Ask a California millennial or Gen Z renter what homeownership looks like for them, and the honest answer is often, “It doesn't.” The median single-family home price in California now hovers around $800,000. And yet, for decades, the state has produced fewer and fewer of the one housing type that could actually bridge that gap — the condominium.
Condominiums are how generations of working and middle-class families built equity and put down roots in the communities where they work. In the South Bay, where median single-family home prices are well over a million dollars, they may be the only realistic path to ownership for a teacher, a nurse, or a first-generation homebuyer.
And we've essentially stopped building them. According to UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation, multifamily condos accounted for just 3 percent of the new housing the state added between 2011 and 2021, compared with 38 percent in Canada.
The reason for this isn't a mystery. California's construction defect liability rules make it way too easy for disputes between builders and buyers to end up in the courts, making attached for-sale housing one of the riskiest things a developer can build. Unlike apartments or single-family homes, condominiums face unusual legal exposure: as soon as a homeowners association forms, attorneys can pursue defect claims, real or alleged, before a builder has a chance to fix anything. The litigation risk is so severe that many developers have simply exited the for-sale condo market entirely.
California has created a legal climate where the rational business decision for developers is to build apartments instead. And the people who pay for it the most are the families who need those condos to exist.
I work in housing policy, which means I spend a lot of time thinking about who gets to live where and who gets left out. Few questions keep me up at night more than this one: in a region defined by innovation and ambition, why can't a middle-class family in San José buy a home?
AB 1903, authored by Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, addresses this directly. It establishes a genuine right-to-repair process which provides builders a clear opportunity to fix defects before litigation begins, while preserving full homeowner recourse when repairs aren't made or aren't adequate. It also tightens the threshold for triggering a defect claim, so the system isn't weaponized by bad actors.
Opponents will frame this as weakening homeowner protections. I'd push back on that. A right to repair is not immunity from accountability — it simply allows for a collaborative approach to solving the problem to precede a long, expensive, and combative one. Fix the problem first; go to court if that fails. That's how warranties work in virtually every other context.
Construction defect law exists for good reasons. Homeowners deserve protection when something goes wrong with the biggest purchase of their lives. AB 1903 doesn’t change that. What it meaningfully changes is the default calculus for builders deciding what to build, restoring feasibility to an ownership product that is currently all but impossible.
San José and the surrounding region have poured enormous energy into upzoning, streamlining approvals, and reducing fees. That work matters. But if liability exposure makes these potential new homes unbuildable, we haven't solved anything. We've just moved the bottleneck.
California cannot seriously claim to be addressing its housing crisis while maintaining rules that make starter homes economically impossible to produce. Homeownership is how ordinary families build wealth. It's how communities develop roots. It's a foundation for a middle-class life that so many Californians are working hard toward — and that so many increasingly can't reach.
AB 1903 is a chance to start rebuilding that foundation. Every year we delay passing reforms, another first-generation buyer is locked out of building wealth and achieving lifetime stability.
Ali Sapirman is Advocacy & Policy Manager at the Housing Action Coalition, a statewide pro-housing nonprofit.
