While it’s always been more expensive to be a homeowner in California, the gap between the rest of the country has widened into a chasm.

The cost of Proposition 47 is just too high.

One day before the deadline, the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority pulled a $20 billion affordable housing bond off Bay Area ballots amid fears that it wouldn’t pass.

Some California agencies are offering incentives and hosting workshops for school districts that want to build affordable housing for teachers.

The Los Gatos Meadows project was granted a story pole exception so it only has to produce a visual rendering, not put up physical structures to indicate where buildings would appear. 

A newly created regional housing finance authority for the entire San Francisco Bay Area will send a bond of up to $20 billion to the ballot. But the fate of its statewide counterpart looks bleak.

California lawmakers made an effort in 2023 to remove red tape around building new houses.

More than 100 developers backing 240 projects with approximately 20,000 proposed affordable housing units applied to the state's Housing and Community Development Department for more than $3.5 billion, but the state only has $576 million to award. 

Why did the homelessness crisis become more dire in 2023, even as the Legislature passed more affordable housing laws? Home prices and rents are still increasing.

Speaker Robert Rivas seems to be laying the institutional groundwork for an aggressively pro-housing legislature next year.

I am concerned about how we, as a city and county, are spending our taxpayers’ funds to address the homelessness crisis.

Housing developments will now be more streamlined with less red tape, density laws can be overruled in the interest of housing, and institutions like colleges or religious organizations can now use portions of their property to build housing.

A patchwork of bills is giving housing developers and local governments more options to reduce red tape for housing projects.

The definition of "adequate shelter" is at the heart of debates raging across California in the five years since a federal appeals court ruled that it’s cruel and unusual punishment to evict homeless people from public spaces when they have no other options.

Instead of the two-thirds supermajority required for local bond measures, legislators are considering a proposed threshold of  55%. Had that standard been in place in 2018, San Jose, Santa Cruz County, Berkeley, San Diego and Santa Rosa would have been granted the power to borrow a total of $2.26 billion.

Three of the biggest housing bonds in state history are bound for the 2024 ballot. But with no shortage of crises facing the state, California can only borrow so much and voters may succumb to bond fatigue.