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California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed 31 felony charges of wage theft and tax evasion against a construction company that he said cost the state and the company’s workers $2.6 million, he announced today.

Bonta filed the criminal complaint on Aug. 26 alleging that US Framing West dodged more than $2.5 million in state payroll taxes and underpaid workers on a public housing project in Cathedral City, in Riverside County. The company, which builds wood framing for such projects as hotels, apartments and housing developments, shorted workers at least $40,000 when it failed to pay the prevailing wage, Bonta said.

“For some reason US Framing West seems to think it can operate outside the prevailing wage laws of California,” Bonta said in a press conference in Los Angeles today. “I’m here with a simple message: They cannot. No company can.”

Cal Matters contacted officials with US Framing West named on its website but did not receive a response.

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Bonta charged the company and two of its officials, Thomas Gregory English and Amelia Frazier Krebs, with wage and tax violations in Riverside, San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange, Alameda, Santa Clara, San Francisco and Contra Costa counties.

Political observers expect Bonta to announce a run for governor, so publicizing a high-profile labor case may help him build support from unions. Most wage theft cases brought by the state are handled administratively or in civil court. 

Between 2018 and 2022, US Framing West hired unlicensed subcontractors and underreported its payroll to the state Employment Development Department, Bonta said. He accused the company of grand theft, payroll tax evasion, prevailing wage theft, and filing false documents with the state.

US Framing West also skipped personal income tax withholding and premiums for state unemployment and disability insurance, Bonta said, and it filed false payroll records for workers on Veterans Village, the Cathedral City project. The facility opened in 2022, offering 60 housing units and services for veterans. 

The complaint says the company stole wages from 19 workers in Riverside County in 2021 and 2022. Under California’s penal code, employers can face grand theft charges for stealing more than $950 in wages or tips from one employee or a total of $2,350 from two or more employees within a year. 

The Northern California Carpenters Regional Council tipped off the state Department of Justice to potential wage theft violations at an Oakland construction project in 2019, Bonta said. The department subsequently looked into US Framing West’s other projects across the state. 

The office filed charges in August, and the two named defendants surrendered and were arraigned this month.

Subsidizing crime

California’s prevailing wage requirements apply to most projects built with public funding, said  Matthew Miller, senior field representative for labor compliance for Nor Cal Carpenters Union. He said US Framing West was working on at least four housing projects financed with tax credits.

“California taxpayers are subsidizing criminal activity in the affordable housing industry,” Miller said.

He added that developers should avoid doing business with companies that skirt employment and tax laws. 

Wage theft can take various forms — employers don’t pay employees for all hours worked, don’t pay the minimum wage, skip overtime pay or don’t allow legally required breaks. In California, workers lose about $2 billion a year to wage theft, Bonta’s office said, and workers in low-wage industries are the most affected. In 2020 and 2021, workers filed claims for more than $300 million in stolen wages each year.

Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Labor Federation, called wage theft “the number one crime” in the burglary and theft category and said businesses should not be able to pay their way out of wage theft violations. 

Read More

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Mayor London Breed, outgoing mayor of San Francisco, made waves recently with a major policy shift: Before providing a shelter bed or any other services, city workers must first offer every homeless person they encounter a bus or train ticket to somewhere else.

But while San Francisco has gotten an outsized amount of attention for putting its busing program at the forefront of its homelessness strategy, other California cities and nonprofits continue to quietly send small numbers of unhoused people all over the country. At least one new program is set to launch early next year. 

For an unhoused person who wants to move in with family in another city or state, or who got stuck somewhere after a job or housing prospect fell through and needs help getting home, these types of programs can be a gamechanger. But some activists worry they can be used coercively to move unhoused people out of sight instead of helping them. And once someone is bused away, it’s hard to tell what happens to them — whether they successfully reunite with family, or become homeless on another city’s sidewalks. 

“In general, the ability to travel back to a place where you have a home is really important and can be a lifesaving service, in fact, and can help to reunite families,” said Niki Jones, executive director of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness. “When done in good faith, it can be an important and powerful intervention.”

Many programs do some homework before sending their clients off on a bus, but the amount of effort they put in varies. One nonprofit serving homeless young people in Los Angeles has a therapist call the client’s family in the destination city, to make sure the client is going into a safe, welcoming environment. One of San Francisco’s relocation programs requires the client only to have a vague connection to their destination city.

These programs are garnering attention at a time when city leaders are facing pressure from all sides, including from Gov. Gavin Newsom, to get rid of homeless encampments, but lack the resources to give everyone a home or shelter bed. Buying someone a one-way ticket out of town is a much cheaper alternative. But the number of people who can benefit from these programs tends to be small. Data from throughout California consistently shows that most people who are homeless are from the county they’re in. And homelessness, addiction and other traumas have marred many people’s relationships, leaving them with no one to help them in another city. 

San Francisco offers bus tickets before shelter

Shortly after beginning an aggressive crackdown on tent encampments in San Francisco, Mayor Breed ordered all city agencies to “offer and incentivize” the city’s busing program before other services. Those who decline any help may be at risk of being arrested for illegally camping in a public place.

Providing free bus tickets to unhoused people is nothing new in San Francisco, which has been offering some form of this program for about two decades, said Emily Cohen, deputy director of communications and legislative affairs for the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. But usage declined during the COVID-19 pandemic, when travel was restricted, and it didn’t pick back up, she said. The mayor’s directive was intended to fix that, she said.

The increased emphasis on busing also comes as the demographics of San Francisco’s homeless population are shifting. This year, 41% of the people surveyed in San Francisco’s point in time count reported they were living in another city or state when they lost their housing. That’s up from 29% two years ago. 

“There are definitely an increasing number of people who are experiencing homelessness in San Francisco who aren’t originally from San Francisco,” Cohen said. 

San Francisco offers three programs to help unhoused people relocate outside of the city. Journey Home, launched in September 2023, has the lowest barrier to entry. While other programs require clients to work with a case manager on a detailed plan to find and hold onto housing when they arrive in their new city, Journey Home requires only that someone be healthy enough to travel and prove they have some connection to their destination city. That proof could be a phone call to a friend or relative in the city, a receipt showing the client once got food stamps there, or an ID with an address in that city. Clients do not need to prove they have housing in the destination city, and the whole process, from intake to sitting on a bus, can take a day or two.

Since July 2022, San Francisco has relocated a total of 1,039 unhoused clients via Journey Home and other programs, according to city data. 

The number of clients relocated via Journey Home spiked in August of this year (the month Breed issued her order) — 25 people were moved, up from nine the month before. The city relocated another 32 people through other programs. That same month, the city placed 120 people from encampments into shelters, and another 429 people on the street declined help, according to the city.

While Lukas Illa, a human rights organizer with the San Francisco-based Coalition on Homelessness, supports programs that help unhoused people who want to relocate, he’s skeptical of Journey Home. The choice to leave San Francisco should be the unhoused person’s to freely make, he said. And he says that’s not the case when police, who have the power to cite and arrest people, offer bus tickets as a first resort.

“Journey Home needs to be so deliberate and to really center the agency and the autonomy of the person it is offered to, and not used as a cudgel to threaten arrest or jail time,” Illa said.

Cohen said no one is being forced to leave San Francisco.

“The intention is to facilitate connections with loved ones and home communities, if that is a safe and healthy option for you,” she said. “But no one is required to take that option.”

Other cities that use homeless busing programs

San Jose has budgeted $200,000 to launch a relocation program called Homeward Bound, which is expected to start in February. That money can go toward a client’s bus or plane ticket, or to help with utility bills or other expenses for the friend or family member taking them in. The city will make sure clients have friends or family to help them in their destination city, but staff are still ironing out the specifics, said Tasha Dean, spokesperson for Mayor Matt Mahan. 

“Reconnecting people living on the streets with family members or loved ones who want to care for them is just common sense,” Mahan said in a statement. “It’s the least expensive, most impactful program we could launch.” 

Sacramento County also offers those services, but they aren’t widely used, said county spokesperson Janna Haynes. During the 2022-23 fiscal year, 17 people used the county’s Return to Residency Program to leave the county. That program has since dissolved, and now social workers in various county programs offer the service on a case-by-case basis. 

The city of Los Angeles doesn’t run a busing program, but multiple nonprofits within the city offer similar services. PATH helped 313 clients reunite with family in the last fiscal year, and a little more than half of those clients left LA County. 

A Safe Place for Youth also helps young people reunite with friends and family outside LA.

Cities and nonprofits in other states also run busing programs — and sometimes send people to California. Haven for Hope, which operates a large homeless shelter and service center in San Antonio, Texas, gave about 60 people one-way bus tickets out of the city last year, said Alberto Rodriguez, vice president of operations. Before they send a client on their way, Haven for Hope calls the family or friend they are going to live with and confirms the client can stay there, Rodriguez said. 

“We’re never just going to send someone back to homelessness in another city or another state, in the same way we don’t want other cities or other states to send their homeless clients to San Antonio without connecting with us,” he said.

Where do people who are bused end up?

Of the 151 people relocated from San Francisco since August, at least 29 went to other cities within California. At least another 12 went to Texas, six went to Florida and seven went to Georgia. Due to a data processing error, the city couldn’t provide information on where 34 people went.

It’s harder to tell what happens to those people once they reach their destination. 

San Francisco only recently started requiring staff to check in with clients 90 days after they leave, but staff often can’t get a hold of them in their new city, Cohen said. The city didn’t provide data on the outcomes of those 90-day calls, which started in July, in time for publication. 

About 15% of people who left San Francisco through the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing’s relocation program between July 2022 and July 2023 ended up back in San Francisco, using the city’s homeless services, within a year. 

Cohen called that an 85% “success rate,” despite the fact that even though someone didn’t return to San Francisco, they might have ended up homeless in their new city. 

“That is fantastic,” Cohen said, “in terms of the amount of investment for the outcome we are able to achieve.”

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As California Democrats attempt to “Trump-proof” the state and Republicans celebrate their party’s sweeping victory, the mood among some of the state’s most prominent housing advocates is glum.

“Trump’s extremist economic agenda is going to tank the housing market and housing construction,” Sen. Scott Wiener, one of the Legislature’s loudest YIMBY voices, said in an interview Friday.

That concern is based largely on actions taken during President-elect Donald Trump’s first presidency and his stated plans to deport massive numbers of immigrants and raise tariffs. Trump has offered few specific housing policy proposals. When CalMatters reached out to his campaign for more details, it didn’t get a response. 

That’s left housing experts, elected officials and journalists reading the tea leaves of his public statements, moves made by his first administration, and the ideas put forward by his former housing secretary, Ben Carson, in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint.

If those are any indication, a Trump presidency will likely make it harder for immigrants, including mixed-status households, and other low-income Californians to access subsidized housing. It could also complicate efforts to build housing in the state that’s specifically designated as affordable. 

At the same time, experts said, Trump could help ease regulations for housing construction across the board, something sought by pro-housing officials in both parties. And some said Trump’s mentions of housing on the campaign trail, however vague, signal bipartisan agreement on the need to do something about housing affordability, at least when it comes to single-family homeownership. In other words, the rest of the country is catching up to California, where more than 3 in 4 adults say the cost of housing is “a big problem.”

Many of the most important housing policy decisions take place at the state and local level, placing some constraints on Trump’s influence. Here are a few ways an incoming Trump administration could affect housing in California.

Mass deportations

As with most other issues affecting the country, Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance have blamed immigrants for the housing crisis, arguing that deporting them will help free up homes for U.S. citizens. He’s also promised to ban mortgages for undocumented immigrants, who make up a tiny portion of the homebuying market, accounting for about 5,000 of the more than 4 million mortgages originated in 2023, the Urban Institute estimates.

Besides the human cost to families in California, a state where nearly half of all children have at least one immigrant parent, mass deportations would mean fewer workers to build new homes, said Ben Metcalf, managing director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley.

“If he’s going to go full bore on deporting everyone who’s not a citizen or green card holder, that is going to gut a construction workforce that is already aging and dwindling,” he said. 

Perspectives on the state’s construction worker shortage vary; Chris Hannan, president of the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California, said that a slowdown in office construction means there are plenty of skilled tradespeople available to build new housing. But California’s construction industry employs more than 200,000 undocumented workers, or about a quarter of the workforce, according to the Migration Policy Institute, meaning their absence would significantly disrupt the industry.

Reducing the population also does not automatically make housing cheaper, at least in some parts of the state. New research from the Public Policy Institute of California finds that in some counties, rents have risen since 2010 even as vacancy rates also rose, with developers focusing on building for higher-income renters and charging more for newer units to recoup construction costs.

Taxing  imports

Tariffs on construction materials would likely depress housing construction in California and elsewhere as companies are forced to pay the extra taxes on imported products, experts said.

Hannan pointed to the supply chain problems during the COVID-19 pandemic that drove up material prices. “The costs went through the roof,” he said. “There were (residential) projects that were delayed and projects that did not move forward.”

During the first Trump administration, the California Building Industry Association told the Sacramento Bee that tariffs enacted during the president’s first two years in office had driven up the cost of the average new home by $20,000 to $30,000.

Trump this year suggested he might impose 20% tariffs on imports across the board, and 60% on those from China.

Business leaders said Trump’s unpredictability makes it difficult to plan for potential future tariffs. “If Trump did nothing and let the (Federal Reserve) continue lowering interest rates and didn’t enact wild tariffs, things would improve for housing construction,” said Elaina Houser, vice president of policy for the Los Angeles Business Council. But a more interventionist President Trump could lead to more instability in the housing market, she said.

“Somebody says the wrong thing to him from another country and he says ‘I’m going to get back at you with tariffs’ — I can see that happening,” she said.

Easing regulations

Assemblymember Joe Patterson says he hopes a Trump administration will keep the promise in the Republican Party’s 2024 platform to “cut unnecessary regulations that raise housing costs.” The Rocklin Republican, who serves as vice-chair of the Assembly Housing Committee, pointed to an affordable apartment complex in his district that he said went through a costly and time-consuming environmental review when developers wanted to add four more units per acre to the site footprint.

Trump could use the power of the federal purse to reward states that speed up approval of new developments, he said. 

“The two things that impact the price of housing is the cost of land…and the time and money to get through the approval process,” he said, referring to Trump’s plans to both loosen regulations and build housing on federal land. “I think if Trump can focus on those two things the market can take care of the rest.”

A Trump administration could also work with Congress to loosen HUD rules governing manufacturing of mobile homes, making more of that cheaper, entry-level housing available, said Alex Horowitz, housing policy initiative director for the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Restricting access to public housing and Section 8

If past is prologue, low-income Californians who rely on federal housing assistance will be at risk under a second Trump administration.

During Trump’s first term, his administration floated a ban on federal housing assistance to families with any undocumented members — including those with U.S. citizen children. The rule, never implemented, would have broken with current policy allowing mixed-status families to receive pro-rated assistance based on the number of family members who are eligible.

If the federal government were to enact a similar rule today, “there’s a large number of households in California that would be impacted — mixed status families who would have to make that hard choice of separating as a family or leaving their housing and quite possibly not being able to find an alternative,” said Chione Flegal, executive director of Housing California, an affordable housing advocacy group.

Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for a second Trump administration, also envisions a thorough overhaul of the Department of Housing and Urban Development that would add time limits and increase work requirements for housing benefits, sell off land owned by public housing authorities, and transfer some of the department’s responsibilities to state and local governments.

Reducing the number of Californians eligible for federal housing vouchers could compromise new affordable housing projects because some developers rely on income from voucher-holders to make projects pencil out, Flegal said.

State leaders could choose to make up some of the funding for housing vouchers, she said, or finance affordable housing projects that wouldn’t be bound by the federal rules, though that would be “incredibly expensive.”

Prioritizing single-family zoning

Trump has railed that Democrats want to “abolish the suburbs,” co-authoring a 2020 Wall Street Journal op-ed with Carson that criticized elected officials in several states, including California, for promoting higher-density housing in residential neighborhoods.

“People fight all of their lives to get into the suburbs and have a beautiful home,” he said in a speech that year. “There will be no more low-income housing forced into the suburbs.”

California lawmakers in recent years have taken the opposite tack, making it easier for homeowners to build ADUs in their backyards and split their lots into two. “Creating more flexibility in zoning is essential to getting housing costs under control and addressing the housing shortage,” said Wiener.

It’s unclear, however, whether Trump would have much ability to influence zoning in California, beyond dangling federal grants as incentives. “The federal government has a limited impact on regulating housing requirements in California or any other state,” Morgan Morales, a spokesperson for the California Building Industry Association. 

Help for first-time homebuyers

The Republican platform promises ​​to “promote homeownership through tax incentives and support for first-time buyers,” help that could theoretically make a difference for California, where the median home price topped $900,000 this year and the age at which the majority of residents become homeowners is 49.

Unlike Vice President Kamala Harris, who said on the campaign trail that she’d give first-time homebuyers up to $25,000 in downpayment assistance, Trump has not offered any specifics. His spokespeople didn’t respond to requests for details.

The president-elect has said he would lower mortgage rates, something presidents don’t directly control. Mortgage rates rose after the election on the expectation that Trump’s economic policies will fuel inflation. Some of the changes contemplated in Project 2025, such as increasing mortgage insurance premiums and decreasing lengths of loans offered by the Federal Housing Administration, would likely make buying more expensive for first-time homebuyers. 

The fact that both parties highlighted homeownership in their campaigns could provide some opportunity for collaboration on the issue at the federal level, said Adam Briones. He’s the CEO of California Community Builders, which promotes homeownership for middle-income Caifornians and those from historically marginalized communities. Briones said that the federal government lacks a large-scale program to build income-restricted affordable housing for homebuyers, the way it does for rental housing through tax credits.

“We are obviously a very divided nation,” he said. “We’re divided politically, racially, along gender and religious lines. The one thing that still seems to unite Americans is most folks want to buy a home. What can we do to use this general desire for American homeownership to potentially bring people together?”

Building housing on federal land

Trump has said he’ll open some federal land to housing construction, an idea with broad appeal that both candidates pushed on the campaign trail.

He’s suggested he would hold a contest to design and build new “Freedom Cities” on federal territory. “Trump Freedom Cities and Homes will sell like hot cakes and everyone will want to live in one!” effused Bill Pulte, a private equity CEO and real estate heir rumored to be under consideration for Trump’s Housing Secretary, this week on X.

Much of the federal land in California is in rugged terrain inhospitable to development or far from population centers, housing researchers said. But a recent Terner Center report found that the United States Postal Service owns more than 50 sites in California that could be suitable for housing construction due to their location in residential areas close to public transportation and other neighborhood amenities.

“I would think this would be an easy win for Trump if he wants to do something visible,” said Metcalf, the Terner Center director. “He likes to build things, he likes building walls. So maybe he can take some federal land and build some housing.”

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When President-elect Donald Trump moves into the White House in January, he will become a key figure in California’s homelessness crisis, holding the federal purse strings and setting policy at the national level. 

So what will this change of power mean for the state as it tries to move its nearly 186,000 homeless residents — the most in the nation — indoors? 

Housing and homeless services experts in California worry the Trump administration will cut federal funding in those areas, while also doing away with policies deemed too “progressive.” 

But surprisingly, based on what he’s said so far about one of the key issues regarding homelessness, Trump’s agenda isn’t much different from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s. Trump pledged to tackle the encampments that have made cities “unlivable” by working with states to ban urban camping and arrest those who don’t comply — something many cities in California started doing before Election Day, as Newsom encouraged them to clear camps.

“The homeless have no right to turn every park and sidewalk into a place for them to squat and do drugs,” Trump said in a campaign video posted online in April, 2023. The video appears to be the last time he revealed specific homelessness policy intentions. 

“There is nothing compassionate about letting these individuals live in filth and squalor rather than getting them the help that they need,” Trump said. 

Newsom, who in most other arenas is one of Trump’s biggest foes, has said nearly the exact same thing.

“There is no compassion in allowing people to suffer the indignity of living in an encampment for years and years,” Newsom said in September before signing a package of housing bills. In July, Newsom ordered state agencies to ramp up encampment sweeps, and he threatened to withhold state funding from cities that fail to do the same.

More than two-dozen California cities and counties already have introduced or passed new ordinances cracking down on camps (or updated existing ones to make them more punitive), after the Supreme Court gave them the green light to do so in June.

Trump also said he would move unhoused people to tent cities staffed with doctors and social workers. 

That plan alarmed Alex Visotzky, senior California policy fellow for the National Alliance to End Homelessness. 

“We need to remember that involuntary carceral approaches don’t work and just delay our efforts to end homelessness,” he said.

If Trump pushes these policies at the national level, especially if he offers federal funding for sweeps and tent cities, it could spur California cities to further crack down, Visotzky said. 

As the Trump administration gets to work replacing the heads of federal agencies such as the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, there’s a good chance policies California has come to rely on will get tossed out along the way, said Sharon Rapport, director of California state policy for the Corporation for Supportive Housing. The new guard likely will scrap at least some policies viewed as the gold standard in California, such as “housing first,” which says unhoused people, even those struggling with an addiction or their mental health, should be offered housing with no strings attached, and then services to help them recover.

It’s also a good bet California would see large cuts to funding for federal housing and homelessness programs — including the voucher program that subsidizes rents for hundreds of thousands of Californians, Rapport said.

That’s worrying for organizations such as Abode, which provides housing and other services for homeless Californians in seven counties.

“Federal funding is the brunt of what we receive either directly or through other entities, so it could be really impactful if there’s a huge reduction,” said CEO Vivian Wan. “It’s just going to hurt all of our communities.”

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Every other week Laurel LaMont walks one block from her Temecula apartment to City Hall to make the case for a new model for low income housing. 

She and her organization, Upward Community, have been calling on the city to create a community land trust, a nonprofit that buys land, then rents or sells homes to low- and moderate income residents. 

But first, LaMont has a more pressing issue; she’s fighting her own eviction from an affordable apartment after her earnings rose above the building’s threshold for subsidized housing.

LaMont’s vision — and her own dilemma — show how the statewide housing crisis has made home ownership, and even rent, unaffordable to many working people.

“For all of time we’ve always had a lesser earning workforce that keeps your community going — your grocers, your baristas, janitors and cooks,” said LaMont, who works at Trader Joe’s. “These are permanent jobs, and we deserve to live in a community we serve.”

Housing prices in California are some of the highest in the country. More than half of tenants spend more than 30% of their income on rent, the Public Policy Institute of California reported.

California homes sold in September for a median price of $868,150, according to the California Association of Realtors. 

Even in Riverside County, long regarded as a haven for reasonably priced housing, the median price was $625,000 last month. It would take an annual income of nearly $160,000 — or $77 an hour —  with a 10% down payment to buy such a home in Temecula, according to Wells Fargo’s mortgage calculator.

The missing middle

For years LaMont has fought for better options for what she calls the “missing middle,” often referred to as workforce housing. 

“There’s no starter homes,” said LaMont, a single mom. “There’s no opening door for the lesser earning, or the single earner.”

Community land trusts offer that entryway to homeownership, she argues. 

Under the model, a nonprofit purchases land and builds homes for lease or sale at stable monthly rates. In the for-sale version residents can buy a home, but not the land, which is restricted to low- or moderate-income housing for up to 99 years. If they leave, residents may take limited equity to their next home. 

LaMont formed her organization, Upward Community, in 2020 with Melissa Bourbonnais, a political science professor, and Aaron Cook, a civil engineer.  They’re trying to raise the money needed to form a 501C3 nonprofit, which would enable it to seek grants for a community land trust, LaMont said. 

The organization is pressing the city to get on board. With a blonde pixie cut and quick smile, LaMont appears disarming but acknowledges she and her fellow activists can be “abrasive” in political exchanges.

“We go to every single council meeting and we do not go in gently,” she said. “Every Tuesday we just walk on up there and give them an earful.”

She has made headway with some council members. Mayor Pro Tem Brenden Kalfus said he thinks a community land trust could be useful in Temecula. 

“I don’t think it’s the solution to the housing crisis, but it helps go in the right direction,” he said. “I think the community land trust gives the community local control.”

Various city-owned parcels could be used for that purpose, Kalfus said. He leans toward townhomes or small single-family homes with limited equity over condos or apartments.

“I think that would best serve the workforce in Temecula,” Kalfus said. “When you go to sell the home, you can’t make more than a certain amount, so it keeps the price reasonable.”

Temecula’s big homes

City officials are working with legal counsel and a consultant to analyze the community land trust model, said Matt Peters, director of community development, in an email to CalMatters. The city also would need a nonprofit organization to administer the trust, a partnership with a real estate developer and financial resources to accomplish it, he added.

Councilmember Zak Schwank said “all options are on the table” for expanding housing in Temecula. But he said the city already works with Habitat for Humanity, and he thinks that’s an efficient way to build low-income homes. Habitat homeowners help build their own homes alongside volunteers and pay an affordable mortgage.

Schwank worries that a community land trust would require city administration, creating new bureaucracy.

“We would have to have a whole other structure in place, with oversight and partners, so I wonder if it’s just cleaner to continue to invest in Habitat homes and things like that,” he said.

Temecula is known for its large, suburban homes, but Schwank said city officials have tried to persuade developers to downsize housing tracts and build entry-level homes.

“We have tried to be more creative with developers, to incentivize them to build the missing middle, or those smaller lot homes,” he said. “We haven’t been too successful with that.”

To spur home construction, the city has rezoned some areas, Schwank said. For instance, it retooled its specific plan for an area called Uptown Temecula to accommodate 3,700 more housing units and streamlined the approval process to make it easy to build new homes there. 

A city zoning map over her bed

Meanwhile LaMont’s own housing situation has taken on new urgency. In July she received an eviction notice after her take-home pay rose to $52,000, exceeding the annual affordable program limit of $49,000 for a two-person household. She got extensions through October, but now she has to move. She said she faces a rent increase from the current $935 she pays per month to more than twice that rate.

LaMont’s apartment in the Warehouse at Creekside is small but tightly organized. Her 19-year-old son Christopher uses a bunk bed in the single bedroom, while LaMont sleeps in the living room on a bed raised for storage underneath. There’s no pantry, so a bookshelf stores packages of Trader Joe’s baking mix, olives and chicken broth. 

A zoning map of Temecula hangs over LaMont’s bed, and shelves next to it are stacked with books on urban planning.

“My unhealthy habit is reading government documents and learning about housing,” she said.

Christopher said his family’s tenuous situation seemed normal when he was a child, but he later realized housing was a struggle. For his high school senior project he presented a design for a walkable, pedestrian-friendly community in Temecula. Now he’s attending Mount San Jacinto Community College with the goal of becoming a civil engineer. 

“I’m just starting to understand there’s no salvation for me if I don’t make it on my own,” he said.

A broken system

City officials say they’re aware of LaMont’s situation and are exploring ways to adjust the income criteria for her building. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development defines low-income renters as people earning less than 80% of an area’s median income. In the Inland Empire that’s $65,600 a year for a two-person household, well above LaMont’s earnings. 

But the income criteria can vary by project. The Warehouse at Creekside restricts tenants to 60% of the area median for one-bedrooms, putting LaMont just above the threshold. City officials said they’re working with the developer to renegotiate that limit.

It won’t change  in time to save LaMont’s lease. She has found a two-bedroom apartment that will open in a few months. It will allow her and her son their own space, but it will double her rent. She worked out a deal to stay in a different apartment in her current building in the interim.

Even with a potential solution, she laments that affordable housing formulas create a trap that penalizes tenants for improving their financial station. She said that’s what causes the “brokenness” of the affordable housing system.

“You’re constantly chasing; there’s no hope of saving any money,” she said. 

This story was made possible in part by a grant from the CIELO Fund of the Inland Empire Community Foundation.

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If Californians vote to approve a rent control measure on the ballot, thousands of Berkeley tenants could immediately see new limits on how much their landlords can raise their rent each year. 

“Families who are living in units that aren’t right for them will have a chance to move without losing their affordability,” said Leah Simon-Weisberg, a longtime tenant lawyer and chair of the city’s rent board. “For some people, it will keep them housed.”

That same scenario, in which the city could cap rent increases on single-family homes and apartments more than 20 years old and units with new tenants, is a nightmare for Krista Gulbransen, who heads the Berkeley Property Owners Association, representing the city’s landlords. “We would revert back to the 1980s and it wouldn’t just be roller skates or rainbow headbands, it would be a lot worse,” she said.

Proposition 33 would repeal a state housing law limiting how cities can regulate rents, letting local governments make that decision. Most California cities wouldn’t see an immediate change. But in a few cities like Berkeley, local laws already contain language allowing much more sweeping regulation than current state law. In those cities, and in others where left-leaning elected officials have expressed public support for expanding rent control, renters could see the soonest benefit from Prop. 33  — and landlords the soonest headaches.

More than 30 cities in California already place some limits on rent increases, with caps ranging from 3% to 10% annually for covered units, some pegged to inflation. 

At the state level, California caps rent increases for apartments and corporate-owned houses more than 15 years old at 10% per year  — a rate that tenant advocates have said can still place a significant burden on tenants.

Some of those local ordinances were once much stricter. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, concern about soaring housing costs led a few cities to limit rent increases even when a new tenant moves in — known as vacancy control. But the 1995 law that Prop. 33 would repeal, known as the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, put a stop to that, along with any rent control on single-family homes or those built after 1995. 

It’s the ban on rent control for single-family homes that most bothers Melvin Willis, a city council member in Richmond, one of the Bay Area’s few remaining solidly working-class cities. Many families in his district rent their houses, he said, and some complain to him about steep rent increases. 

“It’s a hard conversation to have with someone when they say, ‘My rent increased, but we have rent control,’ ” he said. Willis recalled explaining to one family whose rent had doubled that the city’s 3% cap on rent bumps doesn’t apply to single-family homes. “I’ve had that conversation multiple times and it doesn’t feel good,” he said.

Richmond’s rent ordinance leaves out any housing “exempt from rent control pursuant to the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act.” Willis and other affordable housing advocates take that to mean that if Costa-Hawkins goes away, single-family homes and other dwellings that the state law excluded would automatically fall under rent control. 

Nicolas Traylor, the executive director of Richmond’s rent program, was more cautious. The ordinance could be referring to units actually exempt under Costa-Hawkins, he said, or just the types of units, like single-family homes, that Costa-Hawkins excluded. If Prop. 33 passes, he said, the rent program’s general counsel would have to recommend how to move forward.

In San Francisco, city supervisors avoided that ambiguity by unanimously passing legislation that would kick in if Prop. 33 passes, bringing rent control to an estimated 16,000 additional units. Mayor London Breed has said she will sign it if the proposition passes, the San Francisco Standard reported.

San Francisco belongs to a group of cities — along with Berkeley, Oakland, Los Angeles, and the southern California cities of West Hollywood and Santa Monica — with longstanding rent control that current state law especially constrains. That’s because Costa-Hawkins grandfathered in any exemptions they had for more newly built units. So in San Francisco, apartments built after 1979 are considered “new construction” and exempt from rent control. In Los Angeles, it’s 1978.

“It’s completely arbitrary that we can create rent control for buildings from 1978 but we can’t do it for 1980,” said Los Angeles City Council member Hugo Soto-Martínez, pointing to the city’s homelessness crisis. “Every year we continue to lose more of our rent-stabilized housing.”

The council last week passed a resolution, authored by Soto-Martínez, endorsing Prop. 33.

Those kinds of actions by cities trouble landlords, who point out that their costs for utilities and insurance are rising, in some cases outpacing inflation.

In an email newsletter sent to housing providers Friday, real estate firm Bornstein Law warned its clients that “there is a real possibility that Proposition 33 will pass because of the widespread belief that the rents are too damn high.”

The firm urged landlords, in preparation for the potential policy shift, “to raise the rents to market rate if landlords are able to do so” and to consider offering voluntary buyouts to tenants paying below-market rent.

Prop. 33 opponents have also raised concerns that cities will enact rent control so strict it will stifle new housing construction at a time when the state desperately needs it. 

“The state has done so much to remove barriers to building housing and to incentivize affordable housing construction, but Prop. 33 would give NIMBY cities a really powerful weapon to do an end run around those rules,” said Nathan Click, a spokesperson for the No on 33 campaign.

But San Francisco shows that, given the flexibility to craft new policies, even cities with strong histories of tenant advocacy might opt for more modest changes to rent control that can win broad political support. Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin had originally proposed that the city expand rent control to cover housing built before 2024, but walked that back to 1994, an idea that won backing from both the city government’s progressive and moderate wings.

Local rent control expansion “is also going to depend on not just tenant and housing organizations but other civil society organizations in those communities,” said Shanti Singh, legislative director for Tenants Together. “Are they going to be ready to or willing to push for it?”

Manuel Pastor, director of the University of Southern California’s Equity Research Institute, said his research shows that rent stabilization without vacancy control  helps prevent displacement by keeping rents more affordable, while avoiding slowing new construction since there are still incentives to build. 

If cities start capping rent increases when new tenants move in, he said, the effects become more difficult to predict. That’s in part because the last time California cities experimented with vacancy control was more than 30 years ago — back when more multifamily housing was being built and before the tech boom put unprecedented pressure on Northern California’s housing market.

One thing that is likely, he said: California would see geographic variation, with more progressive coastal cities putting in stricter rent caps while inland cities with moderate politics seek to lure development with looser rules.

“If the proponents of Prop. 33 think this will solve our housing crisis, they’re mistaken,” he said. “If the opponents of Prop. 33 think that this will result in housing armageddon, they’re mistaken as well.”

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For some who lived on the streets of Los Angeles, Inside Safe was a lifesaver — giving them a roof over their head for the first time in years, then helping them find a permanent home.

For others, it was a major disappointment. 

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is banking on her Inside Safe initiative to help her solve the largest homelessness crisis in California. The program, which brings people from encampments into hotels until housing becomes available, has moved hundreds of Angelenos into permanent homes. 

But hundreds more have gone from those hotels back to life on the street.

Nearly two years in, the program is successful enough that it spawned a copycat county-wide effort. Yet it has not affected the vast majority of the nearly 30,000 Angelenos who sleep outside. A lack of long-term housing and a shortage of health care, mental health and addiction services remain huge obstacles, as does the program’s high price tag. 

“Lots of people that have been brought inside under Inside Safe, and that’s great,” said John Maceri, chief executive officer of The People Concern, a nonprofit that runs two Inside Safe hotels. “We still struggle with the exit strategy: Where are people going to move to?”

Proponents say data proves the model works: Overall homelessness dropped slightly in the city of Los Angeles in 2024, and the number of people sleeping on the city’s streets is down 10%. 

“Homelessness in LA is down for the first time in years,” Gabby Maarse, spokesperson for Mayor Karen Bass, said in an email. “ The progress made by a new comprehensive strategy, which includes Inside Safe, is a marked improvement since before the mayor took office and she will not be satisfied until street homelessness is ended.”

But the newer county-run copycat program, called Pathway Home, appears to be connecting people with services and permanent housing more quickly — suggesting there are ways the city program could continue to improve.

How LA’s program has improved, and where it still lags

Inside Safe is supposed to be an alternative to the aggressive, law enforcement-heavy sweeps ramping up since the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled cities are free to ban camping even if they have no shelters. More than a dozen California cities already have passed new anti-camping ordinances or updated existing ordinances to make them more punitive. 

Mayor Bass publicly eschewed that strategy, and as of July, police had made no arrests during Inside Safe operations, according to the city. Even so, a report by Human Rights Watch earlier this year accused LA of not doing enough to protect the rights of its unhoused residents.

Bass launched Inside Safe in December 2022. Seven months later, CalMatters reported that fewer than 6% of the people who moved into Inside Safe hotels later went into permanent housing. People living in the hotels weren’t getting the help they needed accessing everything from medical care to mental health and addiction services — something Bass acknowledged at the time was a problem. 

“It was a little chaotic when it first started,” said Maceri.

There has been improvement since then, but challenges remain. To date, Inside Safe has cleared 67 encampments and moved 3,254 people into hotels — nearly 23% of whom have gone on to permanent housing. 

That improvement from 6% to 23% is “great,” said Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez, who has hosted more than a dozen Inside Safe operations in his district. “But it’s obviously not where anybody wants to see it. At the end of the day, interim is interim and permanent is permanent. We want to see folks permanently housed.”

As of July, more people had returned to homelessness from Inside Safe than were permanently housed at the time — 819 compared to 650. 

Getting medical and mental health care, addiction treatment and other resources inside the hotels is still an issue, as service providers continue to struggle with staffing shortages, Maceri said. But it’s gotten “a little bit easier.” The county now sets up resource fairs at the hotels. The mayor appointed Dr. Etsemaye Agonafer as the city’s first deputy mayor of homelessness and community health, tasked with coordinating those services. The mayor also brought in USC and UCLA’s street medicine teams to provide services at the hotels.

It’s still not enough, said Tescia Uribe, chief program officer for the nonprofit PATH, which operates three Inside Safe and three Pathway Home hotels. They have clients with severe mental health and addiction issues who need intensive care. 

 “We are absolutely not set up for that,” Uribe said.

In some cases, living in a hotel room behind a closed door actually allows people’s problems — such as domestic violence between a couple living together, or substance use — to escalate into a crisis, because staff don’t see what’s happening in time to intervene, she said. 

Cost is another huge obstacle for the program: The hotel rooms cost the city an average of $121 per night, and it’s unclear for how long the city will be willing and able to keep paying that. The city bought one hotel in an effort to mitigate those expenses, and is looking into buying additional sites.

“The challenge ahead is about what is the next step?” said Councilmember Nithya Raman. 

‘Ready to go:’ One woman’s experience with Inside Safe

When 51-year-old Shameka Foster moved from her tent on Skid Row into an Inside Safe hotel in October 2023, she was happy to be off the street. 

A chef who makes vegan meats and cheeses from scratch, and who also works at a Skid Row nonprofit helping other unhoused people, Foster thought she’d be in a hotel for three to six months before she found permanent housing. Instead, she’s been in the program a year. 

“(I’m) just ready to go,” she said. “Been ready, but I feel like it’s time now, like it’s past time.”

Foster’s time in the hotel hasn’t always been easy. She’s had multiple bad or humiliating experiences — such as when a staff member walked into her room while she was changing, when the nurse in the hotel wouldn’t give her her blood pressure medication, or when she got food poisoning from a breakfast served, she said. There’s a long list of rules that she sometimes chafes under: Guests aren’t allowed, for example, and residents can’t get fresh toilet paper rolls after 2 p.m., she said. Foster doesn’t know how to access the counseling she wants to help her process the stress and trauma of everything she’s been through in the past few years. 

“I’ve been going through it and shedding a lot of tears,” Foster said, “getting angry and stuff, and sick, humiliated, and just treated like I wasn’t a human.”

Her journey into housing has been frustrating, too. Whenever Foster had a question, such as how to apply or what next steps she should take, her case managers never knew the answer, she said. It took six months for her even to be matched with a housing navigator who had more expertise, she said. 

Eventually, she took matters into her own hands, applied for an apartment in a newly constructed building, pestered the manager with emails and showed up at the building’s ribbon cutting. 

Management at the building told her she should be able to move in by the end of the month. But she’s trying not to get her hopes up. 

A tale of two encampment programs

Eight months after the city of LA launched Inside Safe, LA County kicked off its copycat program, dubbed Pathway Home. The approach was basically the same: Clear encampments throughout LA County, move the occupants into hotels, and then move them from there into permanent housing. 

But the county learned from the city’s challenges. Before the county removes an encampment through Pathway Home, it makes sure it has enough rental subsidies for every camp occupant who is expected to need one. As a result, people are getting housed faster. 

The nonprofit The People Concern runs two city hotels and one county hotel. People stay at the city hotels an average of 240 days, according to Maceri. At the county hotel, it’s just 99 days.

Nonprofit PATH, which operates three city and three county hotels, sees a similar disparity. And people in the county program also are more likely to get permanent housing. Just 36% of those who moved out of PATH’s city-sponsored hotels went into permanent housing, compared to 63% of those who moved out of the county-sponsored hotels, according to the nonprofit.

The county’s program is smaller than the city’s. Pathway Home has moved 145 people into permanent housing so far, while Inside Safe has moved 741.

It’s also easier for residents in the county hotels to access resources such as mental health care because the county is the one running those programs, according to Maceri and Uribe. When the county clears an encampment through Pathway Home, everything from animal control to the department of mental health has staff on site, Uribe said. That’s incredibly helpful, she said, because people are connected with those services from the beginning. 

“The county, definitely, they bring the resources,” Uribe said. “It is very different.” 

Some cities have said no to those resources. City councils in West Covina and Norwalk both voted down the county’s proposals to open Pathway Home hotels there, after a backlash from the community.

But the program made a big difference in Signal Hill, a tiny city of fewer than 12,000 people near Long Beach. In March, LA County helped Signal Hill move about 45 people from encampments directly into permanent housing. 

As a result, the city achieved the elusive white whale status of “functional zero,” which means it has the ability to quickly find housing for anyone who becomes homeless.

“Immediately after the operation we had zero, literally zero, because everyone we knew was housed, including people living in cars,” said Signal Hill City Manager Carlo Tomaino. “That was literally everybody.”

The city had started trying to move people indoors a year earlier, and its outreach team had developed relationships with everyone living on the street, Tomaino said. But Signal Hill, which has no homeless shelters of its own, wouldn’t have been able to house everyone without the county’s resources.

The city has kept its functional zero status since then.

One couple falls through the cracks; someone else gets housing

LA County launched its Pathway Home program in August 2023 by clearing an encampment known as The Dead End along a cul-de-sac in unincorporated Lennox, near the airport. The operation moved 59 people indoors. 

On a recent Tuesday more than a year later, that stretch of road was empty — no tents in sight.

But nearby, a handful of people had pitched tents under the 405 Freeway overpass. Perched on a milk crate on a hill above those tents, 52-year-old Jennifer Marzette ate Burger King for lunch with her partner, Enrique Beltran, as cars whizzed by. 

The couple lived at The Dead End encampment off and on for about eight years. But when county workers came to move the camp’s residents into a hotel, Marzette and Beltran were told they weren’t on the list, Marzette said. She speculates they probably weren’t at their tent when staff first came by to collect names. 

So they’re still sleeping on the street, now a few blocks away from their former camp. They’ve been trying to get into housing or a shelter program together, but have had multiple false starts. They got a housing voucher, but it expired in January, before they could find an apartment that would take it, Marzette said. 

In February or March, they were told they could move into a “family room” at Exodus Recovery’s “Safe Landing” shelter, she said. But they were two hours late to their appointment (the complexities of life on the street sometimes make it hard to get to places on time, Marzette said) and lost the spot. Then, earlier this month, a caseworker said they would get a room at a local hotel. That fell through, Marzette said, and she suspects it’s because they found out she was arrested for domestic violence and jailed briefly in December, over what she says was a misunderstanding during an argument with Beltran.

“I was crying the other day,” she said, as she recounted all of the missed opportunities for someone to help her. “I felt like…that’s just how it goes.”

Chris Felts had a much different experience. He was homeless for two decades, sleeping on sidewalks and in parks, or in doorways when it rained. The 68-year-old had tried several times to get into housing, but it always took so long that he got discouraged and gave up. In February, the county moved him into a hotel in Santa Monica through Pathway Home. Then, in June, he got his very own studio apartment, subsidized with a rental voucher. 

Now, he’s re-learning how to live indoors. He’s practicing his cooking and trying to take care of his health by walking between 5,000 and 7,500 steps a day in his neighborhood. 

But the best part, Felts said, is finally having privacy. 

“I have a chance to just be by myself,” he said. “When you’re homeless you don’t really have that opportunity. There’s always going to be people around.”

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Confused about  Proposition 33? You’re not alone. A recent poll shows the ballot measure to give local governments more ability to limit rent increases is running neck and neck, with nearly a third of voters undecided. 

Prop. 33 would repeal a state law known as the Costa Hawkins Rental Housing Act that prevents local governments from controlling rent on single-family homes, homes built after 1995 (or earlier in some cases), and when tenants move out. If it passes, local governments could create whatever measures they want to limit annual rent increases, and the state couldn’t intervene.

Tenant advocates largely support Prop. 33. Landlords are bankrolling the campaign against it. Democratic officials are split: Some side with tenants on the importance of keeping rents down on existing homes. Others are more focused on increasing overall housing supply, and want to make sure homes are profitable for developers to build and landlords to operate.

You wouldn’t necessarily know all this from the attack ads airing on TV and mailers fluttering into Californians’ mailboxes. Both sides say they stand for affordable housing, and some of the arguments have included a few head-scratching claims. We fact-checked some of those claims, so you don’t have to.

Claim: Prop. 33 would repeal more than 100 state housing laws, including affordable housing requirements and eviction protections. 

Ken Rosen, a UC Berkeley business school professor, makes this claim in a No on 33 video ad. Opponents of Proposition 33 argue that it would give cities who don’t want to build housing a way to undercut new development: by mandating rents so low that developers couldn’t afford to build. They say that could make it hard to enforce recent state laws aimed at addressing the housing crisis, such as the “builder’s remedy” that relaxes zoning rules in cities whose housing plans haven’t been approved by the state.  

“A city would be able to create the economic conditions to basically ignore those laws and requirements,” says Nathan Click, a spokesperson for the No on 33 campaign. 

But that’s not the same as repealing those laws. And California courts have held that rent control policies are unconstitutional if they don’t allow landlords to earn “a just and reasonable return on their property” — meaning any city that tries to force landlords to charge obviously unfeasible rents, such as $1 per month, could face legal challenges.

Verdict: False.

Claim: Prop. 33 could create over 500 local rent boards

A No on 33 mailer makes this claim, pointing out that the rent boards would have the “power to regulate single-family homes, add fees to housing, and even dictate what you can charge to rent out your own home.” 

There are just under 500 cities in California, and all of them could theoretically create rent boards to regulate local rents, whether or not Prop. 33 passes. Under Prop. 33, those boards would be able to cap rent increases on single-family homes, potentially affecting income for both corporate and mom-and-pop landlords. Rent boards can charge landlords fees to cover their operating costs — in San Francisco, for example, it’s $59 per unit — but current law already allows them to do that and would not change under Prop. 33.

Verdict: Mostly true.

Claim: ‘Rent control is an American tradition for over 100 years.’

This, from a Yes on 33 video featuring actor Blair Underwood, is pretty accurate. “Fair rent” committees sprang up in dozens of United States cities in the early 1920s, and rent control became widespread during World War II, helping drive an increase in homeownership. However, more than 30 states have since passed laws banning local rent control. In the states that do allow some form of rent regulation — including California and New York — more than 200 local governments have passed measures limiting how much landlords can charge, according to the National Apartment Association.

Verdict: Mostly true.

Claim: Prop. 33 would repeal the strongest rent control law in the nation

No on 33 campaign ads make this claim, saying the proposition would erase California’s “progress on housing” by getting rid of a law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom. Newsom signed a law in 2019 that caps rent increases in California at 5% plus the rate of inflation, or a maximum of 10%. (The No campaign, staffed by the governor’s longtime advisor, Click, lists Newsom as an endorser.) 

Prop. 33 doesn’t repeal this law, which is set to expire in 2030. It would, however, add this sentence to state law: “The state may not limit the right of any city, county, or city and county to maintain, enact, or expand residential rent control.”  

Proponents say cities need this flexibility to keep annual rent increases below 10%, a rate they say still puts a big burden on tenants. Opponents argue that cities could also use this freedom to allow rents to soar higher than the state cap. But legal experts disagree about whether Prop. 33 might actually allow that: Deepika Sharma, housing clinic director at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law, said the rent cap “is not preempted by overturning Costa Hawkins,” while UC Davis law professor Chris Elmendorf said the proposition could create “a lot of legal murk about how conflicts would be resolved.” 

Verdict: Mostly false.

Claim: ‘Stanford and UC experts agree Prop.33 will make the housing crisis worse’

This claim comes from a No on 33 audio ad. The chair of UC Berkeley’s Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics, Ken Rosen, appears in a No on 33 ad and has argued that Costa Hawkins needs to be preserved or construction will slow and landlords will pull rental units off the market. This echoes the view of many economists at California’s elite universities and elsewhere that rent control reduces rental supply, a view that’s backed by some empirical studies. 

But other economics and policy researchers — particularly those who believe in a stronger role for government in solving social problems — see rent control as part of the solution to housing insecurity. 

“Rent regulations support those who need it most, including those who are not being adequately and safely served by the current set of regulations that provide landlords substantial market power in the housing market,” wrote 32 economists from universities including UC Santa Barbara last year, urging the Biden administration to regulate rents in buildings with federally backed mortgages.  

Verdict: Somewhat misleading.

Claim: ‘Prop. 33 (eliminates) existing protections for seniors and veterans’

This claim from a No on 33 video ad is not true. Prop. 33 doesn’t contain any language about seniors and veterans, and the law it would repeal, Costa Hawkins, doesn’t either.

Verdict: False.

Claim: Homelessness in California is up nearly 40% since 2019

This Yes on 33 video ad overstates the crisis. There are nearly 186,000 homeless Californians, according to a CalMatters analysis of the latest federally mandated census, up from about 151,000 in 2019. That’s an increase of about 23%.

Verdict: False.

(Implied) claim: Kamala Harris supports Prop. 33

A video ad from the Yes on 33 campaign titled “Stand with Kamala Harris” does not say anywhere that Kamala Harris supports the measure. There is even a sentence that appears on screen for a few seconds: “Use of Kamala Harris’ likeness and words does not imply endorsement.” That said, the ad features her image and snippets of speeches prominently for nearly all its 30-second runtime — leading the vice president’s campaign to send a letter to TV stations clarifying that the she has not endorsed the proposition. One could understand how a voter could be confused.

Verdict: Misleading.

California is an expensive place to call home.

It’s such a fundamental part of California life it almost feels silly to say. Along with good weather, sunny beaches, Hollywood and the Golden Gate Bridge, the skyhigh cost of housing has become part of the state’s national identity. 

The high cost of housing touches virtually every aspect of life across the state. It shapes where we can and can’t live and with whom, where our kids can grow up and go to school, where we can work and how long our commutes are. It is the root cause of some of the state’s most pressing crises, like homelessness and poverty, and there are few challenges Californians face that aren’t made worse by the relative scarcity of affordable places to call home. High rents widen the gap between rich and poor. High home prices make wealth generation an ever-more exclusive pursuit. Expensive cities force more workers to commute, which means more driving, traffic and greenhouse gas emissions. “There’s no issue that impacts the state in more ways on more days than the issue of housing,” Gov. Gavin Newsom has said. “This is the original sin in the state of California.”

We know all of this is true. We live it every day. But how did things get so bad? And is there anything we can do to make California affordable again? Here’s what you need to know about California’s housing costs.

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Los Angeles voters’ decision about a new sales tax next month will have a significant effect on the resources dedicated to California’s largest homeless population: Either the county will be set to receive about $1 billion annually, or it will have until 2027 to find a new funding stream. 

Measure A would repeal an existing quarter-cent sales tax and replace it with a half-cent sales tax, slightly increasing what consumers pay for everything from clothes to sporting equipment. If it passes, it’s expected to raise more than $1 billion a year for shelters, housing and other services in a county where more than 75,000 people have nowhere to call home. If the measure fails and nothing else replaces it, the existing tax that funds much of the county’s homeless services will expire in 2027. Officials and service providers worry that would gut LA County’s homeless response system at a time when it’s most needed. 

“To not have those services at our disposal to address the crisis that we’re seeing on our streets would be an absolute travesty,” Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath said.

Supporters of the measure include local nonprofits such as the Los Angeles-area branches of United Way and Habitat for Humanity. As of late September, 49% of likely voters surveyed in a poll co-sponsored by the LA Times said they would vote for Measure A — just short of the majority the measure needs to pass. Another 33% said they would vote no, and 17% remained undecided. 

But with few obvious signs of improvement on the streets, even after seven years of taxes, some critics wonder whether putting more money into existing programs is the right approach.

“We pour too (many) tax dollars into a system that is broken,” said Lance Christensen, vice president of education policy and government affairs for the California Policy Center, a conservative fiscal watchdog group. The group hasn’t taken an official position on Measure A. 

What would Measure A do for homelessness in Los Angeles County?

Los Angeles County voters in 2017 passed a quarter-cent sales tax dubbed “Measure H.” That tax helped the county ramp up its fight against homelessness and today helps fund many of the area’s programs, including Pathway Home, which launched last year to move people out of encampments, into hotels, and ultimately into housing. This year, it will make up about a third of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s total budget, said Paul Rubenstein, deputy chief external relations officer for the authority. 

In all, funds raised by the 2017 tax have helped move more than 42,000 people into permanent housing and 80,500 into temporary housing, according to the county’s Chief Executive Office. 

If the original tax expires in 2027 without a replacement, and housing programs funded by that tax close, the county’s Chief Executive Office estimates unsheltered homelessness could increase by 28%, or nearly 15,000 people.

Measure A would repeal and replace that tax with one that is larger and would fund a wider variety of resources. For example, the prior tax paid for shelters and services, but not for new housing. If Measure A passes, money also would be set aside to build new affordable housing. 

“Services alone don’t solve the problem,” Horvath said. “We need both.”

Nearly a third of the money raised by the new tax would go to the LA County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency, to be spent on new homes and services aimed at preventing people from going through eviction or foreclosure. Most of the rest would be spent on homeless services.

Measure A also would come with some guardrails built into the spending process. Two new oversight bodies are tasked with setting specific goals for programs that spend Measure A dollars. The first is the Executive Committee, which includes two county supervisors, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, Newsom homelessness advisor Hafsa Kaka, and officials from other cities around the county. 

The second is the Leadership Table, which includes service providers, people from the business community, city and county staffers and three people who have experience being homeless themselves. The inspiration for both groups came from Houston. A delegation of LA County leaders visited the Texas city in 2022 and came back wanting to replicate the way its city, county, business, faith and service leaders work together, according to Peter Laugharn, president and CEO of the nonprofit Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, which led the trip.

Together, the two groups will set goals for Measure A-funded programs, track their outcomes and potentially reallocate funds away from underperforming initiatives.

“I think we’re going to come up with some very good stuff,” said Laugharn, co-chair of the Leadership Table.

Proponents hope those two oversight bodies will add an extra layer of transparency and accountability at a time when homelessness spending at the state and local levels is under intense scrutiny. 

A scathing audit released earlier this year found California fails to track both how much it spends on homeless services, and whether that spending is effective. And the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (one of the main agencies that distributes homeless funding in Los Angeles County) is currently being audited as part of a legal settlement between advocates for the rights of unhoused residents and the city and county of LA. A federal judge overseeing that settlement recently blasted the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority for failing to make records of its spending available, according to LAist.

Critics of Measure A aren’t convinced the new oversight bodies will help the county spend the tax dollars more wisely. 

“This is too much administration. Too much bureaucracy,” said Susan Shelley, spokesperson for the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, which wrote the official statement in opposition to Measure A that will appear on voters’ ballots. 

But the association’s main complaint is even simpler: A tax increase is not the way to fund the county’s fight against homelessness.

Los Angeles County already has some of the highest sales tax rates in California, with some cities above 10%. 

“This is very harsh on people,” Shelley said, “especially with inflation pushing prices up.”