Housing Affordability
Increasing housing production to meet California’s growing population needs
The Issue/Challenge
California has long struggled with housing affordability and its effects on our residents and our economy. Solving this issue means addressing our region’s chronic shortage of housing units. New production has failed to meet housing needs – at all income levels and in all housing types – causing prices to escalate to astronomical levels. California has failed to build enough homes, relative to population growth, every year since 1989. In particular, the more recent loss of redevelopment and other funding programs has reduced the production of affordable and subsidized housing projects.
This supply and demand imbalance is at the core of our housing crisis. The challenge then is to increase housing affordability by addressing and resolving the various issues that delay, add cost, or prevent the construction of new housing, and to find ways to reinvigorate and appropriately fund affordable and subsidized housing.
The Southern California Leadership Council’s Position
The Southern California Leadership Council supports:
- Legislation, initiatives and/or reforms that address policy, regulations and other issues that imped or add cost to the production of new housing (both for-sale and for-rent).
- New programs and policies that incentivize the production of housing and eliminate long-standing disincentives, such as the “fiscalization of land use”.
- Educating elected/appointed officials (at all levels) and the general public on how housing is essential to healthy, thriving communities since safe and adequate housing is proven to have positive societal impacts on health, education, crime, civic engagement and the economy.
- Adequate funding for vital subsidized and affordable housing programs, thus allowing essential housing to be a catalyst for transformation in neighborhoods where the economics will not drive new development on its own.