We ‘have to do more’: Californians poised to say yes on dozens of housing, homeless measures

When it came to homelessness and housing affordability this election, California voters sent a clear message to local governments Tuesday in more than 50 ballot measures: do more.

Official results could take days to finalize, but the latest tallies reveal an electorate ready to tax itself for more affordable housing, strengthen renter protections, and reject efforts designed to block new development.

The litany of measures put forward this fall reflect the escalating pressure on local officials to address these complex issues — from both their constituents, who rank homeless and housing affordability as top concerns, and state leaders who are ramping up accountability tactics.

“I think there’s a lot of frustration on the part of voters and political leaders are seeing this,” said Lee Ohanian, economics professor at UCLA and senior fellow at the Hoover Institute. “They know that they have to do more than they’ve done in recent years.”

Hopeful fixes from L.A. to Sacramento

Measures on ballots in Northern California offered solutions that included new funding sources for homeless services like taxes on vacant units and property sales, strengthened rent control protections and permission for cities to build more low-income housing.

As of Thursday, more than a dozen forms of local taxes and bonds to fund new housing construction and homeless services appeared likely to pass, including taxes on owners of vacant units in the city of Berkeley and San Francisco. A similar measure, however, was failing in Santa Cruz – a beachside community where many people own second homes.

Rent control measures in Richmond, Oakland and Santa Monica were headed toward a win, while the fate of dueling measures aimed at easing San Francisco’s affordable housing shortage by encouraging and speeding up construction were still up in the air.

Big cities including Los Angeles, Sacramento, Oakland, Berkeley, and South San Francisco dominated initiatives that would greenlight development of thousands more low-income units under an arcane part of the state constitution.

Voters there backed measures authorizing thousands more affordable housing units in compliance with Article 34, which requires cities to seek approval from voters before approving new housing units – a process that has historically stymied low-income housing projects.

Some homelessness initiatives, like Measure O in Sacramento, took a multi-pronged approach. Voters seemed on track to approve the new regulation, which would allow local officials to more easily clear homeless encampments while requiring the city to provide more shelter beds. The measure was backed by the local business community and drew strong opposition from homeless advocates who said camp sweeps are unnecessarily punitive and costly.

As a longtime resident of Sacramento’s gentrifying Oak Park neighborhood, Irene Sales has more lived experience with California’s twin homelessness and housing crises than most.

Her son died of a fentanyl overdose and several of her family members struggle with mental health and live on the streets. Sales voted in favor of local Measure O simply to see her government tackle the problems.

“I feel like Oak Park failed me and my son,” she said. “Shelters aren’t perfect. They kicked out my nephew for having visitors. But we still need more.”

Defeats for California housing barriers

While most local measures in Tuesday’s election were focused on increasing housing production and funding for homelessness, a handful sought to do the opposite by raising barriers to new construction and even evading state law. In such cases, voters appeared to widely shoot them down.

Residents of wealthy Bay Area suburb Menlo Park were rejecting an initiative that would have prohibited the city council from rezoning single family neighborhoods for denser housing, requiring any change to be put to voters.

An effort to designate gold rush town Nevada City as a historic district to evade a state law that sanctioned new buildings appeared headed to defeat. A proposal in beachfront Santa Cruz to halt construction on a 124-unit affordable housing project and new city library did as well.

David Garcia, policy director of UC Berkeley’s Terner Center, who compiled a list of local housing initiatives across California, said those results indicate that voters grasp the gravity of the state’s affordability crisis.

“Whether (these measures) are couched in the terms of preserving character or stopping a specific development, it just doesn’t seem to have resonated with voters who understand the need to build more housing in their communities,” he said.

To meet housing production goals, the state Legislature created standards to enforce construction mandates and established a new enforcement unit, initial steps in a multiyear process. On homelessness, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently rebuked local government efforts to curb homelessness by putting hundreds of millions of state dollars on hold indefinitely in a reflection of public frustration.

But state and local officials have a lot of ground to make up. The number of people entering homelessness each year continues to outpace those who are fortunate enough to secure stable housing.

California renters need to earn nearly three times the state minimum wage to afford average rent prices, according to the nonprofit California Housing Partnership. The state ramped up housing production in recent years, but the group estimates construction remains far below the 120,000 annual affordable units needed to meet demand.

While the local measures approved in Tuesday’s election may help ease this burden, it’s unclear how significant of an impact they will have, especially given a lack of permanent funding from the state or federal government.

“We’ve neglected this for 30-plus years, and we can’t turn this around immediately,” Ohanian said. “These are all good starts, but I worry they’re just going to be a few drops in the bucket.”

This story was originally published November 10, 2022 at 6:00 AM with the headline "We ‘have to do more’: Californians poised to say yes on dozens of housing, homeless measures."