Housing and homelessness

California’s affordable housing crisis has been raging for decades, and is the defining issue of our time. I firmly believe that living up to our progressive values means ensuring everyone who calls California home truly has a place to call their own. Just days after I was sworn in as Assemblymember, I went on a different kind of listening tour across Assembly District 15, visiting homeless encampments, shelters, and service providers. It was crucial to me to hear from people impacted by the crisis, so I could learn from their stories and carry them with me in my work. 

Our affordable housing and homelessness crisis is sprawling, and fighting it means tackling it from all angles — protecting the stock of affordable housing we have, creating new affordable housing, and keeping current homeowners and renters in their homes. 

I am enormously proud of what we were able to accomplish in my first year in Sacramento. I authored AB 1485, which will create new affordable housing for middle-class Californians who are too often left out of the discussion. This bill, which is now law in our state, allows more working Californians, like teachers, firefighters, and nurses, to live in the communities they serve. 

I also co-authored AB 1482, the Tenant Protection Act of 2019, the nation’s most progressive tenant protection bill. For far too long, California tenants have lacked essential protections — from unfair evictions to egregious rent-gouging — that force people out of their homes, and often into homelessness. This lack of protections has driven our affordable housing crisis, and I was enormously proud to help pass this historic legislation that ensured housing security for millions of Californians across the state. 

Our housing crisis became even more severe when COVID-19 hit in March 2020, and I worked hard to provide housing security to Californians — an essential piece of keeping families safe from the pandemic and its worst effects. I passed AB 2463, which protected thousands of homeowners from foreclosure by ensuring that lenders can’t force someone out of their home because of unrelated debt they may owe. 

I also passed AB 1851 in partnership with the faith community, which allows new affordable housing to be built on the  parking lots of faith-based institutions, like churches. Allowing faith-based institutions to be part of the solution to the housing crisis is exactly the kind of creative solution we need to help reverse its course.

Lastly, I passed AB 725, which will increase the supply of affordable housing by allowing multi-family homes to be built in densely populated metropolitan areas. Much like my 2019 bill, this will allow working Californians to continue to live in the communities they serve, and in which they have put down roots.

There is no silver bullet for California’s housing crisis — solving it means thinking outside the box, being bold, and being relentless. That’s been my commitment since day one, and it’s how I’ll keep up the fight on the defining issue of our time.