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Tag: affordable housing

Legislation exempting Chula Vista property from state Surplus Land Act passes Assembly

, By Tammy Murga, San Diego Union Tribune
The state Assembly has approved legislation that would exempt 383 acres set aside by Chula Vista for a university and innovation district from the Surplus Land Act.Assembly Bill 837, sponsored by Assemblymember David Alvarez, is now under review by the Senate Rules Committee.The Surplus Land Act requires local governments to offer excess land for sale or lease to affordable housing developers first before allowing other uses. It exempts parcels that are impossible to build on or have legal restrictions.
Chula Vista sought an exemption for the site, located near its Otay Ranch Town Center, because it envisions the property having a university, market-rate housing and research and development companies. The city maintained that it acquired the land through agreements that limited the type of developments that could be built on-site.

Will Biden’s Blueprint for a Renters Bill of Rights Be Enough to Fix the U.S. Housing Crisis?

, By Tina Rosales, Practising Law Institute

Thirty-five percent of the U.S. population rent their homes. In general, the renting population tends to be younger, lower income and less white than homeowners, a byproduct of redlining. Redlining is commonly referred to as any racially discriminatory housing practice but originated from the government-sponsored exclusion of Black people from homeownership and white communities. Partially due to these practices, Black (58%) and Latinx (53%) people are more likely to be renters than their white counterparts (31%), according to the 2019 census. Since Black and Latinx communities are less likely to achieve wealth through homeownership and more likely to be subject to the rising costs of rental housing and stagnant wages, the average renter in the U.S. is considered rent burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on rent. Over half of Black and Latinx renters were cost burdened prior to the pandemic compared to 42% of Asian and white households. Black renters were the most likely to be severely cost burdened, spending over 50% of their income on housing. This number rose since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when rental rates soared nearly 25% between 2019 and 2022. In no state can a person afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent on the federal minimum wage. With this bleak outlook on the housing crisis, the Biden-Harris administration, like other administrations in the past, missed the opportunity to step in in a meaningful way to ease the burden on renters by increasing the federal minimum wage.

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Federal Housing Voucher Utilization Promoted in Bill by California Assembly Majority Leader Reyes – Tens of Thousands of Federal Housing Choice Vouchers Are Left Unused Each Year

, By Sierra Sun Times

Assemblymember Eloise Gómez Reyes says, “AB 653 will prevent Californians from falling into homelessness, increase oversight and accountability, and invest in proven solutions to house Californians.”

SACRAMENTO – While affordable housing demand remains high, tens of thousands of federal housing choice vouchers are left unused each year. In order to increase use of these vouchers, Assembly Majority Leader Eloise Gómez Reyes has announced legislation, AB 653, which would create the Federal Housing Voucher Acceleration Program.

The program would:

  • Pair voucher recipients with services to find and secure housing,
  • Incentivize landlords to get their units approved to accept vouchers, and
  • Require public housing authorities with the lowest voucher utilization rates to follow evidence-based practices for improvement.

“I hear from people throughout my district and the state whose eligibility for federal vouchers does nothing to house them,” said Reyes. “When someone receives a voucher to make rent affordable, but they cannot find an available unit to accept it, we see federal dollars left on the table and a household who remains housing insecure. We have to do something to make sure we are maximizing the use of federal resources. This bill provides a common sense way to ensure the state is using federal funding to pair individuals and families with places to live.”

“It has been very hard to use my housing voucher in the Inland Empire,” said Traci, an individual who has gone through the process. “It took me forever to get into a place, and the apartment was vacant for three months. I even tried other places while I was waiting, but was constantly declined.”

AB 653 is sponsored by the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, Corporation for Supportive Housing, Housing California, National Housing Law Project, United Ways of California and Western Center on Law and Poverty. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 33% of families in San Bernardino have to return their unused voucher back to the local PHA and only 44.7% of LA County recipients have success finding housing with a voucher.

Western Center Roundup – March 2023

Celebrating Women’s History Month and Cesar Chavez Day

Advocating, Organizing, Speaking Up and Out: Women Are Driving the Change We Need in California

This Women’s History Month was shaped by powerful testimony women provided in press conferences, legislative hearings, strikes, and listening tours. From demanding Housing as a Human Right, advocating for Affordable Health Care, preventing homelessness through expanded tenant protections, Reimagining a CalWORKs program that truly supports families, and shining a spotlight on the unique barriers faced by farmworkers braving climate change to feed our State, women shared how policies and systems of power impact their daily lives, offering both inspiration and solutions centered in their lived experiences. We stand in awe of these change makers and thank them for their dedication to improving the lives of all Californians. We would also like to extend our congratulations to Sonya Young Aadam, WCLP partner, who received a major national nod with the Unsung Hero Award from the NAACP Image Awards for her work leading the California Black Women’s Health Project and Christine Chambers Goodman, WCLP board member and Professor of Law at Caruso School of Law at Pepperdine, who was recognized with the University’s 10th Annual Award for Excellence in Leadership.


Western Center’s Executive Director, Crystal Crawford Receives NYU School of Law Woman of Distinction Award

Our very own Crystal Crawford, Western Center Executive Director was honored by the New York School of Law with the 2022 Woman of Color Collective Woman of Distinction Award, recognizing alumnae who have made outstanding achievements in the field of law. Crystal’s acceptance speech spoke to the theme of the awards event, Building Bridges, Fostering Wellbeing. A Hays Fellow and Chairperson of Black Allied Law Students Association at NYU Law, Crystal paid homage to several of her classmates who were in attendance, as well as NYU Law professors Paulette Caldwell, Derrick Bell, Bryan Stevenson, and Leon Higginbotham for providing encouragement and inspiration throughout her career. In her closing remarks, Crystal noted that a guiding mantra for her has been the Kwanzaa principle of kujichagulia, or self-determination. “This notion of defining who we are and not letting other people define us, that’s how you foster your own wellbeing.”

Congratulations and thank you for your leadership, Crystal!


NEW REPORT: Return to Sender: How an Unreliable Mail System Harms Californians Living in Poverty

Shaped by interviews throughout the state with public benefits advocates, legal aid attorneys, food bank employees, shelter operators, and nonprofit leaders, as well as individuals struggling to access their mail, and Public Records Act responses from counties concerning their mail holding practices and methods for ensuring unhoused people can access mail, this new report outlines the challenges facing Californians without permanent addresses and/or access to reliable mail services. Special thanks to Liv Williams, who spent a year working at Western Center as a Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP Social Impact Pro Bono Fellow, for her extensive research and authorship of this report. This fellowship project has become a powerful advocacy tool to garner support for SB 491 (Durazo), co-sponsored by Western Center and the Coalition of California Welfare Rights Organizations. This bill would create an option for unhoused Californians to pick up government related mail from a county department of social services such as Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards, election ballots, public housing waiting list notifications, student report cards, and much more. You can track this bill HERE.

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Community Centric Fundraising Hub Highlights Western Center Team’s Journey into Fundraising from a Place of Empowerment and Awareness

Western Center’s development department is as bold as they come. The team, composed of four women from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, is fertile ground to try things differently. The team, Heather Masterton, Xochi Flores, Cinthya Martinez, and April Walker recently documented their experience of reimagining development work by implementing community centric fundraising principles in a new Women’s History Month publication on the CCF hub; we invite you to learn more. “We are not just grant seekers, grant writers, foundation relationship stewards, and event planners. We are also parents, students, and professors. We are sisters and siblings in family and in community. We are connectors of all of the spaces we occupy and engage in. And just like social justice work is transformative and process based, so are the humans who use their creativity, their wordsmithing, their love of language and communication, and their acquired-by-living skillset to propel the work forward…” 

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NEW Blog Post: CalFresh Hunger Games

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress increased Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefit levels through Emergency Allotments to address America’s deepening hunger crisis. On March 1, 2023, those increased SNAP benefits, known as CalFresh in California, expired for approximately three million recipients, bringing food benefits down to an average of $6 per day per person. Western Center’s Outreach and Advocacy Associate, Abraham Zavala-Rodriguez connects with recipients to learn more about the impact of losing those life sustaining increases as inflation rises and the cost of food soars. Jesus and Alicia are getting by with a tight budget. They budget in the face of rising inflation where prices on milk, eggs, and bread skyrocket. For them community driven food banks have been a blessing. Alicia shared, “this is the reality for many Californians. We are doing our best to get by. Our neighbors who are also retired are in a similar situation. Others we know live in houses or apartments where multiple families are living under one roof – it is the only way to survive, but we are running out of time.”

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Inland Empire Politicians Ignoring Housing Crisis While Conjuring Warehouse Crisis

, By Hallie Kutak and Nisha Vyas, The Desert Sun, 

The telltale signs of income inequality, skyrocketing housing costs and chronic homelessness point to a grim reality. California is in a severe, escalating affordable housing crisis.

Again and again, leaders in Sacramento have identified the lack of available, suitable land as one of the main obstacles to affordable housing development. State and local agencies have expended millions in planning efforts to identify such available lands and prioritize them for housing.

But in the Inland Empire, decision makers seem unfazed by this reality and are enacting policies as if there were a warehouse crisis instead.

An astonishing 1 billion square feet of warehouse space has been built in San Bernardino and Riverside counties, with an additional 170 million square feet already approved or pending approval. Warehouses are increasing at a rate five times faster than population growth.

What’s most alarming is that cities and counties are approving massive logistics centers on land zoned for homes. At a time when we should be investing in affordable housing near transit and jobs, our decision makers vote to demolish neighborhoods, displacing residents and rolling out the welcome mat for industrial developers.

These untenable land-use decisions permanently eliminate prime real estate from home construction and bring in pollution that poisons the air for those who remain.

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From Commodities To Communities: Reimagining Housing After The Pandemic

, UCLA Law Review
By Western Center’s Nisha N. Vyas and Matthew Warren
In Discourse, Special Issue: Law Meets World Vol. 68

Abstract

While COVID-19 is not the root cause of housing insecurity, the pandemic has pulled hundreds of thousands of Californians to the precipice of housing loss.  This Article describes the existing eviction process that values individual property rights over the human right to housing, and describes proposed legislative solutions to prevent evictions en masse before considering urgent long-term changes.  This moment calls for us to question the historical commodification of property, and to more towards a system that treats housing as a social good necessary for public health rather than a commodity to generate wealth for the privileged few.

From Commodities To Communities: Reimagining Housing After The Pandemic

Western Center Reaction to Governor Newsom’s Proposed 2020-2021 Budget

First and foremost, Western Center is pleased that Governor Newsom’s proposed budget includes significant and innovative proposals to address the homelessness crisis in California, which will not only help the thousands of people currently experiencing homelessness, but will also prevent more people from losing their housing. We are also pleased to see the Governor take another major step toward providing health care for all by expanding Medi-Cal coverage to undocumented adults over age 65, and to see the extension of the tax ban on period products and diapers, which makes our tax code more equitable for women, girls and young families.

We were hoping to see additional investments for CalWORKs and SSI grants in this proposal, since they are both crucial for lifting Californians out of poverty. We will continue to advocate for those increases in the final budget agreement.

Below are our initial reactions to the proposed budget by issue area. We will release an in-depth analysis next week.

Housing

The proposed budget appropriately treats the state’s homelessness crisis as an emergency. The proposal devotes additional resources to help people at risk of homelessness remain stably housed and to increase both temporary shelter capacity and permanent housing options for people already experiencing homelessness. We are pleased to see the Governor’s sustained commitment to addressing homelessness and look forward to working in partnership with his administration and legislative leaders to further develop effective, sustainable solutions to the crisis that prioritize residents living in poverty.

We agree with the Governor that the state must ramp up efforts to address the state’s shortage of housing, which is primarily a shortage at lower income levels. We are eager to work with the Governor to ensure that policies and programs to speed housing production prioritize the creation of units for households with the lowest incomes who are priced out of the rental market in every county in the state, protect low-income communities and communities of color from displacement, and increase access to high opportunity areas for our clients.

Financial Security

The budget includes funding to increase the CalWORKs child support pass through (read about it here). Currently, the first $50 of child support paid by a non-custodial parent goes to the CalWORKs family, but any amount over that is kept by state and federal governments. In the Governor’s newly proposed budget, CalWORKs families with one child will keep the first $100 of child support, and families with two or more children will keep the first $200 of child support, beginning January 2022. It also includes funding to provide debt relief for child support owed to the government that is deemed uncollectable. We are grateful that the Governor has heard from parents and families in their call for a child support program that works for children, and we are eager to see proposed associated trailer bill law changes for details. We look forward to working with the Governor and legislature to achieve the goals of conforming with federal law and regulation, and ensuring the program works to benefit the children it purports to help.

The budget also includes the extension of the tax ban on period products and diapers, which will make our tax code more equitable, since taxes on period products and diapers are regressive to poor families and young people. We look forward to continuing work in the legislature to end unmet diaper need and period poverty in California.

Additionally, the budget makes a $92 million investment in reducing criminal justice fees and their harmful, recidivistic impact on people with low-incomes and people of color, their families, and their communities. We are grateful to Budget Chair Mitchell for her leadership on this issue and look forward to working on details with her, the Governor, and other budget leaders. We’re also happy to see that Californians with low incomes will soon be able to reduce the cost of their traffic fines and the overall impact of expensive traffic tickets, with this budget proposing to expand the traffic court ability-to-pay pilot program (currently operational in four counties) statewide over several years. The pilot has yet to be evaluated, so we look forward to details from the Judicial Council to see if the program’s reductions in fines and fees are adequate or need to reduced further.

Finally, to further enhance financial security for Californians, the Governor’s budget creates a new state version of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The proposed financial watchdog will hold banks and other financial firms accountable when they engage in unfair and abusive debt collection and banking practices. Medical, student loan, school lunch, and other forms of debt disproportionally burden people experiencing poverty; we expect this new agency to offer important protections for our clients.

Health Care

We applaud the Governor for continuing to move toward universal coverage by making California the first in the nation to expand full-scope Medi-Cal to all income-eligible seniors regardless of immigration status, taking a whole person approach to Medi-Cal, and cost containment with an eye toward quality and equity. We look forward to working with the administration and legislature to advance a budget that ensures equitable access to affordable, comprehensive, quality health care for poor Californians.

The Governor’s proposal also delays suspension of benefits and eligibility, by extending certain Medi-Cal benefits (optical, audiology, podiatry, speech therapy, and incontinence creams and washes), extending Medi-Cal eligibility from 60 days to one year for post-partum women diagnosed with a mental health disorder, and expanding Medi-Cal screening for the overuse of opioids and illicit drugs, all until July 2023.

 

How California’s Tenants Won Statewide Rent Control

California’s progressive activists won a major victory in mid-September when the state legislature passed, and Governor Gavin Newsom promised to sign, a bill creating unprecedented protections for renters facing skyrocketing rents and arbitrary evictions in a state where the increasing unaffordability of housing has reached crisis proportions.

…Led by ACCE, and such other progressive organizations as PICO California, the Western Center on Law and Poverty, Public Advocates, PolicyLink, and TechEquity, the organizers recruited more than 150 groups to support Chiu’s bill, including the state Democratic Party, the California Labor Federation (AFL-CIO), the California State Building and Construction Trades Council, the ACLU, the League of Women Voters, YIMBY Action, the Sierra Club, and California Alliance for Retired Americans.

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