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Mobile home parks offer refuge from California’s housing squeeze. Who’s watching them?

Bobby Riley moved to Stockton Park Village to live out his days in peace.

In 2018, the 87-year-old retired construction worker tucked his used camper trailer into the farthest lot of the horseshoe-shaped mobile home court off a tree-lined street in the outskirts of Stockton. The community’s handyman, Buzz, helped him build a porch and a patio to ground his trailer and enclosed it with a white wooden fence. He set up a swingset on the grassy common area across the way for when his granddaughter, Brooke, came to visit.

But the little piece of heaven he sought soon became a living hell.

Park owners Howard and Anne Fairbanks appear to have abandoned the property in early 2020 and later that year manager Maria Mendoza died, opening it up to squatters and illegal dumping, according to interviews with the state housing department and court records from a nuisance lawsuit filed by the county of San Joaquin against the Fairbankses. The once-green common area soon filled with wood pallets, dirty mattresses, broken-down cars, discarded washing machines and heaps of gleaming black garbage bags teeming with rats, cockroaches and flies, photos and written reports from state and county inspectors show.

The worst for residents were the pools of putrid brown liquid they have had to wade through, on and off, for nearly four years. County officials first observed surfacing sewage across the park in early November, 2020, according to Zoey Merrill, deputy counsel for San Joaquin County. By February 2021, the problems had gotten worse. A month later, Roto-Rooter came out to fix the problem at the county’s behest but was only partially successful and said the only permanent solution would be to replace the sewer lines at an estimated cost of $100,000. Throughout 2021 and 2022, Roto-Rooter periodically affected minor, temporary solutions, but nobody has replaced the sewer lines yet.

That tracks with what Riley told CalMatters: He had to live with the stench, which seeped into his trailer’s thin walls, for “several months.” His neighbors say it still stinks when it rains.

 

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Advocates push for state amendment to make housing a ‘human right’

Should the state guarantee a right to housing for all Californians?

A coalition of anti-poverty advocates led by Matt Haney, a Democratic state assemblymember from San Francisco, is proposing an amendment to the state constitution that seeks to do just that.

The amendment does not define a right to housing, and backers have offered few specifics about what it would mean in practice. But they say it could make it easier for state officials to sue local governments that resist adding significantly more affordable homes. To pass, it needs a two-thirds majority in the state Legislature and then approval by voters.

At a news conference in Sacramento this week, Haney, alongside leaders from advocacy groups including the ACLU of California and Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, touted the amendment as a long-awaited solution to the state’s affordable housing shortage.

“This is a crisis, and the status quo approach that doesn’t recognize (housing) as a fundamental human right is not going to get us there,” said Haney, a newly elected lawmaker who campaigned on bolstering affordable housing.

Past efforts to codify a right to housing in the state constitution have failed in recent years. And it remains unclear if the latest amendment can muster enough support this time around. But if successful, advocates say it would be the first of its kind anywhere in the country.

For decades, the state and Bay Area haven’t come close to building enough affordably priced homes for everyone who needs them. That’s in part due to a lack of funding for low-income housing. But many cities — from metropolitan San Francisco to suburban Pleasanton — have also long resisted planning for growth.

Experts agree that underproduction is at the root of California’s astronomical housing costs, which are putting an increasing strain on many residents and exacerbating the state’s homelessness crisis.

More than half of all California renters spend over 30% of their earnings on housing, classifying them as “rent-burdened” by federal standards. And many pay much more than that. The state’s homeless population, meanwhile, has grown to over 170,000 people amid the economic fallout of the pandemic, spiking by at least 20% in Contra Costa, Alameda and San Mateo counties.

 

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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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The federal government can help with California’s homelessness crisis, but not Trump’s way

By Anya Lawler, Western Center Housing Policy Advocate 

Lately, President Trump has developed a keen interest in California’s homelessness crisis. On his fundraising trip through the state, the president expressed concern for the impact the crisis has on wealthy foreign real estate investors, and on “our best highways, our best streets, our best entrances to buildings.”

Notably absent from his concern is the one group that feels the impact of the crisis most—people who struggle to survive every day without a roof over their head. President Trump seems uninterested in humane, compassionate solutions, or ensuring that the federal government is fulfilling its responsibility by providing the resources needed to make sure everyone has safe, stable, affordable housing.

Instead, there are hints that the President is pursuing policies that would further criminalize homelessness and treat human beings struggling with poverty as objects to be warehoused out of view. This continues the Trump administration’s cruel pattern of using a humanitarian crisis as an excuse to remove people’s constitutional freedoms, and then blaming those hit hardest by the crisis for being there in the first place.

None of us should be surprised. The administration has introduced one heartless policy after another that, if implemented, would undoubtedly increase homelessness in California and beyond. A few examples:

  • The proposed DHS Public Charge Rule, which will hamper economic mobility and increase poverty by scaring immigrant families away from using crucial programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Housing Choice Voucher Program, which help children and families exit poverty and prevent subsequent harm.
  • The proposed new HUD Mixed Status Rule, which will force families to make an impossible choice between removing family members from their household or losing needed housing assistance.
  • The proposed weakening of the HUD Disparate Impact Rule, which will limit housing opportunity by making it easier to discriminate against members of protected classes. If implemented, the rule will have a direct impact on the homelessness crisis by facilitating discrimination against people experiencing homelessness.
  • The proposed changes to the HUD Equal Access Rule, which flies in the face of proven solutions, and creates unnecessary barriers for accessing shelter, directly contributing to an increase in the rate of unsheltered homelessness.
  • The proposed rule changes to SNAP Time Limit Regulations and SNAP Categorical Eligibility Rules, requiring people to make the impossible choice between food and money for housing.

Rather than pursuing misguided and ineffective efforts that dehumanize people and undermine their ability to succeed, Trump could make far more of an impact by removing these deeply problematic rules from consideration, and instead focusing on proven solutions to prevent and reduce homelessness.

While the causes of California’s homelessness crisis are complex and deeply rooted in racial and economic inequality, one crucial part of the solution is housing people can afford. Homelessness will not end in California without a drastic increase in the supply of housing affordable to households with low incomes. The vast majority of funding for that kind of housing is controlled by the federal government.

Stable affordable housing—both with and without supportive services—ensures that vulnerable families and individuals don’t become homeless, assists the legions who have already lost housing, and allows chronically homeless individuals to receive the services they need to stay off the street. California’s dramatic housing shortage is catastrophic for lower-income people; it will take sustained and substantial funding to turn it around.

There is little chance the state can remedy the affordable housing shortage without a significant increase in federal resources. But rather than address the chronic underfunding of federal housing programs that are critical to serving people with the lowest incomes, the Trump administration is pursuing cuts. Rather than increasing the number of Housing Choice Vouchers available in California so eligible households aren’t stuck on years-long waiting lists, the administration remains focused on cutting HUD’s budget and applying problematic Fair Market Rent calculations that add to the challenge of voucher utilization. Rather than ensuring families are stably housed so that they can focus on improving their economic well-being, he remains focused on tearing families apart and punishing them for using the public assistance intended to prevent the many harms caused by poverty.

More policing is not a solution to homelessness. It is not a crime to be poor. It is not a crime to lack adequate shelter. What is criminal is a country as wealthy as ours, where there are resources to humanely address homelessness and knowledge of how to do so effectively, with a president who is more interested in using the homelessness crisis for political gain. We encourage and invite the president to change course and join us in the pursuit of real solutions.