Senate Housing Committee

21 April 2026

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Senate Housing Committee Mon, 20 Apr 2026 California State Senate

00:08 - 00:35

Speaker 1

Good afternoon. I'd like to call to meet to order this meeting of the senate standing committee on housing for Tuesday, 04/21/2026. We do not yet have a quorum, so we'll operate as a subcommittee. And we have a special order of business, which consists of four items. We'll start first with filing one a b seven thirty six, the Affordable Housing Bond Act of 2026 by my colleague, Senator Buffy Wicks, and I'll turn over to the Assembly Member to present on the bill.

00:37 - 04:01

Speaker 2

Thank you, Mr. Chair, also my personal Senator. I appreciate all your hard work here. I'm excited to be in your committee. Thank you for allowing me to present AB seven thirty six, the Affordable Housing Bond Act of 2026.

The purpose of this bill is to raise more money for the affordable housing our state desperately needs. I think, obviously, all of you here know the stats. We have about 170,000 and growing folks experiencing homelessness in our state. Two thirds of our lower income renters are rent burdened, paying so much rent that they sacrifice other basic needs in their life, like food and healthcare, transportation, and our state needs about 1,200,000 units of affordable housing to address this crisis. So that is the challenge.

To build these units, we need tens of billions of dollars, and yet right now, we've extended, all of our dollars from the 2018 bond, and the current budget proposal does not contain, new affordable housing dollars. That's why this bond is so important. It would help us plug a giant hole by providing the bill that's currently in print, 5,000,000,000 for Multifamily Housing Fund, which is our workhorse of affordable housing programs here in the state, which also includes set asides for seniors and rural areas, dollars 1,700,000,000 for permanent supportive housing for folks for formerly homeless, dollars 1,000,000,000 for home ownership programs to help people permanently climb up the economic ladder, and $800,000,000 to make sure we don't lose affordability on existing units who are deed restricted that will retire, dollars 500,000,000 to acquire and rehabilitate existing naturally affordable units, dollars $350,000,000 for farmworker housing, and two fifty million dollars for tribal housing. This will result in the creation and preservation of tens of thousands of affordable units that our communities so desperately need. This is a great investment.

Every dollar of the state money, put in $5 of other private or public sources are brought in. The last thing I will just say about this is, we have done a lot, I think, in this legislative body to streamline and to expedite much needed housing in the state. We have made it more accessible to build. We have passed ADU law. We did major CEQA reforms last year.

We're doing a bunch of stuff on housing innovation construction this year, construction defect liability, all these really important things to solve this problem. We have to have public subsidy. It's really important to do that because we have folks who just simply cannot afford the housing here, and we need to do some sort of public subsidy to support those folks. And I'll also say when we talk about this, we often talk about dollar signs and how many units we get for those dollar signs. What we really are talking about is humans, people in our community, you know, family members, our neighbors, our brothers, our sisters.

These are people with lives who need stable housing. They want to be able to have Thanksgiving dinner under a roof, you know, that there's security. They want to be able to make sure their kids can get ready for school. They want to make sure that they have, the ability to, you know, celebrate and mourn and do all the other things we do in our homes. That is so critical.

And for so many of them right now, they are either living on the precipice of experiencing homelessness or experiencing homelessness, and it is a moral imperative that we do everything we can to stop that. So with that, I'm going to have Ray Pearl speak, the executive director of the California Housing Consortium, and when the time is right and when you have a quorum, respectfully ask for an I vote.

04:01 - 04:04

Speaker 1

Thank you so very much. Good afternoon.

04:04 - 04:19

Speaker 18

Good afternoon. Mr. Chair and committee members, my name is Ray Pearl. I'm the executive director of the California Housing Consortium, and I am also here representing our coalition partner, Housing California. Together, we and our members are in strong support of AB seven thirty six.

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