Housing Crisis

California received another reminder this week that, despite its world-class economy, the state has millions of families mired in poverty.

President Biden signed on Saturday a last-ditch bill to raise the national debt limit that includes Republican-forced provisions for stricter work requirements on welfare recipients. But California is headed in the opposite direction. And that could lead to the state losing a big chunk of the federal grants that fund its CalWORKS program. As Jeanne […]

A bill to tax Airbnb and other short-term rentals to fund affordable housing projects could be voted on by the Senate as soon as today. The proposal has revived the debate over Airbnb and its role in the housing crisis.

If passed, Assembly Constitutional Amendment 10 would give California voters the opportunity to enshrine housing as a fundamental right in the state constitution. The amendment could dramatically reshape how the state confronts the housing crisis.

A builder in a wealthy Bay Area community agreed to a strict union-hiring standard to take advantage of a new housing law. Then it tried to change the deal.

After 15 public hearings and testimony from more than 100 expert witnesses and the public, the California Reparations Task Force approved calculations on Saturday that estimate as much as hundreds of millions of dollars owed to eligible Black residents. Describing the emotional meeting as “one of the more rowdy hearings by the task force,” Wendy […]

California politicians tend to make decisions in the here and now, without fully exploring long-term consequences of their decrees.

What started in March with the stunning collapse of Santa Clara-based Silicon Valley Bank continued Monday, as state regulators announced that they had seized San Francisco-based First Republic Bank, the second biggest bank failure in U.S. history. Quickly, the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation said it appointed as receiver the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., […]

By almost any measure, the balance between advancing projects critical to California's future and environmental protection under the California Environmental Quality Act has been lost. The failure to reform CEQA is not for a lack of knowing what the solutions are.

A California housing law grants generous benefits to builders who agree to only hire union workers. Trouble is, few if any builders found a way to do it.