Vote Yes on Proposition 5 to Let Local Communities Control Their Housing Decisions

The people of California want and need more affordable housing and safe infrastructure. According to the latest official assessment, California needs to add more than 300,000 new homes each year to meet demand, but private developers are barely managing to build a third of that. The lack of this housing has been a top problem here for decades, but, until recently, corporate influence in the Legislature has made it difficult for cities and counties to fund new housing. Too often, corporations see this public good as a threat to their short-term profits and work to prevent communities from raising needed revenue, even when there is majority support.  

Our affordable housing crisis has historical roots in racism. Centuries of housing discrimination have kept BIPOC Californians from becoming homeowners on a par with whites into the present day. The data also indicates that most Black and Latinx renters pay more than 30 percent of their income in rent, defining them as rent burdened. 

Local governments can use bond measures to borrow money to build, paying the debt back over a few decades via slight increases in property taxes. But winning approval through a public vote requires clearing a high bar. The California Constitution requires approval from a full two-thirds of local voters (66.7 percent). This high threshold is so hard to overcome because corporations promote it as protecting homeowners. But what it has really done is suppressed efforts to expand access to affordable housing and kept property taxes artificially low for corporations. 

Of nine local housing bond measures considered by voters throughout the state since 2018, five overcame the threshold. Three received a vote over 55 percent, but less than 66.7 percent; and one measure received less than 55 percent of the vote. Thus, Californians missed out on nearly $1.5 billion that could have funded 12,250 affordable units in San Diego, Santa Rosa, and San Jose. 

The high threshold has also kept many potential housing bond measures off the ballot. Just this year, the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority withdrew a measure that would have funded 72,000 affordable housing units. Proposition 5, in the November ballot, would lower the vote approval threshold to 55 percent, allowing communities more flexibility to build the housing they need.  

 Even if all these measures had gotten a 2/3 vote, California would only be scratching the surface in meeting the affordable housing challenge. That is why we need Prop 5, along with other housing reforms. This measure would not create any new bonds for housing or infrastructure. It would just make it easier for cities and counties to do so. 

Through our Funding Racial Justice and the Budget Power Project (a collaboration with The California Budget & Policy Center and the Million Voters Project), Catalyst California has been training community organizations to understand their local government budget process and push for better funding of their priorities. Participants in the Budget Power Project include East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy and Working Partnerships USA, both of whom have planned campaigns around the transformative effect of housing bond revenue streams. 

Passing Prop 5 now will allow our diverse communities of color, as they inform and empower themselves, to work for bond initiatives that truly fund the housing they need, as well as other priorities, instead of letting government budget resources benefit only the powerful. Vote for Prop 5 in November.