After years of rental rental, housing prices increasingly out of reach and a lasting crisis of the lack of housing that plays every corner of the state, California is finally creating a state agency focused exclusively on housing problems.
Maybe he wondered how it took so long.
Earlier this year, Governor Gavin Newsom introduced a proposal to divide the business agency, consumer and housing services, an uncomfortable bag of disparate bureaucratic operations, in two new agencies: one for housing and departments related to the lack of housing and another for everything else.
The legislature had until July 4 to veto the plan. He did not (although some Republicans tried). Now the work of establishing the first California housing agency begins.
Supporters of bureaucratic reorganization say the movement is very late. In surveys, Californians regularly name housing and lack of housing as among the main concerns of the State. That only guarantees the creation of a new Cabinet level advisor for the governor, said Ray Pearl, executive director of the California Housing Consortium, which advocates the development of affordable homes.
“A secretary at the cabinet level that will sit with other secretaries of the cabinet, whose reach will be the house … that is raising the agenda to the highest level,” he said.
Pearl, as practically all experts interviewed for this article about the new agency, described reorganization as “only the first step” to bring a very necessary order and efficiency to the California financing programs network for affordable homes.
“Simply move people and give them a new presentation card does not change the system,” he said.
A governor spokesman emphasized that the creation of a new housing agency is part of a broader Newsom effort to prioritize one of California's most annoying problems. Since he took the state of the state government in 2018, the governor has increased pressure on local governments to plan more homes, urged them to eliminate the unleashed Californian camps and have pressed the legislation aimed at increasing construction.
“This is the first administration that makes this part of our daily conversation: putting a magnifying glass on the subject of the lack of housing and finding ways to address it effectively. These structural and policy changes create a generational impact,” said spokeswoman Tara Gallegos.
Among the seven agencies at the cabinet level, the BCSH has always seemed the wing of “all the rest” of the state government. The concurrent of affordable housing subsidies, the lenders and urban planning regulators share a letterhead of the agency with supervisors of the cannabis and alcohol industry, professional licensors, guard dog of car mechanic and all in the Racing Board of Horse in California.
“We used to call it 'the island of maladaptive toys,” said Claudia Cappio, who directed both the California housing finance agency and the Department of Housing and Community Development in the previous years and after 2012, when both were packed in the newly created BCSH. “Imagine a staff meeting of all those things … I learned a lot about horse racing.”
In addition to giving the house and the lack of housing its own box on the Newsom organizational table, the main point of sale of reorganization has been to simplify the Hydra of affordable housing financing systems of the State.
Currently, there is a state organization in which affordable housing developers request loans, another in which most subsidies obtain, a third party in which they request federal tax credits that builders use to attract private investors to support their projects and a room for the necessary bonds to ensure many of those credits. This does not include unique veterans programs, transit -oriented development and short -term homes for homeless people, who sprinkle throughout the state government.
To further complicate things, the Fiscal Credit and Credit Financing programs, the backbone of the financing for the development of affordable housing throughout the country, are not even under the control of the governor. These programs are administered by the treasurer chosen regardless of the State.
“Many, many states have what is essentially a housing financing agency that controls most of the affordable housing funds,” said Sarah Karlinsky, who directs research at the UC Berkeley Housing Terner Center. California programs are divided, which is unusual.
Beyond that, “which makes California so unique,” said Karlinksy, “is the fact that resources extend in two different constitutional officers.”
This fragmentation seems to be increasing the cost of construction in California. An analysis of Terner Center this spring estimated that each additional public financing source delays a project for, on average, four months, and adds $ 20,460 in cost per unit costs.
The construction of affordable homes is already clearly expensive here. The construction of a publicly financed project in California costs more than 2.5 times more per square foot than in Texas and Colorado, found a recent report by the RAND Institute.
Will the new housing agency solve that problem? Not everyone is convinced.
Of the many ways in which the shortage of affordable homes affects most people, “the lines in the agency” do not decipher the “list of the best,” said Senator Christopher Caballedon, a Napa Democrat, on the governor's proposal at an audience in March.
Cabaldon said that executive reorganizations are a semi-regular characteristic of California governance. The business agency, consumer and housing services is the product of a reorganization caused by the California Independent Transport Agency.
“The dance of the secretaries we constantly do, always with great ambitions,” said Cabaldon. “Simply say that it will cause more approach, which will be simplified, that will cause a leadership level action, but as? “
As written, the new housing agency will consist of the entities related to the housing of the current agency together with a new affordable housing finance committee, which will be responsible for coordinating the housing subsidy programs currently under the control of the governor.
But the main sources of financing administered by the Treasurer office will remain where they are. The California Constitution would not have allowed Newsom to command those functions of the independent treasurer he would even have wanted.
That is a significant deficiency, according to the Little Hoover commission, the independent supervision agency of the state government, which reviewed the Governor's plan before it was transferred to the legislature. In its final report, the Commission recommended that the governor and the treasurer reach a formal agreement to “create a unified request and a review process” for all affordable finance programs under their respective scope.
Neither the Governor's Office nor the Fiona Ma State Treasurer office would say if they are chasing that goal.
A unique and unified application for each of the publicly financing programs of affordable housing in California has been the bureaucratic holy grail of the affordable developers of California and the policy care since at least mid -1990s Partnership, a non -profit organization that advocates affordable homes.
“There will be a bit of diplomacy” between the two executive branches to resolve a joint application, said Schwartz, who spoke with Calmatters earlier this year after the governor first introduced the proposal. “That is the long -term prize that many of us will press to get out of this process.”
Some defenders of affordable housing have urged legislators to be cautious by marking the various bureaucracies together.
In a letter to four powerful democratic legislators, the California Housing Consortium emphasized that the application systems administered by the Treasurer Office already “work extremely well.”
That process “is not broken and does not need to fix,” said Pearl, director of the Consortium. Before riding with him, he said: “We have configured the agency.”
Pearl and the Consortium also pointed out that last legislation has already ordered the creation of a working group to propose a consolidated application. The findings of that group will be presented on July 1, 2026. That is the same day that the current BCSH will officially dissolve and the two new agencies will take their place.
That also happens only five months before state elections will be held to replace Newsom and Ma, giving voters the opportunity to decide who shall shape the future of affordable housing policy in California.
Christopher writes for Calmatters, where this article originally appeared.
