The California Homeownership Affordability Act will accomplish three objectives:
1. Restore CEQA: The biggest barrier to building the new homes we need is the abuse of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) to file nuisance lawsuits on bogus environmental grounds. When it was passed, CEQA did not even cover housing, and yet California finds itself in a situation where just between 2019 and 2021, around one million new homes that had been approved for construction by state and local government were blocked by bogus CEQA lawsuits.
This Initiative would eliminate CEQA abuse by ending the "private right of action" - only county DAs or the state Attorney General would be able to file CEQA lawsuits.
Why should anyone be able to sue to stop housing being built, if it has already been approved and complies with all existing environmental regulations?
2. Cap Impact Fees: One of the main drivers of astronomical housing costs is the explosion in so-called "Impact Fees" being charged on new housing construction. These are effectively a tax on house-building and create an incentive for only expensive homes to be built.
For example, the fees charged for building an apartment in San Francisco have been as high as $300,000 - even before the cost of land, labor, materials, etc.
This Initiative will cap fees at 3% of the combined construction and labor cost of a new home. The cap would not include fees for schools, or to connect to utilities. The 3% cap would comprise state agency compliance fees capped at 1% and local fees at 2%.
This would dramatically reduce the cost of new housing and incentivize the building of genuinely affordable homes through the market.
3. Construction Worker Housing Fund: To address the shortage of construction workers, which also contributes to rising costs, our proposal includes a new fund, financed by a small portion of Impact Fees, to create a down payment assistance program to help construction workers buy their own home if they commit to staying in the industry in California.
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