California Stewardship Alliance
Homes we can afford. Communities we love. California can have both.
We are a small nonprofit working with local electeds, affordable housing operators, builders and researchers on two questions: what a housing law has to deliver, and how to measure whether it does. By those measures, on the state's own numbers, the current law is failing.
The score
A home you can own? Fewer than one in 380.
Of all homes completed in California, 2021–2025 · every figure, sourced →
On the coast, state law overrides local plans to force production, most of it one-bedroom rentals. In the valley, growth is assigned without the schools and streets to support it. The two complaints sound opposite. They are produced by the same law.
California is not one place, and one rule written for all of it was never going to fit. Over the past decade, the authority to decide what gets built moved from council chambers to state law. The score above is what that produced.
The problem
Nobody is responsible for the whole
Since 1969, California's housing laws have been written for one part of the system at a time, each a reaction to the last. Inside that system, everyone's next move is rational: the State overrides, the city slows, the builder chases the one project type the rules make profitable, residents organize against whatever arrives. No law has been responsible for the whole system, and the results read like it.
What the system does to each of them, cities, families, builders, schools, operators and the State, and what any solution owes them, is on The problem. How the law accumulated, bill by bill, is on Who Decides.
The four tests
First, agree on what a law has to deliver
Homes we can afford
More family-sized homes each year that households at or below the region's median income can rent or buy.
Opportunity where you live
Affordable family homes in high-resource areas, and schools, parks, streets and jobs in low-resource areas.
Homes that get built
What is approved gets built, and approved affordable homes get built first.
A voice
Cities and their residents help make the plans that govern them, and what gets built is what the plan says.
Each test comes with a measure, and most of the measures do not exist in state reporting yet. The standards, the measures and the gaps are on the four tests.
Under way now
Three pieces of work
A bill to measure outcomes.
Cities already file annual housing reports; a bill being drafted adds the outcome fields the four tests need. Once those fields exist, every proposal gets judged on the same numbers.
A working group of San Diego County electeds.
It convenes this fall, and its first job is the tests themselves. Confirm them, correct them, or replace them.
One proposal, from us.
The California Stewardship Fund has published a design it believes passes the four tests, with its arithmetic and its unanswered questions stated. We expect it will not be the only proposal.
Work with us
What we are asking, by reader
Local electeds: read the tests, then bring your city's numbers to one working session.
Affordable housing operators and builders: tell us what your projects need, and what in any proposal would hurt the communities you serve.
Researchers: check the numbers, and help define how opportunity gets measured.
Residents: start here.
Hear when something changes
A new revision of the Act, a study back, a bill in print, and what you can do about it.
A few emails a year when something changes. Unsubscribe any time.
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Fund the work
Your support funds the data, the independent review, and the organizing.
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