Strategy
How this gets decided
Measure, agree the tests, score the proposals, choose the vehicle. The aim is a changed law by 2030.
What replaces the current law has to be more than a good idea: drafted, fiscally scored, independently reviewed, and carried by people on every side of the problem. That takes a sequence, and the sequence matters more than any date in it.
Measure first
Before any proposal can be scored, the data has to exist. A bill being drafted adds outcome fields to the annual housing reports cities already file: bedrooms, tenure, subsidy, completions against approvals. It comes first because it settles what the whole debate runs on. Every proposal, ours included, gets judged on the same numbers.
Agree the tests
With local electeds, affordable housing operators, builders, lenders, researchers and advocates: agree what any housing law has to deliver before arguing whose law delivers it. A working group of San Diego County electeds convenes this fall; it is the first of these conversations, not the last.
Score the proposals
Each proposal is scored against the tests, in public. The California Stewardship Fund has published one, with its numbers and its open questions stated. We expect others, and any serious proposal will be published alongside ours with the same scoring.
Choose the vehicle
A statute, a regional pilot, a constitutional measure, or a combination, chosen with the people at the table once the tests and the scoring have done their work. There is precedent for more than one path. In 2018, a qualified citizen initiative on data privacy was withdrawn at the statutory deadline in exchange for the Legislature passing the California Consumer Privacy Act itself. That is one way this has ended before. It is not the plan; the plan is to earn a proposal good enough that the vehicle becomes a choice.
The aim
A changed law by 2030. How it gets there is decided with the people doing the work.
Why this can work
The coalition exists; it has never been assembled. Cities and counties have sought the return of the 1992 property-tax shift for thirty years and lost every time, because returning local money had no constituency in Sacramento. Ownership interests have watched policy tilt production toward institutional rental. Affordable housing operators have watched the word affordable come to mean one-bedrooms in towers, with nothing funded in the neighborhoods their residents already live in. Inland communities receive the growth without the infrastructure. None of them has had this argument together. Our work is to give each of them a reason, and an introduction.
The review is the point, not a hurdle. If the Legislative Analyst finds the school-funding math does not hold, the money piece gets redesigned in public before anything is filed. A proposal that survives that is worth carrying; one that does not should be replaced, including by someone else's.
The ask
The sequence runs on the people in it
If you hold office, build housing, operate affordable homes, lend, research, or advocate, there is a specific thing we are asking of you, and it is on Work with us. If you live here and want to help, start with For residents.