The four tests
What a housing law has to deliver
Four outcomes, each with a measure attached. We are asking for agreement on these before anyone argues solutions.
For fifty years, everyone who has fought over California housing law has had a solution. Almost nobody has said what a solution has to deliver, in terms that can be measured. The four tests below are our answer, and the bill at the bottom of this page is what makes them scoreable.
Agreeing to the tests commits you to nothing else. Our own proposal, the Act, gets scored against them the same way any other proposal does.
Test one
Homes we can afford
The standard. More homes that households at and below the region's median income can rent or buy, year over year, counted in family-sized homes and not just units.
What it measures. Completions, by bedroom count, affordability level and tenure, per region. A completion is a certificate of occupancy: a home someone can live in, not a permit.
The gap today. Cities report permits and units. They do not report bedrooms, the tenure of affordable units, or the subsidy each unit took.
Where the current system stands. Of the 506,469 homes completed in California from 2021 to 2025, 84,382 were affordable to very-low- and low-income households, and fewer than 1 in 380 was an affordable home a family could own. Every figure, with its source and its limits, is on the scoreboard.
Test two
Opportunity where you live
The standard. The policy raises the opportunity available to people where they already live, in both directions: affordable family homes in high-resource areas, and schools, parks, streets and jobs in low-resource areas.
What it measures. A published opportunity index per neighborhood, tracked over time, independent of unit counts. The method should be set with researchers; the test is that it is measured and published.
The gap today. Nothing in state reporting measures opportunity, and nothing distinguishes a neighborhood that got better for its residents from one that got better by replacing them. The index has to follow people as well as places.
Test three
Homes that get built
The standard. What is approved gets built, and approved affordable homes get built first.
What it measures. Completions against approvals. Time from approval to occupancy. The status of stalled deed-restricted projects, and the public subsidy behind each deed-restricted unit.
The gap today. The state tracks approvals and permits. It does not track why approved affordable homes stall.
Where the current system stands. The scoreboard shows the pipeline at three stages, approval to permit to completion, over the same five years. The affordable share shrinks at every stage. Every figure, with its source and its limits, is on the scoreboard.
Test four
A voice
The standard. A city and its residents are part of making the plan that governs them, in a cooperative process where every voice is heard and accounted for. The plan that process produces holds: what it decides is not overridden later, project by project.
What it measures. The binding half is countable: of the homes completed, how many followed the adopted plan, and how many were pushed through around it by density bonus, builder's remedy or state streamlining. The participation half is harder, and defining its measure is work we are asking researchers to share: who was in the room when the plan was made, and whether their input is traceable in the result.
The gap today. No one publishes the override share today, and no one measures participation at all.
Measure first
Before anything can be scored, the data has to exist
Three of the four tests cannot be scored from what cities report today. So the first piece of work is not a housing proposal at all. It is a bill adding outcome fields, bedrooms, tenure, subsidy, completions against approvals, to the annual housing reports cities already file. We are drafting it now. Once those fields exist, every proposal in the debate, ours included, gets judged on the same numbers.
If you think a test is wrong, or missing, that is the first conversation we want to have.
We are asking local electeds, affordable housing operators, builders, lenders, researchers and advocates to argue these four with us before anyone argues solutions.