POLICIES & LEGISLATION

AHLA-Sponsored Legislation:

AB 1335 – Strengthening Sustainable Communities Strategies: This bill resolves a discrepancy between state-mandated regional planning processes for housing and transportation. You can check out our quick introduction to the bill, read the fact sheet, and follow the bill on Leginfo.

Positions on 2023 Legislation:

ACA 1 – Support: This constitutional amendment would make it easier for local governments to finance affordable housing and related infrastructure by easing the public vote thresholds for certain taxes and bonds.

AB 1287 (Alvarez) – Support: Assembly Bill 1287 would strengthen state density bonus law by allowing additional bonus density and zoning concessions for projects that incorporate certain percentages of homes affordable to moderate income households and would ensure that density bonus law will apply in the Coastal Zone.

SB 4 (Wiener) – Support: SB 4 will allow places of worship and nonprofit colleges to build developments that are 100%
affordable to low and moderate income households, with an emphasis on lower-income households. Many non-profit colleges and faith-based organizations want to partner with affordable housing developers to build more critically needed affordable homes on land they already own, in support of their missions. These organizations, as long-standing community anchors, wish to support their students, staff, congregations, neighbors and families. Yet many of these organizations are currently located in areas that are not zoned to permit housing, requiring an uncertain, difficult, lengthy, and costly process to rezone the land to build the affordable homes Californians desperately need. SB 4 offers new tools for our community anchors to build safe, stable, affordable homes for local residents and families.

SB 31 (Jones) – Oppose: SB 31 would make it a crime to sit, lie, sleep, or store, use, maintain, or place personal property upon any street, sidewalk, or other public right-of-way within 1000 feet of a so-called “sensitive area”, including schools, daycare centers, parks, or libraries. We are gravely concerned that SB 31 would further demonize, destabilize, criminalize, and violate the human rights of unhoused Californians while failing to address the underlying driver of homelessness: the lack of affordable and accessible housing to Californians with the lowest incomes.

Given the ubiquity of schools, parks, libraries, and daycare centers, this policy would effectively make it a crime for any unhoused Californian to exist in public space, and put police officers at the frontlines of responding to our state’s affordable housing and homelessness crisis. By framing the bill as means to protect children and families, this measure perpetuates false narratives that unhoused people are inherently dangerous. It also ignores that our unhoused neighbors include families and children who attend schools and visit parks and libraries. Further, given the fact that Black people and other people of color disproportionately live without housing or shelter and are unjustly targeted by law enforcement, SB 31 also reinforces dangerous racialized stereotypes that continue to reproduce systemic inequity in housing, health, employment, and legal outcomes.

Read our policy agenda to learn about the kind of proposals we support and check our policy tracker to view current positions on bills related to housing.

Read about our 2022 legislation here.