Housing | Tom Steyer for Governor

A home is more than a place to sleep or a piece of property to be owned.

A home connects you to community and it gives you belonging. It is where you build your future, raise a family, and it’s how you achieve the California Dream.

But today, that fundamental promise, the chance to put down roots and raise a family, is slipping away. Californians cannot afford to live in California. And that’s why we can’t treat our housing crisis as just a mathematical shortage of assets. It’s a crisis of the California Dream.

Housing underpins everything in California, and I know that building more housing is possible.

Nearly a decade ago, I signed on to help pass new laws to hold local governments accountable, provide permanent revenues for affordable housing programs, and streamline local zoning approvals. I’ve seen firsthand how these tools can work when they are actually enforced, and as Governor, I will use them to ensure that when builders follow the rules, they can get to work.

I’m no stranger to building housing. I’ve done it before. I co-founded Beneficial State Bank with my wife Kat Taylor, a mission-driven Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI). Beneficial State Bank has spent nearly two decades serving communities abandoned by Wall Street and working to directly dismantle the legacy of redlining and disinvestment. To date, we have financed over 17,000 affordable housing units.

California used to build more than twice as many units as it does now. We need to return to that historic level of production. We can build 1 million homes over four years and fundamentally transform affordability in our state.

Building should be easy. We should bring the same innovation and technology synonymous with California to our housing crisis. And above all else, our housing system should work for working people.

Here’s how I’ll do it.

I’ll make building easier.

We must build every type of home to meet the needs of every Californian: from shelters and transitional housing, to encouraging and supporting the building of apartments and starter homes, as well as single family homes. To do this, we need to make it easier to finance projects, bring certainty and speed to construction, and slash fees and taxes that destroy affordability.

I’ll make financing easy so we can build homes everyone can afford.

Housing finance in California is too fragmented, burdensome, and restrictive. It adds time, costs, and complications that disincentivize the private investments that are vital for affordable housing. Public dollars should bring investments to the table, not scare them away.

As Governor, I will draw on my decades of experience in investing so that state housing programs, whether funding, financing, or incentivizing, align with the real estate finance system. I will streamline competing programs, maximize flexibility, incentivize private liquidity, and partner with local governments. I will invest our public dollars to get the best return possible, by aligning financing programs and incentives to actually meet the needs of the market and fill the missing middle.

But, I won’t just free up capital, I’ll free up land. I will work with policymakers to modernize the Surplus Lands Act, reform agency policies and practices to improve housing delivery on surplus lands, and explore options to better leverage public land holdings for development through long-term ground leases.

I’ll streamline permitting, reform zoning, and enforce laws to build faster.

California needs dense housing located next to public transit. The state has passed critical laws to streamline permitting, increase density, and prioritize housing near transit, which I championed (SB 79) and helped lobby to pass. California has the structures in place to deliver, what we need is accountability, implementation, and execution.

As Governor, I will enforce laws so that builders have certainty that when they follow the rules, they can complete projects. I will work to expand the state’s Pro-housing Designation Program to reward communities that accelerate construction, and I will close loopholes to improve existing laws. But if local governments refuse to follow the law and seek to block housing, the state will step in.

Recognizing the nature of work has changed, California must adapt by making it easier and cheaper to convert old office buildings into mixed use and mixed income housing, which will revitalize downtowns, and bring people closer to job centers.

I’ll slash impact fees and transfer taxes by closing the Trump Tax Loophole.

California’s Trump Tax Loophole is a billionaire-friendly tax break that lets the wealthiest commercial property owners avoid paying taxes based on what their properties are actually worth.

You simply cannot address housing in California without confronting this issue.

Why? Because to backfill the revenue lost from this loophole, cities are forced to charge exorbitant developer and transfer fees on projects and property sales, far higher than other states. These taxes and fees destroy housing affordability.

As Governor, I will close the Trump Tax Loophole and deliver $20 billion to our communities every year, and encourage building of residential units, including providing revenue to replace the exorbitant fees local governments impose that are currently discouraging new homes and apartments.

The state will work with local governments to standardize fees and use a sliding scale to incentivize the construction of a variety of housing types. And, I will expand state programs to offset infill infrastructure costs, so homebuyers don’t foot the bill. This will make it cheaper to build new housing, provide the funds to invest in essential community services, and ensure that excessive costs are no longer passed onto Californians who just want to buy a home.

I’ll make building innovative.

We cannot solve a 21st-century housing crisis by building homes the same way we did a hundred years ago. While technological breakthroughs in industrialized construction and design can drastically lower costs, these innovations require steady economies of scale, leaving them vulnerable to our cyclical, unpredictable housing market, fragmented regulatory system, and mismatched incentives.

As Governor, I will use the investment power of the state to build these industries, and modernize our regulatory agencies so we can finally bring the efficiency and scale of modern manufacturing to California’s housing market.

I’ll invest in industrialized construction like prefab and modular housing, cut red tape, and build with union labor.

The fastest way to drive down housing costs is to slash the cost of construction, and the key to doing that is industrialization.

California knows how to do this. To provide this certainty, I will push to standardize designs, eliminate redundant regulations, simplify inspection and approval processes, and cut red tape.

I’ll also use the state’s massive purchasing power to aggregate demand and build the country’s largest industrialized construction market.

By committing a baseline of state-funded projects, like student housing and emergency shelters, to factory-built housing, we will give manufacturers the pipeline they need to make large capital investments to scale.

I’ll also leverage state investment in modular firms to secure priority access to housing at pre-set prices, ensuring California can rapidly deploy a guaranteed supply of homes for disaster recovery. If disaster strikes, Californians never have to wait to rebuild.

We will apply this same purchasing power to Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), launching a state program to buy materials in bulk. This will achieve economies of scale and pass savings directly on to homeowners, alongside financing options that can be repaid through rental income. Finally, scaling up new approaches requires skilled workers, and as Governor, I will invest in job training and the unionized workforce needed to build 1 million units.

I will treat housing like a public investment.

California is already one of the largest financiers of housing in the country, but it often acts like a disjointed bureaucracy instead of a smart investor. I have been a professional investor for over 40 years and know how to fix this. By deploying the sheer weight of California’s financing system, I will transform the state into an active market-maker that unlocks housing production at scale.

I will leverage the state housing finance agency CalHFA (which has an AA+ credit rating) to unlock stalled mixed-income developments currently paralyzed by high financing costs. Today, filling the funding gap on an apartment building often requires private equity, which demands exorbitant 15% to 20% returns, crushing affordability.

I’ll also establish a new state revolving loan program. This fund will replace expensive private capital with lower-cost state funding. Once stabilized, the loan is repaid with interest and recycled to finance the next development, creating a self-sustaining public investment program.

I’ll promote innovation and flexibility at state agencies.

California’s housing bureaucracy needs to become faster, more nimble, and more focused on outcomes rather than process.

I’ve built businesses and organizations for my entire career and understand what flexibility and innovation look like. As Governor, I will build on and support the transformation of state housing agency culture spurred by the establishment of the California Housing and Homelessness Authority. I will increase internal capacity and introduce real estate and financial sector best practices that will allow California to act proactively, seize market opportunities, and adapt to changing economic conditions.

I’ll make housing work for all Californians.

Building millions of homes is the long-term solution to our crisis, but Californians are hurting now and cannot wait for relief. We must ensure we serve working families, not Wall Street or bureaucracies. As Governor, I will deliver financial relief to renters, give everyday homebuyers the first opportunity to purchase homes, stabilize our broken insurance market, and reform our homelessness strategy to get people off the street and into the care they need.

I’ll put families ahead of Wall Street

To stabilize communities and preempt corporations from buying affordable housing from under Californians, I will expand First Look homeownership programs that give tenants and communities the first right to buy a property when it goes up for sale. I will also expand state policies that put everyday homebuyers ahead of corporate investors. When an affordable unit comes on the market, the opportunity should go to a family, not an investment firm.

I’ll make it easier for builders and buyers to participate in the market, but harder for large institutions that own thousands of homes to crowd out families and buy up units only to rent. If needed, I will enforce anti-monopoly laws in places where private firms are purchasing more houses in the wake of natural disasters, like the Los Angeles wildfires.

I will protect renters.

At a time when the affordability crisis in this state is acute, we cannot address it by promising relief years in the future. To protect renters who are struggling today to deal with the housing crisis caused by policy failure, I will expand the state Renter’s Tax Credit. Affordability means putting money directly into renters’ pockets.

I will help renters know and exercise their rights and have access to homelessness prevention services, fair housing counseling, and case managers to help tenants stay in their homes and halt the flow into homelessness.

As Governor, I will fully enforce California’s Tenant Protection Act to ensure renters are protected statewide, including its cap on excessive rent increases, just cause eviction standards, and relocation assistance for displaced tenants. And additionally, I will support preserving local rent control ordinances consistent with the current statewide framework that encourages continued housing construction while supporting the preservation and stability of our existing housing stock.

I'll take on the insurance crisis and make housing resilient to disasters.

Climate change is driving up California’s home insurance costs, which magnifies affordability and mobility problems. Markets don’t work without insurance. To fix this, we must make our communities resilient to climate change. The worst polluters, not everyday people, should pay for that. I will also work to leverage better data to model risk and work with the Department of Insurance to fix broken risk pools that unfairly drive up premiums.

As Governor, I will also cut red tape by creating state-approved, disaster-resilient blueprints, shielding developers from redundant local mandates when they use these designs.

I'll shelter homeless Californians and expand our interim housing options with matching services.

We need to build more houses quickly, but must provide options for the over 100,000 unsheltered Californians. For too long, California made the mistake of putting all its funding into a single, expensive bucket, focusing almost exclusively on permanent supportive housing while abandoning bridge housing. As a result, the state spent massive amounts but delivered far fewer units. Homelessness results from compounding challenges, and no one gets better on the street.

We must match the housing type to the population served. I will focus on matching the right housing with the right level of care. We will provide high-need, chronically homeless individuals with the intensive support needed to get them off the street, while remaining fully committed to a Housing First approach.

This means prioritizing bridge housing with robust stabilization services to help people succeed. As Governor, I will conduct a full spending review, partner with local governments to identify and implement approaches that work across all levels of need, and quickly build emergency housing so people on the street can spend the night indoors with access to care.

I'll take care of our veterans, our students, and agricultural communities.

California’s housing programs for veterans, students, and agricultural workers must be updated to better serve the needs of these specialized populations. Too often, burdensome regulations can prevent veterans from accessing housing built for them as the result of income limits that penalize them for receiving their hard-earned benefits. I will lift up veterans to help the state better target housing programs to the needs and priorities of that community.

Similarly, extremely high rates of housing insecurity continually plague our students. In a state as prosperous as California, this is unacceptable. I will work with our higher education segments, particularly community colleges, to address this problem.

Our current state housing policies take a one-size-fits all approach that fails to deliver the types of rural and farmworker housing needed in our agricultural communities. I will advance policies that build on the leadership that the Assembly Speaker and other legislators have shown in improving the state’s rural and farmworker housing programs.