AB 1165: California Housing Justice Act of 2026.

SECTION 1.

The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:

(a) Housing unaffordability impacts all Californians and is the leading driver of homelessness in our state. Over 339,000 Californians experienced homelessness in 2024, resulting from well over 1,000,000 extremely low income households paying over one-half of their incomes in rent. The crisis is expected to expand exponentially in response to the wildfires in the Counties of Los Angeles and Ventura, as well as rent increases from a decreased supply of housing stock during a time of increased demand. At the same time, California braces for cuts to federal housing programs, expected to force many more households into houselessness.

(b) The housing and homelessness crisis is a result of many decades of discrimination and racism, policy choices, massive decreases in federal investments in affordable housing, and state disinvestment in the wake of the Great Recession. Beginning in 2019, state leaders began passing significant one-time investments to reduce unsheltered homelessness and promote housing affordability. To truly solve this crisis, we must next scale investments and identify sustainable, ongoing revenue streams to fully fund solutions that work.

(c) Survey after survey reveals voters name housing unaffordability and homelessness as the top issue in our state; despite that, California’s ongoing investments in housing and homelessness account for less than 0.5 percent of the state’s annual budget.

(d) In March 2022, the Department of Housing and Community Development released a plan for progress needed to solve the affordable housing crisis, which identified a need for approximately 1,000,000 homes affordable to people with lower incomes and below. However, the state has failed to pass funding necessary to meet the state’s own goals in this plan. In fact, the state lacks a multiyear sustainable funding strategy for how funding should be invested. Without a long-term strategy to fund moving people off the streets and into housing and preventing future homelessness by creating more affordable housing, the state cannot fully respond to this crisis.

(e) Recent investments have prevented California from reaching the scale of increases in homelessness felt nationwide post-COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, more Californians are pushed into homelessness than ever before for one reason: Californians in poverty cannot afford the growing chasm between increasing rent and stagnant incomes.

(f) Homelessness and housing unaffordability are solvable. Ongoing investment at scale, following a long-term plan to implement evidence-based practices, is a proven intervention. Ongoing federal investments at scale in Housing First programs made possible massive progress toward ending veteran homelessness, decreasing the number of veterans who are unhoused by 55 percent from 2010 to 2022. Research and policy organizations have developed blueprints for solutions in California. These plans detail an annual need for investment of 6 percent of the state’s budget in affordable housing production and preservation, rental subsidies, homelessness assistance, and renter protections.

(g) It is the intent of the Legislature to identify the scale of the level of ongoing public investment needed, with reforms necessary to ensure accountability and collaboration across jurisdictions, to enact solutions to the homelessness and housing unaffordability crisis statewide. At the core of this legislation is a new culture of multilateral accountability, requiring local governments and grantees to be accountable to state oversight, state funding to be transparent to public review, and the entire system, first and foremost, to hold itself accountable to Californians experiencing or who previously experienced homelessness, and who have been failed by decades of policy choices that have contributed to this crisis. This new accountability culture recognizes the state’s obligation to respect, protect, and fulfill the right of all Californians to live in safe, decent, and affordable housing.