Last spring, the California Housing Partnership Corporation (CHPC), an agency created by the state legislature in 1988 to assist non-profits and local governments to create and preserve affordable housing, calculated California needed roughly 1.3m more affordable rentals to meet housing needs. Faced with a costly recovery from the pandemic, the state may fall even further behind.
Municipalities in the Bay Area alone need to build more than 441,100 units over the next decade to meet housing demands, according to an assessment released this year by the California department of housing and community development (HCD). The region is already far off pace. In the last cycle, the Bay Area issued permits for only 9% of the low-income housing the agency said was needed and roughly 71% of permits for market-rate housing.