There is a number that hangs over California the way smog hangs over the San Joaquin Valley: 180,000. That is the estimated count of people without a home in the richest state of the richest nation on earth. And there is another number, smaller but crueller: 102. That is how many hours a week a minimum-wage worker would have to labour to rent a typical one-bedroom apartment, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. There are 168 hours in a week. The arithmetic itself has become a kind of verdict.
Into this arithmetic the Legislature has placed a proposition. When Californians vote in November, Proposition 1 will ask them to authorise the state to sell $11.25 billion in general obligation bonds to build, buy and renovate housing — for renters, veterans, farmworkers, students and tribes. As Marisa Kendall reported for CalMatters, the measure intends to supply what all the permitting reforms of recent years could not: the money.
The houses that exist only on paper
Consider the strange condition of California housing. The state assumes it needs nearly 2.5 million more homes. Yet fewer than a third of its cities and counties are on track to permit enough market-rate housing to meet their state-mandated targets, and fewer than 6 percent are on track for very low-income housing. Legislators have passed law upon law to make projects easier, faster and cheaper to approve. The approvals came; the buildings did not. A recent report estimated that nearly 40,000 affordable units across the state have been designed, permitted and partially financed — and sit stalled, because developers cannot quite close the gap between what housing for the poor costs and what the poor can pay.
This is the gap Prop. 1 is meant to bridge. Of the total, $7.2 billion would go to buy, build or renovate apartment buildings, largely through low-interest loans to developers, with projects required to hold units for low-income households and some devoted to supportive housing for the homeless. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office reckons that, combined with other funding, this could support up to 40,000 rental units. Another $1.25 billion would help veterans secure home loans; $1.1 billion would help low- and moderate-income households buy; $500 million would fund the streets, sewers and water lines new construction needs; $450 million would build or renovate an estimated 2,500 farmworker units; $350 million would house an estimated 1,200 University of California and California State University students; $200 million would go in grants to tribes; and $200 million would fund pilot projects pitched by cities, counties and other groups chasing low-cost designs.
What the future pays
Borrowed money has its own arithmetic. The legislative analyst estimates the bond would cost the state between $500 million and $600 million a year for about 25 years, interest included, drawn from the general fund. The veterans’ $1.25 billion is the exception: it costs the state nothing, since participating veterans repay it through monthly loan payments. California has walked this road before, and narrowly; in 2024 voters approved — by the slimmest of margins — a different Prop. 1, $2 billion for homes tied to mental health and addiction services and for veterans.
The coalition behind the measure is broad: housing developers and advocates, veterans’ groups, the CSU and UC boards, the leagues of cities and counties, Democratic legislators and Governor Gavin Newsom. It is also not disinterested. The campaign has raised more than $12 million, including about $2 million from carpenters’ unions, $1 million from Airbnb and $1 million from Building a Better California, a political action committee funded by Google founder Sergey Brin and other Silicon Valley billionaires. Those who build, it seems, believe in building. Opponents, for their part, have reported no contributions at all.
Among the believers is Vivian Wan, chief executive of the affordable housing nonprofit Abode. Her organisation has four projects in the works — three in the Bay Area, one in Yolo County — totalling about 230 units, every one of them stalled for want of the final money. Housing for the homeless and the poor requires deep subsidy, because the tenants’ rent cannot cover the cost of construction, and often the cost of case managers and services besides. City and county dollars cover some of that, never all.
“Is it enough? Absolutely not. We are lightyears behind in terms of production to meet the need. We have underinvested in housing for decades. This is going to help, for sure, but we really need a permanent source.”
The dissenters
When the measure came to a floor vote, two Republican senators and seven Republican assemblymembers voted no. Senator Tony Strickland of Huntington Beach complained that christening the bill “The Veterans and Affordable Housing Bond Act of 2026” was a bait-and-switch, since only a small share of the money reaches veterans. “It really just says that you’re using veterans to pass your $10 billion general obligation bond,” he said at a June hearing. There are better ways to house families, he argued, than to “borrow money against the future” — and this year’s strong revenues will not last, making deeper state debt a risk.
So the voters are handed the oldest choice in the catechism of public works: pay now, or pay later, or do not pay at all and watch the tents multiply along the riverbeds and under the freeway overpasses. Eleven and a quarter billion dollars is a fortune. Against decades of underinvestment and 2.5 million missing homes, its own most fervent advocate calls it a beginning — which is the honest thing about it, and perhaps the damning thing too.