2024 was the year California cracked down on homeless encampments. 

Fed up with tents taking up sidewalks, parks and vacant lots, officials throughout the state ramped up efforts to remove camps – sometimes even resorting to arresting people for illegal camping. 

The biggest shift came in June with the Grants Pass v. Johnson Supreme Court ruling, which gives cities new authority to arrest, cite and fine people for sleeping outside in public places – even if there is no shelter available. Gov. Gavin Newsom quickly followed the ruling with an order of his own: He demanded state agencies clear homeless encampments, and urged cities to do the same or risk losing out on state funding.

California cities were quick to react. A little more than two months after the court ruling, more than two dozen cities and counties had passed or proposed new ordinances banning camping, or updated existing ordinances to make them more punitive. Unhoused Californians, as well as the activists who fight for their rights, told CalMatters that sweeps had become more frequent and more aggressive.

As they ramped up sweeps, California cities used different strategies to relocate people displaced from homeless encampments. San Diego moved hundreds of people into sanctioned encampments. Los Angeles put people up in hotels. 

2024 also was the year where everyone promised greater accountability. An April audit found the state fails to track how much it spends on homelessness and which state-funded programs are successful. Following that scathing report, Newsom added new rules requiring cities and counties to better track outcomes when spending state homelessness dollars. He also promised to ramp up enforcement against cities and counties that don’t do their part, and in November, his administration sued the city of Norwalk for putting a moratorium on the construction of new homeless shelters .

Meanwhile, CalMatters crunched new data to show California’s homeless population increased to nearly 186,000 people in 2024 – up 8% from 2022.

2025 outlook

One thing to watch for in the upcoming year will be how the new administration under President-elect Donald Trump handles homelessness at the federal level. Homeless service providers throughout California rely on federal grants, and some operators worry their funding could get cut. 

But there is one issue where Trump and Newsom are more aligned than you might think: and that’s how to handle homeless encampments. Trump has promised to tackle encampments by working with states to ban urban camping and arrest people who don’t comply. But many cities in California already started doing that this year, and Newsom has urged local officials to crack down.

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California lawmakers in 2024 made good on a promise to push for more housing construction and hold accountable cities that resist creating affordable homes. But finding money to pay for all that new housing was another matter.

State officials continued to lock horns in court with Huntington Beach over the Orange County city’s refusal to plan for thousands of new homes, its share of the state’s overall housing goal. They reached a legal settlement forcing the Sacramento suburb of Elk Grove to approve more affordable housing. Norwalk, a middle-class community in Los Angeles County, found itself sued by the state after its city council passed a ban on homeless shelters and supportive housing.

Legislators passed bills to strengthen and clarify the state’s “builder’s remedy,” a law that gives developers free rein to build denser projects in cities whose housing plans haven’t earned state approval.

With few new sources of state funding coming online, however, the response of some local leaders has been, “Show me the money.”

Lawmakers chopped more than $1 billion in spending on affordable housing programs this year to help close a projected budget deficit – though they did dole out $1 billion for local governments to fight homelessness – and scrapped plans to put a housing construction bond measure on the November ballot.

In the Bay Area, a local financing authority yanked a $20 billion housing bond from the ballot at the last minute amid concerns it wouldn’t pass. The money would have helped affordable housing developers meet a state-mandated goal of building 180,000 homes for low-income residents by the end of the decade. 

And a $500 million state program aimed at helping tenants and community land trusts buy distressed buildings and preserve them as affordable was killed after the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development failed to award any grants for three years.

At the ballot box, a push to expand cities’ ability to enact local rent control lost to a well-funded campaign by landlords and realtors, who said the measure would make it less profitable to build new multifamily housing. The AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a non-profit that has been the major funder of several rent control ballot propositions in California, suffered a double whammy loss when voters also approved a measure that will make it harder for the organization to bankroll such campaigns in the future.

Renters did score a win, however, with a new law set to take effect in January that will give them twice as much time to respond to eviction notices. And as of this spring, landlords of new apartment buildings constructed with state low-income tax credits will have to cap rent increases at 10% per year.

As the year drew to a close, some cities weighed major rezoning proposals that would make it easier to build multi-family housing in resource-rich neighborhoods. Los Angeles’s city council approved a plan to allow denser projects in commercial corridors and areas that already have apartment buildings, while largely exempting single-family neighborhoods – a move critics said lets wealthy areas off the hook for building their share of homes. Berkeley is set to decide early next year on a controversial plan to allow small apartment buildings in nearly all the city’s neighborhoods, including those where single-family homes dominate.

2025 outlook

California’s leaders will need to figure out how to fund and incentivize construction and preservation of affordable homes to meet their goals without the budget surpluses the state enjoyed previously. A major unknown is how the incoming Trump administration’s policies will affect the state’s housing crisis. President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to raise tariffs on foreign-made goods and deport large numbers of undocumented immigrants, both of which experts say would hamstring housing construction. His administration could also reduce federal support or tighten eligibility rules for public housing and Section 8 vouchers, confronting California with the choice of whether to bridge the gap for residents who rely on that assistance. Meanwhile, California’s Democratic-dominated leadership, smarting from 2024’s national electoral defeat, has pledged new efforts to address the exorbitant cost of living.

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Tenant advocates suffered a big defeat this fall when California voters decided against expanding cities’ ability to limit rent increases. But a state law set to take effect Jan. 1 will give renters facing eviction a little more breathing room.

The law doubles the time tenants have to respond after receiving an eviction notice from five business days to ten. Lawyers who work with renters say that what may seem like a minor procedural change could make a big difference in allowing people to stay in their homes. 

Tenants who are served an eviction notice and don’t respond in writing within the legal timeframe can lose their case by default, potentially incurring financial penalties and a black mark on their record that affects their future ability to obtain housing. That’s true even if a tenant has a valid legal defense – for example, if their landlord increased the rent above state limits or refused to fix problems like lack of heat or broken door locks. About 40% of California tenants lose their cases this way, researchers have estimated.

“Five days has never been enough for a tenant to find legal assistance and try to decipher the complaint filed against them, find out what kind of defenses they have, fill out the paperwork and make it to court,” Lorraine López, a senior attorney with the Western Center on Law and Poverty, told CalMatters earlier this fall.

Access to legal services varies widely across California. San Francisco guarantees legal representation to any tenant facing eviction, and in other cities like Oakland and Los Angeles, robust networks of pro-bono lawyers help renters file responses. But Californians who live in so-called “legal deserts” – often in rural areas – must travel many miles to meet with an attorney.

Tenants with lawyers are less likely to get locked out of their homes, some studies have shown – though fewer than 5% of renters in eviction cases nationwide have legal help, compared with more than 80% of landlords, the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel estimates.

Authored by Assemblymember Ash Kalra, a San Jose Democrat, the new law also offers something for landlords, who generally like eviction cases to move faster. It limits the amount of time tenant lawyers can take to file certain motions alleging errors in a landlord’s complaint. Landlord representatives said lawyers would use those motions to drag out cases unnecessarily.

The change convinced the state’s largest landlord lobby, the California Apartment Association, to remain neutral on the law while legislators debated it. Some local property owner groups still opposed the law.

“The longer these things take, the more expensive it is (for landlords) and the more rent is lost,” said Daniel Bornstein, an attorney who represents property owners.

Two years ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration unveiled a new plan to help solve the homelessness crisis: It began using health care providers, funded through Medi-Cal, to help people get and stay housed.

Now, with President-Elect Donald Trump about to take office, some health care organizations, homeless service providers and other stakeholders throughout California worry  the program may fall apart just as it’s starting to make a difference. It’s one of many potential shake ups they’re bracing for as they prepare for a new federal administration unlikely to see eye to eye with the Golden State on many of its social welfare policies. 

“It makes us all very nervous,” said John Baackes, outgoing CEO of Medi-Cal provider L.A. Care Health Plan.

CalAIM, launched in 2022, is an expansion of Medi-Cal that allows health insurance to pay for certain things that aren’t considered traditional medical care — such as services to help homeless Californians find and keep housing. Proponents say it’s brought a much-needed infusion of money into the state’s overburdened homeless services system. 

But because states aren’t typically allowed to spend Medicaid dollars on those types of services, California had to get special permission from the federal government. That permission, in the form of two waivers, expires at the end of 2026. 

That means the fate of CalAIM rests in the hands of the Trump administration, which can decide whether to renew the program, scale it back or change it. Trump has yet to give any indication of what he would do (or even whether this specific California program is on his radar) and most stakeholders agree any changes he makes probably wouldn’t come until 2026. But the uncertainty is compounding the stress on already overburdened homeless service providers, who routinely receive short-term, one-time grants instead of permanent funding, making it difficult to plan for the future.

“CalAIM has been one of the most important and, I think, under-appreciated policies of the Newsom administration, to try to better connect our health system and our housing system,” said Tommy Newman, vice president of public affairs for United Way of Greater Los Angeles. “And the risk of going backwards on that is scary.”

Newsom’s administration wouldn’t specify what, if anything, it is doing to safeguard CalAIM.

“California will continue to work collaboratively with our federal partners to ensure that families in our state are healthy and our communities are vibrant places to live and work,” Anthony Cava, spokesperson for the Department of Health Care Services, said in a statement. “While we don’t typically speculate on the potential impacts of a new federal administration, we remain committed to protecting Californian’s access to the critical services and programs they need.”

What is CalAIM?

The goal of CalAIM is to address factors known as “social determinants of health” for low-income Californians. It’s hard to stay healthy when you don’t have access to basic necessities, such as housing and nutritious food, for example. Ultimately, it’s supposed to save the state and the feds money by helping people avoid expensive emergency room visits.

In 2023, more than 68,600 Californians used the three services known as the “housing trio” under CalAIM. These are services designed to help them find housing, stay housed or pay for move-in costs such as security deposits and first and last month’s rent, according to the most recent state data available. Only CalAIM’s “medically tailored meals” service (which helps people with conditions such as diabetes access food that meets their dietary needs) was nearly as popular, with nearly 62,700 users.

CalAIM provides a total of 14 of these services, or “community supports,” which also include medical respite care for people who recently left the hospital, asthma remediation — think air filters, dehumidifiers, mold removal — and sobering centers. CalAIM also provides something called “enhanced care management,” which pairs Medi-Cal members with an intensive case manager who can help them access everything from a doctor to a dentist to a social worker. 

One-time grants, doled out to health plans as an incentive for them to ramp up CalAIM services, also helped fund the construction of new affordable housing.

Abode Services, a nonprofit that provides shelter, housing and other aid for unhoused people across seven Bay Area counties, serves more than 1,000 Californians through CalAIM, said CEO Vivian Wan. In Napa County, Abode uses CalAIM to provide case management services to help people move from homeless encampments into shelter and housing. In Santa Cruz County, Abode uses CalAIM funds to replace the federal COVID-19 homelessness funds that poured in during the pandemic but have since dried up. 

Abode and other nonprofits also use CalAIM funds to fill an important gap often left by other grants: services for formerly homeless people living in subsidized housing. State programs such as Homekey offer money to buy or build homeless housing, and vouchers pay for tenants’ rent, but there’s often nothing left to fund the case management, counseling and more that’s crucial to help people with physical and mental health conditions, or addictions — the people Newsom has made a priority in his effort to clear encampments — hold onto their housing. 

“I shudder to think what would happen if we had all of the mandates from our development side of supporting people through coordinated entry, taking really vulnerable people, and we then reduced the services down to bare bones,” Wan said.

What would Trump do to CalAIM?

It’s difficult to speculate about what the Trump administration will do with CalAIM. Celebrity physician Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump’s pick to run the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, has no prior experience with the agency and therefore no track record that could provide clues as to how he will act. 

Any changes likely would be felt at the end of 2026, when California attempts to renew its CalAIM waivers. But it’s not unheard of for a president to terminate a waiver early. After President Joe Biden took office in 2021, he pulled waivers, authorized by Trump, that had allowed states to require Medicaid recipients to prove they were working or unable to work. But that was an extreme situation, as multiple courts had already shot down those waivers.

“It’s not like CalAIM is going away tomorrow, or even in January,” said Sharon Rapport, director of California state policy for the Corporation for Supportive Housing. “But after that, I think that’s where the questions are: What could happen then? And the fact that it’s California, and not Trump’s favorite state, I think makes people worried.”

Plans to expand future coverage also could be at risk. Health plans are rolling out new frameworks under CalAIM to offer health care to people in jail and prison up to 90 days before they are released. California also has applied to amend one of its federal waivers to add rental assistance to the services CalAIM offers. If that’s approved, the state would be allowed to use Medi-Cal to pay for up to six months of rent for homeless and at-risk people who are leaving settings such as jail, prison, the hospital, or an in-patient mental health or substance abuse facility.

But a recent article by conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute questions the use of health care funds to pay for social services — a potential bellwether that suggests the new administration might not be supportive of programs like CalAIM.

“Even if a social welfare program is a well-intentioned and wise idea, that does not make it health-care,” wrote Manhattan Institute senior fellow Chris Pope. “Health care costs will not be greatly reduced by expanding the meaning of health care to cover every social service; nor would doing so distribute nonmedical assistance to those who need it most.”

The Trump administration also could change the waivers before renewing them, forcing California to pare down the services CalAIM offers, or add work requirements. 

Trump, as well as the Republican-controlled Congress, are likely to support requiring Medicaid recipients to prove they are either working or are unable to work. The last time he was in office, Trump approved 13 state waivers that included work requirements, before the Biden administration later withdrew them. Project 2025, a conservative governing blueprint written by the Heritage Foundation, also prioritizes work requirements.

Work requirements historically lead to people, especially low-income people and people of color, losing benefits, according to research by the progressive think tank Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. It found many recipients are working but have a hard time providing the necessary paperwork to prove it, while others can’t work due to obligations as full-time caregivers or a lack of child care. 

Trump and Congress also could impose more sweeping cuts to Medicaid as a whole, which could affect California’s ability to continue programs such as CalAIM. 

There are ways California could safeguard at least some of its CalAIM services, by baking them into Medi-Cal as permanent benefits, Rapport said. Her organization is pushing for the state to do that with CalAIM’s three housing services.

Staff at L.A. Care already are thinking about how they could continue offering CalAIM services to their members if the Trump administration cuts the program. It would require some significant rearranging of funds, said Chief Medical Officer Dr. Sameer Amin. His organization has nearly 16,800 people enrolled in CalAIM services to help them find and keep housing.

“My concern is that the housing crisis in LA County is not something that happened overnight, and it’s not something that can be corrected overnight,” he said. “It really requires a sustained effort over the course of years and a significant amount of investment. And if we don’t do the investment that we need to do, if we have to reprioritize away from some of these programs, my concern is that these folks are not going to get the health care that they need because they are not housed.”

Staff writer Kristen Hwang contributed to this story.

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California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed 31 felony charges of wage theft and tax evasion against a construction company that he said cost the state and the company’s workers $2.6 million, he announced today.

Bonta filed the criminal complaint on Aug. 26 alleging that US Framing West dodged more than $2.5 million in state payroll taxes and underpaid workers on a public housing project in Cathedral City, in Riverside County. The company, which builds wood framing for such projects as hotels, apartments and housing developments, shorted workers at least $40,000 when it failed to pay the prevailing wage, Bonta said.

“For some reason US Framing West seems to think it can operate outside the prevailing wage laws of California,” Bonta said in a press conference in Los Angeles today. “I’m here with a simple message: They cannot. No company can.”

Cal Matters contacted officials with US Framing West named on its website but did not receive a response.

Bonta charged the company and two of its officials, Thomas Gregory English and Amelia Frazier Krebs, with wage and tax violations in Riverside, San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange, Alameda, Santa Clara, San Francisco and Contra Costa counties.

Political observers expect Bonta to announce a run for governor, so publicizing a high-profile labor case may help him build support from unions. Most wage theft cases brought by the state are handled administratively or in civil court. 

Between 2018 and 2022, US Framing West hired unlicensed subcontractors and underreported its payroll to the state Employment Development Department, Bonta said. He accused the company of grand theft, payroll tax evasion, prevailing wage theft, and filing false documents with the state.

US Framing West also skipped personal income tax withholding and premiums for state unemployment and disability insurance, Bonta said, and it filed false payroll records for workers on Veterans Village, the Cathedral City project. The facility opened in 2022, offering 60 housing units and services for veterans. 

The complaint says the company stole wages from 19 workers in Riverside County in 2021 and 2022. Under California’s penal code, employers can face grand theft charges for stealing more than $950 in wages or tips from one employee or a total of $2,350 from two or more employees within a year. 

The Northern California Carpenters Regional Council tipped off the state Department of Justice to potential wage theft violations at an Oakland construction project in 2019, Bonta said. The department subsequently looked into US Framing West’s other projects across the state. 

The office filed charges in August, and the two named defendants surrendered and were arraigned this month.

Subsidizing crime

California’s prevailing wage requirements apply to most projects built with public funding, said  Matthew Miller, senior field representative for labor compliance for Nor Cal Carpenters Union. He said US Framing West was working on at least four housing projects financed with tax credits.

“California taxpayers are subsidizing criminal activity in the affordable housing industry,” Miller said.

He added that developers should avoid doing business with companies that skirt employment and tax laws. 

Wage theft can take various forms — employers don’t pay employees for all hours worked, don’t pay the minimum wage, skip overtime pay or don’t allow legally required breaks. In California, workers lose about $2 billion a year to wage theft, Bonta’s office said, and workers in low-wage industries are the most affected. In 2020 and 2021, workers filed claims for more than $300 million in stolen wages each year.

Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Labor Federation, called wage theft “the number one crime” in the burglary and theft category and said businesses should not be able to pay their way out of wage theft violations. 

This story was made possible in part by a grant from the CIELO Fund of the Inland Empire Community Foundation.

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Mayor London Breed, outgoing mayor of San Francisco, made waves recently with a major policy shift: Before providing a shelter bed or any other services, city workers must first offer every homeless person they encounter a bus or train ticket to somewhere else.

But while San Francisco has gotten an outsized amount of attention for putting its busing program at the forefront of its homelessness strategy, other California cities and nonprofits continue to quietly send small numbers of unhoused people all over the country. At least one new program is set to launch early next year. 

For an unhoused person who wants to move in with family in another city or state, or who got stuck somewhere after a job or housing prospect fell through and needs help getting home, these types of programs can be a gamechanger. But some activists worry they can be used coercively to move unhoused people out of sight instead of helping them. And once someone is bused away, it’s hard to tell what happens to them — whether they successfully reunite with family, or become homeless on another city’s sidewalks. 

“In general, the ability to travel back to a place where you have a home is really important and can be a lifesaving service, in fact, and can help to reunite families,” said Niki Jones, executive director of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness. “When done in good faith, it can be an important and powerful intervention.”

Many programs do some homework before sending their clients off on a bus, but the amount of effort they put in varies. One nonprofit serving homeless young people in Los Angeles has a therapist call the client’s family in the destination city, to make sure the client is going into a safe, welcoming environment. One of San Francisco’s relocation programs requires the client only to have a vague connection to their destination city.

These programs are garnering attention at a time when city leaders are facing pressure from all sides, including from Gov. Gavin Newsom, to get rid of homeless encampments, but lack the resources to give everyone a home or shelter bed. Buying someone a one-way ticket out of town is a much cheaper alternative. But the number of people who can benefit from these programs tends to be small. Data from throughout California consistently shows that most people who are homeless are from the county they’re in. And homelessness, addiction and other traumas have marred many people’s relationships, leaving them with no one to help them in another city. 

San Francisco offers bus tickets before shelter

Shortly after beginning an aggressive crackdown on tent encampments in San Francisco, Mayor Breed ordered all city agencies to “offer and incentivize” the city’s busing program before other services. Those who decline any help may be at risk of being arrested for illegally camping in a public place.

Providing free bus tickets to unhoused people is nothing new in San Francisco, which has been offering some form of this program for about two decades, said Emily Cohen, deputy director of communications and legislative affairs for the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. But usage declined during the COVID-19 pandemic, when travel was restricted, and it didn’t pick back up, she said. The mayor’s directive was intended to fix that, she said.

The increased emphasis on busing also comes as the demographics of San Francisco’s homeless population are shifting. This year, 41% of the people surveyed in San Francisco’s point in time count reported they were living in another city or state when they lost their housing. That’s up from 29% two years ago. 

“There are definitely an increasing number of people who are experiencing homelessness in San Francisco who aren’t originally from San Francisco,” Cohen said. 

San Francisco offers three programs to help unhoused people relocate outside of the city. Journey Home, launched in September 2023, has the lowest barrier to entry. While other programs require clients to work with a case manager on a detailed plan to find and hold onto housing when they arrive in their new city, Journey Home requires only that someone be healthy enough to travel and prove they have some connection to their destination city. That proof could be a phone call to a friend or relative in the city, a receipt showing the client once got food stamps there, or an ID with an address in that city. Clients do not need to prove they have housing in the destination city, and the whole process, from intake to sitting on a bus, can take a day or two.

Since July 2022, San Francisco has relocated a total of 1,039 unhoused clients via Journey Home and other programs, according to city data. 

The number of clients relocated via Journey Home spiked in August of this year (the month Breed issued her order) — 25 people were moved, up from nine the month before. The city relocated another 32 people through other programs. That same month, the city placed 120 people from encampments into shelters, and another 429 people on the street declined help, according to the city.

While Lukas Illa, a human rights organizer with the San Francisco-based Coalition on Homelessness, supports programs that help unhoused people who want to relocate, he’s skeptical of Journey Home. The choice to leave San Francisco should be the unhoused person’s to freely make, he said. And he says that’s not the case when police, who have the power to cite and arrest people, offer bus tickets as a first resort.

“Journey Home needs to be so deliberate and to really center the agency and the autonomy of the person it is offered to, and not used as a cudgel to threaten arrest or jail time,” Illa said.

Cohen said no one is being forced to leave San Francisco.

“The intention is to facilitate connections with loved ones and home communities, if that is a safe and healthy option for you,” she said. “But no one is required to take that option.”

Other cities that use homeless busing programs

San Jose has budgeted $200,000 to launch a relocation program called Homeward Bound, which is expected to start in February. That money can go toward a client’s bus or plane ticket, or to help with utility bills or other expenses for the friend or family member taking them in. The city will make sure clients have friends or family to help them in their destination city, but staff are still ironing out the specifics, said Tasha Dean, spokesperson for Mayor Matt Mahan. 

“Reconnecting people living on the streets with family members or loved ones who want to care for them is just common sense,” Mahan said in a statement. “It’s the least expensive, most impactful program we could launch.” 

Sacramento County also offers those services, but they aren’t widely used, said county spokesperson Janna Haynes. During the 2022-23 fiscal year, 17 people used the county’s Return to Residency Program to leave the county. That program has since dissolved, and now social workers in various county programs offer the service on a case-by-case basis. 

The city of Los Angeles doesn’t run a busing program, but multiple nonprofits within the city offer similar services. PATH helped 313 clients reunite with family in the last fiscal year, and a little more than half of those clients left LA County. 

A Safe Place for Youth also helps young people reunite with friends and family outside LA.

Cities and nonprofits in other states also run busing programs — and sometimes send people to California. Haven for Hope, which operates a large homeless shelter and service center in San Antonio, Texas, gave about 60 people one-way bus tickets out of the city last year, said Alberto Rodriguez, vice president of operations. Before they send a client on their way, Haven for Hope calls the family or friend they are going to live with and confirms the client can stay there, Rodriguez said. 

“We’re never just going to send someone back to homelessness in another city or another state, in the same way we don’t want other cities or other states to send their homeless clients to San Antonio without connecting with us,” he said.

Where do people who are bused end up?

Of the 151 people relocated from San Francisco since August, at least 29 went to other cities within California. At least another 12 went to Texas, six went to Florida and seven went to Georgia. Due to a data processing error, the city couldn’t provide information on where 34 people went.

It’s harder to tell what happens to those people once they reach their destination. 

San Francisco only recently started requiring staff to check in with clients 90 days after they leave, but staff often can’t get a hold of them in their new city, Cohen said. The city didn’t provide data on the outcomes of those 90-day calls, which started in July, in time for publication. 

About 15% of people who left San Francisco through the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing’s relocation program between July 2022 and July 2023 ended up back in San Francisco, using the city’s homeless services, within a year. 

Cohen called that an 85% “success rate,” despite the fact that even though someone didn’t return to San Francisco, they might have ended up homeless in their new city. 

“That is fantastic,” Cohen said, “in terms of the amount of investment for the outcome we are able to achieve.”

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As California Democrats attempt to “Trump-proof” the state and Republicans celebrate their party’s sweeping victory, the mood among some of the state’s most prominent housing advocates is glum.

“Trump’s extremist economic agenda is going to tank the housing market and housing construction,” Sen. Scott Wiener, one of the Legislature’s loudest YIMBY voices, said in an interview Friday.

That concern is based largely on actions taken during President-elect Donald Trump’s first presidency and his stated plans to deport massive numbers of immigrants and raise tariffs. Trump has offered few specific housing policy proposals. When CalMatters reached out to his campaign for more details, it didn’t get a response. 

That’s left housing experts, elected officials and journalists reading the tea leaves of his public statements, moves made by his first administration, and the ideas put forward by his former housing secretary, Ben Carson, in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint.

If those are any indication, a Trump presidency will likely make it harder for immigrants, including mixed-status households, and other low-income Californians to access subsidized housing. It could also complicate efforts to build housing in the state that’s specifically designated as affordable. 

At the same time, experts said, Trump could help ease regulations for housing construction across the board, something sought by pro-housing officials in both parties. And some said Trump’s mentions of housing on the campaign trail, however vague, signal bipartisan agreement on the need to do something about housing affordability, at least when it comes to single-family homeownership. In other words, the rest of the country is catching up to California, where more than 3 in 4 adults say the cost of housing is “a big problem.”

Many of the most important housing policy decisions take place at the state and local level, placing some constraints on Trump’s influence. Here are a few ways an incoming Trump administration could affect housing in California.

Mass deportations

As with most other issues affecting the country, Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance have blamed immigrants for the housing crisis, arguing that deporting them will help free up homes for U.S. citizens. He’s also promised to ban mortgages for undocumented immigrants, who make up a tiny portion of the homebuying market, accounting for about 5,000 of the more than 4 million mortgages originated in 2023, the Urban Institute estimates.

Besides the human cost to families in California, a state where nearly half of all children have at least one immigrant parent, mass deportations would mean fewer workers to build new homes, said Ben Metcalf, managing director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley.

“If he’s going to go full bore on deporting everyone who’s not a citizen or green card holder, that is going to gut a construction workforce that is already aging and dwindling,” he said. 

Perspectives on the state’s construction worker shortage vary; Chris Hannan, president of the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California, said that a slowdown in office construction means there are plenty of skilled tradespeople available to build new housing. But California’s construction industry employs more than 200,000 undocumented workers, or about a quarter of the workforce, according to the Migration Policy Institute, meaning their absence would significantly disrupt the industry.

Reducing the population also does not automatically make housing cheaper, at least in some parts of the state. New research from the Public Policy Institute of California finds that in some counties, rents have risen since 2010 even as vacancy rates also rose, with developers focusing on building for higher-income renters and charging more for newer units to recoup construction costs.

Taxing  imports

Tariffs on construction materials would likely depress housing construction in California and elsewhere as companies are forced to pay the extra taxes on imported products, experts said.

Hannan pointed to the supply chain problems during the COVID-19 pandemic that drove up material prices. “The costs went through the roof,” he said. “There were (residential) projects that were delayed and projects that did not move forward.”

During the first Trump administration, the California Building Industry Association told the Sacramento Bee that tariffs enacted during the president’s first two years in office had driven up the cost of the average new home by $20,000 to $30,000.

Trump this year suggested he might impose 20% tariffs on imports across the board, and 60% on those from China.

Business leaders said Trump’s unpredictability makes it difficult to plan for potential future tariffs. “If Trump did nothing and let the (Federal Reserve) continue lowering interest rates and didn’t enact wild tariffs, things would improve for housing construction,” said Elaina Houser, vice president of policy for the Los Angeles Business Council. But a more interventionist President Trump could lead to more instability in the housing market, she said.

“Somebody says the wrong thing to him from another country and he says ‘I’m going to get back at you with tariffs’ — I can see that happening,” she said.

Easing regulations

Assemblymember Joe Patterson says he hopes a Trump administration will keep the promise in the Republican Party’s 2024 platform to “cut unnecessary regulations that raise housing costs.” The Rocklin Republican, who serves as vice-chair of the Assembly Housing Committee, pointed to an affordable apartment complex in his district that he said went through a costly and time-consuming environmental review when developers wanted to add four more units per acre to the site footprint.

Trump could use the power of the federal purse to reward states that speed up approval of new developments, he said. 

“The two things that impact the price of housing is the cost of land…and the time and money to get through the approval process,” he said, referring to Trump’s plans to both loosen regulations and build housing on federal land. “I think if Trump can focus on those two things the market can take care of the rest.”

A Trump administration could also work with Congress to loosen HUD rules governing manufacturing of mobile homes, making more of that cheaper, entry-level housing available, said Alex Horowitz, housing policy initiative director for the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Restricting access to public housing and Section 8

If past is prologue, low-income Californians who rely on federal housing assistance will be at risk under a second Trump administration.

During Trump’s first term, his administration floated a ban on federal housing assistance to families with any undocumented members — including those with U.S. citizen children. The rule, never implemented, would have broken with current policy allowing mixed-status families to receive pro-rated assistance based on the number of family members who are eligible.

If the federal government were to enact a similar rule today, “there’s a large number of households in California that would be impacted — mixed status families who would have to make that hard choice of separating as a family or leaving their housing and quite possibly not being able to find an alternative,” said Chione Flegal, executive director of Housing California, an affordable housing advocacy group.

Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for a second Trump administration, also envisions a thorough overhaul of the Department of Housing and Urban Development that would add time limits and increase work requirements for housing benefits, sell off land owned by public housing authorities, and transfer some of the department’s responsibilities to state and local governments.

Reducing the number of Californians eligible for federal housing vouchers could compromise new affordable housing projects because some developers rely on income from voucher-holders to make projects pencil out, Flegal said.

State leaders could choose to make up some of the funding for housing vouchers, she said, or finance affordable housing projects that wouldn’t be bound by the federal rules, though that would be “incredibly expensive.”

Prioritizing single-family zoning

Trump has railed that Democrats want to “abolish the suburbs,” co-authoring a 2020 Wall Street Journal op-ed with Carson that criticized elected officials in several states, including California, for promoting higher-density housing in residential neighborhoods.

“People fight all of their lives to get into the suburbs and have a beautiful home,” he said in a speech that year. “There will be no more low-income housing forced into the suburbs.”

California lawmakers in recent years have taken the opposite tack, making it easier for homeowners to build ADUs in their backyards and split their lots into two. “Creating more flexibility in zoning is essential to getting housing costs under control and addressing the housing shortage,” said Wiener.

It’s unclear, however, whether Trump would have much ability to influence zoning in California, beyond dangling federal grants as incentives. “The federal government has a limited impact on regulating housing requirements in California or any other state,” Morgan Morales, a spokesperson for the California Building Industry Association. 

Help for first-time homebuyers

The Republican platform promises ​​to “promote homeownership through tax incentives and support for first-time buyers,” help that could theoretically make a difference for California, where the median home price topped $900,000 this year and the age at which the majority of residents become homeowners is 49.

Unlike Vice President Kamala Harris, who said on the campaign trail that she’d give first-time homebuyers up to $25,000 in downpayment assistance, Trump has not offered any specifics. His spokespeople didn’t respond to requests for details.

The president-elect has said he would lower mortgage rates, something presidents don’t directly control. Mortgage rates rose after the election on the expectation that Trump’s economic policies will fuel inflation. Some of the changes contemplated in Project 2025, such as increasing mortgage insurance premiums and decreasing lengths of loans offered by the Federal Housing Administration, would likely make buying more expensive for first-time homebuyers. 

The fact that both parties highlighted homeownership in their campaigns could provide some opportunity for collaboration on the issue at the federal level, said Adam Briones. He’s the CEO of California Community Builders, which promotes homeownership for middle-income Caifornians and those from historically marginalized communities. Briones said that the federal government lacks a large-scale program to build income-restricted affordable housing for homebuyers, the way it does for rental housing through tax credits.

“We are obviously a very divided nation,” he said. “We’re divided politically, racially, along gender and religious lines. The one thing that still seems to unite Americans is most folks want to buy a home. What can we do to use this general desire for American homeownership to potentially bring people together?”

Building housing on federal land

Trump has said he’ll open some federal land to housing construction, an idea with broad appeal that both candidates pushed on the campaign trail.

He’s suggested he would hold a contest to design and build new “Freedom Cities” on federal territory. “Trump Freedom Cities and Homes will sell like hot cakes and everyone will want to live in one!” effused Bill Pulte, a private equity CEO and real estate heir rumored to be under consideration for Trump’s Housing Secretary, this week on X.

Much of the federal land in California is in rugged terrain inhospitable to development or far from population centers, housing researchers said. But a recent Terner Center report found that the United States Postal Service owns more than 50 sites in California that could be suitable for housing construction due to their location in residential areas close to public transportation and other neighborhood amenities.

“I would think this would be an easy win for Trump if he wants to do something visible,” said Metcalf, the Terner Center director. “He likes to build things, he likes building walls. So maybe he can take some federal land and build some housing.”

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When President-elect Donald Trump moves into the White House in January, he will become a key figure in California’s homelessness crisis, holding the federal purse strings and setting policy at the national level. 

So what will this change of power mean for the state as it tries to move its nearly 186,000 homeless residents — the most in the nation — indoors? 

Housing and homeless services experts in California worry the Trump administration will cut federal funding in those areas, while also doing away with policies deemed too “progressive.” 

But surprisingly, based on what he’s said so far about one of the key issues regarding homelessness, Trump’s agenda isn’t much different from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s. Trump pledged to tackle the encampments that have made cities “unlivable” by working with states to ban urban camping and arrest those who don’t comply — something many cities in California started doing before Election Day, as Newsom encouraged them to clear camps.

“The homeless have no right to turn every park and sidewalk into a place for them to squat and do drugs,” Trump said in a campaign video posted online in April, 2023. The video appears to be the last time he revealed specific homelessness policy intentions. 

“There is nothing compassionate about letting these individuals live in filth and squalor rather than getting them the help that they need,” Trump said. 

Newsom, who in most other arenas is one of Trump’s biggest foes, has said nearly the exact same thing.

“There is no compassion in allowing people to suffer the indignity of living in an encampment for years and years,” Newsom said in September before signing a package of housing bills. In July, Newsom ordered state agencies to ramp up encampment sweeps, and he threatened to withhold state funding from cities that fail to do the same.

More than two-dozen California cities and counties already have introduced or passed new ordinances cracking down on camps (or updated existing ones to make them more punitive), after the Supreme Court gave them the green light to do so in June.

Trump also said he would move unhoused people to tent cities staffed with doctors and social workers. 

That plan alarmed Alex Visotzky, senior California policy fellow for the National Alliance to End Homelessness. 

“We need to remember that involuntary carceral approaches don’t work and just delay our efforts to end homelessness,” he said.

If Trump pushes these policies at the national level, especially if he offers federal funding for sweeps and tent cities, it could spur California cities to further crack down, Visotzky said. 

As the Trump administration gets to work replacing the heads of federal agencies such as the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, there’s a good chance policies California has come to rely on will get tossed out along the way, said Sharon Rapport, director of California state policy for the Corporation for Supportive Housing. The new guard likely will scrap at least some policies viewed as the gold standard in California, such as “housing first,” which says unhoused people, even those struggling with an addiction or their mental health, should be offered housing with no strings attached, and then services to help them recover.

It’s also a good bet California would see large cuts to funding for federal housing and homelessness programs — including the voucher program that subsidizes rents for hundreds of thousands of Californians, Rapport said.

That’s worrying for organizations such as Abode, which provides housing and other services for homeless Californians in seven counties.

“Federal funding is the brunt of what we receive either directly or through other entities, so it could be really impactful if there’s a huge reduction,” said CEO Vivian Wan. “It’s just going to hurt all of our communities.”

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Every other week Laurel LaMont walks one block from her Temecula apartment to City Hall to make the case for a new model for low income housing. 

She and her organization, Upward Community, have been calling on the city to create a community land trust, a nonprofit that buys land, then rents or sells homes to low- and moderate income residents. 

But first, LaMont has a more pressing issue; she’s fighting her own eviction from an affordable apartment after her earnings rose above the building’s threshold for subsidized housing.

LaMont’s vision — and her own dilemma — show how the statewide housing crisis has made home ownership, and even rent, unaffordable to many working people.

“For all of time we’ve always had a lesser earning workforce that keeps your community going — your grocers, your baristas, janitors and cooks,” said LaMont, who works at Trader Joe’s. “These are permanent jobs, and we deserve to live in a community we serve.”

Housing prices in California are some of the highest in the country. More than half of tenants spend more than 30% of their income on rent, the Public Policy Institute of California reported.

California homes sold in September for a median price of $868,150, according to the California Association of Realtors. 

Even in Riverside County, long regarded as a haven for reasonably priced housing, the median price was $625,000 last month. It would take an annual income of nearly $160,000 — or $77 an hour —  with a 10% down payment to buy such a home in Temecula, according to Wells Fargo’s mortgage calculator.

The missing middle

For years LaMont has fought for better options for what she calls the “missing middle,” often referred to as workforce housing. 

“There’s no starter homes,” said LaMont, a single mom. “There’s no opening door for the lesser earning, or the single earner.”

Community land trusts offer that entryway to homeownership, she argues. 

Under the model, a nonprofit purchases land and builds homes for lease or sale at stable monthly rates. In the for-sale version residents can buy a home, but not the land, which is restricted to low- or moderate-income housing for up to 99 years. If they leave, residents may take limited equity to their next home. 

LaMont formed her organization, Upward Community, in 2020 with Melissa Bourbonnais, a political science professor, and Aaron Cook, a civil engineer.  They’re trying to raise the money needed to form a 501C3 nonprofit, which would enable it to seek grants for a community land trust, LaMont said. 

The organization is pressing the city to get on board. With a blonde pixie cut and quick smile, LaMont appears disarming but acknowledges she and her fellow activists can be “abrasive” in political exchanges.

“We go to every single council meeting and we do not go in gently,” she said. “Every Tuesday we just walk on up there and give them an earful.”

She has made headway with some council members. Mayor Pro Tem Brenden Kalfus said he thinks a community land trust could be useful in Temecula. 

“I don’t think it’s the solution to the housing crisis, but it helps go in the right direction,” he said. “I think the community land trust gives the community local control.”

Various city-owned parcels could be used for that purpose, Kalfus said. He leans toward townhomes or small single-family homes with limited equity over condos or apartments.

“I think that would best serve the workforce in Temecula,” Kalfus said. “When you go to sell the home, you can’t make more than a certain amount, so it keeps the price reasonable.”

Temecula’s big homes

City officials are working with legal counsel and a consultant to analyze the community land trust model, said Matt Peters, director of community development, in an email to CalMatters. The city also would need a nonprofit organization to administer the trust, a partnership with a real estate developer and financial resources to accomplish it, he added.

Councilmember Zak Schwank said “all options are on the table” for expanding housing in Temecula. But he said the city already works with Habitat for Humanity, and he thinks that’s an efficient way to build low-income homes. Habitat homeowners help build their own homes alongside volunteers and pay an affordable mortgage.

Schwank worries that a community land trust would require city administration, creating new bureaucracy.

“We would have to have a whole other structure in place, with oversight and partners, so I wonder if it’s just cleaner to continue to invest in Habitat homes and things like that,” he said.

Temecula is known for its large, suburban homes, but Schwank said city officials have tried to persuade developers to downsize housing tracts and build entry-level homes.

“We have tried to be more creative with developers, to incentivize them to build the missing middle, or those smaller lot homes,” he said. “We haven’t been too successful with that.”

To spur home construction, the city has rezoned some areas, Schwank said. For instance, it retooled its specific plan for an area called Uptown Temecula to accommodate 3,700 more housing units and streamlined the approval process to make it easy to build new homes there. 

A city zoning map over her bed

Meanwhile LaMont’s own housing situation has taken on new urgency. In July she received an eviction notice after her take-home pay rose to $52,000, exceeding the annual affordable program limit of $49,000 for a two-person household. She got extensions through October, but now she has to move. She said she faces a rent increase from the current $935 she pays per month to more than twice that rate.

LaMont’s apartment in the Warehouse at Creekside is small but tightly organized. Her 19-year-old son Christopher uses a bunk bed in the single bedroom, while LaMont sleeps in the living room on a bed raised for storage underneath. There’s no pantry, so a bookshelf stores packages of Trader Joe’s baking mix, olives and chicken broth. 

A zoning map of Temecula hangs over LaMont’s bed, and shelves next to it are stacked with books on urban planning.

“My unhealthy habit is reading government documents and learning about housing,” she said.

Christopher said his family’s tenuous situation seemed normal when he was a child, but he later realized housing was a struggle. For his high school senior project he presented a design for a walkable, pedestrian-friendly community in Temecula. Now he’s attending Mount San Jacinto Community College with the goal of becoming a civil engineer. 

“I’m just starting to understand there’s no salvation for me if I don’t make it on my own,” he said.

A broken system

City officials say they’re aware of LaMont’s situation and are exploring ways to adjust the income criteria for her building. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development defines low-income renters as people earning less than 80% of an area’s median income. In the Inland Empire that’s $65,600 a year for a two-person household, well above LaMont’s earnings. 

But the income criteria can vary by project. The Warehouse at Creekside restricts tenants to 60% of the area median for one-bedrooms, putting LaMont just above the threshold. City officials said they’re working with the developer to renegotiate that limit.

It won’t change  in time to save LaMont’s lease. She has found a two-bedroom apartment that will open in a few months. It will allow her and her son their own space, but it will double her rent. She worked out a deal to stay in a different apartment in her current building in the interim.

Even with a potential solution, she laments that affordable housing formulas create a trap that penalizes tenants for improving their financial station. She said that’s what causes the “brokenness” of the affordable housing system.

“You’re constantly chasing; there’s no hope of saving any money,” she said. 

This story was made possible in part by a grant from the CIELO Fund of the Inland Empire Community Foundation.

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If Californians vote to approve a rent control measure on the ballot, thousands of Berkeley tenants could immediately see new limits on how much their landlords can raise their rent each year. 

“Families who are living in units that aren’t right for them will have a chance to move without losing their affordability,” said Leah Simon-Weisberg, a longtime tenant lawyer and chair of the city’s rent board. “For some people, it will keep them housed.”

That same scenario, in which the city could cap rent increases on single-family homes and apartments more than 20 years old and units with new tenants, is a nightmare for Krista Gulbransen, who heads the Berkeley Property Owners Association, representing the city’s landlords. “We would revert back to the 1980s and it wouldn’t just be roller skates or rainbow headbands, it would be a lot worse,” she said.

Proposition 33 would repeal a state housing law limiting how cities can regulate rents, letting local governments make that decision. Most California cities wouldn’t see an immediate change. But in a few cities like Berkeley, local laws already contain language allowing much more sweeping regulation than current state law. In those cities, and in others where left-leaning elected officials have expressed public support for expanding rent control, renters could see the soonest benefit from Prop. 33  — and landlords the soonest headaches.

More than 30 cities in California already place some limits on rent increases, with caps ranging from 3% to 10% annually for covered units, some pegged to inflation. 

At the state level, California caps rent increases for apartments and corporate-owned houses more than 15 years old at 10% per year  — a rate that tenant advocates have said can still place a significant burden on tenants.

Some of those local ordinances were once much stricter. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, concern about soaring housing costs led a few cities to limit rent increases even when a new tenant moves in — known as vacancy control. But the 1995 law that Prop. 33 would repeal, known as the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, put a stop to that, along with any rent control on single-family homes or those built after 1995. 

It’s the ban on rent control for single-family homes that most bothers Melvin Willis, a city council member in Richmond, one of the Bay Area’s few remaining solidly working-class cities. Many families in his district rent their houses, he said, and some complain to him about steep rent increases. 

“It’s a hard conversation to have with someone when they say, ‘My rent increased, but we have rent control,’ ” he said. Willis recalled explaining to one family whose rent had doubled that the city’s 3% cap on rent bumps doesn’t apply to single-family homes. “I’ve had that conversation multiple times and it doesn’t feel good,” he said.

Richmond’s rent ordinance leaves out any housing “exempt from rent control pursuant to the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act.” Willis and other affordable housing advocates take that to mean that if Costa-Hawkins goes away, single-family homes and other dwellings that the state law excluded would automatically fall under rent control. 

Nicolas Traylor, the executive director of Richmond’s rent program, was more cautious. The ordinance could be referring to units actually exempt under Costa-Hawkins, he said, or just the types of units, like single-family homes, that Costa-Hawkins excluded. If Prop. 33 passes, he said, the rent program’s general counsel would have to recommend how to move forward.

In San Francisco, city supervisors avoided that ambiguity by unanimously passing legislation that would kick in if Prop. 33 passes, bringing rent control to an estimated 16,000 additional units. Mayor London Breed has said she will sign it if the proposition passes, the San Francisco Standard reported.

San Francisco belongs to a group of cities — along with Berkeley, Oakland, Los Angeles, and the southern California cities of West Hollywood and Santa Monica — with longstanding rent control that current state law especially constrains. That’s because Costa-Hawkins grandfathered in any exemptions they had for more newly built units. So in San Francisco, apartments built after 1979 are considered “new construction” and exempt from rent control. In Los Angeles, it’s 1978.

“It’s completely arbitrary that we can create rent control for buildings from 1978 but we can’t do it for 1980,” said Los Angeles City Council member Hugo Soto-Martínez, pointing to the city’s homelessness crisis. “Every year we continue to lose more of our rent-stabilized housing.”

The council last week passed a resolution, authored by Soto-Martínez, endorsing Prop. 33.

Those kinds of actions by cities trouble landlords, who point out that their costs for utilities and insurance are rising, in some cases outpacing inflation.

In an email newsletter sent to housing providers Friday, real estate firm Bornstein Law warned its clients that “there is a real possibility that Proposition 33 will pass because of the widespread belief that the rents are too damn high.”

The firm urged landlords, in preparation for the potential policy shift, “to raise the rents to market rate if landlords are able to do so” and to consider offering voluntary buyouts to tenants paying below-market rent.

Prop. 33 opponents have also raised concerns that cities will enact rent control so strict it will stifle new housing construction at a time when the state desperately needs it. 

“The state has done so much to remove barriers to building housing and to incentivize affordable housing construction, but Prop. 33 would give NIMBY cities a really powerful weapon to do an end run around those rules,” said Nathan Click, a spokesperson for the No on 33 campaign.

But San Francisco shows that, given the flexibility to craft new policies, even cities with strong histories of tenant advocacy might opt for more modest changes to rent control that can win broad political support. Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin had originally proposed that the city expand rent control to cover housing built before 2024, but walked that back to 1994, an idea that won backing from both the city government’s progressive and moderate wings.

Local rent control expansion “is also going to depend on not just tenant and housing organizations but other civil society organizations in those communities,” said Shanti Singh, legislative director for Tenants Together. “Are they going to be ready to or willing to push for it?”

Manuel Pastor, director of the University of Southern California’s Equity Research Institute, said his research shows that rent stabilization without vacancy control  helps prevent displacement by keeping rents more affordable, while avoiding slowing new construction since there are still incentives to build. 

If cities start capping rent increases when new tenants move in, he said, the effects become more difficult to predict. That’s in part because the last time California cities experimented with vacancy control was more than 30 years ago — back when more multifamily housing was being built and before the tech boom put unprecedented pressure on Northern California’s housing market.

One thing that is likely, he said: California would see geographic variation, with more progressive coastal cities putting in stricter rent caps while inland cities with moderate politics seek to lure development with looser rules.

“If the proponents of Prop. 33 think this will solve our housing crisis, they’re mistaken,” he said. “If the opponents of Prop. 33 think that this will result in housing armageddon, they’re mistaken as well.”