The high cost of housing is the biggest challenge that California– and the Orange County area I represent– is facing.

The top reason people are leaving our state, and the Number 1 driver for homelessness, is the high cost of housing. We must treat this crisis with the urgency it deserves, and I am supportive of an “all of the above approach” that includes both reducing the barriers to building more housing while also emphasizing funding and subsidies for affordable housing. 

I’m proud to be closely tied with the YIMBY and Abundance movements and will continue to support efforts to aggressively reduce the uncertainty and litigation risk associated with permitting requirements for new building and infrastructure development. While I believe strongly in protecting our environment, it is clear that many of the environmental protection requirements associated with new buildings are not serving their intended purposes.

But simply building new housing is not enough. Affordable housing for low and very low income households will not be built without federal support, and we must reinvigorate the sources of funding that help to build and maintain this particular housing supply.  Earlier in my career, I led the Center for American Progress’s efforts to bolster our federal affordable housing funding, including developing the major proposal on reforming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the housing finance entities that were put into federal conservatorship following the 2008 financial crisis. I’m bringing this expertise to bear in finding solutions for affordable housing in Congress.

Finally, it is critical that we recognize that to address the problem of the chronically homeless, we must do more than just provide housing. By the time you see someone on the streets, they’ve typically been homeless or housing-insecure for months or years, creating a vicious cycle of mental health and substance abuse problems that make it very difficult to re-enter society. The non-profit organizations that are dealing with homelessness most effectively have all reported the same thing– that the biggest barrier to their work is the difficulties in combining federal, state, and local funding for housing and mental health and substance abuse services. By easing these barriers and continuing to fund these critical programs, we can help solve the problem of homelessness.