Late last week, the White House released President Trump’s so-called “Skinny Budget” for 2018, which proposes cuts of $54 billion to domestic programs including more than $6.2 billion (13%) to HUD programs and likely deep cuts to USDA’s housing programs. In addition to eliminating the valuable Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program ($357 million for California) and making deep cuts Read More
The California Department of Finance (DOF) generally focuses only on the cost to the state of proposed new investments. Just last week they insisted that a common sense proposal by Senator Jim Beall (SB 873) should be limited to only three years because mistaken assumptions by the Franchise Tax Board (FTB) led the DOF to conclude that the change would cost hundreds Read More
As tens of thousands of lower-income Californian renters have been displaced from California’s growing job centers over the past five years, a debate has been raging about whether governments should do more to promote investment in affordable housing or instead focus on unshackling the private housing market. The latter theory, promoted by institutions ranging from the Legislative Analysts Office to Read More
Here in California we have gotten all too used to bad news coming from Congress when it comes to renewing annual funding of the remaining federal affordable housing programs. Thus, it comes as quite a relief that as Congress scrambles to complete its already delayed work on federal Fiscal Year 2016 funding, that the news is less bad than previously Read More