CA Assembly Appropriations Chair Buffy Wicks’ Housing Legislative Update

Buffy Wicks: I'm honored to be here. And I know the theme of this is the Roadmap to Rebuild, which obviously in Los Angeles, that has a particularly special meaning. But honestly, we have to rebuild the whole state, especially facing this homelessness crisis that has been a pending crisis now that has taken decades to get here, we have to be laser focused on building the housing we need to build.

I think about my own experience. I grew up in a trailer, in a single wide trailer in the Sierra Valley foothills. My dad worked for the US Forest Service so we were based in Tahoe National Forest. And so I grew up in this little, tiny town, about 1,500 people, no stoplight. I was telling my daughter this last night, and she was like, “You didn’t have a stoplight?.” She lives in Oakland, you know? The dream of Round Table delivering to our house was like a dream. And she’s like, “You didn’t have Doordash?” 

But it was a little tiny town, and I grew up in a trailer. I will say, when I was little, I was actually embarrassed that I was in a trailer. I had friends who had wooden homes, which was such an aspiration for our family. But what I've since come to appreciate is that that trailer enabled me to be able to go to community college. It enabled me to be able to go to a four-year institution. It enabled me to go work for President Obama for six years. I was employee number thirty-two on his first presidential campaign. It enabled me to be the Appropriations Chair of the California State Assembly.

It enabled me because it was housing security. I never wondered if we would have a roof over our heads. And so, while it wasn't much, it was ours. And for too many, particularly brown and black families in our great state of California, that opportunity is not awarded to them–that sense of housing security. So, when I got elected in 2018, I was mission driven on this issue of housing and making sure we need to do everything we can to make it easier to build the homes.

 I don't need to tell you all the facts of what has happened: the 200,000 folks experiencing homelessness, our rent-burdened communities, the lowest homeownership rate in the country. I think we're actually right behind Hawaii, but we're 49th out of 50th and the reality of what that means for us.

So, when I got to Sacramento, I started working on this. I got on the Housing Committee in my second year in office, and started doing bills in this space. I became the Housing chair, I was the Housing chair for two years. And when I came into a position of power, of being Housing chair, and now in a position of power as Appropriations chair, my mission is that I will not protect the status quo, because the status quo is not working for our families. 

And that means taking on sacred cows and having uncomfortable conversations with friends. And that is hard politically sometimes for us, but it is what our elected officials should be doing, because we are not responsible for the feelings of special interest groups. We are responsible for our constituents, and they are not being served right now by the regulatory regime that makes it difficult to build housing in our communities. These are policy choices that we have made over decades and decades and decades, it's been essentially almost illegal to build multi-family housing in many parts of California.

Over the past six, seven years, we've been starting to dismantle a lot of that and to create a better environment for the ability to build. We have set up a situation where it is so easy to get to ‘no’, it is so easy to keep the inertia, it is so easy to keep the status quo, and it's this unique moment in time when we actually just celebrate building housing. How and when did we start demonizing housing? That is why we are where we are today.

And so, one of the big things I focused on over the past year, I created and Chaired the Select Committee on Permitting Reform. This may sound like the most boring thing on Earth, permitting reform, but it's, to me, the underpinning of our inability to be able to actually live in the modern state of California in the year 2025—when we have wildfires that are encroaching in our urban areas; we are going to have sea level rise; we have public transportation needs; we have housing needs. We have all of these needs. And guess what? CEQA is used to make it harder to address all of those things.

CEQA, the landmark environmental bill of 1970, the year before I was born, has served so many great purposes in this state: it has cleaned our air; it has protected our open spaces; it has done a lot—it also treats an oil well the same as it treats an affordable housing project. Those are not the same in terms of their environmental impact, so why are we treating them the same as their environmental impact? 

So, when I chaired the Select Committee, we had four hearings across the state. We did about 16 hours of hearings. We did about 150 interviews with stakeholders. We were looking at CEQA and permitting reform more broadly, not just for housing, but also for renewable energy projects. We did a hearing in Palm Springs last year and testifying there, we learned that the average transmission line takes 12 years to get permitted, and it’s 70 permits through 28 agencies with an 11,000 page environmental impact report–for one transmission line. So, we're not going to reach our climate change goals if that's the reality of what it takes to build.

Coming out of that report, we found that we have some work to do in the California legislature, and the good news is, we can. We have the ability and the power to change the dynamics that are holding us back from being the most inclusive, welcoming state in the nation. We simply aren't right now because of the cost of housing that our working-class communities bear. They bear the burden of our policy choices.

You guys, by the way, have so many strong people coming out of Los Angeles now. And I will say, we have a whole new crop of folks over the last couple of years who, the state of mind has shifted, in Los Angeles as well.

Historically, in the legislature, it's been the Bay Area folks who've been pushing on this because frankly, we had the crisis first I think, before you guys did. Now, unfortunately, you guys have caught up to us and maybe even surpassed us and have a more precarious situation with the wildfires. But you have a bunch of new, great members who are already charging to the fire and lead on this stuff: Harabedian and Schultz. You have a lot of really exciting folks. Tina McKinnor is working on this package with me; Sade [Elhawary], Isaac Bryan helped get my CEQA reform bill out of his [Natural Resources] committee this week, a committee that normally was where CEQA reform went to die. He helped shepherd that through his committee. So, I'm so excited about a lot of the leadership coming out of Los Angeles. I just want you to know that as a side note.

But this year, we put together 23 bills—the Fast Track Housing Package—aimed at making it much easier, quicker, more streamlined. The rules of engagement are known. We can't change the rules after the fact, because we know that happens. But the biggest bill that's part of that is my infill housing CEQA exemption bill.

So, this bill basically says, if you're housing, and you're infill—so you're in our world where there's human beings who are living there— no more CEQA. It's pretty simple. It is simple in policy and complicated in politics, but as my old friend David Axelrod said, “Start with the truth.” And for me, the truth is CEQA is causing so many delays, years and years and years of delays on housing projects to the point that if they do make it, they're a lot more expensive, and more often than not, they don't even make it to the end of the process. That is why we have 200,000 people experiencing homelessness in our communities and growing. So, this is my mission. 

I'm in my fourth term, so I'm in this sort of YOLO, f*** it stage of my career, where we’re just going to go for broke because I'm sick of the fact that it's 80% more expensive to build housing here than it is in Colorado, and almost three times as much more expensive as it is in Texas. And it's not just a red state thing. Red states, blue states, a lot of other states make it easier to build housing. So, I'm a one trick pony on this. I care a lot about it. I'm mission driven on it. I am, selfishly, because I have an eight-year-old and a four-year-old, and I want them to grow up in California. This is all totally selfish, for when they go away to college, I want them to come back here and live in the community in which they were raised when they raise their children. Right now, that is not happening for so many of our families.

We are doing a bunch of other things as well. As mentioned, I have a $10 billion bond I'm trying to get on the ballot that would support affordable housing. We need public investments in affordable housing. This is housing that's supporting our lowest income folks, the folks on the brink of experiencing homelessness, folks who are experiencing homelessness. We have to invest in those communities. With that, we also have to make it easier to build, because that saves us taxpayer money. And so these two things for me are really, really important.

We also have a bill to make it easier for school districts to build housing for their employees. I have so many teachers in Oakland Unified School District; they grew up in Oakland; they want to teach in the communities in which they grew up, the schools they went to—and the realtors in the East Bay say, “Drive till you qualify.” So, they're living out in Tracy and Stockton and beyond. They're spending four hours a day on the road because they want to work there. They should be able to live in those communities. So, we have a ton of other champions. We're working with leadership— the governor, the Senate, the Assembly—, Scott Wiener. We have a lot of great folks from LA. But I will tell you, in these insane political times we are in, that I'm sure none of us thought we would be in, when the federal government is a dumpster fire, right? That is what's happening, and I have a lot of feelings about that and a lot of concern about that.

My focus is making sure that California delivers for our working class families. We have the opportunity to demonstrate strong progressive governance by making sure our families can afford to live and work here, and that our children don't have to worry about if there’s a roof over their head, but that they have that housing security that I was afforded when I was a little kid. So, thank you very much. Appreciate being here today.