🏡💚 Housing and climate measures held from the ballot
This Week in Green Social Housing
June 14, 2024
The past few weeks have dealt several blows to some promising ballot measures and bills that attempted to take on the legacies of pollution, racism, and extraction (and those who profited off them).
On Monday, Asm Bryan announced that he was going to hold ACA 16, and that it won’t be moving forward this year to appear on the ballot in November (as a reminder, ACA 16 is a proposed constitutional “green amendment” to add the right to clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment). In discussing what happened with the proposal, Bryan said he regretted not starting the process last year, when he would have had two years to work through the negotiations and conversations with stakeholders that were needed to get the job done.
The week before, Bryan made amendments to the proposal in an effort to try to appease some opponents. But this move then led to criticism from the bill’s backers — as reported in Politico, the founder of nonprofit Green Amendments for the Generations, Maya van Rossum, criticized last week’s amendments, arguing that they gave it little enforceability in court. The lack of unity on the proposal and the short deadline needed to move it forward combined to seal its fate this week.
At least, for now. ACA 16 began a conversation in the state that many are eager to continue, and I would be surprised if this was the last we’ve heard of a green amendment in California. Perhaps signaling a shared prediction, the California Chamber of Commerce (who listed ACA 16 as a “job killer”) vowed that “the proponents can be sure the proposal will be met with powerful opposition should it be brought back in the future.”
That’s not the only proposed ballot measure to get an early exit. Earlier this month, Senator Ben Allen announced that he would be pulling SCA 2 from the November ballot. I haven’t gotten the chance to talk more about SCA 2 (I thought there would be more time!!), but this would have been an important step to correct a racist housing law that we still live with today.
SCA 2 would have repealed Article 34, which was added to the California Constitution in 1950 as an explicit effort to limit the development of affordable housing and to bar families of color from accessing housing in affluent communities. In short, Article 34 requires local voter approval of any low-income rental housing that is publicly funded. The result is a tool for wealthy white communities to keep people of color and poor people out of their neighborhoods.
This was at the heart of Article 34’s initial design, with a campaign that featured strong appeals to racist fears about integration as well as feeding into the Red Scare fears of socialism. Fundamentally, it has its roots in fighting back against public housing that was originally authorized and financed during the New Deal. At the time, the California Real Estate Association talked about how public housing threatened capitalism, and ran ads about how “minority pressure groups” were pushing public housing.
The legacy of Article 34 reverberates throughout the ensuing decades, stymieing affordable and public housing throughout the state, and weakening efforts to integrate neighborhoods. There are numerous examples that have ongoing impacts, including the decision to block public housing on a hillside in Los Angeles, which would eventually become the location for Dodger Stadium. And it is used to this day — just last year, the city of Millbrae filed a lawsuit to block the county from buying a hotel and converting it into housing for homeless families and seniors (as part of Newsom’s Project Homekey program), arguing the project is illegal because voters haven’t approved it as required under Article 34.
No other state constitution similarly requires voter approval for public housing. And the law is widely considered a racist stain on our state history. Even the Realtors have apologized for their racist history and promised to support attempts to overturn Article 34. So why is it so hard to do?
One core issue is the money. Backers of the proposal haven’t been able to find a group willing to fund the big campaign that any ballot measure in California requires. When Senator Allen announced SCA 2 would not move forward to the November ballot, he noted the crowded November ballot landscape, and the high cost that this campaign would take.
Because unfortunately, it’s not a slam dunk victory. The appeal of local control (often under the guise of ‘democracy’) still has very strong sway — it can be hard to convince voters to give up their ability to vote. And those racist and classist concerns about public housing? Yes, those still exist, and are made worse by the stigmatization of public housing and its residents that persists to this day.
It is not hard to make the clear connection between these two ballot proposals, SCA 2 and ACA 16, and our campaign for green social housing. We are fighting for a vision where housing and a healthy environment are human rights, not objects to be exploited for profit. As long as we stick with the status quo, with racist legacy policies and ongoing discrimination, poor people of color will continue to bear the costs of this extraction — through displacement, exclusion, pollution, and climate disasters.
These likely won’t be the last of the ballot measures to meet an early demise. Similar calculations will be made with other proposals ahead of the June 27 deadline, and active discussions are ongoing (including on the climate bond).
We certainly hope that the Taxpayer Deception Act (TDA) will be one proposal to get the ax. Last month, the California Supreme Court started hearing oral arguments to consider blocking the proposal from getting on to the ballot, and advocates are eagerly awaiting the outcome. Meanwhile, the campaign to fight back against the TDA is in full swing. As we get down to the last days to finalize November’s ballot measures, let’s hope a bit of good news is on the horizon.
