🏡💚 Green Social Housing weekly newsletter
September 15th, 2023
Well, it only took one week before we decided to make things a bit nicer. Hopefully the change to more traditional newsletter appearance is a welcome upgrade from a regular email. Or maybe it makes this seem like just another newsletter clogging up your inbox. If you’ve got requests for how to make this more helpful (e.g. more analysis, less news) or more enjoyable (e.g. skip all this intro text, get right to the info!), please let me know!
THIS WEEK
I may have immediately undermined my aspirations for this to have a reputation as a go-to source for current and up-to-date news, as last week my legislative Appropriations roundup listing SB 555 as “HELD AND DEAD” was almost immediately made incorrect. (As a reminder, SB 555, The Stable Affordable Housing Act, would require the state to conduct a California Social Housing study to analyze how the creation of social housing at scale can meet the state’s housing needs.)
Last Friday (September 8th), a week after the bill was held in Assembly Appropriations, it was revived by Assembly Majority Leader Isaac Bryan, who moved to suspend the rules on the floor and brought it to the Assembly floor for a vote.
But before the floor vote could happen, the Speaker needed to provide a waiver to the Assembly rules to allow amendments to the bill — key amendments that were negotiated with the Governor’s office that should have been made in Appropriations. That waiver had to receive a 2/3 vote in the Assembly in order to include the amendments (which it did on Monday morning), and then the bill required an actual vote on the Assembly floor.
The vote came through yesterday evening, barely passing the Assembly with 42 votes!! 🎉
So, to simplify, here’s the timeline:
Friday, Sept 1: Bill is held in Assembly Appropriations, and dead
Friday, Sept 8: Bill is miraculously resurrected
Monday, Sept 11: Speaker provides waiver to Assembly rules, and waiver receives 2/3 votes needed to accept new amendments
Thursday, Sept 14: Bill passes in the Assembly, 42-15, and then passes the concurrence vote in the Senate
Some of you more seasoned legislative wonks out there probably knew how all of this works, but I sure did not. The end of session is truly wild.
As for the other social housing / housing justice bills we mentioned:
AB 309 (Lee) Social Housing Act of 2023 passed in the Senate, 27-10
SB 567 (Durazo) Homelessness Prevention Act passed the Assembly, 46-13
WHAT WE’RE READING
Social Housing: How a New Generation of Activists Are Reinventing Housing (Nonprofit Quarterly) — great social housing 101 overview, including some of the history and why social housing is gaining momentum in the US
These women are fighting to bring rent control to Southeast LA (KCRW) — those interested can find more reporting on this in the LATimes here
25 California Cities send letter to Gov Newsom calling for statewide zero-emission building standards — more related to the “green” than the “social housing,” but worth checking out the letter sent to Governor Newsom last week by 25 cities calling for the adoption of a statewide zero-emission building standard.
I’ve sent this out to everyone on the current CA GND listserv. If you don’t want to get these weekly newsletters, feel free to unsubscribe below ⬇️
The plan is to keep these coming out once a week on Friday mornings. Please send any relevant topics, articles, reports, or intel to me at zach@apen4ej.org!
