Nearly 40,000 affordable housing units are awaiting funding in California, according to a new Enterprise Community Partners report.
The study reveals a pipeline of 461 developments with 39,880 affordable homes poised to begin construction if they can secure additional funding.
“These are projects that have been entitled and are basically shovel ready,” Heather Hood, vice president and Northern California market leader for Enterprise, tells Affordable Housing Finance.
She notes there may be additional projects in the pipeline, but officials are confident they have not double counted units as they analyzed data from different sources.
Over the next 55 years, these communities would serve an estimated 432,050 low-income households.
A goal of the report is to provide perspective to be able to tackle the problem strategically, according to Hood.
The report focuses on state funding, which is often critical to unlocking private, federal, and local resources. Specifically, every $1 of state funds leverages nearly $3.60 from other sources.
More than two-thirds of the units in the pipeline have been awarded funding from at least one state program. However, for the backlog to move ahead, the developments need an estimated $2.3 billion in state subsidies, $1.8 billion in housing tax credits, and $5.8 billion in tax-exempt bonds, estimates the report.
Enterprise shares several actions that would help unlock and scale the large pipeline of affordable housing, including investing additional funding in the state budget for affordable housing, passing a $10 billion state housing bond that is expected this year, streamlining the housing finance system to improve cost efficiency, and confronting operational challenges such as considering new insurance options.
To learn more, read the Enterprise study here.