The California Housing Partnership released the 2020 Affordable Homes at Risk report, which found that that California has already lost 15,004 affordable rental homes and that another 31,821 affordable rental homes are currently at risk of market rate conversion in the next decade.

At-risk homes are concentrated in Los Angeles County (34 percent), Orange County (11 percent), Santa Clara County (seven percent), San Diego County (six percent) and San Francisco County (five percent). When considering the number of at-risk homes relative to each county’s total stock of affordable homes, Trinity County has the largest proportion of affordable homes at risk of conversion – 68 percent of the county’s total affordable homes.

The report concludes by offering the following recommendations for state policymakers:

  • Pass legislation to authorize the creation of a new Affordable Housing Preservation Tax Credit – AB 2058 (Gabriel and Friedman) to incentivize the preservation of existing affordable homes by experienced affordable housing entities.
  • Make permanent the $500 million annual increase to the California Low Income Housing Tax Credit Program authorized by AB 101 in 2019 so that affordable housing developers can plan to consistently ramp up their capacity, and allocate an additional $100 million specifically for affordable housing preservation as intended by the underlying legislation (AB 10, Chiu).
  • Aggressively enforce the State Preservation Notice Law as expanded by AB 1521 (2017).