Housing affordability is a great issue in many countries and especially in very low and low-income households they are spending more than half of their income on housing costs. Particularly in California’s residents spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing costs. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) defines that housing affordability as the percentage of income spent on housing costs and uses a 30 percent threshold to indicate housing affordability in the United States. It is a request is to the lawmakers, government officials working in the housing development and community-planning fields, the state legislature, and local governments about reasonable public policy alternatives to mitigate the ongoing housing shortage in California. Currently, the state deficit of four million homes, and this number is rising annually by 100,000 units (Gutierrez, 2018). As of 2015, the estimates show that the state has built approximately 100,000 to 140,000 units per year (Mac, 2015). The LAO (2017) suggests that the state needs to construct additional 100,000 units per year to mitigate the ongoing housing shortage in California.

Given the significance housing has in our lives, throughout the decades, California has neglected to build enough houses and apartment units to match the rising demand. Collectively in 2017, there were 1.7 million very low and low-income households in California who spend more than half of their income on housing (Walters, 2017). As of 2015, eight out of ten low-income households in the 200th percentile of the federal poverty line experienced high housing costs. Half of those households spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing in California (California’s Housing Future: Challenges and Opportunities, 2017).