CASE STUDY
3Ps
MISSION
Mounting a statewide pressure campaign to pass urgent housing legislation
Challenge
California’s affordable housing and homelessness crisis had been worsening continually for years. The crisis was made up of three critical issues: a shortage of affordable housing production statewide; a lack of preservation of existing affordable housing; and a critical shortage of protection laws for tenants, resulting in widespread price-gouging and evictions. Pushing back against the crisis would require coordination on strategy to address all sides of the issue, and coordination among partners to ensure leaders and geographic regions were working collaboratively.
Approach
During the 2019 legislative session, 50+1 Strategies oversaw a statewide legislative advocacy campaign as part of the 3Ps coalition for more affordable housing across California. Our campaign delivered over 10,000 patch-through phone calls, oversaw a robust SMS texting campaign, and organized in-district meetings where advocates personally lobbied their state representatives on the issue of affordable housing.
Results
In the end, we helped pass some of the most progressive and historic legislation in the history of the state to address our housing crisis:
- AB 1482, the Tenant Protection Act of 2019, created the strongest new protections for renters in state history — ending rent-gouging by capping annual rent increases, and tightening restrictions on landlords to prevent unjust evictions
- AB 1487 created the structure for the first-ever regional approach and provided new financial resources for counties to create new affordable housing
- SB 330, the Housing Crisis Act of 2019, provided guidelines for cities to quickly process permits on new affordable housing construction and barred local governments from reducing the number of homes that can be built.
