NAACP joins the California African American Chamber to emphasize how Prop. 33 hurts Black communities
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 15 , 2024
Contact: Nathan Click
nathan@click-comms.com
SACRAMENTO – Black leaders across California are speaking out against Proposition 33, the anti-housing initiative that will undermine state housing laws while making it harder for California to build the affordable housing we need to address the state’s housing crisis.
Today, the NAACP CA/HI State Conference announced their opposition to Proposition 33, noting that it would hurt both future renters, and small landlords, who are more likely people of color.
The NAACP announcement follows the vote of the California African American Chamber of Commerce, which also voted to oppose Proposition 33.
“Proposition 33 will hurt communities of color and exacerbate our homeless and housing crisis,” said NAACP California/Hawaii State Conference President Rick L. Callender. “Homeownership has been an essential path to wealth generation for Black and Brown families, and Proposition 33 will simply hurt individual homeowners, making it harder for Black and Brown families to build generational wealth. Just say NO!”
Economists and housing experts at Stanford and UC Berkeley say Prop 33 will make California’s housing crisis significantly worse by reducing the construction of new affordable housing.
Historically, buying a home has been one of the only ways for Black families to build wealth, yet Prop 33 unfairly targets those single-family homeowners. Non-partisan researchers at MIT estimate extreme measures like Prop 33 will result in an average reduction of home values of up to 25 percent. In fact, Prop 33 will create permanent price controls, even on single-family homes and condominiums. Prop 33 will make it harder to become a homeowner or find a place to rent, driving up costs for renters and home buyers.
“Mom-and-pop landlords will be hardest hit by Prop 33– small property owners that are more likely to be people of color and to use their rental properties as income to afford retirement,” said Ahmad Holmes, President & CEO, California African American Chamber of Commerce. “This proposition will allow local governments to tell them how much they can charge to rent out a single room and potentially hinder affordable housing development, further hurting our communities. We should be encouraging more people to be investing in our neighborhoods– not targeting mom-and-pop landlords who are providing much-needed housing.”
Academics at UC Berkeley, Stanford, and researchers across the country have found that rent control policies create worse outcomes for housing production and increase homelessness. Vox recently wrote how rental restrictions like Prop 33 “have long been controversial among economists, most of whom argue that the policy hurts housing markets and ultimately limits supply, thus driving costs up further. A review of more than 200 empirical rent control studies released in March found a ‘wide range of adverse effects’ for communities with rent caps, and that landlords were more likely to allow rent-capped units to fall into disrepair.”
Not only would Proposition 33 weaken California’s existing protections for tenants and homeowners, it would undermine California’s dozens of other state housing measures, which would make it harder to build in California. While masquerading as a rent control measure, Proposition 33 would actually create new loopholes for local governments, allowing them to ignore these laws and block housing California desperately needs.