Californians share housing struggles with Gov. Newsom

Gov. Gavin Newsom met Tuesday with San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo and people slammed by the state’s housing crunch in an effort to put a human face on what the governor called an affordability crisis affecting every part of California.

“It’s not just a coastal problem anymore,” Newsom said, noting that the soaring cost of housing is something people are talking about in places like Stockton and Riverside.

The governor admitted that there’s no magic solution that will instantly end those concerns but said he’s committed to doing what he can to ease the affordability pain of California residents.

“This is a housing crisis,” Newsom said, standing in front of a blue and white “California for All” banner. “It’s impacting communities, not just people’s pocketbooks.”

The help can’t come soon enough for the five people who joined Newsom and Liccardo at the Seven Trees Community Center in San Jose.

Nuemi Guzman, 42, works as a senior legal assistant at an advocacy foundation in San Jose. Her commute from the Merced County town of Los Banos takes 2½ hours each way.

She was born and raised in Gilroy but moved with her husband and three young children because they couldn’t afford to buy a home in the Bay Area. The trade-off isn’t one she’s willing to make anymore.

Getting up at 4:30 every morning and not returning home until 7 p.m., “I don’t see my kids,” Guzman said, breaking into tears. “My kids are growing up with my parents. I don’t get to take them to soccer or basketball practice.”

She and her husband recently traveled to Tucson and are thinking of leaving California for a more affordable life in Arizona.

Housing costs bring up an even more basic question for 28-year-old Shavell Crawford, who works full time as an executive assistant at a homelessness nonprofit in Menlo Park and attends law school at night.

She and her fiance share a place with four roommates to make ends meet.

“Can I live in California with a first home costing between $800,000 and $1 million?” she asked. “When we get married, are we still going to have roommates?”

Businesses also are feeling the affordability pinch. Jenneke de Vries and her husband have owned a pizza stall at San Jose’s San Pedro Square Market for seven years. But as Silicon Valley housing costs go up, it has become harder to hire and keep workers.

“We put out ads and get no response,” de Vries said.

“This is the challenge of our generation,” Liccardo told Newsom. “Is this going to be a California for all, as you said, or a California for the few?”

Newsom talked about what he is doing to boost housing construction. Besides calling for $1.75 billion in new housing money in the preliminary state budget he unveiled last week, he is working with cities to make it easier to build affordable housing.

About $250 million will go toward helping smaller California cities do the planning and preparation for that construction work, taking away the “we can’t afford it” argument many of those communities make, Newsom said.

There’s a stick behind that financial carrot. If cities don’t build that low- and moderateincome housing, they could lose state transportation money, the governor added.

Newsom also signed a pair of executive orders Tuesday, one calling for an inventory of all state property that could be used for housing, which would be completed and put online by April 30. The other would set a Sept. 30 deadline for requests for proposals for projects on that land.

While voters in November overwhelmingly rejected Proposition 10, which would have made it easier to expand rent control in California, Newsom said he is working with Democratic legislators on bills that could put caps on rent.

The battle over rent control “didn’t end on election day,” said Newsom, who opposed Prop. 10 as a threat to housing construction. With bills coming up in the Democratic-controlled Legislature, there’s “a responsibility to pursue a compromise,” he said, declining to give details.

“We don’t want to lose you,” Newsom told the people who spoke about their housing woes. “But unless you have something substantive from us and not just platitudes, you have every right to leave.”