California Stewardship Alliance
Homes we can afford. Communities we love. California can have both.
Right now, we're getting neither. The California Stewardship Alliance is a statewide movement of residents and local leaders building the community-driven solutions that deliver both — and a realistic path back to homeownership.
The scoreboard
The state set the targets. Here’s the score.
The state assigns every California city a housing target, split into income categories the state itself defines. Here’s what’s actually been built.
For every 5 expensive homes California builds, working families get 1 they can afford.
Homes completed — not permitted · 2021–2025
And that one home? More than nine times out of ten, it’s a rental. Families enter a lottery — for a lease.
A home you can own? Fewer than one in 380.
Every figure, every region, every source.
Source: HCD Annual Progress Reports, Table A2 — completed units by income category, 2021–2025, deduplicated; snapshot August 1, 2026. Definitions, methodology, and what happens if you draw the affordability line elsewhere: the full scoreboard.
See the score for your city.
Enter your email and we'll send your city's numbers — the same figures, for the place you actually live.
One email to get your city's numbers. Unsubscribe any time.
And the cost of building the wrong homes isn’t only measured in dollars.
The cost
This is what gets approved when the law says no one local is allowed to ask questions.
Clark Avenue · Encinitas
A housing project was approved on a street that violates the state fire code — the road is too narrow for fire engines. The city had to go to court to fix it.
The public record →Marina Safeway · San Francisco
848 homes. 24 stories. On known toxic soils with untested hazardous waste, in a liquefaction zone — exempt from environmental review.
The law calls this “streamlined.”
The public record →It doesn’t have to work this way.
There is a better way to decide.
This isn’t inevitable
California isn’t one place. It shouldn’t have one rule.
Right now the argument sets neighbors against neighbors and cities against the state. It has been running for years. It has not produced the homes.
There is a better way to decide, and it isn’t an ideology. Can the roads, the water, and the evacuation routes carry it? Is the site safe to build on? Do the numbers work for the people who would actually live there? Those are questions with answers — and the answers are different in every community, which is why one rule written for all of them was never going to fit.
A state exists to serve the people who live in it. Cities aren’t an obstacle to that — they’re how it gets done.
What we’re for
The right homes in the right places — and the red tape cleared off the ones that get there.
Clearing red tape and litigation from projects that serve the people who will live with them — affordable homes in neighborhoods people still recognize.
What that requires
A housing target arrives as a number. It doesn’t arrive with a budget.
And the homes on the short end of that score are the ones that rarely get built without public investment behind them. So fund the target. Invest in the cities carrying it — and the scoreboard becomes how we all find out whether it worked.
Join
Be early.
Homeowners and future homeowners. Community organizations. Council members and county supervisors who have to answer to the people who live with what gets built. This is the ground floor. Not an institution to join — a thing to help build.
Join the movement
Once a month: the numbers, the wins, and what’s next.
Including the score for your city.
Once a month. Unsubscribe any time.
Donate
Fund the work.
Your support funds the data, the legal tools, and the local campaigns that put housing decisions back in the hands of the people who live with them.
Donate