As the California Legislature moves to act on a series of bills dubbed the “Affordable Housing Package,”NFIB announced our opposition to three key bills in the package: Senate Bill 2 (Atkins); Senate Bill 3 (Beall); and Senate Bill 35 (Weiner) on behalf of our 22,000 dues-paying small business owners.
There is no debate or question that we have a serious housing affordability crisis in this state, and we didn’t get here overnight. Each year, we need to build roughly 180,000 homes just to keep up with population growth, and over the last decade we have fallen short by at least 1,000,000. At the core of our exploding housing affordability crisis is basic economics: we have spiking demand coupled with stagnating supply, this leads to skyrocketing housing prices. This is a critical issue for small businesses who are seeing their workforce driven out of this state due to prohibitively high housing costs.
Unfortunately, Senate Bill 2 (Atkins), Senate Bill 3 (Beall), and Senate Bill 35 (Weiner) do nothing to address these fundamental economic realities, but instead raise more taxes on struggling small businesses and working families, put California further into debt, and drastically raise labor costs to build a home.
View Article