Oakland Housing Plan
Build More Homes. Lower Housing Costs. Expand Homeownership.
Oakland’s housing crisis is fundamentally a shortage of homes that people can afford at every income level. Tenant protections and affordable housing subsidies are essential, but Oakland cannot permanently lower housing costs while too many households compete for too few homes. The City should make it dramatically easier, faster, and less expensive to build housing - while protecting renters and investing in permanently affordable homes.
My Work Already Underway
My agenda builds on housing work already underway in Oakland:
Funded tenant legal aid and 180 affordable homes, pairing new housing production with protections for renters.
Authored Measure FF to close a real-estate transfer-tax loophole that lets corporate investors acquire distressed properties through foreclosure or deed-in-lieu structures without paying the same transfer tax as ordinary transactions. The measure protects regular home buyers by exempting qualifying natural-person purchasers and also exempts adaptive-reuse transactions that convert distressed property into housing.
Working on ADU legislation to make it easier to add accessory homes and expand lower-cost ownership and multigenerational housing options.
Working to implement AB 1620 protections so tenants with permanent mobility disabilities in rent-controlled housing can move to an available comparable or smaller accessible unit in the same property without losing their existing rent and lease terms.
Approved more housing near transit and advanced transit-oriented housing policy, including work around SB 79.
Pursuing impact-fee reform east of Lake Merritt so housing in San Antonio, Eastlake, and nearby neighborhoods is not priced out by a fee structure designed for stronger real-estate markets.
Working to identify zoning, permitting, and City fee requirements that unnecessarily add to the cost of building homes.
Exploring a stronger local small-lot and townhome pathway building on SB 684 and SB 1123, so more Oakland families can buy smaller, lower-cost homes.
Expanded the use of motel conversions and other pathways that move people from encampments into shelter and stable housing
1. Build More Housing Near Transit and Commercial Corridors
Oakland should fully leverage state transit-oriented housing laws and go beyond minimum compliance by allowing greater height and density around BART, BRT, major bus corridors, and neighborhood commercial streets. More homes near transit can lower household transportation costs, support local businesses and foot traffic, and let Oakland grow without requiring every household to own a car. This should be paired with affordable housing, social housing, safer walking and biking infrastructure, and public-realm investments so growth improves surrounding neighborhoods.
2. Make Housing By-Right and Treat SB 79 as a Floor, Not a Ceiling
If a housing project complies with Oakland’s zoning and objective health, safety, and design standards, it should receive ministerial approval from staff rather than discretionary review. Oakland should remove the 30-unit ceiling for ministerial design review and allow compliant multifamily housing to proceed administratively regardless of size unless a project truly requires rezoning, a variance, a development agreement, or another discretionary approval. Oakland should also implement SB 79 aggressively rather than maximize temporary exemptions that preserve lower-density zoning. State transit-oriented housing standards should be the baseline from which Oakland asks where it can allow even more housing—not a ceiling to work down from.
3. Protect Renters and Improve Existing Housing
Oakland should protect tenants while expanding the choices available to them. I support preserving strong rent stabilization, Just Cause eviction protections, tenant anti-harassment rules, relocation assistance, rental registration, tenant legal aid, and homelessness-prevention assistance. I also want faster and stronger enforcement when landlords fail to maintain safe, habitable housing or reduce housing services. Rent protection should never mean that a tenant has to accept a deteriorating apartment simply because moving would mean losing a long-held rent.
I am working to implement AB 1620 because tenants with mobility disabilities are especially disadvantaged by Oakland’s older housing stock, much of which predates modern accessibility standards. Qualifying tenants should be able to move to an available comparable or smaller accessible unit in the same property without losing their existing rent and lease terms. I am also open to studying a temporary rent freeze during periods of extraordinary affordability pressure, but any proposal should be evaluated for its effects on renters as a whole - including mobility, housing quality, and the rents faced by people entering the market.
4. Generate Missing-Middle Housing and More Paths to Homeownership
Oakland has already taken important steps toward eliminating single-family-only zoning, but too much of the city still makes the practical choices either a detached house or a large apartment project. The City should make duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, sixplexes, bungalow courts, courtyard apartments, townhomes, and other small multifamily housing genuinely easy to build throughout residential neighborhoods, especially in high-opportunity and transit-accessible areas.
That means allowing fourplexes on smaller lots, creating a simple by-right pathway for 2–10 unit projects, allowing smaller lots and shared access, and expanding fee-simple townhome and small-lot ownership using and going beyond SB 684 and SB 1123 where Oakland has local authority. My ADU legislation should be part of the same strategy: make accessory homes easier to finance and build for multigenerational families, renters, and homeowners who want to add a smaller home to their property.
5. Remove Hidden Construction Costs: Parking, Setbacks, Design Rules, and Stair Cores
Oakland should eliminate residential parking minimums citywide while preserving ADA-accessible parking, loading, bicycle parking, and reasonable parking-management tools. The City should also reduce setbacks, lot-coverage rules, and other dimensional requirements when they prevent otherwise safe housing from fitting on an urban lot.
Oakland should audit its Objective Design Standards and eliminate aesthetic mandates that add cost without a clear connection to safety, accessibility, climate resilience, or a genuinely important public-realm goal. Requirements involving particular façade-material mixes, prescribed percentages of materials, or mimicry of neighboring buildings should not become hidden housing taxes.
I also support single-stair reform for appropriate mid-rise multifamily buildings, with strong fire-safety standards. Requiring two separated stair cores can make smaller infill buildings inefficient or infeasible, consume floor area that could otherwise become homes, and make family-sized or cross-ventilated layouts harder to design. Oakland should support state single-stair reform and be prepared to adopt safe local standards as soon as California law clearly authorizes them.
Oakland should recruit or help establish a unionized modular-housing factory that can serve as the Bay Area’s regional producer of multifamily housing. A regional factory would turn housing production into an economic-development strategy as well: creating stable union jobs in Oakland while supplying market-rate, affordable, and social-housing projects throughout the Bay Area. The Terner Center’s review of the evidence finds that factory-built housing can reduce hard construction costs by roughly 10–25% under the right conditions and shorten construction timelines by about 20–50%.
6. Build Social Housing That Can Become Self-Sustaining
Oakland should create a third lane alongside private development and traditional subsidized affordable housing: permanently public or community-controlled, mixed-income social housing. Traditional affordable housing often requires each project to braid together tax credits, grants, loans, and other subsidies over several years. A mixed-income social-housing model can instead use rents across the income spectrum to cover operations, maintenance, debt service, and lower-rent units, making buildings largely self-sustaining over time and reducing the need for a fresh subsidy stack for every project.
Oakland should launch a Social Housing Pilot by directing Housing & Community Development, the Oakland Housing Authority, and the City Attorney to design the right public development platform, such as an OHA-affiliated entity, joint-powers structure, or other public-benefit vehicle, that can acquire, develop, finance, own, and permanently retain mixed-income housing. The City can contribute well-located public land through long-term ground leases and use public financing authority, project-backed debt, philanthropic capital, BAHFA and other outside financing to get projects started, while minimizing ongoing City subsidy.
The first phase should identify one or two publicly controlled sites and test a portfolio model in which stronger-performing buildings can cross-subsidize lower-rent homes, maintenance, debt service, and eventually future housing production. The goal is not another program that starts from zero every time a project is proposed. It is to create a public housing platform that becomes more financially capable over time.
7. Cut the Cost and Time of Permitting Housing
Oakland should conduct a Housing Permit Cost Audit for representative 4-, 20-, 50-, 100-, and 200-unit projects and publish every City-imposed fee on a per-unit basis. For each fee, the City should identify its legal basis, the staff time and overhead driving the charge, whether Oakland can reduce or defer it, and whether the underlying review can be simplified or eliminated.
The goal is not simply to shift every development cost to the General Fund. The goal is to make the regulatory process itself cheaper. If Oakland can eliminate duplicative reviews, shorten processing time, use objective standards, and reduce staff hours per permit, the savings should flow through to housing production.
8. Make Projects Pencil and Rescue Housing That Is Already Approved
Zoning reform alone does not solve high interest rates, construction costs, or difficult financing. Oakland should identify every entitled housing development that has not moved to construction and determine what is actually preventing it from breaking ground. For viable projects, the City should offer a standardized toolbox: impact-fee deferrals or targeted reductions, expedited plan modifications, removal of obsolete conditions of approval, additional density where appropriate, infrastructure coordination, and other changes that close a genuine feasibility gap.
Housing Production Zones can target neighborhoods where Oakland wants housing but projects do not currently pencil, combining lower or deferred City-controlled impact fees with by-right zoning, additional density, and faster permitting. Incentives should be tied to actually pulling permits and beginning construction. The measure of success should be homes under construction—not entitlements sitting on a shelf.
9. Give Small Builders a Financing and Permitting Path
Oakland should create a dedicated 2–20 unit pathway for homeowners, local contractors, community developers, and small builders. That should include pre-approved plans for ADUs, fourplexes, sixplexes, courtyard housing, and townhomes; predictable all-in fee estimates; and a dedicated small-project permitting team.
But legalizing small housing is not enough if nobody can finance it. Oakland should work with CDFIs, community banks, BAHFA, and philanthropic capital to develop construction loans, loan guarantees, or a revolving small-builder fund for ADUs and 2–20 unit infill projects. The City can reduce regulatory risk while financing partners address the capital gap.
10. Turn Vacant and Obsolete Buildings Into Homes
Oakland should create a dedicated conversion code and permitting team for obsolete offices, retail space, motels, and other commercial buildings. The City should eliminate unnecessary change-of-use barriers, allow flexible residential layouts where state law permits, remove ground-floor commercial requirements where retail demand does not exist, and expedite conversions that create safe housing.
What the Research Shows
Study after study shows that adding housing reduces rent pressure that helps middle and lower income households.
Kate Pennington, UC Berkeley - “Does Building New Housing Cause Displacement? The Supply and Demand Effects of Construction in San Francisco.”
Using San Francisco data and a quasi-experimental research design, Pennington finds that new housing reduced nearby rents and reduced the risk that existing renters would be displaced
Asquith, Mast & Reed - Review of Economics and Statistics - “Local Effects of Large New Apartment Buildings in Low-Income Areas.”
The authors find that new apartment construction in low-income neighborhoods reduced rents in nearby existing buildings relative to comparison areas.
Read the Asquith, Mast & Reed study
Evan Mast - Journal of Urban Economics - “The Effect of New Market-Rate Housing Construction on the Low-Income Housing Market.”
By tracking tens of thousands of moves, Mast shows how new housing creates moving chains that quickly reach below-median-income neighborhoods, freeing existing homes across the housing market.
Glaeser & Gyourko - Journal of Economic Perspectives - “The Economic Implications of Housing Supply.”
This widely cited review explains how restrictions on housing supply create scarcity and drive housing prices above construction costs, while also recognizing that very low-income households still require direct assistance.
Read the Glaeser & Gyourko study
Gyourko & Molloy - Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics - “Regulation and Housing Supply.”
This major literature review concludes that restrictive land-use regulation generally raises housing prices, reduces construction, and makes housing supply less responsive to demand.
Read the Gyourko & Molloy review
The principle is simple: protect tenants, subsidize housing where the market cannot serve people adequately, and stop making homes artificially scarce.