Heart and Home is a monthly column by Josh Ishimatsu, Deputy Director of Strategy

Two quick estimates that tell us we need massive amounts of affordable housing funding in our County. I could say what the bottom line number is here in the synopsis but then you wouldn’t have the fun of reading the full column.

In Santa Clara County, we are not building enough affordable housing. And we haven’t been building enough affordable housing for at least the past 50 years. This means we have a huge backlog of need for affordable homes. In this column, I do 2 cocktail napkin calculations (i.e., quick and dirty estimates) to say how many new affordable homes we need in our County and how much money we need to raise locally in order to build the homes we need.

We Need 50,000 More Affordable Homes in Santa Clara County

Per a study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, we need 58,000+ more affordable homes in Santa Clara County. Per the State of California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA), Santa Clara County needs approximately 41,000 new affordable homes by 2031. Cocktail Napkin Calculation #1 is to take these two numbers, average them, round up and say we need 50,000 more affordable homes in Santa Clara County.

We Don’t Have Enough Public Funding to Build the Housing We Need

In June of 2024, I wrote a Heart & Home column about how our current level of public resources for affordable housing are structurally inadequate – that is, we will continue to underproduce affordable housing because we do not have enough money to build the affordable housing that we need.  Back then, I wrote that we needed 5 to 7 times more public funding than what we currently have if we were to meet our RHNA goals.  Since that writing, our local funding situation has gotten worse (we have successfully used up 2016’s County Measure A and San Jose’s Measure E has been diverted) and we are 2 years into the current RHNA cycle and well off the pace of being able to meet our RHNA goals. So the underlying dynamic – the elephant in the room – is even truer now than before.  We do not have the resources available to meet our goals.  And the gap between our resources and our goals is too big to be closed only through streamlining planning/permitting/funding processes or through value engineering/cost cutting (We still should do all these things!  They will help.  But they will only get us a fraction closer to meeting our true need). 

We Need Way More Public Funding for Affordable Housing

The result of Cocktail Napkin Calculation #2 is that we need $10 Billion in new, local, public affordable housing funding. The calculation is $200,000 in local public subsidy per home times the 50,000 new homes number from above. 2016’s Measure A, by comparison, was $950 Million. So, we need roughly 10X of what we passed in 2016. It’s a big and daunting number, I know.  This number is about the local contribution to an affordable housing development – this is money that we will need even if the State of California Veterans and Affordable Housing Bond Act of 2026 passes this November. I’m just going to let this all sink in for a bit and, in my August column, I’m going to talk a little bit about the implications of the number and what we can do from here.