Our progressive politicians are so obsessed with providing housing for homeless people that they’ve ignored all the middle class working people who can’t afford to buy a house in the Bay Area.
Why do homeless people get all the attention when they’re only a minority population priced out of the housing market? The fact is, our cities have huge numbers of hard-working taxpayers who can’t even afford the down payment on a home, much less the mortgage payments. This is hardly news; we hear about it every day and have for years. And yet, progressives don’t seem to give a damn about them. Instead, all their energy goes into providing housing for homeless people. When is the last time you heard Barbara Lee, or Carroll Fife, or Nikki Bas, feel sorry for working people?
It’s strange. How many homeless people are there in the nine-county Bay Area? Estimates vary; somewhere between 8,000 and 39,000. But how many working people will never be able to afford to buy a home? It has got to be in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, from Cupertino to Concord, San Rafael to San Mateo, Livermore to Los Altos, including Oakland. We all know people, especially younger ones, who despair of ever having a home. They want to own their own homes as much as any homeless person does. There’s a good argument that they’re more entitled to home ownership, since—unlike homeless people--they work hard, pay their taxes, obey the law, and are generally good citizens. Yet, to hear it from the progressives, they don’t exist. According to woke ideology, the only people who deserve our help in finding homes are the encampment denizens—the drug addicts, bippers, and malcontents who chose not to participate in our society.
Fortunately, one Democratic legislator in California, Robert Hertzberg, is sponsoring a first-of-its kind ballot initiative that would enable working families and their children to build wealth and remain in California. His "California Middle-Class Homeownership and Family Home Construction Act of 2026” would provide low-interest rate loans to qualified California homebuyers; such loans would require the homebuyer to put down only 3 percent of the purchase price, instead of the 20 percent or more generally required now. This would make homebuying for those of moderate means much easier. The money would come from the sale of twenty-five billion dollars in bonds.
It’s a relatively simple concept that places middle-class people at the forefront of housing policy in California, instead of homeless people. Hertzberg wrote a letter to the California Attorney General only on Sept. 22 asking for his initiative to be placed on the 2026 election ballot. So far, no serious opposition has surfaced, but it can be only a matter of time before homeless advocates begin screeching that their clients are being left behind. The way I see it is, If there’s only so much money available to help some people buy a place to live, it should be invested in working-class, struggling taxpayers, instead of the indigent class that seeks to live off the labor of others.
Steve Heimoff