Recently, the Building an Affordable California Act (BACA)campaign announced in a media release it had submitted nearly one million signatures in order to qualify the measure for the November 2026 statewide ballot. Over 100 organizations, including CCAH, have joined the coalition behind the measure, underscoring the level of interest in tackling delays that drive up the cost of affordable housing and infrastructure.
“California’s housing affordability crisis is being made worse by seemingly never-ending delays,” said Jenna Abbott, Executive Director of the California Council for Affordable Housing in the press release. “When affordable housing takes years to approve, costs rise, financing becomes harder to secure, and fewer projects get built. BACA will help create a clearer, faster path to delivering the affordable housing Californians urgently need.”
For those working in the affordable housing space, the challenge isn’t just high construction costs or limited financing, it’s time delay. The time it takes to move a project, affordable or market rate, from application to approval adds real, tangible cost. Permitting and approval delays alone can add tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of a new single family home and hundreds of thousands to a multi-family affordable project comprised of several hundred units. For affordable housing, where financing is already tight and margins are constrained by design, those added costs can be the difference between feasible and infeasible
For affordable housing developers, predictability is everything. The Act proposes to establish clearer guardrails. Agencies would be required to approve or deny projects within defined timelines, and public comment periods would be structured but still preserved. Legal challenges would also move more quickly, with courts required to resolve cases within a set timeframe. None of this eliminates scrutiny, it simply brings more discipline and accountability to the process.
Affordable housing has long benefited from partnerships like the one CCAH formed with Cal Chamber to support the measure. When we partner beyond our immediate sector and collaborate with other stakeholders, we can advance shared priorities. When there is overlap in goals, particularly around reducing costs and accelerating delivery, those partnerships can be powerful.
Engaging in this conversation is about ensuring that affordable housing is part of the solution and that any changes to the approval process actually work for the projects our members are trying to deliver.