The housing debate in California often feels a bit like fighting with your rambling uncle during Thanksgiving dinner. But there’s generally one island of universal agreement in a sea of rage: the need for more affordable housing. 

A recent legislative analysis found that 2.2 million extremely low-income and low-income California households are competing for just 664,000 affordable rental homes. To even come close to meeting demand, the California Department of Housing and Community Development estimated the state needs at least 1 million new affordable units by 2031, including about 47,000 in San Francisco.

Building this level of subsidized affordable housing will be neither easy nor cheap — and there’s lots of competition for limited funds. 

In 2018, voters approved $4 billion in bonds for affordable and veteran housing, all of which was allocated by the end of 2023. California’s Multifamily Housing Program — the state’s primary vehicle for providing developers with low-cost loans to build, rehabilitate and preserve affordable housing — has $9 in requests for every dollar available, a California Budget and Policy Center analysis found.

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Proposition 1, which the state Legislature placed on the November ballot with bipartisan support, would authorize California to issue $11.25 billion in new bonds to create and preserve affordable housing and expand homeownership opportunities. Befitting the broad consensus on the state’s affordability crisis, it has no formal opposition.

The measure is rigidly prescriptive in its allocation of funds.

It allocates $7.2 billion to the Multifamily Housing Program — which the measure’s author, Assembly Member Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, described in an endorsement interview as the “workhorse” of California’s efforts to........

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