“This is exactly what the Housing BOOM Act will do. This act focuses on building affordable housing for families and workers, increasing funding for programs that support our most vulnerable residents and revitalizing underused spaces for housing and for critical services,” said San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie.
Bay Area, CA — In case you missed it, U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) unveiled the Housing BOOM (Building Occupancy Opportunities for Millions) Act, legislation aimed at spurring a new boom in housing construction and tackling the housing affordability crisis. The legislation will help address the root causes of housing affordability, including the lack of housing supply and rising rents.
At a press conference in San Francisco, Schiff was joined by San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and additional local leaders at a newly opened affordable-housing complex to roll out his legislation.
Later in the day, in Oakland, Schiff joined Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee and U.S. Representative Lateefah Simon (D-Calif-12) for a tour of Flicker, a new affordable mixed-use housing complex which will consist of 76 affordable housing units, essential health care services, and the largest Native American cultural community center in the region. Schiff highlighted his efforts to help address the root causes of housing affordability.
See coverage below:
NBC Bay Area: Sen. Adam Schiff unveils affordable housing proposal in San Francisco
A California senator says he’s got a new plan to address California’s affordable housing crisis.
Friday, Senator Adam Schiff arrived in the Bay Area to unveil legislation meant to boost new housing construction and tackle some of the many challenges for those trying to make it in the Bay.
Senator Adam Schiff came to San Francisco, one of America’s most expensive cities, to roll out his new affordable housing legislation.
“This is legislation that would make a massive new investment in building affordable homes for middle income and lower income families to make it possible for young people to own a home or be able to pay their rent,” Schiff said.
Schiff says the price of renting or owning a home is creating an unfair burden for too many families, since many are now spending more than 30% of their monthly income on their home.
He also says solving the crisis has to involve building more housing, particularly for America’s middle class, and that’s what his legislation aims to do.
“It would make the largest expansion of the low-income tax credit ever with triple the size of low-income tax credit but also importantly it would invest a substantial amount in building work force housing just like this,” Schiff said.
He unveiled the legislation at the Sophie Maxwell building in the city.
“It has 105 units, it has studios, one bedrooms and two bedrooms and it is targeted and limited and permanently affordable for working class San Franciscans, the people we build housing for,” said Enrique Landa, managing partner at Fifth Space.
“This is exactly what the Housing BOOM Act will do. This act focuses on building affordable housing for families and workers, increasing funding for programs that support our most vulnerable residents and revitalizing underused spaces for housing and for critical services,” said San Francisco mayor Daniel Lurie.
The legislation also aims to increase rental assistance, long term housing solutions and boost funds for “homeless to housed” programs.
One of the key questions the senator was asked was “Does it have support from the other side of the aisle?”
“Not yet. I certainly hope that we will get bipartisan support for a massive investment in new housing like this,” Schiff responded.
NBC Los Angeles: Breaking Down Barriers for Building Affordable Housing
Nolan: Welcome back. Talking with us, Senator Adam Schiff at his office earlier this week in Washington about his new legislation regarding housing.
[…]
Nolan: Housing is normally thought of as a local issue. In California, it’s become a state issue. What does this bill do? And how does it accomplish it?
Schiff: I think we’re seeing important changes at the state and local level when it comes to housing in the sense of breaking down some of the barriers to building housing, building it more quickly. And that’s vitally important, but it’s also a resource question. One of the things that has really struck me traveling up and down the state over the last two or three years is not only what a major issue this is, and I would say it really tops the affordability agenda, the affordability problem that families face, they just simply can’t afford a home. When I was born, the average age of someone buying a new home was 23. Today it’s 40. That says so much about how things have changed. And in order to address that, and to address homelessness, which is such a recurrent epidemic-like problem, we need to build massive amounts of housing. No tinkering around the edges, no small program here, adjustment there is going to really solve this problem. We need a lot more supply. And one thing the federal government can do is not necessarily micromanage what happens at the local level, I don’t think we want to try to do that. But provide some of the incentives, provide some of the resources in the form of tax credits that make it pencil out for developers to build housing that’s affordable. They can build housing for luxury customers, that pencils out. But affordable housing doesn’t pencil out for a lot of developers, we can help change that. There’s a low-income housing tax credit, for example, that– half the projects in California applied for and were denied because it’s capped. You lift that cap, and you could potentially double the new housing in California.
Nolan: And that’s what you’d do?
Schiff: We would triple the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. We would also establish a multi-billion-dollar grant program to build middle income housing and workforce housing. This is something the federal government, I think, can do, needs to do. It doesn’t get us involved in local land use decisions but nevertheless makes it possible to build massive amounts of homes. And I would like to see my party in particular, be the party of the next housing boom in America. Where, like after World War II, when we built millions of new homes for returning GIs, we do that again for ordinary families.
San Francisco Examiner: With new bill, Schiff seeks postwar-esque housing boom
U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff stood atop a newly opened affordable-housing complex in the Dogpatch neighborhood Friday to roll out legislation he said will increase housing availability and affordability throughout the United States.
During a press conference at the Sophie Maxwell Building, Schiff said the bill he introduced Friday will lead to the rapid construction of millions of new homes, combat homelessness, provide tenant support and improve access to federal housing for those who speak limited English.
To illustrate his point, Schiff called attention to California’s attempts to boost the quantity of affordable housing.
“Housing that is affordable housing that meets the needs of families up and down the state of California, indeed all over the country … We need another housing boom in America,” Schiff said. “In the same way that after World War II, we built millions of new homes for returning GIs at an affordable price — we need to do that again.”
Housing is a fiercely contested topic, not just in San Francisco but across the country. Democrats are using the issue to help draw clear lines between their economic programs and those of the Republicans.
President Donald Trump has called the Democrats’ use of the word “affordability” a “con job,” though there’s growing evidence many Americans are clamoring for reduced living costs. Recent polling by Politico showed that 46 percent of Americans have begun to blame Trump for the rising cost of living, the news website reported this week. Those polled also said they couldn’t remember another period during which living costs were worse.
Schiff said he hopes the Housing Boom Act receives bipartisan support, and he said Republicans serious about reducing housing costs for Americans will participate.
When asked whether he’s concerned that Trump’s attacks on “affordability” could scare away potential Republican backers, Schiff said the derogatory remarks by the president “about the struggles people are facing just shows how out of touch he is with what regular families are confronting.”
San Francisco Chronicle: Sen. Adam Schiff uses S.F. affordable project to launch housing act, despite long odds in Congress
The raging debate in Washington D.C. over the rising cost of living was front and center at the Potrero Power Station on Friday as California U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff used an affordable housing complex there as the backdrop to announce legislation that he said would bring a housing construction boom similar to the one seen after World War II.
The 48-page legislation — a long shot because it will need Republican support in order to pass — is called the Housing BOOM (Building Occupancy Opportunity for Millions) Act. It proposes a massive expansion of the 9% federal low-income housing tax credits used to fund affordable housing. It would create a $10 billion annual loan fund and a $5 million annual grant program to expand affordable housing for middle-income families.
“The economy is simply not working for millions of people,” Schiff said. “Unlike the Great Depression, the problem is not that people are unemployed. The problem is people are working and they still can’t afford a place to live.”
Schiff made the remarks standing on the rooftop garden of a new 105-unit building at the Potrero Power Station named after former Supervisor Sophie Maxwell, who fought to shut down the natural gas and diesel burning power station. The workforce housing complex is the first building to open as part of a 23-acre Potrero Power Station redevelopment plan that will eventually include 2,600 homes and 1.2 million square feet of commercial space.
Trump has zigzagged on the question of the rising cost of living, calling himself the “affordability president” one day and then dismissing the whole issue as “a con job” and “fake narrative” propagated by Democrats the next.
“It’s a con job. I think affordability is the greatest con job,” Trump said Wednesday, adding that it “does not mean anything to anybody.”
On Friday, Schiff conceded that he has not lined up any Republican support needed to pass the bill. But he said he thinks GOP lawmakers will have no choice but to embrace legislation that revives the country’s residential construction industry in order to bring down the cost of housing.
“What it will come down to is whether Republicans are serious about building new housing, whether they are serious about bringing down the cost of housing. If they are not, they won’t have much interest,” he said. “There is no dealing with the high cost of living, there is no meeting the promises the President made during his campaign unless we are building a lot more housing.”
Schiff said he hopes that this bill “will prompt my Republican friends to understand the affordability problem that is facing families right where they live.”
“But as we have seen in the health care debate, as Democrats have pushed to bring down the cost of health care, Republicans have found it necessary to respond,” he said.
The announcement of the legislation doubled as a celebration of the $50 million Sophie Maxwell Building, which is affordable to households making between $55,000 and $110,000 a year. The first families started moving in last month, including a restaurant manager in the neighborhood who was previously commuting 90 minutes a day, according to project developer Enrique Landa.
Landa said that the project would have not been possible if his group had not taken advantage of a seldom used 2008 bond-recycling program from the California Housing Finance Agency. The program allows builders to obtain up-front cash by reusing tax-exempt bonds from earlier projects, which would otherwise expire, to fund new affordable housing.
“It was a hard process. It took us five banks, six law firms, three consulting firms, a nonprofit — you name it,” he said.
It should not be that hard to build affordable housing, Schiff said. He said his parents were able to buy their first home for $18,500, which was his father’s annual salary as a clothing salesman.
Maxwell, the former supervisor the development is named after, also harked back to a time when working families could get a foothold in California cities. She said her mother and aunt were able to buy a two-flat building in San Francisco on the salary of a laundry worker and a housekeeper. That allowed Maxwell to become an environmental activist and eventually an elected official.
“They bought it. They did it. They invested in San Francisco. And now I will forever be in the annals or our city because of that,” she said, adding that Schiff’s bill is “what we need to build cities.”
“Why are our schools struggling? Because there are no kids in them,” she said. “We need people in our cities. We heed every kind of person there is in our cities.”
SFGate: Sen. Adam Schiff Announces Housing Proposal At Development Site
U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, D-California, stood on the rooftop of an affordable housing development in San Francisco on Friday to introduce new legislation aimed at boosting construction.
“We need to be building a lot more housing all throughout California — housing that is affordable, housing that meets the needs of families up and down the state of California, and indeed, all over the country,” he said in a speech.
His Housing BOOM Act – Building Occupancy Opportunity for Millions Act – would triple the size of federal low-income housing tax credits.
“This is legislation that would make a massive new investment in building affordable homes for middle-income and lower-income families, to make it possible for young people to own a home or be able to pay their rent,” Schiff said.
Schiff announced his legislation alongside San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, former Supervisor Sophie Maxwell, and Potrero Power Station developer Enrique Landa.
They stood on the roof of the Sophie Maxwell Building, a new affordable housing project at the site of the Potrero Power Station.
The redevelopment project is transforming the space of a former power plant into a large-scale, mixed-use area. Maxwell helped fight to close the polluting power plant when she was supervisor.
Lurie said that the apartment building, which opened in October, is the type of housing project that could be replicated across the country through Schiff’s legislation.
“This is exactly what the Housing BOOM Act will do,” Lurie said. “The investments that the Housing BOOM Act would bring to San Francisco are invaluable, and I’m proud to support Senator Schiff’s initiative to improve housing and development in San Francisco and across California.”
The act would also allocate $10 billion in an annual loan fund and $5 million in an annual grant program for middle-income housing.
“This bill will massively increase the federal incentives to build housing that people can afford,” Schiff said. “It will provide new revenue sources, new means of making it possible.”
Getting the act passed in Congress may be a challenge since Republicans control both the House and the Senate.
But with affordability and the cost of living being one of the top concerns for many Americans, Schiff is hoping that the issue will receive more bipartisan support.
“I hope that this bill will prompt my Republican friends to understand the affordability problem that is confronting families first and foremost,” Schiff said. “There’s no meeting the promises the president made during his campaign unless we’re building a lot more housing.”
CBS News Bay Area: Sen. Schiff Unveils Housing BOOM Act
Goodrich: Today, Senator Adam Schiff toured two new affordable housing projects in San Francisco and Oakland to unveil his Housing BOOM Act. The new measure aims to boost housing construction across the U.S. If passed, it would expand Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, create a housing construction fund, and make affordable housing options more accessible.
Schiff (in clip): There is nothing preventing us from making the same kind of massive investment in building new homes, millions of new homes throughout the country every year.
Goodrich: Congresswoman Lateefah Simon, who represents the East Bay, says she will be introducing a companion legislation in the House of Representatives.
FOX40: Schiff Unveils Housing BOOM Act
Harryman: California Senator Adam Schiff is introducing new legislation that he says will increase housing availability and affordability in the Bay Area, as well as across California and in fact, the entire United States.
Carroll: FOX40 contributor Lindsey Ford has more on the Senator’s remarks he made earlier today during his address at an affordable housing complex in San Francisco that could be impacted by the Housing BOOM Act.
Lurie (in clip): The investments that the Housing BOOM Act would bring to San Francisco are invaluable, and I’m proud to support Senator Schiff’s initiative to improve housing and development in San Francisco and across California.
Ford: Friday in San Francisco’s Dog Patch neighborhood, Mayor Daniel Lurie, California Senator Adam Schiff, and developers of the new Sophie Maxwell Affordable Housing complex highlighted the Housing BOOM Act and the urgent need for affordable homes in the city. Senator Schiff says the Housing BOOM Act would lower costs for renters and provide support for first time home buyers.
Schiff (in clip): On the strength of that single income of $18,000, my parents bought our first home for $18,000. When I was born, the average age of a home buyer was 23 years old. Today it is 40 years old. The economy is simply not working for millions of people.
KTVU: Sen. Schiff Introduces “Housing BOOM Act”
Rendon: Senator Adam Schiff in the Bay Area today unveiling what he’s calling a landmark proposal to address the housing crisis. Schiff released details of his plan along with San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and former supervisor Sophie Maxwell. They made the announcement from a new affordable housing building named after Maxwell. Schiff plan is called the Housing BOOM Act. He says it would expand federal low-income housing tax credits to fund affordable housing projects. The bill would need bipartisan support to pass.
Lee: Senator Schiff also toured a new mixed use housing complex in Oakland, with Mayor Barbara Lee and other East Bay leaders. He praised their efforts to address the housing crisis.
Schiff: I’m so encouraged by how you’re breaking down all those barriers here, because I see these new projects going up, I see these new grounds being broken, and it’s wonderful to see Oakland on the move.
Lee: Senator Schiff said there should be hundreds of thousands of new affordable homes being built every year here in California, if officials are serious about solving the housing crisis.
State Affairs: Schiff unveils Housing BOOM Act, citing California’s crisis as national warning
California Sen. Adam Schiff, unveiled a major federal housing proposal Friday, pitching it as a nationwide response to soaring housing costs and mounting supply shortages, challenges that have reached crisis levels in California and are now mirrored across much of the country.
The Housing BOOM Act, short for Building Occupancy Opportunities for Millions, is centered on expanding the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), a core financing tool for affordable housing development. Schiff’s plan calls for what would be a significant LIHTC expansion, aimed at freeing up stalled projects that are currently delayed by funding gaps.
“We need to ignite a housing boom in the United States — one that meets the urgency of our current crisis,” Schiff said. “Just as we built millions of homes for returning veterans after World War II, we now need to launch a similarly ambitious effort to expand the housing supply and make life more affordable for American families.”
The bill would also establish a new federal fund to support construction of housing for middle-income earners and includes measures to reduce homelessness, strengthen tenant protections and reinforce key housing programs.
Schiff’s move comes as Democrats double-down on an affordability agenda, in the week that President Trump referred to it as a ‘con job’. During a cabinet meeting, Tuesday, Trump said, “They just say the word. It doesn’t mean anything to anybody. They just say it — affordability. I inherited the worst inflation in history. There was no affordability. Nobody could afford anything.”
In California, the housing affordability crisis is especially acute. California’s median home price climbed to $860,300 in October 2025, according to the California Association of Realtors — more than double the national median of $391,800, based on data from the National Association of Realtors. More than half of renters in the state spend over 30% of their income on housing, and nearly 30% are rent-burdened. California also accounts for nearly a third of the nation’s homeless population, despite representing only about 12% of the U.S. population, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
“Of all the affordability challenges Americans face, housing is the most acute. This is certainly the case in California, but it’s true across much of the country,” Schiff told the Los Angeles Times. “I want to see the Democratic Party be the party advocating for the next housing boom in America.”
The legislation follows a series of moves in California aimed at streamlining the development process. This year, the state enacted new reforms to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) through legislation authored by Sen. Scott Wiener. That law allows certain affordable and mixed-income housing projects to bypass CEQA review if they meet certain requirements. Supported by Gov. Gavin Newsom, the measure was part of a broader push to increase production and ease regulatory hurdles.
Rep. Lateefah Simon, D-Calif., who is planning on bringing a companion bill to the House, said that Schiff’s bill could improve the lives of struggling renters and families.
“Secure, affordable housing transforms lives, it opens doors to opportunity,” Simon said. “In California and across the country, the housing shortage is deep and growing. This bill will expand housing supply, offer real solutions to homelessness, strengthen tenant protections, and support veterans and low-income families with the resources they need.”
Nationally, the United States faces a shortage of more than 7 million affordable rental units for low-income households, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. In California, the state housing department estimates at least 2.5 million new homes must be built by 2031, including one million affordable units, to keep pace with demand.
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