Affordable Housing: Protecting Tenants and Homeowners Alike from a Tough Market

One of the most critical issues facing the Bay Area economy is our troubled housing market – Kriss understands that keeping housing affordable for working families is the lifeblood of ensuring that we continue to live in such a diverse community. As your Assemblymember, he will fight both for laws to protect tenants, and for legislation to stop the influx of unfair home foreclosures. On the City Council, Kriss fought hard to protect the stock of existing affordable housing, and to obtain funding for new housing – and he worked to make sure that as many of these new units as possible were designated for working families and low-income people. You can count on Kriss to bring progressive leadership to the Assembly to defend tenants and homeowners alike in this tough market – his proven record on affordable housing means we know he'll continue to be a champion not because he says so, but because he's been there before.

Kriss's Priorities

Support Affordable Housing Funding: The state currently offers a number of funds for affordable housing, through project development, service provision, and other housing-related expenses. Proposition 1C most recently created a number of pots of funding for affordable housing development. But the regulations passed by the Legislature may allow for the use of some of this money to essentially subsidize market-rate housing at the expense of affordable units. In Berkeley, Kriss has repeatedly been able to secure $1,000,000 annually from the City's general fund for the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. At the state level, Kriss will work to create incentives for developers to maximize the use of different funding sources in providing the quality affordable housing this state desperately needs.

Fair-share Development: Affordable housing and transit-oriented development should not be feature of only the state's urban areas. Kriss will support legislation that requires all local jurisdictions, rural and urban, to provide their fair share of affordable and transit-oriented housing so that the job-housing balance is met. The state should be incentivizing good development practices and rewarding projects and agencies that provide housing for working families in the area.

Tackling the Foreclosure Crisis: Every day, families find themselves vulnerable to home foreclosures as bad mortgage agreements have begun to rear their ugly heads. California is now among the many states affected by the mortgage crisis. Kriss will work with community advocates, families and legislators in both parties to make sure that lending institutions are held accountable for their end of the bargain. As one of the Berkeley City Council's most outspoken tenant advocates, Kriss will also work to make sure that tenants who are affected by foreclosures by no fault of their own are not unfairly evicted.

Kriss's Track Record

• Directed millions of dollars to the Berkeley Housing Trust Fund to build more affordable housing along transit corridors
• Led the way towards tougher rent control, keeping rent rates stable if tenants stay in the same apartment for several years, protecting tenants from being illegally evicted, ensuring that landlords would make needed repairs to their properties, and funding legal aid and community outreach to tenants
• Before Kriss came on board the Council, from 1990-1994 the pro-landlord majority raised rents in Berkeley by 45%. After Kriss joined the Council, he worked with the pro-tenant majority to make sure rents only went up by 3% over the next two years.
• In his multiple roles on regional transportation Committees, Kriss has been a passionate advocate for Transit Oriented Development and supporting the Transportation and Land Use Coalition's (TALC) advocacy for funding the linkages between Transportation and Land Use
• Authored the City of Berkeley resolutions and legislation to address the home foreclosure crisis at a local, state, and national level.
• Worked directly with several homeowners and lenders to negotiate compromise agreement and avoid individual foreclosure situations locally.