Public Lands for Affordable Housing Development

One of the challenges in building new affordable homes is acquiring land suitable for housing. In 2019, Governor Newsom took several actions to make state and local public lands available for affordable housing development including:

• Signed an executive order to make excess state land available for affordable housing (Executive Order N-06-19)
• Established criteria to evaluate state-owned land, assess its suitability for affordable housing, and create a digitized map of excess state land (AB 2233, Quirk-Silva, 2022)
• Strengthened the Surplus Land Act and prioritized local surplus land for affordable housing (AB 1486, Ting, 2019)
• Required cities and counties to inventory and report surplus and excess local public lands to include in a statewide inventory (AB 1255, Robert Rivas, 2019)

The Surplus Land Act and the Excess Sites program both aim to make public lands available for affordable housing development, however key differences exist between the two. The Surplus Land Act (Gov. Code, §§ 54220-54234) aims to make locally owned public land that is no longer needed for government purposes available for building affordable homes. For more information on the Surplus Land Act, visit the Local Surplus Land for Affordable Housing section below.

The Excess Sites program aims to identify and prioritize excess state-owned property and aggressively pursue sustainable, innovative, cost-effective housing projects. For more information on the Excess Sites program, visit the Excess State Land for Affordable Housing section below.