By Holden Weisman
Director of Policy & Advocacy, Habitat Greater San Francisco
Our advocacy is literally taking us places! Habitat Greater San Francisco staff and I have been pounding the pavement recently from San Francisco to Washington, DC all so we increase the supply of affordable homes for first-time homebuyers and have the resources to build them. For this advocacy blog post, I’ve got some highlights from some recent advocacy events, ways for you to take easy advocacy actions to support CalHome, and a new report with unique options and innovative concepts for how we can potentially build more housing units faster.
Standing up for CalHome
From Left to Right: Holden Weisman, Director of Policy and Advocacy, Dina, Habitat GSF Homeowner, Belinda Sullivan, Director of Volunteer and Partnership Development, and Haley, Dina’s daughter.
February kicked off in a whirlwind of two major events back-to-back—Habitat for Humanity California’s Advocacy Day in Sacramento and Habitat for Humanity International’s Habitat on the Hill in DC. I’m incredibly lucky to have joined Affiliates from across the state and the nation for these events, both of which moved me beyond words by being surrounded by the hundreds of equally dedicated and passionate Habitat advocates. I’m even luckier that I was joined by Habitat GSF homeowners at both events who took significant time out of their lives to travel to our state and federal capitals to deliver firsthand their stories of what it meant to become a Habitat homeowner and the impact it had on their lives.
From Left to Right: Holden Weisman, Director of Policy and Advocacy, Denise, Habitat GSF Homeowner, and Angelica Resendez, VP of Homeownership and Community Engagement.
As an advocacy professional, I do my best to deliver the big picture facts and data on the challenges we face and the support we need to build affordable homeownership opportunities. But all the facts and figures in the world will never match the value of stories delivered by homeowners themselves, sharing how dramatically homeownership can change your life for the better and build a more prosperous future for families. I’m deeply grateful to Denise for joining our cohort in Sacramento and to Dina and Haley for flying across the country to share their journey in DC.
Amidst the fun (at least to me!) of these events, we teamed up to make some serious asks of our legislators. Our DC advocacy took us across the Capitol for a constituent coffee with California Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, and meetings with staff of several members of the House of Representatives from our service area, including Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Jared Huffman. Staff, board members, homeowners, and volunteers from affiliates around the country presented a strong united voice to support HFHI and initiatives to boost the supply of affordable homes for ownership and the federal resources to help make that happen. It certainly helped for staff and Members to see all of us walking around in our brightly colored Habitat scarves to make a memorable impact!
In Sacramento, we delivered the message loud and clear to our legislators that CalHome—California’s only funding program dedicated to affordable homeownership production and preservation—is at serious risk after once again receiving no allocation in the Governor’s current budget proposal. We demanded throughout the day that CalHome must be funded with $500 million in the 2026-27 State Budget. And we continue to demand this action.
Now is the time to stand up and make your voice heard by telling Governor Newsom and your legislators that we must fully fund CalHome with $500 million. There’s a super easy way for you to do just that right now: with a couple of minutes of your time and a few clicks, you’ll be able to send emails directly to the Governor, your Assemblymember, and your Senator asking them to support CalHome. I encourage you to take this simple step today to increase our strength in numbers and be counted among your fellow advocates who have already made it perfectly clear that CalHome must be funded in the budget.
Coalitions and collective action
Habitat GSF’s advocacy doesn’t stop with any individual action I might take or that we as an organization sign our name onto. Given the uphill fight we’re facing to fund CalHome, we absolutely need our allies to stand alongside us. Over the past month, I’ve had the pleasure of deepening our relationship with fellow members and staff of Call Marin Home, a coalition of housing advocates and organizations working across Marin County, to recruit Marin housing organizations to be those allies and register their support. As a result, 13 coalition organizations officially signed onto our joint letter to Governor Newsom once again demanding $500 million be allocated specifically for CalHome in the final budget. I am especially thankful for the leadership and support of Call Marin Home’s Jenny Silva and Carmela Davis for making this happen, and I couldn’t be happier to contribute to the Call Marin Home coalition.
Are modern versions of Sears Catalog Homes the future of affordable housing construction? Maybe…
Sears Modern Homes were mail-order kit houses sold by Sears, Roebuck and Co. between 1908 and 1942, featuring over 370 designs that ranged from bungalows to colonial styles. Over 70,000 homes were sold in North America, shipped by railroad with pre-cut materials, hardware, and instructions for assembly.
On an entirely different note, earlier this month the UC Berkeley Terner Center for Housing Innovation released “Potential Pathways to Scale Innovative Construction Methods in California,” a new report exploring industrialized construction (IC) and factory-built homes (FBH). The idea is relatively simple: With construction costs continuing to rise and current building methods slow to meet the needs of our housing crisis, it’s well past time to figure out how best to add innovative tools to our collective housing production toolbox and change the political and regulatory environments to make FBH a truly feasible option. While the potential solutions offered may not be ideally suited for Habitat GSF’s needs (yet?), they do offer promising options for growing a future-thinking industry that could rapidly increase the speed and scale of housing production.
We know our housing crisis cannot be solved with the static thinking that the way we’ve always built homes is the only way forward. Innovative ideas like FBH should be cultivated to be a solid option alongside traditional stick-built homes. As Habitat GSF embraces new building technologies to deliver homes to future Habitat homeowners, we’ll share our experiences, roadblocks, and potential ways we can help make innovative construction a part of our own catalog.
I also want to hear from you. Share what you think about factory-built homes and other industrialized construction methods as options for future Habitat homes by sending me your comments and ideas at my email below.
Much more advocacy opportunities are on the horizon, and as always, I’ll be here to help you along the way. For now, take action ASAP to support CalHome, and please reach out to me at hweisman@habitatgsf.org with any questions or comments.
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