By Vanguard Staff
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Riverside’s decision to reject more than $20 million in state funding for a proposed homeless housing project has become one of the region’s most contentious policy debates, drawing scrutiny from housing advocates and civil rights organizations while highlighting broader challenges facing California’s affordable housing system.
In January, the Riverside City Council voted 4-3 against accepting a $20.1 million state grant that would have converted a Quality Inn motel near the University of California, Riverside, into 114 studio apartments for people experiencing homelessness.
According to a city staff report, the permanent supportive housing project would have provided residents with access to mental health care, addiction counseling, case management and other supportive services.
Supporters argued the project offered a rare opportunity to rapidly expand housing for people experiencing homelessness amid rising housing costs and increasing demand for affordable housing.
Opponents contended that the proposal moved forward without sufficient community input and relied too heavily on California’s Housing First model because residents would not have been required to participate in sobriety programs, addiction treatment or other behavioral health services as a condition of receiving housing.
The dispute escalated after the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy organizations filed complaints alleging the city’s rejection of the project may have violated state anti-discrimination and fair housing laws. The complaints prompted an investigation by California’s Civil Rights Department.
In an interview with UC Riverside News, Stan Oklobdzija, an assistant professor in the School of Public Policy at UC Riverside, said the controversy reflects much larger failures in California’s housing system.
“Homelessness is first and foremost a housing problem,” Oklobdzija said.
He noted that California has a disproportionately large share of the nation’s unsheltered homeless population and attributed the problem to decades of insufficient housing construction in major metropolitan areas.
“California is home to about 50% of America’s unsheltered homeless population because California stopped building new housing in its coastal metros around the 1980s,” Oklobdzija said. “As a result, California metros like Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area consistently rank as some of America’s least affordable when looking at average incomes compared to average home costs.”
Oklobdzija pointed to research showing a strong relationship between housing affordability and homelessness rates.
“Research demonstrates that homelessness rates spike when average housing costs grow beyond about 30% of average incomes,” he said.
He challenged common explanations that focus primarily on substance abuse, climate or other social factors.
“Homelessness rates do not correlate with factors such as drug use, weather, or other factors commonly brought up by both elected officials and laymen,” Oklobdzija said.
While California has invested heavily in homelessness programs, he argued that housing shortages continue to undermine those efforts.
“While California spends quite a bit on social services and provisional housing for the homeless (the Newsom administration spent about $24 billion between 2018 and 2024), high housing costs mean the state is forcing people into homelessness faster than it can transition them out via social services,” he said.
Oklobdzija placed much of the responsibility for the state’s housing shortage on local governments, which retain significant authority over land-use decisions despite recent state efforts to increase housing production.
“The chief culprits behind California’s housing crisis are local governments,” he said.
“Despite a series of bills aimed at wrestling authority away from them that were passed in recent years, most land use policy is made by California cities,” Oklobdzija said. “Until very recently, cities faced little to no penalty for failing to build their fair share of housing; thus, they didn’t.”
According to Oklobdzija, local elected officials often deferred to organized opposition groups that challenged new housing proposals.
“Local elected officials, either because they agreed with them or because they were afraid of crossing them, deferred to local activists who ran pressure campaigns against new housing based on objections about parking, crime, or nebulously defined ‘neighborhood character,’” he said.
“In the aggregate, this failure to build created regional shortages, which in turn drove up housing prices,” Oklobdzija said.
He argued that the Riverside vote demonstrates the broader shortcomings of local control over housing policy.
“Riverside City Council’s rejection of a $20 million state grant is emblematic of the failures of letting local governments handle land use issues,” Oklobdzija said.
According to Oklobdzija, local elected officials are often accountable to a relatively small group of highly engaged voters, many of whom are homeowners and more likely to oppose new development or homeless housing projects.
He noted that Riverside County’s homelessness crisis remains substantial, with approximately 4,200 people experiencing homelessness and about 2,400 living unsheltered. He also said Riverside has permitted significantly fewer housing units than similarly sized cities in states such as Texas, Florida and North Carolina.
Oklobdzija also challenged the way housing debates are often framed.
“It’s incorrect to bin housing into an ‘affordable’ vs. ‘not affordable’ dichotomy,” he said.
He explained that subsidized affordable housing makes up only a small portion of the housing market and generally requires significant public subsidies. Rising construction costs, land prices and financing expenses, he said, make it difficult to build housing that is affordable without government assistance.
Addressing criticism that the project lacked sufficient public engagement, Oklobdzija argued that excessive local opposition has contributed to California’s housing shortage.
“One of the reasons California is in such a dire housing crisis is that local residents feel they should be given a veto over development on property that they do not own,” he said.
Oklobdzija noted that local government actions are publicly noticed under state law and argued that elected officials must balance neighborhood concerns with broader regional housing needs.
The Riverside controversy reflects tensions that have played out across California as cities confront rising homelessness, housing affordability challenges and increasing pressure from state officials to expand housing opportunities. The outcome of the Civil Rights Department investigation could further shape how local governments approach future housing and homelessness projects.
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