California State SenateCandidate for District 11

First off, I am the only candidate in this race to reject contributions from the real estate lobby. Meanwhile, my opponent is the most real estate backed politician in California. As well, there is only one renter in the entire state legislature. If elected, I would be the second. 

My plan for affordable housing is endorsed by the San Francisco Tenants Union, Affordable Housing Alliance, and Community Tenants Association and it is called California Homes for All, a fresh approach to California’s housing crisis, focusing on keeping people in their homes during the pandemic, building affordable housing, and prioritizing the needs of our communities before the profits of real estate developers. It starts from the premise that our state’s housing affordability crisis cannot be remedied by relying on real estate developers and the private market alone. 

My $100 billion California Housing Emergency Fund would fund

✔ Removing at least 200,000 existing units from the speculative market and stabilizing their affordability at no-to-low income levels through acquisitions over ten years.

✔ Building at least 100,000 new publicly- or non-profit-owned deeply affordable green homes over ten years, including mixed income social housing. Development would be targeted in cities and regions most acutely facing the affordable housing crisis evidenced by high levels of homelessness, and prioritize building along public transit lines and walkable places. New units would be equipped to rely on electricity generated from renewable energy sources.

✔ Rehabilitating existing publicly owned housing, including energy efficiency and renewable electricity upgrades.

Other parts of my plan include:

✔ Allowing local cities to protect their residents from price gouging and displacement by repealing the Costa-Hawkins and Ellis Acts.

✔ Expanding San Francisco’s Right to Counsel to the state level, providing a universal right to legal counsel for anyone facing eviction.

✔ Establishing a rental registry and landlord licensing structure to promote a fair, competitive housing market and expand regulations on predatory bad actors.

✔ Funding for autonomous community planning to empower low-income communities to create land use plans that address the need for affordable green homes and healthy neighborhoods.

✔ Introducing an Anti-Displacement Act to require local planning processes to evaluate projected socioeconomic impacts resulting from housing developments in vulnerable frontline communities, including preference in new housing developments for anyone displaced under the Ellis Act and Owner Move-In’s in that same area.

✔ Legalizing new public housing by repealing Article 34 of the California Constitution.

✔ Incentivize or require the wealthiest neighborhoods and regions in California to create more housing at all levels of affordability, to redress the historic impact of exclusionary housing policies.

✔ Require balanced development of housing commensurate with job growth that corresponds to wages of local workers.

✔ Prioritize 100% affordable housing development on publicly owned surplus lands.

I support the work of the League of Women Voters and California tribes in their efforts to remove the four dams along the Klamath river. If elected, I would be the first Indigenous woman elected to the California Legislature, and as someone whose Native grandmother was displaced by the construction of a dam in North Dakota, the issue of water rights and Indigenous rights is personal for me. Water supply in California must be balanced between people, agriculture, and preservation of the environment. I look forward to working on these issues and conferencing with groups like the League of Women Voters to meet all of our needs.

Scientists have warned us that climate change is irreversible at this point--that we are in the sixth mass extinction. As a state, we have completely failed to stay on target to reduce our emissions by 40% by 2030. Even in a state as Blue as ours, refineries--like the Chevron refinery in Richmond--fill the lungs of Black and Brown children with pollutants and use fundamentally flawed cap-and-trade mechanisms to get away with it. Even in a state as Blue as ours, 40 fracking permits were approved this year. We need a Just Transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. That means centering frontline communities, including Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color facing environmental racism. It means ensuring workers aren’t left behind; and it means protecting the creatures with whom we share this beautiful state. 

I am proud to be endorsed by the California Environmental Justice Alliance Action Fund, the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, and Sunrise Movement Bay Area.

The transportation sector remains California's largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for about 40% of the state's total. This pandemic has exposed the fragility of our transit system caused by an over-reliance on regressive sales taxes for revenue. If we want to reduce our emissions in California by 40 percent in 10 years, we need to mobilize billions of dollars to expand, protect, and connect all bike lanes; improve pedestrian safety; and make public transportation entirely free. You know who should pay for that? The fossil fuel companies like Chevron who knew about climate change decades ago and kept that research under lock and key to protect their profits. But that won’t be enough. You know who else should pay for a Green New Deal? The rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft who not only actively exploit their workers, but whose cars have life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions that dwarf those from almost all other modes--including a private car. I am proud to be the only candidate in this race to not be funded by Uber and Lyft or the candidate of choice for Chevron.

• Phase out ALL oil drilling, not just fracking, by 2024

• Fund green jobs to make the just transition for workers from extraction to solar, wind, and other forms of renewable energy

• Public takeover of PG&E that balances equity and costs nothing extra to utility payers and workers alike

• An Indigenous Wildfire Task Force

• Fund affordable housing near jobs and transit hubs so working class people aren’t displaced from cities and forced to commute 2 hours to work

• Restoreour soil by transitioning from big corporate agriculture to small scale, pesticide-free organic farming (both for the sake of consumers and farm workers)

• Free public transportation for all

I am the only candidate in this race to pledge to refuse both direct and indirect support from fossil fuel corporations, and actually uphold that pledge.

I am proud to be endorsed by two of the cofounders of Black Lives Matter, The Bayview Newspaper, the San Francisco Latino Democratic Club, and Bay Rising Action Fund especially for my stances on safety and justice.

True public safety doesn’t come from the barrel of a gun or the threat of caging and family separation. We need to stop shoveling ever more of our public money into prisons and policing and instead start investing in building up stable communities. Instead of creating new punishments as “solutions” for every social problem, we need to tackle the root causes that underlie those problems: the poverty, alienation, and desperation that lead to antisocial and harmful behavior. My whole police and criminal justice platforms can be found on my website at jackieforsenate.com.

• End money bail without racially- or economically-biased replacements.

• End slavery, and pay incarcerated fire fighters competitive wages.

• Reduce the risk of death penalty by COVID-19: release the elderly and people who have nearly completed their sentences.

• End child prisons, close all juvenile detention facilities.

• Repeal the death penalty. 

• End all mandatory minimums for nonviolent crimes. 

• Fully decriminalize sex work

• Reduce the prison population by 50% and close 10 state prisons by 2030.

• De-criminalize poverty and homelessness.

• Extend Cal grants for people in prison.

• Drop life imprisonment without parole (LWOP) and permanently end the death penalty.

• Establish a new sentencing commission for CA.

• Appoint more community members to the Board of Parole Hearings.

• Ban racist gang injunctions and gang enhancements. 

• Transform policing in California. See my 10-point Defund and Disarm policing platform at jackieforsenate.com/police