This year’s race for Assembly District 14 race provides an interesting perspective on how progressive housing policies have evolved since the 1970s, as increasingly expensive housing has exacerbated homelessness, Proposition 13 entrenched disparity in homeownership between generations, and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) become a means to curtail housing developments.
While both candidates, incumbent Buffy Wicks and challenger Margot Smith, consider themselves to be progressives, they have opposing approaches to the issue.
Margot Smith is running against incumbent Buffy Wicks for State Assembly in the November 2024 election. (Photo courtesy of Margot Smith)
California District 14 Assemblymember Buffy Wicks led the passage of bills addressing housing affordability and families this past term – including a viral moment when she voted for a family leave bill while nursing her newborn – but her opponent Margot Smith, 94, is seeking to reverse Wicks’s modern approaches.
Assembly District 14 contains portions of Alameda and Contra Costa counties from Davis Point along San Pablo Bay in the north to Piedmont in the south. The district’s 500,000 residents are concentrated in in cities such as Oakland, Richmond and Berkeley, where California’s housing shortage is being acutely felt.
Wicks is the heavy favorite to win in November after receiving nearly 3 out of 4 votes in the March primary. As one of the most powerful California assemblymembers heading the appropriations committee, she authored bills to promote middle-income housing production that cut red tape for affordable projects and introduced ballot measures to fund housing projects.
“For far too long, we’ve been unable to meet the urgent housing needs of Californians. The bills I’ve put forward tackle the root issues that keep housing from being built,” Wicks wrote in an email to Bay Area News Group. “But I also know that building housing needs to be coupled with affordability measures and renter protections.”
Smith received just 17.1% of the vote in the March primary, and is not considered to pose a serious threat to Wicks’ re-election. Still, she said she’s running because she believes all incumbents should be challenged. Her campaign has emphasized a return to traditional housing policy that ends “high-rise market-rate” housing, which she described as a gift to developers.
“The reason I’m running is because I oppose the housing policy that’s coming out of Sacramento,” Smith said at a Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club meeting which she posted to her YouTube channel in August.
Smith’s campaign website states her first act in office would seek to reform Proposition 13 by keeping taxes low on “homes like mine” and ending its protections for properties owned by corporations like Chevron and Disney. In addition, she would seek to restore power to CEQA and local city councils to control where and what housing gets developed.
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But Wicks said the spiraling housing affordability and homelessness crises demand a response that attacks the problems “from all angles – protecting the stock of affordable housing we have, creating new affordable housing, and keeping current homeowners and renters in their homes,” her campaign website states.
“AB 2011, my landmark housing bill signed into law in 2022, solves major delays in housing development by cutting red tape and shaving years off approval processes,” Wick wrote. “Another two bills of mine were signed into law last month by Governor Newson, AB 2243 and AB 1893, that will keep driving real, structural change to solve our housing crisis.”
Smith’s motivation, however, stems from the student housing development at People’s Park in Berkeley, which required state supreme court approval after feverish opposition from residents who wanted to protect its historical value in civil rights movements.
Yet while Berkeley is famous for its progressive stances – socially, economically and environmentally – it is also the founder of exclusionary zoning laws from the early 1900s that implemented single-family zoning and racial covenants that protected housing prices.
Though Berkeley has upzoned much of the city this year for more development, Assembly District 14 voters will have the opportunity to rechart the course of housing development across the East Bay.
“Housing has always been a top priority for me,” Wicks wrote. “Every Californian — seniors, families, veterans, young people — deserves housing security.”