I have experienced our City’s housing crisis painfully from multiple perspectives. My working mother raised my sister and me in low-income housing. My partner and I lost our rent-controlled apartment in Southside Telegraph weeks before our wedding. Due to the high cost of housing in Berkeley and my needing to provide bedside elder care for my mother, I now live separately from my spouse who lives with roommates in Richmond. One of my grandmothers is a homeowner in South Berkeley, and my other grandmother sold her home in West Berkeley. Keeping families in our community requires a serious commitment to the production, preservation, and protection of affordable homes—and evidence-based strategies for reducing the cost of housing for a wide range of incomes.
Here are some strategies I’m currently pursuing:
- Stronger enforcement on the City’s ban on source-of-income discrimination.
- Social housing pilot program to promote reparative justice investments in public housing, long-term leasehold ownership and community land trusts in a fiscally-self sustaining agency.
- Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA), helping tenants purchase their homes to maintain long-term affordability with the help of limited-equity housing cooperatives and community land trusts.
- To increase the production of homes for middle and low-income households, I support:
- Streamlined and secure funding for climate-friendly affordable housing that provides high-paying union construction jobs.
- City-wide quadplex zoning and density bonuses, eliminating exclusionary zoning and prioritizing affordable housing while increasing the supply of homes for all incomes, especially in affluent, high-opportunity neighborhoods.
- Increased funding for permanent supportive housing in the city’s budget.
- Providing resources for low-income homeowners to maintain their homes and remain in the community.
Latest Work
- Councilmember Taplin Proposes Affordable Housing Overlay for Berkeley with Councilmembers Bartlett and Robinson as CosponsorsFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE February 22, 2021 Modeled after a new policy in Cambridge, MA, and a state density bonus established by Assembly Bill 1763 (2019), the proposal would permit up to an additional 6 stories as-of-right for 100% affordable housing in some neighborhoods, one additional story as-of-right in single-family neighborhoods, and aiming for 8 total stories as-of-right […]
- CM Taplin Proposes “Housing as Human Right” Resolution with Social Housing Pilot ProgramFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEFebruary 9, 2021 BERKELEY, CA—City Councilmember Terry Taplin has introduced a resolution to recognize housing as a human right in the City of Berkeley. Cosponsored by Councilmembers Hahn, Harrison, and Mayor Arreguín, the resolution calls for holding city government accountable to this ideal with objective measures for tracking security of tenure and freedom of mobility […]