Terry Taplin

Affordable Housing

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