Reflection by Laurel Hollis
On August 17, 2026, leaders from the Housing and Homelessness LOC’s State Policy Committee
met with staff members from the offices of State Senators Ashby and Calderon to make a final request for their support of several bills. Two bills, AB1633 (Haney) – Taxation of Private Detention Facilities / California Immigrant Resilience Fund; and AB 2465 (Ortega) – State government benefits for Immigration Enforcement Agencies, will work to discourage private businesses from building ICE detention centers in California by making these centers significantly less profitable to build and operate. We also voiced our opposition to SB 802 (Ashby) – Housing for Domestic Violence Victims. This bill was gutted and amended to mandate housing and homelessness service organizations in the Sacramento region to form a joint powers authority, an abrupt shift away from the current organization. SacACT’s opposition is based on our objection to shifting to a mandated JPA at a time when federal funding is being reduced or completely withheld. We believe this will lead to a crisis for managers of the federal funds. It will cause costly delays and threatens to leave more people homeless.
The second group of legislation all bolster the growth of manufactured homes in the state: AB 306 (Schultz and Hadwick) Building regulations; AB 1815 (Wicks) – Housing project building standards; AB 2012 (Hoover) Shipping procedures for factory built housing; AB 2058 (Harabedian) – Site inspection of factory-built housing projects; AB 2166 (Carrillo) – Financial support of factory built housing projects; and AB 2185 (Quirk-Silva) – State funding of factory built housing projects.
I’ve participated in several Housing and Homelessness LOC Lobby Days over the last few years.
This one was different from the others because we had more time to spend with each other between our two visits with staffers and other legislators’ offices to drop off folders with our written positions on bills. I’d previously met everyone who came that day, but I never had much familiarity with their lives or reasons for getting involved in SacACT. Having a deeper understanding of my fellow leaders made me feel more like a member of a team with a clear intention to improve the lives of our fellow human beings, not just an assortment of acquaintances.
During this and the last Lobby Day, we posed a question to each staffer: “SacACT believes that housing is a human right. What does the member believe about that?” The first time I heard this statement was in a presentation Assemblymember Alex Lee made on “social housing”. He described posing it to fellow Democratic Assemblymembers, resulting in stunned silence. They believed that relief from hunger was a human right, but had never thought about every person having a home to prepare and eat that food, sleep and prepare themselves to work and be part of a family and a community being a human right. We haven’t yet heard any thoughtful responses from the staffers about their members’ views, but we plan on continuing to ask the question. We hope that introducing this concept may spark shifts in perspective and more empathetic responses to the difficulties housing insecure and homeless people experience every day.
