Section 50600.

The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:

(a)  The federal Housing and Urban Development Department subsidizes over 147,000 units of California's affordable rental housing. As the owners' obligations expire, more than 19,000 of these units have already been converted to market-rate housing, and an additional 78,000 units are considered at risk of imminent conversion. In addition, more than 7,600 units financed with state and federal low-income housing tax credits will face some risk of conversion as the first generation of tax credit developments reach the expiration of their income and rent restrictions over the next five years. These at-risk units will likely convert to market-rate housing unless they are acquired by organizations that commit to maintaining their affordable rents.

(b)  The loss of these assisted units represents not only a loss of precious affordable housing stock and hardship and potential dislocation for tenants, 40 percent of whom are seniors, but also the loss of billions of dollars of federal housing assistance to California each year.

(c)  This looming loss of affordable rental housing is exacerbated by California's failure to produce more than 50 percent of the new housing units needed to house the state's population for each of the last eight years. The shortage is most strongly felt in the areas of low-cost housing for working families, people moving from welfare to work, and seniors and disabled people.

(d)  Affordable housing organizations that wish to purchase properties at risk of converting to market rate housing often do not have access to the short-term capital needed to purchase the properties quickly. This lack of short-term capital greatly reduces the likelihood that these properties will remain affordable.

(e)  The intent of this chapter is to create a short-term capital loan program to ensure that California's supply of affordable housing is not depleted by the conversion of existing government-assisted rental housing to market-rate housing.

(Added by Stats. 2002, Ch. 721, Sec. 1. Effective January 1, 2003.)