A new OpenTheBooks report says California received $81.4 billion in HUD spending from 2015 through 2024. But the deeper story is not simply whether government spent enough. It is whether that money is helping Californians build stable housing and wealth and who is still being left behind.
California has spent billions of public dollars trying to address housing affordability, homelessness and housing instability.
Yet for millions of Californians, buying a home remains out of reach.
A new OpenTheBooks report, “Extreme Makeover: American Dream Edition” puts a striking number on the issue: California received about $81.4 billion in U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development spending between 2015 and 2024, according to the report. Over the same period, OpenTheBooks calculates that California home prices rose about 82.5%, while median household income increased about 55.3%.
That is a significant affordability gap.
But there is a more important question for California families:
What did all that housing spending actually accomplish—and why are so many families, particularly Latino families, still unable to buy a home?
California’s housing problem is bigger than one spending number
The OpenTheBooks report ranks California’s 2015–2024 affordability gap at about 27 percentage points. But that number needs context.
California was already one of the nation’s most expensive housing markets when the period began.
Today, the state’s affordability problem remains severe. The California Legislative Analyst’s Office Housing Affordability Tracker says a mid-tier California home costs about $775,000, more than twice the price of a typical mid-tier home elsewhere in the country. Only about 22% of California households would likely qualify for a mortgage on a mid-tier home based on their income, down from about 31% in 2019.
That changes how we should think about the problem.
California did not simply become unaffordable because housing prices rose rapidly during one decade.
The state began with a housing affordability problem and has struggled to reverse it.
The $81.4 billion needs some explanation
The OpenTheBooks figure is attention-grabbing, but it does not represent one giant government program designed to make California homes cheaper.
The report’s calculation covers 18 HUD programs, including housing assistance and programs addressing homelessness and affordable housing.
A federal housing voucher can help a low-income family remain housed. Supportive housing can help someone experiencing homelessness. Affordable-housing programs can create or preserve homes for households that cannot afford market rents.
Those programs can serve important purposes without lowering the median price of a California home.
OpenTheBooks nevertheless finds almost no statistical relationship between its measure of HUD spending and its statewide affordability-gap measure.
But it does not prove that HUD programs failed.
The report is comparing government spending with statewide changes in home prices and income. It does not measure the individual outcomes of every program. Nor does it establish whether California’s affordability would have been better or worse without those investments.
That distinction is important when evaluating taxpayer spending.
California is building more homes, but relief hasn’t arrived fast enough
There is another reason the housing story cannot be reduced to government spending.
California has been building more housing.
The Public Policy Institute of California’s analysis of recent construction found that the state added about 677,000 housing units during a six-year period, even as the population barely changed.
Yet housing costs remain high.
PPIC found California’s rental vacancy rate was just 4.3% in 2024, compared with 5.9% elsewhere in the country. It also found that 14% of California homeowners spent more than half their income on housing, while 28% of renters did.
The conclusion is more complicated than either side of the political argument might suggest.
California is building.
But not enough of the right housing, in the right places, at prices households can afford.
And decades of underbuilding have created a deficit that cannot be erased quickly.
The Latino homeownership gap makes the stakes bigger
This is where the housing debate becomes a wealth story.
According to the UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute’s 2026 State of Latinos in California report, only 45% of Latino households in California own their homes, compared with 60% of non-Latino households.
The disparity doesn’t stop with ownership.
When Latino families do own homes, their homes are worth an average of about $229,000 less than homes owned by non-Latino households, according to UCLA’s analysis.
That matters because homeownership is not simply about having a place to live.
For many families, home equity is one of the primary ways wealth is accumulated and transferred to the next generation.
A family that cannot buy a home, or buys much later than previous generations, can lose decades of potential wealth accumulation.
For Latino Californians, that creates a particularly important question:
Can the state’s housing policies close not only an affordability gap, but a wealth gap?
The crisis is moving beyond the coast
California’s housing problem is also changing geographically.
Recent PPIC reporting on California’s housing crisis shows that housing concerns are no longer concentrated only in the state’s most expensive coastal communities. Recent reporting on PPIC’s research found rising concern in inland regions, including parts of the Central Valley and Northern California, as households priced out of expensive areas move elsewhere and put pressure on those markets.
That means the traditional California housing map is changing.
A family may leave Los Angeles or the Bay Area looking for affordability and discover that the communities they move to are becoming less affordable, too.
So what should California measure?
The debate over housing spending often begins and ends with dollars spent.
That is the wrong endpoint.
California should also be asking:
- How many affordable homes were actually built?
- Where were they built?
- How many families received housing assistance?
- How many people avoided homelessness?
- How much did each affordable unit cost?
- How many publicly supported homes remain affordable?
- How many programs helped families become homeowners?
- Are Latino, Black and other historically disadvantaged households gaining ownership and wealth?
- Which policies are producing measurable results?
Those questions move the discussion from spending to outcomes.
And that is where the OpenTheBooks report becomes useful; not necessarily as proof that housing programs failed, but as a reason to examine what public housing dollars are accomplishing.
The American Dream is the real measure
California’s housing crisis cannot be solved simply by spending more money.
It also cannot be explained by blaming one government agency, one political party or one policy.
The evidence points to a combination of factors: decades of limited housing supply, high land and construction costs, restrictive local policies, high rents, mortgage costs and incomes that have not kept pace with the price of buying a home.
But there is one outcome California should not lose sight of.
Can a working family afford to build a life here?
For Latino Californians, the answer remains much harder than it should be.
The state has spent billions.
Now Californians deserve to know what those billions produced and whether they are finally helping more families build a home, build equity and build a future.
This article examines the OpenTheBooks report alongside government and research data. The OpenTheBooks methodology and conclusions are its own; Parriva does not treat the report’s spending-versus-affordability correlation as proof of causation.
