STAY in San José: A Racial Equity Affordability
Framework for FY 2026-27*
The Race Equity Action Leadership (REAL) Coalition** offers the STAY in San José framework to guide the City’s FY 2026-27 budget decisions.
Why Affordability Must Be Central
San José residents have been consistent and clear: the cost of living—and housing affordability in particular—is the top challenge facing people who live here. Year after year, the City’s own resident surveys rank housing costs, rent, and overall affordability above nearly every other concern.
These pressures are not evenly distributed. Rising housing costs, childcare expenses, and basic living costs are deepening income inequality, widening class divides, and reinforcing racial and economic segregation. Black, Latino, immigrant, and low-income households are more likely to be rent-burdened, overcrowded, displaced, or pushed out of the city altogether. Affordability challenges also fall disproportionately on people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ residents, older adults, and people with chronic health or behavioral health needs, many of whom face fixed or limited incomes, discrimination in housing and employment, and higher costs to access basic services. For these communities, affordability is inseparable from dignity, safety, and stability.
Affordability policy is therefore not race-neutral. It is one of the most powerful tools the City has to advance—or undermine—racial equity. The idea of advancing racial equity through affordability policy is consistent with the City of San José’s Racial and Social Equity Ordinance and Equity Values and Standards Policy, which require the City to proactively eliminate disparities, center impacted communities, and embed equity into decision-making. Advancing the priorities below would move the City closer to fulfilling the spirit and intent of these laws.
At its core, this framework is about ensuring that San José remains a place where people can afford to live and work—and where they belong. Policies framed as “compassionate” or “results-driven” must ultimately be evaluated by their real-world impacts on housing stability, dignity, and equity—not by rhetoric alone.
These impacts should be measured and reported transparently, with a clear focus
on whether policies are reducing racial and economic disparities and improving outcomes for the communities most affected by affordability challenges.
PART I: Affordability Framework (Housing, Childcare,
Household Stability)
1. Resolve the Homelessness Crisis by Prioritizing Deeply Affordable Permanent Housing
Shift City policy toward permanent solutions for residents with the greatest need by:
● Prioritizing housing affordable to Extremely Low-Income and Very Low-Income households
● Treating interim shelter and encampment responses as short-term bridges—not substitutes for permanent housing
Affordability impact: Without deeply affordable permanent housing, residents cycle through costly emergency systems while remaining unhoused. Permanent housing stabilizes households and reduces long-term public expenditures.
Strategies that prioritize temporary shelter or enforcement over permanent housing increase long-term costs and instability when the permanent housing supply does not keep pace with need.
2. Prevent Displacement Through Housing Stabilization
Invest in upstream strategies that keep people housed and prevent entry into crisis systems by:
● Fully funding homelessness prevention and housing stabilization services ● Prioritizing flexible assistance and stabilization supports that help households remain safely housed
Affordability impact: Preventing homelessness and displacement is far less costly than responding after crises and preserves housing stability for households most at risk of displacement.
3. Stabilize Tenants by Protecting and Enforcing Their Legal Rights STAY in San José: A Racial Equity Affordability Framework for FY 2026-27, Page 2 Ensure renters can meaningfully exercise their legal rights and remain safely housed by:
● Fully funding universal eviction defense and tenant education. An important next step would be to bring the right to counsel back and consider piloting an eviction defense approach.
● Expanding legal assistance for habitability enforcement, including unsafe or poorly maintained properties
● Acknowledging that legal rights are meaningless without access to attorneys
Affordability impact: Unsafe housing, deferred maintenance, and illegal landlord practices impose hidden costs on low-income tenants and accelerate displacement. Enforcing tenant protections stabilizes households, preserves affordable housing, and reduces reliance on emergency systems.
4. Keep Rents Affordable by Strengthening Rent Stabilization and Preserving Existing Housing
Reduce excessive rent increases while maintaining housing quality by:
● Maintaining the City’s prohibition on utility cost pass-throughs for unmetered rental units, and ensuring that tenants are not charged for utilities through allocation formulas that obscure actual usage and increase housing cost burdens
● Lowering the annual allowable rent increase under the City’s rent stabilization ordinance, which currently permits increases of up to 5% regardless of the local Consumer Price Index (CPI), which tracks inflation ● Relying on the capital fair return process—not blanket rent hikes—to address legitimate capital improvement needs
● Exploring preservation incentives that reward owners who keep rents affordable
Affordability impact: Keeping rents aligned with actual cost growth prevents displacement and preserves naturally occurring affordable housing at a fraction of the cost of new construction. Affordability strategies that rely solely on deregulation or market acceleration—without tenant protections—risk increasing displacement rather than reducing housing cost burdens.
STAY in San José: A Racial Equity Affordability Framework for FY 2026-27, Page 3
5. Reduce Family Cost Burdens by Prioritizing Affordable Childcare Expand and stabilize childcare by:
● Increasing affordable childcare slots
● Stabilizing nonprofit childcare providers serving low-income families Affordability impact: Childcare is one of the largest household expenses, as acknowledged in the City’s Child and Family Master Plan. Without affordable options, families—especially women of color and immigrant parents—are pushed out of the workforce or into economic crisis. Addressing childcare affordability is not solely a county or state responsibility; the City of San José has an obligation to work with the county to step in with meaningful investments, policy leadership, and coordination to ensure families can afford to live and work here.
6. Protect Household Stability by Responding to Harmful Federal Actions Mitigate local impacts of federal policies that threaten affordability, safety, and civil rights by:
● Planning for millions of dollars in lost or threatened federal funding ● Coordinating with Santa Clara County to close gaps in protections for those targeted by the federal administration, including immigrant families, LGBTQ+ residents, people seeking reproductive health care, climate advocates, and organizations advancing racial justice
● Defending nonprofits and community members targeted for their advocacy or service.
● Evaluating how City data systems and surveillance or enforcement technologies—including speed cameras—are used, accessed, or shared, and developing safeguards to ensure they are not repurposed for immigration enforcement
Affordability impact: When households experience fear of detention, family separation, or surveillance, people avoid work, school, healthcare, and public spaces—thereby directly reducing household income and quality of life and increasing housing instability. These disruptions compound affordability challenges and increase reliance on emergency systems. Protecting immigrant families is also a fiscally responsible strategy: immigrants contribute billions of dollars annually in local, state, and federal taxes, and policies that destabilize STAY in San José: A Racial Equity Affordability Framework for FY 2026-27, Page 4 immigrant households reduce economic participation while shifting costs to local governments.
City leadership must take a sustained and courageous public stand in defense of immigrant communities and other targeted groups, clearly condemning federal actions that undermine safety, dignity, and economic stability.
7. Center Affordability and Equity When Evaluating Potential Cuts to Community Services
In the context of a projected budget shortfall, the City must carefully evaluate any proposed reductions to community and nonprofit-delivered services through an affordability and racial equity lens. Services that prevent displacement, support older adults, provide nutrition, offer eviction advice and defense, reduce isolation, and stabilize household income are core components of the City’s affordability and stability infrastructure and should be prioritized accordingly.
Affordability impact: Cuts to the safety net would directly deepen the City’s affordability crisis and disproportionately harm communities already experiencing the greatest economic strain. When these services are reduced or eliminated, costs do not disappear; they are shifted onto families and communities least able to absorb them and often reappear later in more expensive emergency systems.
The City should prioritize maintaining services that stabilize households and prevent harm over reductions to discretionary or deferrable expenditures that do not directly affect residents’ ability to remain housed, healthy, and economically secure.
PART II: Budget-Conscious Strategies That Advance Racial Equity
1. Stabilize Communities and Improve Safety by Expanding Community-Based Alternatives to Policing and Incarceration
Invest in responses that prevent harm, stabilize households, and reduce reliance on emergency and carceral systems by:
STAY in San José: A Racial Equity Affordability Framework for FY 2026-27, Page 5 ● Expanding and sustaining the popular and effective TRUST program citywide and exploring how the City’s crisis call response can best direct calls to community-based care responses
● Establishing a Community-Based Violence Prevention and Intervention Office grounded in public health, trauma-informed care, and neighborhood-led strategies, beginning with an evaluation of successful models
● Implementing community-designed, non-punitive outreach models—co-designed with people who have lived experience of homelessness and behavioral health crises—to build trust, encourage voluntary engagement, and connect people to housing and care, including approaches similar to the HEART model proposed by REAL in the last budget cycle
● Investing in planning phases for community-designed approaches to interpersonal violence (IPV), designed by the neighborhoods or community groups that will benefit from them. These could include restorative justice, peer mentoring, and circulo practices, for example.
Fiscal efficiency and equity impact: Police, jail, emergency room, and inpatient responses are among the most expensive and least effective ways to address mental health crises and substance use. Community-based responses reduce public costs while preventing job loss, fines, incarceration, and housing instability.
Opioid settlement funds are a critical source for this work and should not be used for policing under any circumstances.
PART III: Revenue
1. Secure Long-Term Affordability Through Community-Aligned Revenue Strategies
Enable proactive, transparent exploration of revenue options that reflect community priorities by:
● Allowing City staff to explore combinations of public investments—such as infrastructure, housing, open space, childcare, and resident health and human services—that residents value
● Re-examining Measure E formulations, including potential adjustments at the highest tiers of the property transfer tax
STAY in San José: A Racial Equity Affordability Framework for FY 2026-27, Page 6 ● Authorizing polling and analysis of additional revenue concepts without repeated Council approvals, while maintaining transparency and accountability
Fiscal sustainability and equity impact: Sustainable revenue strategies must be grounded in an honest assessment of the extreme income and wealth disparities that characterize Silicon Valley. In a region where a small number of households hold extraordinary levels of wealth alongside widespread housing and cost burdens, revenue approaches should be evaluated for their ability to raise resources in a progressive manner that does not exacerbate affordability pressures for low- and moderate-income residents.
Centering progressivity in revenue exploration—including options tied to high-value transactions, concentrations of wealth, or corporate activity, while remaining mindful of legal constraints—allows the City to fund critical affordability and stability investments.
Long-term fiscal stability cannot be achieved through austerity or by balancing the budget primarily through cuts to community services; avoiding difficult fiscal conversations only deepens inequality and increases future costs borne by residents and local governments alike.
Bottom Line
In a deficit year, budget choices are equity choices. These priorities advance affordability as a racial justice strategy—grounded in evidence, lived experience, and the City’s own equity laws.
San José can be more affordable—and must also be more humane, more equitable, and more courageous in confronting the intertwined crises of housing, health, community safety, and democracy. Meeting these expectations will require bold choices, sustained public investment, and a willingness to be judged not only by economic indicators, but by whether the people most at risk of displacement and harm are healthier, safer, and able to stay in the communities they call home.
San José must prioritize stability over symbolic or headline-driven actions, permanent solutions over temporary fixes, and dignity over coercion. The REAL Coalition calls on City leadership to advance policies that allow residents to stay in San José—not just survive here, but belong here.
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* We call this framework STAY in San José to reflect the core outcomes it advances: household stability, tenant protections, affordability, and a city where people can remain in the communities they call home. STAY is an acronym for Stability, Tenants’ rights, Affordability, and You belong here!
**The Race Equity Action Leadership (REAL) Coalition is a cross-sector alliance of more than 50 nonprofit organizations, along with many additional nonprofit partners, community advocates, and individuals with lived experience. REAL is committed to dismantling white supremacy culture and systemic racism, using our positional power to advance movement goals, and facilitating the voice of community in government decision-making. We are also committed to learning, advocacy, and organizing while building power in authentic community solidarity.
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