(Photo: Torbak Hopper/Flickr)
Wells Fargo has pledged $400,000 to bolster CA Fwd's work to address the state’s housing supply and affordabilty crisis. Governor Gavin Newsom estimates that the state needs an additional 3.5 million housing units by 2025. CA Fwd and its vast network through the California Economic Summit has been working on ways to make it easier to build housing that Californians need and people of all incomes can afford.
“California Forward is working to ensure that communities in our state are growing, green and great for everyone, and that goal can't be met if we don't address our housing shortage,” said Micah Weinberg, CEO of CA Fwd. “We thank Wells Fargo for investing in this important work that can help all of us better understand and overcome the barriers to housing production in our state.”
Wells Fargo will donate $1 billion through 2025 to address challenges of the U.S. housing affordability crisis, including homelessness, available and affordable rentals, transitional housing, and home ownership. The goal is to reduce the cost burden of housing, and get more people into safe, stable, and affordable homes.
“Addressing housing affordability is a highly complex challenge, “said David Galasso, Wells Fargo lead region president for the Greater California region. “Collaborating with California Forward allows Wells Fargo, through its business and the Wells Fargo Foundation, to use its resources and expertise to develop and scale new ideas and activate solutions in communities of need in collaboration with public-private sector organizations.”
This project will create a statewide snapshot analyzing housing needs in different markets as well as the regional capacity to pull together the necessary economic, policy and political components to catalyze greater housing affordability. The assessment will help Wells Fargo refine current philanthropic investments while identifying new strategies that can help connect institutional efforts to expand housing affordability.
In addition to the snapshot —expected to be completed by the end of June 2020— the first phase of the project will also rely on CA Fwd’s strong regional network to identify best practices that can expedite making housing affordable for more Californians. The next phase of the project will be the engagement of cross-sector leaders to move housing action plans forward.
