Our Work
The Housing Action Coalition (HAC) is a member-supported nonprofit that advocates for building more homes at all levels of affordability to help alleviate the Bay Area and California’s housing shortage, displacement, and affordability crisis.
Our wide-ranging members span 20+ industries including affordable and market rate home builders, architects and designers, engineers and attorneys, labor unions and public education institutions, nonprofits and urban livability organizations, neighborhood associations, startup and grownup tech companies, businesses of all sizes, and individuals who want to play a part in addressing our region and state’s housing headaches.
While our big tent coalition represents a diverse array of sectors and viewpoints, we all share the common conviction that key to solving our displacement and affordability problems is building more homes for residents of all income levels.
To that end, HAC’s 501(c)(3) educational arm produces programs and resources to educate members, decision makers, the media, and the general public about how our housing crisis came to be and what it will take to solve it.
And through HAC’s 501(c)(4) advocacy arm, we engage and activate our members, partners, and legislative allies to make their voices heard in support of building new homes and enacting pro-housing policies to make it faster, easier, and more affordable to build enough housing for all who need it.
Project Support
One of the many benefits of HAC membership is getting support for your project at every step of the hearing and approval process.
If you have an affordable or market rate home building project in the works, HAC can play an instrumental role in helping your secure approval through our three-step process:
Project Review
Present your project to a committee of leading architects, designers, developers, land use attorneys, and other housing experts and receive invaluable feedback to help you refine your presentation and project going forward.
Project Endorsement
Following your presentation, our project review committee will let you know if it will receive a HAC endorsement. If so, we’ll provide you with a project report card or a letter of endorsement. If not, we’ll share specific recommendations for improvement.
Project Advocacy
Why is Bay Area housing the most expensive in the country? What caused our housing crisis and how do we solve it? This popular one-hour program answers these and other housing questions on everyone’s minds, and lays out how individuals and organizations can be part of the solution. Perfect for a lunchtime program or after-work event, we can educate and motivate groups of any size.
For all endorsed projects, HAC will plan and execute a robust advocacy campaign to activate neighbors to voice their support to relevant decision makers. This could take the form of organizing an online petition signing or letter-writing campaign, enlisting speakers to give public comments, generating support via social media, and more.
Legislative Advocacy
While building more homes is vital, so is reforming old and outdated laws that have long made it too difficult and too expensive to build enough housing for everyone who needs it.
That’s why HAC is working hard to enact new laws to make it easier, faster, and less expensive to build more housing at all affordability levels and reform antiquated laws that are only exacerbating our housing crisis.