Tia Boatman Patterson was a kid growing up in the farm belt of California’s San Joaquin Valley when she got a firsthand lesson on the importance of housing security. It's something she now uses as head of one of the state's largest affordable housing lenders.
After her family home in the Central Valley town of Tulare burned to the ground in the 1970s, she and her mom and sister had to bunk with relatives. Later, they lived in public housing before her mother bought a home with the help of a program for first-time homebuyers.
As a result, Boatman Patterson witnessed how a law passed as part of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 that outlawed lending discrimination on the basis of sex or marital status let a single parent qualify for a mortgage. That, in turn, enabled the single mother's daughters to go to college and — in Boatman Patterson's case — law school.
“I’ve seen why we need that ladder, and how much it can impact people’s lives,” Boatman Patterson told CoStar News.
She's since devoted practically her entire career to the issue, from advising lawmakers, the governor of California and eventually the U.S. president on housing policy to leading one of the state's most significant housing finance nonprofit organizations.
Now running the California Community Reinvestment Corp., Boatman Patterson steers one of the state’s largest lenders for affordable housing. With about 20 employees and a $1.5 billion portfolio, the nonprofit lender functions as a consortium of banks.
The organization also offers flexible financing to developers of affordable and workforce housing, stepping in with gap funds to help make affordable projects pencil out, preserve older affordable housing and provide refinancing to keep rents down. The group has been behind an estimated 60,000 units of affordable housing over its 35 years.
Through it all, she has watched as the state has tried and failed to solve a problem that officials say has gotten worse in many ways.
Policy to pocketbook
In recent years, Boatman Patterson has switched from the policy side to addressing what developers and officials increasingly agree is key to building more housing in California: finding ways to pay for it.
For some officials, saying California has a housing crisis these days seems a little like saying Los Angeles has freeways or San Francisco has hills. Politicians from Redding to San Diego have clamored for years for solutions to a situation that’s been decades in the making.
Congress is inching toward the most significant new federal housing legislation in decades as housing affordability has become a national issue. Both the Senate and the House have overwhelmingly passed sweeping bills that aim to bring down the cost of housing by making it easier and less expensive to build. The problem is extreme in California, where more than a third of residents report the high cost of housing has made them consider moving.
In the past decade, the nation’s most populous state has passed about 180 housing reform laws that aim to streamline the approvals process, override local zoning constraints and ultimately boost production and lower costs.
“We’re constantly passing new laws without much thought to implementation or delivery — there’s almost zero oversight or evaluation,” Boatman Patterson said. “We’re just tripping over ourselves.”
She noted that some legislation has been successful, particularly laws to allow homeowners to build more granny flats and backyard cottages. The production of so-called accessory dwelling units has surged in recent years. As of 2022, nearly 1 in 5 homes produced in California was an ADU, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.
'Tripping over ourselves'
But the state remains woefully behind in solving the housing shortage overall, producing only a fraction of its self-mandated objective of building 2.5 million homes by 2030. Neither has much progress been made in providing shelter for the tens of thousands of Californians who lack homes.
A 2024 state audit found the state had spent $24 billion tackling homelessness since 2019 yet failed to track whether the funds had any impact on one of the state’s most intractable problems. An estimated 187,000 people sleep on the streets or in shelters in California as of 2024, amounting to nearly a quarter of the nation’s total homeless population.
None of this surprises Boatman Patterson.
She’s had an inside look at the state’s housing wars for some two decades, working as a policy adviser with the State Assembly Committee on Housing and Community Development in the early 2000s. Later, as head of the California Housing Finance Agency, she started a downpayment assistance program offering deferred-payment loans to first-time homebuyers and a special-needs housing program that arranged home financing for people with mental illness experiencing homelessness.
She served as housing adviser to Gov. Gavin Newsom, and in 2021 joined the White House Office of Management and Budget under the Biden administration as associate director for housing, treasury and commerce.
The road to critic
Boatman Patterson pushed wildfire recovery financing for homeowners and small-business owners in the historically Black and Latino community of Altadena who lost properties in the 2025 Los Angeles fires. Last year, her group worked with officials in Anaheim and Glendale, outside LA, to prevent imminent foreclosures at two affordable housing developments to preserve more than 90 below-market-rate homes.
It’s telling that a technocrat who has worked mostly behind the scenes has become an outspoken critic of California’s housing policies.
"You cannot get this done if the state of California is on one side beating up on local governments and treating developers like they’re the devil."
Boatman Patterson argued that it’s no surprise a fragmented and unnecessarily complex approach to trying to solve the housing crisis has failed to get rid of the state’s notorious red tape and excessive regulation on development. State and local governments and lenders and developers are working at cross purposes, she added, with conflicting agendas that have made them pull in different directions.
“We are putting in policies that don’t necessarily get you to higher production of housing, period,” she said.
For example, state-level efforts to get more homes built implicitly blame local governments for the housing shortage by imposing stringent requirements on cities to plan for many more homes without providing them with mechanisms to get them built.
California provides few incentives, she said, for cities — many of which are strapped for cash and heavily dependent on property taxes to fund basic services — to approve affordable housing developments that are tax exempt.
'We can't fix it or buy our way out'
Boatman Patterson echoed an argument members of the so-called yes-in-my-backyard, or YIMBY, movement have stressed loudly in recent years: that public officials need to work with developers to get more housing built at all levels.
“It took us 40 years to get in the position we are in now, and we can’t fix it instantly or buy our way out,” she wrote in a 2021 blog post on the website of California YIMBY, a group that advocates for more home building.
She stressed that California has underbuilt housing at all income levels for decades. An analysis by the University of California at Berkeley found that, excluding unincorporated, rural regions, more than 80% of residential land in the state is zoned for single-family housing.
Boatman Patterson has noted that single-family zoning originated in the Bay Area city of Berkeley back in 1916 as a deliberate strategy to segregate nonwhite homebuyers.
High single-family home prices up and down the state have driven up costs for apartments and other rentals, with Los Angeles posting monthly rents of $2,350, 30% above the national average, according to CoStar.
San Francisco, for its part, has registered the fastest-rising rents in the nation over the past year. They now average around $3,500 per month, nearly double the U.S. average.
Yet despite rising rents in the tech capital in the midst of the artificial intelligence boom, a combination of high construction costs, difficulty in obtaining financing and a web of local and state regulations has all but halted construction of badly needed new homes in the city, a problem developers have long complained about throughout the state.
“Everybody has to be pulling in the same direction,” Boatman Patterson said. “You cannot get this done if the state of California is on one side, beating up on local governments and treating developers like they’re the devil.”