On the Issues
Building Newark Neighborhoods
Building an Affordable Future for Newark Families
Housing affordability is one of the critical challenges that the City of Newark will need to address over the coming decades. I graduated from Newark Memorial High School 15 years ago and have seen many of my friends priced out of Newark and start their careers and families elsewhere. I have also seen many of my friends' parents choose to retire elsewhere due to the rising cost of living. As a community, we need more affordable options for everyone who wants to live here. We can do this by approving new housing options that meets our needs, using the affordable housing fees the City has collected, and ensuring that all Newark residents benefit from growth and change.
Over the past four years, the City has taken important steps towards making housing in Newark more affordable. We have more than doubled the number of affordable homes through the construction of Timber Senior Housing, Cedar Community Apartments, and Newark Station Seniors.
The City created a First-Time Homebuyers Program, which invests three million dollars to support Newark community members buying their first home. This fund comes from past development projects where the private company chose to pay a fee instead of building affordable housing. I believe this project will be successful, and when that proves to be the case, the City should invest more money in the program over time to help additional families afford to buy homes in Newark.
We created a Local Preference Ordinance to ensure that the people best able to access these benefits and programs are people who are connected to our community.
We also created an Inclusionary Housing Ordinance to ensure that the affordable housing we build is high-quality and a real part of our community. A strong neighborhood cannot be built from one type of housing, whether it be designated below market rate or well above market rate, and this policy will help ensure that future developments have the healthy mixture needed to create a strong sense of community.
The City also streamlined Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) construction that should produce more housing options. These steps will also make it easier for homeowners looking to build an ADU get approvals and permits faster. If re-elected, I will continue to advocate for policies that make it easier to build ADUs within the City of Newark.
Building Rental Housing
As a community, we need affordable options for everyone who wants to live here. That will mean addressing housing options other than single-family homeownership.
Over the past four years, the City Council also has taken significant steps to protect renters. This has included a Rent Review and Mediation Program, which would allow tenants to request third-party review of rent increases of more than five percent during a 12-month period.
We also put in place policies that support tenant stability by establishing minimum lease terms and by providing relocation assistance.
During my time on the Council, we also passed an Anti-Harassment Ordinance that would define inappropriate actions and behaviors by which a property owner could engage with a tenant.
Renters are an important part of the fabric of the Newark community (I am a renter myself), and I am proud that we have put in place these protections.
I believe the next challenge in front of the City Council, if we want to support renters better, will be to build more units of rental housing. The cost of rent in Newark is too high, and by building more rental units, we can bring down rents. Building more housing will also give renters with bad landlords more options to find housing within our community, incentivizing landlords to be better operators.
Building What We Approve
Over the next four years, the City of Newark will need to find ways to get more affordable housing built. We took important steps over the past four years, entitling four large projects with significant affordable components. The Timber Senior Housing project opened for residents in 2026, with another project set to be completed soon. The other two projects have not yet begun construction, and the City Council will need to find ways to ensure those are built. Both projects will face different challenges and will need assistance and incentives from a Council that is dedicated to seeing the actual construction, not just entitlement, of affordable housing projects.
Building affordable units is essential, but even in the ideal world, the number of below-market-rate units we can build will not be able to meet our community’s need for housing. In order to take meaningful steps, the City will also need to incentivize the production of market-rate housing options. As a first step, we need to look at some of the projects that the City Council has already approved (and in some cases permitted), but have not yet been built. To provide a few examples, the City Council in the past has approved:
A project that was first brought to the City Council in 1986 (40 years ago). The area was then zoned for housing in 1992 (the year before I was born). Over the past 40 years, the City has provided every approval the developers have asked for. In the 1990s, Newark voters even approved a ballot measure confirming the residential zoning, giving the project the security it needed to move forward. Despite all of this support from the City, the project is still pending.
A project at NewPark Mall that was approved by the Newark City Council in 2021. The City Council provided the developer what they said they needed but, the developer still chose not to build.
A “Builder’s Remedy Project” near NewPark Mall that is not subject to any of the review or zoning requirements by the City Council that home builders often claim are too burdensome and prevents projects from being profitable. Yet, even when these burdens are removed for this project, the homes are still not being built.
The City of Newark does not build housing ourselves; we rely on private companies to build the housing that our community needs. We can not make Newark a more affordable place to live by simply approving, entitling, and permitting housing. While it is important to make sure that our regulations are not preventing housing from being built (and we need to continue to make progress on this), there also needs to be real incentives and policy structures in place to make it more likely that the projects that are approved actually get built.
The challenges from City Council-approved housing projects not being built goes beyond the lost opportunity at that particular site. Having housing actually built where we prioritized, entitled, and permitted it will also prevent us from needing to approve projects in areas of Newark that are less suited for the housing developments in order to meet our State Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) requirements. If we have to amend our General Plan site-by-site to adapt to approved housing not being built, it will also be much more challenging to plan for our city’s growth as a whole.
Building to Reduce Homelessness
Unfortunately, there are residents of Newark who are currently homeless. We must address this growing need now unless we are comfortable with the situation worsening. When looking at tools for managing homelessness, we must focus on both how we can best help people in need and how to support our whole community as we deal with the impacts of homelessness.
We have made significant strides over the past years. Our 2026 Point in Time Count shows that homelessness in Newark is down since 2024. This is a result of the City of Newark doing our part in the County-wide reduction in homelessness over the past half decade. The regional investments in housing (both temporary and interim), shelter capacity, and supportive services are working, and the City of Newark needs to continue to do our part going forward to reduce homelessness. What happens regionally also impacts Newark, so we also need to work in collaboration with Alameda County and our neighboring cities to ensure every agency is working together to reduce homelessness.
One of those investments that has led to the reduction of homelessness in Newark is the implementation of Project Homekey. This led to the construction of 125 units of housing for Newark residents experiencing or at risk of homelessness. This project was made possible by a State Grant, and we will need to continue to partner successfully with our state and federal partners to continue receiving the funds needed to implement programs that can reduce homelessness.
Every project that addresses homelessness will be imperfect. But we can not ignore people that need help, decide not to assist those neighborhoods impacted by homelessness, or wait for the problem of homelessness to resolve itself. And, if we fail to take critical steps now, we will need more expensive and aggressive solutions in the future that will not be as good at helping the people who need them. We will need to constantly reevaluate our efforts as new tools become available, review other cities' successes, and listen to Newark residents. But we must continue to take steps in a positive direction to address homelessness and should evaluate how any tool or program might help.
Building for a Small-Town Feel
In a 1968 plan for the City’s development, estimates for Newark’s population when the City was fully developed were in the high 50,000s, with upper estimates at 70,000. Six decades later, we are well below that population. This prediction was not based on State requirements or vague concepts of affordability; it was instead determined by what our community needed to build in order to grow into a city that kept its small-town feel and remained uniquely Newark.
Newark’s small-town feel has always been the result of the people who care about this community and give back to it rather than how many people are living here. We must take steps to make sure that the people who are strengthening our community (and have strengthened our community for decades) are able to have a home here.
Missing that 1968 prediction has meant rising costs for families: In 1968, 22% of Newark residents were enrolled in elementary school, with another 12% high school-aged. Today, a far smaller percentage of Newark’s residents are school-aged because it is harder for families to afford to live here. This has meant declining enrollment in our school district as well as challenges for businesses focused on serving families.
One idea from that 1968 plan that deserves to be re-examined in the light of the present is reducing lot sizes for new single-family homes. Too often, the single-family projects that come before the Council are not close to the zoning designation's maximum number of units per acre because each home in the development is so large (and therefore expensive). One way housing developments can get closer to the zoning maximum is for them to include so-called “missing-middle” housing options. These are housing types that were popular in the early days of Newark and helped create the fabric of Newark’s small-town feel, and it is something that can continue to strengthen our community in the future.
Every single new housing project in Newark’s history has brought concerns, and there are sincere reasons to be cautious about growth. One way we can grow responsibly is by updating our development fees to ensure we are accounting for the effects of growth without making those fees overburdensome for homebuilders. We should also look to update our City’s General Plan in the near future to help guide our decision-making over the next decades in a way that looks at Newark as a whole rather than site-by-site.
But I firmly believe that we can grow closer together in community by growing our City. The history of Newark shows that every time we have grown in size, we have also strengthened those bonds of community. If re-elected, I will be diligent in ensuring that housing proposals that come before the Council can accomplish this.