Prop 1: Veterans and Affordable Housing Bond Act

By James Fenkner, CFA

(Editor’s Note: This November, California’s electorate will decide on 14 new measures packaged as Propositions. Some are straightforward. Most are not. They come wrapped in carefully chosen titles, emotional appeals, and selective details that can make the real trade-offs hard to see.

In order to give you better tools with which to understand and influence the elections and policies shaping our state, California Current will dig into each of these propositions. We will look at what they actually propose, where the money goes, who is pushing them, and what sits beneath the surface. The goal is simple: help readers make clearer, more informed choices rather than voting on branding alone.

As with all our articles, readers are welcome to comment and share. – J.F.)

Beware the very first proposition you’ll see on your November ballot.

It’s a con job.

Don’t fall for it.

Democrat legislators named Prop 1 the “Veterans and Affordable Housing Bond Act of 2026” to make it sound noble; it’s anything but.

Prop 1 proposes borrowing a mere $11.25 billion from taxpayers “for our veterans.”

I would say “Hah,” but this is no laughing matter.

And, just so you know who’s behind this charade, Santa Barbara’s own California Senate President Pro Tem Monique Limón, along with her partner in crime, Democrat Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, and the usual Democrat leadership put it there. Governor Newsom signed off.

If you think “Veterans” are at the heart of this fraud, you’d be mistaken. Here’s the actual split: roughly $1.25 billion is set aside to support CalVet home loans, just one ninth of the total raise.

The other $10 billion? Multifamily subsidies, “supportive housing,” farmworker projects, student beds, tribal grants, and something called “innovation funds,” whatever that means.

Veterans are given top billing on the bond. The housing industrial complex, filled with NGOs (non-governmental organizations) whose leadership lives off their quarter-million-dollar-plus salaries, pocket the vast majority of the money. Taxpayers get the bill, with interest.

We’ve Seen This Movie Before

The same “veteran” bait-and-switch was successfully exploited in 2018’s Proposition 1 and before that, in 2014’s Proposition 41.

Both passed.

Both spent the money, pouring a total of $4.6 billion into local government agencies and NGOs.

The small units those programs produced routinely cost $400,000 to well over $500,000 each. That’s multiples of what private builders spend on similar construction. Prevailing wage rules, layered requirements, and California’s special brand of process make sure the costs stay ridiculously high.

And the results? Homelessness keeps rising. Rents keep climbing. The shortage never budges. The bureaucracy gets bigger. The nonprofits and connected developers do just fine.

That same crowd, with the same fraudulent intent, is back with another multi-billion-dollar ask, once again hiding behind veterans.

Just as California’s film business hacks pump out sequel after sequel to any and every successful movie, California’s political flunkies re-animate Propositions over and over again no mater the original Proposition’s outcome.

The pattern is obvious once you look.

Take a group that actually sacrifice for this country – military veterans, law enforcement officers, firefighters – and wheel them out so voters will feel bad about saying no to more debt and more of the same failed programs. The only winner in this make-believe façade is the permanent progressive infrastructure of overpaid bureaucrats, nonprofits, housing authorities, and regulated developers.

Point this out and suddenly you’re the one who lacks compassion.

Central Valley Republican Senator Shannon Grove, an Army veteran herself, called the Prop 1 packaging “shameful.” She says it’s “a homeless bond with a veterans garnish.” She is right. Underneath the marketing it’s the same product: hundreds of millions a year in new General Fund debt service for decades, more money shoved through the same channels that already make housing scarce, and zero serious confrontation with California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) delays, zoning restrictions, or the glacial public process that gums everything up.

What’s missing is more revealing than what’s in the measure. California’s housing authorities already control thousands of public units. Los Angeles alone manages more than 6,000. Those should be prioritized for veterans through preference, renovation, or structured transfers that actually create ownership opportunities. That would give people who served but who have been left behind a shot at the American Dream, a real choice instead of another waiting list where other people inevitably cut ahead. But that would mean admitting the existing public model has failed. Progressives won’t go there. Their answer is always the same: more borrowing, more taxes, more programs under their control.

Proposition 1 won’t even begin to fix the housing shortage. It leaves the rules and costs that created the shortage untouched. It piles on more debt. And it uses the prestige of people who have actually served honorably to paper over a system that keeps failing.

The troops deserve better than to be marketing fodder for yet another worthless progressive bond.

Prop 1 isn’t about “Saving Private Ryan”. It a modern, dystopian version of “The Sting”, without any of the charm or good looks of Robert Redford and Paul Newman and where the hapless marks are millions of California taxpayers.

Vote NO on Proposition 1.