By Nigel Duara
CalMatters

Ken Pritchett clicks his mouse and the logo of a Southern California police department pops up on a computer monitor the width of his shoulders. Another click and the image flips to a three-dimensional map. A glowing orange arrow indicates the direction a man ran as he tried to evade police.

“Right here, this is the path he took in the alley,” Pritchett said, switching from the map to a still image highlighting an object in the man’s hand. “Then you can see him turn toward the officers. He wants to die. This is suicide.”

This incident, like all the videos Pritchett produces in his home office, ended in a police shooting. Pritchett has made more than 170 of these for police departments and sheriff’s offices, mostly in California.

The video flips again, this time to the display of a shuddering body camera worn by an officer sprinting down an alley. Commands are yelled, the person being chased lifts an object with his right hand, police fire their weapons, the man falls down.

The video isn’t much different from hundreds of others produced since California passed a law in 2018 mandating police departments release body camera footage within 45 days of any incident when an officer fires a gun or uses force that leads to great bodily injury or death. Like most other critical incident videos released by law enforcement agencies after a shooting, this one is a heavily edited version of the original raw video, created by one of the private contractors that went into business editing police footage after the law went into effect.

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Pritchett, who makes more of these videos than any other private contractor in California, asked CalMatters not to disclose the name of the police department in order to preserve their business relationship.

The law has some exceptions, allowing departments to withhold video if it would endanger the investigation or put a witness at risk. Law enforcement departments often cite those reasons when regularly denying records requests by CalMatters and other news organizations. Of the 36 fatal police shooting cases since July 2021 being tracked by CalMatters, only three have responded with even partial records.

Instead, the public and the media must rely on edited presentations that often include a highlighted or circled object in a person’s hand, slowed-down video to show the moments when the person may have pointed the object at police and transcriptions of the body camera’s audio.

They are also the only documentation of a fatal police encounter that the public will see for months, or years, or maybe ever.

Since the advent of cell phone cameras and, later, police-worn body cameras, the public has had detailed access to violent police encounters in a way it never had before. After incidents including the livestream of the aftermath of the Minnesota police shooting of Philando Castile in 2016 and the helicopter footage of the Sacramento police shooting of Stephon Clark in 2018, states including California passed a host of laws aimed at using that technology to better judge the actions of officers.

Critics allege that the problem with the condensed, heavily-edited version of the body camera footage released by law enforcement agencies is that they shape public opinion about a person’s death or injury at the hands of the police long before the department in question releases all the facts in the case or the full, raw video.

They also point to particular incidents in which a department erased or failed to transcribe audio critical to understanding the case, did not make clear which officers fired their gun or cut the video at a critical moment. In one case, Los Angeles journalist Sahra Sulaiman has taken apart multiple videos released by the Los Angeles Police Department and found irregularities that she asserts are deliberate manipulations meant to justify officers’ actions. In response, she said the LAPD ignores her or directs her back to the video.

“To only release an edited version is not what we think is called for from the defendant’s point of view,” said Stephen Munkelt, executive director of California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, a Sacramento-based association of criminal defense attorneys. “If they’re editing things out, it’s probably the stuff that’s beneficial to the defendant.”

He also worries about the impact of the release of the body camera footage on a potential jury pool. Still, Munkelt said, some video is better than none, if only because defense attorneys have more grounds to ask a judge for the full, unedited video.

Former journalist working with California police

In response to the 2018 body camera law, a cottage industry has emerged to produce these videos, though several larger law enforcement agencies produce theirs in-house. Pritchett works for Critical Incident Video, founded, not coincidentally, when the law went into effect in 2019. According to emails obtained by The Appeal and The Vallejo Sun, Critical Incident Video charges $5,000 per video.

Pritchett is a former journalist and insists that he applies the same scrutiny and objectivity to these videos, paid for by police departments, that he did in his former life as a television reporter and anchor in Fresno and Sacramento.

“Virtually every article we’ve seen about what we do, somebody accuses us of spinning for the police department, but I have yet to ever see an example put forward that shows that we’re spinning anything,” he said. “And if they did, tell me, for God’s sakes. My entire goal is to make these straight, spin-free.”

Not every department uses Critical Incident Video, but for the dozens that do, Pritchett’s style is unmistakable: first, the map, then usually a transcription of 911 calls, then the body camera video. Pritchett said that, if he’s done his job well, he can help head off conflict between a law enforcement agency and the public.

“I think the main issue now is people come jumping to conclusions about what happened before they’ve seen the video, which is why we recommend that (law enforcement) always get that video out there as quickly as possible,” Pritchett said. “We have done quite a few videos where there was a social media public narrative about something that happened, and the video clearly shows that that didn’t happen.”

Pritchett said that, before he made his first video, he learned by watching the videos that departments produced internally. He did not like what he saw.

“Basically, what we saw was the LAPD’s videos, and I didn’t like them … I probably shouldn’t have said that,” he said with a laugh. “But I remember seeing mugshots. I remember seeing information that was not really relevant (like) previous charges. I remember thinking the whole (video) that someone had a gun, until they told me at the end that it was actually not a gun.”

So, he has rules. He will not refer to the person who was shot as a “suspect.” He will not use mugshots of the person who was shot. He will not display previous charges or convictions of the person shot, even if the department asks him to — something that he said cost his company a client when the police department insisted on including it. If an object was later found to be anything other than a gun, he demands that the departments tell viewers that up front.

Critical Incident Video’s process usually begins hours after a shooting. The police department or sheriff’s office will call Pritchett and send the raw footage, along with any witness video the agency has obtained. He combs through it, picking out the parts he believes are important.

He reads the initial police press release — “which is often incorrect,” he said — then reads any related media reports. He transcribes the audio of the body camera, creates a 3D map showing where the encounter began and writes a prospective script if one is requested, then tells the police to put it in their own words.

Pritchett said he pushes back against departments. Sometimes in a press release, agencies will say they immediately rendered first aid to a person they shot, but the video shows a delay.

“Sometimes that becomes a point of contention,” Pritchett said. “I’m looking at the video and say, well, how do you define immediate? We’ll change that. Like I said, we have to fight.”

The California Police Chiefs Association and the California State Sheriffs’ Association did not return voicemails from CalMatters for this story.

Assemblymember Phil Ting, a San Francisco Democrat who wrote the 2018 body camera law, said he has no problem with the condensed videos provided by law enforcement agencies after a shooting, because they’re much better than what was made public before the law.

“After the legislation was passed into law, we’ve seen so much more released and so much more video,” Ting said. “If a department is articulating why they acted in a particular way, that’s a good thing. They work for the public and we want accountability.”

Michele Hanisee, president of the Los Angeles Association of Deputy District Attorneys, said the release of the videos is a balancing act, forcing prosecutors to weigh the benefit of transparency against the potential harm of prejudicing the jury pool.

“While transparency promotes public confidence in the conduct of law enforcement,” Hanisee wrote in an email to CalMatters, “the pre-trial release of evidence has the potential to influence the testimony of witnesses, create bias in potential jurors, or create an environment that could justify a change in venue.”

Replaying LAPD shooting videos

Three hundred and sixty miles south of Pritchett’s Sacramento home office, Sulaiman, a communities editor for StreetsBlog Los Angeles, is in front of her own monitor, squeezed into the two-foot patch of carpet between her couch and a knee-high table on which her laptop is perched.

Her eyes, reflected back in the dark blue of a police uniform on screen, dart back and forth between the video released by the LAPD and the time code. She rewinds, presses play, pauses the video, rewinds again.

“Did you hear it?” she asks, then presses play on the video from December 2021. “Listen again.”

On screen is Margarito Lopez, a developmentally disabled 22-year-old sitting on a set of short stairs, holding a meat cleaver, bathed in blue and red light. Several LAPD patrol cars are parked in front of him, the officers shouting at him to drop the cleaver, as they have for at least five minutes.

Lopez stands. The police continue to shout in English and in Spanish. He holds the cleaver over his head. The body camera video’s transcription matches the words of the officers: “Hey, drop it, drop it, stop right there!”

Seconds later, officers fire live rounds, killing Lopez. Sulaiman rewinds again and turns up the volume on her laptop.

This time, a piece of audio that wasn’t transcribed by the LAPD is clear: “Forty, stand by.”

Forty, in this case, is code for a less-lethal foam projectile, a warning to other officers that what they’re about to hear are not lethal rounds.

“The protocol demands that they give the warning and then everybody stand down, wait to see what effect it has,” she said. “So he gives the warning and if you don’t know what you’re listening for, you just hear shouting. But then I realized that that’s what the warning was, and immediately, as soon as the less lethal is fired, it’s contagious fire because they didn’t hear the warning.”

Without that piece of audio, Sulaiman said, the video makes it appear that Lopez was shot after failing to comply with commands and advancing toward the officers.

“And that’s where they play with these transcriptions a little bit,” she said. “So that’s the kind of thing where if you have this different piece of information, that completely changes what this incident is.”

Sulaiman doesn’t believe the LAPD transcription left out the less-lethal warning by accident. The LAPD did not respond to specific questions from CalMatters about this incident or the video transcription.

Since the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020, Sulaiman has focused her work almost entirely on police violence.

Among her most thorough investigations was when she found the only evidence that an LAPD sergeant fired his weapon from his vehicle without stopping during a police chase on July 18, despite two other officers determining moments earlier that the man being chased didn’t have a gun.

The video never made clear which officer fired the shot that wounded 39-year-old Jermaine Petit, but in the reflection in the glass of the sergeant’s patrol car dashboard, she saw him holding up his gun and pointing it out the passenger side window. At the time of the shooting, the sergeant’s arm jerks backward. She said she had to watch the video several times, including at one-quarter speed, before she noticed the reflection.

She acknowledges that police have a difficult job in often-chaotic circumstances, trying to make life-or-death decisions. But that, she said, is their job.

“A lot of times they’ll say, oh, when we put civilians through these active shooter sort of scenarios, they just fire willy-nilly at people,” she said. “Well, yeah, ’cause I’m not f——- trained.

“And when you go second-by-second through these, it is certainly a lot easier to play Monday morning quarterback. But you also see that LAPD is doing the same thing when they’re constructing these narratives.”

Sulaiman said the videos themselves are a mixed bag of consequences. She’s glad that there is some video evidence of the shootings released, but said the format is ripe for manipulation by the police.

“What these videos have taught me is how really skilled LAPD is at deflecting attention at deeper structural reform,” she said. “That they are very good at pointing the finger, at localizing blame on the things that take the least amount of tweaking to fix and deflecting any kind of interest in questions of structural reform.”

Both Sulaiman and Pritchett, in their respective jobs, have had to watch hours and hours of people being shot. The images they see are not blurred. People lie dying in pools of blood, people ask why they were shot, people shout for their mothers.

“It’s tough,” Sulaiman said. “I don’t know what else to say about it.”

When asked how viewing those videos affects him, Pritchett paused for several seconds, started to speak, stopped himself, then started again.

“To be determined.”

Copyright © 2023 Bay City News, Inc. All rights reserved. Republication, rebroadcast or redistribution without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. Bay City News is a 24/7 news service covering the greater Bay Area.

By Kristen Hwang
CalMatters

For the second time in as many years, Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing for major reform of California’s mental health system, this time by overhauling the way counties spend mental health dollars and placing a bond measure before voters to build more psychiatric beds.

County behavioral health advocates and local service providers fear programs will be cut and, much like the controversial CARE Courts legislation — which passed last year and allows individuals to petition a court to force seriously mentally ill people into treatment and housing — say Newsom’s initial announcement came as a shock.

“We listened to the press conference just like you,” said Christine Stoner-Mertz, executive director of the California Alliance of Child and Family Services, which represents organizations that provide child welfare, foster care, juvenile justice and youth behavioral health services.

The proposal is being pitched as a solution to the state’s ballooning homelessness crisis, but experts doubt it will make any kind of meaningful dent. No one has published bill language for the proposal, but Newsom unveiled two major changes during his March state-of-the-state tour: Divert 30% of existing Mental Health Services Act money toward housing people living on the streets who are severely mentally ill; Use a bond measure to generate between $3 billion and $5 billion for 6,000 residential psychiatric treatment beds.

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Voters passed the Mental Health Services Act nearly two decades ago as a ballot initiative that levied a 1% tax on state millionaires to fund local mental health programs. Substantial changes to the act are subject to voter approval because it originally passed as a ballot measure in 2004.

The proposal aims to reprioritize a significant portion of the state’s existing behavioral health system to focus on what Newsom characterized as the state’s “most acute challenge,” which is the number of homeless people with mental illness and substance use disorders. Only about 20% of California’s approximately 172,000 homeless people have a severe mental illness, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, but the issue plays an outsized role in state politics.

“It’s unacceptable what we’re dealing with at scale now in the state of California,” Newsom said. “We have to address and come to grips with the reality of mental health in this state and our nation.”

Newsom, who made reducing homelessness a key part of his gubernatorial campaign in 2018, is contending with the reality of homelessness increasing by nearly 32% in the past four years. Though he has called out counties for not acting aggressively enough and dedicated nearly $10 billion to address the problem, he has also faced harsh bi-partisan criticism for what many view as a political stunt in threatening to withhold money from counties and failing to significantly increase the state’s housing stock.

Newsom’s proposal is backed by several lawmakers, including former Assemblymember and current Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, who co-authored the original act, and Sen. Susan Talamantes Eggman, a Democrat from Stockton who co-authored the CARE Court legislation and who has staked the remainder of her term on advancing mental health changes.

Those who do the on-the-ground mental health work in the state, however, say they have major concerns about such a large system shake-up. The focus on housing and the need for more behavioral health treatment beds is welcome, Stoner-Mertz said, but shouldn’t detract from the current workforce crisis and other problems exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“One-third is a big chunk of money,” Stoner-Mertz said. “The question in our minds is what is the approach and process to solving some of these problems. We would welcome greater partnership around that.”

What the mental health funding proposal would change

On Wednesday, state officials revealed new details about the proposal. It changes the categories counties would be required to invest in, focusing most of the money on homeless adults. Counties would be required to spend 30%, or roughly $1 billion annually, of their Mental Health Services Act dollars on housing homeless people with serious mental illness or drug addiction. They would also direct 35% of the funds to full-service partnerships for these individuals, which include clinical treatment and social supports co-designed by the client and the program.

The remaining 35% could be used for a combination of existing programs like mental health prevention and early intervention, infrastructure and workforce investments, although officials made it clear that workforce would be a priority. Innovation grants that have historically been part of the program do not have any dedicated funds. The proposal also opens the door to using the money for people who struggle with addiction but don’t have additional mental health needs.

In contrast, current regulations give counties broad flexibility in using the money. A minimum of 38% must be spent on full-service partnerships, although counties can spend up to 70% on these services. (Full-service partnerships are intensive wraparound services designed to do “whatever it takes” to meet the client’s long-term needs. They can include things like 24/7 case management, clinical treatment, and housing.) About 19% is reserved for prevention and early intervention programs, much of which focuses on children, and 5% for innovation. Some counties choose to use a portion of the funds for workforce and infrastructure needs.

There are some concerns about whether counties have historically met minimum spending requirements, particularly for full-service partnerships, but there’s no question that the money has become an integral part of the state’s behavioral health system, making up nearly one-third of all spending. Last year the tax generated about $3.8 billion. Newsom’s proposal introduces standardized accountability measures and reduces the amount of money counties are allowed to keep in reserves.

In addition, language will be placed on the 2024 ballot asking for a general obligation bond to pay for 6,000 psychiatric and substance abuse treatment beds. These beds would serve approximately 10,000 people annually, according to a fact sheet from Newsom’s office, by providing long-term residential treatment. An undetermined portion of the bond funds would be used to house homeless veterans.

For many mental health organizations, the bond to increase residential care capacity is much easier to swallow than prescriptive changes to how mental health dollars are spent. The state faces a shortage of more than 7,700 adult psychiatric beds, according to a 2021 RAND report commissioned by the County Behavioral Health Directors Association.

“We really appreciate the administration looking at the report that we did, and the focus on building out infrastructure is wonderful,” said Michelle Doty Cabrera, executive director of the County Behavioral Health Directors Association. “But we continue to need the same kind of focus on workforce and funding for services ongoing.”

At the same time that Newsom is advancing this proposal, his January budget delays $1.1 billion in other behavioral health investments over the next two years, including money intended to increase treatment capacity for adults and kids in crisis, and money for workforce development.

What are the primary concerns?

There’s no telling how exactly existing mental health priorities will get reallocated, but cuts are nearly inevitable given how heavily counties rely on the dollars. The money is “braided into the fabric of all things in our safety net,” Doty Cabrera said.

But some of the most pressing questions come from those who work with children and families. Currently, at least half of the money earmarked for prevention and early intervention must be used for children and young adults.

“This is the only protection from our perspective that is actually going to keep a focus on young people and keep a focus on more upstream services,” said Adrienne Shilton, director of public policy for the nonprofit California Alliance of Child and Family Services.

That money is potentially on the chopping block under the new proposal, as are innovation grants that have catalyzed multi-county programs to improve services for communities of color and LGBTQ folks.

Historically, Medi-Cal — the state’s public health insurance program for extremely low-income residents — has not covered behavioral health prevention programs, which is where the Mental Health Services Act becomes important. The money was intended to allow counties the greatest amount of flexibility in meeting local needs, particularly when other funding streams came with restrictions, said Toby Ewing, executive director of the Mental Health Services Oversight and Accountability Commission.

“It is designed to be a counterpoint to historic restrictions that were in place for Medi-Cal,” Ewing said.

At the same time that the money gives counties the ability to provide services beyond Medi-Cal, they also use qualifying program expenses to draw down matching Medi-Cal federal funds, effectively expanding local mental health programs. Collectively, counties use about half of the money on services that qualify for matching federal dollars, Doty Cabrera said.

With about $1 billion earmarked for housing, which the federal government will not pay for, the mental health system may face between $500 million and $1 billion in lost federal revenue, Shilton said, if Newsom’s proposal is approved.

Dr. Mark Ghaly, state secretary for Health and Human Services, disagrees with the assumption that these changes mean cuts will happen. The administration’s team has heard the same concerns in stakeholder meetings following the announcement and will work with counties “to try to maintain as much as we possibly can with them,” Ghaly said.

“There is no reason why we won’t be able to do a lot on the prevention and early intervention side,” Ghaly said.

He also notes that this proposal can’t be considered alone. It is part of a larger strategy to improve mental health services in the state, which includes sweeping changes to Medi-Cal, a children’s behavioral health initiative and investments in crisis response. One piece of the puzzle seeks permission from the federal government to use Medi-Cal dollars on housing, which would allow counties to still draw down a significant portion of matching funds.

“All of these things come together, build on each other, and I would like to say catalyze one another to promote the transformation,” Ghaly said. “This is, in my mind, government doing well.”

Will this help homelessness? Not really.

The proposal has been couched as a solution to California’s explosive homelessness problem, which consistently tops the list of voter issues.

“We’re fooling ourselves that if we don’t address that fundamental need that we can turn this thing around,” Newsom said during his press conference, backed by more than a half dozen officials who detailed homeless issues from state, county, city and personal perspectives.

But the public perception that California’s homelessness crisis is caused by psychiatric emergencies and drug addiction is a false one. Rather, decades of politicians upholding restrictive zoning laws and obstructive environmental policies have pushed California to the bottom of affordable housing rankings and are the primary drivers of homelessness in the state. Other factors, like changes to the state’s criminal justice system, also contribute. Dr. Margot Kushel, director of the UC San Francisco Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, said no amount of spending on mental health will improve the state’s overall homelessness problem.

Still, she and other medical professionals who work primarily with unhoused people say the most vulnerable people on the streets are those with untreated mental illness, and prioritizing housing is the most important thing the state can do for that population’s physical and mental health. People living without shelter also face dismal health outcomes, and discharging a patient back to the street is a recipe for swift deterioration.

Even local and county behavioral health groups that have raised concerns about the proposal acknowledge the need for more housing for their clients, but they fear an inversion of the current problem — housing without services — will result.

“My concern is robbing Peter to pay Paul,” said Debbie Manners, president and CEO of Sycamores, a Los Angeles behavioral health and child welfare agency. Sycamores serves about 500 children and families daily through its school-based mental health program. Two years ago the state allocated $4.4 billion to a Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative, but it’s a one-time investment.

“I’m not sure how that will fill in the gap. I don’t think it will fill the gap,” Manners said.

Unfortunately, limited funding is the reality of this year’s budget cycle, with the Legislative Analyst’s Office projecting a $24 billion deficit.

“You don’t want to pit one need for money against another, and I get that,” Kushel said. “On the other hand, it isn’t really possible to serve this population without their having housing.”

By Alejandro Lazo
CalMatters

In this economy, who has enough money for a down payment on a house?

Despite a projected $25 billion budget deficit, the state of California does. At least for now.

The California Housing Finance Agency is poised to launch a scaled-down version of its new shared equity home loan program on March 27. With the Dream for All program, the state plans to provide $300 million worth of down payments for an estimated 2,300 first-time homebuyers.

The complicated program involves the state paying some or all of the upfront costs for buying a home — the down payment, for instance — in exchange for a share in the home’s value when it is sold, refinanced or transferred.

If the home appreciates in value, those gains to the state would then be used to fund the next borrowers — a little for the seller; a little for the next aspiring buyer.

Everybody wins — as long as prices go up.

The trouble is that home prices have been declining in the state for months, even as higher mortgage interest rates have made monthly mortgage payments more expensive.

A potential economic downturn looms as well, as the Federal Reserve weighs raising borrowing costs even further as soon as today.

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And California’s tech industry is taking a beating and laying off workers, contributing to a decline in personal incomes. Income taxes are the state’s biggest revenue source.

Given the uncertainty, Gov. Gavin Newsom in January proposed a significantly smaller version of the 10-year, $10 billion program originally envisioned by Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins, a Democrat from San Diego. In his January budget, Newsom proposed spending an initial $300 million on the program, a cut from the $500 million compromise signed last year.

Optimism and expectations

The size and scope of the Dream for All program will likely be a subject of negotiations between Newsom and the overwhelmingly Democratic Legislature this year. The governor is expected to offer a revised state spending plan and a new financial forecast in May. Lawmakers must pass a balanced budget by June 15 in order to get paid.

The proposed cut “will not impact the Administration’s commitment or timeline for implementing the program,” Newsom’s Department of Finance said in January.

In a Feb. 13 email to CalMatters, Christopher Woods, budget director for Atkins, said her office will seek more funding for the program.

“The Governor ‘proposing’ to pull back some funds has very little to do with what will actually happen,” Woods wrote to CalMatters, in response to earlier coverage of the program. “No one should expect the program to be cut, and we should all fully expect additional funds — perhaps as much as $1 billion — to be allocated in the 2023-24 Budget Act.”

“With interest rates rising, the program is needed more than ever … and there are several innovative ways to fund the program,” Woods wrote.

Woods declined to answer follow-up questions for this story.

Atkins, who championed the equity sharing program last year, has said the Dream for All program is a priority. She said in a recent statement she isn’t giving up on getting more money for it.

“Our state is about to launch a program that will help change people’s lives for the better, and make the dream of homeownership a reality,” she said. “While existing funding for the California Dream for All is a great first step, we are working to allocate additional funding in the upcoming state budget — with the ultimate goal of providing $1 billion per year — to help even more families set the foundation for building generational wealth.”

Falling equity

The uncertainty in the economy and housing market has been a subject of discussion at CalHFA for months, as officials and political appointees seek to launch a program meant to take advantage of rising home prices at the very moment home equity is falling.

State officials said buyers positioned to hold onto a property for the long-term are those best suited for the program when home prices are falling.

In a presentation to its board of directors in January, CalHFA officials also said the agency is planning for a program with a potentially “very short life cycle.”

“Having lived the dream of buying a house in Los Angeles in 1989, when the market peaked, and then selling it at a loss almost a decade later, I can appreciate that the market doesn’t always go up,” Jim Cervantes, CalHFA’s chair, said during that Jan. 19 meeting.

“Disclosures, whatever we can do to mitigate — or rather, have prospective buyers understand what they’re getting into — would be extremely valuable, because no one’s a good market timer.”

California home prices, already rising for years, saw big gains during the pandemic, as mortgage interest rates hit historic lows and families sought more space for their remote work set-ups to practice social distancing.

The median price of a previously-owned, single-family home in California, as tracked by the California Association of Realtors, increased 47% from March 2020 to May 2022, when it peaked at $900,170.

That same month the Federal Reserve, in order to tackle inflation, began its most aggressive interest rate hikes in years driving up mortgage costs for consumers.

Since May 2022, the state’s median home price has fallen 16.5% to hit $751,330 in January.

Market change

Despite the decline in home prices, monthly mortgage costs continue to make the state’s housing market more unaffordable than at nearly any point in the last 15 years, particularly for lower- and middle-class families. Only 17% of families in California could afford a median-priced single family home at the end of last year, according to the Realtors group.

Given the rapid market changes, Tiena Johnson Hall, CalHFA’s executive director, called the governor’s reductions in Dream for All funding prudent at CalHFA’s January meeting. “There’s still a lot of room for (home) values to continue to decrease, and that is what we expect to see,” she said.

In February, the state’s nonpartisan legislative analyst projected a revised $25 billion deficit in next year’s state budget. Since then, job growth nationally and in California has remained strong, except for layoffs in the tech sector.

The full details of the Dream for All program — for instance, which lenders will offer the shared equity loans to borrowers — are not yet available from CalHFA.

And loans will not be immediately available to consumers when the program launches this month. Lenders will need a month to six weeks to roll out the loans and begin marketing them to consumers, said Ellen Martin, a CalHFA official tasked with designing the program.

“We do know that there’s a lot of excitement out there,” Martin told CalMatters in a recent interview.

How it will work

Some details have been revealed in CalHFA board meetings, public hearings and a report to the state Legislature. Here are some of the program’s key components.

• The loans will not be available for all Californians. Only those who earn 150% or less of the median income of others in their county qualify. Those income limits vary by county, with $300,000 being the cut-off in pricey Santa Clara and San Francisco counties, but $159,000 for many inland counties such as Fresno and Merced.
• The loans will cover as much as 20% of a home purchase. Whenever a home is sold, transferred or refinanced, a borrower will owe the state the original amount the state invested, plus a percentage of the home’s increase in value. If the original loan was 20 percent of a home’s value, the seller would owe the state the original loan plus 20 percent of its increased value, though that amount would be capped at 250% of the original loan amount.
• A social equity feature of the program will be included for those who earn as much as 80% of the area median income. They will get to keep more of their equity when they sell, refinance or transfer their properties than others with higher incomes. Also about 10% of the initial state funds, or $30 million, will be reserved for those lower-income borrowers.
• The loans can be used to fund down payments and closing costs, including interest rate buydowns.
• Given the complexity of the program, borrowers will be required to complete a homebuyer education course.

Advocates’ concerns

The complexity of the program has some consumer advocates worried.

Lisa Sitkin, a senior staff attorney with the National Housing Law Project, said it would be wise for the agency to ensure borrowers receive periodic notices about the loan’s atypical details.

“As time goes by, people tend to forget and treat it as a normal loan, and I think it is useful for people planning to be reminded,” said Sitkin, a member of a working group advising CalHFA on the program.

A proposal to sell the loans as mortgage-backed securities also has her worried. California officials are exploring the idea of pooling the shared equity loans into securities and selling them to investors, to help provide additional money for other borrowers.

Many Wall Street financial institutions bundled often poor-quality mortgage loans into securities during real estate’s boom years and sold them to major investors. But during the years of downturn, getting help to homeowners was complicated by the difficulties identifying who exactly owned these loans.

“If they are sold into private, securitized trusts there is a lack of transparency about who owns your debt, and a lack of information about options if there are problems,” Sitkins said. “I really want to be sure that there are guardrails and protections for the borrowers.”

Consumers are cautious

As CalHFA officials were designing the program last year, they held several listening sessions online, taking comments from the public. Jake Lawrence, a 41-year-old cannabis entrepreneur in Willits who also runs a nonprofit, said he liked what he heard.

“I’m very interested. The problem we face is that there’s such a flux in what’s going on,” Lawrence said. “We’re in the middle of a housing market bust, so we’re gonna watch prices tumble for a minute.”

What’s more, one of the county’s biggest industries, the marijuana trade, has been hit hard by declines in cannabis prices. “It’s beyond suffering,” Lawrence said.

Lawrence also wondered how the state will calculate equity if he makes improvements to a home.

Despite his questions, he is considering the idea.

“It doesn’t hurt my feelings to share equity with someone who invests in me,” he said of the state. “And anybody that understands any kind of financial literacy should understand an investor should be able to have their expected ROI (return on investment). For me, I have zero issue with the idea.”

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