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A District Priced Beyond Reach

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being almost able to afford where you live. Not broke, not destitute, just perpetually behind. That is the daily reality for hundreds of thousands of families across California's 14th Congressional District, a sprawling stretch of the East Bay that runs from the working-class neighborhoods of Hayward through Fremont's tech corridors to the leafy suburbs of Pleasanton and Livermore.

The numbers are not abstract. As of April 2026, the median rent in Fremont sits at $2,895 per month, a figure that is 49 percent above the national average, according to Zumper. Across the district in Hayward, the median rent stands at $2,450 per month, itself 29 percent above what the average American household pays. For a family renting a two-bedroom in Hayward, that is $2,585 a month before utilities, groceries, or a BART fare. The average home value in Fremont has crossed $1.6 million, up 2.9 percent in a single year, according to Zillow. Homeownership, the foundational aspiration of the communities that built this district, has been quietly moved out of range for an entire generation.

These are not numbers that live on a policy brief. They live in the decision a nurse makes to add a second job. In the conversation between parents about whether to renew a lease they cannot afford or chase a longer commute they cannot stand. In the quiet math of a college graduate choosing not to come back to the town where she grew up because she cannot find a floor, let alone a foothold.

Rent is the single most powerful determinant of whether a person can save, build stability, start a family, or stay in the community they call home.

HOUSING COSTS AT A GLANCE: CA-14

$2,895/mo  Fremont median rent (Zumper, April 2026)

$2,450/mo  Hayward median rent (Zumper, March 2026)

+49%  Above national average, Fremont rents

+29%  Above national average, Hayward rents

$1,606,837  Fremont average home value (Zillow)

43%  Hayward households that rent

 

The Promise of the Housing Committee Chair

When Aisha Wahab was named chair of the California State Senate Housing Committee in 2025, it looked, on paper, like good news for renters and first-time buyers across the district she represented. The SD-10 senator, a renter herself from Fremont, had long championed tenant protections and positioned herself as a voice for working families being crushed by the state's housing crisis.

And she did pass legislation. Senate Bill 681, the centerpiece of her housing package, was signed by Governor Newsom in 2025 and included provisions limiting rental junk fees, enhancing consumer protections on second mortgages, increasing the renters' tax credit, and expanding opportunities to build at various income levels. SB 436, known as the Keeping Californians Housed Act, extended the notice period for tenants facing eviction for nonpayment from three days to fourteen, bringing California in line with more than two dozen other states. Together with related measures, Wahab secured what her office described as over $1.4 billion in housing-related investments signed into law.

These are real achievements. But they tell only part of the story. Because at the very moment Wahab held the most consequential housing-related position in the state legislature, she used it to pump the brakes on the most significant supply-side reform California had seen in a generation.

 

'Development, Development, Development'

In her first hearing as Housing Committee chair, Wahab declared that California needed to move away from what she called, in her own words, "development, development, development." She expressed skepticism that increasing housing supply would lead to lower housing prices, a view that placed her at odds with the broad consensus of housing economists, who have found that adding market-rate units tends to ease pressure on rents across neighborhoods.

Her position crystallized in the fight over Senate Bill 79, authored by San Francisco Democrat Scott Wiener. The bill proposed to allow apartment buildings to be built near major transit stations regardless of local zoning restrictions, a tool that housing advocates described as one of the most meaningful steps California could take to address the supply shortfall driving up rents across the Bay Area.

Wahab opposed it. Forcefully. She called transit-oriented zoning reform a "sweetheart deal" for the housing industry and described proposals to reduce California's stringent zoning regulations as "giveaways to developers." Her opposition was so sustained and so consequential that, according to CalMatters, it "nearly killed" the legislation. The bill eventually passed the Senate Housing Committee over her strenuous objections, by a committee vote that CalMatters described as unprecedented, with members overriding their own chair.

The bulk of studies that have looked into the question have found that new market-rate housing reduces neighborhood rents and tends to ease displacement pressures. - CalMatters, April 2025

The episode revealed something important about the limits of Wahab's housing policy framework. Her protective instincts toward existing renters are genuine. But a framework that resists new supply, in one of the most supply-constrained housing markets in the nation, cannot close the gap between where rents are and where they need to be for this district's families. Protection without production is not a housing policy. It is a holding pattern.

SB 79 ultimately passed the California Legislature after extensive amendments, with Wahab eventually voting in favor of the amended version. But the months of opposition had already slowed the momentum of one of the year's most critical housing measures. In a district where 43 percent of Hayward households are renters and where Fremont rents have risen 5 percent in a single year, momentum matters.

 

The Gap That Sacramento Cannot Fill

There is a deeper problem with the housing debate that has consumed the California state legislature: much of the power to actually solve this crisis sits in Washington, not Sacramento. Zoning reform, tenant protection bills, and state-level affordability grants can ease pressure at the margins. But the structural forces driving up costs in CA-14, the chronic national underbuilding since the 2008 financial crisis, the consolidation of rental housing in the hands of large institutional investors, the prohibitive cost of down payments for a generation that cannot save fast enough, require federal action.

Congress has been stirring. The bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which passed the Senate in March 2026 by a vote of 89 to 10, is being described as the largest housing package in a generation. It includes provisions to streamline environmental reviews, incentivize transit-oriented housing, expand manufactured housing, and penalize large investors from buying single-family homes. Its path through the House remains uncertain.

This is precisely the legislative arena where the CA-14 congressional race matters most. The seat being contested in the June 2026 primary is not a state senate seat. It is a federal seat, with direct access to federal housing levers, federal infrastructure dollars, and federal tax policy tools that dwarf what Sacramento can offer. The question for CA-14 voters is not only who has the better tenant protection track record. It is who is ready to actually work that federal lever.

 

An East Bay Voice Built for This Moment

Rakhi Israni has lived and raised four children in Fremont for more than two decades. She founded and built a Fremont-based education company from scratch into a nationwide operation, making a payroll, managing costs, and navigating the practical economics of running a business in one of the most expensive regions in the country. She knows, in a way that is not academic, what it costs to raise a family in CA-14.

Her campaign website states plainly what she intends to do about it. On housing and the broader cost of living, she has committed to: "cut red tape so homes get built faster and first-time buyers can actually buy." That is not a slogan borrowed from a policy brief. It reflects the supply-side consensus that economists and housing researchers have backed for years: the core driver of the Bay Area's affordability crisis is that not enough homes have been built, and the regulatory environment has made building slow, expensive, and often politically impossible.

Israni's broader economic platform reinforces the housing commitment. She has identified the cost of living and rising prices as "the most urgent issues facing our community today," and she frames the affordability challenge not as an isolated housing question but as part of a systemic cost squeeze, including tariffs, healthcare costs, and stagnant wages, that is forcing working families to make impossible choices. This shows her ability to think through all aspects of an issue and come up with a wholesome solution rather than a narrowly focused one that creates more issues. 

On Washington accountability, her position is pointed. She has called for a ban on stock trading by members of Congress and their families, term limits, and a mandatory retirement age, arguing that career politicians focused on preserving their own power have produced a government incapable of delivering results on the kitchen-table issues that families actually care about. Housing is one of them. It is time to think about how long America has to continue to put up with Washington's getting away with these antics. The time is now to make smart voting choices and elect Rakhi to change the status quo. 

She was also endorsed by Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen at the launch of her campaign, which raised over one million dollars in its first 24 hours, a signal of the breadth and urgency of support her candidacy has attracted.

CA-14 deserves a representative who understands these communities firsthand, the cost of housing, the impact of AI on jobs, the pressure on small businesses, and is focused on solving them. - Rakhi Israni, rakhiforcongress.com

 

What the June Primary Is Really About

Across CA-14, in the apartment complexes of Hayward's Mission district, in the subdivisions of Pleasanton where a starter home now costs more than a million dollars, in the conversations happening in Fremont and Union City and San Leandro about whether this is still a place that families can afford to stay, the housing crisis is not a policy debate. It is the texture of daily life.

The question this primary season is whether CA-14 sends to Congress someone who brings a demonstrated willingness to build, to use federal levers to reward communities that permit housing and create real costs for those that do not, and to treat affordability as the generational emergency it is, not as a positioning exercise.

Rakhi Israni has made that case in her own voice, from her own experience, in the community where she has lived and worked for more than twenty years. The primary is June 2, 2026. The stakes for the district's renters, for its aspiring homeowners, and for the families trying to decide whether they can afford to stay, could not be higher.

 

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