A California Assembly bill designed to kill an anti-tax ballot measure has instead united progressive housing advocates against it — and the measure it was meant to stop is still heading to November voters anyway.

Assemblymember Buffy Wicks introduced AB 736 as a preemptive strike: cap transfer taxes statewide at a painful-but-survivable rate, then use that legislation to bargain the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association into pulling a November ballot measure that would reduce the same taxes to near zero. The strategy failed. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association says it's keeping its measure on the ballot regardless. And now San Francisco — which has spent six years building a progressive transfer-tax architecture to fund affordable housing — is stuck staring at two bad outcomes at once.

On a Wednesday morning last week, a small group of activists gathered outside East Bay Assemblymember Buffy Wicks' district office in Oakland. The lights were off and the door was locked. It was, one advocate said, an appropriate metaphor.

The activists — from Tenants Together, the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco, and Democratic Socialists of America chapters on both sides of the bay — had one demand: Wicks must pull AB 736, a bill she had quietly inserted into an existing piece of legislation just days earlier.

The bill would cap property transfer taxes statewide at 3 percent and restrict most local rates to 1.5 percent. In San Francisco, the transfer tax rate on sales over $10 million has been 6 percent since voters approved Proposition I in 2020, a measure passed specifically to fund affordable housing. Under AB 736, that rate would be cut in half. Under the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association's competing November ballot measure — the Local Taxpayer Protection Act — it would fall to just 0.11 percent, with any future increase requiring a two-thirds vote at the ballot box.

Wicks' strategy, according to sources cited by the SF Standard, was to use AB 736 as a bargaining chip to convince HJTA to withdraw their initiative. It didn't work.

HJTA president Jon Coupal announced Monday that the group was keeping its measure on the ballot despite what he called "intense political pressure." "HJTA regards [AB 736] as a step in the right direction; however, it is not adequate," Coupal told the SF Standard.

A spokesperson for Wicks did not respond to questions from the Standard about the bill or the negotiations surrounding it.

A Procedural Maneuver That Left Advocates Flatfooted

AB 736's timeline explains much of the progressive anger. The bill was not introduced through the normal committee process. California legislative records show that AB 736 was originally a housing bond measure that passed the Assembly 65 to 11 in June 2025. The transfer tax cap language was inserted via a gut-and-amend maneuver on the Senate floor on June 22, 2026 — three days before the protest, and days before a vote on the amended version was expected. Advocacy groups say they had almost no warning.

After the June 22 amendment, the bill was re-referred to the Senate Rules and Local Government committees. As of this writing, no Senate floor vote has occurred on the amended language.

Lupe Arreola of Tenants Together did not mince words about what the bill means for SF and other cities. "[AB 736] is going to make it impossible for us to carry out the social housing that people in California have already voted for," she told the SF Standard. "Without robust transfer taxes, municipalities won't have money to build social and affordable housing."

The SF Stakes

San Francisco has more riding on this fight than most California cities. Voters approved Prop I in 2020 to establish the elevated transfer tax rate on large property sales, earmarking those revenues for affordable housing. As The Dissent has reported, the city subsequently diverted some of those funds — a move that prompted a DSA-backed coalition to launch a signature campaign this spring for a constitutional amendment that would lock the money in place.

That initiative, the Affordable Housing Guarantee Act, is aimed directly at preventing City Hall from redirecting transfer tax proceeds. A statewide cap — whether under AB 736 or the HJTA measure — would reduce the pool of revenue that measure is designed to protect.

The stakes are further elevated by the city's anticipated windfall from the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs. City economist Ted Egan has projected that real-estate transactions tied to the technology boom could generate significant transfer tax revenue in the coming years. Both AB 736 and the HJTA measure would cut into that haul.

Real Estate Money Has Already Moved

The California Business Roundtable, which reportedly donated more than $10 million to the Jarvis initiative before this spring, announced this week it would back Wicks' legislation instead. Three major commercial landlords — Douglas Emmett Properties, Hudson Pacific Properties, and Kilroy Realty Corporation — also announced they would redirect their support to AB 736 and pledged approximately $10 million to "advocate generally for compromise solutions," per the SF Standard.

UC Davis law professor Chris Elmendorf, a prominent YIMBY policy analyst, argues the strategy can still work even with HJTA on the ballot. "Had the Legislature done something, maybe Prop. 13 wouldn't have passed," he told the Standard, framing Wicks' bill as an attempt to peel away moderate donors and voters who might otherwise back the more extreme Jarvis version.

But it's hard to see the logic holding if the bill never gets a floor vote. For now, AB 736 sits in a Senate committee while the Jarvis measure remains on track for November — and San Francisco waits to see which version of a transfer tax cut, if any, it's going to be forced to absorb.