There is a story in the Book of Kings about a baby, two mothers, and a king asked to decide which woman the child belongs to. When King Solomon orders the infant cut in half, the false mother accepts the compromise as fair. The real mother cries out to give the baby to the other woman and let it live.
We are watching something like this play out with Measure ULA right now, and it is painful to know exactly who is holding the knife.
In this story, the baby is ULA, the mansion tax Los Angeles voters passed in 2022 with 58% of the vote. Since taking effect in 2023, it has raised roughly $830 million for affordable housing construction, direct rental assistance, and legal support for tenants facing eviction. It is by far the largest single source of homelessness funding in the city. And it is delivering.
Just this month, Mayor Bass announced more than $300 million in new affordable housing funding through ULA, along with $14 million in emergency income support to keep Angelenos displaced by recent fires and other crises from losing their homes. In Council District 11 alone, ULA has already provided nearly $1 million in emergency rental assistance, supported 433 eviction defense cases, and delivered $460,000 in direct income support to households on the verge of losing their homes. The application window for the latest round of emergency income support for seniors and people with disabilities opened April 10th and closes April 30th.
This is not a theoretical program or some future promise. It is money going out the door right now to real people who need it. And it is in serious danger, both because of its critics, but also because of its supposed friends.
The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association is currently gathering signatures for a statewide constitutional amendment that would do two things. First, it would cap real estate transfer taxes at a tiny fraction of what Los Angeles currently charges. Second, it would require a two-thirds supermajority to pass any citizen-initiated special tax measure. ULA, which passed by simple majority and is a transfer tax, happens to be both types of measure the initiative targets. The California Business Roundtable has been explicit about this. As their president told CalMatters, the question was whether they could find the right opportunity to kill both types of tax at once, and then along came Measure ULA. They have been waiting for this moment.
More than just collateral damage in a broader anti-tax campaign, ULA is the stated justification, recruiting tool, and poster child for Howard Jarvis. The anti-tax crusaders want to kill ULA and then use its corpse to pass an amendment that prevents any California city from ever passing anything like it again. Cities across California would collectively lose between two and three billion dollars a year if the measure passes, gutting budgets for housing, schools, parks, and fire safety statewide.
Which makes it all the more baffling, and maddening, that the progressive wing of Los Angeles politics has responded by offering to do Howard Jarvis’s work for them.
Mayor Bass, who presides over the programs that ULA funds and is now taking credit for its results, went behind LA voters to Sacramento seeking legislative carveouts through Senate Bill 423. Councilwoman Nithya Raman, who campaigned for ULA and ran phone banks for it, has proposed exempting the first fifteen years of new multifamily construction, framing this as saving the majority of ULA dollars while addressing concerns about housing production. For both of them, the logic seems to be that if we hollow out ULA enough, maybe Howard Jarvis will stand down.
SB 423 would have enacted a series of ULA modifications that would only take effect if the Howard Jarvis ballot measure was pulled or failed to qualify. It was a hostage negotiation with people who had already said they were not interested in a deal. Howard Jarvis said exactly that. Their president announced that the legislative maneuvering was an attempt to ambush them and that the opportunity had passed. Yet the negotiation continues and the sacrificial logic persists. A new City Council ad hoc committee has formed to study ULA exemptions. Offer the lamb, and perhaps the wolves will be satisfied.
They will not be satisfied, because this is not a negotiation. The anti-tax movement that produced Proposition 13 in 1978 has been playing the long game for nearly fifty years. They know how to use a loophole, wait out a court ruling, regroup after a defeat, and come back with a more carefully targeted measure the next cycle. The 2024 version of this initiative was struck from the ballot by the California Supreme Court for being too sweeping. This year’s version is more narrowly drawn precisely to avoid that fate. The tax revolters learn, adapt, and do not accept partial victories and go home.
Whatever the individual merits of any specific exemption, the political effect of progressive leaders endorsing ULA reform is to legitimize the story that Howard Jarvis wants to tell California voters: that ULA is the problem. It turns out the false mothers are right here at City Hall.
What ULA actually demonstrated, and what makes it so threatening to real estate and business interests, is that progressive taxation at the local level is politically achievable. Fifty-eight percent of Los Angeles voters said yes, and other cities took note. Santa Monica passed its own version the same year, and Bay Area cities have been incrementally raising transfer taxes for a decade. The 2017 California Supreme Court ruling in a case against the city of Upland established that citizen-initiated special tax measures only need a simple majority to pass, and communities across California walked through that door. Howard Jarvis doesn’t just want to close that door for LA, or simply water down our landmark legislation. They want to permanently lock the door for every city in the state.
There is, however, a genuinely strong line of defense that deserves far more attention than the exemption negotiations have received. In 2023, the California Legislature placed its own measure on the November 2026 ballot, known as ACA 13. Its logic turns the Howard Jarvis weapon back on itself. It would require that any future initiative seeking to raise the threshold needed to pass other measures must itself first meet that same higher threshold. In this case, if Howard Jarvis wants a constitutional amendment requiring a two-thirds vote to approve new local taxes, they would need two-thirds of California voters to approve that rule change. They would be required to clear the very bar they are trying to impose on everyone else.
Because ACA 13 is already slated for the November 2026 ballot, it would appear alongside the Howard Jarvis initiative if that measure qualifies. And if ACA 13 passes, it would apply to everything else on the same ballot, potentially neutralizing the Howard Jarvis measure in the same election cycle. That is the fight worth having. Making the case to California voters that Howard Jarvis must clear the very bar they are trying to impose on everyone else is a more honest and effective progressive strategy than quietly negotiating away the program that real estate money has been trying to kill since before the ink was dry on Measure ULA in 2022.
It is worth noting, in the middle of a mayoral race, that not every candidate has gone along with the sacrificial logic. Reverend Rae Huang is the only major candidate who has refused to support modifying Measure ULA. While Bass and Raman have both picked up the knife, Huang has argued that the measure was decided together with communities, and that revising it without genuine community input, under pressure from developers and anti-tax crusaders, is not reform, but surrender. She is the one candidate standing in the room with Solomon and saying no, do not cut the baby. Whether voters reward that position remains to be seen, but it deserves to be named.
Consider what is actually at stake in the exemption discussions. The ULA Emergency Income Support Program is providing one-time unconditional cash assistance to rent-burdened seniors and people with disabilities who are on the edge of losing their housing. Without this support, the line between housed and unhoused in Los Angeles is exactly as thin as it looks. That is what ULA’s false mothers are trading away. Not an abstraction or a line item, but families’ ability to stay in their homes.
Offering to carve up ULA does not address the opposition’s actual goal. It simply demonstrates that the tax’s own supporters can be pressured into weakening it, which is useful for Howard Jarvis’s fundraising and messaging and not much else. The real mother’s answer, the answer of the coalition that built ULA from the ground up and that got outspent two to one by the real estate industry and still won, is to refuse the knife. Defend what voters built, fight the statewide initiative on its merits, support ACA 13, and make the stakes plain to every California voter who stands to lose something if Howard Jarvis prevails. Why are we still negotiating with people who told you the negotiation was over?
The baby is alive and thriving. Don’t cut it in half to appease those who wanted it dead from the start.