California’s Alex Lee Takes on the Housing Crisis
By James Moreau | 12 Aug, 2025

Alex Lee became California’s youngest Assemblymember in 2020, and is focused on legislation to address the state’s housing crisis.

Since 2020, when he became California’s youngest ever Assembly member at age 25, Alex Lee has bet his political career on solving the state’s housing crisis.

California’s housing shortage of nearly four million units has led to a 94% surge over the past decade in the median home price to $909,000.  The affordability problem is exacerbated by a widening income to home-price gap.

Tackling this situation has driven Lee’s activism and policy initiatives.  He has been a vocal critic of housing crisis profiteering and introduced legislation to curb the influence of large corporations and investors who together own one in five California homes.

Lee’s proposed bills, AB 2584 and AB 1240, seek to limit the ability of these entities to purchase single-family homes and convert them into rentals.

He also supported AB 835 to fast-track home construction by changing the building code to allow single-stairway apartment buildings over three stories.

Beyond the hurdles posed by red tape and construction permits in adding housing units, Lee has kept a wary eye on investment vultures, saying, “As we produce more housing, we don’t want the market to be eliminated or narrowed because of those corporate actors.”

His signature AB 11, known as the Social Housing Act, represents Lee’s commitment to creating publicly owned, mixed-income housing to increase affordability and stability for residents.

Lee has also championed consumer protections and food security while protesting Trump’s immigration crackdown. Lee, now 30, was born in San Jose and graduated high school in 2013 in neighboring Milpitas which has a 74% Asian population.  In 2017 he earned a bachelor of arts in political science and communications from the University of California, Davis. Lee’s parents immigrated from Hong Kong.