Opinion: Housing is a privilege in California with sky-high costs. This needs to change, now.

Gonzalez Soto is a tenant living in Pacific Beach and a member of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment.

I never thought that having a child would cause me to become homeless. I was pregnant and working full-time at a minimum-wage job when my daughter was born. My job refused me paid parental leave, and as a single parent without the income to afford costly child care, I was forced to stay home to care for my infant child. This cost me my income and my ability to pay rent.

Within months, my landlord threatened to call the sheriff to evict me. My daughters and I became homeless. We didn’t even own a car to sleep in. For months, I stayed with friends, until we found an emergency women’s shelter.

When the women’s shelter told us after a year that we needed to leave to make room for other families, I was pushed back into the nightmare of trying to find housing we could afford. Between a security deposit and first and last month's rent, I was being asked to come up with nearly $10,000 to find a home. Working minimum wage as a single parent doesn't afford me the ability to have that kind of savings.

By a miracle, we finally found an apartment. It was a stretch financially, but for the last seven years, my daughters and I have been stable. Finally — no more shelters. No more couch surfing.

But in 2021, things changed. An organizer with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment knocked on my door and let me know our building had been bought by Blackstone. Not just our building, but nearly 6,000 other homes regionally. It wasn’t long after that I started getting hit with new fees and being overcharged for water, and my rent went up $300 a month.

We are barely making ends meet. Will we get another huge rent increase? If so, my family will be homeless again.

Across the state, millions of renters like me live on the edge — one rent increase or eviction away from homelessness. Many of us are women with children , especially women of color. In fact, the presence of a child is the greatest single predictor of whether someone will face an eviction.

With corporate landlords like Blackstone buying up more homes across the state, and with the rapid decline of affordable housing options, we’re seeing double-digit increases in homelessness across the state.

This is why we need a constitutional human right to housing. When we ensure the legal right to housing for all Californians, we obligate the government to make that value a reality — not just a talking point.

If passed, the ramifications could be huge. A constitutional human right to housing in California would obligate state and local governments to respect, protect and fulfill this right for its people. That means the state’s need to dramatically increase housing affordability would not only be a goal, but a constitutional requirement. It would spur governments to take renter protections seriously — to protect families from getting huge rent increases like Blackstone gave me, and to ensure that when families do lose their housing, like I did in 2016, there are safe and stable housing options.

I have worked hard all my life to provide for myself and my children. But right now, housing is treated as a privilege only for those who can afford California’s sky-high housing costs. That’s why I joined the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and the Blackstone Tenants Union. I joined because I knew that fighting on my own to stay in my home, against the world’s largest landlord, would be futile. And I joined because there are solutions to this housing crisis — it’s a question of political will.

I want to live in a world where my baby girls don’t have to worry about whether or not they can have a place to live. Where they can dream of their futures without the fear of worrying about where they will sleep at night. I think everyone deserves that. When we amend the California Constitution to assert the legal right to housing, I believe we can make that dream a reality.

This story originally appeared in San Diego Union-Tribune .