Alex Lee on Housing, Education, and California's Future
- May 31
- 4 min read
Written by Michael Qin
Assemblymember Alex Lee is the three-term progressive incumbent representing California’s State Assembly District 24, which spans communities across Fremont, Milpitas, Newark, Sunol, and North San Jose. First elected in 2020 at the age of 25, Lee made history as the youngest Asian American legislator ever elected to the state assembly, as well as California’s first openly bisexual and Gen Z lawmaker.
A South Bay native and University of California, Davis graduate, he currently serves as the Chair of both the Legislative Progressive Caucus and the Select Committee on Social Housing. Throughout his six years in Sacramento, Lee has established a reputation as an unyielding systemic reformer, passing over 45 bills into law and steering more than $84 million in state capital investments back to infrastructure and public services within his home district.
Billionaire Tax
In an interview with The Municipal Journal, Lee frames the state’s economic challenges, whether housing affordability or education funding, around severe wealth inequality and distribution in California. With around 200 billionaire residents, California has more billionaires than any other state, while simultaneously having the worst homelessness crisis nationwide, with over 180,000 individuals unhoused. California’s tax code is built primarily around income tax, but at the billionaire level, wealth accumulates through assets rather than paychecks, meaning the ultra-rich largely fall outside its reach. As a result, Lee argues, billionaires are largely ignored by the tax code, and taxing them has become inefficient.
That concern has translated into concrete legislation. Lee proposed Assembly Bill 259 in 2024 to impose an annual tax of 1.5% on California’s ultra-rich, which ultimately did not pass. Now, the California Billionaire Tax Act is set to appear on the November 2026 ballot, aiming to raise approximately $100 billion in one-time revenue. Unless immediate action is taken, Lee views the status quo as a path toward techno-feudalism, where Big Tech companies act similarly to a small number of powerful dynastic families that control wealth and power through passing it down via inheritance, while the vast majority live as “serfs.”
“The vision I’m fighting for is the opposite: using the benefits of technology and governance to make sure that people’s lives and work are dignified, and that everyone can share in the prosperity we collectively built. That requires strong economic strategies to redistribute wealth where it matters most and reinvest it in society,” Lee said.
Social Housing
Lee has been a champion of social housing, a model that has been adopted in many European and Asian countries, where the government supplants the private real estate market as the lead developer and builds affordable housing the way it builds roads and libraries. Drawing an analogy to public education, Lee argues that housing should be treated as a universal right rather than a market commodity. “Now imagine if schools operated the way the housing market does: your parents would have to scrape and save to find the most affordable private school possible, and outcomes would vary wildly by income. That is exactly what the housing market does today.”
As the Chair of the Social Housing Select Committee, Lee has introduced several bills to establish California’s social housing infrastructure and capital funding. On financing, Lee envisions a self-sustaining revolving loan model: “You start with a large construction loan — at the state level … You build the building. As residents move in, pay rent, or purchase units, that revenue services the debt on the loan and eventually pays it off. Then you use the ongoing rents and revenues to cover maintenance and building operations, while reinvesting the remaining funds back into the loan fund to go build more buildings. It is the same fundamental mechanism private banks and developers use today. The key difference is that the government is the developer, so the profit motive is replaced by the public good motive, which keeps costs lower and access broader.”
Education
Currently, the majority of California public school districts are funded based on average daily attendance (ADA) metrics. In practice, however, ADA-based funding is structurally always lower than enrollment-based funding by around 4% to 6%. Student absences directly reduce what schools receive, costing districts statewide $3.6 billion in annual funding, according to the California Department of Education. High chronic absenteeism in school compounds the issue even more. In the 2024-25 school year, the rate of chronic absenteeism was 1.1 million, or 19% of all California students, a profound problem California has faced since the pandemic. Lee intends to switch California from ADA-based funding to enrollment-based, as “That shift opens the door to so many other improvements: more mental health counselors, better equipment and facilities, better-paying jobs for teachers. All of it starts with the foundation of resources.”
Ideological defense
Lee explicitly views state policy as an ideological defense mechanism against the federal government’s far-right conservatism, fighting against mass deportations, human services, and healthcare budget rollbacks. If re-elected, Lee’s upcoming legislative agenda will take a more progressively offensive focus on policies, including advancing the Young Child Tax Credit, which provides tax rebates of up to $1,189 to parents with children up through age 18, reinvesting money directly into families and back into the local economy.
Want to learn more? Read our full profiles on the other District 24 candidates: Dr. Yang Shao and Max Hsia. For a full overview of the race and voting guide, click here.
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