U.S. Senate candidate Adam Schiff speaks on affordable housing, homelessness and the border | CPT PPP Coverage

SAN DIEGO — With less than two weeks to go before Election Day, voters here in the Golden State are keeping a close eye on California’s race for the U.S. Senate.

The seat previously occupied by the late Senator Dianne Feinstein is now up for grabs. 

Former Padres player and Republican Steve Garvey is going up against Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff. 

WATCH RELATED: Full interview with Adam Schiff

Schiff has been serving as a U.S. Representative in Congress since 2001.

He has said that increasing the availability of affordable housing is his top priority.

“I’m championing a dramatic expansion of the low-income housing tax credit that would build hundreds of thousands of new units,” Schiff told CBS 8. “We need to build a lot more supply of housing if we’re ever going to bring housing prices down.” 

Schiff also calls housing affordability and homelessness “twin crises” that have to be tackled together. 

“You can spends billions as we have to move people off the streets and into shelter, but if you’re not building new housing, new people are simply going to take their place on the street,” he added. “We also need to make sure that when we get people into shelter, they get the mental health treatment they may need, they get the substance abuse treatment they may need, otherwise they won’t stay sheltered.”

In addressing the crisis at the border, Schiff is calling for more resources, including more personnel, to provide security, and said that it is imperative to process asylum claims much more quickly: a system than now take up to five years, or longer, often resulting in deportation.

“That is a terrible system,” Schiff said, “so we need to be able to get those claims properly adjudicated quickly so people know, yes they’re eligible to stay or no they’re not eligible to stay. That is a big part of the solution.”

Schiff has also spoken out on the cross-border sewage crisis impacting the South Bay.

“It is an environmental disaster of the first order,” he said.  

He is calling for the Environmental Protection Agency on the federal level to take more ownership of this issue, as tens of millions of gallons of sewage flow across the US-Mexico border daily. 

“Most significant, we need to surge the resources to fix these treatment plants, make sure the one in Mexico is operating again, make sure the on on the U.S. side is at full capacity and working, so that we can clean this up!”

Earlier this month, we also interviewed Schiff’s opponent, former Dodgers and Padres player Steve Garvey. 

WATCH RELATED: Full interview with Steve Garvey