For many years tribes in California have struggled with drastically underfunded housing programs that have left them unable to meet even basic housing needs. Additionally, tribes have faced significant obstacles in trying to compete with mainstream affordable housing developers for funding awards in California’s low income housing tax credit allocation system. Considerable cross-community work to bring tribes and housing program administrators together, however, led to the creation of California’s first tribal set-aside within the LIHTC program, and the first award to an Indian tribe in California in the thirty-year history of the state’s LIHTC program. The story behind the establishment of this new set-aside offers important lessons about how alliances can be formed to begin to breakdown longstanding barriers of isolation and inaccessibility.