Five California gubernatorial candidates clashed on housing for two hours during a Friday night forum.
With California facing one of the worst housing crises, they agreed that housing needs to be built faster and cheaper but differed significantly on specifics.
Yes, it costs too much to build in California, but developers should also use more union labor with standard prevailing wages, argued former state Attorney General Xavier Becerra.
“There’s a pretty wrenching tradeoff here,” said moderator and New York Times reporter Ezra Klein, who co-authored Abundance, a book that has served as a defining text for a pro-growth progressive movement.
Becerra, surging in the polls, bit back. “We should not believe that we have to build homes by making it so it’s impossible for the carpenter who builds a home to never be able to afford to buy it.”
Former member of Congress Katie Porter, urged caution. “You can actually solve labor by not going backwards on housing in labor policy,” and warned now was not the time to “do prevailing wage in residential.” No matter that her position means that “I took the heat from labor.”
Affordable housing costs more to construct per square foot than market rate housing, because the projects “face more delays. They face more obstacles. They face more community resistance. They face more restrictions on zoning,” said Porter — a reasoning that agrees with Abundance’s viewpoint that excessive veto-power can hinder housing construction. “Every time you have uncertainty about whether something is going to happen, the costs go up.”
San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who’s been neck and neck with Porter in polls, was also keen on building. “If we build the housing, we make up the revenue over time. We have more property taxes, more sales taxes, more workers, more jobs, more dynamism,” said Mahan. “But it’s a tough tradeoff to make because you get yelled at by the park advocates, by the affordable housing advocates, by every other advocate you can imagine.”
Over 500 people attended the forum at Oakland’s Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts and co-hosted by the Terner Center for Housing Innovation, the New York Times, San Francisco Foundation, and Housing Action Coalition. Professionals in suits filled the auditorium and their small talk about “massive high-rise,” “ADUs,” and “knocking down the building” indicated many knew something about housing.
In her opening remarks, State Assemblymember Buffy Wicks paraphrased the main point in Abundance — that too many veto points exerted by different groups, prioritizing process over outcomes contributed to the stalling of California’s high-speed rail project.
“We’ve achieved success in upzoning, in streamlining, permitting and reforming our Byzantine environmental review process, often against our friends in labor and in the environmental community,” said Wicks. “To make the change that we want to see, we have to be laser focused on results, not what our special interest groups want. Our special interests should be our poor, our working class, our middle class families in California.”
The five candidates suggested a mix of carrot and stick approaches to get local and state governments in sync on housing.
“Money is actually how we’re going to get this done,” said Tom Steyer, the billionaire frontrunner who is using his own money to brand himself as the most progressive candidate. “You do it, you get the money. You don’t do it, you don’t get the money. You do more than your share, you get more than your share.”
Incentive is exactly what’s needed here — because “cities and counties in California do not want to have housing in general,” said Syeter. “Someone said to me one time, they’d rather have a used car lot than a new apartment building. The reason is used car lots don’t go to school, used car lots don’t take health care costs.”
Money is also his answer to the housing affordability crisis. “We need to use finance much more aggressively to drive down the cost of housing,” said Steyer, referring to proposals including state housing bonds worth billions of dollars.
For Becerra, the former chief law enforcement officer of California, litigation and penalties are more effective tools to handle conflicts between cities and the state. “I’d say, ‘I’m going to give you incentives to do what you’re supposed to do under the law. At some point, though, those incentives go down and at some point we cross over and now becomes penalties and penalties grow the longer it takes you to conform to what the law says you have to do,’” said Becerra.
“Look, we’re a society that believes that we must teach our kids to follow rules,” he added. “At some point you’re going to pay the price because we need to build.”
Mahan, who supports taking away local control to shift authority to the state — and developers, pushed back against punishing anyone. “The lawsuit should be the last resort here. I feel very strongly that our next governor cannot bring a lawyer’s mindset to this problem. When cities don’t deliver enough housing, “the state should override and create by-right mechanisms for developers to move ahead projects whether or not the city likes it,” he added.
Both Becerra and Porter want to approach the homelessness crisis by intervening before people call into homelessness.
I’d “try to help that person that is on the very edge of losing their housing,” said Becerra. The former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services believes the homelessness crisis is more a mental health crisis and said it takes a similar carrots-first, sticks-second approach. He wants to make sure that the state tells folks “We will not let you languish in the streets.”
Then, if an unhoused person keeps refusing assistance, “We don’t let people make that decision when it’s clear they’re not making the right decisions for themselves.”
Porter said the government should be ready to help with cash. “The very most effective way to keep someone in their home or in their apartment is to give them direct cash assistance. Period,” she said. “Everything else is complicated and expensive and slow.” The average cost of this kind of eviction prevention is $6,000 per family, said Porter, which is far cheaper than providing permanent housing which can cost as much as $800,000 a unit.
The idea “that we can’t trust people with cash, we can’t give low income people cash, is racist. It’s sexist, and it’s wrong. And it costs us a fortune.”
Antonio Villaraigosa, a longshot candidate in the race and former mayor of Los Angeles and speaker of the California Assembly, also participated in the forum.
