California is America’s most populous and most innovative state. It’s also troubled — in particular, it faces an acute housing shortage. So you’d hope the state could find some truly dynamic leaders to make things right.
Alas, your hopes will not come true this year. On Tuesday, voters weighed in on the remarkably weak field seeking its governorship. Votes are still being counted, but it looks like the choice this November will probably be between two of these three candidates: Xavier Becerra, the former Health and Human Services secretary to President Joe Biden who underwhelmed many of his colleagues; Steve Hilton, a Republican former Fox News host who has President Trump’s endorsement; and Tom Steyer, a billionaire who may finally manage to buy his way into public office by spending nine figures of his own money and pandering to virtually every progressive interest group imaginable.
So why didn’t a great state get to choose among some great candidates? Personally, I blame the voters. Electorates get the candidates they deserve. The thing about Californians is that on some level, they get that the state needs to change, but they won’t do what it takes — because they don’t really want it to change. They don’t even appear to care that their government takes weeks to count votes.
The good news is that even in a field this underwhelming, the candidates have made clear they understand that the state doesn’t have enough homes, and they broadly recognize that they need to build more, by making construction cheaper and lowering regulatory barriers. Republicans get this, moderates get this, progressives get this.
But California’s sitting governor, Gavin Newsom, while party to that consensus, has abjectly failed to get California building again. That’s not because he is incompetent — mainly, it’s because he’s up against voters who say they want housing but, at the local level, are addicted to the policies that stop it from getting built.
The state now has fewer residents than it did when Mr. Newsom took office, even as the national population has grown about 4 percent. After the 2030 census, California is likely to lose four congressional districts after a decade of people leaving the state in search of cheaper housing.
If you listen to Mr. Newsom or his potential successors talk about housing, their diagnosis of what has gone wrong is mostly correct: Municipalities do not allow enough housing to be built where it is needed; they impose excessive development fees; permit approvals take too long, which adds cost because time is money; building codes are outdated; NIMBY homeowners and climate activists abuse the state’s environmental laws to delay projects; subsidized affordable housing projects are laden with even more mandates and regulations, making them more expensive to build than market-rate housing.
Democrats in Sacramento have enacted a raft of laws intended to address these problems, often with bipartisan support from the rump of Republicans in California’s legislature. But the reforms have not worked, at least not yet (a reform enacted last year to an environmental law may be the most important pro-housing tool to come out of Sacramento under Mr. Newsom, but it’s too recent to have translated into new homes for Californians on a large scale).
Many of the earlier attempts to loosen zoning rules underwhelmed because interest groups insisted on standards requiring developers to pay union wages, which added prohibitive costs to new housing, and because recalcitrant municipalities outsmarted the state government, exploiting loopholes and finding ways to subvert the reforms.
The pro-housing lawmakers in Sacramento and the anti-housing lawmakers in city halls around the state are elected by the same Californians. To some extent, that’s just the ordinary essence of NIMBYism.
But there’s also a broader anti-development sensibility among many Californians: an idea that the state is “full,” that dense development is anti-environmental and that leafy, low-density suburban jurisdictions like Marin County are the best representation of what it is to live in harmony with nature. Among the state’s remaining Republicans, you may hear a different version of the anti-development thesis, which is that California’s existing stock of homes would suffice if there weren’t so many illegal immigrants.
There’s also a financial reason voters are ambivalent about fixing the housing crisis: If you increase the supply of homes, the price of homes will tend to go down, which is great for people looking to buy a home but not so great for people who already own a home. Mr. Trump expressed this idea with unusual frankness in January, saying: “There’s so much talk about, ‘Oh, we’re going to drive housing prices down.’ I don’t want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes, and they can be assured, that’s what’s going to happen.”
There’s one added fact about California that encourages complacency: It’s paradise. The state’s vast swathes of detached-house suburbia can’t house enough people within commuting distance of job centers in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley, but they represent an American ideal of suburban living in perfect weather. The state’s leading metro areas remain highly productive places to do business, with that productivity only increasing with the A.I. boom in the San Francisco Bay Area. California’s hills are incredibly scenic places to live, even if the homes above Los Angeles are barely insurable because of fire risk. It’s not hard to see how a long-settled homeowner with a nice house and a yard and a strong local economy and a low property tax bill courtesy of Proposition 13 might look around and resist the idea that the state needs to change much.
So, what could the next governor do with state politicians to change all this? First, they will need to do a better job of arguing that building more housing will improve the quality of life even for the Californians who already own homes.
Matt Mahan, the San Jose mayor and gubernatorial candidate who ran well behind the leaders in primary polling, had smart comments at a forum on housing policy last month about local resistance to the creation of “interim housing” for the homeless. Residents understandably worry that those developments could be sources of crime and disorder. So Mr. Mahan described finding ways in San Jose to tie these facilities to improvements in public order: assigning units in these facilities to people who have been homeless in the local area, and then prohibiting homeless encampments in the immediate environs. Neighbors are more open to these facilities when they are tied to a noticeable reduction of unsheltered homelessness on their streets.
California’s leaders will also need to be cleareyed about which policies will actually make new housing production financially viable. There is always a temptation to weigh down pro-housing laws with labor and affordable-housing mandates that drive up the cost per unit and make developers reluctant to actually build.
Finally, it would be nice if the state’s Republicans found a way to make themselves more relevant in policy debates. In some blue states, Republicans compete effectively by taking moderate positions and building coalitions that include moderate Democratic voters. This has even happened in California’s recent history, with the broad electoral coalitions Arnold Schwarzenegger built. But in recent elections California Republican voters have instead favored candidates who hit the favorite notes of the party faithful and stand no chance of winning a general election.
It is a pleasant surprise that California Democrats have embraced market solutions to the housing crisis without pressure from a viable political party to their right. Just think what they might do if they faced viable competition in the race to make California’s housing affordable again.
Josh Barro, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the newsletter Very Serious and is the host of the podcast “Serious Trouble.”
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