California is one of the country’s least affordable states for housing, despite years of legislators passing bills to reduce red tape and build more. On Friday, the Times Opinion columnist Ezra Klein spoke with Xavier Becerra, Matt Mahan, Katie Porter, Tom Steyer and Antonio Villaraigosa, the top Democratic candidates for governor, to learn how they plan to make progress on the issue.
This panel was recorded live. The Times did not fact-check candidates’ remarks.
Ezra Klein: All right. Hello, Oakland.
Welcome to the beautiful Calvin Simmons Theater. We are thrilled you’re here.
The candidates on the stage tonight are, according to the polls, the five top Democratic candidates in this race: Tom Steyer, Xavier Becerra, Katie Porter, Matt Mahan and Antonio Villaraigosa.
I should say we invited the top Republicans, too. Unfortunately, they could not make it tonight.
There have been a lot of debates lately, a lot of debates this week. This is not one of them. What we’re doing here tonight is a forum on one topic — a topic that deserves 90 minutes of our attention — which is California’s housing crisis.
We’re going to have three sections. For each section, I’m going to spend about six minutes talking with each candidate in turn. I’ll ask follow-ups if we have time. I want to give people the opportunity to hear all of you thinking through these issues aloud.
At the end of those six minutes, a bell will sound like this. [Bell rings.]
That bell slightly breaks my heart. I’m a podcast host. I want to give you all 90 minutes each. But you’re going to get very mad at me if I don’t keep this fair, so we’re going to try to keep it very fair.
We are asking candidates not to jump in or interrupt each other. You are free to criticize each other in your answers, but if you do it, the candidate you criticize is going to get a minute to respond, and you are not going to get more time, so strategize accordingly.
To the audience, please hold your very much merited applause here until the end.
Candidates have not seen the questions here in advance, nor have any of the organizations that are co-hosting the event.
With all of that out of the way, let’s get to the reason we’re actually here.
Gov. Gavin Newsom came into office in 2019 with a promise to build millions more homes, and in the years since, dozens of pro-housing laws have passed, some of them written by heroic legislators in this very room. Yet the number of new homes being built in California is basically the same as when Newsom took office.
Housing is a slow and hard problem to solve. It is true that some of these bills may just take time. But we’ve also seen that they will take leadership and courage, and that even the good laws that we need will encounter resistance and headwinds along the way.
So all of you want to build more homes. You all have detailed plans to do so.
The question of tonight is: What has to happen to convert these good intentions into homes that people can live in — and how do we protect those in need or at risk in the meantime?
We’re going to begin by taking on something you all identify as a problem: the very high cost of construction in California.
Mr. Steyer, we’re going to begin with you. A RAND study found that the cost per square foot of constructing an apartment in California is over twice that of constructing it in Texas.
Why do you think that is, and what would you do about it?
Tom Steyer: I know that what’s driving that up is the way that we construct — the cost of labor, the cost of materials and the cost of financing.
For us to drive down the cost per square foot of housing to a place where we can afford to build these houses and people can afford to buy them, we’re going to have to make some real changes in the way we’re going about this.
Let’s talk about two of them — one of which is about the construction on site. We are building houses and we are building apartment buildings the way we have been doing it for 100 years. There is new technology where you basically manufacture the parts of the house off-site, the way you’d construct or manufacture a car, and then you assemble it on-site.
The estimates that people have, both from the real world of having done it, but also projecting what they think they could do, start at 20 percent, and they go up from there. These are real things, and these are manufacturing companies, therefore they need revenues and orders. The state of California can do that, and it can change the building codes.
The second thing in order to drive down the cost of housing is about finance, and the state of California has a number of finance programs. In fact, Buffy Wicks is proposing a $10 billion housing bond, which I think is incredibly important.
[Audience applauds.]
Excuse me, excuse me. [Laughs.] Hold it till the end.
Steyer: And I should say that the nonprofit community bank that my wife, Kat Taylor, and I started in Oakland, Calif., has financed 17,000 low-income housing units.
We need to use finance much more aggressively to drive down the cost of housing.
The third thing I’ll say is this: The cities and counties in California do not want to have housing in general. As someone said to me one time, they’d rather have a used car lot than they would a new apartment building.
The reason is used car lots don’t go to school; used car lots don’t take health care costs. So the reasons that housing is so expensive is the time that it takes to get permits, and also cities and counties will charge very large fees — up to 20 percent of the cost of the house — so that they can preload the cost of having new inhabitants in their community.
I’ve said that I will, on Day 1, call a special election to close a corporate real estate tax loophole worth over $20 billion to the state of California, so that instead of when we’re talking about a new housing facility in a city or county, it’s not an unfunded liability — it’s a funded mandate. We can then work with the cities and counties, and they can stop dragging their feet.
We’re going to come back to the city and county question, but I want to jump in on modular for a minute. Modular housing has been promised and hoped for, for a long time. A lot of politicians have hyped it up.
Investors have invested in it and have been disappointed. The big companies in the space have often failed. Katerra raised $2 billion in private capital, then went bankrupt. Veev failed. Integra failed. Factory OS, which is the biggest one in California, was recently rebranded and recapitalized.
This is pretty central to the way you think about housing. Why do you think they failed, and what have you learned that would make it different now?
Steyer: Well, let me say this. There is a reason they failed, and there’s a reason that most start-ups fail, Ezra: They don’t have revenue, and they don’t have orders.
So the question is: A, does the technology work? B, does it drive down costs? And C, do they have enough orders so that they’re making money and able to sustain themselves and then finance themselves into much bigger enterprises?
And the answer is: The state of California can change the building codes, the state of California can give those orders, and we can actually drive this business so that, in fact, not only do they do what they say they can do, but they can get economies of scale going forward to get the kind of size that it needs so that we can really get what they say they can do.
The estimates right now are that we can drive down the cost per square foot by 20 percent. But I can tell you, because I’ve talked to them, that the people who run these companies see that as a first step, and they think they can go much further than that.
Let me say this. There are 40,000 units in San Francisco that are permitted, that are zoned, that are not being built because they can’t afford to build them at a price that people can afford to buy them.
The ability to drive down this cost is an absolutely critical part of building multiples of what we’ve been building for the last four years, and in fact, solving the housing crisis and putting it in a place where working people, working families, can afford to buy. So getting this right is a critical part of the mix.
Thank you, Mr. Steyer.
Mr. Becerra, yesterday you released a comprehensive housing plan. You say in it that it costs too much to build a home in California. You also say in it that you want more union labor in home building and higher wage standards. For Democrats, there’s a pretty wrenching trade-off here.
An analysis from the Terner Center found that those kinds of standards, notably paying prevailing wage, increase the cost per unit of housing by about $94,000.
How do you both cut the costs of housing and increase the wages behind it at the same time?
Xavier Becerra: Well, I think the Legislature and assembly member Wicks took the first measures that we need to get us to that point where we can make sure that we are building with men and women who are skilled, and we’re doing it at a price that we can afford.
As we’ve seen, if you do infill housing, and you make sure that if you have housing units that will be up to a certain height — usually about eight stories — then you have the right, as a developer, to be able to try to get the labor that you need and try to negotiate a good price.
If you go beyond that, if you’re talking about major construction, prevailing wage will be the standard. I think that’s a good approach.
Then what we do is provide to those who are in the lower-height housing the opportunity to go out to do private actions if you find that there are violations of labor laws.
But I’ll tell you this: 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 ever be able to afford to buy it. I’m going to make sure that those workers who are building those homes can actually think about buying those homes themselves.
All it takes is for us to work together to make sure we are dropping costs. It’s far more than just labor. There are a lot of things that are involved here, and we would tackle those.
I take that point, but tell me then about how you balance the cost — because what you are describing here, if you begin paying prevailing wage, if you begin paying higher wages, you do increase the cost structure.
We all want to see higher wages. I take your point very much that the people who build a home should be able to buy a home. There’s nothing to disagree with in that.
But you have to cut the cost of construction somewhere. You’ve got financing. You’ve got labor. You’ve got materials. If you are increasing a cost driver, what are you decreasing, and by how much?
Becerra: Well, if we could get rid of the Trump taxes, the tariffs, that are now being found illegal, that would help us reduce the cost of building materials. If we could stop going to war in foreign countries ——
But cost of construction in California was high before Donald Trump.
Becerra: It was high, but not as high as it is now, and we can lower those costs.
Transportation of building materials is very expensive. So let’s not disregard that we need Washington to be helping us. But to your point, and remember, again, labor costs for most homes that are going to be built will not be based simply on the highest rates that you have in the large megaprojects. The legislation that was passed by assembly member Wicks provided different ways to do this that would make the labor cost affordable for developers.
We also have to deal with financing. We have to have a stable source of financing. We can’t just do it one time. I think the measure that assembly member Wicks is going to try to put on the ballot is good.
Can you describe what that measure is, just for people not following?
Becerra: Ten billion dollars of bonding financing so that you could start building affordable housing. The 40,000 units that Tom mentioned are ready to go, except the financing. That $10 billion would be readily available to get those shovel-ready projects up and running, which helps give confidence to the California families who are looking to get into a place.
But what is bringing the cost of construction down here? I’m hearing about new bond programs, but the cost of construction is too high. That’s what your plan says. What brings it down?
One, you go after the red tape. We try to streamline — and again, the legislation that the Legislature passed over this last year helps reduce some of the red tape that you have at the state level.
We have to attack it at the local level because of the high fees that are imposed. You also have to make sure that they aren’t trying to use their ordinances to try to prevent us from being able to build.
Remember that most housing that’s built today is reserved for single-family homes. Very little construction is done with apartments and condominiums, very little to buy other than single-family homes. We’re never going to reach the number we need if we continue to build only single-family homes, and that’s why the legislation that allows us to really build out, do the infill where we know we have transportation, will give us an opportunity to increase greater amounts of housing at affordable rates for people who need to either buy or rent.
I think that if we do that and come up with a stable source of funding into the future, so it’s not just a one-time housing bond that people can count on, developers will begin to have confidence that we are looking to give them a predictable means of being able to finance these projects and have them pencil out.
Thank you, Mr. Becerra.
Ms. Porter, you’ve often said on the trail that time is money — something I hear from developers, too. The RAND study I mentioned found that it takes about 27 months to complete a multifamily housing project in Texas, 37 months to complete it in Colorado and 49 months in California. Why does it take so long here, and what would you do about it?
Katie Porter: First, I love that you’re talking about this RAND study, because this is the second time that we’ve had a housing event where we were asked, essentially: What makes construction costs higher? And I think some people still haven’t read the study ——
You believe that?
Porter: I have read the study. We got asked about it before, and nobody had read it, and it doesn’t seem like they have since. The study is very, very clear that the speed is the driver.
Now, that’s not to say there aren’t a lot of things that were mentioned that contribute to the speed.
But if we could be 22 months faster, which is what Colorado does — which does care about the environment and does have good worker standards — then the estimates are we could take 10 or even 20 percent off the price, and that was market rate.
So yes, we need more housing, but more housing is a tool for less expensive housing.
I think it’s really important to think about all the different tools in your tool kit. I strongly support the pending legislation that would create one uniform statewide permit, making it easier for everyone to have the same permit, easier for the state to monitor those denials.
I also think it’s a really good idea to limit how many last-second add-ons can come. If you’re a city and you get a permit, you should have 30 days — that’s the proposal in the Legislature — and, you could argue, it could be 45 or 60 days to say: This is what the fees are going to be. This is your contribution for sewer. This is your contribution for school.
And then you cannot do what we see now, which is just a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more, which is a little bit more delay and then a little bit more cost — until pretty soon the project is unaffordable.
Those are just a couple of ideas.
I also do think there are innovations in architectural design, particularly for multifamily, that could be really helpful — especially smaller multifamily, where we’re seeing things that are four units have to apply the same standards, essentially, as something that’s 400 units.
That also adds to the time unnecessarily without providing much benefit of those smaller unit projects, which we need a lot of.
Yes, we need all of the big units, too, but we’ve got a lot of different geographies in California. They’re going to solve this problem in different ways. But they all need to do it much faster because time is money.
There’s a difficult irony you see not only in that study, but it comes up again and again in my own housing reporting: There is no form of housing that Democrats feel more strongly about and support more unanimously than affordable housing. Affordable housing costs more to construct per square foot than market-rate housing does.
When you look at that same study that we are hyping up here on the stage, what you see is that it costs twice as much to construct a square foot of market-rate housing in California as in Texas, and four times as much to do a square foot of affordable housing as market-rate housing in Texas.
That affordable housing is being built partly on the public dime. Why is it so much more expensive here to do affordable housing than market rate? And what do you do about it?
Porter: This is not a surprise, because affordable housing projects face more delays. They face more obstacles. They face more community resistance. They face more restrictions on zoning. People don’t necessarily want them in a lot of our communities.
The other piece of this is that land becomes more expensive. Every time you have uncertainty about whether something is going to happen, the costs go up.
The other issue is that affordable housing developers are piecing together financing from seven different pools of money that are all designed to make a contribution, and you just as soon get the seventh thing and you’re ready to go, the seventh one expires or you lose that funding or someone changes the term of a program.
So one consolidated, bigger pot of money, which is more similar to what market rate is using — they’re going to Wall Street, they’re getting the money, and they’re using it — one consolidated pot of money would help.
The other thing is the state should be putting land up for affordable housing. That is one of the major factors. It’s one of the hardest ones to solve. You can actually solve labor by not going backward on housing and labor policy, which the other candidates both have.
I think we ought to be trying to drive down the cost of construction, but the land is a tricky piece.
The state should contribute land for affordable housing.
When you say the other candidates are going backward on labor, what do you mean?
Porter: I have said that I do not think today or now is the time to do prevailing wage in residential. When we were in front of the Labor Fed, I was the only candidate — [looks at Matt Mahan] — I don’t believe you were in front of the Labor Fed, so I just want to make it clear.
But of those of us who were in front of the Labor Fed, I was the only one who said: I’m not doing skilled and trained in full today for residential housing, because it’s going to drive up the cost.
[Audience applauds.]
Hold to the end.
And I took the heat from labor. I stood up to labor. Lorena Gonzalez was right there.
I am not scared of anybody because I’ve got three teenagers that I do not want living on my couch.
And you all seem very lovely, but I don’t want you living on my couch or a street corner or in someone’s attic. I want you to all have housing where you can flourish.
There is a pathway to keep building that work force. There is a big need, a huge need, to enforce labor violations and abusive labor practices, which unions have often been very helpful at doing.
You could also do that through actually having government oversight of wage violations and work force violations, and that would be my approach.
Thank you, Ms. Porter.
Mayor Mahan, San Jose has been able to approve over 20,000 new homes for construction, most of which did not get built because the economics didn’t work out.
What could Sacramento do to get those 20,000 homes built?
Matt Mahan: Well, thanks for doing this, Ezra. There’s no more important issue. Just want to say, good evening to everyone. It’s great to be in Oakland. Thank you all for coming out and being pro-housing.
This issue is very personal for me. I grew up in a house remembering my parents argue about how we were going to pay the mortgage — and we were lucky to have a mortgage. My sisters have since moved out of state because they couldn’t afford the cost of living here.
You asked about the state, and as I come around to what we can do across the board, let me just share what we’ve done in San Jose. I came into this problem — we had approved 22,000 homes, and they’re not getting built.
So we’re saying yes, and we’re celebrating the beautiful rendering, and it’s in the paper, and everybody is excited — except the neighbors who say: We don’t want it. And it doesn’t matter because we don’t break ground.
If you look at the RAND study, it’s time and it’s fees that are the two big levers we have control over. The state can impose upon cities some standards and requirements and caps that can hold us accountable.
Now we didn’t wait for that in San Jose. In the last two years, we have moved our multifamily housing approvals in our downtown, all of our planned growth areas along all of our transit corridors, to what’s called a ministerial approval — meaning it’s essentially by right.
It doesn’t go to the planning commission; it doesn’t come to the City Council. It’s just a weekly hearing in the planning department, and you get told to go.
It actually exempts CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act. So you’re just building by right if you conform with what we’ve zoned, and we’ve zoned for dense multifamily housing in these areas. We have dramatically reduced the timeline for building.
I am deep in this right now as the mayor of a big city. We just had a 560-unit project get approved in no time. Came in, got the approval, they’re ready to go. So that’s speed.
Now the state can impose those standards and set deadlines and use its ability to impose effectively a builder’s remedy by right and say: If you don’t meet these turnaround times, city or county, the developer is going to, by law, have the right to build a conforming project.
On fees, we have accumulated, I can tell you in my city, over 10 pages’ worth of fees that look good on paper. It’s to mitigate every imaginable — it’s traffic and parking fees and affordable housing fees, and they all sound good. On their own, they’re all justifiable, and they’re well-intended. But you stack them up, and they’re adding 10 to 20 percent to the cost of housing.
We had a really tough conversation on our City Council. I came to our council and said: We have to cut the one-time fees in order to get the housing in the ground.
The good news is, 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. We eventually, in the long run, are better off.
But it’s a tough trade-off to make because you get yelled at by the park advocates, by the affordable housing advocates, by every other advocate you can imagine. We had a council member lose his seat not long ago in San Jose, and our last mayor lost his council majority over a fee reduction because it was framed as a giveaway to developers.
But there are still a number of big projects that have not been able to go forward because the economics aren’t working for you. What could you do as governor to make it work for cities like San Jose?
Mahan: So to finish the point, Ezra, we cut the fees by over two-thirds, and 2,000 homes got under construction last year.
Another 2,000 are securing financing as we speak and will break ground.
What the state can do is cap local fees. A lot of these fees are not really fees. We allow these bogus nexus studies that employ a cottage industry of consultants.
No offense to any of the consultants in the room, but the nexus is pretty loose. Nobody is getting $65,000 worth of value out of the neighborhood park. I’m sorry. I love our parks.
But I think what we ought to do is cap fees at a much lower level — a top-down policy — and require that a city that wants to impose a higher fee actually produce to the state a feasibility study that shows that the project can still pencil.
Because this is the problem: We don’t control interest rates. We don’t control the cost of timber. But timelines at the local level and all these fees are completely levers within our control. We’ve made excuses for far too long, and it has blocked tens of thousands of units in our cities.
Thank you, Mr. Mahan.
Mr. Villaraigosa, your campaign site defends Proposition 13, California’s cap on property taxes. You talk about holding the line on property taxes.
Proposition 13 pushes cities to raise fees on new housing because they aren’t collecting enough in property taxes to pay the bills. It pushes them to prefer retail and commercial building over residential building. It pushes against homeowners selling because to sell is to lose what is, effectively, a tax break.
I know Proposition 13 is popular. It’s easy for me to sit here and talk about it. But you say you’re willing to do the unpopular things to fix the housing crisis. Why isn’t Proposition 13 reform one of them?
Antonio Villaraigosa: First of all, I didn’t vote for Proposition 13. I’m on record opposing Proposition 13 since 1978. Look it up.
Am I misreading your campaign site?
Villaraigosa: Well, I do believe that we need to hold property taxes down, but let me explain.
First of all, Tom Steyer is right. What he was talking about is called the fiscalization of land use. And because of Proposition 13, we have a situation where we reward a small strip mall more than we would housing. So many cities push back against it.
With respect, I’m saying, with the laws we have today, hold the line on property taxes. But I think we need to fix the whole broken tax system along the lines of Think Long. Think Long has said that what we have today — when we passed Proposition 13, commercial properties were paying 60 percent of the freight. Homeowners were paying 40 percent. Now it’s the other way around.
Property can’t move. People can. It’s why I’ve opposed the billionaire tax, because I said: They’re just going to leave.
I do believe we need to fix Proposition 13 — but fix the whole broken tax system. But within the laws that we have today, Ezra — yes, hold the line on property taxes.
So walk me through how you would fix that tax system.
Villaraigosa: I beg your pardon?
Walk me through how you would fix that tax system.
Villaraigosa: How do we fix it?
Yes, as you’re saying, you want to do it more comprehensively than Proposition 13 reform.
Villaraigosa: We need to fix Proposition 13. I just told you we went from homeowners paying 40 percent, commercial was paying 60 percent, now it’s the other way around. We have to change that. That’s one.
Two, I do believe that we have to address the fact that people who bought a home before 1978 don’t have to pay the same taxes that people who buy a house today do.
That’s not fair, either. We want to keep those costs down, but we have to address the fact that my generation was benefited by the “greatest generation,” which made sacrifices so we could buy a home.
By the way, I bought a home at 25 years old. I was working at a nonprofit. Today, young families can’t buy that because the average down payment is $140,000 to $160,000.
But fixing the broken tax system. We have to address the fact that we don’t have a service tax. Most states do. We have to fix the upper income tax. Those people are leaving, and we have to address the fact that we overrely.
I’m the only person on this stage who’s actually been the speaker of the California State Assembly. I had to balance two budgets with a surplus, and I did. Both times.
The fact is, we can do that in good times. In bad times, we can’t, because the people at the top are paying the vast majority of the taxes. So Think Long has put a proposal to spread them across the economy so that we’re not overreliant on the upper income tax, so that we can tax more and incentivize cities to build housing, not strip malls.
Great. So it sounds like you want to move the line on property taxes. You think the system is not working as it currently stands.
Villaraigosa: The system is not working, yes.
And how, then, does that give you some movement on fees? We’ve heard a couple of the candidates onstage talk about the various fees that are layered on, in part because of the way property taxes work. How do you approach those?
Villaraigosa: When Matt and I are on the stage, we tend to agree a lot, because he’s right: Impact fees are killing us.
Can you describe what impact fees are for people who are not as deep in the weeds on this?
Villaraigosa: Yes. There are all kinds of fees — he mentioned it. Parking fees, all the fees that every group says — all good things, by the way.
In your book — the essence of your book is that Democrats don’t build anymore because we’re looking for perfect, and perfect doesn’t exist. That’s what happens when you have the kind of experience the two of us do. At the end of the day, I built more market-rate, work force affordable and homeless housing in eight years in the middle of a recession than they did in the 12 years before me.
The downtown skyline went from 20,000 people to 60,000. I’m the first mayor in the United States of America to do transit-oriented development districts so that we’re building housing along transit districts.
So what Buffy Wicks and Bob Hertzberg here are doing, these are the things that we need to do to drive down costs, to build housing and to make sure that young people can buy a home again.
Thank you, Mr. Villaraigosa.
I want to talk a bit about one of the difficult fights that a lot of housing projects have run into, which is the conflict with cities and counties.
Mr. Becerra, you were state attorney general when California began suing cities over housing. You sued Huntington Beach. You led the San Mateo case that expanded the Housing Accountability Act’s zone of authority.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has now threatened lawsuits against 15 more cities and counties for dragging their feet or opposing state housing law. Do these lawsuits work to build more housing? In Huntington Beach, it’s been years of legal wrangling, not new build. And if they don’t, what enforcement tools would you want to use or create as governor to align cities with the state?
Becerra: Ezra, you have to use every tool you have, and certainly, litigation is one. You hate to have to go there. You would hope that you would have cooperation between state and local government.
Local governments have, for any number of reasons, decided they want to be able to control what happens when it comes to housing in their jurisdiction. And they do have tools, like zoning laws, and we talk about these fees that they try to collect to help with infrastructure.
But what I would say is that we have to have an agreement, a state-local government agreement, that there has to be a clear path on what the state of California will do when it comes to housing.
Every local government must then fall in place to make sure they’re doing their fair share. The lawsuit against Huntington Beach was because Huntington Beach had its own housing element plan.
It had made it clear that they needed to build several hundred units of new housing, and then they reneged. And so when we sued them, we said: It’s in your own plan. You’re just not willing to do it.
The reason we won is because they were violating the law. The case against San Mateo County was simply to make it clear that the state has a role when it comes to housing. Because while we all are Californians — and we’re Angelenos or Oaklanders or whatever else — we all have to be able to live and work and survive in California.
So the state of California has a role to play. I defended the law that said that every jurisdiction is accountable to meet its housing responsibility. And we prevailed in court and found that this law was constitutional, which set the foundation for us to now be able to push and see the legislation — that has now become law — that’s going to let us build more.
But has that law given access to the kinds of penalties that are needed to make it work? I mean, the Huntington Beach case is interesting because the state and Huntington Beach have gone back and forth.
There were elections in Huntington Beach that led to more opposition, and, to my knowledge, it has not led to the housing being built. There is some absence of sanction that is sufficient to make the cities that don’t want to do it agree with the state.
Becerra: Two issues, Ezra — and this I say as the former chief and law enforcement officer for the state of California. The difficulty with enforcement is that sometimes the penalties, the fines, are never enough. It’s almost a cost of doing business to violate the law. You’re willing to pay the cost of the fines to not have to go in that direction.
The second problem is, of course, that it takes forever. And so when I had been attorney general — or when I was secretary of Health and Human Services on the health care side — the approach I took, when there’s a law in place that requires you to do something, first it’s to give you the leash. 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 it becomes penalties. And the penalties grow the longer it takes you to conform to what the law says you have to do. Incent them to come forward, and if they don’t, then start penalizing them for not coming forward.
Let me pick up on the incentives. One of the lines I thought was interesting in your plan is: “We will use a carrot approach as well. Cities meeting their obligations should be first in line for state resources.” Which state resources?
Becerra: Well, we do have some funding that would be available right now, in existing Housing and Community Development agency funding, but it’s running out.
We do need to have a funding source. The initiatives that are on the ballot, to create bonding authority, would help us have some of that funding that we would need, but we would certainly have to make sure we’re generating the source of funding. The Legislature does provide the state with some money.
It’s not nearly enough, but there is an opportunity to make it clear. The funding that the state has will first and foremost be allocated to those who are conforming to their state law obligations. Those who aren’t — the money that you could have gotten is going to those who are actually fulfilling their housing requirements.
And let me pick up the question from the other side. You have cities — and, again, I’ll use Huntington Beach as an example and say: We don’t want to do this. The representatives you’re dealing with there are elected on a platform of not doing this. Why is it the state’s prerogative to tell them what to do?
Becerra: Same reason that kids have to eat their broccoli. I mean, we all have to live by rules. I guarantee you, everyone would love to be able to cross through an intersection and not have to worry about the red light, but we have rules.
I live in New York. Nobody worries about the red light.
Becerra: Thank God, this is California.
Look, we’re a society that believes that we must teach our kids to follow rules. And if you’re a city, and you see the housing crisis, and you’re not following the rules, then get ready, because I’m going to enforce. I will use the powers of the state — working with the attorney general, working with our Housing and Community Development agencies, working with those who are willing to push the envelope — to say: I’m going to give you a reason to do this building. I’m going to give you an incentive. I’ll put you in the front of the line, but at some point you’re going to pay the price, because we need to build.
Mayor Mahan, building on that, we do see repeatedly this dynamic where big housing bills pass in Sacramento, then cities and counties find ways to delay or evade them. You’re a mayor right now, also running for governor. How would you handle this tension between local control and state goals differently than Governor Newsom has?
Mahan: Actually, I think Governor Newsom has been a champion for housing. And while he and I have disagreed publicly on some other policy areas, I think he’s been bolder on housing than other past governors we’ve had. And I give him a lot of credit for that.
My philosophy is that we should use our housing element process, and the Regional Housing Needs Allocation targets, to tell cities and counties what is expected of them — the policies, the programs, the zoning and the space they need to create for housing and the ability to approve it quickly. I talked about capping fees. And we should give local control up to the point where they lose the privilege of having that local control.
I can tell you from experience, we were on the receiving end of this. We had a number of critiques of a housing element that started under my predecessor, and then around the time I came into office ——
Can you describe what a “housing element” is?
Mahan: This is a policy document that we, as a city — and counties, as well — have to submit to the state to show that we have zoned to create room for new housing, and that we have programs and policies at the local level that will, in fact, enable that housing to get built.
And we had some critiques of our plan, and it was a slow back and forth — a slow process for getting it passed. And like many other cities in the state, we did not meet one of the deadlines for approval, and the state has an accountability mechanism that I would suggest is much more effective — it’s not fun to be on the receiving end of it, but it is much more effective than lawsuits — which is what’s called builder’s remedy.
I think that a lawsuit should be the last resort here. I feel very strongly that our next governor cannot bring a lawyer’s mind-set to this problem. It is a market failure. It is a process failure. It’s the cost stack. It’s the efficiency. It’s innovation, like modular.
But in this case, when cities fail to meet permitting deadlines, when they try to use fees and local building codes to block housing, when they don’t deliver on enabling housing to get built, I think the state should override and create by-right mechanisms for developers to move ahead projects, whether or not the city likes it.
I think that’s an accountability mechanism that’s more effective, frankly, because what we see with these lawsuits is that they drag on for years, they get appealed and eventually maybe the court tells the locality: Go back and update your policies, update your general plan, update your housing element — or whatever it is.
And we’re not actually seeing housing get built. Huntington Beach is not building more housing, to your point. San Diego, I think, was sued when Mr. Becerra was the attorney general, and one of the projects with 2,000 units still hasn’t gotten built. So I think the legal path is not particularly effective if we actually want to build housing.
Let me ask you about the other side of this question, which is persuasion and the relationship between the state and the cities.
Obviously, it is better if there is alignment rather than you have to go to builder’s remedies or litigation. So do you think there are ways to bring cities along?
You’re obviously a very pro-housing mayor, but you presumably know other mayors, and you have seen these fights up close. Are there things the governor could do, or things you would do as governor, that you think could lead to more cohesion between the state goals and the city’s preferences?
Mahan: Yes. We touched on financing tools, and, as you all probably know, during the Great Recession, redevelopment went away in California. And I think that what redevelopment offered was this tax increment financing — meaning you could project future property tax increases, the increment, and then pull that value forward and bond against it to make local upgrades.
And I think we need to revisit having that tool in a limited fashion. I think some cities and counties got into trouble and racked up big debts. So there needs to be guardrails.
But that is a way for cities to build the infrastructure that they need, without having to put all of that incremental cost on each new project up front. And I think it’s a mechanism that could be used to unlock more affordable housing, more of the horizontal upgrades that would enable cities and counties to see the fiscal benefits of building housing faster.
Mr. Becerra, you were mentioned there over the question of whether or not the litigation is effective. You have one minute to expand on that.
Becerra: And I believe Matt didn’t identify the project specifically, but this was a project in the San Diego County area that was in the hills, in wildfire-risky areas. It was a pretty large development — several thousand units. It had one route for egress. And we went to the developer and we went to the county and said: This is a safety hazard.
This is something that could lead to the loss of life if indeed we have a wildfire. This was when I was attorney general, between 2017 and 2021, way before Palisades and Altadena. And we simply said to them: If you’re going to build that many housing units and people are going to be living up there, and there’s a wildfire that hits, you better have a way for these folks to be able to save their lives.
Having one route of egress was not going to do it. So we said to them: If you’re not going to take care of this, guess what? We’re going to have to sue you.
We tried. We tried not to do the litigation, but sometimes, Matt, it does help to have someone who knows how to enforce the law.
Mr. Villaraigosa, you were mayor of Los Angeles, a city very close to my heart as a U.C.L.A. graduate, and I grew up an hour south.
Villaraigosa: Me too.
There you go. L.A. has not exactly been a model of pro-housing policy of late. Mayor Karen Bass signed Executive Directive 1, which expedited affordable housing, then started rolling it back because of local opposition when it seemed to work almost too well.
L.A. passed Measure U.L.A., a transfer tax on the sale of properties over $5 million, which seems to have cut the development of multifamily properties; S.B. 79, which increases housing density around transit, passed in Sacramento, and L.A. City Council passed a rezoning to slow it down.
What would you do as governor to make Los Angeles an engine of housing progress again?
Villaraigosa: Well, as I said, and I’ll say it again: I built more market-rate, work-force-affordable, homeless housing in eight years in the middle of a recession than in the 12 years before me. The downtown skyline changed from 20,000 to 60,000 people.
I agree. Look, I’m opposed to the U.L.A. The U.L.A. is a transfer tax, everybody. What it says, it sounds good. They call it the mansion tax. It says that for homes over $5 million, you have to have a 5 percent transfer tax.
No. 1, you can’t buy a mansion in L.A. for $5 million. But, No. 2, it doesn’t just impact single-family dwellings. It impacts multifamily dwellings. It impacts commercial.
Speaking of RAND and U.C.L.A., my alma mater, did a study, and that study showed that we’ve had an 84 percent drop in construction since the U.L.A.
Let me be clear: As I understand it, I had more cranes than anybody in that eight-year period of time for housing, the airport, community colleges and schools.
Today we just opened up the first leg of something I said 20 years ago. I said: Dream with me. We’ll build a subway to the sea. And we built it. And by the way, abundance, when we were talking in the green room or whatever that was, one of the things I told you ——
Fair enough.
Villaraigosa: I was doing abundance. In 2010, I went to Barack Obama, and I said: Reward cities and counties that are putting up their own money. Allow us to access low-cost loans to build transit. And then I said: Put the National Environmental Policy Act and California Environmental Quality Act together to cut time.
Because you said it. What drives up cost is time or impact fees or CEQA. Do you know that under CEQA, you don’t need to sue on environmental grounds? Under NEPA, you do. You can sue from Richmond, Va., for a project in Richmond, Calif. Yes, you can.
It’s broken. I’ve been taking it on for 20 years, nationally, and lately, with Buffy Wicks and some of these people. I love what they’re doing, because this is what we have to do to build.
Let me ask you about the politics of Los Angeles, because I do take the legislators there, the mayors there, as responding to local demands. I remember speaking to Mayor Garcetti at one point, and there was pressure after Los Angeles passed Measure HHH.
They got the money to build, but a lot of places didn’t want it built where they were. And so there is a push here, even in a city where housing is very expensive.
You know that city as well as anybody. How would you persuade both the mayor of Los Angeles and the people of it that the things you want to do are good for L.A.?
Villaraigosa: You know, there’s a lot of agreement here. Xavier said something about using a carrot and a stick. I agree. That’s what I did. I love using carrots. I loved going into neighborhoods, talking about the need to build housing or a homeless facility or whatever it is. I love working with them and compromising with them.
But in the end, I understood one thing: If you want to be popular, get a dog. Yes.
You’ve not met my dogs.
Villaraigosa: These are jobs where you’ve got to make tough calls. I made those tough calls. That’s how crime went down 48 percent. It was the most violent big city in America when I got there. That’s how graduation rates went up 60 percent. I rocked the apple cart, and I made the tough calls, and that’s what you have to do when you’re governor.
We passed all these laws, but we’ve got to implement them. And I agree with you that Gavin has, without question, been a housing governor.
We passed the laws, but now we need the leadership to actually implement them. Which is why I’ve said we need a housing production accountability board within the Housing Department, to make sure they’re meeting not just their housing element but building the housing that they say is in that element.
Thank you, Mr. Villaraigosa. Mr. Steyer, I’ve broadly been asking questions in this section about how to manage opposition coming from parts of the system.
California is a very complex system that the governor does not control. Of all the candidates onstage, you have the least experience dealing with California’s many, many layers of government, overlapping authorities, stakeholders. You have never held public office before.
It’s a very relationship-based system. Many people I’ve talked to who like your ideas are worried you’ll get overwhelmed by the system. It overwhelms even people who know it very well.
What’s your answer to them?
Steyer: Well, I have two things to say: One, Ezra, you should know that for the last 11 years, we’ve had 20 people in Sacramento working on legislation, and being part of this system for the whole time, trying to put together coalitions and work for progressive policies.
Second, I’ve run three ballot initiatives in the state of California, all of which have required a coalition of legislators, of unions, of interest groups, including, many times, chambers of commerce, including, in the case of getting a tobacco tax, getting the people in the medical associations.
But let me say this, too: Listening on this stage, we’re talking a lot about how we’re going to incent cities and counties.
You’re talking about, in my mind, two different things: How are we going to organize the agencies within the state government? How are we going to relate to the cities and counties around the state of California? Those are two separate questions.
The first one, the governor’s step of bringing all of the housing into one place, is a good first step, but not nearly enough. Because a large part of the problems in timing and cost of housing have to do with multiple overlapping agencies that have different goals and conflicting goals.
So that is a good first step. But in terms of the cities and counties, there’s been a sense, on this stage, that they’re doing something wrong, that it’s basically NIMBYism. They don’t want to do it, and therefore, they obstruct.
And what I was trying to say the first time is this: There is an element of that, of course, but there’s also the element that they can’t afford to do this, that they are getting every housing development is an unfunded mandate.
I’m the only person on this stage who’s saying: I’ll pass a proposition to bring over $20 billion to the cities and counties, so it’s no longer an unfunded mandate.
And to a large extent, when you’re asking: How do you get along with people? — a lot of it is about relationships. And I’m sure that we would have in my administration — I have particular people in mind who have long relationships here and would be part of what I would think of as an office of intergovernmental affairs.
But the other question is this: When you talk about carrots and sticks, you’ve got to have some carrots, and I’m talking about $22 billion worth of carrots.
So two things on that carrot. There was a very similar proposal on the ballot a few years ago. It failed. Twenty-two billion dollars is also higher than most estimates of how much money that would bring in.
So if you put this Proposition 13 reform, or the closing of what you call the Trump tax loophole, on the ballot, and you support it, and — as often happens with well-meaning ballot measures to increase taxes — it fails, then what happens to the rest of the plans when the money isn’t there?
Steyer: So let me say this, Ezra. As you know — if you’ve done your research — I’ve done this three times, and three times people have asked me questions where this was a much tougher proposition than the one that is split roll.
You mean ballot measures?
Steyer: Yes. When you think about ballot measures, it’s a question of: Is there funded opposition?
And I’ve done it against oil companies that are as funded in opposition as you’re ever going to get. And people told me we were crazy to do it, and we got 70 percent of the vote. We did it. The tobacco companies, where the Legislature had failed for 20 years to do it — and we got over 60 percent of the vote. And we also beaten the out-of-state companies that weren’t paying fair state income tax.
So in answer to your question, I’ve done it three times in the state of California and won. I’ve done it three times outside the state of California and won. I look at this, and I say the question is: Can we convince the people of California that this is something necessary, that the money is absolutely necessary, and that it’s just?
And in both of these cases, I believe that to be true, and I’m overwhelmingly confident that we can do it. Because the truth of the matter is — what everybody is talking about here, when we’re talking about doing redevelopment — which is what Matt said, which I think is a good idea — that’s a billion dollars a year.
Not enough. We’re talking about how we need to build a lot of houses, and we need the cities and counties to come along with us. Basically, we need to fund them to be able to do it, and then you’re asking: What’s your stick? And Xavier was saying: Well, we can sue them. And he did say it was a last resort.
But the truth of the matter is that doesn’t get done in the time frame. Money is actually how we’re going to get this done.
Because the answer is going to be: 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.
You’re talking about relationships — I’m talking about incentive. How do we actually incent people?
Everyone is assuming these guys are doing something wrong, and there is NIMBYism. But the truth is, when I’ve talked to mayors, they’ve said: I don’t want to do this because I can’t afford to do this. If you bring the money, I’ll be behind you all the way.
Ms. Porter, you and I both lived a couple of blocks away from each other in Irvine, Calif.
Irvine is an unusual city, a master plan community. The Irvine Company assembled the land in the 19th century and held it, and then shaped it in this way that would be almost impossible today. And I say “almost,” because somebody is trying to do something similar right now, which is the California Forever project.
This tech-billionaire-backed effort to build a new master-planned city of 400,000 in Solano County, on land assembled somewhat like Irvine was. There’s been a lot of local opposition. The way that land was acquired was sort of unusual and secretive.
I have two questions for you here: As governor, what would you think of California Forever? What would be your relationship to that project? And, more broadly, what do you think of the kind of master-planning projects that led to Irvine?
Porter: So I’ve actually asked to meet with the California Forever people, because the first thing is that you’ve got to listen. You’ve got to find out, you’ve got to dig in the details, you’ve got to read the study, you’ve got to ask the hard questions, right?
And I think they might be scared I’m bringing a whiteboard. And so they keep not responding. But I’m really coming from a place of wanting to understand it.
So look, I think some of that is NIMBYism. And I would just say to those on the stage who don’t think there’s very much NIMBYism, I invite you to visit Huntington Beach for yourself. Because I used to represent Huntington Beach, and a lot of those cities in Orange County, as you know, are very anti-housing.
Irvine, interestingly, is not one of them. They are still building. We are adding people. From when you lived there to when I lived there, the population has doubled or tripled, and that is because they control enough of the factors that they don’t get gobsmacked with all of these additive things.
So there is something to having that kind of bigger reach around all of the factors. But let me give you another example of where this doesn’t work — and this is where I thought you were going with California Forever — which is Tejon Ranch.
Are you familiar? This is a really interesting example. This was one of the largest — I think it’s still today the largest contiguous private land holding in California. Pretty amazing, and it’s outside of Los Angeles. I went and I visited and I saw it. They have been trying to develop housing there, work-force-priced housing, for 30-some years.
And they own the land. There’s nobody to permit them, right? They just keep getting sued. They got sued on CEQA. They resolved 29 of the 33 objections, and then they went to court, and they lost on one of them. And do you know what happened? Back to zero on all 33 objections.
So yes, there’s something to saying that you can get your arms around it, but we have to do a lot of other tools.
One thing I do think about master planning is that it can be a way to deal with some of the impact fees. Because in any given strip mall in Irvine, if you’re standing there and you’ve just walked into one store and you walk out and you think: Shoot, I need to go get that other thing — Irvine Company Big Brother will have put that thing across the parking lot in the strip mall.
It’s actually scary. And it’s not for everybody. It is really not for everybody. But I think the fact that I live and am raising my family in a very different model of housing, and living in a place like Orange County, which has got everything — from the worst NIMBYism in the state to some of the fastest growing pro-housing cities in the state — is a really good perspective as governor.
I said the other day to someone — well, they’re like: Well, you’re not really from, like, a big thing in California, like, you know, some people. And I said: Well, Orange County is the sixth most populous county. And they said: In California?
No, in the United States, people. San Diego County is the fifth most populous county in the United States, and they’re making some progress on housing there.
So yes, you’re absolutely right. I think there are limits to what you can expect from master planning. But I do think innovation in housing is important. And at its core, if you take them at their word, which is where I would start — might not be where I’d end, but it’s where I’d start the conversation with California Forever — what they’re saying is: Let us innovate. Let us show people what a different model of living and working and recreating can look like.
I think we need imagination about what housing could be, so that we’re not just fighting about 40-story apartment buildings and single-family. There are so many other permutations of housing. Long-term leases, which is something Europe has that we don’t have — I campaigned on this in my Senate race. I’m campaigning on it now. We need more housing innovation, and at its heart, that’s what I think some of these projects offer.
Mr. Becerra, as secretary of Health and Human Services, you oversaw one of the federal agencies that’s most directly involved in homelessness policy. The Joe Biden administration largely embraced Housing First as the dominant federal framework.
California spent something like $24 billion on homelessness from 2018 to 2023, mostly within that framework, and the unsheltered population has continued to grow. What went wrong?
Becerra: We didn’t focus on outcomes. The accountability wasn’t there. Twenty-four billion dollars were there, but the outcomes didn’t result.
We didn’t see fast enough that people were moved off the street. We didn’t provide the services they needed. To me, the homelessness crisis is as much a mental health crisis as it is someone needing a place, a shelter. And we didn’t provide the types of resources to make sure we could stand people up and make sure that they wouldn’t go back to the streets.
I also believe that we have to do far more to prevent people from ever becoming homeless. I don’t have control of the streets of Los Angeles, of Oakland or the counties as governor. What I can control is the money that we send and try to demand accountability.
But the most important thing, I believe — and this is where I will focus as governor — is trying to help that person who is on the very edge of losing their housing, whether it’s their home or their apartment that they’re renting.
Because there are people who, under some circumstances, you lose your job unexpectedly. You’re trying to get back to work, and it’s taking you a little longer. You’ve used up your savings. You’re on the verge now of losing your apartment that you’re renting. You have a medical emergency. You break your piggy bank open.
You use it all up. It’s not enough. You still have a big bill. All of a sudden, you have to make a decision: Do you pay the bill or do you stay in your home? And I believe those are the folks that, if we provided more support — and I would create a stabilizing fund that would be there to help those Californians who are in a home to make sure they don’t lose their home.
It will cost us far less to invest in someone’s maintaining their housing than trying to pull them off the street, get them to stand up, provide them the services, get them to temporary shelter and then help them get re-employed. And so let’s invest in prevention before we start talking about just trying to pick people off the street.
[Applause.]
You mentioned seeing much of homelessness as a mental health question. One of the difficult questions within that conversation is the role of coercion. What do you do when people are on the street having mental health problems, and they don’t want to go in for treatment, they don’t want to go into a home? What would your approach to that be?
Becerra: First, I think we have to give everyone an opportunity to have an out. And when I established the 988 program — and I hope some of you are familiar with it — it’s like 911, but for mental health crises and suicide prevention. If you dial 988 or text or chat, you’ll get someone who will help you — not as a police officer but as someone who can provide you with services.
We do that. We have a dedicated line for veterans who are hurting. We had — but this administration took it away — a line for L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. people who wanted to be able to speak to somebody who would understand their concern.
We have to give people an out, an opportunity. But what happens too often is we don’t do that, and then we don’t do the second thing, which is to make sure that we tell folks: We are your keeper.
I am my brother’s and my sister’s keeper. We will not let you languish in the streets. And if you keep saying no, and it’s clear that you need help, then it’s really our responsibility as civilized people to make sure we provide our brother or our sister some assistance.
We have to get to that point. We don’t let people make that decision when it’s clear they’re not making the right decisions for themselves.
When you say that you want to see more accountability in the homelessness programs, that’s not a new thing to hear from leaders. It’s not like Governor Newsom doesn’t want accountability in the homelessness policies that he puts forward. When I’ve talked to mayors of major cities, they talk about this.
So very specifically, what would you do that has not already been done?
Becerra: Very similar to the carrot-and-stick approach, which I used, by the way, at H.H.S. We had to help doctors switch from paper record keeping — prescriptions, their medical records — to digital, to finally join the electronic world.
A lot of folks said: We can’t afford it. And so we scaled it. We said: Look, we’re going to give you incentives to change your practice into one that can function electronically, and we’re going to give you incentives. But at some point, there are going to be penalties if you don’t join the real world.
We would do the same thing. There’s a locality. You have programs, but if they’re not resulting in success, then we have to terminate those programs or stop the funding.
I’ll take the money from the programs that aren’t working, and I’ll scale those programs that are working. That’s what you have to do — you have to have the carrot and the stick. But I will use the stick, at the end of the day, because taxpayers are paying for folks to be pulled off the street.
Mr. Steyer, you said the most compassionate thing we can do is revive the interim housing to get people where they want to be.
It’s not a new strategy, building interim housing, from shelters to other approaches, and it tends to run into two problems. One is that communities often don’t want it, and they fight it very, very hard — much harder than they fight a normal apartment building or something like that.
Another is that many unsheltered people refuse to go into these often very restrictive spaces: You can’t bring your partner, you can’t bring your pets.
How do you solve those problems that have made interim housing not the answer that many people hoped it would be?
Steyer: Well, let me take a step back, Ezra, because I agree with Xavier that keeping people off the street is the first thing, because no one gets well on the street.
Being homeless is an incredibly stressful, vulnerable and dangerous condition. When you think about the mental health issues of homeless people, only one in seven people who become homeless has a mental health problem. But virtually everyone who stays on the street for a long time develops one.
I agree with what Xavier was saying, which is that we need to keep people off the street. Because it is much cheaper. He was talking about it from the standpoint of money, but it’s also much cheaper from the standpoint of mental health. That is the first thing.
The second thing that I’ve said is we need to get people off the street as fast as possible — before the dangers and vulnerability on the street multiply the problems that those people have when they originally become homeless.
The reason I’ve supported emergency interim housing, and I would dispute exactly how you characterized it, is this: The strategy that the state of California has right now is shelters and permanent assisted housing.
People hate going into shelters because they actually think they’re dangerous: They have no privacy, they’re not allowed to bring their pets, and it’s something many, many people on the street would prefer — to be on the street than to be in a shelter.
The difference with emergency interim housing is that you actually have privacy. You have a room with a key, you are allowed to bring your pet, and you don’t have to be clean. There are shared food and laundry services, and there are wraparound services.
What I believe is true is that the majority — not 100 percent — of the people on the street are willing to go into emergency interim housing to the tune of somewhere around 70 percent.
When we look at the strategy we’ve had, which is shelters and permanent assisted housing, it has failed. Permanent assisted housing, as you said, in terms of the cost of low-income housing — it costs somewhere between $750,000 and $1 million a key.
What I’m talking about is something that is much cheaper, much faster and that people like much more than the strategies that we’re employing now. It in fact deals with the biggest issue we have, which is that being on the street itself is incredibly dangerous and causes multiple problems. My actual goal is to keep people off the street, get people off the street for their sake, to be compassionate.
Also Senate Bill 79, Buffy Wicks’s bill, which I strongly supported and continue to support, is about building densely around public transportation. For that to happen and for people to want to live there, we need safe, fun, walkable cities where kids can walk. It’s absolutely critical that they feel safe walking down that street. That’s the kind of fun community Californians want.
Let me ask you about interim housing, not even as an emergency question.
You read American history, and you’ve got Abraham Lincoln in boardinghouses all across his travels as a lawyer. You used to have a lot of housing that worked more like college dorms do today. You had a lot of housing where people would come in, and there were shared bathrooms, there was a shared kitchen, there were a lot of people in a single home. And we functionally zoned a lot of that out of existence.
Very low-cost housing — which exists in between what we think of as a home or an apartment now and the street — no longer exists because we made it illegal.
Should we make it legal? Should interim housing be more than an emergency measure?
Steyer: Flexibility in housing is how I would describe what you’re saying. The obvious thing right now is A.D.U.s: accessory dwelling units. It’s a flexible way of sticking a new unit in your backyard. Originally, it was for a family member, but now it’s very much something you can rent out that’s additional housing for your community.
To a very large extent, it’s emergency interim housing. It’s flexible, and honestly, to me, it sounds — I hate to say it, but it sounds like a college dorm. It is taking away from a very rigid sense of what housing is supposed to look like — our existing system is supporting this rigidity without taking into account that we’re in a new world.
We’re going to build tiny little houses. We’re going to build A.D.U.s. But what is critical, from my standpoint, is that we get a lot of units: That we get people off the street for their own sake, that we are actually compassionate about it.
But also that we’re building a society that people — look, great cities are a lot of fun. We need to make sure that our cities are great cities.
Ms. Porter, before people become homeless, they are housed, and what tends to happen is that they have an income shock or a health crisis, or something happens where they can no longer pay their rent, and they’re evicted.
Over half of California renter households spend at least 30 percent of their income on housing, which puts them in danger of that kind of thing happening. We’ve talked a lot here about increasing the supply of housing to reduce costs. In the best case, that takes time.
What is a policy that you want to see to help people afford the home they already live in, in a time of stress or strain, whether they’re an owner or a renter? How do we help people not fall out of the housing situation they’re in now?
Porter: A lot of my career — all of my career before I ran for office — was about this exact question. Studying families who fell into bankruptcy or were facing eviction or foreclosure, that was my life’s work. That’s how I got to know Elizabeth Warren: studying these families, talking to them, researching them.
It’s the things you mentioned — job loss, income loss, it’s medical debt or sickness that leads to the loss of income, or it’s a family breakup, a change in the family structure. These are the same drivers of bankruptcy, that are the drivers of foreclosure and eviction.
There’s some really good research on this. This is not something where we don’t know what to do. But we have not had the willingness from our leaders to scale it up.
The very most effective way to keep someone in their home or in their apartment is to give them direct cash assistance, period. That is the very most effective way. Everything else is complicated and expensive and slow.
Let me give you an example: Somebody scrapes up their rent because they don’t want to get evicted, and then they can’t afford any food. They can’t afford their bus fare, they’re late to work, they lose their job. Scraping up the rent didn’t do any good.
There’s really good research on this. The Audacious Foundation just funded a huge project here in California to do pilots all around the country. The average cost of this kind of cash foreclosure, or eviction prevention, is $6,000 a family — that’s the median cost. Compare that with $1 million or $800,000 a unit.
Long before we get to the interim housing — which I think is right — we should keep doing that — and thanks to Mayor Mahan I got the chance to see some of that, and I’ve seen it in a few other cities since — but we’ve got to put the shovel down on homelessness. The problem keeps getting worse.
Those kinds of programs really work, and California should not have 97 different programs with 52 different forms and 99 fill-in-the-blank questions. We just need to give people a handful of money for a very short period, and most people will not be permanently homeless.
They become permanently homeless because they lose the housing they have. If they could stay put for just a little while until they get better or they find that new job or they get back together with their partner — whatever it is — they will never find themselves in that situation in the first place.
Let me ask you about that fracture ——
Porter: And by the way, I did a lot of this when I worked on the statewide foreclosure prevention, eviction prevention program with Kamala Harris. This was a big part of what we asked the banks to do. They had cheated people into these loans, they were cheating them on the way out — my research exposed that.
A big part of what we said to the banks is: Give them cash so that they can figure out whether they’re going to be able to keep this house or they’re going to need to make a transition. Give them $10,000 or $20,000. In that case, the banks were wrongdoers, so we could ask for big amounts — but give them that money to make that housing transition.
Let me ask you about that — the fractured nature of California’s homelessness, income support and rent support programs.
Porter: I wish you could ask Chad Bianco about this.
[Chuckles.] I remember talking to someone who had run homelessness prevention in L.A., and I remember her saying to me: Look, everybody thinks I have $1 billion to spend. I wish I had $1 billion, and you would let me spend it. There’s $1 billion, and I can’t spend it because it’s coming in from so many sources and it’s audited in so many ways.
And I hear this again and again from public servants: If you would let me do my job, I could do it, but instead I spend all my time managing these overlapping authorities and these different people I report to.
How do you actually unify some of these authorities and give the people we have tasked with these incredibly moral, important, difficult jobs the authority to do them?
Porter: The state can think about doing some of this in our own programs — replacing five or six different programs designed to help you meet your basic needs with something called Cal Need or Cal Necessity.
It’s one program, it’s one chunk of money, and you trust families to figure out what they need to do to stay afloat. By the way, poor people, low-income people, are really, really good at juggling money, because they have to be to exist.
The opposite perception, that we can’t trust people with cash, that we can’t give low-income people cash, is racist, it’s sexist, and it’s wrong. And it costs us a fortune.
[Applause.]
You could take that same approach broadly. Let me just say: I drive a minivan. You might know the license plate says, “OVRSITE” — so I’ve thought a lot about this.
We do oversight backward in our state and in most government agencies. It’s burying people. It’s death by a thousand paper cuts, but they still bleed out.
You are much better crushing — and I mean really crushing — cheaters, and trusting most people to do it right in the first place. That would be my approach.
Mayor Mahan, you have in San Jose done quite a lot in flexible housing to try to help with homelessness. I wanted to ask you a sort of open-ended question here: What have you seen work better than you thought that should scale statewide — that if you were governor, you would really put resources behind it? And what is a state support that you have not found is effective and you would like to move away from?
Mahan: It’s a great question, and I’m not going to start with interim housing, because I think Katie’s description of prevention was right on.
We have partnered with our county and a local nonprofit called Destination Home. We created arguably the nation’s leading prevention model, and the University of Notre Dame studied it and showed that up to — I think the longitudinal data was maybe three or four years by the time they did the study — over 92 percent of households that were helped with one-time rental assistance remain housed and don’t need ongoing public subsidy. It’s incredible.
The one thing I would add is the importance of case management — really supporting someone and helping them bridge past the job loss, the health issue, the unexpected debt that came along, the cars that broke down, whatever it is.
It is very cost-effective, and we’ve reduced inflow by 50 percent, as related to those who are coming off our streets. We’re getting to a point where, with enough supply of interim housing, we can get to functional zero unsheltered homelessness, which has been my biggest focus.
You started, Ezra, with: Well, where did all the money go? Effectively, tens of billions of dollars.
I think we made a mistake politically in trying to convince voters that if they invested in something we need, which is the development of new affordable housing, that they would suddenly see all the tent encampments disappear. It’s not either-or. The truth is, one solution is very slow and expensive and only so scalable, frankly, at least with that mechanism.
As the tent encampments persisted, we lost a lot of public support for the approach. What has worked in San Jose — we have built 23 interim housing sites, and I’ve seen rooms with hundreds of angry neighbors, red in the face, shouting and saying: We’re going to recall you. My commitment to them has been: We’re going to make your neighborhood better, not worse, off.
I think the details matter. What we’ve been able to demonstrate to residents around those 23 sites — and we’re not perfect. I’m sure if I say this, someone is going to tweet me with a photo of something that has gone wrong, so I’m just going to acknowledge that up front. But what we’ve done is we’ve been really radically pragmatic.
When we buy that old motel that’s rundown, and we convert it into transitional housing, or we buy those modular units, some of which are now stacked and built at $300,000 a unit — and you could live in them long term, they’re very nice — some of which are literally just tiny sleeping cabins. We made a commitment to the neighbors in a radius around those sites that there’s going to be a local preference. If you’re homeless in that area, you get first dibs on that housing.
No. 2, after a period of time of outreach and moving people in, in a smaller radius, we’re going to create and enforce a no-encampment zone. With the early sites, what didn’t work was allowing people to still choose to camp a block away from that interim site, and it completely visually undermines that trust and belief that we’re making progress. Not everybody loves the idea of a no-encampment zone, but that’s how we got community buy-in.
What we’ve seen, and this was the case I made, but we had to prove it — and I want to thank my colleagues and others down in San Jose for having the courage to do this — we were finally able to show people that when we built interim housing and got people stabilized indoors and connected to case management, calls for service for crime, to 911, and for blight, to 311, plummeted. Which actually makes perfect common sense: You get people stabilized indoors and not in an unmanaged tent encampment with noise and fires and drug use and all the challenges, and everybody’s quality of life is better.
The thing that we’ve done that has not worked superwell is, as we have tried to throw local public dollars at building new affordable housing, as you pointed out, our cost to build is 30 percent higher than the private market. Frankly, if I could go back, I would have encouraged us to buy the older housing stock that’s $300,000 a unit rather than build new at $1 million a unit, when the private marketplace could have built it if we had just incentivized them at $600,000 a unit.
We should be buying and preserving the older stock, buying down affordability. Let’s do funded inclusionary requirements and buy down affordability on new market-rate units — but not subsidize the least efficient approach with no cost controls or innovation. I don’t think it’s scalable, and we lose public trust when we just keep throwing money in an inefficient way at the problem.
Mr. Villaraigosa ——
Villaraigosa: Antonio is fine.
I’m going to maintain formality here. The New York Times has a whole style guide I have to follow.
The Tenant Protection Act is going to expire during the next governor’s term. That law caps annual rent increases to 5 percent, plus inflation. Some tenants are seeing their rents jump by nearly 10 percent per year, all in. A recent bill to cap rent at 5 percent a year failed in the Legislature. There’s a lot of lobbying in both directions on that.
Rent caps are a tough issue — both sides make good points on this. What is your view on rent caps, particularly in a place like the Bay Area? You have all this new A.I. money sending prices skyrocketing, and a lot of people do not work in A.I. — they’re not part of that. How do you think about the Tenant Protection Act, and how should the annual rent increase caps be decided?
Villaraigosa: As a temporary situation, I’m for it. They’d passed that temporary Tenant Protection Act because people were starving — they were going on the streets, we had Covid. All of those things came into play at the same time.
If you look at any study, or you’ve been in the job that I’ve had over the years, one thing is clear: We need supply. If you want to bring down rents over the long term, you need supply. That’s why I always say you need market-rate housing, you need work force housing, you need affordable housing, and you need housing for the homeless.
I want to speak to something that you raised, though, and you had pooh-poohed: When some of this started, it was in the middle of a recession, and Jerry Brown got rid of redevelopment. Redevelopment was a tool. Tax-increment financing was a tool for us, for economic development and for housing, and particularly for affordable housing.
One of the things I want to say about this conversation, because I’ve heard you speak to the others: We spent $24 billion at the state level, and the fact is homelessness went up. The L.A.O., the Legislative Analyst’s Office, did an analysis: Only two programs worked. A program that we’re all for — rental assistance — helped people when they lost a job or a car broke down, whatever it was, from becoming homeless in the first place. The second was Homekey, which is temporary housing. But right now, the average unit, and this is getting back to your book, “Abundance” — this is where the Democrats get it wrong.
I really appreciate the street team work here.
[Audience laughs.]
Villaraigosa: Well, we’re looking for perfect, everybody. The average unit in L.A. for permanent supportive housing is $850,000. Your kids can’t afford that.
We can build tiny homes. We’re doing it in San Jose, we’re doing it in L.A., for $100,000.
The fact is, we’re looking for perfection, and it doesn’t exist. In Santa Monica, it’s $1.2 million. That’s what the average unit is. That doesn’t work.
So I loved your point and I had forgotten about boardinghouses, which were before my time. [Chuckles.] At the end of the day, we should have an all-of-the-above approach. That’s what happens when you’re practical.
I tell people, I came out of the civil rights movement; I was a labor leader for 25 years before I got elected. I am unabashedly a progressive, but after being a big city mayor for eight years, the one thing I know is the only way we’re going to deal with this is an all-of-the-above solution.
Let me speak about something we haven’t spoken about yet: Democrats love to talk about how Ronald Reagan made this problem worse, because he got rid of mental hospitals.
Democrats have been in office for 28 years. Why don’t we build mental facilities? We did the CARE Courts, and there’s no accountability at the county level to start to use the CARE Courts. When parents who love their kids, or a spouse who loves their partner, want to put them in an institution, it’s almost impossible. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” was one example — crazy — but nobody goes to locked mental facilities.
Part of the problem is that we have to understand there are too many people on the street, and you’re right. I’ve been with Hope the Mission, and let me tell you something: A lot of these people who are on drugs and mentally ill now, they weren’t when they first became homeless. But after being homeless and threatened to be raped and beaten up and having no food and everything else, yes, they start getting on drugs, and they have developmental illnesses and drug problems.
We have to have those services, but if we keep on doing what we’ve been doing — just saying only this or that works — we’re never going to deal with this problem. What I say is this: What is compassionate, humane or progressive about people living in their poop? About people getting beat up at night and stabbed? There is nothing progressive about that. Nothing.
Thank you, Mr. Villaraigosa.
That is our final question, so I’m going to end with a variant of what I always do on the show, which is to ask: What is one book you’d recommend to Californians? We’ll go in order of the room here. Mr. Steyer, we’ll begin with you.
Steyer: The book that I’m recommending is called “The Hour of the Predator,” and it’s a nonfiction book about how the power in our society and around the world is changing. And it is an absolute plea for us to preserve our democracy.
Becerra: Let me give you something uplifting after this conversation.
[Audience laughs.]
There is a book called “Rain of Gold” by Victor Villaseñor, which is all about how, if you just put your mind to it, you can lift up your family and have success. It’s the American dream in this book.
Villaraigosa: I love that book.
Porter: I read for fun, so I think the banger book of the year that really encapsulates, in a fascinating, mind-bending way, all of the frustration and rage that women feel, and that gender stereotypes put onto us and that we have to navigate, is “Yesteryear,” which is a fiction book. It just came out. It’s a 36-hour, stay-up-all-night, don’t-do-your-campaign-work-because-you’re-reading-it banger of a book, and it’s a debut novel, which I also think is important — to support new authors and new voices. “Yesteryear” — much more fun.
[Audience laughs.]
Mahan: For this audience, this is totally unoriginal, but the truth is I just read “Why Nothing Works” — I think you just interviewed the author, Marc Dunkelman. It’s on my night stand, and it was great. It got me thinking about this mix of a top-down, more centralized, get-stuff-done approach, versus that bottom-up, individual-liberties approach, and using the law as a tool. It made me think a little more critically about whether or not we have the right mix in California right now. I think the answer is kind of: no.
Villaraigosa: “Ours Was the Shining Future” — your colleague David Leonhardt wrote it almost two years ago. It’s a book that is critical of Democrats, among other things. It says that we forgot to be the party of working people, we forgot to fight for an economy that’s now not working for enough people, we forgot that issues like affordability are front and center to what people care about.
They care about all the other things we stand for, and I always have, but they care about whether they can eat, pay rent, pay for gas or buy a home. I love that book because it’s reminding us about another time, when we had the G.I. Bill, when we helped people buy homes, when we were doing things to make the economy work for all of us.
Please join me in thanking the candidates here for a wonderful conversation.
You can follow “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu, Marie Cascione, Kristin Lin and Marina King. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. Transcript editing by Filipa Pajevic, Sarah Murphy, Kate Wilkinson and Marlaine Glicksman.
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