My book, Build or Die: How America Suffocates Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Preorder the book now from Bookshop.org.
On Friday, Ezra Klein hosted a housing policy forum for California’s five leading Democratic gubernatorial candidates (the two leading Republicans, Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco, declined to attend). I was in the audience, taking notes.
Anyone who is interested can watch or listen to a recording of the forum here. The Times has helpfully included a full transcript at the link as well. Below are some of my impressions from the forum, going candidate by candidate.
Tom Steyer
Up until the day before the forum, Steyer had by far the best and most detailed housing platform on his campaign site. (More on what changed later.) In line with his written housing platform, he mostly focused on building costs, particularly financing for multifamily projects. That focus is welcome, given that California has done a lot to liberalize zoning statewide but hasn’t seen a comensurate uptick in housing starts; the problem, as Steyer and others correctly noted, is that many of the potential housing developments that are now legal thanks to state-mandated upzonings still don’t pencil out for builders. So figuring out how to ensure that developers can secure the money that will allow them to break ground is critical.
That said, I think Steyer is significantly overrating what financing alone can do. He didn’t talk much about additional upzoning—strangely, none of the candidates paid it much attention—even though the state is going to need to continue making progress on that front. And he seems to think that local government NIMBYism can be mostly attributed to the public costs associated with new housing construction. He repeated a bizarre line of his from the campaign trail, that local governments are reluctant to welcome new residents because it puts them on the hook for associated healthcare and education costs.
I say “bizarre” because neither of these things are costs for cities. Education is, of course, the remit of the local school district; thanks to the Local Control Funding Formula, these districts are mostly funded through state subsidies based on average daily attendance. In other words, and to oversimplify a bit, more students equals more state funding. Population growth is thus a net financial benefit when it comes to public education; and, in fact, many school districts in NIMBY parts of California are facing budget crises because they don’t have enough new students matriculating on an annual basis. Building more housing for families with children would help put those districts on a sustainable footing.
As for healthcare, I have no clue where Steyer is getting this from. Medi-Cal (the state’s Medicaid program) is in a financial hole thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill, but filling that shortfall is the state’s problem. On an individual basis, Medi-Cal is administered at the county level.
When it comes to actual city budgets, infill multifamily housing is almost certainly a net financial benefit. Thanks to Prop 13, property tax assessments only reset when there’s a title transfer or a parcel gets substantially redeveloped; that means cities have a financial incentive to replace single-family homes with multifamily buildings. Greenfield sprawl might sometimes turn into a net loss for city budgets because of the cost of adding brand new infrastructure to previously undeveloped areas, but greenfield sprawl is not the type of housing construction the state should be encouraging anyway. (Plus, cities have a number of special district tools they can use to finance sprawl development if they so choose.)
All of which is to say, Steyer is wrong on municipal finance. If he really wants to encourage more homebuilding in intransigent cities, offering them more money will probably only help at the margins. Many local officials have already decided that no amount of public revenue is worth opening their doors to new neighbors, particularly working-class and lower-income ones.
Xavier Becerra
Becerra was the candidate I was most interested to hear from. If I was going by candidate résumés alone, I would vastly prefer him to Steyer; I would much rather vote for a former state AG and federal HHS Secretary than a billionaire who has never been a public servant. But up until last week, Becerra’s housing platform was basically a platitude-filled postcard. The one housing-related idea he seemed committed to was a proposed statewide freeze on home insurance premiums.
That proposal is most likely a political winner, but in policy terms it’s a disaster. Part of the reason why home insurers are fleeing the state is because the state constitution constrains their ability to accurately price risk; halting premium increases altogether would probably turn California’s home insurance crisis into a full-blown calamity. Instead, the state needs to be doing the opposite: granting insurers more flexibility to charge premiums based on risk, while simultaneously reducing overall risk by making communities more resilient against disasters and encouraging housing construction in the safest parts of the state.
But the release of Becerra’s full housing platform on Thursday made him worth a second look. It’s probably the strongest of the bunch, quite possibly even stronger than Steyer’s. Maybe now that he was an unexpected frontrunner, Becerra was finally starting to take his own candidacy seriously.
Too bad he didn’t add any meat to his housing agenda until after mail ballots had already started going out the door. And too bad that he give no indication during the forum that he had read his own housing platform. His worst moment came during a discussion on homelessness, when he said: “To me, the homelessness crisis is as much a mental health crisis as it is someone needing a place, a shelter.” That may be how a former HHS secretary is inclined to see it, but the would-be governor of a state afflicted by mass homelessness should have a clearer understanding of what’s going on.
Katie Porter
Porter was the biggest surprise of the night. Throught the campaign, her policy platform has largely consisted of slopulist pandering; she’s promising middle-class Californians that she can deliver them single-payer health care and two free years of college while simultaneously cutting their taxes. Someone whose whole shtick is writing numbers on a whiteboard should probably be able to do the arithmetic necessary to determine that these promises are utter nonsense, both individually and in conjunction.
But at the housing forum, Porter demonstrated a stronger command of the issue than nearly any of her opponents. Unlike Becerra, she even seemed to consider it a genuine priority. And unlike most of the other candidates, the longtime Orange County resident was willing to acknowledge the existence of outright NIMBYism instead of trying to wave it away.
Porter’s proposals to standardize permitting statewide and consolidate all the funding streams for affordable housing were particularly welcome. If I was going solely off everyone’s performance on Friday night, she would have my enthusiastic vote. Too bad that the main planks of her overall platform are slopulist dreck.
Matt Mahan
The centrist mayor of San Jose also did pretty well at the forum, in part because Ezra’s questions didn’t touch on the major vulnerabilities in his housing platform: his unqualified defense of Prop 13 (Steyer wants to amend it via ballot measure so that commercial landlords end up paying more; Mahan is strongly opposed to the idea) and his prior defense of single-family zoning. He also wants to suspend the gas tax; not only would that be climate arson, it would also take a major bite out of the state’s transportation funding. Like Porter, Mahan is one of those candidates who would looks pretty good until you read up on everything he didn’t say at the housing forum.
Antonio Villaraigosa
That was some weird shit. A lot of extended monologuing. I found his attempt to explain his position on Prop 13 utterly comprehensible; I still don’t have any idea where he stands. The most consistent theme in his answers to Ezra’s questions was that he really wanted Ezra to know he had read Abundance.
The Verdict
I turned in my ballot yesterday, and I ended up voting for Steyer. That isn’t an endorsement; I can’t really endorse any of the candidates without reservation. But Steyer has one of the better housing platforms, and the rest of his policy agenda mostly lacks the sort of catastrophically bad ideas that pepper his opponents’ agendas. So there you go.
The one true star of the event was Asm. Buffy Wicks, the YIMBY legislative champion who introduced Ezra and the candidates. Her opening remarks were a somewhat painful reminder that the gubernatorial field would have benefited enormously from her presence. Maybe in four to eight years.