Thread by @CSElmendorf

Watching @ezraklein grill the candidates for CA governor on housing policy was a vertiginous experience.

tl, dr: "Abundance" has won the war of ideas, but not the war of legislative attrition in Sacramento. And no one's talking about the second war.

🧵/21

First, the war of ideas: I had expected that at least one of the leading Dem candidates would try to separate from the pack by veering NIMBY.

It hasn't happened.

/2

Take SB 79 (transit-oriented upzoning) for example. Last fall, there was a huge NIMBY push for a gubernatorial veto, led by homeowners associations and @MayorOfLA.

Yet today, not one of the candidates is calling for a pause.

/3

Indeed, the day before the debate, the candidate who's had the least to say about housing, @XavierBecerra, dropped a new housing platform that calls for expanding SB 79.

/4

Or consider the "builder's remedy" for noncompliance with the state's fair-share planning law. (It allows developers to build huge apartment buildings almost anywhere in cities that lack an @California_HCD-approved housing plan.)

/5

Five years ago, the builder's remedy was a moribund, befuddling, never-used provision of state law.

Then it exploded, almost accidentally, due to a couple of seemingly unrelated changes in state law. It was ratified by the Leg in 2024.

/6
nytimes.com/2025/11/20/bus…

You might have thought that a moderate mayor like @MattMahanSJ, whose city got builder's-remedied while he was in office, would speak out against it. Not so!

/7

.@MattMahanSJ actually sang the praises of the builder's remedy, describing it as a huge improvement over lawyers and litigation for getting cities to relax zoning & other constraints on development.

(Listen from 44:30, )

/8

And surely *some* leading Dem would defend prevailing wage or skilled-and-trained mandates, arguing that the housing we need is union-built housing that pays a "fair wage."

Right?

(Recent research finds these mandates add nearly $100k to cost of delivering a new home.)

/9

Becerra's platform nods in this direction. Ezra challenged him.

Becerra answered that there should be ***no wage standard for projects up to 8 stories' tall***, the compromise embedded in @BuffyWicks's 2025 CEQA reforms.

(Listen from 16:45, )

/10

Then @katieporterca jumped in and said there should be no union-wage mandate on residential construction, period.

She bragged about being the only candidate at the @CaliforniaLabor forum who had the gumption to reject such union-wage mandates. (Listen from 26:30.)

/11

I could go on. The candidates basically all agreed that CA should:
- cap impact fees
- reform building code to allow lower-cost construction
- require speedy ministerial permitting, w/ a standardized application form
- backstop it all w/ builder's remedies

/12

So why my sense of vertigo?

Compare what the candidates said to what the Leg is actually doing...and failing to do. Right now.

/13

1⃣ SB 1216, the first "let's tie intergovernmental transfers to housing outcomes" bill of the @cayimby era, SB 1216, was just pulled by its author.

The opposition was too strong for it to survive even a single committee vote.

So much for prioritizing results over plans.

/14

2⃣ Housing leaders like @BuffyWicks have been talking about 2026 as the year the California will make it financially feasible to build housing at scale.

/15

Thus, I was hopeful that the Leg would roll the labor deal of Buffy's 2025 CEQA reforms into other state housing laws.

This would end "prevailing wage" for projects <85' tall (as @XavierBecerra urged at the forum), hugely boosting feasibility.

/16

https://x.com/CSElmendorf/status/1977851134652907789

Yet in 2026, "the year we're finally tackling the cost of construction," no CA Dem even introduced such a bill.

Worse, the Leg is actually backsliding on labor standards.

/17

An egregious bill (SB 1383) authored by a normally-stalwart YIMBY, @JesseArreguin, would prevent developers of mixed-income housing from using the State Density Bonus Law to get cost-saving exemptions from *municipal* labor standards.

/18
leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavC…

SB 1383 is unbelievably bad.

It removes developers' only avenue of relief from wildly infeasible local labor rules.

It's a standing invitation for cities to evade state housing law w/ novel labor standards & local-hire rules.

And It sailed thru its first committee votes.

/19

As @GavinNewsom has shown, a good governor can check such legislative shenanigans.

You do it w/ the veto pen.

You do it w/ budget leverage, pushing through reforms that benefit the diffuse public over opposition from concentrated interests.

/20
hypertext.niskanencenter.org/p/californias-…

But does anyone in the current crop of CA gubernatorial candidates have the mettle to do it?

I wish I knew.

Please listen to the candidates with this question front of mind: .

/end

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