Earlier this year, in the windowless conference room of a downtown San Francisco hotel, one of the first gubernatorial candidate forums of the season kicked off with a simple question: “Do you think California’s housing shortage is primarily the result of local and state regulatory barriers to home building?”
It made for a pithy summary of the “Yes In My Backyard” movement’s pro-development philosophy that the question-asker — Brian Hanlon, co-founder of California YIMBY — and his organization have been pushing California lawmakers to embrace for more than a decade. California’s chronic unaffordability is born of a shortage of homes and the state needs to play an aggressive role in getting more units built, the YIMBYs argue.
On stage were seven candidates, including current Democratic poll leaders Tom Steyer, Katie Porter and Xavier Becerra.
One by one, each responded. “Yes.” “Yes.” “Yes.” “Yes.” “Yes.” “Yes.” “Yes.”
The showing of unanimity made Hanlon realize something.
“Oh, yeah,” he thought. “We won.”
The crowded race to become California’s next governor may still be unsettled with no clear front runner among a half dozen plausibly viable Democrats and two Republicans, but one clear victor has emerged: The Yes In My Backyard movement.
Underscoring that point, five Democratic candidates gathered in Oakland on Friday to participate in another forum on housing. The moderator was New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, whose best-selling book, Abundance, has become a kind of shorthand for a new emphasis in elite Democratic policy circles on rethinking government processes and regulations to make it easier to build more things cheaper and quicker, including homes.
The candidates didn’t find much to disagree about.
‘Pro-housing noises’
What a difference eight years of skyrocketing rents and home prices make.
Think back to 2018, the last time California had an open governor’s race. The Legislature was considering a bill that would have forced local governments to allow apartment buildings near public transit stops. Few of the gubernatorial candidates were willing to embrace it and many were adamantly opposed. Newsom, the clear front runner, who was promoting his hyper-ambitious goal to oversee the construction of 3.5 million new homes, said he appreciated the general idea of the bill but nevertheless refused to back it. It died later that year.
Newsom went on to win that race and as governor he has come to embrace the build, baby, build cause, especially in this second term. Last summer, he signed a bill curbing environmental lawsuits against urban housing developments, a longtime YIMBY policy goal. During the signing ceremony he heralded the end of NIMBYism in California and name-dropped Klein.
A couple months later, Newsom signed Senate Bill 79 — a successor to the unsuccessful 2018 transit-oriented rezoning bill — into law. “YIMBYs rejoice!” his press office said in the resulting press release.
This year, the top Democratic candidates for governor do not see supporting state-imposed pro-development efforts as an electoral liability. Porter publicly backed the new rezoning law in a social media post before Newsom signed it. Steyer championed it in a newspaper opinion piece. After it became law, Becerra noted his support and vowed to “keep building.”
Not that every candidate supports the legislation. Republican Steve Hilton warned that it will “destroy” California’s “single-family suburban neighborhoods” by allowing the construction of mid-rise apartment buildings. The former Fox News host objects to state-led planning mandates and to the prevailing orthodoxy among YIMBY-aligned Democrats in Sacramento that the state should focus new construction in dense urban areas.
Nor have all the candidates taken to the new elite consensus on housing policy with the same enthusiasm. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan supports deregulating housing policy, capping local development fees and relaxing building codes. Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, in contrast, is focused on finding more public support for affordable housing. Some YIMBY groups have already taken sides. YIMBY Action, a California-based pro-development advocacy organization with chapters across the country, endorsed Steyer in early May.
But everyone, especially among the poll-leading Democrats, has at least rhetorically embraced the notion that California needs to build more houses and that state government has a role to play in making sure they get built, even if that sometimes means elbowing aside local governments, neighborhood groups, environmental advocates and unions. As former California YIMBY policy director Ned Resnikoff observed in a recent blog post, “most of the candidates are making pro-housing noises.”
New conventional wisdom on housing
The change on the campaign trail is only the most recent indicator that the politics of housing have radically shifted in California.
Over the last decade, the cause of making it easier to build has gone from a somewhat thankless, niche interest in the California Assembly and Senate to a priority issue championed by legislative leadership. In San Francisco and Berkeley, once synonymous with anti-development local obstruction, mayors have come to power touting their pro-housing bonafides. In Los Angeles, the top fundraising Democrat trying to unseat Karen Bass in the coming mayor’s race has advocated for the densification of the city’s single-family neighborhoods and changes to L.A.’s property transfer tax that developers want.
“The fact that we are now talking about housing production, to the extent that we are, is significant,” said Clayton Nall, a UC Santa Barbara political scientist who has studied public attitudes about housing policy.
But just because the top candidates are offering YIMBY-flavored generalities on the debate stage and setting ambitious targets of units to be built doesn’t mean they will govern as pro-development purists, he stressed.
There might be good political reasons for that: Whatever successes organized YIMBYs have had in California’s Legislature — and in statehouses across the country — that agenda sometimes seems untethered from what the typical voter wants or cares about, said Nall. When asked about the best way to make housing more affordable, majorities of American respondents tend to express preferences for rent control and financial subsidies for renters and aspiring buyers. Polling support for pro-development policies tends to be more muted — and it depends on how the question is asked.
“There are very few people who endorse what I would call the libertarian YIMBY position, which is that we need to deregulate to free the market to build more housing,” said Nall.
A YIMBY-fest in Oakland
As eager audience members lined up outside the Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts in Oakland on Friday for the Klein-moderated event, a group of 60 or so left-leaning tenant rights groups assembled across the street to offer some critical counterprogramming. The activists cheered for rent control, anti-eviction protections, funding for affordable housing and restrictions on large for-profit landlords. When new market-rate apartments were mentioned, the crowd booed.
Renter rights and landlord greed wouldn’t be the focus of the YIMBY-fest inside the Kaiser Center, predicted Anya Svanoe, spokesperson with Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment.
That represents a “complete abdication of responsibility for tenants who are living right now and can’t wait 10 years for a supply solution,” she said.
Later, the Democratic candidates — Steyer, Becerra, Porter, Mahan and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa — mostly offered ways to make it easier, cheaper and simpler to build more homes. They discussed and largely agreed upon the pernicious effects of local development fees, slow permitting processes, and NIMBY obstruction. A research paper on the glacial speed of developing housing in California published by RAND was the improbable star of the event, receiving repeated mention and praise.
Though a few substantive disagreements popped up, no one broke from the general agreement on making it easier to build. Becerra is more comfortable with requiring projects streamlined under state law to require higher labor standards; Porter, not so much. Steyer wants to raise property taxes on commercial properties; Villaraigosa said he would defend California’s property tax system, even as he allowed that some changes might be necessary.
Rent control did come up, but briefly and at the very end.
“As a temporary situation, I’m for it,” said Villaraigosa, responding to Klein’s question about whether state lawmakers should renew its current rent cap policy. “(But) if you want to bring down rents over the long term, you need supply.”
The following Tuesday, California YIMBY put out its official endorsement announcement for governor: No endorsement.
That’s not because none of the top candidates are acceptable to the group — just the opposite. Though none are perfect, “by and large, the top four Dems all have really good housing plans,” Hanlon said in an interview, referring to Becerra, Steyer, Porter and Mahan. “YIMBYs should feel pretty good about the choices they have for governor and should probably select the person that they like based on other, non-housing areas.”
For YIMBYs, California’s next governor — whoever that turns out to be — is already saying all the right things.