OAKLAND, Calif. — California’s top Democratic candidates for governor offered sharply different visions for tackling the state’s deepening housing crisis during a lengthy forum moderated by New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, where debates over labor standards, local control, financing and homelessness exposed both consensus and fault lines within the party.
Hosted at Oakland’s Calvin Simmons Theater and focused exclusively on housing policy, the event featured former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, former U.S. Rep. Katie Porter, businessman Tom Steyer and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
Klein centered the discussion around a key question for the electorate — despite years of pro-housing legislation and promises from Gov. Gavin Newsom, California is still building housing at roughly the same pace as when Newsom entered office in 2019.
“There have been a lot of debates lately,” Klein told the audience. “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.”
The conversation quickly turned to the soaring cost of housing construction in California. Citing a RAND study showing that apartment construction costs per square foot are more than double those in Texas, Klein repeatedly pressed candidates to explain why California remains so expensive to build in and what concrete changes they would implement.
Steyer argued that California’s construction methods remain outdated and heavily reliant on expensive on-site labor practices. “We are building houses and we are building apartment buildings the way we have been doing it for 100 years,” he said, promoting modular and factory-built housing systems as a way to significantly reduce costs. “The estimates right now are that we can drive down the cost per square foot by 20 percent.”
Steyer also blamed local governments for slowing housing production through permitting delays and high development fees. “The cities and counties in California do not want to have housing in general,” he said. “As someone said to me one time, they’d rather have a used car lot than they would a new apartment building.”
To address what he described as structural financial disincentives against housing, Steyer proposed closing a “corporate real estate tax loophole” that he said could generate more than $20 billion for cities and counties. “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,” he said.
Becerra, meanwhile, defended labor protections while acknowledging the challenge of balancing construction costs with worker wages. “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,” Becerra said. “I’m going to make sure that those workers who are building those homes can actually think about buying those homes themselves.”
Pressed repeatedly by Klein on how to reduce costs while supporting higher wages and union labor standards, Becerra pointed to streamlining efforts, financing reforms and local fee reductions. He also backed a proposed $10 billion housing bond championed by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks to finance affordable housing developments stalled by funding shortages.
Porter focused heavily on permitting delays and bureaucratic inefficiencies, arguing that time itself has become one of the largest cost drivers in California housing production. “The study is very, very clear that the speed is the driver,” Porter said, referencing the RAND analysis. “If we could be 22 months faster, which is what Colorado does … we could take 10 or even 20 percent off the price.”
Porter advocated for standardized statewide permitting systems and stricter limits on local governments imposing last-minute fees or project conditions. “You cannot do what we see now, which is just a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more,” she said, describing how escalating delays eventually render projects financially infeasible.
She also broke with some Democratic labor allies by opposing expanded prevailing wage requirements for residential housing construction. “I was the only candidate who said: I’m not doing skilled and trained in full today for residential housing, because it’s going to drive up the cost,” Porter said.
Mahan emphasized what he described as the disconnect between housing approvals and actual construction. Although San Jose has approved more than 20,000 units, many remain unbuilt because projects no longer pencil financially.
“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,” Mahan said. “And it doesn’t matter because we don’t break ground.”
Mahan highlighted San Jose’s use of ministerial approvals and by-right development in transit corridors to accelerate construction timelines and bypass discretionary political hearings. He also argued that local development fees have become excessive. “We have accumulated, I can tell you in my city, over 10 pages’ worth of fees,” he said. “You stack them up, and they’re adding 10 to 20 percent to the cost of housing.”
Villaraigosa took aim at California’s broader tax system, arguing that Proposition 13 and related fiscal structures distort local land-use incentives by rewarding commercial development over housing. “We have a situation where we reward a small strip mall more than we would housing,” Villaraigosa said.
Although he stressed that he opposed Proposition 13 when it passed in 1978, Villaraigosa argued for comprehensive tax reform rather than isolated changes. “The system is not working,” he acknowledged.
The former Los Angeles mayor also criticized Los Angeles’ Measure ULA transfer tax, commonly known as the “mansion tax,” arguing that it has harmed multifamily housing development. “A RAND and UCLA study showed that we’ve had an 84 percent drop in construction since the ULA,” Villaraigosa said.
Throughout the forum, candidates repeatedly returned to the tension between state housing mandates and local opposition. Klein questioned whether lawsuits against cities such as Huntington Beach had meaningfully increased housing production.
Becerra defended litigation as one necessary enforcement tool. “You have to use every tool you have, and certainly, litigation is one,” he said. “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.”
Mahan countered that litigation often drags on for years without producing actual homes. “I think the legal path is not particularly effective if we actually want to build housing,” he said, advocating instead for stronger state “builder’s remedy” enforcement that automatically strips local discretion when cities fail to comply with housing law.
The forum’s final section focused heavily on homelessness, prevention and interim housing.
Becerra criticized California’s homelessness spending record, arguing that the state failed to demand measurable outcomes. “We didn’t focus on outcomes,” he said. “The accountability wasn’t there.”
He proposed creating a “stabilizing fund” aimed at helping financially vulnerable Californians avoid eviction before they become homeless. “It will cost us far less to invest in someone’s maintaining their housing than trying to pull them off the street,” Becerra said.
Porter similarly emphasized direct cash assistance and eviction prevention. “The very most effective way to keep someone in their home or in their apartment is to give them direct cash assistance, period,” she said. “Everything else is complicated and expensive and slow.”
Steyer argued for expanding interim housing models that offer greater privacy and flexibility than traditional shelters. “No one gets well on the street,” he said. “Being homeless is an incredibly stressful, vulnerable and dangerous condition.”
Despite disagreements over labor standards, taxation, CEQA reform and enforcement mechanisms, the candidates broadly agreed that California’s housing shortage has become economically and politically unsustainable.
“We passed all these laws,” Villaraigosa said. “But now we need the leadership to actually implement them.”
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Hopefully the top two vote getting gubernatorial candidates are Republicans and California won’t have to deal with another Democrat governor.
That would be just as disastrous as the current federal administration has been. See what China thinks of us:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/business/china-trump-xi-decline.html
The cost of food has risen significantly in recent years.
And yet, no one claims there’s a shortage of food.
While permitting and Prop 13 have had a significant impact, the real impediment is the lack of a fiscal incentive for local governments to take on the burden of more housing. The solution is to bring back allocating the majority of the property tax increment from new development to local governments, at least for a long period, e.g., 30 years. The abolition of redevelopment agencies (which were being abused) removed this incentive as limited as it was.