The Rebuild Conversations

Affordability is the top issue in American politics, and almost everyone talking about it is describing two different problems at once. That is the argument David Dagan, who directs academic and editorial affairs at the Niskanen Center and edits its journal Hypertext, and Matthew Meyers, Niskanen’s Abundance Coordinator, make in their new playbook, Affordability, Fast and Slow. Fast affordability is the 2022 inflation spike, which the Fed can and did bring down. Slow affordability is the decades-long climb in housing, healthcare, and energy costs, and no interest-rate decision can touch it.

We recorded the day after Trump promised every adult a $5,000 check if Republicans win the midterms, which David called massively inflationary and about as clean an example as you could ask for of redistribution dressed up as an affordability policy. We also got into why the pundit class spent two years puzzling over the vibecession when the answer was sitting in people’s rent and insurance premiums, why the Fed is “a very poor model” for fixing slow affordability, and why giving people more money for something in short supply, whether it is Pokémon cards or housing, just raises the price.

They also told us which reforms they are most confident would actually lower prices: the housing supply agenda that just became law in ROAD to Housing, site-neutral Medicare payments that stop hospitals from buying up clinics to bill at hospital rates, and giving FERC siting authority over interregional transmission lines. If you have ever wondered how “the economy is fine” and “everything costs too much” can both be true, this episode is the explanation.

Fast Affordability, Slow Affordability

Tahra Hoops: Hi, everyone. My name is Tahra Hoops, and I am joined here with my co-host, Gary Winslett. And today we have two very special guests with us, both from the Niskanen Center. We have David Dagan, the Director of Academic and Editorial Affairs at the Niskanen Center, who writes on American politics, edits the Niskanen Center’s journal, Hypertext, and works with the center’s academic fellows to maximize the impact of their research.

We also have Matthew Meyers here with us. He is the Abundance Coordinator for the Niskanen Center, where he works across Niskanen’s policy teams on the emerging abundance agenda, state capacity, housing, climate, and healthcare. Thank you both for being here.

David Dagan: Thanks for having us.

Matthew Meyers: Thank you.

Tahra Hoops: So I wanted to first talk about a new, I guess if you could define it as a paper, a framework, just a great overall piece of resource that I think both policymakers, commentators, and all across the board will find useful. It focuses on affordability, but it gets narrower than that. You guys tend to draw a line between fast affordability, which is the 2022 inflation spike driven by the pandemic, supply chain shortages, and then slow affordability, which is a lot of what we also focus on here at The Rebuild, which is housing, healthcare, and energy eating a lot more of paychecks for decades.

I would love to hear from both of you how the two get fused in voter minds, why we need to untangle them, and how it will matter for policy as well.

Matthew Meyers: Yeah. So as you said, affordability is the number one voter concern right now, and pretty much every politician out there is making it a centerpiece of their campaign and their governing agenda. But really there are two problems. The first is sort of the headline issue of post-COVID, post-stimulus, post-Ukraine war inflation, where it rose up to 9% by mid-2022, raised the cost of living, raised the salience of the issue.

But the second one, which is what we call slow affordability and focus a lot of our policy solutions on, is that the most important parts of people’s budget have been growing at a pace faster than inflation for many, many years. And before 2022, you would hear about a housing crisis in big cities like San Francisco.

Healthcare was obviously a big part of the agenda. People would talk about energy, gas prices, but it wasn’t a comprehensive cost-of-living concept in people’s mind. It wasn’t until inflation rose the salience of all of this that I think the language we developed for it became one and the same. And now there are voters who are angry about the residual effects of that inflation and aren’t used to the higher prices, but there are also voters, sometimes the same voters, who are upset that housing is more expensive and they feel more precarious as a result than they expect.

Healthcare is suppressing wage growth, and their deductibles may be going up. The prices they have to pay at hospitals when their insurance isn’t covering it is going up. And then, more recently, since 2020, electricity costs have been going up. You could tell similar stories about childcare, other forms of energy, that we don’t go into as much detail in the report.

And it’s really important to separate these, because they’re different issues. If you try to think of housing and healthcare affordability problems as things that appeared out of nowhere in 2022, where you can wave a magic wand and make them go down as quickly as you can make inflation rates go down, you’re gonna jump to careless quick-fix solutions, like price controls or just giving people money to make up the difference, when really these are structural issues that have been building for many, many decades.

David Dagan: If I could just add, another reason the two need to be disaggregated is just to understand what people are thinking out there, right? So there’s been this big mystery among the pundit class about what people are even freaking out about. Inflation, the really bad inflation of COVID, is very much in the rearview mirror, although Trump is doing his best to bring inflation back.

And real wages have caught up. Real wages caught up a while ago. Growth has been okay. Stock market’s booming. So a lot of analysts look at all this and they’re like, “What are people freaking out about? And why is consumer sentiment so low?” And Annie Lowrey even had a piece in The Atlantic a while ago that said Americans refuse to be happy. But the whole thing makes a little more sense when you consider that COVID was a sort of final straw on the camel’s back for some of these long-running affordability problems, that really increased the salience of those problems and brought them top of mind for Americans in a way they hadn’t been before, and, as Matthew said, kind of alchemized them with inflation so that it all became one concept in people’s minds.

So we think there’s no great mystery about what Americans are unhappy about, because the strong-macroeconomy story is missing these underlying slow affordability problems.

Vibecession and the Sampling Problem

Tahra Hoops: Do you think that the whole vibecession debate, which was a term coined by Kyla Scanlon, that basically said the economy was chugging along fine, but the overall, as you mentioned, consumer sentiment, the vibes of it all, is why everyone was upset? So it wasn’t so much that we were invalidating consumer sentiment, but it also was saying, in a situation where you are constantly getting headlines and algorithms that are telling you one thing, it might seem like, okay, wait, maybe things around us are bad.

And also with the uprising of, we had the Republican Party getting more popular at this time, and they love to campaign on nostalgia, and it allows people to come to the conclusion in their heads, like, maybe things were better in the rearview mirror, and how we have it now, because of what I’m seeing in the headlines constantly, is just not what it should be.

Like, I do not have it better than my parents.

Matthew Meyers: Yeah. We think the vibecession is part of what’s going on, but as David was saying, there’s a disconnect between the numbers that we’re used to looking at and certain material realities. So people care more about the price of their housing or their healthcare than other prices.

So if high prices are being driven by high housing prices, consumer sentiment will be lower than if it’s driven by high consumable goods. We don’t think that’s the entire thing explaining the vibecession. I think a part of it is they’re having some issues getting a good sample, I was reading about recently. The media environment has changed.

Gary Winslett: So there’s a couple points that you raised that I think are great. One is on the sampling. So what’s really interesting is that most of our inflation data comes from urban environments, right? Like the basket of goods that the Bureau of Labor Statistics analyzes. They look at all these different goods in different urban areas.

And so we have this systematic undercounting of inflation in rural America. But rural America spends a bigger proportion of its income on gas and energy. And so when those go up like they did in 2022 after the war in Ukraine, that actually doesn’t feed through in the data as well, right?

Rural residents spend more, they drive more, right? They often have heating costs that are different. So where I live in Vermont, we still have a lot of basically heating-oil kind of heating systems. And so those drove our heat costs through the roof in a way that’s not captured in most BLS data.

So I think there actually is something to the sampling that you’re bringing up.

David Dagan: I would also say on the sentiment side, there appears to be a sampling problem. There was a good piece in G. Elliott Morris’s Substack, I believe, a while ago about this. The University of Michigan, which runs the major consumer confidence index, changed how they survey people. They switched from phone to online surveys, and it turns out that people systematically report lower sentiment when they’re on their computers, right?

We are grumpier about everything when we’re online. And it appears that the survey also was weighted more heavily towards Democrats, and we know that the out party always reports lower sentiment in this sort of polarized age. So I actually think people’s perceptions are not as bad. People’s grumpiness is actually maybe not as high as some of the numbers suggest, and at the same time, the reasons for them to be grumpy are more material than some of the analysis suggests, right?

So I don’t think the gap is that wide, and to the extent that there still is a gap, sure, you can explain it with media effects, polarization, all the standard reasons why Americans feel worse about life these days. But there’s a real material problem that people are registering in reality.

Is the Fed a Model for Slow Affordability?

Gary Winslett: For sure. And I wanted to bring it back to the fast and slow thing, ‘cause I really think that this is a helpful concept here. You had said that the Fed is this good institutional guardrail when it comes to fast inflation, right? If something causes inflation to go up, the Fed can very quickly raise interest rates to bring inflation back down.

That’s why we have an independent central bank. That’s literally what it’s for. But then that leads to the question of, well, okay, if we do have this institution that can play this great role in terms of fast affordability, what would one on slow affordability look like? What kind of institution could we create to actually be really effective on, wow, for two decades we have not built enough housing?

How do we not let that happen again? Healthcare keeps going up faster than the overall rate of inflation. How do we really rein that in? What do you think some broader solutions are here for institutions and slow affordability?

David Dagan: So maybe I can... Go ahead, Matthew.

Matthew Meyers: No, go ahead.

David Dagan: Okay. A couple thoughts. So I would say that the example of the Fed pulls in a couple directions. So one thing you could say about the Fed is, the great thing about the Fed is it removes interest rate decisions from democracy, right? It empowers technocrats.

That’s also arguably the bad thing about the Fed, right? It’s saying there are certain stuff that we’re just kind of cordoning off from electoral politics ‘cause it’s too dangerous to let the masses mess with that. But I would say that even the Fed, where we do have strong institutional guardrails, those guardrails, and we’re learning this about a lot of the guardrails in our democracy, still require some degree of consensus, right?

We sort of had an understanding that it’s better to do things this way, and there was a lot of buy-in across the board to that. And that buy-in is starting to shake a little bit with Trump’s attacks on the Fed. So I don’t want to overstate the power we have to cordon stuff off, right? And then I would say that the challenge is to develop a similar level of consensus around an understanding of the problems we face on slow affordability. The solution is not to cordon them off from democratic politics a la the Fed. The solution is for our democracy to function well, and for politicians to be responsive to the actual problems people have, and for us to engage in what the political scientist Peter Hall a long time ago called social learning.

Societies can make mistakes and learn from them. We made a lot of mistakes in the stagflation era, the last time people were worried about costs, and we’ve learned from them some. Some of the lessons may have to be relearned. And then just a final point is that I actually think on the slow affordability issues, in some ways what we need is less insulation.

In some ways, what we need is less cordoning off of areas from democratic politics. One reason why we face such high costs in housing or in healthcare is that we’ve allowed insider interests to capture those areas and prevent a majority from exercising its actual will in those, right? So in those ways, the Fed is actually a very poor model for what we need to do to solve some of these problems.

Matthew Meyers: Yeah, building off what David was saying, I would think of slow affordability as really a catch-all term for an industry-by-industry phenomenon where we want industries to be able to grow, for the supply to expand. And we wouldn’t want to entirely cordon off all regulatory decisions from democratic accountability.

But what we can do is design democratic institutions to make sure that the people who would benefit from a regulatory decision and the people who would be hurt by a regulatory decision are all included in the process. So in both housing and energy, a lot of decisions happen at the local level. But when San Francisco restricts its housing supply, the entire country is hurt, because GDP growth is down.

People who would be able to get a good job in San Francisco can’t move there because the housing is too expensive. So what someone like our senior fellow David Schleicher would argue is that an institutional design choice you can make is to put power in the hands of the California governor, ‘cause that way at least the whole state would have input on the housing decisions.

One thing that we argue for in this paper, which is arguably the highest-impact thing you could do in energy, is to give FERC siting power over interregional transmission lines. That is not taking power away from democracy. It’s making sure that the institutions reflect the interests of the whole country, which would benefit from a better interregional transmission network, because it’s not just Missouri, who’s currently blocking a big interregional line, that is benefited or hurt by it.

It is the entire country that is hurt when one state decides to veto.

Gary Winslett: Yep. So this happens all the time in New England, where we want to get electricity from somewhere else in the country, and we end up getting blocked effectively by the state of New York, because you can’t get to New England except going through New York. And so, yes, I’ve seen this play out on a number of occasions, where, yes, it’s state by state, and states have rights, and we get it, but we’re all interconnected.

Local Control and Who Shows Up

Tahra Hoops: It also shows up quite a bit in housing, the housing sector and housing politics as a whole. State preemption is not that popular, especially as you get to the local level. A lot of communities feel like you are taking their decision-making away from them. They feel like it’s undemocratic.

And then you look to papers Ed Glaeser has written, a number of them, and he finds that the people who do have the time to participate in these community meetings are typically more privileged homeowners who are either retired or simply have the time requirement that allows them to attend these meetings, that many working-class people do not also have the time to attend.

I remember there was a large housing community event being held in New York City, and these people were waiting out the door for hours in order to be able to speak to their elected leaders and say, “We need to be able to build more.” And a lot of the sentiments that stuck out to me were basically single fathers who were saying, “Hey, I am here having to pay for daycare that I usually do not and cannot afford to, but this issue matters so much for me, and that is why I am taking time out of my day to do so.”

But that’s not a common occurrence that we could just rely on. But it’s something that has to happen, because local communities do not want to follow the guidelines that the states have already put into place. We already went through the democratic process of getting this passed, but you still have these, what can be considered special interest actors, who want to protect what they solely have, not the wider community.

So it is interesting to see that in small locals, in small housing things across the board, with the energy and FERC siting that you mentioned as well.

Affordability vs. Access

Tahra Hoops: And then just to shift gears a bit, you guys also bring up a very acute point here, discussing affordability versus access.

You’re careful to say that, obviously, cash transfers and the child tax credit are good policy. I always loved reading that from the Niskanen Center, because back when I worked there, the expanded child tax credit is what I spent a lot of my time on. And it was such a joyful policy to work on, because we got to see in real time how much it benefits people.

They’re good policy, but not affordability policy. So we could start with you, David, and then Matthew, I’d love to hear your answer on where you have seen those two get conflated in a way that kind of led to the wrong tool.

David Dagan: Yeah. So there are a couple of examples of politicians conflating redistribution with affordability policy. Just to clarify why redistribution is not necessarily an affordability policy, and this is also important to our distinction between fast and slow affordability: when the cause of high prices is that you don’t have enough supply, giving people more money to buy the thing is not gonna lower the price, right? In fact, it may raise the price even further, because what you’ve done is now increased demand for something of which there are not enough, right?

So my kids collect Pokémon cards, and if there’s a finite supply of Pokémon cards and I double their allowance and every parent does that, the price of Pokémon cards is just gonna go up. It turns out there are actually infinite Pokémon cards and the price never goes down, but that’s a question for another day.

So that’s why this matters, right? And there are a number of prominent instances, I would say, of politicians conflating redistribution or cash transfers with an affordability policy that would actually address the underlying problem. So the most obvious, we’re recording this here on September 10th.

Last night, Donald Trump promised that if the Republicans win the midterms, every American adult gets a $5,000 check. That might be nice, but it’s not an affordability policy, and it’s actually inflationary, right? Massively inflationary. So it will actually have the effect of raising prices.

Gary Winslett: The other thing I would just wanna add here is that redistribution is often very helpful for the people at the bottom. People sometimes need Section 8 housing vouchers, and we wanna do that, and we wanna help them. But redistribution is not usually aimed at the middle class, and middle-class people have affordability challenges too.

If you’re middle class, what you need is a house that you can afford to buy. And Section 8 housing vouchers, as good as they are for the people who need them, as much as we wanna support them, don’t really help you if you’re in that middle-class bracket. And so then middle-class people feel very frustrated, ‘cause they’re like, “Well, I pay all these taxes into the system, and I’m glad that it goes to help people who really need it, but I’m still stuck here.

It’s not like I feel like I’m living on Easy Street. And so who’s gonna do something for me?” And so that’s why you gotta do the supply thing, because that actually creates... And it’s not just housing, it’s everything. But if you create enough supply, that brings the price down, and then middle-class people who are operating in the market have something in the market that fits their income level.

David Dagan: I would just say there are also proposals out there that target that middle-class frustration, but in an unhelpful way. So Florida in November will have on the ballot a measure that would effectively lower property taxes by raising the amount of your home value that is exempt from assessment for purposes of property taxation. That doesn’t lower prices, right? It may lower your taxes a little bit, but the experience of California, where this was done back in 1978, teaches us that what it actually does is the property tax reduction gets priced into the sale price of the home. So it actually increases the upfront cost of home buying.

So you might get a nice property tax cut, but your kids are gonna have a harder time affording a down payment or getting a mortgage, because the sticker price of homes just went up. So that’s an example where you’re trying to help the middle class out, but you’re engaging in redistribution that’s actually gonna backfire.

Matthew Meyers: Yeah, I totally agree with both of you. I think affordability as a political rallying cry is obviously something that affects poor and working-class people. But I think what has made it so potent in some ways is that it has brought economic concerns more to the forefront among people higher up in the income ladder, who are not often thought of as the ones who benefit from redistribution.

So it sort of changed the political calculus and focused attention on middle-class economic concerns. And like you said, we don’t have the fiscal space to massively redistribute to the middle class, and it would have all of these other negative consequences.

If we gave everyone $5,000, it would be massively inflationary. It would be a larger stimulus spend than the entire COVID stimulus was. Instead, making it a market that is affordable under regular conditions, I think, is more in line with what people want from the economy anyway, and is something that’s actually achievable.

And then under any conditions, people at the bottom of the distribution will need help, and that’s why we called it access rather than affordability, ‘cause it’s making sure that everyone is able to participate in the affordable market.

David Dagan: And just on the point of fiscal space, we are running pretty tight on fiscal space. I’m open to more taxation on the high end, right? There’s a lot of wealth being created in this economy right now. So this is not necessarily an anti-tax agenda, right? But use the taxes in a way that’s smart.

Gary Winslett: And the higher taxes aren’t sufficient. One of the real problems that I’ve seen a lot in affordability is there’s this weird mental habit some people, particularly on the far left, tend to have, that if you just punched Jeff Bezos hard enough, that’ll shoot all this money out, and then you just spend money on everything, and that’s all we need to do.

That’s just not how it works. You actually do need to increase supply. These are the things that will actually, long-term, make things more affordable. It’s not just, find a rich person, punch him, and that’s that.

Tax Slopulism and an Honest Message

Tahra Hoops: There has been quite a bit of tax slopulism happening lately, and this is when policymaking obviously gets misconstrued and conflated into political messaging, obviously, because we are in an election year. And I notice even normie Democrats coming out with a lot of tax slopulism headlines, new tax on the most niche things you could ever think of, because they are trying to do what seems like affordability policies in a way that is palatable to the average audience member.

But it’s not going to help us in the long run, given how much this current administration has really hurt the purse strings for both sides. So I’m curious, what’s an honest message a politician can give voters who want results before the next election, without just giving them sweet nothings?

Matthew Meyers: Yeah. It’s tough, because in the hands of a less skilled political communicator, saying, “We’re gonna do all this niche supply stuff and you’ll love it in 10 years,” is like an eat-your-vegetables message. But I think we need to reframe how people understand a lot of these things, and politicians, especially national ones, senators, they have a really big megaphone to change this.

So one of the problems with the tax race to the bottom is taxation has almost become reframed as an issue of virtue. You don’t deserve to have to pay taxes on, or the property taxes on, your home because you already paid it off. Why do you have to still pay taxes on it? You worked hard for the tipped income.

Why should you pay taxes on that either? Instead of understanding that taxation as a whole is how we pay for government services, and we have a fair system so that the people who can afford to pay the most pay the most, and we help out the people who need it. A similar reframing, I think, needs to happen with cost of living.

People don’t really realize that it’s not just a five-year story of COVID happening, us making a lot of mistakes policy-wise, both parties messing up maybe, and now we’ve got to undo it and bring things back to 2021. We have to tell them that this is decades in the making, because the bad zoning policies, healthcare consolidation, the failure to upgrade the grid, other dynamics like Baumol’s cost disease, which we talk about in the paper, are finally catching up to us, and it’s gonna take us a long time to unwind those, and hopefully build patience.

And in the meantime, you can get people excited by doing a lot of pro-supply things. The nice thing about these pro-supply policy measures is there’s no one silver bullet. It’s not like you do one thing and then wait five years and it’s solved. You really have to chip away, which for a politician means a lot of chances to be out there doing something good towards this long-term project, especially if you do the political groundwork of telling people that this is a long-term project that they’ll see dividends from in a couple years, but not right away.

That said, we’re not communications consultants for campaigns, and we think it’s the responsibility of the political system to meet voters’ goals in the ways that actually help them. And we hope other people take this agenda and keep iterating on this policy playbook and finding ways to make it work politically.

Most Confident: Housing and Site-Neutral Payments

Gary Winslett: This is a question that I wanted to make sure we got to. What’s the part of this agenda that you are most confident about? That you’re sure that if we get this right, it’s really gonna actually bring down prices?

Matthew Meyers: I mean, the housing section as a whole. The evidence is just so strong, and the politics of it are also starting to work in favor of the pro-supply side. We just passed ROAD to Housing, the big federal package with a bunch of good ideas for increasing the supply of housing. And many states, I don’t have the exact number, but I believe more than half, passed some sort of pro-supply measure in the past year.

People are changing how they understand this. And then one other thing that I’ll add, just from a different policy area: site-neutral payments for Medicare. What this is, is Medicare currently pays hospitals higher rates for the same service than if it were performed outside of a hospital.

And this does a couple things bad for affordability. One is you pay hospitals the higher rates, and that itself is a cost. But perhaps the more pernicious thing is that it incentivizes hospitals to buy other types of facilities that are delivering medical care, and then bring them under the hospital umbrella so that they start to receive the higher Medicare rate that hospitals do.

And this also drives consolidation in the healthcare market, giving providers more power. So it’s really a vicious cycle. I think the hospitals have a lot of power and are opposed to it, but if we got that one passed, I think it would do a lot of good, and in the very short term, for healthcare.

So I cheated by giving two answers, but those two I’m very confident about.

The Energy Home Run and Who Pays the Piper

Gary Winslett: Okay. And this is for either of you: is there another policy in this sort of playbook that you think is, I don’t wanna say less controversial, but you think is more of an ambitious reach, right? Something that maybe doesn’t have the same sort of academic evidence backing that housing does, but you think could actually be a real game changer on lowering cost?

David Dagan: I guess I’ll take a stab at that. I think that the report focuses on three policy areas: housing, healthcare, and energy. And I think there are some real home runs within reach in energy. We’ve already talked about giving the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission siting authority.

Gary Winslett: That was actually the one I had in mind, ‘cause I don’t know if a study proves it would help, but it just seems like such a reasonable thing to me, and I really think it could do a lot to unlock supply.

David Dagan: A very reasonable thing, very reasonable. It’s within reach, and I would urge people to go to our website and read our analysts Rachel Levine’s and Liza Reed’s many commentaries explaining the virtues of that. I would say, though, that I was gonna go in a different direction.

I think that one’s a home run, and maybe I can’t prove to you empirically that that’s gonna work. But I think the intuition, the logic behind that, is pretty fricking sound. I think the challenge with energy is that we’re gonna have to spend a bunch of money.

We’re gonna have to build a bunch of infrastructure, and it’s gonna be very expensive. And someone’s gonna pay the piper. At the end of the day, you’re either gonna pay it out of your ratepayer pocket on your utility bill or out of your taxpayer pocket. And which one we use is sort of a complicated debate with many moving parts, and it affects who pays more and who pays less.

So we should have those debates. We should figure out how to do this as fairly as possible, but it’s not gonna be cheap. And it’s just a hard sell to tell people, “Hey, to make things cheaper, we’re gonna have you spend a bunch of money.” Right? I think there’s an intuition there that you can explain to people.

People understand that when you pay to put solar panels on your roof, that’s an upfront cost that pays for itself over 20 years, right? So there are analogies that are available, but we have to come up with the money.

Tahra Hoops: I think that’s a good example to use, because, like we said, I don’t think it’s something that you could be least confident in, but it is the most advantageous, and might be a little bit more difficult to sell to the public to get there over the long run. But I do think we are in a unique moment in time where energy costs have now hit mainstream conversation, so it is becoming a bit more palatable for people to be a bit more open to hearing about it.

So I am at least hopeful that there are reforms that could happen in the near future, because I do believe this is something we should have done five years ago, and now needs to be a problem that we resolve quite quickly. But I also just wanted to end it here. You guys did such a great job. I think this agenda is so useful to the conversation happening right now, because it feels like many well-intentioned people are almost talking past each other on a very large problem that needs collective effort.

So by the time this episode releases, it will be out. I encourage everyone to go read through it and the accompanying Niskanen work that you guys cite to across the agenda. And thank you again both for being here.

David Dagan: Thanks.

Matthew Meyers: Thank you both for having us.

This week we sat down with Bale Dalton, the Democratic nominee in Florida’s 7th, a Navy helicopter pilot who went on to run a 16,000-person workforce as NASA’s chief of staff. We recorded a couple of days after Republican primary voters fired Cory Mills, and Bale’s theory of the general election against Ryan Elijah is simple: nobody in this district cares about labels. They care that 45,000 families here just lost their health insurance entirely when Congress let the ACA subsidies expire, and that FPL just won a $7 billion rate hike.

From Navy Helicopters to NASA Chief of Staff

Tahra Hoops: Hi, everyone. My name is Tahra Hoops. I’m here with my co-host, Gary Winslett, and today we have Bale Dalton here with us. Bale Dalton just won his primary in Florida’s 7th Congressional District. Congrats. He has served in the US Navy and Navy Reserve for 24 years, 13 years on active duty with deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, and the Pacific.

As a Navy helicopter pilot, Bale flew medical evac missions in Kuwait, delivered relief after Hurricane Katrina, supported special ops in Iraq and Africa, and directed combat air support in Afghanistan. After active duty, he worked at the State Department and for Senator Bill Nelson in Congress, and as NASA’s chief of staff, he managed over 16,000 employees and helped run one of the federal government’s most effective agencies.

Bale, thanks for being here.

Bale Dalton: Tahra, Gary, great to be here. Thanks for giving me the time. Looking forward to chatting with you.

Tahra Hoops: So obviously with all those incredible experiences that you’ve had, not many people have lived a life like that. What do you think they helped teach you about getting into Congress to help build things faster and cheaper?

Bale Dalton: Well, yeah, I certainly have been blessed to have some amazing adventures and some incredible mentors and examples of public service along the way. In my Navy service, I was actually also the commanding officer of the Navy’s special operations support helicopter squadron.

So in that role, I was taking care of over 400 sailors, making sure that we were trained and ready and prepared for deploying to austere conditions where we were operating in combat. But also taking care of their families, right? Making sure that folks are prepared for the worst, and even in the normal course of action, are they being well taken care of while, sometimes, the single breadwinner is away?

So not just do we have everything ready in case something bad happens, but also, are folks gonna be confident that, A, their sailor’s being taken care of even though they know they’re in a dangerous situation, but B, is the family being taken care of, right? Because that’s so important for folks to be able to do their job, is to have that confidence.

And then when I was working for Senator Nelson, you know, Senator Nelson is a Democrat, but continues to have just wide support throughout all of Florida because he’s very well known for his constituent services. And we were all, I mean, that was drummed into us as staffers. I was on the legislative staff, so I was in DC working on policy for national defense and foreign policy and veteran services, ‘cause Senator Nelson sat on the Armed Services Committee.

And so when I was doing constituent services, it was usually the hardest cases that our district directors couldn’t tackle, or were having, you know, bureaucratic red tape. And so it was really an honor for me to work on behalf of folks like me, right? Florida veterans, making sure that they were getting the benefits that they earned and the care that they needed.

So really, again, a good example there of public service. He used to always tell us, public service is a public trust. And so that’s been ingrained in me for my life. And then we took that forward into NASA. You know, NASA is an incredibly cool agency, right? I mean, we’re doing like amazing things.

But brass tacks-wise, what I think some folks just don’t really know about, I mean, there’s 14 centers across this country, right? So we’re having folks from all different walks of life that live in all different areas of the country, who, you know, on a list of 10 things, eight of them may be different, and getting them all working together on these missions.

But the second part of that is so cool too, because we have folks that are doing so many different things, right? Researchers, scientists, engineers, astronauts, of course. So all the way from folks who are trying to manage programs and be good stewards of tax dollars, having good arguments with scientists who are like, “Look, if money were no option, I could do this, this, and this.”

So it was just really interesting on getting coalitions together, having teams work together to accomplish the mission. So I think in each of those kind of different buckets, I really was able to put together a life experience that is parlayable into being a good representative for folks from Central Florida in those cases.

And sometimes, like, we go too long to talk about all these adventures, but I also was in the private industry for a year, helping a small business, running programs and a profit and loss sheet during COVID. So that was a lot of those things meshing together as well, ‘cause we had overseas employees that I needed to take care of and ensure they were safe in quarantine and on the job, as well as trying to get a very small margin company to be able to weather that COVID storm.

Everything Between Orlando and Daytona

Gary Winslett: So it’s really interesting with your military service, because your district doesn’t contain a big military base, like if it was next to Fort Campbell or Fort Benning or something like that. But Central Florida has a lot of retirees, and a lot of retirees have military experience, and they remember serving. And so I’m just curious how your conversations around your experience have gone when you talk to veterans in your district.

Bale Dalton: Well, Gary, we were talking about University of Florida previously, and so obviously this district is south of Alachua and Gadsden Counties. So for folks that don’t know, we’re sort of the whole area of land in between Orlando and Daytona Beach. It doesn’t include Orlando or Daytona Beach, but basically everything in between.

And what that means is we have an incredibly diverse district in terms of what people do, you know, for their livelihood and to get food on the table. We’ve got health services. A lot of aerospace is still paramount to Central Florida. We do have a lot of military retirees as well as just retirees in general.

And so when you go from west to east, it’s really cool to talk about all of the different things in this district. And yeah, folks in the southern part of Seminole and Volusia, they’re generally traveling to places like University of Central Florida and the research park there, which has really important relationships with our DOD, our Department of Defense, and NASA.

In fact, I’m very good friends with one of the top administrators at Kennedy Space Center. They live in the district and then commute down to KSC. And then we’ve got a lot of folks, too, that commute north. And so we’re sort of situated military-wise in between Naval Air Station Jacksonville in the northern part, and then Kennedy Space Center and Patrick Space Force Station on the south along the coast.

So we’re sort of like the area where everybody lives, and then they just travel outside the voting district for their place of work. But it’s just really a cool district. And of course, I’d be remiss not to mention that in sort of the middle, right, so we’ve got the I-4 corridor on the west, which is, you know, healthcare industry, aerospace industry, financial services, and then the East Coast, which we just talked about, a lot of tourism, a lot of retirees. But right in the middle we’ve got some old Florida ag there, citrus groves, celery fields. So we’ve got kind of a microcosm of the whole nation right here in District 7.

Gary Winslett: So for viewers, I went to University of Florida, so I lived there for years, and one of the things that I actually love about Florida is how internally diverse it is. You can go 20 minutes and go from Gainesville to Palatka, and another 20 minutes over to the coast on the east, and you’re in three totally different worlds in terms of socioeconomic status and experience.

And I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean it in a really positive way. You can actually see these cross-sections of America in really fascinating, fun ways.

Bale Dalton: Yeah, it’s awesome. You know, not to anchor here for too long, but as you know from your experience, we’ve got Wekiwa Springs and Blue Spring, talking about amazing Florida-only natural resources in the western part of this district where people will go swim with manatees, to sort of high ground where the orange groves are, and you’ve got that old sage, to the Atlantic Coast, where you can watch space launches over the coast as well as swim with dolphins.

So, I mean, it’s pretty amazing.

Property Insurance on Borrowed Time

Gary Winslett: I did wanna ask you one question about something that is, I don’t wanna say Florida’s the only place that has this challenge, but it is a very Florida-centric challenge, which is property insurance. It’s one of the most Florida issues there is. There’s been a lot of non-renewals across the state.

You’ve backed federal oversight and a reinsurance backstop, and this is something that I think is gonna be important to a lot of places as we continue to deal with climate change. So could you just walk us through how this backstop lowers premiums and helps people with the cost of living?

Bale Dalton: Yeah, you know, managing insurance as a job or as a program is very unsexy, right? So it’s really hard for some people to try to tackle what economic items can be in place, what incentives can be in place, both for the insured party and for the insurance companies.

And Florida and Tallahassee and our state leadership has tried to solve this in a number of different ways over the last couple of decades. We actually used to have a statewide elected insurance commissioner, something that we don’t have anymore, but has been debated in Tallahassee about bringing back.

So the only good news here is that we know it’s a problem. The bad news is, nobody’s really figured out how to solve it yet. And one of the main issues, as you mentioned, is this reinsurance, which is insuring, you know, basically giving insurance to insurance companies for, in a worst case scenario, like a Hurricane Katrina was to Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama.

You know, we just recognized the anniversary of Hurricane Charley, which came through Central Florida about 15, 16 years ago and really was devastating. In fact, you can kind of track today’s insurance problems, they’re sort of back to Charley, because that was sort of the beginning of the end of some of the smaller insurance companies.

So talking about where government can make some good inroads on this reinsurance issue, so that the insurance companies are not passing all the costs down to the insuree, that’s something that we need to tackle. And with the increasing nature of devastating storms throughout our country, that’s something that we probably need to be tackling at the federal level as well.

I think there are times where we’ve done, you know, depending on the leadership, we’ve done well in being resilient and responding to emergencies. But what we’ve really gotta do better is preparing for and preventing against this economic devastation that happens, from the national level in terms of rebuilding infrastructure, all the way down to our families, who are like, “Hey, I pay a premium every month. What do you mean that is not covering me in this emergency,” right?

You know, folks are surprised by the copays that come out or what insurance can cover. So it’s a distinct and nuanced conversation with how do you give the insurance provider the incentive and tools that they need to provide insurance to those of us who need it, which is all of us here in Florida, at a price that’s reasonable, but also can take care of us in an emergency.

And what worries me the most is that we’re just, we’re on borrowed time right here. That’s a problem that needed a solution yesterday, ‘cause I’m worried that there are just so many Floridians out there who are going without insurance right now because of costs and risking financial ruin, not just for themselves, but for our state and for our federal budget as well when the storm does come, ‘cause it will.

What Won the Primary

Tahra Hoops: I wanna say that I definitely appreciate, one, how much you care for what your possible constituents would be, and how much you know about them. As we know, the primary just happened. We touched on the cost of living a little bit in this question. I want to zoom out quite a bit, because obviously we are in the thick of primary season, and people have been doing a lot of political analysis, like why one person won their primary versus why someone didn’t, X, Y, and Z.

I would love to know, what part of your campaign do you think spoke to voters the most that allowed you to get across the finish line?

Bale Dalton: Yeah. Well, you know, as a lifelong Floridian, I have been disappointed more times, I think, than I have been excited about what’s happening. But I am super excited, because I think, you know, Florida gonna Florida. Like, if anybody wants to write an article about what has happened in Florida on the primary or the last couple of cycles of elections, I mean, good luck. I hope you got 5,000 or 10,000 words, right?

But what we saw... So, as you might imagine, this is my home. I was born and raised here, and I’ve just been really laser focused on Seminole and Volusia County. And what I can hear from those folks who would be my constituents, should I be so lucky to win and have them vote for me, what I’m hearing is that absolutely the cost of living is top of mind.

But they don’t want, you know, a ten-dollar word out there. They want folks to understand the actual issues that they’re facing, right? So we know some of these things are nationwide, like our grocery prices, and we could have a very long conversation about why food is so expensive, because it’s a lot of different factors that have gone into that.

You know, putting gas in their car. We’ve already talked about property insurance pretty in-depth. But health insurance, I mean, the ACA subsidies being allowed to expire by this Mike Johnson-led Congress, that is devastating. I am flummoxed, as you can see, that we are not hearing more about that from Washington, because I will tell you right now, the folks that are paying these higher bills, they wanna know, like, “Why is no one talking about it?”

This is a crisis of Congress’s own making, and we’ve seen now in this district alone, over 45,000 families are now without health insurance at all. Over 150,000 families in this district alone have seen their premiums go up two to four times. So I think what’s happened is that folks are, I mean, as they should be, as am I, just mad as hell at being told what they need to think about and these divisive issues, and being told they gotta hate their neighbor.

You know who they hate right now? The people in Washington, D.C. who are supposed to be solving these problems that they are faced with every single day. And so I think what you’ve seen throughout whatever race you wanna analyze, you’ve seen folks that are like, “This person was not getting the job done. I’m interested in hearing from somebody who wants to get the job done.”

And I think that’s what’s been able to give our campaign and myself as an individual these inroads to talk to folks, Republicans, Democrats, Independents. People do not care what a label is. They wanna know, “Is this guy one of us, and is he gonna go try to solve these problems that we have?”

All of the Above, and Bury the Power Lines

Gary Winslett: I think that’s exactly right. One of the things that I wanted to ask you about in terms of solving these problems is, it’s August. Florida’s hot most of the year anyway, and it’s extra hot in August. This is when we crank the AC. And that’s also when your electricity bill will often be higher, right? Because you gotta stay safe and semi-comfortable.

I wanted to ask you about energy and electricity rates, because I know Florida Power & Light just went through this bruising rate case. And so I just was curious what your thoughts are on, what’s the federal role in getting more cheap green energy generation onto the grid faster? Is it permitting, interconnection queues, transmission? What are your thoughts on this?

Bale Dalton: I think the problem here with our energy is at least threefold. So, the three kind of things that I will talk about here. First of all, I don’t know when it became this politicized issue for the United States of America to have energy independence and to be a leader in research and development of new technologies to solve our energy problem going forward, right?

We know it’s going to be a problem going forward for a number of different reasons. And so, just to stick with generation of power for the moment, what is going on right now that we would just cede an entire part of emerging technologies in solar or wind or geothermal or any of these things that we need a lot more investment in to figure out, are these gonna be good solutions, and how can we make them more efficient, you know, better the efficacy of these things?

And so to completely ignore them, or to take away incentives and subsidies for folks in research and development to do these things, I just think is ludicrous. And so, like I said, I don’t know when that became a political football, but I’m an all of the above approach to energy, ‘cause it’s a huge problem now, and it’s only gonna get worse in the future.

You know, the second thing, you mentioned the rate increases. Here in Florida, we have got, you know, an appointed board in Tallahassee to provide oversight to our energy companies. And I, like, I need to double check, but there’s not a one of them that is actually an expert in energy production.

There’s not a one of them that has talked about how to be good stewards and how to transfer ownership and oversight between the public utility companies and the private companies. And unfortunately, what we’ve seen is, this is such a huge issue here in Florida, and we’ve seen a huge influx of political money into Tallahassee State House races and State Senate races.

And that creates, you know, we’ve been well briefed on that, right? That creates a problem when folks feel like they’re beholden to a private company in order to get elected, and that can change the way they try to actually tackle the problem.

And then the last thing I’ll say is sort of, you know, bracketing. We had creation of energy, but also the transmittal of energy, right? We know that our grid here in Florida in particular, and other places in the United States, is just working off of decades-old infrastructure. And we’ve gotta do better.

I wanna tell you two quick stories. The first on generation, right? When I go to a house in Florida that’s got solar panels, we know now that energy production has for some reason become politicized, right? So you might expect this person with solar panels to be of one particular party or not. In Florida, that is no indicator whatsoever.

This is somebody who is frugal, who understands that money savings here can be provided somewhere else. And of course, we have such great power of the sun. And even though the sun’s not always out, there are these things called batteries, which store the power and basically can take care of you during a storm.

So folks in Florida, they know what energy production is all about. And then the second thing that I’ll talk about as a story is, look, if we’re gonna have these storms, which we have, you know, high wind, high rain storms, why is so much of our infrastructure still above ground? I mean, we could talk about it as an eyesore, but this is just basically energy resilience, to have our power lines buried, especially when they’re going to our transformers and our power substations, ‘cause that’s gonna help us weather these storms.

But, you know, it’s also kinda nicer to look at in a beautiful state like we have.

Cheaper Beats Ideology

Tahra Hoops: I’m glad you brought up the cost component of this, because to me, when I look at the climate conversation, obviously a couple years back, the Biden administration really made climate the number one issue for their admin, and I think kind of read the tea leaves a bit wrong. People, if you look at the cross-polling, are not too worried about the future of our climate, which, like, I hate it.

I’m not proud of it, not happy to see it, but it just is where we are right now. But when you look at the advancement and the scale of clean technologies, one, not only does it help us achieve a future where we could possibly have a green economy better for the climate, it’s cheaper. And it is just a win-win that I see us leave on the table sometimes, where if we just talk about the cost aspect first and foremost, people don’t care about the ideology of where they get their electricity from.

Like, no one is that online. They’re looking at their rate hikes happening every month, and they’re just looking to see how they can make it cheaper.

Bale Dalton: Yeah, this is exactly right. I think this is a perfect example of where sort of the punditry, or even our elected officials who are just so keyed in to keeping us divided, harp on these things where folks are either not interested in the argument or just fully ensconced in one side or the other.

But yeah, people want their energy bills to go down, because that is part and parcel to how they are taking care of their families. And so if we talk about it in the way that, you know, again, if we’re gonna have these geopolitical shocks, like for instance somebody embarking on a war of choice in an oil-rich part of the world, that is a huge issue to our supply chain. Well, we could be more resilient to that as an economy if we had more of our energy coming from either other parts of the world or from other sources.

So I think you’re exactly right, Tahra. This is an economic conversation for the taxpayer. We are being better stewards of taxpayer dollars when we are working hard to ensure that the real dollar effect for our families is increasing rather than decreasing.

And the other thing that I think folks have a little bit glommed onto, I think the absolute highest percentage argument is, how am I providing for my family, right? How am I keeping my costs down? The other thing too is, we are getting the floor wiped with us as a nation by other nations out there, who partially mean us harm, but certainly mean to be more powerful than us throughout the world, in terms of research and development of emerging technologies.

So I think that’s a huge issue too. And I think back to one story when I was working on Senator Nelson’s staff, where we were really trying to tackle this issue so that folks could understand this isn’t just one talking head against another. When we started talking about how much money it costs to rebuild our beaches, how much money it costs to make sure our naval air stations here in this state alone are resilient against the weather, how much it costs to rebuild after a storm, or to rebuild sea walls, or to raise buildings.

That’s all stuff, those costs can go out the window if we are more focused on making sure that we are doing things that are not going to increase the ferocity of some of these nature events that we see.

After Cory Mills: Defining Ryan Elijah

Gary Winslett: One other thing I wanted to ask you about is, a couple days ago in the primary, Republican primary voters understandably told Cory Mills to take a hike. For those of you who don’t know, he’s scandal-plagued, not a great dude. Totally understandable that they made that choice.

But that means you’re running against Ryan Elijah, who, you know, is not scandal-plagued in the same way, right? And so my question is, what is your theory for persuadable voters in the Florida 7th? What do you think is the message that’s gonna actually persuade them to vote for you instead of Ryan Elijah?

Bale Dalton: Well, I agree with you, Gary. I think there’s two pieces of great news here. One is that Floridians, especially in Central Florida, came together and said, “We are not gonna take it anymore. This corruption and grift that we are seeing, you know, the poster child for, here in District 7, he’s out. We’re getting him out.”

So that’s exciting to me, because sometimes you need a piece of good news, and Floridians are just not gonna take it anymore. Now, there is a long way to go, as we well know. But I also say sometimes, like I used to say to my pilots when we were about to land in somebody’s backyard to pick up a terrorist, “Control what you can control.”

So the Florida voters in the primary, they controlled what they can control. They’ve got another choice here in the general, because the good thing now is we don’t have to be distracted about one man’s terrible life decisions, in basically every bucket of life decisions. Now we can focus on the things every single day that are affecting our Floridians, my friends, family, and neighbors here.

And I tell you, I think the more people get to know this fellow Ryan Elijah, the more worried that they are going to be that he is what he’s already told us he is, which is just another rubber stamp there in Congress that is not really interested in tackling these hard things that we’ve just discussed.

But I think he’s just gonna be another one of these people that, you know, he wants to be famous. He wants to wear the pin. You know these folks that are just addicted to power. You can see it in his conversations as he brags about being recruited by other shady members of the Florida delegation who are well known to be in the pockets of DC lobbyists.

And he’s told us where he stands on the policy issues as well. I mean, he said that the economy is in a good spot right now. I haven’t heard that one time in Central Florida. He said that the tariffs are working. I don’t know if he’s spoken to any small business owner within the district, but they don’t say that.

And finally, he said that, basically, he’s supportive of our actions in the war in Iran, which I think pretty much every American has got one problem or another with. First, why is there no long-term solution? Second, why does it seem like the only way out is to be worse than the status quo was before we got into it?

And last, what is going on with our political leadership, who seems to be hanging our servicemen and women out to dry on these extended deployments, not getting the supply ships to where they need to be, lying to us about where the casualties are, how they’ve happened, and what these counterattacks on our bases and the land and the nations of our allies are?

I mean, this is a huge issue. And I was just on the doors two days ago talking to a grandmother whose grandson enlisted a couple years ago. He’s finished with boot camp. He’s about to go on his own deployment. And she said, “Look, I’m always gonna be worried about him, right? He’s doing a dangerous job in harm’s way no matter what. But now I’m even more worried, ‘cause it seems like nobody even cares about him when he’s out there.”

These Americans, these human people that have put their lives on the line, are just being used as pawns in a game that seems to have no win, because we’ve not heard what the long-term plan is.

And these are all things that Ryan Elijah is supportive of. So, look, Florida does their primaries late. I mean, there’s like 70-some days until the general. But we are gonna be defining, you know, the two of us. Floridians have heard about me, and they’ve seen me defined through some of my life experiences and what I think is important, through having listened to them.

I think when they learn more about the Republican nominee, they are not gonna be interested in another rubber stamp, you know. Doesn’t matter whose name is on a rubber stamp, people are tired of the rubber stamp.

Tied to a Sinking Ship

Gary Winslett: Yeah. Well, and you can’t ever overstate when something’s being so badly mismanaged. What’s so shocking to me about the way the war has been done is, the most obvious counter response by the Iranians, obvious to everybody, was going to be to do everything they could to block the Strait of Hormuz, shut that down.

That was obvious to everybody. And the Trump administration had no clear plan as to what to do once this obvious countermove happened. It was just mind-boggling that that was not top of mind for them.

Bale Dalton: Yeah, I think this is what happens when you have someone who is just so against having anybody disagree at any point in time. I mean, we know what happened very early on in this administration at the National Security Council, like, you know, sort of embraced in this DOGE effort.

Look, if we wanna talk about government overreach and bloat in the government, I’m here for it. But firing all of your Middle Eastern advisors and experts before you go into another Middle East conflict, that just doesn’t make sense to me.

And I think what we’re seeing here in Florida, on the doors and in the phone calls and in the meetings, is, look, this district voted for Trump by a majority all three times, right? And I know, ‘cause I’ve heard from them, right? What were they voting for? They’ve been voting for a government that’d be working more efficiently, an economy that would be getting better, and a leader who said that he was gonna be focused on our struggles here at home.

Not one of those three things is happening. And whether folks feel like the president is getting bad advice from the folks around him, they are just not interested anymore in somebody who is just going to go along with the party line. I mean, we have data in this district, actually, that says, by a 2% margin, generically, folks would prefer a Democrat be successful in this election than a Republican. By a much wider margin, we have folks who say they are interested more in somebody who can work across party lines to solve this cost of living crisis than someone who’s just going to back whatever’s coming out of the administration.

So I think people are here for a change, and they are here for somebody that’s gonna actually fight for them, and not for one party or another, or one singular person. And, you know, again, talking about defining this new opponent in Ryan Elijah, I mean, he is quoted as saying, “I did this for the president. I did this for my party.” And I was like, “I’m doing this for Central Floridians.” So I mean, I think it’s a pretty clear choice.

Tahra Hoops: I do not think the GOP understands how large of a sinking ship they are tying themselves to. Every time they get out there and defend the astonishing economic record that he has just plummeted in such a short amount of time, and they say, “Yep, I’m here for this.” Like, for example, I was reading today, Walmart executives have come out to say that they have seen consumer behavior shift. For the first time in years, they’re seeing a decline the same month that they saw gas prices shoot up.

It is clear that consumers are not happy with the current economy, where especially people at the bottom rung of the economic ladder are struggling the hardest. But people would rather sit with the brownie points or the Truth Social post they might get from the president, because it matters more to their future career and resume. It just boggles my mind.

Bale Dalton: Yeah, and I think some of these elected representatives, or wannabes, who have chosen to just toe a party line, need to wake up. Because I will tell you that I’ve spoken to quite a few Republicans and what we call in Florida no-party-affiliated folks, and again, they are not interested in a label.

They’re not interested in a party. They’re not interested in who’s loyal to who. They want somebody that’s gonna be loyal to Central Floridians and actually take care of these things, rather than continue to be gaslit, that, oh, just a little bit of pain now is going to be better in the future.

Well, a little bit of pain, how long has it been? 20 months with a lot of pain? I talked to a guy who owns a landscaping company the other day, and he’s got some older lawnmowers, some of which require diesel. So this is a guy that’s trying to put diesel in a truck, unleaded in his machines. He’s got four or five crews out there, and he’s like, “Look, I can’t make margins anymore, which means I can’t take care of my family, which means I gotta let some employees go, all because the cost of gas is so high, I can’t run my business.”

So I think that there’s some folks out there who have sold their soul that are in for a rude awakening. And it’s really a shame. You know, look, growing up here in Central Florida, I got friends, family, neighbors that are all stripes. Republicans, Independents, third parties, no party affiliation, of course Democrats. And it’s like, folks are, A, tired of being told that they gotta hate their neighbor, and B, tired of a government that just seems to be filled with people who are just addicted to getting reelected and will go wherever the wind is of the leader of a party in order to stay in the cool kids club.

People don’t want somebody in the cool kids club. They want somebody who is going to tackle these things and get things done. And I think we’re gonna see those folks come out in droves in November. No matter what district we’re talking about, we’re gonna see those folks come out.

And that’s good, right? Because our country is better when we have folks talking about policy, and we have representatives who are focused on their constituent needs. And it’s been... I mean, it’s a damn shame how long it’s been since we might have seen that, you know?

Day Zero: What Gets Cheaper

Tahra Hoops: I always say democracy is not a spectator sport. It works better when you get involved and prove what you were talking about through your actions. So I do hope that we see a very large turnout in the upcoming midterms, which are soon. I would like to end this also on a more positive note.

Four years from now, you’ve won the election. What is something in your district that you think is cheaper now thanks to the policies that you’ve helped push?

Bale Dalton: Well, I’ve talked about the incredible increasing cost of healthcare across the board, and you’d have heard me say that having these ACA subsidies expire is a crisis of Congress’s own making. You know, it’s a very common question asked, like, “What’s a day one thing?” That’s like a day zero thing. That could be done now if we had the right people in Congress, right?

So I think for sure, health insurance, especially for the families most in need, would be cheaper in November of 2026, ‘cause we’d have a Congress that would have the spine to stand up for those most in need in their districts.

Certainly, we would attack these illegal tariff taxes. I mean, again, the fact that the Republican Party is getting behind tariffs, and out of making sure that our businesses have what they need to succeed, I’m flummoxed by that. I mean, our small businesses are getting squeezed on both ends. So I think you would have small business owners certainly feel more comfortable about their bottom line when we get rid of this chaotic implementation of these tariff taxes.

And then lastly, hugely important to me is taking care of not just our veterans, but our current servicemen and women. And, you know, every price of everything is going to go down when we stop this Iran war.

We talked a little bit about the cost of groceries. One thing that I think folks sometimes don’t realize is that fertilizer is a petroleum product, and we’ve already had our farms, corporate farms and family farms, plant much less this year, and that’s baked in. That was last spring. So food prices are gonna continue to be expensive and increase until we actually solve this supply chain crisis that’s just been created out of nowhere through this Iran war.

So I think those are three things that you will see be in a better spot in November of 2028, and hopefully much more.

Tahra Hoops: That is great, and I hope it is something that we definitely do see. We said at the start, again, congratulations on winning your primary, and we hope to see you possibly win in the upcoming midterms. Thank you for being here.

Bale Dalton: Well, thanks so much for y’all’s time and your interest. You know, Gary, like we said, Florida gonna Florida, so it’s always a fun place to follow. And I think folks are really interested in the change, and we’re gonna give it to them.

Tahra Hoops: Amazing. Thank you so much.

Bale Dalton: Thanks, Tahra. Thanks, Gary. Great to see you.

This week we sat down with New York State Senator Andrew Gounardes, who represents the 26th District in Brooklyn and chairs the Senate’s Budget and Revenue Committee.

What stuck with us is his diagnosis of the diagnosis. Every politician has learned to say “affordability.” It’s been poll tested, it passed every focus group, and as Andrew puts it, tattoo it on your forehead. Almost nobody has done the harder work of asking why a specific bill is too high for a specific family. He knows because he reads the call log every night. Fifteen calls about food security. Six about landlord-tenant disputes. Eight about people who can’t pay their heating bill. That’s not polling. That’s the district telling him what hurts.

From there we get into the Working Families Tax Credit he drafted on a napkin during downtime in Albany, the 8,000 units going up in Gowanus outside his office window, and why he thinks New York’s population loss is the ballgame: Texas gains five House seats next census, and blue states lose the ability to govern nationally. Stay for the rapid response round, where we find out his retirement plan is being a park ranger at Gettysburg.

What Brooklyn is actually calling about

Tahra Hoops: Hi everyone. My name is Tahra Hoops. I’m joined by my co-host, Gary Winslett, and today we have a very special guest, Andrew Gounardes, who represents New York’s 26th State Senate District. He covers the Brooklyn waterfront neighborhoods from Brooklyn Heights to DUMBO. He’s served in the Senate since January 2019, where he unseated Republican Marty Golden in what was then the 22nd District.

He chairs the Senate Committee on Budget and Revenue, which makes him a central player in Albany’s annual budget fight and one of the most visible legislators on state tax and fiscal policy. He’s been a major champion of family affordability policy, where his signature push has been trying to expand the Working Families Tax Credit, and he’s written more than a hundred laws since 2019. And also, he was my former professor way back in the day at Hunter College, so very happy to have him here.

Andrew Gounardes: Great.

Tahra Hoops: Yeah, thanks for being here. So obviously, you represent a very diverse area of Brooklyn. It’s basically the full spectrum of the New York affordability story. So I would love to know what constituents are telling you right now and how it might differ from area to area.

Andrew Gounardes: Yeah. So I’m lucky that I get to represent 350,000 Brooklynites in the State Senate, spanning from Bay Ridge down in the south where I was born and raised and where I live now with my wife and my three kids, all the way up to Brooklyn Heights and DUMBO and Vinegar Hill, and including a wide swath of the very, very diverse socioeconomic trends that are rippling across the city.

And I think that we keep saying that affordability is a top concern for so many people, and it really is true, but it really hits people in different ways. We see this in my office constantly based on the phone calls we get from constituents asking for help. And the things that we hear the most about from people are, of course, housing, because housing is perpetually in New York a challenge.

But even with housing, it depends neighborhood by neighborhood what types of phone calls we get from people. We hear a lot about housing. We hear a lot about childcare, and a lot of excitement around this push for universal childcare, but just a lot of people struggling to figure out how they can solve their own childcare needs while we build out a full universal system.

We hear about energy costs quite a bit, and just the overall everyday cost of things like food and school supplies and utility bills, which have been skyrocketing here in New York and everywhere across the country. So it really runs the gamut, I would say, across the board. People are feeling the pinch in their pockets and in their wallets, and it’s been like this for quite some time. This is not a new phenomenon that we’ve all of a sudden just discovered. This has been going on for years.

The diagnosis Democrats skipped

Gary Winslett: So you mentioned that it’s been going on for years because, so Democrats have been talking a lot about affordability in the last year or two, but you’ve been on this beat for a while. And so I’m just curious, what do you think Democrats maybe, maybe not right now, but in the past got wrong in terms of how they talk about affordability?

Andrew Gounardes: Yeah. So for me, this has been a primary focus. And one of the reasons why is because, and every office operates differently, but every night I get a summary of every call that comes into our office, and it’s organized by what they’re calling about and a summary of what the issue is.

So I can see in almost real time, at least on a daily basis, we had 15 phone calls today about food security. We had six phone calls about landlord-tenant disputes. We had eight phone calls about utility, unable to afford their heating bill or their cooling bill or whatever. And so I get this data pretty regularly, and so I had a good sense as to where people are feeling the biggest challenges in their life.

And what I think we have missed the mark on, everyone is using affordability as a watchword today because it’s been poll tested, it’s buzzy, it’s passed every focus group. Everyone’s talking about it. Tattoo it on your forehead. It’s like the word to say. But what I think we’ve gotten wrong is a more honest diagnosis, A, about the depth and the severity of the problem, and B, the multiple factors contributing to the causes as well as potential solutions.

I think when politicians talk, they like to identify a problem, and then they have the solution for it. The one solution. So whatever idea is theirs, either they created it or it’s part of their ideological worldview, but that’s the only solution for that particular problem. And that’s just not true, and that doesn’t always accurately capture an honest diagnosis as to what the real underlying problem is.

Your utility bills are too high, so are mine. Why are they too high? And so let’s deconstruct that. Let’s figure out what are the number of tools we can deploy to solve that problem. Your housing is too expensive. My housing is too expensive. Is it because your landlord is illegally raising your rent, and that’s a problem? Is it because you can make your ends meet, but your head’s barely above water? That’s a different problem. Is it because you’re trying to save money to maybe buy an apartment, right, a starter apartment? That’s a different problem. We have to do a better job, I think, at looking at the full field of what people are experiencing, and then come to the table with a whole array of ideas and options to try to help solve for them.

The Working Families Tax Credit, written on a napkin

Tahra Hoops: I’m glad that you were looking at the different causes that could happen, because a lot of the times when people are in such a massive crunch, they just try to get through to the next paycheck. And we shouldn’t want that to be the standard of living. It shouldn’t just have to be to just survive paycheck to paycheck.

We want everyone to have a standard basis where they feel comfortable. And a lot of studies have shown that putting money back in families’ pockets, not just benefits where they could only use it to redeem food or so forth, like actual money, people have been very responsible in using it for necessities. And because they don’t have to worry about their necessities, they are able to now build themselves out and create more economic opportunities for themselves.

And that’s why I wanted to talk about what I mentioned previously, the Working Families Tax Credit that you mentioned. I would love to know what it does differently from existing patchworks. How does a quarterly payout work? And just give us an overall feel for it in case people might not be aware of it.

Andrew Gounardes: Sure. So the Working Families Tax Credit is a proposal that I put together basically on the back of a napkin. When I was up in Albany, I had some downtime, and I saw some early studies about the overwhelming success of the pandemic-era expansion of the federal child tax credit. We bumped up the credit to like $3,600 temporarily, and we paid out half of the value of that credit in a six-month prepayment, month by month, so that families didn’t have to wait until tax time in order to get that money back.

They had money sitting in their accounts that they could use to spend on their everyday necessities and their essentials. And studies show that 93% of that money was spent on everyday essentials, which proves the point that you just made, Tahra, that families, if they have access to resources, can provide for themselves.

The success of that credit was so phenomenal that we cut the federal child poverty rate by 50% in this country, which is staggering. And of course, as soon as that money dried up, the rates went right back up, and families were right back in the same boat as they were before. And so I thought, “How can we replicate that success here in New York?”

And I came up with the Working Families Tax Credit. Same idea, not as generous as the federal government because we have fewer resources, but the overall goal is to give every child up to $1,600 per year, paid out quarterly, so that their families can use that money to be able to pay for their essentials.

Maybe it’s food on the table, maybe it’s the utility bill, maybe it’s school supplies, which have seen significant cost increases over the last couple of years, new clothes. God forbid the family wants to go to the zoo together, and the zoo costs money, right? They wanna go see a show together. They wanna do something as a family, which they absolutely should be able to afford to do, anywhere, and particularly here in New York City, where we have all this rich culture everywhere around us.

That was really the idea behind it. And so that was the starting point. It’s very expensive to do that, and so I thought, “Okay, well, how can we actually do this in a cost-effective way?” And it turns out New York has a bunch of overlapping tax credits and refunds and other things baked into the books for people of various income levels. I said, “What if we streamlined all of that into this one omnibus tax credit so that we don’t have to put more money into it? We can use the existing resources we are currently trying to use to support families, but do so in a more streamlined and effective way, and then package that as the new Working Families Tax Credit.”

So that was the proposal. Unfortunately, we never got it enacted, because budgets have been tough, and there is a fiscal attachment to it. But I’m incredibly proud to say that we’ve had two significant wins over the course of the life of this campaign. The first is that the Empire State Child Credit excluded children under the age of four from being included. So if you were zero, one, two, or three, your parents couldn’t claim that tax credit.

Gary Winslett: Why was that? That doesn’t...

Andrew Gounardes: They did it as a cost savings measure when they first, New York was the first state to adopt a child-based child tax credit in 2004, and like lots of budgeting conversations, they said, “Well, we can’t afford all of it. How do we compromise and do some of it?” They said, “Okay, well, let’s cut out kids zero to four, because kids can get more expensive as they get older.” As the father of three kids now, if they get more expensive when they get older, I don’t even wanna think what that’s gonna look like, because...

Gary Winslett: That’s all I...

Andrew Gounardes: They’re pretty expensive right now.

Gary Winslett: Yeah, I know. I don’t have three, I got one, but I can tell you one is expensive, so I don’t...

Andrew Gounardes: Right? Diapers add up, let me tell you something. Wipes add up. So they excluded kids under the age of four. We closed that gap so that now several hundred thousand more kids would be able, their families could get an additional $330 back in their pocket, which was the value of the child credit up until two years ago.

And then two years ago, again, while we were pushing for the full Working Families Tax Credit, we successfully increased the overall tax credit amount to $500, so up from 330 to $500 per child. And for children under the age of four, who until three years ago were completely excluded, we increased the value of their credit to $1,000.

So now parents can claim up to $1,000 per child for every child under the age of four, and then up to $500 per child for every child aged four to 17, which is real money back in their pockets. Now, it’s not the full thing we’ve been pushing for. We’re still trying to do the quarterly payments. But we’ve made progress to try to put more money back in people’s pockets, which is the ultimate goal we want, because we want families to be able to buy their necessities like they have been in the past.

Incrementalism, Bobby Kennedy, and moving the ball

Gary Winslett: Can I just say how much I appreciate the pragmatism of that? Because so often I’ll hear people in politics act like anything short of revolution is pointless. And it’s not. Incrementalism gets a bad rap, but when you’re making steps forward, that’s good. So I just wanted to say I really appreciate the fact that while you were aiming at something bigger, you were willing to also just get the wins you could right now.

Andrew Gounardes: Thank you for saying that. There’s a quote that I believe in that we kind of as the office, one of our office mantras, and it’s a quote by Bobby Kennedy. So it’s funny you mentioned pragmatism versus idealism, because he is like the ultimate idealist for many of us who believe in the power of government.

And he was paraphrasing Albert Camus. So basically what he said was, “We may never live in a world where there are no hungry children, but we can live in a world where fewer children go hungry. And if you won’t help us, who will?” Right? So just that. We wanna eradicate child poverty. New York, three of the top 10 cities in this country for child poverty rates are right here in New York: Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester.

Abysmal. City of Syracuse, 50% of children in the city of Syracuse live in abject poverty like you can’t even imagine. We might not be able to help every single kid in this state, though we want to, and we aspire to, and we’ll work tirelessly to do it, but if we can make it easier for families, even some families, to feed their kids, why wouldn’t we do that while we keep committing ourselves to the broader goal?

And that’s something that we think about all the time in my office, that I really believe in, and that’s how we’re able, I think, to notch these wins that help us move the ball down the field, sometimes inches, sometimes yards, but that’s how I think you can make a difference.

Why blue states keep losing people

Gary Winslett: Yeah. It’s funny you mention Upstate New York. Because I’ve been there, and I live in Vermont, I sort of see the population stagnation and decline in some of these places. New York loses more residents to other states than almost anywhere else. Texas and the Sun Belt, they’re building. New York really isn’t in comparison. Do you think that’s an indictment of sorts on blue state governance, that we keep losing people and it’s redder states in the South and Sun Belt that keep gaining people?

Andrew Gounardes: I think it’s partially yes. I think we have for a long time, government has been calcified, and we just do the same thing over and over and over again because that’s what they did before, and no one had any incentive to really think we should do anything differently. And so I think part of the problem facing blue states like New York is that we’ve been too calcified for too long.

We’ve been wedded in our ways for too long. We haven’t done the analysis of what is the right diagnosis for the problems we’re facing. And I think you see that in real ways, a lack of ability to build, right? Build housing in particular. We’ve started to turn that ship around a little bit, but nowhere nearly as far as other states have in terms of making it easier to build.

We haven’t thought about what is the right type of economic development model for some of these Rust Belt communities like parts of New York, right, that used to be heavily manufacturing, used to be heavily industrialized, especially some of these cities. We’ve never recovered from the loss of the factory, the loss of the big flagship company pulling up stakes and moving elsewhere or just shutting down.

And I think we have to give that a lot more creative thought and think about what are the new industries and ideas we can be incentivizing to come here, and how do we marry those two things together? How do we make an upstate community a place that’s attractive for someone to wanna put stakes in the ground and invest, attract that entrepreneurship, attract that level of investment, but then also make it easy for them to be able to buy a place they wanna live in and they wanna raise a family in?

So I think it’s twofold. And I think we’re starting to reckon with that. It’s still very slow, but it’s an urgent crisis, and it’s a political crisis, I would argue, because the longer we delay in addressing this, we lose population. That’s one thing. We lose congressional representation. That’s a whole other thing. That’s the ballgame, right? If Texas is gaining five members of the House in the next census, that’s five fewer seats that states like New York can have a voice in Washington advocating on our behalf, and that’s where you see a true loss of political power.

Housing, Gowanus, and the neighborhood that changed

Tahra Hoops: I do think that’s a point that definitely needs to be underscored more, because to me, the failure to build housing is almost a morality issue. Everyone needs shelter. It is the biggest line item in everyone’s budget. But people don’t understand, when the census happens and when we lose votes in the Electoral College, it’s going to be 10 times harder for us to govern.

We’re right now living at a time where Republicans have a majority, and we have seen at the federal level how much that is impacting millions of people across the board, especially from the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill. It’s shown now, in the upcoming school year, millions of kids are not going to be able to get free school lunch anymore because of that. And while other people on the right might frame it as a freeloader situation, they forget, kids are the ones that are on top of it.

But I’m glad you brought up the manufacturing aspect of it and how we’re still rebuilding of that because I think Brooklyn is a great example of it. I grew up in like Ridgewood, Bushwick, off Myrtle Avenue. And when I was a kid to how it is now, it is two completely different areas. And I actually think Brooklyn in certain parts have done such a great job at being able to get up new buildings quite quickly.

And some people, fringe voices, will say they’re pretty upset because it’s changed the character of their neighborhood. It’s not the place that they grew up in, but you should want the place that you live in to evolve with you. I’m glad it doesn’t look the same as to where I grew up in. I grew up in pretty bad poverty. It was not a nice and safe area to be in. And now I remember back when I was in Hunter, all my friends who were coming from out of state, they were like, “Oh, I just got a crazy new place in Bushwick. It’s such a nice area.” I was like, “Wait, you guys are moving there? This is crazy to me.” So it was so fun to see that happen, and it shows how housing policy could change so many different parts around you, from the economic status to the cultural status as well.

Andrew Gounardes: Yeah, absolutely. And look, I think there’s a way to protect people who feel anxious about seeing new developments when they themselves are struggling, and the question is new housing, but for whom? There’s a way to protect those people and do things thoughtfully without hindering development.

A couple of years ago, there was a massive rezoning in my district in Gowanus that would allow for 8,000 new units of housing, 40% of which would be deeply affordable, which is incredible. As part of that analysis, we heard a lot of opposition. Oh, it’s gonna gentrify. Oh, it’s gonna lessen the diversity of the community.

There was, the first time ever, the city undertook a racial analysis of what the rezoning could mean in terms of displacement, and then that analysis fed into the affordability requirements that were mandated as part of that rezoning, as well as additional commitments that the city made to invest in the nearby public housing stock, to address some of the inequities in the school infrastructure in the community, and all the other things that have been neglected for too long, using the development as a catalyst to try to right some of those wrongs, while still allowing 8,000 units of housing to be built.

My office is in Gowanus. We are right in the middle of that rezoning. I have seen these buildings go up around my window in such remarkable speed, while also making sure that we are protecting tenants and giving people who have stuck it out, basically, not giving them the shove out the door.

And so you can do both. We can do both at scale and we absolutely have to, because the consequences of not are just, I think, really bad. And one of my favorite fights to get into with people who oppose housing, “Oh, the neighborhood’s getting too expensive. My kids can’t afford to live here.” Okay, what do you think about the new housing plan for the neighborhood? “Oh, it’s terrible. We can’t build housing here.” Then what about your kids? Where are they gonna go? It’s like they don’t see how those things are related to each other. And when you point that out, then the light bulbs click on, and it’s like, “Oh, I get it now.” And I think that’s how we could actually change this conversation a little bit, too.

Universal childcare and how to pay for it

Gary Winslett: Earlier you had brought up the childcare, so I wanted to also ask you about that, because that’s another thing that’s really expensive. I have a seven-year-old. Back when she was in daycare, before kindergarten, that was expensive. That was a big budget line item for us. Anybody who’s gotta pay for childcare, they’ll tell you how much it is.

And I know you’ve called for universal childcare, and you’ve criticized the New York budget for not fully funding universal pre-K. And so what I’d love to ask you about is, what do you think is the path to get there? How do you make this fight over the childcare dependent credit, or whatever it is, how do you actually get to that place where universal pre-K is fully funded and we’ve got universal childcare?

Andrew Gounardes: Yeah. So I think this is a defining issue for so many families, and it’s a great example of how things used to be 30 years ago bear no relation to how they are today. So how Tahra grew up, right, in her neighborhood bears no relation to what her neighborhood is like today. Childcare is another example of that.

So our previous generation, like my parents’ generation, did not even think that universal childcare was necessary because there was a support network. You could survive and raise a family on one income, and you had a caregiver at home, and all of those factors, for the most part, that just does not exist for the vast majority of people today.

In New York State, this past budget cycle, we have now fully committed to universal pre-K for every single student in the state of New York. New York City has had that for several years. Other parts of the state were mostly there. That is now an ironclad commitment. We now have guaranteed 3-K for every New York City three-year-old.

We now are gonna work on trying to expand that statewide in the next year or two to come, and we are also working at the same time towards universal childcare, where the city of New York just rolled out a pilot program with state investment for 2,000, we call them 2-Care seats, so it’s not 3-K, it’s 2-Care, for children six months to two years old. Two thousand of those seats are being created for this fall, in specific ZIP codes that have the highest need.

Nearly 6,000 families applied, so about a third of them got admission. It shows the demand’s there. We’re gonna build on that by funding more seats and then rolling out this pilot to other counties across the state. Three other counties in New York are also participating in this. But at the end of the day, we have a plan, we have a roadmap.

At the end of the day, it’s gonna take money. We have to make sure that you can pay for the infrastructure to build these classrooms, right? It’s not just throw a throw rug on the floor and put a squishy toy and that’s it. You have to have the right infrastructure for these classrooms. You have to pay the providers a living wage so that they can actually, they’re gonna be wiping your kids’ diapers, you want them to get paid more than just minimum wage to do that, and to raise your kids, to spend eight hours with your kids every single day. It takes resources.

New York State has a budget of $260 billion. Maybe, I think we’re at 270 now. It’s a lot of money. It’s gonna cost several billion dollars more to fully fund universal childcare. I think that we have the roadmap. The funding comes from a combination of raising revenue smartly, but also more smartly using the revenue we currently have. I don’t think anyone can say with a straight face that we are getting $270 billion worth of state government for the budget that we spend.

And that is equally as true as the fact that we have people in the state of New York and businesses in the state of New York who are certainly not carrying their fair load of what a progressive tax structure could be and should be. We have corporations headquartered here that have billions in earnings that have paid zero in federal corporate taxes and zero in state corporate taxes. So we have to do both in order to raise the revenue to then fully fund the roadmap that we’ve clearly laid out, which I think is the right path to be on.

Supply is the childcare problem too

Tahra Hoops: I think it’s good to note that when it comes to childcare, like in other sections of policy, like, as we just talked about, housing, supply will always be such a major part of that. And in the future, as innovation progresses, some things can get automated, but when it comes to childcare, you are never going to allow your child to be taken care of by a robot. You do need humans. Human care will always matter so much.

So it is important that we are investing now for the kids of tomorrow, for the future families of tomorrow, so that whenever they have a family... And also this really does affect women overwhelmingly. In the future, whenever I do have a kid, I don’t want to look at the cost of childcare and look at how much I make and feel like I am getting pushed out of the workforce, and that is the case for many people.

I grew up with a homemaker because my mother looked at the job prospect that she was going to get, realized she had five kids at home and it was like, it would be silly of her to even think to waste money on childcare and so forth when her pay would not add up to that. So ensuring that we can expand more daycares out there.

There have been some new reforms that are small, but I think are helpful, that have been adopted in some states. For example, allowing childcare centers on upper floors. Right now they’re only zoned for the bottom floor, and that leads to such a scarce supply of where we can have. Just shifting that over while making sure the safety codes are there does expand the supply and it opens up new jobs for childcare workers. So having us get creative now, so that future families don’t feel like they have to choose between the workforce or their family and it’s a choice they want, is definitely something that is worthwhile to discuss.

Rapid response

Tahra Hoops: We’re going to hit the last couple of minutes, and we always like to end with kind of a rapid response. These are very lighthearted. Don’t take them super seriously. Whatever comes to your mind. One of the first questions we like to ask is something that you think is too expensive, and you can’t name any of the basic things we just talked about because we know those are expensive.

Andrew Gounardes: Good quality gourmet ice cream.

Tahra Hoops: Oh, like gelato?

Andrew Gounardes: Gelato like Van Leeuwen or Alden’s, and it’s like $9 now for a tub in my supermarket. I can’t spend nine... I am an ice cream addict. I can’t spend $9 a tub. I can’t justify that. I started making ice cream at home with my kids. I don’t wanna be like a homesteader making ice cream because I can’t afford the...

Tahra Hoops: Churning butter.

Andrew Gounardes: Yeah.

Gary Winslett: Turn it. That’s awesome. And what’s something that you think is fascinating about your district that people don’t know about?

Andrew Gounardes: What’s fascinating about my district, the entirety of the Battle of Brooklyn basically took place in my district, which we’re celebrating this month, the 250th anniversary of. And the first armed resistance by local patriots began in my neighborhood of Bay Ridge, where they fired a cannon on the British ships in New York Harbor, back in the beginning of August, 1776. So as a history nerd, I think that’s pretty cool, particularly in light of this year’s 250th celebration.

Tahra Hoops: No, I think that’s a good one. And Gary’s smiling because he is a major history nerd. You have to talk about your previous job that you held back in the day.

Gary Winslett: Don’t take it personally as a New Yorker, but I’m a Boston guy. I lived in Boston for seven years, and before I went to grad school, I actually did those Freedom Trail tours in 1770s getup and everything. Yeah, that was one of my part-time jobs during the recession, was doing those.

Tahra Hoops: More the wig.

Andrew Gounardes: You know what? At one point in my life, I was looking up jobs to be a tour guide at Gettysburg as the National Park Service, because I’m with you there. We’re on the same wavelength. That would be very cool. It’s my retirement plan.

Gary Winslett: Yeah, that’d be great.

Tahra Hoops: This is actually a good question, and always interesting for our viewers to hear. What was your first job? So people can understand, “Oh, I was maybe a clerk back then at the grocery store,” and you could end up being a state senator one day. So yeah, interesting to know that.

Andrew Gounardes: I was a paper filer for a family friend’s insurance company, my first summer job. My job was file papers in their basement all summer.

Gary Winslett: Wow.

Tahra Hoops: I remember turning 14, which is the first time you can legally be allowed to have a job back in New York City, going to my guidance counselor’s office when it was summertime and looking to get a job, and it was the most exciting time ever. And I look back now, I’m like, “Why did you wanna work so bad?”

Andrew Gounardes: It was exciting. You had to sign your working papers, and it was a whole big thing to get your working papers filled out when you turned 14. What a time. That was only a couple years ago for me, so, you know.

Tahra Hoops: Oh yeah, it was last year for me too. Yeah, when you talk about when you were my professor back in undergrad, that was last year, not several years ago at this point. Well, this has been great. Thank you so much for being able to join us. Really appreciate this conversation.

Andrew Gounardes: Yeah, this was a lot of fun. Thank you.

Gary Winslett: Yeah, thanks for coming on.

This week we did something a little different and brought on two guests: Vice Mayor Kesha Hodge Washington of Phoenix and Louisiana State Senator Royce Duplessis of New Orleans. They co-chair the NewDEAL Forum Housing Task Force, which just released its culminating report on what state and local leaders are actually doing about housing costs. Not white-paper theater, actual programs with budgets attached.

What I appreciated most is that neither of them talks about housing like an abstraction. Kesha told us about Phoenix residents who work full-time jobs, clock out, and go back to a shelter bed, and about the city’s new master leasing pilot that puts the city on the lease so someone with a past eviction or no deposit can still get keys. Royce explained why the mortgage is no longer the hard part in Louisiana, where insurance premiums have doubled for many families in just a few years, and how a fortified roof grant comes with a guaranteed cut to your premium.

We also got into the language problem in housing policy. Nobody dreams of an accessory dwelling unit. People do dream of a casita for an aging parent or a kid home from college. If Democrats want to win on affordability this cycle, and we should, that translation plus results people can actually see is the whole game.

The stories that stick

Tahra Hoops: Hi everyone. My name is Tahra Hoops. I am joined with my co-host Gary Winslett, and today we have two very special guests with us. We have Vice Mayor Kesha Hodge Washington of Phoenix, City Council member for District 8, representing South Phoenix and one of the most dynamic housing laboratories in the country.

Since joining the Phoenix City Council, she’s led the creation of the city’s housing trust fund, now at $15 million, and helped Phoenix deliver more than 53,000 units of housing over five years, years before schedule. She’s a co-chair of the NewDEAL Forum Housing Task Force, whose culminating report we are here to discuss today.

I am also joined with State Senator Royce Duplessis, who is a Louisiana State Senator representing District 5 in New Orleans, a city that sits at the intersection of every housing crisis we talk about on the show, from shortages, insurance collapses, and a lot of climate exposure. He’s been the legislative driver behind Louisiana’s expanded fortified roof program, the most concrete state-level response to the homeowners insurance crisis we’ve seen anywhere in the country. He’s also a co-chair of the NewDEAL Forum Housing Task Force. We are very excited to have them both here.

Hello everyone. Thank you both for being here. Very excited to discuss the NewDEAL Housing Task Force report that just came out recently. There is a lot to get through, so I’m just gonna go ahead and get started.

So both of you obviously hear a lot about housing every day from your constituents. It is a number one issue across polling in just about every city, from town halls to the grocery store to your inboxes. For both of you, what is one story or moment from the past year that has stuck with you and shaped how you approach this task force?

Vice Mayor Kesha Hodge Washington: I will say the moments that stick with me are the stories I hear from working-class families who are doing everything right. They’re working full-time jobs, sometimes multiple jobs, and they’re still struggling to find housing. I’ve met residents who have worked, who have lived in Phoenix for decades, who now suddenly find themselves priced out of neighborhoods they helped build. This just continues to reinforce for me that housing affordability isn’t just about housing, it’s about economic mobility. It is a workforce issue, it’s a quality of life issue. It just reminds me that we need solutions at every price point and for every stage of life.

This morning on the way into the office, I was returning a call, and it was about someone who was explaining how they wanted a connection with our landlord-tenant assistance, because they got a notice their rent was going up for an amount they thought to be unreasonable. So I can’t pick one story, because we hear so many of them, but to me, the stories tell the bigger picture. And I think for me, it just emphasized why this task force was so important.

State Sen. Royce Duplessis: Yeah, very similar to what the Vice Mayor just shared. I hear it all the time, and it’s not just from the people you expect to hear it from, but everyday people, working people. I had a teacher who actually reached out and I connected with, and she wasn’t the only one, but I’ve heard this often, that the mortgage payment is no longer the problem. It’s the insurance and those other pieces that are now the big challenge. In Louisiana, we’ve seen the cost of insurance double for many people over the past few years. So, you know, when your insurance bill starts looking like a second mortgage, it’s not just about housing affordability anymore. This is really about economic survival on all fronts.

Gary Winslett: This is so important. This is something I never see talked about in, like, national media, but it’s hitting all different kinds of places. So, like, I live in Vermont, and nobody associates Vermont with flooding, but we’ve had flooding each of the last three summers, because we get so much bigger rainstorms than we used to get ‘cause of climate change. And now a lot of people, like, as you say, it’s not the mortgage, it’s the insurance that’s double or triple what it was five, six years ago, because now actually their house could flood. I would love to just hear you say a little more about this, because I know Louisiana has been at that intersection of insurance cost and climate change for a while. And I think it’s one of these things that really impacts people, even though it somehow, like, never makes the New York Times or whatever.

State Sen. Royce Duplessis: Yeah, we have been at that intersection, just where we are located along the Gulf Coast. We are constantly in the cone or the threat of hurricanes every year. Unfortunately, after Hurricane Ida a few years ago, that’s when we really saw insurance rates just simply skyrocket. We’ve seen it happen after every storm. We saw it after Hurricane Katrina and other storms throughout the years. But most recently, after Hurricane Ida, we saw insurance costs become unbearable for homeowners, for businesses. And what we’ve been trying to do is come up with some real solutions that are gonna address a problem that isn’t going away.

Because to your point around climate change, people need immediate relief, but turning around the environment and addressing climate change can’t happen soon enough to be able to give the people the relief that they need right now. There’ve been a number of policies that we’ve been trying to address, and I’m sure we’ll get to it, but it’s been crushing for our city, for our state, for economic development. We’ve seen a lot of for-sale signs on homes. And Louisiana and New Orleans isn’t unique in that regard, ‘cause everybody’s getting crushed, but insurance in particular is the top issue for us, or it has been the top issue for us locally.

Surprises in the report: insurance and AI permitting

Tahra Hoops: I think it’s important that you mentioned how diverse local issues can be, especially when it comes to housing and insurance issues. Vice Mayor Hodge Washington, I want to pass this question over to you. Were there any policies or ideas in the report that might have surprised you, something another member brought to the table that you hadn’t considered before, that you’re now maybe thinking to bring back to your own city? Because as we’ve mentioned, the great thing about America is, like, all of our cities are so diverse and unique that a lot of them might need a very diverse set of solutions. So interested to hear more there.

Vice Mayor Kesha Hodge Washington: Thank you for that. I wanted to piggyback a little bit on the last question, because that was one of the issues that I admittedly was embarrassed to say I didn’t think about as an affordability issue. My profession pre, I guess, pre-elected office is I actually do commercial civil litigation in the property insurance world. I actually am a lawyer that does a lot of property insurance claims. I’m actually from the US Virgin Islands, which is also struck with a number of hurricanes. And I saw the same exact story that the senator was talking about. Many times, if residents were able to file a claim, their insurance became out of reach the next year for many of them.

So that was something I think that hadn’t always been to the forefront of my thought process when it came to housing affordability and housing stability. And I think it’s one of those areas that we could definitely learn a little bit more from. The senator serves in the legislature. I’m in city council. We have quite a bit of preemption issues, but I think it was helpful to highlight this issue for some of my colleagues at the legislature to say, this is also something you should be considering. So I think that was one of the ideas or the issues that came up from the report that I really hadn’t got an opportunity to think about before.

And the second one was utilizing artificial intelligence and layering that to help us expedite some of the work that’s being done here. Of course, for reliability purposes, we don’t want artificial intelligence to be making all of the decisions when it comes to permitting, but there are possibly ways where we could use it to be more efficient and to highlight potential conflicts and just help the process move more speedily. Those are some of the ideas that I got from the report and got from my time with my colleagues to help address this issue that I think we can bring back into our city.

But I was very encouraged by how much consensus we had about the idea that we can’t solve affordability simply by increasing supply. We have to look at other options, and how do we preserve more existing units, and how do we reduce some of the barriers to development, and modernizing the outdated codes and permitting some of our cities have. I think those were all great things that came out of the report, so thank you.

Tahra Hoops: Yeah, and I’ll pass that question back to you. I really do appreciate you bringing up the idea that AI can help streamline some of the redundancies and inefficiencies that we have in government. I attended a conference last year, I think it was the Abundance Conference, and Jennifer Pahlka, I believe, was the one to say that when you think of government, you think of, like, the DMV. It’s just very long and boring and you just think it’s going to ruin your day. So utilizing modern tools to try and just fasten up the processes that we found were actually adding sometimes days and weeks is going to make it such a much more efficient process for everyone involved. And I agree with you, like, there should always be a human involved to triple check all and every work possible. But it is great to see the progression that we are moving to ensure that the government does not just become the same equivalence of a terrible day at the DMV.

Vice Mayor Kesha Hodge Washington: It’s one of the lessons that I think struck me the most when I transitioned from my private practice into government service, is things moved a lot slower than I was used to. I mean, we have hardworking employees at our city, but I also think we need to figure out how we can move things a little more streamlined. That’s definitely a priority for me.

Casitas, parking minimums, and single stairs

Gary Winslett: I wanna talk about a couple of the ideas in the report. It’s interesting, when you go into reports like this, they use a certain kind of language, and I totally understand why they do. This is, like, policy talk, like single-stair reform and ADU legalization and parking minimum rollbacks. But those are certain ways of talking about it that I think we could actually do better at. So just, like, ADU legalization, I totally get what that means. I think a lot of our listeners will understand what that means, but it’s actually just got so much more of a human story to it than that. It’s like, should you be allowed on your own property to build a small, nice house for your mother-in-law or father-in-law to come live with you on your own property? Like, that is just the most basic common-sense kind of thing. And so I just wanted to talk to you about some of these reforms. How do you see them helping people in your constituencies?

Vice Mayor Kesha Hodge Washington: So the one you just talked about, I think, probably has the broadest long-term impact, the accessory dwelling units. I call them casitas or mother-in-law suites, dependent on the community that I’m talking to, because you’re right, ADU does sound very sterile. It doesn’t sound very welcome. It doesn’t really sound like a solution. But when we say it allows you, if you have the space and you have the setbacks, to be able to add an additional unit on your premises, whether or not it is for your kid that’s going to college and wants semi-independence, or your aging parent, or you just wanna supplement your income and be able to provide a unit for someone else to live in. They allow more property owners to participate in the actual crisis in creating housing. They support multi-generational families, aging parents, workforce housing.

Here in Arizona, it has pretty much been affirmed on the state level. The way I say affirmed is because our friends at the legislature like to tell us if they disagree with what we’ve done by preempting us, and the only preemption we’ve seen on this so far is limitations on short-term rentals. They didn’t want it to be subject to that. So I think that’s a huge win, because this is one way we can create supply without just requiring the traditional developer or the apartment complex builder or the home builder or the industry to do this. This is how individuals can be a part of the solution. So I would say that’s probably had the easier of the political paths.

We’ve done a little bit on the parking reform. That worked for us because we did it along our transit-oriented development, or pretty much where we wanna see more density. And those are the areas where we expected that more of the residents would not have access or wouldn’t need access to a vehicle, because they’re in such close proximity to transportation. So by removing some of the parking requirements that some may view as excessive and adding to the housing costs, we were able to hopefully drive down the ultimate cost per unit, which can then be passed on to the end user, the renter or the owner of the premises at that juncture.

Gary Winslett: Yeah, no, I think the way you’re talking about that, just removing the excess, is really important. I forget exactly where it was, but there was a town that had parking requirements on, like, nursing homes, as if all of the residents in the nursing home had two cars. And it’s like, you’re not doing anything with that rule. You’re just driving up cost for, like, no reason.

Vice Mayor Kesha Hodge Washington: I don’t have a disagreement to that.

Tahra Hoops: I wanted to pass the same question off to Senator Duplessis, on basically, what was something that you found in this report that you might have not thought of for yourself in your own city, but someone else kind of brought to the table that opened your eyes or shed a new perspective? I like to think of one example, of people understanding how housing politics and housing policies is very much climate politics and climate policies, like you just mentioned, transit-oriented development. The more we are able to create walkable cities, the less reliant we are going to be on cars. More people are just outside, walking more, enjoying the fresh air. It’s better for small businesses as well, because people can just go down the street, go to their favorite cafe, maybe work from there for a day if you’re working a remote job. It just creates so many different options. I didn’t have that perspective before getting into the nitty-gritty of all the benefits that these policies could have.

State Sen. Royce Duplessis: Absolutely. I mean, when we’re talking about lowering the cost, the shared costs, how does that cost get spread amongst the developers, building owners, renters? And what we know in development, going to your point about walkability and having people in one space, making towns accessible, we know that density plays a role in that. And a lot of these decisions around density, the number of units allowed, a lot of these decisions do get made at the local level, where the Vice Mayor is serving. We sort of dabble in local building code issues, zoning issues, various issues somewhat at the state level, but these are really more locally focused issues.

And I found the issue on the single-stair reform to be pretty interesting. Not something that I have a lot of experience or familiarity with, but it seems to be an area where there can be some significant long-term impact, particularly in terms of how it can unlock apartment buildings that may not otherwise work out, how a deal may not work out. So I found the single-stair reform concept to be an interesting one, and one that we should be taking a closer look at here in the city of New Orleans and other cities throughout the state.

But certainly, going back to the conversation around accessory dwelling units, how we talk about it absolutely matters. And when you personalize it and you talk about it from the standpoint of a mom-and-pop or mother-in-law unit, that’s more relatable. And then when you talk about it from the standpoint of how people have property rights, and how property owners should be empowered to make decisions around what they’re doing, how they’re using their property, not at the detriment of their neighbors or their neighborhood, but finding that proper balance, it makes the conversation more relatable, and I think you can be more effective when you talk about it using simpler terms like that. But the accessory dwelling unit aspect of this is certainly another key policy that we can’t overlook, because that additional unit can make a big difference for an individual or for a family who needs access to housing.

Gary Winslett: No, I totally agree. On the single-stair reform, one of the things that I find really interesting about it is that it unlocks development on, like, smaller parcels of land. Because when you’ve got the two-stairway rule, you need a big building to make that pencil out. So on, like, small parcels of land, all of a sudden all the numbers break down. But with a single-stair reform, you can do new, you know, smaller kinds of apartments, three, four floors, on these smaller parcels of land. And what that does is it also helps your developers who are small businesses, because they’re often the ones most interested in doing the smaller buildings, rather than the, you know, 90-unit sort of five-over-one that takes up half the block kind of thing. So that’s another one of those areas where I think you actually can hook up to the interest of small businesses when we talk about how we do some of these reforms.

Results, not ideology: the 2026 housing message

Tahra Hoops: I wanted to open this up to kind of a central conversation that Democrats are just having across the board, ‘cause we are still reeling from a devastating loss in 2024, but we do have the election happening later this year, and obviously affordability and housing become a central focus to that. So I would like to ask both of you, what is a housing message that you think is going to resonate to the voters who left, or who just didn’t really leave the couch, in 2024? That was a large issue we had. People did not feel motivated. They did not trust our party enough to go back out there and feel confident that Democrats could deliver for us. So I would love to know how we can close this gap, because it is clear people are upset, like, they’re not happy with what is going on right now. But I’m still a bit unsure if they fully have our back yet.

State Sen. Royce Duplessis: You know, nothing speaks more to voters than results and outcomes. Ideology is great, but when you can point to actual progress, if we can point to a city like Phoenix, or point to a city like New Orleans, or any Democratic city where we can show that there’s actually been progress, we’re not gonna accept the narrative that Democrats who are in leadership are killing their cities. When we can show that there’s actually been progress under Democratic leadership, then I think that’s a message that can resonate. So just pointing to actual results and not trying to lead purely through ideology, I don’t know anything that’s more effective than that.

And also leaning into the, or leaning away from, I should say, the false choice narrative, that we can’t be pro-growth, pro-development, and also be pro-affordability, like you have to choose one or the other. We have to embrace and own the idea and the reality that we can be pro-growth, we can be pro-development, and we can also be pro-affordability for people. So I think those are the messages that we should certainly be leaning into as we approach these upcoming elections. We can’t let anybody else steal this idea, that Democrats can’t be for having a piece of the American dream and also making it such that we’re not against people prospering at the same time.

Tahra Hoops: That just reminded me of something that Senator Gallego spoke about last week at the WelcomeFest event. He said that when he talks to people directly, like as you said, people aren’t really discussing ideologies. He’s talking to immigrants who moved here because they so believe in the American dream. They think that is vital, it’s worthwhile. They wanna work towards that. And right now, it doesn’t feel like Democrats kind of own those results. They don’t own that dream, that people feel it is so out of touch these days. And there’s been recent polling that shows the share of independents is growing day by day. People don’t feel attached to either party right now. So the more representatives that we can have out there in the Democratic Party that’s showing we are focused on our cities doing better, progress, more units going up, people being able to feel comfortable at the end of the month where their bills are all paid for, is something that I do believe will resonate to people. And hopefully we can see that play out in election results. And also, Vice Mayor Hodge Washington, I would love to hear the same thing from you as well.

Vice Mayor Kesha Hodge Washington: I think the senator nailed it. I think our message is not based on policy. It should be based on results. I think we need to do a better job of showing how our practical solutions are making a tangible difference. I mean, most of our constituents and our residents, they live policy decisions through their everyday life, whether or not it’s their monthly rent, it’s their mortgage payment, it’s their utility bills, it’s their commute. I think we have to make sure we’re clear that we are not just identifying the problem. I think we do a very good job of flagging the problem, but I don’t think we do a really good job of identifying what our solution looks like and how that solution is going to impact them. Because we can’t just continue to say that we need to see a shift on the federal government side, sorry, we need to, you know, flip the House of Representatives or gain more seats in the Senate. We have to talk about what it is we’re gonna do when that happens. And we have to cite to real-life examples of how those policy decisions worked for everyday family members, family lives. That is how they need to do that.

We also need to do a better job of, and one of the things that I prioritize in my time, is there are a lot of programs that our community, that our government, our local government and state government, provides, but sometimes they are so siloed. We don’t share that information with the residents. They don’t know where to go in that time of need, and usually by the time they are there, they’re so far behind. So we need to do a little bit better job in sharing those available programs and making sure that more of our residents are attuned with what’s going on. And we have to make sure that we are communicating the result of those programs and progress in a way that doesn’t seem like just spending for spending’s sake. We need to personalize those stories so that it is not viewed as some individual who is just taking advantage of the system. I think the more we personalize the stories to show that they are the teachers, they’re the person that serves us in the restaurant. They get up every day and go to work.

For me, I find that one of the most compelling arguments when I talk to those people who I don’t necessarily share the same ideology with, when it comes to we should be doing more in the homeless and housing space, is what I share with them: Do you realize that we have people in our shelter system who get up every day and go to work? And they clock out from work and they go back into our shelter system. That is not because they’re lazy. It is not because they are on drugs. It is because affordability is a true concern that needs to remain front and center, because it affects everything. It affects the ability for businesses to be able to find the workers they need. So if they can’t afford to work in our city, they’re not gonna wanna commute from outside of our city into the businesses. So our businesses gonna have the same problem finding individuals to work.

For me, as a sociology major, like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, housing is only second to... yeah. And if we’re not focusing on that and showing how we get tangible results, I think we are going to continue to lose the message war and the policy war, because we cannot get people to buy into it if they don’t agree with it, if they don’t see the impact of it.

Gary Winslett: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s exactly right. Like, we’ve gotta show that it can be really affordable to live in blue places and thrive there. It’s just not good enough to have all the right stated values, but then people can’t afford the rent or the mortgage or the insurance. That’s just not gonna ever win you votes if they’re just constantly feeling like you haven’t delivered.

Vice Mayor Kesha Hodge Washington: We also have to understand the economics of it. I think sometimes the Democratic Party gets criticism for thinking they can just simply spend their way out of every crisis. And I think we need to be focused on results and metrics of success, and understanding you can do all of these things and further our democratic values and still be really good financial stewards. And I think we need to start speaking in that language also, so people understand that.

Gary Winslett: Right, well, that’s totally right, because on something like transit spending, you need to be able to spend the public money to build transit systems. But then voters understandably don’t want to give you their taxpayer dollars to spend if they repeatedly see what looks like total waste. It turns into this, like, self-reinforcing cycle. Whereas you can actually flip it around, and if people believe that you’re gonna spend it wisely and they understand where their money’s going, then they’re more willing to actually, you know, say yes to the bond or say yes to the small percentage tax increase.

What their districts do best

Gary Winslett: I think we’re running towards the end of time, so I kind of wanna get to some of our final questions, if that’s all right. I guess I’ll take the first one, and then the rest can go to Tahra. For each of you, what’s something that you think your district does really well that the rest of the country could learn from?

State Sen. Royce Duplessis: All right, I’ll go. So I represent New Orleans, and I like to tell people I represent the part of New Orleans that you visit when you come to New Orleans. So I have the innermost part of the city. I have most of the largest economic engines in the city, which is tourism. But I also have the Port of New Orleans. I have the Superdome, I have the Smoothie King Center, I have Caesars and several major hospitals, and a lot of economic assets are in the district that I represent. But more importantly than that, more importantly than everything I just said, is that we have a community and the culture that emanates from the district I represent, which is the Tremé, and the history that comes out of the Tremé. And if you see some of the second lines that come through, just kind of how we’re able to intertwine all of that commercial activity I just talked about, all of that economic activity, and how we’re able to make it work in our city with community, culturally, and the connectivity there, through the arts and through song and dance and food and everything that we do here. I’m very proud to represent Senate District 5. It’s a special place, and I think it’s very unique.

Gary Winslett: It’s a lot of fun. I’ve been there. It’s great.

Vice Mayor Kesha Hodge Washington: Yeah, I would say District 8. It’s one of the most diverse, eclectic mixes that you’ll find, but I think it tells the story of Phoenix so well. It includes our historic neighborhoods. It includes my South Phoenix, which has a history of redlining. It includes the downtown, so the Mortgage Matchup Center, where our Suns play, and where our baseball stadium is. I also have some of the major economic engines, such as Phoenix Sky Harbor. But for me, the thing that probably my community does the best is resilience and community. Our residents continually show up for each other, whether or not it’s, like, small business. We recently did our 602 Day, which is our city pride, and our community, more so, like, the way they connected small businesses and continue to invest in one another and advocate for neighborhood improvements. I love all the youth mentorship programs that we have, but for me, the most important thing is neighbors step up and help each other during difficult times. There is such a strong sense of community pride, and that pride and that vision, I think, is what continues to shape the district’s future. And I think the district kind of leads the city, but I’m a little biased.

Lightning round

Tahra Hoops: I love both of those answers. Senator Duplessis, I’ll pass this to you, and then, Vice Mayor Hodge Washington, to you as well. In one word, first thing that comes to your mind, don’t think too hard about it, and you can’t say housing: what is something that you think is too expensive?

State Sen. Royce Duplessis: Insurance.

Tahra Hoops: Insurance. Okay. No, that’s too close. That’s too close.

State Sen. Royce Duplessis: That’s too close. That’s too close. One thing that’s too expensive... ground meat. It’s two words.

Tahra Hoops: That is very true. Recently, we have the numbers to track that. I’ll pass it over to you, Vice Mayor Hodge Washington.

Vice Mayor Kesha Hodge Washington: Well, just because we are going to vote on our budget today, or one of our final votes, I will say childcare has become very expensive. And we’ve learned that that’s one of the biggest affordability challenges facing our working families today. And the reason I said that, I was thinking budget, is that for the first time, we will have a childcare set-aside as part of our city budget, to help try and address the affordability concerns for our working families. So I’m very excited about that.

Tahra Hoops: Well, that is great. And I definitely believe that childcare is also just incredibly up there. It is quite insane to see that. And then last one, and it could be either one: what is a policy or innovation that you think is either overrated or underrated? Feel free to pick whichever one from there.

Vice Mayor Kesha Hodge Washington: I’ll go again, since I’m in budget mode. We vote on it this afternoon. One of the things that I’m very excited about, I think it’s probably underrated, is that we will be trying for the first time here in Phoenix, and I’ve pushed it forward, so I’m very happy to see it move forward. It’s called master leasing. It is simply allowing the city to become the tenant and then being able to sublease those units to individuals who are facing some barrier to housing stability, whether or not it’s an eviction, or simply can’t afford the deposit, or have been the victim of domestic violence and those types of things. So it’s going to create more housing opportunities, and I don’t think we try it as much as we should. I’m very excited to see what we’ll do in our pilot for the first time this year, and hopefully being able to continue that. So master leasing is my underrated policy.

Gary Winslett: I have to learn more about that. That sounds cool.

State Sen. Royce Duplessis: For me, underrated policy would be the fortified roof program, and the effort to strengthen more roofs throughout this city and throughout the region. Fortified roofs, that’s not a particularly new concept. We actually modeled our program after the state of Alabama, which is also located along the Gulf Coast. They’ve experienced increases in insurance as a result of hurricanes. The whole concept is, if you get a certain type of roof, certain type of nail, shingle, the way that they seal the roof on top of the home, that mitigates losses anytime there’s a storm, hopefully there is never a storm. But the idea is that on your homeowners insurance policy, you should see a guaranteed reduction. So we’ve really been talking this up and trying to encourage as many people as possible to either get a fortified roof or apply for the state grant program, which we just put more money into, and I think it’s probably hands down the most effective and efficient way that we can get rates down in the state of Louisiana. Because, again, we can get more fortified roofs across the state more quickly than we can deal with the issue of climate change. And I just think it’s something that’s a little underrated. If we can put that program into overdrive, we can see some drastic changes on homeowners insurance.

Vice Mayor Kesha Hodge Washington: And if I could co-sign on this, the fortified roof, real quick, just because of my own personal experience. I’ve actually lived through a hurricane. We lost our roof in a hurricane, and a fortified roof was placed on when we rebuilt our home. And it has since been through many other storms of higher magnitude, and it has been a tremendous, tremendous savings. And people talk about the physical impact of a hurricane, but it also provides emotional stability, especially for those individuals who are seniors. It’s traumatic enough, but being able to stay in your home knowing that your home is able to withstand it, it’s also a plus plus. So I just wanted to say great work of the senator on touching on a policy I don’t think many people think about, but it’s so important.

Tahra Hoops: I am glad we were able to highlight that, and thank you both for your time. I really do encourage everyone to read this amazing Housing Task Force report. You guys are doing incredible work. Housing is such a local issue, so it’s good to know that we have leaders in charge who treat it to be a priority, such as the both of you are doing. So thank you both again.

Vice Mayor Kesha Hodge Washington: Thank you.

State Sen. Royce Duplessis: Honored to be a part of it. Thank you all for having me.

Hi everyone, this week Gary and I talked with Matthew Lewis, communications director at California YIMBY, about why the hard part of the housing fight isn’t the economics but getting people to believe things that are true. We get into why housing and transportation are really one fight, why he thinks AARP were the original YIMBYs, and how bad-faith actors on both the left and right exploit the collapse of local news to lie about bills like SB 79. His bottom line is stubbornly hopeful: SB 79 took seven years to pass, 90% of Americans still don’t know what a YIMBY is, and judging “abundance” one year in is a category error. Call him in 15 years.

Tahra Hoops: Hi everyone. My name is Tahra Hoops. I’m here with my co-host Gary Winslett, and today we have a very special guest. We have Matthew Lewis here. Matthew is the Director of Communications at California YIMBY. He previously spent a decade as a broadcast and print journalist, then moved into advocacy communications with a focus on environmental justice, energy policy, and climate change. Before this, he was Director of Communications at ClimateWorks and also co-led the Risky Business Project, an effort to quantify and communicate the economic risk of climate change in the US. Matthew is a YIMBY homeowner who also believes there’s plenty of room on his block for more neighbors. Happy to have you here.

Matthew Lewis: Thank you. In fact, there is literally a ton of room on my block for more housing. I’m here in Berkeley, California, and it’s sort of astonishing that in 2026 I can still say that with a straight face. And I could say it about the entire city of Berkeley.

Gary Winslett: I went to Berkeley for the first time last year for a conference, and it was a startling kind of place to walk around, just because with proper zoning reform the market would build new housing there relatively quickly.

Matthew Lewis: It is a highly desirable place. People ask me, how do you like Berkeley? I’m like, well, it’s very pleasant. I have a lot of friends here, I’ve been here a number of years, it’s very easy to get to San Francisco, the weather’s actually perfect. But putting on my climate hat for a second, the marginal resident of a California coastal city, just by nature of moving to a California coastal city, reduces their carbon footprint, because of how relatively well managed these cities are in terms of their carbon emissions. So it’s not just room on the merits of land use, it’s good for everybody to put more people in cities like Berkeley.

Tahra Hoops: People underestimate how much living in a walkable neighborhood makes you walk more. I grew up in New York City and DC, and now I live in Los Angeles, and every time I walk for longer than 15 minutes I just accept my fate, like someone might hit me and that is just my life. That is just going to happen.

Matthew Lewis: I am one of those weirdos. Every now and then I make the mistake of flying into LAX. I usually fly to Burbank when I have to go to Los Angeles because it’s so much easier. But I flew to LAX once or twice and I’m like, you know what, I’m not gonna deal with all this. I walked from LAX to Crenshaw for a meeting, down Centennial Boulevard, and I got the whole “oh my God, how do people live this way?”

Tahra Hoops: Imagine me. Imagine me.

Matthew Lewis: It’s like a 10-lane freeway through the heart of the city. There was good bus service, I could have hopped on the bus, but the weather was nice, so I walked. It was like two miles. And I grew up in DC, so the idea of walking two miles is like, oh, just walk two miles, it’s not that big a deal. But in LA it feels like you’re going through a war zone.

Tahra Hoops: I tell my husband all the time, you’re so lucky, I love you, and I am willing to live here. But there are great places in Los Angeles. We actually just had the expansion of a D Line come out, and it was such a fun experience. It was still a bit of a walk, but we didn’t care, we wanted the full experience, we were walking there and I wanted to use the subway. It was the first weekend, it was so clean. The transit doors are something New York City should adopt, because they were full opening doors. We got to downtown LA in around 13 minutes from the west side, which you would not be able to do in a car. So I know there are good parts of it.

Matthew Lewis: I feel like the sleeper story of all these US urban housing and transportation situations right now is the amount of money Los Angeles is investing in transit. It’s the most in the US, as far as I know, at least last time I checked. LA is the city with the best weather and the worst transportation planning combined at once, historically. Everybody’s saying, but Matt, you’re crazy, there’s no way this ever happens, LA’s so broken. And it’s like, yeah, LA is broken in a lot of ways, but I actually really believe it’s the city with the most potential on the planet.

Tahra Hoops: So much space.

Matthew Lewis: It’s sitting there right beneath the surface. It could be the greatest place ever, because the weather really is that good, and it is so flat for most of the city. Nothing’s ever gonna be paradise about Los Angeles, but you could make it so much better than it is now. Compared to all the other deltas of any other city, the potential is so huge.

Housing and transportation are the same fight

Gary Winslett: So with the weather and the flatness, I wanna ask about this, because to me it seems like LA should be e-bike heaven. If you just built fully separated lanes for bicycles. I own a bicycle, I’ll ride it around my neighborhood, but I refuse to share space on the road with a car going 55. I’m just not gonna do that.

Matthew Lewis: You’ve got some really good leaders in LA who are starting to see this. People like Catherine Blakespear. And you’ve got Streets for All, founded in Los Angeles by Michael Schneider. They’ve got a chapter up in San Francisco now, but he successfully ran and passed Measure HLA to try to force LA’s Department of Transportation to do exactly what you’re describing. And the problem, this is one of those deep-state problems that’s actually real, they don’t wanna follow the law.

One problem that YIMBYs are gonna have to confront, not just in California but all over the United States, is that most state and local transportation departments are basically broke. So you can pass measures to improve street safety or to invest more in protected bike lanes, and the transportation departments will just be like, nah, we’re not gonna do that. And it goes both ways. In a city like San Francisco, you’ve actually got an incredibly talented transportation staff who know all the stuff they need to do to make the city safer. Car crashes are the number one cause of violent death in the city of San Francisco, and it’s been that way for years in Los Angeles too. So everybody knows there’s a problem, but you have this combination in some cases of agencies that won’t obey the law.

LADOT is openly and flagrantly violating HLA, which was passed by the voters, which is amazing, that you got a majority of voters in Los Angeles to say yes, spend money making our streets safer. You wouldn’t have expected that, right? But people get it. To your point, Gary, people kind of get the potential. And then in San Francisco you have a transportation agency that really wants to do it but keeps getting blocked by the mayor’s office and by the supervisors. So one way or the other, you’ve got political skullduggery going on.

Because of the completely inseparable relationship between housing and transportation, this is something we’re gonna have to get our heads around as YIMBYs and in the pro-housing movement. We talk to members of the legislature all the time, it’s part of why we exist. And one of the things more of them are coming to realize and really trying to lead on, people like Buffy Wicks, is you can’t just plop houses down and not improve the transportation infrastructure and expect it’s gonna work out. So Buffy’s got bills she’s working on related to this. I mentioned Catherine Blakespear. Laura Friedman, who we worked with on the parking reform bill several years ago, she’s now in Congress, but she could have basically recited the Ten Commandments of Donald Shoup back in the day. So you’re seeing a convergence here, folks realizing these things actually are not separate issues. And I think the next big fight is gonna be over some of these transportation questions.

Listening to NIMBYs on parking

Gary Winslett: Yeah, I think that’s right. The other thing about transportation is it can ease some of the NIMBYism. Not all of it, it’s not a magic wand, but some people aren’t ideological about it. They just have all these concerns about traffic and parking. So if you can ease that, you’ve at least alleviated that kind of problem.

Matthew Lewis: In the YIMBY movement we talk a lot about the history of exclusionary zoning and how it was openly racist. People back then didn’t hide it, because there weren’t laws against discrimination. You gotta remember, zoning came around in the 1910s and ‘20s, and you could openly say all kinds of nasty things about people of different races and ethnicities. And while that’s still the roots of how we got into the predicament we’re in today, I don’t think it’s fair or accurate to say that’s still motivating most people.

The reason I wanted to mention this is that I actually think NIMBYs are being honest, and to a certain degree accurate, not wrong, when they say if you build more housing here it’ll make it harder for me to park and increase traffic. When they openly share that concern, I look at it and think, yeah, that’s actually not wrong. If you put a bunch of housing somewhere and don’t also address the transportation issues, you will in fact make it harder to park and increase traffic. So I feel like we should be listening to them at face value and saying, okay, let’s make that part of what we’re also solving for. I’m as YIMBY as they come, and when I hear them say that, I’m sort of offended in one way, like, wait, we’re not building housing so that you can have parking. But on the other hand, you’re not wrong. It’s an accurate statement in a world where the marginal way to move around is a car. So what we need is a set of leaders who realize that unless we intervene in some way, the marginal mobility solution for a new resident is a car, and that doesn’t scale.

Tahra Hoops: If you ever look on the website Nextdoor, which I love to go look at—

Gary Winslett: What is Nextdoor?

Matthew Lewis: Oh my God. It’s awful.

Tahra Hoops: It’s the page for the older woman in my neighborhood to get on. I live in a place where I am probably the youngest person for miles, and honestly I kind of love it that way. Um, and they’re all on Nextdoor, and they are as NIMBY as they come, and I see the parking thing all of the time. They bulldozed an entire run-down vacant building that had been empty for some time and started to rebuild it. They actually stopped for a bit, because, get this, the workers got deported. It was so bad. And they finally came back on site, they’re close to finishing it, and there was so much pushback on Nextdoor about this development, because people were like, I already can’t park on the street.

The aging-in-place coalition

Matthew Lewis: I know we were gonna talk about communications and how you move people. And I think there are some really interesting ways into this conversation through the lens of older people. I have to give credit where credit is due. My boss, Brian Hanlon, the founder and CEO of California YIMBY, and I talk about this often. We’re getting ready to do a convening on transportation for a separate project we’re working on, and one of the participants is AARP. When you go back in history, you quickly realize, oh, AARP are actually the original YIMBYs, and they’re the original let’s-solve-transportation people, because their members are the ones most negatively impacted by where NIMBYism has brought us.

To drill all the way down to an anecdotal version of this: every year California YIMBY does a lobby day in Sacramento. We have all our priority bills, we get volunteers from all over the state, we converge on Sacramento, and they go around and meet with their legislators. It’s bigger every year. This year we had over—

Tahra Hoops: I was there.

Matthew Lewis: Oh yeah, that’s right, Tahra. I can’t believe we missed each other.

Tahra Hoops: I know.

Matthew Lewis: So you were in the room, you saw it was a huge crowd, but there were also a lot of older people there. One of the women in my group, we were just talking as we walked between offices, like, so tell me your story, why are you here? And she’s like, well, my husband and I live in a suburban part of Walnut Creek, and we have to drive everywhere. We raised kids here, but we’re empty nesters now, and I’m concerned he shouldn’t be driving. I tried to take away the keys, but he’s not that into that. And there’s nowhere for us to move to, to downsize.

AARP wrote a briefing on this like 35 years ago. They’re so far ahead of the game. But you realize the cohort of potential pro-housing folks is so much bigger than we even think it is, because there really are tens of millions of people aging in place in suburbs with driving mandates, who are like, I live in a place where driving is mandatory, I don’t have an option, and I’m realizing I maybe shouldn’t be driving, or my spouse shouldn’t be driving anymore, and we actually would downsize, but for the fact that the neighborhoods where we’d like to downsize to have made it illegal for us to do so. So there’s this large and growing cohort of folks who realize that and are coming out of the woodwork to say, hey, wait, where’s all the senior housing?

And where it ends up, here in the East Bay, I live in Berkeley, there’s a senior housing proposal down by the Rockridge BART station, and it’s going through thanks to bills California YIMBY passed. So we get the full connection of, wow, yeah, this stuff really works. You had asked in the prep, in the questions you sent over, what are some of the messages and communication strategies you can use? And I think this gets at a big one, which is: as big as the tent is now, I actually think it’s even bigger.

Matthew Lewis: There are a lot more people out there who are natural allies. I tried to explain this, unsuccessfully, to some of our erstwhile supporters on the far left. The challenge is that most people actually are not housing-challenged. Even though people might complain about the cost, most people across the United States are securely housed. 65% of Americans own their home. Some might be cost-burdened, but that’s a huge share of Americans who are like, well, I get that there’s a housing problem, it doesn’t really affect me. So how do you activate people? You do it with the highest-level, values-level stuff. Are you concerned about where your kids are gonna live? Are you old and concerned about where you’re gonna live? Would you like to live somewhere more walkable, if you had that option? But it’s very hard to activate people when they’re not impacted directly.

What the YIMBY movement has done, and we’re really lucky, this is one part skill and about five parts luck, is we’ve tapped into a cohort of nerds. We’ve found all the people who get obsessed with stuff like floor-area ratios and single-stair buildings. It’s so weird, like, wait a second, I would never have predicted there’d be millions of people going, oh my God, I’m obsessed with the single-stair building. What a weird thing to be obsessed with. And yet we found them. So keeping the tent as big as possible is really part of the key.

Gary Winslett: No, I think that’s right. And to your point about age cohorts, this is something I’ve found in Vermont, because we’re the second-oldest state in the country. We’ve just got a lot of seniors here.

Tahra Hoops: Second? Is the first Florida? Maine. Okay.

Gary Winslett: Maine is slightly older than us, but we’re pretty old. Even if they’ve been securely housed for a while, they do dislike the fact that wait times to get a doctor’s appointment can be a while, because where are the nurses and NPs gonna live if they can’t move in here? And a lot of them actually want to downsize, but there’s nothing to downsize to, because we don’t have the missing middle. Then it’s got this knock-on effect, where you’ve got an empty nester or elderly couple walking around their three- or four-bedroom house that they would, in theory, like to sell to a younger family, but there’s nowhere for them to move to. And so you just get this blockage in the system, and they can understand that.

Matthew Lewis: They’re experiencing it right now. That’s the key, they’re actually experiencing it, it’s their lived experience today. It’s really unusual to have a large cohort of people seeing firsthand, oh, wait a second, last couple weekends ago we went and looked for condos and there weren’t any. And they suddenly go, wait a second, why aren’t there any condos for us to move into? You’ve gotta find that set of people who get the self-interest in solving the problem. And then you also have to bring in all the people who are like, well, I am secure, but I have an interest in the broader issue. You’ve gotta combine all those things.

Keeping the tent big (and non-partisan)

Matthew Lewis: And the thing we’ve been really lucky at achieving, but that was also very deliberate on California YIMBY’s part, was not turning this into a partisan issue. Not making it about a class war, or about capitalism or socialism, or any of these other in-the-trenches fights that a lot of activists get into. It’s given us a pretty significant advantage, not just in Sacramento. Everybody’s like, oh, well, California’s more liberal. It’s true, we are dominated by Democrats in California, there’s really no Republicans with power to speak of except in places like Huntington Beach, and we’re always suing them over housing anyway. But every one of our major housing bills in Sacramento was passed with Republican votes and would not have passed without them. And you go to other states and that ratio goes way up.

As bad as Republicans are nationally with what’s happening with Trump and in DC and in Congress, and this Cornyn election with Paxton, which is just like, oh my God, how much worse can it get, you go into legislatures in Montana or Idaho or North Carolina or Texas and there are Republicans looking around like, my people are having housing problems, and they’ll vote for good legislation. So the need to keep the narrative at a level where it’s like, yeah, those people in Washington are a mess, but we can solve these problems at the state level, and not make it about that, is really important. Make sure you’re doing the messaging that way. Make sure you’re not letting one breakaway group say, oh no, this is all about this unrelated issue that’s gonna charge things up and shrink the tent. Nope, we don’t do that, we’re about the housing problem. And what we realize is that as long as you keep it pure in that lane, you can draw in a ton of people who, on many other things, you might not wanna work with at all. Just focusing on the housing, you get to work with them.

Gary Winslett: No, I think that’s right. To your point about state-level Republicans being kind of different, Phil Scott, the Republican governor of Vermont, is like super YIMBY. He’s great. Not all state-level Republicans are like that, but some—

Matthew Lewis: No, but you could say the same thing about Democrats. Democrats don’t have any special superiority on housing or transportation either. I’m in constant arguments with my friends in the climate movement about, where are you guys on infill housing and transit investments? Nowhere. They’re nowhere.

Climate, YIMBYism, and a giant mistake

Matthew Lewis: One of the frustrations we have: we passed two major pieces of infill legislation last year. There’s SB 79, which is about more housing near transit. But the other was the full CEQA exemption for infill housing in urban areas, and the climate and environmental movements came out in full opposition to that second bill. And it’s like, wait a second, I come from that movement. When I was working at ClimateWorks, we did a bunch of projects in China through the Energy Foundation China cities program, and we worked with all the Chinese academics. We even published brochures. I have one somewhere, I should have brought it out. It was called “Building Cities for People,” and it was basically, you can reduce all of these impacts by concentrating more housing growth in your cities. This is something people have known for decades. This is 50, 60, 70-year-old stuff. The climate movement has basically forgotten that. Obviously we get a lot of support from climate activists, we get a lot of support from smaller climate groups, but writ large, they’re not there. And it’s like, when are they gonna show up and help?

This gets at the other piece of it. You can solve a lot of climate problems with YIMBYism, important climate problems. In fact, there’s evidence that some of the biggest ones you can only solve with YIMBYism to a certain degree. That’s not to say there isn’t tons of other stuff you have to do, you’ve gotta do electric vehicles, industrial decarb, grid upgrades and all that. But you get a lot of Republican support for things that actually are climate action, by not calling it climate action.

Tahra Hoops: You could do that with so many things when it comes to climate change. It’s sad to see, because I was also working more in the climate-tech space before this, but the second you say the words “climate change,” people think you’re doing 2016, 2020, culture-war stuff, and they just do not care about it. Sorry, go ahead—

Matthew Lewis: It was a giant mistake. There was a giant pivot the climate movement made, and it was a huge mistake, in my opinion. They turned it into a culture war. That was not thoughtful.

Tahra Hoops: And Republicans haven’t moved on from it. If you look at the reasonings for why clean-energy projects are being stopped, it’s nonsensical thinking. I do wanna pull on the thread of why you think that. Because there are climate actors who do show up on these bills—

Matthew Lewis: Oh, totally.

Tahra Hoops: A hundred percent, and we’re not making a blanket statement here. But for those who—

Matthew Lewis: Some of my closest friends are climate activists. I just want everybody to know this.

Tahra Hoops: I know three of them personally. But for those who still push back, I struggle to understand the reasoning there. Or the reasoning of degrowth as a whole. I know Gary has amazing takes here too, but it boggles my mind.

The epistemic crisis and the death of local news

Gary Winslett: I wanna ask Matthew about this, because you’re from the climate space, and there’s climate-change deniers who just deny what is relatively settled science. And it seems there’s a housing equivalent to that, where the economic science is pretty darn clear, housing price is related to housing supply. I’m curious what lessons from the climate space you think translate.

Matthew Lewis: Totally. So Tahra mentioned I was one of the founders of Climate Nexus back in 2010. The challenge we faced at the time, I’ll give the really short version of the creation myth, was there was a group from the Heritage Foundation and some other right-wing think tanks that broke into an email server at the University of East Anglia in the UK. They stole tens of thousands of emails from a server, climate scientists communicating with each other about research they were working on. They mined that email list to find what they thought would be discrediting emails, and then spread it across right-wing media, and Fox News picked it up, and it was all over the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal. Oh, climate scientists are lying to you, climate science is fake.

Long story short, we had to come up with a response to that, to resubmit science as foundational to why climate mattered. I founded Climate Nexus to do that, to ground everything in peer-reviewed research, to really train climate scientists on how to communicate, to get everybody on the same page about, look, what you do with the science after we’ve established it is up to the politicians, but we’ve gotta at least make clear that physics is real. To your point, physics is real, it’s not fake.

The reason I think that’s relevant is that strategy worked in an era when we still had most people getting most of their news and information from mainstream media. Most humans in 2012 were still reading the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, whatever, to get their basic news. That really started to dissolve in the subsequent years. By 2017, really by the first Trump election, there was this giant cohort of people just getting information from totally fake sources. That’s one of the ways Trump won. And the reason that’s so relevant is we’ve now seen that metastasize, and you have these cults of ideology and cults of personality, and everybody’s atomized in the information space. That includes a cohort we colloquially refer to as the left NIMBYs. How is it that socialists who read Marx, who are supposed to do material analysis, would somehow conclude there’s enough housing? That doesn’t match your own experience. And then they’ll say, oh, well, there’s enough housing under capitalism. And you realize, well, wait, so then what’s your first move? And for some of them, their first move is, well, we need to end capitalism. And it’s like, guys, look, I live in Berkeley, California, I’m pretty much on the left, but that’s not happening. We’re not there. You get into these circular debates about, well, is capitalism good or bad? And I don’t care. I mean, I do kind of care, but my job is to end a housing shortage, not to end capitalism. So you end up in these very cloistered conversations that aren’t connected to reality.

Unlike with Climate Nexus, where you could actually work with mainstream media and TV producers to surround-sound like “climate science is real,” we don’t have a vector now to inoculate as effectively as we used to. People are much more in their TikTok lane, their YouTube lane, their Instagram lane. I have no idea where people get information anymore. California YIMBY gets incredible media coverage from mainstream media, and part of the reason is that journalists, all the journalists I’ve worked with, and having been a journalist for many years, they care deeply about accuracy. They do not want to report stuff that’s false, and when they do by accident, they’re like, I need to correct that, because my whole reputation is on accuracy. Because we’re following the bulk of the evidence, that supply and demand is real, Gary, to your point, but also all the housing research about moving chains and filtering and all this other stuff that’s been replicated over time, reporters see that our messaging and our advocacy and even our legislation tracks directly to what the research shows is necessary to end the housing shortage. I think that inoculates us to a degree. Even though people may say, oh, you’re ideologically this or that, it’s like, look, me personally, sure, I ride a bicycle, that puts me in a kind of a cult. But separate that from the fact that all the work we’re doing points back to peer-reviewed research. Oh, okay, yeah, that’s not one person’s opinion, that’s an accumulated consensus from researchers all over the country.

One of the things we realized early, actually my boss had the foresight to say we need to be publishing syntheses of this research. I’ve gotta put in a plug to your listeners: go to California YIMBY and sign up.

Tahra Hoops: I am a subscriber.

Matthew Lewis: Twice a month we publish syntheses of the best housing research you can find. The reason that’s so important is that reporters read it too.

I think the atomization of audiences gets worse before it gets better. I don’t know anybody who’s figured out what you do about journalism and media. It’s a huge problem. And the right is kind of running with the ball, because they can say, well, we’re just gonna do right-wing propaganda and hold our cohort together with that. On the left we have a much bigger challenge, because we’re more heterogeneous. And this is a sub-frustration of mine that I work on as a side project: we can’t get donors from the center to the left to invest in journalism at scale. That’s a huge problem. There are some little examples of it working. One I love to call out, it’s been a major reason for our progress in California, is CalMatters, an independent nonprofit news organization. They’re not growing as fast as I’d like, they need to raise the money, but they’ve got reporters all over the state who are funded to do good journalism. And that good journalism translates up into good legislation, because journalism is the fourth estate. You don’t have an effective democracy without it, you just don’t.

So when we’re talking about communications, yeah, I can do all the messaging research and try to build the big tent and hold the cohort together, and then message on our bills in a way that isn’t too nerdy, but also create a space for the nerds to nerd out on the stuff they get obsessed with. But none of that is as effective now without a really robust ecosystem for journalists, and CalMatters is that. We’re really lucky in California, in the Bay Area at least, and increasingly in the Central Valley, there are really good news organizations and journalists committed to the cause. Los Angeles has been a bit of a wasteland, I’m sorry to say. The size of the city compared to the amount of journalism there just doesn’t line up. There are like three or four really good housing reporters for the entire region of 11 million people. They can’t cover all this stuff. But CalMatters is ramping up, Politico is making some good investments in LA, and that’s very heartening. Even if the reporters are sometimes saying, oh, LA did something bad, that doesn’t bother me, because what I want is more journalism, more coverage of the issue.

So that’s a gating factor, Gary, to answer your question about how you get people to believe things that are true. It’s really hard in the era of atomized audiences where there is no mediator. It’s called media for a reason, it’s mediating a conversation, and we’ve lost the mediation function to a degree. So again, I come back to what I said in the beginning: we’re really lucky to have tapped a thread of deep housing nerds and really urbanist nerds in the United States, that I don’t think we could have created. I think we had to just find it. It’s almost a happy coincidence that there are so many of them out there.

Tahra Hoops: YIMBYs are so prevalent online, and they’re just the best community. One of my dear friends, Natasha Kul, I met her through a YIMBY group chat on Twitter, and I was in her wedding last year. We became such close friends from that. It’s amazing to see such a large grassroots community grow from there. But I’m really glad you mentioned the media aspect, because right now we’re facing kind of a doom cycle. Annie Lowrey wrote a great piece a day or two ago in the Atlantic on how the vibecession is now becoming sort of a permacession. And it’s because the feedback loop, from news translating into policy, is so broken, where there are such mass spouts of misinformation, sometimes disinformation, where people might get corrected, but because outlets are incentivized to get clickbaity headlines, it harms good policymaking. We keep bogging down on Los Angeles, but Spencer Pratt is a perfect example. Someone who was corrected several times on bills like SB 79, and then would still go out there and lie point blank about what it would do. And there was a separate bill, I’m blanking on the other one, for residents in Altadena, that was there to help them—

Matthew Lewis: Oh, the Ben Allen bill. Yeah, yeah.

Tahra Hoops: That had actual—

Matthew Lewis: It was off the hook. It killed the bill. Literally a bill to help people rebuild.

Tahra Hoops: Yes. And it’s shocking that you have to continue to combat this. And you have it from the right, where people like JD Vance go out there saying, we don’t have a housing crisis, we have a people crisis, we need to kick all these people out of here. And it’s like, you are creating fake victims to make yourself seem like a savior. When someone is trying to fear-monger and direct you in a certain direction, that’s when you should stop and question what the prior motives behind this are. This feels like basic stuff I would learn in undergrad.

Matthew Lewis: There’s this emergent joke in the debate about AI, and it’s becoming much more existential as AI becomes a more commonly used thing. It’s an epistemic crisis, no doubt. We’re really having these challenges establishing, well, what is empirically replicable reality? And we’re losing touch with it. The AI joke is, we don’t need more young people going into computer science or engineering, we need more people going into liberal arts and critical thinking. To your point, way back in the day, I don’t know if it’s still around, there used to be this magazine called The Skeptic. Do you guys remember this? Maybe 20 years ago. It felt a little right-coded when you came into it, but when you opened it up you realized what they’re talking about is the scientific tradition of skepticism. Like, I will believe your evidence once you’ve demonstrated it to me to be refutable. We sort of lost that. There’s a huge risk of the death of skepticism, and the opposite of skepticism, of course, is credulity. When you have a credulous population, you’re in real trouble, because, to your point, Tahra, people just start believing whatever crap they’re being fed. Did you believe it because it was told to you by a friend, or by someone very convincing on social media? Or do you believe it because you investigated the claims and, oh yeah, those claims checked out? We don’t do the latter anymore.

Gary Winslett: This is one of the things I’ve been noticing that I find very worrisome. We’ve got this odd juxtaposition where people are often very credulous about what they’re being told right in front of them, and yet at the same time public trust in various institutions is through the floor. So there’s this odd mix of credulity, but also just nihilism.

Trust, state capacity, and the power of City Hall

Matthew Lewis: I think there are good explanations for all of this, and the problem is they’re siloed as far as how people experience them. I’ll give you an example from Los Angeles. The city has spent how many billions of dollars on homelessness in the last 10 years?

Tahra Hoops: Oh God.

Matthew Lewis: Many, many billions of dollars. No progress. And then you have these people being indicted for corruption, for spending the money wrong, and that makes the news. So if I’m a taxpayer who’s very tertiarily paying attention to all this, and I’m a California taxpayer, and California taxpayers are notoriously generous passing bond measures, we probably more than most places actually approve bonds. In Berkeley we approve bonds for parks, you approve bonds for schools all over the state, you approve bonds for the train, and for homelessness. If after several years you’re not seeing results, and then you read a story about how the money all got spent on Ferraris by someone corrupt, you should be like, well wait a second, government is not doing what I thought I was giving my money to it to do. And that will breed skepticism. But it’s even deeper than skepticism, to your point, Gary, it’s actually a loss of trust.

I mentioned at the top that YIMBYism is gonna get pulled into transportation, because we kind of have to. The other place we’re getting pulled into is this bigger discussion about state capacity, and how you not just rebuild state capacity that was lost in the neoliberal era, but to get there, you’ve gotta rebuild trust that state capacity can deliver what it’s saying it can deliver, like trains and affordable housing and actually constructed homelessness services, as opposed to wherever the money ended up going. So you can’t really blame the taxpayer or the voter for being cynical when they’ve got evidence that supports their cynicism. And especially in a democracy like ours, that’s flawed in many ways, people are much more participatory in national politics than in local politics. I actually think the solution is much more local journalism, but then, I come from local journalism, so let’s see if that happens. Most people can name maybe their congressperson, they certainly know who’s president and vice president, but most people can’t name their city council member. And they almost definitely can’t name their state legislator. So they’re attributing the blame to the government they’re most familiar with, even though they don’t really know how the mechanism works, they’re not participating in it. There’s an erosion of civic institutions that’s happened alongside the erosion of our cities. And part of the big-picture YIMBY philosophy is, as we rebuild our cities and fix the mistakes of the last 60 years, my theory is you’ll actually, through osmosis and proximity, get better civic participation and better civic awareness as a result. That’s shorthand for a bunch of other things that have to happen. But a good example, a place that’s super dysfunctional, but nobody would say San Francisco has low civic participation. It’s very high. The problem is there’s an information malfunction.

Tahra Hoops: I also think when people are more open to civic participation, it lets them think of people as a collective, as a community. Right now a lot of Americans across the federal level are acting from a place of scarcity, which causes them to be very individualistic. It’s why people were able to adopt fear, the same as toward anyone else, because we’re already drowning. They can’t even think about someone else, because there’s no stability under their feet. But people forget, if you show up to a city council meeting, you could get things done—

Matthew Lewis: It’s insane. It’s crazy how much power is at City Hall, and I don’t think people connect that. You feel like, well, what does the city do? It collects the trash and paves the streets. And it’s like, well, yeah, and determines the entire fabric of the whole community. They don’t make that connection. You really do have disproportionate power at the local level. I feel like we’ve almost got an upside-down governance problem, where everybody’s super focused on Congress and what the president is doing. And it’s like, wait a second, my theory of governance is that Congress largely reflects a roll-up of what’s happening at the state and local level. So if you have disengagement at the local and state level, you end up with a Congress that looks the way it does, far less accountable to what’s going on at the local level. It doesn’t reflect the values and priorities of people at the local level. And the reason is, well, who’s speaking from the local level?

Tahra Hoops: Mm-hmm.

Matthew Lewis: It’s these NIMBYs. So the YIMBY theory of change is, well, let’s just flip that. Let’s elect a slate of YIMBYs at the state level, and then work our way down and elect them at the local level. And it’s kind of starting to work. You end up with the largest city in the United States electing basically a YIMBY mayor. And in LA, let’s hope and pray something good happens.

Tahra Hoops: It’s a lost cause.

Matthew Lewis: She’s a contender in a way she wouldn’t have been five years ago. She would not have been a contender five years ago. And I think that reflects this pent-up demand for solving cities, among the people who live in them. Wait a second, it doesn’t have to be this broken.

Abundance, one year in

Matthew Lewis: And you started to get at the question about abundance. Tahra, I think that’s where you were going.

Tahra Hoops: Oh, not even. Well, I guess I wasn’t even meaning to. I guess I’m just so abundance-filled it came out by accident. I was going to talk about the fact that you were bringing up the small basics, like picking up the trash. I have a funny story. Back in undergrad I was a very annoying political science major, and I was interning for a member of Congress who was running, and I was out there knocking on doors. I was in college from 2016 to 2020, so I got all the politics, it was very hyperbolic. I remember walking in Queens, ready to talk to people about democracy and what’s at stake, and one of the first things, this old guy just started yelling at me. He’s like, are they gonna fix the streets? If they fix the streets, I’ll vote for him. Other than that, get out of my face. And I remember thinking, wait, that’s not what I was expecting. And then, no, that is what people should care about, and that is what politicians should be held accountable for, because these are the daily things that add up in your life. As you said, in places like California, and this was in New York City, people give a lot from their tax dollars and they just expect the very basics to be working.

Matthew Lewis: It’s like, if you’re driving around a city filled with potholes, and you see an elected official talking about something completely unrelated to that, like, I’m gonna vote to have peace in the Middle East, which is something that happens in a lot of cities. Wait a second, I want peace in the Middle East too, but is it your job to fill the potholes? Make the connection for me here. I get that there’s a lot of passion for peace, I share that passion. But I’m also civically aware enough to know that’s literally Congress’s job. There’s no foreign policy power in the Berkeley City Council. But all the streets in Berkeley are falling apart.

Tahra Hoops: Yes.

Matthew Lewis: Like, actually, I live on a street that’s been abandoned. The city has a program of abandoning streets. No, no, I’m not actually joking. The city of Berkeley is in such arrears on maintaining its streets that the public works department put out this whole guide: here are the streets we’re abandoning, we don’t have money to fix them at all. So I live on an abandoned street.

Tahra Hoops: Oh God.

Matthew Lewis: The city doesn’t have the money to pave our streets. It reaches a state of disrepair where the only option is to tear it up and rebuild it, and we don’t have money to do that. So all we’re gonna do is triage the streets we can save. They didn’t use the word “abandon,” but, you know me, I’m the annoying YIMBY at the city council, and I’m like, hey, I’m just reading this line, this means “abandoned,” right? When the public works department says these streets are beneath the level we have funding to repair, that’s, we’re walking away from these streets. Everyone looks around awkwardly, like, darn it, but yeah, that’s what they’re doing. They’ve abandoned like 15% of the streets in the city. They’re just gonna let them crumble.

Tahra Hoops: That’s insane. These are the things. We can take this back to abundance, but that’s a lot of what abundance was asking for. It was a large state-capacity issue. Abundance has morphed itself, where I think if a lot of people actually read the book, I kind of thought of it as a really nice public-policy 101 intro. It covered some introductory things, it wasn’t all-encompassing, but it was fine as is. Now that YIMBYism, for many people, is combined with abundance, do you think that’s been helpful for the movement or hurtful? Because this is a year later, or is it still up in the air?

Matthew Lewis: I get this question a lot. The way I like to answer is to say, I’ve been a YIMBY kind of since the beginning. There were people before me, but we all met each other in the Bay Area around the same era. Sonja Trauss, we gotta give Sonja Trauss credit, she stood up in 2012 or 2013, the loud Philadelphian at the San Francisco meeting, like, you guys are wrong, we should build more housing in San Francisco. Brian Hanlon met her shortly thereafter, and we all met each other at either Berkeley City Hall or some housing meeting.

The reason I mention that is I’ve been doing this professionally now for nine years, and I can say with a straight face that if somebody gave me the money to do statistically valid research, I bet 90% of Americans still have no idea what a YIMBY is. They probably haven’t even heard the word. YIMBY, what is that? We’re 10 years, 12 years into this thing, and I would say we’re seeing incredible success all across the United States, whether it’s Mamdani, or the Colorado reforms, or the Idaho reforms that just passed, or what we’re doing in California, what’s happening in Texas, what’s happening in Kentucky and North Carolina. It’s grown its own momentum, and people still don’t know what YIMBYism is. So, one year into a new coalition is not the time to ask if it’s working.

The long game

Matthew Lewis: Change in civil society and governance, and I wanna get a little philosophical for a second, I think part of the problem of the collapse of our information environment is that people have lost track of how time works. The kind of change that’s really transformational is decadal in length. It takes decades to really change things in a direction. The common example is the civil rights movement. It did not begin in 1963, the year before it. It began in the 1700s. It took centuries to convince people that humans are equal. Then it grew into a more specific set of asks in the ‘20s and ‘30s around, we want to pass specific laws around voting and access to facilities. And that second phase was still a 60-, 70-year project. The KKK was still running around openly in the 1920s and didn’t get dissolved until the 1930s, when people were like, oh wait, maybe it’s not okay to be lynching people all over the South.

The environmental movement is very similar. It kind of started in the ‘50s with the open-lands and conservation movement, and you had national parks before that, but the clean water and clean air stuff starts in California in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s, and you don’t see progress on clean air and clean water until the end of the 1980s. It took that long to solve acid rain. You still had horrible water quality all over the United States up until the end of the Reagan era. So I wanna ground it. Year one of abundance? Call me in 15 years. Let’s see. YIMBYism is 10 years in, and what gets me excited is that we’re only 10 years in and we’ve got this massive amount of momentum. We’ve passed possibly hundreds of laws around the United States at the state level to unleash more housing growth. That suggests this thing has a lot of growth ahead of it. It’s gonna be so much bigger, because we’re so young and so new. Again, if you ask most Americans what a YIMBY is, they look at you like, I don’t know what word you just said. That’s my take on abundance.

Tahra Hoops: And I love that, and I’m of your mindset. There are a lot of people who saw the one year and thought, one year in, it’s failed completely as a movement.

Matthew Lewis: I was really pissed at Ezra. I actually reached out, I talked to Brian, I was like, dude, we should talk to Ezra, because that’s not fair. And I think if he’s listening to this, I’d say, Ezra, you kind of made a mistake there, bro. The laws we passed a year ago haven’t taken effect, you can’t really be evaluating those. And there’s all these other cycles that have to happen. It takes effect July 1st, so it’s not even in effect yet. But more importantly, it was a little bit of, I wrote the book a year ago, and why hasn’t all this changed? You didn’t really mean that. He’s a really smart guy, I don’t think that’s, I think it came out wrong on his side, and a lot of YIMBYs got kind of Twitter-piled about it.

Tahra Hoops: Just to give people context, that was the recent New York Times interview. It was very long, but I listened to all of it. At one moment they were talking about some YIMBY bills that got passed, and they basically said, oh yes, these bills are passing, but rent’s still high, et cetera. And the one specific one, SB 79, as you mentioned, does not go into effect yet. I see it all the time, people think it’s been enacted for decades. I don’t know where people got this from.

Matthew Lewis: This is where there’s a really funny irony to the way this stuff works. SB 79 began its journey in 2018 as SB 827.

Tahra Hoops: Yes.

Matthew Lewis: And we’ve been fighting publicly about it ever since. This gets back to the typical-voter hypothesis, where they’re not actually paying that close attention, but if you make enough noise about something it becomes part of their peripheral awareness. So they’re like, oh yeah, they passed this in 2018, didn’t they? And it’s like, well, no, we first started talking about it in 2018, but it took us seven years to pass it. So they’re conflating in their minds, well, wait, didn’t you already do that? And it’s like, no, no. And this isn’t a hit against the average voter, it’s an awareness that I’m a nerd, so I’m paying really tight attention to a lot of nerdy stuff most people never even hear about. So the fact that they’re conflating it, that’s not a flaw on their part. We just have to do the extra work of explaining, no, it took seven years, and it just happened, and it’s gonna take another two years to really start to kick in. That’s just the nature of legislative advocacy work.

The downside is we have a lot of bad-faith opponents who will take advantage of people’s lack of awareness to spread misinformation. And that’s as true on the far left as the far right. You’ve got Spencer Pratt spreading misinformation in LA, a low-information environment, everybody’s like, hasn’t SB 79 already passed? It’s like, no, dude, it hasn’t. But we have the same thing with the socialists in San Francisco who will say, oh, they passed all these laws and it’s still not affordable. Both of those polar opposites take advantage. It’s almost like a horseshoe. The thing is, they take advantage of the relatively low salience of public policy issues. And that’s not just true for housing, that’s true for almost everything. Most people just aren’t paying that much attention.

And this gets back to the Climate Nexus discussion. Most public policy issues are low salience, and in a way, Gary, I think you’ll appreciate this for some of the writing you’ve done, it’s a sign of how well off most people are, honestly. It’s a luxury to be able to stop paying close attention to public policy. Most people, even the ones who say, well, I’m kind of struggling, it’s like, well, you’re struggling, but there are solutions, and we could work on them together. Not everybody can be an activist, I wanna be really clear. But I see the $75,000 pickup truck parked in front of the house with a person saying, I’m struggling, and I’m like, yeah, that’s not struggling, buddy.

Gary Winslett: And it’s also a function, when you say it’s about people getting better off, there’s a little bit of privilege going on when you can treat politics as a form of self-expression rather than an activity, just getting something done.

Matthew Lewis: Totally. If YIMBYism were about my self-expression, it would never work. I have a very specific set of the Matt Lewis Perfect World, and I could draw a picture of it and people would be like, I don’t want any piece of that. But that’s not what I’m advocating for.

Gary Winslett: Exactly. And this is one of the great things about YIMBYism. There’s a wide variety of earnestly felt definitions of what the good life looks like, and the great thing about building a lot more housing of all different types is it makes it easy for different kinds of people with different definitions of the good life to honestly and earnestly pursue that. It’s not forcing everybody to agree on this one script of what it means to live the good life. That’s just one of the reasons I like it.

Insurance, cost, and the hard conversations ahead

Matthew Lewis: And this is at the core of our DNA at California YIMBY and the Metropolitan Abundance Project. The thing we’re gonna have to reconcile with, and it’s being forced on us, my other favorite hobby horse is what’s going on in insurance markets and housing risk. It’s an unavoidable collision, there’s no way around it. Where it’s leading is a very politically hard, painful discussion about costs. And it’s not one we’re gonna be able to avoid, because there is, in fact, only so much money in the world. By far the most expensive item on our entire national budgets is not just the housing, but all the infrastructure that serves that housing. To the extent that we’re now staring down the barrel of an insurance crisis in the largest states in the United States, and these are not just blue states, Texas and Florida are in just as much trouble as the rest of us, we’re gonna have to start having some really painful discussions about how to allocate the cost, how to write off costs that can’t be covered anymore. At the small level, it’s the version of, my city has abandoned my street. Imagine that at the scale of an insurance industry that says, we are not going to rebuild that anymore.

This is happening in flooded areas. I talked about journalism. One of my favorite reporters is Liam Dillon, he used to be at the LA Times, now he’s at Politico. He did this incredible piece of investigative journalism last fall where he went back and looked at all the areas that had burned in California since 2015 or 2016, and how many building permits had been pulled to rebuild, and how many houses were actually rebuilt since 2016. It’s 38%. Most people never rebuild the places that burn. And if you look at what’s happening right now in the Palisades, in Altadena, it’s at least as bad as that, actually much worse.

Tahra Hoops: I drove past it recently.

Matthew Lewis: This has huge implications for public budgets. It has huge implications for housing affordability. If it costs $1.5 million to rebuild, to a fire-safety standard, a house that was built for $50,000 in 1940, you’re not gonna build a house. So what are you gonna build? And if you’re not gonna build anything, where do all those marginal humans go? This gets into pretty major areas of public finance and budgets and infrastructure, and we’re just barely cracking the surface of that conversation.

The good life

Matthew Lewis: But to your point about the good life, I agree completely. There is a good life to be had with housing abundance. We’re still in this Cinderella era of the early phases of YIMBYism, where we’re doing the stuff that had to be done, the obvious stuff, zoning reform, building-code stuff, fee reform. And we’re gonna be coming into this infrastructure and budgeting stuff pretty quickly, because how you raise the money and how it gets spent is incredibly material to how good that life actually ends up being.

Tahra Hoops: Well, this has been a lot of fun. I don’t wanna end on the dark and scary note of what is—

Gary Winslett: I enjoyed it.

Tahra Hoops: I feel like we’re sleepwalking into this.

Matthew Lewis: We are, but in a way these are giant first-world problems. But first-world problems. The country has good bones, and we are incredibly wealthy. The combination of those two things is almost the American superpower, really. Setting aside the bigger threat from what’s going on nationally, the long-term implications of our international relations and all that, which YIMBYs don’t work on. Assuming we somehow prevent a total wipeout at the federal level, we’re seeing this growing demand for the better life, Gary, to use your phrase, and people realizing the better life can be a combination of what we consider the better life to be now, but also that it can be different. And the difference piece is where YIMBYism comes in. You really are seeing huge demand for urban living, for walkable living in particular. This is something I write about a lot: people pay a premium for walkability. They pay a lot more for it. And that’s a clear sign of not just demand, but people’s changing preferences. And the changing preferences are where the hope is. When people preferred something that was exclusionary, unsustainable, highly polluting, high-risk, well, we’re seeing the results of that. And what we’re also seeing is that people’s preferences are changing for something that’s less exclusionary, more sustainable fiscally and environmentally. And that, to me, is a good-news story.

Tahra Hoops: It has been very heartwarming to see more of, not exactly the word YIMBY being placed in headlines everywhere, but the only thing you could appreciate about how dire the crisis has become is that people are coming to a good consensus that the only way out is to build your way through it. You’re seeing this from editorial boards, the New York Times had one recently. I find that really encouraging. Even five years ago, if I posted that I was a YIMBY on Twitter, people were coming for you, putting your address in your DMs, saying “stay up at night.” It became, overnight it feels like, where YIMBYism is now almost celebrated, where it wasn’t always the case. There’s been so much growth of what you said is still a movement that is just beginning. That gives me hope, as someone who’s still got a lot of years to live. I haven’t even bought my first home yet. I don’t even know what the market will look like then.

Matthew Lewis: For what it’s worth, I didn’t buy my first home till I was 40.

Tahra Hoops: That will be me as well.

Matthew Lewis: But to your point, there’s this old saying I’m an activist, that I make a joke out of. It goes: first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they join you and claim they were with you all along.

Tahra Hoops: Oh, I’m fine with that.

Matthew Lewis: I kind of feel like that’s what’s happening with YIMBYism. They ignored us, then they were laughing, oh, you’re crazy, you’re never gonna reform CEQA. Then they fought us, and then we reformed CEQA, and everybody’s like, oh yeah, infill housing is great, everybody loves it. So there’s a bit of a secret, and I don’t know that there’s a way to create it from scratch, I’ve never done it successfully, but if you just create enough social momentum with something, you actually will get people to say, oh, I agree with all that, even if they didn’t before. Because there is in fact social norming that happens, and there’s the casual pressure of, well, I don’t wanna be seen as being on the wrong side of this thing that I don’t understand, so I’m gonna pick the side that seems more popular. So the fact that YIMBYism is getting more popular is a really good sign.

California just had the biggest year for housing reform in its modern history. On this episode of The Rebuild, Tahra Hoops and Gary Winslett talk with Nolan Gray of California YIMBY about what actually changed: a full CEQA exemption for infill housing and SB 79's statewide upzoning near transit. Gray, a city planner and the author of Arbitrary Lines, argues that the hard part now is feasibility, and that legalizing the condo is the next front in the fight for homeownership. The conversation runs from degrowth in reverse, to the town that declared itself a mountain lion habitat, to why the movement's real power is 200 people showing up in Sacramento.

This week Gary and I sat down with two amazing housing wonks: Muhammad Alameldin, Senior Policy Advisor at California YIMBY, and Eduardo Mendoza, Policy Director at the Livable Communities Initiative. I rent a condo in LA, and if I opened Zillow tomorrow I could not find anything close to my square footage at my price. There’s a reason for that. California builds about 3,000 condos a year, out of roughly 100,000 multifamily units. As Muhammad put it, more babies are born in two days than we build condos in a year.

Zoning is usually where the housing conversation starts and stops. This episode is about everything after that: why American elevators cost two to four times what the rest of the world pays (Muhammad sits on the board of a senior housing nonprofit that got quoted $380,000 to fix one). Why the windowless bedroom became a standard American housing product. Why a modular home that installs in a day still waits 18 months for permits in San Diego, while Texas approves plans in 24 hours.

It’s a wonky one in the best way. Listen, read, and send it to the person in your life who still blames BlackRock for their rent.

Tahra Hoops: Hi everyone. My name is Tahra Hoops and I am here with my co-host Gary Winslett. Today we have two very special guests with us, both from the great California YIMBY. We have Eduardo Mendoza. Eduardo is the policy director at the Livable Communities Initiative and a Los Angeles-based urban planner. He sits on the board of Abundant Housing LA, previously chaired Inclusive Santa Monica, and has worked with Santa Monica Forward, the Parking Reform Network, and the Palms Neighborhood Council. He has a master’s in planning from USC, and he is also a demographer whose work has appeared in Cityscape and Slate.

Joining us as well, we have Muhammad Alameldin, who is a senior advisor at California YIMBY, where he leads research and shapes the organization’s five-year legislative agenda, focused on the barriers, the how of production, that go way beyond zoning. He was previously a policy associate at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation, has advised BuildCasa, and worked at the Greenlining Institute, and his work has been cited everywhere from the Atlantic to the White House.

Thank you both for being here with us.

Eduardo Mendoza: Thank you.

Muhammad Alameldin: Thank you for having us. Previous White House, not this one.

Tahra Hoops: Back to the good old days.

Why We Don’t Build Condos Anymore

Tahra Hoops: So today I would love for us to start off talking about a very real problem that we have in California that also gets pretty localized in Los Angeles. It’s the fact that we don’t build condos anymore. I rent out of a condo, and if I opened up Zillow for my local area, I would not be able to find anything of this square footage for a similar price at all. So I am stuck with golden handcuffs, and there’s a very real policy reason why we do not build condos here. I know there are a couple bills that you guys have championed, so I would love to start off with an overview, for whoever would like to take that, and some of the bills you guys have championed to combat this issue.

Muhammad Alameldin: So California YIMBY’s legislative agenda this year is, wow, it’s a lot. We’re tackling a few key issues. Number one, we’re gonna make it easier for people to pre-buy units. AB 1406 is a presales bill. Basically, everywhere else in the world, if you have 12 people bidding on a home and the home price goes from $1.1 million to $1.7 million, a developer would find those other 11 people and be like, hey, gimme your down deposit, I’ll build you 11 new units and you guys could live in those in two years. We basically made that impossible in California. The reason why is because developers used to run off with the money, right? Then we invented this thing called computers, and we have this thing called bonding and insurance, and anywhere from Egypt to Guatemala to Germany to Singapore, they all presale units. We don’t have that in California. We’re trying to fix that with 1406.

Oh yeah, my bad. The other issue for condos is construction defect liability, sometimes wrongly called condo defect liability, but it’s construction defect. So what happens is that if there might be defects in your building, a lawyer comes to your HOA, and your HOA has to sue the developer, and then the insurance and the HOA fight it out for five years, and then there’s a big settlement. It’s this long litigious process, and no developer wants to sit in a courtroom for three to five years. And let’s say you did have a leaky window, and then you gotta wait three to five years to get money to fix it. Okay, you fix the window, but now everything around the window is moldy. And it increases the costs, and condos always have to compete with rental housing units. Like, what am I going to build? I wanna build one with less headache, and it’s rentals, because they have a four-year liability instead of a 10-year liability. What we’re trying to do with AB 1903 is just take the lawyers a little bit out of the process. It’s like a car: if I have an issue with my new car, I take it to the dealership and they fix it. If I have an issue with my condo, I could go to the builder and they fix it. That’s our first step in actually making condos a little bit more popular in California.

Gary Winslett: So that makes a lot of sense, ‘cause it got me thinking about a few years ago, I visited some friends of mine in Minneapolis, and they own a condo, and it was nice. We were pretty close to downtown. We could be in the urban center, but they didn’t want to have their own house in the suburbs. They wanted to live in the city, and so a condo was just a way to do that. So I’m always a little stunned that California doesn’t do that, because as great as Minneapolis is, with all of its bike trails and light rail and urbanism, you could do that in California. And I like winter, but most people would prefer the California weather to the Minneapolis weather. So I’m always just surprised. To me it feels very self-sabotaging that California doesn’t do more to just make condos the real starter home.

Muhammad Alameldin: Yeah, everywhere else it’s the real starter home. What we did is that we passed a bunch of random laws in the 1970s and early 2000s that weren’t well thought out, and now we’re dealing with the consequences. Condominium construction, we only build 3,000 condos in California per year. So out of a hundred thousand multifamily units, all of them are apartments except for 3,000 of them. And it’s like, we make more babies in two days than we build condos in a year. It’s not working.

Gary Winslett: Yeah. Well, it also creates this weird two-tier market. You have really wealthy people who can own a whole house, and then you got renters who can’t own, and they’re in apartments. For a place that is fairly left-leaning and rhetorically cares about equality, it’s got this very odd sort of, you know, the aristocrats and the sans-culottes down below. It’s just not a great social setup.

Muhammad Alameldin: Oh dude, yeah. We destroyed the homeownership ladder, right? We’re creating a more economically segregated society, ‘cause we’ve outlawed condos a hundred percent. And you are more likely to own a home because your parent died than you are to buy a condo in California right now. Like, it’s messed up.

Tahra Hoops: It’s an inheritance economy. If you are a boomer, or you know that you’re going to inherit something later in life, you are set. But for everyone else, the economy used to feel like a waiting room. I just need to get a little older, I just need to get a good job, and then the market will have also caught up to me and my financial needs. And that’s just not the case anymore. We’ve kind of lost the plot on what people can agree to be a starter home and what people feel like they should be, to the point where everyone is only ever going to be a renter forever. Which is fine if you are going to be in that financial stability ladder, but we’re forgetting a large bottom rung of people due to that.

Eduardo Mendoza: Absolutely, especially in really high-market areas. For a really long time we kind of stretched the starter homeownership ladder to include townhomes. Townhomes are really valuable in a lot of areas, but in places like San Diego or Los Angeles or San Francisco, they just won’t cut it. You need the density of a condo in order to make a building pencil out for ownership. And just creating those opportunities is very valuable.

Starter Homes on Small Lots: SB 1123

Tahra Hoops: I wanted to ask about one of your more recent bills, I guess this has been just over a year now: SB 1123, which unlocks a lot of the small-lot starter homes. Tell me the mechanics behind that, how it was getting that passed, and what we have seen now a year later.

Muhammad Alameldin: Yeah, definitely. So SB 1123 is an expansion of SB 684. This year we have SB 1116. So each year we’re trying to make the bill better. But SB 1123, we were like, okay, on any multifamily lot, you could split it up to 10 times, or build up to 10 units of condos or apartments on the lot, basically. So what we’re doing is we’re saying, okay, existing land, you could build more housing here. SB 1123 also allows that in single-family zones. We already allow ADUs in single-family zones, but the benefit of SB 1123 is that if you allow for lot splits, these are units that are going to be for sale. So more homeownership opportunity. The average size of those 10 units has to be, like, 1,750 square feet. So you’ll have a lot smaller units, a lot larger units, or somewhere in the middle, but it’s a lot smaller than the 2,500-square-foot single-family home we see everywhere.

And, you know, each year we’re trying to make it better. This year we’re trying to make it so HOAs and CC&Rs don’t restrict it as much. Right now, CC&Rs could say, like, no Black people and no lot splits, from, like, 1930. And the city will say, oh, we’re not gonna enforce that. But then any private citizen could sue. And the thing about lawsuits is that even if there’s no grounds, you’re delaying construction by a few months. We’re just trying to tighten that up a little bit.

Gary Winslett: No, I think that’s great, because no one with a straight face will defend some of that nastiness anymore. You just can’t. Nobody’s on board with that staying on the books, but the fact that there’s this potential risk is what’s doing the thing. So I love hearing that that’s gonna get cleaned up. I did wanna ask, within that, are there minimum lot sizes in that bill? Because those are more prevalent in the Northeast than on the West Coast, but they can sneakily kill projects if you have to put a starter home on a lot that’s too big for it, where land’s expensive.

Muhammad Alameldin: Yeah, so the minimum lot sizes are, for multifamily, I think it’s 600 square feet. For single-family, it’s about 1,200 square feet. So a lot smaller than usual. And we’re seeing a boom similar to what we saw in ADUs. I think Riverside is gonna have like 400 projects come online. I think South San Jose is like another hundred. One is completing tomorrow in San Diego, I’m gonna go check it out. We’re seeing a boom similar to ADUs in 2019. But these are homeownership opportunities, which is awesome.

Beyond Zoning: Elevators and the Building Code

Gary Winslett: No, that’s great. We’re so used to talking about zoning when it comes to housing, for obvious reasons, but I so love the fact that we’re starting to think about other stuff besides just the zoning. I know we’re gonna get to single stair later, so I kind of wanna bracket that off. And we just talked about condos. Are there other non-zoning reforms that you think are potentially super helpful?

Muhammad Alameldin: Well, where do I start? Ed, do you want to take it first and I’ll add some more?

Eduardo Mendoza: Non-zoning reforms. So things within the codes, you might be referring to. Yes.

Tahra Hoops: Or anywhere, wherever your mind goes. Get creative here.

Eduardo Mendoza: Okay, so right now we’re trying to dismantle the myth that a lot of people say, that we’re stuck at building costs, or hard costs and soft costs. We are challenging that notion. One way that we’re doing that is by looking into elevator reform. We overpay in the United States for our elevators, I believe two to four times compared to the rest of the world. And a lot of that is tied to, I would say, bureaucratic and policy inefficiencies that are not directly related to fire and life safety, which is a central theme in a lot of topics covering the building code.

We’re also looking into expanding what the residential code can be. So for context, there are two major codes that govern how we build housing in the United States. One’s the residential code, which typically will cover one to two homes, and then there’s the commercial code, which will do three to as many as you can fit. And there not being a middle ground, or an expanded middle ground, is a problem. So right now what we’re doing is we’re attempting to tackle this on both sides. We’re saying for commercial buildings, you know, what are ways to make our buildings still conform to life safety thresholds while also adopting better electrical code practices, so we don’t overkill the amount of electricity that goes into a building, or elevators, or plumbing. And then on the residential side, we say, how can we upgrade or make our residential code a little bit more resilient in order for it to accommodate a triplex or a fourplex, buildings that would more naturally fall under the residential category?

Gary Winslett: I wanna ask you about the elevator thing, because every time I’ve been part of a conversation in DC about elevator reform, it runs into a brick wall of, the unions don’t want it. Or before they even take it to the unions, it’s just fear of the unions that shuts it down. California is a fairly high union density state, and they’re politically quite strong. Have you figured out a way to get the unions to be on board with elevator reform?

Eduardo Mendoza: I mean, we’re always happy to reach out and get them to understand where we’re coming from. I think a big lesson that we should learn from this type of reform is the people that are impacted by the reform. For example, in the United States, we trail far behind most other countries in the amount of elevators that we see in new buildings. It’s very common in other countries to see an elevator in a two-story or three-story building. You almost never see it here. It’s very common to see elevators in a 10-unit building anywhere else. You don’t see it here. And that has real-life consequences, right? It’s accessibility. It’s the pool of people that you could sell a building to. It’s senior living. It’s people with disabilities, it’s people with children. Let’s say you live on the third floor of a building and you get injured one day. Are you out of luck, ‘cause you can’t get up to the third story of a building?

So what we’re trying to do is create a voice for these people to say, we understand that you have a sweetheart deal with the elevator monopoly, right? Because there are only three major companies in the US. We understand that you’re getting paid really, really well. All that we’re trying to do is expand the amount of elevator installations that we want to get across the country. Maybe it’ll be a little bit less money per elevator, but in large, there’s a lot of opportunity to do either new elevators, new buildings, extra elevators in new buildings, or retrofits of older buildings with elevators. I think it’s a deep win-win situation for all stakeholders. It’s just a matter of challenging the status quo.

Gary Winslett: No, I think the retrofits is an especially good place to start, because you’re comparing the building to, it has an elevator if you can retrofit it in; right now, it doesn’t have an elevator at all. To me, that feels like the first place to go. That would be really helpful.

Eduardo Mendoza: The way I usually describe it to people, and my bad, let me just finish this one and then I’ll let you.

Muhammad Alameldin: Go off, Ed. Go off, Ed.

Eduardo Mendoza: This is usually how people understand the problem, when I frame it like this. You guys know about the McDonald’s ice cream machine problem? When you’re at the drive-through and,

Tahra Hoops: It’s broken.

Eduardo Mendoza: It’s always broken, and you never know why. You guys wanna know why? I mean, it’s not true anymore, because they recently changed the policy, but for the longest time it was true because there’s only one company that could service your machine. And it was up to that one company, exactly, to send their service tech. You couldn’t be an owner of a McDonald’s franchise and say, hey look, the dispenser handle broke, let me order something off of a catalog and hire a guy who has a license to install it. That’d be illegal. You can’t do it. You have to wait for the guy from the company to come. If you want him to come faster, you know, gotta put money on the side.

Gary Winslett: Yeah, and McDonald’s ice cream doesn’t have nearly the margin to justify that. I’m just saying, it’s the McDonald’s ice cream machine. It’s not some high-margin business activity that justifies paying money on the side to get the guy to come.

Tahra Hoops: This is like many home renovations, though. I had a friend in DC who is, by his career, a regulatory lawyer, wanting to remodel his bathroom. It wasn’t intense, wasn’t going into the plumbing at all, just a basic remodel. And the amount of people he had to call to go through to pass all the permits, to get the correct people over there. People were telling him the wrong thing, and this is from the DC government, telling him the wrong thing so many times, where it ended up being such a costly project that he’s just like, I’m never doing this again. How does the average person go through this? It’s maddening.

Muhammad Alameldin: I know a planning director that has unpermitted work ‘cause he couldn’t deal with the process in a different city that he lives in. And if I could add to the elevators, I’m on the board of this church that owns affordable senior housing. We had to fix one of the elevators, and fixing an elevator, and then having a warranty on it so they could come in to fix it anytime for the next two years, was like $380,000. And these are seniors, right? And then I sent that to Ed, and Ed was like, wow, you got a good deal. They could charge a lot more.

Gary Winslett: Oh my God.

Eduardo Mendoza: It’s literally the same elevator that was built in the same factory in East Asia, run by the same company based in Europe. The same elevator in Switzerland, which isn’t even part of the EU, which has their own structures or whatever, they’ll get it at a fifth of the cost.

Tahra Hoops: That’s crazy.

Gary Winslett: So this is actually one of the wildest examples. I did my doctoral dissertation on regulatory trade barriers, so I can nerd out on these international differences. And even in the universe of cases I know of, this one’s extra clear and extra mind-blowing how nonsensical it is.

The Top Non-Zoning Reforms: Codes, Finance, Permits

Muhammad Alameldin: Oh yes. And if we could talk about beyond zoning, to get back...

Tahra Hoops: I was gonna say, I wanna circle back, because I wanna hear your top three outside-zoning reforms.

Muhammad Alameldin: Oh yeah. So this is mostly my job, like, okay, why are things not getting built? So number one, if I could add to Ed’s thing about the residential code, from three to 10 units, it would save 20% on hard costs, and that’s conservative, if we allow triplexes to 10-plexes to build under it. And it would save over a year of delay, because you work with one inspector instead of working with four different inspectors with different timelines. And we could even say, hey, as long as these 10 units are smaller than the biggest single-family home in California, you just use one inspector. Because the biggest single-family home in California is like 48,000 square feet, but they have the most lenient codes. Versus if 10 middle-class people wanna live in homes, they have this regulatory framework they gotta deal with. Ed, you wanna hop in?

Eduardo Mendoza: And we’re already seeing holes in this, or what you always see, the market trying to fix itself when faced with these barriers. For example, in Los Angeles, there’s something called the double duplex. From the outside, it looks like an 8,000-square-foot, four-story apartment. But when you look closely, you’re like, wait a second. This is a duplex with 24 bedrooms and 24 bathrooms in it that is being leased by the bedroom.

Tahra Hoops: Crazy.

Muhammad Alameldin: We wrote a whole paper about this for Mercatus. I forgot about that, Ed. That was like two years of work there. Yeah, it was the double duplex paper, we wrote it for Mercatus. And Mormons are buying these too, because you have nine bedrooms, nine bathrooms, and Mormon households love it, dude.

But three regulatory reforms, let me hit that real quick. So number one, we need to catalyze finance. People think just because we legalize something, the housing finance industry is gonna come in. Nah. Capital’s slow. They’re a little scared. They don’t wanna be the first mover.

Tahra Hoops: Especially in this environment.

Muhammad Alameldin: Yeah. And like, I could double my money with a random coin, or I could follow Trump and how he advocates for war and pulls back, and I could double my money, right? Why would I invest in housing? So I think there just needs to be, like, some revolving loans or these credit enhancements, from the state or from another structure, just to make people more comfortable in investing in housing.

Number two, what Ed was saying: building codes. It’s like a dark box. Anyone could put anything in it. It makes buildings really hard to build and also really ugly. Buildings are so ugly because we have so many codes we have to follow.

Tahra Hoops: That’s a number one critique where many people don’t like YIMBYs. They’re like, we don’t want a bunch of ugly-looking upzoned buildings going up in our neighborhood. And I do understand some of their concerns. You buy a very lovely home, you put your heart and soul into it, and then you just have 20 of the same go up nearby. I can understand the aesthetics issue that people have.

Gary Winslett: But it’s the regulation.

Tahra Hoops: Yeah, I know. I agree.

Gary Winslett: They have to follow these totally asinine rules. I’ve been to a bunch of development review board meetings where I live in Vermont, and it’s unbelievable how much people wanna micromanage the look of buildings, but they don’t know what they’re doing. And so you get micromanaging by people who are not trained to. The craziest example of this was, I was at a DRB for a project that was gonna be a bank and 30 units of housing. And this one guy on the development review board was like, I don’t like this. That corner of that building doesn’t have any windows. And the developer had to be like, sir, it’s a bank. That’s where the vault is going. We don’t have windows into the bank vault. And he just couldn’t. It’s just like, come on, man. You are not qualified to be micromanaging. But that’s what’s going on: you’ve got regulators at the super-local level micromanaging the look of buildings, and then when they look like crap, people are like, oh, capitalism.

Tahra Hoops: You need bigger problems in life if you care about a window on a freaking pink building. Get bigger problems in life. I’m sorry.

Eduardo Mendoza: And there’s a lot of truth behind that. A very big reason of why we have the buildings that look a certain way, or are shaped a certain way, or have massing a certain way, is because of our building codes. And so if we want to work towards nicer buildings, say with courtyards, or more windows, or buildings that look more quaint and, you know, modest, then you do have to understand the big technical book of codes and really point down and reform the code in a way that you will get those beautiful buildings.

Muhammad Alameldin: Yeah, if I could add, the codes make it ugly. So it’s like, oh, NEC standards, right? Says that a kitchen island cannot have outlets anymore ‘cause it’s dangerous. It has to be a little popup outlet. And I’m sure it’s because one company is like, hey, we sell popup outlets, and we’re gonna say it’s a fire hazard, let’s put this in building codes. And now we have these little stupid popup outlets in islands, so people don’t wanna do it. So they just build a kitchen island without an outlet, and then people are gonna go and install extension cords from near their stove over, right? So the inside’s ugly.

And on the outside, on top of building codes, we have objective design standards, which are great in concept. Ministerial review: you’re reviewed quickly, your building gets approved, but the city sets what it’s gonna look like. And a lot of them are like, we must have 11 different materials, we must have these setbacks. It’s like if you have 10 people writing an essay: there’s no voice, and it’s really weird. That’s kind of what’s happening. And then you have 11 different materials and whatever, okay, defects are gonna happen, because you didn’t have a general contractor on that objective design board. So now you’re gonna have a bunch of lawsuits in the building. Everybody just keeps getting into other people’s stuff. Just let it go. Let’s just approve housing, right?

So, the permit timelines, right? SB 1123 is awesome. Still takes like a year to get through permits and everything. After the fire rebuild in Altadena, they were saying, oh, it takes two weeks for us to approve plans. That’s a miracle. I go to Texas, it takes 24 hours.

Tahra Hoops: Ugh.

Muhammad Alameldin: This SB 1123 project we got in San Diego that I’m seeing right now, it took them like 18 months to go through the government process, and San Diego’s really fast by California standards. But they’re installing the units in a day. Then they’re putting in everything within a month. They’re doing modular, but you can actually build the units and have everything installed and be done in a month and a half. But our permitting delays are a year and a half, because people just want random little things, because planners don’t have anything to do. And it’s a huge problem.

Modular Housing

Tahra Hoops: So you actually brought up something that I think our audience would be interested in: modular building. That’s on the newer innovation front when it comes to housing. And you mentioned how it is faster because of it. I would love an overview there.

Muhammad Alameldin: Oh yeah. So modular, I’ll go over some, and I know Ed has some thoughts on this too. If you ask people in the housing industry, they’re like, oh, modular’s not gonna be the solution. And I was kind of in that camp, but then I realized, no one actually did a concentrated push in legalizing modular and streamlining it at a state level before. There are some reforms proposed in California this year. There are gonna be better reforms proposed in the next two years, I promise you that, and we’ll work on that.

But basically it’s saying, hey, instead of building everything on site, we could build some, if not all, of the unit offsite and make the installation in someone’s backyard or on a vacant lot a lot faster. So it’s prefabricated. But you’re building in a factory, so you don’t have to deal with, oh no, it’s really windy, or, oh no, it’s raining. You could actually just build it there. It’s inspected there, through state standards, not local standards. And then it goes onto the site.

Yeah, we need to standardize stuff. Why do we have jurisdictions doing their own thing? That’s wild. What system does that work in? Especially during a crisis. So, yeah, but there’s some issues, right? If you’re transporting stuff from the factory, let’s say from Burbank to San Diego, every different city and county has different rules on, like, how much CHP has to be around that car to drive it over, what hours you could go. You have to have a permit for each stretch of the way, and you can’t do it for a whole year, it’s for every trip that you do with a modular home. And it’s like, oh yeah, you literally can’t transport these buildings.

Tahra Hoops: How do we get anything done?

Gary Winslett: It’s like a case study of something that should absolutely be at the state level, not at the local level. If something’s safe to put on the I-5 or whatever, it should be safe for the whole I-5, not this town versus that town. That’s crazy.

Muhammad Alameldin: Yeah. It makes sense if it’s like the Grapevine. Yeah, okay, maybe we should have different times and standards for the Grapevine. But if you’re driving from Glendale to Pasadena, there shouldn’t be different standards there. And the Terner Center has a whole paper about 40 different reforms that you could do to help with innovation when it comes to modular housing.

Tahra Hoops: Eduardo, I did want to see if you had anything to add there as well.

Eduardo Mendoza: You really covered it. I think the big takeaway from this is: we could solve this through policy. This is not a technological constraint. This is something that we could address head-on and significantly lower the cost of housing.

Tahra Hoops: I often joke that the internet thinks everything’s a conspiracy theory these days. I look around and I think everything is a policy issue these days. Every time you see something that is a small nuisance in your life, I’m Googling immediately: what policy constraints have led us here to annoy me on this specific Tuesday afternoon? That is the dark pill I am on, all of us.

Gary Winslett: You know what’s funny, though, is some of the things you bring up actually travel really well outside of California. So like the modular stuff, we’re really starting to lean into it in Vermont more, because our margins are just a lot thinner. California’s got money, and we just don’t. And so anything we can do to cut cost, we’re trying to do, and modular’s a thing people are really leaning in on.

Catalyzing Finance: Skyscrapers and Presales

Gary Winslett: I also wanted to ask about the catalyzing finance point, because there’s a lot of areas, you know, it might be a low-income urban area or it might be a super rural area, where the financing is a really important deal, in being a little short of making a project pencil versus actually getting it to where someone will build it. So could you say a little more about how you actually do the finance catalyzation?

Muhammad Alameldin: Yeah, so the first one we’re tackling, the biggest one, is AB 2074, which is this bill by Assemblymember Haney that we’re working on with the trades, with the unions, that says the biggest cities, the seven biggest cities, could draw little maps of where they wanna see skyscrapers. It has to be union labor, and of course you’re gonna use union labor when you build a skyscraper anyway, like naturally that’s what’s gonna happen, right?

And what we’re doing is, skyscrapers have such a bad rap in California. Millennium Tower, graffiti tower. So capital doesn’t wanna invest in skyscrapers. So it proposes a revolving loan fund of $500 million from the state that goes in to replace the most expensive part of the debt, with like 12 to 15% interest, with like 5 to 6% interest. And when the building is done, that money goes back to the state, and then it revolves again to another skyscraper. And what it does is, it’s very Keynesian. We kind of create this catalyst where people are like, oh, these skyscrapers are being built, people are renting them, they’re mixed-use or they’re residential, and they’re in downtowns or wherever the city wants more development. Okay, private capital feels more comfortable, right? Because if you have a Millennium Tower that fails, capital’s not gonna invest in another skyscraper in that area in San Francisco for the next 30 years or more. Or graffiti tower.

And that’s the issue of all housing in California, is that financial capital, if you tell them, hey, are you gonna invest in California real estate? No. These big institutional investors that people are complaining about, they’re like, oh, BlackRock’s buying homes and flipping it. They’re not doing that in California. It’s too expensive for even them to do that. So it’s like, there’s not this big corporate scheme in California with money. Not really, because it’s so expensive. You’re telling me you’re gonna hold onto a million-dollar home and wait five years to get $80,000 in equity? No, I could buy fartcoin and make double my money tomorrow.

So we’re trying to get capital more comfortable in investing in California. When it comes to lower-resource areas, when it comes to other types of housing, a credit enhancement, which says, hey, for 10% of this loan, the state will back you on this. We do this with small businesses, and we do this with other stuff that we wanna promote already at the state level. So it would be like, hey, I know this is like a rougher neighborhood, but we want more investment here. And it’s not like opportunity zones, even. And that’s a very controversial thing, opportunity zones. I’m not gonna touch that. What this is, is like: hey, you’re a developer, and 75% of your debt is from a bank, 25% is from private equity. Private equity debt’s really expensive, and that’s actually how they invest in the housing market. Bank, can you put another 10% down for construction? So this project could pencil. And they’ll be like, okay, as long as the state covers that 10%, we’ll do it.

Tahra Hoops: That’s something that, to me, makes a lot of sense. And I love how you brought up that even for these larger institutional investors, they’re making like no money doing so. Which is why I find it to be so funny with specific areas like California especially, people are like, well, corporations are just buying up all the homes, that’s why we don’t have any homes here. I’m like, there are just no homes, period. The undersupply crisis we have here is so deeply severe. I would welcome anyone to come here and start building homes, and if they make a smidgen of a profit, to me that’s better, because at least people are getting into shelter, they’re getting into homes, and they’re fixing a problem that should have been dealt with decades ago. But because of many years of well-meaning policies, we’ve kind of just dug our grave so deeply. I also wanted to, oh, go ahead.

Muhammad Alameldin: Oh dude, I dealt with that specifically, ‘cause I tried to buy a home and I lost out to an all-cash offer a few years ago. I was like, oh man, must have been a corporation. You know, this is evil. I talked to a homie who’s really good at housing finance. He was like, nah, this guy most likely already owns a home. He got a hard money loan against his existing home, bought that house all cash, and then he’s gonna refinance in two months to get a better interest rate. And he beat you with an all-cash offer. Everyone does this.

Gary Winslett: Right. Yeah, that’s how it works. I was talking to my real estate agent here, and he was basically saying the same thing. And it’s always so funny to me too when people say that here, ‘cause I’m like, I promise you no one at Goldman Sachs is like, you know what we’re gonna do? Corner the market in housing in Vermont. That is like our next play.

Tahra Hoops: That’s the moneymaker.

Gary Winslett: That is not what’s going on at all.

Muhammad Alameldin: And the way to break people completely free from private equity in the housing space is allowing for more presales. If a developer could use bank debt and a bond, a bond which is made up of deposits, which is protected and goes back to the buyer if the developer goes under, then we don’t need private equity in the housing market. The United States is the only place that has private equity when it comes to new housing supply investments. For everyone else, it’s like, for small things, some skyscrapers and stuff. You go to Mexico, go to Brazil, go to Singapore, you go anywhere, with social housing or market rate, they all use presales and initial capital to make it, because that’s the only way it pencils. We just don’t do that here.

Single Stair, Finally

Gary Winslett: Eduardo, I wanted to move over to, we’ve delayed single stair long enough in this conversation. I think within this conversation we all know what single stair is, but just for our listeners, walk me through why we even have the two-stairway requirement to begin with. What’s the point, and why is it that other countries don’t have that?

Eduardo Mendoza: Why do we have it? We have it because it was safe, or it made buildings safer, at the time that it was adopted. Two stairs is safer than one in an unprotected building. There were terrible catastrophes where, you know, you would have a fire coming in from a unit or a room that would get into the staircase and spread out through the entire building, and you would have mass-casualty events that were truly tragic. And so in the US, we typically addressed a second means of egress either through a second internal stair or through a fire escape. That’s why a lot of older buildings will have, you know, iron fire escapes right on the facade. In the mid-20th century, I believe, we got rid of fire escapes and ended up just mandating two internal ways of exiting a building.

As the building code has evolved, as fire code has evolved, as all the codes have evolved, they’ve evolved with redundancy in mind. And there have been a lot of advances in how we build homes, how we even build our furniture, right? We have fire-resistant furniture, we have fire-resistant walls, we have compartmentalization. We have certain lengths of how much you could travel inside of a building before needing a mode of egress. All those things combined have kind of diminished the need for a second means of egress in our contemporary setting. And other countries outside of the US, they’ve acknowledged this. And they typically will build their buildings and systems that still maintain very, very high levels of fire and life safety, but also allow for a single means of egress within the building. So it’s a little bit of a broad answer to your question. But at one point it was completely legitimate to address fires with a second means of egress. Today, I believe it’s over 90% of all fires are stopped with a sprinkler system.

Gary Winslett: So we’re talking one-hour firewalls, basically it takes a whole hour to burn through the wall, so it’s not just some old pine box that goes up in a few minutes. We’re talking sprinkler systems, rules about how far away from the door to the stairs. What else goes into fire safety, or are those the main ones?

Eduardo Mendoza: Oh yeah, way more things. There are limits to how large a floor plate can be, it’s typically 4,000 square feet net. There’s travel distances, the farthest you could be away from the exit stair, 20 feet. There are horizontal travel distances as well, I think it’s 125 feet. In some cases there’s pressurization of the interior stairwell itself. There are rules that do not allow stairs to open directly onto your unit, again, to stop smoke spread. There are higher fire ratings for the stairwell itself. It’s not a one-hour, it’s typically two-hour fire ratings for the stairwell, I believe. In some cases other walls are also two hours or one and a half hours. The way to think about building code is through redundancy. You know, if a system fails, there will be 10 other systems that will take its place. And any jurisdiction that adopts single stair, or a single-stair framework for their smaller, modestly sized buildings, takes that into account. It’s never, you know, we’re just getting rid of a stair and calling it a day.

Tahra Hoops: I love that you raised your hand.

Muhammad Alameldin: I had to raise my hand. I wanted to add something cool. And I hope you guys don’t hear the plane. So another thing is that, we do this two-stair requirement, so the only apartments we could build are on, like, this massive lot. And then, you know, the distance from any unit in this giant building to the stairs is much farther than if we had five different buildings with a single stair. So it’s more unsafe than if we were to adopt single stair. And Alfred Twu did this whole thing in the San Francisco Chronicle that you should look up that really illustrates this. We are trying to be so safe against fires that Pew even says you’re more likely to die in a single-family home fire than you are in a multifamily home fire. We try to make it so safe that in the long scheme of things, it’s actually kind of less safe.

Tahra Hoops: That’s insane.

Gary Winslett: And it’s not just a safety thing. The double-loaded corridor, you know, is why every apartment building in America feels like a hotel. Whereas if you go to Italy, I lived in Italy for a year, and people are in these lovely family-style garden apartments that have lots of windows and different-size bedrooms, and it’s just wonderful. And you’re like, wow.

Eduardo Mendoza: And that’s why architects really love this reform. It really allows them to have the creativity to build out the type of building that you want. And it also benefits developers as well. You have a type of building that is able to adapt to different market conditions, to different tenants or buyers. And right now there is that limiting factor, and it’s sadly tied to what seems to be a non-important piece of code. An arbitrary one, right?

One thing that I see a lot today in a lot of new rentals, in 5-over-1s, is the concept of the windowless bedroom, a.k.a. the den. And it’s almost become standardized. You ask anybody from any other country, or even people from here who have no idea of this unit typology, and they say, that’s not good, or, we could do better. Right? And half the time I say, you know, this is something that we have to work with, because this is what the building codes grant us. We can’t deviate. We have to do it, ‘cause that’s the only way we could get the building built in the first place. Whereas that doesn’t have to be a real constraint. You can have units with windows in all bedrooms, right? You can have buildings that have courtyard space and cross-ventilation and all the nice things that improve, you know, your quality of life.

Muhammad Alameldin: One window per housing unit, that was the standard for prisoners for a long time. Like, that is what you have to do for prisons. But now the building codes have gotten so hard that if you want two windows in one space, you gotta have a corner unit, and everyone else has to live, like a prisoner has to, with one window.

And I want to go back to the market conditions. Because we’ve pretty much outlawed single stair, our building codes are difficult. Other countries, when there’s a housing crisis — ‘cause housing crises aren’t new, like humans have had cities for 3,000, 5,000 — I’m Egyptian — thousands of years, right? There have been other housing crises. Greece had a major one in the 1920s. They were short 4 million homes, just like California. What they did is that they had this thing called, I cannot speak Greek for the life of me, antiparochi. Where basically the single-family homeowner would exchange their land to a developer for free, on the condition that they get to own two to three floors of the building. And the developer would build a six-story building with one stair. And then you get to build your generational wealth, and then the developer could sell the other units, and then boom. And that’s how they solved their housing crisis in 20 years. I mean, their GDP growth was like 7.7% for a long time, because they’re building so much housing. It was a major contributing factor. So it was good economically, it was good to solve the housing shortage, and then, like, families got to stay together. And we just cannot do that. The main advantage of single stair is that these lots for single-family homes, we could actually build more units on there. And Ed did a beautiful design competition, a national design competition, recently, and he should share the photos. But we could bring back beauty, and we’re just not doing it.

Tahra Hoops: It also goes to show, like, when people actually treat this as a crisis, instead of what we have now, as in, we have a large group of people who are struggling under this, but we’re still dragging our feet across. And even if we pass great bills on the state level, we’ll have a lot of local counties and cities do everything they can to water down these bills. It’s like, okay, do you wanna treat this as a crisis or not? We need to have someone just, like, have a firm no, really focus on state preemption, and just get it all standardized, so that we can get more people into homes and stop dragging our feet.

Lessons for Other States

Tahra Hoops: But in the essence of time, I did wanna open up the last question to the both of you, just for any advocates in other states who are watching California, obviously. You guys at California YIMBY have passed so many great bills. Still, it’s not solved here, obviously. What should advocates be copying here, and what should they just be learning from, as a case study of what not to do?

Eduardo Mendoza: Well, so one of my hats is working for California YIMBY. My other hat is working for an organization called the Metropolitan Abundance Project. And there we work with different organizations that are truly, truly focused on their core policy issue, and we help them develop model legislation to then introduce to legislatures. So right now we’re working on elevator reform model legislation, single stair, a number of other building codes. On model legislation, we’re doing lot splits, we’re doing one off of 1123 that will be accessible to the country. So we’re proactively working on this, and I invite electeds’ staff and advocates to take a look.

Muhammad Alameldin: What I would say is that, number one, keep the laws easy. Our more complicated laws, no one’s building them. So ADUs, small-lot subdivisions, these are working. Sometimes laws in California are complicated because we have to negotiate with so many people. Other states have it a lot easier to pass laws. And number two, we have this great thing in California called the Housing Accountability Unit and the Attorney General’s office. So when cities break the laws, there’s actually an enforcement mechanism to make them do something, that other states do not have. And I applaud the vision of Governor Newsom on this one, actually. Because it’s like, oh, what city was trying to do a whole mountain lion habitat to get around state law? Altadena. No, not Altadena, I’m sorry, wait, scratch that, that sounds so bad. It’s Los Altos. Los Altos tried to be a wildlife habitat for mountain lions to get around state law. Any other state, that tomfoolery would’ve worked. But here, everybody got involved, and I have developers with, like, 400-plus-unit projects working with the AG’s office against the city, because they’re doing illegal stuff. You don’t have that anywhere else. So make the laws simple, and enforce them. That is the most important stuff.

One Last Thing: The Ballot Measure PSA

Tahra Hoops: This has been great, and I really appreciate both of your time here. I know I learned a lot, and I’m sure our audience will as well. Do you have anything you guys are working on that you would like to plug? Now is the chance.

Muhammad Alameldin: Oh yes. So the state of California is at a crossroads. The Howard Jarvis group is pushing something to the ballot) that would limit transfer taxes to 0.11% and reverse the Upland decision. Upland is this decision where, if there’s a citizens’ initiative, with 50-plus-1 percent you could fund parks and transit and other things that we like, we don’t need a 66% vote. There’s this ballot initiative that’s going in that’s gonna say, oh, we’re gonna limit transfer taxes, because of a lot of the mistakes that LA has done that have killed their housing supply. And the other thing is reversing the Upland decision. Both of those things are terrible for cities, because then you’re gonna cut fire services, you’re gonna cut affordable housing, you’re gonna cut homelessness services, etc. Both groups, for some reason, think they’re gonna win this ballot initiative, the left and the right. Peter Thiel put $5 million behind it.

Tahra Hoops: Crazy.

Muhammad Alameldin: California, let us not do a proposition here. Talk to your state senators, talk to your assembly people. Be loud about this. We need to cut a deal at the state level, because high transfer taxes kill housing supply, we’ve seen it. But also, cutting transfer taxes creates a worse Prop 13 environment where we don’t have any services, and no one’s gonna wanna buy a house where they don’t have, like, firefighters around, right?

Tahra Hoops: Especially not in California.

Muhammad Alameldin: Yeah, especially in California. So let’s talk to your legislators. Talk to your people. Say, cut a deal. The state needs to cut a deal to prevent this proposition, and they have less than a month to do so. This is not a drill. We’re working on this right now, California YIMBY is helping lead these negotiations, and hopefully by the time this is published, we solve the problem.

Tahra Hoops: Thank you.

Muhammad Alameldin: Thank you for having us.

Eduardo Mendoza: bye!

This week Gary and I sat down with Congressman Mike Levin, who represents California’s 49th, the district that runs from Camp Pendleton up through north San Diego and into a slice of Orange County. Levin is one of the few members who pairs a seat on House Appropriations with a real decade of clean-energy work before he ever ran for office, the exact reason why we wanted him on.

We talk primarily about the thing confronting every American these days: the cost of energy. The numbers are rough: energy bills are up about 13% from a year ago. Roughly 80 million Americans can’t cover their utility bills right now. Rep. Levin’s answer is the Energy Bills Relief Act, which he co-leads with Rep. Sean Casten. It brings back the clean-energy tax credits that got cut in the “one big beautiful bill,” makes data centers and hyperscalers pay their fair share instead of quietly handing the cost to you, and rewards the people who actually conserve.

He also doesn’t pretend any of this is simple. He’s a clean-energy guy who’ll still tell you NEPA isn’t perfect, and who won’t let “permitting reform” turn into a Trojan horse for oil and gas. In his words, that’s the dashboard light blinking red. We got into something that should be simple and somehow isn’t: why a military family’s housing allowance is the very thing that disqualifies their kids from a free school lunch. As Levin put it, that’s about the lowest bar a country can clear.

Tahra Hoops: Hi, everyone. My name is Tahra Hoops. I’m here with my co-host, Gary Winslett, and today we have a very special guest. We have Congressman Mike Levin, a Democrat representing California’s 49th Congressional District, first elected in 2018, flipping a long-held Republican seat, and who has won four consecutive elections in one of the most competitive districts in the country.

Levin serves on the House Appropriations Committee, with seats on the Energy and Water Development and Military Construction, Veterans Affairs subcommittees, where he is obviously very busy. And before Congress, he spent more than a decade as an environmental attorney and clean energy advocate. Rep. Levin, we are so excited to have you here with us.

Rep. Mike Levin: Thank you so much for having me. Great to be with you.

The power of the purse

Gary Winslett: Great to have you here. So I guess my first question is, you’re the only member from San Diego or Orange County on House Appropriations, and you sit on Energy and Water. The Trump administration has paused or canceled a whole slew of green energy and grid projects. So my question is, what levers do you have on that subcommittee to push back on that right now? And where do you think a future Democratic majority could move quickly to reverse course on some of these cancellations?

Rep. Mike Levin: The good news is that our lever is the Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 9, Clause 7, that the Appropriations Committee, both in the House and the Senate, has the power of the purse and determines how we spend tax dollars, and also helps to oversee how those dollars are being spent.

And so this administration has run afoul of the Constitution in many ways, but one is undermining the power of the purse of Congress. The good news here is that the president submits a budget request to the Congress, and then we work on a bipartisan basis to try to iron out an actual bill that reflects our values and reflects our priorities.

And on the Energy and Water Subcommittee last year, for example, the president submitted a budget request that eviscerated clean energy and propped up oil and gas at the expense of accelerating the future that I’d want to see, which is more clean energy and lower costs for the average person. But we were able to push back, and the Republicans on the committee actually needed our votes. They needed our support to get the bill across the finish line, and we were able to sustain, I would say, 80% of what we wanted in terms of clean energy funding, research and development funding, and the rest. And so appropriations is a very powerful way where we can combat some of the extreme policy proposals of the president, and not just on energy, where he’s done everything to go after wind and solar and batteries, you name it, often for completely nonsensical reasons. But we can stand up, and we can find common ground, and we can push back against some of the extremism.

Gary Winslett: So it’s funny you mention the president usurping the power of the purse. That’s basically what SCOTUS said when they struck down his IEEPA tariffs, that if Congress had intended to give away its taxation authority, tariffs or taxes, they would’ve said so in IEEPA, and they never do. So this is a recurring theme with this administration.

Rep. Mike Levin: The same is true for appropriations and the power of the purse. And while the Supreme Court ruled narrowly on IEEPA and on the tariff situation, I think you’ll find a similar ruling once the court actually adjudicates Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 related cases, which I think are pretty clear.

Russ Vought, the Office of Management and Budget director, he really is out of control. He is acting as though he’s in charge of federal spending. And look, we can differ on federal spending in terms of ideological differences and matters of different priorities and such. We do all the time on the committee. We have good back and forth, good debate, but we are the Congress of the United States. We’re elected by the people in all the communities across the country to represent their interests and their values and priorities, and we need to do our work, and the executive is then there to execute on the laws as passed by the Congress, including the spending laws.

So look, we see this administration undermining legislative authority on many levels, and this is just one of them.

Tahra Hoops: I’m glad you mentioned the budget, because the first time I went through the proposed budget that they gave to us, it was just about saying, get rid of anything that allows an American to have a comfortable life, and either send it overseas or send it to a defense mechanism, and just completely forgetting what domestic policy was, and forgetting how to have a secure future for American families.

So it’s glad to see members of Congress being able to understand the impacts that it does have on domestic households, because it definitely is jarring to understand. But I did want to highlight some of the efforts that your team has been working on that we are definitely so excited to hear about.

EBRA: the Energy Bills Relief Act

Tahra Hoops: You and Rep. Sean Casten co-lead the SEEC Clean Energy Deployment Task Force, very long name, and co-authored EBRA, the Energy Bills Relief Act. Obviously, energy bills have never been more politically salient than they are now. We saw the recent CPI report. Energy prices, gas prices are simply through the roof. It was an issue before. We have hit crisis mode. And from your seat in California, where people are already paying some of the highest rates in the country, what does this bill specifically deliver for your constituents and across the board? Because they are truly at a breaking point.

Rep. Mike Levin: You are absolutely right. The bills have gone up roughly 13% year-over-year, energy bills. And if you remember, Trump campaigned on cutting bills in half. I mean, think of that. Back in November of 20-- or October of 2024, he said he was going to cut our electric bill in half, and instead it’s gone up significantly, and the war in Iran has made it even worse.

Look, you’ve got roughly 80 million Americans that can’t afford their utility bills right now. In my community, roughly one in four are behind on their electric bill. And so our bill is called EBRA, the Energy Bills Relief Act, and it has five main components, all of which I think are really important to tackling the challenge.

First is reinstating the tax credits that we had in place for things like home and community energy improvements, solar and the rest, that were ended by Trump with his one not-so-beautiful bill last year. And bringing those back, I think, is really important. Two is making sure that data centers are paying their fair share. So we see the proliferation of data centers and hyperscalers all across the country, and we have to make sure that as this is done, the average ratepayer isn’t getting stuck with the bill. So we’ve got a mechanism to do that. Third is rewarding the consumers who are saving energy and embracing energy efficiency, and it’s astonishing to me that we wouldn’t all want efficiency. We wouldn’t want conservation. When I hear the word conservation, I think conservative. You would think conservatives would actually want conservation. But they’ve spent valuable floor time, the Republicans have, on trying to undo efficiency standards for appliances, for refrigerators and shower heads and all the rest. I mean, it’s just insane to me. Number four is providing the financial assistance necessary to families who need it, so that their lights aren’t turned off. And number five is giving a voice back to the American people again, so we actually have a consumer-focused energy policy, not one that’s just run by a handful of big executives or big tech companies.

In California specifically, we’ve got some unique challenges, and the bill has a program designed to offset the cost that utilities are incurring for wildfire-related infrastructure. So wildfire-related costs are now a huge driver of the electric bills, and so our legislation has a mechanism to help offset those costs for the utilities, in a way that I think will be a lot more fair for the average ratepayer.

Feeding military kids

Gary Winslett: Cool. So Camp Pendleton sits in your district, and you recently reintroduced the Military Dependents School Meal Eligibility Act. What that does is it stops the basic allowance for housing that military members get from disqualifying those families for free and reduced-price school meals. A lot of people aren’t talking about this cost-of-living squeeze through the lens of military families. How does that look to you and your constituents from where you sit?

Rep. Mike Levin: So the Marines and sailors that I represent on Camp Pendleton and around our community, and of course we’ve got so many wonderful military families throughout our region, it is an expensive place to live. San Diego is an expensive place, and Orange County is an expensive place, and I hear so often from our military community that they’re having trouble making ends meet.

During the pandemic, I saw really unbelievable stuff with moms and families lining up for food. Kids that in some cases their best meal of the day was that free and reduced meal they were getting at school, and with COVID, they weren’t getting that meal. So the BAH, the basic allowance for housing, is a very modest amount of money that doesn’t really cover the necessary living expenses the way it should, and we should not be penalizing military families and precluding their children from being eligible for school lunches.

It’s really the least we can do. If you think that we’ve got men and women who are volunteering to put themselves in harm’s way to defend our country, to serve our country, and many of them have families that have to move all around the country all the time, and the uncertainty that their mom or dad is going to wind up deployed and in a dangerous situation that can come at any time. The least we could do is make sure the kids that are moving around, that are growing up in this environment, have enough to eat, have a great school to go to, that we’ve got great childcare centers for early childhood. That is the least we could do, and if we can’t even do that, we’ve got to look in the mirror and ask, “What in the world are we doing around here?”

Tahra Hoops: I completely agree, and it is such a frustrating pivot point for people to be like, “Well, what about the very rich of the rich who can afford to send their kids to lunch? I don’t want my tax dollars to fund their kids’ lunch.” It’s such a moral argument. The economics of it is so small. It is so small to be able to provide free lunch for kids. And I find that policies like this can be replicated. If it is in a time of emergency where we find a regulation is a bit redundant, and it needs to be rolled back during this time, we need to look at that specific policy and ask ourselves why it’s there in the first place, no matter how well-intentioned we might square it away in our minds.

But something as small as having free lunch for kids in our schools should not be something that keeps us up at night, especially when we have a current administration sending millions of dollars and causing a global supply shock right now over a war that just about no one voted for, or wanted, or even figured out, or was able to communicate clearly why it was happening.

So I want us to have our focus in the right place here, because it sometimes seems like it’s almost a culture war that gets very misconstrued online, of what’s important and what’s not, and it really shifts our priorities on what matters. But I did want to circle back really fast on all the great things you mentioned in EBRA, because as we mentioned before, you spent more than a decade working in clean energy before coming into Congress, so you more than anyone have such a key expertise on this, and I feel like that gives you credibility to discuss permitting reform. We now have a time to have actual talks on permitting reform. We had talks on it before. I believe Democrats kind of were slow to respond on that. But some in the coalition will treat NEPA reform and faster transmission siting and quicker interconnection queues as a great thing, and others find it as a threat to environmental law. How do you make the case to environmental groups that building faster is pro-climate, that it lets us achieve our climate goals while also achieving our affordability goals that have hit precedence right now?

Permitting reform without steamrolling

Rep. Mike Levin: Well, I think you raise an excellent question, and I guess I would frame it by saying that a lot of times, when I hear people talk about permitting reform, they are talking about it in a manner that is designed to appeal to the oil and gas interests, to make it easier for oil and gas permitting. And I think that fundamentally is the wrong thing to be trying to achieve.

I want to make it easier for building multi-state, multi-gigawatt transmission lines and the electric grid of the future that we’re going to need to interconnect all of the distributed generation, all the electrified transportation, all the other things that I’d like to see in the clean energy future that I hope we all can have.

And so I think there’s a lot of desire to go after the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which was a truly bipartisan bill all the way back in the ‘70s when it was passed and signed into law by Richard Nixon. And it’s not to say NEPA is perfect, because it is definitely not, but I think too often, oil and gas interests scapegoat NEPA as a starting point for negotiations on permitting reform, rather than looking at what the real challenges might be, looking at other reforms that we can make.

I’m also a person who’s developed clean energy projects in my professional career, and I’ve never agreed with the notion that the best way to accelerate things is just to steamroll people, to steamroll parties of interest, to not get good buy-in at the outset of a project. I think we ought to improve the processes that you need to build. You need to make it faster to build. We have ideas in EBRA on how you do that. But I think better community engagement, focusing on the transmission side, is where I’d like to see all this land, and then dealing with the data center piece and the tax credit piece is really, really important.

So anything that, to me, smells like it’s being driven by the fossil fuel industry at the expense of clean energy, for me that’s the dashboard light blinking red.

Lightning round

Gary Winslett: Fair enough. So we like to end with some lighter, more lighthearted questions, just a fun way to end the podcast. Our first one is, what is something that people don’t know about your district that you find fascinating?

Rep. Mike Levin: Ooh. Well, I’ll tell you that Camp Pendleton is massive. If you were to look at Camp Pendleton, it’s bigger than some countries. I don’t know if you’ve ever driven south on the 5 Freeway or north on the 5 Freeway, but you see the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. You might see a sign or two for Camp Pendleton, but you don’t see how far inland it goes. It’s vast. If it were its own city by landmass, I think it would be the biggest city in my district by landmass. And just the extraordinary community there. It really is like a city in a lot of ways.

Tahra Hoops: What is something that you think is too expensive, and you can’t say housing, healthcare, or anything like that?

Rep. Mike Levin: How about everything right now? No, seriously, you know, I love shopping at Trader Joe’s and Costco, and I was just at Costco and gas was $6.80. I know I’m not supposed to say gas, but I will tell you, it was $6.80 a gallon for gas at Costco. That’s a discount of probably 30 cents from elsewhere. And I’ll give you one. I love blueberries, I love strawberries, any kind of fresh food or fresh fruit, and I’ve seen the prices go through the roof. We have a growing son and daughter, 13 and 12, my wife and I, and I look at that grocery bill every month and it goes up and up and up. And I get it. It’s awful.

Gary Winslett: I was just laughing about your berry comment, because I have a seven-year-old, and I go through I don’t even know how much money in the berry fund each month.

Rep. Mike Levin: Hey, and I love our—

Tahra Hoops: Berry fund.

Rep. Mike Levin: —berry growers. We’ve got them in my district, and those are two of my favorite things to eat pretty much every day, blueberries and strawberries. But man, they’re getting pricey.

Tahra Hoops: They’re going to continue to get pricier the longer this goes on, because we’re soon going to see wholesale prices start to rise, and that is going to be passed on to consumers. So it’s not like junk food that is going to rise. It’s the necessities, like the fruits and vegetables, that are going to continue to worsen. And people can square away the gas issue. I’m in Los Angeles. I’m grateful that I don’t actually have to drive. I work remotely. But I remember posting a photo of the gas prices here, and the comments on mine were like, “Well, this is just clearly AI. It’s clearly fake.” And I’m like, “No, they’re real. People are paying them.”

Rep. Mike Levin: Well, it’s the one-two punch of the tariffs and then the war. The war has increased the prices by about a buck 40, buck 50. I will tell you, in California we’ve got higher prices for a lot of reasons, and they were already too high to begin with, but then you add on the war in particular, and it’s just breaking a lot of people right now. They can’t afford it. I’m hearing from people that the percentage of money that’s going to fuel continues to go up and up and up, and there’s just not enough money left over at the end of the month.

Gary Winslett: And then our final question is, what is a policy or innovation that you believe is underrated?

Rep. Mike Levin: Underrated. Ooh, I’ll give you one that’s a little bit wonky, something that’s a big passion of mine. So if you’ve done that drive on the 5 Freeway and you’ve seen those nuclear power domes there that were producing power for many years, we now have nuclear waste on the coast, and the plant there is no longer producing electricity. It hasn’t for some time. We’ve got stranded nuclear fuel at these facilities all across the United States, and that’s not good. We need to get those facilities, the nuclear waste or spent nuclear fuel, to safer places. We have earthquakes, we have population density, we have sea level rise, and we have Camp Pendleton right there, a very important military base. So I’ve been working on a bipartisan basis now for a number of years to really launch a new initiative to solve the spent nuclear fuel challenges across the United States, and that’s actually going very well. It’s maybe the one thing I can point to under this administration and tell you that it’s going really well.

Tahra Hoops: Well, that’s great to hear, and I’m glad we were able to end on a more positive note, given that currently Americans are feeling so many compounded impacts. But it’s glad to see that we have members of Congress who are actually targeted and focused on lowering the daily cost for Americans, because as it continues to worsen, it gets to a financial nihilistic feeling, and that’s a place we never want to be. So we really appreciate the work you’re doing, and for coming over and speaking with us. Thank you.

Gary Winslett: Thank you.

Rep. Mike Levin: Grateful to you. And I think it’s important that we’re not just reflexively against what the president is doing, that we have plans of our own to lower costs and actually improve the lives of everyday Americans. And we do.

Tahra Hoops: Thank you.

The biggest barrier to cheap energy in America isn’t technology, cost, or even politics in the abstract, it’s that utilities get to decide who competes with them. That’s the throughline of this week’s conversation with Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL-06), a clean-energy engineer turned Financial Services Democrat who has spent four years co-authoring the Energy Bills Relief Act with Rep. Mike Levin.

The numbers Casten lays out are startling. There are 2,000 gigawatts of new generation waiting to connect to the U.S. grid. Only 85 of them are fossil fuel. The market has already chosen clean energy; the regulatory system keeps blocking it. Meanwhile, electricity bills are up 13% in Trump’s first year, and utilities just asked for $31 billion in new rate hikes.

From there the conversation widens: what the One Big Beautiful Bill’s rollback of IRA tax credits actually does to coal communities, why one Category 5 hurricane could push Florida into bankruptcy, and Casten’s central argument, that the Republican Party of his youth was pro-market, the Republican Party of today is pro-business, and Democrats have an opening to claim the difference.

Tahra Hoops: Hi everyone. My name is Tahra Hoops. You are joined here at The Rebuild with my co-host Gary Winslett. Today we have a very special guest: Congressman Sean Casten, who represents Illinois’ Sixth Congressional District. It includes a lot of Chicago’s western suburbs. He was first elected in 2018, actually flipping a Republican-held seat at that time. Casten serves on the House Financial Services Committee and the Joint Economic Committee. Before joining Congress, he spent two decades in the clean energy sector, including as CEO of Turbosteam and co-founder of Recycled Energy Development. In Congress, he’s focused on energy policy, climate change, grid modernization, and helping to lower utility costs for constituents across the nation. We are very excited to have you. Representative Casten, how are you doing today?

Rep. Sean Casten: Good. Thank you for having me.

Tahra Hoops: I wanted to jump into the recently introduced Energy Bills Relief Act, which is the most ambitious affordability-focused energy legislation House Democrats have put forward this Congress. It comes at a moment when electricity bills are up 13% in Trump’s first year, and utilities just requested $31 billion in rate hikes. Tell us what is in this bill and why this is the moment for it.

Rep. Sean Casten: It’s funny. Sometimes moments just come to you. Mike Levin and I, who came in together in 2018, have literally been working on this bill for four years, and we’ve been half joking that we were just waiting for Trump to totally botch our energy policy and invade Iran to really make it resonant, so we could run between the shackles.

Somewhat more seriously: when Mike and I both got elected, the Speaker picked us to serve on the climate committee. We wrote a set of 700 recommendations, about 300 of which became law in the Inflation Reduction Act. But when we got our report done, we had a bunch of outside experts vet it, and we said: what is the biggest thing we’re missing that’s going to delay our ability to achieve these goals? And they said, without exception, that the United States has never built transmission fast enough to deploy clean energy.

We’re very good at building gas pipelines, which means we build gas plants where we can run the gas to it at the load. But we try not to build transmission. And so we said, we’ve got to have a package, and we have to have a package that when the window opens, it gets there.

I say this in a climate perspective, but I could just as easily say it in an affordability perspective, because if you can keep your lights on and keep your house warm and get back and forth to work every day without buying fossil fuel, that also means you can do all those things without paying for fossil fuel. Clean energy and affordable energy are completely synonymous.

And candidly, that’s always been the biggest political barrier, because truly prioritizing the interests of consumers to have affordable energy is an existential threat to the fossil fuel sector.

Gary Winslett: It’s funny you mention transmission. Where you are, we make tons of wind in Iowa, and Chicago’s where it needs it. You’re sitting across exactly one of those transmission corridors.

Rep. Sean Casten: Yeah, and there are multiple projects that would bring that wind, that cheap power, into the area, and they’ve been consistently bedeviled by grid interconnection. Grid interconnection is one of these things. The old joke is that asking a utility to connect to their grid is like asking a man for permission to date his wife. Whether or not that’s the best outcome for all involved doesn’t really factor into the conversation.

When you’re sitting there as a utility and power prices are running 90, 100, $110 a megawatt-hour, and somebody wants to build a line that would bring $20 or $30 power in, that’s a competitive threat. You don’t need to be cynical about it. That’s just a practical reality. No business wants to compete with lower-cost supply if it doesn’t have to. And so we’ve seen time and time again utilities and regulators doing a really good job of building transmission lines to bolster reliability and an objectively terrible job of building transmission lines for affordability.

Gary Winslett: Has your region, PJM, been particularly tough on this?

Rep. Sean Casten: Everybody’s tough in their own special way. I criticize ERCOT all the time because ERCOT has remained un-interconnected. That’s the Texas grid. On the bright side, I think PJM has done a much better job than MISO of really embracing markets as tools to solve problems. But all of the regional transmission organizations are really bedeviled by governance problems. Their governance is set by their members, and their members, because they have so much capital invested in the system, are innately lowercase-c conservative.

And a lot of what Mike and I have done tries to fix those things: let’s reform the governance process, let’s compel all the RTOs to be evaluated on a consistent set of metrics over the same geography and on the same timeline, let’s give FERC the authority to permit transmission lines, which it already has for gas lines. We know that system works. We have the ability to do it. But let’s get rid of these abilities for local actors to gum this up, while still making sure that we protect consumers and the environment.

Gary Winslett: Of course. That would just put green energy on the same level playing field as natural gas. What we’ve done with natural gas has been great, but green and clean electricity should be on the same playing field.

Rep. Sean Casten: Look, you can see it in the numbers. We currently have about 1,300 gigawatts of generation in this country. There are 2,000 gigawatts waiting to be interconnected. Of those 2,000 gigawatts, 85 are fossil fuel-fired. Everything else is wind, solar, batteries. That’s what markets want to build. Wouldn’t you prefer to build an asset with no operating costs so you can make more margin? That’s what they want to build. But that stuff is also the competitive threat.

Gary Winslett: Could I also ask you about the tax credits in this bill? What do they do and why do they help?

Rep. Sean Casten: The simplest way to answer is: we simply restore all of the IRA tax credits that were taken away in the One Big Beautiful Bill that Republicans passed. The reason is a little more important from a policy perspective than just “let’s get back at those bad guys.”

If we were to fully embrace affordable energy, it would be a massive wealth transfer from energy producers to energy consumers. Every single American is an energy consumer. A small number of Americans are energy producers. Do the math. All is more than some.

However, for certain communities, that wealth transfer is really, really economically painful. Look at what’s happened to the West Virginia economy as markets have turned away from coal. If you’re living in a town where the mine shut down, then the power plant shut down, then the Walmart shut down, and now the school can’t afford an improvement to the football field, you might understandably not see affordable energy as your friend.

And part of the reason why we wanted to bring those tax credits back in is that when we crafted them, and when I say “we,” I’m talking Mike Levin and the other members of the climate committee, we were really intentional about saying we have to put incentives in place that prioritize investments in those communities that have historically stapled their economy to yesterday’s technology. Because they’re all Americans, and we want everybody to see this as a win, not just the people who don’t depend on the oil derrick in their back 40.

And so those IRA credits with those incentives were really important to put back in.

Tahra Hoops: It is great to see you champion that, because there was so much progress in the prior years and it seemed like we were just starting to see results. But then we have people across the aisle who seem stuck in the past. There was a recent quote from Energy Secretary Chris Wright who said, “I am pretty confident coal will lead the world in global electricity production”. I find that mind-boggling, because if you look across the globe, coal seems like something of the past. Right now we are in an all-of-the-above energy approach, and renewables are a part of that. You’ve directly criticized the Trump administration’s energy policies. What would you say to Republicans who argue that coal or fossil fuels are still the cheapest and most reliable option?

Rep. Sean Casten: Look, it’s not freaking complicated. I could tell you academically all the reasons why, if you don’t have to pay for inputs, you’re going to have a lower operating cost and therefore compete in a market. That makes me sound like a college professor. If you don’t want to treat it that way, just look at the freaking scoreboard.

Coal consumption in the United States has declined over 50% in the last 15 years. That’s not because of wokeism. It’s because a coal plant is a really lousy investment. The private sector is not building coal because you can’t make any money running a coal plant. Coal plants don’t run that often because they get outcompeted by everything else on the grid.

Oil consumption in the United States is exactly the same as it was 15 years ago, not because of wokeism, but because given the choice between a car that gets 10 miles to the gallon and a car that gets 30, or better yet an EV that doesn’t take any fuel, people like not paying for energy. It’s pretty awesome not to have that bill.

So as I tell my Republican colleagues: shut up with your wokeism. You are just afraid of capitalism, because you are a mediocre individual who cannot compete, because you are part of that half of the population that is well below average. That is the Chris Wright story.

Tahra Hoops: I cannot agree with you more. I saw that and I’m like, these are the people who lead and govern us.

Rep. Sean Casten: Chris Wright testified before a science committee hearing that I was on, before he came to Trump’s office. I told him that he was a disposable human being who would be an embarrassment to his grandchildren. I stand by my words. Nobody in the energy industry took Chris Wright as a serious player. He was a guy who could say things and go on Fox TV, and he is as qualified to be Secretary of Energy as Pete Hegseth is qualified to be Secretary of Defense. These are not people who were recognized as understanding the nuance in their industry. Before they got there, they did a good TV hit, and that’s what Trump wanted, and that’s what Trump got.

We have to engage with them because of their power and because they’re tied with the White House. But when you look at what markets were building, markets wanted cheap. When you look at what the rest of the world is building, those not bedeviled by this political concern, they’re making those transitions to more affordable energy.

I’ll give you a statistic. If you divide US GDP by total energy use, we generate about $200 of GDP for every million BTUs of energy. The Danes generate over $500. The Swiss generate over $600. The Brits generate over $300. That means we could potentially double the size of our economy with the same amount of energy input, or cut our energy input by half and have the same standard of living. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?

We invest in labor productivity all the time. We want to get the maximum return on capital. If you’re a steel manufacturer, you don’t want to throw iron away. You want to turn as much of it into steel as possible. Energy is the only place where the United States does such a terrible job relative to other first-world economies at turning inputs into useful output. We can either be depressed about that, or say: what an amazing opportunity to grow our economy.

Gary Winslett: That’s exactly right. The United States has both solar and wind potential, different places, to be sure. Denmark has great wind, not ideal for solar. We actually have both. So we’re kind of just leaving a lot on the table.

Rep. Sean Casten: And candidly, our challenge is that we also have a lot of coal and a lot of gas, and you’ve got a lot of communities that have built their economies on that in ways you don’t see in other countries that embraced efficiency sooner. Denmark is a little bit weird because Denmark made the commitment to efficiency before the North Sea oil discoveries, and by then it was habit. The US, I think, is still deciding whether we want to be full-on adults or whether we still like having the lack of responsibility that you have when you’re a teenager.

Tahra Hoops: It seems to me, just from hearing this, that Democrats are the people who would like to succeed in a capitalistic market, and it’s the Republicans who are holding us back by trying to own the libs and arguing about culture wars from ten years ago. That’s not the narrative you see online. When you think about Democrats and how they move when it comes to innovation, somehow you’d think they’re going to be the party trapped by woke culture stories that you’ll see in the New York Post, stories that are going to harm innovation for all, and that Republicans are trying to be the serious adults. But as you can see from the work you’re doing, it is just the opposite.

Rep. Sean Casten: There’s ample data, and I hate that we have to say this. The Joint Economic Committee, bipartisan and bicameral, has done research showing that going back six presidents, the economy always performs better under Democratic leadership. Not just a little better. A lot better. Eighty to ninety percent of all the jobs created under those six presidents were created under Democratic presidents. The GDP always grows more, the dollar’s always stronger.

I will say there’s nothing innately Democratic or Republican about supporting competitive markets. Ronald Reagan deregulated the airlines and telecoms and led antitrust enforcement. That’s an ideology that works.

I think what’s hard, and this is arguably just as hard for Democrats as Republicans, is that any business that has achieved a certain scale has a lobbying shop. Any entrepreneur with a great idea who can compete against that incumbent doesn’t spend their time on lobbying. So you hear very few voices on either side of the aisle in Washington saying, “What we need is more competition.” Competition has never really had an advocate in Washington.

Gary Winslett: It’s funny you mention how bipartisan some of this is. A lot of that deregulation actually starts under Carter. Carter just doesn’t get as much credit for it as he probably should. But that goes to your point. There’s not a Democrat or Republican way to ensure competition.

Rep. Sean Casten: Maybe this is just my anchor point. I was born in ‘71, I don’t remember Nixon at all, I have vague memories of Carter, but Reagan was the first president I really remember. But I do think the Republican Party of my youth was a pro-market party. The Republican Party of today is a pro-business party, and those are not synonymous terms. There’s a real opportunity for Democrats to step into that void and say: let’s be the pro-market party.

Gary Winslett: I did want to ask you a little more about the Energy Bills Relief Act. If we could get it, it’d be great. How would you assess success in the first few years, if it passes?

Rep. Sean Casten: Let’s make no small plans. I think the last real meaningful energy bill Congress passed was the Energy Policy Act of 1992 (EPAct 1992). That sounds crazy given how long ago that was. We do energy policy roughly every 15 years. We had the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 (PURPA), which was transformative. We had EPAct 1992. We did one in 2005, but it was kind of small. So that’s really the last big one.

When EPAct was passed, within 10 years we built 200 gigawatts of natural gas combined-cycle generation, because suddenly there was an incentive for people to build the lowest-cost source, which at the time was natural gas. Within 10 years, the nuclear fleet went from running at 60% capacity to 90%, because utilities had an incentive to dispatch their lowest-cost assets. So I think we should hold that as a minimum measure of success: within a decade, a complete transformation of the US grid.

Right now you have in the queue all the generation you need to fully decarbonize. If we don’t deploy that quickly, we didn’t get the rules right. Some of what we’ve done is top-down and mandatory, but a lot of it is just changing the incentives.

For example, we have provisions that say: if a utility is investing to decongest the part of the grid you’re on and bring prices down, why don’t we let them make a little more money? Instead of seeing that as a zero-sum fight. If a utility deploys what are known as grid-enhancing technologies, tools that lower line losses on their grid, why don’t they get to keep some of those savings and give some back to the ratepayers? Right now, all of those things are zero-sum fights. So a lot of what Congressman Levin and I have done is to make utilities partners in this, the way EPAct ‘92 gave utilities a pathway to preferentially build the lowest-cost assets. It’s time to update that bill.

The measure of success: let’s be ambitious. Once we’re having a conversation about how zero-marginal-cost supply competes in a market awash in zero-marginal-cost supply and still gets paid to generate, that’s when I know we’ve succeeded.

Tahra Hoops: That all sounds great, and I hope we can get past the gridlocked Congress. Midterms matter so much. But I want to look beyond this bill. You spent four years working on this, and it’s incredibly politically salient right now. What are the top issues you’re focused on, and where do you think you could make the biggest impact this Congress, outside of this bill?

Rep. Sean Casten: The stuff we’re really focused on, and you mentioned that my committees are mostly financial regulation, I’m really increasingly concerned that our next financial crisis is either going to come from crypto or from climate change. Both are creating massive systemic risks.

We spend a lot of time trying to identify where those risks are pooling in our financial connective tissue. On the climate side, here’s a little example: six of the top seven most uninsured housing markets in the country are in Florida counties. Miami-Dade is number one. Broward County is number two. I think Harris County, Texas, is number three. And then it’s a bunch more Florida counties. Twenty percent of all Florida homeowners are in the state insurer of last resort. If that insurer goes away, they have no coverage.

The total value of Florida real estate is about three times total Florida GDP, which means it would only take one Category 5 hurricane to essentially force the state of Florida into bankruptcy. I’m not being hyperbolic. Just run the math on how much of a hit you’d need.

The part of this I think is bipartisan: we’ve never really done a good job of monitoring systemic risks in our financial system beyond a handful of systemically important banks. As we saw with the 2008 financial crisis, if the risk goes off the bank balance sheet and onto an insurance company’s balance sheet, our regulators stop watching it. We made some changes after the financial crisis, but now you’ve got a scenario where the risk goes straight through the insurer onto the property owner, who just says, “I’m not going to get insurance because I can’t afford it.” Where does that risk start to pool? And our financial regulators, particularly in this Trumpian moment, are politically scorned if they even ask the question about climate financial risk. And yet we know those risks are there.

But really the government should be, in the words of Jack Handy, I’d rather be rich than stupid.

Gary Winslett: Fair enough.

Tahra Hoops: I live in Los Angeles now, and for the first time in over a year, we drove down to Pacific Palisades and part of Malibu, which over a year ago was completely burnt down. To see all the structures that were so iconic, and now it’s just complete rubble with not much work having been done. A lot of it is due to the insurance problem we’ve been facing here. It was something they were trying to ignore, and then the wildfires blew it up in everyone’s faces. To see it for the first time in over a year with my own eyes was a very shocking and eerie experience.

Rep. Sean Casten: This is heavy. If you haven’t read the work of Spencer Glendon, I would highly recommend it. He runs Probable Futures, a former managing director at a wealth management firm who has gotten really into climate. One of the points he’s been making for a while is that our species 10,000 years ago survived in a climate very similar to the one we have now, except we were migratory. We need to start thinking about what it looks like to survive in a climate as volatile as the one we have now, because when confronted with this before, our species thought it wasn’t a good idea to tie all your wealth up into a single fixed asset in a fixed geographical location. We didn’t build cities on rivers or along coastlines because we couldn’t count on them staying stable. That’s a really scary prospect. But read the news. There seem to be a lot more migratory people now, aren’t there?

Gary Winslett: It’s funny, in a couple of different ways over the last few minutes you’ve brought up housing, and that was something I wanted to ask you about. A lot of our first pillar at The Rebuild, and all the stuff we do on the cost-of-living blueprint, is about increasing the supply of housing. From your seat on Financial Services, what do you think is the single biggest federal lever that would actually move the needle on housing supply? Is it land use? Is it something to do with Fannie and Freddie? Is it something else?

Rep. Sean Casten: Historically the stuff that has worked best and been most politically durable is lowering costs for first-time homeowners. I say “politically durable” because if you’ve never owned a house, the price of housing is daunting, and we’re seeing the average age of first home purchase going up. On the other hand, 60% of American households own their own home, and the majority of people’s wealth is tied up in their home. And if you want to lose your next election, bring down the cost of 60% of Americans’ primary source of wealth.

If you don’t have housing, housing is a cost. If you have a house, housing is an asset. We want assets to inflate. We want costs to go down. So where Congress has been most effective is helping that first-time buyer get into a home, whether through tax credits or through programs like what we did after World War II, where at least if you were a white American you got a lot of opportunities for discounted mortgages.

The things we call “the projects” were initially built as places for people to get stable housing, and generally that was very racially mixed housing. I’m oversimplifying, but not by much. But then the incentives to lower the cost of first home ownership were applied in very racially disparate ways. And so the projects became a racial thing. That wasn’t how they were first defined, and they worked. We saw home ownership spike with those programs.

I think we’re close on doing a housing bill that would have some good stuff in it. We’ve still got to work out some kinks with the Senate, particularly on what a “financial buyer” of a home looks like and how to prevent financial buyers from coming in. That sounds easy if you just say “private equity is bad.” But then you ask: does anyone have a friend with some investment properties? Would they be covered by the ban? What about a firm that owns housing to provide temporary accommodation for people relocating for a job? I think there are some structural issues that don’t work in what’s come through the Senate, but I’m hopeful we’ll have really hefty credits for first-time buyers in a lot of different structures, because it’s worked in the past, and it stays away from that politically toxic third rail of lowering the price of everybody’s assets.

I represent wealthy people in the suburbs. I would absolutely lose my election if I said, “You know what we need to do is multifamily zoning on your property.”

Tahra Hoops: I appreciate your candor. Trump has even said himself: the thing about building more housing is it will lower housing prices. I understand that point of view, but I’m glad you brought up making it easier for people to own homes. I critique a lot that we are very much in a boomer economy, and it’s very difficult for younger generations to feel like they can get ahead. The economy used to feel like a waiting room. Now people feel like they can’t even get into the waiting room. I would love to pick your brain more, but we’re coming short on time. Let’s do some rapid-fire questions. Low effort, nothing crazy, just the first thing that comes to mind.

What is something you think is too expensive, and you can’t say housing or electricity prices?

Rep. Sean Casten: Junk fees. How much stuff do you get charged for where you’re like, “I don’t even know what value I got”? Every one of those junk fees is too expensive.

Gary Winslett: When I bought a house I remember title insurance. I started looking into it and I’m like, there was no reason this should be this much.

Rep. Sean Casten: Like every time you fly on an airplane. What am I paying for now that I didn’t use to have to pay for?

Tahra Hoops: And what is a policy or innovation that you believe is underrated?

Rep. Sean Casten: The Office of Technology Assessment. It was this amazing office that provided technology assessments for every member of Congress, so robust that in my early years as an engineer and consultant, I’d read OTA reports to get smarter. I’d go in and say, “Let me tell you how paper manufacturing works. Let me tell you how steel manufacturing works. I’m investigating next-generation battery technology. How does that work?” Gingrich and the Republican Congress killed it in [ed. ‘95]. It has never been brought back. Rather than criticize Congress for not being up to speed on new technologies, I don’t think we talk enough about the fact that Congress created an agency specifically to keep us up to speed, and it was a choice of Newt Gingrich’s Republican Party to make Congress dumber. It hardly cost anything. A budget of about $10 million a year.

Gary Winslett: Really Pennywise pound foolish.

Rep. Sean Casten: Again, I’d rather be rich than stupid. That is a politically controversial statement.

Gary Winslett: What’s something people don’t really know about your district that you find fascinating?

Rep. Sean Casten: My district was the last home of Muddy Waters. Coolest guy who ever came from my district. You’d never know it. If you drive through Westmont, Illinois, right now, you wouldn’t think this is where you get the blues. But if you got the blues, got on the train, made it part of the Great Migration, came up north, inspired all these people, and finally had enough to put down a down payment and live in a little house in your final years, Westmont was the place to go. It’s a cool piece of history that runs counter to people’s stereotypes. This does not look like the heart of blues in America.

Gary Winslett: That’s fascinating. I didn’t know that. I’m glad I asked.

Tahra Hoops: And what is something that you think your district does really well?

Rep. Sean Casten: We have really smart and thoughtful people. I’m a nerd at heart. I’m an engineer. Every time I do a town hall, or when we do polls, you realize there are soundbites that infect our public discourse that you can put on a sign. And then you go and talk to people, and they’re just very nuanced and very thoughtful and appreciate the complexities of issues. I don’t know if that’s true everywhere in the country, but I joke all the time that the smartest, most athletic, most charismatic, most talented people in America are all in Illinois’ Sixth District.

Not just the 55% who vote for me, to be clear.

Tahra Hoops: All of them! Well, this has been a lovely conversation. Thank you for all the work that you do. We definitely appreciate it. Thank you for taking the time to be here.

Gary Winslett: Thank you.

Rep. Sean Casten: Thanks so much for having me. Appreciate you guys.

This week on The Rebuild, Gary and I sat down with Rep. Josh Harder for a second time, and I’m so glad we did. Rep. Harder chairs the Bipartisan Build America Caucus and has been one of the loudest voices in Congress pushing the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bill that, if passed cleanly, would be the most significant federal housing legislation in 50 years.

The catch: an 11th-hour amendment called Section 901. It was designed to push institutional investors out of single-family housing, which sounds good on paper and polls well. In practice, as Josh walked us through, it sweeps in the entire build-to-rent category, 72,000 new rental units a year, and forces a seven-year divestiture timeline that would effectively kill the market.

We talked about why Blackstone isn’t actually the villain people think it is, why the best way to punish corporate landlords is to build more housing, and what it’s going to take to fix Section 901 before the bill crosses the finish line. Josh and his co-chairs just released a letter with 76 bipartisan signatures trying to do exactly that– the largest bipartisan push on any substantive policy this Congress.

If you care about housing, cost of living, or just want to understand how a good bill almost gets fumbled at the five-yard line, this one’s for you.

Introduction

Tahra Hoops: Hi everyone. My name is Tahra Hoops. I’m one of the co-hosts of The Rebuild, joined with our other host, Gary Winslett. Today we have a very special repeat guest with us: Representative Josh Harder. He’s a Democratic congressman representing California’s 9th District. He was first elected in 2018, flipping a Republican-held seat, and in May 2025 Harder launched the Bipartisan Build America Caucus, which focuses on reducing regulatory barriers to accelerate housing, energy, and infrastructure development. He serves as its chair.

Harder has been active in pushing for federal housing reform, including the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a major housing package currently under consideration, with a lot of debate around provisions like Section 901. That’s going to be the ongoing theme of this conversation, so we’ll dive right in.

Representative Harder, how are you today?

Rep. Josh Harder: I’m doing great. It’s good to be with you.

Tahra Hoops: For listeners who haven’t tracked every single twist and turn of this bill (and there have been many), would you give us the quick spiel on what the now-amended 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act actually does, and why we’re calling it the most significant federal housing bill in decades?

Overview of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act

Rep. Josh Harder: This bill is a little bit of a franken-bill that combines about 27 other bills into one whole. But I really break it down into a couple of different categories.

First, this creates incentives for cities and counties, local leaders across the country, to build more housing. If they build more, they’re going to get more money from the federal government.

It also repeals a lot of red tape in things like the HUD building code. The big thing there is the repeal of the chassis rule, which is preventing us from building manufactured housing. As you and your listeners probably know, we’ve had very little, if any, construction productivity growth for many decades. So this repeal is a chance to actually lower housing costs by building more homes in factories, a really exciting move in the right direction.

And third, it also expands categorical exemptions from federal permit review so we can actually build housing faster. This is the same sort of thing you’ve seen in states like California and others that have passed real pro-housing legislation over the last couple of years, the federal complement to that.

It does a lot of great things, and that’s one of the reasons we’ve been pushing for it for the last couple of months. We’re hoping we can fix a couple of the last provisions and get this across the finish line for good.

Gary Winslett: Before some of these provisions that we’re going to talk about got added, this was something to be really excited about. The first iteration that went through the House, I was just amazed at how good of a bill this was.

Rep. Josh Harder: That’s right. This is our first chance to pass a federal housing bill in 50 years, so I think it’s really an exciting moment. It’s turned bittersweet, unfortunately, but that shouldn’t cause us to lose hope. We’ve come to this because of such a huge grassroots mobilization across the country to finally bring up housing as a federal issue.

There’s been so much growth at a state and local level over the last decade or two. This is the first time we really have a moment at the federal level, and there are so many good ideas in this bill that are going to do a ton of good.

One thing I’m really excited about is that this helps build more pro-growth zoning practices for cities that actually want to grow. We’re very consumed sometimes with cities that don’t want to do anything, but there’s a whole section of cities out there that really want to build more housing. They just don’t know how. This bill is going to have a lot of support to make sure those folks can actually pass pro-growth measures that accelerate more housing construction. So yes, there’s a whole lot of good things in here, and it’s the result of years of hard work.

The Build America Caucus & Energy Permitting

Gary Winslett: I’d love to talk about how it fits into your broader political trajectory. You launched the Build America Caucus last year to cut red tape, to get federal housing, energy, and infrastructure projects actually built. Where does ROAD fit into that broader project?

Rep. Josh Harder: This is our top priority this Congress. It’s the reason we created the caucus, because there really was not a hub for this type of work. This work spans a lot of different congressional committees, and we wanted something that would be a little more collaborative. Frankly, there are also a lot of folks who weren’t on the main committee that manages housing (the Financial Services Committee in the House) who wanted to be involved in this work. We knew it was going to be bipartisan, we knew it was going to get a lot of momentum, and that’s why we created it in the first place.

The second big effort we’re working on in conjunction with this housing bill is an effort to get an energy permitting bill across the finish line, to make it easier to build energy and lower costs, which I think is especially important when we’re seeing demand growth in artificial intelligence and data center construction across the country. That’s our second priority. But this housing effort is really the reason we constructed this caucus in the first place.

Gary Winslett: It would be really great to see. It was so disappointing when we didn’t get EPRA across the line in the last Congress. So it would be really great to see its successor be really good and do well.

Rep. Josh Harder: There’s some real momentum. There are ongoing negotiations. Ultimately, we need a lot of trust. This administration has unfortunately created a bit of a political vendetta against clean energy projects. They’ve canceled solar projects that were days away from construction and actually offering power to homes.

One real precondition for getting an energy permitting bill across the line is going to be some type of guarantee that this administration is actually going to support all-of-the-above energy, not just fossil fuels, which they clearly love, but nuclear, solar, wind, and geothermal. If we can get that type of commitment, the policy here is pretty well understood, with broad bipartisan agreement behind it. Really, the limiting factor at this moment is the trust to actually get a deal.

Tahra Hoops: Trust seems to be a major key when it comes to any energy infrastructure project. Before we go off on a major tangent, it is just so politically salient right now. When you’re going outside in your car and you see gas prices being screamed at you, and at the end of the month you’re getting utility bills, knowing that remains a major priority for your caucus is always reassuring for us to hear.

But to shift gears a little bit and get back into the nitty gritty:

Section 901 Explained

Tahra Hoops: Could you walk us through what Section 901 (which sounds very wonky as it is) actually is, how it kind of got snuck in there, and why we might have some faults with it?

Rep. Josh Harder: There’s been a lot of concern over the last couple of years about institutional investment in single-family homes. Think about this as Blackstone or BlackRock (sometimes people get a little confused in the memes online) buying all the homes across the country, and that’s the reason housing prices are so high.

I think most of the policy wonks who look at this issue will tell you that’s not entirely true. Institutional owners have less than 1% of the single-family housing stock across the country. But in some areas it can be a lot higher: in metro Atlanta, for instance, more than 30% of single-family homes are owned by institutional investors.

So certainly it is a concern, and there’s been bipartisan agreement on it. Trump has talked about this in his State of the Union, and he’s tweeted a lot about it as well. He’s said this is something we really need to fix. We need to get large hedge funds and private equity firms out of the housing business. That’s gotten a lot of support from the left wing of the Democratic Party as well, which is always skeptical about corporate ownership.

There are real concerns there, and that’s why ultimately, in this bill, there was an 11th-hour change to put in a provision that would put some real limits on institutional ownership in the housing market. I think it was well-intentioned. Unfortunately, because it was drafted at the last minute and didn’t really have time to be heavily vetted, it has some real unintended consequences.

This is Section 901 (that’s the section in the bill), and effectively it’s going to halt the production of a part of the housing industry called the build-to-rent category, which right now is building 72,000 new rental units per year, especially in areas of the Sun Belt like Arizona, where these are just going up like wildfire.

So this provision is going to push out renters. It’s going to destabilize housing through mandatory divestment timelines that are going to compel these owners to sell their property and ultimately displace the renters who live there right now.

The way I think about this and explain it to folks: it’s like trying to solve a food shortage by banning supermarkets. You are punishing the folks who are building the housing that’s actually going to address the crisis we’re seeing all across the country.

Institutional Investors & Build-to-Rent Concerns

Gary Winslett: My mom actually lives in one of these rented build-to-rent houses. She’s got a family member of mine with mental illness challenges, and they just need a house. But they don’t have the money to own one, so they rent one of these build-to-rents.

If the company that manages that is forced to sell it because there’s supposedly some evil landlord, she’s got to move. I just don’t think that’s the intention people have when they think about institutional investors. As you noted, it’s less than 1% of the single-family homes. How did this become such a thing people focus on?

Rep. Josh Harder: Everybody looks for a villain in politics. When you’re frustrated by the state of affairs, you want to find somebody to blame. So it’s no surprise that when we’ve seen housing prices grow more than double the rate of inflation over the last couple of decades, and when most young people can’t afford a house, there’s going to be a lot of anger out there. Somebody’s going to take advantage of that and try to divert it onto somebody else. Especially at a time when people are really skeptical of Wall Street (and understandably so), there’s going to be a lot of blame thrown on private equity.

I think there’s a lot of damage private equity often does. You see consolidation in markets like healthcare where it really is a problem to have so much consolidation. But transferring that to the housing market is a very different situation, where there’s so much capital out there but ultimately most homes are owned by the people who live there, or by landlords that own just a couple of properties. I think the situation here is just that people are really frustrated and they want to have somebody on the other side who’s been responsible for creating all of these problems. Because if it was that easy, we could just fix it. We could just ban institutional investment and all of a sudden tomorrow housing prices would become affordable all across the country.

Of course, that’s not what’s going to happen. It’s because we haven’t built enough housing. If we need to build millions of new units, that’s what we need to be focused on.

The analogy here: if you actually look at the filings of some of these companies, if you look at Blackstone’s filings, they will talk about how one of the biggest risks to their housing portfolio is the risk that we might actually build more homes. Because if we do that, it would actually lower the value of their investments. So I tell folks, if you’re really frustrated about corporate ownership, the best way to stick it to ‘em is actually to deal with the supply issues and build the homes that we can all live in.

Gary Winslett: That’s exactly right. When we build more supply, you have a lot more power on the side of the buyers and renters rather than the landlords, because now it’s the landlords who have to compete to find somebody to live in the house, not the renters trying to compete with each other over a very limited stock.

Rep. Josh Harder: Yeah, absolutely. You can see this time and time again. Abuses by landlords go down when we build more homes. It’s totally obvious. When you have an alternative, where you can move across the street if you don’t like the person managing your home, then you have those options. The best way to give power to the people is to build the homes for them to live in.

Tahra Hoops: It’s funny that this has such strong bipartisan appeal, and why Trump has been very vocal in his Truth Social posts about it, because he’s aware that people are very upset with the economy, as much as he’ll go on TV and say otherwise. But rather than changing some of his policies, like tariffs on construction material (which won’t help) or deporting our entire construction workforce (which also won’t help), doing things like that would be actual tangible efforts to lower the price of housing. But he doesn’t want to do that, because those are his favorite pet policies.

So now he can jump in on this because his team will tell him it’s going to poll well, it’s salient to voters. He can put a very tiny Band-Aid on this, and to him, he’s fixed the problem. He can point to it and say, “I signed that, I got that across.” And while we know it won’t make any meaningful difference, what’s going to happen is that by the time people start to notice, he may be out of office, and we’re still stuck with the issue, which has grown even harder.

But I wanted to get back to the specifics of the bill. Obviously, as we mentioned, it kind of snuck in at the very last minute, to the point that even Senator Schatz at one point said it was a mistake. But clearly it was not: it’s something that’s been doubled down on.

Problems with the Current Language

Tahra Hoops: Where do you think the current language overshoots itself? Would it be just the investor ban in general, or the fact that the text also catches net-new build-to-rent or renovate-to-rent housing?

Rep. Josh Harder: I think the two biggest problems are the overly wide definition of what actually constitutes institutional ownership, and the divestiture timelines.

It’d be a very different situation if you were saying there was a 30-year investment window for you to actually build a home, rent it out, and then maybe someday down the road you had to sell it, maybe to the person who lived there. Right now, the seven-year window that exists, given how long it actually takes to build a home, get all the permits, and do the construction, is just way too short. It would functionally completely kill this market.

And then of course, as Gary said, you’re including a lot of folks, like the entire build-to-rent category, that just don’t belong here. This isn’t what people have a problem with. This isn’t some Wall Street billionaire owning a home and then doubling rents the next day. These are people actually building new homes.

I think it’s unbelievably ironic that a bill all about trying to build more homes could very well have the opposite impact, which would be an absolute catastrophe. It would break my heart if we spent all this work trying to get something across the line, and it actually had the unintended consequence opposite of what we’ve all been working for.

This is actually a very easy problem to solve if we want to solve it. The challenge is that there’s just so much desire from the White House and from folks in the Senate who are pretty wedded to an anti-corporate position that it’s going to be a little challenging getting folks to get to yes here.

But we released a letter yesterday that had 76 signatures of members of Congress. That is a big deal. Just to put that in context, that is the largest bipartisan push for any substantive bill this Congress, for the last year and a half. And it was more than half Democrats, half Republicans, actually a few more Republicans than Democrats in the end. That tells you there is a huge groundswell of feeling that we can get this fixed while retaining the momentum and passing the bill.

Worst-Case Scenarios

Gary Winslett: You told The Dispatch that you’re worried about fumbling at the five-yard line. If 901 stays in there as currently drafted, as you say fumbling at the five-yard line, what do you think the worst-case scenario is if that actually comes to pass?

Rep. Josh Harder: The two worst-case scenarios are passing this bill as-is, or not passing the bill at all. Neither of those are acceptable, and that’s why we have to thread the needle here. We want to keep this momentum. The fact that we could pass the first housing bill in 50 years is a really important moment. This 11th-hour change that unfortunately has gotten a lot of bipartisan support has a real risk of pushing us in the wrong direction.

But the second big risk: we pass this bill as-is, and the benefits turn out to be less than we’re hoping. The chassis rule doesn’t actually produce more manufactured housing. The incentives might not be enough money to cause cities to change their behavior. But the bans are pretty well defined. So unfortunately, one big consequence could be that this bill stops more housing than it actually stimulates. The reason that’s such a big deal is that 72,000 homes a year, over a 10-year timeframe, is a lot of homes.

Blue State Exodus & Political Messaging

Tahra Hoops: All of this is coming to a head while we’re having conversations on the side and noticing the data is showing us we’re facing a blue-state and blue-city exodus. It’s an immediate problem because it shows that people are looking around at the places they live in and the elected leaders they believe in, and they just don’t find it worthwhile to live there. It will also become an electoral problem: if we lose that, it’s going to make races that much harder to win.

I think we have to come to a whole stop as a Democratic Party and look within ourselves and understand: people are leaving for a reason. If you look under the hood, you do see housing is going to be the largest driver of it all. So it would be a logical next step to make it easier to build.

It gets to the point where it almost sounds a little boring to keep saying the same thing over and over, “build, baby, build,” but it keeps refraining from happening. And circling back to the seven-year timeline you gave: that is incredibly short in the period of getting to permits, getting to actual building, getting someone into a home. By the time that happens, it absolutely makes no sense to just build that home.

There is a popular show right now called Euphoria. The main subplot is a lot of crime, drugs, crazy stuff. And then there’s one subplot of one of the developers: he just became a developer, he took over his dad’s business, and he’s trying to build in California. Every other scene is like, “Have you tried getting permits here?” I find it so funny that it’s worked its way into a very popular show. No one has any clue how important this is to me as a policy wonk, and it is really hard to get permitting over the line here.

So what I ask you is: we are in a midterm year, and we do know that not having Wall Street in homes polls well. How do we make this message more politically feasible to the average voter who’s not going to spend as much time on this?

Rep. Josh Harder: You’re totally right on the exodus from blue states. I saw just last week that California is going to lose a million school-age children, which is a challenge to our public school system. We’re just seeing a shrinking in blue states because people can’t afford to live there. It’s not that they don’t want to. I talk to folks all the time whose kids are moving out of state because they just can’t find a home to buy.

But I actually think the two bigger reasons are even more important. One is just the economic opportunity that is limited when you can’t actually buy homes. The best way to see it: with the AI boom in the Bay Area, so many folks are concerned about what AI is going to do to jobs. This is clearly a very productive moment. There are a lot of millionaires and billionaires being minted in San Francisco. Every other time we’ve had a virtual gold rush like that, we’ve seen a huge flood of folks from across the country going into that area to make sure that economic opportunity is shared by all.

That was quite literally the Gold Rush. That’s how my family got to California. My great-great-grandfather got on a wagon train in 1850, and I think if it was a million dollars to buy a home in California, he probably would not have pushed that wagon train all the way into the state. The fact that we’re not able to build housing essentially means we’re not going to make sure that the economic opportunity created by any of these superstar cities is actually shared by enough people.

The second issue I really care about is just the enormous amount of cynicism and apathy about our political process, and life itself, when you can’t actually afford to buy a home. People are really angry out there, and that’s one of the reasons we have to fight back some of the provisions that might not actually make people happier, like banning build-to-rent housing. That cynicism is so potent because people don’t believe they’re actually going to have a life better than their parents. The most important reason for that is they don’t think they’re ever going to own their own home.

There are so many negative effects that come from this housing crisis. This is probably one of the most important policy issues we have across the country, and we are right at the moment where we can actually get this solved.

To your question of how we do it: I think we have to work on people’s minds instead of their hearts. In their hearts, everybody gets this. But the analytical part of our brain sometimes shuts down when we think about housing. We have to persuade people that, on this issue where everybody wants to make it more affordable to own a home, the best way to do it is actually not by banning some of the folks who are doing that right now. It feels like it should be more intuitive than it is, but unfortunately that’s clearly not the case. If we can actually show folks that what they’re trying to do would do the opposite, we can hopefully get a little more momentum.

Gary Winslett: On working with where people are, I’ve found the analogy that works for me the best is asking people: what do you think would happen to the price of used cars if you banned new cars? Any used car that was still in really good working condition, now that’s what rich people are going to want to buy up. That’s just going to jack up the prices of all the used cars underneath them. You’ve got to be able to break it down in those kinds of ways that people get.

Rep. Josh Harder: Absolutely. That’s a great analogy. It’s odd that people understand supply and demand in so many different ways, but when it comes to housing there’s often a little bit of a blind spot. I think that blind spot is just: people don’t believe it’s going to happen. They see the cost, but they’re very skeptical the benefits are ever going to be shared.

The only antidote to that skepticism is reality itself. When people visit a city like Austin, where rents have fallen, they start to say, “Hey, it is possible to live in a city that a lot of people want to live in and not pay through the nose,” although it’s still pretty expensive there. If we can get out of the unfortunate loop we’re in right now, back to a virtuous cycle where people actually see the housing being built, they see prices fall. My hope is that virtuous cycle can be sustained. But we have to force ourselves back onto it first.

Tahra Hoops: Yeah, I think once people start to actually see results is when the tides will change. A lot of people are just acting from a place of scarcity and financial nihilism. People don’t believe it can get any better, so they don’t want anyone to get let in, because right now they already feel like it’s not even enough for them.

That’s why JD Vance has been so popular in putting the narrative that it’s just an immigration issue: it’s not that we don’t have housing, we just have too many people here. But to me, that’s anti-liberalism in itself, to instead say, “No, we’re closed, we can’t welcome you anymore.” And that’s why we have the housing crisis we have now.

It just is mind-boggling to me, because a wealthy country would instead look and say, “Let’s build more so we can welcome more people in and have a better future for all.” To me, that is the most American ideal you could have.

Rep. Josh Harder: Not only is it nihilistic. Go to any housing construction site and you’re going to see immigrants. I mean, those are literally the people building our housing. Not only is it anti-liberal. If you are super anti-immigrant and conservative, you still should want to make sure we have more immigration to actually build the homes that people live in. Because let me tell you: if you walk around the construction sites I see, you’re going to hear a lot of Spanish.

Closing Thoughts

Tahra Hoops: Well, I think that is all the time we have. Thank you so much, Representative Harder, for being on here and for doing the work that you’re doing. I did not know that was the largest bipartisan signage you have on that letter, so just seeing what an incredible feat is happening behind the scenes here, it’s very encouraging for us to see and hear, and I’m sure for the readers and watchers as well. So thank you again.

Rep. Josh Harder: Thank you for the work you’re doing. Now let’s go out and get it done.

Gary Winslett: Thanks.