One question that will be in the minds of voters these coming November elections will be about who can reduce the cost of living and specifically, who can lower the cost of housing. California has the highest median home price in the U.S. and only about 19% of households could afford to buy a median-priced home.
So why is housing in California so expensive and why can’t the state get the crisis under control? The reasons are varied, but one significant contributing factor is local regulations that stifle construction by enforcing strict zoning and building requirements.
As was clear to see recently when I spoke to the two candidates running to represent a Southern California Assembly district, the politicians that we send to Sacramento often enthusiastically enable local governments to stifle development without really understanding the consequences.
Let’s meet our candidates
Republican Assemblyman Tri Ta and Democrat Dr. Paula Swift are running to represent the 70th Assembly District, which covers parts of northwest Orange County including the cities of Westminster, Garden Grove, and parts of Huntington Beach and Seal Beach.
Before being elected to the Assembly in 2022, Tri Ta served as a councilmember and later the mayor of the city of Westminster. Before running for office, Paula Swift earned her Doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership and owned her own business consulting firm. She was briefly a candidate for California’s 40th congressional district last year before switching to this race.
Misguided enthusiasm for local control
Ta and Swift both stated that one of their top priorities is tackling the state’s affordability crisis, but as they revealed in their discussion of housing policy, their approach to doing so is akin to fighting with one hand tied behind your back.
Both candidates expressed support for local control and opposition to mandates from Sacramento that set housing permitting quotas for cities and opposition to regulatory roll backs like Senate Bill 79, which overruled local laws limiting multi-family construction near public transit.
As reported by the Los Angeles Times, SB 79 has the potential to facilitate construction of over a million new housing units in the state’s biggest urban centers. The calculus is relatively straightforward: when you make it easier to build housing, more housing is built, and when more housing is built, housing becomes more affordable. As a real-world test case, after experiencing soaring housing costs, the city of Austin, Texas prioritized policies which eased housing regulations. What followed was rapid construction of new housing and, as a result, falling rents.
Ta voted against SB 79. According to him, it went too far by failing to respect the desires of individual communities. Similarly, Swift seemed to think that such mandates are insensitive to the needs of local communities and wished to see the state work closely with local governments to find happy compromises.
Talk of reaching compromises where everyone is happy is better suited for sappy movies on the Hallmark channel. The reason we’ve started to see sweeping housing mandates come out of Sacramento is that there is simply no other option for finally getting local NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) activists out of the way – leaving local communities to their own devices has only worsened the housing shortage.
One problem with local control is the local governments
When it comes to relying on the wisdom of local government, Tri Ta should know better. Coming from Westminster politics, he has participated in and witnessed firsthand how dysfunctional and destructive many local governments are and how unserious many people elected to city offices can be.
If we include Tri Ta, I have now interviewed three former and current Westminster politicians – the other two being council member Amy Phan West, and current mayor Chi Charlie Nguyen who were both failed candidates for California’s 45th congressional district.
My conversations with each of them led me to the unavoidable conclusion that none of them are suited to holding their local offices in Westminster, let alone higher office. It also explained why Westminster politics are known for being a chaotic and incompetent mess where they regularly engage in shouting matches and where someone getting censured is just a routine part of the city council agenda.
These are the sorts of people that Tri Ta thinks should be making the decisions that determine whether California will continue to be an unaffordable place to live. As opposed to, say, property owners who might want to build housing against the wishes of local politicians.
On other issues, the candidates also floundered
That Tri Ta and Paula Swift hold superficial positions on housing policy was unsurprising given how the rest of their interviews went.
Domestic violence is a signature part of Swift’s platform yet she was unable to provide a single relevant idea for a policy objective that she will pursue. Her knowledge of important proposed legislation was also lacking as evidenced by her not knowing that the pension-boosting Assembly Bill 1383 is not about whether to cut pensions for public safety employees but about whether to increase them.
Tri Ta claims that he’s a fiscal conservative but he voted in favor of AB 1383 even though it would increase the cost of public pensions by billions, the majority of which will go to increasing benefits for employees already earning over $160,000. He told us that he did so because voters approved Proposition 36 and therefore voters care about public safety, but that doesn’t follow.
I also asked Ta what he thought of all of the Chinese-communist-mass-surveillance-like Flock cameras being installed all over California. He said he was against them. But then I asked if federal immigration agents should be allowed access to the data from surveillance systems Ta said he opposed. To my surprise, he said yes. Essentially, according to him, he’s against mass surveillance tools but if we’re already violating privacy, we may as well let federal agents in on the action.
Voters of AD 70 are stuck between a rock and a hard place with these two candidates. More generally though, the race helps us understand how the housing issue has deteriorated in California. The state is overflowing with politicians that reflexively advocate for the right of your neighbor to forbid you from building what you want on your own property, even if it’s something as productive as a few apartments.
Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com.