Plain English with Derek Thompson - How Abundance Won in California

Episode Date: July 3, 2025

The California housing crisis is a disaster and an emergency. Housing construction per capita has steadily fallen in the last few decades, while home prices, rent, and homeless rates have all soared. By some estimates, the state is three million units short of housing demand—the equivalent of seven San Franciscos. One of the major barriers to building more housing has for decades been provisions in the California Environmental Quality Act. Signed by Gov. Ronald Reagan in the 1970s, the CEQA has been called "the law that ate California." It essentially allows anybody with a lawyer to stop any project they don’t like, for any reason. But this week, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed two bills to defang the CEQA. Housing reform advocates are calling it one of the most important legislative breakthroughs in modern state history. It could make it easier to build downtown housing and other urban development projects such as health clinics and childcare facilities. As Newsom wrote, “I just enacted the most game-changing housing reforms in recent California history. We're urgently embracing an abundance agenda by tearing down the barriers that have delayed new affordable housing and infrastructure for decades." Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks wrote the bill to encourage more high-density housing projects, while State Senator Scott Wiener wrote the bill to exempt several types of projects from environmental review. Wicks and Wiener are today’s guests. We talk about the long road to breakthrough, the art of political persuasion, and the future of abundance in California. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Buffy Wicks and Scott Weiner Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you hear the word Seattle Supersonics, what comes to mind? Maybe it's Sean Kemp, The Rain Man, or Gary Payton, the glove, or maybe an image of a tall and skinny 19-year-old rookie, Kevin Duran. For fans in Seattle, it's something else. It's tragedy. It's theft. An iconic team with an incredible fan base that packed its bags and shipped off for Oklahoma City. From Spotify and The Ringer, I'm Jordan Ritter-Con.

And in my podcast, Sonic Boom, I talk to players, politicians, owners, and fans about how Seattle lost the Sonics. You can listen to it on the Book of Basketball feed on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. Today, how abundance won in California. There's a story we tell in the first chapter of abundance about housing. In some ways, it's the entire story of the book in capsule form. It's a tale of two cities. The first city is Lakewood, California.

After World War II, millions of veterans, returned from the European and Pacific theaters. They started families. Young parents, balancing babies in their arms, needed places to live. And housing construction revved up to meet their demand. Few suburban developments showcased this revving up of home construction better than Lakewood, California, a stretch of farmland for growing lima beans and sugar beets just north of Long Beach. Between 1950 and 1953, more than 17,000 homes went up on this land.

At its most furious pace, the city's builders finished a new home once every seven and a half minutes. In four years, Lakewood was transformed from farmland to the fastest-growing city in the fastest-growing state. Lakewood was a poster child of what would become known as the growth machine of the 20th century. This was not a compliment. The growth machine referred to the unrelenting building up of cities and buildings. bridges and infrastructure in ways that trashed the environment, poison the air, and dark in the water. There was a reaction to the growth machine, and it was epitomized by another California city, a few hundred miles north of Lakewood. Petaluma is nestled in the windy hills north of

San Francisco. Its population also rose after the war. But unlike Lakewood, Petaluma became famous within the state not for welcoming growth, but for stopping it. In 1971, it created a hard cap for the number of housing units that could be added in any given year. In the next decades, these hard caps proliferated. The Petaluma Plan was one of a set of new rules that sought to freeze the physical world. In 1970, Governor Ronald Reagan signed the California Environmental Quality Act, or Sequa, as it's commonly known, which became a Swiss Army knife for any group to file any lawsuit to block any new construction at any time.

It was used not just to stop the growth of chemical plants, but to stop the development of solar farms and wind turbines and downtown bike lanes. Today, California is more Petaluma than Lakewood. Housing permits have plummeted. In Los Angeles, fewer homes were built in the 70s and the 60s, fewer built in the 80s and the 70s, and fewer still built in the 90s and the 80s, even as the city's overall population grew.

In the early 2020s, with home prices at record levels, the Petaluma Plan reached its logical endpoint. By some estimates, the state is now three million units short of housing demand. That's like seven San Francisco's. And now, for the first time in the history of the state, California, which as late as the 1960s was growing twice as fast as the rest of the country, has been shrinking this decade. The growth machine has been officially transformed into an anti-growth machine. Nobody should want to go back to the 1950s. That was an era of deadly pollution and toxic air and an utterly careless attitude

toward preserving the environment. It was good that we created environmental legislation to save the air and the water and the birds and our lungs. But now the medicine of the 20th century is contributing to a new disease of the 21st century. the disease of not building. Building what California needs today, building what America needs today, requires a recognition that we need a new social contract

that balances the needs of the public with the limitations of the planet. For almost a decade, there's been a political revolution to create this new paradigm. A group of lawmakers and advocates in California have been growing their power. They call themselves Yimbis.

That's yes to building in my backyard, as opposed to Nimbies, meaning not in my backyard. For years, this group has tried and tried to change the housing equilibrium in California. This week, they notched their greatest victory yet. On Monday, Governor Gavin Newsom signed two bills that make it easier to build downtown housing and other urban development projects, such as health clinics and child care facilities. Most directly, the laws roll back SICWA, making it easier for builders to build without the threat that every effort to change the physical world

will be tied up in court. As Gavin Newsom wrote, quote, I just enacted the most game-changing housing reforms in recent California history. We're urgently embracing an abundance agenda by tearing down the barriers that have delayed new affordable housing

and infrastructure for decades. End quote. Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks wrote the bill to encourage more high-density housing projects. Senator Scott Weiner wrote the bill to exempt several other types of projects from environmental review. Today's guests are Wix and Wiener.

We talk about the long road to breakthrough in California, the art of political persuasion, why housing is progressive and the future of abundance. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English. Scott Wiener, welcome at the show. Thank you for having me. Buffy Wicks, welcome at the show.

Thanks for having me, Derek. Scott, I want to start Big Picture here before we dive head and shoulders in the details of this legislation. California and housing. This is a crisis that is infamous. Everybody knows what it means in the big picture. But I want to know in your direct experience,

in your conversations with constituents, what does the California housing crisis look and feel like on the ground? Well, it looks and feels very real and raw on the ground. It's about talking to people who are really unhappy that their kids have left San Francisco and that they're not going to be able to see their grandkids very often because there was just no path for them to be able to have housing that they can afford that makes sense for a family.

It is about people who have lost their housing and now feel like they need to leave because there's no way for them to afford something now that they've lost their housing. It's about small business owners telling me that they're really struggling to find workers, like for retail or in hospitality, because they can't pay enough for someone to be able to afford housing. It manifests in so many ways, and it's just incredibly harmful. has deep damage to any community when housing costs are through the roof. Buffy, there have been other legislative efforts to confront this problem, the lack of housing construction throughout California.

In the last eight years, the legislature has passed more than 100 housing bills, but you're still far, far behind your state-level goals. So why, if you've passed almost 150 bills, is California is still so far behind in meeting its housing needs. Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, you know, this crisis was decades in the making. You know, this is decades and decades of making very difficult to build housing in California. And so turning the aircraft carrier around takes in it, takes a beat. We've had some successes, ADUs, I know we're discussed often in excess re-dwelling units. We've done a lot more local enforcement and ensuring that locals are actually following state law. You know, the Attorney

General has the Housing Accountability Task Force, the governor has sued cities. Like, there's been I think C-Change politically that the policy is now just catching up to. And I think the biggest illustration obviously is what happened this week, right? Where the crisis has metastasized to such a level that finally politicians like us are, I think, acting with courage in a way that we haven't had the ability to do so before or the desire or we were running into kind of the politics of this for such a long time. And I think we finally, like with the passage of this bill, which I know we'll get to, really called to question the efficacy of sequo and what it's been doing vis-a-housing our housing crisis and push through to, I think, a new level of recognition as an elected body

to say, this crisis is here, it is present, it is concerning all of our constituents, and it's time that we actually act in a bold way, in a bold manner to solve that problem. Some of the stuff we've been doing has been good, but it's really been nibbling around the edges until I think, really, this week was a breakthrough moment. Scott, the centerpiece of these bills is a rollback of Sikwa. And what I'd like you to do is to give me an example. of how SQL works well. We're going to get to Buffy to give examples of how Sequa can be abused,

and I think those examples are often more famous, more infamous among people who are following this debate. But I want to be clear on this call that this is not some kind of effort to destroy environmental regulations in the state of California. This is a law that does good things that has been abused.

So give me, why do you give me a little bit texture on what Sequa is and how you've seen it used well? Yes, Sequa has the word environment in it. And so people assume it's a purely environmental law and it's not. It is a law that in part helps with environmental protection. Like, for example, if you're going to put a chemical plant in a community doing an assessment, there about what the environmental impacts might be so they can be mitigated. And so there are various ways in which SICO can have strong environmental benefits.

And that's why some people will say, hey, we should just repeal SICO. I don't believe that. There is a piece of it that is very important. Unfortunately, over the decades, over the last 50-plus years, since it was enacted, frankly, through court rulings, it's been expanded. profoundly to apply in situations where no one would have thought an environmental law would have applied. And so just in recent years, we've seen Sequah used to try to kill a food bank in Alameda, to try to kill a child care center in Napa. We saw recently the oil industry

sued the city of Los Angeles under Sequa after the... the city council passed an ordinance to phase out oil extraction. So literally a fossil fuel, fossil fuel companies using a quote unquote environmental law to try to pump more oil. We saw Sequa be used in San Francisco to try to block and successfully block for a while, our bike network. So trying to make it easier and safer to ride a bike. We've seen Sequo used to block transit-oriented development.

right by a train station. We've seen it used to try to stop a library renovation or a park renovation. It can make it harder for someone to weatherize their windows because historic preservation gets looped in to Sequa. So I have in the past referred to Sequa as the law that swallowed California. And that's not because there are not that there aren't good parts to Sequel. there are. But it has just grown into this Frankenstein monster that applies in way too many contexts and undermines climate action. Scott's absolutely correct. But the reality of the matter is

Sikwa is used in the same way for oil drilling and fracking as it is for multifamily housing and a transit line. And so the fact that you have a law that can be weaponized in such a way for two very different circumstances is the reason why I think we need the reforms that we now are pushing for and succeeded in getting. I don't want you to go deeper on that, Buffy, because, you know, Scott calls it a Frankenstein monster. I guess my metaphor of choice would be like a Swiss army knife of obstruction. It allows anybody to obstruct anything, right? It's a law that essentially gives anybody with the ability to call a lawyer the power to stop any project they don't like for practically any reason. And this is a power that can be used for good if you're

stopping, say, some plant that is going to poison the local neighborhood. But if it's being used to stop child care centers and plan parenthoods and bike lanes and clean energy projects, it becomes this terrible irony where an environmental law is being used to stymie the construction of green energy projects. But Buffy, I want you to go one level deeper on housing and urban housing in particular, because Sikwa's use to block housing construction is a huge part of the impetus of your legislation. So before we get the details legislation, I really want to understand the urgency of it and the scale of sequa's use to block housing in California. So, for instance, in my district,

I represent Berkeley. UC Berkeley is in my district. There are 10% of the students at Cal have are experiencing homelessness while at Cal. 10% of the students in one of the world's best institutions, higher education institutions. And there's People's Park that is there. This is a classic example. There was a development to bring in 1,200 units. People's Park has been an open-air drug market, essentially. You can't walk by it.

It is not a place that you want to be around. And there's been homeowners in the area that said, you can't build housing there, and they filed a sequel lawsuit that said students and humans, have noise. Human noise violates sequa, you know. And so we had to do a bill that we passed in the legislature, in the Senate and the assembly that the governor signed that said human noise cannot be considered under CEQA. Right. So that's like one example. Now the project's going forward.

It's 1,200 units, 1,000 units for students, 200 units for folks experiencing homelessness, units that we need in our communities. So that's just sort of, I think, one example of money. And there's hundreds of these examples across state of California. And what also happens is once there's even the threat of litigation of I'm going to file a SQL lawsuit, that completely starts depressing the ability to build the housing. And once one plot of land that could be developed has a threat of a lawsuit, if the developer says, listen, I'm out, I'm not going to develop this because I just don't want to deal with the SQL lawsuits. It's hard for them to even sell it to another developer because the other developers are like, I don't want to deal with this. if the local community is going to do a SIGWA lawsuit. So that's why you have all these plots of land that could be repurposed, you know, dilapidated strip malls, etc.

That could be repurposed for what we really need, which is housing. But there's this, this invisible hand of oppression that is Siqua that has stopped our ability to actually build. And, you know, the Stevenson project that Scott was just talking about is another good example. That is one block from a BART stop in downtown San Francisco, a 100% union-built project on a Nordstrom parking lot that's 400, 195 units, 120 of them affordable for low-income folks, that is to me the most environmentally friendly housing that we can ask for right on a barred stop, essentially. And yet there's environmental policy that's being used to stop that project. So this is what we're trying to get at is to unlock a lot of our ability to build this type of housing. So on Monday, millions, maybe tens of millions

of people got this push alert from the New York Times informing them that Gavin Newsom had signed landmark legislation that might be the most important housing reform in decades in California. You had to read a little bit to realize that there were actually two different bills, a Buffy bill and a Scott bill. We'll think of them that way. Let's talk about what the Buffy bill does first, and then Scott, you can talk about what the Scott bill does. Buffy, you go. Sure. So my bill essentially says SICWA no longer exists for infill housing. Infill being defined essentially as our current footprint is the way to think about it. So if we've already built there, SIGWA doesn't apply if it's housing, essentially.

Low-income subsidized, missing middle, market rate, all the above for 20 acres or less for these projects, SICWA no longer is necessary. And this, I think, is sending a huge signal to the state, to our constituents, to the developers, to the financiers, to, you know, homelessness advocates and others to say, we're ready to be building housing. You know, I was talking to a land use attorney after this was passed on Tuesday, and he was essentially speechless. And he said, Buffy, I am literally rewriting all of our applications right now and all of our projects ready to resubmit all of them tomorrow to take advantage of this opportunity to know now that SICWA is no longer going to be an impediment that we have to deal with in terms of

getting these projects moving forward. And to get really nitty gritty here, and Scott, I want to get to you in just a second, but to be very specific, right, if I'm a developer, I'm someone who wants to build in, you know, on a parking lot in a space between some housing in San Francisco. How exactly does this CEQA exemption cash out for me? Yeah, so you still have to go through the normal process of getting your entitlements and going through the process that we, and we're all, that's something Scott and I also working on is making sure the process is fair across localities and there's a fair set of rules. But you still have to go through that process.

You know, the buildings still have to adhere to local, you know, height requirements and other things that local municipalities have control over. it has to be zoned for housing or zoned for multifamily. So the zoning laws, those laws still have to apply. But the CEQA component of having to go through CEQA no longer exists, which is a huge impediment to building the housing that we need. It makes it faster to build the housing and thus it also makes it much cheaper because time is money.

Well, time is money, exactly. And so when you have years and years and years of delays on these projects, that no longer is going to exist because of CEQA. Scott, what does your legislation do? So Buffy's Bill is much easier to describe mine as the clunkier, wonkier one, but it's also, and it goes beyond housing. But I think it's good. So we make a couple of changes. Historically in SICWA, because the politics around SICO have been so toxic.

And SICO fundamentally is, yes, part of it's about the environment, but fundamentally, CECWA is about leverage, control, and extraction. It's about different groups who span the gamut. It could be a company that wants a competitive advantage against another company. It could be a labor union that wants better wages for their workers. It could be an environmental group that wants environmental mitigation and neighborhood group. And so sometimes for very good reasons or very bad reasons, people are very used to leverage. and using SICWA to control a situation.

As a result, the legislature historically has not really changed SICWA, but has created exemptions from SICWA, which we've been criticized saying that it's the Swiss cheese approach, but exemptions are very powerful. Buffy's bill is an exemption. But in this bill, we actually went in to say, let's, in addition to some exemptions, let's try to reform Siqua itself. And that was explosive, but we got a few of the things through. One of them, super wonky, is what we call the administrative record.

The administrative record is when a city does an environmental impact report on a project, they have to put together this administrative record. And then when the lawsuit happens, that becomes the record for the lawsuit. And if a city, if there is like an email or some even minor stuff that has gotten left out of the record, the entire environmental impact report can be overturned. and you go back to scratch on the project. And so the courts had to find the record so broadly that you could have some scheduling email from the assistant to the assistant twice removed that didn't make it in.

And that could be a problem for the administrative record. So we narrowed the administrative record to be only the documents really seen, reviewed, relied on by the decision maker or by their top staff. So we limited that and made it more streamlined and less of a gotcha in court. We also change CEWA itself to say that if a project almost qualifies for an exemption, but not quite, let's say there are seven factors. They meet six of the factors, but they miss on the seven. Right now or before this law, you'd have to just go back to a full environmental impact report as if the exemption didn't exist. We've now changed it that if you come close to the exemption but just miss it, the environmental

impact report is limited only to the part that you missed. So it's a much, much smaller, faster, less expensive environmental impact report. And then we added a number of new exemptions. We provided an exemption for farm worker housing and repair, an exemption for certain clean water and wastewater projects in lower income communities. We have a ton of communities in California that need improved or new water systems. We exempted wildfire risk reduction projects. So brush clearing or some of the forest work that has to happen.

We exempted broadband. And I know I know you, I think you've talked about that before some of the challenges in deploying broadband funds. So we've now exempted the bulk of broadband out of CEQA entirely. We exempted child care facilities in commercial and mixed use areas. We exempted health clinics entirely. We exempted food banks and food pantries and certain park and recreation and trail projects. We exempted advanced manufacturers.

The CHIPS Act almost entirely skipped over California because it's so hard to set up shop here. So if you're doing advanced manufacturing on industrially zoned land, it'll be exempt. And then finally, when a city does what we call a housing element, which is in every eight-year housing plan that they're required to do, that goes through CEQA before it gets approved. they then have the cities that have to rezone to implement the housing element and go through SIGWA again. So it gives the NIMBYs two bites of the apple. We're now exempting those rezoning. So a series of rezoning and a few reforms to the law itself. Right. Yeah. So Buffy's exemptions make it easier and faster to build housing. Your exemptions and changes make it easier to build just about everything else that we need California to build more of, whether it's broadband,

health clinics, child care, manufacturing facilities, clean water, even wildfire reduction projects. It's this expansion of the ability of California to get stuff done and build things. I think Gavin had something like that at the front of his lecterns. I mean, like, let's get building again, which captures the spirit of these legislations. You know, there was an interesting punchy frame for these laws that the New York Times had, which I did not love myself. This is, I believe, a direct quote from the article. Quote, California's moves could inspire other Democratic-led states to weaken their environmental regulations to address housing shortages, such as Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota. Scott, you know, there are environmentalists who say that you're going to destroy the environment.

Some of them were quoted in this New York Times piece. You're here telling me, and you have said that this is a law that's good for the environment, because it allows housing to be built densely rather than forcing everybody to live in the deep suburbs where it's more intensive from a water, gas, electricity, land use cost standpoint to build and live. What's your case that these changes

aren't just taking an environmental law and refashioning it for the needs of the 2020s, but that this law actually is in some way, environmentalist? Yeah, both of these laws are good environmental laws, climate laws to reform SIGWA. Because, you know, I know it's, we see this a lot, that SICO gets described just as an environmental law, where it is partly an environmental law and partly a law that has nothing to do with the environment or that is destructive of the environment. And so, you know, they make it seem like we're rolling back all these environmental protections.

California has very strong environmental laws around toxics, around just so many different issues. And those laws, we all support them and they are fully intact. But CEQA is only partially an environmental law. And CEQA at times undermines climate action. I am an ardent environmentalist, so is Buffy. I consistently get very high legislative scores from the major environmental organizations. I partner with them. I carry very aggressive environmental climate action bills where we're at war with the Chamber of Commerce in the oil industry.

And I have had so many conversations with my allies in the environmental movement that they should not just reflexively knee-jerk oppose any change to Sequa and that they need to. acknowledge that SIGWA is good in some ways and has huge challenges for climate action in other ways. And there are folks in the environmental movement who get that, but it's not enough. I want to talk about the political story of the YIMBY movement. It's been, what, eight years since you've been, Senator Scott seven-ish years since you've been in the Assembly. Buffy, is that roughly correct? Eight and seven? Yeah. So eight, seven years ago, it seems to be like, Yimbi was in the wilderness to a certain extent. And now it's had this huge victory.

And I'd like to sort of work through the story of what changed and what happened. Buffy, what were the politics of Yimbianism when you first came to office? What was the landscape of the politics of Yimbianism seven years ago? Yeah, I described as real nascent, right, and disparate, right? There was emerging voices calling for more action. And there was, you know, when I ran in the East Bay, Oakland, Berkeley area, there was a newly formed East Bay for Everyone group that was new. I don't even think they were, like, officially an organization. They were kind of a couple people meeting at a coffee shop, you know, and I reached out to them immediately because they seemed interesting and had interesting ideas on housing.

And, you know, obviously I'd connected with Scott and some of the other members in the legislature of this sort of persuasion and was just learning a lot about the housing crisis. but it was a newly like organized group of people. And obviously Sonia Strauss, everyone knows her great work in San Francisco. And really San Francisco being on the sort of leading edge of developing this and sort of spilling into the East Bay. But I remember when I ran in 2018, Scott had a bill. What was the number again, Scott? SB 827. SB 827, which is his transit-oriented housing bill, which I voted on in committee today, the new version of it.

And I think I was the only person in that 12-way race who was supporting that bill, which basically said we should be building more housing near our transit stops. I mean, revolutionary, right? But it was very controversial to have that position to take such a position. And a lot of people that said they were pro-housing were sort of pro-100 percent affordable housing. You know, that's that was the space. That's the space they occupied. And sure, we all support 100 percent affordable housing, but we're also not going to subsidize our way out of this crisis. And we need missing middle market rate, all the other things to accommodate the needs.

So that was then, now, right, you have very well-developed organizations. You have a growing YIMB movement. You have, you know, YIMB activists showing up at, you know, Tuesday City Council meetings across the state of California, demanding city council take more action. You have, you know, lobbyists here in California who are hired by organizations that are funded in, you know, grassroots activity and, you know, they're building lists of activists. There's YMB Action Days. There's all kinds of stuff happening in this in Sacramento around this.

and in our city council meetings in a way that's providing a really nice counterbalance to the status quo and the inertia that has led us to where we are today. So I think there's been a growing movement. And it's not everything and it's still kind of like a hand-to-hand combat often with a lot of these bills. But there's a really nice counterbalance, I think, to what we had experienced in years prior, in part because of people like Scott, who's been really at the forefront and other electives, you know, prior to me being in here. So it's been a really exciting place to be. of course, obviously, you're good work, Derek, and abundance and all this other stuff that has percolated over the last year. So has added another, I think, interesting sort of intellectual

framework around the policy conversation and the policy critique that has also been another very useful tool as we talk to lawmakers and others around what we need to do to serve the needs of our state. Scott, the story that Buffy tells, the story of slow accumulating change over seven years, this growth of the YIMB movement as it succeeds at interpersonal persuasion, as it pulls in some money as, you know, national writers like me or Ezra begin to write about it and write books about it. But I think it's really, really important to say that, like, there's also not just the seven-year change, but the one-year change. I was talking to folks in your office who said, you tried a sequo exemption for like five square miles of downtown San Francisco

last year, and that bill didn't get out of committee. And so one year ago, you had like the very minor version or the constrained version of this law that Gavin Newsom just put his signature to, and it didn't get out of committee. What happened in the last year, Scott? Well, I think we've hit a tipping point of awareness. And in the legislature, you know, we've been able to pass some exemptions, but the political pressure around CEQA from the building trades and some other labor unions who are focused on it from the environmental community, from some progressive circles in terms of folks who work with low-income communities. It's a very intense situation.

Anyone who saw the budget committee hearing on Monday that I chaired around our bill, it was incredibly intense. And so for a long time, people were very hesitant to really touch the, I don't want to call it a third rail, but something like that. And over time, people could see that SQL was causing more and more problems. And I would get quiet comments at first from colleagues saying, yeah, I know these are really, really, it's a real issue. And people started getting more and more comfortable. But I will tell you, even this year, it was hard. it was really hard for for both of us and and the governor stepping in and saying I want to see these two

bills in the budget the governor is at his most powerful in the budget and the governor doing that governor when governor newsom did that that was a that turbocharged the conversation and so I want to give governor newsome huge credit how did you get newsome when did he get involved and what do you think pushed him over the edge here? I think Gavin Newsom has always, for a long time, been very yambi-ish. Like, we, we, we, we, we're, he's just very aligned. And, and Jerry Brown before him, like, this is, no, we've had several governors in a row who have said, we need sequel reform.

And, uh, it's just been really hard. And now the stars started to align. So I, I think he, you know, I think he, see, I know he has, gets very frustrated. at the slow pace of things getting done. And so I think he saw an opportunity with these two bills moving forward and he seized it. Buffy, I'd love you to pick up on this

because I am so interested in this general question of like how political change happens, how an idea goes from something that an assemblywoman, a senator, is talking about over drinks to, okay, the first tiny little segment of an organization is founded and hangs out in Noe Valley or something.

And then that grows into something. something else and grows into something else, and now we have this legislation and this budget. Scott was talking about what I took to be, I took to be a story about attention, but people paying attention to Sikwa as a roadblock to, as a bottleneck to the kind of progress that California needed.

Where did that attention come from? Did it like, did it, was it come, was it bottom up where it felt like people were just talking about, well, this is unexcusable this level of homelessness. This is an excusable this level of housing shortage. Was there a top-down aspect of like some elites signaling from the top? How would you describe the sort of attentional shift that Scott's pointing to? You know, I think it was a confluence of things. I think one, you know, as lawmakers, we go back to our districts every weekend and we have 200,000 folks experiencing homelessness

every day. We have growing encampments. We have people who are leaving the state of California because they can't afford to live here. You know, we have the lowest home ownership rates in the country, the highest red and Burton families in the nation, you know, and so when you are confronted with that every day and you're realizing this is a crisis of epic proportion, what are the solutions to that? You at the same time have, as we discussed, this growing YIMBY movement and others from a grassroots level saying, we're demanding change. You know, we want, we need more housing in our communities.

Along with, I think, you know, a policy apparatus to help support that. included the Turner Center and Spur and Bay Area Council and a lot of organizations who put a lot of sort of skin in the game creating the sort of policy framework in addition to some of the national conversation with you and others who have been been a piece of this. And then you have lawmakers like us, you know, when I introduced AB 609, which was the precursor for what went into the into the budget, introducing a clean sequa exemption for infill housing with no labor standards, no affordability, no other bells and whistles, no everything bagel, just literally, a CEQA exemption for infill housing,

I sort of like dropped it and then went to go like hide from the nuclear bomb. Because I realized like we just ripped the band-aid off. But to me that was like, that was the question that needed to be asked. What are our values and our priorities? If we say housing is a human right, we like to say that.

Politicians love saying that. Are we actually creating the environments to that, for that to become a reality? And so for me, it was time to sort of call the question. and say, you know, it felt risky to me politically, to be honest with you, but it felt like the right time to do it. And it also felt like from my perspective when I just think of, you know, where I'm at, I'm halfway through my career. I have the privilege of being the appropriations

chair, which carries a certain amount of weight in the building. You know, we've got leadership from the Speaker and the governor and others and Scott and others who have said, this is a priority to us. So it's not, we're not alone in this, right? And it felt like the year, especially coming out of the election results from November, right, where voters are upset. they want government to work for people. That is what I read from that election result. You know, across the board, regardless of political ideology, people want government to work. And I would argue the most progressive thing we can do is make sure our government works for people. That is a progressive ideology to make sure government is serving the needs of its constituents.

And right now it's a roadblock to housing, not serving the needs. And so from my perspective, it felt like, okay, this is the time, if not now when. I'm in a moment of privilege here. I have the ability to kind of do this and see if it works. And then obviously the governor, coming in, I want to echo Scott's comments. He has been steadfast his resolve on this and from the jump committed to doing this. And he really provided a lot of the backbone this year to make sure we got it done. Scott, the image that I have in my head of a classic California NIMBY is an older, rich household, you know, maybe lives in like Marin County, a beautiful area that doesn't want anything around them to change, that wants the physical world around them to be frozen in amber.

When I imagine in my head this sort of prototypical YIMBY, it's typically a younger person. And I've seen throughout the book tour and just sort of observing political discourse, it's like generational shift in terms of what it means to be a housing progressive and even what it means to be an environmentalist. But it's this younger generation that tends to be more interested in building things, tends to be more interested in adding energy, solar, wind, geothermal, and in part because younger people are locked out of the housing market, or at least are the ones trying to get into the housing market,

and almost definitionally older people who are in the housing market, I've seen this sort of nimbiby split within the progressive coalition. I wonder to what extent you've seen this as well, and whether you think the passage of time has brought a group of younger progressives into power and into positions of both political and communicative power that's provided a little bit of tailwind for the Yimbi movement in California, this generational split. Yeah, so there is a generational divide, although it's not a totally clean one. I know a whole bunch of like 60-something, 70-somethings who are super,

Yimbi. I mean, people stop me on the streets and those older couples, like, thank you for your housing work. So there are older people who get it. Actually, Buffy and I have had some old, I don't want to say their names because I don't want them to know that I'm saying they're older, but some older colleagues who are incredibly pro-housing. And we have some younger people in the political space. And I know some younger people interest in the world who are maybe not as pro-housing. So it doesn't, it's not totally clean. But there is. is a, I think, a difference. Younger people, for younger people, I think that housing is a pillar issue because they have been

priced out. And so when Kamala Harris started talking about the housing shortage, using that word shortage in the presidential campaign, there were a lot of young people that got really excited about that because presidential candidates don't typically talk that way. But there are, we're seeing especially at the city council level, the younger city council member is getting elected who are very vocally pro-housing, vocally, YMB, and they're not scared to say it. And so we have more and more of a network of younger city council members who really get it. So it's slowly shifting, but it's very gradual. Buffy, last question on the sausage-making process of these laws before we get to what you expect from the laws and lessons for abundance liberals and yimbies around the country.

Sequel exemptions and labor are a complicated intersection. And I'm wondering if you could tell me a little bit about how you built labor support for this legislation, while at the same time recognizing that there are so. some unions that don't want sequa powers to go away because you and Scott have just told me they're like everybody else, not good or bad. They've seen the power of this law to allow them to get what they want from certain types of building contracts. So how did you work the labor levers here to get this bill through? How much time do I have, Derek? You have 35 seconds. No. Take a few minutes. We've got some time. Well, all labor is not monolithic here. I think you have a clear distinction, at least in California, you have the Carpenter's Union and you have the building trades. And over the past, really three or four years, the Carpenter's Union has really come to the table trying to be really a force for change on a lot of the barriers to housing in California.

And they have developed a real partnership with the YIMBs and others to say yes to housing, right? All the while, of course, they want to be the union representing those workers. which I fully support and think we should have. We have about 300,000 workers in California who build housing. The vast, vast majority are not union at all. And those are the ones that many of them are exploited. Many of them are low-wage workers. They're immigrants.

They're now getting invaded by ICE. I mean, there's really some deplorable work conditions. Not obviously all the sites, but there's definitely issues there. And union representation from them would be incredibly important. You also have the building trades who tend to represent, you know, the workers who are building more like the bigger projects in downtown San Francisco. go that require kind of a more, quote unquote, skilled and trained workforce. But the vast majority of both the building trades and the carpenters don't represent these

workers. The building trades have tended to not want to create a lot of change when it comes to our current housing laws. They opposed 609 when I introduced it out of the gate. You know, the carpenters were working with me on labor provisions in the bill. The trades didn't really want to participate in those conversations. When we rolled out these provisions last week, around some labor standards that we'd worked with the carpenters on and the developers that we thought could work for everyone. The trades came out in full opposition, and that was essentially a sort of minimum wage floor for those workers who are not union represented. The building trades did not want that in there. We were able to get them off of opposition by removing that wage floor

for those workers. It's a question for them as to why that was the motive for them. But they did become neutral on the bill. And so what we, what we ended up with from a Hauser perspective is a bill that was essentially a pretty clean sequo exemption. What we did put in there to, in honor of our relationship with the carpenters and what their desires were to have them keep supporting the bill was stronger enforcement language. So right now when you build in California, if a subcontractor or contractor isn't paying their worker, the money they're owed, the developer's not on the hook. We added developer liability so that they have skin in the game on making sure the teaser crosses and the eyes are dotted and the workers are being paid a fair wage.

The reputable developers actually like that provision because they already do that. And so it creates a more of a level playing field for the non-reputable developers. So that's a little bit in the weeds. There's a lot more to it. But the sort of top line, I think, is you have some of the construction unions like the carpenters who are really willing to play ball. They've showed real leadership and trying to be part of the solution here. they understand because their workers don't have housing that we have to build more housing.

And so they've been really part of the yes in my backyard movement, sort of speak, not officially, but sort of in concept and in practice, as we've built this very diverse coalition now in some of our bills that Scott and I do, SCIU is there supporting pro housing bills, you know, our school employees union, unions who historically have not been part of the housing debate, you know, organizations like United Way and AARP and others, You know, it's a diverse coalition now that we've been really working on building over the last couple years. But it has been with the unions, the construction industry unions, it's been difficult, you know, and it's been a place to be. And I'll work with them where we can on aligned issues. But what I'm very committed to is getting rid of the roadblocks that stop us from building

housing. Scott, we said earlier that in the last eight years, there's been 150 housing bills. and in that period, housing permits in California have been flat too slightly down. How much do you expect this legislation to move the needle on housing starts? Or maybe to put it more concretely, do you have a vision in your head of what number success looks like and what number disappointment looks like? Sure. And first of all, the 150 bills, I mean, those are a massive spectrum. of kinds of bills, and some of them are very small bills, like correcting a small thing or doing cleanup on an existing law.

There's a much smaller number of really, truly pro-production bills to try to make it easier, faster to build new homes. And we've seen, and some of those bills are more recent, right? It usually takes a new housing law several years to really start working. We saw that with the first housing law that I passed, SB 35. It took a few years for it to really start getting off the ground. It took us years to finally close all the loopholes in our accessory dwelling unit, ADU law, and that's now been taking off. So it just takes some time.

We're also very, you know, the last five years have been rough. We had a pandemic, a global supply chain meltdown, and now very high interest rates. So my view is we need to get the rules right and get everything in place so that when the economic stars align, we can just, you know, build a ton of housing. I want to build as much as we can. And, you know, we need probably a few million homes over time in California. And I want us to have the rules in place to empower that. This is a question for both of you. I, maybe this is just a pundit's fallacy, but I thought it was interesting that this legislative

achievement happened within the same eight-day period that Zoran Mamdani won the New York primary for mayor of New York City. I mean, on the one hand, these could not seem like more opposite stories, like a socialist winning on the East Coast, a YIMBY legislation on the West Coast. I am fully aware of all the cosmetic differences and the substantive differences. But in a way, both stories represent a certain crumbling of the status quo and a paradigm shift, right? On the East Coast, you have an upstart defeating the ultimate status quo candidate in New York State, Aquamo. And on the West Coast, you have SICO, which in many ways is the signature legislation for preserving the status quo. Like, not only is it a piece of status quo, it also exists to preserve that which

previously existed. And so it does seem like an interesting moment of sort of molten politics and paradigm shifts. If we were interested in using the success of California YIMBY as a model for understanding how abundance ideas can win throughout the country at the state level at the national level, what lessons do you think apply from your victory? Like, what are the things you would like to use this show to scream at your brothers and sisters in other cities and other states to say progress is hard politics is the slow boring of hard boards but this is what worked for us you know i think i'll take a stab and scotch up in here but i think one it requires like we've tilled the soil on this for a long time right um and again in part because the crisis is so bad

but we've laid the groundwork there's been a growing grassroots movement there's been energy poured into this. There's been, you know, a professionalization of that, of that, you know, an articulation of that movement here in Sacramento and in city councils across the state of California. There's been a policy apparatus to outline what the solutions are to that and to make that argument. I mean, and I even, you know, I did a select committee on permitting reform starting two years ago doing hearings across the state of California, bringing in all stakeholders on this and, you know, produced a white paper and then a body of work around it, right? So kind of laying that groundwork. But most importantly, then I think what you also need is really the leadership, right? The leadership in the

state. And again, credit to Gavin Newsom and our speaker and our pro time and Scott and others around saying it's time to call that question, right? And I do think you have that in the backdrop of a political environment where the old role book is being thrown out, you know, and doing hard things is hard. And we need leaders in these positions of privilege and power to be courageous with their votes and their actions. And it's critical that we do that or we're all going to lose our job. You know, and I say this all the time like in California. I'm like, okay, Democrats, we control every statewide office. We have two thirds of the, you know, the Senate and the Assembly. And we've had nothing but a growing homelessness crisis. Like, we have to own that conversation.

I know that's a little uncomfortable and maybe uncouth for me to say. But it's the realities that that we see, which means we have to take bold action trying to solve that problem. And so I think this is like one example of that. And I think this moment politically dictates that Democrats do that. And so in that sense, I think you probably see some similarities to what happened in New York. But that's where I think we are as a body and where I think Democrats are as a party. And that's the type of action we should be saying about solving problems and being measured on the outcome and the output of the results of these policy fights that we're having ultimately. Scott, I want you to pick up the baton here.

And I also want you to talk a little bit if you can about the color and texture of persuasion, right? You've been fighting for a bill like this for a long time. And just a year ago, a version of it, again, did not get out of committee. And I would love to hear a little bit about your style, love, and theory of persuasion, how you bring people along to a cause where they might not initially be inclined to be your compatriot. Yeah. So first of all, with Zoran Mamdani, like, as I said, he apparently his, he's refined his thinking on housing from what I understand to a pretty yimbi posture. And I know he's, he said some positive things about abundance. And so I, and that really brought a smile to my face because being in favor of

more housing and making it easier to build housing is the progressive position. And I, I, I, I say this as much as I can, that it is not progressive to oppose pro-housing policies. And so when you have a very, very, very, progressive, leftist, socialist candidate who's embracing a pro-housing agenda, that is incredibly powerful. And we're seeing that there are a lot of DSA, Democratic Socialists, America chapters that are very imbished. There are others that aren't. The one in San Francisco is not, but there are other chapters that are, and it's very powerful.

And housing is popular and elected. It's not, there are people who might be screaming at you at hearings or at your town halls about how much they don't want new housing. They are not representative of the majority. Majority of people support more housing. And I think what Zoran's a win in the primary meant and what, and we've seen it in California too, people want elected officials who are willing to fight, who have energy, and who are willing to break glass and take risks. People are okay with elect, they want elected officials to take risks.

They don't have to agree with you 100% of the time. And then that brings me to what you just asked about persuasion. the number of times that I have had a constituent come up to me on the street and say, you know what, I don't always love what you do around housing, but I really like that you clearly believe in it and you're doing it because you think it's going to make the world a better place in San Francisco a better place. And so I support you and I vote for you. I think a lot of elected officials don't fully understand that people don't have to agree

with you all the time and they can be pissed off at you sometimes. But if they know that you are fighting for them, that you're fighting for what you authentically think is right, they like that and they don't have to agree with you 100% of the time. And so elected officials should take more risks. Scott, Buffy, thank you for fighting. Thank you for taking big risks. And congratulations. When I saw the video of you standing beside Gavin at whatever, 2.30 in the morning when it was texted to me, I thought I was lucid dreaming. So maybe you also thought you were lucid dreaming when you were up there. But it was really a fantastic moment. And I want to offer you my heartfelt congratulations. So thank you. Thank you.