If YIMBY is winning in California, where are all the houses?

Brian Hanlon of California YIMBY answers a rude question.

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Brian Hanlon is the founder of California YIMBY, the state’s premier pro-housing lobbying organization. Since launching in 2017, CA YIMBY has helped pass 25 bills legalizing ADUs, duplexes, dense housing near transit, and much more. I’m a great admirer of Brian’s work, so when I met him at a conference last year, I introduced myself by asking a rude question: Your organization may have won some impressive legislative victories over the past 10 years — but where are the cranes? Why is California still in the midst of a housing crisis?

In this interview, we discuss the answer to my questions, as well as CA YIMBY’s strategies for bringing down the price of development, the state’s biggest remaining barriers to new housing, how to lobby in Sacramento, and the ins and outs of the organization’s landmark victories.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The next phase for CA YIMBY

Clara Collier: I’ll start by repeating the first question I asked you, Brian — where are our houses?

Brian Hanlon: To answer that, we need to back up a bit. California builds so little housing relative to demand compared to other states like Texas and Florida, even though we have the same overall legal system, things like CEQA notwithstanding. The interest rates are the same. We’re in the same giant market.

The main reasons we don’t have housing come down to three basic things. First, zoning. It’s illegal to build dense housing even when there’s demand. Second, streamlining and permits. Even if the housing is legal to build, getting approval can be time-consuming, uncertain, and incredibly lengthy and expensive.

We’ve made tremendous progress over the past eight or nine years focusing on zoning and permitting. Just last year, 2025, we achieved two of our foundational goals.

First, with SB 79 it will be legal to build dense housing near high-quality transit stops throughout California. Second, we passed an exemption for infill housing under CEQA. “Infill” is pretty broadly defined here: If you’re building a home where there are already other homes around, then you cannot use CEQA to sue on environmental grounds and gum up the works.

These are two huge victories. That said, we could abolish zoning tomorrow and replace the entire permit approval regime with one big rubber stamp and it won’t matter, as long as building new housing doesn’t financially pencil.

So the third reason we don’t have housing, and the one we’re focusing on now, is cost. This can take forms like labor costs being a bit higher here than in Texas or Florida, but what we’re really talking about are government-imposed costs and mandates. Things like unfunded inclusionary zoning mandates, which mean it’s illegal to build multifamily housing in many jurisdictions unless the developer also agrees to provide subsidies for low-income renters or lower-income homeowners.

Or there might be $80,000 per unit in parks fees. A city like Palo Alto, which is literally two-thirds protected open space, will still impose incredibly high fees for parks. These all really add up. Depending on the jurisdiction, you can be looking at upward of $150,000 to $200,000 per home just to get permission to build, on top of already high costs.

Clara: So you’re now more interested in focusing on this last category — these additional cost requirements.

Brian: Yes. Inclusionary zoning is an extra cost. Requiring you to install all the hookups for solar roofs on an apartment building is an extra cost. We’re working on a whole bunch of different cost drivers — whether it’s unfunded inclusionary zoning mandates, transfer taxes, parks fees, various housing impact fees, and on and on.

I’ll give you an example. One of the bills we did recently with Sen. Scott Wiener, SB 937 a couple years ago, shifted the time at which fees are due from the application stage to when the certificate of occupancy is issued.

This might sound like an incredibly small thing, and it is very wonky. But let’s say you’re a builder, and even under good circumstances, the time between when you’re submitting an application and when you’re about ready to lease out the units is several years. Given that these fees, if you’re building a large apartment building, can be well in the millions of dollars, if you have to pay those fees as a lump sum several years before you collect any rent, you’re paying high interest on loans. Instead, if you’re paying those fees right before you actually start collecting rent, that changes the economics significantly.

We’re also looking at building code reform and other types of cost drivers. There are all sorts of things in our building code that may sound like they’re clearly for life or safety, or maybe to achieve some environmental or efficiency goal. But when you dig into it, you often see either various forms of interest group capture or just bad ideas that were codified decades ago.

Building code chaos

Clara: This brings up my next question. You say “our building code,” but there isn’t one California building code. There are hundreds of municipal building codes. I believe the starkest case is SB 9, the by-right duplex law, which was hit by hundreds of municipalities demanding increasingly specific and arcane building code restrictions on what you can actually do. In an environment as fragmented as California municipal building codes, what are the levers for actually reducing those costs?

Brian: There’s a lot that can be done here. Just last year, the state legislature passed a bill to freeze all building codes. It’s now illegal for local governments to pass any new requirements for building codes because the problem has gotten so out of hand.

Getting to the core of your question: We have a number of proposals in this area, some we’re working on this year, others that are more long-term.

Things like legalizing single-stair¹. Things like elevator or “core reform” — the rules around that so we can actually get more affordable elevators into more buildings. Things like requiring the California Residential Code instead of the California Building Code — which I know is confusing, but effectively the codes are different if you’re building a single-family home versus an eightplex. If we can make the codes more like single-family homes for the eightplex, you can actually build them much cheaper.

Quite frankly — and I know this sounds a little bit hacky — rather than try to come up with a bespoke California code that is one statewide code, I would prefer to create effectively an overlay zone where a developer may elect to build to EU code standards instead of the local building code.

Clara: Wait, I want to make sure I understand. There’s one building code for the whole EU?

Brian: My understanding is that there are EU code standards. While I’m not an expert on EU rules, my understanding is that EU law creates functional requirements and governments publish codes for how to meet them. For example, the written code starts with outcomes like safety, health, moisture control, ventilation, energy performance. Then builders can follow the default guidance, or use analysis, testing, or engineering judgment to show other ways of meeting those standards. The regulator’s job shifts from “did you follow the recipe?” to “did you meet the objective?”

Clara: I’m looking out my window in Berkeley right now, which has a different building code than Oakland, which I can also see out my window.

Brian: It’s intensely frustrating when you look at the kinds of projects going up in France or Austria or Denmark or Spain. When I’m looking at the cost per square meter my first reaction is always, “Oh wait, I’m messing up the dollar-to-euro conversion or the square-foot-to-square-meter conversion, because no way is it this cheap.” But actually, the cost to build in those jurisdictions — higher quality stuff, by the way, than we’re building here — is really astounding.

Clara: If you can build according to EU codes — how would that work? Would that be a geographic zone? Would municipalities opt into it?

Brian: No. What we would effectively propose is that of the 500 or so different jurisdictions in California, if they all want to have their own beautiful snowflake building codes, fine, God bless.

However, we should create statewide “alternative compliance pathways” that follow performance-based outcomes that either borrow or adopt the best European practices where they outperform ours. So if a developer proposes to build something in your jurisdiction, they can ignore your code and build to these alternative pathways. That’s the proposal — anywhere in California.

Clara: So you’re not replacing any local building codes.

Brian: Right. And if localities think they can do better than the EU, they’re more than welcome to try. But the idea is that there’s one standardized performance code everywhere.

I’ll say there are other areas in California state law that recognize you need standardization. This is especially true for manufactured homes. There aren’t different rules between Berkeley and Oakland when you’re building with prefabricated structures, because that just wouldn’t work. I would argue that logic also extends to traditional building construction, especially as we’re moving — if not to modular construction — to increased use of building panels and various forms of prefab building elements in factories and then assembling on site. It’s going to be more important to have standardized code adoption.

Clara: And this would ultimately be a state law?

Brian: Yes.

Clara: Do you expect a lot of pushback from municipalities on this?

Brian: Yes, I expect pushback from municipalities. I expect pushback from the fire departments and the fire marshal. I expect pushback from all sorts of folks who are staunch defenders of the status quo. We’re not shy about pursuing what we think is optimal policy in the face of opposition. The tricky thing is, what is the absolute strongest policy that you can get? That typically means having very hard-fought, closely fought legislative battles, because if everyone agrees, there’s probably not much opposition and it’s probably not going to do much.

Clara: So the EU zone is one of your optimal policies. What are the other prongs of this strategy?

Brian: I already talked about some cost initiatives. We’re also working on financing. It’s difficult, especially if we’re talking about building high-rises — steel and concrete in city downtowns throughout California — to get those projects to pencil right now.

What we’re looking at is trying to create a state revolving loan fund where the state is able to provide low-interest loans to projects right before vertical construction permits.

What many other states do, which have had a lot of success, is various forms of property tax abatements. Florida has had a very successful law similar in concept to some laws we’ve helped pass before. I’ll note that the specific program in Florida also required effectively a form of workforce housing for lower and middle-class people. But the cost of that subsidy was provided with a tax abatement, and it’s very difficult to do that here.

The big difference is that developers in Florida are able to get huge breaks on property taxes, and we don’t have that in California. Prop 13 ruins everything. It really makes it difficult for state and local governments to incentivize what we want in terms of building.

Seascape With Houses on Beach. Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The most hated state amendment

Clara: Have you ever seriously considered pushing for Prop 13 repeal, or is that just not plausible? Actually — for anybody who isn’t familiar, what is Prop 13?

Brian: Prop 13 and related propositions effectively state that your property tax assessment may not be more than 1% of your property’s value, and that assessed value can only go up by at most 2% a year. The effect is that you have older Californians who bought their home for $80,000 40 years ago and pay about a nickel a year in property taxes, meanwhile their millennial next-door neighbors are paying $30,000 a year in property taxes. It’s a grossly unfair system.

Until recently, you could inherit these tax assessments without restrictions too. California, which views itself as this progressive bastion, had this sort of system that treated taxes based on your blood relationship to the soil. I would argue blood-and-soil progressivism doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Clara: And this has historically been very hard to change. First, because it was a ballot proposition — an amendment to the state constitution — so it would need another ballot proposition to repeal it. And second, because people don’t like their property taxes increasing.

Brian: That’s right. I think there are a few ways to tackle this. I have been working with an academic research institute for several years to see if there are any legs for challenging Prop 13 as a violation of the Federal Fair Housing Act. Long story short, we spent a lot of money and a long time crunching numbers, and it turns out the situation is too muddied — it’s unlikely we would prevail.

We were also part — I’d say a junior part — of a prior reform effort called Schools and Communities First, which would have instituted what’s called a split roll. It would have allowed for easier reassessment of commercial properties, but wouldn’t have changed anything for single-family homeowners. It nearly won.

Now, I think we’re likely back to thinking about what we can do in terms of a different form of split roll, and what is the intersection of “good policy and tractable with reassessing single-family homes, or perhaps different classes of single-family homes, over time. More polling and policy work is needed there before we have any real proposal to take to voters.

Clara: Just to make sure I understand, how does Prop 13 interfere with being able to do the Florida-style kind of tax abatement here? Is it just that we need the revenue?

Brian: No, it’s that it’s so prescriptive on how property taxes are assessed. If you’re providing a discount, how does that property assessment jump up later? How does that end? That’s my understanding. That said, I’ve talked to some attorneys who think there’s more wiggle room here than the prevailing wisdom has it.

The shape of cities

Clara: A lot of the things we’ve been talking about — SB 79, these tax abatement ideas — are focused on larger multifamily buildings. And I get this because I’m also a California urbanist who goes to New York and thinks, “Wow, I wish we had real dense cities like this on the West Coast.” But someone might say, a state like Texas that’s actually building a lot of housing — that’s single-family homes.

Brian: It’s both. Look at the Austin skyline now versus the Austin skyline 15 years ago. It’s totally changed. That’s all dense housing. Houston too. Houston has this reputation for infinite sprawl, which is pretty well-deserved, but Houston has also densified significantly, and they’ve densified in diverse ways. You go from single-family homes to townhomes in many areas — from one single-family home to say three townhomes per parcel — as well as towers, five-over-ones, and everything in between.

If you look at the successful strategies employed in the parts of the country that are growing, mostly in the South, they employ all-of-the-above strategies. They’re building lots of dense multifamily housing. They’re also building lots of single-family homes.

Clara: Would it be accurate to say that CA YIMBY is more focused on multifamily?

Brian: I would say we’re focused mostly on infill, but infill broadly defined. We’re not just focused on building more housing in San Francisco and Oakland. All the places that currently have housing — including suburbs and exurbs — it should be legal to build denser housing there. We’re not just focused on big buildings. We’re also focused on what’s sometimes called missing middle housing².

Clara: Strategically, what was the decision behind focusing on infill versus, say, greenfield³ development?

Brian: A couple things. One, I would just say values. Most folks in the YIMBY movement want more affordability, more inclusive communities, but we also want more walkable communities and places where you don’t necessarily need a car to get everywhere. The only way to get that is density. There are also serious climate and ecological reasons.

That said, we’re not opposed to sprawl or new development. Some of our legislation varies. Where we’ve pushed for big upzones is in existing heavily urbanized areas. But we’re proposing allowing ADUs everywhere, allowing duplexes everywhere. Our permitting reform bills mostly apply everywhere. It’s not the case that our efforts have only been focused on urban areas. We’re also supporting efforts like California Forever.

Clara: We interviewed Jan Sramek about California Forever in an earlier issue.

Brian: I think that’s a great proposal. He’s trying to build a little bit of Czechia in Solano County, which is great. But I would also say the greenfield developers in California are already organized. They’re well-organized and well-represented in the political system. The California Building Industry Association is their main representative in Sacramento. We work closely with them on policy development and advocacy. The infill folks really aren’t organized. You don’t have an infill lobby in California the same way.

Clara: Why is that?

Brian: There aren’t as many of the greenfield developers. It’s easier to organize 10 people than 1000 people. The infill builders tend to be smaller. They’re hyper-competitive with each other. Historically they haven’t really organized themselves. There’s a group, the Council of Infill Builders, who we work with — they’re great —but it’s just a few people.

Clara: I also want to touch on something you mentioned earlier. You talked about ADUs and duplexes. The ADU legislation you guys have sponsored — huge success. Tens of thousands of units. Over 20% of all permits pulled in California are ADUs. But duplexes, much less so. Why? What’s the difference?

Brian: There was a bill a few years ago, SB 9, that legalized duplexes. We knew when we passed SB 9 it wouldn’t do anything. I told anyone privately at the time: guys, just so you know, this bill has too many compromises. We’ll get a few built, but it’s not going to really do anything.

Also, you can basically do anything you can do with SB 9 between two other acts. With the ADU law, we’re now able to build two ADUs on every single-family home parcel. Do you really even need to build a duplex? Now you can build two ADUs.

And there’s another program we created called the Starter Home Act. It’s a very technical bill, but basically, on the right parcel, it allows you to build up to 10 homes. Between the Starter Home Act and the ADU program, do we even need SB 9? Not really.

So the point of the SB 9 fight was to pass this new program in state law, have that hard political fight, and then over the years pass cleanup legislation to actually make it workable, because we simply did not have the political power to pass what needed to pass at that time. This was analogous to the ADU strategy. The first ADU bill passed in something like 1982 and it did nothing for decades.

Clara: Why do you think there was so much more opposition to SB 9 and the duplexes than to the ADUs? These seem structurally similar to me.

Brian: They are. It is weird. I think part of it was — this was 2021, everyone kind of went crazy in 2021 across a whole variety of domains. The NIMBYs were not immune to brain worms and going crazy.

It may have had something to do with the fact that ADUs were seen as, “Oh OK, it’s like a place to build a backyard cottage for your mother-in-law, or maybe you rent it out every once in a while.” It was sort of seen as your homeowner’s thing, a thing for the homeowner.

Despite the compromises, I think SB 9 was seen as, “Oh, these big developers: — to be clear, the big developers didn’t give a shit about SB 9. Ninety percent of these projects are small. But that was part of it. The realtors really ramped up opposition too for very strange reasons. The intensity of opposition did surprise us. It’s hard to say.

Mr. Smith goes to Sacramento

Clara: This actually touches on another set of questions I want to ask, which is one of my hobby horses. I think that Sacramento-oriented lobbying is bizarrely neglected relative to how important it is. You guys are a very effective California legislature-based lobbying organization. I’m really curious about your strategy for doing that and how you’ve figured out how to operate in that space.

Brian: Before getting involved in politics, I sort of assumed that most state elected officials wanted to just get their name in the paper and go march in a parade. Maybe they wanted some high-paid lobby gig later. They weren’t really serious people, whereas the hardworking advocates were working in the public interest, doing their best against impossible odds.

Then I get to Sacramento and find out that the vast majority of state electeds actually are smarter than you think, and they’re genuinely motivated to make lives better for their constituents. They might have different ideas of what the most important things to optimize for are and how to do that. But fundamentally, I’ve found that legislators — the vast majority — are willing to hear you out, willing to hear your argument, and genuinely want to make things better.

Whereas the advocates are kind of impossible — ideologues incapable of critical reasoning. I think that context-setting is important. I found that a lot of folks who are tangentially involved in politics have way too cynical a view of how politics works and how elected officials think and act. And given that context — that you actually have 120 legislators who have a ton of power in aggregate and are mostly reasonable, well-meaning people — there’s a lot you can get done in that environment.

In terms of “how did I know to properly execute?” — well, I learned a lot on the go. Sometimes people ask me, “What’s this secret hack?” I’m like, “I don’t know. Just have a good plan, hire a good team, and work really fucking hard every day.”

Clara: I would say that none of those are trivial, right?

Brian: No, none of them are trivial. It is hard. Don’t get me wrong — when I started California YIMBY, I had thick curly hair and now look at me.

Clara: This is a text-based interview. For the readers, he does not have thick curly hair.

Brian: Not anymore. It’s hard, but most things in life that are worth doing are hard.

Clara: You had fairly little legislative or advocacy experience when you started CA YIMBY.

Brian: Zero.

Clara: So how did you land on the three-pronged legislative strategy that you ultimately settled on?

Brian: I’ve been thinking about these issues for a very long time, writing about it for myself, but I hadn’t been doing it.

What really happened is I learned a lot by doing. The real origin of California YIMBY — the first bill we did was SB 167 by Nancy Skinner, which significantly strengthened the Housing Accountability Act.

This bill had been on the books since 1982, and it basically says that a local government cannot deny a housing application, or condition approval based on lower density, unless there are specific human health or safety standards. Sounds good, but there were so many loopholes the bill was worthless.

My prior nonprofit sued the city of Lafayette for denying a housing project —technically conditioning approval based on lower density. We lost. And then I thought, well, our approach is just going to fail if we don’t fix this law.

I met with Denise Pinkston, a developer who used to be a planner, who introduced me to her friends who were land-use lawyers. We were at a table and I said, “Here was our case, here’s why we lost, here are my proposals to fix that. What else should we fix in this law?”I took their ideas. I literally copied the existing law into Microsoft Word and rewrote it. Then I gave what I wrote to an actual attorney who rewrote what I wrote.

Then, Denise happened to be friends with Nancy Skinner, who was then a State Senator. She introduces it. I traveled to Sacramento every week on the Capitol Corridor — Oakland to Sacramento — go to committee, advocate for the bill. And I was actually making progress. I thought, “Holy fuck. You can actually just do things. You can actually just pass bills.”

It was this experience that convinced me that serious change in Sacramento is tractable. That’s when I pitched Nat Friedman and Zack Rosen, my co-founders, on: well, if I had an actual budget and an actual team, this is how we pass transformative policy in California. But it can’t just be one guy taking the train to Sacramento every week. You actually need a real comms program, you need to grow and leverage the grassroots movement, you need to build a coalition, you need a political action committee, you need lobbyists, everything else. It’s a whole 360-degree campaign operation.

Clara: In general, did you expect to be able to do more with zoning reform legislation, or did you always know from 2017 that you would need to tackle zoning reform, permitting, and these cost structure issues to achieve a really noticeable impact on housing?

Brian: From the very beginning. If you look at my early drafts from 2017, it was zoning, permit reform, and cost control. That has been with us since day one. I actually had a fourth thing, but I quickly dropped it because I realized how incredibly hard it would be.

Clara: What was it?

Brian: Tax reform, like Prop 13 reform. How do we better incentivize approving homes for local governments? But when you really get into this, you’re effectively talking about having this huge multiparty negotiation between cities, school districts, counties, and the state around sharing various revenue streams. That’s important. Someone needs to do that. But that is very, very hard and was well beyond the capabilities of a small scrappy advocacy organization. I quickly jettisoned that fourth pillar from the initial plan.

Where are the cranes?

Clara: What are your projections for the impact of your work? To go back to the very first question I asked you when we met: when are we going to see the houses?

Brian: We already have gotten a lot of the homes that were made possible through bills we passed. You mentioned ADUs. If you talk to a developer about all these projects they’ve recently entitled, they absolutely used either the Housing Accountability Act or the Housing Crisis Act of 2019, SB 330, another bill we did with Nancy Skinner. They use those tools.

The question then is: well, if all these new homes are made possible by bills we’ve passed, why hasn’t the overall state permitting rate significantly increased?

Two big things. The collapse has actually been biggest with single-family homes, which is an issue we don’t really work on. Single-family home production in California really collapsed after the Great Recession and just has nowhere near recovered.

The other thing is local policy has moved in the wrong direction. This is mostly around cost. If you look at Los Angeles passing ULA, the transfer tax — that’s nerfing housing production. A number of cities have imposed higher levels of inclusionary requirements. They’re increasing various types of housing fees. They’re finding new clever ways, talking to their attorneys, to try to thwart state housing law.

This is a dynamic system. If we had the same local rules in place that we had in 2017, yeah, we would have had a lot more homes built.

Clara: What’s driving the increase in these various NIMBY tactics in cities? Is it responding to state legislation? Is it just increased hostility to building?

Brian: Some of it is absolutely in response to state legislation. Some of it is just that the lefty advocacy organizations have really proliferated over the past decade. They’ve gotten a ton more philanthropic donations. A lot of them also get a ton of money from the government at various levels.

Some are just ideological opponents to market-rate housing. You might say, ‘This is crazy. There’s an avalanche of evidence that building more unsubsidized housing lowers rents, reduces displacement, reduces economic and racial segregation.’ All the things these groups say they care about — the things we’re doing are good for achieving their mission. That’s all true, but there are ideologues everywhere who are immune to evidence. It’s part of the human condition.

They’re demanding things like higher, really unworkable anti-demolition standards if a tenant has lived in a building within the past certain number of years. All these sorts of rules and restrictions in state policy that you don’t have in places like Texas and Florida. It really blunts the impacts of the bills that are passing.

Clara: And is that the main source of delay?

Brian: Another part of this is, well, a bunch of our bills take time to actually have any kind of effect. Some of our biggest bills, like SB 79, don’t fully go into effect until 2031. And then it takes a few years after that. These things take time, which is frustrating to folks who are maybe working on a much faster-paced iterative software cycle. But that’s just not how either legislation or the building industry works.

Also, hopefully within two to three years, we’ll actually have passed at least the frameworks for all the big things we need to massively scale housing production. Then it’s going to be about implementation — really working with practitioners, figuring out where these last remaining little roadblocks are to really scale homebuilding.

I’ll say that last year really was the culmination of a bit of a pivot. From, I don’t know, 2021 through 2023, we passed good bills, but I thought we weren’t really passing the transformative stuff we would actually need to 5x housing production. We’re not going to get there through just delaying the assessment of fees from the application stage to the certificate-of-occupancy stage. It matters — it definitely matters — but we’re not going to fix the problem if we’re fundamentally just getting these small technical bills through.

We did a ton of policy work, made some personnel changes, and thought, all right, let’s just do the thing. Let’s propose it, and if we can’t get it, fine, fuck it. I didn’t start California YIMBY to pass a bunch of bills. I started California YIMBY to rebuild the built environment of the world’s fifth-largest economy along much more affordable, inclusive, and sustainable lines.

The story of CEQA

Clara: I want to hear more about your pivot.

Brian: One of those things was the CEQA infill exemption we got done last year. We wrote this proposal and said, “We all know this is impossible, right? You can’t actually just touch CEQA without labor standards, without a bunch of unfunded inclusionary zoning mandates, without all this nonsense from these lefty nonprofits. It’s just not possible.” As Gov. Jerry Brown put it, CEQA reform is “the Lord’s work.” But the Lord’s work will forever be undone.

I’m like, “You know, fuck it. We’re gonna try.”

I was meeting with Buffy Wicks just over a year ago, and we were talking about this proposal.

Clara: She’s my assembly member. Big fan.

Brian: She’s amazing. She’s great. I’d spoken with her about it before, briefed her a couple months prior on what we were doing. She’s like, “Yeah, no, I know, we should do this, but the politics are so hard.” But neither of us is in this to just pass bills. We’re in this to solve problems. Let’s just propose the bill clean, introduce a clean bill, a clean exemption. And if we have to take some amendments, we’ll fight like hell to keep it as strong as we can, but so be it.

She called me a few days later and said, “Fuck it. I’m authoring the bill. We’re going to do it clean.” And it ended up working. It worked.

Clara: What do you think made it happen? What had changed in the legislative environment that made it work better than you expected?

Brian: A few things. One, Buffy is a very strong author, both by virtue of her position — she’s appropriations chair, a very powerful position in the legislature —and two, she’s a very persuasive and forceful advocate for what she believes in. Having a good author helps.

Clara: I think I remember reading an interview she gave where someone asked, “Are you considering running for Congress?” I think this was when Barbara Lee was retiring. And I think she said, “No, I can do so much more in the California State Assembly.”

Brian: Oh yeah. We talked about this. I was like, “Yeah, that’d be miserable. You’d just be there and get nothing done.” She used to live in D.C. She worked in the Obama administration. D.C. is a nice town, but being in Congress right now is miserable. You’re a backbencher in Congress. That sucks. She can get way more done here. She can pass policy that improves the lives of way more people than she could in Congress.

Clara: As you said, the state level is wildly underinvested in.

Brian: But OK, the other things that changed. I think we’ve done a lot of narrative work. We’ve been changing the way people talk about CEQA. We’ve been focused on this for years, ever since we started as an organization. Other folks have absolutely been making the same argument.

Here’s where I think airport books matter. A lot of people go to the airport. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance book — I really do think it came at the right moment to convince a number of Dems that we really need to stop passing these unworkable everything-bagel bills that satisfy our interest groups and don’t deliver and just alienate us from our constituents. It’s a bad system.

I do think more Democrats, especially ambitious Democrats that are looking for higher national office, that can’t just satisfy local California constituencies — like a governor — looked at this and said, “Yeah, we’ve got to get something done here.”

Clara: So why do you think the clean bill actually passed?

Brian: As I said, strong author. I think we had a really good plan, we had a great team, we advocated forcefully for it, and we introduced it clean.

Then the governor announced he wanted to put it in his budget, and that kind of came out of nowhere. I remember Buffy and I were talking to each other, and we’re both like, “Did you do that? What? How did Gavin do this?” Because he’s never done that before. He’s signed almost every single one of our bills. We’ve always had a good working relationship with the governor’s office. But he’s never actually intervened on our behalf in the legislature before to really put his thumb on the scale and say, ‘No, you’re going to pass this.’

That really changed everything. That massively strengthened her hand once it went into the budget. But I also want to say — I think we could have passed the bill without the governor’s support, but it wouldn’t have been as strong. Would have had some more of the California everything-bagel flavorings to it. This is where the support of the executive matters a lot.

The next 10 years

Clara: I wonder if you have thoughts on the political culture of California generally. It’s certainly common to see critiques, especially from people who don’t live in California, about it being a one-party state with all this crazy ideological stuff. I don’t know — I’m a California optimist, I’m a California native, I like it here. From having worked so long and so successfully inside the California political system, how do you feel about how the process works and about making it work better?

Brian: I want to be clear: again, the vast majority of state electeds, Republicans and Democrats, progressives and conservatives, moderates — they’re reasonable people who want what’s best for their constituents. The long-running joke in Sacramento is that the most bitter partisan division is between Assembly Dems and Senate Dems — just different caucus priorities that exactly nobody outside of Sacramento cares about or knows about. Most Californians probably don’t even know there is an Assembly.

Look, we work with Republicans. Buffy Wicks had a permit reform streamlining package, and we said, “Look, we think it’s really important that we have a Republican author for one of the bills.” We worked with Josh Hoover. We got the bill through. It was great.

Republicans and Democrats work much better in Sacramento than they work in D.C. It’s not even close. The folks in Sacramento who are the most troublesome are the people who are trying to get to Congress. The folks who are looking to solve problems—it’s not as bad.

Clara: Alright. Let’s say we want it to work even better than it already does.

Brian: A few things. We need better funding for outcome-oriented, evidence-based organizations that advocate for the general public interest. The vast majority of money in state elections is overwhelmingly interest-based. It’s unions and business, basically. Those are the two big groups that give money to state candidates. That’s not true in Congress, where small donors matter a ton.

I would also reform how the committee process works. You have these things called committee consultants. It makes sense in theory — you actually want professional staff on committees that understand issues well and can analyze bills and make recommendations to the chair and others. That all is very good. But I do think there are a handful of committee consultants who have accrued power beyond what is healthy in a representative democracy.

Clara: What’s your most realistic assessment of housing in California over the next couple of years? What do you think’s going to happen? What are we going to see?

Brian: Over two years, I don’t expect a lot to change on the ground. Over 10 years, yeah, I definitely do. I really think you’re going to see the fruits of the legislation—I think you’re going to see the impact of the bills we’ve passed on a 10-year time horizon.

1. Allowing apartment buildings to be built with only one staircase, which would drive costs and open up layout opportunities

2. Homes that are between single-family homes and apartment high-rises, like duplexes, townhomes, and so on

3. Developing on previously unused land