The Rebuild Conversations

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  1. 4 days ago

    Control What You Can Control

    This week we sat down with Bale Dalton, the Democratic nominee in Florida’s 7th, a Navy helicopter pilot who went on to run a 16,000-person workforce as NASA’s chief of staff. We recorded a couple of days after Republican primary voters fired Cory Mills, and Bale’s theory of the general election against Ryan Elijah is simple: nobody in this district cares about labels. They care that 45,000 families here just lost their health insurance entirely when Congress let the ACA subsidies expire, and that FPL just won a $7 billion rate hike. From Navy Helicopters to NASA Chief of Staff Tahra Hoops: Hi, everyone. My name is Tahra Hoops. I’m here with my co-host, Gary Winslett, and today we have Bale Dalton here with us. Bale Dalton just won his primary in Florida’s 7th Congressional District. Congrats. He has served in the US Navy and Navy Reserve for 24 years, 13 years on active duty with deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, and the Pacific. As a Navy helicopter pilot, Bale flew medical evac missions in Kuwait, delivered relief after Hurricane Katrina, supported special ops in Iraq and Africa, and directed combat air support in Afghanistan. After active duty, he worked at the State Department and for Senator Bill Nelson in Congress, and as NASA’s chief of staff, he managed over 16,000 employees and helped run one of the federal government’s most effective agencies. Bale, thanks for being here. Bale Dalton: Tahra, Gary, great to be here. Thanks for giving me the time. Looking forward to chatting with you. Tahra Hoops: So obviously with all those incredible experiences that you’ve had, not many people have lived a life like that. What do you think they helped teach you about getting into Congress to help build things faster and cheaper? Bale Dalton: Well, yeah, I certainly have been blessed to have some amazing adventures and some incredible mentors and examples of public service along the way. In my Navy service, I was actually also the commanding officer of the Navy’s special operations support helicopter squadron. So in that role, I was taking care of over 400 sailors, making sure that we were trained and ready and prepared for deploying to austere conditions where we were operating in combat. But also taking care of their families, right? Making sure that folks are prepared for the worst, and even in the normal course of action, are they being well taken care of while, sometimes, the single breadwinner is away? So not just do we have everything ready in case something bad happens, but also, are folks gonna be confident that, A, their sailor’s being taken care of even though they know they’re in a dangerous situation, but B, is the family being taken care of, right? Because that’s so important for folks to be able to do their job, is to have that confidence. And then when I was working for Senator Nelson, you know, Senator Nelson is a Democrat, but continues to have just wide support throughout all of Florida because he’s very well known for his constituent services. And we were all, I mean, that was drummed into us as staffers. I was on the legislative staff, so I was in DC working on policy for national defense and foreign policy and veteran services, ‘cause Senator Nelson sat on the Armed Services Committee. And so when I was doing constituent services, it was usually the hardest cases that our district directors couldn’t tackle, or were having, you know, bureaucratic red tape. And so it was really an honor for me to work on behalf of folks like me, right? Florida veterans, making sure that they were getting the benefits that they earned and the care that they needed. So really, again, a good example there of public service. He used to always tell us, public service is a public trust. And so that’s been ingrained in me for my life. And then we took that forward into NASA. You know, NASA is an incredibly cool agency, right? I mean, we’re doing like amazing things. But brass tacks-wise, what I think some folks just don’t really know about, I mean, there’s 14 centers across this country, right? So we’re having folks from all different walks of life that live in all different areas of the country, who, you know, on a list of 10 things, eight of them may be different, and getting them all working together on these missions. But the second part of that is so cool too, because we have folks that are doing so many different things, right? Researchers, scientists, engineers, astronauts, of course. So all the way from folks who are trying to manage programs and be good stewards of tax dollars, having good arguments with scientists who are like, “Look, if money were no option, I could do this, this, and this.” So it was just really interesting on getting coalitions together, having teams work together to accomplish the mission. So I think in each of those kind of different buckets, I really was able to put together a life experience that is parlayable into being a good representative for folks from Central Florida in those cases. And sometimes, like, we go too long to talk about all these adventures, but I also was in the private industry for a year, helping a small business, running programs and a profit and loss sheet during COVID. So that was a lot of those things meshing together as well, ‘cause we had overseas employees that I needed to take care of and ensure they were safe in quarantine and on the job, as well as trying to get a very small margin company to be able to weather that COVID storm. Everything Between Orlando and Daytona Gary Winslett: So it’s really interesting with your military service, because your district doesn’t contain a big military base, like if it was next to Fort Campbell or Fort Benning or something like that. But Central Florida has a lot of retirees, and a lot of retirees have military experience, and they remember serving. And so I’m just curious how your conversations around your experience have gone when you talk to veterans in your district. Bale Dalton: Well, Gary, we were talking about University of Florida previously, and so obviously this district is south of Alachua and Gadsden Counties. So for folks that don’t know, we’re sort of the whole area of land in between Orlando and Daytona Beach. It doesn’t include Orlando or Daytona Beach, but basically everything in between. And what that means is we have an incredibly diverse district in terms of what people do, you know, for their livelihood and to get food on the table. We’ve got health services. A lot of aerospace is still paramount to Central Florida. We do have a lot of military retirees as well as just retirees in general. And so when you go from west to east, it’s really cool to talk about all of the different things in this district. And yeah, folks in the southern part of Seminole and Volusia, they’re generally traveling to places like University of Central Florida and the research park there, which has really important relationships with our DOD, our Department of Defense, and NASA. In fact, I’m very good friends with one of the top administrators at Kennedy Space Center. They live in the district and then commute down to KSC. And then we’ve got a lot of folks, too, that commute north. And so we’re sort of situated military-wise in between Naval Air Station Jacksonville in the northern part, and then Kennedy Space Center and Patrick Space Force Station on the south along the coast. So we’re sort of like the area where everybody lives, and then they just travel outside the voting district for their place of work. But it’s just really a cool district. And of course, I’d be remiss not to mention that in sort of the middle, right, so we’ve got the I-4 corridor on the west, which is, you know, healthcare industry, aerospace industry, financial services, and then the East Coast, which we just talked about, a lot of tourism, a lot of retirees. But right in the middle we’ve got some old Florida ag there, citrus groves, celery fields. So we’ve got kind of a microcosm of the whole nation right here in District 7. Gary Winslett: So for viewers, I went to University of Florida, so I lived there for years, and one of the things that I actually love about Florida is how internally diverse it is. You can go 20 minutes and go from Gainesville to Palatka, and another 20 minutes over to the coast on the east, and you’re in three totally different worlds in terms of socioeconomic status and experience. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean it in a really positive way. You can actually see these cross-sections of America in really fascinating, fun ways. Bale Dalton: Yeah, it’s awesome. You know, not to anchor here for too long, but as you know from your experience, we’ve got Wekiwa Springs and Blue Spring, talking about amazing Florida-only natural resources in the western part of this district where people will go swim with manatees, to sort of high ground where the orange groves are, and you’ve got that old sage, to the Atlantic Coast, where you can watch space launches over the coast as well as swim with dolphins. So, I mean, it’s pretty amazing. Property Insurance on Borrowed Time Gary Winslett: I did wanna ask you one question about something that is, I don’t wanna say Florida’s the only place that has this challenge, but it is a very Florida-centric challenge, which is property insurance. It’s one of the most Florida issues there is. There’s been a lot of non-renewals across the state. You’ve backed federal oversight and a reinsurance backstop, and this is something that I think is gonna be important to a lot of places as we continue to deal with climate change. So could you just walk us through how this backstop lowers premiums and helps people with the cost of living? Bale Dalton: Yeah, you know, managing insurance as a job or as a program is very unsexy, right? So it’s really hard for some people to try to t

  2. 2 Sept

    Diagnosing the Affordability Crisis

    This week we sat down with New York State Senator Andrew Gounardes, who represents the 26th District in Brooklyn and chairs the Senate’s Budget and Revenue Committee. What stuck with us is his diagnosis of the diagnosis. Every politician has learned to say “affordability.” It’s been poll tested, it passed every focus group, and as Andrew puts it, tattoo it on your forehead. Almost nobody has done the harder work of asking why a specific bill is too high for a specific family. He knows because he reads the call log every night. Fifteen calls about food security. Six about landlord-tenant disputes. Eight about people who can’t pay their heating bill. That’s not polling. That’s the district telling him what hurts. From there we get into the Working Families Tax Credit he drafted on a napkin during downtime in Albany, the 8,000 units going up in Gowanus outside his office window, and why he thinks New York’s population loss is the ballgame: Texas gains five House seats next census, and blue states lose the ability to govern nationally. Stay for the rapid response round, where we find out his retirement plan is being a park ranger at Gettysburg. What Brooklyn is actually calling about Tahra Hoops: Hi everyone. My name is Tahra Hoops. I’m joined by my co-host, Gary Winslett, and today we have a very special guest, Andrew Gounardes, who represents New York’s 26th State Senate District. He covers the Brooklyn waterfront neighborhoods from Brooklyn Heights to DUMBO. He’s served in the Senate since January 2019, where he unseated Republican Marty Golden in what was then the 22nd District. He chairs the Senate Committee on Budget and Revenue, which makes him a central player in Albany’s annual budget fight and one of the most visible legislators on state tax and fiscal policy. He’s been a major champion of family affordability policy, where his signature push has been trying to expand the Working Families Tax Credit, and he’s written more than a hundred laws since 2019. And also, he was my former professor way back in the day at Hunter College, so very happy to have him here. Andrew Gounardes: Great. Tahra Hoops: Yeah, thanks for being here. So obviously, you represent a very diverse area of Brooklyn. It’s basically the full spectrum of the New York affordability story. So I would love to know what constituents are telling you right now and how it might differ from area to area. Andrew Gounardes: Yeah. So I’m lucky that I get to represent 350,000 Brooklynites in the State Senate, spanning from Bay Ridge down in the south where I was born and raised and where I live now with my wife and my three kids, all the way up to Brooklyn Heights and DUMBO and Vinegar Hill, and including a wide swath of the very, very diverse socioeconomic trends that are rippling across the city. And I think that we keep saying that affordability is a top concern for so many people, and it really is true, but it really hits people in different ways. We see this in my office constantly based on the phone calls we get from constituents asking for help. And the things that we hear the most about from people are, of course, housing, because housing is perpetually in New York a challenge. But even with housing, it depends neighborhood by neighborhood what types of phone calls we get from people. We hear a lot about housing. We hear a lot about childcare, and a lot of excitement around this push for universal childcare, but just a lot of people struggling to figure out how they can solve their own childcare needs while we build out a full universal system. We hear about energy costs quite a bit, and just the overall everyday cost of things like food and school supplies and utility bills, which have been skyrocketing here in New York and everywhere across the country. So it really runs the gamut, I would say, across the board. People are feeling the pinch in their pockets and in their wallets, and it’s been like this for quite some time. This is not a new phenomenon that we’ve all of a sudden just discovered. This has been going on for years. The diagnosis Democrats skipped Gary Winslett: So you mentioned that it’s been going on for years because, so Democrats have been talking a lot about affordability in the last year or two, but you’ve been on this beat for a while. And so I’m just curious, what do you think Democrats maybe, maybe not right now, but in the past got wrong in terms of how they talk about affordability? Andrew Gounardes: Yeah. So for me, this has been a primary focus. And one of the reasons why is because, and every office operates differently, but every night I get a summary of every call that comes into our office, and it’s organized by what they’re calling about and a summary of what the issue is. So I can see in almost real time, at least on a daily basis, we had 15 phone calls today about food security. We had six phone calls about landlord-tenant disputes. We had eight phone calls about utility, unable to afford their heating bill or their cooling bill or whatever. And so I get this data pretty regularly, and so I had a good sense as to where people are feeling the biggest challenges in their life. And what I think we have missed the mark on, everyone is using affordability as a watchword today because it’s been poll tested, it’s buzzy, it’s passed every focus group. Everyone’s talking about it. Tattoo it on your forehead. It’s like the word to say. But what I think we’ve gotten wrong is a more honest diagnosis, A, about the depth and the severity of the problem, and B, the multiple factors contributing to the causes as well as potential solutions. I think when politicians talk, they like to identify a problem, and then they have the solution for it. The one solution. So whatever idea is theirs, either they created it or it’s part of their ideological worldview, but that’s the only solution for that particular problem. And that’s just not true, and that doesn’t always accurately capture an honest diagnosis as to what the real underlying problem is. Your utility bills are too high, so are mine. Why are they too high? And so let’s deconstruct that. Let’s figure out what are the number of tools we can deploy to solve that problem. Your housing is too expensive. My housing is too expensive. Is it because your landlord is illegally raising your rent, and that’s a problem? Is it because you can make your ends meet, but your head’s barely above water? That’s a different problem. Is it because you’re trying to save money to maybe buy an apartment, right, a starter apartment? That’s a different problem. We have to do a better job, I think, at looking at the full field of what people are experiencing, and then come to the table with a whole array of ideas and options to try to help solve for them. The Working Families Tax Credit, written on a napkin Tahra Hoops: I’m glad that you were looking at the different causes that could happen, because a lot of the times when people are in such a massive crunch, they just try to get through to the next paycheck. And we shouldn’t want that to be the standard of living. It shouldn’t just have to be to just survive paycheck to paycheck. We want everyone to have a standard basis where they feel comfortable. And a lot of studies have shown that putting money back in families’ pockets, not just benefits where they could only use it to redeem food or so forth, like actual money, people have been very responsible in using it for necessities. And because they don’t have to worry about their necessities, they are able to now build themselves out and create more economic opportunities for themselves. And that’s why I wanted to talk about what I mentioned previously, the Working Families Tax Credit that you mentioned. I would love to know what it does differently from existing patchworks. How does a quarterly payout work? And just give us an overall feel for it in case people might not be aware of it. Andrew Gounardes: Sure. So the Working Families Tax Credit is a proposal that I put together basically on the back of a napkin. When I was up in Albany, I had some downtime, and I saw some early studies about the overwhelming success of the pandemic-era expansion of the federal child tax credit. We bumped up the credit to like $3,600 temporarily, and we paid out half of the value of that credit in a six-month prepayment, month by month, so that families didn’t have to wait until tax time in order to get that money back. They had money sitting in their accounts that they could use to spend on their everyday necessities and their essentials. And studies show that 93% of that money was spent on everyday essentials, which proves the point that you just made, Tahra, that families, if they have access to resources, can provide for themselves. The success of that credit was so phenomenal that we cut the federal child poverty rate by 50% in this country, which is staggering. And of course, as soon as that money dried up, the rates went right back up, and families were right back in the same boat as they were before. And so I thought, “How can we replicate that success here in New York?” And I came up with the Working Families Tax Credit. Same idea, not as generous as the federal government because we have fewer resources, but the overall goal is to give every child up to $1,600 per year, paid out quarterly, so that their families can use that money to be able to pay for their essentials. Maybe it’s food on the table, maybe it’s the utility bill, maybe it’s school supplies, which have seen significant cost increases over the last couple of years, new clothes. God forbid the family wants to go to the zoo together, and the zoo costs money, right? They wanna go see a show together. They wanna do something as a family, which they absolutely should be able to afford to do, anywhere, and particularly here in New York City, wh

  3. 29 Jul

    From Second Mortgages to Fortified Roofs

    This week we did something a little different and brought on two guests: Vice Mayor Kesha Hodge Washington of Phoenix and Louisiana State Senator Royce Duplessis of New Orleans. They co-chair the NewDEAL Forum Housing Task Force, which just released its culminating report on what state and local leaders are actually doing about housing costs. Not white-paper theater, actual programs with budgets attached. What I appreciated most is that neither of them talks about housing like an abstraction. Kesha told us about Phoenix residents who work full-time jobs, clock out, and go back to a shelter bed, and about the city’s new master leasing pilot that puts the city on the lease so someone with a past eviction or no deposit can still get keys. Royce explained why the mortgage is no longer the hard part in Louisiana, where insurance premiums have doubled for many families in just a few years, and how a fortified roof grant comes with a guaranteed cut to your premium. We also got into the language problem in housing policy. Nobody dreams of an accessory dwelling unit. People do dream of a casita for an aging parent or a kid home from college. If Democrats want to win on affordability this cycle, and we should, that translation plus results people can actually see is the whole game. The stories that stick Tahra Hoops: Hi everyone. My name is Tahra Hoops. I am joined with my co-host Gary Winslett, and today we have two very special guests with us. We have Vice Mayor Kesha Hodge Washington of Phoenix, City Council member for District 8, representing South Phoenix and one of the most dynamic housing laboratories in the country. Since joining the Phoenix City Council, she’s led the creation of the city’s housing trust fund, now at $15 million, and helped Phoenix deliver more than 53,000 units of housing over five years, years before schedule. She’s a co-chair of the NewDEAL Forum Housing Task Force, whose culminating report we are here to discuss today. I am also joined with State Senator Royce Duplessis, who is a Louisiana State Senator representing District 5 in New Orleans, a city that sits at the intersection of every housing crisis we talk about on the show, from shortages, insurance collapses, and a lot of climate exposure. He’s been the legislative driver behind Louisiana’s expanded fortified roof program, the most concrete state-level response to the homeowners insurance crisis we’ve seen anywhere in the country. He’s also a co-chair of the NewDEAL Forum Housing Task Force. We are very excited to have them both here. Hello everyone. Thank you both for being here. Very excited to discuss the NewDEAL Housing Task Force report that just came out recently. There is a lot to get through, so I’m just gonna go ahead and get started. So both of you obviously hear a lot about housing every day from your constituents. It is a number one issue across polling in just about every city, from town halls to the grocery store to your inboxes. For both of you, what is one story or moment from the past year that has stuck with you and shaped how you approach this task force? Vice Mayor Kesha Hodge Washington: I will say the moments that stick with me are the stories I hear from working-class families who are doing everything right. They’re working full-time jobs, sometimes multiple jobs, and they’re still struggling to find housing. I’ve met residents who have worked, who have lived in Phoenix for decades, who now suddenly find themselves priced out of neighborhoods they helped build. This just continues to reinforce for me that housing affordability isn’t just about housing, it’s about economic mobility. It is a workforce issue, it’s a quality of life issue. It just reminds me that we need solutions at every price point and for every stage of life. This morning on the way into the office, I was returning a call, and it was about someone who was explaining how they wanted a connection with our landlord-tenant assistance, because they got a notice their rent was going up for an amount they thought to be unreasonable. So I can’t pick one story, because we hear so many of them, but to me, the stories tell the bigger picture. And I think for me, it just emphasized why this task force was so important. State Sen. Royce Duplessis: Yeah, very similar to what the Vice Mayor just shared. I hear it all the time, and it’s not just from the people you expect to hear it from, but everyday people, working people. I had a teacher who actually reached out and I connected with, and she wasn’t the only one, but I’ve heard this often, that the mortgage payment is no longer the problem. It’s the insurance and those other pieces that are now the big challenge. In Louisiana, we’ve seen the cost of insurance double for many people over the past few years. So, you know, when your insurance bill starts looking like a second mortgage, it’s not just about housing affordability anymore. This is really about economic survival on all fronts. Gary Winslett: This is so important. This is something I never see talked about in, like, national media, but it’s hitting all different kinds of places. So, like, I live in Vermont, and nobody associates Vermont with flooding, but we’ve had flooding each of the last three summers, because we get so much bigger rainstorms than we used to get ‘cause of climate change. And now a lot of people, like, as you say, it’s not the mortgage, it’s the insurance that’s double or triple what it was five, six years ago, because now actually their house could flood. I would love to just hear you say a little more about this, because I know Louisiana has been at that intersection of insurance cost and climate change for a while. And I think it’s one of these things that really impacts people, even though it somehow, like, never makes the New York Times or whatever. State Sen. Royce Duplessis: Yeah, we have been at that intersection, just where we are located along the Gulf Coast. We are constantly in the cone or the threat of hurricanes every year. Unfortunately, after Hurricane Ida a few years ago, that’s when we really saw insurance rates just simply skyrocket. We’ve seen it happen after every storm. We saw it after Hurricane Katrina and other storms throughout the years. But most recently, after Hurricane Ida, we saw insurance costs become unbearable for homeowners, for businesses. And what we’ve been trying to do is come up with some real solutions that are gonna address a problem that isn’t going away. Because to your point around climate change, people need immediate relief, but turning around the environment and addressing climate change can’t happen soon enough to be able to give the people the relief that they need right now. There’ve been a number of policies that we’ve been trying to address, and I’m sure we’ll get to it, but it’s been crushing for our city, for our state, for economic development. We’ve seen a lot of for-sale signs on homes. And Louisiana and New Orleans isn’t unique in that regard, ‘cause everybody’s getting crushed, but insurance in particular is the top issue for us, or it has been the top issue for us locally. Surprises in the report: insurance and AI permitting Tahra Hoops: I think it’s important that you mentioned how diverse local issues can be, especially when it comes to housing and insurance issues. Vice Mayor Hodge Washington, I want to pass this question over to you. Were there any policies or ideas in the report that might have surprised you, something another member brought to the table that you hadn’t considered before, that you’re now maybe thinking to bring back to your own city? Because as we’ve mentioned, the great thing about America is, like, all of our cities are so diverse and unique that a lot of them might need a very diverse set of solutions. So interested to hear more there. Vice Mayor Kesha Hodge Washington: Thank you for that. I wanted to piggyback a little bit on the last question, because that was one of the issues that I admittedly was embarrassed to say I didn’t think about as an affordability issue. My profession pre, I guess, pre-elected office is I actually do commercial civil litigation in the property insurance world. I actually am a lawyer that does a lot of property insurance claims. I’m actually from the US Virgin Islands, which is also struck with a number of hurricanes. And I saw the same exact story that the senator was talking about. Many times, if residents were able to file a claim, their insurance became out of reach the next year for many of them. So that was something I think that hadn’t always been to the forefront of my thought process when it came to housing affordability and housing stability. And I think it’s one of those areas that we could definitely learn a little bit more from. The senator serves in the legislature. I’m in city council. We have quite a bit of preemption issues, but I think it was helpful to highlight this issue for some of my colleagues at the legislature to say, this is also something you should be considering. So I think that was one of the ideas or the issues that came up from the report that I really hadn’t got an opportunity to think about before. And the second one was utilizing artificial intelligence and layering that to help us expedite some of the work that’s being done here. Of course, for reliability purposes, we don’t want artificial intelligence to be making all of the decisions when it comes to permitting, but there are possibly ways where we could use it to be more efficient and to highlight potential conflicts and just help the process move more speedily. Those are some of the ideas that I got from the report and got from my time with my colleagues to help address this issue that I think we can bring back into our city. But I was very encouraged by how much consensus we had about the idea that we can’t solve a

  4. 17 Jul

    From “First They Ignore You” to “Everybody Loves It”

    Hi everyone, this week Gary and I talked with Matthew Lewis, communications director at California YIMBY, about why the hard part of the housing fight isn’t the economics but getting people to believe things that are true. We get into why housing and transportation are really one fight, why he thinks AARP were the original YIMBYs, and how bad-faith actors on both the left and right exploit the collapse of local news to lie about bills like SB 79. His bottom line is stubbornly hopeful: SB 79 took seven years to pass, 90% of Americans still don’t know what a YIMBY is, and judging “abundance” one year in is a category error. Call him in 15 years. Tahra Hoops: Hi everyone. My name is Tahra Hoops. I’m here with my co-host Gary Winslett, and today we have a very special guest. We have Matthew Lewis here. Matthew is the Director of Communications at California YIMBY. He previously spent a decade as a broadcast and print journalist, then moved into advocacy communications with a focus on environmental justice, energy policy, and climate change. Before this, he was Director of Communications at ClimateWorks and also co-led the Risky Business Project, an effort to quantify and communicate the economic risk of climate change in the US. Matthew is a YIMBY homeowner who also believes there’s plenty of room on his block for more neighbors. Happy to have you here. Matthew Lewis: Thank you. In fact, there is literally a ton of room on my block for more housing. I’m here in Berkeley, California, and it’s sort of astonishing that in 2026 I can still say that with a straight face. And I could say it about the entire city of Berkeley. Gary Winslett: I went to Berkeley for the first time last year for a conference, and it was a startling kind of place to walk around, just because with proper zoning reform the market would build new housing there relatively quickly. Matthew Lewis: It is a highly desirable place. People ask me, how do you like Berkeley? I’m like, well, it’s very pleasant. I have a lot of friends here, I’ve been here a number of years, it’s very easy to get to San Francisco, the weather’s actually perfect. But putting on my climate hat for a second, the marginal resident of a California coastal city, just by nature of moving to a California coastal city, reduces their carbon footprint, because of how relatively well managed these cities are in terms of their carbon emissions. So it’s not just room on the merits of land use, it’s good for everybody to put more people in cities like Berkeley. Tahra Hoops: People underestimate how much living in a walkable neighborhood makes you walk more. I grew up in New York City and DC, and now I live in Los Angeles, and every time I walk for longer than 15 minutes I just accept my fate, like someone might hit me and that is just my life. That is just going to happen. Matthew Lewis: I am one of those weirdos. Every now and then I make the mistake of flying into LAX. I usually fly to Burbank when I have to go to Los Angeles because it’s so much easier. But I flew to LAX once or twice and I’m like, you know what, I’m not gonna deal with all this. I walked from LAX to Crenshaw for a meeting, down Centennial Boulevard, and I got the whole “oh my God, how do people live this way?” Tahra Hoops: Imagine me. Imagine me. Matthew Lewis: It’s like a 10-lane freeway through the heart of the city. There was good bus service, I could have hopped on the bus, but the weather was nice, so I walked. It was like two miles. And I grew up in DC, so the idea of walking two miles is like, oh, just walk two miles, it’s not that big a deal. But in LA it feels like you’re going through a war zone. Tahra Hoops: I tell my husband all the time, you’re so lucky, I love you, and I am willing to live here. But there are great places in Los Angeles. We actually just had the expansion of a D Line come out, and it was such a fun experience. It was still a bit of a walk, but we didn’t care, we wanted the full experience, we were walking there and I wanted to use the subway. It was the first weekend, it was so clean. The transit doors are something New York City should adopt, because they were full opening doors. We got to downtown LA in around 13 minutes from the west side, which you would not be able to do in a car. So I know there are good parts of it. Matthew Lewis: I feel like the sleeper story of all these US urban housing and transportation situations right now is the amount of money Los Angeles is investing in transit. It’s the most in the US, as far as I know, at least last time I checked. LA is the city with the best weather and the worst transportation planning combined at once, historically. Everybody’s saying, but Matt, you’re crazy, there’s no way this ever happens, LA’s so broken. And it’s like, yeah, LA is broken in a lot of ways, but I actually really believe it’s the city with the most potential on the planet. Tahra Hoops: So much space. Matthew Lewis: It’s sitting there right beneath the surface. It could be the greatest place ever, because the weather really is that good, and it is so flat for most of the city. Nothing’s ever gonna be paradise about Los Angeles, but you could make it so much better than it is now. Compared to all the other deltas of any other city, the potential is so huge. Housing and transportation are the same fight Gary Winslett: So with the weather and the flatness, I wanna ask about this, because to me it seems like LA should be e-bike heaven. If you just built fully separated lanes for bicycles. I own a bicycle, I’ll ride it around my neighborhood, but I refuse to share space on the road with a car going 55. I’m just not gonna do that. Matthew Lewis: You’ve got some really good leaders in LA who are starting to see this. People like Catherine Blakespear. And you’ve got Streets for All, founded in Los Angeles by Michael Schneider. They’ve got a chapter up in San Francisco now, but he successfully ran and passed Measure HLA to try to force LA’s Department of Transportation to do exactly what you’re describing. And the problem, this is one of those deep-state problems that’s actually real, they don’t wanna follow the law. One problem that YIMBYs are gonna have to confront, not just in California but all over the United States, is that most state and local transportation departments are basically broke. So you can pass measures to improve street safety or to invest more in protected bike lanes, and the transportation departments will just be like, nah, we’re not gonna do that. And it goes both ways. In a city like San Francisco, you’ve actually got an incredibly talented transportation staff who know all the stuff they need to do to make the city safer. Car crashes are the number one cause of violent death in the city of San Francisco, and it’s been that way for years in Los Angeles too. So everybody knows there’s a problem, but you have this combination in some cases of agencies that won’t obey the law. LADOT is openly and flagrantly violating HLA, which was passed by the voters, which is amazing, that you got a majority of voters in Los Angeles to say yes, spend money making our streets safer. You wouldn’t have expected that, right? But people get it. To your point, Gary, people kind of get the potential. And then in San Francisco you have a transportation agency that really wants to do it but keeps getting blocked by the mayor’s office and by the supervisors. So one way or the other, you’ve got political skullduggery going on. Because of the completely inseparable relationship between housing and transportation, this is something we’re gonna have to get our heads around as YIMBYs and in the pro-housing movement. We talk to members of the legislature all the time, it’s part of why we exist. And one of the things more of them are coming to realize and really trying to lead on, people like Buffy Wicks, is you can’t just plop houses down and not improve the transportation infrastructure and expect it’s gonna work out. So Buffy’s got bills she’s working on related to this. I mentioned Catherine Blakespear. Laura Friedman, who we worked with on the parking reform bill several years ago, she’s now in Congress, but she could have basically recited the Ten Commandments of Donald Shoup back in the day. So you’re seeing a convergence here, folks realizing these things actually are not separate issues. And I think the next big fight is gonna be over some of these transportation questions. Listening to NIMBYs on parking Gary Winslett: Yeah, I think that’s right. The other thing about transportation is it can ease some of the NIMBYism. Not all of it, it’s not a magic wand, but some people aren’t ideological about it. They just have all these concerns about traffic and parking. So if you can ease that, you’ve at least alleviated that kind of problem. Matthew Lewis: In the YIMBY movement we talk a lot about the history of exclusionary zoning and how it was openly racist. People back then didn’t hide it, because there weren’t laws against discrimination. You gotta remember, zoning came around in the 1910s and ‘20s, and you could openly say all kinds of nasty things about people of different races and ethnicities. And while that’s still the roots of how we got into the predicament we’re in today, I don’t think it’s fair or accurate to say that’s still motivating most people. The reason I wanted to mention this is that I actually think NIMBYs are being honest, and to a certain degree accurate, not wrong, when they say if you build more housing here it’ll make it harder for me to park and increase traffic. When they openly share that concern, I look at it and think, yeah, that’s actually not wrong. If you put a bunch of housing somewhere and don’t also address the transportation issues, you will in fact make it harder to park and increase traffic.

  5. 8 Jul

    From Book Reports to Building Booms

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

  6. 6 Jul

    From the Inheritance Economy to the Homeownership Ladder

    This week Gary and I sat down with two amazing housing wonks: Muhammad Alameldin, Senior Policy Advisor at California YIMBY, and Eduardo Mendoza, Policy Director at the Livable Communities Initiative. I rent a condo in LA, and if I opened Zillow tomorrow I could not find anything close to my square footage at my price. There’s a reason for that. California builds about 3,000 condos a year, out of roughly 100,000 multifamily units. As Muhammad put it, more babies are born in two days than we build condos in a year. Zoning is usually where the housing conversation starts and stops. This episode is about everything after that: why American elevators cost two to four times what the rest of the world pays (Muhammad sits on the board of a senior housing nonprofit that got quoted $380,000 to fix one). Why the windowless bedroom became a standard American housing product. Why a modular home that installs in a day still waits 18 months for permits in San Diego, while Texas approves plans in 24 hours. It’s a wonky one in the best way. Listen, read, and send it to the person in your life who still blames BlackRock for their rent. Tahra Hoops: Hi everyone. My name is Tahra Hoops and I am here with my co-host Gary Winslett. Today we have two very special guests with us, both from the great California YIMBY. We have Eduardo Mendoza. Eduardo is the policy director at the Livable Communities Initiative and a Los Angeles-based urban planner. He sits on the board of Abundant Housing LA, previously chaired Inclusive Santa Monica, and has worked with Santa Monica Forward, the Parking Reform Network, and the Palms Neighborhood Council. He has a master’s in planning from USC, and he is also a demographer whose work has appeared in Cityscape and Slate. Joining us as well, we have Muhammad Alameldin, who is a senior advisor at California YIMBY, where he leads research and shapes the organization’s five-year legislative agenda, focused on the barriers, the how of production, that go way beyond zoning. He was previously a policy associate at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation, has advised BuildCasa, and worked at the Greenlining Institute, and his work has been cited everywhere from the Atlantic to the White House. Thank you both for being here with us. Eduardo Mendoza: Thank you. Muhammad Alameldin: Thank you for having us. Previous White House, not this one. Tahra Hoops: Back to the good old days. Why We Don’t Build Condos Anymore Tahra Hoops: So today I would love for us to start off talking about a very real problem that we have in California that also gets pretty localized in Los Angeles. It’s the fact that we don’t build condos anymore. I rent out of a condo, and if I opened up Zillow for my local area, I would not be able to find anything of this square footage for a similar price at all. So I am stuck with golden handcuffs, and there’s a very real policy reason why we do not build condos here. I know there are a couple bills that you guys have championed, so I would love to start off with an overview, for whoever would like to take that, and some of the bills you guys have championed to combat this issue. Muhammad Alameldin: So California YIMBY’s legislative agenda this year is, wow, it’s a lot. We’re tackling a few key issues. Number one, we’re gonna make it easier for people to pre-buy units. AB 1406 is a presales bill. Basically, everywhere else in the world, if you have 12 people bidding on a home and the home price goes from $1.1 million to $1.7 million, a developer would find those other 11 people and be like, hey, gimme your down deposit, I’ll build you 11 new units and you guys could live in those in two years. We basically made that impossible in California. The reason why is because developers used to run off with the money, right? Then we invented this thing called computers, and we have this thing called bonding and insurance, and anywhere from Egypt to Guatemala to Germany to Singapore, they all presale units. We don’t have that in California. We’re trying to fix that with 1406. Oh yeah, my bad. The other issue for condos is construction defect liability, sometimes wrongly called condo defect liability, but it’s construction defect. So what happens is that if there might be defects in your building, a lawyer comes to your HOA, and your HOA has to sue the developer, and then the insurance and the HOA fight it out for five years, and then there’s a big settlement. It’s this long litigious process, and no developer wants to sit in a courtroom for three to five years. And let’s say you did have a leaky window, and then you gotta wait three to five years to get money to fix it. Okay, you fix the window, but now everything around the window is moldy. And it increases the costs, and condos always have to compete with rental housing units. Like, what am I going to build? I wanna build one with less headache, and it’s rentals, because they have a four-year liability instead of a 10-year liability. What we’re trying to do with AB 1903 is just take the lawyers a little bit out of the process. It’s like a car: if I have an issue with my new car, I take it to the dealership and they fix it. If I have an issue with my condo, I could go to the builder and they fix it. That’s our first step in actually making condos a little bit more popular in California. Gary Winslett: So that makes a lot of sense, ‘cause it got me thinking about a few years ago, I visited some friends of mine in Minneapolis, and they own a condo, and it was nice. We were pretty close to downtown. We could be in the urban center, but they didn’t want to have their own house in the suburbs. They wanted to live in the city, and so a condo was just a way to do that. So I’m always a little stunned that California doesn’t do that, because as great as Minneapolis is, with all of its bike trails and light rail and urbanism, you could do that in California. And I like winter, but most people would prefer the California weather to the Minneapolis weather. So I’m always just surprised. To me it feels very self-sabotaging that California doesn’t do more to just make condos the real starter home. Muhammad Alameldin: Yeah, everywhere else it’s the real starter home. What we did is that we passed a bunch of random laws in the 1970s and early 2000s that weren’t well thought out, and now we’re dealing with the consequences. Condominium construction, we only build 3,000 condos in California per year. So out of a hundred thousand multifamily units, all of them are apartments except for 3,000 of them. And it’s like, we make more babies in two days than we build condos in a year. It’s not working. Gary Winslett: Yeah. Well, it also creates this weird two-tier market. You have really wealthy people who can own a whole house, and then you got renters who can’t own, and they’re in apartments. For a place that is fairly left-leaning and rhetorically cares about equality, it’s got this very odd sort of, you know, the aristocrats and the sans-culottes down below. It’s just not a great social setup. Muhammad Alameldin: Oh dude, yeah. We destroyed the homeownership ladder, right? We’re creating a more economically segregated society, ‘cause we’ve outlawed condos a hundred percent. And you are more likely to own a home because your parent died than you are to buy a condo in California right now. Like, it’s messed up. Tahra Hoops: It’s an inheritance economy. If you are a boomer, or you know that you’re going to inherit something later in life, you are set. But for everyone else, the economy used to feel like a waiting room. I just need to get a little older, I just need to get a good job, and then the market will have also caught up to me and my financial needs. And that’s just not the case anymore. We’ve kind of lost the plot on what people can agree to be a starter home and what people feel like they should be, to the point where everyone is only ever going to be a renter forever. Which is fine if you are going to be in that financial stability ladder, but we’re forgetting a large bottom rung of people due to that. Eduardo Mendoza: Absolutely, especially in really high-market areas. For a really long time we kind of stretched the starter homeownership ladder to include townhomes. Townhomes are really valuable in a lot of areas, but in places like San Diego or Los Angeles or San Francisco, they just won’t cut it. You need the density of a condo in order to make a building pencil out for ownership. And just creating those opportunities is very valuable. Starter Homes on Small Lots: SB 1123 Tahra Hoops: I wanted to ask about one of your more recent bills, I guess this has been just over a year now: SB 1123, which unlocks a lot of the small-lot starter homes. Tell me the mechanics behind that, how it was getting that passed, and what we have seen now a year later. Muhammad Alameldin: Yeah, definitely. So SB 1123 is an expansion of SB 684. This year we have SB 1116. So each year we’re trying to make the bill better. But SB 1123, we were like, okay, on any multifamily lot, you could split it up to 10 times, or build up to 10 units of condos or apartments on the lot, basically. So what we’re doing is we’re saying, okay, existing land, you could build more housing here. SB 1123 also allows that in single-family zones. We already allow ADUs in single-family zones, but the benefit of SB 1123 is that if you allow for lot splits, these are units that are going to be for sale. So more homeownership opportunity. The average size of those 10 units has to be, like, 1,750 square feet. So you’ll have a lot smaller units, a lot larger units, or somewhere in the middle, but it’s a lot smaller than the 2,500-square-foot single-family home we see everywhere. And, you know, each year we’re trying to make it better. This year we’re trying to make it so HOAs and CC&Rs don’t restric

    From the Inheritance Economy to the Homeownership Ladder

  7. 10 Jun

    From "Cut Your Bill in Half" to a Breaking Point

    This week Gary and I sat down with Congressman Mike Levin, who represents California’s 49th, the district that runs from Camp Pendleton up through north San Diego and into a slice of Orange County. Levin is one of the few members who pairs a seat on House Appropriations with a real decade of clean-energy work before he ever ran for office, the exact reason why we wanted him on. We talk primarily about the thing confronting every American these days: the cost of energy. The numbers are rough: energy bills are up about 13% from a year ago. Roughly 80 million Americans can’t cover their utility bills right now. Rep. Levin’s answer is the Energy Bills Relief Act, which he co-leads with Rep. Sean Casten. It brings back the clean-energy tax credits that got cut in the “one big beautiful bill,” makes data centers and hyperscalers pay their fair share instead of quietly handing the cost to you, and rewards the people who actually conserve. He also doesn’t pretend any of this is simple. He’s a clean-energy guy who’ll still tell you NEPA isn’t perfect, and who won’t let “permitting reform” turn into a Trojan horse for oil and gas. In his words, that’s the dashboard light blinking red. We got into something that should be simple and somehow isn’t: why a military family’s housing allowance is the very thing that disqualifies their kids from a free school lunch. As Levin put it, that’s about the lowest bar a country can clear. Tahra Hoops: Hi, everyone. My name is Tahra Hoops. I’m here with my co-host, Gary Winslett, and today we have a very special guest. We have Congressman Mike Levin, a Democrat representing California’s 49th Congressional District, first elected in 2018, flipping a long-held Republican seat, and who has won four consecutive elections in one of the most competitive districts in the country. Levin serves on the House Appropriations Committee, with seats on the Energy and Water Development and Military Construction, Veterans Affairs subcommittees, where he is obviously very busy. And before Congress, he spent more than a decade as an environmental attorney and clean energy advocate. Rep. Levin, we are so excited to have you here with us. Rep. Mike Levin: Thank you so much for having me. Great to be with you. The power of the purse Gary Winslett: Great to have you here. So I guess my first question is, you’re the only member from San Diego or Orange County on House Appropriations, and you sit on Energy and Water. The Trump administration has paused or canceled a whole slew of green energy and grid projects. So my question is, what levers do you have on that subcommittee to push back on that right now? And where do you think a future Democratic majority could move quickly to reverse course on some of these cancellations? Rep. Mike Levin: The good news is that our lever is the Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 9, Clause 7, that the Appropriations Committee, both in the House and the Senate, has the power of the purse and determines how we spend tax dollars, and also helps to oversee how those dollars are being spent. And so this administration has run afoul of the Constitution in many ways, but one is undermining the power of the purse of Congress. The good news here is that the president submits a budget request to the Congress, and then we work on a bipartisan basis to try to iron out an actual bill that reflects our values and reflects our priorities. And on the Energy and Water Subcommittee last year, for example, the president submitted a budget request that eviscerated clean energy and propped up oil and gas at the expense of accelerating the future that I’d want to see, which is more clean energy and lower costs for the average person. But we were able to push back, and the Republicans on the committee actually needed our votes. They needed our support to get the bill across the finish line, and we were able to sustain, I would say, 80% of what we wanted in terms of clean energy funding, research and development funding, and the rest. And so appropriations is a very powerful way where we can combat some of the extreme policy proposals of the president, and not just on energy, where he’s done everything to go after wind and solar and batteries, you name it, often for completely nonsensical reasons. But we can stand up, and we can find common ground, and we can push back against some of the extremism. Gary Winslett: So it’s funny you mention the president usurping the power of the purse. That’s basically what SCOTUS said when they struck down his IEEPA tariffs, that if Congress had intended to give away its taxation authority, tariffs or taxes, they would’ve said so in IEEPA, and they never do. So this is a recurring theme with this administration. Rep. Mike Levin: The same is true for appropriations and the power of the purse. And while the Supreme Court ruled narrowly on IEEPA and on the tariff situation, I think you’ll find a similar ruling once the court actually adjudicates Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 related cases, which I think are pretty clear. Russ Vought, the Office of Management and Budget director, he really is out of control. He is acting as though he’s in charge of federal spending. And look, we can differ on federal spending in terms of ideological differences and matters of different priorities and such. We do all the time on the committee. We have good back and forth, good debate, but we are the Congress of the United States. We’re elected by the people in all the communities across the country to represent their interests and their values and priorities, and we need to do our work, and the executive is then there to execute on the laws as passed by the Congress, including the spending laws. So look, we see this administration undermining legislative authority on many levels, and this is just one of them. Tahra Hoops: I’m glad you mentioned the budget, because the first time I went through the proposed budget that they gave to us, it was just about saying, get rid of anything that allows an American to have a comfortable life, and either send it overseas or send it to a defense mechanism, and just completely forgetting what domestic policy was, and forgetting how to have a secure future for American families. So it’s glad to see members of Congress being able to understand the impacts that it does have on domestic households, because it definitely is jarring to understand. But I did want to highlight some of the efforts that your team has been working on that we are definitely so excited to hear about. EBRA: the Energy Bills Relief Act Tahra Hoops: You and Rep. Sean Casten co-lead the SEEC Clean Energy Deployment Task Force, very long name, and co-authored EBRA, the Energy Bills Relief Act. Obviously, energy bills have never been more politically salient than they are now. We saw the recent CPI report. Energy prices, gas prices are simply through the roof. It was an issue before. We have hit crisis mode. And from your seat in California, where people are already paying some of the highest rates in the country, what does this bill specifically deliver for your constituents and across the board? Because they are truly at a breaking point. Rep. Mike Levin: You are absolutely right. The bills have gone up roughly 13% year-over-year, energy bills. And if you remember, Trump campaigned on cutting bills in half. I mean, think of that. Back in November of 20-- or October of 2024, he said he was going to cut our electric bill in half, and instead it’s gone up significantly, and the war in Iran has made it even worse. Look, you’ve got roughly 80 million Americans that can’t afford their utility bills right now. In my community, roughly one in four are behind on their electric bill. And so our bill is called EBRA, the Energy Bills Relief Act, and it has five main components, all of which I think are really important to tackling the challenge. First is reinstating the tax credits that we had in place for things like home and community energy improvements, solar and the rest, that were ended by Trump with his one not-so-beautiful bill last year. And bringing those back, I think, is really important. Two is making sure that data centers are paying their fair share. So we see the proliferation of data centers and hyperscalers all across the country, and we have to make sure that as this is done, the average ratepayer isn’t getting stuck with the bill. So we’ve got a mechanism to do that. Third is rewarding the consumers who are saving energy and embracing energy efficiency, and it’s astonishing to me that we wouldn’t all want efficiency. We wouldn’t want conservation. When I hear the word conservation, I think conservative. You would think conservatives would actually want conservation. But they’ve spent valuable floor time, the Republicans have, on trying to undo efficiency standards for appliances, for refrigerators and shower heads and all the rest. I mean, it’s just insane to me. Number four is providing the financial assistance necessary to families who need it, so that their lights aren’t turned off. And number five is giving a voice back to the American people again, so we actually have a consumer-focused energy policy, not one that’s just run by a handful of big executives or big tech companies. In California specifically, we’ve got some unique challenges, and the bill has a program designed to offset the cost that utilities are incurring for wildfire-related infrastructure. So wildfire-related costs are now a huge driver of the electric bills, and so our legislation has a mechanism to help offset those costs for the utilities, in a way that I think will be a lot more fair for the average ratepayer. Feeding military kids Gary Winslett: Cool. So Camp Pendleton sits in your district, and you recently reintroduced the Military Dependents School Meal Eligibility Act. What that does is it

  8. 6 May

    From Pro-Business to Pro-Market: The Rebuild Conversation with Rep. Sean Casten

    The biggest barrier to cheap energy in America isn’t technology, cost, or even politics in the abstract, it’s that utilities get to decide who competes with them. That’s the throughline of this week’s conversation with Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL-06), a clean-energy engineer turned Financial Services Democrat who has spent four years co-authoring the Energy Bills Relief Act with Rep. Mike Levin. The numbers Casten lays out are startling. There are 2,000 gigawatts of new generation waiting to connect to the U.S. grid. Only 85 of them are fossil fuel. The market has already chosen clean energy; the regulatory system keeps blocking it. Meanwhile, electricity bills are up 13% in Trump’s first year, and utilities just asked for $31 billion in new rate hikes. From there the conversation widens: what the One Big Beautiful Bill’s rollback of IRA tax credits actually does to coal communities, why one Category 5 hurricane could push Florida into bankruptcy, and Casten’s central argument, that the Republican Party of his youth was pro-market, the Republican Party of today is pro-business, and Democrats have an opening to claim the difference. Tahra Hoops: Hi everyone. My name is Tahra Hoops. You are joined here at The Rebuild with my co-host Gary Winslett. Today we have a very special guest: Congressman Sean Casten, who represents Illinois’ Sixth Congressional District. It includes a lot of Chicago’s western suburbs. He was first elected in 2018, actually flipping a Republican-held seat at that time. Casten serves on the House Financial Services Committee and the Joint Economic Committee. Before joining Congress, he spent two decades in the clean energy sector, including as CEO of Turbosteam and co-founder of Recycled Energy Development. In Congress, he’s focused on energy policy, climate change, grid modernization, and helping to lower utility costs for constituents across the nation. We are very excited to have you. Representative Casten, how are you doing today? Rep. Sean Casten: Good. Thank you for having me. Tahra Hoops: I wanted to jump into the recently introduced Energy Bills Relief Act, which is the most ambitious affordability-focused energy legislation House Democrats have put forward this Congress. It comes at a moment when electricity bills are up 13% in Trump’s first year, and utilities just requested $31 billion in rate hikes. Tell us what is in this bill and why this is the moment for it. Rep. Sean Casten: It’s funny. Sometimes moments just come to you. Mike Levin and I, who came in together in 2018, have literally been working on this bill for four years, and we’ve been half joking that we were just waiting for Trump to totally botch our energy policy and invade Iran to really make it resonant, so we could run between the shackles. Somewhat more seriously: when Mike and I both got elected, the Speaker picked us to serve on the climate committee. We wrote a set of 700 recommendations, about 300 of which became law in the Inflation Reduction Act. But when we got our report done, we had a bunch of outside experts vet it, and we said: what is the biggest thing we’re missing that’s going to delay our ability to achieve these goals? And they said, without exception, that the United States has never built transmission fast enough to deploy clean energy. We’re very good at building gas pipelines, which means we build gas plants where we can run the gas to it at the load. But we try not to build transmission. And so we said, we’ve got to have a package, and we have to have a package that when the window opens, it gets there. I say this in a climate perspective, but I could just as easily say it in an affordability perspective, because if you can keep your lights on and keep your house warm and get back and forth to work every day without buying fossil fuel, that also means you can do all those things without paying for fossil fuel. Clean energy and affordable energy are completely synonymous. And candidly, that’s always been the biggest political barrier, because truly prioritizing the interests of consumers to have affordable energy is an existential threat to the fossil fuel sector. Gary Winslett: It’s funny you mention transmission. Where you are, we make tons of wind in Iowa, and Chicago’s where it needs it. You’re sitting across exactly one of those transmission corridors. Rep. Sean Casten: Yeah, and there are multiple projects that would bring that wind, that cheap power, into the area, and they’ve been consistently bedeviled by grid interconnection. Grid interconnection is one of these things. The old joke is that asking a utility to connect to their grid is like asking a man for permission to date his wife. Whether or not that’s the best outcome for all involved doesn’t really factor into the conversation. When you’re sitting there as a utility and power prices are running 90, 100, $110 a megawatt-hour, and somebody wants to build a line that would bring $20 or $30 power in, that’s a competitive threat. You don’t need to be cynical about it. That’s just a practical reality. No business wants to compete with lower-cost supply if it doesn’t have to. And so we’ve seen time and time again utilities and regulators doing a really good job of building transmission lines to bolster reliability and an objectively terrible job of building transmission lines for affordability. Gary Winslett: Has your region, PJM, been particularly tough on this? Rep. Sean Casten: Everybody’s tough in their own special way. I criticize ERCOT all the time because ERCOT has remained un-interconnected. That’s the Texas grid. On the bright side, I think PJM has done a much better job than MISO of really embracing markets as tools to solve problems. But all of the regional transmission organizations are really bedeviled by governance problems. Their governance is set by their members, and their members, because they have so much capital invested in the system, are innately lowercase-c conservative. And a lot of what Mike and I have done tries to fix those things: let’s reform the governance process, let’s compel all the RTOs to be evaluated on a consistent set of metrics over the same geography and on the same timeline, let’s give FERC the authority to permit transmission lines, which it already has for gas lines. We know that system works. We have the ability to do it. But let’s get rid of these abilities for local actors to gum this up, while still making sure that we protect consumers and the environment. Gary Winslett: Of course. That would just put green energy on the same level playing field as natural gas. What we’ve done with natural gas has been great, but green and clean electricity should be on the same playing field. Rep. Sean Casten: Look, you can see it in the numbers. We currently have about 1,300 gigawatts of generation in this country. There are 2,000 gigawatts waiting to be interconnected. Of those 2,000 gigawatts, 85 are fossil fuel-fired. Everything else is wind, solar, batteries. That’s what markets want to build. Wouldn’t you prefer to build an asset with no operating costs so you can make more margin? That’s what they want to build. But that stuff is also the competitive threat. Gary Winslett: Could I also ask you about the tax credits in this bill? What do they do and why do they help? Rep. Sean Casten: The simplest way to answer is: we simply restore all of the IRA tax credits that were taken away in the One Big Beautiful Bill that Republicans passed. The reason is a little more important from a policy perspective than just “let’s get back at those bad guys.” If we were to fully embrace affordable energy, it would be a massive wealth transfer from energy producers to energy consumers. Every single American is an energy consumer. A small number of Americans are energy producers. Do the math. All is more than some. However, for certain communities, that wealth transfer is really, really economically painful. Look at what’s happened to the West Virginia economy as markets have turned away from coal. If you’re living in a town where the mine shut down, then the power plant shut down, then the Walmart shut down, and now the school can’t afford an improvement to the football field, you might understandably not see affordable energy as your friend. And part of the reason why we wanted to bring those tax credits back in is that when we crafted them, and when I say “we,” I’m talking Mike Levin and the other members of the climate committee, we were really intentional about saying we have to put incentives in place that prioritize investments in those communities that have historically stapled their economy to yesterday’s technology. Because they’re all Americans, and we want everybody to see this as a win, not just the people who don’t depend on the oil derrick in their back 40. And so those IRA credits with those incentives were really important to put back in. Tahra Hoops: It is great to see you champion that, because there was so much progress in the prior years and it seemed like we were just starting to see results. But then we have people across the aisle who seem stuck in the past. There was a recent quote from Energy Secretary Chris Wright who said, “I am pretty confident coal will lead the world in global electricity production”. I find that mind-boggling, because if you look across the globe, coal seems like something of the past. Right now we are in an all-of-the-above energy approach, and renewables are a part of that. You’ve directly criticized the Trump administration’s energy policies. What would you say to Republicans who argue that coal or fossil fuels are still the cheapest and most reliable option? Rep. Sean Casten: Look, it’s not freaking complicated. I could tell you academically all the reasons why, if you don’t have to pay for inputs, you’re going to have a lower operating cost and the

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  • Creator
    Chamber of Progress
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    19
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Chamber of Progress
  • Show Website
    The Rebuild Conversations