The Rebuild Conversations

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  1. Jul 29

    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

  2. Jul 17

    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.

  3. Jul 8

    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

  4. Jul 6

    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

  5. Jun 10

    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

  6. May 6

    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

  7. Apr 24

    From 50-Year Opportunity to 11th-Hour Amendment: The Rebuild Conversation with Rep. Josh Harder

    This week on The Rebuild, Gary and I sat down with Rep. Josh Harder for a second time, and I’m so glad we did. Rep. Harder chairs the Bipartisan Build America Caucus and has been one of the loudest voices in Congress pushing the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bill that, if passed cleanly, would be the most significant federal housing legislation in 50 years. The catch: an 11th-hour amendment called Section 901. It was designed to push institutional investors out of single-family housing, which sounds good on paper and polls well. In practice, as Josh walked us through, it sweeps in the entire build-to-rent category, 72,000 new rental units a year, and forces a seven-year divestiture timeline that would effectively kill the market. We talked about why Blackstone isn’t actually the villain people think it is, why the best way to punish corporate landlords is to build more housing, and what it’s going to take to fix Section 901 before the bill crosses the finish line. Josh and his co-chairs just released a letter with 76 bipartisan signatures trying to do exactly that– the largest bipartisan push on any substantive policy this Congress. If you care about housing, cost of living, or just want to understand how a good bill almost gets fumbled at the five-yard line, this one’s for you. Introduction Tahra Hoops: Hi everyone. My name is Tahra Hoops. I’m one of the co-hosts of The Rebuild, joined with our other host, Gary Winslett. Today we have a very special repeat guest with us: Representative Josh Harder. He’s a Democratic congressman representing California’s 9th District. He was first elected in 2018, flipping a Republican-held seat, and in May 2025 Harder launched the Bipartisan Build America Caucus, which focuses on reducing regulatory barriers to accelerate housing, energy, and infrastructure development. He serves as its chair. Harder has been active in pushing for federal housing reform, including the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a major housing package currently under consideration, with a lot of debate around provisions like Section 901. That’s going to be the ongoing theme of this conversation, so we’ll dive right in. Representative Harder, how are you today? Rep. Josh Harder: I’m doing great. It’s good to be with you. Tahra Hoops: For listeners who haven’t tracked every single twist and turn of this bill (and there have been many), would you give us the quick spiel on what the now-amended 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act actually does, and why we’re calling it the most significant federal housing bill in decades? Overview of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act Rep. Josh Harder: This bill is a little bit of a franken-bill that combines about 27 other bills into one whole. But I really break it down into a couple of different categories. First, this creates incentives for cities and counties, local leaders across the country, to build more housing. If they build more, they’re going to get more money from the federal government. It also repeals a lot of red tape in things like the HUD building code. The big thing there is the repeal of the chassis rule, which is preventing us from building manufactured housing. As you and your listeners probably know, we’ve had very little, if any, construction productivity growth for many decades. So this repeal is a chance to actually lower housing costs by building more homes in factories, a really exciting move in the right direction. And third, it also expands categorical exemptions from federal permit review so we can actually build housing faster. This is the same sort of thing you’ve seen in states like California and others that have passed real pro-housing legislation over the last couple of years, the federal complement to that. It does a lot of great things, and that’s one of the reasons we’ve been pushing for it for the last couple of months. We’re hoping we can fix a couple of the last provisions and get this across the finish line for good. Gary Winslett: Before some of these provisions that we’re going to talk about got added, this was something to be really excited about. The first iteration that went through the House, I was just amazed at how good of a bill this was. Rep. Josh Harder: That’s right. This is our first chance to pass a federal housing bill in 50 years, so I think it’s really an exciting moment. It’s turned bittersweet, unfortunately, but that shouldn’t cause us to lose hope. We’ve come to this because of such a huge grassroots mobilization across the country to finally bring up housing as a federal issue. There’s been so much growth at a state and local level over the last decade or two. This is the first time we really have a moment at the federal level, and there are so many good ideas in this bill that are going to do a ton of good. One thing I’m really excited about is that this helps build more pro-growth zoning practices for cities that actually want to grow. We’re very consumed sometimes with cities that don’t want to do anything, but there’s a whole section of cities out there that really want to build more housing. They just don’t know how. This bill is going to have a lot of support to make sure those folks can actually pass pro-growth measures that accelerate more housing construction. So yes, there’s a whole lot of good things in here, and it’s the result of years of hard work. The Build America Caucus & Energy Permitting Gary Winslett: I’d love to talk about how it fits into your broader political trajectory. You launched the Build America Caucus last year to cut red tape, to get federal housing, energy, and infrastructure projects actually built. Where does ROAD fit into that broader project? Rep. Josh Harder: This is our top priority this Congress. It’s the reason we created the caucus, because there really was not a hub for this type of work. This work spans a lot of different congressional committees, and we wanted something that would be a little more collaborative. Frankly, there are also a lot of folks who weren’t on the main committee that manages housing (the Financial Services Committee in the House) who wanted to be involved in this work. We knew it was going to be bipartisan, we knew it was going to get a lot of momentum, and that’s why we created it in the first place. The second big effort we’re working on in conjunction with this housing bill is an effort to get an energy permitting bill across the finish line, to make it easier to build energy and lower costs, which I think is especially important when we’re seeing demand growth in artificial intelligence and data center construction across the country. That’s our second priority. But this housing effort is really the reason we constructed this caucus in the first place. Gary Winslett: It would be really great to see. It was so disappointing when we didn’t get EPRA across the line in the last Congress. So it would be really great to see its successor be really good and do well. Rep. Josh Harder: There’s some real momentum. There are ongoing negotiations. Ultimately, we need a lot of trust. This administration has unfortunately created a bit of a political vendetta against clean energy projects. They’ve canceled solar projects that were days away from construction and actually offering power to homes. One real precondition for getting an energy permitting bill across the line is going to be some type of guarantee that this administration is actually going to support all-of-the-above energy, not just fossil fuels, which they clearly love, but nuclear, solar, wind, and geothermal. If we can get that type of commitment, the policy here is pretty well understood, with broad bipartisan agreement behind it. Really, the limiting factor at this moment is the trust to actually get a deal. Tahra Hoops: Trust seems to be a major key when it comes to any energy infrastructure project. Before we go off on a major tangent, it is just so politically salient right now. When you’re going outside in your car and you see gas prices being screamed at you, and at the end of the month you’re getting utility bills, knowing that remains a major priority for your caucus is always reassuring for us to hear. But to shift gears a little bit and get back into the nitty gritty: Section 901 Explained Tahra Hoops: Could you walk us through what Section 901 (which sounds very wonky as it is) actually is, how it kind of got snuck in there, and why we might have some faults with it? Rep. Josh Harder: There’s been a lot of concern over the last couple of years about institutional investment in single-family homes. Think about this as Blackstone or BlackRock (sometimes people get a little confused in the memes online) buying all the homes across the country, and that’s the reason housing prices are so high. I think most of the policy wonks who look at this issue will tell you that’s not entirely true. Institutional owners have less than 1% of the single-family housing stock across the country. But in some areas it can be a lot higher: in metro Atlanta, for instance, more than 30% of single-family homes are owned by institutional investors. So certainly it is a concern, and there’s been bipartisan agreement on it. Trump has talked about this in his State of the Union, and he’s tweeted a lot about it as well. He’s said this is something we really need to fix. We need to get large hedge funds and private equity firms out of the housing business. That’s gotten a lot of support from the left wing of the Democratic Party as well, which is always skeptical about corporate ownership. There are real concerns there, and that’s why ultimately, in this bill, there was an 11th-hour change to put in a provision that would put some real limits on institutional ownership in the housing market. I think it was well-intentioned. Unfortunately, because it was drafted at the last minute an

  8. Mar 23

    From Housing Crisis to Energy Revolution: The Rebuild Conversation with Tom Steyer

    California’s affordability crisis isn’t slowing down — so we brought on Tom Steyer to talk about what it would actually take to fix it. In this episode, we dig into his plan to build a million homes in four years, why your electricity bill is so high and who profits from it, and whether California can lead a clean energy revolution that’s already underway around the world. Housing, energy, food costs — it’s all on the table. These are the questions Californians are asking every month when the bills come due. Introduction Tahra Hoops: Welcome to the Rebuild. I’m one of your hosts, Tahra Hoops, joined with Gary Winslett, and today we have an incredible guest. We are joined by Tom Steyer, investor, climate activist, and candidate for Governor of California. Tom is the founder of Farallon Capital and the progressive nonprofit NextGen America. He’s spent the last 15 years putting his own resources towards California ballot fights on climate, taxes, and economic fairness. Now he’s running on the most urgent issue facing the state: the cost of living. We’re thrilled to have him here to talk housing, energy costs, and what it would take to actually make California affordable. Tom, welcome to the show. Tom Steyer: Thank you very much for having me. Housing Crisis & Building 1 Million Homes Tahra Hoops: One of the reasons I was so interested to have you on is that I attended one of your housing talks a couple weeks ago in Los Angeles, where housing activists and yourself discussed ways to actually make housing affordable. It’s now one of the major promises of your campaign, to build one million homes in four years. That’s a huge promise. So what does the Governor’s office actually control that could help make those numbers achievable? Tom Steyer: There are a number of issues that have to be dealt with urgently, permitting, zoning, cost per square foot, and relationships with local cities and counties. In every one of these areas, we have to move with urgency. And let me say, this is an urgent issue because Californians cannot afford to live here anymore. The number one bill they have every month is housing. Getting this right is not a nice to have, it’s a have to have. We are in a crisis. There was CEQA reform last year — the California Environmental Quality Act — to try and improve permitting. I supported that publicly. There was a lot of opposition, but it got passed in the legislature. There was zoning reform last year too, which also faced opposition but got done. But there’s a lot more to go in terms of making the timing and regulation of house building as fast and cheap as possible. In some places in California, the fee to build a house is 20% of the cost of the house. That means the price goes up by 25% just because of fees. We also need to dramatically drop the cost per square foot of building. There are tens of thousands of permitted, zoned units in California that aren’t being built because they can’t get built to a price people can afford. There are technologies to build offsite and assemble onsite that are about a third cheaper right now, and people think the price could drop by half. Just to give everyone a sense of how harsh this is: the average first-time home buyer has gone from 28 years old to 42 years old. There are many people in California who think they’ll never be able to buy a house. And a house is not just some asset, it’s the place where you live, where you build a family, where you build your life. The last issue on the table is opposition from cities and counties. To a large extent, they feel that building houses is an unfunded mandate. When they permit units, they expect people to live there, and those people require education and health services that cities don’t have money for. So they push back hard. On that score, I think I’m the only person running for governor talking about this: I will call a special election right away to close a corporate real estate tax loophole that brings in $22 billion a year to localities for education and health. That should dramatically reduce their reluctance. There’s a carrot and stick here, if we’re providing this for you, we’re going to ask something in return. Modular & Offsite Construction Gary Winslett: Can I follow up on the modular points? We’re huge fans of that here at the Rebuild, we love technological solutions to the challenges we face. I had a whole piece last week on the American Housing Corporation doing offsite building and assembling on site. As you say, it saves a ton on development cost per foot. How exactly would the state help with that as governor? Is that procurement standards? Tom Steyer: I think it’s procurement standards, permitting standards, and regulations. But it’s also that people are reluctant to try new things, and this is something whose time has come. When you talk about modularization, I think we’re actually at a stage beyond that. When I think about modular technology, I think about building rooms offsite, putting them on trucks, and taking a wide load down the highway. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about technologies that can easily build nine to twelve stories, the ability to build apartments much cheaper, as well as houses. Gary Winslett: So you’re talking mass timber, that kind of thing? Tom Steyer: Yes, we’ve looked at that for a long time. But a lot of this is about building walls and floors offsite and assembling them on site. It’s been done very successfully with some of the biggest builders and homeowners in the world. The technology is here. The question is how we get it moving, and making sure the jobs that come out of this are good-paying, organized jobs. Tahra Hoops: This all sounds like a no-brainer to me. I’m originally from New York City, which did a lot of building in the past. I grew up in a row home, everything was quite vertical. I’ve been in Los Angeles for two years now, and the first thing I noticed was just how flat everything is. I’d go on walks with my dog and think, we could be doing so much more here. Why do you think Los Angeles and California as a whole have been so slow to build? Tom Steyer: I think there are a couple of reasons. One is cultural. When people are used to low-rise, they can’t imagine high-rise. They find it unpleasant to think about. But if you build it, that was true in New York. Before they built apartment buildings, everyone said, “I’ve never lived in an apartment.” Then they built some really nice ones and people said, “It’s great living in an apartment.” The other thing is there are reasons in terms of liability for developers as to why we never build condos in California. We only build rental apartments and houses, and it has to do with differential liability laws. There are a bunch of things we need to change. But the biggest issue is there has been no sense of urgency. I went down to LA to look at a low-income housing site with the person who developed it, and they said it took three to four months after the building was fully built to get hooked up to the grid. No one can move into a building with no electricity. So that’s three to four months where you’re paying interest on your loan, paying all your costs, with absolutely no revenue. That’s outrageous. We need to stop saying “let’s have the meeting in three months” and start saying “we’re having the meeting this afternoon.” There has to be a sense of urgency. Including ADUs, let’s get going, get units built, and make them at a price point people can actually afford. Tahra Hoops: The process isn’t working. Tom Steyer: We have decades of knowing the process is not working. So let’s stop that attitude. Affordability is at the center of our campaign. The ability to pay your bills at the end of the month is the biggest issue in California, and this government in DC is crushing us. I know it’s just one station, but $8 gas, what does that do to your monthly budget? Energy Costs & Electricity Reform Gary Winslett: California has some of the highest electricity bills in the country, and you’ve made bringing those costs down a centerpiece of your campaign. Your pledge is to lower energy costs by 25%. How are you going to get that done? Tom Steyer: I know everybody feels like that’s impossible. Let’s be clear: California pays twice the average cost of electricity in the United States. If we drop rates by 25%, we’ll still be 50% over the national average. So when people say that’s a big cut, yes, it’s a big drop to a still-terrible place. The three big utilities in this state are legal monopolies. You’re not allowed to compete with them. And monopolies always overcharge and always produce terrible service. They always explain that nothing else is possible, that without them, we go back to burning trees. Here’s how utility economics actually work. Most people think electricity companies charge you for electricity, have costs, and the difference is profits. That’s not true. What they do is get a capital expenditure accepted by the Public Utilities Commission into what’s called the rate base, and they get a guaranteed return on that rate base. So their incentive is to get capital expenditures into the rate base. If you and I are running an electric utility, we could put $200 million into the rate base and make $20 million, or do the same project for $100 million and make $10 million. It’s very much in our interest to choose $200 million. There’s no incentive, in fact, there’s a huge negative incentive, to do things cheaply. That’s a perverse incentive. I’m not angry at these people; that is what the state set up. And meanwhile, there is a gigantic electricity revolution going on in the world. The cost of clean energy is incredibly cheap and getting much cheaper. The cost of batteries is incredibly cheap and getting much cheaper. It is much, much cheaper than fossil

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The Rebuild is about making blue cities and states better and less expensive: tackling high costs, fixing broken processes, and proving that Democrats can deliver. Sign up to get solutions. www.therebuild.pub

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  • Creator
    Chamber of Progress
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    17
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Chamber of Progress
  • Show Website
    The Rebuild Conversations

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