State-Mandated Housing Coming to Your Town | Christine Epperly

While California is struggling with its housing crisis, one woman dared to stand up and ask some tough questions. This huge project showed up with the applicant being somebody from out of state, 86 units. My guest today is Christine Epperle, a licensed civil engineer and building designer with over three decades in business. My first question when the consultant came in is, I'd like to see some of the other ones that you've done locally. They said, oh, you don't need to see that. She discovered a pattern of urbanization, high-density development, and an ambitious plan from the state. A concept called the 15-minute city that will change the landscape of California. So I looked at them. They're basically all the same. And I saw this language, urbanization, high-density, walkable, bikeable. And the potential impacts might be much bigger. Living in that high density, in these small units in high density, it does something to you. Christine, it's great to have you on. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me. We want to talk to you about a phenomenon that's happening in California. People are, we're seeing all these apartment buildings going up. At the same time, they're very high priced and we're told that they're affordable housing. Most of them look like luxury units. You have seen some of this happening in your community, which is a very small town in California. Before we get into that, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself? Yes, I'm a licensed professional engineer. I specialize in structural engineering, in particular custom residential. I've been a sole proprietor for almost 30 years in this field. And then I also do architectural design for people. And I'm very involved in the community with the whole building aspect, design, building, construction, et cetera. And additionally, I've been on the design review board in my town. And the design review board was sort of an advisory type of a board that was started by an architect in our town about 25 years ago. And so it's very friendly and loose and casual and collaborative. And what's happening in your town is actually happening across California. That's right. But your town is a good example of a place that we can examine what is happening. Because it's a small town. Can you tell us what did you see? Well, what happened is we have this design review process. And if you're doing a multifamily project, you have to come before the board. And so this huge project showed up with the applicant being somebody from out of state. 86 units. So they want to build in your town. So your town has 7,500 people. Right. It's a small town. And all of a sudden, there is these developers coming to build 80 units, right? 86. 86 units. Yes. And so it came in front of the board. And we have these what they call discretionary standards. And I'll get to later why that's important. And so it's a sloping lot. It starts at the street at effective zero and goes up to 32 feet. So it's quite sloping. And in order to build his project, he needed a flat lot. So they came in and proposed to just cut the back of the lot, making huge retaining walls, and then building this flat spot and bringing in this development. And one of our discretionary standards is, does it make a smooth transition to the neighboring properties? He started out with 16-foot retaining walls. You know, so we started discussing all this. And they realized that they could go in through the SB-35 process. So they pulled the project. So we have the state bill SB-35. And that is trying to encourage large, high-density housing projects. And it's interesting because they promote it as affordable housing. But actually, only a maximum of 50% have to be affordable. And I want to step back briefly to what affordable means, because you have to get into that word. So affordable is simply 30% of the median income in your county. So in my area, that would make a two-bedroom apartment $3,200, $3,500 would be considered affordable. Wow. Yeah. So anyway, they pulled the- Can you explain that more? Like, what do you mean 30% of the income? So you have every area, it's usually county by county, has a median income. And in my area, it's around $100,000. And the housing, if it's to be considered affordable, cannot be more than 30% of what you're spending on your housing. 30% of that number- Of the median income. Of that number. Not your number, that number. So it's $30,000 a year, the housing has to be. So that's affordable. That's affordable. Which might not be very affordable for a lot of people that are not really- Indeed, it's not low income. So low income is a different meaning entirely. So these SB35 projects are 50% affordable, and then the rest, whatever you want to make it. So these units that you see in your area, what- Which were in Orange County. There's a lot of units going up. I saw them coming over from the airport, yes. And this is what's happening in my area too. They just designate a certain number of units as affordable. And then they deed them into, they can't charge more rent for those. And so it's deceptive because you look like you've got this high end, but not everybody's paying that. But a lot of them are. But they're still paying 30% of the median income of that area. Which could be a lot still. Well, yeah. So for example, I mean, I'm from Menlo Park and I was down there with my dad and he was showing the same thing on the El Camino. And he had talked to his real estate agent and he told me that those were renting out for $8,000 a month. Wow. Well, what the developer does is he has to designate a certain number of units as affordable. And he can rent those out only at that 30% number. But the rest of the units are whatever he can get. So it's a little bit deceptive in my opinion. But what's happening with these developments also is that the developer is getting subsidies. So when we were, let's go back to our project. When they were still in the design review process, I asked the developer, he was very forthcoming. I said, why are you here? You're from Idaho. This is Sebastopol. What are you doing here? And he said, quite frankly, he goes, California gives us the most money. So he explained that they get federal money subsidies, state money subsidies, and local money subsidies if they call it farmworker housing. So they called it farmworker housing. That did set them into having to have it be low income, not affordable, low income. So it's going to be low income. But they're subsidized on their build and the rents are subsidized. The taxpayer. And that's how you get the low income. And then in this process, what you guys were surprised from what it sounds like is this. You showed me the map of where this location is. There's a lot of single family home and a lot of space. And then all of a sudden, there's going to be a big apartment complex kind of in the middle of nowhere. Is that? Yeah, it used to be. So Sebastopol was traditionally mostly apple farming. And so this was actually a remnant of an old apple farm. So there's a few areas in Sebastopol that are within the city jurisdiction that aren't developed. And what the state did was it went around to all the jurisdictions and said, you have to make this housing element and you have to designate areas for high density. So the city of Sebastopol was forced to designate some locations for high density because the state said you had to. So they found this. It was actually two lots. And we'll get to that too. Because these objective design standards are very big on combining lots so that you can do these developments. So there were two lots. They combined them. It was already zoned through the housing element for high density. And in they came. And they used the SB35 process, which means that the local jurisdiction has no say so whatsoever. And this is very common now. A lot of the local jurisdictions, they have to approve this kind of housing, right? The cities have to. It's like you have to give them a permit in 90 days. I mean, it's crazy. So there's a lot of moving parts here in this discussion. So I'm going to move on just briefly to the objective design standards. So what the law says is you can do as a developer as long as the design standards are objective. They can't be subjective. So basically, when we had our standard that said, there has to be a nice transition between your development and the adjacent properties, that gave us the leeway to say, look at the different projects and say, yeah, that does, that doesn't, right? Well, that's subjective. It has to be objective. So it would have had to say, you cannot have a retaining wall taller than six feet. They took two people from the design review board, one person from planning, and one city council member. And they made a subcommittee. And we were to read these objective design standards, which were prepared by a consultant. So my first question when the consultant came in is, I'd like to see some of the other ones that you've done locally, that you've completed the project. And they were hesitant. They said, oh, you don't need to see that. I said, yeah, I'd really like to. And so he said, well, we did one for Belvedere. Well, that was interesting to me because that's where a good bulk of my engineering work is in Belvedere. So I know Belvedere. And I looked at the one that they were presenting us as the sort of preliminary. And they were the same. I mean, I could take page, flip, read the same language, page, flip, read the same language. And that's what made me start thinking, start wondering what was going on here. Like, what's happening? So I did a little research. And I found out that this company did 11 in Marin County. So Belvedere's in Marin County. I'm one county north in Sonoma. So I looked at them. And they're basically all the same. I mean, there's little nuanced tweaks in the language in a few locations. But basically, they're all the same. And that's when I started wondering and asking questions about, what is this? Because we have to adopt this. And they're telling us now it's only for SB35 and SB9 projects. But I'm thinking, well, here you have this document. What's to keep the jurisdictions from just saying, well, we're just going to adopt this for everything now. And so I wanted to know more. Is where that came about. So I started looking into it more. And I saw this language, urbanization, high density, walkable, bikeable. And I'm thinking, you know, I thought about this a little before I've heard about this. But what is this really? And I can see that it's definitely a sort of ideology where you take your housing, you build inboard, you densify your cities. You don't build outside of your cities. That's why you're seeing all these apartments. And the concept of the 15-minute city, which I thought when I first heard about it was some kind of conspiracy theory. But no, they're serious about this. Where you live, the ideal is you can do everything you need to do in your life within a 15-minute walk. You can work. You can recreate. You can go to the restaurant. You can go to the grocery store. Everything within 15 minutes. That's the ideal. So high density essentially means a lot of apartments or a lot of housing in one area, right? Exactly. And you can walk to all your amenities. And they're saying this is more affordable. But from what we are hearing, these apartments are a lot more expensive, like, or the same prices. What are yours? Well, it's interesting because it starts out with we need more housing and we need more affordable. This is what's interesting to me. And that's what this push is about because they're forcing the cities to develop more. This is what they're saying. But this program doesn't seem to support that. And I would say anywhere where you have high density urbanization, it's always more expensive than when you're out in the country. I mean, cities are more expensive to live in. I think that's pretty much normal. So it's almost like we have this thing that's being promoted. And then what's really happening? Folks, you've probably been hearing me talk about WireEFI for a while now. WireEFI has been getting a ton of phone calls from you. And I thank you for supporting an investment that actually helps people. A lot of people are talking about this investment. 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Isn't there a space across the community? Like there's a lot of farmland that people could develop single, if they wanted to. If they wanted to change the zoning, people could develop single family homes, right? Well, they're trying to discourage that. So, and that's a big issue. The document that's really interesting to read is the RENA methodology, final RENA methodology document. So RENA is the Regional Housing Needs Allotment. And that's been around since the 60s. So the government's trying to predict where are we going to need housing? You know, what kind of housing? But what's happened recently is the method includes a lot of things that can't be defined. Okay, so, and then what they do is the state gave the Bay Area, the Association of Bay Area Governments, a number. And this number has to be met within eight years. And that number is 441,000. Then you have a committee that gets together and decides which jurisdiction gets how much of this number. And it's divided into extremely low income, low income, moderate, and above moderate. And then they have this methodology where they're deciding who gets what. So for example, Belvedere is a town that is only exclusively extremely wealthy people. It's just a little rock in the Bay. So their RINA number has required them to balance by having extremely low income housing. So people can live in Belvedere when they're extremely low income. The issue with Belvedere, which I think is an interesting one, is they have no land to build anything on. They're already built out. Completely. So they have to tear something down? Well, they don't know what they're going to do, right? So they're trying to use ADUs as a means to- To build these little homes. Well, but they have to... Now, this is another thing that's really interesting about it. If you don't meet your RINA as a jurisdiction, the punishment is horrible. You get all your grant funding pulled. You get referred to the attorney general. You get fined. You have to meet your RINA number. But it's dependent entirely on people applying for building permits. Like, how can the jurisdiction control that? So in Belvedere, for example, they're hoping that people that have these really... I mean, the houses there are eight, nine, 10 million, 20 million, that they'll build a little ADU in their yard so they can count that towards their RINA number. Well, people living like that are probably not particularly motivated to do that or rent it out. They're not going to rent it out. They don't need to. Also, doesn't it create a social problem if you build an ADU in a $10 million home for a family that, let's say, need affordable housing and they live there and they see these rich people with these nice cars and the kids growing up have to go through seeing their neighbor, their kids have all these nice things. Do you think this is going to create a problem for those low-income families? The whole thing is just inorganic. It's just not following the natural flow of humanity. But the thing is, it can depend. But the problem here, I think, is the density. In that density. For example, I do a lot of work where it involves me going out to large ranches and stuff in the Central Valley. And what I see out there is you'll have the nice house of the ranch owner and then there will be other little houses that the farm workers work in. But it's not, that seems to work out fine. But this is trying to put, if you've got a house in Belvedere and you've got a little tiny space you can put an ADU in, you can see when it's more spread out, like if you could allow building outside of the urban environment, then you're not sharing like the wealthy part of the family. The same driveway. Well, you know, you've got your big fancy house with your pool and your cabana and then you got the granny unit right there. I think that's going to cause problems. Yeah. So, but the, like out on the ranches, there's space around it, right? You know, so you have your own little space with your unit or your house as the farm worker, you know. And you have a different perspective in all of this because you actually visit Europe as well. You kind of are seeing, you go to Hungary on a regular basis and they tell you, because they've been building apartment units and they kind of, we're essentially, we're in California, we're building a lot of apartment units. We want to go in the route. If people don't know about this, they should know about it because we're going to have all these apartment units. We're going to go in a dense, we're planning for a dense living. And you have an interesting perspective because you go to Hungary in Europe, which they do have these apartment units. Can you tell us what do they think of where we're headed? This is very interesting. So after World War II, the housing stock in Hungary was wiped out by the war. So the villages, their houses were all bombed out and they went behind the Iron Curtain and they had a real housing problem because everybody lost their home. So they came in and they built this high density in the cities and they moved the people in. And over time, it was too harsh on the human spirit. It came to be known as brutalism. And now when you go to Hungary, the remnants of this high density where only the very, very poor people live. And they're trying to move people back out into the villages and rebuild into the villages. So it's kind of the opposite of what we're doing now. But the thing that's interesting about Hungary going over there is that the Hungarian people have always looked to California as like a beacon, like we all want to go there. And now they're looking at these YouTube videos and they're seeing all these problems with the homeless and with the crime and everything. And they're asking me, what are you doing? Why are you letting this happen? And additionally, and this is really interesting, they'll say to me, this is our hope. You're our shining light. If the light goes out, we have no hope. You need to have something to aspire to. Now, why do they call it brutalism to be in these apartment buildings? Living in that high density, in these small units in high density and not going very far from your house. Now that happened organically in Hungary because they didn't have any personal transportation. Which part of this program is trying to take that away? It does something to you. It makes you lose confidence. Your world becomes much smaller. You have a low self-image. It's a brutalism. And this is really interesting to me because we have a program where we're taking inner city kids out to like Wyoming and to a ranch. And they've never been more than a few blocks from their home. And we're taking them out there and they're having experience with horses and they're in the outdoors and they're riding horses and they're going fly fishing and having cookouts and everything. But what we found with these kids when they first come is that they have no confidence, none. And they're defensive and they're afraid. And you give them a couple of weeks out there with the horses and the fishing and the hiking and they change. So this is brutalism. But right now it's the trend here. I mean, I'm probably one of the few people certainly in my town that would say this. They get run out of town. So essentially what California is doing, which in your town, which when I saw the pictures, it doesn't really make sense to put a big building in the middle of, you know, ranches and homes that have big backyards. And what's happening in California is we're building these communities in the middle of the towns and suburbs, which essentially you're saying it's not going to really get the people out of those communities anyways, because they're living in this confined space. Well, and what they want to do, so this is the other aspect of this program. Make sure that you don't provide enough parking. So this development that we're getting, the 86, first of all, the road narrows down in that location. So there's no possibility for street parking in the proximity of the units. And they have 1.7 parking places per unit. And that includes the disabled parking and the car charging parking, which, you know, you can't use. And it's interesting to me. So the idea is that these people will give up on having a car. And the plan Bay Area has delineated all these transit corridors, and we're going to take buses and all this kind of stuff. But Sebastopol's out in the middle of nowhere. You have to have a car. You know, they're pretending like you're going to walk into town to go to the grocery store, but you can't. There's so many things that are not in Sebastopol because it's a small town that you have to drive to go do, that these cars are going to be there. You know, and you talk to a normal modern family. The husband has a car. The wife has a car. If you've got kids that are old enough, they have cars, they have to. And there's nowhere for them to park. But this is like they're trying to force you to walk away from your car. And the people making this decision, they're ideologues. Like they see this wonderful, happy situation where everybody, you know, car shares or walks or, you know, whatever. And we save the planet from carbon dioxide or, you know, whatever we're trying to do here. But it's not real. So you're trying to also help these people by bringing these low-income communities in the middle of certain communities that are affluent, right? This is part of the program. Yeah, so they've gone through and they've delineated the areas that they consider are underprivileged. And they've ranked the arena number so that if you have a lot, if you don't have a lot of people in lower-end housing, low-income housing in your area, then it needs to be balanced by bringing those in. And that's reflected in the arena number. This project that's come into our town is arena number-driven project. I mean, we have to develop a certain number of these units. If you really enjoy California Insider and you think we have a valuable program, I highly recommend watching our documentary, Leaving California. It's a 70-minute documentary. We went so in-depth. It's my story going across the state and finding out what's going on. Why do we have people leaving the state? And if there is any solutions for the state so we can stop this exodus. Click on the link below and subscribe to Epoch TV. By subscribing to Epoch TV, you can watch this documentary, Leaving California. Not only you can watch Leaving California, you can watch many other content and documentaries and shows and programs. And it has tremendous value because a lot of this content is nowhere else to be found. Click on the link below and I hope to see you there. The homeless problem is getting worse. It's not getting better. Crime is getting worse. It's not getting better. Regulations are getting worse. It's not getting better. People are bailing on California in record numbers. More than half of Californians are considering moving. It might be harder to find a U-Haul than to find your next home. The exodus of people moving out of California is not new. No sane person would want to leave California if they could make it here. For the first time ever, people are leaving. In 2020, California lost 650,000 people. First time in my lifetime I've heard that. I'm leaving California. Why you should consider moving to heaven. We're gonna miss you guys. Several high-profile companies like Tesla have moved their headquarters. I'm out of here. This place is gonna sink. Watch, they already have high taxes. This is just the tip of the iceberg. California treats businesses like criminals and taxpayers like organ donors and people get tired of it. Here's some of our costs. Drivers are paying $7.39 a gallon. $3 million. This is like a normal house. Our problems are man-made. All you have to do is pay attention. Here is what I found. I can't be the only person who's seeing this. The California legislature can't go on forever like this. This is a form of self-destruction. When I came here 22 years ago, it was a different California. Where is the state headed? California will deteriorate. Where'd the money go? This is because of stupid policies. There's no other word for it. The politicians are making money off our problems. People were tricked. They're being lied to and their way of life is being destroyed. There's a lot of people that you would be surprised by their stories. My entire family is leaving. You know, we left all of our friends behind. Hey, live a day or two in our shoes. We're going to lose the very core values that built this state. California's bad ideas go national really fast. And if California fails, the United States failed. So are they going to bring people from out of town for these units? Or is it going to be people that are there? Because it seems like, is the population growing or is it constant? Or is it constant? How does it work in your city? Well, this is really interesting too. So this particular project has to be farm worker. So where are the farms? Like if they were from where we are. So we have a lot of vineyards. But the thing about vineyards is they really only have, they're labor intensive for a very, very brief time, which is pruning and picking, right? So what the vineyards typically do is they contract out to companies that have crews that they bring around and do the work when the work's needed. So I can't imagine that there's all these low income farm worker people. I mean, I could see out in the Central Valley maybe. But so I don't know. I don't know where they're going to come from. They're not local. The other thing that's interesting is- So they have to drive then further probably to get to these buildings. Well, okay. For sure, the location of this building, nobody's walking to work in 15 minutes. And there's no public transit to take them anywhere. So yes, they have to drive. This was one of the things that we were discussing when it was under the purview of the Design Review Board. We were asking them about this. And they just kept saying, the state law says we only have to put this much parking in. And that's what we're doing. There was a time not too long ago that we could have done something about it. But now we can't. And this all happened at the same time. So we had these initial meetings where we were commenting on the project. And then we got shut off because of the SB35. So what ended up happening, but these people, I felt sorry for them because the public comment on this was during COVID, suddenly everybody's on Zoom. So you're sitting on the Zoom meeting and these poor people that aren't sophisticated with computers, some of them are, spent half of their three minutes saying, can you hear me? Can you see me? Do I have this on right? And they have just a couple minutes of this really critical thing to them. And then they're just cut off. But then at least they had a chance then it moved into SB35. And the attitude was, well, you're living next to a project that's zoned for high density. You should expect this. So it's just a difficult situation. Now there's another side to this where people say state wants to solve the affordability problem with these kinds of projects. They want to make it more affordable. Do you think these units will be costing less to make? Well, this is interesting. So they're saying that it's unaffordable now because there's not enough units. That's the reason. So if you make a whole bunch more units, it'll drive the cost down. But that's actually not the case. So what's happening construction in California, actually the material aspect of this is everywhere. When the lockdowns happened, the producers of materials didn't know what was going to happen. They had to shut down their operations. And there became a huge shortage of materials because interestingly enough, the construction did not slow down. I mean, when the lockdown started, I thought maybe everything would slow down in construction too, but it did not. So it peaked the price. I mean, the prices of everything involved in construction, your concrete, your rebar ties, your formboards, everything is two to three times more than what it was before COVID. And now they're not going back down. This is now the new established price. So you're looking at building the most basic unit at $600 a square foot. So, for example, I live in a 1,200 square foot house. And if I had to rebuild it for, you know, fire or something happened, that would be $720,000 to build a 1,200 square foot. And this is, when I'm saying $600, I am talking about your most minimal material that's probably not going to have very good durability. My contractors are telling me, oh, no, you got to move up to 800 to 1,000. Well, these are fixed costs. I don't care whether or not you're building an SB35 project or you're building a house. Those costs are there. And this is why- Whether you're building a multi-unit or whether you're building a regular- Right. And a multi-unit one is, you know, you're going to get some, some break, you know, because of the size. But lo and behold, what are we finding out? We hear about these, these homeless apartments that were built, I think it was Venice Beach. They said, oh, it's $700,000 per unit. And I'm thinking, yeah, it is. And the other aspect that's driving up the cost is the labor. So what my contractors are telling me is ever since the COVID lockdowns, they can't get the good workers. And so they're having to pay a lot more money because they have to pay more now for a lot less production. So the labor costs have gone way up. And you combine that with the materials costs and you're looking at these, these fixed numbers. And you can talk about building however many units you want. It's still going to cost that. So I don't see this, this program driving the cost down at all. So we're building these complexes, multi-unit complexes in suburbs. We're forcing this development. We want to do it, the state policymakers, they want to do it because they want to lower the cost of housing. They also want to have some climate initiatives. They don't want people to drive. But from what it looks like, it might drive, it might not do much about the cost. And then it might also not have a lot of impact on driving because a lot of these areas are not in the urban areas, right? Well, yeah, it's ridiculous. And the thing is, is when you're looking at the cost, there's all these state mandates that are driving up. All my contractors know exactly what I'm talking about. You know, you can't use gas appliances anymore. So now you have to use these heat pump units and that's a whole nother process and cost. And then you've got your energy requirements for insulation and lighting and everything. It's so onerous. And they just passed a new code in California that made it even worse. And you start to add all these things up and it's just unaffordable. But what's interesting to me is it continues. I mean, there's no shortage of work if you're in the building environment right now. The prices are astronomical. And you don't think this effort of building affordable housing is going to solve it? Well, it's not affordable housing. So they're just saying if you build more units, there'll be enough units that the price will go down. That's the thinking. But that's not what's happening because it still costs that much to build those units. So they still have to sell for the price point based on the cost. Because we're not looking at what's making them costly. It's not because there's not enough units. That's not the reason. In fact, I can tell you that for sure because the landlord-tenant laws in California are so onerous that we have a massive amount of unrented out units that exist right now. And I had a conversation with a lady that ran for mayor of San Francisco. And she was involved with the Chinese community and she told me there was 40,000 unrented units in San Francisco. Because if you rent it out, they're worried that you're not going to get the tenant out. The laws favor the tenant. So people are afraid of renting and then they don't want to, then the price goes up because there's not enough units. Well, those units aren't there, right? So now we're going to build more units, but we've got the cost of the units. So if we could rent out those units that are already existing, then you could go back to a more affordable price because you don't have to pay to build them. You're building these new units. You've got to pay to build them at these costs that I'm describing. And these costs are fixed costs. You can't make them go away unless the prices of everything just start going down. And I don't see that happening. So in a way, it's not well thought out. But in addition to that, there's this sort of underlying agenda. And that is what is called form-based code. And that's what these objective design standards, objective design standards are form-based code. And it's a new way to look at how you're going to plan your community. This is what's interesting about it. So what they're trying to do is not have big boxy buildings, but like have, like if an area gets built out in apartments, you have smaller buildings and maybe some roads or paths going between the buildings. So it doesn't look like one giant building. But the thing that's interesting about it is, and this consultant that we had keeps talking about this, we can combine lots and we can make this like little community within the community, so to speak, because you're going to have little roads going through and some houses and all this. But this is the thing about it. Combining the lots into one lot and then building all these units. One owner, we're talking rentals. We're not talking individual home ownership. Used to be like if you had a townhouse project, what they do is they divide each townhouse becomes its own personal, separate property. So an individual can go in there and buy it and start their, you know, the greatest way in this country for your average person to gain some wealth is to own something, a property. And these are like where people start. They'll start with the townhouse, right? And then they'll get a little equity. Their job will get better. They'll move to the single family. Well, what they're planning here is these apartment complexes that you see going up, they're all rentals. And this plan, this form-based code, they're all rentals. You're creating a rental society. And that's very different from a society where everybody has their own stake in it. And nobody's talking about this. Now, Christine, do you have any recommendations for Californians that are watching this? Yes, I do. First of all, don't take what you're being told about anything and just accept it. Think about it with your own mind. Do research. Look into it. There's the amount of information I found just by going on Google and searching is incredible. But don't accept just what you're being told. And people are busy, so they tend to. And get involved with your city. I mean, I'm only here because I volunteered to be on this board, right? So find ways to get involved with your community. Go on boards. Join the school board. I don't know, the design review board. Run for city council. Get in there and say so because this stuff is all happening and you don't even know about it. Hi, I'm Siamak Khorrami, general manager of Epoch Times in Southern California and host of California Insider. Thank you so much for your amazing support. It's been an honor to have you with us along this journey. And we've grown such a great community of subscribers like yourselves that have been with us committing to truth and tradition, which is what we want to discuss this year at our gala. So please join us on October 28th in Newport Beach for an exceptional night with food, drinks, and great conversations. Our guest speaker will be Victor Davis-Hanson as well as some of our media personalities like Yanni Akelek of American Thought Leaders and Roman from Facts Matter. You can get your tickets now on epochgala.com. And once again, thank you for your support. And I look forward to seeing you on October 28th. So Christine, what would you tell those state leaders? It's not easy. The housing costs have gone up significantly and they're trying to solve this by pushing communities to develop these density housing. What would you tell, what would you recommend to them? Well, I think first of all, they have to find a way to listen to the people that are actually engaged in the industry and not just use these ideological ideas that sound nice because those are the people that really know what's happening. And the cost of construction is, you're gonna have to talk to the people that are actually building the buildings and find out what's going on with them and what they think and what's happening. They'll tell you about the problems with their trucks. They had to convert all their trucks from diesel. That cost a huge amount of money. That got passed on, right? You have all these energy standards. I mean, we live in a really nice environment, really do we need this much insulation and this kind of stuff? What's that costing people? And listen to the people. I don't know how you get to that point where you're actually, it's an interesting situation because people that are actually working and doing stuff, building buildings and transporting the materials, they're working and they're busy, right? And so they're not like available. They don't come to the meetings, the planning meetings. They don't come to them. Who come to the planning meetings are the people that have these nice ideas. They got a little bit more time, maybe they're not working so much. And the ideas sound good. You know, let's bring everybody into the city so that we can protect the environment outside the city. That's kind of a thinking. Well, is that practical? Is that reasonable? I think I would give the leaders the same advice I just said to the people. Don't just take these ideas, think them through, drill down on them, ask yourself questions. Why is this working like this? Does this work? Will this work? What are other options? Listen to people that have other options. Don't shut them down. I mean, people with different viewpoints are getting shut down and not allowed to speak. We have a huge amount of houses built in the 50s, 60s and 70s that are at the end of their lifespan because people can't afford to make the repairs that are needed at this point. And let's find a way maybe to encourage that a little bit. Try to help those people out so that they can go in and encourage home ownership. So they're going the opposite direction. I think if people can find a way to get in and own the home, then they're going to have pride. They're going to have their foot in the door. They're going to feel that they have something of value. When you're creating a society of renters, that's not going to happen. There's no way that's going to happen. This is what happened with the stack and packs in Central Europe. They were all owned by the government and people were renting and there was no motivation to fix them up, maintain them. Why would there be, right? Who's going to do it? The person that owns the property does that. They're motivated to do that because they have a stake in it. Do you have any other thoughts for our audience? California is a great state and there are just awesome people here. So let's just start talking about it. Don't be afraid to talk about these things. Don't let yourself get shut down because we can save this state with all the incredibly wonderful people that are here. So just start talking about it to everybody. Grocery store, line, wherever you go. Just start talking and don't get shut down. Don't get told you're a climate denier or racist or whatever. Just ignore that and just carry on because we are a great people here. The best in the world, in my opinion. Christine Epperle, licensed civil engineer and building designer. It was great to have you on California Insider. Thank you very much. It was my honor. If you like the show and our content, you should go to InsiderCA.com and sign up to our newsletter because we never know what can happen with social media and other platforms in terms of distributing our content. If you'd like to come on the show and be an insider, you can reach out to us at CAInsider at EpochTimesCA.com. Again, it's CAInsider at EpochTimesCA.com. We'd love to have you on the show to tell us what's going on in your field in California. Thank you for watching.