Fees and Lawsuits Fueling California's Housing Cost Crisis | Jennifer Hernandez

A lot of our leaders always say in California that we want to lower the housing cost, but somehow it always goes up. California charges fees. Even put a prefabricated, a trailer home on your lot, fine. $20,000 traffic, $20,000 sewer, $20,000 electricity, $10,000 transit, $5,000 public art, we have these fees. We're very creative with fees. San Francisco fees got up to almost $300,000 per apartment before land, construction, labor, any of it. Just fees. $300,000. Just fees. And many jurisdictions are over $100,000, just fees. We all know that the cost of housing has skyrocketed in California, and it's a lot higher than the rest of the nation. My guest today is Jennifer Hernandez, who's a land use, environmental, and civil attorney. She has tremendous amount of experience with housing in California. Today we're going to dive into all the components that make the cost of housing much higher in California than the rest of the nation. Housing is the top target of environmental lawsuits in California. You want to build housing? Yeah. So I'll take a couple hundred thousand dollars, or I'll sue you. For what reason? I'll make something up. The lawsuit will go away if you make me happy. People don't believe it's possible, that it's legal, but in fact it is. And it happens all the time. We want to make affordable housing. We know how to reduce housing costs. A piece of wood doesn't need to cost more here than it does in Nevada. Are you saying all of this is kind of for show? Those leaders that are talking about this, they are not really wanting to solve this problem. It was power plays by special interests and wealthy donors. I'm Siamak Khorrami. Welcome to California Insider. Jennifer, it's great to have you on. Welcome. Thank you so much. I'm pleased to be here. I like your show. Thank you. We're very excited to have you on because you're a housing expert and you've had a career in housing for 40 years. We want to know why is the housing cost in California so high? Because we've decided to make it that high. A piece of wood doesn't need to cost more here than it does in Nevada. A hammer being swung by a worker paid a good wage doesn't need to cost more here than it costs in Nevada. But we've made a series of policy choices that has made housing here cost three times what it costs in Nevada. Policy choice after policy choice. And I can give you as many examples as you'd like. You need to give us a lot of examples because a lot of our leaders always say in California that we want to lower the housing cost. But somehow it always goes up. So I'll give you a good example. Back in the 1970s, and I'll go back and forth in time, we decided we had a pretty significant challenge with having affordable energy. Electricity and gas both had a problem. And so California decided to require insulation in houses, walls, and roof so that it was cheaper to heat the home over time and we use less energy because the home would stay hotter if it was insulated. California was I think the first or nearly the first state that did that. It increased housing costs. But the idea was that increase in housing costs came back at you, lowered electricity or energy, natural gas costs, right? That was a consumer-based increase in housing costs that would pay back. California has since abandoned that model. Good example, more recent example. As you know, California has about the most temperate climate in the world. 300 or more days a year, you can open or shut the window and you're pretty good. Not in all climates, not in the desert, not in the high mountains, but certainly along the coast. So in the name of climate policy and environmental policy, and in my judgment because a lot of bureaucrats now watch Star Trek, is we decided we needed homes that were tight, where the air didn't circulate to the outside because if the air was kept inside, it stayed hotter with less energy or it stayed colder with less energy. We weren't having to deal with the outside air temperature changing the air temperature inside. So tighter buildings are now what we want, including in homes. Fewer windows that open and close. Much more elaborate air conditioning and heating systems. Much more elaborate filter systems, which have to be maintained. And if you don't maintain the filter system correctly, you can end up with Legionnaire's disease and then much higher energy costs because you have to run all these gizmos, including filters, that you don't have to run when you open and shut the window. It's a concept that would work if you were on the Starship Enterprise. It's a concept that may work well if you live in a super cold climate and insulation alone isn't enough. But in California, where you can open and shut the windows, it's a really high cost. Both at the front end, much more expensive to install these systems than windows that open and shut. And then all the way through as homeowners need to maintain and run these systems. And God help us if they break, which they do, all systems break, and then you have to replace pieces of them. Higher upfront costs, higher ongoing costs, higher housing costs. And how's that good for people if there is no fresh air in the unit or the housing unit? So there's several pieces of the story. One piece of the story is if you want to sell new stuff, new systems that do these fancy filter things, then it's much more interesting to require that that happen. So you get lobbied, right? Groups come in, business groups come in and say, no, this is better. It's healthier to have a filtered system than it is to breathe outdoor air which has pollution in it. And everyone says, oh my goodness, pollution, that's terrible. But it's actually pretty good air. We've watched the mountains emerge. When I grew up, you couldn't see the mountains in Southern California. They were behind the smog curtain all the time. Even the Bay Area where I grew up, it wasn't fog. It was smog. It was a brown tinge smog. But the Obama administration reported in 2016 that tailpipe emissions from our cars and pickup trucks were 99% cleaner than in 1972 when we started regulating air pollution. We're pretty good when we decide to set a goal for ourselves to make things cleaner, to make the air or the water cleaner. We've done a pretty darn good job. But if you declare victory, then the people who want to sell new gizmos, the activists who want to make sure that there's always a new thing to advocate for, so there's a reason for them to take tax donations, tax deductible donations, and sit at the table and advocate for what they're thinking about, they wouldn't have as much to do. And then, of course, there's people who staff agencies. Much more fun, many more opportunities to increase employment, get promotions. If the regulatory regime keeps changing, as opposed to, does the window open and shut? Yes, it does. That's easy. Now is the building tight. That's much more complicated. A lot more people have to be employed to manage that kind of new requirement, and it's being sold as an environmental or safety or climate critical need. And somehow, environmentalism, climatism have become really, really much more important than consumer protection or affordable housing, by which I mean housing people can actually afford to live in. I think we're now well over 10% of Californians who are behind in paying for their energy bills, and we have, as you know, the highest poverty rate in the nation. A third of us live in poverty. We can't make our monthly payments for food, medicine, childcare, even with one of the most generous public subsidy systems in the United States, in terms of public assistance. So we've managed ourself into an unaffordable housing crisis, and there are just a bunch of policy choices. There's 30 of those that I could tell you. So does it mean that they don't want the windows to open? Well, so think about it this way. You've heated your room. It's now 69 degrees. It's perfect. Perfect. You open the window, the air out there is 75 degrees. It comes in, and now we have to cool the air that came in at 75. Other way around. It's 69 degrees. Perfect. The air outside is cold. We open the air, fresh air, it comes in cold, now we have to heat it. So it's that one metric of energy use for heating and cooling, followed by a second notion which is filtered air indoors is cleaner than air outdoors. It's healthier. Wow. Which is very hard to accept from a common sense perspective. In California. On the Enterprise, I'm guessing it's a pretty good system in outer space. And how much something like that costs on the housing units? Because we have these really, really high prices for the housing. How much does that add? Something like this? You know, is it $10,000? Is it $15,000? Is it higher energy bills going forward? For sure, all of that. Is it higher maintenance costs? For sure, all of that. Another thing we're doing now, which is not yet mandated in some jurisdictions, although some are, is we're wanting to not allow people to use natural gas hot water heaters or natural gas air heaters. They want to get rid of natural gas. Same with stoves. The cost of retrofitting an existing home to be all electric, which requires a lot more electricity than homes are wired for, and once you open a wall, if you've ever done a home remodel, there's always a surprise. And then you have to fix that. And if you want solar, which is a good idea, but you open an older home roof and there's stuff that needs to be done. So the cost of retrofitting homes to be all electric is coming in $50,000, $75,000 per home. So these are all add-on costs to a base that's already crazy high costs. It's crazy expensive. One of the issues I talk about in the report we just recently concluded is California charges fees. Local jurisdictions say, you want to come to our community? Great. So you need to pay us $20,000 for traffic. Yep. Even put a prefabricated, a trailer home on your lot. Fine. $20,000 traffic. $20,000 sewer. $20,000 electricity. $10,000 transit. $5,000 public art. We have these fees. We're very creative with fees. The thing about those fees, which the U.S. Supreme Court, by the way, just looked at and had something to say about, but they're higher. California housing fees in many jurisdictions, many cities and counties, are higher than it costs to join a country club in most of the rest of the country. A country club initiation fee with none of the services is what we are now used to as thinking is normal. San Francisco fees got up to almost $300,000 per apartment before land, construction, labor, any of it. Just fees. And many jurisdictions are over $100,000 just fees. Where do these fees go to? They go to a variety of government programs, all, I'm sure, well-intentioned, supporting buses, supporting schools, supporting traffic or, sorry, maintenance or improvements to water, sewer, the kind of thing that existing residents get by paying taxes. New residents pay fees because all these costs are just passed on. The cost of the housing unit just gets that much higher. And so the new buyer pays a price that includes the fees. And then that higher price, they pay two more times for decades. The higher price for the housing purchase becomes part of the tax rate. And then what else? They have to have a bigger mortgage to pay. So they pay interest on the mortgage every year. So it's an incredibly discriminatory tool to apply to new people that existing people don't pay. And we have a system for pretending that it's OK. The city council approved the fee. And the U.S. Supreme Court just came down with a decision last week saying you can't just charge fees because you want to, no matter what the purpose is. Maybe it helps support pay for affordable housing. Maybe it helps parks. Maybe it's good stuff. But to just charge new people that much extra relative to existing people? Can you explain that case? It was a very interesting case. One individual wanted to build something. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good case. So it's in an area just outside Sacramento. It's in the next county over. There was an existing lot where a home could be built legally. Pretty straightforward. Small home. Nothing fancy about it. Prefabricated home. The person who bought it, an individual, was allowed to build the home, had to get a permit to allow for that. Part of the permit requirement was to pay a fee of $23,000 to help that county maintain its roads. That particular county has a challenge maintaining roads because a lot of the land is either federal or state forest lands. So they don't have people living on federal or state forest lands who can pay taxes. But there's roads through them and the county has to maintain the roads. So the county says, we need money to maintain the roads. Here's the amount of new housing we expect to come in to the county. Here's the amount we want that new housing to pay for road maintenance. So every house in this area of this type, in this case a modest home in a already built out area, is going to have to pay $23,000 and then still pay property taxes like everybody else. And the court said, no, you can't have a legislative, a government, impose a fee without showing there's both a nexus, OK, the person who's living there is going to drive, no question, and proportionality. And proportionality means, is it a fair share that you're asking this person to pay? It's one new family of tens of thousands of families. How much is everybody paying for a road maintenance program and how much is it fair to put a $20,000 plus fee on someone who's not even here yet to prepay for their share of the road, which then they also pay taxes on? So it became this system of just, like I say, it's a country club initiation fee. And guess who doesn't fight fees? People who aren't here yet. So you get to adopt a fee and no one in the audience worries about paying it because they're already there. It's the person who's not there yet. Then new people have to pay for it. Yep. And then the developer community that builds homes, builders, they say we can't build a home that people can afford with this kind of fee. And one answer is too bad because we don't want those kind of people anyway. Or too bad because we don't want new housing anyway. Another answer is capitalism is bad. We need to reform capitalism. We need to reform our whole tax system. Prop 13. It's not our problem. We have to reform this bigger picture thing. Or the final answer is we local government have no money. For years, the state has taken away our money and we have no other way to make ends meet. This is the escape valve, the relief valve we have to try to get enough money to do what we need to do to operate local government. That's our only option. All of those are excuses for paying high or imposing high fees. All of them come at a really high cost to young families who need housing. Are you concerned with stock market volatility? The market's closing in on their worst year since the financial crisis. Two of the major indices had their worst day since 2020. U.S. financial markets had their worst day since the start of the pandemic. Do you really trust this economy? News are growing that the U.S. economy could be headed for a recession. Inflation soaring to its highest level in nearly 40 years. Prices for gas and groceries are so high. Inflation sending already sky high prices soaring even higher across the board. What if you could invest in a portfolio with a higher fixed rate of return that's not correlated to the stock market? You can turn your monthly income on or off, compound it, whatever you choose. And there is no loss of principal if you need your money back. And absolutely, there are no fees. Just log on to investwireify.com. Folks, I personally invest my own money with Wireify. Log on to investwireify.com or call 888-WIREIFY24. Now, let's go back to the interview. There's a lot of talk about affordable housing. And in San Francisco, of all places, people care about they want to bring affordable housing. What's happening? Where are these fees? What are they? So the same fees. Typically, the fees are lower for deed restricted, affordable housing units. So a market rate unit, as it's called, without taxpayer subsidy may be required to pay a pretty big fee for affordable housing to be developed somewhere else. Right. But probably both kinds of housing would have to pay, say, a park or transit fee. Sometimes they would pay more or less the same, sometimes more or less different. But affordable housing construction production costs are also extraordinarily high. Santa Monica just approved an affordable housing project where each unit, each apartment in this affordable housing project is going to cost more than a million dollars a piece to build. A portion of those are fees. So it makes everything more expensive and unaffordable and keeps housing from being built. And that's just the fee part of it. We have a whole other suite of tools that make it hard to get housing approved and then, frankly, hard to get it built without lawyers getting involved, like myself, to either get the approval or to defend the approval in court from someone who says, I don't want this housing here. I'm going to sue to block it. I don't want these people. They're going to compete for my parking space. I don't want these people. They're going to use my road. I don't want them using my park. I don't want them in my kid's school. There's a lot of that. And then we have people who use the law, especially environmental laws, to gain an economic advantage. For themselves. Go ahead. You want to build housing? Yeah. So I'll take a couple hundred thousand dollars or I'll sue you. For what reason? I'll make stuff up. I can, I can sue. Anyone can sue alleging that the housing would cause an adverse impact to the environment because we now think about kids making noise as an environmental impact on the street, which is a case involving the UC Berkeley dormitory. People sued next door. They live next to a college campus. College campus wants to build a new dorm. These people sue because they say the students are going to make noise at night. They're going to get drunk and make noise. Well, you choose to live next to a college campus. And by the way, that's illegal conduct. But they sue and they win under environmental lawsuits because we don't really have rules that we enforce. We kind of make it up as we go. So there's an uncertainty about who wins those lawsuits. And by threatening to sue or actually suing, you create, I call it extortion. The lawsuit will go away if you make me happy. And until the lawsuit goes away, you can't get a construction loan. So just by filing a lawsuit, I stop your project for a period of years. The Little Hoover Commission just came out with a report that confirmed this. People don't believe it's possible that it's legal. But in fact, it is. And it happens all the time. Housing is the single most commonly challenged, for environmental reasons, single most commonly challenged form of project. Not factories, not refineries, not roads. People sue under environmental law to block housing. Block housing next to them. Block housing a few blocks away. Block housing on the edge of whatever the city is. Block housing next to a freeway interchange in the middle. And they can just sue anybody for any location? You don't have to live near where the housing is approved. You don't have to be representing the environment. There's a classic case. One gas station owner wanted to expand by two or three pumps. And the gas station owner across the street didn't want him to expand, so he sued under environmental law. Competitors sue each other using environmental law. We've weaponized this tool, this environmental law, to really just add a lot of cost. And because you may be sued, especially in wealthier communities or when you're doing something more controversial, we spend years, 10,000 pages worth of studies, which costs a lot of money. And with that, you still have to go to court, which costs a lot of time and money. And so when you start adding five years and more than a million dollars of costs to do studies and then defend studies, and it can easily go a lot higher than that, it can go 10 million. It can go 30 years of delay. Who's to be surprised that we don't have the housing we need? Do you think this is a California specific? All of the things you're saying, are they mostly California specific? I like to say as a native Californian, multi-generational descendant of Californians, when California sneezes, the country catches a cold. All of these are California sneezes that have, to some extent or another, been copied by other states. The procedural stuff, the use of environmental law, for example, in lawsuits to block projects is much more prevalent in blue states. It's why columnists like Ezra Klein in the New York Times talks about why blue states can't build. We have all of these procedures, all of these litigation opportunities. It slows everything down. It costs a lot more time and money. Red states can still build. So it's an example of a political divide. There are other issues. We have a one-party state. When you have a one-party state, within that party, interest groups have very strong power, especially if they threaten an incumbent with someone who is more aligned with their interests within the same party. And so special interests have a lot of power everywhere. Here, the power is not diluted by a two-party system. It's all within one party. And so it all happens kind of inside the family, among the powerful members of the family. And it rarely gets exposed to outside criticism or a break, which is kind of amazing because it's a Democrat. I'm a Democrat. And normally that's kind of consumer aligned, civil rights aligned, union labor aligned. But a union household is about the most adversely affected, other than the homeless, by the housing crisis. You can't have a union household afford to buy a million dollar house. In fact, we had a study done by John Husing in the Inland Empire who concluded the top paid union construction worker could not afford a median price house in any county that touched the ocean or the San Francisco Bay. So our policy choices betray consumers, civil rights, communities of color and union workers. How has the Democratic Party betrayed exactly the constituents that it, at least as I grew up and remain allegiance, have allegiance to it? That is the core of that party, and yet it is the core that has been hammered by special interest policy choices that give special interest leverage at the direct cost of people. I'm not OK with that. Is there a time you figured this out? Was there a time you put these dots together? Really, it's come over time. I grew up in a very polluted factory town called Pittsburgh, California. I was passionate about the environment because we all had skin rashes, respiratory asthma. I mean, it was a very polluted town. And my dad also liked to take us camping and we get to go to Yosemite in just three hours. We're in Yosemite National Park. We're camping on the California coast, beautiful natural places. So I'm a very passionate environmentalist in a classic sort of sense. So I've always been involved in environmental organizations. I've always provided support for them. But really, and I spent 23 years on the board of the California League of Conservation Voters, what started as a pretty bipartisan and certainly middle of the road notion that we should have less pollution and preserve beautiful natural places. These are not controversial. This is the center. Everybody wants that, especially if you want to bother living in California. It's a big deal. We like the environment, but the environment slowly but surely was distorted, in my judgment, into a sort of NIMBY wing of people who just wanted to preserve the status quo. And then that really meant not adding housing as the state doubled in size. And if you don't add housing while the state doubles in size, you create many problems. And then now a sort of climate wing that says California within our boundaries should reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, we always reduce pollution. It's what we do. But greenhouse gas emissions, carbon monoxide, that's what we exhale. California counts only greenhouse gas emissions produced in California by people. Once a person leaves California and moves to Nevada or Texas, for example, their greenhouse gas emissions annually doubles or even triples almost because we have cleaner energy from electricity. We have, frankly, a lot less use of air conditioners and heaters because of our temperature. We've done things to make this a very low per capita greenhouse gas state. But the way we count greenhouse gas is if the job moves out, terrific. If the person moves out, terrific. We only count greenhouse gas within our borders, which is really crazy because greenhouse gas and climate change is global. But that's a metric very consciously chosen to promote degrowth, the idea that California is already over its holding capacity. And degrowth means some people are going to have to leave. And who has to leave? Our young working families. It's unbelievable. It's immoral. And so I teach environmental justice at the University of California Law School from a civil rights lens because we seem to have forgotten the civil rights in the Democratic Party on our way to making these catastrophic changes. And you're thinking by now, this lady's crazy. Except the legislative analyst's office just confirmed that our climate policy choices for electric vehicles, for energy, they transfer wealth to wealthier people and cost more, a lot more for less wealthy people. Easy example, favor homeowners hit renters hard, hard, especially if they're saving for a down payment. How fair is that? That's legislative analyst's office from January, the Air Resources Board, five billion dollar net increase in household incomes for people earning more than a hundred or a hundred thousand dollars a year. Net decrease of a hundred million dollars for households earning less than a hundred thousand dollars a year. A wealth transfer from the poor and working class to the wealthy. Page 125 and 126 of the California Air Resources Scoping Plan adopted unanimously by an all Democratic board in 2023. A wealth transfer. And they know about this. It's written. It's there. It's disclosed. And the very next paragraph says, it is true that since we have more black and brown Californians in the lower income tier, that this does have, these policy choices we're making, does hit harder at black and brown Californians. Think about the immorality of that policy choice, consciously made, consciously written, look it up. It's an amazing, amazing departure and betrayal from my perspective of Democratic Party values. Is that what you saw or was there other things that you had seen before where you kind of realized something is not making sense? 2008 recession hammered, hammered union workers, especially construction workers, many of whom are still in my family and my extended circle, were a union household. We had also decided we had a housing crisis in 2008 in Silicon Valley. Governor Brown, Jerry Brown, longtime Dem, Climate Hawk was in office. I really pushed hard at the California League of Conservation Voters for a two year pause in being able to sue to block housing in Silicon Valley that was located on bus routes because it's what we said we wanted, right? We want apartment buildings near bus routes. Let's not be able to sue that kind of housing in these locations for two years and let's keep some construction workers employed because if you don't have work, you can't have anything work right. Domestic violence goes higher, kids drop out of school, your house gets foreclosed on, you have higher divorce rates, higher ambulance rates, higher stress, more asthma attacks. Terrible things happen when you don't have money. So let's keep construction workers going in the locations where we say we want housing that's environmentally sustainable along bus routes in Silicon Valley where there's a market. And the answer was not just no, but no way. Folks that like to threaten lawsuits in order to get economic deals said no way. And of course, wealthy environmentalists in Silicon Valley who never wanted that housing said no way. And that to me was the first sense of betrayal of a pretty important, I thought, part of the environmentalist agenda, which was kind of aimed at making both housing for people and environment work together. And I realized it wasn't that at all. It was power plays by special interests and wealthy donors to use the environment as an excuse to block people from living near them. It was terrible. And that did set me off on a whole set of academic studies, including one just recently published by Chapman Law Review called In the Name of the Environment, which documents that indeed every single time housing is the top target of environmental lawsuits in California. Why are so many people leaving California? It wasn't long ago people from everywhere wanted to move to the Golden State to enjoy a better life. Sadly, the standard of living has been dropping in the past decade. Are you like me and wonder why this is happening? I'm Siamak Korami, host of California Insider. In our film, Leaving California, The Untold Story, I take you on an intimate journey of love, loss, tragedy and hope as residents face the prospect of leaving their beloved state. Everyday people like you tell their stories about why they have to move out of the state, even though they don't want to. Experts and policymakers also give insights about what's happening behind the scenes. Together, we get to the root cause of this exodus. Go to LeavingCalifornia.com to view the first 15 minutes of the film for free. By watching Leaving California, you can be part of the solution. Again, go to LeavingCalifornia.com. Jennifer, what you're saying is that a lot of the same people advocate for lower housing costs. People say we have an affordability crisis in California and everyone says that. Are you saying that they don't really care about it in a sense of fixing it? I think the answer is they care, but they can't count. So the people who are the most, I think, passionate about wanting more California housing are also aligned on only wanting small apartments in cities served by bus systems or other transit. That's a form of apartment house. They also support other projects. But this is a big theme. The 15 minute cities, is that sort of like the same concept? I mean, the tragedy here is there are lots of ways to increase density with, you know, granny units and whatnot. But let's just stay with this very classic model of how to build many more housing units in a city along a transit corridor. And it's called a five over one, five stories of apartments over one story of parking. In December 2023, just a few months ago, the state's most respected housing think tank, the Turner Center at Berkeley, reported that in all but the absolute smallest handful of California jurisdictions, cities that had very, very high wages, that form of housing product, five over one, didn't pencil. Couldn't clear hurdles needed to qualify for a bank loan. It was too expensive. Now, if I told you I want to solve the housing crisis, but only if every child is guaranteed their own bedroom and bathroom, you'd look at me and say, well, that's crazy. You're imposing a value judgment that I may or may not disagree with, but we can't afford. We can't do that. And the answer is, well, yeah, it does seem a little goofy, doesn't it? But that's what our housing policies are right now. We want a form of housing, five over one, on transit, where there's already something. It's called infill because there's some other use that's already there. The land is more expensive. They tend to be in high fee jurisdictions and whatnot. We want that and we can't afford it. What do I mean we can't afford it? Well, Berkeley just decided to allow a lot more housing to be built where there is a transit station, BART, parking lot, surface parking lot. Terrific. Makes perfect sense. A lot more housing, a high rise. Perfect. There should be a lot of affordable housing units in the high rise. OK, sure. Has to be built with prevailing wage, a certain wage standard. Has to pay a bunch of fees. Sure. All sounds great. So what's it going to cost? Well, we're going to need the two bedroom units to rent for eighty five hundred dollars a month. Who's going to be able to pay for that? And who, if they have eighty five hundred dollars a month, wants a two bedroom apartment in a parking lot? It's just not penciling. And so there needs to be a real clear sense of what's actually affordable. We're also told that we're doing this kind of housing because we want to make it more affordable. You know, this whole component of let's build a lot of units and all of these cities are mandated to build because we want to make it more affordable. Right. So, no, we want to make affordable housing because we want to require affordable housing that's restricted to people earning lower incomes. But there's no part of this agenda so far that is we want to make housing more affordable. Making housing affordable by a million dollar taxpayer per unit housing production costs does not create a housing unit for a teacher or a nurse. It does not create affordable housing. It creates housing that's deed restricted to low income with taxpayer subsidies at a million dollars an apartment. Making housing affordable is producing housing two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand per apartment, four hundred thousand for a single family home. Just cross the border into Arizona, into Nevada, into any of the states that don't do the kind of crazy stuff we do in California. And in fact, we should be able to make housing a lot less expensive because we now have factories that can build prefab bathrooms and pop them in, prefab kitchen and pop them in. We know how to reduce housing costs, but no one is looking to actually make housing affordable for middle income, hardworking families, the majority of whom are now not white. The majority are immigrants, Latinos, blacks, Asians. And we're not giving that whole two generations worth of people the option to own a home like I had and my parents and grandparents had before me. Are you saying all of this is kind of for show and those leaders that are talking about this are not really they are not really wanting to solve this problem, is it? Oh, I think they really want to solve the problem, but they only know how to make things more expensive to try to create more mandates. They're not so good at taking away what people have now come to count on, whether it's fees or fancy gizmos or it's less costly. They're trying to back engineer into all of these special interests. It's like a big Christmas tree. They want to make all of these special interests happy. Exactly. And then get the housing affordability to come down, which is not possible. It's not possible. So then they just keep thinking about ways to increase taxes and fees. California is pretty good at that. We're one of the highest tax jurisdictions in the country. So our gas taxes or gas costs are already twice as high. So California's overall cost of living is very, very high for lots of the same kind of policy choice reasons. But we don't have the leadership to manage each of the many different special interests and agencies that make housing more expensive. No one's doing the Apollo project that says we got to make housing affordable again for people. So go ahead, have at it. But you're cut off if you don't hit this threshold. You're cut off. We're just going to make it cheap again. Not cheap, still good, but not with this crazy add on stuff that will make people angry and it'll make special interests that are very powerful angry, including environmentalists. Jennifer, you grew up in this state. So you recall how this state has been. This is a very innovative state. It's very impossible, possible on a lot of different fronts. Do you think we can solve this housing problem if the will was there? But we can absolutely solve it if the will was there. But unfortunately now, at least my perception is we have one huge group of people. I call it the keyboard economy. They work in government. They work in nonprofits. They work in business. They talk, meet and write for a living. And then we have other groups of people who still make stuff. They don't have a seat at the table at all. The people who make stuff and the people who talk and type are each in their silos and they fuss with each other. In housing, we have to do advanced permission. And nobody knows how that's going to go or how long it's going to take. It should be, even in New York City, it's like this. You take the plans for the building to the front office with the counter and you say, these plans follow all the rules you've written down. Every environmental, every building, every earthquake, every safety standards are in these architectural drawings. Now, give me my building permit. And that's what happens. We remove all of the nonsense with rules. We used to be pretty focused on rules. We should be able to build housing based on the rule of law instead of the I know it when I see it standard. And that's what we have today. And we've got a lot of people who have the authority to say no or sue. Now, do you think this will get fixed, the housing? I believe it's going to first off have to happen in Southern California, not the Bay Area. In 1979, the Bay Area was singled out by an MIT professor for using what he called the environmental hustle, environmental rhetoric to block housing, whether it was condos in San Francisco or homes in the suburbs. In 1979, Bernard Friedman said we were blocking housing that's needed for young families. We haven't changed in the Bay Area. It's going to have to come from an area that has more immigrants, that has more powerful and better educated minorities. And it has to has to be forced on boomers. We are procedural addicts. There is no procedure. We don't want to elongate and fuss about. We are not OK with the rule of law. We broke a lot of laws coming up. We broke through a lot of laws coming up. We like the I know it when I see it standard. As a generation, we're a very narcissistic generation. It's the me generation. So it's going to have to come from younger folks. It's going to have to come from growing and vital folks who actually believe still in the American dream, the California dream, upward mobility. If you work hard, you should be able to get ahead. And that includes homeownership for your family. Do you have any other thoughts for our audience? Keep the faith. We shouldn't give up. My biggest fear is that enough Californians are just going to leave and that will be bad because if they leave, that energy of young families will be lost and will be hollowed out, will be a senior center with servants. And that's terrible. That's a failing society. It's an unjust society. It's not one I want to sit by for. So don't leave. Stay focused. Hold your local officials accountable. Set up a rule for allowing housing. No more elaborate studies. Ten thousand pages. Every local jurisdiction can set up housing by law. That's what we should do. And then the state needs to just stop stealing money from local government. So local government has money again for public services. Jennifer Hernandez, land use, environmental and civil attorney, it was great to have you on California Insider. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed our time together.