Build, Baby, Build? California’s Hottest Races Are Battles About Housing.

In late September, a Los Angeles Times poll of that city’s mayoral race showed the upstart candidate, LA city councilmember Nithya Raman, up 11 points over incumbent mayor Karen Bass. It was a shocker. But what was really interesting was Bass’ response. Asked about the poll, Bass touted the more than 10,000 units of affordable housing built during her administration. “And we’re not slowing down,” Bass said. “I’ll continue accelerating housing production across LA to build the housing people can afford.”

Funny, that. Raman’s an MIT-educated urban planner who has built her campaign around building more housing and attacked Bass for not building enough. Though Bass started her tenure as mayor with an executive directive that sped up new home construction, she faced huge backlash—mostly from the city’s wealthier and whiter west side—and ultimately softened the policy. Observers say that Raman’s entry into the race made housing into its central issue, so much so that Bass is now campaigning on it, too.

Meanwhile! Up the coast in San Francisco—where rents have gone up about 25 percent this year, a one-bedroom apartment rents for about $4,000 a month, and the median single-family home sells for $1.9 million—state Sen. Scott Wiener is running against city Supervisor Connie Chan for a congressional seat that iconic Rep. Nancy Pelosi has held since Ronald Reagan was president. Like Pelosi, Wiener has a reputation as an effective legislator, in part built on his ability to get big laws passed requiring California communities to build more homes and making it much harder for local opposition to nix them.

A third of California renters—1.5 million households—pay more than half their income in rent.

Chan, on the other hand, has a history of voting against housing and transit-related laws in San Francisco in defense of local control and for all kinds of other stated reasons, like averting displacement of poorer folks (even from low-income homes to be built on a former Nordstrom’s valet parking lot), protecting buildings with historical significance, or just making sure new buildings don’t cast big shadows. It’s a record that the San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial board called “abysmal” and “a case study in why San Francisco has the nation’s worst housing crisis” in a full-throated endorsement of Wiener. 

So of course they’re all talking about housing. Experts disagree on the exact size of California’s housing deficit—estimates have ranged from a shortage as small as tens of thousands of units to upwards of 3 million, but the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development says that California builds an average of 80,000 new homes a year when it should be building 180,000, especially in attractive coastal cities with jobs. A third of California renters, 1.5 million households, pay more than half their income in rent. The state has 12 percent of the US population (itself remarkable) and 22 percent of the nation’s unhoused people.

It’s a disaster wrapped in a tragedy, and a grim look at the future of places similarly resistant to new construction. Housing is a totalizing issue—if you care about homelessness, affordability, taxes, public transit, public school funding, social justice, sprawl, and the environment, a good answer is “build more homes in cities.” Yet every local elected, in every state, who wants any of those things must also dodge flak from their own constituents who don’t want new buildings in their neighborhoods.

Ladling more irony over the top: In these California races, all the candidates are Democrats. (The state’s furshlugginer “jungle primary” system sends the top two to the general.) Their point of divergence—semantic yet crucial—is whether the solution is to build more homes, and what the word “affordable” really means.

The past couple decades have seen a lot of surprising questions break along partisan lines—but housing policy actually defies ideology and identification. In poli-sci speak, it’s a “cross-cutting cleavage,” and the fault line runs right through Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Wiener’s an unabashed YIMBY—that’s “Yes in My Backyard,” the obverse of NIMBY. Alongside a couple other Northern California pols, he waged an epic, decade-long fight to pass laws that forced communities to accept lots of kinds of housing “by-right,” with no lawsuits or meetings to delay them to death, as I wrote about last year. The peak was last year’s SB79, which made big new buildings near public transit largely invulnerable to challenges from self-appointed defenders of neighborhood character. In San Francisco, that marks him as a “moderate.”

“There are some Democrats who consider themselves, like Connie Chan, very progressive, who are progressive on some issues but are conservative on others,” Wiener told me in June. “I’ve said for a long time that being pro-housing is the progressive position, and opposing or making it harder to build housing is the conservative position.” Wiener name-checked leaders of the Democrats’ progressive wing who’ve also gotten more YIMBY-pilled—Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren, Zohran Mamdani…and Nithya Raman. 

Earlier generations of progressives kept the Bay Area from turning into Shanghai. On the other hand, they kept the Bay Area from becoming Shanghai.

In a debate in early October, moderators asked Chan about her district’s poor record of building new homes; she answered that new homes needed to be built citywide, and they had to be affordable.

That’s a linguistic signifier in this fight. For-profit developers won’t build entire projects to sell or rent below market-rate, Californians regularly decline to fund bonds to cover affordable housing construction, and nothing brings people together like the prospect of fighting a new apartment building. So calling for 100 percent affordable housing combines progressive purity in defense of poor people with the conservative fear of having to live near one.

Wiener pushed Chan on her opposition to new construction, and Chan accused him of being in the pocket of billionaires and real estate interests. And it’s true he (and the YIMBY movement) get support, financial and otherwise, from tech-aligned machers in San Francisco. Chan said that while the city needed more housing, it also needed tenant protections—housing couldn’t be “winner-take-all.”

Chan’s campaign director Rudy Gonzalez, also the treasurer for the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades union, tells me that Chan has, in fact, championed a pipeline for new housing in other parts of the city—on Treasure Island, at a former power plant in the Dogpatch neighborhood, near the Stonestown Galleria mall.

“If she was so against housing, wouldn’t there be evidence to support that? It’s that she doesn’t fit neatly into their curated narrative of what it means to be pro-housing, which is build at all costs and any costs,” Gonzalez says. “If you’re ‘yes-and,’ it’s like you’re an obstructionist.” That “and,” he says, is paying attention to things like infrastructure funding, streetscaping, and unionized construction labor. 

San Francisco is a strange town, socioculturally liberal in the extreme but small and resistant to change. Politics there is local, personal, and grudge-filled—a knife fight in a phone booth, as the cliché goes. (In its endorsement of Weiner, the Chronicle flicked at the local gossip that Pelosi is supporting Chan over Wiener because Pelosi wanted her seat to someday go to her own daughter, and that Wiener angered Pelosi by announcing his candidacy before she announced her retirement. The relationship has been fraught.)

More relevant here, the electeds most likely to resist changes to the built environment are still likely to be called progressive, possibly because they follow the tradition of midcentury tree huggers who—to their credit—saved redwood forests and staved off a 1950s plan to dam the Bay and fill it with concrete. They kept the Bay Area from turning into Shanghai, but on the other hand, they kept the Bay Area from becoming Shanghai.

So while the spiciest parts of that Chan-Wiener debate were about AI policy and Gaza, housing policy may decide the race. San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie is pushing his mildly YIMBYish plans to increase housing production; in a Chronicle poll of voters during the primary, just 48 percent of Chan’s supporters approved of those plans, while 85 percent of Wiener’s voters did—as did 73 percent of those who voted for the third-place finisher, a tech millionaire and former Ocasio-Cortez staffer named Saikat Chakrabarti, who now backs Chan. They also tended to be younger and newer to the city—typical markers of YIMBYism.

Los Angeles is different. The Bay Area has its alliance between YIMBYs and technocratic-moderate Democrats, but “that’s less of the case down here,” says Azeen Khanmalek, executive director of Abundant Housing LA, a nonprofit housing advocacy group that endorsed Bass in her first term and is now supporting Raman. “Most of the moderate Democrats are not particularly pro-housing, and I think that most of the pro-housing energy comes from the progressive side of the political spectrum in Los Angeles.”

The Democratic coalition that undergirds LA politics is largely funded by rich white people who live on tree-lined streets in single-family homes, their property taxes held artificially low by Proposition 13 restrictions. San Francisco has them, too, but they’re counterweighted by move-fast-and-break-things disruptovating tech guys.

Raman is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, popular with the progressive wing of the party that has typically aligned itself with leftist opposition to housing construction. In fact, Raman’s advocacy for homebuilding put her at odds with the DSA for a while; the group didn’t endorse Raman over Bass until September. Bass still sides with councilmembers trying to fight Wiener’s SB79. Her spokesperson touted the work Bass did on streamlining affordable housing, and told me that the mayor is “just as frustrated as everyone else is” at how hard it is to build in LA—and said that Raman’s district had been among the worst at building new affordable housing.

The places building the most new housing are also the reddest, politically, which means they thrive while Democrats lose ground on a national issue.

In 2022, in her first week in office, Bass announced Executive Directive 1, a greasing of permitting wheels that made possible those 10,000 homes. She also presided over a much-needed citywide rezoning effort.

“It was more broad than anything her predecessor did,” says David Garcia, deputy director of policy at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation. “The difference between her and Nithya Raman is that Mayor Bass faced pretty strong backlash over Executive Directive 1 and the fear that there would be multifamily buildings in traditionally single-family neighborhoods.” In 2024 Bass softened the provisions of ED1 so it didn’t apply to “historic” (read: wealthier) neighborhoods.

“At the same moment the mayor was moving to walk back that program, Councilmember Raman stood up for several projects proposed in her district that received a lot of intense pushback, and made sure they got built,” says Jesse Zwick, Southern California Director for the advocacy group Housing Action Coalition and a surrogate for the Raman Campaign.

That gave Raman a political opening. By saying she was a yes on all of Bass’ homebuilding policies plus homebuilding in every neighborhood, at every price point, she cast herself as a change candidate. It’s a bet on what Angelenos care about: In that same poll showing Raman 11 points up, 26 percent of people said “building more affordable housing” was a top priority for the next mayor and 32 percent said “moving homeless people indoors” should be, too. Not everyone sees homelessness as a direct consequence of a housing shortage, but for what it’s worth, most of California’s unhoused folks are from California and from the county where they’re living. LA’s latest count showed more than 45,000 homeless people in the city, up 3.4 percent over 2025. That’s not a statistically significant increase, but still not good. Mayor Bass’ response to those new numbers was to fire the chair of the city’s housing and homelessness committee: Nithya Raman.

California cities have a long history of land use policies explicitly designed to exclude nonwhite and poorer people. Proposition 13, the 1978 law that limits state property tax increases, dramatically favors current residents. So LA and San Francisco are pretty weird.

“You have rich individuals, longtime homeowners who have accumulated significant amounts of wealth in their properties, in both places. And in both places they are apprehensive about embracing these kinds of zoning and land use changes,” Garcia says. “But then it gets tricky—and this is the funny thing about housing in general. You have business interests who understand that a housing crisis is bad for business, bad for their employees, and makes it harder for them to secure a workforce. And in many cases those groups are not always aligned with traditional Democratic values.”

So greedy corporate types want to liberalize housing, and liberal homeowners are little-c conservative about it. Meanwhile, younger voters who do align with those traditional Democratic values can’t afford places to live, no matter how they label themselves politically. They tend to go YIMBY—until they get older and become homeowners or renters themselves, at which point they are more likely to oppose new home construction in their neighborhoods. It’s the circle of life. 

If you ask people whether they believe people have a right to housing—as a team of political scientists did in 2024—a strong majority say yes. If you ask them about specific policies to make that happen, they lose their minds. They love rent control. They also love down payment assistance and home mortgage tax deductions—what an economist would call demand-side subsidies. The policy idea people are most tepid on? Making it easier to build new housing.

“Ask people, ‘do you support a federal guarantee of housing for all?’ About half the public says yes. Those are the liberals,” says Clayton Nall, a political scientist at UC Santa Barbara and co-author of the paper. But there’s a catch, Nall adds. If you then ask those liberals if they support building apartments in their own community, just half of them say yes.

“Angelenos want housing to be affordable. That’s actually different than wanting ‘affordable housing.’”

Incontrovertibly, all that means less housing that costs more. But often, all those NIMBY-coded ideas are what politicians mean when they say they support “affordable housing.”

“They don’t mean making more supply,” Nall says. “They instead mean building deed-restricted affordable housing, or public housing, or social housing with income or means-testing restrictions.”

The language, in other words, gets confusing. “Angelenos want housing to be affordable. That’s actually different than wanting ‘affordable housing,’” Zwick says—if “affordable housing” means the kind you have to be below a certain income level to get. “A lot of Angelenos wouldn’t qualify, in the deed-restricted sense, for that housing. What they’re actually saying is, they want their housing to be affordable.”

That’s the real trick. A left-YIMBY-type person might blame housing’s scarcity and cost on historically racist zoning, or a hijacking of California’s landmark environmental quality laws. A left-leaning NIMBY, on the other hand, might call out private equity ownership of homes, or say that homes are sitting unoccupied as the owners await rising rents. (This is a common conspiracy theory, by the way; California’s rental vacancy rate has been below 5 percent since 2013, and the statewide ownership vacancy rate is 1 percent. San Francisco’s apartment vacancy rate is 2.2 percent; LA’s is 5.4 percent. And even those low numbers are optimistic—you need a certain level of vacancy to account for people moving and to alleviate overcrowding.)

“Shockingly, not everyone is in the weeds of housing policy like some of us are, so it’s actually not that obvious that these candidates differ significantly on their approach,” Garcia says. “While each of them can acknowledge housing as a top issue, where they place blame and what they say the resolutions are will resonate with different people.”

LA and SF are indigo-blue, politically. Liberals may broadly value a socioeconomically dynamic and polyglot city, want the unhoused to get housed, want to fight climate change and support public transit, and want to pay less for housing. Those are all things that building more homes in denser urban areas accomplish. But they also want to protect their home’s value and the look of the neighborhood, and they’ll line up to speak at city council meetings opposing construction of a new five-over-one at the end of their block. Nall and his co-authors have described this inconsistent approach as “folk economics.” 

Still, the mayoral race in LA and the congressional race in San Francisco suggest that may be changing. Years ago, Nall and colleagues hypothesized that because national Democratic leaders simply weren’t saying much about housing, partisans had no “elite signals” on what to believe, and defaulted to defending their single-family homes and zucchini gardens. But now the housing crisis is more evident, and progressives like Ocasio-Cortez and Warren and Mamdani are cuing those cues. Big-deal Democratic candidates are running for office on pro-housing platforms—even if their messaging is a bit muddled. They have to—right now, the places building the most new housing are also the reddest, politically, which means they thrive while Democrats lose ground on a national issue. That’s the thing about fault lines: Eventually, they cause an earthquake.