Episode Details

Steve Hilton is one of the two candidates who made it to the runoff in the California gubernatorial election this year. He was in San Diego and kindly agreed to sit down for an interview about his campaign, with Michael Tracey joining us remotely.

We start by arguing about housing. Beyond all the back-and-forth, we uncovered a real philosophical difference. Although Hilton calls himself a YIMBY, he believes in local control and that the state shouldn’t be telling cities and towns that they need to allow more building. Instead, he’d like to go after labor and environmental regulations and find ways to develop more land outside of established communities. I am all for that. But the fact that we have so much of the Bay Area zoned for single-family homes is absolutely crazy given how much wealth is being created there and how much under any rational economic system the region should be growing. Local control in my view does not trump individual rights, and governments that make housing decisions at higher levels tend to do a better job on this, with Japan being a standard example.

Until recent changes in the law, roughly two-thirds of San Francisco’s residential land was reserved for single-family homes, and Palo Alto has historically been worse. In Chinese hubs where tech industries have taken off, we’ve seen the emergence of megacities like Shenzhen, with a population that has gone from approximately 330,000 in 1980 to over 17 million today. Meanwhile, San Francisco went from 775,000 people in 1950 to only about 874,000 as of 2020. This is disgraceful. It’s great that the Bay Area is minting billionaires. But we also want people who work for their companies to be able to afford to live in the area, and for the wealth to contribute to increases in tax revenue and jobs for barbers, waiters, writers, teachers, and other new residents – the kinds of people who are currently priced out due to artificial scarcity. We’ve made a few old homeowners extremely rich at the expense of everyone else.

It seems to me that blue-state Republicans have found a way to run against Democratic YIMBYs by hammering on about defending “local control.” This is strange, because no conservatives believe that Texas should adopt policies that make it easier for communities to block development. In fact, the state has gone in precisely the opposite direction, recently enacting by-right zoning in large cities. The people involved in local fights are usually far from representative of their communities. And even if they are, who cares? Your local community can’t decide it doesn’t want you to speak out about certain issues, and it similarly shouldn’t have the ability to tell you what to do with your property except in the most extreme cases. The worry that moving in the direction of letting people build what they want would lead to anarchy is disproved by how much better the red state model works in terms of providing affordable and spacious housing. There may be some theoretical limit to the principle of strengthening property rights at which point it can cause harm, but Texas hasn’t reached that point, and that means that California is certainly nowhere near it.

If you want more California housing talk, see my interview with Scott Weiner.

Moving beyond that issue, I ask Hilton why he thinks Republicans have performed so poorly in California. I also bring up Spencer Pratt’s insinuations that the LA mayoral election was being stolen from him. It was reassuring to hear Hilton acknowledge that there isn’t widespread voter fraud in California, whatever the problems with the current system. This is good as a g