As ballots roll into the mailboxes of Californians throughout the state, the urgency for candidates to have their voices heard has grown significantly. On Tuesday, May 5, seven candidates running for the California governor position — two Republicans and five Democrats — participated in the final debate before the midterm elections, with more substantive arguments than have been seen previously. In this article, Anthro will go over a question regarding affordable housing asked in the debate with perspectives from all seven candidates.
“I will make sure that down payment assistance programs are expanded under my watch. … How about we help you get that last cog in the process of buying a house, the down payment? Then, when you pay a monthly payment, it’s not for rent. It’s to own the home.”
— Xavier Becerra, Democrat
“The first thing we need to do is support down payment assistance. … When I was mayor, we transformed downtown, built more market-rate, affordable, and homeless housing in eight years, in four years of recession, than in the 12 years before that.”
— Antonio Villagrosa, Democrat
“We certainly can’t afford to live here anymore, and solutions like that are exactly why you can’t afford to live here anymore. … You can’t afford a home in California because the builders cannot afford to build homes because of the excessive regulations in California.”
— Chad Bianco, Republican
“We have to shorten permitting times and make them less expensive, for sure. I’m going to close a corporate real estate tax loophole for $22 billion a year. That’s going to go to the cities and counties. And that’s going to make them willing to permit housing and to make it happen.”
— Tom Steyer, Democrat
“Right now we have the highest housing costs in the country and the lowest home ownership. … We’ve got to simplify the regulations that make it so expensive, two or three times more expensive, to build housing compared to other states.”
— Steve Hilton, Republican
“We have to build enough housing for California to grow our economy, and it’s not enough to just build more. We have to build it less expensively than we are now. Building faster is building cheaper. If we build faster, we can take 10 or 20% off the cost of rent and mortgages.”
— Katie Porter, Democrat
“When we weren’t building housing, we cut permitting times, cut red tape, reduced one-time fees, and got thousands of homes under construction. … We built interim housing and moved thousands of people indoors. … We’ve actually gotten housing built.”
— Matt Mahan, Democrat