“Union power, Litigation, Climate Dogma”: Steve Hilton's Three Reasons for CA's Housing Crisis
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Episode Description
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Brief Summary
California's housing crisis stems from union power, litigation, and climate regulations.
Key points
- California's Housing Crisis. Exploring the structural forces behind California's high housing costs.
- The Role of Unions. Unions leverage lawsuits to negotiate project labor agreements, impacting housing supply.
Transcript
What is going on? Why are rents so high? Why are homes so expensive for the 40 million residents of California? This particular issue, I think, almost captures better than anything else the underlying structural reasons why everything is so difficult in California and so expensive cuz you got these three structural forces that I think underpin the problem and show why a Democrat can't fix it. And the three things are union power, litigation, and climate dogma. The first part of the story is that we're just not building enough homes for the number of jobs that we're creating and the size of our population.
It's a classic supply and demand situation. SQA, the California Environmental Quality Act itself is a nightmare in terms of this the amount of regulation you have to comply with. The private right of action means anyone can sue. 70% of SQA lawsuits are used to block housing. Most of those lawsuits are filed by unions. They're used as leverage to negotiate what they call project labor agreements where you have an agreement for the site and usually they have one or two of these components. Both of which sound great. Skilled and trained workforce which means union only. So it's a closed shop and prevailing wage. Again sounds very
good but it's two or three times market rate wages. So both of those things inflate the
