by Edward Ring via American Greatness,
It’s election season, and because California is a one-party state, we don’t see very many campaign ads for Kamala Harris. But ballot initiatives are another story. One hotly contested ballot initiative, Proposition 33, if approved by voters, will enable California’s cities and counties to impose rent control. How the rent control advocates make their case is typical. Greed and oppression against hapless, helpless, innocent victims. But the government is here to help!
Ads in favor of Prop. 33 are masterpieces in emotional imagery. One after another, a diverse collection of beleaguered tenants appear on the television screen, each of them repeating the phrase “The rent’s too high.” Another ad promoting a yes vote on Prop. 33 follows the same pattern, but this time, one after another, a collection of forlorn tenants asks, “Where will I live?” while superimposed on the screen is written, “Average Rent, $2,800.”
In both cases, viewers are advised to “vote for rent control.”
The naked dishonesty of these ads is lost on most Californians. They have been conditioned to believe that high home prices and high monthly rents are the result of price gouging by greedy landlords when in reality there is a housing shortage because the Democratic majority in the state legislature has passed countless laws that make it almost impossible to get permits to build homes. No wonder the median price for a home in California is $904,000.
Vote for Kamala Harris and the machine she represents, and watch this happen to the whole country.
If there were a competitive market for housing in California, such as there still is in most so-called red states, housing would be affordable for middle-income people to rent or buy. But it is government greed and overreach, not only at the state level but in every city and county, that has created the housing shortage.
The same phenomenon occurs with gasoline in California, where more than a third of the price per gallon goes to cover taxes, almost all of them for state programs. But instead of backing off of its regulatory war on refineries and in-state producers, the governor is holding hearings on “price gouging” by the refineries, alleging that they engage in deliberate shutdowns for maintenance in order to create shortages and high prices. Never mind that California’s gasoline price fluctuations track in precise alignment with fluctuations in the price of crude oil.
In every essential sector of California’s economy—starting with the fundamentals of energy, water, food, transportation, and housing—out-of-control government regulations have paralyzed investment and innovation. They have rendered the state unaffordable for low and middle-income households, and in response, the state expanded its aid programs and subsidies.
What has happened in California is going to happen to the entire nation if Kamala Harris is elected president, because she is a quintessential example of someone who is a product of the state’s Democratic political machine. What has happened in California is an alliance of unionized state bureaucrats with politically connected businesses seeking government subsidies. Other special interests also benefit—environmentalist lobbyists, social justice activists, public service NGOs, trial lawyers—but the core relationship is a partnership between a government that serves itself and crony businesses that have the economies of scale to withstand the punitive regulations and thrive on the subsidies.
The only honest assertion that proponents of a rent control initiative make in their campaign ads is the fact that rent is too high in California. But rent control will make things even worse. As it is, most developers will not do business in California. Why try to build a subdivision in Silicon Valley, where the permits may take 10-20 years to get approved, when they can go to Texas and get plans approved in 10-20 weeks? Why build anything in a state where at any moment another environmentalist organization can file a lawsuit that will take millions of dollars and several years to resolve?
If Prop. 33 passes, developers of multi-family housing will have to contend with the fact that rental income will not be permitted to keep pace with market rates, something that will not only discourage buyers but also disincentivize any ongoing investments in maintenance and upgrades to the properties. Rent control will make California’s housing shortage worse.
How California has coped with its housing shortage so far is an object lesson of how the government steps in to solve a problem it created and then makes the problem worse. When combining state and local funding, California has easily spent more than $30 billion of taxpayer money on “permanent supportive housing” for the state’s homeless, only to see the population of unsheltered homeless hit 186,000 this year, a new record. The money has passed into the hands of developers, bureaucrats, and service NGOs, and after everyone has taken their cut, the construction costs average over $500,000 per unit, with perpetual costs for management and services for the tenants.
California’s “affordable housing” projects have consumed even greater quantities of state and local tax revenue. Nobody has ever come up with a precise estimate but it’s well beyond the $30 billion spent for the homeless. Estimated spending for affordable housing just in 2023 is over $18 billion. In just one year. This spending comes in the form of subsidies and tax incentives granted to developers who cannot possibly build homes or apartments that people can afford and still make a profit. Then the tenants themselves receive additional taxpayer funds in order to afford their monthly rent.
And yet, this is Harris’s explicit, often stated, “holistic” solution to unaffordable homes and rents. More subsidies to developers to construct “affordable housing” and more subsidies to tenants to pay the monthly rent. Deregulating the industry would quickly end America’s housing shortage, cost taxpayers nothing, and restore the American dream of owning a home. But that wouldn’t benefit the bureaucrats or the cronies that control the one-party machine.
California’s cities may not be quite as bad, at least not everywhere, as conservative critics claim, but they’re undeniably a mess. The City of Oakland is a poster child for local government dysfunction. Losing both of their professional sports teams is a high-profile example of failed leadership. They just lost the Oakland A’s after 57 years of residency. And since 2020, the Oakland Raiders have been the Las Vegas Raiders. Losing these iconic teams is just a symptom of a systemic collapse. The city of Oakland is falling apart. Crime is rampant. The city faces a budget crisis. And meanwhile, they are pioneering payments for “universal basic income” and “universal basic mobility.”
In general, California’s major cities are controlled by social justice activists who don’t have even a remote understanding of how to govern. They attract massive political contributions from the public employee unions representing the workers they’re supposedly going to oversee. And as long as they rubber stamp every wage and benefit demand these unions make, they’re free to pass as many ridiculous ordinances as they wish. After all, the more repressive these cities get on their march towards utopia, the more public servants will be necessary for enforcement.
Such is life in Kamala’s California. State directives now intrude into trivial details of daily life. If you refuse to put your kitchen scraps in your “organics” bin instead of the trash bin, you are a climate denier, and you will be fined. After all, all that discarded broccoli and chicken bones in a landfill might make methane, a greenhouse gas! Similar approbation will fall upon you if you object to the recent ban on plastic bags, and never mind their utility or the fact that almost everything in the civilized world is made out of plastic.
But reality isn’t real in California. Their current attorney general, Rob Bonta, has just sued Exxon for “deceiving the public on recyclability of plastic products.” For Bonta, already salivating over his chances to become California’s next governor in 2026, this is a publicity stunt that may yield a profitable settlement for his agency. But for the rest of us, it is yet another example of a one-party state government that engages in relentless harassment of its productive citizens and companies. California’s Democratic politicians are determined to micromanage every aspect of the economic life of the state’s businesses and households.
Voters in America should understand that this national election is not just about social issues. They are of vital importance, but must not overshadow what else is at stake: our economic freedom. A Harris administration will impose California’s soft tyranny on the entire nation while her cronies laugh all the way to the bank.
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