Matt Mahan

get approved in no time, came in, got the approval, they're ready to go.

So that's speed.

Now the state can impose those standards and set deadlines and use its ability to basically impose effectively a builder's remedy, buy right and say, if you don't meet these turnaround times, city or county, the developer is going to buy law.

have the right to build a conforming project.

On fees, we have accumulated, I mean, I can tell you in my city, over 10 pages worth of fees that look good on paper.

It's to mitigate every imaginable, it's traffic and park fees and affordable housing fees, and they all sound good.

On their own, they're all justifiable and they're well-intended, but you stack them up and they're adding 10 to 20% to the cost of housing.

We had a really tough conversation on our city council.

I came to our council and said, we've got to cut the one-time fees in order to get the housing in the ground.

And the good news is if we build the housing, we make up the revenue over time.

We have more property taxes, more sales taxes, more workers, more jobs, more dynamism.

We eventually in the long run are better off.

But it's a tough trade-off to make because you get yelled at by the park advocates, by the affordable housing advocates, by every other advocate you can imagine.

We had a council member literally lose his seat not long ago in San Jose, and our last mayor lose his council majority over a fee reduction because it was framed as a giveaway to developers.

So to finish the point, Ezra, we cut the fees by over two-thirds and 2,000 homes got under construction last year.

Another 2,000 are securing financing as we speak and will break ground.

And what the state can do is...

is cap local fees.

A lot of these fees are not really fees.

We allow these bogus nexus studies that employ a cottage industry of consultants, no offense to any of the consultants in the room, that the nexus is pretty loose.