Matt Mahan

And it's totally lawful.

If you're a union or a business trade group, your job is to advocate for the narrow interest of your members.

I'm not as opposed to them doing what they do.

I'm opposed structurally to a system in which there is a lack of transparency and accountability on behalf of the residents for the outcomes that matter.

And there's not enough of a check and a balance against those interests.

Now,

I'm running because I want to take that on and do what I've done in San Jose, which is start from a premise of, here's some outcome goals that we're going to commit to, and we're going to hold everybody accountable.

And interest be damned, if some group is advocating for something that is in the way of us achieving that outcome, I will name it publicly, and we will have a public fight about it, and we'll use the bully pulpit.

to kind of force them to align with things that work.

I just want to make government work.

But I do think we have a very fundamental challenge in Sacramento of special interest capture.

I mean, we don't build condos in California anymore because our laws around construction defect liability are so expansive that you can be sued 10 years later after a building's been built because the paint is starting to bubble or chip.

And rather than just get it fixed, that becomes a generator of excessive fees, becomes a profit center for trial lawyers.

So there are thousands of these kinds of things in the way that the state works in the regulatory environment that create costs.

Well, it certainly contributes to the fact that California has the lowest homeownership rates in the country, 10% less than the national average.

We are not building condos.

When we build housing today, if it's not a for sale, single family home or townhome, if it's multifamily, if it's denser, it's almost always for rent now.

And one of the main reasons is essentially this litigation or over litigation, overly litigious environment we've incentivized essentially means that it's harder to get financing and insurance on a for sale product.

And why does that matter?

I mean, condos kind of sounds like a sort of random sidebar conversation here, but that's the most accessible form of home ownership.