Matt Mahan

The challenge, and this is what

you know, Ezra Klein famously calls the everything bagel liberalism.

It's sort of, you've got 50 years now of adding process points, fees, restrictions, requirements, very complicated building code, very complicated fire code, all these environmental laws, and you just add up decades of cruft of, you know, but it's all well-intended.

Each one on its own is very justifiable, but the sum, the cumulative effect is

that to build housing, you want to build a kind of classic apartment building, condo building that you might be able to put up in Austin or Miami.

And you can do it there for literally half the cost and half the time.

And at some point, California can't compete with and can't demonstrate that we have better ideas or a better quality of life than a red state because we literally just can't build housing anymore.

And so this is a real public policy failure and we've got to be willing to change our approach.

There's this growing movement driven by young people who are rightly frustrated that the rent's too damn high and they have very little prospect of home ownership.

It's called the YIMBY movement, Yes In My Backyard.

And they are very effectively driving a reform agenda that has many components.

The biggest has been initially zoning reform.

I think they've largely won that battle, not entirely, but expanding zoning for housing and height limits.

And that leads certainly to a lot of tough debates with neighbors.

The bigger levers, in my opinion, are speed and cost of construction, speed being approvals.

I think that's the simplest, which is once you've gone through a public process and decided

where to put housing or how dense it can be, getting the actual entitlement and the building permit should be much faster and simpler than it is today.

We're using AI to review applications for ADUs to catch errors and omissions up front and make sure the applicant comes forward prepared just to save time.

There's no reason for that to sit on somebody's desk in the planning department for three weeks to just tell someone that they're missing a field in the application.

So speeding up processing times is really important.