After the disastrous recent election results — with right-wing extremists prepared to dominate the White House, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court — it’s easy to curl up in a ball and disengage from politics. We must not take that path. Far too much is at stake.
We need to push back hard against the destructive policies this new administration will advance. At the same time, we must prove that a central narrative peddled by President-elect Trump and his cronies is false: the idea that California is a failed state.
Like the rest of the nation, California faces real challenges from rising unaffordability. The success of the state depends on our ability to lower the most important costs facing households everywhere: child care, healthcare, energy, transportation, and, most of all, housing. Focusing like a laser on issues of affordability will provide a powerful contrast to Trump’s Republican Party, which continues to make costly — and largely impossible — promises rather than deal with the complexities of real-world problem-solving.
Democrats must distinguish ourselves as the party of results by focusing on governing well in the places where we hold power. That will mean reckoning with our past failures.
Time-consuming and expensive processes in California and other blue states have made it difficult to develop the things that reduce costs for people and improve their lives. Housing comes to mind most vividly. We have made it incredibly hard to build new homes, with onerous zoning, permitting, and review processes choking off supply.
These policy choices have given us a massive housing shortage that has led to ballooning costs. Housing is a significant reason middle- and working-class people have migrated from blue to red states. As a result, California, New York, and Illinois are likely to lose a combined 10 seats in the House of Representatives — and thus 10 votes in the Electoral College — after the 2030 census.
But it’s not only about housing. California’s energy costs are off the charts. PG&E bears a lot of blame for neglecting its infrastructure to boost profits, then passing along the costs to consumers. At the same time, we are falling behind on our long-standing clean energy leadership goals, with Texas now ahead of California on clean energy generation. It’s still too time-intensive and expensive to build clean energy infrastructure in California. That needs to change if we’re going to truly reduce energy costs.
Transportation is another area where California and other blue states are falling short. It’s appalling that California doesn’t have a true statewide rail system. To get from the Bay Area to Los Angeles currently takes twice as long by rail as by car. California’s addiction to process over results has led to our high-speed rail project getting bogged down at every step, resulting in growing delays and cost overruns and a decline in public confidence in this critical project.
Local and regional public transportation projects are not immune. Delays plagued San Francisco’s first Bus Rapid Transit project on Van Ness, the Geary BRT project, and a similar project in the East Bay. Of note, the Van Ness BRT line, once it was finally implemented (after far too many years), has been a huge success — it’s now much faster, and ridership is exceeding pre-pandemic levels.
California, like many states, also has a significant shortage of child-care capacity, making it incredibly expensive for working families to afford this essential service. While subsidies are important to help people afford child care — and we recently increased those subsidies in California’s budget — they don’t solve the basic problem. We need more educators and facilities. Solving this basic supply issue requires a careful examination of regulatory limitations to expanding capacity while also addressing the barriers that prevent child-care professionals from entering the field, including low pay and insufficient benefits.
California also, at times, increases the cost of living by not engaging in thoughtful regulation to protect consumers and small businesses. We are lagging badly behind in regulating pharmacy benefit managers, the middlemen of the healthcare industry who jack up prescription drug costs. California has not even capped insulin co-pays, while similar reforms have advanced in red states like Texas and West Virginia.
The solutions to these affordability problems are manifold — they require permitting reform, improved government capacity and efficiency, strategic public investments, smart government interventions that actually reduce costs, and, in some cases, letting the private sector do its thing with reasonable, but not heavy-handed, regulation. The common denominator is that California and other blue states need to demonstrate, quickly, that we can deliver the things that reduce costs, streamline government programs, and improve people’s lives. We’re doing this in California in some respects; for example, our increasingly successful work in the Legislature to fast-track housing approvals and sustainable transportation projects. But we need to do a lot more — and quickly.
Some people will object to this approach as “deregulation.” But it’s not an either/or proposition. We can have reasonable regulation to protect public health and safety, workers, consumers, and the environment without strangling our ability to deliver good things that benefit Californians. Making it easier to build housing or open child-care centers doesn’t mean ending safety regulations, for example. But it does mean making those regulations seamless and easier to comply with, and it does mean preventing those regulations from being weaponized by people who simply don’t want a project to happen.
We can protect the public while also making life better for the public — these two goals aren’t mutually exclusive. Bottom line: Democrats know how to do this. We just need to get our focus back on delivering results instead of process for the sake of process.
Scott Wiener represents San Francisco and northern San Mateo County in the California State Senate, where he chairs the Senate Budget Committee.