Dogs with Rabies and Other Modern Horrors
The Californer/10354894

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. - Californer -- If you're registered as an independent or a centrist, you are cordially invited to test these truths for merit and veracity. If I am wrong on any of these points, I ask you to correct me with verifiable facts to the contrary. Let us resurrect critical thinking for our own mutual benefit. Let us roll away the stone.

Let us begin by removing the cotton-candy, rainbows, strings of twinkling lights, stuffed unicorns, and colored balloons. Let's examine the mean streets of today's California in the cold light of day. The cute and cuddly puppies originally voted for have grown into carnivorous wolves. And, in a one-party world, some argue convincingly that the beasts are uncaged; that they roam hungry and unchecked from city to city.

There is no such thing as a $900,000 starter home. Yet across California's 19th District, that is the median, not the ceiling: $897,000 in Monterey County, $1.1 to $1.2 million in Santa Cruz County, and $1.3 to $1.5 million in the city of Santa Cruz itself. A household would need an income nearly double the district median just to responsibly carry the mortgage on the median home. Sacramento's answer is always the same — float a bond, layer on a tax credit, let insiders feather their own nests, call it solved. It isn't solved. The reason isn't a shortage of subsidy. It's a state government that has spent forty years ruining the market that used to solve this problem on its own.

This isn't isolated to the Central Coast. An hour north in Santa Clara County, the numbers only harden the point: San Jose's median home sale price sits at roughly $1.5 million as of mid-2026, at $821 per square foot — reportedly 224% above the national average, in a metro where cost of living runs 83% higher than the U.S. average. San Jose isn't in CD19, but it shares the same regulatory water table — the same CEQA exposure, zoning restrictions, and permitting bottlenecks Sacramento imposes statewide. What happens in San Jose is a preview of what continues to happen from Salinas to Santa Cruz if the underlying law doesn't change.

How Sacramento Turned Gold into Lead

Before you can evaluate any housing fix, you have to name what broke the middle class and disenfranchised multiple generations. It wasn't one policy — it was a stack of them, each adding friction, cost, and delay to the simple act of building a home:

• CEQA litigation. The California Environmental Quality Act, intended to review environmental impact, has become a tool any party can use to delay or kill a housing project — including competitors, NIMBY groups, and unions negotiating for unrelated concessions. Projects that should take months routinely take years and absorb millions in legal costs before a single foundation is poured.
  
  
• Exclusionary zoning. Large swaths of the district are zoned exclusively for detached single-family homes, making duplexes, fourplexes, and other "missing middle" housing illegal even where demand and infrastructure already support it.
  
  
• Permitting bottlenecks. Multi-year timelines — stacked across overlapping city, county, coastal, and water-district authorities — turn what should be a predictable approval process into an open-ended risk that scares off the small and mid-size builders who used to supply starter homes.
  
  
• Water and infrastructure limits. Moratoria and capacity constraints on water hookups across the Central Coast have stalled projects that could have added thousands of units over the last decade.
  
  
• Developer impact fees and parcel taxes. Cities have layered fee after fee onto new construction — often tens of thousands of dollars per unit — baked into the final price of the home before a buyer ever sees it.
  
  
• Broken water-infrastructure promises. California hasn't completed a major new reservoir since 1979. Voters approved $7.12 billion under Proposition 1 in 2014 specifically for new storage, and the flagship project born of that bond, Sites Reservoir, still hasn't broken ground more than a decade later.
  
  
• Reformulated gas and the gas tax. California's unique reformulated gasoline blend, the nation's highest excise tax on fuel, and CARB's Low Carbon Fuel Standard mandates together add well over a dollar to every gallon compared to the national average — a direct line item on every foundation poured and every load of lumber delivered.
  
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• PAGA litigation. The Private Attorneys General Act lets any employee's attorney sue on the state's behalf over paperwork violations, and 2024's promised "comprehensive reform" barely moved the needle — payouts reportedly rose from $1.6 billion in 2024 to $2.2 billion in 2025, with the majority going to attorneys rather than workers.
  
  
• Runaway sales and income taxes. Stacked on top of all of the above, California's top-in-the-nation state income tax and sales tax rates raise the cost of every material, every subcontract, and every payroll dollar a general contractor spends — costs that get passed straight through to the price of the finished home.

Each of these, on its own, is defensible in isolation. Stacked together, they form a regulatory tax on the simple act of building a roof over a family's head — a tax that falls hardest on exactly the entry-level, market-rate supply the middle class needs. Unfortunately, there's even more to the story.

The Sweetheart Deals Behind the Debt

Layer onto all of the above a liability most voters never see on a housing bond ballot: reportedly California's state and local governments are carrying somewhere between $256 billion and $300 billion in unfunded public pension debt — more than $6,000 for every resident in the state. CalPERS alone reportedly reports upward of $166 billion to $180 billion in unfunded liabilities; CalSTRS carries tens of billions more; and that's before counting the state's reportedly and roughly $85 billion in unfunded retiree health care (OPEB) obligations.

This debt didn't happen by accident. It is the product of retirement benefit formulas negotiated between public employee unions and the same city councils, county boards, and state legislators who depend on those unions' political support — an arrangement in which the politicians granting the benefits rarely answer for the bill decades later, when a different generation of taxpayers is left holding it. Reportedly, Sacramento is currently considering AB 1383, a bill that would expand pension promises without requiring the corresponding funds be set aside up front — the same mechanism that built the existing debt in the first place.

If a number of California's cities and counties had their balance sheets stress-tested the way a private company's would be, more than a few could arguably be classified as technically insolvent — carrying obligations that exceed any realistic projection of available revenue. That's not hypothetical: unfunded pension debt was a central driver behind the municipal bankruptcies of Stockton, San Bernardino, and Vallejo. Every dollar diverted to cover an unfunded pension obligation is a dollar unavailable for the infrastructure, permitting staff, and water systems housing supply depends on. And this doesn't include the tens of billions more in outstanding state and local bonded debt — pushing California's total public debt, by some all-in estimates, past $1.0 trillion.

Why bond-and-subsidy housing can't fix what's broken

This is the trap in Sacramento's preferred solution. A price is not a bureaucratic inconvenience; it's information. When a housing unit rents or sells below what it costs to build and maintain, the signal that tells a market "build more of this" gets severed. Layering bond-funded, tax-incentivized housing on top of a market already strangled by CEQA, zoning, fees, and permitting delay doesn't fix the underlying dysfunction — it builds a small number of expensive, one-off structures while leaving the system broken for everyone else.

The deeper problem is durability. Capital funding for a subsidized project shows up once, at groundbreaking, with a ribbon and a press release. The operating money — the unglamorous funding that keeps a building from decaying — has to be re-appropriated year after year, competing against every other program with a lobbyist in Sacramento. Income-restricted rents, set by formula rather than by a market-clearing price, frequently don't cover the real cost of maintenance: roofs, plumbing, security, elevators.

We've run this experiment before. Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis — 33 towers built with the best intentions in 1954 — was dynamited by its own housing authority just 20 years later. Cabrini-Green in Chicago became a byword for concentrated poverty and disinvestment before the city tore it down. American public housing ran essentially the same playbook Soviet planners used in khrushchyovka apartment blocks: build fast, build uniform, build to a formula rather than a market, and defer maintenance to a budget cycle that never adequately arrives. Centralized capital allocation replaces distributed market judgment, income-restricted occupancy concentrates poverty rather than dispersing it, and a public authority, not a market, decides who gets in, who stays, and who pays for repairs. When that authority is underfunded or politically distracted, the building doesn't fail gracefully. It fails as a slum.

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Decades of HUD's own post-mortems on 1960s-70s public housing point to concentrated-poverty developments as sites of elevated crime, underperforming schools, and eroding property values — not because of the residents, but because of the isolation the structure itself imposes on them. A subsidized tower built with no organic private investment around it doesn't uplift its neighborhood. It becomes an island the surrounding market has no stake in supporting.

What it does to the street itself

There's a visual dimension to this fight policy papers rarely mention: what Sacramento's streamlining statutes do to a neighborhood's physical character once local review is removed. Senate Bill 9 — and its 2024 follow-on, SB 450, which further stripped cities of authority to impose their own standards — reportedly caps side and rear setbacks statewide at four feet and requires no setback at all for a unit rebuilt on an existing footprint. These are ministerial approvals: no discretionary review, no public hearing, no design standard beyond what a city already had before the state stepped in.

Walk through Santa Cruz today and the transformation is visible, not theoretical. A provincial, lower-density surf town — bungalows with a strip of yard, sightlines to the hills, streets built around the rhythm of a beach community — is being reshaped, parcel by parcel, into something closer to an urbanesque dystopia: multistory walls of concrete and steel rising lot-line to lot-line, unbroken hardscape where a yard used to be, blocks where the state's ministerial mandate has replaced the town's own sense of what it wanted to be. Nobody voted for that transformation. It arrived by statute.

Multiply that transformation by a handful of lots on every block and you don't get gentle density — you get unbroken concrete hardscape with no room left for a tree, a garden bed, or anything that isn't poured slab. This isn't a side effect of density; it's what density looks like when the state forecloses the one mechanism — local design review — that used to reconcile new supply with the character of an existing street. Residents up and down the Central Coast are starting to describe it bluntly as cementscapes.

Just as bond-and-subsidy housing severs the price signal that tells a market what to build, state design preemption severs the feedback loop that used to tell a builder what belongs on a given block. Local planning commissions weren't always right, and plenty of California cities used design review as a pretext to block housing entirely — that history is real and it's part of why Sacramento acted. But the fix that emerged wasn't calibration; it was elimination. The state didn't reform local design review, it deleted it.

Voters are not wrong to notice the result. When density arrives as an unaccountable state mandate instead of a negotiated local plan, it doesn't build public support for more housing — it builds resentment aimed at density itself, the outcome that makes the next housing bill harder to pass, not easier.

The alternative: clear the barriers

If Sacramento wants more housing at prices Central Coast families can actually afford, the fix isn't a bigger bond measure. It's removing the barriers that made housing this expensive in the first place: CEQA reform targeted specifically at housing, zoning that allows duplexes and fourplexes where infrastructure already exists, permitting timelines measured in months rather than years, and impact fee structures that don't tax new supply into unaffordability. In Washington, that means federal-state permitting coordination and infrastructure investment tied to actual unit production — not another categorical grant program layered on top of a broken local approval process.

Let the private market build at scale, with aesthetics reviewed by locals, and supply does what subsidy never can — bring prices down permanently, because it's driven by ordinary return on investment, and the tried and true mechanism of the free market — not by a grant cycle that expires the moment the ribbon is cut. Bond-and-incentive housing isn't compassionate policy when it's substituted for that reform. It's a monument-building exercise worthy of the Stalin era; it trades a permanent supply solution for a temporary photo opportunity sans the mink hats — and leaves the next generation to explain, twenty years from now, why the buildings Sacramento was so proud of became the neighborhood every Subaru, Tesla and Prius driver clamors to leave.

For more information on US Representative Candidate for CD19 Pete Verbica: Peter Coe Verbica, JD, CRPC®, CFP® (https://peterverbica.com/)

Drafted with AI writing assistance from source data and direction provided by the candidate; positions, edits, and final content are the candidate's own.

Sources: Redfin County and City Housing Market Reports, Monterey County, Santa Cruz County, and San Jose, June–July 2026; Zillow Home Value Index, June 2026; California SB 9 (2021) and SB 450 (2024), Government Code § 65852.21; California Proposition 1 (2014) and Sites Reservoir Authority status reports; California Air Resources Board Low Carbon Fuel Standard filings and Tax Foundation state gas tax data, 2025–2026; California Business & Industrial Alliance PAGA litigation tracker, 2024–2026; Reason Foundation and Equable Institute California pension and total public debt reports, 2025–2026; California State Treasurer's Office Debt Affordability Report, October 2025; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development historical reviews of public housing developments.

Paid for by Verbica for Congress