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      Rent Board Votes for 3.25% Increase on One-Year Leases

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      Two million New Yorkers who live in rent-stabilized apartments will be affected by increases approved at a raucous meeting of the Rent Guidelines Board.Good morning. It’s Wednesday. We’ll look at rent increases that are on the way for two million New Yorkers. We’ll also catch up on the final debate between the Republicans running for governor.Seth Wenig/Associated PressTo the list of items that cost more in 2022 than in 2021, add rent in New York City.As expected in a year when other consumer staples like food and gasoline have surged, the panel that regulates rents in the city approved increases for tenants — 3.25 percent on one-year leases and 5 percent on two-year leases.Housing advocates had pressed for a rent freeze or even a rollback, while landlords had argued that buildings would inevitably deteriorate unless rental income kept pace with expenses. The increases cover about one million rent-stabilized homes, which account for about 28 percent of the city’s housing stock and 44 percent of the rentals.The rent board session was raucous, with audience members blowing whistles and shouting slogans like “housing is a human right.” When the board chairman, David Reiss, outlined the reasons for the increases, dozens of people stood up, turned their backs to him and chanted, drowning him out.The 5-to-4 vote was a setback for tenants, as Mayor Eric Adams acknowledged in a statement after the vote. He said the increases would “unfortunately be a burden to tenants at this difficult time — and that is disappointing.” But he also expressed sympathy for small landlords who he said “are at risk of bankruptcy because of years of no increases at all.”The vote by the board was the first since Adams took office, and as my colleague Mihir Zaveri writes, the board took a different approach than it had under Adams’s predecessor, Bill de Blasio. The highest annual increases during his time in City Hall were 1.5 percent on one-year leases and 2.75 percent on two-year leases.But with the average rent on a newly leased Manhattan apartment reaching $4,975 in May — up 22 percent from 2021, according to the real estate firm Douglas Elliman — the rent-stabilization system has become a crucial source of affordable housing. The median monthly rent for rent-stabilized apartments is $1,400, according to a recent city survey, compared with $1,845 for unregulated homes. And the median income for people living in rent-stabilized homes is about $47,000, compared with $62,960 in unregulated homes.The last time there was a significant increase — 4 percent on one-year leases and 7.75 percent on two-year leases — was in 2013, the last year de Blasio’s predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, was in office.But the board has allowed far higher increases in the past. In July 1980, at a time of high inflation and a gas crisis, the board sanctioned 17 percent increases on three-year leases on apartments where the landlord provided heat. For apartments where tenants provided heat, the figure was 9 percent.On Tuesday Adán Soltren, whom Adams appointed as one of two tenant representatives, voted against the increases. He called the decision to support them “unjust” and told his colleagues, “Your decision will result in millions of people suffering while corporations and investors continue to profit.”Christina Smyth, one of two board members representing landlords, called the increases inadequate. “We are risking the decay of rent-stabilized housing,” she said.WeatherExpect a chance of showers with temperatures near 70. At night, showers and thunderstorms are likely with temps in the mid-60s.ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKINGIn effect until July 4 (Independence Day).The latest Metro newsCharles Fox/The Philadelphia Inquirer, via Associated PressWildfires: The Mullica River fire in Wharton State Forest in South Jersey has burned about 13,500 acres, threatening to become the state’s largest fire in 15 years.New Jersey hoopers: Although New Jersey was home to some of basketball’s greats, historically it has struggled to escape New York’s shadow. But a wave of rising stars in boys’ basketball could shift the trend.Arts & CultureCurtains up, masks off: Broadway theaters will be allowed to drop their mask mandates starting July 1. The Broadway League described the new policy as “mask optional” and said it would be re-evaluated monthly.Best in show: The Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show is underway — not at Madison Square Garden but, for a second year, on the sunny grounds of a Gothic Revival mansion in Tarrytown, N.Y.The Stonewall uprising: The Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center, which will open in 2024 as the first in the national park system devoted to the gay rights movement, will commemorate the 1969 Stonewall uprising and its legacy.DiscoOasis: Roller skating is enjoying another flash of popularity. DiscOasis in Central Park sets itself apart from New York’s other rinks with production values and theatricality.Republican candidates for governor spar againPool photo by Brittainy NewmanIn an hour that turned increasingly contentious, the four Republicans running for governor of New York appeared together one last time, making their case before the primary next week.They spent much of the hour, broadcast on the conservative news channel Newsmax, playing to the Republican base, describing their devotion to former President Donald J. Trump and their disdain for Gov. Kathy Hochul, the incumbent Democrat they hope to replace.“Kathy Hochul is going to get fired,” declared Representative Lee Zeldin, a four-term congressman from Long Island who was chosen as the party’s designee at a convention in March. “I’m looking forward to removing her from this office.”Zeldin was flanked on the stage of the Kodak Center in Rochester, N.Y., by the three other Republicans who also want to run against Hochul — Rob Astorino, a former Westchester County executive; Andrew Giuliani, the son of former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York City; and Harry Wilson, a corporate turnaround specialist who, as an official on President Barack Obama’s automotive task force, helped take General Motors in and out of bankruptcy.After about 40 relatively restrained minutes, the sniping intensified, with Giuliani calling Zeldin “a flip-flopper” and Zeldin saying Giuliani’s “claim to fame” was that the actor Chris Farley had mocked him on “Saturday Night Live” 30 years ago “for being,” Zeldin said, “an obnoxious kid.”As the candidates talked over each other, the moderator, Eric Bolling of Newsmax, tried to reassert control. “Gentlemen, I love the heat, I love the heat,” he said.Giuliani — who has said that he sees his father and Trump as models for the kind of governor he aspires to be — was making his first in-person debate appearance. In the first two Republican debates, hosted by stations in New York City, Giuliani, 36, took part from a separate location because he was unvaccinated. But on Tuesday, he was on the same stage.Talking about his time in the Trump administration, he said, “When I think about the work I did with President Trump in the White House, that’s the kind of change that we need in Albany.”Zeldin, who was once considered a moderate, has also been a Trump stalwart, though in a debate on Monday night he stopped short of saying the 2020 election had been stolen. On Tuesday in Rochester, he seemed more attentive to Trump’s signature policies, saying he believed that the former president’s border wall should be completed.Asked what they would do to reduce crime, Giuliani and Zeldin said they would fire Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney. Wilson said it was “unacceptable for New Yorkers to live on unsafe streets” and said that “an extended family member” had been killed recently “by someone out on cashless bail” — his term for a change in state bail law that Democrats in Albany pushed through in 2019 and Republicans want rolled back.Giuliani said that on his first day as governor, he would tell the leaders of the Assembly and the State Senate, both Democrats, that without a “full repeal” of the bail law, “I’m not funding anything in our upcoming budget negotiations.”Bolling asked the candidates about inflation, abortion and Medicaid fraud. Wilson promised deep reductions in property taxes and income taxes, as did the other candidates. And despite the recent racist massacre in Buffalo, none of the four supported any new gun control measures, with Zeldin saying the state’s gun laws “go too far as is.”METROPOLITAN diaryOverheardDear Diary:I was on the M104, and a woman was talking loudly on her phone. She was explaining to whomever she was talking to about how she had flirted with a guy to make her ex jealous.At one point, her voice became a mumble, and the man sitting across from her interrupted.“Excuse me, can you please raise your voice?” he said. “It sort of dropped and we couldn’t hear what happened.”The other passengers applauded.— Ivy ManskyIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.Melissa Guerrero More

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      Meet South Korea’s Swing Voters: Young, Broke and Angry

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      Frustrated over housing prices, a lack of job opportunities and a widening income gap, the once-reliable voting bloc is undecided and will most likely elect the next president.SEOUL — When he was a college freshman in 2019, Jeong Hyun-min sometimes had less than $10 to cover meals for three days. That same year, a scandal erupted in South Korea that still roils him today.While Mr. Jeong was cleaning tables and serving drinks at beer halls just to make ends meet, the country’s justice minister and his wife were accused of pulling strings to help their daughter glide into medical school, even fabricating an award certificate.“I realized what people had been saying all along: Your chances in this country are determined by what kind of parents you have,” said Mr. Jeong, a political science major at Daejeon University. “Fairness is the key if politicians want our trust back.”On Wednesday, South Koreans will elect a new president and all eyes are on young people, whose disillusionment with the government has made this one of the most tightly fought races in recent memory. ​Frustrated over sky-high housing prices, a lack of job opportunities and a widening income gap, young people who were once considered reliably progressive voters are now seen as undecided and will most likely tip the balance in the election.Jeong Hyun-min, a political science major, works part time distributing textbooks in a high school in South Korea.  “Fairness is the key if politicians want our trust back,” he said.Woohae Cho for The New York TimesUnlike previous generations, these voters are not easily swayed by old political dynamics, such as regional allegiance, loyalty to political bosses, fear of North Korea or a desire to ease tension on the Korean Peninsula. Instead, they talk of economic despair​ and general frustration as their primary concerns, themes captured in popular movies and TV dramas like “Parasite” and “Squid Game.”Many have adopted a saying: “isaenggeul,” or “We can’t make it in this life.”“In the past, young South Koreans tended to vote progressive, but now they have become swing voters,” said Prof. Kim Hyung-joon, an election expert at Myongji University in Seoul. “To them, nothing matters as much as fairness and equal opportunity and which candidate ​will ​provide it.”Young people near Konkuk University in Seoul. Unlike previous generations, these voters are not easily swayed by old political dynamics.Woohae Cho for The New York TimesYoon Suk-yeol, the leading candidate from the opposition People Power Party, has won over voters in their 60s and older by pitching their preferred conservative agenda. He has championed a stronger alliance with the United States and even threatened “pre-emptive strikes” against North Korea.Mr. Yoon’s rival, Lee Jae-myung, the candidate representing President Moon Jae-in’s Democratic Party, remains popular among voters in their 40s and 50s. He has called for a diplomatic balance between the United States, South Korea’s security ally, and China, its biggest trading partner.Few of these issues have roused South Koreans in their 20s and 30s, who make up one-third of the eligible voters, as much as they did older voters. Rather, on top of their minds is an uncertain economic future.“We will be the first generation whose standard of living will be lower than our parents’,” said Kim Dong-min, 24, a student at Konkuk University Law School.Kim Dong-min, 24, studying in the library at Konkuk University Law School. “We will be the first generation whose standard of living will be lower than our parents’,” he said.Woohae Cho for The New York TimesIn the decades following the 1950-53 Korean War, most South Koreans were ​equally ​poor. Those who found success were often referred to as “a dragon rising from a humble ditch.”Middle-class dreams were plausible as the postwar economy roared, churning out jobs. Education functioned as a vehicle of upward mobility. Millions of people migrated to the Seoul metropolitan area, where the best schools and most of the country’s wealth was eventually concentrated.Getting a degree from an elite university and owning an apartment in Seoul became symbols of social mobility. But in recent decades, the economy slowed, and that old formula has broken down. In a survey last year, nearly 65 percent of the respondents in South Korea said they were skeptical that their children’s economic future would be better than their own.In Seoul, the average household must save its entire income for 18.5 years to ​afford to buy a home.Woohae Cho for The New York TimesA majority of ​respondents in their 20s and 30s said they no longer saw education as the great equalizer, as admission into top universities depended largely on whether parents could bankroll expensive private tutors.“How would you feel when you are struggling in a marathon and you see others cruising along in sports cars?” said Oh Byeong-ju, 23, a senior at Dongguk University in Seoul.In South Korea, where nearly three-quarters of household wealth is concentrated in real estate, no index illustrates widening inequality quite ​like housing prices. Young couples whose wealthy parents helped them buy apartments — a tradition in South Korea — saw their property value in Seoul nearly double under Mr. Moon.The average household, on the other hand, must save its entire income for 18.5 years in order to ​afford an apartment in the city, according to estimates by KB Kookmin Bank.“It has become impossible to buy an apartment in Seoul, even if you work and save for your entire life,” said Park Eun-hye, 27, who works at Youth Mungan, a civic group that provides affordable meals for poor youths. “Whatever the candidates say sounds unconvincing. Young people instead invest what little money ​we save in stocks and cryptocurrencies.”Oh Byeong-ju, 23, a senior at Dongguk University in Seoul, says, “How would you feel when you are struggling in a marathon and you see others cruising along in sports cars?” Woohae Cho for The New York TimesSouth Korea’s poverty rate and its income inequality are among the worst in wealthy countries, with youths facing some of the steepest challenges. Nearly one in every five South Koreans between the ages of 15 and 29 was effectively jobless as of January, according to government data. That is far higher than the national average, 13.1 percent.Upon his inauguration, Mr. Moon promised “equal opportunities” for everyone. “The process will be fair,” he said. “And the result will be righteous.”Many young people claim fairness and equal opportunity — or their versions of those values — have been eroded instead. They bristled when Mr. Moon’s government formed a joint ice hockey team with North Korea for the 2018 Winter Olympics, arguing that it was unfair to replace elite South Korean athletes with inferior North Korean players.Posters featuring portraits of presidential candidates in Seoul.Woohae Cho for The New York TimesAnd last year, after a scandal revealed officials had used their position to seek personal gain in the housing market, young voters helped deliver Mr. Moon’s government a crushing defeat in the Seoul mayoral election.Rival political parties have since rushed to appease South Korean youth. Lawmakers lowered the minimum voting age to 18 from 19 and the age limit for running for Parliament to 18 from 25. Mr. Lee and Mr. Yoon, the two leading presidential candidates, have both apologized and have applied different tactics to win votes.Mr. Yoon’s popularity soared among men in the 20s after he promised to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Women and sidelined a campaign adviser who identified as a feminist. Anti-feminist sentiments are widespread among the young men.Park Eun-hye, 27, at Youth Mungan, a civic group that provides affordable meals for young people in Seoul.Woohae Cho for The New York TimesMr. Lee is more popular among women in their 20s, and he has promised to introduce harsher punishment for date rape and other sex crimes. He also campaigned to make companies reveal gender-wage gaps to their employees and to the public.But 20 percent to 30 percent of South Koreans in their 20s and 30s have said they may change their mind about their preferred candidate before they vote this week, according to surveys. “Our support shifts from one political party to another, issue by issue,” Mr. Jeong said. More

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      Gerald Migdol Is Charged in Campaign Finance Scheme

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      Gerald Migdol is accused of concealing contributions to a New York City comptroller candidate to get more public-matching funds.A Manhattan real estate developer was charged on Friday with scheming to conceal contributions to a candidate in this year’s New York City comptroller’s race in a bid to get as much public financing for the candidate as possible.The developer, Gerald Migdol, arranged for dozens of donations to be made to the campaign in the names of people who had not authorized the payments, according to an indictment unsealed on Friday by federal prosecutors in Manhattan.One contribution that prosecutors said Mr. Migdol arranged, a $250 money order, was made in the name of a relative who is a minor, prosecutors said.The indictment does not name the candidate Mr. Migdol sought to help. But the details of the case and publicly available information suggest it is Brian A. Benjamin, a Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for comptroller and is now New York’s lieutenant governor.The indictment does not indicate that the candidate knew of the scheme.Mr. Migdol, 71, was arrested early Friday on charges of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, officials said. He pleaded not guilty in an arraignment on Friday in Federal District Court in Manhattan and was released on bond. The wire fraud charges carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.“Free and fair elections are the foundation of our democracy, and campaign finance regulations are one way communities seek to ensure everyone plays by the same rules,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.Reached by phone after Mr. Migdol’s arraignment, Joel Cohen, his lawyer, said his client had pleaded not guilty “and that’s appropriate.”“That says what we need to say,” Mr. Cohen added.A man who answered the phone at Mr. Migdol’s family-run real estate company, the Migdol Organization, declined to comment. The company, which is based in Harlem, owns and operates residential properties across New York City.In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Benjamin’s comptroller campaign said that “neither Lieutenant Governor Benjamin nor his campaign are being accused of any wrongdoing and they are prepared to fully cooperate with authorities.”The spokesman added that “as soon as the campaign discovered that these contributions were improperly sourced, they donated them to the campaign finance board.”The office of Gov. Kathy Hochul referred all questions to Mr. Benjamin’s campaign. Ms. Hochul chose Mr. Benjamin as her lieutenant governor in August after she succeeded Andrew M. Cuomo.Mr. Migdol’s family has long supported Democratic candidates, according to the Migdol Organization website, which includes photos of family members with Mr. Benjamin and other politicians.Several Migdol family members, including Gerald Migdol, contributed to Mr. Benjamin’s campaign under their own names, campaign finance records show.The contributions at issue in the case against Mr. Migdol, the indictment says, were meant to allow the candidate’s campaign to qualify for public-matching funds through the city’s campaign finance system, potentially unlocking tens of thousands of dollars in additional money. The scheme ran from November 2019 to January 2021, the indictment says.A few of the contributions mentioned in the indictment were given to the campaign by a person at Mr. Migdol’s direction, prosecutors said. The indictment does not name the person, who is identified only as CC-1. The indictment also cites other unnamed “co-conspirators.”Mr. Migdol, prosecutors said, explained the scheme in a message to the unnamed people in July 2020, describing how the city’s public-financing system could multiply their contributions eightfold.“We get 8xl for money orders of $100,” the message said, according to the indictment. “For Money orders of $250=8×1 for first $100 and the other $150 is not matched. So a MO for $250 is worth $950 for [Candidate-1]. Hopefully our next City Comptroller.”A biography of Mr. Migdol on his company’s website says he has been involved in the real estate business in New York City for more than 40 years, primarily in Harlem and the Bronx.Mr. Migdol told The New York Post in 2006 that he started buying brownstones in Harlem in the early 2000s when they were selling for several hundred thousand dollars, far less than the prices such buildings can fetch today.In October 2019, Mr. Migdol received a community leadership award in Harlem that described him as “a true Harlem legend.” He said in his acceptance speech that Mr. Benjamin had nominated him for the award.“I am grateful to my new friend — our great State Senator Brian Benjamin,” Mr. Migdol said in the speech, which his company posted on its website. “At first glance my nomination would not normally be a popular choice. He then said but for the fact that what you guys do here is worthy of being honored.”Mr. Benjamin, a former state senator from Harlem, placed fourth in the Democratic primary for comptroller, well behind the winner, Brad Lander, a City Council member from Brooklyn.Many of the details in the indictment were first reported in January by the news website The City, including that several people whose names were listed on donations to Mr. Benjamin’s campaign said they had not made the payments.One donation reported by The City was a $250 contribution made in the name of Mr. Migdol’s 2-year-old grandson.Jefferson Siegel contributed reporting. More

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      Where Does Eric Adams Really Live?

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      Throughout the race, there has been a significant degree of confusion surrounding the question of where Eric Adams resides.Given the confusion surrounding his residency, and how he accounts for his real estate on his tax returns, a moderator asked Mr. Adams how the electorate could trust him.Mr. Adams said, as he has in the past, that he takes responsibility for omissions on his tax returns, and then blamed his accountant, who he said was homeless.“He went through real trauma,” Mr. Adams said of his accountant. “And I’m not a hypocrite, I wanted to still give him the support that he needed.”Mr. Adams also insisted, again, that his primary residence is in Brooklyn.Mr. Adams owns a multi-unit townhouse in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn in which he says he keeps an apartment. In one of the more bizarre moments of the mayoral primary, he gave a media tour of that apartment, with reporters observing non-vegan food items apparently belonging to Mr. Adams’s son. (Mr. Adams has been a vegan for years.)But Mr. Adams also co-owns a co-op in Fort Lee, N.J., with his partner, and he has said that he moved into Brooklyn Borough Hall for a time after the pandemic arrived. During the primary, Politico New York reported that Mr. Adams used conflicting addresses in public records and that he was still spending nights at Borough Hall.He has had to refile his tax returns in part because of irregularities concerning his residency, the news outlet The City reported. The outlet also reported that the city is seeking to inspect his Brooklyn residence following an allegation of an illegal apartment conversion on the property. His campaign has said he intended to rectify those issues, though the complaint remains active.Mr. Sliwa recently led a journey from Manhattan to Fort Lee “to find out where Eric Adams really lives.” More

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      No, California Isn’t Doomed

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      California has been struggling. It has stumbled through the Covid-19 pandemic and recession, afflicted by wildfires, an epidemic of homelessness and stratospheric housing prices. Last year it experienced its first population decline in records going back to 1900. Its latest mess was a costly and unsuccessful campaign to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom.The state’s problems are real. Nevertheless, there are positive signs. The first step toward fixing problems is recognizing them, and on that score, Californians have grown increasingly aware of what’s wrong. California is also blessed with abundant resources that enable it to fix problems that would be daunting for less endowed states.Housing is a good example. Prices are crazy: On Sept. 16, the California Association of Realtors announced that the median sale price in the state in August was $827,940, up 17 percent from a year earlier. Only 23 percent of California households could afford to buy a median-priced home in the second quarter, down from one-third a year earlier, the association announced in August.To make ends meet, many Californians scrimp and save and commute long distances from exurbs; others give up and move to cheaper states. Employers struggle to lure out-of-state recruits. Homeowners can swap one high-priced house for another, but renters can’t buy starter homes because they have no housing equity to use for a down payment. And California’s epidemic of homelessness can be traced in part to a lack of affordable housing.The upside is that almost everyone in California understands that building more housing is essential. More homes are being built in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and Austin combined than in the entire state of California, says Dan Dunmoyer, president and chief executive of the California Building Industry Association.One of Newsom’s first acts after surviving the recall attempt was to sign three bills to increase housing supply. Senate Bill No. 8 extends a 2019 law that accelerates approval of housing projects. Senate Bill No. 9 allows homeowners to build up to three additional housing units on their land. And Senate Bill No. 10 allows environmental review to be sped up for multiunit projects near transit hubs or in urban developments. Those are the latest of dozens of housing bills signed by Newsom and his predecessor, Jerry Brown.The California Environmental Quality Act, signed into law in 1970 by Ronald Reagan, who was then the governor, is valuable on the whole but enables people to use environmental pretexts to resist housing developments in their neighborhoods that they could not as easily oppose otherwise. There’s widespread agreement that this needs to change.Progress, though, is halting. The pace of issuance of permits for housing construction in California is slower now than in 1975, according to data compiled by the state’s Department of Finance and the U.S. Census Bureau. Environmentalists fight efforts to circumscribe the environmental quality act, worrying that legitimate environmental concerns about new projects will be neglected. And local elected officials continue to push back against efforts to increase density, which they perceive as reducing the value of existing homes. In Palo Alto, the headquarters of Hewlett-Packard and Tesla, Mayor Tom DuBois expressed opposition to Senate Bill No. 10, writing that “such legislation echoes more of Russia than of California.”Up against such forces, Dunmoyer, the president of the building industry association, told me that he’s impressed by the “courage” shown by Newsom and the California State Legislature in enacting senate bills 8, 9 and 10. But, he added, “This is a marathon, and we’re still in the first quarter of the marathon race.”Other problems in California should be fixable with effort and good will. As I wrote in my Sept. 8 newsletter, the state’s water shortages could be alleviated by diverting a little water from agriculture to other purposes. Farms account for only 0.8 percent of the state’s gross domestic product but more than 80 percent of the water used by people (that is, not counting water that stays in streams, deltas and so on).Homelessness is caused partly by a lack of housing, but also by inadequate treatment of people experiencing mental illness and drug addiction. Many conservatives argue that the state has focused too much on low-income housing as the solution to homelessness. “Focus on treatment first rather than housing first,” says Wayne Winegarden, senior fellow in business and economics at the right-of-center Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy. “Otherwise all we’re doing is taking the problem from the street to the hotel room.”Chris Hoene, executive director of the left-of-center California Budget and Policy Center, disagrees with Winegarden, and calls for more spending on Homekey, the state’s program for housing the homeless. Social services should be “wrapped around,” or integrated with, a home, Hoene says. It’s unfortunate, he says, that “people on different sides of strategies pit the potential solutions against each other.”One advantage that California has in dealing with these and other challenges — fixing K-12 education, lowering the tax burden on families and businesses and so on — is that the state’s finances have improved. The state raised taxes and trimmed spending to brace for the Covid-19 recession, but tax revenues came in unexpectedly high because higher-income workers kept working and the financial markets did well, generating taxable capital gains. The $100 billion California Comeback Plan, which Newsom signed in July, is a Christmas tree of Democratic priorities, including stimulus checks for two out of every three Californians, renter assistance, housing for the homeless, tax relief and grants to small businesses, universal pre-K, college savings accounts for low-income students and investments in infrastructure and wildfire resilience.I bounced this optimistic line of thought off Joel Kotkin, a professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., who is an expert on cities. He was more pessimistic. “The way our economy is structured, there’s an incredible amount of wealth being minted for a small number of people,” he said. “We have the worst overcrowding. The schools are terrible and they’re going to get worse.” He added, “Used to be a young, ambitious person went to California. I don’t think that’s happening anymore.”It’s hard to argue with a veteran observer of California like Kotkin, who began writing about Silicon Valley in 1975. On the other hand, the bearishness can be overdone. Matthew A. Winkler, editor in chief emeritus of Bloomberg News, observed earlier this year that people love to declare California “doomed.” It ain’t.The readers writeHow you describe a bill depends upon what you are talking about. If you are concerned about too much fiscal stimulus, then taking note of the tax increases and spending cuts makes sense. If you are concerned with the size of government, taking note of spending cuts makes sense, but it does not make sense to reduce the size of the bill by the amount of the tax increases. Same way with a Republican tax cut. If they cut taxes by $1.5 trillion and fully offset it with $1.5 trillion in spending cuts, that is a $1.5 trillion tax cut and that is how it should be described. Only offsetting tax increases should be taken into account.Paul PecorinoTuscaloosa, Ala.The writer is a professor of economics at the University of Alabama.Quote of the day“According to Wittgenstein’s ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler’s reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler. The less you trust the ruler’s reliability, the more information you are getting about the ruler and the less about the table.”— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets” (2004)Have feedback? Send a note to coy-newsletter@nytimes.com. More

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      California’s Housing Crisis Looms Large for Gavin Newsom

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      Having survived a recall vote, the governor is free to focus on the state’s homeless population and housing shortage. He has more room to maneuver than he did when he first took office.The median home price in California has eclipsed $800,000. Tenants in the state are among the most cost-burdened in the country. Each night more than 100,000 residents sleep outside or in their cars. A crisis, a disaster, the religion of sorrow, a disgrace — whatever journalists and politicians call it, people across the state, including all the major candidates for governor in the recall vote this week, agree that the situation is untenable.The question is what, if anything, the governor can do about it. It’s something that Gov. Gavin Newsom has spent the past three years talking about. And now that he has won a decisive victory in the recall election, which cost close to $300 million and consumed the state’s and governor’s attention for several months, Mr. Newsom is turning his attention back to problems like housing.In many ways the answer there is different from what it was when he took office in 2019.Right now the focus is Senate Bill 9, which would allow duplexes in neighborhoods throughout the state and is one of the hundreds of unsigned bills that piled up on Mr. Newsom’s desk during the recall campaign. But even if Mr. Newsom signs it, which he is widely expected to do in the coming days, his legacy on housing is likely to be less about laws passed on his watch than his administration’s ability to enforce them. That’s because the executive branch has gained much more power over state housing policy than it had even a few years ago, after years of state frustration with how difficult the local governments make it to build housing in California.Mr. Newsom’s administration has come to embrace the role, taking action like suing cities for not building enough to keep up with population growth and creating a team to ensure that cities approve new housing. The moves are part of a nationwide shift in power — away from city councils and toward statehouses — over the $1 trillion annual residential construction market.“It used to be that housing was run by the local planning departments and California governors didn’t really pay attention,” said Ben Metcalf, managing director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. “That has changed.”Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, has tried to get through the pandemic emergency by extending the state’s eviction moratorium even as the federal one lapsed, and pouring money from the state’s budget surplus and various coronavirus relief packages into homeless funding and programs like an effort to turn hotels into supportive housing.But California remains one of the most difficult places in America to build housing, causing a supply-and-demand imbalance. It is the leading edge of a nationwide problem that is pricing middle-income families out of ownership and has one in four rental households paying more than half its pretax income on rent.A polling site in El Centro, Calif., on Tuesday, when a statewide vote kept Gov. Gavin Newsom in office.John Francis Peters for The New York TimesPlanners, economists and both political parties have long called for states to use their power to ease the housing shortage by breaking local logjams. They point out that suburban governments have little incentive to fix the problem since they are accountable to homeowners who prefer that prices only go up. That conundrum has vexed would-be housing reformers since at least the 1970s, and emerged during California’s recall campaign in the Republican debates, where candidates talked a lot about adding more housing but shied away from discussions of where that housing would go.These often contradictory comments were a perfect encapsulation of Californians’ mood: They are universally unhappy with the state’s cost of living and the tent cities that have appeared along freeways, in parks and on beaches. But homeowners remain fiercely protective of their power to say what gets built near them. Kevin Faulconer, a former San Diego mayor and a Republican candidate in the recall election, all but ran away from his own pro-density policies in California’s second-largest city by saying, “When we see some of these pieces of legislation that want to eliminate single-family zoning in California, that’s wrong.”Mr. Newsom has tried to walk this same line. In 2018, he campaigned on a “Marshall Plan for housing” that had a goal of delivering 3.5 million new housing units by 2025. He came to regret the figure once he was in the governor’s chair, and it became fodder for his leading recall opponent, the talk show host Larry Elder, who seized on it as an example of broken promises. Mr. Elder did not need sophisticated research to find fault with the number: In a state that permits around 100,000 housing units a year, delivering 3.5 million — 35 years of housing at the current pace — is close to a physical impossibility.Mr. Newsom has been mostly quiet about big zoning legislation ever since. He did not take a position on Senate Bill 50, a contentious measure that would have allowed apartment buildings in neighborhoods across the state. And he was largely quiet about Senate Bill 9 as it passed through both houses of the State Legislature and lingered on his desk.Mr. Newsom, at a rally on Monday in Long Beach, Calif., has emphasized enforcement of existing housing laws.Doug Mills/The New York TimesWhat he has done instead is enforce existing laws more aggressively than his predecessors did. Two weeks after Mr. Newsom assumed office, California’s attorney general sued Huntington Beach for failing to plan for sufficient new housing. Since then, the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development has sent hundreds of letters telling cities to change or simplify their planning codes to comply with state law.The governor’s most recent budget allocated $4.3 million to staff a “housing accountability unit” made up of planners and lawyers who will monitor local governments’ housing decisions and intervene when they’re not following state law.Zoning defines a neighborhood’s physical character and who might be living next door, so it has captured most of the attention in California’s housing debate. But over the past few years, the Legislature quietly passed a slew of smaller measures that when strung together have radically changed the relationship between state and local government. The new rules change how much housing cities have to plan for, make it harder for them to stop developers from building and ultimately deprive them of funding and local control if they drift too far from state mandates.Because they transfer more oversight of housing from localities to Sacramento, the question of how aggressively those laws are enforced has fallen to the executive branch. It’s one thing for the state to pass laws to desegregate neighborhoods, set aside more land for subsidized housing and require cities to permit backyard cottages. If enforcing them isn’t a priority — which has long been the case with housing laws — they are bound to be ignored.In an interview after the recall vote, Jason Elliott, a senior counselor to Mr. Newsom who works on housing policy, rattled off a series of bill numbers and the esoteric text of planning codes to point out dozens of housing regulations that remain mostly unused. Environmental measures that support increasing density to reduce car trips. Various laws allowing backyard units. A way for developers to sue cities that don’t follow their own zoning rules. These are the types of statutes the new housing accountability unit will try to enforce.“I’m never going to say we’re done passing laws and we can’t do more,” Mr. Elliott said. “But what we really need to do if we want to see units spring up is get several dozen people thinking about this and only this, and empower them to reach out to cities.”Will Mr. Newsom ever get anywhere near 3.5 million new units? No. Even if it were politically possible, it would strain lumber and labor supplies.It took California several decades to get into a housing crisis this bad. Lofty rhetoric and promises for millions of units make do for a campaign slogan, but the reality looks more like a process of slowly digging out. More

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      The California Recall Isn't Just Gavin Newsom Vs. Larry Elder

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      The prospect of Gov. Larry Elder has jolted California’s Democrats out of their apathy. Polling on the recall has swung from a dead heat in early August to an 8.4 margin for Gavin Newsom in FiveThirtyEight’s tracker. But I want to make an affirmative argument for continuing the Newsom experiment: Something exciting is taking shape in California. The torrent of policy that Newsom and the Democratic Legislature are passing amounts to nothing less than a Green New Deal for the Golden State.To understand Newsom, both his successes and his failures, you need to see the paradox that defines his career. The knock on him is that he’s all style, no substance — a guy who got where he is by looking like a politician rather than acting like a leader. The truth is just the opposite. Newsom’s style is his problem; his substance is his redemption.[Get more from Ezra Klein by listening to his Opinion podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show.”]When Newsom was the mayor of San Francisco, his nickname was “Mayor McHottie,” and he came complete with a tabloid-ready personal life and funding from the unimaginably wealthy Getty family. His worst mistakes as governor — like attending a birthday dinner for a lobbyist friend at the luxe French Laundry, unmasked, during the depths of the pandemic — deepen those suspicions. The “Beauty,” one of his recall opponents, who fancies himself “the Beast,” called him in a $5 million ad blitz.The attacks wound Newsom because what appear to be his strengths are actually his weaknesses. Newsom is handsome in a way that comes off as just a little too coifed, like the actor you’d cast to play a politician in a movie. His personal life and social misjudgments have dogged him for decades. He doesn’t have a knack for memorable sound bites or quick connection. (A sample line from our interview: “It was not without consideration that last year we passed a number of bills to site homeless shelters and supportive housing and Homekey and Roomkey projects with CEQA waivers and as-of-right zoning.”) He’s an eager nerd who presents as a slick jock, and he’s never found a way out of that dissonance.He’s also been governing amid the worst pandemic in modern history. California has outperformed most states in health outcomes and, particularly, in economic outcomes. “We dominate all Western democracies in the last five years in G.D.P.,” Newsom said. “The G.O.P. loves G.D.P.! Twenty-one percent G.D.P. growth in the last five years. Texas was 12 percent. And our taxes are lower for the middle class in California than they are in Texas.” Basically every economic indicator you can look at in California is booming, from household income growth to the $80 billion-plus budget surplus. But it’s still been a grueling 18 months of masks, lockdowns, deaths and discord. There’s been little attention to policymaking in Sacramento.As a result, people don’t realize how much Newsom and the Democratic State Legislature have done. But in the two and a half years since Newsom became governor, they’ve more than doubled the size of California’s earned-income tax credit and Young Child Tax Credit, and added a stimulus just for Californians (though some of the neediest were left out). They expanded paid family leave from six to eight weeks and unpaid leave to 12 weeks. They added 200,000 child care slots and $250 million to retrofit child care centers. They passed legislation giving all public school students two free meals each day, funding summer school and after-school programs for two million children and creating a full year of transitional kindergarten for all 4-year-olds by 2025.Newsom is “three years ahead of Joe Biden in terms of pro-family policy,” Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, told me. “Any parents or grandparents who back the recall are voting against their own financial interest, I’d say.”Housing has been harder, in part because you need to do more than just spend money. Ben Metcalf, who led California’s Department of Housing and Community Development for three years under Gov. Jerry Brown and one year under Newsom, recalls that “when Newsom first arrived, I was excited by his vision, but then dismayed by his inability to effectively deliver and get the Legislature to do what he wanted. Brown knew how to wield power. He knew the points of inflection. He had a team of people he could rely on.”You hear unflattering comparisons with Brown often when you ask around about Newsom. Brown was a more disciplined and experienced leader. He chose his priorities carefully, and he did what he promised. The surplus Newsom is spending is a gift bequeathed by Brown, who persuaded California’s voters to sharply raise taxes on the wealthiest residents. But Brown did little to address the state’s housing affordability crisis and neither did the Legislature.Nancy Skinner, a state senator who’s been a leader on housing, told me that “our shortage has been decades in the making.” The mantra, she said, was to just leave it to the cities. “For years, the Legislature just urged city governments to be more responsive. We tried to create some incentives. And only in the last five years did we realize this is a statewide crisis and we can’t just leave it to local governments to get it fixed. It took the Legislature a long time to get to the place of realizing the urging and carrots didn’t do it. We have to do the mandates.”Newsom, to his credit, prioritized housing from the beginning. Early in his term, in 2019, he sued the city of Huntington Beach for allegedly falling short on its housing commitments and threatened to sue dozens more. He made housing the primary focus of his 2020 State of the State speech. But the initial consensus was that he overpromised and underdelivered. There were widespread frustrations that he wasn’t tough enough with the Legislature and his interventions were often ineffective. He remains far behind his goal of building 3.5 million new housing units by 2025.“I said the 3.5 million houses was a stretch goal,” he protested to me. “I said in trying to achieve it, we’d find what we were capable of!”To be fair, Newsom couldn’t have predicted that the pandemic, which descended on California just weeks after his big housing speech, was coming. Still, in February, I was furious watching California’s political class, including Newsom, fail and fail again to pass major housing legislation. But when the facts change, so must your mind. The Legislature just passed, and Newsom will sign, a series of housing bills that achieve something I never expected to see in California: the end of single-family zoning. S.B.9 allows homeowners to divide their properties into two lots and to build two homes on each of those lots. It won’t solve the housing crisis, but it’s a start.Newsom and other Democrats are also finally appreciating the depth of the anger even liberals feel about homelessness. “People can’t take the tents and open-air drug use,” Newsom said to me. “They can’t. Nor can I. They want the streets cleaned up. They want more housing. They don’t care about task forces or bills. I think that sense of urgency coming out of Covid sharpens our edges. The five- to 10-year plans, no one is interested in that anymore. What’s the five- to 10-month plan?”In Newsom’s case, it’s using the state’s budget surpluses to drive a $12 billion investment over two years in permanent residences and mental health care for the homeless. How well it works remains to be seen, but no other state is investing in housing at anything like this scale or speed.What’s most encouraging to me is a broader change you can sense in the politics of this issue. At every level of power in California, the state’s political actors have realized they need to find ways to build. Inaction is no longer a viable option. Even the politicians who oppose development have to pretend to favor it. There’s no illusion that the tent cities can continue, nor that they can be cleared without offering housing to their residents. Politics isn’t just about policy. It’s also about will, coalitions and a sense of consequences. That’s what feels different in California right now. And Newsom deserves some credit for that.“The reason we began suing cities was to provide air cover,” Newsom told me. “I can’t tell you how many mayors privately thanked me even as they publicly criticized me for those lawsuits. We’re trying to drive a different expectation: We will cover you. You want to scapegoat someone, scapegoat the state. We haven’t had that policy in the past. Localism has been determinative. And that’s part of what’s changing.”This is why I disagree with those, like the economist Tyler Cowen, who argue that a Republican victory in the recall would be a healthy wake-up call for California Democrats, with little downside because Elder would be checked by the Legislature. The political system has already woken up. But the politics of housing are miserable, and there’s much more yet to do. To wreck the governing coalition that is finally making progress would be madness.“If Gavin were recalled, that’d be disastrous for housing policy in this state,” Brian Hanlon, the president of California YIMBY, a pro-housing group, told me. “The Legislature, I believe, could override Larry Elder’s vetoes on key bills. But all of these hard-fought housing bills that we are not passing with a supermajority cannot survive an Elder veto. All that would die.”“I also think that if the recall succeeds, in part due to housing, the overall situation in Sacramento would just be chaotic,” Hanlon added later. “It’ll be a lost year as Democrats and the Legislature work to retake the governor’s office in 2022.”Metcalf, the former head of the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development, has moved from dismayed to impressed by Newsom’s record on housing. “We’re beginning to see Newsom find the levers to pull,” he said. “We’re seeing him figure out how to get the Legislature to do what he wants. We’re just getting there with Newsom, which would make it very painful to lose him now.”Every California politician brags that if California were a country, it would be the world’s fifth-largest economy. On climate, though, that’s a point of leverage, a way California can try to use its economic might to push the world to decarbonize faster. “There is no peer on California’s climate leadership,” Newsom told me. “We move markets. We move policy globally, not just nationally.”The first part of Newsom’s climate agenda is a series of executive orders setting aggressive decarbonization targets and standards. They include orders mandating that all new passenger cars sold in the state are zero-emission vehicles by 2035, a pledge to conserve 30 percent of the state’s land and waters by 2030, and directives to the California Air Resources Board to map out a pathway to carbon neutrality by 2035 and an end to oil extraction by 2045.California has, in the past, used access to its markets to transform the products that are sold globally — our tight fuel economy standards became the de facto national standard, and our subsidies for electric vehicles laid a foundation for that market to boom. Newsom wants to do that again, but for far more than just cars.I am, to be honest, skeptical of far-reaching targets and ever more aggressive decarbonization goals. It’s always easier to promise sweeping change in the future. But you can’t build a different future without planning for it now. What matters is whether these orders really do shape public and private decisions in California over the next decade. If Newsom or a like-minded successor remains governor, they have force. But they are instantly vulnerable if he loses office to Elder or anyone else.The second part of Newsom’s climate agenda is, well, money. The California Comeback Plan that Newsom signed this year put nearly $8 billion toward electric vehicles and climate resilience. Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who tracks state climate policies, said that “spending in the billions on climate is basically unheard of at the state level. No other state is doing anything remotely close to this scale.”I could keep going, and Newsom certainly did. He’s got a whole health care agenda meant to integrate physical and mental care called CalAIM that he gets extremely animated talking about (“If you could see me, I’m smiling, I’m so excited by this!”). He also has a plan to let the state bargain for prescription drugs on behalf of not just its public insurance programs but also any private insurers that want to join. He’s trying to convert the Valley State Prison into a rehabilitation center modeled on the Norwegian prisons that progressives admire. He’d love to tell you about his immigration ideas.It’s really a blizzard of plans. Newsom sees what he’s doing as “raising the bar of expectations.” He told me a quote, often attributed to Michelangelo, that he repeats to his staff: “The biggest risk is not that we aim too high and miss it. It’s that we aim too low and reach it.” He admitted they roll their eyes at this. But it is, for him, a strategy. “We’ve stretched the mind and I don’t think it goes back to its original form.”Perhaps. I’ve spoken to Newsom allies who worry that he’s attempting too much and that it could end with him achieving too little. Every one of these ideas will face serious implementation challenges. Transitional kindergarten, for instance, will require the state to produce 12,000 credentialed pre-K teachers and 20,000 more teacher’s aides in the next four years, according to Fuller. It’s going to require a decade of patient political work on housing to reverse California’s affordability crisis. Newsom’s health care agenda alone would preoccupy a traditional term, but his administration hasn’t done much to communicate its vision. When I asked a leading doctor at the University of California at San Francisco about it, he had no idea what it was.So there are challenges still to come — many of them. But I’d like to see Newsom and the Democratic Legislature get the chance to face them. If they succeed, they will make California the progressive beacon it’s long claimed to be.Additional reporting by Roge Karma.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      California Could Throw Away What It’s Won

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      If you live in California and haven’t yet voted or made plans to vote on the proposed recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom, please wake up. This is a situation in which apathy could have awesome consequences: California, which isn’t as liberal a state as you may imagine but is nonetheless considerably more liberal than the nation as a whole, may be about to absent-mindedly acquire a Trumpist governor who could never win a normal election.This would happen at a moment when control of statehouses is especially crucial because it shapes the response to the coronavirus. MAGA governors like Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida aren’t just refusing to impose mask or vaccination requirements themselves; they’re trying to prevent others from taking precautions by issuing executive orders and backing legislation banning the imposition of such requirements by local governments and even private businesses. And that’s the kind of governor California will probably find itself with if the recall succeeds.How is something like this even possible? Because the recall process is crazy. Voters answer two questions: Should Newsom be recalled? And who should replace him? If a majority vote “yes” on recall, whoever is chosen by the largest number of people on the second question becomes governor, even if that person receives far fewer than the number of votes to keep Newsom in office.And the most likely outcome if Newsom is ousted is that Larry Elder, a right-wing talk-radio host who is vehemently opposed to mask and vaccine mandates, will end up in the governor’s office despite receiving only a small fraction of the total vote.What would make this outcome especially galling is that California is in many ways — with the glaring exception of housing, which I’ll get to — a progressive success story.The Golden State took a sharp left turn in 2010, with the election of Jerry Brown as governor. Two years later, Democrats gained a supermajority in the Legislature, giving them the power to enact many progressive priorities. California soon raised taxes on the rich, increased social spending and increased its minimum wage. It also enthusiastically implemented the Affordable Care Act.Conservatives predicted disaster, with some saying that the state was committing economic “suicide.” And California gets a lot of negative coverage in the business press, where one constantly finds assertions that business is moving en masse out of the state to lower-tax, less-regulated states, like Texas.The data, however, say otherwise. Given all the trash-talking of California and trumpeting of Texas’ prospects one reads, it’s a bit startling to look at trends in real G.D.P. and employment between 2010 and the eve of the pandemic and discover that California and Texas had essentially the same growth rates. It’s also startling, given all the talk about people fleeing high taxes, to learn that highly educated, high-income workers — who do indeed pay higher taxes in California than in most other parts of the U.S. — were continuing to migrate into the state.California’s experience, in other words, gives the lie to conservative claims that taxing the rich and spending more on social programs destroys prosperity. And the state didn’t just achieve rapid economic growth; its effective implementation of Obamacare helped it reduce the number of its residents without health insurance much more rapidly than the rest of the country.OK, there are some important shadows on this picture. Even as affluent workers continued to move to California, lower-income workers — who actually pay lower taxes in California than they do in Texas — were moving out. This was surely in large part because of the high price of housing, which has become a huge problem.Despite overall economic success, California has the nation’s highest poverty rate (when you measure it properly), largely because of high housing costs: The median apartment in San Francisco rents for more than twice as much as an apartment in any Texas city. California also has a lot of homelessness, for the same reason.What’s behind California’s housing nightmare? Runaway NIMBYism, which has blocked new housing construction. California’s economic performance matched that of Texas in the 2010s, but it issued far fewer building permits despite having a larger population. California gained three million jobs between 2010 and 2019 but added fewer than 700,000 housing units.NIMBYism, however, happens to be one of the few major issues that cut right across party lines. Conservatives are as likely as liberals to oppose housing construction; some progressives — among them Governor Newsom — are strong advocates of housing expansion. So California’s big policy failure shouldn’t be an issue in this recall election. What’s on the line are its policy successes.If Californians choose to turn their backs on these successes, well, that’s their right. The danger now is that the state won’t choose — that it will stumble into MAGAland via a bizarre recall process and lack of attention.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More