Steve Hilton: How California Became America’s BIGGEST Political Failure | PBD #803

**Patrick Bet-David** (0:11)
The future looks bright.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:13)
My handshake is better than anything I ever signed, right here.

**Javier Becerra** (0:19)
I think I've ever said this before.

**Patrick Bet-David** (0:25)
She is, she is, and a couple of other people are as well. Okay, so today we have a special guest who is trying to do the impossible. I would say you're trying to do the impossible. The reason why I say that is because California politics is so controlled by so many different people. But take somebody with courage who is willing to go and drive some conservative, common sense ideas to people in California who've been devastated the last four to eight years, who love their state, who don't want to leave, who want to see this place become the state everybody would flock to instead of now looking at the numbers back to back to back the last six years, number one state in America for negative net migration. They had so many different issues, most expensive homes. Average home in California right now is about $906,000. Number one in homelessness, 13% in population, but 28% in population of homelessness. You can go highest prices of, so many different things.
And then comes a guy like you that wants to run for governor to the state of California, and it's great to have you here with us. Fantastic to be here. The one and only Steve Hilton. Yes, great to have you here. So before we get into the story, I want to ask you a very open-ended question.
Who runs California? Is it the governor? Is it the unions? Is it the money, the billionaires? Is it the NGOs? Who runs, who's the most powerful institution or individual in California when it comes onto politics?

**Steve Hilton** (1:39)
What a great question. I'm going to answer it with this story, which is almost the reason that I'm doing this. Like it's the closest thing to an actual moment when I thought I'm going to go for it.
So, many people know me from Fox News. I hosted a show there for many years.
But most of my career before then was in business. And I worked a little bit in the government as well in the UK before moving here with my wife and my two sons in 2012 I was senior advisor to David Cameron in 10 Downing Street, responsible for implementing our policy reform program along with many other people in the team there. So, the reason I'm saying that is most of my career has actually been doing things, trying to make change happen in the private sector and government. And so, over the years of being on TV, it was an amazing opportunity. I loved it, but I had a itch to get back to doing stuff. And so, a few years ago, I got back involved in policy and politics in California. And the first issue I looked at was housing. You just mentioned it, housing costs actually is the number one reason people are leaving the state. It's just impossible. You know, like, hardly anyone can even imagine owning a home now in California.
It's something like, you know, I mean, we have the lowest home ownership in the country. Anyway, so I started working on the issue, really learning about what's been driving it and so on. And it took me to try to get an initiative qualified for the ballot that would address two of the big drivers of this insane cost. One of them is a hidden tax on housing called impact fees, the development impact fees. The second is something that's talked about a lot, which is, by the way, this really does answer your question, so just.

**Patrick Bet-David** (3:23)
Please, I'm with you.

**Steve Hilton** (3:25)
I'm getting there. Something called CEQA, the C-E-Q-A, the California Environmental Quality Act, passed in 1970 and it was all about when it started out regulating pollution from big factories and so on. But over the years, it's basically turned into a nightmare that blocks anything and holds up everything. And one of the main problems with CEQA, this law, is that they've given this what they call a private right of action. Means that anyone can file a lawsuit to enforce this environmental law. Normally, with stuff like that, it's the DA or the attorney general. You've got this private right of action. Anyone can file a lawsuit.
70% of CEQA lawsuits are used to block housing.
Most of those are filed by unions in order to negotiate with developers what they call project labor agreements, where you have union workers only, or what they call prevailing wage, which is two or three times higher than market rate wages, et cetera. So the second component of this ballot initiative was ending this private right of action. So at a stroke, you stop all these nuisance lawsuits that block housing.