Housing Is the Test

We are not poor. We are unequal. And the people who benefit from that confusion are spending tens of millions to keep it that way.

On June 2nd, San Francisco voters will decide on Proposition D — the Overpaid CEO Act, a modest surcharge on large corporations whose top executives earn more than 100 times the median salary of their own workers. Only companies with over 1,000 employees and more than a billion dollars in revenue qualify. If those corporations don’t want to pay it, there’s a simple solution: pay their workers more.

This November, California voters will decide on the Billionaire Tax Act, a one-time 5 percent levy on the wealth of the state’s roughly 250 billionaire households, spread over five years — the first tax of its kind anywhere in the world.

Taken together, these two votes are asking a question that goes far deeper than tax policy. They are asking whether the principle of equity — the idea that a society is responsible for the people who live in it — still has any operative meaning in California. They are asking whether housing, healthcare, education, and dignity are rights or commodities. They are asking who this place is for.

They are asking, in other words, whether housing justice is possible in a society that has been deliberately designed against it.

The Scarcity We Were Sold

We have been told, for most of our lives, that there is not enough. Not enough housing, not enough money for public schools, not enough to keep clinics open or buses running or families housed. Scarcity, we are told, is the fundamental condition of public life. We must make hard choices. We must prioritize. We must be patient.

But scarcity is not a fact of nature. It is a political choice — one made on behalf of people who have never experienced it.

Consider what is actually true about California right now. The combined wealth of the state’s ten richest residents has grown ninefold in two decades. The fortunes of just four people — Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Jensen Huang, and Mark Zuckerberg — now equal roughly 24 percent of the entire state’s GDP. California’s 250 billionaire households collectively hold wealth exceeding half of everything the state’s economy produces in a year.

From 2019 to 2025, the wealth of California’s billionaires grew at an average of more than 15 percent per year. In that same period, they paid, on average, just 0.26 percent of their wealth annually in state income taxes. The four wealthiest paid an effective rate of 0.07 percent.

This is not a rounding error. It is the design.

Meanwhile, Medicaid is being cut. The Trump administration’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” — one of the largest transfers of wealth from the poor to the rich in American history — threatens to strip between 25,000 and 50,000 San Franciscans of their Medi-Cal coverage and cut CalFresh benefits to more than 21,000 more. Homelessness is rising. Teachers are striking for wages that qualify as low income in their own city. 17,000 approved affordable homes sit in San Francisco’s pipeline, permitted and waiting, stalled only for lack of public funding that keeps getting stripped away.

And the people sitting on top of more than two trillion dollars in accumulated wealth are mobilizing to make sure none of it is touched.

What Power Actually Looks Like

Sergey Brin is worth roughly $298 billion — a fortune that grew by $195 billion in six years. In several of those years, he paid no California income tax at all. He didn’t sell stock. He didn’t receive compensation. Under current law, wealth that isn’t sold isn’t taxed. That is not an oversight. It is the design.

Brin has spent approximately $70 million in this election cycle alone. $66 million to defeat the Billionaire Tax Act. $500,000 to defeat Prop D. Over a million more to back a moderate candidate for governor. He also moved to Nevada at the end of last year, apparently to avoid the very tax he is spending tens of millions to defeat.

He is not alone. More than $6 million in tech money has poured into Proposition C — a competing ballot measure engineered specifically to block Prop D. The Prop D campaign, backed by labor, has raised roughly $2 million. Brin also funded signature collection for two additional competing ballot initiatives designed to confuse voters and split the wealth tax vote — buying the ballot initiative process itself as a defensive weapon.

This is what power looks like when it feels threatened. Not an argument. Not evidence. Not a good-faith engagement with the question of whether a society built by many should work for many. Just money, deployed at a scale that most people will never see in their lifetimes, to defeat a tax whose highest rate is roughly 1 percent of CEO pay ratios — and to defeat a one-time wealth levy that would cost Brin a fraction of what his fortune grew last year alone.

And when money runs low, there is always the threat: tax us, and we’ll leave.

The math on that threat has now been done. California’s billionaires currently pay so little in taxes that even if every single one of them left the state, it would take 25 years for the lost revenue to equal what a single successful wealth tax would raise. The threat is not an economic analysis. It is a negotiating tactic — and it has been working for decades, quietly disciplining governments into preemptive surrender.

The Moderate’s Bargain

There is another obstacle, one that is harder to name because it wears the face of reason.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., writing in his Letter from Birmingham Jail in 1963, identified it with devastating precision:

“I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

King was writing about racial justice. But the structure of the problem he named is not confined to one era or one struggle. The white moderate of our moment is the well-credentialed explainer — the person who can describe inequality with clarity and sophistication, who acknowledges the data, grants the moral weight of the argument, and then pivots, always, to why now is not the time, why this particular approach is too blunt, why we must wait for a better vehicle, a less divisive moment, a more perfect mechanism.

Ezra Klein is surface brilliant. He can describe the housing crisis, the failures of trickle-down economics, the mechanics of wealth concentration — and describe them well. But description is not confrontation. Rationalism deployed in service of patience is not neutrality. When the moderate’s analysis consistently arrives at the conclusion that disrupting concentrated power is premature or counterproductive, that analysis is doing political work — work that benefits the people whose power is being protected.

The “Mogul Midterms” — as journalists are now calling this election cycle — did not materialize because billionaires read a nuanced policy analysis and decided they disagreed. It materialized because the alarm went off. They are not confused about what is at stake. The question is whether the rest of us are.

Order is not justice. A calm diagnosis of injustice, offered without urgency and without risk to the diagnoser, is its own form of complicity.

Why Housing Is the Test

Everyone agrees we are in a housing crisis. That is one of the few things left in American politics that commands near-universal consensus. But the consensus collapses the moment you ask what the crisis actually is.

The dominant story — the one that fills the op-ed pages and the policy briefings — is that the crisis is a problem of supply. Build more, the argument goes, and prices will fall. Remove the regulations. Streamline the permits. Trust the market. This story is not entirely wrong; in many places, we do need to build more homes, and the rules governing what gets built where deserve scrutiny. But supply is not the crisis. Supply is a symptom.

The crisis is that we have organized housing as a commodity rather than as a human need. We have designed a system in which the same home is asked to do two incompatible things at once: provide shelter to the people who live in it, and produce returns for the people who own it. When those two purposes conflict — and in a financialized housing market, they conflict constantly — the design ensures that returns win. Rents rise faster than wages. Investors outbid families. Vacant units sit empty while people sleep on sidewalks. This is not a malfunction. It is the system performing as designed.

Housing is where the design of our economy becomes a question of who gets to sleep indoors.

It is where the abstractions of tax policy and wealth concentration land in the most direct possible way — on a body, in a bed, or on a sidewalk. It is where the cost of inequity is measured in evictions, in children changing schools mid-year, in seniors dying earlier, in neighborhoods that no longer recognize themselves. It is where the historical inheritance of redlining, exclusionary zoning, urban renewal, and racial covenants meets the present-day machinery of financialization, displacement, and capital flight. Every generation of injustice in this country has been written into the ground beneath people’s feet, and then defended as the natural workings of the market.

Housing justice insists on something different. It insists that housing is not a commodity to be allocated by wealth but a human right to be guaranteed by a society. It insists on equity — that everyone, regardless of race, income, gender, or origin, has equal access to safe, stable, affordable, health-promoting housing. It insists on dignity — that no one should have to choose between rent and medicine, between a place to live and a way to live. It insists on community — that the people most affected by housing policy are the ones who should be shaping it.

This is the test because housing is the most visible and most material expression of every other inequity. When teachers cannot afford to live in the cities where they teach, when nurses commute three hours each way, when the children of longtime San Francisco families are priced out of the neighborhoods their grandparents built, when entire communities of color have been engineered out of the places they once called home — that is not a failure of supply. That is a society that has organized itself around the protection of accumulated wealth rather than the protection of the people who created it.

Prop D and the Billionaire Tax Act are housing justice measures, even though neither one is technically a housing bill. Because the public resources required to build a just housing system — to fund the 17,000 affordable units already approved and waiting, to make the Housing Trust Fund expansion meaningful, to keep tenants in their homes when private rents surge — cannot come from a tax base that exempts the people who hold the wealth. There is no path to housing justice that runs around concentrated wealth. The path runs directly through it.

What This Election Is Actually About

Rising evictions. Surging rents. Gutted federal programs. A city that cannot house its teachers. A state that cannot afford to keep its poorest residents insured. A budget hole blasted open by an administration that cut Medicaid to pay for corporate tax breaks. These are not abstractions. They are the daily reality for millions of people in this state — while four people hold wealth equal to a quarter of the state’s entire economic output and pay taxes at a rate lower than a nurse or a bus driver.

We are not poor. We are unequal. Those are not the same thing.

The opposition to Prop D and the wealth tax is not making an economic argument in good faith. It is making a power argument: We have enough money to defeat this. We will spend what it takes. And if you keep trying, we will leave, or we will buy the initiative process, or we will fund a competing candidate, or we will do all three simultaneously. Sergey Brin is doing all three simultaneously.

Every dollar spent fighting a 1 percent surcharge on corporations that pay their CEOs 600 times more than their median workers is a dollar that reveals something true: this was never about economic efficiency. It is about whether the principle of democratic redistribution survives at all.

What remains of our democracy after Citizens United is already on life support.

When a single individual can spend $70 million to defeat a ballot measure, fund competing initiatives to confuse voters, back candidates across multiple races, and threaten to take his fortune to another state — all simultaneously — we are not describing a democracy with a money problem. We are describing an oligarchy with democratic costuming.

The Floor, Not the Ceiling

Winning Prop D and winning the Billionaire Tax Act will not solve the housing crisis. They will not end homelessness. They will not, by themselves, reverse forty years of compounding inequality or undo the federal devastation now being visited on California’s most vulnerable residents.

But they will establish something that matters enormously: that democratic majorities can still impose obligations on concentrated wealth. That the threat to leave is not the end of the conversation. That the people who built fortunes on California’s infrastructure, universities, labor force, and public networks owe something back to the place that made them possible.

San Francisco’s proposed Housing Trust Fund expansion — a Charter Amendment now heading to the November ballot — would generate an additional $3 billion for affordable housing over 30 years. That is real, and it is worth fighting for. It is also, to be honest about the scale of what we face, the minimum required to keep a stalled pipeline from going completely dark.

The City’s own estimates put the true need at roughly $6 billion per year to actually build the affordable housing San Francisco has approved and promised. We celebrate the Charter Amendment because it represents genuine political will in a moment when that is scarce. We name the gap because pretending the floor is the ceiling has always been how this city breaks its promises to the people least able to absorb the cost.

Prop D and the state wealth tax are the revenue floor on which commitments like that can stand — and on which a more honest reckoning with what we actually owe each other can begin.

There Is Enough

The scarcity narrative has been extraordinarily effective. It has convinced generation after generation that public ambition must be modest, that redistribution is risky, that housing is a privilege rather than a right, and that the correct response to inequality is patience and incremental reform — offered, conveniently, by people who are themselves quite comfortable.

But we are not poor. We are not a society that lacks the resources to house its people, educate its children, or care for its sick. We are a society that has allowed — through politics, through policy, through the quiet discipline of threatened capital flight and overwhelming campaign spending — the rewards of collective prosperity to flow upward at a rate that is, by any historical standard, extraordinary.

The people spending tens of millions of dollars to defeat a 1 percent surcharge on their own pay ratios understand something that the moderate explainers often do not: this is not really about the money. When you have $298 billion, the money is almost beside the point. This is about whether the principle holds. Whether voters can be confused, outspent, or demoralized into accepting that some wealth is simply beyond the reach of democratic accountability — and that housing, healthcare, and dignity must remain perpetually negotiable.

That is what June and November are about. Not just two ballot measures. Not just San Francisco. But whether we still believe — in practice, with our votes, with our organizing, with our willingness to say it plainly — that a society is responsible for the people who live in it. That housing is a right, not a reward. That equity is not a luxury we add when conditions allow, but the foundation on which everything else either stands or collapses.

There is enough for everything we deserve. There has always been enough.

There is enough food for every hungry child in this city. There are enough homes for every person sleeping on our streets. There is enough money to keep our hospitals open, our teachers in their classrooms, our elders in their homes. There is enough — right now, today — to make sure that no family has to choose between rent and medicine, between staying and surviving.

We didn’t get here overnight. The concentration of wealth we are living inside was built deliberately, defended expensively, and normalized gradually — until scarcity began to feel like physics rather than politics. Undoing it will take more than two elections. It will take a sustained refusal to accept that this is simply how things are.

Vote in June.

Vote in November.

And then keep going — because the world we know is possible doesn’t arrive at the ballot box. It arrives when enough of us stop asking permission to imagine it.