The Brief

Rent control can either be your friend or your enemy.

The laws are often the bane of landlords who’d like to charge more and a potential safety net for tenants who can’t afford steep rent hikes. But why it’s around isn’t necessarily because politicians want to protect the little guy — rent control has historically been used to mitigate another problem.

If you want a breakdown of how rent control may work in your area today, here’s the guide for that. But in this one, we’ll explore more of the backdrop: how high inflation, wartime efforts and a housing crisis birthed different eras of rent control.

The wartime effect

L.A.’s first round of modern rent control came more than 80 years ago — and it was perhaps the strictest we’ve seen.

When World War II began in 1939, industrial employment ballooned. The Great Depression was easing, so workers migrated to Los Angeles in the tens of thousands for employment. But the surge in population, combined with the war effort, created a perfect housing storm that lasted for years.

More people were coming at a time when our housing stock couldn’t keep up. About 15,000 residential projects went unfinished because labor and supplies were diverted to the war, according to research from the UCLA Luskin Center. With demand way up, many people had no choice but to live in severely overcrowded and unsuitable conditions. The situation was so dire when a federal study was conducted that a veteran shared how he was living in a house with 18 other people while trying to turn a chicken coop into a place to stay.

A 1945 poster letting tenants know about their rights under rent control.

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United States Office of Price Administration

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Illinois Digital Archives, Illinois State Library, and Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias

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The ultimate solution would be more housing, but that would take years to improve. In the interim, the federal government deployed a rent freeze (and other price controls) in 1942 to ensure essentials remained affordable. Alisa Belinkoff Katz, lead author of UCLA’s study of rent control in L.A., says this move made rent control part of the war effort and more acceptable to landlords.

“It was considered sort of the patriotic thing to do, at least at first while the war was going on,” she said. “It became something that was widely publicized and that people were engaged in.”

That publicity campaign helped to make tenants aware of their rights. Landlords and renters were also required to sign a property registration form that recorded the rent amount under the freeze. To Katz, the tenants who kept tabs on compliance, along with federal enforcement, is what made the rent freeze effective.

A line of people outside of the rent control office at Broadway in Los Angeles on Nov. 5, 1942.

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Herald Examiner Collection

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Los Angeles Public Library

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Property owners register their rentals at the Broadway rent control office in Los Angeles on Sept. 25, 1942.

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Herald Examiner Collection

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Los Angeles Public Library

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The support of landlords didn’t last long, though. The L.A. County apartment association’s president at the time, David Culver, complained about treatment in a meeting with landlords, and together they vowed to take action. They argued that the rent cap was too low to afford taxes and maintenance, and some threatened to take their rentals off the market.

Once the war ended, rent control became a ticking clock. After a postwar federal housing act went into effect, allowing local governments to lose the rules, the L.A. City Council voted to decontrol. Residential rents went back under the sway of the market.

Property owners cheer as the L.A. city council votes 10 to 4 in favor of rent decontrol on July 2, 1950. More than 2,500 owners and tenants packed the council chamber.

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Herald Examiner Collection

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Los Angeles Public Library

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‘Stagflation’ in the 1970s and Proposition 13

Decades later, L.A. was in a different predicament.

An oil crisis was going on, aiding a surge in inflation while economic growth was at a snail’s pace. This is when the term “stagflation” was coined (a portmanteau of stagnation and inflation). Among a number of other things that became more expensive, L.A. home prices were skyrocketing along with owners’ property tax bills.

Landlords again organized around this issue. Howard Jarvis, then-executive director of the L.A. County apartment association, went down in history as the champion of 1978’s Proposition 13 — a measure that aimed to cap property tax rates. But in order for it to pass, he knew that the state’s renters — which made up 45% of households, according to Katz’s research — needed to be convinced to vote for the proposition.

Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann, co-sponsor of the measure, celebrating after Proposition 13 was declared a winner on June 6, 1978.

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Ken Papaleo

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Herald Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library

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Landlords got involved to persuade their tenants. They argued that getting their tax bills reduced would trickle down to their tenants, too. Some even offered rent rebates if it was successful. But after Proposition 13 prevailed at the polls, the rose-colored glasses fell off. Despite what they’d said previously, many owners continued to raise their rents — some by more than 20% that same year.

“It should be an incentive to keep rents low, one would think,” Katz said. “But it hasn't worked out that way because property values continue to rise all over the city. [It helps landlords] because their taxes aren’t going up. So if their taxes are stable and their rents are allowed to increase all the time, then of course it helps them.”

In effect, the law was a type of rent control but for landlords, because it lowered their property taxes and limited increases.

Renters feeling the pinch

Demand for tenant protections was high in this decade, especially in middle-class communities. Renters had few rights and people were feeling the pinch.

“Our phone started ringing off the hooks,” said Larry Gross, executive director of the Coalition for Economic Survival. “It appeared that the speculators discovered Los Angeles. They were buying up rental units throughout the area, raising rent, putting a fresh coat of paint on it, some minor repairs, and then selling it again."

Gross was one of the key people leading the fight for rent control and helped organize tenant unions. He says some apartment buildings were getting flipped four to five times a year. And after Proposition 13, he says the “lid blew off” with rent.

“It was the first of many broken promises that landlords provided to their tenants.”

Renters rallied, urging L.A. leaders to take action. The city council members who represented white, middle-class districts supported the measures, but the ones leading Black and Latino districts did not. Back then, rising rent was viewed as a middle-class problem, and community leaders in lower-income districts worried that rent control would drive away investment in their communities.

Still, the council got enough support to roll back and temporarily freeze rents. Mayor Tom Bradley claimed it was a necessary step to halt “outrageous rent increases.”

The freeze gave the council time to draft a long-term response, which is where the Rent Stabilization Ordinance in place today came from. With this law, landlords can only increase rent in certain properties (built on or before Oct. 1, 1978) generally between 3% and 8%, based on inflation. (There’s a rent freeze on these properties currently because of COVID-19.)

Where we are now

Since the '70s, a lot has changed. Rent control has grown to multiple cities, but so have the legal battles surrounding it.

“It's literally been somewhat of a cat-and-mouse game with landlords,” Gross said. “Because landlords will find loopholes in the law and then use that to evict tenants or increase rent. And then we'd identify those loopholes and we get the city council to close them.”

Property owners looked to change these rules, too, and they got key laws passed from higher up.

New rent laws

1985: The Ellis Act, a California law that allows landlords to evict residential tenants in order to leave the rental business, passes. A landlord filed a lawsuit against Santa Monica, which instituted rent control six years earlier, for refusing to let him demolish his rental property, claiming it was in bad repair. He lost the case when it reached the California Supreme Court, but shortly after the state legislature passed the Ellis Act.

1995: The landlords’ grand slam, the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, passes. This was the state legislature’s response to landlords' building frustration with rent control laws, which were more regulated in some cities.

West Hollywood and Santa Monica, had the strict “vacancy control” rule. Under that provision, owners couldn’t raise rents to market rates between tenants, but small increases were allowed during tenancy. The act made that provision illegal statewide.

“It literally puts a bullseye target on the back of particularly low rent, long-term [rentals],” Gross said on the removal of vacancy control. “If they get those tenants out by any means, they can jack up rents to whatever they want.”

The act also prohibited rent control on residential properties built after Feb. 1, 1995, excluded single-family homes and condos, and generally tied city leaders' hands.

“It froze existing local rent control laws,” Katz said. “It had a huge impact because it prohibited what local governments were able to do to protect renters in their jurisdictions.”

2019: The Tenant Protection Act created a statewide rent increase cap. This cap is adjusted yearly based on inflation. It’s intended to prevent very large increases. And, coming soon, California will be voting on rent control in 2024 (for a third time).

Navigating rent control

It can be tough to easily understand how, when, and where rent control affects you. Everything can change depending on what city you’re in, your building type and when it was built.

Some basics you should be aware of are the main types of rent control:

• Rent freeze (rents are not allowed to rise at all in a given period).
• Vacancy control (rent can’t rise to market rates between tenants, but smaller increases are allowed during tenancy — this is illegal in California).
• Vacancy decontrol (rents can rise to market rates between tenants, and increases are allowed during tenancy — the standard in the state now).

Another way that rent control can change is with how much of the consumer price index, which measures inflation, gets factored in.

For example, the city of L.A. typically lets rent controlled properties increase between 3% and 8% a year, depending on the full rate of inflation. But Katz says that other cities have used a lower percentage of CPI. And the city of L.A. has a freeze on increases in rent controlled buildings until February 2024.

Cities with floors for increases, like L.A., can wind up with a problematic deal for renters and a better one for landlords if rents rise above CPI.

“Several times in the last few years, CPI has actually risen less than 3%, but landlords were allowed to raise the rents by 3%. So that's another question, whether that should be adjusted," Katz said.

Figure out where you stand

Rent control is a tangled web of seemingly boring rules, but it does have real effects. To supporters of the protections, the aim is about keeping things affordable and fair.

“It helps to give some security to tenants in a sense that it extends the protections that homeowners have,” Gross said. “What rent control does is level the playing field.”

If you're a renter and would like to know more about where your home stands with rent control, check out my colleague David Wagner’s cheat sheet to rent hike. If you’re in the city of L.A., you can also put your address into ZIMAS and check the housing tab to see what laws apply.

For six days over a holiday weekend, a chemical tank in an Orange County aerospace plant threatened to explode, and more than 50,000 people had to leave while crews figured out how to stop it. The tank kept getting hotter. A valve in the tank’s cooling system had failed. Officials used drones to read the tank’s temperature from the outside. Ground crews set up an “unmanned ground monitor” — a portable water cannon — blasting water across the tank’s side.

At the height of the emergency at GKN Aerospace — which makes cockpit windows and shields for military aircraft in Garden Grove — officials feared the tank could explode. California deployed more than 700 people to the city, the governor’s office said.

The company’s tank cooled only after it cracked just enough to relieve pressure without unleashing a chemical explosion. By Tuesday night, the evacuations were lifted — but the questions remained.

The near-disaster exposed gaps among multiple regulatory systems that state and local agencies have not fully addressed.

Air quality regulators had flagged compliance problems years before the crisis. Prosecutors are investigating whether the company violated any laws. And community advocates and chemical-safety experts say residents still deserve a clearer accounting of what state and local regulators knew, what safeguards existed and why the tank came so close to catastrophe.

A history of violations

Even as GKN Aerospace worked to resolve environmental compliance notices, regulators and local planners began considering an expansion of the facility that would increase its capacity to manufacture components for military F-35 fighter jets.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District has inspected GKN three times in the last decade. For much of that time, the facility was classified as a “minor source” of emissions within the district’s permitting program, a designation that meant that regulators weren't required to inspect the facility frequently.

That limited oversight may have contributed to what records show was a yearslong compliance problem.

Those violations did not involve the problematic storage tank that holds methyl methacrylate, regulators said.

But in 2020, GKN self-reported certain issues that led South Coast air regulators to inspect the facility and review its records. The air district’s investigation found that the company was out of compliance with multiple rules stretching back to 2017. The facility, located within a mile of homes and schools, had failed to maintain required records about its emissions, was operating new equipment without permits and was using equipment that didn’t match the description in its existing permits, according to regulatory reports.

It took until April 2021 for the air district to issue a formal notice of violation, and until late 2024 for the agency to sign a settlement requiring GKN to pay more than $900,000. The company did not admit liability in the settlement, which resolved 14 alleged violations.

The district now treats GKN as a “major source” of emissions – a type of facility that the South Coast air district inspects yearly. A spokesman said that the company has applied for a more comprehensive permit, at the direction of regulators.

A community seeks answers

For Tracy La, the timeline told its own infuriating story.

“That delay and allowing GKN to operate with pretty much impunity has caused so many tens of thousands of residents of Garden Grove to pay for it,” said La, director of VietRISE, a nonprofit that supports Vietnamese and immigrant communities in Orange County. Displaced residents have had to pay for housing, replace medication, seek transportation and rack up other costs associated with evacuating their homes, she added.

“It's just frustrating that regular everyday people are constantly having to pay the price for our government officials unwilling to hold these powerful, rich corporations accountable,” La said.

Garden Grove is a cornerstone of Little Saigon, one of the largest Vietnamese American communities in the United States — a community that includes immigrants and refugees from the Vietnam War.

Some residents know methyl methacrylate not as an aerospace chemical but as a workplace hazard — one they spent years fighting to eliminate.

Lisa Fu directs the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, which represents Vietnamese manicurists across the state. Her members waged a long campaign against the chemical, documenting its effects on workers' lungs, skin and eyes.

In 2015, the state banned the chemical from nail salons and cosmetology schools after workers flagged health concerns. Now the same chemical was leaking from a tank a few miles from Little Saigon. Fu says collaborative members and their neighbors reported nosebleeds, itchiness and the deaths of pet birds.

Air monitors deployed by the Environmental Protection Agency and the South Coast air district around the facility have shown pollution levels within normal ranges. But Fu said the gap between those readings and what residents experienced has deepened distrust of regulators and their enforcement record.

“You hear in the press conferences that there's no fumes, no vapors, no leak, no contamination,” Fu said. “They are saying it is safe. Safe for who? We believe the community when the stories don't stop coming.”

Community advocates are now asking Garden Grove city leaders to shut the facility down and adopt a moratorium on military manufacturing facilities and expansions in the city.

GKN has an application for a more comprehensive permit under consideration at the South Coast air district, and the public may soon have the opportunity to weigh in. A district spokesperson told CalMatters it had aimed to release the permit for public comment by year’s end, but the timeline may shift because of the emergency.

A potential chemical safety gap

California's toughest accidental-release prevention rules do not cover the chemical that nearly exploded in a Garden Grove tank and forced 50,000 people from their homes.

Methyl methacrylate is a volatile compound and one of the most widely used chemicals in plastics manufacturing. Officials feared the GKN tank would rupture as the liquid overheated, spilling thousands of gallons of chemicals or even exploding.

“It’s like a soda can that you left in your car in the middle of a hot summer,” said Andrew J. Whelton, a Purdue University environmental engineering professor. “The pressure built up within the can exceeds the capacity of that metal can.”

When the tank started overheating, it triggered a chemical reaction that responders could not stop — in part because the reaction had “gummed up” the valves they needed to inject a neutralizing agent, Orange County Fire Authority Division Chief Craig Covey said at a May 22 press conference.

Brandon McBride stands outside his tent at an evacuation shelter at the Elks Lodge in Garden Grove, on May 26, 2026. The site was set up for those who were living near a damaged hazardous chemical tank.

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Jae C. Hong

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AP Photo

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Methyl methacrylate is not a regulated chemical under either the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Risk Management Program or California's parallel system, known as CalARP. That may mean the tank was regulated under an alternate or lower-tier hazardous-materials program — leaving regulators with fewer tools to oversee its storage.

“If you’re living there — you’re a neighbor — can you go see what chemicals they have stored on site?” said Jane Williams, executive director of California Communities Against Toxics. “No, you can’t.”

The federal program’s chemical list has not added reactive chemicals to its list of covered chemicals, despite recommendations from the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, which investigates chemical accidents. The Trump administration aims to eliminate funding for the chemical safety board after October and proposes to roll back the 2024 Risk Management Program amendments that had begun to expand chemical safety requirements.

The same gap exists in California.

The California Environmental Protection Agency confirmed to CalMatters that methyl methacrylate is not a regulated substance under the state's Accidental Release Program.

Orange County health officials confirmed to CalMatters that GKN had a hazardous materials business plan on file — a lower-tier document listing chemicals stored on site — but no risk management plan. The agency said CalARP does not apply to the facility because methyl methacrylate is not a listed chemical under the program.

CalMatters also asked the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health whether worker-safety rules for high-hazard industrial processes applied at the facility — which would have made it eligible for the accidental release program under a separate pathway. The facility had been the subject of multiple workplace safety and health inspections before the tank emergency. Cal/OSHA did not answer that question by deadline.

Chemicals that fall outside federal and state accident prevention programs may also be left out of community emergency planning and drills, Williams said. That means nearby residents may not know what risks they face or how officials would respond.

GKN did not respond to written questions on deadline. In recent days, the company’s statements have emphasized gratitude for the community and first responders. “We recognize there is more work ahead,” said GKN Senior Vice President Steve Carlin, who oversees the Garden Grove site’s programs.

Angela Johnson Meszaros, an attorney for the environmental group Earthjustice, said neighbors to companies like GKN have every reason to think someone’s enforcing rules.

When something like this happens, people “get angry because they were like, ‘Wait, nobody was paying attention to this and now I'm sleeping on the sidewalk?’”

The system, she said, was built around the wrong goal entirely. “We have a system that's built on the notion of getting facilities to return to compliance, but we need to have a system that's about making sure facilities are operating in a way that is safe — and some facilities may not have a culture that allows us to put our lives into their hands.”

A district attorney may prosecute 

Whether any single institution will provide a comprehensive accounting of what went wrong is unclear.

The Orange County District Attorney’s Office has opened a criminal inquiry, spokesperson Kimberly Edds confirmed to CalMatters. Prosecutors sent letters to GKN ordering the company not to destroy or manipulate evidence.

At an anonymous tipline, the office is seeking information about the chemical release, the facility’s operations and the maintenance of the tanks and systems involved.

Water is sprayed on a damaged tank at GKN Aerospace in Garden Grove, on May 24, 2026, after the tank containing a chemical used to make plastic parts overheated Thursday.

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Ethan Swope

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AP Photo

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California law makes it a crime to knowingly or recklessly handle or store hazardous waste in a way that creates an unreasonable risk of fire, explosion, serious injury or death. Edds declined to say what areas of the law the investigation would cover.

In a similar case in 2024, Alameda County prosecutors indicted a scrap metal company after a fire exposed years of hazardous materials violations. They later said they could not prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt and dropped it.

On the regulatory side, no single agency has the task of producing a comprehensive account of the event. Rather than one joint review, each agency involved in the emergency will produce its own separate findings, released according to its own policies and timelines, said Brian Yau, a spokesperson for the Orange County Fire Authority.

Hazardous materials officials, air regulators, environmental officials and the company were developing a site cleanup plan, Yau said. On Friday, the fire authority handed over cleanup and remediation oversight to the county health care agency, said Greg Barta, a spokesperson for the fire authority.

Asked whether he was concerned about industrial facilities operating near dense residential neighborhoods, Gov. Gavin Newsom praised local and state first responders and said the state is reviewing the facility's safety records. Then he offered a candid assessment of the limits of state action.

“As it relates to industrial facilities in and around urban centers,” Newsom said at a press conference Thursday, “that’s a more challenging issue of geography.”

State Sen. Tom Umberg, a Democrat from Santa Ana, said there will be new proposed laws in response to the narrowly-averted disaster.

Williams, of California Communities Against Toxics, said the incident should force a broader look at California’s rules for hazardous industrial sites – not just at GKN, but at every facility storing chemicals that fall outside the state's toughest oversight programs.

“Everyone wants to return to normalcy as quickly as possible, because their nervous systems are all on fire, and the way in which you calm your nervous system is to be in your house and sit on the couch and hold your cat,” she said. “But in a situation like this — where you had a massive near miss — you really need to make sure that the safety systems that failed are not the only safety systems there at risk.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

The number of people with nowhere to call home decreased both in California and nationwide last year, according to a long-awaited federal report.

The data, showing the first decrease in homelessness in years, provided fuel for activists challenging the Trump administration's narrative that current homelessness policies are failing and need to be overhauled.

There were 181,934 homeless Californians counted last year — a 2.8% decrease from 2024, according to the new federal report. Overall, the country saw a 3.3% drop in homelessness, marking the first decrease since 2016. Nationwide, an estimated 745,652 people are homeless.

Those numbers come from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which released its annual homelessness report to Congress on Friday after an unexplained five-month delay. As the country’s main barometer for how efforts to combat homelessness are working, the report plays an important role in allocating funding and shaping policies — and is a major political tool.

The Trump administration used the report to promote its policies, including its crackdown on immigration and efforts to direct funding away from permanent housing. Meanwhile, the National Homelessness Law Center was quick to point out that the decrease in homelessness happened while former President Joe Biden was still in office.

“Homelessness is down because President Biden funded things that we know work, like housing and support,” law center spokesperson Jesse Rabinowitz said in a news release. “Sadly, the Trump administration is doing everything they can to backtrack on this progress.”

The federal government downplayed the small one-year decrease in homelessness, instead focusing on the fact that homelessness has increased 27% nationwide since 2013. That’s when the country started following a practice called “housing first,” which moves people into housing right away instead of requiring them first to get sober or meet other conditions.

"The data is clear that the status quo of ‘housing first’ has failed to meaningfully reduce homelessness, resulting in crisis levels of people living on the streets," said HUD Secretary Scott Turner. "HUD is restoring its programs to advance recovery and self-sufficiency and to ensure that taxpayer-funded benefits serve American families.”

The Trump administration wants to end housing first and instead prioritize housing that requires people to stay sober. The administration also has tried to divert homelessness funds away from permanent housing and into temporary shelters. California is one of 19 states suing the Trump administration over that change.

The federal administration tied the 2025 drop in homelessness to immigration, saying in a news release that it was “attributable to decreases in sanctuary cities.” The full report never mentions sanctuary cities, but it says some communities in New York and Illinois attributed their decreases in homelessness “in part” to changes in federal immigration policy.

Where homelessness declined

California was among the five states that reported the largest decreases in homelessness last year, though there were more significant drops in Illinois (44%), Hawaii (41%), Florida (11%), and New York (8%).

In California, 17 communities reported decreases in the number of people who were “chronically homeless,” meaning they have a disability and have been homeless for a year or longer. Los Angeles County reported 2,394 fewer such people. Officials from communities that saw those declines attributed the trend to opening new housing, placing people in housing more quickly, using a coordinated system to match people with available units and increasing street outreach, according to the report.

The data comes from the federally mandated homeless point-in-time count, which tallies people sleeping in shelters and outside on a given day in January. Volunteers count people they see sleeping on the street, in cars or in other places not meant for habitation. The effort is generally viewed as an undercount, as it’s easy for volunteers to miss people tucked away in hard-to-reach areas.

The federal government requires each community to count the people sleeping on its streets every two years. Counts are conducted by “continuums of care,” which include a county (or multiple counties), cities and local service providers. In California, 14 of the state’s 44 continuums of care did not count last year. HUD used 2024 data for communities in which no 2025 data was available.

Each community is required to submit its point-in-time count data to HUD, which reviews, verifies and analyzes the data before publishing a report. That report typically comes out in December of the year of the count.

How Trump changed point-in-time report

When the federal report finally came out Friday, the Trump administration put its stamp on it in several ways, including by scrubbing all references to gender. The prior report from 2024 broke out homelessness by gender (39% of people counted were women and 60% were men), and included categories such as transgender, gender questioning and non-binary. The 2025 data includes no such breakdown.

And while the previous report referred to “people experiencing homelessness,” the new report instead referred to “homeless persons.”

While the drop in nationwide homelessness last year is a “relief,” there is trouble on the horizon, according to Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

“So much of the progress reflected in the 2025 (point-in-time) count is due to targeted housing and service resources that were available in 2024 to rehouse people,” she said in a news release, “including the highly successful Emergency Housing Voucher program, and new funds to address rural and unsheltered homelessness. Unfortunately, the Trump Administration has largely deprioritized these tools and worked to dismantle the very systems that drove these reductions.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

When a candidate invests their personal fortune in running for public office, does it represent a rich person trying to buy a seat or does it grant them independence from powerful special interests? Voters will decide on Tuesday in an election that has seen candidates spend more of their own money than any previous election.

Liberal billionaire Tom Steyer put up $213 million to fund his campaign for governor. All together, more than 200 candidates have contributed about a quarter billion dollars of their own money this year. That’s an eight-fold increase since the last time Californians voted for governor in 2022 and the most since California started keeping digital campaign finance records in 1999.

The last time a candidate spent anything close to Steyer was in 2010 when Meg Whitman gave over $140 million to her own unsuccessful campaign for governor, setting a record at the time.

Previous statewide races also saw big spenders: Steve Poizner gave $14 million to his campaign in 2006 running for insurance commissioner; Eleni Kounalakis shelled out upwards of $8 million when she ran for lieutenant governor in 2018; Yvonne Yiu dropped nearly $6 million on her campaign for controller four years ago.

Candidates running for state Senate this cycle have given nearly $4 million to their campaigns – the highest amount recorded for the chamber and more than double the $1.7 million candidates put up 20 years ago. Likewise, current congressional candidates have contributed more than $29 million to their campaigns, the most of any cycle in the past two decades.

And this year, some congressional candidates have set records for self-funding their campaigns.

Two of the five congressional candidates who contributed the most money to their campaigns over the last 20 years are running this election. In the competitive contest to succeed Nancy Pelosi in her San Francisco-based congressional district, Democrat Saikat Chakrabati gave nearly $9 million to his campaign, the most of any congressional primary candidate in state history. Eric Jones, who wants to oust fellow Democrat Mike Thompson from his district representing the North Bay, transferred over $5 million of his personal fortune.

Chakrabarti said the money he’s putting up is to counter the millions being spent against him by opponents and that self-funding his campaign is his best choice in a bad system.

“To go up against that kind of money I have two options,” he said. “I could either spend my time calling big donors for money and then I can go to DC and owe a million people a million favors…so I chose to put in my own resources.”

The increase in self-funding may reflect the need for more money to compete after the Supreme Court in a 2010 decision known as Citizens United lifted restrictions on campaign spending by wealthy people and corporations, said Jeremy Mack, executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group The Phoenix Project.

In other words: more money in politics begets more money in politics.

“In California," he said, "it’s often been corporations, real estate and police unions that have often worked together to [fund] similar candidates.”

Maria Colon, a voter in Sacramento who attended a Steyer rally last week said she views corporate donations as implicit corruption, and while self-funding might be a reason to warrant further scrutiny of a candidate, she understands why some like Steyer are pouring money into their own campaigns.

“Frankly, I think there needs to be caps on how much money needs to be raised,” Colon said. “[Corporations] are not giving you their money for free, bro.”

Money is critical for political campaigns and so candidates who can contribute their own cash might have an advantage, said Dr. Wesley Hussey, a professor of political science at Sacramento State University. “A candidate who’s able to put in enough of their own money to start off is a great way to be a viable candidate.”

Andrew Coolidge, a Republican running for Assembly District 3 in the northern part of the state who is the biggest donor to his campaign, said voters should be skeptical of candidates who can fund their own campaign but chose not to.

“I think a candidate who doesn't have some skin in the game is a candidate you have to worry about," he said. "I can feel very comfortable making every decision based on my conscience rather than based upon the opinion of someone else.”

Chris Anderson, a candidate for Lodi City Council who has contributed to his own campaign and attended the Steyer rally, said he likes candidates who can self-fund while raising some questions at the same time.

“There is a part of me that likes the fact that a person is funding their own campaign because they’re less likely to be beholden to a special interest,” he said. “But on the other hand, what special interests got them to where they are?”

Money doesn’t buy everything. Hussey said voters will look at other factors in deciding how to view candidates who spend their own fortunes on their campaigns.

Take Steyer and Whitman. Both had different degrees of involvement in politics before they ran for office. Whitman was involved in both Mitt Romney's and John McCain's 2008 presidential runs, while Steyer has been active in environmental causes for over a decade.

Voters might get more suspicious when a rich candidate shows up without a political track record, Hussey said. “Tom Steyer gave a lot of money to politicians for a long time and tried to kind of enter the political world himself for a while.”

When asked if voters should view his hundreds of millions of dollars as a rich person trying to buy a political office, Steyer said at last week's rally that he believes voters should judge him by the amount of money being spent against him and not as much by the hundreds of millions of dollars he’s put into his campaign.

“In this race there is only one person who isn’t conflicted by taking money from corporations,” he said. “That’s me.”

At a recent public event at Stanford University, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter said she doesn’t think being rich means you’re immune to lobbying.

“That is the same argument that Donald Trump made,” she said. “'You can trust me not to take special interest money because I'm so rich'–I find that unsettling in a democracy.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Starting July 1, a new state law will push cities to increase housing development in neighborhoods located near major transit stops.

When the law was signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last year, Southern California cities began taking their best guess at where exactly those sites would be.

Now, the list is out. On Monday, the Southern California Association of Governments, known as SCAG, published its official map showing where new housing density will be allowed under Senate Bill 79.

Elizabeth Carvajal, SCAG’s deputy director of land use, said local officials sought many clarifications from state leaders in order to be sure that the map would accurately reflect the Legislature’s intent.

“There were a lot of questions after the statute was signed,” Carvajal said. “The clarifications helped further define bus service, as well as pedestrian access points.”

SB 79 has become a political lightning rod

The law’s impact on neighborhoods near transit lines — including those zoned only for single-family homes — has been heavily debated, especially in the race for Los Angeles mayor.

Mayor Karen Bass asked Newsom to veto SB 79, and she continues to oppose adding apartments within the nearly three-quarters of city land reserved for single-family homes.

City councilmember Nithya Raman, who is challenging Bass in the upcoming election, declined to oppose SB 79 and has said some single-family neighborhoods will need to accept more density.

Spencer Pratt, the former reality TV star running for mayor, made waves on social media when he falsely claimed last year that SB 79 would bring high-rises to the Pacific Palisades, where his home burned down. The official SCAG map confirms that SB 79 will have no impact on the neighborhood.

In response to SB 79, housing opponents in some areas have started focusing their efforts on killing plans for expanded public transit. Responding to public pressure, Burbank officials have stalled construction plans for local portions of a rapid bus line from North Hollywood to Pasadena. L.A. Metro is now suing Burbank over that move.

Where will new housing go? And how much will be allowed?

The rules of SB 79 are complex.

The tallest buildings allowed under SB 79 will be nine stories, as long as they are located within 200 feet of a Metro B or D-line stop. These stations qualify as “Tier 1” stops under SB 79, which puts the tallest buildings near heavy rail lines, which in L.A. only applies to the B and D-line subways.

More common will be the “Tier 2” zones around light rail and dedicated bus lane stops, which will allow buildings up to eight stories tall within 200 feet of those stops.

Height limits step down in areas further out from the station. In “Tier 2” zones, buildings up to six stories tall will be allowed within a quarter-mile of the stop, and buildings up to five stories will be allowed within a half-mile.

Neighborhoods near two Metrolink commuter rail stations, in Burbank and Glendale, will also qualify as “Tier 2” zones.

Change won’t necessarily come overnight

New housing won’t necessarily be coming to those zones immediately. Under SB 79, cities have the ability to put off full implementation until 2030 by making their own choices about where to allow more housing.

“Cities can develop alternative plans and delay implementation,” said Philip Law, a SCAG deputy planning director. “The map is not intended to reflect those situations.”

The city of L.A. has taken the delay approach, with the City Council recently voting to allow buildings up to four stories tall around 55 targeted transit stops. This would let the city put off full implementation of SB 79.

The new SCAG map shows no impact in Orange County. The region does not yet qualify as an “urban transit county” under the state law. However, the impending completion of the OC Streetcar through Santa Ana and Garden Grove, expected later this year, will make Orange County eligible for SB 79.

Once the OC Streetcar opens, SCAG plans to update their map to include Orange County, Carvajal said.