The Brief

The largest single piece of federal housing legislation to come out of Congress in at least a generation is about to become law.

It will happen in the middle of the night, without much fanfare and it might be a while before many Californians notice its effects.

That’s because though the bill is politically monumental, it doesn’t do one big thing. Instead, it does a lot of little things. Individually, none of the bill’s 56 regulatory tweaks, pilot programs and low-cost loans and grants are likely to move the needle on the nation's housing affordability woes, nor on California’s specifically.

Supporters hope that collectively, they just might.

Even the law’s path to enactment had an under-the-radar quality to it. The White House abruptly cancelled a planned signing ceremony late last month with President Trump vowing not to lend his signature to the housing bill until Congress first passed a national voter ID proposal. That bill has stalled out in the Senate. On Friday, Trump vowed again not to sign the bill in protest. Even so, because Trump does not appear likely to veto the housing package, it will automatically become law on Saturday just after midnight, as per terms specified in the U.S. Constitution.

For all that, supporters say this is still a big deal: A major, bipartisan piece of legislation aimed at boosting housing construction from a hyperpartisan legislative body that doesn’t typically touch the topic.

“We don't often gather to celebrate federal housing legislation,” said Stephen Russell, president of the San Diego Housing Federation, at a press conference on Thursday. “I think the last time Congress passed anything of this magnitude, many of you were not even alive … it is almost a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

That’s thanks in part to a growing caucus of lawmakers aligned with the “Yes In My Backyard” movement that helped push the bill into law. Many hail from California, a state that has had more experience than most contending with wildly unaffordable housing. But the cause of making housing more affordable, and attributing high housing costs to a lack of sufficient supply, has become a national and bipartisan concern. Case in point: The bill originated as a joint proposal by U.S. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, a Republican, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a Democrat and one of the body's most liberal members.

While the constituent parts of the bill are relatively narrow and none are specifically focused on California, experts highlight a handful of new provisions that could leave a notable imprint on the state.

Build now (or else)

For high-cost cities that don’t build much housing (see: an awful lot of urban California), the federal bill includes a novel carrot and stick.

This portion of the bill would change the Community Development Block Grant, one of the largest sources of federal funding for affordable housing and local economic development. Pricey cities — defined through a variety of data benchmarks like median prices and vacancy rates — with a track record of under-building that continue to see below-average housing construction will have their grant funds cut by 10%. The savings will go to their municipal counterparts that build at a faster clip.

That’s likely to have “real implications for cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco that have traditionally lagged behind” in adding housing supply, said David Garcia, the deputy director of policy at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation.

The City of LA received $48.4 million in its last award from the block grant program in 2024, according to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development data. San Francisco received $18.9 million.

Those numbers aren’t enough to make or break the budget of either city.

“I think this will be a small nudge,” said Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action, in an email. “Which taken across the country could still have a good impact! Little nudges add up.”

More dramatic than the number of dollars involved may be the precedent the policy sets. Even in California, where the state government has aggressively incentivized cities to plan for more housing development and penalized those that don’t, lawmakers have never punished municipalities for failing to actually grow — an outcome that may not always be under a city government’s control.

Such an idea would have been “inconceivable in previous congresses,” said Garcia.

Despite that, the provision hasn’t engendered much public pushback from local government groups yet. In an online summary, Michael Wallace, a lobbyist with the National League of Cities, applauded the overall housing bill as an example of the federal government “choosing partnership with local governments over preemptions.” He singled out other provisions of the bill that provide expanded flexibility for Community Development Block Grant spending, new incentive programs for adding supply, and new supports for local urban planning.

Chassis change

Manufactured housing units are often colloquially referred to as “mobile homes,” but they don’t tend to move around much. Built on assembly lines and shipped to where they’re needed, these naturally affordable houses — the likes of which lawmakers across California and the United States claim we need in droves — are often placed upon permanent foundations where a fewer than one-in-ten ever move again.

Even so, the federal building code applied to manufactured housing includes a costly, vestigial reference to its mobile origins: a permanent chassis.

A giant steel frame with removable axles and wheels, the chassis ostensibly exists to make it easier to pick up and move a manufactured house by truck. In practice, it serves as a 10- to 12-inch thick floor beneath the floor. Because it cannot be removed upon delivery, it just serves as “dead space and wasted money,” said Jess Maxcy, president of the California Manufactured Housing Institute, the industry’s trade group. Aside from adding thousands of dollars in added costs per unit, it also makes it harder for manufactured units to be stacked into double story homes or multifamily apartment buildings.

The federal housing bill removes the permanent chassis requirement, something that manufacturers and some housing policy experts have been pushing for since the mid-1980s.

“That relatively minor change will expand access to one of the most affordable forms of home ownership available,” said Rep. Scott Peters, a San Diego Democrat, at the Thursday press conference.

Maxcy said he doesn’t expect the end of the chassis requirement to trigger an overnight building boom in the manufactured home industry. But especially in California where, due to the high price of land, new single-family homes are more likely to be built stacked on small lots, the regulatory change “provides more opportunities and helps us reduce the price.”

Recovering after disaster

In the months after a natural disaster, long after emergency federal dollars have come and gone, Congress has provided communities with long-term rebuilding grants through the Community Development Block Grant - Disaster Recovery program. Over the last three decades, the program has spent more than $100 billion on the long-term work of recovery, like home construction, infrastructure repair, and rental and relocation assistance. That money tends to be reserved for low income people and communities “who are not going to bounce back without the funds,” said Marion McFadden, who used to run the program under the Biden administration and now works at the disaster preparation and recovery consulting company IEM.

Unfortunately for California, the program only kind of exists. Since the mid-1990s, it’s been stood up and funded on an ad hoc basis, one appropriation bill at a time. That’s presents a challenge for communities planning in the middle of post-disaster planning. It also means the rules that govern the program — when the money goes out, to whom, under what conditions and for what purposes — are redrafted with each political administration. That’s had the effect of slowing things down considerably. No program funding has gone to Los Angeles in the wake of the 2025 fire storms, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Congress has yet to appropriate any.

The new housing bill would officially write the program into law for at least three years.

“It creates the ability for HUD to have money on hand before a disaster and then make a decision within 15 days about whether they’re going to provide funding,” said McFadden.

What the housing bill doesn’t do: Actually provide any fresh funding. Disaster prone communities will need to wait for Congress to take that up later.

A 'bottleneck' removed

For the last two decades, public housing authorities in Los Angeles and the Bay Area have been turning to the federal Rental Assistance Demonstration program to help repair and upgrade their aging stock of increasingly dilapidated public housing. The program works by switching up funding sources in a way that gives locals more flexibility to borrow money and attract private investment dollars.

Until July 11 at midnight, the federal government was only authorized to permit 455,000 of these conversions. The new bill raises the cap by another 100,000.

“This has been a bottleneck in California for years and that bottleneck just got removed,” said Russell with the San Diego Housing Federation.

Not all affordable housing advocates are cheering the development. The National Low Income Housing Coalition has consistently opposed expansion of the program on the grounds that the change in funding source could weaken existing tenant protections. It's unclear whether and to what extent that might be true. A study from last year found no evidence that conversions under the program lead to more evictions.

Wall Street out of suburbia

If you’ve heard only one thing about this housing bill, it’s that it bans “large institutional investors” from buying up more single family homes.

Caveats apply in the final version of the law. The bill defines “large” as any of a number of business structures with control over more than 350 single family homes. It doesn’t apply retrospectively, so current investors with portfolios brimming with houses need not divest. Exemptions exist for new construction, renovations and senior housing. In California specifically, where corporations and other major investors do not play a significant role in the housing market, the effect is likely to be muted.

The measure “takes a hyper-salient issue for lots of people across the country and does a pretty modest intervention to address it,” said Chad Maisel, a fellow at the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress and a former housing policy advisor to President Biden.

Even so, the provision has plenty of bipartisan appeal. Earlier this year, Trump called for an even stricter crackdown on so-called corporate landlords. Gov. Gavin Newsom followed suit the same week.

The anti-investor language was considerably watered down from earlier this year, when a related provision threatened to undermine “build-to-rent” projects: Well-financed subdevelopments of single-family homes reserved for renters. That prompted a revolt by many developers and YIMBY activists who had otherwise enthusiastically supported the bill, who argued that such communities are one of the fastest growing sources of the U.S. housing stock and provide some of the few opportunities for renters to live in suburban-style, family-sized housing.

After the build-to-rent provision was left on the cutting room floor of Congress, state Sen. Aisha Wahab, a Fremont Democrat who is now running for Congress, introduced a bill that picked it back up again. SB 880 would have banned the bundled sale of multiple single-family homes, striking at the heart of the build-to-rent business model. That bill died in the Assembly Judiciary committee in late June.

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

More than two dozen California Assembly Democrats and one state senator sent a letter Wednesday to legislative leaders asking them to delay fees under SB 54, the state’s landmark plastic reduction law, for two years — an eleventh-hour push as the Legislature hurtles toward the end of session.

The letter, addressed to Senate President Pro Tempore Monique Limón and Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, was signed by 23 Assemblymembers and Sen. Melissa Hurtado. It asks lawmakers to pause fee assessment and collection this year and next, commit to a “reform package” next session, and increase legislative oversight of the program going forward.

The request lands amid a broader fight over how the plastics law is rolling out. Little by little California is demanding that the packages you pick up at your doorstep or at the store contain less plastic. A law Gov. Gavin Newsom signed four years ago aims to phase out 25% of non-recyclable, non-compostable plastic by 2032.

To get there, the state tasked a nonprofit, the Circular Action Alliance, with drafting a plan to meet the state goals. The group estimated the work would cost $17.2 billion over five years – and is asking for a three-year exemption from the source-reduction deadline.

But as the state moves to implement the law, questions are mounting over how the organization calculates the fees producers — and eventually consumers — will pay, and how much oversight the group actually faces.

Industry groups say the price tag for complying with the law could be tens of billions of dollars higher than California originally estimated. An industry-commissioned study found the law could cost consumers three times what the state projected — between $683 and $948 a year, rather than $190.

That means groceries, shampoo bottles and other consumer goods packed in plastic could cost a little more as the law takes effect.

The California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery, which oversees implementation, declined an interview but said in a written statement that the law puts consumers first and pushes producers to design packaging with recycling in mind.

“Californians are facing rising costs and pollution from increasingly complex packaging that wasn’t designed for the recycling systems local governments, ratepayers, and the state developed and funded over the past four decades,” said CalRecycle director Zoe Heller. “The law’s rollout is a dial, not a switch, giving producers flexibility to redesign packaging, invest in recycling systems, reduce single-use plastics, and make adjustments along the way,” she added.

Watching the watchers

The Circular Action Alliance published its fee schedule in June, spelling out what each producer owes into the system. The fees could add up to more than $10 million for some businesses, according to the Dairy Institute of California. The Dairy Institute is a trade association that represents milk processors and dairy product manufacturers.

But unlike a state agency, the Circular Action Alliance answers to almost no one, said Katie Davey, executive director of the Dairy Institute.

“[The alliance] does not have to go through an audit by the state auditor. They’re not subject to the (California open government law) Brown Act. They’re not subject to public records requests. The Legislature does not approve their budget and does not approve how many employees they need, or how many fees they can charge,” Davey said.

As a private nonprofit, Circular Action Alliance indeed is not subject to the Brown Act or public-records law — but records it submits to CalRecycle or other government entities may be.

CalRecycle must approve its fee schedule and implementation plan, and has the authority to audit the organization’s performance, said CalRecycle spokesperson Lance Klug, who added that the plastics law includes provisions to ensure the group’s budget and fees are appropriate.

The alliance’s role “is not to set California policy,” said its spokesperson, Larine Urbina. “Our role is to implement the framework established by SB 54 under CalRecycle’s oversight.”

Davey said the gap extends to enforcement. Businesses that fall short will face so-called malus fees, which fund bonuses for those that comply. But the Circular Action Alliance hasn’t said what those fees will be.

Shane Gusman, a lobbyist for the Teamsters, which represents hundreds of thousands of California workers, raised similar concerns. “They’re a wholly independent nonprofit organization that has no oversight. That’s part of the problem.” The union backed the plastics law hoping it would boost jobs; Guzman now says the fees could affect workers too.

Shortly after the alliance published its fee schedule, Davey and a coalition of industry leaders — including the California Restaurant Association, the California League of Food Producers, the American Forest and Paper Association and the Print Creative Alliance — commissioned a study disputing CalRecycle’s numbers.

It found CalRecycle’s 2025 estimate of $21 billion in implementation costs, or $190 a year per California household, rests on “idealized assumptions that fail to capture real-world costs and complications the regulations will create.”

The study puts the number somewhere between $35 and $58 billion, rising after the implementation period.

Klug of CalRecycle said the agency’s earlier reports were just estimates. “The actual costs will be determined by producer choices,” he said. “These costs, for example, will reflect the infrastructure needed to recycle materials that producers are choosing to use.”

Agriculture groups push back 

The biggest hurdle for producers is cutting plastic use 25% by 2032 — which state regulators say will require redesigning packaging and shifting toward reusable products, such as dishes at restaurants and paper-based packaging for produce.

Business groups say they support the state’s goals but call the timeline unworkable.

Food safety is one sticking point: alternatives like paper-based containers for berries are less breathable and spoil faster, while heavier glass or cardboard adds transportation costs, said Casey Creamer, president of the California Fresh Fruit Association.

“We just don’t want to force something out and not be able to deliver a fresh, healthy commodity, or create a situation that has more significant or adverse environmental concerns just because we look at plastics and packaging in a silo,” Creamer said.

Environmental groups oppose any pause.

“All of us pay for plastic pollution through higher garbage bills and clean-ups of polluted beaches and waterways, not to mention the damage to our environment and our health,”said Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for Californians Against Waste.

Sen. Ben Allen, a Democrat representing coastal Los Angeles County who authored the law, said it’s time plastic producers are held accountable for the waste they produce.

“This 11th-hour Hail Mary is only trying to maintain status quo and avoid due responsibility, throwing years of good-faith negotiations, and affordability and sustainability improvements out the window,” he said in a statement about producers’ efforts to pause implementation of the law.

Businesses pass costs to consumers

Whether the plastics law is actually driving up grocery prices yet is hard to pin down. Creamer said businesses may already be factoring the organization’s planned fees into their prices.

Federal data show grocery prices dipped slightly in July from June, though prices have climbed year over year and that rate is accelerating, said Richard Volpe, a consumer-price expert at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Neither the USDA nor the Bureau of Labor Statistics has released August figures, and no data yet isolates the state plastics law’s effect from broader inflation.

Volpe said retailers, who run on thin margins, will eventually pass costs on to consumers — but probably not right away.

“It will not happen overnight,” he said. “And it will still be relatively small, mostly on the order of pennies on the dollar.”

Industry groups warn it will add up.

“If someone’s even on the cusp of food insecurity and they’re looking at $1,000 more a year, that’s pushing them over the food cliff,” said Nate Rose, a spokesperson for the California Grocers Association.

The Teamsters, which backed the plastics law hoping it would boost jobs, now worry the fees could affect workers too.

The law “has been morphed into something that is going to cost California consumers a substantial amount of money at a time when I don’t know if we need to spend thousands more on groceries,” said Gusman, the Teamsters lobbyist. “That also has an impact on the workforce.”

Father's Office built its reputation on refusing to let anyone touch its burger — no substitutions, no exceptions. Just dry-aged beef, bacon fat-caramelized onions, Gruyère, Maytag blue and arugula.

Which is why a new collaboration with hand roll specialist Uoichiba had me… scratching my head.

Yes, that’s right. For a limited time, the Office Burger can be found in hand roll form at Uoichiba locations (Sherman Oaks and DTLA), packed over rice and wrapped in nori in lieu of a bun, for $16.

The collaboration

Turns out Chef Liwei Liao (owner of Uoichiba/Joint Seafood) and Chef Sang Yoon (Father's Office) are close friends who decided to bridge their culinary worlds.

Liao says he’s actually a burger guy off the clock, and considers the Office Burger one of the most iconic in L.A.

"I'm not even a blue cheese fan, but I enjoy it in that flavor combination with the grilled onions —it's basically French onion soup in a sauce —and then his blend of cheese," Liao said.

While the hand roll combo isn’t something you see every day, it's not a total left turn for Uoichiba. The spot already runs four Wagyu hand rolls on its regular menu (cheeseburger, tartare, shabu shabu, steak), so this slots into an existing format rather than a one-off gimmick.

The Uoichiba x Father's Office collaboration hand roll, available through August.

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Grid Vongpiansuksa

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Courtesy Uoichiba

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Does it work?

So... to my verdict on trying it. Despite its unusual format, the elements hit my taste buds, and I was immediately struck by how familiar it all felt —transported straight back to the outdoor patio of Father’s Office at the Helms Bakery building, touching upon all the same notes.

That’s not a surprise, since Liao uses Yoon’s exact Office Burger recipe. “We’re literally using his cheese, his onions, his blend,” he says.

Watching the roll get assembled, it's easy to see the level of precision involved — the dry-aged beef gets a slight char from a hand-held blowtorch, then it's layered with the onion and cheese mixture and fresh arugula, the whole thing coming together like one of Vincent van Gogh's still-life vase paintings.

It's not a one-off, either — Liao said Uoichiba plans to keep doing chef collaborations like this on the hand roll bar about once a month.

Mark Baldassare has seen his fair share of eyebrow-raising political polls in his decades-long career as a public opinion researcher.

Never, though, has he encountered a completely fake survey with made-up findings.

Until this week.

“It’s disturbing,” said Baldassare, survey director at the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank.

“It’s a wake-up call for all of us.”

The poll in question, published last week by a group called Median Strategies, purported to show Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass leading City Councilmember Nithya Raman by double digits — a surprising result given Bass’s low approval rating and her administration’s recent setbacks on homelessness. It also claimed that Bass had won support from a vast majority of voters who supported insurgent Republican Spencer Pratt in the primary election.

But on Monday, Median Strategies retracted its poll and replaced its website with a disclaimer that the survey results were fabricated as part of a “short-term social experiment” and “should not be cited or treated as genuine polling data.” The group’s website also featured “polls” from the Wisconsin and Nevada gubernatorial races.

The fake results, first reported by the Los Angeles Times, duped the California Post, several local television and radio stations and even the mayor’s own campaign, which drew attention to the survey in a now-deleted X post.

The incident further underscores the importance of accuracy and precision in polling and presents yet another challenge for a public already struggling to separate fact from fiction and genuine content from AI-generated slop.

Bass’s spokesperson, Alex Stack, said campaign leadership had reviewed the polling memo that accompanied the results and decided it was legitimate given that “the poll was reported on by multiple news outlets.”

“Any bad faith attempts to influence elections should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Stack said in a statement.

A scheme to rig betting markets?

It’s unclear who’s behind Median Strategies, what their true intentions were with the bogus data and whether they would’ve disclosed the deception to the public if journalists hadn’t intervened. The group did not respond to a list of emailed questions from CalMatters.

“This definitely isn’t a research experiment, right? It sounds like an excuse for very bad behavior,” said Mindy Romero, director of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Inclusive Democracy.

“If we take them at their word, that this is some sort of social experiment, that’s not what reputable researchers engage in,” Romero added. “We always have to think about the harm that we’re doing.”

One alternate theory is that the false survey results were meant to manipulate prediction markets, such as Kalshi and Polymarket, in the same way that securities fraudsters “pump and dump” penny stocks. They buy low, release disingenuous information to drive the price up, then sell high and reap the windfall.

Median’s fake poll spurred high volumes of trades shortly after it was posted, though the price movements were small. The Associated Press tracked thousands of trades from roughly 20 different accounts on Polymarket within six minutes of Bass’s campaign posting about the poll on X. On Kalshi, the price of placing a “yes” bet on Bass winning the mayoral race rose roughly two cents, from 63 to 65, within 15 minutes of the post, the AP reported.

“If nothing else, Median Strategies proved the concept that a pump-and-dump scheme is easily transferrable to election prediction markets,” wrote David Dayen for The American Prospect, a left-leaning policy publication.

Could bogus polls become more common?

For Jonathan Underland, a political strategist who works with Democrat Xavier Becerra’s campaign for governor, the Median Strategies debacle reinforces how important it is to vet a poll’s reputability before sharing it on official platforms.

“I get the excitement of a poll that shows you in the lead,” Underland said. “Everything is an opportunity for your opponent to hit you. The last thing I want to do is promote a poll that’s not real.”

Baldassare detests that public opinion polls drive financial decisions, from betting markets to more traditional political decisions such as which candidates from powerful donors and political groups pour money into. He acknowledged that copycats and wannabes could follow Median Strategies’ example and pump more noise and disinformation into the political ecosystem.

But he noted a silver lining: This is happening in August, when only a fraction of people are tuned into politics, rather than October when voters have their ballots in hand.

He hopes the Median Strategies incident reminds journalists and campaign operatives to recommit to verifying the source of the information before sharing it.

When in doubt, “Call the pollster,” Baldassare said. “Make sure I’m legitimate. You know — a real person.”