Ms. Porter, you and I both lived a couple blocks away from each other in Irvine, California. Irvine is an unusual city, a master planned community. The Irvine Company assembled the land in the 19th century and held it and then shaped it in this way that would be almost impossible today. And I say almost because somebody is trying to do something similar right now, which is a California Forever project. This tech-billionaire-backed effort to build a new master planned city of 400,000, in Solano County, on land assembled somewhat like Irvine was. There’s been a lot of local opposition. The way that land was acquired was unusual and secretive. I have two questions for you here. As governor, what would you think of California Forever? What would be your relationship to that project? And more broadly, what do you think of the kind of master planning projects that led to Irvine? Yeah, so I’ve actually asked to meet with the California Forever people because the first thing is you got to listen. You got to find out. You got to dig in the details, you got to read the study, you got to ask the hard questions. And I think they might be scared I’m bringing a whiteboard. And so they keep not responding. But I’m really coming in in a place of wanting to understand it. So look, I think some of that is NIMBYism. And I would just say to those on the stage who don’t think there’s very much NIMBYism, I invite you to visit Huntington Beach for yourself because I used to represent Huntington Beach, and a lot of those cities in Orange County, as you know, are very anti-housing. Now, Irvine, interestingly, is not one of them. They are still building. We are adding people. From when you live there to when I live there the population has doubled or tripled. And that is because they control enough of the factors that they don’t get gobsmacked with all of these additive things. And so there is something to having that kind of bigger reach around all of the factors. But let me give you another example of where this doesn’t work. And this is where I thought you were going with California Forever, which is Tejon Ranch. Now, this is a really interesting — Are you familiar? This is a really interesting example. This was one of the largest, I think it’s still today the largest contiguous private landholding in California. Pretty, pretty amazing. And it’s outside of Los Angeles. They have been trying to develop. And I went and I visited and I saw it. They have been trying to develop housing there, work-force-priced housing, for 30-some years. And they own the land, like there’s not anybody to permit them. They just keep getting sued. They got sued on CEQA. They resolved 30, 29 of the 33 objections, and then they went to court and they lost on one of them. And do you know what happened? Back to zero on all 33 objections. One thing I do think about master planning is that Irvine, as you know, in any given strip mall in Irvine, if you’re standing there and you’ve just walked into one store and you walk out and you think, Shoot, I need to go get that other thing, Irvine Company Big Brother will have put that thing across the parking lot in the strip mall. It’s like actually scary. And it’s not for everybody. It is really not for everybody. But I think the fact that I live in and am raising my family in a very different model of housing and living in a place like Orange County, which has got everything from the worst NIMBY in the state to some of the fastest- growing pro-housing cities in the state, is a really good perspective as governor. And at its core, if you take them at their word, which is where I would start — might not be where I’d end, but it’s where I’d start the conversation with California Forever — what they’re saying is: Let us innovate. Let us show people what a different model of living and working and recreating can look like. And I think we need imagination about what housing could be so that we’re not just fighting about 40-story apartment buildings and single-family. There are so many other permutations of housing. We need more housing innovation. And at its heart, that’s what I think some of these projects offer.
