At Reagan library, panelists tout Montana, Texas as models for housing policy

• The panel was part of a full day of discussion at the Reagan library, featuring top CEOs, politicians and media figures.
• The housing panel included the governor of Montana, a top housing advocate from Texas and LA developer Rick Caruso.

The panel discussion at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum featured a governor, a major corporate executive, a leader in the pro-housing advocacy movement and one of California’s most famous real estate developers.

There were two areas of general agreement: The United States needs more housing and needs to be able to build it faster and cheaper; and California is far behind states like Texas and Montana in this effort.

The housing panel, “Why Can’t We Build Enough Homes? was part of the first Reagan National Economic Forum, an event on May 30 that was something of a conservative-leaning, single-day version of the Aspen Ideas Festival or the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

The Simi Valley library grounds were crawling with executives of some of the world’s biggest companies, top officials from both of President Donald Trump’s administrations, members of Congress, and journalists from Fox Business, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

They talked about “The Case for American Optimism,” “Reimagining Governance,” and “The Moral Imperative of Economic Growth,” to cite just a few of the day’s speeches and panels.

The housing panelists had come to the belly of the beast to preach their pro-growth gospel: Ventura County has some of the nation’s strictest laws that limit where new housing can be built.

But new housing is being built all over Ventura County, and there is a growing consensus among economists and civic leaders that our lack of housing and the high prices of the homes we do have are among our biggest economic problems.

Without much new housing, Ventura County’s population has been shrinking for a decade. The median price of a single-family home is well over $900,000, and the average apartment rent in 2024 was nearly $2,700 per month.

One message of the housing panel at the Reagan library was that it doesn’t have to be this way.

In Austin, Texas, a city with a thriving economy and growing demand for housing, rents have been declining for years as the city experiences a building boom. And in Montana, a slate of new laws championed by Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte, a member of the panel, has allowed builders to add enough housing to keep up with skyrocketing demand.

Jerusalem Demsas, a writer for The Atlantic magazine, moderated the housing panel, and began by asking why Republican-led states like Texas and Montana have been more successful than California and other Democratic states in encouraging housing development.

“It became clear to me that home ownership is a key component of the American dream,” Gianforte answered. “We want our teachers, our policemen, our nurses to live in the communities where they serve, and if they can’t afford a home, they can’t do that.”

To make that happen, Gianforte said he convened a bipartisan task force to make recommendations to the Montana Legislature. Among other things, the new laws effectively ended single-family zoning, making it legal to build at least two units on any residential property in the state, and they allowed apartment buildings of up to six stories to have a single staircase, which makes them much easier and cheaper to build.

Nicole Nosek, founder of the pro-housing advocacy group Texans for Reasonable Solutions, said housing has become a bipartisan issue in Texas.

Democrats in Austin and Houston agreed to lower minimum lot sizes because it helps working-class people afford homes, and the Republicans in the statehouse like the message of private property rights. Conservation groups like it because smaller lots mean you can pave over less land when you build on open space.

“In politics, sometimes it’s not so much the message, it’s the messenger,” Nosek said. “We put together quite a formidable coalition.”

The problem isn’t just regulations. Richard McPhail, the chief financial officer of The Home Depot, said about half of his company’s customers are general contractors or other construction professionals. They report that permits are harder than ever to come by in most areas of the country, and they also have issues finding skilled laborers like carpenters and electricians.

“We have to do a better job just getting the word out, marketing it, and helping people understand this is part of the core of America, and these are jobs to be proud of,” McPhail said.

In Sacramento, the California Legislature has spent years passing bills that aim to increase housing production. In some cases, they’ve worked. For example, bills to encourage the development of granny flats, or “accessory dwelling units,” have made ADUs the fastest growing type of housing in California.

But in most cases, the laws in Sacramento that should make it easier to build have not had the desired effect, said Rick Caruso, a developer of homes and other real estate in California and the runner-up to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass in the 2022 election.

“The state can do a lot, and needs to be doing a lot more, but it has to be implemented at the local level, and the local level is so over-regulated and has so much red tape,” Caruso said.

He pointed to the pace of rebuilding from this year’s L.A. fires as an example. More than five months after the fire destroyed 7,000 homes in Pacific Palisades, the city of Los Angeles has approved only 58 building permits in the area.

Building when there hasn’t been a fire is even slower. Caruso plans to build housing for employees at his resort in Montecito, the Rosewood Miramar. Approval for that project from the county of Santa Barbara took two years, he said.

Gianforte told the panel that things are different in Montana.

"We clipped the wings of some of our local communities a little bit because they were a little too NIMBY," he said, using an acronym for "Not In My Backyard."

Under Montana's new housing laws, every community must adopt a master plan that specifies where new housing is allowed and what types can be built. Once that is done, Gianforte said, a developer who wants to build a subdivision that meets the requirements of the master plan is handed a permit immediately, with no public hearings.

“I would die of a heart attack if that happened” in California, Caruso said with a laugh.

The audience for the housing panel included Ventura County Supervisor Kelly Long, whose district includes Santa Paula, Fillmore, most of Camarillo and parts of Oxnard.

Long said by text afterward she thought the panel was “on point.” She agreed that local governments need to streamline the approval process for new housing and help build up the local labor force for skilled construction jobs.

The state could also do more to help, she said, with “targeted regulatory relief, strategic investments in infrastructure and workforce development, financial incentives, and stronger alignment between state mandates and local implementation efforts.”

“With this kind of partnership, I think Ventura County can significantly boost housing production while preserving our sustainability goals, community character and long-term economic vitality,” she said.

Tony Biasotti is an investigative and watchdog reporter for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tbiasotti@vcstar.com. This story was made possible by a grant from the Ventura County Community Foundation's Fund to Support Local Journalism.