No US state better embodies the folly and failure of progressive politics than California, the “Golden State” whose image has been tarnished by over-reaching identity politics lead by a class of elites woefully out-of-touch with their working-class fellow citizens. The state’s damaging COVID-response policies — which kept public school kids out of class while their private schools stayed open — perfectly epitomizes such myopic thinking. But so too does California housing policy, which promoted “redistribution”-style legislation such as the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA), which tried to force Santa Clara County homeowners to sell their homes to progressive nonprofits. As author — and Fox News-contributor — Steve Hilton details in his new book “Califailure: Reversing the Ruin of America’s Worst-Run State,” the law would have hobbled homeowners for whom their properties are often their most valuable asset.
California’s leftist elites love to cloak their actions in “compassion,” but I’m not sure there is anything more cruel and heartless than taking money in taxes from hardworking legal immigrants who can’t afford to buy a home so that newly arrived illegal immigrants can. (Any normal person who complains is just proving the elite are the more enlightened, more moral ones. See how that works?)
Here’s a pending law not being considered yet at the state level, but in Santa Clara County. Better known as Silicon Valley, Santa Clara County’s electorate can be described as either very wealthy high-tech entrepreneurs and employees, or very poor people displaced from elsewhere in the Bay Area by the highest home prices in the state.
The county is also very left-wing and very elitist — a degree of self-regard made easier every time another earthshaking tech innovation comes out of its corporate campuses. So how do they cope with unaffordable housing and rampant homelessness? Their enlightened activists tend to force anyone selling their single-family home to give the local housing “nonprofits” the first opportunity to purchase it.
These are the organizations that have already squandered billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded subsidies to build expensive free housing in numbers insufficient to house more than a tiny fraction of the qualifying population. Meanwhile, home prices for everyone else just kept going up along with the number of unsheltered homeless.
Given a benevolent and benign name, the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA) “would give non-profits the first right to purchase rental properties and forbid sellers from listing their property on the open market.”
Here’s how it would work:
Any seller of a rental property must notify nonprofit housing groups of their intent to sell before placing their property on the market. If the nonprofit is interested, the seller must give the nonprofit the first right to make an offer and may not place the property on the market during that time. If the seller turns down the offer, then the seller can place the property on the open market. That’s bad enough. But there’s more!
If the seller receives an acceptable offer, they must go back to the nonprofit and give them the opportunity to match the price. If a nonprofit matches the price, then the nonprofit has the right to purchase the property for that price. But the timeline doesn’t have to work; the nonprofit still has several months to obtain financing. At that point the negotiations end without the original potential buyer being able to counteroffer.
What could possibly go wrong? Imagine the effect this ordinance would have on any young family trying to buy their first home. They would be competing with nonprofits with budgets in the hundreds of millions, nonprofits that have already proven they are indifferent to costs. The entire project, which is gaining echoes in the activist-dominated City Council of Los Angeles, is a crude usurpation of property rights.
But can it be struck down in court? The greatest hope to stop schemes like COPA — which remains unpassed in Santa Clara County — is grassroots opposition by what is left of San Jose’s small business and individual home ownership communities. But the siren song of caring and compassion for the less fortunate can often delude voters. If any place is proof of that, it’s California.
For California’s elites to prioritize these abstract issues and unworkable schemes over practical solutions is a luxury. Just as the elites have their luxury goods, so too do they embrace these luxury policies. It may feel noble and “highly evolved” to them, but for the majority of working people what it really translates into is a cavalier indifference to the core challenges that make or break families and households. These airy aspirations, which we can refer to as luxury beliefs, are an accurate reflection of the groupthink of California’s elite.
They are so fixated on their lofty ideals, and so insulated from the consequences of implementing them, that they are unaware of the harmful impact of these beliefs on working families. Or maybe they just feel so strongly about their luxury beliefs that they believe any sacrifice is necessary to achieve them. But it’s easier to take that position when the sacrifice is being made by someone else and you won’t personally experience the hardship your policies will cause.
This is overwhelmingly the case, of course, when it comes to perhaps the defining luxury belief of California’s elites, and that is extreme environmentalism. Elitist politicians have passed laws that restrict almost every form of productive activity involving tangible materials. Farming, ranching, mining, logging, manufacturing, construction, home building, investment in practical infrastructure, operating small businesses — all of it and more has been throttled by extreme environmentalist laws, regulations, and the endless interference of a multiplicity of government agencies and bureaucracies all infected with the same dreary, negative, antihuman, antigrowth ideological mindset of scarcity and austerity.
The people who are hit are the working class. Working people and families in California are absolutely hammered by “climate” extremism. It’s an example of how, on so many issues, the leftist ruling class in California have simply lost touch with working people, and only care about the ideological obsessions of the college-educated elite.
This is compounded by a smug, self-obsessed insularity. Those who wield power in California tend to live in wealthy coastal enclaves, surrounded by like-minded peers. The policies that are killing everyone else in California do not seem extreme or destructive if you live in an affluent bubble and rarely, if ever, encounter dissenting views.
Meanwhile, California’s blue-collar workers are under assault, and endless burdens are placed on small businesses. Controlling a super-majority of politicians, California’s elites suppress speech, shut down opposition and dismiss disagreement with moralizing contempt. Elitists tend to think rules for others don’t apply to them.
The elites in California do not have to live with the consequences of the policies they enact. Their wealth and their privilege, the spectacular successes that defined California for so long, and maybe even the weather, insulate them from the realities they create, and nurture their arrogance. Perhaps they view themselves as the new masters of the universe.
Ultimately, the core tenet of the modern left is their belief that some people have significantly superior morality and intellectual judgment, and that therefore they should make the decisions for the rest of us. How do you find such enlightened people? Easy: they are already at the top of liberal society.
Excerpted from “Califailure: Reversing the Ruin of America’s Worst-Run State” by Steve Hilton. Copyright 2025 by Steve Hilton. Published with permission from Broadside Books and HarperCollins Publishers.
