For most elected offices I care about balancing many aspects. But in recent years, when voting for the California Assembly and Senate, I've become a single-issue voter. I vote for state-level legislature leaders based on housing policy.

In the "big tent" of the California Democratic Party, housing is one of the few issues where there isn't a Dem-wide consensus — it's necessary to pick sides — and the California state legislature is the venue where our most relevant housing policy is set these days.

It's in this context that I'll be voting for Jesse Arreguín to become our next state senator.

While Arreguín began his public career with NIMBY instincts on Berkeley City Council, he's shown a remarkable commitment to learning and adapting as the Bay Area's housing crisis has intensified and as his responsibilities to serve constituents have grown. He won election as Mayor of Berkeley and then won re-election. And he successfully served an important term as president of the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), steering the 101 municipalities and nine counties of the Bay Area through the recent Housing Element cycle, the first cycle in this decades-long process in which the process came with consequences.

If you've got an hour with nothing better to do, you could watch him serving as president of ABAG on September 24, 2021 overseeing the City of Alameda's appeal of its Regional Housing Needs Assessment allocation:

He successfully helped guide ABAG through dozens of such appeals, and through the much broader process of many of the Bay Area's municipalities and counties now having state-compliant Housing Elements.

The other choice for State Senate, Jovana Beckles, recently had this to say to Berkeleyside about her own proposed approach to the East Bay's housing challenges:

Beckles would follow a different path [than retiring state senator Nancy Skinner], saying she would not support legislation that would further streamline approvals for market-rate housing.

“I would absolutely be a champion for funding and making it easier for people to build affordable housing,” Beckles said. But, she added, “I maintain my position that building more market-rate housing is not the way that we keep rents affordable.”

To bolster her case, Beckles cited data she said she accessed by querying the AI program ChatGPT, which stated Berkeley — where there has been a surge of primarily market-rate construction — had larger rent increases between 2007 and 2023 than Richmond, which allowed fewer market-rate homes but came closer to meeting state targets for affordable housing.

However, the chatbot text Beckles cited, which she later shared with a reporter, did not provide a direct link to the source of its data, saying it came from unspecified “market and housing trend analyses.” And for much of the time period Beckles cited, Berkeley was building relatively little new housing; production began picking up steam in 2015 and peaked in 2022.

Using ChatGPT as a way to make an argument to a reporter and to voters? Uh?

Anyway, leaving aside the way she's trying to make the argument, I disagree with Beckles's argument and her stated approach to housing. We need more housing at all price points. We need more subsidized-affordable housing and more market-rate housing. We need more "infill" housing everywhere in the core inner Bay Area, so we can limit our further sprawl out into open spaces and farmlands and wildfire prone regions. This should be done thoughtfully — and it is being done thoughtfully — by leaders like our retiring state senator Nancy Skinner and rising leaders like Arreguín.

On this contentious topic of housing policy, Arreguín has a successful track record as mayor of Berkeley and as president of ABAG. He also represents continuity with Skinner's successful track record. He's earned my vote and I think he's earned yours as well.