The Builder Class vs The Luxury Beliefs Class

My father struggled with alcoholism. He put me and my brother through real trauma. As Asian Americans we just went into society assuming we were fine, and it came out in strange ways I didn’t have language for.

Then I sat down with Rob Henderson.

Henderson grew up in Los Angeles. Ten foster homes. Each of his three names, he told me, “were taken from adults that I no longer speak with and have essentially either neglected or abandoned me during my childhood.” Air Force at 17. Yale on the GI Bill. PhD from Cambridge. Along the way he spotted a pattern that explains why California keeps getting worse for the people politicians claim to help. He calls them luxury beliefs: ideas that cost nothing to hold if you’re rich and everything if you’re poor.

California is the world capital of luxury beliefs. And the body count is rising.

The Disease

The policing example is the clearest. The people who pushed hardest to defund the police were white Democrats in safe neighborhoods. The people most likely to get murdered were poor and Black. In 2020, a Bayview resident was 7 times more likely to be a victim of violent crime than someone in Pacific Heights, and 20 times more likely to be murdered. “Defund” was a luxury belief with a body count, and the bill came due in neighborhoods that never asked for it.

The pattern compounds across generations. In 1960, 95% of both affluent and working-class families were intact. By 2005: 85% affluent, 30% working-class. The people who kept their marriages told everyone else family structure doesn’t matter.

Education is the same story. Banning the SAT is like destroying every thermometer and declaring no child will ever have a fever again. The ability still exists whether you measure it or not. You just can’t find the kids who have it. David Card’s Nobel-winning research showed standardized tests remain the best predictor of college success for disadvantaged students. Strip them away and admissions defaults to who your parents know.

SFUSD stripped algebra from middle school in 2014 for “equity.” A Stanford study showed it widened the racial achievement gap. Black student proficiency dropped from 13% to 4%. Parents who could afford tutoring routed around it. Poor kids fell further behind. Legalize standardized tests. Legalize teaching math to children. It’s not complicated. We just stopped doing it.

I’ve been tracking this since 2020, when elites started taking virtue-signal positions that hurt the people they claim to help. Everyone could use a little bit of an Asian parent. Maybe not the extreme I got. But enough to look at the data and say: the outcomes matter, and yours are failing.

Henderson diagnosed the disease. One candidate is actually treating it.

The $30 Billion Luxury Belief

California’s insurance collapse is the luxury belief with the biggest price tag. The compassionate-sounding policy: regulate insurance so everyone in fire zones can afford it. The result: State Farm canceled 1,600 policies in Pacific Palisades because regulators wouldn’t let them price risk honestly. The FAIR Plan, the state’s last-resort insurer, had $200 million in surplus. Then the Palisades and Eaton fires caused roughly $50 billion in damage, with only about $20 billion covered. A $30 billion gap. The safety net was a fiction maintained by people who could afford to self-insure.

On February 26, Matt Mahan toured the Palisades fire zone alongside Rick Caruso and LA Councilwoman Traci Park. Insurance was the chief concern from every resident they met. Caruso had warned years earlier about “40 years of brush between Brentwood and the Palisades.” Nobody listened.

Archived tweet

CA governor candidate @MattMahanSJ at @ycombinator right now. He walked the Palisades yesterday. Impressive A moderate, common sense option for California https://t.co/xKONzZJsem

Peggy Mangot @peggymangot February 28, 2026

The next day Mahan was at YC, making his case to founders.

Every other Democrat in the race is auditioning for the public sector union machine. Mahan is the only one who showed up to the burn zone.

Sacramento’s response to the insurance meltdown? SB1301, which would require 180-day notice before dropping policyholders, up from 75 days. More paperwork requirements on insurers who already left. The gap between “defund the police” and getting defunded by a wildfire is narrower than you think. Both are luxury beliefs with body counts.

Zero to Two Thousand

San Jose built zero market-rate homes in 2024. Zero. Mahan cut construction fees, eliminated the construction tax, and streamlined permitting through the Multifamily Housing Incentives Program. In 2025, 2,000+ homes broke ground. Not promised. Not planned. Under construction.

The projects already had approvals. They were frozen by costs the city itself imposed. Mahan didn’t create a new program to study the crisis. He removed the obstacles causing it. That’s the anti-luxury-belief approach: measure outcomes, cut what isn’t working, keep what is.

Homelessness followed the same logic. Unsheltered homelessness dropped 23%, from 5,100 in 2019 to under 4,000 in 2025. Mahan built 1,000+ interim housing beds at $18,000 per bed per year. San Francisco spends hundreds of thousands per placement to accomplish far less. At 95% utilization, 70% of residents stay off the streets, and 40% graduate to permanent housing. Those aren’t beliefs. They’re measurements.

The approach required honesty that luxury beliefs can’t tolerate. Offer shelter, then enforce laws against encampments. One-third of people offered new apartments refused to come indoors. Mahan acknowledged that complexity instead of hiding behind slogans.

San Jose is now the safest big city in America for the first time in 20+ years, with SJPD maintaining a 100% homicide clearance rate for nearly four years. Zero homes built in 2024. Two thousand in 2025. Same city. Different leadership. That’s not ideology. That’s competence.

The obvious objection: San Jose isn’t California. True. But Mahan manages a $6 billion budget and 7,000 employees, more executive experience than anything Katie Porter or Eric Swalwell have run. And his approach, cutting costs and removing barriers rather than layering on new bureaucracies, is exactly what Sacramento has never tried.

The Builder Class vs. the $921 Million Machine

I maxed out my contribution to Mahan at $78,400. So did Sergey Brin. So did Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir. David Baszucki, CEO of Roblox, and his wife combined for $156,800. Rick Caruso maxed out too. Caruso spent $100 million on his own failed LA mayoral bid and learned the hard way that money alone doesn’t work. You need the right candidate. According to the San Jose Spotlight, tech leaders put $3.2 million into an independent committee on top of direct donations, including $1.5 million on a Super Bowl ad. Total raised in his first week: $7 million, more than any rival raised in all of H2 2025 except Steyer, who funds himself.

These aren’t ideological donors hedging bets. They’re the builder class, operators who’ve seen results and want them scaled statewide.

The luxury belief class has a business model too. California’s public-sector unions collect $921 million a year in dues protecting $240 billion in annual compensation. Nine of the top ten political donors in California are unions. They don’t endorse candidates who serve the public. They endorse candidates who serve them. Katie Porter has ATU, SMART, NUHW, and UAW. Eric Swalwell locked down the firefighters and CMA. Tom Steyer grabbed CNA and CSEA on top of spending $27 million on attack ads, 2x everyone else combined. Populism is performance art when you’re a billionaire who made his money in fossil fuels. California’s public-sector unions are the Colorado River of political spending. Normal people and our donations? A trickle.

Porter, Steyer, and Swalwell are all competing to be the next Newsom. Under Newsom, California got $3.7 trillion in cumulative spending, nearly 6,000 new laws, a state workforce up 28%, and the public is worse off than 2019. The $97.5 billion surplus turned out to be a $165 billion accounting error. Between $20 and $30 billion was stolen in fraudulent unemployment claims. Mahan’s approach: “Ask government to do better before we ask taxpayers to pay more.”

The PPIC poll from February 26 shows a five-way deadlock: Hilton 14%, Porter 13%, Bianco 12%, Swalwell 11%, Steyer 10%. Mahan appears near the bottom, but CalMatters noted PPIC started polling February 3, five days after Mahan entered. He was “relegated to the bottom tier” but “expected to become a major contender.” USC’s Christina Bellantoni put it bluntly: “Right now, these Democrats are not very different. They don’t have a lot distinguishing them in their platforms.” Political scientist Melissa Michelson: Mahan had the “most unique vision among Democrats, presenting a message that appeared to resonate with viewers.”

He championed Prop 36, the ballot measure to toughen penalties for repeat theft and fentanyl crimes, when Newsom and the entire Sacramento establishment opposed it. Voters passed it with nearly 70% support. That’s not moderation. That’s reading the room and having the spine to act on it.

June 2

The primary is a top-two system. Mahan needs to finish in the top two against both the union-funded Democrats and two Republicans. The polls say he’s behind. The money says the opposite.

Luxury belief class vs. builder class. That’s the June 2 primary in a sentence. California has spent $3.7 trillion on luxury beliefs. Try competence. Read the full case for Mahan’s record and watch the Henderson conversation.