The mansion is the decoy. Hasan Piker’s $2.7 million place in West Hollywood has nothing whatever to do with why a comparable house in Indianapolis runs $300,000 and a comparable one in West Hollywood runs $2.7 million — and in National Review, Caroline Downey argues in her column, “Hasan Piker Admits He Was Born to Be a Champagne Socialist”, that it does. Her case: Piker bought a mansion, he dripped Cartier through Cuba, and therefore his call for free housing is performance that deserves no real engagement. A person can want a country where nobody needs a millionaire landlord without being a millionaire themselves. Treating the speaker’s spending as proof the policy is fake is the laziest move in political writing, and it is the whole column.
Walk the actual mechanism with me. A developer sits down with a spreadsheet and decides whether to put up a duplex or a six-unit building. Land cost goes on the page. Drywall goes on the page. The plumber’s hourly rate goes on the page. Impact fees go on the page. Financing goes on the page. So does the time it takes to pull a permit from a city office that lost two staff members last quarter. And so does the margin that pays for the next project. Take the margin away — by capping rents, by adding years of approval delay, by letting any neighbor sue under the California Environmental Quality Act — and the developer doesn’t build. The supply doesn’t grow. The existing units get bid up. Whether some streamer across town bought a $2.7 million place does not go on the page. It never does. A $2.7 million house in West Hollywood is what you get when the rules let almost nothing new be built. A $300,000 house in Indianapolis exists because Indiana’s towns let people put up starter homes and fourplexes without a three-year approval process. Same country. Different rules. Different prices.
Now the concessions, because they’re real and they don’t help her. Piker likes nice things. Most people do. He could have bought a perfectly good house in the Midwest for a third of the price, and he chose the mansion. Fine — that’s his money, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. The Cuba trip is fair to mock: he walked through the tourist corridors of a poor country dripping in Cartier. That says something about Piker. It says nothing about whether building more apartments in Los Angeles would help the person who currently can’t find one. And the New York public housing projects she waves at as her closer are genuinely in disrepair. I’ll grant every inch of that.
What I won’t grant is the trick those concessions are doing. The hypocrisy charge is a magician’s trick: it tells you to look at Piker’s wallet instead of the housing code. If Piker had moved to Ohio and lived in a $300,000 split-level, Downey would have picked a different target, and the California housing shortage would be exactly what it is today. The mansion is a symptom. The zoning map is the disease. West Hollywood’s rents didn’t get to six figures because rich people like Piker moved in. They got there because the city spent forty years making new construction effectively illegal.
And notice what happened to Piker’s actual argument, which is that housing should be free. He said it to Ziwe. Her only response is his mortgage statement. Those two things do not talk to each other. Having a mortgage is what happens when a housing market prices people out of homes. “I have a mortgage, so the demand for free housing is invalid” is like saying “I bought water during the flood, so levees don’t matter.” The argument is about whether scarce supply and private landlords are a sound way to run a city. His West Hollywood deed is irrelevant to that question. Those are two different claims. They do not merge.
Even the NYCHA fact she closes on is narrower than she needs it to be. It is a fact about one city, one funding model, one set of mismanagement choices. It is not a law of physics. Those buildings are old, and they became the only housing because the surrounding neighborhoods were zoned to keep new construction out — and then they were starved of the money to keep them up. The failure of one badly run program is a lesson about that program. It is not a verdict on whether anyone, anywhere, should ever be housed for less than market rate. She reaches for the card because she has nothing else. The argument was over before she started writing it.
Here is the part of the conversation the column skipped, which is the only part that builds anything. Let cities approve four-unit buildings on lots currently zoned for one. Let duplexes, fourplexes, and six-story apartment buildings go up by right. Cut permit times from years to months. Let an owner add a backyard cottage or convert a basement into a rental without asking special permission for it. Cap the CEQA lawsuits that hold up every project in the state. Tax the land value, not the new construction sitting on top of it. Send public money to the units that already stand, not to promises on paper. Every one of those is a regulatory choice California made, decade by decade, and every one of them is a choice California can unmake.
Piker’s bank account is a story. The building code is the fact. And none of it depends on whether the speaker wears Cartier.