Porter Focuses on California Housing Costs, AI Plans at KQED Town Hall

Former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter laid out plans to lower housing costs and regulate Silicon Valley in a KQED town hall on Monday.

“We have to make change in California and we have to do it in a smart way, we can’t do it in a reckless way, we can’t do it in a way that’s just about catering to donors,” Porter said. “But we really have to make change because it’s coming, it’s not a choice — AI is coming and the changes are going to be tremendous.”

Porter answered questions from Bay Area residents about education, technology, gas prices and rent in a wide-ranging event moderated by KQED’s Scott Shafer.

Here are three takeaways from the conversation:

Temperament

Porter entered the race last year as a Democratic frontrunner, after three terms in the House and a third-place finish in the 2024 primary for U.S. Senate.

Her campaign drew scrutiny in October when a video uncovered by POLITICO showed Porter telling a staffer to “get out of my f—ing shot” as they walked behind her during a video conversation.

Porter said she apologized to the staffer that day and remains on good terms with her.

“We are all better than our worst moments — I give that grace to everybody I’ve ever worked with, every staffer who has made a mistake who has kept working the next day,” Porter said. “I’m asking for some of that grace from others.”

She also contrasted questions about her demeanor with the early support that many state interest groups showered on former Rep. Eric Swalwell, who ended his campaign and later resigned from Congress amid sexual assault allegations.

“The California establishment, including Sacramento, was very, very quick to hop on board [with] that, and unwilling to believe that Eric Swalwell could have been the kind of person with a bad ‘temperament’ that led him to sexually assault people,” Porter said.

It All Comes Back to Housing

Throughout the conversation, Porter repeatedly returned to housing, calling it “the biggest priority” for the next governor.

Margarita Mendez, a public school teacher, asked Porter how she planned to help educators “afford to live in the communities they teach.”

Porter recounted a conversation with a rideshare driver earlier in the day, who commuted to the Bay Area from Modesto every day to drop his daughter at the school she teaches at in Oakland.

“That is really, really wrong,” Porter said. “And that is the status quo in California.”

In response to a question on housing affordability from Susan Mallon, a San Francisco renter, Porter threw her support behind a down payment assistance bond that would lower the upfront costs for first-time homebuyers.

“There’s just no research behind a 20% down payment,” she said. “That is creating a huge class of people who can never get to homeownership.”

Porter Leans Into AI Regulation

Porter was blunt when San Francisco resident Tom Tripp asked about regulating artificial intelligence and its potential impact on wealth inequality and jobs.

“We only have a year to two before we are going to suffer a lot of job disruption and job loss because of AI,” Porter said. “We have already — on the job piece — waited too long in my opinion.”

Porter floated the idea of restrictions on autonomous semitrucks and school buses. And she dismissed the idea that regulations on the burgeoning technology should be left exclusively to Congress.

“California governors and California gubernatorial candidates cannot have it both ways. They try, because they are men, but they can’t have it both ways,” she said.

“They cannot pat themselves on the back and say ‘we’re the fourth largest economy in the world,’ and then turn around and say ‘What could we do? We’re only the fourth largest economy in the world.”