Page F3From§Eachthe milkman edition — 17 September 2026
As it ran on the front
I already asked this one once, and I got an answer, so please forgive me for coming back to it — but the second time it came out a different shape entirely.
Here's what I mean. On September 12th, down in Charlotte, North Carolina, the governor of California sat for a wide-ranging interview and admitted something that a lot of governors won't admit. He called his state's housing and homelessness problem the "original sin" — his words, not mine, I wrote it down — and said decades of his own state's development policy drove the prices up. That's an answer to the question "whose fault is this?" And the answer, in his own mouth, four days before anything else happened, was: ours.…
…(cont) So when I saw, four days later, a chart going around with his name attached to it — a chart that laid out housing costs going up, up, up — and underneath it, blaming the current occupant of the White House, I had to ask the same question again. Whose fault is this? Because now the answer had changed shape. And here's the part that got me stuck, and I'm sorry, I keep coming back to it: the chart he used to make the second argument is the same chart that proves the first one. The prices on it went up while the other guy was in office. Not this one. The other one.
I don't know about you, but I've got a car in my driveway that needs a fan belt, and I've had two mechanics tell me two different things about what's wrong with it, using the same noise under the hood as their evidence. One says it's the belt. One says it's the pulley. They're both pointing at the same sound. That's fine — that's how car trouble works, nobody's got the whole picture. But if the same mechanic told me it was the belt on Tuesday and the pulley on Saturday, using the same tape measurement both times, I'd want to know why the measurement didn't change but the answer did.
That's really all I've got here. A measurement that didn't move, and an answer that did. I'm not saying anybody's lying — I don't have that kind of information, and it's not my job anyway, I just write things down. I'm asking: if the numbers on the page show one administration, and the name coming out of your mouth is a different administration, which one are we supposed to believe — the numbers, or the mouth?
And look, I'll be honest, I sat with this for a couple days before I even wrote it up, because I kept thinking I was missing something. Maybe there was a second chart. Maybe there was a correction. I checked. There wasn't one, as of when I filed this.
So here's where I leave it, and I mean this as a question, not an answer, because I'm not in the business of answers — I just carry the notebook.
If a man tells a reporter in Charlotte, on the record, that the crisis is his state's own doing, and then four days later stands in front of a chart that backs up exactly that story while saying exactly the opposite out loud — is that a second opinion, or is that the same guy reading the same page two different ways depending on who's in the room?
Oh — and excuse me, one more thing before you go. That chart he's holding. The one with the arrow going up. Does the arrow know whose fault it's supposed to be? Because far as I can tell, it never got the memo. It's just going up.
“Newsom got on camera, held up a chart, and told you Trump's the reason your rent's out of control — except the chart's got the prices climbing while the other guy was in office, and two weeks before that Newsom himself called the whole mess California's own doing, "original sin," his words. That's not a mistake, that's whoever's in front of the mic that week getting blamed, chart or no chart. You're still paying the rent either way — that's the part nobody's fighting over.”
“Look, the underlying point stands regardless of which chart he grabbed — housing costs are up, full stop, and that's a real crisis that predates any of this. Did I say "regardless of which chart"? That's — the chart is the whole story, forget I said that. The man's own state called it their original sin four days earlier, so if anything this proves it's a California problem, which, yes, is not what the chart was being used to argue, but the crisis is real, that part's not in dispute.”
The receipts
NAR puts the median first-time homebuyer at 40 years old - a record - and first-time buyers at a record-low 21% of the market National Association of Realtors, 2025 Profile
Gavin Newsom blames Trump for housing costs using chart showing massive increase under BidenGov. Gavin Newsom blamed President Donald Trump for record housing costs, but the chart he shared shows prices skyrocketed under the Biden administration.
· Newsom concedes California’s housing crisis is fair criticism from the morgue, 12 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.