Courtesy Will Rollins for Congress
Will Rollins, second from right, a Democrat running in California’s 41st Congressional District, is using the issue of earmarks to highlight what he’s hearing about most: housing costs.
“If you heard a lawmaker spent taxpayer money on projects he personally benefited from, you’d probably say that’s wrong, if not worse.” That leads off a damning news segment about Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA), the longest-serving member of the California congressional delegation. It goes on to describe two instances where Calvert, a longtime real estate investor, inserted earmarks into transportation spending bills that personally benefited his real estate holdings.
The first, in 2005, was an improvement project for a road connecting two major highways, adjacent to a property he bought just three months before adding the earmark. Six months after that, Calvert sold the land for nearly $1 million, earning a 79 percent profit. Calvert’s alibi was a local watchdog report that said the profit matched the rise in market value for the area; that would stand to reason if the earmark made the area more valuable. The news report tracked down the president of the organization who conducted the analysis. He said he only spent ten minutes looking at it, and that Calvert “should probably be using a better source than I am.”
Two years later, in 2007, Calvert submitted an earmark for a transportation hub in Corona that would raise the value of the surrounding area; he had seven properties in the vicinity. Calvert acknowledged that his properties would benefit from the earmark in a letter to the House Ethics Committee, while asking if he could still submit it. The Ethics Committee said it was fine, as long as other local businesses benefited as well.
It was the kind of uncompromising investigation into political self-dealing that is rarely seen outside of independent media. But this story was featured on Fox News in 2008, as part of a documentary that remarkably held a major Republican accountable.
At the time, Calvert was in a safe district in a conservative part of the Inland Empire, the warehouse-heavy patch between Los Angeles and the Coachella Valley. But in 2022, Calvert’s district changed in reapportionment, losing Republican areas like Murrieta and Temecula and picking up several desert cities to the east like Palm Springs, which at one point in 2017 had an all-LGBT city council, the first in the nation.
The seat is now a toss-up, and in 2022 Will Rollins, a federal prosecutor, stepped up to challenge Calvert. He came within four points of winning; he even attended freshman orientation in Washington when the race was up in the air. “I had people walk up to me after that election and say, ‘I didn’t even know you had a chance until they were counting your name on the ticker on CNN for a week,’” Rollins told me in an interview. “I would say, ‘Did you vote?’ And they’d be like, umm, no.”
Rollins is running again in California’s 41st District, and the race will likely be even tighter. One public poll shows a pure toss-up, 46 percent to 46 percent with a handful of undecideds. Other partisan Democratic polls have shown Rollins up by between one and six points. It’s one of several toss-up California districts that could determine who controls Congress in 2025.
In the Coachella Valley part of the district, there are several Rollins signs with the tagline “END CORRUPTION.” Ads Rollins has been running refer to Calvert as “one of the most corrupt members of Congress.” Rollins says that it’s a big part of his campaign. “This is not a partisan allegation. It’s something we have seen reported in conservative outlets,” he told me. “When people are struggling with high costs, nothing pisses them off more than hearing their member of Congress has made $20 million by using their tax dollars to line their pockets in real estate.”
THE FOX NEWS SEGMENT ON CALVERT was part of a broad conservative push against earmarks, which were banned in 2011 but came back in 2022. Calvert, a member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, voted to restore earmarks in 2022, after voting to suspend them in 2011. They returned in part because of a bipartisan argument that they help get vital bills passed. Inserting local pet projects is one thing, but doing it to benefit individual members personally is quite another. When Calvert was elevated to Appropriations, even some Republicans anonymously expressed concern that he would be placed on that committee, given past Republican struggles with ethics scandals.
Because of his new toss-up district, Calvert has tried to portray himself as a kinder and gentler bipartisan figure, reversing votes on LGBT rights and other matters. (He otherwise remains a fairly down-the-line Republican.) But when it comes to earmarks, he has wasted no time re-engaging in the process, which critics contend once again benefits his properties.
Calvert has secured $100 million in earmarks just in the past two years according to the Los Angeles Times, including $16 million in transportation projects, including a rail line connecting Los Angeles and Palm Springs, that are located near commercial rental properties, land, and residences that he owns.
Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA), a longtime real estate investor, inserted earmarks into transportation spending bills that personally benefited his real estate holdings.
In August, the group End Citizens United (which typically backs Democrats) asked the House Ethics Committee to investigate Calvert for failing to disclose when he came into possession of certain properties on financial records. For instance, in 2021 Calvert claimed to earn rental income from two properties on 6th Street in Corona without ever indicating when he purchased them on prior forms. The properties are located near some of the transportation earmarks that Calvert secured after 2022. “The lack of information on the properties hinders the ability to determine the potential impact of nearby earmarks on the properties’ value appreciation,” End Citizens United writes in its request for investigation.
Calvert’s office has since said that one of the properties was purchased in 2016 and that the congressman has an 11 percent stake in it. They added that it needed renovations, which explains why it didn’t yield rental money for several years.
The same thing happened with two other properties, one in Corona and another in Palm Springs, in 2020 and 2016, respectively. In the case of the Palm Springs property, Calvert did not list his ownership on his 2021 form, which would appear to mean that he sold it, but there’s no record of a sale, who purchased it, or for how much.
Calvert’s office has yet to respond to a request for comment. He told the L.A. Times that all his earmark requests come up through local government agencies. “They haven’t made it illegal to invest,” he said to the Times. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.”
ROLLINS HAS SUGGESTED THAT ASSETS of members of Congress should be placed in a blind trust. He asked for three debates with Calvert, but the incumbent has so far turned down all requests. The Republican strategy has been fairly boilerplate, tying Rollins to crime, taxes, and the border.
Even in his first campaign in 2022, Rollins connected the dots from public corruption to decisions made that benefit special interests over constituents. (See this Prospect profile of Rollins I wrote in 2022.) But this time around, Rollins is using the issue to highlight what he’s hearing the most about in the campaign: housing costs. “He’s increased his wealth by up to $20 million, while driving up housing costs for you,” Rollins says to the camera in a recent ad, filmed outside an apartment complex where Calvert is an investor.
“Housing is the biggest stress point in Southern California,” said Rollins. He cited studio apartments in Corona, the district’s biggest city, that cost $2,000 a month. The Inland Empire, in part due to high housing prices on the coast, has become a commuter feeder to jobs in Los Angeles and even San Diego. And while it was once considered affordable, the mass of people being pushed from the coast have sought housing in this area, pushing prices up.
When I ask Rollins what’s needed, he plainly says more units. But then he takes it in an interesting direction. “The market has failed in part because there are hedge funds and private equity firms that have gobbled up real estate, and have allowed units, or land, to artificially sit open when there is demand for it, but because they have market dominance they don’t need to do anything,” he said. His ad on housing makes similar claims about “cracking down on corporate investors who buy up properties and jack up rents.”
David Dayen
Will Rollins speaks at a campaign event earlier this week.
I have read about a homebuilder cartel that has gained market share, particularly in local and regional markets, and now engages in land speculation, including by holding onto land for long periods of time, while also working with private equity to offload some of the risk that the land will depreciate in value. This was the first time I’d heard it in the wild, from a would-be policymaker looking at barriers to housing in his district.
Along with cracking down on this investment hoarding strategy, Rollins endorsed Kamala Harris’s various housing policies, like the first-time homebuyer tax credit, and said it was great she was elevating the issue at the top of the ticket. Another antidote to this, he said, would be more access to capital so smaller homebuilders could compete. He mentioned one Coachella Valley nonprofit that seeks regional strategies to develop affordable homes. “What’s happened in the past with funding is that individual developers, or towns or communities, will get their hands on it, but it’s not a strategic countywide type of plan to actually expand the supply,” he said.
I asked Rollins about the Federal Trade Commission’s recent action against Invitation Homes, a corporate single-family rental landlord established after the financial crisis of 2008, for layering on junk fees and taking security deposits. He called it a very relatable problem. “People have been there in places like Corona and Lake Elsinore where they’ve seen a landlord tack on junk fees. Like why did I get billed for this? Why is my cleaning fee if I moved out of my apartment $3,000? Why did they steal my deposit?”
As a former federal prosecutor, Rollins said he was pleased by the Biden administration’s newfound aggressiveness on antitrust, though there could always be more. “We’re living in the modern Gilded Age,” he said. “We need people with courage, but also the funding to go after complex white-collar crimes and civil enforcement.” He told me that one of his favorite books is ProPublica reporter Jesse Eisinger’s The Chickenshit Club, which details why there were no high-level prosecutions after the financial crisis.
IT’S AN INTERESTING MESSAGE, connecting the high cost of living with corporate and public corruption. Rollins has a lot of resources to draw from to spread it. He’s raised a whopping $7 million for the race as of the end of June, and while his third-quarter numbers have not yet been released, Rollins said at a fundraiser this week in Rancho Mirage that he expected to hit $10 million after they were announced. He predicted his quarterly numbers would be as big as what he raised for the entire 2022 cycle.
Rollins also has the largest active volunteer base for a House race in the country, according to his field organizer, and will start canvassing every day in the district by the end of the month.
The district has a jaggedy W shape, and while much is made of Palm Springs and the desert cities, about 80 percent of the district’s population is in the western section, including Corona, Menifee, and Lake Elsinore. Turnout in that area lagged in 2022 (Rollins won the eastern Coachella Valley portion by around 20 points). That’s where the campaign is focusing its efforts.
“There are really significant reforms that the next Congress can make,” Rollins told me. “But it takes actually electing people who care.”
