The former Fox News host and adviser to ex-British prime minister David Cameron lives in Atherton, California, the most expensive ZIP code in the US. He’s married to Rachel Whetstone, a Silicon Valley powerhouse who joined a local campaign against multifamily housing in their own exclusive town.Yet on a rainy night earlier this year in San Francisco, Hilton was hosting an event at Shack15, the swanky private club on the top floor of the Ferry Building,.
Hilton has his own plan: he proposes loosening environmental rules and capping the fees developers pay to towns and cities as a way to bring housing within reach for more people.“I remember that incredible feeling of walking into the apartment I bought in London the first time – that I owned it with my money,” he told the assembled tech workers and professionals at Shack15. “That feeling is just being robbed of this generation.”.
The soaring prices have long undermined California’s historic image as a land of opportunity for people from all walks of life. The share of California adults who owned their own home was less than 44 per cent in 2021, the UC Berkeley Terner Centre for Housing Innovation said in a report. That was about 15 percentage points lower than in the rest of the US, the largest gap on record.