This story is part of How We Get By, a KQED series exploring how people are coping with rising costs in the Bay Area and California. Find the full series here.
California’s next governor will inherit an affordability crisis that defies easy fixes: housing costs that have outpaced incomes for years, electricity rates among the highest in the nation, and gas prices nearly $2 above the national average — all in a state whose economy remains the envy of the country.
Xavier Becerra, the former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary and a Democratic candidate for governor, rattled off some of the biggest cost pressures as he spoke to more than 300 people in a high school gym in Concord last month.
“The cost of affording a home, your health care, groceries, gasoline,” he said. “That cost of living crisis that we face here — it becomes existential.”
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