Actress Jane Fonda and Wendy Schmidt, wife of Google co-founder Eric Schmidt, are bankrolling a campaign to block a popular ballot measure that would cut red tape on housing construction in a state where the median home just hit a record $930,000.
The two women launched their "No on 45" campaign in Sacramento on Wednesday, rallying opposition to Proposition 45, a measure that would limit environmental reviews and court-imposed delays on housing, infrastructure, water, healthcare, and clean energy projects across California. Fonda, 88, and Schmidt, 71, are working through Clean and Healthy California, an environmental PAC that Schmidt seeded with more than $5 million and that has poured $7 million since June into defeating the measure.
They are fighting a reform that 73 percent of California voters support, according to the Public Policy Institute of California, including 80 percent of Democrats and 61 percent of Republicans. And they are doing it from some of the most expensive residential real estate in Los Angeles.
Schmidt purchased the 100-plus-room Spelling estate, known as the Manor, in the Holmby Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles in 2025 for roughly $100 million. The New York Post reported the property has been described as bigger than the Taj Mahal. Fonda lives in a $6 million Century City home.
Between them, the two women occupy real estate worth north of $100 million while leading a campaign that critics say will keep California's housing costs crushing working families.
Matthew Fleming, a fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, did not mince words about the contradiction:
"It is hypocritical that some of these people are really, really wealthy and have their own palaces secured but don't want housing for anyone else."
California already ranks first in the nation for rental costs. Renters need to earn $52.79 per hour to afford a typical two-bedroom home costing $2,745 per month, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. The median home price hit a record $930,000 in May, per the National Association of Realtors.
Prop. 45 targets the California Environmental Quality Act, CEQA, the state's landmark environmental review law. Governor Ronald Reagan first enacted CEQA in the 1970s to protect California's natural environment. Over the decades, however, the law has become a procedural obstacle course that housing advocates, developers, and even some Democratic lawmakers say drives up the cost of building anything in the state.
Democratic Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, a Prop. 45 supporter, has pointed to a case that captures the problem. She alleged that a solar company spent 12 years preparing a 1,100-page environmental review and obtaining 72 permits from 28 different agencies, all to build a single transmission line. That is the kind of regulatory gridlock Prop. 45 aims to reduce.
Supporters of the measure say CEQA reviews add enormous costs to construction projects, and those costs land on renters and homebuyers who can least afford them. The California Chamber of Commerce is among the measure's biggest backers, and a political committee called Building a Better California, backed by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, has contributed $10 million to the pro-Prop. 45 campaign.
That creates an unusual split inside Silicon Valley's billionaire class. Brin, who co-founded Google alongside Eric Schmidt's former partner Larry Page, is funding the campaign to pass the housing reform. Schmidt's wife is spending millions to stop it.
Governor Gavin Newsom has signed bills in recent years to exempt certain projects, such as urban infill developments, from lengthy CEQA reviews, but those carve-outs have done little to move the needle on housing affordability.
Fonda cast her opposition in environmental terms. In a June statement, she said:
"This measure would gut the law that stands between reckless development and the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the health of our communities."
She added that her coalition was "united and prepared to win this fight."
A spokesperson for the No on 45 campaign echoed the framing in an email, calling Prop. 45 a "corporate-backed Polluting Projects Proposition" and arguing it would "fast-track projects like data centers that decimate the health and safety of our communities." The spokesperson said the opposition coalition includes more than 270 organizations, "working families, environmental justice groups, nurses, doctors and the California Democratic Party."
But Fleming, the Pacific Research Institute fellow, pushed back on that characterization. He called Prop. 45 "a pretty modest reform to CEQA" and noted that the same environmental groups and labor unions fighting it have blocked reform at every turn without offering any alternative solution to the housing crisis.
"They've opposed CEQA reform at all turns, nor have they provided any solution to the housing crisis."
Fonda and Schmidt are not alone in the opposition. The Building and Construction Trades Council, a progressive union, has contributed more than $1 million across two associated committees to defeat the measure. Billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs and venture capitalist John Doerr have also provided funding to Clean and Healthy California, the PAC leading the opposition, though the group's earlier work focused on fighting oil drilling in California.
Fleming argued that labor unions have historically used CEQA lawsuits as leverage, a dynamic that gives organized labor a financial incentive to preserve the current system regardless of what it does to housing costs.
The No on 45 campaign spokesperson dismissed the housing argument entirely: "This isn't about affordable housing, and Californians are smart enough to see through that."
Seventy-three percent of voters disagree. And those voters include overwhelming majorities of both parties, the kind of bipartisan consensus that rarely emerges in California politics.
The core tension in this fight is not complicated. California has the highest rental costs in the country, a record-high median home price, and an environmental review process that even some Democratic lawmakers admit has become a bureaucratic obstacle to building. A bipartisan supermajority of voters wants reform.
Standing against them is a coalition bankrolled by some of the wealthiest people in America, people who will never compete for a two-bedroom apartment at $2,745 a month, never spend 12 years waiting for a permit, and never feel the squeeze that CEQA's delays impose on ordinary Californians trying to find a place to live.
When the people leading the charge to block affordable housing live in a 100-room mansion and a $6 million home, the argument sells itself, no matter how many environmental talking points they wrap it in.
