As Tom Steyer amassed billions of dollars by leading a wildly successful San Francisco hedge fund, he did what many wealthy Californians do. He scooped up luxury homes.
His collection looks as if it were ripped from the pages of a glossy real estate magazine. He owns side-by-side, cliff-top mansions in San Francisco with sweeping views of the Golden Gate Bridge, and a 1909 classical home two miles away in a gated community dotted with palm trees and security guards’ vehicles.
Mr. Steyer also owns a $2 million condo in a downtown San Francisco high-rise that features views of the City Hall dome. Another home is just steps from the Pacific Ocean in Stinson Beach, north of the city in Marin County.
About an hour’s drive south of San Francisco, in a coastal farming town called Pescadero, he purchased 11 parcels of land, including six single-family homes and two mobile homes, to create an 1,800-acre, grass-fed cattle ranch, which he named TomKat after himself and his wife, Kat Taylor.
His properties aren’t confined to the Golden State. He owns a home on the Nevada shore of Lake Tahoe and an apartment on New York City’s Fifth Avenue, plus a separate unit there that is referred to on the deed as a “maid’s room.” Records show that Mr. Steyer and his entities appear to own more than a dozen homes.
This might be customary for billionaires in California, where San Francisco has an exclusive Billionaires Row neighborhood, and where Palo Alto has compounds owned by Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Laurene Powell Jobs.
But it highlights a central tension of Mr. Steyer’s campaign that liberal voters have been wrestling with for months: Can they separate his personal wealth from his political policies?
Mr. Steyer, a Democrat, enters Tuesday’s primary as one of three leading candidates for governor. He would need to finish in the top two to advance to the general election.
On the campaign stump, he has cut a progressive path, telling voters that he will make California more affordable, reduce inequality and tax billionaires. His message is aimed at working-class Democrats who fear that they and subsequent generations are being priced out of California.
Yet it comes from a former hedge fund manager who in his personal life has combined parcels and owned multiple residences for part-time use. Some on the left, including prominent unions, have ignored his personal wealth. Others have struggled with it.
“If you are a housing advocate, as you say you are, why are you sitting on all these properties?” said Greer Stone, a Palo Alto city councilman who has pushed legislation to restrict billionaire compounds in his city. “I get frustrated by politicians who say one thing and then live very different lifestyles.”
Mr. Stone, a high school teacher who lives with his wife in an apartment, believes that when wealthy people buy multiple properties, it shrinks the housing stock and drives up prices for everybody else. He said that he still had not cast his ballot and did not particularly like any of the candidates for governor, feeling that Mr. Steyer’s real estate portfolio undercut his housing platform.
Mr. Steyer has spent $200 million of his own money on his campaign, a record sum that enabled him to quickly raise his profile in the nation’s most populous state, where it is difficult to reach voters in a fractured media landscape.
He has argued that his personal wealth frees him from being beholden to corporate interests. He has attacked the Democratic front-runner, Xavier Becerra, for relying on donations from Chevron and other companies.
Mr. Steyer has also said that his career managing a hedge fund has prepared him to help solve California’s housing problems. He argues that the state’s system for financing housing is too bureaucratic, and that he will transform it with the mind-set of “a smart investor.”
Mr. Steyer was not made available for an interview on his personal real estate holdings despite several requests this month.
On Wednesday, he went walking in Berkeley as part of his bus tour called “A California You Can Afford.” Accompanied by the city’s mayor, Mr. Steyer passed by small businesses, including a vegan doughnut shop and a co-working space for queer people. He posed for sidewalk selfies. And he fist-bumped a woman who had a “Defund Oligarchs” pin on her shirt.
Afterward, he allotted five minutes for reporters and took just one question about how he reconciles his housing platform with his personal property collection.
“I’m trying to make sure that all those properties are used,” he said. “Our job in all this stuff, including in units and houses, is to try to make sure that more people can live in the state of California, not to sit on property, but to make sure that we’re adding units so people can live here more easily.”
A New York Times reporter then asked about who lives in his side-by-side mansions in San Francisco. At that point, Lauren Hitt, a campaign spokeswoman, pushed her way between the reporter and Mr. Steyer and said the candidate was done taking questions.
The campaign later clarified the picture. Mr. Steyer and Ms. Taylor live in the spread, which is built across three lots and together has 20 rooms, in the Sea Cliff neighborhood. The Steyers have asked the city for permission to demolish one of the mansions to build a luxury home that would have 7,500 square feet of space over three levels. They would also excavate 1,400 cubic yards of earth to construct a large basement and build a cottage out back.
Dan Sider, chief of staff for the San Francisco Planning Department, said the city was waiting for Mr. Steyer to revise his plans before it issued permits for the work to begin.
The expanse overlooks China Beach, a cove used by Chinese fishermen during the Gold Rush, on the city’s northern waterfront. Sea Cliff has long been home to the rich and famous, including, at various points, the singer Linda Ronstadt, the comedian Robin Williams and Marc Benioff, the Salesforce chief executive.
Mr. Steyer uses the Stinson Beach home, worth $6 million, for his family’s personal use, according to his campaign. The same is true of his six-bedroom home in Lake Tahoe, worth $17 million, in the gated Glenbrook community that includes a golf course and tennis club. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. stayed in that lake home in 2023 on a weeklong vacation.
The campaign said that Mr. Steyer’s other properties were occupied, including rehabilitated homes that house as many as 25 people, mostly employees and their families, at TomKat Ranch. Ms. Taylor’s foundation runs the ranch and promotes environmentally sound land management techniques there.
The campaign said that a family friend was renting Mr. Steyer’s apartment in the Four Seasons Private Residences in downtown San Francisco, though his most recent statement of economic interest filed in March shows less than $500 in income from that unit.
In 2023, Mr. Steyer spent $14.3 million to purchase a seven-bedroom home in the Presidio Terrace neighborhood of San Francisco, which is gated and notes on signs out front that the street is private. He bought the home for one of his children, his campaign said, and they have a loan arrangement.
He bought the New York City apartment on Central Park — for $6.5 million in 2014 — for his brother, the campaign said. His brother purchased the $175,000 maid’s room in March and uses it as an office, according to the campaign.
Mr. Steyer has been endorsed by pro-housing groups, including YIMBY Action and the Abundance Network. They support building far more housing for people of all income levels by loosening rules that are used to restrict housing.
The groups have rallied behind Mr. Steyer for his pledge to build one million homes in California in four years and to make housing construction cheaper and faster by reducing permit hurdles and reforming zoning rules.
Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action, said in an interview that wealthy people owning multiple homes was just a small contributor to the state’s housing crisis — and that it was better that they own assets that are out in the open and taxable instead of hiding their wealth. She said restrictive local development rules were far more problematic.
“If we wanted to seize everyone’s second home and redistribute those homes, that would not move the needle,” she said. “You compare that to 40 years of Cupertino actively conspiring to block housing while adding thousands of jobs at Apple headquarters.”
Mr. Steyer has said he knows how to build a million new homes because he and Ms. Taylor co-founded Beneficial State Bank, which has financed 17,000 affordable housing units in two decades.
Mr. Steyer has also said he will make it harder for investment firms to buy houses. Yet Mr. Steyer himself is an investor in corporate-owned housing.
He has holdings in several real estate companies, as well as the Brookfield Asset Management company, which owns 19,000 single-family rental homes, according to the 95-page economic disclosure form he filed as a candidate.
Ms. Hitt said the Brookfield stock was in an account managed by an adviser and without input from Mr. Steyer.
Mr. Steyer’s campaign pointed out that Mr. Becerra, his chief Democratic rival in the race, also owned multiple properties. Mr. Becerra rents out a townhouse and a condominium in Sacramento and two houses in Los Angeles County. Mr. Becerra and his wife, Carolina Reyes, reported collecting $187,460 in rent for the four properties on their 2024 tax returns.
The real estate lobby is spending heavily to support Mr. Becerra and oppose Mr. Steyer in the governor’s race.
A major reason is the candidates’ diverging stance on policies that affect homeownership and housing, the California Association of Realtors said in a statement. The group wants to preserve the state’s landmark property tax law, as well as a policy that limits the types of properties that can be subject to rent control, and it says Mr. Becerra holds similar views.
Mr. Steyer has campaigned on raising commercial property taxes, capping rent increases and preserving local rent control ordinances. His platform, the Realtors group said, “undermines housing affordability and discourages new construction.”
At China Beach on Wednesday, just below Mr. Steyer’s mansions, Dennis Cabral, 73, paused his daily bike ride to discuss his indecision over the governor’s race.
“Steyer seems like an out-of-the-box kind of guy,” Mr. Cabral said, “but billionaires don’t exactly talk my language.”
Mr. Cabral said he taught preschool and kindergarten for 40 years before retiring. He can only stay in San Francisco, he said, because he has lived in the same rent-controlled apartment for many years.
Danny Hakim contributed reporting. Georgia Gee contributed research.
