Californians tuning into the Democratic presidential debates over the past nine months have watched the shrinking field of candidates clash again and again over issues like health care, the economy, and who is best prepared to take on President Donald Trump.

But even as the state’s delegate-rich March 3 primary looms two weeks away — and millions of voters here already have their ballots — there has been far less focus on the issues that will most directly shape California’s future, from tackling our skyrocketing housing prices and fighting deadly wildfires, to dealing with Silicon Valley’s tech giants and reforming our legal immigration system.

Here’s a primer on what the presidential hopefuls have proposed on those crucial topics.

Housing affordability and homelessness

Housing has long been ignored on the national political stage, but a number of candidates have rolled out sweeping plans to deal with the escalating housing prices and staggering homelessness that have struck cities across the country.

Experts say building more affordable housing is a key to lowering housing costs in places like California — and several candidates would invest huge federal sums to do so. Sen. Bernie Sanders would go the furthest, proposing an investment of $2.5 trillion over 10 years to build and rehabilitate nearly 10 million affordable homes over the next decade. That’s a staggering amount, considering the U.S. is building about 1.3 million housing units a year — period.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren would invest $500 billion, in what the accounting firm Moody’s found would create more than 3 million new affordable housing units and reduce rents by 10 percent. Former hedge fund chief Tom Steyer would spend $470 billion.

“The solutions and numbers may feel very big, and even overwhelming, but this is the scale of the problem,” said David Zisser, the associate director of the affordable housing advocacy group Housing California. “I suspect that $2.5 trillion (that Sanders is proposing) is probably about right.”

Not surprisingly, the party’s most progressive candidates would fund their fix by taxing the rich. Warren would expand the estate tax, while Sanders would use a wealth tax on the richest 0.1 percent of Americans. His plan also calls for a 25 percent house-flipping tax on non-owner-occupied property sold within five years of purchase, and a 2 percent tax on the value of vacant homes.

Experts warn throwing money at affordable housing won’t go that far without also changing local zoning rules that limit where apartment buildings can be built. Warren, Steyer and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg would give grants to cities that reform those zoning practices, while South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sanders would use a stick instead of a carrot, making federal housing or transportation funds to cities contingent on zoning reform.

Other candidates take a different tack by focusing on renters, with proposals from Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Bloomberg, Buttigieg, Sanders and others to greatly increase the availability of housing vouchers — federal funding helping low-income people pay their rent. And Bloomberg, Buttigieg and Klobuchar would expand tax credits that encourage developers to build affordable housing.

In one of the most drastic proposals, Sanders has called for a national rent-control law capping annual rent increases at 3 percent or 1.5 times the rate of inflation — more stringent than a similar California law passed last year — even though some experts warn that would stifle new housing construction. None of the other candidates support that idea.

But they do offer a variety of unique proposals. Buttigieg and Sanders have endorsed a program in which the federal government would give grants to cities to purchase abandoned or foreclosed homes and give them to low-income people who live in historically redlined or racially segregated areas. After 10 years of living in the home as their primary residence, the “homesteader” would fully own the property.

Former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign says he would focus on policies that get homeless people into homes as quickly as possible instead of making shelter a condition of staying sober or participating in other programs. And Warren would deny federal grants to police departments that arrest homeless people for living on the streets.

All of the candidates would go further than Trump, who has talked tough about cracking down on homelessness in California without laying out many specifics, cut funding for public housing repairs in his proposed budgets, and pushed state and local governments to cut regulations that get in the way of building affordable housing.

Fighting wildfires

All of the candidates have outlined policies to slash U.S. carbon emissions and fight climate change. But some also have focused on what the federal government can do to support California and other wildfire-prone Western states facing increasingly deadly and costly wildfires — many of which were sparked by damaged power lines from PG&E and other utilities.

The president can play a big role in fighting wildfires in the state because 57 percent of California forests are owned and managed by the feds. Ken Pimlott, a former Cal Fire chief, said the federal government should be investing more on fire prevention efforts, instead of just supporting the state after huge fires break out.

“Historically it has been state and local governments working in these areas — but with the size of the problem we’re facing, this is clearly a federal issue too,” Pimlott said.

Steyer — the only Californian still in the race — has called for spending a total of $130 billion on forest health and fire safety as well as other agricultural policies. The fires that have devastated communities around California “serve as a reminder of how uncertain our future will be if we don’t address the climate crisis immediately,” Steyer said.

Bloomberg has come out with the most specific plan, calling for doubling federal funding to $10 billion to manage forests and to help communities protect themselves against fires, with half of that going to forest restoration and mitigation work. He would also increase FEMA funding for fireproofing homes.

Sanders is the only candidate who’s called for a public takeover of the California utility giant Pacific Gas and Electric Co., criticizing the company for prioritizing corporate payouts over fire safety in an online video ad released last week.

Warren, Bloomberg, and Klobuchar have called for federal investments in microgrid technology — energy systems disconnected from the main electricity grid — which experts say can help reduce fire risk and avoid the blackouts that plagued Northern California during last year’s fire season.

Several of the candidates would start new programs to put more people to work defending against fires. Bloomberg calls for a “Wildfire Corps,” a team of thousands of workers who would be trained in leading fire resilience work. Steyer has a similar proposal for a “Civilian Climate Corps.”

Trump has urged California to improve its forest management — memorably, calling for the state to “rake” its forests — and approved disaster relief funds for communities devastated by fires. But he’s done little to change the federal government’s approach to wildfires.

Regulating Big Tech companies

The Democratic candidates agree that tech giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple have too much power. But they’re divided on what to do about it.

Two contenders — Warren and Sanders — have endorsed breaking up those companies, in a seismic shift for Silicon Valley. Warren has championed the idea, laying out a plan to break up companies with revenue of more than $25 billion that offer online marketplaces while participating on those platforms, like Amazon selling its own products that compete with other vendors using its site.

That would bring balance to an industry where a few companies have “bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else,” Warren argues in her plan.

The other candidates have called for a variety of new regulations on the tech industry and said they’d be open to breaking up companies in some cases — but none would go as far as Warren or Sanders.

Biden said he would let the Justice Department, “not politics,” decide which antitrust cases to bring. Bloomberg has said Warren and Sanders don’t “know what they’re talking about” on the issue, although he’d be open to some more limited breakups. And Klobuchar said in an interview she favored a broader revamp of U.S. antitrust laws that went beyond a “bumper sticker solution.”

Several candidates have also called for amending or ending laws related to online misinformation. Warren has proposed “tough civil and criminal penalties” for people who knowingly share false information about when and how to vote in U.S. elections.

Currently, under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, social media companies aren’t legally responsible for content their users post. Biden has called for repealing that law, which would lead to a massive shift in tech policy, while Bloomberg has suggested he wants to amend it.

And many of the candidates have called for new regulations on data privacy, although there are few specifics. Buttigieg wants to pass a federal privacy law that requires companies to limit and protect the user data they collect, while Klobuchar has suggested taxing companies that exploit user data.

What about Trump? He has sounded off about bias among the big tech companies, and his Department of Justice has launched a major investigation into whether the firms have pushed anticompetitive policies.

Legal immigration and H-1B visas

All of the candidates have opposed Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants and called for an end to practices like separating migrant families at the border. But there’s been far less conversation about reforming the legal immigration system, even though the large majority of immigrants in California and around the country enter the country legally.

Only a few of the candidates have weighed in on the issue of H-1B visas — the program that lets highly skilled foreigners work in the U.S., and has helped Silicon Valley companies recruit hundreds of thousands of employees. The program has faced uncertainty under Trump, and critics say it allows outsourcing companies to replace American workers with lower-paid foreigners.

Bloomberg and Steyer support raising the annual 85,000 cap on H-1B visas — a limit that’s reached within days of applications opening each year. Klobuchar has also introduced legislation in the Senate to more than double the number of visas available.

They would all pair those increases with reforms to the system such as mandating higher wages to ensure U.S. workers aren’t displaced. Bloomberg is also proposing a “startup visa” for international entrepreneurs, similar to a program in Canada.

“Whether they are starting businesses in Silicon Valley or on Main Street, job-creating immigrants should be welcomed to the U.S. and not sent away to our competitors,” the former mayor says in his plan.

Sanders’ campaign said he would require employers to pay substantially higher wages for H-1B visa-holders, and make them portable between jobs “so workers are not trapped at a sponsoring employer.” He would also put in place tougher enforcement standards to ensure H-1B visa holders aren’t replacing American workers.

In another reform, Buttigieg, Sanders and Steyer said they’d allow the spouses of H-1B visa holders to work — a direct contrast with the Trump administration, which is moving to revoke spouses’ work authorization.

Beyond H-1B visas, Biden and Bloomberg would both get rid of caps that limit how many employment-based green cards are given out each year to citizens of any one country, which have led to huge backlogs for immigrants from China and India. They’d also set up procedures to adjust the number of employment visas available based on unemployment and other economic conditions in the U.S.

That’s a smart idea for modernizing our immigration policy, said Sarah Pierce, an analyst with the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute in Washington.

“We need a system that’s dynamic and responds to the market, instead of this ridiculous system that’s been set in statute for decades,” she said. “The process should be a lot more thoughtful.”