Factually! with Adam Conover - Who Caused the Housing Crisis with Jerusalem Demsas

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

America is in the middle of a massive housing crisis, with a shortage of 4 to 7 million homes compared to the demand. The solution seems simple—just build more homes—but getting there is a lot trickier than it sounds. This week, Adam sits down with journalist Jerusalem Demsas, author of On the Housing Crisis: Land, Development, Democracy, to break down the real reasons behind the housing shortage and explore what we can actually do to get more people into homes. Find Jerusalem's book at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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to receive $40 off. That's code factually at joinmochi.com. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's all right. That's OK.

I don't know anything. Hello, and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, everybody needs a place to live. It's a necessity of life. But as just about everyone in America knows, we are in the middle of a housing crisis.

Housing is simply way too expensive for almost everyone. Over three quarters of American households cannot afford the median home price. And this is no surprise since wages are not keeping pace with home prices at all. The price of homes has risen more than twice as much as wages since just 2000. And this burden, like all economic burdens, falls the hardest on poor people. Of course, in LA where I live, more than 80% of people at or below the poverty line are spending more than half of their income on housing.

Half, more than half of every dollar they earn goes to just having a fucking roof over their heads. Nationally, we are between four and seven million homes short of the demand for people just having this basic necessity. So why can't we just, you know, build the homes that people want, that people need, the homes that people need to live in? What is stopping us from fixing the biggest, most obvious problem in American society today?

Well on the show today we have an incredible guest who is going to answer that question and tell us how we can actually solve it. But before we get into it, I just want to remind you, if you want to support the show directly, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show,

ad free, and a bunch of other wonderful community features as well. I also have a new standup special out. It's called Unmedicated. It's a brand new hour of stand-up comedy. You can watch it at dropout.tv. I hope you do. I'm so proud of it and I'd love for you to see it. If you want to come see me do stand-up live on the road, guess what? I am on tour right now. Coming up soon, I'm headed to Baltimore, Maryland, Portland, Oregon, not Maine. That'll be a different time. Portland, Oregon this time, Seattle, Portland, Oregon, not Maine, that'll be a different time, Portland, Oregon this time,

Seattle, Denver, Austin, Batavia, Illinois, San Francisco, Toronto, Chicago, Boston, and Providence. Come see me, head to adamconver.net for tickets and tour dates. I'd love to see you there and give you a hug after the show. And now let's get to this week's episode. My guest today is one of the very smartest journalistic voices on the housing crisis.

Her work details how we built the crisis ourselves from our own policies over the course of decades, and more importantly, how we can fix it. Her name is Jerusalem Demzes. She's a writer for the Atlantic, the host of the Good on Paper podcast, and the author of the new book on the housing crisis, Land, Development, and Democracy.

I know you're gonna love this interview. Please welcome Jerusalem Dempsis. Jerusalem, thank you so much for being on the show and welcome. Thank you for having me. You have a new book out called On the Housing Crisis. I love talking about the housing crisis. I feel like people are finally talking about it

on a national level. First of all, how bad is it out there? What is the marker of the severity of the housing crisis for you? Yeah. I mean, um, it's very, very bad. I think that it's, it's often quite difficult to quantify the problem here. I mean, we have estimates like 4 million homes shortage that have been floating around. You've seen since the pandemic, I mean, highest home prices, um, of all time, you know, in some markets, topping a million for the pandemic, I mean, highest home prices of all time, you know, in some markets

topping a million for the average for the new home that's sold. I mean, you know, housing a home, the average house in the US, it used to be, you know, $300,000, $400,000. You could imagine someone getting into that house as like a 25-year-old, a 27-year-old, a 30-year-old. I mean, you're seeing numbers in some states where people are expecting to be permanent renters, even if they don't want to be. And even as they're renters, they're seeing their rents rise to astronomical degrees. The number of people who are spending more than 30%,

40% of their income on rent is higher than it's ever been. So these are the kinds of markers you can see that are causing pain. But for me, I mean, often these sorts of indicators can lag the real world stuff that you see all the time, not just as a journalist, but as a regular person. I remember my sister, she moved to New York to go to college. And when she was done, she moved into an apartment and she was making a really good salary. And particularly when you compare it

to people who are really struggling. And yet I remember visiting her and going, you know, this is not a building that's up to code. Like they had to leave the building multiple times because of, you know, mold issues and they had a, you know, a pretty bad landlord. And at the same time, I'm like, this is what's happening at a part of the market where someone's making a decent salary. This is what's happening when someone is gone to college, like has a good job. When you see that kind of pain point happening at that level, it really just speaks to what's going on downstream for people who aren't college educated, who don't have good careers,

who haven't been able to access economic opportunity in the same way. I mean, that's when you really know that there's a lot of ways that people are being blocked out of, you know, economic opportunity. Yeah, and it's changed over my lifetime, I feel like. I mean, it's not like rent was super cheap. When I got out of college in 2004, 2005,

I was living in Brooklyn, it was still pretty expensive, but now, you know, you go look at apartments and there's like lines out the door to get apartments. People are playing crazy broker fees, et cetera. Now that's New York. New York's always kind of had a crazy housing market. But I also remember around while all my friends moved to LA, everyone was like, Oh, it's so much cheaper in LA. Couple of years later, nobody says that.

It's actually the most expensive housing market in the country. If you compare it to median income, at least that's a stat I read recently, it might've changed in recent years. Um, but now you're, uh, what's really interesting is, I travel as a standup comic, and now people are saying it in every single city. When I go to like Nashville and Austin, people are like, oh, no one can afford to live here anymore.

Now those are boom cities. But I've even been to like, I don't know, Indianapolis, places like that. People are starting to talk about how unaffordable housing is everywhere. And that simply, that wasn't really the case like as recently as 15 years ago, right? Totally.

I mean, this is why I think the conversation has become so supercharged. The pandemic really did a lot of this. So I think that what happened before the pandemic is that a lot of federal policy makers would just sort of say things like, yeah, okay, New York's expensive. San Francisco's expensive.

Seattle's expensive, we don't really care, those people make a lot of money, that's not really a federal issue, that's really kind of like these local areas, like that's their problem. And then what you saw during the pandemic, and now we know, is that just a small number of people, due to remote work largely,

moving to these secondary and tertiary markets caused a really fast appreciation, right? And like Idaho is another place I think you're hearing a lot of this pain. A place where you'd expect to see a lot of affordable housing. I mean, Utah, these places that people from the Western States are moving to. And then on the East Coast,

people who are moving to Florida, people who are moving to like Sunbelt States and Georgia, places like that. I mean, that demand pressure really indicated to people how close they were to experiencing the kind of run-up in prices that we're used to seeing in superstar cities on the coasts. And so, yeah, I totally agree with you. It's so wild.

I mean, the most interesting anecdote I heard during the pandemic was graffiti on the walls in Idaho where people were saying, go home Californians, because they were upset about rising home prices. And so yeah, it's definitely become an issue that's beyond all of these normal, traditional expensive cities. Well, and it also violates a very traditional notion of what it means to be an American

or a middle-class American. Like, home ownership was simply one of the things you were granted by having a living at all in our grandparents' and parents' days. And that is, I think, really sharply felt by people of my generation and younger. People are like, I will never be able to own a home. Some of them don't even say it.

They're just like, I hang out with friends of mine who are in their early 40s, and they're like, yeah, I'm gonna stay in this apartment till I die cause I have a good setup here and I like the landlord. They're not even considering buying a home. And so that's a really big generational shift in America that is like, I feel like it's giving a lot of people vertigo. Like it's a little hard to process.

Yeah, I mean, I'm one of those people who is like relatively agnostic on whether or not people are renters or homeowners. Like I'm personally a renter and I think that itostic on whether or not people are renters or homeowners. I personally am a renter and I think that if it works for a situation, you have a good landlord, it's working for you because of what you want your life to be. Absolutely. Totally. But I do think what's really harmful is there are a lot of people who really want to be

homeowners and are being locked out of it. And you're right, that is a real shift in how people expected their lives to go. Everyone's heard from our grandparents' generation this idea that you're 25 and you own a home. I think it must have been like 22. My dad first asked me when I was going to buy property and I was like, not anytime soon. I don't know what you're talking about. And so that's the kind of thing that people are really used to pushing for, for us to see their kids as living the good life. It's that you've settled down, you've been, you've bought this house, like that means you're gonna be safe.

You're gonna have this store of value, you're gonna have this store of wealth. That has been something that is foundational to America for, you know, at least a hundred years. Yeah, I mean, I, I didn't feel it in my life. Like my partner and I bought a home a number of years ago, but we were only able to do so in Los Angeles because both of us created successful television shows

that ran for three or more years. And that is what we had to do in order to purchase a small starter townhouse, right? In Los Angeles. And that's the American dream now, right? Star TV show. Yeah, exactly. Well, and also now we can't move

because the prices of everything else have gone up and the TV industry isn't doing as well as it was five years ago. And, but in our cohort, we're enormously fortunate because we were able to even do that much. And so it really is, I don't know, it feels like a shocking change, but it also feels somewhat mysterious

because when you look at prices of other things in America, the price of TVs has gone down, the price of TVs has gone down. The price of food has gone down. The price of lots of other things have gone up. Certain things, medical care, education, and then especially housing have gone up, up, up. Today we're talking about housing. Why is it the case that housing has become

so unaffordable in America? Yeah, so I think the primary story here, and of course there's a lot of things that go into the cost of a house. I mean, it can be the construction cost of a house. It can be things that are happening on the financing side, what's going on with the interest rates. All of these things play a role. But the real large problem here has to do

with the supply of housing that exists, particularly in the places where people want to live for good jobs. So in the post-World War II era, we had a similar housing shortage. The vets were coming back home from the war. We hadn't really built since before the Great Depression. You had a massive shortage of housing.

The federal government invests in the national highway system. And private developers start building a bunch of homes. You build homes everywhere. It becomes kind of like the front page of newspapers as all of these new developments, these suburban developments going up. And that's kind of the prosperity that the baby boomers got to take advantage of.

They were able to buy those homes, they had a bunch of kids, and now millennials are adults and are mad at them for various reasons. And so the difference now, right, is we similarly saw a lot of these suburban areas really develop, but what happened is people got upset about that development. Some for very good reasons,

people were concerned about conservation, I mean, they were worried about environmental damage. Others for reasons that I like to always say, people think the last home that should have been built is their own. So that became a really animating belief and principle for a lot of people that once their home had been built, now it was time to levy a lot of scrutiny onto all new construction. Did we make sure that that house was built and could we turn that into a park instead? But did they consider all the trees? Did we make sure it's super affordable?

All of these questions, which can be asked in good good faith are often not being asked in good faith. We developed a system in which every new house might have to come under scrutiny for whether or not it should be developed. That really, really raises the cost of development, but it also means less things actually are built. I think often baby boomers will complain. They'll say, well, the problem is millennials, they want these big homes. Why can't they go get a starter home? But what we know is that starter homes don't actually exist anymore. These 1,500 square foot homes, which used to be the way that people entered in the homeownership

ladder and then they might trade up later in life, they've become illegal. In a lot of parts of the country, it was only legal to build large single family homes. And when you make a house bigger, it's gonna be more expensive. And so developers are often constrained from even following the demand pressure that a lot of millennials would be happy for.

A smaller single family home, we don't need a big yard, you're just starting out in the world, you don't need something massive. Those types of homes are illegal in large parts of the country. If you go look up your own city's zoning code, you might find that in large swaths of your city, the smallest home that can be built is on a 5,000 or even 10,000 square foot lot. That's so much bigger than what people were buying into when we saw the boom in the post war era.

Why these regulations exist are for complicated reasons. A lot of them have to do, I think, with an old time desire to maintain separation of different classes. People really wanted to have neighborhoods for rich people and neighborhoods for middle class people and for poor people separated. And the easiest way to do that is to say, OK, well,

anyone can live here as long as you can afford a million dollar house, which, of course, means not everyone can live there. And some of the reason has to do with we've developed notions about the American dream, about home ownership, about what a home should look like. And we've said that doesn't include a duplex. That doesn't include a townhouse. That doesn't include smaller homes. And, you know, it's funny because most of our oldest cities are developed on these smaller homes. And it's funny because most of our oldest cities are developed on these smaller homes. You go to a Pittsburgh or a Lancaster, Pennsylvania,

and you see these homes that were developed before the automobile, and there are tons of row houses. Philadelphia is like this. I mean, you even go and see homes in San Francisco. A lot of the housing in New York City is not even legal to build today. You cannot build those buildings anymore. These iconic brownstones, these iconic apartment buildings, a lot of them would fail if a developer tried to build that today.

Really? I think, yeah, I think the biggest thing is just this question of when you make every single, when you make it really, really hard to develop new housing, you're just gonna make it more expensive for people. Yeah, so in your view, the primary cause is we have too many people saying, hey, don't build that house, like too many people complaining,

shutting down development, and going further than that and putting zoning laws in place to make sure that the kind of, simply the type of homes they don't prefer aren't built like the, you know, they'd say, I don't want a townhouse in my neighborhood, that's too many people, I'd rather, you know, only live around

other big million dollar homes. And that's the main driver of housing prices. So I think NIMBYs, which, I mean, not in my backyard, so folks who kind of complain and say, no, you can't live in my neighborhood, they do have a significant impact, but often what's more impactful is what the default is, right? Without any NIMBYs, right? Without any opposition, what does your city allow to happen? What are your city allowed to be built? As long as the developers following all the safety rules. Often it's very little. You can develop a large single family home on large plots of land, so it's something that's really expensive. But if you want to do anything

else, you need to go to city hall, you need to ask for special permission, you need to ask for an exemption. That's already a lot of work that costs a lot of money. That means even if you get a yes, that new property, that new building is going to be more expensive because they've had to factor in lawyer costs, They've had to factor in the delays to construction. Then when you factor in that there might be some opposition, then it becomes even more expensive for a developer. I've been in local government meetings all around the country where developers will come and they'll say,

listen, we're putting a third of this land for parkland. We're developing trees. We're reserving this for affordable housing. We're reserving this for home ownership opportunities for people in the community. trees. We're going to be reserving this for affordable housing, reserving this for home ownership opportunities for people in the community. I mean, developers, no one needs to defend people who are really rich and who are making houses, but you often see them really making an attempt to meet the needs of the community and still getting rebuffed or seeing

the cost of their units rise. And then people complain, well, developers are only, you know, making units for rich people. And it's like, well, why is that happening? Like, why is the market demand for middle income Americans not being met? And I think a large part of that answer is that local governments have not really cared about the effect of their policies

on the larger housing market. That's really interesting. The local governments haven't cared about the effect of their policies on larger housing market. That's really interesting. The local governments haven't cared about the effect of their policies on larger housing market. In that they're what? They're just catering to the sort of vocal subset of affluent homeowners who probably vote a lot, donate a lot, and really don't want

that apartment building to go in. They're not looking at how it serves the entire population of the city that they live in. Exactly, and I mean, at some level it's pretty rational, right? And often when I make this critique of local government, people bristle a bit because they think I'm like insulting the people who work there. It's not even about whether or not the people who work in local government are good or not. Most of the people I've met in local government who work there are extremely hardworking. They care a lot about the issue. They want to help their community. They

would never want to be seen as people who are perpetuating a housing crisis like this. But the problem is, right, and I like to use this example, like, you know, I was in Arlington, Virginia, which is a suburb of Washington, DC. I was in a, you know, local zoning board meeting that they were having about changing the rules to make it easier to build duplexes in the area. This is a very dense part of the country. This is a place where a lot of people live. It's a fast growing region. And people were fighting back against it.

And what ended up happening, what ends up happening is when I was talking to people who are opposed is that they don't see themselves as part of the broader Washington DC housing market. All they care about is what happens in Arlington on my block. And that can be very rational, right? You know, the people, the city of Arlington, the people of Arlington, the county of Arlington, like these are, they're tasked with caring about the people in their jurisdiction. But the effects of their actions go way beyond that, right? If someone doesn't build

a house in San Francisco, that actually affects the entire country. Because if someone who would have moved San Francisco no longer does so, where do they stay? How does that affect that housing market? Who else would have moved into that home? When you see the housing chain as encompassing an entire country, and particularly an entire state or region,

then you can start to see how these small individual decisions to build or to not build go well beyond the jurisdiction of a single local government. And it just is not in their purview. Like it's not possible for a local government to really attack this problem. Yeah, I mean, you're talking about Arlington, Virginia.

That's a suburb of DC. The people who live there all work for the federal government for the most part. But they work, a lot of them work in Washington, DC, which is not even in the same state. And then, you know, there's another suburb on the other side, that's another state, et cetera, Maryland, da da da da da.

And yes, this is like one sort of, you know, large metropolitan area that's split among three different state or state-like entities in the case of D.C. Same thing in New York with like New Jersey and, you know, Manhattan, et cetera. In Los Angeles here, we've got like the county is cut up into different cities,

each of which have their own rules. So I entirely get this problem that, so in your view, is there too much political power invested at the local level? Like when people are saying like, my community, my city, well actually, ooh, your city shouldn't be in charge of that. This needs to be decided by your state or on a larger level

because when you're too zoomed in, you end up, you know, creating these, these huge imbalances. Yeah, I mean, so I reported on a story a couple of years ago in Colorado where I was, you know, the governor of the state had been really focused on making it easier to build more housing. And at the very local hyper local level in Denver, just minutes from the governor's mansion, there were people

who had voted for Governor Jared Polis, who was the Democratic governor of Colorado. Yet they were pushing back against building this really big development that was going to be market rate housing, partially affordable housing, and on a defunct golf course. I remember asking people, like, hey, you voted for Jared Polis. You're about to vote in a mayoral election where the leading candidate, the guy who ended up winning, was very pro the development at the golf course, very pro more housing, building more housing. Yet, they at the very hyper local level, despite supporting both of these people, right? Were opposing this new development and they would oppose making it easier to build more housing.

And when you think about that, I mean, often people will just say like, people are hypocrites, right? Like that's what's going on here. They pretend like they wanna help the housing crisis, but all they really care about is their own selfish interests. I think this is like not the correct way to look at it. I think the correct way to look at it is when you ask people

political questions in specific arenas, you activate different parts of them. When you tell someone, hey, do you want a new development to exist there? Someone's like, I don't know. I feel like change is a lot. I don't really want to deal with that. I guess I'm opposed if I'm going to be saying anything about it.

But if you ask someone at the state level, hey, do you want the state government to engage in active planning to make sure that housing is affordable, that we need to build more starter homes, that we need to make it easier for people to access homeownership? They're like, yeah, I'm on board.

They'll even vote to tax themselves in order to build more affordable housing. And so the really fundamental question here is how are we asking people political questions? Because there's no choice, right? There's no choice between not building and building, right? If you are changing and not changing, right? If you choose not to build more housing, your community is going to change anyway. It'll just change for the worse. Like you'll be priced out, your kids will be priced out. Homelessness will be on the rise, which we've seen in places like Denver. People will, your city will literally

just get worse as a result. Framing it to people in a way that's actually true, where do you want to see this growth happen? What's really important to you to protect? Of course, we don't want to develop, make it impossible for people to ski or to hike in Denver. I mean, that would be ridiculous. We want to make sure there's parkland that's valuable to people.

But do you really care if a park is developed, a defunct, or defunct golf course is developed? Like, probably not. You don't really care about that. And so your question about this, this problem with, you know, too much local power, it's often a problem of where local governments are not capable of actually providing solutions to people. The city of Denver can't say, hey, I've made sure that the entire state of Colorado will protect parkland and we're just going to develop here in places where it's already urbanized. They can't make you that promise as a voter. All they can say is yes or no to this specific house, this specific apartment.

So that's why so much of the action has been moving to the state level, why you've seen so much legislation, I mean, not just in democratic states, but Montana where a Republican governor has been really active on this issue, Florida, Texas, these are states that have been growing and have been really concerned about what's gonna happen to them. They don't wanna turn to California. Right, well, living in California,

I see why you wouldn't want to, but California is a good example of exactly what you're talking about because we've had the state get much more aggressive about forcing cities to follow their own housing goals or the requirements that are put in them by the state. The state is making more regulations. You must build enough housing to accommodate

the number of people who are gonna live in your city. And you have richer cities like Santa Monica, cities like that, that are refusing to plan to build the housing. They say, fuck you to the state of California. And then the state says, fuck you back. And like, I believe what's happening is there are like some extremely large high rises going up

in some very wealthy parts of Santa Monica or other cities in California that were just automatically approved because the state, the city that is is refused to play ball with the state and approve a sort of reasonable development. It's like, all right, well, fuck you. Now you lost your ability to stop anything. And this giant building is going in,

which is kind of funny, watching them get their comeuppance that way. But it is really striking that probably the people who are angriest about this, those wealthy NIMBY homeowners, probably voted for the same people who are doing this to them on the state level. Pop quiz, how much of your personal data

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visit helloalma.com slash factually to get started and schedule a free consultation today. That's helloalma.com slash factually. When you talk about the two arenas that people are in, right, and people are in many more arenas than that, but in terms of housing, you know, they're thinking about the larger policy.

Do I want my state to govern? They're thinking about their local area. I don't like that new building going in. It really sounds to me like a war between the head and the heart. And you know, because everyone knows, oh yeah, the housing crisis is bad. We gotta do something to fix it.

But oh, I hate that new building in my neighborhood. And the heart seems in many ways more powerful. I mean, to me, this really seems to be a human issue where just in my own neighborhood, well, like I remember I used to do street engagement with a local homelessness coalition in my neighborhood. We would go out and do homelessness. You know, we'd bring water to folks, stuff like that.

And I was out with one of our like lead volunteers. This woman's incredible. She like ran, you know homeless housing She like turned part of her own home into homeless housing for people. She's great. We're driving around We see a new development. She goes. Oh, look at that thing. Look how ugly that building is that new development They're putting it and I was like that We need housing like you know better than anybody that we need This is like 80 units and like yeah sure

It's gonna go to rich people Maybe like a lot of the units are going to rich people rich people need somewhere to live and then if they live there They won't move and gentrify the poor neighborhood if they can just live in this is in Silver Lake This is like already a rich part of Los Angeles or it was gentrified ten years ago. You know now that's what it is So like it's so deep within us this hatred of change. Whenever anybody sees anything go up they go, ugh, look at that thing. It's ugly. I don't like it. It's too expensive. The neighborhood's changing. People are coming in. That's so powerful. Is that like what drives this, that emotion?

Sometimes it feels to me like it all comes back to that. Yeah, I mean, I think there's two things I wanna say to that. First is what you described there, right, is often not known to people. When they see developers building something new and it's just going to high-income yuppies, or it's going to extremely wealthy people

who can afford homes, it doesn't click for them how that affects the housing market. 90% of Americans live in private market housing. At some point, your house was new. When it was new, it was the new luxury home. Eventually, it filters down. I'm now living in a row house that's 100 years old. At some point, this was the nice house that everyone wanted to live in. And it has now been redeveloped, and it's now being rented to me from a homeowner who does not wanna sell their house yet. And so like that is accessible to me at a rent that is accessible to me,

not because it was built new for me, but because at some point it was built, and now it was available, given that the markets have shifted and changed a lot. And this has been mapped by economists. They've looked at the effect of new apartment buildings, luxury apartment buildings that are accessible to higher income people,

and what happens when they're built. And we see very clearly when you track the moving chain, like people who moved into that building, what do they move out of? And then who moves into their unit? And you can explicitly see that the person who empties that older unit, they make it available. They're freeing up space for someone who's lower down the income ladder and so on and

so forth. And that's why the affordable housing crisis is always most acute for the lowest income people because they're the ones who have been pushed out of every single housing opportunity. They've tripled up in these bedrooms and finally they're homeless on the street. I mean, that is what happens when you don't build enough at the top and end of the income ladder. And I think the best thing to think of is this rich people are always going to get theirs. They're always going to get theirs. The question is, is everyone else going to get theirs too? And when you make it a question of like, oh, we're only going to build for poor people, like rich people will take that house rather than be

on the street. You know what I mean? Like, I don't know what people think is going to happen. If I mean, in New York city, we see this so clearly. Why do you see extremely rich people by any country standards living in tiny shoebox apartments? People making well into the six figures living in homes without carbon monoxide alarms, without fire escapes. Why is that? That kind of housing, they've taken it over because there hasn't been enough built for them at their appropriate income level. And so that, I think that logic really isn't clear to people for a very good reason.

I think it's like kind of a complicated thing to think through. And so really proving that has been the economic push and the academic push on this issue for the last decade or so. But I think the second part of your question. Let me just say, I just want to share an anecdote, which is I saw a very good TikTok on this a couple years ago.

And I wish I could remember who it was. Someone had done a TikTok where they pointed at a new construction building in downtown Los Angeles. And they were like, oh, look at the gentrification building, like this big luxury high rise. And someone else followed up and said, look, you know what we should call these instead? We should call them yuppie fish bowls.

This is where we store the yuppies, this big, expensive luxury building downtown. So they don't move to like Cypress Park or another neighborhood that you don't want to be gentrified because they're going to move somewhere. Right. If they don't have some big fucking building with a pool and a gym in it, then they're going to go live in a shitty apartment in your neighborhood. And then they're going to be like, now I need a coffee shop. And now I need to like paint the door orange and all that shit. And so like we do need,

we gotta keep the rich assholes somewhere. And I'm sorry, please continue with your point. No, I think that that's like exactly right. I mean, this is why gentrification discourse can be so poisonous because, you know, people, cities want that growth. The city that's not growing is dying. I mean, that's like, if anyone's ever lived in a city that's seen population decline, it's like a horrible time.

People are really upset. Small businesses are failing. It really feels like all the young people are leaving. It's not a good place to live in. No one likes that. So cities want this population growth. They want the college graduates to come there. They want them to bring their dollars. And then when they're here, they don't bill for them. And they blame them for their housing crisis. And then it they're here, they don't bill for them. And then they blame them for their housing crisis. And then it becomes this massive, really toxic conversation where, you know who gets left out of that?

Like the really rich homeowners who get to pretend that they're not a part of gentrification. So I think that that's really, really harmful. We blame, the people who get blamed for gentrification is the 30 year old who's looking for a place to live. They're looking for their first house. They're looking for an apartment where they can raise a kid, whatever.

And they move to an apartment they can afford. They get all the blame and they're having an impact. And that's real. Who doesn't get blamed is the 60 year old who has a big fucking house and a big development and is like on the neighborhood council of Santa Monica or whatever. And has shut down 10 different apartment buildings

that that 30 year old didn't get to move to. Like that's, like everyone individually is just trying to find a place to live. And like that pointing the finger at people for their individual housing decisions is like really distracts us from talking about like the systemic fucking issues and who's really at fault for them.

Yeah, and I think this over focus on how the distribution of housing works often obscures that there's actually enough room to go around for everyone. There is enough space, there's enough places to build more housing that can accommodate everyone who wants to live in these cities. We used to do this. A lot of our cities now that are claiming there's a massive overgrowth, like Minneapolis, for instance,

they were bigger 60, 70 years ago. They were bigger at that point and were able to accommodate more people with cheaper housing. And so we are creating a problem. We're pretending like you have to fight over this one cookie, but no, you can just bake more cookies. Everyone can have a cookie. But I think on the central problem you're identifying about this fear of change, this sense that growth and change is bad, development is bad. This is something that really developed, as I mentioned, in the post-war era. America in the mid-century was excited to grow. It was so exciting to see new housing developments come up. People would be on the front page of newspapers, people would be like, wow, look at this beautiful new modular building. Like, people were excited

about that. That was something that was considered a positive, economic growth was a positive. And I think that one of the things that we really need to get back to is a feeling that that kind of growth can be inclusive of other people. Like, we've learned, no one's suggesting that we need to go back to the era when no one cared about whether you were creating problems for the environment. No one's suggesting that we shouldn't care about whether people of color are locked out of the housing market. Of course not. But the question is, how do we make people feel good about growth again? And I think it's really a virtuous cycle. When people are frustrated by a new construction, because construction's annoying. It can impede your day, your life. It can change the skyline.

There'll be some ugly buildings that go up. That will definitely happen. But when they feel generally that the growth in their city is benefiting them, there's good jobs coming in. Prices are reasonable. They don't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars a year for daycare.

All of these things rest upon a rising cost of housing. When homes are really expensive, everything's expensive because everyone has to pay higher and higher wages to make up for the fact that home prices are so high. And so as a result, your daycare is expensive, lawyers have to get more money, doctors have to make money, nurses have to make more money, teachers have to make more money, police officers have to make more money. Everyone has to make more and more money. And it's just like this vicious cycle of you're making more money just for it to be eaten up

by your landlord, to be eaten up by a property owner, to be eaten up by all these different rent seekers along the way. And that's not actually making anyone else happier. Yeah, it's really interesting that you say that, that you should want to live in a city where people are moving to the city, and the city is becoming more prosperous.

Because I think about LA, LA was, you know, for a hundred years, the ultimate boom city. You know, it was, LA literally advertised itself across the United States, moved to LA, there'll be an orange tree in your backyard, you'll pick it, it'll be beautiful. It was a fantasy, but it was literally a marketing campaign. There's a lot of great history done on it.

Now, and that was like a thing that people in LA liked about the city, right? It was a boom campaign. There's a lot of great history done on it. Now, and that was like a thing that people in LA liked about the city, right? It was a boom city. Now, when I go to places like Austin and Nashville, which have the boom city feel, Austin, especially all the tech money that's come in, et cetera, et cetera, people talk about it as something bad that has happened to the city. You know, I have to leave because all of this new economic activity has come in. All these new people are moving in and I can't live here anymore. Um, and that really indicates that something has gone very wrong, right? Like that shouldn't be how like more, more should be better, right?

Yeah. I mean, I think a few things. One is that when we've constrained growth so much, when it does happen, it's like really choppy, right? When you have a housing shortage of 4 million homes, I mean, letting loose development means a lot's gonna change at once. You want there to be kind of slow and steady growth, people can kind of feel it, it's happening manageably.

I mean, boom towns are great for a short period of time, but there's a lot of transaction costs to a bunch of construction happening. I get why people are frustrated by parts of it, but I always like for a short period of time, but there's a lot of transaction costs to a bunch of construction happening. I get why people are frustrated by parts of it, but I always like to say, everyone wants growth until they have it. You know what I mean? You go to cities like Detroit, they would beg to have the problems of a city that was growing at the rate of Los Angeles, of San Francisco.

And there's no, I think people imagine that there's some sort of stasis that you can just get to and then it's perfectly even. That's all that happens, right? But it just not existed. What we see in the development of urban economies is either you're attracting new people, you're attracting talent, you're attracting companies, or you're losing them. That's the kind of dynamic you have to understand is that you need to be a city that's pushing and pushing forward this growth this growth or the alternative is like really, really bad. And I think the other thing too is that we shouldn't forget that there's many ways to mitigate the problems of growth, right? There are ways that we have not done in many situations to make sure that when we make it possible for someone to develop, that they're not impacting really key historical or environmental sites that we really, really care about. So making it clear to people that the things that they're not impacting really key historical or environmental sites that we really care about.

Making it clear to people that the things that they love about their city will still remain, no one is suggesting that in DC we pave over the National Mall. No one wants to rig the country of Central Park. These are institutions that will remain and also reminding people of the history. There's this really great book I remember reading that changed my mind on this a lot. I'm not really an architecture person or art history person, anything like that at all. But this history professor at George Washington University, his name is Suleyman Osman, he wrote this book called The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn. And he talks about how those iconic brownstones that now are going for tens of millions of dollars, they were once considered

those tacky cookie cutter homes that were destroying the neighborhood aesthetic and the vibe of New York City. Yeah. So, I think it's really important to remember that these feelings about aesthetic primacy that you have about the current house you live in, that's not something that's stagnant. People will change their minds on that. And also what's often more important is, do people have shelter to begin with? Because that's gonna be more important

to the majority of people than what their house looks like. Well, and it's so frustrating when people say, you have these conversations, oh, there's new construction, I don't like it. Well, we do need more housing, right? You agree. Okay, yes, but why has it gotta be so ugly? Like sometimes I'm like, who gives a shit?

Like everything's ugly. The world is fucking ugly. It's all right to have a couple ugly buildings. And you know what? A hundred years ago, they were building ugly buildings too. And you know what? We knocked down the ugly ones. We kept the pretty ones.

It's fine. Like it's okay. Like it's not that big a fucking deal. Put up some string lights on the outside if you think it's so ugly. You can make it pretty later. Paint it pink. I don't care what the fuck you do.

People need a place to fucking live. It makes me mad. But I don't know. But also like on that, like you can have prettier buildings. Like developers can spend money making buildings more beautiful if they're already spending a bunch of money

just trying to get the house built to begin with. So if you really want there to be really cool architectural prowess that you're seeing in the new development industry, then you should want the cost to be lowered in other areas because making the reason why, I mean, those gentrification buildings you mentioned, the kind of like classic new,

like five over one building that you see in new cities, that's just the cheapest way to build housing. And if you made it any more expensive, you would literally just be pricing more and more people out of it. And by the way, that's like five over one is like a great pattern, right? For building a building,

because you've got commercial on the ground floor. You've got like four floors of housing. It's commercial and residential ideally, right? And that's like good, my understanding is, if you're trying to build a lot of new buildings, that's like, it creates walkability, yada, yada, yada. I wanna push on some of this a little bit though, because I'm sure some of our audience is like thinking of counter arguments

to some of what you're saying. I'd like to speak to some of it. First of all, the idea that, things were better off 50, 70 years ago, you did allude to the fact that that was the era of racist redlining. Right. You had plenty of local control over housing at that point. You know, you had zoning laws that prevented people of certain races from living in certain areas.

So there was plenty of local restriction on housing. And, you know, I'm of the belief that, you know, people are people and always have been. And so the sort of, I hate new stuff being built or whatever, that sort of shit that lurks within the human heart, surely some of that must have existed back then. So is it really the case that we can look at 70 years ago

and say, ah, the vibe was just better for building. And then at some point we all changed our minds and now we're all just more individually prejudicial towards new housing in a way that's hurtful. Like there's something about the argument that sounds right, but then there's some holes in it when I think about a little more deeply. What do you say? Yeah, no, I think it's important to dive into this. So I think a couple of things.

One is that the same exact, I mean, zoning gets invented after the Supreme Court decides in the 1910s that it's illegal to explicitly say black people can't live here, Chinese people can't live here, white people can't live here. You're not allowed to do that as a city anymore. So, zoning gets invented in order to make a facially constitutional way of discriminating based on race. So, in Atlanta, for instance, you have the whites only area just they just changed the name of the map to R1. And now it just looks like a technical thing like, oh, this is just R1. That's not whites only. That's just a different thing. That's a coding. So zoning is literally built out of exclusion on the basis of race. Of course, various reasons over the course of the 20th century, you have people of color are able to get more wealth.

Now, even if it's expensive, you still will see some sort of racial diversity. But class has still been able to be discriminated against. It is legal to say, unless you can buy into this property, you can't live here. Now, I think a couple of things are different between now and the post-war era. First is that in the post-war era, you're developing out often in places that are greenfield development. You're talking about places that have not been developed residentially or before, right? You're building out the suburbs for the first time.

You have the highways being literally built to make it possible for people to live in these new areas. There's just no one there to complain about new building. You're just seeing developments pop up in areas of the country where there's no one to nimby. So that is what's different. And then economists have this concept called a commuting zone. So basically it's this idea that there's an area, a length to which people are willing to actually drive or travel in order to commute to a job. You'll probably drive 30 minutes to your job. You know what I mean? Fine. I'll put up with that. Some people will do an hour, but very,

very few people will go more than two hours. So at some point, there's just like nowhere further to go because who's going to buy a house two and a half hours away from their job, right? So what we see is once you build out the suburbs in these kind of large single family home plots, you don't see a lot of supply, you don't see the prices rising a lot because you can just keep adding more houses further and further out. They're cheaper and cheaper

because they're further from the urban core. And that's fine. Everyone can get a house. It's maybe not ideal for people on various grounds because they would like to be closer. They want to have more urbanists. That people have critiques, of course, that it can get into about the way that cul-de-sacs

or whatever develop, it's not ideal. But people can get housing. What happens now is you have all this demand pressure and there's nowhere to build out. There's no three hours away that someone's going to live to go to their job in New York City. That's just not real. A few people will, but it's just not a real thing that most people are going to do. Instead, you see crowding in the urban core. I think DC is a really great example of this. These row houses, which were once for families, they often get converted. So now like three or four yuppies can live in each of the rooms in the row house because you have to overcrowd housing that was once for, you know, a family or for a couple of people is now for six or

seven, you know, college grads who are just trying to find an inexpensive place to live. That kind of overcrowding and pressure should create more development in the urban core, but now you do have people to oppose new development because that development is now not just happening in some field no one cares about. It's happening in the parking lot next door to your apartment building. It's happening in the old park that used to be a place where you went to school. It's happening in the neighborhood where now an old house has fallen apart. It's deteriorated and they're thinking of redeveloping that as a quadplex or a triplex. So in many ways we're experiencing something new in this time because we're trying to develop

in places that have already communities, ideas about what the place should look like and are very different. So it's really an issue of the maturity of the American housing market and like our city development. That makes a lot of sense to me, given the incredibly like rapid change that's happened, especially in the United States over the past 100 years.

You know, our economy and our built environment has completely changed in that time. That all tracks to me. Hey, did you guys know that I enjoy cannabis? Makes me feel good after a long day, helps music sound better, it makes stupid movies a lot funnier. What is not to love?

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Honestly, like here's, you know, we have not enough supply. We even talked about how if we build houses for rich people, it'll filter down to poorer people. It's sounding very Reagan-esque to me a little bit. And again, a lot of it makes totally tracks, but I do know folks who look at the housing crisis from the opposite end of like, let's look at what's happening explicitly to poor people,

poor people being soaked by landlords, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, those folks tend to have a vision that says, well, hold on, the problem isn't supply. The problem is the capitalists, the homeowners, the people that own the housing, using it as a means to build their personal wealth and to soak those who are poorer. And so what we actually need are tenant protections,

we need strong rent control, we need eviction controls, and that if we were to get all those things, that would solve the housing crisis, that we actually don't need that much built. Now those are sort of two separate claims, A, that we need tenant protections, but B, you do hear people say that the issue is not supply, the issue is these other things.

It's not that we don't have enough, it's that what we do have is under the control of a lot of really greedy people who are using their control to fuck the rest of us. And I'd love to hear you, that has a lot of emotional power, right? And it makes sense to me a lot of the time when I hear it. So I'd love to hear you engage with that a little bit.

Yeah, I mean, I think there are a couple of things here. First is that it is obviously true that there are terrible actors in the housing market who are fucking over a lot of people. Like there are bad landlords, there are people who are building shoddy homes and are not caring about whether or not they're taking health and safety shortcuts.

I mean, all of this is real and people are not making it up if they're experiencing a landlord that's raising their rents unreasonably. The fact there's obviously rampant rent seeking in the home buying space, like right now we're just dealing with a title insurance problem, which is, which obviously is ridiculous, like people taking that much of your money when you're just trying to buy a house. So there's, it's not the case that people are wrong to point out these bad actors. But the question is, why is it that in housing, the producers of house or the owners of housing

are able to do such bad things to new entrants? But in other markets, like you mentioned TVs, people would love to make sure TVs or cars or whatever are really expensive, right? Like wouldn't they also want to make it really, really hard? It's not that people who own houses are somehow worse people than people who own other products, right? Everyone who owns is trying to make a massive profit.

Everyone who's part of the capitalist class there is trying to make a profit. What laws allow them to do to you is what's at issue. I am not gonna hold my breath for a day where every single person is every single rich person somehow really nice and cares and wants to be like, you know, generous and kind to every poor person who rents for them. It's just like not real. And I think people who are waiting for that are like waiting for a fantasy.

But also, like fundamentally, even in a world where there was, you know, complete rent control, every single home is only, you know, a,000 a month. Anyone can get it. There is literally a supply problem mismatch with the number of people who live and want to live in an area and the number of units that are available to them.

We've counted it up. There are multiple different organizations who are not backed by these kinds of real estate interests. These are independent think tanks, independent academics who have this US census. You can just go and look and see how many units there are versus how many jobs are being created and filled in that region.

So even if you want to see public housing built, even if you wanna see affordable housing built, I talk to affordable housing developers all the time who tell me the exact same thing. They have trouble getting new housing built, even stuff that's 100% affordable, senior housing, housing for teachers, workforce development. This same laws, the same things that are stopping private market development are stopping all of these other kinds of development. And also I think what's really important here is we

have this sense when we hear market rate housing that we're talking about the 1%. When we're talking about market rate housing, we're talking about like the 1%. We're talking about market rate housing. We're talking about everyone right now, 90% of this country is in market rate housing. If you are buying from the private market and you are not getting access to public housing, you are in market rate housing right now. If you've ever lived in an apartment building that was built in the last five years, you benefited from someone allowing luxury housing to exist in your home. If you have any, you know, big city or suburb in the last 20 years,

you benefited from this directly. And so I think that's one of those things too, where we've used this kind of language, often it's actually marketing language that developers are using to sell their houses. They're trying to make it sound very luxury, even though like we can see like they're often not luxury, it's just new.

And that kind of can confuse people. But I think that there's nothing incompatible with wanting tenant protections and wanting it to be easier to build more housing. You can have both. You made a lot of great points there. One is that, you know, when a new building goes up, a lot of, you know, a new building go up in my neighborhood and someone will say, well, how many of the units are affordable housing? And they'll look at those.

It's a hundred units. Only units are affordable housing? And they'll look at it and say, ah, it's 100 units. Only 15 are affordable housing. Now, the truth is that those affordable housing units, those are gonna be set at a level where the person I'm talking to is not gonna be able to live in those because they actually make too much money to live in that affordable housing. That affordable housing is gonna be like restricted to,

like, you know, like needy folks, right? As you say, almost everybody is living in the luxury or the market rate housing. So if you see market rate housing go up, you should look at it and say, oh good, more places that someone like me could live, that should hopefully drive the prices overall down or at least restrict them.

If there's more, then there will be more choices available for people like me. But you also, it's a really strong point that when landlords are screwing people, are able to fuck with people, and this is a huge problem. Like, I mean, we've had Matthew Desmond on the show twice. His book, Evicted, I'm sure you've read, hopefully many of our audience has read as well,

it really shows you how much like the landlordism is designed to impoverish people, to soak the poor, et cetera, shows you how much like the landlordism is like designed to impoverish people, to soak the poor, et cetera, that home, that housing owners have way, way, way too much power in our legal system, in our, in our, and in our housing system over people who rent. And that's an incredible cause of a miseration of poverty and death.

But why do they have that power? It's because they have control over an exceedingly scarce resource that people desperately need. And so we need more of the resource. We need more housing fundamentally, and that will make the power that those people have less. Is that your argument?

I'm actually talking to my Desmond next month about my book in Princeton. So like, I mean, he is someone who understands this quite intimately. It is very, very clear, right? When you are the one who is on top of the market. When you show up in a buyer's market, I mean, they roll out the red carpet for you, right? Whether it's TVs or whether it's houses, if people have tried to rent in the market where the landlord is desperate to rent to you, you can feel the power imbalance working in your favor. Many people have never felt this before. Often people who are lower income, they have never felt this because the supply of housing,

of an affordable housing at the lowest levels is the most acute shortage. And so for those folks, right, like they rarely get to feel this level of, well, I'm picking between a bunch of different units. That gives me power to say no to a place that doesn't work well. That gives me power to leave a bad housing situation. That gives me power to demand that within my tenant contract, that I get favorable terms and can leave if there's a problem, that I'm not responsible for road debatement, that I can call my landlord or report them to the city if there's a problem. But when does that power imbalance shift? If a tenant knows there's nowhere for them to go,

if they know this is the best housing they're gonna get, if they're afraid of getting evicted, if they're afraid of not having their lease renewed, if they're afraid of pissing off their landlord by reporting them to the city, if they're, you know, you see this all the time now because even people who are wealthy, who will go into apartments to look at them

for the first time, they're throwing money to beg for the pleasure of being able to rent an apartment. They are willing to overlook safety, health, aesthetic issues with places. And so I think that this question is, it's completely reasonable and fair. I think it's really good that there are people focused on trying to eradicate the worst actors out of the market, but does that solve the fundamental issue for people? No. What about the meme that you often see,

and I just want to tackle this one directly because I see it so often, especially when people talk about homelessness, people will say, there is enough vacant housing today to house everybody. This is like something you see repeated again and again. Is, where does that come from and is that the case? Yeah, whenever someone says this to me, I'm like imagining like a horrible fascist dictatorship

where we ship homeless people to like empty homes in rural like Arkansas. And I'm just like, I don't know what people are talking about like, yes, like you could theoretically force homeless people to move to places where there are no jobs, no community, no, you know, no no familiarity. You could do that. And there are housing units in much of this rural parts of the country that are sometimes even falling apart. That's true. But is that relevant to the problem of they're someone who's lost their home and they're

from Los Angeles and they would like to stay near their family? They would like to eventually be near a good job? Yeah, that's not really relevant to the problem we're talking about here. It is theoretically possible that we could solve the housing shortage by building giant mega-lopelaces in places of the country where there are no jobs. But so I think that that's like often a mismatch. People are talking about they'll look at the raw number of vacant housing units that exist in the whole country and they go like, clearly we could just put people in them. Doesn't make sense. The other problem is that often those vacancies are just

because they also look like, oh, well, even in Los Angeles or even San Francisco, there's a bunch of vacant housing. Lots of times the census is counting something as vacant because it's in between tenants. So even for that month, right? Where the landlord's like re-upping the place for it to come to someone else, that will count as a vacant unit,

but it's already been spoken for. There's no one who's just leaving it empty. Yeah, and you also need, I can't remember where I saw this, but I saw the argument somewhere that you need a certain vacancy rate in a place in order for people to be able to move from one apartment to another. Like if every apartment was taken,

if literally we had a 0% vacancy rate, then no one could move because there would always be someone in the other apartment. All you could do would be like switch apartments. So you need to have what, what, I mean, you might know that you got to have some percentage of open apartments that are sitting vacant. Otherwise there's no flexibility in the market and saying like, oh, well, we've got 1% of apartments are vacant. Well, that doesn't actually you need that. You need you can't just put people in there.

I think it helps to like think of like literally any other good. But you're exactly right. Like you would have to trade and find a moving chain of trades or to get into new housing if every single housing unit was filled. What you want is a significantly healthy vacancy rate. Not so many such that like you have dilapidation. There's going to be like too much vacancy. But you want enough such that there's room

for people to move. Well, but I mean, when people are, have a skepticism of the capitalist side of this, right? People have a skepticism of developers, of owners, et cetera, and of policies that are sort of built for those people, right? You were talking earlier that, hey, developers have a hard time

building anything affordable. All that stuff is real. At the same time, those are the people who get all the attention in our society currently. And so I do like sympathize with folks who say, Hey, is don't we need to start by worrying about what, you know, tenants need first, trying to keep people in their homes, trying to enact rent control, things like that. What is the balance between those policies in your view? Because I can't argue with someone who says, hey, fuck the developers. I'm just worried about the poor people in my neighborhood

who are at risk of getting evicted. Let's worry about them and not the capitalists. Yeah, I mean, firstly, I think it's often kind of like thinking of an analytical mistake to treat this as, are you giving something to developers or are you taking it away? We need people to produce housing. Whether that person is producing it because they're an affordable housing nonprofit, whether it's a private market person, I don't really hear these concerns about other goods, which is what I find very weird. Would someone say we can't be giving money to the producers of flu shot vials? I'm just like, what do you mean? We need flu shot vials.

If you have some other way of producing them, I'm happy to hear it and we should figure out a way to make that happen. But until then, we should get some flu shots out and we shouldn't be hampered by this idea that somehow you're helping a capitalist. At the end of the day, every single good that you have and want is being produced by someone.

And I think it's completely reasonable to want constraints on developers. In many ways, developers earned their bad name through a lot of corruption at the local level, particularly in local politics, where there's often not a lot of attention. Oh yeah, it's endemic here in LA. Developers are one of the largest contributors

to city politics, and you know, at the heart of the incredible corruption scandals that have happened in LA, have been developers just paying off city council people who are now in federal prison as a result. It's real. Yes. In Los Angeles, it's it's I feel like I hear a new story every year about this. But, you know, I think the question is, we want to regulate developers. We want to say if you're going to build new housing, you need to make sure it's healthy, safe in the same way that we do clean air, clean water.

You can't violate these standards. I think creating standards for the private market is completely reasonable. We also should have, I think it's very clear, more money put into public inspectors, making sure that you don't have, in the Miami condo collapse, a situation where people are not actually checking

and making sure the private market is following the rules. All of that is fine, but I just have a hard time stomaching these sorts of arguments from the people who are already benefiting from the homes that have been built by private developers in years past. So I often, I don't hear this from homeless people who are excited to get into these gentrification buildings. I don't hear this from lower income people who are excited about new development opportunities that they're able to get into.

I hear this stuff from people who already have access to housing. And so I find it very, very difficult to believe that this is a really sincerely held belief, especially because tenant protections are compatible with building new supply. The very sorts of people who want to have access to counsel in eviction court, who

want to make sure that rent increases are not happening in some ridiculously unfair fashion should also be fighting and often are fighting. In California, the biggest pro-housing organization, California YIMBY, has been pro every single tenant protection bill. I believe, I mean, I only looked at this starting last year, I looked at it at one too last year, has been pro all the tenant protection bills that came up in the state house and at the same time has been pushing for building new housing. These are not fights that have to happen within housing. These are compatible arguments.

I think that it's often developers are making such a big amount of money because every new house they're building is a luxury development. If you had developers which were developing, you know, like a bunch of townhouses or apartment buildings that were servicing a lot of different people, you probably wouldn't see these massive profits they were raking in either. But also, I'm kind of confused too about how this argument works because people are both angry that the people moving into your developments are rich and they're mad that developers are making money.

Like, aren't you happy they're making it off of these rich people? Like it's kind of a circular argument at some level. So I don't know, I do think the onus is on people to provide an alternative solution here, and I don't think there is one. Well, I also think if you look at the people who is everyone's common enemy, which is the sort of rapacious small-time landlord

who owns a couple of buildings and is like really, you know, getting people evicted and et cetera. Those people are very much against new housing being built because they like the control that they have. They're against tenant protections and they're against new housing. And so we should be doing stuff that those people don't like.

We should be doing both of those things, right? Yes, and I think it's really remarkable that you often see landlords, property owners on the same side, trying to control, like basically like a cartel, the supply of new units from coming in. And they escape all of this scrutiny, even as they are the most dominant actors

in preventing housing from being built. And you can see how much power they have in the political system when, you know, stuff like in LA, when they were starting to lift the eviction controls that were put in place during the pandemic, there was all this talk about, oh, the small time, the mom and pop landlord who like can't, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like this person owns a building and does nothing and receives rent, right? This person is not, what are their expenses?

You know, what is the, they're not running a restaurant, you know, they just own a house and people pay them to live in the house. But they always receive such primacy in the political debate because these are the, you know, people who donate, these are the people who unfortunately voted higher rates, et cetera.

And, you know, if we were to foreground the actual needs of renters, we would build more market rate rental housing and more affordable rental housing, which is what those mom and pop landlords quotation marks don't wanna have happen. I just wanna ask you about public housing or what some now call social housing in the United States. Something that we did a lot, you know, 70, 60 years ago,

very little being built now. Is there any role for, you know, if, hey, we wanna regulate the developers, we wanna make sure that certain kinds of buildings are being built. Is there any role for, you know, the government or public, you know, semi-public entities in any respect to say, hey, let's just build a shitload

of the kind of housing we actually need. And if it's meant to serve the public, why not give the public more control over it and do it that way? Yeah, I mean, first you can regulate the private market as much as you want, so it doesn't need to be publicly built. But I actually think there's a lot of really cool stuff

happening in public development. So the Center for Public Enterprise, you should actually have Paul Williams on your show if you're figuring out their housing episode. They are working on this idea, which is happening in a few different places, including in Montgomery County, Maryland, where I actually grew up, where essentially you

can create a revolving fund. I'm just going to simplify this. But you can create a fund which the city can then use in order to finance the development of new housing. Now a private market developer still builds the housing, but all of the units are still owned by the public and it's mixed income. So you have every single income level in order to make sure that it's financially feasible and make sure that it can service everyone and you have desegregation benefits there

by making sure everything's mixed income, it's publicly owned, the rents are reasonable and they look like new buildings. You can't even distinguish them from like new private sector buildings, private market buildings that are being built. And this is a really great new tool. I think in particular, it really helps with desegregation,

wanting to see income integration, not wanting communities that are so clearly like, oh, this is the middle income, the poor people, the rich people, like wanting to see that integration, not wanting communities that are so clearly like, oh, this is the middle income, the poor people, the rich people, like wanting to see that kind of integration. This is a really, really great tool. I know there's been some talk about potentially doing that at the federal level too. I think that's great.

I think it would be fantastic to see much more of that happen. I don't think, I mean, Americans are really hostile to the traditional public housing that was built in the post-war era. In many ways, it was a failure on purpose in that it was trying to segregate and it was not built to actually be sustainable or mixed income like we have seen in other countries. But yeah, public housing is something that is a great tool.

But again, the reason why it's a great tool is because it's adding supply to the market. That is the fundamental way that it's benefiting. Yeah. I mean, when people talk about public you know, public housing or the projects and like why that has a bad reputation, it's because it's segregated poverty and people by race largely. If you look at the classic projects in New York,

it's very much like that. You walk by these blocks where suddenly it's an entirely different income level and there's no integration of people at different mixed income levels. That's what makes public housing work well. But also at the times at which we tried to build mixed income public housing, rich people fought back.

There's a really great HBO miniseries, David Simon miniseries called Show Me a Hero, which like dramatizes this. Have you seen it? I love that. I love that show. It's my favorite thing David Simon has ever done. It's so good. Go watch it. It's on whatever. It's on HBO. It's on HBO.

I'm not going to plug anything because I'm mad at the streamers right now. But it shows you like a judge in, what was it, the seventies, eighties? Required that- Yeah, Yonkers. In Yonkers, which is a New York City suburb, required that mixed income housing, public housing be built.

And like the white suburb responded like viciously and literally violently. And this was like, you know, decades after people thought that racism was eradicated in America, you know? But this, it was the kind of public housing that would have worked and yet people fought back against it and it's become difficult to build.

But yeah, I really believe that can be a tool as well. What I find really interesting is that it seems like our political system is finally starting to take this issue seriously. I remember watching the last two presidential elections and thinking housing is the biggest issue where I live. It's the biggest like problem that social problem that we have. No one is talking about it.

No one even, you know, even when I don't know, I remember Bernie and Hillary like went to New York City and barely even talked about housing. By contrast, you know, Kamala mentioned it in her DNC speech, mentioned housing prices and like housing policies. It feels like finally this is starting to come up. Are you starting to see a thaw there as well? And what do you think is driving it? Yeah, I mean, the classic thing has always been

housing politics is local, housing policy is local. And people have said that, I think in many ways, federal people have said that as a shield because they didn't want to get involved in it because they knew it was really difficult politics. They knew they were going to have to deal with some seriously powerful actors on the other side of this problem. And so they've really just put hands off, not our problem. Pandemic happens, inflation is probably the number one problem facing the Biden administration when it comes to why they've been so unpopular. Inflation has been

by far the biggest pain point economically that people have faced. When they were searching for all these different ways to bring down prices, it became really clear, which I think regular people, everyone knows, the biggest price that everyone's paying is their rent or their mortgage. That's the biggest cost that you're facing. That was a massive part of what we were seeing in terms of CPI, in terms of inflation over the pandemic in the 2020, 2021, 2022, you're seeing shelter take top notch, report after report. And so, I think that at that point, it became really clear the federal government couldn't put its hands up because they were being blamed politically for this, even though they had not really engaged

on housing policy at the federal level. And so as a result, you've seen a lot more attention from house members, from senators. And now, I mean, on Democratic National Convention stage, you saw Barack Obama bring it up. You saw Kamala Harris bring it up. Tonight is the debate. And so, I mean, we'll see how that gets talked about

during the debate. Yeah, this is gonna come out after the debate, but as we're speaking, we're speaking a couple hours before it happens. Yeah, and so, come out after the debate, but as we're speaking, we're speaking a couple hours before it happens. Yeah, and so, you know, that is going to be, you know, really important to see, but I think it's going to be hard for federal actors to ignore this problem when it becomes

the most important economic issue that their voters are facing. Do you think Trump is gonna say anything about housing? Is there any coherent housing policy on that side? Unfortunately, their housing policy seems restricted to complaining about immigration. So they have this theory that deporting more people will bring down housing costs.

Now, is it the case that if you deported enough people, I guess you could fund, if you deported tens and tens of millions of people, like yes, you would bring down housing costs eventually because there would just be not enough people there, but you'd be deporting, like, you'd have to deport legal immigrants and legal residents of the United States of America. You cannot get lower prices by just reducing the folks who are coming here recently and

seeking asylum and migrants who have come here recently in recent years. The reason for this is a couple of things. One is they're a very small fraction of the demand on housing. The people who are, we saw this in the pandemic, the people who are the biggest fraction of this are American residents. They're people who are benefiting from remote work and now moving into other houses. That's who was driving the cost increases. But also, if you just think about it, new migrants to a country are often doubling up, tripling up in their kinship networks. These are not housing places that are just on the open market. When you stay with a cousin or a friend of a friend in their

basement, that's not an area that would have been rented to someone else, and it's not increasing the cost of housing in the way. It's not the reason why we've seen this increase over the last few years. Of course, we know that in many ways that immigration has actually been beneficial in reducing inflation on a bunch of levels. So I mean, that's been their focus, I think because they're pretty one note about immigration being a core part of their platform

or ending immigration on being part of their platform. But yeah, I mean, I don't expect them to have, you know, a bunch of supply side policies they roll out. Well, but it appeals to a certain like core emotional belief that people have because connected to the belief of, you know, something new is bad, I don't like something new being built. A lot of people sort of feel there's too many people around.

There's too many people. Why's there gotta be so many? And so when someone comes along and says, let's get rid of some of the people, that some people go, yeah, that sounds right to me. Let's get rid of some of them. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that sounds right to me. Let's get rid of some. I mean, this is why I've, I care so much about this issue is because I think that, liberalism and I mean, by that, I mean like lower L liberalism,

like political quality of people openness to other people, openness to, to people living the lives with however, the way they want and leaving them alone really rests on whether or not people feel like they have enough of the basic goods and services they need. When you achieve scarcity of important things, you have scarcity of housing, you have scarcity of educational opportunity, you become extremely oppositional to other groups.

That's what you see when it comes to housing and people turn against immigrants, they turn against, I mean, I told you before, like the Idaho Graffitis and Go Home Californians, you don't have to be an immigrant, it's just you're from California and we're Idaho, so go away. Outsiders, we turn against them.

This happens in other markets, right? Like in education, why there's so many limited spots at extremely good schools, that creates extremely toxic politics, often amongst the most liberal members of our country. These are college graduates in leftist places, sending their kids to these good schools. When you create that kind of scarcity, when you create that artificial scarcity, you are asking

for people to turn towards conservative demagogues, populist ideas around how only my group is good, my group is okay. I mean, we saw this with women entering the labor force. When men feel like the jobs are inflentable, they become opposed to the idea of women working because it's in their economic interests to try to suppress that demand for labor. So in all of these areas, you see that scarcity is a tool for conservative and I mean like small c conservative ideas and liberals should be at the forefront

of trying to make sure there's enough of everything that people don't feel that or all the other things they believe are not possible. Yeah, and this is sort of, I think we're starting to realize that we can have abundance and take care of each other. You know, that we don't need to, something that I resist is,

I feel strongly that, you know, we need to take care of the least advantaged among us, but I don't think we do that by restricting how much of everything we have. We do it by having more. Everybody can live well, right? That's sort of the thesis that we are operating under. And to do that, we need more and we need to make sure that the right people get it.

So I agree with you that scarcity leads to grasping, leads to exclusion, and that we wanna push in the other direction. So we've been talking for, I could talk to you for a thousand years, but I know you have, you told me you have an important writing deadline to get to, I wanna make sure that you're able to get to it.

So let's try to bring it in for a landing here. If we actually wanna solve the housing crisis, what do we do? Give me your policy prescription. If you were on Kamala Harris's policy team, let's just assume that, actually, you could be on the policy team of either of the presidents and they'd listen to you, either of the candidates,

and they'd listen to you and they'd enact what you want. What would your policy prescription be to solve the housing crisis, not just for the rich, not just for the developers, but for everybody who needs a home? Yeah, I mean, the first thing that I would do is get every single governor to, and you know, head of state house and state legislature

to restrict all superfluous regulations when it comes to housing development. So if it does not relate to health and safety, if it's just, we wanna make it more expensive and needs to be a bigger house, those sorts of things get wiped away. I think then at the federal level, increasing a bunch of financing for it to be possible to develop affordable housing. Then you can easily come in with demand-side stuff. When it comes to making vouchers, cash benefits, so all the... The private market's never going to be able to provide housing for the very, very poorest. It can't, you know, the private market's never going to be able to

provide housing for the very, very poorest. Like it can't do that. It's just not, it's not going to pencil out for private market developers. That's where government support comes in. So for people who are at the very bottom of the income ladder, they should have vouchers that make it possible for them to meet that gap. So they go in to rent a place, they pay what they can. And then the rest is covered by the government cash benefit, maxing out those kinds of housing vouchers for the poorest people. Once you have enough affordable housing, then you can provide them that kind of voucher support. Also then I think, you know, now I'm giving you a laundry list of my favorite topics. But I think then on top of that, it's going to be things like landlord registries, like single business owner is expected to register with the government. States should have a list of all of the homes, who they're owned by,

what they're being rented at, and then it should be possible for state inspectors to be able to make sure that laws are being followed. Landlord lobbies, property owner lobbies fight constantly against the sort of registries that can really make sure that they're following the law and that means that they can be tracked. That should be just the basic thing that you're expecting to do. I didn't know that, yeah, that's extremely basic. That there is no- Yes.

There's no registry. Wow. No. You can't do it. In many cities, they make arguments about how it's the privacy rights of tenants. I mean, it's absurd arguments that are being made to resist tracking by state and federal regulators. And I would expect, yeah.

We track and regulate restaurants. We should do it with landlords. Yes, and I mean, I would expect that a lot of them are doing it because they're evading taxation. They're actually charging at a higher rent. They're getting some cash benefit. Or if they're not, they'll be happy to show us their books and they won't have any problem.

They should have a fucking letter in the window. That's what the landlord should have. When you go look at the apartment, there should be a big ass D there. So you can be like, no, you got roaches motherfucker. I'm not paying for this. You know, like. Exactly.

Exactly. No, you're totally right. And I think that even getting to that level of inspection requires us to even track what's going on. And we don't even do that. And when you talk about removing regulations, you're not talking about environmental regulations, health and safety.

You're talking about, let's keep the neighborhood character nice. We don't want like that kind of regulation. Right? All I mean is that if a local government has said you're allowed to build residential housing here, it cannot then say only if you build it for rich people. It has to say you can build any kind of residential place. If I own a house and I want to split it in half to be a duplex, I shouldn't have to ask anyone permission to do that as long as I'm following all the health and safety guidelines. That's no one else's business. And so I often think, I mean, I hear what you're saying. I know people hear this stuff and they're like, is this like Reaganist? Is this like supply side?

Deregulation is something that can be liberal or it can be conservative when people people in the 19, when civil rights reformers were saying, we don't want there to be regulations that restrict black people from living in, from going to white schools, was that, that was deregulatory. That's deregulation. So regulations can be good or they can be bad. And the question is, who is evaluating that

and who's getting to take advantage of it? That is such a good point. And yeah, when you have a regulation that says you can't knock down a single family home and build an apartment for 20 people, build an apartment complex for 20 people. That is a... It's a classist racist regulation.

Yeah. And so those are the regulations that we need to remove. And we need to put in place regulations over landlords that will protect tenants and make housing prices cheaper, eviction protections, things of that nature. Exactly, yeah. What a wonderful prescription. Do you think any of this is gonna happen, Jerusalem?

It's very easy to come and say, I got a lot of people on this show with a lot of big ideas, how do we actually do it? What can people do to help make this shit happen? Yeah, I mean, the first thing is that, I mean, if you'd asked me 10 years ago, if you asked experts in this field 10 years ago, they would have said, none of this will happen.

I'm giving you a view of the world as it is, and I'm kind of despairing over the state of things, and I don't expect anything to change. Organizing at the local and state level has really changed that. I mean, the shift in places like California, Washington state, Oregon, these are places where you would see extreme NIMBYism, extreme power from landlords and homeowners and property owners. In places like Colorado,

in places like Arizona, you're seeing change happen. I think that there's a long way to go. A lot of the time, you're seeing that a lot of these new state laws are not resulting in a ton of new housing, and that they're still having to coming across a bunch of roadblocks, particularly because local government, like you mentioned, is being incredibly resistant to a lot of these regulations. But at the same time, I think that people really, really will not stand for this. And the reason I know this is that they're willing to move really far in order to get ex-affordable homeownership. Like people who are leaving California, you only hear about the billionaires and the people

who are mad about taxes or wokeism or whatever. But most of the people leaving California are middle-class Californians who can't afford a house. That's who's leaving California. And so, if these states decide that they want to be the place that only very, very poor and very, very rich people can live, that's a trajectory they can follow,

but I think it's extremely politically unpopular. I think it creates problems, and that's why you're seeing pushback at the state level. And the most important thing you can do as an individual is calling up your state legislature and saying, hey, it is really, really important to me that you make building more housing, hey, it is really, really important to me that you make building more housing a priority. It is really, really important to me

that you say the state government needs to take more control and monitor whether local governments are actually acting in our best interests or if they're just acting in the interests of exclusionary forces like property owners and landlords. And so if you can put pressure on your state government to do that, that's the most impactful thing you can do.

Yeah, and this is one of the issues where I talk all the time of being involved in local politics. This is one of the ones where you can make the biggest difference on the state level. But also if you go to your local neighborhood council meeting and you just talk back to the people who are ranting on the microphone about how they don't want the neighborhood to change.

This is a small scale community for a little bit. And you go and say, no, no, no, I would like an apartment building to be built, please. I would like homelessness housing to be built, et cetera. If you use your voice and talk back against the cranks, it really does make a difference. Because this is the number one issue that those people are able to exert power

on the local level and we need a counterbalance. And so this is the place where folks listening get involved as much as you can. Jerusalem, your book I wanna make sure we talk about goes into all these topics in more depth. It's called On the Housing Crisis. It's out now. People can of course get it at our special book shop

factuallypod.com slash books. Where else can people find it? Where can they follow your work? Yeah, so thanks for plugging in the book. You can read all about my work also at The Atlantic, where I write every week. And I also have a podcast called Good on Paper, where we explore this topic and others and really kind of unpack the popular narratives

that may not actually be true. So you can come listen to me there if you have not got enough of my dulcet tones on this podcast. Oh my God, that sounds, unpack narratives that popular narratives that may not be true. That's a podcast after my own heart. That sounds great. Yes, exactly.

Well, thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for being in Jerusalem. It's been a thrill. Well, thank you once again to Jerusalem for coming on the show. If you want to pick up a copy of her book, head to factuallypod.com slash books. You'll be supporting not just this show,

but your local bookstore when you buy through that special link. Of course, if you wanna support the show directly, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show, ad free for 15 bucks a month. I will read your name at the end of the podcast and put it in the credits of every single one

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