Factually! with Adam Conover - “Crime-Free Housing” and Modern-Day Redlining with Liam Dillon

Episode Date: December 23, 2020

LA Times reporter Liam Dillon joins Adam to discuss his recent exposé on how “crime-free housing” policies discriminate against black renters and deepen the housing crisis. They also break down the coming Covid-caused eviction wave, and how we might finally dig our way out of the housing crisis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See 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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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. And today we're facing something that I like to call a national housing crisis. I don't like to call it that. I don't like to call it anything, but that is what it is. People in America do not have places to live that they can afford. And unless you missed this, people need a place to live.

You know, just like they need water or food. You know, you fundamentally just have to have a place to be as being part of a physical object extended in space. You know, you need a place to put your mass. Just like, you know, think about how a car needs a garage. You need a garage, but for your body, you know, because that's the thing that holds your brain in it. You follow. I don't need me to keep going on. All right. And yet that fundamental need is all too hard to find for people in this country and frankly, in many other places in the world. You can see this crisis in the high rates of rent burdened people, the number of evictions and the high rates of homelessness. Say you're a renter with a minimum wage full-time

job and you'd like to rent a two-bedroom apartment. Well, hey, why not? You got a job, you should be able to, right? Well, a study in 2018 found that if this was you, you would be able to afford an apartment in exactly zero counties nationwide. I'm just going to say that again. A person with a minimum wage full-time job is unable to rent a two-bedroom apartment anywhere in America. I don't think that's how society should function. Do you? I think there's a, I think it indicates that there's a problem here. And I should add that in no place is the housing crisis more pernicious and more clear of a problem than where I live, California. And that's a little surprising because there are jobs in California.

The California economy is massive. It's larger than the economies of almost every country in the world. And yet, because the cost of living in California is so high, this incredibly wealthy state has the highest functional poverty rate of any state in the country. And here's the really important piece. The housing crisis is not distributed equally through the population. The weight of the housing crisis falls disproportionately on black and brown communities. Black neighborhoods face higher rates of eviction. And while 73 percent of white families own their own home, only 44% of black families do. And that's where the effects of this problem go beyond having a roof over your head. Because homeownership in America is about more than just shelter.

The way our economy is structured, it's also an essential tool for building wealth. And the disparity in homeownership rates is part of why white families today have nearly 10 times the wealth of black families. So why is this? Why is there this disparity? Why do black and brown people suffer from the housing crisis so much more? Well, the fact that we see racist outcomes around housing today is because we had racist housing policies for most of the last century. Starting in the 1930s with the New Deal, the Federal Housing Administration limited access to finance for housing in Black neighborhoods and to Black people. Local laws called housing covenants limited what neighborhoods Black

people were allowed to live in. We've talked about this on the show before. This was called redlining. And basically, to distill it down, what happened was we built an economic system in America that required homeownership to build equity and wealth. And then we denied access to homeownership to an enormous part of the population. It's this decision and the massive legal infrastructure that created it, that created the segregation we know in every major American city today. One of the lessons I've tried to get across in my work time and time again is that the racism of the past created the world we see today.

It was baked in to our society. But while we have talked about this issue on the show before, I want to be really clear about this. It doesn't end there because the racist policies of 60 to 70 years ago, they can't explain all of the inequities in housing we see today.

And that's because there's still racism in housing policy, overt, blatant racism. Today, black Americans today still face less access to credit from lenders. Homes in black neighborhoods are still devalued and racist real estate agents who still just don't want to sell to black Americans control our housing market. So even though, you know, we had a Fair Housing Act in the 60s that outlawed the blatant racist segregationist policies of the time, racist policies and practices still exist in housing today. And look, you don't have to take my word for it. All right. All you have to do is open a recent issue of the L.A. Times or listen to this interview with a reporter from the

LA Times. Today on the show, we have LA Times reporter Liam Dillon. With his colleagues, he published a blockbuster expose that was incredibly disturbing. It's a story on what they call, quote, crime-free housing, a set of racist policies that guide housing in California today. This story is going to shock you, and it has incredible bearing on housing policy nationally. So please welcome to the show, Liam Dillon. Liam, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. So we on this show have talked about redlining, you know, historic practice of discriminatory housing that created the segregated suburbs and cities that we have today. We often think of that as being a thing

of the past. You know, people think we had fair housing acts and all these sorts of things. You are a housing reporter at the L.A. Times. Your recent work uncovered a form of housing discrimination that is, to me, seemed just as pernicious and is alive with us today. Could you talk about what you found? Sure. So we, myself and a couple of colleagues, decided to take a close look at what are known as crime-free housing policies. And this is, they're kind of broad, but essentially the program is kind of very city by city, but they're aimed at empowering landlords to either evict or exclude tenants who have perhaps had past convictions, criminal convictions, or like new arrests or other brushes with law enforcement. And some of these are in the form of like training that police

departments will do to say, hey, here's how you do background checks. Here's some lease provisions you should put into your leases, landlords, that if someone is arrested or there's a bunch of 911 calls, you can get rid of them easier. Other cities have, like, laws that say, you know, they require eviction of a tenant accused of breaking the law. And sort of to your point about the racial impacts and racial effects of these, you know, we found these programs are widespread not only in California here, which is where we took a close look at, but around the country. And when we took a closer look at where we are, or where they were, rather, what we found is the vast majority of these cities that have had large increases in Black and Latino population have these policies, which is, you know, in effect, working to keep certain folks out of those communities, out of those neighborhoods. And we found, too, when evaluating the eviction data that Black and Latino residents, again, often have been disproportionately affected by these laws.

Wow. So, OK, there's a lot to unpack there. Before we even get into the intent of what these laws might be. Yeah. If we're just talking about the effect, it sounds to me, we've talked about on this show, if you're a person with eyes and ears in America, you know that black and brown communities are over-policed relative to other communities. And honestly,

frankly harassed by police officers, by law enforcement, by, you know, the criminal justice system to a, to a large degree. And so if you then have laws that say people who have interacted with criminal justice in some way, either have been arrested or been convicted in the past, are ineligible for housing, you're de facto making it

harder for black and brown people to get housing in that area, right? Is that correct? harder for black and brown people to get housing in that area, right? Is that correct? Yes. I mean, why don't I sort of bring a concrete example to you at this point? You know, we spent a lot of time in the piece that we worked on talking to a gentleman named Terrence Stewart. Terrence, when he was in his early 20s, spent a couple years in prison for a cocaine dealing conviction in Los Angeles County. Once he got out, immediately entered community college, ultimately was accepted to UC Riverside, which is a very prestigious school in the state. And, you know, had a wife, a newborn child, and was looking for a place to live around campus, as you do when you decide to go to college,

to live around campus, as you do when you decide to go to college, right? And ended up, you know, going to many properties, many apartment complexes around the school and found these signs up. And he didn't even know what the signs were. And it turns out, you know, after seeing them enough, it was a logo, gray background, three stenciled outlines of houses. And it was apartment complexes participating in this Riverside Police Department program called Crime Free Housing, which, you know, sort of encouraged landlords not to rent to people who have criminal histories. And so Terrence and his family were rejected from apartment complex after apartment complex after apartment complex in Riverside, ends up in a room in a home in Lake Elsinore, which is a 90 minute bus ride one way from campus. And that's that's where he had to had to end up living. Right.

Even even sort of even worse for him. Five years later, ultimately gets into student housing. So he was able to get, you know, ultimately get closer to to the campus. Five years later, Terrence graduates with a master's degree from UC Riverside. By that point, has a young son, infant son, along with his daughter and his wife. Once again, cannot find housing around UC Riverside once he graduates. You know, again, this drug conviction now is a decade old, nearly a decade old, and once again prohibited because of these policies, or blocked by these policies from living around the school, ends up in an apartment complex where the rats that were so big that he still keeps pictures on his cell phone of them to remind him of how horrible a

living situation it was. And so, again, you know, here's a guy, I mean, what more do you want from someone than to, you know, get a master's degree, right? Yeah. To prove, according to whatever common conception of what it is for someone to, quote unquote, turn their life around, right? Yeah. And here's someone who, again, cannot get as blocked by these sort of policies from having a safe and stable place to live, not only for himself, but his family members too. You know, it's not like his wife was criminally convicted of anything, certainly not his children, right? And they're affected by these policies in the same exact way. Wow. And there's no policy that says, hey, there's the apartments and the cities have a policy that

says, hey, you can't live here if you have a criminal conviction, but there's no clause that say, well, if you have a master's degree, actually, you can live here. Like it's only a negative penalty. And is there and there's no way out of it, presumably. I mean, yeah, let me just say that there's there's so much here. Part of it to me is I'm constantly flabbergasted by the amount of discrimination we put on people who have been incarcerated in America, which is like contrary to the entire idea to me. A judge sentences you to however many years you get out, you have paid your time, you have paid your due.

That's what we that's what we call your debt to society is repaid and you should have a second chance. That's what everybody says with their mouths. Right. But then in policy, you know there's uh employment discrimination there's the ban the box initiative to try to uh remove that sort of discrimination like life is impossible for people after they live after they leave prison which only makes it harder to not if you want someone to not do crimes anymore maybe allow them to get gainful

employment and a place to live but But I'm sorry, I'm getting a little bit far afield here. The question I really want to know is this program that you said was up on the window, the Crime-Free Housing Program. This was put in place by the Riverside County Police Department or Sheriff's Department? This is the city of Riverside has a program. Also, the Riverside County Sheriff's Department has a program so that they do a version. There's both a law in the city of Riverside that speaks to, you know, there may be evictions if there are things that happen in a particular apartment. And also there's these these training at the police departments do for landlords that, you know, again, encourage them to exclude tenants who have had criminal backgrounds. And Riverside County, this is a county just southeast of Los Angeles, massive county.

Many, many people live there. What is the purpose of this policy and this program? If you were to go call up Riverside County and say, why the heck are you doing this? What would they tell you? And what do they tell the landlords? Right. I actually did that with the neighboring County, San Bernardino County, um, sheriff's department. I talked to the police officer who's in charge of running this program

there. And San Bernardino similarly has some aggressive, um, crime-free housing policies. And basically the, the argument is for community safety. You know, um, you know, you don't want, you, no one wants to live in an apartment complex that would be rife with crime. Right. No one wants that the same way they don't want to live in an apartment complex rife with noise or other other nuisances. in that, in that, uh, in that complex. They've told me sort of anecdotally stories of, of apartment complexes that have undergone this training, uh, where landlords have undergone this training where they, you know, argue it's turnaround. I mean, you have, you have, you know, a sort of a cleaned up, um, uh, uh, you know, part of this training as well is, is to increase lighting, trim hedges, you know, do things that could sort of remove some environmental aspects that could broken windows stuff.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And so like they argue, like, you know, once you have a safe and secure apartment complex where you, you know, you have more folks and more families who are more willing to live in these in these neighborhoods and in these in these buildings. But I don't know. I'm trying to I'm trying to be like an objective like

interviewer about this and be like yeah but but like this seems so self-defeating to me because if you're if you're in charge of law enforcement for the county well where do you think those people are going to go like they need to live somewhere right if you're even if we accept okay you see anyone with a criminal conviction as a kind of crime vector, which I don't agree with. But even if you were to adopt that mindset, well, that person needs to live somewhere like and and so just shunts them around from place to place. Well, at this point, I think is really important to basically every single discussion about housing that we have in America, which is, yeah, but not here. Like, yeah, the folks need to live somewhere. Poor folks, homeless folks, folks with a criminal history, you know, they can, sure, they can live somewhere,

just not here, just not next to me, just not in my community, just somewhere else, right? Yeah. And I think that that's a motivating principle. You find a lot all across, again, all across the country when it comes to housing people and where folks are going to live. Somewhere, but not here. Yeah. This is like a housing version of, you know,

the little barriers they put on bus benches so people can't lie down on them, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is like making a little bit, making a little bit, quote, nicer and a little bit less hospitable to people who you view as undesirable. Now tell me a little bit about the landlord piece of this

because we had Matthew Desmond on the show who wrote an incredible book called Evicted talking about the eviction crisis and how routinely landlords use eviction, what a tool it is for them, and the sort of devastating effects that has on people's lives. I think there must be some dimension of that here, that for the landlords, this is at the very least offering them a tool by which they can evict more people. Yeah, it's actually pretty complicated when it comes to landlord perspective on these rules. In some cases, sure, you know, they like the idea of having additional,

as you said, tools to figure out how to, say, remove folks that they don't want to have on their property or remove folks that they, that they, or, you know, or not include them in the first place, right, on their property. And so having additional tools, the police tell them on how to do it. At the same time, you know, there are actually numerous cases where landlords don't like these laws either because they see them as an impingement on their property rights, you know. And in fact, some of the cases that have actually gone to court challenging these laws were filed by landlords who are arguing like, look, like, you know, I have a family. Yeah, sure. They smoke pot. I think they're fine. I don't want to a victim.

The city is telling me I have to. This is a bad law. Wow. And so and in fact, again, as I said, many of the court cases that have overturned some of these laws, not just in California, but around the country, were filed by landlords who argued that the city should have no business telling them who they can or can't rent their properties to. Well, I mean, to me, you would think that would make me feel a little bit better, but it just makes it seem like it's coming from all sides because you've got landlords who use evictions punitively or use them just to like the more evictions, the better. It seems to be how some landlords feel because they can just turn over more often. They can raise the rent more often. And, you know, if anyone has a problem a little bit, they can get you out of there. Not every landlord feels that way. But for those who don't, well, now the state is pressing on you and saying you can't live here.

So how widespread are these policies? You mentioned two counties. I know you focused on California. How widespread are they in California? And do you have a sense that they're national at all? So absolutely national. But I'll just give we dug the deepest in California. So I'll have the best stats.

So I'll give them to you. We found we did kind of a census of all of the cities and counties in the state. There are 539 here in California. And we found at least 147 either have a crime-free housing law, so like a city ordinance, or they offer, the police department offers crime-free housing training for landlords. And so that's more than a quarter of the cities and counties, local governments in California. And again, we found this, again, I wanted to really analyze the racial element of this and examined, you know, of the cities that have had the largest

population growth in black residents over the last three decades in California, of those top 20 cities, 85% have one of these policies. For Latino, greatest increase in Latino residents over the same time, 75%. So again, widespread adoption throughout California, more than a quarter of the local governments in the state have them. But in areas with growing Black and Latino populations, you know, really a huge concentration of these policies, right? And, you know, Riverside and San Bernardino, known as the Inland Empire here in California, you know, huge migration from Los Angeles to those communities over the past 30 years. And so, again, a big concentration of them there. Nationally, the numbers are, of course, a little bit harder, but there is an organization called the International Crime Free

Association. This was founded in the late, early 90s by a police officer in Mesa, Arizona. And he's sort of the intellectual architect, if you will, of many of the policies in California. We could talk about his training manual, which is in some ways very disturbing later on, if you'd like. I'd love to.

But he sort of puts out an estimate that roughly 2,000 cities across the country and elsewhere have policies like this. Well, now this guy's a promoter, so that's the number he would like us to believe. But that's still a very large number. It's a very large number. litigation right now going on both in Illinois and Minnesota challenging these laws essentially on both property rights grounds, as I mentioned before, and also in racial discriminatory grounds, as I believe the case in Minnesota speaks to. Okay, well, let's talk about the discriminatory piece of it. Before we get into, again, the reasons, tell me about the effects.

You've got these, you know, like you say, massive migrations of, you know, people of color from, you know, one area to another in California. And then in 85 percent of those cities that are receiving that growth, these laws are put into effect. Do you have any statistics or any sense of what that means for those communities, for people of color in California? Right. So I think just first of all, just having those policies there and having them more likely to be there certainly speaks to an impact on those communities, particularly from the folks with prior convictions. Right. How hard it is for those folks to find housing in those neighborhoods, those communities, number one. When it comes to actual evictions, the data can be difficult, somewhat difficult to determine or find. We did do some analysis, however, that sort of speaks again to disproportionate effects on Black and Latino residents. So we examined one crime-free program that existed in four of California's

largest cities, LA, Long Beach, Oakland, and Sacramento, roughly 300 folks who were targeted for eviction over that time. Nearly 80% of those who were targeted over this five-year period we looked at were not white. And in fact, in Oakland, Black tenants faced eviction at sort of twice their share of the city's renter population over that time. So, you know, that's one example. Black people were twice as likely to be evicted as compared to the rest of the population, not even just compared to white people, compared to the population at large. Compared to their share of how many black folks in Oakland are renters. Right. Oh, OK. Yeah. Yeah.

And then, you know, there are a couple other communities, you know, the Federal Department of Justice, actually, the reason I got on to this story at all is in December of last year, the Trump administration sued the city of Hesperia, which is a high desert city here in Southern California, alleging their crime-free law was racially discriminatory. It had a racial, and not only that, the intent of the law was to be racially discriminatory. And so, you know, to be frank, I was like, wow, you know, we have not seen many, very many fair housing lawsuits coming out of the Trump administration, probably worth a closer look at what was going on there.

And that kind of pointed me to understanding or checking into how widespread these laws were here in California. Right. But I bring up Hesperia to note that the federal DOJ and Department of Housing and Urban Development did an investigation of how their policy was working and found that black tenants there were nearly four times as likely to be evicted under their law as white tenants. Wow. Four times. Yes. Okay. So let's talk about the historical context again. We know you probably have a wider body of knowledge about this than I do, but it's been

a topic of study for me that throughout American history, when black and brown folks have come to an area, discriminatory housing laws, ordinances, restrictive covenants, things like that have been passed in order to stop those people from leaving certain places. To put it in no uncertain terms, black people come to an area, the white people say, holy shit, we don't like this, and pass laws to either remove or harass those people into removing themselves. And that's an indisputable fact of history. To me, what you're describing sounds like part of the same story. It sounds like, and I'm connecting the dots of causation, right? You're telling me the events that in the places that have the highest, you know, influx of black and brown folks, we see the most of these laws and the impacts are discriminatory. I mean, how do you

feel about that? Is there reason to believe that and to connect it to that? Or do you feel like that's a stretch? No, I mean, I think there absolutely is. There are some mitigating factors that we can go into that, but I think there absolutely is reason to believe this. Let me give you, you know, one example, you know. And some of the more aggressive, or actually a few examples, some of the more aggressive policies that we examined, I mentioned the city of Hesperia, also Antioch, which is a Bay Area suburb that had a huge increase in Black population over the past three decades. Lancaster, an LA.A. sort of exurb, huge increase in Black population.

Hemet, also in Southern California, big increase in Black and Latino population. The argument for putting these laws into place was that there was an increase in crime, right? And yet when we examined what the crime rates were in those four communities, we found either stable rates of crime or declining rates of crime. Right. And so, like, I think that sort of speaks to the point that, you know, and you were saying, as I mentioned, right, boxes of, and they put their laws or practices into place pretty much during the last financial crisis when there was a huge, you know, foreclosures.

And you can certainly understand, and those two communities in particular, deeply, deeply impacted by the foreclosure crisis, right? how there's community disruption around seeing, you know, vacant properties, a bunch of folks moving in and out, you know, you know, you know, weeds and, and, you know, properties unkempt. This is going to come up on next door is what you're saying. Yeah. And one, you can understand why, like there's community disruption based on that. Yeah. Setting aside any racial impacts, right. You're seeing like, you know, communities really overturning at very, at very, very rapid rates. So, you know, communities really overturning at very, very, very rapid rates. So, you know, I don't want to say like, you know, this is entirely about race or totally unconscious bias or even even even conscious bias. And we can get into some of those kind of racist language that was used prior to these ordinances going into place in those communities.

But that being said, it's not certainly I don't think it's all about race. I think there is aspects of community disruption here that that that in some ways, you know, push folks to to adopt some of these policies. But these but those issues can be hard to pull apart as well. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you know, you've got the same thing that we see everywhere. I made I made a joke about next door because it's the thing of like, you know, when people say, oh, there's a scary man lurking around. It's almost always a white person writing about a black person. And that person might say, no, no, it's actually not a race thing. Yeah, it was actually scary, except when you look at the when you look at the overall pattern. Yeah. And, you know, you say crime rates went up, maybe a rate of white people calling the police because someone who they didn't recognize was walking around went up, you know, like that sort of,

and, you know, we're talking about disruption, people's feelings of disruption can be heightened when you bring race into it. You know, they are more, you know, they have more worry and they tend to yell a little bit more at the neighborhood council meeting or whatever. So, but you,

it's a very hard connection to make causally, except when you look at the totality of the trend, which is what you're doing. Well, yeah. And not only that, I mean, you want to look again, we you know, we I don't know. Sometimes I think in these conversations we get messed up by looking at intent versus impact. Right. And we could talk about again, there are certainly some examples of intent when you look at some of the language here. that's pretty gross. But, you know, I think it's pretty undisputable, you know, and at least the areas that we examined in depth, what the impact was, right? Which was that, you know, again, communities that had, you know, growing Black and Latino

populations are among the communities most affected by these policies in California, at the least, where we spent the most time examining. And then also when you're looking at evictions, you know, you find that over and over again, too, where Black and Latino renters sort of facing the most impacts by this. And so by that standard, right, it's not really a question. Yeah. And I don't mean to, you know, I'm falling into a trap because one of the consistent problems with our conversation about race in America is that we reduce everything to like specific animus from individual people being like, I hate that person whose face doesn't look like my face. And you can have racism and racist outcomes that do not require someone to do that or do not need that angry racist person as a motivating factor. It can be done in ways that are sort of clinical and, oh, Joe, yeah, this is just a common sense policy.

And it is until you step back and you look at the effects that you see, oh, this is part of the story. The effects are discriminatory. And you can look at the history and say, this is clearly of a piece with the history of racist housing policies in America. And that's the part that's really disheartening to me about this. And after the break, I want to get into a larger conversation about California and about the nation's housing crisis. But just to put a pin on, put a cap on this part of the conversation, what really disheartens me about this is,

you know, California's story is supposed to be, hey, this is the fucking woke state. This is the state that gets it, right? And yet here we are talking about racially discriminatory housing policies that frankly remind me of the policies I've read about from the 1940s. Like it's, there's a clear line drawing from one to the next. And these were all put in place in the last couple of years and not in the, not in the, the, you know, the, in the

urban parts of, of, of California as well. We're talking about Riverside is, you know, a very short drive from, you know, the the centers of Los Angeles and depending on traffic. But yes, depending on traffic. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But so so what do you think about that? Like as a housing reporter looking at that? I mean, do you find that disheartening? And how do you think this connects to the to the broader story of race and housing in America? Yeah. Well, and there's one other element, too, here that we haven't spent a lot of time on is that the connection now between the police, formal police element in these housing programs, right? And so, you know, all of this conversation reminds me of a quote from a legal scholar I included in the story, Deborah Archer.

She's the co-director at the Center on Race, Inequality, and Law at New York University, and she studied these crime-free housing laws. And in fact, her article, legal article on this compared them to Jim Crow policies, right? Yeah. And she was particularly worried about this involvement of police in sort of government-sponsored racism is what she called it. And her quote, you know, we're seeing an increasing meshing of policing and housing policy in a way that's going to allow the racial biases of the policing system to infiltrate housing with really detrimental impacts for black and brown communities. And she says, you know, this is going to help facilitate and entrench racial segregation in housing. So to your point, absolutely. You know, not just, you know, our work, but scholars have definitely connected this through line between the racist housing policies of the past and how these crime-free housing programs work. And then this

additional element where you have this sort of formal involvement of police, you know, and again, all the racial biases and concerns that policing in this country sort of bring with it. Right. Now added and grafted on to how these housing programs work. It's like we're combining episodes here. It's like the issues from all these other episodes I've done are like coming to roost here and becoming malignant together. And it's not just – I mean the fact is it's not going to create segregation. This is perpetuating segregation and interfering with our efforts to separate. I mean the fact is the racist policies of the past were never undone or their impacts were never reversed. We live with them today. The story I always tell is, you know, growing up on Long Island, there was one black kid in my whole school.

And I would be on the Long Island Railroad going west to New York City and be, oh, all the black people got on the train at this stop. I wonder why that is. I remember having that thought. And it took me 20 years before I found out why, and the reason is because of racist housing policies from the literal 1930s that were avowedly, you know, no non-Caucasians may move here.

And that's still, that is why Long Island is like that way, and California has the same history, and we we're not moving in the right direction. We're moving the wrong direction to fix it, it seems. Well, that's how I feel from hearing the story. Sure, sure. And again, I think it's important here to know this is not just private actors,

you know, being, you know. This is our government. These are government practices that are, you know, encouraging, enriching, and entrenching, if you will, the segregation that exists, right? And that happened in the 1930s. And I think, you know, folks are arguing that policies like this, such as crime-free housing, may be furthering those effects. No, it's true.

Like the suburbs, the racist covenants that kept black people out of the suburbs were encouraged and often enforced by the federal government, federal housing policy, in addition to state and city housing policy. And in this case, yeah, this is the county going to a landlord saying, don't allow this type of person to stay here.

Yep. It's stunning. Yep. Oh my God. All right. So, okay, we got to go take a break. When we come back, I want to,

there's so much we could talk about. I want to talk about the housing crisis more broadly and the pandemic and how it's affecting evictions and housing. But we got to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with Liam Dillon. All right. We're back with liam dylan as angry as i am about the discriminatory policies you're talking about i want to talk about some of the other pressing issues that that you know so much about um so look before march of this year uh we were in an unprecedented housing crisis. And I could list statistics about, you know, the vast percentage of Californians who are paying a huge amount of their income on rent, right, you know, nationally as well. The housing crisis is absolutely national in every city in the country. And then a pandemic hits, which removes so many people's income and throws the

housing market into I don't even know what kind of state. So I would love if you, I assume you've been tracking this and what you could share with us about the effect the pandemic has had on renting, housing, evictions, all these issues. Yeah. It's actually, in some ways it's, it's weird and not what you would expect. I think like, I think like our vision of these, or at least mine, you know, I mean, I've been a reporter for, you know, 15 years, right? And so kind of came of age

during the last kind of housing economic collapse that was caused by a housing crisis, right? And so, you know, first getting into journalism at that point. And, you know, you saw, oh, okay, like economy's bad, housing's bad. That means like home prices go down because there are all these foreclosures,

you know, a lot of supply on the market. And like, you know, rental prices may go down too. And then, you know, watching, oh shit, now everybody, now they're both going up way quicker than anyone can actually afford them, right? And so like, that was the milieu, I guess, of the context in which we're working. What's kind of strange about this pandemic

is you have all sorts of, those indicators are going in weird directions. So like California and many places across the country, you know, home values now are like record, like home prices are at record levels. People, because people are trying to, you know, buy houses and maybe buy houses in different places. But like the home values are going up like crazy, which in some ways is kind of nuts, given the fact we have the economic devastation that we've had because of the pandemic. However, when you understand things in the context of, you know, actually who's harmed most by the pandemic, it sort of makes sense. You know, white collar workers are generally okay doing okay.

You and I are both working from, we're both in our home offices right now. We're at work in our houses. Yeah. Right. So we're able to do that. And a lot of folks like us, right. And they're able to, you know, sock some money away, whether it's your stimulus check or, or, you know, not spending as much money on your vacation, right. Start, you know, trying to dedicate that money towards buying a house, right. You know, a higher down payment. And then what you're also seeing is, you know, a lot of folks don't want people traipsing through their homes right now. And so a lot less, you know, inventory, housing supply on the market. And as a result, you know, you got these home values going through the roof and home prices going through the roof, which, you know, makes the idea of buying a house even more out of reach for folks than it was, say, nine months ago before the pandemic. Then you have the renter situation where you're seeing, you know, in major metro areas, San Francisco, L.A., New York, you know, big places,

rent's going down a lot. I've heard that. You know, on the average and the median rent's going down a lot. In fact, you know, my my fiance and I were just able to get a great deal on an apartment in Santa Monica, not a place we would have been able to live in were it not for rents, you know, stabilizing and going down, you know, in the past nine months. So you have that where, you know, renters in big cities now getting great deals because the rental market is, you know, weaker than it was because of the because of almost directly because of the pandemic. than it was because of, almost directly, because of the pandemic. And then you have this other category, right, which is these folks who, you know, low-wage workers, low-income folks who are really, really, really struggling right now. And really struggling to the point that we're seeing, you know, there's one study came out from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia recently that estimated by the end of this year, by the end of December,

over a million, 1.3 million renter households in the country will owe over $7 billion in back rent by the end of the year. And there are other estimates that are even more dire than that. One group put out a study that said 40 million folks, which is roughly equivalent to the population of California across the country, could be at risk of eviction, you know, because of job losses and economic losses due to the pandemic. Right. And, you know, these are folks who, you know, maybe were helped out by the stimulus, maybe were helped out by by, you know, the expanded unemployment benefits, which in talking to folks here in L.A., certainly a ton of folks were. Absolutely.

That was money that helped them cover their rent, even though they were out of work. Right. But all those things are going away. And so you have a point where you have a lot of states, California and even nationally, the CDC has put out some eviction protections to try to keep folks in their homes right now. But these rental debts continue to pile up. has, you know, put out some eviction protectors to try to keep folks in their homes right now. But these rental debts continue to pile up. And at some point, it's what kind of folks in housing, kind of the housing world, are referring to as an eviction cliff, right? We all see this coming. We see $7 billion owed in back rent. You know, we see folks are just simply unable to catch up and make their payments. And there's going to come a point, and it seems obvious, right, given these numbers, where you could very well see mass evictions because simply there's not enough money to cover all these old rental debts.

And just one more point before I cede the floor to you again. No, this is fascinating. I mean, this is not just for tenants. I mean, that $7 billion in rent that's owed is owed to landlords, right? And, you know, I think contrary to popular perception, the vast, vast majority of landlords in this country are small. They own like between one and four units, one and four properties, right? So not these big, gigantic corporate conglomerates. And these folks are not able to carry, you know, this debt because they have mortgages on their own. They have their own debts. Right. And so, you know, you could very easily see a situation where you have a, you know, you have, you know, this sort of backend economic crisis

that comes off the back of the pandemic. My God. There's so much there. And this is coming at a time when, and look, I can't rattle stats off the top of my head like you, but I have read. I have notes, so I'm doing okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, you're doing great. But also you report on this stuff full time. I'm trying to remember an article that I read a year ago. But, you know, when you look at the percentage of people who, there is a large percentage of people who before the pandemic were already spending sometimes 80 to 90% of their income on rent. Like that's a real phenomenon. That's who Matthew Desmond is writing about an evict. Right. You know, these are people who who all of their money goes to rent and they don't have any money for anything else. And, you know, if they're evicted, they literally cannot find another another apartment. You know, stories of people searching for months to find an apartment that they could afford.

And then once they do afford it, they're spending nearly all of their money on it simply to have a place in which to be. Right, right, right. And then think what happens if you miss one paycheck, right? Your hours were cut, right? And then what happens, you know? I mean, the margins here are so small

for folks to be able to stay in these homes, absolutely. And then once you're evicted, I mean, what Desmond wrote about and we talked extensively about in that episode is, you know, cities, many cities have eviction blacklists where once you've been evicted once, you can't ever find another place to live because they check your name against the blacklist. There's all of that. But the point I was making, people were already enormously rent burdened is the way to put it. And now you add to that the burden of owing back rent. Maybe your landlord lets you stay because they say, look, I know what's going on.

I'm not an ogre. Right. So you can stay. I know you got that stimulus check. So tell you what, pay what you can't. Let's make a deal. And you're going to owe. Right.

And that maybe there are people have been floating that for months. And one of those one of these days, the chickens are going to come home to roost. And this person hasn't been working. And even once they start working again, where are they going to get enough money to pay back rent when they were already paying half of their income when the rent is already already half their income? Yeah. Yeah. You can see how it piles up. It puts me in mind of I was just talking to a friend who is trying to start a new nonprofit theater in New York, a new nonprofit comedy theater. Yeah. And obviously there's been a wave of theater closures there. And I was talking to him about it because I think that's really important. And he said, you know, I think we'll have a little bit of an advantage.

He was just speculating. when we are able to get a place a year from now, let's hope, to open a comedy theater again once we're in that world, maybe it'll be easier for us to get a place because we won't have all the back costs that every venue that has just been with their doors shut has been accumulating back rent, employee pay, all these costs.

And a lot of those places are just gonna go bankrupt. They're gonna get kicked out because they owe the landlord too much money. And then he comes in with a zero balance, you know, and says, hey, I can just start paying the rent today. And he's like, that's good for him. It's bad for those venues. And that is what that makes me think of

that you're saying someone like you, no offense, is able to come in and take advantage of a good deal on a place in Santa Monica because you're not already rent burdened, because you're not already in debt. But someone who's already in a place doesn't get to benefit from any market change, lowered rent, because they already owe that landlord a couple thousand dollars that they will never be able to pay. And they're going to be out on their ass evicted. And then that's going to make it even harder for them to find another place. Absolutely. I think along those exact same lines, I think there is a big fear in among the housing community, if you will, larger housing community, that when it comes to mortgages and folks being foreclosed upon because, you know, landlords being unable to, to get up, carry their mortgages because they're not getting the rental income, right? Then you may see a wave

of kind of somewhat similar to what you saw during the foreclosure crisis, where you have, you know, big institutional investors, big real estate companies, essentially being able to swoop in and get, get properties at, at, you know, bargain basement or, or cheaper prices than otherwise would have. And so you may end up having, and I think there is a decent fear of this, again, in the broader kind of housing community, an even greater corporatization of apartment owning and multifamily housing owning because individual landlords will be foreclosed out of their properties. And those corporate entities have the capital to be able to ride out this crisis, even if they're not getting their same rents. Then the elderly couple who bought a quadplex, fourplex in 1970,

or maybe better, maybe, you know, 10 years ago, since they would still have a mortgage, right? And are, and then have to be foreclosed upon, right? Because they don't, those folks don't have the, that capital the same way the larger corporate entities would. I think that's a good point, but I do want to push back slightly because, you know, just following following uh you know city hall politics here in los angeles which i'm sure you do um you know you see a huge amount of emphasis put on the small the small mom and pop landlord you know as as being the little old lady who who owns the right she she rents out half the building she lives in the other half and oh what's gonna happen to her and those those people do exist right but a lot of

landlords are also let me paint you a different picture uh someone who lives in a two million dollar home has a lot of income and rather than put the money in the stock market they bought a rental property you know oh yeah yeah and they've hired a property manager to manage it and you know they said instead of airbnb-ing i I'll landlord. I'll be a landlord. And so what that makes me think is when we're talking about who is really at risk here, someone who is a landlord, at least they fucking own something. You know what I mean? Like they, by definition, have more assets than a renter. Right, right.

Yes. Two points to that. I could go on forever about this. I mean, yet, like, no one is entitled to have their investment increase. Right. So like, you know, sorry, you know, I mean like, wow, your investment didn't, didn't, you know, didn't deliver 10% returns. I, you know, I can't really feel bad for you about that. Right. I mean, like, so that point is certainly well, well taken. You have no entitlement to your investment in purchasing a home or an apartment complex to go up, right? Additionally, too, you know, many of these longtime landlord owners have benefited

substantially from California's property tax system under Proposition 13 for benefit of your wider audience, essentially is a law that says your property taxes are based on a level of what your purchase price was. So, you know, I think everyone would know that California real estate has gone up a zillion amount, a zillion percentage in the last decade or so, right? If you brought your, bought your apartment complex before that, you've seen insane gains in your property value without a corresponding increase in your taxes, right? Right. And so, you know, you've gained a tremendous amount

during that time by essentially sheltering the value of your home through no, you know, this is not because you invested in the property or, you know, I'm sure many folks obviously have, you know, repaired up, you know, tore up the floors and put in new floors and sure, you know, that's a decent reason why you should be able to rent for more or get more profit, right, from it. But the idea that just simply sitting on a property and then all of a sudden

your values go up with nothing at all and your taxes are capped, that's a huge gain. And that's a gain that folks do not see in almost everyone else in the country. Yeah. Oh, well, let's talk about the propositions a little bit. Proposition 13, yeah, to put it in my terms, just because we can do a whole episode on Proposition 13. Proposition 13, we would have done on Adam Ruins Everything. It's like that big of a topic. If it was not a California-specific issue. It is like one of those things where once you learn about it,

it blows your mind how big the effect was and how few people really understand it. So Proposition 13 was a proposition that was passed by the voters in the 70s, correct? 78, yeah. As part of a tax revolt, basically. And it keeps California property taxes artificially low. Basically, if you stay in your home and you don't sell it, your property taxes barely go up at all year to year, far lower than the than. Yeah, just a percent or two. Yeah. Far lower than the value of the home. And that means that a California gets very little money from property taxes compared to other states, which is why schools here are underfunded compared to other, you know, states that have as much money as California. If you look at California's

education rankings, you know, they are not where you would imagine they would be based on the wealth of the state. And two, it completely like distorts the housing market in this weird way, because it's an immense handout to homeowners specifically or or really any property owner. And and so it's like really the government putting its thumb on the scale in a weird way to incentivize certain types of ownership and to disincentive. Well, long time ownership. Absolutely. Long time ownership. And it's also you can pass it to your children.

So there's like the famous case. I'm sure you hear this all the time that the L.A. Times broke a year or two ago about how Jeff Bridges inherited his parents. That was me. I wrote that story. You wrote that story. Oh, my God. I didn't know you wrote it. I read it before I knew your name. Right. That was me. I wrote that story. You wrote that story. Oh, my God. I didn't know you wrote it. I read it before I knew your name. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So well, you tell me the story. Right. You reported. OK. Yeah. Right. So Jeff Bridges, famous actor, father Lloyd Bridges. Right. They bought a house in the, I don't know, 50s, 60s in Malibu. And it

turns out that, you know, when Jeff Bridges and his siblings' parents died, they left the house to them. And they ended up, you know, being able to claim property taxes or pay property taxes based on the value of what that Malibu beach house was in the 70s. They inherited the tax break. They inherited the tax break and they were trying to rent it out for 16 grand a month, which was roughly three times their annual property tax pay annual annual property tax payment for a Malibu beach house. Yeah. So this is this is Jeff Bridges, a very wealthy man. I love Jeff Bridges.

Who, you know, everyone loves Jeff Bridges. And I'll say I don't think it is individually wrong to take advantage of a tax break. Right. However, when you look at because you're a person and you take advantage of what tax break, right? However, when you look at, because you're a person and you take advantage of what's in front of you, right? But when we look at a matter of tax policy, we should not be giving Jeff Bridges as of state that much of a discount on his property taxes. He doesn't need it. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so this, this is like the, when you look around California today and you say, what is,

why do we have a housing crisis? Is Prop 13 one of the reasons? Oh yeah, absolutely. Because I also, I think it incentivizes, look, I mean, there was an issue in the 70s with property taxes going up at rates that were very large, very quickly, and concerns, I think, many of which, in some extent, were legitimate about, you know, folks living in their houses a

long time and all of a sudden not having to leave because they weren't able to, you know, unable to afford their home because of the taxes. I think it's a legitimate problem, right? And a problem that I guess aimed to address. That being said, you know, now you're dealing, you know, you know, more than 40 years on you know, you know, you know, more than 40 years on with with downstream effects of the 50 years on with downstream effects of this. And it in many ways incentivizes the insane housing shortage that California has. Because, you know, you're if you, you know, keep new housing for coming into your community and have that have a shortage of available homes,

the value of the home that you have is going to go up. And so if you're not feeling any pain in a form of higher taxes from the fact that your home value is going to go up, you're actually incentivized to do things to prevent new housing for coming into your community. Incentivized to do things to keep your home value as high as possible, right? Because you're not feeling those effects at all in the form of

higher taxes. Yeah, it is absolutely wild, the hole that we're in in this regard. Now, and I just want to highlight again that this this proposition also starved local governments because unfortunately for some perverse reason here in america we fund schools through property taxes right which is fucked up another that could be another totally different episode because you end up with wealthier areas having better schools because the property values are higher which is clearly i don know, not how you want a society to work. The people, the kids who need the most attention are the kids who do not live in the wealthy areas. And those are the kids who have the least money for their schooling. So that's

another big problem with Proposition 13. And actually this year, a proposition was on the ballot to try to ameliorate that. Proposition 15, I believe. 15, that's correct. And could you just tell us the story of that and where that came from and how that went? Sure. So Proposition 15 tried to kind of divide the issue when it comes to Prop 13 in half, if you will. And so, you know, we keep talking about homeowners and how they benefit from Proposition 13, but general property owners are actually who benefit from it. Like if a business is on a property, the property taxes they pay

are also based on when they purchased the property. Target and Walmart get this property tax break too. So does Elon Musk. And so does, you know, Apple's new headquarters in Cupertino or whatever. Right, right, exactly. So what Prop 15 tried to do was say,

and it was sort of, I guess, colloquially, if this is even colloquial, was known as split roll, which was to kind of divide in half the situation where larger businesses, industrial areas, industrial properties, they would pay property taxes based on their market value. So what the value of the property is now, not what their purchase price was. Like property taxes are in most other states. In most other states, exactly right. Homeowners would maintain, however, their benefits from this. So this would sort of, you know, obviously the idea was it's more politically palatable and popular to tax business over homeowners. And so that's what they were going to try to do.

And so big campaign, you know, over $100 million campaign around Prop 15, and it failed narrowly. You know, a lot of the business interest, you know, argued, look, yeah, maybe our property taxes are lower compared to other states, but there's a lot of other taxes in California that show that, you know, businesses are taxed perfectly fine and, in fact, in many ways higher than other places in the rest of the country. And as a result, you know, increasing our property taxes could and would result in, you know, us leaving the state and other sort of negative effects, you know, higher prices for consumers, et cetera, et cetera.

You know, and that's the argument that ended up winning the day. consumers, et cetera, et cetera. You know, and that's the argument that ended up ended up winning the day. Well, I was at that argument or was it just an essential conservatism on the part of California voters? You know, because this is part of the story for me. So, you know, a lot of people were happy and a lot of people were mad on on Election Day. I had been following so many of these propositions so closely. We already covered proposition 22 on this show, you know, up and down. I think we saw a bad policy enacted and good policy,

not enacted in the California ballot propositions. You're a reporter. Maybe you don't want to editorialize. I will. Right. Yes. Okay. I will editorialize and I will say,

you know, this is me speaking. Liam's not speaking here. Right. But, you know, I feel that I was looking at and saying, you know, this this really was one that should have won. This was being marketed as the, you know, schools and communities first proposition that would take money from the largest businesses, you know, remove a tax break that the largest businesses did not need to have and give it to our schools and communities. And ballot propositions like this have been popular, for instance, in Los Angeles, you know, that have that have raised money for schools, bond measures, things like that seemed like something that the voters would be willing to pay for.

And the voters said, whoa, whoa, whoa, property taxes. No, no, no, no, no, no. Which is, you know, and essentially it struck me as a conservative position on that. And so a suspicion I've always had is, again, you hear the national media talk about California as the bluest of the blue states. But when it comes to housing, this feels like a very conservative state for me. And I wonder if you agree with that. Oh, boy. I know that's a lot of editorializing. You can, you can answer that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, let me, let me try to answer this. You know I think there's a certain amount of truth to what you're saying for sure. And let me try to talk about that

in the context of one community, you know so Marin County, Marin County is a Bay area county just on the other side of the Golden State Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. Right. One of the wealthier counties in California. Also, one of the counties that has the largest proportion of folks who vote Democrat in any county in California. Right. So very, very, you know, you know, blue, if you will. Among the bluest of the blue counties in California. However, when you look at statistics on housing affordability, on segregation, on many of these other things, right? Building of low-income homes, housing homeless residents, you know, Marin County ranks at or near the bottom among counties in California. And often, you know, I did a story on this a few years ago. Often you'll find folks up there arguing against any kind of new development on the grounds

and low income development or high income development or whatever, right, on the grounds that it would hurt community character, hurt environmental characteristics of the county or whatever. And so, you know, a lot of folks argue, particularly when it comes to housing, that Marin is a classic example of an area where people are not living their values on this issue. I mean, it's really, you know, really hard to be able to afford a home in Marin County. And there's not, and there's a huge amount of segregation in that county, dividing, you know, white residents from people of color. And there's not a amount of segregation in that county dividing, you know, white residents from people of color.

And there's not a lot of, frankly, a lot of action being done to ameliorate those things. And so, you know, I don't know if you want to call that conservative, right? You know, I think like you, you know, and I think in many ways it's probably not correct, but I think you are seeing an example of, again, what many people are saying when it comes to them of a community that doesn't really live the values that they profess, at least by how they vote. I think that's a good point because I'm not – my goal is not to conflate conservatism and discrimination by any measure. I meant in terms of – we associate conservatism with commitment to low taxes. And so that was a piece of it. But I think you've put a finer point on it, which is that, you know, yeah, people don't have the commitment to ending discrimination that they say they do with their mouths. It does not come through in the policies.

And I don't know how I divide it in terms of living values versus not having those values. I think it's probably a little bit of both. When you're talking about Marin County, you know, I think you might have people saying, oh, we just don't want poor people to live here. I bet there's some people who just feel that way. And, you know, but, but I think the contrast that you're talking about is exactly what I'm trying to highlight. Yeah. And that again, goes back, I think, you know, something that we brought up at the beginning of the episode when we were talking about, you know, crime-free housing, which is that, you know, many people say, yeah, okay, like it's good. We should have houses for homeless residents. We should have a place for our workforce to live. You know, we should ensure that, you know, everybody has safe and secure housing,

but just not next to me, you know? Not in my backyard, you might say. Right, exactly, exactly. And so, like, again, I think that strain is, you know, is common when you're talking about a lot of these practices, right? Well, let's talk about the upcoming changes that we might see to housing.

We've got a new presidential administration coming in. That means a new HUD. That means a new, all sorts of departments that might have an impact on housing policy. Do you anticipate any changes coming up in the near future? Well, I think, I mean, sure to answer yes, I think there's a lot that potentially HUD could do when it comes to fair housing, right?

Certainly more lawsuits and more attention to that than the current or the Trump administration did. I think though a lot of this depends on Congress as well. I mean, I think immediately the housing issue as as we discussed, is this potentially looming eviction cliff and foreclosure cliff or whatever, you know, we're calling very, very, potentially very, very soon. And, you know, everybody in this area, from landlords to tenants to housing advocates, I mean, literally everybody is arguing the way you fix this is with a giant cannon of money. And you just shoot it into the landlords and to renters and to, you know, whatever, right? That's what you do. And so like that, I mean, you know,

that I think is the first big issue, right? Are they, how much, is there going to be a cannon of money and how big is that cannon going to be? And I think certainly you're more likely to see at least the president arguing that there should be, right? Whether that translates to Congress and the actual cannon, if I keep this metaphor under the ground, we'll actually, we'll see. But I think, you know, again, I think the first issue and potential issue that could define housing under this administration is how they're going

to tackle this looming eviction and foreclosure crisis that we're seeing. And do you feel that? Look, I have always felt that housing, I've said this on the show before, is the biggest crisis in America that gets the least attention from our political system, that that, you know, you go to any city and they say, oh, my God, housing crisis here are terrible. Right. But you almost never hear a politician talking about it. I remember in 2016, didn't come up once. And, you know, this last election, a couple of the candidates actually had housing plans that they were public and vocal about. And I remember that feeling like a step.

But in my view, a lot of that is because of, you know, in the United States, the rural areas have more political power, have an outsized amount of political power because of the way our electoral college and everything else works. And so as a result, you see less attention paid to what is often an urban issue. I wonder if I wonder if you see that dynamic at play at all, or is this pain more equally felt the pandemic eviction pain? This pain more equally felt the pandemic eviction pain. Well, I think to your point, I mean, you know, just look at the process by which, you know, incoming President Biden selected his secretary for Department of Housing and Urban Development. I mean, this was a congresswoman, Martha Fudge from Ohio is who Biden nominated. This was, you know, she wanted to be the agriculture secretary. Yeah. Well-documented, right?

And not only that, lamented in an interview recently that, you know, Black men and women often get shunted to HUD and to Department of Labor as, you know, places for those folks to be in a cabinet.

Because HUD's seen as the housing project organization. Right, right, right. Yeah. And so, you know, just days after that interview, you know, Congresswoman Fudge, who has, you know, by my reading, little to no formal background in housing policy. I mean, certainly a congresswoman,

certainly, you know, more of a background than I guess the current HUD director, Ben Carson, who was a neurosurgeon, had in housing issues, right? But that being said, I certainly, you know, more of a background than I guess the current HUD director, Ben Carson, who was a neurosurgeon, had in housing issues, right? But that being said, I mean, you know, was put in charge of this, you know, giant bureaucracy and major, major, major issue, you know, again, you know, certainly not something that was her first choice for her place to go and not something that matches her experience. And so to your point, I mean, I think like, you know, HUD being seen as, you know, not a primetime or housing not be seen as a primetime national issue. I think you could certainly see that throughout the process by which the new HUD secretary was named.

Wow. Well, look, let's see. I'll usually try to end on a uplifting note. It's really hard. It's really, really hard when it comes to housing. I mean, you've been you've been, you've been doing work on this for years. You have a regular podcast where you talk about the housing crisis. talking about that make things, you know, these are all ways in which things are moving in the wrong direction, more housing discrimination, less attention being paid to housing, you know, the weight of the needs of landlords being put ahead of the needs of tenants. All these dynamics are still happening. Are there any changes that you see in, you know, the way that these issues are treated that give you cause for hope that we might be getting our arms around the housing crisis? Or

if not, what do you think needs to happen? Right. So I would push back on one of the things you just said about kind of less attention being paid to housing. I do think, you know, putting aside the process by which, you know, the HUD director was selected, right, there actually is a lot more attention being paid at the local level, at the state level, certainly here in California. I agree. Governor Newsom, in fact, right before the pandemic in February, dedicated his entire state of the state speech to the state's homelessness crisis. Right. And so, like, you are seeing elected officials responding to this in a different way. Maybe that's not trickled up, if you will, to the national level in ways that we may think it should.

But there is a response that's coming or at least a demand for that response that we haven't really seen. I've seen the demand. Absolutely. And the dynamic I was talking about where it almost never came up nationally has started to shift and we've started to see more attention paid to the issue. However, at the same time, the Democratic supermajority in California, which professed its desire to change housing in the state, failed to pass a housing bill of any kind last year. Am I correct about that? A better way to put it is failed to pass the major housing bills that they said they were going to.

Yes. Okay. Yeah. And that, I think, speaks to, you know, again, even when this even when the need is enunciated, which it finally is being the conflicted priorities of the of our politicians and also the voters they represent, as evidenced by what you're talking about in Marin County. Yeah. The voters who are the loudest are maybe have conflicted priorities. And so that's yeah, that's what I run up against. I mean, housing's always been seen as a local thing, like a thing you do with the city.

Like you go to your neighborhood zoning board or you vote on city council, but this project gonna go here, where otherwise, right? That's always been, it's been a local, local, you know, the local government gives the building permit, right? Like it's always seen as local, local, local. And I think there's been this realization

from state officials, from some federal officials, that that system, not working in California, you know, not working nationally. And there needs to be, you know, certainly more investment on the side of federal and state government into helping to support housing. You know, I mean, another thing that blows my mind is, you know, a stat. We give way more subsidy, federal and state level, to homeowners than we do to low-income renters. Yeah. With a mortgage interest deduction, through capital gains exclusions, these sorts of things that people don't, you know, you hear all the time. Well, I don't, you know, I don't want taxpayer-funded housing in my community or wasting taxpayer money.

You know, homeowners get taxpayer-funded housing. It's these deductions, which actually cost more, right, than the outlays for public housing. We massively subsidize buying homes in this country. Exactly. And so, like, that idea, you know, I think has frustrated any ability to make progress, the idea that housing is local, when in fact, you know, the federal and state governments, I think, are certainly starting to wake up to the fact that they have a role to play. governments, I think, are certainly starting to wake up to the fact that they have a role to play. And that role could involve just money or reallocating or rededicating the money that they do end up spending, or could involve, you know, going beyond that, perhaps tying some of that money to allowing more housing in certain communities, which would give an incentive for local governments to say yes. Yeah, I mean, you think about how much, and I swear to God,

I'm bringing this in for a landing here, but you think about how much and I swear to God, I'm bringing us in for a landing here. But the you think about how successful the federal government has been at controlling food prices. Right. And just saying that, hey, food is something that people need. Right. So they massively subsidize the food industry itself. The agriculture industry is one of the most subsidized industries in America. The agriculture industry is one of the most subsidized industries in America. There's lots and lots of laws protecting people's health, you know, making food additives and whatnot, making sure that food is safe. There is and there's also price support and subsidies given to the people buying the food in the form of food stamps, et cetera. And the result is that, hey, lots of criticisms of what you find in the grocery store. In fact, just in my interview with Rebecca Poole the other day, we were talking about, you know, how the food that's on the shelves is not the healthiest, contributes to the obesity epidemic, et cetera.

But American food is extremely cheap as a function of income. We have successfully done that. So you can at least get your fucking calories, even if you're drinking Coke and eating Twinkies, you know, and we have completely failed to do that for the other thing that you absolutely need to survive, which is a place to be. And that seems like something that the federal government should step up and do. And certainly certainly local governments as well. But yeah, it seems like something we should get our arms around as a society and maybe tackle. Well, as someone who's covered this issue

for now five years, I agree. Well, Liam, I really can't thank you enough. Please take a listen, folks, to Give Me Shelter, the California housing crisis podcast and check out your work in the LA Times. Can't thank you enough for being here. Thank you so much, Adam.

A real pleasure. check out your work in the LA Times. Can't thank you enough for being here. Thank you so much, Adam. A real pleasure. Well, thank you once again to Liam Dillon for coming on the show. I hope you enjoyed that interview as much as I did. Always incredible to have an actual investigative journalist on the show telling us about what they found. That is it for us this week on Factually. If you enjoyed the conversation, please leave us a rating or review wherever you subscribe. It really does help us out quite a lot. And hey, by the way, I got an announcement to make. I forgot to bring this up, but every episode of Adam Ruins Everything is now

streaming on HBO Max. That's right. You can watch every single episode we have ever made, including my very favorite episode, our series finale, Adam Ruins himself. And in case you didn't hear, and yes, that I did say series finale, well, we announced that I am doing a new show with Netflix that is going to be coming out. I don't know when yet, but it's called The G Word. We are working on it. We're going to shoot it soon. I very much hope. And it's going to come out on Netflix.

But until then, you can watch every single episode of Adam Ruins Everything on HBO Max right now. That is it for us this week on Factually. I want to thank our producers, Kimmy Lucas and Sam Roudman, Andrew Carson, our engineer, Andrew WK for our theme song, the wonderful folks at Falcon Northwest

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