Factually! with Adam Conover - Why Is Housing So Expensive In America? with Jenny Schuetz

Episode Date: March 9, 2022

Why is housing so expensive, when other human needs like food are relatively cheap? Brookings Senior Fellow and author of Fixer-Upper, Jenny Schuetz, joins Adam to explain why our entire system is tilted to protect wealth rather than provide housing, and how we can change the system to fix that. Pick up her book at http://factuallypod.com/books 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 everyone, welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover.

Thank you for joining me once again as I talk to an amazing expert about all the incredible things they know that I don't know that you might not know. We're going to have an incredible time getting our minds blown together. First off, I want to thank everybody who supports this show on Patreon. If you do, you are receiving bonus podcast episodes and exclusive stand-up that I am not posting anywhere else, including my live show, Mind Parasites Live, a whole hour of standup that you can watch there. And you can join our book club. We are reading Four Lost Cities by Annalee Newitz. And at the end of March,

we are going to host a live book club over Zoom that Annalee themselves will be joining us for. It's gonna be so much fun. And if you'd like to join us, you can do so at patreon.com slash Adam Conover. That's patreon.com slash Adam Conover. But let's get to today's episode. Let's talk about housing. You know, housing in the U.S. is very expensive. Renting and owning is a total ripoff, especially in the places where the jobs are, the places where the most people

want to live. You know, we all need space to exist. It's just like a basic need, like air and sunlight. And if you think about it, a couple hundred years ago, you could wander into the woods and just, you know, build your hovel by a brook with the help of some critters. Like there was enough space that if you didn't have any, you could just wander off and find some. But now, now that we have paved over most of this great country, most of the great livable spaces around the world, well, you have to pay for space to exist in, and it is going to cost you. In the last decade, the median home price has risen by roughly 30%, but incomes grew only by 11%. And if you go back even further, the situation only looks worse. Since 1970, median

home prices have risen by 125%. That is huge. But unfortunately, median wages over the last half century only rose by 15%. And it's not just homeowners who are getting screwed. Renters are as well. In the 50 largest U.S. metro areas, rent rose a fucked up 20% between just December 2020 and December 2021. That's in a year they rose by a fifth. In recent years, nearly four in ten renters have been officially rent burdened. That means they spend more than a third of their pre-tax income on rent, and an increasing number spend over half of their income just on a place to lay their heads. I mean, think about this.

You don't have to pay anything to breathe. And, you know, for the most part, food is quite cheap in America. But our country is structured so that paying for simply a place to sleep and jerk off can bleed you dry. So why is this? Why is it that housing is so expensive in America when so many other necessities of life are so cheap? Apart from health care, which is an entirely different episode. But why housing? Well, the answer is that America decided to make homeownership the linchpin of middle class wealth. Federal policies, especially in the post-war era, advocated for mass homeownership. Middle class

families, especially white families, were told and incentivized to invest in homes as a form of wealth. Homes that they could then take loans against to send kids to college. Homes that would supposedly appreciate in value, giving those middle-class, again, often white people, a nest egg that they could use in retirement. In other words, we built a system in which our homes are basically a individual personal bank that we both own and live in. It's hard to imagine anything more capitalist

than that, frankly, but that is our system and the consequences have been somewhat devastating. See, this system creates huge political incentives for those homeowners who occupy, by the way, two thirds of all American homes to keep housing prices as high as possible. I mean, think about it, right? If housing prices are high and you own a home, that benefits you because when you sell that home, you are going to make more money. Therefore, homeowners are incentivized to try to stop new housing from being built because the less the supply, the more demand, the more their homes are worth. So you see the problem here? We have created a housing system

in which the average American is politically incentivized to fight for less, more expensive housing. No wonder then that housing is so expensive in the country. It is baked into the structure of our very society. So what the hell do we do about this? How do we start chipping away at the enormous edifice that is the housing market in order to make sure that everybody in America can find a place to live? Well, to help us figure out the answer to this problem, our guest today is Dr. Jenny Schutz.

She's a senior fellow at the think tank Brookings Metro, and she's taught at USC in Georgetown. And she's the author of Fixer Upper, How to Repair America's Broken Housing Systems. Please welcome Jenny Schutz. Jenny, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having me. So you've written a book about housing policy. Why housing?

What is so important about housing? Well, for people like me who study housing, we always think it's important. But I think in the last couple of years especially, we've seen sort of things start to fall apart a little bit. So the pandemic really shone a light on how many low-income renters are living very, very close to the edge. Even in good times, they can barely make rent. And then something like the pandemic hit, they lose a job, lose some shifts. And all of a sudden, you're talking about potentially millions of people being evicted from their apartments because they can't make the rent payment.

But the problems in the book actually have been a long time building. Since the Great Recession, we haven't built enough homes to keep up with demand. And that's really catching up now because there are sort of these two huge generations, the baby boomers and the millennials, all of whom need someplace to live. And we just don't have enough homes for everybody. Yeah. And is this, look, I live in Los Angeles. It's obviously a crisis in Los Angeles. You're in DC. I know there's a housing issues in DC, but is this becoming a national problem? Some of this is a national problem, and some of it is especially acute in places on the coast. So nationally, we actually haven't built enough housing since the Great Recession. But in places like California, D.C., New York, Boston, we haven't built enough housing to keep up with

demand for more like 30 years. And a lot of this is because of choices that local governments have made and that local voters have expressed their desire not to be building more housing, particularly in the places where people really want to live, the cities and metros that have strong job markets where people want to live, but we just haven't built enough to keep up with demand. So why haven't we built enough? I mean, you just said voters have expressed a preference to not build more housing. And let me just say, if you're looking at the last century of America, that seems a little bit counterintuitive, because like the whole story of the growth of the middle class, you know, in the postwar era is like tied to the construction of homes on a massive scale and like the investment in, you know, home ownership, you know, Levittown,

like that whole story of, you know, of mass home ownership. So how do we end up in a state where we're now not building enough housing? Why? I mean, we're, you know, the government has done a great job, as I've said on this show before, of making sure that we produce enough food and that food is cheap, right? There's been like a main, like a big focus of government agricultural policy. We just got to have to have a lot of food. And we have the cheapest, most abundant food in the world in the United States, which has caused us some problems as well. But, you know, that is something that we have been able to ensure very largely, even though there's still people who go hungry

in this country, like our food supply is huge. We have not been able to do the same thing with housing. Why? So there are a couple of really important things about housing production that make it different from something like the market for food or cars or most other consumer goods and services. One is that it's a very tightly regulated market. And in particular, it's regulated by local governments. So a landowner or a developer can't build a home or take down an existing home without getting explicit permission from the local government within which the land is located. So we've delegated this enormous responsibility to control housing production to local governments. And local governments in turn have decided it's important for the people who already live in a community to get a chance to weigh in on whether or not they should build more housing and what kind of housing they should build. But it turns out a lot of people who already live in communities like their neighborhoods the way

they are. They have a house. By definition, they can already afford to live there. And a lot of neighborhoods just decided we don't want more homes. We don't want more neighbors. We don't want to grow. And in particular, we don't want to build moderately priced housing that low-income families might want to live in. And for local governments, there are also some incentives not to build lower-cost housing because they rely on property taxes to pay for things like schools. So if you build a bunch of housing that doesn't bring in as much in taxes as it costs for the services that local governments have to provide, then local governments also lose. So we have this combination of a system where local governments control the supply of housing, their residents don't necessarily want to expand it,

and they've essentially decided we're just okay with the way things are, and we don't feel the need to accommodate future generations. You explain all of this so clearly. So I would love to hear a clear explanation of my next question, which is why do you think people don't want to have moderately priced housing built in the places that they live? Why do those residents exert that pressure? There are a bunch of different reasons. And for any person who protests against new housing, it's not always clear that they even know what their main motivation is. So the sort of the, I think the most rational economic explanation is homeownership is the biggest single financial asset for middle income families. So the government has encouraged people to buy homes, to put their savings in homes. And if that's your entire nest egg, if that's your retirement plan and how you are expecting to send your kids to college, you're really sensitive to anything that might hurt your property value. So in that case, if you are concerned, for instance, that low-income apartments

or a big box store or anything else is going to hurt your property values, you have a strong financial incentive to push back against development. The more uncomfortable conversation is homeowners tend to be older. They tend to be wealthier. They're more likely to be white. And a lot of the housing that they're protesting against, rental apartments, low-income apartments, would be accessible to lower-income households who are more likely to be Black or Latino. So, we get these conversations that are partly driven by financial self-interest, which is understandable even if it isn't necessarily great for society. And then this undertone of classism, sometimes racism, you know, and some of it also is just a sense of,

I like my neighborhood the way it is. This is comfortable. I've lived here for a long time. And we see that actually for renters and homeowners of all races and incomes say, I like my neighborhood the way it is. I don't want things to change. Well, yeah, because a lot of times when you moved into, especially if you bought a home, you moved someplace because you liked the way it is. And then something changes and you're like, wait, that's not the way things were. Like, look, I own a home. I've lived here about four years and I definitely experienced like, oh, that like there was like a disused industrial building on my block that had like a burrito shop in it. And I used to go to the burrito shop and then they

knocked down the whole building. I was like the burrito shop. I liked walking to the burrito shop. And then they knocked down the whole building. I was like the burrito shop. I liked walking to the burrito shop. What they're building instead is a five-story apartment building. And I'm like, okay, we need here in Los Angeles, we need about 150 units of housing more than we need one more pretty okay burrito shop as much as I liked going to that burrito shop. But here's the thing. If I had moved into the place and the apartment building was already there, I wouldn't have had that feeling of loss. But once I've moved in, I'm paying my mortgage. I'm like, oh, I like how everything is. That's why I chose to live here. Something changes. And I'm like, hey, so there's that basic human dislike of change and loss aversion. I get that. And I also can agree with you that racism and classism exist and that those are problems in human society. I hope everyone listening to the show intuition that I've had, which is that like the overwhelming emphasis in American society on

homeownership as being a path to wealth generation and as being like an asset store, you know, that you, that is where you are keeping your retirement account and basically everything else. And that's literally what you're told. You flip on CNBC and Susie Orman tells you, oh, that's the best investment you can make, yada, yada, yada. A lot of people have to save up. They put their money in and they want the money to keep growing. That just as a baseline assumption of American society is causing our housing crisis because it means that everybody in the system needs housing prices to go up. And housing prices going up is what causes people to not afford housing, which causes a housing crisis, which leads to homelessness. And so you end up with this toxic cycle where people say,

for instance, homelessness is a big problem in LA. And everyone says, I don't want a homeless shelter near here. It's going to cause my property values to go down. That is what they are truly saying. But the problem is if their housing prices stay up, well, that's the cause of homelessness. So it's like we fundamentally want it both ways, like structurally. Is that sound close to accurate to you? Yeah. I mean, the fact that people are so invested in homeownership as a source of wealth building for themselves, and more than that, I would argue, we've kind of been fed this line that homeowners are somehow better people, that homeowners are more invested, that they show up to vote, they get involved with the PTA. you a better person than you were last year when you were a renter. And because of that, we have actually quite a lot of discrimination against renters and rental housing. So that's the biggest

pushback you get is when you try to build housing in a single family homeowner neighborhood, try to build rental housing, people get really upset and they will essentially say, I don't want those renters to live here. They're not invested in the community. They don't care about it. You know, my voice as a long-term homeowner should count more than these people who only got here yesterday, right? And we're sort of fed this through a lot of lines, including, you know, federal government policy that really does argue everybody should just become a homeowner as quickly as possible. And that makes their communities better. And that'll be a source of wealth. And I think at some point, we also have to reckon with, though, the homeownership rate in the US has been going down.

And based on the demographics, it's projected to continue going down. We are going to become a nation with more renters, and we have to stop discriminating against renters in our policies. Well, and of course, it's going down because so many people can't afford to buy a home anymore. I mean, the reason, and I've said this publicly before, the reason my partner who also works in television and I were able to buy a home is because we, each of us in Los Angeles, each of us sold our own television show and then it ran for over two years. And as a result, we were able to buy a middle-class home in Los Angeles. We live in a small townhouse and we townhouse and, you know, we don't have a yard.

We don't have you know what I mean? It's not fancy shit. We're like we're buying like we bought a starter home. And that was what we were able to do after, you know, reaching truly the pinnacle of success in our chosen field for people in our age. in our chosen field for people in our age. And so if you are working a more normal job or a less well-paying job, you can't afford to live in the city.

You can't afford to buy a home in the city at all. And that's true in so many cities around the country. And it's also true outside of cities in many places. So talk to most people under 30. They're like, I'll never be able to buy a home. That is their gut intuition. Do you think that intuition is right when people say that? Depends on what we do. I mean, the problems of not enough housing and escalating housing prices are not going to fix themselves. We do have a lot of policy levers that we could be pushing on that would make things easier. But it's interesting that you

brought up the question of age, because that's actually one of the biggest dividing lines in people's politics on housing. You know, pretty much everybody under the age of 40 realizes that it's super expensive to become a homeowner. They're pessimistic about whether they'll ever be able to. But you talk to people who are in their 40s and 50s who bought their first home when housing was a lot cheaper and we were building a lot more. And they don't really understand what the problem is. So even, you know, like if you talk to people who have kids in their 20s, they say on the one hand, it's terrible that my kid can't move back to the neighborhood they grew up in and buy a house. And on the other hand, they're showing up at the community meetings saying,

don't you dare build condos in my neighborhood. So we kind of haven't connected all of the dots. Yeah. I mean, how much more expensive has it gotten to buy a house? I mean, I know what the real dollar prices are in the city that I live, but, you know, compared to income, has it really gotten that much more expensive? It depends a lot on where you live in the U.S. So in Cleveland in 1980, the median house was worth about $75,000, $80,000. And today it's worth slightly less than that. So real housing prices in Cleveland have actually gone down. In San Francisco, the median home price in 1980 was $300,000, and the median value now is well over a million dollars, right? So there's some parts

of the country where housing prices have gone up by a lot and much, much faster than incomes. There are other places where housing has mostly kept pace with income. And if we look now at the places that are starting to get really expensive, it's spilling over from places like the Bay Area and Los Angeles to places like Boise and Austin and Nashville, which have kind of been a safety valve. They've been the affordable places where you could still move there when you're 25 or 30 and buy a starter house, but they're starting to get priced out of range for middle-income households now. Yeah. I mean, there's all these articles now about, you know, California is so expensive that everyone is moving to Austin or Denver and those which were prior to that not expensive cities. And those cities now have exploding housing markets that, you know, rival California's that are, that are as crazy. But, and, and let me

just say, when you're talking about areas where the housing prices have kept pace with income, I'm going to guess those are also places in which incomes haven't risen that much in the, in that time that like, you know, we're talking about one of our past guests, Alec, Alec McGillis, who wrote this wonderful book fulfillment. A lot of that book is about how the centralization of opportunity that like the large cities like, you know, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, D.C. have like sucked so much income, so much wealth, so much opportunity and growth into themselves that the housing prices have skyrocketed. They've sucked, you know, income away from everywhere else in the country. And that's hurt both places because, because, you know, in Cincinnati or whatever, Cleveland, um, you, uh, you know,

it's not possible to make, you know, they haven't seen the same levels of income growth. And then in the more expensive cities, no one can afford to live anymore because the housing prices have skyrocketed so much. So it seems like part of the story to me. Yeah, it has been. I mean, you have to go back to sort of 1950s and 60s where the Clevelands and St. Louis's of the world still had strong manufacturing economies. So they've had a very long downslide. But what we have seen is that more and more of the highly paid jobs are concentrated in these big cities on the coast, it's actually

good for the country that places like Austin and Denver and Nashville have become more hubs of jobs. So there are a lot more companies, there are a lot more high-skilled jobs. And of course, now with people being able to work remotely, more people can live in places like that and still do the work that they were doing maybe in the Bay Area, right? So it's good that we've got more places that people can live, but it's still going to be very true that the highest wages are in places where housing just gets less and less affordable every year, and there really isn't an end in sight. Yeah. Well, let me, I just want to return again to the question of, before we totally move on from it of homeowners and property values and that vested interest in our property values being a cause of our housing crisis and not building more housing. One thing when we did an episode of Adam Ruins Everything about housing years ago, one thing that we found is that the idea that home prices always go up,

the home is the best investment you can ever make, is actually not true. It's a myth. And that on average, home prices have actually tracked with, I think, inflation almost exactly. Is that right? Like if you average out the whole country? Yeah. I mean, for the whole country, that was true largely that home prices went up about the same rate as inflation and even for a long time, slightly less than the stock market. So if you're thinking of you can either put your money into a home or you can put your money into an S&P index fund, for a long time, the index fund actually would have wound up paying you more unless you were in one of these high-priced markets. I think that's less true over the last 20 years or so, but it is also true that housing is a pretty risky investment compared to something like a mutual fund

because all of your money is in one house located in one place, which is usually close to where you do your job, right? So, like, if you worked in manufacturing in Cleveland, the reason that incomes in Cleveland haven't gone up is that manufacturing has declined, so you're more likely both to lose your job and for your house not to appreciate in value. Right. So housing produces big winners and big losers depending on where you are and also when you

buy in. If you bought a house in Las Vegas in, say, 2006, you were about at the top of the market and you just about lost all of your equity in the first year that you owned the house. And there are places that still haven't recovered. Right. So yeah, it's just this like fundamentally weird way that we think about housing. Because again, people say, oh, the housing always goes up in value. But if you think about it, and I forget where I first heard this idea, but a house can't possibly go up in value. It can go up in price. But in terms of value, well, no matter how long you have the house, it's going to have the same number of rooms. It's going to be able to house the same

number of people. And in fact, it's going to need repairs. So it's going to depreciate. It's more like buying a car. You know, we know, okay, you buy a car, rolls off the lot, loses some value. It slowly gets more worn in and it's worth less. Now a house you can fix up, you can add to, but you have to invest money in it to do that thing, do those things. So when we talk about the price going up, well, that has to be because of other factors like the area booming or the neighborhood getting nicer, you know, like, okay, they, you know, they've been other places get renovated too. And, you know, they're build new housing in the area and, you know, your prices go up or whatever. So that means to me that like, when we talk about homeowners want to boosting

their housing prices, they have a vested interest to like make sure that the total value of the neighborhood is always going up too, because that's the only way that they make a profit. And that again, causes them to fight against lower income housing. So we've created this system where the wealthy people who have a lot of vested interest just fundamentally have the incentive to try to stop more housing from being built all the time. Yeah. I mean, when housing goes up, it's not that the structure gets more valuable. It's the land under the house becomes more valuable. And you're exactly right. The land gets more valuable. It's the land under the house becomes more valuable. And you're exactly right.

The land becomes more valuable when the location it's in is desirable to more people, right? So whether that's there are a whole bunch of new high-paid jobs and people want to live there to work, or they're building a bunch of coffee shops and burrito shops and the neighborhood has lots of amenities. But it's primarily about the location becoming in higher demand, right? And normally what you would do if you're a developer, if you buy a piece of expensive land, you want to build as many homes as possible on as little land as possible by stacking them vertically. And so that's what the market wants to do. When land gets more desirable and more expensive, developers want to build more homes, taller homes, and use less land. But we've got a whole system of regulations that prohibits them from doing that. So we've essentially made it

illegal for developers and the private housing market to respond to rising land values the way that they normally would. And look, I mean, throughout a lot of my work, I have talked about how regulations can be good. And there are many sectors of our economy in which we want more regulation in the financial industry and, you know, to prevent monopolies in telecommunications, things like that. This is an example where the regulations seem bad. And I would love for you to talk a little bit more about, like, why is that? Where are the regulations coming from? Why are they put

in place? Yeah, so there's a whole complicated set of regulations we use to control housing. Most of these are in the zoning code that cities adopt. And zoning was originally supposed to protect against nuisances, so you don't build, you know, a toxic waste dump right next to an elementary school and a bunch of homes. But a lot of what we do in zoning is really restricting the kind of housing that can be built and the size of housing. So, you know, for instance, it's pretty common to make it illegal to build anything other than a single family detached house. And then maybe you have to have a minimum lot size of half an acre or an acre of land. So not only do you have to have, can it only be this certain kind of structure, but you have to have a huge amount of land to put it on.

And that's going to make it much more expensive for people to move into that community. We've made it illegal to build things like townhouses, which are great starter homes, pretty efficient use of land, don't take up that much space. All of the old East Coast cities are full of row houses, but row houses are illegal to build in most places today. You can't build apartment buildings. There's a cap on the maximum height of buildings. So all of this stuff makes it much harder to build the smaller, cheaper forms of housing that the market would like to provide. Yeah. And it's bizarre. I mean, I literally live in a townhouse like you described. I live on a lot in LA where they knocked down a single family home and built four townhouses.

And there's now like, you know, close to a dozen people living where there used to be three or four people living. And that's happening to other units on my block. But I am also under the impression that it's illegal to do that on most plots in Los Angeles. And I happen to live in some little weird zoning carve out where like that is possible. Why were those types of zoning regulations put in place that I mean, it seems kind of odd that the city or the state would be legislating. OK, here's the type of unit you have to build. legislating, okay, here's the type of unit you have to build, I can imagine a lot of interest that the city might have say, oh, let's make sure this entire area is residential or something along those lines. Or as you say, you know, let's make sure there isn't a toxic waste dump. But why say

you must have a yard and a white picket fence? Well, from the neighbor's perspective and from the city, requiring you to have bigger, more expensive houses means that the neighbors who are moving in are going to be at least as affluent as the people who already live in the neighborhood. So it's essentially a form of property insurance for the existing homeowners. And again, for local governments, they want to make sure that new houses being added are going to generate enough property taxes that they can use them to pay for things like schools and roads and parks. And in fact, local governments, particularly in places like California, essentially engage in negotiations with developers who want to do any kind of new development. Yeah, we'll let you build four townhouses on this lot, but we're only going to do it if you pay to repair all of the sidewalks in the neighborhood and put in a contribution to the neighborhood dog park. Right. So it's sort of the restrictive zoning in places like California is the jumping off point for negotiation between the local government,

the developer to see how much money the local government can get out of the developer. Mm hmm. And I understand why a local government would want to do local governments often don't have enough money, especially in California. And a lot of states, you know, taxes have been slashed and capped in all sorts of different ways. And local governments like need to raise some money. And that's one of the things they do. Like I'm sort of understand how the incentive, you know, ends up that way. But you said it also benefits the property owners. So let's come back to the political power of homeowners. Why is it that what you essentially have is the wealthy homeowners writing zoning regulations that boost their own property values? How do they end up

gaining so much power and so that they're able to do such a thing? Because they vote and they show up at community meetings and they write letters and emails to their elected officials. So homeowners are one of the most powerful political blocks, right? They may not have a lobbying association in Sacramento or in D.C., but they carry a lot of weight because they're very visible and very vocal. So there are some political scientists who've done really good work looking at who shows up to community meetings when there's a proposed new development. And it's overwhelmingly homeowners, people who are older, whiter, and more male than the community overall, right? So it's not at all a representative group of people who show up. And the people who show up are the ones who have a financial interest in stopping change, in stopping development. Most of the people who would benefit are the ones who have a financial interest in stopping change, in stopping development.

Most of the people who would benefit from that, first of all, don't live in the community at all. So they can't show up and complain and vote. They don't live there yet because there's no housing available for them. So the people who are like that's true, the people who like live way out in the suburbs or are, you know, unhoused somewhere, they don't show up to the community meeting saying, hey, these policies are preventing someone from building a rental apartment for me because they don't live there. They don't know where the meeting is. So all of the people who live in Riverside and are driving two hours each way to their job don't show up to a meeting in

Hancock Park and say, absolutely, you should build some more apartments. And if they did, the homeowners in Hancock Park would say, well, you don't really count. You're not part of the community. I've been here for 20 years. And so you need to take me seriously. And these newcomers, they're not invested in the community and we shouldn't listen to them. I'll tell you how many I've started going to local government meetings in my neighborhood, which I encourage everybody to do. It does take some intestinal fortitude, but you can make a difference if you show up, especially if you're listening, if you're a renter or, or anybody else. But the number of dudes I have seen who are wearing like an LA Dodgers hat and open their statement with, I have lived in

this neighborhood for 20 years. And I'm like, yeah, I've lived here for five years. I also fucking live here, man. You know, like I, I don't think you're better than like yeah I've lived here for 5 years I also fucking live here man you know like I don't think you're better than me because you've lived here longer like we both of us are humans with needs like but it's this weird thing that like everybody oh my god oh he's lived here since

oh since the 70s oh bow down bow down for the man who has lived here the longest it's perverse yeah but those are the squeaky wheels. And particularly, I will say, older people are both really invested in their neighborhood, and they also have more time, right? So people in their 20s and early 30s who have jobs, who have kids, who have other things going on, don't have time to show up and spend five hours at a community meeting on Tuesday night to say, yes, I would like you to build more apartments. And apparently retirees have a lot of time and they're willing to spend a lot of time protesting. Yeah. But you had said earlier that

we have this prejudice where we sort of believe that homeowners are better people, that they're more invested. But, and I agree, that's a prejudice we need to do away with. But you are also saying that homeowners do show up to meetings more often. Now they're also wealthier, so they can also chip into the city council race or whatever, you know, they're a donor base. But in terms of them like showing up to the meetings, well, there is a little bit of a difference, right?

In terms of how, I mean, I remember when I, you know, I was a renter and I was kind of like, you know, you don't even like care if there's a leak in your apartment, you know, you're like, ah, that's some, that's the, that's the owner's problem. I'm going to leave in a year and whatever. And then, you know, once I became a homeowner, I was like, Hey, what's going on over there? Like, what are they doing over there? Oh, uh, oh, let me, let me make sure that, you know, I just started like, like paying a little bit more attention. I mean, honestly, it's when I started going to these neighborhood council meetings, right, was I didn't do it when I was renting.

So there is a little bit of a psychological shift that is real, right? Yeah, it's true that homeowners are more invested in their surroundings. They're more likely to show up and vote on something because they know this has long-term consequences and they're planning to be there. But we've also constructed a community participation process that's really hard for people to access. So it's not clear whether renters don't show up to meetings because they're just not invested and not interested or because they don't have time to come, right? So a lot of these meetings are held in the evenings, which means that if, you know,

you have small kids, you probably have to get a babysitter to be able to show up to the meeting. And then there's a really hostile environment when people do show up and try to speak. So there are neighborhoods that are renter-heavy, but the people who show up to the meetings are the homeowners, right? And at the very least, cities like LA, where renters are a majority of the households, ought to have more renter-friendly policies than a suburb that's entirely homeowners, but they really don't. where renters or a majority of the households ought to have more renter-friendly policies than a suburb that's entirely homeowners, but they really don't.

Yeah, no, I mean, when you hear the elected, and I'm very sorry to everybody that we always focus on LA, but it is the place where I live and hopefully it applies to where you live as well. But when I hear the local politicians here talk, they are always speaking to the homeowners. That is always, if you're like, who is

their audience? It is always people who own homes. They're always talking about property values and, you know, beautifying and like all these things that, you know, that homeowners really care about. Even the ones who like live in, or sorry, represent a majority renter districts, like the, the less, even if like 90% of their district is like renters in the center of the city, they'll focus on the one part of the district that's like all the homeowners, because that's just who they think they represent, because that's the way it's been for so long. Well, and it's also true that our elected officials are almost all homeowners themselves, and they tend to be older as well. So one of the policy recommendations I make in my book is we should elect more renters,

particularly to things like city council, because they would at least have a better sense of, you know, housing costs are more expensive every year if you're a renter and your landlord jacks up your rent. If you bought your house 30 years ago, you don't even know how expensive it is to live someplace. And literally renters don't have a voice in local government. They're not welcome to be there. They're not part of the local government and they're not influencing policy. Yeah, they're sort of treated like, it's true.

They're sort of treated like, oh, you haven't made it yet, so you don't count. Like, oh, poor you, but the grownups will figure it out. Like, okay, there's people who are renting, but like, oh, you don't really get a voice. You don't really get a vote. Those of us who own property will do it. Okay, we have to take a really quick break,

but when we get back, I wanna make sure that we talk more about race in this conversation and that we talk about what we can do about it because that is, I believe, mostly the subject of your book. And that's, I don't wanna just be the gloom and doom show here.

So we'll be right back with more Jenny Schutz. Okay, we're back with Jenny Schutz. I want to talk more about race in this. We've talked about the power of homeowners, the incentives that homeowners have, and our prejudice against renters. Incentives, look, those can happen to anybody. And when someone's incentivized to do something bad,

I say we should change the incentive, not wag our finger at the person, right? Prejudice against renters, bad too. We're going to try to have a cultural shift. There's other kinds of prejudice that are part of this story as well. Let's talk about those. How does race play a part in our failure

to build the kind of housing that we need? Yeah, it shows up in a couple of different ways and sort of jumping off of homeownership. Homeownership is really at the root of the racial wealth gap. So a lot of the intergenerational wealth that's been passed along to families is somebody owns a home, they build up some equity, they're able to pass along money, say, borrow against that to send their kids to college. White families, younger white households, when they buy their first home, most of them get a gift of some kind from parents or grandparents or family in order to get their foot in the door.

Black and Latino families don't get gifts from their family to buy a house because their families don't have wealth, right? So they were excluded from wealth for so long, both for legal reasons. They were prohibited from owning property, prohibited from getting a mortgage for a long time, and now have just been excluded for so long that they're not able to get their foot in the door. So there's a 30 percentage point gap in homeownership rates between white households and black households. And even within income groups, there's a substantial difference. White households are much more likely to own their homes than black families who earn the same annual income. So that whole issue of, again, the fact that we see and use homes as wealth stores is bad because it causes us to not build more housing because of all these perverse incentives. But also it means that people who have been excluded from housing have also been excluded

from wealth. Yes. And Black families have been excluded from wealth. Yes. And, you know, Black families have been excluded from home ownership. They've also been excluded from moving into a lot of the high opportunity communities. So one of the things that zoning does is kind of set a floor on the minimum price to gain access to a community. So you can't move into a nice suburb unless you can afford the price of housing in that community. And because Black households have lower incomes because of racial discrimination in labor markets,

they're less likely to be able to move into a suburb that has a really good public school system where all of the kids graduate and go to college. They're less likely to be able to live close to a lot of well-paid jobs, right? Black and Latino households are more likely to live in neighborhoods that are at high risk of flooding or wildfires or have other environmental hazards. So, you know, keeping housing limited in the places that are environmentally safe, that are healthy, that have lots of good public services effectively excludes a lot of low-income

families, especially Black and Latino families, from just getting access to good quality public services. Yeah. But it's not just, you said discrimination in the labor market, but it goes a lot deeper than that, right? Because Black and Latino families were literally excluded from the housing market by overt government policy. One of the segments of Adam Ruins Everything I'm proudest of and that people mention to me the most still is we did a big segment on redlining a number of years ago,

and this was overt government policy that said neighborhoods that Black families live in, are worthless, that they should be worth less financially. And a lot of white, more affluent communities had overt policies against anyone non-Caucasian moving in, correct? Yes. So both private markets, private restrictive covenants on the homes, public rules about who was allowed to get a mortgage. Until 1968, with the passage of the Fair Housing Act, it was legal to discriminate against people who wanted to rent or buy a home based on their race. We didn't even outlaw that until the late 60s. So there's a comparatively recent period of history when there hasn't been legal discrimination. And even in that period, there's still discrimination. So one of the things that we do to find out whether, for instance, landlords are

discriminating against people who want to live in their building is do what they call paired testing. So you send a white potential renter and a black potential renter who have the same job and the same income, the same credit rating, send them out to apply for an apartment and see which one of them gets chosen. Every time we do these studies, whether it's buying homes or renting homes, we still find evidence that Black families in particular are discriminated against, that realtors will show them homes in a totally different neighborhood, landlords will just refuse to rent to them or tell them there isn't an apartment available in the building. That's illegal, but it's very, very hard to enforce this

consistently because we've got hundreds of thousands of individual transactions going on all over the country and you just can't enforce all of that. Right. Because every individual broker goes like, oh no, that's not what, no, not, not, it's not race. Just like those people had some, oh, there was some intangible, I don't know. I like the color of his shirt or, or like, I don I don't know, they were able to get the money a little faster or something like that. They'll have some other excuse. But then when you look at it in aggregate, you're like, okay, overall, the white families are being offered housing at a much higher rate. And that's today.

That's happening right now. today that's happening right now. But there's also the historical part of it where, you know, my, you know, my parents owned a home and their parents owned homes. And, you know, as a result, they were given that gift. But, you know, their family had, you know, my grandparents had a little bit of money in the home. They could take out a loan against it. They could send my parents to college. They could give them a little nest egg in order to help them buy their own home and et cetera, et cetera. That built over the years. You know, that's like the, quote, American dream.

Everyone's ascending the ladder of wealth slowly but surely together. But, you know, it only takes two generations back, my grandparents' time, when my grandparents bought their first home, black families, this was in Michigan, plenty of black families in Michigan, black families almost certainly could not buy a home in my grandparents' neighborhood. And so they were excluded from that ladder. They were not able to build that wealth. And that's why what I hammer so much is the racism of the past affects our modern reality. Even if I could snap my fingers and make every single one of those apartment and housing brokers and realtors not racist today, which I would love to continue that work to make

that happen, that doesn't change the fact that the scales were rigged just 40, 50 years ago and that that affects the amount of wealth that people have today, that those that effects are that that shaped our entire neighborhoods and it shaped our entire society. That's exactly right. And if we're serious about closing the racial wealth gap, we have to, at some point, go beyond just making it easier

for Black and Latino families today to buy homes. We're actually gonna have to do something like a transfer of wealth, so like a lump sum transfer, something like baby bonds, where the government gives $3,000 to every kid who's born and they accumulate this until they're 18. But you have to have something that breaks this cycle of families with wealth, pass it on to their family and families without wealth continue not to have wealth and can't get their foot in the door. It's such a deep, it's, it's like such a deep structural problem in American

society. And it's baked into like, it's baked into everything from like this, the structure of our literal neighborhoods, like the, the, you know, the zoning laws of the place that you live in descend from racist zoning laws that were put into place by overt racists to overtly keep black and brown people out. You can look it up. I almost guarantee you that is true of where you live. If you're listening to the show and then also like the deep cultural racism that we have that you're talking about with realtors, not showing homes.

And then also just our resistance to looking at any of that, to taking any of that seriously, because again, you've got an immense population of wealthy white homeowners who are incentivized by the system to not say, not do anything about it. And instead to focus on their own property values going up as you know what they might need to do, because, you know, a lot of retirees, their income went down, they were laid off. The only thing they have in their life is that house. That's the only store of value that they have. 2008 hit them hard or whatever.

And like, they are wedged into the system as well. So we've got this incredibly perverse set of incentives and structural problems. What do we do about it? We've got about 20 minutes left, so I'm sure we can wrap it up in that amount of time and figure out exactly what the solution is to this huge mess. Absolutely. I mean, the policy changes around zoning are actually pretty straightforward. We need to have more flexible regulations that make it easier and faster to build housing and especially to build small, moderately priced

housing. And, you know, we're not talking about legalizing skyscrapers in every part of the country. We're talking about making it legal to build townhouses, single family homes on small lots, you know, small, like three and four story apartment buildings, even just adding that on more of the land would make a big difference. So those are actually the pretty straightforward things. The harder question is, how do you get those policies passed? How do you get these city councils that are dominated by homeowners that listen to the homeowners in their neighborhood to pass things like that? And I think the most promising way is we take some of the authority away from local governments and we push it up the ladder to state governments and potentially even

to the federal government. So states like California are a great example. The state of California is losing money. The state economy is harmed by the fact that it can't build enough homes to keep up with demand, right? Companies can't hire and retain workers. They have to pay more. The state actually lost population. So the state has an incentive to build more homes, to build homes that accommodate workers at a variety of incomes. And God knows California needs to stop building homes in places that are going to burn down every couple of years and concentrate more of the development in places that aren't going

to be as bad for the environment, right? So at the state level, the incentives are better aligned to do this. And more state governments are starting to lean in and say, look, local governments, you don't have complete control over regulation. We're going to either set some sort of target that you have to meet, you have to build X number of homes, or we're going to just say it's illegal to ban duplexes. It's illegal to ban row houses., it's illegal to ban row houses, you're not allowed to do that anymore, right? So states taking back some of the power from local governments, I think is our most promising way to move forward. That still doesn't fix the political question, because it turns out that, you know, the state legislature from a lot of

these places, like the state legislator from Atherton is not going to show up in Sacramento and say, yes, let's legalize apartments. So you still have to build these coalitions of people who would benefit from the changes, but who haven't been engaged in the politics have to start showing up and making their voices heard and pushing politicians to realize that this is actually better for, you know, it's better for a large group of people to make these changes, but it's unpopular with a small and very vocal minority. Yeah. And that's part of why I'm constantly encouraging people to show up to your local meetings.

And again, you will need intestinal fortitude to do it. But just to say like, hey, we need more housing. That's the big problem that we have. We need more housing. And again, nationally, where you live, you need more housing as well. And just like being that voice, like people do hear that, like politicians, you know, do listen to it, what's happening on that local level. But I have to say that what you're proposing, taking power away from local jurisdictions and giving it to the state is like,

on some level, it almost seems like un-American or something. Like we have this deep, deep belief in local control. If you look at schools and all these other policies and, you know, I do have to say, I have an often belief, hey, people know what they need, right? You know, if you want to design a community, ask the people who live in the community. You know, that's that's like a pretty fundamental, you know, idea of how to manage people and how governance should work. And so there's a real tension there. I mean, we've we've had in California.

Maybe you can remind me of the details. There have been some big state bills passed that have allowed a lot more construction, you know, around the state that was billed as California end single family zoning. But I think it was something more like, okay, now every lot should be able to at least have a duplex, right? Is that, do I have it about right? Yeah. Yeah. And that's actually really important because I think some of the proponents of these kinds of zoning changes have liked the phrase in single family zoning. But that's a pretty scary phrase for people who aren't kind of deep in the weeds of housing. It sounds like in single family housing, like they're going to make your house illegal and come bulldoze it, which is not what happened. What California has actually done, it's legal to build a duplex on every lot.

It's legal to build a garden apartment and accessory dwelling unit on every lot. These are not actually major changes, right? This is not going to transform your neighborhood, you know, to look like Manhattan. These are the most modest policy changes. It was incredibly hard to get them passed, but we also need to like not talk about them like we are legalizing skyscrapers, you know, we're making it possible to build a few more homes in your neighborhood. That shouldn't be such a big thing. So if you live in a neighborhood that's been affected by this new law, what it means is that you, if you own a home, could build a little structure in your backyard that you could rent out. We call these ADUs or sometimes they call them granny flats.

If you've got a yard, you could build like a little a guest house, you know, whatever. Or if someone bought your property, they could, if they wanted to, knock it down and build a two unit structure like like a duplex, a house with a wall in the middle with two doors. And there's like, you know, four or five or six bedrooms rather than two, which would double the amount of housing. But it's still, you're talking about something not much bigger. You're not talking about an apartment building. But I mean, that could make a big difference. Like if we could double the amount of housing in California, that would solve the problem. So simply like making that possible is good. And that sort of is similar to the place that I live in, as I said earlier. So yeah, that does seem like a moderate policy.

But I've seen that since that has passed, every jurisdiction in California is now saying, OK, let's try to do what we can to actually invalidate that state bill. Like, let's find, no, local control is important. Let's put lots of restrictions on this new state bill so that people can't really do it. And that's a very hard process to stop because you're, you know, you can have the whole, the mayor and the city council of some suburb in Oxnard or whatever saying, no, fuck this. We're going to do everything we can to stop it. And those local officials still have a ton of power over what gets built for all the reasons that you said, right?

They do. I mean, and you're right. Part of the problem is just conceptually we have this sense that local control is inherently good. Local control is American. You know, local governments should get to make rules that they know what's best. That's a little bit not true. You know, states already have a lot of power, and states, in fact, give local governments quite a bit of money. So, state governments channel funds for schools,

for police, for roads, for sidewalks. The state is already providing a fair amount of financial support to local governments, and it can set conditions on that aid if it wants to, right? States also put, you know, caveats on what local governments can do, for instance, with their school system. So you can't have a local school system that says, you know, we're not going to provide school for everybody. We're going to charge fees for people to go to public school. So we have some boundaries on the things local governments are allowed to do.

Those boundaries are created by the state government, and the state government can change those as well. This is much harder for the federal government. There's not really a legal basis for the federal government to overrule local zoning, but states are in a much better position to do this, and more of them are showing interest. But I would imagine that the federal level, I mean, the Fair Housing Act made a big difference. And I also believe, I read at some point, a history, the Fair Housing Act made a big difference. And I also believe I read at some point a history of the Fair Housing Act. And it's one of those things that the

initial bill that was going to be passed was going to do a lot more. And then they took a lot out of it. And so this landmark, as is often the case, this landmark civil rights bill was actually a very watered down version of what it had previously been. But, you know, so let's talk about the civil rights aspect about let's talk about the discrimination aspect about it. What could the federal or state governments do to prevent, you know, the to prevent and ameliorate the continuing racial discrimination that we have in housing? So the federal government, the Obama administration passed something, a rule called the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Act, which was meant to put more teeth on the Fair Housing Act and make

it harder for local governments to use things like exclusionary zoning. So the Obama administration spent a long time at HUD trying to get this thing implemented. It went into effect shortly before the 2016 election, and then the Trump administration basically took it back. So the Biden administration is trying now to reinstate this. And one of the things it would do is allow HUD and other federal agencies to withhold some of the funding that they give to local governments if those local governments have rules on their books that look like they are furthering racial segregation, right? So requiring two acres of land for every house. That has been hard to get through at the federal level, right? Making the rule and figuring out how to implement this has been complicated. And the real question comes down to what are the resources for enforcement,

right? So the federal government has already sued some local governments like Westchester County, New York, for refusing to build affordable housing. But it turns out places like Westchester have a lot of money and they're willing to fight the lawsuit for decades. So we wind up spending a ton of money on lawsuits that drag out for decades with before they get resolved. And the federal government can't do that for every exclusionary city and county across the country. We just don't have the resources. So I'm less optimistic that we're going to use fair housing to solve exclusionary zoning. It's just it's not the right mechanism to get it at the scale at which zoning is a problem. So you're about the state that seems like the level for you for where we can make this difference.

Yeah. I mean, the sort of fiscal carrots and sticks that the federal government has are not housing funds because there aren't that many of them. It's really on the transportation side. The federal government sends money to state and local governments from the gas tax to pay for things like roads and public transit. for things like roads and public transit, if DOT stopped giving money for road maintenance and for building light rails to any place that didn't allow you to build housing within walking distance of a commuter rail station,

that would make a big difference too. But that's also then the federal government potentially reaching down into local governments and pulling money back and trying to tell them what to do. You seem like an optimist about this issue, that there's a lot that we can do. Yes. And I really appreciate that. There's a but that I'm going to say, sorry. I am constantly struck by the deep, deep, I don't want to say conservatism, like reactionary nature of so many homeowners in America that, you know, it's, for instance, a very deep part of California political culture, right? People

always forget, you know, California brought us Ronald Reagan, you know, was the birthplace of really the modern Republican Party in many ways. Now everyone sees, okay, it's true blue. Every single politician in the state is a Democrat. If you want to run, you have to register as a Democrat before you run. And so, OK, great. So Democrats are probably for Democrats are for less discrimination. They should be able to handle it. Right. But things don't get done. And the reason is that all those white, powerful Democrat homeowners with the Biden signs out in their front yards don't want more housing. They don't want lower priced housing. They don't want people of color living in their neighborhoods. They want homeless people swept away. And, you know, that might sound extreme for me saying that,

but I have been in the meetings where I've heard them say it, you know, and I've and I've seen the Biden signs on their front lawns. And, you know, there is this like split that we do not acknowledge, you know, that our that our red blue dichotomy in national politics completely makes invisible that like when it comes to housing, white homeowners are extremely averse to the changes that we need to make. And we'll fight it like sometimes violently, like something that really struck me. If folks haven't seen this, there's an HBO series a couple of years ago called Show Me a Hero. Have you seen this? Yeah, it's fantastic. By David Simon, who did The Wire.

It's I honestly think it's his best work. It's really wonderful. And it's about the fight over, you know, trying to build affordable housing in Yonkers in the 80s. And I grew up on Long Island. So I was like, you know, Yonkers, Long Island, very similar, both suburbs of New York City. And so I saw this and I was like, this is where I grew up at the time when I grew up in the 80s. And this is a, you know, a true story about, you know, white homeowners like throwing fucking Molotov cocktails at politicians

because they're proposing building apartment buildings. And the good guys lost in the story. You know, the affordable housing was not built in the New York area for this reason. And you're watching this, you're like, this is this is stuff that, you know, it's people in New York acting like what we see in movies about the Jim Crow South in the, in the, you know, forties. And so that is the country that we live in. And that's like a really hard force to fight against. And we have to fight against it every step of the way. Are you, are you an optimist about fighting against that force? I'm optimistic that we can make some pretty big changes in the places where this is worst. So,

you know, ironically, the blue states and blue cities have the worst problem with housing prices. It's California, it's New York, it's Massachusetts. I'm optimistic because there has been more movement in the last couple of years, right? So California has passed a whole slew of laws, right? And you've got leaders like Scott Weiner and Buffy Wicks who are out there standing up and arguing for this stuff and are building a career on fighting for better housing policy. Oregon passed the first statewide legislation legalizing duplexes and triplexes, but we've also got places like Utah that are now pushing for legalization of ADUs and more housing because Salt Lake City is getting so expensive.

So partly I'm optimistic because this has now risen to the level of being a much more salient political problem in more places. More state-level governments have realized that they need to do something and that they can step in and do something. And the other thing is that this is a generational issue. As we said before, people under the age of 30 or 40 think they're never going to be able to buy a home. There are enough millennials who feel like they're cut out of the current system. If they show up at community meetings and they start running for zoning board and they start running for city council and they make their voices heard, you start to give politicians a sense that there's actually, there's momentum, right? Politicians will change their votes when they hear from people saying, I want you to legalize apartments. I want you to make it easier to build.

Yeah. And we're starting to get more people who are willing to do that. Yeah. Who just show up to those meetings and say, please, yes, build more apartments. And who, and who talk to their neighbors about those things, right? Who say, and who talk to their neighbors about those things, right? Who say, you know, because people have this like default of don't build anything new. People hate developers.

They, oh God, did you see? They're building a whole big thing over there. And if you just say to your neighbors, well, you know, we need more housing, right? Like housing prices are too high. And like that would bring new money into the neighborhood, new people into the neighborhood. More burrito shops, more people in the neighborhood means more burrito shops.

Right, right. Exactly. You know, more like, you know, the, the most effective thing that we can build, my understanding is you told me if I'm wrong is like a big apartment building with commercial on the, on the ground floor. Right. Because then those people can take the elevator downstairs, go get a burrito, go back up. Other people can walk around, you know, it's like, we get all, all the good things in one place. Um, and if you just say to your neighbors, like when there's a big building, like, Hey, I, it could be good. Right. Like I want to make sure they build it. Right. Want to make sure that it's not all luxury apartments. There's some affordable apartments in there too, but like in general, like the more the better, right? Cause, cause no one can afford to live. Do we all agree? You might get some people go, oh, okay. All right. You know, perhaps is that helpful?

Yeah, no, I think it is helpful. And the more people have conversations with people they know with their neighbors, you know, when I, when I teach my 20 and 30 something students, I try to get them to talk to their parents, right? Because talking about this with somebody who has a different perspective, but who you know and trust is gonna be a lot more effective than listening to somebody who you don't know

talking at a community meeting, right? But, you know, one of the reasons why I wrote this book is that it needs to get beyond just the little niche group of people who talk about housing on the Internet. It needs to get into a broader conversation. And our current elected officials who don't know that this is a problem or who don't understand how what they're doing affects this need to get on board with this, right?

So this needs to be talked about in a wider audience. And something that I found encouraging lately is I remember in 2016 when I really started becoming aware of the housing crisis. And I remember looking at the candidates for president and saying no one mentions housing ever, never comes up. People talk about the price of gas, but they never say it's too expensive to live, you know, including when, you know, Bernie Sanders would go to, you know, downtown New York, you know, would like go to Harlem. Right. And would not mention the high price of housing. I've said this on this show before, but everyone laughed at Jimmy McMillan when he ran for New York city mayor in like 2014 or whatever,

where the guy who yelled the rent is too damn high and Kenan Thompson did an impression of him on Saturday night live because everyone thought he was funny and he's right. He was right. He coined a slogan that people started saying. People just say now the rent is too damn high. But, okay, so four years later after 2016, a couple of the candidates did have housing plans. Like for the first time-

Actually, all of the Democratic candidates who made it to the debates had a housing plan. Oh, okay. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, they all had a housing plan and they actually all had something in there about housing supply and the need to reform zoning. I mean, in my lifetime, that is the first time presidential candidates have talked about zoning. Yeah. But the important thing is that we need to build a culture in our local states and

cities so that we have local politicians running on that, because that is what you still don't see enough is local politicians running on. We need a ton more housing. We need an ASAP. We need to do it in a way that makes everybody happy and, you know, respects homeowners, too. But we need to have that. And in order for them to run that way, they need to feel that there's a constituency of people who will vote on that basis. Right. live, it's always the Democratic candidate who wins. All of the competition happens in the primary stage. And there's not really an incentive for two Democrats running against each other to take out positions on this. And so these issues don't even get talked about that much in the city elections because there isn't this sort of head-to-head competition over the issues that matter. Yeah. But if we really start attending those meetings and speaking up,

it'll, it'll make that difference. Right. So what do you suggest people do? Again, this is a, you've written a wonderful book about how we can solve the housing crisis. So I assume in the last 10 pages, you're like, here's what you can do. Right. How do you suggest people get started? That's what, that's what I'd like to ask. So the, the day-to-day prescription is exactly right. How do you suggest people get started? That's what I'd like to ask. So the day-to-day prescription is exactly right. Go to your local community meetings. Next time there's a proposal, you know, even something like building a bike lane, right? Show up and say, change is okay. I want a bike lane. I want to park. I want an apartment building. It's okay for our neighborhood to grow and change. If you've got a little bit of extra time, you know, get involved in one of the campaigns. So next time somebody runs for mayor or city council, you know, show up and volunteer

for them, but, you know, be pushing them on your issues, making calls, write emails and letters to your state legislatures if they're doing this stuff. And, you know, at some point we need more people who are under the age of 40 and maybe even still renters to run for office. That's going to make a big difference. Yeah. And we do have some running in California this year and it is, or at least in Los Angeles. And it is really cool to see the response because, you know, other renters go, oh, that's a renter too. You know what I mean? But if you do show up and you do volunteer, I just want to let everyone know, you will be astounded by the amount of power that you have just from showing up. Like we've always felt so hopeless about national politics. What do I do? I donated money to, you know, whatever politician, it didn't make a

difference. They lost. Oh my God. If you start showing up to meetings, you will be astounded at, at how much change you can make truly because it's a very small pond and it is very easy to be a big fish in it. So yeah, I, man, I can't thank you enough. The book, tell us the name of the book and where people can get it. Fixer Upper, How to Repair America's Broken Housing Systems. And it's on all of the online sites. You can get it at Amazon or at Bookshop. It will be in bookstores live starting on February 22nd. And if you want to get it at our special bookshop store, of course, you can get it at

factuallypod.com slash books. Factuallypod.com slash books. You'll support the show and your local bookshop. Or go to your local library if you want. Jenny, thank you so much for being here. This has been absolutely wonderful. It's great talking with you, Adam. Well, thank you once again to Jenny Schutz for coming on the show.

If you want to pick up her book, Fixer Upper, just a reminder, you can get it at factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. And when you do, you'll be supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore. thank our $15 Patreon supporters for their support this week. Allison Liberato, Alan Liska, Antonio LB, Charles Anderson, Chris Staley, Drill Bill M, Hillary Wolkin, Kelly Casey, Mark Long, Michael Warnicke, Michelle Glittermum, Paul Mauck, Rachel Nieto, Robin Madison, and Spencer Campbell. I want to thank our producers, Sam Rodman and Chelsea Jacobson, our engineer, Ryan Connor, Andrew WK for our theme song, and of course, the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I record every episode of this show on. You can find me online at Adam Conover, wherever you get your social media or at

adamconover.net. Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you next week on Factually. That was a HeadGum Podcast.