Search Engine - Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

A re-air from August 2023: Our quest for the answer to this one sends us over a hundred years into the past. We learn about the invisible rules and fights that determine what our neighborhoods look like. We also learn about houses with backyard roller coasters, tiny apartments inside of shopping malls, and then we think a little bit about death. Happy Friday! Check out our merch PJ's newsletter about the state of the show Comment on this episode Support the show To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, search engine listeners. We're re-airing this week a classic episode of the show we're very proud of. But before that, some quick show business that's business about the show, not news about Hollywood. So most importantly, today, Friday, April 18th, is your last day to purchase search engine merchandise. We've got hoodies and teas. They've been selling like hotcakes. Act now. These are hand-printed.

So we can only sell them in limited runs. We cannot make an exception for you on Saturday, no matter how nice your email is. Second, most importantly, I have an announcement about this show itself. I wrote a much longer explanation of what I'm about to say on my newsletter. You can find a link to that in the show notes if the following does not state your curiosity about the editorial schedule of a podcast you listen to. But the TLDR is that we are going to slightly reduce our publishing cadence. We will now be publishing the show two or three times a month. Right now, we are a team of three full-time people, and we want to just give ourselves a little breathing room.

Also, we think having a little more time to make episodes will let us chase down some of the complicated, weird, and ambitious stories that we love. Stories that at this pace we have not always had the bandwidth for. We're really excited about this change. If you want to know more, again, you can check out the little thing I wrote. I talk about our finances, which have hit an exciting not in the red point. I talk a little bit about how the work I do at Search Engine is different from the work I used to contribute at my old show, Reply All. and we talk about internet comments and where you can make internet comments

about search engine that we'll see. Okay, without further ado, here's an episode we made last year we really love. Why can't we turn all the empty offices into apartment buildings? It's about issues that have become even more salient in the last 12 months, housing, yumbiasm, nimbism,

and, of course, roller coasters in your backyard. Anyway, after these ads, please enjoy. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Serval AI. If you ever worked with an IT team, you know how quickly their day gets eaten up by repetitive tickets, password resets, access requests, onboarding.

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measurable value to your clients because top performance shouldn't come at higher cost. Go see the record for yourself at vanguard.com slash impact. That's vanguard.com slash impact. All investing is subject to risk, Vanguard Marketing Corporation distributor. Currently, I have been working out of an office. It's cool. Feels like the olden times. Before everybody had their meetings on their couch while apologizing for how they were dressed or what their children were doing. Next door to the office where I work, there's this other office that is perfectly frozen in time.

They have a big pile of unopened mail stacked just inside their glass door and a hastily type sign saying, everyone's working from home, but we'll be back soon. Something to that effect. New York is filled with empty offices right now. New York's not special, so it's pretty much everywhere else. And I recently got an email from this woman named Julia, who lives in Santa Rosa, California, and had a question about that state of affairs.

Here she is reading her email. I live in an area with catastrophic housing shortage and sky-high rental prices. However, the odd thing I've noticed is that an extreme surplus of commercial properties will sit vacant and empty on the market for months or years. Oh, yeah. Here's the other thing.

The offices are all empty. Apartments are just ridiculously expensive. Shortage of affordable apartments. Surplus of empty offices. Maybe you can see this question coming. Why, when we have such a shortage of housing, does there seem to be no reason to convert vacant real estate into residential properties? It's a great question.

The thought you have had, I have had in Brooklyn and in Toronto, where I visit friends sometimes, where housing seems very, very scarce and you walk around and there's so much empty commercial property and like not empty for a little bit like empty forever and it feels like it feels like one of those problems where you're like it looks kind of simple is it that I am blind to the complexities of this in a way that I don't understand like how can it be that people need space to live and there's a lot of empty space and like those things are not shaking hands at all right how would having empty property be more than having a tenant in there.

Julia was so hung up on this question that as we were wrapping up, she mentioned that when she drives around Santa Rosa, California, where she lives, she'll sometimes take photographs of the empty buildings she thinks should be converted into apartments. I would drive by often and just see these places, and it was while I was usually looking for a place to live. And I was like, I can live there. It's a house. Like, why can I live there? I really like this question. Partly because it just is just, feels like the kind of thing I'm tempted to try to explain without understanding. Like, oh, something, something, something zoning, maybe, or something something, something capitalism, probably.

But if you actually press me to explain it, I would struggle. I think most people would. And I wanted to remedy that. After a short break, we try to find a real answer. Owning a home is full of surprises. Some wonderful, some, not so much. And when something breaks, It can feel like the whole day unravels. That's why Homeserve exists. For as little as $4.99 a month, you'll always have someone to call. A trusted professional ready to help, bringing peace of mind to $4.5 million homeowners nationwide. For plans starting at just $4.99 a month, go to homeserve.com.

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Does this show about the history of business? Available everywhere. You get it. Welcome back to the show. So this question, the more I looked into it, perhaps not surprisingly, while it was fascinating to learn about, It's very complicated. Complicated enough, I actually want to give you a table of contents at the start of this. So to understand why an office building can't just turn into an apartment, we're going to give you an answer in a few chapters.

Chapter 1, why zoning makes this really hard. Chapter 2, why the buildings themselves are making this very hard. Chapter 3, why the people in the town are making it very hard. And chapter 4, who needs to die in order to fix this? I'm not kidding. People will have to die. So let's get started. Hi, Bill. How's it going? Hi, PJ.

To help us get into chapter one of our answer, zoning, I called a man named Bill Fulton. Bill has spent his life thinking about zoning and cities in one way or another. Early in his career, he was a journalist. Later, he was a mayor of a town called Ventura, California. And after that, he was San Diego's urban planning director. What does the planning director do? The planning director in San Diego oversees the long-term plans for all the neighborhoods. How big the buildings can be, what infrastructure has to be included.

You get into big fights with the neighbors over whether there's going to be more development in their neighborhood, that kind of thing. So you sort of play SimCity, but with everybody yelling at you. Yes. That's exactly what a planner does. That sounds really. Somebody who just finds SimCity stressful, that sounds terrible. I told Bill about Julia's question, and I told him why I'd assumed zoning was the culprit. In my brain, zoning is just all the regulations that say in a given city, what can get built where?

Why some streets are filled with houses and others are filled with stores. And I figured the obstacle stopping Julia's empty office from becoming a full apartment was probably a zoning obstacle. Well, first of all, it is correct that zoning has traditionally been very inflexible. And underneath zoning is the assumption that different types of uses of land, you know, houses, stores, factories, they should all be separated. Why do we assume that we should separate those things? Like, where does that historic idea come from? Right. It originally came 100 plus years ago from the idea that in those days, a toxic factory might be right next door to houses or to an apartment building. And so separating those two things became very important. There is a sort of a classist and racist part of it too,

and this became predominant in the 1920s, which is that people who wanted to live in single family homes, and in those days you had to be very affluent to do that, began to put zoning into place in order to separate themselves from all other types of land uses, including apartment buildings. Bill is condensing about a hundred years of very complex history into a paragraph, which is a very courteous thing of him to do. But I actually want to uncondense it and give you a history of the story of zoning.

Because even though story of zoning sounds like the title for a book so boring, you could hide drugs in it, it's actually a good story. And it's a story that gets at a question underneath the question that Julia, our listener is asking. That question is just, why do we have a housing shortage? in the first place. In the 1910s, it was becoming clear that there was something very wrong with American cities.

Skyscapers had recently been invented, and in New York, people were building them pretty much willy-nilly all over the place. As the skyscrapers got taller, the streets themselves were getting darker and darker as these new buildings blocked out the sun. Which meant that now, if you were a builder and you wanted light, you'd have to build your own tall building.

And your tall building required someone else to build their tall building. It's the kind of everyone has to be selfish and insane because there are no rules style of behavior that you might see it best by on Black Friday. Into this hectic scene steps Edward Murray Bassett, the so-called father of American zoning, who points out, we probably need some regulation here, because otherwise the cities are going to be a total free-for-all. These new laws said that citizens would not be forced to live in overcrowded living conditions,

buildings would have to offer everyone natural light, nobody's apartment would be next door to a slaughterhouse. Many of the assumptions we take for granted about what constitutes a good home are actually written into zoning laws like these. Of course, there's another side to these laws that planning director Bill Fulton alluded to. You're probably familiar with this, but I'll give you an example. In Los Angeles, in 1904, city's very first zoning laws passed, and what it does is it bans laundries from certain residential neighborhoods,

which sounds perhaps like a strange priority for the first time. to zoning law, unless you know that many of these laundries were owned by Chinese citizens, who the planning committee wanted to exclude from white neighborhoods. In the years that follow, these kinds of zoning laws actually become less subtle, more explicit. In 1910, Baltimore passes a segregation zoning law that makes black neighborhoods black and white neighborhoods white, a trend that spreads throughout American cities until it's knocked down by the Supreme Court in 1917. Zoning in America, in the decades that follow, remains this strange mix of these two impulses.

One word, zoning, describing both common-sense regulations meant to make cities more livable, but also, in many cases, to allow neighborhoods to exclude groups of people. And the thing is, it's not always clear looking at a particular zoning regulation, which kind of regulation it is. If you want to understand how complicated this can get, how not straightforward and messy and strange it can all be, I would invite you to consider something I have never thought very hard about. The idea of a single-family home. Literally, the archetypical house that a child draws when he asks them to draw a house.

The setting of every sitcom, the blazers were both the Flintstones and the Simpsons live. Many people in America, regardless of their race, their income, the level of prejudice in their hearts, would just prefer to live in a single-family home. But zoning a neighborhood for single-family homes has also historically been a tool for keeping out poor people or people who aren't white. When in 1917, the Supreme Court ruled you couldn't have a whites-only neighborhood, canny city planners, realizing that white wealthy people at the time were much more likely to live in single-family houses, just excluded tenement buildings from certain neighborhoods.

Like Berkeley, California, originally zoned single-family to keep the neighborhood white and wealthy. In 2021, the very progressive city council passed a bill condemning the racist history of single-family zoning in Berkeley. but the process of actually convincing people who own expensive houses to allow apartment buildings to be built next door to them, the council indicated that while that work was important, it wasn't going to happen overnight. Bill Fulton says that zoning restrictions, like the ones in Berkeley,

have become one of the big reasons we don't have enough affordable housing in this country. If you go to a city like Los Angeles and you go to the most desirable parts of town, say the west side, you will see vast areas that are zonement. for single-family homes. If you removed zoning, many of those single-family homes would be redeveloped to higher density, and there would be a lot more housing available. So to a certain extent, single-family zoning is used by homeowners to retain what they call the character of their neighborhood, which, of course, excludes others, right, and also inevitably increases the price of the houses. It doesn't necessarily increase their property values, because they might

literally make more money if they could tear their house down and build something more. But it does raise the value of the houses that are there above what they otherwise would be. In pretty much every American city, there's a zoning debate happening between two sides. You might be familiar with it, Nimbies versus Yimbis. On one side, the Nimbys, the not in my backyard activists, who are often against new development because they typically own houses and they think it'll hurt the price of their house to have like a duplex next door. And on the other side, the Yimbys, that yes in my backyard activists, who want more housing built so that their neighborhood becomes a more affordable place to live.

Bill Fulton began his zoning career in California, a state where this NIMB v. Yimbi debate has been raging for a very long time. But these days, he's relocated to Houston, which, if you're a zoning freak, you know it's a pretty big deal. Because Houston, famously, for us zone heads, is a city that does not have zoning requirements. which means if you live there, you're sort of a de facto yambi, completely unique in America. Just picture a city without zoning laws for a minute. You can build anything anywhere.

In fact, in one of my regular slideshows, I have a funny picture of a single-family house in Houston and a roller coaster right behind it. Is that an argument for or against zoning? Well, I have to explain that not everybody in Houston has a roller coaster. roller coaster in their backyard, and in fact, some people might want one. Obviously, I look this up. The Houston Chronicle interviewed the Killian family, who lives right next to the boardwalk bullet.

Their white two-story house is just underneath this enormous wooden roller coaster. This is a video taken from the front seat. You can see their house. While some people might want a roller coaster in the backyard, the Killian family said, quote, it's such a shame, really. We all used to just love the peaceful quiet. So in a city without zoning laws, where neither the homeowners nor the city gets to say

what should get built where, who does decide? What happens in Houston is that developers tend to dictate what gets built. So you see a lot of single-family homes being torn down and replaced with four to six town homes on the same parcel. And you see a lot of old in urban areas little mini malls being torn down and replaced by, say, five-story apartment buildings. And do you feel like, like, does Houston feel like, does it feel like an advertisement for what we can have when we don't have zoning? Does it feel like a cautionary tale of, like,

why some zoning is helpful? It's both. It's actually, interestingly enough, it's both. Traditionally, in urban planning, Houston was seen as an anomaly, this strange place that didn't have any zoning, so it must be weird. And it is kind of weird. if you look at it in some ways, like the roller coaster in the backyard. But at the same time, as the inflexibility of zoning has become more apparent, partly because of the housing shortage and partly because of this revisiting the racist history, Houston has come to be viewed as a place to look at, is to say, okay, if you don't have zoning or you loosen it up, what happens?

And the answer is you get more housing built. new housing is still mostly high-end housing, but there's definitely more opportunity and more options in a place like Houston than you see in most other cities at this point. And you think that other cities might eventually become more Houston-like, either because people are looking at zoning laws

and seeing what was socially undesirable about it from our more progressive present, or because they're just like, we're out of space and everything can't be a suburb anymore. Yes, I do think that other cities will become more like Houston. They probably won't give up zoning altogether, but they'll make zoning more flexible than it has historically been. So to go back to Julia, remember Julia, and her question,

she lives in Santa Rosa, California, a town that unlike Houston, does have zoning laws. And zoning is likely one obstacle to the conversions that she wants to see happen. But it turns out there's another one, probably a more significant one, which leads us to chapter two, the buildings themselves. Bill says that the way office buildings are constructed is a bigger obstacle to conversion than most people realize. Right now, we're looking at every downtown in America with a lot of empty office space. So why can't you convert that to apartments? Yeah, right?

There are a lot of people trying to figure that out. In some cases that has happened, particularly with older buildings, you get to a bigger retail space and a bigger office space, and it actually gets pretty complicated. We are now to the point where most of the vacant office space that we're seeing in downtowns is from the last time we had a huge office boom, which was the 1980s. The floor plates are huge. So, you know, a typical floor plate, by which I mean to say the size of a floor in one of those office buildings, is maybe 50,000 square feet. So that's

very hard to convert to apartments because there's so much interior space that would be without windows. I see. You picture like a giant office bullpen with tons of cubicles. Right. And you try to convert that into apartments when you have that much space

that would wind up being interior without windows. That's very hard. Bill says the conversions that can be done easily often they have been done. That's why in a lot of cities, old factories that used to make pencils or shoes are now luxury condos. But that's not enough.

We still need more housing. So what do you do? Well, Bill says there's a different kind of commercial space that is actually ripe for redevelopment, huge properties that increasingly look like empty ghost towns in the hearts of American cities. Shopping malls.

Conversion of old retail space and particularly old malls is more promising. And usually the malls have the largest contiguous land ownership in built-up desirable areas. And we are beginning to see more and more malls being redeveloped as at least part of the property being redeveloped for apartments or condos. There's a bunch of complicated factors there. Nevertheless, sometimes developers work around that,

and you are seeing more and more redevelopment of old malls into mostly housing. That's probably the most promising part of it. more promising probably than the big old office buildings, because it's not that hard to tear down a mall. So that's happening more and more. I see. So it's not that malls, because when you started saying that, I was like, well, when I picture like the King of Prussia Mall

where I spent my youth in Pennsylvania, that also seems hard to convert into, like, I wouldn't want to live at the, I mean, I would have wanted to have lived at the GameStop. Now I would not want to live at the GameStop. But what you're saying is they're easier to tear down. Right. You typically don't convert the mall

building to residential, you tear it down. Typically, you do not convert to the mall building to residential, but sometimes you do. If you find yourself needing to restore your sense of wonder at the strangeness of this world, I suggest you Google apartment building inside mall. In downtown Providence, Rhode Island, a building called the Arcade. There's a video of this online. Inside, it looks like a normal shopping mall, vaulted ceilings, two-story mezzanine, except on the top floor, the stores have been converted into apartments.

This is my humble abode. So you can see it's pretty small, but it's really all you need. This medical student gives a tour of her place. It really is small. The kitchen has a tiny fridge, very few cabinets. It's like a kitchen you'd see in a boat maybe, or in a European hostel. It's an efficiency kitchen, which doesn't have a stove. So I bought my own toaster oven, which works well.

The people living in this mall, there's a pretty person with a small business who makes soap, there's a graphic designer. What they have in common is that they are people who say they're comfortable making some compromises to save money. And then I have my closet, which has been a struggle, but I figured out if you could get slim hangers, that works out really well. It's a fascinating, adaptive way to live. It just takes a little getting used to. It's funny, you know, I was talking recently with a friend who worked at a, They work at a video game company in Washington State. And I like their video games.

And I've tried to picture their offices before. And I always pictured their offices in this very cool, high-tech way. And I was asking them about it. And he was like, no, we're in a mall. We're above a mall. And we take an elevator down and we go to the food court. And my head was like, oh, that's kind of ridiculous. And I feel kind of embarrassed to say like, oh, kind of unglamorous or something.

And hearing you describe it, I should be happy about that. because what that probably represents is a city being versatile enough to adjust to how it's changed and to put the things that people need where they need them. I think what you just described, PJ, suggests how deeply embedded in our psyche this separation of development is. The idea that you might have an office above a mall with a food court. You know, a hundred years ago having your office above a retail area in a downtown would been considered very normal. And in other parts of the world, it's still considered very normal. And yet, we think it's really weird if it's in a suburban mall. But I think you're going to see

that more and more. Bill Walton says in the 1980s, there were around 3,000 malls in America. By the time the post-COVID shakeout is done, we'll have about 300, which gives us some more room for housing, although honestly, we'll need even more than that, probably a lot more. But in order to get a lot more housing, we will have to surmount our third obstacle. The third reason Julia cannot have what she wants, an office building turned into an apartment building, the obstacle at the heart of most things. People. That obstacle, after the break.

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Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365, copilot.com, Welcome back to the show. Okay. First things first, very easy. Can you just introduce yourself and say what you do for a living? Sure. My name is Reisa De La Rosa and I am the Division Director for Economic Development for the City of Santa Rosa. After I spoke with Bill Fulton, I got in touch with the City of Santa Rosa. I was trying to understand how people can be an obstacle to changing cities. And I thought for that, I wanted to actually zoom in on the specific place where Julia lives. Raiza Delaroza works in local government in San Rosa. She deals with people all day. She's got a bit of a Leslie Note vibe, somebody who believes in the civic process,

who's very optimistic, who's happy in the weeds. She's worked for the city for 17 years now. Before that, she ran a performing arts theater. I think what makes me probably good at what I do is because I come from an arts background, like I see things probably a little differently or see opportunity differently or, you know, have an understanding of something differently.

combined with my childhood love of bureaucracy. I've never heard of anyone saying that they have a childhood love of bureaucracy. This is, like, there's so much creativity and how you can get things done. Like, I don't know what this is, but when I was a kid, like, I would sit at my mom's typewriter and make up forms and then fill out forms. Seriously? I don't know why. I liked it.

I was like, okay, we're going to, like, efficiently do this. Rays' childhood love of bureaucracy is now an adulthood love of bureaucracy and she said that our listener Julia's questions about turning offices into apartments, Rays suspends her days thinking about exactly those kinds of problems she also drives around

scoping out unused property that she would like to see converted and she says there's actually been some moderate success we have a ton of things that have been entitled in the downtown in the downtown alone In the building permit process, we have 870 permits. Developers have applied for something. We have 419 in construction, and we have 131 final.

So we have a lot of units that are in the pipeline. It's a question of whether or not they can get to the end with their financing. Those 131 new housing units, that includes all new housing in downtown San Rosa since 2016. Obviously, a lot better than zero, but in a city of 180,000 people, clearly it's going to take a lot more than just converting vacant properties to move the needle. Raysa says the will to make a change is there from the city government, but it's very, very hard to get to the finish line. As an example, we have a mall in our downtown,

and it's owned by Simon Properties, and it had a seers in it. So we ran hard after that one to have a mall. it be transformed into housing on top grocery on the bottom. We're still trying to get them to do it. We've had fits and starts with it. And I drive by that every day and think, come on, man. But, you know, and then there was the pandemic and then finances ground to halt. And then there was the da-da-da-da. And then there was, you know, if it's not one thing, it's another, it feels like. Right. And it's like some things are just like cities are slow, real estate is slow, massive amount of money. massive amounts of organization, massive amounts of people involved with opinions.

I mean, in the end, what I've come to figure is we're just such a small piece of the pie of development. Often, Raiza says, the city runs into problems because of the land owners. It turns out there are a lot of reasons why someone with a vacant, unused building might not want to make it into something that someone like Julia might consider more useful. It could be the case that there's no incentive to leave. a building. They purchase it. They own no money on it. The taxes are very low. Or even if they're a new owner, it could be part of a portfolio where the loss on this one helps offset the gains on something else. So then it actually makes sense to not maybe lease it out. There could be any number

of reasons why somebody owns a property doesn't redevelop it. You know, developing housing is expensive. Getting financing for housing is expensive. You know, land property owners have a vested right into doing what they want to do with their property so long as it fits with. within the laws. So from the government's perspective, they're free to go if they wanted to convert it. So the problem in this case, the reason zoning is a little bit of a misnomer is it could suggest that the obstacles coming from the government. And what you're saying is like property owners have all kinds of incentives that can be surprising. You might have an instance where someone just doesn't mind holding on to an empty property that's not generating rent because they want the tax

loss, because the conversion would be expensive, because they're thinking something else down the line, like, people, people kind of like hold on to stuff more so than you would think. Yeah. You know, the other thing is neighbors. Neighbors and Nimbism tends to be the biggest obstacle. You know, sometimes neighbors, whether to be commercial residential, have a very short-term view on impacts that can greatly benefit them down the road. Good evening, everybody. Public hearing number one. If you want to convince yourself that this problem is unfixable. If you want to feel complete and utter despair, the best thing you can do, of course, is a go on the internet. I have watched clip after clip of those neighbors, the Nimbis race is referring to, speaking out in neighborhood meetings all over the country. Meetings where a combination of fear and, frankly, some real nuttiness reign supreme.

And I just want to make sure that there will be no migrants, pedophiles, or criminals moving in because that's what I'm afraid of. I've been told. Here, an older woman in a floral print top is speaking out against a zoning change in her Long Island neighborhood that would allow basement apartments. Because obviously, a basement apartment

would only serve the kinds of people who flee when confronted with natural life. I kind of heard that this is who's moving in. So I just want to be sure that we're not going to be moving in pedophiles and undesirables. That's what I've been told. I'm here for limited apartments,

meaning that Huntington will not be saturated by accessory apartments. About 20 miles to the west, in the Bronx, this speaker, a woman with a mic, is trying to calm down an enormous nimbie crowd. It's not working. She tries to remind people that this proposed new development will offer affordable housing with no cost to the taxpayer. This goes over about as well as if she told them that the government was going to make them eat burned hair sandwiches.

Like a lot of complicated problems that exist today, it's easy to just fixate on the part of the problem that makes you mad. On the arguments. It's easy to reduce everything to a fight. Some people make a lot of money doing this. Here's Tucker Carlson, back when he was still at Fox, reacting to proposed housing legislation from Joe Biden. He'd also like to eliminate, quote, exclusionary zoning and, quote, needless barriers to producing affordable housing. That means that your neighborhood may have to make way for multifamily dwellings. You don't want multifamily dwellings in your neighborhood? It doesn't matter because it's equity. Shut up racist. And there's more where that came from.

Joe Biden would like to spend on a hard to be a bit disheartening. But when I talked to Bill Fulton, the zoning expert, about how you'd ever change the minds of diehard Nimbis. He had an answer that was the most weird combination of hope and fatalism, I think I've ever heard. And how do you convince the person, like, we've screwed up our housing market. Houses have become more and more expensive. Even, like, people with means have, like, over-leverage themselves to buy those houses. And now they're a political constituency that they're like, yeah, yeah, this is messed up,

but I don't want to be the person who has to not have an expensive house. Like, how do you force the person with the mansion to turn it into a duplex? Like, what do you do? Well, you can't. But I will say two things. There are two demographic realities here. One is that most of those people are older. And eventually that constituency will begin to disappear.

There's a huge generation gap between older homeowners, mostly white, who resist change. And then you've got basically everybody under the age of 40 struggling to buy a house. And that's where the YIMBY movement has come from, the yes in my backyard movement, there's a huge demographic reality. And so the political dynamic is changing,

not because people are changing their mind, but because the demographic reality is changing. And that is what I think will prevail in the end. In case you missed that, When Bill is talking optimistically about the demographic reality changing, what he's saying is that of all the things that need to change to help with the housing crisis, one thing that will naturally change is that older people will die. Historically, one of the larger drivers of social change. Which is not to say, hooray for the upcoming deaths of our parents and grandparents. It's bad when people die.

And the people living in the houses have all sorts of reasons for wanting to live in the houses. It's not exclusively about the fear of some other coming to ruin the neighborhood. Sometimes it's as simple as you grew up in a house with a yard and he liked it. Or you'd rather live next to an empty office building than a big new apartment building. These are preferences. There's nothing inherently wrong with them. The problem is just we're running out of space. Good evening, everyone.

How's everyone doing? There's one clip that stood out to me in all the clips I saw, this meeting in Brooklyn, where a state senator, Andrew Gannardis, stands up and says, the problem with holding on to the way things are is that eventually we just lose the future. We need to build a lot of more housing wherever we can. We need to protect the housing we have.

We need to update the housing we have. We've got to get the suburbs to do their fair share, right? This has got to be a comprehensive. We're all in this together approach. Because otherwise, young people are not going to live here anymore. Grandkids are not going to come back from schools at colleges and want to live in their neighborhood anymore. Young families won't be able to live here anymore.

anymore. It's already happening. For all this talk about people leaving New York City, oh, the rich are leaving New York because of the tax. You know who's leaving New York? People who can't afford to live here. Those are the people that are leaving New York. And if we don't find a way to give them a place to live, we're going to lose them forever. So with that, that's a lot to say. It's not a very dramatic clip, which is why I like it. Despite some evidence to the contrary, I think we usually tend to figure our problems out. And not in the big screaming places, but in meetings like this one, where bureaucrats try to hammer out solutions and uncomfortable chairs over bad coffee in meetings that go on too long. Bill Fulton, former and perhaps future bureaucrat,

he says the solution to all this is actually a bunch of solutions. People in the housing debate tend to try to find a silver bullet or tend to think, oh, if only X happened, everything would be fine. Oh, if we just converted all these office buildings to apartments, everything would be fine. And I think the answer is we've been underproducing housing in the United States for 30 years. It's become very expensive in any place that is remotely desirable. It's probably a both and and and at this point. Over the next 10 or 15 years, we're going to have to do everything. It's not just converting office building.

It's not just tearing down old malls and replacing it with housing. It's those things and more. So, to answer our listener, Julia's question, the reason we have to be have not yet turned the office buildings into apartments is because it's hard and people don't like change. But the other part of the answer is that eventually, increasingly, it'll likely happen. The office buildings will become apartments. The single family homes will become apartments. The video game company is going to have to be in the mall, probably next to more apartments. We're going to have to let go of a lot of ideas that we got used to, which always seems hard,

until we do it. That's our show this week. But stick around after the ads for Search Engine's favorite thing from the internet this week. Welcome back to the show. I am joining the studio by Search Engine producer, Garrett Graham. Hello, PJ. Truly one of my favorite people. You have a recommendation.

You have a pick from the internet. Yeah, it's not so much a recommendation as it is just my favorite thing from the internet this week. Which you haven't told me yet, but we both have been having this weird thing where it's like, you're like, do you know what it is? I have a feeling I might know what it is, but I'm not sure that I know what it is.

I think you probably know what it is. you were definitely more online than I am, and so if I've seen it, it probably means that you've seen it. Is it the fake Euro song thing? It's not the fake Euro song thing. Oh, well, the fake Euro song thing is pretty good. What do you have?

So my thing has to do with a Chinese zoo. Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so I'll take it from the top. Yeah. So a few days ago, a video popped up on Wayo, which basically like Chinese Twitter, and it showed a video of a bear at a Chinese zoo in Hongzhou. Yes.

Have you seen the video? I've only seen a still from it. So I'm going to send you the video. Yeah. Let's just watch. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. So there's like captions that I can understand. The bear is like standing on a rock on his hind legs. And he just, his, first of all, he's standing totally comfortably as a human in a bear suit would, but not as a bear normally would. But also there's a quality to the skin around his legs where it's like a little bit loose, but also his legs are very skinny. I'm assuming the bear's. Boy, I have no way of knowing something about the architecture of my own brain in that assumption. But, like, the overall effect is just a person who bought a bear suit on the internet that does not seem to work very well. So this gets posted on Wabo, and immediately people are like, that doesn't look like a bear at all.

Yes. But the first theory is, like, okay, it's not a bear. Maybe it's like another kind of animal. Maybe this is like a dog posing as a bear, which is only funny because, like, a decade ago, a different Chinese zoo got caught trying to pass off a dog as a lion. in one of their exhibits. A Tibetan Mastiff, just like this big furry, hairy dog. They had, like, they sent off their lion

for whatever you send animals from zoos away for, and they replaced it with a dog. And people called on, and they were furious. So at first people in Wave, they were like, okay, that's what's happening here. This is just like, this is a rare breed of dog that they're trying to pass off is a bear. Yeah.

But then somebody posts something to the internet, which is what everybody should have said the first time they saw this video, which is, like, it doesn't look like a dog either. Like, this doesn't look like an animal at all. This looks like a human in a bear costume. Like, exactly what it looks like is an ill-fitting, like, mascot costume at a D3 football game. It's just been plopped on the poor summer intern and thrown into, like, the bear cage to pretend that they're a bear at this Chinese zoo.

Literally, if you force me to bet money, whether it was a bear or human, I would say human. The only thing that would give me pause is there's a brief moment where there's a kind of close-up on the bear's face, and he kind of licks his chops. and his tongue appears to come out, which makes it seem like... Mascots don't have tongues. A mascots don't have tongues. A really fanatic does, but that's a whole other thing. So what was going on here?

So it creates such a controversy that eventually the zoo decides that it's going to respond to this hilarious accusation that it's putting humans into bear costumes and throwing them into cages. And what did they say? They respond in what I think is the best possible way, like the most unhinged way possible,

which is they write a letter from the perspective of the bear responding to the controversy. And so I'm just going to read you part of that letter. Please, yes. Which the New York Times very helpfully translated in their article about the piece because I do not read Chinese characters. Or speak bear.

Or speak bear. The letter says this is the bear. This is the bear named Angela apparently. Yeah. Speaking, the bear says, yesterday after work, I received a call from the park manager asking me if I was slacking off and had a biped replaced me.

Much to my surprise, I'm just sitting in the mountains, and I go viral on the internet. Some people think I look too human when I stand up. It seems you really don't understand me. Previously, some visitors even thought I was too petite to be a bear. I want to emphasize again, I am a Malayan sun bear. Not a black bear, not a dog, a Malian sun bear. I do think it's a little suspicious that they don't explicitly say that they're not a human.

It's also weird they're like adding gas to the fire by being like, no, it's a real bear, but this is this joke where we wrote it from the perspective of the bear. maybe they've understood that the controversy is selling zoo tickets. I think that's what's happening here. I think this is a brilliant PR move. I think this has actually generated more attendance to the zoo. People are going to check out. This is definitely not

a human bear at the zoo. That's a really good recommendation. Okay, so we're going to put the video... Somebody on the newsletter complained about me, pulling the the newsletter too much. We're going to put the video on the newsletter. I don't care. Throw it in the newsletter. I go subscribe to the newsletter. Please. The point of this podcast is just that people

will receive emails. Without enough. Garrett, thank you. Thank you. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by PJ Vogue and Truthy Pinnaminati.

It's produced by me, Garrett Graham, and Noah John. Theme and original composition by Armin Vizarian, fact-checking by Elizabeth Moss, show art by Ali Moss, no relation. Our executive producers

are Jenna Weiss Berman and Leo Reese Dennis. Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Richard Porello, and John Schmidt. And to the team at Odyssey. J.D. Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Casey Klauser,

Mora Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schiaf. Special thanks this week to Chris Jang. Our agent is Orrin Rosenbaum at UTA. Our social media is by the team at Public Opinion, NYC. You can follow and listen to Search Engine with the PJ Vote now for free on the Odyssey app, on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.