Today, Explained - Little pink houses for nobody

Episode Date: June 14, 2019

California is the most populous state in the country, but people increasingly can’t afford to live there. Single family zoning is partly to blame, but state legislators haven’t been able to dump the housing policy. Minneapolis has. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Congratulations to my Toronto Raptors for winning the NBA championship last night. Toronto is a great sports town on a great lake. It's reminiscent of another great sports town on a great lake, the city of Chicago. Chicago is in Illinois. Illinois can be described as amazing. And you can find out all about how amazing Illinois is at enjoyillinois.com. Illinois, are you up for amazing? Alright guys, we gotta talk about zoning.

Not because we want to, but because we have to. You are now entering the zoning zone on Today Explained. Zoning. Zoning Zone on Today Explained. Housing crisis in California is worse than it is anywhere else in the country. Henry Grabar writes about housing for Slate. In Los Angeles, the median home sells for $650,000. And to be clear, that's the entire metro area. So that includes L.A. County and most of the surroundings.

That's the second largest metro area in the entire country. Rounding out the top four cities for median home prices. San Diego, which is just under $600,000. Yikes. San Francisco, which is $947,000. Hug. And San Jose, which is at $1.2 million. Damn.

That's the median house, so half the houses cost more. Zoning. For all its claims of being an economic paradise, California is a failure when it comes to affordable housing. The median home price is about two and a half times what it is nationally. The rent is about 50 percent higher than it is elsewhere. The homeless population is larger than anywhere else in the country. So the crisis is very bad and actively getting worse. Zoning. The obvious solution here seems like it would be just build cheaper housing for people.

It's a boon to the economy. There's fewer homeless people out there. Why not just build some more cheap housing in California? Because it's basically at the moment illegal. Most California cities have most of their residential area reserved for single-family homes. Single-family zoning covers much of Los Angeles, most of San Diego, much of Oakland, and much of San Francisco. To say nothing of all those cities' suburbs, which is where the bulk of the population lives, and those places are zoned almost exclusively for single-family homes. So if you want to build an apartment building in California, the nation's most populous state, you'd be surprised to find there are not very many places where it's legal to build it.

And as a result, most of the development, all this pent-up demand for new houses has gone into housing at the very, very outskirts of cities. And so instead of new residents moving into downtowns and inner suburbs where all the jobs are. You have people moving to land on the very outskirts of cities. Not coincidentally, California has the fastest growing commutes in the nation. KPI X5's Kit Doze live in Mountain View, where some of these super commuters say they are just simply exhausted. Kit? Yeah, a lot of these folks, they get up at 4 or 5 in the morning,

and they don't get home until 7 or 8 at night. That leaves not a lot of time for homework and quality time with the family. Which, in addition to being bad for people's livelihoods, is also terrible for the environment. Yeah, how did it get to be this way? Was this just some sort of antiquated housing policy that wasn't very forward thinking? Well, the roots of single family zoning lie mostly in racist, white, suburban homeowners trying to keep minorities from moving in next door. So if you look at the evolution of the very idea that you could have a law saying that a neighborhood was only for a certain type of house, I mean, it's not intuitive. And that emerges basically

at the moment when the Supreme Court says that racial zoning is unconstitutional. So it was developed as a substitute for racial zoning. Even if the suburbs and city neighborhoods that now employ single-family zoning don't think of it this way, the roots of the policy do come from this desire to keep people out. And that's been the effect. So is California trying to do anything about this? Yeah. So there's been a surge of activism in the California statehouse to try and undo some of these restrictive land use policies, open up dense urban areas for multifamily housing. The leading bill is called SB 50. This is a very controversial bill, as we will see in a moment. For those who are unfamiliar, summarize the purpose of this legislation and what it would do. Sure. Well,

SB 50 is designed to help address our terrible housing crisis. And yes, it's controversial because this is a hard issue. I don't want to overstate what this bill does. It permits small apartment buildings, talking four to five stories, on parcels that are near subway stations or busy bus lines. And it only does that in the state's most populous counties. And it doesn't sound like a radical thing, but it's estimated that that could increase housing production in a year. This is about destroying suburban one-home-per-lot single-family residential neighborhoods. And I'm sorry, but I cannot support this. I want to finish by saying this is discrimination against suburban neighborhoods. Thank you.

So how's this bill doing? Well, it failed. It failed in May for this year. I think that a lot of people think this is a good idea, actually. Polls show it had something like 60 percent support in California. But its failure just goes to show the power of legislators who come from single-family home areas and the development of the policies in the first place, which is to say they're concerned about school quality. They are concerned that they are not going to see a lot of tax revenue from the construction of new apartment buildings because of the way California's tax structure works. And, you know, they're probably concerned about the parking, frankly, because classic

California. Want to practice parking? What's the point? Everywhere you go has valet. If you look at these housing meetings where people discuss this, they always say, well, how are you going to put any more people here? It's so hard to find a parking space now. But but yeah, there was a tremendous amount of opposition. And I should say not just from rich suburban homeowners, but from city council members in Los Angeles and San Francisco as well. California is really struggling with this, but this must be bad elsewhere too, yeah? Oh, yeah. This has been a problem in major U.S. cities for 50 years. I mean, this is one of the major targets of the Fair Housing Act was to try and get exclusionary suburbs

to open up their single-family home areas for apartments. And it's been really, really hard. The Fair Housing Act declared a national policy of fair housing by prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion, and national origin. Changing attitudes and behaviors proved to be difficult.

Suburbs of New York build less housing per capita than the city of Detroit. So it's a problem nationwide, and I think there's a growing sense that something needs to be done. You have solutions coming up in Washington State, in Oregon, in Minnesota. You have people talking about this on the East Coast as well. Is there a chance it becomes a national issue in, say, I don't know, a presidential election or something like that? Well, it's possible.

You're seeing for the first time in maybe decades presidential candidates, Democratic presidential candidates, talking about, Democratic presidential candidates talking about housing as a major issue, which I think reflects the fact that this has become an enormous area of concern for people in some of these expensive metro areas. Cory Booker and Liz Warren have both come out with plans on this issue. I see fundamentally we have a housing crisis in this country. It's very personal to me. It's been an issue since I was working on, since I helped lead the housing clinic we had at

Yale Law School. This is outrageous. So what can we do about it? I'll tell you exactly what we can do about it. We can build 3.2 million new housing units across this country. Urban rural. We can do this. I would say one of the barriers to this becoming a big national issue is that it does seem to be something that is so much more a problem in certain coastal states than it is in other places. But that said, the concept of opening up some of these wealthier suburban areas to more development is a goal, as I said, that's been shared by, say, fair housing advocates or school integration advocates for a really long time. So I think there's an enormous constituency for this. Single-family zoning is causing the most problems on the coasts, but the boldest action is coming out of a city in the Midwest. I'm Sean Ramos from Banning Single-Family Zoning, next on Today Explained. I told you at the top of the show that Illinois can be pretty amazing.

I admittedly have only really spent time in Chicago, Illinois. But here's some things that the Illinois Office of Tourism recommends. There's amazing art like Cloud Gate in Millennium Park. That's Chicago. Been there. Or the Paul Bunyan statue in Atlanta, Illinois. Definitely never been there. Didn't know there was an Atlanta, Illinois until recently. There's amazing food at a five-star restaurant in the West Loop.

Haven't been there probably. Or award-winning barbecue in Murfreesboro. Definitely not been there. Amazing outdoors award-winning barbecue in Murfreesboro. Definitely not been there. Amazing outdoors like canoeing the Cache River. Didn't know that existed. Or kayaking the Chicago River. Knew about that. Haven't done that. Amazing history like Lincoln's home in Springfield. Sounds like a must. Or the German U-boat in the Museum of Science and Industry. You know what I mean? Point of the story is it's amazing what you can find in Illinois. Visit enjoyillinois.com and find yourself your Illinois. Illinois, are you up for amazing? You know the old saw.

If you can't find it in California, head straight to Minneapolis. The Minneapolis City Council just voted on the new comprehensive plan called 2040. Back in December, Minneapolis became the first major American city to straight up ban single-family zoning. Lisa Bender is the president of the Minneapolis City Council. I asked her to tell me how they did it. Well, first of all, the city of Minneapolis, like so many cities around the country, is growing again. And we have a housing shortage here.

We have a 2% rental vacancy rate in our rental market. So as we looked forward over the next several decades, we know that we need more homes for people. And we're very committed as a city to address some of the country's worst racial disparities, which we have here in Minneapolis on almost every measure, health, education, jobs, housing. We see very, very stark racial disparities. We talked about that very explicitly, very head-on. We showed people at open houses, maps of our city that showed the old redlining maps. Then we also had a local college called Augsburg College map racially restrictive covenants that said if you're Jewish or Black or Asian, you couldn't live in these homes. Often just a few lines of text, these restrictions were inserted into warranty deeds across the

country. No persons of any race other than the Aryan race shall use or occupy any building or any lot. The said premises shall not at any time be sold, mortgaged, leased, or sublet or occupied by any person or persons who are not full bloods of the so-called Caucasian and white race. And just to point out, these examples I just read, these are all from right here in Minneapolis and the rest of Hennepin County. And we compared those two maps, redlining and racially restrictive covenants, to our current zoning code, and there's enormous overlap. At the open houses, people could put a little pin in where they lived in the city, and the

map we used was the redlining map. Once an area is redlined, this means that there is no bank in the country that will give you a conventional mortgage if you attempt to purchase in that area. So we, in 2014, legalized ADUs, or they're called mother-in-law units or cottages. And in Minneapolis, we said you could have a cottage in the backyard or you could add another unit into the interior of the home. And that was a way for us to start this conversation because a lot of the concern that comes up when you talk about allowing more housing in single family neighborhoods came up when we proposed a really relatively moderate change. I mean, people say a lot of things when you start talking about adding more housing. So there's concern about parking, about renters, about

renters being loud or producing a lot of garbage. We had people concerned about folks being able to look over from their accessory dwelling unit into someone's backyard. I was never quite sure why you couldn't see in someone's backyard from your house. But the bottom line is change is scary for folks. And for a lot of people in the United States, we have so emphasized and subsidized and celebrated single family home ownership that a lot of people have a lot of their financial investment in their home. Yeah, so how did you get from adding these sort of mother-in-law units and cottages or a basement unit to getting rid of single-family zoning? So in Minneapolis, every 10 years we were required to update our city's master plan for growth.

And so we used this as an opportunity to really talk about housing, about climate change, about race equity in our city. And we invested a lot of staff time and resources in doing community engagement for this plan. There were specific conversations with cultural communities in our city. We had our staff go to street festivals and farmer's markets. We were really doing engagement differently for this plan and as a result we heard loud and clear that the status quo isn't working for a lot of people in our city and we needed to make change. And there was a lot of public support for the idea of adding more housing. It's one of the Mill City's calling cards. Established neighborhoods filled with

vintage housing stock and real front yards. Some worry it's under threat. Thus, the yard signs, for example, zoned for extinction. Do you feel like you convinced anyone who was really strongly vocally against getting rid of single family zoning? I don't want to underplay the amount of opposition there was, particularly from neighborhoods that are traditionally majority single family. But I do think that in many neighborhoods in our city, council members were able to talk with their constituents, hear about concerns, and then build some support. So I think we did win people over.

That said, there was still a lot of fear and opposition by the time we were voting at the end. This plan that ends single family zoning in Minneapolis a lot of fear and opposition by the time we were voting at the end. This plan that ends single family zoning in Minneapolis is called Minneapolis 2040. What do you imagine Minneapolis looks like in 2040 compared to what it looks like now? I think we are at a crossroads where we have to make bold change now to make sure that our city in 2040 is a viable place to live, that our beautiful natural environment is protected, and that we have diversity of race and income in our city.

Eliminating single-family housing isn't singularly going to solve our housing supply problem. It's not going to solve race inequality in housing, but it's the least we can do to start to open up all of our communities for folks to have the chance to live anywhere they would like in our city. So. Zoning. So. Zoning. One last reminder as we head into the weekend that Illinois is amazing. Maybe you're heading there this weekend. Maybe you're not, but you're considering it. Check out enjoyillinois.com to find out more about all the

amazing things you can do in Illinois one weekend this summer. Illinois, are you up for amazing? I mean, I hope so.