UCLA Housing Voice

Ep. 112: 'Stuck' Book Club pt. 1 with Attorney General Rob Bonta

• UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies • Season 5 • Episode 17

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We're doing a three-part book club series on Yoni Appelbaum's 'Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.' This is episode one, covering chapters 1 through 4. 

In the second half of the show, California Attorney General Rob Bonta joins us to talk about connections between the book's themes and his work enforcing housing and immigration law.

Find the Lewis Center at lewis.ucla.edu and chat with the hosts and fellow listeners at our Substack, uclahousingvoice.substack.com.

Show notes:

Shane Phillips 00:00:06
Hello! This is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast and I'm your host, Shane Phillips.

This is the first episode of our book club series on Yoni Appelbaum's 2025 book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. This is arriving much, much later than we initially planned, but we are very excited to be finally kicking off this three-part series. 

If this is your first time being introduced to the UCLA Housing Voice podcast, welcome. You may have noticed that this is episode 112, so there is plenty to catch up on if you like what you hear. We are a show aimed at anyone interested in housing affordability or housing more broadly, who wants to dig a little deeper but can't devote the time to reading a bunch of academic journal articles or think tank reports to find their answers. That is what we are here for. And I promise that our episodes are not usually this long. If you want to hear more but you're not sure where to start, I would recommend checking out episode 61 or 101. 

The idea to start a Housing Voice book club was loosely inspired by the 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker, which I loved and you should definitely listen to and read along to if you have not. It was also just a response to the fact that sometimes a topic deserves more than a single episode's worth of attention, and that's very often the case with good books. 

And, as many of our listeners will surely agree, Stuck is a good book. It is a great mix of history, storytelling and policy wonkery, and as I read it I found myself seeing many things in a new light or from a different angle. It's the first time I was introduced to the idea that places with lots of mobile transient residents can actually have stronger community and religious and civic associations. It was also my first exposure to the distinct histories of the right to move from place to place and the right to belong wherever you ultimately arrive. 

Like any good book, it also helped me draw connections that the author may not have even intended. I'm still thinking about the idea that US history up to this point could be described as a couple 200-year-long cycles of exclusion and then welcoming, or of inclusion and then retrenchment, the first covering the 18th and 19th centuries and the second covering the 20th and 21st. Anyway, I do not need to take up a bunch of time in the intro explaining why books are great. They just are and they offer something different than studies and reports and articles, so we wanted to devote some more time to them in a special format. 

Like I said, we're going to be covering Stuck in three parts. Each episode will include a sort of walkthrough of highlights from the book and an interview with a guest. In some cases, those will happen as two separate parts. In others they'll be combined. For episode number one, we're going to be covering chapters one through four. Then, a couple weeks later, we'll be chapters five through eight. And then, a few weeks after that, will be chapters nine and 10, and just the book as a whole. 

And we have some great guests lined up for this. For this first episode, we are welcoming California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who, since coming into office in 2021, has been leading the state in ensuring accountability in the implementation of both housing and immigration law — kind of a big deal right now. Those two subjects are at the heart of chapters one through four of Stuck, so we were super appreciative that the AG and his staff could make the time. And I was even more appreciative that AG Bonta was willing to challenge some of the book's ideas in a way that I think made for a more interesting conversation and added some important nuance. He joins us for the last hour or so of this episode. 

We're still figuring out the best way to approach this format, not just for this book but for any future book clubs we do, so your thoughts and feedback are very welcome. You can send them directly to me at shanephillips@ucla.edu, or you can find me on Bluesky or LinkedIn, or you can be a part of the conversation with our other listeners at our Substack uclahousingvoice.substack.com. 

The Housing Voice podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, with production support from Claudia Bustamante, Brett Berndt and Tiffany Lieu. My email again is shanephillips@ucla.edu and our Substack is at uclahousingvoice.substack.com. With that let's get to the first episode of the book club. 

So, starting here, I have a special host, my friend Stan Oklobdzija, assistant professor at UC Riverside School of Public Policy, creator of the California Politics and Policy Substack, "Everyone is Welcome" — great name — former research director for California YIMBY, and quite germane to today's topic of conversation, a recent re-migrant back to California from New Orleans where he was teaching at Tulane University for a few years. Thanks for coming on the show, Stan.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:05:19
Hey, thanks for inviting me, Shane, happy to be here.

Shane Phillips 00:05:22
Stan is also one of the authors of the famous, in housing nerd circles, survey research on the folk economics of housing. I've had several people reach out asking us to cover this paper of yours, Stan. So I'll just note for anyone worried about this: his being a co-host does not bump him to the back of the queue or anything. We will definitely be doing an episode on it before too long. So if you are worried, Stan, now you know.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:05:47
Very reassuring.

Shane Phillips 00:05:49
So I read Stuck last year shortly after it came out, and it's sort of what motivated me to start this book club in the first place. The story it tells is not a new one by any means, I think. In fact, one of the problems at the heart of the book was the subject of a previous episode of our show. It's a story of how people used to be able to move to opportunity and how, over the past century, we've refashioned our country into a place where those most in need of upward mobility can't afford to live near good jobs or schools and, increasingly, are being forced to actively move further away from them. As Peter Ganong put it in episode 38, whether you were a janitor or a lawyer back 50 years ago or so, you could improve your material circumstances by moving from somewhere like the Deep South to the New York tri-state area. Today, only the lawyer is better off, and the janitor and others in lower wage jobs are actually worse off, after accounting for housing costs. Also true for most of California. Less educated people are sorting to areas with less opportunity, not by choice but of necessity, while more educated people go to the places with better jobs and better schools for their children, perpetuating their advantages across generations. And of course, this all goes back to where we build housing and, more importantly, where we don't. So, like I said, that is not a new story. But what makes this telling special to me is Applebaum's framing of the problem as one of declining mobility. That and his historical work juxtaposing the circumstances of today against America's past as an unprecedentedly mobile nation and showing how physical mobility is very frequently an essential ingredient for economic mobility. I'm going to read a book praise quote from our friend Chris Elmendorf up at UC Davis School of Law, also your co-author, one of your co-authors on those papers. He writes: "Applebaum's masterful new book traces the history of American ideas about the freedom to move, showing how mobility finally triumphed in law, only to be sapped of practical possibility by a growing morass of local restrictions on housing development. The story he tells is rich with ironies, perfectly timed and surprisingly fun to read." That pretty much sums it up, and I do want to emphasize the part about it being fun to read. This is not a dry academic tome, though we of course love those too here at the Lewis Center. As the deputy executive editor at The Atlantic, Applebaum is unsurprisingly a super engaging writer, and he's also a trained historian with a PhD from Brandeis University, and that historian's touch is one of the things that sets Stuck apart. Again, for me at least. It's worth reminding ourselves that, even if dwelling units and prices and rents are what we tend to measure in housing, the reason we do this work is so that people can live better, richer, freer and fuller lives, and that connection is made clearer as he traces the histories of everyone, from his own family members to the widow in 1940 who rented his three-decker apartment that he lived in later in Cambridge, to President Abraham Lincoln. And I will tell you, Stan, the big reveal on the second page of chapter four. I was shocked.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:09:14
I guess we'll get to it. No spoilers.

Shane Phillips 00:09:18
All right. So that is enough wind up for me. But before we dive into the first chapter here, is there anything you want to add, just as context or background?

Stan Oklobdzija 00:09:28
I think, just really big picture. This book was really great for me because it really spoke to an earlier era of American municipal governments, American sort of city boosterism, where people were happy to have people come, people were looking to grow these cities. And yes, you know, we'll get into a lot of the details about perhaps a lot of people were much less welcome than others. But this idea of growing a city and making a place better and attracting migrants is something that I feel we've just lost a lot of in current America. So it was somewhat jarring to be reading this history of, you know, my own country and sort of seeing, just, you know, what a diametrically opposite attitude people had several decades ago.

Shane Phillips 00:10:11
I like that idea. And, you know, I actually don't think it's necessarily something that has been lost across the board. I travel quite a bit and I feel like smaller cities, newer cities often are pretty open to growth and new people, but the places that have seen the most success and the most demand, certainly almost across the board, have become places that are really closed off and see new neighbors, new people, as more threat than opportunity or potential friend. Okay, so chapter one is titled A Nation of Migrants. And, like most chapter ones, this is both an introduction and a bit of an overview of the book as a whole. We start with Applebaum facing a very familiar dilemma in American life, which is a growing family, rising rent and no affordable options in the community where he lives, which he'd like to stay in if possible. There are familiar stats about rising prices, lengthening commutes, increasing homelessness, et cetera, all across the country, in particular places like Boston, where Applebaum is living. I don't think we really need to get into that for this conversation. We're just going to try to walk through things at a higher level instead of that. The first thing I just want to focus on here is where this is happening and to whom, which is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and to a very highly educated man employed at Harvard. Obviously, there are many millions of Americans in worse circumstances, in housing and otherwise. And that really is my point here. Things have gotten so bad that even someone with Applebaum's background and privileges cannot buy his way out of these problems, and I think that speaks volumes about how much worse it is for the average high school graduate or immigrant or whoever. Stan, you just recently had to go through a version of this right, coming back to LA and needing to find housing near your university.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:12:14
You know, it's always a pleasure as a sort of almost lifelong Californian to delve right back into the California housing market. You know, Applebaum's story is really interesting because it reminds me of something I sort of went through a couple of years ago actually. So a reporter from Fortune contacted me about some troubles that my partner and I were having looking for a house to buy in Los Angeles around 2022, 2023. I forget exactly when it was — and both her and I make quite a bit of money. We were in the top 15% of LA metro area incomes, but yet the idea of getting a house was just ludicrous for us. I mean, I think I said something in the story like we might as well be looking to buy a rocket ship or something like that. Just such an absurd amount of money. And obviously, with everything on social media, I got flamed on it. People thought I was driving a Maserati or heading off to Fiji a couple times a year. And I wish.

Shane Phillips 00:13:12
Just bragging about all your money.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:13:12
Just all my money. You know like people see my beat up Prius and you know, like it might be a bit I'm doing or something like that, but you know it's really like the people that are having these issues, right. If people like me, if people like Yoni Appelbaum, are having these same sorts of issues, just imagine the family of — you know, an Amazon worker and an elementary school teacher or something like that. Right, like people, you know, even at the median level of income, right, how much they have to work, how much they have to sacrifice. You know, just all of just the unnecessary stress and just diminishment of their life that they have to go through for a problem that's just pretty easily solvable.

Shane Phillips 00:13:58
I think the framing of it as, you know, look at this upper middle income household, highly educated household who is struggling with housing. I think on the one hand that can be read a certain way as, like, these are not the people we should be so concerned with. But I think there's also a side of this which is — and I think it's partly the point you're trying to make or we're trying to make in that conversation a few years ago — that like I think a lot of people, especially older people, homeowners, who have owned their homes for a long time, they just can't even see themselves in a poorer household circumstances, a poorer renters. And I actually do think there is some value in, as someone who's a little more in circumstances, a little more similar to theirs financially and to some extent in terms of economic security, just showing, like you can see how much I'm struggling, can you imagine what it is like for other people? Because they can't really imagine and often don't even have any contact with people, you know, in the bottom third of the income spectrum, and so I think it is actually useful to make that comparison, as long as it's done, you know, as sensitively as possible, I guess.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:15:09
No, I think that's absolutely right. I mean, we're sort of inured, unfortunately, as a society, just to hearing these stories of people — maybe immigrant families, for example — having to double up in a room. Think about the example that Conor Doherty wrote about in Golden Gates, of the family — I believe it was in East Palo Alto or Redwood City or something like that — right, having to cram two families into a one-bedroom apartment. And you know, people think, well, okay, fine, that's just sort of the immigrant experience. Or you think about someone who's maybe been down on his luck, you know, struggled with some issues, or something like that, and then it's like, okay, this is part of the transition, right, you don't think about this as someone who, I mean, writes for the Atlantic magazine — right, has a PhD from, you know, a pretty well regarded university, going through these exact same issues, right? I mean, we can just imagine if this is a person who's big quotes done everything right and is still suffering through this, right. So just imagine people that didn't get all the lucky breaks that he did.

Shane Phillips 00:16:07
I think what you're getting at there too is just a lot of people, unfortunately and wrongly, imagine that the housing struggles people are dealing with are their own fault essentially. And I think, again, it just highlights that even the person who, as you say, quote unquote, did everything right is struggling as well, really really said something. So this is where we get to basically the thesis statement for the book. I'm going to quote here: some Americans have become so accustomed to the places with the greatest opportunities being effectively reserved for the rich that it somehow seems natural that they should be. As I said, this immediately called to mind for me, when I was reading it, Ganong and Shoag's work, which we featured in episode 38. So if listeners haven't checked out that episode, I definitely recommend it to get more of a background there. A stat worth mentioning here is how often Americans used to move and how much that has changed over time. So at our nation's peak mobility in the 1800s, about one in three Americans moved in a year. By the mid-1900s it was still pretty high at one in five, and today about one in 12 Americans move each year. So Applebaum goes on to say how, for centuries, Americans at the bottom of the economic ladder had moved to places with greater opportunity, and he explains how this was possible: because people raced to build housing to accommodate them. He uses this building he actually lived in as an example, and, again, the historical approach is just so engaging in a book like this. The building was built in 1901 by a man named Joseph Doherty, who bought a parcel that had a 10 bedroom single family house on it. He tore it down and he rebuilt two three-deckers in its place, each with six units, and I think that is really the dream, and I think if we legalize that across the country, we will probably go 80, 90% of the way to solving our housing crisis. Notable though that even back then, these kinds of homes were called a, quote unquote, menace to life by the Massachusetts Civic League.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:18:14
You know, a part of chapter one that really jumped out at me is Yoni Appelbaum making this case that, you know, many YIMBYs have made in the past. That he says, quote: geographic mobility has long served as a counterweight within American politics against the more virulent strains of racism, nativism and populism. I just spent two years living in Louisiana, a state where the politics have taken a decidedly rightward turn, an increasingly authoritarian turn. Rights for folks in the LGBT community, for women, for a whole host of other people, have been severely diminished. Economic opportunity in that state is rapidly cratering. And you know, I'm thinking of a book like The Warmth of Other Suns, which discussed the Great Migration, right, and talked about a doctor from, I think, Bogalusa or somewhere up in northern Louisiana deciding, you know, enough of Jim Crow, enough of me not being respected as an African-American physician. I'm packing up the car and moving to Los Angeles, right. And just that kind of story is something that, you know, has just been sort of foreclosed upon today. Right, given the shift in American politics and given just, you know, how diminished life is in a lot of states under Republican control right now, that safety valve has just been turned off. Right, there's really not an escape valve for people to try to make a better go of their life. Try to, you know, just reclaim some more of their basic rights by packing up the U-Haul, right. If anything, there's just been a reverse flow of people fleeing these higher cost states where their individual liberties are a bit more secure, but foregoing that for the lower housing prices of a place like Texas or Florida.

Shane Phillips 00:20:02
Ultimately, if you can't afford to live there, the rights don't do you any good. So, coming back to those 12 units that Joseph built back in 1901, I felt like this was the perfect collection of like the stereotypical working class jobs of that era: plumber, telephone operator, postal carrier, store clerk. Later on, in 1940, we have this widow who lived in one of the units with her two children and later brought on a boarder, which is another thing that we just don't see much these days. I understand why we don't have single room occupancy hotels as much and boarding houses anymore, because we basically regulated them out of existence. But I'm curious if you have any sense for why we don't really have boarders or roomers anymore. You don't really need specialized buildings for it, just an empty room in your house somewhere, and we have plenty of those, even in expensive cities. So I know that cities all over the US passed ordinances restricting unrelated adults living in the same house, and I think those were in part intended to shut down these kinds of situations and just roommate households generally, but I don't know if that's the whole story or just part of it. I'm curious if you have any kind of thoughts or insight on that.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:21:21
I mean, I think you know a big story of this is just, America has gotten a lot wealthier, right? I mean, you know, you wouldn't know it from scrolling social media, which just, you know, tells us new stories of doom and gloom every day. But we've actually become a lot more prosperous as a society over the last 100 years, right. I mean, just if you think about what it takes to get a mortgage on a house in 1926 compared to 2026, right, it's just night and day. The amount of money you have to put up, the duration in which you're expected to pay your mortgage, is quite a bit less. So I mean, you know, it makes a lot more sense that, you know, a widow with four extra rooms would take on boarders and, I don't know, cook them dinner around the table every Sunday evening or however things like that used to go back in the day, right?

Shane Phillips 00:22:07
When you say that it's night and day for getting a mortgage, I think some people might hear that as it's much harder now because of high prices. I don't think that's what you mean.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:22:17
No, sorry, I mean—

Shane Phillips 00:22:18
Because the financial system was not designed to get you a mortgage like it is today.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:22:26
That's exactly right. Yeah, you don't have to put 50% down and have five years to pay off both the interest and the principal, right? That's just a completely different story. Homeownership is just a lot more attainable today than it was back then, and yeah, so I mean, you know, there's just really not that impetus to be taking people on. You know, a wealthier society gets sort of higher standards.

Shane Phillips 00:22:47
That was my suspicion too, that's the main thing we're seeing, and this also helps explain, like, why we have shrinking household sizes and things like that. But it is really interesting, I guess, that it has become. Maybe it's also something where there are quite a few people who would do it, who would feel comfortable doing it, but when it's not the norm in society and it's not widespread, it's kind of weird or uncomfortable or people just don't know how to go about renting a room in their place and feeling like that's a socially acceptable thing to do or a safe thing to do.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:23:21
I mean just sort of the desire for privacy is one of the things that people start putting their money towards as they get a little bit more affluent. I mean we're seeing sort of the hostile reemerging to a lesser degree in some cities. Right, there's the sort of elevated yassified capsule. Hotels that are going up in the Bay Area right now. I think there might be actually one in Hollywood in the works. So what is old is becoming new again, right, the sort of the bunk bed, common bathroom, sort of quasi SRO of yesteryear maybe making a return. Who knows, we'll see.

Shane Phillips 00:23:56
Moving on. So early in this chapter we are introduced to the concept of zones of emergence, which are sort of transitional neighborhoods where people from modest backgrounds move into and then later move out of onto greener pastures. Zones of emergence, importantly, are not slums, because very often the people in them were coming from actual slums. Although I am certain that a lot of better off people would have described these zones of emergence as slums, because some people have always mistaken disorder and diversity and busyness for depravity and degeneracy and so on. And I think that's something we will see when we come back to chapter six. In particular, I do think this zone of emergence concept is really important, though I sort of wonder where it stands today. I am sure we still have places you could describe this way, but I'm also certain we have lost a lot of them. Cambridgeport, where Applebaum lived, was a zone of emergence in the early and mid-1900s, but by the time he was living there it was full of grad students and doctors and architects, people who had essentially already emerged, so to speak. And it's hard to imagine sustaining a zone of emergence if you can't build quickly and inexpensively, because its status as an engine for upward mobility is going to draw more people in. And then you obviously have to be building elsewhere too, particularly in nicer neighborhoods, so that people have somewhere to emerge to out of that zone. So, you know, mobility is declining and the culprit he's identified is housing supply and housing affordability downstream of that. But we're going to try to kind of poke at the thesis and ideas in this where we can. There are plenty of other plausible reasons you might expect fewer Americans to be moving today than in the past. So I want to talk about some of these. One is just, you know, an aging population. As people get older they tend to move less in general, and with more people living in their 70s, 80s, 90s, beyond, I think there is something to that. I'll say these are mostly things that are mentioned by Applebaum himself and he's kind of looked into and largely dismissed, even if they do contribute. Another one he mentions is occupational licensing, which might sound a little strange, but this is essentially just the idea that, like you know, you're trained and licensed to do a specific craft, whether it's veterinary medicine or working as a beautician, and if your license does not transfer from state to state, that is a very significant barrier on moving. Another one is women entering the workforce, which, among other things, a two-earner household just has more difficulty moving. Joint custody, making it more difficult for divorced couples. And divorce has increased a lot, largely for good reasons, because women have been economically empowered and that has led them to leave their bad marriages more often. Homeownership has increased. I think one that we will come back to is actually slower technological advancement, where homes are not improving as much or as quickly, and so the need to move up and rebuild might be a little diminished. Better information for finding the right home or community, where you're not constantly having to actually move somewhere to find out how it is, you can just kind of learn online. And another one — I think that I'm not sure is mentioned in the book, but I do think might be contributing here too — is along those same lines as increasing wealth. Stan, I think a decent life might just be possible in more places now than it was 50 or 100 years ago, and so the, I guess, push or pull, the forces pushing you out of a bad place or pulling you to a better place, might just not be as strong. Anything there kind of stand out to you or feel like anything is missing from that list?

Stan Oklobdzija 00:27:51
I mean it's kind of a cop-out answer, but I think the true cause is sort of in all of the above. If we're putting out housing supply constriction, we're putting that off to the side. I mean, definitely, America's population has gotten a lot older. The people most likely to move are people sort of earlier in their career cycle. So those are the people that would cut ties with their hometown and head off to the big city in search of that good big city wage premium, right. But if you're in your 50s already, then you know how much. How many more working years have you got? I think one of the ones that Applebaum refers to sort of tangentially a lot throughout the book, just sort of given his own family history, is immigration. About 100 years ago a larger proportion of the American population was foreign born. And so, you know, if you've just come off a boat from Poland or Italy or Ireland or something, right, you have a lot fewer ties to the place you got off the boat. You know, and you're much more willing to take a chance on a new city like St. Louis or Milwaukee or something like that. Right, you're not really wedded to Philadelphia or New York as much.

Shane Phillips 00:29:03
And I think we will certainly with our guest later on. We will be talking more about immigration in particular. Just pulling out a few other things here. Applebaum has this quote that I just want to say because I like it: Americans aren't moving anymore because, for so many, moving threatens to cost more than it delivers. And I think that really just summarizes the situation a lot of people find themselves in today.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:29:29
I think it really speaks to just the real great central thesis of this book. I mean, when we think about housing affordability, when we think about sort of the sclerosis and housing construction in the United States, we're often tempted to think about the real impact it has on actual people living in that area at the present moment. Right, but just because it's so much more difficult to measure, we often ignore all of these potential costs down the line. Right, that business that didn't get started, that kid who didn't grow up in the high opportunity school that later goes on to, I don't know, invent a cure for some disease or write a great novel that captures this moment in our history? Right, there's all of this potential cost that's imposed on people further and further down the line that we just don't get to. Right, there's been this big stifling of innovation and, I guess, entrepreneurship amongst people. Right, they're not going to take this big leap into the unknown because it's just so costly to do so and the price of failure is so high.

Shane Phillips 00:30:39
And so we've been talking about potential other causes. As I said, Applebaum pins this mostly on housing supply, particularly in the places with the best opportunities, with the best jobs, with the best schools, which have tended to be the most exclusionary places that have built the least housing. As he puts it, American mobility has been slowly strangled by generations of reformers seeking to reassert control over their neighborhoods and their neighbors. Their chosen tools were building codes and restrictive covenants and zoning ordinances designed to segregate land by use and class and race. So I think, you know, worth saying here that this is an argument very much in line with Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and also Why Nothing Works by Mark Dunkelman. And they're all kind of pinning a lot of the blame here on progressive reformers who often, I think, did mean well — not always, but more often than not did mean well and were trying to do good things for their community. And I think important to say also that, as I understand the arguments of all these people, they're not really saying progressives are the bad guys, the worst political actors in America. They're more coming from the perspective of: as the writer, I myself am liberal, Democrat, progressive, and these are the people who I feel like I have some influence over and identify with, and so they're the people I'm going to focus on.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:32:14
I think there's another book that came out a couple years earlier. That's sort of the unsung hero and maybe, like, I don't know, the grandfather to those three books you mentioned. That would be Public Citizens by Paul Sabin, a really, really excellent book about sort of a turn in progressivism, kind of moving away from building these great societies, things like you think about, like Roosevelt's New Deal or something like that, and more into a sort of more technocratic, more lawyer-dominated mindset of how can we constrain government from imposing these harms on us, right? And I think that shift in progressivism is something that, you know, we're beginning to re-examine right now as sort of that generation begins sort of removing itself from power and our newer generation starts taking its place. Right, we're really seeing the flaws in that vision quite a bit more.

Shane Phillips 00:33:09
That perspective definitely shows up in Why Nothing Works a lot as well. Does Saban talk about, like Ralph Nader, and you know I feel like that's a often remarked upon kind of the, if not the turning point, really emblematic of that shift — Nader's Raiders.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:33:25
Nader's Raiders are major protagonists in Public Citizens, as is sort of that nascent environmental movement, the folks sort of inspired by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, that really they mark that turning point of it. Just because, in fairness, you know, there were a lot of sort of government excesses at the time. I mean, this is the time where Eisenhower's freeways were demolishing African-American neighborhoods all around the country, right. I mean, Detroit's Black Bottom was completely erased in order to make that sort of riverfront freeway. In Los Angeles, Sugar Hill was demolished in order to build the 10 freeway. Curiously, the frat houses of USC were spared that same fate for what might be obvious reasons.

Shane Phillips 00:34:10
Who could say why?

Stan Oklobdzija 00:34:11
Who could say. You know, it's a mystery. Scholars have debated it for centuries.

Shane Phillips 00:34:16
So, as I said, this chapter is essentially an overview and we don't have to dwell on all these ideas, and there are some other ideas in here that we can maybe touch on briefly, but they are going to show up later and be explored in more detail. So just going to quickly move through here a few concepts, framings that I thought were interesting. The first one is Applebaum's framing of the problem as not a housing crisis but a mobility crisis. Basically, he's saying that we have plenty of inexpensive housing in places like Flint, Michigan — which is the setting for a later chapter — and the actual problem is that we can no longer move to the places with greater opportunity because we've made those places prohibitively expensive. I think sometimes this argument can be wielded for kind of NIMBY purposes. In this case, I'm fine with it, given the overall argument being made and as an exercise in distinction making. It's a book called Stuck, books need to make a specific argument. It's fine, but to me this definitely is really a case of why not both? We can't move to opportunity, so it's a mobility crisis, and we can't move to opportunity because we don't build enough housing or the right kinds of housing in the right places. So it's a housing crisis. So both are true. If nothing else, different problems resonate with different people, and so I do think it's nice to have other ways of framing them in your back pocket if you need them. The second thing is his claim that no society has ever been as physically mobile as America at its peak, and the idea of people being able to choose their own communities as being one of America's most profound contributions to the world. I don't know if America once being the most physically mobile place in the world is literally true or just close enough to true that it doesn't really matter, but to me, the point about choosing your own communities is the more important one anyway. However you feel about American exceptionalism, and certainly acknowledging all the people for whom mobility was not a right or upon whom mobility was forced, this freedom to move does seem like a genuinely American innovation. As I said, we're going to talk about this a lot more, but really something I think worth taking pride in. I like this quote that he has in the book, because old world Europeans were just scandalized by the mobility of Americans of the, you know, 1800s, 1900s. This person says — oh no, no. This quote is actually from a proponent, from an American, and I actually like their framing of this just as an insult. So they say we have cut loose from the old style of human vegetation, the former method of sticking like an oyster to one spot through numberless succeeding generations. I love the idea of calling people oysters, as long as they're dicks about never leaving their hometown, I think there's nothing wrong with that. But if you're a dick about it — and some people are — you're an oyster. So the argument that Applebaum is making here is that throughout most of history people did not have the right to leave the place that they were born, and if they managed to leave, then they certainly did not have the right to belong somewhere else. That was up to the people who lived in the community, and migrants were frequently turned away if they were seen as incompatible religiously or racially or otherwise, or if the town thought the person would not be able to provide for themselves. So we first developed and codified the right to leave, and it wasn't until later, decades later, that we did the same thing for the right to belong. Part of what offends me about NIMBYism — not in my backyard-ism — is that it's essentially a project to restore the right for a community to reject outsiders, to decide who belongs and who doesn't, and while superficially that may sound reasonable — and it probably is reasonable within some limits — it tends to lead to some very dark places.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:38:22
We have this history in California during the Great Depression of putting California highway patrolmen at the entrances to all the various highways leading into the state at the time, and sort of looking at the people coming in and seeing if this is, you know, a good person that's going to, big quotes, contribute to California, or if this is one of those Okies or Arkies that's just going to be a drain on our state, right? I mean, you know, what's old has become new again. And I think there's a lot of that sort of Malthusian zero-sum thinking of viewing other people as a burden when really, you know, all evidence points to the fact that new migrants into a place, whether they come from abroad or elsewhere in the country, are actually making you richer, making your city more vibrant, and actually a net benefit.

Shane Phillips 00:39:12
I've never figured out exactly how to phrase this succinctly or as clearly as I like, but the anti-immigrant, you know, they're taking our jobs, kind of perspective has never made sense to me, just like for many reasons. But in particular with no immigration at all, a place grows and you know, we have a hundred million more people in this country today than we did, I don't know, 40 or 50 years ago, and the unemployment rate is essentially the same. You know, we create more jobs when more people show up. So this idea that somehow that's going to just flip off at some point and when we start adding more people the jobs are just going to stop being created alongside of them, it just makes no sense. And I understand there's like things can move too fast to keep up and for jobs to respond quickly enough, but in the long or even medium term, it just makes no sense at all to me.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:40:10
I'm actually working on a project on this right now, so I hope to have a draft out in the next couple months or so. But, you know, I really think this opposition to new immigrants and opposition to newcomers in a city sort of comes from the same place. And it comes from this really old human idea of, you know, we lived as hunter gatherers in small bands of 150 or so where everyone knew each other and a lot of people were related to one another. And, you know, life out on the savanna at this time actually was really zero sum, right. If someone is at the watering hole where you're drinking at, I mean, that really does diminish your life in very, very profound ways, right. If people are hunting the game that you rely on to eat, right, that's really hurting you and it's a real detriment to your life, right. So I think a lot of these attitudes, you know, for just the average person who's maybe thinking about housing for the first time and just really quickly, at a really superficial level, you know, they fall back to these really old heuristics that just date back to our origin as a species. So I mean, it's not completely just being pulled from the sky, it's not just these people just coming up with completely kind of stupid and idiotic notions about the way the world works. But when these sort of quick snap judgments become policy, when they get the force of the state behind them, that's when we really start to see this just diminishment of our lived experience.

Shane Phillips 00:41:44
Well, that's actually a good transition, because the next thing on my list here is the idea that mobile societies are also more tolerant societies. This is another argument that Applebaum is advancing, and I think this can definitely come across as unintuitive, but this quote from Carl Becker sums up the concept nicely for me. He says: when the mobility of population was always so great, the strange face, the odd speech, the curious custom of dress and the unaccustomed religious faith ceased to be a matter of comment or concern. I also like this idea that Applebaum points out about how calling someone a stranger, you know, throughout most of history would be more of an accusation, but over time in the US "howdy stranger" becomes this like friendly salutation, really exactly the opposite: like a stranger is almost like a neighbor at the same time. So the idea here, which we'll get to in a later chapter, is that mobile societies can also produce more socially and civically and spiritually engaged communities, and I think that's unintuitive but really interesting and I think once it's explained it actually makes a lot of sense. So I'm looking forward to getting to that in a little bit. Few other things here. First off, as I said, Applebaum does a great job of tracing other people's history, but also his own family history, and as I was reading the book, I just felt very envious of this because I know almost nothing of my own family's personal history. I told you this earlier, Stan, but I do know that a great grandmother, or great great grandmother, was a mail order bride from Norway, which I am perversely proud of, but that's about all I know. I don't know how much of your own background, or how far back it goes for you, Stan.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:43:32
Man, that must have been like one of the first mail order brides ever. You can imagine.

Shane Phillips 00:43:37
A real innovator. Ha.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:43:38
What that catalog looked like right now. My own family history is a lot easier for me to track because it starts in the early 1970s at LAX. My dad's an immigrant from Serbia, came to the US to study at UCLA, and my mom is an immigrant from Vietnam who came to the United States to study, went to UC Riverside where I now teach — which is kind of funny, yeah — and ended up having to stay in Riverside when Saigon fell in 1975. So you know, came and you know, eventually was made to stay. So, yeah, it's a lot easier to track for me.

Shane Phillips 00:44:20
Another thing that comes up here is, and that we'll return to, is this idea of moving as a positive experience. I think often in, especially in higher cost cities where rents have increased quickly, prices have increased quickly, displacement is just an ever-present conversation, gentrification. Inappropriately, I think, understandably, but inappropriately, the idea kind of settles in our mind that moving is a bad thing, and moving certainly can be a bad thing. But all the data I know about suggests that, or just outright says that, for most people, most moves are both voluntary and upward, sort of following the classic housing ladder idea or concept. And so I think just reinforcing that in this book is another one of its contributions that I appreciate.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:45:11
I mean, we really, you know, both you and I working on housing policy, we really see the ugly of our housing crisis quite a bit, and just a lot of that manifests in people leaving communities that they've been in for generations, losing an entire social safety net, and these are, you know, horrendous, real problems that we face. I don't want to diminish that at all. There is another side to this, right. There is this story of, you know, immigrant groups to the United States. Applebaum talks about his, you know, I definitely can see it in my own community, of people coming to the United States, sort of entering these big quotes "emergence zones," right, working and then eventually being able to move into a bigger house, you know, move into the suburbs, right. Sort of kind of do that same sort of churn that people have been doing in America for time immemorial.

Shane Phillips 00:46:02
Absolutely. And another thing that Applebaum brings up repeatedly, and I'm sure we will come back to and have to reinforce ourselves, because I think it can get lost in the sort of positive talk about mobility and what it has brought us. But Applebaum acknowledges repeatedly that the way Applebaum puts this in the first chapter is that mobility was never uncontested. He says, quote: waves of immigrants faced discrimination from those who had come only slightly before, turned away from communities they sought to join just because they were Irish or Italian or Jewish. Laws excluded the Chinese and vigilantes hounded them from their homes. Women seldom enjoyed the full privilege of mobility, constrained by social structures, legal barriers and physical. And of course slavery rears its head here repeatedly, sort of the ultimate restraint on mobility. That persisted in this country for a very long time, and of course even beyond slavery. Jim Crow and other policies of that nature also were their own restrictions on mobility for black people in particular.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:47:11
So I mean, again, to refer to The Warmth of Other Suns, right? I mean, I think everyone who's interested in housing policy really ought to spend some time reading about the Great Migration, right, because this is one of the biggest moves to opportunity in American history. Just the scale of the movement of African-Americans out of the South and into cities like Chicago or New York or Los Angeles is just really unprecedented in our history. And one of the things that's really, really interesting, or was really interesting to me in learning more about the Great Migration, is just the length that these southern cities and states went to prevent these people from leaving. Right, people had to go to the bus station in the middle of the night, right, or they had to get their friend to drop them off at a train station like four towns away where no one would recognize them. Right. The repercussions on someone's family after they would leave to escape the horrendous mistreatment, the disenfranchisement, the second class citizenship of the Jim Crow South, were huge, right, and it's something we really don't appreciate enough when we think about mobility in the United States.

Shane Phillips 00:48:20
I don't think most people think of the post-slavery Jim Crow era as a time of restrained mobility, really. The idea that people were at once segregated and hated and diminished in every way, but at the same time, the white population worked so hard to prevent them from leaving because they were also integral to those communities and their functioning. So, getting a little more into your domain in a very broad sense, political science, there was some really interesting stuff that Applebaum shared about some polling surveys that he had done during the 2016 presidential election, and some insights about how Trump really won: disengaged voters, but also voters who had very little mobility. Some of that may be by choice, but oftentimes certainly not. So, just focusing on the mobility aspect of this, I'm going to quote here. He says: a month before the election, we found that among white voters who had moved more than two hours from their hometown, Hillary Clinton enjoyed a solid six point lead. Those living within a two hour drive, though, back Trump by nine points, and those who had never left their hometown supported him by a remarkable 26 points. Is this something you've ever really come across? Is this familiar to you, this dynamic?

Stan Oklobdzija 00:49:42
I mean, I've not seen that survey until I read the book, but you know, it tracks with a lot of what we know about who is voting Republican and who's voting Democrat in our increasingly sort of polarized age, right, where one's identity predicts one's voting to the greatest extent it has in, you know, since the advent of modern polling, right. I think a big sort of overlooked, omitted variable here is the diploma divide between people that leave their hometown and those who stay. So there's a book that came out about a year or two ago by Matt Grossman from Michigan State and his co-author, David Hopkins, who's a professor at Boston College, looking at this diploma divide between voters, right, just how much having a college degree swings you towards the Democratic Party in the modern era. So when we think about who's moving from their hometown, right, the wage premium for someone with a BA or above in one of these superstar cities more than offsets the increase in housing costs, right. So if you have a bachelor's degree from, I don't know, the flagship state school in the Midwest or something like that, it makes sense for you to pick up out of Iowa or Missouri and head off to Denver or Chicago or to Dallas or something like that, right, to kind of go to one of these higher performing, higher GDP cities and begin your career there, because you're going to pay a lot more for your house. I mean, your house is going to cost way more in Denver than it would in Iowa, but the amount of money that you're going to make over your career is just so much higher it's worth it. That same premium doesn't exist for non-college workers anymore, and that's really, I think, a big driver in what's keeping people stuck in place, but also what's influencing them to vote for these populist candidates like Trump, who give them scapegoats, who give them people to blame for their economic misfortune.

Shane Phillips 00:51:52
That sounds a lot like the Ganong and Shoag paper, actually just a little bit of a different emphasis. Okay, well, I think we can wrap up on the overview chapter one and move to chapter two, which is titled The Death of Great American Cities, and that may sound a little bit familiar to some of our listeners. So this is essentially my one sentence summary of this chapter: how Jane Jacobs extolled urbanism's virtues but helped enact policies and renovated her own home in Greenwich Village such that the kinds of people who once lived there could no longer afford to. So this chapter starts with Rudolf Heckler coming to New York from Austria around 1886, and moving from the Bronx down to the West Village on Hudson Street in 1940, where he became the last resident of 555 Hudson Street before Jane Jacobs. So you know, I'm sure the vast majority of our listeners are very familiar with Jane Jacobs, probably one of the most lionized figures in modern American planning, and for good reason. Death and Life of Great American Cities is truly one of the best books on planning, and it was all the more amazing for having been written basically just from observing how cities actually work in the real world. Don't sleep on the economy of cities either, which I think is a great book, but this is telling the story of how Jacobs and her husband moved to Greenwich Village in 1947, when it was still a zone of emergence, with people constantly moving in and out, and we find out that when they bought their home, they were one of just about 1% of families in Greenwich Village who own their homes, and by the time that they left, it was just no longer a place of upward mobility. Applebaum goes through the history of this property, 555 Hudson Street, how in 1946, it was purchased for $7,000, in 1970 for $45,000, and then in 2009 for $3,350,000. And in the book he puts the appraised value in 2024, I think at like $6,400,000, but it actually declined since then and sold for $5,100,000 in 2025. So a real, real bargain.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:54:10
I'll take two.

Shane Phillips 00:54:13
You know, one of the things that Applebaum points out here, which is entirely true, was that Jane Jacobs realized that the things that professional planners hated about cities were often precisely what most benefited their residents. That's his takeaway from this. But what she ultimately ended up doing throughout the time she lived there, she's known for essentially stopping Robert Moses, stopping this urban renewal scheme through her neighborhood, and gained a lot of accolades — entirely deserved — for that. And she was known for this concept of eyes on the street, where you have people in their shops living on the second and third floor looking out their windows, making neighborhoods safe just by having people around. She also popularized this idea of the sidewalk ballet, of people just kind of going about their business and the real busyness of a place like Greenwich Village in the mid-1900s and early 1900s. And over time she and other people like her — very privileged people relative to their neighbors — managed to first, in, I think, 1961 or maybe a little later, stop this urban renewal scheme that would have, I think it was, put a highway essentially through a park nearby. And then, in 1969, actually have the whole neighborhood landmarked. And so she was someone who celebrated the diversity of the community, not just the people, but actually the buildings as well, you know, having the three-story row home next to the six-story tenement. And yet she was really one of the people most responsible for preventing that kind of dynamism and diversity from continuing to exist and evolve in Greenwich Village. A stat that really stood out to me: she's obviously not responsible for most of this, but based on a timeline, Greenwich Village lost two thirds of its population from 1910 to 1950. And this is something that she maybe not wrongly characterized as unslumming, but it's also — you could also very easily call that gentrification. And so the way Applebaum puts this is quote: Jacobs, in short, had moved into a vibrant immigrant neighborhood, bought historic mixed rental property and transformed it into a modern single-family home. Then she pushed to change the rules so that no one else could easily do the same.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:56:39
I think, you know, number one, Jane Jacobs, right, as a purveyor of vibes, as theory, is sort of unmatched, you know, really, really one of the coldest to ever do it. But I think, you know, one of the really interesting things about Jacobs's story is, you know, she correctly identified all of these things that made Greenwich Village such a desirable and such a vibrant neighborhood to be in. Right, I mean, the things like the sidewalk ballet, the people sitting on their stoop and keeping an eye on everyone, these informal social connections and just the entire streetscape as a third space are, you know, really really keen observations. But I think Jacobs' big fault is just assuming that this is somehow baked into the DNA of the neighborhood, that if we can just keep these rapacious forces from outside out, we can wall them off with historic designations or whatever, this behavior will just continue in perpetuity because maybe there's some sort of magic crystals underneath the sidewalk or something like that, you know. So what she's missing, I think, is this realization that you need newcomers, right, you need these people constantly flowing in. Right, you need this churn of humanity in order to have that dynamism. And that's where this concept of urbanism, I think, falls really short. Right, obviously, Robert Moses trying to stick a highway through lower Manhattan to connect to — I think it was the Brooklyn Bridge or something to that effect. Right, sort of clear out the slums of the meatpacking district and what's now the West Village and the Lower East Side and facilitate car travel through the island of Manhattan, was correctly viewed as something that should be opposed. Right, but there wasn't any real vision offered beyond just pure opposition, and I think that's really sort of laid the foundation for a lot of these types of movements today. Right, there's something to preserve, there's something to fight against, but there's really no alternative vision to offer in its place.

Shane Phillips 00:58:47
And I'm not even sure that if she were alive today to defend herself that she would even disagree that a city needs that churn of residents to have that dynamism and for the sidewalk ballet and everything else to function properly. Maybe she would. But I think the other missing part here is that you actually need a responsive housing supply and built environment to facilitate that churn and that change. Otherwise you end up with this stagnation. And, if nothing else, you end up with what Greenwich Village became, which is just this place that is only affordable to the most wealthy. I like the way that Applebaum frames this — the story of Greenwich Village is sort of he pulls out this fact that Marc Jacobs, the fashion designer, had recently sold his home for $10,500,000 — not the same house, but in the same neighborhood. And so really, Greenwich Village has transitioned over a pretty short time — 50, 60 years — from Jane Jacobs to Marc Jacobs. And a big part of that is because not just Greenwich Village but really much of New York has been kept from responding to the incredible demand to live there and work there with very, very little housing. And so the costs have gone up. And so I think that's also something that is missing here, that there is something inextricable about the built environment. I do think neighborhoods are about the neighbors ultimately, but if you're not making space for them, if you're not adapting to changing needs and changing demand, there's not going to be space for those neighbors.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:00:30
No, that's absolutely correct. And I mean the people that make a neighborhood unique. If you think about sort of like the coffee shop folk music scene that Bob Dylan came out of in Greenwich Village, or you know the punk scene that comes out of the Lower East Side in the 1970s, those are the people that are first to go. I mean, I went to Greenwich Village, spent some time in New York 10 years ago and I remember seeing a Marc Jacobs for Kids on Mulberry Street or something. So I mean, that's the kind of person that's there, you know, that can have designer clothes for an infant to spill SpaghettiOs on, right. So you know, if that's the kind of city you want, then mission accomplished, you've got it.

Shane Phillips 01:01:07
And I suspect that was not her intent, but that's sort of the point. I don't think Applebaum is trying to make the case throughout this chapter that Jacobs was bad. Actually, I think it's that people who can say all the right things and genuinely mean well are nonetheless often acting in ways that undermine their professed values and goals, and I think that's something we've just seen time and time and time again throughout progressive cities in particular, and in housing in particular. Another idea that I want to hit on here before we move on to the next chapter, is he talks about how Jacobs and her husband and a lot of their similarly white collar colleagues had created this committee to save the West Village, and they were, you know, leveraging all of their expertise in marketing and design and things to kind of make their argument, and the argument they were really making was that because the city was not listening to them. You know a dozen, a few dozen people who were very educated, very connected, had very strong views and were able to make their arguments very effectively because they were not being listened to. That was somehow, you know, an unresponsive government, and this is something you just still hear all the time, like the homeowner who shows up to the public hearing for some development project, complaining about how they didn't hear about the meeting that they're at, and then, when the city decides to approve this project that four or five people showed up to oppose, it's seen as anti-democratic. You're acting against our interests, and the fact that we brought these five people out here and the supporters didn't bring anyone except the developer or whatever, means we should win. You should be required to do what we want. For that reason, and I just think there is the entitlement of, I showed up to this meeting and expressed my view and I'm in the majority. Therefore, you should be doing what I say, regardless of the impacts on the broader community, regardless of the fact that me and my four friends amount to a fraction of a percent of the population of this neighborhood. None of that seems to matter, but I just feel like that sense of entitlement really shows up a lot in housing policies and housing processes and all these meetings we have.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:03:35
It's a really, really crazy way to plan for such an extremely important part of an urban economy, right, to figure out how we should build housing, right. So basically, you give anyone who wants to show up a heckler's veto, right. I mean, imagine if we ran the United States Congress like this, right. So if anyone who felt like it could just show up on the floor of Congress and complain about the construction of a new aircraft carrier or something like that, and we had to listen to them because that's who, you know, could get out of work on a Wednesday afternoon at 3 p.m. or something like that, right. I mean, it's an insane way to conduct public policy and yet we do it for housing, which is so consequential, right. I mean, it's the largest expenditure for the typical American family, you know. On top of that, what is a city is really, really differently defined as you go across the country. Right, New York City is this large agglomeration that swallowed up Brooklyn, swallowed up Queens, et cetera, eventually became this large urban conurbation of 10 million people. But where we live in Los Angeles County, or I guess where you live in Los Angeles County, there's 88 separate jurisdictions, right. You kind of just move down one boulevard and suddenly you're in four separate cities, each of which can give the guy who shows up on Wednesday afternoon the heckler's veto. It's insane, right. It's insane. But yet, you know, we hobble ourselves as a country by doing things in this manner.

Shane Phillips 01:05:14
And I think that, you know, it's hard for me to say whether this is just the way things kind of evolved over time, because no one was really paying attention and it's easier to appease the — you know, it's the squeaky wheel gets the grease kind of idea. Or, if it more comes down to, people really didn't want to be building housing anyway. The public officials and whomever else who designed these processes was pretty much on board. And so, you know, everyone agreed we're going to make this as easy to obstruct as possible. I think there's a lot of different causes here, but I do at least appreciate this as something that is being talked about more, written about more and increasingly changed through policy, where we're not just giving a few people or a few opponents the chance to veto something that not only is in the interest of the much broader community but may actually be part of a plan that involved a lot more of the community when it was being written, to decide what kinds of projects the city and the neighborhood are going to allow. Moving along. Chapter three: the freedom to move. Again, my one sentence summary here: This is a history of mobility in North America dating back to before the Pilgrims and Puritans, with an emphasis on how local communities had the right to choose who belonged and who didn't, until the mid-1800s. And so this chapter starts off with the Pilgrims, the very start of white settlement into what became the United States. So the first white settlers, as Applebaum points out, were defined like their name came from their mobility, the pilgrims, pilgrimage. And he notes that migration was viewed very differently in the 1600s than it is today. He writes, in early modern England every person had a proper place tied to their land, their employment and their family. Families were responsible for the care of their members and if they were unable to provide for them, communities assumed the burden. To move away from home was to abandon your responsibilities and, worse yet, to challenge the proper order of society. A nice little call out that he has is the origin of the word mob. I know many people have pointed this out, because it's just really fun. Again pulling a quote here. A new and sinister word entered the English language to describe this mobile vulgus or moving crowd, this dangerously rootless mass of ordinary people with its quicksilver moods, which had dared to leave its proper place. They were known as the mobile, and then the slang of fashionable Londoners contracted that into the mob. That was certainly news to me. But going back to the Pilgrims here, John Winthrop was a Puritan religious leader and he ultimately created the justification for moving away from England, which was not an obvious thing to do and could very easily be seen as a betrayal or, you know, leaving behind your countrymen. But for reasons we don't really need to get into, he helped create this idea of the freedom to leave. And I like this thing that Applebaum points out. The freedom to leave is a sort of release valve where people, if they have disagreements, they are free to leave and kind of resolve them that way. But even just giving people the option to leave gives that choice power and makes it something where if you decide, you know, I have the choice to leave or I can stay. It's going to be rough, but because it's my choice, I'm deciding to stay and I'm going to be comfortable with that. Whereas if you cannot leave and you are in this disagreement with your neighbors or family or whatever and you do not have the option to leave, that's the kind of thing that can make you stew and those tensions build over time and, you know, create these generational conflicts that never get resolved. And so I think that was a really interesting insight of freedom to leave as a release valve. So something I want to talk about here is he talks about how towns were governed. At least northeastern towns were governed on the principle of exclusion, in part because the town was responsible for providing for indigent residents. And so I want to talk about this idea of warning out, which is a term I had heard before but didn't really know much about, certainly didn't know the origins of it. But again, this is the idea that towns were responsible for the welfare of their inhabitants, and so if you left some other city and showed up at the doorstep of this other town and they decided, for one reason or another, that you look like someone who is not going to be able to take care of themselves, they could warn you out and basically say, turn back around, go back where you came from. And that was how things operated for a very long time, and had operated since long before the Pilgrims came to America.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:10:07
So it's really interesting that this concept of warning out is such a bedrock principle of our country. I mean, this sort of idea that people can show up and become public charges and therefore they need to be excluded is something that we sort of still debate, even in the modern era. Right, there was a Supreme Court case in 1999 of Saenz v. Roe, from here in California, that attempted to limit the welfare benefits of newcomers to those of their previous state. Right, it was this idea that people were moving to California to take advantage of our big quote, generous welfare benefits though. I mean, what can you call generous in California post Proposition 13? But anyways, this idea existed, and in order to discourage these public charges from showing up and leeching California welfare, we were going to give them Mississippi welfare or Idaho welfare or something like that, and the Supreme Court ruled that was unconstitutional and a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. So you know, what is old is new again.

Shane Phillips 01:11:12
I mean, a very direct analogy here is just in how many communities treat affordable housing, like they don't want to build affordable housing because they don't want those people in their neighborhood. And that's obviously sometimes just pure class or race. But there is an element of like drawing on our public funds and we don't want to. We don't want you to be our responsibility essentially.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:11:37
And I mean, if you think about the wave of incorporations in California post-World War II, right? I mean, a lot of these cities followed the Lakewood plan specifically so they could exclude certain people from coming in by tweaking land use requirements to make housing more expensive, right. The whole purpose of becoming a city was to decide who can come in and who can't.

Shane Phillips 01:11:57
Still talking about some of the Northeast cities, he points out how this politics of exclusion, it was partly about this public charge — indigent, you know, not wanting to be responsible for other people who couldn't take care of themselves. But it was also to protect the value of labor. And what he says is quote: tenants and hired laborers from outside the community were prospective rivals, depressing the wages that the town born could earn or the prices they could command for their crafts. And so by keeping people out, you're actually keeping wages high and trying to — in something again very resonant today — trying to prioritize the wages of the people who were already there at the expense of people who could not get into the city.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:12:43
And we should really emphasize the fact that, yes, you are going to increase the wages of those skilled laborers that already exist in the town, but at the expense of the wealth of everyone else who lives there, right, I mean new people. Not adding to the demand in the town and not adding to the sort of economic activity in the town keeps everyone else in the town poor, save for the person that has a greater market share of that particular craft or talent or whatever.

Shane Phillips 01:13:13
And there's a really interesting contrast made here between the Massachusetts Bay Company — which is, you know, either where the Pilgrims came from and Puritans came from, or at least related to it — and then the Virginia Company. These are both companies that were created by a royal charter in Britain, controlled by a small group of wealthy investors intended to plant colonies in North America. But he makes this distinction where early Virginia was settled mainly by men who were more driven by seeking profit rather than having this religious motivation. And it's really interesting how — I'm not sure that's the source of the differences between the Northeast and the South later on, but things ended up evolving in such a way where the Northeast had this system where people were able to move pretty freely but they were not really necessarily welcome anywhere. So it's this mobility combined with exclusivity. And in the South, in Virginia, it was very different, where they were essentially trying to recreate a system of English mobility, and it was a very immobile society. In contrast, and interestingly, maybe also for labor reasons, at least to some extent, I think part of this was just the desire for the landowning elites to really exert their power in any way they could, and so having control over their — quote unquote — social lessers was just going to take many forms. But because of the ability to grow tobacco in Virginia and other places in the region, they really needed labor, and one way of keeping labor was to prevent it from moving, and so I think this was true even for white laborers. But this obviously evolved over time into the slavery system that dominated the South for a very long time. Very hard to keep workers doing that kind of backbreaking labor if they're not kept there against their will.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:15:23
Applebaum's really borrowing hard from this really classic work about British folkways in America called Albion Seed by David Hackett Fischer. Right, and it's this idea that these various different strains of England settled different parts of America and created these sort of contrasting cultures that sort of defined our national struggles. And I mean the book is pretty vibes-based. Speaking of vibes-based social science, but it's really, really catching something, right. I mean, the Southern United States really resembled the colony, the Spanish and Portuguese colonies of Latin America, much more than they resembled the Northeast, right, I mean to a large extent. Even today there really exists two different Americas. You know, one that sort of comes out of this New England Puritan trying to build a sort of new, new society based on these rules and these religious commandments, and just the pure extractionism of the Virginia Company, right, where you take an indentured servant and you work them, you know, oftentimes to death, you know, harvesting tobacco or in South Carolina in the rice harvest, and then you just replace them with someone else. Eventually this system of chattel slavery develops there in Virginia, and you know this model of just tying people to a plot of land and just pulling whatever you can out of the land. So you have this idle planter class that gets really rich and everyone else sort of just kind of fights for the crumbs, just really proceeds and continues through American history until everything explodes in the Civil War. So it's really sort of a astute observation.

Shane Phillips 01:17:03
And he tries to draw this to the modern age, and I don't think you would want to imply that it's a straight line or that it is in any way a clean progression. But a point he makes is we are, we've kind of become this country where people at once expect that we should have the freedom to do what we want with our own land — which is a very Virginia Company kind of perspective — but also that we expect to be able to tell our neighbors what they can do with their land, which is a very New England, Puritan, more egalitarian community where everyone is kind of in everyone else's business kind of place. And somehow we keep those two ideas in tension.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:17:49
I mean there's this Simpsons gag where an old lady goes to the market and tells the person bagging her groceries that she wants everything in one bag, but she doesn't want the bag to be heavy. So you know we're kind of allergic to tradeoffs as a people in the United States.

Shane Phillips 01:18:03
So I want to move forward here and we're going to skip over a lot. But I think a really key thing to emphasize from this chapter is that freedom to leave developed pretty early and it was codified in ordinances as early as like 1641 or something in Massachusetts, and the system of warning out was fading, still pretty prominent in the Northeast into the 1800s. But once you get into the Midwest — and I think this might be in part because the Midwest was, you know, still attracting people and growing, and so warning people out constantly for any little thing, you know, we feel like your religion is not compatible or your ethnic background or whatever, certainly still would happen, but just was a little tougher to justify, I would imagine. And so really the only warning out that was happening in Ohio by early to mid 1800s seems to be more on this concern about, you know, are you going to be a public charge, something that's costing us money and we're gonna have to take care of you. And, importantly, the connection here is: you know, we've got the freedom to leave. And, as warning out is declining, what this is really kind of evolving into is a freedom to belong that goes alongside of it, where not only am I allowed to leave the place I'm in — and no one can restrain me from doing that, if I'm a white man at least — but now also, if I choose to live somewhere else, you cannot exclude me from living there and maybe even voting there. So that's something that really developed over time. But a real hinge point that Applebaum highlights, which I think is really interesting, is in 1841 in the Ohio legislature, when they created this nine part test for assessing whether someone was a resident, and, as he puts it, was really centered on individual intent. So it was about how you felt about your own community that you lived in and what your intentions were, whereas before the way this worked was essentially, you could maybe, maybe, go to a community and try to vote there, but anyone could challenge your vote. Any other man could challenge your vote, and a local election judge would decide whether you were a resident and therefore someone who could vote. And so that was something where it was not your intent, not your decision whether you're a resident, it was the community acting through this local election judge. But as of 1841, and then of course this idea spread over time — it really becomes more a matter of do I think I am a resident of this place, and if I think so, then essentially I am. And so that's really the foundation of this idea of people having the right to belong and the decline of this exclusivity where towns and cities are more treated as sort of members only clubs, where we have to approve you in order for you to be welcome here. And the connection I want to make here is actually to state preemption. As I said, that law, that 1841 law, was a law of the Ohio legislature. And we talk about this all the time today, how important state preemption is, because the politics and incentives of local governments are just not very good. They're not in the right place for communities to be welcoming, because you get free rider problems. If I choose to welcome people, it doesn't mean my neighbors are, and maybe that means they're all going to come here and we're going to be responsible for all these additional costs. It's like not an entirely unreasonable concern when other cities or towns are not similarly motivated. And so when a state is able to step in and say, no, you all have to change, you all have to be more welcoming, then the pressure actually falls on everyone and it actually becomes much easier to take on that kind of responsibility. This is something that I don't think Applebaum says explicitly, but it occurred to me while I was prepping for this conversation. If you think about American history and how this is framed, so we essentially went from the system of local governments being highly exclusive in the 1700s, and then in the 1800s we had this state mandated inclusion. You know, started in Ohio. And strangely, we've essentially repeated that cycle in the 1900s — and we're going to talk about this in the next episodes more so, but you know, the 1900s were this period of retrenchment, when cities, local governments, were really taking back that power to exclude and the power to deny people the right to belong in their community. And now, in the 2000s, we've gone back to, well, it looks like the state has to step in again and start taking away — some of, you know, cracking down on some of these exclusionary policies that undid the work of the 1800s.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:23:10
I think the real, the big key lurking variable that we're overlooking here is this economic viability argument, right. So you know, in the middle 1800s, and especially after the Civil War, American cities really start to industrialize, and especially in the North and in the Midwest, industrialism becomes this key economic driver, and so you need people, you need people to work the factories, you need people to work the canals, you need people to work the slaughterhouses, right. And so this tension of excluding people runs right into this need for more workers to power these huge economic engines.

Shane Phillips 01:23:51
Well, if I can step in there, I think this is in contrast to the 1600s, 1700s, even the 1800s, where most people worked on farms and there was just only so many people that a given plot of land could support. It was a much more zero-sum kind of environment where bringing in more people if you didn't have more land for them to work was potentially taking something away in a much more concrete sense.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:24:20
That's absolutely right. I mean just advances in the way we farm and how much food a given farm can produce really freed up a lot of people to make this jump into the city. And I mean we shouldn't fail to recognize just how excruciating and backbreaking farm labor is, right, just given how horrible factory work was, like, if you think about like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle or something like that, people would still prefer to do that rather than working on a farm, really shatters the illusion of sort of that. You know, bucolic, we must return, sort of thing that you see everywhere. And so, you know, in the 1900s it became a lot easier for people to live outside the city, right. We had the advent of the streetcar and suddenly people could sort of move outside of these central urban cores into the first American suburbs. Right, and when we think about, you know, what cities big quotes were trying to preserve with exclusionary land use laws, it was mostly urban land in these suburbs, right. I mean, it's kind of ironic that the Euclid v. Ambler decision is from Ohio itself, right. You know, Ohio really leading the way for American land use law, and that was designed to protect land in a fairly affluent, or I guess, soon to be affluent, suburb of Cleveland.

Shane Phillips 01:25:39
All right, so we're going to keep moving things along here, with a little bit of time left. Chapter four, the last one we're covering here, titled A Migratory People. This is a history with various stories over roughly 100 years of peak American mobility, and it was really exemplified by Moving Day, which we're going to talk about. This is the chapter that starts with that story of Abe Lincoln. I did love this part. It surprised me with the big reveal where you start on page one, just talking about Thomas and Nancy and their son Abraham, born in 1809 near Hodgenville or something. Kentucky, moved to Knob Creek at two, Indiana at seven, Illinois at 21, then to New Salem, elected as state legislature six years later to Springfield, and what do you know? It's Abraham Lincoln. So just a story of like incredible mobility for his family and then later for himself, including him doing a circuit through, I think, either before or during his time in the state legislature and then being elected to Congress and moving to DC. Just kind of an illustration of how commonplace this was at the time. I did like a few of the quotes that Applebaum pulled. One was from de Tocqueville complaining, quote: a man builds a house to spend his latter years in it and he sells it before the roof is on. He plants a garden and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing. He brings a field into tillage and leaves other men to gather the crops. He embraces a profession and gives it up. He settles in a place which he soon afterwards leaves to carry his changeable longings elsewhere. And there's another person, Simon Ansley Farrell, who says: perhaps there is nothing more remarkable in the character of the Americans than the indifference with which they leave their old habitations, friends and relations. So again you can kind of feel the scandalized European perspective on this. But I think an interesting point here is that mobility up to this point had been mainly reserved for the middle class, even in the US. But post-revolution it starts to expand toward the lower classes. Think the — to some extent the rich were always kind of fine where they were because they didn't need to go anywhere. They were doing just great. But the poor lacked the resources to move. That changed over time, and there's some really interesting stats in here about just how mobile Americans were relative to, for example, Britain, where many of them had come from not long ago. And just relating this to economic mobility, one of the things he points out is in Britain in 1850, half of the sons born to unskilled laborers climbed to more skilled occupations, versus four in five in the US. There's another fact in here, bringing this back to the physical mobility. He says, quote: in 19th century Britain a quarter of men over the age of 30 had relocated from one county to another, moving on average 24 miles. In the United States, nearly two thirds of such men had moved between counties and they had journeyed on average more than 200 miles from home.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:28:59
I mean, mobility has always been part of the American experience. In fact, a big cause of our revolution to free ourselves from British rule comes from American colonists repeatedly ignoring the English prohibition on settling lands that were taken from the French during the Seven Years' War, right. Various American colonists kept moving into lands that I think are like now, I guess, modern Kentucky or something like that. And you know, the English, who had just fought a very costly, expensive war against the French, didn't want to anger the Native American tribes there and cause a future war, so they put prohibitions against these colonists moving. Eventually they started to tax them for their security, and you know the rest is history.

Shane Phillips 01:29:47
No, thank you. Yeah.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:29:48
The first Prop 13. The American Revolution.

Shane Phillips 01:29:52
The original tax revolt. I want to make sure we talk about one of the, I think, many people's favorite parts of this book. And something that I think for many of us was a completely new revelation, which is moving day. And this is just a uniquely American thing, from what I can tell, back 100 and more years ago, where, in cities across America, rather than having this constant, constant churn, week to week, month to month, of you know some fraction of people moving out of their homes and finding somewhere new, you would have a large share, if not the majority, of the population all moving in one day. So just thousands of homes emptying out at the same time as people were figuring out where to move next. And it just sounds like, I'm sure it was stressful and difficult and unpleasant in many ways, but it also just sounds like this, like celebration in some ways. And he kind of frames it as this expression of hope. I like how Applebaum puts it here with this quote: With moving day, Americans made a habit out of change. The annual ritual of relocation, for all its inconveniences, provided the impetus to overcome inertia. Instead of accepting the cards they had been dealt, Americans kept drawing new ones. Moving was a defiant assertion of agency, an insistence that around the next corner or over the next hill lay something better for anyone who had the nerve to seize it.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:31:20
I should add here that if you're a fan of moving day, there's actually still moving days that go on to this day in Montreal and Quebec City. July 1st, which is Canada Day, is traditionally the day that everyone moves out of their apartments. So if you want to see a moving day, book your tickets to Quebec for a little over a month from now.

Shane Phillips 01:31:40
That actually sounds like a nice time, maybe better as an observer than a participant. So this is a time when some of the benefits here are tenants are obviously maximizing the number of options that are available to them, and there's also pressure on the landlords, which I think is really interesting, where, if they are not able to lease their unit on that day, they might be stuck with a vacancy for a very long time, or at least having to find someone weeks or months down the road who might not be willing to spend nearly as much. So I thought it was a really interesting approach, and you know a question I had, though. Applebaum has this line about people moving and their motivation for it. Quote: "one decade's prohibitive luxury was the next affordable convenience and the third's absolute necessity," and that made me think about how, in this era, let's say, late 1800s, early 1900s, there was just a lot faster technological advancement and things like light bulbs and phones and indoor plumbing coming to cities and people's homes. They were just a scale of upgrade that I think we generally don't see here. You know, buying a home that was built in 2025 versus 2015, you don't feel a lot of difference, like you might buying one or renting one that was built in 1880 versus 1890, and so it just made me wonder if that's part of what's going on here. You know, I think there's still value in this analogy, or but if that kind of saps some of its strength and relevance to today.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:33:28
I mean, there's no doubt that, you know, the pace of change around the late 1800s, early 1900s was just like nothing we've really ever seen before in human history. But I mean, I think like it speaks more to this idea of an abundance of rental options and to that landlord calculus of having that empty unit for an entire year, right. You know, in places with a lot more slack in the housing market, that sort of interplay between the tenant and landlord still goes on to this day because the tenant just has a lot more leverage, right? I mean, I remember during COVID I moved across the alley into this brand new luxury high rise building. I traded my one bedroom apartment in a converted bank building for a brand new two bedroom, two bath apartment built like two years prior, and it was really good. And the only reason I could negotiate the cheap rent was because everyone had left Los Angeles for this once in a lifetime pandemic. So building a lot of housing, introducing a lot of slack into the housing market, gives renters that opportunity.

Shane Phillips 01:34:43
And that is something that Applebaum emphasizes — that this was not actually the situation in all cities. You know, maybe even back then, this is really something that worked so well for tenants in places that had enough housing. They had an abundant supply of housing and, as you say, very similar benefits accrue to tenants today in places that have an abundant supply of housing and where vacancy rates are not, you know, 2%, 3%, 4%, but are 8%, 9%, 10%. It makes a really, really big difference. I think the last thing we're going to have time for in this chat is this idea that moving and high mobility, physical mobility, actually creates community and builds community. That's something that sounds very unintuitive that you have. You know, we always hear from, you know, homeowners at the public hearing, for example, about how renters are transient, and you know they don't make for good neighbors and so forth. And so it was really interesting reading this perspective — and I think Applebaum makes a really strong case for it — that when people are highly mobile, they are looking for ways to become a part of the community that they've just moved to, and so they're joining churches and they're joining the Elks and, you know, the bowling league or whatever it happens to be. He refers to us as a nation of joiners during this time, just people leaving where they're from and joining all these different groups to embed themselves in the community. And I just felt like that was really, you know, a sort of counterintuitive take that really speaks to today as well, where, at the same time that we have very low mobility in this country, we also are having this loneliness epidemic and many people who feel completely disengaged, very like shamefully, tragically, large share of people who say they have no close friends, and this feels like these things are related to each other.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:36:50
I mean, human beings desire community. It's something that's hardwired in us and it makes us feel profoundly sad and upset when we lack it. Right, and it just makes a lot of sense that when people are new to a place they won't just sit by themselves in their apartments or their rooms just stewing, right. They'll look for community. Think about when you go to college. Right, everyone's in the dorm for the first day. No one knows anybody. So you just kind of branch out and eventually you start putting little groups together. You think about any city around the country. There's always going to be some old building, some old lodge that some immigrant group built to get together all the folks from that country. So they had people to speak to in their own language, they could have the religious services that they had in the old country, maybe some of the food they had in the old country. Right, we have Italian-American halls and Croatian halls all around Los Angeles. You know there's a Turnverein in Sacramento that still is in good use to this day, right? So I mean this is just sort of something that you see kind of happening over and over again in American history, and I mean also, you know, throughout the world, as Applebaum notes quite astutely in this chapter. Yeah, so it is sort of intuitive, right, that people showing up brand new at a place would have this higher desire to go out and seek companionship, to find things that they can join, just to get that sense of community, right.

Shane Phillips 01:38:21
And it's something where, if you don't have that, people who have lived in a community for decades often are not joining new organizations or groups or associations, And so those are just in a constant state of decline because there's no new people coming in to fill in the people who stop going, who pass away, who age out, whatever it happens to be OK. Well, we had so many other things in these notes that we are unfortunately not going to get to Stan. Thank you so much for being game for this. I hope you're game to do a couple more. I feel like we're going to have to do this earlier in the day next time.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:39:08
Absolutely, man. This is great. Thanks for inviting me.

Shane Phillips 01:39:12
All right, that was my conversation with Stan Oklobdzija. Now we're going to hop over to Stan and I's interview with Attorney General Rob Bonta. 

Okay, we are extremely excited and honored to have as our guest California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who was gracious enough to give us an hour of his time out of a very, very busy schedule. He has served in the AG role since 2021, after a more than eight year stint in the state assembly and a few years on the Alameda City Council before that. So he has worked on the issues facing our state from a lot of different perspectives. But the reason we are so excited to have him with us today is because throughout his time as Attorney General, and particularly over the past year, he has been working right at the intersection of housing and immigration, and that is what Stuck is all about. Stan's substack is called Everyone is Welcome, and the AG has been playing a central role in making sure California lives up to that slogan, not just legally through immigration policy and law, but also economically, through his vigorous and outspoken enforcement of state housing law. That work is especially important now, when immigrants are being targeted by the Trump administration and high housing costs are pushing California residents and disproportionately lower income and immigrant residents out to other states that may be less welcoming of undocumented immigrants in particular, or immigrants of all kinds, regardless of their legal status. Bonta was also born in Quezon City in the Philippines before immigrating to California as an infant, and he is the first person of Filipino descent to serve as California AG and, I think, also to serve in the state assembly, and that background is where we're going to start. But first, Attorney General Bonta, thank you so much for joining us and welcome to the Housing Voice podcast.

Rob Bonta 01:41:14
Thank you so much for having me. I'm honored to be with you.

Shane Phillips 01:41:17
So chapter one of Stuck is titled A Nation of Migrants, and so I'd love, if we could, to start with you sharing some of your family's migration and immigration story. In the book, Applebaum spends a lot of time on how physical mobility is often critical to upward mobility, with migration offering people the chance to reinvent themselves and find better opportunities. So, first off, does that resonate for your own personal and family history, and, following up on that, what do you think about how the mobility and opportunities available to earlier generations — maybe particularly in California for your family — may have changed over time?

Rob Bonta 01:41:59
That does ring true for me in many ways. I'll also sort of caveat that I don't think physical mobility is synonymous with upward mobility, but they often correlate, and in my parents' lives and their family's lives as well as mine. My dad's family originally came from Kentucky out west. He ended up being born in the Ventura County area, grew up in a smaller town in Moorpark and then went north to go to college. After he transferred out of community college to go to Cal and then seminary school, and meanwhile my mom was growing up in small towns and villages in the Philippines, born and raised in the Philippines, fled to the countryside when the Japanese occupied the Philippines during World War II to escape detection and eventually growing up to be a young adult and taking a ship for three weeks to come to California to study in grad. And that's where she met my dad at seminary school in Berkeley in 1965. And so, yes, physical mobility was part of their journeys. They met each other, they fell in love. They then moved back to the Philippines and that's what the opportunity that they sought, that's where it was. They wanted to serve, they wanted to be missionaries and they wanted to start a family, and so they had my sister first and then I was born. And at that time a dictator was rising to power, martial law was around the corner, free and fair elections, democracy as it was known was about to end. And my parents knew that and they wanted freedom for me and democracy for me and human rights for me and due process and the rule of law. So, again, physical mobility. They brought us to California because they knew we could have those things. They sought an opportunity for us, a better life for us. That upward mobility and that fleeing from something that was unacceptable was very much correlated to physical mobility. And we first lived with my dad's family and then we moved to the headquarters of the United Farmworkers of America where my parents both worked for the UFW. We lived in a trailer, later rented a couple of different apartments on our way to Sacramento where both my parents ended up being state workers, and then that was the first home that I lived in as a home that we owned. And they were able to move from one neighborhood to another and improve our homes and the school district that we were in. So a lot of that rings true to me in my own life as well. As a young dad and with my wife Mia and our first child, Raina, we moved to the city of Alameda. We started as renters. We scraped together some of our pennies to get a down payment on our starter home. Starter home became a longtime home. We were there for almost 20 years. We sold it and rented while we tried to figure out where we were going to live next, and then we were able to get a home that we felt was better than the first home we had. It also had a couple of ADUs on it for my mom and my wife's mom, who had fixed incomes and were seniors who we love and want to make sure are safe and have secure roofs over their heads. They live on the same lot with us and we're grateful to have that opportunity. So, yes, physical mobility and upward mobility are often correlated, but I'll also just say they're not the same.

Shane Phillips 01:44:56
You said, this rings true, but it's not everything. What do you think is missing from that?

Rob Bonta 01:45:01
I think people find opportunity, they find hope, they find upward mobility in a lot of places, spaces and ways, and I think it's a little an overstated thesis — in my humble opinion, a little too pat — to say that they're the same, especially in today's modernized world. You know, like I feel, along with my family, that we've enjoyed, you know, the California dream, the American dream of upward mobility, and we've lived in the same one mile area in the last 25 years by choice. We wanted to. We love where we live, we love the community, we love the schools, we love the parks, we love the small town, we love our neighbors, we love the values that are shared by the community. We don't want to go anywhere else and we raised three children. One's a young adult, two are over 18. And it wasn't part of — we didn't have to move, we didn't have to flee something and move to something else. That was different. And I think people today, especially with going into the office not being what it once was, working from home being what it is now, people are finding upward mobility in a way that's not place-based. They're staying in the same place, but enjoying upward mobility, and maybe they love where they are and don't want to go somewhere else, and maybe they want to expand the home that they are in or move down the street, which essentially we did, but stay in the same place. So I think it does a lot of work to say physical mobility can get you a lot of upward mobility, but I don't think it does all the work. In my humble opinion, it doesn't account for different types of upward mobility that manifest in many people's lives that are not associated with physical mobility in the way that it's described in the book.

Shane Phillips 01:46:45
And I suspect that Applebaum would agree with that. I certainly agree with that. Think it's often, you know, an essential ingredient for many people. But even for those people it's probably not the only thing. Before we get into some more of the specific themes and ideas from the book, could you tell us a bit about what you've been up to in your time as California Attorney General Rob Bonta? I think maybe we can start off with housing, since you've been really engaged in housing policy throughout your time in office, and you've used the powers of the office in ways I think were generally available to previous AGs but that they rarely exercised, if at all. And you know, Attorney General probably would not be near the top of most people's list when they think about whose job it is to fix our housing market. So I'm curious to hear how you came to be such a champion for the issue and in this role in particular.

Rob Bonta 01:47:36
Absolutely. And if I might just make one final comment related to the prior question, if that works, I think that upward mobility and hope and opportunity can be realized a lot of different ways. And I think that having the option of the choice to be physically mobile is part of that. But you can also find it without being physically mobile, and I think it's important that people don't have their choices taken away from them, so that they have the choice to move somewhere else, to migrate, to immigrate if that's what they wish, if that's what's best for them, if that's what hope and opportunity and upward mobility looks like for them, or if it looks like staying where you are, having that option too. But they should be empowered, should have the choice, they should have the option. So that's kind of how I see the connection between upward mobility and physical mobility: having that choice to be physically mobile if that's where you think your upward mobility will be.

Shane Phillips 01:48:32
I think that's a great distinction.

Rob Bonta 01:48:34
And then, you know, I have always believed that in any role in public office one should be as responsive to the people's needs as we can be, and we should. I should make Californians' fights my fights. I should be their champion, be by their side on the issues that are challenging them the most, whatever they might be. And you can't look out into the world here in California and think that housing is not a challenge. It's one of the biggest challenges. For many people it's the biggest challenge, and I didn't want the past to limit me as I move forward into the future. I didn't want to be restricted just because no other AG had really emphasized housing in their portfolio the way I might. I didn't want that to be a limitation on what we did. I thought we needed to be robust, we needed to be muscular, we needed to be aggressive in what we did on housing, and many often refer to the California Attorney General Rob Bonta as the top cop, and it is that in many ways, including the top housing cop. It can be that, should be that. What we are is, we are one of the major enforcers of laws in California. Criminal laws is kind of what people think about when the term top cop is used. But there's housing laws too, including many recent different state housing laws that, by the way, a lot of local jurisdictions I think were looking at, wondering if they're going to be enforced or not. And I wanted to make it clear: they're going to be enforced. And even if you call yourself a mountain lion sanctuary, we're going to test that, Woodside. Or if you think these are historic landmarks, landmark areas, Pasadena, we're going to test that. We're not just going to let that slide and be a way to evade the housing laws of the state of California. They were passed for a reason. There was a vision of someone in some communities that would benefit from these laws, that would have an opportunity that they were prevented from having, that they were deprived of having in the past. That they would have opportunity to pursue the dream of homeownership or to have security in a place that they rent, but they would have access to secure, safe housing. That was the goal of these laws and they're not there to just be skirted or ignored. And so we've told, we've taken a very clear position, that we are in a housing crisis. When you're in a housing crisis, you need to use all tools in the toolbox and you need all hands on deck. Everybody needs to do something. Nobody needs to do everything, but everyone needs to do something. You need to contribute to the solution, and if one jurisdiction, one city, builds more housing and then another one builds more housing proportionate to the size of their city and the locations that they identify, consistent with RHNA numbers and their allotment, then together we can provide sufficient supply to address our crisis. But if people evade their responsibility, we can't. And so we've been clear that we want all of our local jurisdictions to act in good faith, do their part and follow the law. It's pretty simple, and the laws, as you know, are much more aggressive because the state, in short, is sick of the NIMBYism and what that has meant. When each city has the coveted local control when it applies to housing, it has meant, in many places, not building housing, say no to housing unreasonably, say no to housing, not doing their fair share, not doing their part, and that cannot stand. That cannot keep going on. So the state has created laws: by-right housing, expedited housing, streamlined housing: if you meet certain requirements, you can build the housing, period, and you can't have a discretionary denial by the city. And so we just wanted to enforce those laws. Legislature, a body of representatives that represent the entire state, including those cities that have been NIMBY in the past. They're represented in these decisions. They had an opportunity to make their comments or participate in the legislative process as the laws were being considered for passage. Now they're passed. Now there's no more debate about them. They need to be followed. And so that's where we felt we could play a very important role that hadn't been played in the past: to be fair but firm, to be aggressive, to prioritize housing, to be the champion for housing that Californians need and deserve, so that we can build more housing here in California. And we've had some success where we are shortening the time from application submittal to entitlement when the government approves the application. That's dropped from an average of 145 days back in 2018 to 64 days in 2023. We all know that ADU — accessory dwelling units — that production has surged from less than 2,000 per year in 2016 to 25,000 in 2022. So there's progress, but it's not enough. Annual production is still stuck between about 100,000 and 130,000 units per year. We need to be more than double that — around 300,000 units per year. And so one of the things that I think is important is to show your priorities, plant a flag in the ground and declare your intent, and we did that when we created the housing justice team in 2021. We brought some of our best expertise from across the different divisions and departments and sections of our California Department of Justice and we created a team to focus on housing. And you've seen some of the stuff that we've been doing. We have some very visible lawsuits against the city of Huntington Beach in state court for its failure to adopt a compliant housing element. They sued in federal court. We essentially wiped the floor with them, have taken very indefensible positions time and time again. Like, they are essentially the definition of what it means to be NIMBY, you know, unreasonably so, unlawfully so. They are repeat offenders. They are lawbreakers when it comes to housing law. We reached a settlement in 2024 with the city of Elk Grove because they, in our view, unlawfully denied a 66-unit supportive housing project for lower-income households that are at risk of homelessness, and we had a really strong settlement that required them to make commitments, I think beyond what a court would have ordered, but in a very pro-housing position and posture. We reached a settlement in 2025 with the city of Norwalk when it unlawfully banned new emergency shelters, supportive housing, single room occupancy housing, transitional housing. So we made it clear that we are a watchdog on the block. We'll work with you if you reach out to us and you want to comply with your housing element and you want to meet your RHNA numbers and you want to build more housing but you're not sure how or you don't understand the laws, we will confer with you and be by your side, collaborate and partner to help you get there. And we've done that multiple times. We've done that with San Bernardino and Coronado and Fullerton and Malibu and La Habra Heights and Artesia. But if you're going to resist and defy the law, it's not our wish but we will take you to court and make sure that you follow the law. And again, we'll be fair, we'll enforce the law and not go beyond it. But we'll also be firm. And I think cities knowing that has made a difference. We've seen city council minutes or video recordings where the city council says: we don't think we can go in this direction because the AG will find out and send us a notice of violation or maybe even sue us, and we shouldn't do that. We should follow the law as it's been written. And so there's a little bit of a ripple effect. We're not just impacting the cities where we're engaged collaboratively or engaged in litigation, we're also, I think, sending a message throughout the state that these are laws that are here to be followed. They're not options, they're not recommendations, they're not suggestions. They're requirements, and every city is required to follow them.

Shane Phillips 01:55:58
And it's not just the cities that you're suing or threatening with lawsuits, but there's a — I think you're right. There is very likely a deterrent effect happening as well. I know we want to move on to immigration. Migration, Stan, did you want to follow up on that?

Stan Oklobdzija 01:56:12
So I know this is a housing podcast, but I feel like we'd be a little bit remiss if we're not talking about immigration, like the other issue that's occupying all your time. So I mean, California is such an immigrant heavy state. So many communities have like a second capital city here, right? The second largest city for Salvadorans in America is Los Angeles. West LA is a focal point for the Iranian diaspora. As a Vietnamese American, you know, I have spent a lot of time in Westminster and Garden Grove, which are kind of like a Vietnam for us in exile. So in recent years California hasn't even been listed as an option for refugee resettlement, just because it's so expensive. So new generations of people that could be coming here and contributing to the fabric of our state are just going elsewhere. And many of the places that these people are going are to red states, where they don't have a Rob Bonta or a Keith Ellison there. There you have attorney generals who are Trumpists. So I wonder what you think about this.

Rob Bonta 01:57:13
That's a problem. I don't want to minimize it, but I think it doesn't fully define California as a place where immigrants might find a home. I think a big part of that decision is based on whether and how you're welcomed, if there's support for you, if that state values you, includes you, sees you as a part of the fabric of our state, a part of our future. And we do, maybe more than any other state in the nation. Immigrants are such a critical part of who we have been, who we've become and who we will be. And I'm an immigrant, my mom's an immigrant. Immigrants have made us great, they've made us strong. Immigrants are welcomed here. There's a reason there's second capitals of different communities here in California: because of the values and because of the inclusion and because of the dignity, respect, appreciation that we show here and that we have here. And that's part of our DNA. And we also have subsidized support. That's not the free private market for folks who are eligible under the different eligibility requirements, including income. So there is the possibility of providing services, programs and housing for folks who might not be able to afford that on the private market, but for families not eligible for those services or for families who become, because of greater income and being able to be successful and upwardly mobile, no longer qualify for those services. The high cost of living in California is a problem, and it's a universal problem. It's a problem for immigrants, who are struggling to afford California's prices, including housing. But it's not just housing, it's healthcare, it's gas, it's groceries, it's everything. And it's a problem for non-immigrants. It's a problem for all Californians. And so, you know, the people of America, the people of California, are screaming from the rooftops that affordability is a top issue. Polling and surveys show that. Anecdotal evidence and personal experience shows that. And so we need to lower costs. We're not the only place in the country that's wrestling with this, but, you know, there's often in California this kind of discussion about, you know, millionaires and billionaires leaving. And, as I dug into that issue, there are certainly some that make decisions to leave. But when you're a millionaire or a billionaire, you have the luxury of living anywhere you want. You can live in California if you want. You can afford it if this is the place that you want to live, and a lot do. The data really shows that it's more of a middle-class migration, that it's folks who leave because they can't afford it. And that's a problem. We want people to live here who want to live here. We know that not everyone wants to. You know, as a very biased Californian who loves this state, I don't see why anyone wouldn't want to live here, but I do recognize the reality that some may not. But if you want to live here, you should be able to live here. And we should have affordability at many different levels. And we're losing that. And that's a problem.

Shane Phillips 02:00:13
Your point about who is actually being pushed out of the state, I think, is really important. The stats I've seen are a little out of date now, but I remember looking up through maybe 2017 or 2018. And actually the only income brackets we were not losing population in were above $100,000 a year, and it was all the lower and middle income households who, as you say, because of high housing costs, primarily — not exclusively, but mostly — were being pushed out. And I travel around and speak in different places, and California has a reputation, of course, and one of those reputations is about having high taxes. And a lot of places seem to think that the reason people are not able to stay here or leave is taxes. But you compare how much more people pay in taxes here relative to how much more they pay in housing, and it's just no contest: housing is much more of a burden for people. I wanted to kind of follow up on that a little bit. Another question I had was about, you know, this juxtaposition of having very inclusive language and an actual policy on the social side next to pretty exclusive housing policy, and obviously we're doing a lot to fix that. But the thing I'm actually most interested in in some ways is, I do think that California is very pro-immigrant and we live that and we say that and like we believe it. But interestingly, when we talk about people moving from other states, we can seem a little more anti. Whether you're coming from New York or Texas, I feel like we're sometimes pro-immigrant and anti-migrant, and so there's an ideological inconsistency there at some level. But I just wonder if that rings true to you at all, if you think it's possible to be pro-immigrant without being pro-migrant, without welcoming people from just other states and cities as well as other countries, and how we might bring those two things in closer alignment.

Rob Bonta 02:02:12
I think there's definitely tension there and potential, if not actual, inconsistency. I think that inclusion and values of welcoming and belonging should cut across all sorts of different folks, all sorts of human beings, whether they're crossing national boundaries or state boundaries. And I think California does pride itself in welcoming folks to this state and being a home for folks from around the world who are looking for opportunity and a better life. Millions of people have come to America, and specifically to California, with that dream. My family did, and that is a beautiful thing. And also people, you know, want to come to California from across, you know, from inside our country. You know, intranational travel that is interstate, but within our country, and they have a dream of what California is. You know, the promise that it could provide for them. We're the only state with our own dream, the California dream, as our governor likes to say, and that's a dream that's built on sort of go west, young man, seek your fortunes, bet on yourself. If you are a doer and a dreamer, an innovator, a creator, a believer, you can create something, and that's happened from Hollywood to Silicon Valley and our ag industries. We've led the nation and the world on so many things. And I think we often are hurt by a subscription to a zero-sum fallacy. And there's been writing about this idea that in order for me to succeed, you have to fail. And I try to tell people to reject that framing. It's a framing. And this sort of idea of abundance of opportunity for all, of growing a bigger pie, of the belief that you can do well and I don't need to push you down so I can rise up. But I think there is built into some of the American psyche this inherent competitiveness, this idea that you do have to push someone down for you to rise up, and I like to encourage people to reject that. And whether it's immigrants coming here or migrants coming from within the United States, when they come to California they can help make California even stronger and greater than it is. They can contribute, they can provide, you know, richness in all sorts of different ways, culturally, or provide a diversity of beautiful ideas and perspectives that add to our strength. And so there's definitely a tension in that. You know, the pro-immigrant but anti-migrant perspective. I honestly haven't seen it too much in my own sort of personal anecdotal world. I do recognize that there is some tension in it.

Stan Oklobdzija 02:05:00
I just wanted to follow up on that zero sum thing. You know, in my own research I see a lot of attitudes towards newcomers being viewed as a detriment or a burden. Right, there are people that come and take things that are rightfully ours. Right, they take our parking, they crowd our schools. And you know, while it's good that people feel some ownership in their communities, at a certain point, like you said, it just becomes toxic to view everything as a zero sum transaction. So I wonder if you think like: is there something that just has changed in our culture, or is there a way to get us back to this sort of Pat Brown vision of California that you know we pride ourselves in, how many people we can attract to our state?

Rob Bonta 02:05:39
I think we're shifting to that Pat Brown view. And I think there's always a potential, with fear or anger or scapegoating, to blame others and create a reason to reject newcomers or others coming to our state or our cities. I don't think that will go away, but I think it requires — it's almost like a culture shift, and we're in the middle of a culture shift from, you know, NIMBY to YIMBY, from not in my backyard to yes in my backyard, to rejecting them whoever they are and seeing them as threats and risks. And you know, let's be honest about it, this is often tainted with racism and classism — to being inclusive and saying: you're welcome here, we want you to be part of our community. We do pride ourselves in attracting more people, you know, more talent, more perspectives, more diversity. That makes us good, that makes us strong. And to get there, you need to take intentional steps, like not making certain types of housing illegal, like single family housing, making all other types of zoned areas, making all types of other housing illegal. And so to manifest that vision, it takes steps and action, and the actions that we are taking now as a state, which apply to all of our cities, that provide for more housing and more opportunities for more people to cross boundaries: cross state boundaries to come to California or cross city boundaries to come into cities for the first time. That is consistent with this more welcoming view that rejects the zero sum fallacy.

Shane Phillips 02:07:07
You mentioned abundance, and for me, Stuck sort of sits in this triumvirate of recent books about how more progressive blue states and cities are sometimes shooting themselves in the foot on governance. The other two books being Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and then Why Nothing Works by Mark Dunkelman. You talked about your lawsuits against Huntington Beach, and not all these cases are so cut and dried. And the one that comes up in all these books is the community that really does mean well but keeps inadvertently putting up roadblocks to abundance and to affordability and choice. And this comes up in Applebaum's chronicling of the great urbanist Jane Jacobs and how Greenwich Village transformed into this hyper exclusive neighborhood during her time living there and advocating there. These are communities that, you know, say they want more homes, but only if they're affordable to low-income households and pay prevailing wages and include units for families but also for seniors and young professionals and maybe space for a local co-op grocery store, and on and on and on, until the most profitable thing to do with a parcel of land may just be keeping whatever is there now. And I think we also sometimes have an ideal resident in mind for these homes. On the kind of left side of the political spectrum, that might be someone who really needs help rather than someone who just wants to maybe just move into a nicer home or a nicer neighborhood. And that kind of brings us back to the migrants versus immigrants conversation. But to turn this into a question: what do you see as the path forward on this, and how do you think about the different responsibilities of the courts versus lawmakers to chart that path, given that you've been in both camps and played both roles?

Rob Bonta 02:09:01
It's interesting, I think, when it comes to abundance, I think one of my biggest takeaways from that book by Ezra Klein was just a simple proposition: that we need to make it easy to build the things and create the things that we want. And when it comes to housing, we have not done that. We still can, we have time and we can change, as long as we are cognizant of the challenges that we've created in the past, making it hard to build more housing. We can make it easy to build more housing. But I think people still want and should have the character of the neighborhood. You'd have some consistency there, have smart, thoughtful zoning, there's got to be appropriate health and safety and environmental protections, all that. And we can do all that and build and build fast and build in high volume. But we haven't. And you know, whether it be housing, whether it be energy, whatever the things are that we want. And he uses the very, you know, difficult example from California of high speed rail and how we- you know we wanted that, voters voted for that, but it just hasn't come to pass, and for a lot of different reasons. But I think that the policy on the ground and in execution has to match the value statement. If you say you want to build more housing but you're layering on requirement after requirement and restriction after restriction and creating this Christmas tree of all these different things where in the end it becomes too expensive and doesn't pencil out, it doesn't lead to any more building, then you're not accomplishing the goal. We've seen debates around how many affordable units you should have in a market rate development. And I think some progressives think they're being more progressive when they say: you know, I'm not satisfied with 25, I want 50, or I want 80, you know, and out progressing themselves, some will say I want 100. And then you get zero because it doesn't get built. And the right number is the most amount of affordable units that allows the project to be built. And that could change. You know it's based on a lot of different factors, you know, on interest rates, on the price of materials and steel building costs, on labor costs. And so I think some folks aren't leaders who do mean well, who do want to be inclusive, who do want to be YIMBY, and think that by adding even more requirements that do good things, if they were able to, if they could manifest, they think they're doing the right thing, but in the end they're just leading to the status quo and nothing happening. And I think it takes a little bit more of a complex view of how homes are built, what developers look at when they build them, what factors lead to a successful project, which factors could end the possibility of a project. And I think that takes some time and getting some additional depth into housing policy. But it is an irony. And I've seen it. And I've seen people scream from the rooftops that they're the biggest YIMBY ever and they're the most progressive ever and their policies are leading to nothing being built. So the proof is in the pudding. And in order to be YIMBY, you actually need to build and create policies that provide for that. So it's a tough balancing act, but I think you know you spotlighting that issue and that irony and that tension is important because I think folks do act in good faith, but they don't quite understand how some of their positions may undermine their stated goals.

Stan Oklobdzija 02:12:15
So I wonder, AG Bonta, in your opinion, where should we be drawing the line at community and local control, right? I mean, a city like Huntington Beach, which we've been talking about on this podcast, really can only exist in the form that it does because it's so close to these high-paying job centers in a larger Orange County and in LA County. But because cities are so small and fragmented in California, every jurisdiction has this incentive to declare themselves somehow special, mountain lion sanctuary or whatever it is, and reap the benefits of these big urban agglomeration economies but suffer none of the downsides or responsibilities. So is housing something that cities should maybe have a little bit less of a say in, like how your office shut down Huntington Beach's proposal to institute voter ID laws? Is this an area where the interests of the entire state should maybe start to take precedence?

Rob Bonta 02:13:10
I think it's a balance. And I think the balance is tipping more towards that, towards the state sort of holding, you know, the responsibility of the big picture of where we are as a state. You know, each city is thinking about their city. They're not thinking about how many homes are being built throughout the state. They're thinking about their city and their constituents. And look, I was on a city council. The council chambers can be raucous and people can be angry and people can come in who are hot and intense. And they also might be the vocal minority and not the silent majority. And there also might be big picture goals that we need to contribute to, not solve on our own, not deliver exclusively through our work as a city, but to just do our part. And so that's what these RHNA numbers are, these allocations for the amount of housing to be built in each city are. That's what housing elements are, a plan to build that housing that RHNA requires you to build. And that's what enforcement is that we see from my office and from HCD at the state level to ensure accountability to fulfill those duties. And it's a shared responsibility approach. And I think that's beautiful actually, that every city is contributing to a statewide goal and all doing their part, all picking up a laboring oar, all being a hand on the deck, contributing to the success of the ship, and it seems completely fair to me, completely appropriate. Cities are given the opportunity to plan and build on their own, but there is accountability if they don't. And so I think it's a good balance now, given the housing crisis that we're in, given some of the foot dragging of certain cities, either through lack of effort or potentially lack of good faith or, in Huntington Beach's case, outright defiance. That's unlawful time and time again, almost wanting the political fight with, you know, quote, unquote, Sacramento on this issue. And we're not going to be able to fix a statewide problem unless everyone, every city, contributes, and left to their own devices. We've done that, been there. You know, we had the local control without the stronger accountability, and that's why we're in this crisis. We need a centralized plan that everyone can contribute to in every city and help us build our way out of this crisis. So I think the balance is tipping more towards state authority and guidance. I think there always will be a need, and should be, a level of local control. But there are some issues that are of statewide importance and where you need uniformity and fairness and consistency. And voting is one of them. And the law, as we demonstrated and reaffirmed through our successful lawsuit against Huntington Beach for implementing voter ID elections, is one of them, where the state makes those decisions and they are consistent for everyone. We can't have some states where you have, or cities, excuse me, where you have, poll taxes and tests and other burdens that prevent people from accessing their fundamental right to vote and that suppress the vote and disenfranchise. We need to have the same set of rules for all California voters.

Shane Phillips 02:16:20
I really like the point that you were making just now and right at the beginning of this conversation that when everyone contributes, no one actually has to contribute that much. And I think that's really one of the greatest powers of state reform, state intervention on housing — is that we really just need every city to grow 1% to 1.5%. That alone would double or triple our housing production. It's not asking a lot. It's when a few cities are trying to solve the crisis, build enough housing, but all the rest are refusing, and a few cities just cannot do it on their own. I know we're running out of time here, so I want to close with more of a forward looking question, which is: just what's next? What's undone? What are the priorities going forward? You can feel free to share the next city you're going to sue if you like, but I suspect you might have to keep that close to the vest for now.

Rob Bonta 02:17:12
We're going to do more of the same of what we've done. That'll be part of the plan going forward. And largely that's looked like an enforcement of the state housing laws, turning into reality the legislation that's been passed by our representative legislature for the whole state of California. And that's looked like more by-right housing, expedited housing, streamlined housing. It's looked like housing element law accountability, making sure that cities plan for their fair share of housing and that they make sure they designate sites where that amount of housing can be built. It looks like stronger penalties and accountability when the laws are broken. If some of the penalties are just a cost of doing business, then some cities will just pay the low penalty, absorb it and not build housing. We want the housing to be built. We'll look at success stories like ADU construction and see how to replicate that in other places and in other spaces across the state. We're going to work on more collaborative outreach to more cities that want to accomplish their goals but aren't sure how, and work with them to get there. You know, Coronado was a great example. People might put them in the same category historically as Huntington Beach, but we worked with them to plan how to have a compliant housing element and we got them there. And I think that, you know, carrots, if you will. Collaboration, partnership, in addition to enforcement and accountability when necessary, can all be part of the overall strategy. I think some of our creative legislators that I'm close to, including Senator Scott Wiener in San Francisco, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks out of Berkeley, they're always looking at new ways to advance more housing. We're looking to learn from other jurisdictions that have been more successful than California in building more housing, including looking at fabricated housing, as has been successfully implemented in Scandinavia. It can be lower cost. It can get you a lot of units fast. Looking at other barriers that could be removed while still having the purpose of those policies that have amounted to be barriers accomplished. Some of the impact fees could be prohibitively high, for example, for a developer when building a unit, is just one example. I know there's now some thinking on construction defect law and how that may have contributed to lower production of housing and what an appropriate fix might be there. So it's all good stuff. You know, we're sort of looking under the hood as to how we got here, why we're here, why certain laws are in place, what they accomplish and what their unintended consequences might be, how we can remove the unintended consequences but keep the essential strong point of the law to the extent it protected the environment or health and safety, or provided accountability for a builder that didn't fulfill its responsibility and fulfill its standards, whatever it might be. But we got to barrel down the road full speed using all the tools in the toolbox. I don't think there's a panacea. There's not like a silver bullet where if we did it then we'd get the housing that we need. I think it's an aggregation of multiple important, thoughtful policy steps, backed up by the enforcement of my office and HCD, that will get us there. So we definitely have other cities on our radar. Think cities who are out of compliance with their housing elements. Think cities that have discretionarily and unlawfully denied projects that should be approved under a California law. That's not acceptable to us. We want the law to be followed. It's there for a reason. So we will engage with those cities, work with them cooperatively if we can and go to court if we can't. If they're not willing — we're always willing. We always have an open hand of cooperation and collaboration, but it needs to be met with a hand from the cities as well. So a lot on our plate. To all your listeners, please know this continues to be a top priority. We're proud of our Housing Justice Unit. We're proud to have been perhaps the most aggressively pro-housing California Attorney General Rob Bonta in the history of our state. We want to be that. I think this moment requires that. It calls for it. We want to meet the moment and be the California Attorney General and California Department of Justice that people across the state who are wrestling with affordability and rising housing costs can see as a champion who's by their side to address this problem. So we'll continue to do everything in our power to be that champion for the people of California who deserve it.

Shane Phillips 02:21:23
Well, I think from that response it might be fair to say most aggressive, ambitious state attorney general in any state in the United States. So a lot to look forward to, and thank you again so much, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, for taking the time to talk with us.

Rob Bonta 02:21:40
My great pleasure. Thanks again for having me.

Shane Phillips 02:21:47
You can find our show notes and a transcript of the episode on our website, lewis.ucla.edu. Talk with us and other listeners at uclahousingvoice.substack.com. The UCLA Lewis Center is on the socials. I'm on Bluesky and LinkedIn at shanedphillips and Stan is on Bluesky at stano. Thanks for listening.

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Michael Lens

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Michael Manville

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Paavo Monkkonen

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Shane Phillips

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