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

This is the second episode of our book club series on Yoni Applebaum's 2025 book, 'Stuck: How the Privileged and the Property Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.' If you haven't already listened to part one, you can find that a few episodes back in our catalog and it is a much better starting point. But hey, if you like to start your books midway through, you do you.

Because last episode I already introduced this series and what Stuck is all about, I'm not going to repeat all of it here. Part 1 of the book covers chapters 1 through 4, and this episode covers chapters 5 through 8. Unlike last time, parts 2 and 3 of this series will be combining the walkthrough and the guest interview rather than doing them separately, with our guests being a little more integrated into the episode as a whole. 

Our guest this time is former mayor of Redwood City, California, and managing partner of the Abundance Network, Giselle Hale, whose background and experience made for a really great conversation, I'm sure you will agree. And part three will be with Yoni Applebaum himself. Using the same format, we'll be walking through the last two chapters of Stuck in that episode, but we will of course be talking about and asking questions about every part of the book. If you have any questions for us or for him, send them my way via email, social media or Substack. Just make sure to get them to me by May 25th at the latest. 

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. You can reach me by email at shanephillips@ucla.edu, and our Substack is at uclahousingvoice.substack.com. With that, let's get to chapters 5 through 8 of Stuck, and our guest, Giselle Hale. 

Giselle Hale is the former mayor of Redwood City and current managing partner for the Abundance Network. Giselle, thanks for joining us for the book club and welcome to the Housing Voice podcast.

Giselle Hale 00:02:26
I'm so excited to be here. Thanks, Shane, for having me, and good to see you, Stan.

Shane Phillips 00:02:31
And that's right, my co-host for this whole book club series, Stan Oklobdzija, is here. Hello again, Stan.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:02:37
Hey Shane, what's up? Great to be back.

Shane Phillips 00:02:39
So in the previous episode we covered chapters 1 through 4, which took us from the arrival of the pilgrims up to roughly the mid to late 1800s. Appelbaum tells a story of increasing mobility up to that point, with the right to move developing first and the right to belong coming quite a bit later. This time we're covering chapters 5 through 8, taking us up to the latter half or three-quarters of the 20th century or so. So in these chapters we really see a retrenchment away from those inclusive values that we were hearing about and adopting up to 1850 or so, with people really coming up with a whole host of ways to restore, take back their power to decide who belongs in their community and who doesn't. Giselle, there were a couple reasons I wanted to invite you as our guest for this section of the book. One is your experience in local government, particularly as someone who served in elected office in a city that CityNerd Ray Delahanty ranked as the second most NIMBY in the country just a couple of years ago. We will come back to that in just a moment, since I know you have some very well-founded disagreements with that designation, but I think the relevance of your experience in local government to the many tools of exclusion described in these chapters will be obvious. The other reason is your association with the abundance movement, which seemed like a good fit, having mentioned in part one that stuck feels like it's part of a sort of triumvirate of books alongside abundance and why nothing works. I hadn't realized it at the time I invited you, but I just recently listened to the ezra klein show episode where he talked with his co-author, derek thompson, and the why nothing works author, mark dunkelman, and dunkelman actually suggested stuck as one of his book recommendations. So it sounds like he probably agrees with that assessment. So, Giselle, first thing first here. Before we get into these chapters, tell us a little bit about yourself and the Abundance Network and what you're all trying to accomplish, And you can either start with defending Redwood City or you can, you can end there.

Giselle Hale 00:04:43
Sure, well, again, thanks for having me, enjoyed the first episode. I love that we're doing a deep dive on this book. I think this book, when you think about that trio of books that came out around the same time, has been overlooked a little bit. It needs more exploration. When I talk with other leaders, they love this book. I also think we should be talking a little bit about Color of Law in here somewhere too, because that came out several years earlier and covers some of the same examples. So a little bit about me. I have sort of a unique trifecta of experiences across private sector, political campaigns and local government. So I've spent about 20 years in the private sector, primarily working in the tech industry, which is what brought me to the Bay Area. But then I've also done tours of duty on campaigns, most notably I worked on Obama '08. And I've also served in a variety of local government roles, ending as mayor of Redwood City, and so I served the city for nine years while working, which is pretty common in California. A lot of California electeds, you do double duty, so you work.

Shane Phillips 00:05:43
Smaller cities in particular. Yeah—

Giselle Hale 00:05:44
Yes, yes, and during my time in office we really led a massive revitalization of our community of Redwood City, primarily by adding thousands of units of housing into our downtown. So we actually went from having the name Deadwood City — that's what people would call us — to having the most enviable downtown in the peninsula. Now, that doesn't mean it didn't come without its challenges. I have good NIMBY stories, like the rest of us. But where I would take issue with Ray's assessment is he looked at census data and then he looked at home values, which is skewed. Census data is lagging, and then home values, in Redwood City at least, were highly impacted by Facebook coming up just across the way from us. So it's kind of dirty data. What I would encourage him to do is go back and look at permitting, look at the actual permits issued. Also, look at things like our housing elements. Redwood City submitted our housing element. We were one of the first to get certified in the state, and we didn't submit a hundred percent. We submitted 150% of our state's number, and we had one person, RHNA.

Shane Phillips 00:06:51
This is the planning goal. You have some amount of housing you're supposed to plan for. And you made plans for at least one and a half times that.

Giselle Hale 00:06:58
One and a half times that, with only one person coming to public comment to dissent. Meanwhile down the street in Atherton it was like pitchforks and Andreessen sending letters and Steph Curry sending letters and it was making national headlines. So I like the spirit of that. He's trying to oust these cities, but Rob Bonta mentioned two cities he sued in the last episode that weren't on his list, so I'd encourage him to go back and check his math. On a personal— Wait, I need to re-read the input. The turn ends with "On a personal." which looks like it might be the beginning of a new thought that was cut off. Let me return the cleaned version: One and a half times that, with only one person coming to public comment to dissent. Meanwhile down the street in Atherton it was like pitchforks and Andreessen sending letters and Steph Curry sending letters and it was making national headlines. So I like the spirit of that. He's trying to oust these cities, but Rob Bonta mentioned two cities he sued in the last episode that weren't on his list, so I'd encourage him to go back and check his math. On a personal note, I was born in Wisconsin, very much like the book's thesis states, I had to leave home to find opportunity. And so I came to the Bay Area. I'm married to a man who is a former foster child, who never went to college, who was moved across the US, Canada and the Pacific, and he's now a C-level executive in Silicon Valley. And so I think for us we found that opportunity. But in the process of finding it we became obsessed with the question of why is the rent so high? Which is what led me to the planning commission and later council, and now Abundance — so excited to be included in the discussion about Abundance Network. So we're a C3, C4, we're based out of California, San Francisco, but in this whole space, where you do have a lot of writers and thinkers and researchers such as yourselves, we're really focused on doing the work of bringing abundance into communities, of actualizing the ideas of the movement that others are writing about. So we started with a citizen membership several years ago, which is a national network of professionals, philanthropists, community leaders who basically have invested their own funds in advancing this agenda, and these are individual donors who give small dollar amounts, sometimes larger dollar amounts. We have chapters, so they work in cities on transforming their cities. And then last year we created an elected network, which I lead, where we've brought together 160 local elected officials — mayors, council members, county supervisors — across 32 states who are in pursuit of an abundance agenda in their communities. And I actually just returned this weekend from Denver where our fellowship program, which includes 20 of our members, had our second retreat and we met with Mayor Johnston and Governor Polis and are working on actual abundance projects. So that is a little bit about me, a little bit about us.

Shane Phillips 00:09:17
Awesome. Well, it is great to have you here. I think the fit here is obvious. We're going to do things a little differently. I think I will have explained this in the intro that'll be recorded later. But we're going to combine the guest interview part of this with the walkthrough and we're just going to all be together the whole time for a couple hours to talk through this. I'm going to start each chapter just with a quick summary and then get into the things that interested us, that we just want to dig into a little further. So, as I said, we're starting on chapter five today. This one's titled Dirty Laundry. This chapter serves as a sort of origin story of American zoning, more than a decade before the practice officially got its start. So this starts off in 1885 in Modesto, California, with the powers that be passing an ordinance restricting laundries to a specific district of the city as really a means of expelling Chinese residents from white neighborhoods into Modesto's Chinatown. This was after other methods like arson and lynchings and other forms of violence had failed to do the job. Applebaum puts it, quote: the ghetto that Modesto had failed to impose with violence, it would now attempt to enforce with land use law. The through line of these chapters, starting here with this laundry ordinance, is that this bloodless, indirect approach — land use law — has proven to be far more effective than the more direct, explicitly racist or classist or whateverist methods that had been tried before. The ordinance was challenged legally and went to the state Supreme Court, and they upheld it, despite it being a huge break from past legal precedent. Everyone knew that the laundry ordinance was intended to expel Chinese residents, but they now had this pretense that they were using the police power of the state to promote public health and welfare, some problem that laundries themselves were causing. And as long as they stuck to that line, they could get away with it, even as they were winking furiously at their fellow racists about what they were really doing here. One of the things that really stands out to me, which Applebaum also points out, is how this was a totally improper use of the police power which, as he puts it, is supposed to be general rules applied uniformly, that are also reasonable means of advancing their ends. But in this case you've got Modesto claiming that the laundries are a public nuisance, and putting aside the fact that they don't even seem to have been legitimate nuisances like, say, a slaughterhouse or a tannery or a coal power plant. The city isn't moving the laundries out of residential areas, they're just moving them out of the white areas and cordoning them off into the most densely populated neighborhood in the city, which was Modesto's Chinatown. So, you know, I just feel like that point needs to be made very clearly here — that this policy does not make sense and it isn't even internally consistent, even if you take the statements made in its defense at face value, about what they were trying to accomplish here. Modesto is just a part of this chapter, and it also talks about how other cities tried out various anti-Chinese laundry-related policies of their own more than a decade before Modesto, including San Francisco. What makes Modesto notable, I think, is that they seem to be the first to do it using this proto-zoning law. Before we move on, I think that's sort of the intro to the summary, at least. Anything either of you want to add to that overview?

Stan Oklobdzija 00:12:40
I think it's really interesting that, you know, this sort of zoning was first brought up as one of the police powers of a city. That, you know, is one of the powers that local governments derive from their states and which states derive from the 10th Amendment. I don't want to do any spoiling of our talks about Berkeley or our talks about Euclid v. Ambler, but one of the things that is an enumerated police power is policing public morals, and I think that's the hat that a lot of cities like Modesto sort of hung their bigotry on back in the day.

Shane Phillips 00:13:09
Can you say more about that?

Stan Oklobdzija 00:13:10
Well, you know, so police powers are generally really broadly defined and they sort of give broad leeway for local jurisdictions to do things like protect public safety, sanitation and that sort of thing. But there really is this clause of public morals that, when these powers were enumerated, were something that was, you know, thought of as a much more legitimate government activity. Right, it's sort of fallen out of favor now, but we still sort of see this thing peeking up every once in a while. Things like regulating cannabis dispensaries or strip clubs or something like that is sort of getting back to that idea of protecting the public morality.

Shane Phillips 00:13:46
I guess I should be clear here that the reason that Chinese people were operating these laundries was, you know, this had to do with, like, people moving to California because of the gold rush and really being excluded from most other kinds of jobs in the area. And so ended up operating these laundries for people who were, you know, constantly needing their clothes cleaned. And I think there was also a — this was seen as like women's work, and there was a lot of single men here, and so they weren't going to wash their clothes. And because Chinese residents didn't have really other opportunities, they were sort of willing to do this. But of course, you know, a laundry is most useful when it's near your home. You can kind of just drop it off, pick it up. You don't have to go a long way to get your laundry done. And where I'm going with this is just the fact that this was a situation where they were providing a useful service and what the city officials were trying to do was basically just say: our racism is more powerful than your convenience. And the fact that this is something you want, even many white residents who are relying on these services, is irrelevant, or is at least not as important. I don't know exactly like the right way to phrase that or how to build on that, but it seems like a really critical point that I just think is worth emphasizing here and is in some ways reflected in zoning and other things that follow: just this idea that people kind of vote with their feet, they do things that are meeting their needs in the moment, and then someone from on high is just telling you: no, not that way, and everyone's kind of worse off in the bargain.

Giselle Hale 00:15:28
I mean, I think this theme gets stronger in chapter six, even this idea of obfuscation, right. Like I think in chapter six he directly says like oh, if this went to a referendum, no one would have voted for it. So we had to find a way on paper of making it a label in a way that's really hard to understand. I mean, if you've ever read zoning in a city, it's pretty complicated. And it turns out the book exposes that is by design, right. I think we get into in the same chapter how his grandfather, who sounds like an absolute war hero.

Shane Phillips 00:16:01
Literal war hero: yes.

Giselle Hale 00:16:03
He dies in a zoning board meeting, and I'm sitting there shaking my head going, yeah, that checks out. I mean, if you've been to these meetings, it's just like. It's like a taking of freedoms, right, and here's a man who fought for freedom and it feels like a takings because you're like, wait, I bought this land, I thought I could do this, and now you're going to tell me every single thing I can do with this land and this property and what I can and can't do, and you, really deeply, it strikes at something very American, which is this idea of choice and you can do what you want. So, and of course, fear obviously plays a role in what was happening in Modesto.

Shane Phillips 00:16:38
I'm glad you brought that up. I was definitely going to bring that up if we didn't get to it by the end of the chapter. His literal war hero grandfather — both World War grandfather who survived to 1961, goes to a zoning board of appeals to ask permission to park a trailer on his property and literally dies of a heart attack that same night. So one of the things I appreciate about this story, it just feels like Applebaum was born to write this book. In some way it's just his family history. One thing I do want to point folks to is this concept, this book. I actually don't recall the name of the book, but Heather McGee has this concept called drained pool politics. We'll include a link to it in the show notes. But just this idea that people would rather lose something they value than have a disfavored group gain something. And this term comes from Montgomery, Alabama, closing its public pool rather than comply with desegregation orders, opening it to black residents, you know, a few generations ago. So that's where this drained pool — we would rather have an empty pool that no one can use than allow black people, Jewish people, whatever it might be, Chinese people in this case — to be a part of this.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:17:49
The book is called The Sum of Us. It's a fantastic book.

Giselle Hale 00:17:52
Yes, it is a great book.

Shane Phillips 00:17:53
There you go.

Giselle Hale 00:17:53
Yes, thank you, I was trying to remember it. We should just keep a book list as we're having the series, because I think there's a lot that'll come out.

Shane Phillips 00:18:02
I include in the show notes a whole list of every book mentioned. So absolutely.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:18:07
One book club begets another book club. Just an infinite recursive book club. Now, this drain pool politics is a really super important, I think, and a really, really astute observation that Heather McGee makes about, you know, people just wanting to make themselves less materially well off just so they can have a relative status to lord over somebody, right. It's not enough that you have more. At the end of the day, it's that you have to have more than somebody else. And even if you're both losing, if you lose a little bit less than another person, then you can still sort of lord your relative wealth above them and feel better. And it's a very sort of zero sum, very sort of myopic way of doing politics. But unfortunately it's the kind of politics that drives a lot of how policy is decided in the United States. I mean, you can see it even here in progressive California. I know we like to think of ourselves as a lot more refined and more couth than the people of the South, but if you look at housing developments here in Southern California specifically, you can see when federal law mandated the integration of municipal pools, just by the fact that everyone's backyard suddenly has space for a pool. It's kind of uncanny, right? Like homes built in the 1960s suddenly have these bigger lots with pools in the back. And you know, Sacramento has a famous municipal pool that they closed rather than integrate. I think it's either Riverside or San Bernardino had a similar case with Latino residents that they closed their pool rather than integrated.

Shane Phillips 00:19:38
And you said zero sum, and I think that term comes up a lot in housing policy, where we're talking about like no, a lot of this is positive sum, where one person does not have to lose for another to gain, or at the very least there is more gain than loss. But drained pool politics and these laundry ordinances, I would argue, are actually negative sum. Everyone's worse off. It's just Chinese people are most worse off, and that is a win from a relative status perspective. Let's move on. We're going to stay in this chapter. But the other big thing here is the transition to zoning, and since we have Giselle here to represent the Bay Area, we can talk about Berkeley and how it created — it was the first place that had R-1 zoning. So a lot of this, the rest of the chapter, takes place in Berkeley, starting with Charles Cheney, who was the creator of this, with the express purpose of protecting against — quote — "the invasion of flats and apartments with their renter and floater population." Truly a case of not in my backyard. Cheney apparently never mentioned, as he was working on this, that his own home was within the boundaries of—

Giselle Hale 00:20:48
Of course. They never do, they never do.

Shane Phillips 00:20:48
...the first R1 neighborhood. So he was really— Yeah, he was really protecting himself, of course, but I'm sure he was careful to only talk about how he was protecting others. We end up fast forwarding in the story to a familiar name to all of us, I think, having followed California housing policy over the last decade, which is Phil Bokovoy. Either of you want to tell this story?

Giselle Hale 00:21:12
I mean, I can start. You know, two things I want to mention on this. Before we advance to Berkeley, there was a line, "masking the language of exclusion in the arid prose of land use law would prove to be remarkably enduring," and you really see this picked up in later chapters. This is 100% true. Today you could go to any council or planning commission meeting where there is an affordable housing project and basically hear comments similar to what are in this book being said today. So that has persisted. I also was impressed to learn, as a former planning commissioner, we have Cheney to thank for the modern day planning commission. So which is dubious, I think, a dubious distinction. Because, you know, just added more layers.

Shane Phillips 00:22:01
He gives and he gives.

Giselle Hale 00:22:02
He just gives and gives, I know. And yeah, and then you know, their original recommendations were described as complicated, right, and so this gets back again to this idea of obfuscation. Complication, make it complicated, so it's unclear what's actually happening here, which is a taking. Would most people, if told you're not going to be able to do everything with this piece of land that you wanted to, would they outright have said yes to that? That I don't think so, and so I think that again, it was sort of deceptive by design.

Shane Phillips 00:22:33
I think there's two parts to that too. Not just the complexity of obfuscating what you're doing, but also a more complicated, complex proposal. Policy is just going to kind of scare more people away who are not going to be motivated to be a part of that conversation in the first place. The more technical it seems, the more this is just OK. I guess this is the domain of experts and not really a place for little old me, as just a local resident who's concerned, who wants this or that, to participate. And so I think it's kind of doing double duty there.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:23:06
The complexity also gives it like a lot of gravitas as well. So I mean, if you take BS and you put a lot of heretofore in Latin, and you know even you throw a regression table in there, all of a sudden it's not BS anymore, it's a tablet handed down from God.

Giselle Hale 00:23:20
Absolutely. Yeah, I used to always say the zoning code, it didn't come down on tablets, we can change it, right, but it kind of is presented as if it did. So that's another interesting thing. I'd love to talk a little bit about Berkeley, because I was actually serving in office when this happened, and so one of the things that happens when you're in local office is you kind of figure out who your people are doing the same type of work in other communities. And very quickly I had figured out Lori Droste was one of my people, right, so she was serving on the Berkeley City Council. I believe Jesse Arreguin was the mayor. I was serving on ABAG with him at the time. They had a very pro-housing council and Lori had decided this was an issue that she wanted to elevate and take on. And Bokovoy is a very typical figure in California. You see this in a lot of communities. Someone starts a pro-keep-the-city-the-same organization, a nonprofit. It usually sounds something like Livable X or Neighbors for you know, insert city name. This one was Save Berkeley's Neighborhoods, and his story follows a pattern that you see throughout this book, the pattern being someone who got theirs and then didn't want the next person to get some too, right. So you see this again and again with these characters, and one of the things I love about the way Applebaum wrote this book is that he took just a little bit of time as an author to describe the person for us. Were they short? Were they tall? Did they have a pompadour? What did their mustache look like? So that you can feel like a sense of characters as you're reading about white man after white man who took away our zoning rights.

Shane Phillips 00:25:04
And it's not just people who got theirs and then pull up the ladder, it's essentially always people who got theirs in part through. Mobility through moving to a lot of different places and having lots of housing choices.

Giselle Hale 00:25:09
Through mobility. Yes, yes. A hundred percent.

Shane Phillips 00:25:14
And then wanting to prevent that mobility and those housing options that made it possible for them to move up over time.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:25:20
In this case it should be said that, like it's also mobility, but it's also a lot of public investment. I mean, Phil Bokovoy's house in Berkeley wouldn't be worth a fraction of what it's worth without UC Berkeley, something that every California taxpayer puts money into.

Shane Phillips 00:25:33
Rep the UCs, Stan.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:25:38
I got to. I got to. Product of, and they sign my checks.

Giselle Hale 00:25:42
So I'm a UW. But yay, public education.

Shane Phillips 00:25:46
I'm the other UW—Washington.

Giselle Hale 00:25:48
Yes, okay, there you go, the other UW, but you're spot on. It's like, this is a person who benefited from a world-class education, was able to buy a home and stay in that community, and certainly benefited from Prop 13, which we won't even get into, and now is effectively going to stop others from having that same opportunity, through the guise of environmental protection. And this is something we have seen a lot in California. What often you might refer to as the weaponization of CEQA — CEQA being California's Environmental Quality Act — and so what, typically you'll see, this happened in my community and I can tell the story at a later point in time if there's interest, is they just don't want X, whatever it is project policy, and so you can very easily tie it up in a CEQA lawsuit. And so in this case, what Lori was proposing was really an end to single-family zoning in the city, which would allow for other types of housing, and he filed this lawsuit to hold it up. Now, what the book didn't talk about, which was really interesting at the time — I don't know if you recall this, but it was happening around the time the next tranche of students were meant to be let into the school, and I believe it actually created an issue where students' actual offers to the university were rescinded because the university was literally, literally out of housing. And so what made national news was the idea that one or a small group of angry homeowners could really have that kind of impact on a group of students from across the country at one of the top universities in the nation.

Shane Phillips 00:27:31
A small group who moved there well after the university was created. Like, you know, this just like kills me over and over again. Every university, college town is like this. But people who came there, moved there decades, a century after the university was there, and then they're mad that students live there and that the college wants to grow. You know, there's a million places to live, and choosing to live near a university and then get mad that it has students — maybe I'm just salty about this — working in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the country at UCLA, certainly for students and all the burden that puts on them. But it's just like, you can't believe the hypocrisy of it.

Giselle Hale 00:28:13
Well, and the book comes out in 25, right. So what had happened, I think, around the time of publishing or after — that is of interest and hopefully they update this chapter at a later printing — is that Buffy Wicks is the assembly member for that part of California, she goes on to pass CEQA reform, and CEQA reform that allows an exemption for certain types of housing projects. So in some ways, hitting the level of national press probably helped to raise awareness for what was quietly happening in so many communities and gave a platform for that to happen. The governor signed that into law, and when he signed it into law at the hearing he said, you know, NIMBYs, your time is up.

Shane Phillips 00:28:58
Hehehehe.

Giselle Hale 00:28:59
Abundance — now right, NIMBYs, abundance — and it was really powerful. And it felt like one of those rare examples, from having worked on this issue now for over a decade, of where you actually start to see the pendulum swing in the right direction.

Shane Phillips 00:29:12
I like this. It's the housing superhero origin story.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:29:16
As a faculty member, I really never have to have anything positive to say about university administration, but I will say it was such.

Shane Phillips 00:29:22
You're welcome.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:29:22
A masterful political move for UC Berkeley's administration to rescind 5,100 admissions, right. All over the state a bunch of irate parents on the phone with their state assembly members and their state senators just screaming about this bill that was on the floor, right, which eventually gave Berkeley an exemption from CEQA and allowed them to let those people in. So really great politics from—

Giselle Hale 00:29:49
Agreed.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:29:49
UC Berkeley.

Shane Phillips 00:29:50
That was the more near-term fix before, you know, years later, five, seven years later, whatever it was, passing the CEQA reform. That was much more broad in scope and effectively applies to any infill housing, any housing built in an existing city on a lot that's already been developed in some way in the past. So I do want to start with the hot takes. We got to start early. Here's mine, based on this chapter, having a focus, among other things, on R1 zoning, single-family zoning. I'm not totally sure that is a bad thing for cities to have some single-family only zones. It seems sort of fine to me if there are some areas where you decide that all the homes are going to be single family, that are going to have that form and character. Even if you prohibited single-family homes entirely, I think you would likely end up with the next lowest density zone, whatever you allowed, being the new exclusive area. Like if your city allows everything from townhouses to 20-story high-rises, the townhouses are going to end up being the most expensive housing on the market and that's going to be where the rich people end up. I think where we've gotten into trouble is not so much in the having of single-family zoning and the creation of that as a zone, but in making it the default for how most of our land in most of our cities is regulated. But saying that we shouldn't have R1 zoning at all because it might end up taking over feels like a bit of a slippery slope argument, which I'm always wary of. So what do you guys think about that hot take? Is that a warm take?

Giselle Hale 00:31:23
So I'll jump in and I'll break the news to you. Shane, you already live in a state where R1 zoning really doesn't exist anymore as it was conceived of here, right. So, through a variety of state laws — SB 9, which allowed for split lot, the massive number of ADU laws, and I have a number of stories about those having served through the passage of those and then the subsequent blockage and creative, how do we get around this from local NIMBYs? You effectively don't have that anymore. And look, what I'm in favor of is legalizing more homes at higher densities in more places, and—

Shane Phillips 00:32:05
Crazy.

Giselle Hale 00:32:05
What that might look like in a single family zone is something like ADUs. Right, ADUs are wildly popular, wildly popular nationwide. People love ADUs. It's a flexible form of housing. Right, today it could be where a nanny lives or an adult child lives, and then tomorrow adult child gets married, has kids, they moved into the main house. Now you move into the ADU. Now eventually you need a caretaker. Maybe the caretaker moves into flexible life stage age housing. Wildly popular — duplexes, triplexes. A lot of communities already had those and then they became illegal but they're already in the community, so they're familiar. This is not a foreign entity to a neighborhood. So the idea is you start by, you know, making those possible again and sort of reintroducing this idea of density into more places.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:33:03
So as a former employee of California YIMBY here and as a YIMBY activist, I just want to tell all the other YIMBYs that are listening that Shane Phillips is officially canceled for speaking in favor of—

Giselle Hale 00:33:15
Ha, ha, ha, ha ha.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:33:15
Single-family zoning. So.

Shane Phillips 00:33:17
Ha.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:33:17
Just a note to all the listeners: Shane canceled.

Giselle Hale 00:33:22
Stan, I guess I should have mentioned that I'm also on the board of YIMBY Action, so hey brother.

Shane Phillips 00:33:26
Ha.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:33:26
Giselle agrees, Shane canceled.

Shane Phillips 00:33:30
Bye guys.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:33:30
So.

Giselle Hale 00:33:31
It's going into YIMBY Slack. There you go.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:33:34
So I mean, like, you know, to take a page from the NIMBYs, right, like, on most of America's landmass, if zoning didn't exist, the most intense land use you'd have is a single family home, because you know nothing else is really worth building, right. If you're out in like rural Montana, you're not going to put a 20 story apartment complex or even a duplex. It's just not worth the money, right? So there's so much single family home out there in America, you can just kind of take your pick. Like, what kind of landscape do you like, what kind of food, what kind of weather do you like, and find yourself a single family home. I mean, the only reason we need this prohibition is because land prices in a given area where there's a lot of demand would incentivize building more densely, right, and sort of splitting those land costs through more people who all want to live in that place. So I mean, you know, I have nothing against single family homes. Like, I live in attached single family housing right now. It's really nice, I enjoy my house, right. But I mean, you know, to sort of put the full weight of the law behind my aesthetic and personal preferences seems like kind of silly, right. Like, I mean, where does it end? Like, should I — do I, you know, have the law say what kind of music people can play outside of their bar, you know? Or like what kind of food places can serve? Just because, like, these are my feelings, it seems just kind of like it's kind of puerile.

Shane Phillips 00:34:56
I think where it gets into really problematic territory is, you know, as you said, if you're way out in the middle of nowhere, or even not that far out but far enough, the value of land is so low. You know, why build a duplex, why even build on less than half an acre. The real problem is when you have that single family zoning mandating the quarter acre lot in the middle of a city which is valuable because of its proximity to everything else, because of all the investment that has happened around it, and so in that sense — and I guess we'll come to this when we talk about Euclid, probably — but it becomes much more of a parasitic relationship at that point where you're getting a lot of value out of all the things around you and, partly by nature of your low density, you're not really contributing a lot to anyone else. No one's visiting your single family neighborhood, but you were visiting the other neighborhoods that have that higher density. It's really a one-way relationship. So we're going to move on to chapter six, probably going to spend the most time here. This chapter is called Tenementophobia. In this chapter Applebaum writes about how in the early 1900s native-born elites saw places like the Lower East Side in Manhattan and feared that it would be the future of urban America. They saw these places as unsanitary and immoral and immiserating, and tenements were really the focus of those fears. Hence the chapter's title. And the main argument of this chapter is that the people expressing those concerns about tenements and the people living in them were just wrong on the facts in most cases, and a lot of work went into cherry picking the worst examples of people living in really genuinely unpleasant and degrading and dangerous circumstances, while at the same time ignoring the much larger population who was struggling but getting by just fine, living in tenements. In reality, many of these communities were what Applebaum describes as a quote machine for social mobility, or what in an earlier chapter was called a zone of emergence, and by letting people economize on housing, they were making it possible for them to save and invest and oftentimes move up and then out. But driven by this supposed concern for the well-being of poor city dwellers, which was often just masking a distaste for immigrants themselves or for multifamily housing, people like Edward Bassett and Lawrence Veiller led the creation of laws and ordinances that made it more and more difficult to provide accommodations that poor immigrants and working people could afford. Not to paint with too broad a brush, but a lot of those tenement reforms just made new construction prohibitively expensive, and that just made overcrowding worse. Something we keep coming back to in this book, and I'd say a mistake that Americans in general and urban planners in particular have been making for the past century, if not longer, is mistaking slums as a condition of density rather than a condition of poverty. In some ways, the most extreme outcome of this tenementophobia is single family zoning. Applebaum makes a good point in highlighting how many of the biggest champions for single family housing, including former President Herbert Hoover, lived in super dense, super luxurious residential hotels in New York City and elsewhere. I'm going to share this kind of longer passage from the book that I think really, really captures what's going on there. This really stood out to me. So he says they had touted the single family home as an inculcator of independence and responsibility and hard work, a ward against socialism and communism and anarchism, a guard against immorality and promiscuity, a panacea for communicable diseases, a solution for juvenile delinquency and crime and, above all, a powerful engine of assimilation to American values. But these prescriptions were for ailments from which they believed themselves immune. The maladies they were intended to address were brought on by immigrants and internal migration. The arrival in the nation's burgeoning industrial cities first of large numbers of Eastern and Southern Europeans and later of white and black laborers from the American South. The single-family home was supposed to foster the habits and values that would turn these impoverished new arrivals into respectable citizens. Elite reformers like Veiller and Hoover could live in luxury apartments without fear of moral degradation, because they were already thoroughly respectable. One other thing I just want to signpost for now, since it's a bit of a tangent, but hopefully we can get to later, is the fact that homeownership reduces mobility. Just want to underline that point. People who own their homes move a lot less than renters, and in a book about how reduced physical mobility often means reduced economic and social mobility, that seems really important. Certainly, some of the reduced mobility among homeowners is a choice. It's a selection issue where people who want to settle down are more likely to buy than those who don't. But there's also no doubt that ownership itself is a barrier to mobility in a bunch of different ways, and there are people who would choose to move for family or career reasons if they were renting, who end up staying in place because they own. So that's my incomplete summary of this chapter. What else do you guys want to add to that?

Giselle Hale 00:40:13
I mean, I don't even, there's so much in this chapter. I have so many notes. I mean, okay, let's start with. Is it Vareler? Is that how we say his name?

Shane Phillips 00:40:22
It's Valor, I think.

Giselle Hale 00:40:23
Vareler. Okay, I thought it was interesting that, in addition to complicated being the goal, expensive was the goal, right. He knew there were alternatives, adding more housing, transportation options, social housing, but the goal was to make the housing less attainable. So that's one.

Shane Phillips 00:40:41
More alternatives to accommodating a growing population.

Giselle Hale 00:40:44
Also, that he saw local control as a way of picking up where federal immigration policy could not. So it was substitute immigration policy, right, using this as a tool to create the community that he decided was the community that was desired. And, again, very interesting, he explicitly knew this would not pass a referendum. So instead of using democracy, using regulations as a backdoor solution to get what he wanted. I think for me what this chapter crystallized was, you know, it kind of goes back to your, to Stan's, naming and shaming of your R1 policies. It's this—

Shane Phillips 00:41:22
Ha.

Giselle Hale 00:41:22
Idea that you have to look at original intent and then you have to pair that with outcomes. And when you look at both together, zoning doesn't have a great defensible story, right? The book references the earliest example of zoning was establishing ghettos in medieval Europe where Jews were required to live. So the story, when taken in its totality, when taken both at its origin and the outcomes it has created, it's a damning one, right? And I think that you know something tying this back to abundance, for me in the book Abundance, Ezra talks about, he talks about this a lot. You know those signs you see in neighborhoods.

Shane Phillips 00:42:05
Ezra and Derek.

Giselle Hale 00:42:05
I don't know if these are Ezra and Derek. Yes, which sometimes.

Shane Phillips 00:42:08
Ha.

Giselle Hale 00:42:08
I call them Eric. I combine the two names. They — well no, but no, actually you can actually read the book and know who's talking. Because if.

Shane Phillips 00:42:16
Yeah, it's true.

Giselle Hale 00:42:16
You've followed them long enough, you know. You just know, sorry. So now you know how much I listened to them. But you know he talks about the lawn signs, the lawn signs that you often see that say: you know, I love immigrants. In this home we believe black lives matter. I can tell you from knocking the doors of many of those homes, you'll be met with some ardent defenders of zoning. And so it is sort of the essence of NIMBYism. That episode you mentioned in the introduction that featured Mark Dunkelman. It was a two hour episode, looking back on a year after their book Abundance, and Ezra asked this question to Derek: like why are you so upset about this? Why does this make you so angry when other people get angry about sort of corporate takings? And he had this great reaction that really resonated for me, and it's sort of like, once you see this issue, it's hard to unsee it, and it's a sort of form of quiet power that a lot of people have held over others, and when you become aware of that, it's really hard to turn away from it. So I would say that I would love at some point to talk a little bit more about. I have a hot take on the overall thesis of the book, and then also.

Shane Phillips 00:43:30
Hehehe.

Giselle Hale 00:43:30
The messaging, because I think, like, while all of this historical context is relevant and important, I can tell you it doesn't win elections. It doesn't win upzoning campaigns, and I've seen this attempted and failed. We can talk about the role that it can play, however, in convincing the public to change things.

Shane Phillips 00:43:52
Let's see. Where shall we go. Man, there's so much I want to.

Giselle Hale 00:43:57
I know this chapter is like gold. It's just gold.

Shane Phillips 00:43:58
There's so many things. This chapter is full of things I want to talk about and I don't know where to start. You know, honestly, let's hear hot take number one. I think this is sort of aligned with what we heard from Attorney General Bonta. Actually, a little bit of mobility is not the only thing, but I think you had a little. You had a bit of a different spin on it, a different perspective, so I'm curious to hear what you have to say there.

Giselle Hale 00:44:23
You know, my take is that — and it was — it was a nice sort of departure to look at the entire situation, which I've spent, again, better part of last decade of my life working on, to look through the lens of mobility. It was useful, a useful exercise, but I'm not sure it's the North Star. You know, I would argue the North Star is something more like stability and economic opportunity, and if economic opportunity requires mobility, fine, but I don't think it's the North Star. Look, stability is really important. You know, we're seeing now campaigns, upzoning campaigns across the country passing when the message is around families staying together. Right, Boise, Idaho, Mayor McLean ran that message on her family being able to stay in Boise. San Francisco just won a pretty historic upzoning on what was called the family zoning plan. So you know, Americans, they want and need opportunity and services that allow them to seize opportunity. However, if they have to uproot to find them, they are leaving behind family and community, and there are plenty of examples in the book where people didn't want to leave their community because of that. And we see this in cities who, in addition to housing, are also grappling with child care and elder care. And I want to make the point that this hits women disproportionately. If you look at women's workforce participation in the US, it's gone down. It's gone down relative to our peers in Western Europe, and I really think that speaks directly to the lack of stability that is caused by this need for mobility. If you want to get ahead, in Europe it's much less mobile but you see more women participating. They have generous paid leave, there are public childcare programs and there's that safety net of family nearby, and I think that has to be a part of the equation. I also think what's missing is the discussion of choice as an American value. You know, Americans are obsessed with option value. We are big fans of the combined work of Welcoming Neighbors Network and Sightline. They've done some phenomenal message testing polling on what messages resonate best with voters. When you're trying to have this conversation about creating more homes, you know, messages around more home options resonate more than talking about zoning infill. You know, specific home types. It's not about fetishizing apartments. It's actually about like, what should the cover of the brownie box say? It should say chocolatey and gooey and delicious and not like: these are the 20,000,000 ingredients inside of it. You know, so you have to lead with: what is this going to create for people? And I think this work has an important role, more so in coalition building. You know, if I were to take this work and use it in a campaign, it would be to go to a group that cares about equity and you know, immigrants' rights and expose: hey, this is what this is grounded in. So this upzoning campaign is about undoing that. But I would not make it a core message of an upzoning campaign because I don't think it's going to be a winning message.

Shane Phillips 00:47:36
Let me. Let me try out a way of rephrasing what you just said, which is: mobility is important. It is great that we have it and it is a problem that we are restricting it through housing policy, among other things. But it actually should not be needed to achieve success, to have economic opportunity, for as many people as it is. Does that sound like — maybe not the whole of what you're saying, but does that sound like a fair representation of what you're saying?

Giselle Hale 00:48:07
It's burdensome, yeah, to require that. Yeah, I mean, I think some of the Stanford research from Raj Chetty around, and that's, you know, I think what he's getting at is inclusionary zoning, which I know you and I have some later talks on, a very interesting topic, but that's about just within an existing city, right? How can you create more opportunity based on where people are living and what opportunities they have? So why does it have to require that you uproot your entire life and go through hardship? We should be evolving as a country and not demanding that of people in order to maintain a good life or get ahead.

Shane Phillips 00:48:41
While still maintaining the option for people.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:48:45
I think Giselle has a really, really good point about stability. So I can probably say, friends of the podcast — Chris Elmendorf of UC Davis Law and Clayton Null of UC Santa Barbara's Political Science Department — and I we have this paper out about what sort of messages really move the needle and get people in favor of building new market rate housing. And we tried things like making an analogy about how housing is like used cars, or we kind of summarized evidence of a bunch of economics papers. And the thing that really moved the needle was actually a video from Sightline and it explained housing as a game of musical chairs, right? So if you don't have many chairs or you're pulling chairs out, eventually there's going to be people without a place to sit when the music stops, right. And it sort of speaks to these fears that people have of losing their friends, losing their kids, having to move off to another town and sort of like destabilizing this community that they've really gotten used to and grown to love. And just seeing this small video, this two-minute animation about that, really got people in favor of building the sorts of housing that we need to get ourselves out of this crisis.

Giselle Hale 00:49:52
That video was empirically shown to move voters' perceptions of adding more housing. It would be a great one to link in the show notes along with that entire resource page. So I just want to sort of, it's like my, it's my warning label on the book. And this discussion is great — book, thoughtful, framing, really helpful, historical. I mean, I don't know about you, I read a book like this. You said in the intro of the last episode it's a fun read. I don't experience it that way. I get angry, right, I get. It takes me back to when I applied to the planning commission with a five week old, which is kind of a crazy thing to do, but I was angry about what I had seen and what I knew to be true and I wanted to do something about it. That's how I take a book like this, and so I just would caution for folks, well-intended folks and YIMBYs to take this and use it as a message, because I think there are better messages that are going to resonate with voters. And yet this is important context to have and could be useful for building coalitions to get things done.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:50:53
This knowledge is quite dangerous. I actually just interviewed to be a member of my local planning commission, so all the attendance.

Giselle Hale 00:51:00
You've been warned. Yeah, that's how it starts, Stan. That's how it starts. Starts on the planning commission. It goes from there. Yes—

Stan Oklobdzija 00:51:04
It's the gateway drug, right? Yeah, yeah. So I may have just ruined my life, and it's because of books like Stuck by Yoni Applebaum.

Shane Phillips 00:51:14
I will. I do think that I agree with that. I think it's important to recognize the difference between important information background versus something that's going to necessarily connect for moving people on a policy reform. I do think within this book, though, the story of, you know, how people used to be able to move, regardless of being a lawyer or a janitor, from poorer places to richer places, and now they cannot. That's still mobility based, but there's the kind of corollary of that where, because the places with the greatest opportunities are actually pushing people who are less educated and earn less out of those places into places with fewer opportunities, and that's not only harming them but their children. So this is a generational harm that's occurring. I do think that in some ways, that is the stability mirror image of what Applebaum is really focusing on here, which is the sort of positive mobility, but we're also forcing a lot of negative mobility right now, also through our housing policy, because people are having to leave places like Los Angeles and San Francisco and New York because they just can't afford to stay. So, totally changing direction here. I do want to make sure we flag this and keep it in mind for the next episode, for any future book clubs. Anytime we're reading a history book we have to take note of the great names when we find them. So in this chapter we had Marcus M. Marks, who was Manhattan's first Jewish borough president. Comes out looking pretty good, taking the side of garment industry workers and their need to get outside for some sun and fresh air on their breaks. There was another one in these four chapters. My favorite was J. Dallas Ellis Dort, who we meet briefly in Chapter Seven in Flint, and honorable mention to Ivory Bean out of Boston in Chapter Eight. So didn't know where else to fit that, but really just wanted to make—

Giselle Hale 00:53:13
Good shout outs. Yeah.

Shane Phillips 00:53:13
A point of recognizing the great work those guys are doing. Again, there's so many things we could talk about here. I guess one thing I'll quickly point out is how — I guess we talked about height limits a few times on the podcast. It certainly came up with Gabriel Alfelt when we talked about skyscrapers. It came up with Anthony Orlando when we were talking about building heights and construction costs. I think it was most prominent there. But I thought it was notable here that height limits were actually used even before. It seems they were used for preventing residential development and density, to actually squeeze out the garment industry. And I don't know if this is the first time height limits were used in this way. But you know, height limits were imposed along Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and maybe in other parts of Manhattan, not just to limit the number of workers in a given area and reduce lunchtime crowds of the unwashed masses that all these elites were concerned about, but also to limit the supply of commercial space in the neighborhood and thereby push up rents, driving out manufacturers who relied on fairly low rents. And so a clear analogy there to housing working really exactly the same way. And later on in this chapter we have another guy with a pretty good name, George T. Mortimer, a real estate man who managed the Equitable Office Building Corporation, and that's two of the largest skyscrapers in Manhattan at the time — maybe still, really — that take up a whole block. And he actually became one of the biggest supporters of height limits because it reduced his competition. In addition, as we were talking about earlier, he was able to pull up the ladder so that others could not build similar skyscrapers in the future. So that was just, not the core of this chapter, but I thought an interesting observation.

Giselle Hale 00:54:58
I also thought it was interesting earlier in the chapter how the mechanics of how they would make it more expensive were to add so many regulations that today you see cities now pulling back and states pulling back. For example, if you were to build higher, taller, then you had to have all of these fire resistance elements, sprinklers and all these safety, like layers and layers of safety. And then oh, but the single family home doesn't need to have any of them. So a total awareness that added costs. And I relate to that a lot because when I work with elected officials across the country now they'll say to me like, how do I just fix it? And it's sad because you have to be like, but there's so much cruft there that you're undoing decades of these policies that were intended to slow you down and make it more expensive. It's not just the zoning, it's also the costs that are baked in. You know, you see cities now removing single stair as an example, right. So a lot of this is not just speaking to zoning and where can you put what types of housing, but also intentionally making them more expensive to build.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:56:12
The new trick in the segregationist toolkit is people have sort of figured out how zoning works and zoning has kind of got a bad name because of books like The Color of Law. But the new way you can do something is just make a building so expensive to build that you're not going to get it, and you're getting basically the same result as just banning that building, except you don't have to look like a bad guy. It's a real neat sleight of hand.

Shane Phillips 00:56:37
You get to say: look, we allow seven story buildings, 20 story buildings, whatever, but it's the developers. They're just not willing to build them, even though you know behind the scenes you've made it so that it is effectively impossible, because they could never charge rents high enough to offset the cost of building the thing. Right.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:56:56
These green new developers don't want to have four parking spaces per unit and they don't want to have a 50% mandatory inclusionary component to their building. Why won't these developers just think of the city? I think single stair is. There's a really, really great sort of battlefront right now for making these types of buildings more affordable, kind of getting around this cost disease problem, that cities passing on all of these regulations and sort of like having these old regulations that are still in the book, that sort of drive up costs in invisible ways. It's a really sort of big thing. That's caught on. Shout out to Michael Eliasson for really banging the drum on single-stair reform for so long. It's going to be really interesting to see how American states and cities sort of go forward with this.

Giselle Hale 00:57:41
Well, and there's so many other interrelated. That was just the only part in the book where I saw a mention of cost measures that were used as wedges, right, I think parking reform now is another one, the Parking Reform Network doing great work on that. But one of our partners is this group called Incremental Development Alliance. They work with really small developers, so people who are trying to build in their communities one or two units, two stories, three stories, and they have this great analogy of the door with 13 locks. And with each of these policies, maybe you're opening one lock or two locks, but there's 13 locks, and so until you've opened all of them, that door won't open. And that's the hard part I think a lot of cities are facing today is sort of this investigative journalist work of figuring out exactly how many locks you have and where are they. And what's great about the book is it shows you the layers, layers and layers. You know, even after he did all that there was a mention of it still wasn't enough, right, because still people were building these multi-unit buildings, these apartments, and how terrible it is. So it really gives you that perspective on how long this has been happening and still how much there is left to undo.

Shane Phillips 00:58:52
That metaphor of the door with the many locks, I like that. I almost want to change it a little bit, though, because it seems like part of what's happening with — I guess the quibble I have with that specific metaphor is when all the locks are on one door, you can see all of them. So it's sort of like possible to see and potentially understand all of the things that are blocking you. But I feel like in practice, what we've actually experienced is there was a lot of focus on zoning, and rightfully so, because nothing else matters if the building type isn't legal in the first place. But then we unlock that door and we open the door and then we run into another door right behind it. And that's the building code or it's the labor supply and training.

Giselle Hale 00:59:35
I like that. I like that actually a lot, Shane, because it is sort of you think you've done it right, you think you've done it, and then you're like, wait a minute, there's another door, and no, it's finance. And now I got to go deep on finance, or you know, I love that, you know, and then some of them are doors that you know. One thing I was thinking about after reading this: immigration is such a strong theme in this book and our current immigration policies are going to become another door, because who's going to build the housing that we need? So that's also a part of our continuing story on housing, not just housing for immigrants, but being a part of the workforce.

Shane Phillips 01:00:11
So last thing I think I want to talk about in this chapter — not the last thing I want to talk about, but the last thing maybe we will talk about just so we can keep it moving — is this idea of making reform failure-proof to the extent possible. I don't even remember what it was about this chapter that made me think this. But when I say making reforms failure-proof, I don't mean designing policies and programs that are guaranteed to succeed, because I don't think that's possible in most cases. What I mean here is designing policies or programs so that, if things don't work out as you hoped, you haven't made the situation worse than when you started. I make a narrow version of this argument in my book when I talk about inclusionary housing actually, which is requiring affordable units to be included in certain projects, whether that's 5% or 50%. And what I say in The Affordable City is that you should use incentives where possible instead of mandates. If you create a voluntary density bonus program that lets you build a taller project with more units, if you make some of them affordable to low-income households, then the worst that can happen is no one uses the program and things go on as they had been. If you mandate affordability, even if you also include development bonuses to try to offset the cost, there's a chance that you miscalibrate or even just things change and you end up adding more cost than value, and some sites actually become less likely to be developed and provide the housing we need after the policy's adopted than before it. This is a place where I sometimes butt heads with progressives with whom I share a lot of values and priorities, when their idea is basically that we're going to make housing more affordable by hamstringing the market so that nonprofits and governments can step in and build instead. I think I would even agree that would be great if it worked, but if it doesn't, then now all we've accomplished is killing off the sector that's responsible right now for 80 or 90 percent of our housing, and not just what's being built today, to be clear, but 90 percent of the housing that we built in the past and that we live in today as well. So, Giselle, maybe you in particular, but either of you, I'm curious what you think of this, maybe from your seat with the Abundance Network or having worked in government, where you have to think about not only is this policy going to work, but am I going to potentially make things worse?

Giselle Hale 01:02:31
It's an interesting question. It's not like I think in practice we see a little bit different problem. It's that, you know, again, it's like cities think they're doing the right things but even with doing that they can't see to the finish line. I do think the unintended consequences are less of a concern than doing nothing. I'll give you a recent example. I was at our fellowship this weekend with 20 of our local electeds from across the country. We were talking — one member was talking — about a bill package the state of Michigan is considering which includes support for ADUs. Right, you've seen this sort of pass as a wave across the country, right? I think probably California was one of the earlier states to go deep on ADUs. And they expressed that they were hearing concern about the infrastructure impacts to municipalities, and I had two responses. First, this policy has been tested. It has been enacted in states across the country, and so, in a sense, the myth has been busted. Are there infrastructure costs? Absolutely, but they are minor relative to the cost of and the impacts of not having ample housing. They also don't go in by the thousands, they go in by the hundreds. So it's manageable incremental infrastructure stress, not some sort of systemic collapse. Second, when we solve one problem, we don't solve all the problems. So this idea that we shouldn't try to solve a problem because it might create another creates stasis. We will never run out of problems to solve. If you are an elected official in office, there will always be a problem. This is actually what I love about abundance, because the core question that Derek and Ezra ask in the book was actually: what do people need more of, and how can government help them to get it? And that doesn't mean government has to provide it. That just might mean they need to make it easier, like what we're talking about now. Right, but what I love about that question is that the answer to it can and should be different depending on the decade, depending on where we are with technology, depending on if there is an epidemic. It should be responsive. Government should be responsive to the needs of the day and of the people. And so I don't think the goal is to have fewer problems. It should be to have fewer problems of such urgency and such impact like the shortage of homes has had on people's lives. I would much rather solve the problems that fall from that than deal with the bigger higher order problems. Does that answer your question, Shane? Because it was like sort of a nested question and I actually kind of wasn't sure where you were getting at because I could see different lanes. So push back on me if that didn't answer your question.

Shane Phillips 01:05:13
No, that was perfect. You answered maybe a slightly different question, but it was a better question than I asked, so that's, that's even better.

Giselle Hale 01:05:17
I did, you know. OK, well, and then let me say something else, because I have a bee in my bonnet about this with the.

Shane Phillips 01:05:24
Ha.

Giselle Hale 01:05:24
Progressives I've seen. I live close to El Camino Real and so there's a lot of regular protesting on the main thoroughfare.

Shane Phillips 01:05:30
This is like the sort of main all the way from San Francisco to San Francisco through Silicon Valley.

Giselle Hale 01:05:36
Which, by the way, if you drive through El Camino Real in Redwood City, you will notice it is flanked by eight story buildings. We did eight story buildings. When we did them there was a lot of pearl clutching. It was going to ruin the community. We're fine, we survived. It's just made us have a really vibrant downtown. But I bring up El Camino because there are a lot of protesters there right now protesting against Trump frequently, and one of the things that bothers me when I see that is it's older, progressive, generally white residents who I have seen come to meetings and speak against housing, and for me it's impossible to not see how that relates to where we are nationally, right, with Trump being empowered relatively as an autocrat, which the book does start out with — I'm not just saying that — because he was able to get things done, move things forward, right. So I really think we have to look inward at these issues and see them as being as important to progressive politics as larger federal issues.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:06:40
One of the things I always tell my policy students is that the status quo is a choice, right. I mean, so when we're deciding something on housing, the choice isn't between market rate and then you know, free luxury space, communism, where everyone gets.

Shane Phillips 01:06:56
Hehehehe.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:06:56
To live in a mansion that sort of like hovers above your favorite place in the world. Right? The choice is: either we're building this or we have what we have now, which is mass displacement, which is the largest homeless population, I think, in the Western Hemisphere, which is skyrocketing costs and people leaving the state at the rate that people are leaving, like the Rust Belt or the Deep South, right. And so the perfect can't always be the enemy of the good, right. The choice set isn't between some utopian future and an incremental change. The incremental change is it. This is all we have in our toolkit. And I think I just want to echo Giselle's point that this is something that progressives and people just not in the Republican Party need to get our heads around, because you know Trump does deliver. It's really, really easy to destroy things, but Trump promises he'll destroy things, so you know we're going to.

Giselle Hale 01:07:52
Ha.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:07:52
Have mass deportations. Pretty easy to do that, right, you know, hopefully we're offering a more positive vision of the future rather than, you know, this is just. This is our enemy of the day, and here's your two minutes hate, but we have to deliver something. I mean, I just rode the Metro D line extension in Los Angeles, right, the thing that city planners have been talking about, I mean, Jesus, like 30 years conservatively, but probably something more like 50. Right, and just seeing the joy in people's faces to finally be able to traverse Los Angeles — and it's not a headache, and you know you can access these parts of the city that were previously the most miserable 45 minute drive in your life. You know, that's something that like reinvigorates people's faith in government. And, as the party that's trying to use government to better people's lives, this is something where we ignore this at our own peril.

Giselle Hale 01:08:46
I'm going to just add really quick: this is such a passion area for me. I think the Sightline video is great, that two-minute video, because it actually explains in plain language how, when that luxury apartment goes in, how that prevents a low-income person from being displaced. Another reference I would give is for Justine Underhill's YouTube channel. So Justine is one of our members. She's also on the city council in Falls Church, Virginia. But Justine's background is she's trained as an economist and a journalist and she's really good at taking complex economics and putting them into narrative. And on her YouTube channel she has a YouTube that explains not only how that luxury apartment going in leads to someone not getting displaced, but actually how it relates to homelessness. She has a second video that explains to Stan's point how that speed feature was such a big tool for Trump. She actually talks about the origin story of Trump's interest in politics being an ice skating rink in New York that they just couldn't get through regulations. And this young hotshot developer comes in and he goes: I'm going to do it for you, I'll get it done. And he did. And that's when people started saying to him: you should run for office. So speed as a progressive feature needs to be a part of the dialogue. Another narrative misstep we make: never try to explain Econ 101 to people. Never do it. If you're in the lane of supply and demand, you're failing. You can't do that, so you have to instead speak about what is it that you want to see? And if you go back through your life and you think about what were the apartments that I lived in that were affordable? Generally speaking, they were older apartments, and part of our problem is we don't have a lot of older apartments. Or if we're not building new apartments, somebody's buying the old apartments and they're going to make them look new. And so that life cycle explanation. I explained this to my sister in Texas and she got it, and now she said she's explained it to several people at parties. And that is.

Shane Phillips 01:10:48
Ha.

Giselle Hale 01:10:48
The kind of testimonial that I look for in doing this work. That level of somebody can explain it to another 30 something at a party and they can get it. That's the lane we want to be in.

Shane Phillips 01:11:00
I was scrolling through my notes and I realized Euclid v Ambler Realty — the seminal decision was also in this chapter. Got to briefly talk about it. So.

Giselle Hale 01:11:12
So important, so important.

Shane Phillips 01:11:13
In part because it was decided November 22nd, 1926, a hundred years ago later this year. This is where the U.S. Supreme Court upholds zoning, with Justice George Sutherland writing the famous opinion. "Very often the apartment house is a mere parasite cashing in on the elevated value produced by its environs, even as it erodes it, and therefore apartments come very near to being nuisances. And a nuisance," he claimed, "may be merely a right thing in the wrong place, like a pig in the parlor instead of the barnyard." I realized that was not all actually directly quoted from him, that was actually quoted from the book. But you get the idea. As Applebaum notes, the rhetorical slight of hand here is that Sutherland describes apartments as being very near to a nuisance, which is to say not a nuisance. Then he says that nuisances can be resolved by putting them in their right place, which in the case of apartments is away from single family homes. And suddenly we are treating apartments as nuisances without ever actually resolving that contradiction of him saying it's very near and therefore not a nuisance. So I don't know how much we want to dig in on this. People know about Euclid v. Ambler. You know, people have talked about the whole apartments as parasites idea many times. And, as I said earlier, I think that's getting it exactly backward, where suburbs are the parasites on urban areas. But anything y'all want to add before we move on to chapter seven?

Stan Oklobdzija 01:12:39
I think you know this idea that the single family home is sort of the natural building type really kind of lets a lot of communities believe that, you know, they're a rural area or they're somehow like a separate small village like off in the Alps, when really they're just encapsulated by a metro area and would not exist as a city at all if it weren't for that nearby metro area. So a pox on Euclid.

Giselle Hale 01:13:03
My biggest takeaway was just like going back to the idea of the zoning came down on tablets. This is just a hundred years old. You know, it's not that old, and so we can correct this. This can be a course correction.

Shane Phillips 01:13:18
And the neighborhoods built by it are even younger for the most part. So chapter seven is titled Auto Emancipation, and I think it's sort of doing double duty here, because it's partly about how cars made it possible for people to spread out and free themselves of cities, which did have real challenges, particularly at that time, and also about how black Americans in particular were able to free themselves from the Jim Crow South and from poverty through employment in the auto industry. Was that double meaning obvious to both of you? Because I didn't even actually get it on my second read and only made the connection while preparing for this episode.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:13:56
I'm hearing it for the first time right now.

Giselle Hale 01:13:57
It's the same. I'm like, there's light bulbs going off right now. Thank you.

Shane Phillips 01:14:01
I maybe even Applebaum wasn't aware. We can ask him about it in a couple weeks. But this chapter is doing a few things. I am not even going to try to really summarize all of it. I'll just mention some of its structure and important ideas and we can go from there. There's a focus on Flint, Michigan and the auto industry there and the housing situation around it throughout most of the 1900s. There's also a focus on a much broader time period and geographic area, talking about Black mobility in America, the Great Migration, but dating all the way back to before the Civil War and all the way up to this more modern era in Flint and elsewhere. Restrictions on Black Americans' mobility and access to housing continue to be a central topic in the next chapter. So we don't have to try to capture everything here. In terms of content, Applebaum makes a point about how, even though most enslaved people who ran away were ultimately caught, the constant fleeing and the cost of tracking them down put a real burden on the system of slavery, and that culminated in the Fugitive Slave Act which passed in 1850 and required northern states to cooperate in the return of escaped slaves, and it's really recognized, at least in this book, as a sort of inflection point in our path to civil war, since it radicalized a lot of Northerners who were confronted with being much more explicitly complicit in the enslavement of Black people in the South. So in that sense I think you could say that Black mobility against their enslavers pushed up the timeline on emancipation. Another thing that stood out to me is how differently white Northerners and Southerners viewed employment. This was kind of new to me. I hadn't really read this anecdote or anything. This calls back to the differences between the Massachusetts Bay Company and Virginia Company that we talked about last time. There's this anecdote of the northern writer John Townsend Trowbridge speaking to a South Carolinian who couldn't get his mind around how you could get a man to work for you without compelling him, and that failure of imagination helps explain the laws against enticement and vagrancy that were adopted in the South shortly after the war and the convict laws that ended up functioning as slavery by another name in many cases. The last thing I'll mention is how, even amid the South's post-Civil War black codes and later Jim Crow, Black mobility out of the South was still sharply limited by the prejudice and lack of opportunity available to them in the North. Applebaum notes that in some ways there was more opportunity to be found for Black business owners in the South when they could actually serve their own community as shop owners or doctors and such, while in the North they were excluded from unions and skilled occupations. I think this is also the first time I had read that restrictions on immigration during and after World War I had lowered some of these barriers for Black workers as Northern employers became more desperate for labor with fewer immigrants moving in. So again, not a complete summary, a few points that stood out to me. Anything either of you want to add here?

Stan Oklobdzija 01:17:06
I just want to do a shout out. I think I mentioned it on the last podcast, The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson. It's a history of the Great Migration, fantastic. Really fills out a lot of the sort of reasons of why African-Americans would leave the South. Talks about things like: yeah, there was quite a bit of a market for Black business owners, Black doctors, dentists and that sort of thing. Actually, one of the main characters of the book is Robert Foster, a dentist from Northern Louisiana who makes his way out to Los Angeles. Fantastic book and I really highly recommend it for people interested in housing and just people in general.

Giselle Hale 01:17:42
I'll just share that, for me, this was one of the sections in the book where the concept of mobility felt most resonant. Identifying a key feature of slavery as being the lack of mobility, the lack of ability to choose where you go, was again a new lens on a familiar topic. So I thought this chapter was just, to me, outstanding. Six and seven together.

Shane Phillips 01:18:05
I mentioned that the chapter focuses on Flint, Michigan, home of General Motors, and it really has a much more interesting and unusual history than I realized. There's a housing history in this book, in this chapter, that I was completely unaware of. I think most Americans are familiar at this point with Flint's problems with lead in their pipes in particular and their water and as an epicenter of deindustrialization and all the challenges that come with that. But I definitely did not know anything about its history around housing and land use. Just to summarize really quickly here, the city grew rapidly alongside GM, tripling in population from 13,000 to 39,000 between 1900 and 1910, then almost tripling again to 92,000 by 1920, then adding another 65,000 people the next decade. Its population peaked just under 200,000 in 1960. But despite this massive growth, Flint actually still had 24,000 vacant lots as of 1947, and I don't think that's because it had a ton of land and just hadn't used it all yet, like it was growing further out, because actually a lot of growth was happening outside of its borders throughout this period. In 1920, about 75% of the population of Genesee County was in the city of Flint. By 1950, that was down to 60%. Today it's down to 20%. But what was actually happening was city leadership was so set on Flint being this high class city of single family houses and really nothing else that they set very strict zoning and building codes so that you could not build housing inexpensive enough that a typical factory worker could afford it, despite the relatively high wages that workers made in these factories. So even though we think of places like Flint as being full of empty blighted homes and vacant lots today after the economy fell out from under it, it turns out that, at least in Flint's case, it was always full of vacant land, just for a completely different and self-imposed reason, even as a very economically successful place. Just struck me as a very extreme version of these kinds of restrictions that a place that had the economic vitality of Flint during the mid-century would still have all of this undeveloped land just because they're so set on this like both classist and racist vision of what the city should be.

Giselle Hale 01:20:26
I mean, I think this was another example of acting against your own interests. This is a factory town, right? Tied to the success and failures of GM, described how it was a boom and bust industry. As they would have a stockpile of supply that wasn't selling, people would get let go. As a new model would come across the floor, they'd have to retool and that would lead to layoffs. I will say this was one chapter where, as my background is in marketing and similar to the tenements, you know, the tenements had what you call product market fit. It met the needs of the market. And when you look at Flint, its zoning was not designed to meet the needs of the industry it was intended to support. So it was just a clear mismatch and working against its own interest. You know, there was a developer mentioned in there who was like: yeah, we all know the homes being built here are being built at this, whatever it was at the time, $5,000, $6,000, I don't know. But that wasn't affordable to the average worker. So, and I also thought it was interesting, at some point there was a public entity — it might have been the community development — that outright said: look, this is not working, we need this other mix of housing. So it seemed like there were voices of reason trying to correct. And later — I think it's in Chapter 8, we see that they make some changes. But another great example in the book of like actually working against your own economic interests.

Shane Phillips 01:21:55
Since we're going to keep talking about Flint, I think in the next chapter we can just move on there. I know we just have a short amount of time left. I do want to make sure we mention J.D. Dotson before moving on. This is a man who was born in Mississippi to sharecroppers and, you know, moved to Flint and became a labor leader there. And there's just this really delightful story of him outwitting the GM executive and getting them to provide five Buick cars for the civil rights leader John Lewis, when he was coming to town, by saying that Ford was going to provide some Lincolns if he didn't. And that was a complete bluff and a lie. But they got it out of him. And I just really like the quote of Curtis had been outwitted by a Mississippi sharecropper's son who had taken one of the few jobs made available to black workers in the Buick plants, turned it into a platform for change. Just a great story there. Moving on, last chapter for this episode, the housing trap. This turns the focus to federal policy. Flint was hit hard by the Great Depression, just like the rest of the country, and the federal government created the Homeowners Loan Corporation, HOLC, to bail out a lot of underwater homeowners. Although HOLC was relatively non-discriminatory in who it helped, it did create a lot of the redlining maps that many of our listeners will have seen. Those maps do not seem to have caused lenders to discriminate in who they lent to or where, and it's probably more accurate to say that they just reflected existing attitudes and practices that predated the specific institution. Listeners can check out episodes 15 and 43 of the podcast to learn more about that history. But one thing HOLC really did seem to influence in the long run was the lending practices of the Federal Housing Administration, which was created a few years after HOLC. Both offered mortgages that only required a 20% down payment and that could be paid back over a few decades rather than a few years. Prior to this point you were really not able to buy a home if you didn't have at least 50% down. Both of those features were new and FHA would really scale up the reach of this loan product exponentially compared to HOLC. Applebaum says that the other really consequential thing about the FHA — and I think maybe unexpectedly consequential — is that Congress required its mortgages to be economically sound. And that was a big deal because with these new high loan to value mortgages being offered to millions of Americans, it was a lot easier for people to end up owing more than their home was worth if the economy turned. So the government had to come up with a way of ensuring that the homes they were lending to didn't lose their value. And all of a sudden they were in the business of preventing change in pretty much every neighborhood in America. So, as Applebaum puts it, the FHA in effect declared war on diversity, on mobility, on change itself across the entire country. It gave the federal government a stake in turning a mobile nation static, in freezing the status quo. After more than a century in which it had used its power to expand mobility, extending frontiers, improving transportation and easing the flow of the population, it now set itself to the task of persuading Americans to settle down and stay where they were. And that was not all, because the FHA wanted everything sorted into nice clear buckets. It set out to permanently segregate the nation's land, dividing it according to use, class and race. It was one of the great turning points in American history, and no one at the time even realized or perhaps even intended it. So this is how segregating neighborhoods by both race and class via redlining goes mainstream, and so does zoning to prevent businesses and industrial uses from moving in, which naturally expands to preventing apartments and anything but single-family homes from moving in. If you happen to already live in one of those mixed neighborhoods, then you're out of luck, and if you happen to be black or another racial or ethnic minority, you were also likely out of luck because you were deemed a threat to neighborhood stability yourself and thus a threat to property values. And if that was not true before the FHA adopted these rules, it was definitely true afterward, because the presence of racial minorities meant that the neighborhood was off limits to lenders, and homes tend to lose value when no one can get financing to buy them. So I found this really fascinating. It's a history I knew the parts of, but it was put together in a way that really crystallized it for me. How about you both?

Giselle Hale 01:26:33
Great summary, by the way. Yeah, something that struck me the most was FDR's role in all of this. Right, there was a line that said, where Hoover had simply encouraged the adoption of zoning, FDR effectively imposed it on the entire country. And so you take the essence of what had been created in the previous chapters with R1 zoning, and then this is how it spreads. This is how it scales through this well-intended program and just a massive example of unintended consequences. My follow-up question for Applebaum is why — he doesn't really explain why that was such an imposition with the FHA, why it was so important.

Shane Phillips 01:27:18
Why, why? What was so important?

Giselle Hale 01:27:20
Why the adoption of zoning was so important. Right, I think that, you know, your point about having it ride with the value is interesting, but I think maybe it was his place in history and what was happening where he was coming out of, you know, wanting to ensure that these were funds being spent well, that they wouldn't go down over time. But I would love to have had a little bit more on how that was decided.

Shane Phillips 01:27:45
One thing that it brought to mind for me was just how, I don't know, like it's hard to put myself in the shoes of someone, say, 80 or 100 years ago, where just a lot more people rented and the idea that a neighborhood's economy would decline because of technological changes or, you know, macroeconomic things — it's just like potentially not a big deal. A bunch of landlords lose money, but big deal, right, like we can just move somewhere else. Whereas once everyone owns their home, that kind of mobility, your own fate, is much more tied to the fate of the community and at some level there's — you know, there's — something good about that, but a lot of this is out of the hands of any individual community member or even a community banding together, like if GM decides to leave. That is not something that the community can necessarily do much about, and now your entire economy is essentially gone. There's not much you can do to make up for it.

Giselle Hale 01:28:43
I guess in other parts of the book there's this sort of feeling of like you're in the room where it's happening. You get a sense of the back and forth of how a certain decision was made. I would have loved a little bit more here on why each of these elements was included as stipulations for that FHA funding, because obviously hugely consequential.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:29:04
I think the answer to that sort of lies in, like, the other thread that goes through this chapter, and it's how the end of racially exclusionary zoning in Buchanan v. Worley in 1917 sort of creates this like whack-a-mole system of where you create something that's racially exclusionary zoning but you don't call it that, and then the Supreme Court gets wind of it and they change the rules, like they did in 1948 with Shelley v. Kraemer, and then you go and you try to change the rules again. So I mean, one of the big things when you look at the HOLC maps and you look at the descriptions that the federal government commissioned local realtors to write about various neighborhoods is, you know, part of how they designated community was, you know, flood risk and proximity to noxious land uses, like a rendering plant or something like that. But the other thing was like really detailed descriptions of multifamily for rent housing and black people, Asian people, and immigrants. Right, I mean, like they would count the number of Italian households in a neighborhood. If you're from sort of a big city, you should go to the University of Richmond's digitized HOLC map collection and just poke around a little bit and see what these realtors wrote about your old community. It's really, it's really illuminating.

Shane Phillips 01:30:20
It gives me like phrenology vibes and just like the creepiness of it, of how in people's business they were.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:30:27
It's really bleak. I didn't know. I lived near so many foreign subversives where I grew up in Berkeley, California, but I guess I did.

Giselle Hale 01:30:35
We have a group in our area, I think they're called Menlo Together Color. If you Google Menlo Together Color and Color of Law. They did that exercise right, of digging up those old microfiches and what was being said and what were the posters and the meeting notices and piecing it together and sort of creating like a local lens on, hey, how did this actually go down right here.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:30:56
One of the things, if you read like Color of Law, or if you go back through the history of this, one of the things that the FHA was really concerned about was preventing the spread of these so-called noxious influences, like to use the language of the time, right. So I think zoning is a big part of that. I think people got wise to what was going on in Berkeley and how they figured out how to do whites-only neighborhoods without calling it whites-only, right. I mean, a big part of a lot of the New Deal was trying to figure out ways to give government benefits only to whites but not say it's whites only, right. So you had to mollify the Southern Senate delegation but you couldn't just come out and say what they were saying out loud on the Senate floor. And I think probably the answer lies somewhere there.

Shane Phillips 01:31:43
The GI Bill is a good example of this, where, you know, white or black, you had the right, technically, to get help buying a home, but because of these FHA rules and redlining in practice, many, many white veterans were able to buy homes. And the stat in the book is that it's an estimated fewer than 30,000 of the more than million black veterans were actually able to make use of it. In the same way, I don't think he shared the percent of white veterans who were able to, but I suspect it was probably pushing 50%, if not more, but it was, you know, much more than the 3% that we're talking about here.

Giselle Hale 01:32:22
Well, and this is an area where I think "Color of Law" does get into greater depth on that topic and issue.

Shane Phillips 01:32:27
We'll just underline that, we'll put that at the top of the book list for this episode in the show notes.

Giselle Hale 01:32:34
There you go, there you go.

Shane Phillips 01:32:36
I know we're really out of time here. I do want to talk about one last part of chapter eight that really stood out to me. There was a lot about this chapter that left me wanting to pull my hair out. We didn't get to talk about contract selling, but I just, like good God, I can't believe that was ever a thing and persisted for so long. Not going to get into it. I do want to talk about — I think the thing that may be more frustrating than any other — was this story of Amos A. Lawrence, where we're actually introduced to him in the previous chapter as the guy who was quoted saying that northerners like himself had quote: waked up stark, mad abolitionists after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. At the time he was using his industrialist fortune to keep Kansas a free state and he was shipping rifles to abolitionist settlers there. So he really was walking the walk on his abolitionist ideals. But wouldn't you know it? It turns out this guy was also the first person known to have included a racial restriction in a property deed, writing into the deed of some land that he sold that it could not be occupied by black or Irish people. As Applebaum puts it, hating slavery was one thing; living beside black neighbors, something else again — and I think that really sums it up — the duality of man, not to equate racial restrictions with NIMBYism. Exactly. But I feel like the story is just a perfect encapsulation of how housing sometimes turns otherwise progressive people into selfish, screw you, I've got mine, pull the ladder up behind me misanthropes at best, and straight up bigots at worst. It always comes back to something along the lines of: sure, I wish those people well, but there's no way I want them living anywhere near me. Giselle, I suspect this is an attitude you ran into occasionally in elected office.

Giselle Hale 01:34:30
You know, this is another. He really does nail this sentiment so well. It's great to — I mean, it's not great, but hearing it in this historical context and then hearing it on the dais today, it's the same. It's the same, you know. One example that came to mind: in Redwood City we were passing a Habitat for Humanity project, 21 units, right in the downtown, 5,000 square foot lot, really, really great project. And we had a neighbor, an attorney, called himself the Darth Vader of the planning commission, knew a thing or two about CEQA. And so he sued it, clearly knowing it was never going to be withheld because there's nothing this little tiny infill development was going to do to harm the environment, but knowing fully well that he could sort of run the clock out on it and that it was going to be expensive. And that's exactly what happened. And as I sat through the public comment, it was versions of this. People like Amos, right, saying: you know, this is not the place you want children to play, or this is not safe, this isn't a good place for a family to grow up — like they're doing them a favor. And that was this idea that elite values should be thrust upon everyone, which was also a theme in earlier chapters — like they're almost doing them a favor. It's this very paternalistic concept of I'm looking out for you when the government isn't. And it takes away their agency. And that is what I saw and experienced at so many affordable housing projects. And sadly, you can often still see that today. So, yeah, that is a real thing. And how do you deal with it? You just keep going. That project took three votes. I had to vote on it three times. And I was really grateful to still be mayor when we gave those residents their keys. And that's a life-changing opportunity for somebody to get that opportunity of stability — again, stability. Those residents would say: you know, I have a lot of other things to worry about. We have a crazy healthcare system, we have all these other issues in our society, but that one very large chunk of their monthly income and expenses was now solved for. So it's worth it to keep going, but this is what you will be faced with. This is what is commonly heard. These are the themes, the refrains we still hear today.

Shane Phillips 01:36:58
Well, I think that is a perfect place to close. We've come up on our two hours anyway, and I love that sentiment, so let's wrap it up here. Thank you so much, Stan, for co-hosting with me again, and Giselle Hale, you in particular for joining us here for this long episode on the Housing Voice podcast. Really appreciate it.

Giselle Hale 01:37:19
No, such a pleasure. Thank you for taking so much time to give space to these types of topics, Shane, with this podcast.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:37:26
This was a blast. Thanks so much, man.

Shane Phillips 01:37:32
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.