It’s a new season of Ann Arbor AF, and with the new season comes a new format! Today we are talking with Aaron Lubeck of Durham, N.C. about Jim Crow zoning, why some advocacy feels so taboo in community conversations, and how churches might be coming to save the day on housing. We also dropped a hint about the next interview coming to the pod…
Here are links to the books we mentioned – Snob Zones by Lisa Prevost, Fixer-Upper by Jenny Schuetz, and Arbitrary Lines by M. Nolan Gray – in case you’d like to pick up copies for yourself. And remember that Economist interview Aaron mentioned? Here’s the link to that, too.
Come check out our episodes and transcripts at our website, annarboraf.com. Keep the conversation going with fellow Ann Arbor AFers of Twitter and Facebook. And hey, if you wanted to ko-fi us a few dollars to help us with hosting, we wouldn’t say no.
Transcript
Today we’re talking with Aaron Lubeck, of Durham, North Carolina, about Jim Crow zoning, the limits of participatory governance… and how churches might be coming to save the day on housing? Aaron’s a developer, designer, and builder. He is the author of Green Restorations Sustainable Building and Historic Homes, and also an adjunct professor at Duke University’s Nicholas School. (If you’re one of those people who has big feelings about Duke, maybe just hang on to that for a minute, because there’s lots of fun things to say.) His more recent work focuses on zoning changes to facilitate affordable housing feasibility, including local efforts to create missing middle codes, and… I know, like for our listeners, I am just dropping morsel after morsel. Oh, my God, I want to talk about this. He hosts the Town Builder’s podcast, which is a curated conversation with top new urbanist developers, and founded Southern Urbanism, a nonprofit dedicated to better city building in the south. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, and in the case of the world being extremely small, he is a Pioneer High School graduate.
01:37
Jessica Letaw (she/her): Aaron. Welcome. I’m so glad you’re here today.
01:39
Aaron Lubeck: Oh, me, too. Thanks for having me on the show.
01:42
Molly: Thanks for being here! To get us started, We’ve just read your Bio, but maybe you could tell us a little bit more about yourself, and in particular why and how you got into the advocacy side of this work.
01:54
Aaron Lubeck: sure. So I was actually up in Ann Arbor for pretty much all of the nineteen nineties. But for high school and college my mother’s out of CHECKAUDIO University Um, she on Carolina as well. Then we moved to Michigan when I moved back was basically my trajectory. And since I’ve been back, basically for twenty years, I had been in the design and build construction industries, primarily starting at Trinity Design Build, where I was a Restoration contractor, exclusively doing historical restoration for about ten years, and Durham was a perfect place in this, because it has a very strange arc, boomed because of tobacco, then it died because of tobacco. And then it’s Come back in the last twenty years with Duke University, with mostly medical stuff, not unlike the University of Michigan, just a lot of wealth and research that has come here that has put an incredible pressure into rehabbing historic homes, and that was what we did for so long.
The last ten years or so, though, I’ve been very involved with infill building, zoning code reform, trying to create an ecosystem of small builder/developers that are mostly small-scale folks. A lot of them I would call citizen builders, that are non-professional people who build an ADU in their backyard. People who carve off, you know, a backyard or a side lot or something. People are doing it not not full time, and the more I got into that I got very involved with the Congress for New Urbanism, the National Town Builders Association, the Incremental Development Alliance that are all sort of pushing the envelope for these much-needed reforms. Really, in every city, in any city in America to relegalize just basic building and basic city building. And so that’s my day to day now, it consists of a lot of design and build work, but also advocacy work which is primarily local, but we do stuff across the region.
03:48
Molly: I’m going off script already, because I’m so curious about these citizen builders. And I’m curious, are people building the ADUs because they believe in all of these principles? Or are they building ADUs, and getting into it in the process because they’re discovering the challenges and the need for housing? Or some third thing?
04:10
Aaron Lubeck: It’s a great question, because it’s ADUs are basically the smallest scale permanent housing you can do, if you shave off like you know, tiny homes or deals on wheel and trailer type stuff, and that’s beautiful because it’s the scale that a non-well-capitalized developer can do. It’s the kind of scale you can almost afford to do not well, because it’s not gonna be catastrophic if you don’t. It allows people to experiment, and it’s also, you know if you’re in a historic neighborhood like a Burns Park or something, there’d be some restriction on and experimenting on the front of your house, but in the back of the house it’s ehhh, you could dova modernist addition, or put an accessory dwelling out there out of scraps, and it wouldn’t affect the neighborhood. And so it just allows citizens to do this. There was a good friend of mine, Topher Thomas, an African-American builder, who was teaching high school, I think, three years ago. He happened to slap together a backyard cottage, literally from scraps from my old build company’s dumpster down the street. The neighbor threw an absolute fit, and finally got the city to come out to say he couldn’t do that. He took it down. Then he got permits for it, and then he built the same thing back. That’s a citizen builder, you know, and now he’s so excited about it, and this new rebirthing of what he wants to do, and his friends call him and say, “Well, can you do that for us?” And now he went from a teacher to looking at doing this full time because he just feels empowered to do something about housing that he’s passionate about. With the ADUs there’s a lot of different motivations, I mean ranging from like pure, “I can profit. This makes a good investment,” to, “I like to make money and do something good for my community.” I do think there’s a lot of people who love Ann Arbor, love Durham, love wherever they are, and they look at where they wanna put their savings or investments, and you can send it to a 401k in New York, or you can invest in your community.
06:30
Jess: Right. I was gonna say there’s something so charming about ADUs being a gateway drug to little-a activism. You’re like, “Oh, but I want to make my city a little better.”
06:42
Molly: Right. This is I was thinking is that in the transportation space we often talk about how riding a bike around your city is one of the most radicalizing experiences that you can have in terms of how a city is designed, and I’m wondering if there’s a similar sort of radicalizing experience that people are having when they try to make an ADU.
06:58
Aaron Lubeck: It’s empowering. And I think the broader of what’s happening in housing advocacy in America is where people are flipping or melding their identity and housing, from advocate to builder, and from builder to advocate. It goes both ways. And you see this almost happening in live time on social media, where builders are kind of sick of stuff, and then they realize that they can also get involved in advocacy. And people like Topher, or people who just have a backyard and ADUs are lega, they can do something. They’re becoming a builder in some way. Ten years ago there was a pretty hard line between those two, and they’re increasingly blurring. I think that’s a really good sign. I mean, it is a thing a gateway drug, and because these things are big projects, it takes a big hurdle to kind of get into it. And so it’s one of the many arguments to lower the thresholds for housing generally, but housing types like ADUs. Create more opportunity for citizens to participate.
07:59
Jess: You know you’re talking about gateway drugs and it being radicalizing. And I know exactly what you mean. I will call out a recent example on Twitter. Housing Twitter lost its shit when Cardi B semi-identified as a YIMBY. And for her the threshold was trying to help somebody find an apartment in New York, and A) couldn’t and B) too expensive, and she was like, “What the hell? we need more housing!” and housing Twitter just blew up with joy. So you know, even before trying to create something for yourself, just trying to find something I think can be radicalizing.
08:34
Aaron Lubeck: There’s a little bit of, I mean, and you can unpack the YIMBY movement broadly. It’s so sort of fascinating because it’s so young. I mean It’s really been around five, at most ten years, but if it goes to the next level, or it becomes more the movement as opposed to a movement, And then, like one of the questions about these movements are always, “who’s our Joanna Gaines?” You know you’re going to see on the front page of some magazine when you check out at the grocery store? and I don’t think that really exists yet in housing advocacy. But you’re starting to see it. I mean There was another thing on social media where an Orlando City soccer player had a “Legalize Housing” shirt on, as he was getting ready to play.
09:17
Jess: That was a good day for me, too. I loved seeing that picture.
09:24
Aaron Lubeck: It’s interesting because it’s you know It’s still mostly, not something that famous people or Pop Culture is taking up by any means.
09:28
Jess: So speaking of people that you don’t necessarily expect to dip into housing, when we were doing our prep call for this episode, you let us know that Durham churches were doing something interesting. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
09:42
Aaron Lubeck: Yeah. So you have to step back a little bit historically. But I think for most of human existence, and even America’s existence a substantial, if not plurality of affordable housing had always been produced through charities, predominantly faith-based institutions, and you still see this in the rust belt in the midwest, where again maybe a majority of high schools are from religious groups, and the majority of hospitals are from religious groups. You don’t see that in the South as much, but certainly in St. Louis, Cincinnati, and so forth you do. And in our lifetimes that’s almost completely gone away. Churches do not build houses for a lot of reasons. But mostly the private market has been sort of squeezed out of affordable housing and what’s left is almost exclusively State agency or quasi-state agency through LIHTC low income housing tax credits, and so forth.
And so we know that churches are sort of interesting because they have a couple boxes checked automatically. They usually have land, they have people, they have need, and they have mission. And many of them are land rich, cash poor, not all. And of course, it runs from rural to urban, wealthy to not wealthy. But in Durham County there’s five hundred and fifty religious parcels. There’s two and a quarter square miles of religious property. It’s a lot, and that mission was really important. This is a motivator. So there’s a zoning code reform working its way through the process right now. That should be the Council in early next year that has one very, very simple sentence to enable this, and all it says is, churches are allowed to build unlimited accessory dwellings. That’s it. It’s not any more complex. There’s some nuance of exactly where those are placed, and so forth, that are getting hammered out, but super empowering, as you drive around Ann Arbor and look at different sized churches, and so forth. You know almost any spot you see ther could have four houses in the back, or has a grassy area that you could build a court around. There’s an article that just posted an absolutely stunning site plan done in South Bend, which has an extraordinary architecture school, actually. But there’s also a video rendered on that link that is absolutely mind-welling but just showing what churches could be. And you know Americans who are design nerds, we look at these beautiful Renaissance villages in Europe that basically Don’t exist anywhere in America. Some of the architects the other day, classically trained architects at the school there, and basically retrofit this on a grassy unloved parcel in South Bend, and it’s mindblowing. And you just have to look at it because it’s that good. So we think it’s going to be an incredible opportunity. I say this full disclosure as someone who is not particularly religious. I just think it’s a vessel to build more housing, better housing more affordable and we’re putting on a charette in about three weeks with some churches just to further the idea and see how it shakes out.
12:58
Jess: Well good luck With that I hope you’ll let us know.
13:00
Molly: I’m thinking about the various churches that we have scattered, especially in and near downtown. Here it’s not so much beautiful grassy areas as it is giant parking lots that are mostly empty.
13:11
Aaron Lubeck: Sure, absolutely. I think the urban ones are super interesting to look at. If it’s churches, they usually fill the parking lot for four hours on Sunday. They’re usually underutilized the other times. Some of them might say that they do need that parking. I mean Ann Arbor so weird because it has such kind of peak flow stuff, football games, and church service, or whatever. But if we’re an urban site, I mean I’ve been in this argument with a couple of black pastors here, who in the South, like parking shortages is not a thing, because we’re rural and not that dense, and, trying to convince them when they ever they come to us to help with some housing stuff, with like, “you know, you could develop that parking to some degree.” They’re like “where will people park?” But you look at the street, and it’s like every street in this town is ten percent parked. I’m like “if people have to walk three blocks to hear you talk on Sunday, that’s a sign of success.” Maybe that’s not a problem, or it’s a problem you want to have. So there is a little bit of conditioning. But You’re right that there are a lot of parking lots that are blank slates. That, I think will be a big part of how we’re building housing moving forward.
14:20
Molly: So this gets to the next question we wanted to ask you, which is, we know It’s really important to build effective coalitions when we’re trying to do advocacy for zoning reform specifically, but also housing abundance more broadly. So we wanted to hear about who’s in the coalition in Durham? It feels like here in Ann Arbor Some of these coalitions are just starting to figure out who we might be able to team up with, and where there’s common ground. And I’d love to hear more about the coalitions of Durham.
14:50
Aaron Lubeck: Yeah. So that’s super interesting, because Durham in many ways acts like a college town, but it isn’t really a college town. Duke is probably a quarter of the size of Michigan, and the city itself is probably double the size. So Duke is clearly the elephant in the room, and for years it was the, you know, the big part of the economy here. We still have those sort of influences from the University, but it’s not really a college town like Chapel Hill would be. In terms of coalition I think there is this really great article that Alan Burning was quoted in in the Economist like ten years ago, and he’s the executive director of Sightlines Institute, which is an unbelievable think tank that is a model we’re trying to duplicate here in the south with Southern Urbanism.
15:34
Aaron Lubeck: But it’s basically thirty people who are doing housing advocacy in Seattle, Portland, and in Vancouver, in the Pacific Northwest. Anyway, he was quoted as saying:
15:42
Aaron Lubeck: “In our lifetimes, the past forty years the West Coast cities have been run on a NIMBY-Trotskyite Alliance,” his words. And defining those roughly, He sort of dichotomizes them. the NIMBY group is a wealthier, whiter, more highly educated, but definitely a homeowner sort of vested interest that typically has a lot of their stature is created by broadcasting how good they are, there’s definitely a lot of virtue signaling that’s key to them having and maintaining power.
And they were partnered with, San Francisco is the most extreme example, with an underclass that was everything they weren’t, it was more likely to be of color, younger, renters, less educated, less privileged; and the only thing that they all agreed on was that home builders and developers were the a problem. And that alliance basically throws up San Francisco and the other West Coast cities since the seventies. And so the YIMBY movement can largely be defined as the split of that alliance.
I mean, it was basically the under class or people who didn’t have a home who said, “You know this kind of bullshit and we’re kind of done with it” and broke off. And you can see videos, Sonya Trous has some great videos, She’s sort of a godmother or whatever they call it of the YIMBY movement, and one that was influential on Reason.com, she just started showing up to planning meetings to vote for housing. They literally didn’t know how to handle that. I mean, they’d almost underscored the idea that planning commissions, the purpose of them was to prevent housing. It was not planning, and even that is a virtue signaling name. And she would show up and say, “I protest your twenty story Tower, because it’s not thirty stories.” And I think that that severed the alliance that had existed, and sort of created a new one. I think you can define the alliances that work now tend to be a lot of that advocacy group. But also there’s clearly local alliances that need to have people who range from academics who are reasonably pro housing, young people who want to live in the city but are shut out, young couples, young families in particular. That’s a real sort of existential storyline, when people with two-year-old kids can’t live in the city at a certain point you’re sort of killing your city. It’s urbicide to some degree if you can’t reproduce your young families. And then in Durham. It’s interesting, because, you know, this is a town that’s about 44 percent Black and has a really interesting African-american politics. But there’s very proud middle-class tradition here, with the Black Wall Street, with Bill Freelon who designed the African-American history museum, is an architect here, and a middle class community that I think is separate from that white wealthier crowd that has really run land use for years. There is a sort of a reasoned pro-housing voice that has done reforms here to eliminate single-family zoning, implement small lot houses that have really taken off, and do those sorts of reforms.
19:09
Jess: I have a curiosity. And this is just an opinion question. I don’t know that we have any data in the housing sector for this, but I think a lot about the study that showed that Americans, particularly white Americans, were willing to deny themselves benefit if it was going to benefit Black people or poor people, or whoever they weren’t. And the specific example in the study that I’m thinking of was health insurance. They didn’t want comprehensive health insurance for everyone, because it meant Black folks would have health insurance. And going back to your conversation earlier. When you were talking about people developing ADUs, and the citizen builder, I absolutely love that phrase. I would want maybe “community builder” even to kind of detach the citizen aspect from it. But anyway, thinking about zoning and policy processes and planning processes that facilitate small builders also happen to benefit large builders, and a lot of times in our conversations locally, we hear them shot down, for the latter reason, and not really the former reason. And I’m wondering, Do you think that there’s the same logic at play there? Why can’t we help folks? And part of what I’m getting at is you’ve talked before about how modern zoning practices are an extension of Jim Crow practices, for you more explicitly, since you’re in the South. For us It was more de facto rather than de jure, but we definitely, the North took all of our plays from how the South were doing it, and we just changed the language a little bit. So, anyway, I’m just wondering what you think about that.
20:45
Aaron Lubeck: Sure, and racial Covenants actually were very common in the Midwest. St. Louis in particular. Well, in Detroit actually as well,
Molly: Ann Arbor, too.
Aaron Lubeck: So there’s a lot to unpack there. I’m trying to think of where I started.
Talking about an objection to zoning reform is that, “Well, this is just going to help big guys,” at least here in the South that they’re doing sprawl, two hundred unit apartments, or maybe a three hundred unit apartment complex downtown. And so for me there’s almost three scales of this There’s sort of a downtown developer who is usually, you know, private equity backed, or some local, but a big, you know thing. And they’re usually big guys who are local, bg guys who are national tend to be suburban sprawl. And then there’s this sort of beautiful city building in the middle, which is the urban tier walkable, a lot of single-family homes but kind of you know Seventh Street, Burns Park, I wish I could remember more neighborhoods of Ann Arbor but I can’t but anyways, like the part we think of as the city, and that’s really where it’s only like tends to be focused the most, because that’s the part of the city people are passionate about, and people feel like it’s their own.
So the average citizen’s not going to own part of downtown, but they can in the neighborhoods, and then people just aren’t as passionate about the suburbs. And so I think, when you do reform, It’s nuanced. But there’s ways to sort of tilt the playing field back in favor of the local because it’s been so tilted through proceduralism, which we’ll get into later, towards big corporate interests. And they’re the ones that are doing the national builders and stuff downtown, And so how do you open it up again for the local people? Because I think the evidence is pretty overwhelming. They’re the ones who are going to do cool stuff. They’re the ones who are going to be the iconic places. They’re the ones that are going to do pocket neighborhoods. And so you know, the first thing to do when you’re in a hole is stop digging, so stop punishing those people is the first thing to do, and that’s parking reform, that’s single-family zoning, there’s procedure stuff, there’s lot size, a couple of handfuls of zoning reforms that are really the first batch of things, but I think that particularly with neighborhood commercial, you can actually create codes, that dollar tree and Dollar-general aren’t attracted to, to allow local people to build a local bar but have a lot small enough where dollar tree just isn’t interested.
I feel like you asked a couple other questions and I don’t remember what they are.
Jess: It was a toothpaste tube of questions, they’re all in here and I’m just rolling them out, it’s fine.
Aaron Lubeck: On Jim Crow there’s so much to unpack, as we were unearthing Durham’s code we were coming to the conclusion that you know what, it really does feel like you could make the case that zoning is the new Jim Crow, and somebody corrected me and said, “that’s kind of hyperbolic and untrue, because zoning is the old Jim Crow, too.”
It’s not contextualized that way, and I’ve found that for all you see about racism and land use, partially in the housing advocacy there’s a larger problem that zoning is so nuanced that in my experience the only people who really truly understand the pain points are the ones who suffered on the front lines, which tend to be the architects, builders, and engineers. And it sounds like you’ve got Jenny Schuetz coming on soon, which will be amazing. But that’s a perfect example of somebody who’s doing this day in day out, is an academic. And as a researcher who is really well-respected. Same thing with Nolan Gray, who is a friend of mine who wrote Arbitrary Lines, that they can research sort of the effects of it, but the pain points of why it’s not working. It almost involves a personal tacit knowledge with submitting the permit and dealing with Bob behind the counter, that can only come from suffering it.
And so we saw, we were looking at the reductions in Durham,I encourage you guys to look at the city clerk notes. In the South a lot of these are related to the Fair Housing Act of 1968. We had in Durham urban renewal, took out a substantial swath of the Black neighborhoods in 1967. The freeway came through in 1968, and the Fair Housing Act basically for the first time made it so you could not discriminate based on the color of race. Right at the same time we’ve removed the houses for, from my math, forty percent of the Black population. So right after that is, when we came up with our first technocratic zoning code, which went from sixteen pages to all this wonkiness that experts created to create parking standards and minimum lot width and all this, And so the historic district that I lived in went from seventy families an acre eight. So for me it’s not a coincidence, and I have to be careful saying this, cause when it’s presented it makes it sound like There was a conscious effort to be racist or a neighborhood was choosing to be racist. I think the vast majority of people in Durham and in Ann Arbor, aren’t and have never been racist. I mean. Most people want to do good. I think planning at its worst and zoning at its worst, makes decent people acts in discriminatory ways, and it does it in a way that’s sort of subversive and not clear. And so they don’t understand it, and that’s It’s a really dangerous thing, and those legacy codes are very much still on the books across the country.
26:37
Jess: it is, and I I think what you’re saying really points out the urgency of being actively anti-racist. I think we as individuals, even as white individuals, can have good intentions. But if we’re not actively resisting the systems and the power structures that we know are racist and are grounded in race, there’s an article that we point to in Ann Arbor. It’s a letter to the editor in the late 1970’s, That somebody was advocating for large setbacks and easements because that meant that it would necessarily entail larger lot sizes, and the person in that letter was very explicit in saying people of color, and they didn’t use quite so nice a phrase, would have a harder time buying into the neighborhood that has a large setbacks and easements. So Our language has evolved, but we know that they’re grounded in actually very explicitly racist and racialized ways. And so I hear what you’re saying about nice people. That phrase actually kind of makes me cringe a little bit, because I don’t think it’s enough to be nice,
Aaron: Correct
Jess: and I know that I’m preaching to the choir. But you know, as a white woman, I feel like It’s really incumbent upon me to say I am in a system that tends towards the comfort and privilege of white people, and it’s important for me to recognize that and find the ways that it does that.
27:55
Aaron Lubeck: Yeah, there’s a really good book on that exact topic. Called Snob Zones, a Boston Globe writer talked about four cities, and it’s beautifully pastoral country towns of New England that use every trick in the book to keep their way, and prevent people from joining it. And there was a lot of you know, “we’d love to have you in our town, Jose, and you can build on any three acre minimum lot you can find.” Yeah. So my experience with that is that That attitude still absolutely exists, and I think it’s buried for various virtue signaling tactics. I think it’s where you see it, and this is very present in college towns. Twenty years ago, at MBA Schools the triple bottom line Philosophy was like, I think it’s still taught a little bit. It was super buzzy, like ten, fifteen years ago. So you know, there’s a financial bottom line, which is the clear, simple, straightforward one, and then the sustainable bottom line and an environmental bottom line.
In a college town. You will never see a housing argument for people self-interested, that “I don’t want housing to go here, because it’ll affect my housing values.” It will always be phrased as a social good. “I don’t want housing here because of gentrification, affordable housing, historic preservation, or for an environmental reason: trees, stormwater, stream buffers, whatever.” In college towns, one hundred percent of the objections that you hear will fall into that trichotomy.
Molly: Absolutely. It’s so familiar. They’re all really familiar here. This is one of the reasons we wanted to talk to people in other cities: because Ann Arborites think we’re special, like oh, Ann Arbor is so unique and unusual, and no one else has these problems. For you to just rattle off like literally every objection we hear in Ann Arbor really gives a lie to that.
Jess: Like – I love us! We’re great! but we’re not unique. We are a city in America, and we act like it.
29:51
Aaron Lubeck: That comes down to re-empowering the people. It’s hard to do, because college towns tend to be this college town affinity and collective. People in advocacy will want the city to do something, and the city can’t really do stuff most of the time; like, people want the city to build and the cities don’t actually do that. Yeah, it’s hard to get people to change. As you know.
30:21
Jess: – Speaking of people, I wanted to talk about something. This is a conversation that I actually find pretty difficult to have with most folks, because either they have not been exposed to it, and they don’t have the experience to be able to talk about it; or they’re still in the middle of being traumatized, and it’s difficult for them to speak about it from that aspect.
I was really struck in our early conversations: when we were getting ready for this episode, and I asked how you wanted to be introduced, you approached it with a deep intentionality and specificity. You were like, Yes, to this; no, thank you to this, and – I hope it’s okay to mention your language – you said to be careful about it, because there are people who, quoting directly from you, said they want to see you swinging from a tree. Whether or not that’s literal, I take very much the point that that is the intensity of feeling that people bring to housing advocacy and housing activists. So the first thing that I wanted to do was start by acknowledging that: to start by saying, just having an opinion in this area is often not about disagreeing with people intellectually; it is about getting battered – in meetings, online, in relationships. I think this is one conversation that housing activists don’t have enough; whether we’re right or wrong on specific points (and I think “defund the police” people and for sure organizers like the Movement for Black Lives see similar things) it’s not, “Your ideas are bad.” It’s, “You are a hateful human being.” (And that’s the nicest possible way I can put it. So…I’m curious. I have a million thoughts on this, but I’m curious why you think people feel so strongly about it that they’re going to come at you and call you names? I’ve gotten – I’m in Ann Arbor, right? We are a small town with a lot of trees – and I’ve gotten accused, seriously, of being a Koch brothers’ shill. Somehow I’m a stand-in for those people because I want more housing here. So I’m curious why you think people’s feelings are so strong, both in person and online; and I would like to hear you talk a little bit about how abusive it can get, not to the point of re-experiencing it, but I just want to highlight for our listeners, and for people who may not swim in the river of housing conversations, how intense and sometimes how bad it can get.
32:47
Aaron Lubeck: Sure, Yeah, it was a lot to unpack there. I think that there’s a solid discourse generally in our country. Certainly it exists for housing discourse. There’s been friction points, and in some ways they could be seen as a positive thing. I think it was Amory Lovins who runs the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado, he has this great quote: “You know you’re making progress when the status quo starts to freak out.” So the people who are for Gandhi’s quote, “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.” So we’re in some stretch of that spectrum, and I think that as much as it sucks to be in conflict, those are actually some signs of success. From a builder’s perspective, it’s a little bit different than the advocate, because the advocate is just having fights that are sort of irritating. You can’t convince people, you get called names and so forth. One of the ways that I think YIMBYism works is that it brings people who are at risk in their communities who are putting their butt on the line to build something, we’re usually signing personal guarantees to execute that project, are brought into the public square for abuse by people who aren’t doing any of those things. So that’s a very big difference between the active practitioners and the advocates, and one of the reasons I hope people become both of those. The problem is that proceduralism kind of creates this asymmetric warfare, where some people have everything to lose, and other people have everything to gain at no cost to them. This has really descended over the last 25 to 20 years. I think people who are executing on what I would call America’s planning process in most cities is really a distributed vetocracy: anybody can stop anything for any reason. They’re really determined through procedures or through reviews in California, their CEQA reviews that is – actually, I would go a step farther in saying that the people who are doing that have literally no cost to them if they fail. None. What that’s caused is for people to be really dishonest. Journalism should call them out as actually we’re seeing happening on podcasts like yours, or locally, we have a great ragtag outfit called Triangle Blog Blog of Chapel Hill.
35:11
Jess: I love that blog! Melody Kramer, I’m one of your biggest fans!
Aaron Lubeck: It’s unbelievable. I grew up in Chapel Hill through 1984, before I moved to Ann Arbor, and like nothing even close to that existed in Chapel Hill. I don’t have even the slightest objection to that. So I think there is a fight back on that. But people have, for most of the last twenty years, been able to lie in the public square at no cost to them. I think that that’s changing.
35:39
Jess: I want to point out, too, they can do that at no cost to them; and it genuinely feels like most of our public processes are geared towards getting to a No rather than getting to a Yes. We have so many opportunities for projects, and I’m not even just talking about housing projects – infrastructure projects! I mean, Molly, you’ve talked about this with transportation all the time. The process basically invites folks who are antithetical to what’s happening, and gives them a buffet of different ways and mechanisms and levers which they can mash the “No” button and that gets heard.
Molly: “Are you sure you want a sidewalk here? Well, what about you over here? Do you all want this sidewalk? What if you have to shovel the snow? Do you still want the sidewalk?” It’s like pleading. “Is it okay?”
Jess: “If we have a bike lane, if it takes away two parking spaces, please? No, it’s not okay? Got it.”
36:25
Aaron Lubeck: There’s a larger problem in American planning that has shifted away from landscape architecture, which is what the field was originally, and what it should be, toward engagement. It’s hard to critique engagement. But what that function means is, all you can do is ask questions, and they actually see some really really bad survey design in that field, because they’re not trained in it, and then getting design feedback back. I’m a designer-builder. So if you came to me and said, Hey, we want to build an ADU. The process in any process to build, whether it’s by plan or an ADU, is program -> design -> build. Program is, how big is it? How many bedrooms? What’s your budget? I can actually get through most programming exercises in like fifteen to thirty seconds; but in public planning, we see processes to go ten years, never getting out of programming. I call it Groundhog Day planning, because at the end of the ten-year engagement go back to the beginning,
I think Michigan will be better at this, because it does have a good planning school, and it has an architecture school here. Here in North Carolina it’s very separate. I think it’s critical that if you have any family members or kids interested in urban planning, they have to draw. Like they just have to draw. You don’t have to draw well! But you have to draw well enough to convey an idea. You have to draw a street section. You have to do a site plan. Just to say, What if it’s better this way? Because otherwise we really – it’s a huge problem. We’re in a perpetual loop of discourse. It’s worse in the college towns, because everybody’s inclined to just have meetings.
38:01
Jess: Well, and to consider them themselves experts. And – and I say this with a lot of respect and affection – the number of times that I’ve seen a neurosurgeon or an aerospace engineer or somebody come on and give their CV, PhD credentials and then talk about why they know better than the traffic engineers – it’s one of my funniest jokes that I love to hate.
38:30
Aaron Lubeck: Right. “I have a PhD in ethnopharmacology; let me tell you about housing.” I forget who the author was. But he came up with a home-voter hypothesis like 20 years ago, that people basically vote their property interest. I think it’s in land use. I would bet that NIMBYism actually correlates to home ownership, homeowners are more protective against more homes; but I actually think it correlates with educational attainment. Overwhelmingly the people who are most against new housing are people with terminal degrees. In the college town obviously there’s a lot of medical doctors, but medical doctors – actually, strangely, a lot of planners are against housing. Not all. I want to be really careful; most of my friends are academics. They don’t spend every week in time to prevent shelter for other people. It’s not all academics, but the most vitriolic, it’s a really big overlap with the terminal degrees.
39:22
Jess: *whispers* I’m not going to out Molly as an academic.
39:51
Molly: Jess, did you have any other things you wanted to cover?
39:55
Jess: I do. I don’t want to get all the way into the issue, but you’ve brought up a phrase a couple of times, and I’m wondering if you can just define for us and our listeners “entitlement proceduralism,” and how that shows up.
40:10
Aaron Lubeck: Sure. Entitlements being, can you build a project by right or not? Which means that you’ve got a lot on, you know, State Street: what could you build there without having to go into the public square and go through public process to build it there? Usually it’s a single family house, maybe a duplex, but not a 30-story apartment building. What you see in the planning processes is that when people want to do more with their property, it goes through a rezoning or a variance process, and that can be very expensive, very long, fraught with political risk, and so forth. And so entitlements are a big chunk of what developers do now. It used to be, developers would have the property, build it, and then sell it off. And now it’s become so difficult to do this process that they’ve actually specialized, where some people just entitle the land; then they sell to somebody who just builds it; then there’s somebody else who manages it.
The entitlement proceduralism really just has to do with how hard it is to get your rights to build something, particularly something good. You see all sorts of good stuff with the organizations I’m associated with, like the Congress of New Urbanism: walkable communities, denser housing, community-based design, and so forth. Almost all of which is illegal to build in most cities in America. The challenge is, How do you get the rights to build something good? The better question is, Why should we have to ask permission to build something good, anyway? But the fact is that it’s pretty much like this all across America.
The proceduralism is just the ever-growing difficulties of getting those approvals. They’re substantially worse in wealthier communities; they’re substantially worse in college towns. We kind of track it two different ways. In Durham (we should have an Armageddon Clock or something) but two ways that we see it now – to get a rezoning in this town is: one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and eighteen months –
Molly: Wow!
Aaron Lubeck: – which basically eliminates every small builder in the community, and that’s only at risk when people don’t understand that. So if I want to go approve a pocket neighborhood of twelve homes, I have to put one hundred and fifty thousand dollars on the craps table. If it doesn’t go through, or Council is having a bad day that day, or whatever else happens in that eighteen months – which is a very long time! – that money is a complete loss. So nobody will do it. Nobody’s willing to do that. That’s the cost of proceduralism.
42:42
Jess: This is one of the things that you were alluding to earlier, about discouraging small, maybe non-professional developer folks who just have some land and want to do something with it. They cannot withstand that time and that cost; they don’t have the resources. Most of us don’t.
Aaron: I think that’s absolutely right. Development is becoming more corporate because of that, more uniform, more suburban and more “Everything looks the same.” I’m sure you guys have Texas donut apartments like we do –
Jess: I don’t want to talk about it, Aaron.
43:20
Aaron Lubeck: It all looks the same. So you take these beautifully creative towns that look like Ann Arbor, and Durham, and make them all look exactly the same. It all looks like a strip mall now. That’s the cost of eliminating your local talent. People built affordable housing for most of these cities’ existence. That’s been squashed out in the last twenty years. Now we’re absolutely at risk of losing our local builders, who are mostly up-market now, but they still exist. I encourage you guys to reach out to them, get to know them, hear what they’re hearing and why they’re not doing things. It will tell you a lot about the city.
44:02
Molly: It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy. The people who object to development are like “Oh, it’s so corporate! Oh, it’s so ugly!” But those are the only ones who can build anything. Yeah, it’s a feedback loop.
44:18
Jess: And then they use the same thing to say, “Look, things are getting so expensive. Aren’t you glad we didn’t build more?” and you’re like…Oh. I can’t.
44:26
Aaron Lubeck: Well, and to Molly’s point it really is a downward spiral. People are active with participatory planning, they’re not happy with what’s getting built, they call for more procedure, which eliminates more locals, which means that it’s more corporate, which makes it worse, which calls for more procedure. So this is how you get to eighteen months for a rezoning. It’s yeah, it’s a tiny little a college town.
A good friend of mine develops in Grand, North Carolina, forty miles west of here. Nice, very clean kind of North Carolina town. It’s a hundred and fifty bucks, to rezone, and he’s like he’s in like this sort of fun game where the Council keeps turning him down because he’s like the big urban developer there. He just keeps resubmitting the zoning, and he’s like there’s my one hundred, there’s my application again. Then they turn him down. And he does it again next one.
So there really is a cost to – I guess it’s bureaucracy, but more specifically it’s procedure: if it takes that long, and then you have to go to a million public meetings for this or that to do it, nobody’s left who’s willing to do it. It’s a big problem.
Jess: There’s a thing out in Portland. I don’t know what size a community has to be for this kind of mechanism to be tenable – in Ann Arbor, we have a thing called a Design Review Board; it is essentially an aesthetic check-box for downtown projects. Any project that’s in the downtown that, I think, is of a specific size has to go through the Design Review Board. To be fair, it’s practitioners, it’s folks in the building industry who are for the most part offering reasonable critiques. But it does extend the process, and the cost, for everything. In Portland they have a thing called a Design Review Board. I want what they have, because it is also a commission of volunteer practitioners; but their job is to scrutinize the City, take measurements on how long each kind of development takes, and to offer their feedback on what would make it more efficient? What would make it more effective? What would streamline things? The city of Portland legalized ADUs in 1998, it took them over ten years (I think I am remembering this correctly) for them to start producing even double digits in a city of half a million. Their practitioners were saying, The process is torturous. We can’t find all the forms. The tax information isn’t online. That kind of real-time, people-on-the-ground feedback could be really useful. Are we being commissioned to death? I don’t know; we have so many, and there are so many openings, and it’s hard to find people. But I feel like that would be something that’s useful.
47:03
Aaron Lubeck: Point of fact, in Portland they came out with a really great report on ADUs that was very thorough four years ago. They’re now permitting more accessory dwellings than single-family homes in Portland, which is kind of mind-blowing. It wouldn’t shock me if L.A. is that way too with their permits, their curve has been amazing.
47:20
Jess: Amazing! And they came out the gate strong. They had something like a thousand permits in the first year.
47:21
Aaron Lubeck: It shows a latent demand that’s been squeezed, that opens up once you realize. So that’s great to see.
What you’re describing with the Portland board, which I was unfamiliar with – I know a lot of the advocates out there that do really good work – what I’ve suggested a couple times, and never got any traction on, was the splitting of Planning Commission, which in Durham is 14 people. One or two have practical, risk-bearing experience; the others are citizen advocates, a variety of realtors, and so forth. But it’s really hard to find fourteen people with experience, which you really have to have to be able to do that job, and so the rest becomes feelings. You can present something pretty technical, and then people say, “I don’t know…traffic?” and they vote it down. It’s just not a professional conversation.
What I’ve suggested is splitting that into two, and you basically have two boards. One deals with cases which is really the Planning Board: rezonings you approve or you deny, but Council ultimately has to say; it’s really advisory. The other one is a process board, which is exactly what you’re talking about. It has to be staffed with practitioners and staff. It has to be people who’ve read the zoning code, have suffered the local process. It’s purely advisory; it can’t rewrite anything. But it’s a mechanism to say, you know what, this has prevented good stuff, so maybe twice a year they either go to the staff or the city and say, these are our recommendations to make a better City; this is the case. Then Staff can willingly overrule them, or the City can change them, but this is what’s necessary. To my knowledge, that doesn’t exist anywhere in the country outside of Portland. What you’re saying is the first time I’m sort of loosely hearing of it. It’s actually kind of mind-boggling we don’t have that. In the college town, I’ve been amazed at vitriol, even when the city tries to talk to its practitioner community. We had two meetings four years ago that they brought in builders, including some, probably a third of the group, who were not builders There’s still people who complain about that meeting that happened four years ago. Like: the whole idea that the City could engage people who understand this stuff is…enraging.
49:49
Molly: I have a pair of questions to wrap us up related to our get-informed and get-involved tagline. The first one is, for people who want to get more informed about something that we talked about today, where should they look?
50:02
Aaron Lubeck: I’ve for about close to ten years now been really involved in going down the rabbit hole of the Congress of New Urbanism, otherwise known as the CNU, which started forty years ago as a full-throated rejection of modernist suburbia that had become the norm in America over the last fifty years. It’s sort of a fighters’ group that tries a variety of ways to make cities better. It’s under the direction of the new executive director, Rick Cole, who is a mayor of Pasadena, a really good leader, who, I think, is taking it in great places. He does an annual congress (this year’s in Charlotte), I believe the last week of May, for people who particularly like urban city building to join the party.
50:54
Molly: Awesome, that sounds great. And so, then, for people who have listened to this conversation, who want to go and get involved around one thing. What would you want it to be?
51:04
Aaron Lubeck: I’ve got a couple of things.
Advocacy is so needed. At the end of the day, houses get built by swinging hammers, and the builders are doing all the difficult work. It’s really hard, and that Ann Arbor needs, and that Durham needs. So: become an incremental developer. If you’re in the advocacy world, read your code, build an ADU. I think Habitat’s the easiest loop for me. Anybody who’s serious, I think all affordable housing conversations should happen on a Habitat site. Moving out of the conversation into doing is what has to happen, and you have to look for the best first steps to get that done, and go do them.
52:01
Jess: I want to capture something that Aaron alluded to a little bit ago. We are still lining up all of our interviews for this season, and our very next episode actually isn’t an interview. It’s a ballot explainer for the November General Election. Of course, Ann Arbor has for the most part largely decided its city council in the partisan primary, and we know all of you guys voted in that: good job. But as a reminder, our general midterm election is coming up with absentee voting opening up in the next few weeks, so we wanted to make sure that we did a ballot explainer in advance of absentee so you guys had a sense of what’s going on, including, of course, that the “Reproductive Freedom for All” ballot proposal did actually make it on there, as it should have! So that’s great. But right after that is our next conversation, and I am so delighted to share with you guys, that we are going to be talking to Jenny Schuetz. Jenny, if you don’t know (totally you should, obviously) is the author of the amazing book, Fixer-Upper. It’s a really clear and accessible look at the multiple systems that produce and inhibit housing, from the federal all the way down to the hyperlocal; and and offers solutions for policymakers and advocates every step of the way. AND somehow manages to make the whole thing English?? Talking to her is awesome. Her Twitter is great. If you’d like to understand more about why housing is so sticky, and what we can do about it here in Ann Arbor, I’m so excited to invite everybody to tune into the Jenny Schuetz conversation.
Molly: And just one more little piece of bookkeeping, which is this little tiny THANK YOU to everyone who nominated us and voted for us: We are officially the best local podcast of Washtenaw County for 2022! We’re so excited, and we just wanted to thank you all so much.
And then a final thank you to Aaron Lubeck. Thank you so much for joining us today. This is a really great conversation, and I really appreciate everything you have to share. Thanks so much.
54:08
Aaron Lubeck: Thank you.
54:10
Molly: Okay!
And that’s it for this episode of Ann Arbor AF.
Come check out past episodes and transcripts at our website, annarboraf.com. Keep the conversation going with fellow Ann Arbor AFers on Twitter at the a2council hashtag and Facebook in the Ann Arbor Housing for All facebook group. And hey, if you want to send us a few dollars at ko-fi.com/annarboraf to help us with hosting, we always appreciate it.
We’re your cohosts Molly Kleinman and Jess Letaw; and thanks to producer Scott Trudeau. Theme music is “I dunno” by grapes. You can reach us by email at annarborafpod@gmail.com. Get informed, then get involved. It’s your city!