Today we are talking with Jenny Schuetz! In addition to being the author of the phenomenal book Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems, she is a Senior Fellow at Brookings Metro and is an expert in urban economics and housing policy. Before joining Brookings, Jenny worked at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C. and taught at the University of Southern California.
- Wanna buy FIXER-UPPER?
- Wanna know more about FIXER-UPPER?
- Wanna know more about America’s dysfunction(al housing policies)?
- To hear Jenny in her own words, you can catch her interviews with Ezra Klein on his NYT podcast and with Rachel, Jasmine, and Amanda on The Suburban Women Problem.
Come check out our episodes and transcripts at our website, annarboraf.com. Keep the conversation going with fellow Ann Arbor AFers on 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
Jess: Hi! And welcome to this episode of Ann Arbor AF. I’m Jessica Letaw, and I’m here with co-host Molly Kleinman. We both use she/her pronouns.
Molly and I think a lot about how to make cities better through affordable and abundant housing, safe for transportation outside of cars and community safety beyond law enforcement. We talk about these issues because we know whatever we’re trying to accomplish, we can’t do it alone. So we’re right here with you; learning how to get informed, and then get involved. It’s your city!
Let’s jump in!
Today we’re talking with Jenny Schuetz about her book, Fixer Upper, How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems. Jenny is a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, and is an expert in urban economics and housing policy. She’s the author of Fixer Upper. Before joining Brookings, Jenny worked at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C., and taught at the University of Southern California.
Before we get into the conversation, Molly’s going to do some election reminders for us.
01:18
Molly: Just a real quick reminder that election day is coming up on November 8th, and absentee voting has already started, so if you have your ballot already, you can fill it out and send it back. It’s not too late to request a ballot. Our episode last week gave lots of recommendations for who to vote for on local races, and also, the state propositions and the climate millage. We both came down pro climate millage in the end, and you can listen to our episodes about that as well if you want to get deep into the details of it. It’s also not too late to volunteer for any of the campaigns that you care about. They need volunteers, especially the weekend before the election and on election day. Even if you only have one or two days to spare, you can get out there and knock on doors and drop literature, and it will be a big help. Now, thank you so much, Jenny for joining us today. We are so happy to have you!
02:07
Jenny: It’s exciting to be here with you.
02:10
Jess: I’m wearing my Legalize Housing T-shirt and I feel like I’m wearing the band’s t-shirt to the concert. [As if at a rock concert] “Ahhh, we’re here! We’re talking about the thing!” So I wanted to ground this conversation in why you and why FIXER-UPPER? And it’s because I view your book as a necessary complement to COLOR OF LAW and RACE FOR PROFIT; where COLOR OF LAW gave us a deep historical examination of the racist underpinnings of our legal structure and our legal decisions, and RACE FOR PROFIT did a devastating but admirable job at outlining the private policies that complemented that. What you do is you go beyond those into offering solutions, which I desperately wanted from both of those books, and you also – and I appreciate you doing this before you knew me – put a little love letter into the introduction to organizers. What you said about housing is that “a coherent national movement has yet to take hold. Building political coalitions between younger, racially diverse renter households with affordable housing advocates could achieve broader, more durable policy improvements.” So those are some of the reasons that I felt like a conversation with you would be fun and be really productive.
What I wanted to start with is, you are really looking in your book at national systems. I’d like to tease out what might be unique for smaller communities. Say a college town. What regulatory challenges or landscapes are unique to places like this?
03:51
Jenny: Yeah. And one of the things that’s fascinating about talking to local groups about the book is that almost every locality is a microcosm of the national problems. The issue of not building enough homes, diverse kinds of homes at different price points in the right places. That’s almost universal. Building too many homes in places we shouldn’t be building them. That’s almost universal, too. Some of the generational tensions about who can buy a house and put down roots and security, that’s present almost everywhere. But I will say that college towns have maybe two or three features that are common across most of them, and they’re particular and often very hard to solve. One is that the demand for housing in college towns is really unusual; that you’ve got generally students and faculty, who are willing to pay a premium to be very close to the University to accommodate their schedules. And so you’ve got this very strong demand. Students who are often willing to live in group houses, so pack lots of people into a space which means they can outbid non-students who don’t want to live like that for the same spaces. You’ve got big institutional owners, the University, which has often very deep pockets and a very, very long time horizon. It doesn’t operate like a market landlord, so they may have a giant quad on super expensive land that somebody would love to build housing on and shopping centers on, but they’ll never sell it. So that makes the land very inflexible. I will say also that some of the long standing faculty who’ve lived in these communities tend to be a little on the NIMBYish side, and so that distorts the local politics a lot. You have all of these dynamics wrapped up together. And also, the college town provides a lot of jobs, but is not usually the entire region, so you’ve got spillovers with the neighboring communities. Sometimes the neighboring communities have maybe more land that they could develop, but they operate independently of the college town and of the university. So it’s very hard to coordinate and get to a well-functioning regional housing market.
06:01
Jess: It’s interesting, in starting to have these conversations, we talked to Aaron Lubek from Durham a couple of weeks ago. I got a couple of reach outs on Twitter from folks who I won’t name, who reached out in confidence, who felt this tension. They work for a university. They themselves are in college towns, and don’t want to advocate publicly for housing, because the folks who manage them, folks higher in the administration, and their department are very publicly opposed, and they really feel a tension between their own political leanings and their professional needs, and how they feel like they need to perform professionally. And that was the first time that that specific tension occurred to me. But it looks like it happens in multiple communities.
06:48
Jenny: Yeah, I mean, I think we tend to forget. We assume that all the people who work at universities are full professors who make a ton of money, yet most of the people who work at universities are staff. These are the administrative assistants in the departments, and people who work in the dining halls and the dorms, and all of the support staff. They generally don’t make a ton of money, and they are some of the people who have the hardest time affording housing within a reasonable commuting distance of their jobs. And many of them actually wind up working odd hours; if you’re the janitorial staff, and you clean dorms, or you work concessions at the football stadium, you work really strange hours. You may really want to be close to your job and have a short commute. But you also can’t afford to outbid six students who come from wealthy families, and are buying up group houses close to campus.
07:41
Jess: what you’re talking about, one of the things that I’ve been a little bit frustrated by, is that living in the backyard of the University, whose program I matriculated out of, whose scholarship I largely admire and appreciate, mostly ignore Ann Arbor, and I feel a little bit… Oh, Lord, I forget the word, but the shoemaker’s kids, we’re not the sexy one to pay attention to.
My next question I want to ground a little bit. I’m thinking about the fact that actual redlining maps, the literal redlining maps, are limited to cities of a certain size or larger, and what that does is allows places like Ann Arbor in the absence of any other information, to point to that lack as having always been on the right side of history, when, in fact, we know better. And I think in the North in particular, and I’m saying this as a Southerner who moved to the north and was like “yay! I escaped racism,” and then I was like, “Oh, wait!!” Northern communities outside of the Jim Crow South often point to the lack of Jim Crow laws as a lack of discrimination. When historians and more importantly, folks with lived experience can point very consistently, to the discriminatory experiences that they’ve had. “How can we be racist?” The logic goes, “when we have obviously never done racist things.” And what I’m saying is, there is a lack of scholarship often around, especially around the history and the policy history of places like this. So I’m curious if there’s anything that you can speak to about the gaps in scholarship for research that would help smaller municipalities and rising to meet these challenges.
09:26
Jenny: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a great point that a lot of the research on certainly urbanism focuses on the big cities and focuses often on places that are worse, and even things like the the research that we have on zoning and places that have really exclusionary zoning, which we know makes it hard for low income households, and particularly Black and brown households, to move into some of these high opportunity communities. Most of the research that we have is on big cities, and it’s on places like California and Massachusetts, which we know are terrible. But nobody’s written the history of zoning in Ann Arbor, or, for that matter, in Chapel Hill or in Ithaca. And so we have a blind spot on a lot of these places. And I hear what you’re saying about within the North likes to think of itself as, “We didn’t have Jim Crow laws, and we’re not Birmingham. Therefore we’re okay.” I lived for seven years in the Greater Boston area, and greater Boston had some horrific fights over desegregating schools through busing. It’s all of the small small towns, many of which think of themselves as very progressive outside of Boston., but because they are really small, and they all run their own school systems, and the housing is really expensive, there are no Black families who live here. “It’s not that we wouldn’t welcome them!” Well, yeah, but how many Black families can afford a two million dollar house? So you’re excluding people indirectly and then patting yourself on the back that you’re actually very progressive and virtuous.
10:59
Molly: That sounds so much like Ann Arbor, and in particular, the schools and the school segregation issues which, I can go off on that for a long time. But Ann Arbor didn’t officially desegregate schools until the nineteen eighties, and it was under threat of a court case. My inclination is to put “desegregate” in air quotes because our schools are still quite segregated, and the ways that housing segregation has shaped that, it’s pushed people of color into certain neighborhoods, and it also means that even within the city, we do a little bit of this busing. If you look at the school maps, there’ll be a random island of Burns Park kids who don’t live in the very wealthy Central Burns Park neighborhood, who are zoned for Burns Park, and they’re getting bused in. But most kids who go to the school can walk there, and so even within the school, you then have this divide between the kids who are nearby and within the neighborhood, and the kids who are getting bused in. But people don’t talk about Ann Arbor as a school system that uses busing to solve the segregation problem.
I have so many thoughts and feelings about the way this plays out, especially in the schools my kids go to, but I think what this brings us to in terms of your book and your work is around these intersections between housing and schools, and housing and transportation. And you talk so well about how these things are all connected. But I’m wondering if there are particular details again, in those smaller towns that you see as distinct from other places.
12:40
Jenny: Yeah, I mean, this is one of the really important takeaways of the book is that housing outcomes that we see are really tied up with a lot of the other policies that we have that aren’t explicitly about housing. So I focus a lot on the role of zoning which affects how much housing we build and how much it costs. But it’s also really linked to things like schools, because schools are paid for by property taxes on the homes that we have. And so how valuable the homes are in a community affects the revenues that you have to pay for this, and a lot of places that don’t want low income kids going to the schools, and we can be pretty blunt about it, that’s what they’re trying to do. If the only homes you can build are worth a million dollars, then you don’t have low income kids who live in your town, and who go to your school, and you need to pay for their schooling. And so a lot of these decisions that local governments make about their schools and their transportation systems, and investments in things like parks and sidewalks. All of this is tied together in the neighborhood amenities. When you choose a house, you’re getting access to all kinds of other stuff, and the value of those amenities affects the price of the house or the rent of the apartment that you have. So we can either create opportunities for people to move into places with great public schools and great transit and great jobs, and parks and great neighborhoods, or we price them out of it all together, because the housing is really expensive.
14:10
Jess: One of the section sub headers that you have in your book (I just love how you’ve got a sense of humor that leaks out on a regular basis) was something along the lines of, “Measuring how strict zoning is is like holding a moonbeam,” which I appreciate! And you also talk at one point about how municipalities struggle to measure the impact of their housing policies on renters. And you call out, I think, three or four specific impacts that we know are happening, like who people choose to rent, to how frequently they’re turning over, things like that. But we really don’t measure, and then act on them. So I’m curious. If you were to recommend especially smaller cities, college towns to measure something new, or measure something differently, what that might be, or what that might look like, even if we don’t necessarily have a tool for it yet.
15:04
Jenny: One of the things that I would love local governments to think about more and measure is how long it takes to build homes, and especially homes of different kinds. So, apartments that people rent versus single family homes, local governments don’t actually track this. There’s some points in the process. The developer asks for rezoning, or asks for a building permit; and when the building is completed they do an inspection and give their certificate of occupancy. But an awful lot of the development process occurs before there’s an official ask from the local government. A developer may spend, three or four years talking to local officials, and already doing community meetings and doing outreach and paying their civil engineers and their architects to come up with designs trying to prepare the images of what the the finished project is going to look like before they file the first request for a permit that shows up in the data. So when you talk to local governments and ask them, How long does it take to build an apartment building? And they’ll say, Oh, from the building permit applications to certificate of occupancy is eighteen months; and you talk to the developer, and they say, actually it’s seven years, cause I spent four and a half years doing the pre-development stuff, and the reason the finished apartments are super expensive is because I’ve got people on my payroll for four and a half years in pre development. If we could shorten that time period by half, the apartments would be a ton cheaper. Local government officials go, I don’t understand what you’re talking about! And one of the things I’d like them especially to pay attention to is, How long does it take to get a single family subdivision of homes for sale through the process vs. How long does it take to get an apartment building for rent through the process? My guess is that in a lot of places the rental housing takes longer and is actually more expensive because of all of this process and pre-development.
17:01
Jess: Listeners, I need you to know that I’m dancing in my chair as Jenny is talking, because this is one of my favorite drums to beat. And this is one of the times that I want to point to Portland because of their Design Review Board. Ann Arbor has a Design Review Board that is an aesthetic arbitration of buildings that happen downtown. Portland’s Design Review Board is pointed at the city. They measure how long their processes take and how expensive they are, and they look at different development types and the job of the Board is to make recommendations to staff and to policymakers to help developments go through smoother, more predictably, more transparently. And so I would love to see what you’re talking about. what to measure. Oh, let’s do that. Let’s do that thing
17:47
Molly: and this also feels like the moment to talk about Builder’s Remedy, which has been this hot topic this week on Twitter. It makes me think of pirates, and “Act of Grace!” for builders where you call it out, and suddenly, they don’t kill you, or suddenly you get to magically build housing where they weren’t going to build housing. Builder’s Remedy is this policy in California that, well it feels to me like it came out of nowhere, I’m sure to you two, you’ve been watching all of the steps that got us to this point. We’re basically… I’m going to explain it, and then you two can correct all the things I get wrong. A municipality in California has to have something called the housing element which has to conform with State law around basically zoning, and what you can build where and how tall things can be. And California has now passed some laws that say you have to be expanding the amount of housing that can get built in your town, and there has to be more affordable housing; and if cities are not complying, don’t have a compliant housing element within a certain timeframe builders can just call out “Builder’s Remedy” and build whatever they want as long as it’s 20% affordable? Kind of?
Can we talk a little bit about it? I know California’s special, and not all of it applies to here. But I’m curious. First, if we could understand a little bit better what that is, and then talk about what lessons there might be that we could bring into the college town context.
19:14
Jenny: Yeah, And I’ll actually, I’ll talk a little bit about the Massachusetts builder’s remedy because that’s been in place for something like thirty years now. We have a little bit more evidence about that. In Massachusetts it’s called Chapter 40B, which references the State statute. If cities and towns have less than ten percent of their housing stock that’s affordable to households at a designated income level, then builders are allowed to override local zoning and build something that’s not allowed under the zoning as long as it has at least ten percent affordable units. And so the idea is the super exclusionary suburbs where the entire community is zoned for single family homes on 2 acre lot sizes, and all of the housing is really expensive. Those are places where a developer could go in and say, “Hey, here’s a parcel of land. It’s zoned for single-family. But I want to build apartments, and I’m going to set aside twenty of those for low income families,” and the local jurisdiction gets an option to say, “Okay, we get that. We’re out of compliance with the State law. And so we’re going to allow your proposal.” But if the local government says “we won’t let you do this. We’re going to fight it,” Then the builder gets to go to a State agency, and the State Agency essentially arbitrates it. And so the nice thing about that is local governments that absolutely don’t want to build rental housing, and anything that non rich people can afford, there is an option for developers to go in there and build stuff that doesn’t require the local government to play ball.
And the interesting thing is that there are some localities that are actually okay with that kind of development. They just don’t want to go through the process of rewriting their zoning, because that’s really contentious and hard, and takes a super long time. So they do what are called friendly 40B’s for the developers. I want to build some apartments, and some of them will be low income, and the community is like, “Yeah, great. Go ahead and do that. That’s better than us rewriting our zoning code, and having to fight through it!” It works on some level, and in Massachusetts we have enough time frame to see. There are a bunch of a bunch of 40B projects that have been built; a bunch of rental housing in places that wouldn’t have allowed it otherwise. That’s great. There’s some designated affordable housing in pretty expensive places. What it doesn’t do is fix the underlying zoning. So those places that have super exclusionary zoning still have super exclusionary zoning. They’re still building less than they would otherwise they’re still more expensive than they would be. There’s this little loophole to it. So it’s better than not existing at all. It’s not as good as all those places should rewrite their zoning and allow townhouses and apartments by right everywhere.
22:01
Molly: The thing about that I’ve seen folks honing it on with the California Builders Remedy is this idea of skipping through all of that process, that the Builders Remedy is a way to circumvent all the stuff you are talking about, that it takes seven years to build an apartment building. The trade off is you have to build this affordable housing that maybe wouldn’t have penciled, except that you’re skipping the first four years of process. And now you can afford to put in some affordable housing. Is that accurate?
22:35
Jenny: Yeah, I mean how they would, how they would actually do the arbitration does matter. In Massachusetts there’s still a process. The builder has to apply to the local government and be turned down to then go to the State and get the approval. So it’s not like an overnight magic wand, you can go build it, but it’s much much faster than going through the normal process, and it essentially gets you out of potential litigation, which is really important, and even more so, I think, in the California context, because the State Environmental Quality Act allows for people to sue. I think the builder’s remedy in California would circumvent the State Environmental Quality Act,
Molly: Wow.
Jenny: not one hundred percent sure of that. But if that is the case, that would actually be huge.
23:23
Molly: Right, because of course the Environmental Quality Act, as I understand it nowadays, like it was maybe intended so that you couldn’t build an asphalt plant in someone’s neighborhood. But now people are using it to do things like block affordable housing and block bike lanes and things that we understand are actually good for environmental quality.
23:42
Jenny: Yeah, the California statewide environmental protection law was written so broadly that basically anybody can sue to stop any project for any reason, at least temporarily. It’s really that bad, and so, at the very least, you can slow down a project in litigation, or even threatening to cause a lawsuit; you don’t have to file the lawsuit. You threaten to file the lawsuit, and this creates a whole lot of additional review and a lot of expensive process, and often scares off projects from happening altogether. And yeah, using an environmental law to block bike lanes is a great example like this is failing at its primary purpose.
24:21
Jess: This isn’t exactly in that bike lane. But this is a burning question that I have for you out of the book. One of your subsections is called – and those who are reading along this is “Overcoming the limits of localism” chapter – there’s a subhead that says, “Policies popular with local voters may harm broader, regional or national well-being.” We see that all the time: we’re making decisions, we’re protesting, based on what’s happening on our block or on our street, and we’re not thinking about streets, first of all streets as public goods, and housing as a regional infrastructure. So my question is really for policymakers, How can we help elected leaders think through policies that are popular vs. the ones that are harmful, because it’s really easy to do the things that people are asking for, and harder to do the things that we know that we need but take longer to implement are much less popular. But that as an elected official it’s really hard to get behind it, stay behind it. How can we, as a community, help bolster people who might want to do the right thing, but might feel swayed by, let’s say the loudest voices.
25:35
Jenny: That’s a great question, and every community is wrestling with this. I think there are three strategies that are emerging that can work. One is trying to change the decision making process from a project by project decision to an occasional city wide one. If you think about, instead of the community coming out to vote on every single apartment, building or every single bike lane, or bus stop that gets added, The city is supposed to make a plan at some point that is forward looking. It says, over the next ten years we expect population to increase by X amount. Therefore we need to add a certain amount of housing. Let’s look at our overall zoning and our neighborhood plans, and bring them into alignment with the growth that we need. But once you have that zoning code, and that comprehensive plan or neighborhood plan, then that’s the end of the community engagement process and projects they’re allowed to just go forward. You do the community engagement for the citywide plan every ten years, and then stuff is allowed by right, and people don’t get to veto every project case by case during the community engagement process.
It’s also really really important to get people who will benefit from the changes to show up to the meeting and be heard. And that’s the piece that’s typically been missing. We have these project-by-project meetings, and everybody who shows up are the neighbors who have lived there for thirty years, and who vote in every election, and who call and write letters to the City Council. And they’re the ones who show up and say, yeah, I don’t like it. We don’t need apartments. We shouldn’t change the character of the neighborhood, you know. God forbid! You cut down a tree: “This will enhance global warming and cause gentrification all at the same time. We can’t do this.” You need to have people who show up and say, Hey, I’m a renter, and my rent is going up, and I’d love to have more apartments, so I have more choices. I’d love to have apartments in a neighborhood that I can’t afford to live in now, so I could afford to move there. And part of the problem is that many of the people who would benefit most from these changes. Don’t currently live in the community because they can’t afford to, or they’re future generations who don’t even vote and don’t exist yet, we’d like our elected officials to think about future generations, and not just the people who are here now. They often forget about that. Having people show up at these meetings helps give them political cover, reminds them that there are votes on the side of change and not just against change. The third level is to move decision making from the local level up to the state level, and I’m going to put a little asterisk in this. That’s what California has been doing is taking away some of the power from anti housing, anti growth localities, and the State legislature creating a framework for builders to move forward and to make the housing more diverse. The state level politics are not that easy; fighting this battle in the legislature instead of at City Council doesn’t solve everything.
The other thing that I think is pretty important in states like Michigan is that we’re trusting that the State Legislature has the best interest of localities, and especially of vulnerable populations at heart; that the State is trying to make things better for people who don’t have the political power. Low-income and Black and brown communities are often excluded from the local political process. If the State can weigh in on their behalf, that’s helpful. If this State is not benevolent towards vulnerable populations, they could make it worse. We can look at places like Mississippi, where the state chose not to invest in Jackson’s water system. If the state chooses to behave badly, they could actually make things much worse. And Michigan doesn’t have the best relationship with its cities and its poor communities.
29:36
Molly: Yeah, when you talk about that, the first thing that comes to mind to me is our emergency manager law, which was more nationally known under Rick Snyder about ten years ago, because it was an emergency manager who argued that the city of Flint should switch water sources, and that was what led to the water crisis: an external emergency manager who was prioritizing basically getting the city’s debts paid over the lives of the people who actually live in the city. We see that played out repeatedly across the State of Michigan; the State’s been draining the city of Detroit, bleeding it for decades and decades. And so I don’t think we can look to the State here the same way.
We also have the challenge when we layer on transportation, again, of being the home of the Motor City. Car brain is bipartisan here, and Gretchen Whitmer, our current Democratic governor, who is very important for a lot of reasons is terrible on transportation. I mean, she ran on the platform of “fixing the roads,” and the only thing she meant by that was for cars. Why are we still widening highways? And there was this “innovation corridor,” where there’s all this money going into this very magical-thinking project of a road that’s gonna charge electric vehicles while you drive on it. And also, it’s gonna be for autonomous vehicles, which – these things don’t exist yet! But we’re building a highway for them! Meanwhile, we don’t have a train between Ann Arbor and Detroit. There we have a bus. (We barely have a bus.)
So if the Michigan State Legislature wants to preempt local government’s ability to create protected bike lanes, that would be bad. That’s already what we’re dealing with when we have MDOT roads. Michigan Department of Transportation controls some of the roads that go through our cities, and they don’t let us make the safety improvements that we need on those roads.
Jess: They don’t even make the safety improvements they themselves recommend. They have a Complete Streets Initiative; they just don’t like it anywhere.
32:02
Jenny: Yeah, I mean on the transportation side it’s a little bit easier, maybe, to kick things upstairs one level because most of the transportation funding is actually passed through from the federal government. The Biden Administration is trying really hard to provide more funding for non-car transportation, and also to use the transportation funding as a lever to get local governments to fix some of their land use. So they have these new pots of competitive grants. Local governments can apply for money to do a new light transit or bus rapid transit or something, but in order to qualify, they need to show that they’re going to allow housing and retail next to the transit station, which is not crazy! We should have been doing this thirty years ago! So they’re moving in the right direction with the big pots of money they have which are on the transportation side. But the same kind of logic applies; like, I love what the Biden administration is doing. You could imagine an administration that is gonna turn that around, and it’s gonna switch the transit funding back to being basically all about cars and will limit local governments being able to do better things.
32:55
Molly: What I’m getting from this is that Builders Remedy is not probably Michigan-specific. We’re not going to be able to do that in this state for maybe a while, or maybe ever.
33:06
Jenny: That’s probably true. Yeah, Builders Remedy, as best I can tell, is only done at the state level because it’s really intended to equalize the burden of affordable housing in some ways across different political jurisdictions, and to take back some of the authority from local governments. I live in the District of Columbia, which is this weird city; we’re a quasi state. One of the things that our mayor has done is to set forward a goal, a quantitative goal, for how many housing units we need to build based on their expectations of growth and did this publicly. We need to build 36,000 more units by 2025. And the really key thing is, she said every council ward has to build some. The super affluent places that haven’t built any housing in thirty years have a target; they have a number they’re supposed to hit, both for overall housing and for below-market-rate, affordable housing. And once you have those numbers, whether those are the right numbers or not, there’s a goal out there; and then you can measure it! Either we’re making progress or we’re not. Some of the neighborhoods are making good progress on their goals, and some of the neighborhoods aren’t building anything; but having this – a city like Ann Arbor could do this, too, and balancing this across neighborhoods to make it clear. Nobody gets to opt out. Nobody is going to be preserved in amber and immune from growth. I think that sets a really important expectation.
34:38
Jess: I need to give myself a little Jenny-flavored high five here because I did a mini twitter thread on Builders Remedy in Ann Arbor, and what I said was, We don’t need that; what we need are targets. Thank you very much for again speaking directly to our city Councilmembers: Give yourself a target! Hold yourselves accountable!
Speaking of city council, I know that you guys are going to run out and get copies of FIXER UPPER; we’ll tell you at the end of the episode how to do that! Read the whole book, but feel free to skip to page 160; it’s a table called, “An Action Plan to Fix America’s Housing Systems.” It’s like a cheat sheet! So get the book and read the table. (But read the whole thing, too.)
35:24
Molly: It’s also a very good and very readable book; as someone who struggles to read non-fiction, I was flying through it when I finally picked it up.
Jenny: There’s an audio book. So if you’re sitting in your car in Michigan, driving around doing your errands, you can be listening to it. You can have my thoughts in your brain!
35:45
Jess: Listeners: I have FIXER-UPPER; it’s post-it noted, there’s highlights on every page; really I had to pick and choose what I wanted to ask about, because the real answer was…everything. But I know what I wanted to ask that wasn’t in the book. Okay, Jenny:
What’s your favorite report to read?
36:14
Jenny: Well! The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University every other year puts out a report called the State of Rental Housing, and it is a page-turner! It has all of the information you’ve ever wanted to know about rental housing. It’s a little bit on the horror genre, or the tragedy genre, because it’s usually on the depressing side. But it’s super super helpful. It’s a nationwide overview focused specifically on rental housing, which is really important, because a third of Americans rent their homes, and low and modern income households are much more likely to rent than own. So this is squarely in the equity space. It gives you a lot of trends that are really helpful for understanding what’s going on in the market and calling out: what are the areas where we’re not making progress? What are some of the causes for this? So that should definitely be on your must-read list.
37:07
Jess: Oh, man, I love that. Earlier this year I did a Top 10 list of my favorite municipal reports. That was on my list of things to ask you. One of the cool things about the Joint Center is, when they issue new reports, they do a live webinar, and generally it’s a panel conversation about the contents of the report. Your description of it as horror slash tragedy genre is hilarious (and also devastating). I live-tweeted the last release of the rental housing report, and it ended up being this rage tweetstorm, I think I had fifty in there; but it was so quotable, and it was extremely juicy. It is a cattle call of issues with rental housing in our country, but to me it also increases the urgency of talking about getting renters on our boards and commissions and getting renters elected forefronting renter issues in a way that I’m excited about. Ann Arbor is moving in that direction. We do now have a whole Renters Commission; they just started meeting a few months ago. They’re learning how to look at Ann Arbor’s legislative landscape from a renter oriented perspective, bringing us more in line with our goals and our stated values. Ann Arbor really wants to believe that we are on the side of our vulnerable neighbors, and I think in our hearts we are. But that space between where we have the vision and where we make the plan is a tense space, and we do not always land on the execution of the plan on the other side of it.
38:42
Jenny: Yeah. Ann Arbor is in good company (bad company) in that regard. You know, most of our big cities are majority renter; certainly a lot of college towns, a lot of smaller communities have big renter populations. My favorite group of political scientists Katherine Einstein, David Cliff, and Maxwell Palmer, out of Boston University, have done a fascinating study where they dug through the personal financial disclosures of elected officials for local, state, and federal agencies, and categorized all of the elected officials as either owners or renters; and the astonishing thing is that even in majority renter cities, the vast majority of elected officials are homeowners. People run for office when they’re older when they’re a little bit wealthier when they’re more established – but the people who run cities own homes!
One of my favorite examples of why this matters came in the last New York City mayor’s race. The New York Times asked all the mayoral candidates to guess what the median value of a home was in Brooklyn; they’re all homeowners who bought their house twenty years ago when it was a lot cheaper, so they’re going, I think the median house in Brooklyn is $300,000. Actually, it’s just shy of $1,000,000. They were all off by a lot! If you’re a renter, you know whether your rent is going up; you know what it costs to buy a house because you’ve been looking. And so you’re more conscious that this is a problem and it’s something that needs to be dealt with
40:21
Molly: Even Ann Arbor, which is not that big, is majority renter, we’re 45-55%. Yeah.
40:30
Jess: I want to fangirl an entire chapter in your book, and then I want to call out a Twitter question that somebody posed right before we recorded.
Thank you – on behalf of somebody who has said on this podcast that homeownership is not my ministry, I want to appreciate you for chapter five, “Homeownership should be only one component of household wealth.” That’s all I want to say. I want readers to go in and read this and understand that when we’re talking about housing as a public good, as a social good, we are often often having different conversations about whether we’re talking about housing as a means for wealth generation versus housing as access to opportunity, which is a proxy for access to schools, access to jobs, access to a lively community that we want to be in. For those of you who are a little bit stuck on this idea, and would like to learn more, please gravitate towards chapter five.
41:31
Jenny: I want to say really quickly, about that, there are a couple of framings in that chapter.
Depending on what you lean on, I think it’s not great that as a society, we push everybody into homeownership, and (you know this) create some of the really toxic politics we have with all of these NIMBY homeowners who are super protective of their housing values.
Jess: Your name “home voter” was really on the nose.
Jenny: I didn’t create that; a bill officially invented that. But it’s such a perfect description!
But I think probably your audience will also understand the other framing, which is that it’s not always the case that investing all of your savings in a home is the best financial decision for you. Right? Think about the timing of the market, and where you buy; if you bought a home in Detroit or in Flint twenty years ago, the equity that you invested in that home isn’t going to build up as much wealth as if you had rented an apartment and put your down payment into the S&P 500. In some parts of the country where housing prices have actually gone down over time, you have less wealth today than you did before, because you put it into a house in a neighborhood that wasn’t appreciating. If you bought a house in Flint, you’re then locked into a community. You can’t pick up and move from someplace easily to someplace that has healthier drinking water. People really need to be serious about thinking about, Does this work for you? This is not a solution for everybody, and we shouldn’t expect it to be.
43:07
Jess: As with health care and women’s reproductive care. We should be expanding options!
43:13
Jenny: Right on!
43:14
Jessica Letaw (she/her): Vote Prop three, Michigan! Why is the of that keep going?
Okay. Melody Kramer on Twitter I posted the question: We’re talking to Jenny, what would you like to ask? Melody Kramer, who’s in the Chapel Hill/Carrboro area, said: ”I’m curious if there’s research on how and when to engage in discussion threads on social media, if it’s useful, when it’s useful, what might be the most effective.”
43:47
Jenny: I don’t know if there’s research specifically on the social media question. My guess is, there are probably people in the communications space who do that? I will say, from my personal experience, engaging on social media can be really helpful to reach other people who agree with you, and to know that there’s a community out there, including things like crowdsourcing solutions to problems that pop up elsewhere in the housing space. There are lots of communities that have similar kinds of problems that are trying to lobby their elected officials, and learning what other places have done successfully is really helpful! And there’s some networks specifically for pro-housing advocacy groups. I would push you towards the Welcoming Neighbors Network, and towards YIMBY Action, both of which try to connect groups and help them share success stories and learn from each other. Twitter is great for that.
Part of this goes back to our earlier question about, How do you persuade elected officials to do hard things when they are unpopular? It’s actually not always clear that the hard decision is unpopular in a broad sense. It’s unpopular with a handful of very noisy people; they’re very noisy people in person, and they’re very noisy people on Twitter; but they’re not always the majority. So I think social media can be useful for getting broader knowledge and awareness of an issue to reaching out beyond the handful of people who show up at Tuesday night and fuss about something!
But there are also some new tools to help, like polling. Rather than just ask the people who live in a neighborhood, try polling. Our transit system, WMATA, finally started getting feedback on changing bus routes from people who ride the bus; they had staff who would get on buses and hand out little flyers, asking, Hey, people who ride buses, what do you want the bus service to look like? Instead of asking people who drive cars what you want bus service to look like? Which, by the way, gets you a really different answer. Your local planners can help think through, How do you reach this broader community and engage with them? Students are a hard population to engage on local issues because a lot of them think, I’m just living here for a few years; maybe I don’t even not register to vote here; I’m registered in my parents hometown. But students have a lot to gain from some of the stuff that we’re talking about: more affordable housing, more non-car transportation. If you can figure out a way to tap into those populations, that’s probably a good group to reach on social media. Probably not Twitter so much, maybe it’s on Instagram; but try to do strategic outreach to the people who don’t normally engage. And social media is one of the tools to do that.
46:37
Molly: The University of Michigan has an urbanism club of undergrads who care about urban stuff, and they invited me to come speak as Transportation Commission chair, and it was great! They’re in all different disciplines. It’s not just the Planning students. I, of course, gave them quite the lecture about voting and signing up for boards and commissions and all of those things. But I think it is really tough to engage the students, and it’s become a truism, at least in Ann Arbor, that students don’t vote, and that putting a lot of energy into courting their votes is wasted effort. But even if they’re not going to vote here, I think the point you’re making is that there are other ways that they can share their opinions and their needs and help move the needle on some of those stuff.
47:26
Jenny: And circling back to what elected officials are doing, that’s harmful. A lot of local and some state elected officials have made it really hard for students to register to vote in the place where they go to school, and that’s intentional, because they’re trying to get younger people to not vote. All of our systems are stacked in favor of older people who’ve been in a place for a really long time and have deep established roots. But, younger people have different needs and preferences, and if we could get them to show up and vote the old folks out, we get some better policies.
47:58
Molly: We actually do in the past couple of cycles. They’ve set up polling places on campus, not just polling places, but a whole City/County Clerk’s Office. Go in and register to vote, get your ballot and vote all in one place right on campus. However, our primary, where the City Council is decided, is in August, when they’re not here.
48:27
Jess: It’s not just in August. There’s no communication from the University about the primaries. There’s only communication about the general, and while I support that, can we please do both? And can we please let students know that the elections that really impact them most, that decide where they live and how they get to school, are decided when they’re not here? Can we amp up that communication to University of Michigan people? New president Santa Ono, If you are listening to this, can we please enfranchise students to vote in the primaries? It would make such a difference.
49:00
Jenny: I mean that this is one of these little institutional details. I live in a city that’s basically all democratic. The entire decision that gets made about who’s going to be running in the general is made in June. You show up at the primary, the winner of the primary is going to win in November, guaranteed; but lots of people don’t show up in June because their brain doesn’t say, Oh, it’s June, therefore it’s time to show up to the election! This is entirely stacked in favor of the incumbents who are already in power, and so they have no interest in changing it.
49:30
Jess: A hundred percent.
To your question, Melody, and to this question about elections: I’ve thought a lot about this. As somebody who lives in a community that is also somewhat of a news desert, a few years ago we were really only having conversations about development, A at dinner parties, and B in the comment sections of what news articles we did get. It was a trash fire. It was horrible. I didn’t want to yell at the people who were yelling like that; it felt so dysfunctional and so toxic. The way that I’ve thought about it since I’ve been in community organizing around housing and affordability for almost a decade is that in any given conversation, let’s say there’s a hundred people who are affected: two are arguing for, two are arguing against, and ninety-six have no idea that the conversation is happening. I want to talk to the ninety-six. I really want to get the folks who are affected, but not involved. I want to get them informed, and I really want folks to come into the process, whatever the process is. Even if it’s dysfunctional: understand how it works, and then bring in your voice.
Melody, and other folks who are struggling with that as well: you know your community, your situation, whatever everyone is doing. My answer was not to have online fights with people with strong opinions. I did create an online forum; it started as Ann Arbor YIMBY and went through a couple of evolutions, and is now Ann Arbor Housing For All. But most of my work is done offline, in relationship. That’s really where I spend my time and my energy. I have found that fulfilling, rarely exhausting, productive; not not always with wins, but in terms of where I’m investing my time, my energy, and my love, getting the fuck off platforms that don’t care about me and into a community that does has been really important.
51:25
Jenny: Yeah. Melody is really active in the Chapel Hill area group, and they do a lot of work offline. But you’re 100% right. You persuade people through relationships. You persuade people by having conversations with people, by figuring out what motivates them, what they care about, and then tapping into that and tying into it.
I was pretty conscious of the audiences I was trying to reach with the book. I’m not going to convince the hardcore NIMBYs, right? People who are already on board with this; the two people who are in the conversation going, “Yes, we want more housing!”: you know they don’t need this. It’s helpful hopefully to provide some backup. But they’re already there. But you’re right. There’s this huge amount of people who would benefit from different policies, from different outcomes, who aren’t really engaged, who don’t show up, who don’t vote on this stuff. A lot of them are persuadable, and that’s who we need to be talking to and explaining to them what it is that’s broken about the current system; how our current policies are failing them; and how we can make this better. But until we get large groups of people out and get engaged with this, we’re not going to beat the deeply entrenched forces.
52:38
Molly: Yeah.
So as we wrap up, if policymakers in particular were to read one chapter from your book, which one would it be? And why?
52:49
Jenny: The first chapter. It’s basically a Cliff Notes version of the entire book. I am trying to make this super easy. You can start the table of contents, which each of the chapter titles is like a policy recommendation. There’s that one table in the last chapter. That’s the list of all of the recommendations. I’ve tweeted that out! I’m not hiding the ball anywhere: this IS the policy recommendation! Pick it up and run with it! But the first chapter captures all of this.
I think there are two things that are important for non-housing policy wonks to take away from that.
One is that housing is so deeply connected to all of the outcomes in our life that we care about. This is where you live! This is where your kids go to school! This is your access to economic opportunity! As long as housing systems are broken, all of the other outcomes are going to be bad.
The other one is that this really is a system of a whole bunch of policies. Local zoning, climate, transportation policy are funny for local public schools. Our federal income tax policy, all of this stuff, layers on top of itself. And at the moment, many of these policy systems are pushing us towards bad outcomes. To get to better outcomes, we ought to change a whole bunch of them. We need to change our federal income tax policy, as well as our zoning policy, and understanding how these things are connected is really important, partly because they’re also set by local, state and federal. You need to care not just about your local election. You need to care about your Congressional election, your governor, your school board, all of this stuff fits together.
54:25
Jess: All right, so y’all are already convinced: Jenny knows her shit! She knows what she’s talking about. Go; find more of it. She did an interview on the Suburban Women Problem podcast – which, by the way, what an awesome name! Well done, ladies. She also did a fantastic interview with Ezra Klein, please go listen to it. Of course we’ll drop links to both of those in the show notes, as well as links to where you could find the book, and a Brookings article, “Dysfunctional policies have broken America’s housing supply chain.” All of Jenny’s many smart words.
Jenny, I wonder if you can take us into the end of this episode by reading the last paragraph of your book?
55:04
Jenny: “Reforming our current housing and landing systems will shake up the groups of winners and losers. Rolling back exclusionary zoning across enough localities to improve regional housing production and affordability will require affluent homeowners to accept changes in their neighborhoods, and local governments would likely have to cede some control over land use policy to state or federal governments, or pay financial penalties. Providing adequate rental assistance to all low-income households and ensuring decent quality infrastructure to all communities will require well-off voters to pay more in taxes. The elected officials, from mayors to governors to the President, are understandably reluctant to deliver unpleasant news to their constituents; but the only way we can move toward a better future is to present Americans with an honest, direct assessment of our current problems and concrete proposals for reform.”
Jenny: Get out and vote! Get out and call your local elected officials! Don’t get into Twitter fights; have conversations with your neighbors.
Let’s get this done!
Molly: And that’s it for this episode of Ann Arbor AF! Thank you so much to Jenny Schuetz for joining us today. Go get her book, FIXER-UPPER; listen to her other podcasts that she’s done; read those articles. She’s fantastic!
Also, you can come check out past episodes and transcripts of Ann Arbor AF at our website, annarboraf.com; keep the conversation going with fellow Ann Arbor AFers on Twitter at the #a2council hashtag, and on 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 co-hosts, Molly Kleinman, and Jess Letaw; and thanks to Producer Scott Trudeau. The 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!