Podcast appearances and mentions of nolan gray

comparing approaches housing crisis yimby strong towns nolan gray

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 13, 2025 91:06

The Building Culture Podcast explores holistic solutions to crafting a more beautiful, resilient and thriving world through the built environment. Its host, Austin Tunnell, recently invited Strong Towns President Charles Marohn and California YIMBY's Nolan Gray onto the show to debate the housing crisis. It was a great conversation that explores how these movements align and differ in their approaches to housing. ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES The Building Culture Podcast. Nolan Gray (Twitter/X). Chuck Marohn (Twitter/X).

Michael Monks Show Hour 1 | Zoning, Malibu Fires, and the Worst Christmas Songs

KFI Featured Segments

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 15, 2024 32:31 Transcription Available

Michael kicks off the hour breaking down the big rezoning decision in LA with guest M. Nolan Gray from California YIMBY, exploring its impact on housing, equity, and the city's future. Plus, an update on the Malibu fire containment efforts and a dive into the most cringe-worthy Christmas songs—do they make your list? All this and more on a full moon Saturday night in LA.

christmas california housing fires malibu christmas songs monks zoning worst christmas yimby kfi nolan gray

Key to the City

Booked on Planning

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 10, 2024 32:59 Transcription Available

In our latest episode we are joined by Sara Bronin, the brilliant mind behind "Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World." With a blend of historical insight and visionary thinking, Sara navigates the intricate world of zoning, advocating for strategic enhancements rather than radical abolition. Imagine neighborhoods unshackled from outdated regulations, poised for vibrant growth and adaptability. Discover how zoning can be a catalyst for cultural resurgence with examples from cities like Nashville and Chicago, and how it addresses (or ignores) environmental challenges in areas like Scottsdale and Tucson. This conversation promises to reshape your understanding of zoning's potential as we explore how zoning transcends private domains to revolutionize public spaces. Show Notes:To help support the show, pick up a copy of the book through our Amazon Affiliates page at https://amzn.to/491LWOJ or even better, get a copy through your local bookstore!Further Reading: America's Frozen Neighborhoods: The Abuse of Zoning by Robert ElicksonArbitrary Lines by Nolan Gray and check out our episode recording with Nolan here.The Power Broker by Robert CaroThe National Zoning Atlas project mentioned by Sara: https://www.zoningatlas.org/ To view the show transcripts, click on the episode at https://bookedonplanning.buzzsprout.com/ Follow us on social media for more content related to each episode:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/booked-on-planning/Twitter: https://twitter.com/BookedPlanningFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/bookedonplanningInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/bookedonplanning/

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#29 DEBATE: Chuck Marohn & Nolan Gray - Strong Towns & YIMBY Approach to the Housing Crisis

The Building Culture Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 26, 2024 92:28

In this episode, I sit down with Chuck Marohn from Strong Towns and Nolan Gray from California YIMBY to tackle one of the most pressing issues of our time: the housing crisis in America. It started with an exchange on X (Twitter) where I saw Nolan and Chuck disagreeing. Surprised, I asked them on the podcast to discuss areas of overlap and disagreement between the YIMBY movement and Strong Towns. They were kind enough to agree. In this episode we discuss the complex web of factors driving housing unaffordability, from financialization and zoning laws to the ripple effects of inflation and outdated building codes. We dive into the historical context of these challenges and debate the influence of investors, policymakers, and local governments in shaping the future of housing. Along the way, we uncover where the Strong Towns and YIMBY movements align—and where they diverge—especially on the role of financialization in housing supply. TAKEAWAYS Financialization of housing has created a feedback loop driving up prices, turning homes into investment assets rather than places to live. Zoning and building codes play a critical role in either enabling or hindering the ability to increase housing supply. There is significant overlap between Strong Towns and YIMBY movements, particularly in their shared focus on practical, community-oriented solutions to housing challenges. Local governments can play a crucial role in financing housing development and supporting small builders to create a more diverse housing market. Accessory dwelling units (ADUs) offer quick, scalable housing solutions that align with incremental development strategies. Policy changes are essential to create a more flexible and affordable housing market that meets the needs of diverse communities. CHAPTERS 00:00 Understanding Housing Affordability and Supply Chain Dynamics 02:46 Introduction to the Debate: Strong Towns vs. YIMBY 06:29 Exploring the Financialization of Housing 12:32 The Role of Financialization in Housing Crisis 19:11 Historical Context: Financialization and Housing Policy 24:07 The Impact of Institutional Investors on Housing 29:15 Navigating the Future of Housing Affordability 31:03 The Impact of Financialization on Housing Supply 34:46 Addressing the Affordability Crisis 39:57 The Role of Local Governments in Housing Development 43:42 Zoning, Financing, and the Housing Market 50:56 Inflation and Its Effects on Construction Costs 57:51 Balancing Incremental Development with Market Needs 01:02:36 Addressing the Affordable Housing Crisis 01:11:01 The Role of Incremental Change in Housing 01:19:19 Financing Solutions for Accessory Dwelling Units 01:27:40 Debating Tax Increment Financing (TIF) Strategies 01:30:17 The Future of Housing Movements CONTACT NOLAN & MENTIONED RESOURCES: X: https://x.com/mnolangray?lang=en Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/mnolangray/?hl=en Website YIMBY:https://cayimby.org/author/nolangray/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mnolangray Book:https://islandpress.org/books/arbitrary-lines#desc CONTACT CHUCK & MENTIONED RESOURCES: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/charlesmarohn/?hl=en Strong Towns Website:https://www.strongtowns.org/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlesmarohn Books:https://www.strongtowns.org/book Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/marohn/ Strong Towns Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/strong_towns/?hl=en CONNECT WITH AUSTIN TUNNELL Newsletter: https://playbook.buildingculture.com/ https://www.instagram.com/austintunnell/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/austin-tunnell-2a41894a/ https://twitter.com/AustinTunnell CONNECT WITH BUILDING CULTURE https://www.buildingculture.com/ https://www.instagram.com/buildingculture/ https://twitter.com/build_culture https://www.facebook.com/BuildCulture/ SPONSORS Thank you so much to the sponsors of The Building Culture Podcast! Sierra Pacific Windows: https://www.sierrapacificwindows.com/ One Source Windows: https://onesourcewindows.com/

How Zoning Laws Shape Your Life | What Needs to Change?

Tampa Bay Developer Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 22, 2024 67:47

In Episode 95 of The TBD Podcast, Garrett talks with Nolan Gray, the research director at California YIMBY and the author of Arbitrary Lines. Nolan explains the roots of zoning in the U.S., how it affects housing and cities today, and what steps can improve these challenges. They cover topics like the influence of cars on urban planning, why housing has become so expensive, and how better rules can make cities more livable for everyone. This conversation gives you a clear understanding of how zoning impacts your life and what can change for the better. 0:00:00 - Nolan Gray introduction 0:01:31 - Why cities fascinated Nolan 0:02:13 - Housing affordability challenges 0:03:12 - YIMBY movement origins 0:05:10 - Suburban vs. urban development 0:05:47 - Inspiration for Arbitrary Lines 0:07:42 - Federal involvement in housing 0:08:56 - Suburbanization of America explained 0:09:35 - Evolution of zoning rules 0:11:18 - Effects of land-use segregation 0:13:39 - Cars' role in zoning history 0:19:00 - Local entrepreneurship restrictions 0:21:39 - Race and zoning after WWI 0:27:30 - Housing affordability affecting middle-class 0:29:56 - Suburbs, cars, and urban form 0:32:40 - Managing parking for better cities 0:37:56 - Observing cities to plan better 0:43:20 - Preserving walkability in cities 0:47:11 - Rural vs. urban voting challenges 0:51:10 - Future of housing and demographics

Encore Episode: Inclusionary Zoning with Emily Hamilton

UCLA Housing Voice

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 2, 2024 65:34 Transcription Available

Cities have lived with exclusionary zoning for decades, if not generations. Is inclusionary zoning the answer? Inclusionary zoning, or IZ, requires developers to set aside a share of units in new buildings for low- or moderate-income households, seeking to increase the supply of affordable homes and integrate neighborhoods racially and socioeconomically. But how well does it accomplish these goals? This week we're joined by the Mercatus Center's Dr. Emily Hamilton to discuss her research on how IZ programs have impacted homebuilding and housing prices in the Washington, D.C. region, and the ironic reality that the success of inclusionary zoning relies on the continued existence of exclusionary zoning. Also, Shane and Mike rant about nexus studies. Originally aired in 2022.Show notes:Hamilton, E. (2021). Inclusionary zoning and housing market outcomes. Cityscape, 23(1), 161-194.Manville, M., & Osman, T. (2017). Motivations for growth revolts: Discretion and pretext as sources of development conflict. City & Community, 16(1), 66-85.Bento, A., Lowe, S., Knaap, G. J., & Chakraborty, A. (2009). Housing market effects of inclusionary zoning. Cityscape, 7-26.Li, F., & Guo, Z. (2022). How Does an Expansion of Mandatory Inclusionary Housing Affect Housing Supply? Evidence From London (UK). Journal of the American Planning Association, 88(1), 83-96.Schleicher, D. (2012). City unplanning. Yale Law Journal, 7(122), 1670-1737.Phillips, S. (2022). Building Up the" Zoning Buffer": Using Broad Upzones to Increase Housing Capacity Without Increasing Land Values. UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies.Background on the inclusionary zoning program in Los Angeles (struck down in court, but later enabled by the state legislature).More on housing voucher policy in our interview with Rob Collinson.More on minimum lot size reform in our interview with M. Nolan Gray.A blog post questioning whether new market-rate housing actually “creates” demand for low-income housing.Los Angeles Affordable Housing Linkage Fee nexus study.

How NIMBYism Broke the American City | Nolan Gray

Project Liberal

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 28, 2024 56:39

We're exploring how zoning, regulations, and NIMBYism have impacted America's cities in this episode featuring M. Nolan Gray, Senior Director at California YIMBY and author of Arbitrary Lines. Topics covered include: Why are housing costs skyrocketing across the country? How have zoning laws broken American cities, and what reforms could fix them? How should the YIMBY movement engage with communities resistant to new development? What are the best policy solutions for addressing the housing affordability crisis? How has YIMBYism gained traction within the Democratic Party?Join Project Liberal founder Joshua Eakle and steering committee member Shawn Huckabay as they engage in a timely conversation with Nolan Gray on the future of housing policy.Follow Nolan at https://x.com/mnolangray

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514: Zoning Out: How to Combat the Housing Crisis and Build Wealth

Get Rich Education

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 12, 2024 41:21

Research Director for California YIMBY, professional city planner and author of Arbitrary Lines, Nolan Gray, joins us to discuss how zoning impacts our communities, affordability of retail and commercial real estate. Zoning laws contributing to the affordable housing crisis and what we can do about it. Shifting from NIMBY to YIMBY mindset requires understanding benefits of growth. How zoning laws prevent new development, causing housing shortages and limiting entrepreneurship. California's statewide legalization of accessory dwelling units can be seen as a successful zoning reform example. We discuss how cities like Austin and Minneapolis have seen price stabilization by allowing for more mid-rise multi-family housing near transit and job-rich areas. Learn how to connect with local policymakers and planners to advocate for policy changes that encourage more housing supply. Resources mentioned: Show Notes: GetRichEducation.com/514 You can follow Nolan on X @mnolangray For access to properties or free help with a GRE Investment Coach, start here: GREmarketplace.com Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments. You get paid first: Text FAMILY to 66866 For advertising inquiries, visit: GetRichEducation.com/ad Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review” GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREmarketplace.com/Coach Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— text ‘GRE' to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Complete episode transcript: Automatically Transcribed With Otter.ai Keith Weinhold 00:00 Welcome to GRE. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, if you don't take the right action, inflation will make you poorer. Then the affordable housing crisis keeps your tenant as your tenant is zoning. What's ruining American cities in keeping starter homes unaffordable or just plain extinct in some areas, how do we get more apartments and more density built today on Get Rich Education. When you want the best real estate and finance info, the modern Internet experience limits your free articles access, and it's replete with paywalls and you've got pop ups and push notifications and cookies disclaimers. Ugh. At no other time in history has it been more vital to place nice, clean, free content into your hands that actually adds no hype value to your life. See, this is the golden age of quality newsletters, and I write every word of ours myself. It's got a dash of humor, and it's to the point to get the letter. It couldn't be more simple text, GRE to 66866, and when you start the free newsletter, you'll also get my one hour fast real estate course, completely free. It's called the Don't Quit Your Daydream Letter, and it wires your mind for wealth. Make sure you read it. Text GRE to 66866, text GRE to 66866. Corey Coates 01:38 You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is Get Rich Education. Keith Weinhold 01:54 Welcome to GRE from Calgary, Alberta to Tirana Albania and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm Keith Weinhold, and you are listening to get rich education. When most investors think about inflation, they get it mostly wrong. Their strategy is inflation hedging. And you know, even if you successfully hedge inflation, you are really missing out. You've really got to get fired up about beating inflation. When did you get your first job? Like your first real job in your life? Let's say you did that when you were age 18. Well, that work that you did when you were 18, that created value for somebody else. And you could have done anything with your valuable youth, but instead, you chose to provide value by focusing your time and your energy to sweep floors or enter data into a spreadsheet for somebody else. You were paid for that work that you did. You were paid in dollars, well, if you just tried to store your finite energy that you expended for that employer into dollars, you will lose. Your value will be coerced away from you by your government that just incessantly and relentlessly debases the dollar that you earned at age 18, because they just keep printing more of them. Well, that money printer, which creates the inflation is then an extraction of your resources. Yeah, they extracted your resources, of your time, energy and ingenuity away from you when you were 18, and even the work that you do today, its value will get extracted away from you too. If you say, store dollars under your mattress, if you instead invest it so that its growth rate keeps up with inflation, well, then all you've done is hedge inflation. My point is, get upset about how the system extracts resources from you. And my other point is, don't hedge. Hedge just means that you're treading water. Position yourself to win instead, because you can when you buy income producing property with a loan, you don't just hedge against the inflation. You win three ways at the same time. You probably know that's called the inflation Triple Crown, a concept that I coined. You can watch the three part video series on net, free. It's now easier than ever to access, learn how to actually profit from inflation, not just hedge yourself against it. You can watch that, and it's friction free. There's no email address to leave or anything. Simply watch learn and maybe even be amazed at how you can do this. Those three videos are available. At getricheducation.com/inflationtriplecrown, that's sort of long, so you can also get there with getricheducation.com/itc. Again, that's getricheducation.com/itc. Before we talk with our guests about how zoning is making the affordable housing crisis, even worse, housing values and rents are really looking stable in today's environment. CoreLogic tells us that single family rents are up 3.2% annually. That's the highest rate in a year. And when it comes to prices, the NAR tells us that existing single family home prices hit a record high of $426,900 and that is an all time high. And note that that's existing homes, not new. So median existing homes are basically 427k now. And what does that really mean? Well, that is up 4.1% year over year, the real estate market continues to be it's sort of this tale of the equity rich versus the affordability challenged. Are you equity rich or are you affordability challenged? Well, the more property that you own, the more equity rich you are feeling, that you're going to feel, and oftentimes you're renting out property to the affordably challenged. Of course, the big buzz and a potential really turning point in the economy here or not, it really began about 10 days ago. That's when America reported weak jobs numbers, and that set the unemployment rate from 4.1% up to 4.3%. Citigroup and JP Morgan are now predicting half point Fed rate cuts in both September and November, not just quarter point cuts anymore. I mean, gosh, if there's one thing that we really know, it's that nobody really knows anything. Starting about two years ago, everyone thought a recession was eminent. Bloomberg even said there was a 100% chance that we'd have one by last year. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Everyone thought there would be six or seven Fed rate cuts this year. Wrong, wrong, wrong. You can't even completely count out of rate cut at the next meeting. I mean, sheesh, before that time, we still have two new CPI reports to come out and another jobs report. So, you know, over the long term, this is just how people act. They tend to get ahead of themselves and overreact, and that's really more of a stock market investor sort of thing. And yeah, despite the volatility, you know, us real estate investors are here more chill than Snoop Dogg was at the Olympics. All this fear, what it does is it pushes money into bonds. And when money goes into bonds, it makes mortgage rates go down, and they recently hit 16 month lows near 6.4% and if rates stay low, millions of additional Americans will be able to qualify to buy property that couldn't before, and that could really put more upward pressure on property prices, more than this 4.1% year over year appreciation that we're currently seeing. We know that lots of investors are buying properties like you, getting equity rich and serving the affordability challenge. In fact, 60% of Home Builders indicated that they sold homes to investors from February through April, while 40% reported that they didn't sell to investors. And investors now represent wholly 25% of both new and resale residential transactions and among builders that sold to investors in the past 90 days, 69% of them sold to mom and pop investors. Mom and pop investors, they're loosely defined as those that own one to 10 rental units. They may very well be you. Institutional investors, those that own 10 plus investment properties in this home builders definition here. Well, those institutional investors, they accounted for just 4% of investor sales nationally. So again, more home builders are selling to small real estate investors, those that own one to 10 units. Well, now in almost 10 years of doing the show here, we've never had a full discussion about zoning, and really this is the time. Okay, this ends today because we describe how it's contributing to the affordable housing crisis and what we can do about it. I mean, anymore you really can't find a brand new build 250k starter home anymore, unless maybe it's a tiny home, which then really isn't a full home, and you sacrifice your lifestyle. Well, zoning is a big reason why the Supreme Court decision that deemed zoning constitutional that occurred in 1926. Yes, that's going to turn 100 in the year 2026 that Supreme Court decision that infamously referred to apartments as parasites. Wow. But yet is some zoning good? I mean, say that you and your family have your nice, quiet, single family home on an idyllic half acre lot. Well, if that's the case, should it be allowed that Bitcoin mining facility with its loud cooling fans is built right next to you I'll ask our guest expert about that, and what about say less offensive transgressions, like a condo board that says that you can't rent your unit out. How much zoning is too much or too little? I mean, is someone just being overly sensitive if a duplex is built next to their single family home and they complain about that? So we'll get into all of that. And it really comes down to limiting this McMansionization risk type of nimbyism, not in my backyardism. That's what it is. Again, you can watch the three free videos on how you can substantially and actionably profit from inflation, not hedge, but profit from inflation. It's the inflation triple crown. Be sure to check out those three videos at getricheducation.com/itc. I learned about this week's guest through reason.com we met in person at last month's Freedom Fest in Las Vegas. He is the research director for California Yimby, yes. Yimby, not NIMBY, that is yes in my backyard. And he's a professional city planner. He's the author of the book Arbitrary Lines, how zoning broke the American city and how to fix it. Welcome to GRE. Nolan Gray, Nolan Gray 12:24 thanks so much, Keith. It's a pleasure to be with you, Nolan, Keith Weinhold 12:26 you wrote one article for reason.com with such an interesting title, five words, Abolish Zoning-All of it, you're pretty emphatic there at what you'd like to have happen before we discuss that, why don't you tell us in your words what zoning is? Nolan Gray 12:44 So for the past 100 years, America's cities have been running a grand experiment and how they're governed. Essentially, what we've done, beginning in the 1920s is we said for every single parcel in the city, we're going to assign an allowed use. So most people, if you've played Sim City, you know this might be residential, commercial, industrial, but it goes into so much more detail than that. Different types of residential might be allowed in different parts of the city, commercial, etc, and the vast majority of most American cities, the only form of residential that's allowed is a detached, single family home, right? So that's one half of it, the second half of what zoning is doing, it's placing arbitrary density limits. So the amount of actual housing or amount of floor area that you can build on any particular lot. And it's important to distinguish this from other forms of land use regulation, because in many cases, these rules aren't actually based on any health or safety concerns, but instead a sort of social project of engineering what a correct city should look like. And as I argue in the book and we can discuss over the course of this conversation, is I argue that these rules have actually had incredible harms for our cities and are at the root of our current housing affordability crisis. Keith Weinhold 13:45 I think zoning initially, it began in New York City about 100 years ago. Nolan Gray 13:50 Yeah, so New York City adopted one of the first modern zoning ordinances in 1916 a handful of other cities did so as well. So I'm coming to you from California, Berkeley, California also adopted zoning in this year. And essentially, what happened after New York City adopted it was the federal government put together what's called the standard zoning Enabling Act. They mailed that out to every single state in the country and started putting a lot of pressure on states to adopt zoning and allow local governments to adopt zoning. And then, with the rise of the Federal financial system, as part of the New Deal, housing programs. In many cases, local governments were required or strongly, strongly incentivized to adopt the zoning codes to be eligible for certain federal benefits. Keith Weinhold 14:29 You know, maybe philosophically, one might think, Nolan, well, America stands for freedom, and I should get to do what I want with my plot of land. But if everyone can do whatever they want with their plot of land. I mean, does that mean that my neighbor then could start a sloppy hog farm, or the neighbor on the other side of me could start a battery factory with smoke stacks? So do those sort of things help make the case for zoning? Nolan Gray 14:57 Yeah, that's a great question, you know. So before the rise of zoning. And we actually had a lot of rules for these classic nuisances, these classic externalities, things like smoke, smells, noise, or even just lots and lots of traffic generation. We had rules to say, Hey, if you want to operate certain types of uses, you need to be in a certain designated area where we're going to tolerate a much higher level of externalities. Zoning does that, but it also does so much more. And it's those other aspects that I think are ill conceived. So for example, of course, we don't want a slaughterhouse next to a single family home, but zoning might also say, Oh, by the way, you're not allowed to have a duplex next to a single family home. You're not allowed to start a home based business. You're not allowed to operate certain commercial uses out of certain strip malls in certain parts of the city. You're not allowed to build anything unless you have a certain amount of number of off street number of off street parking spaces, which can make adaptive reuse of historic properties very difficult. So I think absolutely there's a core of land use regulation that makes sense, that's focused on neighbors, not imposing costs on each other, but our current system goes so much further than that, in many ways, imposes new and unconceived costs, including increasing housing prices, limiting housing options in many of our neighborhoods, making it harder to start a business or to have neighborhoods serving retail in many of our neighborhoods. Keith Weinhold 16:09 So perhaps zoning has just simply gone too far, and you touched on it earlier. It seems to me that about three quarters of the area of most cities have zoning restricted only to single family home building, for example, and they ban apartments completely. So maybe, as we try to find the right balance of how much zoning is right, tell us more about really the thesis of your book and why we should ban zoning completely. Nolan Gray 16:38 Of course, we need certain regulations for externalities and nuisances, and to certain extent that can be resolved through litigation, but ideally you look for it and you say, okay, look, there are certain areas where we're going to tolerate certain nuisances and other places where we will not. But beyond that, I think so much of what our land use regulations do is actually causing harm. It's preventing property owners from using their property in ways that are not in any meaningful sense, harmful to their neighbors. It's created this context where now if you want to build just about anything in the typical American city, you have to go through multiple public hearings, you have to do an environmental report in some states, you have to get the permission of local elected officials, you have to undertake all these actions that heavily politicize every new development. And so what we get is so many of our neighborhoods and so many of our cities are locked in amber. And this is partly why, over the last few years, where we've seen a huge amount of demand flow into housing, we've simply had these extreme shortages because markets could not respond with the supply that many of our communities needed. So for example, a starter home in many US cities today might be a townhouse, it might be a two bedroom condo, it might be a single family home on a 2500 square foot lot, but those are precisely the forms of housing that in many cases, our zoning codes make illegal to build. So we're essentially saying if you can't afford at least a certain level of housing, you're not allowed to live in many parts of the community, if in the community altogether, or the same with businesses, if you want to start a small business that might not necessarily have any impact on your neighbors, you might require a special permit. You might require a hearing. You might require to attend a hearing where your competitors are going to show up and oppose your project, purely on a cynical basis. So what it's done is it's created this incredibly disruptive system that's prevented our cities from being entrepreneurial and adaptive, and I think this is the root of a lot of the problems that we're facing today. Keith Weinhold 18:17 Oh, you really surface some good points there Nolan, when I think of over zoning, and we talk about how a lot of times you can't build anything more than a single family home, that certainly creates a lot of problems. Gentrification is sort of a bad word, kind of sprucing up community so much, raising the value so much, that one problem is that familial bonds decay when children that grew up in, say, Southern California, can no longer afford to live there, so they have to move to lower cost Las Vegas, a four to five hour drive away. Excessive gentrification. You touch that, it also harms mobility. If you want to move from Atlanta to Boston for a tech job but you can't find housing, you're not going to move there, so therefore, talent doesn't get matched up with opportunity. Nolan Gray 19:07 That's exactly right. I mean, this is a at the national scale. This is an important piece of the puzzle, which is we've made it hardest to actually move to some of our most productive places. So as you mentioned, places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, New York City, for all their problems, these are incredibly productive places where folks can move to and get high paying jobs and other good educational opportunities, but in many cases, these are the most expensive cities in our country, and it's in no small part because of the many rules and regulations that make it so hard to build housing in those contexts. So you're exactly right. Folks actually turn down higher paying jobs or better opportunities and move to places simply because the housing is more affordable, and you pick up on a really important piece of this, which is in many cases, this is breaking apart families. So a lot of folks who are born and raised in a place like California, their parents might have been able to buy their home in the 70s or 80s or 90s, but they can't afford a home. They have no long term path to actually staying in the community. And so what you're actually seeing is neighborhoods and communities being ripped apart. If the situation in places like California has actually got to be so bad that many of the people who are in a certain sense, beneficiaries of the status quo, maybe they own their home and they're seeing the value go up and up and up. They're also saying, Oh, my children can't afford to live near me. I don't ever get to see my grandkids. The person who serves me at the hospital or at the supermarket can't afford to live here, and we're having trouble keeping folks on. The crisis got to be so bad in certain places like California that we're starting to see tremors of reform. But one of the things I like to say is, if you want to fall into a California style housing crisis, most parts of the country don't need to do anything the rules you have on the books have you moving in that trajectory, right? But if you want to remain a place where we can build more housing, where folks can buy their own home or buy small apartment buildings and start to build wealth, you have to allow for more supply to come online. Keith Weinhold 20:42 Sure, zoning so that you can't build anything other than single family homes compounds the affordability crisis. There really just isn't any such thing as a 250k starter home anymore, anywhere. You represent California, yimby and you live there in the state where people think of ground zero for excessive regulation and taxation and zoning too. I do read more about some zoning being relaxed in California, allowing for the building of an adu on a property, for example, to help build the density. But before you talk about some of the cracks that are actually starting to help break this down. Can you give any bad examples that are especially problematic there in your home state, Nolan? Nolan Gray 21:27 For the past 50 or 60 years, California, has been stuck under a NIMBY paradigm, not in my backyard, right? Every single new project is politically contentious, has to undertake an environmental report, has to undergo multiple public reviews, it takes years and years to get a permit, and that's if the housing is legal to build at all. As you know, in so many parts of California, there's very little to no new construction happening, and that's because of the rules on the books that make it so hard to build. To the extent that we allow new housing to be built, we have a whole bunch of mandates that force the housing to be a lot more expensive, and even if all that pencils again, it can take two years to get fully entitled in a permit. And so of course, the only housing that actually ends up getting built is quite expensive. And some folks say, Well, if we allow new housing to be built in California, it's all expensive. Well, yes, if you only allow a trickle of new housing in a very expensive context, of course the new housing is going to be expensive. But if you look to places like Texas and Florida, for example, that build lots and lots of new housing and don't have all of these costly mandates, they actually can build a lot of new housing, and actually can keep prices relatively under control and create that new supply of what we call missing middle, low rise housing. So as you mentioned, the tide, I think, is turning in California. The silver lining of things getting so bad is that the culture is shifting. And what we've seen is the emergence of this new yimby movement, or yes, in my backyard. And these are folks are saying, hey, not only is not building more, not this horrible threat to my community, but it's actually this enriching opportunity. It's good to have a growing, healthy, affordable community where folks are building, folks are able to move to high opportunity jobs, and folks are able to have choice in the neighborhood they live in. Keith Weinhold 22:55 We're talking about zoning and how that's made the affordable housing crisis worse in the United States with California, yimbys, Nolan, gray Nolan. Tell us more about just the exact sorts of codes that are problematic. We touched on apartment building bans, but I think we're also looking at things like off street parking requirements. You need to have so many off street parking spaces before you can build. Otherwise you can't build. You need to have a minimum lot size of a half acre or a quarter acre in order to build here. So can you talk more specifically about just some of those exact problems on the tactical level that are compounding here? Nolan Gray 23:34 Yeah, that's exactly right. So where are the housings illegal to build altogether. In many cases, there are a whole bunch of rules that increase the price of that housing. So in urban context, for example, where you might want to be building apartments, many cases, you might have parking requirements that say, Well, you have to have two parking spaces per unit or one parking space per bedroom. In many cases, that's what consumers might demand, and you would have to build that to lease out those units or to sell those condos. But if you're building in a context where you might be near a transit line, or you might be near a university campus, or you might be near a major job center, many of your renters might say, hey, actually, I would prefer to have a more affordable rental or a more affordable condo, because we know that there's no such thing as free parking. You know, if it requires a structure or excavation work, parking can easily add $50,000 to the price of a new unit, and so some consumers might want to pay for that, eat that cost, have a parking space. But many consumers, when we relax these rules and say, Hey, developers, you have the incentives and the local knowledge needed to decide how much parking to build. In many cases, we find that they share parking with other uses, so commercial during the day and residential at night, or they allow renters to opt into parking and to pay for parking, but what you get for many households is a cheaper unit. Now another rule that you mentioned, which is very important, is minimum loss size rules. This is certainly a lot more relevant. More relevant and suburban and rural context. But what we say is, if you want to be able to have a single family home, you have to be able to afford at least a certain amount of land. Now, when if you have a context where you don't have water and sewer installed, and you're operating on septic and well water, you do need larger lots as a matter of public health, but in most suburban context, these rules essentially serve no function except to increase the price of housing and the ability to determine what type of housing can be built where is the ability to determine who gets to live where. So if we say, well, you're not allowed to live in this neighborhood unless you can afford a 10,000 square foot lot or a 20,000 square foot lot, what we're essentially doing in 2024 where land is a major factor in affordability, is we're saying that a whole bunch of middle working class households are not allowed to live in these neighborhoods, or they're not allowed to ever become homeowners and start building wealth in the same way that past generations did. And you look at places like Houston, for example, where they don't have zoning, but they have a lot of zoning-like rules. In 1998 they reduced their minimum lot sizes from 5000 square feet citywide to 1400 square feet citywide. And what this did was this kicked off a townhouse and small lot single family home building boom that has helped to keep cities like Houston affordable a whole new supply of starter homes that again, offered that first step on the ladder of home ownership and wealth building. Keith Weinhold 25:52 Over the decades, home prices have outpaced incomes. There are a few reasons for that. One of them is inflation, with wages not keeping up with the real rate of inflation, but the other are barriers to development. We're talking more about that with Nolan gray. When we come back, you're listening to Get Rich Education. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. Hey, you can get your mortgage loans at the same place where I get mine at Ridge Lending Group NMLS, 42056, they provided our listeners with more loans than any provider in the entire nation because they specialize in income properties. They help you build a long term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. You can start your pre qualification and chat with President Chaley Ridge personally. Start Now while it's on your mind at ridgelendinggroup.com. That's RidgeLendingGroup.com. Your bank is getting rich off of you. The national average bank account pays less than 1% on your savings. If your money isn't making 4% you're losing your hard earned cash to inflation, let the Liquidity Fund help you put your money to work with minimum risk, your cash generates up to an 8% return with compound interest, year in and year out. Instead of earning less than 1% sitting in your bank account. The minimum investment is just 25k you keep getting paid until you decide you want your money back. Their decade plus track record proves they've always paid their investors 100% in full and on time. And I would know, because I'm an investor too. Earn 8% hundreds of others are text FAMILY to 66866, learn more about Freedom Family Investments, Liquidity Fund, on your journey to financial freedom through passive income. Text, FAMILY to 66866. Robert Kiyosaki 27:50 This is our Rich Dad, Poor Dad author, Robert Kiyosaki. Listen to Get Rich Education with Keith Weinhold, and the reason I respect Keith, he's a very strong, smart, bright young man. Keith Weinhold 28:14 Welcome back to Get Rich Education . We're talking with California, yimbys Nolan gray about zoning and how these barriers to development are compounding the affordable housing crisis, and there sure are a number of barriers to multi family production. I really think that's what wild it comes down to. You touched on it earlier, and it's something that I spoke about with our audience a month or two ago. Nolan, and that is, mmm, multi families, missing middle these two to four unit properties, duplexes to fourplexes, where they're only constructing about 40% as many of those here in recent years than they did 20 to 30 years ago. The way I think of it is when you lift barriers to multifamily production, of course, you incentivize builders. If a developer buys an acre of land for, say, $90,000 and they had planned to build one unit on that All right? Well, there's one set of inputs in income that a developer can look at. But instead, if you allow them to go from building one unit on this plot of land to two units on it, it increases their profit potential, and it incentivizes developers from that side as well. Nolan Gray 29:23 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so there's been some great work by some friends over at the American Enterprise Institute. What they've done is they've created a nationwide map of mcmassionization risk. So when we have these conversations, we say, hey, let's allow for a range of housing typologies in more neighborhoods, duplexes, triplexes, small, low rise, multi family buildings, townhouses, the types of things that were commonly built in a range of neighborhoods before the rise of zoning. Every city in America has a neighborhood like this. That's a mixture of housing typologies. It would be illegal to build that today, but in many cases, we subject it to preservation requirements because we value it so much that we want to keep it. In any case, what happens when you don't allow that type of gradual incremental infill that keeps our communities affordable. What you get instead is the existing single family homes are converted into much larger, much more expensive single family homes. Now, again, there's nothing wrong with that. Many people might want to buy a smaller 19 fizzies bungalow and turn it into a much larger, 2500 square foot single family home, and God bless them if they want to do it. But what we have is rules on the books that say housing can only get more expensive, it can never get more affordable, or you can never unlock the wealth that's tied up in your land by building an adu or by building a duplex, or by creating more housing options for a range of households. And so that's really, really key. You know, the choice is not between, do we want our communities to change or not? The question is, do we want our communities to remain affordable and maybe change and have some more buildings built and more growth and more development. Or do we want our communities to change in the sense of they become more expensive? Folks retire and they move away, the neighborhood gradually becomes significantly more exclusionary, and young folks who moved grew up in the community can no longer afford to stay. That's the option facing many of our communities. And I think the yimby response to this is more housing construction is good and it's healthy and it's part of a thriving community. Keith Weinhold 31:02 Yeah, Nolan, when we come at this from the familial perspective, like I brought up earlier, it seems like the more zoning there is, the more it benefits seniors and incumbents, the more it benefits the silent generation, the baby boomer generation, and maybe Gen Xers, and it disadvantages millennials and Gen Zers that really don't have their place yet. Nolan Gray 31:24 Yeah, you know, it's tough. I would say it even hurts seniors, right? I mean, if they want their young adult children to be able to live near them, or, many cases, seniors like the option to be able to build an accessory dwelling unit in their backyard and maybe rent that out to friends or family, or maybe even you move into the adu and allow young adult children to move into the primary residence, or even just rent it out and have an additional source of income to supplement fixed incomes. There's reasons why folks, I think, at all different stages of their life, benefit for more flexibility in the rules that govern what can be built. Keith Weinhold 31:52 Psychologically, how do we turn one's mindset from a NIMBY mindset to a yimby mindset? I mean, if someone's got their single family ranch home that they want to live in in their senior years, and they want to see its value appreciate, so they don't want duplexes and fourplexes built next to them, rather than them saying no to turn them into saying yes. I mean, how do you get those people to understand that? Well, like this is the way for the next generation, for you to be able to live near your children and grandchildren? Nolan Gray 32:21 Yeah, that's a great point. You know, I think when you go to these public hearings around projects, you hear relentlessly about the cost of new development, right? Folks speculating about traffic and runoff and other factors parking. We get that perspective. We get bombarded with that perspective. But what we don't get is the alternative perspective of the benefits of a community, remaining relatively affordable, remaining a place where teachers and nurses and firefighters can still afford to be able to own a home and live places, allowing for the kids who grew up in a neighborhood or a city to remain there. And in fact, even just the selfish appeal to the homeowner, there's not actually any evidence that new development happening around you necessarily reduces the price of your single family home, and in some cases, it could actually signal to the market, hey, there's actually development potential on this so when you do decide to maybe sell and move on, your land is potentially going to be more valuable because it has more development potential than it might under a strict exclusionary zoning scenario. So you know, of course, you try to make the altruistic case to people. Hey, think about future generations. Think about folks who maybe want to move to this community or stay in this community, but aren't going to be able to if we don't build housing. But even so, I think there's selfish reasons. If you want to have somebody who's going to check you out at the supermarket or serve you at a restaurant or be a home care nurse, eventually you got to have housing for folks like that. In many cases, new development happening around you is going to increase your land value. Now I would just try the rage of appeals and work people through it. And in many cases, you know, I think people will understand, yeah, okay, I understand we got to have some growth. They might have a perspective on what it should look like, and that's okay. But as long as we can get some consensus that we got to have some growth to accommodate demand the form it takes, we can have a healthy discussion over. Keith Weinhold 33:57 Yeah, real community is the integration of all different types of people, and not school teachers living an hour away where they need to make a two hour round trip drive every day. Well, Nolan, as we're winding down here, can you give us any more successful zoning reform examples that maybe other communities can look to you touched on the success stories in Houston a bit. Are there some other ones? Nolan Gray 34:21 Absolutely. Yeah. So one of the most successful things we've done in California has been statewide legalization of accessory dwelling units. Yeah, that's been key. That started in 2017 and that took a lot of legislation to get us to a place where we are today, but that's resulted in something like 80,00 ADU's permitted, since 2017. That's powerful stuff, right? That's 80,000 households that might have a home, or might be able to rent out a unit to young adult child or an aging parent. Really, really powerful. So I would suggest that folks look into that. That's the lowest of the low hanging fruit. Empower homeowners to add additional units to their properties, and by the way, we also allow you use to be added to multifamily properties, and we're seeing a lot of that happen as well. At other contexts, many cities, dozens of cities across the country. Have removed their minimum parking requirements, acknowledging that, hey, this is a huge cost that we're imposing on projects, developers who are close to consumers, who have, they have the incentives and local knowledge to get this question right. Let them decide. So that's been, I think, a big success. You know, certain cities like Austin and Minneapolis, for example, they've actually sort of kept their markets back under control amid all the chaos of the pandemic real estate market fluctuations by allowing for a lot more mid rise multi family on their commercial corridors and in Job rich areas and in places near transit, that's where we have a huge shortage, is these studios and one bedrooms. So young professionals who, if they can't find that unit, they're going to go bid up the price of a two or three bedroom unit, they're going to roommate up and be living in potentially overcrowded conditions. So Austin, Minneapolis, we, relative to peers, they built a lot of housing and have seen prices stabilize as a result. So there's a lot of different success stories, you know, I would say, if you're at all interested in this, talk to your neighbors about this issue. See what sorts of solutions might make sense for your community. You know, in a suburban or a rural community, ADUs or minimum loss size reform might make sense. And an urban community, removing your parking mandates, allowing for more multifamily, allowing for missing middle, make more sense. Keith Weinhold 36:06 There sure are some encouraging signs. There was there any last thing that a person should know, especially a real estate investor type audience that's interested in buying a property and renting it out to a tenant for the production of income? Is there anything that our group really ought to know about zoning and the direction that things are moving, what to look for and what to be careful of? Nolan Gray 36:28 Well, as your audience probably knows, you know that first essential step for your mom and pop local real estate investor is often a duplex, a triplex, a four Plex, historically, that was an absolutely essential source of middle class wealth building. Yeah, right. And you can see these in so many historic neighborhoods. And to the extent that we've made those exact typologies so incredibly hard to build, we've cut off this very valuable source of democratic, decentralized wealth building that we need to actually encourage as real estate investors and professionals, in many cases, you're an authority figure with your local policymakers and your local planners, and you can say to them, Hey, here's my perspective on what's happening in the market. You know, we have a shortage of a certain type of small scale multifamily or making this case. You know, I talked to a lot of elected officials, and when I say starter home, I think they still think of the bungalow on the 5000 square foot lot with the two car garage. But a starter home in 2024 might be a townhouse, two bedroom condo, a small lot, single family home. These are the types of stories that real estate investors and professionals are trusted advocates on, and you can make that case and explain to local policymakers. Hey, here's the change that we need or explaining. Hey, I wanted to add an additional unit to a property that I own, or I wanted to redevelop a property I own to add a lot more housing. And these were the barriers that I faced that's incredibly valuable information for your local policymakers and planners. And I would say, you know, look around many US, cities and states now have very active yimby or, Yes, in my backyard groups. Go connect up with them. You could be a valuable, trusted expert for them, somebody that they can learn more about the situation with real estate markets, and they can be more effective advocates for policy that I think a lot of us would like to see. Keith Weinhold 37:58 And when it comes to changing NIMBY people to yimby people, and we look at esthetics and adu in the back, that really doesn't change aesthetics on the street front. And I've seen very smart, careful designs of duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes that really look just like single family homes from the Street View level. So there really are some ways around this. You've given us some really good ideas today. Nolan, hey, well, someone wants to learn more about you and your work and zoning. What's the best way for them to do that? Nolan Gray 38:30 Well, I'm on the platform formerly known as Twitter. I'm @mnolangray, M, N, O, L, E, N, G, R, A, y, so feel free to find me there and reach out. And I have a book Arbitrary Lines, how zoning broke the American city and how to fix it. Check that out. If you're at all interested in this, always reach out. Love to hear from folks. Thanks so much for having me, by the way. Keith Weinhold 38:50 All right, well, I hope our audience didn't zone out. It's been great. Chat with you. Nolan, thanks so much for coming on to the show. Yeah, a thought provoking discussion with California yimbys Nolan Gray there it's essentially illegal to build affordable housing in a lot of areas with the way that these zoning laws are written, allowing for more dense building that can limit this ugly urban sprawl, and this makes me think about an Instagram account that I follow. It's called how cars ruined our cities, or some names similar to that. It shows, for example, a picture of how a highway interchange in sprawling Houston has an area so large that you could fit an entire Italian town inside of it. And these sprawl problems compound when a lot size must be, say, at least a quarter acre or a half acre. The tide is turning toward allowing more dense building in some places like we touched on, but it's too bad that it took a. Visible housing crisis to make this happen. I mean, visible like more homeless people out on the street. It took that almost for municipalities to start doing something about all of this. Our guest has quite a following on X. Again, you can find his handle there @mnolangray on X and the image on his account cover it shows someone holding up a sign that reads, zoning kills dreams. Hmm, big thanks to the terrific Nolan gray today until next Monday, when I'll be back here to help you actionably build your Real Estate Wealth. I'm Keith Weinhold. Don't quit your Daydream. Unknown Speaker 40:44 Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of Get Rich Education LLC, exclusively. Keith Weinhold 41:12 The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building, GetRichEducation.com.

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The Housing Crisis and Looming Federal Intervention

large federal acast housing intervention looming housing crisis nolan gray

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 30, 2024 10:11

Large increases in home prices mean both home appreciation and closing off housing options for would-be buyers. Housing researcher Nolan Gray discusses a range of federal options for removing some state and local regulatory barriers to new housing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brave New Home: our future in smarter, simpler, happier housing

Booked on Planning

Play Episode Play 32 sec Highlight Listen Later Jun 11, 2024 36:06 Transcription Available

Discover the future of housing with author Diana Lind as we explore innovative solutions for smarter, simpler, and happier living. Can accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and co-living arrangements be the answer to our housing crisis? We'll discuss the benefits of these options, the possibility of enforcing maximum size requirements for single-family homes, and dive deep into the historical shift from multi-generational living to the isolated single-family home model.Show Notes:Further Reading: Fixer Upper by Jennie Schuetz, Arbitrary Lines by M. Nolan Gray, Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, and Paved Paradise by Henry GrabarTo help support the show, pick up a copy of the book through our Amazon Affiliates page at https://amzn.to/4aLicok or even better, get a copy through your local bookstore!To view the show transcripts, click on the episode at https://bookedonplanning.buzzsprout.com/Cover art by Liz Sanchez-Vegas on UnsplashFollow us on social media for more content related to each episode:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/booked-on-planning/Twitter: https://twitter.com/BookedPlanningFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/bookedonplanningInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/bookedonplanning/

discover law color housing smarter happier new home simpler amazon affiliates brave new adus richard rothstein nolan gray

June 2024

los angeles los angeles dodgers dodger stadium gondola nolan gray

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 1, 2024 68:15

Introduction: Caleb O. BrownBryan Caplan and Nolan Gray on the science and ethics of housing regulationJohan Norberg on why the free market will save the worldJason Fichtner and Rachel Greszler on how to confront the social security dilemmaPrashant Narang on what the US can learn from India's confrontation with economic freedomExclusive: Nicholas Anthony on the challenges for banks within the cannabis industry Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

acast nolan gray

Gondola Dodgers

City Journal's 10 Blocks

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 27, 2024 16:12

M. Nolan Gray joins Jordan McGillis to discuss the controversial plan to install an aerial transit system connecting Los Angeles's Dodger Stadium to the city.

‘It's a policy shift but also a cultural shift'

The Overton Window

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 1, 2024

M. Nolan Gray on the battles for less restrictive housing

policy cultural shift nolan gray

Seth Zeren Builds the Next Right Thing

The Messy City Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 27, 2024 67:48

Of all the parts of this enjoyable conversation with Seth Zeren, now of Providence, RI, the part I liked the most was this quote:The worst fight is with your allies that betray you.The quote, which is mostly about perception, says a lot about people who are frequently in heated agreement with each other, but find themselves disagreeing on something that's very minor in the big picture. We discuss this as we discuss his post called, “When New Urbanists and YIMBYs fight.”Seth has a great Substack, talking about all the overlap in his interests from city planning to development and more. His path and his passion are impressive. From his early days working in local government, to now the cold, hard reality of making development projects work. And what's next? Perhaps some place management, perhaps some housing policy advocacy, perhaps just more really interesting redevelopment projects.Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin's Substack page.Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you'd like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.Intro: “Why Be Friends”Outro: “Fairweather Friend”Transcript:Kevin (00:01.269)Welcome back to the Messy City podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. I'm excited today to have Seth Zarin here with me on the podcast. Seth and I have met in the past and corresponded a little bit. Seth has a sub stack that I definitely recommend called Build the Next Right Thing. And he's in Providence, Rhode Island, which is actually, I think, one of the sort of most underratedsmaller cities in the country. I've always really liked Providence, enjoyed it. So Seth, welcome to the podcast. I know we're going to have a lot of good things to talk about. We're going talk some housing and some other stuff, but glad to have you on so we can do this.Seth Zeren (00:43.574)Thanks Kevin, it's nice to be here.Kevin (00:46.261)I think, you know, Seth, I want to kind of start by talking about you're another guy who has a really interesting path and background into becoming into the development world, which is what you're doing now, but certainly not at all where you started. And I wonder if you could kind of walk people through your professional background and then even like why you wanted to do a sub stack.in the first place, as some of us silly people do to put thoughts out in the world.Seth Zeren (01:19.862)Yeah, absolutely. I usually introduce myself when I meet people by saying that I'm a former climate scientist, recovering city planner, turned real estate developer. I usually get a laugh on recovering. Much like people who have all sorts of addiction issues, city planning is something that you always kind of in the back of your head, always kind of want to work on, but can be really challenging.Kevin (01:35.381)Ha ha ha.Seth Zeren (01:48.918)I'm actually from California. I grew up in the San Francisco suburbs, south of the city in Silicon Valley, basically. And by the time I graduated high school, it was quite clear that I would never be able to afford to live there. At that point, houses were selling for about a million dollars for a little ranch. Now it's about $3 million. And so by the time I left for college, I sort of knew that the housing situation there had been a little bit of a mess.broken so much that it was really unlikely that I would be able to find a good quality of life there for myself at that time. In college, I ended up studying geology and climate science. So I was a geology major, geosciences major, and I narrowly averted the PhD. I dodged it, fortunately, and I found myself really becoming interested after college. I went and lived in South Korea for a year and I taught English there. AndIt was such a different experience than growing up in an American suburb or in a small town where I went to college. And it really got me thinking a lot. And when I came back to the U S and I went and worked at a boarding school while I was figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. And I started to read about cities and urbanism and architecture. And I realized that, Oh, actually at the time I thought I wanted to go to school and do architecture, but I was really intimidated by portfolio and drawing. And I had, I was a scientist. I mean, I could do data.I understood geology, but, um, so I was really intimidated by that. I ended up going to an environmental management program at Yale where I could kind of moonlight in law and architecture and business. And so that was kind of my entree. And I discovered I really liked zoning at the time. Uh, and I like to say like, I like board games and zoning is basically just the biggest board game imaginable. It's a huge map, bunch of colored spaces and a really long rule book, which was totally my jam. And.Kevin (03:38.485)Yeah. Yeah.Seth Zeren (03:46.038)So I was a zoning, big zoning nerd. I interned with the planning department, but you know, in between the two years of graduate school and then got a job as a zoning official after graduate school for Newton, Massachusetts, which is kind of that wealthy first ring suburb outside of Boston where the doctors and professors go to have children. And, uh, I was there for about three years before I kind of realized this was not the place for me. I wanted to do stuff. I wanted to shake things up and.One of the dynamics you'll encounter when you find a sort of a wealthy sort of trophy suburb, right, is that people buy there because they like what it is. Right. So the political dynamic in a place like Newton, like many wealthy suburbs around many cities in America is people are buying a particular place and they want it to stay that way. That's what they bought. And so there's a real change aversion there, which was just a bad fit for someone in their twenties, whose master's degree and wants to get stuff done. And.I had also at the time had the opportunity to work with a bunch of developers. And this was coming out of the financial crisis. So there wasn't a lot happening right away, but slowly, slowly things started to get back in gear. And after about three or four years there, I decided I was going to jump ship from the, from the planning side and eventually found myself working at a development shop as a development manager, kind of coming in to do the permitting work. Right. So I just basically switched sides. I was going to go do permitting for the developer.moving complex projects through design review and master plan approval and stuff like that. And I did that for my sort of early apprenticeship for about three or four years. And got to the point where, you know, I got married, we thought about buying a house and realized Boston was also too expensive. So we started considering other places and Providence was nearby. We'd visited, we had friends here. And at the time, certainly it was massively more affordable than the Boston Cambridge area.So we moved down here about eight, maybe nine years ago, about. And so I was working as a development manager, you know, for a larger firm. And then when I came down here, I was still working remotely, but I connected with some local developers and eventually joined a local firm, Armory Management Company, which is a 35 year old, almost 40 year old partnership now that has done historic rehab.Seth Zeren (06:09.782)Main Street revitalization ground up in field development and came on board here, you know, also as a development manager and kind of worked my way up. Now I'm a partner and working on kind of the future of the firm and future of development in the Providence area. So that's kind of my, my origin story. It's one path. I haven't met a lot of other people who've come through the planner path into development. I would say that I was one of those people that you probably remember this, Kevin, you know, whatever eight, nine, 10 years ago at CNU.There was this whole conversation about why are you working for shitty developers? You know, to architects, planners, engineers, go be your own. And I took that very much to heart and was trying to find a way to do it. And I've kind of managed to find a way to do it, come through that.Kevin (06:54.709)Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have met a few other folks who kind of started in the planning route and then ended up in development. But yeah, you're right. There's not too many. I mean, one thing I'm curious about, Seth, so like I'm a Midwestern or so. I don't have that experience of growing up someplace and then realizing like I'm never going to be able to come back. I mean, so a lot of Midwesterners like myself leave at some point.And then often we find our way back home, but it's like, and there may, there's lots of reasons why people do the things, but there's never seems to be this like logistical issue that says, well, I'm just not going to be able to afford to come back where I grew up. What, what's that? And what's that like to at some point have this realization in the place you grew up in, which you probably have some really fond feelings and memories for that you just, you weren't going to be able to make it back or you weren't going to be able to afford to.make it back. That must be a strange feeling.Seth Zeren (07:55.414)It is, and I will say it becomes a lot stranger when you have your own kids, which I have now. I have two young children and we go back to California, you know, once maybe twice a year visit my parents who are still in the house I grew up in. And you know that neighborhood that I grew up in, you know, hasn't built. More than a couple net new homes in the last 50 years, right? Homes get torn down and they get replaced by bigger homes, but.Kevin (08:00.501)Yeah, sure.Seth Zeren (08:24.246)There's no net additional homes. But my parents raised three kids in that house who all have their own households. My parents are still in that house. So sort of mechanically, if you have a neighborhood that doesn't add any homes, you're essentially, but you have, but you have children, those children have to leave, right? Mechanically, right? And if you then multiply that across an entire region, well, then they have to leave the whole region, which is like why people have to leave California. And I, so I have a very,like complicated relationship with it. It's like, obviously, it's my home, it has like a smell and weather and just like the culture that is what I grew up with. It's it's I have nostalgia for that. But I also go whenever I go back there, I'm like, this place makes me crazy. Because it's not like you couldn't build more buildings, you know, you couldn't, it's not like the soil can't support more buildings, right? There's no physical limitation, really. It's the self imposed limitation. And then when you go back, especially,after the last 20 years or so, and you look, you know, here's a region in the world that is the current sort of nexus of tremendous wealth accumulation, right, the Bay Area. And what did we get for it? Right, we got kind of mediocre drive it strip malls, and the, you know, single family houses that go for three and a half million dollars to $5 million. You know, it's similar times in the world, we got, you know,London, Paris, New York, Chicago, Shanghai, Tokyo, like these metropolitan areas were built and there's this tremendous physical capital that's created by economic growth. But in the Bay Area, it's, it's, it's, it's, so it's kind of depressing for me. I feel like it's helpful to go back as a, as like a cautionary tale, you know, it's, it's a, it's a practice, you know, you have to go to the meditation retreat and struggle. And that's a little bit like what it is for me. Um,So you would ask why I write and so I'm a full -time developer. I run, you know, commercial development, residential development, run commercial leasing, a lot of architecture design permitting, you know, I would say, you know, there's a lot of different backgrounds. One can bring into the development world and all of them come with different strengths. Uh, being the planner background gives me a lot of facility with permitting. And so zoning is an area where we're really effective zoning historic.Seth Zeren (10:50.74)neighborhood relationships, all that kind of stuff. And then finding value in buildings that other people don't see because we look around at what other people are doing in other parts of the country and we're able to import those ideas and try things out. Other people have different advantages that they bring. The reason I write is probably like you, I've got like some thoughts in my head that I have to get out. And, you know, development is a great practical.you know, craft practice, you know, and it's, I mentioned, I think earlier apprenticeship, like there are a few schools that teach development, real estate development, kinda, but mostly they teach what we think of institutional development. So if you want to go build a skyscraper, go to MIT or Columbia. Fine.Kevin (11:37.333)Yeah, MIT's got those great courses and everything else that, yeah.Seth Zeren (11:39.51)Yeah, and like, totally fair. Like, that's a reason that's a thing that makes sense in the world, but it's not going to help you, you know, renovate a triple decker or, you know, put up an ad or or renovate a Main Street building. It's just not the skill set. They're not teaching that. So it's an apprenticeship. I mean, it's still really an apprenticeship job. You have to go and you have to go through a lot of stuff and struggle and you see all the pain and suffering and you go through the stress andKevin (11:53.877)Yeah. Yeah.Seth Zeren (12:08.726)You start to learn stuff and it's one of those jobs. There's so much to learn that you, you know, here I am 40 a partner doing a bunch of development work and I'm learning stuff every day, right? And we're all learning stuff every day. So it's it's really satisfying in that way, but. It's not necessarily intellectual job, right? I mean, thinking about stuff is important. Math is important. Those are all relevant things, but it's not the only thing that matters. And so I write because trying to figure out some stuff, right? Trying to figure out.for myself, but then also how to explain things to other people. Um, cause one of things I say to people is that, and I learned this when I became a developer is that like as a developer, I had more in common with the blue collar tradespeople without a college degree in terms of my understanding of the built environment than I did with someone who had my equivalent class background, education, income level, like an attorney or something, right?They live in a house that they bought from someone else, right? They are a consumer of the built environment, but they know very little about how it gets built. They don't get under the hood. But conversely, like I, you know, the plumber and I under, you know, we're in it together. Now we have very different jobs. We might, you know, we're having a different experience of it, but we both are seeing this world. We're both participating in the making of stuff. And so we end up with this very different environment. And then.because of the way we've regulated the built environment, now there's this huge chasm between the people who build the cities and the people who consume the cities that are built for them. Because people don't build much for themselves or for their cousin or for their neighbor.Kevin (13:44.533)Yeah, yeah, that's a, I mean, that's a really interesting point. I like that Seth. And it sort of resonates with me too. And, you know, in my experiences in design and development and you get some of that in architecture too. If you're the kind of an architect who you spend a lot of time doing construction administration or on job sites, you really, I think get a very different feel for that than if you're just kind of working in schematic design all the time. But yeah, that art of.creating things. And this is what I kind of often tell people about development. One of the things that just completely, like routinely frustrates me is this sort of parody of developers that's put out in the world. It's like, you know, as the black hat evil people trying to, you know, ruin cities and, and not this understanding that actually, and not that there aren't those people, there are some, you know, there are crappy people in every field. But most developers are just simply in the act of creating things that other people are going to use.Seth Zeren (14:36.278)Yeah.Seth Zeren (14:44.022)That's true. And I say that all the time as well. And I would add to that, that one of things that's interesting about development, right, coming from planning. So like real estate or city planning, right? Graduate degrees, conferences, magazines, there's even a licensure, right? You get your AICP, go to the conference, get the magazine. It's a profession. Real estate development isn't really a profession.Kevin (14:44.181)Like that's the whole point.Seth Zeren (15:11.254)You get $2 million and buy a CVS, you're a real estate developer. There you go. You put it on your business card, it's your real estate developer. So there's no professional boundaries for good and for ill. I mean, sometimes I think the boundaries around some of these professions are actually really harmful, but you kind of know what you're going to get. You know what the professional culture is and you kind of know how it changes and you know the institutions. Development really doesn't have any of that. Even the Urban Land Institute, ULI, which is a major player still like,compared to like the APA and planning is minuscule. And so like part of the challenges is that, so that's one piece of it. It's not really a profession. The other piece of it is that one of the things that's happened in the 20th century is we blew up our development culture, right? We had an ecosystem of building places, you know, that was the design, the construction, the operations, the leasing, the materials.the trades, there was a sort of ecosystem of it, and we kind of blew it up. We radically transformed it over a short period of decades. And so there's no continuity. So when people do development, there's not a sense of there's any kind of private constraint or private rules. So it feels even less like there's a profession. There's not like a coherent culture, we're going to build more of that, or we're going to evolve incrementally from a coherent culture of building.We're just going to build whatever you end up. That's where you end up with the like two story building with a mansard. That's like with the weird landscaping. It's just this weird Chimera because the developer and to a large extent, the architects have no grounded. There's, there's no like lineage they're working from. There's no continuity. They're just throwing stuff at the wall, you know,Kevin (17:00.341)Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think one of the other aspects is that in development, so many of the players in the non -institutional world are entrepreneurs. At their heart of hearts, they're entrepreneurs. And it's hard to gather together a whole group of entrepreneurs who are, in some sense, in competition with each other all the time, to feel like a common sense of purpose.Seth Zeren (17:25.174)Yeah, and they're often grinding for their own private gain, which in many parts of the United States is sort of seen as not good, right? Profit is bad to a lot of people. And I think that's unfortunate because while certainly people can do bad things and that's not good, making a profit from doing good things is good. It's a good sign. It means you get to do more of it, right? We say we have to make a profit because that's what we, that's the...Kevin (17:30.101)Yeah.Seth Zeren (17:53.062)seed corn for the next project, right? If we ate all of our seed corn, we would have no next project, right? And if we run out of seed corn, we all starve, right? So you don't get to lose money very many times in real estate before you're out of the game. So it's...Kevin (18:05.685)Yeah, well, and nobody bemoans the local cafe or the barbershop or whomever from making a profit. We all want them to make a profit and succeed, but for some reason, the local developer in a business that's far riskier and more expensive, it's like we completely beat them up about the idea that they actually need to make money to keep going.Seth Zeren (18:22.326)Yeah.Seth Zeren (18:27.606)Yeah. And I think part of it is that there is part of this change in building culture, right? Is that there is where there is more of, or a greater percentage of the built of the new development is sort of seen as done by outsiders for short -term gain. And then they're gone. You know, you'll you've talked to other folks in the incremental development world between the farmer and the hunter, right? And it's we're, we're 90%, 95 % hunters now, you know, instead of 25 % hunters. And that just really changes.Kevin (18:41.397)Yeah. Right.Kevin (18:48.661)Yeah, sure.Seth Zeren (18:56.918)the relationship. So we're a local firm. I work in the neighborhoods in which we live. We work down the block from our projects. If we do a bad job, I have to look at it every day. People know who I am. They're going to yell at me. Like there's a level of responsibility. The profits are most, many of the profits are being reinvested again locally into the next project or into donations to local organizations. So it gets it, you know, not, it's not just as a matter of credibility, but as a matter of like the actual development culture and ecosystem, it's just a better way of life. Um,I think one of the things that's key though about the developer image, right? Is that there was this real period and formative period for, for you and for me, like in the 60s, 70s, 80s of the real estate developer is always the villain, right? And every hallmark movie and every, you know, real estate developers are always the bad guys. And it's a really easy trope, right? It's, it's, it's change for, you know, we're going to change something that's here now that's good for profit, you know, and then they're going to be gone. Um, we don't have any valorous.Kevin (19:37.811)Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Sure.Seth Zeren (19:56.442)examples of the real estate developer in popular culture. And I think if I had a magic wand, I would like I would have some great popular sitcom about, you know, a real estate developer, young Latino builder in LA doing interesting stuff and growing over the course of seasons and be hilarious because there's so much tragic comedy and development. So if anyone out there wants to pitch a show to Hollywood, that's that's what I would pitch. Oh, my God, no, that's not me.Kevin (20:19.893)Well, I think you've got your next screenwriting gig. So, give us an example of a project that you're involved with now, something you're working on to get people sent to what you're doing.Seth Zeren (20:31.798)Yeah, so yeah, I'll give two quick examples. So we just finished a rehabilitation of an historic structure, four story masonry building that was converted back to residential, right? It had been turned into actually a nursing home. It was first as a hospital than a nursing home in the 20th century. It was originally built as four brick row houses. And so we brought that back to residential. That just finished last summer, 12 units. And that project was really great. It's really beautiful building.We are a little bit counter -cultural in some times what we do. So we built, in part following the logic of the building, because we were doing a federal historic tax credit project, we didn't want to torture the building. So the units are large. We have, you know, 1500 square foot, two bedroom, two bath apartments, which is on current construction, like weird. It's just, they're really big and they're expensive as a consequence of being big. But what we're finding is there are people who will like nice stuff, and they're willing to pay.more for an apartment. And it's still cheap compared to New York or Boston. It's expensive in Providence, but there are people who will pay that. And right now we're working on the second phase of that project. So that's probably 26 unit building. We're going to try to get some three bedroom apartments in that, which is again, sort of philosophically, we think it's important that there are places where families could live in multifamily housing. It's on a park. It's a beautiful location. And then the project we just started,As we acquired a 50 ,000 square foot mill building in a kind of old industrial area of the city that has, it's one of those things where the previous owner kind of ran out of money and attention. So some things got done, but not other things. So we're finishing that up and that project, we are actually going to complete sort of the previous owner's plan, which was to create modestly priced commercial spaces. So we, in our portfolio, about 50, 50 residential and commercial, which isn't.necessarily by strategy. It's just sort of where we've ended up. Uh, but I think on the margin, we're a little bit more comfortable with commercials than the typical developer or landlord in our area. So because we run so much of it and it's full, I mean, we're 95, 97 % full and commercial across 300 and something thousand square feet. Um, and that's because we price to rent it, you know, and we take a good job caring for it. Uh, we follow the advice of making things smaller if they don't rent.Seth Zeren (22:57.878)Right? So if you make them smaller, then you make the rent smaller, which means more people can rent it. Um, and there's turnover, but you have a reusable unit, just like an apartment, people move right into it, uh, run their business out of that. So it's been good. I mean, you know, who knows things could always change, but we see a lot of value in, you know, one of the things that happened in American cities is disinvestment and white flight took place was not only did the people leave, but I'll sort of all the businesses.So it's like, what is your dentist? Where's your doctor's office? Where's your accountant? Where's your graphic designer? Or, you know, where's your retail shops, you know, your salons, your banks, your restaurants, your bars and restaurants and bars usually come first, but that's only a piece of the ecosystem. You know, it's a whole, you know, you need gyms and retail stores and yoga studios. And I know that sounds kind of trite, but it's sort of a, a, a curating kind of orientation. So this building, part of the strategy is to create a building that is safe.and modestly priced and not pristine so that it's a building in which people can do work. So it's artists, fabricators who have real businesses but need a space to operate their real business. It's not just a crazy building, spray painting the walls, but a reasonable building, not too expensive, not too fancy, but safe. Sprinklers and a roof that doesn't leak. So that's kind of our current project.Kevin (24:16.149)Yeah. Yeah. That's a great model. It reminds me a little bit of one of Monty Anderson's projects in South Dallas, sort of a similar deal, large former industrial building and essentially a minimal, very minimal tenant finish, but incredibly flexible. And if it's priced right, it, you know, in his case, at least up, you know, very quickly. That's a cool model. So I didn't really have any, a whole lot of personal experience withProvidence probably until the CNU was hosted there in what was that? Mid 2000s or so. Which was the best Congress up to that point and the best one until we hosted one in Savannah, of course. And anyway, I was really impressed by Providence. I thought it was...just an incredibly interesting city, very walkable, really cool architecture everywhere, nice downtown. Just seemed like it had a ton of assets, especially in that region. And like you said, priced very differently than Boston or New York. And so I'm curious about the last decade or so, what's going on in Providence. How's the market there? How are things changing? And as a...more of like a third tier city, what do you see that's different compared to some of the larger markets?Seth Zeren (25:47.094)Well, I think that the big story of the last 10 years is that we're no longer kind of isolated on our own. And I don't know if that's mostly a combination of remote work or if it also has something to do with just how expensive Boston and New York have become and other cities. And Providence has seen some of the highest year over year property appreciation in the country. So you're right. It's a nice place to live, you know, and then if you're paying, you know,$3 ,500 a month for, you know, kind of crappy two bedroom apartment in Somerville, you move to Providence and you can get a really nice apartment for $3 ,500 or you can save a bunch of money. And so that it's not so similar for me, right? We moved down here because it was cheaper. And so that adds demand. It adds demand in the upper end of the market. So a big part of what's happening in Providence, Rhode Island is, is that there's a relatively small number.but of people with a fair amount of resources, income and capital moving here. And the state chronically, because it's sort of been tucked away for a long time, it has very little home construction, right? We are the last, second to last, third to last in per capita home construction every year for the last few decades. And so the intersection of those two things is causing a really crazy housing spike and a lot of angst.And for myself, this is one of the places where like my own experience growing up in the Bay Area and then having my own kids has really hit home because, you know, I know in 20 years, I'm still going to need a house to live in. And my two kids are probably each going to want their own house to live in or apartment. Right. So I either got to build them one. They're going to buy yours or they got to leave. It's math. Right. And so it's put the question of housing shortage kind of on the sharp end of the stick for me personally.Right? Is, you know, am I going to be able to see my grandchildren more than once or twice a year kind of thing? You know, and that's a big deal. Right. And I know people don't quite appreciate it yet. I feel a little bit like a harbinger of doom sometimes because in Rhode Island, the feeling is like this could never happen here. Right. Because we're kind of this backwater sort of economically hasn't done well since deindustrialization. You know, there's some bright spots, but it's a little tough and nice quality of life, but not too expensive. And that whole script.Seth Zeren (28:13.142)of worked for a generation or two, but it's not relevant anymore unfortunately. And then that psychic cultural transformation is going to be really hard.Kevin (28:23.541)So coming from the background that you came from, how do you compare the development or the regulatory apparatus in Rhode Island and in Providence compared to places you've worked or pros and cons and what's going on there?Seth Zeren (28:36.086)Oh boy.Seth Zeren (28:41.494)Yeah, when I go to CNU and I'd say I'm from New England, they're like, how do you work there? Because it's hard. Yeah, we're more heavily regulated region. I think that in some ways that's beneficial to someone like me, right? If you're good at navigating the rules, then it's actually to your advantage to work in a regulated market because there's, you I'm not competing on how cheaply I can put up drywall. I'm competing on who can come up with the most creative use of land and get through the regs.Kevin (28:45.685)Ha ha ha ha.Seth Zeren (29:13.686)It's, you know, Providence itself has a mod, what I would call like a modern zoning ordinance. It's got a lot of, you know, there's things I would quibble with, there's things I would change, but it's basically a functioning ordinance that like does the right things more or less, right? And which is great. We mostly work in Providence. I'd say the rest of the state, like most of the rest of New England, it's still like 1955 and there's no...resources, no political impetus to like really fix that yet. I've, I've helped one of my responses is I helped found last year a group called Neighbors Welcome Rhode Island, which is a sort of strong towns meets UMB type or organization that we're still kind of launching a website now. We're working on legislation, state level legislation, and also trying to support local organizing in these towns.Seth Zeren (30:14.998)So it's a, it's, it's, you know, very similar to the markets I'm used to. It's a new England place. Everyone's in everyone else's business. The place has been inhabited buildings on it for, for, you know, hundreds of years. I think one thing that's always interesting about, about new England though, you know, compared to the national conversation is the missing middle is not missing here. Like our cities are made out of triple deckers, twos, threes, fours, sixes all over the place.Kevin (30:37.653)Mm -hmm.Seth Zeren (30:43.062)Our problem is we don't know what comes next. So a city like Providence right now, the only plan is, and this is true, Boston and these places, you can, sure, you can build on the vacant lots and there's a bunch of vacant lots and you can build those for a while. There's gonna be some bad commercial buildings. You can build on those for a while. There's some old industrial land. You're gonna build on that for a while. But in a different way, but similar to the regions where everything's zoned single family and it's built out single family, you can't add anything.to the bulk of the neighborhoods, which are zoned for two and three family homes, because there's already two and three family homes there. And what we don't have, and I don't think anyone has an answer to this, is how do you create a building typology and a business model and a regulatory framework, building code, zoning code, et cetera, to add density to those neighborhoods, to take a three -family neighborhood and bring it to the next increment.whatever that is, because I don't, I don't think we have a model for that other than to go to a full like five over one big apartment building, but the land assemblage there is really prohibitive. So what's the next thing that's denser than three families on 5 ,000 square foot lots, but isn't a big commercial building. And I don't think we have an answer for that yet. I mean, as a urbanist architecture development community, and we certainly don't have a regulatory framework that will allow us to build it either. So that's like an R and D project. That's sort of a back burner curiosity of mine.Kevin (32:08.981)Does the regulatory framework allow you to build the triple -deckers in place?Seth Zeren (32:14.198)Uh, under zoning. Yeah, kind of under building code. No, right. Cause triple deckers are commercial code. So you need sprinklers. So you can't build them. The cost difference. You'd just build a big two family instead of building a three family. It's a much better strategy. So one of the things that neighbors welcome is proposing this legislative cycle to follow on North Carolina's example and Memphis's examples to move three, four, five, six family dwellings into the residential code. And, you know, with no sprinklers, a single stair. Um,And, you know, we'll keep the two hour rating, just add more drywall. Okay, fine. But, you know, that's one of the things we're proposing along with a single stair reform for the small apartment buildings. But yeah, I mean, it's a chicken and the egg, right? There's no point coming up with the prototype and you can't build it. But then no one wants to reform the building code because there's no prototype that makes sense that people are excited about. So it's really kind of trapped. And so, you know, that's an interesting challenge that we struggle with.Kevin (33:14.069)Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting thing to think about what that next increment to would be beyond the freestanding, you know, triple deckers and stuff like that. Because, you know, I guess the first thing that comes to mind as you start to think about neighborhoods more like you would see in New York or Boston, certain parts of those cities that went to like five and six story walk up buildings that, yeah, yeah. And they're not.Seth Zeren (33:39.476)Buildings that touch. That's the big thing.Kevin (33:43.931)really townhouses wouldn't call them townhouses, but they might be like a five story walk up. Like you'd see, you know, on the upper East or upper East side or upper West side or something like that.Seth Zeren (33:49.598)Yeah.Seth Zeren (33:52.982)Yeah, there's two tiers, I think. There is a version that's more about lot subdivision, right? So we have decently sized lots and three families are big, but you might be able to get some more houses on them or bigger versions. And then I certainly moving to the part where you have party wall construction and the buildings that touch, you recover a bunch of lost area to thin side yards that no one can use. That tier is really interesting because you could probably keep them as owner occupant.Right? They'd be small, you know, two, three, four families, but on smaller piece of land, you know, buildings that touch whatever the next year above that, you know, which is like a single stair elevator, five, six stories, you know, 20 apartments. That's a commercial loan. It's a commercial operator. And, you one of the virtues of the triple decker, right, is that you have a distributed ownership, right? So that it's not just.You know, we have tons of landlords in the state, you know, because everyone I own, the triple decker I live in, right? Everybody owns, you know, a two family, a three family mom, grandma's two family, right? It's just it, there's so many opportunities for people to be small landlords for good and for ill, mostly I think for good, but there are, there are some limitations to it. Um, you know, so when I look around at international examples, right. You know, so for example, I teach real estate development on the side, cause I really care about bringing more people into this profession and not profession trade.craft, whatever. And I had some European students last fall, and I brought them to Providence on a field trip, took them around my neighborhood, which is, you know, to native Rhode Islanders like the hood. It's like the inner city. Ooh, scary. And they're like, this is a very nice suburb, right? Because to them, a bunch of detached two and three family dwellings with a few vacant lots in between them or parking lots, this is suburban density. And they're wrong. And they're not wrong. They're right.Kevin (35:19.893)Yeah.Seth Zeren (35:47.786)you know, historically like that, that was a transition. You'd go from town, right? Which is mostly detached, small multifamily buildings to herb to the city. The building starts to touch because the frontage is really valuable and you wouldn't just leave it for like, you know, five foot grass strips and whatever. Um, and so, you know, it still ends up being quite car focused because, you know, everything is sort of far apart and you know, you got to fill in the empty gaps.Kevin (36:13.781)Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of that reminds me a little bit of what Jane Jacobs used to talk about in Death and Life of Great American Cities as sort of like the gray zones. Yeah, the in -between density.Seth Zeren (36:23.094)Yeah, the gray density. Yeah. And what I would say is what happened to my neighborhood to a certain extent, and I think this is true of a lot of American, you know, urban neighborhoods, you know, sort of pre -auto suburbanization is that what happened, there was so much, there was a lot of removal, even where there wasn't wholesale urban renewal, you know, mercantile buildings were taken down and replaced with a gas station, right, or a parking lot. And the church is, you know, brought down, you know, there's little holes in the fabric.And when I look at the neighborhood as like someone who thinks about cities and can see, can, you know, learns to look in that way, it's kind of looks like someone who's slightly sick, right? Their skin's a little pale, a little drawn, you know, there's a little yellow in their eyes. That's what it kind of feels like. And so it's about kind of filling it back up again. I think we've kind of, in a lot of cases, we kind of dipped down into the gray zone and we're trying to get back into it because once we get kind of out of that gray zone, adding density is good.Right, it brings more services, more people, which can support more businesses. And there's this positive feedback that strengthens the neighborhood and makes it better. But in the gray zone, it's like, well, is more people gonna make it worse? Like, what are we? It's a nice callback, because most people don't make it past parks in death and life. It's just too bad. I tell them all the good bits are at the end.Kevin (37:37.781)There's many good bits. But yeah, I think there's an interesting aspect of American cities in particular there where you have, and I think about this a lot, we wrestle with this so much in my part of town in Kansas City where there is a sort of urban density that actually works pretty well where everybody pretty much drives still, right? If you know what I mean, like it.Seth Zeren (38:05.526)Yep. Yep. Bye, Norris.Kevin (38:06.869)The parking is easy and it's just not that, it's not really urban, but it's not really suburban. And I think there was a generation of people who re -occupied a lot of urban places like that in the 70s and 80s in particular, who love it for that. They love the fact that they're like in the city, but it's like parking was easy. Now the problem is, yeah.Seth Zeren (38:17.91)Yeah.Seth Zeren (38:32.182)Yep, we have that here too, absolutely.Kevin (38:34.997)The problem is like historically that was a complete non -starter. Those neighborhoods had far more people, were far more urban. And by today's standards, it would have been incredibly difficult to have a car and drive it around everywhere and park it.Seth Zeren (38:49.258)Well, people forget that like you could have the same number of housing units and have fewer people because house hold size is so much smaller today. So the street is relatively empty, right? Compared to when grandma was living here, you know, 80 years ago, um, as far fewer people around.Kevin (38:53.365)Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.Kevin (39:03.381)Yeah. And now with the prevalence of like one car per adult everywhere, the challenge of trying to upgrade those neighborhoods to become more like their historical predecessors, it does create a lot of conflict because then all of a sudden we are wrestling with the, it's really the car issue in many respects. Yeah.Seth Zeren (39:15.798)Yeah.Seth Zeren (39:22.774)Yeah, you're moving from one equilibrium to another equilibrium. And that's always really painful because it's going to reduce quality along the trip, even if you end up in a better place on the other side. You know, one of the things I find really helpful or really valuable, and I admired your work about this, is the business improvement district. And I don't know, whatever we call that microform of government. And we're involved in helping create one on a main street near us that has suffered from a tremendous amount of urban renewal and...Kevin (39:32.501)Yeah. Yeah.Kevin (39:46.003)Mm -hmm.Seth Zeren (39:53.3)institutional concentration and we're trying to figure out how to improve that. And one of things that I've learned from doing that is that the city, even with a pretty strong planning department, Providence has a good planning department, lots of good people, plenty of staff. It's not low capacity, but they got a big city to run, right? And they can't know it super deeply everywhere all the time, right? And here, and I'm involved because we own a bunch of property nearby and I've been working in the area for years. And so I get to know all the other owners and I get to know thethe nonprofits and the businesses and residents and you know, but I'm working on like eight square blocks, if that right. And I know that really well. I can talk about this block versus this block and this crosswalk and that curb and this parking lot and that, that tenant and you know, at that micro level. And it just seems to me that that's gotta be the future of a lot of this governance stuff. Cause to get out of that bad equilibrium is going to require a bunch of really careful.tactical hands -on changes to infrastructure, to private development, public, you know, all those pieces. And when I look at the whole city, I'm like, there's not enough coordination, right? There's not enough attention. There's too many things going on, too many fires to fight. It's at that micro level that I could kind of organize enough people, run the small planning exercise, coordinate the private development, coordinate the public investment and keep on top of everybody. But it's only, you know, eight square blocks, right? In a big city.So how does that work?Kevin (41:21.525)Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's something we've wrestled with a lot and we obviously do a bunch of it here, but I'm a big believer in, you know, place management at that scale. And I think one of the issues that we've seen over and over again is, you know, my city is even much bigger. It's like 320 square miles geographically. It's insanely large. Half a million people in the city limits. So like relatively low density for that large of a city, but...the ability of staff to actually manage all that and know what's going on. It's impossible. It's literally impossible. Yeah.Seth Zeren (41:57.142)Well, I've been city staff and I remember how insane it was. I mean, you don't get out of the building because you're too busy answering emails. You know, this is like you fight with the engineers or whoever about an intersection is like, have you ever stood in the intersection for an hour? Because I have, right? Because I'm there all the time. But you can't run the city, you know, not getting out into the field and seeing the mucky bits, right? And that's like.Kevin (42:17.045)Yeah, there's just a there's a huge mismatch in how we manage cities and their ability to change and solve just solve problems, solve basic problems.Seth Zeren (42:25.43)Well, so one of my questions is, is that in part because like the way we teach kind of all the pieces of city building and management is kind of like, and it feels like they're individually busted and then the system is busted. So like public administration, civil engineering, architecture, planning, you know, development, all, you know, whatever that there's a whole package of different professional schools that you could go to that would teach you these different skills, but none of them talk to each other.And so when they're graduates, I remember being a planner and then talking to the civil engineer Newton being like, we're from different planets, man. Like the words I'm saying, you don't understand the words you're saying, I don't understand, like, and no one's in charge. So we're just kind of like, because every department, one of the things that happens in cities, right, is every department is co equal under the under a mayor or city manager or something. So like planning department can't tell DPW what to do. They're the same level, you know, and so we're just kind of butt heads.Kevin (43:01.493)HeheheheheSeth Zeren (43:23.67)But planning is in a particularly bad situation because they don't have any shovels or trucks or much free cash or anything else. They don't get to do much. Their only power is persuasion.Kevin (43:33.525)And it's the first jobs that are cut whenever there's a recession too. But yeah, I mean, the whole industry is very siloed. And this has kind of been the classic battle of the new urbanism from the beginning was really the push from our side was to create generalists, that people who could pull everything together. And our charrette process was designed to bring all those people together and problem solve at the same time.Seth Zeren (43:36.83)Yeah.Kevin (44:03.317)And that actually worked really well, and it does work really well when you're able to facilitate that. The challenge you have in a lot of city governments that I've seen is that they're just like you said, they're all vertically, you know, all differentiated vertically and it's all siloed. And there's not a ton of incentive for the different departments to understand each other and work together unless you have a particularly strong executive who forces that to happen.Seth Zeren (44:28.662)Yeah, that's really the game. It's like, does your executive get it and care and willing to spend the time on it? You've said something really interesting in the past on other versions of this podcast, which is that, I don't know if I'll get it exactly right, but we spend like 50 % of the time on design, 40 % on policy and 10 % on implementation. And we should be like a third, a third, a third. Here's the thing. I feel like the charrette process is really great, but then the charrette leaves. New urbanists don't have, as far as I can tell, much of an answer of how you actually run the city.There's no proposal on how to reorganize the departments of the city government. There's no proposal on charter reform for cities or, you know, there's a whole universe of, you what should the education for a city manager be? Right. We have, we have an idea about what planning should do differently, you know, and so there's bits and pieces, strong towns, urban three, talk a little bit about the finance side. We're just starting to think about it. When you open that door, you realize, oh my gosh, where are the new urbanist police chiefs? Where are the new urbanist fire chiefs? Right.the controllers, the tax assessors, there's this huge apparatus of public entities that are out there. And I guess part of the reason why the place management is so cool is that you get to actually just be a little micro government. And instead of having to silo off every little bit of things, you're a taxing entity, you can also go hire people to put out flowers, you can also write regulations, you're a whole thing. And so likewise, I feel like the CNU universe has not yet...Kevin (45:47.541)Yeah. Yeah.Seth Zeren (45:55.19)really contended with like the mucky bits of administering, managing the city.Kevin (46:00.245)Yeah, I think that's totally, I think it's totally fair. And, you know, I got a lot of that thinking from Liz Plater -Zyberg who, and so the way she broke it down was design, policy and management. That's the three legs of the stool. Most of the people who came to the new urbanism originally and were most passionate were designers. So they had a very heavy emphasis on design. There were also a lot of policy wonks. So you got that policy piece, but yeah, very few people from.the world of understanding how to actually manage cities. And we've had a lot of interaction and bring people to the table and conferences and all, but I still think very little understanding in that world of how things work.Seth Zeren (46:42.166)Well, and you go, I think, to the International Downtown Association, right? The IDA. How is it that the IDA and CNU are still, like, not connected at all? As far as I could tell, right? From the outside, it just, like, the stuff we're doing is so, so connected, right? And so this, I guess, is a plea to the CNU folks and a plea to the IDA folks, like, let's get together, guys. Because, like, CNU can bring a whole bunch of the design and policy ideas. But you're right, we need managers. And manager, Strong Town sometimes talks about howKevin (46:45.173)Mm -hmm. Yeah.Kevin (46:55.925)This is a good question.Seth Zeren (47:11.132)maintenance is not sexy, right? It's easier to get people to design a new road than just fix the damn road you got. But that's the problem, right? If nobody's interested and we have no way of making management or administration better, like you'll just keep doing new projects and then as soon as you leave, they'll just fall apart, right? Because no one's going to run them when you go.Kevin (47:32.981)Yeah, no doubt. And so hopefully we can make that happen. I would have talked with a few people about this that we need to find a way to link up. I mean, there's always been a linkage there, but it's just not nearly as tight and as strong as I think it could be. I'm amazed when I go to the IDA conference just how few new urbanist consultants even bother to attend, which is shocking to me. It's enormous. But yes, I think there's an in...Seth Zeren (47:53.558)Yeah, it seems like a huge missed opportunity on both sides.Kevin (48:02.965)One of the, I think, ill effects of the last 30 or 40 years of there's been a lot of education that's pushed really smart, ambitious young people into the policy world instead of emphasizing that how important really good management is. First of all, I would say design also. I mean, and problem solving with projects generally is incredibly important.My bias is doing projects is more important than policy, but I know there's a role for both. But management, God, if you don't have good ongoing management of a place, just like any business, if a business doesn't have good ongoing management, forget it, you're toast. And a city, if it doesn't have it, is gonna suffer tremendously. So, you one, go ahead, go ahead.Seth Zeren (48:54.038)Well, I was gonna say, I feel like in my head, I've been thinking about this for a long time. And when I went to school, I went into an environmental management program, quote unquote management, right? It was supposed to train professional people to manage environmental organizations, work in government, work at the forest service, work for nonprofits, working for profits, doing environmental stuff. Were there any classes on management stuff, right? Managing people, managing budgets.Communications, no, it was all science, which is great, fine, like I need to know some stuff about ecology or water management or whatever, but like, how are we a professional school? You know, we have to go out in the world and run organizations which have budgets and staff and HR and communications and negotiation. You know, you can go to the business school and learn some of that and a lot of people did, but you gotta ask yourself like, well, what are we doing here?Kevin (49:44.405)Yeah. Well, man, I had six years of architecture school and there wasn't one business course that was required the whole time.Seth Zeren (49:49.718)Yeah, I mean, I see that. And the planning people, you know, maybe it's gotten better. But when I was going through it, I took a negotiations class at the business school, which was the most useful class for being a planner. It was negotiations. Most planners, we don't need people with physical planning backgrounds. I mean, you need someone who can do some physical planning. Mostly you need some social workers because local government is like a family therapy. They have fights going back 20 years with their neighbor about whatever and who's yelling at who. And it's like, we need just some people to get people to talk to each other.It's not about technical analysis. No one ever voted for my zoning amendment because I had a great analysis. No, it's relationships. So, you know, I look at this as like, and I know there's been efforts around this at CNU, but I think we need to really get serious about building new educational institutions. I don't know that we can do it inside. I mean, we've tried it, you know, at Miami, we've tried it at Notre Dame, and there's been some successes, but it's just not enough, right? 30 years later, you know, there's just...it hasn't really changed anything in terms of what we're training. So we have another whole generation raised up in the old way of doing business and we're surprised when we get the same results.Kevin (50:55.829)Well, one of the things that even mystifies me, somebody who's gone to a lot of architecture schools to do student crits and everything else is like there's this, there's a whole group that have come through in the last, I would say 15 years that don't even know anything now about the early new urbanism because that was like so long ago and it's just not taught. So it's wild to me. It's like that has gone down the memory hole.Seth Zeren (51:14.038)Yeah.Seth Zeren (51:19.35)Yeah.Kevin (51:21.077)So I talk about that a lot with people that I know just to try to keep some of those things going and make sure people have a memory of what actually happened in a lot of those years.Seth Zeren (51:29.91)What I think is so striking is I don't think it's actually that much money that would be needed to build some of these institutions. So if anyone out there is listening and wants to write checks, fantastic. But you could get a lot done for not a lot of money building these new institutions. I really do think that. And the scale of impact on society could be really huge. Yeah.Kevin (51:51.893)Yeah. Seth, I want to switch gears and do one more topic before we run out of time. I want to hit on this piece that you wrote about Yenbys and New Urbanists in Strong Towns and sort of the differences or perceived differences, you know, amongst the groups. I wonder if you could sort of set the table and talk a little bit about what, where you were going with that one. It's a long piece for anybody who wants to read it, but it's, it's really good.Seth Zeren (51:55.862)Oh, sure.Seth Zeren (52:02.538)Yeah.Seth Zeren (52:14.326)Yeah, it's on my my sub stack build the next right thing which is I have small children So we watch a lot of Disney movies. That's do the next right thing, which is a song from frozen 2 But related to incrementalism, right? You don't have to know the final answer You just when you and you're confused you just do the next right thing, you know, you're gonna work your way through it solve the problem incrementally Pragmatically, it's very American way to work. It's good. That's build the next right thing andKevin (52:27.533)Know it well.Seth Zeren (52:45.27)It's a part because like getting to utopia is not like you're not going to take one jump to utopia. We got to like work in the world we're in. So this piece came out actually, ironically, I started writing this in the emergency room with my child in the middle of the night. Because when you have little children, sometimes they eat like stuff and you end up in the emergency room in the middle of the night. So I'm like, I'm like starting to jot down some notes and the notes were really stimulated by another guy, Steve Mouzon, who's been on your show, I think, who, you know, is active on Twitter and occasionally.regularly gets in fights with sort of the very online Yimby crowd. And then there was an exchange, you know, about a piece that Steve wrote and some other people responded. And, you know, a lot of people that I'm considered I like or I appreciate their work. I mean, I appreciate Steve's work. I assign his book on on on the original green. I appreciate Nolan Gray's work. I assign his his stuff. So but I was really struck by this continuing like fight.In this case, between the CNU and the Yenbis. And in my analysis, I mean, you can go read the piece, but I'll give you the really short version. It's basically that, and since I'm from California, I'm very sympathetic to the Yenbi argument, right? I feel it in my bones, right? I can never return to the soil I was raised on because of the failure that has gone before us. So in the Yenbi world, it's all about supply. We got to build a bunch of homes, right? And that's the overriding value and virtue and goal.right? You see it celebrate. We're going to build so many more homes. And the new urbanist orientation, which is really importantly different for a few reasons. First of all, it was started in the eighties and nineties when there wasn't a housing crisis. So the DNA is not built around a housing crisis was built around building crappy places, right? Go read, you know, uh, suburban nation, right? It's about building bad stuff. Read consular, you know, that's, that's the DNA. It's also mostly working in the South, you know, in the Midwest to a certain extent whereThere hasn't been a supply crunch, you know, because they're building stuff, right? It's building sprawl. We can build better sprawl, worse sprawl, but it's still just getting built. And so, you know, a lot of that is about quality. How do we build good places? And so what's so frustrating about, I think, to both sides about the EMBC and U debate is that often we agree. Often building density and building quality are the same. So we're on the same team, but sometimes they're not. And the worst...Seth Zeren (55:12.502)fight is with your ally who betrays you, right? Your enemies, yeah, f**k that guy, he's terrible, right? You know, that's easy, but my friend, I thought you were with me, but now we're not, ah. And so that's what keeps happening, right? The CNU folks are like, you know, that might be a little bit too much density, aren't you worried about the blank walls? Aren't you worried about X, Y, and Z? And then, and the, and the, the Yenbis are like, are you kidding, man? Like we're all homeless, like, unless we build this building, we don't have time for your cute little nonsense. You know, your ADU is just too slow, whatever.Kevin (55:15.477)YouSeth Zeren (55:41.878)And so that's, that's on sort of goals and the people are different, right? The CNU architects first developers planners, the Yimby movement really comes out of activists, uh, political advocates, regular people, software engineers who are not professional built environment people, uh, lawyers, right? It's a policy oriented movement, economists, right? That's the core. That's their intellectual DNA is.know, economists at George Mason, whereas the CNU, it's, it's an, a few architects at Miami. That's really different DNA, right? And I think the CNU has, for whatever reason, not really, it's done some behind the scenes politics, you know, policy change, right? There's been really important behind the scenes policy change, very not visible to normal people. It's never been interested in mass mobilization, you know, votes.persuading elected officials, it's not their jam. The Yenby movement is a political advocacy movement, right? So they're trying to like win votes and get lost. So the Yenby folks have gotten more bills passed that does a bunch of CNU ideas, right? The missing middle, ADUs, all the stuff that CNU came up with like 20, 30 years ago is being mandated by bills passed by Yenby. So they're like, CNU guys, we're doing the thing. Why are you yelling at us? Right? But the Yenbys don't always appreciate that the CNU has,rebuilt so much of the DNA of 20th century planning. So like, complete streets was like a CNU invention. People don't realize that anymore because it's now so mainstream. And so there's this sort of tension where people don't see the benefits the others have provided because they're kind of operating in different styles. So that's, I think, the sort of core tension. And then I added the strong towns because strong towns sometimes finds itself fighting with both of them.And often aligned, right? Often we're all the same team, right? I consider myself a Yimby. I run a Yimby organization. I also am a Strong Towns founding member and I've been at CNU a lot. But they're subtly different, right? The Strong Towns thing that puts them at odds with some of these groups is that Strong Towns core idea is that we need to reengage bottom -up feedback, right? That the system is too top -down, too...Seth Zeren (58:06.454)tightly wound, too fixed, too set. So we build these places that are built to a finished state. We can't ever change them. We have tables that are not responsive to content. So we're just locked up. We can't get anything done. And the Strong Town's idea is, well, we need the systems to be responsive, right? If housing prices go up, we should build. If they don't go up, we shouldn't build. We need to make the streets context sensitive. And so on the one hand, we're all for getting rid of parking requirements and upzoning stuff. So the inbys are like, great.But then sometimes we're like, well, that might be too much of zoning. Here's some reasons why. And the Yenbis are like, wait, I thought you were pro density. I thought you were pro development. We're like, yes, but right. Uh, the strong towns, people would worry that the Yenbis in 1950 would have been the suburban sprawl advocates, right? They would have said, we need the houses now. Damn the consequences. We're not going to worry about fiscal insolvency in 50 years. We're just going to build the houses now. You know, that's, so that's the strong towns. Sort tension with the Yenby movement is the top down, the sort of.And this is a result of your movement being led by political advocates and attorneys and economists, right? There's the concern about that kind of top -down policy orientation, these sort of single metrics, let's get it done. And then I think sometimes there's also debate with the CNU around things trying to be too precious. Ther

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William Whyte, the American Urbanist

Booked on Planning

Play Episode Play 20 sec Highlight Listen Later Feb 13, 2024 40:58 Transcription Available

In this episode we talk with author Richard Rein who illuminates the life and work of the extraordinary William H. White. Rein's revelations, based on his book "American Urbanist: How William White's Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life," shed light on how White's discerning eye for public spaces revolutionized urban design. Our discussion traverses the path from White's iconic "The Organization Man" to his trailblazing stance on pedestrian-friendly cities.Show Notes:To view the show transcripts, click on the episode at https://bookedonplanning.buzzsprout.com/Marine Corps Gazette https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=marinecorpsgazetteFurther Reading: Suburban Nation by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck, Arbitrary Lines by M. Nolan Gray, Paved Paradise by Henry GraberFollow us on social media for more content related to each episode:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/booked-on-planning/Twitter: https://twitter.com/BookedPlanningFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/bookedonplanningInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/bookedonplanning/

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2023 Was A Big Year for Housing Reformers

united states states acast housing reformers big year nolan gray

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 21, 2023 15:15

States are starting to understand how zoning and other housing restrictions have contributed to the housing crisis gripping so much of the United States. Nolan Gray of California YIMBY explains. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Have zoning laws 'broken' Kansas City? This author thinks so

Up To Date

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 25, 2023 19:21

Author and city planner Nolan Gray argues that places like Kansas City need to abolish zoning laws, which he blames for housing segregation and the lack of walkable neighborhoods. Gray is speaking Wednesday at the Kansas City Public Library's Plaza branch.

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Arbitrary Lines with M. Nolan Gray at 2023 Annual Conference

Get Real Estate Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 3, 2023 58:13

In this special episode, Maryland REALTORS CEO, Chuck Kasky, Esq., is joined by urban planner and author of Arbitrary Lines, M. Nolan Gray, to discuss the history of regulatory zoning laws, missing middle housing, city density and policies that continue to have tremendous impacts on local economies. M. Nolan Gray is a professional city planner and an expert in urban land-use regulation. He is currently completing a Ph.D. in urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. Gray previously worked on the front lines of zoning as a planner in New York City. M. Nolan Gray provides historical context on where urban landscapes find themselves today in regards to the housing crisis and how policy has historically limited housing growth. However in contrast, he provides examples of successful policy changes that have enabled the expansion of housing options for diverse populations through creative land use and re-evaluation of dated policies.This episode was recorded live at the ALL IN Maryland REALTORS Annual Conference .

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City Zoning: The Good, the Bad, and the Environmental Consequences with Nolan Gray, Author and Professional City Planner

The Green Hour

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 11, 2023 84:02

For a lot of people, their only experience with city zoning is from playing SimCity. While SimCity may have introduced some aspects of zoning, it only scratches the surface of its real-world complexities. In this episode, we delve into the profound impact of zoning on our environment, including its role in promoting urban sprawl and car-dependent lifestyles that contribute to increased carbon emissions. Join us as we uncover the untold environmental consequences of zoning and discuss alternative approaches to create more sustainable and eco-friendly cities. It's time to reimagine the relationship between zoning and the environment for a greener future.Our guest on The Green Hour today is Nolan Gray, a distinguished expert in zoning and urban planning. I had the pleasure of meeting Nolan at an environmental conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he delivered a compelling talk on zoning and discussed his book titled "Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It," which was published in 2022.Nolan Gray currently serves as the research director for California YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) and has dedicated the majority of his career to the study of zoning. He brings a wealth of practical experience to the table, having worked as a planner in New York City. Nolan is also an Affiliated Scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where he advises state and local policymakers on land-use policy.With a Ph.D. in urban planning underway at UCLA, Nolan is actively contributing to the academic understanding of urban planning. He is widely recognized for his insightful contributions, with his work appearing in prominent publications such as The Atlantic, Bloomberg CityLab, and The Guardian. In addition to his professional accomplishments, Nolan Gray is a member of the esteemed America's Future 1995 Society, further demonstrating his standing as a respected authority in his field.

S3E2 - The Work-from-Home Technology Boon and its Consequences

Densely Speaking

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 10, 2023 49:49

The Work-from-Home Technology Boon and its Consequences (Andra Ghent) Andra Ghent is Professor of Finance at the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business. She is the author of The Work-from-Home Technology Boon and its Consequences, with Morris A. Davis and Jesse Gregory. Appendices: Andra Ghent: the miniseries Show Me a Hero and the book Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by Nolan Gray. Also mentioned: Natalia Emanuel & Emma Harrington, Working Remotely? Selection, Treatment, and the Market for Remote Work and Emanuel, Harrington & Amanda Pallais, The Power of Proximity to Coworkers: Training for Tomorrow or Productivity Today? Greg Shill: The Puzzle and Persistence of Biglaw Clustering (summarized in this blog post) Jeff Lin: Growth in Cities, revisited Follow us on the web or on Twitter: @denselyspeaking, @jeffrlin, @greg_shill. On Threads: Jeff is @jeffrlin and Greg is @just_shilling. Producer: Courtney Campbell The views expressed on the show are those of the participants, and do not necessarily represent the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, the Federal Reserve System, or any of the other institutions with which the hosts or guests are affiliated.

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The Invisible Reason for High Housing Prices: Restrictive Land-Use Regulations

Upzoned

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 5, 2023 38:48

It is extremely difficult to build housing in Rhode Island. It's also expensive to buy homes, with prices having increased by 34% since the summer of 2020. Why? Adam A. Millsap makes the case in Forbes that because Rhode Island zoning laws are overly restrictive, developers are unable to meet the current and past needs of housing. Millsap writes: “Places with fewer land-use regulations and more flexible zoning have lower housing prices and slower rent growth. Land-use regulations such as density restrictions, height restrictions, minimum lot sizes, parking requirements, and complicated set-back rules prevent developers from building more housing, especially more affordable housing.” In this episode of Upzoned, join host Abby Kinney as she talks with guest Nolan Gray, author of Arbitrary Lines, about his perspective on zoning laws and Rhode Island's efforts to address their housing crisis. ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES “Zoning Reforms, Not Public Housing, Will Fix Rhode Island's Housing Problem,” by Adam A. Millsap, Forbes (May 2023). Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by Nolan Gray. Abby Kinney (Twitter). Nolan Gray (Twitter). Theme Music by Kemet the Phantom.

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Nolan Gray & Joshua Humphries: Zoning and Affordable Housing

The CityAge Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 31, 2023 43:11

On this week's episode we sat down with Nolan Gray, author of Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It, and Joshua Humphries, Senior Housing Policy Advisor to Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens. Both interviews explore the current housing crisis. With Nolan, we dive into the far-reaching problems zoning has caused and worsened (including the housing crisis, racial segregation, lagging economic growth, and urban sprawl that hurts the climate) and what we can do about it. With Joshua, we discuss Atlanta's housing needs in particular, and the unique way they're addressing them.Arbitrary Lines: https://tinyurl.com/yvx42sch

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Ep. 181: Nolan Gray - Do We Need Zoning?

The Curious Task

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 19, 2023 59:51

Alex and Nolan discuss a novel solution to many of the difficult issues surrounding housing in North America: the elimination of zoning laws. Further Reading and References: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/zoning-housing-affordability-nimby-parking-houston/661289/ https://reason.com/2022/06/21/abolish-zoning-all-of-it/ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-04/how-houston-s-zoning-can-help-hurricane-harvey-recovery https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-26/manufactured-homes-are-the-cheap-housing-fix-we-need https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-28/cities-don-t-use-zoning-to-exclude-families-with-kids https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRUbDvMpyCM&ab_channel=VancouverPublicLibrary https://marketurbanism.com/2018/07/30/how-should-we-interpret-jane-jacobs/ https://marketurbanism.com/2016/02/21/who-plans-jane-jacobs-hayekian-critique-of-urban-planning/ https://www.planetizen.com/blogs/121786-jane-jacobs-and-zoning

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Zoning and Housing Reform in 2022

acast housing reform zoning nolan gray

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 9, 2023 19:22

The housing crunch is showing signs of breaking, at least when it comes to states where the availability of affordable housing has been most visible. Nolan Gray, author of Arbitrary Lines, discusses what changed in 2022. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

#550 The 2022 GovieLovies

GovLove - A Podcast About Local Government

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 30, 2022 92:04

Another year, another snake draft. The GovLove co-hosts teamed up to hand out awards and recap the seventh full year of a podcast about local government. Kirsten, Toney, Lauren, Dan, and Ben all selected three of their favorite episodes to honor with the most prestigious award in local government podcasting, a GovieLovie! They also shared their favorite highlight from 2022, their favorite holiday tradition, and what they are obsessed with from 2022. Hosts: Kirsten Wyatt, Ben Kittelson, Toney Thompson, Lauren Palmer, & Dan Bolin The GovieLovies Kirsten The Impact of the Great Resignation with Ronnie Dampier, Melody Lenox, & Margarita Hudgins Women in Fire Service with Anna Koons & Danielle Dulin, Warrensburg, MO Bereavement Leave for Loss of Pregnancy with Bobby Wilson, Pittsburgh, PA Ben Building a Culture of Equity with Danya Perry, Wake County, NC Arbitrary Lines, the Case Against Zoning with M. Nolan Gray, UCLA Lewis Center The Job of a Prothonotary with Noah Marlier, Montgomery County, PA Toney Making Zoning Easier to Understand with Sara Bronin Troubling Signs at the Supreme Court with Amanda Karras, Lisa Soronen, & Brian Connolly Leadership & Career Development with Eric Marsh Lauren Mayors & Local Political Violence with Heidi Gerbracht & Sue Thomas Transforming the 911 System with Rebecca Neusteter, University of Chicago Health Lab Becoming a City Manager with Tanisha Briley, Gaithersburg, MD Dan Employee Engagement and Culture with Dan Biles, Paso County, FL Addressing the Rise of Local Official Harassment with Brooks Rainwater, National League of Cities Diversity and Inclusion in Peoria, IL with Melodi Green Producer Pick from Pizza Mike - From Librarian to City Manager with Abigail Elder, Hood River, OR

‘Arbitrary Lines' Author Nolan Gray on Zoning Reform and Hitting Planning's Reset Button

American Planning Association

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 20, 2022 30:29

As the old saying goes, “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” For decades, zoning has been the hammer swung by cities at a laundry list of challenges. But this blunt tool, developed to regulate land use and density, has had profound collateral damage, planner Nolan Gray argues. Cities and planners have long been constrained by a zoning “straitjacket,” he says, preventing them from solving the problems that plague communities today: housing affordability, sprawl, segregation, environmental concerns. How can we reverse that trend? Gray's new book, Arbitrary Lines, looks for answers in the form of zoning reform. “My argument in the book is, yes, zoning has failed, and we should abolish zoning. But it's not a pure deregulation argument. It's a ‘we're-regulating-the-wrong-things' argument. I actually do think planners have a hugely important role to play in the impacts of new development.” —Nolan Gray, Planner and Author of Arbitrary Lines In this special episode of the People Behind the Plans podcast, Gray sits down with guest host Jason Jordan, APA's director of public affairs, to examine the cities and states charting a new course for zoning reform — and offer advice for planners navigating the myriad interests impacting land use decisions. Episode URL: https://planning.org/podcast/arbitrary-lines-author-nolan-gray-on-zoning-reform-and-hitting-plannings-reset-button/

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How to Fix California's Housing Issue

California Rebel Base with Steve Hilton

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 18, 2022 31:34

Steve chats with M. Nolan Gray, author of Arbitrary Lines; How zoning broke the American city and how to fix it. They talk about why California has a housing shortage, how LA is losing its personality, and why there is hope on the horizon.

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Nolan Gray: How Zoning Broke the American City | Ep #15

Let's Talk Housing

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 15, 2022 22:39

A talk with Nolan Gray, nationally renowned researcher, planner, Mercatus Center affiliated scholar, and the author of Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. Nolan shares why he thinks zoning broke the American city and why he thinks zoning abolition is necessary to build more affordable, vibrant, and sustainable cities in America. Please click the button to subscribe so you don't miss any episodes and leave a review if your favorite podcast app has that ability. Thank you! For more information go to https://housingfirstmn.org/ © 2022 Housing First Minnesota

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How Zoning Broke the American City

Green Sense Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 1, 2022 25:45

Are zoning codes stopping cities from being vibrant, equitable, and sustainable? This week we spoke with M. Nolan Gray, the Research Director for California YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) and author of “Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It.” During the interview, Nolan discusses how flawed policies are a major reason many US cities cannot address housing shortages, stunted growth and innovation, persistent racial and economic segregation, and car-dependent development. Nolan shares his proactive ideas for making our cities better.

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HFO Multifamily Marketwatch - Interview: Author Nolan Gray Explains Zoning's History as a Barrier to Affordable Housing

Multifamily Marketwatch

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 28, 2022 12:16

This month on HFO-TV, we spoke to Nolan Gray, research director for California YIMBY and author of Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. Nolan joins HFO Broker Aaron Kirk Douglas to discuss his new book and the history and role of zoning in where we live and work. Find Arbitrary Lines on Amazon or the publisher's website, islandpress.org/books/arbitrary-lines.

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Conversation with Aaron Lubeck in Durham, N.C.

Ann Arbor AF

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 24, 2022 55:33

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 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.Support the show

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Conversation with Aaron Lubeck in Durham, N.C.

Ann Arbor AF

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 24, 2022 55:33

conversations economists durham jim crow fixer uppers lubeck nolan gray jenny schuetz

EP 584 Zoning Regulations: What Are They Good For?

America Trends

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 7, 2022 33:46

The answer is nothing really unless you are looking to enrich incumbent property owners, institutionalize segregation and contribute to sprawl. That's according to our guest, M. Nolan Gray, author of “Arbitray Lines”. He's a professional city planner and an expert in land-use regulation. And while there are plenty of reasons to plan for diverse, … Continue reading EP 584 Zoning Regulations: What Are They Good For? →

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Episode 398: The Arbitrary Lines of Zoning

Talking Headways: A Streetsblog Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 1, 2022 42:24 Very Popular

This week we're joined by Nolan Gray to talk about his new book Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. We talk about how cities were regulated before zoning, why state and national reforms are important and why zoning abolition should be the ultimate goal. Follow us on twitter @theoverheadwire Support the show on Patreon http://patreon.com/theoverheadwire Buy books on our Bookshop.org Affiliate site!

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Zoning is a House of Cards, and Even THAT isn't Allowed in R-1

The Planning Commission

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 24, 2022 55:52

M. Nolan Gray, author of Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix it, joins The Planning Commisssion. This deep dive will take you on a journey from Euclid, Ohio to Houston, Texas all while the Commission chats about the many issues facing the fundamental land use planning tool-zoning.

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Twice on Sunday: Anti-Semitism, 2A, Alzheimer's Scandal, Zoning, Primary Results, & more

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 7, 2022 157:29

Our guest today is Heard Tell regular Dr Michael Siegel, who joins to talk about anti-semitism past, in current headlines, and from his own lived experience. Michael talks about the difference between previous generations, his father's experiences, and things that have happened in his own lifetime to give perspective and a human face to what hate can drive people to do. Also, Michael helps discuss the anti-semitic donor and supporter of Pennsylvania GOP gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano that has brought the issue to the fore in the state he lives in, and how Vladimir Putin's policy towards Jews in Russia is doing the same overseas. Plus we talk about the mindset of living with such things as the Tree of Life shootings in recent memory, and how it affects a community after.Our guest today is the returning Gabriella Hoffman of Young Voices and the District of Conservation podcast. We talk the aftermath of the gun legislation that passed congress, the new press for another assault weapons ban, and 2nd Amendment issues both in response to the headlines and as part of an election year cycle. Gabriella also breaks down some of the legal wrangling over gun control, such as the the Bruen and Heller decisions, what the current makeup of the court means for gun control, and the press for wider concealed and open carry rights. We aslo talk about the whether the rhetorical link between gun control and hunting/conservation has an effect on 2A issues, and how conservationist and hunters shape the issue.What is really going on beyond the recent headliens involving Alzheimer's Disease research and misconduct? Heard Tell viewers asked for this story to be covered, and we reached out to Dr Ryan Townely, a clinician and Alzheimer's disease researcher who participates in clinical research trials and educates medical students, neurology residents, and fellows. Dr Townley will explain the controversies, what headlines are sensationalized, what parts of the stories folks need to pay attention to, and give good facts and information on a disease that rightly terrifies people and is devistating to almost 6 million Americans with no treatment or cure. Dr Townley also talks about what we do know about the disease, the good research and work that is advancing towards treatments and cures, and risk factors and things folks can do in the mean time.Our guest today is Nolan Gray, author of the book Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It joins to explain beyond just the internet arguments how zoning and planning affect not just our cities and communities, but also the cultural and political debates we have about everything from property rights, to taxes, to quality of life. Nolan breaks down the nomenclature of what zoning is and isn't, compares cities like Houston who has little zoning to other cities like Minneapolis, Fayetteville, and Hartford who have varied and different zoning issues. Nolan also explains that while zoning is often citied as need to improve cities, it is usually the chief obstacle to building more affordable, vibrant, equitable, and sustainable cities. Also, Nolan breaks down a real world example of the how zoning laws and political ideology clash using the umbiquitous American zoning product - the stripmall.Our guest today is Heard Tell regular and Elections Daily's own Joe Szymanski who returns to break down the primary action from Tuesday night. Arizona, Washington, Missouri, Kansas, and Michigan all went to the poll and Joe helps sort out what the surprises were, what happened as expected, and what the matchups for the November general election mean. Joe also breaks down the big name races, and how the surprise of the night didn't involve a candidate at all.--------------------Questions, comments, concerns, ideas, or epistles? Email us HeardTellShow@gmail.comPlease make sure to subscribe to @Heard Tell , like the program, comment with your thoughts, and share with others.Support Heard Tell here: Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/heard-tell/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Twice on Sunday: UK PM Race, Are We/Aren't We in a Recession, Zoning, Kazakhstan, Cuba, YouTube, Reddit & more

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 31, 2022 160:58

Twice on Sunday for the last week in July, 2022:Our guest today is the returning Alexander Salter, an economist and research fellow at Texas Tech and Young Voices contributor. With headlines full of economic news and a White House trying to define what a recession is/isn't while also explaining inflation, cost of living, and other issues, Alexander helps us turn down the noise and get to the terminology and language of economics that is vital to understanding what is going on in this unique environment. Alexander also delves into the odd economics of having low unemployment but a labor issue and inflation, the path that got us here, and the bipartisian habit of fiscal ill responsibility that shows no signs of changing anytime soon. We also put him on the spot as to whether the latest economic data is the peaking of the worst, or if the summer of discontent will run into the fall and winter.Our guest today from Young Voices UK is Lettice Bromovsky. We take a deep dive and review of UK Conservative Party leadership contest, and get into the background, credentials, and prospects of Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss as they contend to be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Lettice walks us through how the leadership contest is structured, the last days of Boris that brought it about, and what we can expect in the next 6 weeks of convincing the party who should be the next leader. Also, we talk through the also-rans, who rose in prominence, who lost standing, and what it means for the future of the Conservatives.Our guest today is freelance journalist and head of the Happy Warrior substack and podcast Peter Pischke. Peter joins to talk about two platforms that have tremendous influence in American culture and media: Reddit and YouTube. Peter details from writing he has done how the case of popular Youtuber Act Man is an example of the good, the bad, and the ugly of content moderation on one of the worlds biggest, most dynamic, and ever-growing media platforms. Also, Peter explains the influence of Reddit, and how even the mostly free-for-all subreddits are starting to have to be reigned in by the parent company, stoking debates on censorship, fair use rules, and what should and shouldn't be content that can be held as liable against a platform.Joining us on Heard Tell guest Cassandra Shand returns to the program to talk about the current crisis in Cuba, from the fuel and food shortages that are plaguing most of the world, to the healthcare system collapse and crackdown on protests that are becoming all too familiar again. Cassandra also talks about the newest wave of the very old problem of migrants and exiles fleeing Cuba and trying to get to America, and whether or not America's current policy from embargo to official status to immigration rules needs reviewed and adjusted.Our guest today is Nolan Gray, author of the book Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It joins to explain beyond just the internet arguments how zoning and planning affect not just our cities and communities, but also the cultural and political debates we have about everything from property rights, to taxes, to quality of life. Nolan breaks down the nomenclature of what zoning is and isn't, compares cities like Houston who has little zoning to other cities like Minneapolis, Fayetteville, and Hartford who have varied and different zoning issues. Nolan also explains that while zoning is often citied as need to improve cities, it is usually the chief obstacle to building more affordable, vibrant, equitable, and sustainable cities. Also, Nolan breaks down a real world example of the how zoning laws and political ideology clash using the umbiquitous American zoning product - the stripmall.Guest Roy Mathews returns to Heard Tell to talk about Kazakhstan, and how the ancient crossroads between the East and the West once again finds themselves between world powers. Roy explains the situation of President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev from publicly confronting Putin, to internal questions about legitimacy, and what his background and motivations are in trying to position his country in a shifting world with China on one side and Russia on the other, and is there an opening for the west to make inroads. Plus we'll talk how China's increasing trade and financial influence complicates not just geopolitics, but the ordinary Kazakh citizens including the largest diaspora of Uyghurs along with other ethnic Turkic groups who know all too well China's human rights violations.--------------------Questions, comments, concerns, ideas, or epistles? Email us HeardTellShow@gmail.comPlease make sure to subscribe to @Heard Tell , like the program, comment with your thoughts, and share with others.Support Heard Tell here: Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/heard-tell/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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Good Talks: Zoning, Urban/City Planning Policies, Affordable Housing, Culture & Politics Thereof w/ Nolan Gray

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 30, 2022 30:03

Our guest today is Nolan Gray, author of the book Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It joins to explain beyond just the internet arguments how zoning and planning affect not just our cities and communities, but also the cultural and political debates we have about everything from property rights, to taxes, to quality of life. Nolan breaks down the nomenclature of what zoning is and isn't, compares cities like Houston who has little zoning to other cities like Minneapolis, Fayetteville, and Hartford who have varied and different zoning issues. Nolan also explains that while zoning is often citied as need to improve cities, it is usually the chief obstacle to building more affordable, vibrant, equitable, and sustainable cities. Also, Nolan breaks down a real world example of the how zoning laws and political ideology clash using the umbiquitous American zoning product - the stripmall.--------------------Questions, comments, concerns, ideas, or epistles? Email us HeardTellShow@gmail.comPlease make sure to subscribe to @Heard Tell , like the program, comment with your thoughts, and share with others.You can support Heard Tell here:Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/heard-tell/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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PACT Act/Burn Pit Hot Mess, Zoning/Housing Policy, Putin's Weaponized Refugees, Cuomo, w/ Nolan Gray

america zoning nolan gray

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 29, 2022 48:05

Your Heard Tell for Friday, July the 29th, 2022 is turning down the noise of the news cycle and getting to the information we need to discern the time we live in by parsing out the uproar over the Pact Act procedural vote in the US Senate that stopped VA funding and burn pit legislation from going forward. We'll talk about the funding and financial bloat added to the bill, whether or not that was the right time to fight that battle, and what it means in real world, practical terms beyond just the politics and outrage on social media on an issue that has been decades trying to get recognition. Vladimir Putin is once again using refugees as weapons, and the millions flowing from Ukraine into Europe are not just a byproduct of war but a centerpiece to Putin's plans. We work through a piece by Ivana Stradner and Iulia Sabina-Joja that breaks down the history and intention of people being used to destabilize governments and the world order opposed to Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine. Our guest today is Nolan Gray, author of the book Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It joins to explain beyond just the internet arguments how zoning and planning affect not just our cities and communities, but also the cultural and political debates we have about everything from property rights, to taxes, to quality of life. Nolan breaks down the nomenclature of what zoning is and isn't, compares cities like Houston who has little zoning to other cities like Minneapolis, Fayetteville, and Hartford who have varied and different zoning issues. Nolan also explains that while zoning is often citied as need to improve cities, it is usually the chief obstacle to building more affordable, vibrant, equitable, and sustainable cities. Also, Nolan breaks down a real world example of the how zoning laws and political ideology clash using the umbiquitous American zoning product - the stripmall. Meanwhile, Chris Cuomo is back, sort of, as the disgraced and fired former CNN host has a new TV gig, and one of the UK largest grocery stores collects over a million free meals from customers for those in need. All that and more on this Friday edition of Heard Tell.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/heard-tell/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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Our maritime past and future with David Shukman

Connected Places

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 21, 2022 33:25

In this episode, we meet David Shukman, former BBC Science Editor. For over 30 years David has been reporting from all over the globe on the profound changes that are happening in our environment, our seas, and the wider natural world. Having started his career with the BBC in 1983, he was appointed the BBC's first science editor in 2012, a position he held until stepping down at the end of COP26 in Glasgow. David has some fascinating stories to share from his time as a science reporter, and he's also thought a lot about the future of the world's oceans and the profound changes and innovations we're witnessing here in Britain. This episode is the full interview with David, who briefly appeared on our recent episode on the future of the UK's ports (episode 45). In that episode we explored the innovation that's happening the UK's maritime economy, the role of ports as a powerful engine of regional growth and a potential gateway to new global markets and routes to foreign direct investment. We also heard from some of the innovators and port operators who are writing a new maritime story in Britain, like Bob Sanguinetti, CEO of Aberdeen Harbour and Nolan Gray, Freeport Director at Tees Valley Combined Authority. We heard from Anna Ziou, Policy Director at the UK Chamber of Shipping, as well as Mark Wharton and Sophie Peachy from IOTICS, a UK company specialising in data and digital twin technology. Music on this episode is by Phill Ward Music (www.phillward.com) If you'd like to get in touch with your feedback, comments and suggestions on what you'd like to hear more of on Connected Places, please email: podcast@cp.catapult.org.uk. We're looking forward to hearing from you! Follow the show! Don't forget to subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Please also take a moment to write a review and rate us so that more people can hear about the podcast and what we do at Connected Places Catapult.

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Abolish Zoning Already

Everything Urban

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 18, 2022 20:58

Join my new co-host Roger Valdez and I as we discuss the topic that is gaining new traction thanks to a book by Nolan Gray titled Abritrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. Whatever the origins of zoning are and no matter how outdates those ideas are, zoning persists, and Cities are all the worst for it.

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What's Wrong with Zoning (with M. Nolan Gray)

Free Thoughts

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 15, 2022 50:00 Very Popular

One border libertarians might be curious about lies between what zoning is and what zoning is not. M. Nolan Gray, author of the new book, “Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It” joins the show to explain the roots of our zoning regulations, clarify if overpopulated cities are the real problem, and describe how cities like Houston, Texas are adapting. Plus; where do we go from here? Is the complete abolition of zoning the end goal? What progress is left on the table by our current way of doing things? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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America's Zoning Problem

RadioWest

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 15, 2022 51:33

City planner Nolan Gray is the first to admit it: Getting people excited about city zoning is tough. And yet, this seemingly dull topic shapes our lives by shaping the cities we live in.

295. M. Nolan Gray with Shaun Scott: How Zoning Broke the American City

Town Hall Seattle Civics Series

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 13, 2022 61:23

With exponential growth in the Seattle area, demand and costs for housing are high and availability is low. Affordable housing is difficult for so many to come by, and the region is feeling more than just growing pains; it's in crisis. In Seattle, most residential areas are zoned for single-family homes, restricting the ability to increase housing density and provide more affordable housing options. Are there new housing solutions that can accommodate everyone? As regions across the country grapple with how to solve the growing housing crisis, city planner M. Nolan Gray shared vital insight in his new book, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. He contended that it's time to move beyond zoning and abolish it, which could help U.S. cities address housing shortages, stunted growth and innovation, racial and economic segregation, and car-dependent development. But the approach is not without controversy. As discussion continues around loosening long-standing zoning rules, some residents worry that zoning changes will impact the “character” of neighborhoods, while others see the current zoning rules as an impediment to much-needed change. Could our region benefit from a reimagined approach to single-family neighborhoods? Through explanations and stories, Gray showed why zoning abolition could help produce more affordable, vibrant, equitable, and sustainable cities. M. Nolan Gray is a professional city planner and an expert in urban land-use regulation. He is currently completing a PhD in urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. Gray previously worked on the front lines of zoning as a planner in New York City. He now serves as an affiliated scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where he advises state and local policymakers on land-use policy. Gray is a contributor to Market Urbanism and a widely published author, with work appearing in outlets such as the Atlantic, Bloomberg CityLab, and the Guardian. He lives in Los Angeles, California, and is originally from Lexington, Kentucky. Shaun Scott is a Seattle-based writer and historian. A former Pramila Jayapal staffer and Bernie Sanders 2020 Washington State Field Director, he is currently the Policy Lead at the Statewide Poverty Action Network. His essays about popular culture and late capitalism have appeared in Sports Illustrated, The Guardian, and Jacobin Magazine. He is the author of the paperback Millennials and the Moments that Made Us: A Cultural History of the US from 1982-Present, and the forthcoming hardcover from UW Press Heartbreak City: Sports and the Progressive Movement in Urban America. Buy the Book: Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It (Paperback) from Third Place Books Presented by Town Hall Seattle.

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City Journal's 10 Blocks: Zoning Out Growth

The Ricochet Audio Network Superfeed

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 1, 2022

Urban planner and Mercatus Center scholar M. Nolan Gray joins Brian Anderson to discuss municipal zoning's past, present, and future. His new book, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It, is out now. Find the transcript of this conversation and more at City Journal.

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Zoning Out Growth

City Journal's 10 Blocks

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 23, 2022 17:21 Very Popular

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Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 22, 2022 40:10

There are many social and economic ills that could be addressed by dramatically reducing or abolishing zoning. That task is far from simple. M. Nolan Gray's new book is Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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The Arbitrary Lines of Zoning ft. M Nolan Gray

The Neoliberal Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 17, 2022 60:56

Almost every major city is defined by a set of zoning regulations - a map that says exactly which types of buildings can be built in which areas, and what you're allowed to use those buildings for. M Nolan Gray, a city planner and author of the new book 'Arbitrary Lines', joins the show to discuss zoning. How did our modern system of zoning develop in the 20th century? What impact does zoning have on our cities? Is zoning to blame for the housing affordability crisis? And should we reform or abolish the systems of zoning that are holding us back? Follow Nolan at https://twitter.com/mnolangray To make sure you hear every episode, join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/neoliberalproject. Patrons get access to exclusive bonus episodes, our sticker-of-the-month club, and our insider Slack. Become a supporter today! Got questions for the Neoliberal Podcast? Send them to mailbag@neoliberalproject.org Follow us at: https://twitter.com/ne0liberal https://www.instagram.com/neoliberalproject/ https://www.twitch.tv/neoliberalproject Join a local chapter at https://neoliberalproject.org/join

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Ep 27: Minimum Lot Size Reform with M. Nolan Gray

UCLA Housing Voice

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 15, 2022 74:25 Transcription Available

“Find ways to give vocal minorities opt-out mechanisms where they can have some of the land use rules that they want, but they don't get to drag the whole city down with them.” That's one of Nolan Gray's primary lessons from the success of minimum lot size reform in Houston, and a prescription for land use reform more generally. Houston's reform, which took place in 1998, reduced the minimum parcel size for new homes from 5,000 to just 1,400 square feet per unit, and it's produced tens of thousands of low-cost townhome-style houses in the city's “inner loop.” It also allowed individual neighborhoods to opt-out of the reform, creating a political context in which reform could move forward. Gray, a doctoral student at UCLA and author of the new book, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It, joins us to talk about the lessons we can learn from the famously unzoned city of Houston, and the promise that minimum lot size reform holds for improving affordability and giving residents more choice in how they live their lives.

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Nolan Gray: Exposing the Arbitrariness of Zoning Codes

GovLove - A Podcast About Local Government

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 13, 2022 54:10 Very Popular

Professional city planner and longtime Strong Towns contributor Nolan Gray comes to The Strong Towns Podcast today to talk about his new book, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. As you may have already gathered from the title, this is a book all about the flawed nature of zoning, and why reforming our zoning codes is such a key part of building stronger, more financially resilient cities and towns. As Strong Towns Podcast host Chuck Marohn notes, if you don't know anything about zoning, you're going to get a lot out of this book. And if you're an expert on zoning, you're still going to get a lot out of this book. So if you're looking for an accessible, yet informative exploration of what's gone wrong with the way we plan cities, look no further. Additional Show Notes Order Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It here. Nolan Gray (Twitter). Charles Marohn (Twitter).

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#522 Arbitrary Lines, the Case Against Zoning with M. Nolan Gray, UCLA Lewis Center

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 10, 2022 57:12

What do we want city planning to do? M. Nolan Gray, author and researcher at the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, joined the podcast to talk about his new book, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. Nolan provides an in-depth history of zoning including the impacts and ways zoning has distorted American cities. He shared ways that cities can reform zoning and what a city without zoning might look like. He also discussed what the future of planning profession would be without zoning. Host: Ben Kittelson

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Omari Salisbury & the End of His Morning Show

Seattle's Morning News with Dave Ross

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 2, 2022 36:40

Feliks Banel on efforts to create monument to Flight 293 // Dose of Kindness -- lost stuffed triceratops returned // Gee Scott on the Bidens' "fexting" // Chris Sullivan on the FAA's scrutiny of Boeing // Omari Salisbury live on the end of his Morning Update Show // Rachel Belle on a couple suing their son for a lack of grandkids // M. Nolan Gray, author of Arbitrary Lines See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Reimagining the UK's ports and maritime economy

Connected Places

Play Episode Listen Later May 25, 2022 37:14

The United Kingdom is a maritime nation. Our ports have long been hubs connecting Britain to the rest of the world. Yet if we think of ports as under-utilised hubs of innovation, things start to get exciting! Whether it's 5G, autonomous systems, or net zero infrastructure, our ports can foster diverse innovation ecosystems. They can also be powerful engines of regional growth, as well as gateways to new global markets and routes to foreign direct investment. With the right vision and imagination, we have the tools and capabilities to write a new and exciting chapter in Britain's maritime story. This episode features a special guest, David Shukman, the BBC's former Science Editor, who's reported from around the world on climate change and the environment for 30 years. We also meet some of the innovators and port operators who are writing that new maritime story, like Bob Sanguinetti, CEO of Aberdeen Harbour and Nolan Gray, Freeport Director at Tees Valley Combined Authority. We hear from Anna Ziou, Policy Director at the UK Chamber of Shipping, as well as Mark Wharton and Sophie Peachy from IOTICS, a UK company specialising in data and digital twin technology. Music on this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions and Phill Ward Music (www.phillward.com) Show notes: To find out more about our Clean Maritime Demonstrator project in Aberdeen, click here. To learn more about our work on the future of the UK's Freeports, click here. To learn about how our ports are increasing being seen as hubs of clean energy and innovation, click here. To download our report on Hubs of Innovation, click here, and you can also read our playbook for place leaders by clicking here. And to register for the Maritime Innovation Week, which the Catapult is participating in as part of London Innovation Week from 13th-17th June, click here. If you'd like to get in touch with your feedback, comments and suggestions on what you'd like to hear more of on Connected Places, please email: podcast@cp.catapult.org.uk. We're looking forward to hearing from you! Follow the show! Don't forget to subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Please also take a moment to write a review and rate us so that more people can hear about the podcast and what we do at Connected Places Catapult.

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Can We Build Strong Towns from Scratch in the 21st Century?

Upzoned

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 20, 2022 39:54 Very Popular

With the housing market still hot as a red poker despite an uptick in interest rates, Nolan Gray, in a recent article from Bloomberg's CityLab, explores the idea of building brand-new cities (in the mode of 21st-century China or the Brasilia of the latter 20th century) to address the housing crisis. Alain Bertaud, a fellow at the Marron Institute for Urban Management and a former city planner at the World Bank, engages with Gray in this published interview to explain whether or not this is a realistic solution. Host Abby Kinney and her co-host Charles Marohn of Strong Towns chew it over in this episode of Upzoned. “Historically, infrastructure follows the market, not the other way around,” Kinney notes. “Huge public investments in infrastructure where there are no jobs are not really a very smart investment because the upfront costs of building an entire city's worth of infrastructure are so incredibly high. The public sector would have to be in a negative cash flow for a very long time.” Marohn talks about places where this has actually been done, with the government fronting the money for infrastructure and subsidizing individuals through mortgages and commercial real estate loans. “They fail in every financial metric that is longer than the immediate sugar high you get out of the transaction,” he says. There are interesting examples, as both hosts discuss, but it's hard to beat an organically grown, incrementally developed city, where historic trial and error has made places that work. Where do you fall on this question? Additional Show Notes “The Problem With Building a New City From Scratch,” by Nolan Gray, CityLab (April 2022). Abby Kinney (Twitter) Charles Marohn (Twitter) Theme Music by Kemet the Phantom.

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86: Arbitrary Lines with Nolan Gray

Narratives

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 21, 2022 55:57

In this episode, I'm joined by Nolan Gray and my friend Lars Doucet to discuss zoning, city planning and land value taxes. Nolan is the author of the upcoming book about Zoning, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It.

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Weaponizing Historic Preservation

Upzoned

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 19, 2022 40:47

Today on Upzoned, host Abby Kinney and regular co-host Chuck Marohn are joined by a special guest: Shomari Benton, the co-founder of Benton Lloyd & Chung (a law firm in Kansas City, Missouri, that specializes in land use and real estate). He is also an avid urbanist, historic preservation advocate, and small-scale developer. Together, they discuss an article from The Atlantic by Nolan Gray, titled “Stop Fetishizing Old Homes.” Gray takes a rather spicy approach to talking about historic preservation, and how it has ultimately harmed the capacity for many cities across the U.S. to develop a sufficient number of housing units in a housing crisis. He argues that the fetishization of old homes has encouraged our society to weaponize preservation in a self-righteous pursuit that clouds the more important need of building more housing. According to the author, we need to start getting serious about new construction, as opposed to preserving old housing—which he compares to poorly maintained, unsafe junker cars being forced back into service after their intended lifespan. What's the Strong Towns take on this conversation? Find out as Abby, Chuck, and Shomari “upzone” it! Additional Show Notes “Stop Fetishizing Old Homes,” by M. Nolan Gray, The Atlantic (January 2022) Shomari Benton (Twitter) Abby Kinney (Twitter) Charles Marohn (Twitter) Theme Music by Kemet the Phantom

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Ep. 107 | Inflation Like Its 1982

Markets & Mortgages

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 13, 2022 17:45

SUMMARY: Inflation data is out and it is as expected, which means not good, as the index jumps 7% with food and energy seeing even higher numbers, mortgage demand is up to start the year, and M. Nolan Gray at The Atlantic says we have to stop fetishizing old homes. SourceInflation Hits 7% To End The YearMortgage Demand Up To Start The YearStop Fetishizing Old HomesBut wait, there's more...SIGN UP: Markets & Mortgages Morning Newsletter

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October 2021

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 1, 2021 70:17

1.Introduction: Caleb O. Brown 2. Jennifer Schulp and SEC Commissioner Elad Roisman on the future of equities markets 3. Nolan Gray, a housing researcher on the hurdles to reforming housing 4. Abigail Hall, an economist, on military affiliation in the attack on the Capitol 5. Will Ruger, President Trump's nominee for ambassador to Afghanistan on the rocky but necessary exit from Afghanistan 6. Matthew Feeney on the promising and troubling potential uses of drone technology See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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The Trouble with Housing in California

california housing nolan gray

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 1, 2021 16:32

The regulatory environment and decades of less than adequate housing production has contributed to a dramatic rise in housing prices in California. Housing researcher Nolan Gray details how we got here. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

July 2021

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 1, 2021 69:52

1) Introduction: Caleb O. Brown 2) Nolan Gray and Scott Lincicome on rising housing costs 3) David Weller and Neha Mishra on international and domestic digital trade regulations 4) Julian Sanchez and Patrick Eddington on the Pentagon Papers, 50 years later 5) Charles Silver on his co-authored book, Medical Mal practice Litigation See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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Congressional Stimulus for Homebuyers? Now? Really?

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Play Episode Listen Later Jun 4, 2021 15:22

In an especially hot housing market with significant supply constraints, why spend taxpayer money to goose demand? Housing researcher Nolan Gray argues it's precisely the wrong policy response. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

5 - 4-2021 MFYV With Guest Nolan Gray

Loving Liberty Radio

Play Episode Listen Later May 5, 2021 10:16

Urbanism of Star Wars

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5-4-2021 MFYV with guest Nolan Gray

Fed By Ravens Media

Play Episode Listen Later May 5, 2021 10:16

Urbanism of Star Wars #MFYV #Stephenkent #Bryanhyde #YoungVoices #TalkRadio #CurrentEvents --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/fedbyravens/support

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Nolan Gray – The California Housing Crisis

Next Round

Play Episode Listen Later May 4, 2021 32:06

PRI’s guest in this podcast is Nolan Gray, an urban planner and currently a Ph.D. student at UCLA. Housing affordability and housing shortages are two key reasons so many Californians are fleeing the state. Nolan discusses why housing is so expensive and the regulatory barriers that are preventing more houses from being built. He also offers policy recommendations to help more Californians find an affordable place to live.

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230: Good Intentions Aren't Enough -with Nolan Gray

The Brian Nichols Show

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 16, 2021 39:55

"The goal of the proposal is ...." Now, to judge how a proposal did, one would want to look at the actual outcomes of said proposal, versus just looking at the intentions of the proposal. And yet, when it comes to government programs and policies, it is the intentions that lawmakers seem to focus on. Nolan Gray is a housing researcher at UCLA, a former NYC city planner, host of the YouTube "Pop Culture Urbanism" (where he dissects housing & city questions from famous movies & TV shows), and joins the program to specifically address California's extreme environmental laws and where they ended up exacerbating the very problems they were seeking to address. Find Nolan Online- Twitter: https://twitter.com/mnolangray YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZvSHJDIcsI&list=PLrq2fpPamIE81zmZ98Y8NxrTiQBJmqiqM Article Discussed: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/signature-environmental-law-hurts-housing/618264/ Sponsored By: MUDWTR: Start your new morning ritual with MUD! LINK for TBNS Listeners: https://bit.ly/38QBpHx Support The Brian Nichols Show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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4-13-2021 MFYV with guest Nolan Gray

Fed By Ravens Media

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 14, 2021 11:00

Housing crisis & The Case for Luxury Condos #MFYV #Stephenkent #Bryanhyde #YoungVoices #TalkRadio #CurrentEvents --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/fedbyravens/support

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4 - 13 - 2021 MFYV With Guest Nolan Gray

Loving Liberty Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 14, 2021 11:00

Housing crisis & The Case for Luxury Condos

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Episode 135 Y(oda) In My Backyard with Nolan Gray

The Urbane Cowboys Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 9, 2021 40:37

Join us for a conversation with urbanist Nolan Gray about Star Wars, its superiority over Star Trek, and why think tankers are the true Jedi. Cohosted by Josiah Neeley of R Street Institute and Doug McCullough of Lone Star Policy Institute.

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Liberty Informant: Hillbilly Urbanism

The Matthew Spositi Program

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 17, 2021 7:43

Given that “redneck” and “hillbilly” remain the last acceptable stereotypes among polite society, it isn't surprising that the stereotypical urban home of poor, recently rural whites remains an object of scorn. The mere mention of a trailer park conjures images of criminals in wife-beaters, moldy mattresses thrown awry, and Confederate flags. As with most social phenomena, there is a much more interesting reality behind this crass cliché. Trailer parks remain one of the last forms of housing in US cities provided by the market explicitly for low-income residents. Better still, they offer a working example of traditional urban design elements and private governance. This article was published at the Foundation for Economic Education, by Nolan Gray. Article Link: https://fee.org/articles/hillbilly-urbanism/

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A ROO for College Station?

Think Brazos

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 12, 2021 9:41

Potential Consequences of a Restricted Occupancy Overlay (ROO) for College StationThe College Station City Council is considering adopting a Restricted Occupancy Overlay. Also called a ROO, this potential rule could allow neighborhoods to vote on restricting how many unrelated people can live in a home together. College Station and Bryan, Texas are both home to Texas A&M University, the largest university in Texas. Some students live on campus, but many live off campus and their housing options and costs are impacted by decisions made by the city councils of these two cities. When housing options are limited, these students compete with the low-income population for good housing. Local regulations such as this ROO can impact local housing costs, so Think Brazos will continue to follow and update you on this potential ordinance.In this video and podcast episode, Habitat staff Charles and Whitney Coats ask policy experts Emily Hamilton, Salim Furth, and Nolan Gray from the Mercatus Center about the potential consequences of this kind of regulation for residents in College Station. This interview is part of a longer interview where we discussed housing policies that could help reduce the spread of the Coronavirus (and future viruses).If you would like more background information on the Restricted Occupancy Overlay, please listen to our podcast interviews with College Station city council opponents Elizabeth Cunha and Joe Guerra—they disagreed on this issue and explain why in these episodes. Visit Think Brazos for more conversations about how we keep a growing community affordable for everyone—Texas A&M students, Aggie graduates, employees, and fans!

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How can housing help Bryan and College Station recover from the Coronavirus?

Think Brazos

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 29, 2020 26:09

COVID-19 has taken lives and livelihoods in Bryan and College Station. Hopes are rising for a vaccine, but what else can a community do to help recover?Mercatus Center scholars Emily Hamilton, Salim Furth, and Nolan Gray join Charles and Whitney Coats of Think Brazos to discuss how certain housing types could help Bryan and College Station recover from COVID-19 and what that recovery may look like. The Mercatus publication discussed in the video is “Policies to Help Communities Recover: Housing Restrictions”. Enjoy the show and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes. Just remember – “Think local. Think Brazos!”Think Brazos is a project of Bryan/College Station Habitat for Humanity focused on policies that help local Brazos County families thrive. This interview is not an endorsement of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

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Market Urbanism

Ethiscope podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 13, 2020 61:14

Interviews with Emily Hamilton, Nolan Gray, and Alain Bertaud about how cities thrive under free markets rather than detailed planning.

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Ep. 14: Reels, IGTV, & Story Updates (what’s new on Instagram)

Instagram Insider Hacks

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 7, 2020 8:24

Listen for the very latest on Reels, IGTV, & Story Updates (what's new on Instagram) Click below for shownotes https://ruthiegray.mom/reels-igtv-story-updates/ Nolan Gray, podcast editor at Indigo Sound @nolangray https://www.instagram.com/nolangray/ 3 Tip Reel Post: How to leave quick and efficient comments on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/p/CEt1sGWn871/ Episode 7: New IGTV Updates + best IG Hacks https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-7-new-igtv-updates-best-instagram-hacks/id1511805380?i=1000485478362 Episode 12 How to find the best Instagram filters from stories https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-12-how-to-find-best-instagram-filters-for-stories/id1511805380?i=1000488984193 Follow me @Ruthiegray.mom on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ruthiegray.mom/ Reels, IGTV, & Story Updates (what's new on Instagram) Reels - Episode 17 (coming up) Will teach you about how and why using Reels as an effective tool to broaden your audience reach but I just dropped a 3 tip reels post in my IG feed all about how to make comments quickly and efficiently! - this is how I use reels. Go see how I did that! IGTV previews used to be one minute and now the’re only 15 seconds so say what you need to say to hook your follower to tap in! Spend time on that hook, girlfriend. I talk all about best IGTV practices and updates in episode 7 so if you need more tips on that head there! New Story Layout New story layout Open up stories and the default at very bottom bottom says story Swipe left to shoot a reel and right to go live. Your main toolbar is now on the left side of the story screen Here you can access Create, Boomerang, Layout Superzoom, and handsfree. Filters are on either side of the large white story circle button that you use to either snap photos or shoot video. Head to episode 12 to discover the best filters and how to find them! This concludes this short experimental on the fly travel episode of the Instagram Insider Hacks podcast. I so appreciate you listening and connecting with me in the dm @ruthiegray.mom and If you’re learning and enjoying the podcast, would you consider tapping the 5 stars on the app and even leaving a few words of what you like about it? Virtual chocolate all around for that!

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Spider-Man vs New York City Housing (Ft. Nolan Gray)

On the Run with Remso W. Martinez

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 3, 2020 66:25

The debate over urban housing enters the world of the spectacular, amazing, ultimate superhero known as Spider-Man as Young Voices contributor Nolan Gray teaches Remso a thing or two about why housing in New York has turned into a socioeconomic battleground thanks to the most epic of Marvel worthy villains- the government of New York City! Mentioned in this episode: Watch the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsbmm_VfLqk&feature=youtu.be) Follow Nolan on Twitter (https://twitter.com/mnolangray) Robinhood Get your free stock just for signing up with Robinhood and start investing today. Click here (https://join.robinhood.com/remsom) Libertarian Country Order the hottest and most humorous liberty themed clothing on the market. Click here (https://www.libertariancountry.com/?rfsn=392344.93653) Cash App The best way to send and receive money, as well as get discount boosts for the places you love to shop and eat. You can even trade Bitcoin and stocks! Get $5 just for signing up with the link below. Click here (https://cash.app/app/PMKWTJT) Dosh Get instant cash back from thousands of stores everyday! Get $5 when you sign up with Dosh when you link your credit or debit card. Click here (https://link.dosh.cash/REMSOM1) InboxDollars Make money the easiest way possible by taking surveys, reading emails, playing games, and watching commercials! Earn $5 when you sign up at the link below. Click here (https://www.inboxdollars.com/r/1942617866/76) Books “Stay Away From the Libertarians!” by Remso W. Martinez (foreword by Logan Albright) Click here (https://www.amazon.com/Stay-Away-Libertarians-Remso-Martinez-ebook/dp/B07DYDTZQP/) “How to Succeed in Politics (and Other Forms of Devil Worship) by Remso W. Martinez Click here (https://www.amazon.com/Succeed-Politics-Other-Forms-Worship-ebook/dp/B07XVFY9F8/) Consulting Email Remso today at remso@rwmartinez.com with the subject line “Book” to get a 15 minute free authors consultation. Watch “the Witching Hour” on-demand Watch available episodes of the Indie Series Awards winning show “the Witching Hour” with Remso and the paranormal investigators of Argos Paranormal with the link below. Click here (https://www.argosparanormal.com/tvshows.html)

September 2020

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 1, 2020 64:42

1. Introduction: Caleb O. Brown 2. Cato Audio Roundtable: Ilya Shapiro and Trevor Burrus on the Cato SCOTUS Review 3. Simone Weichselbaum and Patrick Jaicomo on how Federal Task Forces Reduce Police Accountability 4. Nolan Gray on Housing Regulation and “Destroying the Suburbs” 5. John Glaser on the Decidedly Interventionist Foreign Policy of Joe Biden See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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Deregulating Housing or "Destroying" the Suburbs?

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Play Episode Listen Later Jul 30, 2020 9:12

President Trump fears that a President Biden would "destroy" the suburbs of the United States. How true is that? Nolan Gray of the Mercatus Center discusses the federal role in local housing and zoning decisions. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

KLP Ep. 5: Nolan Gray

Kentucky Life Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 4, 2020 77:59

Nolan Gray is a native Lexingtonian, former New York City Planner, University of Kentucky Alumni, and current research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He is also a contributor at Strong Towns, City Lab, and Young Voices. You can read his work here: https://www.strongtowns.org/contributors-journal/2017/12/8/nolan-gray

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7-12-2019 Loving Liberty with Bryan Hyde hr1

Loving Liberty Radio Network

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 12, 2019 42:55

Nolan Gray from Market Urbanism discusses the ongoing retail apocalypse and possible solutions. Also, a Mississippi candidate for governor refuses to travel alone with a female reporter. Principled or sexist? --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/loving-liberty/support

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Episode 23: Amash's Independence, Stranger Things and the death of malls

Underscored Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 10, 2019 34:02

We're back!! Hope you had a great holiday, we sure did. Today we're talking about Justin Amash and his departure from the GOP. Was it political grandstanding, strategy or pure principles? Jordan Lancaster and Alex Muresianu dig into this with Stephen Kent. Also, Nolan Gray rejoins Underscored to talk about STRANGER THINGS season 3 and what it shows us about the rise and fall of the shopping mall. This is a segment you don't want to miss. Follow them all on Twitter: Nolan Gray @mnolangray Jordan Lancaster @Jordylancaster Alex Muresianu @AHardToSpell Stephen Kent @Stephen_Kent89

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Salim Furth on Land Use Regulations, the Rise of NIMBYism, and Options for Reform

Macro Musings with David Beckworth

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 23, 2019 59:27

Salim Furth is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center where he studies regional, urban, and macroeconomic trends and policies. Salim joins the show today to talk about some of his work on housing supply in the United States and its implications for policy. David and Salim also discuss the problems that arise from rigid zoning laws, the rise of NIMBYism, and possible ways to conduct regulatory zoning reform. Transcript for the episode: https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/podcasts/06242019/land-use-regulations-rise-nimbyism-and-options-reform Salim’s Twitter: @salimfurth Salim’s Mercatus profile: https://www.mercatus.org/people/salim-furth Related Links: *Housing Supply in the 2010s* by Salim Furth https://www.mercatus.org/publications/state-and-local-regulations/housing-supply-2010s *Do Minimum-Lot-Size Regulations Limit Housing Supply in Texas?* by Nolan Gray and Salim Furth https://www.mercatus.org/publications/urban-economics/do-minimum-lot-size-regulations-limit-housing-supply-texas *The Link Between Local Zoning Policy and Housing Affordability in America’s Cities* by Kevin Erdmann, Salim Furth, and Emily Hamilton https://www.mercatus.org/publications/urban-economics/link-between-local-zoning-policy-and-housing-affordability-america%E2%80%99s David’s blog: macromarketmusings.blogspot.com David’s Twitter: @DavidBeckworth

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Nolan Gray on the Future of Urbanism

History and Politics

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 31, 2018 25:33

Conversation with Young Voices Advocate and contributor to Market Urbanism Nolan Gray. We talk about malls, YIMBY, housing regulations, gentrification, trailer parks, tiny houses and ways to house the homeless.

conversations urbanism yimby nolan gray young voices advocate

'Heading For a Heartbreak'? - 7/24/18

The Glenn Beck Program

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 24, 2018 110:15

Hour 1 Controlling America's new axes of evil?...The tough life of a 21 year old Millennial Marketing Intern...living on $25 an hour in NYC... avocado toast and the Hampton's...'shallow trendy world'...the life many Americans dream about?...capitalist with socialist mindset? Hour 2 Nothing like "the intersection of sports, race and politics.”? ...How the death of the shopping mall can be a made a blessing for the suburbs...Nolan Gray from Young Voices Advocate, joins Glenn to discuss how and why?...What is causing the collapse of our malls?...the future of shopping 'lifestyle centers'? ...Australia, does it really exist?...bizarre geographical conspiracies? Hour 3 NY Daily News nose dive...$90 million lost...the harsh reality of the media business ...Californians are leaving for Texas, seeking abundant options in energy?...50 % of all the jobs in the nation are in Texas ...Making lists with Austrians?...Austrian state may require Jews to register to buy Kosher meat? ...Racist receipt hoax? ...The media is scaring the average person to death? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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ana008: Way Beyond the Roads | The Tom Woods Show Ep. 802 plus Post-game

Anarchitecture

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 18, 2016 67:30

We were recently interviewed on The Tom Woods Show. This episode includes the discussion with Tom, plus a “post-game” discussion to further clarify some of the points raised during the interview. View full show notes at anarchitecturepodcast.com/ana008. ----more---- Pre-Game Tom Woods is the… Nicest Guy In the Liberty Movement (except on Twitter) James Brown of the Liberty Movement Oprah of the Liberty Movement Preparations for the interview Interview – The Tom Woods Show, Episode 802 (00:04:55) Tom Introduces Tim and Joe Joe, the “Multi-disciplinary Engineer” Ideological slants of Architects and Engineers Logistics of producing “The World’s Most Antipodal Podcast (TM)” What is the Built Environment? Who will build the roads? Built Environment issues are not politicized left vs. right Libertarians and “Normal People” “Undesirable Material” – Anarcho-Sewage Treatment The format of every NPR story Is Tennis more libertarian than football? Planning isn’t a bad thing Jane Jacobs Human Scale “Eyes on the Street” Planned and Unplanned cities Failures of Planning – Boston City Hall Plaza The roads, revisited Are libertarian solutions too clunky? Technical solutions and commercial solutions Pop Quiz: Which country is an anarcho-capitalist utopia with private roads? Privatization and divestiture – How do we get there from here? Anarchitecture Podcast website details @anarchitecturep on Twitter – Real world examples (we use #ThisIsAnarchitecture) “The Tom Woods House” – A great result using DonorSee Post-Game (00:41:37) Initial reactions Our first interview – thinking on our toes How we usually record – Editing Ums and Ahs Technical Challenges Tim’s Recording Rig Joe’s Pop Filter “Have I started an electrical fire?” Tom’s cat – even the pro’s have glitches Highlights Unscripted moments of inspiration Tom’s takeaways from #ana003 Who was Hayek? Developed Austrian Business Cycle Theory with Ludwig von Mises Won the “Swedish Central Bank’s Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel” AKA Nobel Prize in Economics Focused on the role of decentralized information in a complex society Who was Jane Jacobs? “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” Feud with Robert Moses – Grassroots opposition to eminent domain No formal education, an autodidact Journalist for Architectural Record magazine “Where are all the people?” “Eyes on the Street” – taking ownership of your neighborhood Le Corbusier’s “Vertical City” – Unite de habitacion A good idea, dumbed down Public housing projects and criminality A spectacular failure – Pruitt-Igoe A decentralized surveillance state Distributed surveillance, judgement and action “Were there any parts where you put your foot in your mouth?” Dodging the question UN AGENDA 21!!! – Too harsh? Applying Austrian insights about information and monopoly theory to city planning Channeling Alex Jones Conclusion Update on the final episode of the Citizen of Nowhere series Tim’s blog post on Patrik Schumacher Links/Resources The Tom Woods Show Episode 802 on Tom’s site Article mentioned in the interview: Architects are left-leaning Architects’ Utopian Visions Modernist Dreams of Utopian Architecture Utopian Architecture Part 2: Beyond Modernism Jane Jacobs on Wikipedia on Mises.org on Strong Towns Jacobs and Hayek – Strong Towns podcast with Nolan Gray of Market Urbanism The Death and Life of Great American Cities on Amazon Boston City Hall Plaza Apologia Walter Block on Road Privitization The Privatization of Roads and Highways (free e-book on Mises.org) – Note, Joe got the name wrong in the discussion Privatizing Roads Lecture on Youtube Sweden’s Private Road Associations (PRA’s) on Wikipedia on National Academy of Sciences A counterpoint – Are Private Road Associations really private? The Tom Woods House The Tom Woods Show Ep. 751 with Gret Glyer of DonorSee Public Space Frank van Dun on Public Space and Rights of Way in an anarcho-capitalist society Rebuttal by Walter Block Frederich A. Hayek “Nobel Prize” Acceptance Speech: The Pretense of Knowledge Essay: The Use of Knowledge in Society Jeff Tucker applies Hayek’s insights to a city Pass Le Corbusier Wrote a book called Toward an Architecture. Get it? Toward Anarchitecture! What a visionary! Unité d’habitation concept – Cité radieuse (Radiant City) in Marseille Dumbed down, then demolished: Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis The Capitalist and the Entrepreneur by Peter Klein (free e-book on Mises.org) Join the Conversation Use hashtag #ana008 to reference this episode in a tweet, post, or comment

How Land Use Restrictions Make Housing Unaffordable with Emily Hamilton

Economics Detective Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 21, 2016 32:36

What follows is an edited transcript of my conversation with Emily Hamilton about land use regulations' effects on affordable housing. Petersen: My guest today is Emily Hamilton. She is a researcher at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Emily, thanks for being on Economics Detective Radio. Hamilton: Thanks a lot for having me. Petersen: So, Emily recently wrote a paper titled "How Land Use Regulation Undermines Affordable Housing" along with her co-author Sanford Ikeda. The paper is a review of many studies looking at land use restrictions and it identifies four of the most common types of land use restrictions. Those are: minimum lots sizes, minimum parking requirements, inclusionary zoning, and urban growth boundaries. So Emily, could you tell us what each of those restrictions entail? Hamilton: Sure. So, starting off with the first, minimum lots sizes. This is probably what people most commonly associate with zoning. It's the type of Euclidian zoning that separates residential areas from businesses and then within residential areas limits the number of units that can be on any certain size of land. And this is the most common tool that makes up what is sometimes referred to as Snob Zoning, where residents lobby for larger minimum lots sizes and larger house sizes to ensure that their neighbors are people who can afford only that minimum size of housing. Petersen: So it keeps the poor away, effectively. Hamilton: Exactly. And then parking requirements are often used as a tool to ensure that street parking doesn't get too congested. So when cars first became common, parking was really crazy where people would just leave their car on the street, maybe double parked, or in an inconvenient situation near their destination. And obviously as driving became more and more common and that was just an untenable situation and there had to be some sort of order to where people were allowed to park. But street parking remained typically free or underpriced relative to demand. So, people began lobbying for a parking requirement that would require business owners and residential developers to provide parking that was off streets so that this underpriced street parking remained available. But that brought us to today where we often have just mass seas of parking in retail areas and residential areas, which are paper focuses on. Parking substantially contributes to the cost of housing, making it inaccessible in some neighborhoods for low income people and driving up the cost of housing for everyone who has been using the amount of parking that their developer was required to provide. Petersen: So that's one where you can really see the original justification. And it makes sense, if you have a business and a lot of people are parking and it spills over onto the street then maybe that's an externality. And it seems reasonable for you to have to provide parking for the people who come to your business, especially if a lot of them are driving there. But we push that too far, is what I'm hearing. Hamilton: Exactly. Yeah, it does seem reasonable but the argument in favor of parking requirements tends to ignore that business owners have every incentive to make it easy to get to their business. So, in many cases there's not necessarily an externality because the business owner providing the parking has the right incentive to provide enough to make it easy for their customers to get there. The externality really comes up when we think about street parking and Donald Shoup---probably the world's foremost expert on parking---has made the argument that pricing street parking according to demand is a real key in getting parking rules right. Petersen: So, on to the next one. What is inclusionary zoning? Hamilton: Inclusionary zoning is a rule that requires developers to make a certain number of units in a new development accessible to people at various income levels. Often inclusionary zoning is tied with density bonuses. So, a developer will have the choice to make a non-inclusionary project that is only allowed to have the regular amount of density that that lot is zoned for. Or, he can choose to take the inclusionary zoning density bonus which will allow him to build more units overall including the inclusionary unit and additional market-rate units. Typically, units are affordable to people who are making a certain percentage of the area median income, so people who might not have low income but who are making not enough to afford a market rate unit in their current neighborhood. Petersen: Okay, so that's sort of forcing developers to build affordable units that they then will probably lose money on, so that they can build the market rate units that they can make money on. Hamilton: Exactly. That's how cities make inclusionary zoning attractive to developers is by giving them that bonus that can allow them to build more market rate housing. In other cities, however, inclusionary zoning is required for all new developments so it really varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction how it's implemented. Petersen: So the fourth land use restriction you mention is urban growth boundaries. What are those? Hamilton: So Oregon is the most famous example in the US of implementing an urban growth boundary. And what it is, is basically a state law that requires each city to set up a boundary around its edges, where for a certain amount of time no housing can be built outside of that boundary. And the idea is to gradually expand the city's footprint over time to allow the suburbs to expand a little further, but to restrict that suburban development using the boundary for some time period. Other examples like London's urban growth boundary I believe are permanent, so there are certain areas that can never be developed. Petersen: So I believe we have something like this in Vancouver. We have farmland in the metro Vancouver area which---for context this area is one of the most overheated high-priced housing markets in the world---and we have this land that's just zoned for farms. And a lot of the time people don't even bother to plant crops, they're just holding the land for the day when eventually it can be rezoned into housing. So I looked it up before we went on and some of these plots are $350,000 an acre, which of course is not reflective of just how productive they are as farmland but of how productive they would be when they are eventually rezoned. Hamilton: Exactly. Yes, very similar to Oregon's program. And a lot of empirical studies have been done on Portland's growth boundary because researchers can easily look at the block that are selling on either side of the boundary to see whether or not it's affecting land prices and several studies have found a very clear effect of the boundary in driving up the price of the land. Petersen: And in Vancouver, the city is very reluctant to rezone. So, people are constantly applying and being denied but you know it's like winning the lottery having your bit of useless farmland rezoned to super high value housing. And people are just holding on to those dead lands in the hopes of winning that lottery which is kind of---it's a bizarre outcome. Hamilton: It is. And urban growth boundary supporters often frame it as environmental regulation that's going to protect this open space. While encouraging people to live in more dense and transit and walkable friendly neighborhoods, but it's not as if Portland is free of other types of zoning rules. So at the same time it has this urban growth boundary it also has a lot of traditional zoning rules that limit the potential to build up while the growth boundary is limiting the potential to grow out. So it's coming from both directions. Petersen: So, just how costly do economists think these regulations are? What kind of estimates do they have? Hamilton: So, I think some of the most compelling estimates look at the macroeconomic effect of these rules. Because typically the most binding zoning rules are also in the most productive cities, where there's the highest level of demand for people to live. Because these are where the best jobs are as well as the best urban amenities, a lot of people want to live here. One study looking at this macroeconomic effect found that the three most productive cities which are New York, San Francisco, and San Jose---I should clarify; this is just looking at the effective growth within US---if those three cities lowered the burden of their land use regulation to that of the median American city it could result in a 9% increase in the level of US GDP. So, these rules are having just an enormous effect on economic growth. Not to mention the very substantial effect they have for individuals and making it difficult or impossible for people to afford to live in their desired location. Petersen: So, you know, San Francisco that's where Silicon Valley is. And so we think of it as a place with super high productivity---tech workers working at Google---and yet with their housing market being one of the most restricted. So not only is there the loss from the housing market itself, that you could sell a lot of housing there and that would increase GDP by itself, but also there are people living in less productive areas doing less productive jobs, who could come and work for Google. But they can't because they've been priced out of the market. Is that where most of the effect comes from? Hamilton: That's right. Yeah, I think the effect is also certainly at that top-end of the market where we're seeing all kinds of blog posts and articles about a person making six figures at Facebook who can't afford the Bay area. So those people might choose to go live in say Denver, or Austin, or a city that still has plenty of great jobs but isn't as productive as San Francisco or San Jose. But then we also see this down the income spectrum, where people who are in the service industry, say waiting tables, could make much more in San Francisco then they can in Houston, or wherever they happen to live. But their quality of life is much better in some of less productive cities because of the cost of housing and other areas of consumption that higher real estate costs drive up. Petersen: One thing I've heard about a lot of these Californian coastal cities---I think it was Palo Alto---where not a single member of the Palo Alto Police Department lives in Palo Alto because you just can't live there on a policeman's salary, so they all have to commute in every day and then commute out every night. Hamilton: Yeah, and for some of these hugely important needed services it just makes the quality of life of the people in those industries so much worse than it would be if they could afford to live closer to their job. Petersen: Right. So, to summarize the labor market mobility of the United States in general has been greatly restricted by these land use restrictions. Even though the land use restrictions are local, this has an effect on the national economy. Hamilton: Exactly right. And we can see this in the data where income convergence across areas of the country has greatly slowed down since the 1970's when these rules really started taking off. Petersen: You argue that the costs of these restrictions fall primarily on low-income households so can you talk through how that happens? Hamilton: Sure. It happens in two ways. First off, you have the low income people who are living in very expensive cities and these people might have to endure very long commutes---you talked about the police officer in Palo Alto who can't live anywhere near his job. Not that police officers are low income, but just as an example that illustrates the point. Or they have to live in very substandard housing, perhaps a group house that's just crammed with people maybe even illegally, in order to afford to live anywhere near where they're working. Petersen: Yeah, I was going to say I thought those group houses were illegal from these very same land use regulations, but I guess people get around it. Hamilton: Yeah, a lot of US cities have rules about the number of unrelated people who can live in a house. And certainly those rules are sometimes broken. That, I think, is clear to anyone who's spent time in an expensive city. You know, people have to live in these less than ideal conditions and waste too much of their time commuting in order to make that work. But the unseen version of it is the person who lives in a low-income part of the country and would like to improve their job opportunity and quality of life by moving to somewhere more productive, but they simply can't make it work so they stay in that low-income area without meeting their working potential. Petersen: There was a study by David Autor---I think I cited it in a previous episode and got the author name wrong but it's definitely David Autor---and it was looking at the shock, the trade shock that hit United States when it opened up trade with China in the early 2000's. And it basically showed that a lot of parts of the country just never recovered. So, if you worked in particular industries---I think the furniture industry was one that was basically wiped out---and if you worked in a town next to a furniture factory and that was your job, not only did you lose your job, you lost all the value in your home because the one industry in the town is gone. And you can't afford to move to one of the booming industries like Silicon Valley or in another part of the country because they've so greatly restricted the elasticity of their housing supply. And that's not all, Autor's paper basically just shows that it took a very long time to recover from the shock and a lot of places didn't recover at all. But I really think that housing is part of that picture if you're trying to figure out why the US economy can't respond to shocks like it used to in the 20th century. That has to be a big part of the picture. Hamilton: Definitely. And that trend, as far as people being able to leave these depressed or economically stagnant areas, this also comes out in the income's convergence as we talked about earlier. Petersen: So, the other part of that, I saw in your paper, was not only are poor people hurt but rich people who already own homes have seen those home prices rise. So it's affecting inequality at both ends of the spectrum, correct? Hamilton: Right, Bill Fischel at Dartmouth has done a lot of work on why it is that people lobby so hard in favor of rules that restrict development. And he terms it as the Homevoter Hypothesis, where people who own homes have a huge amount of their wealth tied up in their home and so they are in favor of rules that protect that asset and prevent any shocks such as a huge amount of new development that could result in a decline in their homes value. I think you talked about that in your episode with Nolan Gray on trailer parks. Petersen: Yeah, we talked about William Fischel's Homevoter Hypothesis. So the essence of that is that people vote in local elections, and they lobby to restrict the supply of housing in their neighborhood, and that increases their wealth by, you know, increasing the land values in that area. How do you deal with that when there's such an entrenched special interest everywhere to push up land prices? Hamilton: I think that's the hugely difficult problem. And at the same time as we have the challenges with the Homevoter system that Fischel plays out, we have a lot of federal policies that encourage homeownership as not just a good community-building tool but also as an investment. So people are programmed by the federal government to see their house as an investment in spite of economic challenges that it presents. David [Schleicher]---a law professor at Yale---has done some really interesting work on ways that institutional changes could limit the activity of homeowners and lobbying against new development. One of his proposals is called a Zoning Budget. And under a zoning budget, municipalities would have to allow a certain amount of population growth each year. So, they could designate areas of a city that are going to only be home to single family homes, but within some parts of the city, they would have to allow building growth to accommodate a growing population. Petersen: How would that be enforced, though? Hamilton: It would have to be a state law, or perhaps a federal law, but I think much more likely a state law that would mandate that localities do that. Massachusetts recently passed a law that requires all jurisdictions within the state to allow at least some multifamily housing. So it's kind of a similar idea. The state government can set a floor on how much local government can restrict development. Petersen: So, what I'm hearing is that different levels of government have different incentives with respect to restrictions. So, at the lowest level if I'm just in a small district or municipal area and I can restrict what my neighbors build on their property, that really affects my home price and that's the main thing that I'm going to lobby for at that level of government. But if I had to go all the way to the state government to try to push up house prices in my neighborhood, it wouldn't go so well. The state government has incentives to allow more people to live within their boundaries. Is that the gist of it? Hamilton: Yeah, that's right. It's easy to imagine a mayor of a fancy suburban community who simply represents his constituents' views that the community already has enough people, you know, life there is good and so nothing needs to change. But, I don't think that you'd find a Governor that would say "Our state doesn't need any more people or economic growth." So the incentives are less in favor of homeowners, local homeowners, the further up you go from the local to state jurisdiction. Petersen: Right. I guess a big issue is that the people who would like to move somewhere but live somewhere else don't get to vote in that place's elections or in their ballot measures. And so there's this group that has an interest in lower housing costs because they might move to your city or your town, if they could afford it, but they're not represented politically in that city or town and so they can't vote for more housing and lower prices. But then when you go to the whole state level and people are mobile within a state, those people do have a say or they are represented and pricing them out of the places they'd like to live really is bad for politics, bad for getting their votes. Hamilton: Right. So the Palo Alto police officer can't vote to change Palo Alto's policies but he can vote to change California policy. Petersen: Right, because he still lives within California. So one of the other policy recommendations I saw in your paper is tax increment local transfers or TILTs. What are they and how can they impact land use restrictions? Hamilton: That's another idea that comes from David Schleicher and I think it's another really interesting concept. The idea behind TILT is that a new development increases the property tax base within a jurisdiction. So, if you have a neighborhood, say a block full of single family homes that is allowed to be sold to a developer in order to build a couple of large apartment buildings, each apartment is going to be less expensive than the previous single family homes, but overall the apartment buildings will contribute more to property tax. And the idea behind a TILT is that part of this tax increment---which is the difference between the new tax base and the previous smaller tax base---could be shared with neighbors to the new development to kind of buy off their support for the development. So, those people who are in some sense harmed by the new buildings, whether in terms of more traffic or a change in their neighborhood's character, also benefit from the new building financially. So they're more likely to support it. Petersen: So economists talk about Potential Pareto Improvements, where you have a situation where some people are made better off while other people are worse off, but you could have a transfer to make everyone better off. And what I'm hearing with TILTs is you actually do that transfer, you actually pay off the losers with some of the surplus you get from the winners. So everyone can be better off when you make this overall beneficial change. Hamilton: Exactly. And sometimes communities do use community benefit as a tool to try to get developers to share their windfall and build a new project with the neighborhood. So they might say, "you can build an apartment building here, but you also have to build a swimming pool that the whole neighborhood can use at this other location," and in a way that achieves the end goal of buying off community support for new development. But it also drives up the cost of the new housing that the developer can provide. So TILTs have the advantage of keeping the cost of building the same for the developer, but still sharing that financial windfall of the new development with a broader group of people. Petersen: Yeah, I really like these policy recommendations. It would be so easy to just say "land use restrictions are bad, let's not have those anymore." But these really have an eye to the political structures that we currently have and towards making progress within the structure we have. So I like that approach to policy or to policy recommendations. I think economists should maybe do that more often. Hamilton: Yeah, looking for a win-win outcome. Petersen: The one other one that I don't think we've talked about is home equity insurance, which sounds like a business plan more than a policy proposal. But how can home equity insurance help to reduce the costs of land use restrictions? Hamilton: That proposal also came from Bill Fischel a couple of decades ago following on his work of the Homevoters theory. He proposed the idea that the reason home owners are so opposed to new development is often because they have so much of their financial wealth tied up in this house that they're not just opposed to a loss in their investment, but even more so, opposed to risk. So they want the policies that they see will limit the variance in their home equity and he proposed home equity insurance as a financial goal that could lower this threat and provide homeowners with a minimum amount of equity that they would have regardless to the new development. I think it's a really interesting concept but it's unclear, would this be a private financial product? Obviously the market isn't currently providing it, or would it be some kind of government policy? And while I do think it's very interesting, I think that we should be somewhat leery of new government policies that promote homeownership as a financial wealth building tool. Petersen: Well, the funny thing is that usually with insurance, if you have fire insurance you want to minimize the moral hazard of that, you don't want people to say: "Well I've got fire insurance so I don't have to worry about fires anymore." But with this, you sort of want that, you have insurance on the value of your home and then actually your goal is to make people less worried about the value of their home so that they will be okay with policies that reduce it. It's almost the opposite of what you want with insurance most of the time. In this case you want to maximize moral hazard. Hamilton: Yeah that's a great point and I think that's why it could only be a government product. Petersen: Right. Because if the private sector was providing home price insurance to homeowners then the company that provided the insurance would now have an incentive to lobby against upzoning the neighborhood. Hamilton: Exactly. Yeah it would create a new a new group of NIMBYs. Petersen: Yeah, at first I thought 'Oh great!', well this is something that we can just do, without the government. You can just get a bunch of people together, who have an interest in making cities more livable and they can provide this financial asset. But that seems like there are problems with it that are hard to overcome within the private sector. So overall do you think the tide might be turning on the NIMBYs? Are people becoming more aware of this issue and of land use restrictions and their effects on housing prices? Hamilton: I do think awareness is growing. There's a group popping up called YIMBY which stands for "Yes In My Backyard" as opposed to the suburban NIMBY to say "Not In My Backyard" to any sort of new development. And these YIMBY groups are gaining some traction in cities like San Francisco and lobbying in favor of new development to counter the voices that oppose new development. I am somewhat pessimistic, I have to say, just because from a public choice standpoint the forces in favor of land use regulations that limit housing are so powerful. But in spite of my pessimism, I'm seeing since the time that I started working on this issue several years ago, much more coverage of the issue from all kinds of media outlets, as well as much more interest in on-the-ground politics from people who aren't in the typical homeowner category. Petersen: Yeah, and I am hopeful too. But I often see people blame other factors for high home prices. They blame the speculators. The speculators are always the ones that are pushing up home prices. And rarely, I think, do people blame restrictions, although the YIMBY movement is a happy exception to that. Hamilton: Yeah, I think way too often real estate developers are framed as the enemy in these debates because they're the ones who make money off building new housing. But it's really the regulations that are to blame both for the inordinate profits that developers can make in expensive cities, and for the high costs of housing. Petersen: Do you have any closing thoughts about land use restrictions? Hamilton: I think that it's just really important to try to spread the message about the costs that these regulations have. Not just for low-income people but for the whole country and world economic growth. That's obviously a cause that I would think everyone would be behind: creating opportunity for people to live in the most productive cities where they can contribute the most to society and to the economy. Petersen: My guest today has been Emily Hamilton. Emily, thanks for being part of Economics Detective Radio. Hamilton: Thanks a lot for having me.

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Emily Hamilton on Land-Use Regulation and the Cost of Housing

Market Urbanism Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 7, 2016 33:54

Emily Hamilton and Nolan Gray discuss the relationship between land-use regulation and the rising cost of housing. Our theme music is "Origami" by Graham Bole, hosted on the Free Music Archive.

cost housing regulation origami free music archive land use emily hamilton nolan gray graham bole

Trailer Parks, Zoning, and Market Urbanism with Nolan Gray

Economics Detective Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 2, 2016 51:15

Today's guest on Economics Detective Radio is Nolan Gray. Nolan is a writer for Market Urbanism and the host of the recently launched Market Urbanism Podcast. Market urbanism is the synthesis of classical liberal economics and an appreciation for urban life. Market urbanists are interested in economic issues specific to cities, such as housing affordability and urban transportation. Nolan wrote an article titled "Reclaiming 'Redneck' Urbanism: What Urban Planners Can Learn From Trailer Parks." As Nolan points out, trailer parks are remarkable in that they achieve very high densities with just one- and two-story construction. They do so while providing remarkably low rents of between $300 and $500, or $700 to $1,100 per month to live in brand new manufactured homes. They are also interesting in that the park managers provide a form of private governance to their tenants. A century ago, there were many kinds of low-income housing available to people of lesser means. Low-quality apartments, denser housing, and boarding houses have largely been regulated out of existence. The remarkable thing about trailer parks is that they haven't been made illegal or untenable by regulation. The one thing trailer parks don't have is a mixture of uses, but they get around this by locating close to business areas. Cities in Europe and Japan, which didn't adopt American-style zoning, have much higher density and more mixed-use neighbourhoods. Houston, which has taken steps to de-regulate, has seen more development of this sort recently. It seems like dense, mixed-use neighbourhoods pass the market test whenever they are allowed. Sonia Hirt, in her book Zoned in the USA, explains why city planners became focused on separating uses. When these rules were first being adopted, industry polluted much more than it does today, so there was a health justification for separating them. But there were also superstitions, such as the idea that having children close to groceries would spread disease. William Fischel's homevoter hypothesis states that local homeowners engage in political activism to prevent development, thus protecting their home prices. They may justify their opposition to development in terms of environmentalism or preserving local character, but homeowners stand to gain or lose a significant portion of their life savings depending on the price of their homes. This makes local politics particularly hostile to new development and denser, more affordable housing. Meanwhile, people blame everything except land use restrictions for high housing prices. Foreign buyers have been a recent scapegoat in Vancouver, which adopted a tax on foreign buyers, thus popping its housing bubble. Airbnb is also blamed for high housing costs, though its effect is certainly negligible. While housing is important because it is many households' largest expense, inelastic housing supplies prevent people from moving for labour opportunities. Autor, Dorn, and Hanson (2016) show how many local labour markets in America never really recovered from a trade shock with China in the early 2000's. Much of this may have been due to America's inelastic housing supply. When industries like the furniture industry were outcompeted by Chinese imports, the people who owned homes in furniture-producing towns lost both their jobs and the value of their homes. With home prices elsewhere being so high, many of these people chose to spend the rest of their lives on welfare rather than moving to find work. Ed Glaeser has written more on the costs of subsidizing home ownership. Home ownership is a bad investment. Having a single, large asset take up a large part of one's portfolio is just bad investing, particularly when that asset's value is correlated with your labour earnings. While one can hedge one's home value against futures markets based on the Case-Shiller index, but few people do this. Errata: I accidentally referred to The Simpsons character Frank Grimes as Rick Grimes. Rick Grimes is from The Walking Dead. Also, I wrongly said that the paper on the China shock was by Angus Deaton. Somehow I mixed him up with David Autor. Same initials, just reversed? Other Links: Jane Jacobs as Spontaneous Order Theorist with Pierre Desrochers The California exodus to Texas is reflected in market-based, one-way U-Haul truck rental prices

united states america american texas europe china japan chinese home market airbnb vancouver cities autor walking dead simpsons foreign hanson zoning u haul trailer park dorn rick grimes zoned angus deaton case shiller david autor nolan gray frank grimes ed glaeser market urbanism economics detective radio

Nolan Gray of Market Urbanism

urban planning jane jacobs strong towns nolan gray hayekian market urbanism

Play Episode Listen Later May 4, 2016 40:54

It's Jane Jacobs Week at Strong Towns. Nolan Gray is a writer for Market Urbanism. He analyzes Jane Jacobs' work in light of Hayekian philosophy and discusses the need to move away from central planning. Read his piece, Who Plans? Jane Jacobs' Hayekian Critique of Urban Planning.

Nolan Gray of Market Urbanism