The Strong Towns Podcast
Today, Chuck sits down with YIMBY Action’s Laura Foote. They dive into America’s housing crisis, debate the future of zoning, and explore what it will take to fix broken incentives and build more homes.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hey everybody, this is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns Podcast. I have Laura Foote with me today from YIMBY Action. This is a call that we were going to do a while back, and then I had to cancel, and now we've rescheduled. Laura, welcome to Strong Towns. It's great to chat with you.
Yeah, Chuck, thanks so much for having me. I feel like the online interactions we've been having have been much more fun, I hope, for you than they sometimes are. I feel like we are having an interesting conversation, and I'm so glad you were game to bring this into the podcast world.
Yes. I'm glad to have been able to chat with you. I've developed, maybe, a YIMBY allergy that I'm trying to cure with small doses of positivity. I think I ODed. Flowers are beautiful, and smelling a flower is beautiful, but then putting your head into a whole bouquet of flowers is too much. I think I got the whole head-in-the-flowers thing with the YIMBYs, so I'm now sniffing one beautiful rose at a time. So that's what this conversation is.
I feel like nobody's movement is its best self on Twitter. And no person is their best. So I'm sort of glad that that medium is dying off, because I think it exacerbated mutual loathing in ways that were just unnecessary, and just fueled the incentives of the platform. There are other platforms that I think have similar problems, but I think Twitter is number one. There was that peak in 2017, 2018, I feel like, where it was just a barrage of "What's the most uncharitable way of interpreting somebody else's opinion?" and then putting them on blast. Maybe I'm being idealistic, feeling like we can get to another place.
No, I think you're right. We've actually measured it algorithmically, because we're in this space where we really, really try to be a positive voice. We've seen instances where someone will comment on the same thing we comment on or retweet with a quote tweet, and we will have way more followers, way more influence, way more of this. The thing we say is not nasty and mean, and our interaction to impression ratio will be really high. So people are interacting with our stuff, but it doesn't get shown to anyone. The thing that is not very charitable, kind of crude and mean, will get 100x the impressions, even though no one's interacting with it. I've actually gotten to the point where I feel like, if you assume good intentions of the people behind it, which I always kind of start with, the algorithm's gotten away from them in a way that is just not good for society, is just not helpful.
I feel like loathing is an addictive emotion. They're sort of playing into that addiction people have.
Let's talk positive. You're in San Francisco right now. Are you from San Francisco?
I am from DC originally. I went to college in upstate New York. I lived in New York City for a little bit, then Chicago, and then followed a boy out to San Francisco, and was the less income partner, a typical San Francisco couple where one person has the income to make it work and the other person does not. I managed to claw my way to stay here, ended up married to an affordable housing developer with two kids. So I think I'm officially now a rooted San Franciscan.
Wonderful, wonderful. You have two kids in San Francisco right now?
Two kids in San Francisco, one and a half and three.
Our mutual friend Andrew Burleson, who's my boss, my board chair, I remember thinking he was insane because he has four kids in a small place in San Francisco. As someone who is from a small town, I've only lived in Minnesota. Obviously I've traveled all over, but it always seemed a high bar to not be able to send your kids out in the woods or what have you. It seemed a little heroic.
Everybody should get to choose whatever lifestyle makes sense for them. I have epilepsy, so I can't drive, and my husband is just bad at driving and shouldn't.
Very fair.
Once you're sort of in this situation of "How do you have your kids be able to have a full life and get access to things while needing to maintain walkability?" We literally cannot drive ourselves to soccer practice and all that stuff that I want them to be able to experience. In America's structures, it really, literally limits where you can live. I love San Francisco. I'm a classic San Franciscan. I love being able to walk to my latte. That is definitely a key part of my lifestyle is walking to a latte. But it's also true that when I look at my family—they're based in Maine—I looked at Portland, Maine recently on Zillow, because I hate myself, and the walkable part of Portland has almost the same rents as San Francisco. I was like, once you're into true walkability where you can make a lifestyle work without a car, the rents are pretty high kind of everywhere, whether you're comparing Minnesota. The premium on that lifestyle is very high right now.
It's fascinating, because my neighborhood is very walkable. I walk to work, I walk home, I use my car to drive to the airport and back in Minneapolis. Then if I have to go do something out in the periphery, I will drive. But I've gone weeks without driving here if I'm not traveling. But when the kids were younger, if you want to participate in life here, if you want to go to the school, if you want to go to softball practice with them, if you want to go watch them in dance, you do not have a choice but to drive. So I think someone with epilepsy or someone who could not drive for whatever—I mean, go through the plethora of reasons, because there's a lot of reasons people cannot drive—I do not think you could live here a very full life. You would be deeply constrained.
Yeah. I do housing advocacy, and it deeply frustrates me that, every time we're out there advocating for a housing project, someone will bring up, "Oh, in order to work for disabled people, for people who struggle with mobility issues, this needs to have a lot of parking." I'm always filled with such personal rage. Like, me and the elderly people and the kids are on the bus, and- are we allowed to curse on this podcast?
We don't generally, but it's okay. Go ahead. I will take it.
You can feel the emotion that I am feeling when someone is saying, "We need to look out for the disabled person, and therefore we need a lot of parking." It just fills me with such rage to be like, "No, actually, the opposite of that. Cars, in fact, are not a great system for many people who have various kinds of mobility issues. A well-funded public transportation system is, and please get on that." I know that's not the right hearing for this. We're talking about housing.
No, but it's interesting, because I feel like it's all connected. My dad had polio when he was three, and he's always had messed up legs, messed up back. My whole life, he's had the handicap sticker. As someone who's sensitive to this, because I've seen—Joe Minicozzi and I did this thing in Asheville once, and Joe went down and got a list. There were a bunch of people who were getting handicapped stickers so they could park in convenient places who really didn't need them. I don't say that to be judgmental, but I've watched my dad really, super struggle to walk and get around, and it's deeply painful for him. It's funny, because in the context of, say, my small town, the answer for him is to have more parking, or to have better parking, because there is no transit system per se. It wouldn't serve him well if there were. There's a dial-a-ride bus that is not a very great system, and it doesn't serve where he's at anyway. But I think obviously, in a place like San Francisco, that's an absurdity. Having transit that can serve everybody would be the solution. I do feel like, as we're going to transition to talk about housing, it does seem to me that I can sit here in a small town in Minnesota and recognize that difference, and I think you can sit there in San Francisco, and I'm guessing also recognize that difference. But it is kind of maddening.
I want to push back on the difference, actually. This will be fun. Okay, we run organizations that have chapters. We have now 81 chapters in 27 states.
You should talk about what YIMBY Action is.
I feel like YIMBY is kind of the urbanist cousin of Strong Towns. We are "Yes In My Backyard." We believe that we have a national housing shortage, especially acute in places that have jobs and opportunity. We look at the barriers to housing production, primarily focused on zoning regulations, permitting, all of the other fees and constraints we put on housing production, and we believe we need a lot more housing, especially in those high-opportunity neighborhoods, and that means both subsidized affordable housing and market-rate housing. So we really focus on bringing down the barriers to housing production a little bit wherever they are. But definitely where our chapters spring up is in places where, I would say, our core demographic of members—the most—we have people of all different kinds, but the stunted millennial is definitely our core demographic. Somebody who is paying too much to live. They have a job that's paying okay wages, and yet they cannot do all of the sort of things that in the previous generation would have been perceived as super normal. My mother was the executive director of a small nonprofit. My father was the executive director of a small nonprofit. I'm the executive director of a small nonprofit. My husband's the executive director of a small nonprofit. So I should be kind of very parallel to where my mother was. She was able to buy a townhome in DC. I will probably be a renter, at least until the end of this podcast, but sort of indeterminately long. That's driven by a chronic housing shortage.
Yeah, I think the thing that I was bringing up, and maybe this is where you were going to push back, is I kind of started with this idea that a solution here in—let's go to the extreme—my small town of 14,000 people in central Minnesota is just going to look different than a solution to a similar problem in San Francisco, which I do think are probably two extremes of this conversation. I mean, I find San Francisco to be a deeply dysfunctional place. It's delightful in a lot of ways. But when people come to me with the litany of "You can't do this," and "You're required to do this," and "We need the state to change this," I'm like, "Really? Why?" Okay, I don't get it. It's a whole layer of things I don't get. But if you said we need—I'm obviously not a huge fan of parking, but we don't have functional transit. It's never going to drive out and pick up my dad at the farm and bring him into my kid's band concert. My dad's got to drive in with my mom, and he's got to park. So there's going to be, at least in the indeterminate future, some accommodation for that. How would or wouldn't you see those situations as similar or different?
I think that what communities adopt can be very different. But there are these sort of—I have to think about this as chess versus checkers—there's a net of bad housing policies that exists everywhere. Where you see the most pain is where the economic growth is pushing up against that net. That's where you can really see it. But we don't know if your town next week might have a jobs bonanza because, I don't know, they find oil or whatever. I'm making something up. The net of bad policies that hold back housing production is not universal in that some places—San Francisco, I would say, is at the upper end of how bad, how thick is the net—but the net shouldn't exist. So I'll take an example that I'm more familiar with. My family is based in a town in Maine, and that town in Maine has a small college, and the town versus gown has been going on for generations. The town has successfully blocked the college from adding dorms for a generation, and housing prices have gotten out of control in this small town in Maine. Now most of the, a lot of the, college students have to live a little bit out of town, and they drive on a windy road drunk at night when they're coming back from their parties. That road has become one of the most dangerous roads in Maine. That's a housing shortage story. Those kids should be in dorms in town, stumbling home, because we're not going to get college students to drink a whole heck of a lot less, rather than driving those long distances. To me, that's the same principle that is happening in San Francisco. We have denied them the opportunity to be able to live in what would be a walkable community 99% of the time. It doesn't mean that they don't need a car because they're driving in and driving home on the weekends. We might need to deal with their parking, but the systematic housing shortage and the lack of those dormitories is driving a much larger problem and has created more demand for cars and parking than would be there otherwise.
Yeah, I think there's no question about that. We could add twice as many homes in our neighborhood here, the neighborhood I live in, and it would be an appreciably better place. But the zoning restricts us from doing that.
Your dad would be able to—I mean, I don't know your dad's particular situation—but I'll take myself. I'm on the bus with people who are in the electric chairs.
Not the literal electric chairs. The electric scooters.
The electric scooters. They can zip around. These people are on the go in a way. When you set up for walkability, maybe if you had a downtown community where they were able to be on the e-scooter, your dad might choose to not prioritize needing a parking spot if he was living in a three-unit apartment building with an elevator, could get down on his e-scooter and zip around the corner to get his—I don't know what your dad likes—milkshakes. There's a whole little lifestyle there that could be happening that used to happen in towns in America, but we made impossible with—I'm sure you have an article on stroads and things like that.
Yeah, we've written a couple times on stroads. What I always talk about is we would put the wind at the back of so many public policy problems if we had more walkable neighborhoods, whether that is public health, whether that is accessibility, providing services. The big challenge that we have is that the city is also now located all the different things around so everything is, in a sense, devolved to be not walkable. If we fully committed tomorrow to making this city really a walkable mecca, we could improve the ability for people here to get around really, I think, rather quickly with small, little investments. But the transformation to make it functional where you wouldn't have to be stubborn like me—or, I have a higher net income than most people in this neighborhood. This is a very poor town. I can get my groceries delivered and things like that, where other people are not able to do that. To truly transform it to where you could walk to the grocery store and walk to the doctor and walk to the pharmacy, that would take a generation or more here, is what I see.
I think that's true, and we better get cracking.
Yeah, we better get going.
We better get cracking to pull some differences. I'm sure it's an irritating podcast to listen to people agree with each other. I think where we probably disagree somewhat is on methods. I think that that level of transformation requires more transformative pressure from state and federal. Especially the federal brought us to this reality where there's such high incentives for local governments. The decision-making process in local governments, I feel, is deeply damaged by the current setup and makes it very hard to kind of escape the—what's the opposite of a virtuous cycle?—a vicious cycle, a negative feedback loop.
Talk about that from your perspective. I fundamentally agree with the idea that federal governments have damaged local governments and created negative feedback loops. I think I find it interesting the next step though. So describe that for me. I'm also trying to put myself in a San Francisco mindset where I think there is a different kind of dysfunction than you have in most of the rest of the country. But describe in your mind what that damage is, and then how we arrest that negative feedback loop.
A lot of the damage is historical. So the federal government incentivized every government to adopt local zoning that was very restrictive, and now everybody treats it like it's gospel. "The zoning, oh, it's our precious zoning." And by everybody, I don't mean everybody, because the other thing—we do sort of Intro to YIMBY, and I'll be like, "How many of you know who your city council member is?" No hands go up. Most people don't know about or have an emotional attachment to zoning, and they conflate zoning with building code. They conflate zoning with safety. So we have this kind of big—the federal government incentivized that, and now we're here living with it, and we continue to have incentives for car-centric development. A lot of the money coming back into communities from cities incentivizes poor decision-making around sort of doubling and tripling down on sprawl development, on cars. So how do we kind of undo that vicious cycle? YIMBY, I feel like we take the bite we can take when we can take it. That means we're active at all three levels of government—local, state, federal—and we're fighting for that ultimate transformative situation where—this is my most radical opinion, maybe, but maybe this is the right audience for it. I don't think we should have zoning. There are health and safety regulations. I absolutely think we should have, but I don't think that there's any benefit to having zoning period. We take the incremental steps that we can take when we can take it. So in most places, that means we're fighting for incremental accessory dwelling units being legalized. Does that mean that we're fighting for that at the local level, where we hope local jurisdictions adopt that, or at the state level, where they can legalize it all in one fell swoop? I think that some of these things, especially ADUs, what's nice about doing it at the state level is that our economy works a little bit better at the state and federal level, and so it's easier for companies to enter the ADU market and start to produce things when you do a sort of statewide transformation. I think you can have more immediate impact when you're doing things statewide, but you also often have to demonstrate that the programs work locally and then get adopted statewide. I think we're in this ongoing political argument, where we're growing our membership. We endorse candidates who agree with us. There's all this tactical work of making sure that it's popular to adopt pro-housing policies. I would say that I'm indifferent to what level of government. Does it matter if we changed it at every city council? I don't—the problem for me there is that I don't think that's plausible. I think the more plausible political path is state and federal, but I also think you have to organize locally in order to achieve those goals.
What do you think would happen in San Francisco if there was no zoning?
We'd build a lot more housing. Is this a trick question?
No, I think—well, the next question I have is, what do you think would happen in my town? Because I've got strong opinions on what would happen in my town, and none of it is good. I'm interested in understanding what would happen in San Francisco, because I'm open to the idea that it would be very different than what happened here.
It's interesting. So zoning is one example of the constraints. We have 1,000 other constraints as well that I would sort of lump into that. So if you just eliminated zoning, you wouldn't deal with how easy is it to demolish something, all of the other stuff. You'd end up with the thing people hate right now, which is spiky towers on the parking lots that exist sort of popping up 300 feet high or higher. The people who have an aesthetic concern around housing would have the most anxiety about that. So because I want to be successful and not inspire a backlash, I take that into account, and so I wouldn't do that as our immediate step. I think we need incremental change, and some of that is happening currently in San Francisco. We have what's called the Family Zoning Plan being debated right now that's very much focused on sort of mid-rise housing and also getting rid of other constraints so that that housing actually gets built. I mean, I think probably in your town, there's not an incentive to build steel frame construction and something huge. So you would not get towers.
Yeah, you would get—I'm not a fan of zoning, so I'm not the one to sit here and defend zoning, but I feel like there's a methadone kind of conversation. Because if you look—this is my history of US cities—if you look at development patterns in the 19th century and the early 20th century, you have a certain received wisdom that governed how we built things, even in the absence of zoning. I've spent a lot of time thinking about where did that received wisdom come from? It came from in a kind of Chesterton's fence kind of way. People tried stuff, it didn't work. Those places failed. People died. Things didn't work out. We built up kind of a body of knowledge that if you're going to build a building, you build it in line with other buildings, and you open it up onto the streets, and you put your sewage in the back, and you did basic things that made cities kind of nicer places to live than they otherwise would be. When you introduce the zoning, and you introduce the automobile, and you introduce these other kind of radical transformations, the overall financing system of how we build this stuff, we create this cookie-cutter process, and that wisdom of how to build a great place is, in a sense, it atrophies and then goes away. If you keep the financing in place, and you keep the kind of cultural sense of "Well, the way we get groceries is you build a big box grocery store with a big parking lot out front," there's a certain cultural expectation that we have. I feel like you would just get the worst of what we have today on steroids. I don't like current zoning, but I would, in my city, I would advocate for some type of form-based code, combined with a better capital improvements plan where we weren't investing in stuff out on the edge, where we were maintaining our neighborhoods, combined with a different pricing plan for utilities. I feel like this is a really complex problem that messing with the zoning code doesn't even start to get at. Does that make sense? Or is that different than what you experience?
It's different from what I experience. I mean, maybe this is because I'm from the bad place, San Francisco, but the number of fake problems that get thrown up. Some of them are real. PG&E is a terrible company that takes forever to do their hookups, whatever. This reminds me of middle school thesis, antithesis, synthesis. I feel like if you fight for the midpoint, we're going to consistently lose. I feel like maybe this is sort of the disposition.
I'm Catholic. I watch fellow Catholics fight on abortion in this way. We don't—Strong Towns, we don't get into all that stuff—but I watch it and I cringe because I'm like, that argument is the NRA approach.
Totally, yeah.
Anytime we get into massive policies, it's "I won't give an inch because giving an inch will mean..." and I don't—my brain doesn't work that way.
No, no. This is the difference, I guess, between us and the NRA and whatnot, is that we do give inches. In practice, we're just constantly giving inches. Do I want ADUs statewide? ADUs statewide, it's a crumb of the loaf. I'm taking this incrementally, and I look forward to—I mean, where we sort of get the more complexity. So we have these five pillars: upzoning, permit streamlining, more money for subsidized affordable housing, reforming bad incentives and tenant protections, and protecting renters. Those are our kind of five basic, simple planks that we're fighting for, and they interact and intersect. So I take a somewhat—the fees we put on housing have a very obvious, clear negative effect on production. I think you're the kind of person who would be like, "Well, what are we going to do about funding schools?" So a lot of school fees on new housing production is this massive problem. It's stifling housing production. It's a huge problem. In California, we're going to be tackling fee reform next year a little bit more, but it's just something that happens and pops up over and over again across the country. I will say that YIMBY has a simple, simplistic thing, which is right now the most urgent problem is the housing shortage, and the school fees are an unjust and inequitable way to fund our schools. It puts the burden on new residents and takes the burden off of existing residents, and it stifles housing production and fuels this. So is it simplistic to say simply, we're gonna ban school fees?
Get rid of the fees and figure out something else for schools.
Yeah. So that's I'm sort of—I have kids, so now the other hat that I wear is I'm joining the San Francisco Parents Organization that is going to be in that hat, worried about where we're going to replace that funding and have a holistic approach. But I think this is where I think single-issue advocacy can be really powerful, is to say that this system isn't working, and so we're going to shove back and say, "I don't have a holistic 'How are we going to fund our schools?'" and sort of go back to the system where we taxed and spent. That would be my—that's what I think we should do.
You explain this to me in a way that I grasp you differently now, and I understand it. I think I agree less, but I understand it. Let me give you an opposite.
You should exist. This is the other thing. I think that Strong Towns, somebody else doing this holistic approach, is—I think we exist in an ecosystem. Worrying about "Yeah, we're not going to tax housing for our schools. Where is that money going to come from?" Somebody does need to be doing that.
You gotta deal with that, right. I feel like what—I think this is why the state preemption thing, we hear it differently and we react to it differently. Because to me, if we just stick to housing, I would describe the problem as the toolbox that we have and the capacity we have at the local level to deal with this is too limited. The pain is being felt in the community here. People can't afford to move here. They can't afford to downsize. They can't afford to shift houses. Their kids can't live here. Even in my small town, we have an affordable housing issue. The pain is very real, but we don't have any mechanism to respond dynamically to it. We can't do X, because that causes Y, and if we do Z, then we'll do this and then—our toolbox is too small.
I feel like—this is your town, not my town—but when I look at the small town politics that I'm more familiar with, where my family is, where my summer is buried there, the problem is not that they don't have a toolbox. I mean, this is—
We have one way of raising money: property tax. I mean, we can charge fees, but if it does not work in those two constructs, which the fees are really super limited, you can't pay for it. Just period, it's gone.
Why can't you raise property taxes?
We can, but you're limited to how much you can do, and you have—
But that's a political problem. That's not a genuine constraint, that's a political constraint. I mean, just so that—it's not gravity that's holding you back, and it's also not the federal government. It's the political desire to raise property taxes, which I do think is one of the most massive artificial political constraints we have. Part of this is long term—all YIMBYs will transform into Georgists at some point.
It's very interesting. Let me think that through, because I want to acquiesce your point that if we wanted to, we could increase property taxes by 10x.
I wouldn't even say you would have to do 10x. You upzone, you maybe density bonus or something.
I'm gonna tell you right now that in order for this city to be solvent, taxes would have to go up six, seven, eight times, easily. I mean, right now we are so dramatically underwater in terms of what we have built and what we have the capacity to maintain. The thing about raising property taxes 6x is that you would actually have—again, I'm saying these are feedback loops that we feel—you would dramatically lower property values too, because people buy homes based on payments. If your taxes go way, way up, your monthly income can only support so much of a house payment. The reaction would be that house prices would have to go down, and that impairment of the tax base creates that negative feedback loop where you're taxing a higher percentage of what the value of the house is worth. I'm not saying it couldn't be done. I'm just saying it's a real constraint.
Yeah, it's a real constraint. But does it actually constrain you from approving an apartment building that didn't have a ton of fees?
No.
I mean, the case-by-case space.
In San Francisco, you have a fee system that most of the rest of country does not have. I mean, you'll have it in Colorado, you'll have it in Florida, but we don't have exaction fees. If you go build a house, you pay a building permit inspection fee, you pay a zoning fee, you pay your sewer and water hookup fees, but you're not supporting the school district with a fee that comes through a different tax system. That's part of that overall lack of a toolbox.
Yeah. I mean, there are other things that I lump in. Parking requirements amount to a fee, if you sort of look at it that way.
It is an imposition that raises costs. Yeah.
So I guess this is sort of—I'm not saying you have to raise the taxes. I mean, this is where I sort of feel like, in practice, I see Strong Towns chapters operating very similarly to YIMBY Action chapters and coordinating frequently and agreeing on policy. So I always find it funny when I'm like, "Oh, Chuck's mad on the internet." I'm like, in practice, everybody's agreeing on so many of these incremental steps.
I've always said the overlap is 90%. What I've tried to step back from reacting to is the simplistic rhetoric, which—there's a lot of simplistic rhetoric out of YIMBY land where it's "If we just did this state preemption," or "Just make your, force cities to do this." And I'm like—
Can I shift that?
Yeah, go for it.
I can't speak to all the rhetoric that's ever been had. I think that what I intend to be saying there is that these are obvious constraints. The minimum thing we can do to get out of our own way is remove this barrier, and then we get to do all the fun stuff. We can, once you allow ADUs, once you get rid of some of the fees, once you legalize missing middle housing, then we have this ability and new residents and ability to actually fix other problems. But right now with—this is the sort of—it's impossible to solve so many other problems, because the housing shortage is driving more people into homelessness, driving more people into overcrowded conditions, and fraying our way of life. So I'm not saying don't solve those other problems. I'm saying that this is a huge unnecessary burden that we could just put down.
I hear you. My whole background has been working at the local government level, and there's an endless number of things that local governments have incentives to do terribly and then have developed terrible practices around. Local government should be completely remade in a new, modern way. I'm not ever going to defend what they do. The thing that I always come back to, though, is when state preemption is the tool, I then say, "Well, who do we look to to implement that tool?" I have a team here at Strong Towns. There's 20 some of us. I can have the most brilliant idea. I got to look around at my team and be like, "Who's going to carry this out?" And if there's not the capacity there, I have to build that capacity, either by training someone in, by coaching someone along, or by bringing someone in new. When we want housing reform and we want housing built, and we want housing, to me, it has to start at the very local level, because those are the people who are always going to be either in the way or an assistant to it. They're the people who are going to have to run it, going to have to make it work. We have to have that capacity. To me, not just the rhetoric of "Local government is the problem, and we need to smash them and clear them out of the way," but then the legislation that is "Here's what you must do, here's what you have to do," especially in California, where it's piled on top of Prop 13 and all these other insanities, that just make local government deeply dysfunctional. I feel like it is just banging on the same dysfunction over and over. To me, if you said, "How would we fix this in California?" the via negativa, the idea—how many state restrictions can we remove and give cities more flexibility, more options, more ability to respond to these stresses? That would be my gut approach, and it seems like we go the opposite direction.
Well, this would be sort of a historical thing. We've tried the other direction. We have opened up and encouraged local governments to transform themselves. We've had this process in California, the regional housing needs allocation system, where local governments were given a goal, but a lot of flexibility about how they achieve that goal, and it went disastrously. The local governments, because who shows up and is engaged on the local government level—we all know the biases that go into that—and they figure out elaborate ways to not achieve their housing production goals. They upzone swamps, they create local programs that they know won't work, and all that stuff. So I think there's a—I would say that local governments, this is sort of—what can local government actually do and do well? I don't think that local government should be burdened with approving housing. I think that they're bad at it. I think it creates a denial of service attack on themselves. Especially project-by-project approvals. They create an entire system where they have to receive all these individualized comments on the individualized project and analyze them and respond. That's bizarre. It's absolutely bizarre, totally bizarre. So it's like, aren't we doing something nice to local governments by being like, "Honey, don't even try anymore. You guys should not do individual project-by-project permitting. We're going to take that entire nonsense off your plate." This is the other thing, is that city council members are constantly quietly saying, "Thank you." They don't want to be taking these perceived as tough votes on individual housing projects over and over and over again, and spending so much of their constituent relation times distracting them from the actual issues. Are their schools falling apart? Is the bridge gonna collapse? All of that other stuff. I think that housing permitting and probably zoning also is something that local governments are dispositionally not going to be good at, because of the structure of decision-making, the incentive to pull up the ladder, to pull up the drawbridge, to pull up the ladder of opportunity is so high that it makes it very hard at the local government level to allow housing production even when it would break you out of that vicious cycle.
I've never understood that argument, though.
Have you attended enough city council meetings? This is the—
Oh yeah, yeah. So let me say that there is a huge incentive for people who have bought into a neighborhood and are worried about change. I think, particularly in my part of the world, when the city comes in and says, "We're going to change this," it generally does not go well. I think there's rational reasons why people would resist that, just based on their historical looking around going, "Okay..."
Well, also it's impossible to measure all the people who are like, "Sure, whatever," and didn't show up to city council.
Totally. It's disproportionate. If I have a reason to oppose it, I'm 1,000 times more likely to show up than the 1,000 people who are for it. But here's the thing that I've struggled to understand, because I've heard this said many, many times. Cities have an incentive. My city is broke. My city has an incentive to double the number of houses in this neighborhood over the next two decades, because it's the only way they're actually going to be able to maintain the streets. There's no incentive to not do that, except people showing up in a public forum and saying that they're against it. That is very powerful. I mean, when the city council room is full of people and you're like, "Hey, these are our constituents," that is a really powerful thing. But the idea that the city doesn't have an incentive to fix this in some way, to work through the hard things, to try to make this happen, I don't get that argument, because their business model, if we just go to that, would say you need to have more people in the same place to make this work.
I think it's "What decisions do we make democratically at what levels of government?" I think that democratically, it's impossible to fully incorporate—it's interesting you talk about sort of costs, and understanding the costs. I think that when we make decisions at the city council level on housing, it is not impossible but much harder to see the correct cost-benefit analysis. So you just disproportionately get to the wrong answer. Why I want to move more decision-making up to the state level on housing is because that's where I think the cost-benefit analysis is being done better, more properly, to incorporate the benefits of housing production versus the cost. Is that always the case? No. Do I think that it's great? We win local city council victories all the time.
You're running for council and winning.
Totally. This is the all-of-the-above strategy. We're organizing, we're currently passing in San Francisco—I knock on wood as I say it—a massive rezoning plan, but we would not be doing it if the state wasn't—I will not curse—but hounding our butt. Before we end—we're getting up on time—you say implementation? What happens in implementation? I love that you asked that question, because we just put out an implementation guide to help people organize locally around implementation of legislation. Because I think you're completely correct that it doesn't stop at the state level, that this feedback loop and this relationship between state and federal and local governments is a conversation that never ends. It's a back and forth. It's something that you can be deeply empowered to make change in your local community. I don't know if you have show notes we could add it in, but I think that of the YIMBY movement's—I actually think you and I are probably the closest together, because what happens at the local level when a state law is passed? 99% of the time, they fall apart. So we have to be there in the community ushering those bills in.
I wasn't going to get to that part. That's the other thing. We spend all this time and energy at the state level smashing local capacity, but the implementation of it all relies on local capacity.
Why is it smashing local capacity to tell them they don't have to permit housing? I feel like I am offering them the opportunity to not degrade their own capacity by having 18 hearings about an apartment building.
They shouldn't have 18 hearings about an apartment building. They should fix that part of their system. It is the idea of creating a longer feedback loop between the pain and the ability to respond by having the state set these requirements. It's creating a longer feedback loop, where a shorter feedback loop with a larger toolbox should give more ability to respond dynamically. I love when the YIMBY people show up at the council meetings and say, "We need to do this, we need to do that, we need to fix this, we need to fix that." When they show up in force, it makes a huge difference.
How do you explain cities-? You think that it's just that they didn't have the tools. I see them having a lot of tools that they didn't use. The 2000s, the 2010s, I'm like, they were awash with tools, and yet the housing shortage, 20 years of worse and worse and worse and worse.
I think states pay cities to do what the state wants. I think the federal government pays cities to do what the federal government wants. I think in general, most of those things are really bad for cities.
Wait a second, you're meaner to the cities than I am. You want to cut off their funding? I just want to allow them to not do painful planning exercises.
I don't necessarily want to cut their funding as much as I would change the way that it flows. It largely flows right now through transportation projects, through big mega projects, and through other large kind of state-scaled, federal-scaled investments. What cities need is the money. But cities actually need to do 1,000 small investments, as opposed to one big one. Because you have the one big one, what happens is that every pain that the city has gets directed into this series of big things that they're going to do.
This seems like what you're fighting for, then, is state reform and federal reform. No?
Well, I think cities have to live in the world we're given. What we have recognized as a movement is—I'm going to say this, and this is not directed at you, but it's more directed at us, and what we see as shortcomings for us. There's a certain seduction of playing the big game with the big players and not doing the hard work of making the city run. There's also, I think, the thing it does to your language and your intellect when you're like, "This is a really complex problem that needs really complex actors to deal thoughtfully about it. We need to sit down and figure this out." What happens is, when you start doing statewide stuff, it dumbs things down to where you get—I'll use a different example than YIMBY—you get something like Complete Streets, or you get something like Vision Zero, which to me, these are two corrupt, co-opted kind of responses. Engineers are happy to do Complete Streets, police departments are happy to do Vision Zero, because it just adds to their budget of doing the wrong thing right now. I wouldn't say there's no room for state policy reform, but we've intentionally avoided that as being core to what we do, because we feel like there's such an urgent need to do things locally, and there's so much gain that can be made by doing it.
I totally get you. I love this. I wrote this down, the seduction of doing the big things with the big players.
Well, you want to be in the room where it happens. I mean, that's a lot of fun. When I have Congressman call me up like "Oh could you come?", it's like I could do that all the time, and it's—
The urge to run before you walk is constant.
Yeah, it's ego-stroking more than it actually is effective.
And you can pass this thing that is supposedly going to be high impact, and then it falls apart or creates worse incentives. So this is why I think our organizing philosophy actually has a lot in common with your organizing philosophy. What I believe is that we have to have these local chapters on the ground seeing how things pan out, feeding that information back up, creating local political will to take bigger bites or the right bites, figuring out what's working and what's not. I think that a lot of organizations are either at the state level or at the local level, and I think that I agree with you, if you're choosing either at the state level or at the local level, then there's a lot of merit in being at the local level, where I think we can be—I don't want to say immediate, it's not tomorrow—but this kind of turning the cruise ship is that we have to be at both the local, the state, and also, I think, at the federal level, and connecting informationally those three levels of government to be able to make these systems actually work. We have to have the learning of what's happening at the local level, where are ADUs working and where aren't they, so you can feed that up into trailing legislation, potentially. Why does setting the housing production goals fall apart every time? That kind of back-and-forth information, I think, is extremely valuable. This is, not to hype our new implementation guide, but I think this goes into that thinking. This is, I think, what's hard is you guys have made, I think, a really effective brand out of focusing entirely on the complicated parts. I think there's a lot of value in that, but I also think that this is maybe we have more of a brand disagreement. I think that the brand of YIMBY's simplicity is actually masking the greater depths of, sort of, where do we actually get people to? Because I do think that we do put forward a brand of, "It's a housing shortage, stupid." I think that that's both true and not the complete statement. You get them on the "It's a housing shortage, stupid," and then they stay for the "Learn who your city council member is and engage them in conversations about the difference between a state density bonus program and a local density bonus program." That's the escalation. That, I think, is lost in the external-facing more simple brand.
We have five priority campaigns. The first one is transparent local accounting, safe and productive streets, ending highway expansions, incremental housing everywhere, and parking mandates. Those are the five things. For us, it's the city we want to bring about. We started out talking about walkable cities and great neighborhoods. Those five things, universally, would help every city in North America make huge progress. We have those five because those are five that we have said, "If we make advancements on this, it brings a whole bunch of other good things with it." But if you made me pick one, I think they all at the local level—you use the word "complicated," and we use the word "complex" because complicated is like a watch where you can tune it, and complex is like feedback loops where they interact with each other. You fix the streets, it fixes the housing. You fix the housing, it makes the street problem better. You stop building the highways, it makes the whole thing gel. There's a complexity to it where you're looking for incremental gains that compound, as opposed to a win you can celebrate that may not actually be a win.
We're about to pass in California statewide zoning reform, except that it has 15 asterisks next to it. I don't know if you've looked at SB 79.
I've looked at all of them to one degree or another. It's fine. Are you going to have a statewide proposition referendum pushing back on this stuff in your next election?
Pushing back on SB 79? No.
On all the zoning reforms you've done.
I'm gonna knock on wood as I say this. I'm constantly on the lookout for the backlash, and I see it rarely. They are not as organized and as powerful. I think sometimes, I think maybe all the YIMBY movement is doing is demonstrating that the neighborhood defenders are not as scary as they want you to believe they are. We are just giving a little bit of cover to all the elected officials who knew what the right decision was, but were intimidated by the NIMBY opposition, and all we have done is thrown a few Atlantic articles into the mix, such that they have found their cojones.
There's something to that. We've supported statewide parking reform almost everywhere it's been put forth. It is one of those things where the conversation at the local level is generally stuck, and it is one of those universal things where in the smallest of cities and the biggest of cities, if we can get this thing unstuck, there's no negative downside to it. It's a positive.
Yeah, no. I mean, I'm actually going to be writing a Substack about this, but now I can't remember. It was a governor at YIMBY Town said that one of the most important political things that we need to do was educate elected officials about the difference between political discomfort and a political liability. I was like, "Oh, that's a great quote." Political discomfort versus a political liability. Because I think that this is most housing decisions—this is not true all the time. I'm not doing a universal—but let's say it's 20% more than people realize. You're experiencing political discomfort when you're approving a housing project, but not necessarily genuine political liability. But it's also my job to organize. It's my job to organize in order to make them braver. Literally, that is my job.
I think that I have an opposite approach that I take with people, because I have a lot of engineers who will call me and say, "I think you're right and I want to do this, but if I stand up and say it, I will lose my job, or they'll attack my license," or what have you. I have local politicians who will say the same thing. I always tell them, "There's a difference between being brave and being stupid. Do what you can. Make the case where you can. Tell me where we can help." But I always feel like it is the charge of the hyper advocate to look at the politician and say, "Just be braver." And it's like, I don't know—I respect enough of them in their roles to realize that a lot of them are pretty brave and they will do good things, but it's our role to shift the world around them to make the good thing easier to do.
Totally agree on that. You and I can't rely on heroes.
Totally. We can't rely on heroes. We have to actually be better than that.
I could not agree with you more on that. So one of my radicalizing experiences—I had moved to San Francisco. I was volunteering on a campaign for assembly, and I was like, "Why aren't you talking more about housing?" And he proceeded to give me a long explanation that was like, "Well, you have to understand," and then listed out all of this stuff. Halfway through the speech, I was like, "What I have to understand is that not enough people are clapping for him when he says something pro-housing." He can list off all the other things, constraints that he feels politically, and those are interesting. It's an interesting story. But actually, all this is the—checkers versus chess. There need to be a visible constituency that rewards politicians for saying the right things on housing. I completely agree with you. I think there are very few brave politicians. I think there's some truth to there are more people who agree on these issues. That's why we're—Strong Towns and YIMBY Action—why we're out there organizing them. There are more people than, I think, the politician can always see that do agree with them, and so I think not 100% of the time—don't do something stupid. I think that it is also true that they can stick their foot out a little further than they think they could. They could tell a story about how their kid is not going to be able to live in that community. They could move more hearts and minds and maybe win reelection a little bit more than they think they can. I want them to both hear that and be excited that a YIMBY Action chapter might be coming to their backyard or a Strong Towns chapter to help them take those steps.
Maybe that's a good place to stop. Thank you for your time. If people want to get in touch with you and see the work that you're doing, what's the best place to do that?
Yimbyaction.org, and you can also email me at [email protected]—yeah, just my first name and the org.
I have been told that you are the nice YIMBYs of all of them. The thing that I have found is that there are many, many, many different strains of YIMBY. There's almost as many YIMBY organizations or YIMBY things as there are people. So I've been told that you guys are the nice ones.
Let me just tell you, that is not a universal feeling, but I will accept it.
Really, that you're the nice ones?
Oh, definitely. I mean, it wouldn't be a good movement if we didn't have a little bit of in-fighting.
You're nice. This was pleasant.
Strident, sometimes. I've been accused of being quite strident. But hopefully that can also be nice.
It can be nice. I've been strident as well. Even towards YIMBYs a couple times.
I'm sure you've been just as strident to the NIMBYs, though.
I think that because I have a natural reaction to NIMBYs that is negative, I have this extra step where I try to be like, "Okay, let me try to understand the psychology behind this particular insane statement you just made." But that's me. Okay.
Thanks so much, Chuck.
Thank you. We'll talk again soon. Take care.
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