States are legalizing ADUs, cutting parking mandates, and changing zoning, but it's still difficult to estimate how much housing each of those reforms will actually produce. Carlee Alm-LaBar talks with Arnold Ventures housing director Stephanie Kestelman, The Turnout’s Grace Gordon, and Strong Towns executive director John Reuter about the Housing Data and Technology Innovation Challenge, a nine-week competition asking teams to build open-source tools that estimate the effects of housing reforms using public data and transparent assumptions. Plenty of housing reforms have arrived with big promises about what they’ll produce and then fallen short; building these tools could give people a better way to challenge the assumptions behind those promises and be clearer about what the available data can actually support.
We know the problem. In many places, there are just not enough homes. We also have no shortage of ideas for what to change, but what we don't have is an equally good way to tell which of these changes will matter by how much and where. States and cities are moving on zoning, ADUs, parking requirements, transit-oriented development, and plenty more. If you're choosing among these ideas, though, you want some way to understand their likely effects now, not years after market outcomes have accumulated. The Housing Data and Technology Innovation Challenge is built around that question.
Sponsored by Arnold Ventures and administered by the Turnout, it's inviting people to build open-source tools that can help policymakers estimate how different housing reforms could affect housing supply, and make those estimates understandable enough to actually use. Welcome to Upzoned, a podcast from Strong Towns, where we look past the headline and into the systems, tradeoffs, and assumptions shaping our cities and towns.
My name is Carlee Alm-LaBar, the chief of staff at Strong Towns, and today we're doing a little twist on our usual format to talk about one of the biggest issues in the strong town space right now: housing and housing policy, and about an innovative effort to advance the policy conversation. I'm really excited about the group we have around the table today. First, we have Dr. Stephanie Kestelman joining us from Washington D.C. She's director of housing at Arnold Ventures, a philanthropy focused on evidence-based public policy. Stephanie's an economist whose work focuses on housing supply and rental housing.
Glad to have you with us, Stephanie.
Thank you so much for having me here.
And also joining us from Washington is Grace Gordon, research lead and project manager at the Turnout, a consulting organization that works with governments and other institutions on data, technology, and public sector systems. Grace's background includes policy research, project management, and work with state and local officials. So glad you're here, Grace.
Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to be here.
And finally, joining us from Boston, we have John Reuter, our executive director here at Strong Towns. Before taking on that role, John spent 12 years on our board and served as our first senior fellow. He also brings experience in local government and state and local advocacy. Welcome, John.
Thank you. Good to see you, Carlee.
So, Stephanie, I'm going to start with you because you're representing Arnold Ventures, who's sponsoring this entire effort. So I'm hoping you can kind of take us back to the beginning and tell us what is the Housing and Data Technology Innovation Challenge and what inspired you guys to lead this effort.
Yes, thank you so much again for having us. So the Housing Data and Technology Innovation Challenge is a nine-week open-source challenge that will run from October 14th to December 16th, 2026. It's fully remote, open nationally, and the idea here is to try to create a tool that policymakers, advocates, and the general public can use to rank or understand the potential impacts of different housing policies that states are considering around the country. So, as you described, Carlee, states around the U.S. are passing reforms to try to legalize and encourage housing of different shapes and sizes.
These policies include accessory dwelling unit legalization, low-density multifamily like duplexes and triplexes, reductions in parking minimums, allowing residential construction near commercial corridors, and the question we get most often is how many homes will we get out of these policies, and as you said, I am a housing economist by training, and this is a very complicated question to answer. Economists have their own ways of trying to address this question.
There are other tools out there that try to address similar questions at the city level in a different way, but at the state-level, the biggest challenge is just the sparsity of data. It's hard to know how many lots in a given state are zoned for a particular use. It's hard to know what the development fees are across different cities, and this is only scratching the surface. We often don't know how many parking spots you can put in, etc. So, one of the biggest challenges in modeling is just how do we deal with an environment that doesn't have a lot of good national or state-level data, or where the data is disjointed across municipalities.
Where assumptions about what will get built will really determine what the results of the or what the estimates will look like, and so that's what we're trying to do here. We want teams across the country to try to come up with tools that can then be scaled up to other states, and that use the fact that we live in a data-poor or unconcentrated environment. Use reasonable assumptions, transparent assumptions that policymakers can modify or can grapple with, and say, "I don't like this assumption, and then can rank policy options for their state given their state context and what the policies might do.
That's great. Wow, we're gonna have a lot to dig into for sure. Grace, I'd love to turn to you and just why first was the Turnout a good partner for the project? Tell us a little bit about your organization, and then we're going to get into a couple of the details of the challenge.
Yeah, thanks, Carlee. So the Turnout is a professional services firm. We work at the intersection of policy and technology across a variety of sectors. We've helped to identify and develop solutions that improve or try to improve systems, and make sure that the people working in, especially, like highly regulated environments, have the tools that they need to visualize, to make informed decisions and to ultimately come to outcomes that have been informed by both data tools and the technology that they're using.
So we got connected with Arnold and started talking about the housing space and how there's a lot of public data out there, and how great it would be if we could start to take that data and develop it into tools that policymakers can use to make informed decisions, especially sort of at the state-level. So, yeah, that's how it got started, and the Turnout has run hackathon-style challenges in the past. So we thought it would be a fun way to bridge the nerdy data world with the housing policy landscape.
Absolutely, and why did this come about now, or what are you seeing that makes this especially relevant today?
Yeah, so Stephanie's our housing expert, really, but, we've seen across the country, states are passing reforms to legalize and encourage housing of different shapes and sizes. Stephanie mentioned it before. Examples include legalizing ADUs, low-density multifamily reductions in parking minimums, and, we're seeing in sort of the general conversation policymakers asking how many homes these policies will generate, and because we can't predict the future, we figured it'd be really cool to get a bunch of smart people together to create tools that use data and transparent assumptions.
Transparency is going to be a key sort of theme throughout this challenge to give a range of estimates. The goal of the challenge is to develop a tool that simulates the impact of the different policy reforms, and to try to make it as transparent and replicable as possible, so that it can be scaled to other states and inform the housing policy development.
And Carlee, I'll jump in here very briefly. So Arnold Ventures has run research requests for proposals in the past. It's part of our bread and butter toolkit, and that's in part because we value the opportunity to evaluate multiple proposals at the same time and compare them on their merits. So we wanted to do something similar in developing this tool, in the sense that we wanted to be able to compare multiple approaches at the same time, given that this challenge, or the idea initially, was going to leverage data, it was going to leverage coding and technology.
I was talking to my friends who are software engineers, and they said you should just try to do this as a codeathon because then not only are you comparing options at the same time, but you're also getting a broader set of people who might not necessarily have known how to work in the housing space, right? They might not be housing economists. They might not be urban planners, but they know how to wrangle data. They know how to process large quantities of information, and if they're working with people who understand the housing space, they could come up with something that is very usable, but also based on believable assumptions.
So this is the first time Arnold Ventures is running a challenge like this. We're very excited. Our board is very excited, and so I'm excited to see what comes out of it.
Well, that's a great segue into just asking either of you who do you hope participates as a team and participates in the challenge.
I can take that one. So we are really, really hoping to get interdisciplinary teams. We want data scientists, technologists, computer scientists, housing policy experts, civic analysts. The work is naturally both technical and policy focused, so mixed teams are going to be a really natural fit. A team can be as small as one person or as large as five. Digging into the participation requirements, participants must be legal residents of the 50 states or DC at least 18 years of age, and everyone is going to be able to register individually on the challenge website. Registration should open in the next day or two, and close on October 7.
Let me just make an additional pitch here for these things because I think it's so easy to go like I'm going to get in and win., what? If you think you have the idea of how we can measure housing, which is an incredibly difficult, complex question, and we can talk more about like why this is such a hard thing that requires like everybody coming together in a minute here. But the other thing is, exploring these challenges will help you better think about housing in your own community, and think about how you're actually approaching housing and what you're doing.
So, if you're a group of students out there, or if you're just a group of folks out there, I think about our financial decoder, which is to help places understand their finances, their places, and the ramifications for their city balance sheets. What we found out when we released that is a bunch of people from all sorts of different backgrounds started picking it up and building tools around it. Somebody created a tool to make it automatically fill.
Somebody else came up with a tool to figure out how to like better explain it with like okay here's how we're gonna have to automatically explain what the results mean and what to take out of it, and those kind of jumps forward made things that we never could have thought of to begin with jump in that way, and those teams looked radically different from everything from amateurs to really serious long-term people who have looked at financial data for decades to mixes of the two to software engineers, and all of those people came out of it with a deeper understanding of how their city's finances worked, with a deeper analysis of the thing, an ability to actually drive the conversation forward where they lived.
So, I think there's one thing that we're going to have this shared knowledge base at the end of this process, and this ability to talk about what are the drivers, what aren't the drivers, what does work, what doesn't work, how does this policy compare to that policy, what are the elements of the policy as they deal with the different barriers to housing, which are not just zoning, but zoning is a big one.
But then there's multiple layers underneath that, right, that we need to talk about, it's going to help you understand all those things and think it through, and you're going to be part of this community that's trying to drive this question forward at the same time. So I just say, if you're out there and you're thinking, "Boy, this sounds fun, or "Boy, this sounds interesting, but I'm not sure if I'm ready. I'm not a data scientist. I'm not a housing economist. I'm not a whatever, right?
What we've seen is this kind of bottom-up solution building, where people meet it where they are and bring their own insights to it, can create more power than just going out and hiring one expert team, right? That's what Stephanie was really talking about here a second ago. What makes this transformative is having people show up wherever they are and bringing their own insights and ideas to the table, and us being able to look at all of those. So I just want to really encourage you: if you're out there and you're thinking this might just be fun or this is a lark, you might end up as the winner.
Even if you're not the winner, you can make a serious contribution to helping us as a community think better about housing and what causes housing supply to go up or not go up as we think about these policies
Absolutely, John. I wanted to actually follow, and I think you touched on some of this. But from a Strong Towns perspective, what will we be watching as the challenge develops and moves forward?
Well, I think transparency is really key, right? I think emphasis on that is really key because we don't know everything yet. I loved Stephanie's like we don't have very much data, and Grace was like, "We have lots of data. The reality is, we're kind of at this glass half full period in housing information right now, where we have so much more information than we used to. There have been projects to figure out what's the implication of local data. We have more databases on these things. We have more economic research than we ever did before, right? We know a lot more, and at the same time, we don't know nearly enough, right?
We haven't passed enough of these policies to really understand their ramifications truly, and be able to say, "Oh, here's the answer, here's where it's at. But we do have enough to have hints at what may be true, and to test them, and to start trying to figure this thing out, and so we both have not enough data and lots of data, and that's a tricky place to be. I think it's where a competition and exploration like this is so valuable.
I think we're also excited from a Strong Towns perspective about that bottom up stuff that I just talked about the idea that this really is a call to everyone to go out there and try and to think about these problems to try to come together. It's going to widen the knowledge base of people who are thinking about these problems and have a deeper understanding of them. I think that's really valuable from a Strong Towns point of view. Right, that I started to talk about this, and this will be my little concluding thought here.
I'd love Stephanie if you have thoughts about how we think about these layers too, and if I'm even thinking about the right layers here, but I think okay, there's zoning, right? Is it even allowed to build? Can you legally build the thing? Then we go down a layer and we say, okay, is it financially feasible to build the thing? Because it doesn't actually pencil out to do it. People aren't going to do it. Can they figure out how to actually put it together and build it? Then there's the question of will they build it, right? I think about ADUs as a great example of this. The first question is just, are they legal?
Okay, we got to make them legal. Now we're going to make them legal everywhere. Great, that's a Strong Towns belief. We should allow you to build an accessory dwelling unit anywhere that where there's currently utilities and infrastructure provided. We should allow ADUs there. Great, they're legal everywhere. Then the question becomes, okay, where can I financially make this pencil out? There are a whole bunch of things besides zoning, by the way, that influence that: fees, material costs, design reviews, longer permitting, financing, and all the challenges of building there. Then everyone who could build an ADU isn't going to, right?
They're not going to do it probably ever, or certainly not immediately. So there's this question of when will that get built over time, and this starts to get at that complexity of these questions, and it also I think there's two things that are really exciting about this to me, for policymakers, but also local people thinking about this. What it's going to show you, I believe, as we look at these assumptions, is not only how do you design policies that get there, but also it's going to show what are the major drivers that change the thing.
So if I'm not at the state government looking at these things, if I'm in a local city or a local chamber of commerce or a local pro-housing group, I can think about some of those other layers there too and think how can my actions actually change those? Great that the state legalized ADUs, but what's the intervention for us as the city of how we're going to make sure that there's finances there to help make it happen? What are we going to do to actually encourage people to build these things? Right? What are other levers that we can actually play with here too? How does changing those assumptions change the whole impact of this overall law?
So that's what's exciting to me is I think that this kind of transparency and exploration is going to create this opportunity not just for state policymakers, but for all of us to think more thoughtfully about housing and where we can intervene to build to get the kind of housing we need and want in our places built. So that was a very long answer, but yeah, Stephanie, how am I thinking about that? There, what how do I capture some of those levels and the complexity, and what am I getting wrong?
No, that was great, John. I should just have you come around with me and talk about the challenge because you have about as much enthusiasm for it as Grace and I do, which is exciting because you haven't been working on this for a while. I think that's exactly right. I will also add, for example, with ADUs, what if every subdivision just immediately added an ADU to a single-family home that it built, then you don't necessarily need to rely on the behavior of the current owner. So these are the kinds of questions that I don't expect people to answer in the challenge specifically, but are the things that we should be grappling with broadly.
Financing is one thing, as you said, zoning is can you build it? Building codes and hard costs in general are another thing that we the housing team at Arnold Ventures have been working on. Process reform if it takes you a long time to be able to put an ADU in your backyard, and you either have been hoping to get some revenue from it by renting it out, or you're trying to house an older adult in your family, or your child who just got back from college. If it takes you a year, two years, three years to get it permitted, then maybe you don't want to build it at all. You're exactly right in how you're thinking about it, and we don't know.
We have some data out there about if you pass an ADU legalization law, how many of the single-family homes or the duplexes will actually put an ADU. The results tend to be geographically concentrated in the states that passed the bills earlier, and so in some senses, at least for the challenge, we might be making assumptions and playing with those assumptions just to try to get at an answer. But you're spot on the layers of what we're thinking about
I have a follow-up question for you all, and really anybody can take this., you guys have mentioned several policy reforms. Where do you see policymakers struggling with a lack of data?, where do they? Where are they? Like, okay, well, here's a possible policy, but we don't know if it's going to work, and, from a more political standpoint, policymakers may not want to take big risks or big leaps when the outcomes aren't somewhat more certain. So I'm curious, where you have seen tension points, particularly in what I might call the pro-housing space, that you're really hoping this challenge helps clarify or helps provide a path forward.
Yeah, so not to hammer too much on ADUs, but that is such low hanging fruit of an example to talk about. Most cities, states, suburbs don't measure ADU permits as new housing permits. They will measure them as additional space, so it will show up as a renovation. It might show up as an additional housing unit in some places, but truly, in many places around the U.S. We have no idea how many ADUs have been built. Similarly, for parking reform, building permits don't usually track how many parking spaces are being built as part of that project.
So, when we reduce parking requirements, we don't really know how many parking spots are actually being put in after the parking requirement goes down, so we know anecdotally that after parking reform passes, developers still build parking because the residents of those buildings or of those developments want some parking.
They don't necessarily need three spots for every bedroom, but they might need one spot for every unit, and so that's, You can tell I'm the economist in the room because I was the glass half empty on availability, but I think, we can't know what we don't measure, and that is something that, outside of the challenge our team is trying to work on is improving the data environment and just measuring the outcomes that we care about. I don't think I fully answered your question.
So no, I think that's great because I think this was actually going to lead into a question which you already started to answer, which is, what makes measuring it so difficult, and meaning what makes measuring housing production so difficult, and, you essentially started to answer it or answered it with the idea that like the policies that we're saying are going to increase housing, their impacts aren't really documented in the, in the regulatory process at the local government.
So I would expect as you launch into a challenge like this, you're really thinking about innovative ways that teams are going to need to be thinking about the data collection because, it's going to be really challenging to, go across all the municipalities in a state and be like, okay, add this field about parking to your building permit, for instance, or whatever the case may be. So I'm curious if either of you want to talk about how to think expansively about data collection in this challenge, and where teams might be able to get creative,. I'll open that up to anybody who wants to take it.
Give our teams, give our listeners some secret tips to give them a little bit of this conversation. Yeah, exactly. Okay, okay. Anybody can listen. Everybody can listen.
Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, this is the hot tip. We are only asking teams to use publicly available data, so we are not asking teams to go out and do data collection themselves. We have compiled a list of publicly available datasets that teams will be able to play around with, but as you said, Carlee, these are going to be tools that, or the datasets are going to require teams to make assumptions and communicate uncertainty throughout the process of building their tool, and we have some thoughts on that piece, especially because as we've looked through the data, and, Stephanie flagged this for us early on. It's not going to be granular.
We do not want solutions that get super granular. We're going to want ranges and not single numbers. We want teams to be really thoughtful and document what assumptions they're making, why they're prioritizing certain assumptions over others, and how much the result moves when a key input like construction cost changes. So all of that needs to be done in plain language where a user can see it, and so that's sort of getting back to that transparency.
We're asking teams to use open-source tools so that they'll be able to document both the code piece, but also their thought process to show states and policymakers what exactly the tool can tell you and what it can't. Right, because there's going to be certainly shortcomings to every tool that is built, and that's okay. I think that's part of the beauty of this.
Yeah, I'd love John for you to kind of take that because I think, particularly from a Strong Towns perspective, we're always encouraging nuance, particularly into policy reform or things where, I don't think anybody would want the outcome of this challenge for people to stop thinking about it just following what the tool says, right? Because these are not intended to be 100% certain and determinative. I'm assuming, and I don't want to speak for you all, that they're intended to be guideposts and ways to think about inputs into housing production. John, any thoughts to add to that?
Well, I do want to jump back to Stephanie here a second here and get any more tips or tricks from a housing economist for the teams here of things that they could think about. I love the emphasis on transparency and the understanding that there's not going to be some quick fix where suddenly we're going to understand housing, and the willingness to embrace how much we are still trying to figure out here, I think is so essential in this moment, because I just hear people on various sides of the argument just jump to conclusion, be like, we know the answers, it's all figured out-and I'm like, no, we don't know the answers.
We have some principles that seem to be clear. We know that when you don't let something get built, it can't get built. That's true. We know when you make a process longer to build something, it gets more expensive. That's true, right? So there are some things that we understand around what helps or hurts housing supply, but how much or what it even does to prices exactly, and what the surrounding medians are there. We have some principles, we have some ideas, but it's complicated.
Anything that opens up our minds to thinking about complexity and being able to talk openly and honestly about the assumptions we're making, and then letting us then challenge each other's assumptions and have conversations about why we're assuming this versus assuming that and those kind of principles. I just think it's going to lead to a more mature conversation, and I think that's where our activism needs right now.
We've had a great initial understanding of like, oh my gosh, we're not building housing where it's most needed, and we're not building the right types of housing where it's most needed, and how do we approach this and figure it out. That was a fundamental transformation that's happened over the last decade and has been essential. Now the question is to have some rigor and bring to it and say, okay, okay, but what does this specific policy do? Because we've had a lot of state policies that came with big promises of a lot of housing, and they haven't always fulfilled those promises.
Understanding why or why not is really key, and understanding our assumptions that we made about why they would is important, and also helps us figure out. Okay, here's our corrective piece of legislation to fix what didn't work there. What are our assumptions about why this is the fix versus this being the fix? Those are just complicated questions where we don't know all the answers. But what we shouldn't let that do is stop us from going and trying to find the answers, or by stepping just to be like, oh, we're not going to make any assumptions, as though you can just not take action because you don't know enough.
We have to take action in an environment with both a lot of data and not enough data at the same time, and figure out how to do that in a thoughtful way. But, but Stephanie, what are the other tips and tricks that we can tell people as they look at this data, as they think about it. I think projecting in general is just such a complicated thing with these ranges. I came from working on energy policy previously, and we project how much clean energy would get to its heel or this type or that type. I was always like, it always feels a little mystical in some way.
I guess at the end of the day, even though the people doing it had goodwill, they were trying to figure. Out, but it's really hard. So, what more tips or tricks as people work on this tricky problem? Can you give them?
Yeah, John, I hear you want me to get a bit wonkish, so I try to stay close to the ground. It's very Strong Towns to be just a little bit wonkish. We like to say we're technically rigorous, but accessible is where we try to land in the whole thing. That's our aim. All right. So what I'll say for the tool estimates of how a policy might impact zone capacity. So that is the if everyone built to the maximum, how much housing would we get? Those types of estimates are not going to be useful because that is the Pollyanna version the general debate has often talked about of the world, and that is not the world that we live in.
It's not the world that pencils, and so just measuring, we change the zoning now we can build 1000 dwelling units per acre in this area is just not going to be informative to policymakers. On the other side of this, you might be an economist out there. If you are, I'm one of you, so I can say this with love.
Our models in economics of, if you pull this lever, this is how the whole economy changes in sequence might also not be helpful because while the general public is very smart and can grapple with tradeoffs, they're not following how a particular type of elasticity or a particular parameter in the model is actually permeating the entire model, and so it ends up looking and sounding like a black box to most people. Sometimes it feels like a black box to me, and I'm a housing economist who's been trained in this. So that's the other side of this, where it might not necessarily be useful. So what is useful?
There are many states that have where the cities have very good parcel-level data from the assessor's office, they have zoning maps. But the minute you get out to the suburbs, all that data is gone, or is just very hard to get. Now there are people out there who have purchased access to data sets that collect data across municipalities, across jurisdictions in the U.S. And that's great for them. Those data sets are expensive. We don't expect anyone to use them in the challenge.
In fact, we don't want people to be using these kinds of proprietary data sets because what we want is if I Stephanie Kestelman can look at a tool and say I can recreate this and run the code and check whether it works, I need to be able to access the data. All right, so that still doesn't answer John's question of what are the tips and tricks. Be creative. Truly, if you're out there and you think, "Wow, I can use satellite data and these assumptions to figure out where all the single-family parcels in America are, I would love to see that. I have my own ideas of how I would approach the challenge, but I am not participating.
I'm not even judging. I am just gonna be a final consumer. So creativity, I think, will go a long way. I mean, creativity with an explanation of how you got there, and that might mean that you're making some serious assumptions that then allow you to do everything else. So you might not have a sense of where all the bus stops or commuter rail stops are in a particular state, but there's data from I don't know. I think we mentioned Open Street maps in our handbook, it shows you like that it has points of interest data.
Maybe you just assume that half of those are major transit areas, or tell us how you got to that number or why you thought of that number. But I've been jokingly describing this as how many golf balls fit in an airplane?, we have a bit more data than that. You can, our challenge participants can measure the golf ball. They can look up how large the airplane is. So we're not making completely uneducated guesses, but we're also not necessarily, we're telling you what kind of plane we're working with, but we're not necessarily telling you can put in the balls into the plane and then see how many you put in.
So, John, I hope that answers your question without biasing everyone to work on the solution that I have in my mind. Because what I have in my mind is probably, I don't know if it works. I have my own background. I have my own experience with the data. I'd love to see what people who are not me are doing. That's why I'm not doing it. That's why I want everybody else to throw their hat into the ring.
I love that, and I, as you speak, I, it really is start with the data, is what you're saying. Actually look at it and think about it creatively. I think a lot about like design thinking as we think about these kind of things and reframing the question. I think it's really going to be helpful for people. My advice would be, for what it's worth, and I am not a housing economist, but as someone who thinks about how do we create creativity around how they solve these problems, I think is actually pulling it out and reframing the question. Even going to the data and going, okay, how might we use this data? How might we use this data point?
Really spend some time thinking about the assumptions and not jumping right to trying to build a model, right? Actually taking some time to sit and go through that data, going, what do we know? Putting it, categorizing it different ways, thinking about it, thinking about how you could use it in different and creative ways, and what might you do with it. What are different ways we can think about the data? Right. It really is. I think. What are the different assumptions we could make? Let's list a bunch of different assumptions and say, okay, which ones of these do we believe? Let's try to rank them.
Something that's really interesting is to take a chart and say, okay, what data do we have? You could rank how much data we have and how good it is versus how much we think it tells us, right? You can put that on a chart there and start to like rank it that way. I'm sure there are other ways that people could rank data and interesting ways to think about it. What do we think are the most important things? Here are all the factors that affect housing output. Okay, let's rank those.
What do we think are most important to help us do it, and so that kind of design thinking, where you engage with the data and engage with these thoughts and talk, I think is where having teams is going to really help people too. Where you have some like actual exchange about this stuff instead of just jumping right in and going, well, we already know what causes housing to go up. It's this, this, and this. I think the teams that are going to be the most interesting to me are going to be the ones who really start to challenge their assumptions at the get-go. Think about those things and start to figure out.
Have a lively dialogue at the front end of what do we think is important, what do we think is less important, and why, and actually spend half a day having that dialog and that conversation. Set up and facilitate a workshop to have those questions because it's not just about the mechanics of the tool; it's about the thinking, right? I think that's what makes this competition so exciting is that you're really being asked to think and create and explore.
What I'm most excited to see is that exploration from teams and have them then, as this contest asks them to do, articulate that exploration, how they explored and how they came to those conclusions. So, those are my own like little tips and tricks. As I think about, if I was going, oh, if I was going to do this, how would I try to facilitate a team or start trying to think about it that I hope builds on the things that you heard from Grace and Stephanie too.
And that's also why we are having mentors as part of the challenge because that allows teams who can who want to be creative and approach from this design standpoint, and then they have a sanity check or a person who can push back a little bit on their assumptions and say this is not quite how it works or this is exactly how it works, and it's also a learning opportunity for the mentors themselves who are going to see the tools as they get developed, and will be able to shift their thinking.
We have housing experts serving as mentors, and they'll get to shift their own thinking about the data landscape that we live in and the kinds of assumptions that are necessary.
Yeah, just to underline that, I think that the conversations that are going to be had both within teams and also with mentors, and sort of as these tools get developed, talking about them a bit more externally. That's going to be the real takeaways for a lot of the participants in this challenge. I'd also add that you don't have to come in with a team if you're just somebody who's interested in this topic, register, and there will be a space for you to find and develop a team within our platform. So you don't need to have sort of the collaboration built already.
You could come in and build it, and I think that making those new connections is also going to be vital for that design thinking process that you just mentioned, John. That's great.
I'm going to transition to kind of like if we look out a few months, and the deadline for the tool is past, and the teams have created their tool, and they've shared their assumptions and slide decks with you all. What do you hope that is easier for policymakers to do once these tools are created? What are you hoping to see with the outcome?
Great question, Carlee. So I think what we're hoping is that policymakers are using these tools to make better informed decisions about housing reform. That they're logged in and playing around with something on their computer as they're thinking about what's going to be on their legislative agendas, and because everything is open-source, the tools are going to outlive the challenge, right? We hope that governments, advocates, researchers will pick them up, use them, play with them, improve them, and that the thinking that's done in these nine weeks sort of snowballs into something bigger.
Yeah, I'll say the tools are going to be state specific at this point in time, the prototypes are going to be based on a particular state. I think the first order of business is to take the most promising ones and see how they can be expanded to another state on the list on the challenge website or other states in general, and that will also bring resilience to the model because then you're testing it against other data environments or similar., maybe you're using national data and now you're just stress testing the assumptions. So I think that's the one of the first orders of business for us.
In the medium term, I would love to add more policy types to the list that would be great. Then the hope is that as time goes on, we can update the underlying data., housing gets built, so now that particular lot is less likely to be developed in the next few years. We want to maybe take that parcel out, or we want to shift the assumptions a little bit as we're moving on. So I think making this a living and breathing tool that can inform the debate is our biggest hope, and then also as we learn about what kinds of assumptions are most important or drive the results, what kinds of data we would like to make this even more granular.
My hope is that, as policymakers find usefulness in these tools, that they will also hear the plea of the researcher for, institutionalizing better data.
That's great, John. How about you? What will you be watching and hoping for from a Strong Towns perspective, or more generally?
I think one of the most exciting things to me about this, though, is not just how policymakers, but how advocates and even how local people end up being able to use this to have really thoughtful questions, and so that we actually start to test assumptions and talk about assumptions and have deeper dialog with each other. To me, that's the most exciting part about this.
Like, I think it will help policymakers for sure, but I think also as an entire pro-housing community, this is going to help us have a deeper, more thoughtful, more data-driven conversation with each other about this, and talk about that glass half full of data that we have now, and what does it mean, and what do we know, and what do we not know, and why do, and what do we think about what we don't know, and what do we think about what we know, and all those things sound simple, but they're really complicated, and I think what's great is this is going to make a more nuanced and complicated dialog about housing, and that's like an incredible thing, that's just a really a powerful thing to take technically rigorous information to make it more accessible.
I was saying earlier, so much of our work at Strong Towns is about that, and I feel like this is going to help enhance that process, enhance that conversation.
Yeah, maybe some of your listeners really care about housing, but they can't step away from work to go to a public hearing in the middle of the day, but they have technical skills that could serve the pro-housing movement, and I think that's the challenge is also another way to bring people into the fold with the skills that they have, and in a way that they are contributing and feel like they're a part of the movement and can keep the momentum going.
Absolutely, and I really love the way I think John said at the beginning of the episode, this pro-housing movement is still pretty young, and so I'm personally thrilled to see your two organizations kind of advance the conversation from a policy perspective, and really, I would say, this is a classic carrot kind of thing, so that people are like, okay, we need to continue to push ourselves to think more critically about what is really moving the needle in the housing space. So, thank you both so much for your efforts. I'd love before we go to the down zone.
I'd love to get a couple last words from you all, but maybe start with Grace to remind folks of, deadlines and a couple other logistics, if you don't mind.
Of course, of course. I just want to just express a lot of gratitude to Strong Towns for giving us the opportunity to talk about this, and I think that the mission of people who care about safe and livable and resilient cities is exactly who we are hoping will join this challenge. So registration is going to open very soon. It will be open until October 7. If you want to learn more about the challenge or register your interest, the URL is housingchallenge.turnout.rocks. If you're not interested in joining, please help us spread the word to your network. I think that this is going to require everybody to get folks in the door.
We're planning an informational webinar that will be up on that website very soon, and we hope that you will join us.
That's great, Stephanie. Any last thoughts about what you're hoping, or what you'd like to see, or anything you'd love our listeners to know?
Yes, if you think you might want to join, you should join. If, people who might be interested in participating, truly, we think, if you're a high schooler who's got some data chops. If you're in college, grad school, but also if, you have a nine to five or a nine-to-whatever job, and you want to spend some of your free time working on making usable, replicable, transparent tools, this challenge is for you. We don't know when this is going live, but registration will be open by the time this comes out. By the time of recording, it is not open, but it will be open by the time this comes out. Please go and check out the website.
It is housingchallenge.turnout.rocks. A bit of a weird website, but go and check it out, and if you're interested in some of the other work that we are doing at Arnold Ventures, you should feel free to reach out or take a look at our website. Again, just spread the word to your networks.
We're just excited, so come be excited with us and make cool things. Yeah, absolutely. How about you, John? Closing thoughts from the Strong Towns lens.
Make cool things. That's exactly what this is about. Go explore this stuff and make cool things. Whoever you are, if you feel that's like this is the lowest possible commitment you could make, like go and try it out. If you're like, what, I'm going to spend half a day playing with something, and that's my commitment. I'm going to look at the data. You are going to know more about housing and housing supply and how it works and what policies do than you did before. So I would just encourage people like this is a fun thing. You can put as much or as little as you want into this thing, but it's all going to add up.
And your afternoon working on this problem may create a breakthrough on an assumption or a thought about a data or on one key piece that actually adds up with other people. You don't have to solve the whole housing crisis and problem. This thing that's not what it's going to do, but it is going to expand how we all think, and it's an opportunity to expand how you think. So I'm just really excited, and we'll be watching to see what the brilliant ideas are that spring up.
That's great, and, I would just say too, like what an opportunity to work on such a challenge of I would say our time. Right, this is a relatively new thing, and the way you guys have organized this, it's so accessible to anyone who cares about this issue, you don't have to be an existing policymaker or really have any existing role. So I would just encourage people who've been thinking they may have a voice but not sure how to plug in. This is an incredible way to do it. So thank you guys. So you guys are first time guests. So I'm going to ask John to do our first down zone, so he can set the model.
John, what have you been reading lately that, or listening to? What do you want to share with the folks?
It's a problem because I'm going to be really obnoxious today, so I'm setting a bad example because we're normally like, oh, here's a TV show or here's like a whatever thing. But what have I been reading? I am rereading Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, which is just like thick, thick philosophy about how we interact with each other, with my favorite professor from college. We've been reading this every Monday together, piece by piece, and it's just been like this wonderful, beautiful thing. But I cannot, in good faith, tell everyone to go read one of the thickest, most fascinating books of philosophy I've ever read in my life.
Even though I think it's wonderful and I think it'll be life changing, enriching, but oh my gosh, it's thick. Oh my gosh, it's dense. We got through three pages in our conversation this week. But I would say just read the prologue. It is about the impact of space travel, the impact of industrialization, and frankly, it goes into AI. It was written in the 1950s, late 1950s, 1960s when this came out, and it feels so present today. It's really about the challenges to technology, the challenges to advancement to our humanity, and what it means to be human.
You don't have to read the whole thing; you can literally just read the prologue, and then if you get set, which is like six pages, and I think it's just absolutely a beautiful thought about the power we have over what it means to be human and how we condition what it means, and both there are threats and opportunities to that. As I think about AI, especially during these times, which I think about a lot as we read this, I think we have an opportunity to use AI in ways that enhance what it means to be human, and ways to destroy what it means to be human. I think it's so important as we think about technology: how are we?
How are we conditioning ourselves? How are we creating ourselves? How are we creating an environment ourselves that makes us be the best versions of ourselves? So that's what I'm thinking about constantly these days. You'll probably hear me talk about three more times on these things over the years because it's going to take us a year to get through this at our pace, maybe a year and a half. That's what we're on pace for. But it really is wonderful, and I guess my other up zone. So read the prologue, and the other thing I'll say is like read a book with somebody. That's my other advice.
Is so wonderful to read things together, and we so often think that we need to read it with lots and lots of people in book groups, but really with just one other person is such a deep experience. There's this idea. I'm Greek Orthodox, but there's this idea in the Jewish tradition of the Bible studying the Torah in pairs, right? It becomes such a richer experience. To me, I think that's true of any book and any literature. Is how do we study it in pairs and explore it together? I just think that's such a deep experience. So sorry for being extra wonky today, but that's what's on my mind in the downtown.
That is great, good advice, Stephanie. You want to go next?
Sure. How am I supposed to follow John? Great description of the Jewish tradition of havruta, which is the studying together. I will say two things. So I just came back from the North American meeting of the Urban Economics Association, where I got to see lots of people presenting very cool research, and I just can't stop thinking about some of the papers that people are writing. I'm particularly excited about people working on questions related to housing and state capacity.
So the bureaucrats that approve or check or don't approve the housing that we so want to build, and so one of my colleagues from grad school, Evan Soltas, has been doing some great work on this, and I'm excited to just continuing seeing the academic literature evolve there. I'm rereading A Paradise of Small Houses by Max Podemski just because I can't always remember all the details of how the different housing typologies came about in different U.S. cities, but I just keep recommending this book to everybody.
If you want to learn about how the Philadelphia row home became such a mainstay of Philadelphia housing typologies, that book is for you. It has other cities too. It's pretty great. So that's my down zone. That's great, thank you.
Gonna have to get that one, Grace. How about you?
Just love this practice. This is so fun to share what you're reading.
That's awesome.
So I have been listening to an audio book by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass. That's what she's most known for. But she came out with a book two years ago called The Service Berry, and it's about the gift economies and neighborliness and our relationship to nature. It's just so beautiful and refreshing and inspirational. That's my down zone.
That is wonderful. I mean, it all three of you guys make me just want to spend the rest of the week like tucked in a library, right? These are all officially on my list, but it sounds like I'm going to need some time to get through them all. I will add another. I have the advance copy, I guess the first draft of our president and founder Chuck Marohn's new book that'll be coming out next spring on economic development called Grow Strong, and we are just so excited.
I don't want to give any of the lessons and wisdom away, but suffice to say, it's going to be a really, I think, meaningful contribution to Strong Towns thinking for communities, and I'm just extremely excited to have it sort of added to the way we think about helping communities. So be on the lookout for that in the spring. It's really great. Thank you guys all so much for joining this conversation, and congratulations to both Stephanie and Grace for the work you've done so far. We know this challenge is going to be a success, and we're going to be watching it all the way. So, that's it for Upzoned this week.
If you want to keep the conversation going, whether you have another question or something we didn't get to? An idea you want to add? We've created a thread in the Strong Towns Commons where you can join the conversation. You can find that at commons.strongtowns.org. We'll be back next week with a new topic and a new group to talk it through. As always, take care of yourselves and take care of your places. Thank you, guys.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.