Why Sprawl IS the Housing Crisis

(upbeat music) Hey everybody, this Chuck Monello with Strong Towns. Welcome back to the Strong Towns podcast. My local church is looking at doing a capital project. Churches do these kind of things all the time, right? We're doing an addition, we're adding on here, doing that, in our case, we're replacing the rectory, the place where the priests live. And if I said I hated this project, it'd be an understatement. I probably have to spend a few more years in purgatory for that, saying that publicly, or thinking it. We've had this interesting conversation and dialogue in my church about whether we should do this project or not. And they recently did a survey of parishioners. You could go online or fill out the survey, or someone could call you and talk you through the questions, and then write down your responses. And they had a pretty healthy center of responses. Those were published last weekend. They were included in the bulletin, a summary, and then you could get all the responses, all the data by going online, which I of course did, downloaded, ran through AI and got a little data set put together. I said, like, what is the top four concerns that people in the parish are expressing? And give me some statistical weighting and group them, and then give me some quotes and what have you. The number one concern, not enough parking. The number one concern in my parish was that we didn't have enough parking. Now, let me be clear, we have a neighborhood church. I've gone here my entire life. My parents have gone here their entire life. My grandparents went there their entire life. I think my great grandparents were part of building this church originally. My grandfather's name is like on a plaque on the back wall because they did this thing honoring the soldiers who were in World War II at the time. This has been a neighborhood church for a long, long time. This church has existed in this location. It's kind of a cathedral-like Catholic church. It's been here for a while. In the last decade plus, we have spent an inordinate amount of time and resources, maybe emphasize resources, tearing down the neighborhood around the church to add parking. We have not quadrupled membership, but we have certainly quadrupled the amount of parking that we have. We tore down houses behind the church. That's now a big parking lot. We tore houses across the street from the church. That's now a parking lot. This proposal that they are going through now would add even more parking. They're trying to get the city to vacate the streets and they can expand the parking lot essentially up to the steps near the steps of the church. This project has really frustrated me. It's frustrated me a lot because I don't want to get to like Catholic on you here, but let me go on a little diversion for a moment. Hey, we just have a new Pope. So like you guys can, everybody, even the non-Catholics in this audience have been subjected to a little bit of Catholicism lately. I'm not going to give you theology, but let me give you this. If we listed the things that Catholics are supposed to worry about, and this is me sounding high in mighty like a great Catholic, I'm a struggling Catholic. I'm not pretending I'm better than anybody else, but if we go through the list of things that we're supposed to be worried about, the poor, the indigent, the underserved washing the feet of criminals, I mean, let's just go through like the long list, the homeless, the dislocated. Parking is not high on that list, yet we are going to fundraise. Six, seven figures of money, and part of the teaser, or part of the hook, the way we're getting people to fund this, to take out their wallets and spend this money, is by saying there will be more parking. We actually had one of the comments, and I don't mean to throw one of my fellow personers under the bus. I'm not going to get, there were no names, so like this is all anonymous, but one of my fellow personers actually said, it is, they didn't use the word intolerable, but they did say something like, nobody should have to, which maybe my brain is interpreted as intolerable. No one should have to leave the 730 mass, and fight with the people who are coming for the nine o'clock mass over parking. In other words, there should be adequate parking for every one of the 730 mass, and every one of the nine o'clock mass simultaneously, even though there's obviously like time between those two for people to leave and come and go. I live five blocks from church, and we generally walk. I will acknowledge there are times in the winter when it's very, very cold that we will drive, but generally we try to walk. This bothers me a lot. And I struggle with what to do with this anxiety over this, pent up frustration. There's a part of me that wants to just yell at the people in my church, like what are you thinking? What is wrong with you? How can tearing down this neighborhood of which you have, you know, have your place of worship in, but have otherwise completely divorced yourself from? Almost to the point of looking at it with disdain, it is better off as parking. How can we reconcile that with what we're actually gathered to do? It bothers me. I feel like shaking some people, right? Yet if I step back, I have to acknowledge the indisputable fact that a huge percentage of the parishioners of my church have as their top issue in adequate amounts of parking. Let me just throw in, when we have driven in the winter, these would be, you know, Minnesota winter cold days below zero. When we have driven in the winter, we have never had to walk more than half a block. We park on the streets. You can call me stubborn or whatever. I refuse to park in these parking lots. It's like what is the holy ground? It's the opposite of holy ground. It's like sacrilege. I just won't do it. I won't park in any of these parking lots. So we park on the street and, you know, half a block away. That's max. When I was a kid and they didn't have all these parking lots, we would drive in from, you know, four miles away from the farm outside of town and we would come in and we would have to park a block away. Maybe like a little bit on the next block. So you could say a block in a quarter away would be like, if we were really late. I have to step back and acknowledge that the parishioners, the people that I sit and abuse with, the people that I go to church with, they want parking. And they want parking because that's the lifestyle that they live. That's the way that they go about their lives. That's the way that they have arranged themselves. And if I don't acknowledge that, if I don't deal with that reality, if I don't take that reality into account, not only am I just going to be speaking right past people, not only am I speaking to like a blank wall, I'm going to say things in my frame, in my prism, in my world that are utterly foolish, incomprehensible and absurd to those who would look at new parking as like the obvious thing we should do. I say this because I've been pushed by a number of you to respond to the recent New York Times article by Conrad Ority called Why America Should Sprall. The subtitle of this is the word Sprall has become an epithet for garish reckless growth. But to fix the housing crisis, the country needs more of it. Let me just say as someone who does media, great clickbait article, right? Like great article to start a conversation, the idea that the New York Times would publish an article pro-sprall, that is going to get a lot of discussion going. And I think in that sense, it's been good and I also get the strategy. But let's also not kid ourselves, friends. This country, America, the United States, and for the large part, Canada as well, and many other parts of the world, is built around auto-oriented development. We drive, we live in cul-de-sacs, we shop at big box stores, we go to drive through restaurants. That is a ubiquitous American condition. Everybody listening to this here has gone through a McDonald's drive through. And that might not be your favorite thing and it might not be the thing you do frequently. It might not be the thing you have done in the last decade. But we all share that experience. We've all been there. And for most of us, for most people, this is our lives. And let me take it to the next step here. Not only does our church, you know, response reflect that, but our politics reflect that as well. You want to get elected to a statewide or, you know, a national office. You're appealing largely to people who live in subdivisions, who drive everywhere, who shop at big box stores, and people who expect free parking. Even if you are in New York City where I know we're having this experiment now in congestion pricing, which by the way, I just so I'm clear, I like congestion pricing. I think we should have more congestion pricing. I think the price mechanism is the only way to deal with congestion. I like this. But we're having this huge experiment. And the reason why it is generating controversy is because a huge number of people in New York, particularly people who are close to power and influential, drive everywhere they go in our most walkable city, in our city with the most amount of transit. Imagine what it's like, you know, for the rest of the country. The political ecosystem we operate in, the physical environment isn't neutral. It's very auto dependent and that does shape what is politically possible. So in an article like Conradorities in the New York Times says America should sprawl, I want you to recognize that this is not a bold proposal. It is if anything, a capitulation to the status quo. It's a capitulation to what we have actually done and what we are geared up to do best. So I think we should acknowledge that if the goal is to build units, if you're looking out from New York City or Washington DC, if you're on Wall Street or you're in the quarters of power or you're in some kind of decision making framework in a state capital and you're looking out on the landscape and you're saying, hey, we don't have enough housing. We need to build more housing. What button do I press? What lever do I pull? What thing do I do right now today to get as much housing as I can? The easy button is sprawl. That's in a sense. The machine we have built. Imagine you're working at an assembly line that builds cars and you're saying, okay, America needs a lot more transportation. We could really use some buses. We could really use some trains. We could really use a lot of bikes. Oh my gosh, if we could just build a lot of bikes, that would be great. People could get places really cheaply, really easily. But I run a car plant and I'm going to go press the button tomorrow and I want that button to spit out transportation. The easy thing to do is cars. The easy thing to do today is to just build more what Dordi here is calling sprawl. The piece that he wrote is really well written, of course. I mean, say what you want about the New York Times and you know, you can say a lot about the New York Times, the New York Times write stuff that is well written. If you want to read good, well written journalism is a good place to go. I think even more than that, it resonated with a lot of people because it's saying what they already believe, right? We need more housing. However, we can get it. Wherever we can get it. That is a desperate thing. That is a lived reality by many, many people. And the way we do it is to use the mechanisms we have in place to go do that right now, to go do that today, to go do it at scale. Part of my, I'm just going to use the word tension. Let's call it that part of my tension with the yimbi, the yes and my backyard people. It is over the simplicity of their argument. Now, I know the simplicity is grand, right? Because if you're trying to mobilize people, if you're trying to get legislation passed, if you're trying to, you know, work in the corridors of power to assert power and steam rule others, do the things you need to do to get legislation passed, which, let's be clear, that's not what we're doing here at Strong Towns. If that's your deal, simplicity helps, right? I mean, go back and look at political campaigns, you know, my entire life, simplicity wins, right? Make America great again. It's the economy stupid, right? Read my lips. No new taxes. These are things that resonate with people because they're simple. They point the compass in a direction and they say, like, let's go do it. Let's get stuff done. Let's not sweat the details. Let's not worry about the nuance. But here's the problem. This is why nuance is important. Sproul. And let's just be clear. At Strong Towns, we actually have, I should have a style guide, the way we talk about things, you know, because we have guest writers and people who come in and chat about stuff. And we've actually created internally a list of red words, yellow words. In other words, red don't use yellow use with caution. Sproul is one of the red words. We just don't use it. To me, it's a bad rhetorical device to communicate something that for us has more nuance than just a garish, ugly, reckless, you know, growth as Dordi describes it in the subtitle of that piece. We just don't use the word Sproul because we find that it actually polarizes and divides people when we're trying to open people's minds. I am going to use the word Sproul liberally throughout this conversation. It won't come natural to me, but I'm going to do it because that's the basis of this very specific article in this very specific dialogue. Here's the problem with Sproul. It doesn't solve the housing crisis. And I'm going to go a step further. Sproul is the housing crisis. The housing crisis we have today is because of the way we have chosen to assemble ourselves on the landscape, the way we have chosen to develop. From a macro perspective, Sproul, it's not a housing strategy. It is a, if anything positive, it's a growth, it's an economic growth strategy. In reality, it has morphed into a debt strategy, a way to leverage debt, whether it is the debt of potential homeowners, whether it is national debt, whether it is state level debt. It's a mechanism to use leverage to bring capital into the market to keep capital flow going, to keep the market moving, to keep things going. Sproul is at its core not a housing strategy. It is a debt strategy. When you look at Sproul, what you are looking at is housing and development as consumption, and as production. You are looking at something that through its manifestation consumes more resources than it creates. Let me be very clear about this because there's a lot of people who, and this is why I don't use the term Sproul, when you use the term Sproul, immediately default to an environmental lens. Sproul is environmentally destructive. It bisects ecosystems. It destroys habitats. It leads to a lot of driving, which creates lots of emissions. You can go down the list. Basically, the core of the Sproul conversation, or the conversation around Sproul, is an environmental conversation. We don't use the word Sproul because we don't want to get drug into that framework and that prism. I am not asserting that it is environmentally destructive. I think you can make that assertion, and I think there's really good arguments along those lines, but that's not the argument that I'm trying to make. That's not the argument that strung towns is trying to make. When we say it is consumption, not production, what we are saying is that in our economy today, the underlying idea of Sproul is that we can invest a dollar in Sproul and it creates multiple dollars of economic benefit for the economy. It puts people to work. It creates jobs. It creates transactions in the economy. It gets people hiring people to do their yard and hiring people to clean their pool and hiring people to, you know, what have you? Go down the list, put tile in their bathroom. Like, Sproul is great. The more that we can build, the more loans we can originate, the more mortgage-backed securities we can create, the more flow we can create in the economy. Sproul is like this engine for growth. What I am suggesting is that instead of having this massive multiplier where we spend a dollar and as the economist like to say, you have two dollars, three dollars, four dollars generated throughout the economy, what Sproul does is it actually consumes. It creates today and then takes in the future. And it takes and it takes in the future. Let me give an all of branch in a sense to, I don't want to let the economists off the hook because I feel like economists. are intellectually lazy about this stuff. I mean, I've written a lot about how economists are just really stupid when it comes to infrastructure. You can go back to, you know, I don't want to misquote Keynes because I think John Maynard Keynes is brilliant. I do think that the way that his ideas, I mean, Karl Marx was brilliant. I think the ways that his ideas have been interpreted but to work, some of the things Marx said were horrible and awful. But some of them were brilliant insights. I think there's a difference between philosophical thinkers and then the way their ideas are used. I think Keynes is a brilliant philosophical intellect. I'm not sure that his ideas have been implemented the way he would call for them to be. And so I'm letting him off the hook here. But I'm going to say something that I've seen ascribed to him. This idea that we would do well in an economic downturn to just pay people to dig ditches and fill them back in. If we paid people to dig ditches and fill them back in, people would have money, they would have resources. They could go spend those resources. And you would see this kind of flowering of second order and third order effects. Now I'm going out instead of starving. I've got money to go out and buy bread. That puts someone to work baking the bread. That puts someone to work collecting the wheat. That puts someone to work all up and down the chain. And so the idea is if we were in a recession, if we're in a depression, if we're in a really bad place economically, we can just pay people to dig ditches and then fill them back in. And that would be a productive use of money because of this multiplier effect. If we take that to the next step-- and this is where I think economists get lost because I think they don't understand whether they're actually prescribing. Economists will say, well, if we instead of digging a ditch and filling it back in, if we built a bridge or a highway or a sewer and water pipe, or name any of a myriad of potential infrastructure that we could build, not only would we get the multiplier effect immediately like Cain suggests, but we would also get this productive piece of, in a sense, national machinery that we would be able to use for good. Let me throw the bone out to the people who are going to argue, as economists have argued, but argue from the heart, from the gut, from their instinct that this is what success looks like. This is what we should do. If we want to solve the housing crisis, if we want to create growth, if we want to create jobs, we should build sprawl. sprawl creates a really quick sugar high for our economy. When you go out and sell the land, when you go out and build houses, cash flows. It flows through the economy. Yes, developers are out there doing this work, but they hire people. And they buy materials. And they have transactions everywhere from the realtor and the person writing the insurance policy and the person originating the loan. Oh, we have to the person who's putting the shingles on and fixing up the plumbing and putting on your trim and painting the house. There's a whole cadre of people who are now employed and now have jobs because we have sprawl taking place, because we're out building this stuff. And if you think about bringing forward, which is what debt brings spending forward to today, you bring that forward to today in exchange for not spending tomorrow, right? By bringing forward 30 years of spending to today, through a mortgage, you can juice the economy in a really, really big way. This is the magic of building homes. This is the magic of sprawl. This is a magic of the assembly line process that we built. The problem that we have identified at strong towns-- and this is not-- I mean, I kind of thought this was me originally because I'm figured this out on my own. It was very painful to go through and be like, OK, I'm working as an engineer. I'm working as a planner. I'm building this stuff. I'm building a great strong America. I'm doing really good work. Why is this not working? To then kind of understanding why. That was a decade-long journey for me. That was very painful. But then I found out a lot of people who knew this stuff already and had talked about it for decades. You can go back to the Nixon administration who wrote whole reports about the fact that sprawl consumes resources. It doesn't produce them. Because what happens when you build that road? Now, somebody's got to maintain it. And who is that somebody? That somebody is the local government. Somebody's the city. And what is the city? The city's just a collection of us. It's us working together in a place to do stuff together, right? If we're going to maintain that road, look around at your neighbors. You all got to pitch in money to make that happen. There's no pot of money coming from the state. There's no gravy train coming from the federal government. Yes, there might be grants sometimes that you can get. But you got to maintain that stuff. That's going to be on you. You got to fix that road. You got to fix that pipe. You have to take care of that sidewalk. You've got to maintain that park, that building you build. You've got to repair it, that sewage treatment facility. You got to run it. You got to put people in there. You got to staff it. You got to work. You got to do this stuff. This is your responsibility. So local governments get stuck with those costs. Here's the catch. And this is why we don't talk about sprawl. We talk about things like the suburban experiment or the North American development pattern, because the sprawl part, the thing we would identify as the horizontal expansion part, the key to making that not work is that we do it in large amounts. We do it all at once over a broad area. And we do it to a finished state. We build things to be static. Let's just look at that for a second, because this is also, by the way, what we do in our cities. This is why the post-World War II development pattern, the suburban experiment, the way we build today, if we simplify it down to just sprawl, we are actually creating an argument that is incomplete. It just looks at the stuff on the edge of the city and says, you know, that stuff is bad, but treating the core of our cities in the exact same way, well, that's okay or that is more understandable or more acceptable. Let me point out a truism that just, you know, on its face destroys all the math here. The truism is that the inflation rate for five decades now, at least maybe more, the inflation rate on construction costs far exceeds the inflation rate on your tax base. In a state like Minnesota where you have property tax, there's a direct correlation, right? Because you build the stuff and then you tax the property and you use that property tax to pay for the maintenance of the stuff you build. It's kind of easy to see the difference. Let's pretend that you start on day one and on day one, what you've built generates enough tax base, generates enough tax revenue to actually maintain the stuff that you put in the ground. Let's say that that's true on day one, by the way, not even close to being true in almost every instance. In every instance that I've ever looked at of stuff built in the last 20 years, it is absolutely not true. Okay, but let's pretend for a minute that it is true. Okay, after year one, your housing values have gone up by X and your construction costs have gone up by factor of something above X. So what was true in year one is now no longer true. And every year that that goes on, it becomes less and less and less true. The gap grows more and more just from inflation of construction costs exceeding the inflation of home values and essentially capacity. This was a conundrum to me in the 1990s, like I didn't understand. How can this possibly be? You would back then they would have these books, you know, because we didn't have the internet the way we have today to research some of these things. So we would actually have these books that were published of construction inflation because if we were working on a project and you had to say three years from now, this is what this project is going to cost. You had to put an inflation factor into it and you base that on historic inflation rates for concrete for asphalt for what have you. And so I look back in these books and I'd be like, I don't get it. How can the inflation rate for this stuff be so much higher than the general inflation rate or the rise of the overall economy? Won't we just eventually go broke? And the answer was, oh, that's really cute. Chuck, shut up and do the math. That is just one aspect. You have the other aspect that now your neighborhood is unable to change. Your neighborhood is locked into regulatory amber, right? Your neighborhood is not supposed to evolve, it's not supposed to grow, it's not supposed to shift. This was the conundrum that I struggled with. How do you actually solve this cost disparity? Well, the answer is. is your neighborhoods need to become more productive over time. If we look at development patterns of the past, you would grow incrementally. You would add that paved road after you had a certain number of homes. You would add that sewer and water after you had a certain number of homes. You would add that new park after you had a certain number of homes. You'd put that amenity in after you had a certain amount of text base. Everything kind of grew together incrementally. You never got too far out in front of your skis. Now we build everything, widespread, all at once, to a finished state. And then we lock it in stasis. Stasis is like the marketing brochure of the stuff that we build. Move to this neighborhood. It's a nice neighborhood. It's not going to change. We can protect it from change with zoning codes and regulations and homeowners associations and on and on and on. No change is a feature, not a flaw. And so, and I pointed this out many times, you build a brand new subdivision and on day one, it looks great. And on day two, it looks great. And on day three, it looks great. And when people go look at it, they're like, this is what success looks like. This is what a nice neighborhood looks like. This is what prosperity looks like. And then they drive over to the neighborhood that was built 30 years earlier. And they're like, ooh, this is kind of starting to go bad. And then they go look at the one that was built 40 years earlier. And then like, ooh, this one is this a little worse yet. And then they go to the one that was built 50 years earlier and 60 years earlier. And they're like, yeah, this is these, these people here, they don't care about their place. Not recognizing that what happens when you lock a place down is that 25, 30 years after it's built, everybody's shingles need to be replaced. Everybody's siding needs to be replaced. Everybody's sidewalk needs to be replaced all at the same time. The entire neighborhood enters a phase of decline all at the same time. That is predictable, that is knowable, that is expected, that has no relationship to the quality of the individual living in the house. This is just time. This is how entropy works. And we get to that spot. And yes, just statistically, you may even be in a neighborhood where most people are willing to, you know, buck up and repaint their house and fix their roof and do all the stuff that you need to do to keep it working. But statistically, there's going to be some people who don't. There's going to be some people who fall behind. There's going to be some people who are so loaded up with debt trying to get into that place that they don't have the money to do all these other things. And so what happens is the neighborhood starts to show outward signs of decline. The exact time that it's starting to experience distress and the exact time the road needs to be fixed, the sidewalk needs to be fixed. It shows outward signs of distress. What happens then? What happens to the affluent people in that neighborhood? We all know what happened. They move on to the next neighborhood. They move on to a better place. This place is going bad. This place is not what it used to be. You know, we've got all the cultural narratives to explain what is happening in slow motion in front of us. So we move on. We move on to the next successful place, right? We leave behind people of lesser financial means to maintain a neighborhood at the time when the costs are spiking and the relentless math of maintenance costs growing and the neighborhood itself stagnating in stasis just no longer works. If we go back in time and we look at the way neighborhoods worked prior to the suburban experiment, prior to the Great Depression, I've never claimed and I'm not claiming now that these were idyllic places. There were idyllic places, absolutely. There are idyllic places in sprawl too. I'm not claiming that neighborhoods of the past were idyllic. What I am saying is that they grew and evolved and changed and matured incrementally over time. They were connected to the core of the city and so each neighborhood that was added on in the edge because they were connected in this walkable framework, the proximity to that center, the proximity to the neighborhood center, the proximity to the core, that all became something that was reflected in land values. And the more people who moved to the neighborhood, the more those underlying land values would grow because not only did more people mean more customers and more patrons, but more customers and more patrons meant better shops and better places and higher quality establishments, which again meant a more desirable neighborhood and more people wanting to live there. And as these rising land values accelerate change and evolution, what you would see is that people would say, "Hey, this house is falling apart. It makes sense for me to fix the roof, maintain the yard, replace the siding, or add a backyard cottage, or add a apartment building onto the side, or convert this into a duplex, or buy the house next door and make it a four unit place." There was a natural mechanism to thicken up these places over time because it made financial sense in a regime of ever increasing land values based on proximity. There's a natural renewal mechanism that we see within neighborhoods. And this natural renewal mechanism automatically included different price points, housing of many different styles, many different price points. Not only that, but a market that was responsive to supply and demand characteristics, locally responsive to supply and demand. There's not a lot of people demanding to move to this neighborhood. Land values are going to stagnate. Whoa, lots of people want to move here. Land values are going to go up. Land values going up, creates this redevelopment pressure. All of a sudden the redevelopment is a profitable thing to do. So now we're adding more units organically as we go. This mechanism has been stripped out. Sproul strips it out. It strips it out not only by ensuring from a regulatory standpoint that the land cannot grow in value. Sure, land will grow in value by inflation, but land is not going to grow in value by proximity. You lock land down through regulation, you don't allow the neighborhood to change, you lock land down because you don't allow neighborhoods to form neighborhoods to function or anything that would make the location better. And in fact, we haven't had active things, especially in poorer neighborhoods that make the neighborhoods worse off. Now we're going to come through and redo your road and we can't afford the sub-ex anymore, so those are coming out. Now we're going to come through and redo your park and we can't afford it. So now we're going to take out the equipment or not moids or not maintain it. And so the few scattered amenities that we do have stagnate over time as well. This is what you get with Sproul. This is what happens. And if we want to point a finger at why we have a crisis of housing today, I've even seen people credibly argue that we don't have a lack of housing units. I don't know as I fully buy that, but I can see it from where I'm at. We certainly do not have a lack of space or a lack of bedrooms or a lack of capacity. But what we do have is the lack of mechanisms to actually make that make any sense. This is a direct result of the way we have chosen to build. This is a direct result of Sproul. Building more Sproul doesn't solve that problem. Again, what is this development pattern? It is the ability to take 30 years of your future spending, bring it into today and spend it, which was really critical at the end of World War II to get the economy going, keep us out of another great depression, to get us all moving. And today we are trapped. This brings me to Texas. And Dordy's piece focused on Texas, and I think for good reason, Texas is like the poster child for this kind of Sproul optimism. I know really, really smart people from Texas who are like, this is exactly what we need to do. We're leading the way. Dordy spoke to a lot of people putting this together. A lot of people that I know that are really smart. He always spoke to us, and none of our stuff made it in, which obviously didn't fit the narrative. The smart people that I know though talk about this idea of sunbelt exceptionalism, which Dordy invokes in his article, right? Texas is leading Dallas for Worth, is unstoppable. This is like Princeton, Texas, which were highlighted on the edge of what is exciting growth, and they're seeing all kinds of things happen that are positive in terms of new investment and new housing and new growth and all this. It is hard for me to not, and I'll just state it plainly and clear. Clearly, you know, Texas today is where California was 30 years ago. Texas today is just a generation behind California. California went through all of this. How do you think you got Prop 13? Prop 13 would not pass today. I don't think maybe it would. I don't know. California's are crazy. I don't understand them. But Prop 13 was born out of the tax revolt of the 1970s and 80s. As in a sense, California was our first state to really go all in on sprawl. Because you could do it in a moderate climate without needing air conditioning, without needing all the stuff that you need in Texas, in Arizona, to be able to do this. You didn't need that in California. And so the technology was not necessary. It took 20, 30, 40 years for it to really get to the point where you could develop broad swaths of Texas in the same manner. So California went first and you saw California explosive growth, all this investment, all the sprawl, right? And then you started to see after you get through the first generation, you started to see the second generation impacts. You start to see the maintenance bill come to you. You start to see your property tax is going up. And what happens is that you have a tax revolt. Oh, these horrible local governments, they're just cheating us. They're just, you know, outspending on things we don't need to spend on. They just simplified if they just, you know, lived within their means, we would all be better off. And so you get a statewide referendum limiting the ability of local governments to raise property taxes. And that has, in a sense, killed a lot of California because, you know, if you, it was like sprawl fuel, right? You know, it was sprawl fuel and then ultimately redevelopment fuel, right? If you were a city and your existing tax base could only go up, you know, 3% a year, 2% a year, whatever the percentage was, but you could get new development on the edge where you could take an orange grove, paying X number of dollars per acre and put in a new subdivision that would pay 100 X. Let's focus our energy on sprawl. Let's focus all our energy on the new subdivision. And so, in a sense, the problem that was creating the financial crisis was just doubled down on as a solution to what became a city municipal crisis. California went through a period where they did redevelopment, which that also got kicked out. And I remember people being very angry about that. But this was basically the idea that the city would have these agencies that would go in and redevelop large swaths of their city from low tax base to high tax base because that was the only, these were generally not good developments, but they were the only way that the city could make ends meet or pretend they were going to start to make ends meet. A lot of the dysfunction that we see in California, a lot of the dysfunction in their politics in the narratives they tell themselves, I have said a number of times, California leads the country in hypocrisy, right? Because the narratives they tell about themselves, the things that they say they want to do, the things they say they say they want are reflected in the opposite, in the negative, in the way that they build, the way that they act, the things that they do. Californians are not some weird, like, different creature than the rest of us. You take a minus out and you put them in California, they're going to be a California. You take a Texan and you put them in California and, you know, I know Texans don't like to think this, but in a generation they're going to be Californians. They're going to think the same way. They're going to have the same hypocrisies, the same misconstruing, the same cognitive dissonance in their brain that everybody else around them does. Their humans is what I'm saying. And when we look at Texas, what we can see is the same humans, the same instincts are driving the dialogue and the conversation there. Every place where we build new stuff, those are the nice neighborhoods, those are the new places. We can build those. Let's go build it at scale. Let's build a city, you know, all the way up the highway from Dallas to Oklahoma city. Let's just keep going. There's more and more and more land here. It's cheap. It's affordable. We can get it. We can build lots of units and if we build lots of units, that's how we solve the housing crisis. That's how we address the housing problem. There's no recognition in the moment of how a state like California, which, I mean, let's be clear, gave us Ronald Reagan. A conservative state like California became the place that it is today. And there's no recognition from Texans that they are on the exact same path. Let alone Oklahomaans or Louisianaans or Minnesotans or, you know, any of us that have dabbled or gone down this path with this experiment, which is a subset of all of us. When I read like the mayor of Princeton going, in Dordy's article going on and on about all the things that they now need to do, hey, we're growing and so we need to do this. I mean, you do this and it's really expensive. And so we need more growth. I look at that and I'm like, this dude's not overseeing a master planning process. He's overseeing civic triage. This is a losing strategy. And the idea that the answer to whatever housing problem you think we have, and I definitely think we have one, but however you would define it, if the answer is sprawl, is it's doing more of what got us here? That is the definition of insanity. I want to end by coming back to the Yimbe conversation because I've had a little bit of, I mean, I always have a little bit of negative dialogue with Yimbe's online. Maybe I'll give this disclaimer because I think it's worth it. I, you know, chat one on one with a lot of people who identify as yes and my backyard. And, you know, in almost all instances, I find them to be well aligned with what we're doing. I find them to be pleasant people. I find them to be people that I can work with. I find them to be people that embrace nuance and dialogue and can kind of recognize the tensions, the tensions that I led off with with the parking at my church. But there's a subset of the Yimbe conversation. And this is the subset that tends to be most online. I would say most political. But that really embraces, I think, the kind of hyper divisiveness and oversimplicity of this whole conversation. To me, the conradordity article takes the, what I'm just going to call the extreme Yimbe point of view, which I'll just say is build units, build them wherever, you know, I mean, I've seen Yimbe say, I want brutal density, I want it wherever, you know, if you've got a neighborhood and someone wants to build a six story apartment, you know, single family home neighborhood, go build it, shove it down their throats, you know, there are a bunch of Yimbe's, you know, they're comfortable in their houses and everybody else. And they, you know, they've got the whole like narrative and it's a very divisive narrative of us against them. And they've got theirs and we got to get ours. And, you know, all these people are comfortable and it is a narrative that I am very uncomfortable with, but it's one that is not, it's not so far out of the Yimbe conversation that it's unidentifiable to them or unidentifiable to anybody who is seriously in that space. Of course, there has to be more than just building units. And I think if your whole thing is like we just need to build units wherever it is, I don't care. We have a housing crisis. We don't have enough homes. The way we make housing affordable is just to build, build, build, build, build. If we can build a unit there, do it. If we can build a unit over here, do it. If we can build a big complex over here, do it. If we can build sprawl, do it. We just need units, units, units, units. If you subscribe to that thinking, this is the logical conclusion that you get to. I've had a lot of Yimbe people push back when I said that. I was asked when this piece first came out, what I thought of it and I said to me, it's the logical conclusion of the hyper-Yimbe mindset. We need more units. We can't get them here. I'm sick of waiting. Let's just build them here where we can get them and build them at scale. This is the hyper, the logical outcome of that thinking. I've had a lot of people push back and say, I don't know any Yimbe who says we should build sprawl. I don't know any Yimbe who says we should do anything but infill. I don't know any Yimbe who says we should just build, build, build. I got to tell you, I run an arm all the time. They scream and yell at me. I'm going to say the worst offense that I've ever seen is someone like Steve Mozan who is like a deeply thoughtful person. He wrote the book, The Original Green. He has gone out of his way to try to engage with the Yes and My Backyard groups in a number of ways saying, hey, I'm all for more units. I want to build more and more and more. I think our neighborhoods need a lot more units but we are making a huge disservice to everybody. including the future people who will live in these places and just housing long-term. If we don't look at things like design and how these fit in and how we make the neighborhood this active cauldron of evolution and growth and renewal. I have seen him skewered in peace after peace, after peace, tweet after tweet, comment after comment, vitriol thrown at this man, who only said we should be building decent places at scale, lots of units. I've said before, we need a lot more housing. We need lots and lots of housing. Our core campaign is incremental housing everywhere. No neighborhood should be locked in amber. No neighborhood cannot be subject to some degree of change in maturing and evolution. Infill matters, reforming zoning matters. On that, I feel like strong towns and the broader yes and my backyard movement are really well aligned. But there's a big percentage of the most vocal imbi's. And yes, I said the most vocal, not the most thoughtful, but the most vocal. They far too often treat the housing crisis like simply a numbers game. More units, full stop. When that mindset goes out in cheers for towers in small towns or sprawl on the edge of the city, as dirty as in this article, the yin-bih movement stops being a reform movement and it becomes a growth at all cost machine. And I think that machine destroys not just neighborhoods, not just cities, but I think actually destroys longterm, the things that will make a housing market work. So if we're not gonna sprawl, what are we gonna do? We gotta go and build strong towns. We have to actually change the way we approach our neighborhoods so that every neighborhood can evolve and change over time. The next increment of development needs to be allowed in every neighborhood. At strong towns, we put out earlier this year, the first of a set of three toolkits that we are producing, the first one was on regulatory reform. These are six things that cities can do today to make more housing legal in their cities. We call that the housing ready toolkit. If you go to strong towns.org/housingready, you can download that toolkit. It's six things. If your city's doing all six, let us know. There's a little form you can fill out. We'll put you on the map and we will tell everybody that we know, hey, this is a place that's ready to build. This is a place that's ready, that's taking housing seriously. This is a place that is independent of what the state government's doing or the federal government's doing or anybody else. This is a city that's stepped up and said, we are doing what we can to get more housing. The second toolkit is in production right now. We are working on it. It is going to deal with how we create an environment where incremental developers can prosper. How do we get the people who are actually going to do this work, building hundreds, thousands of units, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands across this country? How do we get those people off the sidelines and to work doing this work? The third toolkit, which will come out early next year is going to be on finance. How do local governments help finance this revolution? How do we get them to use their resources, not at a loss, not as dumb money at the card table, but as actual difference maker to get housing units built? This is the strong-downs approach. We need every neighborhood to contribute. We need every neighborhood to evolve, every neighborhood to be sure, every neighborhood to become a stronger, more prosperous, more successful place. This is an urgent calling. And let me just say, it's not just an urgent calling because we need the housing units, but we desperately need the housing units. It's an urgent calling because we need to fix our city's budgets. We need to make our streets safer. We need to make our places better places to live. There's a convergence of thought here. And this conradordy piece not only oversimplifies a problem, responding to it in a hammer nail kind of way, but I think draws the worst instincts of the Yimbi movement out into the light in a way that just reflects badly on this entire conversation. Let's push back. Let's do this differently. Let's recognize that there is a third way. We don't have to choose between doing nothing and building sprawl. We don't have to choose between agonizing endless fights to get a big unit built over here or a subsidized unit built over there. We can actually go out and unleash people to provide lots and lots of housing, making their lives better, making other people's lives better, helping them to fulfill their dreams. This is all possible. If you're interested in more, not only go to strungdowns.org and go to that housing ready site, strungdowns.org/housingready, but pick up the book, "Escaping the Housing Trap." Daniel Herigus and I wrote a national bestseller called "Escaping the Housing Trap." We've ended the book tour for that one, but I'm still happy to come out and chat with you. I'm happy to come out and be part of your community, part of your dialogue, and talk about how we can make these things happen. In the meantime, thanks everybody for listening. Keep doing what you can to build a strungdown. Take care. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)