American housing crisis. Give them a warm welcome. [applause] thank you for coming, its always nice to be back at romans, one of the best independent bookstores in the entire country. [applause] i was just browsing the childrens section, i spent many a day and night looking with my daughter atbooks. And tonight you get to buy books. As many as you want. Theyre stacked up hereand there are more than that available. It makes an excellent gift item. Whatever holidays might be coming up for you, you can wipe out all of your Holiday Shopping tonight. Take the rest of the year all. It is a wonderful book and its not just i should say its not just a book about housing. Its, i think its not an exaggeration to call this a manuscript, a great manuscript of california history. So you will be getting a lot of policy in here but its also brilliantly driven by characters. You will get to know quite a few people involved in the history of californias housing crisis and the activists and all the others and it begins with an activist who runs through the book and i think it ends up with somebody you probably are all familiar with by now, the author of sb 50 which has been three stripes buthes not out yet, he may be coming back. Since it is a history book, take us back to the seeds of the current crisis, take us back to the great migration, the movement west, people coming from the east, from the midwest, over the world chasing that american dream, the singlefamily home with the well irrigated front lawn and the barbecue in the backyard. It was what drew many people here, this idea of California Living so take us back to some of the early history of how california grew and the role that housing has played. So i feel like its not exactly a history book, its a journalism book withhistory in it. So anyway, if we think about what itmeans to be a rich society in america , weve always measured that or at least symbolize that with housing and california was the impact of that. You can get tocalifornia, get a house with an orange tree in the backyard. The fascinating role sunset magazine plated all this, people thought it was instructionmanual for how to live. People bought what is the barbecue, how does this work . It was truly seen as an instruction manual for how to how to live a warm california life and there was this Magazine Article i talked about in 1948 so if you think about this whole thing like many things about america as kind of postwar history , there was a time Magazine Article that said all these people live in california is going to forecast what we become as a nation and we had three families, one who made 20,000, one 150 and one made 40 grand, a fireman in glendale and they had a house with an orange tree in the backyard and this was seen as, what i like about that article was look at how well everyone is doing. So people change that dream and they came and came and we build freeways. We dont i gigantic 400 mile river from my neck of the woods to your neck of the woods and as you guys know theres an aqueduct in the middle of the state of california that is supplying your water and draining our water. So that you guys can build more subdivisions but anyways, youre welcome for that. So it was this amazing dreams so they built and they built and i think that we could see in this period california becoming so relevant. Every president ial candidate had to come out here and they the california delegation to approve them and it wasnt just a liberal thing either. Reagan and nixon are coming out of california at this time of this dream was creating a new politics, i knew everything that set the course for the entire nation and i think the part of the premise of the book is this dream has fallen apart but is falling apart and a lot of other places to so california is showing us we got some problems. It leading the nation but not in positive ways. There are universal truths and observations in here so i think its a book is going to be appreciated not just in Northern California where i grew up but also in Southern California but as you say, other states, other eddies are experiencing this. So what went wrong . What happened in paradise mark when did it begin and whatwere the early seeds of that . I feel like the first indication is people saying california has a housing problem is the mid70s. So despite the fact that we all feel like this just happened, theres been a lot of people talking about this happening. The New York Times wrote an article in 1981 and the headline was changing San Francisco is forcing as a haven for wealthy and childless. So they nailed that one. A couple things happened, our economy changed in fundamental ways it became much more unequal. The great symbolism of this is technology versus kind of more service sector, we had e jobs, retail, stuff like that and that structure isnt just economic, those people have to live near each other because technically people who are doing service jobs are effectively waiting on people who have more money so they have to be profitable to them and thats another important thing. The other thing is housing, weve gotten into a place where youre just sprawled and strolled and never built housing out of the few places and now were trying. Its not going so well at all. When i was born in california, the population of the state was 10 million. And today the population of la county is 10 million. And the state ofcourse is close to 40 million. While im pretty old so maybe thats not shocking to anybody but we have not built enough new housing to accommodate the 30 million extra people who arrived after i arrived. And theres some reasons that you dig into what some of those reasonsare. Why is it that if you have been a destination, if we have this robust economy that is frequently referred to as the fifthlargest in the world , with all of these jobs, why do we have a housingshortage . What happened . I traded all the stories all the big things youre asking, the through characters and the characters i chose to tell that story are the father and son, icons of our state, pat brown, the governor really led the face and jerry brown who has been in the center of the backlash. And i feel the background is this guy who literally said why would we ever not invite people to move to california, what are we going to do, say theresnot enough water to go around . We need detailed infrastructure for people to live here. We had a celebration in 1963 and encouraged the Highway Department to put a counter on the bay bridge showed new york barely growing, california adding dozens of people and then to say look at how you were doing, all these people are moving. I think we had a fourday party like i said. And people were having moments of agonized or honking and all these great things. I think out the beta and aone dollar sale because we are number one. And then you had jerry brown with this environmentalist, this dark character always talking about the next or the calamity. Now these about Climate Change but at that time it was about nuclear holocaust, that was a very 70 if you jerry brown was also worried about the environment, he was talking about how california can handle this many people, this concept of carrying capacity is the idea that the lands couldnt sustainmore people. So those two characters symbolize this gogo thing that went so off the rails they at one point had a plan to i think people were almost the entire San Francisco bay. There was a similar plan to build a freeway in the city of San Francisco including several other goldengate parks thoughpeople slipped out and they said no. And not even flip, i think people are happy that those plans did not run their course area and im happy the San Francisco bay was not a Massive Concrete but it became so easy to stop housing and people started stopping a threestory apartment complex next to in their local downtown. They started staffing duplexes on their neighborhood of singlefamily homes and itjust , this kind of front of environmentalism came peoples way of stopping everything. And sure enough, a lot of people wanted to come here. There were still a lot of jobs being created and the price of housing rocketed up and that led to disease kept going from the 70s to the 80s to the 90s and finally i think we all recognize over the last few years it is broken. It is reached the point that we cannot, we have homeless encampments. We have obviously horrible traffic, stuff like that. Theres a center of supercomputing which is people who drive at least three hours to and from work and so this bankruptcy happening gradually and all at once, this is like our housing crisis, it happened graduallyand then all at once. I was writing about new teachers graduating from cal state northridge and their starting salary of 53,000 and i think the average rental in la county is Something Like 2500 now. And the superintendent suit showed me i think its referred to as a heat map. Theres a. Where every la unified employee lives. And of course theres a concentration in the basin and the valley and San Gabriel Valley the bats go well north of ventura into San Bernardino and riverside and all beyond an almost to san diego so when i read about housing and how we need to figure out this housing crisis, people tell me why do we have to figure it out, if peoplecant afford to live here why dont they move to nevada . Why dont they moved to india . I have answers for them but i dont want to hear their answers, what are youranswers to that . Why should everybody be if you cant afford to live here why should you and why should we have to buildhousing for you . You touched on earlier. For starters a lot of those people were born here, are from here, they have families here, those are important things but we are creating a ton of jobs in entertainment here, the streaming revolution isupon us. Even if it blows up integrated a lot of jobs and im sure a lot of them will stay in my neck of the woods weve created tons of jobs in not just in computer engineering, notall that many people work in the industry. But there are other jobs for teachers and Service Workers and accountants and all these people. That make a whole robust economy. And what bothers me about this is these big obligated cities like los angeles and San Francisco and places like minneapolis denver. Theres this housing thing is affecting a lot of i hesitate to call them secondary cities but secondary cities as well. That is where prosperity happens. Theres no Government Program that is better looking people through the middleclass and beyond that a big city where a lot is going on and when we start locking people out of thosecities in the form of housing crisis , i just think thats super unfair. Especially when you think about it, if you think about say detroit in the 50s, that was the Silicon Valley of its time and it brought all these people the middleclass jobs. There was a lot of racism and problems at that time as well which we should work on, but it seems profoundly unfair that the places where americans can better themselves the most and find their jobs and getting into issues that are exciting and have a lot of mobility that they cant get near them unless they have a high paying job or family money. There are these things that are obviously interrelated. Get into gentrification in the book i had been saying in my columns waiting for people to say that, nobody ever did but especially in the coastal cities of california the prosperity drives the poverty. Address that i think im more a week in your book. Talk to me about that, about how since there is no shortage of highly skilled, welleducated trade people to pay whatever is that for an apartment or a house, what the impact on the nurse, on the mechanics, on the teacher . Theres a character, the whole long narrative in my book, a 15yearold girl named stephanie and she comes home with this tactic take to her gedoor that says thank you for your continued residence in this twobedroom apartment in bedford city but your rent is going hundred dollars in three days and if you cant pay, were going to be evicted. So she goes and organizes all these people in her apartment complex. Figures out there another public complex with the same landlord and she gets in on you and theres this big long drawnout fight and eventually they get a nearby out deal. Essentially maybe ill give you some money to leave. Theyprotested and all these things. And then i went back to say who moved in after . It was another very similarly situated family and her family of fathers in construction and the mother clean houses. Aipac eight people into the same space. And whats happening here is these people are coming to this region to get close to people who make a lot of money and other things, just as money people come to la and Service Professions to get close to people making moneyand other industry. Theres no place for them but the best place they can go to better themselves is, theres no place for them to live. They dont know theyre in this really there in this ey human with each other where theyre fighting over this small number of Affordable Apartments and then your upper click and theres another apartment complex i look at in a similar area and they get bought by an investor who clears everyone out and try to make it middleclass housing for like midlevel so all of the chain people are being tied down on the top of each other because theres just not enough places seor there are not enough affordable places to live. And not enough lowpaying jobs. We could solve this in theory by giving everyone five times their current minimum wage or something. These are new economies with higher wages or more assistance for those doing necessary jobs. I spent weeks at an Elementary School in the Central Valley or rather the san fernando valley. An Elementary School where almost a quarter of the students are homeless. Not living in a tent outside the school but waking up in motels and garages two and three families in a twobedroom apartment esand i want to get your thoughts on this, is that its in an area surrounded by shutdown Lockheed Martin and a shutdown rocketdyne and shutdown gm all those manufacturing and Aerospace Jobs that were the backbone of the california economy are gone now so there are these service jobs and 25 percent of the students at an Elementary School are homeless so talk about the relationship between the ways in which californias economy grown and influenced this housing crisis. I know youvetouched on it. Like isaid , california is leading the nation. But theres nothing happening here is super unique. We have as i talked about a second ago a lot more of what they call knowledge jobs. People who have some talent whether its Billing Software platforms or telling jokes or acting or radio or whatever and they multiply that challenge through some kind of device. That device allows them to reach millions of people. And they become quite wealthy because this is quite a lot of reach. But then there are people who have to work sidebyside with someone, a teacher. Maybe a nurse although this is fairly well. Somebody who works at target and they multiply their talents, not nearly as much so our economy has been bifurcated into the what we call knowledge jobs and more service jobs. What weve lost as you alluded to is the missing middle, these jobs are people could use machines and manufacturing plants to multiply their labor in a way that allowed people ldwith very little education, formal anyway to have really decent middleclass jobs and you could throw up in life and even still go back to a factory area it wasnt all over for you. And the loss of that middle wage kind of job is a huge piece of the housing problem and its a huge piece of so much. I think the median mail wage was like higher in the 70s than it is today, adjusted for inflation so the erosion of that class is a huge problem. Im a big fan of easy rawlins. Always going, people are always going to the airport manufacturing plant to get job. It is like a constant theme but he has landlord and that the beam too. There are these two different versions of reality right now, its a political season so no surprise there but the folks in power would have things have never been better and its booming. And on the other side, the army of candidates for the democratic nomination are saying hell out there. And it is there for some people. Are you surprised to see so many headlines stillabout the economy booming . Its coming along. I keep seeing the headline and i think i need to take these people on tour of places i regularly visit. I wrote an article inthe New York Times. Ive been beat up and said theres too much doom and gloom from the east coast. I think they would never do such a thing. I like steve lopez, i know weve never met but i read his column, i subscribe to the New York Times and here he is beating up me but the headline, i forget what the headline was the gist of the story is if you look at any piece ofdata traditional piece of data , california economy has never been better. Income growth, much better than the rest of the country. Whatever indicator you want to take, a traditional one is very good but of course, we have homeless encampments everywhere. I asked poverty rate in the nation when you adjust for the cost of living and so that is just an expression of like i said this bifurcated economy where we dont have a way for people to jump up into those knowledge jobs so we need to obviously invest in education and all these things but in the meantime, you have Affordable Housing for people just get settled because that girl i told you about suffered this displacement, she went through months of school on top of that. I cant imagine that her studies were going swimmingly during the months she was organizing two buildings keep her family from becoming homeless. Just imagine the cost to our future economy from that kind of thing of missed hours and opportunity,all that kind of stuff. Youre going to love the characters in this book and i want to see if we can get connor to talk about oneof them. By the name of sonja, sonja trauss, is that how you pronounce your name . Tell us the sonja trauss story. In the center of this book about housing and all these horrible things is this er lovely story of people having a political awakening. Local government, in a way this book profiles local government because all local governments on the same but they are alsoall different. We can imagine local governments are doing the same thing but if you go to a city council meeting, its a wild scene. Nobody knowswhat they doing. People go and make long speeches, its crazy but its beautiful because it people who feel like they can really have a voice and nobodys going to washington. People do but thats so distant but you can go to city council, you can make so much noise and startling they will listen to you, to the point people go why are they listening to you. If this discovery we all go through in life whether its through our job or when weget to know our Parent Center but there are no adults in the world, where trying to figure this out ourselves and is this woman who becomes one of these people. She talks going to the board of supervisors meetings and writings and an attack, and says i am here because you dont have enough housing in reSan Francisco and i represent renters, we are the San Francisco bay area renters federation. And she just starts tearing up, going to meeting after meeting. Yelling at people. Cleaning, claiming shes ahead of bart and their sister not in my backyard. She starts calling herself the yimby. Remarkable about it is people start following her, she lost the next meeting, i want to be in bart. And then this is the kind of thing that might seem to be does happen. At City Council Meetings in whatever but it catches on. This is not just some gadfly nothing. And then in Silicon Valley people start getting her money so she quit her job and becomes a professional activist and she goes and sues a suburb or not building enough housing. Shes not a lawyer. She copy and paste a lawsuit, changes a couple details and files this lawsuit on behalf of herself and the lawsuit, they give her all this money to go away shows jesus a guerrilla activist but i think then this has become a nationwide thing, she starts getting invited to these national conferences, there are these yimby around the country area there are now yimbys in portland, austin, seattle. , there are yimbys all around the country and you are even now seeing all the democratic president ial candidates have introduced some sort of zoning perform meaning theyre going to make it easier to build housing and a singlefamily home neighbors. As part of their national platform, this has never. Appened so what i think is an amazing story is this person who is a little off her rocker. And as these very bombastic tactics. Finds that he can make a difference and there are people around the country who see the exact same thing in their City Councils and youd be surprised to find out if they show up and become a kind of determined band of people. People will start listening. We have some of those activists here in la andevery community hasnt. Im going to do a little ship here from where we are to where do we go from here and also, we need to squeeze all of you in and give you a chance to ask some questions and i think were at the Halfway Point and were supposed to be getting into that. I know that you have said you didnt write the book to offer solutions. Necessarily but lets talk at least about my own solution. Its not a solution. You want your my extremely unpopular, yes. You promise not to get up and leave . My so i only quick because this is his name. Its not about me. Its not a new thing. Look, part of the problem is singlefamily exclusionary zoning up and down california. So many places where youcant do any density , you can mess at all with a neighborhood as people are out in force thats understandable. But here is the way i look at it. We are rssearching for a way to fund more housing. Because the market is not going to take care of all of so where do you get the money and some very smart people have persuaded me that theres a lot of money in equity. And what do they mean by that . Aimingeverybody in this room , the argument is radioactive, i fear where youre going. You have benefited from so much policy. You have the value of your home is been driven up by policy that you have supported. Have made it difficult to build any density and for instance, you get prop 13 benefits. There was a reason for prop 13, maybe it went too far but there was a reason for it but the value tof your home, your equity has just exploded the cause of it. You get to write off your mortgage, the finance charge. You get the benefit of all these freeways to get you whereveryou need to go. Pardon . So shouldnt you way on this time to sell your house in addition to your Capital Gains tax, being hit with a small butsignificant tax . Significance, it is significant. It goes into the Affordable Housing fund so now youve got the money. I just sold the problem for you. The second problem is where do you build it and thats where fd 50 comes in. Scott is in your book quite a bit so talk to us about what we have tried, what we will be trying and what are some of the solutions here that we need to work out. Returning to the themeof you see the same thing. Does anybody like my the idea of the whole thing that youwill be taxed . I see people leaving, isee head shaking no. Returning to the theme of all the same things are happening everywhere , where theres a housing problem which is a lot of places in america, indianapolis has been the first major city in america to essentially eliminate singlefamily zoning. That doesnt mean you can build a skyscraper next to a bungalow that you can build a triplex, like a split level house, like a cottage house. You can do that now effectively in a line so you were seeing this movement around the country. One of the more radical proposals was here in california where they had a proposal that would allow you to build a fourstory Apartment Building within a half mile of any train stop and also basically built fancy school districts. Its a littlemore complicated but more or less at how it played out. And people flipped out and ed what was interesting about the contours of the flip out if you will is that you had a neighborhood, one of the scenes in the book is a guy from a prominently black, very middleclass neighborhood, beautiful anneighborhood,anybody want to live there. Its got this lovely beach and these lovely boulevards. But so south la and Beverly Hills are coming together to oppose this and that was true all over the state there were people worried about gentrification, worried about new homes coming in and raising the rent and then another group of people worrying about this nebulous neighborhood character which is when people say my neighborhood character. Me, thats a Broad Coalition of people and their together for good reasons and i think addressing that through the political process somehow is the pump we have to get over and the reason i dont offer solutions in this bookis for starters , im on the news pages and you are on the colonists side of the world but also i think its more fun, more educational also does a better read to see these people bashing their heads against the wall going after solutions and you have sonia showing up to meetings and saying im going to barge my way through new housing loss and stephanie, this 15yearold girl saying when going to create a tenants right movement to fight these landlords. You see sister christina this nonwho has become a multimillionaire compartment investor facesoff against a private equity fund , both trying to get the same apartment and she wants to buy it to make it affordable for ever and but shes kind of like got this army of real estate brokers. She is a serious businessperson now and so theres these, she tried to create what are a Community Ranch house and theres this other guy who sonia assumes and hes trying to kind of push is community to build something in the middle area a middle solution with more housing but he of course gets squashed so all these people are trying to solve this problem in the way they think they know how and i think watching them try to solve it , seeing how hard it is her soft, thats much more realistic than peers a policy listed on top of that you see the perspective to why their perspectives are so genuine and that certain People Solutions dont help them so theyre not going to get on board with it. And feeling that and seeing that brings you into the politics in a way that is so much better than a poll says this or whatever. Im a little bit encouraged that it seems to be more a focus of the Current Governor and the last one and things are happening, he devoted so much of his state of the state to housing. Are you encouraged by that . Not that he laid out any specific plan or how to finance it. Im encouraged by things happening all across this country. Theres a good crowd of people here so thats encouraging for many reasons. There are like i said before all the democratic president ial candidates are talking about housing, 80 not as much as people would like but they all have these advanced plans and they talk about the importance of zoning and that never happened before. You see cities like minneapolis taking radical steps to change their zoning more than a change in probably 100 years. You see laws across the country in every kind of community to add what are called accessory, people building cottages in their backyard. Thats happening everywhere so all around the country and the world, people are taking steps and we will learn from those steps and a lot of them will bestupid steps but thats okay. So we are, thats kind of like what the book is about. Its all these people trying to solve it so im encouraged that everyones working and if anything this book is about the importance of and its really the amazing impact you can have if you just show up. And these are the people who show up. One of, i think one of the heroes of this book is the city manager oflafayette. And i think hes now employed again. I spent lots of time in that area growing up. So we have reached the point where we know that youre all here to buy books and we need to get to that quickly so youve got 20 minutes to ask questions. Theyre going to pass around a microphone and steve is going to absolve me of the responsibility of saying who gets asked the question but theyre going to pass around the microphone. I think were going to put it on you to pick somebody to hand the mic to and let me suggest first that were interested in your comments, we dont have time for policy papers or speeches so try to keep it as brief as you can and we will let connor give it a shot. Thank you so much. This is such an important issue. My name is petty and i work in endoflife, i help people and their families and ive been doing it for over 30 years but what im seeing an increase of his the system that influenced endoflife, can you address anything . I know theres a statistic that so many people are losing their homes they are bankrupt from cancer treatments and treatments that theyre receiving, last cost of bankruptcy is medical care. Can you address anything about the social issues affecting this and we have more and more Homeless People dying and were trying to help them and people are bitter and i try to help them die and not be better. The systems that have failed them, losing homes and that kind of thing so im seeing the levels, do you address that at all . I dont address endoflife care specifically , but i think there are lots of obviously this girl, shes not at the end of her life but the impact on her family and the impact of displacement. I think alittle bit of time , about four days at a homeless encampment. And i think there is certainly plenty of bitterness in the book but there are also two things that youre talking about that get messed up whether their futures, whether they are cops who sleep in their cars , all sorts of professions and services that we need are not, cities have a hard time hiring people to do whatever, all different sorts of jobs so theres a lot of Different Things we need in an economy and in a society and when housing is so much that people cant do those jobs , things start to fall apart. Lets see, next question. You just pass some of the strictest rent control in the nation on emergency legislation that failed about and this is something california has never seen and something that land and Real Estate Investors never thought could help themand this is just a nacve question , if its something voters have been so resistant to it andacted on top of us, what will happen . Will it succeed . The rent control law youre talking about is severely less strict than the one voters rejected area is not the same. And i think that rather than having a debate about rent control which is a very deep debate, i think we have to recognize and this is what i was saying about feeling people where their perspective is, if youre stephanie and her family and someone slaps you with an 800 rent increase, you as a moconcerned citizen, as a participant in this democracy like anybody elseare going to go looking for the policy lever that can help you not be homeless. And we are seeing a huge sparents Rights Movement around the country, not just in california and we are going to have to come up with more ways to keep tenants in their homes, whether or not thats rent control or Something Else and if those people arent in control a hoshould be thinking about how to build housing and more Affordable Housing because that policy five is not going away as long as is like the one in this bookare happening. Id like to just add a big part of the response right now to homelessness is the realization that even if you could house the 50,000 people currently homeless in la county, there are 58,000 more coming in behind them so a big part of the response has been things like rental assistance and homelessness prevention. I was looking at old articles about homelessness in the 80s and Dianne Feinstein promising they can nd end it by christmas that year. Anytime you hear somebody announce a fiveyear plan. But they didnt realize what was happening, they just bought it was this thing. They didnt know something was breaking in our whole way of life. And still breaking. Have you bought further in terms of the economic ratifications of the reduced mobility ends up coming with the housing crisis like this and what a sort of systemic, the broader systemic effects of that then our. When you say reduced mobility, you mean people are moving to places for jobs. The natural, when say the whole areas, the normal thing to do would be everyone goes to california where there are jobs but you cant afford to do that theres a sort of built in wrench thrown into the works. Its a huge problem. We can take this with a grain of salt but Something Like a few trillion dollars in Economic Activity is lost by people not moving the better opportunities. And theres no better dunemployment surety than going to a place that has a ton of job and they havent offered the programs when they move people to places so its a huge problem and also makes us kind of stuck, one of the fun things about america, im not saying everybody has to move around all the time, its fine that people move to different places and show up and they bring different kind of restaurants and stuff, you can get a chicago dog in la. I know people are still complaining about the new york pizza i think its better. And the bagels. But i think its a huge problem because you are, people dont know what opportunities are missing out on. And they dont know that maybe, you do this story all the time where someone says i got laid off and i moved to this place and my life improved so much because i found this thing and it turned out to be my calling and whatever that not happening is this huge problem. And one that economists are starting to quantify saying is sapping us by keeping people fromreaching their potential. But then housing costs were good. I like your roadhouse idea. I was saying we need more, we need to build more housing that has some kind of chance of being affordable. We were doing things right now is i would say theres a neighborhood in every city in San Francisco. Its called the market, in la i guess it was downtown area you tell me area minneapolis its called the northridge or the Warehouse District and in new york its ons in yard. Theres all these industrial plaisance happening and lets put a bunch of condos over there. They didnt want to touch the rest of the city and theres this problem, build them really tall condos over there and in exchange we will not touch the 75 percent of the land mass that is generally singlefamily homes in america area and i think that those giants glass elevators equipped buildings have no prayer of being affordable but things like filly rowhouses or these kind of cute threestory brick things where that has some prayer of being affordable when i say affordable i need a government is not going to support you. You can go get into it with your teacher wages orwhatever else. Wheres the microphone . My name is ryan bell. Im working Homeless Services fora number of years. Esim currently candidate for city council in pasadena and im a tenants rights activist and member of the pasadena tenants rights union. Im 40 years old, i have zero equity in property as a result so im wondering what you think about the idea rthat the elephant in the room really is the commodification of an essential feature of human life. So when we look at prescription drugs, its very popular now to say the commodification of prescription drugs is in humans because people cant n afford what they need to live or medical care more broadly so what im noticing local communities is that homeowners whose wealth and retirement is tied up in their property become enemies of the people who dont have that the cause for me to be able to afford my housing your Property Value needs to go down and youre never going tovote for that. So to me it seems that essentially capitalism as it controls the Housing Market is the enemy of any future that we have for us all to be able to live together your response to that. The people who bought homes and that estimated the value, they didnt plan on that scenario happening and i think that when we demonize that, we shut down the conversation in the. This is why i try not to use ordinary although there are a lot of nifty quotes in the books but those are other people. And so we do have private property in this industry, i dont think thats changing anytime soon. A great many people of a great many races and a great many range of incomes own property. I dont know, it seems unfair to change that especially since people owning property comes out of rent control. It becomes their way of solidifying their place. Libut thats a commodification as it is. Im not suggesting we take away from them, we just think they have their tax write off and im paying my landlord mortgage and any increases in taxes that they get, i pay my property taxes via my landlord so im just wondering how to achieve some kind of equity r, im not talking about radical communism where we confiscate everybodys property, im talking about creating an equitable system Affordable Housing can be built outside of Market Forces because much housing do we have to build for the prices trickledown . Is not going to happen overnight but it does have to happen because it didnt become this bad overnight either so we do need to build i think, i dont think you can shut off the market. I dont think you can say were not going to build market rate housing. Most of the major changes that have led to widespread economic benefits in this country have had a large sector component of some kind. So i dont think thats going to change anytime soon. I think youre probably going to haveto, we do need to build a ton of Affordable Housing. Public housing is something we should revisit, that didnt work well last time but there are several countries where it works fine but were going to need to also intensify our landuse and build more housing where people live and i always think, this is one thing i always say, we built the space for a lot of jobs in la, and certainly in the Silicon Valley and elsewhere. It wasnt likely to know this was coming, when we built all this these Office Buildings weknow what we were getting into or should have. I think that when we act like i didnt know this housing thing is coming, it seems fundamentally dishonest to the other kinds of projects people are approving. People arent antigrowth but they seem to be prooffice building. Exactly, so anyway my point is that we are going to have to spend more money on Affordable Housing but were going to have to find a way to build it because today, the weight of Affordable Housing is it is not appreciably different than how we build market rate housing so those two things have been locked together through policy, lot together through funding mechanisms and some people say thats so stupid that we should just focus on blowing up the system and i appreciate that view is obviously theres a ci role or radicalism but my job as a journalist is also say what seems vaguely realistic and it seems like intensifying the landuse overtime gently is where were going to getthat. In your research did you see any successful models for incentivizing landlords to have Affordable Housing so we have our homes and we have a tax benefit based on individual homes. But did you see any cities that were effectively incentivizing landlords because the rent control model tends to make them adversaries. And did you see anything where you could use a free market approach that is encouraged by a governments policy that says hey, you get a tax write off for building these types of residences and that might give you that kind of gratification that youre looking for. So the section 8 program technically is that really it needs to be about four or five times the current size, about one in four people who need an Affordable Apartment can get a voucher in la and other places. The line is either years long or close for excess demand but [inaudible] there are ways without going into health that soup, the federal government has this big program called the low Income Housing tax credit which is basically corporations get this coupon if they build Affordable Housing so theres lots of ways to do it but we still have to buildit. Affordable housing complexes built with that program are protested just as vehemently as some condos so i think that at some point you have to figure out where youre going to put it. To some extent all the av you legislation and the fact that i dont know how its going t to shake out but around the country there making easier to buildapartments in your backyard. A regulatory lowering of that meaning its much easier to build anything in your backyard,some people are going to make it space for them but some people are going to rent it out to. That is some extent a kind of incentive, saying are going to make it much easier for you to build a place that you can potentially be in so i think all of those things are slowly happening. And i rather than some exact tax credit thing i think just finding ways for people to build more kinds of units that can be flexible and in your neighborhood in an interesting way, that seems like the market working, not some fundamental thing or whatever. David brooks wrote an article i am not responsible for david brooks. But you saw the article on a nuclear family. Is some of that in play in terms of our dynamics . We shot for this individual Small Nuclear family home and we might be going back to a more, almost like victorian model. Without getting too deep into an incendiary headline written by my lovely colleague on the opinion side of thehouse , we see much more people live in singles then used to and in the 1970s in San Francisco population was still declining. The household formation which is the number of people who need a place to live was throwing there were more singles remore gay people , that does play into the data. More i should say more housing people but people getting married much later, having fewer kids so the amount of people who need a place for their households is larger now and it used to be. But that means micro units, things like that, i dont know s. The Housing Market will have to reflect that in some way. Weve reached the point where you need to begin lighting up the by bundles of this book. One more. The cost of building low Income Housing is over 500,000 per unit. Its a huge problem. So the question is about technology. Can technology abus . Ive read about 3d printing houses. Ive readabout manufactured houses , i read about building codes andadd a third of the cost. This is a huge problem. If we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on Affordable Housing in california we still get wouldnt get anywhere near what we needed and thats partly because the cost of building a new unit is quite high, 500,000 in San Francisco, its 850. Theyre going to pass a 600 million Affordable Housing built and by the time they spend that money it will be 600years. Not. But the equity tax,were not going to solve the problem. I hesitate to Say Technology will save us because that have not worked out very well in the past two years. But there are a lot of exciting things happening with people doing modular co construction, more indoor construction, basically building homes on an Assembly Line read the chapter about a guy who built Affordable Housing for many years and now its crazy, you see this piece of plywood go up like a conveyor belt, it just goes around the room and after 20 steps its like an apartment in a box and get put on a truck and they can build the whole building in a day and i think thats something that im optimistic about area i dont want to say that these companies are going to save us but i think its awesome that the private market is tapering in that direction. And i say its their problem, not ours. Its fun to see investors going into things that we actually need instead of another. This is something that has Great Potential to solve a problem and also you were talking about bluecollar jobs at one point. Many of the people i met in this factory used to be waitresses and now they make 30, 40 an hour on this Assembly Line. So i think the way we build housing is the more optimistic thing. I think it can dent the cost a little, but thats about it but its cool to see people trying things and that again but the spirit of this book is and that iswhat we will end on, trying new technology. I dont want to be into some ideology, these are people who show up and they should want to show up. Apathy is the real enemy so i think its great that the people in this book are using their free time basically to try to improve this horrible problem and we can learn from them. Its a greatcontribution, thank you for coming. Be sure to buy a copy. Thank you all again for coming. Connor will now be signing copies of his book area if you can line up on this side of the room to get your book signed and you can grabcopies of the book on thisroundtable as well as down the staircase and to the right. Thank you. Heres a look at some authors who recently appeared or will be appearing soon on book tvs after words, our weekly Author Interview program that includes bestselling nonfiction books and guest interviews read last Week National security adviser Katie Mcfarland taylor time in the Trump Administration area journalist Eileen Zimmerman look at what color drug addiction. And this again on after words your times reporter our chronicles the first year of the largest class of women ever elected to congress to. There had to be a gender focus. Often because as we all know women often, many women after the and talked into running sometimes read even more qualified than a male challenger so if thats the case with women, you are going to have to recruit women directly and i talked to a woman who had run into primary in North Carolina and she was stunned to see how many women in their 50s just didnt believe that another woman should have that job. So its something thats regional but its really
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