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