Book Talk II
Thoughts on a discussion with housing journalist Jerusalem Demsas
As I mentioned by way of introducing my rant about inscrutable, barely functional parking machines in Washington, D.C., I was in Takoma Park, Maryland for a book talk at a local indie bookstore with Jerusalem Demsas and a couple of folks from the Greater Greater Washington team.
Demsas is one of the best writers out there on housing and related issues, and her work at general-interest publications, Vox and The Atlantic, has done a lot to get this conversation into the mainstream. That was her opening point, in fact—that after decades of tight zoning and underbuilding, and after about 10 years of pro-housing/YIMBY politics being a thing, the housing issue finally feels like a mainstream, “regular person” issue instead of a policy-wonk issue. Having written on these subjects for about five years, I think I see that happening too. It’s an exciting time to be doing work on housing, urbanism, and all these issues related to our built environment.
I took a lot of notes (on my phone, sorry—I hope nobody thought I wasn’t paying attention) and I want to go through some of what was said here and just sort of give you a condensed version of this very good conversation with some of my thoughts.
Demsas opened with a point that I think people think of as being “left” or “progressive,” but which is really just…true: she said that it’s very easy to turn your life into a narrative and see your choices as determining your life trajectory, but so much of where you end up is your surroundings and your opportunities. The housing issue—which really means who can live where, in which kinds of places, at what price, with access to which schools, etc.—truly does affect our lives, and the lives of our children, in a lot of invisible ways. Ways that feel “natural” but which are downstream of policy choices. Zoning, she put it, “is about what kinds of lives are available to people.”
Now the conservative in me has, not a counterpoint, but a question that I think about or at least can anticipate: to what extent is a given place or community a kind of place apart from the sum of the people who live there? One of the phrases Demsas used, and that housing advocates use a lot, is “opportunity-rich places.” How many newcomers can a place sustain before it’s no longer the kind of place that attracted newcomers in the first place? We know that concentrated poverty produces all sorts of problems; how much poverty can these high-opportunity places absorb before they begin to replicate the problems of the places people are leaving? Etc., etc.
But I can explain this. YIMBYs sort of sidestep the question of “nice” (i.e. usually affluent) neighborhoods, and instead point out that the places we think of as “nice” are usually places with a lot of economic opportunity. If a bunch of rich, highly educated people is what makes a place “nice,” then “letting in” poor people might ruin it, right? But that’s the wrong way to think about it. What actually makes a place “nice” is that it has jobs, opportunity, the things people need to do well. These are more than the sum of the people who live there, and in some sense should belong to anybody with a willingness to take advantage of opportunity, i.e. willing to work. If you believe that everybody should be able to have access to good jobs, then you have to believe that it should be much easier to live in a lot of “nice” places. Putting up private walls around these opportunity-rich places is effectively denying people even the right to work.
Another interesting point Demsas made was about the American left, and how it no longer really builds anything. I remember, when I was a young Republican, thinking about FDR, he may have been an imperial president, but at least, you know, we still have the Hoover Dam. Whatever you thought of the New Deal, there was something real and tangible to show for those public expenditures and expansions of federal power.
Nowadays, Texas is building more solar electricity capacity than California. Red states are the ones making things and building things. Demsas noted that Hillary Clinton’s bitter remark about the dynamic places in America voting for her is no longer true: the dynamic places in America today are Republican-leaning states.
Now I want to make a point here about arguments versus rhetoric. One of the moderators asked her to elaborate a bit on why this matters for blue states or cities. Demsas basically said you can’t talk about progressive values in the abstract; if you want women to have access to abortion rights, for example, among other things, you need to build housing in places where abortion is legal so they can access that.
Now again, this is where I can hear conservatives saying something like, oh, so that’s what this is about. I had an old editor who was like this: he observed that housing was an important issue with LGBT folks, and he tweeted something like “Conservatives should be suspicious of urbanism/housing when they see all the freaks who are behind it.”
My point isn’t that progressives shouldn’t be pro-housing to avoid triggering people like that. My point is more subtle: “blue states need to build housing so women can access abortion” isn’t really an argument or a reason to build housing per se; it’s just one way of trying to get one interest group behind a universal policy. Conservatives could say “red states need to build housing so families can homeschool” or whatever might be a more right-leaning policy priority. These reasons could obviously contradict each other as they pile up. But none of that matters much. Mistaking this sort of messaging for the substance of the argument itself is one of the fundamental drivers of our political division.
Of course, we talked more concretely about housing too. Demsas noted, when asked about the YIMBY view that you just need to build enough to drive down prices, that it feels like we’re building a lot but in absolute terms we really aren’t. No wonder so many people doubt that supply increases would drive down prices—we haven’t really tested it!
We used to. She noted that Maryland’s Montgomery County, where she’s from and where we were having our talk, used to be the kind of place a regular family could move to. California used to be like that. Now Northern Virginia, which is seen as more affluent and exclusive than Maryland’s D.C. suburbs, has more housing options than Montgomery County. So many of the places that are now in the grip of a housing crisis used to be broadly affordable. There’s no trick for fixing this without actually building things.
Yet it feels like the construction never stops. I think this is a downside of the popular “density corridor” approach to new construction that a lot of localities take. That’s basically where you redevelop parcels along main commercial strips with large buildings, instead of loosening the zoning across the board. My home of Fairfax County is full of this: commercial strips with old strip mall, big-box stores, and big new apartment buildings, and then frozen-in-time single-family neighborhoods back behind the strips. The upside is that you’re redeveloping aging buildings and you’re not disrupting residential neighborhoods; the downside is that the absolute amount of change is rather small, but it’s highly concentrated and visible.
But the numbers don’t lie. Demsas notes that underbuilding is a real, measurable phenomenon. Many localities generate lots of jobs but barely build any housing; a lot of places are not even building 1 new home for 10 new jobs. Obviously, those “missing” homes are largely accounted for either by long commutes or by exurban building, but that doesn’t fix the problem. Cities, Demsas said, are just “people moving places for jobs.” Everything else follows from that.
This is one of those high-level questions I keep coming back to. How did we get to this point where both in terms of policy and in terms of how people think about cities, housing became this sort of boutique issue, this optional or even suspect thing? When did we cut housing off from the rest of the economy? Demsas noted how widely people just have a negative view of “developers.” It’s almost like a meme, a fully formed view people just adopt without any thinking involved. She pointed out how no other product is subject to this sort of thinking. Nobody debates how many cars or iPhones should be allowed to be produced. If you Socratic dialogue this—just keep asking “why” to every objection to housing—what is the final underlying reason?
I suspect at least part of it is a lot of us assume our preferences are shared. So we might ask “Do I want this?” but we think we’re answering “does anybody want this?” We also don’t consider that our own preferences and needs change. From the time we’re kids to the time we live on our own, we’ve lived in a lot of different types and price points of housing. You can’t forget all that and say “I have a house now so that’s all that should be built.”
But it’s easy to do that psychologically, and it’s even easier if your neighbors think the same way. Demsas talked about the hyperlocal land-use system and whether it is participatory or democratic. Her answer is, not at all.
She told an interesting story about an ANC, a very local elected official in Washington, D.C., who had absolutely no idea that 40 percent of the people in their tract—i.e., that they theoretically represented—didn’t own or have access to a car. This was a bit of public information that was findable. This official literally couldn’t believe it. Our circles can really be tiny. A totally different, unfamiliar world can be very proximate to us. That should make us both humble and curious. Don’t be the “how could Nixon win, I don’t know anybody who voted for him!” lady.
But about the hyperlocal land use process. Demsas notes that the people who show up to community input meetings are wildly unrepresentative even of the communities they’re in. These meetings are often on weekdays at odd times. She points out how difficult it is for, say, a working-class mom without a reliable car to take the bus somewhere at 2pm on a Wednesday and sit there for an hour and give a public comment which will be against the mood of the room, may invite booing, etc. If you just zoom out a bit, how does it make any sense at all that whether or not the housing market is allowed to keep pace with the job market falls to the outcome of this process?
I can imagine someone saying, well, it should be hard. If you can’t bother to show up, how much is your opinion worth? I’ve heard right-wing folks say this with voting; we shouldn’t be making voting easier, we should make it harder so that the opinions we get are the most sincerely, strongly held ones. Obviously that could be cynical; the harder process benefits the affluent/NIMBY folks. But I think there’s also a really deep difference here: some people think the purpose of politics is to make good things harder, to force people to build character. Other people think the point of politics is to make good things easier. Housing is a prime example of the political process being distorted to make a good thing harder.
I have some more notes/comments—long talk!—which I’ll wrap up another day soon.
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“I have a house now so that’s all that should be built” is too real an attitude.
> "some people think the purpose of politics is to make good things harder, to force people to build character. Other people think the point of politics is to make good things easier."
I think there's a synthesis here: the point of politics is the social growth in virtue (in the virtue ethics sense). At first glance, that looks much closer to the "building character" half, but a good parent, teacher, or manager knows that skills come from an environment where it is possible to succeed. Sometimes good parents make things easier, sometimes they make things harder - but what makes them good is their knowledge of what is good for *that* particular person, and their will to do that good thing for them; i.e., love.