On the Park Bench - Housing Affordability & Access

all right good afternoon everyone uh good morning to the west coast uh my name is mallory bachas and i want to welcome you to on the park bench a public square conversation brought to you by the congress for the new urbanism on the park bench pres presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in urbanism and allied industries and we provide opportunity for the audience to engage with them in real time so you'll see a q a there at the bottom of your screen please feel free to use that and we'll be getting to questions uh once each of the speakers have spoken um this webinar series is intended to provide a platform for cnu to engage debate and collaborate on the pressing and emerging issues that we're all facing right now uh and um and today's conversation is going to be housing affordability and access and i'll be introducing the three wonderful speakers that we have in a moment but before i do i wanted to go through uh uh to point out to y'all that we have a couple upcoming webinars uh the first is equity-driven planning with mitch silver he's the commissioner of new york city parks department um that'll be happening on tuesday august 25th at 2pm we also have uh on tuesday september 1st at noon eastern time we'll be bring back main street and small-scale manufacturing with ilana cruz who is the founder and ceo of recast city but today we're talking about housing affordability and access and um you know well before the current pandemic that we're facing cities and towns across the country were already enduring a housing crisis in 2018 the national income housing coalition found in a study that the minimum full-time minimum wage workers could not afford housing in any county in the country and the charter of the new urbanism says that we advocate for diverse neighborhoods but if housing is unaffordable to all but the very wealthy then are we living up to these ideals with our work and so today we've brought three uh wonderful uh speakers three wonderful experts in in housing affordability housing access housing mobility uh to to discuss you know their backgrounds and then to engage in a conversation about the topic i'm going to start here by introducing laura foote uh laura is the founder and executive director of yin the action a network of pro housing activists fighting for more inclusive housing policies they have over 3 000 members and they drive policy change to increase the supply of housing at all levels bringing down the cost of living and opportunity rich cities and towns um laura is a nationally recognized leader in the movement she helped grow the fledgling pro housing movement into a political force and um you know that includes working on legislation at state and local levels and helping to elect housing champions in those positions uh laura is going to talk about a lot of exciting things having to do with the particularly the politics associated with this very difficult uh this very difficult topic for many communities next up we're gonna have berhan azeem he is a pakistani immigrant that grew up in new york city with housing and stability and then later moved to the boston area burhan is a board member and treasurer of abundant housing massachusetts and also a board member of a better cambridge abundant housing is a statewide envy organization that that is working to pass bills like housing choice in the state legislature a better cambridge is the emba organization with an affiliated pac that is focused on cambridge itself he holds a bachelor of science from mit speaks three languages and has studied sustainability and is passionate about migrating climate change and its impacts and so we're excited to hear from berhan and then finally katie swenson is a nationally recognized design leader researcher writer and educator she's a senior principal at mass design group a non-profit architecture firm with the mission to research build and advocate for architecture that promotes justice and human dignity she's releasing two books this fall one is design with love at home in america and also in bohemia a memoir of love loss and kindness she's formerly the vice president of design and sustainability at enterprise community partners which is a national non-profit uh working she her work there was in affordable housing community development and leadership cultivation specifically she's a loeb fellow uh taught at boston architectural college and parsons school of design um and she's co-authored growing urban habitat seeking a new housing development model with william morris and suzanne schindler uh all three of these speakers have extensive knowledge so i'm gonna pass off first to laura to go ahead and uh and and begin our presentation hi uh well thank you guys so much for having me i'm really excited uh to talk with uh frankly like most of the time i end up talking with people who are like intro to the topic and really excited um but i'm assuming that we have a certain level of nerdiness here at the congress for new urbanism um so i'm going to i get the opportunity to sort of skip over some things normally i talk a lot about how we have a housing shortage um and and you sort of need to hammer that over and over in people's minds like fundamentally we have a housing shortage and that in and of itself the the lack of sufficient quantity of housing for people to live in is bad has a disproportionate impact on people of color has a disproportionate impact on low-income people has a disproportionate impact on younger people i'm going to take a lot of that stuff that we kind of understand already i think that this crowd probably pretty much understands that it's also a drag on the national economy as well as local economies i'm going to take it as a given that you all understand that it also has a horrific effect on our environment that we are driving up carbon emissions as people are forced to live further and further from their jobs and opportunity mega commuting so we at enb we kind of categorize the housing shortages being bad for human beings we care about them the economy also a good thing to care about and the entire environment um and so we we normally we talk okay how we're going to address the housing shortage what are we going to do what are we going to do um we see it fundamentally as a policy problem obviously we know how to build housing obviously we have market demand i hate my apartment so i would like to upgrade to a two-bedroom so there's your market demand um we have a lot of available land there are two parking lots on my block um and you know we joke a lot it's not millennials complaining um you know sometimes there's a pull yourselves up by your bootstraps you know oh you can't afford to live in this community there's there's a lot of people have a lot of weird ideas about housing um and so we believe that there are jobs and not enough housing near them driving high prices and long commutes we have this fundamental shortage and that's a shortage that makes both market rate housing unaffordable and also a chronic housing shortage of also subsidized affordable housing and the like okay why why what are these policies we we break them into zoning permitting and funding shortages we also often talk about bad incentives that make it hard for cities and towns to say yes to housing but really fundamentally why does the zoning and the permitting hold us back from being able to have uh abundant housing housing decisions are being made on the block by block level they are being made project by project and they are getting held hostage by people who have the wherewithal and the you know local political connections in order to be fundamental to the decision-making around those projects um we have this kind of big idea that's starting to get through the population that exclusionary zoning is bad it's very exciting right donald trump has come out and said we need to protect the suburbs and suddenly everybody's talking about how exclusionary zoning is a really bad thing and it's thrilling for me right i'm like yes like we're finally connecting the idea that like being inclusive in this like oh my school doesn't technically say no black children are allowed but if we keep people of color and low income people out of our communities through exclusionary zoning then obviously in practice that is what is happening and it's really we think it's extremely important to understand the history of how we got here where did these laws come from we know that there is a history of segregation of explicit racial segregation that was government policy and that really a lot of our zoning maps directly come from that as soon as we made it illegal on paper to block people of color from communities we started coming up with elaborate zoning rules that made the okay you can't say no black family can join this neighborhood okay so then we will block the kind of housing that is more accessible and affordable to those people and but we will also therefore be blocking affordable subsidized affordable housing because by blocking multi-family housing in many cases you are blocking a low income in communities of color um i'm going to assume that you guys i just went pretty fast through that but people with a planning background know this they understand this um and and sometimes they will even talk you know the the president of the apa came out somewhat recently and said you know the planning uh history has been rather complicit in all of this and they started admitting that the the planning profession has actually not always been a force for good in saying we need to integrate our communities and really fundamentally that is because of power dynamics planners are often employed by local governments where you are under a huge amount of pressure to you know you are at the will of the local elected officials um and i and i really want to help people connect this to like what is happening now because when you start with a pre-segregated society when you start with the levels of segregation that we have now and you say local communities should get to decide what their destiny is and we say we're going to have a decision-making process that prioritizes the views and opinions and frankly finances of people who have already gotten the benefit of being able to buy into that community who maybe historically have been able to benefit from historically racist policies i'm in maine right now visiting my family my great grandparents were able to buy a home in this town my grandparents certainly benefited from multiple explicitly racist uh financing systems that allowed them to purchase homes over the years my parents generation has certainly benefited from all of that i was able as a kid to get into better schools than i otherwise would have because of this multi-generational systemically racist institution in housing that was designed to build up white families and not families of color all of that happened and now we have pre-segregated communities and the planning and and sort of decision-making process is all designed around uh placating families frankly like mine and saying how are we going to make you comfortable with the idea of change and when we make decisions at this level of government you get just an unbelievable amount of hypocrisy right because of course my mother's generation doesn't want to say out loud we don't want those people in my community right i i their people my generation are starting to have kids and they say i want to get my kid into a good school district and i think we have to say okay what is that going to mean how much of the perpetuating of the existing power dynamics of the existing segregation are we going to allow in the name of local control how much of the existing inequality are we going to allow in the name of neighborhoods deciding what their futures are going to be how much are we going to allow this entire system where architects and pr firms are spending ungodly amounts of time and money having community meeting after community meeting to convince local privileged residents that the new housing is not going to be so bad and that maybe it might come from with some benefits for them because god knows they need more benefits we are going to continue to exacerbate inequality if our systems are designed around placating existing residents and not around saying we have to have minimum standards we have to say there is no major civil rights achievement that has been achieved through local control it just has not happened white people and people of privilege do not give it up when it is very close to home when you are talking about somebody saying out loud i'm okay with my school integrating you find that a lot of liberal ideals often erode and so we have to ask these questions at different levels of government when it is easier to have people the angels of your better nature are easier to appeal to when we say should we integrate schools i can get almost everyone to say yes to that should we integrate our communities almost everyone can say yes to that and so our planning processes have to change in order to get that answer if we all say we want that answer then we cannot continue to make decisions on project-by-project basis where who also gets to come to those meetings is an exercise and privilege who has the time right all of this process we add on top of it once you say oh the community isn't happy so we have to make more process to make them happy you're in fact selecting for appealing to the most privileged people who can engage in a process that never ends my significant other helps build uh affordable housing and i can say this story now because last night he got his permits um but 11 years as part of the third attempt at building housing in a fairly privileged neighborhood near a uh bart station that's our our heavy rail station this was arguably 50 years in the making to get 100 units of housing which my goodness there were a lot of explanations about that number but we're finally going to get it it could have been 2 000 units of housing we lost units of housing through an 11-year process to make that decision and we lost time and so we are seeing that privileged communities are able to both perpetuate the housing shortage and able to keep their neighborhoods fundamentally exclusionary either by slowing stalling or stopping the housing that we know that we need there is no public engagement process that will get us to an equitable society it is not going to happen and i hope that uh that is a radical enough statement that will get everybody talking about it for a long time to come i am going to hand it over i actually have forgotten who i'm handing it over to uh i think i'll take it a lot okay great uh so i think that was actually a wonderful setup we had not planned it that way but i think that well laura and i talk about um connects a lot so i'm very grateful to have that um so let me share my slides see if you can see that so i wanted to talk a little bit about the politics of development and a very granular level i think laura did a great job of setting up at a high level um and all the difficulties that face and i want to kind of go through the process of what happens uh when you try to build something in a city like cambridge where cambridge massachusetts which is where i live um and i think it provides a great example and i think that um what's also interesting is that laura and i can come to slightly different conclusions i think that like localism is a huge cause of our problems um but i don't think it's going anywhere at least not in massachusetts and so i think that a huge thing that we can fight for is representation uh because local elections just don't have are not representative of the cities that they take place in because voter turnout is so low it's around 20 percent that like the people who vote in local elections are not actually the city so even um plans that are overwhelmingly popular still end up not passing because of who ends up voting so to take it a step back let's talk about how your project needs to get approved and it can either get approved by meeting zoning results but often times in cambridge these are quite restrictive and hard to build under so for example i think around 95 of the parcels in our city are not allowed to be built today i live on a street of triple deckers which is currently zoned for single-family housing and so it is so far away from meeting where the city is never la nevertheless accompanying a city that can grow and oftentimes these are also not by right zoning where it can take an incredibly long process even if you meet the zoning rules as written so oftentimes what the developers do is they go through a special permit and i'm sure you guys are familiar with this uh process as well this is hopefully just a template to build off of um and so it'll need to get approval from this local zoning or planning board and that'll need to get voted on by the local city council and the special corollary here is that in massachusetts you can't pass something with simply a majority you need a super majority so in a town like salem which is right next door they have 11 members you need you something with seven members voting for and for voting against still will not get passed you need eight three to get something passed so you need a really big majority to get something passed and as a result a lot of things just don't end up happening um and i think this is a great example cambridge is a really wonderful city we have mit and harvard tons of people that want to live here and over the last hundred years our population has not changed one bit it is was 105 000 and it is today according to the 20th 10th century 105 000 people and over that time the u.s population has quadrupled we have gone from about 75 million people to almost 320 million people in the us and so it's been incredible change but our cities have really stayed stagnant um and i think that is a little bit of nimbyism in our local politics you know those who vote in local elections tend to be older and more privileged and then there's a status quo bias i like the city i like my city the way it is i don't want it to change there's economic interest in that you don't want new housing that's built to make it cheaper for other people to live here because you directly benefit and there's also segregationist tendencies um you don't hear it directly as laurence was saying but you do hear that you know i don't want like those type of people in my neighborhood um or that you know like i think that the neighborhood is good as we are we don't want other people coming in i'll kind of ruin that like uh feel that we have going here and um actually i think it's a great time when uh i was canvassing once in some of our richer parts of our city um you really get a sense of how people see the city in that i was walking around giving out pamphlets and i went to mit and i had a bachelor's degree and the comment i got from almost everyone on the city is i don't think you're qualified to be talking about housing see this block everyone on this block has a phd you can't talk about it unless you have a phd so i think that you know your advocacy is not really helping here and i think even things like that that you can't be advocating within your own city that you're not really welcome in this neighborhood unless you have a phd like it creates a hostile structure and that really controls a lot of our local politics um and the worst of all are public meetings so you have to match the bar of the 20 to be involved in local elections and then you have to match the power of being the one percent of that to show up to local meetings there's about 50 people who show up to our regular city council meetings and they are the ones there every single meeting and there's the one that speaks in almost all of the room myself having been in the room i'm often the only person who's not white in the room the only person who's under the age of 50 in the room and the only person who doesn't own their own home and so it's like very like a dramatic experience and this comes in a city where where uh almost majority minority and the median age is around 25. um and so like public meetings are also another step where you where the city council kind of gets a sense or the planning board gets a sense of what the city feels but the people who show up aren't really representative of the community um and there are other structural programs on top of this not even that include just the city and who represents it you can easily be sued and have your project delayed even if it gets approved so there's lots of affordable housing developments that get approved under local zoning laws but then they get delayed five years because of like all uh because of people sewing saying like oh it still doesn't meet this design requirement or that design requirement and just appealing to the zoning board and often by that time affordable housing developers can lose their funding you also need a super majority um to get bills passed and i talked a little bit about that before with the example of salem we're lucky right now in that in the state house in massachusetts we have a bill called housing choice that would require that if you're going to pass a bill that increases the housing supply you can do it with a simple majority but we'll still see if that's going to get passed and i think it's just excessive localization in that it really goes down to you need the approval of not only the city but also the planning board and also your local neighborhood any one of those people any one of those steps you can get blocked at and it's made worse because local neighborhood groups are actually officially recognized by the city so they have official power even though they end up maybe a couple neighbors um in a very big part of the city with 25 000 people might only have like three or four people on the committee so we talk a lot about turnout as our solution so you see here there's a graph about turnout and this is on the 2019 election results i can let you guess where people who are older and more opposed to housing live it's around here and that's where we get really high voter turnout and a lot of places that are younger that actually where the housing would get built because that's where they're on main thruways um people just don't vote and overall nowhere in this map does this match the type of turnout you get in like national elections which can be upwards of 60 70 percent um and it also goes with the median age of the residents you know in the younger parts of the city where you can get median age of 20 27 in the 30s or 40s um it's a completely different turnout than in the older parts of the city and i think it just goes to show how older residents are really dominating local politics they'll have a graph later on that really makes that point home um but we have a solution which is that turn out younger voters in that the map of age distribution versus abc is the group that i'm part of that's pro housing you can see that the blue areas where we really win support on overlap almost directly with how the voter uh the median voter age in the cities in the district and so you know where the youngest people are is also where the most pro-housing people are and so i think that's a solution that we've been going after rather than combating localism directly we've been trying to win in our cities by increasing the turnout of younger voters really anyone under the age of 45. uh so i think this is a great example so the blue is a national election in our city so you see how you know this is representative of people who actually end up tending to vote uh so we have a very young population um and then we get slightly older but we have actually pretty high voter turnout this is in a state election uh so this is the overall residence this is who turns out in the state elections uh right uh this is sorry this is the overall residence here's who's registered and actually the turnout is pretty uh close to this it matches uh this graph pretty well and then this is who ends up voting in local elections you can see who's missing from the population and who ends up not voting at all in local elections so much so that when you really scale the grass about what percentage of people turn out the age group from about 19 to 40 the voting turnout rate is around 20 whereas when you get to 60 to 90 you get much closer to 50 percent with it peaking at around 65 percent and i think that this is the real core is that like in this city youngest campus with 110 000 or 105 000 people where the median age is around 25 to 30. uh the most likely people to vote are age 70 those are the modal voters in our city and that's where politics appeals to so why don't younger people get involved i think it's because part a is that very few people know about their local city council we have nine members on our local city council and i think the latest poll shows about forty percent of people can identify who our mayor is nevertheless like individual city council members uh no one knows about zoning it's quite complex and it's really hard to get involved city council meetings are during the work day and they can be far away especially if you are apparently young kids our local elections are in odd years which makes it even more difficult to vote most people don't even know there's an election happening and what's also very tricky is that young people aren't registered to vote and it can be really hard to register like the cambridge boston area is known for having a lot of students uh whether it's college students but also like phd students people who've been here for 10 years and really do want to get involved but there's a lot of tricky things that you can think you're registered to vote but in um for example if you're a harvard phd student who's trying to register to vote you actually have an address that harvard gives you here's the address you should send your mail to and if you go and fill that address out on your voter registration form it will get denied and and the local municipality won't tell you because uh what they want is not your mailing address but your residential address so let's say you know that and you put in your residential address you'll still get rejected because they want both and so oftentimes it can be incredibly difficult to vote and yet someone will often have to try a couple times um and so it becomes really frustrating for people to vote and so that's why a lot of times people don't get involved and so you know i think that's a huge reason for why we have a graph that looks like this i think it's a huge failure of our local politics and who will be allowed to get involved um but i think that it's also really supportive on how you can get involved this is the group a better cambridge supporting 100 affordable housing overlay and you know whether it's here or i know minneapolis uh in a lot of these smaller cities um it only takes like 10 20 people who get involved and are really excited about changing their city and a smaller city still hundreds of thousands of people if not you know millions and like that number of people can really change the politics the affordable housing overlay will get passed this month and that's because of a better cambridge and how a few dozen volunteers really got involved over the last election and got us the super majority that we need to pass this law so that's all i have to say on the topic and i'm looking forward to the q a session that goes right afterwards and i think i'll forward it now to katie great thank you so much um wonderful it's nice to go last because um so many great concepts have already come up i'm going to um let's see can you all see my screen everything working good um so hi so glad to be here um katie swenson i'm with mass design group um mass is a non-profit architecture uh landscape architecture design and build firm we have over 120 participants in our collective and we have eight offices around the world right now i work out of our boston office although of course working from home these days um but we have about 80 people in kigali rwanda our um our first office i want to just start just a little bit with the moment that we're in we have been doing quite a lot of work in understanding the role of architecture in fighting kobit 19. i think we've all experienced profound shifts and so it's important to just start with some of them um mass has worked for about a dozen years in designing hospitals and health care centers in um in mostly in rwanda um and elsewhere in africa where using passive and design strategies to combat the prevention of the spread of either tuberculosis cholera ebola has been a real design strategy and so when coven 19 hit we got a call first thing monday morning march 15th from boston healthcare for the homeless asking if we could review plans for the temporary shelters that they were putting up to be able to treat and test their clients and we started understanding that from the very beginning that architecture and architects had an important role to play in participating in keeping people safe so we set about doing a series of these resources they're all available free on our website um essentially applying lessons from infection control to this situation as you know guidelines and the research in science was developing one of the most incredible projects we did was um being able to walk through the halls of mount sinai during a surge with a doctor with a camera a gopro on his head understanding what was happening in these incredibly stressful environments people in the field of um of infectious disease talk about spaces staff systems and stuff and the kind of coordinated front of all of these things and so of course you think about systems staff and stuff being all the ppe the protocols all the different sort of mechanisms but understanding how this space can also play a role in supporting keeping people safe was an important element of the conversation that i think has not um been as elevated as as perhaps it should be so um yesterday actually we had a webinar with the joint center for housing on this new guide designing senior housing for safe interaction i encourage you to go and have a listen and look through this and really important scope of work we chose in the housing arena to specifically focus on senior housing because of course seniors are both most vulnerable to the disease and the effects of the disease but also to the threat of social isolation and so um in our efforts we're trying to understand how do we design new housing or retrofit existing housing for safe interaction and not so social isolation so i'm not going to go through these um too much today but i encourage you to to have a look and i'm going to briefly show you one project that mass is designing right now in brighton massachusetts which was designed before kovid sort of appeared but had used a methodology that we use at mass called the purpose-built uh series which is essentially digging deep into a mission of a non-profits um you know project and understanding how design can very specifically fuel emission and because um two life in this case had such a strong emphasis on designing for community we started to create a strategy with extensive community input and building on in many ways the campus that was already there to create these kind of small clustered neighborhoods and this strategy it ends up works out very well to sort of create pods in a sense so i just want to you know start by saying that the um architecture is in no way going to solve affordable housing but architecture actually absolutely has to do its job it has to dig in understand the science understand the research um understand the local context and then sort of deliver on its promise to create buildings and environments that are going to keep people safe now we heard from laura already a little bit about you know the kind of profound crisis of 40 nearly 40 million households burdened by housing expenses in the u.s we've been building 80 000 new units of housing per year but losing 100 000 units to either gentrification or abandonment or they were built as affordable units and then kind of get lost into the marketplace and of course at this moment in time with um with uh kovid we're all kind of uh you know the affordable housing industry has done an amazing job i think um trying to go to bad for renters all over the country but i think we're all incredibly worried about what's going to happen as the economy tends to continues to falter and and rents are going to be due so here we are in this environment at mass we say architecture is never neutral it either hurts or it heals and i think i would in some ways say the same thing about sort of our approach towards housing i think you know the other my my colleagues kind of brought up this idea around local control and and the fact that we don't really have a federal housing policy and so you know no housing policy is a policy i would argue the fact that we do not have a guarantee that every person in america has should have access to a home is itself a policy so i want to share with you um i have this book coming out next month i'm i'm so excited about it um got one copy here but it's kind it's into the warehouse and i'm going to show you a few um i'm going to show you four case studies because part of what um the charge i think i heard from mallory when she asked um asked me to join this conversation was to also understand how housing operates in context as well so you know if we start with certainly the premise that um you know architects have an absolute mandate to um deliver on the very best sort of architecture at a building by building level i think understanding that of course we don't live only in buildings we live in places and neighborhoods and with people um so my work um let me see okay sorry i was getting uh i wonder if i can go back okay um so my work for the last 15 years with the enterprise rose fellowship program has been an incredibly instructive part of my life and um so this book design with love is built on this theory that anyone no matter everyone no matter their race or their neighborhood they live in deserves a well-dignified a well-designed affordable home in a safe community and as i set out on this journey i was asking myself a couple questions you know the first is can effective community design help overcome the trauma born from years of racism disinvestment and neglect um and then i think also just um you know on a personal level on an individual level could i myself learn to recognize the power dynamic of my personal privilege in a way that allows me to contribute to this dismantling of systemic injustice rather than contributing to its perpetuation i think a difficult and important question let's see something's going a little a little faster than i am um so we started this journey in san ysidro california um at the border of tijuana and um san diego in a um a town of 30 000 people david flores was a fellow with me when i was a rose fellow back in 2001 to 2004 so it's a community that i've gotten to know over many years this is an image of the new um 750 million dollar border control station um you know in case you haven't been lately just to be clear there there already is a wall um there are sort of multiple layers of walls at the border and um so david flores has worked in san ysidro for nearly 20 years um this first project la casitas was built back in 2004 and as an architect he also brings his whole self to this endeavor david himself was born in juarez texas and i mean in born in mexico and and immigrated with his family to the u.s when he was nine years old and his father was later deported and separated from their family and so this idea that essentially the issues of community development are in so many ways about keeping families intact both um on either side of the border crossing the border this kind of constant flow that is really the reality for people in this community who often will wake up in mexico and go to school in the u.s or wake up in the u.s and go to the doctor in mexico um so i i wanted to just highlight that of course housing is an incredibly important part of the equation here but it's also healthcare immigration processing and so many other issues that casa familiar is looking at they've just completed a beautiful project designed by teddy cruz called living rooms at the border which is absolutely fantastic but the issues of affordability just continue to challenge this community where because of many of our policies that determine who's eligible for housing according to a kind of area median income there's a tremendous mismatch between what people are able to afford and what even the affordable market is able to deliver um so you know incredible to see the kinds of architects who are taking on just about every aspect of the question um certainly housing but also david has served on the planning commission of san ysidro he's also been a part of um the planning and and um trying to advocate for his community as this border control center at san ysidro gets designed and completed i'm going to move quickly to um thunder valley south dakota lakota sioux community where a group of young people had an incredible vision to bring forth the sort of cultural heritage of their spiritual life into a built articulation of the present um at the thunder valley community development corporation the reality however is that um 85 percent of the homes in this area are flimsy and efficient structures and you know to the points of my colleagues earlier i think there's also just this kind of stunning policy and financial you know to call it a mismatch is perhaps understated between a banking system and the needs of people lenders won't finance site-built homes on a reservation because the land is owned by the tribe and the bank cannot foreclose on such land and therefore you see a proponents of trailers and other sort of hud related housing so here the issues are certainly about housing but also about language and culture and school there's a new montessori school this young boy is walking to with his mom um a montessori a lakota immersion montessori school on this site you see they're also working for food sovereignty and a number of arts and cultures program as well as economic development and much of this development was built by a lakota owned construction company um so you know this idea that absolutely we must build more and better housing but you know just building housing is also not going to solve everything um so moving to um los angeles you know and i i think laura kind of referenced um a little bit this kind of incredible situation that we have in the u.s where at least 10 000 residents in this neighborhood of skid row who many of whom live outside of shelters and in in a kind of environment that has actually been planned um the the the los angeles city council you know about 50 years ago created a containment zone in skid row so this is a neighborhood that was this is a planned neighborhood one could argue it wasn't necessarily planned very well um and you know i think that it's important to just recognize how much we've gotten kind of used to this idea that homelessness is a thing in america i think you know it's amazing i guess what you can get used to but um i appreciated this local artist saying that you know skid row or or really the effects of homelessness is the predictable result of a profoundly sick society and i think it's really important to kind of take that on squarely um lots of um really important both um not just architecture but attempts at really using design and design with dignity as a way to um not just uh elevate you know the the role of affordable housing but kind of celebrate um celebrate housing for people who work were homeless before um i think it's also important you know to understand this idea that you know sometimes we say like home is where our heart is or um there's no place like home etc this kind of notion that you know home defines us in some way and especially now when we're spending so much time at home but you know this kind of idea that um that that people who are living in alternative means do not count somehow or are aren't able to vote or are unable to count i think is something that we need to really think about the last project i'm going to show is in baltimore maryland where to the point earlier about redlining baltimore got a jump on redlining with racial segregation governing much of their housing policy starting in 1910 a couple decades before others kind of piled on and to the result in this neighborhood on west saratoga street in west baltimore is um that a profound disinvestment over many years of course in redlined areas it's impossible to get a loan for your home or to sell it at a price that would merit the kind of upkeep and so many of the houses were owned either by some lords or people who couldn't maintain them because they become abandoned and ultimately get torn down and what gets left is often sort of a dumping ground in the neighborhood um and you know this is also a neighborhood where there's a tremendous amount of gun violence and um this sort of idea that neighborhoods are kind of i guess left a little bit on their own to solve their issues so this man donald quarles who lives on this block um set out first to stop the dumping and ended up taking on this kind of major initiative to basically make the streets in this neighborhood safe again and you know we like to talk about on the park bench i noticed was the name of our um discussion today but there's not always a pretty park bench with a shady tree to sit on you know sometimes there's no trees even much less a park bench so donald set out to um make a change in this space where there were some formerly abandoned houses cleared out it's not even a park but over time with his colleagues and partners and neighborhood partners has i i would say for the price of one affordable housing unit built this kind of incredible amenity for the whole neighborhood and um so understanding again there's there's housing on their agenda as well and i know that that we'll get to doing new um and and renovating affordable housing here but remembering that um that these public places and spaces we need in all neighborhoods especially perhaps a neighborhood like um like this incredible one in uh west baltimore um so that's it i'm going to end there and open send it back to mallory and open it up for questions thank you so much thank you katie uh thank you berhan thank you laura for your presentations and um i think you know the the the weaving of these topics uh it sort of became effortless amongst y'all and so i actually have a question to start out with that uh ties into some some of the the points each one of you made in different ways which is uh to start with katie brought up you know the importance of home right now for all of us um you know in a pandemic where we are being asked and or forced or mandated to to stay home literally that that this issue of affordable housing of housing access of homelessness is so incredibly um just it's like a meta concept for us as we sit and talk about the built environment and so um katie mentioned you know in in i think this is in the preface to your book katie about recognizing the power dynamic of your own personal privilege and affecting and then dismantling these systems and and specifically thinking about the systems that perpetuate the housing crisis and so um i wondered if each of you might uh reflect a little bit about the ways in which you have found your own work uh sort of intermingling with uh with uh the housing crisis uh in your own local uh in your own local context are there ways in which your work sort of takes on a higher level when you look out the front door of your home or when you look at the immediate neighborhood around you or um or you know in neighborhoods that you frequent and and if you have some if that has influenced your work in particular ways particularly as i say right now well while we're so focused on our own homes sure i can go um it's so you know we all know that the housing shortage has this disproportionate impact on people of color on younger people um and on people lower income and for me that has also intersected with sort of women and how does that sort of the personal stories that you end up with where you realize that you you think you're hearing a story about somebody's life and challenges they're facing and then you realize like you're actually hearing a housing story and you're actually hearing a story that's all about lack of access and opportunity and being stuck and you know i worked entry level sales especially when i was first out of college for a while and you know i had a lot of friends where they would tell me they were living with a hoarder oh god and and you realize well that's a housing shortage story or they're living with an ex and they can't get you know out of the apartment and they're living in the living room and when shelter and place came into effect um is when i really sort of you know i had been living with my significant other and didn't move kind of until i had the next boyfriend lined up whose apartment i could move into and that you know that they're that that's really up are we saying that here you know that the the feminism in me i was i'm exactly where my mother was at my age i am running a small nonprofit that's doing advocacy i can't pay myself what i would love to be able to pay myself because we're investing in the movement and at my age she was able to get married buy a house and have a kid and at my age in exactly the same place on paper i cannot do that i i am stunted i put off having kids i live with a wonderful guy but you know for a while his ex-wife was living in the living room um and i was really glad that shelter in place did not come into effect when she was living in the living room and we were living in the bedroom um you know those are the kinds of stories that you end up with with you know this that's a middle-class story at this point and that is what is also deeply disturbing that i have told you a middle-class story in america that is not that sad there are far sadder stories than that and those are classic housing shortage stories um to build upon that i think that like you know each person has their individual stories and i think there's so many you can count um you know in cambridge in general and then to share my story like in cambridge like there's so many different stories about like you know if you're young 20 something and you go to graduate school where you might be making 35 40 000 a year uh but the rents here are like five hundred dollars for a two bedroom you know most people end up taking three or four roommates um but also the local zoning laws were meant to punish students such that you know you can't have more than three people who are unrelated live in the same house so oftentimes they're not even on the lease and if something happens such as with one of my friends who uh was with a predatory landlord who would only get a triple decker and he would only uh allow tenants like not explicitly seeing this but all of his tenants end up being 20 something white blonde women and when that started feeling predatory half of the residents weren't even on the lease so they had no legal recourse um so their stories like that to stories of like people who live in larger apartment complexes such as the one about like 10 blocks from me uh which saw a 47 rent increase this year um and that's like not affordable for anyone and i know for me like i was born in pakistan and when i first came to the united states like my parents were very poor and so we lived with another family uh but the house was so small it was uh a three bedroom and we had five of us and they had uh eight of them and so the 13 of us would live in a three bedroom where you know that was broke all of the zoning laws and um you know we would hide in the closet when the landlord came because they knew that the one family was there but having a second family was too much and we didn't want to get caught i skipped pre-k because we were afraid of getting caught coming in and out all the time and so you know like housing shortage is a real story that lots of people feel um and like i think what laura said it really it's home it's it really doesn't have to be this way like in cambridge the rants have really quadrupled over the last 15 years like it didn't always used to be this way but now it's so hard to imagine a world where it's not this way but i think that you know the advocacy and design shows up like really it doesn't have to be this way like we can do things to change the current situation i am i have three daughters and um one's a 2020 college grad so um you know she's entering sort of this moment in the world but um you know we've been i'm i'm incredibly lucky to have a home that they could all come home to and we had grad grad student friend come to and we were able to kind of shelter in place together eventually we merged with a family next door who had a three-year-old and working parents and needed child care so i think one of the other big things that's been happening of course is um you know this sort of notion that we work at home and there's and everything is expected of the home and including child care in school and everything else so for us we were we were you know exceptionally lucky to be able to kind of pod up in a way that we could help each other um so feel very fortunate in that respect um well in in another to the broader topic of affordable housing another privilege that all of us you know here speaking and probably many of the people listening in have is that we as professionals in one angle or another of this field we understand the system that is implicating these these housing challenges that that is creating the housing crisis um and and so i wondered from you each are operating in different spheres but i wonder if um one or many of you might want to talk about the process for educating people that don't have that sort of knowledge privilege um about the system that is creating the challenges that then these people um may be facing in their own community and and they may you know engage very clearly with the outcomes that they're experiencing but how do you help them to to engage with the process and to to build inertia that will change those systems yeah i'll start i know you guys have a lot to say on this question so i'll be quick um i work very closely with a bronx-based design team called designing the wii who have an exhibition that's called undesign the red line and um this undesigned the red line exhibition is just does an incredible job of using redlining um which was a very explicit um racist racist set of policies and procedures but situating it within a much longer time frame um understanding all many of the sort of social movements um that have kind of created this situation that we see now in our urban environment so um the exhibition has always been in person and so one of the things that we're starting to try to do together is understand how to kind of digitize that and put that into a larger realm i think that you can watch a movie like 13th and really kind of grasp so much of certain situations but how the built environment became the way it is seems to be shockingly elusive for many people including people who work in banking and mortgage industry and in affordable housing who simply have not somehow gotten the memo on um you know how our sort of real estate practices have been formed over time i mean what i do is is you know wrangle people who are excited about the ideas that we've talked about here and turn them into a real political block and say okay we are going to get different people elected and we are going to move the conversation at the local state and federal level and we do project by project advocacy mostly as a mechanism to understand and mobilize and change the conversation so you know we do all different levels of advocacy because when you're when you're sort of taking this new idea and making it part of the political conversation you have to hit every single level and get people uh understanding and thinking thinking about these problems really differently um and so you know we've been fairly you know medium successful as far as like you know there's a bunch of pro housing activists across the country and um every presidential candidate uh on the democratic side had a relatively better housing platform this year that actually acknowledged uh the role zoning has played in making communities more exclusionary um that's thrilling um we're seeing real progress in you know there's a federal yimby act that is making its way you know assuming congress passes laws again uh it's it's there uh and it's it's plugging along um and and i think that there is a real opportunity to make changes um at the the state especially level we i think what we will see and this is common with uh you know a real change in society is that you see local changes local laws that become poster child for state and federal and that's good right local change is really important for teeing it up for bigger challenges um but we are not gonna achieve like beverly hills is not gonna say like oh you know what i should do get rid of exclusionary zoning right like that's not gonna happen right but we could see um you know portland just passed major legislation uh to legalize fourplexes and and and that's a great piece of legislation that has the potential to become a real model and a proof of concept for saying actually we need federal minimum standards if we're going to really recommit to affirmatively furthering fair housing and we're going to make that real we're going to have to implement zoning standards across the country we're going to have to actually say we're going to integrate we're going to have to legalize you know affordable housing overlays where you legalize the construction of uh actually subsidized affordable housing but also legalizing simple missing middle mid-rise apartments in every single neighborhood and you have to say that in fact wealthy exclusionary communities are not going to have the right to keep multi-family housing out and that's a big change uh that's a huge mental hurdle for a lot of people and and we're gonna see little you know we're gonna achieve some local successes and and we're already seeing that and that builds the momentum for uh state and federal huge overhauls which i think are are closer than they've ever been before um i think that was really really comprehensive on all fronts from laura um i think that the uh only additional piece i have is like i think if we're talking about individuals who perhaps don't have any experience with zoning i wanted to just touch on that piece um my like um biggest thought is that perhaps like you know people who are really active in local politics have like very strong nimby beliefs but i'm not sure that regular like quote-unquote regular people necessarily do and i think that that's also why i normally start my conversations with that question that i kind of shared with you guys today it's like you know cambridge's population 100 years ago was 105 000. what do you think the city's population is today i think that something like that really gets people thinking because almost every response like 200 000 thousand people intuitively understand that cities are supposed to grow and around the same lines if you talk about you know like the average like the median price today of a one bedroom is change is twenty five hundred dollars what do you think it was you know when i was born in like 1997. um and no one will come up with you know it was around 500 and it gives you a sense like okay well you know actually prices have gone up a lot and the city hasn't changed and i think just asking those questions where people have an intuitive feel it's a really strong way to begin because i think that like getting into like the nerdiness of zoning or like you know like affordable housing isn't isn't because of all these market reasons or things like that like a lot of people don't care or they have a very negative view of like the supply demand curve um that like a lot of us are talk about and so i think just getting a sense of like you know you know like what are the problems i think is a great way to start a conversation and to pile on what bronze saying you have sort of the politics is made up of two things you know values and trade-offs and we if we say okay you know there are a lot of different ways to ask the question about values right do you think it's important if you ask the question like do you think it's important for a local community to decide what's important for them right they'll be like oh yeah yeah yeah but you know the same person will also give the answer do you think it's important for your kid to be able to afford to be able to buy a home in your community oh yeah yeah yeah do you think that uh we should be integrating yeah yeah yeah you know there are a lot of questions you'll get a yes answer to but you have to make sure that they they they it's not intuitive that these conflict these values are in conflict and so you have to make sure that we're saying okay we we need outcomes of a more equitable society so we're going to ask the question at the right level of government rather than having this constant selection bias where people are short-term thinkers and really do not say you know it's every individual housing project it's very easy for every snowflake to not feel like they're part of the avalanche so oh well how can you say that me blocking this four plex is causing the housing shortage this is just four units of housing that i hate right and so how do we make sure that we're we're asking the question to the avalanche not the snowflake that's a great that's a great way to put it laura um i love that um well and and and while we're on this very broad level and and we're a little over three o'clock but i i wanted to bring this back because it it sort of hit me as like you know sort of a key aspect of what we're talking about katie brought up that we lack a federal housing policy effectively and um and if we you know many organizations not just you know folks who work in the planning world who feel that housing is a human right but the american bar association the u.n you know there's lots of organizations that would support this as a as a a social position but if that's the case what would it doesn't have to be one thing but it could just be one particular thing that would be on your dream federal housing policy what would that look like so obama wrote a white paper one time and i like almost printed it out and framed it so um there are a lot of other things right that we can talk about um but i do think that like we could have a federal housing policy and and even we could base it off of laws we've already passed we have you know fair housing laws um we we had a policy that was going to say we're going to affirmatively further fair housing it is i think quite telling that previous interpretations of affirmatively furthering fair housing have only addressed the issues of subsidized affordable housing a key component of fair housing but i think there's a lot there that's sort of like implicitly racist about saying that fair housing is only about subsidized affordable housing in fact fair housing is about all kinds of housing and is about saying we need our communities to have multiple income levels in the same community um and so there are a lot of ways we could be interpreting current legislation that would actually help us get to a more just society but also um you know we could have national zoning standards where i mean there is no reason to allow single-family home only zoning if you are going to be allowing housing there's no environmental reason i mean it's the most inefficient kind of housing it's a mandatory sprawl zone that makes the environment worse that makes communities less walkable that makes people lonely i mean the other thing is like i don't know about you but like every 80s movie was about the suburbs being kind of terrible and i think that we could just go back to having towns again right we used to have towns that would have a little walkable community that weren't about separating everybody out and everybody having a giant lot and being isolated from one another the suburbs are a commitment to isolation and to loneliness that we just don't have to do as a society we could say it's legal to build multi-family housing and yes individuals might choose to have single-family homes but they might live next door to a four-unit building where maybe their kid can afford to live and and families don't have to be broken up and that's something that we could do at a national level to talk a little bit about that environmental piece because i think that's a piece where i can speak on a really technical level i think that we can't understate the influence that like multi-family units have on the environmental impact of an individual so an average individual will emit about 138 tons of carbon per year if you get rid of their cars and like have less driving the way that we do in during the peak of the pandemic it goes down about 12 if you use less air conditioning it goes down about four percent um if you like do all these things it goes down a couple different a few percent it's a really really hard problem to lower someone's individual carbon emissions if you they live instead of in a single family house in a triple decker their emissions go down by about 60 percent there is no other um initiative that we can take that is so cheap because people are already doing this we don't the government doesn't have to spend money they will have such a massive impact on the individual carbon emissions of a person like this is a really really big deal like there is no way that we can become green or have a net uh carbon zero policy without having more people live in multi-family houses it's just not possible i agree absolutely and i i would just add that you know in the us all of our quote affordable housing um all of our subsidized housing public housing tax credit housing uh vouchers amounts to less than five percent of our entire housing stock so you know in in many european countries it starts at 20 and goes up to eighty percent so less than five percent and you know we talk about housing is being subsidized and and you know of course we subsidize home ownership for single-family homes through the mortgage interest tax deduction that's a you know four times the amount of subsidy we give out in the states or to homeowners um as opposed to for affordable housing so i just think it's also important to just like yeah put it put some of these facts out there like less than all five percent of the whole countries afford is affordable housing um so it's really we have we have a tremendous opportunity to do better that's a really great point katie um and and we're we're well over so i want to be mindful of everyone's time and and think thank all three of our panelists so much for this discussion it was really really valuable i learned a lot and hopefully hopefully the listeners did as well and um and i want to do a quick plug for the next uh the next webinar the next on the park bench we'll be doing on august 25th again at 2 pm eastern time uh which will be equity-driven planning with mitch silver and finally thank you one more time uh to laura and deburahan and to katie for for sharing your knowledge and expertise and and engaged in this discussion for us thank you so much on behalf of cnu thanks so much for having us thank you great to be here thank you