Berkeley Talks: In 1970, one in five Americans moved every year. Now it’s one in 13. What changed?

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (intro): This is Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. We’re also on YouTube @BerkeleyNews. New episodes come out every other Friday.

Also, we have another show, Berkeley Voices. This season on the podcast, we’re exploring the theme of transformation. In eight episodes, we’re looking at how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at Berkeley. You can find all of our podcast episodes on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Music fades out)

Paul Pierson: Really happy to have everybody here for this event, which we, at the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative, have really been looking forward to co-sponsoring this with the Berkeley Committee …?

David Broockman: Center for American Democracy. 

Paul Pierson: Center. Berkeley Center for American Democracy. Sorry, David. And we’re really happy to have Yoni Appelbaum and Jerusalem Demsas here with us. I’m going to introduce them in just a second. I wanted to just say a little bit about the logistics of how this is going to work. Each of them has produced a really, I have to say, really wonderful book on the stuff that we’re going to be talking about today. And unlike the academics who I usually hang out with, these people can really write, but they also have a lot of great ideas about a really, really important subject.

And I have to say, we were talking about this a little bit beforehand, it’s nice to be talking about a really, really serious social problem where we’re trying to craft solutions that doesn’t immediately involve us in talking about what’s going on right now in Washington, D.C. It might come up, but I think this is something where it’s happening in California as much as it’s happening anywhere, maybe more than it’s happening anywhere else, and where a lot of the things that need to happen need to happen in California and in other states. Let both of them talk more about that.

So logistically, I’m going to turn it over to each of them to talk for about 20 minutes about the work that they’ve been doing. And at the end of that period, BESI staff will be here to … Some of you probably have note cards already. If there’s a question that you want to ask, put it on the note cards so we’ll try to work through a bunch of questions and comments as efficiently as we can.

While that is happening, I’m going to ask these guys some questions. I had a chance to read both these wonderful books in the last week, and then we’ll take a bunch of these questions from the audience. So that’ll take us up to about 5:30 p.m. And then we actually do have another half hour or so if people want to stick around, talk more about these issues. We’ll have a little bit of food and drink over here, and we’ll have a reception that’ll last for about half an hour.

Oh, and on the note cards, if your question is directed particularly at the work of one of our two great authors, if you put that at the top of the note card, just will make it a little easier for me as I’m multitasking to process what questions should be directed where.

OK, so that’s enough of an intro. Let me just quickly run through the bios of our two speakers, and then turn directly to letting them talk about their books. Yoni Appelbaum is the deputy executive editor of The Atlantic and the author of Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. He’s a social and cultural historian of the United States. Before joining The Atlantic, he was a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard, previously taught at Babson College and at Brandeis University, where he received his Ph.D. in American history.

Jerusalem Demsas is a staff writer at The Atlantic where she covers housing, democracy, federalism, immigration, and economics. She hosts the podcast Good on Paper. I will say the deliciously wonky Good on Paper, as in that idea seemed like a good idea on paper, how does it do in the real world where each week Demsas and a guest take a closer look at the facts, and research the challenge, the popular narratives of the day. I listened recently to the conversation that she had with David Brockman about how people think about housing and housing affordability and whether they want more housing in their neighborhood. That was a great one. If you want to start on that podcast, I’d recommend that you start with that episode.

Jerusalem Demsas: I didn’t pay him.

Paul Pierson: Did he pay you, I think actually it’s more the question.

Her new book on the housing crisis collects selections of her writing in The Atlantic to offer an accessible guide to this wide-ranging issue. We are so happy to have you guys with us, and I think we’ll start with Yoni to talk about his project.

Yoni Appelbaum: All right. Well, thank you for having me here, for giving me the excuse to escape Washington, D.C., and come out and talk to all of you about housing. I wrote this book, and thought that I was going to be writing a history of zoning, but the project turned on me the way that research often does, and it is, in large measure, a history of American mobility.

And to understand what I mean by that, I want you to go back in your minds 500 years to the old world where most identities were inherited at birth. You were born someplace and attached to it legally in general, practically by lots of other social conventions. You had a spot on the social hierarchy, you inherited your religion, often your occupation, your identity. You could go out to the church graveyard and see rows of gravestones with your last name on them, and you expected one day you would be buried there and your children and your grandchildren after you.

That was how the world worked through much of human history in most times and most places. And it was how the early European colonists who came to what is now the United States expected that the world they were constructing would work as well. They did not mean to set off a revolution in human freedom. Quite the contrary.

But when they get here, the idea of moving to a new place, of leaving your proper place in the world and going someplace new turned out to be a very difficult genie to stuff back into the bottle. Those early settlers kept moving. They moved for all kinds of reasons, some economic, some social, religious, political. They planted new communities. But in any of those communities, if you’d wanted to show up in colonial New England and move into a town, it didn’t matter if you had bought a house or rented a farm or gotten engaged to a girl in town, the community had the power to warn you out. And in the communities where we have the best records, we can see that they warn most aspiring new entrants out. They said, “You’re not welcome here. Go back to the place you came from. We don’t accept you as members of our community.”

It’s a remarkable thing. When I moved into my house, it didn’t occur to me that the neighbors could deliver a notice to my door within two weeks telling me I wasn’t welcome there. But that’s how this country worked, it’s how it worked well after the revolution. It’s not until the early-1800s that there’s a legal revolution in America, which makes residence a matter of individual choice rather than communal consent that the system had been attenuating for several decades. But there’s a series of rulings and legal changes that allow people in the United States to go places and to say, “I am a resident here because I intend to be a resident here.” And that was enough.

And once we do that, once we open the possibility of human mobility, Americans start moving at a sort of astonishing rate. In the 19th century, one out of three Americans moved every year, which is sort of really hard to conceive of now. There was this institution in many cities and many farming regions where farm tendency was the prevailing form of ownership called Moving Day. All the leases would expire on a single day, and a quarter or a third, half the people would get up and swap residences between sunup and sundown.

And most people who swapped residences ended up better off for it. They ended up … If you built a small number of luxury units for the rich, the rich would bump up into those, and they’d vacate. And people who are a little less rich would move into the really luxurious houses they’ve been living in, and so on down the chain, you can trace chains of 10, 12, 15 moves with everybody moving into a place that was in some way better than the place that they were giving up. They thought of homes the way I might think of an iPhone or a car, you sort of have it for a couple of years, and then you trade up for a new model.

These constant moves in America made possible by the constant construction of new housing created a new kind of social order. When people would come here from Europe to visit, they typically remarked on two things that they found to be profoundly weird about the United States. The first was our extraordinary mobility. And Europeans, almost to a man, saw this as a tremendous character flaw in the United States. Tocqueville accused us of being restless in the midst of prosperity, that although we … They understood that you could move if you were desperate, that you could be displaced by famine or … But what they didn’t understand was that you had an adequate living, and you wanted something better for yourself. That struck them as profoundly wrong. You should accept your lot in life, you should stay where you were, you should put down roots. And Americans persisted in doing OK and thinking that they could do better and their children could do even better than they had, and it really weirded them out.

The other thing that they all remark on is that we have a mania for association, again, in Tocqueville’s phrase, and they all remark on this, and they think this is great, that they look around, and they can see the rich array of civic groups and voluntary associations that Americans have created. And so they have a critique, and they have something that they’re envious of, and they never put the two halves together. It simply does not occur to them that it is America’s extraordinary rate of geographic mobility, which creates the rich and vibrant and diverse communities that Americans will belong to.

But that is precisely what is driving it. When you move someplace new, you’re likelier to join new things. America, for more than 200 years, has been the only place on earth where a majority of adults no longer belong to the church or confession into which they were born. That’s been true from the founding. And the reason for that is when you’re moving someplace new, maybe you try out a new church, you go down the road, there’s a place where all your neighbors are going, you push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you get out there and you show up. It’s awkward to walk into a large hall where everybody else knows everybody who’s there, but if you’re new in town, maybe you’ve got no choice, maybe you’ve got to do that. And so you get this extraordinary social vibrancy, so you get some other things too.

If you match Americans of really any decade against their peers in, say, Britain, you’ll find that the Americans are moving more often over longer distances into better effect. That is the Americans who relocate always do better than the Americans who stay in place, but they also do better than people in Europe who are relocating from one place to another. The extraordinary mobility of the society gives outsized returns to geographic mobility. They do better economically, they do better in terms of the occupational brackets that they occupy. And then those effects are actually amplified in the second generation. Their kids do even better relative to the kids of those who have stayed where they are, and they do even better relative to the kids of the people who’ve moved within Europe.

And so you get this extraordinary degree of social vitality and civic life, you get amazing fluidity in terms of climbing the economic ladder and occupational mobility. And you get something else too, you get a different kind of a disposition.

There’s a great study by University of Chicago psychologists, which looks at people who want to move, and then follows up a year later to say like, “Did you move? And now tell me about your life.” The movers grow more optimistic, they grow more future-oriented, they grow likelier to be accepting of others and of differences, more likely to become engaged in the communities in which they’ve landed and likelier to see the success of those communities as reinforcing their own success and their own success is dependent on the success of those around them, right?

So these are characteristic American traits often that we’ve pushed beyond the breaking point, that the famously optimistic Americans who barrel around the world and can’t see problems, but they also had upsides, these traits, and they came, I think in large measure, out of this extraordinary mobility that we experienced.

So that was the greatest discovery of the research. The question is why don’t we do this anymore? And I should say we don’t do this anymore. As late as 1970, one in five Americans moved every year. In December, we got new numbers from the census, and it’s now down to 1 out of 13. The decline in social mobility is the largest and least remarked change in America of the last 50 years. And I believe that it is driving many other much more discussed changes.

And we stopped moving for a very simple reason. For 200 years, it was possible to change your fortunes by relocating. 50 years ago, if you were a janitor in rural Alabama and you relocated to San Francisco to the Bay Area and stayed in the same job, you earn a lot more, 40% more than if you stayed where you were. Your cost of living went up, but you ended up with more money in the bank account at the end of every month.

Today, if you made that same move from Alabama to the Bay Area, your wages would still go up by the same amount roughly, but the cost of living here would more than offset your wage gains. You would end up with less in the bank account at the end of every month than if you’d stayed where you were. And so people are simply staying where they are.

There was a convergence between the richest and poorest parts of this country for 200 years. It starts to level off in the 1970s. By about 20 years ago, it had totally plateaued. Today, the richest and the poorest places in the country are on divergent paths. Mobility is now a privilege exercised by the affluent and the well-educated. Most Americans no longer stand to gain by moving toward the places in this country that offer them the greatest opportunities, the greatest professional opportunities, the best educations for their children.

We know that the single most important decision you’ll make as a parent is not how you sleep train your kids, it’s not what you feed them, it is where you live. When you choose that location, you are, in large measure, choosing your kids’ odds of success in life.

And these days, Americans are no longer moving toward the places that have the greatest degree of opportunity, they’re moving to the places that have the cheapest housing. It is a profound change in the social geography of this country, and it is driving, I believe, much of the anger and frustration that we see.

So what went wrong? What went wrong in a word is zoning. The book that I wrote is ultimately a history. And a large part of that history, much more than I had realized, takes place here in California. California is where zoning is invented in the United States in 1885 in Modesto in a law that was intended to push the Chinese out of Modesto. It was the third thing that they had tried in Modesto.

The first thing they tried was vigilante violence where they put on hoods and marched through the streets and beat up Chinese residents who they encountered, smashed the storefronts, piled their belongings in the street in [inaudible 00:16:24]. But the Chinese wanted their piece of the American dream, and they rebuilt.

The second thing they tried was arson. They tried burning down the Chinese laundries that they were operating in the largely white neighborhoods of the cities. That didn’t work either. And then they found a much more effective tool of racial segregation. They hit on zoning. They wrote an ordinance that pushed all of the laundries in the city, west of the tracks and south of G Street.

And I pulled a map of 1885 Modesto, and there is only one block on that map that is west of the tracks and south of G Street, and it is labeled Chinatown. It was an implicit racial segregation of the city done in facially neutral language. And the courts here in California will uphold that.

The system of zoning then spread. There’s a huge part of this that I hope we’ll get into later set here in Berkeley, which invents single-family zoning over in Elmwood. And zoning jumps to the East Coast in New York where it’s used to push the Jews back into the Lower East Side in a way from the thriving department stores along Fifth Avenue. And that gives us our first city-wide zoning ordinance. And zoning spreads then nationally, partially through the good offices of Herbert Hoover, but largely at the behest of the federal government in the New Deal.

In recent decades, there’s a second turn to this story where starting in the 1970s, we give people … there’s a revolt on the left against big government. And the critique is that big government has been captured by big business. And the critique is 100% correct.

The remedy that is proposed has a downside though, it is to empower local communities and individuals to challenge any government decision making. So we spend the first half of the 20th century making every matter of land use, even on privately owned land subject to government regulation. We then empower anyone with enough time and money and resources to challenge any decision, any approval granted by the government.

If you put those two things together, what you end up with is not a democracy, but a vetocracy, a system in which individuals are empowered to block things from happening. It is particularly in progressive jurisdictions that this is a problem. And to me, that is a crisis because I can look around and see by real estate prices that Americans want to live in those jurisdictions, they appreciate their investment in public services. Many Americans feel that it is in fact a matter of life and death to live in such jurisdictions. If you’re a woman seeking at this moment to exercise a right to choose, if you’re a member of the LGBTQ community, being in such a place can feel incredibly important. But those are the jurisdictions that have made it hard to build.

That is where the housing crisis have gone up by the most in the United States. And it is sadly the case that the more progressive a jurisdiction, the harder it’s gotten. There’s a great study of California which says that for every 10 points in liberal vote share a community increases, the number of new housing permits that it issues goes down by 30%. As places get bluer, it gets harder to build. And we can talk about why that is, but that is the case.

And so I look at this as a self-induced crisis of progressivism that through a set of legal changes, each of which was intended to address a real problem, we’ve arrived at a situation where the places where Americans most want to live, where they can give their children better lives, where they can lift themselves up economically, where they can join vibrant social communities, those places have become impossible to build in and therefore impossible to move to except for a privileged slice at the top of American society.

And what is a tragedy for that worker in Alabama is also a crisis of progressivism as a political movement, because to the extent that you can’t move into these places, to the extent that even people born in these places or with jobs in these places often can’t afford to stay, they’re now bleeding population. With every new census, there are fewer electoral votes in the blue states, fewer congressional seats. The population is shifting to red areas.

It is not turning those places purple. People are social creatures. When people relocate, they tend to adopt the political views of those around them. It is instead shifting the American population in a more conservative direction.

And so that is the tragedy that the book unfolds. But it is also … and I’ll turn over to Jerusalem here in a moment, it is also a story that I think we can regard with a fair amount of optimism. These are problems that progressive America has created for itself. That means that they do not rely necessarily on federal solutions. You don’t need our dysfunctional Congress to get itself together and act, you don’t need the current presidential administration to act in a beneficent way. These are mostly matters of state law, state law that has delegated power down to municipalities. And the municipalities in the states have the power to reverse this.

But to get there, I think you’ve got to go back to the place where I started. We began as a country of exclusionary communities that walled themselves off from new arrivals. We made this country prosperous and pluralistic by tearing down those walls and enabling Americans to move where they wanted, giving Americans a profound sense of individual agency in the process. We can rebuild that kind of society by, again, stripping away some of the exclusionary powers that we have redelegated to communities and allowing people to go where they want.

Jerusalem Demsas: So it’s funny because I’m the opposite case of Yoni’s book. I have never re-signed a lease until just this past month, and so I think I’m just moving for everyone else.

So Yoni talked a bit about the … Well, Yoni gave you a full history of the historical context of zoning and how we got here. My book is really about the small democratic problem and crisis in local government. Originally when I started working on this issue, I was concerned about the issue of housing affordability, and as someone who is an immigrant to this country myself, I was concerned about the crisis of mobility. And I discovered along the way that the questions we were all asking ourselves were really fundamental ones over who gets to decide what happens to the land that we all have. Land is a finite resource, one that no one created themselves, but people get to benefit from it all the time. When someone’s sitting on a house that’s worth $1.5 million and they bought it when it was $500,000, they didn’t really do anything to make that happen. But they get to accrue all of those benefits all the same.

So that is the major question of the book that I wrote, and it starts with an essay that I reported in Denver where there was a defunct golf course. So in most American cities, there are not large plots of land just sitting around waiting to be developed. Those are often at the fringes because we have mostly developed center city. People want to live there. But in Denver, there was a defunct golf course because in 1997, the city of Denver had paid $2 million to the owners of the golf course to put a conservation easement on this property. And they did this. And in the easement it said, it must always have the ability to function as a nineteen-hole golf course, which is bizarre.

And eventually what happens is a development firm decides to take a bet. They think that they can get this conservation easement lifted either through the court system or they can get it lifted by getting the city of Denver to vote to allow them to lift it. So they buy it on the cheap, they buy it when the conservation easement is still on it. And so that’s depressed the value of the land. The voters of Denver, I think surprised this risky taking development firm and they vote 59 to 41, which is a pretty big margin, nearly 20 points not to allow them to remove the easement. This actually happens twice, and this is after the developer has fliered every single home in the surrounding neighborhood, had multiple community meetings, reserved two-thirds of the 155 acres for open space permanently that was going to be developed into open space for the community.

The one-third that will be developed, 2,500 homes that would include affordable housing, senior housing, homeownership opportunities. They were going to develop a fund to allow the community members to be able to access homeownership opportunities, people who were long-time members of this community. Every single thing that you could tick down the box, they had promised to keep the trees. They had promised someone that they could have a soccer field somewhere because their kids like to play soccer in that area. And they had done every single thing. Any one of those complaints that ended up coming up, they had tried to resolve them and it still ended up failing.

And the reason why this attracted my attention is not just because, I mean developments fail all the time. That’s kind of the classic story right now in American housing politics. But the reason why this attracted my attention is because Denver is not a city that you would just immediately expect to be wholesale opposed development. This is a fast-growing city. It’s a place where it’s a purple state. It’s not some place where it’s a hostile to business or development. But most interestingly, the very same election when Denver voters say, “We don’t want you to develop this 155 acre golf course.” They also vote into office two … They have a runoff election. And both mayoral candidates were in favor of that development. And the final winning candidate, the current mayor of Denver, was the YIMBY endorsed candidate.

So the same voters that were like don’t develop this are now voting also to say, “We do want this YIMBY, pro-development, pro-housing affordability candidate to be in office.” And at the same time, you have governor Jared Polis who has made it his key signature issue to say, “I want to build more housing. I don’t think that local government should have a solitary purview over how housing gets developed. It’s a regional issue. These are not just issues that can be decided at the very hyper-local level.” He pretty popular governor in Colorado. He’s also someone who has continued to make this his calling card, has continued to pass legislation on this issue even after this fails.

So what do we make of this? Because the democratic voice of the people is saying a bunch of mixed things. They’ve also voted a $1.3 billion, a million dollar bond measure to fund affordable housing. And so the issues at play here are how do you hear these voices when government officials are trying to figure out what it is the populace actually wants? And the thesis of my book is essentially is that when you delegate housing and land use authority to the local level, the only thing you are allowing is people’s parochial concerns to come into play. The only thing you are allowing is for people’s concerns when they’re thinking, “Oh, what about the construction? What about my view changing?”

You don’t allow them to access the parts of their brain when they’re voting for governor, when they’re voting for mayor, when they’re thinking about bigger issues, when they’re thinking about what about the housing affordability crisis? What about homelessness? And that’s the big problem I think with housing, is that we’ve delegated to a level of government that actually just cannot resolve this problem because it doesn’t even ask people to think in this way. When people engage with their local government, they’re thinking about potholes, they’re thinking about resolving these small concerns, and they’re thinking about the ways in which their life can be harmed by changes. They’re not thinking about these bigger macroeconomic problems that they want to see resolved. And why is that?

I think there are a bunch of ways that I explore this in the book, and a bunch of reasons why we see this happening. One, I think there’s this problem in political science called the boundary problem, which is how do you decide what the area of concern is before you even hold vote and say, “We’re going to have the city of Berkeley vote on whether or not to do X or Y.” You have to decide what is the city of Berkeley? What is the jurisdiction that we’re talking about here? And you can get kind of ridiculous with this because even in a place like San Francisco is an international housing market. It affects someone in China about if they’re going to come here and study if home prices are too high.

So you have to have some sorts of logistical constraints. But at the same time, the problem with housing is that the benefits that accrue to building new housing are so diffuse that the beneficiaries are almost the large part of them are never included. I live in Washington DC and when someone builds or doesn’t build a house in Arlington, Virginia and Northern Virginia, I don’t vote in those elections, but that’s still the housing market I live in. And it’s really interesting the way that people kind of conceptualize this problem because I was at a zoning board meeting in Arlington, Virginia once and they were talking about whether or not to allow, I think it’s literally 36 new townhouses to exist, to be permitted in the city. And I’m sitting next to, I always immediately beeline for the people who I’m assume are going to be the most opposed just so I can sit next to them.

And so I go and sit next to these people and they’re muttering, they’re talking about how annoyed they are. And this man gets up and he’s one of the very few people who get up who’s not an older white person. And before he even talks, the woman next to me turns to the person she’s sitting with and goes, “I bet that guy’s from Washington DC. We shouldn’t even let people from DC talk.” And the assumption I think, was that he was Black. This was Northern Virginia. Northern Virginia’s a pretty diverse place, but there’s obviously some racial undertones going on in that conversation. I didn’t ask her about it, so I can’t 100% confirm that was going on. But I think we can draw some inferences.

And I think the reason why this is important is that it goes to show how much these very liberal people, I mean this Northern Virginia, I mean it’s voting quite heavily for Joe Biden, for Kamala Harris. These are progressives in these places. And at the same time when you get them in these local community meetings, all of these other commitments fly out the window. And at the same time, even if he was from DC, I don’t know where this guy was from, why is it not equally relevant to him whether or not Arlington builds housing. That artificial line that divides DC from Arlington, Virginia, it may be relevant on a map, it may be relevant for whether or not we have access to congressional representation, but it’s not relevant for whether or not it affects your home prices. And the way that people live their lives are crossing these jurisdictional boundaries all the time.

But I think also, I think the important thing is, and the book is quite harsh on local government, but I don’t want to be harsh on people who work in local government, who I think most of who I talk to are fantastic, hardworking people who want to make the world a better place. And I think the challenge that they have is because of the regional nature of this problem, even if they all wanted to, they couldn’t solve the issue. Any individual small city in a larger metropolitan area that wanted to address the housing crisis, like just take a look at what’s happening in Jersey City near New York. They’ve made valiant, valiant jumps to try to address the housing crisis and I think are giving some serious room to New York City to not build a lot of housing.

But as a result, that removal of pressure also enables a lot of NIMBYs to say, “OK, well Jersey City’s building, so we don’t really need to build that much in Brooklyn.” And that kind of interplay requires a more regional, a state level, a higher level response. It requires that sort of 30,000 foot view of the problem, because you do need to balance a bunch of different interests. It wouldn’t be good if we raised every single park in the city and turned it into housing. You do want to protect some places from development, but how do you make those trades when you’re in city government and the only thing you can control is yes or no do I develop this plot of land? You can’t say, “Well, yeah, we’re going to protect that area and that town and we can develop here.”

So that kind of jockeying, that kind of interplay, that kind of negotiation cannot happen at the local level, even with the most well-meaning of folks. And I think that we’re seeing that in how the housing movement has really turned its attention in this country from trying to get these locality by locality wins towards focusing on state level action. The biggest amount of pressure that I’ve seen in the last couple of years has been in state houses across the country because people are realizing you cannot go council member by council member and try to resolve a housing crisis. You need to start higher up.

But I think that there’s a bigger even problem in local government, which is just this fundamental problem of representation. Nobody votes in local government, and I’m not going to yell at you for this because I know everyone yells at everyone for this. Nobody knows who their local elected officials are. Hyper local elected officials, maybe you know some of them, but you don’t know all of them. I don’t know all of the local elected officials that exist. I have to go on my phone and Google every time there’s a local election in DC, I’m in the voting booth going, “OK, who is this person? Can I find any information on them somewhere? Has the urbanist group endorsed them? Has an environmental group said anything about them?” You’re doing all of this work because unlike with federal campaigns, and often even with statewide campaigns, this kind of information is not readily available to you.

But most importantly, even if you wanted to be a super informed voter, you really couldn’t be. Where would you find this information? There aren’t really avenues for you to access this, even if there are local papers. Someone’s not really covering every single zoning board race. There’s not the kind of coverage that you would need in order to really evaluate whether someone was able to do their job well or not. But even more concerning is even if you had an army of grad students at every single zoning board in the country and historic preservation committee taking notes, could they even accurately identify who is responsible for the bad outcomes?

Sorry, I’m not supposed to mention Donald Trump. But when Donald Trump says, “I’m going to do tariffs.” Everyone knows what’s happening. That’s the President of the United States. He’s saying he’s able to enact that policy by himself and he’s going to do it. There’s a very clear attribution of what’s happening and why. But when homes are ballooning in price, who do we blame? Do we blame the person who right now is mayor and didn’t build enough housing, but maybe they built some housing? Do you blame the Historic Preservation Committee because they made it a bit too hard to conform to some certain design standards? Do you blame a zoning board chair? Do you blame the school board?

It’s impossible to really attribute who’s actually responsible for this outcome in a way that could allow for democratic feedback loops to really come into play. And the way that you see this coming out is that even people who engage in local government are coming to races that are almost entirely unopposed. I wrote these numbers down because I wasn’t going to remember them, but in 2020 61% of city council races, 78% of county races, 62% of school board races, and 64% of judges were unopposed elections. There was a study done about elected prosecutors that found that 95% of the time, if you were running for reelection, you would win. And 85% of the time they were running for reelection unopposed.

So even if you were to become the best civically engaged person in the world, you were to know and able to perfectly attribute who had caused all the problems in local government, who was causing the housing crisis, who was causing all the homelessness, et cetera, you would not be able to even make your voice meaningfully heard in local government, the place where everyone says you can have the biggest impact. So this crisis, I think is something that I think goes under addressed. And I think most people don’t think about it when they think about crises of democracy. Rightfully so. Our attention is drawn to other places right now, but I think part of the problem is that we don’t even see what’s going on in local government. And so because it’s so quiet, because we don’t have a lot of engagement in the space and we don’t have people voting, and we don’t have media paying attention to it, that becomes a recurring problem.

And when you do have people engaging, you do see that there’s a massive representational issues and that 65 and older, that’s who’s voting in local races. Who Votes For Mayor Project, Portland State University did this a while ago, and they found that in the 65 and older residents in the poorest and least educated parts of the city were two to five times more likely to vote than 18 to 35 year olds in the wealthiest and most educated parts of the city. That creates massive problems in how elected officials view their job. I’m not saying people 65 and older don’t deserve, of course, a voice in politics, but this kind of imbalance creates a problem whereby government is influenced by people who are most adverse, they’re at the end of their working life, or nearing the end of their working life. They care less about economic growth opportunities bringing in new businesses here. They care more about beautification, maintaining things in their final decades of life, wanting to have less risky. I mean, some neighborhoods in DC make it impossible for bars to even be loud after 10 PM.

These are the types of anti-urban, anti-young people, anti-future policies that you have to balance against people who are younger, who care about their jobs, who care about their future, who are less invested in the aesthetic goals of 20 or 30 years ago. These things are not balanced in local government, and when you look at higher levels of government, you can actually see this working a lot better. So local government is the place, I think people don’t realize, is controlling how land use is done in this country. And I’ve talked a lot about housing. We’re talking about housing today. But this doesn’t just apply to housing, this applies to energy. This applies to transportation. Why is it so difficult to get California high-speed rail built in this state here?

There are a lot of problems. I’m not going to attribute it to one thing, but the fragmented nature of local government in this state means that every single time that project wants to get a permit, it can’t just go, “OK, we’re getting a permit for this entire section of land here. Every single local government needs to be OK when the state’s coming and saying, we’re permitting this project. This is a good project. You need to compensate the landowners. You need to make sure you’re following certain guidelines. You can’t be polluting. You’re within certain standards, but still you get the permit because California gave it to you.” That project has to go locality by locality begging them to give them a permit. And if they don’t get that permit, they basically need to just give them whatever it costs in order to get them on board.

And that’s how you get a line that’s costing $70, $100 billion to go from Fresno to Bakersfield. I mean, it’s absolutely ridiculous. And this is not something that happens in other countries. I have a friend who works in the transportation space and he was talking to a Swedish transportation planner about this process. And this guy legit would not believe him that you did not get right of way if you had already gotten permitting from the national government. He would not believe it. He’s like, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. No one would ever do transportation policy this way. This kind of localization doesn’t exist.” And it doesn’t exist in the rest of the world other than maybe India. We have 90,000 units of local government in this country. 90,000 units. That is not normal.

That’s not what’s happening in Germany. It’s a federalized country. It’s not happening in France. It’s not happening in any of the Swedish countries we’re talking about. It’s not happening in East Asian countries. This is an anomaly and it is causing most of the problems because you can’t get that kind of centralized decision making and taking hard choices, even if people want to get aligned and build high-speed rail. Even if there’s statewide federal money being put on the line, people wanted high-speed rail to happen, and it’s not going to happen. I’m going to go on the record here. I do not think there’s going to be a high-speed rail line from the Los Angeles to San Francisco.

So that was a lot of things about a lot of things about local government. But the one thing I want to leave you with is people often hear this and they go, “I just need to get more involved in local government. We could just fix this if we all decided to show up to all our zoning board meetings and really advocate for policies we care about.” And I’m not going to tell you not to do that. I think you should do your civic duty, whatever. But I think that there’s this quote that always sticks with me from Robert Dahl where he says, “Like other performers, including teachers, ministers, and actors, politicians and political agents are prone to overstate the interest of the audience and their performance.” We should probably add journalists to this too.

But the reason this quote sticks with me is because there’s this sense that there’s something wrong with the populace. That the lack of local civic engagement is a reflection of our failures as our civic duty is weakened, that we need to be revitalized. I remember when I was in college, they would have us go to these participatory democracy seminars where I had to argue with the most right-wing guy in the class. And I was like, “I hate democracy. This is horrible.” And they kept saying, “If you were just a better person, you would just do participation.” But it’s not a reflection of our failures, that government isn’t working for us. This system wasn’t meant to hear everyone’s voices and actually create outcomes that work for everyone. It is literally created, and it is this kind of fragmentation only exists to make it difficult to get big things done to solve big problems affirmatively.

Paul Pierson: Thank you. OK, a couple of things before we launch into questions. Again, a reminder, if you’ve got a question you want to ask, fill out a note card and give it to one of our staff people and they will bring it up to bring it up to me. I’ve got a bunch of questions so I could ask questions all day about these presentations, but we don’t want that. So we’d like to get to your questions. And then the other thing I should just say quickly at this point is just a big shout-out to all the Bestie staff for being here and making this event happen. Eva, Erin, Amanda, Sam, Diane, none of this could have happened without you guys, so thank you for doing all that.

OK, so I do want to spend a bunch of time asking you guys about democracy and how we think about democracy and the way that you guys think about democracy. But I actually thought, and mostly I’m going to focus this on more contemporary stuff, even though the history is remarkable, read Yoni’s book for sure. But I think all of us want to figure out how do we get unstuck. So we want to focus on that. But one aspect with the history I did want to get to just before we turn to talking about this question about democracy and local democracy, and that’s about the role of race, which Yoni touched on in talking about, in particular, the California experience.

But so one of the interesting things about how unusual the American case is and the power of these local governments, and again, I was trying to impress this on my students today. I was teaching them about American federalism, and I was trying to explain American federalism is actually really, really unusual. But local jurisdictions, they have no status in the American constitution. States have a big status in the American constitution, but local governments, they’re creatures of the states. So I think that actually makes it-

Jerusalem Demsas: Municipal associations get very angry when you say this to them, by the way.

Paul Pierson: Yeah. OK, well you can tell me about that then. All right. So that makes it kind of doubly puzzling what you’re describing. And so just a quick passage from Jerusalem’s book where she writes, “Preferences that flourish out of a desire to separate Americans by race have evolved into a labyrinthine exclusionary and localized system that is at the heart of the housing crisis.” And so I just wanted to give you guys a chance to maybe talk a little bit more about the role of race in both creating this system, and as you were also suggesting, I think, Jerusalem, maybe also sustaining it.

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah, so I mean, Yoni talked about how Chinese exclusion really spurs us in California. What we also see is during the Great Migration, when we see African Americans come from the south to northern cities, just an explosion of land use regulations that result from that move. That there is an immediate desire block by block to segregate by race, to not have people who are coming in from the south seeking a better life to have access to these northern cities that are becoming boom towns. I mean, there’s the causal evidence for this. And I think it’s funny now because most NIMBYs, I mean we’re talking about in progressive areas, I actually think they don’t have problems living next to Black people. They don’t have problems living next to Asian people. They have problems living next to poor Black people. They have problems living next to middle class Black people and middle class Asian people. And I was reading about the concerted effort that it took to get Americans OK with living next to people of different races and how the civil rights movement had to really shop around and find the most palatable.

I mean, I used to say like Cosby, but that’s not true anymore. But that kind of person to make you feel like, oh, so this person next door, they are just like me. And you see all this happening. I mean, Don’t Blame Us is a great book by Lily Geissmer about the Boston suburbs. And if you’re interested in this history in the 1970s, definitely go read it. And you see the work being done by affordable housing advocates and civil rights advocates to get these middle class doctors to come be the first people to move into these areas and get people acclimated to it.

And now, when I read those transcripts of how people would talk about Black Americans, Chinese Americans, anyone who wasn’t really kind of a wasp moving into their neighborhood, and I hear now how people talk about the idea of a middle class person even moving into their neighborhood. It is remarkably similar. People will out loud say things like, “Sure, but this just a different culture of person coming in here. They’re going to affect the neighborhood in a way where they’re going to have their boom … I mean literally their boom boxes are going to be really loud.” Or whatever it is. And it’s something where I’m like, there has to be, I think a similar sort of class movement in this space to acclimate people to the idea. Yeah, not every middle class person is this caricature you’ve built in your head from, I don’t know, TV and The Wire or something, but there’s a level to which people are right now do not actually think it is wrong to segregate by class. They are fine and very comfortable saying, I mean, I was at this, at this dinner with a bunch of rich people who were telling me why they were NIMBYs in Connecticut and they were like, “Yes, but it’s different with poor people because we bought into this to have a nice place. So you need to be able to buy into this nice place.”

So this link between my place will be degraded if someone even earning $100,000 less than me moves in there and you’re like a millionaire. I mean, it’s kind of bizarre, but I mean this is what we see in Atherton where we see Mark Andreessen who is someone who’s a proponent of building things and incumbents need to be broken down. And the idea that a few millionaires could move into giant town homes, it makes him and his wife irate and that sort of thinking that these kinds of class divisions are actually real in a way that race wasn’t real. It makes me think we’ve kind of forgotten what happened with race. The very same arguments were being made about Black people, about Asian people, about people who weren’t wasps all the time.

So I mean, to me, the story of American zoning, I mean, again, it starts with a Supreme Court case in Louisville, Kentucky where you were not allowed to sell your house to a Black person if the block was already majority White and then they overturned that explicit racial zoning and then it becomes we can just do this by class. Atlanta it’s very, it’s not funny, but it’s kind of funny. And they’re like the places that used to say, “Whites only,” they just change it to R1, which is residential one. It’s still in zoning code now, the exact same places. And so this class segregation is a direct descendant of racial segregation that was just facially unconstitutional.

Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah, that’s really well put. They’re indistinguishable from the beginning. Right? In America, if you’re going to segregate by class, you are segregating a large measure by race. And so many of the early zoning laws, you start Modesto with a Chinese exclusion. Los Angeles then does the same thing with its laundries in 1906, jumps to New York often these are anti-immigrant laws in their early guys, which in the early 20th century does mean at least in the minds of their drafters segregating by race.

Here in Berkeley, you get the nation’s first single family zoning ordinance and it comes from a guy who is like many others, he’s from a family, Berkeley booms after the earthquake, people discover that they can commute back and forth to San Francisco. He has nothing against height. He’s working in a nine-story building as an architect during the day in San Francisco, but he’s commuting home across the Bay and what he does not want and what he’s very explicit about not wanting is he doesn’t want the working class coming home with him to Berkeley.

He talks about the inferior floating rental class and wanting to keep it out of his community. And because he’s an architect and not a lawyer, he doesn’t know that it’s blatantly unconstitutional to draft a single family zoning ordinance, which is why nobody else has tried it in America to that point because it’s usually lawyers who draft these things. But he goes through with it anyway and is going to, somebody has built an apartment building down just down Piedmont Ave. He lives on Piedmont Ave in Elmwood. He’s really upset that down the block somebody has built an apartment building in his backyard and so he gets the state to pass an enabling statute and then Berkeley to draft an ordinance. And then he writes the report for the committee in Berkeley and designates America’s first single family zoning ordinance in Elmwood as a way to keep working class immigrants out of his community.

That is just fundamentally intertwined with the history of zoning. And if the question is zoning about race or class, the answer is really I think yes, it is about race and class and the two things are very hard to separate in the American context. Even if today it is true that in many of the tightly zoned very affluent communities, you have a high measure of racial diversity. You can have rich people, professional class people of every ethnicity and background and people are fine with that, but that is not representative of the American public at large. It remains the case that the people who are negatively impacted by really restrictive zoning are overwhelmingly racial minorities because of the class structure in America. So these things are very tightly intertwined and I don’t think there’s a way to tease them apart at some level.

Jerusalem Demsas: What’s that guy’s name? We should out him, what’s his name?

Yoni Appelbaum: Call him not by name, but there are, Charles Cheney was the original. So Charles Cheney here today, we can go after Charles Cheney today, and he really believed this and then evangelized for another communities that you could, he didn’t want California to be like the East coast, which was full of immigrant apartment buildings. He wanted this to be an entire state full of single-family homes. And to some substantial extent that vision wins in California to the detriment of California.

Paul Pierson:

OK, so let’s talk a little bit about democracy. And I think you guys are both very effectively withering in your analyses of limitations of local democracy. The idea that the foundation of democracy is local democracy and you both have pithy ways of putting it. Yoni has the title of one of his chapters is a Plague of Localists and Jerusalem writes about the macro-micro disconnect like the parts of our brain and our vision of the world that are activated when we only focus on the local. So I’m persuaded, and also by the idea that this is actually quite unusual to the US that people really see local democracy as kind of the cornerstone of democracy.

We had Ezra Klein out here last year and he was talking about Tokyo and how different and he said, “So in Japan, in Japan, they don’t think of Tokyo as belonging to the residents of Tokyo. They think of it as belonging to Japan.” And so they built a ton of housing. I think it’s still the biggest metropolitan area in the world.

They built a ton of housing. It’s affordable to live in Tokyo because there’s this basic orientation. It’s all very persuasive. I don’t think it rings … It’s going to resonate with most Americans. I think it’s hard to make that resonate with most Americans, right? I mean, there’s tons of survey research that would suggest that people feel much better about their local governments, then they feel somewhat less good about their state government and then they feel much worse about the federal government. How do you make the argument to people, how do you make that resonate in American culture to say, “Hey, we really need to push decision making up to a level that’s not so local.”

Jerusalem Demsas: So I am not a politician, nor do I advise them. I just get really angry and I write articles. But when I look at what’s happening in other places, I don’t think you have to convince everyone to hate local government in order to make this work. Just I think what you see now is that activists are focusing on engaging with state governments and you have to make it clear to state governments that their interests are at stake here, right? So you have a problem where the political science literature on whether voters actually hold their elected officials accountable for failing is quite depressing. But one thing that you do see is that there are some findings that show governors when the economic outcomes of a state unemployment are relatively better, they do better. And when they’re relatively worse than other states nearby, they do worse. And you see this sometimes replicated with mayors as well.

So governors are very concerned about being held accountable for the economic outcomes that voters see them as responsible for. And they are finally really, really mad at their local governments for making them the scapegoat of their own problems. And I’ve talked with governors about this issue and they will say, “Obviously housing is a regional problem. Obviously housing is regional.” And of course their voters are mad about homelessness crises. They’re mad about cost of living that’s happening in their states. I mean, even now voters are holding the presidential candidates responsible for housing decisions that are being made in their own backyard, they don’t realize are the result of their local governments. So I think essentially, what’s going to happen is the political system is going to force state governments to state legislators, to make local governments care about this issue and work on it. Because as you mentioned, there’s no US constitutional authority granted to local governments.

So at the end of the day, even though I’m railing against local governments, I’m really railing against state governments that are allowing localities to do this. If you’re completely in charge. I mean right now if the state of California wanted it could truly choose to dissolve local governments. US federal government can’t do that with states legally, I don’t know, but they can’t do that with states. But local governments do not have any kind of authority outside of some state constitutions where even then you can actually amend those constitutions and take those authorities away. So to me, I think that it’s really, really bad these local governments are doing think they should feel bad about themselves. They think they shouldn’t do these kinds of things. But I think from a political perspective, you just have to get states to start caring.

Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah, I mean all of that I think is exactly right. One thing that you’ve written is that at each level that you go up town, county, state, federal, in an election, the broader and more participatory and more representative the electorate becomes, right? So often we think about local decision making as empowering people. It gets championed and giving voice to the voiceless, allowing communities to represent themselves. That is not how it works in practice. And the only thing that is less representative than a municipal electorate is the cross-section of people who show up at a local hearing, right? Every level you climb down, the electorate gets more affluent, it gets older, it gets Whiter, and it’s increasingly comprised of homeowners as opposed to renters. So the more local and parochial you make the interests, the less representative the community that is weighing in. And I think that people are, most of us don’t think about it this way.

There’s this sort of this illusion of local control where it’s like, well, if it’s my local community making the decision, I’ve got more say in it. I find that talking about that actually is not a bad thing to do that as people think, yeah, I didn’t vote in the local election. I did show up in the presidential race that there are levels in which my voice is being heard here and that can actually be good.

The other thing that is really tough to resolve though, is that, I mean local communities are not in the constitution, but one reason they’re not there is they were sort of assumed that the constitution is a compact among states. The local communities were in many cases functionally, legally, they were corporations of the states functionally, they were often sovereign. They ran things on their own, they set the boundaries of their membership.

They could warn out at the time of the founding they could worn out residents they didn’t want. That was sort of a assumed element of the system. So it’s deep in our political DNA, it’s really hard to overcome. I don’t think we’re getting rid of local government tomorrow. What is not deep in our political DNA is local land use law, right? Up until 100 years ago, it was not legal. It was not constitutional for local communities to try to regulate almost anything about how private landowners use their land other than if they were using that land in some way that hurt their neighbors. The nuisance standard was the legal test that you apply. So if I want to put a tannery on my land or a brickyard and I’m hurting my neighbors from the runoff, from the smells, that’s something a local community can regulate.

But a local community did not have the power to say, “You can’t turn that one family home and into two-family home. You can’t tear down the two-family home and put up an apartment building.” Simply didn’t exist. It is very recent that this is anywhere in America. It’s not really until the New Deal that it becomes nationwide. There are many people living today who are born into a country in which you could build on your private property, what you chose to build on that property. So I think that if you’re going to focus the eye on local government here, part of it is about reframing who makes the decisions, but the bigger part of it is recovering just how recent these changes are, just how profoundly they’ve reshaped our society and just how reversible they are.

You can still have a local government, you just don’t have to let, I mean the reason they’re building so much in Japan is that zoning there is a federal power. Japan, from 1970 until about 2000 Tokyo was on the same trajectory as New York increasing challenges to any new construction, decreasing permits issued, rising housing prices and the feds intervene in Japan and they say, “OK, the most restrictive zoning that you can now apply anywhere in the city has street-level retail and multifamily housing above it. Nothing more restrictive than that. You can slap that label anywhere you want on the map of Tokyo, we have 11 other categories you can choose from there even less restrictive, but there’s going to be no single-family zoning here. You’re going to be able to build as of right with light manufacturing, street-level retail, multifamily housing, go.”

And that turns the Tokyo housing market around and Tokyo again becomes an engine of economic development within Japan. So these are recent choices that we’ve made as a country. They are unusual choices to Jerusalem’s point and they’re reversible choices.

Paul Pierson:

I’m going to ask one more and then I’m going to turn to the questions that we’ve gotten here from the audience, so hopefully maybe interject a little bit of a note of optimism. What do you guys think of the rise of the YIMBYism, which I would say is to me pretty striking in the degree of progress that is made, certainly in terms of the kinds of conversations that people are having around these issues in a really short period of time. If we have time later, I could drive you up and down Shaddock Avenue in Berkeley and just, I like to do, I’m into this stuff. I like driving down and I say, “There’s a new apartment building, there’s a new apartment building. There are a lot of new apartment buildings going up.” So I don’t know if the glass is half empty or half full from your perspective, but it does feel like there’s been a shift, a significant shift in the conversation in a relatively short period of time. And I’m just interested in what you guys think about that?

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah, when I first started thinking about these problems, I started calling political scientists to ask them about this issue. They were just like, “Oh yeah, we all know this is a problem. It’s just like irresolvable. They were just like, yeah, I mean there’s a huge problem in democratic governance of land at the local level, but what are you going to do about it? NIMBYs are totally in charge of local government. You could never fix that. You should move on and work on something else.” That was the prevailing viewpoint of not just political scientists who paid attention to these issues. I mean, again, I found this book by this brown professor who has passed away, Mark Danielewski about, I’m forgetting the name of the book, but it was the 1970s, and he’s basically just writing. “If you allow zoning ordinances to reduce the supply of housing, you will see mass racial and class segregation in American cities.”

And in 1970s, before you see this happening in San Francisco and before Silicon Valley’s, before the big booms in Boston suburbs, etc. Like most of these places are still pretty affordable. It was not confusing what would happen if you restricted the supply of housing such that only a few people would get access to housing. This was known. And so the thing that is really surprising is that now anyone is doing anything about it, and it’s something that I think it’s worth puzzling out what’s going on here. I mean, I think a few things. One, is that the population of people who began to be affected by housing costs in high-opportunity areas stopped just being lower and lower middle-income people. For a long time, very poor people have had a housing crisis in San Francisco, for a long time lower middle-class people have been priced out of these areas.

But once it becomes yuppies, once it becomes college-educated kids, your kids who you’re like, I bought a house here and now there’s no way my 25-year-old could afford to rent near me or near where I was going to be. They have to move further away. That becomes a different political dynamic. This is a voting block that is very, very important and is becoming more and more active, especially as Millennials enter their prime home buying years in the last five years or so. And that becomes a political force in local and state government in a way they weren’t before because they weren’t homeowners. And so I think that’s really important.

The other thing that’s really important is eventually people are willing to travel a good amount. They’ll commute to get to a good job, they’ll commute even up. I mean, the rule of thumb is like the max commuting zone is two hours. Most people won’t do this, but that’s kind the max commuting zone. You could expect someone if they really, really want a job to do. We basically either built that out or we banned housing in much of that area. Once you built that out, then you start seeing much of this pressure happening like before, OK, you move to the exurb, it’s not great, but it’s not the end of the world to have to sit in an hour of traffic to get to work. That’s what people were doing in DC and Los Angeles, etc.

But once it gets beyond that, once people stop actually coming in, once you have a workforce development issue and you start seeing some businesses are getting involved in why is there no longer a way for me to hire people to come work for me? I mean, there’s a ridiculous case right now in Vail, Colorado where they literally cannot get people who can work the resorts because they don’t have affordable housing there, and yet they still voted down.

Anyway, this is not optimistic. But the optimistic thing I think, is that there are political dynamics that are changing here, and also that local government is so unrepresentative that basically a small group of people can hijack the system. And that’s what you’re seeing I think with YIMBYs, is that there’s not massive amounts of people now coming out to these zoning board meetings and now it’s representative. It’s just like there’s now a counterweight to the unrepresentative NIMBYs. Now you have the unrepresentative YIMBYs there too, so there’s cover for someone to do the right thing.

Yoni Appelbaum: The most crowded and contentious local hearing I’ve ever attended in my life, and I worked in municipal government covered municipal government was when Cambridge, Massachusetts tried to ban Uber, and the line was literally around the block. If you want to quickly launch a political movement in this country, really piss off affluent professionals and degrade their quality of life and they will come out and force. And there is a way in which that is what the YIMBY movement is testifying to is that because this was a crisis located in blue cities, because it was young people, it squeezed particularly hard. It wasn’t the incumbents who’d bought their house back in 1975. That’s where the organizing energy was, and I give a lot of credit to some of the public intellectuals who first sort of highlighted this, put it on the radar, people help them make sense that their individual struggles and finding housing were part of a broader pattern. That was part of the story.

That other thing though, I would say is that it’s really hard to change people’s minds. You usually get big political change in this country as a matter of generational succession. We are currently still governed by the Baby Boom generation to a surprising extent, particularly at the municipal level as Jerusalem was pointing out, and that is a generation that came of age with a few basic political truths, particularly on the left. You have to fight the man. Growth is bad and profit is inherently suspicious. I think that among many younger voters, there’s a different set of political truths. They worry not about growth per se, they worry about the climate. They worry about not being able to build densely and sustainably. They worry less about sticking it to the man than they do about trying to create the kinds of communities in which they can thrive. They worry about the declining diversity of their communities. Their orientation toward political problems is really different. And so to the extent that this is a movement that is taking flight, it is-

And so to the extent that this is a movement that is taking flight, it is taking flight in part because of the changing demographics of the country. I expect that with each subsequent year, as those younger voters comprise a larger and larger portion of the electorate, you’ll see more and more support for these kinds of pro-growth and pro-density policies. And that’s until you get these, right? So whatever the problems out of the growth-oriented mindset are the kids of the people who are currently showing up at these hearings to testify in favor of development, they can go back the other way.

Paul Pierson:

Yeah. The academic version of that is science advances one obituary at a time which is an idea that I found more persuasive a couple of decades ago than I do now. So questions from the audience. So a couple here that I can group that I think are riffs on something Yoni said, which is this is a self-induced crisis of progressivism. So one member of the audience writes, “Why do you both believe that restrictive zoning regimes and other small D checks in development are so much more prevalent in progressive jurisdictions?” Right? And somebody else asked up on another element of this is, “To what extent, if any, do you think the failure to build housing in progressive jurisdictions has motivated support for Donald Trump?”

Yoni Appelbaum: I’ll take a first stab at this. I think that the reason that this is particularly crisis and progressive jurisdictions is that progressives believe that government can be a force for good in the world, and so many of these regulations are intended to achieve no volumes. Progressives also over the last 30 years, really have moved towards centering a concept of harm. That is, if a policy can be shown to have an adverse effect, there ought to be a mechanism for blocking the policy. But that gets to the boundary problem that Jerusalem was talking about a minute ago. It may be bad for people on the block if an undeveloped lot where their kids are playing gets developed, there is harm there, and therefore, progressive jurisdictions empower people to block that development. There are lots of unseen harms, right? The guy from Alabama who’s not moving to change his life, not putting his daughter in your kid’s elementary school, he’s being harmed in a way that will utterly alter the trajectory of his life and of his daughter’s life.

But he’s not included within the boundary. So this is why this is such a problem of progressive jurisdictions. They believe in government, they believe in using it to achieve good, and they believe in using it to minimize harm. But the way that we’ve drawn the boundaries really makes that calculus one where the ultimate harms can be quite different, right? Like CQA was originally a law here in California intended to restrain sprawl. There has been no more effective mechanism of sprawl in California than the CQA. It made it almost impossible to build in places with existing residents than push the development out. So you can see that perverse dynamic that this generates. Do I think that this is causing support for Donald Trump? I mentioned earlier the study of what happens to people when they move, right? If somebody says, “I intend to move.” And they move, they grow more optimistic, more future-oriented.

What I love about that research is they also followed up with all the people who said that they intended to move and then did not. And their trajectory was really different. They grew more cynical, more alienated from their communities, more withdrawn socially and detached from local organizations. They also reoriented themselves toward a zero-sum mindset in which others gains were coming at their expense. I know that in 2016, people who had never left their hometown, where I believe 26 points more likely to vote for Donald Trump than those who had been able to move. You can look across a broad range of indicators here, and what you see is support for Donald Trump is up the most in places where mobility is down the most. People in those places report seeing the world with a zero-sum mindset where things like immigration and mobility are perceived as threats. I remember talking to one person who said, “I’m against change in my community because every time it changes in my community, it gets worse.”

If that is your experience of the world, if you’ve been stripped of the agency that you expected to have as American, if you didn’t get your slice of the American dream because you weren’t able to move toward the opportunities that you expected to have, you may not be able to put your finger on it. You may not say, “Zoning regulation screwed me out of the life I was supposed to have.” But you know that something has gone wrong, and you’re right to be pissed about it, right? There is real anger in the country because large parts of the country are stuck economically. They are not having the lives that even their parents had much less their grandparents. And that anger, Donald Trump has a positive genius for identifying and exploiting grievance. And there was an enormous well of grievance in this country from the people who had been shut out and had come to bitterly resent the areas where they could see people leading the lives they wish they had, but not letting them move in to be their neighbors.

Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah, I think that there’s basically a necessary prerequisite for people to feel open to immigrants, other people’s different ways of life, pluralism, is they have to feel like it doesn’t come at a threat to their own interest and the interests of the people they care about. This sort of zero-sum thinking, I read this article for The Atlantic after, it just didn’t make it into the book. It’s post the most recent election. There were a lot of people who felt that new immigrants were taking homes away from them and from people in their communities. And the thing that’s interesting about this is that increased demand does increase prices if supply remains stagnant or does not keep up. So they’re not wrong. When you see an increase of newcomers, whether they’re immigrants or yuppies or whoever it is coming into your community and the amount of housing remains stable, those people’s demand is competing with your demand.

And then the question is, are you going to be the kind of high-minded person who goes, “OK, I know about supply-side economics and I understand that it’s important to place the blame in the hands of the people who are blocking new supply, and thus in 10 or 20 years, then there will be enough supply for me and my children.” Probably not. Even if you’re a really, really good person who doesn’t hate immigrants, I think a big reason why you’re seeing this turn against immigration, even from self-professed liberals. I mean, I was talking to someone who was an affordable housing lawyer in Brooklyn. I mean, she’s in a rent control department. She’s been there for 70 years, or sorry, she’s 70 years old. She’s been there for 50 years. And she was talking to me and she’s a very liberal person, very, very oppressive person and she witnessed seeing the migrant wave coming to downtown in Midtown Manhattan.

And she was just like, “Oh, this is a massive affordable problem.” This is someone who understands the housing industry, is pro-housing, is pro-development. And this, she became polarized against it, witnessing what she saw as, “There’s not enough housing for these people. They just can’t come here.” I think that we need to not expect as liberals, as progressives, as whatever, how you’d identify, to believe that people are going to overcome when they’re being asked to pay for in expense of increased housing costs, their kids not being able to live here, et cetera, new people coming in, pluralism, et cetera. So to me, I don’t think that if people embrace a pro-housing agenda, that means that liberalism will reign forever and we can just sit back. But I do think that you cannot get other liberal priorities through if people don’t feel comfortable with the amount of economic growth and opportunity that’s available to them. And the biggest thing they pay for every month is their housing costs.

Paul Pierson:

I think we’ve got time for one more. There are a ton of good questions here, but this is about inequality and thinking about inequality in this context. I’m going to paraphrase a little bit, but the member of the audience says, “What needs to happen for us to create more equal and equitable city infrastructure and landscapes, equal in terms of access to resources, housing prices, and also air pollution from local industry, green space, et cetera?” And I’ll just connect to that. I thought there were interesting inequality issues raised in both of your accounts posing somewhat different dilemmas or tensions that we need to wrestle with. So Jerusalem, for you, and you raised this question in the book. A lot of opportunity now is actually in suburbs because that’s where the best schools are on average. It’s probably easier to build housing in the already dense places because people who live in dense places, David’s research suggests this, they don’t mind a little bit more density, whereas in the suburbs you get a lot more resistance to it.

They move to places like that in part because they don’t want to be in dense places. So how does one think about, I mean, there are big inequality implications I think, of dealing about that dilemma. And the one for you, Yoni, you just talked about this very briefly in the book, but I think it’s really interesting. So if you increase mobility and you make it possible for people to migrate where there are opportunities, what is that going to mean for the communities that they leave? And you suggest really quickly, “Well, it’s actually going to be good for them because the housing prices will go down there and there’ll be less competition for things.” But I kind of wondered about that. I think you look at what’s happened not just in the US, but in a lot of countries, left behind places. If you open up mobility, a lot of the most productive people in those communities are going to leave and what is going to be a left behind? So I don’t know. General thoughts about inequality and where it fits into these stories.

Jerusalem Demsas: Sure. So a big question about inequality and how to improve urban form in there. So I think there are a couple of things to keep in mind. First is that something that I think is present a lot of what Yoni was talking about earlier is there’s this desire within progressive spaces to optimize for so many different factors when trying to do anything. When you’re trying to resolve a crisis of affordability, the more things you try to optimize for outside of that, the more difficult it becomes to solve even the original problem. This doesn’t mean that you let everything die. It’s not saying we should have slave labor in order to build a new housing, but there’s a level to which there’s not, I think, an awareness of this in liberal jurisdictions because you have a highly educated populace and there are folks who are used to going like, “Oh, I’m sure I could just figure out every single variable and then perfectly optimize for it and then get there.”

And that sort of thinking creates a problem wherein you’re now not just trying to solve an affordability crisis, you’re trying to fix tree canopy, you’re trying to fix, you’re trying to optimize for the exact aesthetic makeup of an area. And all of these things can be important to different extents, but we have to decide whether or not we’re in a housing emergency or not. Is it an emergency where the most important thing is to get homeless people into permanent supportive housing or is it not? It’s not an emergency, and it’s OK to wait a little bit in order to make sure you’re paying the prevailing wage. Wait a little bit to make sure the facade is appropriate with historic preservation. Wait a little bit to make sure that you’re not cutting down too many trees. There’s some level of all of these things that you should do.

You shouldn’t throw away all of these other concerns, but how much should we invest in these different concerns when I think most Californians, when they’re polled are told, are saying they think it’s unacceptable that there are tent encampments in their cities. And so I think that that’s something to keep in mind when we’re thinking about optimizing for other concerns. The other thing I’ll say is this, I care a lot about residential segregation. That is the main reason why I started working on these issues. When my family came to this country, the place we ended up living, it’s actually a very exclusionary suburb called Potomac, Maryland. Very, very good school system there. And I never really thought about when I was growing up, I was like, there’s one townhouse development that we live in and every other Black person lives in. The rest of it is white.

I’m like, I never really thought about what was going on there. But later I looked it up and I started working in housing and I realized that some progressive planners had created an inclusionary zoning requirement that said, “If you’re going to develop these massive single family homes, you have to create a middle income housing opportunity.” And that is the only reason I lived in that place and I had access to those schools. And then later, someone else densified Rockville, Maryland. And when my parents got divorced, I was able to stay in the school that I was going to because my dad could get an apartment where I could walk to school. If that apartment building had not existed, not only would I have spent less time with both my parents, I would not have been able to go to the school I went to. Who knows, think may have still been fine, but it’s massive impact on people’s lives when you don’t have access to those kinds of opportunities.

So I’m not going to say that I don’t think that’s something that’s important. I think the most interesting and coolest tool for trying to increase class integration in exclusionary suburbs is a cooler tool that’s being tried out by Montgomery County, Maryland, Atlanta, Georgia, which is trying to get big jurisdictions, state housing projects to basically say, “We’re going to fund through bond measures through a revolving fund, we’re going to fund new housing, we’re going to own it. We’re going to have a developer develop the whole house. But because it’s owned by the state, we’re not really trying to make a profit off of it. We just need to cross subsidize.” So you have rich people paying higher rent in there for that poor people and cross subsidization. This has not solve the housing crisis. You cannot get enough production from these sorts of funds order to build 4 million homes, which is the deficit we’re at right now.

But that can be a really, really great tool if states are like, “We’d like to make sure that we have a bunch of housing where the good schools are that’s accessible to people.” You can build that. That’s actually possible for people to do and that can be complementary to a policy that’s saying, “We’re also going to let a bunch of new housing exist wherever the demand is and where developers can build.” So I think you could explore those tools. I think it’s just really important not to let those tools become the thing that you’re doing to resolve the housing crisis because they can’t do that on their own.

Yoni Appelbaum: I’m really glad you asked the question about what happens to communities that people leave. It’s a good question. I can answer it in one of two ways. One would be like a cold-blooded economist. I could say, “Look, historically places in America have boomed and then they have gone bust.” If you have high rates of residential mobility, what happens to the places that have gone bust is yeah, a lot of the young people leave. They send back what in the international context we would call remittances, that is that they send some of their earnings back home to help support the people who for whatever reason have chosen to stay. Their absence tightens the local labor market and drives up wages for those who are still there, pulls people into the workforce who otherwise because of disability or substance abuse issues, as many of these communities would otherwise have been excluded from the workforce.

So I can tell you that empirically, that community will do better with high rates of people flowing out of the community than it does if everybody stays where they are. But I don’t think that’s a sufficient answer. That doesn’t speak to the pain and the loss of watching a community in decline. It doesn’t speak to what it feels like if your kids all go off and move someplace else. I spent a week while I was writing the book, walking around Flint, Michigan and talking to people there. It’s not a rural community, but I went there because there are neighborhoods in Flint. Flint was once the best place you could go to bet on your child’s future. In the Great Migration, it pulls tons of workers up from the south who are seeking better lives for themselves and their kids in Flint and they find it.

And now it is, I mean, I was walking around blocks. I wanted to go to the worst places in America to raise your kids. And Raj Chetty’s Opportunity Atlas showed me census districts in Flint that were in the first percentile, the odds that those kids will earn anything, that they were down in the first percentile for income for the first percentile and mobility relative to where their parents were. And I talked to people because I wanted to know, “Why do you live here?” And people have all kinds of stories. They lived there for a family. They lived there for their church, they lived there for their community. And then you start asking, “Have you ever left Flint?” And you start to get lots of stories. “Yeah, I did. I crashed with a friend in Miami. I got a job.” But then he lost his apartment.

“I couldn’t afford the rent, so I moved back to Flint and I’ve been here ever since.” And you hear many, many variations on that basic story. And so the way I started to think about this was that we tend to get place-based policy wrong because we start with the places, but we ought to be starting with the people. I can sit in my house in Washington DC and imagine that it’d be really great if Flint revived and that we should come up with lots of programs that strongly incentivize people currently in Flint to stay and invest for the future. But then I got to look that dad in the eye who’s living in a place where his kids’ opportunities are in the first percentile and say, “Look, I’ll give you a federal tax incentive if you lash your daughter’s future to this community. I will pay you to stay in a place where your child will have less opportunity.”

When you frame it that way, I think place-based policy becomes a whole lot less attractive. The thing that America did, notably, the thing that drew wave after wave of immigrant to this country was we let people make their own choices. We gave them a sense of agency and said, “Go to the places where you think you can build a better future for yourself. And to the extent that we do that, yeah, there are costs. It’s not good news for the places that are currently in decline and the best hope I have for those places is that many of them have revived historically, but they don’t revive by keeping a large pool of underemployed people who are angry and bitter and resentful about being trapped in that community.

They revive restoring American mobility and having people move there purposefully in order to build a better future for themselves. And you can see this in places like Springfield, Ohio, where it got a large influx of Haitian immigrants for whom Springfield was not a depressed industrial community that was well passed its prime. It was a place that they thought they could build better futures for themselves and their family. The businesses started reviving. People got optimistic. That one didn’t have a happy ending but it is a model for what can happen if you make mobility your principle rather than place-based policy.

Jerusalem Demsas: I think I want to just add a couple of things here. One is that exactly, I mean, in the United States, if you want population increase, you have infinite world demand to have population increase. There are people for whom it is only increasing their quality of life, quadrupling their lifetime income, their outcomes for their children, escaping different horrible outcomes that they might face in their home countries. And there’s a great idea coming out of the economic innovation group’s idea of Heartland Visas where, and there’s some places that do require ask for this, where local governments can say, “We’re facing population decline. We can’t get people to stay. We want vetted former Afghan translators who are helping us. We want Ukrainians who are trying to resettle to come here.” Maine, suburban Maine, Lewistown, Maine is a great example of this where the Somali population, the local rural towns, and this is not like a very, very liberal area or anything like that.

These very rural towns ask for a small influx of Somali immigrants. And it completely revives the community in town increasing not just the economic vibrancy of it. And I’m not saying this happens without any conflict. Of course there’s always conflict when there’s cultural intermixing, but if people want people to move there, this is the United States of America. You can get people to move here. It’s not a problem. And the second thing I’ll add is this. There’s an essay I have in my book called, it’s about where all of the Black people in cities went, right? Everyone talks about this all the time. Gentrification is of course a major concern in urban policymaking. But when you look at the most successful policy that kept people in their communities, it was not allowing middle-class Black Americans to move to the suburbs until the late 1970s and beyond.

What we see after that, I mean, this is something now where people are looking at a lot of these places. If you look across the river in Washington DC, across Santa Costia, and you see a lot of the deprivation that’s there, it’s a heavily African American community. The reason for that is largely because a lot of Black middle-class people who were not allowed to move to the suburbs, left. The solution then would be to not allow them to buy into the upper-income suburbs that they wanted to go to. So whenever people talk about this problem when they’re like, “Oh, it’s such an issue that there are people who are left behind.” I really want them to operationalize what they’re saying.

Are you saying that you think the people who made the decision to pursue a better life in Prince George’s County, Maryland should not have been allowed to do that? Some people will say yes. I think that’s a liberal. But I think the big problem here is that we can have sympathy for places that change, that die and that decay but at the core, I think exactly what Yoni said, I care about people. These places are the people. They’re not inherently valuable outside of that.

Paul Pierson: That’s the academy board.

Yoni Appelbaum: They’re playing us off the stage.

Jerusalem Demsas: They really are.

Paul Pierson: Yeah.

Jerusalem Demsas: So funny.

Paul Pierson: I cannot recommend these books too highly. They are beautifully written, but they also just sparkle with ideas. When we started talking about this, the idea of doing this program, we thought, well, maybe we could get Jerusalem Demsas or Yoni Appelbaum to come out, and then we found out they would both come and talk to us. So we started referring to it as the Dem-Apples meeting. Have you guys not heard that before? You must have heard that before. So how about Dem-Apples? Thank you.

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