Episode 100: The Big 100!! Listener Questions, (Re-)Meet the Hosts, and Book Club

Unknown Speaker 0:00
Housing policy is so cool.

Shane Phillips 0:07
Hello, this is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast, and I'm your host, Shane Phillips. This is, believe it or not, our 100th episode, nearly five years. Thank you, dear listener, for being a part of it. To mark the occasion, we are departing from the usual guest interview format and talking amongst ourselves, just me and my co-hosts. We talk more about how the episode will be structured later, so for the intro, I will just signpost a few things. After a few minutes checking in, the first thing you'll hear in this episode is our book club announcement. Definitely give that a listen, and let me know if you've got any feedback on how we can best include the Housing Voice audience in that experience, those of you who want to be part of the book club anyway. About nine or ten minutes in, we take our first listener request, which is that the hosts reintroduce themselves. Since we've never really done that, we end up taking our time with it. If you want to skip past all of it, the other listener questions start around minute 32. Yes, we talk about ourselves for 20 minutes. But it turns out we've all got some pretty interesting history, and even I learned quite a few things about my co-hosts, so I don't think you'll regret it if you listen through. After we share some of our favorite episodes, the rest of the time is devoted to answering listener questions on research and policy. We ran out of time and left plenty of questions unanswered, but we're definitely doing another of these episodes before too long, so don't worry if yours didn't get answered this time. I answered one last question afterward, just recorded on my own and tacked onto the end, so don't miss that either. Last thing, you'll definitely note that the audio quality is not great on this one, and that's because we all just bunched around a single microphone at the Lewis Center conference table to do the record. Not the highest fidelity approach, but it was a lot of fun. The Housing Voice Podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies with production support from Claudia Bustamante, Brett Berndt, and Tiffany Lieu. Send your questions and feedback to shanephilips@ucla.edu, and as always, if you like the show, give us a five-star rating and a review on Apple or Spotify. With that, let's get to our conversation, period.

All right, let's do this. Yeah, here we go. This is episode 100. We are all here together for the first time ever. Not ever. Ever.

Michael Lens 2:49
It's pretty rare that the four of us are in the same table, especially in the last two years.

Shane Phillips 2:53
Today we're together for the first time for the podcast. We've actually only done one in the past, not with us, but just with a guest, with Vinit. That went well enough. That was fun. So let's do it again.

Michael Lens 3:04
Let's do it again.

Shane Phillips 3:05
Yeah. Woo! Coincidentally, Gavin Newsom just signed SB 79 today. How do we all feel about this?

Paavo Monkkonen 3:12
It's good. Yay.

Michael Lens 3:13
We're supposed to be very sober and intellectual and never take sides on anything, but I think a lot of our research and the research that we tend to consume points in the direction of SB 79 being kind of a necessary tool in the kit. So let's go.

Shane Phillips 3:34
Yeah, I'm excited. I actually think this was the last possible day he could sign bills, so he probably wouldn't do it for us. He wasn't excited about it.

Michael Lens 3:42
Because he's sending me emails about democracy or something. Yeah.

Michael Manville 3:45
Well, the mayor of LA was lobbying him.

Shane Phillips 3:50
Yes, against it. Strongly against it. So after four and a half years and publishing 100 and something hours of content...

Michael Lens 4:00
Unbelievable.

Shane Phillips 4:01
We felt like we should do something special for number 100 here. It is just me and the co-hosts, Professors Mike Manville, Paavo Monkkonen, and Mike Lens, MLM, as you are known in some circles or papers.

Michael Lens 4:15
The density bros, which includes Shane.

Shane Phillips 4:19
That's right. And I'm here too, Shane Phillips. And we're going to turn the spotlight on ourselves a little bit on the podcast itself and on our listeners. So there's no research to talk about, no specific paper, no report, nothing like that. You all, the listener, have sent us a bunch of questions and we're going to answer as many as we can in the next 90 minutes or so.

Michael Manville 4:38
So it's just an exercise in narcissism.

Shane Phillips 4:41
Yes. I think we've earned 100 episodes. I think we have earned that right.

Michael Manville 4:44
have earned that right. If you earn your narcissism, it's not a personality malfunction.

Shane Phillips 4:50
Yes. Side note, since episode one, I've been naming the episodes 001, 002, because I knew we were going to get to 100. Because you know we're going to 999. Yeah. Because if you just do like 01 or 123, the ordering in the file folder gets all messed up. So I knew it was coming. Okay. I guess that implies I did not think we're going to get to 1000.

Michael Lens 5:12 No.

Shane Phillips 5:13
Which is probably correct. But there you go.

Paavo Monkkonen 5:15
By that time, yeah. Four and a half years times 10, I think you're old. Ooh.

Michael Lens 5:18
Yeah, that's a long time. Yes. Wow.

Shane Phillips 5:19
Well, maybe we could just do more. Do them faster.

Michael Lens 5:23
Do them faster. Yeah, that's not well advised.

Shane Phillips 5:26
Before we get to all these questions, we do have some exciting news. We talked about a book club and we have selected the first book of this new series. It is, as I talked about earlier, one of the options I was considering. Yoni Applebaum's Stuck. How the privileged and the propertied broke the engine of American opportunity. The book came out in early 2025 and it's one of my favorite housing books of the past, I'm not sure how long. It's great and I think it's going to make for a lot of great conversations in the coming months and it was so great, in fact, that I actually lost a copy in Seoul while traveling and had to buy another one just to make sure I would have this on my on my bookshelf forever. Our friend Berkeley ultra-nimby Phil Bakavoy makes an appearance in the book. I am very excited for you and the listeners to experience a big Abraham Lincoln reveal. We're taking a selfie right now. We will learn...

Paavo Monkkonen 6:19
Are we broadcasting this on YouTube?

Shane Phillips 6:21
Nope. Nope.

Paavo Monkkonen 6:23
Good.

Shane Phillips 6:24
Yeah, thank God. We will learn to love Tenements and hate Edward Murray Bassett and so much more. I'm really looking forward to rereading it and getting even more out of it through conversations with you guys and with our guests. This is a book club and that means we really want our listeners reading along with us. We're still working out the details but the plan for now is to do four episodes, each covering about a quarter of the book. We will summarize it as we go and each episode will feature a different guest joining to talk about what interested us, what we found funny or crazy or horrifying, where we may quibble with some of the conclusions, and what we think the book tells us about the world today. If this format reminds you of the 99% invisible breakdown of The Power Broker, it should because that was definitely an inspiration. But Stuck is only 320 pages to The Power Broker's 1344, so we're not going to drag this out over a full year. Right now the plan is to knock this out in about four months, one episode each month. Most exciting of all, Yoni Applebaum himself will be joining us for the final episode. That's his chance to defend himself against all the personal and professional attacks. We will have lobbed at him over the previous three months.

Michael Lens 7:32
That's what we do.

Shane Phillips 7:33
That's what we do.

Michael Manville 7:34
I had no idea we were going to launch personal attacks against him.

Shane Phillips 7:36
Oh, it's happening.

Michael Manville 7:37
I don't even know the man.

Shane Phillips 7:38
Yeah, I didn't tell him, but...

Michael Lens 7:40
When I've got nothing, you know, substantive to say, I just go ad hominem, you know, right to the gut.

Michael Manville 7:45
Well, we are professors.

Shane Phillips 7:47
Yoni is probably best known as a writer and deputy executive editor at The Atlantic, but he's also got a PhD in American history. And in my opinion, both parts of that background are really reflected in the quality of the writing and historical research that went into this book. So thank you, Yoni, for being game for this. If you're on board for the club and don't already have the book, our show notes will have a link to the publisher's website. I'm sure you can also find Stuck at just about any bookstore or library. And if you're still unsure, we've also linked to an article in The Atlantic that's adapted from the book. Also, also, we'd really like this to be more engaging than just having you lovely listeners read along and hear what we have to say. I think, to me, the best part of a book club is that everyone gets to chime in. So to make that possible, we're looking into setting up some other venue where we can have more of a dialogue with our listeners and where our listeners can interact with each other too. One option is something like Substack, where we just create a separate post for each episode and everyone can have at it in the comments. Another is a Housing Voice subreddit, but I don't really know much about Reddit, so I may need a guide if we decide to do that. Seems like a big lift. A third option is Discord. Again, that's a little messy, I'm not sure about it. I'm leaning towards Substack because it could also be a place we host a newsletter or other things like that in the future, but definitely reach out to me, email me, or message me on Blue Sky or LinkedIn if you've got feedback on these ideas or have any different ones. And I should say that this is not intended just for the book club. The idea is that we would have a thread for every episode in the future so people can chat and ask questions, and that dialogue can be just a permanent resource for the future. Any questions, doctors?

Paavo Monkkonen 9:31
What about just like an email list where we all reply all a lot? I mean, we're old professors now, so that's how we...

Michael Lens 9:37
Oh! My god. Analog!

Shane Phillips 9:39
Pass.

Michael Manville 9:39
I have a landline with an answering machine, and if anyone just has thoughts about the book, they can leave a message.

Paavo Monkkonen 9:48
Well, the sending a voice memo could be an idea.

Shane Phillips 9:50
I mean, that actually does work. We could at least play people's recordings. I've seen that done before. Okay, so let's get on to some listener questions. First up on Blue Sky, Hannah wrote asking us to reintroduce ourselves as part of this mailbag episode, which seemed like a pretty good place to start. I'm sure a lot of new listeners start with the most recent episode and work back from there. That's usually what I do when I discover something new. So they might have no idea who we are. Hannah's question implies that we must have introduced ourselves thoroughly at some earlier time, and I'm not actually sure that's true. I would say it's been more like a very, very, very long audiobook where you have to learn about the characters in bits and drabs through these oblique references to past work and earlier conversations. So this might be a chance to fix that a little bit. I think first we will go around the room and each quickly sketch out our education, relevant work history, research interests, boring stuff. That may be important for anyone worried we don't have any business talking about housing policy or research. After a few minutes of that, tell us something that's actually interesting about your background. We will go in order from dumbest to smartest, me first. So you guys get to figure out who goes next. So I grew up in Washington state, got my bachelor's from the University of Washington, came to LA to get my master's degree in urban planning at USC. I actually applied to and was accepted into the public administration program because I had never actually done anything in urban planning in any way, and I was worried about finding jobs outside the field if I ended up hating it. I was pretty lucky though because USC had just gotten a giant gift from Sol Price, founder of Price Club, later merged into Costco. So I and many others got a full tuition scholarship that let me add a master's in urban planning free of charge. Like a lot of people in the field, I came to urban planning through an interest in transportation, but by the time I was starting at USC I really started getting a lot more into housing and land use. And I think that was partly out of a growing recognition, again that many people come to, that effective land use planning is sort of a foundation of effective transportation and access to opportunity and upward mobility and environmental protection and on and on and on. But I think I was also drawn to it because it felt more contested than other areas of urban planning, and I think I've learned that I like doing the work of convincing people. So anyway, my first year at USC I interned for Los Angeles council member Jose Huizar, who's now serving 13 years in federal prison on two counts of racketeering and tax evasion.

Michael Lens 12:32
Pretty good. I'm laughing so I didn't even see that coming. I didn't know about that.

Paavo Monkkonen 12:37
I didn't know about that either.

Shane Phillips 12:38
I didn't even earn minimum wage for the record.

Michael Manville 12:41
Although he does curiously drive a very nice car.

Paavo Monkkonen 12:45
Yeah, yeah. I was wondering about that.

Shane Phillips 12:44
I mean I make money now, legally. My second year I worked part time for a small consulting firm and did some development advisory stuff barely, but also managed the nonprofit behind the downtown LA streetcar advocacy, which I then managed full time for a little over a year after graduating. After that I was hired as director of public policy at Central City Association, which is a member-based advocacy organization focused on downtown LA. This was 2017, and I should say by this point I'd been writing at my blog Better Institutions for about five years, and I think that, more than anything, I can credit for my hiring at CCA, which was based on the stuff I was writing, was very downtown focused. I was living in downtown at the time. CCA was a really great job in many ways, and I got to work not just on housing but transportation and parks and energy and many other things, but it was ultimately my job to advocate on behalf of our members, not necessarily what I personally believed in, and over time those two things moved further and further apart. And so this position at UCLA opened up at really just the right time since I was looking for a role where the face I presented to the public actually reflected my own views and where I had a bit more autonomy to decide what kinds of projects I'd work on. I'd also already knew the three of you, I think probably in person a little bit, but definitely by reputation. I remember not long before I had a lunch with Paavo and Juan trying to convince me to apply to the doctoral program, I never did.

Paavo Monkkonen 14:16
We hung out with Alex Fish once too, was that before or after?

Shane Phillips 14:19
I don't know when that was. It was a while ago. Hung out with that guy multiple times. We're buddies.

Michael Lens 14:25
And I feel like you were much more famous than we were then and now, and now you're more famous than us because of the podcast, then you were more famous than us because of housing Twitter, and you're, I think, a fairly large role there.

Shane Phillips 14:44
Yeah, you guys are just too busy to be out in public, huh?

Michael Lens 14:46
We're not that interested.

Shane Phillips 14:47
Yeah, that might have something to do with it. I have a whole bunch of things I also wrote down here about my book, but this is just too much. And so I will say I have a book called The Affordable City. It's really trying to tie together different priorities, different factions in housing policy with mixed success. But it's something that I think really reflects my interest in, again, the sort of communications and messaging side of things. I've had a lot of different jobs just to go through a list here. Busser in a restaurant, delivering pizza, bagging groceries.

Michael Lens 15:28
Oh, I've delivered pizza.

Shane Phillips 15:29
Isn't it a great job? It's a great job. It's so easy. And you make pretty good money.

Michael Lens 15:34
For a while, I was like the manager and the cook. And then I was at a couple of other restaurants as the delivery driver. I was like, why wasn't I doing this whole time? The money's even better.

Shane Phillips 15:44
Yeah.

Michael Lens 15:45
Or even better. The money's not awful.

Paavo Monkkonen 15:47 Comparatively.

Michael Lens 15:49
But the stress is way lower.

Shane Phillips 15:50
You get tips. And you're just driving around in your car, chilling, listening to music, whatever.

Michael Lens 15:54
Meet people.

Shane Phillips 15:56
Well, that's not always great.

Michael Lens 15:57
Not always great, no.

Shane Phillips 15:58
So I did that. I loaded and sorted packages at UPS for several years. I installed cable for Comcast. I did some microbial and genetic research at University of Washington.

Michael Lens 16:08
Where the hell did that come from?

Shane Phillips 16:10
Pretty broad interests. My undergrad degree was in biochemistry. So I think the broad interest plus the interest in complex systems seems to fit with where I ended up, even if biochemistry makes no sense for leading me to housing policy. I guess I've said a few interesting things already. But the one I actually wanted to share, which probably has come up at some point, is that I never graduated high school. I took community college classes for junior and senior year. But I regularly skipped them and failed many. And in my senior year, I was actually just forging my counselor's signature to approve my classes every quarter.

Michael Lens 16:47
Are you supposed to admit that in a public forum?

Shane Phillips 16:48
I think I'm fine now.

Michael Manville 16:50
Statute of limitations.

Michael Lens 16:52
For sure. For sure, yeah.

Shane Phillips 16:52
So because I was just choosing my own classes, I'm not sure even if I had passed all of them that I would have graduated. But I definitely did not and was out of school for several years and only later went back and got my two-year degree before transferring to University of Washington and getting my bachelor's and then master's. But to this day, I do not have a diploma or a GED or any kind of equivalency, and I'm kind of proud of that. I don't know. Take a perverse pride.

Michael Lens 17:21
That kicks ass.

Shane Phillips 17:22 Who's next?

Michael Lens 17:23
Funky. I'm dumb. So I'll talk. Wow. Okay, Mike. This is Mike the Lens, not Mike the Manville. And I got my BA in poli sci at Macalester, a small school in St. Paul. I was born and raised in St. Paul, so I didn't go more than 15 minutes from my mom's front door for college. And it was an amazing experience. Met my wife, met all of my best friends in the world, except for the people in this room. And I drifted towards the more kind of policy analysis sort of things in that department, which actually had some of those offerings rather than just talking about Plato and Machiavelli all your day. So then I went off to get my MPP at Michigan, in a way, following my wife, who was at law school there. It was also the best place for me, really, at the time.

Shane Phillips 18:17
I didn't realize you've been married that long.

Michael Lens 18:19
Yeah. 20 years this summer.

Shane Phillips 18:21
Wow.

Michael Lens 18:22
We've been together 27. So then at the Ford School at the University of Michigan, I continued to drift towards more quantitative analytic courses and skill development. And that kind of had me drifting into a more research job, research as a potential career. So a couple of years go by, I decided, oh, well, maybe I will try to get into a PhD program and do that part time as kind of a hobby. Any of the PhD students, past or present, in our department or future, please don't think of doing that. That's not really the appropriate way to think of a doctoral program.

Paavo Monkkonen 19:07
But although some do.

Michael Lens 19:11
I wasn't the first, and damn, not the last.

Paavo Monkkonen 19:14
I'm guessing you didn't present it to the schools that this was your plan.

Michael Lens 19:17
Oh, 100%. No, no, not at all. Of course. I got connected early on to my lifelong advisors, Ingrid Ellen and Kathy O'Regan. And when I came there, I kind of wanted to, I thought I might do like labor, employment or welfare policy research. And you know, Ingrid and Kathy have always been more housing oriented. Paavo and I share, we're kind of on the same advisor tree, right? Like John Quigley's Paavo's advisor, John Quigley was Kathy's advisor, and then Kathy is my advisor. So that's always fun.

Shane Phillips 19:52
And make you like his uncle advisor.

Michael Lens 19:54
Yeah, yeah. I think he's like a, he's like an older cousin. I don't know what it is. And so the more and more I started spending time with them, the more I was like, oh, housing policy really merges a lot of my interests. It's this study of why people live where they live. So thinking about issues of segregation, how cities are either ways that we can kind of overcome inequalities or exacerbate inequalities and our government housing programs are inadequate in this country. And in my opinion, and we've talked a lot about the voucher program, public housing, low income housing, tax credits, et cetera, but the people who do benefit from those programs get a lot of money in comparison to the totality of their household budget, right? You might, if you're a voucher recipient, you might get $15,000 for rent from the federal government. That's a big, big number.

Shane Phillips 20:45
Yeah. That might be about the same amount as your income.

Michael Lens 20:49
It might be the same amount as your income. It's probably going to exceed what you get in food stamps and other sources of cash assistance. So it's big stuff. And my love of cities and space and kind of interest in segregation merged with this government role really kind of sparked something for me.

Shane Phillips 21:08
On segregation, is it Minneapolis-St. Paul that's the most segregated or it might be Milwaukee?

Michael Lens 21:14
Milwaukee, yeah. Minneapolis-St. Paul is probably kind of middle of the road for a Midwestern metro, which is always bad. Midwestern metros are always very segregated. And so I think that you're kind of handing me a piece of my research. So most recently, which has been covered on this podcast, published a book called Where the Hood At, which is about black neighborhoods in the US. That's kind of the culmination of a bunch of the thoughts I've had on segregation and black communities over the years. But most of my research has been very focused on housing subsidies and I think as a direct result of hanging out with you all for the last either six or 15 years, I've studied the land use and zoning implications for housing affordability a lot. That's not something I ever would have done if I hadn't come to UCLA's Urban Planning Department. That wasn't really the top of mind thing for me. I was really all about subsidy programs and would have gone in a direction like that.

Paavo Monkkonen 22:17
Although you had the idea to do the first collab on that topic.

Michael Lens 22:21
That's true. Seg-ulation. Seg-ulation.

Michael Manville 22:24
That paper took a long time to write. Award-winning paper.

Michael Lens 22:27
An award-winning paper. Still my most cited paper with Paavo 2016.

Shane Phillips 22:31
I've never even heard of this paper.

Michael Manville 22:34
It's not called Seg-ulation.

Shane Phillips 22:35
I don't like the name. Seg-ulation.

Paavo Monkkonen 22:38
Lance was like, hey, what if we do the segregation thing and connected with the regulation thing?

Michael Lens 22:44
Yes. Yes.

Paavo Monkkonen 22:46
Surprisingly understudied at the time.

Michael Lens 22:49
Yeah. A thing was born. My other most cited paper I think is our, like, you know, abolish single family zoning paper. So it's all about this room.

Paavo Monkkonen 22:57
So much zoning.

Michael Lens 22:58
Yeah. All right. Enough of me.

Shane Phillips 22:59
You got an interesting factoid thing or was it just mixed in there?

Paavo Monkkonen 23:02
Good at karaoke.

Michael Lens 23:04
I'm fairly decent at karaoke. I'm now looking at this mic like I should do something else.

Shane Phillips 23:12
We might ask you to prove it.

Michael Lens 23:15
I am probably the most active youth soccer referee that certainly any of these people know.

Paavo Monkkonen 23:22
Absolutely true. That's true.

Michael Lens 23:24
And I would guess in this building of public affairs faculty.

Michael Manville 23:27
That's probably also true.

Paavo Monkkonen 23:28
I'll go next because Manville's the smartest one. But I'm going to be quick because I think on the first episode you asked me something about my background and then I just like went on and on and Shane was like, no, you can stop now. I was like, well, in 1978 a young couple had a baby, it was named Paavo.

Michael Manville 23:52
The formative experience in kindergarten was when the boys took my milks.

Paavo Monkkonen 23:56
Put an onion on our belt was the style in those days. Well, so interesting fact about me, Professor Monkkonen, that's my father. My father was a professor and he wrote on, he was a historian, urban historian, quantitative urban historian. So Kurt Vonnegut has a great quote in his autobiography, like, I tried to do something else. His parents were artists. I tried to be a chemical engineer and then in the end I just gave up and inherited the gas station. So I feel like at some point in my life I just realized my dad had a really cool job and I just went with that. But when I was 17 in Culver City, my life's plan was to never live in Culver City and never be a professor. I was like, that's what I needed to do.

Michael Manville 24:37
So I just failed in every aspiration.

Michael Lens 24:40
Sorry for the aside, but Paavo and I were on like a career panel very early in our time here with our doctoral students and I said some off the cuff remark, you know, thinking about the original Professor Monkkonen and his now son, Professor Monkkonen. And I accused him, I was like, well, Paavo, you know, you've probably been thinking about being a professor for much of your life and the dirty look he shot me, I don't think I've ever seen since. He was just like, motherfucker, don't ever say that again. No.

Paavo Monkkonen 25:10
Yes. So that wasn't the plan. Wasn't the plan. But then, yeah, so I wanted to do something good for the world in the real world and not in the ivory tower. And so I did it.

Michael Lens 25:20
So you got a bunch of degrees in the ivory tower.

Paavo Monkkonen 25:23
Yeah, exactly. So I studied at Berkeley after I graduated with a BA in Greek. I worked for the ARC San Francisco, which was a really great serendipity. It's a big organization that helps people with developmental disabilities live independently. And I was like on their housing task force and helping people with vouchers find housing, moving people into a new project that they had built in Fisherman's Wharf. So that was actually later inspirational. Then I moved to Spain and then Mexico, and I volunteered in microfinance stuff in Mexico. And then I needed to get a more serious position in that world, I thought, so I did a master's in public policy. And during my summer internship, I learned about this possibility of being a professor and also influencing the world. And so I thought, maybe I could do that because I had met some professors at Berkeley that consulted a lot and helped write laws in Albania and do all these real world things. And I'm like, hmm, this urban planning thing, maybe I could combine flexibility in job life and schedule as well as having an impact.

Michael Lens 26:33
So I want to break in quick on when you said Mexico. So you also met your wife in college.

Paavo Monkkonen 26:42
I did not.

Michael Lens 26:43
You did not!

Paavo Monkkonen 26:44
in fact, I did not.

Michael Lens 26:47
Sorry, my bad. But OK, so here's where I'm going, though.

Paavo Monkkonen 26:52
We're also married 20 years though.

Michael Lens 26:53
You got married the day before Molly and I got married. That's what I'm remembering correctly.

Paavo Monkkonen 26:57
Because we got married on Bastille Day because we always knew we were going to live in France.

Michael Manville 27:02 Yeah, there you go. Yeah.

Paavo Monkkonen 27:05
Yeah, yeah. I met my wife in Mexico while I was teaching English there. Yeah, we met at a party.

Michael Manville 27:12
So and now you're a professor.

Paavo Monkkonen 27:13
I'm not a professor. Fast forward. Everything is great. Yeah, I'll just so quickly to wrap up work with John Quigley and David Dell, my Ph.D. They were great advisors. Quigley got me into regulation, land use regulation and housing affordability research. And then I my main interest was like living abroad, working abroad, doing research abroad. And so I worked in Mexico and Hong Kong and recently France. And, you know, I love being a professor. It's great to learn stuff. I mean, I think that's why this we can get to it later. The podcast has been fun because it gives us an excuse to learn stuff.

Michael Lens 27:44
Yeah, it's efficient.

Paavo Monkkonen 27:46
I got nothing interesting. I never delivered pizza. I worked at the Chicken Roaster restaurant. And one time the Stone Temple Pilots came in and bought some. Nineties kids, nineties teenagers, oh, STP.

Michael Lens 27:57
Did you finish the fact that you boomeranged back to Culver City, like on your childhood?

Paavo Monkkonen 28:02
Yeah, that's so I guess. Yeah. So that's been like a really beneficial thing about this job is I ended up moving back to Culver City because my mom was still there. But then I got to use my professional knowledge of zoning and these other things to influence local politics at a very micro micro scale.

Shane Phillips 28:20
Yeah, and we won't disclose his current address. Well, people already know from our interview with Jesse, he's in Santa Monica.

Paavo Monkkonen 28:26
Across the street from Lincoln Middle School.

Michael Lens 28:28
All right.

Shane Phillips 28:29
Mike Manville.

Paavo Monkkonen 28:32
The smartest.

Michael Lens 28:33
The best writer in the room.

Michael Manville 28:35
God. Yeah. So I grew up.

Shane Phillips 28:37
He's going to explain why.

Michael Manville 28:40
No, I grew up outside Boston. I went to Holy Cross College, which is in Worcester, which is right in the middle of Boston.

Michael Lens 28:47
Which is always right neck and neck with McAllister in the liberal arts rankings.

Shane Phillips 28:51
In the middle of Massachusetts, not Boston.

Michael Manville 28:53
That's right. In the middle of Massachusetts. Sorry. And I'm being advised not to move because otherwise I always make noise during these podcasts. I fidget too much. I went to Holy Cross, graduated. I had a good degree in history. I became a newspaper reporter. I worked for a few small newspapers. And then for like a year and a half or so, I worked for a newspaper on Nantucket Island, which is off the coast of Massachusetts. And that's kind of where I got interested in planning because Nantucket is its own little microcosm. It has all the goods have to be bought either by air or boat. It's 30 miles offshore. There was a lot of land use controversies because it has a lot of rich people who show up in the summer. And in the winter, you can like rent or even not even rent, just live for free in a large mansion because someone's not there. And then in the summer, you scramble around because that mansion is reoccupied by somebody from Greenwich or being rented for two thousand dollars a day or something like that. Anyway, I got interested in that. The newspaper sort of went out of business and I picked up a job with the island's economic development commission. I helped write Nantucket's comprehensive plan that got me interested in planning.

Shane Phillips 30:04
I feel like living and working in Nantucket would make me not ever want to do planning. I'm surprised that you were like, this is cool. I like this.

Michael Manville 30:17
Yeah, I did like it. I mean, I didn't have to do a lot of interaction with the public, which helped.

Paavo Monkkonen 30:23
Yeah, that's key. Did the plan say protect single family neighborhoods in it?

Shane Phillips 30:27
It must have.

Michael Manville 30:28
Yeah. I mean, there's, you know, how much multi-family housing was on Nantucket, very, very little. I mean, there was some and there was a lot of subdivision of single family homes into legal and illegal units. That's kind of where I lived. But there was not a lot of multi-family housing. There probably still isn't. The whole island is a historic district. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Somehow. Oh, yeah. Then I kicked around for a while trying to do freelance writing. I lived in Savannah, Georgia, for a while. Then I was back up in Massachusetts and then I went to graduate school. I came here to UCLA for a master's degree and a Ph.D. I worked with my advisor, Don Shoup, who got me into the study of regulation after graduating and doing a postdoc. I spent five years at Cornell and then I came back here. And the interesting thing, I guess, is that I was hired here to be a transportation person. And also...

Michael Lens 31:25
Sorry, Brian!

Michael Manville 31:28
And also, you know, there was the idea that I could teach the economics class. And I did come here and teach transportation economics classes. And I've never taken a transportation class in my life. Wow. I have taken three total economics classes, one of which I almost failed an undergrad.

Shane Phillips 31:47
This is why he's the smartest.

Michael Manville 31:49
Because I almost failed an undergrad from economics class.

Shane Phillips 31:54
He doesn't need classes. He just learns things.

Michael Lens 31:56
I got a B- and a C something in my two undergrad economics classes and I ran straight away from that department. And then, of course, MPP and, you know, Ph.D. in public policy time. I had to go through all that again.

Paavo Monkkonen 32:10
Oh, I got a fun one. I took Econ with, I think, Michael Stolt out of here in the public policy department. And I really impressed the instructor because I knew the Greek origin of the word economics.

Shane Phillips 32:21
Finally, his bachelor's degree is paying off.

Paavo Monkkonen 32:22 It paid off.

Michael Manville 32:24
We've been talking about ourselves for like a half hour.

Paavo Monkkonen 32:26
Yeah, that's what we're doing.

Michael Lens 32:28 This is highly embarrassing.

Paavo Monkkonen 32:29
We're going to put a disclaimer on the...

Shane Phillips 32:31
We're going to talk about ourselves a little more here.

Michael Lens 32:34
Oh, yeah. I see. I see in the notes.

Shane Phillips 32:37
This is just a, you know, we've been doing this for a long time. What are your favorite episodes that you have been involved in? I know Mike has some things written down so you can go first. You don't have to explain all of them.

Paavo Monkkonen 32:48
We have clips queued up from each one, right?

Shane Phillips 32:51
We'll do that in post.

Paavo Monkkonen 32:53
And you've selected great quotables?

Shane Phillips 32:54
I got you.

Michael Lens 32:55
Yeah. I mean, I think I want to start with Andre Perry. You know, that conversation was, I think, when I was in the thick of writing my book on black neighborhoods and his book, Know Your Price, that wasn't the focus of our podcast. We were talking...

Shane Phillips 33:13
Actually, it was. No, it wasn't just his research. We did read the book. Because I remember we asked about his childhood, which is how he starts the book.

Michael Lens 33:22
A hundred percent. My bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that book, I read that when I was on sabbatical in London and starting the book. And there were so many connections between his book and what I was trying to do. And I like, I mean, I told him straight up, like I lifted so many of his recommendations from that book that he also talked about kind of, you know, the community land trusts and other kind of community-based development sort of schemes, public-private partnerships, things like that. I lifted a lot of that from him. And so that was really exciting. Another one that comes to mind is Rob Collinson's episode. We recorded that early in my sabbatical in London. And a couple of angles for me, you know, personally, he is also an advisee or former advisee of Ingrid and Kathy as he did his Ph.D. at NYU, far more like quantitatively skilled than I am. I think he's got an undergraduate degree in math or something. And but his skills are not just in the math and the numbers. You know, I found his description, if you go back to that podcast, his description of the various processes and thresholds and rules that govern the housing choice voucher program was astonishingly clear. And he went into every little nook and cranny of every little incentive and every little threshold and border that we create in that program. And like, if you listen to that three times on a loop, you will understand 98 percent of what you need to know about the voucher program. So that was super cool. Some quick hits. I think Esther Sullivan's research on manufactured homes is always fascinating. I think I can learn three or four times in a row how many people live in manufactured homes, which far dwarfs what you think the number is, you know, and also just some of the regulatory weirdness of manufactured homes and the different kind of legalities I think really come to mind. Tim Aubry, you know, I got to lead with the accent. Like there was a steady stream of A's. You know, coming from Canada,

Shane Phillips 35:38 Super Canadian.

Michael Lens 35:39 He was super Canadian. And of course, he was super nice. And, you know, I talk about the At Home Chez Soi program.

Shane Phillips 35:47
What's that mean, Paavo?

Michael Lens 35:49 At home, at home?

Shane Phillips 35:57 At home, at your home.

Michael Lens 35 At home, your home, at home, at your home? Whatever. And it's such a clear test of or at least if we lead with housing in our response to homelessness, like how do we know it works or does it work better than some other things? And I think the At Home Chez Soi, at home, at home, oui, oui, I guess, test is really, really convincing to me. Prentiss and I, Prentiss Dantzler are good friends. And, you know, I think it's our conversation, you know, Prentiss and I don't really talk shop that much. We like hang out at conferences and, you know, talk about life. And then like, you know, Shane starts peppering him with questions and he's giving all these high level answers.

Shane Phillips 36:40
It's like, oh, my friend's smart.

Michael Lens 36:43
Yeah, bro, I didn't know you could do that, man. That's cool. So that was just fun on that level. And then finally, Elizabeth Delmelle, we were both on sabbatical at that time. She was in the Netherlands and I was in London. So Shane was disadvantaged on the time zone count for once on that situation. But, you know, she's got some, I used her work a lot in my book on kind of neighborhood trajectories. That wasn't necessarily, that wasn't really the focus of our conversation that day. It was more about gentrification and I think real investments and stuff. But she's a very careful researcher and, you know, a good person to talk to and on a pod in life. So, yeah, all those are my favorite.

Shane Phillips 37:27
I'll go just in case this steals from anyone else, because I'm just going to limit myself to like the first 25 episodes or so, because I've been involved in all of them and it's too many to pick from. And as I said, there's probably people who have started listening recently and haven't made their way through the back catalog. And so highlighting some ones that stood out might make some sense. First one is Kathy O'Regan, episode four. This was our first non-UCLA guest. And I think it was the first time I felt like maybe we could actually make this podcast into a real thing. It was just like a very, I don't know, it was a, it felt like a real conversation. It was not just like an interview.

Michael Lens 38:04
She's always got such a great amount of energy, right?

Shane Phillips 38:08
Yeah. There was just like a lot of heart in that conversation, I feel like. The episode, not that there wasn't with you guys.

Michael Manville 38:15
Heartless.

Shane Phillips 38:17
Heartless. Cold blooded. Our episode with Minjee I think because it's one of those topics that you think or I think is really important, but it feels like no one else was really paying attention to. And that was our chance to really shine a spotlight on it. And I felt like we all did a good job of that. The episode with Louis Thomas on family friendly housing in Vancouver, B.C., really just totally changed my mind about how you make an urban neighborhood welcoming to families and like what really matters.

Michael Lens 38:46 I agree.

Shane Phillips 38:47
And I mean, I had even thought like actually the housing doesn't matter that much. And I still think it's kind of oversold as though if you just build a bunch of three bedroom apartments, you're going to get families. But he had such interesting insights about like the amenities on site, how having all the families on one floor so their kids can run around in the hallway, just stuff like that. A lot of things stuck with me. The conversation with Jiro Yoshida was my first really non superficial exposure to Japanese housing policy, and it's just spurred an ongoing interest in how they do things there. And I've been to Japan twice since then. I will go back many times, I'm sure. It was also, I think, the first time we had like a really big sustained jump in listeners. So clearly a lot of other people found it interesting. And the last set is three episodes we did in a row with Beth Shinn on interventions for family homelessness. I think that might have also been the first episode we did on a randomized controlled trial. Adam Millard-Ball on how building more parking causes more driving and car ownership. And then Michael Hankinson on how electing city councils by district instead of at large is associated with reduced housing production. I just felt like these were all very different, but very important topics. The studies were all very persuasive and all three were really great communicators. Last thing I'll say is just I want to comment on the series we've done. Pathways Home was really fun to do on homelessness. Road Scholars, you know, I got to take a step back, but it's cool to just bring in some some new topics. And with our ongoing incentive series, it's been fun to really immerse ourselves in a specific topic. And in both cases, it's like we start out with a plan and then start reading things, doing more research and then realize like, oh, there's like six more episodes I could do on this topic. And we're in the midst of that right now with building standards and codes. And we'll see we'll see where we go.

Michael Manville 40:41
Yeah, I mean, I think almost all of the I mean, almost all, no, all of the episodes.

Paavo Monkkonen 40:46
Wait, which ones didn't you like?

Michael Manville 40:47
I tend to just have these adjectives that I don't mean. All the episodes I've been involved in, I've enjoyed. I think the ones that come to mind are some of the ones that are just kind of a little different from the others. So, well, so I think about our episode with Peter Ganong, which was not that different in many ways. He's a very accomplished social scientist and he did a great job explaining this relationship between regulation and migration. And I thought that was a wonderful conversation, but also kind of along the lines of what we often do. But I've been the co-host on a couple of history episodes, too, that I thought were really interesting. So Todd Michney coming on to talk about his research on redlining. I thought that was great. Judge Glock talking about the origins of the federal intervention in mortgage markets, I thought was really interesting, interesting both because it was substantively really interesting and also it just it was kind of something completely different.

Paavo Monkkonen 41:38
Yeah, I echo the sentiment of, you know, using these to learn new things and, you know, also hang out with friends. I've enjoyed being able to reconnect with people that I shared educational pathways with, like Kristin Perkins or Jackie Begley. Those were fun to record. But other fun ones, the one with Hayden Shelby was great about Thailand's Ban Mangkong program, just because I feel like I thought it was a paper that I had read. But this forced me to think quite even more and ask follow up questions in a way like you get a much deeper understanding of the research. I also, you know, with Magda Maaoui, we talked about the SRU law in France and then that inspired a collaboration, actually finally finished this paper we worked on for a long time about comparing French right to housing policies to U.S. fair housing policies.

Shane Phillips 42:27
I mean, you were just in France for two years as well. Like, do you think you would have ended up there regardless?

Paavo Monkkonen 42:31
Maybe not. Housing Policy Voice changed my life.

Shane Phillips 42:34
Housing what?

Michael Lens 43:36
Housing Policy Voice.

Michael Manville 42:39 We meant to announce the new name of our podcast is the Housing Policy Voice.

Michael Lens 42:44 It's whatever Paavo wants it to be.

Michael Manville 42:47 The new name is just Dunkin.

Paavo Monkkonen 42:52
Yeah, so those were all great. Also, Dinora Gonzalez talking about Mexican suburbanization stuff. Good stuff. Traveling around the world through the podcast.

Shane Phillips 43:02
Oh, yeah. On the history, the conversation with Akira Drake Rodriguez was really to me as well. Not only because it was a great conversation, but also we had a U.S. Senator's staff reach out to us after that one and ask, like, can you put us in contact with her? And that was the first time I was like, who listens to the show?

Michael Manville 43:21
And also, how does someone in a Senate office not know how to contact a professor on their own?

Shane Phillips 43:27
I imagine it's just, you know, give us a warm introduction, but who knows?

Michael Lens 43:33
There's the cynical. Yeah,

Michael Manville 43:36
We don't have many resources. We're trying to find Ivy League professors.

Michael Lens 43:40
Let me Google that for you.

Shane Phillips 43:42
All right. So enough on the podcast itself. Let's actually answer some listener questions about policy and planning stuff. Daniel M. has a question about the urban planning deep state, which is how Paavo categorized this, not the terminology that Daniel used. He asks, is anyone doing any research on the role of planners in delaying, weakening or otherwise stymying zoning reform internally? He gives us some additional context in his email that will probably sound familiar to our listeners. He says, in my job, I find that some of the strongest opposition to new ideas or approaches has always come from other planners, including the, quote unquote, established ones with AICP in their email signatures. He talks about colleagues throwing tantrums about reducing minimum lot sizes, reducing setbacks, expanding uses, et cetera. I like this illustrative exchange he provides, just what is your justification for reducing the setback? And the response being, well, what's your justification for having it? He continues, overall, it seems to be a philosophical problem of expecting the burden of proof to be on the person proposing the change rather than on the existing regulation for demonstrating what problem it's solving. Thank you for the great question, Daniel. I will start just by acknowledging that this kind of resistance is not unique to housing or planning, that outcomes we expect of proposed reforms are pretty commonly held to a higher standard than the impacts of existing policy. We consider something like creating bus lanes and the people who get the attention are not the thousands of bus riders who will get to work and school and anywhere else faster. It's the dozens of people who park on that street in front of the businesses. You see similar issues in environmental and energy policy, health care taxes. It's really everywhere. So I think in a sense it's very natural. Loss aversion is a real thing.

Paavo Monkkonen 45:34
But I'll just say also, like changing the rules all the time is also not necessarily a good idea. I mean, I think I in general, I think we should perform most planning rules, but there is like institutional economics has some research showing that like a fairly bad policy that's consistent is better than like a continuously changing policy in many ways.

Shane Phillips 45:53
Yeah. And this is something you hear that I think is sometimes feels like a self-interested complaint, but from city planners in California and people in different departments, that they keep changing the rules. And it's not entirely wrong. Part of the reason they're doing it is because cities keep trying to evade the intent of the law. And so they have to keep closing loopholes and tightening things. So it's kind of goes both ways. But, you know, they talk about this in business all the time, like certainty is important. And that's true on the policy side as well. I do want to say, like, this might sound like a defense of the conservative approach to urban planning, and I don't think that's the message I want to leave him with. I do think it's natural for voters and community advocates and others to raise these concerns. And I think it's one of the jobs of planning departments to be sensitive to those and take them seriously. But another part of their job is to think about the bigger picture and the consequences of the status quo. And I think that's something that planners have almost a unique vantage point for being able to do and see where the current trajectory is taking us and have some sense of the levers they could pull to change course. So it's perfectly natural to have concerns with this or that reform. But planners in particular and policymakers and elected officials, if they're raising these concerns, they should be coming up with alternatives or complementary reforms to address them, not just kind of throwing out the what about, what if, here's why we can't do it and just stopping the conversation there. Anyone else?

Paavo Monkkonen 47:19
Yeah, I mean, it's funny because if you think about the 60s and 70s dream of advocacy planning, like it envisioned planners as this like deep state, but for progressive change for the benefit of the poor. And so I think those planners exist for sure. And so there's also planners working to not necessarily do what the city council wants, but in a good way. I have seen in a city that I won't name, but it rhymes with Shmulver Shmitty, some deep state planning, trying to not make reforms that the council wanted to make. So I think I think it's a super interesting area of research that someone should study because I don't know any research. Probably it's been studied to some extent, but maybe not recently.

Michael Manville 47:59
I've never seen any of it related to planning departments. And I think, you know, that the concern is kind of what's been said so far. There's an omission bias, right, which is to say that changes to the status quo always receive more scrutiny than the status quo itself. And so if you propose eliminating setbacks, you know, people wonder about what's going to happen as a result of that. And nobody wonders what it means to have setbacks because we've had them for a long time. This is also just an artifact of kind of the civil service protection that if you have people who come up having been trained and acclimated in one era of planning, you know, elected officials can change and people's views of the conventional wisdom can change and the civil servants don't change. And so there's going to be an older generation, I'm generalizing here a little bit, an older generation of bureaucrats that are resistant to whatever those changes are. And they're in a position to slow things down. And so one caution I always have about like, well, how do we clear these people out is that in Washington, D.C. right now, we see one of the answers, which is just like you remove civil service protection and start firing people. And that gets you a civil service that's more amenable to the political moment. But I think a lot of us look at what's happening in Washington and don't actually particularly like that. In terms of studies of this, there's more study of this in transportation. Transportation has a really divided deep state with younger, again, I'm generalizing a little bit, younger people coming up, working in large transportation agencies who have been trained in planning programs and bumping into older, more established planners and bureaucrats who are trained as engineers and who are maybe still more likely to think we've got to widen ourselves some highways. Amy Lee, who just finished a postdoc here at UCLA and is now back at UC Davis and some of her colleagues have written a fair amount about the, for lack of a better way of putting it, the Caltrans deep state and how high ranking civil servants in Caltrans have been deeply resistant to California's efforts to not widen highways anymore, move away from a focus on automobiles. And they really, and this is spilled over into the news, a prominent Caltrans political appointee was fired last summer, two summers ago, because she tried to blow the whistle on a bunch of Caltrans officials secretly widening a highway. It's hard to secretly widen a highway, but they disguised it as maintenance. And then we're going to add a lane while they were repaving it.

Paavo Monkkonen 50:28 Oh, behavior of addicts.

Michael Manville 50:32
So she blew the whistle and there was a little civil war and then she was out the door. And so this stuff does happen.

Shane Phillips 50:39
Rather than the people who did the bad thing going out the door.

Michael Manville 50:43 When the civil war starts, you never know who's going to win. That's one reason not to have wars and the, one of many. But the difficulty, as you can imagine from a research perspective, is getting these people to talk. So it's, but it definitely happens. And I think there's a lot of, beyond people's particular opinions about zoning, there's just structural factors at work, right? It's just like you've been there a long time and you can't, no one can make you leave and you've got your opinions. This is how universities run too.

Paavo Monkkonen 51:15 And especially if the rules are very complicated and you're the one that knows them.

Michael Manville 51:18 Yeah, there's some leverage there, you know?

Shane Phillips 51:19
Even if your views are problematic in some way, causing some issues or out of step, you probably do have just this institutional knowledge that nonetheless makes you valuable in important ways.

Michael Manville 51:31
That's exactly right. Which is that in many large institutions, the value you have is your knowledge and if everything changes, you run the risk of becoming less valuable and it's human nature to resist that.

Shane Phillips 51:43
The more complicated the bureaucracy, the system, the more valuable that person is too, actually. Which is maybe a reason to simplify things somewhat. Rodney L. has a question about the endless debate over prioritizing market rate or social housing. He says, many supply skeptics argue that it would be a better use of resources and political capital to advocate for social housing instead of focusing on reforms that would free up the private market to build more housing and lower costs, policies like upzoning, ending parking minimums, allowing point access blocks, etc. However, I assume that these same reforms would also make it cheaper for social housing developers to build housing and therefore to build more units for less money. Can you speak a bit about how these barriers impact social housing developers similarly or not? Paavo, you spent two years in France studying social housing. You've got a paper on this coming out in the next month. What do you think?

Paavo Monkkonen 52:41
I think why not both? I mean, I don't think it's like a false dichotomy to say we should do one or the other. Like the limitation on social housing or even the way we do affordable housing, subsidized affordable housing in the U.S. is money and it's not zoning, right? So zoning is a separate thing from money. In France, social housing landlords don't have a special pathway that they use to build things and I don't think that happens anywhere in Europe. There is some increased collaboration with local governments in a way that private developers don't have. But yeah, I think it's it's definitely like a false dichotomy with people that are skeptical of market rate housing in general, usually. And yeah, I mean, I think one thing that I that I don't have a good evidence on yet, but I think is true also, it's interesting. There is a crowding out effect with social housing production and market rate housing production. There's some good research by Guillaume Chappelle in France about how social housing projects, since they're a slightly lower density than private projects, would have been like maybe even more than one to one replacement of what would have been built otherwise. So that's like a downside for the private real estate development. On the other hand, you know, these big social housing associations can lobby for standardization and they can do these mass production things in a way that like there is a lobby for infill housing in a way that we don't have in the U.S. I mean, that's something that's come up in the political conversations here where we have like in these incentive conversations where like the single family sprawl developers have a powerful lobby in California, but the multifamily ones don't.

Shane Phillips 54:11
And nationally, they have the National Association of Home Builders, but there's no real equivalent, at least in terms of power here in the U.S., for multifamily.

Paavo Monkkonen 54:19
Yes. Yes. And housing policy.

Michael Lens 54:21
I see in our notes, I'm giving away the store there. Shane can delete that. But I know Shane has a good answer to this that we'll probably get to. But I have a couple of things that I would like to say between Paavo and Shane on this. And one is that, like, there's very little evidence that going for social housing, public housing, increased housing subsidy is a small lift in the United States. Right. Something like 5 million people benefit from housing subsidies in the United States out of 340 million people.

Shane Phillips 54:57
I think that might be 5 million households.

Michael Lens 55:00
5 million households. Thank you. Thank you. 5 million households.

Shane Phillips 55:03
150 million households or whatever.

Michael Lens 55:05
Thank you. Still an infinitesimally small share. The percent is very low in the single digits. And then it's a small minority of people that have low incomes that live in subsidized housing. Like this country is very, very, very, very far away from a robust social safety net when it comes to housing. And so this idea that, like, we should shift our, you know, political capital from market rate housing or upzoning or whatever to housing subsidies just strikes me as not really reading the situation in this country very well.

Paavo Monkkonen 55:42
The recent Elmendor, Oklobdzija, and Nall paper provides actually very interesting events on exactly that point, which you could say on the one hand, they show that you're wrong, but then on the other hand, they show that you're right, because they like ask people what kinds of housing policies they want. And people definitely in the vacuum, people prefer spend money on below market rate housing, spend money on vouchers. They also prefer rent control. Yeah. Get the Wall Street investors. Yeah. All those much more than like pro-housing in general, something reform stuff. Yeah. But then once you ask them to weigh that as a tradeoff between other things the government could be spending money on, it changes completely. So like in a vacuum, people will say like, yes, I support it. But then you say like, OK, but you're going to have to pay some more taxes. Then they're going to say, no, I don't support it. And the zoning reform stuff is free.

Shane Phillips 56:30
So if they support more taxes, it's like, would you rather that housing stuff or like health care stuff or any number of other things?

Michael Lens 56:36
Yeah. And the weird thing is you've got like this, you know, near universal or very high share of the population that hates developers, hates development and hates upzoning and all that sort of stuff. But like they're most of them are not like super into fighting against that when it's not happening near them so much. And then are they going to fight an increase in taxes for housing that's going to happen really far away from them? Possibly. Absolutely. You know, like if you're raising my taxes in Los Angeles and a bunch of that money's going to Arkansas or Detroit or New York City for people's housing needs, you are going to fight that. You just you answer in surveys that you want the poor to have nice things. And then until you have to pay for it until you have to pay for it.

Michael Manville 57:28
I would say it's not it's not so much that they would fight that because they probably just wouldn't be aware of it. It's that they wouldn't object when some political entrepreneur in Washington cut it. Yeah. And that that's the story of public housing in the United States is just that it's always on the chopping block when the government changes hands. It's a pariah for the Republican Party. It has been for a long time. It's socialist housing to them. And so the risk is that even if you succeed, you have some sort of progressive majority in Congress and you push through a big public housing program. You know, you run the risk of turning the people you put into that housing into political footballs within four years. And that is part of the history of American public housing. Like it's you come out of the Great Society and then what happens? All the federal money, well, not all, but a lot of the federal money is stripped away from that housing.

Michael Lens 58:19
1974 moratorium on public housing.

Michael Manville 58:22
Moratorium on public housing.

Michael Lens 58:23 That really has not been lifted since.

Michael Manville 58:24
No, it had not been lifted. And also, perhaps even more importantly, operating subsidies slashed, right? And so the housing that people are in becomes lower and lower quality, despite the fact that they might be working hard on their own to sort of keep their own units up. And so you can't fall into this trap of sort of looking at the reality of market rate housing and all the warts that come with it. There's construction near your neighborhood and maybe it's ugly or whatever. And then comparing it to this idealized version of public housing, which imagines that we

Paavo Monkkonen 58:54
Its social housing, Mike.

Michael Lens 58:55
If we call it social housing, everybody will like it, but also pay for it.

Michael Manville 58:58
Everybody will like it, but we will be, you know, Sweden circa 1978. We're just like the government is never going to change. We're all going to just keep pouring money into it. And that's not the country we have. Right. I mean, it's just like you do run this big risk that like one election, people talk about, well, you don't want to subject people to the whims of the market. Well, true, maybe. But you also don't want to subject them to the whims of our incredibly polarized political system.

Paavo Monkkonen 59:27
Yeah, that's a good phrase.

Michael Lens 59:28
Could the state of California be the provider?

Shane Phillips 59:31
See, that's what I wanted to get into is I just think, like...

Michael Manville 59:33 The state of California?

Shane Phillips 59:34
You need the federal government to fund this stuff. Like, there's no other entity that has the resources. And even if you could get a lot of money in California, you have to loan out so much at a time. You can't have a deficit in the state government. And so you can't just lend out a bunch of money for tens of billions of dollars worth of construction, which is what you would need, which means you're going to have to get it from the federal government. And most of the social housing need is in places like Los Angeles and New York and, you know, Seattle, et cetera, San Francisco, that have really created this problem for themselves. And so you're asking all these other parts of the country to now send a bunch of money to the most expensive cities in the country to build housing for poor people. And like, I want that housing to be built, but that is not a political winner. It wasn't 12 years ago. It's certainly not now.

Michael Manville 1:00:28
We should clarify here. It's a political winner in California to waste a bunch of money. The state of California is building, in quotes, a high speed rail system. You know, we're 15 years in, we've laid zero miles of track and we're pushing 100 billion dollars in costs. So, like, we are willing to waste money, but that is not a good endorsement. Like, so the answer is no, California cannot build this. California can't build anything.

Shane Phillips 1:00:56
Yeah, we're going to have to do a lot to prove that that's the case. And yeah, the idea is...

Michael Lens 1:00:59
There's an occasional libertarian amongst us in here.

Michael Manville 1:01:01
I mean, I don't think you have to be a libertarian to think California can't build anything.

Paavo Monkkonen 1:01:06
Yeah, but if you want to learn about a country that's roughly the size of California..

Michael Lens 1:01:11 Oui, oui, baguette!

Paavo Monkkonen 1:01:12 A diverse, mixed country that has a system that actually works, you should check out the Lewis Center's website. There's a report dropping shortly about France, which I think is I mean, it offers an interesting way to do it that I think is not the state doing it. It's not money from the federal government. I mean, there's a way it could happen, but it could also happen. It needs zoning reform as well.

Michael Manville 1:01:31
And you can you can look at Singapore. You can. There are places where the political system is set up in such a way, both temperamentally and institutionally, that this is a better bet. But when you have a Congress like ours, winner take all representation and deep polarization, you really are jeopardizing people. If you say your shelter is conditioned on the whims of the ...

Paavo Monkkonen 1:01:54
MAGA.

Michael Manville 1:01:58
Yeah. You'd rather you'd rather let people rely on the market than rely on MAGA, I think.

Shane Phillips 1:02:01
Well, just bringing this back before we go on to the next question, I do feel like the point about let's call it state capacity in a place like California is really important because I actually would like to see us develop that capacity to build rail affordably, to build housing affordably or support it in ways that make it more affordable to build. But by anyone's standard, no matter how optimistic, that's a very long term project. And the idea that we should shift all of our advocacy and energy to making that happen so that maybe 10 years from now we start to really see the fruits of it when we can actually make it possible to build housing in greater numbers and diversity and at lower costs now. Like, why would we make that trade? And that's why we're not. That's the reason most advocacy and the successful advocacy in the state is focused on market rate or unsubsidized housing primarily is just because that's what we can do now. And it actually is very effective, even if it doesn't solve every problem.

Michael Manville 1:03:01
And to bring it all the way back, to bring it all. the way back to what Paavo was saying, 99 percent of the reforms that you would make to make it easier for some market rate multifamily developer to build are also going to make it easier for some affordable housing developer to build and for some future social housing developer to build.

Shane Phillips 1:03:16
Next question. Mark E asks about the effectiveness of state housing legislation. This is in California, but I think this question is probably pretty broadly applicable. He's specifically curious to hear our perspective on the lag time between the passage of state legislation and then local implementation and then actually building housing. California, as we all know, has passed a ton of laws over the last decade, but it's yet to really show up in the production numbers other than for accessory dwelling units. I'm going to give a little context, some figures here from the California Department of Housing and Community Development. This data is not perfect, but probably roughly accurate. In 2013, we permitted about 80,000 units statewide, and that was split pretty evenly between single family houses and multifamily with five units or more. Since then, there's been, I think, good news, bad news and interesting news, I guess. The good news is that permitting has increased and it peaked at around 135,000 units in 2022. It's a big increase percentage wise. The bad news is that it's still not nearly enough and we should be probably building at least twice that much per year. We should have been building at least twice that much per year for the past decade. So it's probably three or four times per year at this point. And multifamily production in particular has barely budged. And that's what we need to build the most. It's the least expensive. It's more likely to be located in urban areas where demand is highest. We permitted about 45,000 multifamily units in 2013. We were around 50 to 60,000 per year up to 2023, and we were back to 45,000 last year in 2024. The interesting news is that most of the growth in annual production has come from ADUs. Maybe interesting or just mixed news. We permitted fewer than 1,500 a year before 2017, 5,000 in 2017, 9,000 in 2018, and it has kept on growing steadily and hit 30,000 in 2024. So I think that's something of a success story and maybe has some lessons for us. But I'm going to have one of you guys jump in and talk about this. You know, I think this is partly a question of like direct intervention in the way of various ADU laws or even SB 9 just says cities, you know, have to allow these kinds of homes to be built versus planning mandates that say you have to plan for some amount of housing and create the zoning and, you know, setbacks and development standards and whatever else to make that possible. Paavo, you have done a lot.

Paavo Monkkonen 1:05:48
I just texted Aaron Barrall to see if he can give me an estimate. Total rezoned units through the planning mandate system. Yeah, well, I was involved with the intense debate over how to allocate growth targets in Southern California four years ago and then all the housing permits were passed and then just now things are finally being rezoned. And then Aaron emailed me that overlay rezones have been invalidated by an appellate court in California recently because of lawsuit in Redondo Beach. So the planning mandate thing happens really, really slow. I mean, the you know, the other way around is the more preemptive approach, which also happens really slow unless the law is written well. Right. So the ADU thing happened after 40 years of the state trying to force the locals to change. So, I mean, I don't think there's a necessarily a priori better way to do it. It's just like the details. I don't know.

Michael Manville 1:06:39
The thing about preemption is that it's probably the best way to get to what we want in many instances, which is not to say it's good or like that you're going to be super impressed by it. If you look at theories around preemption, just in general, right, they work best when you're trying to resolve a coordination problem rather than a cooperation problem, which is to say that if everybody kind of agrees that we want to do something, but we just can't coordinate, preemption is great. And so the famous example in economics is Thomas Schelling's example of how the NFL came to adopt a helmet mandate. You know, all these hockey players were skating around and they all knew that they were at huge risk of head injury because they weren't wearing helmets, but they also all knew that if they were the only people to put a helmet on, they would lose a little bit of peripheral vision and be at a competitive disadvantage. And so nobody wore a helmet.

Michael Lens 1:07:26
I thought it was just a bunch of tough guy stuff.

Michael Manville 1:07:30
No, they did polls of the players. They're like, we all want to wear helmets, but we're all afraid that if we wear helmets...

Shane Phillips 1:07:35 Disadvantage.

Michael Manville 1:07:36
Yeah. So this is the perfect case for preemption where the NFL just said it stepped in and said, everybody wears a helmet. And so then everybody loses that competitive, the same competitive advantage.

Shane Phillips 1:07:46
We've seen that recently with like schools, with phones in schools where you poll students they're like, I would love to not to just have to put my phone away, but I don't want to be the only kid in class or in school who has no phone.

Michael Manville 1:07:57
Who has no phone. Right. And so and then even more so is that their parents want that for them. Right. That's the real that's the real implementer in many ways. Once you get more of a cooperation problem where people are sort of some of them actively don't want what the preemption is, then you introduce these principal agent issues where yes, the law is passed and now we're looking for ways to avoid oversight. And that's much more what you have with some of these local governments. And again, it's not unique to land use. You know, in the 1990s, the citizens of California passed a law saying where we are right now, the University of California could not use race in admissions or hiring. And I think it's pretty much an open secret that the University of California has tried ever since to not obey that law. Right. I mean, the UC pretty much said as soon as it was passed, we're going to try and get around this. And they have been able to, to some extent, because like they're the implementers and it's very hard for the state to oversee it. The same thing plays out with land use preemption. Right. You can say, hey, you've got to plan for this or you've got to make sure this is going to be legal. But cities just have a lot of different ways to try and shade or cut corners or whatever. And what happens is you have to take many bites at the apple if you really want to do it. And that's what happened with ADUs.

Shane Phillips 1:09:14
This is another case where, I mean, another law that just passed or was signed by the governor, I think today or recently was on third party permit review, where if cities took too long to review a permit or a project that's being built or whatever, then the developer can hire a third party to do that review and certify everything. And so it's trying to tackle like one little part of one thing at a time that cities can throw up as obstacles to building the housing that the state is telling them that they have to do.

Michael Manville 1:09:42
Right. I mean, the upshot of this is just it's very hard to tell a bunch of people to do something that they just don't want to do.

Shane Phillips 1:09:50
Is there good news here?

Michael Lens 1:09:51
This sounds like a recent new father speaking.

Michael Manville 1:09:57
I have a very cooperative young child.

Michael Lens 1:10:01
I don't! They're not young anymore. They were never cooperative.

Michael Manville 1:10:06
But I think that that's the issue, right? It doesn't make it less important. It doesn't make again, it doesn't make preemption not the best tool we have. But you should have reasonable expectations around it. It's if you talk to people in Huntington Beach or Santa Monica or something, you rapidly understand that just because the state says they have to do something that they have to do just because the state says they have to do something, they're not going to roll over.

Paavo Monkkonen 1:10:26
Yeah. And it's funny, I got a very lawyerly fun fact. Maybe you'll enjoy Nick Moran's friend of the pod said it's technically not preemption. A lot of what the state of California has done, because like with the ADU law, it's saying you guys have to make an ordinance that meets these characteristics. It's not like a state ordinance. Whereas maybe in Massachusetts, it is a state law coming in over the local.

Michael Lens 1:10:47
403B?

Michael Manville 1:10:50
40B, yeah.

Michael Lens 1:10:51 Where did I get the 3?

Paavo Monkkonen 1:10:52
It's a very nitpicky thing.

Michael Manville 1:10:54
Yeah. That must be the legal definition, because what I think of preemption is like you, the city government, cannot make a law that makes this illegal. Right. That that would at least in the dictionary definition. But Nick is an attorney. So, you know...

Michael Lens 1:11:09
I don't know if this is the last word here. I just keep being an optimist about this kind of stuff. You know, first, I do think that, you know, with all of these important caveats about how many carrots and sticks you can actually use effectively at cities, like their behavior is likely to change, you know, to some extent. Some of it is just like an ADU becomes legal and there's not much you can do about it. Some of it is, you know, eventually like more and more upzoning happens in more and more places because the state is just like staring you in the face. Right. And I'm an optimist in the sense that I think that once we we already have a lot of these new rules and laws baked into the system and it's always very hard to unbake them out of the system. Right. And, you know, I think the worst that can happen, and this is certainly on the table, is that there is a much more effective backlash to what we have out there. And in part, that backlash becomes powerful because people get fed up with the problem not being solved. You know, we still have homelessness. We still have extremely high housing costs for way too many people. And all this energy and all this yapping that we've done to make it better isn't working. And then people get mad. You know, and I think the most obvious place where you see this, this tension is like Proposition HHH in Los Angeles, where we have spent billions of dollars on our 1.2 billion dollars on expediting permanent supportive housing projects. And everybody looks around and says, but visible homelessness is worse than it's ever been. And then we say never again. But our voters just last November, you know, said, let's keep doing it.

Michael Manville 1:13:03
I mean, I think that's a great point. And I think back in the sort of the arena of the State House and everything, I mean, I'm also fairly optimistic about it. I think Mike's right that the rosy take on this, which I don't think is unrealistic, is like, well, you know, you start to get some ADUs, you start to get some small apartment buildings and then people start to chill out a little bit. Yeah. Right. And so the norm actually changes. Yeah. It's like, you know, right now, some of that opposition is built on this norm in some of these cities that we don't want any kind of multifamily development. And then it starts to come in and people see that the sky doesn't fall and then the norm shifts and then the law actually becomes more effective in part because it's less necessary. The bad outcome that Mike alluded to is not just a backlash, but also just a disillusionment, which is, you know, what I think Shane and I were at something a few summers ago. And Liam Dillon, who was then at the L.A. Times, said something like, hey, we've passed 100 housing laws at the state level and not much has happened. And I think that's true. But that's also just an artifact of both how hard it is to get a good law passed and the incentives that legislators have. Like if housing becomes the thing up in Sacramento, everybody wants to have done a housing bill. And some of these housing bills just don't do very much, but they get through. And then the ones that are big swings that are sort of like, well, this would probably change a lot. They either don't get through or they get really watered down. And so SB 9 is a great example. The SB 9 could have turned into a, it's sort of just become a quiet nothing burger, but it really could have.

Paavo Monkkonen 1:14:33
Hey, there were 15 new housing units built last year because of SB 9.

Michael Manville 1:14:38
A quiet nothing burger. But, you know, someone could have taken that and just said, like, well, look, you know, we quote unquote ended single family zoning in California and nothing happened. Right. And so this shows that state preemption doesn't do anything. And that's I think the danger is that you have these watered down state bills come through and they don't do much. And then people start to think that local zoning isn't really a problem.

Shane Phillips 1:15:01
Yeah. My optimistic take is just that it comes from our conversation with Eleanor West actually just learning the history of reform in New Zealand, just how long it took and how from the outside it looked like suddenly everything was changing in 2016 and onward. But they had started having these conversations a decade earlier and it took a long time for things to really break through in the same way as it took 40 years for ADU laws to break through before one actually really started making a difference. And I think we're on a much faster timeline here, but it's just not something you never fixed this problem in a matter of just a few years, especially a problem that's been 50 plus years in the making.

Michael Lens 1:15:46 Yeah.

Paavo Monkkonen 1:15:47
Update from Aaron Barrall for 400 jurisdictions, table B rezoned units, 1.9 million units. But most of it's from Los Angeles and San Francisco. Removing those, we get four hundred and seventy eight thousand rezoned space for rezoned units. And then, you know, how much of that actually gets built? I mean, then that took three years to actually get written into the book. So, yeah, like the eight year period of the housing element cycle will probably have built a couple hundred units because of it.

Michael Manville 1:16:13
And it really matters how those are distributed across particular parcels.

Paavo Monkkonen 1:16:18 Absolutely.

Michael Manville 1:16:19 And so it's a tough question.

Shane Phillips 1:16:20
I think this will be our last listener question about just research stuff. And since we had Road Scholars, did some transportation things, I think it makes sense to bring some transportation things in here. And these things definitely have relevance to land use. They affect how we plan our cities. Who cares about land use? Exactly. We're going back to we're satisfying Brian. We're doing what you were brought to UCLA to do. Talk about transportation. Will P. had two questions. I'm not sure we're going to get to both. We'll just start with the first one and see where we end up. He sent these questions a while back. So actually the policies that were just proposed at the time he was writing have already gone into effect. But they're still interesting and they're questions I've asked of Mike in the past. The question we're going to ask of Will's is about congestion pricing. Will says that New York City's congestion pricing program was not paired with increased train and bus service or active transportation investment, at least to the same degree as in London, for example, another city that's had congestion pricing for a while. He worried that this might be America's one shot at congestion pricing and that things could backfire if we make driving a lot more expensive without giving people viable alternatives. So, Mike, I'm going to turn this over to you. But just to narrow this question maybe a little bit or I guess open it up, my impression from this side of the country is that New York City's congestion pricing program has been pretty much an unqualified success, but it has a transit system that really has no peer in North America. So viable alternatives are going to be a lot less of a problem there than they are just about anywhere else. So maybe you can respond to this question with second and third tier transit systems also in mind, places like Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles.

Michael Manville 1:18:04
Yeah, I think L.A. is like a fourth tier transit system. I'm too hard on L.A.'s transit system, but it's because I use it. So, yeah, there's a couple of ways to look at what happened in New York and Shane's right that if the fear is that this is going to trigger a backlash, it turns out to be pretty popular. And that's in line with what we see with congestion pricing systems around the world, which is that before they come in, there's a lot of opposition to them. And then that usually swings to majority support and they stay that way. I think from an economic perspective, the concern people like me have about New York's congestion pricing system isn't that it's unpopular or the people don't have alternatives because we're talking about Manhattan. I'm sure there are some people who live very far out and have no choice or feel like they have no choice but to drive into Manhattan, but you're talking about a tiny share of overall travelers into that area.

Shane Phillips 1:18:55
The people traveling by car into Manhattan, on average, are far wealthier than the people using transit. And so they're best able to afford it in the vast majority of places.

Michael Manville 1:19:04
Tend to be very well off in part because New York just doesn't have a lot of parking either. So you're already prepared to spend a lot of money if you're coming over a bridge or through a tunnel to go into Manhattan so that the marginal $12 or whatever it is isn't huge compared to what you're already spending. The concern that economists might have with New York City's congestion program is just that it's so crude and that it really is oriented so blatantly around revenue rather than an actual transportation goal. Ideally, a congestion pricing system is designed to make the city's roads work better as opposed to just depressing car traffic because at a certain point you don't really want the streets of Manhattan to get too uncongested because then all of a sudden you have fast vehicle traffic on the streets of Manhattan and Manhattan is not highways. It's streets that people cross and that have crisscross traffic and so forth. That's one reason London invested so heavily after its cordon toll was put in place and shrinking its street network, shrinking the width of its streets and putting in speed bumps. You just had dangerous levels of speed. And so that leads me to talk about the rest of the U.S., which of course doesn't have New York's subway system and doesn't have even New York's bus fleet. We shouldn't in the rest of the country get focused on cordon tolls. There's very few downtowns in the United States that rival New York's. There's very few subway systems. And anyway, it's a cordon toll. Cordon toll is just like you pick a neighborhood or an island. The cordon toll is what London... Entering triggers it. That's what London, it's what Stockholm, it's what New York has done.

Shane Phillips 1:20:36
It's not about like specific roads being tolled. It's just if you enter on any road, you're paying that toll.

Michael Manville 1:20:43
You drive across this boundary, you're going to pay. What we should think about in the rest of the country is pricing our freeways. That's where most of the delay is going to be. And if you get rid of delay on the freeways, you're going to pull traffic off surface streets onto those freeways because they're working better. And so you're going to make the surface streets work better as well. And most of all, you don't end up with this difficult trade-off between congestion and dangerous levels of speed on streets where you have bicyclists and pedestrians and so forth, that the great benefit of a freeway is that it's unambiguously a road designed to move vehicles at high speed. So that's where you want to price. You want to pull the cars onto those freeways and that lets you take steps in the rest of your city to make those streets more livable for multimodal traffic that is going to intersect with each other.

Michael Lens 1:21:30
As someone who now drives regularly to San Diego and Orange County, or my wife does the same with our younger son for soccer games, I love toll roads. I admittedly have some money for toll roads. It's OK for our budget. I love toll roads.

Michael Manville 1:21:49
Yeah. And with respect to the alternatives and the price and things like that, politically it always helps to be able to say we have a great transit system. But it just isn't the case that you need to have a viable alternative before you price an important piece of public network infrastructure. The only way I can get electricity in my house is from LADWP. The only way I can get water in my house is from LADWP. Both of those are metered. I don't run outside and neither do any of my neighbors saying you can't charge me for my electricity because you didn't set up an alternative electricity system. We all just use a little bit less fucking electricity when it's expensive. And you can do the same with driving. It's just it's a very foreign idea because we've never priced it. But you can do it. And will this be a burden for some low income drivers? Absolutely. And that's what you use some of the revenue for.

Michael Lens 1:22:41
Yes. We can design programs.

Michael Manville 1:22:44
We can design programs to do that for people of the middle class, people above the middle class. The one observation I would make is that the typical American spends substantially more on their automobile than is absolutely necessary to safely convey them and their family around. And at a certain point on the margin, most of those families might be willing to spend a little bit less on the car in order to set aside some money to ensure that they don't have traffic congestion.

Michael Lens 1:23:15
Right. So spend money on the car or spend less money on the car and more money on the road.

Michael Manville 1:23:20
And then you have a better trip?

Michael Lens 1:23:21 Yeah.

Shane Phillips 1:23:23
Well said. Well, we ran out of time and everyone had to run off to meetings and we had plenty of questions left over. So I guess we'll just have to do another listener question episode before too long. I also didn't get to ask my last question of Paavo and the Mikes. What I wanted to do was hear everyone's reflections about being a part of UCLA Housing Voice, especially what those three get out of the show as co-hosts. I know my answer as the person who produces and hosts every episode, but they have different roles. Some day I'll get my answers, but I still wanted to share my answer before I sign off because it's a message of gratitude to our listeners as much as anything else. As far as what I get out of the show, producing UCLA Housing Voice is the best part of my job. I've said this many times over the past several years, but I'm not sure I've ever said that on an actual recording. Academia is a place for learning, exploring and educating, among other things, and the podcast lets me do all three in a pretty unique way. Anyone who's got a Ph.D. after their name has read many more studies and articles than I have, but I'd hazard a guess that very few people have read as many papers as carefully as I do for this show. I get to really dig in, not just because I want to, but because producing a good show depends on it, and I feel very fortunate to be in this position. This seems obvious in retrospect, but something I hadn't really considered when we started the podcast is that most of our guests would be professors, which is to say that they are professional teachers. We get to talk to people who know more about their field than anyone on the planet, and most of them have a lot of experience explaining their work to people who don't have the same background. As researchers, a lot of the media requests we get are just people looking for a quick soundbite, and I'm not knocking that because it absolutely has its place. But it really is fun when we can take the time to take full advantage of the expertise of the folks who come talk to us. Another thing I love about producing this show is that it lets me combine my curiosity with my interest in the communications and messaging side of housing policy. My formal job title in UCLA's HR system is research data analyst, and I consider myself a serviceable researcher. But truthfully, I am much more passionate about the sharing part of research than the discovering part. As much as I value the practice of research, I'm pretty sure I have a much bigger impact when a great podcast episode helps hundreds or even thousands of people speak a little more clearly and persuasively about housing to their friends, family, neighbors, elected officials, and constituents. If I can share some warm fuzzies for a minute here, which is now much easier that I'm recording this alone in my office, it's also been a great experience getting to do this show with my co-hosts. I could do this show on my own if I had to, but each of them brings different perspectives and personalities to these interviews, and they bring a depth of knowledge that I will just never match. The show would be less informative and less fun without you guys, so I sincerely appreciate you all being a part of it. And let us not forget that we could not keep this show going without the ongoing support of Claudia Bustamante, our student assistants past and present, and the Lewis Center's leadership. I hope you all feel some ownership over the podcast as well, because you very much deserve to. All right, that is that. Before I go, I want to close with a sincere thank you to our listeners for going along with us on this journey. This is a wonky show, and I couldn't have guessed we would find an audience of thousands of people, only about 10% of whom even live in California, believe it or not, who are willing to listen to hour-long conversations about peer-reviewed research, one jargony, methodologically complex article at a time. But here we are. Thanks for being exactly the kind of nerds we were trying to reach when we created this show. I hope we're able to do another hundred episodes and that we can keep growing and doing different and exciting new things with the show in the years to come. Housing voice out. The Lewis Center's website is lewis.ucla.edu. Show notes and a transcript of the interview are there too. The UCLA Lewis Center is on the socials. I'm there at Shane D. Phillips. Lens is @mc_lens. Paavo is @elpaavo and Manville is @michaelmanvill6. Thanks for listening. See you for the next hundred.

Unknown Speaker 1:28:07
Housing policy is so boring.

Michael Manville 1:28:12
Can that just be...

Paavo Monkkonen 1:28:14
Listener, you decide.

Michael Manville 1:28:15
Can't that just be how the podcast ends?

Michael Lens 1:28:17 Yeah, we could do it.