Episode 102: Minimum Standards vs. Affordability with Benjamin Schneider (Incentives Series pt. 5)

Shane Phillips 0:05
Hello, this is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast and I'm your host, Shane Phillips. This is the fifth episode in our ongoing incentive series supported by UCLA's Center for Incentive Design. Throughout this series, we'll be exploring the misalignment between what we say we want our policies and processes to achieve, the behaviors and outcomes they actually incentivize and potential solutions. Joining us this week is Benjamin Schneider to talk with us about his new book, The Unfinished Metropolis, and how we've been grappling with trade-offs between building quality and affordability for over 100 years. Looking back to our previous episodes, on the one hand, we had truly objectionable people like Lawrence Veiller arguing in the 1910s to use the building code to deliberately make it too expensive to build multifamily housing. On the other hand, just a few years later, we also had people like Edith Elmer Wood, a focus of our conversation today, who earnestly wanted to improve the quality of multifamily housing, yet still recognized that it could be a double-edged sword. Safer buildings and increased access to light and air were laudable goals that nonetheless came at a real cost, and it was a cost that many working class people of the era simply could not afford. If we didn't pair those heightened building standards with public subsidies, Wood argued, then very few new buildings might go up, and we could inadvertently make the problem worse as more people crowd into the older stock. It's a trade-off we've too often failed to acknowledge in our history, and I think it's all the more relevant today when new housing has actually been quite safe and healthy for decades, yet our codes and standards keep being ratcheted upward and increasing costs. A note on terminology here, we refer a bunch of times to tenements, which is a term you hear a lot in urban history, but not so much elsewhere, and candidly it's a word I've always understood in context, but could not really define if you ask me. After doing a little digging, I'm still not sure there's a single agreed upon definition, but generally speaking, tenements refer to densely packed multifamily buildings, usually around five to seven stories and covering most or all of the lot. Some were converted from an original single-family use, others were purpose-built, and many were converted from single-family with more built on top of and around them. Their heyday was the 1800s and early 1900s, especially in fast-growing cities like New York and Chicago, and they were typically very low quality and very overcrowded and therefore quite unsafe and unhealthy for the people who called them home. Importantly, though, they were also very affordable and served as a landing spot for many newly arriving families who could save and eventually move on to better accommodations. Just a reminder, we've got some episodes coming up for our book club where we'll be talking about Stuck by Yoni Appelbaum. We'll be recording the first episode covering chapters one through four in December and publishing it in January. After that, the other two episodes will be spaced about three to four weeks apart. 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 Lu. As always, you can send your questions and feedback to shanephilips@ucla.edu. With that, let's get to our conversation with Ben Schneider. Ben Schneider is a freelance journalist, Bloomberg CityLab contributor, and author of The Unfinished Metropolis, a new book exploring why American cities have stagnated and what we stand to gain by reimagining the built environment. Benjamin, thanks for joining us and welcome to the Housing Voice podcast.

Benjamin Schneider 4:03
Thanks for having me.

Shane Phillips 4:04
My cohost today is Mike Manville. Hey, Mike.

Michael Manville 4:07
Hey, guys.

Shane Phillips 4:08
First things first, Ben, give us a tour of somewhere meaningful to you that you'd like to share with us in our audience.

Benjamin Schneider 4:14
Well, I just moved away from my old neighborhood in Brooklyn, Prospect Heights. What I love about the Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, borderland area is that there's a really amazing variety of new and old buildings and industrial buildings and residential buildings and commercial buildings. It's just a very stimulating streetscape. I think it's one of these few places in American cities that illustrates urban history on the street itself. So many neighborhoods in the states are reflective of just that moment in which they were built. So I love walking the streets of Prospect Heights and contemplating time passing in the city.

Shane Phillips 4:53
Yeah. It doesn't have the same homogeneity of a lot of neighborhoods built since World War II, let's say.

Benjamin Schneider 4:59
Yeah. Also, in New York, there being a lot of historic districts, which are lovely, but are these snapshots of a particular moment of the neighborhood's development.

Shane Phillips 5:08
All right. So this is episode five of our incentive series and yes, we have found another angle on building codes and standards to talk about before we move on to the next section of the series. I had planned on checking out Benjamin's book eventually, but an article that he wrote in Planetizen a couple months ago grabbed my attention and it seemed like an opportunity to think through some of this codes and standards stuff in a more historical context. So we invited him on to talk about it and how some of the themes from his book relate. We'll get into that momentarily, but first, Ben, let me just give you a chance to say a bit about the book. The full title is The Unfinished Metropolis, Igniting the City Building Revolution. What's it about and what motivated you to write it?

Benjamin Schneider 5:52
So it's a tour of the built environment of American cities, exploring what has gone wrong in urban planning in the US and what are the innovative and exciting solutions on the horizon to fix our biggest urban problems, whether it's housing affordability, a lack of safe and efficient transportation options, or downtowns and shopping centers that are struggling to attract the foot traffic that they once did. So it walks through those three pieces of American urbanism, housing, transportation, and commercial environments, and explores in a deep way those themes.

Shane Phillips 6:27
And we'll come back to those. The parts of the book we're going to focus on are those housing parts. But before that, the article I mentioned that caught my attention has this headline, 106 Years Ago She Predicted Today's Housing Crisis. What If We'd Listened? It's about Edith Elmer Wood, a progressive Arab reformer and housing advocate who wrote a book in 1919, which is now out of copyright and linked to in our show notes at the Internet Archive. And it's about the difficult task of housing unskilled wage earners. At a time when reformers were rightly focused on improving the really squalid conditions in urban tenements, Wood was thinking several steps ahead about the impact of rising housing standards on affordability. She was very much in favor of higher quality housing for the urban and working poor, and we'll get into that, but things like larger units, more separation between buildings to provide light and air, stricter building codes to protect against fire and structural deficiencies, all that kind of thing. But her argument is that these improvements come at a cost, and it's a cost we need to acknowledge and do something about. If we mandate these things without a corresponding increase in public subsidies, it'll become impossible or it would become impossible to build housing that's affordable to lower income people and still turn a profit. The end result that she predicts is a quote unquote housing famine. Instead of building a bunch of higher quality housing for this population, you'll end up tightening the release valve provided by tenements and forcing people into even more crowded and dangerous conditions, into basically whatever housing stock already exists, even as your population may be growing. If this warning seems prophetic, that is because it was, it is exactly what happened in New York and in cities across the country. And we thought it was worth talking about today more than 100 years later because it's a lesson I think we still have not fully learned. As we talked about during the first four episodes of this series, we keep sticking new housing and particularly multifamily housing with expensive mandates that are billed as improving health and safety, and perhaps do in some cases, but we often fail to recognize the unintended consequences of those mandates on safety, on livability, on sustainability, and especially affordability. Ben, I've tried to summarize here the downside to raising minimum standards beyond a level that the working poor can afford. Again, at least if we're not willing to subsidize the cost of those higher standards, which we haven't been historically. But I also want to acknowledge that there is a categorical difference between the quality and the safety of tenements New Yorkers were living in in the 1910s and the apartments people live in today, even if today's homes were built in the 70s or 80s. The tenements of 100 years ago were unpleasant to live in, and they were a genuine threat to life and safety in a way that most housing built after World War II just is not. Could you describe urban housing of that era for us and what it was like to live in it?

Benjamin Schneider 9:25
Yeah. I mean, it's really important to foreground this conversation in a realistic discussion of what tenement housing was like, particularly in the late 19th, early 20th century when there were very few or no regulations around housing quality in big cities. What you had were these unimaginably overcrowded conditions with as many as 12 or 15 people in one or two rooms, no running water inside these buildings, outhouses, if they could be called that, in the backyard. The yard wasn't much because the buildings were covering 90% or more of the lot and many of the rooms in the buildings did not have exterior window access. So it was very unsanitary, as you can imagine, and also very unsafe in terms of fire risk where there weren't a lot of ways of escaping from a building. If there was a fire, everyone was crowded into a tiny single stairwell that just did not have enough capacity to evacuate everyone from that building. So the motivations behind the housing movement that Edith Elmer Wood was reacting to were very legitimate and very important issues to address. That was largely what was happening in the late 19th century and the early 20th century with these first batches of tenement laws that mandated things like running water, fire escapes, fireproof building materials. But even as early as 1919 when Edith Elmer Wood was writing, she was observing how some of those tenement laws were already starting to go past reasonable definitions of health and safety and were taking on a more moralistic valence. They were prescribing the ideal way to live rather than focusing on keeping people healthy and well.

Shane Phillips 11:14
Do you have a sense for whether the bare minimum requirements, the things like the fire escapes, the things like making sure that every room had an exit or a window, running water, whether that alone was enough to put housing out of reach of the working poor? Or was it really things they did beyond the bare necessities that were making these newer homes being built out of their reach?

Benjamin Schneider 11:40
Wood talks about how the new law tenements, which I think were based on the 1901 codes, already had a pretty big impact on housing production and housing supply in New York, such that she was starting to see these kinds of shortages emerge. But I think from our perspective, the kinds of regulations called for in those new law tenements are very reasonable and still allow for quite a bit of density. It was subsequently, when you start to have things like really generous side setbacks, full on bans on multifamily housing or multi-generational households, really onerous building material requirements, those things start to get into this area where, in fact, in many cases, the people behind those policies were transparently saying, this is not actually about health and safety, but we're going to make it look like it's about health and safety to justify marginalizing apartment buildings as a housing typology in cities.

Shane Phillips 12:35
Right, right. And that leads me perfectly to the next question. This is actually mainly for Mike, but Mike, when I asked the faculty who of you was interested in co-hosting this episode, you volunteered and said the progressives were up your alley. What should we know about them, not just in terms of their attitudes toward housing, but their motivations more generally? I'm kind of fascinated that someone like Edith Elmer Wood could be put in the same group as someone like Lawrence Veiller, who's one of the people Ben was really just referring to. That's the guy we mentioned a couple episodes ago, who in the early 1920s was arguing for using the building code to make it as expensive as possible to build multifamily housing, just because he didn't like it.

Michael Manville 13:16
Yeah, well, I mean, I think progressivism was a big tent, and so people arrived at it with a real mixture of motivations. I mean, I'd be interested to hear Ben's thoughts on this as well, but I do think cities had changed so much and so rapidly in this period of time, starting around 1880 or so, just an absolute explosion of in-migration and a lot of that in-migration being not just people who hadn't previously lived in the city, but immigrants, primarily from Eastern Europe and so forth. Native-born urbanites, a lot of them looked at this wrenching change and had a wide range of reactions that I think ranged from real concern and horror about the conditions some of these folks were living in to maybe a less admirable concern and horror about what that meant for community morals, what that meant for the future of America. You had this mixture of pity and prejudice and sincerity and snobbery and a certain amount of nativism and xenophobia that all jumbled together and then came out in different forms in proposed regulations about the built environment. People who had quite different motivations could end up proposing and supporting the same reforms. Lawrence Veiller was a eugenicist and a xenophobe and an anti-Semite and also someone who just like really thought that apartment living was a threat to American morals, but one could look at the tenements and want to see them fundamentally changed or even banned and harbor none of those opinions, just be concerned about the welfare of the people living within them. I think that's kind of what was going on and so it's hard to take everybody under that big umbrella and put them in a single box, although I do think they were often united by a belief that the condition of housing itself was more a cause of problems than a symptom of them, which led to all of them sort of coalescing around the idea that regulating housing and improving it could do a lot of good.

Shane Phillips 15:36
Yeah, Ben, do you want to talk about this idea that you bring up in your book of design determinism?

Benjamin Schneider 15:43
Yeah, I think Mike was really getting at this concept that throughout architectural history really but especially in this moment, there was this notion that the physical design of a building or a housing typology shaped in profound ways the way of life of the people inside it, the health and the moral virtue or characteristics of people. For instance, Vayler himself talked about how the streams of people coming in and out of tenement houses create moral depravity since you're sort of interacting with so many strangers or that because they were so overcrowded, the saloon was the only place where people would want to spend time and that that led to vice and drunkenness, et cetera. So there was this idea taking hold in that moment that if you could just fix the design of these homes and these buildings, that you could kind of fix these social problems too. You could eliminate crime and vice and create upstanding citizens by way of very different form of housing and that would come to be reflected very explicitly in the physical design of public housing, the sort of high modernism of the tower in the park, which was the light and air were huge points of emphasis and sort of clean geometric lines made it so that it was hard to have dust accumulate or it was hard to hide things away in your apartment. And so a lot of these ideas actually had a pretty profound influence on design going forward.

Shane Phillips 17:14
In your book, you also tell the story of a building in New York City that was originally built as affordable housing way back in 1912, but it failed pretty quickly and is now a luxury co-op. I think this is just a illustrative story and maybe tells us quite a bit about why public housing and other things failed and just why we ended up where we have and maybe also just the fact that high quality housing is expensive and requires a lot of money to keep up, whether it's public funding for lower income people or just higher income people paying for it themselves. Could you tell us about that building and its history?

Benjamin Schneider 17:52
In the turn of the 20th century, as upper-class New Yorkers were learning about tenement conditions from books like Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives, they were inspired to do something about it and the product of that movement was known as the model tenement movement. Basically the way it worked is that philanthropists would fund the construction of new apartment buildings that were much higher quality than the tenements that immigrants actually lived in and one of those was called the Cherokee Apartments on the Upper East Side on 77th Street. It's a gorgeous building. It's still there today. It's got these bronze balustrades and oversized windows and balconies. As you say, Shane, it is now a luxury co-op, but it was initially built to be low-income housing and to specifically correct some of the design challenges of tenement housing, the lack of air and lights, the lack of multi-bedroom units. All of that was addressed in the design of this building, which is really quite excellent. But what happened at that building and actually at pretty much all of the model tenements is that the financial model just didn't work. The philanthropists were willing to fund these buildings to be constructed as these, in some sense of a vanity project of something they could point to as making their mark on the city, but they weren't prepared to subsidize the rents of low-income tenants there indefinitely. They expected somehow that the folks who would be served by those buildings would be able to pay the full cost of maintaining and operating the buildings and they just couldn't. Those buildings were sold off onto the private market, became just part of the regular housing stock of the city. It was the first really vivid instance of this problem that's cropped up throughout America's affordable housing history of the challenge of sustaining low rents at a decent building over a long period of time.

Shane Phillips 19:46
Yeah. There was a part of what I kind of, I don't know, darkly appreciated about this story. The philanthropist behind this specific project was a Vanderbilt and Edith Elmer Wood ran into this same problem or felt similarly that if we could just kind of remove the profit motive, maybe even have some one-time subsidies for these projects, that then the wages of the working poor, the working class could be enough to keep things running and it could be self-sustaining at that point. Just thinking about the Vanderbilt in particular, I'm reminded of that Arrested Development scene with Lucille. It's one banana, Michael. What could it cost? $10, just like the lack of appreciation for what people were actually earning and what they could actually afford. I think that's part of what's going into this. Then on the other hand, not really understanding perhaps how much it does cost to build high quality housing. This is back more than 100 years ago when labor costs were much lower and I think actually to build high quality housing was a lot cheaper than it is today and still it just was not enough. Of course, wages were much lower and much more unequal then as well. Back when Wood wrote this book, her big concern was tenement laws and how they might make it infeasible to build apartments for the working poor, at least without public subsidies. I just want to say again here, that's the concern we're highlighting here. She was really, really strongly in support of these reforms. She just thought it was important that we subsidize them. Another important point here is that those laws at least had a firm grounding in health and safety concerns. But let's move forward in time and talk about some of the policies that didn't have such strong justifications, even if they may have been framed similarly in their time. Two big ones, first is single family only zoning or put it another way, apartment bans. Second is the demolition and conversion of hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million SRO units, single room occupancy hotel units from the 60s onward. These both come up in your book as well. So tell us how those fit into this framework and any other things that you think also are worth mentioning here.

Benjamin Schneider 22:04
Single family zoning is really the logical conclusion of Lawrence Veiller's crusade and the crusade of many others who viewed apartments as immoral. Basically they looked at multifamily housing and continually found new deficiencies with the various ways of laying it out or designing it such that they could be better than the tenements that were initially critiqued for their unlivability. Each subsequent tenement law was just not enough. And ultimately what they felt was that the only virtuous environment to live in would be a single family home. And that is sort of the ideology that undergirds the mass adoption of single family zoning basically everywhere throughout the country. And SROs are a similar story. There were efforts to regulate SROs to make them a little bit more livable and healthy. But ultimately the solution that policymakers landed on, this is more like moving into the mid-century period, was just that SROs are bad news just as they are. There's no kind of redemptive way to do it. So they ought to be demolished and that's what happened. Over a million SRO units were demolished in the 60s and 70s across the country.

Shane Phillips 23:15
And it really reflects this view again that the housing is the cause of the social problems you observe among the people living in that housing, not a consequence of poverty.

Michael Manville 23:27
It's a belief that living in that sort of low quality housing is the mother of crime and poverty and misfortune and not that people coming from some misfortunate background might have no better option than to live in housing that many other people would consider substandard.

Shane Phillips 23:48
Right. And then if you get rid of this housing, somehow their lives will reform rather than them just now losing access to this option that I think it's just not appreciated that people are there because it is their best option. And taking away that option does not make their life better. It just forces them to go to the next worst option for their housing, which might be living on the street. And maybe you can talk a little bit about how the demolition and conversion of all these SROs coincided with the emergence of modern homelessness, Ben.

Benjamin Schneider 24:22
Well, we've seen the natural experiment play out of what happens when you remove that housing option of last resort. And as you say, the result is modern homelessness, the mass homelessness that we see today. There was a very clear kind of historical feedback loop here where, as I mentioned, in the sixties and seventies was sort of the heyday of SRO demolition, often kind of part of a downtown urban renewal schemes. And those projects directly then led into the 1980s when very rapidly in the early eighties, cities woke up to really unprecedented levels of unsheltered homeless people sleeping in doorways and on the streets of their downtowns. And over the years, housing researchers have pointed to this moment as a really important inflection point for the emergence of what we call modern homelessness, this largely economically driven form of homelessness where it's clearly the results of a shortage of low-income housing. We had just bulldozed a lot of that low-income housing right before modern homelessness emerged onto the scene.

Michael Manville 25:29
Yeah. I mean, a very telling statistic that I think out here in LA, Marc Velianatos sort of uncovered is that in the 19 teens and 1920s, the population of Los Angeles's Skid Row was larger than it is today, but they all lived in SROs. And today that the population is lower, but a tremendous amount of people actually live on the street.

Shane Phillips 25:50
This really is another version of what Edith Elmer Wood was talking about where you could imagine having torn these down, converted them, improved them, all these SROs, and also spent a lot of money, public money to build more low-income housing or to help the people who are living in these SRO units to afford this new higher quality housing. But if anything, what actually happened is the opposite. And at the same time as we were losing all of these SRO units, we also were pretty sharply cutting government housing subsidies, particularly at the federal government level.

Benjamin Schneider 26:30
Right. It's also important to point out that the emergence of modern homelessness also corresponds to the end of the public housing development era. The peak of public housing units that actually existed was roughly the late 1970s, I think. So we had all of these, what Edith Elmer Wood would call restrictive housing policies that were either demolishing or limiting the amount of housing options that were available while simultaneously cutting off constructive housing policies through institutions like exclusionary zoning and apartment bans and this whole gauntlet of housing obstacles that you talk about on the show all the time.

Shane Phillips 27:06
Yeah. Yeah. And beyond public housing alone, there was just large cuts to HUD funding, Department of Housing and Urban Development funding during this time, during the, I think the Nixon administration maybe was the start of this and then continuing into the Reagan administration as well. So there's a line from Wood that really resonated with me that you highlighted. She said that even the best restrictive policy regime, quote, is only negative. It will prevent the bad. It will not produce the good, unquote. I think in some cases merely preventing bad things is enough and the worse the bad outcome you're preventing, the more true that might be. If buildings are regularly collapsing or burning down and killing the occupants, then you clearly need stronger standards even if compliance is quite expensive, even then not to say that there are costs, but I think the case is clearer there. But once we get into things like minimum room sizes and unit sizes or ceiling heights or building setbacks or open space mandates, you start to see the limits of these policies. I don't think there's any question that they are nice to have, but they do come at a cost and builders pretty much always have the option of either not building or just building somewhere else. In California, they've really done a little of both. On the one hand, housing production has declined across the country over the past few decades, but it has declined much more in our state than in places like Florida and Texas say. We've mandated the good, in Woods' words, with strong sustainability standards and affordable unit set asides and all the rest, but we end up producing less and the lower income people we say we're trying to help, and I think genuinely are, are all migrating to other states with lower standards that build housing regular people can actually afford. Woods' government subsidy solution was proposed to solve the problem of truly needing to raise minimum standards to ensure basic health and safety. Today the problem seems to be that we've raised our standards well beyond that level. The well-meaning hope is that that raises the bar for everyone, but I worry that it just relegates more people to older, lower quality housing when I think the evidence suggests pretty strongly that we would be much better off with millions of people upgrading to, let's say, 2000s era housing than with hundreds of thousands of people upgrading to 2020s era housing, and that seems to be the trade we're making, but anyway, I'm curious to hear what you think about this and whether we should apply Woods' thinking differently today in light of the much greater safety and quality of today's housing stock where we don't need to do so much to ensure the basics for people anymore.

Benjamin Schneider 29:47
I think it's really important to revisit building codes in particular, an area that doesn't get as much attention in light of changing technologies, changing building techniques, and different safety strategies that exist now versus 100 years ago when a lot of these codes and laws were initially conceived of. The quintessential example that I'm sure your listeners are familiar with is this single stair requirement, or rather the double stair requirement that exists in so many American apartment buildings today, and the possibility of building an apartment building with just one central stairwell in it, and I know I mentioned when I was describing tenements that that was one problem with their safety, but that was very much in a context where the buildings were ultra flammable, they were super overcrowded, they didn't have sprinklers, and there are a whole host of other issues with those kinds of buildings that made them unsafe with a single stairwell. Times have changed a lot, and building technologies have changed a lot, and plenty of other places have proven that some of these ideas about what it takes to build a safe building now are pretty outdated and are worth revisiting. So I think Wood's message is really worth bringing into the present day and applying to almost every aspect of housing policy, considering what does this thing actually do? Is it rooted in our contemporary needs, or is it a relic that's reflective of a different time with different needs?

Michael Manville 31:10
I think since this episode is part of our incentive series, you also have to think about the incentives that face the people who make these rules. If you are someone who is supposed to hold developers to certain building codes and enforce building codes, the fear that you have in the back of your mind is that a fire does hit a building, or some structural incident occurs in a building, and in the aftermath of that event, can you show that you actually imposed a number of safety regulations on that building that averted the worst, or that prevented it from being truly disastrous? Your worst case scenario is that you as the building department told a developer they could build a building with just one staircase, and then a fire happens, and then it's hard to evacuate and so forth, and you're liable, and you're pilloried, et cetera. What you don't worry about is that the entire city gets quietly more expensive over time because of your regulations. You have no incentive to be concerned that by enforcing these visible regulations, you contribute in a less visible way to a housing crisis. It's one of these things that progressive reform and its descendants have always struggled with is just these counterfactual situations, and what happens when housing goes unbuilt because we apply high standards to the housing that is built is just literally someone else's problem, but that someone else turns out oftentimes to be no one else.

Shane Phillips 32:45
This came up in our conversation with Jesse Zwick, and the person whose lap it falls on often is the elected official, the council member, and that's part of why he is a strong advocate, and I agree with this, for elected officials and other people who are not building code officials, fire officials, getting more involved in this issue, and that's not to say that they get to overrule the expertise and the knowledge and experience of those officials with this very specific experience, but it is clearly important that their perspective is brought to the table and these decisions are not made purely through the lens of safety, let's say, because actually we know from every aspect of our lives that people constantly make trade-offs between a little less safety and a little more convenience, a little less safety and a little lower cost.

Michael Manville 33:40
Yeah. I mean, if you think a building with one staircase is dangerous, I have terrible news for you about your drive to work, because statistically that's where the danger is, and again, it's not to devalue the expertise of people who have studied building safety. It really is true that if you require multiple staircases and all sorts of other things, the building is safer. It's just to keep in mind that there are many other costs that people can simply define out of their ambit, but that doesn't make those costs go away.

Benjamin Schneider 34:15
I would even push back a little bit on the premise that the two stair requirement is inherently safer, because if you go into some contemporary five over one style apartment buildings, especially these big Texas donuts that are just enormous, 500 unit buildings that wrap around an internal parking garage, the stairways themselves are located often very far from your units and in places that can be kind of illogical to find. I don't know the data on this, but I've been in some of these apartment buildings and I've wondered what would it take to actually evacuate this place? As compared to a single stair building where you've got four units on one landing, it's very clear where your exit is and it's right there. I think there's some ways in which that design can actually be even worse.

Michael Manville 35:02
Oh, sure. Yeah. I mean, you can imagine situations where it's worse, but just steel manning the idea. Just make it even simpler. You could have a law where everybody has to walk around wearing a helmet. That does make us all safer. You never know when something's going to fall from the sky and hit you on the head, but there's a trade-off to that, but if we had a large bureaucracy that was only concerned about people's brain health and didn't have to factor in any other costs, we might all have a helmet law, but we don't. That's the only point I was making is that-

Shane Phillips 35:32
We do have that for buildings, though, is the difference.

Michael Manville 35:36
That even if you can see that a lot of these things do incrementally increase safety, you do have to weigh that against the various other things they do.

Shane Phillips 35:43
Right. Right. Ben, you wrote in chapter two of your book that, quote, it took many years for regulations to catch up with prevailing ideologies and even longer for Wood's prophecy to come true. Through the 1930s, American cities were a riot of diverse multifamily housing typologies. For me, that raised the question of why. Why did multifamily of all kinds and densities continue making up a large portion of housing production up until at least the 60s and 70s? For all the forces arrayed against it, it seems like there was not as much, I guess, policy transfer from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Every city was just kind of figuring things out on their own, how to discourage and prohibit these things. Do you have thoughts on why, or is that not really a fair characterization?

Benjamin Schneider 36:32
Well, there was a really interesting moment in the 1920s and 30s when some of these early tenement laws were bearing fruit in terms of creating really innovative housing typologies, more courtyard style apartments, for instance, that did have better light and air, or sort of rifts on the single family home or the row home that were very regionally specific, like the New England triple decker or the Chicago six flat, or in California, the bungalow and the bungalow court. These were sort of modest multifamily housing typologies that were emerging as policy makers and builders were kind of trying to think beyond the tenement as a housing typology. And what happened was that the powers that be basically felt that these things were similar to tenements in New England. There was a huge movement against the triple decker because it was viewed as this place where immigrants would go and fail to assimilate into American society. And so those were pretty much banned across that region and copy and paste for almost every kind of innovative regional missing middle housing typology in that 1920s, 1930s period. A lot of these building typologies were also filled by parking requirements, which started to come out in the 30s, which is why I identified that kind of moment in time as an important inflection point. But you're right that in general, multifamily housing production continued fairly robustly through the 60s. And I think in that post-war era, what you start to see is this really interesting phenomenon of the suburban garden apartment complex. These were often built in these kind of awkwardly shaped parcels that were in between the big subdivisions that were getting built at that time or in between a shopping center and a housing subdivision and policy makers viewed apartments as a valuable buffer basically to keep single families home zones separate from commercial and industrial zones. And these kind of suburban communities were often like still incorporating. It was kind of the early days of their development. So I think there was just less organized opposition to multifamily housing. But then as these places get more established, more as folks would say, built out, then there was more organized opposition to stopping multifamily housing. And I think that's a big part of why you start to see those figures start to drop off in the 60s.

Shane Phillips 38:54
Yeah. I hadn't really thought about this before, I probably should have, but I kind of see a progression and I'm probably skipping some steps here, but just illustratively from the really dense, big bulky tenement to something like a courtyard apartment, which we have many of those in Los Angeles today from the 20s and 30s, I would say. And they're often quite beautiful. They have an interior courtyard, a little space on the outside too. There may be five, six stories. And so the courtyard apartments were sort of a response to the tenements and improvement upon them, or maybe just like, well, this is what we can build now since the tenement style is illegal. And then that slowly also gets banned and regulated out of existence. And in Los Angeles, we end up with the Dingbat, the two, three story building that is basically built around parking requirements. And I just see this progression as sort of developers responding to these different policies. And that's well-trod territory, but I just think about specifically how the design kind of gets worse over time. We're regulating these things out of existence and we go from courtyard apartments to dingbats and it provided housing and it was affordable and that's great, but maybe we could have just kept building courtyards and that would have been probably a lot better, but that was no longer an option.

Benjamin Schneider 40:19
Yeah. I describe it in the book as a game of whack-a-mole where as soon as builders would adapt to new regulations then there would be subsequent regulations that would make that typology also illegal or infeasible to build. And actually the same thing happened to the dingbats. Those as you say were a response to increased parking mandates, but then by the mid 60s, LA ratcheted up the requirements even more. That made it much harder to build the dingbat style. And then after the dingbat, what came next? I don't know. Not all that much.

Shane Phillips 40:50
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the story.

Michael Manville 40:53
When I first moved to LA, like many people who first moved to LA, I lived in a dingbat. It's not just, well, it is a response to parking requirements, but it's very much a response to a peculiarity of LA's parking requirements, which didn't just say that every unit needed to have parking, but that it needed to have covered parking. That's a very unusual aspect of LA zoning code, especially because really LA doesn't have adverse weather.

Shane Phillips 41:17
Yeah. I was going to say, of all places to require covered parking.

Michael Manville 41:21
But it does. LA has a covered parking requirement, and that is what leads to that unique shape of the dingbat where you have the overhangs on both sides. You needed to come up with a cheap apartment building that would still cover the required parking. That's why you didn't see them in many other places, which parking requirements themselves were ubiquitous, but that covered parking requirement is just a little extra LA spice.

Shane Phillips 41:48
Yeah. That was a little trivia I was not aware of. Ben, developers of the era were happy to endorse Wood's diagnosis of the problem, but not her proposed solution. Quoting you again, you say, the central premise of her book is to make the case for the government to get into the housing business and provide high quality homes for the poor. Could you explain why she felt that was the right solution and give us some of the details about how she envisioned this actually working in practice?

Benjamin Schneider 42:17
She observed this economic problem, which is that as you ratchet up building codes and habitability standards, you make housing development more expensive such that those rents eventually become unaffordable to people with low incomes. She was correct in that observation. She thought the solution there had to be the government stepping in and becoming a builder itself and bridging the gap to an extent between what it costs to build good quality housing and what low income people wanted to pay or were able to pay. I think this is where she starts to lose touch a little bit because she felt that the government could pretty much ... The government would have to put forward a capital infusion at the front to build the buildings, but that similarly to the idea of the model tenements that eventually this program would be self-sustaining with the rents that tenants would pay. She partly envisioned that taking place with, I think, more middle income people also living in these kinds of developments, but I think generally speaking, there's a little bit of wishful thinking on her part in terms of how this would actually work with no or minimal subsidies.

Shane Phillips 43:27
Do you want to say a little bit about her role in the public housing movement going forward? Because I think you describe her having a pretty big role in that and I think that kind of builds on her experience and her beliefs that are developing during this time.

Benjamin Schneider 43:43
Yeah. It's really interesting to read her 1919 book, Housing of the Unskilled Wage Earner because it introduces these ideas that would then come to bear in this fight for the public housing program in the 1930s, which she was a really important part of. Again, it reflected kind of what I just described. The initial idea was that the government would put forward the money up front and that these buildings and agencies would be self-supporting over the long term. That was based on the hope that the program would serve a pretty broad swath of household types, of income types from the middle income to the low income households. That is how the program worked initially, but that brought up kind of political issues of its own in terms of how the government should be allocating its resources. By the 50s and 60s, those rules started to get rolled back and public housing became reserved for those with the lowest incomes, which then set it up for this situation by the 1970s where it was really struggling financially and not able to self-sustain, which is a situation that persists to this day with most public housing agencies.

Shane Phillips 44:51
Yeah. It's kind of a reliving of the experience of that Cherokee building built by the Vanderbilt heir.

Benjamin Schneider 44:57
Yeah, exactly.

Shane Phillips 44:58
One thing I enjoy about reading books as opposed to shorter articles and so forth is it just kind of gives you the space to think more expansively and rethink things that you're already pretty familiar with. You mentioned Pruitt-Igoe in the book, and I think 13,000 units or some very large number of units that I forget exactly how many, but just a huge amount of public housing in St. Louis that was built in, I think the 50s and torn down in the 70s maybe, it didn't last more than 20 years or so. But this is not really germane to anything in particular, but it did make me think one of the problems with public housing beyond all the things that are discussed all the time about it not really being self-supporting and so forth is, you mentioned how all these units were plunked down in just one location at a time when the economy was really kind of falling apart in St. Louis and they were losing population. And it does kind of, I think, reveal the weaknesses of a really top down approach. And not to say that the market approach to housing is perfect for every solution, but I don't think you would have ended up with private developers coming in and building that amount of housing in a place like St. Louis at that time. And then ending up in a position where there's just like, even at very low prices, very little demand and with three quarters of them being vacant or whatever it ended up being. It just made me think about that aspect of the public housing program and wonder how we could do something a little more incremental and not just trying to build thousands of units in one neighborhood all in one go.

Benjamin Schneider 46:35
Yeah, totally. And it goes back to Jane Jacobs' idea of gradual versus cataclysmic change. The developments like Pruitt-Igoe were so clearly a cataclysmic event for a neighborhood. It was the clear cutting of the existing neighborhood and the erection of, I think it was like 11,000 units of identical towers that were not particularly appealing to begin with. And then as St. Louis' economy started going downhill, it's this singular kind of asset that is being buffeted by the huge economic headwinds of a collapsing city. I think it's a much more difficult situation to deal with than, for instance, if there were more smaller distributed public housing projects throughout the St. Louis metro area, some scenario like that, which of course was impossible because of the nimbyism of suburban communities when the public housing program was getting started. And another interesting theme here is just the fact that in the 30s through 60s, roughly when public housing was actually getting built, you have to think about what were the major cities in the US at that time. And many of them were these rust belt cities that pretty much immediately thereafter would lose enormous amounts of population. And the housing need there was significantly reduced very soon after these complexes were built, which is just sort of a historical irony that I don't know that anyone could have done anything about, but it's a factor behind why public housing was not as successful as it could have been.

Shane Phillips 48:02
Last thing I want to talk about here is a little more of the legacy of public housing in the United States and how it relates to other kinds of housing reform. This is a little bit of a tangent from the main topic of this conversation, but again, just a thought that occurred to me while reading your book and I want to explore it a bit here. Anyone who's listened to UCLA Housing Voice for a while knows that I'm a big advocate for state level housing reform. And one thing I really believe is that it's usually better to accept an incremental incomplete reform than to wait until you can pass something more complete and maybe closer to your ideal. There's value in putting points on the board and getting something into law that you can build upon in later years. ADU reform in California is the example that I always come back to. The state passed ADU laws every several years dating back to 1982, but it wasn't until 2016 that a couple of bills really broke the log jam and we started seeing meaningful ADU production. And since then, we've just kept streamlining and closing loopholes. Public housing strikes me as something very different where just passing something was maybe exactly the problem. The program was deeply flawed by design. Everyone knew it, but the various compromises were seen as necessary to get it over the finish line. Many people in Congress probably thought they could come back later and fix it, but that just didn't happen and instead it became a very visible failure of the welfare state and I think poisoned the well against subsidized housing for generations, really to the modern day in many, many places. I'm curious to hear thoughts from both of you really on that legacy and what lessons it might have for us today, not really just about public housing specifically, but about this idea of like, is it a good thing to just pass something or not or when is it a good thing and when is it maybe something where you should hold out and wait for the thing you really want?

Benjamin Schneider 49:55
Yeah, it's a really good question. I think especially challenging now when particularly at the federal level, you really can't assume you'll ever get another bite at the apple. And I wonder, maybe back then in the 1930s with the public housing program, there may have been a little bit more idealism that they could kind of work on the program and amend it and they did actually in certain ways in the coming years.

Shane Phillips 50:17
Yeah.

Benjamin Schneider 50:17
But I just always come back to the original sin of the slum clearance requirement. To me, almost every other aspect of it is understandable and kind of justifiable in some sense, but the fact that for every new unit of public housing, the law required you to demolish one unit of quote unquote slum housing just was such a big force in the physical destruction of so many vital neighborhoods and really just undermined the whole premise of public housing being this sort of additive city building force. It really just sort of was this do-over of city building that in many cases turned out worse than the neighborhoods it replaced. So if I could go back and tell people to hold off and do it a little bit differently, that's the one piece that I think is just it may have been worth it to go forward with that particular piece of legislation if you could take that one piece out.

Michael Manville 51:10
Yeah. I mean, I agree with that and I think that to your question, Shane, the public housing program, it had to make a lot of compromises to stay afloat and you never know it's sort of like alternative history and stuff. I think you can make a case that it made certainly one too many. It was when you combine the various things it had to do to get past a sort of sneaking suspicion that this was a little too Soviet or something with, as mentioned, the kind of miscalculation that urban renewal would work really well and these big Midwestern cities would continue to be very vital places rather than places where huge portions of the population migrated. You just got a program that almost from the beginning unfortunately was on life support. The initial idea was that people from all walks of life or many walks of life would be in these buildings and true to Woods' ideal that the majority of sort of working class residents would subsidize the very worst off. That might have been true for a few years. My mother tells the story of when she was young visiting her cousins who maybe in the early 50s were living in one of the first public housing projects in Boston but within a few years they were out because it was a time when a great many people, certainly not all people in the United States, but a great many people were experiencing a lot of upward mobility and with good jobs, folks could even if they were in public housing for a bit soon be in a suburban house and that's what a lot of people wanted. Within the span of a decade or so, public housing was serving a purpose very different from what its enabling vision was and doing so without the resources that needed to sort of carry out that new mission successfully. I just think there's examples from around the world of public housing that works reasonably well and we just sort of from the get-go got off on the wrong foot with it.

Shane Phillips 53:07
Yeah. Yeah. And on this topic of slum clearance as a sort of original sin, I think what you said Mike about some people feeling public housing, maybe this is just a little too Soviet. I think those two things are probably related where the influence of the private sector played a role and building all that public housing might be less of a threat if you're tearing down a bunch of other housing such that you're not flooding the market with new supply and driving down the price of the existing housing, right? I have to imagine that played a role in all of this.

Michael Manville 53:40
Oh yeah. If you read about the debates about public housing in Los Angeles, which ultimately culminated in the clearing of Chavez Ravine and Dodger Stadium and all that, the idea of the kind of a red scare played a huge role and a lot of that was pushed aggressively by people in the real estate industry for sure.

Benjamin Schneider 54:00
Yeah. I was just going to say, as far as I recall in my research, that connection between the private real estate industry advocating for that slum clearance provision, that was a pretty clear connection and an ask on their part to keep the overall housing supply static such that their position wouldn't be threatened. You can imagine if the housing supply of public housing had, it was over a million units, 1.5 million units across the country in a time when there were probably half as many units as there are now, that could have made a pretty big impact on the overall housing market if that was an additive number of homes being brought online. But as it actually transpired, it was just a no net gain situation, so it didn't really affect the broader real estate market that much.

Shane Phillips 54:46
Yeah. Well, as always, we come back to housing supply and I think that's a great place to end. Ben Schneider, thank you so much for joining us on the Housing Voice podcast. The title of the book again is The Unfinished Metropolis, Igniting the City Building Revolution. Thank you so much.

Benjamin Schneider 55:04
Thanks, Shane.

Shane Phillips 55:05
You can find more info on Ben's work, our show notes, and a transcript on our website, lewis.UCLA.edu. The UCLA Lewis Center is on the socials. I'm on Blue Sky @ Shane D. Phillips, and Mike is on Twitter at MichaelManville6. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.