The Complexities of the Housing Crisis

Daniel Herriges has been one of my favorite reads on the Strong Towns site for many years. He has thoughtful, in-depth pieces on many subjects, notably housing. Now, he has co-authored a new book with Chuck Marohn called “Escaping the Housing Trap.” We discuss the book, and much more, including my guest appearance in the book.

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Intro: “Why Be Friends”

Outro: “Fairweather Friend”

Kevin K (00:02.704)

Welcome back to the Messy City podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. Thanks for listening. I've got a special guest here today, somebody who has been one of my favorite reads for many years now. Daniel Herrigus is here joining us. And Daniel, it's great to see you.

Daniel Herriges (00:24.11)

Great to be here, Kevin. Thank you.

Kevin K (00:25.85)

We're going to talk a lot about housing today and housing itself is obviously, it's probably one of the most, been one of the most talked about topics nationally inside the urban planning and development world and outside that world as well, probably for at least a decade as housing costs have really exploded in a lot of places in the country. So it's a very, very common conversation piece.

And a lot of it is often frustrating and confusing to talk about. So into this, Daniel Steps, he's actually been writing about this for some time on the Strong Towns website and writing really great pieces. And now he is the co -author of a new book with Chuck Marrone called Escaping the Housing Trap, which comes out, when does it come out Daniel?

Daniel Herriges (01:21.494)

April, April 23rd.

Kevin K (01:23.152)

April 23rd, okay. So I'm really, really looking forward to this. I think Daniel and I have probably learned from each other quite a bit in things that we've talked about and written about. And so I'm really, I'm excited to have this conversation and kind of dive deeper a little bit into the general topic of housing and his perspective and the book's perspective on it.

So Daniel was kind enough to share with me a little bit of the introduction. And I say that just because I've marked a few notes to help me direct the conversation a little bit. Housing is so broad as a topic. There's about a thousand different places you can go. And I really like how you laid it out here in the beginning. But I do want to start with just kind of one piece that I think is really fundamental that I just highlighted here a couple of sentences.

And I know probably for strong towns readers, this will sound familiar, but I just think it's important to emphasize this and repeat it because, and have you expand on it. But you talk about central to this approach is that recognition that cities are complex systems. They are shaped by countless decisions made by millions of individuals over time with interconnections that are challenging to trace or fully grasp. When attempts are made to simplify.

or ignore this inherent complexity in organizing urban life, challenges and disruptions arise. I wonder if you could expand a little bit on that and why do you think that's so fundamental to this conversation?

Daniel Herriges (03:04.526)

Yeah, well, it's something that's been it's been fundamental to the Strong Towns conversation for a long time, as I think anybody who's read the blog and is familiar with our work knows. And I do think it's central to to grasping what's really gone wrong. You know, it's it's funny, I would talk to people casually, you know, old friends and stuff in the process of writing this book, and they'd say, well, what's new in your life? And I'd say, well, I'm co -writing this book with my boss and.

It's about the housing crisis. And an old high school friend of mine, I remember I'm sitting down for coffee with him, and I said, I'm writing a book about the housing crisis. And he goes, oh, cool. Wait, which one? I've never talked to anybody who like, I say housing crisis and they scoff at the idea like, oh no, there isn't a housing crisis. But people's understandings of what that means are incredibly varied because of exactly what you're saying and what you pulled out of the intro to the book. That what,

Kevin K (03:41.84)

Hahaha.

Kevin K (03:49.776)

Yeah.

Daniel Herriges (04:02.03)

really we try to organize the narrative around in this book is we have this massive paradigm shift in the 20th century in how we house ourselves as a society in the US. And to a lesser extent, Canada, I think throughout the Anglosphere, you can see commonalities, but we have this massive paradigm shift alongside sort of the broader paradigm shift that we've talked about as the suburban experiment at Strong Towns.

starting in the mid 20th century and really upending the way we finance housing and all sorts of urban development, the way we finance it, the way we plan it and regulate it, and our cultural assumptions about it. And what that really amounts to, at the core of that paradigm shift, is this very modernist, this very 20th century idea that we can solve, we can permanently solve the messiness of the city.

that we can permanently solve these tensions that exist around, well, how is your neighborhood going to change and evolve? Are you going to be uncomfortable with that change? Are people going to be displaced? Is the character going to change? How are you going to finance housing? Is it going to be a struggle? Are you going to have to make sacrifices? This idea emerges for a number of reasons that we can delve deeper into that, well, we can solve all these problems now. In a modern, prosperous society, we're going to have mass.

middle class prosperity, we're going to have mass homeownership. It's going to be an economic engine. It's going to be the the foundation of everything good in society. We're going to build, we're going to plan neighborhoods that are better than the places people have lived in the past. It's all going to be scientific and orderly and optimized. And through that, we can deliver kind of a permanently prosperous society. And this is the vision that emerges through the 1930s into the middle of the century.

And looking back now, decades later, we can really see the cracks in that vision. And those cracks look like a whole bunch of different things breaking. And to most people, housing crisis means the affordability crisis, which is especially acute in certain kind of high cost regions of the country. So a lot of the discourse around, quote unquote, the housing crisis, initially starts to come out of places like New York City, like San Francisco, like Boston, and it's all about, well, nobody can afford the rent anymore.

Daniel Herriges (06:26.926)

But we paint, I think, a picture of it that's inclusive of that, but broader than that. Because there are all sorts of ways in which housing is just broken. We're not building the right kinds of housing for people's needs. We're not building it in the right places. A lot of people are squeezed. They're overly indebted. They're making huge sacrifices in terms of how they live their life or where they can live their life. We're not happy. We've largely lost faith that...

the development industry is going to be responsive to community needs and is going to give us products that really amount to the kind of communities we want to live in. Things are just, they're fundamentally broken in a lot of ways that don't necessarily tie up with a bow into a really neat package. Like, well, this is the definition of the housing crisis and this is the thing that's wrong. So I think the messy city is a great place to be having this conversation because it's kind of a messy book, and deliberately so, because it tries to get at all of these different facets of, well, what is the paradigm that emerged with the suburban experiment? And then what are all these sort of cascading consequences of it that have led to the situation we're in today?

Kevin K (07:45.36)

So let me give you some of the, just right off the top, let's maybe get the grumpy old man questions out of the way. I'll give you some of the grumpy old man questions. Well, so one of them is, well, you know, you're mostly talking about cities in certain parts of the country where they just make it really hard to build anything, and that's why housing is so expensive. And...

Daniel Herriges (07:52.846)

Hahaha.

Kevin K (08:09.968)

Also, you know, when I was a young person, we shared bedrooms. My starter home was an 800 square foot house and you expect a 2000 or 2400 square foot house. And it's really just expectations have changed.

Daniel Herriges (08:29.166)

Yeah, so that's two great kind of grumpy old man questions to use your parlance there. Yeah, I think that in terms of sort of the geographic question, the loudest voices in the discourse tend to be from these places that are really kind of exceptional, San Francisco, New York. But the sense that there's a housing crisis is much, much broader and more widespread than that. It just manifests a little bit differently.

Kevin K (08:32.016)

I'm good for those.

Daniel Herriges (08:56.654)

I think that you hear it and you see it in Kansas City where you are. I mean, I'm certainly aware of some of the stories of, you know, some of the tenant activism that has come out of Kansas City, people who really are finding their housing situation, the options available to them, finding it to be dire. I think that in every city, there are issues where there are these mismatches and these spillovers in terms of where really should we be building housing and what kind of product should we be building?

versus what are we building? You have neighborhoods that are mired in stasis, that are mired in disinvestment for decades. They've got really good bones, they're good places, they have a lot of historic character, they have people who deeply love them, but places that just can't catch a break. At the same time, you've got these building patterns happening maybe out on the suburban fringe that are...

I mean, they're financially ruinous, which is a core thing we've talked about at length at Strong Towns. They're producing more liabilities than they are revenue for the communities that they're in. But they're also mismatched with where the demand really is, especially among younger people who want to move into home ownership. So even in a place like Kansas City, where if you look at aggregate, like metro area statistics, like housing is a bargain there compared to on the coasts.

And even if you look at relative to local wages, which are certainly lower than in a San Francisco or New York, it's still better. Home prices in Northern California are 10 times median income. Where you are, it might be four times. But there are still people who are stretched and who are squeezed. There are neighborhoods where there is a shortage of decent housing in good condition that meets the needs of people there. There's definitely a shortage of

walkable urban places. I'm sure that there are places that people are getting pushed out of. And then there are these mismatches that are really pervasive all over the country from small towns to mid -size and big metros, where, for example, one statistic that I find myself repeating a lot, and I learned this from Ali Thurmond -Quinlan, who I know you know, Kevin, fantastic incremental developer in Arkansas. She does this great presentation about how,

Daniel Herriges (11:19.15)

Two thirds of American households are made up of one or two people. And yet 88 % of the new homes that are built have three bedrooms or more. It's that kind of thing that plays into the housing crisis where like we keep churning out this really, really limited range of products, these monocultures. And often it's, you know, the suburban tract home in a cornfield where the financing is in place, the institutional arrangements are in place. We've made it really, really easy.

to keep churning that out. But even within a relatively small geography, you can have housing shortages in other places. You can have real problems with people being able to access close -in neighborhoods, close to jobs, close to amenities, or housing that is the right size and configuration for what they actually need, where they are in life.

Kevin K (12:11.472)

Let's dive into the starter home piece of that a little bit because I just know you've written about that extensively in the past and I think about like my own situation. When I look at the houses my parents owned when – either before I was born or shortly after I was born, they were very modest houses. I think when I was born in 1969, at that point –

Daniel Herriges (12:15.758)

Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Kevin K (12:39.632)

When I was born, we had four kids and I think we lived in a three bedroom ranch with a basement in Omaha, a pretty small place. And then we're able to get a little bit bigger place, probably more like a four bedroom or so. But I mean, really for most of my childhood, we shared bedrooms as kids. And there's certainly, I know as a parent today, there's a vastly different expectation.

on the part of my other parents, on the part of kids, about what constitutes an appropriate house for a family. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that and just how that all has changed so much over the years.

Daniel Herriges (13:19.758)

Right. Right.

Daniel Herriges (13:26.414)

I think the expectations are in a feedback loop with these other kind of institutional factors that are affecting what we build and what we don't build and what options are out there. So I think, I hear what you're saying and I think there's a lot of truth to that. I mean, I look at my family, I got two young children and would sharing a bedroom be the worst thing in the world for them? No, but even when we like, when we go on vacation somewhere, when we...

go stay with in -laws and there's the prospect that they're gonna have to sleep in the same room. It's like, oh God, they won't get any sleep. They'll keep it to like, but it's really alien to like what we've assumed is just like the basic, like this is how you're supposed to live as a middle -class American family. And I think there has been that shift. I think it's also the case though that like the kind of starter home you're talking about, like you even look at the old photos of Levittown or those early sort of mass production suburbs.

in the 1950s, like we're not building those anymore. Houses like that, almost nothing is built that's on that scale. There are institutional factors that play into that. I mean, there are regulatory factors like minimum lot sizes in a lot of communities. There are things that we've done that basically make it uneconomic to build smaller homes on smaller lots. And then, you know, combine that with this cultural expectations question. I think there's a little bit of chicken and egg there.

I do think though that maybe not in the context of families with children specifically, but there is a huge amount of demand out there for maybe a different version than what you're thinking of in the 50s, the leave it to beaver kind of era, but there's a huge amount of demand out there for what we might call a starter home today. It just looks different. My wife and I, when we were in our 20s,

starting out not making a lot of money, we didn't own a lot of stuff. We lived in backyard accessory dwelling units, backyard cottages behind a larger single family home. And these were all homes that had been built in like the 1930s. So they were kind of grandfathered into a zoning code that doesn't allow them anymore. We were lucky to find these, they were fantastic. I mean, they were the right sized living arrangement for where we were in life. We weren't ready to be homeowners. Maybe in a different era, we might've been homeowners at that age, I don't know.

Daniel Herriges (15:47.566)

But a very small home for a modest rent, like that was perfect. In big high cost cities, you see there's a lot of push to, can we do more micro apartments? Can we do sort of a modernized version of the single room occupancy where amenities like the kitchen are shared? There is demand out there for this stuff. I think that the new version of it needs to be allowed to evolve. And I think it will.

Kevin K (16:18.704)

Yeah, I think you could see this even when you look to, you know, I think a lot about some of the things that the author Joel Gourault wrote years ago. He wrote a couple of books that I really loved, but one of them was called Edge City. And he came up with this whole notion of the favored quarter, that if every metro area has like a quarter, if it's a pie, there's a quarter of it that just has better.

demographics, better reputation, whatever, than the other parts of the metro area. And I think if you look in some of those favored quarters that have those subdivisions still from the 1940s and 50s, the very small Cape Cod homes and others that were built in that era, it's amazing how you, I think it validates what you're talking about. There's incredible demand for those. Those areas have really continued to be.

desirable places to live for young families, even though they're much smaller homes than they might buy on the edge. And in the unfavored quarters, you don't see as much of that. They've had a lot more decline. And that speaks to other factors. But there's clearly this interest in demand still for the people will make that trade off to have a smaller place, you know, regardless if it's in an area they want to be in.

Daniel Herriges (17:47.15)

Yeah, the thing that's tough is that that stuff is getting bid up really fast in a lot of cities to the point where it's not really a viable starter home option for a lot of people. I mean, those old like Cape Cod, you know, those houses, you find them in California now. Like you're paying two million dollars for one of those. It's valued for the land underneath it. And often it's going to be torn down and replaced with a much larger home. But I mean, my wife and I, when we did buy our house in Sarasota, Florida, where we lived until...

on the middle of last year, we bought in the neighborhood, like we really prized the location. We wanted to be somewhere where she could walk to work, where we only had to own one car, where we were close to downtown, close to walkable parts of the city that we liked. And we bought in the neighborhood that was sort of the last bastion of affordable home ownership in that it is these really modest houses. A lot of them are under a thousand square feet. But the prices have run up like crazy just in the...

in the seven years since we made that purchase. We couldn't have gone back and bought that house today, the one that we just sold last year. And the notion that like this is a viable option for working class families, I mean, that's gone. Like it's a working class neighborhood that is transitioning really fast because anywhere, like you said, where the location is desirable, when we have an overall scarcity, small homes, big homes, it doesn't matter, they're gonna be bid up.

Kevin K (19:11.472)

How much in your writing or thinking about this has the impact of kind of just shifting demand for like more urban or walkable places? How does that play a role in exactly what you talked about there with Sarasota where, you know, we had a few decades of really going gung -ho with building suburbia and then all of a sudden we've had this major shift in interest and demand in the last couple of decades.

on the part of all age groups, but especially younger people. And yet those new places haven't built much housing at all. So what do you see? How do you see that? Is that like a major factor in what people are talking about in terms of the pain they're feeling?

Daniel Herriges (19:58.926)

I think that shift is huge and I think it's underappreciated. I think it's actually hard to quantify because you got another kind of chicken and egg thing, right? Where people, I mean, you hear the contrarians right now. Like there are a lot of voices saying there's been this big shift and millennials are much more pro -urban than older generations were. And Gen Z is even more pro -urban than that. People want to live in walkable places, centrally located places. They don't want to do all this driving like.

And then you see the confrarians come back and say, well, actually, millennials are all having kids and buying homes out in the suburbs. And it's kind of like, well, they're, do you know that that's what they want or are they buying where they can afford? And there's probably a bit of both in a lot of cases, but I think that the notion of revealed preference gets really tricky here. Does the fact that 10 ,000 more times, 10 ,000 times more people buy Camrys than Lexuses, does that mean that everybody likes the Camry more as a car?

That's probably 10 ,000 is probably not the factor there. I'm positive it's not, but I needed a number real quick. But like there's suppose it revealed preference is going to be shaped by what the market makes available. You know, in Sarasota, there are tons of great kind of single family, quote unquote, homes that are occupied by families. They're occupied by a bunch of 20 something roommates who work in the service industry and they're crowding into a house because that's how they can afford the rent.

Not, it's not because that's the way those people would prefer. Like that's the ideal living arrangement for people at that stage in life and in kind of a roommate situation. It's because that's all that there is. So I think, yeah, I think that there is evidence of a really profound shift and where it's showing up is not so much in where people currently live or what they're buying, what they're renting. It shows up to some extent in preference surveys that you'll hear from like the National Association of Realtors, like.

Oh, 42 % of Americans would rather have a smaller house in a walkable neighborhood than a larger house in a place they have to drive. But more than that, it's showing up in prices. It's showing up in the way some of these preferred locations are being bid up. Despite being older housing, smaller housing, maybe lower quality, you look at price per square foot and it becomes really obvious that the places where people will pay a premium for less house tend to be walkable, really well -located locations with

Daniel Herriges (22:23.406)

with access to some urban amenities. We're just beginning to re -legalize more of that pattern. So there's gonna be a big lag in how much of this is actually being built and how are people actually living. One thing we talk about in the book is that I think a bunch of people's assumptions about the housing market were shaped during this really anomalous era, you know, post -

post -World War II and the era of kind of urban decline, where from the 1970s through the 1990s, you had had massive suburban flight out of core cities in almost every metro in America. You had huge amounts of vacant real estate, even in New York, even in Manhattan, you had huge vacancy rates. And so the city became this place that, if that was when your attitudes were shaped, you thought like...

this is a place, this is affordable, this is where the artists go to get their cheap studio space, this is where the people who are kind of on the margins of society, the city is where they go to live and they live this cool bohemian life. And so the most important policy priority is preventing the decline of these places. Let's do really rigid historic preservation, let's zone them in amber, let's try to protect this environment. Nobody was thinking about large -scale gentrification, nobody was thinking about

people actually being displaced en masse from these urban locations. That wasn't on the radar in the late 20th century. I think there has been an absolute sea change now where in some ways the policies that we established in that era now are really, really biting us because we essentially locked down a bunch of what remained of our pre -suburban kind of built environment.

And now there's this massive demand for these places and there's this need to change. And the only lever we have is, well, let's pick pockets of it and let's allow mass scale redevelopment, like giant five over one buildings, you this wholesale sort of wiping clean. Like we're struggling with, oh, wait a minute, now there's actually all this demand for what used to be like sort of the fringe oddball.

Kevin K (24:25.104)

Yeah.

Daniel Herriges (24:41.068)

Bohemian choice. I don't know.

Kevin K (24:42.672)

Yeah. It's funny how that kind of infects people's brains in so many respects. And I know that because I'm old enough to have lived in my part of the city when it was still pretty rough and pretty cheap. And I know a lot of people and friends who were older than me in that era who did exactly as you described. They were able to buy these incredible historic homes or buildings for next to nothing.

And they have a vision of the way things were in that era as like they haven't really changed all that much. And I've often talked about it. They went from being basically no demand neighborhoods to now a lot of them are high demand, but they're still kind of using that like no demand thinking about how to solve problems. And it's like, I'm sorry, it's just, it's a different world now.

Kevin K (25:38.96)

So I want to piggyback a little bit on this. There's another sentence here, a couple sentences I picked up on that you wrote that I'd like to just kind of talk about, because I thought this was really insightful. You said, those who set housing policy often do not understand housing finance. Those who focus on finance are often oblivious to the effects of land use policy. These conversations, housing finance and land use policy, occur in separate circles.

and are often insufficiently informed by each other. I really like the way that you talk about that. It certainly resonates with my experience. I wonder if you could expand a little bit more on how you've seen that play out.

Daniel Herriges (26:21.838)

Yeah, you can kind of witness it. If you go on Twitter, which I refuse to call X, but you can actually see the separate conversations happening in real time, depending on kind of who you follow and who's responding to those conversations, you can see that there are people who are interested in land use policy and zoning in housing development. A lot of them are associated with things like the Yes in My Backyard movement, and they're talking about housing in one set of terms.

Kevin K (26:29.588)

Likewise.

Daniel Herriges (26:51.47)

And, but then you go and you follow people who analyze the financial markets and they're looking at the housing market in the sense of what is happening with housing as an asset class. And they like, it's literally like they're speaking different languages. It's these people aren't in conversation with each other. Like they're literally not in each other's replies, but they're also it's different metrics. It's different assumptions about like, what even is quote, quote unquote, the housing market? Are we talking about,

housing as a financial product, mortgages and their secondary, their derivatives as a financial product. Are we talking about the homes that people live in and the rents that they pay? And it's a really funny divide. And that divide, the stage was set for that through the policy decisions made in the 20th century to create a mass market in federally supported, federally insured.

long -term mortgages and to make that the foundation of how we're going to house people in this country. And what we did was we created a system where increasingly housing was the foundation of the financial system. It was also the foundation of a bunch of other things. It became the foundation of local government's ability to fund their own operations. So many things are riding on housing prices going up and up and up.

And if you talk to someone in that finance world, what is a housing crisis? A housing crisis is 2008. A housing crisis is when housing prices crash and it brings the economy with it. And fears of a housing crisis mean, well, we're afraid that building is going to slow down and prices are going to slump and rents are going to slump and it's going to have all these cascading effects on the financial system. If you go talk to a bunch of yimbies in San Francisco, what is a housing crisis? Well, duh, a housing crisis when people can't pay their rent.

There is a really fundamental tension that is deeply ingrained in our society because we expect housing to do two contradictory things. We expect it to be a reliable, secure source of shelter for everyone who needs shelter, which is everyone. We also expect it to be this sort of indefinitely appreciating financial asset. Not necessarily like your home, though often your home, but...

Daniel Herriges (29:18.446)

more broadly, the housing market as a whole needs to go up and up and up or things break. That is the fundamental, you know, the book is titled Escaping the Housing Trap. That is fundamentally what the housing trap is. It is this contradiction that we haven't grappled with that a whole bunch of us need housing prices to fall and a whole bunch of us are also going to suffer if housing prices fall.

Kevin K (29:42.224)

Yeah. How have you, I'm just curious, how have you been able to talk to people in your own community or at the local level? Do you engage, especially for the dozen or so years you lived in Sarasota, did you engage with housing activists or people who are trying to shape local housing policy and talk about this perspective that you bring about?

the housing trap and the different perspectives and motivations.

Daniel Herriges (30:16.078)

I did, you know, I had the chance in Sarasota to talk with a wide variety of people from kind of community and neighborhood activists to local elected officials, chamber of commerce types. I can't say I was super successful at influencing the conversation there. I would try to plant seeds when I talk to people, because I think that there's a lot of lack of understanding of even the contours of the issue. Like, I guess I'd tell you two stories here kind of related to that, and I'll try not to ramble.

When I was in planning school, I had to do a summer internship and I did mine. I went to grad school up in Minneapolis, but then I went back to Sarasota where my wife lived for the summer and I did my internship in the county planning department. I think at this point, it's been far enough, you know, it's been enough years that I can say this and I don't have to worry about who I might be offending by saying this, but they tasked me as part of my planning internship with doing some kind of internal research, internal white papers basically on.

best practices for promoting affordable housing. Because by 2016, they understood Florida is growing really fast. We have a housing crisis. We don't have enough housing. Rents are skyrocketing. But the prevailing thinking was so undeveloped about like even the terms of the conversation. So like I'm I'm trying to put together this research on, you know, what what levers do we have as the local government, as the county government to promote affordable housing?

And I'm thinking of it in terms of how do we promote housing affordability, you know, get supply and demand aligned, remove zoning related obstacles to the production of more inexpensive housing, the production of housing where there's high demand. And then there's also this conversation about sources of subsidy and how do we get purpose -built affordable housing built. And that's all well and good. I went into one meeting where I'm supposed to like briefly summarize some of these results. And I realized sitting at this table, like 20 minutes in,

it kind of dawns on me and a couple of the other planners that half the people at this table think that we're there to talk about homelessness. And they're they're baffled by everything coming out of my mouth and out of the, you know, the other planners' mouths because we're talking about zoning and they're like, but, you know, we what we really want to talk about is we've got this handful of vacant lots that the county owns and can we partner with any of the providers who Salvation Army or Habitat or both? And all of a sudden it's kind of like, wait a minute.

Daniel Herriges (32:42.734)

we're talking about affordable housing, we're not talking about homelessness. And they're like, I thought they were the same. Like, people are really way more, if you're immersed in kind of urbanist debates or just thinking about these issues, like the average person, including the average local policymaker, is way closer to square one than you think they are. So I saw that in Florida that like the everybody who was elected to office there had this sense that, well, we got to do something about affordable housing.

and they didn't have the slightest clue how to think holistically about housing affordability as an issue in their community. Like, literally it was like, who can we partner with to get a small amount of subsidy delivered to one nonprofit that's gonna build a few homes? No sense of the scale of the problem or really, you know, the problem as a basic issue of what do we allow the market to build? And when you...

That conversation has grown and Sarasota is, I think it's behind the curve, but I think they are tackling some of these broader questions of like, what does it say in our zoning code and how does that affect what gets built and what can't get built? There's still this mentality that's really, really ingrained. And it goes back to what I was saying about kind of that 1970s through 1990s, that defensive mentality of cities are.

You know, we've got suburban flight and urban neighborhoods have suffered decline and they've suffered stagnation. And the thing we need to do is hold the line and protect them. We're not even worried about overwhelming demand. We can't even conceive of that. So I sat in this meeting once. I was asked to come by the president of my neighborhood association and it was a handful of neighborhood advocates and then a local elected official and a couple of city staff. And we're talking about missing middle housing because they were considering a.

zoning code change to allow a modest amount of what's called the missing middle. Essentially in some neighborhoods in Sarasota where only single family homes were allowed to be built, they were gonna allow up to four units on a residential lot. And the question is, how broad will this be and what are the parameters of it be? And I'm listening to these people who work for the city and they're saying, well, I'm just concerned that this needs to be tightly, tightly regulated to prevent abuses. So.

Daniel Herriges (35:06.478)

You know, what if, what if people build multiple units and then they Airbnb them? Well, we got to make sure we have provisions that they can't turn them into short -term rentals. And, you know, what if, what if someone builds a fourplex and, you know, there are loud parties there and it's a nuisance to the neighbors. So, okay, we got to have special, um, provisions to, you know, maybe there's more landscaping screening or a bigger setback or something, but we got to make sure it won't be a nuisance to the neighbors. And well, you know, the goal of this is to provide more housing for our downtown workforce in our restaurants and stores. And.

But what if the people who are living in this housing, what if they're vacationing snowbirds? What if they're not our workforce? Well, can we put a provision into the lease? You know, if you want to build multiple units on this lot, maybe you should be required to put a provision into the lease that the person living there must be employed in downtown Sarasota. Like these were literally the things being thrown out in this conversation. It needs to be tightly, tightly regulated to make sure it does exactly what we think it should do. And, um,

You know, I pointed out and I think it largely fell on deaf ears. Like, do we say any of this stuff about new single family houses? Well, no, we don't. It's only this prospect of something that is a change in the existing pattern, you know, God forbid. But the funny thing that happened in this conversation was it kind of reached a natural lull and people are just sort of shooting the breeze for a while. And it's mostly a bunch of like neighborhood association presidents in Sarasota who are people in their 60s and 70s.

They've moved down to enjoy the Florida sunshine and they're all from somewhere else. Everyone in Florida is from somewhere, pretty much. And the gentleman to my left starts talking about his childhood in Fall River, Massachusetts. And he, you know, lived on this wonderful street and it was full of triple -decker houses where you've got the family that owns it is probably living in one of the units and they have a couple tenants. And there was this restaurant on the ground floor of an apartment building on the corner and he used to love it.

this idyllic picture of just kind of traditional, missing middle urbanism. And other people chimed in and they had similar childhood experiences. And the person who kept saying tightly, tightly regulated, chimes into the conversation and turns out that one of her family members, I don't remember if it was father or grandfather, but had owned a triple decker in Massachusetts. And it had been a stepping stone into building some wealth and joining the middle class and being homeowners in an affordable way.

Daniel Herriges (37:31.402)

had nothing but fond things to say about this. And so they all have these really positive experiences with real missing middle housing in the real world. And then the conversation goes back to the topic at hand and immediately a switch flips and it's, anyway, yeah, this is all great. I love this stuff. I think we should allow the missing middle. I just think it needs to be tightly, tightly regulated. So there's this huge disconnect. There's this huge sort of loss aversion that people have.

Kevin K (37:53.296)

Ha ha ha ha.

Daniel Herriges (38:01.006)

And this disconnect between like the stuff we're talking about as urbanists, the kind of things that have been illegal for a long time in most places that we're talking about allowing again, they're not alien to Americans. People have been to places that have this development pattern, they've seen it, and they largely have positive impressions of it. And the question is, how do you get past that wall with people? When I would talk with people in Sarasota, I would always point out like,

because there were a lot of similar fears about an ordinance to allow backyard accessory dwelling units. And I would point out that the one neighborhood in Sarasota that has a lot of existing accessory dwelling units, it was built in the 1920s and 30s, it is one of the wealthiest, one of the nicest, one of the universally thought most charming, successful neighborhoods in Sarasota. Everybody loves this place. Everybody is simultaneously terrified of what could go wrong.

Kevin K (38:57.84)

Ha ha.

Daniel Herriges (38:57.902)

if we allowed more places like it to be built today.

Kevin K (39:00.464)

Yeah, we can't have any of that. It's clearly way too desirable. I think that's a great segue into this other piece, another piece here that really caught my eye in your introduction where you talked a little bit about James C. Scott's book, Seeing Like a State and his ideology of high modernism. And so just a couple of quick sentences on that where he said, high modernism consists of a strong belief in the scientific perfectibility of society. The high modernist seeks to render

complex social phenomena, discrete, legible, and measurable in order to prescribe solutions through rational scientific management. And then later how you said we believed we could devise permanent solutions to problems that had bedeviled city dwellers forever. So I mean, I love that. It kind of speaks to something that I've thought a lot about as well. And one of the more...

of all the fascinating changes that we made in the 20th century, really one of the least talked about is just exactly this that you highlighted there was this adoption of that everything in society could be categorized and scientifically managed and that that was the right approach. But I think what you point out here is that it also had tons of consequences.

Daniel Herriges (40:22.51)

Mm -hmm.

Yeah, in the more historical portion of the book, I got to do a lot of research on the origins of American zoning for this book. And you really see that underlying ideology in the way people talk about it. The earliest attempts at residential zoning came from a really good place. They largely came from progressive public health reforms in the late 19th and early 20th century. People looking at squalid conditions in tenements and like...

Kevin K (40:33.68)

Lucky you.

Kevin K (40:53.488)

Mm -hmm.

Daniel Herriges (40:53.71)

People are getting sick, these buildings are catching on fire, what can we do? And so there are some really obvious reforms that take shape that, okay, we're gonna require a little more space between buildings so light and air can get in, we're gonna require firewalls. But then you very quickly see that morph into a tool that can be used not for sort of urgent public health and safety needs, but for either to address circumstances that...

frankly, kind of really elitist reformers deem morally objectionable. You see anti -immigrant sentiment play into it. You see a lot of things, but you see this notion that, well, now that we have this tool of we can regulate the form and the arrangement of buildings in the city, hey, this is great. We can designate whole neighborhoods where apartment houses aren't allowed because we think that apartment houses are going to be a deleterious impact on the moral well -being of the neighborhood, on the children who are going to play with God knows who.

Um, a mere parasite. Take advantage of the, I can't, I can't quote the whole thing from memory, but yeah, take advantage of the pleasant residential character in the neighborhood, but degrade that character at the same time. You can find tons of quotes like that and you can find it from the same reformist figures who were involved in sort of the anti -tenement struggles. So it's really easy, I think, to moralize about figures of the past and to judge them by what we know in the present.

Kevin K (41:51.312)

What were they described as in the Euclid decision, like parasites? Yeah.

Daniel Herriges (42:21.326)

And I'm doing a little bit of that right now. And I do try to be disciplined about not doing that. You have to understand that these people thought they were doing good and they were products of their time. And that in some ways they were doing good. But what you see is that these regulatory tools, whether the intentions were good to begin with or not, they've metastasized into this notion that now we're going to order the entire urban landscape and we're going to strictly separate uses from each other.

residential zone over here and the apartment the higher density apartment zone over here and the commercial over here. And it becomes this thing that's less about you know well we can really articulate the the urgent public purpose here the urgent health and safety issue and more about well of course we should do this of course we should diligently plan every aspect of the city to ensure that it's harmonious and works well and.

And so it gets put to all sorts of purposes where each one in isolation might make sense. The rationale for building setback requirements might make sense in isolation. The rationale for parking mandates, especially at a certain time in history, might have made sense in isolation. There's often a very concrete problem that the planners of the day are trying to address. You lump all of it together, and now we've got this system that we've inherited that has just become this multi -headed hydra.

The zoning chapter of the book starts with an anecdote about Somerville, Massachusetts, which I'm indebted to Daniel K. Hertz, who's a housing scholar for this. But the illegal city of Somerville was a blog post that Hertz initially wrote back in 2015 based on a study that Somerville's own planning department did where they found that in a city of 80 ,000 people, there were only 22 conforming lots. There were only 22 lots in the entire city of Somerville where...

What was standing on that lot, if it burned down today, you could get a permit to rebuild it tomorrow. Like, that's insane. And nobody who initially contributed to the spread of zoning, nobody foresaw that outcome. But we have a broken paradigm.

Kevin K (44:26.448)

And I think most lay people especially have no idea how crazy that's gotten. And I think the house that I live in now is actually a non -conforming lot for the zoning that we live in. And it's pretty amazing how that has metastasized so much. I wonder, and I also do appreciate what you're talking about. I do feel like sometimes it's easy to cast dispersions on.

I mean, I think if you went back in time, you would find that it was often many, most of the smartest and most idealistic people of those generations who were really doing what they felt was the right thing to do to make better places and have a better society. And we have a hundred years of hindsight now to look at those things. And it's, so we have a lot of easier way to look at what's worked and what hasn't. But...

I really do think that a lot of it had good intentions behind it that we don't talk about. One thing I want to hit on while I have you is, you know, now that you're back in Minnesota and you left Florida, which is a very high growth state, and I'm not sure how fast growth Sarasota and that region is in particular compared to other parts of Florida. But...

Daniel Herriges (45:50.166)

extremely.

Kevin K (45:53.52)

How do you perceive these issues, especially some of the housing issues being different in really fast growth places like the Sunbelt versus here in the Midwest, Kansas City and Minneapolis are both growing metropolitan areas, but they grow very modestly. Although I think the Twin Cities probably grows faster than most people realize, but they're still by comparisons of Sunbelt cities, they're slower growing.

Daniel Herriges (46:18.67)

Yeah. The issues of people struggling to afford rent or to find a home in the kind of place they want, I mean, those exist in both kinds of places. I do think there are some really key kind of contextual differences in the Sunbelt. I mean, Sarasota, that region is home to two of the three fastest growing master planned communities in the US. Number one is the villages, which is the 55 plus.

Kevin K (46:47.92)

Yeah. Sure. Yeah.

Daniel Herriges (46:48.43)

like Metro at this point outside of Orlando, but then two and three are both in Greater Sarasota. So incredible amounts of in -migration from other parts of the US, incredible rate of growth. And so it gives you the opportunity to make big mistakes really quickly. Like from my perspective, I mean, driving around on the suburban fringe of Sarasota is kind of this horrifying scene of just like, okay, here's two more square miles that have been clear cut that weren't clear cut last month, and they're going to be subdivisions and.

We can replicate our bad mistakes really, really quickly. But we can also, there's a whole bunch of energy that can go towards like making things better. You know, you just like, when you're growing, there are resources to be spread around. I think there's a zero sum element to the conversation in slow or no growth places that becomes a little bit more challenging where like, you know, I'm...

I would love to see a whole bunch of urban revitalization in St. Paul where I live now. I can think of specific spots around the city that have just sort of languished for decades, you know. Big giant vacant lots that were vacant when I was a little kid and are still vacant. And it's kind of like, when is somebody going to do something here? And it's like, well, when are enough people going to move to St. Paul to make it economically viable for somebody to, quote unquote, do something with all of this land? And I'm dying to see it happen.

And I think the kind of opportunities are different. I was in Charlotte for the Congress for New Urbanism, along with the Strong Towns National Gathering last May. And in Charlotte, it's incredible. They've built this light rail line and at like three different stops on the one light rail line, there are entire high density mixed use neighborhoods popping up out of full cloth. And it's just like, how on earth is there this much money going like...

And nothing like that is going to happen here. And we kind of have to resign ourselves to like, we're not going to see these miraculous things just emerge from the dirt. But what's possible in, you know, the kind of environment where you don't have the cataclysmic money so much, you don't have the, you know, real estate isn't the same kind of like just omnipresent giant business as it is in somewhere like Florida or somewhere like North Carolina.

Daniel Herriges (49:14.958)

What you have is opportunities for incremental developers who are resourceful and a little bit scrappy. And if, especially if local government can find the way to support people who want to be the one to buy that vacant lot in their neighborhood and put up something cool on it, remove the barriers in the way of that person, help them connect with each other, learn from each other, access financing. Cool things can happen from the bottom up.

in places where, you know, from a 30 ,000 foot view, they're not growing or exploding in the same way. And that's something that I get really excited about. It's something that the last third of our book is really heavily devoted to. Kevin, you're actually in the book. I don't know if you knew this. You are credited with the term swarm for talking about, you know, having a whole bunch of small scale developers.

Kevin K (50:00.432)

Uh oh, I didn't know that.

Kevin K (50:05.464)

Ha ha ha ha.

Daniel Herriges (50:11.598)

building within existing neighborhoods, within the existing fabric of our cities, as opposed to the current large developer, large site led model of how we build housing. But that's to the extent that we have a prescription for what needs to happen, that's at the core of it, is we need to cultivate and enable and support the swarm of.

up, you know, infill developers working at small scales, often people working with property they already own and live on or in the neighborhood where they live, to start to thicken up the places that we already have where we do need housing, doing backyard cottages, doing vacant lot infill, doing small apartment buildings, mixed use projects. And the places where we see that happening, where we see like some snowballing momentum with a community of people doing the small scale development work,

It's not the San Francisco's of the world. Nobody can afford to do it there. It's not the big Sunbelt cities. It's not Sarasota. It's not Charlotte. It's not Nashville. Those places are a little more mired in this like kind of suburban experiment mindset. That's really, really hostile to anyone other than a big entrenched developer. Where we see it happening is it's in South Bend, Indiana, which we discuss a lot in the book. It's in Memphis, Tennessee. It's in these poorer places, these disinvested places where there's a huge amount of opportunity to bring them back.

But it's going to happen through kind of scrappy people working, you know, working in the cracks and the seams of what's already there.

Kevin K (51:43.408)

Yeah, I was going to ask you, you know, it's always dangerous to give kind of generic advice in a book or on a podcast. And I want people to buy the book. So we don't want to give away everything here. But what else might you tease that you talk about in the book as potential avenues for people to look at? And is it mostly focused like at the local level or do you talk about like national?

Daniel Herriges (51:58.542)

Hahaha.

Kevin K (52:13.476)

changes as well.

Daniel Herriges (52:16.174)

I think the national aspect is there in talking about the housing finance system and the history of how it's developed. A lot of the historical stuff meant to set the context. I think we deliberately shy away from offering federal policy prescriptions. True to the bottom -up emphasis of strong towns. What you're gonna get out of this book, if you go in looking for the solution to the housing crisis, you're gonna be disappointed.

In fact, our publisher wanted us to have the Strong Towns solution to the housing crisis be the subject of the book. And we fought them on it. We said, no, it's the Strong Towns response to the housing crisis. We don't have a solution for you, but we have avenues to pursue. And those avenues are local. I think there's a lot that is within the power of local governments to jumpstart and to help snowball and sometimes just to get out of the...

Kevin K (52:50.128)

Oh, there you go.

Daniel Herriges (53:13.102)

of the paradigm shift that really needs to happen. I'm not gonna spoil it, I want people to buy the book. Believe it or not, much more than you want people to buy the book, I want people to buy the book. There's some stuff, and some things that Chuck came up with that I was kind of blown away by, like it's never occurred to me that this is a policy tool we could use, but there's some really good practical advice for local leaders.

Kevin K (53:22.416)

I'm sure you do.

Daniel Herriges (53:41.838)

local developers, local governments in particular, to not be helpless at the hands of these overbearing market forces. The housing market, capital H, capital M, is this thing that just goes up and up and up forever. But how can we get out of the clutches of that? And how can we enable bottom -up solutions to actually proliferate in our communities from people who are invested in our communities?

Kevin K (54:07.696)

Great. That's great. Daniel, what else is next up for you? I presume you're going to keep writing. Are you going to become a small developer at some point?

Daniel Herriges (54:17.71)

Uh, not out of the question. I will never say it's out of the question, because small developers are kind of... Small developers are kind of my heroes. I've got the bug, you know? I go, I'm out and about around the city, I'm walking, I'm riding my bike, and I'm constantly looking at some derelict or vacant lot and saying, well, what could be there? And who's gonna do it? And like, I get excited about that. I'm probably not becoming a small developer anytime soon. I don't know that I have the risk tolerance or the constitution for it.

Kevin K (54:18.672)

I ask I try to I try to ask everybody that and put and nudge people

Kevin K (54:36.272)

Shush, shush, shush.

Daniel Herriges (54:47.598)

Definitely gonna keep writing. I write every week just about for Strong Towns and we'll see what else comes next. But I'm really excited to have finished this book and for the world to get to read it.

Kevin K (54:58.96)

Well, I'm looking forward to it. I'll certainly buy it myself and look forward to finding out where I am in the book. That's interesting to hear. So always fascinating. So Daniel, as we wrap up, do you have a favorite messy city or messy neighborhood that you want to talk about?

Daniel Herriges (55:07.406)

Hehehe

Daniel Herriges (55:17.614)

Oh man, that's a really good question.

Kevin K (55:19.952)

That's why I ask it.

Daniel Herriges (55:23.906)

That's why you ask it.

Kevin K (55:24.91)

Yeah.

Daniel Herriges (55:33.774)

I got too many favorite messy places. The places that I go to is just my favorite kind of urban places are often not particularly messy. They're just the shining examples, like Savannah's historic district of just like, man, if we could just do this all day every day, that would be great. But I do appreciate messiness. I appreciate kind of ad hoc places where people are doing what they can with what they have.

Honestly, you see a lot of that outside the US. It's been a while since I've left the country and I feel like I'm due to find a chance to travel. I am fascinated by cities in the global south. I lived in Quito, Ecuador for a little less than a year when I was younger and the tolerance for messiness there is like super cool. Like if you want to do something, you kind of go out and do it, largely because like the state doesn't have the capacity to stand in your way, but...

Kevin K (56:18.704)

Oh wow.

Daniel Herriges (56:34.776)

There is like an ad hoc transportation system in Quito that I went my first two months that I lived there I went looking fruitlessly over and over for like a system map where I could see all the bus routes and where they go I finally realized that there wasn't one There was no such thing because these are just private operators and they run a bus and they'd slap a bunch of signs on the front windshield of neighborhoods that that bus served and you paid a quarter and you got on and You kind of had to figure it out through trial and error

Kevin K (56:47.44)

Ha ha.

Kevin K (57:01.968)

Yeah, that's the...

Daniel Herriges (57:03.086)

But it was this incredibly adaptive system. You could get anywhere once you figured out how to use these informal buses. But same things like informal forms of like the lowest bar to entry development. You would see street vendors all over the place. Like that's the entry stage restaurant. You know, you set up a little shack in the park, or let's shack a little stand, and you sell like skewered meats in the park. And eventually you get a brick and mortar space. And you like, I love that kind of thing.

There's an energy and an excitement that it's almost totally absent from North American cities.

Kevin K (57:36.784)

Yeah, actually, I just read a really great article that Chris Arnod just published, I think this week, on the very topic. And he even talked about Quito, Ecuador. And he was comparing the experience as a bus rider there versus being a bus rider in Los Angeles or a lot of other American cities. And just completely echoed almost everything you just said, which is very true. Yeah. Yeah, he's a brilliant writer. So.

Daniel Herriges (57:43.5)

Mm -hmm.

Daniel Herriges (57:53.294)

Yeah

Daniel Herriges (57:58.382)

Yeah, I read that same article, it was great. I always love his writing.

Kevin K (58:04.624)

Well, Daniel, thanks so much for all this. It's really great to catch up and look forward to getting the book and engaging more and talking about these issues. So appreciate your time.

Daniel Herriges (58:09.486)

Thank you.

Daniel Herriges (58:16.398)

Totally, I will tell your listeners, housingtrap .org is the one stop shop if you wanna, you can pre -order the book from there, you can get links to places you can do it, you can also learn about hosting an event to talk about some of these issues. So.

Kevin K (58:30.244)

Terrific, terrific. And could also find you on the Strongtown site and on social media. All right. All right, Daniel. Thanks again. Take care.

Daniel Herriges (58:35.796)

Absolutely.

Daniel Herriges (58:40.078)

Thank you, Kevin. Take care.