The Henry George Program

Alex Contreras is from Downey, CA (southeast LA County), which is facing off against a freeway expansion, which will destroy homes and take away public space. Who's responsible, and how is Alex and everybody else in the Happy City Coalition organizing to stop it?

Jennifer Bradshaw is a housing activist in Vancouver, and is here to talk about how social housing and public housing works in her city, and the dismal politics that pits them against each other. Who controls property wealth, and how can we organize to achieve more equitable ends?

Derek Sagehorn of East Bay for Everyone and Common Ground California is the co-author of a paper on transit value capture, and is here to talk about the dismal history of Bay Area transit and recapturing land value, and its more rosy future. What is Link21, and why do we need to take on Prop 13 and Prop 218 to make it work? Also featuring a discussion of the sort of *bad* "value capture" beloved by lazy non-profits, and how they almost killed AB1401.

Alex Fisch is the mayor of Culver City, and a powerful poster on California Housing Twitter; we talk about projects within the city to improve the homelessness crisis, as well as recapture value from land value uplift; also talk about regional cooperation amongst the many governments, and how Culver City addresses its racist foundations a century ago

Urban planning expert Shane Phillips discusses the limitations of homeownership as a wealth-building tool, proposing innovative solutions like a rental pension and localized housing equity. The conversation also delves into the complexities of housing policies, including rent control, home equity disparities between generations, and the need for tailored solutions in different U.S. markets. Phillips challenges traditional views on homeownership, suggesting alternative approaches like collective mortgage payments and deliberate appreciation of home values at the inflation rate for sustainable investment.

Ma’ayan Dembo, formerly of KZSU fame, is back on the airwaves to share her academic research, done in conjunction with ACT-LA, about alternatives to policing in transit. In Los Angeles as well as the Bay Area, what interventions are effective, what best works to actually make riders feel safe, and how does this integrate into the larger homelessness crisis?

We finally talk about McDonald's, and the big business of landowning with McDonald's expert Alan Joyce. How did the McDonald's Corporation leverage land speculation to grow faster than its competitors? What special relationships did the rise of McDonald's have in common with suburbanization? And should McDonald's just go all-in on becoming a REIT?

The Embarcadero Institute is a think tank based in Palo Alto, producing slick-looking white papers about how California doesn't need so much housing, actually. Stan Oklobdzija, research director for CA YIMBY, is on to pick apart the claims these papers make. We talk shop on headship rates, RHNA adjustments, derpy quadratic fits, and much more.

Senator Stanley Chang is here from Hawaii to talk about Aloha Homes, a proposal to import what works about Singapore-style public housing (cheap, dense condos built on public land). History about housing and land in Hawaii, including its public trust model.

Palo Alto has a large park that has a unique ban on non-residents. They're changing this prohibition... but not if Lydia Kou's referendum has anything to say about it. We have on former Palo Alto councilmember Cory Wolbach to talk about the history of this park, the legal challenge which Palo Alto settled but may resurrect, and how this fits into the particular ideology of many Palo Alto residents: “Residentialism”.