Episode post here. Transcription by Prexie Magallanes.
Matt Teichman:
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, an
unexpected philosophy podcast. I’m Matt Teichman, and with us today
is Luca Gattoni-Celli, founder of YIMBYs of Northern
Virginia and author of the Cornerstone
Substack about housing,
urbanism, and the world we build for each other. He is here to discuss
the housing crisis and how to fix it. Luca Gattoni-Celli, welcome.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
Thanks Matt. Happy to be here. And thanks
for inviting me here.
Matt Teichman:
My pleasure. Okay, let’s just start by talking
about what the housing crisis is. What’s the crisis we’re in?
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
So, I actually just wrote a piece in USA
Today about this through another program I’m in, called the Young
Voices. It’s kind of a fellowship program. In that op-ed, I talk about
how the housing crisis is, fundamentally, a shortage of homes in
America, especially in the places where people want to live, and work,
and seek opportunity, educational and otherwise.
Matt Teichman:
Actually, that was my first question: is the
crisis evenly spread-out all over America, or are we mostly talking
about close to cities?
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
You know what? Since the pandemic, it’s
both. Before the pandemic, it was concentrated in places like New
York, San Francisco, Boston. And with the pandemic shaking up where
people wanted to live, and what they wanted out of their lives and
their homes, it metastasized, largely from California across the
western half of the United States, but also just in general, people
move further out. They were expecting to work remotely indefinitely,
or most days of the week.
It is true, and I think too often overlooked, that the housing crisis is worse in the places with the disproportionate jobs and opportunity in the country. But there are really very few places left in the United States, if any, that are meaningfully desirable in any way, and also affordable to live in. A place like Buffalo—and I have a friend who loves the Bills, so I’m not insulting Buffalo—but a place like Buffalo has a terrible housing crisis, in much the same way as where we are now: Arlington, Virginia. Arlington has Amazon HQ2 right down the road. It has the Pentagon. It has a lot of different opportunities and interesting things happening here.
And if you try to get an apartment in Buffalo, it’s fundamentally the same experience. There are not enough options; all of them are a little bit (or maybe a lot) overpriced. Going back to the high-level question, the housing affordability crisis is fundamentally driven by a lack of supply. You can see that in the economic data, and even in the–you know, a year or two before the subprime mortgage crisis really hit, home construction, measured in total units, fell off a cliff. And also, units completed is still very much down. Units in production has gone back up; it’s actually at a historically high level right now. But units completed—like homes actually being delivered onto the market—is still way down and catching up.
There’s going to be a lot of catching up to do, and coinciding with this, you have millennials, who are famously the largest generation—the largest demographic cohort in US history–hitting our prime home-buying years. So supply went down just as demand went up, and that equals a shortage, and high prices.
Matt Teichman:
One thing I was initially wondering about this
is, yes: the proliferation of more and more remote work is making
cities less where you have to live in order to have a good-paying
job. But it’s also spreading the problems that previously were
specific to areas right around cities all over the place, to remote
areas, where that wasn’t a problem before.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
Yeah, that’s a good question. I’m not an
expert on return to work or hybrid work policies, and I think it’s
probably a bad idea to try to generalize. One observation that does
jump out for me is that although the primary reason that someone would
want to live in a city or want to relocate, historically, would have
been for a job. Although, side note, increasingly, it’s just literally
so they can afford to buy a home.
Matt Teichman:
Absolutely.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
People also just want to live somewhere
where there are things to do, right?
Matt Teichman:
Yes.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
There’s certainly a segment of the
population that would be happy to just live in the middle of Idaho and
look at deer all day. By the way, that sounds pretty good to me
sometimes; I’d love to visit the Mountain West one day. But, with that
said, most people want to go to a place, and have their kids grow up
in a place that’s on some basic level—in the most anodyne way
possible—vibrant, and has different amenities, cultural
institutions, maybe sports, maybe live music. Maybe they want to go to
an art museum every now and again. Who knows?
Matt Teichman:
A fresh supply of warm bodies coming from some
background you’ve never encountered before.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
Well, not everybody likes that, but I
do. And yeah, it’s one of the reasons that I like living in this
area. So, we’re recording this in my backyard. Just using where I live
as an example, I love living in the DC area, even though truthfully,
even with my day job, there’s not really a reason for me to live here
anymore. Because my friends are here. I like the Smithsonians, that
my kids and wife can go to during the day for free. I love that the
last couple of times I went to Pentagon City’s Costco, I heard at
least six different languages that I didn’t recognize. There are just
these unbeatable qualities about this area, and you can’t find that in
rural Iowa—nothing against rural Iowa. I’ve visited there too, and
it was a really great experience that if we completely lose ourselves,
we can get into. But people want to be near other people, whether
they want to admit it or not. A classic pattern of NIMBY—NIMBY, “not
in my backyard”—behavior is wanting to live near the city, but keep
people at arm’s length.
Matt Teichman:
Maybe we should come out and explain some of
these terms. NIMBY is an acronym, short for “not in my backyard.” And
that is an acronym meaning: somebody who doesn’t want there to be
development and building in the suburb where they live?
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
Yeah, more or less. There are different
flavors of NIMBYs, and they differ by context. But the classic mental
image we have of a NIMBY is someone who lives in suburbia and doesn’t
want denser housing built near them.
Now, even in New York City, even like Manhattan, or Queens, or the Bronx, some of the densest places in the country and, by global standards, still extremely dense. You’ll have people freaking out about a new building and saying that it’s going to completely unbalance the neighborhood, or some insane, ridiculous notion. And then, much more credibly and much more sympathetically, there are people—I could use the Hispanic community in Alexandria, the city where I actually live, which is a few miles from here, as an example. The local tenants’ rights workers group, Tenants and Workers United—I was having a conversation with them, and their community, that they represent for the last 40 years, since before I was born, have only ever experienced development and new housing coming in as displacement and pricing them out.
So if I’m trying to talk to them about all of this, I’m not going to say, well, you know, there’s this study over here that shows that there’s a filtering effect where new housing is built, and it benefits everybody. That’s not a narrative, or a way of approaching that issue, that’s going to resonate with them. But back to the broader point, NIMBYism—canonically, typically, archetypically—refers to someone who basically thinks that if too many other people live near them, it’ll ruin their life. There is this really misanthropic undertone to it, whether folks are really conscious of it or not, that I personally find really interesting, and that maybe your listeners, since this is a philosophy podcast, might find interesting too.
Matt Teichman:
And then YIMBY, so that’s like NIMBY, except
with a Y at the beginning instead of an N, standing for “yes in my
backyard.” YIMBY, the position, which I think it’s safe to say you
represent, is some sort of pro-building, pro-development position. Is
that right?
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
Absolutely. So there’s not really a NIMBY
movement (with an N) because there’s not that many organizations. Now
there certainly are some, there’s some in this area—there’s one in
California that’s kind of Orwellianly called Livable California. But
there’s not really a movement. It is remarkable how consistent NIMBY
talking points are, like concerns about parking, or traffic, or
whatever.
The YIMBY movement I like to think about and talk about as: we’re the people who say yes. We are the people who say yes in my backyard. We welcome and embrace growth, and development, and change, and see it as a potential force for good because the status quo isn’t really working for anyone, at this point. The housing market, in its current form, and current equilibrium, is really punishing for most people. Even people who’ve been in their homes a long time might now be paying really high property taxes that they weren’t before. In California, that’s not really true because of something called Prop 13, which we don’t really have time to get into, probably. But the bigger point is that the YIMBY movement is the expression of a really broad recognition that the housing market is totally broken, and that we need to chart a different course. That fundamentally, the problem is supply, and is a shortage that needs to be addressed. That’s the new element that the YIMBY movement brought to the table.
Matt Teichman:
So at least in a lot of the country, and
certainly in urban areas, it tends to be very expensive to live—with
certain cities, New York and San Francisco, famously having an
incredibly inhospitable real estate market. How did we get here? What
caused this housing crisis?
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
To make a long story short—and I know
this is the direction we want to go in with the conversation—this is
a regulatory failure. There are certain regulations at the local and
state level that make it difficult, or often illegal, to build denser
housing. Dense housing refers to housing where many units of housing
or many homes, or just many individuals, can live on one piece of
land. It’s making more efficient use of land; and that’s how I think
about urbanism and land use. Asking the question again, and again, and
again, are we able to make efficient use of this resource, this really
finite resource, which is land?
Zoning is both the simplest and also the most, I would say, precise and correct way to refer to regulations like restricting how many units of housing can be on one lot—on one piece of property. How high can the building go? How much of the lot can it cover? How can the building be from the front? The front setback from the property line, the side setbacks, the floor to area ratio, which is the ratio of the floor space of the building to the area of the lot, just on and on and on. The typologies that are allowed. Is it a duplex? Is it row houses? Is it an apartment building, like a small apartment building? And zoning extends to non-residential land uses as well: so, commercial space, like office space, light industrial or industrial space, everything from like a brewery to like steelworks, garbage dumps, places you’re not allowed to build, like a wildlife preserve. On some level, all of this stuff is zoning, and maybe that’s an expansive definition. Zoning was created roughly 100 years ago—maybe a little more like 110—to segregate land uses, to move or separate industrial, commercial and residential land uses from each other. That’s called single use zoning.
Matt Teichman:
That’s kind of intuitive, right? We probably
don’t want a factory pumping toxic gas into the main thoroughfare of a
city, or stuff like that.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I’m not going
to send my kids to a school that’s next to a garbage dump for sure.
Matt Teichman:
Right.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
But there were already ways of dealing
with that problem, even 110 years ago. Zoning really came into
effect—and this is going to sound a little dark—but kind of almost
as a form of social control. This was at the height of the progressive
era; I think that’s no accident. And if we want to really go into the
origins of single-family zoning—the zoning that says that you can
only build a detached single-family home on a lot.
Matt Teichman:
Not even a duplex?
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
Right: not even a duplex. The history of
that in America traces to two places. One was midtown Manhattan, which
was very much driven by business interests. But the other story to
highlight in 1916, and the one that’s really more representative of
how zoning evolved in the United States was—
Matt Teichman:
—actually, can I just ask you about
Manhattan? 100 years ago, I had to just build a single-family house
somewhere in Manhattan? That’s unimaginable right now.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
That’s not quite right. Zoning in
general—zoning as we know it—took form in these two different
places in 1916. One of them was in New York City. The other was in
Berkeley, California, of all places. It was a city that was in the
midst of explosive growth in the Bay Area. And now is of course—
Matt Teichman:
—maybe not coincidentally, two of the most
expensive places to live in the entire country.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
Yeah. I mean, the Bay Area is more of a
coincidence, because of Silicon Valley. But at the same time, it is
extremely poetic, undeniably, and that’s not something I’d fully
thought about before. That’s really funny.
Single family zoning as we know it, Matt, really started in Berkeley, California, and there’s some subtext here. I’m going to see if you can catch it. A white property owner wanted his new neighborhood to be isolated and insulated from a black dance hall and Chinese-owned laundromats. That’s why he pushed for the local government in Berkeley to create this set of laws and rules that has become single family zoning.
Matt Teichman:
Was that the stated justification for the
policy, or was it more like: this is clearly what he had in mind?
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
It wasn’t something that anyone was
trying to hide. There are plenty of examples from that era.
Matt Teichman:
It’s long enough ago now that people weren’t
trying to hide that yet.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
That’s true. Exactly right. I mean, there
are plenty of examples of posters from that era. You know, we have
built this whole new neighborhood. People might even advertise: “all
white neighborhood” to prospective buyers of a plot of land or a house
in a new development. And I’m not everybody’s cookie-cutter
progressive, or anything like that. But it’s almost impossible to look
at this history, and look at the broad arc of it, without seeing two
things: systemic racism and class warfare. Maybe this is our
opportunity to talk about that, actually.
Matt Teichman:
Maybe we can connect some of those dots. So is
the idea that the origin of a policy that says no big apartment
complexes, only single-family homes—the origin of that is:
single-family homes are more expensive, so we’re going to keep the
riffraff out. Is that the idea?
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
Yes.
Matt Teichman:
And then, of course, in America, the riffraff
is always racialized.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
Often, yes. My father was born in Italy,
and he talked about how sometimes people would make Godfather
jokes. He came to the United States in 1977 to work at Columbia
Medical Center—
Matt Teichman:
—that is peak Godfather time to come to the
US.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
Yeah, it is, I guess. He caught the tail
end of an era when Italian people were not considered white.
Matt Teichman:
Italian, Polish: the people who were
grandfathered in.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
This didn’t really occur to me until I
watched a documentary narrated by Stanley Tucci about the
Italian-American experience. I did go to a Black Lives Matter protest
before it was cool, so, that’s true: you got me. But I, personally,
don’t think that focusing on racial narratives is necessarily the most
helpful way to understand history, per se.
But in this context, when we’re talking about housing, and how it has been controlled over time, and talking about laws that are still very much in effect today—70% of the land in most US cities. This is a New York Times stat that I can’t quit. I just keep quoting this one stat: about 70% of land in the typical American city is restricted to single family homes only. So there’s this deep core motivation, and, like, manifested idea of prejudice, and separation, and segregation that’s really embedded at the heart of land use policy and housing regulation.
Matt Teichman:
So the idea, broadly, is that cities start at
whatever size they start at, and they grow as economic activity
increases in them. If we were to let nature take its course, as it
were, each of these cities would continue expanding. But instead, what
happened was after a certain amount of expansion, there’s this
stopping point. We can’t build dense housing anymore. Now we just have
to have single family properties. And then, what starts happening is
that we get sprawl, and people, rather than being able to live within
a reasonable distance of where they work, having to live farther and
farther away. In other words, prohibiting the building of houses where
many, many people can live, in your view, gave rise to this sprawl
phenomenon.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
I think that’s a great summary,
especially from someone who claims not to know anything about this
topic.
Matt Teichman:
Well, thank you.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
You’re welcome. It’s definitely the
case—or it has been strongly suggested to me by actual
experts—that there’s an inherent appetite for sprawl and for
car-dependent lifestyles in the market, in the average person. But
there are two things that push against that, and that suggest that
this is what we have now, and the pattern of growth of American cities
now is very far away from a market outcome.
The two things I would point to are: one, the lack of an alternative that people have really experienced or contemplated. And this requires a slightly broader point. Urbanism—which is the study of the built environment and how people interact with it—urbanism, once you’ve kind of gotten your toes into it, causes you to be constantly interpreting the world around you in a way that most people don’t. They just walk down the street and they might see a tree, or they might see a squirrel. They’re kind of taking the environment they’re in—that built environment—as a given, and they’re not necessarily thinking about, “Well, how could it be different?” or “What is the full range of possibilities?”
The second reason that sprawl is not, in current form, a market outcome is that it is legally mandated, in very important ways, starting with zoning. Minimum lot sizes are a huge policy, in terms of dictating the minimum cost of a unit of housing, but also it affects things like the giant parking lots that stores are required to have, the huge front setbacks that mean that the front of a store is isolated from the road, just to give you a really simple example. Every time you walk through a Target parking lot, and you have a small child—I have three small children.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah, we’re up in Target like 24 hours a day.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
You probably have like a membership, or a
VIP pass. So dad to dad, when you’re in the Target parking lot, and
you’re walking to the store, you parked your car, and you’ve got the
kid, and you have to be really careful that the kid doesn’t run into
the way of a car, and get hit by the car, and there’s not really a
sidewalk, probably. It’s just a bunch of asphalt; it’s not really an
environment that humans are supposed to navigate. If this was the way
that like a yard operated at a port with trucks coming and going, it
would not pass muster.
Matt Teichman:
Or a shipyard where you had to swim for a mile
to get to the dock, because boats were taking up the whole—
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
—yeah, there you go. The point here is
that that giant parking lot probably was legally mandated by the local
land use regulations—by the local zoning. There are minimum parking
requirements that add a lot of cost, and sometimes complexity, to a
new apartment building, that are a very common feature of local zoning
codes.
Matt Teichman:
I was wondering about this, because I know a
lot of people who are fans of the suburbs. I might even count as one
of them. Maybe I’ve just reached an age where there is something I
appreciate about how good a place the suburbs are for biking and
skating, for example. Maybe just the aesthetics, a certain kind of
comfort. I think that is part of the appeal for a lot of people.
It seems like maybe what you’re arguing isn’t that literally nobody likes to live in the suburbs, but rather, that the proportion of people who live in the suburbs is skewed heavily suburb-wards, because of these policies, and if buildings were allowed to be built where buildings wanted to be built, then we would see a more reasonable proportion of people living in the suburbs, versus living in medium density areas, versus living in cities. Is that right?
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
Absolutely. I’ll be the first to say I
like living in the suburbs too. Arlington and Alexandria—Arlington
County and Alexandria City; we’re in Arlington right now—are
suburbs. They are not really traditional suburbs. If I ever go on a
road trip, and I go through different small towns, or different
areas—you know, my wife has cousins in Akron, Ohio who we
visit. This is is a fundamentally different place. Right now, you and
I are recording this in a giant hotel. There’s another giant hotel
over there. There are all these big office buildings. A lot of them
are being converted into apartments.
Matt Teichman:
It’s very event space-y, conference-y here, I
would say.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
A lot of Arlington is like that,
especially close to the metro stations. (The Metro is DC’s version of
the subway.) I’m not saying: oh, suburbs are just inherently evil. I
don’t think that’s true. I think that what is true is that you can
have a quieter, slightly more relaxed pace of life while still having
what we have here. This is still unequivocally a suburban
jurisdiction, but it has tall buildings. Amazon HQ2, like I said, is
right over there, so is the Pentagon—literally the world’s largest
office building, by the way: fun fact.
It’s still a very different feel from Washington DC proper, or in Tokyo, which is the world’s largest city. And which by the way, is also one of the world’s most affordable cities, because they just build, and build, and build lots and lots of housing. There are these quiet neighborhoods that have that slower feel, and these are things that people can choose that won’t get crowded out by insatiable appetite for growth.
There’s a neighborhood called Del Rey—it’s a streetcar suburb in Alexandria—and the way it was developed was with really small residential lots that are now called substandard lots, because you wouldn’t be allowed to build a house on a lot that small anymore. The west side of this neighborhood has 10,000 people per square mile living there. But yeah, Del Rey is quiet and peaceful, birds sing, there are lots of shady trees, and 10,000 people live in one square mile of that neighborhood. So when people are imagining what suburban life would or could be like, they have a very narrow, fearful—I don’t know how to say this without being insulting—kind of low information perspective on what’s possible.
Matt Teichman:
I don’t have hard data on this—just
anecdotal—but definitely, some nontrivial proportion of people who
live in faraway suburbs would rather just live in the city, and they
can’t afford it. They only live in the suburbs because that’s what
they can afford.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
A hundred percent. I mean, there’s this
assertion that zoning somehow secures not only a small D democratic
vox populi outcome, but also that it’s supposed to be some signal of
a market preference. One, that’s not how the market works. The market
doesn’t express preferences by regulating. Regulation does not express
a market preference; it binds a market preference. It prevents a
market preference from being expressed.
But the second thing that I would just point to is: you’re absolutely right. The housing in DC, which is supposed to be this hellscape (and it does have a really high murder rate right now, and there are some serious problems that need to be solved in DC, for sure), DC still has more expensive housing than Arlington does, which is still more expensive than Alexandria, which is a little farther out, which is still quite a bit more expensive than Prince William County, which is continuing south on I-95.
Apples to apples, you can’t tell me that people hate the city, because clearly there’s a market for it. There’s a crazy amount of status quo bias when you’re having conversations, or just analyzing the lay of the land of the housing market in urban form. And there’s also a huge amount of conflation of what is and what ought to be, or what’s objectively true versus what people’s personal preferences are.
Matt Teichman:
Maybe we could step through: what’s the
mechanism by which more building in urban areas would lower housing
prices in those areas?
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
Okay. There’s a few different things
going on. As you said, more supply means that the people renting out a
unit or selling a house on the market, they don’t have the same
pricing power, because the people who are buying have alternatives. So
more supply makes the price go down: that’s just basic economics, in
the truest sense. There’s also the angle of how efficiently you’re
using the land. This gets really complicated, because you have the
“unimproved” value of the land, meaning how valuable the land is. A
patch of dirt in Manhattan versus a patch of dirt in Iowa. Sorry to
pick on Iowa again, but the land in Manhattan is worth more. It’s
close to more interesting, important stuff; it’s more valuable.
But setting aside all the complications of the value of the land versus the value of the structure, and all those contingencies, if you have more people living on a piece of land, each of them can then split the cost of that land, whether they’re renting, or whether we’re talking about condos or townhouses. The density, which people act like is a really dirty word, but I love this way of putting it: it’s the way that lower income people come together to bid on an expensive piece of land instead of one rich person living on it. If you allow more people to live on a piece of land, then the price each one of those individuals pays is going to be lower. It’s basically economies of scale. (Basically—I don’t know if that’s quite the proper term in this context.)
Matt Teichman:
It’s interesting, because I think a lot of
people have the intuition that, well, New York is expensive, and New
York has lots of people living in the same place. So maybe it’s
expensive because there are all these people living in the same
place. I think that’s what leads some people to have the intuition
that if we allow building, it’s just going to create more expensive
dwellings. But it seems like maybe that’s not right. Maybe actually,
the cause and effect is backwards there, and in fact, the density is
detracting from what would be even higher prices, where we find it.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
Abosolutely. Let’s go back to Tokyo. Why
do I keep talking about Tokyo? Well, it’s an extremely unique example;
Japan is a very unique country. As of 2023, Tokyo, Japan had 40.8
million people living in that metropolitan region.
Matt Teichman:
So it’s about four times the size of New York,
population-wise?
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
I think so. New York has a big metro
region population as well, so it’s kind of apples to oranges, but
yeah. The point is that Tokyo is generally cited as the example of the
world’s largest city, and certainly the world’s largest agglomeration
of human beings. And it has a population comparable to the population
of the entire state of California.
Now, let’s pause for a second. California, and especially the Bay area, but also LA, and really the whole state, has the worst housing affordability crisis in the United States. But if it were true that density somehow caused housing to be more expensive, or caused the value of the land to rise so much that it wiped out the savings from having more people live on each piece of land, then how would it be that an apartment in downtown Tokyo is cheaper than an apartment in downtown LA, or an apartment in downtown San Francisco? How could it be that the cost of living in the world’s largest city is much more accessible than the cost of living (certainly in terms of housing) than California? How could that possibly be true, if density made housing more expensive? It actually suggests the opposite, doesn’t it?
It suggests that if you build enough housing, and if you meet the demand that’s out there for people to live in a place, they will live there. It will be affordable, and supply will reach and meet demand. And the price that clears the market, to use a technical term, will be a more or less reasonable one. To extend the analogy further, Canada has an even worse housing crisis than we do (the United States does) by some measures. Guess what? Canada also has roughly the same population as Tokyo. Now we’re talking about an entire country, one that has more land than the United States.
This isn’t apples to oranges anymore. We’re talking about Tokyo versus a whole country, and one that has way more land even than Japan, as a country, has. But it’s the same number of people, and somehow the people living all crowded together pay less rent than someone in Toronto right now. How could that be true? The reason it’s true is because if you let supply grow to meet demand, it will.
Matt Teichman:
Are there other factors other than zoning
regulations which, in your view, have led to the housing crisis?
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
In brief, because we don’t want to end up
accidentally making two podcast episodes about this, the two areas
other than zoning of housing regulation that are really notable are
permitting and the building code. Permitting, sometimes called the
entitlement process, is the process whereby local jurisdictions grant
permission to a developer to actually build a new house, or build a
new apartment building. This process tends to be very drawn out, which
puts financial pressure on a project, and might make it fall apart and
not ever come to fruition, and adds a lot of costs and uncertainty. It
also is highly discretionary, so even if something is allowed under
zoning, there’s this dynamic of the political authority, and the
regulatory actor being able to kind of push and prod the
developer. This isn’t to defend developers in any special way, but
it’s not a great situation, when you have a housing crisis and we’re
trying to figure out ways to build more.
The other area that we need to talk about briefly is the building code. Things like requiring sprinklers in new townhouses sounds like a great idea, but it adds a lot of unnecessary cost, I would argue, to projects, just as a random example. I live in a townhouse, it doesn’t have sprinklers, and I feel perfectly safe. There’s a safe way to build townhouses without sprinklers. That’s just one small example.
Along with fire safety, another area of excess regulation you see in building codes—which are the codes that actually control what materials and methods can be used to construct buildings—is energy efficiency. So: really stringent requirements for the materials and insulation, etc. It’s easy to defend these things, and I don’t think there’s bad intent behind them, but it might also mean that it’s harder to build new housing that’s more energy-efficient. So people end up being stuck living in older housing that’s less energy efficient and, oh, by the way, less fire-safe as well. So, the thing to—
Matt Teichman:
—in other words, it’s not like you’re
anti-safety.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
No.
Matt Teichman:
Everyone in the room here is in favor of
buildings being safe. Rather, it seems like the concern here is: we
want to make sure that any measures we take to increase safety don’t
have unintended negative consequences that outweigh the safety gains
that we would get from them.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
Yeah. It’s a different version of the
classic problem of the FDA over-regulating things, or not allowing a
new drug to go forward. So someone dies of a disease that might have
been cured by that drug, but it wasn’t approved by the FDA. But when
that person dies, no one blames the FDA. Increasingly, maybe more and
more they do. But similar situation with housing: the least safe, most
energy inefficient, often the most overcrowded housing in a city,
tends to be stuff that is way behind current standards for building. I
live near a large apartment complex with five high-rise apartment
towers, and they don’t have sprinklers. They were built in the early
1960s. That would never fly today.
Matt Teichman:
So you, and maybe several others in this
space, have also argued that some of the situation that we’re in has
arisen as a result of neglect of people’s property rights. How does
that argument go?
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
There’s not just one way to approach it,
but I see two axes that this operates along. We’ve already covered one
of them, which is that you, Matt, owner of your house or
whathaveyou—this is a hypothetical, like you own a house on a plot
of land—
Matt Teichman:
—quite hypothetical.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
Okay. Well, now I know why you like this
topic. You are very heavily regulated in what you’re allowed to do
with that land, for all the reasons we talked about. The building
code, the permitting process for any changes you want to make, or
things you want to build, the zoning. It’s heavily, heavily regulated,
and that does constrain your property rights. The other thing is: your
neighbors probably get to have all kinds of opinions to political
authorities about what you do with your property, even if it doesn’t
really directly affect them.
Matt Teichman:
Maybe they think the garden in front is ugly,
but I love my garden.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
Yeah. Or maybe you want to build a small
apartment building, and have some tenants, and make some income for
your family, and offer people places to live, but then they worry
about traffic. I don’t want to get too sidetracked here, but you were
talking about how people hate cities, or whatever—this is a classic
urbanist trope. But the things that people hate about cities tend to
be the things that they hate about cars: they take up a lot of
space, cars do. Cars take up a lot of space. They’re noisy, they
pollute, they’re dangerous, it’s hard to walk around in a place that
has a lot of cars driving around, and there’s heavy traffic. I’ll
leave that point there.
But on this point of property rights, I wrote about this issue in a long piece for the American System—it’s a project of the American Conservative Magazine—arguing that weak property rights are an essential way to understand the housing crisis. In that essay, I was able to share one of my core theses about the housing crisis, which is that for many decades, harkening back to the history of zoning that we went over, we as individuals have had incredibly inappropriate expansive power over each other’s lives: where we live, how we live. And the political struggle that we’re all undergoing right now—that my YIMBY group is involved in, that the YIMBY movement is involved in—is a project of undoing this inappropriate control that we have over each other, that is (I think) most correctly understood as an impingement on property rights.
When you give people that kind of control, it would be a miracle if they didn’t abuse it. To me, that’s the skeleton key of understanding so much of this. Like the misanthropy that we were talking about earlier: this idea I need to make sure that these poor black people stay away from me, and don’t live in my neighborhood and interact with my kids. It’s just all wrapped up together.
Matt Teichman:
There’s a common theme of mistrust, underlying
a lot of it.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
Absolutely. There is this belief that
human beings are a burden on each other. There’s a belief that other
people’s existence places a burden on you, in a way that I just don’t
think is true. Maybe this will be my final thought, but there’s this
pattern that repeats over and over again of a new building (or
whatever change being proposed), people melting down, just being very
upset, and very afraid, and opposing the change. The change happens
anyway, the building is built, a few years pass, and people might not
even remember what they were so worried about. This happens over and
over again. Change is the only constant, and the reason you’re talking
to me today—the reason we came together to sit down together—is
because the way that we handle housing policy right now isn’t working
for anyone. Low-income people, middle income people.
I told my congressman about the work that I was doing and my congressman, who’s one of the wealthiest people in Congress, immediately started complaining to me about what a hard time he was having buying a house!
Matt Teichman:
That’s incredible.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
It was wild. So this has become a
universal experience. And if we—you know, me personally, I’m an
optimist. People here at the E.V. Unconference are all optimists, as
you can see from the different projects we’re working on. I just
can’t imagine that we wouldn’t try to solve the problem.
Matt Teichman:
Luca Gattoni-Celli, you’re welcome to come
build in my backyard anytime. Thanks so much for coming on the show.
Luca Gattoni-Celli:
You too, Matt. Thank you.