Awesome interview! I've been reading your work for a while, Jerusalem, and I love it! I work in the urban planning field and am passionate about ending homelessness and increasing affordable housing.
Something that has gotten me thinking recently...not only have we made it hard to be a long-term renter in this country, but we also don't make any efforts to convert long-term rentals into homeowners. It blows my mind, for instance, how I have neighbors who rented their townhouse for 26 YEARS and then their landlord sold it to them at a 20% discount. They paid this man's ENTIRE mortgage and their reward was 20% off the asking price. He should have gifted them the house at that point!!!
Even worse, there is a trend in Baltimore City neighborhoods that are ripe for gentrification for the city to buy out landlords of renter occupied houses for $20,000-$30,000 per rowhome to then give the land to developers. Often these renters have been there for DECADES and paid far more than that in rent - why doesn't the city buy the houses and then gift them to the longtime tenants!? Instead, they let the houses go vacant and then gift the land to developers, who either demolish them and then build luxury condos (with a small percentage saved as affordable housing) or rehab them and resell them at 10x the price.
The amount of money that the city also spends in demolishing houses (for empty lots or parks) could also be better used to buy out landlords and gift these houses to the black and brown families living in them. On one block, the city spent $600,000 to demolish 16 rowhomes - that's $37,500 each!!! Yep, the cost of demolition, not even the cost of the real estate! For the occupied ones, they paid between $40,000-$119,000 to buy them out!!
It's mind-blowing that a depopulating city with over 10,000 vacant houses is contributing to making itself less affordable by demolishing existing renter-occupied housing.
Thank you for giving me a good person to follow on housing -- my neighborhood is currently in an uproar over a proposed expansion of an existing affordable housing complex and I have been doing tons of reading on housing issues just to be able to adequately respond to my neighbors' emails. (It's actually super interesting: for most people, the real objection is to development and increasing density, but the fact that it's affordable housing is being used to put that in a justice discourse, with claims that the proposed building is deficient in various ways that amount to mistreatment of people in need of affordable housing.)
But on the minimum wage, I would want to be clear that the long-held economic theory of a very conservative discipline may have opposed increasing the minimum wage, but the best recent empirical studies based on actual minimum wage increases do a lot to dismantle that theory, leading to a shift in the consensus.
Jerusalem is brilliant. Thank you for highlighting her work.
Awesome interview! I've been reading your work for a while, Jerusalem, and I love it! I work in the urban planning field and am passionate about ending homelessness and increasing affordable housing.
Something that has gotten me thinking recently...not only have we made it hard to be a long-term renter in this country, but we also don't make any efforts to convert long-term rentals into homeowners. It blows my mind, for instance, how I have neighbors who rented their townhouse for 26 YEARS and then their landlord sold it to them at a 20% discount. They paid this man's ENTIRE mortgage and their reward was 20% off the asking price. He should have gifted them the house at that point!!!
Even worse, there is a trend in Baltimore City neighborhoods that are ripe for gentrification for the city to buy out landlords of renter occupied houses for $20,000-$30,000 per rowhome to then give the land to developers. Often these renters have been there for DECADES and paid far more than that in rent - why doesn't the city buy the houses and then gift them to the longtime tenants!? Instead, they let the houses go vacant and then gift the land to developers, who either demolish them and then build luxury condos (with a small percentage saved as affordable housing) or rehab them and resell them at 10x the price.
The amount of money that the city also spends in demolishing houses (for empty lots or parks) could also be better used to buy out landlords and gift these houses to the black and brown families living in them. On one block, the city spent $600,000 to demolish 16 rowhomes - that's $37,500 each!!! Yep, the cost of demolition, not even the cost of the real estate! For the occupied ones, they paid between $40,000-$119,000 to buy them out!!
It's mind-blowing that a depopulating city with over 10,000 vacant houses is contributing to making itself less affordable by demolishing existing renter-occupied housing.
Thank you for giving me a good person to follow on housing -- my neighborhood is currently in an uproar over a proposed expansion of an existing affordable housing complex and I have been doing tons of reading on housing issues just to be able to adequately respond to my neighbors' emails. (It's actually super interesting: for most people, the real objection is to development and increasing density, but the fact that it's affordable housing is being used to put that in a justice discourse, with claims that the proposed building is deficient in various ways that amount to mistreatment of people in need of affordable housing.)
But on the minimum wage, I would want to be clear that the long-held economic theory of a very conservative discipline may have opposed increasing the minimum wage, but the best recent empirical studies based on actual minimum wage increases do a lot to dismantle that theory, leading to a shift in the consensus.
Great interview. Thank you