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.
I work in town and urban planning and used to believe that objections to development and increasing density were just racist dog-whistles; while in many ways they are, I've found that people are truly against ANY kind of change, period. You would be amazed at how upset people get over the addition of 3 McMansions in an existing neighborhood, the transfer of three parking spaces from one block to another, and the idea of their children being redistricted from a predominately white elementary school rated 9/10 to another predominately white elementary school rated 9/10. It's honestly mind-blowing.
It was really telling to me when a neighbor wrote an op-ed to the local paper about the McMansions and used the words "our neighborhood is perfect exactly the way it is now, PERIOD." The author went on and on about how the empty lots had become needed informal park space, which is baffling because the neighborhood is next to a 180 acre county park with lots of passive park space!
That whole situation actually taught me how fake news and misinformation spreads and wins. In brief, so many rumors spread on social media early in the process it was unreal - the government is selling off historically designated park land to build condos! The government is lying about them being single family houses like how they lie about everything! It didn't matter how many ways we explained that no, this land is zoned for single family housing and these lots are not part of the nearby historic park. While they eventually realized that no condos were coming, people stayed skeptical that the government was hiding something and lying to them, so local elected officials voted to block the development from happening.
As for the parking space issue, the plan was to move a bus stop over a block for safety reasons. The old bus stop would become three spaces and the new bus stop would be created out of three existing spaces. Again, there was this weird mistrust of government that we weren't going to replace the spaces and that this was a slippery slope to losing all of the parking everywhere!
It was in this case as well as the school redistricting that I started to notice what I call "politically correct dog-whistles" - dog-whistles that legitimately are things that need to be considered but instead are used as throwaway talking points only. With the parking shift: "But what about disabled people!?! Now they have to walk further!!!" With the redistricting: "This will affect kids' mental health!!!" But here's the reality - when you start to provide actual solutions to these things, the same people get upset by those, too. You tell them they are improving the sidewalks as part of the project, they complain that it's a waste of taxpayer dollars. You mention more robust health services in schools, they complain that everyone is so sensitive nowadays and question its effectiveness.
I have learned to keep quiet with the general public about legitimate concerns because they try to twist them in their favor to shut down a project. I had legitimate concerns about an affordable housing project because it was next to an grade F intersection with a major highway that residents would have to cross to access the supermarket. I still wanted the housing built, but I wanted intersection improvements, too. While I wanted to publicly mention this, I knew that if I did, the people who were completely opposed would use my legitimate concerns as a rally cry to completely oppose the project with zero alternatives. Therefore, I emailed the consulting firm working on the project directly. While I am extremely displeased that they didn't add any sidewalks or pedestrian crossings, at least the housing got built.
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.
I work in town and urban planning and used to believe that objections to development and increasing density were just racist dog-whistles; while in many ways they are, I've found that people are truly against ANY kind of change, period. You would be amazed at how upset people get over the addition of 3 McMansions in an existing neighborhood, the transfer of three parking spaces from one block to another, and the idea of their children being redistricted from a predominately white elementary school rated 9/10 to another predominately white elementary school rated 9/10. It's honestly mind-blowing.
It was really telling to me when a neighbor wrote an op-ed to the local paper about the McMansions and used the words "our neighborhood is perfect exactly the way it is now, PERIOD." The author went on and on about how the empty lots had become needed informal park space, which is baffling because the neighborhood is next to a 180 acre county park with lots of passive park space!
That whole situation actually taught me how fake news and misinformation spreads and wins. In brief, so many rumors spread on social media early in the process it was unreal - the government is selling off historically designated park land to build condos! The government is lying about them being single family houses like how they lie about everything! It didn't matter how many ways we explained that no, this land is zoned for single family housing and these lots are not part of the nearby historic park. While they eventually realized that no condos were coming, people stayed skeptical that the government was hiding something and lying to them, so local elected officials voted to block the development from happening.
As for the parking space issue, the plan was to move a bus stop over a block for safety reasons. The old bus stop would become three spaces and the new bus stop would be created out of three existing spaces. Again, there was this weird mistrust of government that we weren't going to replace the spaces and that this was a slippery slope to losing all of the parking everywhere!
It was in this case as well as the school redistricting that I started to notice what I call "politically correct dog-whistles" - dog-whistles that legitimately are things that need to be considered but instead are used as throwaway talking points only. With the parking shift: "But what about disabled people!?! Now they have to walk further!!!" With the redistricting: "This will affect kids' mental health!!!" But here's the reality - when you start to provide actual solutions to these things, the same people get upset by those, too. You tell them they are improving the sidewalks as part of the project, they complain that it's a waste of taxpayer dollars. You mention more robust health services in schools, they complain that everyone is so sensitive nowadays and question its effectiveness.
I have learned to keep quiet with the general public about legitimate concerns because they try to twist them in their favor to shut down a project. I had legitimate concerns about an affordable housing project because it was next to an grade F intersection with a major highway that residents would have to cross to access the supermarket. I still wanted the housing built, but I wanted intersection improvements, too. While I wanted to publicly mention this, I knew that if I did, the people who were completely opposed would use my legitimate concerns as a rally cry to completely oppose the project with zero alternatives. Therefore, I emailed the consulting firm working on the project directly. While I am extremely displeased that they didn't add any sidewalks or pedestrian crossings, at least the housing got built.
Great interview. Thank you