Junior Podcast Editor, Gabriel Taylor (MPP ‘24) chats with Richard Kahlenberg, Author of “Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See” to discuss the US housing crisis, it’s causes, and what we might do to solve it.
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Gabriel Taylor: Hello and welcome back to the Georgetown Public Policy Review Podcast. I’m your host, Gabriel Taylor. Today’s episode is somewhat of a crash course on the US housing crisis. We’ll talk about what the housing crisis is, some of the causes, and potential solutions. I’m joined today by Richard Kahlenberg. Kahlenberg is a scholar of both education and housing policy, currently serving as a non-resident scholar at the McCourt School of Public policy, and a lecturer at the George Washington University, Trachtenberg School of Public Policy. He’s also a Senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute and an author many times over, who recently published a book titled, “Excluded: How Snob Zoning, Nimbyism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See.” Richard, it’s great to have you on the podcast today.
Richard Kahlenberg: Great to be with you, Taylor.
Taylor: So before we really of get into the housing crisis, can you tell us a little bit about how you came to be where you are today, and what sort of ignited the particular interests in education and housing that have shaped your career so far?
Kahlenberg: Sure. So I was raised in a socially conscious family. We cared about fairness, and naturally, I was drawn to education issues because that’s so central to the promise of equal opportunity in America. I spent about 25 years writing about education policy in a variety of ways, K-12 education, inequality in higher education as well. But ultimately, I just kept knocking my head against housing policy. So that’s where I’ve ended up now, focusing in my new book, on the walls, the invisible walls that we build between different communities through zoning regulations that really have a huge impact on educational opportunity.
Taylor: So I want to talk about the book in a little bit. But first, I want to set the stage for our listeners. So I’m sure most people have heard that the US is currently experiencing a housing crisis, but they might not know exactly what a housing crisis is. So can you talk to us a little bit about what makes the current state of American housing unique compared to other periods of time? And what constitutes what we’re going through right now as a crisis?
Kahlenberg: Yeah, well, I guess I would say we have a dual crisis. The main crisis that people are talking about in housing is the problem of unaffordable housing; rents are enormously high for people, much higher than they have been relative to income in the past in the United States. And housing is a lot more expensive than it is in other countries, which suggests maybe it doesn’t have to be this way. So that’s the main housing crisis. But I think there’s also a second housing crisis that has to do with rising economic segregation in America. Our housing is also much more economically segregated, so the rich and poor are living apart much more than in the past. And these two housing crises, I think, are related: the ways in which housing has become more unaffordable and the ways in which housing has become more economically segregated.
Taylor Taylor: It’s interesting – you talk about the widening gap in the cost of housing and income. Can you talk a bit about what’s causing that gap?
Kahlenberg Kahlenberg: Yeah. Well, there’s one central cause, which is that in the United States, unlike most other countries, every community has tremendous power in deciding who gets to live there. They use a tool called exclusionary zoning, which sets the parameters on what type of housing will be available in that community. So in 75% of the land in most urban areas, you can’t build anything other than a detached single-family home. No duplexes, no triplexes, no small apartment buildings, certainly no big apartment buildings.
And that’s pervasive in the United States. And that does two things.
One, it artificially limits the supply of housing in a region. So in a metropolitan area, it’s illegal to build any kind of multifamily housing, you have, by definition limited the number of units within reasonable distance of jobs and the core community.
And the other thing you’ve done is make sure that people of modest means who may be able to afford a multifamily unit but not an individual single-family home will be excluded. And that means either that they’re going to have to live outside the metropolitan region or, if they can’t afford to live in a metropolitan region, they’ll live on the outskirts, oftentimes because that’s where housing is more affordable. So these invisible walls that we build through zoning policy are really at the root of both the affordability crisis and the economic segregation crisis.
Taylor: So we’ve got these high prices and these zoning regulations that are driving people out towards the outskirts of towns. Right before we started recording, we were talking about rural Ohio. You look at Zillow or go to these more rural parts of the country, and the housing is not astronomical in the way that you’d see it in urban centers. So I guess my question is this – is the housing crisis a uniquely urban problem? Or is this also pervading in rural areas in other ways?
Kahlenberg: Well, I’ll agree with both of those things. So it is primarily an urban metropolitan area phenomenon because that’s where oftentimes the jobs with the highest wages are, and people flock to metropolitan areas or want to flock to those areas for that reason. And at the same time, the crisis in affordability is spreading to some places that hadn’t dealt with this issue before. With the COVID-19 pandemic, obviously, a lot of us started working remotely. Knowledge workers, at least, can work remotely.
And so you see across the country what a group called ‘Up for Growth’ is called the immigration magnets, internal immigration magnets: places in Colorado and Montana, Utah, that have become very unaffordable because all these fairly well-to-do knowledge workers move to areas to work remotely, around beautiful scenery, and you can see why they do it. But if there’s not enough housing, then that’s going to price other people out of those communities. So you’re kind of seeing gentrification and displacement in parts of the country where that hadn’t been a problem. So I would sum up, I would say, primarily, this is a crisis in metropolitan areas. But some rural communities are now sharing the burden of unaffordable housing.
Taylor: That’s interesting, and that makes sense in these rural areas. You know, one house might be on a 2-acre plot of land as opposed to, you know, a very small plot in an urban area. So without that density, it really doesn’t take as much demand to drive prices up. A little bit ago, you had mentioned these invisible walls that we’re building through exclusionary zoning, which is a central theme of your new book. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the main principles and takeaways of the book, and how they play into what we’re seeing in the affordability crisis?
Kahlenberg: Sure. So people recognize that as you travel around a metropolitan area, some communities are wealthier, some less wealthy. Some communities are predominantly white, others have a lot of people of color, and I think many people just kind of take this for granted – “This is just the way it’s always been. It’s always going to be this way”, and that many people think it’s the working of the marketplace, the desirable communities that have strong schools are more expensive, so of course, they’re not gonna be able to accommodate people of lesser means. What that misses is that you could create much more affordable housing, smaller units in wealthier areas, predominantly white areas. And people could enjoy those high-performing public schools in those communities if it weren’t illegal to build multifamily houses, and there are lots of other tricks that communities use to exclude. It’s not just the ban on duplexes, triplexes, and apartments. It’s things like requiring a minimum lot size if you want to live in the community.
In addition, there are some communities that will say, “Okay, you can have multifamily housing here, but we’re gonna require that it needs this very expensive brick siding,” which has the effect of excluding people based on income. And when you look at the history of these laws, it’s really quite dark. The original idea behind zoning was a good one, which was we want to promote health and safety. We don’t want polluting factories right next to residential areas and things, wanna sort. And that makes sense. But quickly, in the early twentieth century, communities adopted racial zoning laws. So these were laws that made it illegal for black people to buy in predominantly white neighborhoods. And the justification, incredible as it may appear to us today, was health and safety. The Mayor of Baltimore said that he wanted to quarantine. That was this word, quarantine, black people to prevent the spread of communicable diseases. You know, this was the racist thinking at the time.
The other piece was, we need zoning to protect the property values of white people. And that’s a little bit more contemporary. We still hear property values pop up a lot in conversations about zoning, and so some people are familiar with this history of racial zoning, but I try to, in the book, update it and say it morphed over time into class or economic zoning. So in 1917 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down those terrible racial zoning laws, but communities quickly shifted to the single-family zoning to prevent most black people from moving into white communities. And now we have class bias in our zoning laws. And so it happens within each racial group. So there are white communities – this one white community in Wisconsin, you know, hardly any people of color in the community, and yet they adopted zoning laws and other methods to keep poorer whites away from wealthier whites. And you see it in Prince George’s County, Maryland, which is a predominantly black community, and there were bans on multifamily housing that were implemented by wealthier black people to exclude poorer black people. So now we have pervasive class discrimination in housing that has an enormous impact on opportunity for kids and for families because lots of research suggests that low-income people can thrive and do great things if given the right environment. But concentrations of poverty are bad for opportunity, and that’s what our zoning laws tend or promote.
Taylor Taylor: Is there a symbiosis in having these mixed-income communities? So you just mentioned that there are more economic benefits for low-income people. So if you’re trying to make the argument to the wealthy power holders, is there a benefit that they might see to having a mixed-income community?
Kahlenberg: Absolutely. That’s a great point. So I think there are 2 arguments for wealthier communities to open up a bit. One would be, I would try to appeal to their morality. They may not realize that by adopting zoning laws, they are imposing enormous harms on people, that some families are gonna have to choose between medicine and making rent for their kids, just because their zoning laws are limiting the supply of housing in the region. So part of it would be a moral argument, and that’s had some impact in some communities. But primarily, most people are motivated by self-interest. And I would say to people in exclusive communities, you’re missing out. You’re missing out on one of the great things about America that we are a country where people come from all corners of the world. And one of the things that makes life interesting is having people from different backgrounds interact, sharing their novel experiences that you may not be familiar with. I mean, we see it most clearly in things like food or entertainment where we all benefit from having a variety of people from a variety of backgrounds bringing those types of experiences and attributes to a community.
But in America today, your life is just gonna be more interesting if you are not in an isolated bubble, and your kids will be better prepared for life in 21st century America, where there is this period of changing demographics. If you isolate your kids and all they know are other wealthier people, most of them white, You’re forfeiting the opportunity for them to learn how to navigate diversity in the workplace and to learn from different cultures and people with different sets of life experiences.
Taylor: So a little bit earlier, you had mentioned that a lot of the problems that we’re seeing in the U.S. are not necessarily problems that we’re seeing abroad in other countries. Are there countries that we can point to that seem to have their housing markets in order? And are there lessons that we can take from any of those countries and apply in the U.S.?
Kahlenberg: Yes, I think, you know, if you look to places like Japan and Germany, they have different sets of zoning regimes than we do. In Japan, for example, the zoning is set much more at the national level as opposed to the local level, and housing is more affordable and it’s less economically segregated than in the United States. And so that’s kind of political science 101: if you have national leaders who are looking at what’s good for the country, what’s good for everyone, then you’re more likely to get positive types of zoning laws than if every community is setting the rules, and they’re all trying to manipulate those rules to keep certain people out. That’s not good for anyone. So let me give you one example. There’s something that a lot of communities engage in called fiscal zoning. So the idea is, well, we want people in our community who are gonna contribute a lot in taxes, you know, that are wealthier and not consume that many services. So sometimes communities will specifically target, well, let’s recruit this 55 and over housing development because they don’t have kids in the public schools. So that’s something that basically selfish local communities are going to try to do. And if you have more of a national perspective, you realize, well, that doesn’t make sense. We want all our kids educated well, and so raising the level at which decisions are made in places like Japan have had really positive impacts. And they don’t have the affordability crisis that we have in so many regions in the United States.
Taylor Taylor: So, you know, the U.S. culturally is such an individualistic society, and it feels like a lot of the current policies around zoning are kind of baked into the culture of American society. Is there a path forward from where we are now to get us to a model that’s closer to what Japan has?
Kahlenberg: I think so. And actually, in interesting ways, I think the fact that we are an individualistic society cuts against exclusionary zoning in this way: There have been interesting alliances between Liberals and Conservatives on zoning reform. Liberals like me talk about exclusion, civil rights, equal opportunity, housing affordability. Conservatives talk about property rights and the principal that if someone buys a plot of land, they should have a lot of say over what happens on that plot of land. They do not want the Government telling them “well might be more profitable for you to create a duplex on this property, but it’s illegal”, so Conservatives often will talk about positive reforms in zoning laws as a form of deregulation – getting the government out of the business of deciding what to do. But to your broader point about the politics of this. When I started researching my book “Excluded,” there were not a whole lot of examples of success in bringing about reform. This was back in 2017. But in the last several years, we’ve seen an explosion in the number of communities that are changing their zoning laws to open up communities and try to tackle the housing affordability crisis.
So it really started in Minneapolis 2018 when they, you know, 70% of the land was set aside for single-family homes, all but 14 out of the 15 best schools were in these areas. So if you were an apartment or multifamily dweller, you couldn’t be near these high-performing schools. Minneapolis in 2018 said housing is becoming too expensive. A group called Neighbors for more neighbors said, You know, why are we treating our fellow citizens this way? They looked at the kind of history of racism in the zoning laws and said they wanted to do something positive. And so, in one fell swoop, they said that you can build a duplex or a triplex anywhere in the community. All the land that had been single-family only. And they made a number of other changes that had a big impact, actually a bigger impact, In some ways. They reformed their off-street parking requirements for new buildings. They allow for more buildings near transit. And this had a very positive effect. So that led to additional changes. California, Oregon, Utah, Maine, we’re seeing lots of places throughout the country beginning to tackle zoning reform. So for decades, “not in my backyard forces”, “Nimby’s” almost always won, and that’s no longer true. And I think the situation became bad enough in terms of affordability that we reached this crisis point where reform became politically possible and in many ways politically necessary for candidates to be able to say, here’s what I’m gonna do about the fact that the rent is so damn high.
Taylor: I think it’s a great note to end on. So, Richard, thank you so much for joining me. Any final thoughts additional plugs for your book, anything?
Kahlenberg: Yeah. Well, I’m always gonna give additional plugs to the book “Excluded: How Zoning and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See.” Thank you very much, Taylor. I really enjoyed the conversation. Appreciate your great questions.
Taylor: Thank you so much for listening to the Georgetown Public Policy Review podcast. I hope you enjoyed our conversation. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and check out more from Georgetown Public Policy Review at GPPReview.com. Thanks!
Established in 1995, the Georgetown Public Policy Review is the McCourt School of Public Policy’s nonpartisan, graduate student-run publication. Our mission is to provide an outlet for innovative new thinkers and established policymakers to offer perspectives on the politics and policies that shape our nation and our world.
