Housing is Not Beer
Let’s leave our ideologies at home and pay attention to our actual housing system
This post is part of a series of ‘bigger ideas’ posts that shed light on some of the fundamentals of how we think about about our housing system. Others in the series include posts about stability and mobility in housing, the importance of housing tenure, ideas on retrofitting the housing economy and converting nonhousing to housing, why we need a more “complete” housing policy framework, why temporary housing and homeownership both matter, and why we should talk about a new social contract in housing.
Stay tuned for future posts on the Affordable / Market-rate quagmire, and for a megapiece this fall that brings it all together: redesigning our housing system.
This is, I promise, a post about housing. But first, beer.
Here in the Bay Area, there is much talk - at least amongst a subset of newspapers and my middle-aged male friends - about the pending demise of a local beer company. Unless something changes, Anchor Brewing Company, maker of the (once?) iconic Anchor Steam Beer, will shut down.
For current - in my case, former - beer drinkers of a certain age, Anchor is a legend. Anchor was a rare holdout from an earlier era of American brewing before the postwar era dominated by big corporate lager. When I started drinking beer in the early nineties, it was one of the few brands that was local and had taste. They were microbrew before microbrew was a thing, and helped pave the way for the crazy beer world we have today. Their brewery tours were legendary and inspirational not only after you tasted barleywine for the first time. I have no doubt that many of the brewers who would go on to build an industry with more than 1,110 craft breweries in California alone spent an afternoon on Mariposa Street in the 90’s having their minds blown.
Some of the hand-wringing about Anchor’s demise comes from a challenging moment in San Francisco history, where everyone is looking to shit on the City, including many of the people who live there. It’s also a classic corporate story - longtime legendary owner sells to a couple of industry vets (from Marin of course) who sell to big corporate who ultimately shuts it down. Somewhere in there is a terrible rebrand, a historic unionization campaign - whose members I hope will ultimately be able to buy the brewery before it is taken apart - and increasing competition from other even more local, modern and frankly much tastier beer companies, and here we are.1
I understand people’s emotional connection to Anchor, and San Francisco’s particular sensitivity to the demise of anything right now. Too much feels like it’s falling apart. But the (maybe) end of Anchor is not a symbol of the beer economy failing. Never in the history of beer has the beer economy been better.
There is cheap beer and expensive beer, local beer and corporate beer and artisanal beer from around the world. Our cold beer technology is so advanced that an average California supermarket has tens of thousands of beers ready for summer at any given moment. There is beer for people who don’t drink gluten, beer for people who don’t drink alcohol, and beer for people who don’t drink beer - like me. To find a microbrew on tap thirty years ago was amazing. Today, you can choose from cider or hard kombucha or hard seltzer or cocktails in a can. The markets (plural) for cold, fizzy and generally 5% are mind-blowing right now.
Imagine if our housing economy was this way - widely accessible, with tons of choice, in a product that gives people a lot of joy (and sometimes a headache or alcoholism or worse).2 It certainly could be, but getting there means recognizing something important: the economic lessons of one thing don’t apply universally to other things.
But things - and the systems that produce them - are different. Housing is not beer. We can take lessons or inspiration from the success (and limitations) of the beer economy, but we have to be careful that we don’t take the well worn pathway through economic ideology to get there.
How to Think About Beer and Housing - and How Not to
Now I am not in the beer industry at all, nor am I an expert in the political economy of alcohol. But from what I can observe about the success of the beer economy is that the industry has somehow had its corporate cake and ate the small business one too. We have a very large and thriving megacorporate beer world, and a pretty substantial microcraft beer world. According to the California Craft Beer Association, these 1,100+ brewers employ ±54k people and contribute $9 billion to the state economy, all while AB InBev and a few other mega conglomerates keep getting bigger - in part by buying smaller breweries, like Sapporo did Anchor.
The big corporates ensure a steady supply of cheap beer, while the microbrews keep it fresh and local and innovative. The former provides an out for the latter - if you start a successful small beer company, you know you can possibly stick the exit by selling out to someone larger. And you can feel good about ‘selling out’ because some other beer entrepreneur can and will start another brewery down the street.
This isn’t to say it’s all rosy. Beer comes from agricultural products and I assure you this is not an exploitation-free zone, either of workers or water resources or land or biodiversity. Anchor was importantly the first craft brewery to be unionized - and this happened in 2019 - and I have no doubt that there are ways to improve the conditions of workers (here is the AFL-CIO list of union booze labels). The beer industry is also incredibly white. According to the Brewery Association, 92.2% of brewers are solely white-owned, a persistent problem in too many industries which is extra glaring in beer. It’s one of the reasons many are excited about Hella Coastal, Oakland’s first black-owned brewery.
Then there are the negative externalities of beer consumption - the health impacts, the drunk driving. This is largely where policy comes in. We have a relatively peaceful political economy where alcohol producers accept special surtaxes, in part because they fund health programs that are caused by alcoholism. This is the main role of public policy in beer in America (unlike Germany with its famous purity laws where they are regulating the actual product more). There are also all manner of brewing associations and industry groups that help support and self-regulate, and negotiate with regulators (like in every industry).
If I were a standard American economic thinker of a certain stripe, I would start waxing poetic about the massive and diverse private sector with tons of competition. Look at the consistent supply and demand! Look at the narrowly aimed, high-tax and relatively effective regulation and relatively peaceful politics! Producers and consumers seem to really like each other, and consumers regularly become producers. It’s as close as we get to political economic utopia in 21st century America.
But alas, nobody is living in their beer. Beer is not a durable good which is meant to last 50 years and which you need to borrow 30 years worth of money to buy or build. Beer is made on land, but then it can travel to wherever the consumer wants or needs it very easily, instead of occupying the same space on the same block in the same town for generations, constantly demanding upkeep and a steady supply of energy, water, internet, sewage and loan repayments.
Nobody votes based on their beer, nor do they vote based on where their beer sits. Your beer is not represented by anyone, regulated long term by any agency, nor is your beer anyone’s job once it enters your hand. Your beer has nothing to do with my beer - nobody is arguing that your beer creates shade on my beer, demands expensive municipal services, takes up parking spots, or gentrifies or displaces me or my beer.3
Nobody is threatening to withdraw essential insurance from your beer because California is on fire. Your chances of getting sued if you sell someone a bad beer are slim.
I could go on and on,4 but I hope you get my point.
Our housing economy sucks not because it isn’t shaped like the beer economy. It sucks because we don’t spend enough time thinking about how to restructure the housing economy to be as good as the beer economy. Supply and demand are a lot easier when the thing you are supplying and demanding is designed to go in a can. The beer economy should be our inspiration, not our model. But we can only get there if we start paying more attention to actual economies and markets, not the fantasies that ideologies of every stripe have been selling us for generations.
Walking Away From the Plank of Economic Ideology
Recently, Felicia Wong, the president of the Roosevelt Institute, published a very smart piece on industrial policy. There is a welcome trend in America to think more about making things, and about making a policy machine that helps make things better (and faster). Wong is all in on industrial policy, but she argues we need to make the conversation better in three ways -
By not forgetting about race and power
By thinking about how we learn in this moment (rather than just insist on faster, faster, more, more), and
By recognizing that there are always trade offs.
I love her “three things”, but my favorite piece is how she ties it all together. Much of the fighting around industrial policy comes from ideology, what she refers to eloquently as “a yearning for a single narrative, with a short list of relevant variables, for this new era [of industrial policy].” Ideology is what’s killing our ability to actually build and rebuild our systems like housing. In her words:
“Instead of trying to win the internet by calling on each other to walk ideological planks, let’s put more energy into amassing evidence, building power, and identifying blind spots in our analysis.”
I can’t stress enough how important it is for housers to move beyond ‘single narratives’ - both economically, politically and in terms of ‘solutions - and to really internalize just how dangerous ideology of all stripes is to our housing. This is a central argument of my book The Spatial Contract, something I’ve tried to emphasize in talks and posts about a new social contract for housing in California.
If I could humbly add a 4th point to Dr. Wong’s list, it would be to remember that systems are different. Much of the Spatial Contract is about getting political and economic thinkers - and trying to give them real analytical tools - to really understand the radically different nature of systems. All those myriad ways that housing is different from beer.
These material differences trump any ideology. Technically, I am some sort of capitalist for beer and socialist for housing, but I reject both of those labels because there is no ism for folks like me who start from the thing we need (i.e. housing or beer), add in some basic ethics,5 an analysis of the actual system we have today in the world (including race, power and climate), and work to reconstruct things from there.6
Housing needs massive public sector involvement in a way that beer does not, which is why I write about social housing and not social beer. I don’t care about public and private sectors as some sort of holy object. I only care about housing and beer (or the millions of other things we all need to survive, thrive or just do basic things). All my ideas about housing and beer come from learning about how housing and beer are produced and consumed, or how these systems interact with other systems like water or energy, about what people need or want from their housing or beer, or the history of racism and inequality in those systems.
We can aspire to build a housing industry that better mimics the success of the beer economy, but only when we start trying to rebuild the housing economy according to the logics and needs of housing and homebuilding, not the ideological buzzwords of markets and capital and sectors. We need to move beyond the type of standard thinking where people apply some economic and political ideology or ism equally across all the things there are to make. The specific arrangements of small business and big business and public sector and nonprofits in beer will be radically very different from those in housing.7
How exactly should we (re)organize our housing economy? Well, that’s the subject of a megapost coming this fall.
Stay tuned!
Amidst all the nostalgia about Anchor, I am reminded of a recent camping trip where we sat around discussing Anchors demise with coolers full of Sierra Nevada, Bud Light, High Noons, IPAs and everything but Anchor. And some pinot grigio with lime seltzer for me (don’t hate it’s the answer).
Every major important system we need to survive - housing, food, water, energy, health care, transportation - can kill you if done wrong. They just kill you in different ways, which is what matters - hence this essay.
For the record I am generally opposed to objections to new housing for the first reasons and sympathetic to reasons which involve people feeling like they will be displaced or being actually displaced. But I’m guessing you all know that.
The barriers to effective demand for beer are very low - you need a few dollars and a nearby store, not a well-paying job and good credit. Sure, beer production is complex, especially these days, but when it comes to the complexities of supply chains, the number of ingredients and different skills needed and vast capital reserves, housing is another order of magnitude.
We talk about them as the 6 principles for a healthier spatial contract: Retention of core purpose, strengthening the system, access and inclusion, elimination of exploitation and oppression, honoring planetary boundaries, transparency.
If you want to call it Pragmatism, fine.
And sure, sometimes we can learn directly from other systems. Housing can learn from the beer economy how to embrace choice. They don’t get bogged down in fights over which beer is the right beer, or even the definition of beer, unlike housers and our insane ideologies of housing tenure. Perhaps they can learn from some of our nascent but growing programs to prioritize BIPOC producers, even if we are only a few steps ahead of them.
Thanks for sharing this piece Alex. Consumables like beer are not the same as durable products, especially essential durables like housing, and a lot of people forget that, so thank you for reiterating.
I have some rambly thoughts, shared in no particular order below:
A clarification: It almost sounds like you are saying the private housing market cannot deliver the combination of small-scale “microbrew” developers and large scale “mass produced” developers in a way that is similar to the beer market. Am I understanding correctly?
You are certainly right that the housing market and beer market are different: Cities don’t say “you can only produce 1 beer per acre of land,” they don’t have arbitrary restrictions on beer production like floor area ratios dictating that beer production must be proportional to land quantity. If anything, the biggest constraint on beer production in cities is zoning for breweries.
Taking a long view, the phrase “nobody votes on their beer” is only true in America right now because beer has been widely legalized. During Prohibition days, a lot of people voted on their beer!
We live in the days of widespread housing prohibition. While I agree in abstract we need to “rebuild the housing economy according to the logics and needs of housing and homebuilding, not the ideological buzzwords of markets and capital and sectors,” I don’t know what that means in practice. Ending housing prohibition is one example of something that feels a lot more concrete.
As you say, it’s not an either/or issue, and the ideological buckets we trap ourselves in prevent us from pursuing comprehensive solutions. We need fewer restrictive regulations, we need more federal funding, we need more state productive capacity (ie social housing), we need more tenant protections, preservation, emphasis on race and class and sustainability and comprehensive systems change.
Yet I worry we lose sight of the concrete, achievable wins when we get caught up in abstraction. Money, zoning, tenant protections, social housing—these are tangible, winnable things that lead to the housing we need. Getting “housers to move beyond ‘single narratives’ - both economically, politically and in terms of ‘solutions - and to really internalize just how dangerous ideology of all stripes is to our housing” feels a lot more abstract. Who or what are you even referring to? Maybe rather than throwing out ideology altogether, we should be creating an all-encompassing ideology of housing abundance, with an all-of-the-above strategy to get us there.
Thanks again for the piece, I’m looking forward to the long form follow up this fall!