Housing's Missing Mirror
If housers want to lead us to a better housed future, we need a mirror, not just a spotlight
May was Affordable Housing Month, which means that like many of you, I went to a lot of housing events. I went to in-person events and online webinars. I went to events sponsored by affordable housing developers, for-profit developers, businesses like architects and attorneys who serve both sectors, and trade associations or membership organizations that represent some mix of all of the above. I even spoke at one event about social housing, a topic and event I will come back to soon.
I learned a few important things about the housing world during this month of schmoozing and listening and having quiet conversations with colleagues new and old about whatever some speaker said - or didn’t say.
Number 1. Housing is an incredibly diverse field, especially if you push beyond the small world of policy and politics into the vastly larger world of folks who design, build, maintain, finance, buy, sell, or entitle housing.
I like spending time in housing spaces, or more specifically with housers, and not just because we share a profession and sometimes a calling. There is incredible energy coming from all manners of young folks, especially BIPOC and women and queer and nonbinary folks who don’t necessarily look or think like the housing and real estate development worlds of earlier eras. Housing is also an intellectually and professionally diverse place, a place where engineers and architects mix with policymakers and financial analysts; where lawyers, planners, mortgage brokers, and social workers aren’t just in the same room as folks nerding out on cross-laminated timber and housing tenure (“CLT for your CLT?”), they often are those nerds.
Number 2. There is unanimity that we have a massive housing crisis in California.
To be honest, it felt like I was attending “Housing Crisis Month” events. Only some events talked about “capital A” Affordable Housing, but every event seemed to hone in on how rough it is out there - for the unhoused, for tenants, for people trying to buy a home, for builders of every stripe, for lenders, for policymakers. No matter what you see as the solutions, there is no debate over the size, scale and frankly the scariness of the challenge in front of us.
Number 3. Virtually every speaker at these events - myself very much included - stayed in one of three lanes. An important fourth lane was mostly empty.
One lane involved talking about how bad the situation is (naturally). Another involved promoting a plan, program, idea or contribution to fixing it (because if you don’t, who will?). A third popular lane - point the finger at the culprit (the blame game). The public sector was the most popular victim, but I saw folks also blame developers, NIMBYs, YIMBYs, tenants, and unions. I even saw one event where developers threw just mildly veiled shade at labor when labor was literally sitting at the table in front of them.
Do you know who never once got any shade? The specific sectors of whomever was speaking. Almost nobody reflected on how their organization, sector or subsector could change. Change was always about them and they, and almost never we.
Everyone shone a spotlight, often in very smart (and occasionally very brave) ways.
Nobody seemed to bring a mirror.
The Blame Game and the Missing Mirror
The blame game and the missing mirror are related. Both are parts of housing discourse I’ve been struggling with for a very long time, ever since I started to think about myself as a houser decades ago. My unease about certain ways housers talk about the challenge of housing has stuck with me throughout my odd career as an organizer, planner, academic and now consultant. But I never could really put it into words until I went to so many housing events in such a short time.
Developers - especially for-profits, but also non-profits - seemed to be the most susceptible to the finger-pointing. I feel for them - we’ve created an incredibly brutal housing system that too often sucks to live and work in. But watching developers talk endless shit about government, the state of the city, politicians, unions, or activists - or just saying that nothing is really their fault because they just service capital - just reinforces stereotypes about developers and doesn’t solve problems (it’s also just empirically incorrect).
The only group largely immune from this tendency to point fingers was the group who got the fingers pointed at them - public officials. The folks most likely to fall on their swords were electeds, although many made it clear their predecessor was at fault. The people most likely to talk about how they could improve or get better were those embedded in public administration, the same people who constantly get crapped on by virtually every other part of the housing system.
The Missing Mirror
But when it comes to the missing mirror, this tendency to talk about anything and everything except how your part of the housing industry needed to change, or how we as a housing ecosystem or industry needed to change, was almost universal. It didn’t matter whether the speaker was from a for-profit or non-profit organization, public or private sector; or whether they were an academic, journalist, lender, builder, funder or executive; nor their feelings about YIMBYism, rent control, market-rate housing, CEQA or prevailing wage. It didn’t matter who hosted the event, the specific subset of housers in the room, or who was on stage or moderating or on the host committee. We (almost) all stayed quiet on this issue.
I very much include myself in this list. I had my brief moment on stage during Housing Crisis Month, and while I tried hard not to point fingers, I didn’t exactly hold up a mirror. I didn’t use it to examine ways my subsectors - consulting, research, academia, writing - could be better. I talked about the crisis, hopes and ideas for the future and my own work, as did so many friends and colleagues that got up on a real or virtual stage during May. I was speaking at a university, but never discussed how both education and research on housing has to change systematically if we want May to become Housing Celebration Month and not Housing Crisis Month. I am now a small-time consultant, but I never discussed how the consultant-industrial complex has so much room for reform. The part of my life not spent in academia is mostly in the nonprofit sector, but I did not speak about the myriad ways I and my fellow do-gooders need to change our practices and some of our beliefs if we’re to achieve real change.
I stayed positive, tried to offer hope and some vision of a better future. I kept my critiques vague and mostly about the past, not really touching on the realities of the present. I didn’t air the dirty laundry of my topic area and didn’t get into why the social housing community is divided, let alone why so many struggle to see how it represents true hopes for real change. Like so many of us do, I preached to the choir. This meant I walked away from my own talk with the same gnawing feeling as I felt when I listened to so many other housers speak, no matter whether they were a friend or colleague, no matter whether they said brilliant things or whether they just bullshit us for ten minutes.
The Blame Game Makes Things Worse, Not Better
I first learned to spot the blame game when I became a houser in New York City, where casting aspersions was an art form. I learned how housers and housing developers pass the buck, always having a ready explanation for why our housing system sucks or why specific housing programs or policies or developments fail or become incredibly mediocre and why this is always someone else’s fault.
There is always someone to blame that is more powerful or seemingly responsible than you and your org. You can seemingly always blame government or finance - in part because they often are to blame, but also because people will nod their heads and agree with you. Housing’s incredible diversity of professions means you can generally blame another part of the system that you may not understand, part of the language of barriers and roadblocks and bottlenecks that we use to imagine housing in two dimensions when it exists in four. The only thing that changes depending on who is speaking is who gets blamed. So what’s the problem with the blame game?
Problem Number 1. Blaming someone, or the system as a whole, doesn’t often produce change.
The first problem with the blame game isn’t that folks aren’t often right. This is especially the case for housing, where there is so much blame to go around you don’t need to have good aim to hit a target.
The problem is that it doesn’t work. Blaming someone else - or the system as a whole - doesn’t often produce change.
As my friend and colleague Adam Briones wisely says, so much of persuading people is about who the messenger is. People listen to folks who are like them, who come from the same corner of the industry and work in the same jobs. While I am a member of various organizations that include for-profit and nonprofit developers, I know that I am not one (at least not yet!). Nothing I can say about how they can reform themselves will convince them to do so. If we want for-profit developers to stop acting in ways that make people dislike them even more, it’s much more effective if an actual for-profit developer says so.
This is particularly true for the hard truths. Nobody likes to hear their baby is ugly. If we want folks to confront hard truths in housing, those truths need to be reflected back at us by people holding up a mirror, not shining a spotlight. In many ways, it is the most important lesson I have learned in middle age - the difference between being right and winning.1 If we want to win - and I do believe most housers in those rooms actually want to see California better housed - the blame game can’t be central to our strategy.
Problem Number 2. The blame game often makes things worse.
The second problem is that the blame game often makes things worse. Everyone is into narrative these days, but we seem to have forgotten the most important part of narrative studies - words do damage. In housing, we have a 150-year+ history of powerful people using their public stage to talk shit about the homes and neighborhoods of people of color, discourse that actively made the lives of these communities worse and their houses less habitable and valuable.2 Now we seem to have expanded to just talking shit about the whole system or government in general, or about the future of (certain) cities.3
All that vitriol aimed at the public sector? It feeds right-wing narratives, furthers political dysfunction, makes it harder to actually solve those problems in the public sector, and erodes already shaky public confidence in our institutions. Why would anyone in their right mind work in public service or run for office in our current era of influential people who should know better constantly throwing shade every day, all the time?
Building a Mirror to Enhance the Spotlight
As housers, we undoubtedly have to try to make shit work in a messed up housing system, one constantly made worse by folks from outside the system that don’t understand housing or don’t care about it. We will always be up against it, buffeted by macroeconomic and cultural forces that are way beyond our control.
But, if we want to take some of that control back, we have to admit that the housing system partly sucks because we housers made it suck. We - our companies, organizations, professional and trade associations, labor unions, training and educational systems, thought leaders, consultants, writers, and journalists - we helped make housing the way it is, good, bad, and ugly.4
We have to find a way to be more honest in these public gatherings about how we can change our own sectors, or about the real disagreements in the room that are often glossed over. This was the other frustrating part of Housing Crisis Month, the other absence caused by a lack of mirrors. As speakers and leaders, we didn’t do enough to acknowledge and admit that divisions between housers were part of the problem. Everyone acted as if it was kumbaya in the room, and the problem was outside of it. But we all know that wasn’t the case, and pretending it was so does damage. I know this because I too didn’t tell the full story of these elephants in the room, even if I could see them clearly.
We need these events to be more self-reflective if we want to take full advantage of the incredible diversity of minds, bodies, and professional backgrounds that make up the housing industry. We need to make space for leaders and everyone else in the room to discuss how they, their organization and their subsector need to transform themselves, or how housers need to transform the industry and ecosystem. Instead of pointing fingers at the dividers, we can point out the divisions in the room and own them. We can shine the spotlight on the crisis and lift up good ideas and important interventions without pretending this is sufficient enough.
A more self-reflective housing community can achieve so much. It will help us build a more holistic vision for housing change that recognizes the whole set of industries to retrofit, not just a policy system to fix. A more reflective conversation helps us see the forest for the trees, helps us keep an eye out on the ecosystem impacts of what we say - helping us keep an eye out for winning, not just for being right.
A more reflective conversation can build trust. If we hear people talk first about how they are working to change their own org or sector, we will be a lot more open to their ideas for changing the larger system or specific policies or programs. This is especially true if it comes with an acknowledgement of the sins of the past. We somehow expect people to trust us when the housing community and the housing industry has never fully accepted its role in making and constantly perpetuating this very racialized crisis what it is today.5
The onus for building this mirror isn’t just on those of us who get on stage. It starts with those who organize the stages (a role I have played as often as I have the role of speaker). It’s hard being honest in front of your peers. As necessary as it is, it will only happen if those of us who organize these conversations work with the participants ahead of time to make it feel safe, and get everyone to walk down this road together.
The good news from Housing Crisis Month is that more and more housing spaces have the kind of big tent diversity we need to actually make real change. Now we just need to get more honest with each other if we want the tent to become a real coalition.
I’m an expert in this difference because I spent so much time in academia, where the relentless pursuit of some very specific truth often overwhelms any consideration for actually changing the world. Academia trains you to be right, not to win, and tries to convince you that the former is more important than the latter. Whatever lessons I learned in NYC housing politics on how to point the finger are nothing compared to the dark arts you learn in academia.
I beg every housing journalist, headline writer and editorial board member to read Bob Beauregard’s Voices of Decline about journalism’s role in denigrating American cities until they actually resembled the headlines. I wrote an update in 2013 on how this was being applied to diverse suburbs and exurbs. Now it comes in the form of constant doom-loop talk and crapping on San Francisco and Oakland by local and national newspapers alike.
This actually takes us back to the original anti-urban bias of the 19th century. If you want a great old school take on this, I recommend Morton and Lucia White’s The Intellectual Versus the City which explains why anti-urbanism is so deeply rooted in the US.
For any developers out there struggling with local government, please read Marc Weiss’ Rise of the Community Builders, which will explain how a nascent development industry built the planning commission and land use regulation system that you now struggle with.
I have a lot of respect for Richard Rothstein, but his otherwise brilliant The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America was very problematic in how it made everyone focus on the government, and not on the private sector. He seems to be walking this back a bit, but he could do much more. Good to see him also acknowledging that his book created an undo focus on a very old set of redlining maps. People are discovering the segregation of the past not the segregation of the present, which has consequences.