“Housing is a gateway to all the other things in people’s lives.”

How did you get involved in housing policy as a field of study?

I fell into it completely by accident. 

When I came out of college, I was hired by a company called Abt Associates, which does consulting for government agencies. They hired me for a new group that was working with local housing authorities. I spent two years traveling all over the country to help housing authorities figure out what to do with their properties. I saw places like Boston, which had 10-year wait lists for their housing, and places like St. Louis, which had 30% vacancy and crumbling buildings with no money to repair them. That got me really interested in why housing markets are so different from city to city, and even from neighborhood to neighborhood within the same city. I got hooked on it. 

Tell me more about what you saw.

A lot of it was thinking about how much housing affects everything else in your life. Public housing properties tend to be in neighborhoods that aren’t especially close to jobs or transit. They are in neighborhoods that don’t have grocery stores or services or good public schools and parks. 

Housing is a gateway to all the other things in people’s lives. 

You can just see by looking around how much less opportunity people have if they live in a neighborhood that does not have good services. This makes it really important for everybody to have access to good neighborhoods. But the way housing markets work, that does not really happen very often. 

Are we starting to see policymakers take on this housing challenge?

In the last five or six years we have seen a lot more awareness about the problem of not building enough homes. In particular, policymakers are looking at the problem of not building enough homes in neighborhoods that have great opportunities and great jobs and services. That has been a problem in some parts of the country for decades, like New York and California. I did my graduate work in Boston, which has been under-building housing for 40 years. 

Part of the reason we have so much more public awareness of it now is that the housing shortage has spilled over from being an expensive coastal city problem to a problem almost everywhere in the country. 

It is gratifying that there is more attention, but the reason there’s more attention is that this is worse for more people. That’s pretty alarming. At some point, we have to figure out how to tackle this problem. We cannot allow a housing shortage for the entire country to continue indefinitely. 

What drew you to Arnold Ventures to take on this housing challenge?

I have been excited watching AV become a bigger player in the housing abundance space. It is fairly new for philanthropy to be focused on issues like housing supply, building more housing, and the role of the private market. Traditionally, a lot of the philanthropic organizations in the housing space have focused on subsidized housing, homelessness, providing direct services, or maybe funding for housing for low-income families. Engaging more broadly with what happens when housing markets do not work the way they are supposed to, what happens when many parts of the country no longer build enough housing to keep up with job growth and population growth, is a new space for philanthropy. I am really excited that AV is leaning into that space. 

I also like that AV has a practical approach. You cannot just fund research by itself. You cannot just fund direct service and engagement with governments. You need to have all the pieces together. We must understand what are the right policies that will be effective, the kinds of policy changes we should be pushing for in different locations, and then connect that with legislative advocacy. How do we get those policies in place? How do we win the hearts and minds necessary to persuade people and make the policy changes we need? 

You’ve written a book: Fixer Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing System. So, let me ask: How do we repair America’s broken housing system?

The motivation for writing the book was to connect the dots between a lot of different parts of housing markets and housing policies that we often think of as independent. One good example is that we tend to think of market-rate housing and the development of housing for non-poor people as being totally separate from the need for affordable housing for low-income households. We have been trying to solve these in different policy silos, but they are quite connected. Tighter housing markets for non-poor people mean fewer opportunities to help poor people access opportunities. It means subsidies are less effective or that we need greater subsidies. And housing connects not just to the physical housing itself, it also connects to things like how we collect money to pay for schools and local public services and the financial incentives that local governments have. Housing also affects exposure to climate risk and property insurance bills. The book was an attempt to try to pull together a lot of these different aspects of housing markets and tie a coherent narrative around all of them. It is very hard to solve one piece of the housing puzzle while leaving everything else the same. We really need to have a holistic view and address this from lots of angles at the same time.

What research and data are still needed to help us solve the housing challenge?

We have a mountain of research that shows local governments with restrictive regulations around development do not build enough housing, which means that housing becomes too expensive. We still need to figure out exactly which regulations need to be changed to unlock the capacity for more housing supply. Partly that is because, until the last couple of years, we have not had real-world examples where local governments loosen regulations and make it easier to build. That is very new in the policy space. We are just starting to get an empirical situation where we can do evaluation and research. It is important that we evaluate these policy experiments at the state and local level, understand what changes are effective in what kinds of market circumstances, and what changes are not effective so we can put our political capital behind the policies that will deliver the most housing.

So much housing policy work seems focused in major coastal cities, like New York or San Francisco, or in Washington, D.C. But AV is based in Houston – a city known for its relatively loose housing policies. Do you think that gives AV a unique perspective in this work?

There are two really exciting things about Houston. One is that Houston has been pretty good about changing its regulations to allow more development and tweaking them over time. For example, Houston keeps reducing its minimum lot size to allow for homes on smaller pieces of land — tall, skinny townhomes. Adjusting regulations to meet changing market conditions is something more cities should do. I want to figure out why Houston has politically been able to do this and other cities haven’t. 

The other thing is that often the housing discussion happens in big coastal cities that already have a very dense urban core and are very walkable. But a lot of Americans live in Sun Belt cities that look more like Houston than Boston or New York. We have to figure out ways to make housing markets work well in the Sun Belt and in low-density suburban communities if we are going to find a nationwide solution. We need to figure out how to make housing markets work in Houston and not just in San Francisco and New York. 

What do you do when you’re not working on housing?

I spend a lot of time walking around cities looking at housing, which is probably pretty close to my day job. Other than that, I am also a big foodie. I love to cook and bake. It’s fall now, so I am looking forward to baking all kinds of things with apples and cinnamon and pumpkin that smell really nice and fall-like.