Yes In My Back Yard! (with Dr. Jenny Schuetz and Erinn Grube)

Today, we’re talking about all things housing policy. What makes a neighborhood a good place to raise a family? How can we say “Yes In My Back Yard” instead of “Not In My Back Yard”? But first, hosts Amanda Weinstein, Jasmine Clark and Rachel Vindman talk about the news. Jasmine just got out of session in the Georgia Legislature and her Republican colleagues passed some really bad bills. And new abortion bills and “Don’t Say Gay” bills are sweeping the nation. But in some much-needed good news, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed to the Supreme Court!

Erinn Grube, the Village Council President in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, joins the pod to talk about how they were able to put up some new housing developments while still keeping the cute and historical character of their town. Erinn discusses the importance of walkability and what her kids have learned about local government by watching her work.

After that, Amanda gets to chat with economist and housing expert Dr. Jenny Schuetz about her new book, Fixer Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing System. They discuss what suburban women should know about housing policy, how it affects our daily lives, how a history of racism has affected housing in America, and how affordable housing is good for everyone.

Finally, Rachel, Amanda and Jasmine raise a glass to big milestones for their kids, to a little alone time for themselves, and to people who say “Yes In My Back Yard!” in this week’s “Toast to Joy.”

If you want to check out Red Wine and Blue’s “Parent Playbook,” you can find it here. It’s a fun guide full of helpful advice for moms who want to organize in their communities.

For a transcript of this episode, please email theswppod@redwine.blue.

For a transcript of this episode, please email theswppod@redwine.blue.

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Transcript

The Suburban Women Problem - Season 2, Episode 13

Amanda Weinstein: Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us. I'm Amanda Weinstein.

Rachel Vindman: I’m Rachel Vindman. 

Jasmine: I’m Jasmine Clark. 

Amanda: And you're listening to The Suburban Women Problem. Today, I'm very excited to share my conversation with economist, Jenny Schuetz. We talked about housing policy and the suburbs and what it's like to be a woman in economics and it was so much fun to hang out with her.

And before that we're going to talk to Erinnn Grube, a mom who's serving as city council president in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. It's such a cute town. If you're ever in Ohio, you do need to go to Chagrin Falls. They recently put up new housing developments in Chagrin Falls while still keeping the town super cute and charming, so I wanted to ask Erinn how they managed to do it because we were not successful when we tried to do that here in Hudson. Super not successful. It just devolved real fast. 

But before we get to any of that, welcome back, Jasmine, we missed you last week! It's so nice to see you again. So Jasmine, what has been going on with you in Georgia?

Jasmine: So as you all know, last week was the last day of session, or last Monday was the last day of session in Georgia. And boy was it a rollercoaster ride of emotions. You know, there were some good, definitely some bad and definitely some really, really, really ugly. We did stop some bad things from happening, but we also had some things that made it across that I was really disappointed with. And in a very sneaky move at the very end of the night, just before we adjourned for the entirety of the session, they snuck through a bill about divisive concepts, which we had already seen, but they stuck in one section of the bill at the very last minute that would ban trans students from participating in sports.

They actually knew they did not have the support. And so in order to get this through, they completely pretended like it wasn't there. And had people voting on it without even knowing it was there. We called it out at the last minute but by then, you know, people had already started casting their votes and it's a lot harder to convince people of the bad that something like this will do when you really had no opportunity, because there was no way to debate it. So yeah, those are the types of things that we're dealing with here in Georgia. 

Election season starts now. And I think this last session reminds us just how important it is for everyone to get out and vote in every election. That means primaries, non-partisan school boards like here in Gwinnett county, and definitely in the general.

Amanda: And what they're doing in Georgia is what they're trying to do in every single state. So I think sometimes we listen to like the Don't Say Gay bill in Florida and think, well, I mean, it's Florida, they're crazy. They would never do that where I live. Oh no, no, no, no. Right. They're trying to do this everywhere. They have the same playbook in every single state. 

So in Ohio, we just had a bill come to the floor of Don't Say Gay in Ohio now similar to Florida's bill and they're doing this in dozens of states now. Restricting, you know, what people can say not only in schools but also colleges, libraries, municipal governments, it's really restricting what we can say and centering what we can say in any public space, anything where government is involved at all.

And they're just going to keep going farther. Like they started with our schools because our kids are apparently easy targets they think, and now they're moving to libraries and all these other public spaces. So we had here in Hudson, they tried - we had the Moms for Liberty group try to, you know, take over the board of our local library. And it didn't work though, because we voted on it. We voted on it, we voted them down and we voted for people who didn't want to censor the library. And we even had a lot of people come in from a nearby retirement home who love this library and didn't want to see it change, but we're seeing in states all across America, the same playbook of centering what we say and do.

Rachel: In Oklahoma, where I was born, they, it was not unusual for them to pass some kind of unconstitutional abortion bill, every session, every session. And then the state would spend a lot of money fighting it, but it would be struck down because it was unconstitutional. But this year they passed it. And, you know, I wonder, I wonder what's going to happen if it went too far, if it, what they're going to say about it, because it makes performing any abortion in Oklahoma. Only in the case of medical emergencies would it be legal, but I don't think, I don't think there's anything that's really going to meet that threshold to be honest. So it is punishable by a maximum fine of a hundred thousand dollars or 10 years in state prison. 

Again, this, this is something they've tried for a long time, but now you have other states that have done it as well. And you know, there was like a tried and true playbook. 

Jasmine: You give an inch, which we shouldn't have given in the first place, and they are taking miles and miles and miles. And each state seems to try to one up the next state, you know. It’s really scary to me how easy it is for people to just be like, “you know what, today we're just going to strip this right away from women.” And there are people who are like, “yeah, well, I might not like that particular thing, but I'm still going to vote for them because… blah.” And I'm just like, I don't understand that. 

Rachel: I think one of the reasons why people go along with it is… they really don't care. They don't see this as an issue that affects them. They think “I'll never want an abortion. So why does it matter?” But that is just not the way society works. A cooperative society does not work that way. 

Jasmine: Well, can I see, say for the latest story out of Texas where the mom was charged with murder basically for going into the hospital, having a miscarriage and according to reports, suggesting that she induced that miscarriage. So people might think “that's not me because I would never have an abortion.” But you don't know if you will ever have a miscarriage and you do not know how the healthcare workers at the facility that you may go to might perceive your situation. And if you might not find yourself in the same situation that the other lady found herself in. You just don't know. And so people should not be okay with other people's rights being taken away because you're not that many degrees separated from the same exact situation happening to you. 

Rachel: Yeah, no, I completely agree. Okay, let's talk about it. President Biden, he made a promise that he would nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court and she was approved!

Amanda: Bipartisan support!

Jasmine: I was extremely excited about Judge Jackson. You know, when the numbers were coming in, and I don't know if y'all saw the video of her in Joe Biden's office and they're like watching the screen, it was amazing. The pure joy on her face that moment. Like, I felt it. Even though I'm just like looking at like a screen, I still felt it. And I think if I'm feeling this then I know there are young women across the country who are feeling this as well. I mean, she has broken down so many barriers. 

And I mean, her background is actually kind of different than a lot of the other people on the Supreme Court. I mean, she went to public school, you know, she’s been a public defender. She really is an amazing person to have on the bench. And I think it's going to be better for her being there. 

Rachel: She’ll ask different questions. I mean, she, she will, she will bring a different perspective and ask different questions. But you could tell with her, there was still this, like, is it real? And when I was watching it, what you're talking about, that really got me as well. I was really happy to watch it with my daughter who actually asked, “Did they, did she wonder if this was going to happen?” And I was like, “I think she did.” And, and that was a really teachable moment, a conversation, you know, I mean, not to get too, like, down with the patriarchy you know, in my living room, but—

Amanda: Haha. But down with patriarchy!

Rachel: Haha yeah. But I did feel like, you know, she questioned where other men would not have questioned. I mean, did Neil Gorsuch question whether he was going to be approved? Hell no, he didn't. Not for a minute. 

Amanda: We have a lot of laws, a lot of systems that do not treat people fairly, where justice is not acting in a way that is blind. So to have that representation right now is especially important. 

And I think it's relevant to what we're talking about today too with our guests. Because if you think about books like The Color of Law, if you think about the civil rights movement, one way that people dealt with the civil rights movement was to start enacting a bunch of zoning to keep certain people out of where they live. Right. And so zoning and these laws, which are on the face of them colorblind, right? There's isn't a zoning necessarily right now that said “Black people can't live here.”

Jasmine: Although at one point there was.

Amanda: There was, I know, there used to be. But now even we think about like even red lining, right? So red lining we've talked about, isn't a thing anymore. So we fixed it, right? 

Jasmine: No.

Amanda: No! If you look at those areas, they are still highly related to a lot of the issues society has. And we see zoning making apartment buildings illegal. But it's also really important for the environment and for racial justice to have better housing policy. It is important for so many things. On that note, let's ask someone who's actually on a city council here in Ohio about how she's navigating these issues on the local level. Erinn, welcome to the podcast!

Erinn Grube: Hi, I'm excited to be here. 

Amanda: So I wanted to have you on the podcast today because you're the council president in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and I live in Hudson, Ohio. So it's about 15 miles away from you. And here in Hudson, we had a lot of pushback when we tried to put up some denser more affordable housing, like apartment buildings or condos type stuff. And we still have a plot of land sitting empty filling with goose poop right now, actually. So how did you manage to put up apartment buildings in Chagrin Falls?

Erinn: So Chagrin is a little different than Hudson. I think in some ways we're sort of stewards of a legacy that has always really embraced multiple uses adjacent to each other on top of each other. So our history is that we were a mill town with this little river that runs through it. And there were all these mill workers and like you had a large economic spectrum from the beginning. That makes it a little bit easier because we don't have the same NIMBY sort of situation that you have in other communities where they're coming from large lots and now you're suddenly changing density. 

Amanad: So, you said real quick, you used the word NIMBY. Can you just explain what that means when you say NIMBY? 

Erinn: So the whole “not in my backyard” mindset, right? Like density housing is okay, they’re like, it's okay in the Heights, but not here where I live. Yeah. 

Jasmine: Yeah. We have a lot of that in Atlanta where there's a lot of, whenever someone comes up with, oh, let's, you know, build affordable housing here. And then people, you know, the NIMBY signs pop up. Or the NIMBY, I will say, hashtags pop up. 

Amanda: So I know on city council, you have to balance a lot of things and a lot of interests— what's good for kids and families and businesses and, you know, keeping the history and charm of your town intact like you're doing, keeping it that cute little town it is. So how do you balance all of that? 

Erinn: Some days better than others. So we moved here because our kids could walk to school. Like for me, I wanted my kids to not necessarily be tied to buses in a traditional sort of suburban K-12 busing experience. I wanted them to be able to walk and we found Chagrin and it's like, beginning in fourth grade, the kids are basically in school in the center of town. So there's this fantastic culture of elementary through like, older kids, like walking to school. They'd like go to the popcorn shop and buy ice cream, or they can walk to the library or the park. And so there's this great community culture that's a little free rangy that has embraced that. 

And then my son was like in kindergarten. And the superintendent was like, “we're going to abandon the school in the center of town and build a new school out sort of in the adjacent community,” which didn't have sidewalks. So that's sort of how I got involved because I felt like it was really important developmentally for them to have that sort of early independence within this very like safe experience because we have crossing guards and people are aware of these children. You know, they're, they're learning to be citizens in the world, I guess is the best way to say it. So, you know, we pushed back against the superintendent who had wanted to stop using that building. And it was renovated and we put on new classrooms to make it modern, but kept a lot of the historical elements too.

And so the balance is like, I mean, it's finding all those little moments where you can sort of embrace this culture of walking and sort of live and work in one place and making sure that we're holding onto those and paying attention so that they don't disappear when you're not paying attention.

Jasmine: So Erinn, you are a mom. You just mentioned how you moved and I, you know, the whole, like moving to a place because of the schools or the culture or the community that definitely makes a hundred percent sense to me and probably to a lot of our listeners. So I'm a mom as well, and my daughter lives with me and so she gets to basically get like an insider view of being in politics. And so how does that work with your kids? Do they know what you do? Do they understand what being the council president means? And do you think they're like absorbing what it means to be a part of local government? 

Erinn: Oh yes. I mean, so I was elected in 2017, so I think probably around the same time you were Jasmine, right?

Jasmine: Yeah, I was in 18. Yeah. 

Erinn: Yeah. So it's like this moment where all these young moms were coming into local office and it changed village hall. They weren't really used to having kids coming, but I had a two-year-old at the time, three-year-old, and so she came with me to meetings. She went to parks meetings, you know, we're talking, we were talking at one point about what sort of railing should be on the bridge because we're getting a new bridge cause our bridge is old. And you know, we're talking about how easily can kids climb this railing and yeah, she's right there. 

So they've grown up with it in sort of a special way, in my opinion. They get to third grade social studies and they know who's on council. They know the players. I can only imagine what they're telling their teachers in the classroom. But you know, it's, I think they understand firsthand that this work really does make impacts. We're trying to build a new playground in the center of the village. It's causing some minor kerfuffles here and there. And so, you know, they've seen the playground and they understand that we're having this conversation about, is this what we want? And learning to sort of listen to all the voices and just try to, you know, sort of distill where the community really wants us to go. It's hard. You can't, I don't think you can teach that without showing them. It just, it's too hard to explain. 

Rachel: And I think it's so important that it’s on such a small level, because it's hard on a national level. Those are the kinds of conversations we have often in my house and it's, it's difficult or even international level. And our daughter's just now at 11 like starting really able to understand things. But when they're younger it's just, it's more of a conversation you can have driving around your town and understanding that being engaged and being involved in your community is so important. And many people have different opinions, but hopefully on a smaller level that people also get along. They're more willing to listen to each other and find compromise that we don't see sometimes on this one, the larger level politics.

Erinn: And also seeing that cycle of like disagreement and forgiveness, I think is important. All of you experienced it, but like people will criticize you for things that are not true, they’ve just made it up, like are taken out of context. 

And then, you know, sometimes you also make really good changes. Like we put in these sidewalks and no one had thought, “well, we should put in a crosswalk because this is where kids need to cross to go to school.” And so every time we stop at this stop sign, now my kids are like, "it's mom’s stop sign!” Cause people were not happy when we put it in. 

Rachel: We had a big kerfuffle about a stop sign in our town. It was huge. 

Amanda: Change is hard, even small change. So Erinn, what do you think is the way you've had the biggest impact on your community? Is there anything that kind of sticks out in your mind? 

Erinn: One of my frustrations before coming in office was communication and I mean, both at the school district level but also at the local level, not understanding that our road was going to be torn up or what was going to happen next. So I've tried as an elected official to be really communicative and it's taken a lot of the fun out of Facebook, like that's been the personal cost for it. It's not just looking at my friends’ photos of Easter egg hunts this week, but I think it's really important for people to know why we're relining a sanitary sewer line. Like what are the, what are the impacts of doing that? And I think, I think people understand why they’re waiting a little bit longer in their cars when you've really tried to talk to them first. 

Amanda: All right. Thank you, Erinn for joining us, it was such a pleasure to talk to you. 

Erinn: It was an honor. Thank you guys. Definitely a fan girl moment. I appreciate it. 

Amanda: Thank you. Bye. Now we're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we'll have my conversation with Dr. Jenny Schuetz. 

BREAK

Amanda: So our guest today is a senior fellow at Brookings Metro and an expert in urban economics and housing policy. She's been interviewed by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. And she's the author of the new book Fixer Upper: How to Repair America's Broken Housing Systems. Dr. Jenny Schuetz, thank you for joining me on The Suburban Women Problem! 

Dr. Jenny Schuetz: Thanks for having me first. Let me say your book is such a good read and cover so much policy ground in a readable way, and I love the title. So I am an HGTV fan and I have to ask, Fixer-upper, was that a reference to the HGTV show?

Jenny: That wasn't my intention, but it's turning out that way. Although I've gotten some emails from people who say, “oh, I read your book and I thought it was going to be about fixing up old houses. And I'm really disappointed.” 

Amanda: Haha. Oh, no. 

Jenny: Sorry about that. 

Amanda: So I'm an economist and you're an economist and you and I talk on Twitter sometimes about economic policy. So I could get into the nitty-gritty details about this stuff for hours with you. But what should the average listener, the average suburban mom in America, know about housing policy and how should they talk about it with their friends? 

Jenny: So housing policy, the whole sort of package of housing policies affects our day-to-day life and our quality of life in lots of ways, but often they're kind of hidden to us. So actually one way I was thinking about this is my, my sister-in-law and brother-in-law live in a very typical suburban neighborhood outside DC, which is sort of like very much 1990s suburb. And they, you know, chose to live there primarily because it has really great public schools and they wanted to have a big house with a big yard.

So my, my nieces are little at this point. And so there's some really good things about their neighborhood, but it's also in many ways not actually that kid friendly and not that people friendly. So you come out of the house and you're immediately on a giant curvy road that has no sidewalks and has no bike lanes and cars drive really fast. And so, you know, my nieces are never going to be able to walk to their friend's house or ride their bikes in the yard. Right. It's far away from, you know, any, any kind of like grocery store or coffee shop. You have to get in a car and drive 20 minutes to the nearest shopping center to do all of your errands.

So those aren't particularly like kid friendly or family friendly conditions. It's not that those are the natural way that neighborhoods develop. Those are all the results of conscious policy decisions that we've made. So zoning laws that require houses to be built on really large lots means that everything is spread out and it's hard to get from one place to another without a car. Right. We spend more of our transportation funding on cars and road infrastructure than on things like buses and sidewalks and bike lanes. 

So we've got all of these housing policies at the federal state and local level that create our neighborhoods and influence the way we interact with people and our environment and sort of our day to day environment in many ways that aren't particularly friendly and comfortable, even for people who are doing pretty well and think of their neighborhoods as nice places to live.

Amanda: That’s such a good point. Cause I've read research of how important independence is for children that they can walk to a park and have this walkable area where they can have some independence, maybe even walk to a store and buy candy if they want to do so. I did that growing up and that's actually really important for kids and a lot of neighborhoods, a lot of suburbs don't have that and can't offer that type of independence for kids anymore.

Jenny: They really don't. I mean, kids have a much harder time walking or biking to school than they did a couple generations ago. Right. And moms essentially have a full-time second job, which is shuttling kids around to school and all of their activities. Because kids can't get around on their own. And we don't have things like regular bus service that they could ride. Right. So until they're 16 and you know, their parents are going to have to get them a car, kids are entirely dependent on parents, particularly moms, largely because of these built environment decisions. 

Amanda: All right. So tell us about your book. Why did you decide to write about America's broken housing systems and what solutions did you find to fix it?

Jenny: So the big backdrop for kind of how our housing systems are broken, what we need to fix, sort of goes back to the great recession. We essentially stopped building houses after the great recession and didn't really pick back up again. So at the national level, we’re 10 years into a housing deficit which shows how it has not enough homes for people to live in a high prices and rents in most places where people want to live. So unless you bought a house there 30 years ago, there's a good chance that you can't move in because we're just not expanding housing at all. 

On the flip side, we also have patterns of, of housing development and city growth that are really damaging for climate change. So we're actually making things worse by where we build and don't build housing. We build homes and a lot of places at very high climate risks, which we taxpayers are already paying for. And that will only get worse over time. So you know, we have these sort of large systemic problems with housing systems, most of which are choices made by policy makers and by individual kind of members of the community.

Amanda: I love that you mentioned you know, housing prices. Cause we hear a lot about how you know, new college students, millennials can't afford to buy a house and we often hear this trope of like, “well, if you just stopped buying avocado toast once in a while—” so I know you mentioned this in your book— “then you could afford that house.” But it's not true because housing prices have gotten so bad in a lot of areas. And we talk a lot about inflation right now, right? When we think about inflation, like housing and housing prices are in there. And one very common economic approach to dealing with, if you have high prices, build more houses then, and that's how you deal with it. It's not just about, you know, millennials buying avocado toast all the time.

Jenny: It’s not, and this is such an issue that splits along generational lines. So if you talk to lots of people under the age of 40, yeah, they are particularly in kind of the big, expensive cities. They feel like they're never going to be able to buy a house, or they're never going to be able to buy a house that's sort of the size and quality that they want in a neighborhood they want to live in, because it's just so expensive relative to incomes. That wasn't the case before. So I'm a late gen X-er right. And we were still able to, you know, if you wanted to come out of college and buy a house within say five years or so, most people were able to do that. And for our parents and grandparents even more so. 

But it's just become so much more expensive relative to income that it's really hard for people to access the places that they want to live. Right. And some of this is really down to the kind of this decision making process, where we have said, you know, housing markets don't work like other kinds of things. If the demand increases and the price goes up, then, you know, GM just makes more cars. Right? We don't, we don't allow housing to be built that way. It requires explicit permission from local governments to build any new homes. And we've essentially decided to shut down production in large parts of the country. 

Amanda: So some of the policy suggestions that you make in your book, like legalizing row houses and more apartment complexes, could be a little controversial in some suburbs. How can we convince people that policy, these policies are good for everyone? 

Jenny: Yeah. So there's sort of three big reasons that I think people should embrace this both for sort of the good of other people, but also for their own wellbeing. One is that regional economies just work better when workers at all levels of income can afford to live relatively close to their jobs. Right? So if we think about a lot of big cities like the Bay Area, you know, if you're say a teacher or a nurse or a firefighter, you can't afford to live anywhere close to your job, because housing is so expensive. 

Amanda: We want teachers and firefighters to be near us. We need those services! 

Jenny: We need them a lot. And we also need, you know, people who work in food service and housekeepers and landscapers, right? So the regional economy just works better when people at lots of different incomes and occupations can live close to their jobs. 

You know, the climate part is a big piece of this too. We are building a lot of homes in places that are at very high risk. So again, places like California, we're building more and more homes in places that catch fire every year, right? Places like Florida that will literally be underwater from a sea level rise. We the taxpayers are paying the cost of that. Every time a storm comes through, you know, people die. People die in Queens in basement apartments because they can't afford to live in safer places. So there are, you know, these huge human and economic costs attached to climate change. Where we build housing, where we don't build housing and how we build it is a big part of that too. 

And then the third reason is we are massively under investing in the workforce of the future because a lot of low income families with kids can't afford to live in neighborhoods that have good quality public schools, with safe streets, healthy housing, and healthy neighborhoods. There are a lot of families with kids who are living in substandard quality housing, right? With lead paint and asbestos that impedes kids’ mental development, places where the public schools aren't doing particularly well. Right? These are our future workers and our future citizens. And we are essentially under investing in the workforce systematically. 

Amanda: That’s such an important point. And I think it's a big concern for any parent, that we want to make sure that we're investing in our kids so our kids have a future, but we also want to make sure that, you know, the people our kids are going to grow up with, their classmates and their neighbors and the people are going to interact with, we want all kids to have that shot. Like to me, the American dream is also about, it's not just about a house in the suburbs. It's about giving our kids a shot, giving every kid a shot to be the best whoever it is that they want to be. And housing is very much tied to that. 

And so in this country, we have a history of racism that has shaped a lot of American domestic policy and housing policy is no exception to that. So on our podcast, we actually heard from Cory Booker, who talks about how his family struggled to buy a house in a suburb in New Jersey. So can you tell us more about this intersection of housing policy and racial inequity in our country? 

Jenny: Yeah, there, there are two ways that it's particularly obvious. One is that until pretty recently in our country's history, Black people weren't allowed to buy homes. And that was just legal. Right? So they weren't, you know, realtors could refuse to show them homes. Banks could refuse to give them mortgages. That was completely legal until the 1968 Fair Housing Act. And even since then, we haven't had kind of full force enforcement of it. It's not particularly well-funded.

And so there's still a lot of discrimination, particularly in applications for mortgages especially for Black families and also for Latino families. That's especially problematic because owning your own home has been the primary way the U S has encouraged families to build wealth. So you buy a house, you pay down the mortgage over time, you build some equity and if your parents or grandparents owned a home, then they've accumulated some wealth that they can pass on to you.

We know for instance that when white families buy their first home is in their twenties or thirties, they're very likely to get a gift for the down payment from parents or grandparents to help them buy into this. Young Black households are less likely to do that because their parents and grandparents didn't have the opportunity to build wealth. Right. So they don't have it in the family. They can't pass it along. This compounds over generations. So we're now at the point where white households, about 70% of them own their own home. Only about 40% of Black households own their own homes. So a 30 percentage point difference in homeownership. 

The second way we really see enormous gaps in sort of racial opportunity is that, you know, these zoning laws that require only single family, detached homes and large, you know, minimum, lots of one acre of land per house. These are effectively a way of keeping low income households out of communities that have, you know, great jobs and transit and schools. They are not discriminating officially on the basis of race, but they make housing in high opportunity communities more expensive, right? 

So affluent suburbs, it's not that Black people can't live there. Any Black person who can buy a $2 million house is welcome to come to the community. Right? But it turns out more Black and Latino families can't afford to buy into these really high costs neighborhoods. So zoning reinforces both economic and racial segregation that's existed for a very long time. 

Amanda: I love that you brought that up. So one kind of surprising thing to me about your book when I was reading it was when you mentioned— so a lot of our wealth, as you've already mentioned is tied to our housing, right? So that means our, our interests, our incentives are to maintain our own housing prices and we worry that, you know, a new apartment building could bring it down.

And one way to combat that is to allow or incentivize people to build wealth in ways other than mortgages. And so you even talk a little bit about baby bonds. And so this surprising, cause I think a lot of people are like, “what do baby bonds have to do with housing?” So can you explain, what do baby bonds have to do with housing?

Jenny: Baby bonds would be an alternative way for families to build wealth and especially families who've previously been locked out of wealth building through home ownership. So you mentioned you'd been talking to Cory, Cory Booker. This was one of his proposals in the 2020 campaign. The idea is that the federal government would give some amount of money, say $5,000 to every kid who's born. And then the kid accumulates money during their childhood. And by the time they're 18, then they have a little, a little stock, a little early nest egg, which they could use maybe to pay for college or to start a business or potentially to buy a house. That's really important for families who don't have wealth to pass along. And so it's a way of compensating for the fact that we've had discrimination in housing markets all the way through. 

I think it's also important—so, investing in kids and, you know, making sure that they're going to have some wealth is a great thing to do. It's also really important though, for adults to have access to some liquid savings, right? So some other ways we could use the federal tax code would be to incentivize people to put money aside out of your paycheck just like you do for your 401k, but for short term savings, right? We sort of forget that, like you buy a house, you spend a bunch of money on the down payment, but then you get in the house and you still need money. Right. Things break and they go wrong. 

Amanda: They do. Our HVAC system, we’ve had to deal with that. 

Jenny: Oh my gosh. 80 year old house, we had to replace the heating and cooling in the first year we were in the house. Like that's really expensive. Right. So we would just, we would have much more financially secure people if we didn't rely solely on homeownership and thought about creative ways to use things like the tax code to encourage people to save in other ways.

Amanda: So we're talking a lot about neighborhoods and housing. What do you love most about your own neighborhood? 

Jenny: One is that it's a great place to walk dogs. 

Amanda: Oh I love that too about my neighborhood. 

Jenny: I have a dog and we chose our neighborhood partly based on this, we're close to Rock Creek park, which is a fantastic place to walk with your dog, but we're also close to maybe four or five coffee shops that we can go to on the morning walk. Cause it's very important to get coffee first thing in the morning. You know, and, and lots of places that we can walk to easily, which is really nice. We're about a block off of the main bus line. 

But the other thing that we really loved about our neighborhood when we started walking around is that there's incredible diversity, both in people, but also in the buildings. So we've got houses in our neighborhood that were built in the 19 teens and twenties, sort of traditional craftsman style. We've got some brand new, very contemporary sort of, you know, sleek, modern houses. There’s a bunch of mid-century moderns. There's some like 1950s Tudors. And like the variation in architectural style just makes it a really interesting place to walk around and look at. 

And that's one of the things that I wish we sort of recognized that every house doesn’t have to look identical for a neighborhood to be sort of cohesive. It just doesn't make sense when you look at a lot of the neighborhoods that have been built up over time. 

Amanda: I love that. So I also love that my neighborhood is walkable, so we can actually walk— it's a little bit far with little ones, but we can walk to our little downtown, and it's much easier to bike, so we tend to bike with them. But so once we're downtown, we can get to restaurants, which we do all the time, especially in the summer months. 

Jenny: And older neighborhoods tend to have houses that are closer together, which also makes them very neighborly. Right? So like what, there's the, there's sort of this idea of like the Halloween test, right? Can kids who are going trick or treating, how many houses can they get to, right? Cause the suburbs that have these giant houses that are far apart are actually really bad for trick or treating. Cause you can't go to that many places. Like, you know, the little row house neighborhoods, those are perfect for Halloween.

Amanda: Oh, I love it. Yeah. So we thought about that when buying a house that we wanted like a neighborhood where kids— so we actually didn't have kids at the time when we bought this house, but we were planning to have children. But we wanted to live, you know, where there was a neighborhood where they could go trick or treating and they could easily go see other friends and you know, these little things that I think we don't think about much, but it takes like policy and thinking about it. Do you make sure there's a sidewalk and do you make sure it's walkable and how do you do that? And so I think it's really interesting. 

I also wanted to ask you, so you and I are both women in economics, which isn't easy and actually econ has had a pretty massive reckoning lately when it comes to gender. So what has your experience been like as a woman in this unfortunately still pretty male dominated field?

Jenny: Yeah. I mean, that's, that's a whole huge tough topic in itself. I've had good experiences and bad, I suspect like most women. I think it's not just economics. It's academia in general has a pretty high quotient of like jerks with big egos, which never makes for a nice working environment. And not all male economists are jerks. 

Amanda: They’re not, there's a lot of very lovely male economists. 

Jenny: Some of my biggest supporters have been men. And you know, I, I've certainly been in lots of rooms where I'm the only woman, sometimes that feels okay and sometimes that feels uncomfortable. You know, some of the sort of difficulty of being woman comes in kind of subtle ways, like you're asked to do more teaching and more service and more mentoring of students. Which isn't necessarily bad, except that it's hard to do that and then do the research that you're also supposed to do. 

I've, you know, I've been very lucky. I've had a bunch of really good and supportive male mentors. You know, my, my dissertation advisor, my undergraduate thesis advisor were terrific men who supported me and helped me and, you know, opened doors for me. I've also been really lucky that I've had female mentors at almost every stage of my career. And really importantly, when I came out of grad school and did my post-doc, I was at NYU's Fermin center, which was run at the time by two women who ran the center and it was just an incredibly productive working environment where everybody got to work on good projects. Everybody got credit for the work that they did. So you always got your name on paper. You know, they, they didn't have an ego about who was going to present the paper and it was just a really supportive and lovely environment. And I wish there were more places like that for women, especially early in their career when it's, when it's harder to get your fair share.

Amanda: Well, I have loved talking about this with you, because I think it's really important for women to see that. Sometimes we hear econ and we think inflation, and we might think stock prices, you know, and finance, but like here today, we're talking about housing and neighborhoods and building a life and a community for our kids.

And when we're missing women's voices, we miss really important questions and perspectives that I think the field needs. And so I really appreciate your book and having this conversation. But before we let you go, we like to ask some rapid fire questions. Jenny, are you ready?

Jenny: I am ready, fire away.

Amanda: All right. So if you could live in any neighborhood from a TV show, what would it be? 

Jenny: The Good Place. Which is absolutely an urbanist paradise, right? So like you have little houses and big houses next to each other, and nobody drives anywhere, everybody walks, and you have a cute little downtown center with little cafes and restaurants. Perfect. 

Amanda: Oh man, that was good. Oh, I was thinking like, I thought you might say like row houses, like a New York City row house, like Sex and the City, which is also super cool. But yeah, Good Place. All right. I'm gonna, I would change my answer. I like that. 

All right. So what's a talent that you have that might surprise us?

Jenny: I love to cook and bake. And I have been doing a lot of it during the pandemic because we go out to eat a lot less. So I've gotten in fact very into baking biscuits, like old fashioned biscuits. It's sort of therapeutic because you knead the dough with your hands and there’s butter and you cut it in and they're infinitely customizable. So feta and scallion is my favorite combination so far, but it's like something that's quick and easy to whip up and is very comforting. 

Amanda: Oh, I love that. I do love to cook, but I'm not good at it, but I still like it. You don't have to be good to like things. All right. If you could be interviewed by any person on earth, who would it be?

Jenny: Terry Gross, she has just like this mesmerizing voice. I feel like she looks into people's soul and like, you know, gets them to confess deep things and deeply bonds and empathizes. So Terry Gross, if you're listening, anytime I'm available. 

Amanda: Oh, I love her. You just want to listen. All right. What are you most excited about doing this summer?

Jenny: So a little before the summer starts, I'm actually going to go out to Albuquerque and visit with three of my best friends from college, two of whom I haven't seen since the pandemic started. And we're going to have a really nice weekend and catch up. I'm very excited about that. 

Amanda: Oh, nice. So one thing I do love doing is it's so fun to visit other cities. We’ve talked about like beach vacations, but usually we're visiting different relatives and different friends, and that's how I get to other cities, but I love seeing other cities. And I always like to notice little developments that they're doing. So my sister lives in Tacoma and I noticed they had this new waterfront development, which was like, super mixed use, walkable areas for kids, like splash park, and I just loved it. 

Jenny: This is actually my favorite thing to do when I travel to, I go to cities more often than not, or at least places that have like an urban center and I walk around and take pictures of housing. So everywhere I go, I'm like walking neighborhoods and taking pictures of houses. 

Amanda: I love it. So we, my husband and I, used to run through cities. And so we actually ran through we'd do like long, 10 mile runs and it was a great way to see the city. Cause you could see a little more of it, but you're on the ground. And we were running through San Francisco and it was so fun and sometimes we just like run and we'll end up wherever we end up. And I think we ended up through their pride parade. So we kind of actually were a little part of the parade. Cause we were like, we just kind of turned and didn't know how to get out of it. And anyway, but it was super fun. 

All right. That is the end of our rapid fire questions. Where can people go to find out more about you and your book? 

Jenny: So you can find the book at bookshop.org if you want to support your local independent bookstore. It’s also available on Amazon and you can look me up on my Brookings homepage. There's a little blurb about Fixer Upper, and you can find links to all of the other things.

Amanda: Awesome. It has been so fun doing a little bit of econ geeking out with you over economics and all things housing policy and urban economics. So thanks for stopping by The Suburban Women Problem. 

Jenny: Thanks. It's been great.

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Jasmine: Welcome back everyone. So, Amanda, I really enjoyed listening to your conversation with Jenny. These are the types of conversations that are not necessarily always the easiest ones to have, but they're, they're still very important. So I really appreciate her perspective. 

Amanda: I loved talking all things housing policy with her. I think it's really interesting. And I think her book is really readable whether you're an economist or not. And it's really thinking about how our cities, how our communities have been shaped by housing policy and how we can do better. And I think housing policy is a space where our communities can do better and better for all of us, better for our kids, better for the environment, better for racial justice. There are so many ways that her book touches on so many issues we're dealing with and they're big hard issues, right? These are not easy issues and these are tough conversations that really have to happen. And so I just loved talking to Jenny about all of this stuff. 

Jasmine: We’re all about those tough conversations on the pod. 

Rachel: I mean, it's on our podcast and it's also in our country. If we don't have the tough conversations and we're not willing to actually put the work in to fix the problems, then guess what? Nothing is going to get fixed. 

Amanda: And I think some of it is stepping away from your own interests, which is probably already I'm getting in hot water. But like even when she talks about mortgage interest relief, like I know we all like our tax breaks for owning a home. I get it. However, that's super unfair to all of the renters out there.

So I think about my kids actually. So our kids are most likely to wait longer to get married. They're most like to wait longer to have kids. They're more likely to be renters for longer. Right. So these policies are absolutely about our kids and what kind of housing our kids are going to have. 

And so this is one reason why I really love focusing on renters is because to me, I think about these are going to be my kids for awhile. I want them to have potentially an apartment building near me if they want to come back and live in Hudson. I want them to have policies that fit their life right before they get married and have kids. And we just simply do not have those policies right now. 

All right. So before we go each week, we like to leave you with something positive that we call our Toast to Joy. So Jasmine, let's start with you. What's your Toast to Joy this week? 

Jasmine: So my Toast to Joy… I don't know if it's joy or, I don't really actually know. But I still think it's a good thing. So I'm going for it. My son has officially passed his driving permit test! It’s also scary. So he will be spending the next year or so, just over a year, you know, practicing driving as he tries to get a driver's license. 

And number one it's horrifying. Yes, I know. But I still think it's a milestone, you know, it's, you know, something he's like checked off, a box he's checked off. And in order to do it, you know, in order to take his driving test, his dad was really big on his grades being where they need to be. And so, whereas pandemic year, his grades were not great, this year he's really shown up and shown out in the academics department.

He's, you know, he's growing up into like a little man. It's so… I don't know, like I said, it's joyful, but also horrifying at the same time. All right, Rachel, how about you? What's your Toast to Joy?

Rachel: Well, my Toast to Joy this week is my husband is going away for a couple of days and I just need a couple of days to breathe. 

Amanda: I love it. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. 

Rachel: Yes, that too. But he's been so, so busy that even though he has a research assistant to also help them with scheduling, I've gotten roped into a lot and I'm glad that he's going to be gone and I can focus on a couple of things for me. I feel like I can get some things done before spring break, and then we can just enjoy some time with the family. So. My Toast to Joy is my husband leaving. And you Amanda? Hahaha.

Amanda: Ha. So, my Toast to Joy is, given our topic, I would really love to do my Toast to Joy to the YIMBYs— the Yes In My Back Yard. And the interesting thing about housing policy is, it’s totally not aligned with political parties. And so the YIMBYs tend to be people from Republican and Democrat backgrounds. And so you end up talking to a lot of people you don't usually talk to, which I think is really interesting.

Rachel: It makes sense though. 

Amanda: Yeah, it does. 

Rachel: It actually really makes sense that this is one area where you can talk to people and give them backs and give them information and really change minds. I believe this is, this is an area that there's a lot of potential for growth. 

Amanda: I think so, too. And it's, and I get it. Change is hard. Right? I get that. For a, for a community, you’re worried because you want to keep that community so charming and lovely, and you want to keep it the place you love. So I get that. But so for the people who are willing to kind of step out and be like, you know what, the way to keep it the way we love is to let it grow. Right? 

So you think about your kids too, right? I love my kids, but we, we have to let them grow into the beautiful people that they are. We can't just keep them the same. And I think about the same is true with our communities. We have to let it grow and grow in a way that, you know, it needs to grow. 

So, thanks so much everyone for joining us today and we'll see you again next week on another episode of The Suburban Women Problem!