Chris Elmendorf on Aesthetics, Developers & Housing Politics

Why do so many Americans say housing costs are a top concern — but still oppose new housing in their neighborhoods? UC Davis law professor Chris Elmendorf shares surprising research revealing that aesthetics and feelings about developers may matter more than self-interest or NIMBYism.
In this conversation, we cover:

- Why just saying the word "developer" drops support for new housing by 4+ points
- How Hollywood has generated an estimated 1 billion negative representations of developers
- Why "small local homebuilder" gets a dramatically different reaction than "big real estate developer"
- What a video of a developer rescuing dogs has to do with housing policy
- Why ugly buildings hurt housing support even among renters who would benefit from lower rents
- The vacancy chain concept — and why it's one of the most persuasive arguments for building more housing
- The story of how a Twitter thread helped revive California's "builder's remedy" law
- What the pro-housing movement should actually focus on to win long-term

This is the Season 1 finale of Everybody Gets Pie. Tune in for another season soon!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If people have weak views about the effects of new housing supply on the material things they care about, like well, what are they going to base their views on instead? And what they seem to base their views on are things that are like easy shortcuts or impressions that are easy to form. So they may have associations with developers, or they may have associations with rich people, or they may have associations with poor people that lead them to certain views. I do think it's possible to shift opinion and increase political support for supply with economically oriented arguments. The question that is still open in my mind is whether you can convey that type of information effectively in the context of a political campaign with short attention spans. You know, that remains to be seen.

SPEAKER_02 0:42

If you ask Americans, would you support allowing new apartment buildings to be built in your neighborhood? You get a certain level of support. But now ask the same question, but this time mention who's building the apartments, developers, support drops, even though it's the exact same policy. So why do so many Americans oppose building new housing even when they say that housing costs are some of their top concerns? The standard explanations are homeowners protecting their property values and just classic NIMBYism, but new research actually suggests that the real answers are more surprising and maybe more fixable. It turns out that how voters feel about the people who are building their housing and whether they think the buildings are ugly may matter more than self-interest or backyard politics. So today we're diving into that research and what it means for actually solving the housing crisis. Welcome to Everybody Gets Pie, the podcast about making the American pie of opportunity big enough so that everybody can get their slice. This is a podcast focused on the need for more American abundance in housing, in energy, in childcare, innovation, and more. And as a quick note, I should mention this is the final episode of our very first season before we take a break. Burhan is running for Massachusetts State Senate, and we will have a whole bunch of other exciting things to announce in the coming months before we start working on a season two. So stay tuned. Now for this very special season finale, we spoke with Chris Almendorf. He's a professor of law at UC Davis. His latest research alongside David Brockman and Josh Kalla reveals a powerful and overlooked force shaping America's housing politics. But first, we asked him about why people have such a strong reaction to the word developer. Let's take a listen. All right, Chris, I want to get right into it with uh some of your research that has actually deeply influenced the way that I talk about housing. So in a recent study, you asked people, would you support allowing new apartment buildings to be built in your neighborhood? And then you asked a different group that exact same question, but then that time around, you actually mentioned that developers would be the ones building the housing. Could you talk to us about what you found from that study and how just adding the word developers changed people's minds?

SPEAKER_00 2:54

Yes. So that uh question in which people were randomly assigned to be either asked about allowing the new apartments to be built in their neighborhood or allowing developers to build new apartments in their neighborhood was part of a larger study in which we asked very similar questions about housing development to um different groups of people. The groups of people who got the questions were randomly assigned. So they're in expectation, exactly the same groups of people. And all that varies in those questions is whether some group that people have positive or negative associations with is made salient, made visible. And so in that version of the question, the group that was made visible was developers. Obviously, developers are the ones who build new apartments. Um, but simply reminding people that developers are the ones who built new apartments, uh, causes support for new apartments to drop. In that case, the drop wasn't hugely dramatic. It was about a four percentage point decline in support. Um, in some of the other manipulations, it it was much more dramatic. But the the bottom line is that people are evaluating housing policies, not in the way a policy analyst would with close attention to consequences, but by using information about groups that they have strong feelings about and kind of projecting those feelings onto the policy.

SPEAKER_02 4:14

It's it's funny because like I was using the word developers. I mean, now I I have a little swear jar where I try not to use certain words. But I mean it it is striking how the words that we use can can greatly influence whether or not people feel supportive to new housing or how people feel about that.

SPEAKER_01 4:34

Do you have a theory, Chris, of why people don't like developers? I was just curious. Like, I feel like, you know, you don't have a negative perception necessarily to like, do you like the software that was written by software engineers? But developers seem to have like a particularly different uh connotation with them.

SPEAKER_00 4:48

So uh as part of an extension of that paper, which uh I think has actually been posted publicly, but it hasn't been tweeted about yet, my co-author, uh Josh Kalla, tried to find all movies uh that had representations of developers um over a long period of time. And he then uh had uh Claude Code uh assess whether the representation of developers was favorable or negative. And his estimate is that people have been exposed to about one billion negative representations of developers in the aggregates, as measured by movie ticket sales over the last several decades.

SPEAKER_02 5:29

I mean, that's that's really funny because I mean, like, you know, so our popular media, it's like developers are the big bad guys that are coming to like tear down a neighborhood or like, you know, take over, and they're the fat cats who are trying to make a lot of money, versus like people who are literally building homes. Like there, there's just like some uh stigma around it. So maybe it comes from Hollywood or or somewhere else.

SPEAKER_00 5:53

And we've also set up the housing permitting process to create corruption. What I mean by that is that uh housing development and the way it's regulated has essentially been like the way Trump regulates tariffs. And we know that in Trump's tariff world, tariffs are entirely discretionary. Anybody who provides a favor to the president gets like a reduction in their tariffs, a carve out, an exemption. It's all ad hoc. It's all based on quid pro quo. Like the elite media now is having an aversive reaction to that practice in the context of tariffs, but that's totally normal in the context of housing development. And it shouldn't be a surprise that if you set up a process that is totally ad hoc and discretionary, that there's going to be a lot of side payments and payments under the table, and from time to time, developers will end up going to jail. And then that's in the press, that's prominently visible, and it probably contributes to the negative associations that people have with developers.

SPEAKER_01 6:49

Yeah, a big conversation that I have is that um actually developers are not the biggest fans of zoning reform because oftentimes the developers that exist exist in a way that they can get through the process, however long and tedious it is. And so they've kind of worked out the situation. It's in fact like if you made it, you know, a standard fair process where, you know, if anyone followed the rules, this would be allowed and this wouldn't be allowed, like it would not necessarily benefit them. It would instead create like a new class of like, you know, like smaller local home builders sort of situation. That actually reminded me you had a question, right? So you also tested like by-right permitting and whether projects would meet all the rules, should be automatically approved, and that you tested exactly this, right? Whether it would be built by small local homeowners or big real estate developers. And there was a big gap. Could you explain more about that?

SPEAKER_00 7:38

Yes, small local home builders versus big real estate developers. And yeah, there's a huge effect there where people are much more supportive of development by small local home builders rather than big real estate developers. And you might think that maybe that has something to do with people's assumptions that like the things that would be built by local home builders would be different in character than the things that would be built by big real estate developers. But we also went back and did another version of that question where we specified in very narrow bands exactly what could be built. And even if you specify very precisely what can be built, if it's built by big real estate developers, people have a really negative reaction to it. And if it's proposed to be built by small local home builders, uh they're they're much more positive about it. Um and this is not this is associated in a in a correlational sense with people's feelings towards developers.

SPEAKER_02 8:30

It's it's funny because uh you also in that study, you you went further and you actually made videos with the real estate developer. So one about uh one of them was her rescuing dogs, one was about pension funds uh for retired teachers investing in her projects, one about neighbors yelling at her in public meetings. Uh, did watching any of those videos actually change people's minds as to whether or not they supported uh more housing or not?

SPEAKER_00 8:55

Yeah, so those videos had a small positive effect on uh people's support for uh both new housing development in their neighborhood and for buy rate permitting uh for housing development built by developers. You know, the effects aren't massive, but that then again, the treatment, the exposure is just one video. And so our our takeaway from that is that while you know people may have these ideas about developers formed by Hollywood uh over many decades, uh, those ideas aren't fixed. And exposure to new kinds of information about developers doing different or better things or just being decent people, not even information about the developers' projects, uh, can shift feelings towards developers and uh then support for uh development itself.

SPEAKER_02 9:44

It's funny, it seems like they need like a rebranding effort. I mean, because it's funny, because like literally changing the word from developer to home builder makes a huge difference. Uh a video about rescuing dogs that says literally nothing about housing, increased support for building apartments. And so it's just funny how I guess when when people see like this is not like some like massive, like evil corporation, but maybe like there are humans behind it, um, and they're trying to like actually build more housing that people can live in. Um, that that's something that that people are more willing to support. But do you do you think that this is unique? Is housing unique in a way that like people people don't feel this way about doctors, they don't feel about this this way about like other major industries? Is it specifically the discretionary part of it? Or or do you think that there are other things that are driving it?

SPEAKER_00 10:36

Yeah, I mean that's a really that's a really, really good question. We see that people also have really strong negative associations with Wall Street, which people don't have direct personal experience of either. So I think it has something to do with um there are business entities that you sense have an effect on your world, like Wall Street investors. You know, from time to time they're financial crises. Like there's big things that happen in the world that that change, but you don't deal with them directly in any sort of immediate personal and repeated sense. So Amazon is a popular company, right? Why is Amazon a popular company? Because people buy stuff from Amazon all the time and it comes. You know, for the most part, it comes like exactly when Amazon says it's gonna come, and they leave a little picture showing that they, you know, the package was deposited on your doorstep. And so you develop firsthand experience with the with the company. Even though everybody lives in a home that was built once upon a time by a developer, you're not engaged in repeated transactions with developers. And you may perceive that they shape your world in some way because they appear on TV or in Instagram reels or in movies, and from time to time there are new buildings that go up, and maybe you like some of the buildings and you don't like other buildings, but you don't have that um customer relationship, and in particular, a repeated customer relationship that allows you to build an experience that would warrant either like trust or distrust. And so I think that may contribute to um the feelings being a little bit divorced from what developers actually do.

SPEAKER_01 12:26

So would homes be more popular if you could buy them on Amazon? Like, should we bring back the Sears catalog?

SPEAKER_00 12:33

I mean, I I think that's I think that is a really interesting question. Like if it may maybe we actually need more visible developer brands.

SPEAKER_02 12:42

But you'd also need to make repeated purchases. So even if you could buy a home on Amazon, you still probably only buy like one or two. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 12:50

Right. But if you're renting, oh yeah, then you would have repeated contacts. I I don't know. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 12:56

That's funny. I mean, I I really do feel like um so Berhan and me are both both on um city council, Berhan and in Cambridge and and me and in False Church, Virginia, and I there really is an expectation of like when we're approving any sort of project, uh the the mindset is what are you going to give us? Like you're making money on this. I think there's a community-wide feeling like you're making money, you you have to give something back to us, not like you're building homes and providing assets, you know, and and and things for like to make people's lives better. And so it really, I think there's this mentality where it's like people feel like uh home builders, developers are taking something away from them.

SPEAKER_00 13:36

Or there's just that convention of of quid pro clo, you know, like I mean that that is another version of the Trump mentality, right? You don't get permission to do something unless you give us like give me like some special dispensation. Give me fifty a 15% stake in your company, give me, you know, contributions to the, you know, the peace board or the war board or whatever it is, right? It it's a it's a version of that.

SPEAKER_01 14:01

That's a really interesting analogy. You know, I kind of wonder how much of these things hold up once you're outside of like a survey polling environment, right? When people hear about it from a whole bunch of different angles and everything. I think that most of these kind of uh fit my bias in terms of how I think about the world. I think the one question you asked that didn't exactly fit it is that you did this more recent paper on aesthetics and how whether people think that, you know, if a be a building looks beautiful or how exactly it looks has a big impact on their approval of apartments. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_00 14:31

Yeah. So there's actually a connection between the aesthetics paper and the symbolics paper, the symbolic politics paper, and that like both papers start with the assumption, which is informed by some of my earlier work, that it's actually hard for people to figure out what the tangible effects of new development are going to be for material things they care about, like housing prices or rents. Those are two examples. People don't have strong views about that, they get conflicting messages. Uh, and particularly when you're talking about effects in a local context, you know, new development can increase the value or the rents on apartments nearby if it brings in new amenities or new value, new apartments can can decrease the rents for apartments nearby if it's adding more supply or like adding congestion. And so if people have weak views about the effects of new housing supply on the material things they care about, like, well, what are they going to base their views on instead? And what they seem to base their views on are things that are like easy shortcuts, right? Or impressions that are easy to form. So they may have associations with developers, or they may have associations with rich people, or they may have associations with poor people that lead them to certain views. But the other thing that they respond to is pictures. Like they like some the way some things look and they don't like the way some other things look. And that's like a little less mysterious to people than the economic consequences of new development for material things they care about. And it seems that people um do have aesthetic preferences that that are pretty sincerely felt and they respond to them. Now, how much tangible like political benefit there is from changing a project design from from from X to Y, like I think there's there's um still a lot to be learned there and and relative to like the range of feasible project designs. Um, but at least if you're going from a really bad to a really good design, or if you're going from projects that are in scale roughly similar to things nearby, to projects that in scale are two or three times taller than things nearby, people do seem to have a a pretty strong reaction to that.

SPEAKER_02 16:44

It's funny that I mean going through this paper was was really interesting for me because I um have personal experience trying to block housing. This is 10 years ago, I've clearly uh changed, but trying to block housing because I didn't like the way that it looked. Um and I sort of rallied neighbors. I was the ultimate uh NIMBY in trying to stop this housing project. Yeah, a huge part of it was like I just didn't think it fit in. And so it's funny, one of the things that I was very strongly opposed to, I felt it was too big. The first thing that I felt it was too boxy, and then and there was not enough like ornamentation or design or whatever else. And then and then it was too big. But what's interesting, and this is the position that I've come around to recently, is I actually don't think that height matters that much. So people will say height matters, but like when they're actually in a really beautiful space with beautiful ground floor retail, um, you can have buildings as tall as like 10 stories. I I've been to places with like 10 story buildings and beautiful, like wide sidewalks, lovely walking experience, planters, whatever else, and it feels nice. Um, and so yeah, I I think like people put height as like a uh like this huge thing that like actually doesn't matter as much as as they think it does. And so I don't have no idea how to test that, but that's something that I want to know about.

SPEAKER_00 18:04

When you were doing that organizing work uh a decade ago, what did people react to when you were trying to rally them to the NIMBY cause? Was it was it the heights or was the boxiness, or what messages did you find were effective?

SPEAKER_02 18:18

So I started with the height and the box. So like my gut reaction was why I got so involved was because I saw a picture, I saw a rendering of what it was going to be, and that freaked me out. And so that's it's funny because like a picture is what set me off. If I didn't see a picture and it was just like talking about it abstract, I'd be like, oh, okay, whatever. Seeing that picture got me engaged, and then I was like fighting this. Once I started fighting it, it was then I was jumping for other justifications. So I was then saying that you know this is gonna cut down trees. I I cared more about that picture, is what like stood out to me more than like the trees, but then you know, trees was like a something that was like easy to talk about. Um, and and like and to some degree I did care about the trees, but like not as much as I cared about how it was gonna look. Um I I'm trying to think of other things, things like, oh, affordability. I mean, you can go down the list. We were saying it was, you know, this was this historical site. Um, and so I I I was reaching for any possible justification that I could, but my like core issue was the aesthetic. So it almost like morphed into other things, and then I convinced myself that this was like the most like you know, all these things mattered.

SPEAKER_00 19:26

But it's the picture that got you started, right?

SPEAKER_02 19:28

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:29

So one of the questions that we that we got about that paper was was well, yeah, people react to aesthetics, but what they really care about is not the aesthetics per se. What they care about is like what they believe the aesthetics will do to other material things like rents in the neighborhood, right? So like if you build an ugly building, it's gonna cause home prices or or rents to decline nearby. If you build a pretty building, it's gonna raise home prices and rents nearby. And it's that's the thing they ultimately care about. And it turns out that you know, we asked a bunch of questions after showing people the pictures of a pro proposed development depicted with a pretty picture or an ugly picture about what they thought the development would do to, if anything, to crime rates in the neighborhood and to rents nearby and home values nearby. And people do think that the ugly building is going to have negative consequences for these material outcomes. But if you give the same ugly build-in treatment to homeowners and renters and ask about support for development, it has exactly the same negative effect on both homeowners and renters, right? Even though the renters believe it's gonna cause rents to go down nearby, and which they presumably should want, right? And the homeowners believe that it's gonna cause home prices to go down nearby, which they presumably should not want. So, like there are these beliefs that are probably roughly correct about these material outcomes that are associated with changes in aesthetics, but they do not, those material outcome beliefs do not translate into support in the way that you would expect if homeowners and renters were each rationally tying their political views on development to their material interests.

SPEAKER_02 21:18

It's really interesting because that absolutely aligns with my experience, at least, at least 10 years ago. You also tested um uh how people felt about ugly office buildings versus ugly apartment buildings. And it seemed that people were actually so it's not even like people are necessarily concerned about more housing in that case, because they were l they they were less supportive of ugly offices.

SPEAKER_00 21:41

Yeah, so we didn't actually we didn't actually show ugly office buildings. What we but what we did was we we asked people some survey questions about whether they thought cities would look nicer with fewer tall apartment buildings, and whether they thought new apartment buildings were ugly. And the answer is Those questions are also pretty strongly associated with support for allowing uh new apartments to be built in commercial corridors, which you would think would be an area where people wouldn't really care maybe that much about aesthetics. But it turns out that like even this relatively uncontroversial policy of allowing five-story apartment buildings to be built in commercial corridors is one that there's a mix of opinion on. And the people who are more negative about it are the people who think cities would look better with fewer small, fewer tall apartment buildings and also that the new apartment buildings tend to be ugly. And so one question we had in our mind is like, well, are people just saying that they think apartment buildings are ugly or it would be better to have fewer tall apartment buildings because like really they are racist, let's say, or like want to keep a certain type of person out of their city. And our strategy for getting at that question of whether these answers, these stated aesthetic preferences are pretextual, was to randomly assign people in a survey to a question about allowing five-story apartment buildings to be built in commercial areas versus allowing five-story office buildings to be built in commercial areas, right? And if the statements about apartments are pretextual, you would expect they would be strongly associated with uh views about new apartment buildings, but not with views about new office buildings, right, of the same size. But it turns out people who think cities would look nicer with fewer tall apartment buildings are just as opposed to tall office buildings as they are to tall apartment buildings. That's one indication those preferences are sincere. The other thing that surprised us is that on average, people are actually more supportive of allowing five-story apartment buildings than five-story office buildings. Like there absolutely is some racism and and some worry about the types of people who might live in apartment buildings. Um, but there's also a lot of people who think apartments are fine. And I don't know, I guess the concern about new residents and the types of people who live in apartment buildings is probably overstated.

SPEAKER_01 24:18

Yeah, I had a thought, which is that I actually find that it's like a hard conversation to have because I think that you know there's some amount of the population that gets very upset with new development. And then most people are just kind of like, whatever, like maybe it's a small annoyance, maybe it's a small positive, but like they don't really care. And then before, you know, you had like the pro-housing movement, you didn't really have that many people who are objectively being like, you know, development is good because like you kind of have to make this long intellectual case and convert people and that sorts of stuff versus like the localized harm piece. But you know, having said all of that, like, you know, what's still surprising to me is in all the research, is like no one still believes that building bar housing lowers prices. They're like, if you if you ask them like, should we build housing, they're like, yeah, we should build housing. And you know, you get like both Trump and Zoran coming together and they're like, we should build more housing. And then you ask everyone, does it lower housing prices? And no one kind of really believes it. Um so like what do people think high like housing prices come from? And then do you have a sense of why they support housing if they don't actually think it'll lower prices?

SPEAKER_00 25:24

I mean, I think some people believe there's a connection to between housing supply and housing prices, like 30 to 40 percent, maybe based on the uh work that I've done. But those views are just weakly held. And like the housing price effects will materialize over long periods of time. And the things that people react to more immediately are things like symbols and aesthetics. Doesn't mean A, that people don't think prices are important. They do, they do think prices are important, and doesn't mean you can't persuade people that um new housing supply uh is gonna make a difference for prices and and should be supported for that reason. So there's another paper I did where we randomly assigned uh people to uh different kinds of explainers about the vacancy chains idea, the idea that if you build new fancy housing, people are gonna move into that housing and leave other housing, and that other housing is going to be then occupied by someone else who moves into it and and vacates their former hermit crab shell and so forth and so on, such that new fancy housing will, within a few moves, pretty rapidly free up new uh affordable housing for people to move into. And one of those um uh videos, which was an explainer from the Sightline Institute, had a huge effect on uh both people's uh economic beliefs and their support for uh housing development, both infield development and and greenfield development. I do think it's possible to to um to shift opinion and uh uh to to increase supply with or increase political support for supply with with economically oriented arguments. The question that is still open to in my mind is whether you can convey that type of information effectively in the context of a political campaign with short attention spans. And you know, that remains to be seen.

SPEAKER_02 27:29

It's funny because I um, as I was going door to door, um anytime I had a discussion about housing costs, that would end up delving into a it just had to be a 30-minute discussion. There's no uh it was very difficult to have like a pithy discussion on housing affordability, uh like at least when I was on the the campaign trail. Um and so that's where like the the sight line video that you mentioned is like fantastic um because that's sort of like a short like visual. And this is where I really do think like talking about things is helpful, but like actually seeing like a moving chain or like seeing people moving from one place to another can be like so much more impactful for some reason. Like even if it's an animation, seeing something with our eyes um can make a big difference.

SPEAKER_00 28:16

We live in a short form video culture.

SPEAKER_02 28:19

Yeah, right. So it's almost like we need we need more um more short form videos. But it was interesting because um from your your folk economics paper where you where you did um look at uh you know, peep whether people felt like um housing, you see more housing would help lower cost. It's funny because like you tested how people thought about like cars, grains, plumbers. So it's like would um the supply of if the supply of uh used cars suddenly drop like dropped, I think that's what you did.

SPEAKER_00 28:50

It was it was new cars, yeah. Supply supply of new cars drops, what happens to the price of used cars, which is the exact housing analogy.

SPEAKER_02 28:57

Oh, perfect. And so like the people were like, oh, well, the the if if the supply of new cars drops, then obviously the price of used cars would would go up, but they couldn't apply that exact same logic to the housing market or or uh a a good chunk of people. And so it does seem that there is um some sort of disconnect um between like housing versus cars versus versus other goods. And so it does housing is somewhat unique, I guess, in terms of like items in in this discussion. Do you have a sense like I guess we're we were talking about that for like why is housing unique in terms of like how people feel about developers? But like do you know, do you have a sense as like why housing is unique in terms of how people think about the economics?

SPEAKER_00 29:39

Yeah, I think I think like the difference between housing and cars is that um cars depreciate faster than housing. And so there's like a you know, a supply shock on new cars has a bigger effect on the total size of the automobile stock than a supply shock in the in the housing market uh has on the total size of the housing stock. And also people had first hand experience during the pandemic with a supply shock, a negative supply shock in the housing or in the automobile market. And used car prices did in fact go up through the roof during the pandemic. So people learn from experience and they have an an easier time remembering experiences than they have generalizing from those experiences or thinking through more abstract concepts.

SPEAKER_02 30:33

And actually, housing prices, at least for the past decade, have only gone up, or well, in the except for some markets, have like pretty vastly gone up in a lot of our cities. And so the experience is that housing is a a great investment because you'll always make you'll make money on it. I'm not including uh what happened in in 2008. But um there is this sort of I think location and land is oftentimes something that's like often discounted. So it's like your house might actually be declining in value as it gets older and and wears down, but your land as more people move to a city, as there's um more jobs or whatever else in in a certain location becomes like far more valuable. And so there's this um, I guess a little bit of a disconnect between like the land versus the the property or the house that's actually built on the land. And so I think that makes everything so much more complicated.

SPEAKER_00 31:24

And also, and also um that housing exists in physical locations in space that are relatively fixed, um, which both means that uh a uh like local supply shock in Cambridge or in Arlington uh is not going to affect the stock of the entire like US or even statewide or regional housing market very much. Um and second, that local like fixity, the fact that housing is tied to a location, means that housing prices are affected not just by the total size of the housing stock and the total demand for housing, but also by the highly local effects that uh new housing or new development has on the so-called quality of the neighborhood, right? So if it brings in new businesses and shops, that may uh have a positive amenity or agglomeration effect that um other things equal raises prices nearby. Or if it's ugly and um causes a lot of congestion or you know, brings it causes some other social change that that the market doesn't value or disvalues, right? That new housing could have a local negative effect. So it housing is just like because of its fixity, like to a location, it's more complicated than these other goods and services, even uh durable consumer goods like cars.

SPEAKER_01 32:55

So, Chris, uh let's talk about the builder's remedy. You kind of brought it back from the dead in 2019. I think there was this Twitter thread where you forgot where you wrote about like this 1990 California law. And um, you know, I'm a big believer in the posting to policy pipeline, and you know, that's kind of single stare. Um, but also, you know, that thread launched a wave of developer applications across California. So, what is it? How did you find it? Um, and how do you feel about it like now in 2026?

SPEAKER_00 33:25

Yeah, that's a that's a great question. It's a really kind of fun story. Now, to say that I brought the builder's remedy back is an overstatement because as you know, in Massachusetts, you have Chapter 40B for affordable housing, which is a builder's remedy type law. Um, New Jersey has had a builder's remedy since the days of the Mount Laurel litigation in the 1970s and 1980s. Um, so it's not the case that like I invented the builder's remedy. Um uh it's it's more accurate to say that I found this peculiarity in California law that nobody seemed to have noticed or paid attention to. I was like, ah, that's a builder's remedy. That's just like New Jersey and Massachusetts. Um and on uh New Year's Day 2019, I put out a Twitter thread. I was relatively new to Twitter at the time, where I laid out like what I had fig what appeared to be on paper, this California Builders Remedy Law, and it's like, hey people, like why have I never ever heard of any project that's ever been proposed using this using this law? And the reaction from other California housing lawyers and advocates is kind of like, huh? Like, what is this law?

SPEAKER_02 34:39

Can you go through what exactly? Because I think a lot of people might not know what builder's remedy is.

SPEAKER_00 34:43

Yeah, so builder's remedy, the the basic idea is that if a city isn't meeting its obligations under some state housing law, uh developers or builders in that city can build projects without complying with the city's zoning. And there may be a process to get the project approved, either through the courts or through some state administrative procedure, like like there is in in Massachusetts, an appeal process. So California has a law called the Regional Housing Needs Assessment or RENA law, terrible acronym, uh that basically says every city has to plan for its fair share of regionally needed housing. That law has been on the books since 1980. It hasn't generated much new housing because the housing targets have been too small, and because cities have, quote, planned for their fair share of needed housing by saying, ah, like that's a nice location over there where we have a school. So let's assign our share of regionally needed housing to our sites where we have a school or city hall or a fire station or some other place where no housing will ever be developed. Um so so the process was not a particularly effective one. But in 1990, the legislature made an effort to strengthen the process, at least somewhat. And as part of that uh 1990 uh law, the legislature laid out um grounds on which cities may deny an affordable housing project. An affordable housing project is now defined, or or was at the time defined as a project in which 20% of the units are deed-restricted affordable housing for low-income households. And the grounds are something like the city has met its housing target, um, the project uh uh would cause a health or safety problem. Uh, the project doesn't comply with some other specific state or federal law, the project you know lacks um water or wastewater services or is on like agricultural preservation land. And the final ground is uh the project does not comply with the city's zoning and the city has a housing plan. That's this fair share housing plan that's in compliance with state law. In other words, the implication seems to be that if you don't have a housing plan that's in compliance with the state's fair share of the law, you can't use your zoning as the basis for disapproving an affordable housing project. And that's like that's the builder's remedy principle right there. And it was right there on the page and it'd been there on the page since 1990. And yet, like I'd never heard of anybody building this kind of project. And turns out neither had anybody else. And then the question was, well, why not? Um, and there are like I had some theories about the about the why not. Like there were some significant ambiguities about like if a developer submits a project, well, the city doesn't have a compliant fair share plan, and the city drags its feet on the project, but then uh and then five years later gets a compliant plan and then disapproves the project, can it do so because it then has a compliant plan? There's also some like really weird, like almost internally contradictory stuff in in the law itself about about what kinds of development standards can be applied to these projects that when cities don't have a compliant housing plan. But anyway, that got the that got people thinking about about the law. And then in the same year, the legislature, without any discussion of the build-rift remedy, passed a law that said uh a city has to process a uh housing uh project on the basis of the rules that were in place at the time the project application was submitted. It's like, oh okay, that's a potential solution to the problem of um the uh city like dragging its feet for five years until it gets a compliant plan and then disapproving the project. I followed up that initial thread with an explainer about how the builder's remedy would potentially fit together with these other um state housing laws and enable some projects to be built, even though historically nobody was willing to roll the dice on the on the builder's remedy. That was, I think, in the spring of 2022, so like three years later. And during that spring and summer, I was actually talking with some philanthropists about possibly establishing a um like a you can think of it as like a philanthropic venture capital fund to propose projects that are legally uncertain with a view to like getting good precedence on the books that would then allow um uh more profit-minded developers uh to uh have confidence in the laws that exist on paper but haven't been tested in practice. But I thought it was just too risky for someone who is actually like a profit-minded developer to try this. Um but then like without like any uh uh coordination with me or alert to me or anything else, in October of 2022, just a few months later, uh one lawyer submitted 12 builders' remedy projects uh in in Santa Monica, days before the city council was to vote to adopt its housing plan. And like the rest is history, like the floodgates open, people are submitting these projects all over the place. And I've since had like numerous hilarious conversations with developers who've approached me, like they see me at a like cocktail hour or something, like, hey Elmendorf, I was reading all your Twitter threads before you wrote that paper and buying up land here and there. It's like so people were actually like making making plans apparently on the basis of these Twitter threads about the builder's remedy. And then, like, once the first projects were submitted, a bunch of others came in quickly on the heels. And then there were a suite of judicial decisions that resolved most of the ambiguities in favor of housing. Uh, and then finally the legislature stepped in and and clarified most of the remaining, removed most of the remaining ambiguities, put some limits on the size of the builders' remedy projects, but also made a bunch of reforms that make made the projects more feasible. And so it's gone from being a kind of moribund, forgotten about part of uh California land use and housing law to a to a principal incentive for cities to to adopt decent housing plans.

SPEAKER_02 41:47

Wow. So you are directly this this tweet that you had is like directly responsible for many, many, many new housing uh units that might not have existed otherwise.

SPEAKER_00 41:59

Well, I would say I would say partially responsible because there were there were clearly other people who would have figured out some of the stuff as well. But certainly it my Twitter threads drew attention and unbeknownst to me led to some land acquisition and development strategies that probably wouldn't have been per pursued otherwise. And I also think that the the little primer I wrote a couple years later, laying out some of the problems and s suggesting ways the legislature could could clarify the law had a had a pretty significant influence on what the legislature ended up doing.

SPEAKER_02 42:33

Okay, so I kind of want to take a few steps back. You know, all this research that you've done on like how to communicate housing, how to get more housing built, how to get people to support housing, whatever else, like what would you say are the key takeaways for people in the Yimbi movement or the pro homes movement that are trying to convince others to build more homes? Like I can say my takeaways are like don't build ugly buildings and like you know, show show developers, you know, caring for rescue dogs. But I mean, uh besides like the some of those um more silly things, like what can people actually do and and where does the responsibility fall in terms of like I I guess trying to get other people on on board?

SPEAKER_00 43:19

I think where to the question of like where does responsibility fall? I think different people have different strengths. So some people have great strengths as a communicator of ideas, and if you've got great strengths as a communicator of ideas or the ability to do short form videos that people like, then by all means, like do more short form videos, right? Whether those are videos that help to like personalize developers or make developers into less of a mysterious force operating in in in people's worlds, or whether there those are videos like the sight line kind of moves video that helped to explain economic concepts and make them um uh Easier for lay people to understand. Um, I think a second big theme is most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about housing. So they rely on like simple, easily accessible bits of information, whether that's like an impression that like something looks good and and is improving the community, or associations they may have with developers or rich people or Wall Street that could be quite negative. Given that reality that most people aren't spending a lot of time thinking about these issues, like it's gonna be better to move housing policy from local governments to the states as much as possible, because when you're doing housing like very locally, having a few well-organized people who are most likely going to be the neighbors of the proposed project who might be disappointed in some way, like that NIMBY phenomenon is real. Like getting it into an arena where where immediate neighbors have less influence over projects is probably a good idea. And that's been a big, a big theme of the of the YIMBY movement. Um, but also when you're in these um policy-making arenas like state legislatures, where policies are more abstract and their particular implications for particular communities is less apparent. Like there's going to be a lot of pressure for things like inclusionary uh uh requirements that raise the cost of building because people like affordable housing. You know, that's another like like positive association concept, right? And so like recognizing that reality and then trying to figure out ways in which um that reality can be squared with economic realities is like a really important job for policymakers. And maybe the answer there is like funded inclusionary zoning, like we see from from uh Washington State with its transit-oriented upzoning law, which says uh you have to set aside 20% of the units as affordable housing for low-income households, but you get a 30-year property tax break to offset your losses on those units. So instead of like going to war with public opinion, right, trying to try to like reconcile public opinion with the with the economics. So I guess those are my those are my my big picture thoughts. Oh, and I I guess I guess one other thing is like, I don't want to say this is like a one other thing. I think this is actually a really important thing, is have some success stories that are not just success stories in the sense of we built more housing and the addition to the housing supply is on the margins going to make housing more affordable for people in general. But we created some new communities that people like. And so I'm actually really excited about groups like uh uh Create Streets in the UK, Livable Communities Initiative in in Los Angeles, um, that have a vision for uh and the and the courtyard urbanist people. These are groups that have a vision for how we can build a lot of new housing and make communities better places to live in the process. And I think I think that's really a promising strategy for um the EMB movement.

SPEAKER_02 47:08

It's funny you mentioned that because I do think that there is sort of there's a long run game for housing and then a short run. And so, like and the short run is okay, let's just build more housing, build whatever it is, anything, at least from my perspective. I have gotten so much flack, and this is like for for buildings that were built well before my time, um, that people hated and they hated it so much that now they're coming out in opposition to anything new that's that's getting built because they're very concerned that things are gonna turn out like these other projects that that they so deeply dislike. Um so I think you're absolutely correct. And like, if we can get some examples of look how great this can be, then I think that helps people better see the vision of a better, there's you get more housing in the long run, even if it's like slightly, I don't know, maybe maybe a little more expensive to have those architectural details or a little more expensive to you know lay things out in a certain way, it actually can foster a lot more more support uh down the road. So I don't know, I think about like how how we can get maximum amount of housing possible that we need. Um, and so maybe giving up a little bit in the short term is is beneficial uh for the long run. Now, with that, we have to ask you is there a book, blog, article, podcast, uh, anything that like has influenced you at any point in your life uh that you can recommend to our listeners?

SPEAKER_00 48:29

Yes, I'm I'm gonna recommend a book by Arthur Stamps the Third called Psychology and the Aesthetics of the Built Environment. This book was published in the year 2000. Had Arthur Stamps lived a little bit longer, um, he could have been like the Don Shoop of Design Review. A Shoop, as everybody listening to this podcast probably knows, is was uh uh an economist who taught in uh the planning and public policy school at UCLA for many years and wrote a book called The High Cost of Free Parking that became uh a bible among um urbanists and EMDs and transit reformers, and in time led to many, many, many important parking reforms that we've seen in state and and and local government levels. Um and Arthur Stamps was a was a contemporary of Shoops, a few years younger, um, who never had a faculty uh professor position, worked first as an engineer, then as an architect, and did countless really careful, small sample, but really careful studies of how people uh respond to different kinds of buildings. And he he collected these studies in this book published in the year 2000. It's just remarkable. Like there's so many like wonderful nuggets in that book about things that people like and things that people hate. He also shows that design review is practiced both in the uh professional architects uh version of design review and in the lay community board members of design review does not lead to projects that look better. So it's like really, really important results. But at the same time, he's able to show like very concretely like these are things that people like about some designs, these are things people don't like. Um, one of his findings is that building heights don't really matter, goes similar to your point until uh until they're they're at least one and a half times bigger than the neighboring buildings. At any rate, it's just it's a it's a it's a treasure of a book. Uh, and unfortunately, he died relatively young before and before the emergence of the EMB movement and uh before there was an audience for uh his work. But I I hope it hasn't come back.

SPEAKER_02 50:44

Oh man. Okay, I am very excited to read this book. So this is going on our very long book list, but I might have to bump this one up to the top that I read next. Anyway, Chris Elvendorf, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate having you on.

SPEAKER_00 50:56

Yes, great to be here. Thanks so much.

SPEAKER_02 50:58

Thanks for listening. We would love to hear your feedback and what you think we should do for season two by tagging us on Twitter at Pi4Everybody or leaving a comment on YouTube. See you next time. Pie gang.