Why are housing and urban land use so central to climate policy? In this episode, I try to answer the question squarely, in dialogue with Matthew Lewis of California YIMBY. We discuss why EVs alone can't decarbonize transportation fast enough, how the climate-driven insurance crisis will bankrupt states, why the climate movement’s own internal NIMBYs are its greatest impediment, and when green philanthropists and leaders will finally catch up.
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David Roberts
All right, hello everyone. This is Volts for March 7, 2025, "Why housing is a pass/fail question for climate." I'm your host, David Roberts. Longtime Volts listeners know that housing and urban land use constitute one of my central preoccupations, to which I've returned several times over the years. I talked with researchers at RMI about the greenhouse gas reductions that density brings. I talked with a kick-ass Washington state legislator who has gotten lots of housing reform passed in recent years. I talked with mobility activists about the social and psychological benefits of car-free cities. I ranted with Dan Savage about short-sighted land-use policy in Blue America. Just last week, I talked with two YIMBY activists from New York and Texas.
What I haven't done yet is an episode that straightforwardly explains why housing and urban land use belong on a podcast about climate and decarbonization. I think the connection is far better understood today than it was even a few years ago, but the mainstream climate movement has not fully metabolized the need to prioritize urban land reform. Nor have the movement’s funders taken it to heart.
So, I thought I would tackle the subject head-on with one of the best in the game. Matthew Lewis has been in and around California politics, policy, activism, and advocacy for decades now, in a variety of positions, but he is currently the director of communications for the advocacy group California YIMBY.
We're going to talk about why urban land use is a climate issue, why EVs are an insufficient solution, how the insurance crisis is crashing down on the housing industry, and what kinds of policies can lead us to a better place.
With no further ado, Matthew Lewis, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming. It's been a long time coming.
Matthew Lewis
David, it's so exciting for me. I'm thinking back to when we met and actually, in preparation for this conversation, realized it was right around the time that I was getting pulled into the climate movement from more of the energy and land use side. And so, I feel like we're coming full circle here.
David Roberts
Yeah, we both ended up here in YIMBY. The more I thought about how to structure this episode, the more my brain started to short circuit. There's a lot to cover here, but maybe let's just start at the highest level. So, there is climate mitigation, reducing greenhouse gases, and there's climate adaptation, which is just adjusting to the changes that are already underway or inevitable. And there's a reason why housing is central to both those stories. But let's start with mitigation, because I think this is kind of the connection that people don't fully get. So, if you were doing just the sort of elevator pitch, 5-minute version, why housing and urban land use are not peripherally, but central to climate change mitigation, to reducing greenhouse gases, how would you put it? To someone who, you know, your average educated person who just hasn't really thought about it?
Matthew Lewis
Yeah, yeah. If you'll humor me for a minute, I think it would be illustrative to explain how I came to notice because I didn't really. It wasn't inherent to me either. And I want to start there because I fully understand why someone who's steeped in climate technology and policy, it takes a minute to grok, "Wait, what the hell does housing have to do with this?" Because I was in the same boat. So my evolution into becoming a strident YIMBY, I knew that we had a housing crisis in California. I'm a homeowner, very lucky to be a homeowner in Berkeley.
And I was working in industrial climate policy at the time, helping to pass some laws around cleaning up heavy industry in California specifically. As a part of that, I was reading all these state reports on various climate initiatives. The state of California is very aggressive, at least through the legislature, in passing laws to reduce carbon emissions and address climate change. And I tend to read that stuff. I came across a report in 2016 or 2017. I want to give credit here. I'm going to give a shout out to all the climate journalists who listen to this podcast and sort of note to the funders, guys, we need good journalism.
It's very important for the movement. I mean that. But there is a woman named Melanie Curry who is the editor for Streetsblog, and she recently retired. So hello, Melanie, if you're listening to this, thank you for your career of good work. But I want to mention her because she started going to these really obscure meetings of the California Air Resources Board related to some transportation topics. That was her job. I read this Melanie Curry piece and it was like this bombshell buried on page 17. It basically said that the California Air Resources Board was admitting that there was no way for the state of California to meet its climate goals unless it reduced this very equally obscure concept called "vehicle miles traveled," which in plain language is how much you drive. How many miles do you drive?
And so, the report was like, "Look, we've got all these lofty goals about vehicle electrification." We have these things called sustainable community strategies that were the result of a law passed a dozen years ago by Darrell Steinberg called SB 375, the Sustainable Communities Strategy. And it all set these targets for reducing vehicle miles traveled. But what I didn't quite understand was like, well, I thought electric cars would take care of that. And for your listeners who are not from California, something about me that I'll share: I used to go to this festival called Burning Man. Some of you might have heard of it, but it's in the Nevada desert.
And in 2007, they actually called it sort of, there was a side thing within Burning Man called the Green Man — and you'll see where I'm going with this. And at the time, I was working in the solar industry doing like solar promoting solar panels and all the various accoutrements that go into the solar industry. But we managed to get this sort of area of Burning Man set aside for people to sort of demonstrate new clean technologies. They were really into that. So we're out in the desert and that was the year that this guy, who you may have heard of, named Elon Musk, drove the very first roadster out to the playa and showcased it to the burners.
And we all thought, "Oh my God, this guy's going to save the world." Well, obviously, yeah, sigh. What else? I mean, yes, giant, giant sigh. But so I had sort of drunk the Kool Aid. I was like, "This is amazing. We're going to have electric cars solve this problem of the fact that we have too much pollution from burning gasoline and so on and so forth." But then I saw this Melanie Curry story and it was like, "No, no, no, that's not the case at all. Inclusive of having the most aggressive electric vehicle rollout standards of any state in the country, we have to reduce how much people drive by 25% by the year 2030." And I was thinking, "Wait, wait, that's soon. That's not some distant future."
Because if you're in climate, you understand that everything we care about carbon are these long-term curves. Everybody's like, "Oh, look at the curve, look at the curve. Is it coming down, is it going up?" The same report from the California Air Resources Board showed that the vehicle miles travel curve was going up steeply. Not like kind of maybe it was going to go down and maybe it was feathering around with like, "Oh, we're going to solve the problem." But it was just on the steep upward curve. And the report concluded, "Yeah, we're going to miss the targets. Completely inclusive of full vehicle electrification."
And that was sort of like my wake-up call. Which is, "Oh, wait a second, so what do we do?" And they weren't equivocal about what do we do. They said, "Well, we have to change land use. We actually have to make it possible for people to have better choices about how much they drive." And it was a framing for me that I also hadn't thought about. It was like, "Oh, wait, yeah, are people choosing to drive as much as they do, or are they kind of being forced to by the built environment?"
And I am someone in my own personal life, I just hate driving. I think it's miserable. I hate sitting in traffic. I hate all the other people who are trying to muscle in front of you and all that stuff. So, I've made choices to avoid driving as best I can, but I'm very fortunate to have been able to make those choices. And when you look at what's happening not just in California, but all over the country, we're essentially building a residential environment that is locking in no choice but to drive. That's true all over the place, but it's also still true in California.
This is proving to be quite a catastrophe for us on several fronts, one of which is, of course, climate change. But it bleeds over into other issues, David, that you touched on at the opener related to the insurance crisis we're facing. The fact that we actually lost population for a couple of years, and it wasn't just because of the pandemic, it's because of housing costs. There are other implications for politics that get even darker and more dire, but I think we're going to try to keep this on the lighter side for now. So that was my introduction to this whole field of pretty established research around the relationship between land use, housing, and carbon emissions.
And it's massive. It's actually one of the largest of all of them. And it doesn't just stop with the driving. And I want to give you a chance to butt in, because I could keep going, but that was my introduction to it. And so, I just went down the rabbit hole of understanding, wow, full fleet electrification is a critical task and just completely insufficient to what we need to do to get carbon emissions going where they need to go.
David Roberts
I think a lot of people are still in the stage you were at in the beginning, which is like, "We can EV that," and they don't understand why. So, at the root of this, then, is the basic insight that there is simply no practicable way for us to electrify the auto fleet fast enough to meet our climate goals. That's the root of the climate angle on urbanism.
Matthew Lewis
That's right.
David Roberts
And we'll just say, you sort of alluded to this, but I'll just say as a framing device going forward. This is just, we're just talking about the climate part. Like, it's better economically for cities. I mean, it's better culturally, it's better politically to have people like — this is kind of what I wanted to say in the intro, but then I realized if I went down this road, I would just ramble on too long. But, like, cities are the greatest human invention. They are the greatest invention of human civilization. They produce wonders.
Everything, every technology, every culturally significant, everything you want to point to as human accomplishment comes out of cities, comes out of people living close together, you know, full stop. Like just seeing each other, running into each other. That, to me, is the root insight here to everything else sort of spills out from that. And greenhouse gases are just one part of that. But this is just — greenhouse gases are just one of many arguments.
Matthew Lewis
It wouldn't be a great podcast if we didn't make fun of economists a little bit.
David Roberts
Of course.
Matthew Lewis
And so, what an economist would call this in their cold, calculating verbiage, is an agglomeration.
David Roberts
Yeah, agglomeration. And it's magic. It produces wonders.
Matthew Lewis
Yeah, I think the thing that I really hope folks listening take away, especially if they're climate activists or funders, is in the list of things of major problems you need to solve for humanity, I would actually put this problem, this question of making cities affordable and accessible to the majority of humans, actually higher up than climate, both for the reason you cited, but also because from the typical person's experience, people are experiencing climate change, but most people aren't climate activists. Like, they're not looking at the world through the frame of "What am I doing today to improve the climate?"
Even if they say that they are, they usually aren't. And so, the reason I think it's so important to frame it that way is that cities are like a cheat code for solving climate change. And the benefits that people get are all these other things. It's sort of like, do you remember back in the day when all this efficiency stuff was first taking off? This is. I'm going to go back in Twitter history here a little bit to the early days of the online climate wars. And there were these debates about Jevons Paradox and "efficiency doesn't work."
And Amory Lovins was out there saying, "Oh, no, they don't want, they don't care about the electricity. They want a cold beer." Right? Like, that's still true today. People don't really care if their car is electric or gasoline. They want to get to work on time. People don't really care if their house is heated by a heat pump with solar panels or whatever. They just want it to be comfortable inside their house. And that actually extends to the urban experience, right? Like, people don't want to sit in traffic. People don't — I'll tell you, I think that there's a super cultural opportunity here.
And there's a guy in Portland who's really doing some incredible work on this with something called the "bike bus."
David Roberts
Oh yeah, I've seen them. They have those in Barcelona.
Matthew Lewis
Oh man, he's a hero. That guy's a climate hero. If the climate funders are going to fund anybody, it's in stuff like that. And the reason is, I see it as a cheat code is because if you talk to any parent with small children or just school-age children, the bane of their existence is the school drop-off line. Right. Why do we have a nation of school drop-off lines? I walked to school every day and I'm old, but I'm not that old.
David Roberts
But Matthew, people think they want that. Well, people don't want those things, but they think they are the price they have to pay to get the things they think they do want. And they think they want a yard. They think they want their own grill, their own pool, their own big TV, their own privacy. And I want to get into some of why they think that, but we're already behind schedule so we got to keep going. So, I'm going to do a little speed round here.
Matthew Lewis
Okay. Yeah.
David Roberts
The premise here is that people need to drive less. If you just follow that string, pull that string, everything else follows from it. You end up with the need for more compact communities to have more people living together, closer together. So, they need to drive less. There are a bunch of, I think, standard arguments you hear against that basic push. I want to just speed run through a couple of them, starting with the dumbest and building up to some that I think might actually have some merit. So, starting with the dumbest, what do you think about this worry about — because this is my experience in Seattle — this worry about urban trees and, more broadly, the character of the neighborhood?
What do you think about this idea that people moved somewhere that had a certain feel and they think that they are owed basically that feel staying the way it is when they bought it? Is that just "screw you, life is hard," or do you have something more to say about that?
Matthew Lewis
So, I'm glad you started with that because I actually think there's some merit to it, but not for the reasons the people making that argument think.
David Roberts
Okay, and remember, this is the speed round, so...
Matthew Lewis
I'm going to remember this is a speed round. We can't gloss over the incredible destruction of urban renewal, and this is literally razing cities to the ground to make freeways and suburbs. The reason I want to mention that is that part of what happened was people ended up in those car-dependent suburbs largely because there wasn't a second alternative. Something we know about human behavior is that once you've bought something, there's not just the sunk cost fallacy, but we're actually really resilient to change as a species. When you move somewhere, you start to think, "Well, this is just my preference," even if you didn't actually have a choice in the first place.
The task of leadership on climate is to recognize that a lot of the complaining you hear isn't people saying, "This is the only way possible for us to live." It's them saying, "I don't know another way, because there isn't a choice." The way we can prove this is true is by just using the classic, very simple, economic principle of prices. If you look at the price of housing in a walkable neighborhood in the United States, it will be 30 to 50% higher than a house in a car-dependent place.
And the reason is that a lot more people would prefer to have the house in a walkable neighborhood. They just don't have that choice.
David Roberts
Yes. Okay, second argument. The real problem is foreign investors buying up houses and apartments and leaving them vacant, thus driving prices higher. All we really need to do is ban foreign investment and then there's enough housing. We just need to put people in it.
Matthew Lewis
I mean — so as a bicycle investor, I personally have invested in a dozen bicycles specifically to prevent people from riding them so that I could make money on the bicycles later. So this is a great argument for me. I mean, it's just silly. The notion that someone buys a revenue-producing asset to keep it off the market is economic illiteracy. It just doesn't happen at any kind of scale that makes a difference. And foreign investment, first of all, is a good thing. I know that's not a very popular thing to say in the era of Trump, but one of the things that has made the US economy the most powerful economy on the planet is that we are a very attractive destination for investment and that actually has accrued to the benefit of most people by lowering costs, not just the cost of the goods they consume, including housing and everything else, but lowering the cost of capital.
And I think people are going to get a hard lesson in what happens when you reverse that, because we're kind of in that process right now. But the notion that there's foreign investors buying a lot of homes is not backed up by any of the data. Most homes in the United States are owned by their occupant. 67% of Americans own their homes and a significant portion of the rest are small mom-and-pop landlords who own, you know, two to three to four properties. So it's just really a non-issue.
David Roberts
How about this one? The supposed emission savings benefits of cities go away if you incorporate embodied emissions represented by all the stuff and services you have to import into the city to service city dwellers.
Matthew Lewis
I like this one because one of my favorite climate projects that I've ever come across is the CoolClimate Lab here at Berkeley that Chris Jones and the team put together several years ago. So, you can actually pull up on the CoolClimate Lab website, you can type in your zip code, and it will tell you what your emissions profile looks like. And it includes a lot of — not all embodied emissions, it's very hard to get 100% of embodied emissions — but it will tell you most of your embodied emissions. And what it shows is what you'd expect.
The resident of a central part of Washington D.C. has significantly lower carbon emissions than a resident of the suburbs of D.C., and it really is a very simple thing to break down. Most of that is car travel. But there's an important second piece that we didn't get into, and I just want to touch on this because there's really good research on this as well. Energy consumption in multifamily housing per square foot is significantly lower than energy consumption in a single unit house. And it's a very simple equation to figure out. When you put a 2,000 square foot flat on top of another 2,000 square foot flat, and then another one on top of that, you're basically capturing the energy. Most energy, of course, heat rises; it goes up through the roof.
But if there's another unit up there, then it goes into the other unit. What the researchers showed is that just doing that can reduce energy use by as much as 30%. Just the simple act of stacking. And it can be higher if you use passive house principles and do this stuff —
David Roberts
And you're just sharing, I mean, you're sharing infrastructure. It's pretty obvious.
Matthew Lewis
You also reduce embodied emissions because instead of having four boilers for the house, you have one larger boiler. I mean, there's all kinds of things you gain in economies of scale from doing multifamily.
David Roberts
I want to get back to this question, how far that goes, but one more, couple more arguments. What about the idea that the problem here is not too few houses in the hot cities where the jobs are? The problem is the jobs being concentrated in too few cities. And the answer here is to spread out the jobs so that you can have, instead of two or three giant congested metros, you have say 20 that all have kind of medium density jobs and medium density building and nice little suburbs. Everybody gets their suburb, everybody gets their jobs.
More cities, more cities get more of the pie. Why shouldn't we work toward that?
Matthew Lewis
I always find this one kind of curious for two reasons. One is the assumption that the people proposing it, especially if they own businesses, I sort of like, "Well, why didn't you do that?"
David Roberts
It's like when Obama, remember when Obama was talking about Mitch McConnell? "Why don't you, why don't you go hang out with Mitch McConnell?"
Matthew Lewis
"Why didn't you do that?" And the reason I start there is because there's a reason businesses locate in cities and —
David Roberts
It's agglomeration. We return to our theme.
Matthew Lewis
Yeah, return to our theme. But there's an important subcomponent of agglomeration, which is cities actually do this already. So, it doesn't matter if you go to St. Louis, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, or, you know, Cleveland. That's kind of already happening. The difference that's lost in that, "So why don't we just let people live in other cities?" is that you have specialization that happens. So, like you will attract a certain type of worker who specializes in a certain skill set based on what are the major industries in your city.
And you can't just suddenly decide, "Oh, we want all the tech workers to be in Omaha now because Omaha has lower cost housing," because all the tech workers actually live in the Bay Area and they're settled here. And it's by the same token, like you're not going to attract a ton of auto workers to Denver from Detroit because they're in Detroit. And there's this assumption like, "Oh, well, if we just decide to do this thing —" No, that's not how agglomeration works.
David Roberts
I never understand what the mechanism exactly is supposed to be.
Matthew Lewis
The mechanism is, "I feel like my neighborhood is full and why can't these people go somewhere else?" That's the mechanism. And I think the thing that's really fun for me is to try to keep a lightheartedness about it, the fun about NIMBYism is, man, do they come up with some creative ways to say, "I just don't like people and don't want them around me anymore."
David Roberts
Well, I try so hard. I mean, I actually, this is funny. I interviewed these two YIMBYs last week from New York City and Austin, and I was like, "Well, I consider myself an open-minded individual, you know, whatever. I want to know, like, what are the arguments against doing this stuff?" So, I went to AI, Matt, I went to Perplexity, the AI, and said, "List the top five arguments against urban density," and they suck. It's all the ones you're familiar with. It's the dumb stuff about trees, it's the dumb stuff about foreign ownership. It's the dumb stuff about "We're full."
Like, there are no good, empirically backed arguments hiding behind the bad arguments. It's bad arguments all the way down. Which goes to your point, which is all of these are reverse engineered. That's how they come across and that's what they are. They're reverse engineered from "I don't want anybody moving into my neighborhood."
Matthew Lewis
But, I think part of what we need to do as a movement is to unpack how people arrived at that place in the first place because it's not actually inherent to human behavior. You and I were talking before we got started, and I'm introverted, so I actually need alone time. But, I live in a major metropolitan area. I don't have a hard time finding the space I need to recharge my batteries. I think that this does come back to, we now have several generations with no experience of choice in where they live.
Like, they got pushed into a suburb because that's just where we build housing in the United States. And that's not unique to California. Like, that's a problem all over the country, that cities have been sort of run by NIMBYs for decades.
David Roberts
Yeah, but try telling people that their preferences have been —
Matthew Lewis
You can't say, you can't say that their preference is wrong. And this is why the work is really to break open the logjam against giving them a choice in the first place. I do want to say the one thing that we do come up with, and I think is something we could be better at as a movement, is just the word density is sort of dense. Like, it's so loaded of a phrase. Because in my vision of a "dense urban environment," I'm thinking like Paris or Milan, you know, I'm thinking Copenhagen, I'm thinking Oslo.
David Roberts
Let me get my question in here. This is my number one most important question. I think it's the one thing that I wrestle most with, and you're circling it now, so let me just ask it straight out, which is: I think there's a perception of the YIMBY movement, that they just want density uber alles, no matter what. And of course, in the real world, you're weighing density against some other values, and I can list a couple of those. And I'd like you to talk a little bit about how YIMBYs think about just raw density versus these other values.
So, one of the other values is just livability, right? And I think one of the main reasons there's so much opposition to density in the US is that most US city dwellers, their experience of density is that it's ugly and gross. And I bring this from Seattle, where — you know, not to go off on this whole rant again, because I think listeners are probably getting sick of hearing this rant — but like all the new population in Seattle is being herded into these ticky-tacky apartments alongside four and five-lane stroads. So, I mean, they're transit accessible, I guess in some definition, in that they're a couple of blocks away from a bus stop.
But, you would never walk anywhere. You can't walk anywhere. It's dangerous. There are people trying to parallel park in front of these things as other people are driving by at 40 miles an hour. There are kids running around coming home from school. It's like in Seattle, density where you find it is unpleasant, is generally unpleasant. I wouldn't want to live in most of what passes for density in Seattle. So, this is like one value you weigh against just the raw benefits of density. What about quality of density? Quality of livability, green space, walkability, public spaces? That's one thing.
Another one is, how do you weigh the merits of density versus the quality of the buildings themselves in terms of how tightly their envelope is built? Are they built to net zero standards, et cetera, et cetera? And then there's another value you might weigh against it: resilience. How much do we weigh just raw density versus density built specifically to be resilient against the effects of climate change? And then there's the justice thing too. So, on the one hand, you just have sort of like raw density. Get as many people as possible into as small a space as possible.
And then there's all these other things that you also value. But if you truly value them, you will, in practice, somewhat slow down and raise the price of density. If you do density well, you're going to do it a little more slowly and a little more expensively. So, how do you weigh the trade-off between just the need for density versus these other values that you might want to build in?
Matthew Lewis
There's a lot packed into that.
David Roberts
Yeah, that's 38 questions.
Matthew Lewis
Let me start at the top. So, the thing to remember is what YIMBYs are asking for — I mean, I think we use density as a shorthand for a whole bunch of things, and that's... and I kind of want to kill that because it gets such a charged reaction. But the truth of how housing works in practice is that a builder builds a house and if somebody wants to live in that house, they buy or they rent it. And what happens in these conversations about how many homes on a block or in a particular neighborhood or whatever is, cities decide that they're afraid of all the people living in the single unit neighborhoods who don't want any more housing anywhere near them.
And what that does is, they end up only allowing higher density zoning in a couple of specific neighborhoods. That has the effect of really distorting the entire market because you're constraining the place where all the people competing to build more homes can build. So, they're bidding up the value of the land where it's legal to build more homes. So, you're actually driving up the price by constraining the options. And then you end up with, what's the lowest cost building they can get done past their design review board and their historical architectural review board, and then the parking committee and the commercial committee and the parks and zone district committee.
It's like, it's like you just layer on all these costs and you end up with a building that's kind of like, "Well, it's not the most beautiful building we wanted to build, but it's the one we could get built." And I think that the principle here that YIMBYs are fighting for is that you really should have multifamily zoning in the entire city.
David Roberts
And this is, this is what they call gentle density. Right?
Matthew Lewis
But see, this is what happens if you do this citywide — again, a builder is a business person. I think this is something that people forget, but somebody who builds a house is actually in the business of providing a house for somebody who wants to live in it. They don't want to build a product that nobody wants to live in. Right. They also don't want to build a product that doesn't have nice amenities because they're competing against all the other builders. And so, you know, everybody wants to get more money for their home. But if you build enough of them, what you end up with, and I mean, across the city, is all kinds of different housing typologies.
And if you do it in the right way, you actually don't end up with that many high rises because you don't need them. Like, if you're doing fourplexes in four stories or six-story apartment buildings and they're legal kind of all over the place, you get like a few here and a few there and a few over there and a few over here, and you end up satisfying the need with a superior style of housing that not only fits into the neighborhood, but that can have all kinds of amenities that you just can't get in a high rise. And there's actually a guy in Seattle who, I don't know if you know who he is, Michael Eliason, who writes extensively about —
David Roberts
Oh yeah.
Matthew Lewis
So, you know Mike. So, he's got this whole thing and he's the guy. I mean, I learned so much reading his work about not just Passive House, but like —
David Roberts
His book grew out of a guest post on Volts.
Matthew Lewis
Oh, that's so cool. I love to hear that. But so, he's got this, you know, if you look at, for the listeners who want to check it out, the buildings that Mike is talking about are spectacular. Like, you have people beating down the door to live in these buildings.
David Roberts
Yeah, but this is the problem, like, no, Americans see those. We're back to our basic problem.
Matthew Lewis
They're illegal to build.
David Roberts
Exactly. So, this, we're in a — I don't even know what you call it, we're in a trap where no American consumer can see a better alternative and therefore, they don't think they want one.
Matthew Lewis
This is why the housing shortage and affordability crisis is a crisis of political leadership. And the reason is that no matter what you try to do, and I'm talking anything you want, a bike lane, somebody's gonna oppose it. You want to put in a preschool, somebody's gonna try to oppose it. You want to put in a park, somebody's gonna try to oppose it. You're gonna put in a new Indian restaurant, somebody's gonna try to oppose it. Like, that's the nature of cities. There's always some crank who thinks that time ended the day they moved into the neighborhood and that nothing should change after that.
And this is actually — I think that there's a deep philosophical question here, and I want to push back against the premise that I know you were sort of straw-manning it, so I appreciate that. But the very notion that anything should be subject to not just a pocket veto of a neighbor's, but that the neighbors can sincerely express a desire to have no change happen to them ever, as if that's a real thing that's possible on this planet. And I mean that sincerely, because I think part of what we're confronting here is a society that has become afraid of change.
And that's a much deeper problem than housing. Like, housing is an expression of that.
David Roberts
It's that lack of social trust, which infects everything.
Matthew Lewis
But there's an entire — I mean, I got to do this because this came up yesterday, and so it's so timely. But there's a Native American writer, Leslie Marmon Silko, who wrote a book in the late 70s, early 80s called Ceremony, and it's about this young Puebloan guy who's, like, lost on the reservation. He doesn't know which way his life is going. And he meets this older kind of witchcraft lady who's, like, mentoring him and teaching him stuff about how to make life work in the white, colonialist, modern world. And he's struggling and struggling, and she finally says a bunch of things to him about change.
And there's this quote in the book that I want everybody to fully internalize, which is, "She taught me this above all else: Things which don't shift and grow are dead things."
David Roberts
Yep.
Matthew Lewis
And this is where we are. We're at this place where we're so allergic to change and growth that it's killing us. And it's not just — we see this in housing, but it's not just in housing.
David Roberts
US political history is, like, around the 2010s, there's a big wave of, "Hey, maybe we should be less racist. Maybe we should be less misogynist." And the backlash against that is ongoing and may very well literally destroy the country. Like, people really hate change across the board. And I don't know how you solve that on any kind of mass level.
Matthew Lewis
Well, let me put it this way. You're not going to solve it at a planning and zoning commission hearing, but for some reason, we've made that the place where people get to express these fears. And I don't want to undersell the fact, especially for your listeners, that if you're afraid of what's happening nationally, if you're freaked out about national politics — I've been saying this on Facebook to anyone who would listen to me — go down to City Hall and get involved. Because you would be shocked by the number of very consequential decisions that are being made in your city that will have a much more immediate effect on your life than anything that's happening in Washington, D.C.
And in fact, I would argue that a lot of the explanation for what's happening in Washington, D.C., is the degree to which people have completely checked out of local politics and don't know why their city looks the way it does. Like, they don't know why there's so much homelessness. They don't know why housing is so unaffordable. They don't know why they're sitting in traffic for three hours a day.
David Roberts
People don't even know — I mean, this was one of the original insights of early feminists — it's not like they know it's a political issue and they don't know the right explanation. They don't even know it's an issue. Like, do you know what I mean?
Matthew Lewis
It's the water they're swimming in; it's the fish swimming in the water.
David Roberts
Women didn't think of doing more housework as a political issue as such until it was framed as such. Then, you see the world in a new way. A lot of people just don't think, "Why is the city this way? What could be different?" But this question about local control is interesting because, on the other hand, it seems like one of the principles of the YIMBY movement — I don't know if I elevate it to a principle, but it's one of the strategies — has been to try to push decision making, the locus of decision making, up out of the local area.
And in fact, as far as I can tell, the higher you get it, the better policy you get. Like, the really good policies we're seeing are coming out of the state level. How do you think about the tension between, in terms of democracy and in terms of outcomes, the sort of tension between local control and pushing it up?
Matthew Lewis
So, the initial tension really comes from the emergence of the YIMBY movement in the first place. It was a bunch of us, and I was sort of one of the early acolytes of, you know, showing up to these hearings — this is going back 10, 12 years — and I was like, "Oh my God, I'm outnumbered 40 to 1. But I'm going to be, I'll be the stink at the party because that's the fun of being a YIMBY," right? But part of what happened along the way, so my boss, Brian Hanlon, I met him at one of these planning and zoning commission hearings in Berkeley of all places.
And he went on to found California YIMBY because he kind of quickly unpacked, like, "This isn't going anywhere and it doesn't scale."
David Roberts
I look at the live tweets from those meetings. You don't have to go to many of them to see, to grok exactly what's going on.
Matthew Lewis
Exactly what's happening. So, he very smartly started a statewide policy organization focused on changing state housing law and then cramming down, making more homes legal in the cities that had basically made them illegal and now have like the worst homelessness crisis in the developed world. But I think there's this knock-on effect that has happened over time and I want to get to your question. It's not really an either-or. So yes, it's critical that states that have cities run by anti-housing factors or that have just unaffordable housing crises and burgeoning traffic and pollution and all those other problems, they do need to come to their cities and say, "You guys aren't solving this problem."
And by the way, states actually have a significant, urgent interest in solving these problems that go way beyond just climate change. Like, if you don't have affordable housing, your population starts to go down, and that's catastrophic.
David Roberts
Well, California's losing legislators. I mean, I keep pounding the table about this, literally, concretely losing the Democratic Party.
Matthew Lewis
We're probably going to lose four seats at the next apportionment. That's right. And it's insane. But that's the cost of a housing shortage. But what I wanted to get to was, you got to do the state work because then you can get all the cities at once and sort of say, "Hey guys, like no, no, we want our cities to be places where as many people who want to live there as possible can." So that's part one. But there's another part that we realized along the way and we've actually pulled this off in Berkeley of all places, which is that the people who were showing up to these meetings — and there's actually research on this which is kind of stunning — but the people who show up at meetings to fight against housing are not representative of even their own neighborhoods.
David Roberts
Oh, no, there's tons of research on this.
Matthew Lewis
They are just the people with the free time to go to all the meetings.
David Roberts
And who has free time? Older, wealthier, whiter.
Matthew Lewis
Yep, it's true. But in Berkeley, what happened was because we'd sort of built this movement, we actually ended up doing both. So there's a bunch of folks who were involved in sort of standing up state legislative capacity on housing that came from East Bay, Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco. But along the way, we identified all these neighbors who were like, "Yeah, I'm totally with you guys. I don't know why the city keeps blocking all this housing." And that, over time, led to us kind of winning almost all the seats on the Berkeley City Council.
And so, the reason I want to point that out is that the only reason you need states to intervene is because the cities have, like, very vocally said, "We don't care how expensive housing is. We don't care how many people are homeless. We don't care how much pollution this causes. We just like things the way they are."
David Roberts
Well, if you're like Marin, like, you're sitting pretty. What internal incentive do you have?
Matthew Lewis
Well, I'll tell you. I mean, actually, I'm glad you brought up Marin, because this comes back to our first principle: Marin is losing children, as in, their school districts are shrinking, and so they're actually starting to lose funding for education because the formulas work on how many pupils they have. But there's another even worse part of this from it — well, it's not worse, it's all bad in Marin. But 70% of the people who work in Marin County commute from another county. And so when you look at the carbon emissions impact of Marin's intransigence on housing, like, this is a county that sort of prides itself on being "We're all sustainable. And we're like —
David Roberts
In this house.
Matthew Lewis
"In this house, we like science, except not as long as it doesn't get too sciency." Like, what kind of science are we talking about here? But they're literally causing pollution all over the Bay Area because they don't allow more housing to happen. And they'll tell you, "Oh, no, but that's not true." And I've had people say to me, "Yeah, but Elon Musk is..." And I'm like, "Don't even say that. Don't, don't, don't finish that sentence. Please don't finish that sentence."
David Roberts
"He's building tunnels."
Matthew Lewis
Tunnels. Yeah.
David Roberts
I mean, this is a political dynamic I'm interested in, because one of the worries that I hear from a lot of people is if you go up to the state level, pass policy there, and then go back down and impose it on cities that don't want it, you are going to be pissing off and alienating Democratic voters, and you might drive them into the arms of the reactionaries, or you might just cause a backlash that causes them to elect a bunch of NIMBY Democrats. Or you might... You know what I mean? Like, by overriding local control, you risk political backlash.
Now, if what you're saying is true, if, like, local control is in some sense an illusion and the locals are actually with you on this, then there's less danger.
Matthew Lewis
There's actually a third phenomenon, and it's actually even cooler than all that. So, we talked earlier about how what people are afraid of is change, which is really being afraid of something that you haven't seen or don't know or don't understand. Right? What ends up happening is you build the apartment, and people are like, "Oh, that's not so bad."
David Roberts
No one ever goes backwards on these things.
Matthew Lewis
So, literally, the people who will go to the meeting and say, like, "This is going to destroy the entire community. It's going to kill thousands of children. All the dogs are going to run out of town. Like, this is the worst project we've ever seen." You literally build it, and the next day they're like, "Oh, yeah, that's not so bad." And so, this question of a backlash is sort of like it's a red herring because you don't end up actually... I mean, I think the thing that people need to understand is most of the housing that will ever be built in the United States has actually already been built.
Yeah, like, we need 5% more homes, you know, and it's kind of like... And guess what? You can actually put them... if you spread them out enough, you'll barely even be able to tell. And I actually do this thing in Berkeley when I get the chance with somebody where — I actually did this with a columnist for the Orange County Register a couple of years ago. We were walking through a neighborhood, and I was like, "Look, I'm just going to... we're going to walk through this neighborhood, and I want you to try to guess which house is an apartment building and which house is a single family."
And he couldn't guess. Like, he couldn't tell, "Oh, yeah, no, there's four units in that." Well, but it looks like, it looks like one house. They don't even know.
David Roberts
I'll concede this, but with a big "but". And this is one of the things about urban land use fights in general that baffle me, and I've raised it a bunch of times, which is: you're right that if they just build the apartment building, you won't get sustained backlash because the fears are mostly made up, they mostly don't play out, and apartments are fine and they're apartments all over the place. Everything's fine. And it's the same with bike lanes. It's the same with shutting a highway. Almost any YIMBY-esque urban reform, people never go backwards and want to get rid of it after it's there.
Once it's there, people are almost always like, "Oh, that? Well, that's fine." There's no backlash. But on the other hand, nor does the fight materially change the next time. In other words, no one learns from the fact that they built the apartment and it was fine. The opposition to the next apartment building is just as furious as the opposition to the last one.
Matthew Lewis
I would push back on that and I would give a few examples of why I don't think that's necessarily true. So, one is here in Berkeley, where the support for more housing grew as we densified the downtown. It went up. The same happened in Emeryville. But, Emeryville has always been very pro-housing. It's also a very small city. Sacramento has been crushing it on homebuilding for years and they keep doing more, they keep going further. Cambridge, Massachusetts, just this week legalized, I think, six-story buildings throughout the entire city. The entire city.
David Roberts
And is this changing minds or is this just bringing people who agree out of the woodwork and making them politically visible?
Matthew Lewis
I think it's a combination of various factors. I think it's that for sure. It's sort of bringing in the originally aligned people who were on the sidelines. I think there is the reality of an actual housing shortage and affordability crisis where you're building a political movement that's like, "No, this is affecting us and we have to solve it." I think there's a whole bunch of things that are coming into play here.
David Roberts
So there is momentum, you think there's momentum and there's change? People are changing their minds?
Matthew Lewis
There's momentum in the YIMBY movement. And I want to be, I think, something that really inspired me from the very early days of YIMBYism. Coming from climate activism, these were people who were showing up that did not have an institution.
David Roberts
Right.
Matthew Lewis
They did not have, there was no one — like, they were just like, "I'm going to go to this meeting because, damn it, this is insane that they're blocking a senior housing place like downtown on city-owned land." Right. And so it's organic. There are people like this all over the country and it's sort of like the bright side of the dark side of the problem. So the dark side is that we have a legitimate housing shortage and affordability crisis in most of our cities. The bright side is that the people who are experiencing that have agency and are showing up and using that agency. The YIMBY movement is channeling it into both better election results at the city level, but also state-level reforms that will accelerate progress on this.
David Roberts
And bipartisan state level.
Matthew Lewis
And bipartisan, yeah. That's both yours and my favorite word.
David Roberts
Well, this is like one area of policy where it legitimately is kind of a little bit bipartisan. A little bit. We haven't talked about the insurance thing yet. Obviously, I did a whole pod on this with Kate Gordon, which was great. People should listen to it.
Matthew Lewis
Oh yes, that's right, that's right. I remember I set you up with her.
David Roberts
So, we don't have to rehearse the whole insurance thing. I think people get that insurance rates are rising because of climate change. Let's just do the sort of summary. So, to the extent you can summarize, why does the insurance situation lend urgency to YIMBY reforms? What is the connection between climate, insurance, and YIMBY?
Matthew Lewis
The journalist Abrahm Lustgarten has a book out, about, I don't know, about two years now, and it's called "On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America." In the book, he gets, it's a pretty straightforward climate change book, "Here are the impacts that are coming." It builds on things such as that I was involved with a dozen years ago with Kate, the Risky Business Project. And it essentially extrapolates, "Here are parts of the United States that it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to either build or maintain a home because of either fires, flooding, extreme heat, or extreme hurricanes."
And so, he extrapolates a little further and says, "There's going to be 10 to 15 million Americans who need to move in the next couple of decades." And when you think about that, like the next couple of decades is the life of most existing mortgages in the United States. So, these are homes that people are still making payments on. And when you unpack the fact that the mortgage can't be held if it's not insured, you realize the scale of the crisis we're looking at. And this is, you know, we are in the immediate throes of this in Los Angeles with the fires.
I don't think people in Los Angeles realize how bad it's going to get, even if the state does everything right, because Los Angeles is a city built to block housing. I mean, it is just a political body that has perfected the art of creating homelessness, displacement, and overcrowding. And it's what it is best at. And that's on top of the fact that a lot of these people were underinsured, which means they'll get a payout for the house they lost, but it will be nowhere near enough money to rebuild what they had. This is happening all over the country.
I mean, it's happened in New Orleans. It's happened in South Texas. It's happened in Florida. And so, the YIMBY case again, I mean, I ascribe to the housing theory of everything. So, like, if you ask me what a problem is, I'll explain to you how it's connected to housing. But the reason the climate movement needs to be freaked out about this is that 10 to 15 million people in a country of 380 million doesn't sound like a lot. You still got to figure out where they're going to go. And on top of that, I think something that gets lost in all this is that the trend of people moving from rural areas into cities is continuing, even if they're moving into the suburbs and exurbs of those cities.
Right? So, it's not like we've ended history and said, "Oh, no, now we can do remote work and everybody can just live wherever the heck they want." Like, that was a very weird development during COVID where people were like, "Oh, yeah, this means you don't have — " No, actually, you need teams. People work in teams. Like, agglomeration is real.
David Roberts
I just want to underline that agglomeration has not been cancelled.
Matthew Lewis
Agglomeration has not been cancelled. It has not been cancelled.
David Roberts
It's still very real.
Matthew Lewis
It's still very real. So, you have these two things piling up on each other. You have the existing housing shortage in cities that were sort of blocking agglomeration effects. And there's been economic analyses that suggest this is very expensive for the US economy.
David Roberts
It's a macroeconomic effect.
Matthew Lewis
It's like wiping out trillions of dollars in value. I mean, it's just insane. And my personal — I mean, I would be remiss if I didn't say this on your podcast: I hate that all this money goes to the car industry.
David Roberts
Yeah, I was going to say. I was going to say one of your core beliefs is that the car industry is way worse than most people appreciate. I wonder if you want to just say a few words.
Matthew Lewis
Way worse than most people appreciate.
David Roberts
I'll give you a little, like a one-minute rant, if you want to.
Matthew Lewis
So, I drive a car sometimes because, you know, we live in the United States and sometimes it's necessary and even nice to be able to drive somewhere. The problem is that we're talking about a $5 trillion annual expense to the American people. And if you dig up the statistics on what people report about how much they drive, do they like it? How do they feel about it? What does it do for human health? What about the health costs of all these crashes? The numbers are just, they're mind-blowing. And it's all a subsidy for the car industry.
And I'm sort of like, "Look, if somebody wants to drive around, I don't really care, but don't let them run me down on my street and don't make me subsidize their parking." Like, I'm fine if you want to drive everywhere you go, I don't actually have a problem with that. I just don't want to pay for it. And I think that there's... I get that people are like, "Well, but this is a proper role of government to sort of subsidize how people get around." And I'm like, "Yeah, on a bus!" But we're talking about a private industry.
Like, we're subsidizing a private industry, and it's larger than anything else we subsidize. I mean, people don't realize, like, it's trillions of dollars a year that we actually give to these.
David Roberts
And to get back to the point you made earlier: if something is ubiquitous long enough, people lose sight of the fact that it's a choice. I just saw, you know, Seattle has this program. I think a bunch of cities had this post-COVID program where you close off a few streets, make them pedestrian streets, right? Because people are stuck at home, et cetera, et cetera. And then some cities tried to make them permanent or semi-permanent.
Matthew Lewis
Yeah, yeah.
David Roberts
Seattle did it in its normal half-assed way. There are some streets still, but it's still temporary marking and no one cares. But I was looking at Nextdoor, you know, which I should never do. I was reading this guy on Nextdoor who basically said, "The arrogance of these people to cut off a street from its intended purpose so that a minority of people can have access to it." And I'm like, "Dude, what do you think the status quo is? What do you think the city has roped off that area for a minority of users its entire history? You're just mad that it's a different minority of users."
Matthew Lewis
I have to say, I think the most darkly funny thing that's happening right now in the country is that a car salesman, who built his company on Democratic electric car subsidies and sold most of his products to liberals and Democrats in blue cities, has gone on to completely dismantle the entire United States government that liberals were depending on to defend the country. And I was like, "Yeah, we paid for that."
David Roberts
As I've been watching it all, I've been like, "This is Matthew Lewis' worldview unfolding right in front of me. Like, you empower the car guys —"
Matthew Lewis
Look, man, I told you guys we should never trust a car salesman. Just don't. If you don't trust the car salesman, everything else is going to be fine. But nobody listens to me, man.
David Roberts
We are already over time. I knew we could talk about this forever, but I want to get to at least a little bit of the question of policy. So, there are a zillion things you could do in the name of driving less and having people live more closely together. We've had now, you know, the experiment run in several different places. We've had several different kinds of policies passed. Are we far enough along now that we can make a list of the most efficacious — like, if you want to get involved in this advocacy, you want to go to your city hall, what is in your back pocket? What is the sort of top three list of reforms that...?
Matthew Lewis
Let me do three to five. So, people give YIMBYs a lot of heck because they're like, "Oh, all you guys care about is zoning reform." And we do care about zoning. Zoning reform is important. It matters a lot. And it's still got to be number one, because a city's ability to restrict how many homes you can build on a piece of land is the gating factor for all the other things that you got to do. So, you've got to do zoning reform. And ideally, you do it citywide to prevent the unintended consequences of driving up costs in a few places where you allow multifamily, you actually make housing more expensive when you restrict it that way.
You also don't end up with the ability to create the kind of neighborhood connectivity that you want in a city. Like, you do want to have an area where you're not just walking on one block and then it's a car sewer on the next block. You want to connect these things, and so you want to do that citywide. But zoning alone is actually not sufficient. And there's two reasons: One is there's a bunch of other processes and barriers that cities have put in place that you also have to address.
David Roberts
When you say zoning, do you mainly mean no more single-family zoning? All lots have to accommodate two to three dwellings? I mean, there's a lot of different kinds of zoning reform.
Matthew Lewis
Yeah. Something that's really important to point out is that under all scenarios, anyone who wants to build a single-family home will still be allowed to do so.
David Roberts
I know this is the funny thing about people who yell. They're like, "Washington is shoving this one-size-fits-all solution on us." So again, what do you think the status quo is?
Matthew Lewis
We're not taking anyone's single-family home, and we're not going to prevent you from building a single-family home if that's the kind of home you want. There's no YIMBY alive who wants that. Because it just is irrelevant to the conversation. What we're saying is, "If you want to build two homes, you're allowed to. If you want to build four homes, you're allowed to. If you want to build six to 10 homes, you're allowed to. If you want to build one, that's also fine." And if you live in one right now and it's just a single-family home, that's completely fine. Like, good for you. You have a house to live in. We hope you live long and prosper in that house. But that is all a zoning question.
And in an ideal world, you would taper this — you don't really need to, but I think the politics will lean this way — you allow denser housing as you move closer to urban cores or importantly to transit centers, because that's where the value is. And this is actually a critical point: Cities and states have put billions of dollars into public transit systems of public money, but then they allow the single-family homeowners around those transit systems to dictate the land use. And it's like, "Guys, you didn't pay for that amenity."
David Roberts
This is Seattle, Matt. We spent whatever, like $5 billion on light rail.
Matthew Lewis
Oh, it's everywhere.
David Roberts
And basically accepted light rail that provides about 10% of the value it could have added if you just built around the station.
Matthew Lewis
It's a giant subsidy to those homeowners. And it's not quite similar in scale to what we do with cars, but it's a similar philosophy, which is, "We'll spend all this public subsidy, but only let some people actually have access to it." So, zoning is one. There's another one, and this gets into the details of what actually happens in a city planning department, which is the permitting, the entitling, and then the design review and related processes around the type of building you build, when it can get built, how long that process takes, etc. So, permit streamlining is really, really critical.
San Francisco is one of the worst offenders on permitting in California. It takes almost three years to get a permit to build a house in San Francisco. And it's just, if you think about it, people are like, "Oh, it's so expensive. Well, it's expensive because it takes three years." I mean, that process is — you're paying somebody to make it through the process over three years.
David Roberts
Yeah, and I don't know how common this is, but it took me a while to even wrap my head around this one. But, you know, Seattle has this design review board where you propose a building. You design the building, and then the building passes all the code. Like, it lives up to code. It does all the things that legally it's supposed to do. And then you take your legal building and run it in front of this review board that just says stuff like, "Eh, I don't like the shade of the bricks on that corner. Go fiddle with those bricks." And that alone, that right there, that's six months of reviews, redoing the design, coming back to the design review board. And that can go on for years. Who are these people?
Matthew Lewis
Coming back to something you said earlier, which is, why do we end up with these buildings that just aren't that attractive? Well, that's why. Because what you end up with is an architectural community that's like, "Well, we've run through these traps so many times. This is the only kind of building that will possibly pass design review." And it's stupid. It's like, if you go to a modern country like China, you're like, "They have all kinds of interesting architecture."
David Roberts
And it turns out, diversity is interesting to the human eye. Who knew?
Matthew Lewis
It's interesting. That's right. But design review is one of the worst, worst things that cities do for buildings, because the reality is that architects are freaking talented, man. And they don't want to build ugly buildings. They want to put a beautiful building on their resume. I promise you, they care about that. So let's let architects do what they do and make our cities more beautiful. But that requires changes to the permitting process, the review process. There's a bunch of stuff that's in the world of finance that gets very tricky. So one of the things that we realized was when you pay your fees, if you're forced to pay your fees when you pull the permit, as a builder, you're paying a very high interest rate on the fees before you've ever got a certificate of occupancy.
So, we wrote a law that says, actually, you pay your fees when you get your certificate of occupancy. And it saves so much money on some of these projects that they're actually able to add 1 to 2 to 4 to 5 units to the building. But that gets into the weeds of some of the changes. I think that the big one, and this is probably the biggest challenge which we face, is access to finance for subsidized affordable housing. And this is where there's this cleavage on the left for some reason that I still don't understand.
David Roberts
Yeah, I wanted to ask about this. This is the number one question that you saw on social media. The number one thing people ask.
Matthew Lewis
It's so weird, man.
David Roberts
People want housing to be a human right, and they want the whole thing to be publicly administered. And, I don't think people appreciate what that would involve, like what that would involve and the prospects of that actually happening.
Matthew Lewis
I get the sentiment of where it's coming from because there's a certain cohort of people who just think that the problem is actually capitalism. And capitalism has its warts. Let's be really clear. It's not a perfect system. But 90% of Americans live in market-rate housing. And part of the reason is that it can be built much faster and you get more variety and you get more choice and so you end up with a much more abundant housing ecosystem when you allow the market to build what it builds. People have made the mistake of thinking that what we currently live in is what the market can deliver.
And that's the problem because it's like, "Guys, the rulings are all in the books. In the 60s, 70s, and 80s, they made it illegal to build most types of housing. Like, this is not what the market delivered. This is what NIMBYs delivered."
David Roberts
This gets back to the confusion we were talking about earlier. Like people view this, they think, "Well, if this is what the market produced, this must be what people want."
Matthew Lewis
Yeah, that's right.
David Roberts
"This must be what I want."
Matthew Lewis
That's right. It's that famous meme of the guy, like with a butterfly, like, "Is this efficient?" No, it's not. But I think that the place where YIMBYs are in full alignment with some of the far-left folks who critique us is we actually do need a lot of subsidized housing. That is an unquestionable truth. And we need not just the housing, but we need the funding for the housing. And it is very hard in some states to get that funding passed; it requires a tax increase of some kind.
David Roberts
Well, also the place they look for that money is from developers. So then, they put a bunch of fees on development to raise money for that stuff. But then, that has the sort of knock-on effect of slowing down and making it more expensive.
Matthew Lewis
There's a whole rabbit hole we could go down around inclusionary zoning, which is just a total catastrophe, which is what you're describing.
David Roberts
Yeah, you don't want to make building slower in order to fund —
Matthew Lewis
"You don't tax the thing you want more of." That's right.
David Roberts
Well, there's a shorter way to put it.
Matthew Lewis
But the thing is, you know, there is a way to raise a lot of money for housing subsidies, and we need to be exploring more of those ways because the reality is that for somewhere between 5 and 10% of the population, they're never going to be able to afford market-rate rent. And I was having breakfast with a guy this morning — I just want to use an illustrative example because Oakland has built about 10,000 new market-rate apartments downtown in the last 10 years. Almost all of those apartments are affordable to the median income earner in Oakland.
So, 80 to 100% of AMI. So, when we talk about affordable housing, people get confused because, like, "Well, affordable to who?" And the YIMBY answer is affordable to most people. Like, if it's affordable to most people, then we've achieved our goal. What the far left has been saying is, "Yeah, but that's not good enough. We want it only to be affordable to people at the very bottom of the income stream." The problem is that that's such a distorted view of the populace because you're only talking about 5% of people. The whole middle of the country also needs housing.
Right. And so, if you build enough of it at that range, you actually can house them. And affordability, by the way, is defined by the Department of Housing and Urban Development as about 30% of your income. So, there's actually this is not like an unknown, it's like that's the number you're aiming for. But we still need billions of dollars in subsidies to provide housing for people at the bottom of the income scale. And California YIMBY has sponsored every measure we could find that would actually do that. We're totally on board with trying to get social housing reintroduced in the state of California because that's another way to approach having the state build homes for people who need them.
David Roberts
What's the model? Different countries, different cities do social housing in many different ways. A lot of people point to Vienna, but that's sort of like, you know, that's like 80% of that is subsidized or something like that. Do you have a...?
Matthew Lewis
Well, so subsidized and social are not the same thing, to be clear. Like, it's an ownership model. It's not just about the subsidy. So, you can have social housing that doesn't necessarily get a huge amount of government subsidy. It just is owned by a government or a quasi-government entity that can control rents and manages the structure.
So, I think people assume that this means that you can't have ownership in social housing. You actually can. The difference is that when you buy into a social housing project, your resale value is capped. Now, that also has the benefit of capping your cost. It goes both ways. Right. So, there's a lot of different ways to do this. I think that the challenge is that the history of social housing in the United States is not great, but it also ended so long ago. We're like generations beyond when that was going on. And I think that the zeitgeist has changed enough where it's worth taking a look at.
But, I think everybody needs to be really clear, like, there is almost no plausible future where 100% of the homes built in the United States are social housing. It's just beyond comprehension because you're talking trillions of dollars and the government will never have the money. The worst part of this is it's not just that the government will never have the money. It's that the market already has the money and wants to build the housing at a price that people can afford because those people are earning money and they want to pay for that housing. And so, this notion that we should stop a willing buyer and a willing seller from having a transaction because it hasn't achieved our ideological goals is, frankly, cruel. It's cruel.
David Roberts
Yeah, that was the point I wanted to make. Every bit of housing you build, it's not just that a developer made money, blah, blah, whatever, it's that a family got housing. You know what I mean? Like, every bit of housing you build relieves a little bit of suffering. It's not a neutral thing here. So, delaying it, waiting for an ideological revolution is not neutral. You're hurting a lot of people.
Matthew Lewis
And I think this gets at a sort of deeper philosophical question about both governance and society and economics, which is, should people be free to choose where they live and in what kind of structure they live, or should the government be deciding that for them? And I know that's a very oversimplified version of the conversation, but at the end of the day, we kind of fought these ideological battles 50, 75 years ago. And while I think there's a lot of things we need to improve about American capitalism and the social welfare state, and I'm very curious and interested in, like, universal basic income, especially as we have artificial intelligence coming on, I think it gets more salient.
But, we live in a country where people like to choose where they live. And the best way to satisfy that is by building a lot of housing and giving them a lot of options and making builders compete with their products, their house that they build for people who want to live in them. And this notion that there's some way for someone to insert themselves and say, "No, you're the wrong person to live in that house. This is the right person to live in this house. That's the wrong kind of house to build. This is the right kind of house to build."
That's kind of what we're grappling with here. Like, I actually. It's been really wild, David, because I didn't start as, you know, I was never like a "Rah, rah, freedom" kind of guy. Like, my background is much more on the left side of the spectrum, but housing kind of freedom-pilled me a little bit in a way that I didn't expect. Because, no, actually, people should be able to choose where they live. Like, that seems fundamental.
David Roberts
Yeah.
Matthew Lewis
And the fact that we're having to debate this on the left is disappointing. But I gotta say, like, I think for the most part, people are pretty aligned. I think these fights are much more online in general. There are big exceptions to that. Like, we definitely have a political problem in California with some of this, especially in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco. But I think those are actually being slowly resolved through better engagement. Like, more people are getting involved in these questions.
David Roberts
Big victory in Cambridge mere days ago. Cambridge, which is right in the sort of, like, heart of old money NIMBY Northeast, you know, that's the heart of darkness there. And if they can do it. So, there's a million other things I could ask you, but we're way over time, and I want to touch on at least one thing before we're done. So, we'll make this the kind of the final topic, which is, I think it's fair to say, and I think you would agree, that the institutional climate movement and climate funders are not as hip to this aspect of the climate fight as they ought to be.
As a matter of fact, I just had an experience last week. I won't even say any of the names because it's all, none of it's real yet, but suffice it to say, a bunch of big names, wealthy people are getting together in conclaves trying to figure out our climate problems. You know, putting our climate problems into buckets, et cetera, putting the best people on the buckets. All this is the kind of thing that rich people do. You know, they build their foundations to do these kinds of things. And housing was nowhere, land use was nowhere. Even like most demand side stuff was kind of nowhere except for energy efficiency thought of in a very early 2000s way.
Like, I really don't think the institutional climate movement has picked up on this yet. So, what would you say? I mean, there are two ways you could go here. One is you could say, "Look, we are, we being YIMBY, are succeeding and building a coalition way better and faster than the climate movement is. So, don't put your chocolate in our peanut butter. We're doing fine. If anything, you'll just slow us down. If we get attached to you, we'll just get slowed down." The other way to look at it is there's a ton of money in that world that is alleged to be devoted to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
And this is a big way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So, they ought to be, the climate movement ought to talk more about it, fund it more, et cetera. Where do you come down on that?
Matthew Lewis
It's been the biggest disappointment of this stage of my career, to be honest, because I came from climate philanthropy. I mean, this was my, this is what I was doing when I met you, was working in climate philanthropy. And I did what I had been trained to do, which was to follow the carbon, right? Follow the carbon and find out where it's coming from, figure out what the intervention is, and then stop it. And somewhere along the way, and there's some folks who validated this for me because I thought I was going crazy. Like, "Wait, why am I the only person who is making this connection?"
But there's a guy, Darryl Young, who used to be at the Summit Foundation and he's now at a different foundation in Cambridge of all places, I think. And Beth Osborne, who runs Transportation for America — I've got to put in a plug for some good organizations here. And I sat down with them and I was like, "Am I crazy?" They're like, "No, no, no, no, no. You've nailed it. This is completely correct." And what I had nailed, it was really just like observing and saying, like, "Hey, is it my imagination or is all the climate money on land use going to subsidize electric cars?"
And it was true. All the money in climate on land use is going to subsidize electric cars. I couldn't explain to you why that's the case.
David Roberts
I think one thing that's in a lot of people's heads, I wanted to raise this earlier, is the idea that even if you can't get all the way there with electric vehicles, the mechanisms by which you can push electric vehicles out are very clear. They're gaining momentum. You're getting a big chunk of climate gases for it. Whereas trying to do better urban land use is excruciatingly difficult. It's slow. It's a city by city by city by city battle. So even if you think both of them are important, you can just get a lot farther, a lot faster with EVs.
I think that is what is in the back of people's heads.
Matthew Lewis
I think that was the calculus, and I think there were a couple of major errors in the calculus that would have probably been difficult to see at the time, so in fairness to how it ended up that way. But one of the big errors was miscalculating the US auto industry. And this was something that I think some of the folks knew. I'm also not going to name any names, but there were people who were involved in this fight earlier who were like, "Yeah, they really don't want to do fuel economy." And that was clear for a long time.
They did not want to improve the fuel economy of the fleet. And they made that very clear by putting in the loophole, the SUV loophole, back in the 90s, and then deciding, "Oh, yeah, by the way, we just decided to stop making sedans." It's like, "Oh, so the kind of car that's regulated by fuel economy, you just decided to stop making those."
David Roberts
And now, here come the people on Twitter telling me, "Oh, Americans just inherently love giant trucks with high grates."
Matthew Lewis
It's so crazy because I was alive to say, "No, actually, that's not what happened." You know, like, you're not going to gaslight me into thinking that that's true. So, there was just a miscalculation about the US auto industry and its DNA and its culture and its willingness to actually pivot to cleaner cars. Not just culturally, there's this whole other aspect of it which is financial, which is a car factory is expensive to build. So, once you've built 50 F150 truck manufacturing factories, you're going to make as many of those damn trucks as you can because you're trying to capitalize on the investment.
And so, we're now living in the place where, like still today, most of the cars sold in the United States are gas-guzzling SUVs. The number one car sold in the United States is a Ford F150. Half of the top 10 cars are like these gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs. That's today, that's in 2025. That was one thing that I think they miscalculated on was how, how would they be able to pressure the US auto industry on this?
David Roberts
They underestimated the perfidy of the car companies.
Matthew Lewis
They underestimated how, frankly, I'm sorry, but how much these people do not care about human life and safety. And I extend that to the vehicles themselves where they're, you know, they've now designed these grills of these trucks. It's almost like, I mean, I'm sure this isn't what they set out to do, but if you wanted to kill children —
David Roberts
They're kid killers.
Matthew Lewis
that's how you would design a car.
David Roberts
And they regularly kill kids.
Matthew Lewis
And they regularly kill kids. So, "Oh yeah, they're going to kill kids, but they're also going to act on climate change." Like, give me a break. It doesn't add up. But the other thing where I think they missed and where they were wrong was on the speed question. So, I actually heard this a lot was, "Oh yeah, it's faster to switch out cars." Let's say you had the perfect car industry and you had a regular pace of fleet turnover. And you know Costa Samaras?
David Roberts
He's been on the pod.
Matthew Lewis
Oh, great. So, he actually did a calculation about fleet turnover and found that, under the best case scenario, the deadline — this was great, this blew my mind, this was a few years ago — he said under the best case scenario, the deadline for the United States to have 100% of new car sales be electric, was 2020.
David Roberts
And this is with normal turnover. We should acknowledge, if we got religion, we could theoretically buy out people's remaining auto life, like if we really wanted to.
Matthew Lewis
So, here's the thing. It's not just that, but like if you decided you were going to spend three and a half trillion dollars to retire the existing fleet, that same $3.5 trillion would buy you almost all of the housing plus high-speed rail that you need to actually wipe carbon off the map. And this is where things got weird on the climate side. Here's the reason the mayor of Paris has taken that city — it was a motorhead city, I don't know how many people went to Paris 25 years ago, but it was choked with diesel and it was just a traffic nightmare — she has completely turned that city around much faster than the pace of electric vehicle sales, even in France.
So, this question about land use, I agree, it's hard. And I was actually in those conversations with people like, "Yeah, it's too granular, you've got to go to City Hall." And I was like, "Okay." Before I was a YIMBY, I kind of understood that. What was missing though was they just sort of assumed that because city halls are run by NIMBYs, it will take too long. And they didn't actually anticipate either the realization that you can get much further, much faster with state action, but also that people actually want these things.
There's consumer demand for walkable neighborhoods; there's consumer demand for letting their kids just walk to school. And they just kind of erased all of that from their minds as like, "Oh, no, we're past that era, we're never going to get there again." And what we've shown is actually, it is actually faster to change land use when you set out to do that than to turn over the fleet.
David Roberts
Well, yes, but how fast is it going to be to make every US city into a Paris, though? I mean, that's the real, like, if they all had the willingness, then they could do it very fast. Right, but that's not the source of the slowness.
Matthew Lewis
The thing that makes this conversation — you know, it's all speculation. There's no way to sort of try the counterfactual. But imagine if the climate movement broadly and climate funders back in 2005 said, "We're going to do both hands, we're going to max out on electric vehicles and we're going to solve this land use problem in cities." I think after 20 years of trying, we would be so much further along than we are now. And it was just a giant missed opportunity from thinking — and I was there, so I want to take my little, tiny slice of the blame.
I was at Burning Man when Elon Musk showed up with that roadster, and I was like, "Oh, my God, this guy's going to solve all the problems, right?" There just wasn't a recognition that, like, yeah, you need all the electric cars you can build and you need to deploy them as quickly as you can. And if you fix cities along the way, you actually achieve the goal. Like, you can actually get there if you do both. But for whatever reason, the decision was made to only do one of them. And I understand that it seemed impossible back then, but also, they didn't try.
Like, it wasn't, "Oh, we tried all these different things and it didn't work." It was, "Oh, Elon Musk went to Burning Man with a roadster and here we are."
David Roberts
Well, I mean, I don't think it's a coincidence that the vast, vast, vast majority of America's ruling class lives in big suburban houses and drives everywhere they go, right? Like, it's just not in their personal world. Even city leaders, I know even the leaders of dense cities live in —
Matthew Lewis
I think the thing, the most transformative thing that most people can do that they literally have access to, regardless of what happens with the rest of the country, especially if you live in a city or even just a metropolitan area, and you have, you know, your votes or your local folks vote for people who ride transit. And the reason that's so important, it doesn't matter where they are on the economic spectrum, because I ride BART and Muni, and I promise you, there's a lot of very wealthy people who are riding BART and Muni because it's the Bay Area, right? There's money there. So it's not about an income spectrum.
But people who ride transit just inherently get the connection between housing and mobility and agglomeration, especially if they're running for office. Like, they're just going to be those kinds of people. And on top of that, if they don't know climate already, they get it in an instant. Usually, they tend to know climate, in my experience. But so that's my, sort of my parting message to folks, is that if you really want to transform your city to make it more climate resilient, reduce pollution, all that sort of stuff, really pay attention to your local elections and just focus on people whose platform is, "I want more housing, I want more investments in transit, I want more walkability, and yes, I want to create some public charging for electric cars." But if all they're doing is public charging for electric cars, "Oh, yeah, that's all we got to do."
Then, your spidey sense should be going off because that person's not serious about solving urban problems.
David Roberts
All right, well, you know, there's a million —
Matthew Lewis
I know. We could go on, this is great.
David Roberts
A million more things to touch on, but we'll have to leave it there. We've busted my time limit.
Matthew Lewis
I know, I know.
David Roberts
All right, man. Thanks for coming on.
Matthew Lewis
I'm super psyched we finally got to do this, David.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially, to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.
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