Why Kamala Is Talking About Housing
A story on how I helped the White House and the national Democratic party discuss zoning and the housing shortage, which may have contributed to the national platform of today.
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Kamala Harris is the first presidential candidate to run on national zoning and permitting reform as a key issue for the nation’s housing shortage. (As I edit this, President Obama just brought up how outdated regulations are stifling housing construction for the next generation.) It’s unclear what exactly President Harris would do to speed up housing construction, but this White House blueprint gives a few ideas. Among them are exemptions from the National Environmental Policy Act, by exempting infill housing projects that reduce driving near public transit. Reforming our federal building code to allow for better and more efficient housing construction already used outside the United States. Still, it seems like being pro-upzoning is now a major policy plank of the Democrats national housing platform, and I may have contributed something to this evolution.
In 2017, President Trump hired Ben Carson, a failed GOP presidential candidate, to head the Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Land use issues impacting housing were a fringe conversation in Washington at the time. It was clear that among Carson’s staff were a few people who wanted to push for zoning reform. Carson obviously had no interest in the subject, but when he withheld federal grants for subsidized housing projects as any Republican HUD chair would do, he loosely argued in a public statement that communities should reduce barriers to market construction rather than rely on subsidies.
This was an idiotic remark since many communities that depend on HUD grants weren’t restrictively zoned but middle-American communities that lacked housing investment. Otherwise, nothing more came from the Trump Administration on easing housing construction, except blaming immigrants for housing cost spikes. But during these four years, the Yes In My Backyard movement sprung up in California and spread to major cities nationwide. Scott Wiener, who led bills to institute higher density housing and supported LGBTQ civil rights laws, caught the far-right’s attention.
Tucker Carlson, a far-right Fox News host who was fired due to his lies about 2020 election fraud, ran programs on how Scott Wiener was trying to ruin the suburbs with apartment buildings. Trump picked this up and in a cynical move to win Suburban Women voters, made defending single-family zoning his number 2 policy plank in 2020. That might seem ironic since he’s a real estate developer, but developers were many of America’s pioneers in restrictive zoning to protect their investments. Trump repealed a symbolic provision of Obama’s Affirmative Furthering Fair Housing, that encouraged communities to allow for denser housing to be eligible for federal grants. Trump and Ben Carson launched their “NIMBY” blitz by writing an op-ed (or had it ghost written since Trump’s demonstrated zero writing ability) in the Wall Street Journal denouncing plans to densify American cities.
Biden didn’t counter-run on this stuff since suburban women weren’t going to be swayed by barely disguised dog-whistles about minorities, low income housing and zoning. After Biden’s inauguration, I received a message from a fan on Twitter who worked for Vice President Harris’ administration and wanted to discuss federal housing policy. Following up on this, a friend of mine, Noah Smith (who has a good Substack and blog) set up a meeting between myself and Jared Bernstein, Senior Economic advisor for the Vice President.
This was an awkward meeting. With my pandemic hair and a quickly buttoned-up shirt, I was in a video call with Mr. Bernstein, who clearly was in the White House and was more focused on the ongoing withdrawal from Afghanistan. Nevertheless, he gave me about 30 minutes to basically elaborate my ideas on housing policy that could, maybe, possibly be of use to the Biden Administration.
I explained the intricacies of the housing shortage and how it was acute in Democratic areas, betraying our message of inclusivity. I broke down how in California and New York, anti-growth policies supported by many local Democrats were leading to intensive suburban sprawl and out-of-state migration. I spoke on how difficult it was to pass laws even allowing for just duplexes in California because many Democrats thought it was progressive to oppose new housing. During this time, a bill I worked on with my former employer to allow duplexes statewide had been struck down in the legislature. Bernstein, who like many in Washington had read some national news about it, asked what the deal was in California that such a common sense reform was so difficult.
I explained that the most important thing that could create political change on local housing shortages isn’t federal laws, but narrative. That the Democratic party and a Democratic president needed to be pro-housing and pro-density, explicitly. That this narrative leadership would trickle down locally more than any federal laws would. Mr. Bernstein mostly nodded along with his younger aides clearly in total agreement with these local issues I highlighted, and got an aide to collect my contact information and hold another meeting.
When I met the aides at the second meeting, several acknowledged that they were monitoring the aggressive housing wars going on in California over zoning, including through my tweets. They also wanted the President to take a more aggressive stance on housing affordability, but they were in the early stages of crafting federal housing and land use ideas. They very much appreciated what I was talking about in California, and that the White House was key to getting local Democrats to address their housing issues with evidence-based solutions. I was among many people they consulted, but considering how much time we spent on housing policies, I don’t think the pool was very big.
Shortly after this meeting, the White House then published its first, explicit zoning opinion, on Juneteenth of 2021, discussing the history of zoning as a tool of racial segregation. A few months later, Biden’s White House published an economic piece heralding the work being done in California (and my hometowns of Oakland and Berkeley by name) to boost housing supply through upzoning. This cemented the Biden administration and the Democratic Party into the pro-housing party. Although Trump’s suburban gamble as chief NIMBY was transparently opportunist, it undoubtedly helped local Democrats take big looks in the mirror on whose side they were on.
Today, Kamala Harris is running on a platform of ending exclusionary zoning restrictions that unduly burden housing production, and a platform of speeding up housing construction near public transit and infill locations. This was unfathomable three years ago, as it was still a radical idea in California. The Biden Administration and the Vice President’s campaign is more forcefully changing the national narratives around housing density, and implicitly driving anti-density ideas away from the Democratic party and the expensive, coastal Democratic cities. I’m obviously going to take a little bit a credit for some of this shift, but it mostly follows national trends where educated young people have been amplifying these ideas and its now made its way to the White House.
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Now, for a separate topic: my local town of Berkeley is very excited that Kamala Harris was raised here as a child. When Biden won in 2020, many of the locals held street celebrations outside of the duplex she was raised in on the west side of the city. That home was just one of three in Berkeley she resided in as a child, the other two recently receiving attention in our local online news publication.
When the Vice President was born at an Oakland hospital to the parents of a Hindu Indian mother and a Jamaican father who both studied and worked at the University of California, her first year on Earth was spent at a 1940s apartment building south of campus. A year later, she moved with her divorced mother to a moderately denser and then new apartment complex just outside of downtown Berkeley and lived there through the 1960s. Finally, her mother moved to a duplex in West Berkeley in the 1970s, where more middle-class Blacks and Asians lived.
Harris spoke highly of her Berkeley childhood in her memoirs as grand, full of joy, no problems, and beautiful. Yet, these homes in Berkeley she remembered fondly were not thought of that way by the locals in the late 1960s when she lived there. Berkeleyans passed zoning ordinances citywide to curtail the very type of housing Kamala Harris grew up in. In 1969, revolt against apartments, density and growth swelled the city — both and left and liberal. They embarked on a mass downzoning campaign that brought an end to additional multi-family housing in Berkeley, and made the very duplex and apartments Kamala grew up, and that Berkeleyans danced around, impossible to build today.
The higher-density apartment she’s standing beside on Milvia Street (in the above photo) represented the epitome of “over-development”, “cheapness” and “anti-family” housing that opponents charged were destroying neighborhoods. Even the student-oriented apartment she lived in as an infant near UC Campus reminds me of the great enrollment cap of 2022, when a group of Berkeleyans fought to stop the University of California from enrolling more students, and creating more demand for student-oriented apartments.
I don’t pretend everything is about housing, but I can’t ignore the irony that as Berkeleyans decorate their homes with imagery and text of Kamala Harris and her local connections, that Kamala Harris was born to an aspect of Berkeley many Berkeleyans resent. The daughter of parents who studied at the University of California, an institution people argue over-enrolls and ruins our quaint city. The daughter of a mother who worked at a major research laboratory, while people today fight against additional research laboratories being built in Berkeley. Despite all the qualms that families need big houses and suburban living, Kamala lived a great childhood in those “ticky-tacky” apartments it seems.
So I can’t help but think: could a middle-class, bi-racial girl like young Kamala Harris be raised in the Berkeley that came after her? The Berkeley of today and of the last 40 years? I don’t think so. Maybe she would’ve briefly lived in some of the student-oriented apartments downtown, but her parents today would live in Oakland, or commute from Contra Costa County and today’s Kamala Harris wouldn’t come from Berkeley.
If Kamala Harris becomes president of the United States, I wonder if Berkeley will acknowledge that she wasn’t from the grand single-family homes or the fancy mansions we herald. No, she is from the part of Berkeley with those dense apartment buildings. They gave a home to a little girl who may soon become the president of the United States.