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This is The Assignment Episode five on the housing crisis with Sonja Trauss. Take one.
The debate over just how to deal with the housing shortage in this country has finally reached the level of presidential politics.
Part of my plan is to work with home builders in the private sector to create tax incentives to build by the end of my first term, 3 million more housing units.
We have a lot of Americans that need homes. We should be kicking out illegal immigrants who are competing for those homes. And we should be building more homes for the American citizens who deserve to be here.
But the way they talk about this is a lot different from the old Nimby fights. Picture the "not in my backyard" types who frequently shut down developments that would hurt their property values. So, for example.
San Francisco voted overwhelmingly to legalize marijuana. Right?
Our guest today is from California.
But then when it came time to cite places to actually buy it, no neighborhood wanted it.
This is the voice of a San Francisco Bay Area activist whose point of view is beginning to spread around the country in both red and blue states. Yimbys say, " Yes, in my backyard." And we're talking about them because the language of that movement has spread to the presidential campaigns who are embracing their calls to ease local zoning laws and build baby build our way out of the housing crisis. So what's it like to be an activist on a topic where things are kind of going your way? Because now they're talking about it?
Yeah, we're totally at the beginning.
I'm Audie Cornish, and this is The Assignment. Sonja Trauss and her organization, Yimby Law, sued a town in Ventura County in Southern California, not far from where we're sitting down for this interview. Some residents tried to fight a senior assisted living project because of the usual things traffic, construction, noise, messed up mountain views. But this is what the Yimby movement does: force the conversation about zoning in a different direction, and it's made them some enemies. They're accused of being shills for big tech, big developers and big conservative foundations who all stand to benefit from their activism. The trick has been trying to convince the public that this approach: build as much as possible everywhere you can is activism that will benefit all of us. I think of housing as being way more controversial than people realize. In part because of something I remember hearing from Donald Trump where he once called it the American suburban lifestyle dream. And I think we people do have this vision of their first home, right? And that vision is like a single family home on some sizable plot of land. And it doesn't have an apartment building next to it or a shelter or a store or whatever. And that makes it, I think, way harder to do the kind of development that the country needs for its housing supply. I mean, am I getting that right?
Kind of. I mean, there are elements of that that are people's dream. But, you know, actually, if you look like the most expensive places are like dense, walkable, you know, apartments, maybe they are single family houses, but they're row houses with relatively small yard. So although it is absolutely like a very attractive situation to have like a large lot, when you look at where people actually are trying to move and live, they are a huge another part of the American dream is that your kid can walk to their friend's house or you can like give them a ten and be like, "Go get me milk from the corner store."
School to walk to school. Right. Like, you can't do that in these large cul de sac, auto oriented areas. And that has been definitely in the last couple of decades. People are realizing what you give up when you live in a suburban, you know, subdivision like that. But the other way I feel like it's showing up is that one of the things that makes these fights contentious is this sense of scarcity. And this was something we also noticed right away in San Francisco, but I think is true everywhere, is that people will say like, you know, do we have enough room in the schools? Is this going to overburden the parks? And there's kind of two ways that your community can go with that, right? Are you going to say, okay, well, we are we're going to have a growing population, so let's organize and go to the school board and make sure that we're expanding schools fast enough. You know, let's make sure that we're investing our parks because we're about to have more population. Right? Like, that's an abundance mindset. Or are you going to just buy into this scarcity and assume...
Say "We have only this much...".
And let's make sure we don't go past that amount that we have.
Right. And that's what's, you know, in JD Vance one of JD Vance's speeches at the I think at the Republican convention, he was referencing, you know, all of this mess in in Springfield, which it turns out is a housing issue at its core.
Yes. JD Vance said, I think during the convention, but also in the most recent debate and I want to read this, he talks about Americans being forced to, quote, compete with migrants for a scarce number of homes. And I was thinking about that word "scarce," in preparing to talk to you, because it feels like that's at the heart of what we are talking about as a housing crisis. But the people who say, "Yes, in my backyard" want us all to think about it differently.
Exactly right. I mean, we're organizing for housing. That's the obvious thing. But I think even more importantly, we're organizing people to second guess this notion of scarcity. Is it scarce? Is that something that's received? Is that something we can do nothing about? Because if we take that as it is, in another speech, JD Vance referred to housing as precious. And precious is like gold. Like there's only so much of it in the universe, and maybe you can mine more, but you know, you can't make more. But we can make more housing. Like, it's not alchemy. We know how we have materials. We don't have to just accept limits and fight with people. We can make more. And I just, I don't know. I'm really happy to be working on this because it feels like such an important moment to be working on that.
'I know we're talking here in California, but you've encountered in this very pro-development stance that you have a lot of what the traditional not in my backyard protesting looks like. Can you talk about what you've seen? What are some of the challenges when people do try to develop not just affordable housing?
Yeah, affordable housing and unaffordable housing, Yeah. I think a lot of times people are like, well, most of it is driven by class bias. And so if people were trying to build like luxury housing, no one would be against that. But, you know, people are against it because the main thing that's emerging everywhere and is in all of us is status quo bias, nostalgia. A lot of people just like things the way they are, you know. And so that's why there's no like national organized Nimby group, right? That like mirrors what we do because...
Because housing is governed so much, housing policy is covered at the local level, right? It's not like a national policy issue yet. These fights happen on the local level between neighbors. Right. And not always on like neatly political lines, I think.
No, not at all. I mean, there's definitely people in our movement, especially seeing, you know, Kamala and Barack Obama like President Barack Obama, like bringing this up, thinking, oh no, like this is going to be become partisan. But it's not, you know, because our opposition is bipartisan. Right. Like all kinds of people like things the way they are and are going to struggle with the idea of something changing. But, you know, we find that when we present a compelling vision, you know, and most people like the stuff I was talking about before. A lot of people do want to think of themselves as abundance oriented and optimistic and welcoming. And once you point out that all of that stuff has a connection in their own community, they do want to be Yimbys.
So one of the other things that the kind of Trump/Vance ticket has talked about is, as we mentioned, mass deportation as a way to free up supply, that somehow there are so many migrants that they are affecting, that Americans are competing, right, to get these homes, which there's a lot to fact check in that the evidence for that is scant, but it's something that they are bringing up. They're also talking about opening up federal land to create ultra low tax and ultra low regulation zones. Which, you know, gets at this issue of like zoning is the problem. You're someone who, like, has these zoning fights. Is zoning the problem?
Definitely, yes. And it's something people don't even know what it is. But those are the rules. I think a lot of people just sort of, you know, go around a neighborhood and they just think it turned out that way. But actually, the zoning creates it creates the neighborhood.
The character of it, the layout of it.
Yeah, everything. And, you know, you might think like, why don't I have a two storey house? Well, it might be actually literally illegal. In a lot of places most of the housing that exists if it's an older community. Most of the housing that exists, you wouldn't be able to build today because they changed the zoning. So, yeah, the zoning is the way that in America we try to separate high income and low income folks, right? That's how you you know, if you're preventing an apartment building, that's generally a relatively cheaper way of living. And so when you prevent lower cost housing, you prevent lower income folks, and then you don't have economically integrated communities. And that leads to all kinds of problems.
'And we've heard in the past, I think around 2020, Donald Trump would talk about the idea of like, I'm going to protect you and you're single zoning communities. We're not going to let Democrats destroy the suburbs, right? That was like the kind of language he would use around this issue. I think both he and Democrats have come around to the kinds of things you're bringing up in this so-called Yimby movement. And one is saying, wait a second, maybe zoning reform could be a thing. And we've seen several states attempt it with major pushback. You know, I think of Arizona, New York, even California. Uphill battles, right? To do this. But what is the goal with this approach? Like, what is it that you are trying to do and what is it that you hear in what the candidates are talking about?
We have a couple goals and actually that's one of the things that's exciting about working in Yimby is that people come to it with different goals but with a single strategy, right? So some people are here for the environmental reason. You know, when you look at ways to reduce your carbon footprint, like the very best way is to work it is to live in a in a dense community, you know, walkable community or something that's not car oriented. So for some people, the goal is reducing climate change by, you know, having more apartments and corner stores and, you know, walkable to your office and to schools. Another reason that people do it is, is integration, economic and racial integration. Right? That they think that we are going to have like stronger communities when different types of people can live together. Another thing is economic growth. I mean, you actually...
That's where we get kind of the Red State Yimbys. Right? You think about a state like Montana, which has actually relaxed some restrictions around certain kinds of homes people can build on their land. Like it's developers, obviously, who are excited to hear about low regulation. But there is like a growing bipartisan or Republican leaning push as well.
'And not just the economic growth in the sense that building housing is a sector. But I mean if you you might have a small business but or a big business. Where are your employees going to live? Right? Having having a community where like everybody has to make the same amount of money, well, that's not a functioning economy. You know, that's not what we have. There are lots of jobs with different income levels. And if you want to have a community with like small businesses and dentists and coffee shops and daycare centers, you know, those people have to have somewhere to live. And so you have to have a really wide variety of housing just to have that community like economically flourish. And I don't know for me a lot lately. The final thing is, is really fighting against this notion of scarcity, you know, because I think that that's something that's really driving like panic and racism and, you know, anti-immigrant sentiment is this idea that immigrants come and then we have to compete with them for housing. We have to compete for resources like this is America. We don't have to compete. We can make more.
I'm talking with Sonja Trauss about housing and the Yimby movement. "Yes, in my backyard." We'll have more in a moment. We talked about JD Vance introducing this idea of scarcity, right? In the kind of public and the popular discourse. There's only so many resources, especially houses, and migrants are taking them. In terms of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, the thing they've talked about with a lot of specificity is just building more. She wants to build 3 million more homes the next four years, but also she wants to like try and use a little carrot stick, I think, to try and get these local governments to start taking the zoning stuff more seriously. What do you understand of her policies and is any of it kind of reflective of the movement here, right? Because she's from California.
I can't help but think so. One of the things that we notice when we hear her talking about it is she's saying shortage, you know, which is new. When I started doing this...
Yeah, the housing shortage, which is a big difference from housing crisis. Because crisis, you know, feels unsolvable. But shortage points to the solution, you know, which is make more. What do you do when you don't have enough? You make more. So I do like to think that it's because she's from the Bay Area and the Bay Area is somewhere that's been grappling with this for a little while and succeeding. I mean, we have...
And California, right? Governor Newsom, like this is a state that is now openly reckoned with, wrestled with these questions.
Yeah. And, you know, one of the things that happened when we started organizing ten years ago, a lot of politicians or, you know, just people who think they know everything, we're like, you're never going to get politicians to support, like building a lot of housing, which turned out to not be true at all. It's actually quite popular politically. And we're seeing this with Kamala, too, because politicians get the idea that the few people who come out to oppose like some particular development, like speak for everyone. But most people are like, yeah, that seems smart. Okay, sure. And then they just like go grocery shopping, you know what I mean? They're not showing up. So one of the things we've been doing is really making those pro housing voices visible. And I think that that is what's moving this to the national stage, that the national politicians are both seeing that it's a problem and also seeing that the solution of building more is not politically toxic. It's popular because, you know, there's a lot of people out there that live in apartments and like them.
Yeah, but it's also a little different from past, I think, approach, which is mostly focused on, okay, there's going to be rent control or there's going to be a block of housing or there's going to be vouchers. In a way, it's focused on, as you said, the scarce supply of housing stock and giving more people access to it rather than like expanding it.
Yeah, that was definitely something we were doing that was new. And, you know, rent control and vouchers are huge are super important for economic integration, but neither of those create new housing. And at some point, you know, when you have a growing economy, when you have growing population, like you actually have to make more, not just sort of move around, who's going to live where.
How do you think we got here? When you think of the housing crisis or a shortage, what do you think got us to this point?
'Well, for decades, the governments, local governments, state governments, even the federal government have had sort of two competing goals. One is that in the U.S., most people's -- most of their wealth is tied up in their house. Right? So you want people to feel like they're getting wealthier over time.
It's access to wealth and upward mobility. I have a home.
Right, and people plan to retire using the savings, you know, that is in their house. And so you're a politician. You want people to feel like they're getting richer and you want them to actually be getting richer. So you have that. But on the other hand, then housing is not affordable. So what are what are people supposed to do when they're trying to buy their first house or they've been renting for a long time? So, you know, that's another thing we do at Yimby, which is like try to focus policy on housing as being a place to live. Right? A safe place to enjoy raising your family, keeping all your stuff.
Yeah. But it's also, I think, shaking the foundation of something that that we all believe, which is that buying a home is, is a marker of upward mobility, of stability, right? Of wealth generation, of legacy. And I feel like that's why these fights are so vicious. Right? On the local level. So when when Kamala Harris when the vice president says we're going to build 3 million homes, like I think really, where? Who's going to do that? Are they going to be okay with it or is it going to be a lot of little fights?
Well, what we've found actually, though, is that for individuals where initially if they thought maybe, no, look, apartments in my community, it's going to be whatever bad for my property values. First of all, it's not it's just not something that's borne out by data. The other thing is that people realize that those apartments might be like for them. You know, there are people who have a big house. They raise their kids. Now their kids are gone. They don't need it. They'd like to stay in their community. But there's no condos, right? Because they're prohibited. And that's been actually kind of a successful thing is like going back to rethink that. Like, wouldn't you like to sell your house and then move into a condo? Another thing is that when they have kids who haven't moved out, you know, that's something that really opens people's eyes. Or another thing is they have a small business and they want to hire somebody at, you know, the coffee shop that they own or whatever. They they realize like, what? Where are my employees supposed to live? I don't want to hire somebody who has to drive 35 minutes. It's like just not a good situation. So, you know, that's why we have chapters, so many places. There are a lot of individuals who are sort of thinking...
Like people are in a different place in their lives and they're thinking about it differently. Yeah, my frame for this is the Great Recession. I was covering Congress at that time. I was actually now that I think about it, trying to sell a house at that time. So I was in that, you know, period where you're like, I am about to lose the value of my home tremendously. And in the aftermath of that, fewer homes were being built. That's like a huge part of this crisis, right? It's just like we weren't building enough. Are you hearing anything from the candidates that make you feel like we're on the path to building more, or is this a kind of a slow moving movement on the national level?
'It's interesting. I do. You know, I mean, obviously, just talking about it in the race is so encouraging. One of the things that talking about at the federal level does is give local candidates permission, you know, to talk about it. And especially having such a like high profile and well-liked candidate saying yes to housing. I mean, we've already seen...
Yes. Right, Exactly. We've already seen local electeds or people running taking some of that those talking points and like going even further and talking about specific buildings that they want to do in their community and being like, we want to be part of the 3 million homes, you know, Kamala's was promised. So that's actually huge. People might not realize that the campaigns, they're not just about like the literal policies that wound up getting passed, but they're also about like how these kinds of issues show up in the national conversation. So that's a big deal. But also, the Biden administration has already been doing pro housing policies and programs. So, yeah, we expect to see more.
'But as things become national, the politics become nastier. Right? When issues are nationalized in a lot of ways. And I know that your movement has taken a lot of criticism for the big tech funding, you know, for people like yourself, for these state campaigns, for some of these zoning deregulation moves that also have the backing of developers, etc.. It's been kind of like strange bedfellows between the left and the right coming together in this issue. Do you worry that as it becomes a national issue, that little shred of bipartisanship will kind of start to go away? Right. Because people say, wait a second. Why? Why are you working with so-and-so?
No, I don't think so. I'm not really worried about it.
Are you sure? Arizona, Colorado. There's been a couple of places, I think Texas, New York ton of opposition when people kind of came out of the woodwork and said, wait a second. Who are these folks? What is this movement? Why are these people working together?
Right. But that was before it got to the national level. You know, so, yeah, no, you're totally right. We've had bitter fights. But being at the national level, it's I think it's actually going to make it less bitter because it's legitimizing to the notion of building. One of the things that made fights so bitter in the beginning was that we were saying something that people weren't used to hearing. And so there's the double thing of like, one, someone might disagree. And two, you know, people kind of naturally gang up on a new idea. And so there was this momentum of like, I've never heard this before. I don't like hearing something new. This is weird. Which is really dissipating now that it's getting recognition from, you know, the national chattering class.
Well, Sonja Trauss, thank you so much for speaking with us, coming out. And I'm going to be interested to see where these ideas go next.
Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.
Sonja Trauss is Executive Director of Yimby Law, the legal arm of "Yes, In My Backyard." We spoke to her at Mesa, just outside of Ojai, California. It's a cluster of tiny homes, transitional housing for youth who have aged out of foster care. If you want to see this conversation, you can check it out on YouTube. The link is in our episode notes. The Assignment is a production of CNN Audio, and this episode was produced by Graelyn Brashear, Osman Noor and Dan Bloom. Our senior producer is Matt Martinez. Steve Lickteig is executive producer of CNN Audio and our technical director is Dan Dzula. This week our video team on the road, Styke Dimas and Kevin Myers. We also have support from Haley Thomas Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrus, Nicole Pesaru and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Katie Hinman. I'm Audie Cornish. And as always, thank you for listening.
