Mind-Numbing NIMBYism: Jon Lovett with Zennon Ulyate-Crow on Radio Abundance Los Angeles

Transcript

0:00 Hello, everyone. My name is Zennon Ulyate-Crow. I am the executive director of People First California and a guest host on Radio Abundance here today with Jon Lovett of Pod Save America. Thank you for so much for coming on the show and thanks for having me. Yeah. So, Jon. Okay. Last week. That's right. You interviewed State Senator Scott Wiener and LA City Council member Imelda Padilla after the city voted to oppose SB 79, which would legalize building apartments next to train stations in California. In the now infamous interview that has been streamed tens of millions of times across platforms, Council member Padilla bragged about how she reduced the height of an 100% affordable housing project by three floors to appease neighbors. Reaction to her explaining that like it was a win was priceless. Can you tell me a little bit more about why her reaction broke your brain? Sure. So I should start by saying I had interviewed Karen Bass, our mayor, a couple weeks ago, and I didn't know that a resolution vote was coming. I don't know if anybody knew a resolution vote was coming. I don't know if anybody knew a resolution vote was coming. I felt bad when I saw the resolution coming through and that she came on board to vote for it. Signing the resolution means they opposed SB 79, which I'm sure your audience knows. I really wanted us to have a debate about it on Pod Save America. It was a big issue. We know Buffy Wicks, who is one of the lead sponsors from our Obama days.

1:30 And Scott Wiener graciously agreed to be part of a debate. We really didn't know who to be on the other side. It's hard to find somebody, I mean, to agree to be on the other side. There weren't a lot of people willing to talk about it. And I had reached out to some people to say directly, like, I am out there saying I think we need to build more housing, that I am in favor of this. I was annoyed at the passage of the resolution. But it would be an open forum. It would be like, I really would try to be honest about my own biases. I tried to do that in the conversation.

1:57 But I think it was just what I felt when I was having the conversation was, this is why. This is the problem. This is somebody. And to her credit, I appreciate that she was willing to talk to me about it. Scott Wiener is in favor of it. I was biased towards it. I tried to give her a fair hearing. But even in seeing a local city council person who is dealing with both YIMBYs and NIMBYs, trying to figure out how to strike the right balance, you see how the process itself, that the compromise really is ultimately not building enough housing, right? Because you start by saying it is very, very difficult to build in California the amount we need to make up for several decades of failure.

2:44 And so even if we went full tilt, it would take a while for us to catch up. But our plans are never a full tilt. And then the modification of those plans with local influence and control reduces it further. And then you end up with someone saying, look, I was able to build something. I cut the height down. It's three stories, not six stories. We added some more parking lots. This is a good example. And it is. It's an example of the problem. And I couldn't believe that I was seeing somebody lay out so clearly what has gone wrong. Now, that is not to say, you know, I think there's been a lot of like, like, how could she think? How could she believe that she's dealing with the people that show up at these hearings? And I've heard this from a bunch of people locally and at the state level that NIMBYs are louder than NIMBYs. It's still to this day. Like, it is great that there's a movement of people, certainly online, talking about why building more housing is so important.

3:36 Like, we have to, you know, abundance, radio abundance. Like, that's great. But locally, day to day, they're still hearing from owners, not renters, and people that are against development, not in favor of it. Yeah. And who would have thought a city council meeting on 3 p.m. on a Tuesday? Right. And only the people who are retired or are homeowners and have the time to go to a city council meeting at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday would have their voices heard. And the other problem, right, and this is not on any – this is no one's fault. This is reality. You know who never attends city council meetings? People who didn't move here. Or people who want to move here. Or people who might move here in five years. They're never at the meetings. Yeah. And so that is like a fundamental problem. And add to it all the specific challenges California has had. Add to it the decades of failure. You see why, first of all, we're starting to see a move against it, but also why it's just so hard.

4:27 Yeah, definitely. And to build off that, you know, just last week, former chair of the California Environmental Voters and Democratic Assemblymember Rick Zuber, who actually represents this district here in L.A., came out in opposition to the bill because it doesn't respect the land use patterns of Southern California. When we're talking about a bill that would legalize apartments near transit, one of the most common sense strategies to reduce car dependency that there is. Why do you think there is a level of hypocrisy where people who are self-proclaimed environmentalists and will advocate for plastic straw bans or other policies that are good, but won't take the steps to put people first and reduce our carbon emissions? It's a good question.

5:12 First of all, it's just politics. Yeah. Again, to what we're saying there, that it is true, right? Like this one, this SB 79 won't solve all of our problems. It's incremental. Yeah. Right? And so you can oppose it incrementally and not feel responsible for the consequences while answering the concerns of the people that are worried about seven-story buildings going up down the street from them. And, you know, people try to convince themselves that they're not doing the wrong thing in whatever way he wants to do that. But ultimately, it is like, yeah, it's just, it's people giving in to like kind of crass short-term politics. Yeah, exactly. Kind of what we need more is like a YIMBY plus.

5:58 Like it's not, we're not, we don't need just 79. We need to make sure we have supply and demand side solutions. And part of this also is, is sometimes like people say, I was thinking about it after the conversation because Padilla said this about wanting the buildings to, like people don't want to live in a cement box and, you know, to protect the character of the neighborhoods. And would that it were the case that what we're building are only beautiful buildings. Like, oh, that must be that the buildings we're building are fantastic and beautiful specimens that perfectly fit in the character of the neighborhood. No, that's actually not what's happening, right? In a lot of neighborhoods around Los Angeles, even in like the core of Los Angeles, what has been constructed a lot over the last decade, 20 years, these hideous big box single family homes that are the size of what a duplex or triplex or more would have been a few decades ago that go edge to edge on these single family plots.

6:58 They are so ugly. They are tasteless. They are contractor built monstrosities designed to maximize square footage because that maximizes return on a flip. Then you look at what are the kinds of apartment buildings that have gone through? Are they beautiful? I'm glad they're built. And I really like try even in my own mind to be like, you know what? That's not the best looking building, but I'm glad it's there. But if you drive around Los Angeles and you see what are the apartments that have gone through, it's not because they passed some threshold of beauty. It's because of luck and politics and timing and connections and whatever else and process and whatever else managed to allow this building through. And so it's not as if this sort of focus on character and beauty and dignity has resulted in a beautiful city. It's just an emptier city. Yeah, we've created so many barriers to actually being able to build anything that the only thing that ever makes it through is what you see on the street today in Los Angeles.

7:47 Right, right. And by the way, like because building is so hard to do, there aren't people thinking about what would make L.A. look like a beautiful place, not just a more populous place, not just a more affordable place, but a beautiful city, right? Like we're so bad at building. We're so bad at providing services or increasing services and increasing transit. Everything is so expensive that there's no time to think there's no time or money or space for anyone to be like, you know what? We don't just want to build more. We want to make L.A. awesome. Yeah. Right. Like we want to make it cool. Yeah. Yeah. We need people first urbanism. Yeah, we do. So and to jump on this a little bit more, a few weeks ago, Senator Ben Allen, who represents the Palisades, introduced a bill that would create a state rebuilding agency to recover from the fires that decimated the community.

8:33 And I'm, you know, I went to Pali High. This is my neighborhood. And it was a great idea. But his bill was killed because MAGA conspiracy theorists claimed that the agency would bring low income housing to the Palisades, even though that's not what the bill did at all. And so now a lot of the same conspiracy theorists who killed his bill are coming out against SB 79 saying it would destroy the Palisades when the nearest area up zoned by the bill is three miles away from the Palisades and the Palisades will basically guaranteed never be touched by this bill. And so kind of the question is more even after having his own common sense bill killed by conspiracy theorists, Senator Allen is refusing to vote on SB 79 because of claims made by and large the same group of people. Why do you think that Democratic legislators are siding with MAGA NIMBYs a lot of the time when it comes to a lot of these conspiracy theories around these bills?

9:25 I don't know. And I don't know specifically about that bill that you mentioned. I will say that it has been interesting to watch in the wake of the fires people come up with ways to build faster to actually not solve problems that have anything to do with the fire but the problems that exist constantly all the time in Los Angeles to build anything. Like, oh, we need to speed up the permitting process because of the fires. We just need to speed up the permitting process. Like, oh, there are too many redundant systems. Like, we don't need this level of, like, permitting and long-term slow permitting or we don't have enough people on these things. Like, yeah, that's true. Even that's like, like, this has been my, that was sort of what my takeaway too is from the conversation I've had and just the broader debate in California, which is this is an emergency, right? Like, that, no, like, the reason parts of, whole parts of downtown LA office buildings are vacant is not because of a fire.

10:18 But the number of people who have been unable to afford to live here and the number of businesses that don't have the base to open, given the expense of being in Los Angeles, like, it might as well have been, right? It might as well have been, but it's not, right? So, like, why are we, why are we so focused on responding to this? Like, why can't we bring the same energy we are bringing to responding to this acute crisis of the fire to the, to the way in which this problem has been virtually indistinguishable from what would have happened had there been a terrible natural disaster that, that gutted parts of the LA and, and regional economy. Exactly. And something that I think about a lot is earthquakes. I mean, eventually, somewhere down the line, California's going to have the big one and we're going to lose a lot of places. And what are we doing today to set ourselves up for the future and say, you know, with the Palisades fire response, it was very much a, okay, we're going to streamline permits for people that are rebuilding in the Palisades, which is great.

11:10 Like, people need to rebuild. We need to do that. Why couldn't we have taken that extra step forward and said, hey, not only do we need to rebuild the Palisades, but also there are tons of people displaced right now in the city and there are tons of projects just sitting on paper waiting to be built, but they're just stuck in some process in some dark room somewhere. Right. Why can't we expand that? Right. And, and, and, you know, I, there was some like debate about like, oh, like shouldn't the Palisades, why are we allowing the Palisades to, to continue to be zoned in the same way that it was for a long time? Like, why do we want to just allow single family homes to go where single family homes have been? And I, and I appreciate that point of view, but I do think it's almost a red herring because like we need to do upzoning and like including the way SB 79 does it, but the problem is so much bigger than there's just too many parts of LA zoned for single family.

12:03 We can actually build vast amounts of housing of all kinds for including single family across LA without, without it creating an impression that the only way we get out of this is by kind of obliterating like neighborhoods, right? Like that have existed for a long time. That's like just not true. And it's what, what I think the NIMBYs want people to think is the goal. And like, like that is a balance, right? Because like it is part of the problem that so much of LA is zoned for single family. But like, I, you know, I know like when, when I moved to LA, like my first place was like a duplex in like in, in Hollywood kind of by West Hollywood. And then like, you know, I like lived there for a long time and then moved into like a different place. And you kind of, you like, you want to have a city where people can see themselves being in all phases of their lives, right?

12:54 Moving here as a, as a young person and being in like a studio or a small one bedroom apartment, then like meeting someone, moving into a bigger place, building a family and moving into another place. Like you want all those kinds of options to be available and it is possible. Yeah. Yeah. And speaking as a recent college grad, like the only reason I was able to come back to LA is because my parents live here and I'm living at my parents' house. Like if that wasn't the case, if I was like some kid that was facing persecution for like my LGBT beliefs in another state and wanted to come to LA, which is one of the best safe havens in the world, I couldn't do that unless I had an anchor here to do that today. Right. And by the way, like that has like consequences, like for all kinds of like industries, because like it's people that can move home and kind of can start at the bottom of the entertainment industry because even the entertainment industry, like where, when it's not pushed out, like it's hard to afford to be here at the salaries, especially at the entry level, like, like the starting jobs.

13:49 It's just like the, the way in which it warps all of Los Angeles politics, it makes like, you know, like I have a company. We're surrounded by people that work at Crooked Media, like we had a big negotiation with our union. Part of that is how unaffordable Los Angeles is, right? Like, like the downstream effects of LA being so affordable on rent, like it hits everybody. It affects everything that we do here. Like we just, they just signed, they just approved like the first batch of, of tax credits for shooting in LA, which is awesome. They, that is a great example of like government, let's say on its way to like being as responsive as it should be. It's a huge improvement. They increase the amount of money that, that California is willing to put behind having production come back.

14:36 Right. But then you see the people that are getting the credit and it's, they're like, we're glad to do this, but it's still really expensive and hard to shoot in Los Angeles. Like that hasn't changed, you know? And so it's just, it affects everything. And I, I like thinking about it as like with the same level of, of like attention and acute focus as we have after the fires, I think to me, it's like what we have to do. Yeah, exactly. And again, it's again, the demand and the supply side solutions, right? Demand. We need to make sure people are paid enough so that they can afford the housing, but we also need to make the housing affordable enough so people can pay for the housing. It's all like a virtuous circle because like as much as there's not enough housing, you also drive around whole parts of LA and there's a lot of storefronts that are empty. Right. And, uh, part of that is because LA is expensive for all of these reasons, but also even if you want to open a business, how can you be sure there's going to be a customer base behind it?

15:26 Right. Like an apartment building on a major thoroughfare is a group of our people that are not just going to use our, use the roads and the transit. They're going to go to restaurants. They're going to buy things. They're going to be part of the community. And, and like we, we, we have no idea the opportunity costs because it's impossible to fully measure. You know, streets for all a great organization in LA put out a study, uh, that said if SV79 was built to its fullest potential in LA, the city of LA would have a billion dollar more in revenue each year, which would have exactly fully closed the huge budget cap that caused thousands of issues for the city. I mean, I, I live, I live in Los Feliz and there are the Los Feliz towers and they are huge. And I'm sure that, and I know that people were furious when those buildings went up, but the shame, right.

16:12 Is that there aren't more like down that street and like around that hub. And like, you just, you look around LA and you just like, see, like, you know, you look at the, you, and certainly you go down to like, uh, uh, like the, the, the coast and the lack of building in Santa Monica and elsewhere, it's even worse. And, and we'll just never know the, like, there's so many people that would have been here and made California their home that never did. Yeah. And so to actually to touch on like the generational aspect of it, one thing that's really interesting that we're seeing in terms of where folks land on their positions bill is that it's very, very divided on the age of the elected officials. So like you have mayor Bass who has now signed this anti SB 79 resolution, has been calling legislators, telling them to oppose it. Um, but at the same time, you have assembly member El Harway who was a Bass accolade, worked with community coalition for 12 years and was mentored by Karen Bass.

17:04 And just a few days ago, she voted to advance to SB 79 out of committee. Um, and she's a young new legislator. You're seeing this kind of divide where like the old guard of like the Caruso's and Bass's are opposed to the more younger people that are more in favor of this things. What do you think about like the fact that this kind of feels like almost a generational issue more than even a progressive versus moderate thing? Yeah. Well, it's interesting how it's different than the national debate because there's sort of this sort of confusing national debate around abundance and is abundance just like, what like centrism by another name? And it's about empowering developers and blaming the left. And I just don't think that's a pretty, a very fair debate, especially then when you look at what happened when the rubber meets the road and it was the progressives on the council, not all of them actually, but it was three of the progressives certainly on the council that were against this, against, uh, uh, the more, uh, moderate by LA standards members.

17:57 Yeah. And that does tell you something like I'm like, when I saw the resolution, I did assume that the mayor would sign it in part because it's non-binding and it's like quite a, like, it's like a, it's a free one, you know, to get behind the council's position rather than to like basically campaign against campaign, basically go against the council on something that has no actual force, but I'm, but then if she is making calls, it's more than that. Right. And that is not great. Yeah. Uh, but I, I don't know what to make of the generational divide. Part of it I do think is like the, the, the politics of, of building and of addressing not just the problems of government from the right, but also from the left, like the failings of CEQA, the fact that we couldn't build high-speed rail, the affordability crisis in California, the loss of population to Texas and other States, the possibility that this could cost us the house, even if we win it back now.

18:57 Like, I feel like these have been internalized by people that are, um, uh, more kind of on the leading edge of how Democrats are thinking and talking about politics and it's slower to move up the food chain to some of the older members. Maybe it's as simple as that, right? Like I think Biden, uh, had to be, had to be dragged as unfair actually, because I think he went further than even he needed to, but like Biden followed the kind of younger and more progressive, uh, uh, leaders towards a more aggressive agenda, which was a good thing. And maybe that's what has happened here too. Yeah. And I think it's like just a crazy irony that like, we're doing this great thing with Prop 50 in California where we're going to, you know, redistrict to make sure we're fighting against Texas that's redistricting there.

19:46 And, you know, we're going to end up adding, I think it's four democratic seats if we redistrict it in California and we're going to lose three at the census is what they're predicting because we haven't built enough housing. And it has to happen now. I just don't people like this, the, the, the urgency of the building needing to begin right now, I think is maybe a little bit lost on people like people. Oh, this is a longterm problem. And it is, but like, we need to be building huge amounts of housing right now. The, uh, yeah, it's, uh, it is like the, anyway, I don't know. Yeah. Well, and one thing like we need to do as well is like Assemblymember El-Hari, like for her supporting this, she's doing fantastic stuff. Like she deserves all the credit in the world for doing that. And like, we want to support her.

20:32 And like, I think one thing that we're missing, which is what, you know, people sort of California is about doing is really having a left wing urbanism lens on focus on elections and supporting those people because we really want to make sure that like for those that are doing the right stuff, are fighting up for people first communities, like how are we moving forward and supporting them at their back so that they know that they are safeguarded and they are protected by the next generation. One thing that I also have found like really heartening in this moment too, is, uh, that the left has been advocating for like part of the answer being like market-based, like unleashing private development as well, which for a long time, I think was a taboo subject, even for people that believed it.

21:18 But just in the last couple of days, I've seen like, uh, uh, an explainer out of somebody from the controller's office explaining what led to this moment. Nithya made a great, uh, video explaining what's happening. Momdani has basically said, Hey, like, I think I was not, uh, um, I've like, I've moved on the importance of private development and like the fact that we need a ton more market-based answers to this. And like that to me really is like answers. I think the final part of, of the equation for the left, the left, including everyone in this conversation, because it means that there is a, I think of an ideological consensus that says we need to, uh, uh, build a ton more affordable housing that can be government led at times.

22:05 We need to also remove obstacles that the government creates and we need to also, uh, with safeguards against, uh, you know, uh, uh, predatory practices with safeguards against kind of development that has like kind of no basis in what we're trying to build as a city. But that recognizes that the kind of like, uh, uh, micromanagement by the government of what goes where and who builds where and how many units and how many parking spots and all of that maybe in any one project might make it a little bit better or more suitable, uh, ultimately is like, is like part of the, the, the, the terrible backlog in building. Right. Right. I mean, we're in a crisis housing shortage, right? We need to treat it like it is.

22:52 Yeah. Um, and so one other thing I wanted to touch on was that it seems like many of like the major democratic party donors are still on the wrong side of housing. Um, this is why like Tom Steyer, uh, who's a very heavy democratic donor, uh, is coming out in heavily in support of SB 79 and other pro housing seems to be a potential game changer. But like, what about the rest of like the folks that are in many ways funding the democratic party? Like would president Obama weigh in and warn the donors about what happens to our democracy if we fail on housing and, you know, why does the democratic party seem to struggle with nimbyism so hard when the consequences are so catastrophic? Yeah. Well, so, uh, uh, abundance was on president Obama's list of books with a strong recommendation about why we have to be a party that can actually answer the needs of people and why that's so important.

23:43 Uh, yeah, I don't, I don't know where the, like, I, I would have to like know which specific donors and where the, you know, but, but like. Uh, uh, I, I think we're moving on this. I think we really are. And I think that's very good. Like, I, I think this debate we've been having about whether like, you know, monopolistic practices or is this just an attack on environmental rules? Like all of it, I think has been instructive to people paying close attention. And the truth is the arguments against, uh, a law like SB 79 just don't hold up that well. They just don't. And part of it also is just, Hey, the world is not a perfect place and neither is any kind of development, but, and neither is how a city changes. Like a city changes.

24:28 It evolves, it becomes something else. Uh, a, a, a part of a neighborhood you liked loved when you first moved to a place will look different when you leave it. And cities make cities, states, municipalities, they make mistakes. They build things they shouldn't have. They get stuff wrong. But the biggest mistake we can make right now is to worry about imperfect solutions when we need to be building a ton of all kinds of housing and all kinds of transit everywhere, all at once across California. And as we do that, I do think some of these sort of contentious parts of it, like how many units should be affordable character of neighborhood? Like, will people like, like a lot of these questions slowly get answered as you build enough housing, right? Like even these debates about what share of units should be affordable, it is based on the assumption that market rate housing will never be affordable in California again.

25:20 I don't accept that. We shouldn't, we shouldn't. Yeah. Uh, and so part of this is, uh, you know, a guy Brown, him as a comedian, he, he, he has a line, which says sometimes you have to have to leave the house to want to go out. Like we just got to do stuff. We got to build stuff. We have to like prove that we can. And suddenly people, maybe you can't imagine how this is good for a neighborhood or a city will suddenly start to understand and more and more people will come. It's like a successful, I think, but get success. I hope. Yeah. We get kind of like a forward looking thing. Like, okay. Like we know that what's happening, the consequences of what's happening now is like LA is losing its creative edge. Yes. Losing are the people that make this character of this community. Great. Right. Right. And so like, what are we going to do to say, okay, we're going to move forward and we're going to continue to do things and how are we going to tweak it along the way?

26:06 So it's, we do that, but the answer can't be nothing. Right. And like, I don't like, you know, New York ahead of us in some ways in terms of how unaffordable a place can get. And then you look at like Manhattan and like a place that used to be such a, like a vibrant and creative place is now like a jewel box for tourists and wealthy people. And like, you just like, you, if you want to preserve the character of Los Angeles, ultimately Los Angeles is a place from where people from all over America and the world came because it was a place where you could like make a life and make a creative life too and be whatever you wanted to be here. And you could like imagine a different way of being from how you grew up. And like, it made LA a really special place. Like that to me, that's why I'm here.

26:52 That's how, why a lot of people are here. And if you want to preserve that character, like seven story buildings by the transit, of course, Jesus fucking Christ.

27:02 It's basic stuff. And, you know, I think one of the thing is that like, again, we are seeing like a level where like there has been a lot of really great strides within the pro housing movement. But like, even then you're starting to see some politicians that we've like banked on and like have supported have ended up being against some of these housing bills. And so with, well, so Karen Bass puts out a pretty good housing policy and then she gets a lot of criticism and she pairs it back and pairs it back and like kind of feeds the criticism. And yeah. Yeah. So I guess the main thing that I think we're missing in a lot of ways is holding people accountable to that. Like we know, like you said, you know, the morality of SB 79 and like knowing the questions about it, like this is common sense policy. This is basic stuff.

27:47 Like, how are we making sure that like if people aren't agreeing this, we're making sure like, hey, like this is the issue of our time. Yeah. Every, you know, I'm a big believer in the housing theory of everything. You know, we don't have good schools because our property taxes don't work because we haven't been building anything. Right. And because we locked in, we have a, we have a system that's unchanged, basically very difficult to change that locks in low property tax rates. Exactly. Exactly. And like, you know, you want to see, you know, better amenities in your communities and better services. Like we need to make sure that we're collecting that new growth and putting it directly back into the things that people need, the services that people need. And, you know, all of this stuff's come back to this. So I just want to say thank you so much for coming on Radio Abundance again. Thanks for having me. My name is Zenon Elliot Crowe, Executive Director of People First California here with John Lovett of Pod Save America.

28:34 And don't forget to call your state senator and your state assembly member and tell them to support SB 79. They're not hearing from enough people, so we got to do that. All right. Thank you. Thank you. That was great.