This week on Radio Abundance, we sit down with four amazing women who are blazing the trail to Progressive Abundance in the United States Congress and in Arizona. First, the team sits down with United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman, a Hollywood Film Producer turned Mayor turned California Legislator, now in the US House of Representatives, who has fought her whole life to build homes for people, not cars. Then, we head to Arizona, where we hear from a trio of local lawmakers: Phoenix City Councilmember Anna Hernandez, Arizona State Representative Sarah Ligouri, and Arizona State Senator Analise Ortiz. Together, these three musketeers tell us how they've worked arm-in-arm to rise above challenges and create neighborhoods where culture and communities can thrive.
Transcript
0:00 Welcome to Radio Abundance, a podcast by YIMBY Democrats for America. It's time to build again, folks. Fascism never made America great, but when progressives build, that's where you'll find American greatness. Tonight's first guest is United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman. A one-time Hollywood film producer and mayor, Congresswoman Friedman fought against parking minimums in the California State Assembly. Now she fights for abundance in the U.S. Congress. She'll be followed by a trio of amazing women and lawmakers from Arizona. Arizona State Senator Annalise Ortiz, Arizona State Representative Sarah Liguori, and Phoenix City Council member Anna Hernandez. Together, they're like the three musketeers of abundance in Arizona. Tonight's special episode features two amazing interviews with four trailblazing women. And what trail are they blazing? Why, it's the path forward to American Progressive Abundance.
0:56 You're listening to Radio Abundance, a podcast by YIMBY Democrats for America. Now, let's get to the show. Please welcome your host for the evening, YIMBY Democrats for America Executive Director Steve Boyle. And to kick things off, here's Steve. I'm Donald J. Trump, and I hate these guys. Representative Friedman, thank you so much for joining us on Radio Abundance. Thanks for inviting me. It's exciting to be here with you. We're excited to have you. We're super excited to talk about your background. You're working in California. You're working in Congress. Even your background in the film industry is really interesting to us. And we're excited to talk about that and all things storytelling. And hey, for everybody who might not be familiar with you yet, I'm wondering if you can introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about who you are and what you're working on.
1:44 Great. So I'm Laura Friedman, and I represent the 30th district in California, which is parts of Los Angeles, namely the Hollywood area and the hipster area as well of Silver Lake, Echo Park and Los Feliz. And then the cities of Kendall, Burbank, West Hollywood, and a little bit of Pasadena. So it's a fabulous district. It's very vibrant. But it's also a district that for years have increasingly been housing poor. And the crisis over the lack of California's ability or desire to build enough housing to accommodate its residents has reached really epic proportions in Los Angeles.
2:31 And we see homelessness everywhere. And we also have overcrowding. And we certainly have people who the idea of ever owning a home seems completely out of reach. And lots of our residents are struggling with rents that are, you know, sometimes half of their take-home salary. So it's the reason why I've spent, you know, my last eight years in the California legislature focusing on issues around housing production, as well as issues around public transportation and the environment, because I actually think that these are very connected issues that need to be desiloed. And so I've spent a lot of my career trying to make people understand that environmental policy is also housing policy, is also something that we're not going to fix without transportation policy.
3:18 Something I find really fascinating in your background, actually, is that, you know, you're a representative from California, it's just a good Los Angeles, but you authored a lot of great bills through these parking mandates. And, you know, usually when I think Los Angeles, and I have a lot of family and friends out there, reducing the amount of parking does not sound like the most popular thing. I'm curious, I'm curious, sort of like what was your journey to recognizing that like bills like AB 1401, AB 2097, both efforts to reduce parking mandates were necessary? And how did you sort of build the political support to accomplish that in an area that's not traditionally seen very friendly to sort of parking reduction? That's a great question. That's a great question. It's one of my favorite things to talk about. And so I think that I was considered to be the only Los Angeles based YIMBY for, you know, lack of a better term, while I was in the legislature.
4:14 And it has been a really hard discussion in Los Angeles for a variety of reasons that we don't even have the time to start getting into. But for one thing, as an elected representative, I represent everybody in my community and even around the community, as far as I'm concerned, because we make laws in Congress for the whole country, not just for the 30th district. And I made laws in California for the whole state. And I had to think about not just the single family homeowners who didn't need parking as a problem and wanted to be able to park wherever they went, but the people who didn't have a place to live or didn't have an adequate place to live or couldn't afford where they were living. And it became very clear to me that there were barriers to building the housing that we need. And when you look and coming from local government, because I was a council member for eight years and mayor of the city of Glendale and local government land use is kind of your bread and butter.
5:10 You know, what you mostly do in local government is think about how you're going to develop and grow as a community, how people live. And it's very immediate on the ground kind of issues that you deal with. And we have dedicated an incredible amount of precious land and space in Los Angeles and around the country to parking. So an economist named Donald Shoup, who was, I think, at UCLA, wrote a book about the high price of parking. And he talked about how what we think of as being free is actually not free and that we all pay for this very inefficient use of land. And what I tell people is, you know, we dedicate more space for every car in California than we do for places for people to live.
5:57 You think about that, that we have prioritized parking cars to where we have multiple spaces available at all times for every single of the millions of cars in California. But we don't have a place for everyone to live. We dedicate more space. I had the statistic. It was something like we have a thousand square feet of space for every car. But only 800 square feet of space for every person for housing. So we got that all backwards. And we also invest millions, billions of dollars in mass transit in California. And yet we have not given that transit a really fair chance to work. Because if you put a lot of parking near transit, surprise, surprise, people will just drive their cars to whatever those locations are.
6:42 But if you tell people like, hey, it's going to be really inconvenient for you to try to park. But we have this really nice train and we're going to give you a park and ride somewhere else. And you can take the train into this very congested area, like like, let's say, downtown L.A. and L.A. Live. People will use the they'll use transit. And so you give transit a chance to actually work. And you also give people a chance to pay less money to live in an apartment that doesn't have a parking space. And, you know, bottom line, we spoke to a lot of residents who were living in places in San Diego, for instance, which already had a similar ordinance in their downtown, where they were able to afford a really nice apartment in downtown San Diego because they weren't paying for a parking space that they weren't using. But they instead were in transit and riding their bike around and walking to work. And so they were like, why do we have to pay for a parking space? So there were all kinds of reasons.
7:29 And I would say that, you know, as someone who I'm very much an environmentalist and what keeps me awake at night more than anything else is climate change. And by loss of biodiversity, having people live in a more condensed area where they can get around using transit and walking and biking and where they can get more quickly and easily to where they work is an environmental imperative. Because the alternative to that is sprawl. It's sprawl. It was habitat, losing farmland and also having people using cars, which are still by and large fossil fuel powered. So there's a real environmental imperative to find better people to move around. And all you have to do is go to pretty much any major European city to see how they have figured this out and not sacrifice their quality of life.
8:16 They have a better quality of life. So it's all about living better, making things more affordable, being more sustainable and, you know, making sure that people can actually afford where they're living and have better choices. And we just haven't offered enough of that in California. Speaking of the shift from sprawl to infill, 2020 author of the bill for CEQA exemptions for infill housing, you know, is held in committee. And this year, Assemblymember Bucky Wicks has legislation, I believe it's AP 607, CEQA exemptions for infill housing. Well, I'm curious, or have you worked with her on that legislation? Because it very seems like a successor to your bill. And also, do you think, yeah, how politics changed to that, the idea you had, which I wish we passed then, but like now finally seems to, the politics seems to have shifted that it's looking more likely to pass.
9:14 Sometimes it takes a while to normalize these big ideas. So I did the parking reform bill and it took me a couple of years to do that. But Nancy Skinner, who was a state senator, had introduced a similar bill several years earlier. It just wasn't the right thing. But you have to have someone who starts the conversation. So when I was chair of natural resources, I introduced this bill, 2020, and that bill would have been a categorical exemption from CEQA, from the California Environmental Quality Act, for all infill housing. And I thought it was a great bill because we know that it's much more sustainable to build the housing that we need in an already developed infill area. And by the way, the bill didn't change zoning. It wasn't going to like upend and destroy people's neighborhoods or anything like that. I was literally saying, if you're building an apartment building on what used to be a windshield donut shop, why should you have to go through a lengthy environmental review when we know that that apartment building is going to do nothing bad to the environment and only good things, reduce emissions, and also give people a place to live, which we desperately need.
10:15 So why should you bog this down with a couple of years of environmental review when we know the answer is that it's going to be environmentally beneficial? So it made all the sense in the world to me then, and it makes sense to me now. And Bucky is a good friend and been a great partner of mine on a lot of my legislation, and I wish her well on the successor to my legislation, and I will take a victory lap when it passes. I'm actually, I'll let these guys go for other questions soon, I promise. I'm just, one thing I think is sort of interesting for us and for our listeners is that, you know, we talk about like these ideas, abundance, and we read articles. But the black box of how like ideas work through the legislature and how legislators change their minds, I think is really mysterious for most people.
11:01 Like when you talked about like, you normalize the idea.
11:05 What happens between like those years, like when Nancy Skinner introduced it, right? And then you introduced one version, another version. Is it that like, legislators just like, read more, talk to you, and change their minds over time? Is it that like, groups change their minds over time? Is that polling change? Like, I'm curious as to actually how it works on the ground level of like, how ideas shift the legislature. Yeah, that's a great question too. I would say with parking, I think when Nancy first introduced it, I would say that the sort of pro-housing movement was smaller. It was not as much in the zeitgeist, and the crisis wasn't as bad, let's be honest. The crisis was really bad in San Francisco, but hadn't spread across California the way that it did later.
11:51 And we saw rents and housing prices really skyrocket very, very quickly. You know, when I first moved to Los Angeles in 1992, I found my apartment because you could just drive up and down the streets of Hollywood, and they were just for rent signs everywhere, and you would just call them. And even me is coming in as a, you know, sort of entry-level film person, not a huge income, you know, not a big shot. I could rent a decent apartment in Hollywood and not have it break the bank. That is not the case any longer. So, you know, we saw a really big change. And so it could be that when Nancy first introduced the bill, there just wasn't as much of a crisis that she was addressing. And that means that there maybe weren't as many advocates behind it.
12:38 And having people who are grassroots advocates across the state, or, you know, in my case now across the country, pushing other representatives to support something is key to getting big and difficult ideas through. You know, the way that I also normalized the bill was I spoke, I tried to make it as bipartisan as I could. And I spoke to Republicans, and I just said, hey, why should the NIMBY, why should the nanny state tell a private property owner how much parking they need for their development? Shouldn't they be able to make that decision themselves without the nanny state looking for their shoulder? And a lot of Republicans said, this is a property rights bill, and I'm going to support it. And they did. And that helped quite a bit, that we had bipartisan support on that bill. You know, it's funny, if you looked at the vote and the discussion, you probably couldn't just have told who was a Democrat and who was a Republican when we were having our debates about the legislation.
13:29 There were Democrats who loved it. There were Democrats who hated it. There were Republicans who loved it. And there were Republicans who hated it. Because, you know, some things like the cost of housing really shouldn't be a partisan issue.
13:40 You know, on that note, right, one of the through lines of the conversation so far has been how do we achieve core progressive goals, right? Here, we believe that every human being has dignity. They deserve a home and a roof over their heads. That means having enough homes for everybody. You pointed out, in a way, our cities are filled with free and abundant public housing. It's just public housing for parked cars, not people. We know that, you know, we believe that climate change is a cataclysmic threat. And yet there are, you know, it can be difficult to build climate infrastructure. And so California is getting lapped in some ways by Texas. Yeah, we invited legislation around that, too. I did a bill that would have streamlined and had a cataclysmic exemption for building substations to handle electrical load as we add more electricity onto the grid, more clean energy, you know, so that we could deal with electricity coming in from new solar and new wind.
14:35 And I couldn't get that bill through the legislature either, which is crazy to me because, you know, all this process, you know, process is good if it's if it's making sure that we're not doing bad things to people, to vulnerable people. Right. Then then you really need the process. You know, you want to make sure that we're not doing a polluting factory in an economically disadvantaged community. We absolutely need people to be able to weigh in on things like that and what happens to their community and get the buy in, make projects better. But what we don't need is so much process that we stop projects that have the ability to save our planet. I mean, there's a certain point where you have to say, maybe we should sit down and figure out and come to an agreement about the times when the process is not going to be additive.
15:21 And when we know that this thing that is being done, this thing we're building is demonstrably good for the environment and good for human beings, even though there may be people who don't make it, that the good that it does is so important that it outweighs the fact that we are using process in a way that's just stopping things. It doesn't make sense to me. And it's very frustrating to me as someone who is progressive, lies awake at night, worried about climate change and has constituents who can't pay their rent. Right. We we can't just. So let's get back for a second to parking reform. When I did parking reform, people thought I was absolutely insane. And there are people who would say you are doing this thing that is really disruptive and really massive. And, you know, maybe I don't like I don't like it.
16:07 And what I would say back is I get that I'm going to I'm going to do bills year after year that are going to be really big and that swing for the stars. And that a lot of people aren't going to like because, you know what, sitting around and trying to find the perfect solution is what got us into this mess. And if we don't we don't do anything, we're we're we're not acknowledging the gravity of the problems that people are facing. So you can either try to really address them and run the risk of doing the wrong thing every now and then. And you know what? If we do something and it's really bad, we still have a legislature. We still have Congress. We can go back and fix it. But if we don't do anything and we let problems get so bad that we just can't address them anymore because they're so massive.
16:54 We just we missed the chance to head off a disaster. So I, you know, I have no problem with going and doing something that is big and bold. And you're right. Sometimes I did a bill about automated speed enforcement for egregious speeding. It took me four years to get that passed, which in Congress, you know, is nothing. But in the California legislature, where you only get 12 years, that's a lot. That's a lot. And it was the first time we introduced the bill. People across the state had this so many problems with it. You know, they remembered the red light camera program. They didn't want to do that again for those who are in California. So, you know what we did? We sat down with all the opponents, including AAA, and we said, we have a problem. We're seeing 30 percent increases of fatal collisions for pedestrians and cyclists year after year.
17:43 Not safe to walk down the street. Kids are getting killed. My daughter, who is now going to be 12, I'm scared to let her just walk to school. Right. This is a real problem. So we get that there's all of these considerations about this bill and things people don't like. So let's let's list them and let's address them. And we ended up addressing everything. Equity, disadvantaged communities, being unfair, concerns about privacy, about these problems being cash cows. And we wrote what is undeniably the best bill about automated enforcement that exists in the United States. And a bill that deals with every single one of these concerns that was so good that we had groups from from black and brown communities standing up and saying we desperately need this.
18:32 And this addresses our concerns. We had AAA come on as a supporter of the legislation. They had never done that before. The automated enforcement. We had support from every single corner of the state of California because we took people's concerns seriously. And we did everything we could to address them. It's not to say that everybody ended up supporting it, but we built such a big tent that after four years of trying, we got that legislation passed. And I'm really, really proud of it. So, you know, you just have to you can't mock the opposition. You have to actually listen to them because a lot of times people have real concerns. And if you can address them, you address them. But you should never let that process stop you from trying. You have to fix it later, but we don't have time to sit around and and not, you know, and not try.
19:20 Speaking of opposition, you mentioned AB 914 for the electrical substations. I'm curious sort of who opposed that and why, because it seems like a no brainer to me that, like, we really need to build a lot more clean energy. You're going to require, you know, people to use like their cars. There's a lot more demand for it. Like, you need the infrastructure to build it. You know, there were there were people in the legislature who just didn't feel that that CEQA, which the bill targeted, presented a big a big barrier to building these substations. But we were hearing from the utilities that they were and that they were adding one to two years of delay at least and making the projects a lot more expensive. And to me, it doesn't make sense. Why? Because a lot of the substation are rebuilt. So you already have an existing substation.
20:09 So you've got this thing filled with wires. And when you rebuild it and a lot of you're making it smaller because you're taking older and inefficient hardware and replacing it with newer hardware that tends to have a smaller footprint. So it didn't make a lot of sense to me. It's not like you're we're not talking about going into a beautiful, pristine meadow filled with wild, rare wildflowers and endangered species and then knocking it all down to build something new. For the most part, you're talking about replacing something that already exists with something that's cleaner and smaller and nicer looking. So I don't understand why we have to put this through a long environmental process. Well, I I can't say that I completely understand the opposition that we had, but we had enough of it that we couldn't get the bill heard in committee. And I do believe that the governor did work on this and that people are still continuing to work on these issues because we need to streamline transmission and and all of clean energy infrastructure.
21:04 We just don't have time. The climate is changing too quickly. Electrical rates are too high for people. This would help bring down rates for for rate payers and clean up for grid. And we don't want to have to keep burning fossil fuel in California unnecessarily. You know, as promised, I would love now to ask about your Hollywood background. I'll share that. You know, my background is also in the entertainment industry. So I was really excited to learn more about that. I want to learn more about your origin story and also how you're using it today. I'll say that it seems to me like quite a lot of politics really does come down to storytelling. And it's also not lost on me. You know, I think, you know, Ronald Reagan was an actor, and I think that's a lot of how he approached his presidency. Donald Trump was a reality TV show executive producer. And so I think it's not surprising that he approaches his presidency, I would say, a lot by kind of inventing his own versions of reality and making us all compete in them.
21:57 So he invented his his background and his his acumen was a creation of a reality show.
22:06 It's it's a myth. It's a TV character. And now we learn that. Right. So I'm curious. Yeah, I'm curious about your background and what you what you've learned and how you're applying it today. Thanks. And you're right that storytelling and communicating is a big part of what politicians do, that that communication is really, really important. I also think it's important that you are able to have a vision. And to me, a lot of entertainment, a lot of making film and TV, which was what I did, has to do with having a vision and holding that vision in your mind and being able to communicate that with other people. And then working with them to, you know, to hold the vision, because, you know, if you're working on a film, you may read a book and you have an idea. But when you bring in the creative, the other creative people, when the director comes in, the writers, the set designers, they bring their own vision to that project.
22:57 And to me, doing a bill is so similar. You know, people may come in and they pitch their idea. You know, I've got this idea for a bill or you see a need somewhere and you come up with that vision and then you get your stakeholders together. You build your crew and your cast, right? And then everybody gives their input. And maybe you change your vision. You own it based on their input and that whole universe of different experiences that they bring to the table. And then you have to go out and communicate that to the public and get them on board. And that means that they have to share the vision, right, of what, you know, in my case, with housing legislation, it's the vision of what we could have, right, and a better city that we could have if we just change our policies and have a united vision about a place where we do have abundance and where we have enough housing for everybody.
23:45 And we have public transportation so that we get cars off the road and we're not all just sitting stuck in traffic all the time. Like, we know what that looks like because there's other cities that have done that and other people that live that way. So we want that for our residents, too. We want that affordability where people can afford now to pay their rent because there's enough units out there to bring the rents down. And, like, they had the experience I had when I came to L.A. where you have all this choice. Do I want to live here? Do I want to live there? There's four rent signs all over the place and I can afford to live there. And now maybe I can just jump on public transportation to get around instead of having to spend all this money on a car or I can Uber or whatever. So we know what the vision is. It's just about now figuring out how to get there. So my origin story, as you said, is I grew up in South Florida and I loved science fiction.
24:37 I grew up reading science fiction. I still do. So I thought that I wanted to, like, be an astrophysicist, right? Because, of course, like, I'm always looking at the stars and I'm reading about space. So I'm going to go and study astrophysics. I didn't really think that having failed algebra and getting, like, a D in hypophysics, like, didn't really clue me in. But I somehow get into this college that has, University of Rochester, that has an astrophysics department. So I go to my first day of math. The professor, like, is like, all right, there's all this stuff you all learned in high school. And he's writing equations on this board. And I look at it and I just went, I don't understand any of this. I didn't learn high school. Well, I can't do this. That's not how I built. I got up and I walked out and I ended up studying film instead. And I realized that all the time it was actually the fixed part of the science fiction I liked.
25:26 It wasn't that it wasn't the science part. And so I studied film, I did, you did end up looking at a lot of stars. I looked at, that's right. Very good. And you were at Glendale where Disney and Star Wars are made. That's right. So I didn't know. I, listen, I've seen gravity, so I don't want to go to space. Like, I always say to people, I've watched all these movies. It always goes wrong. I mean, whether it's your regular board or, you know, or 2001 Space Odyssey. Like, it's not good. It's never good. So I don't, I'm fine staying here on planet Earth. I just want to bet planet Earth. And I lived in New York City for years.
26:13 I lived there during college sometimes. And then I lived there after and I worked for film producers and I worked at HBO. And then I got a job at Paramount in 1992 and moved out and had a great career in the film industry. I produced four, four features, but I was mostly a studio executive. So I oversaw like 15 films a year, you know, from small budget to big budget. Oversaw a lot of television as well. And I loved it. But I started doing historic preservation work around L.A. as a volunteer. And I got to save the Cinerama Dome, worked on the Capitol Records building when we thought it was under threat, the case study houses. And I love architecture and design. I love new buildings. I love old buildings. And that got me, I'm recruited onto the city of Glendale to deny our view board, which I know is sometimes seen as the enemy, right, of the housing people.
27:06 But I learned about what architects go through, what they do. I did care a lot about making sure that what was built in my city was high quality and was good and fit in. And I also was very convinced that we needed to build more. So I decided to run for city council and ran and was part of doing a programmatic EIR for Glendale downtown that did a study of up to 6,000 new units in Glendale. We adopted that. And so when I was on the council, we were able to very quickly entitle thousands of new units in downtown Glendale. We upzoned the whole area and we got all these new units built. And it was great. And because of that, we got the Americana at Brand, which is a big shopping mall, very fancy kind of lifestyle center with housing.
27:52 The first time they had done a mall that had housing built into it. And it's super successful. I mean, people come from all over to shop there and dine there. And we created a vibrant, walkable downtown in our city.
28:07 Yeah, that's all I was going to say. I think we actually talked about the Americana on this show before in the context of why are the only urbanist downtowns, mixed use downtowns we can build in America malls. But it's a it's lovely and pretty incredible accomplishment, actually. It's not in Arcana because Brand Boulevard, all the way from the 134 down is also a destination spot with clubs and restaurants and shops. And so the mall works really seamlessly with them. And by forcing the mall to not turn its back on the street, you know, that was a discussion with the developer, believe it or not. They they weren't very interested in doing that. But the city of Glendale insisted that Brandon Central be seamless so that you don't really see that you're going into a mall, that it feels like part of the landscape.
28:58 It was it was integrated very well into the city. And that whole area has been revitalized. It was an old redevelopment project area that the city of Glendale had. And so there was a lot of resources that went into Brand Boulevard and those apartment buildings of which we have something like 5000 units now that have been put in in the last 12 years. Since the programmatic EIR, there's a lot of affordable units. There are buildings that are 100 percent affordable. We have a building that's all for returning veterans, for instance, 100 percent affordable housing for returning veterans who are homeless. So, you know, a huge need and a lot of market rate in there as well. It's it's a mix and it's wonderful.
29:40 Speaking of the movies you produced 1996, you produced the American comedy film named House Arrest, which features a plot where for the family, it's just to live in a basement for a while. Did you think that inspired any of your views of housing? Well, I don't let my daughter see that movie because actually in the film, the children lock their parents into the basement, put them under house arrest and force them to live there together to sort of fix their problems. So that movie is banned from my particular home.
30:10 I'm just kidding. Yeah, we did do that movie. And I haven't thought of that connection, but it's it's a good one. I like it. Well, I think we're we're ever excited about. I just we've never had a house. Sorry, we don't have a movie producer on here. So I thought it was really cool to look into your film on.
30:26 Yeah, I bring up It Takes Two, which was a movie that a lot of people, my daughter still thinks it's the best movie ever made. So I'm not going to disagree with her. But a super cute film produced. It was a great I actually have seen it. It's great. I just could not figure out a housing joke to make related to this.
30:44 Yeah, it does start out in an orphanage. I mean, that's housing. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of, I think really exciting to hear you talk about the need to convey a vision and also your background in historic preservation. Right. I think it's my opinion. I think it's sort of our opinion that, you know, in many ways, I think the Yimby movement has captured most of the folks that are going to be swayed by data. And the next step really is the aesthetics and the vision and the literal mental image of what Yimbyism, what abundance, what it can bring, how that's part and parcel with historic preservation and historic buildings, how new buildings can be a part of that same kind of movement and spirit of our heritage and gorgeous architecture and gorgeous public places.
31:33 So that's super exciting. Before we let you go, I'm just curious. What haven't we asked you or what haven't we talked about that you think is really important to raise and get out there before we before we let you get out of here? You know, something you just mentioned, I think is important because one thing we, you know, if you don't have the public with you, none of these policies will work. And so it's very important that we also show areas that are reluctant to add housing, very successful housing projects that we build things that people like. And so that means making sure that we do pay attention to what the development patterns are in a community. You know, even being willing sometimes to make things a little bit smaller just so that they have less opposition and fit in better if they're backing up to a single family neighborhood, for instance, finding ways to integrate them into existing communities so that they become beloved by the community so that the next time someone proposes something, people say, yeah, that other one came in and it was actually really nice.
32:31 We need to show proof of concept of density working well and being additive and not be something that people feel has destroyed something that they liked. So I'll just end with that because it's doable. We can do it. We have the vision. We've got the architects. We've got the will. And I love that you have a show centered around abundance. And it's something that I work on every single day and want to keep as we, as I move forward, I'm only four months into my new job in Congress, but I would love to come back if you will have me to talk about ways that we are trying to bring that abundance mindset to politics. You're welcome. Anytime. Congressman Freeman, thank you so much for sitting down with us and joining us today.
33:17 And let's let's have you back soon. Absolutely. Thanks so much.
33:22 Arizona is a land of extremes and contrasts. High mountains extend diagonally across the state. Many are extinct volcanoes. A few miles south of Tucson, Arizona, stands the mission of San Xavier. A drastic departure from the Spanish influence, however, is the state capital at Phoenix, the toughest little town in the west and the hills and valleys of Arizona. There resounds the song of the cowboy, which is a fitting conclusion to our roaming through Arizona. And now it's time for a radio abundance road trip. It would be better in a train. So pack your bags, because next we're headed to the land of the sun, the Grand Canyon State, Arizona.
34:07 And what do we find in Arizona? Why, a trio of local lawmakers, three women leading the way together towards Progressive Abundance. Please welcome to Radio Abundance, Arizona State Senator Annalise Ortiz, Arizona State Representative Sarah Liguori, and Phoenix City Councilmember Ana Hernandez. To get us started, here's Steve Boyle. Hey, everybody. We are here with Arizona State Senator Annalise Ortiz, Arizona State Representative Sarah Liguori, and Phoenix City Councilmember Ana Hernandez, a trio of spectacular, abundance-minded Arizona legislators who also played a big role in Yimby's for Harris this past fall. Annalise, Sarah, Ana, thank you so much for joining us on Radio Abundance.
34:52 Thanks for having us. So great to be here. You know, I want to throw it over to Armand first, actually. Armand, of course, really drove Yimby's for Harris. And so I'd love, Armand, if you could tell us a little bit of the story of how you met our trio and the role they played. And, you know, it's sort of an opportunity here live on the podcast to thank them for the amazing work they did. Well, so during the summer, we did this thing for folks who aren't familiar, called Yimby's for Harris, similar to, like, White Deeds for Harris and Black Women for Harris. We went to organize it around housing policy because we're Yimby's, we love Common Harris Housing Agenda. So I created a WhatsApp group and it exploded.
35:40 Tons and tons of people joined and represented Liguori, who I first, you know, I just saw Sarah was, like, super helpful in wanting to connect folks to Arizona. And then at a certain point, I was, like, oh, I closed this first night. And I realized she was actually an elected official and a representative. And I was, like, wow, bowled over.
36:00 And she connected us to Senator Ortiz. And then Senator Hernandez was now on the city council.
36:09 And they wanted to do something together. And we wanted to, like, show that Yimby had now become, like, a big national. Like, when I first started in 2015, it was really, like, San Francisco and New York.
36:22 And unfortunately, you know, because people cannot live in San Francisco or New York or other places, all other people, and there was housing being built and, like, Sunbelt all years, for example, folks are moving to places like Arizona. But now, you know, you can't solve the problem by keeping on having other people go elsewhere, like places need to build.
36:46 And so the housing corrective has come, I think, is now a national thing. And these legislators have just done really awesome work to try to advance the cause of housing.
36:57 And so I want to say, yeah, how grateful I am to all of you for participating, for being a voice for housing and fighting for affordability. And I want to kick it off with sort of, you know, we'll talk later, I think, about, like, how your journey starts. But I think what's on top of all of our minds is, like, what's happening right now. Well, you know, there's a Starter Homes Act in Arizona that was proposed, and then there were concerns from the governor, and it's kind of, there are a lot of other bills being passed. So give us, like, sort of a rundown of the state of play. Go ahead, Senator Ortiz. Thank you so much for that introduction. Yeah, so it's been quite a journey here in the state of Arizona around ZOE reform that really got started in 2022 with a Housing Supply Study Committee.
37:47 That was a bipartisan study committee that essentially went across the state to hear from different communities about how they were struggling with their housing shortage. Since then, we've had different iterations of this zoning reform starter homes kind of bill. And last year, in the 2024 legislative section, we were able to pass the Starter Homes Act out of both chambers with bipartisan support. It really would have just done a few things, which was to reduce minimum lock sizes, as well as crack down on design review measures that we know can often be very onerous processes that add certain regulations around aesthetics and designs of home.
38:34 That don't have anything to do with health or safety, but add costs for the homebuyer. So that version of the bill, unfortunately, was vetoed by Governor Katie Robbs. So this legislative session, after I had been re-elected and Representative LaGaurie had been re-elected, we decided to give it another go. So we amended the bill with bipartisan support again, we had two Republican sponsors and on the Senate version, we had multiple Democratic co-sponsors. And we addressed the governor's concerns in that bill. That bill has now passed through the Senate with bipartisan support. The majority of the Democratic caucus supported it in the Senate, which was exciting. It got out of committee in the House.
39:19 And now it's kind of been bogged down by negotiations that are still ongoing. So it has been a very long road. But I remain optimistic on the Starter Homes Act in particular, that we will be able to get something done, if not this year, in the coming years. And I will let Representative LaGaurie add in anything I might have missed.
39:43 No, thank you. And my, Councilwoman Hernandez. Well, I was just going to say, Armand, I don't know if I found you or if you found me or how I got initially added to that. It was all a bit of a blur, to be honest. But I was like so thankful for it because once the chat began, you know, it was really great to see not just the quantity of people that were focused on this, on the policy, on the advocacy, on the campaign. But just the breadth of people around the country. And then also, for me, it's been such a great learning experience to hear what's going on in different states. So I just want to say, you know, thank you. And it's faithful. Our paths cross through there. But I think Senator Ortiz did a great job of describing it. When I went to the legislature in 2022, as a, you know, a little freshman running around, people ask you, what do you want to focus on?
40:35 And my biggest thing was, well, I'm a little bit worried seeing what's happening in Seattle and L.A. And I think we're watching like a slow-moving tsunami coming to Arizona with homelessness increasing. And we're not building enough housing. We're not building the right type of housing. What does this all mean? I had no idea, you know, at the time what that meant or what policy levers we could effectively pull. But that was, you know, my freshman year just starting to have these conversations and then crossing, you know, paths with Senator Ortiz and working together in the House. And as she mentioned, that study committee, I think, really helped kind of coalesce the policy front and legislators together to understand what do we need to start working on and how much of it is tied to zoning. And so that it's really been, even from its infancy over the past three or four years, watching it transform, I feel like we are so much more education and tuned in and trying to stay ahead of this.
41:32 You know, I shouldn't even say ahead because our numbers are not great in Arizona, but trying to stay on top of everything that's going on with housing stalling and homelessness increasing. And then also looking ahead, what's coming under the next, you know, two years and four years with this new administration and how can we continue to double down on the work that we're doing in the state. And then just great partnerships now with and I give credit to these two women immensely who came in and moved mountains on the housing front to Senator Ortiz and then Senator Ana Hernandez of doing what I don't think could have been done before in trying to get housing policy across the finish line. And now having a partnership from that state and city level with Ana being at the city council now.
42:19 So I'm very optimistic that we can like continue from this point and I'll use that as a segue to Councilwoman Hernandez. Yeah, if you could tell us a little more about what the process was like for you for trying to get that law passed and then how you're trying to achieve similar housing policy goals at the local. Well, I'll say that I don't think either side is there's great people on both sides, right? We've been able to do what Sarah and Annalise are talking about. We've been able to, you know, coalesce a group of unlikely allies that want to come to the table to work. So I think it's less about party lines and more about the individual policymakers that understand and are truly invested into solving this issue.
43:04 And, you know, that was a wild experience for me the last few years. Besides housing policy, the other policy I work on is policing accountability. And the housing work that we were doing has been so much more controversial than anything I've done in the policing and criminal justice space, which is wild, right? And I think it just shows how hard it has truly been to get any real solutions done around housing and, you know, especially on the supply side. So it was a wild ride. It was a lot of real work in having to get my, at the time I was in the Senate, getting my fellow senators to trust me as an individual to trust the policy.
43:50 And it was, we could, we could explain the policy and show the, how this will truly have an impact till we were blue in the face and they still wouldn't take it. So a lot of times it really relied on our personal relationships. Like, do you trust us? Do you trust us to not support anything that's going to harm, that we wouldn't support anything that wouldn't harm our communities? And really that's how we were able to bring folks along. I think there, it's funny because at the time there was also a lot of things happening at the city level prior to me running for council. We had a big situation around displacement around mobile home residents. And that, the way that the city handled that specific issue through a lot of support behind us at the state level, right?
44:35 Because there was legislators that are like, okay, the city's not willing to move, then we need to move at the state level. So capitalizing on those opportunities to really show that, that in real time impact that was happening really helped over the last couple of years. And so, because as Senator Ortiz mentioned, you know, the, this year we kind of are at a stalling point. For me going into the city, it's also has been, where can I identify opportunities to push these same zoning reforms at the city level? Right. Because now it puts me in a quite unique position to be able to push more and, and lead, right? Phoenix is the fifth largest city in the country. And we don't really have a housing champion or a housing leader at the table.
45:25 And so I think it's, there's so much opportunity, you know, we all know, recognize the difficulties ahead, but, you know, it's in building those relationships and adding more people to that coalition space and bringing more people to the table that probably wouldn't want to work on this. But our understanding, how critical this is, and how much of a winning issue this is. Speaking of, I'd love, oh, go ahead. I just, like, being, I think it really struck me when you were speaking as you talked about how you were having to convince other people, right? And that they have to trust you and you have to build all that. I'm curious how, because I've seen this for a lot of folks, is that there's, like, one person in, like, a legislative coalition who gets sort of figures out this issue and becomes an evangelist for it.
46:13 And, like, for all of you, I'm curious, how was your, what was your, like, EMB journey, right? Like, how did you come to believe that, like, the way you saw the housing crisis is to build more housing? As crazy as it is to say that out loud, it's like, you know, a lot of people don't believe that, right? And how did you come to know that you're a EMB? This thing is, the EMB exists, all of that. I'm curious to hear you guys' personal story there.
46:38 I mean, I can start real quick. For me, it was really, as I mentioned, a lot of the work I do outside of housing is in policing. And for me, housing has now become a real critical issue to public safety. And so, for me, it was easy for me to go all in and take an even, like, way more progressive stance because of my stance on policing. And so, I've recognized how to talk about this to my community members and from my own personal experience. So, that is kind of what threw me into this EMB journey where it's like, hey, recognizing the impact that housing can have on some of these other areas.
47:25 I've tried to really build and incorporate that into my work. So, that's kind of unintentionally threw me full force and, you know, I'm going to double and triple down on the housing stances and the EMB stance. Like, we need more housing everywhere. We need more diverse housing. And so, I try to always tie it back to some of the other critical issues that maybe other folks haven't connected the dots on. And so, that has also helped bring people along the way by using housing. Like, how can we connect the dots on housing to these other areas?
48:01 And I'll jump in because I think when I look at, when I think back on my journey, I think it also resonates with what I see a lot of other people's journeys are right now in understanding housing where housing is, not everyone comes in, especially at the legislature. Like, everyone comes in with a very unique background. And it might be teaching or it might be business or, you know, it might be they were a dentist or whatever it is. And I feel like housing is such a unique thing that really we don't have a lot of people down there that understand what does it take to build a development and what are the nuances in there. I came in with maybe like a lap or two ahead of most because I came from a real estate development background and I also worked in the financing space on the nonprofit side for a while.
48:48 But even then, for me, it did take a lot of conscious, OK, how do we really wrap our hands around the policy and how do we. And so that's its own, you know, bucket of learning that we had to go to. And we have a great coalition of really smart people that we work with. So it's really been relying on the relationships, the trust, the education, the communication spaces that we've been in, like collaboratively learning and helping each other. And then also taking that and going out and multiplying that to others that have no background in understanding housing or coming in saying, I don't even know where to start on this. And what does affordable housing even mean and what is zoning and how do these things help? So it's really been and that's where I think working with, you know, Councilwoman Hernandez and Senator Ortiz is great because we all have different strengths.
49:38 We all communicate different. We have different relationships in the Senate, in the House with different groups. But we're able to all come together in a way that has been able to, like, spread what we know out to others. A lot of handholding. You know, we've taken legislators to affordable housing developments who were brought people in to speak. So it's been very had to be on the educational, the relationship building and tying together that piece, which sounds, well, that's very labor intensive. And it takes a lot of time. And it's true. It does. But we have been able to build a coalition from, like, maybe five people that understand housing and support it. It's like 15 people that will go to bat, you know, for housing policy. And I would now consider them being these two because we've invested that time and resources and the relationships and the education and just continue to build upon that with time.
50:30 And also, the other thing is the crisis has grown. So a lot of people might not that might not have understood it or wanted to dip in it. It's like, well, now it's everywhere. It's in the newspapers. It's in campaign polling. It's the number one thing we hear from constituents. So everyone is really forced to come to the table to say, OK, we have to take solutions to this seriously. And I think that's where, you know, the three of us and our coalitions that we've built are really able to step into that moment and say, OK, let's clear any confusion. Let's talk about what we really need to do here to really start to make a difference on this. Senator Ortiz, what is your EMB origin story? Yeah, so I was born and raised here in Arizona and throughout my entire adult life had dealt with having to move from apartment to apartment as my rent had been raised on me.
51:20 That was a big motivating factor for me to run. And when I started knocking on doors to win my first election, I was hearing from constituent after constituent, regardless of whether they were a young professional like I was or if they were a senior citizen who was looking to downsize their home. They were talking about this problem of not being able to afford their rent and of not having housing choices. And as I started to do more policy research and meet more experts in the field, whether they were low income housing providers or tenant advocates, I started to hear again and again the common theme of zoning reform. And so digging into it more once I did get elected just made me really excited to start putting forward some of these policies and working with different coalitions of housing partners to try to address this issue.
52:13 And when we would talk about the lack of housing options, I had direct experience with that because I had moved so often and I knew what it was like to only have large corporate corporate owned apartment complexes available and how that put so much of the power in the hands of the landlord. But then I had also had an opportunity to live in a small townhome where I knew my landlord, I was able to pick up the phone and talk to her and my rent was significantly cheaper when I lived in that kind of a housing setup. But those types of housing setups where you have a small townhome or a small condo that's being rented out by a mom and pop landlord are less and less common because of the housing shortage. And being able to really see how these policy concepts apply to my own life, to my own journey being a renter and still a renter, it really helped me to recognize that this was a policy issue that had a direct impact on my life and on my constituent lives.
53:17 And I think that's what that's what can be so frustrating in a lot of these conversations we have when we are trying to bring skeptical Democrats on board is that there are a lot of Democrats who had been out of the housing market or hadn't rented in decades and they don't know what it's like to be looking for a home or place to live or rental in this environment. So I'm really appreciative for the work that we've been able to do to organize, particularly young people, young renters. And we've had some of those young renters come testify at the Capitol, meet one-on-one with legislators to share their experience. And the contrast is always very stark when you see what it's like for a young person just getting their start in the professional world right now.
54:07 And what, you know, the homeowners who have owned their home for decades, who are complaining about new housing coming into their neighborhood, their perspectives are very, very different. And when you see the arguments laid out side by side, it really is a stark contrast that I think works to our advantage as YIMBYs. You know, I'd love to take a quick step back and build a little context around Arizona. You know, YIMBY Democrats for America is a national organization, but I don't think it would be unfair to say we often focus a lot of energy on big blue cities and big blue states, both for the electoral ramifications of population gain and decline. And then also under the theory that if everyone who wants to live in New York, San Francisco and L.A. can, that that will alleviate the demand pressure and the bidding war everywhere.
54:56 But for anybody listening who hasn't done a deep dive on Arizona, I'm wondering what you can tell us about the local color and unique attributes and sort of origin and history of Arizona's housing crisis that folks might not know. You know, you mentioned earlier, Phoenix is the largest city in the U.S. If you expand that to be looking at the entire sort of surrounding areas of cities, I think is one of our fastest growing and biggest metropolises in the country. And I suspect we'll be hearing a lot more about the housing crunch in Arizona in the years to come. I'm wondering what folks should know about what's unique or not unique about about housing in Arizona.
55:35 I can jump in on that if you want. Well, Arizona has always been built, you know, desert state sprawl. So very, you know, car, car centered, car focused, building out into the suburbs, you know, qualified to buy. We've been dominated by real estate up until almost recently, like the last six years. Like it was a real estate town in Phoenix and it's been a real estate state. And we've just started to diversify, which is its own good and bad in the sense that now we have, you know, major international business hubs on top of business hubs. But facing those same problems of we're a city that's grown up really fast in the past six years.
56:21 I think we were like the fourth most undersupplied market for two or three years from like 2021 till just recently. So we're attracting a lot of business, but are we keeping up with the housing that's needed here? So I, I always allude to it that I'm an Arizona native.
56:40 And, you know, you know, like Senator Ortiz have lived in literally every type of housing, you know, you can imagine that the days of yesteryear in Arizona are gone of being able to, you know, find a place for $800,000 a month. Arizona was so wonderful. We could, we could, we could work and we could pay our rent without even worrying about it up until the last five years. And within the last, you know, six or seven years, we've seen this rapid transition that I don't think anyone has been able to keep up with. In the sense that we were a very affordable state and just got a massive influx of people starting in 2018. And have we kept up, kept up with that and have we kept up with them the way that we should in the sense that we haven't been, you know, building dense and building up like a lot of cities have, because it's just our natural tendency to continue to build out.
57:29 And so I think that's where I've been looking at, you know, the problem is the same old, same old that Arizona has been doing. We're now at a grown up phase where we have to start building and doing different because the sprawl and the building out isn't going to work. And we are now a big kid city, as opposed to being like an affordable, small, small town, you know, cowboy state. Something top of mind for me, you know, I really think of the Yimby movement as founded by women. I think of Sonia Trous as kind of the godmother of the Yimby movement. Laura Foote comes to mind as a legend of the movement. Both are actually young mothers. And so if you go to a Yimby event in California, we did the other day, there's young kids running around, which is both very joyful and inspiring. And also it's part of the housing conversation. If you look at the demographics of lawmakers in this country, and if you look at the demographics of our own movement, there's a lot of dudes.
58:23 So we have the great honor today to talk to three kick-ass women who are democratic lawmakers and abundance pioneers. And for each of you, I'm curious to what extent, if at all, gender has played a role, both in your own personal fight for your political voice and any bullshit you've had to overcome along the way, as well as to what extent it might have shaped any of your housing views with dimensions that deserve more attention and centrality in our national conversations on housing and abundance.
58:55 I love this question because I worked in real estate and in Arizona and Phoenix and real estate. It literally is an all boys club. It was me and one other woman in the office. But coming from an all boys world, which was, you know, real estate in Arizona and still, for the most part, sadly continues to be, I take great pride because rooms that I'm in now, whatever room I'm in now, like, it is overwhelmingly women. And, you know, looking at these two women and looking at all the different groups that we're in, like, it is predominantly a lot of women in this space. And sometimes I say that and men get mad at me for saying that. And I don't say it in a way of just like, I am just observing and reporting back that, like, these are, you know, 90 percent of these spaces that we've been in have been women.
59:49 And so it's just a point of pride to me to look around the legislature, look around, I think now the city council and look around some of our coalition building groups where sometimes it's 100 percent women. And we just we come in, we brainstorm, we put it all together and we're able to to leave. And it's something you don't think about unless you stop to be cognizant of it. But I think it's been really powerful to say and to look at the coalitions that we've built that are women of all ages, of all stages of life coming together around these issues.
1:00:22 Yeah, I mean, it's been I was joking. I'm like, well, you need something done, send the women in.
1:00:29 Even like the year before that Senator Ortiz and I got to the legislature right there. It was the it was the housing bill was introduced and it didn't really move. And in the next year, Senator Ortiz and I come into the legislature, you know, we we land ourselves in the middle of a housing in housing policy. And we really ran circles around so many other people. But there's a lot of barriers with that. As Senator Ortiz mentioned earlier, like we've been taking a lot of rocks, a lot of arrows, a lot of shocks. Right. Our mains have been dragged through the mud because of the housing things that we're working on. And especially as to women of color, I think we we saw it even more. And we literally I literally had people saying that we were being I was being manipulated and taken advantage of by some of the partners working on housing.
1:01:22 And I'm like, that's kind of a discredit to my intelligence. I also prior to running for office, I worked in mortgage for about 15 years. So I totally understand the business from that aspect. Right. So not only is in my life experience, but also my work experience is in the housing industry for 15 years. And so people didn't do their homework on it. So they didn't understand how I was going to come to the table and in that bring more, you know, no, we need to we need to talk about this. I'm also very I'm an Aries, so I'm very like fiery. So I'll go into rooms and say the things that need to be said right without fear and all of that and call things out.
1:02:10 But also recognizing how I need to talk about different things in different rooms. But there was a lot of that. There was a lot of pushback from our from fellow Democrats that didn't trust. They didn't want to trust in my work and my in how much we're doing on housing legislation simply because I'm a woman of color. So how to work extra hard and convince people and really show like we can win these things and to be part of the group that delivered on the one of the strongest casita legislations across the country was just the result of all the work. And all those rocks and all those arrows were totally worth it because now I'm part of the group that can say, well, this is cool. You guys don't want to support this, but this is what we did in light of that. Right.
1:02:58 So it's like pointing to that and bringing other people along and getting more people involved to be advocates and to support these measures have been pretty cool. So it's worth it. The rocks and the arrows have been worth it and would continue to be worth it.
1:03:16 You know, Councilmember Hernandez, I was going to say you that you that is the first mention of astrology on Radio Abundance. You're a male. I don't know. I'm a cancer or everybody else. Are we compatible? How do we back up?
1:03:34 I am. Oh, actually, very fortuitous day for this, but there's a new pope named Leo. I'm a Leo.
1:03:41 And Aries. So, yeah, we had that Aries energy going into into some housing work. You, I mean, you need that to deal with the stuff you all have to deal with. And I think that's also why it works, because sometimes we say, you know, good cop, bad cop when we go into some of these conversations. And so we also have the astrological sign balance. Senator Ortiz, curious what your perspective is. So the other thing I wanted to add, I think Sarah and Anna wrapped it up beautifully about being women. But I think as being Latinas in particular is important in this movement, because what we saw with the accessory dwelling unit bill was that so many of our community members on the west side, where I represent, as well as on the south side, they already had casitas in their backyard.
1:04:31 Whether or not it was legal, there are a lot of people that have the skills of being able to build and construct an accessory dwelling unit, and they don't want the city called on them because they don't have the right permits or the right ordinance. So when we're allowed to come in and say, hey, this is legal now, totally fine for you to build your casita, people were so excited about it. And I think there also is such a desire in our Latino community to live multi-generationally. It really is a norm for a lot of Latino families, for college students to live at home until they finish their degree, which is what I did. I was able to live with my parents. And so to be able to construct an ADU in your own backyard, to have some privacy while you are still going through school, but still being able to be with mom and dad, to not have a $2,000 a month rent payment is really, really important when it comes to basic prosperity for our gente in getting ahead, as well as for caring for our elders.
1:05:36 It's also very much a cultural desire to be able to take care of your abuela, abuelo, or whoever it might be, so that they can age near their loved one and have the privacy, be able to retire with dignity, but still have that closeness of family. And that messaging has been so, like, it's almost not even a challenge to explain to our community why these things are needed, because they already live it and experience it and want it. And so leaning into that, into knowing what our community needs and following the lead of our community, really, I think, played a big role in helping us get the casita bill across the finish line.
1:06:19 Speaking of casitas, so all of you have talked about them quite a bit. In California, they're really the only form of housing, we're still having a lot of success producing more. I noticed that there was legislation recently passed that changed it. So you guys did casita reforms in the past, and then recently, I think the governor signed a bill to allow there to be rentals. Is that a recent change, or is that, you can tell us a little more about that one, I'm curious. The rentals we got last year, there was an STR stipulation in there that if they were going to be used as STR, the principal unit had to be owner. So we tried to pass it with guardrails.
1:07:04 I think this session, or the recent one, was to bring that same legislation to county, I think is what we finally were able to move this year. But Sarah and Alex can speak more to that, to the current one. Yeah, that's right. There was, as I said, a lot of concerns around, oh, people are just going to use these ADUs as short-term rentals. And we already have too many Airbnbs, and really the opposition tried to use that to derail the legislation. So the stipulation we put in there was that if a city wanted to say that one of the units, either the primary unit or the ADU, must be owner-occupied if it's being used as a short-term rental, the cities have the flexibility to do that if they so choose.
1:07:51 So I think it helped with quelling some of the opposition, but of course not all of it. Senator Ortiz, you mentioned that you and Councilmember Hernandez are both Latinas. And I'd actually like to ask a question on this, because I think this is a very important kind of through line in housing debates, but also just solving the policy of how we can protect and celebrate cultural neighborhoods, cultural character, cultural communities, while also building more housing to make sure that for everybody, especially those folks, they can afford their rent and afford to stay where they are. Sarah, I apologize. This question is not for you. I assume you and I are both at least half Italian-X. But, you know, for example, in San Francisco, there's an amazing Latino neighborhood, which is the Mission District.
1:08:43 Because it's so vibrant and exciting, a lot of people who are not Latinos move from there, there's incredible pressure on rents. You know, gentrification sometimes comes from luxury towers. It also sometimes comes from not building luxury towers so that the people who were going to live in them instead go after the existing housing and displace the residents. And I think one of the dangers of scarcity and the 50-year crisis of scarcity we've built up is it pits people against each other and makes people really afraid of change and threats to community and threats to evolution. And one thing I'm constantly thinking about is how can we both, you know, protect, preserve, embrace, enhance, celebrate cultural communities, and also allow that cultural character and local neighborhood character not to dissipate or be encased in amber, but thrive and, you know, rise as high as we can build.
1:09:40 And I'm just curious, and from your perspective, on that wider issue in policy, on the trade-offs when it comes to those communities and new housing, and the political side of this, which is, I think, certainly I can say in San Francisco, that, you know, the Latino community in the Latino neighborhood in the Mission District, I think is, you know, very reasonably so. Probably one of the most anti-housing communities in San Francisco, because the threats to that, the continuing sort of growth and preservation of that culture are so real and immediate and visible. I don't have the solution here, and I'm hardly the right guy to ask the question, but I'd love to know what your perspective is on that.
1:10:22 Yeah, I think it's a delicate balance, and I will love to hear Councilwoman Arnambas chime in as well. But, so, one thing I did want to mention earlier was that Phoenix is also a very racially segregated community. There, of course, is a long racist history of pushing Black and brown people into South Phoenix, which is a majority Black neighborhoods that, you know, the city has not been mindful from all the way back to when the highway was first built, dividing the community to, and displacing the community to a lot of the industrialized zoning that makes the air less clean, and the quality of life, and the lifespans shorter in South Phoenix. And then in the West Side, where I represent in Glendale, I had residents who told me when I was knocking doors that they remember when the Glendale police would sit on the train tracks waiting for any Latinos to go north of the train tracks to stop them right away and say Latinos can't go north of the train tracks in Glendale.
1:11:24 And so our community in South, the South Side of Glendale, is a majority Latino because that racial segregation still has so much of an impact and has had generational ramifications. And so I think it's really an important question that we do need to be considering when it comes to ensuring that people who have ties to the community should be the ones that are able to have first dibs when it comes to moving into new projects, whether they are low income or workforce housing that's being built. I think we also need to look at community land trust models and how we can be building wealth for people in the communities that they already have been in. And so those are definitely things that we want to continue to explore.
1:12:14 The South Side of Phoenix also had put into place a transit-oriented development plan as they have had the city's light rail expand into South Phoenix to make sure that housing that's being built along the light rail is being done in tandem with the community and, again, giving the people who already live there the ability to move into those new units. And so those are all tools that we've seen that I think are working, but I think it's paramount that elected officials are building trust with those communities of color and doing everything we can to ensure people are not displaced. As we saw in Phoenix, when Anna had alluded earlier to the mobile home park, the people who were displaced there was because Grand Canyon University was expanding its footprint.
1:13:05 So it wasn't necessarily housing that was being built. It was this college campus that was displacing mobile home residents. And when that happened, the mayor of Phoenix would not let those mobile home residents speak during public comment. But yet anytime we talk about other housing development or by right development, the city's very first punchline is you're taking away the residents' right to participate in the process. But when it's Black and Brown folks who want to participate in the process, we're shut down. So we have to be sure that we are not using this issue of public participation as an excuse when it's convenient, but then not leaning into public participation when it really benefits Black and Brown voices.
1:13:54 Yeah, and I'll just add that recently Rashad Thomas wrote an article that shows that Phoenix is the ninth most gentrified city in the United States. And, you know, for my humble opinion, you know, I think a big part of that is scarcity, right? Is the lack of abundance in housing and how a housing shortage does contribute to gentrification. Because as you said earlier, when there's a limited supply available, people that need the housing are going to go look elsewhere. And if we don't build housing everywhere, we're going to continue to displace people and continue to cause gentrification in communities, and Latino communities and Black communities.
1:14:41 And for me, it's so important to have community-centered policy in that. And why I, you know, I said it while I was in the legislature a lot, like, it is so important to also undo exclusionary zoning, right? When we're talking about policy. And that has been one of the biggest frustrating battles to have with my fellow Democrats. That, at this point, I'm just at a point where I'm going to call things what they are, right? Like, if you're going to continue to hold up these exclusionary zoning practices, then you are contributing to segregation. And you are contributing to the harm that is coming to my community. So, for me, it's a lot of the work has been in speaking to that, understanding my own history in the community and the history of my communities.
1:15:32 And then working with community partners that are truly centered in good solutions. Like, how do we elevate the community? How do they have access to the same tools that other folks have? And really trying to change that part of it.
1:15:51 It's a complicated issue, right? Because zoning in itself is such a complicated thing. But this is, it just goes to show that abundance is going to also be a path to equity for black and brown communities, especially here in Phoenix. So, I think it's going to take a lot. We need a lot of different tools. But I agree with Annalise, like the community land trust. Also, maybe how do we make community members, like micro developers, so they can actually build their own communities because they're heavily invested into that community and then find ways to incorporate our culture and our arts into those same developments. So, I think that's just a few of the pains that need to happen. And it's going to be the work that's on the horizon for us.
1:16:38 Well, this has been an amazing conversation so far and a real honor. We'll get to let you get out of here in a second. But before we do, I want to pass it to Armand for a final question. And as you answer this, I also want to give you permission to, if there's anything that we didn't get to today that you're thinking, man, we should have talked about that. Feel free to weave that in and give us some parting thoughts. And Armand, the floor is yours. Sure. So, I want to make up for the fact that my last policy question, I kind of like garbled a little. We have a very nerdy audience.
1:17:14 Obviously, given I'm here, the nerve factor is off the charts. But I think our audience would really love to hear some, like, a breakdown of the legislation that you either passed recently that you're really excited about and why you think it'll make a big impact. And the legislation you're currently hoping to try to pass, like, you know, in detail, sort of like, what will it change? Why do you think it'll be effective?
1:17:40 We'd love to hear that. And then to the end with, like, what Steve said, like, what else should we have asked you about? And how can we help you and support?
1:17:53 What's the start of?
1:17:55 Sarah? I've got two things that come to mind, so I'm happy to jump in here.
1:18:03 It's a little bit of, and I try not to be, like, a bad news bearer, like, all the time, but it's a little bit of a sad state of affair, you know, with the housing landscape in Arizona right now, especially where we're at in the legislative process with, you know, we're recessed and we have a budget to do, and we have to get that done in the next, you know, month and a half. But looking at the landscape of housing this year has been less optimistic than it was last year. And it's, we're fighting, you know, we have fights with even our director of housing getting confirmed. She just had to step down. They're trying to not continue it for longer than one year. They don't want any money in housing trust fund. They don't want to fund LIHTC. They're trying to pass all these bad homelessness bills. So from the legislative front, there's, I think, more negative than positive that's come out this year.
1:18:53 And that's just saying that's what the landscape is in Arizona right now. But, you know, one thing that also failed that I was working on, and I think I put it in the chat at one point, was the Yes and God's Backyard Bill. And that ties into, you know, just a segue on the abundance. And the district that I represent can be very minby. And the opposite, what we're talking about is, you know, large acre lots and, you know, getting emails from constituents saying, you know, our neighborhood is full. So it just is the definition, you know, of scarcity to me as, you know, we're talking through all of this. So we're hoping that we can, you know, continue to work on utilizing church property, utilizing school property. We've caught something there. There's a church or school property that's going to be developed.
1:19:40 And we're hoping that we can start to scale that. Across the state. And then the other, like, in the weed thing I'm really excited about is the condo defect rule that I think, I don't know how many states it's being worked on here, but it's a huge problem. And it has been a huge problem in Arizona. And when you look at the housing spectrum, we really have not had anyone building, you know, attached townhomes and condos in the last 10 to 12 years because of this. And it stalled this year again for the second year in a row, but we're really coming at it very robust. And then again, in partnership with the city, Councilwoman Hernandez, I know we'll be picking this up. And we've been working with one of her colleagues down there, too. So I think it's another city. Our audience, could you just explain, like, what the condo defect stuff? Well, yes. Sorry. I thought we were, like, nerdy, nerdy level there.
1:20:27 I'm in the weeds audience, but I think this is, Armand, correct me if I'm wrong, this is a top thing for you, is it not? It's one of my, like, new obsessions, yes. Me too. What the fuck? Okay. Tell the people what it is. Well, I became middle-aged. I'm 35 now. All my friends, like, are having babies, and then they want to buy a home, and they can't be in the city, right? They leave.
1:20:49 So it's, like, now it's something I've tried to figure out what's going on, and Representative Liguori can explain. Well, I'll give a high level and then jump in, but, you know, basically it was me finding out about this, you know, 10-plus years ago from my friends who built this type of product of saying, Hey, we're not going to, how's your, you know, 12-unit townhome complex? Oh, we're not going to build those anymore. Why? Oh, because there's, you know, groups of attorneys that have moved into Arizona, and they're suing anyone under this condo defect rule where they go from project to project and find flaws, get the homeowners to come together, and they sue the builder. It could be, you know, I've heard things like broken garage door handles, things that are, you know, very small, but the cost of insurance goes up for builders so high that it makes it, you know, it adds a layer to how expensive it is for them to get insured to build the project because these lawsuits were so prevalent and expensive for them.
1:21:51 So that builders literally stopped building, and another thing I think unique to Arizona is that also opened the gates to the build-to-rent community taking over. So we've seen everyone move to the build-to-rent model as a byproduct of not being able to build shared wall products, condos, townhomes, things of that nature. And also we have a loophole in our water laws that they don't have to prove the water supply if they build build-to-rent. So we've got those two things layered into why build-to-rent is being so crazy down here. But that, you know, affordable, diverse, you know, middle-of-the-road product has become too expensive for builders to build because of the insurance reason and the liability. So that's where we've seen other states, I think Montana just passed it too, working on condo defect.
1:22:38 And so it's been a big priority that I'm optimistic about. We can, you know, get done next year. I may remain optimistic about working on some piece of the Starter Homes Act. I think we are going to probably need to pivot to taking smaller bites at the apple. I'm really looking forward to see what happens with Texas' Starter Homes Act, which is similar to what we tried to pass. But I think just a basic reducing minimum lot sizes across the board should be an easy piece of legislation to get done. And it's been wild that we have had a challenging time. But I think if we were to do just a clean version of reducing minimum lot sizes in Arizona, we could hopefully have some success. Another thing I really want to work on that I think would be tough, given our current political landscape, is parking reform.
1:23:26 Where the minimum parking requirements in Arizona for multifamily housing is just ridiculous. And not only does it add to the cost of constructing new multifamily, but it also reduces the amount of homes that can actually be on the plot of land. And then on top of that, Arizona is hot and it contributes to our heat island effect, which is already terrible. And so the last time I tried to work on reducing minimum parking requirements, the Republicans tried to kind of take it and turn it into this 15-minute cities. The Democrats want to take away our guns and our cars now. But it was just absolutely ridiculous. And so I felt the past couple of years that there was no real pathway to getting parking reform done.
1:24:15 But I still want to work on it on the legislative level. Maybe it's more of a transit-oriented development type model where we reduce the parking requirements the closer you are to light rail or a major public bus stop and transit station or something of that nature. So I want to keep noodling on that. And hopefully we can have some Republican states take the lead on that because it is a very bipartisan issue. And if we can get Republican buy-in in other states, maybe we can get Arizona Republicans to see that it's important. But also we could work on parking reform on the local level. And with that, I'll turn it to Councilwoman Hernandez.
1:24:57 Yeah, they sent me to office with a long laundry list that they want me to. Okay, cool. This is what you need to add to your list. But all the stuff I'm very excited to work with them on. So definitely condo defects. I actually introduced the bill two years ago around that. But we hit barriers with that. And we had to prioritize the casita bill last year. If you could just explain, I think Representative Lou Burry did a great job explaining the problem. I'm curious how you guys were thinking of solving this. Like what did that bill propose to do? That bill proposed to change, reduce the number of years that lawsuits can be brought. Not completely.
1:25:42 It wouldn't eliminate it. It would just reduce it, I think, by two years. And then it was also wanting to change the number of folks that had to sign on to the lawsuit. So, which kind of ties into my other thing that it's a big vision. And it's going to be really, really hard to tackle. It might even be harder than starter homes. But HOAs, I like want to abolish HOAs. Love to get support. I don't know where EMBs fall on that. But I absolutely loathe HOAs. So, that's like a big vision. But besides condo defect, going into council, I also am excited to get to start working on a Phoenix version of the starter home legislation.
1:26:27 That's probably going to be one of the biggest policies that I start with. And then what else is there? I mean, there's so much stuff to do. I think part of it, the bad news side of it is just being on the defensive against a lot of housing grant money that's being cut from the cities, from the federal level. So, it's like being on the defense on a lot of housing fights to protect what we have.
1:26:55 But, you know, we'll see how that plays out. But overall, I'm just excited to really collaborate with my state legislators, my state senator, my personal state senator, and one of my favorite state reps. I can't say favorite because other of my faves might fight me. But my favorite housing representative and like how we can collab at the different levels. I think that is a piece that we haven't tapped into enough, is building those partnerships at the different government levels. And now we have an amazing opportunity to do it here in Arizona and hopefully be successful in that. And maybe that would be a model for others to tap into.
1:27:40 Well, Council Member Hernandez, Senator Ortiz, Representative Liguri, it was an honor to work with you in the fall. And it is an honor to get a chance to chat with you and sit with all of you today. So, thank you so much for joining us on Radio Abundance. And thank you so much for everything that you have done and continue to do on housing and abundance. Thank you. Have a great opportunity. Thank you for having me on. You've been listening to Radio Abundance. Join the movement for Progressive Abundance at YimbyDemocrats.org. Yes, we can build again. Yes, we can trounce the fascists. Yes, you can be the difference. This is AI, by the way. You think these jokers actually got Obama? Check in with me in a few months. It'll happen.
1:28:26 Thank you for listening to Radio Abundance, a new podcast by Yimby Democrats for America. Now it's time for you to join the movement. We're building a big tent and it's going to take all of us. Join us and together we'll fight to build America, defeat fascism, and unleash the era of Progressive Abundance. Join the movement at YimbyDemocrats.org. The crisis over the lack of California's ability or desire to build enough housing has reached really epic proportions in Los Angeles. I give credit to these women immensely who came in and moved mountains on the housing front. I'm going to double and triple down on the housing stances. In the Yimby stance, we need more housing everywhere. We dedicate more space for every car in California than we do for places for people to live.
1:29:13 The crisis has grown. A lot of people that might not have understood it or wanted to dip in it, it's like, well, now it's everywhere. We have multiple spaces available in all times for every single of the millions of cars in California, but we don't have a place for everyone to live. When we talk about the lack of housing options, I had direct experience with that because I had moved so often and I knew what it was like to only have large corporate owned apartment complexes available and how that puts so much of the power in the hands of the landlord. We need community members, micro developers. They can actually build their own communities because they're heavily invested into that community to incorporate our culture and our arts. It's all about living better, making things more affordable, being more sustainable. I think there was too much listening to the polls when everywhere throughout my district, we were hearing affordability and housing and homelessness is their biggest priority.
1:30:09 We stop projects that have the ability to save our planet. Especially on the democratic side, they need to see us out there, they need to see us delivering tangible wins that are going to ultimately change their material condition. It's doable, we can do it, we have the vision, we've got the architects, we've got the will. We have an amazing opportunity to do it here in Arizona and hopefully that would be a model for others to tap into. I love that you have a show centered around abundance and it's something that I work on every single day. abundance is going to also be a path to equity for black and brown communities. It's going to be the work that's on the horizon for us.