 I'm not forcing you all to agree to this. I think it's a great thing to be able to work out for me in a state-wide climate policy that certainly should have my N plus one number in place. No! The answer to the question of what is the appropriate number of prices. N plus one. Of course. I don't have any codes like jerking my chin towards a call. I don't have any of that. I do have a color coded. Hi everyone. My name is Gloria Bruce. I'm the executive director of the state housing organizations. I think that's why I'm here. I am also. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for coming on the radio. Hi everybody. I'm Dan Chapman. I am the co-chair of apartments in the region. I've been searching the housing transportation. I'm an associate professor here at this institution. Thank you everybody for those lovely introductions. In case you were curious, I was Dan. I think that's my favorite student course. You know, so let's start off with the first most basic question, why are we here? What is the connection between bicycling and housing, but the barrier really across California? So, so that one of the things that we're finding out from the NBA, in addition to your housing policy, it's trying to cement the links of legislators around the fact that how do you communicate in a farm actually? There's silo from a policy perspective, there's silo from a funding perspective, there's silo union in the funding part, but you think about the way the built environment interacts with us, it's completely determined by their people. And so the way you zone and regulate the different types of land uses for state is 100% determined about how far people have to travel to do things they have to do. So the basic concept is where you put the homes isn't just the factor of racial equity, environmental impact, affordability, but it also just permits the political coalition you can build for the other things you want to do on the streets and in the land. So there's really no way to separate the potential success and growth of the pro-bicycle communities and the pro-transition from this question that I have in the menus and the other building practices, but so that's what I'll answer. Yes, that makes total sense. I agree with everything you just said. And I guess we'll all start, well first let me ask one question. How many of you are already considered yourselves a housing advocate? Okay, that's why you're here, right? So we're kind of reaching to the choir. We're hopefully giving you a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more info to take to the other people who are already out and are getting involved with that. So my organization, so we're based in Oakland and we do advocacy, we do organizing, we do education on what everyone is with three keys of solving the housing crisis, producing more housing, getting it created, preserving the affordable housing that we have, and protecting people as they keep them in their homes. So the three keys are what we work on through advocacy. And so what is going to happen with that? So I was thinking about my job down there. I'm fortunate enough to live in Oakland and have a lot of business I have to do when I have to go to the house to get me down to Oakland. And I was thinking about how in 2018 and 2019 when I used to ride on tour on the days that I did, that housing building move was actually a physical constraint, making my ride less convenient and a lot more in the way and more dangerous. There were, I counted one day, I'm just between Temescal and my office in Oakland, something like nine or 10 active construction sites that were infringing on the sidewalk or biking or closing a street or just, you know, like biking under a giant crane, super kind of scary and uncomfortable. And then I compare that to now where there's still some of that going on. But these days, it's much more likely that the sidewalk or lightly is going to be impeded by someone living there or or degree that somebody else has dumped in your current site community because they have decided this is a place of people who aren't valued. So we've done our play there. And it's really just striking to be like, wow, we had all this building two years ago hasn't actually solved the problem. In fact, the homeless count numbers will be coming out in a few months. But we think they're going to be the eyes to see this that the problem of people being in the house is from fit in the last few years. So how do we tie this all together? Matthew touched on it, which is really, there's a lot of the biggest problem, of course, is the fact that we have people who have to use the streets as their private investments. That's the number one justice issue. It doesn't matter that it's impeding on the bike lanes, it doesn't matter that it looks dirty. Problem is, this is an inhumane situation that we have to face. And everything else has to come after that in my opinion. However, all of what I'm talking about, or even just the fact that when I bite a telescope, which is a very thoughtfully designed buffer bike lane situation, because of the dining shed that are there that weren't there a couple years ago, it's actually a pretty fraught ride. Sometimes people like dying out in the dining shed. And all of this is a failure of uncoordinated planning and misplaced priorities within our public sphere where we're advocating. So let's start with getting people indoors and let's see how can we plan for our whole theater community for everybody. I have a lot more to say. I'll leave it there and pass it on. So first of all, I have to say a little bit about the issues. So my research and sort of professional interests as well as my relationship with health and transportation, and there are some obvious relationships that we just heard about right now. But I guess I'll go even more obvious and talk about the relationships between cycling and housing. And it will come as no surprise to hear that the research out there that talks about studying the influence of the built department of travel patterns looks at sort of power of array of services and housing and some of the flexible travel patterns tends to support the idea that what really matters for alternative modes of all kinds of cycling, walking, transportation, public transportation is proximity. And so there's a lot of focus we've heard a lot so sure about the more housing of transit or building housing more densely that sort of thing. It's worth noting a couple of things about this relationship. One of them is that there's another important thing happening in the building department that affects how housing affects transportation and vice versa. And that is the extent to which it's also difficult to do other things. So in particular, the extent which is more difficult to drive can influence the effects of the building department of travel. If you can cycle somewhere in five minutes, you can drive there in one minute and you can park for free there. It doesn't matter if it's like every five minutes, most people are going to choose to drive on those circumstances. And so a lot of what we see in the terms of the building department density and housing place that really has to do with the correlation of the places of housing and density of housing with traffic conditions that are more difficult and also infrastructure that's for alternative modes. So that's an important thing to keep in mind. And another one to keep in mind that we should always think about when we talk about housing and transportation is that when people think about housing and travel they're often thinking about the future. And the reason for that is that the picture of the scene as it is in fact is really important. It's my phone giving me directions right now. I don't know if I can use it. Hey, you're here. What was I saying? Something interesting. So so it's it's it's important to make housing and housing jobs balanced. People talk about wanting to issue this more housing near jobs and that's true. But it's also true that about the 5% trips are not for work there for other things. Those other things are all kinds of non-work activities including shopping and visiting people and dropping the kids off and kicking them off those sorts of things. And so a lot of what we're talking about when we talk about housing concentration isn't necessarily housing concentration is a wonderful job but also the availability of shops and services and other activities nearby, parks, you know we've been doing that. So I think if you've been wanting to talk about the consequences of different types of policies and how they might actually influence people's travel choices. Cycling is just one of the many travel choices. It is a relatively small shareable couple of truths. And so we have to be thinking of course when we think about cycling we need to be thinking of more in terms of cultural options that are something that we're riding. Thank you all for that. One of the things Matthew mentioned early on gives a good touch on where I think we're about to go so I'm very excited. I want to ask you that it's kind of obvious but backwards question which is what is it that if for the four of us in perhaps one million people in guidance that these things kind of should just go together. Why is it that we don't typically talk about bicycle and the wheelie to your point with this kind of like transportation we're closing generally. Can you retransmit these then then as a fact you can look through that and start yourself on the way back? Absolutely. Why aren't transportation housing won't close if they did? Well I mean when we talk about that especially from the planes and from the policies. Yeah I mean with respect I think they increase the R and A happens for a long time so to some extent they've reached the quietest people we know it's for a thing that happens all the time. So they are they are connected to the extent that they're that they're unconnected. I mean that's a sort of hard question there's a long history of sort of an engineering approach to trying to provide infrastructure that is focused on mobility and takes for granted the idea that there are things to get to them we're just trying to get to those things and hasn't thought historically necessarily about the ways that the prohibition then causes changes in land use so that's one big missing thing. The second thing that I think we need to kind of acknowledge here is that driving in the auto is an incredibly amazing and beneficial technology and I like to say that because I'm here for the second time and I say this is the person who does the bicycle itself but it's true and it has enabled a disjunction of transportation as we can afford to have a disjunction of transportation now it's the person you have the technology for. Now there are consequences there are all kinds of externalities of our use and all kinds of consequences for the spatial arrangement or everything else that have fallen on that but that's that's it that's a great idea too thank you. Sure I hope we're not going to have everybody answers you just to think that's perfect. So I'm going to agree with Dan from one point that at least in the affordable housing industry where I spend a lot of my time the folks who are non-profit housing developers or folks who work with government to facilitate affordable housing transportation housing are connected in the discourse very much so there are you know pots of funding to enable the affordable housing sustainable communities to wrap up which specifically brings together transit oriented development with affordable housing where you can actually get more money to build your affordable housing project if it's near transit so transit oriented development at this point is sort of accepted possible in the affordable housing development world but the key word there is transit and housing are very connected. Active transportation and housing I think are not maybe are connected to people's minds but not in a sort of a professional discourse and I'm coming from I this is the only panel of this summit that I'm joining this speech which I'm sorry to say that's partly because the statewide affordable housing conference was also this week in Sacramento coming back from two days up there and I can tell you because I was paying attention um biking or walking not mentioned once in any of the many many sessions right okay but I'm going to chat with me come on you can come on you have some talks but but I think that you are true you all did have one panel on that is true yeah I didn't hear anything about being talked about at all on in many panels of that conference um and here's what I'm going to say about that which is that when I am talking to the folks that we work with and work with a lot of affordable housing practitioners and professionals we also work with people who have lived experience and currently live in subsidized affordable homes and organize with us um they also never talk about bicycles or something like I've literally never I don't have to say I said literally never take part in conversation about it but I think it's because you are a low income person you are so much more concerned about where you're going to find place to sleep and how you're going to pay your bills than whether or not because I know there's a lot of discourse oh my friends are judging people who don't do neighborhoods I mean that's a real discourse it's not what I hear from folks right here is the rent is too big and again everything else is secondary and the last thing I'll say is that I think that for those who are doing grassroots organizing before advocacy on affordable housing let's be real let's go back to what I was saying before I don't feel that the active transportation world has always been the most welcoming space just to be real and all of our all of our fields can do better on welcoming people from the outside but you know as a queer it's raised black and then I have not always felt that the biking community is wearing what's been my time I think that's changing and evolving and looking around this room and I appreciate that um but it's not your average grassroots agenda advocate probably has a picture in their head of who's going to come to a light summit which might be inaccurate but I think it's also a barrier so there's no those are the things that the chair doesn't like freaking out to me well I'll touch base on that because I'm so happy to mention that because when we were team comes you've been at this conversation and when I was asking about the panel it's like the people I think about who are actually leading up here and sort of going further I think that it is in some ways especially in urban centers of privilege to be able to bike and walk and invest the intersection of race and system dynamics makes it very difficult for the same person to be carrying out what it says the second issue again is a really good mark that's for privilege is that a lot of people who are working in the number of cities in the bay and other cities plus the state the people who are concerned about high school safety and will show up to a meeting will call the mayor's office you don't have a housing model or even to be more specific they're they're not experiencing the type of housing problem like you were explaining or they do not feel what is their problem even if they're really I mean I think I think there's I want to go back to my name you mentioned about the the portability of bars not if you actually and I mean and I mean that just just here in the area I know the city of Marado and virtually bankrupt because they ran out of money this is a city where the median cost is 3.5 this is not a city with that money okay so the point is that the way we pay for that infrastructure hides most of the cost to governments and to the people who rely on the car itself I bring that up because when we get into the protectors and you were talking about the same folks who are showing up for the safety you might actually have now protected by facility in their community they're also living in in most cases with people who are most likely to drive or most of the trips when you go into lower income communities you actually see transit riders who are here you also see more people ride bikes because guess what those people have significantly lower levels of fire they can't afford it and it's not a question of oh we can get them alone or what happens you know I don't have five thousand dollars the bio who's a junker that will give me to work I just don't have so I need some other way to get around again there's there's something that comes up and this is actually a very live conversation housing conversations about what are the mechanisms for more integrated economic integration and it's actually controversial defense the literature is kind of all over the place about a little bit it's not clear what works are not one answer the point is that that integration leads you to the promised land is so many ways because of the nature and how advocacy is going to work to develop so I can I struggle to the original world where people who are struggling to make the rent where people who are actually the victims of traffic violence which tends to be disproportionately in lower income communities of color are they really going to have the time to hold these economies no no they're not but but if they're living in mixed neighborhoods where the people who do have to pass and we are actually frankly one of our challenges in those neighborhoods unfortunately you're too too often unwilling to allow the neighborhood to kill that's a huge problem to face hey we're not just California all over the country we've got to economically integrate our neighborhoods with housing specifically with housing because then what happens is indeed we don't have the capacity to show up as they're focused on much more urgent priorities their neighbors who do are going to see the mutual benefit eat and I got to say like let's be real here even if they don't see mutual benefit those benefits are going to prove to the whole neighborhood right and this is really critical because it's really hard to force people to say I'm going to be on short stay right you can't legislate that in fact the tendency is in general for people to be self-interested okay so how do you take advantage of that self-interest in this context to help the benefits accrue to people who have been historically disempowered in this advantage and who will almost certainly never have the capacity to go and represent their own interests in these government hearings at 7 p.m on a Thursday night 2 p.m on a Wednesday it's like it's not going to happen well I want to stay on the subject you know we've kind of danced around the subject a bit about judgment right and when we talk about like we'll talk about my school infrastructure when we talk about icicle at all or when we talk about housing oftentimes in the etc which I do more um what should we do about right how do we address that intersection at least you said that's often going to find a radical called is the situation where do you want to start yeah I think it's it's the conversation in New York London and something other places right how do we how do we bring thriving communities safety and amenities businesses to to communities that have lacked investment historically without those communities and feeling like the people who've been there don't feel like they're welcome to know right it's it's the fundamental question of one of the fundamental questions we don't know which we have not seen we have absolutely not saw that um and I I think I guess I'm not going to speak to the relationship between like infrastructure and gentrification because I don't know that much about that and I know the research is kind of to what I said before which is you know the folks that we work with in east oakland and west oakland um they're very clear that like they are very passionate about about gentrification and its related phenomenon displacement they're very passionate about not getting displaced um and I also want to push back against the notion I think a lot of times people say oh oakland's over everyone's been displaced actually not not true at all what happens instead is people just you know they just double up they do what they can to stay when people leave but then people also do whatever they can to stay um and I'm very overcrowded housing conditions um which is why when you're in east oakland it's impossible to find a place to park even though it's all single family homes a lot of it single family homes because there are three families living in a home um and you know that that's that's a consequence of gentrification but at the at the end of the day I think if we can build more authentic relationships between advocates and between community groups and with government I think for people who are living this day to day it is not an abstract or ideological debate about gentrification where it's so often is in rooms like this again people are like can I pay my rent am I going to get run over if I cross the street am I going to get shot if I look at someone the wrong way like those are the questions that people need to be able to have answered in a way that makes them feel loved and safe and belonging it's not about this like abstract concept of gentrification and so I think if we are working holistically towards neighborhoods that happen to be both safer to live in and safer to bike in um then I think we can maybe push past some of the ideology and get to what we're really working towards and before we pass it today and I'm just going to mark a point that you just said with a pin that holistic planning so it's we're going to come back to that yeah go ahead um so um in defense of abstraction um please professor actually no I don't need to go there but I just wanted to say that no I mean I think you made a good distinction that we need to to um emphasize which is the distinction between gentrification and displacement and so um and also the distinction between people being served by and having their needs met by infrastructure developments or planning efforts versus actually you know being negatively impacted by them by them causing displacement so there is virtually no evidence that things like bike lanes have any impact on property values and there's been plenty of people out there who've hoped that they did and studied the studied them in hopes that you would show that there was a public value being placed on such infrastructures so that would justify more such investment now you can look at this two ways one of them is oh it's a bummer that you don't find such a relationship and the other one is well it's good because it means that it won't contribute to rising rents which can then contribute to displacement pressure um so I'll just say two things about the gentrification gentrification and displacement the first one is gentrification can happen without displacement happening and let's for all for all we can do can we can we do that how do we do that and the answer to that is it's a regional problem it is a regional housing supply problem and we think about planning a lot of the times I come in from a planning department we think about planning as a kind of a local neighborhood level even parcel level exercise and it is but when it comes to dealing with the issue of housing affordability it's completely insufficient to think about housing supply as even only being located near transit that's one reason why the notion of transit oriented development is deeply problematic because transit oriented development implies that housing supply should be focused in certain places and it probably shouldn't it probably should be more broadly applied everywhere including in marin county and and in other places beverly hills and santa monica and and well santa monica's done a slightly better job so so there are um larger issues at play here that have to do with the more general provision of housing that needs to be the supply of housing and the land available for housing needs to be opened up more broadly and we're starting to do that in california but we you know we have this sp9 which has made it so that you can actually develop two or actually four housing on any single family's own parcel in this state that could have some impacts but on the other hand the likelihood of individual parcels that are already developed being more intensively developed is going to be limited and so we have a much larger issue how does this affect bicycling how does this affect transportation in general the relaxation of controls that try to dampen the supply of housing or that try to stop housing from being developed are ubiquitous and to the extent that they could be relaxed more generally you would tend to have more clustering of housing and more ability for people to use alternative modes because the fact is the market tends to want more density that tends to be there tend to be certain places that people want to live and there's more housing demand in those areas than is typically made by supply i come from berkeley berkeley is an example of this and berkeley has in recent years done a bit more to try to increase housing supply and it's been opposed by a lot of people on the council and the mayor and then the mayor somehow turned that around i'm not exactly sure what happened there um yeah it's interesting uh so so the question is what would happen in this in a world where we had a more general relaxation housing and i think we would have we might have some gentrification happening but we'd have a lot less displacement happening um and that's all i need to say about that right that's enough okay perfect i wanted to i want to build up what dan said and in this point that gentrification and displacement are two different things because displacement is people actually having to leave their community and grow somewhere else right gentrification is not necessarily better or worse but it is fundamentally feeling like you're not welcome in a community feeling like the amenities that you live in the community and and relied upon have been have been displaced so like it can be a business or a school or another like a dear daycare left the community or something like that so but they're different things because displacement you measure and and we're seeing it in places like san francisco that has basically lost its entire black population well did all those black people leave the bay area no they're in anioc they're in tracy they're interlock here in east oakland right so so the city kind of and and this is the point i want to get to about this importance of thinking in a bigger scope about planning which really gets at the nut of this the reason that happened is that san francisco is not accountable for the housing it doesn't build the region is those people don't i mean unfortunately and this is something that is actually catastrophic for things like climate change a lot of these people are being displaced to places like texas you want to talk about a problem if you move from california to texas just in moving you have tripled your carbon footprint just in that act alone you have tripled your carbon footprint because california has such a low relative carbon footprint but there's all kinds of other reasons you don't want to be displacing people out of state and frankly you don't really want to be displacing people at all but we have a system of governance where the jurisdictions municipalities get to say we're going to allow this many people to live here and anyone else who shows up that's not our problem well guess whose problem it's become it's become oakland's problem that san francisco hasn't built enough housing because people just go across the bridge and then if oakland is trying to keep up did a pretty good job for a few years but it still could do much more berkeley could do more so berkeley didn't do enough for a long time so guess where those people get displaced to well they're in east oakland oh no now they're in livermore oh wait no now they're in tracy now they're in stockton now they're in fresno this is what happens when you don't build enough housing and when you let cities determine 100 especially if these cities have a history of exclusionary zoning redlining uh downzoning i think the thing that i like to say to people particularly from la the city of los angeles in 1965 was zoned for 10 million people 10 million people city of los angeles not the county guess what the zoning is for la today four million people they they eliminated housing potential for six million people in the city of los angeles you don't think that had an impact on the rest of the cities in la you don't think that pushed people out to riverside and san bernadino and further for housing of course it did but that was a decision the city made to say you know what and you hear this all the time from people who we refer to as nimbis i think i'm gonna let you use that word we're full our city is full enough people live here and i just have to say like someone who really believes in cities as a like an emergent property of human evolution the notion of a city ever being full the notion of a city ever being done or complete is crap it's crap this is the mindset we're up against with some of these things and you have these governing bodies that that over represent the views of people who think their city is full and so if you zoom out and think about well what do you do about that taking a more regional view use the word holistic and thinking okay this is a coherent region how do we make sure we plan for the people who live in the region not because they live in san francisco and oh the hate is this quaint little like guess what the hate used to be you know it's okay it's not anymore so so we have to i mean there's this there's this thing or that is underway there are regional governing bodies that are trying to do this they still struggle it's not like it's perfect but the notion of sort of zooming further away the state has a huge role to play in this and frankly the state and what we focused on in california envy is really giving the state more tools to help regions plan for more housing and we're moving and increasingly transportation because what we've learned is that at the city level you get these parochial interests that can take over the city government and cause huge problems for the whole region and there's just no pathway i can imagine we're sticking to that model is going to get you the solutions you want whether it's on biking and active mobility or whether it's on living your transit or to dance point the fact that most trips aren't to work people go to grocery stores they go to daycare they drop the kids off at their friends place if you're one mile from all those things you're going to make a very different set of choices every day when you walk to your house than if all those things are 15 miles away and that's the key is we can actually think about ways it's not just about densifying oakland and densifying berkeley and densifying san francisco it's about creating more amenities in these out of line communities creating more reasons to draw people to those so that they can do all the things they need within a mile or two miles and that's really i think what we're focused on collectively i mean we all have our different approaches to how we want to get there but we've got to take this bigger picture view of where the houses go and it can't just be next to the train it's got to be next to all the other things and that you get the agglomeration effect from people living close to each other so just that that agglomeration effect by the way one of those agglomeration effects is simply when there's enough housing they're great this creates a market for local services when those local services are local then you can have travel that is not not by car or at least shorter i mean we would get by the way much farther we'd have much be much closer to our climate goals if people just drove less we don't have to so again i'm in a bicycling conference modal shifts are hard but carpooling is an amazing thing in comparison to driving alone and driving shorter trips is also amazing in comparison to driving longer dan it sounds like you're trying to convince everyone to drive i'm not i'm not that's what i'm hearing it's okay um i i think that we've touched a bit on the holistic part and i want to stay with that but instead of just talking about holistic planning from a from a government standpoint or from a state and regional standpoint i want to circle back to the people right like how are we literally the four of us but also 25 30 of us going to have these holistic conversations with each other what what does that look like right like how do you start that conversation and i will also preface as we lean towards the end of this discussion is how do we empower you all to share this these kinds of conversations with your friends and indoctrinate others into caring about housing and transportation like i do i'm gonna start yeah gloria's always the best store thanks and i will also just just tag on a little bit to what dan said i'm also not i'm also not on the secret pro driving agenda but i i will i will just say that um you know this is this is a pretty urban focused conversation that we're having right here um and one time earlier today i did actually in a housing meeting here someone bring up what they termed active transportation it was someone who works in the sand walking valley and she was like look it's just not like biking and walking are just not an option where we are which you know you could debate that or not i'm not in a place to debate it but you know she was like we just need to get people living closer to their jobs right that's like step step one so i just let's also just be conscious that wherever we are that the context is going to be very locally locally specific um but all driven by the really messed up regional dynamics that that matthew was pointing out it's still san francisco's fault no matter it's okay sure let's put it all it's all there's a problem in san francisco's fault if you may if you have one takeaway from this conversation let it be matthew's point that it is san francisco's fault i like that one i'm gonna i'm gonna take i'm gonna take the controversy a step further though i'm gonna say it's all white supremacy and capitalism's fault actually rich you know san francisco's fault is it the same thing i don't know i'm kidding i actually love san francisco i do i do i do um but anyway so where was i going with that um holistic conversation holistic conversation thank you i i really think the way to have the holistic conversation is just to have the holistic conversation like i think there's so we're all going to specialize in the thing that is our job or the thing that is our passion that is normal and that is correct um someone who is spending their time working on bike policy should not be trying to get up to speed on all of the weeds of all the all you know of sp9 for example um it that that's okay and and i don't need to get up to speed on you know whatever it is you all are talking about all protected by claims or a big deal right however i do think we need to all start with the mindset because i see this in every sector that i'm in that we all think our sector is the most important one and everything else flows from that right and i mean in housing it happens to be true no but sorry not sorry but you're not sorry no um but but i think i do think we need to remind ourselves that just okay we're obsessed we're obsessed with biking we're obsessed with walking we're obsessed with buses whatever it is that's fine and let's just remember there are other perspectives out there that we need to be we need to be channeling and then i would also just say it's a plug but it's also a concrete thing you can do check out our website ebho.org eastbayhousingorganizations.org you can sign up for our email list you can get our emails about the actions we're doing in oakland and beyond you can send a letter to a city council member it's really easy um just every once in a while step out of your comfort zone and advocate on something else doesn't mean you have to do it full time but every voice matters do you want to plug yimby as well c a yimby.org join no i mean i think i think um obviously we all have our specialization and there's no way to expect everybody to be experts but the thing that i'm very excited about that is happening um there is a convergence going on around these i want to call them urban issues but it's not just about i think people think assume when you say urban issues you mean los angeles or san francisco um there are a lot of other cities in california most of them actually aren't even on the coast um and and it's important to do a reminder of that fresno is a big city uh riverside is a big city um these are these are places that uh we don't think about necessarily or at least for a lot of folks don't come to the top of mind and incredibly impacted by housing actually people don't think that the highest rates since fresno stocked in crazy rent increases sorry no no i mean just to this point you know you could buy a house in fresno 10 years ago for like 250 000 dollars now like the median is 700 000 bucks in fresno it's insane but but why why why why because the bay area actually not that far off but but the thing is is you know look at just look at that distance that's a forced distance that is a policy choice that people made and the convergence that's happening is at both ends it's people recognizing in fresno this isn't working for us it's people recognizing in the bay area this isn't working for us either and the systems that are in place i do have to say like i don't want to get into a discourse about capitalism because that's for me and gave to do over beers at the bar over here but but the problem is there are legacy systems that we are in fact fighting the development of highways in this country was catastrophic i mean we know the history here right this was not done this was not a piece in love oh everybody's going to be able to drive everywhere kind of situation it was forced through communities and we know what communities it was forced through the decision to go largely suburban it was a policy choice that wasn't what people naturally decided to do it was a policy choice by the government to subsidize a certain type of housing to encourage that type of housing to give bankless that certain type of lifestyle so we do have like you know 75 years of unfortunate decisions about housing and transportation that we're up against but that's not to say that the next 75 years have to look the same and what's happening with the transportation folks the safe streets folks the bicycle folks that people who just work in transportation on trains and buses and bus lanes and the housing people affordable housers people do a statewide policy we actually are finding each other and we're having these conversations and thinking about like what is the solution to these problems because guess what i'm going to double down on something she said i think housing is actually pretty central to all this because everything else you do is determined is determined by where you put the housing the house is a physical thing that once it's there everything else is decided after that so we have to make sure that the decision about where we put the house is in the right place not just for the people who need the house but thinking about like what is our collective vision for the kind of society we want to live in what is our collective vision for how we correct the wrongs of the past which are awful i think most of us know the history of of this stuff if you don't like there's books and books and we'll we'll send you book rest i have to say the past and the present past and the present it's ongoing it hasn't we haven't stopped it yet that's a totally fair and accurate point agree but but the convergence i want to encourage people to find places of convergence because they're with your colleagues they're with our organizations we're doing this is happening i mean my boss was talking to dave all the time and this is something that you know didn't happen five years ago so that the housing advocate talking to the bike advocate and then there's the transit advocates like we just need to do that more how can we support each other what are in our case what bills can we sign on to together that show a bigger coalition behind these reforms and as that coalition gets bigger the vision the scale of the possible vision gets significantly bigger we can actually correct a lot of this if i agree that we don't want to talk about bike lanes and in fresno but that's just today i think the fresno of 10 years from now is going to be a very different conversation if we're effective as advocates so yeah i want to follow that we were asking we were i mean asked to answer a question about holistic approaches and yeah if you had any recommendations one thing i would say is is that what i try to talk about in in my planning classes with my students is the necessity of taking a person focused approach and that we often take an issue focused approach instead because we come up with an issue might be bikes and might be housing will can be whatever it is but that isn't necessarily responding to the needs of the person who is in front of us and what they articulate as being their needs and so a participatory approach is always really helpful and i think that tends to be more holistic in the sense that it tends to be about about people. Secondarily i would say to this point that it has been brought up earlier housing probably is really really important for everybody but part of the reason for that it is it because it has been systematically suppressed in so many places for so long and that's why it's raising its head it's such a big problem there are other big things in our lives that also matter indoor plumbing for example but it isn't something but indoor plumbing isn't something that's been systematically stopped from happening and so we don't hear hear about that right so it's different things are important because of the history and that's and so i would agree the housing is really important and maybe that's the that could be the takeaway in addition to san francisco is to blame for everything. Just to repeat Dan's point really quickly if you leave here with anything it is the combination that san francisco is to blame and second and most importantly just repeating back again having these holistic conversations with your friends and your colleagues about the intersection of these issues but most importantly people's lived experiences and how they are navigating both figuratively and literally throughout the world i want to open up for some questions we have a couple of minutes and i see a hand there and then i'll go around the bend so i think on the holistic note on the intersection between people who think about mobility and housing um i actually personally in my personal life maybe i'm just in a liberal bubble i feel like i've been really able to talk to people about housing and talk to people about mobility in those intersections where i feel like the messaging has really gotten to people in our spheres but has not gotten to like i would say the average person is when it comes to parking minimum reform and i think i i would love just your thoughts and like how we talk about that and how we can change that conversation you know i i led a panel with professor of parking professor at parking of michael manville and mott smith with senator portantino and it still didn't get to him he still didn't get it and so and i'm still struggling to have these conversations in my own personal life and i'm just asking for you guys to give any wisdom or knowledge on this topic because i think it's it's vital thank you for supporting ab 1401 first of all um one of the bills that california is working on this year that we are renewing from last year is parking reform um which is and this is i'm going to assume people don't know this but we actually mandate a huge amount of parking in this state just to give you a sense of the scale the city uh the county of los angeles 200 square miles of parking spaces 200 square miles of parking spaces in l.a county manhattan island is 25 square miles so when l.a county says they don't have anywhere to put people who don't have homes it's bullshit they have they could house everyone in l.a county who doesn't have a house guess how much parking they would have left over 190 square miles okay so this is fundamental misallocation of urban land it is fundamentally stupid it's also the law we require people to build parking if they build anything oh you're building a restaurant guess how much parking you need per square foot if you build a thousand square foot restaurant in l.a you need something like eight thousand square feet of parking that is not an exaggeration so we're just forcing our cities to become parking lots by law so we're taking a run trying to fix that i'm not i'm going to get to your question so the first step is to is to give and i know this is this sort of gets in a little bit of the capitalism debate but i'm going to stay away from that give developers the choice do they want to build parking or do they not want to build parking now this is really important for affordable housing developers because a single parking spot in an apartment building can cost from 40 to a hundred thousand dollars per space depending on the location of the building or whether you're going down underground or going up over the ground but each penny of that cost has to come out of the subsidies the developer has to build those subsidized units so you're literally just shrinking the number of apartments that you can build for low-income people because you're mandating that you build parking for them guess what those are also the same people who are least likely to have or use a car every day it's insane it's insane so that's one step is to actually try to take that but i think to the point about how do you talk about it where we've got a lot of traction is in two fronts one is in addressing you know kind of bringing up the climate implications of forced car storage it only gets just so far but there is a pretty large and passionate constituency in california for climate action and by large i mean like sways the legislature it's a really important topic in sacramento they really care about it now there's tons of ways to point out their hypocrisy on this and i'm like they're definitely room for improvement but pointing out that um that parking actually causes driving and there's tons of research on this you literally can evaporate driving behavior if you start to eliminate parking it just goes away it's like it doesn't happen but the second piece is this affordability piece you actually make it really really hard to spread your housing subsidy dollars as far as you can and get the most homes for people if you require those apartments to have the maximum amount of parking and that's that cuts a whole other way and it's sort of counterintuitive like well wait a second but why does it because it costs $50,000 per parking space that's why and and so if a unit costs to 250,000 to borrow against or build you've just you know five parking spots five parking spots you've eliminated a home for somebody right so are you going to eliminate homes and do 200 square miles of parking or you can actually build more homes and let people park wherever they can if they need to i'm just gonna say 30 seconds on this because i want to get to the other questions but um i agree with everything you said and and going back to dan's point about being people-centered i think when you're encountering really entrenched resistance you've got to figure out what is really bugging people right get down to them and and sometimes it's just like straight up like racism xenophobia able and whatever and i have no patience for that i'm not going to cater that obviously however um affordable housing developers don't want to build parking because it's expensive however we cannot simply dismiss the fact that for a lot of people including low-income people sometimes driving is still their best way to get around it's often not their car a very un unrecognized mode is how do you get to work someone else's car my cousin picks me up my you know my granny picks me up whatever it is um and we do not we as affordable housing folks actually do not get very far when we tell low-income people you actually don't need to drive and you're the people who aren't supposed to drive like that's right so until so again going back to the holistic planning until you can tell someone that they can get to their 5a and shift shift at the airport safely without driving in a metal shell until you have other alternatives for people then we have to keep pushing for the parking reform 100 we cannot be dismissive of those who are for the right reasons not quite there yet so that's all i want to say going around the bend so we were next um so it's great to hear you know further discussion about the convergence amongst housing and transportation advocates which is something i'm definitely all for um i think that there's a lot of similarities with both our succumb to nimbyism oftentimes and just general gentrification discourse and things like that um there more than you're trying to put a bike lane or add you know housing certain types of housing um it seems to me and correct me if i'm wrong or provide your opinion that housing advocacy has been more effective in some ways than transportation advocacy in terms of building a larger more collective movement in emb but i might be wrong about this so i'd like to hear your thoughts on that see what are different tactics different housing risk transportation advocates have taken which have been effective and kind of start back kind of discourse to see both how we can compare tactics and um adopt more effective ones i'll start now i will flag that because we only have four minutes we have a support stop at five your questions can be the last one sorry um i i think that both have been successful or unsuccessful depending on what your metric is right like i think that we have some fantastic bikeways for example in neighborhoods that would kill me if i said i wanted to up some of them right like let's use telegraph which is just right here right like it runs through one of the most expensive areas of the city and the bikeways there and the housing isn't right like and at the same time the only reason there's like a really really tall building you know a hundred feet off of telegraph at the macarthur part station is because they have land use authority so on one hand i kind of like question that a little bit but at the same time i think that it also depends on politics right like i think it this is my statement all of you i think it is really critical who we vote for in the time that we vote for them right that that there are council members who are very supportive of bikeway infrastructure who would never support upzoning their neighborhood district one and voclin and then at the same time there are neighborhoods that are happy to welcome housing but feel that bike lanes are gentrification district three so i'm just naming off council members in oakland do you guys want to add to that when i when i heard your question the first thing i thought was it's exactly it's exactly the opposite i think we have an arguably an oversupply of transportation infrastructure generally now most of that is auto infrastructure um we have a massive under supply of housing in the coastal cities of the united states and in some other cities in the united states a massive under supply the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of units in in california and this has been true for decades so you know i think the advocacy for housing is much harder because we're talking about a largely private market effort that is not controlled directly by the public sector but it can be stopped the public sector can stop it but they can't make it happen so that's a sort of a different world than the world of transportation which is one in which we're largely publicly providing infrastructure and so we have those decisions to make with public funds so um but i couldn't you know as to actual advocacy tactics and so on i'm not sure what i would say on that one yeah i i think this is a huge technical minutiae but i want all of you to know this that like the way that we make formulas for our tax dollars to be spent on things and this kind of gets to your point there are a ton of grants available for transportation projects there are very few grants available for housing projects like the fact that telegraph got i think all said and done maybe 20 million dollars of funds just for that one street we're talking about 14th street is 15 million dollars like just for these whole streets right but those are dollars that could have gone to housing affordability right just for two streets and don't come around i like both of them and i love those projects but i do want to flag that when we look at state budgets for example we look at city budgets for example that those dollars could be moved towards housing affordability okay so support alex support alex lee social housing bill please we need to get back to building public housing in this state i mean that's one of the other things but the thing i want to point out this is provocative food for thought i actually think that if you can get the housing right you know the bike and the transit stuff kind of forces itself into the market because because because the way people want to get around like if it is really a super pain in the ass to drive a car whether you take away the parking or not they're going to start saying you know what it's a pain in the ass to drive this goddamn car so food for thought i mean i am a cyclist like i'm religious fanatic cyclist although i'm injured at the moment but so i i'm not going to say don't build it bike lanes dave please keep doing what you're doing we're all we're all we're all in on it but just think about think about how much easier it could be if you put if you help people live closer to where they want to live which is indicated by these insane prices and then what happens after that so i think there's nothing thank you all for coming and have a great afternoon