 Well, this is the third affirmation session. It's very important. We're in a place where we've, this is a place where we produce these scores. But we produce these scores in the interaction of action, I could say, and activism. And this is very important, the possibility of understanding that what we do here has to have an effect out there, being connected, being out there, actually. It's so important in this session and it's crucial because we have Christopher Hawthorne and Vicky Beam that have moved from academia and design and law to public service and to basically using policy and politics as their round for change and to address questions. And this journey is so important and thank you so much for being here with us. We're also talking of a number of topics that are incredibly timely. And as you were saying, Vicky, before when have not they been timely, right? Housing density, how to intervene on what exists and how to do it actionable so that can be happening fast and with consensus. And it's great also to have these affirmations with Weiping Wu and Anna Lubinsky. The school is actually very much also a ferment that the building environment is interdisciplinary. It's not something that is centered around architecture but is distributed in a number of notices that have to be interacting and collaborating. The first affirmation session was looking at what it means to project to the future, what it means to actually anticipate the future and the future being a space for wording and welding did not yet to come. And I think that that was crucial, a crucial discussion in a number of disciplines that are using images or projecting images of other versions of what exists as a possibility to re-mobilize society, so the social, as Albeina would teach us to say. The second session was incredible as well. It was really looking at what it means to operate ecologically through design through construction and what is the way different actors could be mobilized in processes of design, redefining the way they relate to each other as a team, understanding what ecology means and what also is the case for design, I would say, on climate crisis. This is really a unique moment to discuss policy as related to action and design. I'm so happy that we have four people that are very much experts on this and also have a long trajectory doing this. So the session, as always, is going to be introduced by Barjan Bolman. There's a cohort of 800 people actually following from around the world now and sending questions from people that are in the Ivy League in their offices following these two people that are in refugee camps in Sudan and this is also how we want to have this discussion as connected to many voices around the world. Thanks. Hello all and welcome to what is now our third affirmation and as always, I want to welcome all of you who joined us here in person but also the many of you, as Andres mentioned, who joined us remotely, the members of our planetary cohort that take the effort to attend this event live from all over the planet despite sometimes inconvenient time differences. So today's affirmation is titled Design Policy and we are incredibly happy to have two speakers who have been very involved in policy making joining us today, namely Vicky Bean and Christopher Hawthorne and to have Waiping Wu and Adam Lubinsky provide the initial responses to their talks. And something that I cannot state enough is that affirmations really wants to discuss what societies and ecosystems can be. It's about possible presence and about possible futures and of course the notion of policy after futurisms and material ecologies in our previous sessions could also be understood as being central to that. Yet to be sure, this would require a policy not as a sort of one directionally tackling simple or less simple tasks or problems of a specific managerial or bureaucratic order rather this would entail an understanding of policy as fundamentally intersected with the many complexities and ecosystems that we are all part of. And it is precisely in the work of Christopher and Vicky that such complexities I believe are acknowledged. So developing an architectural housing competition in collaboration with the LA Mayor's office as in the case of Christopher's low-rise project is really not about inventing new architectural typologies but rather it operates critically at the intersections of inclusivity, affordability, wildfires, gentrification, racialization, notions of community, aging populations and so on. So such instances tackle oversights in what Hawthorne calls policy donuts, policy that leaves holes where in reality, complexities I think should be addressed. And similarly both Vicky's research and work in the city has critically operated at the intersections of public housing, affordability, segregated neighborhoods, zoning, mortgages, fees, data and environmental justice, et cetera. So this is also therefore work that acknowledges the ways in which design and design policy in regards to the built environment operates across a multitude of scales. And I love the example that Christopher gives about certain new green deal incentives and that getting rid of natural gas is actually intrinsically tied to the ways in which stove tops, electrical induction stove tops are rendered in the images sort of selling and trying to sell and market those apartments. So the scalar component seems crucial and also brings up something specific that might come up later, which is that, despite the fact that both of you work for very specific, almost idiosyncratic cities, Los Angeles and New York, I would also like to know how relevant this concept of the city still is for you and the work you're doing. So we'll start with a talk by Christopher and followed by Vicky. And as I mentioned last week, this is not a lecture or two lectures followed by a panel. Affirmations really wants to be a planetary conversation. So the presentations will be brief, 25 to 30 minutes each and then we'll have a response first by Wiping Wu and then by Adam Lubinski before we open it up to you and the planetary cohort and we'll end around 815, 820. So and I'll briefly introduce the speakers now. Christopher Hawthorne is a senior critic at Geel School of Architecture with a secondary appointment at Geel and English, a regular contributor to the New York Times, the New Yorker and other publications. He was the architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2004 to 2018. And from 2018 to 2022, he served as the first chief design officer of the city of Los Angeles, a position appointed by Mayor Eric Garcetti. And I'm sure you're all very familiar with much of his writing, but I want to plug one of his most recent texts, which appeared in the New Yorker issue of September 12th, titled How to Decolonize the City, in which he discusses the exhibition style Congo at Siva and Brussels and which calls for a new methodology of an emerging mode of cultural policy that would apply to the built environment at large. Vicky Bean is the judge Edward Weinfeld Professor of Law at NYU School of Law, an affiliated professor of public policy of the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and faculty director of NYU's Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. Bean returned to NYU in 2022 after serving as deputy mayor for housing and economic development of the city of New York from 2019 to 2021. In that role, she led a team of more than 30,000 people financing the new construction and preservation of 200,000 homes on budget and two years earlier than promised. Bean also previously served as the commissioner of housing preservation and development, HPD, for the city of New York from 2014 to 2017, leading the 2,400-person agency to promote affordable housing. Under a leadership, the agency financed the preservation of new construction of no less than 62,500 affordable homes in just three years. Wei Ping Wu is professor of urban planning and director of the Masters in Urban Planning program here at Columbia GSEP and the Vice Provost for Academic Programs at Columbia University. Before joining Columbia in 2016, she was a professor and chair in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy at Tufts University, trained in architecture and urban planning. Professor Wu has focused her research and teaching on understanding urban dynamics in developing countries in general and China in particular. She's an internationally acclaimed urban planning scholar working on global urbanization with a specific expertise in issues of migration, housing and infrastructure of Chinese cities and her publication include nine books, including the essential, I would say the Chinese city as well as many articles in top academic journals. And then Adam Lubinski is an associate professor of professional practice here at Columbia GSEP and a design and a sorry, managing principal at WXY architecture and urban design. He has a background in urban design, planning and mobility with more than 15 years of experience teaching, leading large scale strategic and master plans for public and private sector clients, including extensive work for New York City, agencies, community development, corporations, cultural institutions and private developers. He has thought here at Cornell Parsons and at Bartlett and holds a PhD in urban planning from University College and a masters from this very school. And I also want to thank Yuhi and Eresa for help in facilitating the questions. And as always Clarisse, who is managing the online questions from the planetary cohort. And with that, I think we're ready to get started. So Christopher. Thank you so much, Bart. Thank you, Andres, for the invitation. Hello, good evening, everyone. Good evening to everyone on the live stream as well. It's fantastic to be back at Columbia and in conversation with all of you. Very much looking forward to it. I will get right into it. As Bart mentioned, I was the architecture critic at the Los Angeles Times for almost 15 years. And I wrote about all kinds of things, including the border wall prototypes. But in the latter years of that position, I really concentrated on the urbanism and civic identity of Los Angeles. And in that capacity, got to know when he was a council member, Eric Garcetti, then council president. And then when he became mayor of Los Angeles, we did some public conversations about the future of the city with a focus on the built environment in Los Angeles and the architecture and design character of the city. And in that capacity, got to know the mayor and his ambitions for the city along those lines quite well. In the spring of 2018, he asked me to take on a newly created position called chief design officer for the city. I didn't think I would ever leave the LA Times. There are not very many full-time architecture critic positions, especially these days, it's a shrinking number. And I felt very supported in the work that I was doing. I had lots of autonomy at the Los Angeles Times. Nonetheless, it seemed like too exciting and challenging an opportunity to pass up. So the role, as we defined it together, the mayor and I really involved design oversight on the one hand of existing projects and new initiatives to promote effective, equitable and sustainable design. And my focus was really across the board a range of projects involving the public right of way, public art at LAX and elsewhere. A lot of work on procurement and digging in, as I'm sure Vicki can appreciate to the language that relates to design in RFP, RFQ and other procurement documents. Thinking given the intensity of the climate crisis, thinking about shade from an equity point of view and as a kind of infrastructure in Los Angeles. And then two topics that I'll concentrate on in my remarks this evening, civic memory and housing policy. My position was based in the mayor's office. There are pluses and minuses to advantages and disadvantages to being in a point to even elected official as opposed to being in a city department. And we can talk a little bit about that maybe later. But I really did collaborate with a number of city council offices, city departments. Speaking of that last point, unlike New York, which I think has more than 50, right? City council of 51, right? 59 city council offices. Los Angeles has just 15 in a city of four million people. LA County has just five supervisors for a county of 10 million population. And that means that a lot of land use authority in particular by tradition and by policy and by law flows through individual council offices and council members planning deputies, which complicated some of the work I'm about to share with you in some interesting ways. So the design oversight work included major public projects like this new essentially gateway airport connector at LAX as well as public projects at prominent locations. This is a planned two tower development at the site of my former employer, the Los Angeles Times, which decamped its headquarters to El Segundo on the west side of Los Angeles. I worked, as I mentioned, quite a bit on issues related to shade and shade equity, particularly in the public right of way. And that included working on a new street furniture contract with designs for new transit shelters by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. As well as a lot of projects related to COVID and post COVID, including design standards for our outdoor dining program, which we called El Fresco. And with a number of partners at USC and elsewhere in Los Angeles, spent some time thinking about the future of the 550 to 600 gas station sites just in the city of Los Angeles, which will have to find new uses after 2035 when gas powered vehicles are phased out in the state of California, practically speaking, it will probably happen even sooner than that. So we invited a number of architects and design firms to help us think about whether those gas stations, which are under private ownership, it's important to say, and also we'll need significant remediation, might be turned into housing to open space or other kinds of community centers. This is one of the responses to that prompt from Jeffrey Naba and his firm, Annaba Williams. But as I mentioned, I want to concentrate this evening on two areas of initiatives in particular that I worked on while I was chief design officer. Those are housing and civic memory. On the housing front, I think most of you will be familiar with this photograph, maybe among the most famous architectural photographs of the 20th century, and it suggests the extent to which there is a very stubborn idea that residential architecture and maybe architecture more broadly begins and ends in Los Angeles with the single family house and the case study program which produced this doll house certainly was part of that story as is artwork by artists like David Hockney and others who really equated the good life or an idea of the California version of the American dream with the single family house, the swimming pool, the private garden, et cetera. Certainly it's fair to say that the individual house continues to be a locus of experimentation and innovation. This was particularly true when it came to architects of color in 20th century Los Angeles like Paul Williams who was prohibited not just from building or buying property in certain neighborhoods but even from spending the night in certain areas of Southern California when he was a practicing architect which makes his own house in Lafayette Square neighborhood of Los Angeles all the more significant in connection to that history of innovation and certainly that continued all the way through the latter years of the 20th century and the work that Frank Gary and a number of other architects were doing in rethinking and reinventing the single family house typology and because of that the single family house became across Southern California really a kind of infrastructure by mid century when new subdivisions like this one in Lakewood were being developed at a regional really macro scale across the region. That leaves us with the zoning map that we have today which as you can see here reflects the fact that more than three quarters of the residential land in the city of Los Angeles is zoned single family even today which suggests some of the challenges that we face in our housing policy writ large. That ignores though that story that narrative that set of tropes ignores a really rich history vital history of innovation in multifamily housing in the decades leading up to World War II leading up to mid century and what we now think of as the missing middle scale beginning really in the late 19th century with bungalow courts and continuing through early experiments by Irving Gill, Schindler, Neutra other modernists and continuing through mid century at a bigger scale in projects like Village Green which really did achieve a kind of humane solution to the housing crunch and the population growth in the 30s and leading into World War II which led us after World War II to the typology that may be familiar to some of you born in Los Angeles called the Dingbat which was essentially two or three story apartment buildings over typically covered parking sometimes garage parking at street level which helped quite affordably in fact house successive waves of newcomers to Los Angeles who came in really significant numbers after federal immigration reform happened in 1965 when we saw a significant leap in the immigration to Southern California from Latin America and Asia in particular leading to some of you may remember the film Slums of Beverly Hills which features a Dingbat quite prominently. Many of them if we go back had names like Beverly Capri or Casa Bella these sort of aspirational names and the word Dingbat actually comes from this little typographical feature which was often affixed as a bit of ornament or decoration to the facade of these buildings but they were so popular and so many of these buildings and apartment buildings like them began to sprout all over Los Angeles and significantly for our discussion this evening move into single family and low-rise neighborhoods that they produced a pretty severe and actually politically speaking quite successful backlash in a series of no growth and slow growth efforts in the 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s which through ballot measures other kinds of zoning changes really reduced as you can see in this now within LA housing circles famous diagram that comes from a dissertation by Greg Morrow when he was at UCLA which suggests that the zoning capacity of Los Angeles was reduced from about 10 million to below four million by the end of that slow growth effort in 1990 which leaves us with some of the issues that we have today and some of the issues that we were working to address during my time in the mayor's office much of state housing policy is set in California at the state level in Sacramento and then there's a negotiation between state housing laws and how those laws are implemented or carried out in individual cities so some of the projects I'm about to talk about are really about that negotiation between new streamlining or zoning changes at the state level in Sacramento and then how that played out at the city level in Los Angeles but the efforts to up zone particularly single family neighborhood state wide kept hitting a number of roadblocks particularly because of opposition importantly from Southern California lawmakers in Los Angeles and Los Angeles County so that produced a kind of stalemate and this stalemate was in place when I joined the mayor's office in 2018. On the one hand it was very clear if you think back to that zoning map that I showed that that is not a sustainable land use model for the 21st century in terms of our climate goals in terms of our housing affordability goals it's clear that there has to be an effort to locate new housing more strategically intelligently near transit and jobs. On the other hand most elected officials including the mayor who appointed me it's fair to say saw no incentive in wading into that territory and promoting a zoning reform in fact they saw only downside politically speaking so we had this sort of Gordian knot on the one hand a clear sense of this zoning map was not sustainable on the other very clear difficulty in terms of imagining politically speaking a way forward and giving incentives to elected officials to wade into that territory which is where this low rise effort that we're gonna talk about comes into play and there are some particular complications that are unique to the state of California. This is a permanent support of housing proposal funded in part by affordable housing bond by Eriko and Moss Architects that was designed to fill two city owned surface parking lots. Hard to think of a better site for new affordable housing, no building has to get knocked down, nobody has to get displaced but because this project is within the half mile wide band that falls under the jurisdiction of the California Coastal Commission the California Coastal Commission sees parking access to the beaches and the coasts of California and maintaining that parking access is part of its mission not really seeing a contradiction between that and the larger environmental mission that it was charged with and as a result we had to replace every one of the parking spaces that were in those surface parking lots in addition to the new parking that would be added to serve the new residents of the project so a project of about 150 units then suddenly required about 450 parking spaces. Proving an adage from the parking reform guru at UCLA, Don Shubb that form follows not function in California often but parking requirements. So we endeavored foolheartedly or not, foolishly or not to wade into this territory and really wanted to think about how we could create a platform for elected officials and the city as a whole to have a more productive conversation about housing policy because as Bart mentioned we really had a hole in our housing policy donut on the one end at the level of accessory dwelling units and second units we saw really terrific production and we were seeing really terrific results of policy changes and public subsidy for larger scale projects both market rate and affordable subsidized projects but the so-called missing middle particularly four to 10 units but really anywhere from two to about 20 units was the hole in that donut but we wanted to organize this quite differently from other competitions. I think everyone will be familiar with a feeling in many communities, particularly communities of color that design competitions can often take ideas from architects outside of communities and see those ideas imposed on communities. We wanted to reverse that dynamic until we very intentionally started the process with a number of listening sessions which informed the brief. This is one on community land trusts. We made those sessions required viewing for anyone who wanted to participate in what we ended up calling a design challenge instead of a competition for some reasons that we reflected what we heard in those listening sessions and I don't expect that you'll read every name on this list but we had four different juries and this because we had tenants, affordable housing developers, community land trust leaders, it was a very different kind of jury than is typically the case in a competition and as a result of making those listening sessions required viewing for anyone who participated we really did have a much different conversation that was much more attuned to the sensitivities around displacement and future of communities of color than is typically the case in this kind of competition and that was certainly a departure I think from the ways in which earlier efforts to address the housing crisis in Los Angeles through architecture like the case study program operated. I don't think John Intenza was thinking about redlining or mortgage subsidy when he was engaging those architects. So we had four categories in this design challenge. One of the winners was a young architect from New York. Looking at four to 10 unit sites of various kinds. This is a winner in the four plex category which imagines taking a single family lot and accommodating four units with architecture by Omgivning and landscape by Studio MLA, my Mialairs firm and we were tremendously encouraged by the response that we had to low rise nearly 400 submissions and a really robust series of conversations that continues in Los Angeles about the future of single family and low rise neighborhoods. Another project we worked on had to do with streamlining and promoting the ongoing success of our ADU program which was a design pre-approval program for ADUs. We invited a number of particularly young and emerging offices to take part in a pilot project and then once the project launched it was available open to any architect who could meet the basic qualifications. Basically this allows architects to submit designs for pre-approval, go through the process of getting those approved through our Department of Building and Safety. Homeowners can then work with the participating architects to negotiate a fee with the exception of this new addition to the program which is owned outright by the city of Los Angeles and can be downloaded for free by homeowners who are seeking to add an ADU. ADUs now make up consistently between 20 and 25% of our housing units produced in Los Angeles which is on the one hand a sign of the success of these programs, on the other a sign of the stubborn size of the hole in that doughnut that so many are happening at the second unit. And we did anticipate of course some final breakthroughs in Sacramento and sure enough after this competition, sorry after this effort had been launched, state lawmakers in Sacramento finally broke through that log jam to make the four plexes legal to build on single family parcel statewide which is again something we had specifically anticipated in one of the categories. We had some very nice coverage including a piece by Michael Kilman in The Times. And a couple of takeaways. One is why focus on this scale? One is that the kind of hole in the doughnut that I mentioned but also if you look at the second bullet there are a number of studies that suggest that these 10 to two unit projects tend to be on a per unit basis by far the most, the least expensive and most affordable to build it's because they're typically one to two stories wood frame construction. It's exactly the kind of construction that we know how to build in Southern California. But also in terms of filling what had been a kind of vacuum of policy. Because of that log jam, no elected officials, no public policy discussions were moving into that territory. That left a vacuum that was consistently filled over the last two decades with pretty apocalyptic and alarmist visions from housing opponents about the damage that would be wrought in communities if we allowed first ADUs and then let's say a four plex. We wanted to tap into the intelligence of architects and landscape architects to help balance that a little bit. In the few minutes that I have left I wanna talk about another initiative that was central to the work that I did when I was in the mayor's office. And that is what we ended up calling the Mayor's Office Civic Memory Working Group which was our version of the discussion that was happening all over the country beginning in 2017, 2018, 2019 about fraught histories, controversial monuments, and memorials beginning of course with Confederate monuments in many Southern cities and states. Some of you may have seen the Ed Rushe show at MoMA which I recommend to you. If you haven't seen it and you may have seen a variation on this piece which suggests I think the complexity of LA's relationship with history. Los Angeles has long been very proud of the fact that it's a city understood as a city of the future maybe the city of the future, the headquarters of the Hollywood Dream Factory a place that has had its civic gaze really firmly fixed on the future. And as a result has neglected many elements of its past, has relied on myth making and boosterism more than most cities and has been guilty of more aggressively whitewashing difficult moments of its past I think that is the case in many American cities. So in an effort to tap into that national conversation on the one hand but also tailor it specifically to this peculiar relationship that LA enjoys with history we convened a group of what ended up being more than three dozen historians, architects, indigenous leaders, colleagues of mine in city government in what we call as I mentioned the mayor's office civic memory group which really set out to explore this question about what new policies might help the city commemorate its history more fully, more accurately, more honestly especially as I said where that history is fraught or has been whitewashed. And we were guided throughout by this quote from the great Isabel Wilkerson which is often a useful response to anyone who would say well why am I responsible for the sins of my ancestors or forebears and particularly not least for its architectural metaphor we relied on this as a kind of touch point for us as we were doing this work and facing those questions. Also we launched this group toward the end of 2019 and then we paid very close attention as the city really changed around us in the next two years and we saw some really remarkable examples of bottom up community led commemoration. First with following the shooting death of the rapper Nipsey Hussle which produced an amazing as you can see outpouring of grief and commemoration and his honor similarly when Kobe Bryant was killed in a helicopter crash in early 2020 not long after we started our work an incredible outpouring of completely organic community led memorialization commemoration and then of course after the murder of George Floyd and during COVID the Black Lives Matter movement, marches and conversation that that provoked in Los Angeles as in so many other cities. We also again to get back to the peculiar relationship of Los Angeles and memory wanted to pay attention to the ways in which despite our lack of monuments, public squares, statues the way in which we had our own language of commemoration and have our own language in Los Angeles and the ways in which we understand memory through movement as can be seen in this juxtaposition of Randy's Donuts one of the classic examples of car friendly architecture where the sign is quite a bit larger than the building, it's advertising but this is when the space shuttle endeavor was returned after being retired from service to its spot in the California Science Center in Exposition Park near USC and it moved through the city of Los Angeles in a kind of slow motion, slow speed parade that drew hundreds of thousands of spectators and allowed us to commemorate in a certain way in a very LA way a history of aerospace innovation in the city of Los Angeles which is very important to the history of the city. The results of all of that work in conversation was a report in print form and on a website called past due. Even the design of the project we wanted to communicate the ambition of it. We worked with a fantastic graphic design studio in Los Angeles called Poly Mode. They developed new typefaces for the project, bespoke typefaces that reflected certain cultural histories in Los Angeles. We had 18 key specific policy recommendations but we really wanted to flesh that out. We didn't want this to be a typical city document and the design of course was meant to reflect that. We also commissioned new writing, new photography and wrapped that together in this publication that was endorsed by Merrick Garcetti in April of 2021 about 18 months or so after we had started our work. So it included commemorations of a certain particular important sites of historical memory including the site at UCLA where the first internet message was sent to Palo Alto but also much thornier trickier issues like the legacies of Spanish colonialism and Unipero Cera and what to do with statues of Cera all throughout Southern California which are our version to a certain extent of Confederate statues. Very difficult subject given that Cera has been canonized by the Catholic Church on the one hand and on the other that statues and seeing his name and history represented our source of great pain we heard from native communities repeatedly in our work. Still all of this work contained on the website at civicmemory.la. A couple of key themes that emerged from this work we heard in our conversations with communities that too often the city was acting as a kind of gatekeeper when it came to civic memory and that communities were much more interested in the city figuring out how to facilitate new expressions of organic community bottom up memory. We really tried to avoid the document being prescriptive or being a set of rules. We really paid careful attention to community outreach and engagement and we allowed the report to disagree with itself. We didn't want to aim for some illusory consensus. These are incredibly difficult subjects with a range of valuable perspectives and we wanted to engage those and that's also what made this I think different from a typical city or mayor's office document that it allowed that level of uncertainty and debate even within its pages. That work has continued to spin off a number of initiatives that I have remained involved in. The report helped us shape commemorations for the very difficult 30th anniversary of 1992. The civic uprising that followed the acquittal of the police officers charged with beating Rodney King. This was an event, a poster for an event that was designed by Polymode, the same design studio that did the original report. And importantly, we continue to hear echoes and see connections between some of the events that we explored that had been forgotten or whitewashed or buried and ongoing debates about civic identity. This is an image from the Mexican repatriation which happened during the depths of the depression. This is the report page that deals with it. Somewhere between 400,000 and 2 million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were repatriated against their will. Many of them citizens of the United States and Los Angeles was the epicenter of that effort. And now as we hear, I think particularly, crowding into the mainstream from the right new debates about birthright citizenship. Important to remember that we have in our own blue cities histories very similar to that that we understand, I think, too little. The final thing that I'll talk about this evening is the most significant project yet to emerge directly from the civic memory recommendations which is an effort to build and realize a memorial to the victims of the 1871 Chinese massacre which remains the deadliest episode of racial violence in Los Angeles history. 10% of the Chinese population was killed in a single evening. Even more shocking to me is the fact that 10% of the Los Angeles population at the time participated in the mob violence that killed those Chinese residents, all men of Los Angeles in 1871. We worked with an AAPI-led design firm in Los Angeles called Folder Studio to do a request for ideas or an RFI document to solicit submissions for a new memorial. Again, I don't expect you to read all these names, but this suggests the extent of the engagement in this process we brought together a steering committee of Chinese American leaders in Chinatown and in the larger Chinese American diaspora in Southern California which is quite extensive. This group ultimately numbered more than 75 leaders who helped inform the brief and the plans for this project. And after a really remarkable collection of submissions, the city selected this proposal from Nicholas Leong and Judy Chung along North Los Angeles which is where most of the violence that day in 1871 took place, really a remarkable response to that RFI. It's not just at the primary site which is here next to the Chinese American Museum, it also reflects the distributed nature of the violence, that violence really took place across the entire geography of Los Angeles as it existed in 1871, but also some sites of sanctuary. As Chinese were fleeing downtown, fleeing the site of the violence, there were certain white property owners in Los Angeles who opened their properties as sites of sanctuary, so a silver lining on a very, very dark day. We wanted this to be a new kind of kind of distributed or networked memorial that would have a primary gathering spot at the location of violence but also reflect the geography of the massacre itself and embedded in the sidewalk will be these markers sort of leading visitors through this narrative in built space. And very pleased to say that thanks to some recent support from the Mellon Foundation and its Monuments Project, in addition to significant city funding that's already in place, the project is at its primary site fully funded and moving full speed ahead. So I look forward to talking about some of the lessons I learned from this experience particularly as they relate to procurement, community engagement, these issues, these kind of Gordian knots of public policy, but I will leave it there for now and thank you very much. Well, first of all, thank you for sponsoring this part and Andres and thank you for having me here and thank you for that incredible presentation. I have some sense of what's involved in these public design and memory issues and they're very, very thorny. So congratulations for all you accomplished there. So I wanna take us back to New York and do wanna say thank you to all the folks who are online from all over the world. So I risk being too parochial here by talking about New York, but I think that the issues that we're facing in terms of how do we redevelop our single family neighborhoods, our low density neighborhoods, our issues that people are facing all over the world. So I hope that there are things that we can take from that. So let me just start by putting this in context. Those of you who are New Yorkers or who recently moved here to go to school will know that New York has an affordability crisis has for as long as I've been here, which is almost 40 years. So, but just to put a little bit of context into that, let me just talk for a moment about that crisis. The crisis first and foremost is a problem that the increase in our rents and our housing prices, but I'm gonna focus on rents because the largest portion of the city of New York is renters, the largest portion of our population is renters and because renters tend to be lower income than homeowners. So you see here both New York State and New York City, so the red lines here are the rate of the growth in rents if they were indexed to the prices in 1980 and how much they've increased. And you see for the really the first two decades up until 2000, they were pretty close. Rent was rising at about the same rate that incomes were rising. And so, if you could afford the place that you were living in, you probably could continue to afford that place because your income was rising parallel to what was happening to rents. But what happened starting in 2000 is that incomes took a nosedive, rents took a quite steep increase in both the state and the city and that just left a huge gap in what people could afford to pay for the homes that they had been living in as rents grew. Rents grew faster than inflation for all segments of New York from the lowest income or the lowest rent, I should say, 25th percentile where rents increased here in New York City by 14% just in the last 11 years from 2010 to 2021. And at the median rent increased by 19%. This is after inflation. So that's a very steep increase for just 11 years in all these different segments. Between a quarter and a third of all New York state residents, including New York City residents, rentors pay more than half of their income for their rent for housing expenses. Not just a third of their income, which is what we consider if you're paying more than a third, you're rent burdened. If you're paying more than a half, you're severely rent burdened. That leaves you very little money to pay for medicine, to educate your kids, to buy food. And yet we have these very high shares of our renter populations who are paying more than half of what they take home, what their income is. And for our very poorest New Yorkers, the 28% of our renters were almost a million people who are what we define as extremely low income, making less than $27,810 for a family of four. For those people, the situation is really almost impossible, right? We would need about 656,000 more homes priced at a rent that they could afford in order to make that share of our renter population not be so rent burdened, right? In fact, while they make 27,810, that's the number, they would need about 83,000 in order to afford the median two-bedroom rental in New York City. So that's, when you think about just the enormity, first of all, of the number of people, right? The number of households, not just the number of people, but the number of households, what we would need to come up with in order to make housing affordable for those households and just how huge the gap is between what they make and what it would be necessary for them to pay for a two-bedroom house. It's really a remarkable crisis. And the crisis is in large part, not exclusively, but in large part caused by the fact that we just aren't producing enough housing. So if you look here, the city of New York has a per capita permitting rate of about 24 homes per 1,000 people, whereas Los Angeles is doing better. And if you look up the scale, you see your Southern cities, your Southeastern cities, Texas, but even the District of Columbia. I mean, look at that. It's almost four times the amount, the number of new homes permitted per capita as New York is providing. So it's a dramatic difference. So if you're not producing that level of housing, you're going obviously to have a housing shortage and where you have a housing shortage, you're going to have higher rents, right? Also, if you put it in context over time, we're building far less than we used to build. The 1920s is certainly an outlier where we built more than 700,000 homes in a decade, right? But there were many, many times, the 1950s, the 1960s, where we were building north of 300,000. Even the 1970s, the decade of the fiscal crisis, we permitted 171,000 homes. Today, we really struggle. We did 169,000 in the 2010s and we're still making up for, or trying to make up for, this incredible deficit that we saw in the 1980s and 1990s. We're in the entire decade of the 1990s. We only permitted 80,000, 81,000 homes, right? So it's a remarkable drop-off and shows just what the supply problem is. As a result, our vacancy rate is dangerously low. Economists consider a healthy vacancy rate to be around 7%. You need houses to be turning over, rents, apartments to be turning over in order to give people choices, in order for there to be spaces available on the market when a household needs to move. And that's considered at around 7% hours, hovers between, sorry, between three and 4%. 5% is considered under New York law an emergency. We are still in an emergency that we have had four decades. So the result is that over these last few decades, housing has become just incredibly more expensive. So this is a map that shows you in 2010, the share of tracks within a county where the person making median income, the median income for that tract could afford the median priced home or apartment, right? And you see that the dark green is over 75% of the homes were affordable to somebody making the median income. And the red is less than 10%, the pink is 10 to 25%. And you see what's happened in New York, which is for those of you who are map challenged, right? This is the New York area in here of the Northeast. And what you see is we went from all that green to all that pink and red. So in that red, for example, if I'm making the median income for my tract, I can only afford 10% of the homes in that tract, right? And this is a tremendous problem for the sort of superstar cities, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and the coasts, but it's also a problem almost, well, let me put it this way, a lot of places throughout the United States. So I've showed you the same map for the Southeastern US, you know, where we think of as a high growth Atlanta, you know, Charlottesville, those kinds of places. And you see, again, this move from that dark green to all pink and red, right? The only areas of the United States that are not that now that pink and red are the sort of red basket states, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, on up to the Dakotas and the Northern States, those are the only ones now in the United States that don't have that affordability crisis. So it's something that we're facing all over what to do about it, right? Where are we going to build in order to get the kind of supply that we need? We've tried to fix it with high rises and for those of you who are familiar with New York, this is a picture taken in 2013 and then again in 2013, 2023, looking into Manhattan from Brooklyn. And what you see here is all of the downtown Brooklyn high rises and the East River, Waterfront, Green Point, Williamsburg, Waterfront high rises that have gone up, which now actually blocked the view of the high rises in Manhattan. So we've tried to fix this with high rises and we'll continue to do that, right? But we're running out of land that's appropriate for those high rises. We're running out of air that's appropriate for those high rises because in New York City, the state prevents us from going higher on residential than what we call 12 floor area ratio, right? If you're building an office building, you can build 24, 30, FAR. If you're building residential under state law in New York City, we can only build to 12 FAR. So we can't really go any higher with those high rises than what we already have or bigger with those high rises. As was pointed out, it's very expensive to build high rises versus an eight to 10 unit building, right? When you talk about having to use steel, when you talk about the foundations that you need, the elevators course that you need, high rises are very, very expensive. The residents of all the high rise neighborhoods think that they've done quite a bit already and don't think that they should bear an unfair share of accommodating the city's growth. And then last but not least, the environmental consequences of all the low density, highly car dependent and very flood prone areas in the city. Those environmental consequences as we saw really tragically last week and several years ago are really beginning to catch up with us or possibly even outrun us. So there's been a lot of talk about gentle density, the kind of middle housing that Christian referred to. And those approaches are expanding across the countries. We're seeing a lot of places, not just on the coast, not just Oregon, Washington, et cetera, but really all over the United States start to talk about gentle density. So and it's become an issue even in New York. Last week, Mayor Adams announced his city of yes for housing opportunity where he proposed that every neighborhood had to allow more development in order to accommodate our housing needs. And last year, Governor Huckle proposed that every neighborhood in the city have to allow growth at a rate of about 3% every three years and every suburban jurisdiction that isn't served by mass transit had to suburban and rural had to allow at least 1% over a three-year period. Neither of these has been passed and Governor Huckle's housing plan last year went down pretty hard and Mayor Adams proposal has to go through the 59 community boards. So it's not gonna be an easy lift. So what are these low density neighborhoods that we're talking about? So the Furman Center where I am one of the faculty directors looked at the bottom quartile of the city's community districts by density and what you see here in blue are all those areas. Not surprisingly, Staten Island, the furthest away from the old fashioned concept of a central business district on Eastern Queens, Northern Bronx, and the Rockaways are our lowest density neighborhoods. What you see are some of the housing types that we see in those areas. These happen to be in Queens. And if you look at, well, what are they contributing to the growth of New York and to the housing needs of New York? The lowest density neighborhoods saw the lowest percentage increases in their housing stock over the last decade. So over the last decade, the lowest density community districts grew just barely over 2% or permitted about 2% of their housing stock over that decade. Whereas the highest density areas permitted a little bit more than 3% and the city overall permitted a little more than 5%. Now, one of the things that that tells you is the highest density, the high rises that I talked about earlier being sort of where we tried first, are actually not even pulling what might be considered to be their fair share. It's really the two quartiles in the middle, the middle density neighborhoods that are bearing most of the weight of the new housing construction in New York over the last decade. Only two of the lowest density community districts met. The governor's standard of 3% growth over a three year period in the 2020 to 2022 period, the Rockaways and some one area in Queens, Jamaica, Queens. And many people think, well, that's not quite fair because there is about 45% of the land, not 75% as in LA, but about 45% of the land and yet it's only home to about 28% of the city's population. That's also the case in the low density suburbs of Westchester and Long Island, right? Which are providing far less housing than New York City and then the New Jersey suburbs, which are building a great deal to accommodate the jobs that are coming in to the tri-state area. But the Westchester and Long Island suburbs are not stepping up in the same way and have very low permitting rates. So that's a problem on fairness grounds on a couple of dimensions, right? One is that some of these low density neighborhoods are among the city's highest opportunity neighborhoods. They have some of the city's best schools. So you see here those low density neighborhoods, which are again the sort of not the darkest green, but the second darkest green and that on your left side is fourth grade student performance in language arts and on the right side, fourth grade student performance on math. And you do see that some of the lowest density areas are the very best performance in the city in terms of how kids are doing in our schools. Similarly, some of the lowest density neighborhoods have some of the lowest crime in the city. And I want to be clear that that's for the community districts as a whole. Within a community district, if you drill down further than into the track level, not at the CD level, at the community district level, you see that there are very different patterns within a community district and that there are areas of density in every one of the low density community districts that tend to be poorer, more composed of people of color and that where you have vast differences in measures like school quality. What about in terms of who lives in the community districts that are the lowest density? Contrary to I think the common perception, they are not all white, right? In fact, they are less white than the city as a whole, right? They are more Asian and more non-Hispanic black than the city as a whole. So they are not, our concept is often parts of Queens that we think of as being very, very upper income and white, but that is not what marks the totality of our low density districts. And so we have to be careful about thinking about the fairness of trying to have a little bit denser development in these areas. And we need especially to be concerned about the fact that more than half of the city's black homeowners own homes in those 15 low density neighborhoods. So whatever we do to encourage more density in those areas, we've got to be very protective about the existing black homeownership in those areas because we have obviously a very serious discrepancy between white home ownership rate and black home ownership rate in the city. And of course the foreclosure crisis tells us we really have to be careful also in terms of what we do in those low density neighborhoods so that we don't end up with the kind of crash in those neighborhoods and the kind of foreclosure rates in those neighborhoods that we saw after the 2008 crash. And we also have to take into account that those low density areas are disproportionately at risk of flooding. So you see in the blue, you see the 20, 100 year flood plain and you see it's in many, many of our low density neighborhoods. So all that needs to be taken into account in thinking about fairness of how much we can ask these neighborhoods to accommodate more growth but certainly we need to be having that discussion. So what would general density look like? Christian showed some great examples and those ADU examples. Let me show a couple of others to just give a concept because many people really have a hard time wrapping their head around. What would happen in our single family neighborhoods if we had more gentle density? And really the answer is a few more and smaller homes on the same amount of space, on the same lot which means that you're using a lot less lawn, a lot less garden and lawn on the side yards, on the backyards, you're gonna use that more for housing and less for yards, right? So in Houston, which actually has had a program for almost 20 years now of allowing densification of townhouses, lots with townhouses on them and what you saw is some of those areas being redeveloped to have two townhouses instead of one townhouse or in the picture here to really have not attached homes but still detached homes but at a slightly greater density. Have the same thing in Portland where you have a lot of bigger, older houses that were subdivided into two or three and so you get two or three times the amount of density in those areas and of course through ADUs which Christian mentioned, here's an ADU in a backyard in Portland. So how do we move from the picture that I showed you of those single family homes in Queens to a more gentle density framework? So let me suggest a couple of things. First is that we take advantage of transit, one of the blessings of New York City, that we take advantage of transit and I unfortunately could not overlay these two maps but if you see that main corridor of transit availability here, over here, throughout here, you see that there is space that is covered in those low density areas that can accommodate transit oriented development. So that should really be the first place that we think about bringing in higher levels of density. Some of that may be six story apartment houses rather than the eight to 10 apartment houses but that's an area that's really ripe for slightly more density or even a little bit more density to take advantage of the transit and to accommodate people's need for housing. One thing that we've learned from watching around the rest of the country is that you need what I'm gonna call a whole of regulation approach when Minneapolis made headlines for ending single family zoning and let me just say that's a misnomer. We're not like declaring single family zoning places illegal tomorrow. They're all grandfathered in, grandparented in but we are saying that single family going forward cannot just be used for single family. Of course it could be used for single family unless there's a minimum density imposed which is not the way that most of these proposals run but what happened is that Minneapolis ended single family zoning but it didn't end all of the things that constrain building two single family zones which includes the side yards, the backyards, the front yard requirements, the height restrictions and all kinds of other envelope restrictions that keep buildings from reaching that even gentle density that we're talking about and of course parking requirements so which are really a thorn in everyone's side. We need to take advantage of traditional models as you drive around the city. Think about how many places you see that are single family retail, right? We never used to have single family retail. You lived above the store. You had a couple of apartments above the store and we seem to have done away with that. In fact, when I was housing commissioner and I would go talk to people and say you've got three stories above your store. Why isn't it rented out? And they would show me they had taken the stairs out leading up to the upper apartments and they were for boxes, for empty boxes instead of for people. So we need to revert to some of those traditional models. We need to rethink contextual zoning. In the early 2000s, a lot of low density neighborhoods got what were called contextual zones which allegedly were to ensure that what got built there fit in, looked compatible, was aesthetically of the same type as what was being built there but in reality they were down zones in many cases. They prevented the kinds of growth, even the kinds of housing types even that were there then. And we need to understand that the context today is this crisis in affordability, not a crisis in aesthetics, right? And so we really need to rethink some of those contextual re-zones. Most importantly, we need to build a coalition. Who might be members of our coalition? Everywhere I went across the city when I was housing commissioner, I would hear from parents. My kids went to college, they wanna come home, there's no place for them that's affordable. There's no place in our neighborhood that they can move to. Similarly, people saying, I want to bring my parent home here because I need to take care of him or her, right? People who say, look, I'm really struggling to pay the city's increasing property taxes, to pay the energy bill. I need to be able to bring in some rental income. That's a constituency, right? People who care about the climate change implications, that's a constituency. People who care about the habitat, the wetlands, all of the historic treasures that would otherwise be built or be used for greenfield development or for redevelopment if we don't allow more development in the places where we're already living. And those who think it's not fair. It's not fair for some neighborhoods, especially those two in the middle, which are places like East New York, Brownsville, Flatbush, those kinds of places, that feel like they're being asked to bear more than their fair share of the growth as these higher density neighborhoods are facing the 12 FAR cap and the lower density neighborhoods are enjoying contextual rezones that keep them from having any new housing. Those concerned about the equity implications of where the growth would have to go if it doesn't go in New York City. And those who want to see our incredible investments in infrastructure, transit, et cetera, be efficiently used. So that's just a smattering of who needs to be in that coalition, but that's really where we're gonna have to focus. If we want to see the kinds of changes that we've seen in California has really been a leader on at the state level. So, let me end there, and I think we'll have plenty to talk about in terms of how to get there. Thank you very much, Vols. This was amazing. I think the overlaps and the notion of coalition I think is crucial. I'm sure we'll get back to that. I would like to open the questions to Wiping if you want to start. Thank you both very much, really enjoyed and learned a lot in two very different cities, but you come to quite similar ways of thinking about, particularly in terms of density. And I think that the desire to have a large scope of design policy is really in the right place, because we think about the American urban landscape. Land is individually owned, housing is market provided, but the collective challenges, affordability, or the collective memory and space is public good. And who's to take care of that, right? So, I think in the school, we have student study architecture, student study, urban design and urban planning. There's often in between space that has not been well cared for in many cities. So I think this, I find it extremely encouraging in a way in which it moves. And I want to, in the interest of time, just raise one kind of question on observation in terms of the central issue of density, right? So if we look at density, you can actually peel it apart of the many elements that constitute density, right? How many units you build on the acre and then how tall and how, in terms of a lot coverage of each building on the lot, right? So then how many rooms can you permit as bedrooms versus other kinds of required conditions that we need for bedrooms? And then how many people can you allow to live in a single bedroom? And I think if you look at all of those elements, the way in which we could achieve gentle density perhaps could be even more. I mean, I grew up in China, where we had maybe four to five square meters per person living space as considered to be the most extreme crowding, obviously. That translates to something like 36 to 40 square feet, right? So I think there are other dimensions of design policy that we could potentially look into. For instance, I understand, for instance, some basements cannot be used for residential purposes or living persons because they don't have two egresses, right? And lots of those. And then now also, we have so many more non-traditional families in which the whole definition of single family housing is sort of out of date. And we have a lot of people who live together with no blood or marriage or other relationship. So I think all of which can be actually peeled apart and rethink. And so I feel like in a way that this is really great direction in which we go to the many examples you've shown, on the other hand, we still, for some reason, still stuck in this residential use needs to be residential use in terms of the physical areas of city. And then, we have a lot of people who are living in the residential area and then family has to be family, right? So I feel a little bit we're still in that traditional mode of regulation. And so for instance, I know New York a little bit better than Los Angeles. It's kind of a jarring to see the juxtaposition of lack of housing, but then the increasing commercial vacancy and office vacancy. You just walk on Broadway right here and you see a lot of street level space is completely vacant. On the other hand, we have a lots of housing affordability issues. And then of course we call them real estate because it's difficult to retrofit and to make it sort of rapid repurposing. But I think in many other places, particularly outside of the United States, that has been done. So if you look at Japan, for instance, the higher density living arrangements that have been catered to the poor, single people and family and so on. So I don't have an answer. I'm asking you the question and then the whether there is both because the challenge with design policy is you collectively make policy but you can only notch so much the private developers and land owners to conform to those policies. You're like the AUD, right? And it's more of an incentive rather than a requirement. And so I wanted to post this question to you as you see that how far can we go in terms of pursuing design policies in either the more traditional state of mind or how far can we push it to a more radical change of mind? Let me just start. Sure. It's a great question. Thank you for those comments also. I mean, look, I think we have to push both our regulatory process, which as a lawyer, I know how difficult that can be. But we also just need to push on our vision of what could be accomplished and how people could live, right? I mean, I think one of the examples that's nearest to my heart is I came to New York as a 22-year-old and the only reason that I was able to come for an internship was that I was able to live in the Webster Apartments for Women, an SRO, my room was tiny. I shared a bathroom with all kinds of other women, but it was cheap and it was clean and it was safe and introduced me to other people and really made it possible for me to get a toehold in New York and that's why I'm here. We've outlawed that, right? Why can't we have that vision again? Why do we have this vision that everybody has to have their own pretty big space, right? I mean, New York until recently had a 400 square foot minimum for an apartment, right? And people would think that you were, I mean, I was once, when I was housing commissioner, I was called a murderer because I wanted to propose smaller places so that we could fit more people into those places. We don't have a vision of that as a desirable, and what the trade-offs are, right? And until we have that mental vision, we're not gonna get anything done on the regulatory front. I completely agree with that. Thank you for a really important question. As I mentioned, so much of the conversation about housing policy, particularly in single-family neighborhoods in Los Angeles, had been dominated for many decades by these visions of disaster. What would happen if we allowed the second unit, the accessory dwelling unit, the in-law apartment? What would happen if we allowed fourplexes? The intense pressure would put on infrastructure, traffic, parking, et cetera. And it's one of the reasons we arranged the low-rise process in the way that we did by starting in our engagement process by actually asking people about their own neighborhoods and asking them, on the one hand, what they did want to protect, but also how they would like to see their neighborhoods evolve. What did they used to have that they no longer have that they would like to bring back? What would they like to add that they see in other cities? And what we heard consistently is that the solutions had to do to your question much more, they needed to be focused much more on flexibility and options than on number of units, per se. And that meant that, and COVID and the pandemic really clarified a lot of these issues for people. We were asking people these questions in the middle of COVID, and so we were hearing a lot of aspirational answers that had to do with housing types that would more successfully accommodate multi-generational households, of which we have a very high proportion in Los Angeles, and those are precisely the households that suffered the most during COVID, when you had a multi-generational household, typically an overcrowded or rigid housing in terms of zoning, where at least one member of the household had a job that couldn't be done remotely, that person was going out to do that job, and in many cases bringing COVID back to a household that included elders in less space than was ideal, and that's really where we saw our worst outcome. So when we asked that question in a more positive light, what would you like to see added or brought back to neighborhoods? We heard answers that had to do with support for corner stores, for reintroducing retail spaces into single family neighborhoods, which used to be quite common in Los Angeles, as in most places, and the appeal of that really became clear during COVID. People had a lot of time, we all had a lot of time, to sort of analyze our own residential, communities, neighborhoods, and think about what was lacking, what we could walk to, what we couldn't walk to. Of course in Los Angeles, there are many more places where we notice what we couldn't walk to, than would be the case in New York. And also kind of flexibility that reflects the changes that people go through during their lifetimes. Most homeowners were renters. They might become renters, or want to downsize later in life. They might want to be able to age in place. They might want to, to Vicki's list of the coalition, be able to have neighborhoods that support people who grew up in the neighborhood and went away, have the ability to come back and afford to live there. So then we took that set of aspirations, and which is why it was so important to start with the engagement, and then ask the architects, and landscape architects who participated to sort of give architectural landscape form to those sets of questions. And that really was helpful in providing the kind of vision. And in some ways that has, we also asked and had requirements in certain categories that they're, because of those conversations, that the participants in the program, in the project, include a corner store, or have a shared kitchen, for example, that is now not legal in Los Angeles, there's so many other cities to have a communal kitchen that might be shared by four or five or six units. And in some ways, those illustrations, those ideas that we got back from the architects, have filtered into policy. So we were remaking all of our community plans, all 35 of them across the city of Los Angeles. And the first few of those to roll out now include the ability to have that kind of small scale retail corner store reintroduced in a single family or low rise setting. Adam, please. It's great to have front row seat, really very provocative, very interesting and impossible not to see this as a kind of comparison between New York and LA. And I think, Vicki, listening to you, I wanna separate for a moment the sort of the aspiration that you've put forward for New York, which in a way is to bring it closer to LA and focus a little bit more on the reality of what development has actually looked like here. And so I think when you start to look at LA and you look at what's really happening in New York, you see in a way a kind of evolution that grows out of the identity of those cities. And in essence, in LA, you have this dispersed density which is getting a bit denser. And in New York City, what you have are pockets of new density that have been appearing that in New York, while we may have this aspiration, what we really see, and I'm quoting Furman Center materials because that's what everybody reads, is that really the growth in New York is happening in just a handful of community districts, five to 10 community districts have about 50% of the growth in New York City. So it's not that dispersed model. And so to look at these changes through the lenses of urbanism, of affordability and sustainability to question, are we headed the right direction? You know, in the context of Los Angeles, are we headed the right direction by having this incremental density? What does that mean in terms of transportation? Are we able to shift away from our dependency on cars? And in the New York City context, are we able to actually achieve some more of this gentle density? I mean, in essence, you're sort of answering the question of where we may need to go. And then when we think about affordability, are the ADUs really accomplishing that? And when we look at what's happening in New York City, is mandatory affordable housing, 70% of which, or 75% of which is market rate? Is that model really working? And one point that, again, is from your materials is that 90% of the affordable housing that's being built in New York City, that's in buildings of 100 units or more, which I think is an astonishing number. And so to take the LA model and to see it happen in New York, will that work? Is that a direction for achieving affordability? And then that last lens, so you reach get three questions out of this one, sorry. Thinking about all of that new building when in New York and probably in LA, there's that potential for reuse for all of those office buildings, how do we begin to think about that? And can we use policy to actually establish some kind of low carbon tax credit that goes with the affordable housing, low income tax credit? How can we incentivize that so we're making use of all that embedded carbon? And again, on the sustainability front, you know, relying on infrastructure rather than cars, taking up open space. So a lot of challenges that we're seeing in order to get to essentially addressing equity and climate crises. I'm happy to go first this time. Thank you, these are really key questions. So I think let's take a step back. I think Vicki very helpfully gave us a list of the coalition that is beginning to emerge around these questions. The list is very similar in Los Angeles in terms of what is giving rise to these new policies. And I think gives us some hope of optimism of achieving the kind of scale that you're quite rightly saying is necessary. And I would add to that list the lessons that folks, communities have learned from COVID and during the pandemic is absolutely part of that. That clarity is adding to the coalition as well. But let's take a step back to answer your question and think about the coalition that has been in place to protect the status quo. I think it's very important to understand the strength and diversity of that coalition and why it's been able, at least in the LA context, which I understand, why it's been able to maintain that status quo despite all the evidence that we need to shift. And it's a surprisingly wide-ranging coalition in Los Angeles. So it includes, of course, classic nimbyism. It includes white, wealthy homeowners in the hills. But it also includes a number of communities of color who have really good reason to be skeptical of what land use reform coming down from city, county, state, or federal government will look like given the histories of those attempts in the 20th century and how things like freeway expansion and other kinds of things were sold to those communities in the 20th century. It includes the council offices that I mentioned and those planning deputies I mentioned. It includes land use attorneys and other experts in land use, all of whom benefit from a status quo that maintained a kind of scarcity, a number of housing developers, of course, all of whom benefit from the kind of scarcity that makes any new housing production that can get through this Byzantine system more valuable than it would be in a place like Houston, for example, where those constraints don't exist. That's why we approached our process in the way that we did. It's easy enough as you sometimes hear from housing advocates to say, why not just make 20 unit projects legal in single family neighborhoods across the city? The climate crisis demands it. The housing affordability and homelessness crisis demand it. There is a political dimension that has to be untangled that includes all of those actors, very powerful actors in various ways, some powerful because of their wealth, some powerful because of their political influence that have maintained this status quo of limited housing production across Los Angeles. So that means building a case for not just doing the things we're talking about, but accelerating them as quickly as possible to meet the need that you're quite rightly identifying. So that means going from two units on a single family lot, which has been successful but is not enough and does not promote affordability in the way that it needs to, to where state law now takes us, which I mentioned SB 9, which allows fourplexes, there was a companion bill, SB 10, that allows 10 units on a single family lot, but cities have to opt in rather than figure out how to apply new state housing laws. So we have to get, now if we had 10 units on a single family lot available across that map that I showed, that might get us some way and there were fewer constraints to actually building, we addressed the housing, the parking requirements. It's about building the political case and the coalition to get us from two to 10, right? Which is very complicated, but we do have to accelerate that as much as possible. And that's what these efforts have really tried to do, building and so the way that the ADU success story has happened, Vicki's right that that's a real success story for the state, but it is, there's been a lot of trial and error. The state passed ADU streamlining in 2018, then cities could either try to support that new state laws Los Angeles did or try to block it like a lot of cities in Orange County, Huntington Beach did, and then over time the laws are taken back up in Sacramento and streamlined and all of the issues that Vicki identified are ironed out and those have largely been ironed out, the parking requirements, other things have been ironed out for ADUs. They need to be ironed out for the fourplexes and then for the larger units. And then the last thing I'll say on the question of reuse, this is incredibly important. I mentioned that the two to 10 units are the cheapest to build on a per unit basis. There is one category that's significantly cheaper and that is taking an existing single family house and subdividing it into four units, which is not quite legal yet in Los Angeles. You can do up to three units through a kind of junior ADU program and soon perhaps you'll be able to just subdivide your single family house into four units. That is by far, some studies suggest less than $100,000 per unit to do that work versus about 175 to 200,000 a unit for two to four, let's say, wood frame construction. And then another real success story from LA's housing policy over the last 20 to 25 years is our adaptive reuse ordinance, which was passed in the late 1990s, which allowed commercial buildings downtown only, it was limited to downtown Los Angeles, to be converted into residential projects with a minimum of red tape, no parking requirements, et cetera. Because of the success of that program, most of the low hanging fruit, which is smaller floor plate pre-war buildings, which are easier and cheaper to convert from commercial to residential, have largely been converted, at least downtown. So there is now an effort that I was working on with many colleagues in adaptive reuse 2.0, which would both expand it beyond downtown and also think about those larger floor plate buildings, which of course, as any architect can tell you, are much more complicated to think about in terms of conversion to residential. So there is a lot of opportunity there and I completely agree that's an area where we should be focusing for climate and all kinds of other reasons. I totally agree with Christopher on all of those points. So let me jump in on the affordability question. I mean, first of all, having more supply in general will be helpful, right? Bring down that gap that I showed, bring up those vacancy rates that I showed. So even having more supply, forget about income restricted, is important. Nevertheless, I really wanna say that I think one of the mistakes that's going on in New York right now is the mayor's proposal for office conversions required no affordability. And we've been there, we've done that. Look at downtown, the Phi Dye district, where we allowed conversions very successfully. We got a lot of housing out of those old office buildings, underused office buildings in the financial district, not a shred of affordable housing there, right? And we shouldn't make that same mistake again. We need to work out the economics of it, yes. But we've managed to do that for all kinds of new construction. We ought to be able to figure it, be able to figure it out for those office conversions. And the second point about those office conversions is, we do need to think about what kind of neighborhoods are we creating? And if it's just like one office buildings, I mean I'm sorry, one conversion to residential surrounded by five blocks of old commercial, that's gonna not feel very good, right? And we're gonna have all kinds of debates about schools and all of those kinds of things. So we need to think more generally about the urban design that needs to go along with those conversion policies, right? But I mean, remember that slide that I showed that suggested that we needed almost 700,000 new homes to house the 28% of our renters who make below 28,000 for a family of four, right? So we've gotta have affordable housing. There's got to be built into every one of the programs some kind of affordable housing. That's hard when we're talking about an ADU, right? But when we're talking about a fourplex or a sixplex, one can make it work, right? Requires thoughtfulness, but one can make it work. And I think that's just, we just have to do that. We have to commit to do that. Which seems to be essentially a question of imagination as well or the imaginary, let's say, as I get and to move beyond the sort of low-hanging fruits that Christopher mentioned before. Imagination, vision and I would say empathy, right? Both LA and New York, our city's built upon being the gateway to the rest of the United States. And if we lose that vision of ourselves as the place where people from all over the world, from all over the United States come, we will have lost a very significant part of our vision. And there's definitely so much opportunity for the architects, planners, real estate students out there to meet these challenges. But I think just understanding the need for more units overall, but looking at those vacancy rates, if you were to look at the percentage of vacancy rates for rents below $2,500, it's like 0.5%. And then if you look at the vacancy rates above $2,500 a month, it might be 10%. And so the mathematics of our mandatory inclusionary housing policy, which is 70% market rate and 30% affordable, is really hard. Like it's moving that needle to address the renters that you were describing. And I know, because this was your job for many years to try and figure this out. But some of that math isn't quite matching up. And to understand, for you perhaps, the model that you're looking to is less relying on things like MIH and more relying on smaller initiatives by homeowners to help get there. And maybe it's a different kind of policy. I think on the macro level, we really need to be looking to the federal government too. If you think about, there's one of the tropes that I could have added to that list about Los Angeles is that we're a city of homeowners. In fact, we have one of the highest percentages of rental households in the country. It's roughly two thirds, which puts us on the top four or five on a percentage basis in the country. And if you think about all of the subsidy, particularly at the federal level, that is supporting the single family home and the ways in which that could be tweaked and that has to happen at the federal level, it seems to me to subsidize rental households to a similar degree when you think about the mortgage reduction and all the other. And in the Los Angeles context, even that image I showed of the case study house, those great Shulman photographs suggest those houses kind of swimming in isolation. But in fact, it was a freeway construction paid for maybe 90 cents on the dollar by the federal government that supported that kind of low density development across the region to say nothing of those mortgage deduction policies. So there are a whole range of ways in which the renter could be better supported by the federal government than as compared to the homeowner. For sure. And I would just add that one of the challenges of densifying relatively low density areas is you've got a transition problem and you need some way of thinking about how do I aggregate a few single family lots together so that I can build a six-story apartment building or that kind of thing. So we really need to be thinking about, well, what's the government's role there? What's the role of like, could the government buy it, put it into a community land trust? That would ensure some level of affordability. So there are opportunities here as well that we need to be thinking about. I just also wanted to pick up on something Vicki said a couple of minutes ago, which is so important. And that is the larger narrative of the pace of change. So in Los Angeles, which of course had long dedicated itself to the idea that it was continually in flux, that it was defined by flux and change, evolution. The narrative by the time I got to the Los Angeles Times had sort of been hijacked by folks who had decided that the pace of change had accelerated too much. And that included a lot of colleagues of mine at the LA Times that included policy makers, elected officials, who were all working to slow down that rate of change, which had significant and long lasting impacts on the rate of housing production, among other things. So that's why these larger narratives are important and rest in control to say, Los Angeles is now losing population. It is changing at a slower pace than it has throughout its modern history. In fact, when we need to accelerate to get back to what makes Los Angeles, Los Angeles is actually more of that flux, not less of it, despite what you hear in the sort of dominant narrative, let's say over the last generation, I would say. Maybe this is a good moment to open it up to the audience here for any questions. See in the back there. My microphone is coming down. Thank you so much. I just have a question about the attributes that were being used to describe the renters and home owners. There was a lot about race and ethnicity or income, but I didn't see much about the profession. And I was thinking about, for example, college towns or you mentioned DC and how there are a lot of government workers there. And I wonder if you could maybe talk about that. I mean, of course, profession is wrapped up in some of those other categories as well. There's a lot of overlap. Certainly college towns. I mean, I don't know the LIC around its college campuses. Obviously we're sitting in the middle of one and have many throughout the city that are critically important and could be being pushed more in terms of employee assisted housing for those kinds of professions, right? For professors like me, for example, there could be a lot more that was being done to provide for employee assisted housing by the university for the whole range of the faculty and staff, which would be important. We haven't had that in New York City to hardly any degree. And I think it could be a really important thing. A second point is that I think our business community needs to step up and be an advocate on this, right? They are bringing jobs and we want them to bring jobs, but they also need to understand that the housing needs to be there. And in New York City, what we've seen is that businesses no longer, or the major businesses in New York City no longer think of themselves as a New York based corporation. They're international in scope, they could go anywhere, right? And so they're not stepping into this civic discourse about what we need to do to grow, how we need to grow, that kind of thing. And I think that's a real gap that does play into the question of are you a university town or are you a tech town or are you a government worker town in a very important way? Just a quick thought on the perspective in Los Angeles on this question. One of the elements that really exacerbated our housing affordability crisis in Los Angeles was that for many decades, promoting job growth and economic development was politically safe and palatable in a way that promoting housing development and housing growth was not. And this was particularly true in areas on the west side of Los Angeles where between 2010 and 2020, roughly speaking, cities like Santa Monica, Culver City, elements, neighborhoods of the city of Los Angeles on the west side were attracting something like eight or nine new jobs for every new housing unit that was being produced. So you saw a number of high-end employment centers in places like Santa Monica being added without the political will to provide housing, which meant that the burden of housing affordability fell on other parts of the region. It also meant that the city of Santa Monica, for example, essentially stayed the same population-wise between 1970 and 2020 while adding untold thousands of numbers of jobs, the same dynamic in Culver City and other cities on the west side. So it was that gap between the safety politically speaking of promoting job growth versus the difficulty of promoting new housing really exacerbated it. And then that has led to a dynamic now with the population in LA, city and county plateauing. The people who are leaving are leaving largely for housing affordability reasons and the people who are moving in are coming because they are economically mobile and they're coming in to take one of the higher paying jobs in a place like Santa Monica, right? So that just further exacerbates the issue and the households that are leaving are largely communities of color. We've seen the black population in the city of Los Angeles declined by more than 25, almost 30% since 1980. So really, really significant declines and having, as I said, almost everything to do with housing affordability. So just maybe to add another dimension to your question is also the proportion of renters versus owners can also depend on, quote unquote, whether the location is a hot market, right? So if you look at New York, you are going to have much higher proportion of renters. You know, people like us, right, would have owned, right, if we were teaching, I don't know, in Maryland, right? Because it's very expensive to own in New York and so you will have, or Boston, these are typical hot markets where the proportion of renters can be much higher. So it really varies by geography. You've got renters, and then you've got short-term renters. Now there's a big piece about how there are more Airbnb listings in New York City now than there are apartment listings. So we've got different kinds of renters which really throws off the market in all sorts of ways. But they're cracking down on the Airbnb, right? Yeah, I think, yeah, it's trying. We also have a lot of questions from the planetary cohort, which there's no time to go through all of them and a lot actually had to do with this sort of challenging notions of the nuclear family, other ways of living together, all the way to sort of relationships between different species that might come up. But we sort of touched upon that already. Maybe one thing I do want to bring up since we're in a school of architecture and the built environment, in the end there's a question from Miri Powell who wonders how curricula or education more broadly could potentially, or if it's needed, to change for architecture students in response to the changing roles and responsibilities of architects that they believe your work sort of demonstrates. And similarly, Catherine O'Rourke asks if you see a specific role for design professionals and I'm looking of course at you, Christopher, as well, but in what position or place in the process like architects and urban planners and other professionals of the built environment could be placed within this sort of policy framework, let's say, I'm sort of rephrasing her question here. Just quickly on the curriculum question, it is a matter of broadening the ways in which we understand some of those iconic images from architectural history. So when I was learning about the case study program, I certainly was not learning about highway subsidy or redlining or any of the things that I think students learn about now. So I think a lot has changed in a very positive way in terms of the thinking more about, as Andres was saying, these kinds of intersections, all the areas that architecture touches on. And a lot of this frankly is coming from the students and really insisting to your question about reuse, really thinking, insisting that we hear most of this from students and young architects primarily that before we think about any new construction, we had to be thinking about adaptive use of all the existing resources and think about the embodied carbon that might be, and those questions might be addressed by, let's say, making it easier to subdivide an existing house into four units. And then in the larger question about design professionals, it's really about a kind of communication translation among the different groups. The big part of my job in the mayor's office was sort of moving between my colleagues in the planning department who are really working on the nitty-gritty of these new community plans or working on procurement language for new housing and to communities and really explaining to each of those what we were hearing on the other side of the equation and really developing those skills primarily among, you know, not least among architects. One of the things I've been teaching at Yale is trying to get the future architects at the School of Architecture to think about the role that the written word writing and these sort of larger narratives play both in terms of them as subjects, architects who will be written about, but also as authors, architects who can use the written word, use that sort of set of narrative strategies as a kind of secret weapon to situate themselves within the field, give themselves a different kind of agency within the field, so that's part of it as well. You know, I actually want to add even more to that. We used to have a faculty, Anna Pugina, she did a research project called Cities Without Kitchens, I believe, and so it's actually so radical, but if you think about the social ramifications of housing without kitchens, then you think about it, who's cooks anymore, right? We do a lot of takeout, why do we always have the design with housing, all have their own kitchens, right? But I think what is more profound for her research and then her teaching is that actually who, you know, in the traditional sort of domesticity of family life, who was doing all the cooking? Was all the women, and so in a way it was very radical as a social idea, so I think for architects and planners, I think we all have the potential to think beyond the built environment, because the built environment both is the platform that contains our social behavior, but it can also reshape social behavior and even social norms, so I would say to add to your point, Christopher, in terms of the cross-disciplinary, within the built environment fields is to think even more broadly how we live and pass through space could actually reshape how we interact and so on, so I just thought that project was just really radical and great way of thinking about different kinds of domesticity and woman's role and also how we actually live now. As not an architect or an urban planner, but as a lawyer, I think across the professions we need to teach people to get to yes. We spend a lot of time teaching people to be a roadblock and that's not where we should be. It's certainly not in my profession. I have to say. First, thank you very much for a great presentations and thank you for working for our cities, not everyone does that and that's very important. On design policy, thank you Vicky for the slide that shows the income gap. I think the issue of rents, outpacing income is the central one and when we think about affordability crisis, we usually concentrate on all the people that cannot afford homes and sometimes we don't see the flip side of the inequality that has been created in these 40 years with so many people having two homes. So many people benefiting from mortgage deductions that are very high deductions. When you think about policy, so there's two questions. One, have you calculated the kind of subsidy that that second or third slide would necessitate if there are almost 800,000 people that make 28,000 but would need to make 76,000 to afford the housing that we are able to do, what would be that in terms of money? And two, if you have thought about that, where should that subsidy come from? Christopher mentioned more active role of the federal government, would that be, have you thought about whether that is in ref structuring taxes or any other ways of kind of closing that gap? So great question, thank you. I mean, there have been calculations of what it would take and by and large, they are less than the kind of money that we have devoted to home ownership as Christopher was saying. So it can be done, we've done it before to help people become homeowners. We could do it now to help narrow that gap, but also I think that we need to understand that that graph that I showed shows that housing affordability is a two prong thing. Houses are too costly and jobs aren't paying enough, right? And we need more federal government role in making wages better, in making wages more stable, right? There's a role for local governments on that in terms of minimum wage in terms of, again, sort of income stability measures. And we need to also think about, do we need to give people a home, which is the way that we normally, when we talk about affordable housing, we're giving a person a home, right, an apartment. We could give them more money and that might be more effective in any number of ways. And so we really need to think about all of those different dimensions and also call it for what it is. I mean, when we subsidize housing to be built at an income restricted level for affordability, people say, oh, you're subsidizing poor people or poorer people, right? We're subsidizing their employers, right? Yes, we're subsidizing, for working people who are subsidizing their employers. So, let's be frank about that and think about what that means in terms of our public policy. I think that's exactly right. And two quick thoughts. First, to your point about kitchens and flexibility, we're moving a little bit in that direction in Los Angeles in our new zoning code, which has been comprehensively rethought for the first time since the 1940s, believe it or not, does rely to a certain degree on form-based code which could be agnostic about program and could lead to the kind of flexibility that you're talking about where you could imagine spaces, volumes of space that could accommodate any number of uses that could change over time. And that includes not just interior, but also exterior space where you think about where parking requirements are now in place but might be relaxed having spaces that could be easily converted to other kinds of outdoor use. On this other question, I think the flip side or the potential danger of this kind of an intersectional approach that Andres was talking about is that we ask architecture and urban design to bear the burdens of a number of larger issues, economic and societal issues that are not architectures to bear and that architecture has no hope of solving in a larger sense. So I think that's important to clarify and we tried to make clear in all the initiatives that we were working on that we were asking architects to help us illustrate and clarify these issues in some of the ways out of them, rather than saying that it should fall on the shoulders of architects to solve this larger question of inequality which has grown in all the ways that a number of you have pointed out. I wanted to pick up on the discussion about getting to yes and what it means to have a coalition because I think there are some indicators out there and struggles of how to do that. One, I think just recognizing the benefits of density and getting people to understand that with more density can come more infrastructure, can come a different kind of communal way of living just by being able to provide more amenities. But thinking about what getting to yes looks like through processes, some of that involves a series of stakeholders from real estate developers through to community residents. Thinking about zoning is not just about form which I think you're beginning to address but as a kind of performance and there have been ways in which neighborhood initiatives have looked at performance-based zoning which looks at a range of things beyond just uses and form but also ownership, ways in which labor participates in the process, thinking about how the public space takes shape. So really thinking about what it means to have a process is really critical and starting to happen and fits and starts in places where people are rethinking that and it can't just be top down. Just a quick thought on that and then Hannah Taviki on this question of coalition building. There has been a kind of narrative that community engagement necessarily dilutes the ambition of public design projects and I think that is not only false, we really tried to work to counter that notion. It all comes down to how the engagement process is designed itself and it has to be designed in a very thoughtful, strategic, intentional way and the best example of how to move away from models that haven't worked is the kind of classic model and a community meaning of putting a microphone stand at the, having a meeting on a weekday evening, putting a microphone stand down near the stage and having people who want to express their opinions given an opportunity to versus a much more targeted approach that meets people where they are that thinks about multilingual conversations that thinks about childcare, that thinks about actually paying people for their time which we tried to do whenever possible. We tried to raise, as we were raising money for the budgets for these projects, think about compensating people for their time and having facilitated conversations again that really are about how we would like to see our neighborhoods evolve, what we would like to add rather than the same few people venting about again the pace of change in their neighborhood which they see as too fast. I think that's a great place to end. We're out of time as always with affirmations. They tend to go on much longer but that's great. It was a great conversation. I want to say to everybody that next week we'll have Paola Tavares and Sylvia Rivera-Cousi Canqui with Emmanuel Atmasou discuss the topic of indigenous worldings for affirmations for. For now, thank you very much and thank you. Thank you everybody. Thank you. Thank you.