 This is Don Rowan in Oropal at Norwich University and we're doing the economic diversity and the build environment and it's a panel discussion with a number of experts that are going to be discussing this for the next hour. And so we're looking to hope that you'll join us and enjoy the show. Have you skipped your stairs to your face? Yeah, I did. That was such a surprise. The only version of my face that any of you need is this one that you're going to have. I mean, in fact, I don't recommend looking at it. I recommend looking at this. Sorry, my photography is better than my personal beauty. Does this work? Thank you all. It's a real honor to be here. And to be on this esteemed panel, I'm going to do my best to make four hopefully relatively brief points and to try to, in some ways, incorporate, I think, a few points and lessons to piggyback on my four esteemed colleagues. So yeah, my name is Alex Shaffer and I'm probably the least practically useful of the panelists, unfortunately. So hopefully I will have some things that are useful to say. And because I read too much Buzzfeed, I've made four points. So this is a listicle for all of you young generation who like the listicle. This is a listicle. So the first point is if we're going to talk about economic diversity in the built environment in the United States of America, then that can't just be a question about class that has to incorporate race at the foundational level. There isn't, you know, clearly the country is a whole with very few exceptions. Class and race are so intertwined in this country that it's just, you know, my apologies and I recognize that it's changed. It's not the way that it once was, but races for, you know, currently and for the foreseeable future are an integral part of this conversation. So race can be an even more difficult conversation to have in the United States than class, but it's one that absolutely has to happen. But in order to have that conversation and I think to do it well, and especially to think about the relationship between race, class, and built environment, we need to do a little bit of what Sarah asked, which is to sort of broaden our, I think, the geographic frame of reference. I wrote it down. We're going to enlarge our geographic frame of reference. So one of the main ways that we think about race and class and the environment in the United States is through the lens of segregation. And Gina mentioned a lot of the kind of key tools like redlining that were used to segregate the American metropolis. So one of the biggest challenges, though, is that segregation isn't still around in the United States. And many of the places that were the kind of key geographies, the key areas of segregation still feel the impacts on a day to day basis of all of the things that happened 50, even 100 years ago. But at the same time, segregation has changed. Suburbia is not what suburbia once was. The geography of our metropolis has just gotten so much bigger. So many people of color have moved out of older inner city neighborhoods, looking for the American dream, looking for housing, moving very far away. So if you really want to understand segregation in most metropolises in the United States, you need to get in your car from wherever you feel like segregation happened in the center city and drive for an hour in any variety of different directions. And then you will start to see the larger metropolis. Community of color have been moving out to suburbs for a very long time in the United States. And just because there's a new geography doesn't mean that people are still segregated. So this is what I talk about as re-segregation. So the book you see here, there's actually a 30% discount voucher on my website. But Barbara's book is probably cheaper and better than mine. So it all comes out in the watch. So this is a big argument that I make about the San Francisco Bay Area. So this is a dot density map that you will see what segregation looked like in the 1970s. And the African-American community is represented in the yellow dots. And you can see that there's just really intense clustering. If you were African-American in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1970, there were a handful of neighborhoods in the entire region of many millions of people in which you could rest your head. And this formed what I like to think of as a mental map. And you can see some of the spaces right here. This is East Oakland and West Oakland. This is the small industrial city of Richmond. There's a handful of neighborhoods in San Francisco. There's a kind of forgot-about places in suburbia. Again, there's a myth of segregation as always being an urban, a central city thing, when in fact there are always been important African-American and other communities of color in suburban spaces often attached to industry. So this is East Palo Alto here, not too far from Silicon Valley. There's some places out in Stockton out in here. And this is a pretty big distance. So from this city of Stockton out to San Francisco, it's about 75 miles and about two hours in traffic. So this creates a kind of mental map of what we think about segregation as something being trapped. So this is a set of mental maps that were done in Los Angeles in 1970. And so the map on the left is a composite of middle-class white folks from the San Fernando Valley about what was their city, what was their region, where did they go, where did they work, where did they, where was their space? The map on the right is a composite map of Latino families in Boyle Heights in East LA. And you can see, again, a much smaller space that felt like, these were the spaces that felt like they were their spaces. And so this has given us an understanding of segregation of what I like to think of as ghetto as segregation. There was about being trapped. You physically, at the threat of violence for cultural reasons, legal reasons, all sorts of reasons, if you were a person of color during this era, just simply couldn't leave. It was dangerous at times, not even just to try to live in a place, but even to sort of circulate in these spaces. So the things have changed a lot of ways. So this is a simple map, a graph, not much of a data guy, but every once in a while you come across a map that really says something. So the line in red is the African American population of the city of the county of San Francisco, and the city and the county of San Francisco the same. And the line below is the African American population of San Joaquin County, which is out here in the east. And so you can see San Francisco has gone from an African American population about 14%, at its height to less than 3% now. And the population of San Joaquin County, there are now more African Americans in San Joaquin County than there are in San Francisco County. I can show you another map in here. So these, if you look at this map, these communities out in this area, in southern Solano County, in eastern Contra Costa County in the Bay Area, now have collectively more African American residents than all of Richmond and Oakland, right? Then Richmond, which were the heart of the black community in the Bay Area at the time. And so I could talk about the Filipino community in the same way. I could talk about Southeast Asians from Cambodia and Vietnam, from Laos, among refugees who came out for the war. We could talk about Latinos in a similar way. Again, different geographies, but the same process of migrating out from central city locations to suburban places for a whole slew of different reasons. Sometimes because the neighborhoods are gentrifying. Sometimes because people are being evicted. Sometimes it's because it's an opportunity to buy a house. And people want to buy a house, they want peace and quiet, a home with a swimming pool. It's the American dream. I mean, simply because people are moving to suburbs that isn't unusual or weird. Why I call it resegregation is that this map that you see is a map of foreclosures. And so if you want to find the foreclosures, the San Francisco, California, the Bay Area, which is a region in total about this region that you're seeing is about nine or 10 million people, right? We are the richest metropolis in the United States of America. You can make an argument that the San Francisco Bay Area is the richest region in the world and perhaps the richest region in history. And we're also famously very progressive, supposedly. So, but we were one of the centers of the 2008 foreclosure crisis. And almost all of the foreclosures happen not in San Francisco or in Oakland or in center cities, but far deep in these suburbs that many people in San Francisco have never been to. Right? Places that are 50 miles away, 75 miles away. Where all of these communities that you see that are highlighted with the highest foreclosure rates, all of these communities are majority non-mike. We're talking about cities between 50 and 150, 200,000 people. This is the city of Stockton, right? So, we're talking about people who have moved out to suburbs facing high rates of foreclosure. With foreclosure came fiscal crisis, right? The property taxes that we pay in most places in the place like California pay for schools and roads and sewers and parks, right? The largest municipal bankruptcy in the history of the United States was the city of Vallejo until the city of Stockton, which is larger when bankrupt a couple years later. So, in all of these places, communities of color now have seen, again, it's not the same type of being trapped segregation that we saw, but you're still dealing with very unequal suburbia. So, it's not about suburbs versus cities, but about different experiences and different types of suburbia. If you go into the inner ring suburbs in the Bay Area, these places right here that I'm talking about in the center where I grew up here in Marin County, here's where all your computers come from, right? These places have the opposite experience. So, in Palo Alto, home of Stanford University, right on the edge of Silicon Valley, had a foreclosure rate of five foreclosures for every 100,000 people. Patterson, which went from a city of about 1,000 people in an old farm town to a city of about 25,000 people, again, majority non-white, 5,000 foreclosures for every 100,000 people. That's a thousand times difference. And so, essentially, is we went from creating a region which had inequality based on city versus suburb, we now have a situation where we have unequal suburbia. That when it was finally time for people of color to have the opportunity for the suburban dream, that suburban dream was not provided at the same level and the same quality and the same degree of security that it was provided to my parents. So, the class trajectory that my family went through, if father grew up in New York City, again, the grandchildren of immigrants moving through this American class hierarchy as, you know, Jews became white and moved to the suburb and we had all of those privileges. Well, when the suburban door was open to communities of color, the same quality of suburbia was not there. And there's a whole set of reasons why it's not there. But the point I want to make here is that, again, you've got to think about race and you've got to alter your geography. The geography of the American metropolis is not the same as it was. Now, but this is the problem, this is the challenge in understanding this, is that just because suburbia is now really, has changed and segregation hasn't changed, it doesn't mean that old fashioned forms of segregation are gone. You need to think about things with a both and attitude. Either or is a very kind of 20th century way of thinking, but since you're all like, some of you are even born in this millennia, which is terrifying or maybe almost, right? Anybody born in 2000 in the room? Oh my God. So, again, old fashioned segregation, your grandparents' version or your great grandparents' version of segregation still exists in many places in the United States at the same time as this new 21st century kind of what I think of as mobile segregation. I call it re-segregation for various political reasons, but you could also think of it as segregation 2.0 or a new form of segregation. So that's the first point that I want to make. The second point, which I think builds really well on a lot of people's perspective is that I want you to think that at the core, it's not just about code or about policies. It's got to be about the politics. If you want, what most of my book is about is not actually about re-segregation. It's about how in the richest and supposedly most progressive place in the United States that we allowed this to happen. We knew 50 years ago that this process was beginning. We had lots of good plans, lots of good planners, tons of good designs, and just at the end of the day couldn't get it together to make it happen. And when I talk about politics, I'm not just talking about red versus blue Democrats and Republicans. I'm not just talking about what presidents do or Congress people or local government officials or even people who've worked for the government. I'm talking about the full set of politics. All of those coalitions, all of those power dynamics, all of those sets of relations. I'm talking about neighbor on neighbor politics. The way that you as an individual relate to your homeless neighbor is politics. That's not just humans on humans. That forms politics, right? It can be as simple as like relationship with global corporations like Subway, which has, I looked it up, 25,000 stores, 22,000 stores in 111 countries. I've been to, I think, more than my share, right? So you need to think about that broader politics. Because again, we always have lots of really good ideas but to get to the point where you can upscale them or where subsidies are being pushed in one way or another where things become possible is because of politics, not just because of the types of code. Again, in the book, one of the big things that I argue about is that essentially we weren't able to pull together the type of effective politics that we need. And so this is one of the things that I want to encourage people to think about is there a somewhat of a different way of thinking about different types of politics? The end of the day, housing is something that we collectively produce that everybody needs or perhaps shelter. I really appreciate the kind of thinking about shelter and not just about housing. But I think we can come to a consensus in this room about the need for housing. We may disagree vehemently about how to build a litter. You might want one kind of house and you might want another kind of house. But we need to start thinking about the fact that the end of the day, right? The politics of housing are about coming to an agreement. Other issues in our society like war or abortion are not about coming to an agreement. Eric about drawing lawns in the sand and you may have one side and I'm on the other. And we're not trying to come up with a reasonable solution or effective politics. It's about holding the line. But in housing, again, we have such a dysfunctional housing system despite the fact that almost everybody needs or wants a house. And so again, I include all sorts of actors. Again, people like banks. Almost all of you are gonna go work for firms. You're gonna be playing the game of housing and design and that broader politics really matters. The second, a third point, which relates to the second, first point, and again, I think plays a lot off what Dave showed, is to go beyond kind of models of good housing. Because what makes good housing for me is not what makes good housing for you. One of the biggest problems with various other eras of housing is that we always had this kind of one size fits all. I mean, I love the spirit of the modernist era of really trying to build mass housing for the masses that there were so many sort of sins by architects and other planners and designers, assuming that there was one type of housing for different people. So the goal is, for me, is again, to be not, it's not about deciding which of those models is better and being a lot less judgmental and trying to figure out ways to make all as many forms of housing secure, right, about reducing vulnerabilities, about reducing risk regardless of the type, tenure type, or the design type, or the location. And so let me give you an example, right? So one of the things that we used to think that, for instance, home ownership was better because home ownership was more secure. In between 2007 and 2010, 10 million homes in United States were foreclosed. There's only about 130 million housing units or something like that in the United States, maybe 150 now, something maximum. So we're talking about, I don't know, somewhere between five and 8% of all the structures, low-loan, all the owned structures. So there is no sort of inherently secure form of tenure. Any type of house can burn down, can be knocked down. You can be dispossessed of any type of home in the United States, whether it's foreclosure or eviction or code violations or natural disaster or fire, you can always, they're always in security and we need to be start paying attention to finding ways of securing everything and not simply about finding this sort of ideal form of tenure. And that includes also kind of some of the urban and rural divides. And one of the big political problems we have in the United States is that people assume that there's no sort of shared political interest between people who live in different lifestyles. That somehow I live in rural Vermont and I wanna live a particular way versus I live in Boston or New York or in the big city and some, but no, everybody lives in some sort of home and there's some basic understandings. There's ways that we can create, I think, a better politics around reducing vulnerability. And so this is one of the things that I've been working on with some colleagues in Oakland is trying to develop a new form of public policy analysis around housing vulnerability. Most of the analysis we do in the state of California around housing has to do with needs assessment. We try to figure out how many different types of houses at different income levels we need to build and then we never build them, right? And one of the reasons why we never build them is that everybody is scared. Renters are scared, homeless people are scared, homeowners are scared, big landlords, everybody is nervous that they're gonna lose their thing. And so nobody can pull together to really be able to produce the new type of housing because at the end of the day, try to convince somebody that the new house building, being built on the corner, is gonna somehow benefit. So you already have a home. So housing vulnerability analysis, we've got a pilot study in Oakland, you can go to housingvulnerability.org and start to see the contours of what we're developing. It's trying to figure out a way that we can start paying attention to vulnerability. How do we protect people and preserve existing housing in part so that we can produce a new politics that's capable of upscaling the types of production? Whether again, it's the big scale interventions, the genome works along whether it's some of the small scale interventions that you're seeing from the other two folks. And as one final point, I do wanna say that one of the ways of building this kind of new politics involves a certain degree for restorative justice. Now this map, this picture you see, I saw a seat pleasant. So this is about Kevin Durant and the Golden State Warriors. This is a picture taken in Oakland. Now in my opinion, the Golden State Warriors do not owe anybody an apology for being so good. Sorry if there's Celtic fans or whatever else they're all, you know. But the Golden State Warriors actually do owe the city of Oakland an apology for the way that they have left the city and just again, not for actively leaving but for the way of doing it, right? This is taken on a BART platform where Oscar Grant was killed in 2009, right? So BART as an agency, this is the Bay Area Repertrain System does owe a certain amount of apologies. So one of the problems we have, I think, of creating a new politics is that so many of the institutions that we're a part of, whether it's not this university but other universities that I've been part of, whether it's institutions like architecture or planning, whether it's public agencies, whether it's big developers or banks, so much of people's lack of faith in the politics of urbanization and housing and development comes from the fact that we've watched all of this injustice happen for such a long period of time and so nobody trusts anybody. Nobody trusts that at the end of the day you're not gonna get done because we've made a lot of promises. Architecture, planning, development, we've made a lot of promises to a lot of people over a long period of time and at the end of the day haven't been able to produce. And I do think that there's gonna have to be a certain kind of acknowledgement of that history, right? Again, Gina mentioned, give you that long history. People know their history. They're not stupid. People didn't wake up yesterday and so everybody's going, oh yeah, this is all wonderful, let's all band together. In order to get some of that new politics, I think there's gonna have to be some, we're sort of just, some act of just acknowledging, hey yeah, listen, you screwed up. As a planner, as an academic, I can raise my hand as a white suburbanite, I can raise my hand, I can acknowledge all of the ways that the community's either, not necessarily me, I wasn't even alive when a lot of this was done, I can still own that history and I think that's gonna be really important. You've gotta build some new faith in that new type of politics. I think that means us, brings us to the end. Don't try to answer this down or do we want to push it? No, let's say that. This is it. First I'd like to thank you all for this, huh? Yes. Yes. So I'd like to thank you all for such an amazing show, that was amazing. And I'd like to, we all give the lecture committee and Taulia and, so we'll get into some questions, but the first question is for everyone to add to you, you brought up the point that we're such an affluent society, where the United Nations ranks the U.S. in the top 15 wealthiest nations in the world. And our economic model is based on growth and in particular, growth of affluence. So does that model work to solve these problems ultimately or do we need a new model to solve some of these issues? It's not a problem. It's not a problem. I'm going to do the classic move and like twist the question around. So my answer to this would be, I'm not really a believer that we actually have a model. So there's not a model, there's just, that the economy is a very complex thing. And I think the most important thing that we need to do is to stop talking about the economy as if it's some sort of one big thing. There are economies. So the economy of housing is not the same as the economy of energy, which is not the same as the economy of food, right? So I'm a hardcore capitalist when it comes to the economy of beer. I think beer has been, beer is the only functional economy we have in America. I don't think there's a single person in this room who doesn't have access to beer, all the beer that they can eat, it comes at the right price, in the right location. We have an immense amount of innovation, we have massive global beer corporations and all sorts of small micro-brew corporations and they all function well. You have certain degrees of government oversight in the right way, in the right place, whether it's purity, whether it's sale of the miners, public spaces, alcoholism is in support, you have nonprofit sector involved, every way, again, it's a whole massive specific economy. So I think the beer economy is working really well and the housing economy really sucks. And so the key for me in some ways is to, if you talk about growth versus degrowth or you use the C word, capitalism, and you talk about whatever other variations that are kind of coming, you immediately get into these kind of political ideological fights that have cursed the 19th and 20th century. So what I believe, what I would argue for is to start talking about the economy of specific things. Because each, you know, sets, it's not just an industry, right? We also have, housing is not an industry, yes, it is an industry, but it is a much bigger economy that involves social connections that people have, emotional connections, cultural relationships to housing. We can talk about that within the larger economies. We need to start separating now. Some of our economies need to grow. Our housing economy does need to grow. Other aspects of our economy probably could stand to shrink. Some of them we need to focus on just kind of keeping them stable. But the key I think is, and this is really important, I don't think we've done enough in the world of the built environment is to insist that the economies of the built environment are different and they can't just be reduced to the larger economy. So I hope that's not too much of a punty redirection. It seems like part of the question is, maybe does capitalism work? I mean, that's, you know, capitalism is about growing, you gotta keep growing and keep making more money. And I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with that, except for the way we work now is these externalities are not paid for. So we're using environmental resources that everybody's suffering for them being used and money being made off them. But we're not getting paid back for those things that we're losing. And, you know, my point of the final slide about how it's so easy to take care of people's minimal needs and how much we're losing at the top of that pyramid for where we can get back from those people. I mean, that's growth at the top of the pyramid that we can get back that we're losing because we're not paying for the externality of just disposing of these humans. So I don't think it's necessarily the growth is the problem. I think that externalities perhaps are the problem that we're getting things for free and we're disposing of things that we're not paying for. So I'm a big supporter of a minimum income, minimum survival income. And I kind of wonder what a capitalist system would do with all the skills of people like this to provide housing and security for people if society was required to make sure everybody was housed and was safe. I think that we could make this stuff happen pretty easily because the skills are here. It's definitely worth it. I want everybody to answer the question. Can you say the question again? Was there not in there? Well, just as such an affluent society, such an affluent country, our economic model is based on growth and affluent and growing affluent. So does that model still work to solve some of these issues? Is there another model? Yeah, I think that that's a really hard question. For me, it's hard to separate affluence from race. And so, if you're talking about affluence and people that have affluence helping say underserved neighborhoods to grow, that's usually in the hands of one race versus and or one class, right? So if you have lots of brown people and people of lesser means, what they think about every day is not necessarily about how I can use my money to save better society. They're thinking about, right, how can I pay the rent? How can I buy groceries for my family? I think that folks who live in these underserved communities, the youth are probably thinking, you know, how can I use my money to buy the things or to be affluent, right? I want the shoes and the seekers and the jewelry and all of that. And so, certainly talking about affluence and the model for improving the community, that's just a hard thing for me to even think about how to separate those two. And I'll say one more thing. It's interesting having some affluence and being African-American because you still have the same exact challenges, right? In terms of access to opportunity, in terms of people's preconceived notions about who you are or how you live, I wind up a lot having people think certain things of me because of my skin color and nothing else about my background. So that's part of why I'm in this space in terms of community development work. I'm using my affluence to help people who don't have as much as I do. And so helping and working in communities and providing support to people and letting them know that just because you're brown doesn't mean you can't do it, I'll use that. Sure, I'll try. And Sarah, I wanna hear your thoughts on this too. I'll just add that I think that we sort of talk collectively in this country is that there's a trust in the market, but the market has never operated as a shared thing that everyone has equal access to. And so we can't act like, okay, well today, we're gonna start, we're gonna start doing this right. And it doesn't get to start today. And so that's part of our challenge is that we've got, I think all of our presentations touched on this on some level, but there are these, I really do think that reparations is a conversation we need to be having very explicitly at universities. We're doing this at UVA, but also in our urban planning and in our cities, like how do we reflect on the game never being fair and never being equal for so long. And then also, how do we make better choices today? So I've been, our school is going to a racial equity auditing process because there's so many structural inequities that aren't even just in the money, but are actually in, to Gina's point, people are hired left if they have non-anglo-sounding names and people, I mean, our racism is so embedded in every decision we make that the game is fixed. And so that's gonna continue to be a problem that's not only about the economy as a numeric thing, but actually also about the way we make all of these choices as a collective that have very real economic effects. Sarah, do you wanna add anything? I'm sorry. Yes, I love listening to you guys talk about this, thinking about models and growth. Of course, then it makes me think about capitalism, which I appreciated Alex's derailing from commenting straight on an opinion about capitalism. To me, one of the biggest risks of what people write about and talk about right now in terms of thinking about everything in a cost-benefit analysis or in terms of dollars or the kind of financial logic or so-called neoliberal movement that we're all living in is the deterioration on our imaginations to think about solutions, systems, alternatives, no, we can't, is for his project possible for more people. Love to open this conversation up to the wider public. Yes, Carl? Thank you for these phenomenal presentations and there's a lot of really productive overlap too. I actually wanna pick up on what Sarah was just talking about and this does connect to some of what Alex explored also and I'm gonna use the imagination theme here. The questions of power and equity came up and frankly, I don't see how we can really get to the issue of the proper and just and rational distribution of power if we don't confront capitalism. Capitalism is the mode that has enabled an intense concentration of global wealth which is itself a problem but it also is a kind of stranded asset. I mean, we have so many challenges globally and we can't get at the assets because this is now held by capitalist entities which exercise enormous power. So on the question of sort of the urban development issue couldn't we take Alex's invitation to kind of designate what's appropriate for capitalist expansion and what isn't and say that the city for example should be not the site for capitalist investment strategies because there's no housing security as long as it is possible for massive development entities to create all kinds of mechanisms to alter housing, to shape housing for the wealthy, to make it a property ownership for the purpose of having extra assets. I mean, I think I heard something about New York now, Manhattan having 30% non occupancy, something like that, it's a high number. That can't be solved by the kind of the grassroots synthesizing of strategies and working together. That is a macro question. So I'll sort of, I think there is a place where the antagonism between what I would call a decommodified socialist platform and maybe some form of capitalism which is pretty insistent, have to fight it out. Well, it's hard for me to think about it on a macro level but I have seen in cities for example where back to politics where certain politicians decide that in order to develop buildings, they look at two or three different issues. One is the rights affordable housing component I was talking earlier about inclusionary zoning, to make sure that in these developments where they're building high end and luxury apartments that they also have to build apartments that are affordable, some politicians will institute things like a certain number of units, only a certain number of units can be allocated for investment so that investors that again build these high end apartments aren't allowed or condos aren't allowed to only sell them off to investors so that they're not real occupants for people who really live in that city and pay taxes to that city and work in that city. So there are ways that at least some politicians on a local level and a state level decide they're going to try to influence capitalism by putting in various rules and regulations to sort of help solve that problem. I think if we're thinking about it on a macro level and having to go up a level higher in terms of cities versus states versus the federal government, maybe that's where you deal with it on a macro level but obviously we're not in a position to do that now when we have billionaires right here in the federal government. I do think there's an interesting push towards community benefit agreement models not just at the sort of traditional level that they've been done for the last decade but actually especially as we're in a school of architecture a push towards models that are thinking about public infrastructure differently so like the founders of the High Line in New York have come out publicly to say we really wish we'd ask the question first what do our neighbors need and really structured our plan based on that which would have been a very different plan. I think it probably still would have been a really pretty park but thinking about the investments and the policies and the politics around the High Line would have been fundamentally different if we were answering your question with that in mind and then so the 11th Street Bridge project park in D.C. is a really interesting model where they have said all right we wanna take that we wanna repurpose this piece of sort of non-functional infrastructure and make it into a park but we know that the way that these things play out is that a lot of people in the Anacostia neighborhood will be displaced and we cannot have that epically so instead we're gonna raise $50 million to start a fund to make sure that people get to stay in their homes we're gonna do this in a community driven way and then only after we've really found the models to kind of keep people having the amount of choice that they want in their own neighborhood to have the capacity to do what they want and make their own choices then we can start raising money for this really pretty bridge and so I think there are models out there that are starting to form but they're definitely still the exception and not the goal. So yeah, I would just offer probably two points of relationship to a great question. Again, I would push away from the use of the term capitalism and the reason why for me is that this is just as much about feudalism as it is about capitalism. I mean, if you look at the big cities right now the major players are often sovereign wealth funds Singapore, Qatar, Dubai, it's inherited wealth. So it's not, maybe it was capitalist when it was earned in the 19th century but now it's like daddy's money like grandpa's money and it's all about inherited wealth which is a form of a century feudal rule. Like you have it because you inherited because your daddy had it or your grandpa had it and that's where the, that's where the, if you want to look at the real racial quality you're talking about wealth which is all about who's daddy and again, speaking of the current situation at the White House is about someone doing inherited land from his dad and so that's where the law of development company comes from and so again, again, the C word just doesn't work because it doesn't get into, again, these old and inherited kind of very feudal relationships. The aristocracy in Europe basically fused with the capitalist class to become this kind of joint thing so it just doesn't work as much. Again, I would much rather talk about greed. I would rather talk about power or elites. These to me are much more useful categories than imagining an economic system which again, I don't think describes that much and part of that has to do with the fact that again the year is not housing, they're really different systems and we need to start talking about things in really different ways and that's, so if you're starting to talk about how to regulate this kind of growing feudal relationships between real, especially urban real estate and the economic system that produces and owns housing then it becomes, again, I think there's, you start to see how all of these complex, different actors have to be involved both in crafting the larger movement to make change but also in the codes, I mean it's easy to say to look at, again, the big crisis of vacant homes and another thing to then develop the types of regulations and policies that can deal with it because we have a big problem, we often sort of, we have a lot of baby and bathwater problems, right? We try to create policies to deal with one particular social problem when we create all of these externalities on top of it. Airbnb, for instance, can be a lifeline for a lot of low income people who rent rooms in their houses as a way of keeping it afloat. It can also be a massive source of exploitation. You have short-term rentals or a massive challenge. Airbnb as a corporation is a different challenge. They're not, they're related but they're not the same. And so I think, again, when you start to get down into the specific economies and away from these kind of bigger ideological constructs around capitalism, I think actually the types of coalitions, the types of fine-grained political solutions become possible or become more possible. Again, again, the other thing about it is that when you take on the weight of history, you realize that the situation we're dealing with is hundreds of years in the making. And to undo it is, you know, we are the Jews wandering in the desert right now. Like maybe those kids, maybe all of them that born in 2000 will see the light, will be around to see the solution but I don't plan on being, I don't think I'm gonna be on the planet and I doubt any of us really are gonna be around when this solution arises. But we've lost the ability as a society to have any sort of long-term vision down the road. And maybe, again, maybe one of the things that is important about climate change as a discourse that at least it's allowing us to sort of, people are starting to think a little bit more long-term. Again, I think the climate change discourse needs a lot of sort of racial justice inserted in it. But again, some of the new leaders that you're seeing come from these communities and are speaking in this way. So maybe we're starting to see that long-term vision. How's the environment or the need for affordable houses is high? Should we prioritize building large amounts of affordable housing for the lowest cost or building affordable housing whose design truly fits the community? Can I answer that one? Yeah. Um, I think you can do both. The example that I showed, can I actually put that back on the screen if you don't mind? So this building between this and this. So this project, when we first started designing it, we used actually an architect, Tordi Gallo's partners. They are a, who you all might know from being architectural students. They do work all over the world actually. And they do a lot of high-end development. But they've been also in the affordable housing space for a long time. When we started this project in particular, we said, you know, we wanna design something that is affordable, that has affordable materials, but that doesn't look like it. And so again, when I show folks this picture, they actually think these, like this gray, they think that is metal panels, right? But that's cementitious, which is a lot less expensive than metal panels. And I actually had a contractor. I needed an estimate for a new building I was building. And I basically said, use this building as an example. The building cost came in two and a half times what this building cost, because visually the architect designed in, or I'm sorry, the contractor estimated metal panels and all kinds of expensive things. But this building did not cost what it could have cost if you used traditionally, you know, traditional materials that you would use in a high-end apartment building. So you can do both. You can provide people with quality housing and have it be affordable. Like I said, there are people who live here actually that make no income, that make zero income. And in the affordable housing business, you also have a utility allowance. And so when you make zero income, this property actually winds up writing you a check. So when you pay your utilities for $70 and you make no income, basically the property pays you $70 so you can pay your utilities. So it's possible. I wanted to thank you all for your work and your commitment to different racial minorities and disadvantaged populations. I think the question that I'm interested in asking is how our education model can be more linked to learning how to design in a way that comes from these people because frankly it isn't for the most part what we learn. We learn and we work in a project that is ours and we make the decisions. So I'm wondering what thoughts you have on how that sort of authorship from the community can actually be brought into how we're learning. I like your question. Yeah, I think we've got a lot of nods here. Almost like we planted you. Right, right. So I spend a lot of time teaching interdisciplinary applied classes so they're typically three hour credit hours but often people wish they were more. So it's a practical like studio-ish sort of a thing. And we work in partnership with community groups. So I spent a lot of my time actually writing grants for these projects because as I see my role at the university as a resource mobilizer so I can spend some of my time writing a grant that actually pays my partners to come and collaborate. We are working right now and the university is considering an institute called the Equity Institute for the redress of inequity through community engaged scholarship which would allow this to have an infrastructure where knowledge, because often like I am completely in charge, right? I'm in charge not only of my students experience but also of my partnerships, partners experience if I'm the one with the grant. So even that is an imperfect system. So universities have been really bad at sharing power. It's not a thing we do well. And research is often about like those with the credentials getting to know all the things and ask all the questions. So it's not a simple thing but I spend a lot of my time working with my students to understand how we can all be better partners. And so that takes, we do some implicit bias training. We do, we link that with structural inequity because you can't sort of do one without the other. We acknowledge sort of power distributions that are in unbalance and try to take time to do that. We do listening sessions all on our own before we get with our partner so that we can be the best partners that we can be. And then often the project doesn't look exactly like we thought it would, right? And so there's a lot of like giving up on the sort of traditional conception of beauty which I think is another thing that's really hard for our fields to do is to sort of acknowledge that actually maybe beauty is in the sort of shared power. Beauty is in the feeling of co-ownership, right? Beauty is in the wealth redistribution. And that's not a, you know, that's, we're working on that as a field. Like we've got a ways to go. So I think there's a lot of kind of fundamental challenges but honestly it will change because students like yourself are asking these questions. And if I could sort of upscale this point really quickly, I think the other thing that's really important that we don't do enough of in the United States is just learn at a young age how anything in the built environment is actually made. I mean, I don't know, I went to public school in California maybe y'all are from Vermont and went to different public schools where you learn how housing is built or how sewage systems work or how the energy systems work or how the water systems work or the food systems but I didn't, right? You learn about Congress, you learn about the Constitution, you learn about the history but you don't learn about anything outside. Look, walk outside, look around you and ask at any point in your education system you learn about anything that got there how anything got made. And we just don't learn it and then we have all these problems with the fact that the system isn't equitable and doesn't work but it's like we don't actually teach it. And so that to me is a huge part. And I think a lot of it goes beyond the get expertise I think one of the biggest things you can do here is is there a way for the architecture school to extend this sort of understanding of housing and the built environment out into the rest of the campus out into the rest of the community so that people around here understand where everything came from and how it all got there and how it's all built. Too much of it we have to learn on our own we learn through our professions or we don't learn until we become professional or until we get elected to public office and then all of a sudden are responsible for caring for it. So that has to be, again to me learning about the built environment is just as important as math and reading and science and all of the subjects that we learned in school and there just needs to be a bigger emphasis on education. If you look at other societies that I think that are better at it they learn more as kids about how everything gets made. Just wanted to offer one thing I learned from working for a software company for a number of years is the notion of agile development and scrum and these are ways that software companies are working a lot these days where instead of doing what they call a waterfall process which is basically figuring out the whole problem and the solution and taking years to figure out this complex solution they start out really small ask the stakeholders what the problem is create a really small solution and learn from that and then iterate and you're always iterating with the stakeholders so I think, I just noticed that that I think it's really applicable to the architectural process so I just take a look there's a lot of stuff on the web about agile development and there's a book called Story Mapping which is a really great exercise and it'd be great to run an architecture studio based on that process. I was going to think this is somewhat a follow-up Can you speak a little bit more? Yes, as a follow-up what would you, I'm trying to articulate this but knowing that there are these young people here who will be going in and very junior positions and firms when they get out of school what questions can they ask what actions can they take at that point in their life before they have the power of leadership of a firm or the financing to finance affordable housing what can they do as junior professionals and what would you advise them? That's great. So Ray, did you hear that question? A little bit but that's okay I'll listen to the answers. Okay, well let me tell you what it was because I feel like you're going to have good things to say so it was for all of the students that are going to graduate and go into the world before they are running firms and making decisions what questions can they ask to be a part of this change? It was a follow-up to what Alex was saying and I think in many ways my answer would be his plea which is the questions should be about the curiosity of the built environment the curiosity of the landscapes around you asking questions about how to learn about people's histories embedded and all the things you look at how to talk to people you might not normally talk to so that you can collect a wider set of stories about how those places are made so I think that's a place to start in terms of just a kind of emphasis or focus on a certain kind of built environment history Can they have agency in a firm? Do you think in any way and change as a junior person? So I've been lucky to be a part of a thing called Design Futures which is a student leadership forum and I've been amazed as I watch young people funded by their universities to come and be a part of a sort of collective of young people and the people doing this work that are working with them to sort of ask hard questions about how design and social justice relate directly and then they go and they are often the people that the firms want so they're easily getting jobs because they're feisty and they're not going to give up and they're hard workers and so I think a lot of the design field is actually keen and aware that some of the students that are most sort of socially and civically minded are also the students that they want to hire and they're the ones doing dynamic design build projects with partners they're the ones that have really impressive like I was learning about your freedom by design work earlier those experiences where you're actually a part of something and you're making change are incredibly transformational and you learn things that you don't learn when you're just learning about the Constitution to go back to Alex's point so I think what's nice about that is that now that that's sort of a scene you know truth in the hiring world it's giving our younger generations the platform to be heard and actually to suggest change and these firms that are you know the sort of larger the Gales and the Perkins and Wills you know the Genslers they want to be seen as the firms doing this sort of work and so they actually want to hear those voices and they want to give them platforms to take to be to be the drivers of the change because often you know us old fogies know that actually we don't know how to solve some of these problems and the way that we learned didn't give us those skills and so I actually think there's a fair amount if you want to be in that space there's like you know room and encouragement and we just have to keep also really working to you know to educate those in power to make this space too I want to give all of you the opportunity to just talk about how we can be helping are you to empower them to help deal with this? Well in my work I usually wind up working with the same one or two or three architectural firms and I do that because they have the same mission in terms of the work I do and so there are many architectural firms out there that specialize say in luxury housing and the way they perform community engagement is very different than the architects I work with so I would say two things for young people certainly if you're passionate about working in communities you find a firm that is also mission driven and believes in what you believe in but on the flip side if you like to be a pain in the ass but you're still a mission driven why not go work for one of those big high end luxury apartment developers and kick their butts and make them do the work the way the work should be done not ignoring the community not just going and throwing up the story building but doing true and community engagement the last question here well I just have a comment to ask that I think there needs to be more communication between the generations of professionals and students because there are so many students that are driven and passionate about what we're talking about now and sustainability and there's people that are curious and there's professionals out there that know so much about this and I think there needs to be more communication between people like this and in February I went to a conference about sustainability by Efficiency of the Month and there were I had to apply for a scholarship to get an admission fee covered and there were 40 scholarships to be applied for I saw about 8 students there at the whole conference for the 2 days and I found that about the scholarship from about the student camp and I just think that if there was more communication between professionals about that to mention students there would have been a lot more people okay well I have a question so do you often have professionals come and speak in the classroom like do case studies besides the symposium do you have that because I see that a lot at universities where you know folks professionals come in with case studies and you can talk about all the issues and that opens up a lot of communication to have people from different disciplines come in and talk to you I think that way you stay engaged with a variety of professional networks do you want to ask me I mean the only piece of advice that I would give you or say in this question is just don't need to be aware of getting advice from old folks like me is that a lot of us have spent way too long playing the game and just assume that this is the way the world you know this is the way the world works that's just a load of horse puppy right the game that you see out there was created by humans you know it didn't come down from Monhigh like we whatever it is the economy or the politics or the housing situation we made it and every generation remakes it in some ways in their own way and you have to sort of stop economics of something might not work but they can be fixed, they can be changed economics is not Newtonian laws of physics yeah you drop an apple it will kind of do the same thing every time housing economics has changed every development you built right so that's the kind of thing it's project by project piece by piece and so you know as ISD once said don't hit the player hit the game you can fix the game is what has to be fixed and I think that's one of the key things that you can do at an early time look it out, it's going to do a hussy of quartets right but my last word I guess would be it's all about experience I mean I love getting older and I feel like I'm finally at this comfort point where I feel like I know enough and I also know that that I don't know and I'm comfortable with that as well so I'm not going around being frustrated with the way things are and just trying to blaze a trail without any knowledge behind me so I just say get a lot of experiences even if you get a bad message you can question it, that's learning just as well as learning something from somebody who has a better idea and it takes time, it will take time to become creative and be able to be nimble just like playing a guitar, you can play a chord but to be creative with that takes an experience so enjoy the process and experience a lot cool I want to continue this conversation but move it out into the atrium where we have a beautiful reception but I want to thank this incredible panel