 Great. Good evening, everyone. I'm happy to welcome you to tonight's lecture. Tonight we have Mark Norman here visiting with us, and I'm happy to welcome him back to GSAP, so on behalf of the school and Dean Andrews, thank you for coming. Tonight, Mark will give his lecture, and then I'm going to join him at the table along with Bernadette Baird-Zarrz, who is a PhD candidate here at the school in urban planning. She's also the IDC Foundation Fellow of our new newly created GSAP Housing Lab, and she's the co-editor of a just-released textbook, Zoning for the 21st Century Planning. Congratulations. She is also an adjunct professor of public service of NYU's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. She is an urban planner and researcher specializing in land use and housing, so I'm looking forward to that. So it's, as I said, it's a great pleasure to welcome Mark back to Columbia GSAP this evening as part of the first public discussion hosted by the GSAP Housing Lab. Mark's extensive work on affordable housing has opened up significant conversations and new thinking urgently needed today to move architects, planners, and developers beyond the shortcomings and impasses inherited from the past decades that has perpetuated the crisis around housing affordability and accessibility. Something that continues to plague cities all around our country, seemingly without end. This opening up and ushering of new ideas has strategically focused on the necessary convergence of design, policy, and financing, with an understanding that neither a particular discipline nor its practice alone can solve the problem, but when thoughtfully synthesized could produce new untapped possibilities. A global ambition that is localized and grounded in the specific histories of each city and neighborhood, culture, community, and also now facing evolving issues through climate change. In 2017, Mark curated these concerns as an exhibition at the Center for Architecture, Designing Affordability, Quicker, Smarter, More Efficient Housing Now, Expanding from there to a global audience at the Sydney Architecture Festival and at the Shenzhen Biennial of Architecture. Designing Affordability presented 23 case studies that addressed ways of reducing costs without compromising design quality, broadening the concept of affordability beyond that of policy initiatives to examine instead how architects, engineers, planners, policymakers, tenants, and homeowners could come together to design innovative ways to re-imagine public housing, leverage land, rethink building, modularity, and incremental building while leveraging technology and new ideas about homework and life. He notes of importance the great distinction between affordable housing and a housing that is affordable. More recently, he organized the Building Better Futures, Innovations in Equitable Development at the University of Michigan, Taubman College, assembling experts at the forefront of design, financing, and development dedicated to better buildings, better outcomes, and better futures for all across race, income, age, ability, household type, and geography. The conference featured an outstanding list of scholars and practitioners, a testimony to Mark's unique place in the field as a rare convener, able to bring together a very broad range of voices as well as bridge-across modes of research, emerging practice, and strategic action. As one of the leading international voices on affordable housing, his education and training as an urban planner and his 20 years of professional practice in the field of community, development, and finance today produces then his experience that he has with for-profit and non-profit organizations, consulting firms, and investment banks, working collaboratively to develop or finance over 2,000 units, totaling more than 400 million in total development costs. In addition to his professional leadership and achievements, Mark is a committed educator, currently a professor of practice at the University of Michigan, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and previously a professor of practice at Syracuse University, leading courses on real estate and housing policy, and where he also implemented initiatives at Upstate, a center for design research and real estate in collaboration with the city, state, and university partners. In 2014 to 2015, he was selected as a Harvard Loeb Fellow at the Graduate School of Design, where he consulted with architects, planners, non-profit organizations, and others throughout the United States. Since 1994, Mark has served as a board member for 11 different non-profit and community organizations, addressing issues of finance and design, of affordable housing, and community development, including the Executive Committee of Design Futures, serving on the Federal Reserve's Community Advisory Council, and also on the Board of Mass Design Group. It's my pleasure to welcome Mark to the podium. Thank you. First, I want to thank Dean Andros and Hillary Bernadette, the Housing Lab, and GSAP for having me. I also want to acknowledge all my collaborators, hopefully I've done that throughout the talk, because this work doesn't happen alone. I also want to say that the title of the talk is Prototyping Better Futures, Prototyping, because it implies testing ideas. And allowing one to explore specific concepts of larger systems before diving into full-blown sort of development mode. It also implies that we don't have all the answers, and we certainly don't with the housing crisis. And I wrote Better Futures instead of Better Housing because our problems are broader than housing. And I realize with each passing year that housing alone won't solve our problems of access, affordability, equity in our housing markets. So what I'm hoping to do this evening is talking about ways I'm starting to prototype what a better future might look like, and the partners necessary to move these ideas forward. The issues that we need to address are intersectional. So I want to start with three case studies that I feel exemplify the problems that we face. I picked a variety of geographies and typologies to show the history of housing in the U.S. and the regulatory policy frameworks that have exacerbated inequality, our problems with affordability, and sort of a lack of opportunity for large segments of our population. I also want to use these case studies to map a path forward in this moment of stagnating incomes, intractable, nimbyism, and aging populations, but also the positive side of policy changes, financial innovation, and awareness among the general public of these issues. Finally, I want to talk about projects I'm working on that might be testbeds for some of these ideas around affordability, wealth building, and giving a wider range of families, a wider range of incomes, agency and decisions about housing and economic development. And I'm going to try to do this all in 40 minutes or less. So let's start with prototyping. So for me, moving from lending and investing and affordable housing development to Syracuse, where I got to run the center for design research in real estate, allowed me to think differently and take a little bit of a step back, sort of an intellectual step back, but also a step forward into collaboration, architects, engineers, and designers. And so for me, prototyping not only in architecture, urban design, and urban planning, but also in finance was key to some of that work there. So I just want to talk briefly about some of the things we did up there as a way that led me through what prototyping could do for solving our problems. So it started with the work actually initiated by Julia Zernayak and Mark Robbins on the Near West Side and the Neighborhood Plan. I came in at a great time for trying to implement some of the things in that plan. And the philosophies behind this were to create a livable city for all incomes and sort of get out of our enclaves and also scale up the innovations. So one of the projects that I first worked on was around looking at how the street could be performative, not just for stormwater, but also for connectivity, for play, for placemaking. And also for environmental justice. And this resulted in a project we did with Stas, Landscape Urbanism, Julia Zernayak, and foundations. And the prototype was really what does the street look like if you want to make it connective and you want children to be active in their environments. And so the prototype actually put in place things that hundreds of kids could actually test and break. And understand how it would work. And it was also a way of figuring out with the Water and Tour Department how to actually finance this stuff. Another project I want to talk about just related to prototyping was a problem that many of our cities have. This kind of be any city, this is Syracuse though. You see the highway running through the middle of the city. And luckily we were at the moment where it reached the end of its useful life, meaning that it either had to be torn down, rebuilt, or rehabbed. And so one of the prototypes here was how do we show people the possibilities if we have this opportunity. And, excuse me, so one of the things was just to talk about the historic fabric. Also this could be just about any city. The historic fabric, the current fabric. So this is red lining, this is urban renewal, this is highway construction, this is America. And how do we think about what the better future is with that gone? And so one of the great things about a professor of practices, you can think about sort of intellectually and historically how we got to where we were. But then in the classroom, look at design studios. We also held AIA charrettes and exhibitions to figure out how this might look. And then to think about how we could look at it in advance of it being down. So overlaying it with statistics, with data to make people aware of sort of economic possibilities, mapping the sites that we would gain, thinking about the development that could be done, thinking about the new affordability and walkability, and actually prototyping sort of what that might be and inviting the community and to look at how we might get there. So I bring up these examples to just talk about how we might bring that prototyping to housing. And one of the things that I wanted to talk about was this sort of crisis we face that isn't just in our big cities but is all over the country and how we think about housing. And that was the impetus for designing affordability to think about how architects, designers and engineers were actually moving these ideas forward. And I won't go into sort of all the projects of designing affordability, but the 24 projects both in the US and abroad with projects added in Australia and Shenzhen was a way of enlisting other people that were prototyping and trying to create better ways of thinking about our cities, our buildings, our policies and the way we finance housing. So that leads me to understanding. So trying to understand the dimensions of this problem, especially in the US and how we got here. So the issue really that urban planners can be a part of solving, but that we have to work on in collaboration. And I just want to bring up a quote from sort of the much discussed and sometimes criticized Sam Stein book where he says, today's urban planners face an existential crisis. If the city is an investment strategy are we just wealth managers? That actually stuck out to me because are we just wealth managers? Have we solved the housing crisis? And so in thinking about that, I think about, well, one, he gives too much agency to urban planners, sadly. But also he downplays the sort of triple threat of stagnant wages, of changing demographics of global competition for labor and materials. And also for the fact that development costs outpace our current wages. So I wanted to sort of broaden the potential solutions here beyond housing or even the city to larger issues of wealth generation, shared prosperity and choice. And I want to start with a highly personal, maybe slightly embarrassing example, which underscores some of the problems we face. So this is just a short list of some of the problems we face. But I wanted to start with where I grew up in deeply affordable, highly subsidized housing. UCLA is about two blocks to the east and the Getty Center is about a mile to the west. And acknowledge that I call it and I try to call it more and more affordable, deeply subsidized, because it was. And to think about all of the ways that we built wealth and how that was reinforced through policy. Right, and that's the 30 year fixed rate mortgage. That's the mortgage interest deduction. This is California, so my parents were at an age where they benefited from Proposition 13, not only a lower property tax, but a property tax rollback and then their property taxes only rose 1% per year. And so when you think about all of these things and you think about income and equality, you think all of these things are actually great for people here and exacerbating the problem elsewhere. And so I talk about this because there's so many ways in which we've guided our policies to build wealth for a certain segment of the population, usually the home owning segment. And I just want to talk a little bit because it actually gets worse. People talk about Proposition 13. They don't talk so much about Proposition 60 in California where you can take your Proposition 13 tax break to your new house. And they don't talk about Proposition 14, which happened about three years before my parents moved where California voters approved a referendum saying that the state couldn't enforce racial covenants. So I think about all of these things and the deed for this house actually still has a racial covenant in it. It's just black lined. And think about what if you were trying to buy before the racial covenants were overthrown. And not 1948 when the Supreme Court decided it, but more like 1968 when states actually started enforcing it. What if you were a renter? And then just the amount of wealth that gets built in this case is kind of crazy. So from a $60,000 purchase price, you have a $1.6 million sale price, which is an appreciation of 7.5%. And you don't have to pay most of the capital gains taxes. So when we talk about income inequality, I think we also have to talk about all of those systems that are in place that exacerbated that we haven't really changed. So just talking to people at the Federal Reserve, we're also talking about we're in a historically low interest rate environment. The Federal Reserve shed report talks about how a $400 emergency can be devastating for more than 40% of American families. And I put this up just because in my parents and other homeowners case that $400 emergency can take the form of the home equity line or other things which benefit from the lower interest rates. For those that don't have it, the credit card rates don't track the interest rate cuts that we've been seeing. So just another example of sort of this exacerbating, these exacerbating factors we see in the housing market. So let's move away from my family and move to New York. So when we talk about policy, Northside Peers rezoned for manufacturing to multifamily residential. And what are the subsidies that went in place there? So inclusionary, which gave 25% affordable, but then I would call 75% unaffordable. And low income housing tax credits, Community Reinvestment Act, HPD and state subsidies. And when I think about this, think about the 60% appreciation from 2010 to 2020 for the people in the towers. Think about the lucky 120 people out of the 25,000 that applied in the rental. So rents in the general neighborhood increased 54%. And even the affordable tax credit rents, because of the general increase in incomes across New York, the 60% of median rents are 26% higher because everybody else got wealthier while people at 60% of median in 2010 didn't. And we know where incomes are and how they've stagnated over the last 10 years. So in addition to that, the collective tax abatement savings for the condo owners is $33 million over 30 years. And as part of a Furman Center report, we learned that the population of Williamsburg Green Point has increased by 20,000 while the Latino population has decreased by 15,000. And then just for good measure, I put in the $10.73 ferry subsidy only to say that the people at the lowest incomes don't benefit from that. So these are just ways I want to outline of how income inequality can manifest itself. And then in addition, most of our programs are on the road to expiring. So thinking about not only sort of the loss of affordability, but also the expiration over time that we're seeing now and we'll see in the future. So people might have seen this graphic before that I showed, but I wanted to talk about a different kind of example where homeownership in these previous cases were creating benefits, but in some cases they are creating problems and negative benefits. And our subsidies for homeownership are shifting increasingly from owners to investors. So this is Lakewood, California. 1949 acres of bean fields gave way to cookie cutter single-family homes. Like many proliferating subdivisions, it had a suite of subsidies from 30-year mortgage to the home interest deduction. But it was also pretty amazing in the sense that 17,000 houses were built in 33 months. It's 515 houses a month, 17 houses a day at construction costs adjusted for inflation that are $96 a square foot. That's something that even our modular friends can only dream of. And sale prices adjusted for inflation, $140, which today adjusted for inflation would be affordable to people at 45% of the area median income in Los Angeles. So our suburbs actually were providing affordable housing for those that could get it. What I want to shift to are some of these houses today. So this is Detroit. And in a project I'm working on in a neighborhood called Warndale, many of these houses, same era, 1950s, early 1960s, look almost exactly the same. But if you look inside the houses, they're very different conditions. So we see homeowners free and clear, homeowners at risk, homeowners on land contracts, and increasingly the neighborhood that was 70-80% ownership is now approaching almost 50% rentals. And I just want to take one block to show the current condition on one block. So a plethora of, in the same sort of housing typology, occupied, unoccupied owner, renter, and vacant land. And if you look, the prices are all over the place. Houses turning over once, twice a year, and creating more vulnerability for the homeowners. So the indications, both from Detroit and from other places, are that these patterns will not only continue but accelerate and spread to currently stable markets. So this is a number of different things. This is the purchase of single-family portfolios out of foreclosure. This is land bank sales. This is private equity discovering that even in low-value markets that there's profit to be had in single-family rentals. And in this case also, the single-family rentals don't benefit from some of the protections that multi-family rental actually has, like inspections or even tenant organizing because of its dispersed nature. And we can see that the number of single-family rentals increased after the crisis. And now is an asset class with, for example, Blackstone being one of the largest holders of these single-family markets. And so when I reflect on Warndale, I think about the foreclosed show at MoMA and sort of what we thought was the crisis moment that is now in many communities becoming a new normal for the sort of promise of home ownership being thwarted in many cases. So going through these three cases, I just wanted to go back to the Sam Stein quote to say that actually urban planners might need to be better wealth managers and develop investment strategies that are more equitable than the ones we have now. And we can blame mortgage finance, we can blame sort of mathematical formulas like derivatives, but really the issue is creating policies that don't exacerbate displacement. So what are the new financial structures we might be able to think about? So that is what brings me to speculating. So I've been working for the last year on something called the Cooperative Community Inc. And it draws on sort of how we build wealth for an increasing number of people for whom the American dream of home ownership is out of reach and for others who currently own homes where occupancy is precarious. And it also tries to sort of expand the way we create wealth away from just the notion that our houses will increase value. So what this is looking at is sort of how to in areas of rapid appreciation think about how we change the ownership models and also think about how we can create better outcomes for people. So the Cooperative Community Inc. is a process by which owners, workers, neighbors can all be participants in community development that's diverse, equitable and broadly accessible. And it's based on a cooperative model expanding a cohort of stakeholders that can become shareholders in a corporation but acquires assets through a variety of means. This could be existing owners pledging assets to the corporation which yields equivalent shares in the corporation. It could be that corporation then using those assets as collateral and purchasing additional assets or using it for renovation or rehab. It also as a public benefit corporation can benefit from CRA related investment, crowdfunding models and philanthropic support. So in line with other cooperative models, it is a shareholder model with a right of occupancy for those that need housing but also allows others to be shareholders for sort of a shared prosperity model. So what I wanted to share here is we looked at how people actually create wealth. And for our low and middle income families, it's mostly through the house. As you move up the income scale, it becomes much more diversified. So the question with the cooperative community Inc. is how can you have a diversified basket of assets that don't create a sort of reliance on housing markets that have to increase in value in order for families to create wealth. So we're looking more at a basket of assets that's more like the upper middle rather than either no assets whatsoever and debt or really all your eggs in the housing basket. And so the notion behind CCI is to expand on existing mechanisms for building wealth and supporting communities and providing affordable housing options. So like a community, land trust assets would be acquired and held to maintain affordability. However, in the case of CCI, the land values are leveraged to provide collateral for additional acquisitions, renovations, and also a diverse set of assets, office, retail, commercial, securities, and other things that create a portfolio of assets. So it also, unlike our current financing models, creates a little more diversity in terms of who lives there and the rules that one would live under because it's a more democratic model of the owners and shareholders deciding the value. So it's a prototype and process because it's necessary to talk to a wide variety of partners. It's also important to differentiate this from other wealth-creating products like the reverse mortgage, for example, or land contracts or portfolio purchases. And it's also sort of decoupled from the notion that houses have to appreciate and that every individual homeowner is responsible for the failure or success of their property. So the other thing around specifics are thinking about organizational acquisition, development, long-term asset management, regulations around dividends, exits and payouts. So the other thing we're looking at is internal loans, equity lines, saving products to create a suite of products for people that think about this cooperative model but that can also benefit from leveraging those assets. So in addition to looking at sort of the historic cooperative models, we're also talking to people at the Evergreen Cooperative in Cleveland, which is a worker cooperative. We're looking at large agricultural models and the way they acquire and distribute income and share costs. And the hope is an implementable plan and open source format for communities which would be different for different geographies. So the goals really would be building wealth for low-income and moderate-income people, promoting affordability, creating neighborhood stability, fostering community cohesion, allowing for intergenerational wealth, de-risking ownership, creating spin-off businesses and opportunities, and promoting preservation and new construction of housing. So what might the cooperative community look like in my three earlier examples? In the case of my parents, this is just the asset mix. In the case of my parents, where Los Angeles has a small-lots ordinance, it would be not selling their house to the highest bidder who, it turns out, basically tore it down and flipped it for $800,000 more, but taking advantage of the small-lots ordinance to actually get a house on site, not having to relocate, but providing additional benefits for other people of low and moderate incomes to live on site, and also to give them assets that are decoupled from the house. So giving them all the equity they would get anyway, but providing some of the things that we talk about in planning and urban development that we haven't seen scale up, like the accessory dwelling unit, like the small-lots ordinance, and other typologies that sometimes our policies have changed but haven't gotten as much traction as we might want. In the Northside Peers example, it might look like at the end of that tax credit period, thinking about acquiring some of the retail, making those renters shareholders, thinking about rehabilitation, repositioning, incorporation of additional assets, and long-term affordability, but with a diversification of assets that actually let them increase their wealth while also living affordably. In the case of a Warndale in Detroit, it's acquiring those assets from the land bank and stabilizing the block, stabilizing values on the block, but also reaching beyond the block to the commercial corridor that the city of Detroit sees as very important for revitalizing the neighborhood overall and creating jobs. So where do we get the inventory? We're at a moment of, I think, inflection in many ways. This is a zillow estimate of the baby boomers who will leave their houses for one reason or another, whether it be death or assisted living or others, versus how many people are actually going to be able to buy houses. And the estimate is for about four million houses, potentially, that will be sort of coming on the market, and it's not clear who those buyers are, and that's across the country. It's also thinking about how our wages haven't kept track, haven't tracked with either construction costs or median rents and how we see increasing cost burdens. It's also that expiring long-term housing tax credit portfolio and the increasing numbers of rentals, single-family homes that are now rentals. So thinking about not just a process to sort of de-risk ownership and diversify it, but also what the inventory is that lets us scale up and get there. And so just in thinking about this model, I have been able to start testing some of this. So this is the city of Ann Arbor, which has a median income of $101,000 a year for a family of four and has only built about 50 units of affordable housing, but has lost 800 low-income housing units through expiration of their tax credit period. So right now we're modeling a lot of the downtown sites, most of which are parking lots, for affordable housing. And just to give you an example, so this is one site and looking at the possibilities, but the initial ask from the city was underwrite these for low-income housing tax credit affordable developments. But in conversation, the question was, one, it's the equivalent of 2,000 units. So the amount of years it would take and the competitiveness of the tax credits wouldn't let that happen. So they luckily let me underwrite it in a variety of different ways, underwriting it as a co-op, underwriting it as a revenue bond issued by the city so that we could have a range of incomes and weren't chasing points in the way people many times have to do for tax credit deals. Looking at what if we sold the land and it went into an affordable housing fund, and then looking at other models to just diversify the way we look at housing and the way cities can leverage land, not just for your normal affordable housing deal, which is incredibly competitive and incredibly complex, but to do it faster and to do it under different models, co-op, or a sort of range of income. So this is happening now for 10 sites in downtown Ann Arbor. Another example I just want to share is Friendship Court, this is Charlottesville, Virginia. This is a low-income housing tax credit project, 150 units, and the families there make on average about $15,000 a year, and it is approaching its 15-year tax credit period. And so luckily it's owned by a non-profit, but we can start looking at the ways we can reimagine it. You'll see downtown Charlottesville, the historic mall just a block and a half away. So what does that look like? So with Liz Ogbu and SanTech, we did a master plan talking to the residents and thinking about what they want, we also know that 150 units can be 600 units as of right, which is very scary for somebody making $15,000 a year. The question is, if it's market, if it's mixed income, and I make $15,000 a year and the other person that moves in that has three times more units at quadruple the income, how does my family stay? How does life look? So those are some of the questions that were asked and answered. And also educating people to testify on their behalf at community meetings. So what does affordability look like? How do you finance it? What is workforce? What is tax credit? How do we get a ladder of affordability rather than just affordable and market rate? So all those questions we were asking and thinking about how we actually might make it happen. So phase one is under construction. In talking to the residents, nobody will be displaced, which is great, but also means a 10-year buildout through 2029, but also gives us the time to think about what shared prosperity and equity might look like in Charlottesville for people that have been in this neighborhood for many, many years. I also just want to talk about our current project Detroit and thinking about, so in all of these cases where we have opportunities to create new models of housing, of finance, of policy. So Corktown is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Detroit. You might know that Ford has bought the Michigan Central Station and is moving 4,000 to 5,000 employees there for their mobility unit at the same time. This neighborhood has been developing, so after many decades of actually not much construction, 330 units were delivered in 2019 and another 150 in the pipeline. At the same time, there are 1,000, more than 1,000 publicly owned parcels. So with that investment, that hundreds of million dollars investment from Ford, how can we think about these parcels and who benefits from this new investment coming in? So that process is underway now of thinking, what does that look like? What does it look like? How are the parcels assembled? How are they disposed of? What do those RFPs look like? And once again, how do we have shared prosperity when big investments come into neighborhoods, especially with the benefit of so much publicly owned land? So for these 700 to 1,100 residential units, the question is what do those look like? How will we finance them? So finally, I want to just talk about how we measure all of this. So I've been thinking a lot about career in affordable housing, very happy at the ribbon cutting, but what happens after? What happens 15 or 30 years later? How do we engage people when we're trying to figure out their lives and how new housing is financed? So with my colleagues at UVA, Liz Ogbu, and others, we're trying to come up with a social equity impact protocol to sort of measure sort of what the impact of these decisions are, of previous policies of existing policies. I think we're also in a wonderful time because we are starting to measure what the impact of our policies are. Tony Griffin's just City Index, the SEED system, and this system is being rolled out to 20 community development corporations to have them sort of look at their projects, both past and upcoming, to see where they fit. And so it's a relatively simple framework. There are three sort of tiers, which is do no harm, which I think is a lot of our current affordable housing, at least now. So residents get to stay, residents are in some ways engaged. But then we wanted to move on and see where co-power was happening, where decision making actually was redistributed so people could actually make choices about their lives. And then finally reparations, which is actually redistributing the way ownership, management, and other things are done. So in this case, you know, it's thinking about, for example, the Friendship Court Charlottesville example, where it could just be reissuing the tax credits, and people at 30, 40, 50% of the median income get a unit for another 30 years. But it also could be a complete change in the way that happens, because in the 15 years prior, they gained no wealth. So how do we think about the way a kind of reparative structure can work in this landscape, where we have tax credit units that are coming back to us, where we have cities with vacant land, and we have other opportunities of gaining units and rethinking how we finance them. So through this process, we'll learn over the next year sort of how these projects rank, and how we might create funding to enhance the ways that nonprofits are looking at their developments, are engaging people, and moving things forward. So finally, I just want to talk about a project that's just starting up that I think embodies all of these concepts. This is Portland, Oregon. When I said in the beginning that every city, you could basically find the historically black neighborhood, the thriving African-American business district, followed by the Interstate Highway and urban renewal. Portland is another one of those cities, but they, through their vision trust, are rethinking this historically black neighborhood that's now sports stadiums and parking lots that was a historic black neighborhood, and how we might repair some of the harm that was done and create opportunities. So in this process that's just starting, not only do they want to understand affordable housing, but they want memory, they want a storyteller. So we're partnered with Michael Ford, the hip hop architect, Moody Nolan, and Smith Group to rethink sort of how this could be and looking at the ownership and thinking about what that could look like in a sort of equitable development strategy that actually built wealth and opportunities in the neighborhood. So, you know, my question is what would a social impact protocol look like if it applied to the Community Reinvestment Act? What would a cooperative community look like if it was applied to city-owned sites or master plans or qualified allocation plans? And what would it look like 10 years from now or 20 years from now? So I'd like to know all of that. Thank you. Oh, I have so many questions. Thank you, Mark, so much for that presentation. That was tremendous. I have to say I've had the privilege of speaking with Professor Norman twice over the last few weeks, and he listened so much it's actually very hard to get an idea of all of this content. And so I'm just bowled over by the granularity and the vision and ambition of ideas here. And I think, you know, at the Housing Lab, our mandate from Dean Andraus and with the support of the IDC Foundation is to create an interdisciplinary space that tries to knit together big ideas and actually possible change, speaking to the housing crisis across interdisciplinary work. And you're doing it. How can we do it like you or better and following your footsteps? But what an incredible kind of an unusual practitioner across geographies and types of practice. So I guess one of the things that we're hunting for or puzzling over at the lab is where are these moments that have catalyzed change that are at the margins but also speak to big structures? And so to push back against the big ideas a little bit and say when can we be radical and reasonable also or connect the two together? So does that mean for limited equity make sense theoretically? We all like it, but yet it happens so rarely. And so when and where can it happen? And how can the framing from an asset perspective, which I think is brilliant and I haven't heard that before so much of the discourse is about affordability and accessing housing but from the asset help us change the way things happen and the process and how these things can happen. Who's involved in these conversations? How have you made these examples come forward? The second thing that we were talking about earlier too is and that we're struggling with in the housing lab one of the projects this year is to profile the already existing housing stock in New York and some of the innovations that have happened and one thing that New York has done a lot of is co-ops, some limited equity, some limited income co-ops so some of them have done well, some of them a lot of them haven't but what can we learn from that model and understanding the different ways that they've worked? So when we talk about that we come up against this kind of ethical issue of in the state that we're in now with not much money for poor people and incredibly unequal and rapidly becoming more unequal income and asset inequality, how much is sharing, asking poor people to share? How much is collective bootstraps actually possible? And it's so tantalizing as a planner and as somebody who fundamentally deeply believes in the power of democratic deliberation and what ownership can do but with four people with limited assets and two jobs and not much extra time to be part of a co-op that you're responsible to also upkeep and also own or manage or be part of owning how your assets are managed. Is that and when is that or how can that not be an additional burden or should we just do it anyway because there's no other money from anywhere else so we need to do something? I have a bunch of other questions. Wow, that's a lot in one question. I'll stop there. I'll go off the hook a little bit here which is we can't solve all problems for all people with the same tool and so I think a limit equity or shared equity models will work for a certain segment of the population. Our crisis is now reaching into workforce, like the market isn't producing even workforce housing. We need to subsidize that but those are also relatively high incomes so that seems like a perfect place for a shared equity model. For the family at minimum wage with child care needs, I think our systems have to be robust in the deeply affordable supportive housing which will be different with the hope that we can actually build wealth. So one of the things I just haven't, I don't talk about housing so much anymore because if people aren't able, if there aren't those mechanisms for building wealth, then we keep resubsidizing the housing we already built and we're going to keep resubsidizing it and it's going to get harder each time and so I think there's a housing pollution but there also has to be some other right and so that's most of the reason why I embarrass myself with my parents' story which I think is a lot of people's stories actually is that there were all these things put in place to let them build wealth but we don't have those for people of lower incomes or people that don't own houses and so I feel like that's one of the things we really have to unpack and that's a policy, that's tax policy in many cases. My other question was, one of them was, so we have all of these new ways to do things that you laid out and we have all the old ways of doing things that are really bad that planners and architects and policy makers have put in place that deepen segregation and deepen inequality and we learn about them in our master's programs and then go out in the world and reproduce them and how can we, is there a way that we can, okay sorry, make it more specific, where would you start as a place to both untangle, disassemble some of the problematic structures and is there a way to use the same tools to intervene? So I would say as a scholar of zoning, how about zoning is bad and has done a lot of bad things but how about also using it as a mechanism that can push forward takings which it can do, type of land takings, types of rights upon land, types of costs on land, not just using public land, it's bad to use zoning to do these things but we don't have any other planning tools or money anymore. So how do we... Should we blow it up or should we use it? I think we can start, I mean there is so much city, county, hospital, university owned land, we can start there and maybe we get to that place with a complete change in administration and finance and everything else but I feel like there's so many opportunities we don't take now and I'll just share an example from Ann Arbor where there was a city owned lot, they built an underground parking garage with the supports for a 19 story building and in the middle of downtown, hotel and luxury housing, right? Like that lost opportunity and that's happening every day in every city, right? People are making decisions about what to do with land. So I think we probably have enough situations like that that we can work on the takings but I think what we have in front of us is enough to start showing clear evidence that we can get things done, hopefully. I should say too I was using takings as just a generalized word of exactions like ways to use land tools to push for a little bit more or to stop giving so much. So much away, yeah. I wanted to go back to the Charlottesville project and I think you kind of started to address something that the residents were asking, what does life look like? Can you talk more about that? What does it look like after? And how do you start to both I think explain in the process and maybe as different as an architect but you know the kind of there's limitations in a way to be able to argue or push for certain things and how do we as professionals I guess speak to these different levels of concerns and ultimately it comes down to trust and particularly in the communities that you talk about there's incredible distrust and it seems almost impossible to overcome that in a way. Rightfully so. I'm just going to say Charlottesville is hard for me because you go in with a notion of what works. So it's a tax credit deal that's at the end of its 15 years. It's 150 units, you can build 600. Great. What the people that lived there said was we're let's say at 20% of median income. There's $600,000 condos that are built across the street. So they understand that the 450 additional units are going to be that. And so the hard thing is if I want to get housing for them, they have a Section 8 contract which is going to expire. The tax credits have to be under 60. There's nothing to fund 60 to 100% of the median income. So the hard thing for me was oh well maybe it's not a tax credit deal because that takes away so much flexibility but that's the tool we have. And the other interesting thing was income inequality is a really interesting thing in a lot of our urban neighborhoods because the lower income people in this particular project, 80% are single female head of household. And I would say 90% of the market rate people living downtown are single or couples, childless with a dog. So that was a joke. But kind of true. So one of the other things was that they're like the minute our kids run down that hallway, everybody now has a front door it's townhouse style. The minute one of my kids runs down the hallway or bounces a ball, I'm in trouble. I have a higher, you know, I might get evicted. I'm going to get complained about barbecue, Becky might move in. There are just all these issues around that. So that actually changes the design to have front door entrances, to have actually less density. So between less density and maybe we're not using tax credits, what am I doing here? But that's the part of listening that I think we have to do more because that means it's going to be a better development. If we don't use tax credits and city issues revenue bond, then we can have housing. Then when people go out of income, that's okay. Because we're not under those same regulations. We might have some tax credit units, we might have some section 8 units, but as people's incomes go up and they do there, but people move out because they exceed the income limits. So I think a lot of it's going to be listening and probably maybe getting less density or different kinds of design than I think we would think about for very dense urban locations. Or how to keep people able to stay and so they've fostered a community not wanting to leave. And I think to that and just what does it look like with respect to things beyond housing, because it's also about what other amenities and grocery stores were. I think in some of these communities there's also food deserts and all of these things that contribute to health that are somehow not part of the equation always. I'm not saying that in your case, but just like how do we start to think about that and a little bit of I liked how you were talking about step forward into collaboration and how as professionals can we do more of that because often there is a limit in what you can do. At least speaking as an architect, our bounds are certain scales of things and interventions even if we have desires to do more things, I guess. And in that case, I mean the nine phases, I mean also I think communities are getting smarter. So I think it was also clear that relocation means you're probably not coming back. Not because you don't have a unit when you come back, but it's like you have two kids in school and you relocate. Two years later you're not going to take them out of school again. So I think that was also the ten year build out. Six phases was everybody's going to move from their current unit to a new unit on the same site in the same school district. And that's also a hard thing because think about the construction costs, think about the logistics, think about the time that that takes, but that's also something I think we're going to have to do more if we really want to be equitable about development. On that too, I was thinking how, so how do we take this forward? We dismantle things and we advance your proposal. And a lot of the geographies that have, almost all the geographies that I know of that have successfully kind of take used or transition parcels of land or housing into limited equity scenarios where some kind of shareholding has happened during a downturn often. Maybe New York's co-ops in the raging 20s are an exception. And you have this unique perspective of having worked in Syracuse, Detroit and Brooklyn and been an active professional in all three places, or sorry, many more places than that. Where could we, is there a space to intervene, to prototype as you say, in a city that's rapidly appreciating like New York? Obviously we shouldn't assume trajectories last forever. And, or would that be the wrong thing at the wrong moment? I mean at the housing lab as we talked about, we're kind of struggling with how do we show the parts of co-ops that can expand or become, kind of utilize cross subsidies or legalize certain ways that maintenance payments are kept low to keep affordable tenants and then build up, build out, build under maybe. But that's at the margins, right? Because in a place where land values are, we can't, zoning has limits, we can't regulate away economic rent so far. I mean, where would be the space for something at scale to advance your proposal? Should we just wait for a downturn and then move in? I mean, I think, how do I say that? I think we've lost an opportunity with a lot of the rezonings. Because right that, let's say 15 years ago that space was industrial sites on the waterfront. And we were still in a model of if you want 20% affordable, we're going to give you incentives, we're going to give you tax breaks, and the rest is going to be luxury. If we had a time machine, I think that was a moment, right? I mean, that was a lot of units. Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Hunter's Point, you know, like, it's just a lot of units on land that was devalued because of zoning that we put lots and lots of new value on with a policy change. So I think if that ever comes up again, don't do that. But, you know, and unfortunately also those places were next to places that were just lower and middle income neighborhoods. And so, I mean, up zone, park slope, maybe? Do it the right way? I don't know. I mean, a lot of neighborhoods that were upper income were down zoned. So I think we have the mechanisms for flipping those levers in policy, but we've been flipping them this way rather than that way. So this gets me to the question of prototyping. I feel like in planning and architecture, we know a lot of what's good and what's bad for affordable housing, right? They entrusts housing trust, corporate is good. Not doing mixed income in a bad way. There's been a lot of case studies and a lot of knowledge accumulated, but yet we still do the same things. So how do you see the power of prototyping? We were talking about this a little bit earlier today. RFP with an example project or advocating within the developer community or getting on board with advocacy organizations or all of the above. What is prototyping as a strategy? I feel like if a developer owns a land, probably not going to happen. I mean, one, there's already the need for some sort of return because it was bought at a certain price. And so I think it has to be our public agencies, our anchor institutions. Those are our opportunities to prototype. But I think, I mean, we prototyped in other ways, but I think because we're doing it with existing landowners, then the incentives get layered on until the deal can get done. So is it 20%? Maybe you can start at 40 and then you can push back to 20. So that's a different kind of prototyping. I hypothesize that the example you showed us are also prototypes. Oh, yeah, for sure. I'd be interested to hear a little bit more about your experience with as projects are getting built the cost of construction. I mean, I think you had said this, there's affordable housing and then housing that's affordable. But to look at that through just the sheer dollars per square foot and it's expensive and the quality is challenging, ultimately for a variety of reasons. How do we think about this in going forward, also thinking about climate change issues around this that are challenging neighborhoods in general in cities particularly neighborhoods that are vulnerable? And how do we try to think through new ways of building and with developers and cities that may not have the resources, the experience, the labor force to do that? Do you have any stories or experiences? One of the things I like about the housing lab is they are focusing on what's existing and that's the most sustainable. How do we modify, augment, increase what's existing? It's also theoretically cheaper. And so I think new construction for so many, right at $300 per square foot, it's just unaffordable for so many people. The Joint Center for Housing Studies rental report said that in a lot of jurisdictions, 75% of new construction was all basically luxury housing. And that's a factor of construction costs. And so I think it has to be, as the lab is doing, thinking about the housing stock we have and how we rethink basement roofs, the way we live, and other things to get more units for all different kinds of people. Most cities around the world, I haven't worked in the U.S. as much, but land, as you noted, is such a powerful lever because it counts for like 50% to 70% often of the cost within cities too. So, you know, wondering, looking forward, I don't see this as limited. You kept saying in the U.S. and I thought it's not. Let's take it further. But if we can't make it cheaper and still safe, then what other things can we look at? Well, and all of the Ann Arbor sites are going to be 75 to 99-year ground leases. And so we're balancing the affordability if it's mixed income with the ground lease payment. So in some cases it'll be $1 a year, and in some cases it'll be approaching market rate, depending on the type of development. But, yeah, I think they agree that they're not going to sell any more, or hopefully not going to sell any more land, especially in the downtown because once that's gone, that's gone. And you lose all sorts of other control, right? So with the ground lease, you also have control over time, you know, even potentially with ownership and management. I'm curious about the idea that the ground floor maintains or stays retail. I've seen some projects here in New York that the ground floor is not retail, but it's offered to a nonprofit or some other kinds of institutions that in turn then support those that are living there. And I'm curious about your thoughts for this. Is this something that can be sustainable? Is this something that could be more emphatic and sort of mandated, maybe perhaps even somehow through zoning to say that it can't be a store owner that goes out of business or something that isn't big bucks either, but just that how to ensure that the ground floor stays occupied because it seems to be another point of just creating unsafe streets or conditions and what have you had to experience in that? I mean, it's, I think the retail, well, issue is tough right now, especially in New York. Yeah, for sure. And it's also, we need more tools there because that's the way we activate the street. Everything depends on that retail, like walkability and just neighborhood cohesion. And that's kind of our only tool for activating the ground floor. So I would love to understand, I don't know if somebody's working on how you not only activate but generate income for a ground floor. That's not a CVS or Chase or a Citibank. That would be wonderful. Maybe we could open it up for some questions. I'd say for the questions too, how do we take these forward, today's not the day to think about contagion per se, but how do good ideas spread? Sorry. Thank you, Mark. My question related to the last kind of prompt, you worked in a wide diversity of markets on both extremes in the country. I'm wondering if there are any examples of models, projects, programs, policies from some of the less sexy cities across the country that the New York's in the Bay Area and other places really ought to look at as a model that would be really applicable in some of the other markets or in some of the sunbelt fast-growing markets that do offer a level of market-created affordability? I forgot to mention it, but I've been really impressed. I think people say cities are the incubators of innovation, but right now the state of Nebraska, Oregon and Virginia are abolishing single families or at least allowing sort of missing middle housing. Imagine the New York State did that. Surprised that Nebraska's ahead of us on that one. So I think that is, I mean, that's just a, I would have never thought, right? I mean, the city of Minneapolis, yes, but like the state of Oregon, the state of Virginia and the state of Nebraska are all thinking about this because every place has an affordable housing crisis and every place doubled down on single family. You know, even in New York City, we have a lot of single families. So I think we could probably learn some lessons from those states. Like how do you get that through the legislature even? Hi, my name is Dan Wu. Really appreciated this presentation. I love the sort of mix between solutions and thinking really hard about the numbers and also just sort of the historical context. My question is about, I love that point you just brought up, this point about the states and other regions thinking about rolling back exclusionary zoning. And I'd love to hear a little bit more about sort of the politics and the coalition building work that you think is necessary perhaps architects and urban planners and policy people. Like what is sort of our role to sort of start forging those coalitions? There was a really great report by the Century Foundation looking into another region that was thinking about rolling back exclusionary zoning was Minneapolis. They were looking at what happened in Minneapolis, like how did they build this coalition? And one of the things that popped up was this idea of new coalitions between, yes, in my backyard, activists, young progressive politicians and traditional racial intended organizers. And it's like we need more of these cross-cutting coalitions to create these new ideas in addition to these new ideas, like the ones you proposed, like limited thinking about cooperatives and things like that. So we'd love to just get more of a comment around how can we build this new vision? How do we build these sort of cross-cutting coalitions? And how do we start making that power, these new movements around alternative ways to look at housing? In the Minneapolis case, I think a lot of people talk about, oh, Minneapolis abolished single-family zoning, but I think we should talk about more the fact that they did a racial equity analysis before that, and that's what came out of it. It was the exclusionary nature, the historic sort of reasons why single-family zoning was put in place and kept in place in a lot of places and prevented so many people from gaining wealth. So to me, that's the interesting part of the Minneapolis story. There are more jurisdictions doing that now, but I think that sort of puts... I don't think a lot of people even... They don't think twice about the 30-year mortgage or FHA finance or... And so I think if we think about those issues and the harm they created, that might be a good way of building coalitions. I think that's what moved the needle in Minneapolis. And to start on to that as a personal thought, I think one thing that young technocrats or people with skills can do, architects and planners, is make visible how exactly these structures continue to deepen inequality and segregation across U.S. cities, if that's what you're interested in. One, foreground it, even though we know it, somehow we haven't done a great job acknowledging it. And then Tuesday, all right, these things are built with values. We have different values now, I think, as a society, or at least we as planners and architects, and the MS Red students who are here, we think the city should be different. This is what that new... This is what the regulations or what the planning policies would be. This is how we can imagine the future, so that entails a dismantling. But making that clear and making that visible I think is tricky. I think we can learn from how you've presented your work today. Great presentation, Mark. I really love the slides about the subsidies. It's the only time you talk too much about federal housing policy, so can you elaborate? Maybe what would you do in your first 100 days as Secretary? What are the major things that the next administration should post in terms of housing policy? I mean, strangely enough, in this horrible tax bill from 2017, they did limit what you could take in the deduction. Sadly, I think if we had had a different administration, that chunk of revenue that we'll gain wouldn't have gone to tax cuts, but would have gone to housing. And so I think as we hopefully take some of those subsidies that people don't even realize they have a way, that we capture what that number is and move it to help other people out. Like, for example... Right, so anybody can take the mortgage interest deduction. It's a subsidy. But I don't even know how many hundreds of thousands of people are on that Section 8 waiting list. So if you were of a certain income and qualified, which is the case in the mortgage interest deduction, why not Section 8? If you qualify, you get it. And that would actually be pretty easy to pay for. Just have to reduce that limit on the mortgage interest deduction a little more, like we're done, theoretically. Or at least maybe in Congress, but not in the Senate. Thanks, Mark. Is there anything you can think of or share when it comes to possible modes of resistance in relationship to housing or in relationship to not even just prototyping as it came up quite a bit, like in a way almost like reverse engineering in terms of what is taken away rather than gained? I find it incredibly interesting that your brilliant talk happens almost like simultaneous with like Community Board 9's meeting today on HDFCs, which is kind of, I don't even know, 10 blocks from here and kind of like the largest kind of community with the largest amount of HDFCs, kind of trying to fight a bill that, whatever his name is, Assembly Speaker Epstein is trying to put forward in terms of taking control away from HDFCs that are self-governed, like self-regulated, kind of, you know, like putting in whatever sweat equity people were building and kind of putting in over 30 years, kind of trying to centralize, right, like the kind of management board of directors, control maintenance and all of this. I kind of like this activism and like resistance kind of mode as a mode of, I don't know, equity that you build, political equity or like activism, because like I like what you show in your examples quite a bit and I wonder if some of the ideas that Bernadette is alluding to or pointing to are really, in fact, like all that like old-fashioned or if they, you know, it's not like, I guess, a kind of like tech-savvy, like, you know, youngsters like hyper-millennial type of crowd, but like in fact, people that, to a degree, particularly when you look at HDFCs, like started to engage with that mode of housing and model of housing, like in, you know, early mid-80s that now are kind of like at a certain point in their 60s looking at kind of like, retirement like ideas, but all of a sudden are like almost like out of their homes because they can't afford it or like, like supposedly rolled into a different kind of, I don't know, model of housing, like, but how do you, how do you resist this within already an umbrella of like thousands and thousands of like HDFCs that are actually pretty awesome as a kind of like system or as a mode if you think about both housing and equity in that context. I mean, so the, I mean, one of the reasons I started looking at this cooperative community which is larger than the housing is that right even in New York, how many co-ops went market, right? I mean, because they still need an exit, right? Like they, like, let's say you live in it for 25 years, great, then you sell your share for what you bought them for, plus a adjuster. And so, I mean, a rational person would say if it's time to vote that I'm going to vote for this going market so I can sell at market rate. So just one of the notions behind it was, well, what are the other options? Like if you've increased the value, you know, X amount but don't benefit from it and maybe have deferred maintenance, can we diversify that so that like everything isn't the housing? Like housing is your retirement strategy. The housing is your home equity line for like a college tuition payment, right? Like it's just, everything is wrapped up in the value of the house. And so how do you sort of at least a little bit decouple that from everything else you need in life? So that was sort of the notion behind that. Right, that then went back into the co-op itself, the co-ops itself, that then allowed you to take, like I don't even know, like 30, 40% that kind of like helped to build some of the businesses or like program to store products that Hillary was a little into. Just say if you're interested in HDFCs, we're writing a white paper at the lab. Come join us, help us out. We're interviewing a lot of the different kinds of HDFCs. They're a diverse and not homogenous type of population of co-ops. Really interesting. Talk to Juan back there. We're recruiting him. But FlipTax is a way of a blunt instrument for limited equity, I would argue. But it's interesting still. I just have a question about, well thank you for the presentation and discussion. You mentioned a lot about how programs like Lytec are, you know, expiring and that's becoming an increasing problem in across the country. And I guess that begs the question of like how much do we use that as a sign to shift more to, you know, permanent affordability models. And I just want to hear your thoughts about the debate between those two approaches. You know, whether or not permanent affordability is politically viable, financially viable. Oh, totally. I mean, we just need to make the choice, I think. But I would also say, I mean, I'm a tax credit person like a lot of my career, but that was 1986. So it probably is time to rethink and have something new and reflect on this program and just come up with different models. It's been amazingly successful all over the country, but, you know, the affordability periods are longer now, but they still expire. And they don't build wealth. And I was actually really surprised when I looked at Williamsburg, right? So like a 60% median income unit is now 26% higher than it was less than 10 years ago. Right? So like just even that part of the model that I didn't even think was problematic was like, oh, if you're in a rising market, all of a sudden, right? Like just that measure. And people in Detroit are really talking about this now because the median income is a larger area. So let's say in Detroit, it's, for Detroit, it's $70,000 something. But the median income in the city of Detroit is $26,000. So right? So just like, I think there's just so many things we could rethink about how we do that. It means more subsidy. But it also just might mean like thinking about programs that augment or complement or just are 2020 and not 1986 thinking. Would you advocate for a more localized AMI? That's more money. So yes, but we also have to be realistic that, right? Like if all of a sudden the AMI goes down by half, the subsidy goes up by right double. So yes, but if I had a magic wand, yes. Thank you so much, Mark. Thanks.