 Welcome everybody, to what I think is going to be a fantastic fireside chat here with Sarah Bronin. My name is Ruben Tague and I work in the Impact and Responsible Investments Group at Prudential. Prudential has had an Impact Investments Group for nearly 50 years and we are really proud of the work that we've done, particularly in the area of real estate and urban transformation. We invest in affordable housing, we invest in transformative community development and we have an especially close relationship with our home city of Newark where we've made a lot of investments over the years to try to build an equitable space for Newarkers and for all comers. That's why I wanted to talk today with Sarah, who is, you're going to learn, is doing some really fantastic work both in our home city of Hartford as well as in the state of Connecticut and I think is one of the really engaged and most interesting thinkers in the area of how do we change the places where we live to make them more equitable for everyone. And we're going to, I think, talk a lot about policy and we're also going to get into the nitty-gritty of how these decisions get made at the local level in order to try to unpack, I think, some of these issues that those of us who sit on the table as investors or as funders can start getting our hands around what we ought to be doing to contribute to a more equitable reality as it's lived in these urban, suburban and ex-urban spaces. Sarah Bronen is an extremely impressive individual. I'll flatter her just a little bit by saying that she is not just an architect, she is also a law professor at the University of Connecticut. She chaired the Planning and Zoning Commission in Hartford for seven years and she just recently became the founder of Desegregate Connecticut, which is going to be the focus of our conversation today. I'm going to mostly let Sarah talk because she's the interesting one here in this fireside chat and we're going to get things underway here. Sarah, can I just ask that you sort of tell us a little bit about your background and sort of how you got from, you know, all of your professional credentials to getting into activism and the sort of movement that you're creating around Desegregate Connecticut? Yeah, so Ruben, thanks first to you and to Prudential for having me. This is such an amazing conference and a great opportunity to exchange ideas and so I'm looking forward to the conversation. Well, I don't know how I got into this. I mean, so I'm an architect and a lawyer and you kind of average those out and you get urban planning or planning law and zoning law. Zoning law is what impacts the built environment most of all the laws that, you know, we have out there and being able to serve here in Hartford on the local Planning and Zoning Commission really gave me a great insight into how these laws affect everyday people both for good and for bad. So what we tried to do here in Hartford and what we actually achieved was we threw out the old zoning code and put in an entirely new one that looks at equity and looks at environment and that really advances inclusive growth. But without doing that and having that experience, I wouldn't have thought to think about, you know, how zoning impacts communities on a broader statewide basis and even nationally. And so I think that's where, you know, working at the local level, you know, taking this combined educational experience and trying to make change here locally has really made me think, wow, you know, we really need to do this on a much bigger scale. And I would also say that, you know, Connecticut is a very is an unusual state in this regard because of the way it regulates land use. It is at the local level, but local commissions are actually empowered to make changes on their own. Whereas in most places, it's legislative bodies and city councils. So we had a great opportunity here and, you know, now I'm looking forward to the next level. Great. So, you know, you can see from my background that I've tried to provide a little visual context for this conversation with my generic urban sprawl pattern here or suburban sprawl pattern. But I wanted to ask you specifically about something you just said, which is, you know, what are these ways in which traditional zoning law, conventional zoning as it as it's lived tends to run counter to the concepts of equity? And what are the ways in which zoning law actually like reinforces or creates segregation patterns? Yes. So to answer that question, you really have to go back to the dawn of zoning. So zoning was first created actually at the beginning of the 20th century in the early 1900s as a way to prevent what they thought of at the time as nuisances from being located close to primarily housing. So zoning was created to give a sense of order so that factories weren't next to housing and so that interestingly enough apartment buildings were not built next to single family homes. I'll get to that in just a second. But unfortunately in the early 20th century, lots of cities around the country actually had what were explicitly racial zoning laws. And so on the books of local governments across the country were laws that said essentially white people live in this district, black people or Hispanic people live in this district and literally in the law wrote it in to say that people were segregated on the basis of race. Now the Supreme Court declared that unconstitutional in a case called Buchanan versus Warley. But nonetheless, cities had shown that one of the reasons why they wanted to do zoning in the first place was to separate people on the basis of race or maybe on the basis of class. And what they did after that point after the Supreme Court decision was they put in different kinds of rules that would prevent certain people from living in certain neighborhoods. And we can get into the technical details of those, but one of the biggest ones was a minimum lot size. And so they were very clever in doing this because in saying that a particular neighborhood has to have a minimum lot size of one acre or two acres for one unit of housing, they drove up housing prices, drove up land prices and prevented people from lower income groups from locating in these neighborhoods. At the same time, you use the word sprawl, that ended up using up a lot of our farmland, a lot of our forest and contributing to dire environmental consequences that we see today. So just using the minimum lot size as one example of a race neutral law that was nonetheless included in zoning ordinances across the country, having a racially disparate impact. And that's really, again, you go back to the dawn of zoning and you see that, unfortunately, the motivation at least 100 years ago was very clear in many communities. So how has that played out? Can you talk a little bit about what the landscape is today in Connecticut in terms of racial patterns of living and where these zoning laws persist? Yeah. So in Connecticut, there's about seven medium-sized cities and these are between 100 and 150,000. These are not huge cities by perhaps most state standards. But in those central cities, what we've seen is as a deep concentration of poverty and also a high percentage of minority residents. So this result came from bank policies in the past known as redlining. And if anybody hasn't read Richard Rothstein's The Color of the Law and hasn't seen how the law has mandated segregation that persists today, I would encourage you to read that book. So whether it was redlining and bank policies or zoning laws or just, you know, access to employment and places where people could actually, and the demolition of the street car system and the changing modes of transportation and dominance of the car, all of these things came together in the 50s, 60s, and 70s to create a highly segregated state. Connecticut has 169 towns, 167 of them have zoning. And you can see that poverty is concentrated in a very few number of those towns. And again, the impacts of our past decisions persist today. And most of those towns have not updated their zoning codes in decades. Hartford, before we did ours, it was probably 50 years before a comprehensive overhaul had been done with those. And of course, a lot has changed in 50 years. You mentioned minimum lot sizes as being one of these policies that sort of enhances this pattern of segregation. Or there are a couple of others that you would point to as being especially effective in reinforcing those patterns. So the probably another one of the biggest ones, if not the biggest is the use requirement that housing in most of our state and across the country is single family only. So what that means is that it's one family to every house. And usually that is a detached house located just on this like like those houses right behind you in the image image on your screen. So single family zoning has contributed both to rising costs and rising segregation. What we don't allow here in most of our communities is for people to carve out an accessory dwelling unit, a small unit on the third floor over garage that would allow you to at least have a one person or maybe a single mom with a child or a grandparent living in the same lot as a single family home. That's just one of the things that prohibitions on things like accessory dwelling units prohibitions on things like creating making some of these houses that you see in your image duplexes instead of single family homes allowing two families to live in these very large homes. These things are very common across the United States, extremely common in Connecticut and desegregate Connecticut. The group that I work with is working on mapping just how prevalent these practices are. And to be to be accurate, these are not practices that are limited to the state of Connecticut, correct? You know, these are patterns that play out across the country and in nearly every state and in most communities that most of us live in. Is that a fair statement? Absolutely. There are tens of thousands of jurisdictions across the country with zoning ordinances. You see actually zoning has been in the news quite a bit recently and Northern California, there's been a ton of battles in exclusive communities about zoning in up and down the east coast. There have been moves, including in Massachusetts and Vermont to liberalize zoning laws at the state level, just like what we're trying to do in Connecticut. So this really is a national story and it's been highlighted and brought to the fore by two crises that we've been experiencing. One is COVID and the fact that so many people have lost their jobs and therefore they have not been able to pay rent and therefore they're being evicted from their housing, even when there are moratorium in place to prevent that. So COVID is one pandemic. And the other pandemic is the pandemic of racial injustice, something again that we have seen in devastating detail, but not starting with George Floyd going back so many decades before that, but having that seared into the national consciousness and thinking as a society now, you know, why do we have such segregation and why do we have societies where there's so many different opportunities for people of color and versus others? So I think the issue of housing has been raised to, I think, hopefully a higher level of national conversation. And I do think housing reform is one really important way to both expand the supply of housing that's available to people of all incomes and backgrounds and also to try to start to stem and reverse some of the racial injustice that we've seen nationally. Yeah, I would add to that that both of those crises are taking place in the context of a 20 year or 30 year crisis around housing affordability, where we've seen, I think, in the Metro New York area anywhere between a third up to 50% in some places of renters are burdened in terms of the amount that they're spending on their rent. You've seen rent burdens go up 10, 15% over just the last five to 10 years as housing construction has failed to keep track with population growth, only exacerbating that crisis, which is, you know, equally if not worse, equally that if not worse in the Northern California communities, you mentioned they have the same kinds of dynamics there around under building. Yeah, well, you raise a couple of great points. So this concept of cost burden and severe cost burden. Severe cost burden means spending more than 50% of your income on housing here in Hartford, which is a very low income city, majority minority, 15% white. We see that about 29% of our residents are severely cost burden, meaning that given their very low income levels, they're spending more than 50% of their income on housing. What this shows is that we're not creating enough housing here to satisfy supply, the constraints that we put on zoning broadly in our region mean that we're not producing enough housing, meaning that the small amount of housing that we have, the prices are higher for it. So that's one of the reasons why a desegregate Connecticut is working towards housing supply as one of the goals. You also mentioned, so you mentioned, you mentioned cost burden. I'll have to come back to the second thing I wanted to raise. OK, I mentioned the California Geography and the relationship with New York. Maybe that was it, but if not. Yes, New York. OK, so just something else on New York. The Regional Plan Association, which is one of our partners in this effort, has done an amazing study on accessory dwelling units, the kind of housing that I just mentioned. And then the ability to produce those accessory dwelling units in proximity to train stations. And what they found is if we loosen zoning laws to allow that kind of housing in the New York metro area, which means in New Jersey, in New York and Westchester County, in Fairfield County, in Connecticut, we could produce hundreds of thousands of units that were walkable to the train station right away. And so what holds us back from doing that it's it's zoning. It's as simple as that. It's zoning at the local level, which is why, again, one of the things that we're advocating for at Desegregate CT is is zoning around transit, making that more making more diverse housing, making multi unit housing, townhouses, accessory dwelling units, really opening that up around train stations. It's a no brainer, but instead around many of our train stations, we have massive surface parking lots instead of instead of development. It's it's backwards and it should be changed. So thank you for putting in the plug for that RPA report. I actually am on the board of the RPA. And if you hadn't done it, I would have had to be my neighbor report. Go ahead and look it up, but wait till you're done watching this chat. Then go look it up and read it. It is a fantastic report and it shows how easy it really would be with almost no disruption from the sense that people think of zoning change as disruptive to people's neighborhoods to add ADUs and create housing opportunity for lots more people. I want to turn now to the work of Desegregate CT and what you're doing. Can you talk a little bit about what the strategy is and what the approach is and maybe what your early wins have been, you know, to the extent you've got something you'd like to point to. Yeah, so Desegregate Connecticut, it's on DesegregateCT.org is a coalition of organizations and people that aims to advance a statewide land use reform agenda. So so 40 organizations have actually signed up and these are very diverse. There's civil rights and social justice organizations, affordable housing organizations, good planning organizations like the RPA and home builders and developers who have said, you know, from all of these different perspectives, the way that we on a statewide basis plan for or don't plan for our housing inventory is completely backwards. So so, you know, we've kind of gotten together. We started meeting in June and the genesis for the meetings was really a conversation that I convened with architects and planners and lawyers. And I sort of sent something out to all the listservs in June because I'm on all of them in the state. And I said, does anybody want to have this conversation with me? And I thought maybe 10 or 15 people would show up and 230 people showed up to that first call in June. So that tells you with all of the reckonings that we're doing across the country, you know, that tells me that right here in our professions in those people, you know, within those people and those professions that are complicit in the land use system we have today, there is deep recognition that land use regulations cause segregation and that we have to do something about it. So our group has put together a platform. We put together a platform for the special session that the legislature convened over the summer. They did not take up this issue, probably because there's an election in a couple of weeks, but we're really hopeful that they will take up our updated legislative proposals in January. So right now we're working on updating our legislative proposals, building our coalition. We are fundraising to get to help to find better ways to spread our message. We think videos would be a great way. And we're also doing research. And so research for us involves doing something that no state has done before, which is to compile a massive GIS database of all the zoning codes in the state and identify district by district, town by town, what each district allows and put it on a map. And eventually we hope through this research, which right now is a team of 20 volunteers, and I should say we're all volunteers, researching, mapping, putting all of this information together. And we're hoping that by December we'll have something and it'll be it'll be really unique, but I think it will put in stark relief the disparities that exist in our state. So we're working on a lot of different fronts. Oh, and we're also convening meetings and events. So if anybody's interested in checking out some of the things that we've we've brought in national experts that we have an events page, everything has been recorded. And so we're really trying to maybe because I'm a law professor and I think let's educate people and surely they will see the need for change. We're putting a lot of emphasis on education and research just as we are using that to undergird our advocacy efforts. Yeah, I've spent some time on your website and and, you know, even at this early stage, you've already got some fascinating data up there. The charts that you've got showing the relationship between median income by town in Connecticut and which areas have got, you know, the one acre lot minimums that you mentioned or parking minimum data, which we actually actually haven't talked about. But that's another driver of making it difficult to build is having to add multiple parking spaces per unit of housing. And I think you've done a really fantastic job of showing in in quite simple terms. I know that the data is complex and the work that's going to go on is, you know, is going to involve a lot of GIS expertise and things like that. But just those simple tables I found quite compelling in terms of understanding the nature of the problem. Yeah, so Connecticut data collaborative helped us with those tables. We work with Data Haven, which is another nonprofit here. And and other organizations. So and and by the way, we have some great architects on board. Caesar Clark, Pelley Clark Pelley is doing infographics for us on the on the elements of the platform and our research on other states and what they're doing. So we it's a really a great team effort at this point. But you raise the issue of parking. Can I say something about parking? Always always. So parking is my probably my my my most sort of my pet issue when it comes to zoning. So all across the country for every land use, not just housing, but for office buildings and for retail, zoning codes say that if you're building this use, you have to have X number of parking spaces. So often it'll say if you're building at an apartment building, you have to have one, two or sometimes three units of parking per unit of housing that you provide. What that what does that do? First of all, it raises the cost of housing. In fact, just this week, our desegregate CT Twitter page was tweeting about a study that shows that parking increases the cost of housing by 17 percent. So increases the cost of housing. It also subsidizes driving. So if you're telling every private developer, even a private homeowner, you have to build parking. It's it's really providing infrastructure for driving when we don't do the same for bikes, our bike storage or bike racks. And that's that's again the national trend. And it also just degrades the quality of our environment because not only does it encourage more driving and encourages more sprawl, but it requires curb cuts, which means that instead of having continuous sidewalks, you have a bunch of driveways and you can see some of that. Actually, you don't have a lot of the driveways are in the front in your image. OK, so you still do have the driveways. I have to look closer at your at your background. But parking has all of these very negative effects. And, you know, it's it's gotten to the point where we have an obsession with requiring parking. And it's I think it's really destroying our cities. You can't build a historic Main Street anymore and you can't build and it drives out the cost, particularly of multifamily housing because you have to build a structured parking garage and those cost about 15. Space, so just think about that. And so, you know, again, you might think zoning is this very technical area of, oh, you know, how how can I know what what, you know, what zoning with zoning does, but I'm here to tell you, zoning has a huge impact on affordability of housing. And you kind of have to get into these details in order to change it. Here in Hartford, we've actually completely eliminated minimum parking requirements, which means the developers can provide parking up to a maximum that they don't have to. And that's a it's a I guess you could call it a moral stance. We're alone in completely eliminating them. But I hope that other communities will start doing it at least incrementally. So, you know, let's assume that you've now got a thousand to two thousand listeners here who have been converted. They they now recognize the role that zoning and zoning law and the history of zoning plays in some of the inequities that I think the SOCAP audience really wants to try to address very broadly in their work. What are some of the things that, you know, those of us who sit on the investment side of the table or film profit side of the table or maybe maybe even social entrepreneurs could be doing to get engaged with this to be asking the right questions. You know, for example, we are investing every year in numerous affordable housing projects and managers who build affordable housing because we see that as important. But I don't think this really is part of the conversation right now. Most of the time with most of the folks we work with. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on on how this particular community could either where they live or where you live, you know, develop a take on this work or make a contribution to it if they wanted to. Yes, so if you are all involved in the production of affordable housing and you're putting even a dollar toward construction of affordable housing, you should really consider what you want to put towards zoning reforms in the communities that you work in. If you talk to the to the folks you're investing in and the developers, the nonprofit developers, you know, even you can ask them, why did you choose this site? Why did you choose this community? And by and large, they'll say because zoning enables this here. And if I had to go to a town where this affordable housing is really needed, it would take me two to three years of lawyer cost, development cost, engineering cost, redoing and doing my application over and over again. Fees to the town in Connecticut. We've heard these are applications as much as $40,000, you know, that they say it's not worth it. So to make a real difference in the affordable housing world, we need to put housing in communities where the housing is needed, not just communities like our central cities, like the Hartford's of the country, which have affordable housing and where poverty is already concentrated. Of course, the concentration of poverty has a lot of ramifications, which, you know, we have not enough time to go into detail here. So I would encourage everybody who's involved in affordable housing or involved in health equity to look at zoning as a potential root for the sort of the root of the problem. If people are interested in learning about our movement, which I think is unique because it is a really, it's a coherent statewide movement that has a very specific set of goals. We're not looking at housing finance. We're not looking at, you know, anything related to anything but land use reforms. And the reason we're doing that is because our argument is that it's no cost to the state. And if the state can make these changes, there will be this massive array of ensuing benefits in equity and economy and environment. So we have a very specific and clear focus and we're hoping for reforms. So if you're interested in partnering with us, that would be great. I don't think we need a ton of investment to make a huge difference. But I think given all that we've done with just volunteers, it is time to take things to the next level. So we're hoping actually this week to announce a fiscal sponsor who through whom we can fundraise and partner. And and hopefully that'll that'll all come into place this week. Maybe by the time of the conference, you know, everybody's everybody's interested and we can tweet that out and put that out. But that's something that we're that we're that we're actively looking into in the hopes that it can accelerate what we're trying to do. You know, on the flip side, are there harmful practices that you see that investors or real estate developers are engaged in that they could perhaps address, you know, right away or try to stop? I think sometimes we thought we think a lot about, you know, positive impact. But I think what you're describing is sort of the, you know, calcification of some practices that maybe people ought to be rethinking and questioning out of themselves or their partners. Yeah, so I think one question that that investors may want to ask is just that locational question. Is this is this going to make the biggest impact? If I invest in a project, you know, here versus there and, you know, where where is the opportunity? I know you guys think about this all the time. So that's not something that I need to tell you. I also think that with every project that happens, there's an opportunity to educate the public about either how hard it was or the changes in the obstacles that were seen in the process. And I think exposing some of the things that you have no doubt seen as obstacles will actually help to smooth the conversation for reform later. For example, one of the things that that investors may have seen with their development partners is the use of the term character to stop projects from happening. So you'll go to a zoning board meeting and the zoning board commission will sit around and they'll say, this doesn't fit with the character of our community. And what they don't necessarily mean is architectural character. What they often mean, and sometimes they even say, is the people don't fit with the character. I don't think enough people understand how common that is. And I don't think enough people are outraged enough about it. And we're outraged about a lot right now. But it is something that we need to focus on and and fix. Sorry, when you hear that word character, you're hearing racial undertones or socioeconomic undertones that ought to be made more explicit. Do you think like that should get called out? So sometimes people will say, you know, I don't want minorities here because they'll bring crime or I don't want Hispanic people here because they have too many kids. I just got a court document last week, a filing against one of our towns. We're an Asian-American family who was here, who was here on a well, I think the leader of the family is here on a visa was hit with a zoning violation and the Planning and Zoning Commission of the town joke that the zoning violation would lead to his being deported. And it was just a litany of anti-immigrant sentiments that were recorded right there on the public record. It's just not thinly veiled in a lot of cases. And so sometimes it is sometimes racism is better veiled than in other times. But oftentimes people, they forget that they're being recorded even and they'll say the most amazing things. Exposing that is, I think, a really important part of the conversation. And and so that's another role that I think investors can play is is keeping track of those things. And when they see something, say something, you know, I can't think of a better way to put it. I think that's great. I mean, I would say in the last six months, certainly there's been a call for more courage among the investor community around issues of racial equity and really getting it right and being willing to put our necks out a little bit for the people who have their necks on the line all the time. And this sounds like another way in which we can and should be tracking to that. So I think we're running out of time. And that that's my that's my cell phone reminding me that we're running out of time. So I think I'm going to just thank you so much for your time today. This has been a really terrific conversation and I wish we had another half an hour. I hope that everyone listening, you know, goes to your website and engages with your group and more importantly, engages with the thinking around it and these structures and these questions because I think it'll make us all better investors and better members of this values driven capitalism that we're all trying to be part of. Absolutely. And thank you so much for having me and have a great conference. Everyone is absolutely my pleasure. Thank you all for attending. Take care.