first off, thank you so for

everybody for coming tonight for chris and the bookshelf for hosting. yeah, i i'm really excited to be here and the book just came out a few days ago. there is just an article in the new york times today about investors buying up properties. so it's something that kind of drew me in for the last several years, and i just kind of followed that thread from an original study about short term rentals. and i'm excited carol smith is here tonight, so i'm i'm thinking that the event will kind of go like this for the first half. we'll kind of talk about what we saw, what i saw in my research, talk about the book, and she can talk about her organization

renting partnerships and her role. and then we can talk back and forth and then we'll open it up to qio so yeah, do you do you want introduce yourself. hello, my name is carol smith and i am with an organization called renting partnership. it's and we have a unique property management style that allows renters to earn equity. yeah. yeah. so i've been asked to talk a little bit about what made me want to write the book. i started i started writing this as a master's thesis for well, while i was in school at northern arizona in flagstaff. and i was studying the impact of short term rentals. the first line in the book is this book was born from a sign

in a stranger's yard, and that's from a vacation that i took with friends to new orleans in 2017. so we traveled down there and we thought we'd stay in a short term rental, an airbnb, because that be more home like we could be on a block and we wouldn't have to spend as much on groceries for food going out. but on that block there was a sign that said neighbor is not airbnb. and that kind of stuck with me. that theme of how it how airbnb is impacted neighbors. and then when i moved to flagstaff, i saw this trend. i saw a similar sign that said homes, hotels, and so with that i was taken in and i decided that's what i'm going to study for my thesis. but that was 2019. i was pitching that at the beginning of the winter, 2020.

and i'd then covid shut everything down. the housing market exploded and i realized that this was a much bigger topic. and so i followed that thread looking at second homes, looking at the growth of investor owned properties, a lot of private equity firms really getting into the mix and. just the general growth in that the rapid rise in homes appreciating and so i realized that a lot of government officials kind of spoke out of both sides of their mouth. they would say, see, the economy is doing great. look at housing prices. if live in a house, you're a appreciating that value going up and up when you retire. someday and want to move away. but you also need somewhere to live and if that's what's happening all over the people

who are really benefiting, where the people who don't live in a who were just using that as a commodity, as an investment price. so that's that's a lot of what the book is focused on. and so that's why housing is on affordable and it relates to. exclusionary zoning. it relates to a lot of government policy. and then the second half of the subtitle is and how we can change it and i think that was important to me in studying it. and that's why i wanted to talk with local housing organizers as i travel and yeah, i think carol your model that randi partnerships is really interesting. i wonder if you could kind of dig into it to explain where it came from, where it came from was my partner, who is marjorie spear? me. it was her concept. she told me about it back.

1997 and look and we got together and we start working toward doing a project and trying to get a development that we could work with, a partner with to develop this type of housing for the first time. and. in 1999, we had a discussion, the franciscan friars who had property in over-the-rhine and they wanted they had a i had a couple of blocks of it. and they had an apartment complex on that on their property. and they said that they would allow us to demonstrate great use their property in order to demonstrate and prove my theory. and so we initially did the first 25 units with with the friars margie's concerns basically is that you have

participatory management with the residents and they can earn equity. what what we use to determine that equity was the vacancy rate that is in that you build into the budget for for turnovers when people move out. so there were four commitments that they each individual had to make. they had to make a commitment to pay their rent on time. because when you start chasing people for their money, that's, that's more money you have to spend that they are doing the same task. and that assigned task is somewhat janitorial. so they took care of the janitor type situation and then the other was that they at a ten the monthly meetings and then the

kicker is they stay five years if they stay you see with the average person moving every two and two and a half to three years, we would have their money put aside for them to be able to earn that equity. and we did prove our theory. we had a study done after we had did it for ten years and they this study said, yes, it was the process was correct. and it did what it said it was going to do, but it added something else. it added community people built community together because they work together to maintain the property they met every month to learn up to discuss what they needed to do there. twice a year we would have clean up days and everybody would take turns. and the interesting thing is, is that when we first started, because marty is the gardener and was the inside person in

when we got to your tent, everybody was outside nobody was inside anymore. i mean, it just changed people's lives so much, not only in terms of the economics, but also in the way that they looked and looked at and viewed things and did things. so it was it proved itself to be successful. we had a board who wanted to take it a different direction. so we margie and i left and we started renting partnerships and we didn't have this big 25 unit complex, but we started with a two family and that seems to be going over pretty, pretty good in terms of of having residents because then it is really like their home. we had two middle age women in one and we have two young women

in another and we're working on another right now that would have a single middle aged person in a lady who has five children. the program really the program really does a lot for people. not only are there building equity in and money being put in a reserve for them, they are learning because at our monthly meetings we talk budget, we talk maintenance problems, we talk about where they're growing and going. so there is a lot of community building and education along with the participatory management because most of the individuals have not had budgeting courses. they have not ever had to plan a fire or pull a weed. so it's it's a growth situation as well. is an earnings situation. then we found out that it really

benefits people are they do things that most people don't aren't already do one mother she where her money she took and she sent her daughter off to college she was able to fix up her dorm room and everything and i had another lady had asthma. and when in the summer months she couldn't work. so she paid her rent during the summer months. had another lady who it was the mother and her two sons. and each one of them had an apartment and one of them lost his job and he took his money and moved to california. so that he could start over in a different career. another young lady had she was a paralegal, and her eyesight began to fail her and she used

that money as co-pay to have eye surgery done on her half own eyes and then we have four people to actually take this when they in five years was up and bought a house. so it comes to the money that they earn and put aside has come has given them the ability to be financially stable no more so than if they were in a normal renting situation. so we've we're working the in one of the things that we do is that we try to maintain the housing affordable bill and how we do that is that we don't raise the rent unless there is a major repair or something that needs to be done where we have to raise the rent. so it's not a thing where we're raising it each month or each year at 3% so that we can have this profit margin. we don't we're not looking for a

profit margin. we're looking for people to be stable and to know that they got a place to live and live comfortably. yeah, it really struck me hearing hearing that story about it's just a radical, radically different way of seeing things. i'm trying to train myself to think about the word radical differently because i think that's a perfectly sane way of doing things. and i think way that we treat housing right now is a really radical view that housing is not a right, that people that is a commodity that should. put on the market to whoever can pay the most. i think that's a really radical departure from most of human history. honestly honestly. but yeah, have you seen that

your your model have other neighbor or other property kind of look to it and been like i wouldn't think that would work or then, then taken in with it. but yeah, we've, we've had from all over the country wanting to talk about it and replicate it. we made some adjustments because what we did before we had, we didn't have a land trust. so with the other properties now we're, they are part of a land which will always that affordable housing. so that presents the longer it did we didn't that we did not have a nationally but we have had inquiries we've been invited to other cities and stuff to talk with them. and as they're looking for redevelopment activity to be able to provide affordable

housing. yeah. and maintain it right. yeah. i think that's great. yeah. it's kind of, it's one of the things that. i really kept coming back to in the book is that sign of homes versus hotels kind of became i got an underlying way of viewing, viewing, housing our whole economy in a way where it's being seen in one of two ways housing and education and health care and retirement. it's being seen as, on one hand, a way to turn a profit, a way to maximize gains and. on the other hand, something to bolster community, to be more stable, to be connected to other

people, to build a life. and i think that's that yeah, that's kind of at the core of the book. the middle section. i really delve deep into that because it was the history of a history of housing. and so the way things are today, to understand that you have to dig back into the history where we came from. can you talk a little bit about the history of housing here, history of attempts to build on affordable, more affordable housing, especially in the racial lens in cincinnati? that was something that i didn't focus on cincinnati in the book so much, but that that's just at the core of housing and how it's been used to drive a wedge between races, really dating

back to before the us was even founded. and the period of colonies ation. well, yes you know you go back thank you. i can, i can go back is four is the seventies when the government came with money for what they would call modeled and doing time they in terms of african american they some of you may have heard of community action which is a large nonprofit that deals with low income and at that time we also got legal aid because at that time, landlords, people were just sitting people out without going to court and what have you. so they created legal in order for them to begin to represent people who were being abused by

owners and property. so in seventies the federal government start funding these projects and that's when it was in call section eight, but it was called to, to anyone d three. that was the law that they that they did so with that in mind there was a law out of of of developed of a multifamily. and in cincinnati, the african american communities have always basically followed the --, the jewish community of the upper west end and dayton and bank street and what have you was, a jewish community and then they moved from downtown to avanti l from abbeydale to bond, heel from pond hill, the rule of life. so we've always followed basically their communities in

their housing and we took over in then they had a lot of apartment complex is in avondale and that's where a lot the housing the rental housing was put in and deal however during another transition of when they. in 1975 that in the nineties look when they brought in the expressway interstate 75 that broke up the african american community and then west when we start moving to other neighborhoods as well so there's been a progression in now bit to 21 3d3 and to 2023 dc they are moved to the wayside so what they have now is that the feds have a program this called tax credit final c and big business

is by our fund get tax breaks basically fee for investing in low developing low income housing and that's where we are now but affordable bility does not always reach the income that the people who really need the housing are you you can make $0.50 more an hour and won't be able to you know didn't bring a whole lot but it takes you out of the market for being able to have subsidized rent so are a lot of issues have built on this and now we're with tax credits and our government which has funding for housing as well through the block grant program that the feds have and they do

not they not they do not have the process this is in the policies set where the nonprofit who were being successful 20 years ago can not can be successful because they're getting that number of units as opposed to the qual ity and what really needs to happen in terms of having affordable housing for for a particular group of people. yeah, yeah. okay, go ahead. so i just yeah, i mean, one of the thing is, is that we need to we need to look at our policies because we get there. is there are there's a need for other type of housing. and when we went in the non were really being active because it was before tax and the actual community each community or

neighborhood just about had a what they call a community development corporation and that community development corporation took care of the economics and housing it in bit in their own neighborhood and that funding is no longer available as it used to be. so got that middle person who's not looking for a profit per say but to provide service in housing for different individuals and that they're not the concern when the money is being spread because they're not they don't have the numbers they may have a small. ten units whereas the the the bigger corporations though that need the tax credit they can 50 units at a time and it makes a

big difference. yeah that one of the things that really struck me in studying it is that housing is so local and the politics are local, and people are care about it and it hits home on a very personal level. but then the themes are so interconnected and national in scope and so that what what's going on in cincinnati not the same as kansas city and it's not the same as northwest montana. it's not the same as new york. but they're all interconnected and you see a lot of that both at the when it comes to the problems and when it comes to the solutions. i think we need to see them as interconnected. you yeah. have you have you noticed.

good efforts for. tenants uniting around issues or people really sparking change by coming together on housing issues? not really. not a whole lot because of the the financing of of how you do housing and how you develop. i haven't seen a lot of that. and that's why i started to begin to look at where where we need shoring up on which is like. money that that is not just tax credits that there should be some other additional funding for housing there's that little bit more not as profitable and

in most of the cdc development corporations are are more service oriented in their development of housing opposed to profit. mm. and now that they're not involved like they used to be, then you don't have as much growth in housing that is more affordable. and then you have right now, i mean, you have the port authority is taking up two housing developer hours by default. they had a one incident was real and i think the other one was in west western here somewhere in that area. and they had. 127 one owner and he went into

default and. these are rental houses, not apartment complex. these are actually housing in another 147 with a with another developer that went foreclosed on. so when you have situation like that where one individual owns a hundred and some odd houses, look how many people he's affected and what happens to these people when he defaults and the port authority stepped in a step is trying to step in and be the savior for those houses okay. yeah it's a it's a a very rickety yeah. rickety boat. we're all absolutely absolutely yeah and very tricky. um, i wanted to give you a chance to say anything more

broadly that you might want to and then kind of open it up to questions from people i, i don't have anything. okay, that's fine. yeah. but i mean, you know, it come out in the wash. yeah. oh yeah. i that anybody has questions on renting partnerships or, or specific aspects of what we've talked about or in the book. uh, i just don't open it up to you on. i'd like to ask a question about what were just talking about those two owners that had those many homes. were they just out of curiosity, do you know if they were local owners or were out? i think they were out of town. do you find that that's a become a bigger problem here, not just in cincinnati, but across the country with these out of may have they really don't have any agency in terms of the city or

the community. so but they're coming in and they're buying up all of these homes to rent. and then they just seem to disappear. that's and it's not just. national is international, right? it's not just national. it's international is what you're who owns the properties i mean, we are i know that in certain communities there are not people that are even this country that are owning housing in businesses and what have you. ah, i know in my neighborhood i live in roselawn and we have to chinese people who have applied rent, both rental homes as well as. business.

buildings, built buildings that businesses in there and they're not even from this country. and it's so related to what you were talking about with the tax credit situation, why they're buying across the country. i don't think that they're buying they're going for the tax credits. i don't think they're going for it's the is the corporations that need the the the hiding money are the the the transfer being protected from taxes and so that they have to pay taxes because. they got this tax credit based upon them putting money into this. leilani farha from the tuesday un special rapporteur on affordable housing or adequate. she identifies this as a global trend and has for before covid.

in 2017 1819 she was speaking to it a lot where you have. real estate becoming where people are parking their money increasingly and it's commercial real estate, but especially residential real estate and you saw that leading up to the great recession, 27 2008. but then it's really fascinating, a morbid way we turned around the great recession and kind of doubled on some of those same interests. so there's a researcher for the federal reserve who identified second home buying or investor was linked to 10% of the run up in housing costs and 30% of the run up in construction costs leading up to the recession. and then after the recession or

while it was happening, you had people being forced out of their homes, foreclosing and being evicted and there were hundreds of thousands of properties that, didn't have an owner, but they were very cheap. it was just that there was former owners couldn't pay for the price that the property was worth before, but nobody was buying other than places like blackrock and private equity firms. and so at hud and different government agencies that auctioned off tens of thousands of properties to private equity firms leading directly after that and so that was just those are that was just one event or it happened an isolated incident instances after that but it just kind of shows the priority

priority is stabilizing the housing market and making sure that prices keep going up no matter who is buying them. and that of the problems that we had before we turn to those same causes of the problem to try to solve it and then is it any wonder that we get more entrenched in those issues. yeah i ask your. the way you have tenants develop equity. and so they're getting what would otherwise be profit. i think is are you running a charitable institution or just less profit or. well basically is is not a charitable institution because it's they're paying their rent

and we're paying the bills and. what we're saying is that because we are a profit. we're not looking for profit. so the profit goes back to the to the resident basically. and there are other nonprofits that are are looking to do that in their communities because they they see the advantage of of people being stable, keeping the community together and being able to take care of their needs based upon that they don't have to borrow money because of the things that we did do. it was a couple of our residents had gotten on this payday lending merry go round and we had to buy them off because they got they needed money and it had nowhere to get it from. but because they had it in a in

a couple of instances were because they had been they were residents of ours and they had proven themselves instead by their commitment to do what they could to earn equity. we allowed them to borrow money before it was due because before it was due to give them because they were in a financial situation that they couldn't get off. they i mean, it was just like like said a merry go round and you pay so much and the next time you have to pay, you pay twice as much. so was really horrendous is it is it this mismatch of could you walk us through a practical example? i'm trying get the same question answered that this fellow has, which let's say you buy a property family for $200,000. does your nonprofit finance at

generally, yes. what we do is that we we buy the property with the and with the anticipation of doing whatever it is necessary to update the property and then be to rent it at particular rate. say, for instance, like right now, if we have a house or a unit or building where we could get the units for and have a rehab for $125,000, then that way that that can be at an affordable rent where as if they it is not at market so so you cover your mortgage and the expenses and the rent has to cover that right the rent has to cover that. so let's say the rent is $1,000 a month. now, what, what, how how much equity do they get? how much equity do they build after five years, it's like.

4170 something dollars. would be for that amount of rent. okay. that that's across the board regardless to who because what we've done is that we said that we're going to we're going to lose out per unit we're going to lose. 2500 or 2000 plus if they leave in two and a half years. but okay, now i get the okay. so you take that normal vacancy rate and you say you get that equity. so if somebody leaves before five years, they walk away from their equity and then you guys just pull that pull that back into the profit. if fixing up the property, which we would have, you know, getting ready for the next person. okay, carol, do you have security deposit.

ids? do you just read the credits? yes, we do here. yeah, we do. the normal thing. and then the other part of that that you have to go through three orientations with us before can even rent. you got to know what the deals are what what you're being asked to commit you got to see the financial benefit of it as well. is the stabilization of it. so they have to go through an orientation of at least three sessions before before will even rent to them. you just don't walk up and ask for an application. you got know what you're getting into and you got to make a commitment to do that. so it's getting the games right? absolutely. we had it with our initial project. we we had one every action in ten years. so much better rate than. one eviction in ten years.

so, so this is in a when the sheriff came to make sure that they left, they were surprised because the complex had the apartments, buildings were on the outside and there was a in a courtyard. and the resident had flowers and trees and everything was nice and orderly. and he was like, wow oh, they were impressed because the residents took care the place and they had never been in, like i said, ten years. that was one eviction. do you work with traditional lenders this or with like hamilton county development corporation? where do you access the financing? well, the city has the last two projects that we had, the worked with us.

we had well, the first one that we after we departed from the organization that we belong to. the first when we worked with our local to 65 construction union and they we identified the house, they bought the house and we had an agreement that after five years that we would purchase the house and we did. and we had when we got this oh, we got, we got another house that was right next door to it that the port. oh so our financing the purchase and rehab of one building and update certain things in the other building that we already had and that we got money from the city and we also got some

money from greater cincinnati foundation to to help to be able to help us find the the building and we did it based upon. $125 per unit for the building. can i ask a question so the tenants basically do not own the they just pay and they get equity back that they can then use. so it's a little bit different than habitat for humanity where they actually go and they own the house. the end of the process, correct? i mean so these people are not on this property. so brendan, could you speak a little bit to how do we get people to become their own landowners? i mean, i think what you're doing is great, but i'm interested in how we get

everyday people into owning properties you yeah. i mean i know habitat really and i used to i used to work with them. yeah. so i understand little bit about it and they had a lot of sweat equity which is very similar to to your program, but i'm just curious to know what you see terms of programs in the future or how we can as individuals, you know, try to benefit everybody into owning a property versus being a tenant. i think. one one thing i'd point out is just. it's important to have all different models. and so the model that we have that. models that we have right now on the whole are you can rent and that money's gone and it goes toward the landlord who you

probably see eye to eye with or say that or you can own your property and the goal is to. build equity within that. and i think that that's not the focus on homeownership isn't the same throughout the world. it's very much it's very centered in the us, especially because. there are so few other ways that you can be stable your retirement is privatized health care privatized child care is privatized. all these things are kind of up to you to take care of. and so it's very individualized the focus and so when it comes to homeownership, that's kind of become a way that people can protect against it.

financial shortfalls are issues in any of those other areas. so i think the model that they're kind of pioneer in is a really really great because it offers another view, but one model i bring up is community land trusts as a potential solution. and that residents don't own house on the land itself, but they a 99 year lease or that's typically the model. so in this instance government at different levels city state, federal usually not the federal so much but city and or nonprofits or neighborhood organizations. they own the land and they keep it at a steady rate. and then. the residents will buy the house or they have a 99 year lease and

they can do anything they want with it during that time. they can make repairs, they can renovate, they can sell it, they can pass it on to kids. but the price is held in check so that when they sell it, they're going to make it might go up in line with inflation or enough to. meet basic those basic needs. but it's not going to go up dramatically in value. it's also not going to go down dramatically value. and so they're more stable against the whims of, the market and the idea is that they can afford it home ownership more easily to start with. and so if you instead of buying a property for $300,000, they might buy a house for 200 or

$220,000. and so their monthly rates are going to be much lower. they're it kind of their creative solutions where they might pay a lower property tax it's owned by a government entity or it's owned by a nonprofit. and the goal is to keep it affordable and. then when they go to sell it, they might not sell a $300 property, 300,000 property for 400,000. they might sell. a $220,000 one for 240,000, but they could afford the house initially and that is a radical different. entry point in rather than renting for decades to be able to get to that point. and so yeah, there's there's a lot of different models. i think the part of the problem

is the focus on home ownership no matter what. and the view of homeownership as a means of building, building up wealth because. one of the themes that i kept coming back to is that everything stacks. and so if your parents did well and your grandparents did well, you're more to do well. if you're if you inherited debt or you inherited discrimination, if you're inherited violence, you're more likely to end up in neighborhoods where you are paying high rental rates. your surrounded violence. you don't have access to good jobs. and so those things just stack on top of each other and for future generations become more entrenched. and that's partly a result.

treating housing as an individual pursuit instead seeing it as something we all have a stake in. when someone leaves your neighborhood. it's not just a sigh of relief that. it wasn't you. instead, it's it. that's that's my baby sitter that just left. that's my ride to work. that's my friend. that i rely on to cope things going on on a daily basis. and so it's it really to. start seeing things differently in that respect. in your studies, did you did you find something that really struck you that would be a good answer or response to maintaining affordable housing

to maintain it? i think having it there for people in the future. mm mm. i think it's. one of the biggest things is kind of going back to that is the things that have to stop doing and when housing is treated as a commodity. so so on the surface, things like investor owned properties or second homes or. an influx of remote workers might not seem to have too much to do with each other, but essentially they're all putting local, they're globalizing the local market. and so suddenly someone making $60,000, working a job that very

directly people in the area teacher, a construction worker, a nurse, suddenly they're having to compete with someone who makes money makes their income from a silicon valley job or a wall street job. and when you put when you force people to compete on that level, it's untenable. and they really have to that the locals are going to lose every time. and so i think when it comes to housing one of the things that i think we saw with the the great recession is that there was a lot of. a lot of internal shame that felt when they lost their home, when they couldn't afford to rent, when they lost their job,

they in turn analyzed it. there were protests, there was organizing, but it didn't turn into a mass movement. and i think that's one of the things that i saw again and again in in the us, there's a big focus on individualism and, individual gains and that's when we design housing that where you want your property to keep going up in value and cities want the property values to keep going up because they can have more property taxes. developers want property values to keep going up and they can building out along the way. it's, it's just very shortsighted. and i think one of the best things that we can do is to

stop, to cut off, to treat locals differently. we treat all these other entities. i think that, yeah, i'll hand it right. yeah. zoning, building codes and land use generate the biggest in housing. now karen was talking about how the buildings existed, the land use existed. so that's sort of out of the equation. but if you really want for far the growth of population to have housing, you have to deal with zoning land use and building and zoning is done totally by the locals, except maybe in california where they now passed a law that any single family house have a salary dwelling which is working, but prices are so high anyway. it's ridiculous, you know, the

requirement of a two car garage that most cities have for a house is the size of an accessory dwelling. dwelling that if you had buy it, it's going to be hundreds of thousands of dollars, a 50 foot lot house here might sell for 300,000 over there. i know people in paid two and a quarter million the same thing and so there is a huge disparity. but as our population grows, the idea of affordable and the article that's out front and in the new york times talks about starter homes and the front page says affordable and it says starter homes. the idea of affordable house for somebody that's one of the house their whole life. and it has a silicon valley job. they can't afford $1,000,000, two bedroom, little bitty

kitchen, little bitty house and on a little bitty lot, they still need an affordable house. there's this huge huge disparity. it starts with locals and zoning. those people are elected officials locally and. you don't have to have all this stuff and a lot of people do it to protect the property values they're killing. the possibility for their own children to grow up and stay in the community. one of the best worker houses community in the nation that studied worldwide is right next door. that's mary, my, which is now hugely because it was worker housing that was well-planned good common space, good commercial support. so we have one of the best examples in the world, let alone the united states.

the planners come to look at all the time today doesn't look like it because of the way the prices are, but that's because it was a nice design. and you can the the the the article in the new york times today has a plan on the front page. the 77 houses in one year and planned development with lots open space lots community. so that were purchased cash by investors. all right 76 homes one less and that same year were purchased through mortgages and regular people. now that's a plan development if you've got open space and as soon as that and those investors on one third those the eight can't do anything because takes it to third vote to do stuff. so then investors are going to all of a sudden be running right

smack dab up against a lot of local people especially zimbabwe of what we in cincinnati call the suburbs, which are also called cities, you know. yeah. so northern kentucky has 32 small cities and, you know, cincinnati is not cincinnati areas. mason and norwood and, batavia and is, you know, it's a metroplex. yeah, it's one housing market is driven by housing. and what carol was talking about following jewish community. there's no community to follow anymore. right? there's not. and most of the affordable housing is going way out east cape has really exploded. harrison just i'm aware of the risk having, just got a 500 unit development going against the national park on a state park.

i guess. those will hold value, but as developers can mix value and we have we have right communities around here that have an 18 foot wide single townhome with no garage built in the mid seventies. yeah. as well as. the same community has riverview with probably double triple in price. people need to do that. they need they need to. but it's done by locals. i want to bring an end to make sure everybody can hear a little bit but a question or comment was about the local control that kind of entrenches entrenches certain zoning codes that are exclusionary to lot of building models and drives up the cost of that kind of end at the front

end for you do money out of there right. and that's yeah. the. stunning short term rentals that really kind of i saw two sides of it where the short term rentals have have entry points into these places and it people say, oh, it's just the market at work and. locals were losing control in that sense. but it's there's a deference to the no matter what happens that locals aren't acting. they're acting there's there's real concern from a lot of locals that their housing markets or their housing values will go down if you build these in. but that's kind of the way we've. designed it, where people are

protecting their housing values there? a researcher, i believe his name was william fishel, who wrote a lot and kind of pioneered this idea of home equity insurance, where if you were really concerned, your home price dropping, you could pay into this this structured account, then if it did drop, if they built multi-unit properties in the if they kept building out, you were assured that your housing your house wouldn't drop in value. i think that's one possible block against that but i think. it's also it speaks a larger issue of people feeling the right maintain in their space, their neighborhood their city, the way it's always been. and i think it speaks to when

you're talking about local control, a question is how local and because if you allow the city of cincinnati to vote on affordable housing measures, that would be in neighborhoods, the city would probably go for it. but very, very local control where people feel that their housing value is going to be affected when you only allow them to vote, it's pretty it's pretty obvious the end result is and that that goes back a long ways from having this tension between. single family homes, multi-unit homes. it's kind of built into the way that we designed the the federal housing from the beginning, going back to the twenties and

thirties. it didn't have to be that model and back in the thirties, 40, 5060s, there were many many more thousands many more starter homes being built, which oftentimes get defined as 1400 square feet or less, which might be a garage. many people now. and so there is kind of a there's. a cyclical nature where people have more space and then they need more space and they want more space. and developers build toward that. and then people want that and. so is who is driving it? is a big question, but at the heart of it, it's policy and policy comes from people and the

lobbying that are advocate for those things. and so i think exclusionary zoning, it it at its heart, it's about preserving things in a particular way and i think it always deserves a question of who is benefiting from it. keeping it this way that doesn't get it an answer to it, but it does. i think it it deserves that interrogation. cincinnati is what in the last. loughner oh, cincinnati in the last, i guess you would say 20 years. hey, is that a complete change because. being gay is probably to say had

a little bit to do with it. but a lot of influx has come from this suburbs that they are still building up like mason lebanon up in that area. but a lot of a transition came from that in cincinnati now because 20 years ago you could not find a house that was worth $1,000,000 in over the rhine. and now that whole population just about has changed based upon the development and rezoning certain areas of over rhine that you have districts and what have you in there that do certain things in the housing that that's been there since cincinnati was born here, changed hands to and have been

redeveloped to cost millions of dollars. yep. gentrification and in it's real but they are taking those old homes and they look good parking and no parking. so i mean you so you have those kind of situations that change the housing market basically because and then you have two different cultures down there that one main street started devise the culture. okay but eventually i can see them coming on up the heel to you see, you know, that kind of thing. so because of what you see brings to the city so have a lot of other factors that that have

to do with actual housing that puts a change on housing and how is it redeveloped in the in and how it goes from here. that's the point i was trying to make. our population is growing. we just tore down a hospital. that was built in the seventies. i worked on it. i'm an architect. it was one of the first things i worked on out of college. jewish has got no deaconess. oh gosh. yeah. i thought you said it's going to be student housing and. and grinders, ice and. yeah, but i still know they got the money from someplace that's not a hospital. oh yeah. one of the things that's happening in suburbia right now here is pairing houses so that you pairing like to. we have a one and two family building code so you don't have to do all the commercial stuff. you don't need an architect you

can build two families. and so marketing wise, since there's a lot of retirees, the baby bonus and everything, some of the builders are doing paired patio homes, which is our paired this they don't say duplexes because that means else to be able to do the same thing but it's the same that different it gets into that. yeah and a lot of it young couples, people are buying a lot of the patio homes. they were so amazed they changed a lot of land plans and some of the pads had to go back to that process. and then they started. now they're doing developing and great and we have a lot of top here. so like northern kentucky, they're grading this can be either one right down the street. yeah because people developers are responding to the need for starter homes and affordable housing in that the median has just gone through the roof. so the bringing it down for a

young that has decent jobs and not too big car. i went to one of these places and asked the office homes now. why, why, why? why aren't you even selling more? is it? well, some of these young couples have a car payment higher than their house payment about. yeah. so the cars are more important to you and the gets to you and go on concerts gets to you used to be the people to them about stuff to the money to buy a house they can't do without anything. now it seems seems that gets into some other issues. setting those two it affects everything but yeah ripple uh huh yeah. those $7 starbucks coffees. oh yeah. i think the. one. yeah, one of the things that you

see happening is that. that when talk about individual solutions, it it needs to be individual because cities are so different and the factors that they face from the topography to the age of population to the industries there. but everything kind of ripples out. and so when you have one city setting policy is in isolation, this is something that a planner in bozeman i spoke to talked about a lot is that you can have these islands of restraint when it comes to development or prioritizing affordable city. but when it's done isolation, other cities are just waiting to capitalize on that and draw on more residents because you of have a situation happening

throughout the country and saw this during covid. you see it right now. remote workers cities are in competition with each other for these high end, high end residents or perceivable high end residents, whether you call them the class or remote workers or the young professionals, it's it's the competition for these same residents. so most cities would say that they want to grow. but if you dig into it, they don't want to grow with everyone. and a lot of times they that's a wonderful they emphasize they emphasize certain types of growth. and i think when people realize that on a very gut level and so when that lot of times you get people shutting down against

growth because they realize that the growth doesn't include them or it's. at the expense their existing community and the people who really live there. there's a really bright guy in the planning papers. one time and they are pogo. yeah, pogo said, we've met the enemy and he has us. yeah. mm. yeah. so it's, it's. yeah. when, when you dig into the issues, it's just. the short term around was kind of became a good starting point for diving in because it's the there's a quote from langston hughes he draws from in 1936 he wrote a poem called let america be america again. and he's talking about the country how it's being seen the

narrator is seeing the country for its freedom, its democracy, its opportunity. and there's someone kind of speaking in the background, their words are in parentheses, and they say, that's not what i see. that's not what it is for me. and eventually, the narrator turns and confronts that person, he says, who's that whispering in the dark? who is that drawing their veil across the stars and that speaker responds and says, i'm the poor, white fool, then pushed apart, i'm the -- bearing slavery's scars. i'm the red man driven from the land. i'm the immigrant clutching the hope i, seek and finding only the old stupid plan of dog eat dog of mighty crushed the weak. and it's just this. it's a really profound quote and really kind of digs into this issue. we continually put existing

community, uh, on the market for whoever has the the money to come in and turn a profit and the market is always open for someone who has the money to put forward. and so. it's when it comes to housing, there are a lot of there a lot of things wrong. there are a lot of potential solutions. but it's that's one of the main things that i kept coming back to, is seeing things more in a community sense, rather than this in individual competitive sense of yeah, really getting people into the canvas ation, valuing housing as the cornerstone of community rather than simply a way to get yours

and get out, so to speak. yeah, well, give us your view. i mean, i'm. airbnb's here to stay. i mean, what's what's your status right now? i guess the other question is, well, what else is on the horizon? and like that, i mean, it's from a really short period that that's developed right. and i guess one thing that i keep wondering as well, apparently they don't compete with the hotel. i mean, what's happened that i mean, you'd think that that would have had impact on the hotel industry, but apparently not. did you look at any of that? yeah, too much. they they are so surrounding short term rentals are they here to stay and do they with hotels kind of those questions what's. the next thing i mean are are

the if they're here to stay okay then they're here to stay is there something else coming? i mean. yeah. so it went i'll get to the question of whether they compete with hotels because i think this gets into the nature growth and who are we growing for? how do we grow as communities? so a lot of times they they make compete with hotels and hotels haven't been happy about short term rentals because many times short term rentals don't pay the same taxes. they don't have the same regulations at play. many communities have started regulating them more closely to hotels and. you're seeing that kind of even out a little bit more hotels have gotten more into the short term rental market and so there's kind of been a fusion the two where short term rentals rentals one of the founders of

originally said one of our only rules is can't be a commodity you can go to a marriott anywhere in the world and it looks pretty much the same. and so he wanted it to look different. and if you stayed in a term rental any time more, they look pretty much the same or the ikea furniture, it's a it's that a lot of times to the cheapest ways that that place can be furnished and it's pretty obvious the difference between. a place that is lived in and somebody leaves for the weekend and, they rent it out when they're gone versus a place that's on the market year round and they goal is to just bring as many people back to back. so as far as whether they're here to stay, i think been in

some ways. it's up to individual communities. so their communities where they've passed almost complete bans of short term rentals. and when i say short term rentals, there are different models. so the way it was originally conceived of is, oh, you have a spare room in your house you can rent that out, make a little money you can cook breakfast for the person in the morning, you can give them a tour. but across the board what the way it usually happens, it's the entire home that's being out and it's not just someone leaving for the weekend and renting their house out or, going on vacation and trying to make ends meet better. it's increasingly owned by either a second homeowner who might be there a few weekends out of the year, or an investor who has no interest in the property.

other bringing in as many people. and i think a lot of communities are regulating it. but. it's taken a lot of pushback from residents and. oftentimes it's coming directly from residents on ballot initiatives, using colorado as an example, couple of years ago, residents really dug in to the issue and. there were ballot initiatives, initiative across the state because they were fed up with trying to get their representatives to do something because this is their home and they representatives. and we're like, well, we need the tourism, but this is something that when i was working for public lands agencies, i saw these competing trends. so there was increased tourism, which should be good for residents and industries tourism

industries. but at the same time that there is more tourism, the housing prices were going up because increasingly they were not housing residents, they were housing tourists. so i don't know if i got to every question, but. okay. yeah. sure. one of the most important things about your book is the fact that you did start it, you researched it factual and it's a it's a part the housing industry that the typical resident of town can relate to, especially a suburban town like madeira, like where you are and like mazan, like all the cities around here, the urban core, what but i think you started out with that's that's a special thing unto itself but where housing is growing, the

urban core can only grow up. it can't go out. the out has got to got to do a better job of getting up and using using the land better as you create amenity, which is what america did. the planet's health was so good that people wanted to live there. it didn't need hardwood floors and marble countertops and the kitchen because they saw it on tv. they didn't even have tv. it was workers housing, albeit it was sundown towns, you know. but they used to haul the workers out before the sunset. and no black person combined and still on probably some of the deeds, it's not enforced anymore. they legally got rid of it, but it was a sundown town. right. and so you're. housing sort of an uphill battle to be equitable for a long time, but it's still an uphill you you know, one of the people that

oftentimes ask me and i'll i'll answer this and i'll kind of give you the last word unless there's another burning question. but i, i think people often at and ask me if i'm hopeful about the state of housing in the future of housing and depressing. oh, yeah, it, i try not to end that way so i don't know how far in new york but it's where we where we've been. oh yeah. mm. yeah. so it's as a phrase oftentimes said, if not angry, you're not paying attention. and i think that's true. as i was writing it, it's the pandemic was in full swing. it was a winter in flagstaff. everyone around may seem to have covid. i was pressing to try to work on my thesis and i was digging into these statistics and it me angry because this is this was my this

is what's happening in flagstaff. i saw people unhoused on the street. i saw friends who were being forced to leave town, who had master's degrees. i saw it, talked to people who raised their kids in town. and they knew that their were never going to be able to own a house unless it was the house that they lived in. and those things bothered me a lot. and that's those things are happening throughout the country but i tweak that phrase, if not angry, you're not paying attention to be if you're not hopeful, you're not paying attention because. there are so many people working on this issue, carol, being one of them. and. people are paying attention. i think one of the great moments right now is that a great things

about this moment in time is that covid kind of collapsed everything into a short time span. and so where we saw a lot of outside investment in housing, remote workers spreading far and wide, a need to build more but build more with the idea that everyone be able to live here. it collapsed it into a short window. and so we can see the problems more are tied together. and i think with that it gives us a lot of. a lot of power and being able connect our efforts together and connect the solution. it's so yeah, kind of my larger view on that general question of being hopeful in this moment. i want to give you a chance to

add on and if anything that we missed or that you just want to connect leave people with i'll leave it open and it won't guide you. what would there's a need for all kinds of housing. so, you know, we all got to realize it's it's i mean, you know, you got an scale in this country that goes here to here and got people who have to live in housing, some sort of housing. and we've got many people living under bridges and in parks and what have you. so, you know, we got to look at it all. is is it it's a situation that has to be addressed in this company country. i thought about as you were talking, i used to i remember you i used to get all these notices about this real investment course and, you know, you can make money and it's a in

a sort of like what's happening now because a lot of empty people are investing in real estate. it's really become a commodity and lay there trying to make money. and so you have you're you're novices, if you will, that are doing this and not with any forethought. other making money and that it has this i mean i think a lot of what is happening is based on that. well private equity is a huge player and they're not novices. they're not, you know, but i guess they're not the big developers. so to speak, that have you major corporations. and they have all lawyers and they have developers and people employed is, you know, the

person who is trying to live a better life. you know i'm not condemning i'm just saying that that we have people who are involved that weren't involved previously and now they are involved because they they have their agenda. that's very true. and one of the easiest ways to lose money, the building business is to start developing and not know what you're doing right. and around here, there's a lot of people that have lost a lot of money right right. but it's also a great profession to do something a little bit better than the other guy, but with less cost and there's a lot people do that these days. well, i just want to say thank you, carol. thank you. thanks to everybody for showing up and chris and the bookshelf

hosting the conversation. um yeah it's been it's been really great. thank you. oh, yeah. you want totim schwab, a freelae

journalist based in washington, dc. his 2019 investigation into the gates foundation won multiple awards, including an easy from the park center for independent and a deadline club award from the et