The Housing Trap, with Daniel Herriges

Daniel Herriges has been one of my favorite reads on the Strong Towns site for many years. He has thoughtful, in-depth pieces on many subjects, notably housing. Now, he has co-authored a new book with Chuck Marohn called “Escaping the Housing Trap.” We discuss the book, and much more, including my guest appearance in the book.

New feature: transcript below

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Intro: “Why Be Friends”

Outro: “Fairweather Friend”

Kevin K (00:02.704)

Welcome back to the Messy City podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. Thanks for listening. I've got a special guest here today, somebody who has been one of my favorite reads for many years now. Daniel Herrigus is here joining us. And Daniel, it's great to see you.

Daniel Herriges (00:24.11)

Great to be here, Kevin. Thank you.

Kevin K (00:25.85)

We're going to talk a lot about housing today and housing itself is obviously, it's probably one of the most, been one of the most talked about topics nationally inside the urban planning and development world and outside that world as well, probably for at least a decade as housing costs have really exploded in a lot of places in the country. So it's a very, very common conversation piece.

And a lot of it is often frustrating and confusing to talk about. So into this, Daniel Steps, he's actually been writing about this for some time on the Strong Towns website and writing really great pieces. And now he is the co -author of a new book with Chuck Marrone called Escaping the Housing Trap, which comes out, when does it come out Daniel?

Daniel Herriges (01:21.494)

April, April 23rd.

Kevin K (01:23.152)

April 23rd, okay. So I'm really, really looking forward to this. I think Daniel and I have probably learned from each other quite a bit in things that we've talked about and written about. And so I'm really, I'm excited to have this conversation and kind of dive deeper a little bit into the general topic of housing and his perspective and the book's perspective on it.

So Daniel was kind enough to share with me a little bit of the introduction. And I say that just because I've marked a few notes to help me direct the conversation a little bit. Housing is so broad as a topic. There's about a thousand different places you can go. And I really like how you laid it out here in the beginning. But I do want to start with just kind of one piece that I think is really fundamental that I just highlighted here a couple of sentences.

And I know probably for strong towns readers, this will sound familiar, but I just think it's important to emphasize this and repeat it because, and have you expand on it. But you talk about central to this approach is that recognition that cities are complex systems. They are shaped by countless decisions made by millions of individuals over time with interconnections that are challenging to trace or fully grasp. When attempts are made to simplify.

or ignore this inherent complexity in organizing urban life, challenges and disruptions arise. I wonder if you could expand a little bit on that and why do you think that's so fundamental to this conversation?

Daniel Herriges (03:04.526)

Yeah, well, it's something that's been it's been fundamental to the Strong Towns conversation for a long time, as I think anybody who's read the blog and is familiar with our work knows. And I do think it's central to to grasping what's really gone wrong. You know, it's it's funny, I would talk to people casually, you know, old friends and stuff in the process of writing this book, and they'd say, well, what's new in your life? And I'd say, well, I'm co -writing this book with my boss and.

It's about the housing crisis. And an old high school friend of mine, I remember I'm sitting down for coffee with him, and I said, I'm writing a book about the housing crisis. And he goes, oh, cool. Wait, which one? I've never talked to anybody who like, I say housing crisis and they scoff at the idea like, oh no, there isn't a housing crisis. But people's understandings of what that means are incredibly varied because of exactly what you're saying and what you pulled out of the intro to the book. That what,

Kevin K (03:41.84)

Hahaha.

Kevin K (03:49.776)

Yeah.

Daniel Herriges (04:02.03)

really we try to organize the narrative around in this book is we have this massive paradigm shift in the 20th century in how we house ourselves as a society in the US. And to a lesser extent, Canada, I think throughout the Anglosphere, you can see commonalities, but we have this massive paradigm shift alongside sort of the broader paradigm shift that we've talked about as the suburban experiment at Strong Towns.

starting in the mid 20th century and really upending the way we finance housing and all sorts of urban development, the way we finance it, the way we plan it and regulate it, and our cultural assumptions about it. And what that really amounts to, at the core of that paradigm shift, is this very modernist, this very 20th century idea that we can solve, we can permanently solve the messiness of the city.

that we can permanently solve these tensions that exist around, well, how is your neighborhood going to change and evolve? Are you going to be uncomfortable with that change? Are people going to be displaced? Is the character going to change? How are you going to finance housing? Is it going to be a struggle? Are you going to have to make sacrifices? This idea emerges for a number of reasons that we can delve deeper into that, well, we can solve all these problems now. In a modern, prosperous society, we're going to have mass.

middle class prosperity, we're going to have mass homeownership. It's going to be an economic engine. It's going to be the the foundation of everything good in society. We're going to build, we're going to plan neighborhoods that are better than the places people have lived in the past. It's all going to be scientific and orderly and optimized. And through that, we can deliver kind of a permanently prosperous society. And this is the vision that emerges through the 1930s into the middle of the century.

And looking back now, decades later, we can really see the cracks in that vision. And those cracks look like a whole bunch of different things breaking. And to most people, housing crisis means the affordability crisis, which is especially acute in certain kind of high cost regions of the country. So a lot of the discourse around, quote unquote, the housing crisis, initially starts to come out of places like New York City, like San Francisco, like Boston, and it's all about, well, nobody can afford the rent anymore.

Daniel Herriges (06:26.926)

But we paint, I think, a picture of it that's inclusive of that, but broader than that. Because there are all sorts of ways in which housing is just broken. We're not building the right kinds of housing for people's needs. We're not building it in the right places. A lot of people are squeezed. They're overly indebted. They're making huge sacrifices in terms of how they live their life or where they can live their life. We're not happy. We've largely lost faith that...

the development industry is going to be responsive to community needs and is going to give us products that really amount to the kind of communities we want to live in. Things are just, they're fundamentally broken in a lot of ways that don't necessarily tie up with a bow into a really neat package. Like, well, this is the definition of the housing crisis and this is the thing that's wrong. So I think the messy city is a great place to be having this conversation because it's kind of a messy book, and deliberately so, because it tries to get at all of these different facets of, well, what is the paradigm that emerged with the suburban experiment? And then what are all these sort of cascading consequences of it that have led to the situation we're in today?

Kevin K (07:45.36)

So let me give you some of the, just right off the top, let's maybe get the grumpy old man questions out of the way. I'll give you some of the grumpy old man questions. Well, so one of them is, well, you know, you're mostly talking about cities in certain parts of the country where they just make it really hard to build anything, and that's why housing is so expensive. And...

Daniel Herriges (07:52.846)

Hahaha.

Kevin K (08:09.968)

Also, you know, when I was a young person, we shared bedrooms. My starter home was an 800 square foot house and you expect a 2000 or 2400 square foot house. And it's really just expectations have changed.

Daniel Herriges (08:29.166)

Yeah, so that's two great kind of grumpy old man questions to use your parlance there. Yeah, I think that in terms of sort of the geographic question, the loudest voices in the discourse tend to be from these places that are really kind of exceptional, San Francisco, New York. But the sense that there's a housing crisis is much, much broader and more widespread than that. It just manifests a little bit differently.

Kevin K (08:32.016)

I'm good for those.

Daniel Herriges (08:56.654)

I think that you hear it and you see it in Kansas City where you are. I mean, I'm certainly aware of some of the stories of, you know, some of th