MGM: KZSU Stanford 90.1 FM. I am Mark Mollineaux. This is the Henry George Program. The show all about land value, municipal planning and debate. Today the program we have on Patrick Connor, very special guest from Vancouver. Who has been working in academia for many years in practice on urban planning and urban design, his book is "Sick City" and has created some controversy between whether georgism and upzoning bills, as they exist now, are compatible or not. We'll talk about this, we'll talk about the law of rent and so much more. But further ado, let's get into this debate. Thank you so much for being here, Patrick. Patrick Condon: Glad to be here. MGM: Yeah. Very gracious, as things are usually in Housing Twitter, we were contentiously discussing the work of Patrick Condon, and Patrick Condon jumped in to say, hey, instead of just talking about it, let's talk about on your radio show. And that sounds like a great idea. So to get into it yeah. Patrick Condon, in the last year during COVID released a book called Sick City. He released it very graciously, again for free. So it's out there as a PDF. And it is a book about COVID about urbanization. And I mean, honestly, I'll just say right off the bat, I think the book itself is very good, very interesting. I think it's a lot of the reaction and the politics around the reception of the book, which is a bit controversial. So we'll get into that. So before we start you, want you to talk a little bit more about kind of what led you to write the book. Patrick Condon: Well, as you alluded to, the COVID situation was kind of dramatic interregnum in the world, and all of us hoped for movement in the right direction and in one way, the direction that the property market in housing, which is something I've long been concerned with, went in the wrong direction in Vancouver. But in many other parts of the world, the price of rents and housing rents went up by 10%, and the cost per square foot of housing here in Vancouver and many other places went up by 20%. So go figure. We expected it to collapse. And I was already concerned about the gap between average wages generally. But again, Vancouver is kind of the basket case, the worst case example of this. The gap between wages and housing costs had reached a point of crisis and something that concerned me and many other people in very different ways. And I felt that I had something possibly to add to that, which essentially came down to the insight that and it's not original to me. Other thinkers have been thinking about this for a while and dating back at least 100 years or even 200 years to the time of Adam Smith, that the problem is really the price of urban land and how the influence of urban land is the underlying pathology that makes both rents too high and housing unaffordable. And then, of course, I did tie that to the issues of structural inequality that affect many Americans, particularly black Americans, who have the legacy of slavery to deal with and tried to track that forward in terms of land ownership and the way that they were prevented from acquiring land and through zoning strategies, still are prevented from acquiring land. MGM: And the effects of overcrowding today in different places that are directly corresponding to higher incidences of disease and COVID. Patrick Condon: That's right. Which is inordinately black and brown Americans, but not just black and brown people of lower income, whatever their color skin is, are affected in similar ways because they live in overcrowded apartments. They may be immigrant communities, that's another factor. But they live in communities that are also their neighbors, have the similar circumstances, so they're in contact in their cafes and in their workplaces and so forth. And the statistics really bear that out. So that was my motivation. MGM: So I think here's the major, I guess, surprise, which is like, okay, here's a book about urban land rents. Fantastic. People don't talk about it enough. And actually the book treats it, I'd say, in a very good way, someone who wants to reform the way that urban land rents act to the benefit to people. And in this book is signing Henry George throughout. Why is it then that you're on the California, georgists and actually other people I know, that Vancouver, georgists basically are all, like, kind of we're on opposite sides of some big argument? And how did that happen? Patrick Condon: Yeah, you tell me. The political trajectory of this, I think, is that people in California picked up on my book who were suspicious of the new legislation that seeks to overrule local control on zoning for the purpose of creating affordable housing. And they were glad to have support for their contention in the parts of my book that talk about the fact that adding additional density to a neighborhood in the absence of some kind of policy controls may not achieve the objective of increased affordability. In other words, my work challenges the theory of supply and demand, which is the dominant impetus, I think, behind the legislation in California and elsewhere, which seek to basically override local zoning authority to insist that single family home areas are rezoned for multiple dwellings. And I think those people, to be honest, kind of miss my other point, which is that density is a good thing in many ways, and I've had a long career of 40 years of advancing missing middle density for demographic reasons, for walkability reasons, for sustainability reasons. But my only argument is that under present global economic circumstance, just increasing density allowance in the hope or the belief that you will increase affordability doesn't seem to be borne out by the evidence. That's not the only point I'm trying to make. I'm saying, if that is the case, if it's not working to increase affordability, what do we do? And my argument is that do not just increase allowable density in the absence of policy constraints. Only allow density increases in return for affordability. And there are various ways to do that. Inclusive zoning, Cambridge's affordable housing overlay zoning, various ways that zoning tools which have been constitutionally supported by the US. Constitution and California Supreme Court over the years, are adequate tools for us to use in the context of thinking about densifying presently low density neighborhoods. MGM: Yeah, I think there's two responses here or two kind of different avenues. Both are interesting. One has to do with kind of the political landscape, and one has to do with the policy landscape of how these ideas are being approached. And I think the political landscape, I think, is a little bit easier to understand, which is, in the last year, after you released Six City, you made a speaking appointment down with Livville, California, for a webinar. And as you say, I think these people clearly just want some reason to oppose legislation. And I think in the past, they'll listen to anybody who says, like, oh, yeah, more density is not a good thing, and just ignore everything else they say. I think one of the great ironies I heard in the last few months, berkeley, who actually has kind of a pro density but also pro affordable housing majority, was approving an affordable housing overlay, and one homeowner came in giving comments saying, this is a bad idea. In fact, adding more density is a bad idea. I heard this from the academic. Patrick Condon says this is a bad idea. Patrick Condon: Well, they didn't read the book because chapter seven, half of chapter seven is entirely devoted to the affordable housing overlay of Cambridge. And it answers the question, under these circumstances, what do you do? And my answer is the affordable housing overlay in Cambridge. MGM: Absolutely. It's right there in black and white. I guess my point is, I think the political underlying message, which I think can't be underlined enough, is there is a large amount of basically conservative, status quo oriented homeowners, and they all basically are homeowners who don't want anything to change. They don't want affordable housing overlays. They don't want to discipline the market. They don't want anything to change. And honestly, I think unless you address them head on and say, part of the way to achieve any better world, including exploring this toolbox of value capture, means defeating these people. And I worry that if you seem to be accepted and cheered by these people, I wonder what that says about, well, are we doing enough as a whole to take these people on? And that's kind of my political thought. Patrick Condon: Well, my political thought, Mark, is I hope that you can help me advance the other side of that case. Because, again, to reemphasize adding density is necessary for a variety of reasons, and it is possible to add density in a way that enhances affordability, and we ought to all collectively understand what those mechanisms are and agree to them. So I end up, for political reasons, choosing to advance the idea of the Cambridge affordable housing overlay as a model, because I think we have the political tools in every community to do that. I think it's a good precedent because in Cambridge, the elected officials and the planning officials and the non governmental organizations who are desperate to provide affordable housings all got together and came up with a plan, and it took them four years to get it approved. And they had to fight against the same kind of I hesitate to use the word intransigence, but let's use the word resistance of people fearful of changing their neighborhoods and through very careful urban design explorations where they literally showed what that three decker equivalent would look like going next to your single family home in your neighborhood and how that was. This is an important point in Cambridge. They overcame the NIMBY resistance in large part, I believe, by really talking about affordability and saying this is a strategy not to add density to your neighborhood. This is a strategy to enhance affordability. And politically, I hope we're at a breakpoint because the average middle class boomer I number myself in that group are not unaware of the severity of the housing crisis. The ones that I end up talking to are aware of this crisis. Their own children are being forced not to live in the cities that they grew up in anymore. As a consequence of this, they end up, many of them being, however, suspicious, that just adding density is not going to be the solution to that problem. And they look around, they see a few examples of new projects that come in nearby that are marketed as luxury condos or luxury apartments, units which fortifies their skepticism. So I'm hopeful that there can be a dialogue with those people analogous to what has happened in Cambridge. I'm an urban designer. I'm not a real estate economist. I'm basically nothing but a designer. So I really believe that the design strategy in Cambridge was very important to show people what these would look like and to build faith that this was really about affordability and not just being the vanguard of what they would call developer interests. And people raping their neighborhoods and all the things you hear from Yummies when they come nimbies when they come to meetings. I understand where you're coming from, but my view is we have a political problem here, and it occurs at the neighborhood level, and I do believe there are solutions to it. But I'll only say one more thing and then it'll be your turn. But I do not think you said it. Basically, the yimbies come out, the Nimbies come out, and they yell and scream. What we haven't talked about yet is the broad scale, and the California legislation embodies this belief the broad scale belief that just adding supply will solve the affordability problem. And I do not believe that anymore that adding supply ends up, under present circumstances, not influencing the housing market to the point where the price per square foot either manifested through rents or purchase price for condominiums or detached housing is reduced. That's my major point. MGM: Yeah. Again, on the two avenues, my mind is still flipped into the politics mode. And I think I do have I partially agree and partially disagree with some of these claims. Like to get to that more. But I think one thing I want to say is more than anything, if you ask me, do I support density bills now because they will make things more affordable? And my answer is no, that is not my reason. My reason is actually because I believe they are going to be a political win insofar as they will break up kind of entrenched communities of exclusion. I think they're effective bills because they're bills that oppose segregation. They oppose basically atomized distant, detached family culture. And more than that, it will eventually disrupt systems of people who treat their home more as an investment, which homeowners do and will create renters. And even if someone's a condo owner, they own less of the land. So they're going to be more likely in the end to support radical measures to discipline land markets, whereas homeowners are the least likely people to support George's paradigm. Homeowners are incredibly anti georgist is my read. Patrick Condon: Well, my first response to what you've just said, Mark, is I get that. I totally get that. And I did say earlier that new density is a good thing for many, many reasons. So my belief is that to imagine that new density is going to immediately create increased affordability is where I disagree. So the things that you allude to that are the sort of systemic possible consequences I'm not sure that you're correct, but I can understand the argument that the systemic possible consequences of breaking down the single family zoning would in the long term lead to the reintegration of different minority groups into neighborhoods, the de emphasis on land value, the sort of watering down of concern about land value and so forth, that would align with some kind of George premise. I agree with that. And I don't want this to be a discussion of violent agreement between sure. Yeah. So I will disagree with you now that I think these legislations miss an opportunity, that all they had to do was put a clause in and say in the process of breaking down this barrier of single family zoning, we also will insist on some level of affordability pegged to average wages. And if they would do that, they would both achieve, I think that social objective. Plus they would discipline the land market because if they were insisting on that for every new development, it would influence the project pro forma and the assessment of what the land value was. And all of the developers that would be going into compete for that project would have to acknowledge that this new project was going to need to have 20% I like 50% personally, let's say 50% affordability based at 30% of prevailing wages and perpetually pegged to that. The end result on what they call the residual value of the land would be the residual value of that land would be affected. It would certainly be reduced. So my argument, which I think the people in the neighborhood groups that have found a support for their argument are drawn to, is that we shouldn't just increase density without that demand for affordability. MGM: Yeah, I suppose there are ways. I mean, some of the other ways, and you get some value capture. One of that is inclusionary zoning. Insofar as the bills that are out actually retain existing Iz rates, it really would produce more. It would do this value capture at a larger scale because it'd be more of it. So I would say, in some sense, the value capture is, in fact, baked into these bills. Could it be baked in more? I would say possibly. I think these bills are far from far from perfect. They certainly don't achieve an explicitly George's end. But I would say that this is something I was saying on Twitter before you reached out to me. I think this entire mindset of how to achieve value capture, it's a very interesting approach, which is, how do we get value capture upon the changes, upon when anything changes? How do we value capture from these changes? As opposed to we live in a world of enormous inequity. There is a lot of value stored up with landowners right now. Patrick Condon: That's right. MGM: And when we don't act, which is the status quo is what we do every time these bills fail. It's every time. What Livable California wants to see. They want the status quo. We don't take on the inequities that are baked in. If you only get value capture on the changes, the landowners get away with it. And that is kind of what the land value capture paradigm has been certainly in San Francisco and the Bay Area for the last 50 years. And I think it has very lofty aims. But the politics are bad because in the end, it's a recipe for doing nothing. And that's why I worry about yeah. Patrick Condon: I get that argument. So let me throw this back at you and tell me if I'm getting this right. I think what you're saying is that if we just open up the landscape and eliminate most of the feathers of the thing we call zoning, low density zoning, essentially, that it would unleash a new economic context that would in the long term, redistribute that land value in a way that made it more accessible to a broader demographic cross section, both in terms of age cohorts and income cohorts and also ethnic cohorts. Do I have that right? MGM: I think that's part of I wouldn't say unfettered, but I would say certainly less fettered. I'd say the state we're starting with right now is a state of R One zoning nearly everywhere. It's a very locked down system. Patrick Condon: Yeah, I know. MGM: And I would say this ground like the baseline is a very bad baseline to work with. At the very least, I would say I'd like to move to a baseline of basically maybe 20 plus units per acre with higher density around larger transit hubs, but certainly not R One everywhere. And I think when you have that, then you you have a much better baseline. And if you want to move above that, then you could still have I think you can still have regulations that you could use to exploit land subsidies even if you don't go fuel. But I'm kind of rambling. What do you think of that? Patrick Condon: Yeah, I've heard this discussion. All my good friends who are concerned with this question take different positions. So of course I respect that position, and I respect my friends who are also concerned about housing, which is indeed a crisis. So with that violent agreement, I will disagree with you for a little while here, Mark. I think what it comes down to, between what you're saying and what I'm saying is I don't have faith that under present global economic circumstances that I use the word unfetter. So forgive me for using it. I don't have faith that unfettering the system in terms of land use control, which presently does protect all those R One owners. And I can accept the idea that that's at the disadvantage of almost everyone who's not lucky enough to be situated on that piece of dirt with this incredibly increased land value. I accept that part. What I don't accept or what I suspect is not true, is under present global circumstances, if we unfettered that system, would it achieve, even in the long term, the benefits of increasing equality manifested and broader access to decent housing and good neighborhoods? I'm not confident in that. And I think we've entered a period since the 19 since basically well, basically since 1980, but certainly since 2008 where the situation in the world where the gravitational pull of money towards the 1% and the billionaire class is so dramatic that it's now worse than what we used to call the Gilded Era back in the turn of the 20th century, that there is so much gravitational pull towards that class and away from the average wage earning. Class that it becomes very difficult to imagine how you can let the free market system operate in a way that would mitigate against what we see as a current problem. I have come to decide. I have come to believe that this is a new moment akin to the progressive era in American politics in the 1920s prior to the crash, when so much of this kind of George's thinking was coming along, that the diagnosis that Henry George best articulated becomes increasingly important and in in a bumper sticker way. The basic problem is that all the value of entrepreneurs in cities and workers in cities is becoming absorbed into land value. That was what he said. And that's the situation we find ourselves in and we need a strategy to attack that problem and redistribute that land value, which is moving away from wage earners towards wage earners. And we need to do that Monday. And the best strategy I can think of is to use the zoning tools that we have available to us. Now, to insist in the context of upzoning all this R One landscape in California is the most dramatic example, and you read about that in the context of that legislation to get rid of R One to when a parcel's use changes, it must change towards a certain percentage of designated and specific and perpetual affordability linked to wages. Now, I'll say one more thing. I'll turn it back to you. We haven't had that idea in our political consciousness since at least the 1980s when the neoliberal world became dominant under the so called Reagan Thatcher revolution. We thought we gave up on public housing those days and we said the market can do it and we is still dominated. This YIMBY NIMBY thing is still dominated by an underlying non acknowledged adherence to the neoliberal formulation that the market can solve all problems if it's only unfettered. I no longer believe that's even remotely true. MGM: Okay, I think there's a lot of agreement I have with you there. I would say my main here's more of like a thought experiment, which is just we're treating the idea that if we move from here to there, if we move from our current paradigm to a world in which there is more buy right density, this would be unfettering. And I would say in some ways this treats where we are now as being at once fettered and less market driven than the future place we could be. So where A now b, what I would contest is I'd say where we're at now is in some ways fettered. In other ways it is unfettered and could be more fettered. And I would say that the paradigm we live under is part of you can call it a privatized neoliberal paradigm to point out a federal we have right now. This even goes with some of these solutions. Let's say you add an affordable housing overlay, which is to say you keep low density as a default. But if you reach a higher density, part of this additional value will be used for subsidized use. Great. This is win win. But here's a problem. What if someone says, you know what, no thanks. I am instead going to remain zoned R One and I'm going to sell my house to someone else for $3 million? Patrick Condon: That's a good question. MGM: And that is someone who is currently like they're just skirting this entire value capture scheme and they are operating in a financialized, highly privatized, highly speculative game of trading real estate. And this is all kosher within our world. And why is it we have some fetters, such as low density zoning, but not others, such as 100% capital gains taxes on real estate sales? It's very unusual that we, and I would say very suspiciously favorable to homeowners, that the fetters we don't have are the ones that enrich homeowners. And I would say if you want to say I will never stand for density until we get value capture, I'd say, okay, but how about we fetter the homeowners as they are right now, which nobody is talking about? And I would say that's kind of. Patrick Condon: One thought and it's a good thought. And my response to that is, yeah, that's a problem. My best response to that is that I also think, and Portland did this, that you should downzone R One. You should reduce the allowable FSR on the R ones simultaneously with the affordable housing overlay. They reduce the single family allowance for their R one zones in Portland. I think there's other flaws with their ordinance. But one thing I thought was really good was that if you want to rebuild a single family home in that, it has to be a much smaller home now than the one that was allowed, which also has the policy consequence of reducing the value of land for the R One purpose. Your larger question is why not capital gains tax? Why not a tax on the tax. MGM: On the status quo? Patrick Condon: In other words, why not really? Tax dirt, basically, is what George said and what they're doing in Pennsylvania. Why not just tax dirt at a high level and not the buildings? I also agree with that. And if we could do that, if we could have a major policy shift in our world and shift the way the instrument of tax policy operates now, which is largely taxing income and corporate profits and bias that towards a tax that largely drew away from the profitability of capital gains and additional tax on dirt, that would make dirt less attractive an investment and use that money that you gain to direct towards social purpose, which was George's argument in our case. The social purpose, which is desperate, is housing. And we don't really have a national model. You get places like Vienna where they have a national model where they've done that for almost they have done that for literally 100 years. So that 55% of their housing is now non market housing. And the financing of that has been entirely through the kind of mechanisms that we're talking about. In my book, this current book, I'm saying I don't think that's politically possible now, but we do have these zoning mechanisms that we could use tomorrow and they've made it through the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of California and most of the states. It's legal. We're doing it already. We just have to really bring this strategy up to scale. That's what I'm saying. I think you and I maybe tend to agree on the underlying land economics that is really the problem here, and have our differences on the policy strategies that are practical and politically feasible under present circumstances as a corrective. MGM: Yeah. Again, I think there's a policy approach, a political approach here's. The last I think of my political responses, which is the great advantage of a land value tax, is it's broad, it covers everything, and there is essentially no dead weight insofar as the land is going to continue to exist. I'd say the other tools which are kind of backdoors of value capture, this is inclusionary zoning. This is project by project value capture. Exactions extra density bonuses for affordable housing. I would say these are all they all have a lot of advantages. My only real worry, or my large worry, is there is a very high chance they'll be intentionally misdesigned by people who want them to fail. I think if you create an inclusionary zoning system, I would say a good system, the perfect system, would be you create the right bonus, it actually creates affordable housing. And then suddenly you look around and suddenly everywhere is being redeveloped. And then suddenly you're getting 20%, 50% everywhere. And then, like, boy, the entire world transformed. If you do it badly, what do you get? You get dead weight loss. And what does dead weight loss look in this sense? It would look, nothing happens. And you see this happen. People propose people who say, like, oh, I'm a homeowner, but I just care so darn much about affordable housing. Let's make it 85%. And what happens is not a single darn thing gets built. And who's happy, I think, to point the fingers, bad faith people who nerf the bill to create the status quo, being privileged and nothing changing, get exactly what they asked for. And that, I think, is a metapolitical problem, which is these are all very powerful value capture tools. If you do it right, how do we make sure we don't allow bad faith actors to do it wrong? Which I think is what we see a lot of the time. Patrick Condon: I agree with almost everything you said, and basically what we're talking about here comes down to a strategic choice, which depends on when you make a strategic choice, do you think this will work politically or this other thing will work politically? And we all have reasons to be very skeptical in either case about the chances of political success. Based on the observed reality that I've witnessed throughout my whole life, it's been terribly depressing. So at the moment, I've made the choice that the existing tools that we have are the best strategic choice, which is. Inclusive zoning or affordable housing overlays, even though I know that a more systemic approach would be a land value tax where you direct that new money towards social benefit. And the social benefit we need now is housing. So you would do what Vienna did. You would have a huge 50% sector in time that was non market housing. You would decolonize the land of your cities, in effect permanently. That's, I think, a very dramatic ambition. MGM: The politics are hard. Good luck. Patrick Condon: But using very simple existing tools. Well, I've confused. I've combined the two. The politics of changing the tax strategy where you actually did tax every single family home, if you tripled the tax on every single family home that was out there with what Pennsylvania does, in some cases with the land being taxed at five times the value of the improvement. So if you have a lot of land in a tiny house and that's a pretty good strategy. And that's very much in the mold that Henry George talked about. But when Henry George was alive, he didn't have zoning as a strategy. And I have just made in the book. Maybe I'll change my mind next year. But maybe, Mark, you'll convince me tonight that the best strategy is to tax land all over the place and then stream that money into affordable housing, and that will both drive down the value of land and increase the coffers for building affordable housing. Yeah, that's probably a more systemic approach. I'm skeptical that that's not the low hanging fruit path towards this end. Absolutely, no. I'll turn it over to you in a moment. I just want to make one more point, also not recognized in your assessment. There is if you do have a broad scale, let's say, for example, affordable housing overlay in effect, that operates as call it a tax, if you will, because if the whole city of Cambridge land market knows that no new density is available to them, that means that the land value will be stabilized. In fact, it might even be reduced in the most optimal circumstances because the present price of that land bakes in an assumption of future increases in value, which may be increases in density possibility, which happens certainly in Vancouver. So if you use these zoning tools and you discipline the land market over time, in a way it does the same thing as a broad scale land tax on everybody's parcel and avoids the political problem. Because the only people that will be pissed off would be the land speculators who want to cash out on that two acre parcel in downtown in Central Square in Cambridge. You know what I mean? MGM: Yeah, I mean, the logic is inescapable, but I think if you look at maybe some of the empirics on it, for example, this exact theory is laid out by a theorist in San Francisco 50 years ago, Calvin Welch. And his thing is we need to downzone San Francisco, and we need to perform value capture by on. Project by project, we create exactions for community benefit. And this will actually, as opposed to people being worried about gentrification and the uplift in land value by downzoning will keep a land value low. And I think certainly broadly, certainly in the short to medium term, it's not wrong. Down zoning does decrease land value. But what happens, you flash forward 40, 50 years. We have single family zoned housing in San Francisco selling for $2 million. We have the median price in Palo Alto over $3 million. And these are all zoned low. So, like, what's happening here? I think that the plan of downzoning leads to low land value. It doesn't quite work if the pressure just builds underneath and doing nothing to relieve it. And I'd say the tools of you only get value capture exactions on changes just continues to build up. This low and low and low pressure. It's like strapping a girdle on someone who's just gaining weight. Like, just the pressure builds and you don't actually solve the core problem. And I'd say that you would say, oh, you get value capture as you need it, but no, nothing really changes. Palo Alto is enormously inequitable, even though they've I'd say the problem of these policies going badly seems to be extremely likely. And that's what has happened in reality. And I think we need to do more to make sure that the status quo isn't the path we take. That's what I worry about. Patrick Condon: Yeah, I get what you're worried about. So I have a quick question for you, then I have something else to say. But do you think that there's a blend of these two strategies that you get certain benefits from? When there's an up zoning, you demand affordability and return on the one hand, and then across maybe the whole state, you say, r one zoning is gone, so it's minimum four dwelling units per lot across the state. Do you think those things can coexist or are they incompatible? MGM: I'd say honestly, they are absolutely aligned. And them not in conjunction is, I think, unworkable. For instance, Berkeley berkeley got rid of single family zoning replaced with quadplex zoning in the last year, and they put in affordable housing overlay. These are the same people who are looking at creating a better baseline and more value capture within. California has a screwed up system, obviously, prop 13. But we do what we can because I think these are people who really want to see change. They are serious actors of change, whereas the Palo Altos of the world, pretty much everybody who invited you to live with California, they not only don't want to densify to a better baseline, but they will not actually create sensible value capture because they are conservatives. Like conservatives will never help you. Patrick Condon: Well, I understand the kind of political polarities that are underlie this whole thing. I totally get that, and that's a rabbit hole. We could spend a lot of time going down, but I totally get that. But I also would interject very briefly that in this particular instance, you get very peculiar alignments of people on the right side of the conservative progressive spectrum and the left side for very different reasons. I'm sure you're very well aware of that. Very briefly, I will say that I'm suspicious. My own feeling is, I hope you're right, Mark. I hope that in general, in terms of trying to adjust this system towards maximum equity in the housing market and I've said it before, I'll say it again, I think inequality is largely addressable through housing. Most importantly. It's not flat screen TVs that cost too much. It's not double latte Mochas that cost too much. It's housing that cost too much. So that's the fundamental element of inequality. And I fear that if you simply upzone the world and also ask for affordability benefits in some other context of upzoning going above that base up zoning, you've lost the opportunity because the context has elevated yet again the value of all that land up to whatever it represents in terms of the allowable density on that parcel. Against the background of in Vancouver, for example, it's $1,200 per built square foot, whether it's rental or condo, and everything else filters down. So when you add that allowable density without that extraction, what simply happens is the only beneficiary of that is the land speculator. Now, I know this debate on that point. I know that just because I say it doesn't make it true. So I get that this is not going to be resolved in a conversation between you and I, but I will provide some evidence that the city of Vancouver has since the 1980s done something very peculiar for very site specific reasons that I don't have time to go into. They have said that if we're going to upzone a building or a district, we are going to recapture 80% of what they call the land lift as a consequence of our doing that increased density allowance. And when you look at the image of Vancouver with all those towers, basically, and I will speak to the caveats in a moment, basically 80% of that entire landlift ended up going into public purpose. And they didn't use that exclusively for affordable housing. They used it for libraries and daycare centers and parks. And the city is beautiful as a consequence of that land value capture. But the only point I'm making is Vancouver provides a brilliant example that you can capture on a project by project or a district by district basis, 80% of the lift, and you get the discretionary opportunity to put that wherever you want it. So that has encouraged me that this idea of using the machinery of development as the tool, as the moment for extracting that value towards public purpose, is more than possible. It's demonstrably efficaciously. It has occurred in Vancouver more so than in any other North American municipality. And I've studied it. So that's why I'm who I am on this topic. That's why I end up thinking, well, it's the moment of development that you have the opportunity and you do have tremendous development pressure from your generation, people who need housing and all that kind of stuff. Some of you can afford market housing in a higher density form. Good for you. You'll make your five to 10% per year, I hope forever. Good. Buy that market condo. Why not also have next door to you at a 50% level a non market unit so that you balance the non market with the market. So that in time, by the time you're my age, we would have an urban world where we would have the same kind of balance that Vienna has, where they have 50% non market, 50% market. And the smart people who have the money, they buy the market stuff because they make money on it. It's great. Good for them. They have a retirement account. But the other half who don't have a hope in hell of ever coming up with a 20% down payment because they can't go to the bank of mom and dad, have decent homes on the same street as those other people in the market units. I know that's a bit of a polymical speech on my part and forgive me for that, but yeah, it's heartfelt. MGM: No, I mean, I think there's you could look around a lot of places and the Vancouver the growth in value capture you've seen is an indication value capture is possible. I certainly agree, and it's good. But I suppose the other question is, is it broad and is it working at the scale we need? I think I'm I'm actually pretty, you know, sympathetic to a lot of cases saying up zoning in practice has been largely inevitable and largely has not been very effective. Patrick Condon: I agree. MGM: But I think my real response is a real broad based up zoning program has not been tried. The upzonings we see in process seem to be we will upzone a few neighborhoods in near the city corps, in gentrifying areas, certainly not the affluent white people neighborhoods, but we will actually upzone areas of largely disempowered communities. And then you see what happens. It creates localized displacement to these spot zonings. And in the end, you could even say like, oh, maybe there's help. The density has advantages for transit and so on. But certainly if you only upsell the poor neighborhoods, that's not equitable, but that's what we've seen. And I'd say the California bills do a lot to they're getting the rich homeowners angry, and that's a good sign. I'd say the fact that to say that upzonings we've seen in the past discredit what I'd say are more comprehensive, broader and essentially less regressive. upzonings. I'd say they're not really fair to compare the two. Patrick Condon: Yeah, well, I don't have all the answers, Mark, and neither do you. I operate from a basis of what I know in Vancouver. So to your point of up, zonings have been too localized, often concentrated on low income areas to the detriment of existing residents and those things. I understand that, and that's undebatable. That is a goddamn problem in the way that it has been done, largely in the United States and frankly, largely in California, given the severity of the crisis there, which is unprecedented or unequal to the issue in other states. In the United States, even New York doesn't have the same level of this problem that you're experiencing there. Now, having said that, another West Coast city that I happen to have lived in for nearly 30 years, effectively rezoned the entire city gradually over 15 years. The so called R one district, what we would think of as basically single family homes, zoning districts, which covered over 60%, 60% to 70% of the geographic footprint and only had 15% of the 30% somewhere around, call it 20% of the people on 60% of the land. As a response to the same things that we're talking about that are egregious in California, the public and their elected officials gradually first legalized basement suites which were already there. It's mostly bungalow houses on very small lots, most of which already had illegal suites. So the first thing I did was legalize that. And that brought in like 30,000 new dwelling units into the legal inventory. And then they increased the allowable density on all of the 200 arterials so that you have a commercial first floor in many locations, and then now it's up to six floors. And that brought in another many thousands more and more recently. And then in addition to that, we have lanes in the entire city. Every block has rear lanes. Every one of those rear lanes has a legal opportunity to put a lane house in what they call a lane house. Some people call them granny flats. So that's that. And then finally, and most recently, the city of Vancouver has said every single family home lot, what we call single family home lot now is authorized to be a duplex. And each one of those two duplexes can have a rental suite. So these 3000 square foot lots are legal for four dwelling units. That means that the dirt can accompany every 800 to 900 dirt can accommodate a dwelling unit. Now, that has increased the inventory. And what I'm talking about now did not have an exaction associated with it. All those changes to the broad total city were just now, by right, you can do all these new things. So nobody asked for tax money and landlift on that. And all of that was done in the presumption that that huge change in the context would deliver affordable housing. And during that 15 years, I'm sad to say, and I was an advocate for a lot of those changes, and I still am an advocate for those changes for a variety of reasons. It's better these neighborhoods are better if small families have smaller units and all this stuff. But the result, unfortunately, the evidence on the ground has not been a mitigating of price rises, certainly not a reduction in per square foot price rises. It has ended up being a 300% increase in the per square foot cost of that housing. So I've, of course, become skeptical of a strategy that says, let's just open up this whole metro region to that kind of strategy, which Vancouver has already experimented with. And I wouldn't say go back against it. There's other benefits that I've mentioned, but if affordability was one of the benefits that you were anticipating, unfortunately it didn't work out. And that is why, reluctantly, I've decided that these density increases should not come in the absence of affordability requirements. MGM: Yeah, I think it's really interesting to kind of talk about the dramatic changes in Vancouver and to actually look at Vancouver. How does this redound into the shape of the city? And it's still like I mean, go into 3D mode and Google Earth and zoom around. Vancouver has an incredibly compact skyscraper zone. And then you look around, nothing else is above one, two stories. It's wild just how basically the shape of the city is so flat in so low density for so much of it. And I think here's the I mean, I think to go back earlier, I promised of the policy idea that I pushed back on will density in general, does it affect affordability? And I'd say, if you actually make it happen, which is to say, I don't think Vancouver really densified in practice enough, they legalized it. And this is actually a big reason I'm not that thrilled over legalizing quadplexes in the last couple of years. Minnesota built like a handful. Portland built like a handful. You need to do more than legalize it. Put a twoFounded point on it. You need to mandate it. You need the carrot and the stick. But overall, there is a claim that you make in the book and elsewhere, that effectively, the more you densify, the per unit cost will remain the same or increase, which will mean affordability will never be affected, which is there's a drawing that has gone around. Let me pull it up. It's a little picture of a purple house on a I know the drawing. Yeah, I mean, you can describe it. I have it in front of me. But if you want to describe what. Patrick Condon: It says, it's a little house. And then it goes to four stories. And the cost per square foot stays the same because the land price quadruples. MGM: Yeah, actually, I'm seeing an image on the Livville, California website. They love it before rezoning. It's a million dollar house on a million dollar plot. The cost per is basically a million per unit. And then after rezoning, it's four stacked up. It's a million dollars per house. And now the land price is $4 million. Patrick Condon: Yeah, it's fourth grade math, but that has turned out to be the case in Vancouver when we have experienced these density increases. And it's very hard to scientifically draw exact causal relationship between, okay, I rezoned this parcel. It suddenly was assessed at four times more. But generally the information in Vancouver does support that sometimes the per square foot price of the resulting unit is a little bit less than it would have been as a single family home. Sometimes it's actually significantly more because it's a newer structure and so forth. But the point I'm making, the overarching anxiety that I have is that Henry George was right when he said that every penny of the value of the labor of wage earners and the entrepreneurial intelligence of the entrepreneurs ends up going into land value. That's what's really happening. And that's really not a function of us doing what in comparison to that ends up being minor changes relative to allowable density. The overarching thing that's happening here is that that land value is not, in Henry George's sense, that giant sucking sound of all that entrepreneurial and labor value going into the land is not manifested always directly in the price of a square acre. It ends up in urban areas, largely manifested in the price of a square foot of inhabitable investment product. And people who are in the market, like yourselves, who are buying a condo, are not buying it anymore based on its utility value. Its utility is not $800,000 or whatever it is in your market right now. Its utility value is way lower than that. But why you buy it is because the global market is assessing that value at that rate. And you are willing to pay that price made easier by 2% mortgages because you have some degree of confidence that there would be a 5% increase in that value over time. And those calculations accrue to whether you're buying a condo or a single family home or a half duplex and so forth. I keep constantly trying to explain why simply adding density I lack confidence, based on my experience and my analysis, that even if you do it systemically across maybe even the extent of a large metropolitan region like the Bay Area, I'm not confident that if your only objective is to achieve affordability, then you may be disappointed. MGM: So I would say the land residual is everything. And I think looking at this is definitely the right analysis. I would say your analysis is absolutely correct if you are looking in a basically George's micro mold. If you're looking at it as a fact, like, this is one price taker and one plot, everything else remains the same, you're absolutely correct. I think a spot zoning of one spot where it goes up to four on one, effectively the unit per will remain about the same, I would say, like, if it's one or I mean, let's just say there's no preference either way between basically detached or being part of the condo. Because overall, what is the actual mechanism which determines affordability? And it is about the alternatives a person has. If you are dropped down in a city, you are looking, okay, this person is selling a million dollar condo. What are your other options? Next door, they're selling a detached for a million bucks. Okay, well, I'm going to drive out, and if I can drive out five minutes and then suddenly there's a house for $100,000, it's like, okay, I'm certainly not paying a million bucks. I can find this $100,000 house five minutes away. But if you get in your car or you hop on a bus or hop on one of the larger high transit systems and if you stick around and it takes an hour, 2 hours, I guess, in the Bay Area if they got a Tracy or if you're in Vancouver, you're going out to Langley and Surrey and all this that's how it is in practice. You're in a sea of expensive stuff, and it takes hours before you find cheap stuff. And that is the law of rent. The law of rent. It's the shape of land rents that's right. Throughout an entire city. And if you're only doing a spot zoning, absolutely. That does not change the difference. My objection is if you are really doing large scale reshaping of densities, you would in fact see a disciplining of the land market. Because if you do this right, in my perspective in Palo Alto, if you allow much higher densities right now, if you are trying to get close to Palo Alto, you're driving 2 hours. But this is because you have to pass through low density unit after unit. You have to drive through mile after mile to cross what are you passing? You're passing a couple hundred thousand different houses. If it takes only 20 minutes to pass 100,000 houses, this brings in the margin of cheaper land. Patrick Condon: That's right. MGM: And this would mean you can get more for your buck closer to where you need to be, which is more affordability. So I would say this is my caveat in a city core. If you're talking about midtown Manhattan, the skyscrapers of Vancouver, downtown Palo Alto, or downtown San Francisco or wherever, I believe if you upzoned all mine, I don't think the actual core will get cheaper, but a commute for a reasonable distance from a place close to the core will get cheaper. And that's what affordability is. It means shorter commutes, cheaper housing with a shorter commute. And I would say that's what the analysis seems to lack. And I'm kind of curious what your response is. Patrick Condon: Well, my first response is I hope you're right. It was only a few years ago that I was basically singing the same tune, that if we just you know, if we overwhelmed the the metropolitan system with additional opportunity for density, that the the effect would be as. You suggest that the sheer mass of that new density opportunity would be such that two hour commute would turn into a 20 minutes commute? And by the way, that's all part of the George's playbook, because the georgists are all about sprawl would be eliminated if we really dealt with the land problem. Because post World War II American landscape is very much a consequence of, in a way of thinking, escaping the problem of land value absorption, because they built all these freeways out into the distant lands where the investment in infrastructure was such that it overcame this problem of. MGM: It worked for a couple of decades. Patrick Condon: It worked for a long time. We're stuck with the result, which is a massive amount of R-1 zoning. So I totally get that. I guess I'll say I hope you're right. You know, maybe just rezoning all that would turn my disappointment about the law of supply and demand might be overcome. If I could see a circumstance where just opening up the zoning where you increase by a factor of five or more the allowable density throughout the first and second rank suburbs that you would overcome this egregious problem of people driving till they qualify and the public expenditure required to chase that with the subway, BART system and freeway upgrades and so forth. That's the American landscape we've just described. Driven, I think, by land value problem. So much agreement there. So I will push back a little bit on that utopian dream of yours, and I have my own utopian dreams because of the visual evidence that I have in Vancouver that opening up the whole city and the adjoining cities to additional density has not produced that result. First of all, we haven't gotten the uptake on a lot of that new authority. So there's a certain amount of uptake. A parcel here takes advantage of this new duplexing opportunity with the two rental units, and they go out at $1,200 a square foot, still same price as the rest of the city. And you would expect more people to uptake that. But when there's a suspicion that value is going to drop, the sale price is going to drop below that $1,200 per square foot price that they've risked everything for because they've paid for the land. Based on that assumption, they back away from the project. So the absorption level of that is pretty, unfortunately, pretty limited, we have found, from the upzoning. So you may find that the upzoning is not going to produce the kind of results that you want either. And you may be right. That my strategy of saying you can have additional density only if you have 50% affordability. And by doing that, Mr Developer, Mr and Mrs Developer, we're doing that on your behalf because we don't want you to overpay for the land. So good luck out there. Don't overpay for the land on the premise that our policy insistence on this will drop that land price such that the economics of people of average wages will be able to pay for the project. The project will pencil out. I know that's maybe my own utopian view, which is possibly equal in its lack of grounding in reality as your own, that hopes for that utopian result of lowered prices for millennials and gen z folk, but I'm not going to back away. This is my story and I'm sticking to it. MGM: Sure. Patrick Condon: I still think that a broad scale strategy, and the Cambridge one is a pretty good example of that. It's one whole city. Even though it's a small city. It could be done on a region basis or certainly on a center city like San Francisco in its immediate surrounding suburbs. The first ring, possibly even the second ring suburbs that the state legislature in California has it within. Their power to do that by inserting a clause that says, in the context of this up zoning, a certain percentage, I would say 50 of this new housing units should be pegged to medium wages. Doesn't mean that it's free. Median wages in San Francisco are pretty good. You've got a high tech industry. Your median wages are 40% higher than our median wages up here. So you've got a much better situation as a starting point if you say median wages is the benchmark. So the economics of that, if you consult with your smart people who are not married to the neoliberal dogma, if you get post neoliberal economic people and planners to start to intervene and lobby with your state legislature, I think my way is the way to go. That's my story. I'm sticking to it. MGM: Yeah. I think there is two real questions here as a policy lever, and I think the two questions are what are you doing to design and shape how the law of rent works? And the second one is, what are you doing to equitably use land subsidy, which is like the land value of a city for public benefit? And I'd say these are kind of not really inherently connected. I think they're somewhat orthogonal, which is to say the first question, which is what is the shape of your city? How are people commuting, necessarily? That doesn't really mean you're using land value. Correct. And a lot of georgists are density skeptical for that reason, because you can have a place where certainly your commutes are shorter, but within the city, private landowners are getting every cent of it. Patrick Condon: That's right. MGM: And the other question and so the question is, okay, even if you live in sprawl hell world, you could still equitably use the land subsidy for public benefit. And it doesn't matter how bad it is, because we all make it work. That's why Frank Lloyd Wright, who was a georgist, proposed. A low density car based city because he says broad acre city, mostly because he wanted architecture as king. Because if you just use your land subsidy correct, everything's fine, and like, okay, not wrong. I still would not want to live there, but not wrong. So looking strictly at the land subsidy question, the question is, what is the destination of your land subsidy? And I think there are a number of approaches. One would be the land subsidy is in the perfect georgist mold. It is put into public coffers, redistributed everybody in the terms of public goods or infrastructure or just a dividend. Great. Another way would be you completely use land subsidy and use it to create basically subsidized public housing, which is in effect of a form of infrastructure. Patrick Condon: That's right. MGM: And that's more the Vienna look in a way, they are basically using their land subsidy for public housing also. Great. How do our cities use land subsidy right now? In practice, we're using our land subsidy to help incumbent landowners either retain explicit profit if they sell or implicit imputed rents when they remain in a house. If you are living in Palo Alto and you bought your house for $100,000, but all the houses are worth 3 million, now, it is clear to me that is actually you are enjoying a land subsidy you are taking for free, something other people would pay out the nose for. And that's where our land subs are going. They're going towards landowners, which are landlords, but also homeowners. Patrick Condon: And we need to take land speculators, too. MGM: Absolutely. And what are we doing to take them on? And I'd say that I think your toolbox has part of the right solution, but I don't think it does enough to take these people on. Patrick Condon: Yeah, maybe. You know, maybe. I mean, it's a political calculation. I've already agreed with you that the best way be, you know, a giant capital gains tax on land at the point of transfer. We do it a little bit in BC, and it generates billions of dollars. So it's precedented or on your property tax, have a differential between improvements and the land value and really tax the out of really big backyards to the point where it's punitive. And then those proceeds, which could be in the hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, if you're thinking region wide, should be streamed into public benefit, I favor the Vienna model, which streams that benefit into where it's most needed, which is housing. It's not public housing. It's non market housing. And there's a big difference between the two, because that's the crisis where we find ourselves we don't have a crisis of affordability relative to lattes and avocado toast. That's not really where the problem is. Problem is nobody can put a roof over their head. So if we could just deal with that, the equity issue would be very much managed. And I also think other environmental issues such as we've alluded to, which is excess commuting distances and taxpayer consequences to overblown infrastructure, freeways and subways and so forth, would be mitigated if we didn't have 70% of our people traveling more than an hour twice a day to get back and forth. Only provoked to do that because they couldn't afford a house closer in. So I get all that. So maybe you and others can convince me that those systemic ways are politically achievable within my lifetime. My lifetime is getting short. So I'm a little bit more anxious to see this problem solved in the near term. And my analysis is that the systemic recapture of the land value which in georgist terms is only there because us workers, teachers, baristas hospital orderlies, bus drivers, everybody who makes a city happen and the entrepreneurs who own the shops and whatever else's capital, infrastructure on top of the ground. All that value ends up getting absorbed into the ground to the point where the regional economy strains under the load and the political consequences which we're seeing exhibited in the intergenerational conflict between people your age and my age because of this disparity. Get to the breaking point. All those things can and should be addressed. But I'm wandering a little way, a little far afield from my point, which is obviously I could be wrong, but based on 30 years of looking at this, I think the immediate opportunity and the California legislation is a very important opportunity in this respect to put a clause in that says that this upzoning must come and come. In return for this upzoning there must be some assurance of affordability. It may be possible that the market would generate that affordability. Right. So your point? Maybe it does. So then there wouldn't have to be non market options. Maybe just blowing the whole thing open would suddenly produce a 50% reduction in the cost per square foot of housing close into where jobs are. That would be wonderful and I'd say hallelujah. I'm not confident that that would happen. Maybe it would happen. But if it doesn't happen if this experiment with just blowing up the density restrictions and the zoning restrictions throughout the region doesn't produce the desired results well, that's a problem. It just means that the inequality is being even further baked into the system so that only tech bros are going to be able to afford that condo and the baristas are going to be still I don't want to use the F word for a podcast maybe sent up more broadly but they are screwed. MGM: Yeah, I think there's a synthesis in place here which I don't disagree with the value capture. I mean I'd say the ideal value capture is broad based and I'd say project based. I worry that you won't capture it all. But the real question is how do you move from here to a broad based system? And I'd say you get there by having less people who have material interests to not get there. But in general, I'd say that we're pretty close to as long as you're doing something which changes stuff and then also recoups it. If you have a change in housing in which the baseline increases from its current awful position to a higher position from R One to something more like Townhouses everywhere. And then on top of it says, well, you can even have higher levels. But if you do, there's going to be value. Capture, extractions. Okay. To me that sounds like it's the best of all worlds, which is you avoid the problem of your baseline being awful and you have to add extra stuff to it, too. Making sure, like if you zone for townhouses, you can't build a big single family unit, like you can actually have maximum floor sizes. That's a real thing, too. In the end, I think you need to use more to discipline incumbents. And I absolutely agree with you. And you say the politics aren't there. They aren't. As long as incumbents are intransigent, comfortable, rich and politically connected, they won't get touched. But I think in time, as a number of things happen, which is young people continue to age into a world which isn't ready for them and boomers. And older people kind of euphemistically age out. Yeah, less euphemistically. I think you're going to have a different political calculus and I think we need the roadmap in place because we're not going to flip a light switch on tomorrow. But the real question is how are we going to get there within some time frame? Patrick Condon: Yeah, and I think we're towards the end of our conversation. Yeah, good place. We've unpacked a lot of stuff. Yeah. Kind of responding to what you just said. What you said could be true. Rezone everything for townhouse density and then beyond that you get an exaction on a kind of district by district or spot by spot basis. Maybe that would work. My fear on that one, of course, is that by allowing that townhouse density, which by the way, four dwelling units on a 3000 square foot lot in Vancouver is townhouse density, that's 40 dwelling units per acre. Parking is an issue, but it's still 40 units per acre, which is legally allowable. So we have rezoned the whole city for townhouse density. MGM: That's like a baseline, too. You need to get rid of parking tomorrow. Patrick Condon: Yeah, I know. That's a whole separate conversation and I 100% agree with you on that, and particularly in a city like Vancouver, which has tremendous walkability in transit. But let's set that aside for the moment. I fear that my fear, which is kind of a closing comment, my anxiety I hope you're right. But my anxiety is that if you just did that townhouse density up zone, you might also engender a land value increase that when you went to get that additional new project at a higher density, it would end up competing against that higher value for the land. The base value of that land would already be pegged at townhouse density, grounded in that $1,200 per square foot number, which has everything to say about the residual. So that's my anxiety. MGM: If you do that tomorrow, the landowners will get a bonus for free. And that's not great, but it's how you grease the wheels in my mind. It's imperfect, but I can maybe live with it and we can get that value capture back later. But you're not wrong. Just say in closing, I would hope, going ahead, that you would feel that California urbanists and georgists or something, I think are hearing what you're saying. We get where you're coming from, and I think we can work together to help craft legislation, get better and better. I would hope you would notice the difference between people who are hungry for change and want to see real things happen, even if it hurts the placidity of our very comfortable people and the number of bad faith people who are just hungry for a sound bite in order to do nothing. And I would say those people are dangerous. Patrick Condon: Yeah, I get that. Well, you know, the reason why I talked to Livable Camp, California, was they're the first people to call me up. So I said yes. And thank you, Mark, for giving me yet another opportunity to, I think in a more fulsome and extended way, talk about what I really mean so that hopefully things don't get misinterpreted. Because I'm very much committed to this issue of affordability for your generation and struggling to figure out how that could be systemically and systematically engendered given the constraints, the global economic circumstances that we've discussed a lot today. And I think I've tried as best as I can and with a fair amount of passion to explain my analysis and my strategy choices, which are grounded in what I think is politically achievable. But I agree with you that maybe there are other things that are politically achievable, and I don't have the same level of confidence that an opening up of the restrictions on R one across the entire state in the absence of some requirement for affordability would be efficacious if your objective is affordability. But I at the same time understand the frustration of an entire generation who sees 90% of the California landscape completely locked up and inaccessible to them when they may have grown up in those exact same neighborhoods. I get that. MGM: Yeah. As I said before, I don't think that basically a liberalization of density is going to great affordability, although I do believe it will help. I do think it will tend to make more open mindedness. And I'd say if more people are talking about large scale value capture, you're moving in good direction. And I'd say, well, I mean, I'm optimistic in that sense. Patrick Condon: Well, we'll leave it at that, Mark. Great. Well, and one more time. MGM: If you want to hear more of your the book is out There Six City, available in PDF. Thank you so much for being here. Patrick Condon: All right. Great. Mark. Talk to you later. Thank you very much. Bye bye bye there. Patrick Condon: We have been talking to Patrick Condon and debating about the book "Sick City," his conclusions about land value and urban planning and much more. You can listen to this episode and all previous episodes of this podcast radio show at the website seethecat.org This is a presentation of KZSU Stanford.