MGM: KZSU Stanford, 90.1 FM. I'm Mark Mollineaux. This is the Henry George Program, a show all about land, policy, and politics. We're here in 2024 and starting off with an episode about a housing elements. We're taking a deep dive into the state housing planning apparatus. And who better than Kevin Burke: housing elements watchdog, housing elements whisperer of East Bay For Everyone to take us on this journey, we'll be talking about how this process has been going from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, getting to issues such as fair housing provisions. We'll talk about what everyone wants to hear: builders remedy, and even talk a bit about land value. Without further ado, let's just get to it. So, Kevin, thank you so much for being here today. Kevin Burke: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. MGM: Yeah, so this is not the first time we've talked about housing elements. We've talked about how housing elements have been incubated, a lot of the process, you know, some of the watchdogging down in southern California. But one, it's a big issue. I think it's worth going back to this, again and again, because it's an interesting example of state planning: what is California trying to do to make housing happen? And two, there's been a lot of interesting updates, both as far as what's happening in northern California. And builders remedy wasn't even a thing a year and change ago. So I guess just introduce yourself and talk a little bit, what got you, specifically into the world of housing elements. Kevin Burke: Yeah. So professionally I work as a software engineer and I guess I got interested in sort of housing both through: it just seems like a lot of the issues in this area kind of boil down to the housing know both personally, like my friends and family can't afford to live in the Bay Area. And kind of from a public policy perspective, it just makes every problem so much harder if you can't hire middle income workers because they can't afford to live here. And then going to meetings in San Francisco and realizing the crazy things that people were saying at public hearings. But yeah, how I got interested in housing elements specifically is I thought they were a really useful lever for shaping public policy and sort of influencing public policy because the penalties for not having a compliant housing element are pretty severe. So cities are paying a lot of attention to it and the state's paying a lot of attention to it and there aren't a lot of opportunities to personally be able to add hundreds to thousands of housing units or not that you're directly building them. But changing zoning in such a way to make those units possible to build, if you were going to do that directly, financially, you'd need tens of hundreds of millions of dollars. That's a pretty neat way, I think, to have a lot of impact on housing in California is how I saw the opportunity. MGM: Yeah. What's the 30 second pitch for people who may not be familiar? What's your elevator pitch for housing elements 101? Kevin Burke: Yeah. So every eight years, the state requires every jurisdiction in the state to show that it has basically the capacity to add a set number of new homes. And so this number changes for each city and county. But basically the city needs to show that it has the capacity and that it has sites where people are going to build those. And so the problem is that cities are not really interested or incentivized to try very hard at this. And so that's where kind of, if you're an advocate, if you can point out the flaws in city's plans, you can force them to submit better plans and actually have a more realistic chance of getting the housing built in the numbers that they say they tell the state that are actually going to get built. MGM: And to clarify, this isn't new. It was rolled out like 1980 or so. Actually, I'd be curious with the first cycle, what was the motivation? Because it's weird that they made these happen. You must have a housing element, but then they just kind of honor system, just, "have fun out there", because they didn't matter at all for better part of 30 years. Kevin Burke: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's kind of this weird. So this is the 6th, we're going through the 6th cycle, which depending on where you are, is like starting in 2022/ 23 and ending in 2030, 2031. But yeah, there's kind of this weird, like kabuki theater where the state doesn't want to directly say that it's trying to build housing or add housing. And so instead they use this kind of indirect mechanism of telling cities, okay, you're responsible for planning this many new homes, you're responsible for planning this many new homes. And then the cities kind of have more control showing it where the homes are going to go inside of the city. And generally this hasn't really led to good results in the past for a few reasons. One is the cities don't want to build housing at the rates that the state wants them to build at. So they've in the past submitted a bunch of infeasible sites. There's a really good LA Times article by Liam Dillon focused on Foster City. That kind of covers-- MGM: But I feel like that's a more recent thing. Kind of in the past they wouldn't even, I guess, did they always have site inventories or has that been adapted? Because I feel in the past they can say whatever and they would just like, first, in the past, the overall numbers were far less. And then two, they just wouldn't do it. They just would say, oh, we did 5%. Oh, we tried really hard. Kevin Burke: Right. MGM: We'll do better next time. Which is, yeah, I mean, there's nothing there. At least now, reading all these housing elements in this current cycle where one, they have higher requirements and there are actual consequences through several different policy levers which we can get into, I'm reminded of nothing so much as just like, insolent teenagers doing homework or something. It's so many people trying to fudge their numbers, trying to get away with stuff, and it's just this weird back and forth, back and forth. But yeah, I mean, as you talk about fake site inventories is something we see. We talked about this down in southern California. But yeah, I think just tell people again, what does it mean when someone kind of fakes that kind of stuff? Kevin Burke: Yeah, I mean, you're kind of right. If you go back and look at the first housing elements, it'll be like ten pages or something like that. And then now you go and look at a housing element. There's like 600 pages of evidence. And I think part of that is the state sort of demanding more evidence. And part of it is the laws have kind of changed about what sort of things you need to submit as part of your housing element. The consequences of submitting a fake site inventory. So let's say I'm like an average size city. You could say I'm like Danville, for example. And I have-- MGM: That's a town. Kevin Burke: Yes. And I have 40,000 residents and I've been asked to add 2000 new homes by 2031. And so I might allocate those to a bunch of different sites in my town and say this site is going to build 200 apartments and this site is going to build 50 apartments, and this site is going to build ten apartments or whatever. And we're going to add this many adus and all those together kind of add to 2000. Plus you're supposed to add a little bit of buffer because accidents happen and the buffer is entirely insufficient. But that's another story. So the issue is if you submit fake sites, basically, like you're getting away with a lower sites inventory than otherwise, you would be submitting. Right, if half of that inventory is on fake sites. And realistically, you're looking at adding about 1000 homes instead of 2000. So the game for advocates is to try to disqualify as many sites as possible in order to sort of try to concentrate higher levels of development on the feasible sites. And that can take increasing base densities or sort of triggering rezonings on feasible sites. For example, in Lafayette, they were trying to count their Bart parking lot in their site's inventory. And our argument was essentially around the site is not on BART's plan for sort of where they're building housing in the next decade. And also it has a contract with a solar panel developer. There's solar panels on top of the site where they'd have to pay $3 million or something to get out of that contract. And so we were successful at basically disqualifying that site. And I mean, they were counting on like 800 units on that site. So as a result of that, they had to reallocate those units to other sites in Lafayette and increase the base densities there. MGM: Yeah, it'd be nice if BART could move quicker and redevelop all their parking lots. But as we see in North Berkeley, it's unfortunately slow mostly. I mean, it seems like it's mostly a probabilities game. In the past, I think you mean for at least cycles in the past, as long as you get your numbers up, they rubber stamp it. But now it's like you have to multiply every one by what's its probability? And if it's like something is a 95%, yeah, that's basically a one for one. But you could have everything from like, oh yeah, flip a coin, and then you have to have twice as many. But if you find like really dubious ones, that just won't happen. That should be discounted essentially to 0% or close to it. I noticed here, like you were talking with unincorporated Contra Costa County and your letter was recommending because they need about 8000 units and you were recommending 40,000 or so, basically a five times multiplier. That's basically giving a 20% probability. Do you think a realistic, or is this how to do with these specific context of-- Kevin Burke: It depends. Realistic in what? MGM: Or you just make a maximalist demand just because it's better? Kevin Burke: If you go back and look at like for example, in the last housing elements and people have actually done these and there are various kind of tools online that you can look at that sort of show this, but I mean, it's about that percentage, right, which is about 20%, where you say in the fifth cycle, if you said a site was going to turn into housing, maybe about 20% of the time it did. MGM: So big cities, small cities, suburbs, 20% is pretty good across the board. Kevin Burke: Yeah. I mean, the other thing that you see a lot of times is that sites that aren't on the inventory become housing, because this is kind of like an imperfect exercise. Sure. So their guidelines are basically like, assume an 85% conversion ratio or like 15% buffer, and that's just like way too high. When you look at how many sites people are allocating in the last cycle, and you look at some of the specific sites, we had a conversation with someone at HCD where basically we're saying a lot of these sites, cities are submitting are just complete junk. And what this person said was, well, look at the Fry's in Palo Alto, which they included. And even though it was like a healthy business, Fry's. And then, oh, they went bankrupt, and now it's turning into housing. And this was their argument for saying basically like, well, we should accept cities when they submit any kind of junk in their site's inventory. But a more realistic approach would be to say, okay, let's assign a probability that fries goes bankrupt to, say, 3% to 5% or something like that. And then you multiply the number of units you could get on that site by 3%, and then you count that towards your inventory. And so if you did that, you could include a larger number of sites at a much lower probability. But in reality, what a lot of cities are doing is just throwing in bad sites and saying that there's an 85% chance that they're going to become housing if they were trying to actually hit the numbers. And then the other issue is kind of the lower income numbers, where if you look at the targets, they assume about 45% of every new home is going to become offered to lower income residents. A much more realistic numbers, around ten to 15% when you look at new housing. So the way to sort of hit your lower income targets is to massively overshoot the market rate. You get ten to 15% of those at lower income and you can actually hit your lower income targets. MGM: Yeah, I think getting the subsidized or directly or indirectly subsidized tranches, I think that's a much more difficult thing to do. And I think we'll get into that kind of. I'll earmark that. But yeah, as you're talking about the 15% buffer, it's kind of treated as like, oh, yeah, that's just good practice, but it seems like that's not empirically backed up. And then on top of it, people are not even hitting that. A lot of places are squeezing in under 1% and I think I read that Danville just, like, missed their target. They're under it, which is. Are they going for partial credit? Like, what are they doing there? Kevin Burke: Yeah, so, I mean, the buffer is just a guideline. All you have to do under the statute is just identify sites for 100% of your arena. MGM: But if you. Not 100%, if you only hit 95% of it, do they not just flunk you out of the gates? Kevin Burke: Yeah, they should, and they did in Danville's case, but, yeah, so Danville, basically, the issue there was they circulated a draft where the lower income targets just didn't add up to what their lower income RHNA was. The way that they dealt with this is they assumed that they changed the assumptions about every single project to just increase the number of lower income units on each site. So, like, a site that had 100 units, and previously they said 25% of these are going to be lower income. Now all of a sudden, they're saying 33% of these are going to be lower income in their newer draft. I mean, it's all just completely made up. MGM: Well, if you cook your books, shouldn't the numbers add up to be correct in the end? It's weird to cook your books, and it's not adding up. Kevin Burke: Yes, but it's a way to cook your books that, like, HCD accepts. MGM: Okay. I don't understand why they couldn't actually hit their total. If you're just lying, it shouldn't be hard to. Kevin Burke: Yeah. So anyone's site, in theory, a lower income housing developer could buy it and develop lower income housing. The reality is that the funds for those sorts of projects are pretty limited, and we're still probably, I don't know if I had to guess, around 90% of homes on the market are being produced at the market rate. And so then with market rate, you get basically, like 80% to 90% of the units in a project are going to be market rate. And then you get some number of units offered at inclusionary, what's called, like, inclusionary zoning. So you get, like, 10% to 20% of the units at sort of below market rate or lower income housing. MGM: Yeah, kind of. This is a pet peeve, which is at least it's a trend, which is a lot of people whining about. I mean, I'm thinking specifically about people in San Francisco. They whine about hitting their new market rate targets, saying, well, "last cycle we exceeded our market rate targets. We did badly on subsidized." And there's, like, two different responses to this, which is just the fact that, well, now you have to do more. They had 30,000 last time. It's 80,000 this time. So it's over two times as many. It's like, okay, you hopped over the hurdle last time. Let's see if you can do this taller one and then two is they're saying, okay, it's like, the problem is a lack of subsidized. And as you're saying, one strategy, and really the main strategy is you get subsidized units by having a percentage of new build through IZ of market rate. So it's like, okay, well, if that's your strategy, you need to build a *lot* of market rate, or you need to find novel and different ways to build only subsidized, which means you'd need to find all this revenue. And the people who whine about the market rate are never serious about this. At least I never hear people talk about, here is my plan to build only subsidized? I don't know. Kevin Burke: Yeah, so there were people in San Francisco who are throwing around numbers. Like, the state should give us $40 billion or $50 billion. Yeah. MGM: If the state just gives it to you, that's great. Yeah. Kevin Burke: I mean, that would be just for San Francisco alone, that would be like a third of the state's budget or like a quarter of the state's budget for all purposes. Right. Not even, like, housing. The amount of money that spent on housing, that's, like, all of the money that goes to every education system. And so, like, yeah, if you want to give a quarter of the state budget to San Francisco to build affordable housing, yes. MGM: You can build all of, like, I guess you have two choices. You can either build your subsized units by also building market rate at huge quantities, or you can bankrupt the schools. These people market rates so much, they'd rather bankrupt the schools. Kevin Burke: Yeah. I mean, it's just an artifact of the RHNA targets are just an artifact of people basically looking at RHNA numbers and then saying, oh, well, we should propose higher, lower income because it's more important. Which is like, that's reasonable. That makes sense. But it also leads to this sort of distortion where the percentages given to each city don't match up with the percentages that actually get proposed in project developments. And so you end up with this sort of, everyone overshoots their market rate or gets closer to their market rate goal than they do their lower income goal, just as the nature of the way that works out. MGM: And I could see if a place is a poorer, disadvantaged city that is kind of helpless. It's like, oh, "we're more of a ward to the state. Please, you need to give us funds." But San Francisco is a rich. And the thing, too, I hear this the most. San Francisco gets my hackles up, but Beverly Hills claims this. And I say again and again, you're rich. If you really care about subsidized units so much, you can raise the revenue and build it, but you don't. I don't know. It's like this weird, simultaneous helplessness, but just unserious. I don't know. I think the cynical read is just, this is just a bunch of creating a distraction to say why you can't just build new housing. And I think that's the correct read, but I don't know. Kevin Burke: Yeah, so one of the sort of most promising legislative fixes to come out of sort of working on this has just been. I feel like the most effective would just be to triple or quadruple the market rate. RHNA. And then I think you just have fewer places to hide if you're a city, because you need to rezone a lot more parcels. And then also, there wouldn't be so much nitpicking over individual sites because individual sites wouldn't matter as much. And the other thing is that would also sort of insulate you from complaints about, oh, we overshot our market rate and we undershot our lower income. I don't know how politically feasible that would be. But there certainly solve a lot of the kind of problems that we're seeing with sites, inventories, and the sort of RHNA process. MGM: Yeah. Personally, I'm not the hugest fan of IZ, just as far as it's like a weird break you're putting on the new housing. I'd rather find different ways to, I think, decouple it. I mean, I do like the per- building integration to some degree. I don't know. I feel like decoupling it instead and just having a big fund full of, here's your subsidized funds instead of. I don't know. That's another question, too. How far are your subsidized funds going? We have all these different countywide measures, but the money doesn't go that far due to different reasons. And I guess it's good to have the numbers, because it's like a target for number of units, which is the important part. But if you're just failing at doing it, unlike the market rate, there aren't the same penalties. But I don't know, it's tough. It's a historically big problem. How do you build subsidized units in big quantities? And it's not easy. Kevin Burke: Yeah, I mean, the other issue that people don't really talk about is that it sort of shifts enforcement to all of these different apartment owners. If I have, for example, a ten-unit subdivision, which I live in Walnut Creek, and there are a fair number of these. So now you're doing one unit at below market rates, and so now you need to be responsible for income verification and policing and making sure that this person isn't like renting out the unit. And I mean, you've seen, even in San Francisco, which in theory has the resources to do something like this, a lot of their subsidized units are just vacant because of various sort of difficulties with administering the program. MGM: How do you get on? Do you have a billion different queues? A lot of times you do. It's like, if you're looking for affordable housing, it's like, first you need to find out, how does this work? Then? What are the million pieces of paperwork I need to do to apply for a million queues and then wait for seven years at least? I don't know. I don't think you can look at the end like, this is good for people. And I'd say, like, the people who actually are, like, look at our politician class. How many people are living, in deed restricted, subsidized units? Essentially zero. And I think it's a sign that we consider, "oh, it's housing for others." I think if we had more people actually deal with these headaches, we probably would remedy some of these headaches, but it's kind of a tangent. So here's the big thing. Housing elements are incredibly exciting in, I think, some of the larger scale--, at least it's how we're doing business right now. And it's nice to see all these cities whine, but I think you're dealing with Alameda County, Contra Costa county over in the East Bay, and also East Bay for Everyone is dealing with San Francisco too, because why not? But there's so many cities between the two of those. You're talking about 35 cities, cities and towns. And I don't know, it feels like I've been keeping track myself in, like, Palo Alto, I've spoken a few times mostly to taunt them, because I feel like, I think a better process than seeing compliance is seeing them screw. But how do you deal with all these different. There's too much going on, too many deadlines. I'll just be honest. I feel overwhelmed and confused. Does your workflow just actually mesh with us pretty well, or how do you deal with the chaos? Kevin Burke: Yeah, it's a good question. So we've tended to focus on jurisdictions where sort of regulation is a bigger barrier to getting housing approved. And so this tends to be the more exclusive jurisdictions. MGM: So places that you are not looking at would be, for example? Kevin Burke: Well, like, lower income. I mean, like Antioch, for, like, we did not really look that hard. Okay. MGM: You did have mean. But I think in particular, we were. Kevin Burke: Looking at, like, Rockridge, we were looking at kind of missing middle, because the issue in Oakland, I mean, you'll see this again and again, and kind of housing elements is they were concentrating so much of the new development in sort of the lower income east Oakland areas and less in the hills. Not that they should be putting everything in the hills, but, like, every neighborhood should have its part and more around their downtown bar stations than less around Rockridge. And Rockridge was downzoned in 1970 in response to an affordable housing development that went in there. And so a lot of our sort of efforts went around sort of explaining the historical context to hed and trying to get those reversed. I mean, we were massively successful doing that, and we ended up getting a really strong missing middle program pass, which is now implemented, and also rezonings in Rockridge, which got passed there. And then in Contra Costa County. It's a lot of the housing, a lot of the cities on the 680/ -24 corridor. So, like Orinda, Lafayette, Walnut Creek, and then unincorporated Contra Costa County, which is Alamo, and pockets throughout and Danville have kind of been the cities that I've been focusing on in particular. And in terms of workflows, it's really hard. Basically, I kind of just track this a lot by email. So you try to sign up for everyone's email distribution list, and then they're basically required to send out emails when they have a new draft for review or when the city council is reviewing something. And so then you get those and you kind of circulate. And we collaborate a lot in slack with other people on our team to say, here's what we're sending. Here's our notes on this draft that come in. The other thing is that you can skip a lot of kind of the documents. So it's 600 pages, but you don't necessarily need to read 600 pages of everything. The really big things to focus on are like the sites inventory, the constraints section. So the constraints section is like here are all the different ways that we make it hard to build housing. So we impose parking minimums and then you have to build parking in addition to the housing. Or we set a height limit of 30ft or we set zoning restraints that will permit a maximum of ten units per acre. Right. Or we have minimum lot size rules and so they're supposed to write all these down. So that's another thing you can ding cities on is like you're not analyzing these constraints properly. Here's a constraint that you didn't analyze and then the other one is programs, which is like your programs are supposed to fix all the things in your constraints section and make it possible to achieve the housing. We've been able to get some pretty good programs in, in a lot of different cities for things that they're supposed to do to facilitate sort of housing development. MGM: Yeah, I guess you have kind of like the distribution of how you're trying to set up housing within your district. And then there is the overall hurdles that apply to any single parcel. I think those are both interesting. I think the overall hurdles, it's nice to fix it there. I mean I think it's nice if we fix that at the state level because a lot of these bad policies should just be stripped away at every single juncture. Again, I mean I don't follow the East Bay stuff, you know, closely and you know, kind of at a very top level familiar with a lot of these jurisdictions. But I guess my main experience is Palo Alto and I can see these sins come again and example. I mean I think this is probably a running trend in most places. You talk about where are you going to put your new housing? And to like if I were the God know, doing this in Palo Alto, I would say around the two Caltrain stations it should look like Hong Kong, it should go very tall. And they've done something in their downtown, on University, but on their other one there is a place like Old Palo Alto, I used to live in ADU there, and it's old bungalows, small little things, they're all really expensive now obviously. And they didn't touch this at all. This is a walk from a Caltrain station and they say oh we're looking for new sites, this doesn't get touched. Instead they put sites up by the highway on former industrial sites. They're looking to tear down retail centers. To me, it's not like I feel like, oh, we need to preserve all retail centers as it is in places. They're looking like, oh, we're going to tear down the McDonald's on Page Mill. It seems to be like that, people eat there. I would rather tear down a bunch of, and make dense a bunch more residential areas. But places, in my experience, they don't touch the residential areas. Is that a pattern that you'd see in most of these places or any places actually touching the residential centers? Kevin Burke: Yeah, absolutely. It's absolutely a pattern. And it's really unfortunate. I mean, it's just very kind of silly is that when you see kind of these big bills come out like Senate Bill 50, which would have rezoned everything around transit kind of by. Right. And the pushback from all these cities is local control. We know best where housing should go. Trust us, we're going to do it. And then they put up these plans where all of the housing is kind of concentrated around big car thoroughfares and away from kind of transit in ways. MGM: That are going to not even thoroughfares like the way Palo Alto is tucking them in industrial areas that are so. And people have done this in the, like Mountain View has done better in the past, but I've done flyering and knocking doors in townhouses built in old industrial centers. And you realize it because you have to walk 2 miles to get to transit anywhere. Kevin Burke: Yeah, so, I mean, the explicit guidance that Danville Town Council gave staff at the start of this process was keep everything away from single family zones. And that was kind of their overarching consideration in where to kind of identify new sites. But yeah, you see this just again and again, like in Contra Costa County, basically, in Contra Costa County, it's a collection of unincorporated areas. So North Richmond is an industrial zone. Crockett, Rodeo, Bay Point, all of these are sort of lower income. All of these have higher populations of minorities, have worse schools, have worse pollution, and then you have kind of higher income, higher white populations, better schools, less pollution, places like Alamo and Saranap and Kensington and even Discovery Bay. And basically a disproportionate amount of the site's inventory is going into the lower income areas with more minorities. Every map they put in in Contra Costa county looks like the same map. And the state has these guidelines, which, thank goodness, they're finally kind of pushing back on this and saying these new laws that pass around fair housing, and they say basically it's not fair to do this. Right. We're not giving people an equal shot at having opportunity. Right. If you talk about the people who are going to be moving into these new apartments, a lot of them are going to be putting the kids in worse school districts. I mean, personally, I think it's a lot easier to keep a good school know and have it accommodate sort of more students in a lot of cases, prevent enrollment declines, which is one thing that you see a lot in the San Juan Valley than it is to take a bad school and sort of transform it into a good. So I think that's just like really unfair that they're doing that. And so finally, this cycle, this state has kind of tools, some tools to push back on things like this. Unfortunately, it is. But, yeah, I mean, this pattern of kind of disproportionate, let's put stuff in industrial sites, let's put stuff in more heavily polluted areas, is unfortunately pretty widespread. MGM: Yeah, I guess it seems to me like maybe it's harder to quantify because there is, as you say, the fair housing, the AFFH requirement as part of this process. And maybe I was a bit naive, but I thought, oh, like Palo Alto doing it this way, this alone will cause them to say this is a fair housing. Think they're, it seems like they're not really saying that not touching single family housing in areas that should be changed is enough of a fair housing violation itself. Or how does that. Kevin Burke: Mean? The issue with the fair housing, the way that the fair housing guidelines came about is the Obama administration put out these fair housing guidelines at the federal level that didn't end up getting implemented. And so someone took those and said, well, we can just implement these in California. So then they basically adopted those for California, passed it, signed into law, and there's a lot of good stuff in there, like you're supposed to analyze sort of like patterns of access, historical segregation. Things have led to segregation. Like in Lafayette, for example, the town was 99% white in 1960, and 13,000 people moved to Lafayette between 1960 and 1970, and it was 99% white in 1970. So they've never had a similar number of people move. So, I mean, you're looking at huge numbers of white residents at a time when segregation was through a number of formal and informal methods enforced in know it'd be harder to get a loan. If you were a black person in Lafayette, your realtor probably wouldn't even show you houses. Not to mention a lot of these homes and subdivisions might have had something in the CCNRs that says you can't sell this house. To a black person. In 1968, they voted to incorporate. In 1974, they passed a general plan that reduced the density on a ton of different sites in Lafayette. And so this is kind of the context. And today it's like an 80% white suburb. A ton of white people moved in and then they basically voted to downs on the town. And since then, it's pretty much stayed really white. They've never had a chance. There's never really been an equal opportunity for black people to move in. Since we've sort of reduced the de facto segregation levels and sort of lending and showing people apartments and home sales, this is the thing that they're trying to reverse. This is the thing that cities are supposed to analyze. The problem is that the guidelines, they're kind of like, you need to explain what you're going to do to remedy this. But they're not really quantifiable for understandable reasons. But the problem is that makes it really hard to enforce versus something like the sites inventory, where the law for sites inventory is basically like you are supposed to show. If you're talking about a non vacant site that's something with any kind of store like business or apartment on it, you're supposed to show substantial evidence that the existing use will discontinue. Right? That's what the law says. It's literally a text of the law. So that's really clear. The city needs to show substantial evidence that this use is going to discontinue. So if you're saying a preschool is going to turn to housing, it's like, show me evidence that this preschool is listed on LoopNet or something like that. MGM: You create a betting market if you want to. That's an actual claim. Kevin Burke: Sure. MGM: As opposed to segregation, like segregational end. How do you adjudicate that in the end? Kevin Burke: Yeah. So developer sent a letter of interest. So that's really clear guideline where fair housing is much more sort of vague. And so similarly, the remedies. How are you judging whether this is an appropriate remedy for fair housing or not? Right. So a lot of it has sort of come down to the discretion of people at HCD and sort of what advocates are pushing for. I will say we've had better than anticipated results. Honestly, I've been grateful for how much HCD is willing to push back, but at the same time, it has been kind of frustrating and it has been a little bit inconsistent, city to city, in terms of what cities can do and what cities can't. Like Orinda, for example, they made no changes to single family zones. Right now it's legal to sell in Orinda like a $4 million mansion. That's 6000 sqft. But if you wanted to build three 2000 square foot triplexes, you could not do that. That doesn't really make sense to me from a fair housing perspective in terms of who can afford Orinda and sort of increasing the amount of affordability and the number of people that have access to opportunity in, you know, Walnut Creek, we were pretty successful in getting a program to reduce the minimum lot sizes in. That's. That's something that I hope HCD will look at and legislators will look at in sort of future iterations of this process. MGM: Yeah, I'm thinking more about like just the quantification part because I feel some, you can talk very broadly about kind know fair housing in the abstract. If quantifying it, there are ways to do it. I mean, you can quantify racial segregation to a large degree. There is data on race populations in different areas and also geographies, I suppose, making that actionable. I worry if you kind of tie it to outcomes, if that will kind of run afoul of race. Quotas are generally not looked upon well in the law. And if you say you can't be segregated white, I don't know if that's going to be kind of an issue. There are ways to kind of look at things that correlate highly with that, or just class stratification. Where are different people at different income levels living? And if you do it that way, you don't have the same race issues. And it seems like it's a pretty good, if you're seeing a bunch of concentrated high income people, you're probably dealing with something that is either downstream of past de facto segregation or just is working to be or de jure segregation and is working to kind of be de facto segregation. On top of that. To look at one thing, and I always pointed the title of this show, a lot of this stuff is exhibited in the form of land values. If you are putting your site inventory on low land values, that's a bad sign. In your city, there really should be something like a reasonable ratio of number of people dwelling on a certain value of land. High land value should have higher numbers of people and vice versa. And I don't think, again, it's harder to do this because we don't actually assess parcels in California as often as we should. But I think we probably could look at that and kind of say, yeah, it's give a mean. I'm just kind of looking at ways you can kind know, give objective grades. Kevin Burke: Exactly. Yeah. So, I mean, we've proposed in Contra Costa County, for example, like a number of tests that we think are reasonable for sort of evaluating fair housing. The mixed use densities in the higher income areas, are they equal to the mixed use densities in the lower income areas? Right. Or do you have, like, for example, if you're proposing 100 units an acre in Bay Point, you should be proposing 100 units an acre in Alamo, single family rezones. So what densities? Basically, the way that this works is when Contra Costa County was first built, like all of Alamo and Danville was zoned for agricultural, with a minimum half acre lot size. And so then later that was turned into basically like, what's called the r-20 zone, which is like a minimum 20,000 square foot lot size. And that zone just does not exist in lower income parts of the county at all. And so, I mean, that fact is just like massively unfair. So you can propose whatever development standards you want for the r 20 zone, but just its existence. MGM: Where are the gentleman farmers supposed to live in the low income places? Kevin Burke: Right. It just does not exist in Crockett. Right? There's no r 20 zone in Crockett or Rodeo or North Richmond. And so, I mean, what we're saying is, like, if you're sort of going to rezone these lower income areas for seven to 17 units per acre, which is a pretty common single family rezoning that they're doing now in these lower income communities, you should also be identifying similar numbers in the higher income communities and rezoning those for seven to 17 units an acre. MGM: I do wonder. This is kind of a question which is looking at different areas. I can make examples in the peninsula, compare Palo Alto, Los Altos Hills. But I'm guessing if you compare, like, Rockridge to Alamo, I mean, I might be off base here, but Danville is kind of, I think, on the same. Like, what is the difference between kind of city core, transit connected areas and bedroom communities, which are kind of badly sited? Some places are rich, but also they're, like, distant. And I suppose if you ask me, should Palo Alto be as dense as Los Altos Hills? I would say it should be denser. Los Alto's Hills is. I mean, if you really ask me, I think it should be depopulated. It's like, it's know, rich jerks living in the hills on giant. It's like if you build towers there, it's very hard to get people to the rest of the area, as opposed to literally Old Palo Alto, is blocks away from Caltrain. That should be where your towers are. I guess that's a question. Is Alamo, like, kind of a badly attached bedroom community, or does it have connectivity? Kevin Burke: So it's a good question. I mean, it's funny how much history I've sort of learned about this area as a process of doing this, because you really need to understand the history to sort of figure out why things have happened and sort of where we're in this place that we're in. MGM: Most people only know it because Steph Curry lives there. Kevin Burke: Right, right. Well, he moved to Atherton when they moved to San Francisco. MGM: Yeah, because he was part of that whole letter thing, too. Kevin Burke: Yeah. Wow. MGM: He hits all the great places. Kevin Burke: But, I mean, Alamo has, like, tens of black residents in a community, so he and Draymond Green deciding to move there, like, significantly increase the black population in Alamo, which is really unfortunate. So, I mean, the history of Alamo is that it had a railroad running through it, which is owned by Southern Pacific Railroad and was freight only and ran from Pleasant Hill all the way down to Pleasanton and got bought by the East Bay Parks and Recreation district in 1980 and turned into the Iron Horse Trail. So, I mean, there's no reason why you couldn't have ran past, derail there and set up stations and done everything. And it was also initially targeted by Bart Highway 680 for heavy rail right down the middle of the freeway there. And then that was opposed by residents of Alamo, residents of Danville, residents of Santa Ramon, who said, we don't want our communities to change, and we don't want new development that's going to come from having a barge station in our town. And so that's why those plans were shelved. So, I mean, there's kind of like a circular argument here, which is we can't have more density because we don't have good transportation networks, but then also, we can't ever get good transportation networks because we don't have good density. Right. If you look at the density that you need to have a decent bus connection, it's higher than it is in Alamo, but you could build apartments and then run a County Connection bus, and that would make the bus a lot more effective. MGM: Yeah, I guess there's, like, different levels because, like, Atherton, where he moved to, that's another case that was on Caltrain, and they ripped out the station, you know, which is just abhorrent, whereas Los Altos Hills and like Hillsborough, objectively, they never had transit. They've always been just rich jerks. But I'm sure the Iron Horse trail, it was sold as railbanking, and I'm sure they'll take a withdrawal any day now and actually put rail back. Kevin Burke: I mean, so, like Walnut Creek, for example, they took the entire right of way and turned it into South Broadway, which is this really kind of silly, almost two mile long road with no left or right exits that duplicates an existing road on South Main. But the parcel is probably like 50 acres. You could have imagined, like a big park space, open space, tennis courts, any number of sports fields that you wanted. Instead, they thought, well, the best way to use this former train track right away would be put in a new road and some sound walls. MGM: Yeah, I'll say. I'm always of two binds with bike trails out of old railroads, because in theory, you could bring them back, make them dual use or something. But then I think the biggest issue is, okay, in almost all cases, you're going to have to widen it, at least in some areas. And just getting that acquisition of the right of way is, like, disastrously expensive. I don't know. I think it shouldn't be, because I don't know if this is kind of an abstract issue about, like, in my dream world, a land value tax. I think that you would say they kind of, along that corridor, you should tax it higher in someone's backyard that abuts it, like the back end of your parking lot. You should actually kind of like. Are you sure you want that back end of your want? Wouldn't you rather give it back to the city? Kevin Burke: I don't too. You know, even having a bike trail existing, they could be doing a lot more to facilitate sort of access. I mean, like a lot of the properties, Walnut Creek is a pretty good trail network. Not just the Iron Horse Trail, but also they have canals running through it, and each of the canals has a trail running next to it. But I mean, the properties along the canals, they don't have a right of way that opens onto the trail, the bike trail. All the entrance and exit from your property is to the road. And so that's the thing that you could address with a code. You could say if you're building a new house, it needs to have bike access, like a concrete ramp and a gate leading down to the trail, so that we can sort of facilitate using these networks that we have. But that doesn't exist, unfortunately, right now. MGM: That's another thing. I feel like on the dream world thing, better public acquisition would allow cities to have, like, let's create a cut through in all these areas right now. If you have bad cul de sacs and things that aren't well connected, they are never remedied. Well. And I don't know, maybe, I guess in theory, that could be part of kind of a larger city, transportation planning, and maybe it will be out of self interest eventually, but right now, it could be pretty dismal in a lot of places. Kevin Burke: Yeah, definitely. MGM: But that's kind of a side thing. So your general take is even places, even a lot of places that seem to be not well connected, it might be worth it to really put their feet to the fire and say, no, sorry. And also, we want to have you remedy the transportation networks you should have had or not disinvested in. Kevin Burke: Yes. Broadly, yes. And I think the other thing is that all of our sort of wealthier areas are in a lot better position to deal with all these problems than our lower income areas, who don't have the resources. So just as an example, the other thing is that a lot of times, they're not even trying. So a lot of the complaints. Alamo. So Contra Costa County submitted a draft housing element. So this is an example. Kind of like, when I talk know, we've asked the county to analyze just all of the inequalities exist. I mean, here's one is, like, when the county submits a new housing element, there's a group called the Alamo Improvement Association. And so they mail every single Alamo resident with every single site in Alamo that's on the housing element, and they know, here's where to send your comments. Send them to Candice Anderson, the county supervisor. And they don't say yes or no, but it's, like, pretty clear which way they want you to go. And so as a result of the comments that were submitted on the housing element, there were maybe 80 comments, and 65 of them were from Alamo residents. And Alamo is maybe 10% of the total unincorporated population of the county. And they're submitting, like, tons and tons and tons of the comments on the housing element. MGM: What are the dynamics? Because I know most places, I mean, this kind of goes a lot of places you find, and you say, well, if you don't get an order, we're going to disincorporate you. And Alamo is unincorporated, but they seem to be thriving in their own sense within the unincorporated county. I guess that's also a big question of, like, what do cities gain and lose by incorporation? And what is the. They're apparently still calling the shots, I guess, even though. Kevin Burke: Yeah, I think the tides kind of turned a little bit now that each city has kind of like, now that I think the RHNA mechanisms are taking into account sort of how wealthy you are and how sort of jobs rich your communities are and sort of access to its transit. I mean, even a place like Danville, when you compare to somewhere like Brentwood, it's so much closer to BARt and so much closer to San Francisco that it sort of scores higher, even though if it's 1015 minutes down the freeway. But yeah, I think you see this just basically anytime anyone submits an application for new housing in any of these racially concentrated areas of affluence, I see this over and over again. It's unincorporated Walnut Creek, Alamo. I was looking at one in Discovery Bay today. There's just tons of community opposition. Like, the people know how to organize to fight these projects. It doesn't even matter what's being proposed. MGM: People live in Discovery Bay. But it's a weird canal city. Kevin Burke: Yeah, it's an interesting mean because it's way out. MGM: It's past Antioch, but I've wanted to visit it for a while. But what is it like? Kevin Burke: I've honestly, I've never been, but the demographics, it's significantly wider and significant. The median income is higher than the surrounding communities. MGM: Are there people working like the FIRE industry? Is it similar people that work and live in Walnut Creek or. I don't understand why it's like Walnut Creek. That's too hustling and bustling for me. I need to be out in Discovery Bay. Kevin Burke: You know, I think the wealthy communities, back to my point of, like, the wealthy communities, I think, have more resources to solve these problems. So Alamo, like, a lot of the complaints when you go and read through all these letters are school pickup traffic is bad, specifically around Rancho Romero elementary, which is right on the main kind of thoroughfare through town, which in Alamo is called Danville Boulevard. And then it changes names as you go to different towns. And then you go and look at it and you look at how people are getting to school, and it's probably, I'd say 80% to 95% is like individual parents dropping off their kids in a car. MGM: That's the thing people point to. They do like overhead photos. This is a new thing where people have a weird caravan of single family. It's a drive through, dropping off your kids, and that didn't exist decades ago. It's weird. Kevin Burke: Yeah. So, I mean, no wonder you're upset about traffic is because you have this incredibly walkable, bikeable location. It steps from the Iron Horse Trail and 80% to 95% of parents are doing pickups every day in a car, which means that the traffic is going on to adjacent side streets and it's going on to the main thoroughfare. And it's like every day, 03:00 and 08:00 in the morning is kind of a disaster. And then you say, well, what are you actually doing to mitigate this? And the answer is nothing. The county is doing nothing. They say it's the school district's fault. The school district is doing nothing. They say that everything outside of the school facilities the county's fault. And I mean, if you look at, for example, it's funny to mention Palo Alto, but if you look at Palo Alto, they have an amazing program for this and they've been focusing for decades now on safe routes to school and investing in making sure that it's safe for every kid to get to school. And as a result, the mode share for private auto in Palo Alto is under 50%. So that means that more than 50% of all kids at every single level at elementary school are walking or biking or taking the bus or carpooling to get to school. MGM: I will say it's good, but also bleak dimension of that because Palo Alto is still so car brained that they're talking about one know because they need to redo all the Caltrain crossings. This is really off topic, but I just want to very briefly, Churchill cuts through Caltrain. So it's either they have to just cut it off, they can make it bike only, pedestrian only, they could just cut it entirely or they could build a very expensive car tunnel. And people are saying, oh, we need the car tunnel because if we don't have this, everyone's going to have to drive so much further to drop their kids off of school and everyone should be able to walk to school in Palo Alto. That's absurd. But people are still car brained. We're getting late in the episode, but I think I just kind of want to talk about what everyone wants to talk about. The sexiest part of all is builder's remedy. I guess builder's remedy is when you miss your deadlines. Question one, are all the deadlines closed in northern California? I can't really keep track of where everyone is and also what is a deadline versus what is an extension. What is the status of everywhere you've been seeing? I guess you can talk about your places, but are most of them either failed or flunked at this point, or passed or flunked. Kevin Burke: Yeah, it's a good question. I think about half of the jurisdictions are in compliance and half of them are not. And so, I mean, it's not just, if you're not in compliance, it's not just builders remedy. There's also a number of grants that are tied to sort of housing element compliance, and those are grants for affordable housing and grants for transportation. So, for example, MTC, which is kind of the Bay Area, overwhelming transportation authority, had some grant money to give out. Walnut Creek applied for and got $7 million worth of grants from MTC that relied on the city having a compliant housing element by December 31. And so they got that. But I was kind of pressing people starting in January of this year and saying, we need to be trying harder to hit this deadline. I live in Wallen Creek, which I'm saying, you know, I don't think we're on pace to hit this right now. And finally, after a lot of teeth pulling, we kind of got something that was successful. MGM: But, yeah, withholding funds for affordable housing seems like really unlikely to upset the people who are segregationists living in rich neighborhoods. Kevin Burke: Right. MGM: But transportation funds, I could see how that. Does that actually motivate people in your experience? Kevin Burke: Yeah, to an extent. To an extent. I think the builder's remedy is sort of the bigger penalty. MGM: It certainly seems to be scaring people. It scares the worst people in ways that I appreciate, as opposed to the other stuff. Kevin Burke: So we've seen some people are kind of quiet about their builder's remedy stuff. And you see a lot of things where people are submitting, basically like a one page sheet of paper that says, here's my proposed builder's remedy project. And then once you submit that, you have basically six months to submit an actual application. And so people are submitting a thing that says, here's my, I'm just doing this to vest my developers rights, which is like, even if you get into compliance, I still have this valid application from when you're out of compliance, and then you have six months from that date to actually go forward and pay all the fees and submit actual renderings and plans and everything else that you need to do to get a permit. Yes. MGM: So that's a question I have. Okay, let's go back and just very quickly. 30 seconds. Builder's remedy. Go explain what it is. Kevin Burke: So the builder's remedy is if you don't have a compliant housing element, the law says anyone can submit an application of any density on any residential parcel in your city. As long as 20% of the units are affordable to people making lower incomes, you can build whatever you want. And so in theory, this should pave the way for kind of like towers and places where there's high demand that's being constrained by the zoning. In practice, developers are kind of herd animals, and a lot of them are scared of retribution and are scared of political blowback, or they live in a community and they don't want sort of blowback, or they think that staff has significant power to sort of hurt their other applications or slow down their other applications through sort of exercising their own discretion. And so they're kind of been reluctant to use this in a lot of ways. MGM: People have always said it, developers are too pro social, they're not antagonistic enough. Kevin Burke: The other thing I would say is there are some unanswered sort of legal questions around this. So unless you have the stomach for a protracted legal battle, especially on a project by project basis, where if you're looking at almost certainly going to the California appeals court, maybe to the Supreme Court, that's several years being added onto your timeline. So unless you're proposing something that's, like, immensely profitable and the profits can help fund your legal battle, something like this 17 story building in Palo Alto, a lot of developers aren't necessarily looking to have that fight. MGM: Yeah, it'd be interesting to take odds. What is everyone's percentage they think of this stuff is going to get built because you have to kind of multiply your profit margin by that ods, that it's going to be struck down somewhere. I don't know, 25%, 40, 60. I don't know. Kevin Burke: But I think the best strategy is kind of a political one. So you submit one project which says this project complies with the zoning, and it may make the neighbors unhappy, but I'd like to build it. And the zoning says that I should be able to build it. And then you submit a second builder's remedy project for like twice or three times the. MGM: Yeah. Kevin Burke: And you say, if you monkey around with my application too much or make me know years and years of neighborhood meetings, then I'm just going to do the builder's remedy project instead. MGM: That's what they did with the mall Valco down in Cupertino. They basically had their real thing, and then they had their kind of work taking the SB 35 short circuit, and that helped them get back. Let's go back to the negotiating table and do it the right way. And, yeah, I think that's a really good point. But, yeah, I think, as you're saying, there's hurdles to doing it. One is it has not been tested, so there's large scale statewide challenges in court. And these are moving along. I think I just saw, there's news today that it seems to be looking pretty good that it will be upheld. Like, this is broadly valid, but there's site specific lawsuits. Sequa, the Environmental Quality act allows environmental impact reports, and if you're not part of an existing impact report for a kind of existing zoning, you're open to lawsuits there. And it can cost a lot of money and a lot of headaches to be compliant with that. So I guess there's two different avenues for lawsuits alone. Kevin Burke: Yeah, definitely. MGM: And I suppose the third thing, this is actually something you wrote in your cron article, is that you can still impose higher, essentially, impact fees, I guess, for sewer infrastructure and stuff, too. And I guess it kind of surprises me because it feels like, how do people not exploit that and just impose arbitrary impact fees to kind of stop it, I guess? Does this have to be compliant with actually some sort of standard for infrastructure impact fees for sewers, et cetera? It seems like that's actually kind of dangerous. Kevin Burke: There's kind of two different angles looking at this. So one is, unfortunately, the way the state law kind of works is like someone proposes doing something bad, like in Berkeley saying that students are pollution, and then the state law comes up to prevent cities from doing the bad thing. And you saw this again and again with adus, but kind of, there aren't enough sort of builders remedy cases or sort of established kind of law to fix the bad thing. On the flip side, though, because this is so rare, you can't oppose a fee after an application has been submitted, and because Atherton, for example, doesn't have a multifamily zone, they might not have thought to write down here are impact fees for multifamily apartments, because multifamily apartments are illegal in our. MGM: If you have stuff on the books, you can throw it at them, but it'll be very suspicious and difficult to get away with if you have a new impact fee or something. Kevin Burke: It's not legal to do that after you submit an application, right? Because it's kind of like the double jeopardy thing or whatever, right, where you can't invent a crime for someone to be accused of after the fact. MGM: I was wondering that has that effect with existing laws, too. For example, let's look like SB 330 for no net loss. It seems like. Well, that's essentially an impact fee for working off a parcel or it's not an open slate. There are certain regulations, but those are already on the books. That's interesting. Okay, cool. It does make me wonder, because I always think about new forms, like no net loss or something, for example. Like no net loss for different cultural institutions or something. That'd be interesting. But it is interesting. I guess if you're doing that, you can't retroactively protect stuff. You have to get ahead of the curve. Kevin Burke: Yeah. Though, I mean, for historical preservation, its own can of worms, where a lot of times suddenly people become interested in a parcel's historic qualities only because someone has proposed doing something actually, like, interesting with it. MGM: Yeah, I think it can be a very ad hoc. If you want to oppose housing, I am on the books. I support preservation for protecting cinemas. I think we know net loss for cinema screens, but that's my own kind of very personal hatchet. But I do agree that making it kind of general and not abused is pretty hard. But no, as we're mentioning, there's a couple of builders remedy things on the books being looked at. I think it'd be interesting to look more about some of these things as they're going down the pipe. But what are you looking out for? Are stuff going on in East Bay? Because I've seen the ones in the peninsula. Are the places in East Bay rich enough to justify any of these things? Kevin Burke: I think it depends right now on sort of the individual property owners and their sort of willingness to kind of stomach this. Right. So, I mean, if you bought some property in 1990 and your property taxes are low and you're living on it, for example, maybe you can fund a court case indefinitely. I think I saw one in Pacifica that sort of fit those parameters where someone proposed building like 40 townhomes or something, and probably they can fund a suit and they can kind of wait out the city and get more clarity on the court cases and kind of go forward with that application. But yeah, I think another thing is the more that people are sort of writing about the builder's remedy, the more you might see people taking interest in sort of submitting applications that fit this. MGM: It's too bad lawsuits cost so much these days. We used to have a society where people just put up nuisance houses and all this. It's like, wow, that was cool when, I mean, just personal grievances can do so much to make stuff happen. Kevin Burke: There are basically legal nonprofits. Both legal nonprofits and the attorney general are sort of interested in establishing case law here. So, I mean, we're taping this on Wednesday the 13th, just yesterday it was announced that the attorney general is intervening in La Cañada Flintridge, where there's one. MGM: I was referring to before about good news. Kevin Burke: Yeah, there is sort of legal assistance available, but, yeah, it just takes a long time. And if interest rates are 9% and so you have a loan on a $3 million property that's going to add a substantial amount to your cost, you're looking almost $300,000 a year just in borrowing costs to sort of keep that loan going. MGM: That is a wild thing. It's like, boy, if we had builders remedy plus a zero interest rate environment, that would have been an interesting combination. Kevin Burke: But it's kind of crazy. MGM: We're still seeing stuff in the constraints we have here. Well, I think we're over an hour. Anything else you want to kind of wrap up with here? Kevin Burke: Yeah, so, I mean, the thing I think is really interesting about housing elements is like, I lived in San Francisco for a long time, but I was still participating in the East Bay because you can be like one of 200 people who's like standing in a queue at the San Francisco city hall to comment on whatever the housing policy is in San Francisco, because it gets so much know, or calling Nancy Pelosi to ask for x y or. But, you know, if you're looking at housing, like a lot of times we're the only people submitting comments on a housing. Uh, and so you can kind of be like the expert. If you just take like an hour reading through a document, you probably know more about that document than anyone, except like five people on the planet. And you can kind of really shape things in a positive way by taking that time and submitting a comment, even if you don't think you're an expert. Like, I'm not an expert. I just, like, read stuff and I say, does this make sense? And if it doesn't, then I ask questions or I submit a comment about it. And we've had a lot of success in sort of shaping things and moving things in a positive direction. It is a really steep barrier to getting started. We're obviously always happy to sort of help have new volunteers and onboard new volunteers for doing this kind of work. But I would encourage you to get involved because I think this is a really powerful sort of lever for making change in your community. And if you do have questions, please reach out. And I'm happy to talk with anyone about this stuff. It's pretty nerdy, but I like it because I think it's really successful at sort of helping get housing built. MGM: One, a final question relating to that I mentioned earlier, speaking of Palo Alto, I'd mostly taunt them because they're so distinctly hostile that honestly I kind of just want them to screw up and get punished because I think that's more of a chance of them doing the right thing. But I guess that's a question. Bend or break? How often do you think you can actually bend? People do the right thing and kind of get better outcomes through actual reforms? And how many places, if any, in your opinion, do you think, oh, they're past working with, they just need to be punished or broken up or put. Kevin Burke: It's a good question because I mean, even a lot of these jurisdictions that I've thought, I kept saying what are they doing? Because they kept just submitting the same thing over and over again. Yeah, it was incomprehensible and a lot of them ended up submitting really good programs. So I do think kind of the lever of the builder's remedy and kind of state certification is pretty substantial in a lot of these places. I mean, San Francisco, for example, you're seeing stuff that was just not know and there are reasons to be disappointed, but it's been so successful. And all of the reason that this constraints reduction stuff is happening is because of the threat of losing affordable housing funding. And advocates working SF is a good case. MGM: Insofar as they're such a bad politics and practice, they should not be this bad. They're stagnant and they're stuck in ruts, but they can be reformed as opposed to like Atherton or Hillsborough or Alto, like, I think they're honestly just an hoa for the worst people in the world and they're never going to be better than that. Kevin Burke: I don't and that's in know if you strengthen the builder's remedy and then half a decade from now people will be significantly more scared and a lot more incentivized to try to hit their numbers or people be ready on the day to submit the applications. I think this is the first year that people have been aware of the builder's remedy and that exists and it's been kind of slow to sort of percolate through the community. But I think certainly in eight years people are going to be ready on the spot. MGM: Yeah, I think this cycle is crazy. Next cycle is going to be nuts. But yeah, thanks for the deep dive. And if people want to find you or find more about East Bay for Everyone, Where should they go? Kevin Burke: Oh, man. We're online at eastbayforeveryone.org. I have a website at Kevin Burke dot dev, although I don't post as much as I used to. I have a Twitter account, but I don't post there anymore. I guess you can find me on Bluesky or Threads. Yeah. Search for East Bay for Everyone and go from there. Cool. MGM: Thanks for having the time. It's been fun. Kevin Burke: Absolutely. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you, Mark. This is a lot of fun. MGM: Cool. We have been talking to Kevin Burke, all about housing elements and much more. And as you heard at the end, we did record this in mid December. You can find this episode and all previous episodes of this radio show at the website, seethecat.org. This a presentation of KZSU Stanford.