The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
How to Repair America’s Broken Housing System — with Dr. Jenny Schuetz
Thu, 14 Nov 2024
Dr. Jenny Schuetz, a nationally renowned economist, author, and policy expert on housing and land use, joins Scott to discuss trends and structural shifts occurring in the housing market, America’s broken housing system, and potential policy solutions. Follow Jenny, @jenny_schuetz. Scott opens with his thoughts on FTC Chair Lina Khan’s uncertain future under a second Trump administration. Algebra of happiness: How Scott copes during hard times. Subscribe to No Mercy / No Malice Buy "The Algebra of Wealth," out now. Follow the podcast across socials @profgpod: Instagram Threads X Reddit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
What are the main problems with America's housing system?
A bunch of the big institutional investors went into neighborhoods that had foreclosed and boarded up homes, bought them, and at least rehabbed them enough to be habitable, got renters in, so they stabilized some of the neighborhoods that were hardest hit.
You may argue, you know, we'd like them to sell to homeowners once the mortgage markets loosen up, but they did perform a really important service because they have access to capital when other people don't.
What do you think of these sort of cities and startups where, and my understanding is, there's certain big swaths of land in California and other states that have been incorporated by investors. And my understanding is one of the motivations or the opportunities they see is a lack of zoning and the ability to just, you know, kind of build, baby, build.
What do you think of these sort of startup cities?
So there's a big one outside of the Bay Area that's gotten a lot of political pushback. My sense is part of the problem there is that there was intentional secrecy on the front end. So they were buying up a lot of land and trying to develop plans for this without revealing who was behind it. And that comes across as secretive and undemocratic. And so people are kind of nervous about this.
We do have older examples of planned cities, so Celebration in Florida, Columbia, Maryland, Reston Town Center in Virginia, where there was a big master-planned city. Many of those are lovely places to build, and people want to be in a place that has housing and restaurants and public space and parks. And there are some efficiencies to doing these in kind of large scale.
We see that also within neighborhoods within cities, You know, in Washington, D.C., where I live, a number of the big new neighborhoods around Union Market and the Navy Yards Ballpark, those were done as big master plan communities. So those can be really nice places, and you have some economies of scale, and the infrastructure is provided.
I think the sort of concern of, are private companies doing this going to be accountable to voters, is worth a conversation. I'm also a little skeptical that you can build a city and fill it with tenants who won't at some point then... want to take control over the democratic process.
So maybe you build, you know, forever California, 10 years down the line, the people who've moved in there decide they actually don't want to continue building housing and they turn into NIMBYs. That strikes me as a very plausible outcome down the line.
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