Dee Davis (00:27)
Good morning and welcome to the Management Under Construction podcast. I'm Dee Davis.
Brad Wyant (00:32)
and I'm Brad Wyant
Dee Davis (00:33)
And we wanted to let you know right off the top today, folks, that this is Brad's next to last episode. We are so sad that Brad is leaving us, but he's going on to wonderful things. Brad, can you tell us why you're leaving the show?
Brad Wyant (00:48)
I can, it's a combination of different things, but the primary factor is that I just moved to a new city, I'm trying to nest and build a new personal life in this place, and being able to spend my weekends doing the things that somebody my age wants to be doing. I want to be trying to find that life partner and spend time with them, try to build a new friend network out here. But also it has a little bit to do with the fact that
Secret Service, the work that I'm doing is a lot harder to talk about on this podcast due to the nature of that work. And obviously I've left the construction industry. So whether that's temporary or not, aside, it's hard to bring the things that I used to be to bring to the table in terms of my career on this cast and to be able to support the topics that make the show run But still a huge supporter of what Dee's trying to do here and very sad to be leaving, but
I know that the journey will continue and I'm sure she'll have some great guests on so please keep tuning in for all of the great content that's going to be coming your way.
Dee Davis (01:47)
And we're gonna miss you so much, Brad. My whole staff has been lamenting for weeks about the recordings of these final episodes with you. And we're all very, very sad to see you go, but so happy for you that you're moving on to wonderful things. And we appreciate you and your participation in this cast so much for the last two seasons.
Brad Wyant (02:11)
Well, let's go out on a high note. I'm going to try to give us our best cast yet with a passion topic of mine that I hope you'll all take some interest into because it affects our daily lives. It affects our business, the construction world, and it's something that we really have to ask ourselves as we enter the middle part of the 21st century here of what we're going to do about the housing issues that we face.
Brad Wyant (02:36)
the inspiration for this cast came about after I read a book called Paved Paradise, How Parking Explains the World. And it's a very NPR book for those of you thinking this is such a Brad book. it came back to me after I read an NPR article about the book and part of the interview went over why the author wrote the book. He said that
Basically, this whole thesis for the book was that suburban building codes have been infected with this virus of parking minimums that are causing the cost of construction to rise and to push some development out of economic possibility. Whereas we're a car-loving society that demands parking be cheap, convenient, and available, which is very difficult to offer, all three of those things, the cost of having enough parking spaces and garages to meet those demands is so high that we spend much more
on our buildings than we should. His data suggests that a single parking space in a dense area can cost as much as $100,000. But on the other hand, in the neighborhoods surrounding many of our cities and towns, we observe suburban sprawl. Many single-family homes packed close together with little public transportation connecting them, and highways that become ever more congested as more farmland is converted to housing developments. I'm sure people that listen to this podcast have seen that picture.
of 80 cars on the highway compared with 80 people on a bus and just how much space on the roads those cars take up compared to public transportation like a train or something. And we're seeing it in Denver and Boulder suburbs. The whole stretch between Denver and Boulder seems to be turning into these really ticker type housing developments where these houses are just crunched down on top of each other no matter where you look.
where there used to be farmland. Friends of mine tell me that that's happening in other cities near them too. here where I'm in DC, some of the suburbs are the way they're gonna be and they're never gonna change, but some of the suburbs further out are getting really dense and are seeing this kind of development.
The question of this cast today is what's really going on and what should we do about it? But before we go to that, I'd love to hear what Dee's idea of a perfect living situation is, because I think that's going to bring a lot of context to how we talk about this today.
Dee Davis (04:46)
Well, I'm a certified country girl. So my perfect living situation is as far from any dense living in city as possible. and of course that's within reason. So people like me who love to live out and I live in a teeny tiny little farming town in Northern Colorado that when you walk through our little
main part of town, looks like you could film a Hallmark movie That's exactly what our little downtown looks like. It's extremely picturesque, it's very small town. And my neighbors are not on top of me, it's very quiet, that's my ideal. There's nature all around me, but not everybody has that ideal.
Where I am is great because it's somewhat convenient. I don't mind driving 10, 15, 20 minutes to whatever I want to get to, but that's the thing. And we're going to talk about that some more in this cast is that when you choose to live out and get away from those dense urban areas, there's a certain amount of inconvenience that comes with that. was raised in a, on a mountain where we had no grocery stores and no high school and
Brad Wyant (05:56)
Mm-hmm.
Dee Davis (05:56)
you had to drive down a mountain to go grocery shopping or to go to school. Once I got to high school, I had an hour bus ride back and forth to school every day because we lived in a very rural area. I lived down a dirt road. I know that's like a thing. People are like a dirt road. What's that? And my house in California is,
three quarters of a mile down a dirt road. I like it like that. Put some pot holes in that baby. Slow those people down. Keep them from coming down my road. That's how I like to live. There's a lot of people who are like, no, I want the convenience of having everything, five minutes away without driving. So different strokes for different folks.
Brad Wyant (06:23)
you
Dee Davis (06:38)
But I am curious about that $100,000 per parking space that you mentioned. you don't mean $100,000 to build it. what's that $100,000 figure?
Brad Wyant (06:49)
I think he's talking not just about the cost to pave and to paint parking spaces or to put in a garage. I think he's also talking about the cost of the real estate, how much that land is worth. And when you start including that kind of figure, I think it makes more sense to talk about a six figure amount. But that becomes an interesting question because it's like, OK, how much real estate do you give to the car? In New York, obviously,
None. owns a car in New York. Or if you do, you're a multi-multi-billionaire. But in the suburbs where, like you said, you have to own a car to get around, or even more important, in rural areas where you really need to own a car, not just a bicycle or something, yeah, that parking space probably doesn't cost as much because the land is worth less, but also it's essential. So you have to have a car.
I'm not sure that he breaks down in the book how he gets to that hundred thousand dollars. It's been a minute since I read it. But in suburbs that are especially wealthy suburbs, I think I could see the math on that. some of the suburbs around some of the nicer cities in the country where the land is just very valuable. It makes sense to me that that would be how much it would be for a parking space.
Dee Davis (07:54)
Yeah, that does make more sense when you're talking about the cost of real estate, one of my favorite things to talk about when we talk about how expensive parking is, and I hate paying for parking, because I'm a country girl, the thought of paying for parking really makes me mad. And go into places that are more dense, where it's difficult to find parking, that stresses me out and upsets me every single time.
And I remember the last time I went to San Francisco, which was quite a few years ago now, maybe 10 or 12 years ago. we flew there and then walked everywhere and took public transportation. And I remember seeing signs. for parking. And it was $50 to park.
that was more than 10 years ago. That same parking spot today is probably 75 or $80 for anybody who's silly enough to rent a car in the Bay Area. You just don't do that. You just get around with public transportation and walk because as you said, New York's the same way. Forget about it. There's no parking. And even if there were, you couldn't afford it.
Brad Wyant (09:00)
Right, it's such a privilege to have a car to take you to exactly where you want to go. And it's ridiculous that you don't need it. In most of the Bay Area, you really don't need a car. So why own one? And if you do have the occasion to get out to Yosemite or something like that, there are buses, but you could rent a car. when you do the math, a lot cheaper than paying for parking, paying for the car, paying for the insurance on the car, paying for gas, all these things. So it works out. ⁓
But well put, think the cost of parking certainly varies by suburb, varies by place, varies by how valuable the land underneath that spot is. to return to the thesis of the cast and the idea here, what are we gonna do about the cost of housing and the cost of these idyllic suburbs that we both really like the idea of having a yard, having space, having privacy?
but still being near enough to the world to enjoy the conveniences of a grocery store Where did this idea start? That there was this happy medium between total urban density, downtown, never owning a car and living on a farm, work truck, farm truck, tractor being your mode of transportation.
The American dream that many GIs had when they were returning from World War II was to own their own single-family house, a car, and to leave the cities in favor of the suburbs or to leave the farms, as the case may be. Many Americans have since realized that dream, but the cost of living in suburbs surrounding major cities has skyrocketed. San Francisco, like we were just talking about, LA, Chicago, Boston, New York, Detroit,
These are all surrounded by some of the wealthiest and most expensive suburbs to live in in the world. These towns are actively preventing mass transit from connecting these suburbs with downtown in the hopes of keeping crime and homeless people out. If you want to reference for that, take a look at all of the protests that went on in Santa Monica when LA's Metropolitan Transit Authority was trying to connect the Purple Line. I think it was the time. Now it's something else. Now they've all got it.
letters, which I'm mystified by. But there were people coming out in droves, hippie drippy surfer type people picketing and going nuts over the idea of public transportation reaching their safe little spaces. So making it so that towns are only reachable by car has so far worked for many of these towns in the sense that crime and homelessness are low, but
having no public transportation or having inconvenient, very long trip public transportation prevents cheap labor needed for retail shops and home services from reaching these neighborhoods. So Aspen, for instance, to give the most extreme example, has become so wealthy and so privileged that people that work in those coffee shops can't afford to live there and have to own a car and have to drive.
from an hour or more away to get to these jobs. They're having a huge affordability of labor crisis in that area right now. The old style main street of small towns in America with a small strip of street side parking in front of two and three story buildings is illegal to build in most places according to the author. These developments would not meet the parking minimums required by most suburban building codes today.
Which is crazy to me. mean, Dee what do you think of that? Do you think that there's something about that that smacks of like some incongruous screwed up thing going on there? Do you think that there should be such a thing as a parking minimum for a building?
Dee Davis (12:25)
I guess I have very mixed feelings on this. I would say yes and no. Here's what I see when I'm out driving around and trying to find a parking space is I see tons and tons and tons of ADA parking spaces empty, almost everywhere. So the way the codes work is that there's minimums for parking based on the population of a building.
And a certain percentage of those have to be ADA parking, the blue with the wheelchair logo that we all know. There's stiff fines for parking in those when you don't have the handicapped ⁓ placard or license plate on your car. So people definitely stay away from parking in those. in ⁓ so many buildings, the only empty spaces.
are the handicap parking. The percentage is greater if you go to a healthcare facility, hospital, something like that. Those percentages get even larger for obvious reasons because you're having people that have health challenges. And those are always the most convenient upfront parking as we well know. Now we're having additional things like required EV parking spaces, pregnant mother spaces.
Brad Wyant (13:18)
Yeah.
Dee Davis (13:38)
there's even veteran spaces in some places. Now those are not code required and neither is the pregnant ⁓ mother. Those are optional, but a lot of businesses are choosing to do that. And that puts even more strain on the parking for anywhere. when I go to Wilmington, Delaware, I have a client that's over in that area and I go to downtown Wilmington.
It's no different for me than going to downtown Denver, going to downtown San Diego and trying to find parking. Good luck with that. Good luck with that. It's all paid. There's no free parking. I've circled and circled and circled trying to meet colleagues for dinner down there for 20, 30 minutes, trying to find a space. It's ridiculous. So should there be minimums in some areas? I would say there's not enough.
parking available and areas like that where you have lots of shopping and dining. But in businesses, oftentimes there's maybe too much.
Brad Wyant (14:30)
Hmm.
Yeah, I mean, it's very dependent, I think. It's case dependent. You have to look at, I think, the options of what people have accessible to them to reach spaces. In Denver, there's a bunch of rapid transit. RTD has good lines, especially if you live in downtown Denver and you get to the airport frequently. The RTD is great. It's half hour.
10 bucks, is way cheaper than Uber, even though it's much more expensive than other trips on RTD. And it's pretty fast.
when it comes to me trying to get to Denver from my parents place, which is in a suburb, how am going to get there? Well, I could try to connect to RTD by riding a bike to the nearest RTD stop. The roads to get to that stop have no bike lanes and they're 45 mile an hour speed limits, which means everyone's doing 55. And that's terrifying.
I don't feel safe going that slow on a public road with that high of a speed limit. So I'm gonna drive and I'm gonna try to find parking downtown. But the feeling of getting parking downtown, maybe it's worth the pain. don't know. That's my hot take for the day is that sometimes we just have to have the pain, but go ahead,
Dee Davis (15:37)
Well, one of
strategies when I'm, feel like I'm forced to go to downtown. I never opt to go to downtown San Diego when I'm there, but when I do have to go for an industry event I have tried this trick. So here's an option. This may work for you in your situation when you're visiting your parents. I drive to a point.
In this case, I drive to the Target parking lot in Mission Valley and I park my car and I pick the Target parking lot because it's a busy parking lot. There's a lot of people around. I'm very paranoid about my car getting broken into. So I feel like it's pretty safe with the high foot traffic and high security in the Target parking lot. I park it there and call an Uber. It only cost me about 10 bucks to Uber from that Target to wherever I'm going downtown.
Brad Wyant (16:18)
you
Dee Davis (16:23)
then another 10 bucks Ubering back, but I'd be paying that in parking anyway. And then I don't have to deal with the stress of trying to find a parking spot, walking through downtown at night by myself, which is a little bit scary sometimes. That's one of the solutions I've come up with. I haven't done this to downtown Denver yet, but I'm getting close because I've had to go to downtown Denver a few times recently and I don't love it.
Brad Wyant (16:45)
I rarely do. think there's a barber there that I go to every now and then that is overpriced, but is very good. that's about all I go downtown for anymore besides to see friends. But I'm the same way. And this author identifies this phenomenon in American culture of parking anxiety. And he spends a whole couple of chapters on it, just the idea of going downtown, but having to find parking downtown.
It's gonna be so expensive and it's gonna take forever to This is a real thing we're experiencing in our cities. So these parking minimums, they're either not enough or they're creating too much costs. I think he wrote the book way before Waymo had really taken off and Uber and Lyft have obviously gotten cheaper. But a strategy like what Dee is talking about here is the kind of thing that he prescribes as the solution there's still always gonna be people that want their car.
and that have a lifestyle that fits with a car. But when it comes to our urban areas, parking somewhere and then coming into the city another way could be a really effective solution. And I think he's absolutely right about that. think Dee you the nail on the head here, trying to find a way to make parking outside where this parking is so expensive and then getting into the city with a cheap, convenient means is sort of a best of both worlds solution here.
But where does that leave us as far as housing and as far as urban density and as far as what we're gonna do about these costs? We're millions of units behind in America's largest cities on housing goals. And it's getting more and more expensive to try to exist in this country, to build new housing. New housing is always the most expensive to build. The old housing is not getting cheaper because there are more and more people coming to the cities. So for many Americans, greater density afforded by
rapid public transit and many nearby amenities like grocery stores and public parks and restaurants within walking distance is an ideal solution to rising costs. Driving fewer cars also helps us meet air quality goals in our cities. But the urban lifestyle of using a bicycle or a cart, where you can haul your groceries home yourself. Using carts like that and
taking Ubers every now and then and not owning a car. That urban lifestyle is not what we seem to long for in this country, or at the very least we have not longed for it en masse until recently. And so Dee, you've got a really interesting point about mental health here.
Dee Davis (19:01)
Yeah, I've read a bunch of studies and done some research on mental health when it comes to living in these urban environments. from a sustainability standpoint, urban density is the most sustainable. And I find myself at odds with the reality of that sometimes, of course, it's going to be
more sustainable to have more people living in smaller spaces and less square footage and packed together like sardines from a sustainability standpoint, that's ideal. I can't live that way. And a lot of people can't or don't want to live that way. And what we found when we've done these mental health studies is that for a lot of people, there are some serious mental health challenges with living like that.
We have what I call a good, bad, better scenario. So dense urban living is from a mental health standpoint, better than living in urban sprawl, but rural is better than both of those. And the reason that there's a difference is connectedness you're more connected when you're in a very densely urban environment. And that's a good thing from a mental health standpoint.
When you're in a very rural area, you have constant exposure to quiet nature, fresh air. That allows your body system to bring it down a notch and experience peace and calm. There's no nature retreats in the city other than maybe a park. That's about as close as you're ever going to get. And it's statistically proven that
people calm down when they're around the color green. And why is that? Because green is the color of nature. It's the color of grass and trees and plants. And I know we talked about this on a previous cast. In acting, there's a room called a green room and they used to actually be green. And that was the purpose was to calm people before they went on stage. These days they're just rooms and I've seen very few green rooms that are.
green, but that's the whole point. And that's why they call them a green room. Not surprisingly, violent crimes are at their lowest in rural areas, not just because there's less people, but there's because there's less demand for resources. When you're highly densified, there's more demand for resources, more competition, people's anxiety and stress raise, and it leads to bad mental health.
and density can put stress on resources and drive costs up, which makes everything more expensive. It's never cheap to live in a city like the cities you listed off, Chicago and Boston and Los Angeles and Denver, It's also expensive to live in a rural area because you have more space. So you're going to, in theory, have more property.
So we have this tug and pull of, well, that's where suburbia comes from. It's that mix of, okay, it's not the dense living that I can't afford and maybe don't want. And it's not the really rural area that, I can't afford to live on acreage. Who can afford to do that? this is what you get with suburbia. And it comes with its own challenges because we are not a nation that does well with public transportation.
And that connectedness that we lose drives us to have not as great of mental health. People feel disconnected and they also, have to drive and then we have to park and then we have stress.
Brad Wyant (22:25)
And it's ironic. think a lot of people would think living somewhere really rural would be a great way to feel disconnected. And I think for some people it is. on the other hand, I heard a story that some of that one of my classmates told about living in New York City where she was assaulted in New York's public transportation and no one came to her aid.
And I think there's a loneliness among the crowd that people can experience, even if you're surrounded by other human beings. There's this distancing, there's this othering, there's this very awkward, no, no, no, but we're not here to help you. it's screwed up. You can find just as much loneliness in a city as you can in a rural area, I think. It just depends on the people that you find on the train that day, maybe that are.
that are good or not good people, that are citizens of their world or not. I wanna talk about something that underlies the issue that we're talking about here, the cost of the suburbs, the privilege of having this in-between worlds space. Detroit was once one of the richest cities in the world, but by the 1970s, it was one of America's poorest.
And many economic and social factors led to its decline, but chief among them was the phenomenon known as white flight. After the auto industry decentralized, moving to right to work states as well as abroad, but first and in greatest quantities, it moved to the suburbs surrounding Detroit. The wealthiest workers who were mostly white due to discrimination and redlining that were prevalent at the time and still go on to this day.
moved with those jobs to the suburbs, which is where they wanted to be. Like as we talked about, that's where the newest housing developments were being built and where their dollar was going further toward offering a more luxurious lifestyle. They were getting more by moving there. More space, more privacy, more quiet, but also more connection with nature and still proximity to neighbors. In 1967, the riots in Detroit that were started to protest discrimination in Detroit's police force, and this is an aside, it was estimated that
45 % of Detroit's police force were extremely anti-black and another 34 % were simply prejudiced at this time. There were 43 deaths due to those riots, 1,200 injuries and the destruction of 400 buildings, as well as the deployment of the 101st Airborne and the National Guard. So this issue of housing and affordability and the spaces that we create and choose to live in has always had a racial undertone in this country. Redlining,
has occurred throughout this country's history in the cities, in the suburbs, and dealing with that history is something that we're gonna have to deal with as we try to solve these problems. I'll never forget it, a very intelligent, very well-spoken young man who I had the privilege of knowing when I was in high school spoke about redlining in the suburb I grew up in and how it had happened up until a lot more recently than people thought and that that was wrong and that...
we need to seek out discrimination wherever it lives and combat it. I think that he was absolutely right. It really woke me up to some problems that are systemic to our world. And it's something that I think about in this context of how do we seek out these kinds of prejudices and prevent them from causing the problems that lead to things like the Detroit riots that lead to the separation of classes in such a racial
an unfair way.
Much like then, we're at an affordability tipping point. New York City has voted in a mayor who promises to subsidize housing and grocery stores to a greater extent than ever before. And workers are fighting to work remotely all over this country. We want to live in affordable suburbs rather than these really high stress, really high cost cities while still making the same high paying salaries rather than stay in those cities and raise children there.
A lot of people moved out of huge urban centers like New York and LA and San Francisco to states like Colorado and North Carolina and Tennessee to seek more quiet, to seek more space, to seek places where they can touch grass more easily. And they still wanted to hold those same urban
salaries and do that work remotely and as a country we're having a very interesting discussion about whether or not That will be allowed to persist and that's a very interesting economic Proposition do we need to be in person to do these jobs? How important is that? How much are we willing to spend on commercial real estate right now as Dee I'm sure knows the amount of people willing to spend on commercial real estate is Nothing, so it's going to be very interesting to see how that market persists
On a personal note, I have to say that I don't want to raise kids in the city because I'm scared of the danger of that. There are more cars and trucks driving faster than they should in the city. There's more crime. There's more people in close proximity to each other, which all worry me as a prospective parent. And the suburbs feel safer because they're what I know. They're where I was raised. There are fewer people there, it feels like, with nothing to lose. Less homelessness, less mental health crises.
fewer storefronts that smell like urine and less litter even. but the idea of a city that's ideal where people demand better conditions, where there's less litter, where there's less urine stained storefronts could be a really wonderful place to live if that were possible. It would be much more affordable from the suburbs.
I don't know where I stand on it all. don't know what the solution is. But I think the sooner that we talk about the underlying issues causing these discrepancies, these gaps, these ⁓ prejudices, the sooner we can get to solving them. And I think it'll be interesting to see how this new New York mayor succeeds or does not with these initiatives he wants to put in in New York City. It's going to be interesting to see how Tennessee and Colorado and
North Carolina do with all these remote workers who make their money from a big fortune 500 company with its base somewhere else and are starting to spend that money here, but push out people who've lived in those places their entire lives and how that impacts those economies, how that impacts those societies. think now is one of the most interesting times to be looking at housing and the cost of housing and how it impacts the places we live and work.
Keep an eye out for these kinds of issues. the next time that you're getting anxious about parking downtown and think about how the different choices we make impact the people around us, is my point.
Dee Davis (28:37)
I was just reading a couple of days ago about how Balboa Park in San Diego is going to start charging for parking. Balboa Park, if you've never been to San Diego is a huge, huge area. don't know how it's hundreds of acres, I believe. All of the museums are down there and there's a whole bunch of different other really interesting spaces in Balboa Park. And it's a great place to go hang out for the day.
There's not really very many restaurants there, which I've always found kind of strange, but there's some great museums and there's tons of open space, lots of big grassy areas and things for people to hang out. in the zoo is there parking has always been free in Balboa park I guess they're charging different in different areas is the plan.
And the more in demand space is the higher the parking is going to be. And apparently some of it's going to be quite high. And I did, I got mad when I saw that everything is so expensive. And this is just one more contributing factor to making things affordable, whether you're talking about affordable housing or affordable entertainment or, you know, dining out, all these things are so expensive anymore.
Brad Wyant (29:37)
Mm.
Dee Davis (29:46)
my first thought is, fine, I just won't go to Balboa Park ever again. And that's probably exactly what's going to happen because I'm not paying to park. I'm just not going to do it. I also don't go to sporting events because I'm not paying to park. it's not that I never go. very rarely go. Going to a baseball game, for example, you can get a reasonably affordable ticket to a local baseball game.
and take your family, it will cost you more to park to go to the game than it will cost to get the ticket to go to the game. Or you're doubling your cost by parking. $30 for a ticket, $30 for parking. Are you kidding me? Now it's a $60 ticket. So this is the challenge that we have with everything these days is
to do anything, there's additional cost. I went to a NAWIC meeting this last week. It cost me, $12 or $15 to park to go to an hour and a half meeting in downtown Denver this week. Really? I have to spend an hour of my time driving down there, then I have to find parking, pay to park, hope my car's okay, and then an hour driving home.
It's a lot. And it drives people away from doing these things, or at least people like me. think there's people that are going to do it no matter what, for sure. And then there's a lot of people like me
this is all related to housing and, urban sprawl and, and I hate the term affordable housing because affordable is such a meaningless word. You ask a hundred people what affordable means and you're going to get a hundred answers. I detest that term. However, I'm going to use it, whatever affordable means to you, housing.
Sometimes we put these initiatives in, and for example, in my neighborhood in Colorado, the developer that developed our neighborhood had a certain amount of affordable housing that they had to put into this development, as is kind of the thing everywhere these days, less expensive. It's just less expensive is all that really means, less expensive than most of the houses that they're putting in.
there's a common wall and it's two multi-story buildings that are kind of squished together with a common wall. And they're called twin homes and they're really more like a condo than anything else.
And it's great for the folks that can afford to live in our town because it's a smaller, more affordable home. But these same folks are then challenged with, well, now I have to drive everywhere.
there is expense that goes with living in a less populated area that we don't have any public transportation here. There's probably a public bus that comes through the town maybe once a day, maybe a couple of times a week. I'm sure it exists, but I've never seen it. There is no hub anywhere near here that I've ever seen.
that goes to the buses that you mentioned, Brad. Now, at my old house down in Westminster, there was a parking area that was very close and I could hop on that bus and take it to the airport or anywhere I wanted to go. But you start moving into these more rural areas, those things don't exist. And then all of the housing crisis that we're currently in is exacerbated by temporary housing.
And what that means is people are using Airbnb's, these corporations ⁓ or individuals that are purchasing multiple Airbnb's and other types of temporary housing that are used instead of hotels. My town, for example, no hotel. There's no hotel, no motel, no nothing in our town. So if you have out of town guests and you don't have space, there's only a handful of Airbnb's in our town.
Brad Wyant (33:08)
Mm-hmm.
Dee Davis (33:30)
or they have to go the next town or two over to find somewhere to stay. Not convenient.
Brad Wyant (33:35)
And then you're renting a car, because of course you have to get a car to go to the hotel, to go to the hotel where you want to be. As an aside, I think one of the reasons that Airbnb and VRBO have been so successful is because hotels have gotten so bad and or so expensive to go to that people just got fed up with it and homeowners will be like, yeah, I'll make a little money on the side and just pay somebody to clean it up when you're gone. Whatever.
And then that turned into an entire business strategy because people liked it so much more than dealing with Marriott and all these other companies. How bad do you have to be at your job to be beaten by somebody's house that they're just willing to rent out? But that's how bad some of these hotels they're understaffed when you visit them. You're waiting for 15 minutes to get a room key.
The room key doesn't work sometimes because it's the cheapest piece of plastic somebody could figure out to give you that might work sometimes. It's still $35 to park a vehicle overnight because they're trying to gouge in and make as much money as possible everywhere. and when it comes to these different kinds of things that really impact the lives that we lead, it strikes me that we make these other arguments about, well, but government shouldn't step in.
and have a say in these kinds of things that's so screwed up that government requires you to have affordable housing and that housing development. It's like, okay, yes, government is wrong often. I was raised in a conservative household. My beliefs are very much in a pro free market side of things. But on the other side of that, the government ends up making the market. We still have lots of government thumbs on all the scales, child tax credits.
mortgage credits. So you're economically incentivized to own a home in this country. Renters lose out from a tax policy standpoint compared to homeowners.
what thumbs on what scales should be the conversation, not, well, let's just get government out of it. That's not productive in terms of discourse about it. So when it comes to decisions like how much are we willing to spend on public transportation? How much are we willing to have things stink as far as roads being clogged or waiting for construction to be done on that addition of a bike lane or things like that?
We need to have these conversations more publicly. We need to have them more transparently. We need to have them with a broader perspective about how these decisions impact different people's lives. Because just saying when you live in Santa Monica that you don't there to be a train station near you that connects to downtown LA because it might increase crime is like, okay, well yeah, but if we just take other measures to prevent crime, like putting MTA,
police officers at stations and having different policies about how often police officers patrol different areas, maybe staffing up the police force to try and prevent issues from occurring, having police officers get trained on mental health de-escalation, which a lot of police forces are doing, and this is a very controversial take, paying police officers more to deal with the problems that they have to deal with, defunding the police. I get where people came from on that, but...
not having people to enforce the law is a crazy take. This is me being canceled, by the way. This is my self-cancelling podcast as I go out on a bang here. But that's my take is that we can't have these monolithic stances on things. There needs to be nuanced conversation in our politics about what these solutions are. And until we
have those conversations, it's gonna continue to get worse and worse because conspirators do be conspiring, which is a hot take again. But I'm gonna stop there. I'm gonna rein it in.
Dee what why don't you tell us about what our next podcast is going to be about what our next or next topic is
Dee Davis (37:14)
Brad's final episode is going to be what I call the question game. So Brad and I are going to ask each other some fun and interesting questions and you're going to get to know us a little bit better It's going to be really fun and funny and interesting. I can't wait to do it.
I gotta tell you though, I'm cracking up as you're talking about these things. We generally don't delve into politics at all on the cast and we're getting there a little bit today and that's okay. I gotta tell you, I watched that election in New York and I'm cringing because I'm thinking, first of all, I don't know where they're gonna get the money to achieve all the things that they're saying. ⁓
New York has had rent control for years in the city. from a real estate perspective, I've really wondered I guess I'm a little unclear as to how that works out for the landlords. How could it possibly be incentivizing for the landlords to have tenants paying a very small amount? As the way rent control works to my understanding is that whatever rent you got in at,
it's kind of capped for as long as you are the tenant, it's connected to you as the tenant. So if you're stay in the place, the landlord can't just keep increasing the rent. There's a cap as to how much they can increase the rent. And so what happens over long periods of time is you end up paying way under market.
under current market. So if you've been in that apartment for 20 years, you're paying way under what somebody would be paying if if you left and a new tenant came in. So I don't really understand how that could work out very well for a lot of these landlords, except that maybe they've owned the building for ever and ever and ever. And it gets passed from family to family. And so there's no mortgage. don't know. that's, that's a
a cap way of managing costs in a ⁓ very, very expensive place like New York City. When you start subsidizing in a free market,
It gets very complicated very quickly because those subsidies are tax money. The government only gets their money from one place and that's the taxpayers. So when you start subsidizing anything, whether it's food or housing or anything, somebody, some taxpayer is paying for that for the people that are getting the benefit. And I just don't see how that's sustainable over time.
I feel like that's going to be a big problem for the city of New York in the long run. It sounds good. Dare I say it? Hitler's policy sounded good in the early 30s. Just saying. When we get in these situations where economic times are really rough and expenses get really high,
Brad Wyant (39:46)
And yeah.
Dee Davis (39:54)
These ideas come forth and this has happened throughout history. These ideas come forth and they're like, that's going to fix everything. It's going to solve it. Everything's going be more affordable. Well, here's the thing. It never works in the long run. It always fails in the long run. So I'm worried for New York City. I really am.
Brad Wyant (40:12)
Your note about unsustainability makes a lot of sense. And I think the purpose of certain government subsidized benefits like SNAP, like affordable housing vouchers, like programs that help people get back on their feet. The idea with that is that it's a temporary thing to help you climb out of the hole that you're in. And I think that this country almost unanimously would agree that benefits like that.
even unemployment are meant to help people that fall in hard times that get into a situation of bad luck. And that
is kindness that I think we can all appreciate that our tax dollars should go to. The housing vouchers that this campaign seems to be about and the kinds of subsidies that have been prevalent in New York do seem to feel more like they're suppressing free market activity for the sake of benefiting some more than they are helping people through difficult times. Allowing the market to set the price for things
is a big part of what our economy is based on and subsidizing housing to the extent that this mayor proposes to is a very drastic step and it smacks of the kind of thing that a lot of people are really scared by and every dictator including Hitler starts as a utopian. If we just made these things true then the world would be perfect and somehow with Hitler and Stalin it ended up being
One of those things that we have to make true is that none of these people are here anymore. And then the way that that happened was that they just had to murder them all. Which, that's when it falls off a cliff. I'm not, can't compare this man to those people. This man has a utopian view that he's trying to enact that is for the good of the world and he doesn't, he's not talking about killing anybody. I somebody will sound bite me and 25 years later, it'll be like, Brad, why I thought, no, that's not what I'm saying. I'm utopian ideas have a way
of not working out on whatever scale they're proposed on. And that's what we're saying here.
Dee Davis (41:59)
Well, I think we can agree that we've got a long way to go when it comes to urban sprawl. I don't know if we're gonna stop it. The sprawl is expensive. It's sucking up all of our land.
and our free open space, which we're certainly seeing tons of in Colorado. mean, California is long gone. I haven't seen an open acre in California in years. No, I'm kidding. There is, but it's honestly mostly unusable property. The thing that I remember most about when I first came to Colorado to work was the openness of it.
it was crazy. The journey from Denver International Airport, which if you haven't been, is in the middle of nowhere. It's starting to be in the middle of somewhere, but it was built in the middle of nowhere. And that drive up the toll road to the area where I came to work in Northern Colorado, as somebody who was raised in Southern California, I remember
looking on both sides and thinking, I've never seen so much open space in my whole life. And I've lived a lot of places. And I remember thinking, am I being kidnapped? was in a car with a workmate who was brand new to me. I'd never met this person before then, except in a video call. And I thought, is this smart, Dee? Should you really be traveling with somebody that you barely know? they could dump your body anywhere.
There was so much open space. was mind blowing and it's beautiful. I love it. And that is a sense of peace and calm that I get when I leave Colorado. I'm sad every time I miss my mountains. I say goodbye to the mountains. Every I'm like, bye, I'm going to miss you. can't wait to come back. And when I come back and that drive home, I'm just, that decompression of seeing all that open space.
and all that green, just, it is absolutely my happy place. I hope that never stops, but it is developing rapidly. That open space, that farmland that you mentioned is being eaten up by housing, mostly housing. It's really not so much commercial, at least in the areas that I'm in, it's housing.
It's just going up everywhere. And all I can think is where are all the people for all these houses? Our population is not increasing at that kind of a rate. So who is buying all these houses and why do we need to keep building?
Brad Wyant (44:26)
Well, these are the questions that we have to find answers to. These are the conversations we have to have and we got to figure it out. I don't know what we're going to do, but we've got to find a solution and it's got to be a community-based one. It's got to be an equitable one and needs to come yesterday. So we'll see if Mr. Magdani's policies work out. I think the whole world is watching with rapt attention there. I know I certainly am as somebody from this industry and ⁓
Dee Davis (44:43)
Yeah, absolutely.
Brad Wyant (44:54)
In the meantime, thanks for listening, to our wild rantings about housing and suburban sprawl and where it's all going.
Dee Davis (45:00)
Well, stay tuned for our next episode, which is the question game. And Brad, thank you so much for writing and producing such a wonderful episode, and we'll see you next time.
Brad Wyant (45:11)
See you next time.
