I have never really gotten into podcasts. 

Sometimes I listen to The Urbanist on Monocle Radio when I’m puttering around my place, but generally speaking I don’t consume a lot of content in this format.

Part of this might be because I don’t have a commute (commuting sucks) and I don’t drive enough that I feel the need to fill my time with stimulating things. 

Sometimes I also find it hard to do other meaningful things at the same time. I just want to sit and listen attentively. (That probably speaks to my multitasking abilities.)

But every now and then I feel like I should be taking more advantage of all the information embedded in podcasts.

So below are three that I’m going to try and listen to more often and that you might also enjoy. If you know of any great podcasts, please share them in the comment section below.

If you can’t see the embedded podcasts below, you’ll need to visit this blog post on the web.

99% Invisible with Roman Mars

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The Urbanist on Monocle 24

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Unlisted with Brand Inman (Real Estate)

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In 1933, the United States Congress created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC). With foreclosures rising as a result of The Great Depression, the task of the agency was to provide new low-interest mortgages to both homeowners and private mortgage lenders. Between 1993 and 1936, the agency served about one million households.

By 1935, the parent company of the agency (the Federal Home Loan Bank Board) decided to initiate something called the “City Survey Program.” The idea was to look at local real estate trends – including the racial and ethnic composition of the country’s largest cities – in order to get a better understanding of how to manage all of these outstanding loans.

One outcome of this program was the creation of the HOLC’s infamous “residential security maps.” (Philadelphia’s is shown at the top of this post.)

These were maps that categorized city neighborhoods according to 4 grades. Grade A neighborhoods (green) were the best ones. They were ethnically homogenous and had room to be further developed. Grade B neighborhoods (blue) were the second-best ones. They were already completely developed, but were still considered desirable. Grade C neighborhoods (yellow) were starting to decline and showed an “infiltration of a lower grade population.” And finally, grade D neighborhoods were considered “hazardous” and colored in red. These neighborhoods had low homeownership rates, old crappy housing, and an “undesirable population”, which, at the time, largely referred to Jews and African Americans.

Some have argued that the HOLC and their “residential security maps” are what kicked off systematic mortgage discrimination in America’s inner city neighborhoods – later referred to as “redlining.” This was the practice of denying credit to people who lived in these undesirable neighborhoods (and even to real estate developers who wanted to build in these undesirable neighborhoods).

But University of Pennsylvania professor Amy Hillier has argued that these maps simply reflected the ethos of the time period. Using a sampling of HOLC mortgages, she found that 62% of them were issued to grade D (red) neighborhoods. The agency, itself, was not actually redlining in practice.

Furthermore, she also looked at private mortgages issued in Philadelphia between 1937 and 1950 and found that security grade rating actually had no impact on the total number of loans issued. She did, however, discover slightly higher interest rates for properties located near and in the bottom security grades.

All of this is to say that “redlining” is likely not the only culprit for inner city decay. There are other factors at play.

To that end, the National Bureau of Economic Research recently published a working paper, which I discovered through CityLab, called, “Racial Sorting and the Emergence of Segregation in American Cities.” The key finding here is as follows:

“Our preferred estimates suggest that white flight was responsible for 34 percent of the increase in segregation over the 1910s and 50 percent over the 1920s. Our analysis suggests that segregation would likely have arisen in American cities even without the presence of discriminatory institutions as a direct consequence of the widespread and decentralized relocation decisions of white urban residents.”

In other words, it wasn’t just mortgage discrimination; it was also just general discrimination. That actually makes a lot of sense, because, if you think about it, the former couldn’t have occurred without the latter being present.

Here’s how the research paper puts it (via CityLab):

“Policies that reduce barriers faced by blacks in the housing market may thus not prevent or reverse segregation as long as white households have the ability and desire to avoid black neighbors.”

(Note: Most of the information and data used in this post was sourced from the work and research of Amy Hillier.)

Ontario is looking to pass legislation that would allow municipalities in the province to implement something known as inclusionary zoning. If passed and should municipalities decide to use this tool (Toronto almost certainly would), developers would then be required and/or incentivized to include some percentage of affordable housing in their new market rate developments. 

Politically, inclusionary zoning tends to be popular. It’s believed to be a way for governments to create new affordable housing using relatively small public subsidies. Not surprisingly though, the development industry generally hates IZ. It’s another cost that needs to be added to the development pro forma – though some municipalities rightly offset these additional costs with additional density, breaks on levies, and so on.

What I always think about when this topic comes up is the broader economic impact of the land use policy. Because I’m suspect that it’s as simple as: mandate affordable housing; get more affordable housing for free. Generally there are always trade-offs.

So here’s some reading material for you all this morning.

In a classic paper (1981) by Yale Professor Robert C. Ellickson – called The Irony of Inclusionary Zoning – he argues that these practices can actually increase general house prices:

As a counterargument Owen Pickford over at The Urbanist argues that IZ simply reduces land prices as a result of the new tax. Land, after all, is the residual claimant. Therefore, he believes it’s an effective affordable housing policy. (I’m not so sure I believe that land prices would decrease in practice.)

There’s also debate about the effectiveness of inclusionary zoning to actually deliver affordable housing at a meaningful scale. City Observatory wrote a post that looked at the total number of units produced (through IZ) across a number of American cities and the results were spotty. It should, however, be noted that not all inclusionary zoning policies are mandatory.

Finally, the Furman Center for Real Estate & Urban Policy at New York University published a housing policy brief back in 2008 that looked at this exact topic. While they admit that the data is scarce, they come to the conclusion that IZ had no meaningful impact on the prices and production of single-family housing in San Francisco, but that IZ seems to have slightly decreased production and slightly increased pricing in the suburbs of Boston.

What this last point suggests is that inclusionary zoning policies are not all created equal. So like all difficult questions, the answer to this one is likely: it depends. If anyone can point me to better data on inclusionary zoning, I would love to see it.