Episode 23: Political Representation and Housing Supply with Michael Hankinson

Shane Phillips 0:04
Hello, this is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast and I'm your host Shane Phillips. Each episode we discuss a different housing research paper with its author to better understand how we can make our cities more affordable and more equitable. A quick announcement right at the top here, for the accredited urban planners out there, as of last week, you can now receive credit toward your AICP certification just for listening to us, you can just search for "UCLA Housing Voice podcast" on the APA certification maintenance page, and you'll find all of our episodes there. My apologies that I have nothing to offer the rest of you. I guess you'll just have to keep listening for the love of the game. Anyway, back to our regular programming. Our guest this week is Professor Michael Hankinson of George Washington University, and my co-host is Mike Manville. Today we're talking about how political representation affects the production of housing, not just how much is built, but also where. Hankinson is a political scientist, whereas most of our guests have been urban planners, sociologists, and economists. So this is a bit of a departure for us, but I think you'll find that it pays off. We're discussing the consequences of a shift in California's electoral politics that got started with the California Voting Rights Act of 2001. For reasons we get into during the interview, that law spurred many cities to change from at-large elections, where council members represent the entire city to district elections, where cities are divided up into districts and each district elects its own representative. There were very good reasons for that shift, especially the increase in racial and ethnic minority council representation that followed. But Hankinson finds that cities that shifted to district elections also ended up approving less housing. He describes this as a supply-equity trade-off, we lose some housing production, but we gain representational equity. Of course, as regular listeners will know, reduced housing production has its own equity implications, as prices rise, and renters and households of color are most likely to bear those costs. This is a conversation about how we deal with situations where there are diffuse benefits, but concentrated costs, how we can structure and bundle reforms in ways that address different needs for different groups of people. And the limitations of empowerment that emphasizes the authority to say no, but doesn't really create new avenues for how to say yes. These are all questions that have a very deep relevance to housing policy. And while this analysis focuses on California, the takeaways should apply just about anywhere. The Housing Voice podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, and we receive much appreciated production support from Claudia Bustamante, Olivia Urena, and Hannah Barlow. If you want to help the show, please give us a five-star rating and a review. And if you have any feedback or show ideas, you can email me at shanephillips@ucla.edu. Let's get to our conversation with Professor Hankinson. Our guest this week is Michael Hankinson, assistant professor of political science at George Washington University. And we are here to talk about political representation and its impact on housing supply at the municipal level. Welcome to the Housing Voice podcast, Michael.

Michael Hankinson 3:26
thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to chat about this today.

Shane Phillips 3:30
And we have another Mike or Michael as our co-host today. Mike Manville, welcome.

Michael Manville 3:35
Thanks, always a pleasure.

Shane Phillips 3:36
So let's start with a tour, before we get into your research. You are now a DC local. So where would you suggest that a couple outsiders like Mike and I visit if we were in town? Bonus points for anything with special appeal to housing or urban planning nerds?

Michael Hankinson 3:52
Yes. So my big hobby my love here is cycling. And one thing that I really struggle with in New York City as much as I love the city I was there for three years was, it's very hard to get around particularly for recreation cycling, like as a bit of a workout. And DC is just teeming with these rails to trails connectors that just kind of cut through the heart of the city going to Northern Virginia, up into Maryland, I had no idea between the W and OD rail to trail line or the trails following the Anacostia River. And why I think this is interesting from a like housing, urban space nerd perspective is that there is this plan to build a light rail system on one of these former rail lines these rights of way through suburban Maryland, just outside of DC it's about a seven mile walk from the you know, the Washington Monument as a point of reference. And what's exciting about that is I think it captures a lot of the debates that are out there and some of the conversations that we're going to have today in terms of when you want to do something I think is positive and respond to things like climate change, or just traffic congestion for everyday commute. You have the natural confidence of homeowners being skeptical of it. But you also have people who I think would normally be in favor of this people who like the trails like cycling and want to fit that within the project. And that can slow things down or add prices, increase expenses. And then finally, you have concerns about how this is gonna affect housing prices and lower middle income communities, even in suburban Maryland. And as far as I've followed it, I haven't seen a clear housing plan around responding to that. And so something that I think is generally widely supported has been in the works for on a scale of 30 years, it's just bringing these questions about equity forward, and it's just slightly outside the boundary of DC. So if you get out there, you can see the progress in work and hear the debates play out in the Washington Post.

Michael Manville 5:49
You know, every time I hear someone from a city like Washington or other places talk about a network of protected bike paths, I can't help but feel bad for them. Because you know, one of the real joys of cycling in Los Angeles is the knowledge that at any minute, any number of vehicles could just crash right into you. And I just like, is it really what's the point if you're not constantly terrified?

Michael Hankinson 6:12
Well, that constant adrenaline rush really helps set PRs, you know when you're driving cars. I'm just in this peaceful tranquil rail to trail path, and I can't get a personal best.

Michael Manville 6:23
I feel like it keeps me on my edge. You know, I'm constantly grateful to the Cadillac Escalades, so.

Shane Phillips 6:29
Don't forget the Range Rovers.

Michael Manville 6:30
And the Range Rovers.

Shane Phillips 6:31
Okay, so your paper is titled 'The Supply-Equity Trade-off: The Effect of Spatial Representation on the Local Housing Supply' with your co-author Asya Magazinnik from MIT. And in this paper, you're comparing housing supply outcomes in cities with two different types of political representation. At-large, where elected officials represent the whole city and are voted on by all of its constituents, and district representation where the city is broken up into districts and officials are elected within an only represent those individual districts. There's a lot more to the study than just that. But the fundamental question is whether cities permit less housing when they switch from at-large to district elections. And spoiler alert, you find that they do. Before we even talk about the housing aspect of all of this, though, tell us a little bit about how at-large and district representation work and some of the main arguments for and against each, especially in terms of political representation of racial and ethnic minorities.

Michael Hankinson 7:37
Absolutely. So the larger question here is, how do we convert votes, individual votes into elected officials, that kind of our representative democracy runs off of? And you can have some high minded conversations about this. And really, in the United States, this played out within cities, around the turn of the 20th century, when you had these progressive performers who tend to be white, upper middle class individuals who cared a lot about the decisions the government was making. And their argument was that if you have people who are running citywide, they are running these at-large elections, and they're going to care about voters all around the city, not just in their individual neighborhood, and therefore, the decisions they make, maybe more reflective of the city as a whole, which seems kind of intuitive. But you think about, what is that in contrast to? And it's in contrast to what was also playing out at the time was the establishment of urban political machines that built their power base from largely newly arriving immigrant communities. And were very good at channeling political benefits into neighborhoods at this geographic scale. And the idea was that these individuals who were getting power through these district elected councils didn't have the city's interests in mind, they just had their narrow constituencies with their districts at heart. And that's kind of the, you know, kind of the chalkboard philosophy behind it. It's in the city's best interests.

Shane Phillips 9:02
Um-hum.

Michael Hankinson 9:02
But we can also think about what happens to the types of people who get elected on these two systems. And so within a election, if you have what is called "polarized voting", which means there's certain patterns, we see it with parties, right? Democrats vote for Democrats, Republicans vote for Republicans. Within cities, you really don't have the strong party labels. So you tend to have what you had back at this time of the progressive performers which was racially polarized voting or ethnically polarized voting where the white candidates would get the votes of white voters and non white candidates would appeal to the votes of non-white voters. And when you have this racially polarized voting, what it means is that in an at-large system, whoever is the majority voting bloc, so 50% of voters that turnout for that election, they can effectively vote in an entire city council exclusively from their generally racial or ethnic group. And so even if you have just you know, 40% of an ethnic outgroup or racial outgroup, in an at-large system under polarized voting, where people vote according to race or ethnicity, they're effectively boxed out of the electoral system. And this was something that was also, you know, kind of the last openly spoken argument behind the white progressive performers is their way to kind of maintain their control of the city and arguably pursue what they saw in the city's "best interests". And so what change and the where district elections came from was this recognition that this led to city councils that were not descriptively, representative of the underlying population. And so fast forward to the 1960s, you have Voting Rights Act 1965. And in section two of that reform, the target was these southern cities with at-large elections, where black voters were, you know, as we saw at the turn of the century, kicked out entirely of city council elections. So the reform there was to draw these districts and the requirements were that you could push this reform under the voting rights act under two conditions. One, you had to have this, what they called "politically cohesive voting", it's the same thing as racially polarized voting, if you show these patterns, where black voters are voting for black candidates, white voters are voting for white candidates, that that's the first part. The second one is you have to have a sufficiently large and geographically compact population, you can also think about this as a segregated population. And the goal here is that you need to have that concentration so that when you draw these lines, you can draw a district that is majority-minority. Because if you don't have a big enough minority population, or if you have a population evenly distributed throughout the city, you could draw lines all night on these different maps and you're not going to get a district where that minority group can achieve representation, get a majority of the votes within that district. And but that last point is key because that's what this reform in California, that gives us this opportunity to do this type of study did, was it lowered that last requirement it essentially said, look, forget this match, you really just have to show that you have this politically cohesive voting, racially polarized voting. And so by lowering that bar, that last step, it opened the floodgates for lawsuits to be threatened, litigation be threatened across California. And it also required that the defendant, in this case, the city government, would have to pay the expenses, all legal in-court fees, even if there was an out of court settlement, they'd have to pay kind of civil rights firms for their time. So you've seen this rollout across California, where whether or not a city under you know, our classical notions of the VRA is a good candidate where district elections really benefit the minority population. We're seeing these cities become threatened and therefore, either, you know, fight it in the courts rack up millions of dollars of legal fees and eventually capitulate or just saying, we don't have it in our budget to really fight this fight. We're just going to switch pre-emptively to district elections.

Shane Phillips 12:59
Yeah. And they probably learned over time that they were unlikely to win a legal fight anyway, right? It seemed like most of the times this was challenged, they ended up losing.

Michael Hankinson 13:10
Yeah, almost certainly, I think there are few fights happening right now, that may give either a glimmer of hope or try to find alternatives to districts. But really, it's been no concrete kind of pushback to keep at-large elections.

Shane Phillips 13:23
And just for a little more background here. As you write in your paper, nearly two-thirds of US cities still have multi-member at-large elections, and only about 14% have these single-member district elections. The remainder are sort of a hybrid where you might have some seats at-large and other seats that are district. I know, Seattle works this way, I think Boston does as well. And just a little more background here. So the law you're referring to I think you might have said is the California Voting Rights Act of 2001. So it's been in place about 20 years. I'm curious, do you have in mind any like particularly egregious examples of this kind of polarized voting in the at-large system and maybe an example of a place that shifted pretty dramatically after the change to district elections?

Michael Hankinson 14:13
Well, in the paper, we catalog, what are the groups that are most dominant in these elections? In terms of winning seats, and kind of, what is their share of elections won compared to their share of the population? What you'd kind of expect in their sort of, you know, random draws or simulations. And we find that it's certainly the case that minority populations are suffering from under-representation in these at-large elections. In terms of particularly egregious cases, it's hard to say we're focused more on the housing reforms, we've generated some maps of places like Escondido, California, in particular, where and you know, we're going to get into the mechanism of how this works, but the pattern of warehousing built in those cities completely changes in the short period of time, even once they switch to today's district elections. So I don't have a particular case in mind that's changing the politics there.

Michael Manville 15:05
Oh, let me in not with respect to housing, but I have a few egregious cases of at-large representation for sure. You know, because I do want to sort of emphasize what Michael is saying that the at-large system, there was a progressive impulse behind it, but it really could lead to some terrible outcomes. And I think people who've lived in California for a while might remember the City of Bell, right? A small community south of downtown, predominantly immigrant, a lot of immigrants who are overwhelmingly Hispanic, as is often the case in Southern California. And there was a scandal in 2010, or 2011 or so where it came out that the city government had essentially looted this the city. It was a little kleptocratic state where the city manager was being paid $500,000 a year, and the city council was sort of emptying the coffers. And what was so striking is that the city council was predominantly white, in a city that was overwhelmingly Hispanic, and a large portion of the residents simply couldn't vote, right, because they were they were foreign born. And what that left you was a sort of classic case of the problems of at-large voting, which was a white minority, in a minority of the sort of the space, but that made up a narrow majority of likely voters. And so you elected a government from a small part of this city, who was then totally uninterested in being responsive to the city itself. And you know, there were many things that went into that, but sorry, I think there was general agreement that had Bell had districts like that just couldn't have happened. But these are the sorts of things that can happen. And when you hear about these sort of deeply unresponsive city governments, often times they are, in part an artifact of this at-large representation

Shane Phillips 16:54
That unrepresentativeness, it leads to a quote that actually is in your paper, Michael. So this is actually a quote from Anaheim City Council member Jose Moreno that you included in the article. And what he's doing here is relaying something that he's heard from one of his white constituents. And he says, "she was saying, the only thing I noticed in my neighborhood is, the more Latinos move in the worst services we are getting, I don't see our streets getting taken care of. I see divestment happening from our neighborhoods. And what I've come to understand is, it's not that Latinos diminish the neighborhood, it's that politicians diminish Latinos. And when they move into a neighborhood, that neighborhood is not invested in." So I kind of hear that in the Bell example. And I appreciate how that framing from councilmember Moreno places the blame on the elected officials rather than the people moving into the neighborhood. And it sort of illustrates how at-large elections can drive a wedge sort of between different racial and ethnic groups and encourage more exclusionary attitudes. My impression in this specific case is that the white constituent quoted here is not anti-Latino, and wasn't proposing that Latinos be excluded from her neighborhood. But she was just kind of correctly, it seems diagnosing a problem with at-large elections. I think that dynamic is worth discussing in its own right, but I'm mostly introducing it to connect us back to housing production here. You're trying to answer several questions in your study, one of which is whether less housing is permitted in cities that shift to district elections, but also, regardless of the total amount of housing production, you're also looking at whether it's distributed differently between neighborhoods within a city when that shift happens. So you hypothesized that there would be less overall production in cities with district elections, and that it would also be more evenly distributed. Why was that your expectation?

Michael Hankinson 18:54
Yeah, so we spoke about at-large versus district elections, I introduced these kind of two key ingredients. One is polarized voting, which typically in the American context is racially polarized voting, you can go to other contexts and maybe more religious polarized voting, but polarized voting, and then spatial segregation, right? The third ingredient, and what brings in housing production, or really any sort of locally undesirable land use, we call it "LULU" in the paper. That's one term that people throw around but just things that society needs but people generally don't want to look at, right? The third ingredient that affects that is what is known as "legislative deference". It's also known as "other domain of privilege" or "log rolling". That's this idea that each council member has control over what happens in their district. So for example, if you are a member of City Council, and something's proposed for your district that your constituents don't like, well, there's a risk that if it gets built, you're going to lose your job in the next election. If we are City Council, and we hear about you having this problem, rather than each of us, kind of the other n minus one people in the city council, think that's what's in the best interest of the city, we might say, well, let's just go along with whatever you want for your district. Because we know that when that same type of land use is proposed for our district, you'll, you know, scratch our back and vote along with what I want. In this way, we all kind of protect each other's seats in our next election cycles. This is kind of like a frustrating point, particularly for people interested in urban planning. But it's kind of fascinating from a surprising solution to a collective action problem on the city council that kind of protects each other, but maybe doesn't solve the overall thing. This matters, because as people of this podcast, may have heard housing is often framed as this locally undesirable land use, right? It has the noise and congestion that comes with it. The stereotypes about class and race of people moving in nearby and from my earlier work, even renters who are pro-housing supply in the aggregate, they get supply and demand. They're on board with citywide increase in supply, they may propose new market-rate housing in their immediate neighborhoods because they're worried about that kind of inducing some sort of demand in their local context. And they'll pose a specific individual project. So when we map this on to a at-large city, we start to think about that, in this case, the city council is only going to respond to two types of neighborhoods that you both just described, these highly motivated, highly mobilized, generally white, wealthier homeowner communities, they really don't care about these minority parts of the city, because they're not important for their voting bloc, and the number of at-large council members that I interviewed, that said, well, the benefit of the at-large system is that you don't just have one person you can appeal to, to fix something you can appeal to all, you know, five members or less of City Council, I mean, I don't know it was in their heart and mind, but as a political scientist is laughable to think that they would care because they just don't need those votes. So that is their coalition. So in that type of city, the housing we would expect these unwanted land uses could be easily channeled into these minority neighborhoods, they're not part of that dominant voting coalition.

Shane Phillips 22:02
Um-hmm.

Michael Hankinson 22:02
But when you switch or adopt a district election system, now that everyone has a seat at the table, this norm of legislative deference makes a huge difference. And that's because now there's, each neighborhood has that ability to block the thing that they don't want. I'm saying neighborhood and districts kind of interchangeably here.

Michael Manville 22:21
Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Hankinson 22:21
Each district has the ability to block something that they don't want. And therefore, if you go round to each district, it's gonna be very hard to get that development cited. So putting these two things together, our questions are responding to how you set it up, right? Do these district elections decrease the production of new housing, because each neighborhood has the ability to veto the projects? And we find yes, yes, it does. And then as a mechanism, can we see what's happening with inside the cities? Under those at-large elections, was housing being channeled into the minority neighborhoods? Where we'd expect there to be the least responsiveness because those aren't parts of the dominant voting coalition. We find that to be true within the six cities that we do a deep dive into. And then second is once those six cities adopt district elections, is this decrease in the housing supply coming from these minority neighborhoods that have now gained power, and they are part of that log role, they're able to kind of push back on things they don't want. And that is also what we found that the tightening of the supply was coming from an inability of the council to now channel in these unwanted land uses into the places that have the least political power.

Shane Phillips 23:28
Right, now everywhere has the same sort of veto power, and how big were these effects? So how much was permitting reduced overall? And what did that look like at the level of the district? Like was it, you know, these other districts just ended up where they used to build more now they built the same as other districts? Or are they still building more than the traditionally more exclusionary districts? What did that look like?

Michael Hankinson 23:56
So what we found is that there was this decrease in particularly multi-family housing, which we can talk a bit about these differences between multi-family and single family housing, again, to why that may be, that's what we expected, though, that the biggest drop would be multi-family housing. And it seemed in these cities that switched under the California Voting Rights Act in this particular set of cities that we looked at for the importance in causal identification. These decreases were around 55% decrease in multi-family housing...

Michael Manville 24:24
Wow.

Shane Phillips 24:24
Wow.

Michael Hankinson 24:24
... permitted each year in the number of units. When we look at the cities where we would expect the biggest effects, these cities that have, they are just kind of right for district elections, they have high-level segregation, or they have a large minority population that's under-represented on council, or they just have this measured gap in terms of how under-represented that minority population is. What we'd expect is big effects. There we saw effects on a scale of a 75% drop in the multi-family housing permitted each year. And so the effects on aggregate supply were quite larger than we actually expected. And when we looked within six cities, and we did a deep dive into where these discretionary permits were going. kind of housing that's most susceptible to the political pressures on the city council. There, we saw that the housing was being channeled into minority neighborhoods, those minority neighborhoods were taking on around 30% more housing each year than comparable white neighborhoods in the same city. And once they switched district elections, that inequality was completely erased. There was no statistical difference between the white and minority neighborhoods anymore, which is what we would expect if everyone has that veto power at the table.

Shane Phillips 25:31
Yeah, yeah. I mean, those are huge impacts, though, for permits to drop by basically half.

Michael Hankinson 25:36
Yeah, it's a little unsettling.

Shane Phillips 25:39
That's all it takes. Yeah. You did test a few other hypotheses. And you mentioned that you thought this would be primarily in multi-family housing, if you could just quickly explain why that was your expectation that this would disproportionately affect multi-family housing.

Michael Hankinson 25:56
Sure thing. So when it comes to the politics of housing, all housing is equally opposed. I mentioned a host of reasons why people may not like new housing in their immediate community. And all those reasons, tend to be less problematic under single-family housing. Some people say well, it's just the aesthetics, it's more than fit for neighborhood character. But we can think about what that means in reality, often means fewer people, right? You have one family unit versus an apartment that can hold 10 or 12 families or what have you, that's going to lead to less congestion, okay, so cuts down on some of the noise and possibly air pollution from cars, the house is going to be built generally on the outskirts of the city. So it's got few neighbors to effect and so just kind of less politically volatile. But the big thing here is that it's generally going to be more expensive per unit, almost always. And so this avoids a lot of people's concerns about the integration along class and and racial lines, because race is so highly correlated with income in this country. And so there may be just this whole kind of bucket of reasons people may be less opposed to single-family housing. So even if you empower a neighborhood to block housing, they may be less inclined to block the single-family housing just because they're like, well, actually, this is okay, that's not the housing I was concerned about, or the housing I think is sparring gentrification, instead of these large market-ready apartment buildings. But the other thing is the political process behind the approvals, so multi-family housing, and I'd say, nearly all multi-family housing in the California has to go through a discretionary review process. And California's particularly difficult about this. And this includes public hearings where the community can come and kind of really make their voices heard and signal that they're going to vote out of office anyone that supports this. But it also requires a legislative approval by the planning commission. Not to mention many additional design boards in some California cities. And even though these commissions are not directly elected by voters that they're appointed by the city council, so there is some sort of connection there where commissioner may want to keep their job after the next election cycle. And so because it's multi-family housing is; a) more strongly opposed and b) the type of housing that actually has kind of political pressure on it, to have to go through this political process. That's where we expect to have these biggest swings in approval. And what that also means is that Asya and I had to spend one summer going through over 2000 public meeting minutes of these planning commissions and city councils in order to geocode these development permits across six different cities in an eight-year time. So it was very labor-intensive process, but we think we isolated exactly the types of housing where we would expect to see an effect, if an effect existed. And lo and behold, we found it.

Shane Phillips 28:44
Did you find that there was basically no difference in single- family? Or was it just a smaller drop?

Michael Hankinson 28:49
It was too noisy to make much out, it was a much smaller drop, but it was also noisier. So it's hard to say what exactly is going on there?

Shane Phillips 28:56
Gotcha. So you describe this dynamic in the title of your paper and in several places in the paper as the supply-equity trade-off, where you're losing some housing production, but gaining some equity and how it's distributed and also just representationally. But as you know, under production of housing has its own implications for equity, because we know from many studies that when you don't build enough housing prices rise more rapidly. And as you say in the conclusion, in terms of housing outcomes, you may be trading spatially concentrated impacts from housing construction, like traffic and noise and these kinds of things for the spatially diffuse impacts of rising prices. And in either case, people of color are disproportionately renters, and disproportionately low income and so the diffuse burden of higher housing costs is also going to hit households of color disproportionately hard. I don't bring that up to undermine the positive aspects of district elections. But for me, it does drive home how you rarely seem to get better overall outcomes by increasing the number of veto points in a system, which is sort of what's going on here. So we've had a system of local control over housing and land use decisions for generations, and that system has been dominated by people who are disproportionately older, whiter, wealthier and property owning. And we're, you know, I think rightly trying to equalize the voices of younger people, poorer people, people of color, renters, or even, you know, overweight, their concerns, if anything, given how long and how dramatically things have been kind of swung in the other direction for so long. But if all we're doing is giving those latter groups the same power to say, no, that doesn't seem like it's going to get us where we need to go. And I'm saying things you're aware of, because this is all in your paper. I also don't want to imply that anyone saying this is the only thing we need to do to improve equity. So I don't want to set up a straw man here. But I'm curious for both of you what your thoughts are on what the lessons we might take from this, since I don't think anyone's takeaway here is, well, district elections, reduce housing production, therefore we shouldn't do them.

Michael Hankinson 31:15
Yeah, in the paper, we try to grapple with this at the end. And think about what the overall takeaway is, and echoing your sentiments, I think we frame the equity as kind of potentially short-lived for the reasons you exactly described. But I push back against people who argue that, therefore this type of reform is the wrong fit. I think it's an incomplete fit, we need additional components to try to achieve both of these goals. But the idea that the status quo of like seeing this type of lack of representation with geographic and, therefore along racial and income lines, and that it is convenient for trying to pursue something like a collective acumen, like housing just doesn't quite cut it for me in terms of allowing it to persist. And I think your illusion to kind of these veto points. It's inherent in the American system, in American politics, even at the federal level is built around negative power goes back to the founding and the fears of establishing a strong central government, you need to have these checks and balances. And so I think it extends across a whole wealth of these policies, particularly ones that have spatially concentrated costs. I've done some other research on and that I think, are very concerning for responding to even things as far away from housing as the opioid epidemic, where I've done other projects, looking at bipartisan nimbyism, towards opioid addiction treatment clinics, as well as clean-energy infrastructure that that we need to respond to climate change.

Michael Manville 32:51
I mean, I think that that's very well said, and I think there's just a lot to unpack in the tension between sort of the political voice at a neighborhood level and the need for, you know, goods that actually have this huge regional ramifications. And, you know, I don't think anyone or I hope nobody would argue that it's just okay to have a situation where entire neighborhoods just, you know, get run over and don't have political voice, right. I mean, that does not lead to good outcomes, we, you know, anybody who wants to, really needs to be convinced back and just go look at the siting of freeways throughout, you know, US cities like it, that's not where we want to be. And I think, you know, at the same time, some of the concerns that you raised at the end of your paper, and that the chain raised to sort of reiterate it, you know, they matter, and I think I can think of two of them that come up. But one is just that if you have a neighborhood of renters, the ability to block a project actually just isn't that useful. Right, if you have a neighborhood of homeowners, you block a project and what happens in that neighborhood, values go up. And so you preserve the neighborhood as you like it, and then your your wealth rises, if you have a neighborhood of renters and you block a project, rents go up. Right, and and now you've preserved your neighborhood, at least for a little while. But you know, it's rent, right? And then so your neighborhood is going to change even if it doesn't change physically, you or your neighbors who you've come to be, you know, accustomed to seeing are going to either face more financial distress or have to move out and so forth. And so, a lot of the housing problem that's faced by people in low income renter neighborhoods is related to but somewhat separate from their lack of political voice, right? I mean, their lack of political voice matters. But if you were to think of like in an optimal world, and of course we're not in it, it's less that they should be able to block housing. It's more that they should be able to force housing to go other places. That under the at-large system, and certainly you see this happen in lots of cities. You know, housing, the no one wants, multi-family housing just gets dumped in neighborhoods that don't have a lot of voice. But from an economic perspective, that changes the neighborhood, which is bad. And it's done over the objections of the neighborhood. And that's also bad. But it probably doesn't raise rents, right? But if you wanted to preserve the integrity of that neighborhood, and keep rents down, you'd need to literally put it in a rich neighborhood. And so that's kind of not what just giving the political voice to block things. So in some ways, you almost need to empower these neighborhoods even more.

Shane Phillips 35:35
To ground this a little bit to what Mike just said, my experience in Los Angeles sort of in in more kind of advocacy circles rather than academic circles, is that there's pretty widespread agreement that we need to build a lot more housing in affluent areas, the west side, whiter, traditionally exclusionary neighborhoods, but the community-based organizations that represent communities of color, poor communities, unhoused people, there's an agreement there, but it is challenging to push that as a political effort. I think, you know, for good reasons, like these are communities that have been on their back foot that are in a defensive position in many respects, and to expect them to be the ones to lead the charge on upzoning wealthy neighborhoods, it's just, it's asking a lot. And I'm not sure it's realistic to ask that of them. So that that kind of builds up to this transition, where, in the conclusion of your paper, you mentioned something that really resonated with me, maybe because in my book, I sort of make a similar point. But you basically separate or distinguish this problem of supply from the problem of equity. And basically, if switching from at-large to district elections is good for representational equity, but bad for housing supply, maybe the answer is not to throw out the representational equity idea, but to think about complementary solutions to the supply problem. So in this case, you know, what if we combine district elections with state intervention of some kind in land use planning housing policies, we get to keep the benefits of the district elections, both in terms of representation and a better distribution of housing between neighborhoods, but we increase the total amount of housing by pressuring cities, or incentivizing them to approve more housing overall, whether that's by more aggressive housing targets, builders remedy kind of things, withholding money for infrastructure investments, or what have you. That approach is, I think, also better than the state intervention without the shift to district elections. So sort of the inverse, because that might lead to more housing, but continued overconcentration in minority neighborhoods, which is not a good outcome either. So by putting them together, we get the best of both worlds, at least in theory. Could you talk a little bit about this, because this is sort of where you conclude the paper. And maybe we can also talk about the example that you use of military base closures and how bundled reforms help to break that logjam?

Michael Hankinson 38:19
So you hit the nail on the head. And I think that's our optimistic takeaway. I'm optimistic about it. But I think it's really hard to to confidently project what's going to happen in equilibrium. When these policies get rolled out. And if there is a strong say, top-down mandate for local housing targets, it could very well be that we lose the norm of legislative deference, right? So now even though you have a minority number of the city council that's able to veto things they don't like then you have the other n minus one city council members decides just to gang up on them and say, well, we are actually majority now we want to protect our seats, and you're not part of our log role. That could happen. It could be that another cleavage emerges, right? That all of a sudden, maybe you have stronger parties formed at the local level that cleaves differently along these housing politics then. And since that racially polarized voting, you have another type of polarized voting doesn't match the districts that you came up with. And it becomes really difficult all the sudden, we don't know, I think the good news is that as this reform rolls out, and more and more cities are... every morning, I start by looking on Google to see what new cities have decided to adopt district elections. So we're just gonna get more data and combine the data coming from the California Housing Community Development Department, we'll be able to track this even better. So fingers crossed for that. As for the other example of military bases, I referenced in the paper. This is some great work by Rick Hills and David Schleicher, when they're looking at what they call a zoning budget, and their takeaway from the closing of military bases was that this was very difficult until basically there was a decision by Congress to solve this collective action problem by creating Base Realignment and Closure Commissions, also known as BRAC. And the two big reforms there, was something somewhat similar. But the commissions took the control away from Congress. And they were using kind of these standardized practices to evaluate which bases would be closed. And that could be something similar to a statewide housing body trying to think in a more dispassionate way about housing targets at the local level. And second, was bundling together these closures into one big list that would be approved by the president. And technically Congress could have a joint resolution kind of knocking it down. But it was very different than the iterated nature of deciding on individual-based closures, which is also, you know, kind of similar to how we've been talking about this, we talked about this individual house proposals being voted up or down. And Mike was talking about, you know, the ability of a neighborhood to block something they don't like, when really, you know, the question is, can we start to bundle this housing proposals together and think about what is a bargain that can be struck now with previously, politically weak neighborhoods having equal power and their ability in building a coalition to get an overall package through? And so I think I just brings it full circle that something like what is discussed in the paper, what we just walked through Shane would kind of mimic these trends that we saw in improving, even something as seemingly unrelated as closing military bases, it's still a policy with spatially concentrated cost, which is a notoriously difficult political problem to solve. I hope that our contribution to this conversation is thinking about the policy outcomes and the by-products that are most directly affected by this type of institutional change, which, in some ways, when we were interviewing people out in California was surprising that we would talk about housing as something that we cared about why we're looking at this, and even the city council members that we were talking to, the planning commissioners, didn't quite get it. Like, huh, that's interesting, you're talking about housing like this hadn't crossed my mind, which is actually really good for our causal identification study, because it's not just that they want to constrain the housing supply, but it was baffling to us. So I think what our goal is trying to raise the ceiling to one of these other downstream outcomes. But I think my hope, you know, would be that there's more that comes with it. So whether that's a top-down pressure from the state, or, you know, some other type of institution that we move to, like a proportional representation model, or some sort of rank choice, voting, design, those are things that we thought about loosely, but we haven't deeply dug into when it comes to modeling out what it means for geographic spatial representation and the distribution of spatial outcomes.

Michael Manville 42:47
Yeah, that is pretty, I guess that makes sense. It is kind of remarkable that the city councilors weren't really thinking about it in terms of housing, I mean talk about exogenous. So that is good. But I guess it, you know, it's maybe something about housing, that in most neighborhoods in California, you know, I mean, the story of the housing crisis, they don't change much, right? And so you could understand where your typical constituent, particularly the constituent who just feels like the government isn't being super responsive, isn't thinking about development. Because chances are, if you just grabbed a random neighborhood, no one's proposing it. But of course, when housing is proposed, it becomes incredibly salient, right? And so it may not be a motivating force for a legislative change, or a districting change or something like that. Because normally, you're thinking about, yeah, God, there's been a pothole there forever. That you know the school stinks, what have you. And that's more of the day to day. But then as soon as someone says, oh, yeah, this is, you know, this is going to be 15 apartments, you're like, Whoa, hang on, like, now, it's salient, but that's just not going to describe most people in most of California most of the time. And that is, uh, yeah, it's great for your identification.

Shane Phillips 43:59
I think it might also just be, you know, in these at-large cities, if you have these unrepresentative people in office, at the time that the shift is being made, they're representing probably the places that are building a lot of housing to begin with. And so they're not like personally concerned or feel like it's an effect on them. They're already able to sort of offload it to these under-represented areas.

Michael Manville 44:25
Yeah. Incite them both, yeah.

Shane Phillips 44:27
Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Hankinson 44:28
And the funny thing is that if you are representing these, there's such a thing, you may be concerned about your re-election under district-based system where there's kind of less to go around. You're all from the same neighborhood, like the Riviera in Santa Barbara, if you will, but also that housing in your neighborhood probably isn't going to change under district elections, right? Because we don't have this affirmative policy of driving in supply or trying to hit a target actually. Instead, you just kind of shutting off the spigot in all neighborhoods, not to use too kind of a remove of a metaphor there. So it actually doesn't make a whole lot of difference to them, it's gonna make a difference to the people who now have representation and housing outcomes. But again, even talking to these minority coalitions they were just more concerned about having a seat at the table and not necessarily saying this is about housing issues?

Michael Manville 45:16
Yeah, I mean, I really do you think it's the case that the housing in many places in California is disproportionately located in less powerful neighborhoods. But in California, we also just don't build much housing.

Shane Phillips 45:31
Um-hum.

Michael Manville 45:31
And so it's, you know, that the difference is that difference between more likely and most right, it's like most of the time, that's just not on your mind, because it really isn't happening, although when it does, you notice. And I guess one last question I might have for you, or maybe it's not last, I guess we have 10 minutes left, is I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how many districts or how big the districts need to be, you know, because like Los Angeles famously has, that's 15 districts, we actually have 15 at-large sort of governments, because they're so big and so heterogeneous, and the typical city council member has, you know, this vast expanse, that's a mixture of homeowners, and renters, and we still managed to put a lot of our housing in a very small share of the land area, that is disproportionately minority. And so you have people say, well, we should actually have 35 or 50, council members and things like that. Does anything flow from your research that would, you know, suggest anything along those lines?

Michael Hankinson 46:32
Yeah. Just for some context, there was an earlier statistic. I think that Shane mentioned about less than 20% of cities having district elections. And so for context for the audience, these district elections tend to be in these large cities where just, you kind of lose the ability to say that it's a good thing to have, that you loose the ability to say that it's not important to have geographic representation across the city as big as, say, Los Angeles, right? So even if it sounds like only 80% of cities have these, it's actually much more than 80% of the population in the legislative area. But the second part is, yes, the city's districts does matter. You get some very interesting stuff in a formal model approach, which we're working on about, well, actually, if you have district elections, we haven't big enough districts, it's functionally sort of like they're running in a mini city. Or they can actually support housings, various parts of, like you got inequalities within the even district where it's no longer us talking about like a neighborhood level, a district means something very different. And that can be captured in LA, for instance, with the institution of neighborhood councils, I believe you have 99 neighborhood councils that they can call themselves a neighborhood that's very different than the 15 districts, right? So that's a very big difference there. But the third thing is really thinking about these other effects of district elections. And this is the stuff I think was much more on the minds of the advocates for this reform, which was about what does it mean to run for city council, like the district elections could usher in a whole new wave of people connecting with their voters. Because it's just cheaper to run an election if you don't have to run citywide.

Michael Manville 48:04
Uhmm

Shane Phillips 48:04
Right.

Michael Hankinson 48:05
You're not fighting for citywide media. And in one case, particularly in Escondido, a new council member, she said that she actually just went to every door in her district. Now they had district elections, and was able to win election that way, it was a majority Latino neighborhood, but just that would be an impossible apparatus to run. And so someone like her could not have, likely not have one election in Escondido otherwise, just based on the scale of what it's like to run an election there.

Michael Manville 48:31
Absolutely. And to sort of tag on to that. I mean, you can't walk the council district in Los Angeles, right? I mean, it's just the the idea of running for Los Angeles City Council is akin to running for governor in some states, right? And so, you know, whatever benefits come from precinct, they're not the same as having that neighborhood level accountability. Because you can be a council member in Los Angeles, and we all know from experience, just completely ignore some of the neighborhoods that you are technically accountable to. And you're absolutely right, the neighborhood council system is designed to mitigate that a little bit. But of course, those coucillors don't have anywhere near the power of the actual elected official.

Shane Phillips 49:16
I think this might be a good time as we're coming to a close here just to discuss a few alternatives, how we might do things differently in the future, or how some places are already doing things a little differently. So we've got at-large, which is about two-thirds of all cities, we've got district, which is another 14%-15%, but disproportionately large cities. And then we have some cities, as I mentioned, Seattle and I think Boston and others that have some at-large seats, some district seats, trying to kind of do a hybrid. What other options are out there that might kind of resolve some of these issues a little better? I know one idea that I feel like is gaining traction in some circles at least is the idea of of multi-member districts. Where you have multiple districts, but within each district, multiple people are elected. And so even though these other types of representation aren't the focus of your study, do you have any thoughts on if there's any potential for them to address some of the downsides of district elections? And at-large elections for that matter?

Michael Hankinson 50:17
Yes. I think some sort of multi-member district approach seems promising in terms of mitigating some of these concerns, naturally you have larger districts, and there's a lot of variables you could play with here, you can try to increase just the size of city council as well. But I think a challenge is even if you're, if the goal is to remove this tying of representation to a specific geographic area, to think that promotes some sort of, you know, ability to put nimbyism into policy outcomes. If you still have the polarized voting, and still have racial segregation. Even that individual who runs who is a racial minority want to appeal to a group that is kind of, you know, spatially constrained away, they're kind of representing districts anyway, right? If you're aggregating those votes, they're getting put through the system, because the system still has the polarized voting, so is the racial segregation, you still have kind of a similar outcome. And maybe they still have the ability to block housing, they don't want if you've maintained some sort of legislative deference. So I hesitate to kind of paint too far out in the timeline about how these assumptions are going to respond to the different institutions. But I think there may be other ways around it, that trying to break some of these other patterns that are creating this problem to begin with, rather than coming up with a institutional design that is maybe too out there for the average voter. Like, the reason why districts catch on is the average voter kind of gets it in the urban context, they tend to get it in terms of, "oh, I have some representatives works this way too, we have this large district. It's just natural".

Shane Phillips 51:58
Just going back to the issue of like salience of these issues at different levels. It does feel like, to some extent, we're already figuring out the right answer here in California than I think other places. I do think maybe just more state intervention plus district elections is a pretty good solution that we've already hit on, you know, just looking at things like polling here in California. If you go to a public meeting, or if you listen to certain corners of the media and so forth, it seems like there's this really large constituency of people who are opposed to building more housing. But when you poll people at a countywide or statewide level, it's pretty overwhelming support for building more housing, even when you say explicitly, like, you know, do you support housing in your neighborhood, even if it's a little bit bigger than what exists right now, you still get, you know, 60%-65% support. And it just seems like people, as Mike said, earlier, people get really worked up when a project is proposed in their neighborhood. But for one, it only takes half a dozen people calling a council member for them to really take notice. And that's not at all representative of the broader community. But you know, I think just more importantly, people don't seem to call up their state legislator when these kinds of things happen. So when the state legislature says, you know, every city has to allow accessory dwelling units, or you have to allow two duplexes on a lot, you know, there's still some backlash to that, but it just doesn't seem to have the same electoral consequences that people putting forward these bills. Michael Anderson from sightline had a good article on this, in both California and Oregon, the people who put forward these bills in Oregon, the lead on their missing middle bill is running for governor. And in the leading position, the people who put forward things like SB 330, and SB 50. Here in California, they're winning their elections, re-elections, handily. So maybe we've already figured it out.

Michael Hankinson 53:56
I think the big puzzles here is also trying to think about the kind of the fog of politics for some of these local races where you know what, certainly once you get outside of LA, you see we are working with very kind of limited staff, you know, and so if you think the polling is so limited at the presidential or congress level, in terms of getting the finger on the pulse, what you leave legislators with, city councilors with, is well, who they talk to, who shows up, who's calling the office and even if it's like, "well, we got 20 calls. 15 against 5 in favor". That's your poll. So I think this is the key point where we think about organizations, but the kind of political organizing mobilization, it's not so much to persuade all the persuasions, and frontpart it, but showing that there's going to be this political installation for people who are trying to push back against the knee-jerk reaction of the, kind of, vociferous opposition that shows up at that 8pm meeting on a Wednesday.

Michael Manville 54:55
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think it's almost like a "Moneyball" problem that exists in politics were, you know, the premise of Moneyball is that professional baseball had these rules of thumb that turned out to be like, largely groundless, you know, the size of a batter's biceps would determine his batting average or something. And I think, you know, there's a rule of thumb that like, if you talk to even a part-time elected official, they mention some version of it, like one phone call actually represents 300 people and one letter represents 500. And it's like, well, yeah, or it might represent one cranky guy, right? We don't really know. And I think that one strong hypothesis, when you look at sort of what Shane was talking about, and then think about, as you were talking about, Michael, the relative lack of information we have, is that we might just have a political system that sort of underweighs the possibility that lots of people are different. You know, we always want to scale up and say, Oh, we got two phone calls, that must mean half the district is mad. And it could, but it could also mean 20 people are mad, or it could mean two people are bad, and most elected officials have no way of discerning between that. So they end up being very risk averse.

Shane Phillips 56:04
Michael, before we go, is there anything from this paper that we missed that you wanted to make sure we cover or, you know, failing that anything you want to tell us about upcoming research?

Michael Hankinson 56:15
I think the one of the larger takeaways, and just the more I look at this, the more I see it is how concentrated costs play a role in all of our big policies that we're grappling with, like as a country. And then just most recently, when it comes to something like climate change, we see these progressive polls putting out something like new data for progress saying from last year, 60% of voters are in favor of some sort of green new deal. Well a key part of that is expanding kind of transmission lines in order to get renewable energy sources from the places where they exist, or wind, or hydropower is, to dense urban environments that are going to consume it. Well. We saw, just last year, that despite 60% of voters favoring this, we saw 60% of Mainers, voters in Maine, voting against the construction of a clean energy transmission line from Quebec to Massachusetts cities. And it was framed as just, this is a bad deal for Maine, right? And the vote would not only block that, it would make transmission lines require, in Maine, two-thirds legislativeee approval. By just creating more veto points, more negative power in the system. And so not only was the outcome bad, but just like the fact that we're voting on this, it's like a $71 million campaign for that one issue.

Shane Phillips 57:30
Wow.

Michael Hankinson 57:30
And so I think that the lesson, I know that the podcast focuses a lot on housing issues is that these types of problems and blocks and grappling with the supply-equity trade-off as Asya and I frame it. Is something that we're seeing everywhere. And I'm excited that people are thinking about this as a kind of a great piece recently in response to the challenges that UC Berkeley has seen. But I don't see the big structural change. I'm not sure what that is yet. That is going to help us solve this housing problem at the local level, but even things like energy infrastructure, opioid addiction responses, that's gonna play up at federal and state level. And so when I think about the research ahead, I just think there's like, three key points that I'm looking at. To address this, like one is the behavioral response, how do people just respond to these things that are put near them? And what can we learn about what stimulates people to respond negatively or positively to? What this paper is focused on is where the institutional forms. How do our political systems affect that supply-equity trade-off? And what we get and where. And three, and I think the hardest one for me to think about is; a) how to grapple with it, and b) how to implement it. How do we get people to adopt these institutions, once we've maybe come up with them? And right now, I think we see a lot of effort to kind of, rip power away from the local level and to kind of place it into state or federal, and I'm worried about how that's gonna play out in the long-run with our given increased focus on racial justice and equity and the mistakes that our country has made in the past with dealing with centralization versus the local level of power. But I hope there's enough momentum to try to get there.

Shane Phillips 59:14
Michael Hankinson, thank you so much for joining us today.

Michael Hankinson 59:16
Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Shane Phillips 59:22
You can read more about Professor Hankinson's research and find our show notes and a transcript of the interview at our website lewis.ucla.edu. The UCLA Lewis Center is on Facebook and Twitter. I'm on Twitter @ShaneDPhillips, and Mike is @MichaelManville6. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.