Home / UCLA Housing Voice Podcast / Episode 24: Mass Production and Suburbanization in Mexico with Dinorah González

Episode 24: Mass Production and Suburbanization in Mexico with Dinorah González

González-Ochoa, Policy-Induced Suburbanization: Mass-Produced Housing and Location Choices in Tijuana, Mexico

More

Episode Summary: How do developers choose where to build? We need to know the answer to make good policy, and our policy choices may determine whether housing developments advance economic and racial integration, access to opportunity, and sustainability, or they exacerbate segregation, stagnation, and environmental destruction. Dr. Dinorah González of Universidad Iberoamericana joins us to discuss her research into this question in Tijuana, Mexico, where hundreds of thousands of homes were built for low-income households as a result of a nationwide quasi-public mortgage program, INFONAVIT. The program had immense consequences for where people lived and the jobs, schools, and amenities they had access to — and much to teach us about getting the most from the homes and communities we build. Listen in as we chat about the industrialization of housing construction, the role of government in housing provision, suburbanization across the North American content, and grappling with the trade-offs that always accompany large-scale public policies and programs.

  • “During the second half of the 20th century, urban growth in Mexico primarily occurred through informal settlements. Cities faced a series of problems that inhibited the supply of affordable housing. Alegría and Ordóñez (2005) highlight how limited access to mortgages, low expectations of the capitalization of land income, weak property titles, high costs of supplying infrastructure, and high development costs made it nearly impossible for low-income families to acquire a home through formal markets. Because of these restrictions, in Tijuana, informal settlements accounted for 50% of land occupation up to the year 2000 (Alegría & Ordóñez, 2005). The late 1980s brought financial reform and other institutional transformations driven by international entities. Housing policies transformed the government’s role from the purveyor of low-income housing to one of facilitator, implementing actions that could stabilize the financial system, relieve the housing deficit, and activate the entire economy (Puebla, 2002). INFONAVIT, the public housing savings system to which formal-sector workers contribute 5% of their wages, was at the head of policy implementation. INFONAVIT became a financial entity, leaving the task of generating housing supply to private companies.”

 

  • “To accomplish the goal of pairing mortgage availability with housing supply, the institution needed to overcome two main obstacles: a debilitated construction industry and the general distrust of private companies regarding transparent public fund assignments … González-Arreola (2006) states that construction companies were skeptical of the government’s initial proposal and reacted only when the state introduced substantial incentives. In October 1998, these came with a formal agreement between private companies and INFONAVIT, called the Commitment for Housing. This agreement promised a package of incentives that would ensure a low-income housing supply, two of which were vital for low-cost production through scale economies. INFONAVIT would provide a constant flow of mortgages and commit to a faster registration and approval of credit holders. It would also give builders a 50% advance on future sales when 65% of the housing development was complete (González-Arreola, 2006). These bridging loans helped companies gain leverage at a reduced financial cost. Other incentives included mediating with state and municipal governments to facilitate the use of available land, reduce procedures for construction permits, and guarantee transparent credit assignments.”

 

  • “From 2000 to 2015, the speculative housing industry boomed. As a result, private developers built over 10 million new homes purchased with these mortgages (Comisión Nacional de Vivienda [CONAVI], 2018). Low-income housing accounted for 64% of these units … One of the cities where the speculative construction of housing had the most impact was Tijuana. By 2000, the city had a population of 1.2 million, a population growth rate of 4.94%, and a significant share of formal employment. In this context, thousands of families qualified for mortgages, making the city an attractive market for housing developers. From 2000 to 2015, INFONAVIT assigned 217,913 mortgages for new housing to Tijuana (CONAVI, 2018). Hence, the number of homes built by speculative home builders accounted for 96% of the housing increment for that period.”

 

  • “Mortgage-driven housing production induced an intense urban expansion process. From 2002 to 2014, the city authorized 3,413 hectares for housing subdivisions. Three physical characteristics of these developments are relevant to this study. First, companies were mass-producing housing using novel construction methods and techniques. Second, 91% of the land where private companies built houses was outside the urban area. Third, suburban lots were large—59 hectares on average. These data on housing development size and location support the hypothesis that scale economies in housing production motivate developers’ location decisions.”

 

  • “Internal scale economies are savings generated within the company; these arise from efficiencies because of concentrating production and exploiting fixed costs such as transportation, machinery, administration, and financial savings (Gill & Chor-Ching, 2010; Myers, 2004). Scale economies are also associated with large-volume production and usually generate higher labor productivity because of task repetition (Leung, Meh, & Terajima, 2008). One crucial benefit of a large company with high volume production is the incentive and capability to invest in innovation through technology (Gupta, 1983). These savings grow as production volume increases, rendering a lower marginal cost of production for any good or service.”

 

  • “In housing production, the lack of evidence on scale economies motivates a critical discussion on construction efficiency. Housing is a large, immobile, and expensive undertaking that faces several challenges in rendering higher productivity. Construction usually occurs in the same place where the house is inhabited, and several tasks are unique to each project and not readily subject to industrialized processes (Gómez, 2004). Additionally, weather and geological conditions, variations in the price and availability of inputs, and variations in demand add risk to any construction venture (Hendrickson & Tung, 2008; Hillebrandt, 1985; Serpell, 2002). These characteristics in housing production are structural restrictions that inhibit both innovation and productivity (Ball, 1999; 2003); in doing so, they also affect housing affordability.”

 

  • “Based on the evidence of higher competition, rising inflation of materials, and the reduction of profit margins, it is possible to set a scenario in which the company’s strategies to lower production costs became imperative. The initial boost in construction profit margins that Alegría and González (2016) point to was most likely a part of the initial pack of policy incentives. To this argument, González-Arreola (2006) contributes that INFONAVIT presented a proposed net marginal profit of 14% to incentivize housing supply. However, the data demonstrate that profit margins did not rise indefinitely. It is probable that as competition grew and developers confronted higher production costs, their marginal earnings reduced. By 2015, real estate market observers estimated an 8–9% net profit margin for low-income housing developers (Softec, 2015). Under circumstances that press marginal profits, companies can compensate with higher sales, internal efficiencies, and factor substitution, among other strategies.”

 

  • “These data support a counterargument to the interpretation of researchers studying the Mexican housing phenomenon. Libertun de Duren (2018b) and Castro et al. (2006) assume that all housing production savings from scale economies automatically translate into higher marginal profits; in doing so, they deny the role of structural restrictions in low-income housing provision. Specifically, the government secured housing demand through the mortgage system to reduce market uncertainty. I hypothesize that in these conditions, companies grew and were able to generate internal efficiencies through innovation. These efficiencies helped housing firms manage increasing competition and rising input costs, compensating for lower marginal gains with a higher market share.”

 

  • “An example of these efficiencies is the development of reusable concrete casting that helped housing firms implement a semi-industrialized production process. The Meccano construction system developed by the Urbi Housing Company uses predesigned reusable concrete formwork for mass building home units. Construction workers set up a framework in which electrical installations and plumbing have already been completed, after which they pour the concrete into the framework in one step, leaving a monolithic housing structure. This process shortened the construction time of a housing unit from one week to one day. It also led to a reduction in waste, materials, and the need for labor, providing significant advantages over the other, more traditional construction technologies (Meccano de Mexico, 2015) … However, industrialization is not possible for other building tasks, such as infrastructure enablement, site clearing, paving, and sidewalk construction, which are unique to each project. Because of these customized tasks, a construction process can never be considered fully industrialized.”

 

  • “Libertun de Duren (2018b) relies on in-depth interviews with home developers to study scale economies in housing production. The author concludes that scale economies and not land prices are why developers choose suburban land plots to build low-income housing. A relevant fact in that study is that developers mention that building costs in central areas do not differ from those in suburban lots; therefore, savings from scale economies come from financial cost, infrastructure construction, and the ease of obtaining permits, among other things.”

 

  • “This is a quantitative study that seeks to understand the underlying causes of the urban form in Tijuana, Mexico. I divided the hypothesis test into two analyses. The first analysis measures economies of scale from a sample of housing production costs comprising 89 housing prototypes classified by construction technology. The second analysis evaluates housing development location decisions using data on location, lot size, land price, housing density, and percentage of low-income housing.”

 

  • “For both analyses, I sought to collect data on housing developments built from 2000 to 2016. To accomplish this, I obtained data on production costs from housing companies between March 2016 and October 2017 through convenience sampling. The sampling technique enabled data acquisition from any construction company willing to share such data. This sampling choice proved necessary given that such information is generally considered private and developers are hesitant to share it.”

 

  • “According to the model described above, given a constant technology, scale economies are present if an increase in production volume (Vp) generates a decrease in production cost (Cp). I use regression analysis to compare the relationship between Vp and Cp for two construction techniques: masonry block and concrete casting. Figure 1 illustrates that the regression model for the masonry block construction technique has a negative linear relationship, as a change in the production volume affects cost at a negative rate. Table 1 presents the results for this model, which fail to show diminishing returns on production volume. An adjusted R2 of − 0.019 and a lack of statistical significance show a weak relationship between production cost and housing output. Although most prototypes were built by companies that use on-site block prefabrication, scale economies in production are untraceable for this sample.”

 

  • “For housing built with concrete casting construction techniques, the relationship between production volume and production cost displays a pronounced negative trend (see Figure 2). The regression model for the concrete casting technique is statistically significant (see Table 1). The negative coefficient shows that increases in housing volume generate reductions in housing production costs. The adjusted R2 indicates that the production volume explains 59% of the price variation. These results provide evidence of scale economies in housing production when implementing concrete casting construction techniques.”

 

  • “Developments in group B are an average distance of 10.8 km from the CBD; the average cost of land for these was 248 pesos per square meter, lot size was 26 hectares, and density was 31.9 houses per hectare. In group C, the land price average is 257 pesos per square meter, only 9 pesos more than group B; the most relevant differences between these two groups are the distance from the CBD, the land plot size, and the percentage of low-income housing. The developments in group C are located at an average distance of 16.98 km, and the average size of a plot of land is 84.28 ha, three times larger than group B. Also, only 27% of housing developments in group B are for low-income housing,whereas in group C, 78% of developments are for low-income families … The small differences in price, together with the substantial differences in lot size and low-income housing percentage, indicate that the price of land is not the only factor that motivates the developers’ location decision. Considering the evidence of scale economies in large-scale production from the previous analysis, it is evident that developers prefer large plots of land for low-income housing.”

Shane Phillips 0:05
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 places to live. Our guest this week is Dr. Dinorah Gonzalez of Universidad Ibero Americana in Tijuana. And my co-host is Paavo Monkkonen. Today we're talking about housing policy in Mexico, and lessons from their experience with mass production and suburbanization over the past few decades. Dr. Gonzalez's research takes a closer look at what Paavo described in his dissertation as "Mexico's housing transition", a shift from mostly urban self built incremental housing production and upgrading to a more standardized, sprawling, "modern approach to development". The government catalyzed this shift with the creation of a semi-public mortgage program that guaranteed demand for developers similar to what FHA back loans did for the US in previous generations. It led to a huge boom in suburban housing development, with a large share of homes affordable to low-income households, but it also exacerbated inequalities, inaccess to jobs, schools, hospitals, and other basic needs. Here we're focused on the experience of Tijuana, right on the US-Mexico border, and the strategies that developers use to reduce production costs so they can be eligible for that government-backed mortgage program. Dinorah's research has a lot to tell us about how production costs affect decisions about housing design, location, and price, how standardization and better business models may lead to greater productivity in the construction sector, and how governments can structure markets for more socially beneficial outcomes. The Housing Voice podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, and we receive production support from Claudia Bustamante, Olivia Urena, and Hannah Barlow. As a reminder, you can now earn AICP credit for listening to the show, just go to the APA credit maintenance webpage and search for UCLA Housing Voice podcast. 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 Dr. Gonzales.

Our guest this week is Dinorah Gonzalez lecturer at Universidad Ibero Americana in Tijuana and a recent postdoctoral fellow here at UCLA. We have her on to talk about suburbanization and mass-produced housing in Mexico, and also hopefully some discussion of Mexican housing policy more generally, since it's a topic we've yet to cover, and of course, Mexico is our very close neighbor to the south. Dinorah, thanks for joining us, and welcome to the Housing Voice podcast.

Dinorah Gonzalez 3:01
Thank you, Shane. Thank you Paavo for the invitation. Thank you to the UCLA Latin American Cities Initiative for fostering the understanding of housing in Mexico and Latin America.

Shane Phillips 3:13
And you heard there, Paavo is our co-host today. Welcome, Paavo.

Paavo Monkkonen 3:17
Hey, how's it going? Thanks, I'm super excited to talk to Dinorah about this cool paper.

Shane Phillips 3:22
So to start, as we always do, we're going to be talking about Tijuana specifically today. So Dinorah take us on a tour if we were visiting, where would you want to show us around?

Dinorah Gonzalez 3:32
Oh, so many places! Well, Tijuana, first I will have to say that this is the city I was born and raised, so it's really in my veins. So I will try to give you my impression of the city, you probably think you know it, because maybe you're part of the millions of visitors that come to the city on business or tourism. Or you might have made up your mind of it because you see the city constantly in the news, right? So Tijuana sits along the US-Mexico border, and it's by far the largest city on the Mexican side. The city borders San Diego, and if you were to look at this satellite picture of it, you would see that it's almost a mass, a single mass, right? But we couldn't be more wrong. These are two different cities in two different countries with two very different social realities and economic realities. And they're divided by a wall, a limit, a line, that over the years has gone from somewhat transparent to a more visible and tangible barrier. And you can see this when you come driving from LA or from San Diego but (what) first strikes you when you approach the border is the tightly built hillside. This monumental Mexican flag waving in the middle of this myriad of different colored houses and buildings. And this is a very different picture from what you see in Southern California where you have your beach suburbs and uniform development and an orderly pattern. So, yeah, that's the first impression. So when you cross the border, I would like to drive you through Avenida Internacionale, and the first place I would definitely take you to is to the northern-most part of the country, which is Playas de Tijuan, this is a beach community that is located right next to Imperial Beach in San Diego. Paavo is very familiar with this community.

Paavo Monkkonen 5:43
I'm raising the roof.

Dinorah Gonzalez 5:48
Yeah, he's raising the roof. Playas is a quaint suburb, mid to high-income community with a very beautiful view of the Pacific Ocean. But what makes this place really extraordinary is the border wall. Here is the physical barrier that divides the two countries and it goes all the way into the Pacific Ocean. On the wall, and in the public space surrounding it, you can see work from many artists who imprint the different migrant struggles that materialize in this border town. And I would also, if we were to stop here, I would tell you the stories of families who come to the wall, from both sides of the border, to reunite every so often with loved ones. So it's a pretty extraordinary place, and it helps you to understand a little bit of what the wall means for us. The wall for us is not something that just happened like six years ago when it became like the part of this political discourse. It's a barrier that we have lived with most of our lives, and we have seen it transform from this barbed wire fence to a steel sheath barrier that we had in the 90s to a vertical grade that we see now. So in order to understand Tijuana, and its people, you really have to understand what the wall represents, and what the border crossing represents. For many people, this is an impasse in their migration pact, and we see daily, the human tragedy that materializes here in this town. And well, after seeing the wall, and after seeing the physical border crossings, the second place I would take you to is to downtown, our bustling downtown. Here you would have your pick of gourmet restaurants, artisanal breweries, as you can see, I'm very partial to eating and drinking. And I would take you to Avenida Revolucion, our iconic street where bars and containers opened up during prohibition, and is now part of our historic downtown. You would have to eat a caesar salad at the hotel where it was invented, and also I would have to take you down to our Zona Rio, which is the most modern financial district; (you) can eat some Baja-Mex cuisine that combines deliciously with our local wine. And we can have our pick of street food: tortas, tacos, seafood, you name it, it's all here, and it's all super delicious. All of these activities show you a picture of a vibrant, economically diversified city with a dynamic that is very much intertwined with the US and very much dependent on these institutional and economic differences between the US and Mexico. And so maybe this gives you a different picture of what you thought Tijuana was.

Shane Phillips 9:08
Yeah, I really appreciate that. I think it's helpful for maybe dispelling some stereotypes that folks have or might have. And I think some of what we're going to be talking about might do that a little bit more as well.

Paavo Monkkonen 9:20
And we could do a whole podcast about Playas de Tijuana and how the transformation of it over the last, you know, 10-15 years has really been fast. I mean, like as this case study of nimbyism/ you know...a place where nimbyism may be justified in some ways because of the lack of access out of the neighborhood because the hills and the way the construction has been happening over recent years. I think it's a really interesting place.

Shane Phillips 9:48
So the name of the article that we're talking about today is 'Policy Induced Suburbanization: Mass Produced Housing and Location Choices in Tijuana, Mexico', and it was published just this year in the journal, Housing Policy Debate. And, just to give a little background since Paavo, has worked on this stuff for a long time, the process of urbanization in Mexico and how this has all happened over time. Paavo, do you want to give some of that background, and then we can kind of turn it over to Dinorah for a few questions.

Paavo Monkkonen 10:20
Sure. Yeah, and I'm super excited to talk about this paper, because the focus on developers and the development process, I think, is very new and important in this area of research. So Mexico's urbanization throughout most of the 20th century, was characterized by what's often called self-built, or self-help housing, which is kind of this incremental development of housing by households without housing finance. And that really shaped how cities expand in this slower, low-density process with a lot of vacant lots. But then in the early 90s, with a lot of other transformations that were happening in the federal level in Mexico, the government turned what had been a housing fund that directly built housing, and allocated, kind of through unions, into a mortgage bank, and expanded the activities of that mortgage bank very significantly, especially after the financial crisis in 1994. And this really kind of "modernized" the housing development process and created kind of a boom in large-scale private sector development of suburban housing. And so in my dissertation, I call this the "housing transition". And I've studied kind of how this rapid expansion and boom in suburban housing development transforms cities kind of at a macro level in terms of segregation or vacancy or kind of urban form. But I think Dinorah's paper, delving into kind of the development process, really has a lot of potential to impact policy and kind of give us a greater understanding. So looking at how suburban developers choose where to build, what influences their kind of decisions in the production process and we'll get into that. So Dinorah, before we get to your paper, maybe do you want to add anything to this primer on Mexico's housing policy recently? Or kind of, I don't know, discuss the similarities you see between Mexico and the US in terms of suburban development.

Dinorah Gonzalez 12:09
I think you gave a pretty good picture of what public policy was, and how these sudden mortgage influx really stimulated the construction industry, and it stimulated it to produce a lot of homes. In some way, in the same way that it did all that time ago, in the US when you had all this mortgage in this suburbanization, right? I think both in the US and in Mexico, you saw that, all this sudden, demand for housing stimulated the construction industry. And the housing developers started to arise. And these were firms specializing in home building, right? And you also see a whole sorts of industry innovations such as: pre-fabricated elements that you would use for home building, you saw that home design start to be much more modulated; industry standards were set, efficiencies within construction started to become important, and the firm specializing in various components of the construction projects. Those are things that happened in Mexico and the United States. And that's why we can see that the built space have some similarities, right? You have that both in the United States and Mexico suburbanization is comprised of these large developments with a lot of homes, because they were built where land prices were low. And this led to suburban sprawl. But also you have that the use of prefabricated components and building and large scales gave us this homogeneous landscape, everything looks kind of like the same, right? And you have these similarities. But here, you have the most important difference is that related to income, the person buying the home in Mexico has significantly less income. Mexico is a country where around 40% of the population lives people below the poverty line. And right now, to give you a better picture of this, we can talk about minimum wage. Right now it's about $9 a day. However, for maquiladora worker which is the average industrial worker here in the city of Tijuana for example, the average maquiladora worker is making around $300 to $500 a month approximately. So they would be making $4000 to $6000 a year, which is the salary above minimum wage. But when you compare this to the US salary, which is around $32,000, in a year, for an industrial worker, you get a sense of how much of a home that a low income worker can purchase with such a restricted salary.

Paavo Monkkonen 15:36
Right. And I wonder if I mean, I think, to me, one of the big differences is that, like you say, the target population for this program, and I like in your paper, I think you mentioned how the federal government in the early 90s convened all these developers and said, Look, we need to build houses that are affordable to this population group. And that means $25,000, or something, right. And so the developers responded with, I mean, if you compare it to the Levittown housing back in the day in the US, you know, the lats are much, much, much smaller. And the houses are much, much, much smaller. Right. So the Levittown lots I just looked it up. It's there. 7000 square feet. And then, you know, the early stage in front of a housing in Mexico, it's, you know, 600 square feet, or 700 square feet, right. So the kind of the, the size of the housing units and the lots of so much smaller, because the original intent was to be able to serve a population that was making so much less money then then the way it developed in the US. Yes.

Dinorah Gonzalez 16:33
And that's, that's one of the first restrictions you have the salary, how much of a house can you afford with this income? And what developers came up with was the, you know, we need to really pinch every single corner in order to economize and produce a home that can that these people can afford. And it came to a home that would have to be bought around $20,000 $25,000. And you can imagine what size of a home and had to be, for you to build it. And in buy all the input inputs for this type of home, out of

Shane Phillips 17:26
curiosity, you know, thinking about because so much of this housing in this program is targeted toward low income households. I'm wondering how people in Mexico view developers, and if they have the same sort of, you know, sort of villainous reputation that they often have in the air in the US, or if the fact that they're mostly building housing for low income households kind of changes how they're perceived there at all? Oh, no.

Paavo Monkkonen 17:58
We differ on many things, but

Dinorah Gonzalez 18:00
not on that. No, you have to understand that is the villainous perception of developers and that he goes founded on events that had real social, very real social repercussions. During social housing boom, several researchers have documented bad practices like negligence fraud, and the housing industry, mostly in construction and financing. I, in the LA Times, you have a Richard morosi. You writing this piece on developers how developers built houses with faulty construction and incomplete developments that overall aggravated the already dire situation of low income families who bought these tiny homes in the suburban locations. But this perception of greed and bad practices is being it's it's seeps into how we conceptualize the whole housing debacle as academics, for example, I've found papers that interpret faulty construction or incomplete streets as a cost cost reduction strategy, which is not it's just lousy business planning, lack of oversight from the company and the government. And if you think about it, as a business, if you deliver faulty goods, you will not compete for a long time. So it's just it's just bad business, right? And that kind of thinking can also fog, how we understand what we're really necessary cost reduction strategies like mass production, which sometimes it's also interpreted as the screen based strategy. It's not interpreted as a necessary action to produce that home affordable home, right.

Shane Phillips 19:57
It's just a way to pad the profits of the developers is how its interpreted.

Dinorah Gonzalez 20:02
Yeah. So it does present us with this analytical confusion, that tends to discard any analysis that focuses on production as unnecessary, because everybody feels that the explanation for these decisions is just plain green.

Paavo Monkkonen 20:18
And the fact that developers are greedy doesn't help thing. But it does, you know, makes people blame that rather than the structure of the program that was set up by the federal government, right, so the federal government is, is asking for a low cost housing unit. And, you know, even the most honest and upstart, you know, upstanding developers going to be able to only produce something that's of low cost, right. And so exactly that, you know, the blame game, in this whole program has been interesting to see who's who blames who, you know, for the problems.

Dinorah Gonzalez 20:52
Yeah. And that will you say, right there, but what is really important because the government has strained as far away as it get can get from housing facilitation through markets, because it's so tainted, right. And it has reduced subsidies and eliminated many of the programs associated with low income house building, homebuilding, leaving housing provision totally to the market forces. And as a result, low income housing production has stalled to a halt. Very few companies in Mexico still build low income housing. And there hasn't been no notable policy intention on reactivating it. And the lack of government intervention in housing provision translates to fewer options and more expensive housing for lower income families. And the Yeah,

Shane Phillips 21:39
just just so I'm sure we're on the same page, are you talking about like, this is what's going on right now? Or this was kind of what was occurring before these reforms?

Dinorah Gonzalez 21:51
No, this is what's going on right now. Right now. The government doesn't touch, low income housing production through markets with a lot 10 foot pole. It's, it's been that way since while subsidies have slowly declined since 2008. And then you have had several reforms. But right now, there are very, very few companies that still build low income housing and the Hiko.

Paavo Monkkonen 22:22
Got it. And I guess it might be helpful to clarify. Right. So

Shane Phillips 22:25
the mortgage bank that the government runs is because of provident fund that's combined with a pension system, right. It's the Fund for workers housing, and that does the majority of mortgages in the end. So you know, that's it's a quasi federal agency, and it has its own, you know, okay. So it's so it's so that's the distinction we're making here is this fun with the pension system and everything, it is doing a lot of production of housing for low income households, but it's not like formally a government entity, right. And it's not operating with like government subsidies really. So and that alone,

Paavo Monkkonen 23:01
right, in the early 2000s, they were they were funneling a lot of subsidies through these loans that the federal mortgage bank was issuing. But now they do no longer do the subsidy combined with those loans in order to target kind of the lower income households. But all formal salaried workers are members of this workers housing fund, and so kind of they're lending out those contributions of of salaried workers to salaried workers. Okay. Okay.

Shane Phillips 23:27
So getting into the paper here a little bit more, the central question of your article is whether developers are choosing sites based on low land prices, choosing where to build based on the price of land, or on effectively on the overall size of land, which determines how many homes they can build in a single project and therefore, effects the economies of scale that they can achieve while building? It's my understanding that, you know, part of why you're interested in this question is that a lot of these suburban developments are taking place in pretty accessible, inaccessible and segregated areas? And so, you know, we want to know why that's happening. But more specifically, I'm just curious for your response on why should researchers and advocates care about whether it's land prices or economies of scale that to determine their location decisions? Why is that specific question important?

Dinorah Gonzalez 24:23
Well, here we can return to the question, is it greed or are these production imperatives of low cost housing production right. So, we need to clarify the clearly the different effects that each one has on the one hand, low cost production imperatives come from having to build this $20,000 $25,000 hole, right. And these this amount has to cover construction costs, land costs, infrastructure permits, administrative costs, construction financing costs. So just for you to picture this, I was reading yesterday that the whole permits just the permits for a home in California, it's going to cost you $25,000 per hole. So you need to build a home with what you're just going to spend on permits on in California. So So here is where you need to grasp, like the complexity of building this low cost home. If you were to build today, this minimum size home like those built for in the year 2000 to 2008, roughly around 355 square feet, you would spend just on concrete, just on concrete, you would spend around $6,000. Yeah, I'm not talking about steel, I'm just talking about country, concrete. So imagine that you're a developer, and you do Shane, very decent person, and you forecast your production for further year, maintaining that the price of concrete is going to be stable, and also the price of steel and your primary building materials. So if anywhere along the line, you encounter an increase in one of these materials, which is very common for construction inputs, they could throw your number offs and eat off your profits. So every efficiency in housing production counts, from the choice of construction technology, to the home's design to the roads that you design, to the allotment, public spaces to the ease of obtaining permits. So every single construction economy is going to count. And here is where the developers started arranging production, through cost reduction strategies in order to hit that target market of the $20,000. Home or $25,000. Home where these mortgages were allocated. And the result was the semi industrial lives production of tiny suburban houses, which under the best circumstances of Shane being the very decent developer he is where, where he oversaw construction quality and had complete streets and basic public services. These little tiny houses are still socially unjust, because they are too small for medium sized family, because they're located in areas with where there's no transportations, no goods or service provision, no schools, no hospitals, they're away from jobs even. And you have these families clustered in developments, with where everyone is low income. So you can see that the size of the social problem that just these decisions, and I'm not talking about all of this bad lack of the lack of supervision or the lack of streets, I'm talking, given that all things are within within the best results that we can obtain from this type of arranging or production

Shane Phillips 28:23
within the constraints that you have the constraints you can achieve.

Dinorah Gonzalez 28:27
Yeah, yeah, you're still going to have very, very inequitable social space.

Paavo Monkkonen 28:35
One other point that I was thinking about with this question is cheap land has always been seen for a long time as a kind of solution to housing problems in Latin America, right? access to cheap land for the urban poor has been a rallying cry for for decades. I think that if you think about urban sustainability, infill housing is extremely important. And so highlighting the role of economies of scale, I think, has important policy implications. Because you know, if you can reduce costs with economies of scale, in the infill context, right, that's kind of the dream of mass produced infill, rather than just kind of continued expansion and making things inexpensive through through cheap land.

Shane Phillips 29:16
Yeah. And is it maybe fair to say that, you know, this isn't really about, like whether land prices or production costs are more important relative, you know, one is more important than the other, but really just identifying the ways in which both are important and both play a really, you know, crucial role here. Okay. So construction, efficiency, productivity, basically, how do we build housing, less expensively at lower cost? is a pretty hot topic. I think in housing policy these days, at least. In my circles, we've been reading a lot of a Brian Potter and his construction physics substack but I feel like researchers like us aren't all that well equipped to study this stuff. It If you're not out there doing the work day to day, you know, as a developer or a contractor, it does seem difficult to really understand the challenges that builders are facing. But just to give a big picture sense for why we care about this, many industries have gotten a lot more productive over the decades, they're producing more or higher quality goods, given a fixed amount of investment of time or money. I think a classic example of this is in electronics, where you can buy a 70 inch 4k OLED TV today for less than what it costs to buy a 40 inch CRT television few decades ago. But that has not happened with construction at all, productivity has been pretty much flat for a long time in the industry. And I'm, you know, I'm referring here to us trends, which I'm more familiar with by imagine, it's not all that different elsewhere, including Mexico. And when you pair that flat, or even somewhat declining productivity in the construction industry, with rising land cost, rising materials, costs and so on, it's just getting more and more expensive to build homes. Could you give us a quick primer on why it's been so hard to improve construction efficiency? And some of the strategies that people that developers that contractors, governments have been using to try to get more housing out of the dollars were spending building them?

Dinorah Gonzalez 31:23
Yeah, sure. Well, construction, housing production, overall, is an activity that is difficult to optimize, like you said, it's not a TV or a computer products where technology evolves rapidly, and you can make them cheaper. And every time this, there's some technological change, right. So for example, housing, it's not prone, easily prone to industrialization, because it's a large goods. So the sheer size mix makes it difficult to industrialize. So you can maybe go for an industrial realization of components. But then you have to bring them all over to the site, and manually put them together. And so that makes it additionally difficult.

Shane Phillips 32:13
Right. So it's big, and it's location specific.

Dinorah Gonzalez 32:18
Yeah, it's big, and it's location specific. And in addition to the location, you have to, you have to work on it, right, you have different activities that are specifically tailored to each project, such as cycling, road design, infrastructure requirements. So this all of this makes construction highly prone to unforeseen contingencies. Or maybe the rain cycle extends a couple of months, and it delays your project. Or maybe you will ask, evaded, and found the material that was not detected by the geophysical probing, and you need more time to figure out what the implications of it are. Just to give you an idea of the complexity of the construction process.

Shane Phillips 33:01
And could you tell us a little bit about so your paper, you're looking at two building technologies, one of which is a little more standardized or industrialized than the other? So that one being reusable concrete casting? Could you tell us a little bit about the role that that has played in bringing down costs, and maybe contrast that with this other technology construction approach, which is the block technology?

Dinorah Gonzalez 33:28
Sure. In this, so technology, innovation is something that is very important to, to every industry, right? And we've, we've been talking about how it has been difficult to innovate for the construction industry. Practically, we've been using brick and mortar for how many years I mean, hundreds 1000s of years, right? And the way that we build has changed very little. And this technological change in Mexico, the use of concrete casting came only when you kind of controlled some of these structural restrictions that impede technological change. I'm talking about guaranteeing demand, when the government got all of these developers together and told them, okay, guys, you have to produce this home at this price. And we are going to guarantee you these mortgages, you're going to have the mortgage. And so the target, the target buyer became not the person but the mortgage right. They had to build something that can that could be bought with that mortgage. So they started scrambling and trying to figure things out and innovating. And for example, HAIL, which is one of the largest housing companies in Mexico, they developed a system where blocks, they use blocks, but they were thinner. And they would, they would need less steel reinforcement. And so that way they they could cut costs, right. But the winning innovation overall was these houses that were built with concrete casings, because you would have this cast this really large cast, where would you would do some setup, setting up installations, like electric installations, plumbing installations, but then you would just come up and with your concrete machinery and, and build a house in a day, instead of a week,

Shane Phillips 35:58
Does it work like where you basically just set up the molding or whatever you want to call it the cast, and then, you know, do the wiring or whatever you have to do or maybe that comes after, but you just basically in a single pour of concrete, you just fill in the whole thing. And it's all just kind of one big structure. And that saves you time. Okay,

Dinorah Gonzalez 36:19
Yeah, and that saves you a really a lot of time.

Paavo Monkkonen 36:23
Like 3d printing, but pouring concrete into a metal mold.

Dinorah Gonzalez 36:28
So yeah, so you you could really cut times, not even half, I mean, it would be really fast. And this only came about because you didn't have to think that maybe those 100 calluses wouldn't be sold at the end of the day, right? Because you knew those have had 100 houses 1000 houses were already signed with a mortgage. Right? I don't know if that makes sense.

Paavo Monkkonen 37:02
Yeah, totally. I mean that, you know, my, my father in law is an architect and in Tijuana, and he did these houses that have like a metal structure with drywall and insulation, which was a very different style of construction technology. And he could not get bank financing for them. Right. So I think that this idea of innovation, being stymied by financing, or being promoted by financing is extremely important to think about.

Shane Phillips 37:27
Yeah, I mean, anything that even applies, it definitely applies here in the US in a lot of different contexts. But like, one that we always talk about is parking. And, you know, you can have a city or state change its policy and say, You don't have to build parking anymore when you build a new development. But a lot of developers will say like, well, we don't really even want to build the parking, but our lenders require it of us, right? Because they don't believe that if we build a building with no parking, or limited parking, that there's going to be the demand for it. So having that guaranteed demand, I can see why that really makes a difference. So So what did you actually find we're getting into this very late, but what were the findings of this research, you know, between land prices, and, you know, kind of the overall lot area and this opportunity for economies of scale? What was what was really the the deciding factor here? Or what role did each of those two things play? And maybe you can kind of mention how the economies of scale differed between the block technology approach versus the concrete casting approach?

Dinorah Gonzalez 38:34
Well, well, we can first talk about about technology, right? Because the concrete casting approach requires like this large investment that can only play a payoff if you build in volume. I mean, if people are going to build just like a few houses, why buy all this nice concrete cast and setup all here production. So, for example, one casting system can be used to build around 1500 homes, or maybe even 1700. So you can imagine how much you have to build in order to get your money's worth. So I've found that you did get scale economies from building all of that, but the more you built, I think the idea

Shane Phillips 39:22
here might be like, you know, and I'm just throwing out completely wrong numbers, but just for illustrative purposes, if it costs you say, $10,000 to build the cast, or let's say, $100,000 to build the cast, but it lets you save $1,000 on each building, then if you're only building 50 units, you've spent $100,000 on this cast, and you've only save 50,000. But if you've got 500, you've spent $100,000 on that cast, but you've saved 500,000 And so that's where the scale of economies and you have to cross some threshold before it actually started saving you money.

Dinorah Gonzalez 40:03
Exactly. And so you would have to build a lot of houses for it to be really an economical choice. On the other hand building with bricks, you don't see that. That advantage, right? It's not that it's, it's not that you don't get economies from building a lot of homes, because you, you you might have, you know, you get economies from just doing a one big housing development permit or maybe by just setting up your selling points in one place. But they're not that significant. Yeah, they're, they're not construction economies. Right. You know, they're, they're not construction scale economies, because you still have to do the brick and mortar, and you still have to manually construct every home.

Shane Phillips 40:59
Right? And then land prices are pretty low. And the government's pretty accommodating with the permitting, it sounds like So really, the construction materials and labor are the very large, largest share of the cost. That's where you need to save money, if you can. Yeah,

Paavo Monkkonen 41:14
exactly. I would love to have you just mentioned a little bit about the methodology and how you kind of what data did you use to test the hypothesis about scale economies?

Dinorah Gonzalez 41:25
So for this analysis, I use construction budgets from around 23 construction developments and around 89 prototypes of houses.

Paavo Monkkonen 41:40
Yeah, that's, I mean, that's a rare find, right? I mean, the ability to actually analyze project costed is is rare in this research field.

Shane Phillips 41:48
Developers are not very open with this stuff. For some reason, I feel like they think that their their data is all proprietary that they're doing something very different than their competitors. But I'm not really sure that that's the case. So the case study in this paper, as we've talked about is Tijuana. And the city has seen incredible growth over the past several decades, it grew 5% per year, from 1990 to 2000, to 1.2 million residents. And then over the next 15 years, this public mortgage lender issued more than 200,000 mortgage loans to Tijuana households, and the population today is over 2.2 million. So it's almost doubled. In just over 20 years. The vast majority of these homes are being built in suburban developments on large tracts of land fairly distant from the urban core. We talked a little bit about this already. But could you give us a little bit more of a picture of what these mass produced suburban developments look like? Just you know, some basics in terms of the size of the lots, the square footage of the buildings? Are they attached or the detached? And just an idea of how this compares to the sort of Levittown style or the McMansion sprawl developments you see here in the US.

Dinorah Gonzalez 43:05
Okay, well, you have to picture again, I'm going back to the tiny home. The minimum size, or the smallest that was built was around 355 square feet up to like 474 square feet.

Shane Phillips 43:21
So the biggest ones are usually only about 500 at most.

Dinorah Gonzalez 43:27
Yeah. Yes, at most. They have one bedroom. It's like a teeny tiny New York apartment but in the middle of nowhere. It's kind of like that way I can describe it. It's one bedroom, a room that holds a kitchen dining living area and a bathroom. In the back you have tiny service patio, you don't have a backyard and just enough to fit a laundry sink and the front of the house you have a parking space, and the little small area for plants.

Paavo Monkkonen 44:04
That was one of the best features of these things is the parking pad included for social interest housing and Eric Gara. I'm sure you've you know, his work, the Eric Garrett, has written about parking and social interest housing developments in the suburbs.

Dinorah Gonzalez 44:17
Yeah, I mean the parking space was not even enough to for to fit a small car and open all the doors. I mean, you have you would have trouble opening and you could open probably one or have a sunroof know what, it was really small. It is really small. And most people used it to expand their house, make another room or to make porch. Those are some of the things people , and these are mostly not detached. They're duplexes, triplexes and the most recent models are for four storey-building buildings, which you can get certain economies from sharing the walls and the slabs, the ceiling slabs. But you don't need an elevator still. So yeah, that's kind of the idea the if you can...

Shane Phillips 45:24
I'm curious, you know, I wanted to ground this a little bit in like, relative to what, and I didn't ask this yet, but I just wanted, you know, something I'm thinking about is these homes are very small, they're inadequate in many ways, but like, lots of people are buying them. And so is it fair to say that it is a significant improvement over people's living situations kind of their alternatives? Or is that not really the case? And it's more of their kind of being pushed into these types of living arrangement arrangements?

Dinorah Gonzalez 45:57
Well, you would have to evaluate it by comparing their incremental housing and maybe incremental housing over the long run has, you have a bigger house a bigger lot, and bigger spaces. But you also have to go through all this time, of uncertainty, and of manipulation and regulation, you know, regulating and getting your land security?

Shane Phillips 46:29
Yeah, like you don't, you don't own the property, probably in most of those cases,

Dinorah Gonzalez 46:33
Until the government, or until you can access one of the government's regularization programs. So you...

Shane Phillips 46:42
to sort of be moved into the formal housing market?

Dinorah Gonzalez 46:46
Yeah, and this is a long process. And over the years, you might be living in a little shack that's improvised. And so it's, I don't, I don't have the elements right now to compare them.

Paavo Monkkonen 47:04
it's trade offs all the way down. It's a great question. I mean, I once wanted to do a study, there's a there's a develop a formal development is of social interest housing called El Refugio, in like East TJ, and then across the boulevard, there's an incremental neighborhood called Rancho El Refugio, and it's like, okay, the lots are 1000 square feet instead of 600 square feet. But like you said, you know, without the mortgage to build the house in the beginning and pay it off over time, you're going to be living in something much more temporary in the beginning and slowly adding on to it over time, and then eventually getting infrastructure and running water installed, maybe at a later date. Right, so it is... I'm not sure it kind of what the present value comparison would be of the two. But I don't think probably most people are thinking about it in that way, either.

Dinorah Gonzalez 47:58
Yeah, and it's going to be different for every development, depending on its location and different characteristics.

Paavo Monkkonen 48:05
And but yeah, I guess just a final kind of relativity question. You know, the one director have in front of you that a conference in San Diego once said, like, "you know, everyone used to complain about the slums that were people were living in, and other complaining about these new houses being tiny". But like, I think that's a better problem to have than than slum conditions so I don't know. From the federal perspective, I think, you know, this idea of a modern formal development is more attractive than what people had been building on their own before. But I think from the household perspective, you know, the informal sector offers something more customized, and maybe in a better location.

Dinorah Gonzalez 48:43
And it's probably also cheaper for the government. I mean, formal housing, you have to provide the infrastructure provide the different programs to make it to adequate it to make it better. So in the end, Brian, you just transfer those costs to the person spying.

Shane Phillips 49:05
This kind of reminds me of our conversation with Paige and Shelby and her work in slum upgrading in Bangkok, and sort of the the trade offs there. So I want to tie this to, you know, what this means for policy a little bit and what we can take away from this, and I had a few questions about this, but I might just sort of combine them. This paper is looking at things in a suburban context. But I'm curious to hear, you know, what might be the takeaways in that context, because we do build a lot of suburban housing still in the US. And that's, I don't think going to change anytime soon. But also thinking about how this can apply to more of an urban context. You know, I'm sort of reminded of how developers here in LA and a lot of other places, they often say it takes basically the same amount of work to build a 300 unit building versus a 20 unit one, in either case, If you've got to hire a bunch of people to design it, to get it approved through the city, you'll have probably a similar number of people managing the project. And doing a lot of the same things like setting up a staging area, pouring a foundation, all that the things you have to do may be bigger and more numerous. But it's qualitatively pretty similar - modular and prefabricated construction are some efforts to bring economies of scale to some of that process. But it seems like that can maybe only take us so far. So on both the suburban side and the urban side, and, you know, pose this to both of you. I'm just curious for your reflections on what lessons we might draw from this. And like, how can this knowledge of the economies of scale and the production inputs and everything, help us build housing more affordably?

Dinorah Gonzalez 50:50
Well, I believe that if government really has the intention of really digging into this, we can think of offsetting production diseconomies through government subsidies, you know, and this could be in different forms, maybe even, this could even be in the form of land and other production incentives. And here is where we might encounter like, a couple of problems in the Mexican experience, you know, first for over the 20-some years that these, 30-some years of these policies have been in place, there has been no clear land strategy on the behalf of the government's leaving developers to amass their own land reserves. So it's really hard now to get land in cities with really these hot real estate markets. And this is a problem, because it's mostly in the hands of private companies. And also, we can say that local governments, such as states, and state and municipal governments have land they acquired through donations into conifer, for example, developers donate 10% of the total sellable area, to the municipality. This in addition to a lot in the public parks and schools and whatnot. And also informal developments, when they go through the irregular regularization process, they also donate land to the state government. So these donations could be used to promote infill developments, may be reasonable prices, but the local governments sometimes sell these plots, either to the developers or the other, or other entrepreneurs. But there's a very lack in transparency in what happens to these plots. So we have to really think of how we're going to produce this infill development, bear in mind that the type of production that we we assessed is almost gone. And we have a positive, something positive that did come out of this, that is that companies rescaled, after the housing bubble, and these companies when they shrunk, they have also reorganized, they have better business models, they have used production efficiencies in other ways. For example, they build a four-storey social housing project, by renting the concrete casings, they don't buy them anymore, or they subcontract specialized workforce for different tasks. They're not these big, enormously big companies, they've shrunk. And also these subcontractors compete on the basis of efficiency and price, which is something developers do in different parts of the world. So you're no longer building the hundreds of homes right off the bat. So we need to learn how to use those efficiencies in ways that we can do the infill development.

Shane Phillips 54:13
It's kind of reminding me of how, you know something that's been pointed out as a I think a flaw in our approach to housing development in the US is just how cyclical things are and how dependent on the business cycle it is where you just build a lot of housing some years and no housing almost other years. And you're kind of building oftentimes when prices are highest or buying land when prices are highest. But it's also just not very good for I think the the industry and the workers themselves where it's kind of feast or famine. Sometimes there's lots of jobs, other times there's just nothing going on. And it does seem like maybe having more small scale, consistent support for these kinds of things can be one part of the solution.

Dinorah Gonzalez 54:55
Yes, I agree with that. Pablo, I

Shane Phillips 54:57
don't know if you've been thinking about this much lately. But I've been, I was asking about this on Twitter actually recently about kind of the role of public land in development and how you know, in the US, and it sounds like maybe this is similar in Mexico where most land is privately owned, and that includes most land that gets developed. Whereas in a lot of European countries and other parts of the world, a lot of the housing development that happens is basically the government auctioning off its land or developing something on itself or even buying land for the purpose of finding someone to develop on it. It just seems like a very different approach. And when we leave it all to just kind of the the market to see what turns over what gets sold at any given time. And we have no control over that. It seems like we're, its own obstacle to building the housing that we need.

Paavo Monkkonen 55:50
Yeah, I mean, I think one notable thing about the Hong Kong housing strategy is that it has won a long term strategy, right? And, you know, so they do get tons of economies of scale by by building dense housing, but also by having public investment in housing production. Like you said, it's a counter cyclical process. I mean, there's just consistent, it's not even necessarily counter-cyclical, but by having a certain certainty about the future of where you're going to build and what you're going to build, then you can maximize the production efficiencies within that certain path forward. Right. And it's a thing that we definitely do the opposite of in our governance of housing production in the US.

Shane Phillips 56:32
I mean, if you just think about like, it's not as though people stop having children as though people stop plotting to form households, just because you know, the economy is not quite as strong this year as that year and yet, that's how we build housing. It's just it follows the economy rather than the actual demographics or needs. Yeah. All right. Well, I think we're running out of time here. But do you Nora, is there anything we missed here, anything you want to share or key takeaways or anything like that, from the paper that you want to make sure we cover before we go?

Dinorah Gonzalez 57:03
Maybe we can talk about the parametos del contextio urbana, urban containing parameters. And this is a very interesting way of looking at how the public policy does not or did not understand housing supply or house or how low income housing supply is restricted. When this whole housing debacle really unfolded, they tried to pull back on the subsidies and try to specifically allocate them to better locations, right. So the CPUs were these buffers, that the Federal Housing Agencies throw around the cities and around urban corridors to prioritize the subsidy allocation. And in order to procure these more socially equitable conditions, and they kind of functioned, or they wanted them to function like a subsidy incentive. For example, in 2016, a homebuyer you can receive, like, around $500, or 215 $100. In more in a federal subsidy, when you bought a home within these boundaries. The thing is that it was difficult to find a cheap home located within these boundaries, right? So if we look at this, with the knowledge that production economies are imperative for low-cost housing production, we can say that the incentive was not nearly enough to offset the higher cost of building small amounts of housing, in land that is considered considerably more expensive, right? And that's how we can give a better picture of what housing policy are, or how this helps us figure out what is not working within housing policy.

Paavo Monkkonen 59:04
This story, I think, really highlights the trade offs and housing policy, right, and how we It illustrates, you can build housing really inexpensively. It's just maybe not what what people want other people to live in, right. I think there's this this problem we have in the US of excessive minimum standards for housing, you know, and maybe we don't want to go to 600 square foot lots and 400 square foot houses, but I don't know, I mean, a lot of people in the world live in those conditions, and they're doing fine. So yeah, I mean, I think that the story is really illustrative also of the benefits of scale economies and thinking about how we can translate some of that experience to the US.

Shane Phillips 59:44
And I think if you do want to establish these minimum standards, which I think there's good reason to want to do, you actually have to put the resources behind these things. You can't just say, "well now these cheapest types of homes are illegal to build, we're going to require that they be larger and so forth. But we're not going to help you pay for them". And in that case, I think, you know, we've seen this with like boarding houses and single room occupancy, hotels and things like that in the US where we took away this sort of housing of last resort option, but we didn't replace it with anything. And, you know, we saw that, you know, had negative impacts on homelessness, and that kind of thing. It seems like the Mexican approach here, they kind of, you know, set some minimum standards, not super aggressive ones, but they also did really try to make sure that the demand was there, and that they, you know, they worked with the developers to figure out how, how to feasibly actually build this housing, not just demand it and then see what happens, ya know.

Paavo Monkkonen 1:00:45
Yeah and that partnership, I mean, I think, you know, the Mexican case has a lot of problems. And I recommend reading Morosi's sensational expose of all the fraud and you know, but I think that doesn't mean that it's not a good idea to collaborate between homebuilders and government financing.

Dinorah Gonzalez 1:01:03
Yes, and it's needed. It's needed to give more opportunities to lower income families to find housing. It's it's one of the options. We shouldn't take away options from them. We should give them more.

Paavo Monkkonen 1:01:16
Right. Yeah.

Shane Phillips 1:01:17
I think that's a great place to end. Dinorah Gonzales, thank you so much for joining today.

Dinorah Gonzalez 1:01:22
Thank you so much, Shane, thank you so much Paavo, was a very interesting conversation.

Paavo Monkkonen 1:01:27
Let's go to Playa. Let's go have some tacos. See you there. See you.

Shane Phillips 1:01:40
You can read more about Dr. Gonzalez, his research and find our show notes and a transcript of the interview at our website. Lewis that ucla.edu The UCLA Lewis Center is on Facebook and Twitter. I'm on Twitter at Shane D. Phillips. And Pablo is at el pavo. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time!

About the Guest Speaker(s)

Dinorah Gonzalez

Dr Dinorah Gonzalez is a professor and researcher in the area of urban planning, economic development and housing. She is an urban planner with experience in the design, implementation and evaluation of urban public policies.
Learn More

Suggested Episodes