Episode 25: Housing Justice with Casey Dawkins

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, in this case, a book to better understand how we can make our cities more affordable and equitable places to live. Our guest this week is Dr. Casey Dawkins of the University of Maryland, and my co-host is Mike Lens. Similar to our recent episode with Michael Hankinson, our conversation with Casey focuses more on political science and political philosophy than we usually do but I think you'll find that the theory relates to very tangible concerns here. His book, Just Housing is all about the moral and political foundations of the housing justice movement. And it traces the history and motivations of land and housing reformers back to the founding of America and even beyond, it grapples with questions at the heart of housing justice questions like is housing a human right? If it is, what does that say about our government's obligations, and what we owe to each other? And how do we balance the right to private property, which among other things is founded on the right to exclude with a universal right to adequate housing and secure tenure? Casey has answers. We are always thinking about how research translates into practice. So we also spent a fair amount of time on his proposal for a negative income tax and the housing allowance to every low-income household. We get into what that really means and why it might be a better approach than or at least a good complement to some of the more common strategies like investment in public housing or housing vouchers. 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 always, you can help the show by giving us a five-star rating and a review. And if you have any feedback or show ideas, you can email me at Shane phillips@ucla.edu. Let's get to our conversation with Dr. Dawkins.

Today's episode will be a little different from our typical format, where we interview an author about a recent journal article and instead we're going to be discussing a book by today's guest, Casey Dawkins, so a book not an article, Dr. Dawkins is a professor of Urban Studies and Planning and a research associate with the National Center for Smart Growth, both at the University of Maryland. His book is titled Just Housing: The Moral Foundations of American Housing Policy'. Casey Dawkins, welcome to the UCLA Housing Voice podcast.

Casey Dawkins 2:48
Hi, Shane. Thanks for having me on.

Shane Phillips 2:50
And Mike Lens. Welcome back as co-host.

Michael Lens 2:53
Good to be here, Shane. Welcome to Casey as well. Since we last recorded this podcast, I've been to Italy, I've been to France, and I've gotten through my dose of Omicron so it's been a little bit of dream life, a little bit of crazy life but that's how we do it.

Casey Dawkins 3:12
I haven't left my living room....

Shane Phillips 3:16
You're kind of rubbing it in Mike.

Michael Lens 3:19
Well, I mean, you know, it's not all fun and games. I've had like five weeks of house guests. I mean, you know,

Shane Phillips 3:26
How's the book going? That's the nominal reason you were away right?

Michael Lens 3:31
You know, it's been really fantastic at different points. But the last few weeks as I've been gallivanting through France, and England with my friends, it's taken a bit of a hiatus.

Shane Phillips 3:45
Understandable. So Casey, we always like to kick off the podcast with our guests telling us something special about either the city where they live or where they're from, or just a favorite place that they know, well, where do you want to tell us about and what is something special about it?

Casey Dawkins 4:02
So I've lived in the Washington DC area for about 15 years now. This is where I get my accent. I actually grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, but I've lived here I think longer than I've lived anywhere else. So it is sort of interesting. I tell other people I live in the DC area, but I've actually, you know, I first moved to Alexandria, Virginia, then I moved to H Street Northeast and the see now live in Takoma Park, Maryland. So I've sort of traversed the three states or the two states and the District that make up the region, but it's a great place to live. I mean, anyone who lives here or has spent time here would probably agree with most of what I would say and you know, it's people come here for the free museums, you know, the monuments, the public spaces, but it's also a great place with rich history, diverse neighborhoods and close to the coast, close to the mountains and the entire Northeastern corridors. It's been a great place to live. and you know, being the center of federal policymaking sort of obviously has its benefits if you like, you know, talking politics. Most places will host their debate, you know, we have debate-watching parties in our bars instead of football-watching; we have federal government shut down specials.

Shane Phillips 5:24
Alright, well, Mike, so it was your recommendation that we do this book and kind of depart from our usual approach here. And I actually did end up reading the whole book. So kudos to me, I knocked it out over the past couple of weeks. But do you want to give an introduction of the book?

Michael Lens 5:42
Yes, of course. And yeah, kudos to you, Shane. I don't say this with any negativity whatsoever but it's not the easiest book to read. It's a lot of pleasure but a little bit of work too. But under the summary, you know, in this book, which is Just Housing, I'm sure we've mentioned that already but the title of the book is Just Housing. And in it, Professor Dawkins interrogates, you know, a common declaration by housing advocates that housing is a human right. And so I think of that, and it's implicit in the book that at least one jumping off point, or one motivation for this book is this interrogation of the idea that housing is a human, right. It's an ubiquitous phrase declared by many actors in housing justice movements, that seek to fulfill that promise in US housing policy, that housing should be treated as a human right. And this motivates Casey to trace whether American political philosophy, various social, and housing movements, you know, legislation that really establishes housing, action by governments, and jurisprudence, whether all of these things kind of actually support the treatment of housing as a human right. And in my reading of this, this argument, you know, for advocates to be successful in using a slogan or a statement like housing as a human right, they must convince the electorate that housing is special, that there is something specific that a rights-based conception of housing should provide everyone and that there is some kind of public entity that is responsible for providing a specified housing allotment for everybody. I find his discussion of historical movements through US history very interesting and particularly important. And this also, of course, supports you know, how this rights-based conception of housing I think, as has evolved over time. The kind of end of the book, the latter part of the book, specifies Dawkins preferred policies to further housing justice. And he begins with a critique of a fully public model of housing provision, which is not preferred by Casey, and he'll talk more about why but part of it is because there's also a pretty strong defense in this book of private property rights. And so provocative argument here is that property rights both create and solve the problem of housing insecurity, which I think is really interesting, and we should talk more about. His preferred way to rebalance the scales between property rights and housing rights in this country in the United States anyway, is the negative housing tax. And this tax would be on both housing consumption, incremental growth, and housing wealth, and the proceeds from this tax would go to a monthly housing allowance for those with the most extreme housing needs. And there would also be a block grant to assess spatial inequalities and housing costs. So we're going to talk a lot about the policy implications of this book so I'll leave it at that introduction. But before we go on, Casey, is there anything you'd like to clarify in my summary or add?

Casey Dawkins 8:54
I mean, there's really nothing I would add to clarify, I think that's a great summary. And I appreciate you sort of hitting all of the highlights. And as you sort of pointed out, I went to a lot of places in this book, you know, the history of housing policy, the philosophy of justice, which was sort of really fun to return to even going back to my undergraduate days, but I sort of really delve deeply into that literature because I thought a lot of the arguments that are going on in political philosophy right now, are really some of the same arguments that are happening in housing. I guess the only thing I might add is, not necessarily anything you missed, but maybe say a bit about my motivation for writing the book in the first place. And I started thinking about this back in, oh, gosh, it was during the Obama administration when Fair Housing was sort of the topic du jour and the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule was being substantially revised. And, you know, there's a big debate among fair housing advocates or housing advocates more broadly about sort of what does Fair Housing mean? You know, does fairness mean limiting discriminatory treatment and housing or does it mean something bigger, you know, the integration of neighborhoods by race and income? So as I've sort of started thinking about that question, that sort of brought me into other similar debates in housing policy that were really defined by similar disagreement over basic, you know, fundamental goals, the justifications for those goals and the growth role that housing plays in sort of tying it all together, and, you know, the learning more about, you know, your side of the country, you're well familiar with the NIMBY FIMBY debate that's going on. And, you know, with the question of, should we loosen the reins on housing supply to make housing more affordable or should we protect tenants rights or greatly expand the provision of public housing; that's a similar kind of debate. And so just sort of looking more at those kinds of debates, which seem to be sort of pervasive in housing, I wanted to sort of, you know, get to the core of that. This always is, you know, usually a lecture in my housing course, you know, what are we trying to do in housing, and usually, the upshot of that lecture is well we're trying to do a lot of things.

Shane Phillips 11:24
Perhaps too many

Casey Dawkins 11:26
Yeah, and I wanted to get to the meat of that. But really, you know, the most interesting thing to me is, were untangling those things that conflict. You know, we have goals that are in conflict with one another so how do you sort of think through those things, and what's the special significance of housing, and why do we care about it? And why do we need a policy realm devoted to it? So that's sort of where I began.

Michael Lens 11:51
Yes, yeah. I think, of course, the interesting questions are like where are those tensions - what you're trying to do kind of collides with one another? So let's start kind of with, you know, where you land, I guess, on housing as some kind of a right, you know. So we talked about one of the motivations being whether or not housing is a human right. And ultimately, you conclude that housing is a social right. So how are those two concepts different? Are those two types of rights different, and why does this distinction matter?

Casey Dawkins 12:25
Sure, so to me, the primary difference is in how each right is grounded. And I spent a lot of time talking about this in chapter six, and I talk about the differences for the grounds for human rights versus what I call well, I didn't invent the term but I'd refer to them as social rights as many others have. It really the basic difference is that human rights are appealing to the idea of human dignity, to argue that rights are necessary to protect human beings distinctive moral status. You know, what is distinctive gives us sort of normative, you know, the status of needing rights to be protected, what is distinctive about human beings dignity that sort of grounds that that kind of right, and that's a universal sort of ideal that applies globally. Social rights, on the other hand, protect our right to be full members of a given society and participate as equal citizens on equal terms in that society. And so basically, what I want to argue is the ground of human rights is weak without some prior appeal to what human dignity means within the context of a given society. So for example, a conception of housing justice grounded in some universal ideal of human dignity, would fail to account for housing's distinctive role in distributing access to public education in nations such as the US which largely financed public education from state and local taxes. Housing markets themselves are highly localized in the conditions that make housing unaffordable in San Francisco are very different from the conditions that make housing unaffordable in London, where you're at or Hong Kong. So, you know, given the localized nature of housing markets, and the variability in the national institutions that determine how housing gets distributed, a universal conception of the human right to housing is likely to yield a thin-watered down conception of minimal housing entitlements that would ignore the distinctive contribution of housing to each nation's shared culture, essentially the field of human rights don't go far enough to address the unique challenges in the housing realm that we face here in the US.

Michael Lens 14:49
Right, so I think you've gotten this to some of this but why do you think it's necessary or is housing special or is housing policy special to the point where we need to ground housing policy in a rights based framework or do we kind of do this with everything else or should we?

Casey Dawkins 15:12
No, that's a good question. This is something that really, the going back to political philosophy, really shaped my thinking on this. You know, I mean, you know, traditional policy analysis, you know, sort of approach is to define your goals and define the best means to achieving those goals. And one of the things that is talked about a lot in the, in the, in the political philosophy, literature is sort of the differences in sort of policy approaches that are grounded in collective goals versus those in their right base. And so that was sort of really interesting to me, and I thought was really kind of crucial to this, this argument. And really, the most important thing about any right is that it gives the right holder kind of veto power. So it's right to demand justification, when someone tries to affect your fundamental interests, even when the majority approves of the action that's, you know, infringing on your interests. Rights essentially protect the right holder from the whims of politics in a sense, and, and so that's a very strong ground for a moral framework. It's sort of interesting if you go back to history, the history of housing policy I lay out is actually I think, even more expansive than you'll find in a lot of big books, because I go all the way back to the founding era, even before that..

Michael Lens 16:35
Oh, without a doubt!

Casey Dawkins 16:36
And so one of the things that I found really interesting is that if you sort of start from the founding era and go forward, there was a strong emphasis on rights-based reforms in the founding period and all through the 19th century. I mean, Thomas Paine thought that everyone had a natural right to hold property. And he proposed a tax on land inheritance to create something he called the National Fund, that would provide sort of social insurance plus a stakeholder grant to everyone that would be distributed equally and unconditionally to everyone when they reach adulthood. And that sort of idea, Jefferson had sort of similar but less radical versions of that idea, had a big influence on the land reform movement in the homestead movement. But sort of an interesting thing happened in the late 19th century, you know, when the progressive movement sort of emerged; progressives, you know, were sort of looking for new solutions to a variety of social ills. But at the same time, they were very critical of the idea of natural rights, and they really abandon right-based approaches altogether so they sort of looked for different moral frameworks to ground their policy suggestions. And so you saw a lot of policies being framed and utilitarian kind of arguments, very common in the tenement housing reform movement or appeals to the common good were also sort of common, but there's sort of an abandonment of the idea of the right-based approach. And, you know, even more concerning some of these progressive reformers also defined the common good in a very narrow way that was exclusionary, that excluded people of color or those who didn't own single-family detached home. So you saw a sort of move away from from that approach. Now, it sort of reemerged from time to time and during the New Deal era, Catherine Bauer, who is the sort of major figure in the history of US public housing reform, said that a decent dwelling is not a reward withheld for the successful but a fundamental right, to which every citizen is entitled; the provision of which becomes a responsibility of government. And so Franklin D, Roosevelt proposed something called the second bill of rights that would guarantee rights to, among other things, a decent home, but it was never put into into law. But so my book is essentially making the case for something like the second bill of rights, but for housing.

Michael Lens 19:16
Right, so, you know, we can talk a little bit about a couple politics questions maybe before we get specifically to policy. So, you know, do you think that housing advocates should kind of rethink the housing as a human rights strategy? Because, you know, you just talked about how rights have been used as justifications over time in different ways. You know, do you feel like there's something either strategically or on the merits of the question that this rather commonly used catchphrase like housing as a human right, gets gets wrong or is maybe strategically misplaced?

Casey Dawkins 19:57
One of the primary reasons I wanted to tackle this topic is that I felt that a lot of the discussion around the right to housing was unclear. They're often calling for the protection of the right to housing without really defining what do you mean by the right to housing? So what does that give the right holder? What does that obligate the government to do in return? And there was really a lack of clarity around what a right to housing is meant. I mean, it's a strong rhetorical device. But what does it mean if we're going to use that as a basis for policy, and so that's what I really want to get at. And it's sort of going back to my comments about human rights versus social rights, I think we can do better than just protecting the human right to minimal housing provision. You know, we can deliver a right that secures a the most important ingredient of a dignified American life - a home but we need to, I think, be explicit about what that means in terms of policy. So I want to just really sort of make that as concrete as possible, but connect it to a grounded argument. Another thing I should probably make clear, I'm not really making a political argument, you know, I'm not sort of offering a roadmap for advocacy. I'm making an argument from the standpoint of what justice requires and argue that justice in the housing arena requires that more of us take on the responsibility of meeting the needs of those who are poorly housed, and essentially arguing that the property rights and housing that most of us take for granted, are only justifiable if we make this egalitarian commitment. And so that's sort of the touchstone for the argument I'm trying to make. But I do think that the, you know, the issue of clarity and grounding is a good thing for the movement itself, and sort of tying it to policy and, and moving forward.

Shane Phillips 21:58
I do feel like that, even if your book is not about the politics, obviously, it's always present. And, you know, something that I think your book brings out when it talks about housing as a human right versus a social right, is just this idea that housing is a human right, you know, especially when it's not very well defined, it's very easy to interpret it as sort of a very minimal thing, as a thing that, you know, leads us to focus solely on the poorest and most vulnerable and most disenfranchised. And I think there's absolutely reason, and there's kind of a need to swing the pendulum back in a way where we are prioritizing those things. But at the same time, you know, a frustration I've seen is just this, it almost is like, that's the sole focus. And there's not really a bigger picture vision for what does housing look like for all of us, and what does that mean for the people who, you know, maybe aren't going to be eligible for subsidies or, you know, direct assistance?

Casey Dawkins 22:58
Yeah, you know, coalitions matter, and politics do matter. I guess, one way to maybe think about this kind of argument is to say that any of us can be in a position at some point in our life of being between stable housing units. You know, I mean, those who argue for something like the basic income, for example, kind of make a similar argument, you know, there should be a minimum floor that no one should be allowed to fall below - the minimum level of assistance that society should provide to its members. And so I'm essentially arguing similarly, that housing should be an important, you know, sort of piece of that,

Michael Lens 23:42
Maybe we should get into, you know, what kind of specific benefits you think should flow from this social right. And I think that follows having advocates lay out exactly what this right means and what you know, can should confer for people.

Casey Dawkins 24:03
Yeah, and I think a right to housing does two very important things. First, taking language from the human rights movement, actually, a right to housing elevates housing provision to a special place of importance for the national policy debate. Cass Sunstein, who's a lawyer who's written thousands of books, argues that rights establish a nation's constitutive commitment to protecting certain fundamental interests. Now, this doesn't mean that the right to housing can never be violated. But it does mean that when making political trade-off, policies that infringe on someone's right to be housed will be placed under a special kind of scrutiny. And so policies in Canada's national housing strategy are sort of framed in that way, for example. Secondly, I think a right-based approach structures the incentives of economic actors prior to exchange. So it's distinct from a traditional tax and spin redistributive approach that reallocates resources after the fact. Right-based approaches rely on what sometimes be called pre-distribution, to assign rights, alter incentives without necessarily having to correct inequalities after the fact. So an example of this is a Just Cause Eviction law, for example, expands tenants rights to remain in their homes, while simultaneously sort of restricting landlords rights to arbitrarily evict them. And so I don't sort of argue that pre-distribution is the entire solution but I think it's an important piece of a sort of a right base strategy.

Shane Phillips 25:51
There's something you said there that I think is is worth getting into a little further, and it does appear in your book, I think a little bit as well. You said essentially, that, you know, a right to housing or any kind of right, does not imply that that right can never be violated or transgressed against. And I think some people would dispute that. But can you explain a little bit further, what you mean by that, and kind of what the implications of that are?

Casey Dawkins 26:18
Yeah, I mean, I really sort of like the political structuring argument, you know the best. Canada is committed to protecting the right to housing, for example, actually, France is a very good example of a nation that tries to do this. They have a policy, I'll just go by the acronym of DELO, and I don't have my English to French guy to help me get through the acronym, what that actually stands for but it's based on a right to housing. But essentially, what it does, is it gives every person a sort of a claim on public resources that should be provided to them, if their housing situation, renders them homeless. You know, if you become homeless, there's a sort of local government agency that you can register your claim for the right to housing, and then ask that that social housing be provided to meet that need. If no housing is available, then there's sort of an additional administrative step that provides you with different options. And you know, it's administratively complex, and probably not the most efficient process. But it shows how sort of restructuring housing provision around the basic idea of a right can sort of reorient the structure of the housing delivery system to ensure that, you know, at a minimum, no one goes without any housing, and we sort of are distributing resources to deal with the sort of the most pressing housing problems. You know, Canada, their version of that is to say, "okay, we acknowledge the right to housing", in sort of the public allocation of resources, make a certain commitment to, you know, sort of a certain dollar commitment, to providing resources for homelessness alleviation, and other sorts of policies. So I think it sort of changes the terms of the conversation. You know, when we talk about now, national housing policy is not being talked about as much as most of us probably wish it would be. But structuring around the right to housing sort of establishes a minimum floor of responsibility that is sort of hard to change based on the priorities that are established.

Shane Phillips 28:49
I was actually listening to another podcast just a couple of weeks ago

Michael Lens 28:53
There are no other podcasts!

Shane Phillips 28:53
.... and this discussion of rights came up. And I think the argument was essentially that in the US, we have few rights but they are very strongly upheld, and defended when they are determined to be rights. And in many other countries, it's sort of the opposite approach where they have many rights, but they're sort of more weakly held. And they're like serious goals, and they work toward them but they don't expect that they're going to overturn everything to ensure that every single person has. I feel like that's an interesting dichotomy, I don't know which is better, maybe I do. But I think that's an interesting way of looking at it.

Casey Dawkins 29:37
Sort of I guess it was in the 80s, the big complaint was rights inflation. The idea that we're sort of asking for too many new rights and we need to sort of protects protect the ones we have.

Shane Phillips 29:51
Yeah, and I mean, it sounds dismissive and silly but it does take a lot to defend these rights and it does create a lot of obligations. So there's always the question of like, "well you've established that this is a right but can you actually do what's necessary to make that a reality?

Casey Dawkins 30:09
Yeah, I think the idea is too as you point out if it is indeed a right, and that's sort of a strong legal claim, then we don't want to sort of diminish the importance of what a right is by calling something a right if it's not, you know. If housing is a deed of right, then let's take that seriously.

Shane Phillips 30:28
This brings up the case of New York where they have a right to shelter, so they don't have a right to housing, but their state constitution and this was sort of determined by a series of lawsuits, there is a right to shelter so that every unsheltered homeless person has to be offered shelter of some kind, or a hotel voucher or what have you. And it's interesting so for one shelter is not housing by most definitions, just to be clear, but they have a very limited unsheltered homeless population in New York, whereas here in California, it's extremely high. It's the vast majority of unhoused people. And so it sounds very good but in New York, you know, the sort of a flip side to that is that they spend so many resources on shelter, and it leaves fewer available for kind of longer-term housing solutions. And so there's a real trade off here. I'm curious to hear, you know, I know you included that in your book as well.

Casey Dawkins 31:25
It's interesting, as I was writing this book, I started to realize pretty soon that I could have made the entire book about New York. But this idea of the right to shelter that emerged in in New York after a court battle was really sort of important in establishing the national homelessness movement. And I think it's, you know, you rightly say that it doesn't go far enough. But it goes quite a bit farther than most cities. And, you know, I think the real problem, DC actually has something similar there (and) couple of other examples of this in other localities. I think the real problem, though, is that here in the US, even the most forward-thinking laws are sort of constrained by the US Constitution, which doesn't guarantee a right to housing. So it's not going to sort of protect that as an obligation. And when it conflicts with the right on private property, it's going to side on the side of property owners. The current Supreme Court has actually said that there is no right to housing recognized by the constitution. So, you know, taking the right housing seriously, I think really means fundamentally rethinking some of our basic institutions.

Michael Lens 32:42
So you talked earlier about it being, of course, interesting when, you know, rights conflict. And, you know, I think we talked also about when we have too many rights, or many rights, I don't know if there's ever too many or whatever. But if there's many rights, like there's a higher chance that some of these rights are going to conflict. And so that, of course, brings me to property rights versus housing rights. And also while talking about jurisprudence around this, you know, I'm certainly not a legal scholar, but I would strongly suggest that, you know, any reading of legal jurisprudence in the US is going to heavily favor the idea of protecting property rights over protecting housing rights, as you just basically like you stated. And burying the lead here, you pretty vigorously defend property rights in this book. And so I think we should talk about how those two rights conflict or they don't, and you know, how you kind of, you know, as a scholar, like, defend both of these rights?

Casey Dawkins 33:54
Yeah, I'm glad that you bring this up. I think this is one of the most distinctive pieces of the argument. And I should say that I'm offering a qualified defense of private property. It's not a full throated defense as a libertarian might offer. But basically, I'm arguing that the only way to justify an institution like private property that protects certain interests, by excluding others, is to justify that institution to those who were excluded. And the only way to do that is to provide a reasonable opportunity for everyone to acquire some property. So viewed in this way, property rights are justified to the extent that everyone's right to housing is secured. And I call a property rights regime that's sort of structured in this way, a secure tenure property regime and that sort of thought about as actually after writing the book it's very similar to what John Rawls describes the "property-owning democracy" and, you know, so that was an unintentional similarity. But yeah, I think is consistent with what he has talked about in his work. One of the things, because I think this is really important, in terms of what a right to housing is, particularly within this kind of property regime. I see the right to housing as a kind of property rights. So if you sort of decomposed the bundle of property rights that homeowners have, you have the right to use an occupied property, the right to exclude others, and the right to exchange property for money; the right to housing, as I understand it, includes the first of these two, but not the third. Instead, under a secure tenure property regime, the right to earn income from property is attenuated, and possibly limited to extend the right to housing to those who don't enjoy it. So for example, I'm not really arguing for or against rent control, but it's a good example of a policy that would attenuate landlords rights to earn income, while expanding existing renters' rights not to be forced in their homes. Now, we can sort of argue about whether that in practice is what actually happens but that is sort of an example of how something like that might work.

Shane Phillips 36:20
I want to hold on this, you know, tenure security and tenure insecurity for a moment. I think it's something you introduced, and I feel like it's a pretty core issue in your book, and just to be addressed by housing justice overall. And by tenure insecurity, you're really referring to a lack of control over one's living arrangements up to and including just lacking access to housing altogether. And tied to that is a sort of neutrality between different forms of tenure, primarily renting versus owning. So how does that neutrality between owning and renting relate to tenure security? And how do we sort of bring that neutrality to fruition? Because, as you know, as we all know, right now, US housing policies tilted very heavily toward homeowners and property owners.

Casey Dawkins 37:10
Yeah, I mean, this is a really important piece of the argument. And the idea of tenure neutrality goes back to what I see as sort of a core value in the conception of justice, which is something referred to as civic equality. And it sort of stems from something I refer to as moral equality. And I think Ronald Dworkin has a good quote that sort of captures this idea, he says that the state should treat those whom it governs with concern, that is, as human beings are capable of suffering and frustration, and with respect that as human beings who are capable of forming and acting on intelligent conceptions of how their life should be lived. So sort of, as Dworkin lays it out, the idea of state neutrality is sort of central to that, and this sort of goes back to Rawls, the idea of the state shouldn't justify its actions by appealing to a sort of a controversial conception of the good life that not everyone would be in agreement with. But the history of US housing reform, reformers have sort of taken the opposite approach; they've appealed to the idea that homeowners are better citizens, or that the good life consists in, you know, owning a suburban home. And sort of argue that housing policy should be shouldn't be grounded in those kinds of arguments that are subject to reasonable disagreement. But instead, housing policies should sort of guarantee tenure security across a range of housing types, sort of without favoring any particular tenure arrangement. But you can also sort of think of tenure neutrality as an egalitarian principle. You know, it's sort of designed to eliminate tenure-based differences, and secure housing arrangements by sort of elevating renters' housing security to a level closer to what homeowners enjoy,

Shane Phillips 39:11
I've been thinking about this a lot, and how, you know, I think that security is a really important thing to emphasize here. But obviously, homeowners and renters are different, and they have sort of different interests to some degree. So how far does that extend? Trying to think of a good example here, like, you know, you talked about sort of attenuating the right to earn an income on your property. And I think that's, that's pretty straightforward. But, you know, say an owner, you know I think this one's a little easier, but like an owner wants to move a family member into a unit that they own and evict someone who lives there. And maybe a more difficult one would be, they want to, you know, tear down a single-family home or a duplex that someone has rented, and build, you know, higher density homes; how far does that right to secure tenure extend?

Casey Dawkins 40:07
Yeah, I mean, you could think of a lot of sort of examples, and ultimately is sort of thinking back to the primary objective of, you know, ensuring that those with the least secure housing arrangements are sort of prioritized, and the provision of housing policy is sort of maybe a sort of a way of thinking through those things. But you know, it's interesting, tenure security or tenure neutrality, you know I'm sure we'll get into the negative tax idea, and that's where it sort of shows up the most. But you could also think of this in terms of sort of a principle for zoning reform, you know, our zoning ordinances are often sort of uplifting, single-family housing is a sort of an ideal housing type and...

Shane Phillips 40:56
.... that needs to be protected against the intrusion of other types of (housing)

Casey Dawkins 41:00
Oh, yeah, oh yeah, and rents are relegating other housing types as inferior. And you can sort of think of a lot of examples of that. And so as a principle for zoning reform, I think this sort of idea is a pretty powerful guide.

Michael Lens 41:15
Yeah, well, let's get into the policy part of this, I think. So, you know, maybe we should start with some, you know, ideas, and some well-used policies in housing, that are already present, you know, such as, like public housing, right? We just talked about your defensive private property rights, which I think is part of your critique of public housing, at least, you know, how it's practiced, and why, you know, not to spoil the fun for everybody, but why your preferred policy solution isn't just like, a radical increase in the size of the public housing program in the US. So can you talk through your critique of public housing?

Casey Dawkins 42:03
Sure thing. I should say that the sort of the critique of public housing is not central in the book, I think it takes a paragraph or two. But I think it is a sort of an important argument because I don't land on the side of a large-scale social housing program. So maybe sort of clarifying why that might be the case, I think is useful. It sort of goes back to the sort of; there's a chapter there in the book where I talk about sort of the injustices of homelessness or the injustices of tenure insecurity. And one of those injustices is that the homeless have no access to private spaces where they can freely engage in activities without having to first obtain the approval of someone else. You know, they have no places in which to be free, because their any action requires the approval of a private property owner. And civic Republicans would call this kind of injustice, domination, and Jeremy Waldron, he's a legal philosophers, has written a really powerful argument around this in political philosophy, as is it applies to homelessness. But he sort of extends that argument; if the government provided all housing, citizens would still experience the domination of government agents, rather than the domination of multiple owners of private property. What's really needed is for the homeless person to have control over their own private space, free from any form of domination, which is sort of why private property becomes an important piece of the equation. And there's sort of the standard other kinds of critiques of public housing is, you know, it's markets are generally better at delivering the diversity of housing options that consumers prefer; I think that's sort of central to my argument unnecessarily. But I don't want to make too much of that objection because I do think that some expansion of public housing beyond what we currently have in the US is probably a good thing. I want to sort of give an example to show how sometimes I feel like our dichotomies are too sharp around this topic in the US. So, take Singapore, for example, it's a market-based system, the government plays a significant role in the acquisition of land, the construction of housing, and the subsidies for home purchase. But at the same time, those homes are then sold to homeowners who largely retain their ownership rights. And I say largely because they have certain obligations about home appreciation. But all I'm saying is that the emphasis of policy reform in the US with its large private sector role in housing provision has to be on making markets work for those to have less. And I think that's sort of the main priority that we should be focusing on.

Michael Lens 45:06
And so like the other big policy, in housing that helps people afford housing when they can't, is the housing voucher program. I'm kind of skipping past the Low Income Housing Tax Program, but, maybe kind of lumping that in with public housing in some ways. So we have a housing voucher program that is, you know, in many ways larger than than our public housing stock or program. You and I are friendly with a whole bunch of people that study the housing voucher program and what it can and should do. I'm even one of those people, you've been one of those people in some ways. So why not just you know, make the voucher program bigger and better?

Casey Dawkins 45:52
So that's basically what the negative housing tax is designed to do. So it's essentially expanding the voucher program into an entitlement, so that it wouldn't be sort of rationed into about 25% of households that qualify for it as is currently the case with the voucher program. It also expand to include renters and owners who own incomes below certain thresholds. So here, again, sort of the idea of tenure neutrality, we're providing housing assistance, it should be tenure neutral. I can say more about the negative Housing Tax idea.

Michael Lens 46:28
Let's get into it yeah. So maybe start by talking why this is better supported by this Rights Framework, as you understand it, and then, you know, we can get into the mechanics of it as well.

Casey Dawkins 46:42
Sure thing. So I mean, first is sort of real simple characterization of what it is; the basic idea is to reform the income tax, so that we tax homeowners untaxed income in the form of imputed rental income and capital gains on home sales that are not currently taxed, and also getting rid of the mortgage interest deduction, the property tax deduction, and that'll raise substantial revenue; I can get into the dollar amounts later if you want. But essentially, the money that would be raised for that would be more than enough to provide a guaranteed housing allowance to all very low-income households. And that would be sort of an entitlement, that would be sort of the funding source for that entitlement; anything in excess of that, the amount would go to the the housing allowance, would go to a block grant program, that would be targeted to high-cost housing markets. And that block grant would be used to essentially as a housing supply enhancement for places that have sort of a shortage of affordable housing supply. So that's sort of the basic idea.

Shane Phillips 47:53
Kind of tackling things from both the supply and the demand side.

Casey Dawkins 47:57
Yeah, that's really what I thought was important. Because, you know, one of the worries with a sort of a large scale expansion of a demand side subsidy is that you're just sort of replacing the problem, you're leading to inflated rents. You have people have more money, income to spend on housing, rents are gonna go up. So it's a way to sort of dampen that inflationary pressure, but also to target existing, you know, housing supply shortages, in markets, you know, such as the ones that you're probably very familiar with. So I wanted to sort of balance, you know, the supply side and demand side strategy. But another thing that I was sort of trying to do here is I wanted to sort of shift the burden of satisfying low-income housing needs to those who benefit from existing property arrangements. In other words, those who own current residential property and who benefit from property-based institutions have the obligation of extending rights to those who have less; one of the sort of important features of the negative housing tax, is the allocation of benefits and burdens in a proportional way that targets those housing inequalities that come out of the current tax structure?

Michael Lens 49:18
Yeah, so that I mean, I guess, to reiterate, you know, for me, I think it's very intriguing and important, that we're not just taxing housing transactions, but you're taxing gains and housing wealth, right, which a lot of times those gains in housing wealth are, you know, you're not some kind of genius because you bought, you know, it's an accident of history right? You bought something at a particular point in time. And maybe even like, you know, there were public investments that occurred or, you know, just happenstance and luck that occurred that led to your housing investment really paying off over the long term, right?

Shane Phillips 49:57
I think in California, that figure is something In like, almost like a third of all housing appreciation, appreciation in the value of homes is in California. And you know, it's not because Californians are like smarter investors overall or something, it's just because they happen to live in California. And we're not building enough housing and people want to live here and like no individual person, no business, no landlord is responsible for that. It's a collective, it's something we all contribute to.

Michael Lens 50:29
Right, yeah, you hit one nail on the head Shane, of course, which is like, there's, you know, this protection of property wealth leads to some some bad actors or some bad acting, right, where you want to exclude others or exclude some additional housing or development or whatever to protect your property investment. The flip side, or an interesting outcome in that as that increases in kind of the value of your home or, or kind of the locational greatness of your area, is going to increase your tax burden, right? And so, so one interesting piece of this is that homeowners kind of might incur the costs of gentrification, you know, or neighborhood Improvement, or locational. Improvement, or wherever, just as renters currently do. That's obviously a hot button topic. And that sounds great to me, even though I'm a homeowner in a place that will probably keep accelerating in value, until you inevitably get to the point where like, everybody's like, "I don't want anything to get better around me because, you know, I, as a homeowner, I'm gonna get taxed more the renters are gonna get increasing rent pressures, et cetera". So like, is that a piece that you worry about there, and then, you know, homeowners dominate electoral politics. So like, that changes a lot of kind of incentives and acting there in some interesting ways.

Shane Phillips 52:02
There's the backlash aspect of it of even if you can make this happen, like, as soon as prices start going up, do we get another, you know, like Prop 13, where people were getting, you know, their homes were worth way more money, and they were way richer, but like that was less important to them in the moment than the fact that their tax payments every six months or every year were higher.

Casey Dawkins 52:23
No, I'm glad you raised this great question. That's actually don't talk enough about in the book. But you know, another way of saying the same thing is that the negative housing tax would sort of transform the housing piece of the income tax into a benefit tax. Yeah, so households pay for what they're willing to get and benefits similar to a user fee. You know, some good economist would probably like this, because it closely approximates the pricing mechanism in the private market. So you sort of get what you pay for. Yeah, so that's maybe another way of looking at it.

Shane Phillips 52:59
Yeah, and there's just a lot of, you know, for lack of a better word, overconsumption of housing. That is, in large part because we are not neutral with respect to tenure. We do a lot of things to encourage people to put, frankly more money than they should, or even necessarily want to, into their housing rather than other things because you get all these tax subsidies, imputed rent is exempted from taxation. When you sell it, you get the first 250,000 or $500,000 of gains tax-free. All of that encourages people to spend more and having this consumption tax sort of offsets that at least a little bit.

Casey Dawkins 53:37
Well, honestly, it also creates a huge incentive for nimbyism. You know, I mean, if your house is your primary source of wealth, you know, you're going to engage in collective action to protect that. So this, I mean, you know, this is sort of a testable proposition but one might think that nimbyism would be less of an attractive option if you're sort of losing all of your wealth gains in a form of a tax.

Michael Lens 54:03
Right, right. So you know, race, of course, complicates any discussion of housing in the US, but it also, there's been quite a lot of discussion and movement over many years on race and rights in the US, and racial justice of course. You discuss racial discrimination quite a lot at various points in the book when tracing housing movements, and also in discussing the policy side of things. But you know, the negative Housing tax inevitably, is race neutral. You know, I guess, so there's two questions here, first is like, does your concept of the social right to housing support a policy that can be used to affirmatively further racial equity or you know, is there kind of, can you be racially explicit in this kind of right? And then if so, you know, how can like this negative income tax, further racial equity, I guess?

Casey Dawkins 55:15
You know, something I sort of grappled with from the beginning, as they pointed out, sort of started thinking about this book by thinking about fair housing. And a couple of things I would say. And, you know, one is that this is, this is sort of the next book. There's, there's a sort of a chapter discussion of this, but I think this is really a sort of separate topic all of its own. But one thing I should point out there, you know, I think that there is room for quite a bit, that that can be done within the framework that I set out. So one of the important dimensions of sort of civic equality is something I refer to as relational equality. And this is sort of a, an odd deal achieved when when everyone, all citizens view one another as equal participants in the social order and equally respect one other civic freedom. And it's the sort of an expression of an anti subordination idea that looks at the shared effects of inaction to on persistent group disparities. You know, so, under that guise, I think there's a strong case to be made for addressing things such as spatial inequalities that lead to opportunity hoarding, for example, a large part of that of which is caused by, you know, nimbyism and the desire to sort of protect your home as an investment, you know. So although that is a sort of race-neutral policy, I think it would have significant implications for sort of the spatial distribution of wealth, you know, across regions. A couple other things I would say are that the policies themselves are race-neutral, but the benefits I think, would flow disproportionately to low-income people of color, who are hit the hardest by homelessness and housing insecurity, I'm actually doing some work for HUD, actually, this year spending the year at HUD on sabbatical. And I'm actually looking at the impacts of some of these policies and sort of how they would play out across different household groups, and spatially. What I'm finding is that a tenure-neutral tax reform, paired with this housing allowance would yield proportionately larger benefits for people of color, and specifically, it would reduce after-tax income inequality for black households more dramatically than it would for white households. So, you know, I think they're in sort of exploring ways in which those benefits flow more so to certain groups and others that I think something that I want to really dive into more deeply in sort of the next phase of this work.

Michael Lens 58:01
And, you know, getting back to Fair Housing again, I mean, do you see a a way that this could further racial or income integration as well? I mean, is that an outcome that you think is possible in this framework?

Casey Dawkins 58:18
Yes, it's a great question. And I'm actually critical of the idea, in the book, I'm sort of critical, the idea of using specialty targeted vouchers to encourage low-income folks to move to high-income neighborhoods to promote, you know, integration and sort of arguing that that's a form of paternalism, you know, it's objectionable, really, for the same reason that it's objectionable to justify housing policy by appealing to the superiority of a suburban lifestyle. So I don't really side on the side of sort of aggressively promoting residential integration. And this is actually something I've sort of come around to a different view on, sort of early in my career, sort of a stronger proponent of sort of aggressive pro-integration policies. And I think I've sort of learned more about the objections to some of those, you know, folks, like Eddie Gates have done really great work on this and sort of his entire book sort of devoted to this topic. I've really sort of learned a lot from him and from those conversations, and I think I've found this arguments really compelling.

Michael Lens 59:33
Yeah, I would agree. And, yeah, I found that piece of your book. It was a little surprising to me to encounter but as is also very honest, you know. It's like in our kind of weighing of housing scholarship, I certainly wouldn't say that it's like taboo to say like, "oh, we shouldn't encourage pro integrative moves" but it's not usually the favored kind of solution or it smacks some people (who) have kind of complacency about segregation. But, you know, it's hard to disagree with the paternalism inherent in it. And it's hard to disagree with, you know, some of you mentioned, Ed Gates' work, which we should we should link to, that really, I think, does a great job of framing kind of the dark side of adhering too strongly I think, to that philosophy and that mechanism.

Shane Phillips 1:00:31
So for the last question here, I think I want to come back to the politics. And a couple episodes back, we had Michael Hankinson, on to talk about his research. And his finding that a shift from at large elections to district elections, increased minority representation, this is in California, but it decreased housing supply and the places where this shift took place. And we ended up talking about how the benefits to representation were clear and important and obviously good, but that when it came to housing, that representation mostly just created another veto point, which you kind of talked about briefly already, really just another venue to say no, but not really any good mechanisms for saying, you know, "yes, let's do this but let's do it differently than we have in the past". And in your book, you write, "American progressive reformers set out to redefine property, private property, and reform property-based institutions to promote the common good". In practice, most reformers pursued a conservative regulatory approach to reform using the state's police powers to transfer particular sticks in the property rights bundle, to government bodies, thereby collectivizing, the right to exclude". And that line "collectivizing the right to exclude" really has stuck with me since I read it, and it echoes our conversation with Michael Hankinson. It also comes up later in your book, when you talk about the tensions between the individual right to housing and a collective right to housing. So I'd really like to hear just your reflections on how we've maybe steered things in the wrong direction in terms of the institutions we've set up to deal with housing and housing justice, even when we've had the best intentions in mind. And again, that tension between individual rights to housing and collective rights to housing and what that means

Casey Dawkins 1:02:33
It's a great question. This idea of collectivizing the right to exclude was really referring to what happened when residential zoning ordinances sort of made their first appearance within American cities around the turn of the 20th century. So you think about what zoning does, it effectively took certain rights from the individual property bundle. So the right to use property in particular ways, for example, it transferred that to collective decision-making bodies so and in doing that it gave communities the false impression, they gained the collective property right, and property use. You know, sort of going back to the idea of a right, communities rather than individual property owners gained a veto right over the use of property, and they wielded that veto to exclude anyone who chose to use property in ways that was not approved by the community. So that transfer has been sort of the enabling mechanism for a lot of the nimbyism that that's occurring. You know, essentially, I'm sort of arguing that collectivizing, the right to exclude sort of got things all wrong. It sort of trivialize the importance of private property to the pursuit of individual life plans while simultaneously giving collective bodies the sort of power to deny access to that right. And so the one thing I want to make clear here is I'm not making a sort of traditional libertarian argument. Although if you want to call it left libertarian, that's probably you know, pretty accurate. I don't think we should return to sort of the 19th-century laissez faire constitutional era. What we need to do instead is to sort of acknowledge everyone's right to that most basic stick in the property bundle, the right to use property, to sort of realize your conception of the good, while possibly attenuating the right to earn income to ensure that everyone has access to housing. You know, in terms of your comment on Michael Hankins is really interesting research. I think federalism in the US has been sort of both a blessing and a curse for housing policy. You know, on the one hand, decentralized authority has given small communities and minority groups greater representation continues to do so. It's also going to communities to say even if, you know it's only the power say No, on the issues that affect them the most but yeah, you know, at the same time, we haven't paired the centralized authority with a strong national commitment to ensuring that those decentralized decisions do not deprive some of access to the most basic ingredients of the good life, a place to call home. So that's sort of what I'm hoping a right-based strategy does is sort of reorient national priorities around that goal, and by doing so, restructuring, sort of the outcomes associated with local decisions.

Shane Phillips 1:05:33
All right, well, I think that is a great place to end. Casey Dawkins, your book is Just Housing: The Moral Foundations of American Housing Policy. It is highly recommended by both Mike and I, thank you so much for being on the show.

Casey Dawkins 1:05:46
Thank you both, enjoyed it.

Shane Phillips 1:05:51
You can read more about Dr. Dawkins' 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 at Shane D. Phillips. Mike is there at MC_lens. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai