What's the Objective?

Say you and a group of friends are organizing a road trip and you've been tasked with getting everyone there. You start to think about it and recognize that your friends have some different preferences. Some may prefer low cost over convenience. Other have preferences for more scenery over a shorter route. Another might have a favorite restaurant they like to visit when they travel. You then realize this exercise isn't valuable until you know where you're going. It doesn't matter if there's a great restaurant off the highway to LA if you're not going to LA.

This point is dumb and obvious but I make it because it relates to a frustrating aspect of housing debates in the Bay Area: everyone argues about the routes without knowing the destination. That is, most of the arguments seem to be over the means, without any consensus (or often proposals) about the ends. Granted, the ends are a political question that require deliberation, but that deliberation doesn't seem to happen.

What does happen is the equivalent of our friends laying out demands about the routes. The route can't take more than four hours. We need to make at least one stop at an In-n-Out. It has to be at least 40% scenic. That may be ok, unless, given your destination, there are no feasible routes that meet all of those requirements! If that's the case then you need to start relaxing some of those constraints or you won't get anywhere.

Which feels like where we're at with housing. We don't know how much housing is needed, but we know that it can't raise taxes on homeowners, it can't change existing neighborhoods, it can't cast shadows on parks, it can't cost less than 700K per unit. As a result, we do the equivalent of going nowhere: we get very little housing at any level. That's the only we way we can satisfy all of the constraints.

If we had an objective, we could identify our real options for meeting it, and have a way to think about which constraints we should relax. We could see the concrete tradeoffs that would be made by different approaches. We could see, for example, how much closer to our objective would we get if we raised maximum building heights; up-zoned near transit; had X% inclusionary requirement; streamlined permitting or removing discretionary review. Those debates would be contentious, but at least we'd have some basis for the discussion. Without an objective we don't se how much closer we're getting for each change. We just see (and feel) that someone has their constraint violated.

And trivially, but importantly, without an objective we can't know if we met the objective or not. Until you know your destination you can't answer the question "are we at our destination?" Unless we have an answer to what our housing objective is, we'll never know whether we've "solved" the housing crisis because we won't know what counts as a solution.

So what would such an objective look like? It would be a statement about who should be able to live in what type of housing, where, and for how much. Here's a (simplistic) possibility: "anyone should be able to rent an apartment anywhere in the Bay Area for no more than 30% of their income." There are many other possibilities. You could change the anywhere with "somewhere," or give preference to incumbent residents, or have carve-outs for particular communities. Regardless, with such an objective we could then say "what would have to be the case for this to be true?" We could start to see how many units of what types of housing would be needed where it order to make this true. This in turn would allow us to see the real options for getting there, which we could then use to see what constraints we should relax to get us there.

So if having an objective has these nice benefits, why don't we talk about them? Well, for people who oppose most new housing, I think it's because objectives that match their preferences are often distasteful to say out loud (though often they do just say it out loud) or because non-distasteful objectives would have implications they find unacceptable (like building and taxing almost everyone everywhere, a lot more).

For those that support new housing my guess is that it's just tough to come up with one, and you still have to do a lot of additional research once you have one. That said, I think it'd be especially valuable for housing advocates to articulate such an objective. These objectives form a vision that people can rally around and a touch-point for policy discussions.