Recorded on Monday, April 20, 2026
TRANSCRIPT
Twan Claiborne ’07 Once again, thank you all for coming to this evening's SwatTalk: “Let's fix the housing crisis” with Jamie Madden, class of ’06. My name is Twan LeGrett class of 2007. And I will be your moderator this evening. Some housekeeping things. Thank you to the Alumni Council, which puts on SwatTalks throughout the year on various topics. Thank you to the Office of Family Engagement for their support on the technical side. This evening's talk will be an informal homecoming conversation about what to do about the housing crisis. We'll start with me answering questions, Jamie will talk about his book he just published, Bittersweet Lane Creating Homes in the Americas in the American Affordable Housing Crisis. The aim of the book is to demystify affordable housing while exploring the meaning of home from an intergenerational, low income perspective. In addition to all of the jargon and background that Jamie infuses his own lived experience, which is an important perspective when talking about such lofty things. He graduated Swarthmore in 2006 and he got his master's sometime later and has just been working in various sectors, but really thinking about the housing and making it affordable and solving issues with community and social justice. So that is our introduction, thank you Jamie for being here.
Jamie Madden ’06 Thank you, Twan. And thank you everyone, for including me in this. I was telling Twan and folks just before this that when I was working on the book and there's these, like, little dreams about. If I pull this off, I managed to finish the book and get it published, what are the things going to do with it? And I wanted this. So thank you all. And I'm seeing 108 participants, which is so many more than I was dreaming for tonight either. So truly - thank you. But I think it is indicative and I've done, I think, 15 readings of the book. LA, Brooklyn, three Boston readings, a tiny village in Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, three Seattle readings, Bremerton, Washington. And everywhere more people than I would have guessed have come out and, you know, might have some kind of opinion about myself, but I can't pretend that it's me that's the draw, right? This housing crisis is touching everyone in nearly every community at this point. But everywhere I've been there, ten rooms full of people who are really interested in understanding it and fixing it, which is kind of exactly what I hope for this. This book started out with, my work in creating affordable housing, and especially when I was, working so that the larger nonprofits I worked with could help out or partner with smaller, usually Black or Indigenous or LatinX or Asian community groups who wanted to create some housing in their neighborhoods, affordable housing, other community development things like preschools. And there was never just like a book I could leave behind and say, I know the jargon is crazy. We make it sound complicated, but like, really, you can learn this. And I couldn't write that book. It was too boring. At least coming from me and coming from me - no one would buy it because I'm not a professor and I can't assign it on a syllabus. A UDub professor wrote that book, it came out last year, it's called Affordable Housing in America. It's really good, actually, by Graham Colburn. But I started encountering these hybrid memoirs, and was sort of inspired by that and using my and my family's stories to tell the story of affordable housing and housing in America. I get into our immigrant stories, which all turned out to be housing stories. And, you know, my grandmother had her first two children in public housing. I grew up largely in affordable housing and experiencing housing insecurity. And, you know, my broader family is very much still in that struggle. So I sort of put all that up there in the hopes that people can understand the stakes and, you know, hopefully that the book is entertaining enough to teach people a few things.
Twan Claiborne ’07 Well, I'm still in the midst of reading it, but from what I've encountered, it's been very interesting. And it's such I mean, there are moments when I couldn’t stop, and I think it's because you've infused such a personal element that made the very lofty idea of housing more approachable. When it comes to talking about those lofty things, when it's housing anything related to social justice or human crises, we often tend to go very jargony and really heady, but you intentionally chose to ground in a real life experience. Did you find that when you've talked about that book that has helped people be able to connect with it more, and why use that as a template for talking about such lofty things?
Jamie Madden ’06 Yeah, yeah. Really, a few responses to that. You know, one is that housing is a very personal, important topic. One of the hazards of book talks on this has been that everyone has a housing story, and the Q&A sometimes can be the place where they need to tell their housing story and try to accommodate while being fair to everyone. But you know, it's real and everyone can identify with that topic. And when you have something like that, if you ignore that, what are you doing? So there's an element where multiple ways of knowing, holding each other to account was part of what I really wanted for this book so that I have my own experience. I have the oral histories and interviews, primary research and secondary research. From an academic standpoint, I have the professional experience and have done the math and all those different viewpoints. I try to have hold each other to account because if one is missing, you get the critique that, well, you know, you're just you don't get it because you didn't live it or, well, you lived it, but you didn't study it or you studied it, but never worked. So it's, my daughter just came in, this is Neeve, for the 06
Twan Claiborne ’07 Hello Neeve. Welcome.
Jamie Madden ’06 Twan, she’s such a Seattle baby too.
Twan Claiborne ’07 Oh, I love it! Already walking around barefoot and just floating
Jamie Madden ’06 She's the most, emotionally mature person in my entire extended family.
Twan Claiborne ’07 That's us too. There's a lot of time to contemplate things in the rain and the pine trees when you're free.
Jamie Madden ’06 Great place to write a book. Really.
Twan Claiborne ’07 Right. It truly is. It truly is. Now trying to always think about how to phrase this question, because you think we live in a time, and also a culture where they use hot topic words and phrases for really tough and gritty issues, right? Housing Crisis sounds like stuff's on fire, right? And, it brings out a lot of emotions and it brings a lot of thoughts and, you know, there's a conflict where is it, you know, a failing of our institutions or is it a personal failing, which often with these things we lead through our personal failing? What is in crisis when it comes to housing?
Jamie Madden ’06 Yeah. And, the on fire thing is, there's a paragraph in the book where I felt maybe I was being a little bit dramatic about bodies being left on our streets when fires or freezes, etc., meet people living outdoors. And then in the editing process, the Palisades fire happened. It's like, well, maybe I wasn't even dramatic enough here, actually. But what is the crisis in that personal systemic that is super, super, super important to understanding housing. And I kind of from two angles. One is, and all of the data and understanding really backs this up - the cause of homelessness - now for the linguists here, you might be jumping out of your seats - it’s a lack of homes. Now for those of you who need a lot of data to back that up, I would send you to Greg Colburn Homelessness is a Housing Problem. Really incredible analysis of the variation in homelessness amongst places, showing that the only two variables that matter to homelessness are rents and vacancy rates, right? That's all about supply and affordability of housing. Now, an individual's housing crisis, an individual's homelessness is likely precipitated by something, right? Divorce, an injury, losing a job, what have you. And usually things that people can blame you for. You shouldn't got divorced, you shouldn't have done those drugs, you shouldn't have had those kids, etc., but you can make those mistakes in places where there's enough housing and not be sentenced to the streets. Right? So the problem is systemic, but there's such a personal element that I would say much of the culture and even much of the academics, up until maybe 20 years ago, really focus on individual debt and how can we fix them. I wanted to figure out where that came from. So in the research for the book I kind of followed back, how have we handled this. There have always been poor people in America. How have we housed them from all the way back to colonialism? I had a separate question about why was my family poor. And actually the answers to both questions collided. And like early British colonialism and the early development of title and eviction laws, etc. but I bring that up because there's this very English Anglo-Saxon cultural thing that happened that underlies the housing crisis, not just in the United States, but I would argue everywhere in the English speaking world. You'll notice in Ireland, the UK, Australia, they all have our housing crisis right now to varying degrees. Is that their society, our society says, yes, charity to your neighbor is our Christian duty. We're nominally Christian. They were very explicitly Christian when they did this. But like really, who's our neighbor and how much should we help them when and from the Puritans to the present, our systems, particularly with housing, but I would say in general, when you're dealing with things that are for poor people, they focus much more on that. How do we separate the worthy from the unworthy? How do we minimize the amount of resources we put into this thing? And there is a place for triage, but, and I get into a lot of numbers in the book, anyone who's been paying attention to the budget under the current administration, I think it's all out the window at this point, right? The ICE budget could cure child homelessness within two years. The money is there, but that's not the way we think about it, right? We have this very artificial scarcity and even liberals, Biden administration, their definitions of who's worthy and unworthy change. And you might feel strongly that your definition of worthy is correct. I've come to the strong opinion that as long as that question is the heart of how we approach things, we can never fix it because if there's someone that's going to be deemed unworthy, they're going to be. And with necessities like food, water, shelter, you're sentencing people to potential death by deeming them unworthy. There's also just a tremendous amount of waste in the human intelligence and money and resources and time that our system puts into defining who's worthy and unworthy, rather than actually going and building homes. I think a lot about what's real. And I approach this problem from those first principles of, all right, home, solve homelessness. We know what it takes to build homes, place to build permission to build their resources to direct labor materials. That resources bit can be structured really differently, but whether you're a capitalist, an anarchist, a fascist, a communist, that's… [gets interrupted] No matter what your political system, you have to deal with, this fundamental thing is that homes cost money. They cost money to build, they cost money to operate. And there will always be people in a market economy and a capitalist economy that cannot afford that amount of money. So like right now in Seattle, it probably costs about $9,000-$10,000 a year to operate one apartment as one landlord in a multi-family building. So anyone who can't afford that, you know, $900-$1000 a month in rent, the market doesn't even notice them. So that's where the absolute necessity of subsidizing people's housing costs and subsidizing the construction of affordable housing is so important. And my political position in the book is less of, here's policies and tactics that work, I mean, they're there, but my stance is, well, we know how to fix this. We know what it costs. The money is there. I want you to explain to me why we haven't.
Twan Claiborne ’07 I think back to your point about the worthiness. And in my mind, as I was reading your book and you were talking about what happened once your mother left, and there's this feeling of worthiness, is this something I need, and deserve? And I think about, you know, especially within the New York area, building of Stuyvesant Town and in Philadelphia and even in Long Island, building a, what is it called? Levittown, right? Which were in essence, housing works, but with the deems of worthiness to it. And here in New York, you have the housing lottery, which is supposed to be sort of a way of dealing with the housing crisis. Yet there's that question of worthiness going there. What work do you see, either the collective people or the people were supposed to elect and pay to do the job? Where do you see them really tackling that word worthy? And is it something that's just so lofty that it's unapproachable? Or is it like, we have to really sit down and grapple with the history that we're trying to erase?
Jamie Madden ’06 I think it's that ladder. Towards the end of the book, I speak about this incident with Congresswoman Maxine Waters from a few years ago. Some of you may have seen the YouTube video. And like, an unarguable progressive champion, Maxine Waters, right? She is. But even she is so bought into this that when confronted with a group of her own constituents desperately lining up for housing vouchers, she told them all to go home. And she got real upset when they pointed out accurately, we ain't got no homes to go to. That's why we're here, right? So it's bought into on that level. The Biden administration has perhaps been worse than either Trump administration at this particular thing. Congress passed tremendous amounts of money during Covid that HUD was supposed to put out the door very quickly. HUD took that opportunity to redefine homelessness and to have, like all these very specific categories and all this stuff, and it very specifically kept people on the streets longer and you know, I can speak specifically from some Seattle examples where it was like six months, millions of dollars that could have been used to buy buildings to open up housing were stuck there. So I do think it is a challenge, even amongst us on the left or progressives or however you might label yourself as a good person to really challenge this worthy, unworthy idea. In the book towards the end, I suggest a universal housing voucher as one of the potentially most powerful ways to address this serious market failure in housing, where your rent might not be enough for your landlord to operate, or for a developer to build. So there needs to be some subsidy there. Michael Tubbs, former mayor of Stockton, California, has been a big voice behind universal basic income. I find that really compelling, too. You know, my politics kind of come down on everyone should have the necessities. You know, even people that I hate the most, they should have food, water, shelter and care.
Twan Claiborne ’07 Yeah. That's a hard thing to grapple with because those people are fighting against exactly what we want for everybody. And we end up in these circular conversations where we want to remove the unworthiness, but then someone does something and we're like, well, not you. Oh, right [laughs]. Parallel conversation with dismantling the prison industrial complex where it's like, oh, this is not really helping because it's, you know, 13th amendment yet. What do we do with what we have? Because no one's having the imagination to see beyond what's presented to them.
Jamie Madden ’06 That's right. It's a different talk, but, let's sometime get together and I'll talk about how in pre-colonial Ireland, we had a fully reparative justice system.
Twan Claiborne ’07 Oh, that’s a next SwatTalk.
Jamie Madden ’06 And since we're there too, you know, it's really important to point out prisons are probably the largest affordable housing type in the United States. Federal prisons alone house over 2 million people. That doesn't get to county, state, you know, local stuff where there's millions, millions more. That doesn't get into immigration detention centers. 2 million is more than the number of people who are served by public housing. It's more than the number of people are served by Section 8 or slightly above it, I'd have to go double check. It's in the book, read the book. You know, it's slightly less than the affordable housing built under the low income housing tax credit, which is how we've been doing things for the last 40 years. But any way you slice it, it's in the top three of our housing programs for the poor. And that is a terrible thing to say out loud.
Twan Claiborne ’07 I mean, honestly, because we don't have a rehabilitative justice system, people end up re-offending. And having seen so many documentaries, it's like, well, that's the only place that I have food, shelter and can make a little money and not have it go, you know, to my housing, which takes it away. That makes me think of how our housing needs to be interconnected with a lot of other things. So should we fix housing? What would the other things that would need fixing be either directly or indirectly fixed by making sure that everybody has housing or needs the guarantee that those things would be there.
Jamie Madden ’06 No, nothing's guaranteed. This is the work of generations, right? And I couldn't have, you know, gotten to Swarthmore College if I didn't have a little bit of housing stability. And a little bit of that ability to take an education if instead of being in affordable housing through much of my childhood or being with my grandmother when I was in high school, we were in a car or hotels or streets. No way in hell I would have been able to end up at Swarthmore College. And I say that to say we should be reasonable and we should think with people if they've been deprived of some of the necessities, it's the work of generations. Repair all of that. That said, there's a lot of the work in solving the housing crisis and I might sound simplistic or glib or I'm like, I just build enough homes for everyone. But really and truly like the way we fix this is we need to be allowed to build. That's your abundance people, your get rid of racist zoning people. You need those resources to build that affordable housing, social housing, section eight public housing, all the different ways we make this happen. Home mortgage interest deduction, etc. And then we need really strong resin protections so that lenders and landlords can't take advantage of the generosity of subsidy to take egregious rents, to use unjust evictions, etc., with foreclosures. And it really is this kind of three legged stool where being allowed to build is fine, but we can't afford it for everyone without the subsidies. And even with those two legs, the stool is going to fall over without really strong resident protections, you know? And that's work. That's work from the carpenters framing it up to the architects designing it, to the leasing agents getting people there to the resident services, social workers helping families stabilize and find success from there. And that work will continue. But it's just work, right? We know it works. We know what it costs. It's just the work of doing it. I think the other thing you're alluding to is the way it touches everything else, right? Chronic disease. You know, there have been I love pilot projects. There's a pilot project when I left Swarthmore in ’06 I got a job in health care policy in Massachusetts. And there was a pilot at the time, and I read, a few months ago about a new pilot of the exact same thing, 20 some years later. In Massachusetts, we let one of the insurers that uses subsidies to use that money to, say, replace someone's carpet, get them an air conditioner, get rid of black mold, prevent an eviction. And that is so wildly more cost effective than letting them go homeless and or letting them the housing they're in continue to hurt them. So there's a lot with health education. We could go on and on about how necessary that stability is for children or adults, for that matter, to learn your ability to work, your ability to be healthy, to stay sober or to get mental health or physical health care. I mean, to me, it's just it's foundational. After food and water, shelter is like, you need to live.
Twan Claiborne ’07 Right. I've always seen comparisons with particularly Scandinavian countries, which this administration loves Scandinavian countries and much more from, from them. But, you know, I think I recently saw today there is the news or maybe it was I was reading it in your book, but something that had said that Finland or Norway, one of the Scandinavian countries, had nearly gotten to 0% eradication of homelessness. And folks love to point to those other places as doing it successfully. Yet people will critique, well, look at the history of that country. Look at the population of that country. How helpful is it to look at those countries as examples of solving the housing crisis? Is it something that can be duplicated here, or do we just have too much baggage that we aren't confronting that prevents us from really using a perfect example of how to in this crisis?
Jamie Madden ’06 Yes. I mean, a few things. Comparative look is always important. I do think that there's a habit, certainly here in Seattle, to look to Europe. I think we should be looking the other direction to Asia. If you want to look at the best examples of urban planning and city building in the world today, you need to go to places like Seoul, Japan, Singapore are some of the first tier Chinese cities, etc. You know, I walk around Seoul, I have in-laws there and I just go, why can't we have nice things? You know, they really do things right there. All these places are different. I do think the comparative angle is useful to say, yes, it's possible. And this is one of the ways that can look. And the more diversity you have in those comparisons, it can look like this, or it can look like that, and you can kind of bring more people along. I think it also can highlight our peculiarity. And I don't really want to write another book about housing, but if I do, I want to really pull at this idea of, is this problem really about that basis in English common law, English property law, and English poor law? You know, Scandinavian countries and these East Asian countries, say Hong Kong and Macau, famously not English places, right. And it's all these countries that were colonized by the English who on their independence, still just use these exact same laws that had been designed for the explicit purpose of stealing land from my ancestors, of stealing your ancestors are stealing the land for both sitting on right now, and then making sure that the rent is set around everything we can produce. Yeah, I'm going to. I'm going to pause there before I go down a big rabbit hole about Agartha More. I think that the comparisons stuff is important, and we have to understand how we're different. And, you know, point in time where the unworthy thing again. I mean, this is not a book about how to make this politically possible, it's sort of a book about what is necessary to fix it. Because accomplishing the politics requires people to stop voting with white supremacy.
Twan Claiborne ’07 it's just so and I mean, I say it all my time on my social media is it's just it's just so ingrained like things, you know, it's a quote, Lauryn Hill, it could all be so simple, but we rather it be hard. Because going back to your earlier point, that question of rooted in, I call it fandom Jesus, like, take care of thy neighbor, but we've been with our rugged individualism, been sort of socialized to not trust that person. So why would we then look at this very simple issue with unglazed eyes, if that is how we're trained and how are we going to, you know, a larger question like how do we undo that? Because people that come here, you've seen it where people are coming in with personal stories and unfortunately, some people will value more personal, their personal story or a certain type of personal story over others.
Jamie Madden ’06 Yeah. You know, speaking to white people as a white-ish person, I say ish because I know my culture and I'm Boston Irish. I think more of us need to understand just how horrific racism and white supremacy is for us. Like my personal liberation, my family's ability to have stability in life are wound up in the liberation of others. So like I in the book, I get into the numbers on, you know, the home my grandmother grew up in that her immigrant parents were able to buy was redlined, and they sold it in the late 70s for the same price they bought it in the mid 20s. But now that triple decker in that part of Boston would be three different condos going for about $1 million each, right? That harmed us as white people, as individual white people, because systemic racism was trying to target people of color, but couldn't do it quite as neatly as they used to be able to. I think you can look at other issues like zoning, like school district boundaries and funding. There's a lot of ways where if you're a white person with proximity to blackness or other communities that have been marginalized, or you're just a white person without resources. Our liberation is very dependent on everyone else's liberation, because I would say, like, racism is the number one reason that it's hard to get past this worthy/unworthy paradigm. There just so many people that people don't want to see get a hand what they see as a handout.
Twan Claiborne ’07 Which is wild because here you are with the GoFundMe because your insurance doesn't cover this guy on the other end, you might be homeless. Like what? What are we doing? As kids would say. Oh, just a reminder to folks and I see some of them popping into the Q&A portion, if you have any questions, please drop them into the chat. Make sure to include your class here or your affiliation to the college if you're an alum, or if you're not an alum, but if you're a family or friends. There was something you had just said and I completely lost my train of thought. So while I figure that out, I'm going to go to some of the questions. So this question is from Perry Chang: The first Trump tax change essentially gave renters the same deduction that at least middle class income homeowners got, eliminating some of the tax expenditure advantage for homeowners, that means renters are no longer subsidizing homeowners, subsidizing homeowners except for owners of very valuable housing. Could that have created some homeowner versus renter equity?
Jamie Madden ’06 Equity in the sense that both have suffered? You know, I'm a middle class person who owns a small condo and I cannot deduct the interest that I pay on it. That parenthetical, except for owners of very valuable housing is doing a tremendous amount of work. It is true Trump's tax reforms did make the home more on mortgage interest deduction, much less of a specific hit on the federal budget than it has been for many decades. It is still, I don't have the number of top of my head apologies, but it is still a huge number. So I would say renters do, continue to subsidize wealthy homeowners. Lower and middle income homeowners also subsidize wealthy owners.
Twan Claiborne ’07 Which again, I'm like, if we're striving for this American dream of wanting everyone to be homeowners, but we are creating these barriers from them being homeowners, that no one's going to get it. Or you do these fun tricks like the housing crisis. That was one of my questions too, I know you probably talked about it in your book, but what I feel like there was a portion where you had mentioned in the late 90s, the United States government shift their priorities in paying for subsidized housing, and there was a move toward increasing homeownership, but then you get these predatory loans and all those things, how did the housing bubble burst figure into this housing crisis? Because it seemed like the way they framed it, there was an abundance and then there was two months of something and it exploded.
Jamie Madden ’06 Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to pull the history back a little bit and see if I can do enough context history in thirty seconds for just help. Housing development before the mid-nineteenth century was pretty much solely a private enterprise, but the land was much cheaper. A lot of it was stolen. The labor was much cheaper. A lot of unions were busted, and we had chattel slavery. The materials were much cheaper, same reason. So there's so many fewer people falling in that place where the market doesn't serve them and those people were hated anyway. In the mid 19th century, we start getting things like settlement houses and immigration assistance. The demolition of slums and, you know, healthier housing. And that was very much of that Wasp tradition of where the unworthy, if these people are having trouble, there must be something wrong with them. Let's fix them. That is the dominant paradigm until the world wars. We have some experiments with a type of public housing in World War I. Quincy, Massachusetts, shout out Massachusetts! First one. And then, you know, from the 1930s to the 1950s, we build a lot of public housing. It excludes a lot of people at that time in the 60s. We swap who it's for. So from kind of a preferred, worthy low income people to really housing of last resort and public housing budgets were completely kneecapped by those reforms and public housing just declined in quality, more or less to the present, with some variation. And then in the 70s, we stopped building public housing altogether. It's basically not allowed. We start bringing the market in, mostly through Section 8, which is that housing voucher pays part of tenants rent. There's a version that stays with the building and there’s a version that stays with the tenant. But this does that thing of transforming the rent that household can afford into a rent that can actually exercise some market demand, right, and get them a place to live. That worked okay. There were a lot of vulnerabilities in the program. There was a lot of abuse. Fred Trump very famously got rich abusing some of these programs. So in Nixon, we put a moratorium on new housing under Section 8. So we've done some public housing. We say no more. We did some Section 8 and said no more. And then there's nothing really producing housing until 1986. Reagan tax reforms. We get the low income housing tax credit, which is the regime we've been using for the last 40 years. Concurrently with all of this zoning is invented, 1920 is more or less, many places that initially put in zoning codes have them very explicitly racist. The explicitness of restrictive covenants and explicit racial zoning challenged the Supreme Court weren't allowed. What was allowed was implicit racial zoning, which I would argue is the regime that we're still with today, although thankfully, it's getting tremendous amounts of pushback. Once those racial covenants and those other means of keeping neighborhoods segregated became less legal. They started to say, well, if we can't decide who's allowed in our neighborhood, then maybe we don't allow anyone new in our neighborhood. And you see this massive proliferation of exclusionary zoning throughout the 1980s and 1990s. That really is what sets the stage for the housing crisis we have starting in the 1980s and they knew this back then. There were economic reports about this back then, it was clear if we created jobs and didn't build homes, we'd create a permanent underclass of people who experience homelessness. And that's exactly what we then continued to do for the next 40 years. In the 90s, early 2000, there is this gambling amongst the financial sector on home mortgages, many of which were extremely poorly underwritten and many of which had balloon terms or high interest rate terms that blew up in people. There were certain markets, Florida, Las Vegas, where there was maybe an abundance of housing that was developed before the crash, in places like New York and Massachusetts, no, we never even got to that place even during that period. What we got was people getting mortgages to move out to some of those homes, and then losing those to foreclosure. My hometown Randolph, is the foreclosure leader king of Massachusetts. It is also the second or third blackest community in Massachusetts. So foundation causation.
Twan Claiborne ’07 Interesting.
Jamie Madden ’06 So, yeah, so that run up and crash rates really in everyone's face, especially for those of us who lived through it during those years. But there was never enough supply. We're already in this place where beginning 86, 70 years, 60s, where to draw the line. But the federal government had been disinvested in housing for a very long time. And local communities had been stopping the growth of housing through exclusionary zoning for a very long time. And more than financial dynamics, I think those two are really what set the stage for where we are today.
Twan Claiborne ’07 It's very much analogous to, in New York, in the 2010’s when they were trying to figure out where to build temporary shelters, they're like, this is a great idea, but not here. And if it's not here, then where is it going to be? This is a great question, actually very connected to what you were just saying in terms of housing going back, particularly homeowners versus renters. This is from Becky Voorhees, class of 1993. How do you define housing? For example, square feet per person, proximity to health care, groceries, jobs, schools, minimum sanitation, safety standards. That's the first question and then, the second question I'll ask after, once you answer that.
Jamie Madden ’06 Defining things with their edges rather than centers is always, and inside a lot of discussion, we could do that at Sharples for hours, but I would say, you know, a place, a structure where you have doors that lock windows, bathrooms, sewage, fresh water, at least some ability to cook and kitchen, and that sort of the bare minimum and that you can stay there, you know, and where that then, is distinct from, say, just like shelter is that permanence and also that it's yours, right? Whereas shelters often congregate or if you're in a non congregate shelter like the tiny homes of Seattle has been using, it's not yours. It's temporary, right? So I wouldn't count either of those as housing. Those are shelters. And I would say doorways, tents, RVs, cars definitely not housing. But we really do rely on doorways, tents, cars and RVs a whole lot to house our working class.
Twan Claiborne ’07 Going back, because that keeps them out of sight, out of mind. And again, worthiness, that lingering concept which, you know, still using laws from the 1600s in this country to defy laws in the 2020s, it's just.
Jamie Madden ’06 Yeah, and all you nerds, I went back and read them. If you don't talk about a Treatise on Land title from 1800 in Massachusetts.
Twan Claiborne ’07 And it's just wild to me that this is, I won't go down that rabbit hole because we will be here all day. Yeah. And then interconnected. Can you talk about the fellow traveler role of public transportation?
Jamie Madden ’06 Absolutely. Yeah. So city planning, nerdiness, and thank you. Public transit workers on the call as well. It's all part of it. There's this interesting thing throughout the history of human settlement, people are willing to live like 20 to 45 minutes from where they need to be during the day. Roughly. And when you look at some of our older cities, Boston is actually a really good example for its age. The center of town was when the technology was walking. And if you were rich, you had a horse, right. So this very nice, walkable urban thing. And then in the late 19th, early 20th century, you start getting streetcars instead of early public transportation, and you start getting these streetcar suburbs, where you've got that kind of low rise. I mean, think Queens, New York is a good example of streetcar suburb, urbanism as well. And then you get the automobile, right, and you get places like Seattle that are very much an auto based urbanism. And we really push that to its extreme. You know, I talked about in the book too, one of the solutions to housing in the English speaking world is - go somewhere else. And like the 20th, early 21st century version of that is drive till you qualify. Okay, so now I've driven out to where I qualify. I'm three hours from my job. I don't get to see my family. I have chronic disease. I'm polluting, I'm moving to climate change, etc. and expanding that 20 to 40 minute range is really the role of public transportation as I see it, for the housing ecosystem and for a city, if you have really good, efficient public transit, then you maybe can live somewhere that's far from where you need to be during the day but you know, you can get there and you can rely on it. This is one of those places too, where I say, go look at Asia. Like, go look at any major city in Asia. They're doing a much better job than we are at transportation.
Twan Claiborne ’07 Yeah. It also helps that they're community oriented. They take care of the people and not, you know, individuals or things like that. You know, that helps. This question is from Jeff Sable, apologies if I'm mispronouncing your name. Class of ’79. I also believe it's important to implement universal rental assistance. I teach at Tuffts, and we have estimated the cost of implementing universal rental assistance. My research hopes to show that the benefits of universal health insurance, such as the decrease in homelessness and evictions in Massachusetts, will clearly outweigh these costs. I'm interested to hear your ideas about how we can make this happen.
Jamie Madden ’06 Yeah, well thank you Jeff. Thank you for that work. I want to go see your research, see how far off the estimates I made in my book are, around a quarter billion dollars is what I put it at. It's real money, but it's so within the realm of what we spend on other priorities. And if and when we all survive this current regime and we do live under an authoritarian regime, I think there's really strong consensus on that. That's not controversial anymore. There should be an opportunity to do big things and to solve big problems, because we have to really take a disaster recovery framework and rebuild what's happened over these 12 years. And I think that universal housing, universal basic income should very much be on that. Hanging any hopes on the federal level is something I've never been willing to do. But ideally it would come from them. From the numbers, the state level and the city level, county level is always sort of this, inherited wisdom that, well, you don't want to do rental assistance or that sort of thing at two local level level, because then you'll attract all the people who come in and you'll run out of money and what have you. Out of curiosity, I ran the numbers for Seattle. You know how much would it cost if we gave every currently homeless person a housing voucher at $2,000 a month, which is probably more than we would actually need to have an effect. And it was like 25-30% of the SPD budget. Much of which is spent on sweeping these people from place to place. So I think we need to be bold in our demands. It's been funny, having conversations about the book because always and rightfully, the question comes up, well, how can we actually get our politicians to do this shit? That's a different book. I wrote the book about building the housing. I can't just kind of wish that away. You know, assume it like an economist. But what I'm trying to do with this is set a stake out of this is what's absolutely necessary. And I would bet Jeff's research is doing something similar. And then it's on us to pressure through all those ways that politicians can be pressured to deliver on at least that minimum of what's necessary, and to make those really strong demands. There are many things where we need to do this. But housing is just so foundational to life that, as Jeff points out, as we discussed earlier, if you get people stably housed, the economy saves money, the households save money, the public saves money. You enable so much growth and creativity. I think it's really there's a tangent, but it's important to me, so indulge please. Thank you. It's really misunderstood how much or people in America are not allowed to make mistakes.
Twan Claiborne ’07 Yes, yes, yes.
Jamie Madden ’06 The smallest mistake can land you in prison, can get you an eviction, can lose your car, can lose your job, whatever. A small, small, small, small thing; stealing an ice cream cone and getting caught for it can precipitate so much crisis that you end up on the streets in this country and it's worse now, but even when we were young, I felt that. Yeah. And I have, like many an unhealthy relationship to perfectionism as a result. Now, the problem is, if you want to create anything: a book, music, a business, the work of that is failure, you have to sit down and write, even if it's trash and it's failure. You have to go query. You have to go try to raise funds. You get whatever your creation is, whatever the work of creating it and then getting it in the world is you have to be able to fail and to lean into failure. And that's just a privilege that fewer and fewer people in this country have. But we solve this problem. Imagine, like, imagine how good the music would be and the art and the entrepreneurship if nobody had to worry about their brand.
Twan Claiborne ’07 Right. Gosh, I just imagine just meadows and the earth healing and just seeing things from trees. Oh my gosh, it's in the budget and we're not competing. We're not putting imaginary quantities of values on these things.And then we end up, you know, fighting all over again. It's madness.
This question is from Chris Roger. You're Chris Roger. ’97. Could you talk about the trade off between housing availability and housing quality? I would also be interested in hearing about the relative importance of an ownership versus rental approach.
Jamie Madden ’06 Sure. So availability and quality, there is a tension here. And it's part of a broader tension where public policy over the last few decades, especially, has put the costs of many, many, many, many, many good causes that are not housing onto housing, right? So union labor, passive house or lead, high quality, you know, it's just there's so much that's put on it. And at some point that just breaks the bank of being able to make a project feasible. And then that reduces your availability. So there is this tough discussion in public policy and actually conversations hot in Seattle at the moment around our mandatory housing affordability, which is like our inclusionary zoning developer. You have to include some affordability or pay us a law. But in this climate, there's nothing getting built. And so the developers are saying, please let us a pencil. So this quality availability thing is important. That said there has to be a minimum standard. We've been here before. Go to the Tenement Museum in New York, right? Read about slums in the 18th and 19th centuries, about what happens, when we let low quality be the solution to housing. But if we don't pony up and pay to actually build housing and subsidize what's there, then we're never going to get to that either, right? To have nothing and nothing. And instead of having a low quality home, we're relying on tents and doorways and cars. So I think especially in some of the most liberal jurisdictions, I've spent my whole life living in them. You know, we have to temper ourselves about what's realistic and what's really important and what costs.
Ownership versus rental. Diversity is super, super important in any ecosystem. Cities are ecosystems. Housing is an ecosystem. People in this country, across the world, wildly diverse and take DEI out of your head if you want to. Some people are old, some people are young. Some people have certain abilities. We all have very different needs for our households, and those needs change over time. There are times you want flexibility. There are times you want stability. Maybe you're a person that loves spending every weekend at Home Depot. Maybe that's your nightmare, right? So it's really important that there be choice and tenure. More rental housing, more affordable rental housing, more homeownership. I'd love to see other tenure models become more available in the States. There's more movement to social housing. Korea has a system I'd like to understand more than I do. It's sort of, you buy a long term lease, so you're renting, but you own it for ten years. Which, you know, I could see, like, as a young person or young family who wants a little bit of stability but doesn't want to be in the ownership place as being a great option. So I think the more options, the better. I have a whole chapter in the book where I hem and haw about affordable homeownership. Because homeownership as shelter and shelter that you get to sort of govern yourself, super important. Homeownership is wealth building is a contradiction in terms to affordability. And we do have affordable homeownership programs that have built affordable homeownership. And it's always a hard balance between how do we allow some wealth appreciation for these households? But how do we also make it affordable for the next household that inhabits it? And so again and then little policy, these are huge debates. And the larger picture sort of we need all of it.
Twan Claiborne ’07 I want to let the audience know, we have about 6 or 7 minutes left. Thank you for all your questions. There's 18 questions. So we're not going to get to all of them. But I'm going to try to sort of combine a couple of questions that are connected. And these two questions are actually connected to what you were just talking about from Amy Chen and Gilda Kramer, who is in the class of 76. The first one is you talk about how the housing market issues are systemic and rooted in the market. What do you think of the feasibility of alternative housing, such as community land trust or limited equity cooperatives on a large scale, and then connect to that? What are the most effective methods a suburban municipality can utilize to create more affordable or attainable housing?
Jamie Madden ’06 Okay, and try to do those in order. So on the feasibility of alternative models, community land trusts, you know, a nonprofit, a community that cares about it, maybe even a public thing, owns a bunch of land, owns buildings and now lets those trade at, no matter which model, you still have to grapple with the fact that it costs money to build and cost money to operate, and there will be people who can't afford those. So all of these tactics; community land trust limited, equity cooperatives, social housing, affordable housing, public housing, Margaery housing, etc., etc., etc. whatever it is, we need to make sure that we're subsidizing households so that it is available to them. It's probably cheaper and much more efficient to do that in a non capitalist community land trust system. You can do it under capitalism. We just have to come up with enough money to purchase all the land from the current owner class. So all of those tools are very useful and they can make what we do much more cost efficient. But that core issue of there are people who can't afford housing payments that the housing demands and we have to solve for that, no matter what. Those are a couple good things actually for suburban municipalities. Especially if you're a suburb where maybe land is a little bit cheap right now, if it's cheaper than the core city that you're near. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. Next best time is today, kind of thing. The best time to start a community land trust was certainly 20 years ago. But if you can afford to do it now, that's helpful too. Swatty, ’06 Benu Campton has been involved in doing that stuff. And in Somerville, Massachusetts with a lot of other great advocates and probably more societies there, and I didn't think it could be done in Somerville. I thought Somerville was already too expensive. And they have proven me wrong. So I think that's one, you know, the first thing should be what can you do less of. So if you have large lots zoning, if you have onerous design review, if you have fees that are making housing completely infeasible, etc., etc. If your local government is part of the problem and if you live in America, your local government is probably part of this problem. Start with doing less of the things that are harmful and you will start to see some help. But again, without that money, without that, kind of actually putting money towards building affordable housing and subsidizing people, we're not going to get there, right? Because you need a place to build, need permission to build there. That local government is the permission piece. And we need the resources. Resources can be really hard for small municipalities and suburbs. There's some good models in suburban Seattle, actually, where our suburbs to the east, which is our wealthy suburbs, and then later our suburbs to the south, which is our impoverished suburbs, have coalitions where they've got like eight, ten, 12 municipalities that each put some money into a pot every year. And then that money is available to nonprofits and others to build affordable housing. And they actually share with each other usually, which can be hard. Never easy to make them share, but they do. And so that might be, those might be some models to look at from the suburbs. GILDA, that's a regional coalition for housing. ARCH would be the older East Side one.
Twan Claiborne ’07 Oh. That's incredible. You know, I get Bellevue crap about a lot of things, but it's not. To hear that they're doing something right, but something, you know.
Jamie Madden ’06 I guess I could take the train there now, but I don't know. I would know it.
Twan Claiborne ’07 There you go. See, there is that good old shade toward the east side. This question is from my fellow classmate, Jason Horowitz. My class ’07. How much optimism do you feel about recent apparent momentum for more restrictions on land use regulation at the state level. So, speaking of state, even if it's incremental, do you think that's a good approach for states to take?
Jamie Madden ’06 Yes. I have been feeling optimistic about the momentum, around challenging exclusionary land use policies, racist zoning, etc. I remember 15 years ago talking about this at an affordable housing conference and people kind of doing what? really? no? Now it's consensus, to the point where we have these unfortunate splits in some places, especially in California, between your YIMBY's and NIMBYs. But the fact of the matter is, just about every jurisdiction in this country has overly exclusionary land use policy, and we need to open those up. And every opening is helpful. Every little thing is helpful. I'd rather have it all at once. I think there's a strategy. If we had a functional Supreme Court and or Congress, to show zoning in violation of the 14th amendment, there's a lot of good precedent. But, you know, this Supreme Court Congress. So those local level advocacy and then the state level advocacy and finding states are finding ways to get around jurisdictions that are not cooperating. And it's, you know, it's important to do, unfortunately. And that's always a difficult politics between local leaders and state leaders when you want to take local control over zoning. But it's very clear that it's a problem. It's very clear to me that it needs to go. And, any progress in getting rid of it is good. And I think once those little bits of progress always help, right? Like, people are terrified of growth and change. But, you know, if you see a three story townhome go up and there's a block of those, it's not so bad. Maybe you're less worried about the six story mid-rise. You know, you kind of I would like to do it all at once. But I think if incrementalism is what's possible where you are, then it might be the way to go.
Twan Claiborne ’07 Right? Baby steps, baby steps. This. This country loves to take things slow, but then it builds so fast at the same time, I found three houses to match.
Jamie Madden ’06 I found so many 19th and early 20th century studies on housing of the poor. That's like the same stuff I could, you know, get hired to write today. And I've watched it, just in the decade that I've been in Seattle, the same questions asked and answered. But the dominant forces didn't like the answer. So now we're asking them again a few years later. And I would love to get us out of this cycle.
Twan Claiborne ’07 Yes. And then our final question for the evening sort of wrap this all up in the bow, because you just talked about what we can do at the state level, and if we had a functioning federal government, what they could do. This is from your classmate Anna Chu. What can we as individuals do, to contribute to solutions or at least not add to the problem.
Jamie Madden ’06 Yeah. I think the first thing is to think about where you have any influence or power currently, and where do you have any potentially. And what kind of stuff do you like to do. Because there's so much work to be done. And if I'm using that kind of three legged stool model of housing affordability where we need to be allowed to build, you need the resources to build, and we need to protect residents to stay in their homes. You know, you can work on any one of those problems. So if zoning nerd-ism and nerd-ism, did I just make that word? No one look at the date. You know, if if abundance is your thing, you want to take on the zoning codes, do local policy advocacy, or go there if you want to get involved in actually developing housing and join our field in affordable housing, or if you want to sell out to a bank but be kind of nice, you know, work for one of the many lenders or investors to affordable housing. If you can advocate at any government level for money, get us that money, because that's the most important one in my mind. If you like working with people, if it's the individual stuff that keeps you going, if you're a social worker type, there's so much need out there for people to help with homeless folks, people experiencing housing insecurity. There are organizations wherever you live, there will be ways for you to contribute, maybe to volunteer, maybe to do it yourself. Anarchist mutual aid. You don't have to wait for anyone else. You can go feed people in a park. You know, if you have extra space, if you have extra homes, get connected to folks you trust, whether it's through a church or a rowing club, whatever. If whatever power or opportunity or space you have to provide - do that thing because there's so much to be done, that thinking about what's the best we could do or what's the thing is, almost silly in that, like, do what you can do, do a little bit more of it. I'd say that's generally applicable from housing to fascism.
Twan Claiborne ’07 Honestly, we need to oh, I don't know, the capitalist urge to want to put that on a t- shirt and sell it. You know, just live that model, do what you can do. There's always a part to play for anyone. And that's a wonderful final word. Thank you, Jamie, for your time. If folks want to hear more from…
Jamie Madden ’06 Can I do one quick final word, I remember that this graphic. So I wrote this book. There's 120,000 words. Please do read it. I promise it's good. I wouldn't promote if it weren't. I'm incapable. I'm Boston Irish. I'm not supposed to promote ourselves. I mentioned that. I went looking as I was researching it - how did we get here? Meet my family individually. Our society and those answers collided. It took me so long to do that.
This background here is from a Dublin based artist who goes by, Malas Fashari SpiceBag. The background is a famous 19th century painting of evictions during Angorortamore, the Great hunger. They blame it on the potatoes. It was the agricultural heart of the British Empire. There was lots of food. It was all exported. And I learned in the research that evictions were really the mechanism of the genocide, that my ancestors survived, that at some point, all my ancestors had to look at the food they grew and say, do I sell this and avoid being evicted from evicted? If I’m evicted I probably have to emigrate or die in a ditch. But if I do that, give it to the landlord, I can't give it to my daughter. Right. Do I feed my hungry child? Do I pay the landlord? And that was very much the dynamic that caused a quarter of the island to die and a quarter to emigrate. And what SpiceBag did was take photos of police illegally assisting in eviction, illegally wearing balaclavas. You're really not supposed to do that in the Republic of Ireland, in Dublin in 2018, and the political class got very upset. He was impugning the reputation of an Angardis Shakana, you know, and maybe they have a point. Maybe it is different because in the 19th century it was that, state violence was being used for the benefit of foreign capital. And in the present one, it's that state violence is being used for foreign capital. So this has been a problem for a long time, and it will take a long time, but it is fixable, and it's really only been a couple hundred years, and that isn't that long. When you really look back at everything our ancestors have been through and how our culture has come here. So it's a big problem. It's not going to get better soon. But, I would like to leave people with hope and optimism that we do know how to fix it. And if we can survive this moment and get to a place where we can get the resources out there and we can get rid of the barriers then we could fix this. We could have that world with all the meadows and everything, right?
Twan Claiborne ’07 It takes work and that and that's something that folks don't want to do, but it needs to be done. You get up for work every day, so this is just this is more humanist work versus feeding the machine. Well, thank you again, Jamie. Thank you so much. Where can we purchase your book and also find out where you're going and think all the other happenings.
Jamie Madden ’06 Yeah. Thank you. Book can be found wherever books are at. Also, the audio book, I narrated it. That was a joy and really hard. BitterSweetlaneBook.com will have links to everything. I put up events. There's some podcasts if you love my voice enough or you just need something to help you sleep. Also, I didn't get to talk about it. I love to talk about it, music was a huge part of my writing of this. There's a soundtrack to your reading. If you read the book, there's a Spotify playlist from there, and all of the songs in the playlist are referenced in the book. So little Easter egg hunt for you. Yeah. BittersweetLaneBook.com. Buy it wherever you buy your books.
Twan Claiborne ’07 Thank you. And I once again, thank you to the team of Alumni Council who put this on. Thank you to the Office of Family Engagement who are working in the back end, this podcast, audio cast, this gathering, this conversation is being recorded so you can share with your friends in a couple of weeks. And we hope you all have an amazing and restful evening and fight the good fight. Thank you all.
Jamie Madden ’06 Thank you.
Twan Claiborne ’07 Thank you. Good night everybody.
