Potlucks, Everything Bagels, and Trying to Solve Everything All at Once
Everyone’s Hungry, and What Happens When Organizers Won't Let Us Bring Lasagna
I went to a potluck recently. (I love potlucks. My friends Marc and Heather have thrown a weekly one for a decade+ and it’s one of the best examples of topophilia I’ve ever seen.) And something happened that reminded me of the housing market.
At this potluck, everyone was supposed to bring a dish. An early arrival showed up with deviled eggs. I love deviled eggs too. Delicious. But there weren’t that many, they’re not that filling (I could eat a dozen of them) and they were (rightfully so, they were so good) gone before most people got there.
Other friends brought an amazing salad. Great dressing, fresh veggies…and not that filling just by itself. Another family brought little ham biscuits. Very good, but went quickly.
Then. Someone filled the table by bringing a giant tray of lasagna. I don’t know that the lasagna was everyone’s favorite, but everyone took a big hunk, and everyone ate well.
How our housing market is like a potluck
Perhaps I’m stretching the analogy too far, but bear with me. As I think about how we build in our cities and towns, this potluck made a lot of sense.
The deviled eggs play the role of the longtime residents who’ve adopted a NIMBY posture. (This is nothing against the people who actually brought deviled eggs to the potluck. It’s an analogy.) Delicious, high-end, takes a long time to make, people are thrilled they are there. But there aren’t that many, they are more intricate to make, and the people who get there first end up eating most of them.
The salad plays the role of deeply affordable housing (in many places, this is Low-Income Housing Tax Credit housing, or other affordable housing with rent controls). Nutritious for the community-affordable housing is the right thing to do. Kind of expensive to make. They’re great additions. But if they’re the only thing on the table, people go hungry.
And the lasagna is the vast majority of workforce/market-rate housing. It feeds the crowd. It’s not perfect, but it’s hearty, reliable, and makes everything else work. And when you don’t have enough food at the table, lasagna helps. Nobody looks at a tray of lasagna and says, “How dare you bring this-it’s not salad.” Or “This is lower class and higher calorie than deviled eggs, and changes the character of the table.” They say, “Thank God, there’s something here most everyone can eat.”
The housing shortage-and our community development strategy-is a potluck with gatekeepers
Imagine if, at this same potluck, there was a gatekeeper at the door telling you: “You can’t bring lasagna, we already have one,” or “Only side dishes allowed this year.” “Your lasagna must be gluten free and must come in below this calorie count.” Imagine if bringing a dish required a committee review, submitting the recipe to the potluck organizer, and a permitting process. “We can’t have cheeseburgers at the potluck, that would change the nature of what we are trying to do.” That’s what our housing policy looks like in many cities today.
We have a massive housing shortage. I’ve said this in this newsletter before. Charlotte is short 30,000 units, Dallas 100,000, and D.C. over 130,000. Nationwide, we’re short over 7 million homes. Yet in many places, it’s practically illegal to build anything other than a detached single-family home on a big lot. Imagine a potluck where everyone is only allowed to bring desserts, even though the table’s already full of them and people want carbs and protein. That’s the system we’ve created.
The “Everything Bagel” Fallacy of Trying to Make Things Better
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, in their recent book Abundance, talked about the “everything bagel” challenge of public policy. An everything bagel is awesome. But it has a *little* bit of a lot of toppings, they say, not piled on everything. The challenge with government development goals is they require LOTS of everything. Many mandates in the infrastructure and climate bills in the Biden Administration provided funding for projects…but they had to build bridges or power generation projects AND support vocational training AND support environmental and climate goals AND be cost-effective AND raise workers’ wages AND improve the diversity hiring goals of these projects.
All of these goals, Abundance argues, are worthy—and I agree. There is nothing objectionable about trying to have more female welders for infrastructure projects and there are great vocational training organizations. But fitting all these goals INTO ONE PROJECT balloons costs and timelines so that nothing ever gets built, people become discouraged, and everyone leaves hungry and angry.
I’m frustrated at our society’s inability to build everything, due to our goals of optimizing everything. Not every dish will be perfect but we often need “all of the above.”
Specifically, with housing and community development, if we want to fix the housing shortage, we need to stop sneering at the lasagna. We need policies that make it easier-not harder-to build it. Let the deviled eggs and salad shine, of course. But don’t pretend they can feed the crowd alone.