Discover the future of housing with author Diana Lind as we explore innovative solutions for smarter, simpler, and happier living. Can accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and co-living arrangements be the answer to our housing crisis? We'll discuss the benefits of these options, the possibility of enforcing maximum size requirements for single-family homes, and dive deep into the historical shift from multi-generational living to the isolated single-family home model.
Show Notes:
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Discover the future of housing with author Diana Lind as we explore innovative solutions for smarter, simpler, and happier living. Can accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and co-living arrangements be the answer to our housing crisis? We'll discuss the benefits of these options, the possibility of enforcing maximum size requirements for single-family homes, and dive deep into the historical shift from multi-generational living to the isolated single-family home model.
Show Notes:
Cover art by Liz Sanchez-Vegas on Unsplash
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Twitter: https://twitter.com/BookedPlanning
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This episode is brought to you by RDG. Rdg is comprised of architects, landscape architects, engineers, artists and planners with a passion for design and a drive to make a difference. They believe in applying new ways of thinking and innovative approaches to the preparation of plans that address community and regional issues. With offices in Omaha, nebraska, st Louis, missouri, denver, colorado and Des Moines, iowa, they are a network of design and planning professionals dedicated to applying their talents in extraordinary ways. You're listening to the Booked On Planning Podcast, a project of the Nebraska chapter of the American Planning Association. In each episode, we dive into how cities function, by talking with authors on housing, transportation and everything in between. Join us as we get Booked on Planning. Welcome back, bookworms, to another episode of Booked on Planning. In this episode, we talk with author Diana Lind on her book Brave New Home Our Future in Smarter, simpler, happier Housing. The book covers a range of housing options using two types of approaches either building our way out of the housing crisis or, more efficiently, using the housing stock that we have.
Jennifer Hiatt:And Diana makes the point that it will be incredibly difficult to build ourselves out of this problem. At some point we are going to have to embrace a denser living situation and I fully recognize that I'm a part of the problem. I like living alone. I did make sure to buy a small two-bedroom house, since that's all the space I really needed, but eventually probably have to embrace a denser lifestyle.
Stephanie Rouse:And some of the ideas are pretty common at this point, like accessory dwelling units, while others are not quite mainstream yet, such as co-living living with other individuals, and we even discuss the strange love of tiny homes that are accompanied by a continued dislike for traditional manufactured housing, even though it's the same concept as a tiny home is.
Jennifer Hiatt:I actually have to admit I adore tiny homes. I don't have any animosity towards manufactured housing at all, but tiny homes make me very happy. They are cute, they are. My favorite idea that she put forward was using the zoning code to enforce a maximum size requirement on single family homes instead of a minimum size requirement. I would have thought that having to clean a giant house would be a deterrent to big housing, but alas, we may need to put it into regulations instead.
Stephanie Rouse:Yeah, that was a new approach that I hadn't really thought of. I know I've been thinking about how we really need to get rid of our minimum housing size requirements to make it easier, but never really thought about placing a maximum. Yeah, me neither. Dana starts our conversation by talking about the evolution of housing and changing trends like multi-generational living, a way of life that up until about the mid-20th century was pretty common, but we're actually starting to see that returning. And I have to admit, similar to you, Jennifer, while I'm on board with this type of housing and see its benefits, I find it hard to be living with others, especially my parents again, but maybe if I had more space for them in a separate ADU it would be different.
Jennifer Hiatt:So I actually moved back. I was boomerang kid and moved back into my parents' house for a short time after school while I was closing on a new home in my new location and I wouldn't recommend it personally. It wasn't great, but, like you said, maybe if we had an ADU it would probably be okay.
Stephanie Rouse:So let's get into our conversation with author Diana Lind of Brave New Home. Diana, thank you for joining us on Booked on Planning to talk about your latest book Brave New Home Our Future in Smarter, simpler, happier Housing. Can you start off by giving our listeners a brief overview of how housing was originally thought about before shifting to a single family focus?
Diana Lind:Sure. So I think that a lot of people think of the single family home with the white picket fence as kind of always being the American dream and always the way that people live. But when you look at you know the ways that people lived before we had cars. It was a much denser style of housing, much more mixed use. So you know, if you look back at the earliest times, a lot of housing was really mixed use. You would find people would be living above where they worked really mixed use. You would find people would be living above where they worked. People might live in a rental apartment or bedroom above, say, like a tavern, which would also have in the backyard chickens, which would also have, you know, an office downstairs. These were, you know, much more mixed use types of spaces.
Diana Lind:As the US grew and it grew really exponentially in the 1800s it became really important for housing to accommodate newcomers into cities.
Diana Lind:So there were boarding houses which were like houses, where you might have anywhere up to even 30 people living in rooms within a house, having the landlord getting meals there, having a certain amount of social interaction there.
Diana Lind:But actually it's estimated between one third and to one half of people living in cities in the 1800s were either borders themselves or hosting borders, and it was, like you know, regular families much like you might say today with Airbnb might rent out a room in their house.
Diana Lind:It really wasn't until the early 1900s that you really start seeing this push for single family homes and it's coming, you know, from a legitimate place where a lot of cities were really overcrowded, families really crushed together without much dignity. But I think that what ended up happening is we really kind of took things a little bit too far to which to say that, you know, living in a standalone single family home is the only dignified way to live, it's the right way for everyone to live, and really at that point in time there wasn't kind of the same sort of concerns about environmental issues, segregation issues, what have you Really? You know we can talk about this more, but starting in the 1900s, there was this really big shift towards living in single-family homes and it wasn't really the case in those early days of walkable urban America.
Stephanie Rouse:Yeah, as the preservationist of the group I always find it very interesting because I look at the urban core and what used to be there and we've demolished a lot in our community and there were so many brownstones and terrace apartments and then all of the mixed use downtown that had a residential above is largely gone. So I think a lot of people just assume we never had that. But it was there. It just got taken down and never replaced.
Diana Lind:Totally yeah, and I would just add one other thing. I think that we also often tend to think that it was either row houses or single family homes, but there were also really especially in the late 1800s, early 1900s, kind of like this array of housing choices, a lot of housing that was specifically built for workers. So you might have, you know, women professionals who live together, male sailors who live together, sailors who lived together. You had apartment hotels, which were these kind of almost like extended stay places where people lived and had communal dining rooms and were thought of even as a feminist housing type, because they took the domestic labor out of the household. I think a lot of people aren't aware that we just have this era of housing options that I think we're trying to get back to that existed once in the past.
Jennifer Hiatt:You know, stephanie, I think it's kind of interesting that you say that. So I, as listeners know, studied history in my undergrad and I actually one of the areas I focused on was domestic life. As I was reading this book, I actually kind of felt like I got gaslit a little bit by some of my undergrad studies, because it was all about the house and then the household, but never like borders, never how people might co-mingle together. It was really like, from the lens of, this is the very rich person's home they live with their staff. This is how everybody lived. It was very interesting to think about. You start the book laying out the groundwork for how we landed in the situation we are in, with the housing market so intrinsically tied to homeownership through decades of federal campaigning and subsidy, and by the end of the book you advocate for shifting course and placing more emphasis on other types of housing models that don't prop up homeownership as this low interest, fixed rate capital. How hard do you think it will be to achieve and how would we even go about starting?
Diana Lind:We have to think about what alternatives there might be to the 30-year mortgage in terms of having an asset that people could leverage and build wealth over time.
Diana Lind:I would say the first step is really kind of acknowledging that we actually really do need to start thinking about that right, because so many people are really locked out of the home ownership cycle really.
Diana Lind:So I think we're, you know, finally at this point where there's been this recognition that we can't keep on pushing this as our sole way of wealth creation.
Diana Lind:I think that is starting to really there's a shift that's starting to happen where people are kind of looking at models like, let's just say, in Europe, where a lot of people aren't homeowners but instead live in public housing that enable that lower their costs so that they're able to have that kind of economic security that we have always associated with homeownership and they're able to access that through this other, different type of model. So I think, like the first step is really starting to open up our eyes, to think about, you know, what other types of either wealth creation or economic stability tools there might be. I do think that it's such a huge part of our economy that pulling away from home ownership entirely. It's not going to happen like overnight, but I do think that over the course of, let's just say, this next generation, when a lot of people aren't able to buy into their homes, what's our solution for those folks going to be?
Stephanie Rouse:One of those unique housing models that you discuss in the book would be the co-living housing, and I found that really interesting because here in Lincoln there was some conversations about it in one of our small area planning processes and so we wrote it into a planned unit development trying to encourage it and get it tested out, and just have had no success in getting anything up and running. There's just so many barriers beyond just zoning issues, but the financial side of things and the building code side of things what do you find to be the biggest barrier to this type of housing? That would seem to be a great addition to any city's housing options.
Diana Lind:Yeah, so I think you've mentioned a couple of the barriers certainly trying to figure out how different types of building codes could enable it, and I think that some of the most successful examples have been in cities where cities have taken it on as a pilot. So piloting micro apartments or piloting co-living, potentially as like, say, an affordable housing situation, and they have, whether it's sort of almost like spot zoning or through that, one pilot kind of enabled a model work, some of the kinks out through that and then allowed other development that's similar to it. So I think that pilots can be a useful tool, but I think that there can be a useful tool, but I think that there's certainly like a lot of other barriers. Right, if you're a developer, you've seen a certain type of housing sell or rent pretty easily for your entire life, and right now I think a lot of developers sort of see the real estate industry in a kind of recession right now. So like, why would you try out something risky or different? And so I think that just looking at it as like a pure profitable development opportunity is not the way that you're going to get co-living built.
Diana Lind:And I think that's sort of why when I started writing this book, which was in 2018, we were in a, like, a different part of the cycle. It was also before the pandemic, and I think there was a lot more excitement about co-living as potentially a profitable rental alternative. I think now what we need to not be able to find housing in downtown New Orleans, near where all the tourism spots are, and so you might find that there are developers who can't make a project pencil out without some kind of public sector subsidy, and that might also be a way to potentially get it to work. But I definitely think we're in a part of the cycle right now where co-living just like may not work as a purely profitable real estate type.
Jennifer Hiatt:Yeah, and one thing that I have learned about real estate developers is that they're not a risky bunch of people, so thinking about putting up a new concept is a little difficult for them. Another concept that you mentioned it was a zoning concept and kind of love zoning, figuring out how to make it better. So this intrigued me a lot is getting rid of minimum size requirements for apartments and actually implementing maximum size regulations for single family housing, which I just think of the process of implementing that and I'm laughing honestly.
Jennifer Hiatt:But the example you used was not allowing a 4000 square foot single family home and I know minimum size requirements were ostensibly implemented to prevent overcrowding. And again, we know that they were also used to implement and keep segregation in place long after it was outlawed. But can you discuss how that change would work in actuality?
Diana Lind:Sure, yeah, I mean, I think that there's an array of regulations that are put on housing in terms of minimum sizes. I think it would work quite simply in the reverse. You know, you'd simply just say in our city you're not able to build a house that's more than X amount of square feet. New development, grandfather, in old, big old single family homes, but new development, you know, not more than X size. And I think that there's also ways in which it could kind of complement zoning that would say enable, you know, much smaller lot sizes, right, so like it becomes much more difficult to build an oversized house on a 10th of an acre site or something like that.
Diana Lind:I think that there's a relationship, certainly like there's a correlation between the oversized house and the very big lot. And as you get smaller lot sizes, you'll probably just sort of naturally end up with kind of smaller houses as a result. But you get smaller lot sizes, you'll probably just sort of naturally end up with kind of smaller houses as a result. But you know, there's, I think there's just a lot of other opportunities for zoning to enable, certainly like more than one house on a parcel and and to potentially also say for developers they can't figure out how to make the project work without a certain amount of square footage, because they're charging X per square foot. Could there be ways in which you sort of help to incentivize that, not just through like one large single family home, but through a house with an accessory dwelling unit or something like that, something that is potentially more valuable to sell but also opens up the chance that you might have some like more economic diversity as a result with two different housing sizes?
Stephanie Rouse:And speaking of smaller homes, tiny homes are essentially manufactured housing, but they get all the attention and praise from the media and have shows on HGTV. And what is it about tiny homes that makes them more acceptable than the more traditional manufactured home?
Diana Lind:And I think it may have something to do with, you know, like your traditional manufactured home may not have the aesthetic sensibility that you would find in a lot of the new tiny homes that are out there. I remember when I was reporting the book, I went to a tiny home conference and kind of showcase and a lot of the homes that were being built were either intended to look like either a miniature farmhouse modern house or like a miniature mid-century modern house or something like that, like they're much more aesthetically oriented so that if you saw them from the street you would just automatically associate it a bit more with traditional development, whereas there is definitely like an aesthetic of the manufactured home which is just not as highly defined so that I would say it's just kind of like it's a lot of just the way that tiny homes have been presented, it's in the language being used around it. You know you can look at it like either, in a way feeling sort of cynically, like well, it is just, you know, manufactured home, in what is it? Like a wolf in sheep's clothing or something like that. You know it's sort of just being disguised as this other thing or you could also look at it as like, well, isn't that a clever way for us to kind of enable this type of housing without raising people's hackles?
Diana Lind:If you were to say this is a trailer park, people might be, you know, really concerned about that going into their neighborhood. But if you say it's a tiny home village, what do people say about it? You know, and I think that I just, you know, sort of, would advocate for keeping the language, keeping the aesthetics out there, knowing that it's enabling some people to live more affordably in places and to enable smaller housing type in a lot of areas which otherwise, otherwise might not if it was just, you know, strictly seen as manufactured housing.
Jennifer Hiatt:I know tiny homes have been a thing for a little longer than Instagram, but I feel like social media has really advanced the cause of tiny living in general, right, like you see all of these very aesthetically pleasing tiny homes. But even van life or camper life has become this thing where you see all these flippers on Instagram buy a 1950s camper and flip it and make it look like a living room that you would love to be in or whatever. So I think that they've really helped in the rebranding of manufactured housing. I'm here for that. Speaking of manufactured housing, a concept that I cannot believe disappeared is you mentioned the Sears housing building kit and liken them to the first time of manufactured homes and for listeners who don't know what we're talking about, you used to be able to order your home out of the Sears catalog. Like you could just call them up and order model, whatever, and everything would be delivered to your house and sat down on your lot and you could build your house. Why do we move away from this?
Diana Lind:Yeah, so I don't have a good answer about why we moved away from this, but you're thinking, you're making me think, this would make for some really good investigative work on my own. I don't. I don't really know other than what I can say in terms of how, what the challenges are at this point in terms of, like, prefab housing and whatnot. I mean, I think one part of it may have had to do with some of those like zoning issues and the kinds of houses that those Sears houses were right Like. A lot of them were much smaller houses than we would be building today. So if you wanted to build a standalone single family home, some of those Sears houses might be under 1000 square feet, which would just be like illegal in some neighborhoods, you know. So I don't know that they would be at the traditional size that like the market's at right now, like I don't know that those Sears homes ever were, say, 2500 square feet, and I think that there's definitely been, for as long as I've been alive, like a really strong effort to try to encourage more prefab housing. But I've also seen that that has never been as successful as people want it to be, you know, and I think that that may just have something to do with, like, changing the standards around the type of housing that people are looking for. So those Sears houses were not expensive to build. They were pretty good quality. I don't know that we're.
Diana Lind:We have that sort of same like cost to quality ratio these days and a lot of stuff that's getting built out there, but then a lot of the stuff that let's just say, like the newer prefab high quality stuff, it ends up being like not that much cheaper than building something from scratch. Contractors are kind of befuddled about how to build it. You have to still deal with, you know, various other different things like owning the land. Land is really expensive. Why would you build a prefab thing instead of a brand new home if you have gone through the trouble and expense of a piece of land?
Diana Lind:So I've heard a lot of this sort of like pushback against it. That being said, I will say that, like accessory dwelling units, which are those smaller houses, there are a ton of companies that are building prefab accessory dwelling units. You can go online and order one of them and it will get shipped to your house. So, like it does still exist. They're smaller. I think they're more expensive than they were and I think that if you were looking to live in a 900 square foot or 600 square foot house, you could still totally do that today. It's just not that same like super iconic thing, like the Sears era, and it's not as mainstream.
Stephanie Rouse:Which just seems crazy in a world of IKEA furniture where we assemble everything. Yeah, I was gonna say I don't know that I would want to try and assemble my home the way I'm happy.
Diana Lind:Assemble everything Right. Task that with the house.
Jennifer Hiatt:Yeah, I was going to say I don't know that I would want to try and assemble my home the way. I'm happy to try and assemble a coffee table, but probably can find a contractor.
Stephanie Rouse:Yeah, in the book you kind of identify two types of housing solutions. One is the build our way out of it like ADUs, and then the more efficiently using what we have, like multi-generational homes or renting out empty spare bedrooms. Which approach do you think has the most potential to lessen the housing crisis that we're seeing?
Diana Lind:So I haven't seen a ton of research that has said that accessory dwelling units have been successful in actually, let's just say, creating enough supply that housing costs are going down. But they have been successful in creating housing in areas where there's sort of almost like a minimum cost to enter and they're enabling people who are unable to buy that standalone home to enter that market and live in that neighborhood. So that's like one way of solving the housing crisis. I think that if we're looking at another side of things, from encouraging people to kind of rent out their spare bedrooms as another way, you know, just given the fact that there are just millions of spare bedrooms and people are, you know, and we also have this total mismatch between people who need housing and all this excess housing that no one is using I think that there's definitely a solution there, but we haven't really figured out the best way to figure it out. Like there are organizations I profile one in the book called Nestorly, which tries to connect seniors with particularly college students. In these tend to be more expensive college town areas where the seniors can offer lower cost housing, the college students can sometimes offer something in barter to kind of exchange for the cost of housing and then hopefully kind of build a relationship as a result of becoming roommates. How much can you scale that?
Diana Lind:I think that they have scaled it a bit but have had maybe some trouble scaling it beyond that and I think it ultimately comes down to certainly the human factor. I think that people generally are not interested in having strangers in their homes. They're not excited just adding a roommate. And even some of these programs, whether it's necessarily or even if it's Airbnb, people can be kind of shy about doing it. So I think that it's never really quite gotten to scale.
Diana Lind:So the one thing I would say is just accessory dwelling units have seemed to be, in terms of, like the alternative housing types, like the most successful, both in terms of just geographically it's become a zoning issue around the country Accessory dwelling units are getting built, they're getting permitted, they're becoming much more of the fabric of our housing than they were, say, five years ago and certainly 10 years ago. And I feel like there's a lot of momentum there and I just think the one question is whether, like, what exact housing problem are they going to solve? You know, are they really going to make housing more affordable? Not sure, but I think they will enable a set of people who otherwise couldn't access a single-family home neighborhood, enable them to live there, and I think that's really important, especially as we think about school teachers or hospital workers or people particularly working in the public sector who might not be able to even live in the neighborhoods that they work. Adus could be.
Stephanie Rouse:This isn't an ADU, but what I've seen a lot in Lincoln and I think this is happening elsewhere too is we have all these old churches that were nestled within the neighborhood back when it was walk to church instead of drive everywhere and you didn't need a massive parking lot, accommodate a bunch of parking, and so we're seeing a lot of reuse in these single family neighborhoods where you get four or five different apartment units within the church, and it opens up access to a type of housing unit that wasn't available before in these neighborhoods.
Diana Lind:No, that's really cool and I've definitely been reading a lot about Yigbe, yes and God's Backyard that there's this movement of churches and other religious buildings to turn the whether it's their actual buildings or their parking lots or the land they own and to use that as a way to try to address housing and neighborhoods. I think that's really cool.
Jennifer Hiatt:Lincoln. Actually. Just they have a skilled nursing home Well, actually more of like a skilled nursing hospital that built three different types of living unit, so it's very much like the people who need the most care in the hospital area. But then they built a multi generational housing development that was aimed at pairing their aging but still independent patients with nursing students, with the thought that each generational group could kind of support each other and the patients would have the medical assistance that they would need as well. I mean, it's basically just an apartment building with different intentions for residents. But even this straightforward development just really struggled to come to bear. People in the neighborhood were against it. It was just really frustrating to watch what could be a really cool, needed housing type face such backlash.
Diana Lind:Yeah, that sounds like a really awesome project actually, and I feel like the kind of thing that we just need so much more of. I mean that makes perfect sense, especially as we think about senior living and just how, for so many people, they don't want to move into a 55 plus community, they don't want to live in assisted living, they want their independence, they still want to have their own place, but they also do need access to care, and then a lot of those caregivers are unable to afford housing, so, like that would seem to me to make a ton of sense as like a housing type, and so it's really frustrating to hear that people were against that, because I feel like how could you be against, particularly like these two types of people seniors who, like, really need housing, and caregivers, who really need housing Like these are two types of people that we really should be supporting.
Jennifer Hiatt:A lot of the backlash was actually aimed at student housing, and Lincoln gets that a lot, so it's just the students have to live somewhere.
Diana Lind:Right, yeah, so they were like nursing students, and so there was even backlash against them. Even if they were, that's that's you know, that's that's really too bad.
Jennifer Hiatt:Yeah, it was interesting.
Stephanie Rouse:I think part of the issue too and it comes with almost every housing project is parking. If you want more density or smaller units or multi-generational, everyone gets upset because they don't feel like there's ever going to be enough parking and then it's just going to clutter the streets and it kills a lot of projects.
Diana Lind:I feel like just hearing about your different experiences there. Like for each community, there's different types of parking is an issue in every city around the country for sure, but you would sort of hope that it wouldn't be like a deal, a deal breaker for one of these kinds of projects. You know, and I do have to hope that especially I feel like we're on a little bit of a wave where between things like autonomous vehicles and kind of new car rental programs, there's Turo or Kite. Some of these kinds of different car rental programs might make it easier for people to not own a car or even to just have one car per household. But yeah, it's a shame when that's a deal breaker for a project like this.
Stephanie Rouse:I think one of the co-living examples you gave they had a couple shared cars that residents could then rent out and use as they needed, which I think is a really good model for apartment complexes. You can reduce the amount of parking that you have to build if you have a few spaces for the shared cars, because not everyone needs a car all the time.
Diana Lind:Right? Yeah, totally. I do really think that you know, maybe in 10 years from now we'll have better car rental programs, car share programs. That will make it easier and it may not work for every type of household. But I think one of the things I tried to get across in the book is just that we're a country that is so diverse, has so many different types of households, so many different demographics and nearly, say, 350 million people. Like you don't need to. Even if you provide something for 1% of that population, like something that works for that small demographic, that's still a huge target audience for it. And so I think that trying to figure out how do you get people to recognize that, even if something doesn't work for everyone all the time, like some of these different housing solutions or transportation solutions could work for people for a period of their lives, whether it's like they're a student or when they're a senior or something like that.
Stephanie Rouse:You identify all these different layers of housing issues, from the way the media talks about new housing trends to the way the government is financially making homeownership the default, and this is all following many decades of policy at both the local and the federal level, which seems very daunting. Where do we start with so many areas where we need to make change and who should be starting this work?
Diana Lind:I do feel a lot more optimistic about just where we're headed as a country in terms of the housing conversation than I felt five years ago when I was writing this book.
Diana Lind:I feel like there has been a lot of progress and, in a way, beautifully, not like a thing that is just for blue states or red states, or it's been a really like bipartisan kind of coalition around.
Diana Lind:You know, yes, in my backyard housing building, more housing and I think that you know, unfortunately, it has been supported by the fact that housing has just gotten so crazy expensive and, just like the number of people who feel they need to be a part of this conversation has grown bigger, and so it's not just affecting people in, like, the expensive cities, it's affecting everybody right now.
Diana Lind:So I think that I feel pretty optimistic, that change is possible in a way which I didn't feel at the biggest levels, unless it also happens at the local level, and so I would definitely say that some of the most important things that you can do would be to get involved locally, to find your sort of local YIMBY chapter, to find like-minded people, to be the ones to show up at those housing meetings you know, those planning discussions and to make your voice heard about the importance of building housing and to try to also ensure that people are a bit more informed about some of the issues and really trying to like hone a bit of your message, whether it is kind of around creating more housing because you think that that would make it more affordable, or creating more housing because it's not letting people who grew up in this neighborhood continue to stay in the neighborhood that they want to live in, trying to figure out like what are the messages that could resonate.
Stephanie Rouse:So I think that at the local level.
Diana Lind:Trying to get involved is certainly really important. Beyond that, I've also seen how there have been some promising statewide changes. A lot of the reform on housing is happening at the state level and it's being kind of formed between different types of coalitions, whether it's groups like AARP, who are looking at it from the perspective of we need more housing that people can age in place and that is more conducive for seniors, to people who are saying that the expensiveness of the city is causing our suburban or rural areas to become more expensive too, and trying to find a way to partner on that. So I think that trying to find your way into what's your connection point to some of the statewide coalitions and I feel like there's just so many different access points you could get involved in it again through a thing like ARP, or you get involved in it because you're part of a transit organization that is trying to think about how to build the kind of housing density that will support transportation. So figure out what your place is there.
Diana Lind:And I'd say, lastly, at the national level, is change happening as fast as we needed to? Definitely not, but I do think that there is increasingly a sort of recognition that, like the federal government, is not going to fund sprawl anymore, it's going to fund more equitable development, and a lot of that has to do with places that are encouraging housing beyond single family. They have specific funding formulas that are around supporting neighborhoods that are not just single family homes. So I feel like, from all these different pressure points, I feel pretty optimistic that things are going to change.
Jennifer Hiatt:I think ending on an optimistic note is always the best. So our final question always what books would you recommend to our readers?
Diana Lind:Sure, yeah. So thinking a little bit just about housing, I guess the two ones that I would mention would be Jenny Schutz. She is a researcher at Brookings and her book that she has is called Fixer Upper, and that is about a lot of these same kinds of issues around, like what's wrong with our housing situation and what can we do to fix it. And then another book that I would recommend is by Nolan Gray, called Arbitrary Lines, and that also, I think, comes into a lot of these different types of zoning issues that people might find interesting. Certainly, if you want to like dive deeper into the racial segregation aspect of single family housing, I would recommend Color of Law by Richard Rothstein. And then, since we talked a little bit about parking, I would recommend Paved Paradise by Henry Glebar. That goes into a lot about how parking issues pervade everything in this country. So those are a couple of different ones there that I enjoyed.
Stephanie Rouse:And just a reminder to our listeners, we have actually spoken with Nolan Gray and Richard Rothstein, so if you guys are interested in those books, you can check out those episodes, and I will say that we've gotten Paved Paradise as a recommended reading several times, so I feel like we need to maybe cover that one on an episode.
Jennifer Hiatt:Yeah, I definitely already own it. Like we need to maybe cover that one on an episode.
Stephanie Rouse:Yeah, I definitely already own it. Well, diana, thank you so much for joining us on the show today and talking about your book.
Diana Lind:Brave New Home. Yes, thank you so much for having me this was really fun.
Jennifer Hiatt:I enjoyed talking with you both. We hope you enjoyed this conversation with author Diana Lind on her book Brave New Home Our Future in Smarter, simpler, happier Housing. You can get your own copy through the publisher, bold Type Books or click the link in the show notes to take you directly to the Amazon page. Remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and please rate, review and share the show. Thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next time on Book Sound Planning. Thank you,