Bittersweet Lane

In the latest episode of the Booked On Planning podcast, hosts Stephanie Rouse and Jennifer Hiatt sat down with author and developer Jamie Madden to discuss his new book, Bittersweet Lane: Creating Home(s) in the American Affordable Housing Crisis. Part memoir and part educational guide, the book offers a rare look at the housing crisis from someone who grew up in affordable housing and now spends his career building it.

Madden’s unique background allows him to bridge the gap between resident needs and developer realities. He emphasizes that successful housing requires understanding the “chain of consequences” behind every decision—from laundry room placement to the complex certification processes residents must navigate. A central theme of the interview is the ideological struggle over the purpose of affordable housing. Madden points out that while the goal should be simple—"everyone should have a place to live"—U.S. policy has historically wavered between viewing housing as a reward (like parks) or a punitive measure (like prisons). 

Show Notes:

• Further Reading: 
  • Gaffs: Why No One Can Get a House, and What We Can Do About It by Rory Hearne
  • Poor: Grit, courage, and the life-changing value of self-belief by Katriona O’Sullivan
  • Topographia Hibernica: Acclaimed stories from the bestselling Irish author, podcaster, satirist and musician by Blindboy Boatclub
• A past episode referenced by Jamie is Homeless is a Housing Issue, a book he references in Bittersweet Lane.
• Check out the APA National Planning Conference page and register to attend today at https://planning.org/conference/?utm_campaign=NPC26&utm_source=external&utm_medium=podcast&utm_content=bookedonplanning 
• To help support the show, pick up a copy of the book through our Bookshop page at https://bookshop.org/shop/bookedonplanning or get a copy through your local bookstore!
• To view the show transcripts, click on the episode at https://bookedonplanning.buzzsprout.com/

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Transcript

Stephanie: As a planner you know how important it is to build community and keep your skills sharp. Pick up a fresh idea from a colleague. Find your next employer. Get inspired by your pick of over 200 education sessions. Experience all this and more at APAs 2026 National Planning Conference this April. Come gather with the heart of the planning profession in Detroit, a city that knows what it means to innovate. Register today at planning.org/conference. You never know who you'll meet. 

 [00:01:00] Welcome back, bookworms. I'm Stephanie Rouse, and we're the hosts of the Book Done Planning podcast. In today's episode, we talked with author. Jamie Madden on his book, bittersweet Lane, creating Homes in the Affordable Housing Crisis. This was a book was sent us and I'm glad because I found it to be a really incredibly interesting read. I always love to expand my knowledge in the world of affordable housing, since that's what I do day to day. But this one I thought was super interesting. but it was a memoir kind of combined with affordable housing. coming from Jamie's experience growing up in an affordable housing project.

Jennifer: Yeah. And listeners, if you're like me and the first time you picked up, Had to review a capital stack or anything like that was a few years into your career. This is also an excellent book as Jamie really does explain the ins and outs of, yes, development of affordable [00:02:00] housing, but also the principles that he utilizes really just expand on development in general.

So if you're wanting to learn about the development process, it's an equally good read.

Stephanie: And his, he's got a whole appendix of additional resources and more targeted information that is helpful to that point.

Jennifer: My favorite thing from his appendix is his poem on how to create a proforma. So when you pick up the book, you should definitely check that out.

Stephanie: Yeah, and he's got, uh, fun little acronyms for different aspects of the development process. one is a puppy, and I'm blanking on exactly what

Jennifer: Exactly what that,

Stephanie: but

Jennifer: so pick up the book and find out readers. Well, it was a wonderful conversation, so let's get into it with our author Jamie Madden, on his book, bittersweet Lane, creating Homes in the American Affordable Housing Crisis. 

Stephanie: Jamie, thank you for joining us on, booked On Planning to talk about your book, bittersweet Lane, creating Homes in the American Affordable Housing Crisis. I really enjoyed your book as it was kinda part [00:03:00] memoir, part education on affordable housing developments. My whole world now is affordable housing here at the city of Lincoln, so it was really interesting read.

And do you have such a unique perspective having grown up in an affordable housing project and now you're a developer working on getting them built. How has your background really helped shape the projects that you work on?

Jamie Madden: probably in every way, like all of us. But let me start with, it's such a pleasure to be here. I've been wicked excited for the conversation. It's been a little bit of time in coming and many of the books that I cite and enjoy are past episodes of yours, so I hope any listeners will go back to some of those.

 how does my perspective shape me? I think it's the multiple perspectives more than anything that when I'm doing my work. Somewhat natural for me to think about it from a resident perspective as well as my developer perspective, or public policy and planning perspective. And I've got a good few friends in the building trades who will give me shit, to make sure their perspectives are heard as well, that.

Multiple perspectives, I think gives me a good understanding of the chain of consequences [00:04:00] that little decisions in design or the development program or policies have on the residents lives, but also the work of the people actually building it, the people actually managing and maintaining the building.

 Small details like laundry and garbage disposal, ephemeral, but life-changing things like certification and application processes. know, housing is incredibly impactful and those multiple perspectives, I think give us the best possible way to help folks and we can get all of it in there.

Jennifer: Jamie. First of all, I wanna apologize. I've been down with some awful virus, so my voice is terrible. but you like Stephanie and I have a master's in planning. Your master's is from MIT, one of your professors taught you that planning is not the driving force. It is the resulting one. And I thought that was such an. Interesting perspective to think about planning. So can you, talk about what your professor meant there and what in your experience you think of as city planning?

Jamie Madden: Yeah. so that comes from the late great professor Tony [00:05:00] Lee, who was really impactful mentor of mine. and we lost during, the COVID Pandemic in 2021. When I was in grad school, I helped him on research and teaching a seminar and later trying to build a website on this way of understanding cities.

He called people place and planning and being in MIT and both of us being from Boston and Boston being generally a good case study for this sort of thing. the class was immigration in Boston's ethnic neighborhoods. And what he means by planning is not the driving force, it's the reactionary one is that as much as when we're sitting down in front of a computer or a community with a big piece of butcher paper or something, we think it's blank.

That's a fiction, right? We're always dealing in real places. In a longer flow and chain of history. And so Tani would try to make sure that we understood when we're working in a place that it's important to think about who lives there and why. Why did they leave where they were before? What is it about the place they're in now that brought them there?

Who lived there before them? Why did they leave or [00:06:00] what happened? And understanding those flows of people and the why, then birth, the interventions that we see in housing or transportation or parks. I think there's a lot of, Professional self-respect in trying to view these things as neutral actors and, and trying to speak as if we're neutral.

but I think the honesty of history is that usually planning interventions are done in reaction to some change and are about whoever has the power to make those interventions, their reaction to the change. And that might include their prejudices about whoever those people are.

Stephanie: So another quote from the book from you that I thought was really interesting is that you said, we can't agree on who, what, or where, because. Can't agree on why in reference to building affordable housing, what is the why that we need to convince everyone of.

Jamie Madden: Yeah. it's one of these things that feels very obvious to me. Everyone sleeps somewhere. Everyone should have a home. turns out we've been studying this question over and over for 400 years in different versions, and when I discussed that in the book, I'm, [00:07:00] reacting in part to MIT Professor Larry Vale's work on public housing, which for anyone interested in the history and the full sweep of public housing in America, his series is indispensable.

and in Puritan to the projects, which is about the early history of public housing, he discusses how. Ideologically public housing and affordable housing falls in between two different things that the US knows how to do. We know how to do things to punish people, prisons, poor houses, slave quarters, tenements.

 We know how to do things to reward people, tax credits, parks, nice school, et cetera. And from very, very early days when. Congress would never have even passed the initial public housing bills during Roosevelt were it not paired with slum clearance to tear people's neighborhoods down. From those very beginnings, we've never been clear on is this a punitive institution or is this an institution that is infrastructure or meant for helping people?

And I feel like that mentality has never fallen away from it. can see their thinking pervade, not just the public, but in [00:08:00] our profession, our very large and expensive focus on compliance and eligibility. Endless public discussions about punitive approaches to homelessness. despite all reason and data I'm hoping my book can help people think more deeply about these whys and why we should do it.

 But it really shouldn't take the 120,000 words. It really should be as simple as. Everyone should have a place to live.

Jennifer: Yeah, but it seems like the most simple observations are the hardest ones to solve in planning. should have a place to sleep. Everyone should have clean water and. Clean air and access to food. But those are like our, our four biggest questions that we fight in this profession.

Jamie Madden: Yeah, and I think those are apt analogies, particularly water and food, because these are human necessities. I think most of the conversations we end up having about housing are more about investment value. Or larger management of population flows or neighborhoods or something. But at core, housing is a human necessity, [00:09:00] and I believe we should be treating it as such.

Jennifer: and even though we do know how to provide homes and in the past our government has done just that, as a potential infrastructure project, turns out we're actually really shitty landlords. In your words, so have we always been shitty landlords? And how did we let it get to the point where we are letting some of our, The housing stock that we've built to try and solve this problem molder into dust.

Jamie Madden: Yeah, I think there was really only a short period in which the United States attempted to be a good landlord. starting with some of the earliest phrase in public housing that were really about, like shipyard workforces and military veterans and the. 19 teens and 1920s with World War I and then expanding into public housing in the 1930s with Roosevelt and the New Deal.

 we tried for a little while. By the 1960s we had completely given up on that. So thirties through fifties. We actually build housing. We fund it in the 1960s. We change eligibility and [00:10:00] funding requirements such that. We create structural deficits for public housing authorities all over the country and in the 60 some years since we have done nothing but cut and cut and cut and ask people to do more and more with less, which is not how a good landlord would approach managing their properties, I think.

Stephanie: What's interesting, and I can't remember. The exact figure in the book, but you give a figure, if we just put this amount of funding into building housing and rehabbing our housing stock, then we could fix this solution. And the number is less than several federal agency budgets. Like it's, it's a solvable solution.

We just aren't putting the priority there.

Jamie Madden: That's exactly right. The numbers are not huge. in the book, the way I estimated it was I took the total number of people who are extremely cost burdened or currently experiencing homelessness to cast a wide net. And then I assumed a pretty conservative, I wanna say maybe $400,000 per home in construction costs.

In reality, we could do better [00:11:00] and came out with, I think it was like $240 billion in capital to catch up and then. About 240, $250 billion annually in rental and mortgage assistance To solve this problem forever, to put that in, uh, context, that is one Jeff Bezos per year. We have a lot of those guys. This is only one of them per year that we'd really need.

the ice budget is $30 billion a year. That much alone could end child homelessness. If we wanted to say prioritize children and. This is all fantasy while talking about the United States Federal government in 2026. But I've been surprised even, thinking about it at different levels. And so, for instance, in Seattle, we spend $30 million a year on homelessness sweeps the cost of actually housing our, I believe it's 17,000 off top of my head.

People currently experiencing homelessness comes out to about 2020 5% of our police budget. These are priorities and these are choices, and even at the least logical, most risky level of government to try [00:12:00] to do, say a universal basic income or voucher program. Turns out our city could afford it compared to what it's spending on other priorities.

Stephanie: Yeah, we're trying to make the case here that. Our justice system is spending significant amounts of money because we're criminalizing homelessness. And if we were to kind of reallocate some of our funding and put it more into building permanent supportive housing or a low barrier shelter, just places for people to actually receive , housing services to help them build to a more stable situation is worth reconsidering our budget priorities.

Jamie Madden: Absolutely. And I think if we're honest about. Housing for poor people in this country. We have to include the prison system. As a part of that, we have more people that we are paying a tremendous amount of tax money on in prisons, in immigration detention, in other kind of. Carceral systems that we're paying for than we do in any single housing program.

 The federal prison system alone is bigger than Section eight. It's bigger than public housing. It's bigger than tax credit program. so I don't [00:13:00] talk in great detail about the prison system. In my book, go to Michelle Alexander and New Jim Crow for a primer if you haven't yet, but. If I'm being honest about the system as a whole, I have to deal with the fact that prisons are a larger provider of housing than most of our other affordable housing programs.

Stephanie: Which is just insane.

 So physical construction of market rate projects is essentially the similar process for affordable housing projects, but the development side and how you have to finance it is very different. Can you describe what an affordable project has to deal with that a market rate project wouldn't, and how that impacts how these projects get built?

Jamie Madden: Sure. Yeah. So any project, the three things we need to build are a place to build permissions, to build there, and the resources to direct labor and materials. the cost of doing all that we refer to as total development, cost, and housing and planning. In the private market, if that total development cost isn't exceeded by an acceptable amount above with the sales and rents that, and revenue that it can justify.

If you can't get a [00:14:00] nice return on investment, you just don't do the project. That's where we start in affordable housing. We start from the, this makes no economic sense the entire point, of course, is to keep sales or rents low enough, that it's not going to pay for itself. So we have a, a huge deficit on the source side.

On the use side, on the costs, we face all those same development costs plus a lot of extra legal, accounting and financial fees. We have a very, very complex financial system that has developed over the course of a century of really clever, well-meaning people trying to squeeze evermore pennies out of a really hostile system.

And at this point, the way it works is you might have a mortgage loan as conventional real estate would. You will have an equity investor, but rather than. Benefiting from sales or cost flow. Our equity investors benefit from the low income housing, tax credit, and other credit programs, and those two large capital sources together typically pay for about 60%, two thirds of a development with that last 40% or so coming from state, local, county, federal, [00:15:00] occasionally.

Private philanthropic funding sources. It's not unusual in affordable housing to have a dozen lawyers around the closing table because we've got 14 different financial participants. And you can imagine the exponential amount of time and complexity and expense as compared to development that doesn't need to think about those things.

And that's just the financing side on the design and construction side. We face a lot of additional requirements, many of them good, right? We want to pay labor better. We want to hold ourselves to a higher level of sustainability. Most of us intend to be developer owner managers, and we're gonna house our residents for a long period of time.

We're not gonna sell the building, and that means we have to shell out for those really hardy, durable materials during construction that, a condo developer in the private market might be aimings. For something different in their design. And of course the entitlement process as well. Getting those permissions can be much more controversial, and much more difficult when you're trying to build homes for poor people.

Although I'd say in, in some jurisdictions, that is changing in some good ways. So it's a really complex, [00:16:00] difficult way of doing things, and we managed to do it sometimes.

Stephanie: I've been encouraged

the

Jennifer: or a,

Stephanie: response that people.

Jennifer: bonds that people have to

Stephanie: projects in

Jennifer: general and

Stephanie: housing

Jennifer: projects

Stephanie: be NIMBYs, were

Jennifer: were

Stephanie: dominant voice,

Jennifer: boys, but now we have this

Stephanie: of BMBs that's helping to balance that

Jennifer: out.

Stephanie: say, yes, we need more neighbors, we need more housing for everyone. 

Jamie Madden: Yeah, I, toured the Northeast for a month when the book came out in November, December. And in Somerville, Massachusetts, there's a current city council member who is my conversation partner, Ben Ewen Campen, and he really wanted me to hammer home for the Somerville audience when I lived there. 15 years ago how anti housing the city government was and many advocates were.

And Ben was one of the first people to run for their city council on a pro housing, pro affordable housing platform. and I think the hipster and him wants recognition for that may be because now everyone in Somerville is saying, we want more housing, we want more bike infrastructure. so it's an encouraging trend.

Jennifer: It's, and [00:17:00] I am also an attorney and have sat on the private side of. Affordable housing development before I worked for the city, and I would regularly think, I don't know if it's everywhere, but in Nebraska, a lot of our affordable housing providers don't have in-house counsel. They pay outside legal counsel, but a lot of our developers, private developers, just on staff. And the, cost difference has to be huge, but. affordable housing developers could write the attorney's fees in as part of being able to get grant money and such, but they can't, justify a salary. And those are all, like, those kinds of nuances are always so ridiculous to me.

I'm like, if you put me on salary, I cost you a lot less in the long run. you can charge me out different projects if I'm your, outside counsel. And that has got to be adding so much money to every project. And I don't know if it's the same in the design world too with architects, but there's stupid games that we all have to play to fit into the box requirements that federal, state, or [00:18:00] local money has. It's very frustrating.

Jamie Madden: That's exactly right. And I would add, you know, for a podcast that talks about innovations and planning all the time, and we're asking what's the cool thing you've seen or what have you learned, it's incredibly hard to innovate if you can't iterate. And it's hard even to follow up on other people's innovations if you don't have the capacity to have that kind of thinking in-house.

I worked at the Community Builders, which is a large nonprofit, affordable housing developer in the northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Midwest. We had brilliant lawyers on staff and the luxury I had as a development project manager to walk down the hall and think through complex. Financial and legal structuring issues with those lawyers allowed me to deliver more affordable housing for people.

faster and smaller nonprofit developers, which is maybe the largest section of the affordable housing ecosystem, don't have that luxury. You have to get to a economy of scale before you can afford that. And like you said, it's not just legal that applies across any number of disciplines.

so innovating in the first place, but then really implementing the things we're learning [00:19:00] is that much harder in our field than, you know, in tech fields or manufacturing fields where you can iterate thousands, tens of thousands of times.

Jennifer: And as we've already kind of talked about a few times, the US subsidizes housing in many different ways, both market and affordable. but I don't know if our readers would ever realize that the. Largest way that we subsidize housing is actually through the whole mortgage interest deduction, which of course exclusively benefits homeowners,

Jamie Madden: Mm-hmm.

Jennifer: So why, your opinion, is this form of subsidy acceptable then you have to beg for like any other form of subsidy in housing?

Jamie Madden: It sounds simplistic. But I can't come to any conclusion other than it's just about who benefits. And by definition, where homes that generate enough interest, mortgage interest, that you have a deduction to make. Those are wealth. You have to have quite a bit of property wealth to benefit. So by definition, this is a program that only benefits the wealthy.

It also is very disproportionately suburban and disproportionately white. And I think that's why, The [00:20:00] largest affordable housing funding program since 1986 has been the low income housing tax credit program. There's a lot to be said for and against it. It's complicated, it's inefficient, but the quality and sustainability that's provided has far exceeded anything that's section eight or public housing we're able to accomplish.

 And I'm left wondering if it's in part the same answer. Well, it's who benefits from the low income housing tax credit? Well, the large corporate investors and banks that make 20% returns on these credits are certainly amongst the beneficiaries. And maybe that's what has helped protect the low income housing tax credit program when Congress, and their analogs and state and local governments have spent my entire lifetime cutting Section eight and cutting public housing.

Stephanie: Yeah, it really comes down to who has a voice and who has the connections to the policy makers that are making these decisions. And there just aren't enough large advocacy organizations that can really make that case and advocate for preserving federal funding or increasing federal funding towards affordable housing. I think in this [00:21:00] last legislative cycle, there was a lot of work done by individuals at local, state, levels too. Preserve what little funding we had with the Continuum of Care grants and that whole process under fire, and so like a ton of effort and coordination and outreach went out just to save what we had versus even just trying to get anything else.

Jamie Madden: That's right. And I think that's been the story of the last four decades or so. You talked about. How hard we have to fight just to protect funding, let alone try to expand it. And in the book, I reserve a fair amount of cism for Democratic party leaders, and that's a complete 180 from what we normally have to do in the affordable housing world, which is praise our politicians for every penny we get, lest we never get another penny.

So I talk about the Biden administration. As their opening budget proposal proposing to leave by their own under count Minneapolis sized population of people homelessness in this country. And that was the opening bit. What they got in the budget was a 10th of that.

so there's really been a bipartisan [00:22:00] consensus on not funding housing for a very, very long time. And while I understand the professional need. To use positive reinforcement with politicians and to advocate for what we need and try to end cuts and ask for what we think we can get with this book. I'm trying to make a strong demand for what we need.

It's not. Simply about political possibility or plausibility in politics from where we're sitting today or from 10 years ago. I think we need to be really honest about the absolute minimum that is needed, which is to fully fund these programs and to do away with exclusionary zoning. And, I don't feel like keeping a lot of praise on people who, you know, wanna give us half of that and then ask for praise.

Stephanie: to that point, our last episode was, all about the progressive movement and how. has high ideals, wants to solve all these issues, but is getting absolutely nothing done because no one can agree on how to do it. And it's the swing back and forth between whether Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian impulses.

But the Democrats, we think they're gonna get these things done. They're supportive of this, but [00:23:00] in reality they're

Jamie Madden: They never have been.

Stephanie: Yeah. So it's, it's very interesting.

 another challenge in doing affordable housing projects is balancing as planners our desire for community feedback and input but also being able to get these projects off the ground and running. How do you balance diverse community input while also trying to avoid unraveling projects altogether?

Jamie Madden: To me, the keys are really giving people a meaningful opportunity to make meaningful changes to a proposal. So that's showing up to community before you have really nice renderings, right? Sketchy conceptual design in pencil or closest to it if possible, right? Like show people that you are. Willing to make meaningful changes based on their feedback and also to be able to make those changes.

We have to ask at the right time and the formal processes that a jurisdiction might require, may or may not line up with that. The informal processes are often just as if not more important. There are many informal vetoes in the process. If the wrong community group or the wrong trades union or the wrong [00:24:00] elected official doesn't like your project, you can lose it.

So there's part of the entitlement process that is just survivor, right? You can't, you gotta make sure you don't anger any of these people and you have to satisfy them enough to get through. But then. There's that full bit of it, of how do we actually get better design And the example I like to use was, the last project that I managed in Boston before I moved to Seattle was in the neighborhood my grandmother grew up in, in Forest Hills across from an MBTA terminal.

It's a neighborhood I had lived in. I had a lot of close friends in, at the community meetings. I still got the treatment as if I was some alien coming in to change the neighborhood of people who'd only lived there for 10 or 15 years. But I also organized really hard to get a number of voices in and around the neighborhood.

 I think you have mentioned on this podcast before, one of the contradictions in this whole process is you don't build homes for people who are already living in homes in a place. So we don't involve in the community process, the residents, potential residents, potential small business owners on the ground floors, any of the people that might actually use the building.

Often not at the table. So I find bringing them in is really important. And to that diversity point, I've had many times [00:25:00] in my career where someone who is different from me, who looks at the world a little bit differently caught something really meaningful. in that Forest Hills project, it was a woman saying, you know, the way you have this.

Circulation in the back of the building looks dangerous to me. I wouldn't feel safe there. I certainly wouldn't feel safe there at night. It's like, oh, I missed that, And that was really good feedback. and I think there's many places in design where we need to make sure that we're designing for everybody and we get really good feedback when we actually solicit that.

I also find it is helpful for that mixed use bit because again, the community in some senses cares less about what's going on upstairs than what they can get downstairs and. In affordable housing. Doing retail leasing can be incredibly difficult because our timeframes are insane and no reasonable business is gonna plan on our timeframe.

So we have to essentially build space on spec and hope we can get something good in there later most of the time. But the community process, I've also used as a time to really solicit people who might. be thinking of building a business in four years, or maybe they're working from a food truck now and they wanna go brick and mortar in four years, which is how long it's gonna take me to build this project and [00:26:00] we can do something together.

so summing up that ramble, just making sure that the people whose feedback we want and need have the opportunity are in the room and that it's meaningful and that may or may not actually line up with the official processes we have to go through.

Jennifer: here in Lincoln, we use tax increment financing as an incentive for affordable housing if you are building residential, and one of the biggest problems we have is trying to do some kind of mixed use. So we have mixed income because most of our projects are market based. And to receive that public benefit we require you provide a percentage of those market units at affordable.

But then we put commercial down below and we have a bunch of these buildings right now with our commercial just sitting vacant for years because it's really hard to identify. what services the tenants are gonna need, or I know they're gonna need a grocery store, but how do I put a grocery store

Jamie Madden: Mm-hmm.

Jennifer: a mixed use building?

It's very frustrating and I

Jamie Madden: Yeah.

Jennifer: solve that problem.

Jamie Madden: Money isn't money always the solution? I mean, seriously though, there's a, there's a real issue with tenant [00:27:00] improvements and if I have a shelf space and I want to build out a grocery store or I wanna build out a preschool and I need a ton of extra plumbing and whatever, a restaurant, these are expensive things I.

In market real estate, you'll often have developers view that restaurant or grocery store or preschool downstairs as a loss leader, the same way they would view building out a swimming pool or a gym, right? It's an amenity, so you can charge more upstairs. Of course in affordable housing, that's absolutely impossible.

We don't want to charge more upstairs and the monies that we use to build are absolutely forbidden to be used on anything except exactly what they're supposed to be used on. I have worked on ways to try to pull money in there. Early learning I think is a great place to, Pull systems together because we're so mission aligned.

 We have insane financing systems, both in early learning and housing. And, architecturally we can make it work a lot. So in Washington State, we've developed a couple sources, purely public as well as a. Private public partnerships leveraged with philanthropy and community development, financial institution dollars to create funding sources for those ground [00:28:00] floors.

We also, I tell the city of Seattle, they should always be bragging about this program, the Equitable Development Initiative, which is something that really came out of community here and provides both capital and capacity, building money for communities to undertake. All sorts of developments with or without housing so that they can build the birthing center, the community center, the bookstore, the Food Innovation Center, what have you, that the community really wants.

 And that tension we often have between the dollars for unit, we need to solve the housing crisis, build as much housing as possible, and the community development. We really wanna make it a good place to live. EDI, the Equitable Development Initiative in Seattle has been a great way to try to. Turn that tension on its head and provide resources that then help these two things help each other out rather than competing for scarce resources.

Jennifer: I check out that resource because I also on the other side, I'm on the board of a community, land trust. And we're also trying to find that same balance on commercial side and create commercial units and our land trust as well. Bottom line is. [00:29:00] Land development is really confusing and because it is, and mostly just very frustrating, how do you continue to remain positive and impactful in a profession whose goal is to really, you wanna do the work, but often the people within our same profession can be dismissive of lived experiences and the needs of the people that you're trying to help.

So how do you keep a sunny disposition?

Jamie Madden: I am not sure I do. You know, and I, I'd say the dismissiveness and the disrespect and the misunderstandings are the things that I have the hardest time with. Um, there's a cultural dislocation that comes from growing up lower class and then existing in and working in the professional world. Many books written on the topic, and I have a good few examples in mine from the affordable housing world specifically, and there's this extra kind of, almost moral injury to it happening.

In our space where, well, if the point is we're trying to create better communities for people like me, if we're trying to do it better for the next kid, how are you so dismissive of what those kids actually need? And why don't you value the voice of someone who used to be one of them? it can be really hard.[00:30:00] 

There's a lot of time, and it starts in college, right? You're studying urban planning and you're reading texts about what do we do about these people? But you are the, these people, those people, it can be hard to take. And I think there's a lot of almost dissociation that's necessary to survive in that space.

and appear positive because of course, appearing positive is necessary for working anywhere outside of the Northeast where we do get away with yelling and cursing at each other. How I keep going and how I keep working is knowing that even if my work isn't going to solve the housing crisis writ large, this feeling of bailing water against the tide, I know on a very intimate, visceral level that.

Every home we're able to build and provide as a safe quality, a place to live for a household. We solve that household's housing crisis, and that really does mean the world. And, it's that thought that keeps me moving forward, bailing water against the tide, in a system that can be hostile.

Stephanie: I love that and I think it's very well, put, changing your perspective. If all your time and energy helps one [00:31:00] household, that's still one household that would not have been helped. So, If we know how to build and fund housing projects, what do you think is the most important thing that needs to change in order to get more affordable housing built?

Jamie Madden: Again, the necessities to build any homes. Place to build permissions, to build there resources, to direct labor and materials. We have no shortage of places in this country. Even our most expensive urban areas have surface parking, which to me that says you have space. So from where we're sitting today.

We need to fully fund housing that could look like funding Section eight at a level where everyone who is eligible gets a voucher. That could look like a universal basic income that could look like any number of ways where we actually make sure that everyone's need for a place to live gets translated into economic demand.

For a place to live that can be well maintained and for additional rehab or development to create more of them. So money is the very biggest thing. and then those permissions also huge exclusionary zoning, needs to go the way of racially restrictive covenants. I [00:32:00] talk in the book about how looking at the Supreme Court decisions upon which it rests, which themselves rest on great decisions like Plessy versus Ferguson, and other.

Policies that rest on the same legal frameworks that our zoning rests on have been ruled in constitutional. Congress could also do it, I realize, saying that the Supreme Court or Congress could do something good. Again, it's a little bit fantasy sitting in 2026. so at whatever jurisdictional level people can work, removing those barriers, getting rid of exclusionary zoning, fully funding.

Those are non-negotiable. We can't solve this without those. There's an image I've been using that I didn't think of till after the book and would've been nice to have in there of it's really a three-legged stool that we need the resources to build or we can't do anything at all we need to be allowed to build.

But even given that without really strong protection for residents rights, right, just cause eviction, preventions, foreclosure preventions, et cetera, et cetera. It's, it's really wobbly and the system can be taken advantage of really well. And so, from a book standpoint, I don't know, make a stool [00:33:00] out of abundance, evicted in color of law, and then we can start, you know, resting on something maybe.

Jennifer: one of the points that you make, speaking of tenants rights in the book, you talk about how our entire legal jurisprudence on. Property ownership living rights is actually based in English, common law, and English Common law set up the property rights that they have to make it as simple as possible for a Lord to kick out a surf

Jamie Madden: Mm-hmm.

Jennifer: those property rights to make sure that the crown could kick out.

Irish people or people living in India or whatever, in the easiest and fastest way possible. And then the United States just whole ham dropped that legal process into our books and now we just accept that as like, oh yeah, obviously that's the best way that we should do it. When. We don't have a crown theoretically, lording over us at this point.

And property ownership is not necessarily the end all, be all of everything. And I think you did a really good job of like laying out how that process got here and why it [00:34:00] sucks.

Jamie Madden: Thank you. Yeah, This is not the main focus of the book, but the thing that I walked away from researching and writing that kind of most changed the way I see the world was I started out exploring these two separate questions. How did we get here? How did we get here as a nation? How did my family get to the level of being lower class and affordable housing and whatnot that we were, and the answers really collided, on the individual level.

It's like we were poor because we were poor, because we were poor, because we were poor because the Brits stole our land. Set the rent at everything you can possibly produce except for those potatoes over there maybe. and then used evictions as a form of. Genocide. and that's how we ended up over here.

And the over here, our legal framework. Similarly, right? It, it was England for the first 150 years, then the fledgling the United States in the late 17, early 18 hundreds. I read some of these legal texts where they're debating, we are a new country, should we just. Use English common law, should we use English poor laws as the basis for how we think about charity and helping folks out?

 Should we use English land [00:35:00] title as the basis for our real estate system? so it's a really good land title in Massachusetts from 1800 that spends, hundreds of pages to create an argument that basically says, well, the King of England said this land is ours. And even if that was a bad thing, it's ours now.

So let's just go with it. And now living where I do in the Pacific Northwest where that history of colonialism, land entitlement, et cetera, is really only 150, 180 years old as opposed to the 400 some in Boston, has been really hard to unsee once I've seen this. There's a flip way of saying this is that I derive a lot of hope for the future knowing that.

We have not always lived the way we live, and in fact, this system which prioritizes separating the worthy from the unworthy above all else is very peculiarly, puritan, British cultural artifact that we live with, that viewing housing not as a necessity, but as a commodity or a means of social control. Is not common amongst most world cultures throughout [00:36:00] history and even the British have only been acting this way for four or 500 years out of a very long history.

So I do take a lot of hope from knowing the way we're doing things right now that we take for granted, and we think is just the world as it is, is maybe an aberration historically, and we don't have to keep doing it this way.

Jennifer: That's a beautiful sentiment to end on. So always our last

Jamie Madden: I.

Jennifer: question ' cause it is booked on planning, what books would you recommend our readers check out?

Jamie Madden: So I'm gonna skip past the obvious American housing books. Many of you have covered from Greg Colburn and Richard Rothstein and Matt Desmond and Larry Vale. for a few Irish books. 'cause I think the comparative perspective can teach us a lot. So Rory Hearn's, gaffes. Why no one can get a house. And what we can do about it, would be kind of the Irish version of my book or maybe one of Greg Coburn's books.

And the author is now a member of the Doll, which is the Irish Parliament, and, really great stuff in here. And I think. That historical perspective of this kind of goes back to British colonialism, I think becomes clearer when you compare what's happening here to what's happening in Ireland. Katrina O'Sullivan's Poor, some memoir [00:37:00] by a professor psychology about her experiences growing up poor in both the UK and Ireland.

 Gorgeous memoir. I wish I could write that. Well, and then, blind Boy, boat Club pen, name of a fantastic writer, musician, podcaster. this is his latest collection of short stories. Topograph. Hi Barica. And, besides the beautiful writing, I think.

Blind Boy is incredibly talented at shedding light on those little messy, forgotten, overgrown parts of our cities and towns. that I think is really essential to urban planning as well.

Stephanie: I love it. No one's ever given us a list of our. Readings from another country, so that's

Jamie Madden: Well, for the month that's in it.

Stephanie: True. Jamie, thank you again for joining us on Booked On Planning to talk about your book, bittersweet Lane, creating Homes in the American Affordable Housing Crisis.

Jamie Madden: Thank you so much.

I do 

Jennifer: We hope you enjoyed this conversation with author Jamie Madden on his book, bittersweet Lane, creating Homes in the American Affordable Housing Crisis.

 You can get your own copy through the publisher at Row House Publishing by supporting your local bookstore or supporting the [00:38:00] show through our page at bookshop.org/shop/book on planning.

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 Booked On Planning.