Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)

A re-air from August 2023: Our quest for the answer to this one sends us over a hundred years into the past. We learn about the invisible rules and fights that determine what our neighborhoods look like. We also learn about houses with backyard roller coasters, tiny apartments inside of shopping malls, and then we think a little bit about death. Happy Friday! Check out our merch https://searchengine.bigcartel.com/ PJ's newsletter about the state of the show https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/search-engine-in-2025 Comment on this episode https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/why-cant-we-turn-all-the-empty-offices Support the show https://www.searchengine.show/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

  Hello, Search Engine listeners. We're re-airing this week a classic episode of the show we're very proud of. But before that, some quick show business. It's business about the show, not news about Hollywood. So, most importantly, today, Friday, April 18th, is your last day to purchase Search Engine merchandise. We've got hoodies and tees. They've been selling like hotcakes. Act now. These are hand-printed, so we can only sell them in limited runs. We cannot make an exception for you on Saturday, no matter how nice your email is. Second most importantly, I have an announcement about this show itself. I wrote a much longer explanation of what I'm about to say on my newsletter. You can find a link to that in the show notes if the following does not sate your curiosity

• 0:42PJ Vogt?

  about the editorial schedule of a podcast you listen to. But the TLDR is that we are going to slightly reduce our publishing cadence. We will now be publishing the show two or three times a month. Right now, we are a team of three full-time people, and we want to just give ourselves a little breathing room. Also, we think having a little more time to make episodes will let us chase down some of the complicated, weird, and ambitious stories that we love. Stories that, at this pace, we have not always had the bandwidth for. We're really excited about this change. If you want to know more, again, you can check out the little thing I wrote. I talk about our finances, which have hit an exciting "not in the red point." I talk a little bit about how the work I do at Search Engine

• 1:23PJ Vogt?

  is different from the work I used to contribute at my old show, Reply All. And we talk about internet comments, and where you can make internet comments about Search Engine, that we'll see. Okay. Without further ado, here's an episode we made last year we really love. Why Can't We Turn All the Empty Offices Into Apartment Buildings? It's about issues that have become even more salient in the last 12 months: housing, ymbyism, nimbyism, and, of course, roller coasters in your backyard. Anyway, after these ads, please enjoy.

• 1:55PJ Vogt?

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• 2:36PJ Vogt?

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• 3:17PJ Vogt?

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• 3:58PJ Vogt?

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• 4:33PJ Vogt?

  Currently, I have been working out of an office. It's cool. Feels like the olden times, before everybody had their meetings on their couch while apologizing for how they were dressed or what their children were doing. Next door to the office where I work, there's this other office that is perfectly frozen in time. They have a big pile of unopened mail stacked just inside their glass door and a hastily typed sign saying, "Everyone's working from home, but we'll be back soon," something to that effect. New York is filled with empty offices right now. New York's not special, so is pretty much everywhere else. And I recently got an email from this woman named Julia, who lives in Santa Rosa, California, and had a question about that state of affairs. Here she is, reading her email.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  I live in an area with catastrophic housing shortage and sky-high rental prices. However, the odd thing I've noticed is that an extreme surplus of commercial properties will sit vacant and empty on the market for months or years.

• 5:28PJ Vogt?

  Oh, yeah. Here's the other thing. The offices are all empty. Apartments are just ridiculously expensive. Shortage of affordable apartments, surplus of empty offices. Maybe you can see this question coming.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Why, when we have such a shortage of housing, does there seem to be no reason to convert vacant real estate into residential properties?

• 5:51PJ Vogt?

  It's a great question. The thought you have had, I have had, in Brooklyn and in Toronto, where I visit friends sometimes, where housing seems very scarce, and you walk around and there's so much empty commercial property. And like, not empty for a little bit, like, empty forever. And it feels like, it feels like one of those problems where you're like, it looks kind of simple. Is it that I am blind to the complexities of this in a way that I don't understand? Like, how can it be that people need space to live and there's a lot of empty space? And like, those things are not shaking hands at all?

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Right. How would having empty property be more profitable than having a tenant in there?

• 6:35PJ Vogt?

  Giulio was so hung up on this question that as we were wrapping up, she mentioned that when she drives around Santa Rosa, California, where she lives, she'll sometimes take photographs of the empty buildings she thinks should be converted into apartments.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  I would drive by often and just see these places. And it was while I was usually looking for a place to live. And I was like, I can live there. It's a house. Like, why can't I live there?

• 7:00PJ Vogt?

  I really like this question, partly because it just feels like the kind of thing I'm tempted to try to explain without understanding. Like, oh, something, something zoning, maybe? Or something, something capitalism, probably? But if you actually press me to explain it, I would struggle. I think most people would. And I wanted to remedy that. After a short break, we try to find a real answer.

• 7:35PJ Vogt?

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• 8:19PJ Vogt?

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• 8:37PJ Vogt?

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• 9:22PJ Vogt?

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• 9:49PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show. So this question, the more I looked into it, perhaps not surprisingly, while it was fascinating to learn about, it's very complicated. Complicated enough, I actually want to give you a table of contents at the start of this. So to understand why an office building can't just turn into an apartment, we're going to give you an answer in a few chapters. Chapter one, why zoning makes this really hard. Chapter two, why the buildings themselves are making this very hard. Chapter three, why the people in the town are making it very hard. And chapter four, who needs to die in order to fix this? I'm not kidding. People will have to die. So let's get started. Hi, Bill. How's it going?

• 10:32Speaker 02

  Hi, PJ.

• 10:34PJ Vogt?

  To help us get into chapter one of our answer, zoning, I called a man named Bill Fulton. Bill has spent his life thinking about zoning and cities in one way or another. Early in his career, he was a journalist. Later, he was a mayor of a town called Ventura, California. And after that, he was San Diego's urban planning director. What does a planning director do?

• 10:55Speaker 02

  The planning director in San Diego oversees the long-term plans for all the neighborhoods, how big the buildings can be, what infrastructure has to be included. You get into big fights with the neighbors over whether there's going to be more development in their neighborhood, that kind of thing.

• 11:11PJ Vogt?

  So you sort of play SimCity, but with everybody yelling at you?

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Yes, that's exactly what a planner does.

• 11:19PJ Vogt?

  That sounds really... As somebody who just finds SimCity stressful, that sounds terrible. I told Bill about Julia's question, and I told him why I'd assumed zoning was the culprit. In my brain, zoning is just all the regulations that say in a given city, what can get built where? Why some streets are filled with houses and others are filled with stores. And I figured the obstacle stopping Julia's empty office from becoming a full apartment was probably a zoning obstacle.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, it is correct that zoning has traditionally been very inflexible. And underneath zoning is the assumption that different types of uses of land, you know, houses, stores, factories, they should all be separated.

• 12:07PJ Vogt?

  Why do we assume that we should separate those things? Like, where does that historical idea come from?

• 12:12Speaker 02

  Right, it originally came 100-plus years ago from the idea that in those days, a toxic factory might be right next door to houses or to an apartment building. And so separating those two things became very important. There is a sort of a classist and racist part of it, too. And this became predominant in the 1920s, which is that people who wanted to live in single-family homes, and in those days, you had to be very affluent to do that, began to put zoning into place in order to separate themselves from all other types of land uses, including apartment buildings.

• 12:53PJ Vogt?

  Bill is condensing about 100 years of very complex history into a paragraph, which is a very courteous thing of him to do. But I usually want to uncondense it and give you a history of the story of zoning. Because even though "story of zoning" sounds like the title for a book so boring you could hide drugs in it, it's actually a good story. And it's a story that gets at a question underneath the question that Julia, our listener, is asking. That question is just, why do we have a housing shortage in the first place? In the 1910s, it was becoming clear that there was something very wrong with American cities. Skyscrapers had recently been invented, and in New York, people were building them pretty much willy-nilly, all over the place.

• 13:38PJ Vogt?

  As the skyscrapers got taller, the streets themselves were getting darker and darker as these new buildings blocked out the sun. Which meant that now, if you were a builder and you wanted light, you had to build your own tall building. And your tall building required someone else to build their tall building. It's the kind of "everyone has to be selfish and insane because there are no rules" style of behavior that you might see at Best Buy on Black Friday. Into this hectic scene steps Edward Murray Bassett, the so-called "Father of American Zoning," who points out, "We probably need some regulation here, because otherwise the cities are going to be a total free-for-all." These new laws said that citizens would not be forced to live in overcrowded living

• 14:19PJ Vogt?

  conditions, buildings would have to offer everyone natural light, nobody's apartment would be next door to a slaughterhouse. Many of the assumptions we take for granted about what constitutes a good home are actually written into zoning laws like these. Of course, there's another side to these laws that Planning Director Bill Fulton alluded to. You're probably familiar with this, but I'll give you an example. In Los Angeles, in 1904, the city's very first zoning law is passed. And what it does is it bans laundries from certain residential neighborhoods. Which sounds perhaps like a strange priority for the first zoning law, unless you know that many of these laundries were owned by Chinese citizens,

• 15:03PJ Vogt?

  who the planning committee wanted to exclude from white neighborhoods. In the years that follow, these kinds of zoning laws actually become less subtle, more explicit. In 1910, Baltimore passes a segregation zoning law that makes black neighborhoods black and white neighborhoods white, a trend that spreads throughout American cities until it's knocked down by the Supreme Court in 1917. Zoning in America in the decades that follow remains this strange mix of these two impulses. One word, zoning, describing both commonsense regulations meant to make cities more livable, but also, in many cases, to allow neighborhoods to exclude groups of people. And the thing is, it's not always clear, looking at a particular zoning regulation,

• 15:48PJ Vogt?

  which kind of regulation it is. If you want to understand how complicated this can get, how not straightforward and messy and strange it can all be, I would invite you to consider something I have never thought very hard about: the idea of a single-family home.

• 16:08PJ Vogt?

  Literally, the archetypical house that a child draws when you ask them to draw a house. The setting of every sitcom, the place where both the Flintstones and the Simpsons live. Many people in America, regardless of their race, their income, the level of prejudice in their hearts, would just prefer to live in a single-family home. But zoning a neighborhood for single-family homes has also historically been a tool for keeping out poor people, or people who aren't white. When, in 1917, the Supreme Court ruled you couldn't have a whites-only neighborhood, canny city planners, realizing that white, wealthy people at the time were much more likely to live in single-family houses, just excluded tenement buildings from certain neighborhoods. Like Berkeley, California, originally zoned single-family to keep the neighborhood white and wealthy.

• 16:53PJ Vogt?

  In 2021, the very progressive city council passed a bill condemning the racist history of single-family zoning in Berkeley. But the process of actually convincing people who own expensive houses to allow apartment buildings to be built next door to them, the council indicated that while that work was important, it wasn't going to happen overnight.

• 17:15PJ Vogt?

  Bill Fulton says that zoning restrictions like the ones in Berkeley have become one of the big reasons we don't have enough affordable housing in this country.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  If you go to a city like Los Angeles and you go to the most desirable parts of town, say the west side, you will see vast areas that are zoned for single-family homes. If you removed zoning, many of those single-family homes would be redeveloped to higher density and there would be a lot more housing available. So to a certain extent, single-family zoning is used by homeowners to retain what they call the character of their neighborhood, which of course excludes others, right? And also inevitably increases the price of the houses. It doesn't necessarily increase their property values because they might literally make more money if they could tear their house down and build something more. But

• 18:06Speaker 02

  it does raise the value of the houses that are there above what they otherwise would be.

• 18:13PJ Vogt?

  In pretty much every American city, there's a zoning debate happening between two sides. You might be familiar with it. NIMBYs versus YIMBYs. On one side, the NIMBYs, the not-in-my-backyard activists, who are often against new development because they typically own houses and they think it'll hurt the price of their house to have like a duplex next door. And on the other side, the YIMBYs, the yes-in-my-backyard activists, who want more housing built so that their neighborhood becomes a more affordable place to live.

• 18:41PJ Vogt?

  Bill Fulton began his zoning career in California, the state where this NIMBY v. YIMBY debate has been raging for a very long time. But these days, he's relocated to Houston, which, if you're a zoning freak, you know is a pretty big deal. Because Houston, famously for us zone heads, is a city that does not have zoning requirements. Which means if you live there, you're sort of a de facto YIMBY. Completely unique in America. Just picture a city without zoning laws for a minute.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  You can build anything, anywhere. In fact, in one of my regular slideshows, I have a funny picture of a single-family house in Houston and a roller coaster right behind it.

• 19:24PJ Vogt?

  Is that an argument for or against zoning?

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Well, I have to explain that not everybody in Houston has a roller coaster in their backyard. And in fact, some people might want one.

• 19:34PJ Vogt?

  Obviously, I looked this up. The Houston Chronicle interviewed the Killian family, who lives right next to the Boardwalk Bullet. Their white two-story house is just underneath this enormous wooden roller coaster. This is a video taken from the front seat. You can see their house.

• 19:53PJ Vogt?

  While some people might want a roller coaster in the backyard, the Killian family said, quote, "It's such a shame, really. We all used to just love the peaceful quiet."

• 20:09PJ Vogt?

  So, in a city without zoning laws, where neither the homeowners nor the city gets to say what should get built where, who does decide?

• 20:18Speaker 02

  What happens in Houston is that developers tend to dictate what gets built. So you see a lot of single-family homes being torn down and replaced with four to six townhomes on the same parcel. And you see a lot of old, in urban areas, little mini malls being torn down and replaced by, say, five-story apartment buildings.

• 20:41PJ Vogt?

  And do you feel like, like, does Houston feel like, does it feel like an advertisement for what we can have when we don't have zoning? Does it feel like a cautionary tale of like, why some zoning is helpful?

• 20:52Speaker 02

  It's both. It's actually, interestingly enough, it's both. Traditionally, in urban planning, Houston was seen as an anomaly. This strange place that didn't have any zoning, so it must be weird. And it is kind of weird, if you look at it, in some ways, like the roller coaster in the backyard. But at the same time, as the inflexibility of zoning has become more apparent, partly because of the housing shortage and partly because of this revisiting the racist history, Houston has come to be viewed as a place to look at, is to say, okay, if you, if you don't have zoning, or you loosen it up, what happens? And the answer is, you get more housing built. New housing is still mostly high-end housing.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  But there's definitely more opportunity and more options in a place like Houston than you see in, in most other cities at this point.

• 21:44PJ Vogt?

  And you think that other cities might eventually become more Houston-like? Either because people are looking at zoning laws and seeing what was... Socially undesirable about it from our more progressive present, or because they're just like, we're out of space and like, everything can't be a suburb anymore.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  Yes, I do think that other cities will become more like Houston. They probably won't give up zoning altogether, but they'll make zoning more flexible than it has historically been.

• 22:17PJ Vogt?

  So to go back to Julia, remember Julia, and her question. She lives in Santa Rosa, California, a town that unlike Houston, does have zoning laws. And zoning is likely one obstacle to the conversions that she wants to see happen. But it turns out there's another one, probably a more significant one, which leads us to chapter two, the buildings themselves.

• 22:39PJ Vogt?

  Bill says that the way office buildings are constructed is a bigger obstacle to conversion than most people realize.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  Right now, we're looking at every downtown in America with a lot of empty office space. So why can't you convert that to apartments, right? There are a lot of people trying to figure that out. In some cases, that has happened, particularly with older buildings. You get to a bigger retail space and a bigger office space, and it actually gets pretty complicated. We are now to the point where most of the vacant office space that we're seeing in downtowns is from the last time we had a huge office boom, which was the 1980s. The floor plates are huge. So, you know, a typical floor plate, by which I mean to say the size of a floor in one of those office buildings,

• 23:31Speaker 02

  is maybe 50,000 square feet. So that's very hard to convert to apartments because there's so much interior space that would be without windows.

• 23:43PJ Vogt?

  I see. You picture like a giant office bullpen with tons of cubicles.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Right. And you're trying to convert that into apartments when you have that much space that would wind up being interior without windows. That's very hard.

• 23:57PJ Vogt?

  Bill says the conversions that can be done easily, often they have been done. That's why in a lot of cities, old factories that used to make pencils or shoes are now luxury condos. But that's not enough. We still need more housing. So what do you do? Well, Bill says there's a different kind of commercial space that is actually ripe for redevelopment. Huge properties that increasingly look like empty ghost towns in the hearts of American cities. Shopping malls.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  Conversion of old retail space, and particularly old malls, is more promising. And usually, the malls have the largest contiguous land ownership in built-up desirable areas.

• 24:41PJ Vogt?

  Oh, interesting.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  And we are beginning to see more and more malls being redeveloped as, at least part of the property, being redeveloped for apartments or condos. There's a bunch of complicated factors there. Nevertheless, sometimes developers work around that, and you are seeing more and more redevelopment of old malls into mostly housing. That's probably the most promising part of it. More promising, probably, than the big old office buildings because it's not that hard to tear down a mall. So that's happening more and more.

• 25:14PJ Vogt?

  I see. So it's not that malls... Because when you started to say that, I was like, well, when I picture, like, you know, the King of Prussia Mall where I spent my youth in Pennsylvania, that also seems hard to convert into, like, I wouldn't want to live at the... I mean, I would have wanted to have lived at the GameStop. Now I would not want to live at the GameStop. But what you're saying is, they're easier to tear down.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  Right. You typically don't convert the mall building to residential. You tear it down.

• 25:41PJ Vogt?

  Typically, you do not convert the mall building to residential. But sometimes you do. If you find yourself needing to restore your sense of wonder at the strangeness of this world, I suggest you Google apartment building inside mall.

• 25:56PJ Vogt?

  In downtown Providence, Rhode Island, a building called The Arcade. There's a video of this online. Inside, it looks like a normal shopping mall. Vaulted ceilings, two-story mezzanine. Except on the top floor, the stores have been converted into apartments.

• 26:10Speaker 03

  This is my humble abode. So you can see it's pretty small, but it's really all you need.

• 26:16PJ Vogt?

  This medical student gives a tour of her place. It really is small. The kitchen has a tiny fridge, very few cabinets. It's like a kitchen you'd see in a boat, maybe, or in a European hostel.

• 26:27Speaker 03

  It's an efficiency kitchen, which doesn't have a stove. So I bought my own toaster oven, which works well.

• 26:34PJ Vogt?

  The people living in this mall, there's a person with a small business who makes soap. There's a graphic designer. What they have in common is that they are people who say they're comfortable making some compromises to save money.

• 26:45Speaker 03

  And then I have my closet, which has been a struggle. But I figured out you could get slim hangers. That works out really well.

• 26:54PJ Vogt?

  It's a fascinating, adaptive way to live. It just takes a little getting used to. But it's funny, you know, I was talking recently with a friend who worked at a, they work at a video game company in Washington State. And I like their video games and I've like, I've tried to picture their offices before and I always pictured their offices in this very cool, high-tech way. And I was asking about it and he was like, no, we're in a mall. We're above a mall. And I'm like, we take an elevator down and we go to the food court. And my head was like, oh, that's kind of ridiculous. And I feel kind of embarrassed to say like, oh, kind of unglamorous or something. And hearing you describe it, I should be happy about that because what that probably

• 27:33PJ Vogt?

  represents is a city being versatile enough to adjust to how it's changed and to put the things that people need where they need them.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  I think what you just described, PJ, suggests how deeply embedded in our psyche this separation of development is. The idea that you might have an office above a mall with a food court. You know, 100 years ago, having your office above a retail area in a downtown would have been considered very normal. And in other parts of the world, it's still considered very normal. And yet, we think it's really weird if it's in a suburban mall. But I think you're going to see that more and more.

• 28:16PJ Vogt?

  Bill Fulton says in the 1980s, there were around 3,000 malls in America. By the time the post-COVID shakeout is done, we'll have about 300, which gives us some more room for housing. Although honestly, we'll need even more than that, probably a lot more. But in order to get a lot more housing, we will have to surmount our third obstacle. The third reason Julia cannot have what she wants, an office building turned into an apartment building. The obstacle at the heart of most things: people.

• 28:52PJ Vogt?

  That obstacle, after the break.

• 29:14PJ Vogt?

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• 31:27PJ Vogt?

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• 32:42PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show. Okay. First things first, very easy. Can you just introduce yourself and say what you do for a living?

• 32:51Speaker 04

  Sure. My name is Raissa De La Rosa and I am the Division Director for Economic Development for the City of Santa Rosa.

• 33:01PJ Vogt?

  After I spoke with Bill Fulton, I got in touch with the City of Santa Rosa. I was trying to understand how people can be an obstacle to changing cities. And I thought for that, I wanted to actually zoom in on the specific place where Julia lives. Raissa De La Rosa works in local government in Santa Rosa. She deals with people all day. She's got a bit of a Leslie Knope vibe, somebody who believes in the civic process, who's very optimistic, who's happy in the weeds. She's worked for the city for 17 years now. Before that, she ran a performing arts theater.

• 33:31Speaker 04

  I think what makes me probably good at what I do is because I come from an arts background, like I see things probably a little differently, or see opportunity differently, or have an understanding of something differently, combined with my childhood love of bureaucracy.

• 33:48PJ Vogt?

  I've never heard of anyone saying that they have a childhood love of bureaucracy.

• 33:51Speaker 04

  This is, like, there's so much creativity in how you can get things done.

• 33:59Speaker 04

  Like, I don't know what this is, but when I was a kid, like, I would sit at my mom's typewriter and make up forms and then fill out forms.

• 34:07PJ Vogt?

  Seriously?

• 34:08Speaker 04

  I don't know why, I liked it. I was like, okay, we're gonna efficiently do this.

• 34:13PJ Vogt?

  Raissa's childhood love of bureaucracy is now an adulthood love of bureaucracy. And she said that our listener Julia's questions about turning offices into apartments, Raissa spends her days thinking about exactly those kinds of problems. She also drives around scoping out unused property that she would like to see converted. And she says there's actually been some moderate success.

• 34:34Speaker 04

  We have a ton of things that have been entitled in the downtown. In the downtown alone, in the building permit process, we have 870 permits. Developers have applied for something. We have 419 in construction and we have 131 final. So we have a lot of units that are in the pipeline. It's a question of whether or not they can get to the end with their financing.

• 35:04PJ Vogt?

  Those 131 new housing units, that includes all new housing in downtown Santa Rosa since 2016. Obviously, a lot better than zero, but in a city of 180,000 people, clearly, it's going to take a lot more than just converting vacant properties to move the needle. Raisa says the will to make a change is there from the city government, but it's very, very hard to get to the finish line.

• 35:28Speaker 04

  As an example, we have a mall in our downtown and it's owned by Simon Properties. And it had a Sears in it. So we ran hard after that one to have it be transformed into housing on top, grocery on the bottom. We're still trying to get them to do it. We've had fits and starts with it. And I drive by that every day and think, come on, man. But, you know, and then there was the pandemic and then finances ground to halt. And then there was the da, da, da, da. And then there was, you know, if it's not one thing, it's another, it feels like.

• 36:06PJ Vogt?

  Right. And it's like some things are just like cities are slow, real estate is slow, massive amount of money, massive amounts of organization, massive amounts of people involved with opinion.

• 36:14Speaker 04

  I mean, in the end, what I've come to figure is we're just such a small piece of the pie of development.

• 36:22PJ Vogt?

  Often, Raisa says, the city runs into problems because of the landowners. It turns out there are a lot of reasons why someone with a vacant, unused building might not want to make it into something that someone like Julia might consider more useful.

• 36:36Speaker 04

  It could be the case that there's no incentive to lease a building. They purchase it, they owe no money on it, the taxes are very low. Or even if they're a new owner, it could be part of a portfolio where the loss on this one helps offset the gains on something else. So then it actually makes sense to not maybe lease it out. There could be any number of reasons why somebody who owns a property doesn't redevelop it. You know, developing housing is expensive, getting financing for housing is expensive. You know, land property owners have a vested right into doing what they want to do with their property so long as it fits within the laws. So from the government's perspective, they're free to go if they wanted to convert it.

• 37:18PJ Vogt?

  So the problem in this case, the reason zoning is a little bit of a misnomer is it could suggest that like the obstacles coming from the government. And what you're saying is like, property owners have all kinds of incentives that can be surprising. You might have an instance where someone just doesn't mind holding on to an empty property that's not generating rent because they want the tax loss, because the conversion would be expensive, because they're thinking something else down the line. Like, people, people kind of like hold on to stuff more so than you would think.

• 37:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, the other thing is neighbors. Neighbors and nimbyism tends to be the biggest obstacle. You know, sometimes neighbors, whether they be commercial, residential, have a very short-term view on impacts that can greatly benefit them down the road.

• 38:06Speaker 05

  Good evening, everybody. Public hearing number one.

• 38:09PJ Vogt?

  If you want to convince yourself that this problem is unfixable, if you want to feel complete and utter despair, the best thing you can do, of course, is to go on the internet. I have watched clip after clip of those neighbors, the NIMBYs, Ray says, referring to, speaking out in neighborhood meetings all over the country. Meetings where a combination of fear and frankly, some real nuttiness reigns supreme.

• 38:32Speaker 06

  And I just want to make sure that there will be no migrants, pedophiles, or criminals moving in because that's what I'm afraid of. I've been told.

• 38:43PJ Vogt?

  Here, an older woman in a floral print top is speaking out against a zoning change in her Long Island neighborhood that would allow basement apartments. Because obviously, a basement apartment would only serve the kinds of people who flee when confronted with natural life.

• 38:59Speaker 06

  I kind of heard that this is who's moving in. So I just want to be sure that we're not going to be moving in pedophiles and undesirables. That's what I've been told. I'm here for limited apartments, meaning that Huntington will not be saturated by accessory apartments.

• 39:22PJ Vogt?

  About 20 miles to the west, in the Bronx, this speaker, a woman with a mic, is trying to calm down an enormous NIMBY crowd. It's not working. She tries to remind people that this proposed new development will offer affordable housing with no cost to the taxpayer. This goes over about as well as if she told them that the government was going to make them eat burned hair sandwiches.

• 39:56PJ Vogt?

  Like a lot of complicated problems that exist today, it's easy to just fixate on the part of the problem that makes you mad, on the arguments. It's easy to reduce everything to a fight. Some people make a lot of money doing this. Here's Tucker Carlson, back when he was still at Fox, reacting to proposed housing legislation from Joe Biden.

• 40:16Speaker 07

  He'd also like to eliminate, quote, exclusionary zoning, and, quote, needless barriers to producing affordable housing. That means that your neighborhood may have to make way for multifamily dwellings. You don't want multifamily dwellings in your neighborhood? Doesn't matter because it's equity. Shut up racist. And there's more where that came from. Joe Biden would like to spend-

• 40:36PJ Vogt?

  It can all be a bit disheartening. But when I talked to Bill Fulton, the zoning expert, about how you'd ever change the minds of diehard NIMBYs, he had an answer that was the most weird combination of hope and fatalism I think I've ever heard. And how do you like, how do you convince the person, like, we've screwed up our housing market. Houses have become more and more expensive. Even like people with means have like over leveraged themselves to buy those houses. And now they're a political constituency that are like, yeah, yeah, this is messed up. But I don't want to be the person who has to not have an expensive house. Like, how do you force the person with the mansion to turn it into a duplex? Like, what do you do?

• 41:17Speaker 02

  Well, you can't. But I will say two things. There are two demographic realities here. One is that most of those people are older. And eventually, that constituency will begin to disappear. There's a huge generation gap between older homeowners, mostly white, who resist change. And then you've got basically everybody under the age of 40 struggling to buy a house. And that's where the YIMBY movement has come from, the yes in my backyard movement is it. There's a huge demographic reality. And so the political dynamic is changing, not because people are changing their mind, but because the demographic reality is changing.

• 42:02Speaker 02

  And that is what I think will prevail in the end.

• 42:06PJ Vogt?

  In case you missed that, when Bill is talking optimistically about the demographic reality changing, what he's saying is that of all the things that need to change to help with the housing crisis, one thing that will naturally change is that older people will die. Historically, one of the larger drivers of social change. Which is not to say, hooray for the upcoming deaths of our parents and grandparents. It's bad when people die. And the people living in the houses have all sorts of reasons for wanting to live in the houses. It's not exclusively about the fear of some other coming to ruin the neighborhood. Sometimes it's as simple as you grew up in a house with a yard and you liked it.

• 42:47PJ Vogt?

  Or you'd rather live next to an empty office building than a big new apartment building. These are preferences. There's nothing inherently wrong with them. The problem is just we're running out of space.

• 43:00Speaker 08

  Good evening, everyone. How's everyone doing?

• 43:02PJ Vogt?

  There's one clip that stood out to me in all the clips I saw. This meeting in Brooklyn where a state senator, Andrew Gennardis, stands up and says, "The problem with holding on to the way things are is that eventually we just lose the future."

• 43:15Speaker 08

  We need to build a lot more housing wherever we can. We need to protect the housing we have. We need to update the housing we have. We gotta do, get the suburbs to do their fair share, right? This has gotta be a comprehensive, we're all in this together approach. Because otherwise, young people are not gonna live here anymore. Grandkids are not gonna come back from schools, to colleges, and wanna live in their neighborhood anymore. Young families won't be able to live here anymore. It's already happening. For all this talk about people leaving New York City, oh, the rich are leaving New York because of the tax. You know who's leaving New York? People who can't afford to live here. Those are the people that are leaving New York. And if we don't find a way to give them a place to live, we're gonna lose them forever. So with that, that's a lot to say.

• 43:53PJ Vogt?

  It's not a very dramatic clip, which is why I like it. Despite some evidence to the contrary, I think we usually tend to figure our problems out. And not in the big screaming places, but in meetings like this one, where bureaucrats try to hammer out solutions in uncomfortable chairs over bad coffee in meetings that go on too long. Bill Fulton, former and perhaps future bureaucrat, he says the solution to all this is actually a bunch of solutions.

• 44:22Speaker 02

  People in the housing debate tend to try to find a silver bullet or tend to think, oh, if only X happened, everything would be fine. Oh, if we just converted all these office buildings to apartments, everything would be fine. And I think the answer is we've been underproducing housing in the United States for 30 years. It's become very expensive in any place that is remotely desirable. It's probably a both and and and at this point. Over the next 10 or 15 years, we're gonna have to do everything. It's not just converting office buildings. It's not just tearing down old malls and replacing it with housing. It's those things and more.

• 45:02PJ Vogt?

  So to answer our listener Giulio's question, the reason we have not yet turned the office buildings into apartments is because it's hard and people don't like change. But the other part of the answer is that eventually, increasingly, it'll likely happen. The office buildings will become apartments, the single-family homes will become apartments, the video game company is going to have to be in the mall, probably next to more apartments. We're going to have to let go of a lot of ideas that we got used to, which always seems hard, until we do it.

• 45:42PJ Vogt?

  That's our show this week, but stick around after the ads for Search Engine's Favorite Thing from the Internet this week.

• 46:05PJ Vogt?

  This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by VistaPrint. As a small business owner running a podcast, I'm always looking for authentic ways to connect with listeners, which makes VistaPrint such a valued expert partner for us. I was on their site the other day brainstorming new things we could make for our show, and the creative momentum took over. I ended up designing Search Engine stickers, and I tried to make a sign for our office. When your physical branding looks this sharp and professional, it immediately communicates credibility and shows your audience that you mean business. VistaPrint truly helps every dollar go further, delivering premium quality and design support that make your company look established without breaking the bank. Whether you need your design tweaked or a total rebrand, VistaPrint has you covered with the expert

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• 47:19PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show. I am joining the studio by surgeon producer Garrett Graham.

• 47:24Speaker 09

  Hello PJ.

• 47:25PJ Vogt?

  Truly one of my favorite people. What, you have a, you have a recommendation, you have a pick from the internet?

• 47:30Speaker 09

  Yeah, it's not so much a recommendation as it is just my favorite thing from the internet this week.

• 47:34PJ Vogt?

  Which, you haven't told me yet, but we've both been having this weird thing where it's like, you're like, do you know what it is? I'm like, I have a feeling I might know what it is, but I'm not sure that I know what it is.

• 47:42Speaker 09

  I think you probably know what it is. You are, you are definitely more online than I am. And so if I've seen it, it probably means that you've seen it.

• 47:49PJ Vogt?

  Is it the fake Euro song thing?

• 47:51Speaker 09

  It's not the fake Euro song thing.

• 47:53PJ Vogt?

  Well, the fake Euro song thing is pretty good. What do you have?

• 47:56Speaker 09

  So, my thing has to do with a Chinese zoo.

• 48:00PJ Vogt?

  Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 48:03Speaker 09

  Okay, so I'll take it from the top. So, a few days ago, a video popped up on Weibo, which is basically like Chinese Twitter, and it showed a video of a bear at a Chinese zoo in Hangzhou.

• 48:13PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 48:13Speaker 09

  Have you seen the video?

• 48:14PJ Vogt?

  I've only seen a still from it.

• 48:16Speaker 09

  So, I'm gonna send you the video. Let's just watch.

• 48:20PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 48:20Speaker 09

  Okay.

• 48:23PJ Vogt?

  Okay, so it's, there's like captions that I can't understand. The bear is like standing on a rock on his hind legs and he just, his, first of all, he's standing totally comfortably as a human in a bear suit would, but not as a bear normally would. But also, there's a quality to the skin around his legs where it's like a little bit loose, but also his legs are very skinny. I'm assuming the bear's, boy, I have no way of knowing something about the architecture of my own brain in that assumption. But like, the overall effect is just a person who bought a bear suit on the internet that does not seem to work very well.

• 48:56Speaker 09

  So this gets posted on Weibo and immediately people are like, that doesn't look like a bear at all.

• 49:01PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 49:01Speaker 09

  But the first theory is like, okay, it's not a bear, maybe it's like another kind of animal. Maybe this is like a dog posing as a bear, which is only funny because like a decade ago, a different Chinese zoo got caught trying to pass off a dog as a lion.

• 49:15PJ Vogt?

  Wait, really?

• 49:15Speaker 09

  In one of their exhibits, a Tibetan Mastiff, just like this big furry hairy dog. They had like, they sent off their lion for like, whatever you send animals from zoos away for, and they replaced it with a dog. And people caught on and they were furious. So at first, people on Weibo are like, okay, that's, that's what's happening here. This is just like, this is a rare breed of dog that they're trying to pass off as a bear.

• 49:35PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 49:36Speaker 09

  But then somebody posted something to the internet, which is what everybody should have said the first time they saw this video, which is like, it doesn't look like a dog either. Like, this doesn't look like an animal at all. This looks like a human in a bear costume. Like, exactly what it looks like is an ill-fitting mascot costume at a D3 football game. It's just been plopped on, a poor summer intern, and thrown into, like, the bear cage to pretend that they're a bear at this Chinese zoo.

• 50:00PJ Vogt?

  Literally, if you forced me to bet money whether it was a bear or a human, I would say human. The only thing that would give me pause is there's a brief moment where there's a kind of close-up on the bear's face, and he kind of licks his chops, and his tongue appears to come out, which makes it seem like-

• 50:16Speaker 09

  Mascots don't have tongues.

• 50:18PJ Vogt?

  Mascots don't have tongues. A really fanatic does, but that's a whole nother thing. So what was going on here?

• 50:22Speaker 09

  So, it creates such a controversy that, like, eventually, the zoo decides that it's gonna respond to this hilarious accusation that it's putting humans into bear costumes and throwing them into cages.

• 50:35PJ Vogt?

  And what did they say?

• 50:36Speaker 09

  They respond in what I think is the best possible way, like, the most unhinged way possible, which is they write a letter from the perspective of the bear, responding to the controversy. And so I'm just gonna read you part of that letter.

• 50:49PJ Vogt?

  Please, yes.

• 50:49Speaker 09

  Which The New York Times very helpfully translated in their article about the piece, because I do not read Chinese characters.

• 50:56PJ Vogt?

  Or speak bear.

• 50:56Speaker 09

  Or speak bear. The letter says, this is the bear, bear named Angela, apparently, speaking. The bear says, "Yesterday after work, I received a call from the park manager, asking me if I was slacking off and had a biped replace me. Much to my surprise, I'm just sitting in the mountains, and I go viral on the internet. Some people think I look too human when I stand up. It seems you really don't understand me. Previously, some visitors even thought I was too petite to be a bear. I want to emphasize again, I am a Malayan sun bear. Not a black bear, not a dog, a Malayan sun bear." I do think it's a little suspicious that they don't explicitly say that they're not a human.

• 51:33PJ Vogt?

  It's also weird they're, like, adding gas to the fire of it, being like, no, it's a real bear, but this is this joke where we wrote it from the perspective of the bear. Maybe they've understood that the controversy is selling zoo tickets.

• 51:43Speaker 09

  I think that's what's happening here. I think this is a brilliant PR move. I think this has actually generated more attendance to the zoo. People are, like, going to check out this definitely not a human bear at the zoo.

• 51:54PJ Vogt?

  That's a really good recommendation. Okay, so we're gonna put the video- Somebody on the newsletter complained about me plugging the newsletter too much. We're gonna put the video on the newsletter. I don't care.

• 52:03Speaker 09

  Throw it in the newsletter.

• 52:04PJ Vogt?

  Go subscribe to the newsletter, please. The point of this podcast is just so that people will receive emails.

• 52:09Speaker 09

  Without a doubt.

• 52:11PJ Vogt?

  Garrett, thank you.

• 52:12Speaker 09

  Thank you.

• 52:16Speaker 09

  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by PJ Vogt and Shruti Pennamaneni. It's produced by me, Garrett Graham, and Noah John. Theme and original composition by Armin Vazarian. Fact checking by Elizabeth Moss. Show art by Ali Moss, no relation. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leo Reese-Dennis. Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Richard Perrello, and John Schmidt. And to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Casey Clauser, Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hillary Schuff. Special thanks this week to Chris Jiang. Our agent is Orin Rosenbaum at UTA. Our social media is by the team at Public Opinion NYC.

• 53:00Speaker 09

  You can follow and listen to Search Engine with PJ Vogt now for free on the Odyssey app, on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.