May 20, 2022
Emily Hamilton Emily Hamilton is a Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Urbanity Project at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Emily’s research focuses on urban economics and land-use policy.
In this episode we talked about:
-Emily’s Bio & Background
-Land use regulation
-The evolution of zoning regulations
-Single Family Housing Ownership
-Housing Regulations Challenges
-Affordable Housing
-Rent Control
-Vacancy Decontrol
-Policy Restrictions
-Accessory Apartments
-BANANA - Build Absolutely Nothing -Anywhere Near Anybody
-Resources and Lessons Learned
Useful links:
Book: “Green Metropolis” by David Owen
https://www.mercatus.org/scholars/emily-hamilton
@ebwhamilton Twitter
Transcriptions:
Jesse (0s): Welcome to the working capital real estate podcast. My name is Jesper galley. And on this show, we discuss all things real estate with investors and experts in a variety of industries that impact real estate. Whether you're looking at your first investment or raising your first fund, join me and let's build that portfolio one square foot at a time. Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Jesper galley and you're listening to working capital the real estate podcast. My special guest today is Emily Hamilton. Emily is a senior research fellow and director of their abandon the project at the Mercatus center at George Mason university.
Emily's research focuses on urban economics and land use policy. And she joins us today to talk about housing in the United States and a little bit more broadly in general, in Canadian and other north American markets. Emily has, how's it going today?
Emily (48s): Good. Thanks for having me, Jessie.
Jesse (50s): Yeah. Thank you so much for, for joining the podcast for listeners that aren't, aren't familiar with your work at Emily. Maybe you could give us a little bit of a high level description of how you got into the space that you're in right now, as it pertains to, you know, economics land use policy and the like
Emily (1m 9s): Sure. Yeah, I'm an economist studying mostly the effects of land use regulations, local zoning roles and their effect on housing affordability. I first got interested in this policy area when I wound up in an internship in the planning department of my hometown in Colorado, before that I really had not been aware that all of these local zoning roles have such a large role of shaping what our cities and neighborhoods look like.
But once you learn about all the intricacies of rules, like parking requirements and height limits and setback requirements, it's really changes. I think how, how we see the built world around us.
Jesse (1m 60s): So I've always been fascinated with urban economics, as it relates to the work we do in commercial real estate. A triumph of the city was, was a book that was recommended to me a few years ago. I thought it was another interesting avenue into how these policies that you're describing or that you research play into the actions of individuals. And I guess economics in general, how that, how people kind of adapt and the incentives that we set up, how people use those incentives and collectively make certain decisions.
Maybe you could give us a little bit of a background of land use regulation in general. You know, we didn't invent the wheel and suddenly somebody is like, you need three meters or four feet to build a that there. So what was kind of the evolution of, of a lot of the modern policies that, that we see?
Emily (2m 49s): Sure. In the U S context, the first zoning regulation was implemented in New York city. There were land use regulations prior to the New York ordinance, but that's the first one that looks like what we think of as a complete zoning ordinance today. And that was in 1916 in New York. But when that went into effect, there were already people in other localities across the U S thinking about implementing these types of, of land use restrictions and the spread very quickly across the country.
After that land use ordinances started off being focused primarily on Euclidean zoning. So separating different types of land uses from each other, having office districts and industrial districts and residential districts, but got much more binding over time to the point that in the 1940s, fifties, sixties, we see much more focus on single family zoning and large lot single family zoning becoming the kind of defacto primary land use designation in, in localities across the country
Jesse (4m 15s): And the, the restrictions or the zoning itself. It sounds very similar to kind of the local environment that we have in, in my area in Toronto. But I think across the, across the country here and across the United States, the, the push for these different types of zonings at the, when they first started was the push primarily from a government standpoint, was it from a, you know, a developer standpoint who, what was the thrust or the lobbyists that were pushing for these initial zoning ordinances?
Emily (4m 47s): In the New York context, there was an organization called the fifth avenue commission that was made up primarily of the owners of very fancy department stores on fifth avenue. And they were concerned that garment workers who worked in factories, making clothing, primarily Jewish immigrants were spending too much time near their fancy department stores because these garment manufacturing buildings were right up next to these department stores because the manufacturers wanted to be able to see what was going on in the department stores.
You know, what, what do people want what's selling? What should we be making? So they pushed the, the fifth avenue commission pushed for zoning in an effort to prevent the factory workers from being, from working so close to where their stores were. And this is something that's really a common thread throughout zoning is we're separating land uses directly, but we're separating people on the basis of their income or whatever background factors people have indirectly.
Jesse (6m 7s): So you could sorry, go ahead.
Emily (6m 10s): Oh, no, no, please.
Jesse (6m 12s): So I was just going to say, you can have what seems to be an innocuous regulation that would have a disparate income on, on, you know, different types of people, different classes of people, like you said, income or, or other classifications.
Emily (6m 25s): Exactly. Yeah. Us lawyers refer to this as being facially neutral, that it doesn't look like these regulations are enforcing segregation on the basis of race or income, but they are indirectly. Hmm. And then following the fifth avenues commission or concurrent with the fifth avenues commissions work and efforts to implement this stoning ordinance in New York city, there was also a lot of work in the federal level led by the Hoover administration initially in the U S to support the adoption of zoning rules across the country.
And that really became ingrained in, in federal housing policy, following world war two, when the federal government limited its underwriting of mortgages to locations that implemented land use regulations that met with federal standards. And that included single-family zoning as one, one factor that the federal government saw as lowering risks of mortgage default.
Jesse (7m 50s): So I'm curious about that because there is one distinction. I mean, there's a few distinctions between the Canadian and us context when it comes to real estate. One of the big ones is the fact that if any main Freddie Mac, you have government agencies that do encourage home ownership, where in Canada or crown corporations, they don't encourage home ownership. They encourage affordable housing, a very European take of, of the U S version. I'm curious though that the impetus to have that type of housing policy or the result of that housing policy, I know through Bush, through Clinton, the percentage of home owners have, has gone up and down.
It's kind of, I think in the 70% area in that time, I'm not sure what it is today, but was there a reason that there was, there was such favoritism to single family housing and ownership in the states? Was that just something in the DNA, you know, as a country,
Emily (8m 46s): I wish I wish I had a better answer to why that is such an important part of housing policy in us history. Perhaps it goes all the way back to kind of Jeffersonian ideal. So a nation of landowners, but it, yes, it, it goes very far back in, in us housing policy that there is a federal objective of encouraging and subsidizing home ownership rather than the broader lens of government policies that support housing affordability, regardless of whether it's rented or owned.
Jesse (9m 33s): So like all regulation, I feel like most of the time it be gets more regulation and then that regulation gets more regulation. Where do you see the w what do you see the state of regulation? I didn't know. It's a huge question because there's so many different states with different regulation, but are there a couple areas that you focus in your research that you think these are, these are some of the biggest issues or the biggest challenges or problems with housing regulation in the states or land use regulations?
Emily (10m 5s): Yeah. Well, I think one place where we really see the, the issue of regulation, begetting more regulation is in inclusionary zoning. I'm not sure what that looks like, or if there's a comparable policy in Canadian cities, but in the U S it's becoming more and more common for localities to require a certain percentage of units in a new development to be affordable to households, making a certain level of income, is that being implemented in Canada.
Jesse (10m 39s): And I'm not sure if this would tie in. I find a lot of times they're similar things with different names, but a lot of, you know, if you're, if you are buying a, an apartment building, tearing it down and putting up condos, you have to rental replace that you have rental replacement there, as there is a certain percentage of new developments that need to be affordable housing, like you're saying, and then some, some good and not so good policy outcomes of that, you know, cause then it's, you know, sometimes you have the lottery system of people that, you know, how you determine what's affordable, not, and is not affordable sounds, you know, similar or scary sounds easy.
It's, you know, this amount of income, but then what happens when you have more people than, than units available. So, yeah, I think, I think we're, we're very similar on that front.
Emily (11m 25s): Yeah. What I've studied inclusionary zoning in the Washington DC region. And what I found is that localities that have adopted this policy have experienced faster rising market rate housing than what they could have expected without the policy. So this policy that's intended to help housing affordability is making the problem worse for all the households that don't get to benefit from the inclusionary zoning units.
And similarly, those are generally allocated by lottery here. I wouldn't say that inclusionary zoning is one of the primary regulations to worry about. I think that minimum lot size requirements and in general, having a very small amount of, of land area in many localities where multi-family housing can be built are, are the primary causes of housing affordability problems in the U S but we can just see with inclusionary zoning that the, as you say, regulation breeds more regulation and it becomes this web that gets harder and harder to untangle as opposed to tackling the exclusionary zoning rules more directly.
Jesse (12m 58s): Yeah, I was reading today. I think it is being proposed like usually very seemingly at least my point of view, not to get political, but seemingly radical ideas that our, our government has talked about. Basically not allowing or putting more a moratorium on foreign investment in real estate in Canada. And what I'm curious about is you have these regulations and the actually actual ability to create affordable housing. I'm not sure if you're aware of it, or if there are other American cities that are similar, but in Toronto we call it the shadow rental market, it's condo ownership and where somebody like you and I might buy a condo and rent that condo because a pretty insane stat to me is that 90% of the, or 85% of the rental stock in Toronto in the greater Toronto area, you know, 3 million in GT, even more people, 85% of that rental stock was built prior to 1990 or sorry, 1970.
So we have extremely old rental stock. We cannot build enough multi-family and it's reflected in the pricing. And when we put these government policies in, and this is where I think it's like a lot of U S cities where we put these government policies and, and say, you got to build a certain amount of affordable housing, but at the same time, you won't allow, you know, David and Janet that own a house just outside of Toronto, like have a rental in their basement. You know, that regulation is more cumbersome where you can call the one affordable housing, but you could easily say that you can unlock affordable housing and other ways from a regulatory standpoint, any thoughts on that?
Emily (14m 36s): Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes people in the U S call it capital a affordable housing. When we're talking about housing that is designated to be affordable to people, making a certain income level. Versus I often prefer to talk about housing affordability, which is just having an abundance of housing that fits within people's budgets comfortably and allows them to live in a place where they have access to their own best opportunities, as opposed to housing.
That's set aside on the basis of your exact income.
Jesse (15m 17s): Yeah. Now we had a Richard Epstein on from NYU. I think he's at Hoover now, but he was basically giving us a history of the New York rental or rent control. And it was at the time, I think we're right in the Biden presidency was talking about the eviction moratoriums and a lot of the listeners who are investors, you know, there's that frustration at that time. One thing I love about the states is that it's exactly that you have different states. If you like policies in Florida, you can go to Florida. If you like plot policies in Washington, you can go to Washington in the Canadian context.
We're pretty uniform when it comes to rent control. I'm pretty sure every province has some version of, of rent control policies. Has your work touched at all into kind of the, the actual policies as it pertains to landlord and tenants within, within locales?
Emily (16m 10s): No. I have not done a lot of research on tenant landlord law generally, or rent control more specifically, but I am familiar with, with some of the research, particularly in the bay area on rent control. What's been the case. There is, it seems that rent control does have benefits for reducing displacement among households in rent controlled apartments, unsurprisingly.
But this comes at the cost of reducing the overall supply of rental housing by both discouraging investment in new rental properties, and also encouraging the conversion of apartment buildings to condos. So sometimes when, when people are creating policy, they think that, well, as long as we don't apply rent control to new construction, we won't affect a supply, but there are always ways to reduce the supply of rental housing, if you give landlords a motivation to do so.
Jesse (17m 30s): Yeah, that has been, it's been a policy I know in some states, but also up here that, you know, that caveat, you know, we're going to have rent control or rent stabilization, but we're going to let you build, you know, new construction is not going to be it's, it's not going to apply to new construction. And for, from at least as best I can tell that really doesn't make developers feel, give them the warm and fuzzy, because it just gives them the idea that so wait, you can put that policy in place and take it away just as quickly.
Emily (17m 58s): Exactly. Yeah. Now there haven't been a couple of cases in the U S where reforms on the supply side have been paired with relatively liberal rent stabilization laws. So for example, the state of Oregon passed a statewide law that applies to many of its localities, replacing single families owning with two to four unit zoning, depending on the exact situation of the locality.
And that was paired with rent stabilization that I believe is limited to CPI the rate of inflation plus 5%. So that's pretty, you know, it's going,
Jesse (18m 46s): I was going to say, we would take that all day.
Emily (18m 48s): Yeah. Yeah. That's going to stand in the way of some rental increases that landlords would, would want to do, but not a lot. So it's relatively minor rent stabilization in exchange for liberalization of some local zoning rules.
Jesse (19m 8s): Yeah. It's always fascinating to me where, I mean, that example to me, I would, I would take that every day of the week with us right now, the way our rental stabilization works is that we are pretty much a CPI, inflation, inflator, or numbers, really all, you can raise it by. And the only time you could really mark to market your rents or, you know, have them, you know, if you had a tenant for a long time, that was under market, the only way you can move that up is if a tenant vacates. So you are pretty much stuck until you have a vacancy and to further complicate that once your tenant is done their term and they're on month to month, you can not just the victim if they choose to stay.
So we're in a weird position where, and I have, I have sympathy as a landlord, as an investor. I have sympathy for individuals and their security of having a, having a home and having a place. But it also, you know, like everything where the policy has to these outcomes that you don't expect. And, you know, part of that is, is maybe people not following the rules explicitly or doing other things because, you know, they're, they're not investing in upgrades to their buildings and, and the likes.
So yeah, it's, it's definitely one of those complicated things, but we would definitely, we would definitely take that over kind of what we have right now, which is, I think as of 20, 22, this year, we're allowed to raise rent 1.2%. So, I mean, you look at the world that's kind of happening around us. It's not, it's not a really significant increase. Yeah.
Emily (20m 46s): Yeah. New York state recently reformed their rent control policy and set big limits on vacancy decontrol. And one thing that we're seeing now in New York city is some building owners are requiring new tenants to go through brokers and to pay a several thousand dollar fee to, to start renting an apartment.
So it's kind of like key money from, from the old day.
Jesse (21m 22s): Yeah. And for those that don't know, when you say vacancy decontrol, you're talking about what, what kind of, I was alluding to there that, that when a, a unit becomes vacant, you can now capture that higher rent with a Newton. Is that right?
Emily (21m 36s): That's right. Yes. There are still some conditions. I believe where with a certain level of renovations buildings can, or units can go back up to, to market rate, but there, it's very difficult now to increase rates even when, when you get a new tenant in New York city.
Jesse (22m 0s): Yeah. And in fairness, I should, I should have been clear. You reminded me, we call them AGI as above guideline increases. You have to show that you've done enough work that, you know, shows that we can raise above the posted guideline. But it's funny you say key money. I mean, that is exactly what I'm talking about from, from an economics point of view where a very similar thing it was, I'm not sure if you're familiar, but in, on the brokerage side, when office real estate was really crazy, three, four years ago, and people tenants or couldn't find space fast enough, we were, I think 1.7% vacant.
What started to happen was subleases where most institutional landlords don't allow you to profit. Once they achieved their rent, they couldn't profit. So suddenly furniture that would probably cost 5,000 was costing 500,000. So, you know what I mean? It would be like one of those things where, okay, here's the lease deal. And here's the side agreement for furniture for a hundred thousand. And it's really, you look at the value of furniture is pretty much nil after it gets used for seven years.
Emily (22m 59s): Right? Exactly. And one thing we see in the U S context is that the places where rent stabilization laws and tenant protections more broadly are the strongest regions like New York, Boston, San Francisco, these are probably the parts of the country where it's worst to be a tenant or someone looking for a new apartment, even though on paper, it might look like they offer a lot of benefits to tenants.
Jesse (23m 33s): Yeah, no, that's a great point. It's again, it really goes back to a lot of these policies. I find it, you know, anytime a government policy happens, I feel like there should be a committee that just analyzes the things that you don't expect to be an implication of the policy, because oftentimes it seems like the exact opposite is the outcome of the intent.
Emily (23m 53s): Yeah, definitely.
Jesse (23m 54s): So why don't we move? We move over to a little bit of on the policy side, the work that you do, you know, you're, you're looking at urban economics, you're looking at land use regulation from a policy prescription outcome. Are there certain things that you think are more effective than others or certain things that you've researched that you find is in the literature that is really a path forward for, you know, for the states or, you know, by, by extension other markets?
Emily (24m 26s): Yeah. In the U S there's been a lot of recent focus on allowing a little bit more density in single family neighborhoods. And with very good reason, as we talked about this is often the largest zoning designation at least of a residential land in us cities. And we, we talked about its history of being a tool for segregating residents on the basis of their income directly and by race or background indirectly.
But in, in some cases it's difficult for, to, to craft these reforms in such a way that they actually lead to a lot of new housing getting built. So for example, there's been a lot of work to permit accessory dwelling units in the U S this has been really successful in some cases in Los Angeles, perhaps most notably following a lot of state-level reforms that required localities across California to make it easier to build accessory dwelling units.
They're really taking off in LA and in some other parts of the state, but we see a lot of accessory dwelling unit knit ordinances at both the state and the local level that are not getting units built because they place a lot of limits on how these units can be built. And in some cases make it really hard to finance these units.
I am more optimistic about reducing minimum lot size as a tool to get more housing being built in, in areas that are currently zoned for single family housing relative to allowing ADU or duplexes or triplexes or fourplexes on these lots in part, because there are so many ways to make it difficult to build those additional units on a lot.
And in part, because I'm reducing minimum lot size and allowing a single lot to be subdivided into more, lots fits very naturally with a lot of home builders and home buyers or renters model as compared to something like ADU use or duplexes that are going to require some changes to the, the home building industry and what people are expecting.
Not that those, those changes would be bad by any extent, I think duplexes are wonderful, just they're not, they haven't been proven to lead to a lot of new housing construction in the U S context in many cases.
Jesse (27m 32s): So I'm curious about that when you say the, the minimum lot size, a lot of the regulation that we have. I mean, one, when you want to say, add density to a site, a lot of times, you know, parking requirements, you may need a variance. You may need to actually go to a committee of adjustments. Then the other piece of it is, you know, certain areas will have X time coverage that they're allowed to have on a certain site. So when you say reduce the lot size, and are you talking, so you have this single family, you know, say it's half an acre, are we talking about severances where you could separate and have different uses for that for different severed pieces?
Emily (28m 10s): Yes. In, in the U S context, it's usually called subdivision. So splitting that say half acre, lot into, you know, four, 5,000 square foot lots.
Jesse (28m 25s): Okay. And, and that, so just to back up your first point there on accessory apartments, I think we've one of the first rental properties I bought was in close to the university of Waterloo for, for anybody that's, it's about an hour and a half west of Toronto. And I remember we had an accessory apartment attached to the single family home. And I remember, you know, we have other apartment buildings that we own now, but I remember at the time that I had to do more to get that approved, or like the annual maintenance on that of fire code, exit egress, you know, the, the licensing fee for that accessory apartment unit.
But I guess the alternative is, is worse. If you, if you don't even have, we're not even allowed to actually have the accessory apartments.
Emily (29m 11s): Right. Certainly I live in Washington DC and here the big barrier on building accessory apartments is that the natural place to put them is in the basements of DC row houses. But there have to be a certain ceiling height met in order for a basement to be a legal place for one of these, even if it has like its own front door, it is, seems to be the perfect location for a little, but if the ceiling's not tall enough, it won't get permitted there.
And it costs over a hundred thousand dollars generally to dig out the basement to raise the ceiling height, which is just a lot of investment in what we want to see as an easy, low cost way to add a housing unit.
Jesse (30m 3s): Yeah. I think it gets back to the parental aspect of government. It's. I mean, I come from the commercial real estate world, so it's easy for me to say, we're so used to this idea of contracting adults. You know, if I want a five foot ceiling, you know, I have signed an agreement for five foot ceiling, but, you know, I always picture like John Stossel and like 2020 when I was a kid where like, you know, you've got to protect the consumer. So there's like this balance of individuals that, you know, the governments that wants to protect, but also have the ability to have consumer demand be met, whatever that demand is.
Emily (30m 36s): Certainly. Yeah. And I think there's very much a role for governments to set some safety standards in housing, particularly with things that are hard to observe, like, you know, the, the building being, being sound, not at risk of collapse or anything, but with things like ceiling Heights, that's very easy for a prospective tenant to observe assuming they can, can visit the, the apartment where at least the landlord would be required to disclose ceiling Heights below a certain height.
But that's something that people can very much decide if it's worth it to them to save some money on rent by having an apartment that's maybe not as ideal as, as all of us would like, or if they want to pay more to live elsewhere.
Jesse (31m 35s): Yeah. I, it just gets back to this idea of the government is so, so far removed from, you know, when you have a regulation that says this, this, this, that needs to be two inches taller to conform to, to, you know, to the rules in that area. And you know, on the other side, you have a mechanic in that shop saying, I work here every day. This is the way it should be, or that is acceptable. You know, for that context, I wanted to touch base on this before, before we end the podcast, what is the state of, well, I've heard a new one.
I don't know if I was listening to you on the podcast, but nimbyism not in my backyard. This kind of, you know, seems to be every, no matter what city you go to, there's some aspect of this, but was it you, that was talking about banana?
Emily (32m 20s): I'm not sure
Jesse (32m 21s): You're
Emily (32m 22s): Familiar, familiar with,
Jesse (32m 23s): Could you, could you define that or just tell our listeners what that term means?
Emily (32m 27s): Yes. A banana means build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone. And we, we see this, Catherine Einstein is a professor in, in the Boston area and she and her colleagues wrote a great book called neighborhood defenders, which talks about nimbyism going beyond just people, opposing things, right near their house in their almost literally in their backyard or that are, are going to have a big effect on their immediate area and moving towards the broader goal of, of stopping development more broadly, when we see demands for things like growth caps on a locality's general population as a whole, that gets into banana territory,
Jesse (33m 26s): Go ahead. Caps. I've actually never heard of that term. Is that the, for the actual, like the real estate stock or, or the individual amount of people? Okay.
Emily (33m 35s): Stock of housing, Boulder, Colorado has a famous one here.
Jesse (33m 40s): Wow. So the, okay, so the nimbyism piece, I live in an area in Toronto that is if 30 years ago, or even less than that, it was a very industrial area, not particularly great in terms of crime. This is in the east end of Toronto. And now it is a very bougie area you're in queen east. It's kind of, a lot of boutique shops are in this area. And it seems like the individuals that were living there 20, 25 years ago slowly shifted more and more east and are kind of getting to that point where 15 years ago, a lot of people that moved into this area, they wanted the inexpensive housing, but now, you know, they want it built for them.
But now that it's built for them, they don't want any more building for them. So how do we, you know, what is the solution to these type of PO or these types of outcomes, because it's just seems no matter what happens when you go into an area and gentrify, it just seems that the people that end up getting comfortable in that area, you know, it, then the buck stops with them from their point of view.
Emily (34m 44s): Yes, certainly a problem in, in many us cities as well. I think the, the solution is to move land, use decisions up to higher levels of government, perhaps a provincial level in Canada, because when land use decisions are made, particularly at a neighborhood level, the, the benefits of new housing being built are very far off.
They're not going to go to the people who live in that neighborhood. They're going to go to the people who are going to live in say a new apartment building, who, who knows where they live right now. And they're going to go to the people who build the apartment building and firms who can hire workers, because they have a place to live that they can afford in that area. Whereas at the local level, the costs of housing construction are very visible and highly concentrated in the people, particularly who live right next to that new development.
So at higher levels of, of government, it, it's easier for people to see that we need new housing and we need to weigh the benefits of that new housing against the costs, not just consider the costs alone.
Jesse (36m 7s): You know, that's, that's pretty fascinating in that if, if you're a more free market oriented kind of person in real estate, and it's very counterintuitive to you because it's almost like you for, for most decisions, at least from my kind of my view is that it's better to have it at the, at the most granular level. But it sounds like in this case, it's, it's kind of similar to political capture that yes, that is the case. You should have it granular, except once these people move in, they're captured by their own, whatever it is, like the, they, they just, they don't want any more.
And it's, I think it's a very human thing. You know, they have their, their situation, but, you know, when it, before they moved in yeah. Build, you know, for my house that is in that area. So it seems like it's almost, it is like a bit of capture that the people that end up moving to these areas and gentrifying them, they don't want anything else to happen after, you know, they, they close on their dealer, you know, they're living there for a few years.
Emily (37m 3s): Yeah, that's right. And what we've seen with some state level reforms in the U S is state governments setting limits on the extent to which local governments can block housing construction. So essentially the state government is protecting individual property owners rights from some local level limits. So in a way it's devolving decision-making to an even more local level down to the individual property owner.
Jesse (37m 35s): Yeah. That's great. It's also this idea of like a lot of these, these groups that are consider themselves these kind of community activist groups, oftentimes politically are left leaning. And that's one of the things that triumph of the city I thought was, was so compelling in that book was talking about how, how much more green cities are to rural areas. It's very counterintuitive because when somebody thinks of the city, I think of the godfather reunion was just, or a series was on TV. And I, to your point of Jewish immigrants, Italians, too, where you look at these tenements in New York, that's what you think of, oh, it must be a very polluted, very bad area.
Where if you look at the output, I guess, per acre of, of greenhouse gas emissions, it's much, much worse outside of the city.
Emily (38m 22s): Yes, that's right. And unfortunately, in, in the U S I'm sure in Canada, too, the places where carbon emissions per person are lowest, are also places where it's extremely difficult to build more housing and therefore extremely difficult for more people to live in these places where they would be using less carbon.
Jesse (38m 46s): Yeah. And, and we have, we have a lot of things in land is one of them, but yeah, it would definitely be, be the case as well. Well, I want to be mindful of the time here before we let our guests go. We typically ask four questions, they're softballs, so don't worry. And, and then we'll, we'll, we'll connect our listeners to wherever they can kind of reach out to find your work and go from there. So if you're okay, I'll kick us off.
Emily (39m 12s): Yeah. Sounds good.
Jesse (39m 14s): So since you're in the academic space as well, maybe this will pertain not just to the real estate industry, but what's your advice for younger individuals that want to get into our industry, and maybe let's focus it on a, on a academic point of view, a academic stream. If somebody wants to get into research or wants to get into the type of work you do, you know, what, what type of things would you encourage them to do while they're, you know, say pre pre college or in college?
Emily (39m 41s): I would definitely recommend internships in, so either in the field where they want to work, or if they're interested in, in academia in say a think tank or in working with a professor, for example, at their university over the summer, both as a, a good way to make the connections that they would need to get a job in that field later. And as a way to, to try it out without making a big commitment, like signing up for grad school.
Jesse (40m 19s): Yeah. Which is which that is a, what is a podcast or book that you are really digging or recommending right now?
Emily (40m 27s): Well, on the topic of the environmental efficiency of urban living, I'd recommend the green metropolis by David Owen
Jesse (40m 38s): Pretty much. Okay. And we'll put a link up to that. One thing that you know, now in your career, whether it's business real estate academics, that you wish you knew when you, when you started out,
Emily (40m 53s): I wish that I had gotten more involved in Twitter earlier in my career. Housing. Twitter is such a great resource for, for learning about the industry. Particularly from, from my standpoint, as I'm reading, I'm studying the effects of land use regulations. It's really helpful to be able to follow home builders, infill developers on Twitter and see how these regulations are affecting their work.
Jesse (41m 26s): You're also in Washington DC, which I think Twitter is just table stakes. Okay. Emily first car make and model
Emily (41m 34s): Honda accord.
Jesse (41m 35s): Oh, that was a quick answer. Perfect. I feel like that question. I always ask that because I w I like Barry Ritholtz on a master's of business and Bloomberg, and that's the last question. And it's funny how we're now phasing into the point where people are like, that's a bit of an offensive question, like with the younger generation, as we're getting to the point where, like, we, we don't drive cars, so I'm like
Emily (41m 56s): No longer on a car.
Jesse (41m 58s): Oh, there you go. Fair enough. So Emily work in people reach out aside from a Google search to, to take a look at your work or, you know, see what you're up to.
Emily (42m 8s): Well, by most of my work is available@mercatus.org, where I have a scholar page and links to my, my research in shorter form writings there. And as I mentioned, I am very into housing, Twitter, and I'm on there at E B w Hamilton.
Jesse (42m 27s): My guest today has been Emily Hamilton, Emily, thanks for being part of working capital.
Emily (42m 32s): Thanks so much, Jesse.
Jesse (42m 35s): Thank you so much for listening to working capital the real estate podcast. I'm your host, Jesse for galley. If you liked the episode, head on to iTunes and leave us a five star review and share on social media, it really helps us out. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on Instagram, Jesse for galley, F R a G a L E, have a good one take care.