July 8, 2025 • 32 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
It's that time, time, Time, Time, Luck and Load from
Michael Very Show is.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
On the air, disturbing allegations about a Q sex trafficker
Jeffrey Epstein and members of his social circle. Those allegations
come from newly unsealed documents from a now settled court
case against Epstein associate Elaine Maxwell. A woman claims that
Maxwell groomed her to be a sex slave to Epstein
and was trafficked to some of his most powerful associates.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
The training started immediately, give Jeffrey what he wants. A
lot of his training came from Helen herself and being
a woman. It kind of surprises you that a woman
could actually let stuff like that happen, but only let
it happen. But so groom you into doing.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
These power players a priority for us right now? Can
we even touch them?
Speaker 3 (01:04):
No?
Speaker 4 (01:04):
It's like everything you know, it hides in plane site.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Epstein was hiding in plane side.
Speaker 4 (01:10):
We all knew about him, we all knew what he
was doing, but we had no one that would.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Go after him. They were afraid of him. For whatever reason,
they were afraid.
Speaker 5 (01:18):
The airplane that we flew on for this humanitarian mission
was owned by Jeffrey Epstein and to then learn, oh,
he was actually on some of those flights, and this
Maxwell woman was on some of those flights.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
I didn't know him. I've never spent any time with him.
Speaker 5 (01:36):
I was with the Clinton Foundation people, That's who I
was with.
Speaker 6 (01:41):
She told me everything, she had pictures, she had everything.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
She wasn't hiding for twelve years.
Speaker 5 (01:45):
We convinced her to come out.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
We convinced her to talk to us.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
It was unbelievable what we had Clinton, We had everything.
Speaker 6 (01:52):
There's no question executives ABC protected Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Why do you think they did that?
Speaker 4 (01:57):
Well because their star anchor's name is George Stepanopolis. And
of course George Stepanopolis worked as Bill Clinton's communications director
at the White House. And when was all of this
information being given to Amy Orbak at ABC? When did
she bring all of this to her executives to say
we should put this on the air. Oh, right before
a twenty sixteen presidential election, when Hillary Clinton was running
(02:19):
on the Democratic ticket.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
At the time.
Speaker 6 (02:21):
Amy Robach took this story to her superiors and they said,
I don't know who Jeffrey Epstein is. His name was
already all over the News is a convicted sexophone.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (02:29):
One of the things you've been talking about on your
show is your allegation that government officials are eighteen in
paraphia child trafficking.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
From the degree of Jodren right by me, like what
Jeffrey Epstein did, Clo. I love this country so much,
and like you, I will passionately argue for the best
policies for it. You know, sometimes I'm probably like the
(03:00):
dad in the stands at the little league game my
kids pitching. I think every pitch is a strike, and
when the ump doesn't call it, I'm mad at him.
But when my kid's batting and takes a pitch, I
think every pitch is outside And why on earth what
you call that a strike? What are you blind? I'm
(03:24):
sure I get it wrong. I'm not Rush. He was
not a nine point six. Sometimes you go up to
nine nine point eight. I'm not Rush, but I do worry.
I worry that there are people There were some mistakes
made in Trump's first administration that were against his better judgment.
(03:47):
But the president, this guy's seventy nine years old, and
yet he keeps a tougher schedule than anybody I know.
President works his tail off, but he can't do everything.
There are very powerful, very influential, very rich, and not
just Americans, people who have the ear of other people
(04:14):
who have Donald Trump's ear. You know, if a guy
is trying to cut a deal because he knows Trump
won't be present forever and he wants to get hired
by this company or this country afterwards, he's not going
to say, mister President, and I'm for this because I
want to make money as soon as I leave out
(04:34):
of here. I want to cut a deal now. But
he's going to do it. And it worries me because
every king, every prime minister, every CEO needs good counselors,
good conciliaries, good advisors, trusted advisors. And I worry we
(04:58):
have some folks who have insinuated themselves into Trump's inner circle,
just as we had folks who did that in the
first administration. That's how we ended up with Operation Warp Speed.
That's how we ended up with Jacqueline Burk's That's how
Fauci was kept when he should have been fired. That's
how Christopher Ray was kept when he should have been fired.
(05:19):
And you can say, oh, Michael, you're speaking ill of Trump.
Wait a minute. When I spoke ill of Christopher Ray
when he was Trump's FBI direct I had people who said,
you have never liked Trump. You hide it well, but
you're just and I said, that's not true. I didn't
like Trump when he was running. I think he's done
an amazing job. His own lawyer, Michael Cohen turned against him.
(05:43):
I didn't. I am a big supporter. I think he's
doing a great job. But I don't think that whether
a decision that is made personnel or policy is good
or bad simply based on what Trump says and a
lot of people do well. Trump said, it's got to
be true, but you have to understand there were mistakes
(06:04):
made in the first term, and they were against Trump's gut.
He trusted people as you have to do. I'm saying
there are some snakes that come out at night. As
Charlie Pride said, I'm gonna play you this clip. I
thought we were going to deport, right, I thought we
were going to deport I want you to listen to
(06:26):
this clip from over the weekend and you decide maybe
I'm at fault. This is five oh for Jim.
Speaker 8 (06:32):
And we're working on legislation right now.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Susie right.
Speaker 8 (06:36):
We're working on legislation right now where farmers look ain't
no better.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
They work with him for years. He had cases that
were not here.
Speaker 8 (06:44):
But just even over the years where people have worked
for a farm on a farm for fourteen fifteen years
and they get thrown out pretty viciously, and we can't
do it. We got to work with the farmers and
people that have hotels and leisure properties to We're gonna
work with them, and we're gonna very.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Strong and smart, and we're going to put you in charge.
We're going to make you responsible.
Speaker 8 (07:04):
And I think that that's going to make a lot
of people happy. Now, serious radical right people who I
also happen to like a lot. They may not be
quite as happy, but they'll understand, won't they. Do you
think so, Madame Secretary, to look at you with a
white hat on, do you think they'll understand that you're.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
The one that brought this whole situation up.
Speaker 8 (07:23):
We're going to be changing the name of the Gulf
of Mexico.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
To the Gulf of Ritt and Michael Berry.
Speaker 9 (07:29):
Which has a beautiful lay.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
On a Sunday back in May, I was sitting out
in the afternoon with my wife. We were having coffee
and I came across I don't remember which paper was
Wall Street Journal, New York. It was Wall Street Johnale.
I came across a piece entitled Perfect Communities Review the
Abundant Life in Levittown. It was a book review of
(07:56):
a book by a fellow named Edward Berenson, and the
book is called Perfect Communities. Levitt Levittown town named after him,
types of town named after him, and the dream of
white suburbia caught my attention. The subheading was to build
affordable homes on a mass scale. William Levitt sought cost
cutting measures and fought political battles. And it was written
(08:19):
by Edward Glazer at Harvard University. I reached out to him.
Our schedules haven't meshed, but today they have, and I
am delighted to have him with us. I thought it
was a very very interesting piece because it covers something
that I am quite interested in, and that is, in
today's world, you will see a lot of folks talking
(08:41):
about the myth of home ownership, home ownership slipping outside
the grasp of the average American blackrock buying up homes
or building homes only for the sake of renting. You've
got interest rates in the mid to high sixes, but
on your credit could be higher, whereas I'm locked in
low twos. Makes a big difference on the same house.
(09:03):
All of these things conspiring together to make home ownership,
which we all agree is is good for society. Every
data point will tell you lower crime, higher performance, better
nuclear stability, all nuclear family stability. Home ownership is great.
Why can't we build homes that are affordable? I don't
(09:24):
mean affordable housing as a governmental subsidy. I mean why
can't we build homes that people can own that are affordable?
And this fellow tried to do it. There was a
book written about it, and Edward Glazer has written a
review of that. I've asked him to join us to
discuss Edward Glazer, welcome to the program.
Speaker 9 (09:42):
Thank you so much for having me on. And I'm
always happy to discuss housing.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Yeah, it's a fascinating subject. I was reading about you
and you seem to be a proponent of something that
I have argued in favor of, which, considering I'm a
right wing nut, surprises people. That is an urban density.
I was the mayor pro tim in the City of
Houston during the two thousands, and my great frustration was
(10:08):
people wanted public transit, they wanted a rail system, they
wanted everything that requires density. But every time a single
family home in one of the historic neighborhoods, not a
historic home, but a single family home was torn down
and three town homes put on that five thousand square
foot lot, they said, it's ruining the neighborhood. And I said,
you want things that require density, but you do everything
(10:30):
you can to regulate against density. And so your seeming
advocacy of greater density in the urban environment as a
better use of space seemed to me very interesting. So
I've diverged a little, but there you go. Absolutely.
Speaker 9 (10:48):
So let me rephrase what you're in favor of to
make it clear that it is, in fact a perfectly
reasonable right wing thing to be in favor of, which
is your in favor of freedom. You're in favor of
someone who owns a plot of land in downtown Houston
being able to densify that land if she or he
feels like they want to do that, And that's always
(11:08):
what I've advocated. I mean, I do see lots of
positive things about density. There are lots of great things
about it, but I don't see any reason why the
public sector needs to artificially subsidize it. What I think
is that people should be able to add density to
their lots. You know, I wrote an article almost twenty
years ago called Houston, New York has a Problem two
thousand and eight City Journals, where I held up your
(11:30):
Houston if you're talking about the problems there, which from
a national perspective, Houston is like an affordable housing dream,
and I like, you mean, affordable is just the market
rate being low enough so that ordinary people can buy,
not some extra government program. But you know, in two
thousand and eight and two thousand and seven, I just
went through I just wanted to make New Yorkers understand, right,
(11:50):
why so many people were moving to Texas, why so
many people were moving to Houston, and the difference in
quality of life, right for a young couple doing kind
of thing more things, earning a bit more in New York,
but the housing costs just ate up everything, and they
were sort of scraping by right in New York. Right,
they were living this sort of perilous life of trying
(12:11):
to figure out a three hour commute to get something,
Whereas in Houston they were living solidly middle class lives.
There's kids were going to decent schools, they were eating
out at decent but affordable restaurants, and you know, it
was just night and day. I must say I came
away from that more amazed why everyone had moved to
Texas rather than why so many people had. But Texas
(12:31):
is really still the national leader in terms of making
it relatively easy to build. And you know, when you
think about the past thirty years, I just wrote a
paper with my long term colleague Joe Jerko on this
for Brookings. You know, many of your sundalt competitors that
were housing supply superstars, like Atlanta and Miami and Phoenix,
(12:52):
all of them have started to fall down on the
job right. All of them started to make it harder
and harder to build in medium density areas, and as
a con quint, they'd become.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Far less affordable.
Speaker 9 (13:02):
Texas has slowed down, but it's slowed down by left.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
You know. Professor Edward Glazer of Harvard University as our guest.
He wrote a review of the book Perfect Communities, levitt
Levittown and The Dream of Dream of White Suburbia and
I promise we will get to the book in case
anyone was wonder if there was going to be a payoff,
just a quick anecdote. So I came out of law school.
I got two law degrees because I thought I would
want to teach law. After I practiced, and I realized
(13:29):
that I wanted to do deals. I didn't want to
write the paper for them, So I went out and
started buying apartment complexes on on credit, owner financed. I
had no cash. I was just cobbling together deals and
to pay the bills. I started a real estate brokerage
for him, and having been a lawyer, all my clients
came from law school classmates who had gone to other places,
(13:52):
and then when they had somebody that was moving to Houston,
that'd go, oh, I have a buddy who's a real
estate broker there. And it was amazing to me to
see the look on the face of people from particularly
San Francisco, New York, and Boston. Those were the big three,
and they would come to town. Now, this was the
late nineties, so that this number sounds bigger than was
bigger than than it is today. But they would have
(14:13):
between four and six hundred thousand dollars, and I'd say,
all right, I'll take you out to view seven to
ten different properties in that price range, some townhomes, some
single families, some inner loops, some out and they couldn't
believe that they could live right next to downtown in
a two year old town home, absolutely outfitted with everything.
(14:34):
And they'd say, you know, in San fran Boston, New York,
I'd have an eighth floor walk up, which means, for
those of you who don't know, means you don't have
an elevator, an eighth floor walk up of four hundred
feet a peer to tear, and I can have all
this here. They couldn't believe it, And that's a game changer.
That's a life changer for people completely.
Speaker 9 (14:56):
I came to write my book Trying for the City
about fourteen years ago, where where we all I also
discussed thee I have a whole chapter that's basically about
the Woodlands that just walks through sort of the amazing
transformation that sort of actually being able to build that
scale means in terms of your ability to just deliver
both house and community to ordinary people.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
For Edward Glazer is our guest from Harvard University. We're
going to talk about this book, Perfect Communities, Levitt, Levittown
and the Dream of White Suburbia. I don't care if
somebody decy strikes shoe. You can't shoot Michael. It's been
booked off us are Edward Glazier of Harvard University. Writes
(15:36):
on things related to housing, particularly the free market of
housing and how housing is priced and where we live
and density and things like this, which is one of
along with transportation, and they go, they go hand in
glove is one of my great interests in life when
(15:58):
it comes to policy. He has written a review of
a book called Perfect Communities, Levitt, Levittown in the Dream
of White Suburbia by Edward Berenson, and you talk in
the in your review, Professor Glazer treat home building like
any other form of manufacturing, which gets cheaper with vertical integration,
(16:19):
mechanization and assembly lines. Typically, mister Berenson writes, a middleman bought, say,
lumber from a lumber mill and then sold it to
the builder, marking up the price along the way. But
Levitt had a vertical integration. Why have we not been able?
I mean I looked to boxable, I had their Ceo
Taramini on some time ago, and know, if you know
(16:41):
about them, it's a manufactured home. Everybody's trying to get
into a truly made I don't mean a trailer, a
mobile home. A manufactured home that can be plopped down
and then you plummet and tie into to the electrical lines.
Why has no one been able to do that? Professor Glazer.
Speaker 9 (17:00):
So, I fundamentally think this is about local land use regulation.
I you know, in other work of mine with Leo Demico,
Joe Jericho, Bill Kerr, and JACKI mal Ponsetto, we've traveled
the last one hundred and thirty years and try to
look at housing productivity in the US, and what you
see is kind of a stagnant period nineteen hundred to
nineteen forty, and then nineteen forty to nineteen seventy, the
(17:23):
age of Bill Levit, the age in which like we
were starting, we're building massive projects and there was real
technological innovation. Like productivity went way up. Since the nineteen seventies,
it's gone way down. And you know, if you compare
houses and cars, like.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
We could do a lot more cars per worker.
Speaker 9 (17:39):
Now than we were able to in the nineteen seventies,
but we're doing fewer houses per per worker. And I
think this is all about projects getting smaller and smaller,
the firms getting smaller and sptant. You know, more than
fifty percent of America's employment that's working on residential construction
is in firms with fewer than ten workers. Just just
(18:00):
let that think in fewer than ten workers, right, as
opposed to sort of every other major industry where the
majority of workers are in establishments with more than five
hundred workers. You know what firms with seven workers don't have.
They don't have research and development departments. They don't have
the kind of scale that would enable you to invent
the technologies that would remake the future. And it's precisely
because every community has decided they want to micro manage
(18:23):
every little project, right that we don't have the ability
to sort of just build at scale. And I think,
you know, you could imagine lots of things that would
break that, one of which we would be state wide
as of right zoning for particular models and manufactured house. Right.
The more that you created that process, the more individual
producers would say, oh, I'm going to come up with
something great, because they can put these down all over
(18:46):
Texas if I managed to get the state wide approval
to put in my manufacturer home, my modular home.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
So there was a lot of highbrow academic wordage verbiage
there that I want to make sure that we cut
through to the guide driving home from work. I think
it is very important, and that is you know why
if you want to especially in this, I know you
probably want to stay away from from political ideology. But
(19:18):
for the white liberal urban intellectual who says, you know,
housing is not affordable inside the urban core anymore, well,
damn it. That's mostly the part of the government. And
that's the part that frustrates me so much, is that
you cannot convince people of this having served on city
(19:39):
council as a mayor pro tem of a city, the
largest city that doesn't have zoning, although we do have
a lot of deed restrictions and we do have a
lot of regulations and more now than we did when
I was there, But dead gummet, it's the government that's
actually it's a local government that's actually causing the problem,
and that you cannot get people to understand.
Speaker 9 (20:00):
It's you know, it's been I've been fighting on this
for twenty five years. Twenty five years, I've been fighting
for the cause of helping people to understand that the
ultimate villaineer is local land use regulation. And you know,
one of the points I think of Levitt, the reason
why the Levit story is interesting. He's not really the
nicest guy in the world. But you know that doesn't
matter because, like you know, as Adam Smith said tw
(20:23):
hundred and fifty years ago, you know, we depend on
self interest to make things work. And you know, he
was just a businessman. He did great stuff, and he
managed to pull the price of the price of housing down,
whereas all of the people who seem kind of saintly
were saying, oh, let's protect this thing, let's protect that
preservation thing, right, all of them. You know what they are,
They're the architects of scarcity because they're working through regulation,
(20:45):
they're stopping down the forces of competition and greed. Quite honestly,
that actually lead to the construction of large scale affordable housing.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
You have a very interesting delivery style where I'd love
to be Do you teach in the classroom? You back, Okay,
I didn't know. If it was pure scholarship, it would
be fascinating to sit through your courses because you have
this interesting elocution where you race and then you completely
(21:21):
punctuate to a stop. It's halting. It's interesting. It would
be I need to read more of your writing because
you have great discipline. You can kind of turn on
a dime. You probably didn't ask for an elocution review,
but that's what you're getting now. It is very interesting,
Professor Glazer, that we can't seem to accomplish this, and yet,
(21:46):
you know, to his credit, George W. Bush tried. It
ended up being a bust. You ended up having a
bunch of liar loans, and you ended up giving tax
benefits to people to own who had no business owning,
and you had people with terrible credit trying to own,
and then people buying multiple homes, and you had the
two thousand and eight mortgage bust. But what is the answer.
(22:07):
I'm going to make you king for the day. There
are no political implications. You don't need anyone else's sign on.
How do we create an environment where the private market
creates housing that is plentiful and affordable in the urban
core of our major cities.
Speaker 9 (22:26):
Clarity, simplicity, you know, everything being as of right, right,
so you know, and making sure the as of right
density levels are sufficiently high, so you know. You want
something where developments can come in and can know I
can start building like tomorrow if my building conforms to
the following free thing. It's the delays, it's the lawsuits,
(22:49):
it's all that stuff that makes it so difficult to
build and leads developers to both build only for the
rich and build much smaller projects. So you really want
to make sure that whatever your code is is incredibly clear,
incredibly simple, and targeted towards smart things right, which means
you want to make sure the buildings are reasonably safe,
and you want to make sure you know the uses
(23:11):
aren't deeply harmful for the people of living you by.
But that's a really small set of things that would
would fall if out of those those rules. Just make
it simple, make it fast, make it dense.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
You do realize that every listener is now carefully studying
your delivery and your halting pattern as punctuation to see
if there was any merit to what I said. Professor
Edward Laser of Harvard University is our guest. He happens
to be an expert in something that is a great
academic interest of mine, and that is the housing market.
(23:45):
How we build, where we build, how much it costs.
Will continue our conversation, which I don't know if you
folks are enjoying it, but I should grease your job.
Would use that tone to me, not a joe.
Speaker 8 (23:55):
That's sarcastic, contemptuous tone that means you know everything because
you're a man.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Then I know nothing because I'm a woman.
Speaker 9 (24:02):
That is not a joke.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
That is a natural fact. The Michael Very Show. This
is kind of a Kevin Bacon multiple degree removed. Professor
Edward Glazier is a professor and scholar at Harvard University
who writes about housing. He wrote a review in The
Wall Street Journal back in May which I thoroughly enjoyed
(24:26):
on a Sunday afternoon. The review was of a book
by Edward Berenson about a fellow named Levitt? Did you
keep up with all that? The book is called Perfect Communities?
Should you want to buy it? Levitt? Levitt Town, Levittown
and the Dream of White Suburbia? Professor Glazer, what do
(24:47):
you take from all this? This man like Edison? You know,
the great failure as I see it, of Thomas Edison
was the thing he really wanted to accomplish was these
homes that he could, you know, take with a and
drop down. He just didn't have the delivery mechanism. Could
he could create it. What do you take of this effort?
I don't know if you're aware of Teramini's company Boxable
(25:10):
to create a unit that you could build and then
drop on site. I love it.
Speaker 9 (25:17):
I think that would be tremendous, right, I mean, I
think the more that we can use the magic of
mass production to make things cheaper, more fish and more beautiful, right,
the better off we are. So the delivery is a
big issue, right, These all houses are big. Boxable seems
to be very creative in terms of the way that
they smooth it down so they can move it over space.
(25:40):
But the delivery is a big challenge. But you know,
I would love it if in fifty years people naturally
thought that all of our houses were going to be
built on a factory. And you know, there are great
examples from elsewhere. Japan, which has a much more sensible
zoning structure for the US than the US. They basically
have nine different kinds of zones throughout the entire country
and you know you're one of those not so it
(26:02):
gives you a great deal of sort of predictability, uniformity,
and unsurprisingly, in a world with much simpler zoning, you
see a lot more mass produced housing. And it's beautiful.
It's beautiful, it's nice, and it's cool, and no one
to think it's bad. And I'm sure somebody thinks that,
but many people think it's great. And so I think, really,
this is the dream is to do for housing what
Henry Ford did for cars, and that was in some
(26:23):
sense what Bill Levitt's dream was too. But when it
looked like he was making it happen in the fifties
and sixties, he then run and then into the buzzsaw
of increasingly regulated local spaces that just made it very,
very different from mass produce anything locally.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Yeah, but I will say two things inform the following statement.
We went to Japan, first time i'd been my wife
and kids at Christmas, and I am in love with Japan.
There's so many things I love. I love their nationalism,
I love their pride, I love their efficiency, I love
their hard work and diligence and so many things. But
(27:00):
I did not find the architecture to be inspiring. And
I did a separate law degree in England, in Nottingham,
northeast of London, and I found that, particularly as you
leave London, you find this uniformity of row houses that
look like public housing in the United States. You know,
(27:21):
it's just a brick with anybody's ever seen an English sitcom? Upstairs, downstairs,
you name it. They all look the same. And I
find that kind of Eastern European Soviet Bloc fifties Hungary depressing.
I like to see more design, and I love the
(27:42):
creativity of the individual. To me, that's an important part
of life is seeing people's creative expression through their architecture.
I understand I'm speaking out of both sides of my
mouth because we're talking about housing thats affordable, but.
Speaker 9 (27:55):
Still so I'm the side of an architecture with historians,
so like you know, I also believe that our beautiful
buildings are some of our greatest treasures. But I also
have my doubts about local governments being the right people
to decide what beauty is. I tend to think that
sort of it's individuals. It's individual geniuses who make stuff
that's beautiful, and often the government gets then it just
(28:17):
gets in the way. I don't have a problem with
a limited amount of historic preservation that is well targeted,
ideally justified to some kind of cost benefit analysis. But
I'm going to push back on the notion that it's
through regulation that we're going to get nicer stuff of
uture UK example was one in which it was government
architecture that led to the problem. And you know, if
you're building a large scale development, if you're building the woodlands,
(28:39):
if you're building the leave of town stuff, you've got
to attract customers. You want to create a you know,
it's in the sort of core capitalistic interest to create
a community that gets people excited, that gives people joy.
And I would much rather trust to that than I
would to a local regulatory body to actually produce something
that people will love. So I think you get both
(29:01):
and it is so easy. I mean, think about, like
all the things you can do with sort of you know,
modern modern manufacturing, to create different facades, to make all
the houses look kind of different. You have different colors,
a slightly different shapes. They don't have to look all
the same, even if they're manufactured not after all, not
all the products that come out of general motors look identical,
so I think the housing doesn't have to look identically either,
(29:23):
and it can be really nice.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
It's an interesting concept, you know, the urban, the urban
implementation versus a more rural. What we're seeing a lot
of outside of Houston is we're seeing some of the
biggest developments we've ever seen at one time, the Howard
Hughes Corporation and several others that are you know, you're
(29:52):
building thousands of units because you've got cheap dirt, low crime,
good local schools, decent infrastructure. You know, people don't need
to work near, don't need to live near where they
work as much anymore. And you've seen a lot of
manufacturing and these sorts of things, the retails following the rooftops,
so you've got a lot more to do out in
(30:13):
those communities, and it's very exciting to watch. They're not
manufactured per se, but boy, they've got these these these
stick homes down to such a process that they get
in and out of there that they're able to drive
the price down well below one hundred thousand dollars in
some cases, including for dirt, and that's pretty impressive. It
(30:35):
is pretty amazing.
Speaker 9 (30:36):
I mean, I'm a big fan of how it's Hughes
and it's CEO J Cross, who used to used to
run related Hudson Yard, So it used to be a
very urban builder. And I think it's not surprising that,
you know, you move from New York to Texas if
you really want to be on the cutting edge of
building in America. But yeah, they're they're at scale and
they can get the prices down. And I look around
(30:58):
me in you know, Massachusetts, and everything's a one off
project and it's massively more expensive because of that.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
It's an exciting day because even including incorporating inflation, you're
seeing some elements of building construction, particularly because of composites
and the like. I saw a home the other day
online that was built by a three D machine. And
(31:28):
you think about, now, the guy who hammers, and the
guy who travels, and the guy the guy who lays
tile and these sorts of things. It may be frightening
to that guy. But the idea that you could you
could standardize construction and create a systematized process like this,
(31:48):
and how that would drive down cost for the consumer,
much as AI has done in many ways. From the
consumer's perspective, that's very exciting.
Speaker 9 (31:58):
It is very Excitingolutely it's innovation, and you know, normally
American businesses innovating. I mean, housing has been a rare
exception much of the country, and you know, it's it's
nice to see housing doing what every every sensible industry
does and the ultimate where it's absolutely going to be.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
The consumed Professor, Edward Blazer, you're here about. You're herebout
deputized as the housing expert for the Michael Berry Show.
Here Toofore, you are great. I am up against a break.
I would love to have you back as as issues
arise around the country. You are charming, you are brilliant,
(32:38):
are a lot of thank you and good night.
It's that time, time, Time, Time, Luck and Load from
Michael Very Show is.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
On the air, disturbing allegations about a Q sex trafficker
Jeffrey Epstein and members of his social circle. Those allegations
come from newly unsealed documents from a now settled court
case against Epstein associate Elaine Maxwell. A woman claims that
Maxwell groomed her to be a sex slave to Epstein
and was trafficked to some of his most powerful associates.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
The training started immediately, give Jeffrey what he wants. A
lot of his training came from Helen herself and being
a woman. It kind of surprises you that a woman
could actually let stuff like that happen, but only let
it happen. But so groom you into doing.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
These power players a priority for us right now? Can
we even touch them?
Speaker 3 (01:04):
No?
Speaker 4 (01:04):
It's like everything you know, it hides in plane site.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Epstein was hiding in plane side.
Speaker 4 (01:10):
We all knew about him, we all knew what he
was doing, but we had no one that would.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Go after him. They were afraid of him. For whatever reason,
they were afraid.
Speaker 5 (01:18):
The airplane that we flew on for this humanitarian mission
was owned by Jeffrey Epstein and to then learn, oh,
he was actually on some of those flights, and this
Maxwell woman was on some of those flights.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
I didn't know him. I've never spent any time with him.
Speaker 5 (01:36):
I was with the Clinton Foundation people, That's who I
was with.
Speaker 6 (01:41):
She told me everything, she had pictures, she had everything.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
She wasn't hiding for twelve years.
Speaker 5 (01:45):
We convinced her to come out.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
We convinced her to talk to us.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
It was unbelievable what we had Clinton, We had everything.
Speaker 6 (01:52):
There's no question executives ABC protected Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Why do you think they did that?
Speaker 4 (01:57):
Well because their star anchor's name is George Stepanopolis. And
of course George Stepanopolis worked as Bill Clinton's communications director
at the White House. And when was all of this
information being given to Amy Orbak at ABC? When did
she bring all of this to her executives to say
we should put this on the air. Oh, right before
a twenty sixteen presidential election, when Hillary Clinton was running
(02:19):
on the Democratic ticket.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
At the time.
Speaker 6 (02:21):
Amy Robach took this story to her superiors and they said,
I don't know who Jeffrey Epstein is. His name was
already all over the News is a convicted sexophone.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (02:29):
One of the things you've been talking about on your
show is your allegation that government officials are eighteen in
paraphia child trafficking.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
From the degree of Jodren right by me, like what
Jeffrey Epstein did, Clo. I love this country so much,
and like you, I will passionately argue for the best
policies for it. You know, sometimes I'm probably like the
(03:00):
dad in the stands at the little league game my
kids pitching. I think every pitch is a strike, and
when the ump doesn't call it, I'm mad at him.
But when my kid's batting and takes a pitch, I
think every pitch is outside And why on earth what
you call that a strike? What are you blind? I'm
(03:24):
sure I get it wrong. I'm not Rush. He was
not a nine point six. Sometimes you go up to
nine nine point eight. I'm not Rush, but I do worry.
I worry that there are people There were some mistakes
made in Trump's first administration that were against his better judgment.
(03:47):
But the president, this guy's seventy nine years old, and
yet he keeps a tougher schedule than anybody I know.
President works his tail off, but he can't do everything.
There are very powerful, very influential, very rich, and not
just Americans, people who have the ear of other people
(04:14):
who have Donald Trump's ear. You know, if a guy
is trying to cut a deal because he knows Trump
won't be present forever and he wants to get hired
by this company or this country afterwards, he's not going
to say, mister President, and I'm for this because I
want to make money as soon as I leave out
(04:34):
of here. I want to cut a deal now. But
he's going to do it. And it worries me because
every king, every prime minister, every CEO needs good counselors,
good conciliaries, good advisors, trusted advisors. And I worry we
(04:58):
have some folks who have insinuated themselves into Trump's inner circle,
just as we had folks who did that in the
first administration. That's how we ended up with Operation Warp Speed.
That's how we ended up with Jacqueline Burk's That's how
Fauci was kept when he should have been fired. That's
how Christopher Ray was kept when he should have been fired.
(05:19):
And you can say, oh, Michael, you're speaking ill of Trump.
Wait a minute. When I spoke ill of Christopher Ray
when he was Trump's FBI direct I had people who said,
you have never liked Trump. You hide it well, but
you're just and I said, that's not true. I didn't
like Trump when he was running. I think he's done
an amazing job. His own lawyer, Michael Cohen turned against him.
(05:43):
I didn't. I am a big supporter. I think he's
doing a great job. But I don't think that whether
a decision that is made personnel or policy is good
or bad simply based on what Trump says and a
lot of people do well. Trump said, it's got to
be true, but you have to understand there were mistakes
(06:04):
made in the first term, and they were against Trump's gut.
He trusted people as you have to do. I'm saying
there are some snakes that come out at night. As
Charlie Pride said, I'm gonna play you this clip. I
thought we were going to deport, right, I thought we
were going to deport I want you to listen to
(06:26):
this clip from over the weekend and you decide maybe
I'm at fault. This is five oh for Jim.
Speaker 8 (06:32):
And we're working on legislation right now.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Susie right.
Speaker 8 (06:36):
We're working on legislation right now where farmers look ain't
no better.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
They work with him for years. He had cases that
were not here.
Speaker 8 (06:44):
But just even over the years where people have worked
for a farm on a farm for fourteen fifteen years
and they get thrown out pretty viciously, and we can't
do it. We got to work with the farmers and
people that have hotels and leisure properties to We're gonna
work with them, and we're gonna very.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Strong and smart, and we're going to put you in charge.
We're going to make you responsible.
Speaker 8 (07:04):
And I think that that's going to make a lot
of people happy. Now, serious radical right people who I
also happen to like a lot. They may not be
quite as happy, but they'll understand, won't they. Do you
think so, Madame Secretary, to look at you with a
white hat on, do you think they'll understand that you're.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
The one that brought this whole situation up.
Speaker 8 (07:23):
We're going to be changing the name of the Gulf
of Mexico.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
To the Gulf of Ritt and Michael Berry.
Speaker 9 (07:29):
Which has a beautiful lay.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
On a Sunday back in May, I was sitting out
in the afternoon with my wife. We were having coffee
and I came across I don't remember which paper was
Wall Street Journal, New York. It was Wall Street Johnale.
I came across a piece entitled Perfect Communities Review the
Abundant Life in Levittown. It was a book review of
(07:56):
a book by a fellow named Edward Berenson, and the
book is called Perfect Communities. Levitt Levittown town named after him,
types of town named after him, and the dream of
white suburbia caught my attention. The subheading was to build
affordable homes on a mass scale. William Levitt sought cost
cutting measures and fought political battles. And it was written
(08:19):
by Edward Glazer at Harvard University. I reached out to him.
Our schedules haven't meshed, but today they have, and I
am delighted to have him with us. I thought it
was a very very interesting piece because it covers something
that I am quite interested in, and that is, in
today's world, you will see a lot of folks talking
(08:41):
about the myth of home ownership, home ownership slipping outside
the grasp of the average American blackrock buying up homes
or building homes only for the sake of renting. You've
got interest rates in the mid to high sixes, but
on your credit could be higher, whereas I'm locked in
low twos. Makes a big difference on the same house.
(09:03):
All of these things conspiring together to make home ownership,
which we all agree is is good for society. Every
data point will tell you lower crime, higher performance, better
nuclear stability, all nuclear family stability. Home ownership is great.
Why can't we build homes that are affordable? I don't
(09:24):
mean affordable housing as a governmental subsidy. I mean why
can't we build homes that people can own that are affordable?
And this fellow tried to do it. There was a
book written about it, and Edward Glazer has written a
review of that. I've asked him to join us to
discuss Edward Glazer, welcome to the program.
Speaker 9 (09:42):
Thank you so much for having me on. And I'm
always happy to discuss housing.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Yeah, it's a fascinating subject. I was reading about you
and you seem to be a proponent of something that
I have argued in favor of, which, considering I'm a
right wing nut, surprises people. That is an urban density.
I was the mayor pro tim in the City of
Houston during the two thousands, and my great frustration was
(10:08):
people wanted public transit, they wanted a rail system, they
wanted everything that requires density. But every time a single
family home in one of the historic neighborhoods, not a
historic home, but a single family home was torn down
and three town homes put on that five thousand square
foot lot, they said, it's ruining the neighborhood. And I said,
you want things that require density, but you do everything
(10:30):
you can to regulate against density. And so your seeming
advocacy of greater density in the urban environment as a
better use of space seemed to me very interesting. So
I've diverged a little, but there you go. Absolutely.
Speaker 9 (10:48):
So let me rephrase what you're in favor of to
make it clear that it is, in fact a perfectly
reasonable right wing thing to be in favor of, which
is your in favor of freedom. You're in favor of
someone who owns a plot of land in downtown Houston
being able to densify that land if she or he
feels like they want to do that, And that's always
(11:08):
what I've advocated. I mean, I do see lots of
positive things about density. There are lots of great things
about it, but I don't see any reason why the
public sector needs to artificially subsidize it. What I think
is that people should be able to add density to
their lots. You know, I wrote an article almost twenty
years ago called Houston, New York has a Problem two
thousand and eight City Journals, where I held up your
(11:30):
Houston if you're talking about the problems there, which from
a national perspective, Houston is like an affordable housing dream,
and I like, you mean, affordable is just the market
rate being low enough so that ordinary people can buy,
not some extra government program. But you know, in two
thousand and eight and two thousand and seven, I just
went through I just wanted to make New Yorkers understand, right,
(11:50):
why so many people were moving to Texas, why so
many people were moving to Houston, and the difference in
quality of life, right for a young couple doing kind
of thing more things, earning a bit more in New York,
but the housing costs just ate up everything, and they
were sort of scraping by right in New York. Right,
they were living this sort of perilous life of trying
(12:11):
to figure out a three hour commute to get something,
Whereas in Houston they were living solidly middle class lives.
There's kids were going to decent schools, they were eating
out at decent but affordable restaurants, and you know, it
was just night and day. I must say I came
away from that more amazed why everyone had moved to
Texas rather than why so many people had. But Texas
(12:31):
is really still the national leader in terms of making
it relatively easy to build. And you know, when you
think about the past thirty years, I just wrote a
paper with my long term colleague Joe Jerko on this
for Brookings. You know, many of your sundalt competitors that
were housing supply superstars, like Atlanta and Miami and Phoenix,
(12:52):
all of them have started to fall down on the
job right. All of them started to make it harder
and harder to build in medium density areas, and as
a con quint, they'd become.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Far less affordable.
Speaker 9 (13:02):
Texas has slowed down, but it's slowed down by left.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
You know. Professor Edward Glazer of Harvard University as our guest.
He wrote a review of the book Perfect Communities, levitt
Levittown and The Dream of Dream of White Suburbia and
I promise we will get to the book in case
anyone was wonder if there was going to be a payoff,
just a quick anecdote. So I came out of law school.
I got two law degrees because I thought I would
want to teach law. After I practiced, and I realized
(13:29):
that I wanted to do deals. I didn't want to
write the paper for them, So I went out and
started buying apartment complexes on on credit, owner financed. I
had no cash. I was just cobbling together deals and
to pay the bills. I started a real estate brokerage
for him, and having been a lawyer, all my clients
came from law school classmates who had gone to other places,
(13:52):
and then when they had somebody that was moving to Houston,
that'd go, oh, I have a buddy who's a real
estate broker there. And it was amazing to me to
see the look on the face of people from particularly
San Francisco, New York, and Boston. Those were the big three,
and they would come to town. Now, this was the
late nineties, so that this number sounds bigger than was
bigger than than it is today. But they would have
(14:13):
between four and six hundred thousand dollars, and I'd say,
all right, I'll take you out to view seven to
ten different properties in that price range, some townhomes, some
single families, some inner loops, some out and they couldn't
believe that they could live right next to downtown in
a two year old town home, absolutely outfitted with everything.
(14:34):
And they'd say, you know, in San fran Boston, New York,
I'd have an eighth floor walk up, which means, for
those of you who don't know, means you don't have
an elevator, an eighth floor walk up of four hundred
feet a peer to tear, and I can have all
this here. They couldn't believe it, And that's a game changer.
That's a life changer for people completely.
Speaker 9 (14:56):
I came to write my book Trying for the City
about fourteen years ago, where where we all I also
discussed thee I have a whole chapter that's basically about
the Woodlands that just walks through sort of the amazing
transformation that sort of actually being able to build that
scale means in terms of your ability to just deliver
both house and community to ordinary people.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
For Edward Glazer is our guest from Harvard University. We're
going to talk about this book, Perfect Communities, Levitt, Levittown
and the Dream of White Suburbia. I don't care if
somebody decy strikes shoe. You can't shoot Michael. It's been
booked off us are Edward Glazier of Harvard University. Writes
(15:36):
on things related to housing, particularly the free market of
housing and how housing is priced and where we live
and density and things like this, which is one of
along with transportation, and they go, they go hand in
glove is one of my great interests in life when
(15:58):
it comes to policy. He has written a review of
a book called Perfect Communities, Levitt, Levittown in the Dream
of White Suburbia by Edward Berenson, and you talk in
the in your review, Professor Glazer treat home building like
any other form of manufacturing, which gets cheaper with vertical integration,
(16:19):
mechanization and assembly lines. Typically, mister Berenson writes, a middleman bought, say,
lumber from a lumber mill and then sold it to
the builder, marking up the price along the way. But
Levitt had a vertical integration. Why have we not been able?
I mean I looked to boxable, I had their Ceo
Taramini on some time ago, and know, if you know
(16:41):
about them, it's a manufactured home. Everybody's trying to get
into a truly made I don't mean a trailer, a
mobile home. A manufactured home that can be plopped down
and then you plummet and tie into to the electrical lines.
Why has no one been able to do that? Professor Glazer.
Speaker 9 (17:00):
So, I fundamentally think this is about local land use regulation.
I you know, in other work of mine with Leo Demico,
Joe Jericho, Bill Kerr, and JACKI mal Ponsetto, we've traveled
the last one hundred and thirty years and try to
look at housing productivity in the US, and what you
see is kind of a stagnant period nineteen hundred to
nineteen forty, and then nineteen forty to nineteen seventy, the
(17:23):
age of Bill Levit, the age in which like we
were starting, we're building massive projects and there was real
technological innovation. Like productivity went way up. Since the nineteen seventies,
it's gone way down. And you know, if you compare
houses and cars, like.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
We could do a lot more cars per worker.
Speaker 9 (17:39):
Now than we were able to in the nineteen seventies,
but we're doing fewer houses per per worker. And I
think this is all about projects getting smaller and smaller,
the firms getting smaller and sptant. You know, more than
fifty percent of America's employment that's working on residential construction
is in firms with fewer than ten workers. Just just
(18:00):
let that think in fewer than ten workers, right, as
opposed to sort of every other major industry where the
majority of workers are in establishments with more than five
hundred workers. You know what firms with seven workers don't have.
They don't have research and development departments. They don't have
the kind of scale that would enable you to invent
the technologies that would remake the future. And it's precisely
because every community has decided they want to micro manage
(18:23):
every little project, right that we don't have the ability
to sort of just build at scale. And I think,
you know, you could imagine lots of things that would
break that, one of which we would be state wide
as of right zoning for particular models and manufactured house. Right.
The more that you created that process, the more individual
producers would say, oh, I'm going to come up with
something great, because they can put these down all over
(18:46):
Texas if I managed to get the state wide approval
to put in my manufacturer home, my modular home.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
So there was a lot of highbrow academic wordage verbiage
there that I want to make sure that we cut
through to the guide driving home from work. I think
it is very important, and that is you know why
if you want to especially in this, I know you
probably want to stay away from from political ideology. But
(19:18):
for the white liberal urban intellectual who says, you know,
housing is not affordable inside the urban core anymore, well,
damn it. That's mostly the part of the government. And
that's the part that frustrates me so much, is that
you cannot convince people of this having served on city
(19:39):
council as a mayor pro tem of a city, the
largest city that doesn't have zoning, although we do have
a lot of deed restrictions and we do have a
lot of regulations and more now than we did when
I was there, But dead gummet, it's the government that's
actually it's a local government that's actually causing the problem,
and that you cannot get people to understand.
Speaker 9 (20:00):
It's you know, it's been I've been fighting on this
for twenty five years. Twenty five years, I've been fighting
for the cause of helping people to understand that the
ultimate villaineer is local land use regulation. And you know,
one of the points I think of Levitt, the reason
why the Levit story is interesting. He's not really the
nicest guy in the world. But you know that doesn't
matter because, like you know, as Adam Smith said tw
(20:23):
hundred and fifty years ago, you know, we depend on
self interest to make things work. And you know, he
was just a businessman. He did great stuff, and he
managed to pull the price of the price of housing down,
whereas all of the people who seem kind of saintly
were saying, oh, let's protect this thing, let's protect that
preservation thing, right, all of them. You know what they are,
They're the architects of scarcity because they're working through regulation,
(20:45):
they're stopping down the forces of competition and greed. Quite honestly,
that actually lead to the construction of large scale affordable housing.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
You have a very interesting delivery style where I'd love
to be Do you teach in the classroom? You back, Okay,
I didn't know. If it was pure scholarship, it would
be fascinating to sit through your courses because you have
this interesting elocution where you race and then you completely
(21:21):
punctuate to a stop. It's halting. It's interesting. It would
be I need to read more of your writing because
you have great discipline. You can kind of turn on
a dime. You probably didn't ask for an elocution review,
but that's what you're getting now. It is very interesting,
Professor Glazer, that we can't seem to accomplish this, and yet,
(21:46):
you know, to his credit, George W. Bush tried. It
ended up being a bust. You ended up having a
bunch of liar loans, and you ended up giving tax
benefits to people to own who had no business owning,
and you had people with terrible credit trying to own,
and then people buying multiple homes, and you had the
two thousand and eight mortgage bust. But what is the answer.
(22:07):
I'm going to make you king for the day. There
are no political implications. You don't need anyone else's sign on.
How do we create an environment where the private market
creates housing that is plentiful and affordable in the urban
core of our major cities.
Speaker 9 (22:26):
Clarity, simplicity, you know, everything being as of right, right,
so you know, and making sure the as of right
density levels are sufficiently high, so you know. You want
something where developments can come in and can know I
can start building like tomorrow if my building conforms to
the following free thing. It's the delays, it's the lawsuits,
(22:49):
it's all that stuff that makes it so difficult to
build and leads developers to both build only for the
rich and build much smaller projects. So you really want
to make sure that whatever your code is is incredibly clear,
incredibly simple, and targeted towards smart things right, which means
you want to make sure the buildings are reasonably safe,
and you want to make sure you know the uses
(23:11):
aren't deeply harmful for the people of living you by.
But that's a really small set of things that would
would fall if out of those those rules. Just make
it simple, make it fast, make it dense.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
You do realize that every listener is now carefully studying
your delivery and your halting pattern as punctuation to see
if there was any merit to what I said. Professor
Edward Laser of Harvard University is our guest. He happens
to be an expert in something that is a great
academic interest of mine, and that is the housing market.
(23:45):
How we build, where we build, how much it costs.
Will continue our conversation, which I don't know if you
folks are enjoying it, but I should grease your job.
Would use that tone to me, not a joe.
Speaker 8 (23:55):
That's sarcastic, contemptuous tone that means you know everything because
you're a man.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Then I know nothing because I'm a woman.
Speaker 9 (24:02):
That is not a joke.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
That is a natural fact. The Michael Very Show. This
is kind of a Kevin Bacon multiple degree removed. Professor
Edward Glazier is a professor and scholar at Harvard University
who writes about housing. He wrote a review in The
Wall Street Journal back in May which I thoroughly enjoyed
(24:26):
on a Sunday afternoon. The review was of a book
by Edward Berenson about a fellow named Levitt? Did you
keep up with all that? The book is called Perfect Communities?
Should you want to buy it? Levitt? Levitt Town, Levittown
and the Dream of White Suburbia? Professor Glazer, what do
(24:47):
you take from all this? This man like Edison? You know,
the great failure as I see it, of Thomas Edison
was the thing he really wanted to accomplish was these
homes that he could, you know, take with a and
drop down. He just didn't have the delivery mechanism. Could
he could create it. What do you take of this effort?
I don't know if you're aware of Teramini's company Boxable
(25:10):
to create a unit that you could build and then
drop on site. I love it.
Speaker 9 (25:17):
I think that would be tremendous, right, I mean, I
think the more that we can use the magic of
mass production to make things cheaper, more fish and more beautiful, right,
the better off we are. So the delivery is a
big issue, right, These all houses are big. Boxable seems
to be very creative in terms of the way that
they smooth it down so they can move it over space.
(25:40):
But the delivery is a big challenge. But you know,
I would love it if in fifty years people naturally
thought that all of our houses were going to be
built on a factory. And you know, there are great
examples from elsewhere. Japan, which has a much more sensible
zoning structure for the US than the US. They basically
have nine different kinds of zones throughout the entire country
and you know you're one of those not so it
(26:02):
gives you a great deal of sort of predictability, uniformity,
and unsurprisingly, in a world with much simpler zoning, you
see a lot more mass produced housing. And it's beautiful.
It's beautiful, it's nice, and it's cool, and no one
to think it's bad. And I'm sure somebody thinks that,
but many people think it's great. And so I think, really,
this is the dream is to do for housing what
Henry Ford did for cars, and that was in some
(26:23):
sense what Bill Levitt's dream was too. But when it
looked like he was making it happen in the fifties
and sixties, he then run and then into the buzzsaw
of increasingly regulated local spaces that just made it very,
very different from mass produce anything locally.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Yeah, but I will say two things inform the following statement.
We went to Japan, first time i'd been my wife
and kids at Christmas, and I am in love with Japan.
There's so many things I love. I love their nationalism,
I love their pride, I love their efficiency, I love
their hard work and diligence and so many things. But
(27:00):
I did not find the architecture to be inspiring. And
I did a separate law degree in England, in Nottingham,
northeast of London, and I found that, particularly as you
leave London, you find this uniformity of row houses that
look like public housing in the United States. You know,
(27:21):
it's just a brick with anybody's ever seen an English sitcom? Upstairs, downstairs,
you name it. They all look the same. And I
find that kind of Eastern European Soviet Bloc fifties Hungary depressing.
I like to see more design, and I love the
(27:42):
creativity of the individual. To me, that's an important part
of life is seeing people's creative expression through their architecture.
I understand I'm speaking out of both sides of my
mouth because we're talking about housing thats affordable, but.
Speaker 9 (27:55):
Still so I'm the side of an architecture with historians,
so like you know, I also believe that our beautiful
buildings are some of our greatest treasures. But I also
have my doubts about local governments being the right people
to decide what beauty is. I tend to think that
sort of it's individuals. It's individual geniuses who make stuff
that's beautiful, and often the government gets then it just
(28:17):
gets in the way. I don't have a problem with
a limited amount of historic preservation that is well targeted,
ideally justified to some kind of cost benefit analysis. But
I'm going to push back on the notion that it's
through regulation that we're going to get nicer stuff of
uture UK example was one in which it was government
architecture that led to the problem. And you know, if
you're building a large scale development, if you're building the woodlands,
(28:39):
if you're building the leave of town stuff, you've got
to attract customers. You want to create a you know,
it's in the sort of core capitalistic interest to create
a community that gets people excited, that gives people joy.
And I would much rather trust to that than I
would to a local regulatory body to actually produce something
that people will love. So I think you get both
(29:01):
and it is so easy. I mean, think about, like
all the things you can do with sort of you know,
modern modern manufacturing, to create different facades, to make all
the houses look kind of different. You have different colors,
a slightly different shapes. They don't have to look all
the same, even if they're manufactured not after all, not
all the products that come out of general motors look identical,
so I think the housing doesn't have to look identically either,
(29:23):
and it can be really nice.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
It's an interesting concept, you know, the urban, the urban
implementation versus a more rural. What we're seeing a lot
of outside of Houston is we're seeing some of the
biggest developments we've ever seen at one time, the Howard
Hughes Corporation and several others that are you know, you're
(29:52):
building thousands of units because you've got cheap dirt, low crime,
good local schools, decent infrastructure. You know, people don't need
to work near, don't need to live near where they
work as much anymore. And you've seen a lot of
manufacturing and these sorts of things, the retails following the rooftops,
so you've got a lot more to do out in
(30:13):
those communities, and it's very exciting to watch. They're not
manufactured per se, but boy, they've got these these these
stick homes down to such a process that they get
in and out of there that they're able to drive
the price down well below one hundred thousand dollars in
some cases, including for dirt, and that's pretty impressive. It
(30:35):
is pretty amazing.
Speaker 9 (30:36):
I mean, I'm a big fan of how it's Hughes
and it's CEO J Cross, who used to used to
run related Hudson Yard, So it used to be a
very urban builder. And I think it's not surprising that,
you know, you move from New York to Texas if
you really want to be on the cutting edge of
building in America. But yeah, they're they're at scale and
they can get the prices down. And I look around
(30:58):
me in you know, Massachusetts, and everything's a one off
project and it's massively more expensive because of that.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
It's an exciting day because even including incorporating inflation, you're
seeing some elements of building construction, particularly because of composites
and the like. I saw a home the other day
online that was built by a three D machine. And
(31:28):
you think about, now, the guy who hammers, and the
guy who travels, and the guy the guy who lays
tile and these sorts of things. It may be frightening
to that guy. But the idea that you could you
could standardize construction and create a systematized process like this,
(31:48):
and how that would drive down cost for the consumer,
much as AI has done in many ways. From the
consumer's perspective, that's very exciting.
Speaker 9 (31:58):
It is very Excitingolutely it's innovation, and you know, normally
American businesses innovating. I mean, housing has been a rare
exception much of the country, and you know, it's it's
nice to see housing doing what every every sensible industry
does and the ultimate where it's absolutely going to be.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
The consumed Professor, Edward Blazer, you're here about. You're herebout
deputized as the housing expert for the Michael Berry Show.
Here Toofore, you are great. I am up against a break.
I would love to have you back as as issues
arise around the country. You are charming, you are brilliant,
(32:38):
are a lot of thank you and good night.
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