Emily Badger

In the history of American politics, one fact distills the nation’s enduring suspicion of cities: Voters have never elected a sitting mayor to the presidency.

Americans have seldom embraced anyone who’s even touched the job. Calvin Coolidge was the last president, one of just three in 230 years, to have been a mayor at any point. He led Northampton, Massachusetts — a modest town, really — for two years.

But as the Democratic Party becomes ever more aligned with urban areas, its presidential field is now studded with politicians whose boasts include running a city. Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has now jumped to the lead in Iowa polling. Also in the race are two recent mayors, Julián Castro and Cory Booker, and another candidate who got his start as a mayor, Bernie Sanders. The current New York City mayor, Bill de Blasio, and a former Denver mayor, John Hickenlooper, have already come and gone, while Michael Bloomberg, another New York City mayor, is still calculating on the sidelines.

That’s to say nothing of the mayors who flirted with a presidential bid (Los Angeles’ Eric Garcetti, New Orleans’ Mitch Landrieu, Tallahassee’s Andrew Gillum) but never jumped in.

Mayors say the nature of the job has changed, as has the country’s perception of it. Machine politics are a thing of the past, and cities now claim to drive the country’s economic future. The reputation of politicians in Washington has suffered from legislative gridlock, Buttigieg suggests, making mayors, by comparison, look better.

But the political map is shifting, too. As the Democratic Party cedes rural voters to Republicans, Democratic candidates closely tied to cities face fewer obstacles building a primary coalition. And in a general election, where the country’s urban-rural divide has grown sharper, more suburban voters are joining that coalition, too.

“Whoever our next nominee is going to be, they better be able to get the record-level turnouts we had in ’08 and 2012 in urban areas,” said Booker, who was mayor of Newark, New Jersey, before becoming a U.S. senator. He pointed to steep declines in black voters in Milwaukee in 2016, in a state that President Donald Trump won by around 23,000 votes.

On the campaign trail, Booker sprints right into many negative associations voters have had with urban America. He took over a city with a shrinking population and tax base as well as a troubled school district, he says. He was the first mayor of Newark since the 1960s — “I’m not exaggerating” — who was not indicted or charged with corruption. But then he pivots to the argument that the city began to transform on his watch, as evidenced by new building permits, new residents, new grocery stores, even a new hotel.

This kind of American urban story — one of recovery rather than decline — is a relatively new one. Few mayors eyeing higher office could have plausibly told it in the 1990s, or the ’50s. Bloomberg and Buttigieg have their own versions of it, albeit on drastically different scales.

“Our community when I took office was being written up as dying,” Buttigieg said. “We’d been dealing for decades with the consequences of losing factories; we had a poverty rate approaching 30%.”

For Buttigieg, too, such dire details are worth telling because they are the backdrop of his story, not the point of it.

But it is perhaps a sign that some old perceptions have not died off that the most successful mayoral candidate so far is from a place that is smaller, whiter and less well known than Newark, New York or San Antonio. From Buttigieg’s office window, he notes that he can see both factories and cornfields, a view that situates him differently from any big-city mayor.

“It’s Indiana Rust Belt,” said Maxwell Palmer, a political scientist at Boston University. “But we don’t have a good sense of what South Bend is compared to lots of places, the way we do about New York or San Francisco.”

Given 230 years of hardened stereotypes about American cities, that vagueness may be an asset. With it, it’s possible that the mayor of a city of 100,000 may have a better chance of becoming president than the nationally known mayor of a city of 8 million.

‘Dangerous Places’

It’s not just the reputation for corruption.

“There’s an even longer-standing American historical association with cities as being dangerous places,” said Brian Balogh, a historian at the University of Virginia. “Cities were associated with sin, with having a sense of anonymity.”

Thomas Jefferson believed that the rural farmer was the ideal of the American citizen. William Jennings Bryan preached something similar a century later. “Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic,” he said in his 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech. “But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”

We can do without the cities, in other words.

At different points, they have been considered too full of immigrants, the poor, African Americans, factories, patronage, congestion and disease. And their mayors have been almost structurally predisposed to antagonize rural voters. In the battle for state resources, whatever cities won, rural communities appeared to lose, a tension that remains today.

In seeking higher office, mayors from smaller towns could also be ridiculed for lacking experience.

“The challenge then when you go to the larger city is that it sort of opens a can of worms,” said Patricia A. Kirkland, a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton. “Larger cities tend to be more liberal. And as a result, some of the promises that politicians might need to make and the positions they might need to take to build an electoral coalition might be difficult to justify later to more moderate voters.”

As a result, mayors have appeared less likely to seek higher offices of all kinds, including the more obvious steppingstones to the presidency. The other two mayor-presidents, Andrew Johnson of Greeneville, Tennessee, and Grover Cleveland of Buffalo, New York, were, like Coolidge, governors in the interim (and Coolidge ascended to the presidency in 1923 after Warren G. Harding’s death, not through election).

Palmer, the political scientist, and colleagues cataloged the career trajectories of nearly 700 American mayors in office since 1992 in the largest cities and every state capital (South Bend wasn’t large enough to make the study). Fewer than 20% of the mayors ran for higher office, fewer than 15% won a primary, and only about 5% won their races. Those are striking numbers for the mayors of the country’s most prominent cities, the researchers argue.

In related interviews with mayors for the study, the obstacles appeared to be not just how nonurban voters might view these mayors, but also how the mayors might view their job options.

“A lot of them said that: ‘Why on earth would I want to do anything else?’” said Katherine Levine Einstein, the study’s lead author and also a political scientist at Boston University. “If you get to be a mayor of a city of over 100,000, it’s a pretty big job. You have a fair amount of control. And you get to live in your home.”

More mayors today are also claiming expansive roles setting higher minimum wages, immigration policies and environmental rules. The mayor of New York City can arguably do more about climate change than a Democratic president with a Republican Senate can.

“When you’re a mayor, you’re the center of gravity of everything,” said Anthony Williams, a former mayor of Washington, who has argued that the time is right for a mayor to become president. “I’m not criticizing the legislature, but mayors consider the legislature like a talk-a-thon.”

Now, if the less appealing jobs in between a mayor and a president can just be skipped, that’s a different story.

‘America’s future’

The most recent, closest approximation to a big-city mayor in a general election for president might have been Al Smith, said Gerald Gamm, a professor of political science and history at the University of Rochester. Smith was never actually a mayor. But he was inseparable from New York City, having been the sheriff of Manhattan, president of the city’s board of aldermen and later the governor. In the 1928 election against Herbert Hoover, Smith was the Roman Catholic candidate, the opponent of prohibition, the man tied to Tammany Hall.

“It was very much a battle between city and country, and country completely obliterated city,” Gamm said. Hoover carried 40 states. “But Obama-McCain was also a city-country campaign to some extent, and city won.”

What’s changed, Gamm said, is that the acceptance of immigrants and diversity long associated with cities is now more of a majority position in America. But it’s provocative to wonder if Barack Obama would have been as successful nationally had he been a mayor of Chicago first, and not a community activist and state legislator there. The city’s fiscal problems, racial inequality and crime might have clung to him more.

Mayors’ troubles (crime, poverty) tend be more widely recognized beyond city borders than their successes (plowing streets, improving parks). Booker has needed to trumpet those victories over what people might already think they know about Newark. For Bloomberg, the successes are more widely known, although they have created challenges of their own, including a city that has grown more expensive. Buttigieg entered the race with voters knowing little about his city’s troubles or successes. They have since learned that South Bend is on the rebound, but also that its Police Department has alienated African American residents.

Castro, who was mayor of San Antonio and then secretary of housing and urban development, potentially benefits from representing a city without a reputation for far-left politics, past corruption or recent decline. But if San Antonio vaguely seems like a foreign place to voters in Iowa or New Hampshire, Castro has a retort.

“I point out that San Antonio looks like America’s future,” he said. “It’s a city that is growing, with a diversified economy, a diverse population.”

Even if a mayor doesn’t win with that kind of argument in 2020, it appears that the job is no longer disqualifying.

“People criticized Mayor de Blasio,” said Williams, the former Washington mayor. “But it wasn’t because he was a mayor.”

This article originally appeared in

230 Years and Zero Presidents: Why Mayors Haven't Jumped Straight to the White House

(The Upshot)

Yet out here on the western edge of the Washington suburbs that have steadily turned the state blue, this election has been primarily and bitterly about traffic.

The voters are preoccupied by it. The candidates are sparring over it in their signs. Never mind the election’s statewide implications (Republicans hold just a three-seat advantage in the House of Delegates and a one-seat edge in the Senate), or what message the results might send to President Donald Trump. People are irate about Route 28, a stop-and-go arterial that each day squeezes tens of thousands of exurbanites toward Washington. During the worst morning rush hours, a 4-mile stretch of road passing through the district can take 35 minutes to drive, and that’s before anyone gets anywhere near the interstate to D.C.

“Fixing this road is the most important part of my legislative agenda,” said Danica Roem, the first-term Democratic state delegate here, sitting in her ’98 Honda Accord during Friday evening rush hour on the miserable road in question. “When you understand the historic nature of my candidacy and my incumbency, you know that’s a hell of a statement to make.”

Two years ago, Roem unseated the area’s 13-term, deeply conservative state assemblyman, becoming the first openly transgender state legislator in the country. Yes, she talks about equality, but it is not the top priority in a way that many people outside her district expect. “At the same time, trans people get stuck in traffic,” she said, looking out at taillights as far as the eye could see. “I am right now literally stuck on Route 28, and I am a transgender woman.”

Traffic has a way of subsuming all other issues here. It distorts daily life and separates families. It’s destroying what people who moved out here believed was the good life awaiting them, and what to do about that is a political question, too.

Suburbia is now the nation’s political battleground, as college-educated white voters have shifted toward the Democratic Party and as more racially and economically diverse residents have moved in. But this is a second kind of suburban politics: not the politics of abortion or gun control or bathroom bills, but the politics of development and traffic and growth.

The two currents are not unrelated. The same population boom in Northern Virginia that has turned more suburbs blue has also worsened the gridlock.

Life out here for many families is premised on a precarious trade-off: The housing is more affordable, the neighborhoods smell like campfires, and many homes have views of the woods now in full fall colors. But in exchange for those prizes, a vast majority of workers must leave the area, often heading toward Washington 30 miles to the east. The closest metro stop connected to the city is 15 miles away.

If the traffic is flowing freely, this is a reasonable bargain. If it’s not, the whole deal starts to collapse.

“As a practical matter, most of us realized that we were going to spend some time in our cars when we moved out here, but it has gotten ridiculous,” Kelly McGinn, the Republican running against Roem, told a conservative radio show, “The John Fredericks Show,” this fall.

McGinn, a past aide to former Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, has raised alarm about the leftward creep of the state Assembly. During the last legislative session, she protested as a concerned citizen in Richmond against ratification in Virginia of the Equal Rights Amendment (the bill failed but could be revived by Democrats next year).

But McGinn, too, has primarily been talking on the campaign trail not about the culture war, but the traffic war. She has pitched herself as a problem-solving mother — “Send in the mom!” her slogan says — in an appeal that subtly juxtaposes her against her opponent, even as they are both talking about Route 28 (Roem points out that she is also a stepmother).

“My children dubbed it ‘the yucky road’ as little kids,” McGinn said in another podcast interview. “There was a lot of crying on that road — mostly them, but some me, too.”

She declined to comment further on the topic for this article.

Route 28, a four-lane road interrupted by stoplights, has not changed substantially over the past 20 years as new subdivisions have been built all around it. Roem, who was born and raised in the area, recites the region’s transformation: new homes on land she remembers as a cow farm here, new homes on former grasslands there, new homes where there were once woods over there.

She pointed to one neighborhood that she said she knew would deliver her the election in 2017. It is recently full of townhome complexes and apartments, denser housing that political scientists have linked with more economically and racially diverse residents — and more Democratic voters.

These neighborhoods all funnel commuters onto Route 28, which leads to Interstate 66 and, ultimately, the defense contracting and government jobs closer to D.C. Along the road itself, an entire auto ecosystem has grown up to support the suburban bargain. There are new car dealer lots, used car lots, tire shops, brake inspectors, carwashes, gas stations, offices for renting cars, offices for insuring cars, offices for obtaining car titles and loans, and drive-through restaurants for commuters who must eat in the car.

During rush hour, workers sit at a standstill in their cars, staring at businesses designed to service those cars, lately with political volunteers waving signs aimed at the owners of those cars.

“Fix Route 28 now!” Roem’s signs say.

“Money, not studies,” one McGinn campaign sign counters. Another evokes Ronald Reagan’s famous 1980 swipe at Jimmy Carter: “Is your commute better than 2 years ago?”

Of course, it is hard for anyone to say that the answer is yes, although Roem points to indicators that improvement is coming. Further up the road, the interstate interchange is under construction in an effort to speed up traffic. And a state study costing about $300,000 that Roem has pushed is also examining how intersections on Route 28 might be redesigned.

But transportation projects do not move at the pace of every-two-year elections. That makes traffic a risky issue to run on, even if it’s the top concern voters cite. Roem has tried to buy some patience with far wonkier details than McGinn has offered. Back in her campaign office in a modest office building on the site of a large car sales lot, Roem sketched alternative intersection designs on the back of a volunteer sign-up sheet. With enough creativity, she argues, transportation engineers can remove the stoplights that stall traffic on Route 28.

She acknowledges that the area ultimately needs more than engineering fixes. Workers need more freedom to work remotely. The area itself needs more high-paying jobs so people do not have to drive 60 miles round-trip to find them. Local governments need to stop approving new developments with no plans to simultaneously invest in infrastructure. But the most tempting solution is to change the road, not the terms of the bargain itself.

In the neighborhoods around Route 28 where Roem was canvassing a few days before the election, voters offered horror stories of waking up at 4 a.m. to beat traffic into the city, or eating family dinners at 9 p.m. to accommodate parents commuting home.

“It’s not healthy. I intensely dislike it,” said Audrey Coffey of the family routine that has evolved around her husband’s commute toward the city. He never leaves the Washington area before 7 p.m., to make the drive manageable. “We knew we were not lessening his commute when we bought this home,” Coffey, a teacher, said. “We knew it would only get worse.”

If either candidate here lures more state aid for the region’s roads, it is undoubtedly true that in the time it takes to improve them, still more people will move in. But Roem struggles to picture life that far in advance, once all her dream alternative intersections have been built.

“Once the road is fixed,” she said, now driving through the dark, “I’m going to re-evaluate my entire life.”

Where the Road to Richmond Goes Through a Road to and From Washington

MANASSAS PARK, Va. — If Democrats take control of the Virginia state legislature Tuesday, they will hold unified power in this Southern state for the first time in a generation. They will have a chance to enact stricter gun laws, to expand LGBTQ rights, to raise the state’s minimum wage. And they will preside over the next redistricting, which will shape political power in Virginia for a decade.

Elizabeth Warren wants to offer down-payment assistance to home buyers in formerly “redlined” neighborhoods where the federal government once denied access to mortgages. Cory Booker would like to create “baby bonds” that would be worth more to children in poorer families, helping them one day to buy houses or other assets.

Both presidential candidates say their proposals would aid in narrowing the enduring black-white wealth gap in America. But neither policy attempts to do that in the most direct way possible — by steering benefits to African Americans.

Their ideas, along with several others that scholars advocate, are facing a tricky problem today. There’s growing momentum on the left to address the racial wealth gap. But the prospects for race-based policies before the Supreme Court are unpromising, and that’s unlikely to change with five conservative justices.

“The court is functionally not now going to be an ally in anything here, so you do have to be careful,” said Mehrsa Baradaran, a law professor at the University of Georgia who has written about the racial wealth gap.

The court is unlikely to uphold baby bonds or housing programs explicitly for African Americans, even to remedy disparities created when many government benefits were explicitly for whites. Affirmative action and government contracting programs have similarly struggled to meet or skirt the court’s strict scrutiny for applying benefits by race.

Proponents concerned about the wealth gap instead must come up with policies that have the effect of disproportionately building wealth for African Americans, without singling them out.

“There are ways that you can craft legislation that essentially gets at this effect,” Baradaran said. “Look at how much legislation we have that gets at the opposite effect.”

Policies like the mortgage interest deduction, for example, disproportionately benefit white families, who are more likely to own homes. So do tax advantages for the rich, who are more likely to be white. Even federal investments in seemingly race-neutral infrastructure like the Interstate Highway System had this effect by enabling the development of all-white suburbs in an era of legal discrimination.

Wealth-building proposals today are trying to engineer a similar if opposite outcome. That makes the details thorny.

“The first and most efficient approach is targeting relief to the people who were targeted with discrimination,” said Dorothy Brown, a law professor at Emory University. “If we can’t get there, then we have to go to next best.”

Warren’s strategy, she said, is a clever workaround. Rather than specifying African Americans, Warren’s bill would target specific neighborhoods where African Americans harmed by the legacy of lending discrimination are likely to live.

Other researchers argue that a program based on neighborhoods redlined in the 1930s would be too narrow; most African Americans who buy homes aren’t purchasing in such neighborhoods today (and in some cities, middle-income whites are).

But the kind of neighborhood criteria Warren has in mind could be one model. Brown proposes identifying neighborhoods with the least household wealth and allowing tax breaks associated with homeownership, like the mortgage deduction, only to people who live there.

Baradaran proposes a “21st Century Homestead Act” that would focus on neighborhoods with many vacant properties. She proposes using government funds to purchase, restore and transfer properties to residents, then to help them build wealth by revitalizing their neighborhoods.

Booker’s proposal would give $1,000 in a government savings fund to every newborn in America, for use later in adulthood. But the government would seed more money into that fund each year according to a family’s income, giving the most to children in the poorest families. That money could then be spent in adulthood on education, buying a home or starting a business.

It isn’t meant to be an income supplement, but rather a means to build assets.

“Ultimately, assets give people agency in their lives,” said Darrick Hamilton, director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University. His work on the baby bonds concept informed Booker’s proposal. “Assets give people the ability to make decisions,” he said, “to have choice and have freedom and self-determination.”

The point is not just to equalize wealth in America, Hamilton said, but to equalize those choices.

Booker’s proposal could benefit African Americans in particular by giving more to the families with the lowest incomes. But Hamilton’s original idea would steer the greatest benefits to families with the least wealth. Wealth, which takes into account the value of assets like a home or a stock portfolio, is harder for the government to track than income. But it is a clearer proxy for race in economic data.

Research shows that black people with higher-paying jobs still hold less wealth than white people with lower incomes, who may benefit from generations of accumulated wealth. Even black people with college degrees are likely to have less wealth than white people who didn’t complete high school.

While the federal government might have trouble tracking wealth for allocating baby bonds, it would be feasible with homeownership programs, said Dan Immergluck, a professor at Georgia State University. Loan officers already assess wealth when deciding whether to give people mortgages.

Immergluck favors an idea that would grant down-payment assistance, as Warren proposes, but that would target households with low family wealth. Ideally, he said, such a program would count parental wealth, too, given that whites are far more likely than African Americans to receive down payment assistance (or any kind of financial help) from their parents.

Much more sophisticated data is available now than in the past, said Andre Perry, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, and it could be used to devise these policies — to identify neighborhoods with depressed property values, or to trace back the people helped or harmed today by past government policies.

There are ways, in other words, to sidestep race itself.

But in the end, that may only close the racial wealth gap so much. Today, African Americans make up about 13% of the population, but hold only 2.6% of the country’s wealth, said William Darity, a professor at Duke who has also worked on the baby bonds proposal. He wants to see those numbers equalized.

“That’s an objective that is not achieved by any of the existing policies on the table now,” Darity said. “Ultimately, you need a person-based program if you’re really concerned about the racial wealth gap. And it not only has to be person-based, but it has to be race-specific.”

That would look, he said, like another idea that has gotten attention — albeit with far fewer details — on the campaign trail: a comprehensive reparations program.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/upshot/racial-wealth-gap-2020-candidates.html" id="fc60006b-64c5-3f40-a87e-714e542bb7f1">The New York Times</a>.

Can the Racial Wealth Gap Be Closed Without Speaking of Race?

NEW YORK — Congestion pricing has the potential to significantly change how traffic flows through Manhattan streets, how commuters get around the city, how companies like Uber and Lyft operate.

But most radically, if the policy spreads it could challenge a deeply embedded cultural idea, requiring people to pay for something Americans have long demanded — and largely believe they’ve gotten — free of charge.

The idea of the open road evokes these intertwined meanings: The freedom to use it should be free. Residential street parking should be free. Traffic lanes should be free. Stretches of public curb dedicated to private driveways? Those should be free, too.

In other ways, the government has heavily subsidized driving, or hidden the reality of who pays for it in places no one sees. Local laws require off-street parking from businesses and housing developers, who pass on the construction cost of it to tenants and customers who may not drive at all.

Federal and state governments fund roads with gas taxes that feel far removed from a direct user fee (and that have come to operate like less and less of one in an era of fuel efficiency).

“They add up to a pretty giant system of subsidies,” said Michael Manville, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But they don’t look like what we often consider subsidies.”

This system looks to us, instead, like an entitlement — driving is an American right, and so the infrastructure that enables it should be free.

Congestion pricing is premised instead on the notion that public roads are a valuable and scarce resource. And we should pay in some places to use it not primarily to gin up revenue, but to help manage access for everyone.

“It’s a huge departure from how we’ve culturally thought about this over the years,” said Kari Watkins, a professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

In reality, the government is a monopoly provider of road space, and the government has largely chosen to give it away. It’s no surprise, then, that the vast majority of American commuters drive to work alone, or that all those lonely commuters (plus taxis, Ubers, buses and delivery trucks) cause congestion.

When the government holds down the price of something people value, Manville said, we get shortages. And congestion is effectively a shortage of road — one that occurs at the peak times when people want to use it most.

If we had that problem with other kinds of infrastructure or commodities, we’d charge people more for them. If airline tickets were particularly in demand, their prices would go up. If there were a run on avocados, grocers wouldn’t respond by keeping them as cheap as possible.

“The roads hold such a special position in our brain that we use logic around them that we would never use around everything else,” Manville said.

Other countries have socialized health care, parental leave or housing, Jeffrey Tumlin, a transportation consultant at Nelson\Nygaard, pointed out. In America, we’ve socialized driving — and housing for our cars.

“We don’t let people put their self-storage containers in public parks, but it’s just fine to store their cars on other public land for free,” Tumlin wrote in an email.

Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia, traces this thinking to the 1920s and ’30s, when industry groups and government officials were debating whether to fund America’s expanding roads with tolls, which were by then common on bridges.

Road builders were happy to have tolls, and they appeared in places like the Pennsylvania Turnpike. But auto clubs and car manufacturers dependent on car sales opposed them. They preferred a gas tax, a cost less visible to drivers every time they got in a car. Together, they were remarkably savvy about branding the choice as one between “toll roads and free roads.” (A 1939 federal report even adopted that phrase as its title.)

“Of course, there’s no such thing as a free road,” Norton said. “But they were making the ambiguous association between their cause and the great cause of freedom.”

Industry publications at the time linked the need for “free” roads to patriotism, the Bill of Rights, even the Minutemen.

Today, because most people seldom pay directly for roads — or because general funds do — it can seem as if no one does.

“Therefore the street transportation system has no cost,” said Yonah Freemark, a doctoral student in city planning at MIT who runs the blog The Transport Politic. “And therefore we can just expect to have unlimited parking, we can expect to have unlimited access to neighborhoods, for whatever reason, for free.”

Take those expectations to their logical conclusion in a major city today, and you get 10-mph road speeds, rampant double parking, clogged intersections and worsening commute times. You get, finally, the political will for congestion pricing.

Now the culture of limitless, cheap driving may begin to shift in some places. But it will take much longer to change the physical environment that has grown up around that culture over decades, leaving many people without good alternatives to driving alone.

Where there are few other choices, like reliable bus routes, congestion pricing risks burdening poorer drivers in particular. But that is a problem we’ve thought about before, too, Manville said, if we’re now willing to treat roads as we do other infrastructure. He pointed to “lifeline” utility services: subsidized rates for electricity and gas offered to users with fewer resources.

“Fortunately, congestion pricing comes with its own built-in solution,” he said, “which is that it raises a ton of money.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/upshot/the-streets-were-never-free-congestion-pricing-finally-makes-that-plain.html" id="5602d2b7-088e-364d-a848-bb0761c06494">The New York Times</a>.

The Streets Were Never Free. Congestion Pricing Finally Makes That Plain.

His most startling ideas — a national rent control standard, and new taxes on land speculation and house “flipping” — would bring America closer to the idea that housing should be treated as shelter and not a commodity.

But in the housing plan his campaign released Wednesday, Sanders doesn’t go all the way there. He allows for profit, but not certain kinds of profit, or profit by certain kinds of actors. In that middle ground, somewhere between the private market and social housing for all, things get complicated.

The national rent control standard Sanders has proposed would cap the amount that landlords can raise rents, to shield tenants from escalating housing costs and, in a deeper sense, the excesses of capitalism in the housing market. Landlords could raise the rent by no more than 3% per year, or 1 1/2 times the rate of inflation, whichever is higher.

His housing plan says nothing about the profits of people buying and selling homes in the normal course of homeownership. In fact, Sanders would invest an additional $8 billion into federal programs to help first-time homebuyers, precisely because homeownership in America is often a means of building wealth.

Between the two proposals lies a fraught balance: One would curb profits in the housing market while the other acknowledges that many Americans depend on those profits. Sanders’ campaign seeks to reconcile the two by arguing that rich investors or landlords shouldn’t get to make so much, while ordinary American families should have a chance to make something.

“We want to return to the notion that homeownership can be an asset builder for working people and average American families, and it is not just a vehicle to commodify to make the rich richer,” said Josh Orton, a senior adviser to the Sanders campaign and its national policy director.

In practice, however, it’s not always obvious how to distinguish the working families from the rich investors, or how to devise policies that crack down on the one but not the other. Some middle-class families, for example, build wealth by owning rental properties. And landlord groups are skeptical that 3% rent increases would build them much wealth, especially when property taxes, insurance rates and utilities aren’t also capped.

Sanders’ proposal would also put a hefty tax on house flipping, hitting owners who sell a property for more than the original price within five years of purchase (for a place they don’t occupy). But that definition would cover people we don’t think of as flippers: a small-scale general contractor who remodels two homes a year; a family that buys a home for an aging parent who later dies; a landlord who herself faces financial distress and must get out of the business.

Sanders has similarly proposed a tax on empty homes, aimed at speculators who sit on vacant properties until they become more lucrative to redevelop, or simply profitable to resell. That is a real problem in some communities, leaving neighbors to live with blight for years. But owning an empty home doesn’t necessarily make you a speculator. Someone who has put a property on the market and struggled to sell it for months might end up facing this tax.

The full proposal, emphasizing the feel-good parts of the market but not the others, is trying to have it both ways, said Jenny Schuetz, a housing economist at the Brookings Institution who has been following housing proposals from the 2020 candidates.

“In some ideal universe, people would buy homes (or rental properties) that appreciated slightly faster than inflation, allowing them to build wealth, but without housing costs rising too fast to pressure renters, deter new homeowners, or create excess capital gains,” Schuetz wrote in an email. “In that context, both rent control and flipping taxes make sense. The problem is, with any semblance of a private real estate market, land and housing values don’t behave that way.”

She is skeptical that it is even possible to design or regulate a market that gives modest returns to individual homeowners, but never gives big returns to landlords; that penalizes greedy flippers, but never harms small-time contractors; that taxes vacant homes but doesn’t punish working families.

Sanders’ ideas invite a host of questions about how they would technically work (how do we police a million landlords?) and where their legal authority would come from (would the courts uphold a national rent control law?). But these deeper questions about the kind of housing market voters might want seem worth hashing out, regardless of those other details.

Orton, the Sanders adviser, pushed back against the logic of economists that, for one, rent control discourages developers from building and landlords from renting housing that Americans badly need.

“I would say to those economists, how is that working out?” he said of the current deference to the market. “That’s what we’ve been doing. When we’ve left this to private developers, everything from the crash of the housing market to how we’ve seen gentrification just explode in some of the most vulnerable communities, to how we’ve seen people priced out of what would normally be affordable housing — this current crisis is the result of that.”

Should People Profit From Housing? Bernie Sanders Says Yes, and No

Bernie Sanders has gone much further than any of the other 2020 Democratic presidential candidates in proposing not just more money for affordable housing, or more enforcement of fair-housing laws, but also fundamental changes in how the housing market functions.

Busing is still needed today, Harris has since said. But discussion of just what that would look like has appeared to make both candidates uncomfortable on the campaign trail. As the issue lingers, it is easy to imagine a future debate question — one of those raise-your-hand episodes: “Do you support busing today?”

That is not the right question for this moment, according to researchers who’ve studied school desegregation and what happened when those efforts waned across the country. The term “busing” itself remains loaded in the same way it was in the 1970s. And the deeper problems that policy sidestepped remain largely unresolved today, with many school systems more segregated now than they were under court-ordered integration plans.

“The question is not, ‘Do we say yes or no to a 1970s-through-1990s intervention?’” said Ansley Erickson, a historian at Columbia University. “It’s ‘What is the intervention we need right now?’”

We know that schools and communities are segregated today because of past actions, in part those taken intentionally by the government, she added. What’s the obligation of the president today, she would also ask each candidate, to address that?

Matthew Delmont, a historian at Dartmouth who has written about the history of busing, said, “If it just becomes a question of ‘Do you support busing?’ that misses the whole history of how that became a code word to oppose school desegregation.” He would put the question this way: “If we actually care about education for students of color and low-income students, what kinds of school and housing policies will make things better a decade from now?”

Their questions both touch on housing policy for a simple reason: Schools are segregated because communities are.

But historically, the defendants in most school desegregation cases were school districts and school boards, and so courts had no power to demand fixes that might have affected the housing market.

That placed outsized expectations on busing that would be the same today, and raises another question:

“Why was the burden of undoing centuries of discrimination and segregation placed solely on schools?” said Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies the relationship between schools and housing.

George Romney, Mitt Romney’s father and the secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the Richard Nixon administration, argued for withholding federal money from communities that blocked housing for lower-income and minority families, rather than just transporting African American children to schools in such places. But Nixon halted the idea.

“That could have been a really different turning point in terms of how we think about school desegregation, but also about our neighborhoods,” said Erica Frankenberg, a professor of education at Penn State.

Maybe that’s worth asking candidates about, too: Raise your hand if you believe the federal government should withhold money from communities that intentionally block economic and racial integration. (Cory Booker’s housing plan, for one, would do that.)

School integration built over time into neighborhoods would probably have been more lasting than the integration that busing helped accomplish. Researchers have found that court orders ending school desegregation plans resulted in immediate changes in both classrooms and housing markets.

After the courts in 2001 ended a comprehensive desegregation plan in Charlotte, North Carolina, that included busing, research by Stephen Billings, David Deming and Jonah Rockoff found that African American male students in newly segregated schools were more likely to drop out of high school, less likely to go to college and more likely to be arrested as young adults.

In the housing market in Charlotte, researchers David Liebowitz and Lindsay Page found, white families with children were more likely after 2001 to move to whiter neighborhoods than they had been before desegregation ended.

If busing helped to decouple housing decisions from school considerations, that was no longer true once desegregation plans ended.

Evidence of all the links between where people live and how they think about schools has piled up: Research shows that rising income segregation in America since 1990 has been largely driven by the housing choices of parents with children, as higher-income families pursue the neighborhoods that come with the best schools. Another recent study found that the spread of online public school ratings has driven up the price of housing near higher-ranked schools, contributing to the sorting of wealthier and white families into those neighborhoods.

In addition, research has repeatedly found that communities with more comprehensive school desegregation plans have had faster declines in racial residential segregation than places without such school policies. And when Montgomery County, Maryland, required developers to build affordable housing in wealthier neighborhoods, poorer children who had access to good schools in those neighborhoods excelled in math and reading.

Other policies that might help disrupt the feedback loop between neighborhood and school segregation include measures to equalize school funding within states across school districts, so that wealthy communities with higher property taxes wouldn’t inherently have more to spend on education, compounding the advantages that also make housing in those districts more desirable.

School ratings systems that include diversity and not just test scores could provide a different signal to homebuying parents, who often say in the abstract that they value school diversity even if they oppose means like busing of creating it. Tax credits to develop affordable housing or housing vouchers given to individual families could also be leveraged to move more families closer to good schools. Districts could draw attendance zones in ways that cut across neighborhoods with different demographics.

Some of these choices would have to be made locally. But the federal government could offer grants to entice districts and states willing to make them.

In the absence of integration, perceptions of the “best schools” become incorporated into housing prices. And white homeowners defending their property values perceive threats in the possibility of integrating schools — or in the loss of “neighborhood schools” they control.

“It looks different when you’re contesting a busing plan in a metropolitan area in the 1970s than it does when you’re contesting a school zoning plan in Manhattan in 2019,” Erickson said. “But I think the core linkages, especially for white people, between racial segregation and ideas about educational value and property value — that feels quite enduring.”

Busing alone never could have unwound that knot. The more relevant question for presidential candidates today is what could — and how they plan to talk to white parents about that.

'Do you support busing' is not the best question

In the short time since Kamala Harris and Joe Biden tangled over the history of busing in the first Democratic primary debate, the question has awkwardly shifted to the present.

'Do you support busing?' is not the best question

It’s striking, then, that several Democratic candidates for president are now approaching renters in a way they’ve seldom been treated before — as a voting bloc.

Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, senators from some of the most expensive housing markets in the country, have proposed substantial bills to alleviate the housing crisis. They’re not talking in gauzy terms about homeownership, the rare housing topic that usually gets a nod. They see unsustainable, raw-deal, skyrocketing rents, and they’re not hesitant to sermonize about it.

In Iowa, Warren has “wonked out” on housing economics, and in New Hampshire she’s talked about racial inequality in the market. Booker has invoked the book “Evicted” (he included it in his book club) and his own family’s barriers to housing (a white couple had to pose for his parents when they bought their first home in New Jersey).

This spring, Harris, who has proposed a refundable tax credit for renters, walked into a hotel ballroom of housing activists and policymakers in Washington for a conference of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

“I believe that the right to housing should be understood to be a fundamental right, a human right, a civil right,” she told a cheering crowd with smartphones held aloft. “Not everyone has figured that out yet, so there’s a lot of work to do to make the point.”

Diane Yentel, president of the coalition, jokes that in past elections, housing advocates have had to strain to hear mention of their concerns.

“We’ve watched debates and town halls and said: ‘Oh, she said neighborhood! They’re talking about our issue. Or she said house!’ — just trying to find a way to feel hopeful,” Yentel said. There has been more talk of housing affordability early in this Democratic primary than has been the case in any presidential campaign she can remember. “It’s really remarkable,” she said.

Renters heavily overlap with key Democratic constituencies, including younger adults, African-Americans and Hispanics, and urban residents. Voter turnout of renters in 2016 was about 12 percentage points lower than that of homeowners, according to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. But that year they favored Hillary Clinton by 28 points (homeowners preferred Donald Trump by 11 points).

Housing researchers and renters say the climate has changed even since 2016. High rent costs have increasingly spread beyond coastal cities, and the pain is now expanding from the working class to the middle class. Housing vacancy rates are at a three-decade low. A poll commissioned by groups, including the National Low Income Housing Coalition, found that 60% of people say housing affordability is a serious problem where they live — up 21 points from 2016.

What’s changed is not just the cost of rent itself, said Andrew Criscione, a 30-year-old renter in Boston. Rather, he said, people of his generation increasingly fear that annual rent increases aren’t the product of a bubble soon to burst, but that this is their indefinite reality.

“Now you’re seeing people like me, who 10 or 20 years ago really would be pretty comfortable,” Criscione said. He makes $55,000 a year working in communications for a college, but he shares an apartment in a run-down triple-decker with two other professionals, with one bathroom between them. “Suddenly, we’re living in these tenement-type setups, we don’t really have an escape option, all the jobs are in big cities, and every city has a rent crisis.”

Home prices in much of the country declined or slowed after the housing crash. But rents just kept rising, with the added pressure of millions of people who became renters when their homes went into foreclosure. The home building industry has recovered slowly, and where new construction has picked up it has mostly added housing for the high-income market.

“The private markets have shifted away from entry-level housing into building McMansions, and I understand that — the reason for it is the profits are better,” Warren said. That represents a new reality from a generation ago, she said, one that demands a different approach from the federal government.

“We’re not going to solve our housing crisis by nibbling at the edges,” she said. “We need to tackle it head-on with big comprehensive solutions that match the size of the problem we face.”

Her bill, reintroduced in March and co-sponsored by another presidential candidate, Kirsten Gillibrand, includes a hefty infusion of money to nonprofit developers of affordable housing, paid for by raising the estate tax. A Moody’s analysis projected that the added resources, about $50 billion a year, would help build enough new housing to push rents a decade from now about 10% lower than they would be without Warren’s bill. That estimate, however, treats the nation’s supply of housing as a single market, and the real effects would most likely be different in Boston and in Des Moines, Iowa.

Warren’s bill also includes down payment assistance to new homeowners living in neighborhoods that were historically redlined by banks, in an effort to narrow the black-white homeownership gap. She and Booker also want to nudge local communities to allow more housing by changing zoning laws that block the construction of apartments or denser housing. Such laws have the effect of maintaining economic and racial segregation, and analysts on the left and right view them as a key driver of high housing costs.

Warren wants to dangle a new pot of federal money to communities that change such laws. Booker’s bill would punish those that won’t, by withholding community development grants. Either proposal would mean more federal intervention in decisions long viewed as inherently local. But both Warren and Booker argue that federal policies helped shape local communities more than residents often acknowledge.

“My whole life experience has been seeing how federal laws that were bigoted and biased created disinvestment in certain communities and created wealth and opportunity in others,” Booker said. “Federal policy literally helped to design cities as we know them.”

It follows, he said, that the federal government should help change those patterns.

That’s an argument that Clinton sidestepped just three years ago, even as her economic agenda included a proposal to increase federal spending on housing. In reality, the Democratic coalition also includes many homeowners who don’t want new rental housing nearby — or who benefit from the tight housing supply that has driven up the value of their homes.

The Moody’s analysis that Warren often cites also concludes that her bill would slow the appreciation of home prices. But in the early stages of courting renters, these candidates are not yet talking about how helping them may require concessions from more than just the people rich enough to pay estate taxes.

“That’s a huge problem for the whole zoning reform debate — there’s just no way to slice it that a vast number of wealthy, powerful people aren’t going to have to make some significant sacrifice,” said Kenneth Stahl, a law professor at Chapman University. “Candidates have to think about whether they’re going to be rewarded for going out on that limb.”

Harris has not yet put herself there. She has proposed only a tax credit for renters (Booker’s bill includes one, too). That’s likely to be popular with renters. But absent policies that also try to increase supply, economists warn that any money the government gives renters will just wind up in the pockets of landlords, pushing up rents even more.

Jess Sheehan, a 32-year-old renter in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who has become involved in local housing politics, says she prefers Warren’s plan for confronting the harder supply problems. But she says she loves that other candidates at least have plans. And there are reasons to expect more — from Pete Buttigieg, who should appreciate the topic as a mayor, and Julián Castro, who was a secretary of housing and urban development in the Obama administration.

“I hope it becomes an obvious part of the package,” Sheehan said. “How can you run for president without speaking to this?”

This article originally appeared in <a id="946d042c-a8ab-4d6b-8845-1e9e05ea9218" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/upshot/2020-democrats-court-renters.html">The New York Times</a>.

Renters are mad, Presidential candidates have noticed

(The Upshot): Renters hold little sway in Washington. They vote at lower rates than homeowners. They’re generally represented in Congress by homeowners. They have no deep-pocketed lobbyists. And their problems, if anyone considers them at all, are typically waved off as problems for local government.