Jake Auchincloss
The following is a transcript from YIMBY Democrats for America’s interview with Congressman Jake Auchincloss on Episode 1 of Radio Abundance, which premiered on April 8th, 2025.
Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:
Congressman, thank you so much for joining us. I want to welcome you to Radio Abundance and thank you for jumping in to help us launch YIMBY Democrats for America. We are big fans of yours on your interest in and work on Abundance. We really enjoyed your guest appearance on Ezra Klein's podcast recently, and we’re excited to chat today about the future of the Democratic party, the future of housing, of energy, and of what it's like to build a more progressive future by building. So thank you for being with us.
Congressman Jake Auchincloss:
I'm looking forward to this conversation.
Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:
Let's start here: Why build more housing? What's the impact of that? Why make it easier for people to build more housing? Why make it easier for people to build more energy? I'm curious about the philosophical underpinnings of your goals in these areas and how you came to those opinions.
Congressman Jake Auchincloss:
Reducing the cost of housing is the best way that policymakers have to increase real earnings for the middle class and the working class.
When you look at an American family's budget and where the money goes, the lion's share goes towards shelter.
If a federal policy maker can make a 1% difference in healthcare, or a 1% difference in childcare, or a 1% difference in housing costs, the overall real dollars effect will be greatest in housing.
I'm a housing maximalist.
I really view housing policy as upstream of most of the economic challenges that America faces today.
Whether that is cost of living, whether that is income inequality, whether that is economic mobility, whether geographic or socioeconomic: we need to build housing.
Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:
I think you're in good company here in terms of being a housing maximalist and the housing theory of everything.
Armand and I both have San Francisco roots. For example, I work pretty heavily in the artist community in San Francisco, right? And you see a lot of folks who are really suffering under the crushing burden of high rents. People who are a gig away from homelessness. People who are homelessness and are struggling on the streets. People who, more than anybody else, desperately need housing, and yet, oftentimes, are really fearful of the idea of building more housing, really fearful that new construction will cause gentrification, that it will be just luxury housing.
I'm curious how you speak to those concerns, coming from people who need it, most coming from within the party, and, ultimately, how we get to a point where we are building abundant housing and not just luxury housing?
Congressman Jake Auchincloss:
I think it's a twofold path.
The first is to recognize that you're not going to ‘community meeting’ your way towards enough housing.
I was a city counselor for five years, and I served on the land use committee.
I have been through hundreds of hours of community meetings about building housing, and I will say authoritatively that if we allow localities to conduct community engagement processes, we will not build the 10 million units of housing that this country needs to build.
There is an element where you need the political courage to stamp on local NIMYism and build the housing.
So, in Massachusetts, that looks like state zoning, whether through 40 B, which is our way of insisting that localities build multifamily housing.
The MBTA Communities Act, again, basically a state pressure point to force localities to build multifamily near transit or, even more innovatively, looking at decommissioned military bases, looking at brownfield sites, looking at former prison sites that are already state-zoned and saying that the state now is going to insist on building very dense housing here.
Because, particularly in New England, but California also, there is a very strong vetocracy that threads its way through the process of building housing.
So, one is just the political courage.
Two, though, I think, is recognizing that when we add a tremendous amount of regulation, particularly in the form of the amount of time it takes to permit housing, what ends up happening is that you've got to be a really deep pocketed developer with a very ambitious proposal to make it worth it.
When you're looking at six years and litigation to build a project, that project's probably going to be higher end units, and it's going to be at a big footprint.
If we instead made it so that you could be a small-scale entrepreneurial developer, where you could throw up 2-to-3-unit missing middle multifamily housing and have it done in 15 months, you would get more of the fine grain development, more of the mass market development, that I think builds organic trust within a community, because people see that it is developers of the community, building for the community in a way that feels like it is enhancing the community.
Armand Domalewski, Cofounder of YIMBY Democrats for America:
One thing I thought was really interesting in your interview with Ezra is: you're talking now about the zoning issues and the approvals, and you brought up in that context that one thing that makes it particularly challenging is this issue of Baumol's cost disease.
One, I just wanna say thank you for talking about Baumol's cost disease. I’m an econ nerd. Personally. I had the honor of teaching a mayoral candidate who will remain anonymous in San Francisco Baumol's cost disease was, and he was like, “oh, I've never heard of that.”
But it's basically the idea that, when things are very labor intensive and low productivity, they are going to inflate faster than gross domestic product.
You touch on the topic of modular and manufactured housing, and one of the reasons that housing costs remain so stubbornly high is not just the zoning, but what we call the hard cost.
Just the cost of building and construction remains this bespoke thing, right?
You have to build it on site. There's a lot of manufacturing.
Matt Yglesias and Brian Potter of Construction Physics had this like back and forth about it and they found that HUD had actually done a lot of research in 2011, saying, ‘here are the legal obstacles to building manufactured housing.’
But what's interesting since then is that jurisdictions have implemented them.
The results have been probably inconsistent.
It's hard to find a trend.
So, I'm wondering, as a federal policy maker, one of things that you can do is leverage HUD's ability to research and also the ability to create federal standards for things like manufactured housing.
I'm curious if you have any thoughts about how we can move housing more effectively from being what I think you refer to as a service rather than being a manufactured good.
Congressman Jake Auchincloss:
Such a good question!
A good intuition pump for housing and it suffering from cost disease is to imagine that we built cars the way that we build houses.
You stood in your driveway.
You called up a general contractor.
That general contractor hired some subcontractors.
They all came to your driveway with pipes and aluminum and metal and semiconductors and electronics, and they built a car in your driveway.
What would happen is that car would cost a fortune, right?
It would probably cost about a million dollars, because cars actually have as many parts and are just about as labor intensive when built by hand as a house is.
But, of course, that's not how cars are built.
They're mass produced in factories, and so they benefit from what's known as Wright’s Law, which basically states that when you double the production of something, the cost per unit goes down by about 25%.
And so, cars over the last hundred years have benefited from Wright’s law.
They've plummeted down the production cost curve, and cars actually relative to income are affordable in the United States.
Houses, of course, are not.
And, to your point, part of it is the soft cost of zoning and restricted supply.
But, part of it is the hard cost of the fact that housing has not experienced Wright’s Law, and, in my view, part of the solution, not the entirety, but part of the solution is indeed mass produced modular housing.
The knock on that is that it's ‘the technology of the future,’ and it always has been.
People have been talking about this since the 1960's.
There are a lot of companies now who are experiencing real improvements in productivity on this front.
Many of them are in California actually.
But what all of them need, I think, is a demand signal that they need to be able to produce at scale.
This is one of the reasons why I really think that bold governors should be chartering new cities in their states, saying that we're going to do two things here. One: we are going to issue a credible demand signal for not hundreds but thousands of mass produced modular housing units. And, by the way, set up the factory right here on site, so we don't have the transportation costs eating into some of the gains and efficiency. And, number two: we're going to offer low-cost financing to do that.
And that's where the federal government can step in. Fannie Mae. Freddie Mac —instead of just subsidizing demand for housing, they should be subsidizing the supply of housing by offering zero interest loans to mass produced housing.
Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:
Charter cities and new cities is a fantasy of mine that I never expected a congressman to talk about, and I was so excited to hear you talk about that recently and on the Ezra Klein interview and a few other places.
I'm curious, in your imagination, how those would work?
Is it a matter of designating the land and selling it to private developers and zoning it for high density?
Do you imagine governments actually building and developing some of the properties themselves?
How do you imagine these new cities manifesting?
Congressman Jake Auchincloss
I think there's three ingredients to them.
One is state zoning of a property. I don't think it's the federal government imposing a zoning declaration, right? It's gotta be state-driven. Governors buy in. Legislatures buy in. But, whether it's brownfield, whether it's a decommissioned military base – those are the two most likely in Massachusetts. In Western states, it might just be greenfield development. They have more land than we do in the Northeast. But either way, it's state zoning.
Number two, as I mentioned with Armand: I do think you need some element of federal financing, low-cost financing for the development. Not grants, but zero interest loans, because right now, with treasuries at 5%, it's getting pretty tough for developers to put shovels in the ground.
And then the third element is this innovative construction. We have to mass produce quickly on site. It can't be shipping in modulars. We gotta have the offsite construction here.
Now I'll add in a wrinkle. Which is to say housing is not the only social good subject to cost disease. Energy is as well. And a small modular nuclear reactor on site would guarantee low cost energy, reliable, affordable for the residents of this new development. And you could do the same thing, issue a credible demand signal, and you start to induce the private industry to build that site there.
The final thing I'll add is that people may come to this site for cheaper housing and cheaper energy, but they're going to stay there because of the walkability.
This is an opportunity for us as a country to get past our obsession with cars and to have a ‘no single occupancy vehicle’ rule for these new developments, to create fine-grain, walkable places where people are around people.
Armand Domalewski, Cofounder of YIMBY Democrats for America:
Speaking of, you touched on like nuclear energy, and I think that provides us an opportunity to talk about broader abundance.
I think one of the cool things about your interview and other things I've read from you is that I think you’re on the forefront intellectually of politicians of talking about Abundance broadly is a philosophy.
Something I found really interesting in the Democratic Party, and I think you can speak to this as a member of Congress, is that Democratic voters have become more consistently pro free trade, I think in particular as a reaction to Trump being insane.
There's a recent survey that actually found that the more left wing you are and self-identify, the more likely you are to be pro free trade.
But you don't see that online, right? If anything, the more vocally left wing people are more protectionist.
Congressman Deluzio and Senator Brown both recently wrote pieces arguing for protectionism. Even folks who criticize Trump's specific tariffs – they'll talk about smart tariffs, but not from a perspective of, okay, it's a cost we have to pay to achieve this strategic goal of semiconductors at home. They seem to think that it's an economic boon in and of itself.
So I'm wondering: why you think that disconnect is there between politicians and the voters themselves who seem to be more pro free trade now?
Congress Jake Auchincloss:
I think that tariffs are a worthwhile debate for the party to be having. I'm actually really happy that Chris Deluzio wrote that op-ed. I commented on it and said, I probably agree with half of this, right?
But the point is: thank you for putting out big ideas and forcing the Democratic party to actually engage substantively.
Because the party, I think, needs more energy, more raw ideas, and needs to be less straight jacketed in how we propose them. There's too much self-enforced discipline on, “you can't put this out there unless it's been vetted 17 different ways.”
Put out ideas. Smart people will listen to them. They'll come back to you with better versions of that idea, and that's how a party develops.
So I don't have an issue with the Democratic party debating tariffs. I think it's a good thing.
I do think, though, to your core question, there's something really interesting happening, which is: around about 2016, we entered what I think of as the seventh party system in the United States.
There's been six previous iterations of partisan alignments going back to the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans when it was Hamilton and Jefferson, all the way through Andrew Jackson and all the way through Lincoln and FDR.
And, around about 2016, the Republican party stopped being the Reagan Republicans, and they started being something closer to an anti-elitist, Christian Nationalist Party.
Democrats have not yet realigned ourselves for this seventh party system. And, as we do, the opportunity that we have is to embrace markets.
Republicans are retreating from markets. They are the ones who are becoming more status, more deistic, more skeptical of trade and commerce and exchange.
And I think Democrats have an opportunity to say, actually markets work really well. They don't work perfectly: Exhibit A, Health Insurance.
But, a lot of times, they work really well, and housing is a great example of where we have not allowed markets to work well enough because of self-imposed restrictions on supply through zoning.
Armand Domalewski, Cofounder of YIMBY Democrats for America:
Speaking of healthcare, that's another thing.
I feel like, right now, the Abundance movement has been talking a lot about housing. Obviously it's where I came up and Steve came up. But Abundance is about more than just housing, as you touched on in your interview by discussing healthcare abundance.
There's been a lot of news recently about China, for example, producing a lot of new, innovative drugs. And a big reason for that seems to be that they really deregulated and streamlined their drug approval process.
Willy Chertman and Ruxandra Tesloianu at the Institute for Progress provided a lot of recommendations for what they call ‘clinical trial buttons’ and policies to make it easier to get drugs approved and tested faster so they can reduce the cost of bringing new medications to the market.
So I'm curious: what are your thoughts about how to bring abundance to the healthcare field?
Congressman Jake Auchincloss:
First of all, huge props for raising the nine white paper clinical trial abundance agenda from Institute for Progress!
That's awesome. I've been pouring over it.
Healthcare is hard, right?
And I think we have to be incredibly humble as we walk into this field about applying maxims from other fields because healthcare is a very inefficient market. It has tremendous problems with it as a market economy.
And so one of the ways that I think about healthcare is to think about it as, ‘what are the sub-domains within healthcare that are gonna be most afflicted by cost disease,’ which is to say, broad demand, low productivity growth and high labor intensity.
And then, how do we deflect demand for those very cost-diseased sectors?
And the three areas that have the most cost disease in healthcare are: nursing facilities, emergency rooms, and intensive care units.
And again, that's not to say that they are not important things! They're hugely valuable to society. But, they're expensive, and they're gonna remain expensive.
Some of the best ways that we have to deflect demand for those three subdomains is: one, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals that keep people away from the need for service intensive healthcare.
And two is: community health centers, primary and preventative care. We should be investing more in biotechnology and medical device technology, things like diagnostics or cures for Alzheimer's. These things pay for themselves many times over.
And then community health centers – I mean, they cost 1% of US healthcare spending and treat 10% of patients. They are some of the jewels in the US healthcare system, and we should radically expand their funding, because they're a darn good deal.
Armand Domalewski, Cofounder of YIMBY Democrats for America:
I’ve never heard that. Why are they so cost efficient?
Congressman Jake Auchincloss:
Community health centers are cost efficient for a number of different reasons. One is: they are not profit seeking. Two is: they take this team approach to care.
So, when you walk into a community health center, you've got a primary care physician, a mental health counselor, a substance use specialist, a pharmacist, a diagnostician, and they take a team approach to care, which is highly effective.
They emphasize primary and preventative care, which we know has high returns, and it's a model that both the patient and the provider feel good about.
When I was recently touring one in my district, the doctor said to me, “This is what I imagined doing when I went to medical school. Every 15 minutes, I'm not filling out some prior auth for a health insurance corporation. I'm meeting patients, and I'm talking to them.” That is where we gotta get back to.
You know what country does a really good job with this? It's Portugal, actually.
They have a network of community health centers that have been very effective in population health management.
Armand Domalewski, Cofounder of YIMBY Democrats for America:
That's really cool.
Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:
I was very fascinated earlier when you talked about the shifts in the party system and that need for the Democratic party both to reinvent itself and to articulate what its vision is for what it's going to bring to America.
I both want to give you an opportunity to explain your full vision for what that would be if you were in charge of it, both in terms of what we'd accomplish and in terms of how we'd sell those ideas.
I do think you've said a lot so far that kind of implicitly frames that picture. But then, within that: it's pretty clear in this conversation you are speaking a language that's very exciting to us, right, in terms of the attitudes towards Abundance, in terms of both what the government can accomplish and how it can empower the the markets and individual creativity to accomplish things, in terms of what we can learn from other places, and in terms of how we can adapt to the times. That's very exciting, and also it seems very rare.
So, I am curious: how do we take these ideas and win them throughout the party and the nation? Who are your allies? How can we build more allies? And, not just how can you build more allies, but how can the people out here listening to you and getting excited about some of what you're saying, how can they support you and promote these ideas within the party?
I'd love to hear the fullest vision you’ve got and what you need to make it the party's vision as we move forward in the next two to four years?
Congressman Jake Auchincloss:
I don't – and this is an odd thing for a politician to say – I do not claim a vision at this point.
I actually think Democrats should be cautious. We just took a drubbing. What we need right now is not more message testing. I can go sit there in Washington with 17 pollsters and strategists, and we'll get a gajillion messages that test really well.
We don't need message testing. I'm not even interested in candidates. The forest of ambition is large, and there's a lot of presidential timber. Somebody's gonna emerge; I have no doubt.
I am interested in ideas. What the Democratic Party needs is ideas, and we should be pumping out ideas through forums like this, and taking in feedback about them. And the ideas that are vibrating with the electorate – those, I think, will then create an organic vision and a message that we have.
I have a sense of some things that I think are gonna be compelling. I think Democrats need to treat cost disease in housing, in healthcare, in higher education.
We’ve got to protect Social Security. That is the backbone of the Democratic Party's commitment to the American people.
Democrats need to regain trust on public safety. Democrats need to regain trust on how we deliver excellence and education. The school closures during Covid were a catastrophe. The Democratic Party was complicit in them, and we need to earn back voters' trust by delivering tutoring to kids at scale in this country who are behind grade level on reading and writing and arithmetic.
I think Democrats need to pick thoughtful fights with tech, demonstrating where it serves social good – like with offsite modular housing, construction or biotechnology – but also saying where it is contrary to public interest, like with the social media corporations that are attention-fracking our kids and corroding our civil discourse.
We're going to fight back hard, because we haven't, candidly, over the last two decades. So, I have a sense of some of the things that might thread together, but we’ve got a couple more years to be talking about it before a bunch of ambitious presidential candidates take the stage and try to become the standard bearer for the party.
The best arenas for many of these ideas will actually not be Congress. It'll be the states. I'm excited to see Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Andy Beshear in Kentucky and Roy Cooper in North Carolina and Jared Polis in Colorado.
I want to see governors look to make their states exemplars of how we can lower the cost of core social goods, improve education, and improve public safety, because ultimately, if we're going to try to win back voters’ trust with national governance, we darn well better show good state governance.
Armand Domalewski, Cofounder of YIMBY Democrats for America:
Speaking of state governance – not so much state governors, but the idea of vision – one thing I've run into in 10 years of doing this stuff is that there are oftentimes a lot of really embedded ideas.
For example, ‘housing needs to have this really rigorous process and all these checks’ and so on. And ‘it's almost a harm that needs to be avoided.’ Or, best case, ‘it’s something that we can use to pay for affordable housing.’ But ‘market rate housing is bad.’
These ideas that are anti-Abundance, I think, are in many ways very deeply embedded throughout the entire democratic governing class, right? It's not just what vision wins at the top.
There was this moment actually during the Biden administration when, around permitting reform and the CHIPS act, Biden was really frustrated. He was like, “why is it taking so long?”
And it’s that all of your people have been implementing and have written into law all these rules that you mut hire more bureaucrats and you must force those people to work 24 hours a day to jump through 20 hoops.
I'm wondering: what your thoughts are on how we can change the way that, change how the Democratic party as a whole thinks from top to bottom
Congressman Jake Auchincloss:
Totally agree! We are overly enthralled by procedure and not focused enough on our performance. Our constituents care about what gets delivered at the end of the day.
If I've got a rest stop in my district, and it's become an outdoor urinal – it's a welcome mat for Massachusetts, and people are driving by, and you're seeing people urinating outdoors because the facility has gotten to such disrepair.
It has been years. I have been working with state officials, federal officials, trying to get that darn thing renovated. And it is exactly what you're describing: it is the procedural and the accretion of regulations – each one of which in isolation made sense and was well intentioned – but it creates into this web that you find yourself stuck in, and it becomes an obsession with procedure and not with performance.
That makes it harder for us, then, when Elon Musk takes a chainsaw to a bunch of procedures that actually really are important, right? Like the way that the FDA investigates pharmaceutical quality in its lab in St. Louis. And we're like, ‘actually, wait a minute, hold on. That super is important. Don't get rid of that.’
We have a little bit of a credibility gap with people. They're like, ‘oh yeah, you Democrats, yeah, you just like your rules.’ So one way that I have found to push back on that mentality is to point to other countries that have a different mentality.
So, for housing, I'll point to Tokyo. Nobody has ever accused the Japanese of not delivering high quality social good, right? Look at their housing stock in Tokyo. They build a ridiculous amount of housing. It's all different formats, right? Some of it wouldn't meet code in the United States. And they have managed to keep housing costs at a very reasonable percentage of wages.
When it comes to infrastructure, I'll look to Madrid. Madrid builds. And, Armand, Brian Potter wrote about this: Madrid builds its subway for 1/16th the cost of New York. And anybody who's rode the Madrid Subway will tell you, it's better than anything America has, right?
So this can be done differently, and you just gotta point to other countries.
Armand Domalewki, Cofounder of YIMBY Democrats for America:
I think it makes a lot of sense. How do we communicate that?
I think of YIMBYism the proto-kernel of this movement, and it took about 10 years to get those ideas out.
I'm wondering how you're thinking about this: How can we build a broader Abundance movement?
Those are good individual arguments, right, but I'm curious about what your thoughts are on this: I think we're all trying to figure out, “how do we turn this into something that is a larger ethos and not just an elite conversation amongst people who read blogs like Construction Physics and Yggy,” right?
How do we communicate, so that for Democratic staffers, for individual voters, this is something that is a DNA change throughout?
Congressman Jake Auchincloss:
I think that's happening. It's interesting what you say about YIMBY as the kernel of this, of the realignment. I actually really agree with that. I really agree with that. I think it has been successful, actually, in cascading into the public imagination.
When I first ran for city council in 2015, you could be a progressive – a self-styled progressive – and be very NIMBY. The two of them, there was no cognitive dissonance there.
Am I going to say that's 180-degrees changed? No, definitely not. But it's changed a lot, especially with people under 50.
I would say it has changed a lot in the last decade, where people proactively recognize that, “if you care about progressive values, you gotta care about building housing.”
And there's every reason to believe that can happen in energy next. I'm already seeing it happening in energy next. The conversation on the left around nuclear power is changing pretty drastically.
I think we have the votes, if we can get it to the floor, to get bipartisan permitting reform done in Congress, which would be a major step. We got nuclear permitting reform done last Congress. So, I think energy is next up on this.
And then the third one that I see progress on in the short term is childcare.
Actually, here in Massachusetts, Governor Healy, working with a number of really savvy operators and experts, has taken a supply side approach to childcare, where she's operating grants directly to childcare providers. It's reducing their operating leverage, and it's covering their overhead, allowing them to offer better contracts for their childcare faculty. And it's working. It is working.
And I would love to see a Mikie Sherrill or Abigail Spanberger campaign on doing that in Virginia or New Jersey.
Armand Domalewski, Cofounder of YIMBY Democrats for America:
Just a quick note, because he was one of our speakers. Mikie, she's great, but when we had YIMBYs for Harris, Steven Fulop, who's also a great YIMBY mayor, was one of our big speakers. So I want to give him a shout out too.
Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:
Congressman, I know we’ve got let you go in a second. There's questions rattling around my head that I think are complementary and that I'd love for you to touch on a little bit.
One is about the moment we're in. We've talked about some exciting things that can be done in government and in politics.
For every ordinary citizen that might be listening to this, that might want to push these ideas, but also wants to stand up to Trump: what can they be doing right now to accomplish both of those goals?
I think the mirror image of that question, in terms of your life right now, is: you're working at the national level, and you're in the party out of power. You talked about areas of bipartisan cooperation. I'm curious what allies we have across the aisle, and also: how do you balance delivering for America with collaborating and at times empowering some folks who are doing some rough stuff out there right now?
So, I'm curious about the ethics of bipartisanism right now and the tension there, and then, with the backdrop of the Trump administration, what can ordinary citizens be doing to build a better world right now?
Congressman Jake Auchincloss:
The most important thing that ordinary Americans can do is to refuse to pull back from the public sphere. What authoritarians seek is for people to retreat from the public sphere and into the private sphere.
And so what I want Americans to do is to pick one issue – it doesn't have to be everything; we know they're flooding the zone – one issue that you're passionate about, you’ve got expertise about, and you have energy about, and find the nonprofit that aligns with your values and volunteer for them. Help.
If it's electoral reform, maybe look at Veterans for All Voters. If it's democracy and rule of law, look at ProtectDemocracy.org. There's a lot of good orgs out there, and staying with them, I think, really strengthens the sinews of our civil society.
My job – I have two.
I’ve got to represent the values of my constituents, and I have to advance their priorities. Representing their values means that I'm not going to vote for that continuing resolution a few days ago because it was a blank check for Donald Trump to continue to try to claim the power of the purse from Congress, and I think that undermines the separation of powers in the Constitution.
It also means, though, that if I can get the MAHA Caucus to work with me on funding community health centers – because they love community health centers – I'm going to do that.
If we can get HUD to change some of the regulations, or rather, I should say, standardize more of the regulations around modular housing – which the Biden administration refused to do – that's a win.
I've been meeting with some of the groups on this, and actually, there's a real opportunity to create some efficiencies for how we think about modular housing construction with some federal guidelines, much as was done for the 1-to-4-unit modular. Now, you can do it for more stackable modular units.
So I'm going to try to hit those singles and doubles where I can.
I'm a co-chair of the YIMBY Caucus. I'm a co-sponsor of the YIMBY Act. Another favorite of mine is the People Before Parking Act, which Robert Garcia put forward.
We didn't get a chance to talk about this, guys: I have a sense that we're gonna be aligned on this, but I firmly believe that every politician should have at least one unpopular opinion, and mine is that parking is the bane of American urban design and housing affordability.
We should be much tougher on free parking policies than we currently are.
Armand Domalewski, Cofounder of YIMBY Democrats for America:
Oh, amen.
Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:
Speaking of, there’s a lot – as you mentioned – a lot of alignment here, and a lot of more ground for us to cover in the future.
We’ve got to let you go now, so you can get to work on this stuff!
But, the door's open, and we’re looking forward to continuing this conversation and supporting, Progressive Abundance.
Thanks so much for being with us today!
Armand Domalewski, Cofounder of YIMBY Democrats for America:
Yeah, thank you so much. This is an honor!