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Foreign.
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First class streetcar downtown with a fine ladies in the peeps. Hey everybody, this is Chuck Marone. Welcome to Upzoned, a podcast from strong towns where we take a current news story about cities and we upzone it, using the story to explore deeper concepts about how our cities work and what we can do to make them better. Before we jump into this week's paper, let me say something that longtime listeners probably already know about me. I'm generally pretty skeptical of academic housing research. That's not because I think academics are bad people or that rigorous research is invaluable. It's because I think housing research has developed something of an echo chamber. Researchers tend to build on one another's work. They use the same assumptions, they ask the same kinds of questions, they refine the same basic models. Over time, those assumptions become accepted wisdom, even when I don't think they've actually been proven. One of the biggest examples is the way we talk about housing affordability. Much of the literature starts with the assumption that housing is fundamentally a supply problem. Researchers then spend a lot of time studying how much supply we need, what kinds of supply we need, and how quickly prices respond to new supply. Those are worthwhile questions, but they all begin from essentially the same premise. I've been a critic of that way of thinking for a long, long time. So when I came across a paper that genuinely asks a different question, I pay attention. And that's what this paper now today does. I wanted to give this background because there's going to be some of you that are saying, well, Chuck, I thought you didn't like studies and now you're sharing a study. Yeah, I'm a bit of a hypocrite there. I'm not sharing it because I think it's right. I'm sharing it because it's different. The study that I asked our guests to read today is called the Role of Price Spillovers in the Australian Housing Crisis A to Market Analysis. It is an academic paper. It has a number of authors on it. I'm not going to read their names. I'm not going to butcher their names. I have more respect for them than that. But we will link to it in the show notes. You should go read it. The authors in this aren't asking how many homes Australia needs to build. They aren't trying to estimate the elasticity of housing supply or measure even the impact of zoning reform. Instead, they're asking something a bit more fundamental. How do housing price increases spread? Why do detached houses keep getting more expensive than apartments? Why does that rate go up higher and faster and what does it tell us about what's actually driving the affordability problem? Their first major conclusion is that detached houses drive the housing market, with price increases in housing leading and pulling up prices in apartments, not the other way around. Their second conclusion is that housing prices don't stay local. They spread from one city to another. This suggests that housing is increasingly functioning as a financial asset with capital chasing appreciation across markets. With me today to discuss is Andrew Burleson. Andrew is the chair of the Strong Towns Board. He's been involved with Strong Towns since the very early days. He brings experience from urban planning, real estate finance, local development. He's also the founder of the Houston chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism. And he now lives with his family in Denver. Andrew, welcome to upzoned.
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Thanks, Chuck. Glad to be here.
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Jeff Fong is a board member at YIMBY Action. He has spent years writing and thinking about housing policy, housing production and the social safety net. Jeff also brings a personal perspective to the issue, having entered the workforce during the 2008 recession and worked additional hours as a Lyft driver to keep up with the cost of housing. Jeff substacks at Urban Proxima, so you can go and check him out there. It's a fantastic substack. Jeff, welcome to upzoned.
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Yeah, thanks for having me, Chuck.
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Jeff, maybe we can start with you. I feel like you in particular have a very interesting perspective when it comes to housing. I wonder how you read this study and some of the analysis that went into it and assumptions and some of the conclusions.
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Yeah, so I may have gone down a rabbit hole and hyper fixated after you sent me an interesting paper. So just got to that.
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That's why you're here, friend.
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C
So our broad brushstrokes. I think this paper is doing three different things and I'll keep them brief and we can dive into whatever is actually interesting here. But like one is advancing a specific sort of statistical approach. And part of what they're doing here is saying we should understand different types of housing as sort of like different discrete markets. And I think that's absolutely correct and very interest. Wish we would do more of it. I think too much aggregation blinds us to a lot of stuff. The second thing is making an empirical claim about the relationship between these two submarkets. I think that's also interesting however, and we can get into this if we want. I have deep concerns about the way that they went about that, which are kind of buried in the paper. If you Read the fine print. And then the third thing is a set of policy recommendations which some of them make total sense to me. And some of them, I'm like, this kind of only follows if you grant some of the things from step two. So that's interesting paper. Overall, I think they're trying to chart out some interesting territory. I have some concerns with some of their conclusions that they jump to.
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I want to come back and have you delve into the second part, but maybe before we do that, Andrew, why don't you give your kind of first blush impression of what you read and what the assertions are here that we should discuss?
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Yeah, I did not think of that as systematically as Jeff just broke down for us. So, so I'm, I'm a little bit at a disadvantage out of the gate, I guess. But, so I will say this. I had two reactions. First that I feel about any kind of paper I read. The first one is that we're talking about Australia and I think we can learn a lot from any place, but I definitely have to be careful trying to learn too much from a place I don't know a lot about because these are big, complex issues and it's just too easy to imagine that things are exactly the same there when I know they aren't. So that's like one note of caution I had for myself. And then the second is just obviously that housing and financial markets are complex systems. We can reason about what's going on in them, but we can't run controlled experiments and we never see the counterfactuals. So we have to be humble about how much we can actually know versus how much we can, you know, theorize and have some partial understanding, but not a complete understanding. So to me, I think then I agree with Jeff's framing on the first point that it is interesting to think of these as two markets. I actually felt more, a little, a little triggered by their second assertion that there is really just one market. I think, Chuck, I've argued with you about this once or twice that I, I hate that framing. I think there's no such thing as a national housing market. There's only regional housing markets because you can't live in. You can only physically live in one place. So, you know, what's going on with prices in Akron, Ohio is just not very connected to what's going on in Miami, Florida, but it is connected to some degree. And I think the point that they made of being able to see evidence of how the financial market was pushing spillover, I do think that resonates. And I've had a lot of firsthand experience with that in the US I'm from the Austin area. Then I lived in San Francisco for a long time during COVID I moved back to Austin to be closer to family during the pandemic. And I had the cringy experience of being part of this wave of Californians. But it was like, no, I swear I'm from here. Don't ignore my license plate. You know, don't lump me in with these people. But I watched as I watched as the market in Austin reacted very strongly to this influx of people who were coming from a very different economy and how that impacted and changed everything on the ground in Austin and created a huge price shock there. And so I definitely think that spillover effect is real. And the way they analyzed that I thought was interesting. So that's probably enough preamble, but those were my first impressions.
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Jeff. I remember back in 2006, 2007, where we were having this debate over how correlated the housing market was. And the underlying argument was that, well, the California market is different than say the Florida market, which is different than Nevada, which is different than Texas, which is different than Minnesota. And then it ended up that everything was perfectly correlated in financial terms. Obviously this is not 2006, 2007. It's a different time. We're doing things differently. I wonder if you can delve into Andrew's point there about correlation, but also kind of expound maybe on your second point about the relationship between markets and what maybe some of the assumptions in that report that you would question or you would say, hey, this maybe is not going far enough or doesn't answer all the questions I've got.
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Yeah. So I think in general and 2008, something that I don't even know if I fully understand. I mean in full, I mean, full disclosure, I was still relatively young in 2008 and not fully formed in my opinions about the greater political economy.
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But it seems you're still relatively young, Jeff. We all are. Right?
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Yeah, let's go with that. Chuck, let's go with that line. 2008 does sound a lot more like a financial story. And I think it's the way that I would think about it, given my frame of mind now is less that all housing markets were correlated because finance and more like all housing markets were correlated because all housing markets were dominated by single family homes that were backed by, you know, Our everybody's favorite 30 year fixed rate mortgage that was being securitized. So I think that that, that felt like a, that felt like a financial thing. And I'll stop myself before I go too far. It just starts to sound like a Georgia story in my head. But we can, we can circle back to that later. But I kind of echo Andrew's sentiment that like, I'm skeptical of talking about housing markets as like a national phenomenon. I, as it turns out, I got into a fun little back and forth last year with an Australian economist, as it turns out, that takes that view that national housing markets are like highly correlated in a way that if you built one additional unit in San Francisco, it would literally cause one less unit to be built somewhere else. So I don't, I don't think markets are that efficient, particularly in housing. As for the paper, one of the things that I kind of found in the fine print is that their definition of, if you notice, they talk about, I think it's dwellings or houses or something, but their other, their other term is units. And I think they, maybe even there's
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dwellings and there's units.
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Yeah, yeah, but units is literally anything that is just not a single family
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home is what I read. Yeah, right.
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So I'm like, reading that, I'm like, I think there's still something there to talk about, but they've lumped in literally anything that's not a single family home is its own category. And then are theorizing about like the, the relationship between two statistical aggregates, one being single family homes and ones. And it's purely based on the structure. There's nothing to do with like how they're financed. So that raised an eyebrow where I'm like, I don't know if this is, this is certainly not saying anything about the price behavior of commercially financed apartment buildings as we would think of them colloquially.
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So, Andrew, the two pieces that I feel like I can really easily understand from the paper, one is the idea that there would be some kind of a push pull effect. And I think that's pretty easy to reason about intuitively because you can talk about preference order. Not everyone prefers to live in a single family house. But I think at least from everything I've ever seen, the majority of people, if it was all, if all costs and locations and other concerns were equal, and I would say, you know, I'm a person who really likes big cities and have lived in the downtown apartments and everything, I still, if I could have, you know, all other things equal, would probably choose to have a house for myself with more space and more yard and why not, right? Like those, those that's that's a personal luxury to have that. So the idea that that would be the top of most people's preference hierarchy is like, pretty easy to accept. And if that's the case, then you can imagine how, okay, people are basically buying the best housing that they can afford. Like each individual person where now, okay, the problem is the best is actually much more complicated than just houses are the best. But. But I think we could just pretend for a moment that most people would stay other things equal. I want a house that's on a bigger house on a bigger piece of land if I could have it. Right, okay. Then you can imagine the world as sort of an auction where the richest person gets the biggest house on the most land and we filter our way down until there's no more houses left, and then everyone after that chooses to live in apartments. I don't think the real world is that clean, but I think that that rhymes with reality. Like, there's some truth to that. And then that could become. You could imagine that being plausible that, okay, well, so then whatever is going on in the housing market is sort of setting the price at the margins and the price kind of cascades down from the best houses. Sell first to the richest people, and then what's left over is what's left. And then if that were the case, then it's not that surprising that if we go to the other side of the spectrum, right, like that. Let's. Let's think from the bottom up. If your alternative is to sleep on a park bench and there's a, I don't know, a tent available for $5 a night, whatever, you might take the tent if you could afford it. I don't want to make that too extreme because that's not a realistic example either. Like, people who are in that level of poverty, it's a very different set of problems. But, you know, if you're someone who. You have a small income and you're trying to find whatever you can find, you're kind of looking for like, okay, well, what is the housing that's left over that no one else wanted? Because that's probably what I'm going to be able to afford. So again, in this, like, preference cascade, you would have this sort of crappiest apartments in town are sort of at the bottom of that list. It makes sense that we know that income distribution is this like power curve, right? So it makes sense that you would have more movement at the wider end of that power curve that, you know, the first richest person and the second richest person is actually quite an enormous gap. And so their ability at the margins to move that like most desirable housing stock in terms of price, it makes sense that that would move more and that apartments would move less because apartments are more constrained by the people who are looking for apartments don't have as much room to like go up. At the same time, since there is a degree to which shelter is shelter and everyone is looking for a place to live, the nicest house going up in price moves the next nicest house up in price moves the next nicest. And like all of that pulls the whole market up. And so at a certain point, and this is what I felt like I lived through in San Francisco, you were down to this point where I didn't want to live on the street and I did have a good job that paid a good salary, but I was having to pay a huge amount of rent for a terrible apartment because my alternative was to not live there at all, you know. And so in that sense, the luxury, the top of the market, what was doing was pulling up the bottom of the market too. Just that framing, I think does make intuitive sense. Now then, when they say, when they jump to the conclusion, therefore supply doesn't matter, that's where I have a hard time saying, I think that's an oversimplification or too strong of a conclusion. Because I can tell you, if there had been the Ikea tower in downtown San Francisco available and it was 300 stories and I had to live on the 200th floor or whatever, but it was 500 bucks a month, I would have been interested in that and a lot of other people would have too. But it didn't exist and we don't know the counterfactuals. So I don't know where is the tipping point between at what point is there so much supply that enough people have sort of said, never mind, forget about the sort of top end luxury market here, I just don't even care. And then like the last thing I'll say about that, and let me yield the floor here, is there's many things in the world that are becoming this kind of K shaped, kind of like a world of the, the ultra wealthy and a world of everybody else. And we, we've seen that, we see that as a concern across many aspects of our society right now. It's not hard for me to imagine that some of that dynamic exists in housing as well and could show up in a study. When you're looking, when you're trying to look at how to break Things down that you can start to see. This sort of bimodal effect is not surprising to me. So anyway, let me, let me pass it back.
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Feel like the three of us have had enough conversations over time where we all respect the idea that housing is complex and housing prices are complex and it's not just a function of supply, period. There are other things. What I found interesting about this study and the reason I wanted to talk about and share it is that very first chart shows that divergence that you describe. Andrew, what you just described is I would say like the opposite of filtering. The idea that the filtering concept is the idea that, and I make fun of it because I'm not a fan, you know, I've said, okay, we build a really wealthy person a house, they move up and then like the next wealthy person moves up into their house and then at the bottom a poor person gets a house and an angel gets their wings. And like, you know, it's all great. So like go build luxury housing and like everybody will filter up. What this chart kind of shows is that if this is just a supply problem and I would maybe add to what's not in the study, if this is just a supply problem and filtering is actually a thing where, you know, everybody moves up and then when there's a new unit, you're competing. There shouldn't be that broad divergence. There just should be demand all the way down because someone sleeping on a park bench who could otherwise be in a house. And like, why is there this huge divergence, divergence in Australia? I'll note that as well. Why is there this huge divergence between what you're seeing for single family homes and what you're seeing other places? And I, I do feel like their conclusion is maybe too strong, but I feel like the conclusion is it's something more than just supply. Like there's something else that is pushing that market up and that something else really feels like it is investment capital, speculation, finance in that realm and less in the strict number of units. We can solve it by building more kind of realm. Andrew, I see you being skeptical, but I'm going to let Jeff talk next and then Andrew, we're going to come back to you. Jeff, go ahead.
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This is actually the perfect setup because I may have also spent a little bit too much time this week learning about the Australian housing market because one
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thing led to another.
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I just had some free time. One thing that I noted, and I have citations somewhere because I wanted to make sure I wasn't just like LLM Hallucinating anything. It looks like at least specifically for the five cities they called out something like 66 called 2/3 of the housing stock is single family detached housing. And then even with their grab bag other sort of component, like you know, that leaves you like the other third as you know, other stuff. So if we're talking about like why does single family detached housing drive the overall distribution? Well if prices in 2/3 of your popular in your observations go up, well of course that's going to have an overwhelming effect on the smaller portion. Now as far as like why that's the case, this is getting way beyond my, my knowledge of Australia. It looks like they have a lot of. I found some, don't quote me on this, but it looks like minimum lot sizes there can run something like 5,000 to like 8,000 square feet. Like it just looks like, it looks like the worst type of like you must consume, like you must eat the entire cake or you get nothing type of land use planning.
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Yeah, yeah.
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But the financial story there is and this is going to be wild. I think they don't have a 30 year fixed mortgage analog but they have something called negative gearing which sounds completely insane where if you own an investment property and you lose money on it, you can deduct that loss against your income and then also a capital gains. Like basically if you sell your house, you know, like you can roll over into a new house in the United States apparently they have that but you don't even have to roll it over into new property is what I read this week. So there's all this like larger portion of the housing stock that appears to be mandated as far as like what's allowed but then on top of it gets all these like extra tax incentives that I'm like, well of course you made it so people had to buy a large piece of pie and then you gave them all these tax incentives. Like of course that's all capitalized in the land values. So that's what I think that I'm seeing and what feels like a more specific set of explanations for like one why one side of this looks so big and the other side looks so inconsequential.
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Andrew, I'm going to give you the last word on this study and then we'll shift to the down zone.
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That's a good tee up. I would say the U.S. i know and Australia it sounds like I would, I would have assumed and it sounds like Jeff did the research to confirm. So thank you Jeff. We've done a lot. This is what you wrote about in the Housing Trap. We've done a lot to try to make housing into a good financial product, into a good financial asset. So we have two things going on at the same time. We have a shelter market that is real, that is part of the equation. But we separately have this financial market going on that is part of the equation. When we've created all of this policy to make sure that homes are a great financial asset for anyone who lives in them, well, then they're also a great financial asset for people who don't live in them. Like, you kind of can't have it both ways. And I think ultimately it's not surprising that we would get these consequences. Let me just. Because I think this may help any listeners who might feel skeptical about that. Let me just try and illustrate with one short story. The mindset of your home value is part of your net wealth, rather than it being like your shelter. People don't think of their car as being part of their net wealth. They think of it as being part of their, like, you know, personal utility. I don't know how to say this, but, like, it's one of your assets, but it's not a financial asset. It's a financial liability, you know, but you value it because it does lots of good things for you. You need it. You get all this utility from it. It's great. You're not bothered by the fact that this is a financial liability, but you're conscious of the fact that you're not making money off that. But people think about their house as something they're making money off of, and that has these weird effects. What I saw in Austin was this huge wave of people in 2020 and 2021 move into town. They just sold a house for a million dollars In California in 2019, a million dollars would have bought you almost any house in the Austin area. By the end of 2021. It would have not bought you very many houses in the Austin area. Well, there weren't actually that many people who moved. There also weren't that many houses for sale. So what happened is the people listed at what they thought of as a normal Austin price. Someone with California money goes, what a great deal. They beat each other up. Those prices then skyrocket on paper. But what I lived through when I left Austin in 2022 was this incredible hangover where people still wanted to list their price for this influx of California money coming in. And the wave was over. And what I saw was people would leave their house on the market for a Year and then just refuse to sell because they've latched into their mind, well, last year, my neighbor sold their house for a million dollars. Therefore, my house is worth a million dollars. Therefore, anyone who doesn't want to pay me, this is insane. And they have this weird behavior here where it's your shelter, you're living in it, you don't have to move, but you maybe you want to, but your decision not to ends up being muddled by this idea that you have this number in your head that it's worth. And that makes the single family house market very strange. Very, very sticky is the term that people use. Right? Like, the prices are unreasonably sticky. And then people's retirement plans are based on these, like, numbers that they have in their head that are very sticky about things that happened at one point in time in a very illiquid market. And so just to say, like, all of that kind of comes from or all of that tends to hinge on things we have done to make the housing market a very, very good investment. That gets people thinking of it that way. That gets people thinking of it as, this is not just the place I live. It's not just an asset that I have that I sort of drain the value of over time, but rather, this is this thing that's making me wealthy. We've done a lot to make it be. To make that be true. And then now we're, like, facing the consequences of, well, now that. Now we've made it a good asset, and that's actually got all kinds of negative consequences for our shelter. That's a big problem. Anyway, you wrote the book on that, so we probably don't need to belabor that too much. But I do think that is a big part of the story that we have to grapple with if we want to actually fix our shelter problems. Probably doing things that make housing less of a great financial asset are going to be part of that mix. And politically, I don't know if we can talk about it that way or not, but I think when you think about just grappling with reality, that's going to have to be part of what we. We do.
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Jeff, I saw you nodding along. I said Andrew to the last word, but I'll let you have it.
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Yeah, no, please let Jeff.
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I will. I'll let Jeff. Jeff's our guest. I do. I do feel like there is this human side of it where, you know, if we looked at a stock I invest in, you know, whatever stock, it goes up in price, and then it goes down in price. I don't like, wait and say I'm going to wait till it gets to my price before I sell it. If I got to sell it, I got to sell it at whatever the stock. The more we make housing act like a financial asset, the more it kind of mirrors a stock in terms of its price up and down. It is different because it is A less liquid, B, more emotional, C more tied directly to your own personal net worth than whatever stock you own here or on there. I don't know if you want to take this home, build on what Andrew said or if there's something else you wanted to add.
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C
Yeah, I just want to plus one all that. I think when I think about housing, if housing continues to be everybody's personal and main financial form of not even really savings as an investment vehicle, that is a fundamental problem with the system that we have and I would prefer to see. I think it's just same thing Andrew is saying in different words. I think housing should be and should be thought of as consumer durable like a car or a refrigerator or just something that we know that we're going to use, we're going to get use out of and that honestly is going to be a depreciating but useful piece of capital over time. And for me, the extra thing that I'll add there is, I think about that in terms of separating the land value that's getting securitized from the structure itself because that's the underlying, in my mind, that is the underlying problem when Random House on the periphery of some booming metro because somebody founded a tech company when that like 10, 20, 30, 50 x's it's the location value. It's not like the, the timber in the walls that's getting more valuable. So I think finding a way to pull that out of the financial system is part of, of what needs to happen here.
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We're going to switch to the down zone, which is where we pause for a moment and talk in a, in a friendly way about something we've been up to doing. Interested in. Andrew, I'll start with you this week. What's your down zone item?
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Well, I wrote about this because it was such an unusual experience, but I got to go to a World cup game. I felt kind of guilty. I still feel just a little guilty admitting that it was something I had to save up for, for a long time to be able to afford. But I was really amazed by what a great experience it was and not, not in the ways I expected. You know, I, I Expected that. You know, I thought of it as a personal bucket list thing like, this may never happen again in my lifetime. And I. I'm interested in the World Cup. I want to see it. But there was this incredible, like, positivity. This is the best way I can describe it, I would say. There's. There's usually this paradox right when you go to a sporting event. Usually either it's like a baseball game in the middle of the season, and no one really cares that much who wins. And so it's. It's fun, infested, whatever, but no one's really paying attention, or it's like an SEC football game in October, and people have, like, falsely equated that their life hinges on the outcome of this game. And everyone' really paying attention and the energy is there, but there's also this, like, desperation and this, like, negative edge of, like, people are more afraid of losing than they are excited about winning, you know?
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B
Yeah.
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A
And this was the only thing I've ever been to where everyone was paying attention. No one was on their phone. Every person in the building was incredibly invested in the outcome. But it didn't have any of that negative edge. It seemed like everyone and I, probably, because it's just a once in a lifetime thing, everyone felt lucky to be there. But I will say this. You know, it's a cliche to say that these things bring the world together, but it, man, it really felt like that. I was really amazed by the. By just how. How, like, entirely positive and happy and uplifting and the whole thing felt. They did a great job with, like, the national anthems and the, like, intro videos for each country. And so, I don't know, like, all of it was just like. It was like if Disney put on the perfect sporting event that just made everyone leave happy whether they left or whether they won or lost. And I was not expecting that at all. So anyway, I would say that was amazing. I'm very excited for the rest of the World Cup. I obviously hope the US Pulls off an improbable deep run into the tournament. And if anybody lives near any of the host cities, the atmosphere was that way. Not just inside the building with the ridiculous tickets, but all around the whole city center. And my sister lives in the Kansas City area. She said it's kind of been the same there. So just go check out the festivities around the stadium and you'll get most of that same experience.
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B
Super cool. Jeff. You're down zone.
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C
So recently I've been kind of, like, meditating on how I experience my own attachment to place. And I wrote something about this recently, but I've had the experience of moving around quite a lot in my adult life. And yeah, so I've had the experience of going back to places that I've lived. And that's sort of almost, that's not always jarring, but almost like a melancholic experience of being like, oh, this isn't like it was 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago. And I don't know, the thought that came to mind that made me put pen to paper was just kind of recognizing that a lot of times our attachment to place is really an attachment to a period of time that we experienced a place and the relationships that existed in those places and the things we experienced at those times. And just thinking about it, almost like a piece of music, right? You can appreciate a couple lines in a song, but everything keeps going. Yeah, it was my reflection on how I experience it and was trying to maybe give other people words for things that they've experienced in their life.
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B
I'm going to share for my downs on this week. I am in the we want to say final Sprint. I'm in the last six, seven weeks of finishing the next manuscript that needs to be the publisher in mid August and I'm going back and reading a book that I had read, not really thinking it would be part of this book on economic development that I'm working on, but is now becoming a big part of it. It's called Apple in China and it's about how essentially Apple dipped their toe into China as a way to solve a short term problem and then essentially got sucked in and now is in a sense like wholly dependent on Chinese supply chains. And the part of it that I found most interesting is how the idea of extracting from China, like getting out. We're going to start a chip factory in Arizona while a part goes bad and now it takes six weeks to get a replacement part where in China the entire ecosystem is there and if a part goes bad, you just order it and they bring it across the street and it's back installed in 45 minutes and you're up and running again. This is what Jane Jacobs called import replacement. And it's become such a passe like economic concept because we're like distribution, Ricardo, to like put things where people can do them best. And we've got globalization. As globalization becomes under threat, the ability to react and adapt and actually build supply chains becomes really important. So I found this book to be really good when I read it and now Going back a second time and rereading it in light of some of the arguments that I'm trying to make has been really enlightening. I did not mention at the top I had written bios for you guys and it did not include your substacks. You two are both like prolific substack writers. You do great work. Your stuff is fantastic to read. Jeff, I'm going to get this right. Yours is Urban Proxima. Is that how you would say it?
- [33:41]
C
Yep.
- [33:41]
B
So if you code on substack the URL, is it going to be your name Jeff Fong or is it going to be Urban Proxima? I can't remember how you get there.
- [33:50]
C
The actual site is urbanproxima.org, and then if you look for me on Substack notes, it's just at J E F F F O N G. All right, perfect.
- [34:02]
B
And Andrew, you, your substack is now Free Range City. And yes, that's right. If people want to follow you, where are they going to get that at?
- [34:11]
A
You can go directly there online at Freerange City or just search my name on substack and I'll pop up.
- [34:19]
B
Andrew Burleson. All right, thank you to both of you. Jeff Fong, it's been wonderful having you here as a guest. I hope we have you back again soon. And Andrew, as always, I'll say this not just because you're my boss, because I love you. Thanks for being here. It's always great gift for me to be able to hear and listen to your thoughts and share that with our audience. For everybody listening, thank you for doing what you can to build a strong town. We'll talk to you again soon. Take care. Let me show you what I'm about to do.
- [34:48]
A
This episode was produced by Strong Towns,
- [34:51]
B
a non profit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a strongtowns member@strongtowns.org membership.