From Risk to Resilience: Practical Sustainability For Communities

- Good afternoon, everyone, I'm Richard Green, I'm director of the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate here with "Lusk Perspectives." And today we're privileged to have with us my boss, the leader of the Price School of Public Policy, Christopher Boone. Chris joined us as Dean the first of this year and came into the enviable position of running a school just before a fire had horrifying effects on Southern California and led us to have to start thinking about brand new things. And I can testify that he did it with grace, and so it's really a pleasure to have him here. I'm gonna allow him to largely introduce himself, but I just wanna say that he came to us from Arizona State University and he is a renowned scholar on sustainability issues, environmental hazard issues, and environmental justice issues, so those are the things we're going to be talking about today. But Chris, let me start by asking you, what I ask all of our guests, is what has been your journey to get here?

- Yeah, you know, I have to be careful about describing my journey, 'cause it's the one thing I've discovered is that the older you get, the longer the story becomes. So I'll try to keep it as brief as possible. You know, instead of just going over what's on my CV and I'm happy to post it and you can find it online anyway on LinkedIn, one thing I wanna talk about, and I think, Richard, you and I had this discussion at one point, that what really mattered, and sometimes people forget about with these journeys, is how some words of encouragement from one person can make such a difference in your life. And that's what I like to focus on when students ask me, "How did I get to where I am today?" Because of course, you know, in a very individualistic society, we like to proclaim that all of our successes are our own, but clearly it depends a lot on the support and encouragement of others. So even as an undergraduate student, I was planning to complete my degree and I was at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and go get a job. I was thinking about going into urban planning, and one day the chair of the department, I was in the Geography department, came up to me and put his arm around my shoulder and said, "Chris, "been talking to the faculty "and we think you have what it takes "to pursue a graduate degree." And I had not thought one moment about the idea of doing a graduate degree or becoming a graduate student. No one in my family had ever done that. But that got me thinking. And then I started talking with others, I started talking with other graduate students, and then I realized, yeah, this would actually be an interesting thing. I'd love doing research. I'd served as a research assistant for a faculty member who was looking at the distribution of rabies in Eastern Ontario, and tried to understand the physiographic and other features that might explain the propensity of rabies. And I just loved being in that research lab and working with data. I know that you are a data lover too, Richard Green, so I think you know where I'm coming from. So I did my homework, let me put it that way. It wasn't just, I took these words of encouragement and decided to completely change what I planned to do with my life, but I wouldn't have done any of that had it not been for those words of encouragement. And the same thing happened when I went off to the University of Toronto to pursue a master's degree. I thought I'd get a master's degree and then go find a job. And it was the same, similar kind of story where someone said, "Hey, have you ever thought about doing a PhD?" And then, of course, once you do a PhD, at least back in those days, that pretty much put you on the academic track. And, thankfully, I was fortunate enough to find my way into an academic career that has been an absolutely wonderful journey. I've learned along the way, I've been able to add to bodies of knowledge, which of course is a really important responsibility. But an even larger one is an opportunity to work with students and have a chance to work with them and help them learn. And then, of course, the most amazing and joyful thing that happens, it's always nice to publish a paper, but when you see your students go on to do extraordinary things after they graduate, that's the greatest gift of all.

- I agree. It's been one of the great pleasures of my life to have students all over the world who I know I didn't screw up too badly, given what they have done in their career.

- That's one way to put it.

- I also, I do wanna sort of underline your initial point, which is about how there is no such thing as a self-made person.

- Mm-hmm.

- It is without, and for me, it's my parents, but also I had a third grade teacher who was very influential to me. So even long before college.

- Wow.

- And so I really appreciate you bringing that up in your story, because... I think we all should be remembering that pretty much every day.

- Mmm-hmm.

- So.

- Yeah. And to be thankful and grateful for it, right? 'Cause if we had to do it all ourselves, that would be a pretty miserable experience, quite frankly.

- Yeah, yeah, you know, it's funny, I wasn't planning on going down this path, but I saw somebody on LinkedIn, which you and I both use, who was writing this essay about how the strongest people have no friends because they don't need external validation.

- Mm-hmm.

- I'm thinking, boy, that is a sad, sad person that would-

- That is very sad. I mean, maybe there's a certain personality that could tolerate that, but I don't know, are they a human being? You gotta wonder.

- Yeah, you really do, so. So let's start getting into your work.

- [Christopher] Okay.

- So, and sustainability... is something that I think matters increasingly in my field, real estate. And I actually was on a dissertation committee today where one of the papers is basically about how important revelation of information is about... energy efficiency to the determination of how appealing houses are on the market. So in Portland, Oregon, the Portland metropolitan area, they've started to require at time of sale for people to reveal the energy characteristics of their houses. And what the student is finding is it matters a lot to how attractive the house is in the marketplace. So beyond the issues of climate change, at a more practical level, people want houses that don't... despoil the environment as much as they used to, it's showing up in the marketplace. So with that sort of framing of thinking about sustainability, I mean, tell us about what your findings have been about sustainability, and we are gonna get to the other issues we talked about earlier.

- Yeah.

- And I find the environmental justice stuff, the living around hazard stuff is really important and really interesting, so we're gonna get to that. But let's just start by talking about sort of your, thematically, what you've done in the area of sustainability.

- Yeah, so thanks Richard, so, and I'm glad to hear that, and it's a message I hear over and over again from multiple fields. And I guess that's the really one key component about sustainability is it's inherently an interdisciplinary endeavor, right? So it's not something that's owned by one discipline, whether that's ecology or geography or engineering, whatever the case might be. And it's because when you really look at the idea of sustainability seriously, it's more than the environment. So a lot of people go typically to environmental concerns. And that's important because we need to have a healthy environment to be able to do anything else. There's no planet B as many students will say, right? But sustainability ultimately is about human wellbeing, and it's about human wellbeing for present and for future generations. And that intergenerational fairness is a really key component and motivator for sustainability. And the idea behind that, as you know, is that when we take actions, we should be thinking about not just improving the wellbeing of our own lives and the people that we love and family members and so forth, but really thinking about next generations as well. And the idea behind it, and it's an ancient one, this is not new. You can go back and see actually very ancient texts, including Thomas Jefferson, talking about the importance of thinking about fairness to the next generations. Is that when we're making our decisions, when we're performing our daily actions and big decisions like buying a house, think about what are the implications for the ability of future generations also to have meaningful, healthy, and strong lives themselves, right, so... and it is a... it is a human, very human, when you get down to it, human idea, because, you know, we all want something better for our children, we want something better for our grandchildren. In fact, you know, when I look, when you look at some of the literature on support for sustainability, and I know you're gonna love this 'cause it relates to demographics, there tends to be really strong support amongst young people, and that makes a lot of sense because they're looking at many decades ahead in their own lifetimes, right? So they might have six or seven decades that they need to think about what that time period is gonna be like for their lives. And then there tends to be really strong support for people who are in their 60s and 70s because they're thinking about their grandchildren. And it's those people in the middle where it tends to wane a little bit. And one of the issues associated with that is that it's usually the people in the middle that are in positions of power and authority. So how do you mobilize young people and grandparents in order to be able to push sustainability agendas? I think that's one of the big puzzles that we need to think about. So maybe I should start with the definition. When we think about sustainability, it's about improving human wellbeing for present and future generations, while stewarding the environment on which all life depends. Right, so it's a systems-based approach that does put human wellbeing at the forefront, but it recognizes that we can't have human wellbeing for present or for future generations if we misuse the environment, misuse the earth's life support system to the degree that it simply becomes impossible, right? So there's no substitutability for some things like clean air. So we really have to take care of that environment to make sure that the basis for not just survival, but for thriving is there now and is there into the future. So with that, as I said, most people generally go straight for the environmental issues, for good reasons, but I like to remind everyone, and this gets to environmental justice, that we also need to be thinking about human wellbeing, about current inequalities, ut also inequalities between present and future generations. If we leave that out, then I would say it's not sustainability, it's something else. It's environmentalism or environmental science or environmental studies, but sustainability has to incorporate those notions and the idea of human wellbeing for present and future generations.

- So, let me ask about the conflict between abstractions and being willing to do the specific and sometimes painful things-

- Yeah.

- Necessary to achieve those abstractions.

- Mm-hmm.

- And I'll give, and as everybody on this who watches this podcast or listens to it knows, I'm an economist, so I always think in terms of pricing.

- Mm-hmm.

- And like many economists, in fact the vast majority of economists, I think gasoline is too cheap in the United States. We talk in terms of externalities and Pigouvian pricing.

- Yeah. Uh-huh.

- And if you factor in air pollution, if you factor in injury from cars, if you factor in roads wearing out and so on, the price of gasoline, if it took into account all of those things, and we'll leave aside the fact that electric vehicles are a whole other set of problems.

- Yeah.

- 'Cause they're still dangerous and they still wear out roads but... gas would be, according to "Resources for the Future," like $6.50, seven dollars a gallon.

- Mm-hmm, say it again.

- And, of course-

- I missed that figure.

- Something like six, $6 and 50 cents to $7 a gallon, somewhere in that.

- Yeah.

- Okay, if any American politician proposes that-

- Mm-hmm.

- They will lose election.

- Right.

- I am pretty sure.

- Yeah, mm-hmm.

- So here's a very tangible policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to actually achieve a number of good things that people powerfully reject-

- Mm-hmm.

- As an idea.

- And so how do we think about communicating the need to bear some cost at a personal level in order to assure that future generations can have sustainable lives, using the meaning you're, not just about the environment, but about things like, say, not getting injured-

- Mm-hmm.

- As frequently by cars, or now I'm gonna be accused of being a car warrior. Look, for whatever it's worth, I love my car, but nevertheless-

- Mm-hmm.

- And you see it in all kinds of polling data, when people are asked, do they worry about the future of the environment, they say, yes. "Are you willing to pay more money?" They say, no.

- Mm-hmm.

- How do we, how we we square that circle?

- Yeah, it's not easy. You know what, but there's some lessons. So, the tobacco industry, for instance, right? I'm sure they fought tooth and nail to try to decrease whatever taxes were being imposed because it was demonstrated that smoking causes lung cancer, right? And there's costs associated with that to the individual, but also to society. And now if you've, I'm not a smoker, but I know from people who do smoke, which are increasingly few in number, that the cost of a package of cigarettes is considerably more expensive in real dollar terms than it was 40 years ago. So we are able to demonstrate that because of health, and I think the health angle is really important. That is one of the big motivators. To me, two key motivators for behavior change are, well, there's many but jobs and health tend to be things that motivate individuals. So on the health side, if we're able to demonstrate, and it's gonna become increasingly difficult, but if we're able to demonstrate that CO₂ is not just an odorless gas, but it has health implications because it leads to rising temperatures, which leads to diffusion of more kinds of vector-borne diseases, all the things that we talked about, in addition to the health consequences of driving individual vehicles and so forth. If people understood those true costs and the risks associated with it, would they be willing to pay more, is, I think, an open question. So maybe the data and the evidence hasn't been communicated in ways, or the narrative hasn't been created in ways that is resonating with people. Is that enough, I don't know. I know that you're probably a fan of a carbon tax, most economists are, and there's been attempts in many parts of the world to institute those, and they've often been pulled back. So those, I think, offer an opportunity to learn. So, in British Columbia, they instituted a carbon tax, but I think that's, it's certainly the nationwide carbon tax in Canada has been dissolved. It'd be good to go back and look at the lessons learned from why did it fail? And as you know, there are rebates associated with it. So even though people were being charged more at the tax, at the pump, there were rebates based on income levels and so forth, so that it tried to be as progressive a tax as possible. And then on the idea of jobs, so one of the things that I've been investigating over the last few years is the growth of green jobs. And green jobs are skyrocketing, by the way, there are more green jobs now than there are qualified people.

- And for that matter, and Texas has had a particular surge in green jobs, right?

- Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's all over.

- It's not a red state, blue state thing.

- No, no, it isn't. And there's a lot of qualities about green jobs that I'm hoping will capture people's attention. So, first of all, more jobs than there are qualified people to fill them. Those green jobs tend to also be more resilient. So people are less likely to be fired if they hold a green job than a non-green job. They tend to be higher paid, they tend to require and also allow for more skills development. They tend to be more diverse in terms of the populations of people that they hire. People think green jobs are just for college kids, and that's not the case at all. It spreads across all levels of education. And so, this is a new emerging economic opportunity that unfortunately I don't think has quite gotten into the consciousness of the public. And if it does, or when it does, maybe we'll start to see some change. But having said that, I don't want to be naive. I don't wanna think that these things alone are gonna change people's minds and all of a sudden people would be willing to pay $6 at the pump. But there are some lessons from history that I think we need to learn from that might maybe not get us to $6, but might get us to like $4.50.

- Well, that's kind of where we are in California.

- Right, in California, we're already there, that's right. And, you know, when you look at those data, I mean, one of the things that I see, anecdotally, 'cause I was living in Arizona before, is I see a lot more hybrids and smaller cars in California than I do in Arizona. So I think there is a gasoline price effect that I see on the roadways here.

- So I wanna, you know, what you were saying about green jobs was so interesting, and again, seems like a pretty compelling story. Tell us a little more about what they are, and you talk about that they span the range of educational attainment.

- Mm-hmm. Yeah, so it can mean a lot of different things, and the definitions are always tricky when it comes to these things. So I wrote a paper on it, I think, I don't know if I shared this paper with you, Richard, but I'm happy to share it with you and anyone who's listening to this podcast. But it can range from anything from those jobs where you need strong training in environmental science, right, so it could be someone who's operating a wastewater treatment plant, to someone who needs to be aware of the benefits that are associated with the kind of work that they're doing that they might not even know is potentially a green job. And the classic example of that is an electrician. So there's booming demand for electricians and there's an insufficient supply. These as you know, are very well paying jobs. But what makes this an interesting and compelling case is that with Gen Z, we know from, again, from the literature that many of the Gen Zers are looking, not just for a paycheck, they like a paycheck like everyone else, but they want jobs with purpose. And if you can demonstrate to someone, a Gen Zer, that working as an electrician is part of the climate strategy, then you have an opportunity of improving recruitment to those positions and also retention in those positions. What's interesting is, several years ago I was at a military... base camp in North Carolina, and we were talking to one of the COs there, and they actually have a sustainability strategy on their base, and part of it is actually looking after a threatened species of tree and a threatened bird species. And you wouldn't think that has anything to do with military readiness, and it is a bit of a stretch to see the connection between the two, but what he said was that when new recruits came to the base and knew that part of their role was to look after this really pristine wilderness around the base and look after the environment, that that actually helped with recruitment and retention of new recruits to an organization that's having a hard time recruiting. So it can be a way to improve the ability of employers to attract employees, while at the same time providing a sense of purpose to the people who are holding these jobs, and at the same time being part of the larger puzzle for trying to figure out what kinds of jobs do we need to move to a more sustainable economy.

- So I wanna shift to now your work on where people locate in environmental hazards.

- Mm-hmm.

- And... you've done quite a lot of work in that area, and sometimes you find some things that at first blush, maybe a little surprising.

- Yeah.

- Sometimes you find things that are not surprising at all.

- Yeah. Yeah.

- I'm trying to queue you up here for-

- Sure, yeah. Yeah.

- So, so tell us about that.

- Yeah, so one little tidbit that I wanna insert in here is that the work that I started in environmental justice actually started here in California. So my first academic job was at Cal State in Los Angeles, and I was working with a colleague and friend of mine, Alan Madaris, and he alerted me to this brand new data set that had just been released by the federal government based on a piece of legislation called the Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act. And what this database was, was a national database of all facilities in the United States that released toxins, known toxins into the air, land, and water. And this data historically was not made available. We could probably get it, but it was not made available publicly. And the reason it was made available publicly was because of what happened in Bhopal, India in 1984. You remember that, many listeners probably don't, but there was an industrial accident in this-

- Union Carbide, if I remember correct.

- It was Union Carbide, yeah. And what happened is that this facility was producing something called methyl isocyanate, which is used as a pesticide, and it's a volatile gas, and it exploded and it caused estimated 2000 either deaths or serious injuries. And what was alarming, of course, is that no one knew what was happening on the other side of the wall, right? The very similar accident happened in West Virginia the year later, also a Union Carbide facility. And so, congress passed this piece of legislation, and the important part, the key words there of that piece of legislation are "Right to Know." And the logic behind the legislation is that all Americans had a right to know if they were living in or near facilities that were producing things that could be hazardous or dangerous to their health and wellbeing. But for us, as scholars, what it did is it made these data available, and then we could start to ask questions about, okay, where are they? And who's at risk? And who's-

- So just real quick.

- Yeah.

- Is this self-reported data, or is there an audit?

- It's self-reported data, but there's always the threat of an audit.

- Okay.

- Yeah, mm-hmm. So there's probably under reporting, you know, I think it's safe to say there's probably under reporting, especially in the early years. And also, the list of chemicals, initially there was about 650 chemicals that were considered toxic, and that number has increased since. So it's hard to compare the data over time, but what we're able to do, and others were able to do, is to say, all right, so who's, what neighborhoods are you more likely to find these toxic facilities located in? And this was not the birth of environmental justice, it actually started long, long before this legislation, including the work of Robert Bullard in Houston when he was looking at the distribution of landfill sites. So the ideas weren't new, but the data set was new. So I worked with a colleague, as I said, at Cal State LA, and we were able to demonstrate that the best social predictor, controlling for income and other factors, was percent Hispanic. So neighborhoods that had large percent Hispanic population were far more likely to have one of these Toxic Release Inventory sites than those that had a low percentage Hispanic population. And this fell in line with the thinking and the theory around environmental justice that communities of color were most likely to have, were disproportionately impacted by environmental hazards. So, I left that position for personal reasons, I won't go into it, but I moved east of the hundredth meridian, over that side of the country, and I got engaged with a large NSF-sponsored project called the Baltimore Ecosystem Study. And so, one of the first things that I did when I was asked to join this large interdisciplinary study, which is, and the purpose of that is try to understand how Baltimore function as a special kind of ecosystem, an urban ecosystem, I said, all right, I'm gonna look at the distribution of these Toxic Release Inventory sites. And Baltimore, as we know, is a very segregated city, mostly Black and White. It's become more diverse since, but very much a Black and White city. And my hypothesis was that we'd be much more likely to find Toxic Release Inventory sites in Black neighborhoods rather than White neighborhoods. And so, you know, I work in geographic information systems, that's where I do all my analysis and statistical analysis and ran the numbers. And what I found is that percent White was the best predictor, controlling for other variables like income and so forth, of where you would find these toxic facilities. And I went back, I thought maybe I'd switched the columns or something-

- Right, right.

- Kind of error, right, you know what I'm talking about, and so I double checked and triple checked, and lo and behold, no, I was right. And so that was really curious. And then I started reading that there are a couple of other examples, like in Detroit, a similar study, a study that used a similar approach, it found the same finding. And, but this goes against the grain of most, the vast majority of environmental justice studies. Cleveland, I think was another example. And so I started to scratch my head and say, well, what's going on here? And so one of the ways that I've conducted my scholarship, typically Richard, is to start with an analysis of present-day circumstances and then try to understand through history and decisions and policies, how is it that we got to the patterns that we see today. And so I started diving into the history of Baltimore, and one of the interesting things that I found in that case is that what we consider to be a disamenity or hazard today was historically an amenity that was afforded to White Baltimoreans and that was living close to work. So the ability to be able to walk to work rather than to travel long distances to find employment in these factories was much more likely in White neighborhoods that had higher degrees of privilege than Black neighborhoods. And there's, there's a lot of change in cities, but there's also extraordinary inertia at the same time.

- Mm-hmm.

- So even though these communities today, including, I visited one in Locust Point that was right near a wastewater treatment facility. The city was trying to move them because they wanted to expand this wastewater treatment facility. And there was active resistance by that community, 'cause people were saying, "Well, my grandparents lived here, "this is my neighborhood, I don't wanna move." So what, and the whole series of things happened in Baltimore was one of the first, it was the first city to legalize segregation through an ordinance in the 1910s that was eventually struck down by the courts and NAACP, mostly around property rights issues. So it wasn't, though, there wasn't segregation and racism in Baltimore, it just, it played out historically in ways that resulted in a modern-day pattern that was counterintuitive.

- So I, there are just so many things in that statement that are worth talking about is, for Baltimore is, if I recall, it's the city that Frederick Douglass ran away from when he escaped.

- Yeah.

- As a slave.

- That's right. Yeah, mm-hmm.

- Oh there, there... It doesn't cover itself in glory in terms of its history with respect to race.

- Mm-hmm.

- But I'm thinking about just how you go about doing your social science, which is you look at the data-

- Mm-hmm.

- And even when the data contradict your preconceived notions, you check, you make sure you didn't make mistakes.

- Yeah.

- You probably rarely do, but I make mistakes all the time, so I need to double check and triple check. But then when you're convinced it's not a mistake-

- Mm-hmm.

- You let the data, you follow the data-

- Mm-hmm.

- And you tell it, and it tells you where to go.

- Mm-hmm.

- And I think that's something we do in academia that people don't appreciate enough, that there is this set ethos of following the data.

- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

- But I think people have no idea what we do.

- Mm-hmm.

- And so, it is one of the good things about this work is you don't let what you think is true guide your ultimate conclusions about things.

- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

- You, you... try to figure out, okay, why is this, there, contradiction?

- Mm-hmm, yeah.

- And the story about, you know, I think about Baltimore in particular, what we consider now a disamenity. It's not just the chemical waste, as I think about there was that huge, I think it was Bethlehem Steel plant.

- That's right, mm-hmm.

- On the southeastern side of Baltimore. And, you know, when you drive by it, you say, "Oh, that must have always been a disamenity." I think about when I was a kid, the steel mills were still operating at full capacity in Gary, Indiana.

- Mm-hmm.

- And my family used to drive through there once a year to visit my family on the East Coast, we lived in Wisconsin. And I thought, what an awful place, because the sky was the same color 24 hours a day, it was always sort of this pale orange color.

- Mm-hmm.

- From, you know, the chimneys lighting up the sky at night and the soot darkening the sky during the day.

- Mm-hmm.

- But when I drove through Gary many years ago, it had a population of about 200,000 people, it's now about 70,000. And that's all about all those jobs being gone.

- Mm-hmm.

- And so, yeah, even our view of what an amenity is changes across time, right?

- Yeah.

- And you really, and you found that in your work.

- You know, Richard, just to insert one quick observation. If you look at bird's-eye views of cities in the late 19th century, they always featured smokestacks, because smokestacks were signs of progress and prosperity.

- Sure.

- [Christopher] It was a source of pride, right?

- Yeah.

- Mm-hmm.

- Well, you know, Manchester, which is I think most people think is the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, it's still proud of those old machines that don't do any work anymore. But they feature them in museums and-

- Sure, this is sort of like industrial chic now, right?

- Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

- Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

- So, but you know, I think about a parallel... with your work on hazards and amenities and where people live, and the problem we're facing with natural disasters right now. So it's gonna come back to what happened when you first came on board with us, which is-

- Yeah, mm-hmm.

- We had two neighborhoods, essentially, well say, wiped out, would be incorrect. About 50% destroyed, both of them, the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, and if you look at both of these places, nearly all of the Palisades were in a high-risk fire zone.

- Mm-hmm.

- And almost all of Altadena that burnt down, not quite all of it, a little bit less, but was in a high-risk fire zone. And you look at these places and you say, "Well, why on earth are people buying, "building wooden houses in these places "that are so vulnerable to fire?" Well, the answer is kind of easy if you visit them, is they're incredibly beautiful places.

- Mm-hmm.

- I mean, the Palisades, it's called Pacific Palisades for a reason. They're Palisades and they're on the Pacific. They're gorgeous.

- Yeah, mm-hmm.

- And... Altadena is there in the foothills of the San Gabriel Valley in these wonderful nooks and crannies, and it's, again, gorgeous, and it's its own other interesting history. But you have this conflict, right? It is very often the places that are the nicest to live when there isn't a natural disaster happening-

- Mm-hmm.

- Are at most risk of natural disaster. So from a policy standpoint, how do we, how do we deal with that?

- Yeah.

- Not that I'm trying to put anything big on your plate right now.

- Yeah, no, and, well there's a lot of smart people trying to figure that out right now, and it's complicated. I remember, I'll try to get to a direct answer, but I wanna-

- Okay.

- [Christopher] I wanna draw some-

- Well, it's fun how you get there, so take your time.

- Yeah, so it's interesting parallels. I remember after Katrina happened, I heard all kinds of people saying New Orleans shouldn't exist. And I heard that mostly from people who didn't live in New Orleans, right? So it was very easy for them to say such a thing. And yet New Orleans is, we owe a lot to New Orleans, not just in terms of the economy, and, you know, it was one of the key ports of the Mississippi River, but birthplace of jazz, birthplace of the cocktail was in New Orleans.

- I didn't know that.

- Yeah, that's where-

- Is the Sazerac, is the Sazerac the first cocktail?

- I don't know if it is the first cocktail or not, but, you know, because it was a confluence of so many cultures, right? You had Creole culture, you had French culture, had English culture, African culture all coming together in this amazingly interesting place. And so for people to say in a kind of flippant way, because it floods, it shouldn't be allowed to exist. One, they're not resident there, they didn't live their lives there, they didn't, maybe not fully appreciate everything that New Orleans has given back to us. Those kinds of, frankly, that sort of made me angry when I'd hear people say that, especially from people who weren't from the bowl. And then, so we have to be careful. And I know we had a seminar, a webinar, not long after the fires happened, and you were on there with the Santina and Bill Deverell, and we made that point again, that these, they're not just houses and streets, they're places, they're communities, they're where people live. There's attachment to those places. And so the notion and idea that people would wanna rebuild and move back is understandable. 'Cause it's not because they just want new shelter or new homes, but they want to recreate that sense of community, that sense of shared living experience that they enjoyed for decades. So on the other hand, there are social costs, as we know, associated with living near hazards, right? So it's affecting the lives of people there, but it's also, there's an economic cost and even a... a health cost associated with people living close to hazards because when the hazards do happen, we have to collectively pay for them. It puts emergency workers in front of hazards, right? So there's possibilities for injuries and death and so forth. So all of these things I think have to be incorporated into thinking through how do we actually deal with the notion, idea of living near hazards. The other thing, you know, as a reminder is that you'd be hard-pitched to find any place in the United States that doesn't have some kind of hazard that they deal with. Right, whether it's heat, cold, tornadoes, precipitation, wildfires, whatever the case might be. But we also know that those risks are increasing in severity because of climate, right? So climate's putting more energy into the system and it's making these hazards that have been around for a long time, even more so. So although we're focusing now on Pacific Palisades and Altadena, it's a part of a larger national conversation we need to have about how is it that we are going to assess these risks to start off with, and then how are we going to assess the costs and the benefits associated with living near natural hazards, and then what policies do we need to put in place to ultimately reduce the risks of any harm to property and to people that we might have? And I know that's where you've had discussions with colleagues at UCLA and here at USC thinking about if we are gonna rebuild, how do we rebuild, what kind of materials, is there a chance to rethink infrastructure and so forth? So, you know, hopefully, you know, if nothing else, we're an academic institution, let's hope that we learn, right, and take the time to actually learn from these experiences and incorporate all those elements. But, you know, maybe do things just a little bit better next time around.

- Yeah, so I, on New Orleans, and it was actually Ed Glaeser said, "Pay everybody half a million dollars to move away."

- Mm-hmm, yeah, yeah.

- So New Orleans is a very special place for all of the reasons that you gave.

- Mm-hmm.

- And... we would be poor as a country without it. And so New Orleans just creates lots of positive externalities for the rest of the country.

- Yeah, mm-hmm.

- But I don't know if that's true for every town.

- Mm-hmm.

- But what is true for every town, I think, is the social ties within those towns are really important to people.

- Mm-hmm.

- And there, you know, there's a, I think the best cited paper in all of urban economics is a paper by Jennifer Roback about why people move, and she said, there are basically three things. There's cost of living-

- Mm-hmm.

- There's... wages, and there are these things called amenities.

- Mm-hmm, yeah.

- And the problem with Roback, first of all, when you test it against data, it doesn't work very well.

- Mm-hmm.

- And there's a reason for that is when you really look at the most important element about why people live where they live, it's proximity to their parents.

- Mm-hmm.

- Is, you know, the median American adult lives something like 13 miles away from their parents.

- Mm-hmm.

- So being close to family, being close to friends, really matters a lot. And I think it's, I think it's an area, my field, economics, is getting a little better at thinking about it-

- Mm-hmm.

- But we still haven't really figured out how to model it properly. But it makes one wonder, is the right way to sometimes think about these things is help people move on mass from a dangerous place to a less dangerous place so they retain their social networks, but don't, aren't exposed to the hazards. And I take your point, we don't know what a hazardous place is anymore.

- Mm-hmm.

- I mean, Asheville was not on people's bingo card-

- Yeah.

- As place to be hit by a hurricane, only it turns out-

- Yes.

- It has a whole bunch of other natural hazards. It's in a very shallow river plain, and so it floods all the time and you don't need a Helene for Asheville to flood.

- Mm-hmm.

- But... But I mean that's, I don't think we contemplate that even as a policy, is how do we keep the, the people are what really matter, how do we keep them together if after a national natural disaster, we determine that there is no way we can keep them safe in a particular location?

- Yeah, I hear you but I think place still matters, so people do matter, but I think the place where people are matters as well. Right, so the physical place where they are, they have attachment to that place and their identity is associated with that place in the communities that they have, where they gather and so forth. I mean, so when you, when you hear about where people have been displaced, right? So where eminent domain gets-

- Yeah.

- Used, and people get placed, even community wide, into a different environment, often that social capital just dissolves because the social capital is associated with the place and its history, right, and its physical characteristics. So it's just the, I think it's, it's people and, right, it's not just people themselves.

- Right, okay.

- Mm-hmm.

- So let's talk about, so you brought up eminent domain. Let's talk about that a little bit.

- Okay.

- So, do you, so it has been... a major source of... all kinds of injustices, not just environmental injustices.

- Mm-hmm.

- Right? And particularly here in Los Angeles with the construction of the freeways.

- Yeah.

- Flynn, of the Philadelphia Fed has a great series of work on this.

- [Christopher] Mm-hmm.

- So, is there a way, do you think, we could do eminent domain right, or is it so fraught that we shouldn't, we should almost never do it?

- Yeah, you know, it's, I've thought about this a lot and it actually goes right back to my dissertation because-

- No, I know, that's why I'm asking you the question.

- Because one of the things that I was studying was the so-called modernization of Rio de Janeiro that was trying to make itself into the Paris of South America. So they blasted a giant wide boulevard through the historic core of the city and actually leveled the original hill, called Morro da Favela, from which we take the name favela as a name for describing shanty towns around Brazil and other parts of the world. And they completely destroyed those communities and displaced people to far-flung northern, so it was pretty awful. And Paris did it as well, and, of course, there was a lot of consternation when Baron Haussmann was blasting those wide boulevards through Paris and destroying the medieval heart of the city. But if you go to Paris today, it actually looks pretty good.

- Yeah, I think people like Haussmann now, I think he has a good reputation.

- Yeah, yeah, he does, but he wasn't very, you know, he was not that popular by most Parisians when he was undertaking those. So, so maybe part of it is, you know, maybe it does take time for people to heal or to forget, or whatever the case might be. That's, I'm not trying to justify blasting boulevards through historical neighborhoods, but in some cases it seems to have worked out okay. But, of course, you know, the other thing about Haussmann, he was helping Napoleon quell riots, so everyone seemed "Les Misérables," right, and people setting up barricades and so forth. So part of the reasoning behind those boulevards was not just to put pretty trees beside them and call it a day, it was to make sure that they could march the armies in and quell any uprising, so it's a counter-revolutionary measure at the same time. So it's important to keep that in mind when people are thinking about these so-called beautification, beautification efforts. So, I'm sure that there's justifiable reasons why we need to use eminent domain. You know, part of the issue is the act itself and then the process of working through eminent domain. So our colleague, Santina Contreras, who we know and love, part of her work is being able to demonstrate, and this relates to the fires as well, that we just need to do a much better job of community engagement. I know community engagement can take time, it can be frustrating, you can get people saying irrelevant things, but just that seems to be a really important way of trying to reduce the amount of... of problematic elements that can be associated with those eminent domain decisions.

- So do you think there are criteria? So I'm, when you say community engagement.

- Mm-hmm.

- I think about a place I really admire, which is Seoul, Korea.

- Mm-hmm.

- And they actually don't do very much.

- Mm-hmm. Yeah.

- Is, when they decide to build a subway line, they build a subway line-

- Yeah.

- And it takes them about five years from beginning to end to build-

- Yeah.

- Like 10 miles of subway.

- Yep, mm-hmm.

- Okay, and... you know, I suspect you are like, I'm a big fan of subways.

- Mm-hmm.

- I wish Los Angeles had subways the way Shanghai had subways. That would be my fantasy version of Los Angeles.

- Yeah. Yeah

- And it takes forever to build a subway here.

- Yeah.

- The one that's going down, finally to Westwood from downtown, it's something like a 35 year process to get that thing built.

- Right. Yeah.

- Because of community engagement and lawsuits and so on and so forth. So, again, how do you, how do you, what are your criteria for determining the golden mean-

- Yeah.

- Between-

- Yeah.

- Being a democracy, but also finally building stuff, building stuff that's environmentally-

- Mm-hmm.

- Very good, and I think an amenity-

- Mm-hmm.

- For particularly lower income people.

- Yeah, I knew as, as I started talking about that, I knew where that was going.

- Yes.

- So yeah, there's upsides and there's downsides. The obvious downside is they can greatly delay any decisions being made. And this works in, you know, everyday life as well. If you, you wanna make a decision, right? If you can do it on your own, it's gonna get done faster. But, you know, what's that proverb? "If you wanna move quickly, go on your own. "If you wanna walk far, go with others." So, oh, is there an in-between version of that problem?

- Yeah, there should, we need an in-between version of that, I think.

- Yeah, no, so yeah-

- I prefer dinner parties of six to large parties. So maybe-

- There you go. There you go.

- That's where I-

- Maybe six is the magic number, right, committee of six. Yeah, no, I get it, and so, you know, life is about trade offs it seems, and so what are those, what is the, the optimal trade off between efficiency and engagement? You know, I don't think I wanna live in a society where government just comes in and bulldozes-

- No.

- Whole neighborhoods, but at the same time, when there are some broader societal benefits that can be accrued, then, you know, there's gotta be a place for compromise.

- So let's finish, I just wanna finish on an international note, as you, and you already referred to Rio, and so I know you've done work in Brazil. I always admire your map of Vietnam behind your shoulder.

- Oh yeah.

- There you go.

- Yeah.

- There you go. So tell us, I mean, what have we learned from other countries that might be applicable to the United States, might make us a better society, and vice versa, are there things about America that you think other countries could learn from? This is, by the way, when I take my students abroad, this is always how I have them frame. And if the answer is no, that's fine, but I'm just curious, you have a lot of experience abroad. What has that experience taught you that... that you've brought home with you and could be very helpful to us here?

- Well, I'll use a recent example. So I was just in London with some of our colleagues, as well as hosts called Q5's, so Jen Ludwig hosting us there for a panel. And on that panel we had Tyler Goodwin, who you know well, as well as Lord Ian Duncan, and we had another panelist who represented, oh my gosh, town of Bristol, I apologize for forgetting her name. And the discussion was around the importance of placemaking for sustainability. And one of the reasons I was excited to have this in London is because London has an extraordinary sense of place, right, and we've talked about this before. You know when you're going from one neighborhood to the next in terms of the architecture, in terms of the street layouts, in terms of the shops, in terms of the activities, the people and so forth. And there's a really strong... identity associated with these different neighborhoods. And that's an important quality because, when we go back to sustainability, which is where we started, so I'm trying to tie the bow, the other end of the bow here, when you can create a strong sense of place, it creates a degree of people caring about where they are. Right, and when people care about where they are, they're willing to think about things not just in the short term, but in the long term. That they want this place, they love this place, they're attached to this place, they wanna see it continue, not just for the next few years while they're waiting out the rest of their mortgage payments, but as a place where their kids and their grandkids can enjoy and come back to. And that idea that... that we can create those places in such a way that people are willing to defend them, to look after them, to care for them, to think about not just the economic return, but the social returns or the cultural returns, I think London does that in ways that are absolutely extraordinary.

- So, but the thing about Lon, and I love London.

- I know you do.

- It's the only place I would rather live than Los Angeles.

- Mm-hmm.

- I think I've told you before-

- Mm-hmm.

- But... the reason I don't live there is it's so expensive.

- Mm-hmm.

- Even by the standards of California, it is very expensive.

- [Christopher] Yeah, mm-hmm.

- And I think about the contrast with that is, I don't know if you know the Pete Seeger song, "Ticky Tack," bout ticky-tacky houses.

- Mm-hmm. Yeah.

- You know, sort of, with these banal boxes. But, you know, the thing about these banal boxes is they're really cheap to deliver.

- Mm-hmm, yeah.

- To people.

- Mm-hmm.

- So, I think the average Londoner... who doesn't live... in W1.

- Mm-hmm, yeah, mm-hmm.

- They kind of have a tough life. I mean their commute is quite long.

- Mm-hmm.

- Although I guess crossrail was supposed to make it better, but have you given thought to how do you create that sense of character, and let's call it that, while at the same time, making it attainable-

- Mm-hmm.

- To as many people as possible?

- It's interesting you say that, Richard, 'cause that's exactly where we all landed at the end. So that's, we started on the importance of placemaking, we all ended on affordability. Right, which seems to be top of mind, not just in London, but in everywhere. And that's, that's one of the paradoxes, right, is when you create these really enviable places where people wanna live, they're gonna bid those rents up. Things are gonna get very expensive and then you're gonna displace all but the wealthiest. And that's obviously not what you wanna see happen. And I would argue that richness in place depends on having a community that's not representative of only one percent of the population, you really need to... I mean, one of the reasons why I like going to London is that, you know, maybe these are people that don't live there and come from outside of the city, but it's incredibly diverse city as well, right? Very international.

- Well, and they do have a lot of social housing there. So that's one of the reasons you have diversity and, and the social housing is -

- Yeah.

- Wow, London.

- Mm-hmm.

- But that said-

- Mm-hmm.

- You know, you have to win the lottery to get in the social housing.

- Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, I don't have a perfect solution for you, but that's one element that I think needs to be part of how we think about why cities are great, and one element that I would like to see replicated, recognizing that we need to be careful and cognizant of the fact that you might be driving up housing at the same time. I just saw your recent LinkedIn post about percentage of the US population that spends more than 50% of their income on housing comparing 1970 to 2020. And it's pretty shocking. What was it, something-

- Yeah.

- 13% in 1970, and what was the figure for-

- 25% now.

- 25%, yeah.

- Yeah. Yeah.

- That's pretty significant jump. And so, we know that's not just because everyone's moving to LA and San Francisco and New York, there's larger macroeconomic things that are going on there, including insufficient housing, but, you know, the housing affordability is, is a tough nut and it's something that, I don't know, we need the brightest minds to think about how we actually gonna crack that.

- Yeah, you know, I think about, it is both things, so I think about one of my favorite movies is "The Apartment."

- Mm-hmm.

- A Billy Wilder movie with Jack Lemmon, and he talks about his walkup apartment.

- Yeah.

- Which is the apartment.

- Yeah.

- And he pays about 80 bucks a month for that apartment. And at the time in New York, that was affordable.

- Mm-hmm.

- You could like be a junior accountant, which is what he was on the first rung of the ladder and afford an apartment on the Upper East Side of New York. I mean, it wasn't luxurious, but it was affordable, right?

- Mm-hmm.

- And... unless you've been in a rent controlled unit for 20 years, you're not that in New York, but the other thing is, what we saw is wage, between the end of World War II and the mid 1970s, wages rose much faster than rents.

- Mm-hmm.

- And starting sometime in the mid '70s, that just stopped.

- Mm-hmm.

- And... Yeah, and part of it is supply, but part of it is also, wages rose very rapidly in the United States between about 1945 and 1975, and then they stopped rising rapidly.

- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

- So it is, I mean, I don't know how to solve it, but actually I do, but it's not gonna happen, is we spend one percent of GDP helping people with housing. We could largely solve it, but-

- Oh, I thought you were gonna say eminent domain.

- No, no, no, no. No, not in this instance, so-

- Right.

- So let's, so we have about four minutes left. I wanna wrap up by just letting you say, you've been with us for a little over seven months now.

- Mm-hmm, yeah.

- So, what have you thought, what's good, what needs fixing? What do you wanna say about the Price School? I'm just gonna give you three or four minutes to talk about that.

- Well, you know, I am excited to be here 'cause I made the decision to come here and I actually moved away, farther away from my family, so, you know that it was a sacrifice that I made. So I'm, you know, I've said this many times before, Richard, but what excites me about the Price School is its mission, which is about improving community wellbeing here and abroad. The fact that it's solutions-oriented and impact-oriented, it's important that we continue to do research and scholarship, and I'm a big and firm believer in intellectual curiosity because you never know where that's gonna lead, but I am also really proud of the fact that the Price School has always had a focus on use-inspired research. So things that we've been talking about today, issues that we've raised, every one of those I think could be an important research endeavor. So once we've identified those problems or solutions or opportunities or challenges, getting bright minds to think about what kind of evidence do we need to start to gather? What experts do we need to consult with? What communities do we need to engage to actually answer those things? That to me is the spirit of what the Price School is trying to achieve. The other thing that is an important priority for me is thinking about what makes this a school rather than four individual departments. And we had a discussion, as you know, in the spring, thinking about integrative themes. And what's interesting, if I remember that conversation, is a couple of themes that came up, and we didn't talk about one of these today, is AI was one-

- Mmm.

- And sustainability was the other, so I was pleased to see that. And, of course, it falls in line with my thinking around sustainability that is really interdisciplinary, mission-oriented endeavor. And I think the Price School is in a fantastic position to be able to advance thoughts and ideas on that. And, of course, also working with colleagues across the university and with the city and county and so forth. I also, one of the big reasons why I made the move is, as you know, I love Los Angeles, with all of its warts and everything else, and high cost of living, things that we touched on today, it's an amazingly interesting, energetic part of the world. And I think I've said on more than one occasion that one of the fascinating things to me about Los Angeles is I think the future happens here first. And so-

- It often does.

- And bad, right, good and bad. So if you wanna be in a place where you can think about where the rest of the country, or even the world is going on things like these urban issues that we've described today, I think, look to Los Angeles, because chances are we're either not gonna figure it out, we're gonna figure it out, we're gonna experience it, and hopefully the lessons and ideas and policies and everything else that we bring to the table to address those will have repercussions well beyond the city of Los Angeles itself. So, I'm excited to be here as an urbanist. You know, this is like my playground, being in a place like Los Angeles and being in the Price School with its mission and its focus on impact. I can't think of a better place to be.

- Well, we're glad you're here, Chris. so thank you for an engaging hour of conversation.

- Yeah, it's been fun.

- And to our listeners, viewers, look to our next "Lusk Perspectives," which will be in a couple of weeks. We'll be talking to Bill Witte and Gino Canori of Related California about how they see the development process going in California right now. So, Dean Chris Boone, again, thank you very much for your time and we're signing off for now.