(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 585: Bill Fulton and the Future of Where

This Week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Bill Fulton who has worn many hats including mayor, planning director, think tank director, publisher, professor and currently can be found writing on Substack at The Future of Where. We chat the impacts of work from home on cities, changing migration patterns and the south’s new role as the “National Suburb”, tax policy and burdens, 100 years of zoning law, and much much more.

You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA

Find all of the episodes and this one in our archive.

And below is a full unedited AI generated transcript, that’s pretty good actually…

Then I went to Houston, and I ran the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University in Houston, so I call myself a Texanfornian. Um-

And as a kid, I explored every inch, square inch of that town, and I just was always very place-oriented, right? Place leaves a deep imprint on me. It’s very meaningful. And so, you know, I’ve never been exclusively about big cities. I lived most of my life in my hometown of Auburn, New York, and in my adopted hometown of Ventura, California, both of which are pretty small.

But places and human settlements and how people interact with place has always been central to what I’m interested in, even when I was a journalist, even when I was a young newspaper reporter.

I’m curious how your thinking on cities has evolved through all of that and changed over that time period. Is there anything that sticks out to you?

You know, my daughter eventually studied planning at Sonoma State, and she was so interested in it she became a Chinese medicine and acupuncture expert.

So they would go to the grocery store where they were stocking up. They would go to the newspaper where they’re printing the newspaper. They would go down to the sewage plant, right? And that’s the kinda thing that always fascinated me about cities. How they actually f- what it takes for them to function on a day-to-day basis.

You know, many people, uh, have said, and I think this is attributable to Lewis Mumford, that cities are humankind’s greatest, most complex creation. And to see it operate every day, to me, has always been fascinating. A major evolution for me was when I went into elected office and I realized there was much more to running a city government than I had ever imagined, which involved a lot about running the organization, the municipality itself, rather than having the city function.

All of a sudden I had to learn about labor and budgets and things like that, which is stuff that I still do. Here’s one thing that has evolved for me. I think a lot of people see cities and human settlements as being different, right? There’s big cities, there’s small towns, you know, there’s exurban areas.

People who live in them think of themselves as very different from the other people, and they think of their places as very different. But to me, I’ve come around to the idea that human settlements are, on some level, all the same. They perform the same function. They bring us together socially, culturally, and most importantly economically so that we can engage in efficient human interaction with all those outcomes in mind.

And it doesn’t matter whether you’re living in New York City or you’re living in some little teeny town in rural Texas, that community still has to give you, provide for you all the same things. You have to be able to get around. You have to have a place to live. You have to have, at least until recently with remote work, a job.

You have to be able to buy groceries. Your kids have to go to school. So I see that what’s evolved for me is understanding that there are more similarities between all human settlements than differences.

But realistically, they are all just very similar species in a way, right?

What you do on a day-to-day basis is pretty similar. You get up, you go to work, your kids go to school, you go buy groceries, you go engage in recreational or cultural activities. All those things are more or less the same. They occur at a different scale and, and there’s different qualities to them. But what a human settlement does for the average resident is not very different

Like, the idea that a lot of liberal folks go into more dense areas and more conservative folks will go into more rural or suburban areas. There’s a mix in there. You know, the sorting of it all.

There’s no question about that. The question for me is, is a chicken and egg question. Do people go live in cities ’cause they’re liberal, or do they go live in cities ’cause they like living in cities, and those qualities of living in a big city are more conducive to having a liberal mindset, right? The thing that really strikes me…

So the sorting is clearly going on in a way that it didn’t used to, which is troubling in a certain way, right? Um, because people are more geographically separate from one another. They’re more likely to interact with people, you know, who have the same point of view as they do. A couple of things about that, though.

One is I’ve always found workplaces to be a place where people actually often leave politics behind and come together. You know, a workplace is economically integrated. There is usually not… This is not always true, but there is usually not a political price of admission. And so I think one of the things that’s happening with, uh, white collar workers engaged in remote work is they’re losing that, and they’re living more of their life in their bubble.

The other thing I would say is, and I wish I had a map of this, it’s not… If you look at the presidential election and you look at a map and you look at the difference between a county level map and a state level map, you realize there really are no s- there’s no such thing as blue states and red states, right?

There are blue geographical areas and red geographical areas. The blue geographical areas are typically in cities surrounded by red areas. As people, particularly white collar people, sort of disperse and move around, it seems to me there’s, as somebody said, uh, there are more, and particularly in the West, there are more blueberries in the strawberry patch, as somebody put it, right?

So although people are sorting, they’re not sorting on a large scale. They’re sorting on a pretty small scale, right? They live in communities, uh, with like-minded people that probably vote like they do. But it’s not like if you’re a Democrat, it’s not like there’s a Republican for 50 miles around.

And I’m fascinated by it because it’s something that I’ve been doing since 2014. And so I got to see it personally, and then the pandemic hit, and it kind of shot up to where a lot more people were able to do it. But I’m curious, like, how that got into your interest because you’ve been thinking about it quite extensively.

Somebody actually had to very expensively come and dig a trench in our front yard. You know, and little by little, this became easier. I, I, I just The remote work thing just strikes me as one of the biggest potential shifts to the way human settlements work in a long time. My daughter and her husband and their kid live in Bend, which is Oregon, which is maybe America’s leading Zoom town, right?

There’s a lot of implications to that. They are disconnected from work in a way that was never the case before. They may be more connected to their community than commuters ever were, right? Because they have more time to do things in the community. My son-in-law, when he lived in the Bay Area, was on the tech company bus all the time.

Now he’s a soccer coach.

There may be an upper limit that isn’t far above that, but I also think there’s a, a more of a separation now between white collar and blue collar work, or white collar work and servi- service workers, right? Where th- there’s a big difference now between people who can work anywhere, like you and me, and people who must go to a job site to work, whether that’s construction, restaurants, whatever, and I just think that’s gonna be a bigger and bigger…

You can almost see a, a political schism there, right, between Democrats and Republicans. Uh, I just think that schism’s gonna get bigger and bigger.

I know a couple folks there, and so I, I saw some folks and they were talking about the growth, and it’s just, like, insane how big it’s grown. And I’m curious, like, how does that impact these individual places, the Zoom towns, like the Boises, like the Bends, like maybe even the Seattles or the Portlands, the places that people from the Bay Area specifically, you know, try to escape then come back at some point, seems like, Austins and Miamis and whatnot.

And you see realtors who cater to people coming from out of state. It has an enormous impact on that. In, in Bend, you know, the question is not did you move from the Bay Area? The question is when did you move from the Bay Area, right?

It leads to political change. You know, Bend is a blueberry in a strawberry patch. So is Boise. So that’s one thing. But they’re also, uh, the folks from California or the West Coast come with, um, a whole different set of expectations, right? You know, the old joke is they move to Idaho partly because taxes are lower, and then they wonder why they don’t get the kinds of services out of the government that they got in California, right?

So I think it’s a matter of changing expectation, too. It’s a, it’s a cultural change, it’s a political change, and it’s an expectation change

But the fact that Texas isn’t growing as fast, and it’s depending on migration and, uh, immigration. Yes. And that places like the Piedmont and, you know, Tennessee and northern Georgia, it’s really fascinating that that’s actually where a lot of the action is rather than the Floridas and the Texases, which is what we expected from the Sun Belt.

But in any event, we have seen a big shift away from Florida and Texas to Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina. I’m not quite sure y- that’s more than the Piedmont, right?

They- they’ve moved halfway back. Uh, I think a number of things are happening. One is that the scenery i- i- is more beautiful in that part of the country than in either Florida or Texas, with the possible exception of the Hill Country, which is pretty.

If you wanna buy a single family house on a half an acre, you’re gonna go to that part of the country to do it. Certainly in Florida, and even in Texas, those size lots are not readily available. So that area, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and, and parts of Alabama, have recently bec- have really become what Los Angeles used to be, which is the national suburb, right?

That’s where people move to live a truly suburban lifestyle.

You know, all you have to do is build densely in, in centered locations, and you’ll be fine. The South is just a sprawling mess. Yes, you’re right. The suburbs of Los Angeles and the Bay Area Were always compact in the sense that they were small single-family lots by national standards, right? Always. I had a friend once who said, “Californians like to live close to the ground and close to each other.”

Whereas that entire belt of the South from Raleigh to Birmingham, I’ll say, is basically all half acre and one acre lots. It’s the national suburb, and so in some sense it’s the American dream, but it’s also, I think, an unsolvable sprawl problem.

Uh, but particularly in that part of the South is not being met. And it’ll be interesting to see if the development business can meet that demand in Texas and in the South.

And so it’s creating kind of a discussion about whether you’re, quote-unquote, “running out of land,” not because you’re running out of land literally, but you’re actually running out of spaces where people have access to the amenities that they want access to, or cities or whatever it may be, jobs, those types of things.

And so what they found is that there’s not a lot of space for these big developments, right? The big sprawling developments. And so when you have to come back inwards, the neighborhoods that existed are a little bit sclerotic and they don’t allow change, and so that’s, is what- … starting to cause some of the housing issues.

And so-

And so will we eventually get to a point where the really limiting factor in all this is the design and the location of amenities and jobs if folks can’t access them within a car commute?

AT&T’s moving up to Collin County, which is one of the fastest growing counties in the country now. It has over a million people. That’s where Frisco and Plano and McKinney are, and the famous Celina, which, uh, was made famous by Conor Dougherty in his, in his sprawl article in The New York Times. So that’s not unlike what you saw, you know, Chevron moving from Downtown San Francisco to, to San Ramon, right?

It’s not unlike that. So, so I think step one is a decentralization of the jobs. I don’t see any reason why Texas would not stop sprawling in the foreseeable future. You’ve got white-collar workers who don’t need to live particularly near anywhere, and you’ve got blue-collar workers who- Frankly, and I’ve written about this, have to drive a long distance in very expensive trucks that get terrible gas mileage to go to work.

So, uh, there may be a little of that, but… And we’ve seen a little bit just back in Houston in the la- where I used to live. In the last year or two, we’ve seen a lot of population growth in the city of Houston, which is surprising, uh, ’cause it had stopped during COVID completely. Most of the growth is still in, in the outlying counties, though.

I, I think you’ll see a decentralization of the jobs, and then people will put up with amenity poor locations, which they have in the suburbs for many years. You know, uh, we used to have a joke in Houston where one of our local politicians used to say that the Grand Parkway, Highway 99, the, is gonna be the last ring road around Houston.

It’s the third ring road. People would say, “What’s the next ring road around Houston?” He would say, “I-35,” which is the- … the highway that goes through the middle of Austin about, you know, 150 miles away. That’s it. But there’s really nothing to stop that going on, and, uh, your point is well taken that jobs and amenities will curb that to a certain extent.

But I think the history of suburban development, think of Orange County, suggests that when people and jobs and wealth move, amenities eventually follow.

I mean, you see the, you know, Exxon moved out to The Woodlands, right, in that area. Yes. Yes. And so The Woodlands is starting to become such a thing, and it’s really interesting to see that change over time. And then so if that’s a new center, then that’s gonna create its own catchment area, I imagine.

Those cities are rapidly gaining amenities. A lot of old shopping centers being converted into typical walkable lifestyle centers, things like that. Housing will come next. Downtown McKinney, which is in Collin County, you know, it’s an old railroad downtown, but it is one of the most spectacular small city downtowns anywhere, and it, it draws enormous numbers of people from the northern part of Dallas.

So people are still attracted to the amenities, and sometimes, increasingly, you see the amenities, northern Dallas being a good example, being in the old railroad downtowns or, or the old shopping centers being redone.

I mean, the average car, new car is $50,000. You can only go so far, and so, you know, the, and now insurance is getting more expensive. You have a lot of, like, climate issues too. But I’m just curious, like, what this does to, like, the regular discussion about transportation and affordability generally, ’cause housing prices are pretty huge too, even if you’re in some of these far-flung areas.

But new vehicles have gotten bigger. They’ve gotten way more expensive. It’s hard to imagine stretching the car loan out more than seven years. I never would’ve guessed in the old days that you would have a seven-year car loan, right? But a lot of these people who live on the fringe and, and particularly, as I saw in Texas, drive these big trucks, are incredibly stretched.

And so, and you see drive-through till you qualify, and that just gets harder and harder when the driving part becomes as expensive as the qualifying part, right? So I, a lot of the people who live on the edge of the metropolitan areas are really quite stressed financially and also stressed in commuting too.

If you, you don’t get all those things at the same time. Having lived, grown up in New York and lived in California, in other words, having lived in high income tax states my entire life, it was really interesting to go to Texas and see, well, where do they get their money from, right? And, you know, part of it is that the services aren’t as good.

My wife is a retired teacher from Texas, and she never made nearly as much money as she would make in California as a teacher. Part of it is that at, in Texas is that there is some, you know, oil-related money that flows to the state. But- What’s interesting in Texas is that the burden is borne by the property taxes, and the state even moves around the school property taxes kind of the way California does in order to plug the holes because the state doesn’t have income tax to plug the holes.

Now they’re talking about– And there are certain limitations now on property tax in Texas, but when Governor Abbott talks about getting rid of property tax, I, I have no idea what they’re gonna– how they’re gonna pay for the, the schools or anything else, right? On a percentage basis, compared to your assessment, property taxes in Texas are about twice what they are in California.

Now, because those are high in Ca- higher in California, that doesn’t quite work out. But, you know, you’re talking two, two and a half percent per year of assessed value in Te- uh, Texas And with no income tax and relatively moderate sales tax, there’s really no other way to keep the government functioning, particularly the schools.

And so, uh, unless Governor Abbott also plans to kinda somehow shift all to charter schools and get rid of public schools, which might- he might wanna do, I don’t see how this, this works. More likely, I think, is, uh, uh, Texas now has a limitation on property tax revenue, and that might get cranked down more, but more, more likely that’s the path.

That’s the, been the path in many other states, not just California.

But there is also now a limitation. It’s not a limitation on the tax rate. It’s not a limitation on the tax assessment in Texas. It is a limitation on the amount of revenue you can raise per year. Uh, it only goes up… That can only go up 3.5% per year, plus new construction. So that forces the locals to reduce the property tax rate.

20, 30 years ago?

I think what we’re gonna s- see is… Well, two things. One is I think you’ll see a scaling back legally of what zoning can do. The piece I wrote, which is not out yet, uh, basically says the concept of, you know, health, safety, and welfare. We’ve used the, the concept of welfare extremely expansively, uh, so that zoning could regulate everything, and I think that’s gonna be, uh, constrained.

There’s a school of thought among some conservative legal thinkers- That this Supreme Court, and who knows what they might do, could just blow away Euclid versus Ambler altogether because the conservatives think that it’s, you know, a violation of property rights, consti- unconstitutional, and the liberals think it’s, you know, a social justice issue.

Um, I don’t think that’s likely to happen, but I think we’re gonna see some constraints. And that’s why places like Houston, which are more lightly regulated on land use become more of a model. Houston is not the perfect example of regulation light. In Houston, as you know, since you grew up in the city, and if you grew up in Kingwood, you grew up in the city of Houston, there is no, uh, zoning for use.

There’s lots of other land use regulations, but there’s no zoning for use. And so you get a much more market-driven approach to, to what gets built. And I think certainly on the housing side, you’re seeing that in California. So I think we’re gonna see regulation light, more flexible regulation. Um, in California, it’s focused only on housing at this point, where at the same time they’re clamping down on warehouses and data centers, right?

But I do think you’re gonna see A less onerous approach to zoning and land use regulation in the future than you’ve seen in the past generally throughout the entire country. There, there’ll be different flavors. It’ll look different. But I think we’ve reached, we reached peak zoning probably 10, 15 years ago.

Because Euclid, Euclid’s really been reth- particularly on the left, has been really rethought as a decision that wasn’t so much meant to protect communities, but rather the view on the left is it was designed to protect privilege.

Especially, like, places like here in San Francisco. I mean, it’s so hard to build anything of substance, and it’s even hard to, like, renovate your house. Um, there’s so many, like, little things you have to go through. Some of the houses on my street, for example, took three or four years just to put a floor underneath them, and so it’s fascinating, and all the regulations that go along with that.

Um, and that’s not just zoning obviously, but that’s, uh- Right … a lot of, like, the con- restrictions that people are complaining about.

And a lot of land use regulations, zoning, uh, CEQA in California, the California Environmental Quality Act, are really designed to maintain the status quo, and that really has made it much more difficult to build anything. Uh, the environmental review… E- everybody who listens to your podcast has undoubtedly read Abundance.

You know all this. The joke I used to say when I taught land use planning to people who were environmentalists, I would start the class by saying, “Every once in a while, somewhere in the world, somebody needs to build a building,” right? “And so here’s… I’m gonna teach you the process by which that happens.”

And, you know, the status quo is not always the best thing for society. Society changes. People change, demographics change, economics change. And so it’s very difficult if your entire community becomes a petrified forest to maintain things. So I do think we’re gonna see, even in San Francisco, you’ve seen Mayor Lurie endorse what you might call by, in San Francisco standards, regulation light, you know, easier permitting and so forth.

I think that’s gonna be a trend that sweeps the entire country.

There’s gonna be a big fight over that. But a little like some of the other California housing laws, I think what we’re gonna find is that the density, the California density bonus law and local efforts to make it easier to build housing have already opened things up. And so SB 79 might not be as necessary or as widely used as, as one might think.

Here in San Diego, the city has been so aggressive in, A, uh, allowing more density through a program called Complete- Complete Communities, and B, basically making almost everything ministerial and therefore exempt from environmental review that I don’t think it’s, in the city of San Diego, I don’t think it’s gonna make that much of a difference.

And I’ve talked to a lot of developers about SB 79 in the last six months, and they’re kind of all shrugging their shoulders. They, you know, stuff’s already happening. So I’m not sure. And in addition to that, SB 79 does not really… I mean, it affects a lot of places in the Bay Area, affects a lot of places in LA.

It affects quite a few places in San Diego, but it’s not in that m- many jurisdictions. Certainly in San Francisco where you live, basically the whole city is SB 79 now pretty much, thanks to Muni, right? Mm. So I think the jury is out on whether it is truly transformational or not. We’ve seen laws passed in the past in California, SB 35, um, AB 2011, which allows essentially ministerial approval of, of, of housing on commercial properties.

They’ve been used, but they haven’t been transformational. It remains to be seen whether SB 79 is gonna be truly transformational as the IMBEs seem to think. The other interesting thing to me, having observed California housing and land use for a long time, is we’ve had all these new housing laws in the last 10 years.

The amount of housing production hasn’t gone up Hardly at all. Uh, I think the nature of it has shifted. There’s more affordable, there’s more AD- there’s more deed restricted affordable, there’s more, more ADUs. But the number of units has not gone up in spite of all this stuff, and I think that suggests that land use regulatory reform is a necessary but not sufficient precondition to build more housing.

And I think that’s what is the hard part about it, is that you’re trying to build so many units, but it’s just not as easy to build because of all the regulations and rules and what’s been built up over the last 100 years in terms of finance and things like that as well. Feels like that anyways.

You’ve seen this in California and Texas both, in, in, in Arizona. You build a master planned community. You know where, you know where this stuff’s gonna go. You sorta know when. Uh, you know how to plan for the infrastructure. You up zone a whole, uh, a whole city in California, you don’t know which developer’s gonna come along and try to build which infill project where, and that makes it very difficult to plan for.

It makes it very difficult to finance infrastructure, and it also makes it difficult to persuade the current residents that something good is gonna come out of this for them, like more amenities or, or better parks or something like that.

Or maybe you’re not a fan of sports, maybe you’re observer of, of- I’m

Um, here in San Francisco specifically, like I’m a member of a community-owned team, the oldest community-owned team in the country, SF City FC. Uh, we own 51% of the team, so nothing happens without the actual folks. It’s kinda like Green Bay Packers kinda thing. But then, you know, Mayor Lurie decides to back a big money outfit and kicks us out of our stadium.

We c- have- can’t do anything about it. And so there’s, there’s an interesting kind of money aspect to it, a, a politics aspect to it, and then there’s people like our team who’s just like, “We’re the community team,” but we kinda get kicked around a little bit.

In the town in upstate New York where I grew up, there was a minor league team, a Class A team for many, many years that was the only professional- baseball team In the United States that was owned by a non-profit and a community non-profit. Not exactly the same as the Packers, uh, which is owned by stockholders, but you can’t own more than one share, right?

Yeah. Um, uh, it was owned by literally a community-based non-profit. The stadium had been recovered in around the time I was born in the 1950s, uh, had been rescued by community members, including my parents, who went out and picked up all the rocks out of the outfield. So I saw at an early age how sports can affect and bind communities together, right?

But I think there’s a difference between that and billionaires owning major league teams, right, and shaking cities down.

The deal to build Petco Park in- included the ability of the then owner of the Padres to develop the entire neighborhood around it, uh, which was derelict. And that’s been done successfully, very successfully. But then you see a huge difference in the activity level in this neighborhood between days when there’s a game and days when there’s not, right?

So I think in order to try to get public subsidies, professional sports has been oversold as an economic item. It’s a civic ego item. And you see this getting pushed further and further down. I was working in a town recently where, uh, a major economic development effort was to attract these big youth sports tournaments, right?

And the whole game there is to get the parents to come in and stay overnight, right? I don’t know what the economic impact of that is. It’s more than nothing. It may be more than having a major league team, right? Who knows? But I think the relationship between sports and communities, and entertainment and communities generally, is just a fascinating topic.

Yeah. So far that day has not come.

or urban Milwaukee or wherever else, but you miss some of the other ones. I don’t get too much from some of the smaller cities out there. Hardly anything from, like, the Dakotas or places that just it seems like there’s not a lot of news about cities and urbanism, and the stuff that we care about just kinda disappears.

And so I’m curious, like, your thoughts on, like, that change over time and the n- and the growth of these new- news deserts and just kind of the news landscape overall

They were the generalists who had to understand the town. I think we, what we, as with so many other things in our society, we’re creating kind of, as you said, a two-tiered system, right? Where there’s places where there is either enough philanthropic money to support news outlets, or in smaller communities, people with time and expertise who’ve maybe moved to some community for lifestyle reasons, who are willing to invest in that.

And then there are, uh, other communities, and I think the Plains states are good examples of that, of places where neither of those things exist. I, I don’t quite know what to do about it. I think it’s very sad. I see great variation even in news outlets that are owned by major corporations, uh, in smaller markets.

I see huge variation from one city to the next in, in the quality of the coverage. Some of it’s pretty good. Some of it’s not. But like so many other things, right, that kind of coverage is gonna gravitate toward the money and toward the bigger cities. One interesting example, and CalMatters is beginning to do this now, was Texas Tribune always had a philosophy of we’ll make our stuff available to local newspapers around Texas for free.

Part of the reason for that was that that might attract donors from that town.

Yeah. And, and that’s definitely a loss.

and some others that- Yeah … covering the Metro stuff. There used to be a lot of really good local reporting in that, and, uh, some of that’s gone by the wayside. Well, the

a long time talking about-

One is, uh, “We are completely unique. There is no other town like us in the world.” And the second thing they say is, “Tell me a town just like ours that had exactly the same problems and solved them.” I guess I wish people would ask, how can we borrow the relevant successes from another community and fit those jigsaw pieces together in our town in an effective way rather than trying to just wholesale, you know, import something that seemed to work somewhere else.

So, so sometimes, uh, you, uh, it, it is great when you learn from, and I certainly did in Houston, when you learn from a community that is, or a city that is very different from yours and contains a very different set of lessons than you think you would learn.