Housing is a huge problem in the United States, and we here at Civic Ventures have been thinking about it for a really long time.

Everywhere in the US, the poorest 20% of households can't afford market rate housing without some extra subsidy.

There's just a bunch of people who earn too little money to pay for the operating costs of housing.

People's wages have not remotely kept up with the cost of living.

You know, we often say if people have no money, then who will buy the stuff?

Well, if people have no housing, who will do the work?

From the home offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is pitchfork economics, with Nick Hanauer, the best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.

I'm Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.

Hey, I'm Zach Silk, and I'm the president of Civic Ventures.

Well, here's the thing. Housing is a huge problem in the United States, and we here at Civic Ventures have been thinking about it for a really long time.

I think most of you know, we are here in Seattle, and if you're in one of these blue superstar cities, you're wrestling with how do you deal with a booming, growing economy and the reality that many people who work in that economy simply can't afford to live in the city.

There's just really incredible crisis that's been going on in the country that has been under talked about, you know, the basic dynamic is you have skyrocketing prices in these coveted metro areas, and then you have this other thing happening where poor households everywhere, not in these metros like we're talking about small places in the middle of the country cannot afford rent.

And so you just have this really crazy dynamic of economic disparity and inequality leading to runaway costs at the top end, really high pressures on the bottom end.

Anyway, I find housing to be one of the underappreciated parts of our inequality problem in the United States, and I think it's one of the things we need to really wrestle with if we're going to solve the long term problems of both wealth generation and income inequality.

Yeah, so we're lucky today to get to talk to Jenny Schutz who's a senior fellow at the Brookings institution focused on housing, and she's the author of this cool new book Fixer Upper How to Repair America's Broken Housing Systems, and you know, the housing problem is hard.

And you know, it's easy to say, but probably worth reflecting on it's obvious that if you live in a place like Seattle and have a ton of these super fast growing technology companies here, like the senior executives of one of these companies can make a decision in an hour to add 3000 new jobs and start recruiting for them.

But to build 3000 new houses in the best of cases would take two to four years right like it's just like the lag sweep aside all of the policy problems just the logistics of building three or four thousand new houses for three or four thousand new employees is going to put you behind the eight ball if everything was working perfectly.

And now multiply that problem times a thousand and you kind of have our situation and certainly Seattle has been both the beneficiary and a victim of this kind of growth and dynamics and it's happening all over the country.

And then when you mix in to that basic logistical challenge, the sort of nimbism that I think everybody sees around us, it's hard and complicated.

But anyway, I mean, it'll be super fun to talk to Jenny about her book and to get some pointers on how we might all fix this mess.

My name's Jenny Schutz. I'm a senior fellow at Brookings Metro based in Washington, DC. I'm an urban economist by training and have been studying housing policy and housing affordability from lots of different angles for many years.

And I've recently published a new book called Fixer Upper, How to Repair America's Broken Housing Systems, which imbitiously tries to lay out all the things that are wrong with US housing policies and markets and how to fix all of them.

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