New KQED Podcast 'SOLD OUT: Rethinking Housing in America' examines housing affordability by zeroing in on the epicenter of the crisis — California. Digs Into Runaway Housing Costs

President Trump has made protecting the suburbs from low-income housing part of his reelection campaign. But this idea — that middle-class families should be kept separate from the poor and working class — has been around for a century, and it’s had profound impacts on our housing supply, affordability and racial inequity.

It’s a topic we’ll unpack in KQED’s upcoming podcast, SOLD OUT: Rethinking Housing in America.

We have been reporting on how California’s housing crisis has been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. We’ve talked to unemployed workers worried about eviction, covered rent strikes and tracked the state’s plan to house people experiencing homelessness.

The coronavirus has exposed just how precarious and inequitable America’s housing system has been.

Nearly 11 million U.S. renters, or one in four, spent more than half their incomes on housing in 2018; that was when the economy was considered healthy. In California, it’s one in three. As a nation, we are not building enough. That’s according to Freddie Mac, which estimates we need 370,000 more units each year to keep up with demand. The mortgage corporation also says 29 states have a housing deficit. And California is the epicenter of this housing crisis.

“If America really cared about a solution, they would do things like give people adequate housing and get everyone a job,” said Akil Riley, an Oakland native and Howard University student, at a protest he helped organize after the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd.

2020 is proving to be an inflection point, and how we respond may determine whether California’s housing crisis can be turned around. So, we’re posing a challenge in this podcast to physicians, homebuilders, community organizers and activists, hotel owners and attorneys to ask what we can do now.

“People resist change,” said Rick Holliday, CEO and co-founder of Factory OS, a company that builds modular housing. “And I think we finally hit a point where the cost was so high, we have to change.”

One of the episodes in the SOLD OUT podcast digs into the origins of single-family neighborhoods, which helped create our suburbs. The episode looks at how communities have used local development rules to keep out low-income residents and people of color.

When the Supreme Court outlawed city rules that enforced racial segregation by prohibiting Black people from buying homes in white neighborhoods, cities simply adopted a new tool with a new name: zoning. Instead of discriminating based on race, cities passed zoning laws that discriminated based on class and architecture. The zones, or districts, limited the types of buildings that were allowed, such as single-family homes or factories, apartments or offices, shops or warehouses.

And it all started right here in the Bay Area. Berkeley was one of the first cities to use what is now known as single-family zoning, which bars anything other than single-family homes from being built in certain neighborhoods. These homes were too expensive (and still are) for most poor people and people of color, thereby keeping the rich and white neighborhoods rich and white.

“The land closest to where industrial activity was already taking place was the land that was going to be relegated for the denser zoning, with the expectation that white people would live in the single-family neighborhoods,” said Dorothy Walker, a 90-year-old Berkeley resident, who served for many years on the city’s Planning Commission.

While single-family zoning institutionalized racial segregation in housing, redlining bolstered it by denying Black, Indigenous and other people of color the ability to get a mortgage, buy a home and grow generational wealth. Later, predatory lending and the foreclosure crisis compounded the problem, leading to a growing wealth gap between white families and Black or Latino ones. Today, the coronavirus tightens its grip on Black, Native and Latino people in the U.S. And now, a presidential election in November has the country talking about housing segregation and what our neighborhoods say about us as a nation.

Join us on Sept. 21 when we release the first episode of SOLD OUT. Explore the ideas and meet the people who are trying to do something, because we just can’t wait anymore. Subscribe to SOLD OUT now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, NPR One or on your favorite podcast listening app.