We Don't Have a Housing Shortage. We Have a Paycheck Shortage.

Wish like clearly I would only give to an economist get everybody else would be like. Yeah, I hope this is not right

Hello and welcome to Artemis to economy. I'm Katherine and Edward's economist. I'm Robin Rousy and I'm an editor On this show we believe the U.S. economy can be better and we talk about how to get there one problem in solution at a time Today on Optimistic economy. We're gonna be talking about the housing market housing and is there's really a shortage of housing and if supplies

“The answer to all of our housing cost was and I'm gonna say no, but you should listen anyway”

Do you have any announcements? Give us money. Oh, yes, we do have an announcement. Oh wonderful Optimistic economy relies on people like you don't aim to our show over the hiatus. We got donations at the spiritual sponsor level from four people Including Sunday Gil and we want to thank her for her donation You too could become an on-air named spiritual sponsor by giving us money at optimist economy.com

All right, our next section is really the one that I I own which is retcon where we go back and Talk about episodes reflect on episodes as well as fix things that I said that we're wrong But Robin has one today I

“Do you mentioned bended like Beckham in our last episode and it was permended nagra who is the actress from that movie who shows up at the angel city football club”

We've been soccer games here in Los Angeles and everybody goes wild. I would lose my mind. Yeah Yeah, people I imagine if you're I see I'm not in those expensive seats, but if you are I'm sure it'll be like it'd be crazy Okay, next chapter is terms and conditions Cutler I see look something up. I did I like to blow V8 it blow V8. Yeah, blow V8 It means to talk or write at length to talk yourself horse. Yeah

Okay, the only reason why I wanted to include is I'm trying to get back into writing bloomberg columns and Man, it was slow going. I was trying so hard to get words on the page and I was Having my favorite bloomberg subject, which is to knock at Congress for being bad at its job and not doing anything And I I brought up a hearing that they had in which they took turns yelling at health insurance CEOs

“And then yelling at each other for being like the real cause of the problem and I was trying to come up with a term for talking into dead air”

And then I was like maybe I don't want to look it up Maybe it doesn't exist. Neshen look it up and bring it up. Anyway, blow V8. It's a blow V8 It's a good word I looked up a term that turns out is not an economic term, but it is one-legged stool So there's a story in the paper today as I was recording this about the one-legged stool is holding up the fragile economy

And in this case, they're talking about in the space of consumer spending It's just highly wealthy people doing most of the consumer spending in the labor market It's healthcare and social assistance jobs that are creating all the job growth and in in the stock market

It's basically seven tech companies creating all the returns

So all of these are unstable like a one-legged stool, but I looked it up. I also discovered that apparently When Alfred Nobel had his first nitroglycerin factories, he actually had one-legged stools for the guys who had to supervise the VATs of Chemicals making nitroglycerin so that they stayed aware was also called a suicide stool

So you didn't fall asleep listening down on the job I was like, is it one-legged stool just like a pole? It's you know, it's got a you know a seat on it Yeah, just but just one It looked a little and they had a picture of it at that Nobel website. I was like, is this a real thing? And indeed it was a real thing We're gonna take a quick break and we'll be back with the biggest pillar of the mall

The biggest pill crow the biggest pill crow bigger than any pilgrim. We've ever heard of any Pilgrow. I don't know if you did you see this poll yesterday that the New York Times Santapole about

Fortability no it said that basically Americans are deeply pessimistic about their economic future

But also specifically they said more than a half of people surveyed said that housing and education are now so expensive that they are actually unaforeable Housing was 54% I think 58% said education is unaforeable. Yeah, I mean Americans have said quite clearly housing is unaforeable

We need to juice the market in order to ease prices and I think what we try to do on the show and what we want to do Specifically today is to get at what's what's wrong with that story. It's not that wrong wrong wrong It's just not the whole story. It's not the whole story and if you don't think about the whole story

If you don't think about the actual cause of the problem, you'll never solve and and we want to solve housing affordability

But it's not as simple as

“Let's just build some stuff. I think the other things that we you know just to keep in mind about what's been going on is”

Of course the president has proposed and then backed away from the idea of 50-year mortgages as a way to make housing more affordable Sorry Is that a spit take Okay It's such a bad policy

I know it was so bad. I just deleted it, but then I did remember I don't know if you saw the reporting of the 50-year mortgage

Were the guy who built Pulti? Yeah, built Pulti. He put like a poster board with FDR's face and then Trump's face and under one

He put 30-year mortgage in the other he put like 50-year mortgage. He's like you're gonna be Like FDR and then as soon as it came out people That just made me Not nailed it Fascinating, they built Pulti so built Pulti's the

He directs the federal housing and finance agency like overseas Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and they've been just like Firing all the people whose jobs were about housing affordability programs Fair lending programs teams that focus on counseling People on mortgages his ideas just like let banks do whatever they want to we don't get rid of all the regulations that came

After in the wake of the 2008 recession and housing crisis just that's the solution boom 50. You're welcome. And here we are So failing that yeah feeling that feeling that you know, how do we how do we talk about housing?

“What do you what do you need to know to have a you know proactive productive conversation of what is going on with housing the US?”

I think that there's like kind of a north star here is that when we're talking about home affordability We should look at the home ownership rate it peaked in 2005 with the peak of the housing bubble and

After the housing bubble crashed the home ownership rate in the US fell for 11 years and it went down to 62% from a peak of 69 And it didn't stop falling until 2016 and then it started to rise again now a lot of weird things happened with the home ownership rate in the pandemic But right now it is around 65 to 66% kind of bouncing between there so it's it's stable Maybe you would argue it should be rising But it's not crashing

It has been stable for the past few years so the home ownership rate is not like Falling off a cliff the way that it did after the housing bubble burst

The second is if you look at mortgage debt service this is the amount of money that all Americans piled together

Our spending on their mortgage payment and express that as a share of income and all the disposable income they have Mortgage payments now are smaller share of disposable income than they were before the pandemic again It peaked with the housing bubble peaked a couple years later in 2007, but we now spend less on mortgages as a country than we did even six years ago As a percentage of income Where there some kind of catastrophic crisis in the housing sector those two things would not be stable

And so that's I don't say that to to be like up and here's the economist with the data that says your struggle is fake because the data says you're wrong It's to in some ways a lay the concerns of how big of a problem we're dealing with because we have some basic level of stability in the market in home ownership So that's that's good. It's good. It might make you it might make you feel like I'm erasing your experience But it is good that those things are stable and they're not flashing red

“But I think the second thing to understand and this is this is also pretty important is that”

When we think about housing in how many houses we need like what are the total number of units we need? The denominator isn't people. It's households and we build housing for households not people You mean how many housing units you need is based on how many households there are not how many Individual humans there are in the country right right so Bit of a terminology here a household and kind of the economic definition is

Whoever has a key so if you live in an apartment with three roommates You and your roommates are one household if you live in an apartment by yourself

You are one household two families the household is basically whoever is under the roof

Whether they're related or not Over the past 15 years we have seen a big slowing of household formation Which means you go out and you get a new key so when I moved in with my boyfriend I left my group house with three roommates and he left his group house or two roommates and we moved into a place together We have formed a new household so there has been

A lot of reasons why we have not had new household formation and one of them was After the great recession a lot of people were staying with their parent like living with their parents longer Married rates are down Independent living amongst young adults is down and some of this is because housing is expensive But at the same time it also reduces the total need for housing

So it's it's definitely a two-way street like the total like household formation of the US is down by several million over the last 15 years. And it's projected to stay down

one question I've always had about this is whether there's also a mismatch between

the types of housing that are available and the housing that people need at or a stages of their life so You just moved into a house in Texas You've got kids you wanted to be in a house with multiple bedrooms in Southern California where I live A huge amount of the construction that's happening is apartments they are mostly one bedroom and two bedroom apartments

They are probably not ideal for people who have children or more than one child And granted you know Southern California thinks it's the Midwest and we should all have backyards But I've often wondered if there's also that right and it likewise a shortage of not just the size of the units

“But whether you are at a stage where you want to be buying a house versus renting like I think a lot of these things get really”

Mashed up together into like housing shortage

One of the shortage could be we've got housing it's just what you said it's not affordable Yeah, I think that's the exact instinct that that you can understand at a really fundamental level What it means to be mismatched to the housing supply because you want to live in a house But there's only condos or you want to live in an apartment But there's only like houses far from the city center right that mismatch of preferences

Translate that to income and that is the housing affordability problem we have is that the distribution of Housing is mismatched to the distribution of income and we have a to the extent that we have a housing shortage It's not a net shortage like we have more people than houses It is a distributional shortage where we don't have enough housing for the people at the place that people can afford Right supply is not like it's a it's a problem, but it's a really subtle version of the supply problem and maybe someone say not really a problem all

It's about mismatched between what people can afford in the bottom Yeah, and what is being built? Yeah, right so it's not a matter of like as long as we got rid of certain regulatory and tax policy People are suddenly gonna build housing that someone who makes $50,000 a year can afford yeah

“That's why the the supply answer is not fitting with the actual supply problem which is income”

We don't have housing for people who don't make that much money That is the problem. It's not that we don't have housing is that we don't have the right price of housing And what people are building is not at that price point at least what private developers want to build is not at that price point Yeah, that's interesting and this affordability problem. I mean again I live in Southern California the affordability problem came to us a long long time ago

So it's been kind of interesting to see it catch up to other places like for instance we lived for two years in Spokane and I watched it happen in Spokane in like in this period of time Between 2019 to what is it 2022 or 2023 when housing prices shot up like What is it 48% or something There was in fact this gigantic leap in home prices as people moved and

Then also a gap in purchasing power because of largely because of interest rates and Housing prices outpacing wage growth so I wrote about this in 2024. I wrote about it in the start of summer like really getting into home buying season and interest rates were high

And there was all this talk about how like we had to push housing supply and construction forward And I I said you know affordability is a function of price and income Like if I can't afford something it could be that it's expensive or I just don't have that much money

“And I said I think the US will have a housing crisis so long that pursues a low wage policy in the labor market”

So if you assume that 30% of your income is affordable

And that standard has

“Policy president behind it because that subsidized housing is paid back based on 30% of your income”

So if you were in federal subsidized housing they're tagging it around 30% so it's not just like a number that came out of the air

Like there is a lot of federal policy behind it So it's you know you we can talk about housing supply But like there are wages in the US for which there is no housing that is affordable for someone who makes that little money and we will not build it No one out there is like we've got to go out and build housing for which will we're gonna pay me More than $500 yeah, they're not it's not that's not what they're building one of the things I read was that the change between

2019 and now is That in 2019 54% of houses were affordable to a median household income And now that number is like 28% so I was just also curious if half the houses are affordable Is that like kind of where you would want it to be like to me 2019 to already fell on affordable But I live in Southern California like it was it's it's I know that I'm in this

Hyper Real estate bubble we We merely adopted the dark you were born and it's no I moved here, but Anyway back to my question, which is If like 54% of the housing stock that was for sale is affordable to the median household income is that in balance

54% of the housing stock that was for sale is affordable median household is in balance Not necessarily because it all depends on the distribution of home prices relative to the distribution of income And it could be that like at the exact middle point half you know, which You could have the middle person could afford Middle housing, but that says nothing about the people underneath

The US income distribution has a big clump of people Below average and we have more people below the average income than we do above it because the tail is really really long right so if you if you take an average right just One of my favorite measures of central tendency, but if you take an average right you're just like here's the total income here's number of people

We divide that average Can be above what even 60 or 70% of Americans make because we have a big clump of people That are below average and then a long tail of people that are above average so I say all this because You know what what that big clump can afford

Really depends on if it has an equally big clump of housing right there and the middle point is instructive But it's not necessarily going to be indicative of what happens to everybody else below them

“Does that mean the crisis or the real crunch point is people trying to get into the housing market?”

It's people trying to buy their first home

Yes, I think that that's where I guess maybe trying to move Now a lot of ways that's a function of Interest rates that interest rates have pushed up mortgage payments which they're intended to do and that as a result of that You know, either can't afford the mortgage payment because it's higher than rent or it crowds out other spending now I you know not to be like I don't know that like

Jericho economists that's like actual I'm not supposed to be like this is one of the reasons why we push up interest rates when inflation gets out of controls Because when you push up interest rates and it makes things like mortgage payments more expensive That crowds out other spending and that reduces demand lowering the pressure on prices in the economy And this is we're essentially all feeling the pain of having to try and conquer inflation

This is one channel of doing it. I mean it is a blunt tool to raise interest rates and you get all kinds of pain points like this So that's one reason why the the supply concern and the need to build build build

“It's I think out of step with the reality that the escalation of home ownership affordability in the crisis around it does coincide really well with interest rates climbing”

And then I and then the second part would be that I don't I'm not convinced that we are actually millions and millions of short of units

so much as I am convinced that we do not have a housing stock that reflects the accumulated toll of five decades of income inequality

And a lot of developers will build for the top of the market and the bottom market becomes affordable You know, basically when it grows so old or dispossessed that like other people can afford it Well, that's not an affordable housing strategy Just a wait and just wait for houses to get old and yeah, yeah, that's actually called Noah naturally occurring affordable housing No, okay, yeah, and there there are people who are like work in urban areas to try to

You have people who come in with a lot of income and they decide to neighborhood is desirable and they push up the home price in a neighborhood

And you have all these Noah's that are lost because people are willing, you know Kind of going back to what we said about hedonic pricing the neighborhood itself has become more desirable and then that has Altered the the home price and the affordable housing is gone. Yeah, and you certainly see that in big cities where even the houses that probably Should be torn down because they weren't ever really I live in a neighborhood where tons of houses less I just boomed in the 1920s

They built so many houses that they just they weren't built to last But they do because it would now be so expensive to rebuild them on those lots in part because of engineering

“Things that things that they didn't do a lot of hundred years ago and so you just if you want to live in the center of the city”

You live with the old housing stock and you pour money into that instead of trying to you know build something new or move farther out where there's land Yeah, it would be really nice to just like be able to sprinkle some housing on a city and say like They're like the problems solved, but I think what I want to stress about housing is that the problems go much deeper than just Is there a pile of bricks for you to move into and I think it's a function of how we Remunerate workers in our economy

You know you go decades and decades without Meaningfully reforming the labor market regulations without raising the minimum wage and then you have a housing affordability crisis

And you're like in the answer is to build more and like or

Think about it. We might have enough houses and not enough income and one of those problems is a lot There are a lot of people who want to jump in the game and say like well, let's develop and let's build stuff here as opposed to You know, let's start getting incomes higher. I mean, I was looking up this morning the median mortgage payment in the US Right now is 2,259 dollars the median

“Weekly earning of a full-time worker in the United States is around 12 hundred bucks”

1200 bucks All over for women But 1200 bucks is a median

Mead it's all over for women. I'm sorry. Yeah. It's a 1200 bucks

But it's around a thousand for women and 1300 for men So median weekly earnings 1200 dollars median mortgage payment 222 hundred dollars

That comes out to needing $7,500 a month of income in order for that payment to be affordable So you can think of that $7,500 a month of being around $1,700 a week. Okay, so there is a $500 weekly gap between what your median mortgage payment is and what the median worker earns That 500 dollar gap is not going away with a supply

Like a infusion of supply that is an income and wage problem And the more we focused on supply like supply is not getting you out of this Yeah Supply will only get you out of this if you have the government aggressively building homes that are below market rates The market will not build below market rate homes the government can go out and build below market rate homes

That is what they would have to do to actually change supply in a way that matters for You know affordability right I mean It's worth going back to history and thinking that like we have had housing supply shortages in the United States They were very acute during World War II and people who worked at factories related to wartime production They were living in shanty towns and tent villages even though they were making good money

Because there was just no house to bed that happened here and they're in fact are still

“Literally composite huts that were divided into like duplexes that were housing into the 60s I think”

Because they just couldn't build housing fast enough to absorb all the people who moved here after the war In addition to all the returning soldiers and you know all the people who'd worked in the ports and such and in the aerospace industry Well, I mean the the US coming out of World War II you had a lot of Constrained household formation as it were like you had people like they were married But they were in their parents house because like there was just not a house to be found in the city

And it was not about preferences and it was not about what they could afford I mean it was just there was a not enough housing where people lived and you saw a Just absolute flourishing of home development a lot of it with the government's health if not the government building Directly some of the histories your will you'll read will say like Yeah, because otherwise people would have like outright revolted like they need they people were so desperate for housing

They wanted to get out of their parents house. They didn't want it then they wanted to all live alone and you saw this like Era of single family housing as a reaction to how much doubling up occurred out of necessity During World War II when there wasn't enough houses especially in areas near production

Not just because of what we should build but like I do this all the time, but like this is not your grandfather's house in shortage. This is like people can't afford housing because we've been building too much Expensive housing Not enough affordable housing and incomes have started to you know have just not

Take an off the way that they should have and if we don't have incomes rising at the bottom like we will never have affordable housing for

Half of Americans

“If the market is building for the top and I think there's this kind of idea of like oh, but more supply”

Would reduce payments I just you haven't seen it. I haven't seen it I actually I found this story by the way about what it would take just to get back to the 2019 affordability levels The analysis was from actually realtor.com which I believe put out a report about it but they said to get Things back to what you were talking about where the mortgage payment would be about 21% of median household income compared to more than 30% today

They say mortgage rates would have to fall to 2.65% or home prices would have to fall 35% or incomes would have to rise

56%. Yeah, so it's not going to be just one. Yeah. It's not going to be just one thing

And I guess the income side is Overlooked here. Yeah, and there's a degree to which Enough income can solve this problem enough housing cannot solve this problem more housing can help but it cannot solve this

“Problem if people don't have enough income or if incomes are being so left so far behind”

Housing price now there's a whole other piece of this that there are a lot of people out there who do not want more housing Now they say that they do and they want housing to be affordable but I get this sense that really They want to keep housing as kind of the privileged good that it is because they treat it like a piggy bank. I mean most Americans view their home as an Investment like they're trying to get equity out of it. Yeah, I guess I mean I can't speak to everybody but

To have savings out of their house if not an investment. You know, does that distinction make any sense to you So when I bought my house I was very young compared to my peers. I was 27 when I bought my house And I did it because housing prices were low but I was paying so much and rent that I really couldn't afford to save at the rate I wanted to save so I wound up buying a duplex and It allowed me to at least use the money that I was was putting towards rent to a certain extent that it was also going to

Build up the principal and the equity in the house I did not expect that the more that the housing market would do what it did. What year is you buy your house? 1997 1997. Now, you know, I mean I was a newspaper reporter. I wasn't making a lot of money But I did also read the newspaper and it told me that housing housing costs in Southern California were at 10 year lows Because of riots earthquakes the recession like that combo pack meant that housing prices were a 10 year lows

And I was like this is my chance. I got to go. I do it now. I think a lot of people view housing as an investment That you know, the boomers bond houses for 50 grand in 1980 and now they're worth millions and like they want to do the same And that they want they think of a house as this like equity

“You know, skyscraper of like once you get in like you go straight to the top and like all you need to be a millionaires by a house and have it like just hold on to it”

And it just goes up up up and up I don't think people should make money off their houses. I think it warps a lot of decision making to have so much of an investment But in a lot of money and just one stock like it warps decision making. Yeah, it does I mean we keep passing laws and constitutional amendments and all sorts of things in California trying to incentivize people to do different things with their housing right so we have rules that say you can take your property tax

Basis with you When you move if you're over 55 Because they just feel like people are locked in the kind of the same way that people talk about being locked into low mortgage rates That it would cost so much more you'd have to essentially downsize your house the feeling is it was for you know It's boomers, but now it's going to be gen Xers

You know that housing prices shot up so much that you can't afford the property taxes on the place that you would go And I mean we live in Los Angeles in part because we are locked into those to all those things Yeah, I mean yeah portable market is which we talked about once on a planet episode Like if you're credit worthy and you're paying down a 25-year mortgage and that's worth

$500,000 like why does it have to be fixed to that one

Address like you could pay a feed and just move basically your how the thing about portable mortgages is like sure sure

It's basically someone is giving you a

And kind of letting you the swapping assets your your swapping like the little a asset for the big a asset of like I own a house

But like that kind of changes the perspective that people have on mortgages as well as how they like how long they stay in a house How they invest in a house what they think of equity out of the house It's almost like you're pre-paying rent for 30 years and then you're shifting location of

“I'd rather pre-pay rent with an interest on a loan rather than pay it in like real time and then that I think would change a lot of people's”

Calculus of like do I need to buy one do I need to buy I mean there's so much wrong with the housing market that's not supply I think every time I hear a supply thing I just it's just this like I roll for days of like Yeah, let me guess we need to be able to kill more birds and build houses and flood planes like I get it We shouldn't have regulations and that's the answer to all of our problems or hear me out

Fixing all the problems we have yeah all right optimism optimism

Yeah, I'm going to do two things one is I bet someone's going to be listening and be like nice for two homeowners to talk about it

And we're going to get like a lot of slime especially if there's a lot of black Flack we're not gonna get any slack Flack What why do I What do you have here?

I don't know where I know the people think that I correct you cuz like I'm a But I really I'm trying to help I I think we will get flat because we're two homeowners talking about I'm a landlord. I'm the worst kind of owner you're a landlord You're one step away from being a pawn broker like I just like draw a mustache on my face We just lost production

“But but I think in fairness. I have a I have a rent control. I have a rent control. Do you know it?”

Oh Okay, they're back. We got production back Dirk was a listen to the show. He's going to be like wait what I mean yeah, it's it's a lot for like two people who own houses Yeah, refinance houses to be like supply isn't the end of be all and it's not to downplay how hard it is to buy a house that I bring up all these other things

I think it's to make the narrative much more empowering, right? Like hey y'all good news Our salvation doesn't come from housing developers deciding to take a chance on a market That's good. Don't listen to our housing developer presidents Or whatever Legion of Bros who are following him It's not there if our fate is not in their hands our fate is in the hands of like better banking policy

Better lending policy and better labor market policy where people actually earn an income and that is where our salvation comes from and not from whenever Some besides it build a big building and say like it's mixed use and one of the units are affordable Come on like y'all let's put this power this back in our hands here

“You need to go out there and demand unionization if you want to work with housing like we need better income”

Sorry, I didn't need to um I didn't need to rant So I know I focus on income sure but Think for a minute about or we like if you listen to the first episode we talked about the just Normandy of income inequality

Right we have Over the past 50 years seen

This incredible increase in incomes at the top versus

This is this positive growth for the bottom 90 percent missing out on so much of the economic growth So if I were to tell you Think of like 2 housing markets 1 in 1975 and 1 in 2025 or 2026

How much has our housing supply kept up with the gross income inequality? Right like these are fixed buildings Many of them built before the time we're talking about If you were to just like kind of close your eyes at the end of the first episode and say what are the consequences of having five Decades of growing income inequality which the top incomes are taking off in the bottom or not

Growing enough at all. Well, yeah, we're going to be mismatch their housing stock Eventually This is a consequence of long-term income inequality that we have now our mismatch to our housing stock and that is a big part of the problem and that is not just a matter of like Stripping down environmental regulations and making sure that we can build like at a watershed or at a national park It's a bigger problem than that, but it's also

That makes that solution seems so like That solution has so many other benefits, right? I mean, there's so many things that are happening because of housing affordability including like Far reduced mobility of Americans people just aren't moving anywhere and in part because they don't have the money to move in by a house in a new city There's a lot of things that that people get locked into because they can't afford to move

Building housing yeah, or maybe the answer to that is not like more market built housing

“I think the government building below market housing is the answer Americans are terrified of that now”

Yeah, we're terrified of it now. We didn't we weren't always but I mean the government building below market housing that is actually affordable

You know most of our Intervention into the housing market is for the very poorest. Yeah, right we don't have Media and public housing. We have low low low income public housing. We kind of ask private developers to like in some places Set aside some units for people who are at like 30 to 50% of area income That is not the same thing as building housing for the middle or or having government subsidized housing for the middle

Which we don't really have we do more at the bottom none in the middle and the private action takes place Kind of hit the top half we do also act as if I don't know that it's that it's Anathema to American capitalism for the government to be interfering in the housing market Right that it's a market but of course the interfere in it in all sorts of ways So why not in a way that actually increases affordability instead of I don't know subsidizing banks with

More interest deductions. It's really often there's like the right kind of intervention and it never applies to like

Most of us It seems to apply to JP Morgan Chase more than me. Yeah, I know yeah Like we have we have low income housing tax credits to help build very low income housing But there's not enough and there's no reason why the government can't build housing alongside of housing building that it's Subsidizing if it wanted to try if it wanted to take a chance on

Housing affordability in a way that it had control over

“I think it's all a matter of like the solution to the housing affordability problem is truly about what we are willing to ask for”

And that is optimism because that puts agency back in our hands It's not waiting for a developer to decide that our neighborhood or our city or our price point is suddenly worth it to them Or they can squeeze the government for more in order to make it worth it Right if if we make this about what the government can to actually intervene in the housing market We get to design our solution and we are more empowered in that process than

Just build build build build yeah, so let's become empowered Let's tell them exactly what we want them to do and and make sure that the housing that is built in the supply that is addressed is Something that will benefit the bottom 70% of Americans and not the top 30 who can afford a housing anyway All right, we're gonna take a little break and we will be right back with executive orders And we're back to continue to tell people how to live their lives

Society should be organized Smaller ways

“So I have an executive order as listeners of the show know I wasn't used in last week visiting Catherine and”

her family and I flew back on Delta Airlines and I'm just gonna say bathrooms on airplanes have become Criminally small. I am an average size woman. I don't know how anybody

Larger than me is fitting into this bathroom. I'm waiting for an Americans with disabilities Loss it on these like they're criminally small someone listeners gonna know how airplanes get around ADA. I don't understand how yeah how bathrooms on planes work for people with a disability I mean try going in there with a kid. Oh, yeah, yes, I endorse this executive order Make your bathrooms on airplanes bigger all on am track or like you and your eight best friends gonna go to the bathroom together

Like everybody on this on go. Oh, y'all go. They grew down to the bathroom on the am track All right, what's your executive order? My executive order is very self-serving But I need to be involved on the remaining casting decisions for the movie that that they're making about the 1999 women's world cup about the 99ers the girls of summer I need to be involved in the rest of casting. They did great with the I mean they me a she looks just like her

I'm very excited but like you can't exclude me anymore I need to be a part of this. I get so many ideas of who should play everyone and I swear to God I swear to God if they cast the wrong person as Michelle acres like I don't know what I'm going to do Who do you think should play Michelle acres? I don't I don't have everyone yet. I just need to be in the room when the decisions are made to make sure that there's like

You want approval I need producer approval a lot of actresses are like five foot nothing 75 pounds and I'm like Michelle acres Tall is like a force of nature and I you can't just do casting and you can't just do like angles

Like I need a person of substance in the most amazing wig. Yeah, let's not skimped out on the wig budget for this one

Like let's let's make sure that this Cool, I've got so many anyway

Better if it's no one but me but I just I feel like I'm gonna install myself there. Okay. That's all it's good

“All right, optimistic on me doesn't have any financial sponsors except you guys”

What we do is virtual sponsors and those are the things that are keeping us going Catherine what your spiritual sponsor this week Lily Allen's new album West End Girl. I listened to this end your recommendation while I made dinner the other night What do you think it's great it's great I mean I That's all I keep thinking is like

Wow this sounds so painful and she's been through so much, but at the same time I have benefited from this personally by having such a bang or album Yeah, I feel like I'd been on an I'd read a novel by the time I finished cooking dinner I've been through such a journey yeah and also the SNL skit that features her where they reference the album is like equally is good It's when Joshua Connor hosted, but I would recommend watching the Lily Allen SNL skits

But I I can't help but thinking that like That one song of like love in my Adolin it is I'm like that is the new bless your heart Like if I walk up to someone and I'm like love in my

“Love in light I'm like wow that's what it devastating thing to say love in light the new bless your heart”

If there's hope in the world the new bless your heart will be love in light Madeline oh, man, it was so good. What are the who is your spiritual sponsor what is your spiritual sponsor? My spiritual sponsor this week is actually Japanese grand sumo tournaments

I won't go on and on about it, but here's what I can tell you the champion sumo wrestler in Japan right now

Is a guy who's actually a 21 year old Ukrainian so everybody's a wrestling name and his wrestling name is only shiki and You know it references because he's Ukrainian blue as the Ukrainian flag and then shiki is the name of the was his mentor But anyway, but his real name is Danilo Yavushishian and he's a 21 year old Ukrainian He moved to Japan after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but he had been a wrestler in a sumo wrestler

And sumo is done like this. There's like 20 odd guys and they each wrestle one person one day Every day for 15 days each wrestling match. I mean sometimes they last seconds For a similar wrestling match last like two minutes. It's like epic and it's full of ritual and it's full of these amazing outfits and this huge stadium full of people looking down on this one little Adoyo which is the ring where they wrestle and anyway it's pretty great. There was a Wall Street Journal article

“Actually it turned out just I think today yesterday about about this guy the wrestling champion, but we watch the whole tournament and you can watch”

You can also watch it days Bouts in about 30 minutes because they're so short and they're on YouTube on NHK Which is the National Broadcaster Japan's YouTube sumo. Yeah, and you know for our video listeners

I do have sumo wrestlers in the painting on the back wall here. Oh my god, you do. Yeah, I've never pieced together

What's your painting is of because of the window my mind is blown on so many levels That's it for another episode of Optimist Economy Optimist Economy podcast is edited by Sophie Loan our video production for social media is by Andy Robinson video consulting Thank you for making us sound like a podcast so if you agree with the things we say We post video clips from the show for you to share with your friends or your foes

We're on TikTok Instagram YouTube and linked in you can find us on those platforms to share some highlights from the show If you're on sub-stacks you can follow us there too and we have an Optimist chat going And while Optimist Economy is a labor of love for me and Catherine we do have bills debate So if you have the means to contribute you can do so at Optimist Economy.com Where we will also happily sell you a t-shirt or a hat or a really good tote bag or a really good tote bag

Okay, thanks y'all love and light

No house I will ever own will ever come close to how cool my Chicago apartment was that we rented it is just it will never nothing

Will ever come close it was one block south of like the northern border of the Chicago fire. So it was in that like bos art style It was just Sophie I had the opposite experience Sorry Sophie my Chicago apartment is so cool