In this episode Professor Steve Goldsmith interviews Carlos Martín, project director of the Remodeling Futures Program at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.
In this episode Professor Goldsmith interviews Carlos Martín about his work as the project director of the Remodeling Futures Program at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. They discuss Martín's background as an architect and engineer and how that informs his view of public policy and governance, the history of displacement in America, and why community bonds are a key aspect of infrastructure.
Music credit: Summer-Man by Ketsa
About Data-Smart City Solutions
Housed at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University, we work to catalyze the adoption of data projects on the local government level by serving as a central resource for cities interested in this emerging field. We highlight best practices, top innovators, and promising case studies while also connecting leading industry, academic, and government officials. Our research focus is the intersection of government and data, ranging from open data and predictive analytics to civic engagement technology. To learn more visit us online and follow us on Twitter.
Betsy Gardner:
Hi, this is Betsy Gardner, senior editor at the Harvard Kennedy School and producer of The Data-Smart City Pod. Since we started this podcast, we've had great support from our listeners, and to make sure that you don't miss an episode, please find us under the new Data-Smart City Pod channel wherever you listen. Make sure to subscribe so you get each episode, and thanks for listening.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Hello, this is Stephen Goldsmith, professor of Urban Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, Bloomberg Center on Cities with another one of our podcasts, and today we have Carlos Martín, the project director of the Remodeling Futures Program at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. It's a long title, but Director Martín, good to have you with us.
Carlos Martín:
Thank you, Stephen. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Before we get started on our particular questions about the future in equity and infrastructure and housing, tell us a little bit about your impressive background, please.
Carlos Martín:
Sure. I'm not sure if it's that impressive. It's much more aligned with what I thought was interesting throughout my life, and so I just kept asking questions and following that rabbit hole wherever it took me. It may be odd for somebody to work in the social science research space and the policy space to be coming from my background, which is officially trained as an architect and civil and environmental engineer. Finished up my doctoral studies at Stanford and my interests were always in the physical qualities of our communities and our housing and that eventually led me to conversations with the actual industry that develops and maintains that housing stock and that community stock as well as the public policies, that involvement. This has been, in my mind, a very clear trajectory about my questions that have taken me to a lot of different jobs in a lot of different places and now I'm at Harvard.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Well, impressive background and it's good to have you with us. I just finished a book, oh, about a year ago on economic mobility. Well, I won't drag you through the story of my book, but one of the things we looked at was the connection between places and opportunity, the development of neighborhoods, redlining, poverty and such issues. You have a recent report on connecting Americans to prosperity. Could you start by talking to us a little bit about the connection between place housing, infrastructure and opportunity?
Carlos Martín:
Certainly. I mean, the history of this country is one that has been overlaid by physical strata, in which some of the same policies, some of the same economic interests are able to inform the ability of people to live in certain places, to develop communities, and to not. And in many cases, particularly during the advent of the big highway systems and a lot of the major infrastructure systems that we had going from the 30s all the way through to the 60s in this country, even that we're now seeing having maintenance problems and requiring major repairs if not completely overhauling what they're doing, like our energy grid.
Let me go back in history then development of those systems, and in many cases you saw things like highways tearing through neighborhoods and displacing whole communities simply because that was the most convenient method of getting a certain population within a metropolitan region to their jobs and back. It's about who we prioritize in terms of our services and the same thing plays out to the property level, which is a minor area of interest at the Joint Center for Housing Studies, looking at how layers of decisions have developed certain kinds of housing of a certain kind of quality and stock and whether those are repaired and whether the occupants of those have the resources and the bandwidth to be able to do those repairs on their own and the industry that provides them. It's a series of layers, I think, is important to think about and I like to think about it as an engineer when I'm digging in dirt. I'd like to see that our social and economic policies have played the same role in terms of informing what the physical stock in our soils are.
Stephen Goldsmith:
I've got several questions on that, but before I get there, do you view the issues of climate and sustainability and equity as separate issues from the work you're doing on extending and connecting Americans to prosperity or are they similar parts of the same question? Should we think about climate sustainability separately or as part of connecting Americans to prosperity?
Carlos Martín:
Absolutely part of it. That specific reference was really around infrastructure, the public works infrastructure that we were seeing being funded with the IIJA Act or Investment in Infrastructure and Jobs Act. Housing, for me, is an infrastructure so the same questions around how that strata of social and economic policy has resulted in physical artifacts is the same. It's the exact same question, just a different sector of the inquiry for me.
Stephen Goldsmith:
We've spent some considerable amount of time at the Data-Smart site at Harvard, and in some other writing that we've done, on mapping equity or inequity, particularly as it relates to infrastructure showing disparities and the like. What's the role of data visualization and what sorts of data would you recommend a city leader look at in trying to understand inequity, prosperity in an infrastructure?
Carlos Martín:
I think any ability to elect data and then present it in a way that either educates or creates awareness to individual families and decision makers is important, but also then what the policy action is based on that data. Is there additional research? Is there actual suggestion for either municipal, state or federal change in how we govern? Absolutely critical. It depends on the level of government that I'm speaking to that has the constitutional ability to determine what kind of data is collected and how it is used and how it is presented. But speaking on the public sector, one thing I would say to a local government, a city or county government is how much do you actually know about your housing stock, the physical quality of your communities? And the reality is most people don't know that much.
The only agencies within a local government that tend to know these things are the tax assessors who has to make comparables and determine what rate you're going to pay for your property taxes. The housing department may know general terms, but they're very much focused on only the assisted housing stock and potentially the environmental office may know certain neighborhoods don't have trees, certain neighborhoods, the infrastructure, the storm water systems aren't working, those things. These tend to be very siloed. I would say one, do an assessment of what you actually know about the quality, not only communities, but the individual houses within communities, and then how are you breaking down the silos between these different agencies that may or may not know one piece of that puzzle?
Stephen Goldsmith:
We have groups that we manage, chief data officers, chiefs of staff, now emerging chief equity officers. I'm intrigued by a point in your report that says, "There are examples of infrastructure's attempts at fairness from which to draw lessons." Thinking about that audience I just mentioned, what are those attempts and what would some of those lessons be?
Carlos Martín:
Sure. In that report, I was mentioning cases of the local infrastructure development and planning processes, and this goes from fairly famous national cases like Miami-Dade's Coastal Adaptation and Planning, the New York City regions opposed planning. That just became big news in the last couple of weeks because of the Army Corps's estimate of the tens of billions of dollars that it would cost to do some of these activities, but down to rural communities. I mean, in fact, one of the best examples that I've always come up with is a small community in Nebraska. They just did a lot of additional effort, not just doing the cost benefit analysis of a river redevelopment area that was also meant to help improve a transit, a local road, but was a very thoughtful conversation with the local communities, a primarily African-American community that had been displaced in the past. There are opportunities to be very thoughtful about this.
I was smiling in my head when you talked about Chief X Officer. I need to disclose that I was the lead evaluator of the 100 resilient cities, which many of your Bloomberg folks know about. And the reality there is that the intervention was very much focused on city government and how city government works or as communities more than the expected longer term outcomes and benefits in terms of resiliency and adaptation to any specific shock that the city may face beyond climate, really about how city government works. And in those cases, it was really about desiloing. 100 resilient cities was really making sure that people spoke to each other and the comment I made about data is one of these opportunities to think about it.
What cities know about their own communities and their own constituents, but also really them thinking about, "Well, how is it that these services and these programs that we separately run can better serve the communities that are in them?" In some cases, those silos were created because the state funds them in a certain way and the state gets their money because the federal government funds them in a certain way. These silos, they're pretty deep in the strata of our communities in the analogy that I'm making, but it's important to track out how that plays out in people's lives at the ground, which is primarily in cities and towns across this country.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Before we let you go, let's switch for a second to another area of expertise. I mean, you're located in the Joint Center for Housing Studies, so if we thought about housing, I mean, there's so much to be done in the cities with which we work, particularly in those neighborhoods that are more densely poor, where the number of boarded up vacant houses is significant. If we thought about infrastructure and equity in housing, what two or three tips or lessons would you provide to our listeners on where they should begin or how they should think about addressing the needs of those neighborhoods?
Carlos Martín:
Your question comes in very good timing, not only because of the conversations we're having about the implementation of things like the Infrastructure Act, but as well as the Inflation Reduction Act, which is heavily focused on housing and housing quality as it relates to energy efficiency and electrification. And it's also well-timed because of the Joint Center for Housing Studies improving America's Housing Biennial report will be released on March 23rd. They're actually talking about these specific issues. And so the three that I would focus most on are number one, these basic, physical quality issues with housing, particularly for low income households and those communities that have been underserved by infrastructure largely. This is still a pressing issue in the United States. In the most advanced economy on the planet, we still have underperforming housing just in terms of basic structural repairs, inadequacy with regards to plumbing systems, et cetera.
Thinking about that community and what they need is an absolutely critical focus, and that's something that local communities have been a little more aggressive about. They've used federal funding, but they've been able to attack that issue a little more solidly. There aren't enough resources for the demand and the need that exist out there, but beyond that basic structural importance are two other points that I think are important for your listeners to know.
The first is this issue of energy efficiency. When you have poor performing homes, they also consume a lot of energy and they're making the occupants even that much more financial in house distress because they're paying more for energy that's just going through the window, and they have a lot of poor health outcomes because of this as a problem. This goes to our continued use of the natural gas and carbon-based fuel sources, as well as just a home's physical ability to be more efficient.
The third point is how homes contribute to our greenhouse gas emissions in this country disproportionately. US homes are about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions. Just US homes themselves as a sector are ranked against Brazil and Germany in terms of the total sizes of greenhouse gas emissions, right? That's just our homes in this country. All of those greenhouse emissions, of course, are already having an impact. We're seeing increased, severe weather events. We're seeing changing temperature shifts happen in every sector of the country. These are important issues that we have to think about in terms of adapting our homes and our communities to climate's effect, not just trying to prevent future climate change.
Thinking about the strategies or either mitigating and in some places, displacing current homes and the families that live in them to safer ground is an absolute critical issue that we have to keep looking at because unfortunately, disaster repairs continue to become an increasing part of the overall repair and remodeling market in this country. We have to remind people that we're actually spending a lot of money on disaster repairs that we could have been spending on preparing these homes to begin with before disaster hit.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Your last sentence, I was thinking about my time as Deputy Mayor of New York. I wonder how one goes about figuring out whether remodeling existing housing or apartment makes sense and can it be made resilient and energy efficient, or whether it really needs to be rebuilt? Is there a way the city could play a role in that evaluation?
Carlos Martín:
Absolutely. I mean, cities have the data about their constituents and about their properties more than federal government does. Federal government actually uses city-based data that turns into proprietary data that gets sold for national analysis. Cities actually know a lot more about their constituents and about the physical quality of their communities than anybody else. The challenge is that the first part of your question, it's very expensive to fully retrofit, both for energy performance as well as for future climate adaptation any individual building. And so, the cost benefit analysis that we typically use tend to be federally dictated, would suggest that a lot of places it's too expensive to rebuild. The question becomes one, whether if each building can physically be retrofitted, how much would that cost? Then two, what decisions are we making, and this is a critical governance issue that I think is regional and national.
When are we deciding that a certain community or a certain group of buildings, including some houses, is too cost ineffective to mitigate them, to make them be able to withstand future changes in the environment? We have a history on this planet of moving because of environmental changes, right? I mean, climate displacement isn't a modern concept. The Dust Bowl was the first mass movement of those kinds, and of course we preceded that with social displacement from Native American and African American communities in this country for so long. There's a history of displacement being done, not thoughtfully, not with actual criteria for the physical characteristics of what that would look like, and certainly not with the resources afterwards to support those households to go to safer ground, but also to maintain all the community, all of the economic bonds that they had to begin with. We're at a critical turning point in this country around that issue about what do we invest in? What do we value in terms of communities?
Stephen Goldsmith:
Well, this is very exciting. You know so much about so many things that our listeners care about. This is Professor Steven Goldsmith at Harvard Kennedy School and today with Carlos Martín, Project Director of Remodeling Futures Program. Carlos, thank you so much for your time and I know our listeners appreciate your insights.
Carlos Martín:
Thank you for having me. I look forward to hearing theirs as well.
Betsy Gardner:
If you like this podcast, please visit us at datasmartcities.org or follow us @DataSmartCities on Twitter. And remember to subscribe at the new Data-Smart City Pod channel on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. This podcast was produced by me, Betsy Gardner, and hosted by Professor Steve Goldsmith. We're proud to be the central resource for cities interested in the intersection of government, data, and innovation. Thanks for listening.