Jeff and Randy run a T-shirt store and community destination that shows off their St. Louis pride.
Jeff and Randy Vines are 44-year-old identical twins. They’re also the creators and co-owners of STL-Style, a St. Louis apparel store that has become a destination for locals and tourists alike. STL-Style has been in its Cherokee Street storefront since 2010, with no plans to expand into a bigger location — even though the business has annual sales of just over $1 million.
Here’s how the Vines brothers turned a love for their hometown into a thriving small business, creating not only T-shirts, but also a gathering space for St. Louis residents.
Randy: From an early age, we were always obsessed with our city, St. Louis. We wanted to show it off and represent it in a way that was cool and stylish and honest. When we first started toying around with the idea of T-shirts, circa 2000, it was because there wasn’t any St. Louis apparel out there that we wanted to wear. It was all embarrassing touristy stuff, back then.
We started cranking out designs that we came up with; we got the help of one of our graphic designer friends, and started doing this side hustle thing on the weekends and after hours. Turning out designs we thought were cool, that we wanted to wear, and printing a few shirts here and there. Sure enough, it resonated with a bigger audience: “I really like your shirt, where can I get one of those?” People started asking if we would make shirts for their friends. It took on a life of its own.
We first started printing our shirts with an old-school crank press on our friend’s kitchen table. It was a pretty low-tech process, but it worked for our purposes back then. As we grew, we used the proceeds from our sales to invest in better equipment, and before too long we teamed up with some friends of ours who had a screen printing business. In 2010 we found ourselves with a storefront lease on Cherokee Street, which is in a very cool, up-and-coming neighborhood in South St. Louis, and we’ve been there ever since.
We have a retail store that is a destination for St. Louis-centric gift items and apparel, and we also have a robust screen printing business as well. Right now the majority of our revenue comes from custom-designed, screen-printed promotional items for events, schools, corporations, that kind of thing. That’s the bread and butter. The retail store, the online store, that’s the icing. It pays the overhead and helps sustain the business.
Jeff: It’s a destination. People come to shop at our store.
Randy: Our store is our favorite part of the business. It also brings in the people who become our clients.
Jeff: I had previously worked at a bowling shirt company, so I understood how the T-shirt business worked. Randy, at the time, was in hotel management. He had the customer service stuff down. It was a natural fit, the way we came together, but it wasn’t planned at all. I lost my job unexpectedly, and our friend, who is still our landlord, offered us the space.
Randy: It had always been a pipe dream, to sell St. Louis stuff all the time, but we had no business acumen at all. We weren’t expecting to do it as a full-time enterprise. It was always going to be a sideline hobby. A hustle. But we found ourselves with this unique opportunity— we could either run this shop and try to make a go of it, or we could open on the weekends and keep our day jobs. We decided to really dedicate ourselves to this idea, and if it failed, at least we tried.
It did the opposite of fail. We created an institution in the city.
Jeff: We never had a business plan, and we never tried to follow a mold. We were freewheeling, trying things out. We actually met with a job counselor. We wanted to know what we should do. At that time we were selling T-shirts for fun, but the job counselor kept coming back to it as the nucleus of all our interests and skills. That was one of the reasons we decided to do it full-time.
Randy: We never worked together in a professional capacity until we opened our shop, but we produced a public access TV show with a couple of friends for four years during the 1990s and that probably influenced the course of our lives more than anything else we’ve ever done. Our great-grandfather emigrated to the US in his early 30s and owned and operated a shoe repair shop on the North Side of St. Louis for decades, so maybe the brick-and-mortar shopkeeping gig is in our DNA!
We weren’t trying to start a “twin” business. That’s never been our brand. But we’ve always been interested in the same things. We’re also uninterested in anything artificial or contrived or pretentious. We wanted to create a brand that reflected St. Louis in all its glory. We wanted to make sure that whatever we put out there, in the store or online, was an honest reflection of how we perceive the city and how we want our customers to perceive us. We don’t shy away from the grit and the grime, or the potentially controversial designs. These are inherent in our brand and what we’re all about.
Our bestselling shirt is “Saint Fuckin Louis.” That’s been our bestseller since we opened the doors. We also run limited-edition, politically inspired items depending on what’s going on locally or nationally. We do not shy away from posting publicly about our progressive politics or our stance on certain issues. We’ve always been told that it’s a bad idea to mix politics and business, but we figured, for every one person we offend and lose, there are another 10 people who respect us. We win their loyalty.
Jeff: We intentionally don’t have price tags on a lot of our in-store items. At first it was because we were lazy, and then we realized it was an advantage. It gave us an opportunity to talk to every person who came in. You can’t buy anything without striking up a conversation. It’s really kind of a beautiful thing.
Randy: It’s very important to us that the shop creates an experience for everyone who walks in the door. It’s not conventional retail, buy your goods and leave, thank you. We wanted to create an experience that can’t be replicated in any other retail environment. We’re a gathering spot. A place for civic discourse, where people can talk about the city or the political environment. Local elections. National elections! A forum for exchanging ideas and thoughts and good vibes.
Jeff: We also do organized tours in conjunction with the History Museum.
Randy: Walking tours of Cherokee Street, bus tours of the city.
Jeff: Talks to school groups.
Randy: Design workshops for summer camps.
Jeff: Entrepreneurship forums.
Randy: Our business isn’t just about making money for ourselves and our staff. It’s also about creating something that the city can use.
Jeff: Cherokee Street is not an established shopping district, so people have to seek us out. We did that intentionally, because we wanted to give people a reason to discover a part of the city [they] might not ever see.
We’re in a very artistic part of St. Louis, and many of the people we hire have artistic backgrounds. They help us bring our ideas to life, and they contribute great ideas of their own.
Randy: We’ve never used conventional hiring practices. It’s a gut feeling. It’s an emotional thing. Some of our employees have been hired when we weren’t even looking to hire and they weren’t even looking for a job!
Jeff: I think we have one of the lowest turnovers for a retail store in St. Louis. Some of our employees have been with us for five years or more. We’re still in touch with just about everyone we’ve ever hired.
Randy: Every single employee we’ve had working at the shop — we’re on good terms with all of them. Very rarely have we ever had to let someone go, but even in the cases where we did, we’re on good terms. Former employees, in some cases, we let them hang on to their keys to the shop.
Jeff: It’s like a second home. We always wanted it to be that way.
Randy: We’ve had these sweetheart offers to expand, open a second location, set up kiosks, move to a bigger space — all of that’s great and we get why other businesses want to do that, but we feel like we’ve immersed everything in our souls into the space we have. There’s no way to create this anywhere else.
Nicole Dieker is a personal finance writer whose work has appeared in Bankrate, Lifehacker, Morning Brew, and Dwell. She is also the author of the Larkin Day Mysteries, a comedy-cozy mystery series set in eastern Iowa, and WHAT IT IS and WHAT TO DO NEXT, a quarterly zine about understanding reality.
Michael Schulman on why the Oscars are always behind the times, and his new book, Oscar Wars.
What even is the point of the Oscars?
Every year, I find myself asking that question, and every year I have a different answer. They’re a cultural barometer. They’re a way to spotlight movies that got lost in the mega-blockbuster vortex. They’re ridiculous. They’re surprising. They’re a big, hot mess.
Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears, by New Yorker staff writer Michael Schulman, wades into that perennial question via a terrifically entertaining structure: He looks at a decade of scandals at the Oscars, the things that went horribly wrong, the shenanigans people talked about and argued about and still get a little salty about every year when the Oscars roll around again. In so doing, he traces an evolution in the way the Oscars — and the industry group that gives them out, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences — have evolved. And along the way, we get to learn how scandals around bad behavior, weird winners, snubs, and blow-ups tell us something about ourselves as a country.
It’s a great book, and I was delighted to talk to Schulman about it. In our conversation (which has been lightly edited for clarity), we discuss some of the zaniest chaos the Oscars has provoked, the reason they even got started in the first place, and what the future could hold, maybe.
Every year, people ask me the same question: “Is there a cash prize if you win the Oscar?” When I say no, the follow-up is often, “Then why does everyone work so hard to get one?” I explain that winning an Oscar can come with indirect monetary gain (winners may get more and better work), but more importantly, it’s about gaining cultural power.
That’s what you say at the beginning of your book, that the common thread through all of the Oscar controversies is the story of people looking to get power, hang on to power, and decide who else gets to have power. Was there a point that you realized that’s what was behind all of this Oscars hubbub?
I spent four years researching and writing the book, and I think I wrote that section about power at the end, when I was trying to stand back and figure out what the common threads were. Of course, there are a couple, like cultural change and generational conflict.
But when I really thought about what human theme was beneath every episode covered in the book, it was power. It was people trying to maintain their power or snatch power from outside the system or beat someone else at the Oscar game.
From the time that the Academy Awards were created, it was this talisman for people. As soon as there was an award to win, people wanted to win it. And I think there are a lot of psychological reasons for that. I mean, who doesn’t want adulation from their peers and reinforcement for their ego? It’s certainly good for your career most of the time — with the notable exception of the “Oscar curse” that strikes some people.
But it’s hard. People are always trying to attain power in Hollywood. It’s a very tumultuous, uncertain, unpredictable business. So besides money and position, the Oscar is one tangible way of attaining power and influence.
I have a friend who always says that it’s relatively easy to tell how much money you have because you just look at your bank account and you kind of know. But it’s impossible to tell how much power you have. So any marker of power is something to grasp after, even if from the outside it looks like you’re a very powerful person.
Yeah. Or how much talent you have. People who make any kind of art are always insecure, trying to grasp at some proof that they’re good at what they do.
I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Writers included!
So prizes for artistic pursuits give you some reassurance. There’s a quote near the beginning of the book from Terry Press, who is a longtime marketing executive. I asked her at one point, what is all this for? Why do people want Oscars?
And she said, “Ego and bragging rights. It’s a town built on a rock-solid foundation of insecurity.”
One thing I love about your narrative is that it’s not just a collection of weird anecdotes, which is certainly a book someone could have written; it’s an argument. You make the case, explicitly but also implicitly, that when we look at Oscars and Hollywood more broadly, we’re seeing a weirdly entertaining encapsulation of very specific anxieties in American culture at that moment. The great film critic and cultural historian Jim Hoberman calls it the “dream life” of the country. It’s the fantasies and the fears all wrapped up into one.
But I think what people forget — and what you bring to life — is that it really all started with fears about respectability, and also labor. Those two issues actually are the reason we have the Oscars at all.
The Academy was founded in 1927 by 36 founding members who really represented a cross-section of influence and power in Hollywood in the silent era. Their rhetoric from that time is so utopian. They talk about how they wanted to be “the League of Nations for Hollywood.” They talk about creating harmony and promoting motion pictures throughout the world, and that’s all well and good, but there were basically two underlying, ongoing crises for Hollywood that are the subtexts of those statements.
One is that Hollywood was, by and large, not a unionized town in the ’20s. The craftspeople were unionized, but not the artists, not the actors, writers, and directors. There were signs that they might start to organize, and that was a big problem for people like [MGM founder] Louis B. Mayer and the other studio heads.
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Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
So, one of the reasons the Academy was invented was to mediate disputes over salaries or hirings and firings and to oversee contract negotiations. There was a lot of resentment from the rank and file because they saw this as a kind of company union that would preempt actual labor unions. Which was true! The birth of the Academy managed to push off the creation of guilds in Hollywood for about five years, until the Depression hit and the labor movement of the ’30s gave rise to SAG and other guilds.
The other thing that was happening in 1920s Hollywood is that there was a series of very salacious scandals, like the arrest of Paramount’s Fatty Arbuckle for rape and murder, and other murders and sex scandals and drug scandals. Then as now, there was a culture war in the country. The conservative element saw Hollywood as a cesspool of sin. There was a real threat of censorship laws.
So the Academy, this new organization, helped rebrand Hollywood not as a cesspool but as an “academy,” a very lofty idea. The Academy Awards were originally just kind of one item on a long list of ideas the Academy had. But it has to do with that goal of elevating the idea of motion pictures as an art form, so that it wasn’t seen as this gutter activity that would corrupt whoever stumbled into its path.
All of this points to something I’m always thinking about: that Hollywood is a fundamentally conservative place, in the sense that on the highest levels of decision-making, it’s risk-averse and fixated on what’s “okay” to show the country about itself, on what won’t rock the boat. For a long period in the 20th century, the studio execs even explicitly saw themselves as guardians of America’s morality. That arises in some of the scandals in your book: that they were and are conservative on matters of gender and power, homophobia, race, and more.
One particularly notable example is what happened with the Hollywood blacklist and HUAC. I had never heard that wild story about screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.
Oh, isn’t it great?
It’s incredible.
One of my favorite semi-forgotten Oscar scandals, because it’s so weird. In 1957, the award for Best Motion Picture Story — a category that no longer exists — went to someone named “Robert Rich” for a movie called The Brave One, which was about a Mexican boy and his bull. Robert Rich was not in attendance. In the days after the ceremony, no one could locate him. That is because he did not exist.
The producers of the movie said he was a guy they met in Munich, an ex-GI, who sold them this story, but they didn’t know where he was. Maybe Europe, maybe Australia. Life [magazine] actually ran an illustration of what Robert Rich might look like, based on their recollections. It’s such a funny picture. It says he has an aquiline nose, parted hair, such-and-such height.
But really, he was a pseudonym, a front for Dalton Trumbo, who was the most famous screenwriter on the Hollywood blacklist. He had actually been to prison already, as one of the Hollywood Ten.
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American Stock Archive/Archive Photos/Getty Images
What I really love about this story is that once Trumbo saw that this phantom person, “Robert Rich,” won an Oscar for his work, he realized he could use that to turn the tables on the blacklist and try to destroy it by creating a PR crisis for the Academy. He used his wit and his cleverness and his words, and he played the press in order to fan this ridiculous controversy. It went on for two years.
He actually wrote a poem and sent it in to Life. It’s so funny. It goes, “Come back, Robert Rich, wherever you are / Return so the ghost can be shriven. / Do you live on the moon? Do you live on a star? / Is that where your legends are scriven?”
Trumbo was such a smart, waggish writer, and at the end of all this, he managed to basically manipulate the Academy into dropping its rule against blacklisted people being eligible for awards. The rule only lasted two years because the Academy realized it was unenforceable, and it just kept creating one embarrassing PR crisis for them after another. It was an open secret that these really prominent screenwriters were working on the black market under fake names and being paid bargain rates. Trumbo exploited that hypocrisy by playing up this Robert Rich scandal to the hilt.
It does seem like the history of the Oscars is a history of PR crises that the Academy created for itself and failed to anticipate — right up to the present, with #OscarsSoWhite and #MeToo. Is there some reason that this keeps happening?
Well, yes. Hollywood is built on perception and optics and public relations. And on one very fundamental level, the Oscars are a marketing event. Often, in Hollywood, things don’t happen unless they become a PR problem, and people are forced to change something or move or do something.
That sounds very cynical, and it mostly is. But when you think about it, #MeToo and #OscarsSoWhite became big movements because of a herd mentality. They had to build until the point where the powers that be felt that it was more damaging to stand still than to enact change.
The Academy tends to be more reactive than proactive when it comes to criticism and changing with the times. This is the same story as 1969, 1970, when the Academy was woefully out of step with the baby boom and it hadn’t really reached across the generation gap. The Academy president, Gregory Peck, realized that something had to be done.
So, just like in 2016 after #OscarsSoWhite, he realized that the only way the Academy could survive and be relevant was to bring in more people and update the membership. But this was 1969 and the Academy was still giving Oliver! Best Picture.
Then, in a single year, the Best Picture winner went from Oliver!, which was rated G, to Midnight Cowboy, which was rated X. So I asked, what happened in that year to make the Academy change course so drastically and finally embrace the counterculture?
What you’re describing when you say that Hollywood is slow to change is, in a sense, the story of American society. One thing you write about that really underlines this is all the racism and tokenism that has marked the Oscars over nearly a century. Something I gleaned from your book is that the milestones illuminate failures rather than wins. It’s not really a win when it’s the 2020s and someone is the first minority to be nominated in their category.
I have a chapter that braids the stories of three pioneering Black Oscar winners: Hattie McDaniel for Gone With the Wind, Sidney Poitier for Lilies of the Field, and Halle Berry for Monster’s Ball. They were all the first Black actors to win in those categories. And I thought it was amazing that their stories had so many parallels. Each won the Oscar, and it was hailed as this historic moment by the Academy and by Hollywood.
However, for each of them, it was a very isolating experience. They had to represent everyone, but they were pleasing almost no one. And they all received backlash from the Black community. In Hattie McDaniel’s case, for instance, she won for playing Mammy in Gone With the Wind, and then spent the rest of her career fighting with the NAACP, which was trying to get Hollywood to broaden its role for Black actors beyond mammies and the like. She was really stuck in that mammy archetype.
Sidney Poitier had a similar issue where he was suddenly criticized for being too wholesome and upstanding, and quickly fell out of fashion during the rise of Blaxploitation.
And then Halle Berry — I think we forget how much criticism and ridicule she received for her speech. It was almost shocking to go back just to 2002 and look at what the public reaction was like. People writing in to newspapers saying that she shouldn’t have made it all about race, that she embarrassed herself by crying so much, that she had been too sexual in her role in Monster’s Ball.
All three of them had these experiences where they could be held up by Hollywood as proof of progress, and yet their experience of these victories was something very different.
That is absolutely still true today. Every time I have to come up with a list of “milestones” in the Oscar nominations, it’s like, “Really? This person is the first to be nominated in this?” It’s really kind of shocking.
There still hasn’t been a Black Best Director winner. I mean, seriously? A Black person has never won Best Director. No person of color has won Best Actress since Halle Berry. And she was the first! She was the only one!
I end that chapter with something Halle Berry said in 2016: She had waited 15 years to see someone follow in her footsteps, and no one did. She said that it was heartbreaking because in her speech, she said, “Tonight a door has been opened.” But 15 years later, she realized she thought it was a moment that was bigger than her, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe she hadn’t opened a door. That was heartbreaking to her.
And there certainly isn’t going to be a Black Best Actress winner this year because nobody is even not nominated.
That raises a final question for me. The Oscars hold an outsized place in the minds of ordinary people. People care more about the Oscars than any other awards; they don’t care about the Emmys the same way, or even the Grammys. There are reasons for that. The Oscars story is very neat; it acts like a sports season crossed with a political campaign. It’s got the players and the shockers and the plot twists.
But now that we’ve reached 2023, it’s very clear to me that the Oscars as a cultural phenomenon are on the decline. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think so. There are factors at play. Having written this book, what do you think the future of the Oscars is?
It’s an interesting question, but it’s hard to say.
We’re in a moment of extreme skepticism toward longstanding institutions in general, whether it’s the Oscars or Washington or the New York Times. We’re in an anti-institutional moment. Maybe that’s a good thing; maybe it’s a bad thing. But it’s undeniably true.
The Oscars’ ratings have been on a downslide. They bumped up a little bit last year; the low point was 2021, the pandemic Oscars that were held in an LA train station.
But I think part of the problem is that firstly, the monoculture has declined. It’s very hard now to get the entire country, much less the world, to all watch the same thing on TV. Pop culture is much more fragmented. So I don’t think there’s ever going to be an audience for the Oscars like there was 30 years ago.
The other thing that’s really changed is the role of movies in our lives. Movies themselves aren’t as central to American culture as they once were. In particular, Hollywood is very bifurcated right now between these big tentpole movies like the Marvel movies and Avatar, which seem to be the only thing that people rush out to the theaters to go see, and then on the other side, indie movies and stuff that winds up on streaming that people are very comfortable staying home and watching on Paramount+ or HBO Max or Netflix.
What doesn’t exist as much anymore is the mid-level movie. And those have always helped tie the Oscars to mainstream American culture. For instance, when you think back to the ’90s, you had movies like Forrest Gump and The English Patient or Good Will Hunting. Those were adult dramas that everyone saw. They were big hits, and they weren’t superhero movies, but they also weren’t little indie movies.
Because of that, when the Oscar list came out every year, people had seen these movies. And I think now when the Oscar nominations come out, a lot of people are left scratching their heads. They complain, “I haven’t seen any of these. What the hell?”
But I don’t think that’s the Oscars’ fault, and I don’t think that the Academy can really do anything about that. They keep trying to incorporate more popular movies. Last year, you could vote online for your Audience Favorite. Years ago, they tried to add a Best Popular Film category, and people ridiculed it so much that they basically just retreated it into the hedges and it never happened.
I think that’s fine. I don’t think that’s what the Oscars are for.
But it is an issue for the relevance of the Academy Awards because people need to be invested, they need to be watching the movies, and the Oscars do a great job of lifting up and giving oxygen to little movies like Tár and Women Talking and Aftersun and stuff that’s nominated now, against the Avatars and the Top Guns.
I don’t have a crystal ball, and I don’t think the Oscars will cease to exist anytime soon. But as I look at the book and the almost century of history that it covers, I do wonder, is this the history of something that is, on some level, over? Or is it just cyclical? There are so many times in Hollywood history where the technology changes or taste changes and it gives birth to something great, like it did in the New Hollywood of the ’70s.
I don’t know. I’ll be interested to see.
Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears is available at booksellers nationwide.
The White House could do more to address the housing shortage.
For decades, the US has built fewer homes than it needs — a trend that has led to soaring rent and home prices, hurt economic growth, and hampered attempts to address the climate crisis.
Just how much more housing the US should have is debatable. But the estimates are unanimous that the country needs a lot more — 1.5 million units, or 3.8 million, or even 5.5 million — to ensure affordable housing for everyone. Low-income housing advocates estimate that America has a shortage of 7 million affordable rental units for those living in poverty; another group found nearly 11 million households spend more than 50 percent of their income on rent.
Last May, the White House announced the Housing Supply Action Plan, a grab bag of ideas that the Biden administration called “the most comprehensive all of government effort to close the housing supply shortfall in history.”
But 10 months later, there has been minimal progress, and higher interest rates have led to an overall slowdown in construction. The federal government did pass significant new investments in climate and infrastructure but largely failed to authorize new spending to expand the supply of housing.
There was real home-building progress in 2022 — more multifamily projects were started than in any year since 1986 — and the Biden administration argues its economic stimulus policies helped fueled some of that demand.
Yet most of those projects had been in the works for a long time. And although the Biden administration has invested more time and resources into the housing supply issue than its two most recent predecessors, it’s hard to claim the issue has stayed at the top of the president’s agenda. Biden has not pushed hard for expanding housing supply as a legislative priority and has not spent much time talking about building more homes. The housing crisis was barely mentioned in his recent State of the Union address.
“Both to the credit and detriment of this administration, they just have a lot of priorities,” said Ben Metcalf of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, who is a former Obama administration HUD official.
Developers say they’ve been begging the Biden administration to take more steps to reduce the cost of construction. Advocates for looser zoning rules say there is more the White House could do to clearly communicate what’s driving the crisis.
In the weeks leading up to the omnibus spending bill that Congress passed in late December, the Biden administration made clear its top legislative priorities were new money for Ukraine, Covid-19, and disaster relief. Biden officials defend their broad approach and say housing supply remains a focus that will be reflected in their soon-to-be-released budget proposal. But given how often officials cite resource constraints as a limiting factor, their ever-widening agenda creates obvious challenges.
Many pressing issues don’t receive much attention from the president. But among policy analysts, there’s a growing consensus that America’s housing shortage is the primary issue exacerbating many of the other big problems the country faces — from the climate crisis and homelessness to economic inequality and chronic illness. Unlike many other policy crises, too, housing is one that’s not yet totally polarized yet along partisan lines. The White House has gestured to agreeing with this analysis, but at least so far, it hasn’t met the crisis with proportionate urgency.
The feds’ tools against NIMBYism, briefly explained
Housing prices keep rising primarily because there’s not enough housing to go around. A top culprit for this scarcity is local zoning laws that bar new construction and empower homeowners who gain financially from restricting housing supply to decide whether or not to make room for more neighbors.
It’s illegal to build apartments on more than 70 percent of residential land in virtually every major US city. Other regulatory barriers, like minimum parking requirements, minimum lot sizes, and height limits, also make it harder to fit more people onto the available land. The popular shorthand for these restrictions is NIMBYism — short for “not in my backyard.”
Experts praised the Biden administration for elevating zoning issues in its plan released last May because many people don’t grasp, or don’t believe, that these policies and the fundamental imbalance between housing supply and demand fuel the affordability crisis.
“Getting the president to talk about housing and keeping up a consistent drum beat about supply and these land use barriers is among the most important things the White House could be doing,” said Andy Winkler, the housing director at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
The Biden administration’s plan proposes deploying new financing tools to build and preserve housing, to improve existing federal financing models, and to offer incentives for communities to reduce their housing development barriers.
In October, the White House announced progress on executing its plan, and it has taken some steps — like finalizing a rule to make it easier to build mixed-income projects, and extending several tax credit deadlines so that projects delayed by the pandemic could continue.
These changes are welcome, but in practical terms, they’re modest. Without an increase in federal funding, the administration’s impact on total housing supply will be limited.
Part of the challenge is that building new housing is an area where local governments hold immense power, and cities fiercely defend their right to dictate what kind of housing should exist. Land use policy has also historically been a state responsibility. As a result, federal lawmakers generally opt for strategies that encourage localities to make change, rather than strip money from those that don’t.
In his first year in office, Biden proposed a grant program to reward communities that loosened their zoning rules. That idea became the $1.75 billion Unlocking Possibilities program, which was included in the House’s Build Back Better bill but cut from the Senate’s version.
In 2022, the Biden administration tried again, proposing a new $10 billion grant program to reward states and localities that remove barriers to housing development. The omnibus spending package Congress passed in December did include its first competitive grant program aimed at zoning reform, dubbed a “YIMBY” grant — an acronym that stands for “yes in my backyard.” But it was for just $85 million, less than 1 percent of what Biden asked for.
“It’s not a meaningful amount of money; it’s a symbolic amount,” said Eric Kober, a senior fellow at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, of the new grant program. Kober is skeptical that the federal government can successfully nudge cities and states to take action on zoning. “Local governments often don’t understand the effects of their own land-use policies, and those that do can feign compliance while quietly undermining housing construction,” he wrote last year in a critical assessment of Biden’s housing plan.
The concern is warranted. One aspect of Biden’s plan that received early attention is a proposal to use both federal housing and transportation dollars to incentivize zoning reforms. In theory that’s a great idea: investments in new public transit are less useful if few people can actually live nearby the subsidized trains and subways.
But when the Transportation Department announced recipients of $2.2 billion in new competitive grants in August, few, if any of the 166 projects were from applicants that embraced zoning reforms. Some went to notorious NIMBY cities, like San Francisco. The White House claims two recipients — in Colorado and Minnesota — were chosen in part due to their adoption of land use policies to promote housing density.
“That doesn’t strike me as a systematic approach to encouraging future reform,” said Emily Hamilton, the director of the Urbanity Project at the Mercatus Center. “There certainly doesn’t seem to be any accountability that these zoning reforms are actually going to build more housing.”
The Transportation Department declined to comment on these criticisms but pointed to its rating rubric, which ranks applicants higher if they “coordinate and integrate land use, affordable housing, and transportation planning.” A spokesperson said they also recently announced that transit-oriented development projects are now eligible to receive better financing, that they have received “dozens” of inquiries so far, and they expect several projects will benefit from that this year.
Another Biden initiative was to allow states to use federal pandemic funds to address the housing shortage. A few, like Illinois, seized this opportunity. Allison Clements, of the Illinois Housing Council, said her state committed more than $339 million in American Rescue Plan funds to create affordable housing and fight homelessness.
But most states had no interest in leveraging the funds for housing production, and at the local level there’s often rarely the capacity to manage those kinds of projects, even if there was interest. So while it was a welcome idea, in practical terms it couldn’t support much new housing overall.
I asked HUD if, beyond the new $85 million YIMBY grant, it was looking to incorporate zoning into any of its other large grants. For example, while HUD cannot condition funding on zoning reforms without congressional approval, it does ask all recipients of its $3 billion Community Development Block Grant program to submit plans identifying barriers to housing development. HUD could specifically mention zoning here.
A HUD official said they don’t have plans to do that, but believe that combined with Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing work, “many communities will come to the conclusion that addressing zoning and land use reform, if it is exclusionary, is part of that.”
To move the needle, Hamilton of the Mercatus Center thinks Congress needs to create a new grant program that specifically awards jurisdictions based on housing market outcomes — like how much housing is actually built and how much it costs. A more heavy-handed federal approach, however, could fuel local backlash and potentially polarize the housing supply issues.
“It’s definitely a risk,” Hamilton said when asked about the idea’s political viability. “It would not be good for housing policy to become a left or right-coded issue.” But she emphasized there has been conservative interest in deregulating zoning before.
The federal government is not treating housing construction as urgent
To make a dent on housing supply, the Biden administration will need to invest more political capital in pushing for funding and continue to prioritize barriers to both subsidized and market-rate housing.
While Biden’s team can tout high rates of multifamily housing construction in 2022, completions have lagged, and analysts are bracing for a construction slowdown now from higher interest rates. Single-family home starts declined in 2022 for the first time for this reason, and the home-builder industry predicts both single-family and multifamily construction will decline this year.
Some of the biggest pieces of the administration’s plan are bills that Congress failed to pass last year, but that the Biden administration also failed to really lobby for. Those bills would have subsidized the preservation and repair of existing affordable homes, and offered more money for low-income rental construction.
The housing shortage has animated conservative think tanks, as well as some Republicans in Congress, like Indiana Sen. Todd Young. Winkler said he and his colleagues are encouraging the administration to work more proactively with Republicans this year. “They haven’t really yet engaged in those bipartisan conversations,” he said. In October, the Bipartisan Policy Center outlined a series of housing bills it believes could unite both parties.
“This plan is a departure from the Build Back Better Act — which recognized the severity of the nation’s housing affordability crisis but did not embrace a politically feasible, bipartisan agenda to address it,” Winkler’s team wrote.
One recurring critique was that the Biden administration has not been as aggressive in working to help the private sector build more homes.
For example, housing industry groups have been lobbying HUD to raise its large loan limits, which developers say could help them bring about anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 new additional homes annually and does not require congressional approval. The federal housing agency sets limits to mitigate lending risk, but with rising interest rates, builders are finding it harder to make financing deals possible under the status quo.
“There’s been a bias at HUD toward working with the nonprofit community, and we’ve been trying to get them to be more open to working with private sector partners,” said Bill Killmer, a lobbyist with the Mortgage Bankers Association. A HUD spokesperson said they’re reviewing their loan limits.
Builders have also been pressing the Biden administration to ease up on certain tariffs to reduce the cost of home construction. Last April, more than 10,000 members of the National Association of Home Builders urged the administration to suspend taxes on Canadian softwood lumber. But the trade dispute continues, and the US actually increased tariffs on Canadian timber companies in January. Lumber cost has come down recently, but builders say that’s just because construction is down.
“The Biden administration has done nothing to make lumber cheaper, and in fact, you could argue they are making it more expensive, due to overzealous environmental regulation that’s made it impossible in some cases to harvest in our own national forests,” said Jerry Howard, CEO of the National Association of Home Builders. Howard credited Biden’s team for reducing the cost of manufacturing chips but lamented that “the administration is focusing all of its efforts on very low-income housing.”
Kober, of the Manhattan Institute, argued Biden has embraced protectionist trade policies to help his reelection chances, even if it raises the price of housing construction and feeds into inflation. He criticized the Buy America rules included in recent federal legislation, arguing they will make building housing more expensive.
Buy America rules do not apply to market-rate housing or housing built with the low-income housing tax credit, but affordable housing advocates have expressed concern with how these new rules could impact existing subsidized programs.
A White House spokesperson defended the rules, saying “using American-made materials will help make supply chains more resilient and can reduce costly delays that slow down projects.”
Advocates remain cautiously hopeful about the potential for increased production of manufactured housing, which are homes largely assembled in factories. These houses are far less expensive to produce at scale than conventional “site-built” housing, and included in the federal omnibus bill was a new $225 million grant program for this sector.
But current federal policies discourage lenders from offering accessible financing terms to buyers of manufactured homes, and advocates like Jim Gray, a fellow at the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, have been urging Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to offer less expensive products.
“It has been an uphill battle,” Gray admitted. The Biden housing supply plan talked about promoting manufactured housing, and HUD has been focused on research in the area and working to improve relevant loans, but progress has been slow so far.
Yet there’s also been no real push to treat factory-made housing as an urgent federal investment priority like leaders have, say, electric cars or solar energy.
“The federal government could be saying, ‘Hey, we have an investor role to play in building American factories for entry-level housing,’ but instead they talk mostly about the annual HUD festival [on innovative housing models] they host,” said Metcalf. “That’s cool, but that’s not the focus we’ve brought to bear for other industries.”
Tackling the housing supply crisis will require big, industrial-level creativity on a scale comparable to what the administration brought to legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. So far, on housing, that’s been missing. Winkler says he thinks the Biden administration has made “a good-faith effort to do what they can administratively, but without the substantial resources they had wanted to get in the reconciliation plan, their hands are somewhat tied.”
Many of the provisions of the administration’s plan “align with our own priorities,” he said, but “on the whole, that cannot in and of itself be transformational.”