Housing is Not Hypothetical

TOPICS DISCUSSED

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UPCOMING EXCITING PROJECTS AT PANTSUIT POLITICS

EPISODE RESOURCES

Ukraine Check In

Affordable Housing

TRANSCRIPT

Katie Stigers [00:00:00] Hi. My name's Katie Stigers. I'm a long time Pantsuit Politics listener, and I've worked in the housing industry for a few years. Nothing I say speaks for my employer. One of the things that we're seeing in the housing market is that there's less filtering because there's not enough supply in the market. People who normally would buy a new house, a bigger house, a more expensive house and release the house that they're in back into the market, aren't doing that. There's nowhere to go and or there's not enough places that they want to go. And at the same time, the houses that they would otherwise leave aren't available for new families to buy. And so there is some stickiness in the market. And similarly, sometimes we see people, you know, with gentrification buying houses that they then fix up. And and then the house that they left, say, in the suburbs or wherever becomes available for a family that wants to move there. We're not seeing as much of that at all because there just aren't houses to move to and that's the result of a lot of other factors.  

Sarah [00:01:14] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.  

Beth [00:01:15] And this is Beth Silvers.  

Sarah [00:01:17] Thank you for joining us for Pantsuit Politics.  

Beth [00:01:33] Hello and thank you so much for joining us for a new episode of Pantsuit Politics. Today, we're going to check in on Russia's invasion of Ukraine. We're going to talk about affordable housing, which if our Instagram post previewing this topic is any indication, is something that is on everyone's minds. And then as we see the school year wrap up and get into the summer, we're going to chat about what the summer holds for each of us and how we're going to cope with the summer. Is that a fair thing to say? Coping the summer. But before we get started, we just wanted to say thank you to everyone who's taken a second to review our book. Now What? How to Move Forward when we're divided (About Basically Everything). We are at the stage in the process now where your purchases are still very, very, important. And after you've purchased, if you could say one sentence about hopefully how much you enjoyed the book, we would really, really, appreciate it.  

Sarah [00:02:24] We love this review from Rachel. She said, "Yes, this book subject might be how to talk about politics, but it's more so a roadmap on how to practice empathy and connection with your fellow humans. From debates over how to load a dishwasher to whether you should ghost your uncle on Facebook -- Spoiler alert, there's no hard and fast answer -- to finally giving country music the praise it deserves. The book aims to address how we think about many of the important relationships and issues in our lives." Thank you so much, Rachel. What a lovely review. I think we're like 87. We're told 100 is a very important goal and we just do what we're told here at Pantsuit Politics when it comes to promoting our book. So if you haven't left a review, we would greatly, greatly, appreciate it. And up next, we're going to talk about Ukraine.  

Beth [00:03:15] Sarah We had a meeting recently and you said, I feel like we haven't checked in on Ukraine in a while. And I realize that I have been a little bit deliberately avoiding checking in on Ukraine. I have not done a More To Say on it in a while. I think I maintain that feeling of it's terrible. It's going better than anyone could have expected and it's still terrible. And I just want to stay in a place where it's going better than anyone could have expected. And maybe if I talk about it, it will change it. Have a little bit of that Jurassic Park vibe like just be very, very, still right now and don't disrupt what's happening.  

Sarah [00:03:51] Yeah. Because of the nature of Good Morning, the news brief I do every morning on our premium content, I check in with it pretty regularly, but I'm definitely a macro girl. Like, what's the vibe? I very much check the vibe and I think the vibe is good. It seems very much like from the high aerial view of the conflict that there was a moment where they said, "okay, Russia is reorienting, they're going to the east, they're going to the Donbass region, they're going to pour all their military support. They're just going to really focus on there." And then they still did bad there. They're still doing bad there. It's just continues to go badly. I was listening to reporting yesterday about the Air Force and how the Ukrainian Air Force is keeping up way more than they expected and that the Russian planes are older and they're not servicing them. And I was listening to a fighter pilot talk about how they could sometimes hear the Russian fighter pilots and how scared and how often, if there was any sort of conflict, they'd just turn around and go back.  

[00:04:49] And so I think the other big component of this shift we're all feeling, too, is how many high ranking officials are actually going to Ukraine. Nancy Pelosi was there. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was there. Joe Biden went for a surprise visit. And so I think that all that energy of like this is going well, this is going -- especially in the western part of Ukraine, I mean, it's decimated.  The reporting on what it will take to rebuild that part of the country is insane. But no, I agree. I think it continues to go better even as we sort of enter a new phases than anyone expected. And I do bring a little bit of that energy of, like, I just want to read just enough to confirm that and then I'm going to back out slowly.  

Beth [00:05:33] Yeah. And because I am more of a details person, the details remain heartwrenching even as it goes better than anyone expected. We know that a U.N. human rights monitoring mission has determined that we have dramatically undercounted how many Ukrainians have died in this conflict. It really jumped out at me that the World Health Organization said this week that at least 3000 people have died in Ukraine just because they couldn't access treatment for chronic disease. We also know that Ukrainians are pushing Russian troops out of Kharkiv now that they are somehow holding in Mariupol. Russia didn't have the fanfare that folks expected on May 9th, which is a day that is significant to Russia in connection with how they think about what happened in World War Two. I'm not sure that the Russian story about what happened in World War Two you can exactly square it with history, but it is a significant date where there is usually a lot of military fanfare in Russia. And Putin's speech that day acknowledged that Russia has lost lives in Ukraine. He still says that the Ukrainians are Nazis that Russia is fighting. But it wasn't what a lot of observers expected in terms of a significant escalation and a significant show of might, which seems to indicate that maybe some reality is breaking through that bubble that he's been surrounded by.  

Sarah [00:07:00] Yeah, I mean, I don't know how it could end at this point. I mean, if we're all feeling the ripple effects of food supply issues and global supply chain and the cost of things, how much larger and orders of magnitude must that impact be on Russia, which has basically been cut out of the global economy? And so I can't fathom a scenario where even with his enormous power and enormous wealth, he could protect himself from the implications of this. Not to mention just the thousands and thousands of dead Russian soldiers, which he even acknowledged during that celebration for sort of the first time. There's still intelligence reporting that says it's not like he has any immediate plans to leave. Like, they're still worried this could stretch out and stretch out and stretch out. And I think that is both impossibly hard for Ukraine. And also they seem to just  accept this and are pulling, clawing any normalcy back from what they can right now with a lot of support from the European Union and the United States, which seems to stay strong, which does not seem to fade.  

[00:08:15] I feel like, honestly, in the United States, the longer this goes on, the less I hear that sort of like ridiculous far right support for Russia and criticism of Ukraine. I feel like some of that has died down and that's incredibly positive. It doesn't come up in sort of my community conversations that anybody's, like, tired of it or ready to not support Ukraine to move on. Like, I don't feel like that's a position that's really out there in American life. I mean, in my existence. I'm sure it's out there somewhere. There's an Internet, there's a place for everything. But I feel like that sort of  encouraging on the ground here because that's what we have impact over, right? As much as we have impact over anything is how we talk about this and think about this and continue to support Ukraine in American life.  

Beth [00:09:01] There continues to be bipartisan support in Congress to spend lots and lots of money and work to get weapons over very quickly. I think it's been interesting to read comments from Democratic senators about how concerned they are that we're depleting our stock of weapons and defense systems, and that supply chain issues mean that replacing the equipment we're sending to Ukraine is going to take a while. That sounds like something that Republicans would be out there saying. And I mentioned it as a hopeful thing, because we don't hear Republicans talking about how we shouldn't be spending this money. And we hear Democrats saying, and our defense here is important. And this war in Ukraine, and particularly the rate at which Ukrainian troops have burned through this equipment, tells us that we really need to be sure that we're prepared in America to defend ourselves if something like this were to happen here. So I think a lot has shifted even in the way that we think about defense planning and spending here in the United States.  

[00:10:03] And I know that none of us in a in a dream world would wish for Congress to say, "Let's spend lots and lots more money on defense." But I think it's worth acknowledging that there are some productive and pragmatic discussions happening on a bipartisan basis around that topic. So President Zelensky told students in France this week on a video conference that the war will end when Russia returns our right to live. He has a way with words. That President Zelensky, I think all the time about him asking whether we are going to allow Russia to kill Ukrainians slowly. He just really has a way of summing up a clarity about what's going on there. And as much as I don't want to sound like we're calling a sports game, like who's winning right now or who's losing ground, we will continue to check in and send lots of love to everyone who is impacted in ways that are extremely personal by this conflict. And we'll continue to think about those macro effects of the way that what's going on in Ukraine and Russia affects the food supply, affects fuel availability. And please feel free to send questions to inform those discussions as we go forward.  

[00:11:16] Next up, we are going to discuss housing prices. The Washington Post has a tool where you can take a look at how housing prices have shifted over the last year in your county. So I put in my county, Boone County, Kentucky, and learned that since 2019, prices here are up by 15.5%. That is above the national average, which is hovering around 11%. And the average rent in Boone County, Kentucky -- and Boone County spans very rural area, very, very suburban area and then small city. The average rent here is $1,066 a month. I'm sure depending on where you're located, that number means different things to you. That seems quite expensive to me as a resident of Boone County for what rent might cost. So we ask everyone on Instagram to tell us what their experiences are with the housing market and that constant price escalation. The experience of I bought a house for 250,000 and now I'm being told it's worth 500,000 is just prevalent whether you are in Kentucky or California or Oklahoma or Miami, it's just happening everywhere.  

Sarah [00:12:46] So I looked at my county, McCracken County, where only up 5%. The average rate is about $800, which is a little high for Paducah. In Paducah, we always say we don't hit the highs, we don't hit the lows, we sort of float in the middle. This is the most I feel like the talk of the national real estate market has permeated Paducah, where you hear people saying like someone just knocked on my door. It's selling before it even hits the market. Yeah, my house is worth so much more than I paid for it. So it's even permeating areas I think that it's not usually -- I mean, I don't live in Orlando, right? I don't live in California. But it's even hitting places like Paducah.  

Beth [00:13:30] So if you think about why that is, one piece is that the inventory out there, the number of houses on the market is just extremely low. I listen to a podcast that was very real estate inside baseball. I honestly had a hard time hanging with it because it was so insider for that industry and there was a lot I didn't understand. But I caught them talking about how the number of houses that are listed right now, and that doesn't encompass all the sales because a lot of sales are happening without ever listing at home. But the number of houses listed right now is about a third of what was on the market this time last year. It is very, very low. And there are so many reasons for that. One of the most interesting that they talked about was that baby boomers own the housing inventory at a time when many, many, millennials are trying to buy homes. Now that we've had more people turning 32 over the last couple of years than we have since the baby boomers. So you've got a lot of people out there looking for houses. And the baby boomers, unlike previous generations, are not flocking to Florida and Arizona. They're staying in their communities with their families. There's something lovely about that, but we aren't seeing the housing turnover that we have in previous generations.  

Sarah [00:14:49] Yeah. We keep talking about there will just be months and months where there's not a single house for sale in our neighborhood, which is very rare. There's almost always a house for sale in our neighborhood, but the inventory has just stayed low. We also are like that classic turn over neighborhood. We have about half of our neighborhood that is retirees living in big houses and their kids are out of the house and maybe they're looking to downsize or maybe they're not. And then we have about half people with kids my age, like really little four year olds, ten year olds coming into the neighborhood with little kids looking to invest. I also read a really interesting article that baby boomers are looking to pass off some of their wealth. And so a lot of those 32 year olds are getting help for a down payment from baby boomer parents who are looking to pass on some of that wealth and are ready to help them buy a house, but there's nowhere to buy. Like, there's still that low inventory. And they're so much more. It's like generational.  

[00:15:50] It's that we had these historically low mortgage rates for years and years and years. It's that we have a lot of NIMBYism. We don't want to build small houses. That's the other thing. It's like it's worth it to build a 4000 square foot house if you're a contract or a building company. But it's not really worth it to build like a 1500 square foot house, right? And that's really like you see in Paducah, there will be times where you can find something under 1000 square feet or you can find something over like 10,000 square feet, but you can't find anything from like 2 to 4000 square feet. And not to mention that we're just talking about buying a house. We're not talking about building a house and the cost of lumber and the labor shortages and the impact of the scale back of immigration. It just feels like it is just an avalanche of factors all falling down at once.  

Beth [00:16:44] Katie Stigers is one of our executive producers, and she works in housing and she left us almost a mini podcast on Boxer about housing issues, which were so helpful. And I really tuned in for what she had to say about why new construction is so challenging right now. Because it isn't just labor shortage and immigration pulling back, it's also just that a lot of people were so scarred by the 2007/2008 economic recession and believed that housing was never coming back, that they left the profession. And so you lost almost like a generation of people who knew how to build homes. And getting new people in is difficult. It is backbreaking work at very low pay. She said we always talk about the skilled trades as being these high paying jobs. Some of them are, but you have to work a really long time and have a lot of business savvy to get there.  

[00:17:40] Being a carpenters assistant is maybe $14, $15 an hour in a good case. You don't get benefits. You don't work if it rains. And when you are working, it's really hard work that is hard on your body and it's hard to see where your career is going in those positions. And if you want to move up and you have that business savvy, the bonding and insurance is overwhelming, very, very expensive. So there are just a lot of disincentives to new construction. And that real estate podcast that I listen to that we'll link in the notes for those of you who can hang with an insider's discussion. They were talking about how they do not see a scenario where new construction gets us out of the phase that we're in right now.  

Sarah [00:18:26] The avalanche of all these factors,  some of them I understand and you can start to see the trends and you can kind of see how they sneak up on us and they're hard to fix. The part that just makes me angry that I feel like would be easy to fix, is not like some cultural trend that snuck up on us, but is just greed is the outside investment in rental properties and the outside investment in places like trailer parks. That part makes me want to scream. Like I had a friend who sold her family home in Florida and she said they got it was like 30 offers in the first 24 hours in this like little town outside Tampa. And they ended up selling it to an investment firm. And she was kind of sad. This woman wrote this letter about like, "I want to raise my family. This looks like a family home." But the investment company offered $45,000 more. And just buying it up to then jack the rent up on people, it's just so gross. And there has to be a better and quicker way to at least get to that part of the problem.  

Beth [00:19:34] Yeah. And I think that it's easy to get into typical defensive posture for any kind of political discussion around talking about houses as investment because you can kind of go to your corner of like, "Well, we're a landlord for one house. Is that the same as an investment firm buying 60 houses in 100 mile radius?" And I think it's not. I think it's decidedly not. And I think there's a real discussion to have about occupancy and where investment is being done from. And I hate to say that. I've thought a hundred ways like how could we write legislation that prevents investors in foreign countries from buying up lots of American homes? And then I feel really prevential and not the kind of person I want to be when I say something like that. But I also think we have such a serious problem right now, and I don't know how to fix the problem. And immigration is one of those things where it would be a partial solution because you would have more home builders if we had more immigration. And at the same time, we don't have enough housing. Like if we have an influx of immigration, our housing supply is going to be squeezed even more. So it's a really hard problem.  

Sarah [00:20:51] Well, and I think one of the best pieces I've read on this was in Vox, I think it was just a couple of years ago. We'll put it in the show notes. And the writer just talked about, look, you can get mad at NIMBYism and sort of people taking investment property bids and all this stuff. But we don't have a really great social safety net in America. And a lot of ways people protect against income inequality is the home. Are these rising real estate prices? And so they have to protect that. That's their retirement. And so scratching below the surface to realize this is an exploitable situation for a reason. And that we have to start thinking about like what makes it better for everybody instead of just either getting mad at people or trying to shame them into different behavior is really, really, important.  I mean, we all got to have a place to live or we don't. We see American cities where people don't have a place to live and that causes a whole other level of instability.  

[00:21:51] And it feels like we're all just putting it together with duct tape and prayers, hoping something gives. And I think that to a certain extent, the interest rate will be that thing with rising interest rates. Inevitably, there will be a slowdown and some changes coming. But that's not going to solve the affordability crisis. I mean, there's a part of me as I was thinking about this and listening to Katie's Voxer and thought, is remote work going to be the thing that gives to a certain extent? Is there going to be this sense of, well, we're just moved to different places that are more affordable, places like Paducah, that there's only a 5% growth and not a 20% growth.  But then I read these heartbreaking messages so many of our listeners wrote in the Instagram thing, like, "My entire family lives in California. Am I supposed to, in the hunt of affordable housing and a place to live, leave my entire community?" Man, and my heart broke.  

[00:22:49] Like, just by the luck of birth, I was born in a place that's affordable. Like, my tribe, my village, my people live in a place that's incredibly affordable, free, good public schools, affordable housing. Not the sexiest job market on planet Earth, but it's just I can't imagine how hard that must be. And then just the animosity in particular towards Californians as they do seek out more affordable housing to me is so gross. And even like people moving to Florida. And the way we talk about those trends and people who are just trying to find a more affordable place to live with a job market they can participate in, it shows you that it's just like the ugliest of ugly scarcity mindset coming to play.  

Beth [00:23:41] Because there is a reality to the scarcity. Like, we do not have enough houses right now. If lots of people flocked to my area because it's more affordable -- I mean, welcome --  

Sarah [00:23:50] Wouldn't be affordable for long. 

Beth [00:23:51] I want to be their neighbors, but it's not going to be affordable for much longer and it is going to create problems.  It just is. Even as you think about things like NIMBYism and regulations that would help, so a big issue is that we don't often allow multifamily housing. So I'm going to just be extremely vulnerable for a second and tell you that I live near a single family home under the same homeowner's association that I live under, where a lot of people live there. I don't know exactly who lives there, but I know it's a lot of people and they all drive cars. And so those cars are everywhere and they have a business that involves cars and there are just cars and cars and cars for days. And it makes entering my neighborhood rather unpleasant. And I don't mean eyesore. I mean a safety issue. There are too many cars on the street at a place where you need to be able to see. And so I check myself about this all the time because I get mad about it. I really do. And then I think, Beth, you support people being able to live in affordable places. I want everybody to have a nice home and if that means living in large groups, I am for that. I don't want to restrict these things. And I also recognize that the problems are real. So I don't want to be super mad at people who are expressing the problems side because the problems are real. It's just there isn't a bit of this discussion that is theoretical, and I think that's what makes it especially difficult.  

Sarah [00:25:20] Yeah. You see that when you go to places like California. You'll see a house and there will be -- and not a big house. Not a big house. An expensive house. Very expensive, but not a big house. And it will have 7 to 8 cars in the driveway. I always noticed that when I go back to California.  Paducah has a really interesting mix of not just single family homes. I think it's one of the things I am proudest of and I like most about my community. I live in a nice neighborhood. I have houses in my neighborhood that are 10,000 plus square feet and worth over $1,000,000. And I also have duplexes in my neighborhood. They're nice duplexes. They're really nice duplexes, but they're duplexes. Because Paducah is old, it's really interesting you can kind of watch the flow, where you can like walk through the history of real estate in Paducah, and in the country in a certain way. Now I live in a pretty densely populated suburb, but some of these houses were people's country homes back in the early 1900s when people lived in downtown Paducah, which is several miles away.  

[00:26:29] But we have a mix. We have a real, real, mix. Big houses next to the elementary school. There's a couple of places surrounding the neighborhood. There's affordable housing apartments. That's not to say there isn't segregation, there absolutely is economic and otherwise in Paducah. But it is more mixed than other places you will find. And I don't really know if that is just the historical component of that, if it was built up over time. And that in some of it was built before there was a lot of zoning protection and NIMBYism and it was just a sort of different way people approached it. But I always drive through and think about like, yeah, look at that. That is a very expensive house and that is it affordable or like rent-protected apartment unit. and they are less than a mile away, and sometimes right next door. And I think if you grow up around that, there is less of a sort of -- it's like you just have to see it. You kind of have to see it.  

[00:27:28] And because if it's something in the horizon and you've never experienced, you can feel that sort of clenching and defendable, sort of, I got to protect my investment because it's my retirement. But when you grow up around it and you realize like, oh, no, it can just can be like this. It is a very different orientation to it happening. Although, look, the truth is, it doesn't happen as much. Although, I guess I guess the duplexes in my neighborhood, they're very new. And I don't remember even a mumble of discontent about them, but it's like it's one of those things. It's like, as long as it's theoretical, I think people are going to be so protective against it; whereas, if they can see it happen and feel the impact of it, like you said, even some of the impact where you have to kind of coach yourself a little bit about it. But you have to give people the opportunity to do that. If they never get the opportunity to even, then this is where we get stuck in a cycle.  

Beth [00:28:22] It seems more possible to me in a place like Paducah because it's small. I just think we're there because you can't dismiss people quite as easily in a small place. And the bureaucracy is a little bit more in your face and kind of shared than in larger spaces. We've been using the term NIMBYism. If you're not familiar with that term, it's Not In My Backyard. So it's a shorthand for referring to zoning regulations and HOA restrictions and just all the ways in which we prevent more affordable housing from being constructed. That said, again, Katie points out, and I think wisely, that the market around housing doesn't really work because there are not incentives to build affordable homes.  

Sarah [00:29:01] Economic incentives.  

Beth [00:29:02] Right. Even if we were past the protectionism that prevents affordable housing from being constructed, there are still a lot of reasons why getting those homes constructed is a big lift. So we talked about investment for a second. I want to ask Sarah how you feel about Airbnb in light of this conversation?  

Sarah [00:29:21] Yeah, that's really hard. My husband said that when we got back from Utah, where about half the places we stayed were Airbnbs. He was like, "Man, when are we going to start thinking about the ethics of using Airbnbs when we travel?" I think it's really hard. I think it's really hard if you travel and you use Airbnb a lot, you start to get a sense for the difference. Like Nashville is a place that I really close to not using Airbnb anymore. I noticed we booked a place like a year ago in one part of town, and then we booked a place for our audio book in another part of town. And when I messaged to ask a question, it picked up the chat from the other place because the person owns both places. And they're very stripped bare and they just feel like hotels. Whereas,  in other places, in Utah to a certain extent, it felt like these were people's homes or they lived there at least part of the time and they were moving in and out, which is what Airbnb was supposed to be when it started. And I feel much less bad about that.  

[00:30:20] And I think what's really hard about Airbnb is like they are usually like small business owners. Now I'm starting to feel less and less like that about Nashville, but they are small business owners. And it's like what you said, like, well, these are not like private equity funds. You can tell that these are small business owners trying to make a go at running Airbnbs. And also if they're Airbnbs, people can't live in them and that reduces the inventory even further. So I think it's really hard. And it's hard, especially if you're a family because it is such a affordable, convenient way to travel. When you have small kids and you have a washer and dryer and people have their own bedrooms and places to decompress than a hotel room. But it's not doable. New York City has like sort of shut down Airbnbs. I don't ever use the Airbnb days when I go to New York City. And there are still options, but they're harder to find for a family our size. And so Airbnb is always such a tempting, if ethically complicated option.  

Beth [00:31:18] Yeah. And I don't even feel angry at small business owners trying to make this work. It was a new idea. It served a lot of people. It has served me.  

Sarah [00:31:26] They're trying to afford their own house.  

Beth [00:31:28] That's right. I mean, it's it's not something I'm mad at anybody about. It's just a question that I find myself returning to often. And I wonder about the effect. We heard from quite a few military families about this, that the military is not keeping up with this problem. And they're they're sending people to places where base housing is on a long wait list, and rental prices are not affordable on a military salary, and homes are not available. And so you've been stationed in this place with nowhere to live. Like what? That's a lot to think about. And if I were running an Airbnb empire in a place like that, I think I would just have to consider, like, what are my responsibilities here? What what do we do about this?  

Sarah [00:32:14] Well, they are clearly shifting because it's like a huge percentage of Airbnb's business are now long term rentals. It is people saying, "I can't find a rental, so I guess I'll just Airbnb month to month until I can find something." It was like the majority of them were not. I mean, I'm talking about Airbnb like it's just vacation rentals, but it's not. People are using it for long term. Especially remote workers will go live here for a while. Not to mention the people in our comments that are like, well, we sold it all and now we're doing the vanlife and that's where we're living, because that was the only option for our family and still live a somewhat like recreational lifestyle where we weren't killing it just to stay in the house. And it's like that trend is obviously related to this inventory and affordability trend. Did you ever see Nomadland?  

Beth [00:33:02] No.  

Sarah [00:33:03] It's based on a nonfiction book about basically retirees who live on the road and work in these transient jobs because of a lot of the affordability issues surrounding housing and just general American life. And it was so beautifully done and so interesting and such a reflection on like what are we doing to people? What does this mean when you can't find a place to live?  

Beth [00:33:31] Now, we are just scratching the surface of this topic. We haven't even talked about interest rates and how interest rates are climbing and how part of the housing inventory problem is that people got in their homes on fixed rates when the rates were rock bottom low. And now that things are normalizing a little bit, like we aren't even close to interest rates the way interest rates used to be that were just normal. There is no incentive to move if you've got a good fixed rate mortgage. There are just so many issues it's hard to talk about all of them. Before we leave it, I just want to recognize the range of outcomes that this creates. So at my church on Sunday, my pastor was talking about our shower ministry. We have several showers. We just expanded so that we had more for people to come in and just refresh, get a clean pair of socks, get a good shower, get a cup of coffee. And our shower ministry is working with a local hospital to have nurses come out because so many people are working and living in their cars because they cannot afford rent even with their jobs.  

[00:34:38] And when you live in your car and you sleep in a car, you get a lot of edema. Like not elevating your feet is a real problem. And so nurses are coming in to treat people for edema. These are people who are going to work at a job every single day and cannot afford a small apartment and are sleeping in their cars. And I don't mention that to do some kind of like forced gratitude or high class gratitude at the suffering of others. I don't want to do that. And I don't want to make anybody feel like, well, it could be worse than the disappointment I'm experiencing and not being able to buy my first home or anything like that. But there is just a huge range of what's going on here and what kinds of decisions people are having to make because we don't have enough homes. And so it's something that I think we'll continue to think and talk about here and and try to unpack in more detail around separate topics. But we wanted to kick the discussion off today by just acknowledging what a problem this is.  

Sarah [00:35:40] Yeah. And I just want to say, the hundreds and hundreds of comments on our Instagram posts, it is a particular stress. It is a particular frustration. It is a particular heartbreak to feel trapped in your living situation or trapped in your home. There was a time in my life where I spent every evening in the real estate system going lot by lot to thinking, was this put on the market? Was this pulled off the market? Would they be willing to sell again? A lot. But it's actually how I found the house I'm in. I found it. It wasn't listed. It had been listed, had been pulled off. And by a combination of very of luck and and work and more luck, the people were willing to sell it. But I remember that time so vividly how miserable I was and how I felt like I couldn't do what I wanted to do in my job because I felt like I didn't have enough space. I felt like my kids were running all over me all the time because we didn't have enough space and I wanted to be somewhere else. And so if you are in that space, you are not alone. If we learned anything from those comments and we all knew it, we didn't need hundreds of comments on Instagram, we know that you're not the only one out there struggling with that. And it is a real struggle. And we hear you and we see you and we hope that you've found some support wherever you can. And we desperately hope that the situation shifts to the benefit of all of you out there just looking to find a home.  

Beth [00:37:28] Well, two very heavy topics. And we always try to end on a lighter note. So next up, we're going to talk about what's on our minds outside of politics, which is right now frantically preparing for the summer. It's hard, Sarah, because I really enjoy the summer and I also dread the summer. The summer contains multitudes for me. That's what it is.  

Sarah [00:37:55] Well, I do not like this summer. I am vocal about the fact that winter is my favorite season. I just like the vibe. You know what I'm saying?  I just like winter's vibe. Summer's vibe is so like an 11 and I just need it to take it down a notch. Maybe I will feel differently when I do not have children out of school in the summer. But I also don't like the hot and I'm always at risk for a sunburn. So it's not my favorite season, but it's also the season that feels like it just takes so much intense preparation, which is also probably a source of some of my resentment.  

Beth [00:38:27] I think the summer is wonderful in the moments that feel like summer.  A long day at the pool where everyone's hanging out and orders a pizza and just decides to just be together for the day. And there's music playing. The trouble is to get to those moments that feel like summer, the concert, the outdoor movie, whatever. It just takes so much work and trying to figure out how are we going to work? What are we going to do for childcare? And we are in a wonderful situation here. I have as good a situation as I can have in terms of the neighborhood that we live in and the support that we have and the flexibility that Chad and I have. And it is still so hard, especially because we don't have any family in the area. It just makes everything like a puzzle of who's going to take whom to what, when and how can everybody be quiet while I'm recording this or Chad's on that call. I also feel like I missed Chad a lot in the summer because all of the outdoor work of summer he really takes on and he would say he has to take on because I won't do it. And there is some truth in that. There is some truth in that I will own that, but it makes me miss him. And sometimes I think like, gosh, we have all this space to enjoy for the summer, but are we really getting to enjoy it because it takes so much work to keep it up? So there's just like a lot of of pieces to it.  

Sarah [00:39:50] This summer I was feeling the most prepared and excited. We are sending our children to sleepaway camp together. The plan was to send all five. Several other camps lined up. I was feeling like this is going to be awesome. We had June covered. Now we take July off. So that's a totally different thing. But with June covered, of course, then type one diabetes, there are real loop in my plans. And now I had to think about, well, I've got Felix at camp, but how is he going to get his insulin shot? Because most of these camps don't have nurses on staff. So that's been a real situation in my planning. We did do a brain dump last night where we like walk through day by day and then of course, a big huge of our piece of our plan is we take a big trip in July. So my family and I are going to Europe this summer.  

[00:40:34] We're going to go to Italy and Switzerland and France, which is also was very exciting and now has a whole other level of planning layered on top of it. But I'm really excited. I'm feeling much better after our brain dump last night and we got a lot of the camp situation sorted. Felix is now not going to camp with all the rest of kids. He's going to Camp Ho Mita Koda, which is a diabetes camp, the longest running diabetes camp in the country. So I'm very, very, excited for him for that. We got all that situation, but it took like a plane ticket to like figure out how to do that. So there's just like so many moving parts where I thought like I had them all sorted and then maybe like I was just going to press the first domino and it was going to be this great summer. Which is not how it was going to go anyway, I know that, but I was telling myself that and now I feel like I have to set up a whole new run of dominoes.  

Beth [00:41:24] Yeah. And you and I approach summer kind of differently, too, because you love to take the big trip. That feels very stressful to me. My stress level is just high right now. I can't even name why my life is very good. But it's high. I'm having some fibromyalgia symptoms that have been dormant for a couple of years. And I feel stressed about that and that's kind of a cycle. So I am right now just trying to see my way to July because we are going to take the podcast off for July. Just give everybody a break as we have in years past. And I'm going to take the first two weeks off completely and then I'm going to work the second two weeks kind of getting ready to come back because taking the full month of July off, I found extremely stressful last year. That doesn't work for me. And so I'm looking forward to having a real break this first few weeks and then coming back with some planning and organization time so that when fall hits, I will have a little bit of a running start.  

[00:42:16] I am excited about the camps that our kids are going to do. So my kids are going to go to a camp in Paducah with Sarah's kids the maybe second week of June. And then two weeks later, they're all going to come to my area for a sleepaway camp. Ellen has a million camps. Ellen wanted to do everything this summer. She's doing drama camp and choir camp and zoo camp and just all kinds of things. I twisted Jane's arm. I have her going to three camps, which I feel very proud of because last year it was negative camps. Jane just wanted to be in her room all summer long. So hopefully everybody will be out in the world. And I do feel like that will let me get to know my kids in a new way because they're going to have a lot of adventures and independence that they haven't had for a while. And I'm excited about that.  

Sarah [00:42:59] Yes, I love camps. I love kids full of camps. Part of it is I didn't get to do that when I was little. I went to California every summer to see my dad because my parents were divorced, which was awesome and an amazing adventure. And I learned lots of independence and had experiences my peers didn't have. But I really want that traditional sort of fun camp experience for my kids that I feel like I missed out on. Even when they're not excited to do it. I don't really care, I'll make them do it anyway. And last year there were several camps that Griffin in particular was like, "I don't want to do it." And then he was like, "That was really fun." I was like, "I know, right? I actually know what I'm talking about." So I hope you get that same confirmation from Jane where she is like you were the rightest mom.  

Beth [00:43:37] Yeah, I hope so too. I like hearing you're the rightest mom. Yesterday Jane told me I was the greatest mom in history. And I said you should feel free to say that again sometime. I really liked hearing it.  

Sarah [00:43:44] Or just record it maybe.  

Beth [00:43:46] Before we go today, I would just like to say happy anniversary to my husband, Chad. This episode is releasing on our 15th Wedding Anniversary. It's been a very good 15 years. I think it will be a good next 15 years. I'm looking forward to it. And so, Chad, I am so happy that you're going to be home and I love you and thanks for doing life with me. Thank you all so much for joining us for this episode. Thank you again for purchasing and reading our book. Now What? How to Move Forward When We're Divided (About Basically Everything). Just a reminder that your book reviews mean a lot to us. I am told, again, we do what we're told here, that I need to let you know that if you want to review the book on Amazon, you have to have purchased the book on Amazon. They're very particular about that, but you can review on Goodreads or wherever you bought it. And you sharing on social media makes a huge difference, so thank you for doing that. Everybody have the best weekend available to you.  

[00:44:44] Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our managing director.  

Sarah [00:44:49] Maggie Penton is our community engagement manager. Dante Lima is the composer and performer of our theme music.  

Beth [00:44:55] Our show is listener-supported. Special thanks to our executive producers.  

Executive Producers (Read their own names) [00:44:59] Martha Bronitisky. Linda Daniel. Ali Edwards. Janice Elliot. Sara Greenup. Julie Haller. Helen Handley. Tiffany Hasler. Emily Holladay. Katie Johnson, Katina Zugenalis Kasling. Barry Kaufman. Molly Kohrs.   

[00:45:19] The Kriebs. Laurie LaDow. Lilly McClure. Emily Neesley. The Pentons. Tawni Peterson. Tracy Puthoff. Sarah Ralph. Jeremy Sequoia. Katie Stigers. Karin True. Onica Ulveling. Nick and Alysa Vilelli. Katherine Vollmer. Amy Whited.  

Beth [00:45:35] Jeff Davis. Melinda Johnston. Ashley Thompson. Michelle Wood. Joshua Allen. Morgan McHugh. Nicole Berklas. Paula Bremer, and Tim Miller. 

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