Nicole Nosek joins Judge Glock to discuss housing reform legislation spearheaded by Texans for Reasonable Solutions.
Audio Transcript
Judge Glock: Hi, this is Judge Glock at the Manhattan Institute. Welcome to 10 Blocks. I’m here today with Nicole Nosek, the founder and head of Texans for Reasonable Solutions. Nicole has been one of the most powerful forces for housing reform in Texas over the last three or so years. And Texas, over that period has presented a model that I think, and I think many others think is a very interesting model that the rest of the nation should pay attention to in terms of loosening up regulations and restrictions on housing. Nicole, thanks for coming on the show.
Nicole Nosek: Thank you. It’s a real honor to be here.
Judge Glock: So Nicole, how did you get into housing reform originally, or why did you get into housing reform?
Nicole Nosek: It’s funny, having at one point in my life lived in the Bay Area, you really learn what not to do on housing by looking at San Francisco. So in understanding what good housing policy looks like, it’s almost important to understand what bad housing policy looks like. And somehow, me living in San Francisco, working as a paralegal, studying to go to law school, I was working about 40, 50 hours a week. And despite that, after paying rent, living in a situation where there was a three bedroom apartment. In one room, there was the landlord and his wife and his child. The other room was a young professional. I was in the third room, shared a bathroom. It was very squished. Despite that, after paying rent, groceries, I ended up having about a thousand dollars in my bank account if I was lucky every month. And it caused me to take a step back and think something is wrong with this picture.
And as I started sort of going down the rabbit hole and getting involved with a group of similar individuals who also were looking down the rabbit hole of, something is wrong here. You heard about these insane policies. There’s a policy in San Francisco for discretionary review where anybody across the entire city can decide that they don’t want you to renovate your window in a certain way or put a certain color palette on your town home or on your home. And because of that, it will add four to 18 months of delay. It has to go in front of the planning commission. And in fact, there was a guy, there’s always that guy. There was a guy who had a big map and he would intentionally go and protest and try to stop any renovations or home constructions within San Francisco. This was sort of his life mission. And so back to the question you asked, I think understanding good housing policy necessarily entails understanding really bad housing policy. And so while we moved to Texas in 2019, we really got a crash course of how bad things can go. And it really scared me because Austin, at the time that we moved, felt like it was moving in the direction of San Francisco.
Judge Glock: And you were part of the exodus from the Bay Area to Austin, which I was part of and followed you the next year, although I don’t think we had met at the time. And yeah, so we and others came to Austin. The housing prices were exploding at that time. The rent prices were exploding as well. And like you said, it looked like Austin and some of the other major Texas cities, which had a huge cost of living and housing cost advantage historically might be going down the road of San Francisco, which for those of us who had spent time in the city was somewhat terrifying. So you’ve started Texans for reasonable solutions to look at what the state of Texas could do to alleviate the housing crisis. And you kind of came at the 2023 Texas legislative session, and Texas only has these legislative sessions every two years. You came at that 2023 session trying to make reforms. And so what did you do and what did you accomplish in that first session?
Nicole Nosek: Yeah, and Judge, I think you were a part of a lot of those early meetings. We approached the issue with we don’t know what the solutions are. We need a group of people that are experts in this. Both practitioners, land use researchers, nonprofits like Austin Habitat for Humanity, architects, builders, what is the actual issue here? And so we had a few of those table discussions where initially it was in our backyard and there was probably 12 or 13 people. It was a little awkward because a lot of people were coming into our home, we’d never met them before. And we put together a list of ideas that we had run by certain researchers and had people rattle off, this is a bad idea, this is a good idea, this needs to be tweaked. And we ended up doing, as you may remember, Judge, probably four or five more meetings like that. And those tables and those rooms really grew in number of who was around the table helping us decide the various policies.
Judge Glock: And then so you landed on a handful of policies you mentioned I and others were kind of advising you on and discussing going into that 2023 session such as reducing minimum lot sizes in major urban areas, allowing accessory dwelling units, the ADUs, to be built in those same places, and also allowing independent third party permitting and inspections. So how did that 2023 session end up?
Nicole Nosek: So we hired a lobbyist and we had that group of folks who helped us come up with the policies, probably relied less on those groups of folks. It was a little bit more hands-off in 2023 than say 2025. So third party review, the bill that we passed basically said if within 45 days you don’t get your permits back, you’re allowed to go to a engineer, you’re allowed to go to a qualified architect to basically work with you in order to get your permits back. So we ended up getting that passed, and that was a priority bill. And we got within two votes of getting an accessory dwelling unit bill passed. And when you get within two votes of getting an accessory dwelling unit passed bill passed, you really start to look closely at what you could have done different.
Judge Glock: To clarify too, it was a difference of two votes. So hypothetically, if one person switched, it would’ve tied and then there could have been the tie breaking vote that would’ve turned it over. So there might’ve been one dude or lady in the legislature if they had switched, you would’ve gotten that bill through. Right?
Nicole Nosek: Exactly. True.
Judge Glock: Okay.
Nicole Nosek: And so if we’d just had one more that had switched, we would’ve gotten that. And so you really start looking back. I’d received a text message from somebody in our coalition, “Hey, should I text message so-and-so legislator? I know that they’re probably going to be a no, but I’m good friends with them. I’d prefer not to, but if you need me to, I will.” And I said, no, it looks like we’re going to be okay, but it’s going to be close. And so you really start going through all of those different scenarios. What I did was, after you lose by that amount, I just took that disappointment and poured it into creating what we saw in 2025, which was a really strong grassroots effort. My thoughts were, look, we did moderately well in 2023, but I really wanted to walk away with at least two wins to feel like we really have momentum in the movement and that we were investing our time and resources in something that was really going to move the needle for Texans and their cost of living and quality of life.
So I figured going into the 2025 session, we were going to build a really strong grassroots movement. And if we are going to lose because we were too loud, so be it, we’re going to lose in the grassroots way, but at least we know we tried. And if you take a look at our 2025 results, there were seven major housing bills that were passed, like really move the needle in terms of relating and touching on zoning. Four of those were led by our organization and we were very lucky to have extremely committed legislators who really did a lot of work to get us there. And I credit in huge part, a tremendous coalition that we built literally from shortly after that, the death of that ADU bill. So somehow that second bill dying by one or two votes, depending on how you look at it, ignited a huge fire under my butt and many other people in their coalition and our coalition who saw we were really close to getting a major reform done. Now going… Go ahead.
Judge Glock: That can certainly motivate a lot of people. And I think the success of the third party review bill and the near failure of that A DU bill made people realize that there is a real possibility in Texas to make major reforms at a time when housing is perhaps the number one issue in the state, and arguably even in the entire nation in terms of its driving force on the overall increase in cost of living. So you had a year and a half about after the end of that session, before the start of that 2025 session, little time to stew, a little time to think about what you could change and do differently. And as you said, you started by us realizing you need a much bigger coalition. You need to kind of broaden the base of what was working on this. You kind of try to narrow reform effort in 2023 and you thought, let’s see how many people we can get involved in that. Is that right?
Nicole Nosek: I think that’s partially right. I would say that we actually had put together a pretty strong coalition. So, Judge, a lot of those tables that you and I brainstormed through, a lot of these different policy proposals, a lot of those folks became our coalition. Again, Austin Habitat for Humanity, architects. There were organizations there at the legislature that got involved because they realized how critical it was that if Texas was going to be a real business powerhouse, employees needed homes. So I think we actually had quite a strong coalition. We had folks from the left like Appleseed, we had folks from the right, Texas Public Policy Foundation, Americans for Prosperity in 2023. The thing that I wish that we would’ve done a little better is ask them to be doing those meetings early. And that’s what we ended up doing differently in 2025. Going into 2025, we had done over 300 meetings, our coalition, so to be clear, that’s not me.
I was part of a lot of those meetings. But having a group like Appleseed or Austin Habitat for Humanity, going in and talking to legislators that they have close relationships with talking about how, yes, actually if you allow missing middle housing, if you allow lot sizes to be reduced, if you allow apartments in commercial spaces, you actually will bring down costs through supply and demand. And then on the right, a lot of our strongest allies like Americans for Prosperity, Texas Public Policy Foundation, were also talking to a lot of legislators. We were in meetings together, sometimes they were in meetings alone. But what was really key here is that if somebody loves the Lakers, you don’t send that legislator in to talk to somebody with a Nets basketball shirt on, if that makes sense.
Judge Glock: One of the things I’ve learned talking to legislators is find out what they’re interested in both professionally and personally. What do they care about and how can that relate to the issue you care about? So yeah, you built this coalition and this time in 2025, you made sure there’s a lot more outreach and a lot more meetings happening with the right people. You’re making sure the people being sent into those state legislative meetings are aware of what the legislators care about. What else do you think you did differently this time around?
Nicole Nosek: What I realized from last session, the reason why we are in the situation that we’re in today of a massive undersupply of homes is because NIMBYs have been so effective. They’ve been extraordinarily effective at reaching out and getting activated. And so we needed to do the same thing on our end. So we had a big chat and every time something was having a little trouble in committee or getting out, we would make sure that we activated that chat. What’s also really important, and it’s going to sound small, but it was very significant, is having a “send letters to the legislator” button that people can easily just activate, send it to their friends. We even utilized something that another organization had taught us, which is getting a hundred solid people that you know are going to be reliable. So even if they’re in the middle of their work, they’re going to take a bathroom break to make sure that they hit, send a letter button when needed.
So we had a lot of committed folks, and I think what was really key here, Judge, is there’s some folks who we were making the YIMBY case for. There was a lot of YIMBYs that were sort of out there in Texas from the left to the right to the center, people whose kids can’t even move back home, can’t even move back from New York City, they’re having trouble finding a home in Austin. I think what’s really key about this is it’s not a solo performance. This is really, if you’re wanting to lead this movement, it’s leading an orchestra. So I think that that is probably one of the key things that we leaned into. I think the other really important part here is that we had over 60 organizations who had given their logos. And so this wasn’t just, Hey Nicole, who’s really inspired by this niche topic about YIMBY, this was a situation where when you walk in and you’ve got a logo sheet that is three pages long and you’re having trouble getting all the graphics on the one page, legislators, see, this isn’t just something if they vote no or they ignore it or they don’t let it out of committee, this is a lot of people want this and from different angles. We’re lucky to have folks like the Realtors, Society of Architects groups like as I mentioned earlier, ideological groups, very importantly Texas Association of Business. All of a sudden you found that some of the biggest corporations in America were having trouble with their business models because Austin was becoming too expensive. Even if $35 an hour was a good salary or was a good wage in 2020, it no longer was because housing was so expensive. Really, I think what’s key here is that it can’t be a movement that’s just sort of quietly led by one organization. Power in numbers, especially on this issue because the fact is that the opposition has been winning up until recently because they’ve been so active in power in numbers.
Judge Glock: I very much appreciate what you said there. As I’ve told some people, it’s very important to remember that politics is a team sport. It’s certainly not tennis, it’s not a solo operation. By definition, you need to get people to agree with you to get anything done. And obviously this was one of the great successes you had the last legislative session there getting a lot of groups that maybe were being pinched by housing prices, maybe cared about in the abstract, but didn’t know what to do with that energy. And when I’ve looked at other kind of successful movements for legislative reform before, it looks like a similar model to that. It’s how can we get people who care about this issue but don’t know what to do about it or who are affected by the issue, but don’t know why they should care to organize together to get something done in a state house. And that’s clearly what happened here. So who pushed back then? Well, you had this great group of a lot of people, everything from people on the kind of social justice left to people on the activist property rights, general business community, right. But who was fighting against you?
Nicole Nosek: Yeah, great question. Pew Trust had given a huge gift to the Americans and even to this movement when they published polling showing how Americans across the country believed in how they felt about different policy reforms, everything from minimum lot size to commercial to residential to accessory dwelling units. When I read that list, they’d done a few states individually. Texas was one of them. It helped enormously to see, okay, you could notice the trend. Okay, well, it appears that when you’re directly in people’s neighborhoods, the polling goes about 50 percent lower than the polling for things like opening up all commercial to residential. Well then, I’m thinking, because my two criteria is one impacts and two winning. So I want to make sure that we’re having an impact on affordability for a good amount of Texans. And I also want to make sure that we can also pass it.
Sometimes where I think YIMBY leaders get caught up is that they become puritanical and because they believe, okay, well it’s not someone’s property, all of a sudden they have a beautiful bill that’s just not possible because legislators are too scared to get behind it. So when we were equipped with this polling, it was extraordinarily helpful to see, okay, well, I think we’ll get far less pushback if we go into areas like commercial, which by the way, you look at any given city in Texas, it’s anywhere from about 17 to 21 percent of land is commercial. So here you are, and we have the opportunity to open up 17 to 21 percent of commercial land for apartments and homes. That’s a game changer, as we all know. I imagine a lot of the folks who are listening supply is one of the biggest indicators of affordability and then also missing middle.
So are we allowing apartments? Are we allowing town homes? Are we allowing the types of homes that teachers and nurses and young families can afford? We ended up pivoting so that we went to areas that were outside of people’s neighborhoods, more so than we did in 2023. And look, ideologically, I get it, and I do believe that if you have land and you want to build a town home, you should be able to build a town home. But at the end of the day, I am not the person in the legislature voting on these issues. We have to have enough votes to be able to actually help Texans’ families and Texan young people and nurses and a lot of our young workers across the state. Does that make sense?
Judge Glock: No, absolutely. And in this session, you were focusing a little more on what could be accomplished in specifically where there was strong polling, where you knew the public could back you on these reforms, even if it was maybe not in the kind of core traditional YIMBY areas such as neighborhood up zoning and so forth. Because like, hey, commercial is a great spot. You can get a lot of upzoning and new housing accomplished without telling somebody there’s going to be a big apartment down the street from them in their suburban subdivision. Is that kind of the idea?
Nicole Nosek: That’s exactly what I’m saying. And so we made huge pivots. I love minimum lot size reform. That’s probably my favorite
Judge Glock: Mine too.
Nicole Nosek: What was something that we haven’t talked about yet is one of the surprising things that had happened after 2023 was City of Austin had seen how close we got to minimum lot size reform at the state. They ended up enacting minimum lot size reform in the city of Austin. Huge kudos to Mayor Watson for doing that was not easy at all. It took, again, a strong coalition. What we decided to do, coming back into the 2025 session, we had spoken, again, 300 legislative meetings, some of which were legislators themselves, some of which were chief of staffs and legislative directors. And we were able to basically poll a lot of these policies a year before even going into the legislative session. Again, if the policy sounds beautiful, and there’s researchers that are saying it’s great, but legislators don’t like it, you’re going to lose. And so having those early meetings a year before when legislative offices and legislators are relaxed and they can take the time to actually listen to these ideas really helped us pivot. And so for things like that minimum lot size policy, which initially was minimum lot size everywhere with the exception of HOAs, historic preservation and deed restrictions. As we had those meetings, we decided to pivot. So now it was minimum lot size in new neighborhoods of five acres and more. What we saw was unlike California, unlike New York, there’s actually a lot of undeveloped land in our major Texas cities. In Dallas, there’s almost 38 percent of land there is undeveloped. That’s ripe for building minimum lot size reform.
Judge Glock: Yeah, I think a lot of people don’t appreciate that, how large Texas cities are, large as a part of their whole metro area and how much can still be done even fairly close in to the center of the cities in some of these places. So…
Nicole Nosek: Wait, can I mention something really quick on that? I would like to mention it’s important before pivoting out of neighborhoods, you have to reach out to researchers, whether it’s drop Judge, or whether American Enterprise Institute was really helpful. Pew Trust was beyond helpful. Make sure that the land that you’re opening up is actually enough to be impactful. So before we went deep on that commercial to residential bill, we saw that, okay, give or take, 20 percent of land will be opened up in a city. That’s huge. We had researchers do the analysis on whether minimum lot size in Greenfield would actually be impactful. And American Enterprise Institute showed, yeah, it would actually be hugely impactful and triple the amount of homes in the next decade where this is implemented. So I think that’s really key. You don’t just default pivot out of a neighborhood. You make sure that there actually is enough land outside of the neighborhood to make a difference on supply. Because I don’t know if that would be the case in somewhere like San Francisco.
Judge Glock: Exactly. And these are the sort of difficult questions that anyone working the legislative chain has to ask because a lot of bills sound great, either politically without actually polling it or they sound great in terms of their impact, but they might not have a substantial impact depending on very nitty gritty things such as the nature of local neighborhoods, local urban development, et cetera, et cetera. And so you paid a lot of attention to that clearly. So we can get maybe a little bit more to the specific bills in a second. First, I’d like to actually just talk a little bit about messaging and outreach. How did you think about that? You mentioned a little bit about how to meet legislators where they were. How else did you structure your media presence and outreach in this case?
Nicole Nosek: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think it’s really key that, again, you’re finding all of the people, whether it’s on social media, whether it’s in your communities that are behind the cause. And so we had done a few grassroots events in Dallas, in San Antonio, in Austin, and in Houston. And so automatically just one event, one event would yield 50 folks. Now as soon as a Houston member is resisting some of these, for example, you’ve got 50 people who showed up to their event who feel like they’re part of something that you can activate when needed. So that was really helpful. There’s also so many great influencers that folks can reach out to. YIMBYland being one of the foremost, every time we emailed YIMBYland, “Hey, we’re having some trouble in committee. Can you throw this letter to the legislator up?” It’s a great congregating space for people across Texas would follow YIMBYland who has just really funny, compelling content.
You have to go to where people are at, if that makes sense. We had done a concerted effort to make sure that we’re finding the Dallas Habitat for Humanities. We were finding the Dallas housing coalitions both on the left and the right, the Urban Land Reform with Charles Blain in Houston. So we are finding all of those different folks and making sure we are keeping them in the loop so that when both they would actually come during legislative session and walk the halls with some of the folks on our team, and then some of them were actually doing zooms with legislators without our guidance, depending on what they were comfortable with. So again, it was getting those people who are already excited about this and just making it easy for them to do what they were wanting to do.
On messaging, you can’t be everything for everyone. I’m a big data nerd. And so a lot of the stuff that we’re posting revolved around data because it’s hard to argue with data. And we had folks TPPF at Americans for Prosperity who were talking a lot about solving the affordability issue through the free market and talking a lot about solving affordability through property rights. On the left, it was gentrification. We had folks from Appleseed that were posting on social media about gentrification, and they were also doing those meetings. I can’t emphasize enough, if you are the only person doing meetings, involved in pushing this, you’re probably not going to have a lot of success. It needs to be, again, a choir or an orchestra of people from different backgrounds, not just yourself.
Judge Glock: So I think you also, you got, I guess students and maybe I think I heard a pastor was involved at some point.
Nicole Nosek: Oh yeah, yeah, good point. We had during the testimonies, the typical testimony that we had, I really appreciate our team for building this out. We had a pastor from Houston who talked about the middle class poor. Once again, the theme here is somebody connected me to him because he had delivered a sermon about how housing was creating not only poor folks who are struggling with housing, but now you had a middle class poor. And by the way, this was in Houston. So if Houston is struggling with a middle class poor, think about the state of the rest of Texas. There is also, we typically tried to make sure that there was at least one UT Austin student or one A&M student. I know one of the A&M students, he’s now working at Texas Public Policy Foundation. I think he had such a compelling impact.
One of the legislators took a picture, was really proud of this guy. When you take a look at a student, whether you are Libertarian, whether you are Republican, Democrat, and they’re saying the prospect of home ownership is very bleak for me. And by the way, the policies that y’all have created are making it so that in seven decades, young people have never been in this position on home ownership. That’s a different kind of appeal to somebody like me or our organization who goes really deep on data that appeals to across the spectrum, some of the other sort of unlikely allies, but that I’m extremely grateful for. The Farm Bureau, the Farm Bureau testified at almost all of our bill hearings because the fact is when you’re not allowing people to build up and build in, you are ruining their farmland. And there’s a lot of great data on that.
I recommend people look at American Farmland Trust, and they even have it broken down by state to state. I know billions of dollars of agriculture is ruined every year in Texas because of minimum lot size reform. And they specifically talk about how huge lot sizes hurt farms and agricultural areas. So that was really incredible because you had an Austin Democrat who keeps hearing from their district that the top thing that they’re struggling with is affordability. And then we had folks from the Freedom Caucus, or we had folks from the caucus that has a lot of the farmland areas that were really pushing hard as a way to preserve their farmland. So it was really, again, back to the choir and different reasons that different people were getting involved.
Judge Glock: Maybe we can just briefly go over the four main bills you passed. So you mentioned the minimum lot size on new developments. What were the other three?
Nicole Nosek: We had minimum lot size in new neighborhoods, five acres and more. We ended up doing polling on that. Texas Association of Business Foundation polled and saw that almost eight out of 10 folks in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Collin County, a lot of those suburbs right around Dallas were in support of the idea that five acres or more of land people can build to different levels of affordability. That was really helpful because we did experience a little bit more resistance around Dallas County. And so being able to poll and see, well, what are the policies that folks from that area are okay with we’re extremely helpful. So I’m very grateful for a Texas Association of Business Foundation for that. And what was really great was if a legislator was a little bit hesitant, showing them that polling helps them know what their district actually thought of these policies.
So that was one. The second one was commercial to residential. And if you looked at Pew Trust polling, which I recommend people Google this because it could help advise their own policies within their respective states, it was about 76 percent in support of allowing apartments around shopping centers and restaurants and then office conversions, allowing underutilized commercial buildings to be converted to apartments. That was in the high seventies. So that was probably the most NIMBY-friendly bill of them all. And I’m very grateful for Representative Patterson for passing that. I think at the end of the day, we have a situation in Texas where 25 percent of the office space is literally just sitting empty. And so there’s some issues with the floor plates, but at the end of the day, if you can skip that rezoning process and know that you have the permits and you can by right convert that into senior living or student housing, or oftentimes even your most ardent opponents become somewhat okay with that. So we probably saw the least resistance to that, especially during a time where very few people are required, less people are required to go back into work than what they were pre COVID. The fourth one was the Tyrant’s veto. It’s traditionally called the Petition Rights back to one of these messaging, the Petition Rights bill is confusing as all hell. You know this, Judge. Judge, why don’t you give this synopsis of it and I’ll explain what we did on messaging.
Judge Glock: Oh, you’re putting me on the spot. But yes. So it allowed certain number of neighbors, I believe about 20 percent within a certain radius from a rezoning to petition against that rezoning. And if that 20 or so percent of neighbors petitioned against it, it required a supermajority vote on the city council to go ahead with that rezoning. So it allowed a lot of people in a very close proximity to upzoning or petitions for increased housing to block that pretty effectively. And did that throughout the state of Texas up until recently.
Nicole Nosek: I think one of the biggest problems with that policy in reforming it is petition rights sounds so good, right? Would you like your petition rights? Hell yeah. I’d like my petition rights. But really it’s one of the biggest obstacles to missing middle housing in central Texas, or it was until we passed this law. And so I think being able to reframe really complex issues in a way that’s simple and compelling. And so I thought of this idea, Tyrants’ Veto against some people’s better judgment. But what was really neat was, once again, back to some of those early meetings that we had with legislators when I would talk about, okay, well our fourth idea here is Tyrants Veto, legislators, ears really perked up. Who wants a tyrant to have a veto over democratic rule? Which is exactly what that process was. Back to what we talked about at the beginning of the podcast, discretionary review. Why should one guy in San Francisco six miles away be able to tell you what color window shape, what color external palette on your window should be?
So being able to reframe very complex issues in a way that helps you, I think is really important. And of course, you need to make sure that it’s true and accurate, right? Before we increase the threshold, so instead of 20 percent of property owners being able to kill it, we now have 60 percent of property owners that are required to be able to create a protest. And then it would have to go to city council where 51 percent of the city council would have to override that, if that makes sense.
Judge Glock: Exactly. So just about out of time here, but if you could pass one more YIMBY bill or one more bill that could change housing in Texas, what would that be? And are you thinking about then that for the 2027 session?
Nicole Nosek: Yeah, and I think that one of the pieces of advice I was given that I ignored in 2023 that I wish I would’ve done was having a tracker. Before you go into that vote, you should know where your votes, where your winning votes are going to come from, and if you have even a little bit more time and a little bit more volunteers or more hands on deck, if you’re able to build a tracker that goes up to 30 percent above what you need to win. So we probably needed only 76, 77 votes. I really respect the folks on our team. We always made sure that we were as close to a hundred votes as possible. Did that always pan out? No, but the fact is it was well above that initial vote where that vote was lost by two votes. The other thing I want to point out is we didn’t prioritize that ADU legislation the next session because we’d met and talked with our opponents, which I think was actually really helpful.
When you have opponents versus enemies, I think that they’re much different when you can sit across the table. We even got the Municipal League to endorse two of our pieces of legislation. Having amicable conversations, even though you might be opposed on a lot, really helped. We even spoke with one of the lead housing opposition groups, and they were the ones who actually said exactly what the Pew Trust data said, look, do something with strip malls, do something. They didn’t say they were going to endorse us, but they did give us a tip as to what wouldn’t be life or death for them. So that was extremely helpful. And I’m sorry, you had another question?
Judge Glock: Oh, well, yeah, no, it was just asking about for the next legislative session, what are you and your team thinking about and is there sort of an ideal bill you would like to get across either in that session or just in never-never land, if you had total authority as a tyrant to push through new housing bills?
Nicole Nosek: We definitely have a long list of different legislation that I’m excited about, and what we’ll probably do, similar to this session, is just go to our partners, go to our allies, go to people who know a lot more than you on the technical stuff and ask what will really move the needle. But before that, what I think is really key, and also something that is frequently overlooked, there’s been great laws like RHNA was a great law that was passed in other states that said, okay, cities must plan out, they must permit the amount of homes for the projected population. Well, laws like that were ignored for decades. And so what’s really key and what we made sure to do this session was we added enforcement language saying that the Attorney General, which is pretty typical, can make sure to enforce this, but also a housing organization can also make sure to enforce this and legal fees if the city is found to be noncompliant, legal fees would get paid to the housing organization. So that housing organization in theory could be TFRS, it could be TPPF, it could be an array of organizations that testified and were involved in housing. But the point is, what I had seen and heard of so much is laws that are passed, and yet there’s still NIMBYism within the powers that are supposed to be instituting these laws. So making sure that there’s enforcement mechanisms. So we are closely tracking how the different cities are implementing minimum lot size reform in new neighborhoods, and also commercial to residential, and making sure that they are, thankfully, that enforcement language makes sure that the impact that we sought to have will be realized one way or the other. So I don’t think that you’re just done and you move on. You have to make sure that the laws that you and your coalition worked so hard on actually are followed through on.
Judge Glock: Nicole, thank you so much.
Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images
