Disinformation, false narratives, bias structure sink new Housing Department podcast series

The Housing Department of the City of San Jose recently introduced a new podcast series, "Dwellings," produced by department staff, which claims to present expert opinion on the housing issues facing the city. "Dwellings," however, fails to deliver on its stated purpose. Instead of presenting neutral, or at least balanced, viewpoints on local housing issues, the podcast takes a one-sided, hard-left posture towards housing issues--even on issues about which the council has not given the department direction.

Here are a few examples of how the "Dwellings" podcast collapses under the weight of its own Wokeness.

Disinformation:

Most academic experts in the housing and homeless field acknowledge that a number of forces cause homelessness: high housing costs, certainly, but also mental health issues, addiction issues, limited housing supply, very limited affordable housing supply, zoning, building regulations, misguided homelessness programs, etc. Jennifer Loving, CEO of Destination Home (episode 1) rejects all such nuance and complexity: "The root causes of homelessness are not the fault of the homelessness system," she says. "It's the failure of America: gentrification, white supremacy, systemic racism, structural racism, the criminal justice system. These are all systems that have perpetually not allowed people to build wealth and it catches up at homelessness...Racial inequity drives homelessness. Every system has been designed to better serve white people from the jump."

False Narratives:

Michael Lane of SPUR, in the Opportunity Housing (episode 2) podcast, claims that a more densified San Jose would be "a return to the way humans have lived for millenia." This is patently false and ahistorical. For most of human history, there were no cities at all. And when cities began to develop, the huge majority of humans still lived in non-urban, rural areas. And almost all cities, from the Mesopotamians forward, experienced most residents living in areas surrounding the militarized urban core (inside the city walls) in a more spread out design pattern. In fact, this low-density approach is the natural state of human urban design. We recommend to Michael Lane the book Sprawl by Michael Bruegman so he can expand his horizons beyond the falsities of his favored New Urbanist colleagues.

Partisan Posture:

A quick civics lesson: the Housing Department is a taxpayer-funded staff function of the City of San Jose. It is not an advocacy organization. It is supposed to implement the policies decided upon by City Council. You wouldn't know it from listening to "Dwellings"--two examples:

1.) The "expert opinion" is stacked. While "Dwellings" claims to be educational about housing issues, it *only* interviews either non profit leaders or Housing Department staffers. Builders, contractors, landlords, renters, architects, developers--perspectives from anyone from the market side of the issue--is purposefully not included. And bizarrely, the stakeholder group most impacted by the proposed Opportunity Housing approach--homeowners--gets zero voice and representation. Zero. This leads to a systemically bias podcast.

2.) The Housing Department behaves as though it has an advocacy responsibility to push for certain types of housing policies even before the City has decided upon those policies. In a telling interaction in the Opportunity Housing podcast, the staff moderator asks Michael Lane, director of SPUR SJ: "We have gotten some community pushback on Opportunity Housing. How do we shift the community mindset to a more positive view of this housing--how do we, as government employees, as advocates, how do we change the conversation so it is more positive?"

This is a brazen, disturbing revelation that the podcast has an agenda that is independent of the city's, taxpayer's, and residents' direction on Opportunity Housing, which has yet to be determined. And that they view their role more as an in-house advocacy group, rather than an organization working for the City Council and the people of San Jose.

Follow Opportunity Now on Twitter @svopportunity.