Susan Pendergrass speaks with Salim Furth, senior research fellow and director of the Urbanity Project at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, about the policy brief he co-authored with Emily Hamilton and Charles Gardner, Housing Reform in the States: A Menu of Options for 2027. They discuss why home prices have risen faster than inflation, how states like Missouri may be able to lower costs by loosening lot size and permitting rules, why HUD code manufactured homes face local barriers, how single-stair apartment buildings and lower-cost elevators could make small-lot infill more feasible, and more.
Episode Transcript
Susan Pendergrass (00:00): Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast this morning. Salim Furth, you’re the director of the Urbanicity Project, the Mercatus Center.
Salim Furth (00:06): Urbanity Project.
Susan Pendergrass (00:08): Urbanity Project. And I’m gonna give you one second to explain the difference. At the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia, what is the Urbanity Project?
Salim Furth (00:20): So that’s just our housing and land use research group. We tend to make things into acronyms, so we wanted a one-word name so that they couldn’t turn it into an acronym.
Susan Pendergrass (00:32): Nice.
Well, we haven’t talked about housing on the podcast any time recently, but, and I will say that I think a lot of the problems with housing policy that are in areas with too many people don’t necessarily apply in Missouri because that is not really our problem. But we certainly have the need for better housing policy in the state, and
And so I really liked your recent report on housing reforms that could happen in twenty twenty-seven and I think many of them apply to Missouri. So I appreciate the report. But just basically, why, you know, affordability and the cost of housing is certainly front and center in the media these days. Why is that a problem that we can’t seem to resolve? Why is it that, like, young people are like, rent’s doubled and I can’t afford to buy a home? Like
Why is that continuing to happen?
Salim Furth (01:33): Great question. So
Susan Pendergrass (01:34): Thank you.
Salim Furth (01:35): Yeah, Missouri, I mean, I just pulled up the data before this. Missouri has had the 16th highest increase in home prices since the sort of the month before the pandemic is kind of our usual baseline. So it’s not extreme, it’s kind of in the middle of the distribution, but above average.
Susan Pendergrass (01:53): Yeah.
Salim Furth (01:54): Prices average, according to Zillow, was about 170, 175 in January of twenty twenty, and now it’s about two seventy-five.
And, right, so, you know, incomes have certainly risen. A lot of that is just overall inflation that affects wages, affects prices of everything, and is not unique to housing.
But a lot of people haven’t had wage increases that big. And in general, nationwide, housing prices have risen a good deal faster than inflation. So that’s the kind of the backstory. People feel like it’s expensive because it’s gotten a lot more expensive recently. And, you know, I went to graduate school in Rochester, New York, which I actually bought a house for $28,000, in not a great location, but a perfectly fine house. And, you know, I think houses on that
Street sell for something like a hundred thousand now. So it’s gotten a lot pricier. And people feel that, right? If you live in an area where you’re accustomed to the idea that housing shouldn’t be a big chunk of your paycheck, one of the things that happens, I mean, you talked about states that are, you know, have relatively few people. If you’re either declining or in a rebound mode, prices can move a lot
before supply moves.
Susan Pendergrass (03:10): So basically, like, if you think about the “build baby build” Bryan Caplan approach of just letting a million more houses or units get built, that’ll solve the problem of affordability. Is that what you would recommend as well?
Salim Furth (03:26): So yeah, that’s what states with really high demand need to do, right? So Texas has really high demand, prices remain within reach of middle-class people because they just build a lot. They build tons of subdivisions, they build tons of apartment buildings, they build tons of townhouses, they are doing, you know, everything on the menu as much as you wanna eat.
If you go to California or Massachusetts, it’s the opposite.
Susan Pendergrass (03:47): Yeah.
Salim Furth (03:50): They do none of that well. They don’t build a lot of apartment buildings. So it isn’t, sometimes I think culture warriors want to make this a, well, it’s, you know, urban versus suburban. But the reality is the states that build a lot of urban housing are the states that build a lot of suburban housing. And the states that don’t build urban housing are the states that don’t build suburban housing. Now, states like Missouri are kind of in a weird position. You’re not getting a lot of people who are moving out of
you know, Florida or California because of high prices are moving to Missouri. There’s a few, but not a ton. You’re not, you know, experiencing really high demand like Texas is. But I’d say there’s two ways that the same logic applies to a state in Missouri’s position. One is just, you know, the housing growth rate is not zero, right? There are still new homes being built and the builders need to recoup their costs.
There isn’t a lot that you can do from a regulatory or government perspective on the cost of labor or the cost of materials. The main thing the government controls is the cost of land. And they do that via regulation. How much land are you required to build a house? There’s also an infrastructure component, but that kind of cuts both ways, and we could get back to that in a little bit if you want. But saying, hey, if you want to build a new home in Missouri, you shouldn’t need to have a large piece of land if you’re connected to an existing sewer system, especially in a place that has fewer people using those sewers. The infrastructures there allow people to build on a small piece of land. They can save a modest amount of money. The land is probably 10 to 30 percent of a home in Missouri, whereas in Los Angeles, it might be 80 percent of a home. So there isn’t nearly as much savings possible, but there’s still some savings possible. So the one reason is, you know, you look for your keys under the light because that’s where you have a chance to find them. The analogy breaks down, but, like, you’re gonna find the things that you can find in reforms to permitting processes, which is time, and then land use policies, which is land. So governments affect how long it takes to build and how much land you need. They don’t affect so much on the other stuff. So do what you can. That’s half the answer. Then the other half is you want to be ready for when demand turns around.
You know, lots of places have counted themselves out. Massachusetts was in a half-century-long economic depression for the first half of the 20th century because it was a water power state. It has a lot of little tiny waterfalls, which made it just a fantastic place for the early stages of the industrial revolution. Every little town had a water-powered mill, and hundreds of thousands of French Canadians moved down from really crappy farms in the frozen north to work in these mills. And then guess what? Electricity.
Happened. And, like, these mills were not efficient uses of space and kind of like industrial layout for electricity. And the place got hammered. Its port became irrelevant in the railroad era because of distance from U.S. internal markets. And so it went through a major depression from, you know, roughly 1910, 1920 until 1970 when high-tech and the sort of the advantages of having the strong university legacies brought it back to being a boomtown.
And guess what? In that period, it did not align its regulations to say, hey, if we ever become a hot place to live again and ever experience high demand, we should be ready for it. And so they were not, and they have experienced extremely high growth in housing costs as a result. So some places like California have always been, right? California’s got fantastic weather, that doesn’t really change. And so there’s always been a lot of demand, whether it’s retirees or, you know, the aircraft industry or war workers during World War
Two or Silicon Valley now, one thing after another. But a lot of places, Seattle, I keep a sign in my office that says, “Will the last person leaving Seattle turn out the lights?” That was a billboard some real estate agents paid for back in the 70s when it seemed like Seattle was going the way of the Rust Belt. So you might come back. Be ready for it.
Susan Pendergrass (07:52): Didn’t. Yeah. Yeah, I have a sister in Portland, Oregon, and, you know, they have that green zone, brown zone thing, which just drives prices up. Although right now people are leaving Oregon, but, you know, it artificially inflates prices. I feel like in Missouri, our state legislature, to the extent that they get involved in it, the fix is to try to build more low income housing. And then building at the bottom will somehow
fix the market, which I think it’s not really proven true. And we also do it through low income housing tax credits, which is probably one of the worst policies because they turn into chips that get traded. But so we don’t even end up with more low income housing. And then at the same time, what I perceive of anyway in Missouri is fewer builders are going after, like, the starter home market. So you’re either building housing specifically for low income residents or you’re building four thousand square feet
three car garage houses and there’s not really a lot happening in between and then we still have unaffordable housing.
Salim Furth (08:58): Yeah, that’s right. So the problems facing low income people in housing are obviously cost, right? Even in a very cheap housing unit, it costs a certain amount to keep the lights on, right? Utilities aren’t cheaper.
Just because you have a, well, they’re somewhat cheaper if you have a small house, but not radically cheaper. You’re still using similar amounts of water, et cetera. And so the cost of keeping the building, especially if it’s an old building, the landlord has got to cover the cost of maintenance, or at a certain point he’s gonna walk away. So it’s really hard to have high quality housing in a soft market for people who don’t have much money.
Low income housing tax credit, it’s a federal policy, there’s no way you can change that at state level. But yes, it’s a terrible idea, partly because the way that states might what you can actually change, the way that states choose to administer it is to spread it really thin. Like you’re out of peanut butter and you’re trying to give everybody a peanut butter sandwich, and so you just put a tiny bit on every piece of bread. And what that means is for a relatively small amount of subsidy that each project is getting, you’re paying a lot for lawyers.
Because the lawyers, again, they don’t get spread thin. They take their full cut to do the deal, whether it’s a big deal or a small deal. And so it ends up, as some professors have calculated, that only about 30 cents on the dollar reaches the final recipient. Because most
Susan Pendergrass (10:20): Mm-hmm.
Salim Furth (10:21): of it is lost in all of the white-collar professions along the way that each take their cut. And, you know, again, I think it’s a really flawed program.
What states could potentially do is really push for flexibility to try to put as much of their funding as they can into fully subsidized. So say we’re gonna put, we’re gonna make one really good peanut butter sandwich, and even though that uses up most of our subsidy, that’s better than spreading it really thin and paying a lot of lawyers along the way. So that is one possibility that the state can do.
The other thing, look, to the point of people building 4,000 square foot houses would be different. 4,000 square foot houses. One place in your region that’s actually breaking the mold here is Wichita, where they are building a ton of starter home duplexes.
It’s
Susan Pendergrass (11:11): So smart.
Salim Furth (11:12): about 40% of new production in the last five years. And those are they’re not
You know, they’re not gonna win architectural awards and, you know, they’re probably not the forever home for somebody who is upwardly mobile. But for 180K, you can get that starter home, which is gonna be probably, you know, three bedrooms, two baths, has a garage on the front side, minimal amenities.
Probably not your home forever, but it lets you get that first step of homeownership, have your first kid or two, get that raise and move up, start building equity. And, you know, there’s a debate going on in Wichita, are we building too many of these? And, you know, I don’t want to second guess the market, but zero is probably too few. And, you know, if your city is building zero homes in the $180,000, $200,000, $220,000 range,
then probably you’ve got regulations that make it so you can’t build a duplex on a small plot of land. Because that’s what Wichita is able to do, is that on something like five thousand square feet, you can put a duplex, which means that each homeowner is only paying for twenty five hundred square feet of land, only paying for about twenty five feet of frontage on the road. So if you think about every road needs pavement, sidewalk,
sewers underground, like all those linear costs, you’re paying less of that because you’re using less land. And, you know, I know the St. Louis area has lots of smaller municipalities. I would bet most of them do not allow for
Susan Pendergrass (12:44): My bad.
Salim Furth (12:45): a home to be on 2,500 square feet of land and 25 feet of frontage. And if you want affordability, those are the kinds of edges you need to start shaving.
Susan Pendergrass (12:54): What about just wondering, like, if this isn’t a topic that you research, feel free to tell me. But, like, modular homes, insofar as I know that the technology exists where we could be knocking out a lot of homes in a factory and delivering them. And is there cultural bias against it? Is there actual regulatory bias against it, or why don’t we see
You know, Amazon selling houses on their website. Like,
Salim Furth (13:24): Right, right, right.
Susan Pendergrass (13:25): Why don’t we see more Amazon houses just showing up? Because that to me would, number one, allow for just a lot more housing, and you don’t have to stick build it on site. And why don’t we see more of that?
Salim Furth (13:38): I lived in a Sears Roebuck house, actually, at one point. A kit that was delivered
Susan Pendergrass (13:40): Nice. In Rochester? Yeah.
Salim Furth (13:43): around 1910 in Arlington, Virginia. So, so, great question. So, first of all, it took me probably several years of working in housing to fully disentangle all of the terminology. The primary type of housing that is built in a factory is what I think we should best call HUD code homes, because
They get called mobile homes, but they’re not really mobile. They get called manufactured homes, which is true, but they are not all of manufactured homes. And the key difference is, where does the inspection happen and who does it? So a HUD code home is built to a federal building code that is required to be the same across the nation, so states and localities cannot add or subtract from it. There were just some changes made to that via legislation, bipartisan legislation that passed this summer, and those changes should take a few thousand dollars off the cost and allow more creative uses. So, like, stacking, you know, two manufactured homes vertically, for instance, which could legally be done, but could not pragmatically be done before. So
That’s the cheapest and best and clearest form. That’s the dominant form of homes that are built in a factory. They are small, they tend to be used in rural areas. So a lot of them get installed either on manufactured home parks or, if somebody owns 25 acres in a rural area and they’re remote and, you know, building is expensive in their area, so they just buy one of these, and it might be 125,000, 150,000, and it’s delivered to the site. Historically, they’ve all been delivered on a steel chassis. The change is that they can now be removed from the steel chassis after transportation with a small lift that allows the chassis to be reused. That’s where the savings come from. Every state is going to need to actually implement this. So Missouri should make sure to implement the legislative changes at the state level to enable those savings to go from the federal down to the Missouri consumer.
There are lots and lots of local regulations against these. Part of that is historic bias. People don’t want cheap housing. And part of that is a different sort of a category mismatch. Because HUD code homes are inspected in the factory as they’re built by a federally certified inspector, they come all put together, right? So the wiring is hidden. The wiring is in the wall, the way it will be when you move in. That means that the local inspector cannot see the wiring and cannot inspect the house. So a lot of states, I believe, including Missouri, have laws saying that at least in theory, localities cannot discriminate against manufactured houses or HUD code homes. But if the assumption is, well, we don’t know how to even approve you unless you pass local inspection, then it’s not gonna work. Because you can’t go, you can’t deliver the thing and then start ripping it up to look at the wiring and the plumbing and everything else that needs to be inspected. That was all inspected before, it’s got a stamp on it. And so I think states probably need a stronger preemption law that says not only can you not discriminate, but you in fact can’t require local inspections. You have to allow the entire top-to-bottom process of installing a HUD code home. And you can’t require things that then contradict the HUD code. So you can’t say, sure you can put a HUD code home here, but only if the roof pitch is X.
Susan Pendergrass (17:05): Mm-hmm.
Salim Furth (17:06): Because it has its own roof pitch requirements and if they don’t match, then you can’t change the HUD code. They’re not gonna build you homes that don’t match the HUD code to match your local roof pitch or your local,
Susan Pendergrass (17:15): Right.
Salim Furth (17:16): you know, requirement for multiple exterior materials or, you know, things like these aesthetic requirements that people think make housing more beautiful. They never work for me, but, you know, some people like these.
So, you know, I think there’s a role for the state to say, no, no, no, we really mean it. This is the cheapest form of housing. People everywhere in our state, if you can build a house here, you can install a house that was federally certified in a factory according to that whole top to bottom process. That’s a little bit tricky, and some states I think have kind of cracked the code, but I would say most probably have not.
Susan Pendergrass (17:51): That’s a shame. Okay, two last things. I know that these are not the biggest topics in your study of what states could be doing in twenty twenty-seven, but they are intriguing to me. The first is, can you explain to me the single stair multifamily building issue?
Salim Furth (18:11): Yes. So this is actually really tricky to explain to somebody who is not from the US. Because outside of the US and Canada, basically every apartment building in the world is built with one staircase, an elevator if it’s above some number of stories, and it’s usually built out of concrete. In the US, multifamily buildings are built out of softwood lumber.
And they usually have multiple staircases and then a central hallway connecting those so that everybody in the building has two ways of egress. And those reflect different choices that were made early in the 20th century when fire safety was really, really poor and a lot of people died in house fires, or then everybody had, you know.
oil burning lamps and coal burning stoves and a lot of actual fire in their homes. And so the rest of the world said, well, we’re not gonna build with wood because wood burns, and so we’re gonna use more expensive materials and get safety that way. The US said, well, we have so much wood, this is super abundant here, and we’re gonna keep building with wood, but we’re gonna require multiple ways of egress. Fast forward a hundred years, we do not have fires in our houses on a daily basis. And if you, you know, have a candle in it
starts a fire, you very likely in a building that size have sprinklers. You know, all the sort of passive forms of fire suppression have made it so that a modern multifamily building, even one built out of softwood lumber, is by far the safest place that you can live. So you are maybe in a single family home ten times more likely to die in a fire than in a multifamily building because multifamily buildings have fire suppression built in.
Which means that the double egress thing is actually basically irrelevant because these things basically never catch fire in a serious way. And so we have this kind of now redundant requirement that made sense when it was passed as a choice of how to get safety without compromising too much on cost.
And so, but functionally, because you have to have two staircases, it means you’re losing space where it costs, staircases are quite expensive to build. They’re fairly complex units within a building, and that cost has to then be passed on to the rentable or sellable square footage of the building, which means everybody has to pay a little bit more. It also means that functionally you need to have a central corridor, which means that small buildings just aren’t gonna ever work.
So a lot of US cities, we’re seeing Texas cities do this on their own, we’re seeing states do this. The Minnesota Department of Building, or whatever it’s called, did, I think, the gold standard study of safety and said these things are great. A single stair building is actually safer than a two-stair building because it is usually so much smaller.
And so it’s really about unlocking the possibility of building multifamily the same way we build it in most other places, except on smaller pieces of land. So I think of, you know, especially the legacy cities in Missouri, right? So have lots of vacant land. I was just reading about Kansas City, has had a downtown revival. Part of a barrier to
Susan Pendergrass (21:21): They’re trying.
Salim Furth (21:24): bringing people back downtown is that the types of building that make sense with our current building codes and economics are usually really big. You need an acre or more to build a multifamily building. But if you have an old downtown, it’s usually chopped into pretty small parcels because that’s what made sense, you know, back then. If you could build a six-story multifamily building on a quarter acre, then all of a sudden a lot of these vacant parcels or empty parking lots that are not serving the tax rolls, not contributing to their neighborhoods, those could make sense as multifamily units. So part of the benefit is on reuse of land. The other part of the benefit, and I think this is probably less relevant to Missouri relative to higher cost places,
is that it makes for nicer family style apartments. So if you’re gonna build three bedroom apartments in the two-quarrid model, it’s really hard to do that because they only have light on one side. Right? So if you’re quartered on the center of the building, you’re only getting windows on one side. It’s really hard to kind of do the apartment layout so that everybody gets a bedroom window without having some rooms, whether it’s your living room has no windows or something like that.
If you have a small footprint apartment, or small footprint building, then again, this is what most of the world has, two, maybe four units on each floor, which have light on two or three sides each. So, you know, if you’re in São Paulo, Brazil, if you’re a middle-class family, most likely what you have is a condominium on some floor of a five to twenty-story building that has light on, you know, depending on the size of the building, either you’re on a corner and so you have two sides
light or you’re kind of a wrap around half of a floor and you’ve got three sides light. And it’s much easier to lay out a house so that it feels like a house where you can have, you know, bedrooms for two children and have everybody have light in their homes. Again, in the Missouri context people have lots of options for single family homes or town homes even close to the urban core.
That are not too expensive. So the promise of we’re gonna let you live in the city on a fourth floor is probably not so relevant. But that’s the other thing that people get really excited about is we could have urban style family living and not force people into this choice of either you have a 45-minute commute or you have a crappy unit that’s, you know, not fit to your family’s needs.
Susan Pendergrass (23:50): Yeah, and it’s also just an example
of regulations that are making it more difficult, making it more expensive, and adding to the housing affordability issue, right? Like we need to go back and revisit and certainly Missouri state legislature could go back and get rid of that regulation, or even municipalities could do it. Finally, there was a tornado a year and a half ago in St. Louis and the Show-Me Institute building was fairly destroyed in it and
Salim Furth (24:18): Yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (24:19): And it is rebuilt and ready to go. But the issue that we’re having is our elevator. And I know that you mentioned elevators, and I don’t understand why the elevator industry has also become a bit of a chokehold on the system.
Salim Furth (24:30): Mm-hmm.
Susan Pendergrass (24:32): Are these like lobbying groups or what’s going on where we have these seemingly, we’re not, well, go ahead. Explain to me what the elevator issue is in the United States compared to the rest of the world.
Salim Furth (24:45): Great. Well, if you want to know a lot about elevators, you should have Stephen Smith from the Center for Building in North America.
Susan Pendergrass (24:48): Okay.
Salim Furth (24:51): He wrote an 80 page report called Elevators and knows
Susan Pendergrass (24:56): Nice.
Salim Furth (24:57): far, far more than is healthy for one individual. So
Susan Pendergrass (24:58): Well, just, we’ll cover the surface for us.
Salim Furth (25:01): the surface. So lack of competition creates bad industries.
Susan Pendergrass (25:06): Yeah, of course. Yeah.
Salim Furth (25:07): If you don’t have a lot of players, then you don’t have the pressure to do better, to offer better service, to innovate, to keep costs down. And the US is a classic case of a market with too few companies, and the result is that we have by far the fewest elevators in the developed world relative to our size. So
Like relative to, for a thousand people of population, Spain has something like ten times the number of elevators that we do. Greece, which is, you know, much poorer than our poorest state, has far more elevators than the US. And the result is that for especially in an aging country where more and more people are, thankfully, living a long time but also living years when they don’t have
their strongest mobility, right? Whether they’re in a wheelchair or it’s just physically a little bit tricky to go up and downstairs. It can be really nice to have a small elevator in a three-story building. A lot of countries do that as just a matter of course. Of course there’s an elevator. Maybe not a big one, but just, you know, if you need to move something heavy, right, it’s there.
Susan Pendergrass (26:12): A lift. Yeah.
Salim Furth (26:15): Or if you are, you know, slow moving on steps, you can just take the lift. And I think fundamentally it’s lack of competition. And so the US is one
you know, kind of world of elevators, and the rest of the world is a world of elevators. So everywhere else in the world has basically adopted what started as European standards. And so if you want to sell elevator replacement parts, you can either sell to the US only, which doesn’t have a lot of elevators, or you can sell to the entire world. And
Susan Pendergrass (26:45): Ha ha ha.
Salim Furth (26:46): So the main step that the US needs to take is to start to allow
the kind of the global elevator industry to penetrate the US market. And then that
Susan Pendergrass (26:56): Okay.
Salim Furth (26:57): would, you know, this isn’t just like, well, we’re gonna give up on American producers. Once that competition is there
There would be an evolution where American producers would then start selling not only to the US but to the world. But it’s pretty tricky, right? When you’ve got all these existing units, right, that are all built to one standard, it takes a long time and it’s tricky to produce for both of those. So we’re a little bit of Yeah. Yeah. So
Susan Pendergrass (27:20): ‘Cause our elevators have to be bigger, right? Generally.
Salim Furth (27:23): that so we have a bunch of requirements like that. Our cabs have to be bigger, they have to carry someone in a stretcher.
The stretcher size just got increased for kind of a reason that nobody really understood because they were like, well, it should be a little bit longer. What if we had a really long stretcher? And then there’s just layered on top. So the state of Maine made some really small changes that were positive last year. They had adopted what were the newest industry standards, which said every elevator cab needs this really fancy audiovisual equipment built in.
In case someone who is both deaf and blind is stuck in the elevator. The odds of that happening are extremely, extremely slim. To our knowledge, not one life has ever been saved by this audiovisual equipment. And by the way, virtually everyone is carrying around equivalent audiovisual equipment in their pockets today, so it’s less needed than ever.
But it was gonna add thousands of dollars to the cost of every new elevator in Maine. And they realized this is a terrible idea. And so they did that, and there was one other
requirement that I think had to do with the firewalling around the hoist system. Again, fires are so much rarer that we are, you know, double and triple and quadruple solving what was originally a real problem. Fires in buildings were a very serious problem for the history of the world. We have mostly solved the problem of fires in new buildings. New buildings are extremely safe, and adding yet another fire requirement around elevators was gonna increase the cost without bringing the benefits that would justify that cost compared to, hey,
people who have mobility problems cannot access a whole bunch more apartments or can’t visit this home or this building. And so yeah, enabling more cheap elevators
So those main reforms are like little ones that are not gonna solve the underlying issue, but at least keep it from getting worse. There’s a bigger conversation to be had with Stephen about how to really
Susan Pendergrass (29:22): Yeah.
Salim Furth (29:24): reorient the US towards a competitive elevator market, which would make our building system, you know, much, much more accessible to our population as we all get older.
Susan Pendergrass (29:34): I think there’s probably lots of opportunity to increase the amount of competition in the building industry. But what I appreciate about your report, which is available at the Mercatus website, is that you have like 18 options that state legislatures
Salim Furth (29:48): That’s right.
Susan Pendergrass (29:49): can look at. So then people go, what to do about the cost of housing? Like, here’s 18 things you could start with, and some of them are big and some of them are just elevators, you know, or a second staircase, or just really thinking through that there are things that could be done that would at least bring the industry up into the twenty-first century and make it more feasible for folks to build housing across the board, just build more housing. Very interesting. Thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. It’s a great report and certainly a topic that’s of a concern to a lot of people these days. So thank you so much.
Salim Furth (30:25): Thanks for having me on. It was a pleasure.
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