Equity and Inclusion in the Future of Real Estate

Equity and Inclusion in the Future of Real Estate

A Conversation with Renée Cheng

In many of the conversations we’ve been having with our fellow real estate agents – plus lenders, developers and builders – about how we can make housing in Seattle more inclusive, one question comes up: “What does all this talk of equity have to do with me?” To prompt some thoughtful answers and inspire some different entry points into this evolving conversation, we thought it made sense to interview a local leader working at the intersection of equity and housing.

After meeting with the students from the Aspire program at the UW College of Built Environments last summer, their enthusiasm and focus on equity got me interested in speaking to Renée Cheng, dean of the college. Trained as an architect, Dean Cheng is also an author and an award-winning educator. She leads teams that create undergraduate programs that use the lens of home and community to imagine better futures in built environments.

This quote from Renée’s interview with Architect Magazine is an excellent jumping-off point into our conversation.  – Sarah Rudinoff, SEACHANGE Editorial Team

“We know that spaces are incredibly powerful. Sequence of spaces, collections of buildings that become neighborhoods and cities send cues and they do shape behavior and they do have clear messages about who belongs. If we believe that space can elevate your experience, we also have to believe that space can constrain your experience. And so, then it becomes our responsibility as designers who are super skilled at shaping space for many centuries after we’re gone, to know what kinds of things we might be trying at least to influence and seeding what will hopefully be a flourishing society.” — Renée Cheng, Dean of the CBE, UW

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SARAH
Hi Renee, thank you for talking with me today. I know you run a large college within the university and students are being educated in city planning, architecture, landscape design, construction and real estate. How are your teachers leading this conversation inside of equity across all these disciplines but especially real estate? How do the students want it to be integrated into their instruction? Talking to the Aspire students that we visited with, they are well aware of Seattle’s housing crunch and many other challenges.
RENÉE
Yes, students have always wanted to change the world and I think they see the problems of the world as something that their generation can and should address. At the same time, I think students are feeling some urgency and pressure that a lot of the problems that have been left to them by previous generations are extremely difficult to even define, let alone solve.
Shelter is a really basic human need. You also think about clean air, clean water, and quality of life. These are all things that you can’t take for granted anymore. When students are thinking about a house they could afford, they’re also thinking about sustainability and environmental health, and how that house or that neighborhood might be able to be a place that’s safe and healthy.
They’re also really aware of disparities and patterns of disparities that have happened over a long period of time in Seattle, but also in the United States. I would say with all of our students, a lot of whom are international, there’s also a global awareness — certainly of climate change — but many of the disparities have been very race-based, and there are clear, dominant cultural advantages that have happened in America.
We have a number of interdisciplinary studios, a lot of them are community-based. Our students are learning different points of view: that someone who has to build the thing is going to be asking different questions than the person that’s dealing with the financial side, which is different from the person that’s concerned about the quality of the space and the structure. Then you have to figure out how it fits into the land, how it works with other landforms, or the infrastructure and transportation that gets you there.

At our college, we talk a lot about equity as working across differences and being able to deeply appreciate the differences and the different points of view. We talk a lot about the ability to work across differences as a collaboration, a way to integrate and understand something that you might not have considered because of your lived experience or your training. On a big scale we talk about how at the college, we’re all joined around the built environment. We all have an appreciation for how the different roles come into play, and we all need to work together and understand these things.

SARAH
It sounds like you are integrating all these disciplines, and have a philosophy of collaboration, because that is what the students’ jobs will be like when they leave school.

RENÉE

In the actual work that happens in communities or municipalities, you have all the disciplines in our college in addition to policymakers and lawyers, public health concerns, material science issues, engineering, and so on. The base group of five disciplines that we have in our college only gets stronger as graduates can integrate and work collaboratively with others who may not have thought about, say, whether a building is made out of timber or concrete, and which material has more fair labor practices or a higher carbon offset.
We have incredibly challenging problems ahead and we can’t keep working the way that we’ve been working. So how do we begin shifting? And a lot of that is looking at it with different angles and not continuing to do what we have been doing in the past or refining it – but to potentially radically shift while still taking forward some of the skills that we have learned over time.
SARAH
What’s been the most challenging thing in bringing DEI work to the college? Have you had pushback from the larger community?

RENÉE

I actually studied change process and innovation in the built environment, and ways that new technologies or new practices get adopted. And there’s a couple of different theories of how change occurs.

What I know and what we’ve seen from other institutions that have prioritized diversity is that diversity alone doesn’t actually bring you anything and can actually bring you a lot of negative effects unless you’re focusing on equity and inclusion. Have we been recruiting and working on a new dialogue, and have we been able to get these different points of view, including from our faculty and staff? But different viewpoints will bring up conflict, so I would not say it is about trying to get people to agree. We are deepening our appreciation of conflict and being able to have conflict in a really productive way.

In our focus groups and surveys, we definitely noticed a huge discomfort with conflict, and a very strong desire for harmony, getting along, and acknowledging that we’re all human. That minimization of differences allows us to be strong and feel like we’re unified. But if you dig a little deeper and say, “Okay, yes, we’re all human, but you know, we have really different ideas around the word ‘profit,’ or ‘traditions.’” You need to get to that level in order to go deeper.
SARAH
I wanted to talk a bit about your students. How are you implementing the DEI work or the talk of affordable housing in real estate coursework?

RENÉE

In our real estate faculty, we have several people with expertise in affordable housing. Our faculty are very in touch with our communities and current issues. Some of them are working on a pandemic-related recovery in retail markets and commercial real estate. They’re looking at things like transit-oriented development and new ways of thinking about land use where land might be owned by Sound Transit or King County, for example.
In the Puget Sound area, things are changing so rapidly that there are different conditions here than across other markets in America. In some ways we’re kind of like a microcosm in another ways, we’re an outlier. Seattle, as a laboratory or a case study, is a way to demonstrate gentrification, because it’s so clear in a place like the Central District. We have a studio we’ve been running for a few years now with the Nehemiah Initiative, which is a group of Black churches in the Central District looking to re-develop their land for the community’s good. We’ve worked with six churches now, plus the YMCA. We have projects where we’re meeting with the pastors and the bishops, trying to figure out with shrinking congregations and super valuable land: How do we manage this?
In terms of other equity issues, we’re not doing one-off community work, where we work with a community once and then we leave. We try to make commitments that are over multiple years so that these communities are getting value, because they’re teaching our students what their needs are and what they’ve been facing. That kind of expertise in invaluable and we wouldn’t be able to teach the students without them.
SARAH
In real estate, we mostly work in the open market. But what else is there? I’ve done two land lease transactions over my career. It seems like a model that could create affordable housing in perpetuity in many neighborhoods.

RENÉE

Yes, also co-housing and increasing density through DADUs are things that real estate agents could champion. Because when people are buying a house, it’s not something they do all the time. Maybe it’s the first house they’re buying, or they might do it maybe two or three times in their life, whereas an agent is seeing sales and different forms of sales every day. You can help to nudge behavior by making different options less scary, such as figuring out how much would it cost if they were to build a DADU.
With something like co-housing, if people hadn’t grown up with it or seen it, how would they even know that that’s an option? Agents can make some of these less common transactions more available and accessible, so people don’t feel like it’s a mysterious thing that isn’t what everyone else does. Because, as we know, current practices are not necessarily ones we want to perpetuate.
SARAH
We all win when more real estate agents know about different avenues for ownership. What are the organizations that you think are leading the way for more equitable housing?

RENÉE

Our Aspire group just met with Homesight, and there is a group called Sound Communities with a number of people that have worked for the city and county. Other cities have been held up as great examples, like Salt Lake City, which has done a lot to reduce homelessness, and Minneapolis, which has passed new zoning laws to expand multi-family housing. I also follow different prototypes that are trying to get construction costs down through offsite construction or other means.

We know that affordable housing is a complex and difficult topic, just like homelessness is. There is no one size that’s going to fit all, and there are also not a lot of shining examples that have it figured out. There are great projects, great individual projects, and sometimes small cities that have been able to solve certain things, but there’s not going to be a silver bullet.

SARAH

I would love to know what the Aspire students’ feedback to you was about the real estate industry, after their summer program.

RENÉE

First of all, they really enjoyed meeting with all of the different agents and found the idea of building community and helping individuals really appealing. I think that they also saw some barriers, including a need for more people in the real estate industry from the racial demographics that they represented. A number of them talked about how, when they first started the Aspire program, many of them had not met real estate agents before or didn’t have any agents in their family.

Another perception was that real estate was a sales thing, and that you couldn’t necessarily trust agents because they were primarily selling to you. Then they really developed trust with a number of agents and owners and understood more about their values, so some of those perceived barriers fell away.
But there are other obstacles that are potentially harder, including financial or network barriers. A couple of students had ideas for incentive programs, or different ways to structure the initial costs of getting into the industry to make it more accessible. I think that they were thinking not only of themselves, but of their peers that might want to go into real estate.

The students would say, “I think I can get over this idea that real estate is all about sales, but now I need to come up with the money to begin and figure out how long I have to work without getting much money back. What would I live on until then?” I think it’s very much worth paying attention to both their perceived barriers and the real financial barriers to entry into the industry, so that you can quantify and address both.

SARAH

I think that it’s important to open these conversations among ourselves in the industry, because we don’t talk a lot about that with each other: how everybody started, and how we went from no business to having a business.

RENÉE

Yes, the students were asking a lot of agents how they got started, and they realized that many agents started pretty young, which was for them very encouraging because many of them started at the ages that the students are right now. But then they found quite a lot of the owners, for example, had family in the business and had really high credit ratings when they began. They were already in a position where they had more choices because their finances were in better shape. I think they realized, age-wise, that it could be a good time for them to enter the industry, but they also come from a really different background. And if they fail it might mean something very different than if other folks fail.

SARAH

That is helpful to know, and this awareness can allow us in the industry to be more inclusive, as we were discussing earlier. In terms of perceived barriers, I had the advantage that my mother was a broker when I was growing up. I saw it as a viable career even though I didn’t have a lot of savings or huge financial help.

RENÉE

Money is definitely a factor, and satisfaction or values is another factor. You wouldn’t want one without the other. Our students, at this moment in their careers, are less likely to say, “As long as the money’s good, I’ll put aside these other things.” They want it all. They want to be able to do something that’s consistent with their values, and that’s making a difference in the world with these urgent problems that they perceive – while also having a stable financial base. It’s hard, but they do look at real estate as an opportunity for that.

SARAH

And it is. Thank you so much, Renee, for spending your valuable time with me.

RENÉE

My pleasure.

2200 1323 Sarah Rudinoff
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