M. Ryan Gorman wants you to imagine purchasing a plane ticket.
You’ve chosen dates around the early spring, when the frost is giving way to lush leaves and fragrant flowers. The ticket comes with plenty of perks — priority boarding and extra leg room — and best of all, it’s nonstop. However, you see an odd question right before you hit purchase: Would you like to sit in a baby-free row?
M. Ryan Gorman | Credit: LinkedIn
Do you click no, remembering the struggle of traveling with your own fussy baby? Or do you ensure your comfort, hoping another kind passenger will allow a family, likely looking forward to a similar vacation, to sit in their row? You chose the latter option, banking on the fact that someone else will have more patience.
“Now the airline, to be clear, allows babies on the plane. The FAA allows babies on the plane,” he said. “There are six people in every row on this flight, and if just one person in each row clicked ‘no baby,’ do you think there’s a possibility that every row on the plane would have no babies? And do you think if someone was traveling with a baby, suddenly that makes them have to either drive or buy a much more expensive ticket from an airline that doesn’t offer the no-baby option or whatever?”
The example is an analogy. But in practice, Gorman noted, “That’s what we’ve done to housing.”
Gorman said fictional scenarios like these have been a powerful tool in his housing affordability work through btcRE: be the change real estate, which he co-founded with Brian R. Iammartino in 2011. He said these scenarios help stakeholders — lawmakers, developers, students, and community members — turn their attention away from the biases they brought into the room and begin considering solutions.
“Because of the ‘buttons’ we’ve clicked, houses are a million dollars, and 42-year-olds can’t afford to buy their first home. That’s what we’ve done. That’s dumb,” he said. “And the audience often agrees. And then it becomes, ‘Now where do we go from here?'”
Gorman — who left his role as CEO of Coldwell Banker in 2023 — said he centers conversations around straightforward “purple policies.” In other words those things that are often a gateway for players on both sides of the aisle to come to a middle ground.
“They’re forced to focus on the content of what I talked about. And they’re sort of like, ‘Well, that sounds reasonable. I’m still not sure whether you’ve got a D or an R next to your name, but what you said about parking makes sense. What you said about a second set of stairs on a three-story apartment building makes sense,” he said. “What you said about how people lived in the past versus how they live now makes sense.”
What follows is a version of Inman’s conversation with Gorman that has been edited for length and clarity.
During my 10 years at Inman, I’ve always been most proud of my work on housing policy and affordability. I had a feature in 2019 that dug into the rise of upzoning. I had another feature in 2020 that discussed the ramifications of pocket listings. In 2023, I spoke with academics about new methods for calculating affordability.
I haven’t always received the best reactions to those stories, but I believe that real estate professionals, especially agents, have the power to truly move our country forward in a meaningful way when it comes to housing access for everyone. And I want to do my best to equip them with information that helps them think deeply about creating more housing opportunities for their communities.
I’ve experienced tons of [negative] reactions as well. When I did things like launch the diversity and inclusion network within Coldwell Banker, I got so many responses from people who had extremely strong opinions.
On a normal day, I would get like a thousand messages, but if I launched something like that, I’d get 3,600 messages, or something insane, and a lot of them were heated. But I engaged with every single one of them, and for so many of them, when I’d respond, their response back was, ‘I honestly thought that was gonna go to an unread email box.’
But what I have found more effective, and this is me just speaking, you know, contemporaneously, and thinking about what you’re working on, are purple policies. Those are things where people almost kind of wait for me to finish the sentence to decide, you know, what my political affiliation is. To decide whether or not they actually agree with me. But they’re forced to focus on the content of what I talked about, and they’re sort of like, ‘Well, that sounds reasonable. That is a reasonable proposal.”
What’s an example of a purple policy?
How can we move forward without dealing with the past? How can we not recognize that a specific policy that I’m critiquing was actually written by people who, in the meeting on public record, said, ‘We’re writing this policy to keep Black people or Jewish people or Irish people or whoever out of our neighborhood.’ They said those words while they wrote the policy. How can we not reckon with that?
And the fact is, I personally think as a society, we can’t. And individually, it’s hard to get people to critique a situation or policy because they very quickly rationalize if they feel they have a protected interest.
So, this is what I do.
Let’s say you have a single-family home, and you like your single-family home, and you like your neighborhood of single-family homes. And you feel like I’m trying to take that away from you.
So, I might say, ‘In the middle of the night, your property rights were stolen from you. Did you know that? Well, in your town, probably in the fifties, sixties, or seventies, somebody at town hall passed a rule that said that you can’t do something with your property, like converting the basement into an apartment and renting it to a person in the neighborhood who everyone knows and likes. But they have to rent because they can’t afford to buy.’
Or, I’ll point out that the place where they get their hair cut has a couple of apartments above that create a nice little vibe in their neighborhood. And there’s a place next door with a good dark roast and a corner bodega that’s walking distance from your mother’s house.
But those things are illegal now, because five people showed up at a public meeting in a town of 36,000 people. They lobbied for something to be passed, and now you don’t have access to that anymore.
Those are the conversations we have with people who aren’t dialed into the affordable housing space. The property rights side of the equation and the housing affordability side of the equation oftentimes feel like they’re on different aisles, but they’re not.
In my work, I find one group is really interested in the history of why a rule was put there. And for another group, they’re just really interested in deregulation, eliminating red tape, and giving people back their property rights. Both of them can land on the same answer, even though they go through two very different doors to get there.
We live in a country that, in many ways, is coming apart at the seams. And whatever common ground people stood on politically is cracking underneath. How do you navigate that?
I provide education in high schools about real estate development. So, I’ll ask the kids what their favorite places to hang out are. Sometimes they’ll say a mall, but usually they’ll say a downtown around here, like Montclair or Bloomfield, and I’ll ask them why they like it. They’ll usually just say it’s fun, so I’ll ask them to talk about what they do when they’re there. They’ll mention a bunch of different shops or cafes and restaurants that aren’t too expensive.
Then, I’ll ask them if their parents enjoy that area too, and they often say yes. It’s a place that makes everyone happy. I start walking them through it. And then they end up realizing the components of what makes them happy and what makes their parents happy are similar, and that there are policies that can preserve that or take it away.
Look at Minneapolis and then look at Montana. Google the ‘Montana Miracle.’ [The housing policies] they passed in Montana at the state level to increase densification, like accessory dwelling units, duplexes, triplexes, elimination of single-family, all the things, are the same things that they did in Minneapolis, and it’s worked in both areas.
Montana is, you know, bright red. Right. And Minnesota is, you know, deep blue. Those are things that I think can flip the table a little bit on people, even in how they process these policies.
As you think about your work, is it more effective to look back or look forward? Is it more about undoing the past or paving a new path?
Yeah. You know, one person’s reparations is another person’s retribution. Right. And people can get wrapped around the axle on that. How long is too long to fix a past wrong?
Like, if my neighbor broke into my house while I was on vacation and stole my television, I should be able to get my TV when I get back home. Right? But what about five years later? What about ten? If I can’t get it, should my kids be able to get what was stolen? What about my grandkids or great-grandkids?
That’s one category of how we reconcile with the past, and individual jurisdictions are trying to reconcile with that. Bruce’s Beach in California is an example of that.
But the other side is, how do we make sure things like that are never done again? Most people, to varying degrees, agree that we probably shouldn’t be taking things away from people anymore. But eminent domain still happens, right? And eminent domain happens for like widening highways and for creating a public plaza, etc.
So, part of the solution is having a high bar for eminent domain. Like, it’s actually hard to solve some problems. This is not among them.
But what we have done is divided up the decision-making into very small areas and then told people, ‘Once you get up the ladder, I need you to not pull the ladder up behind you.’
And the fact is, it’s really tempting, really tempting to pull the ladder up. But, we have to make sure that the whole community is making the decision as opposed to just the people who’ve already climbed the ladder.
