Understanding the housing affordability crisis - and what’s needed to fix it: Habitat for Humanity CEO

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Welcome to Meet the Leader, a podcast where top leaders share how they're tackling the world's toughest challenges.

In today's episode, we talk to Jonathan Reckford. He is the CEO of Habitat for Humanity International. He'll talk about what's needed to truly tackle housing affordability and how leaders can tap kindness for change.

Subscribe to Meet the Leader on Apple, Spotify and wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And don't forget to rate and review us. I'm Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum. And this is Meet the Leader.

Jonathan Reckford, Habitat for Humanity International We've got to make housing a high priority. And housing is expensive and complex. But if we don't solve it, we won't solve all the other challenges we've got.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Housing affordability has reached crisis levels. One report released this year by the Frontier Center for Public Policy rates the affordability of certain markets, and it found that countries like Australia didn't have a single affordable market, although in that country it did have five that it rated severe or impossible.

There are a range of reasons for this crisis, including housing costs, outpaced income growth and policies that hold back housing supply. But no matter what the reason, these barriers are eroding communities. They're also keeping people from tapping the benefits of stable, affordable housing that we don't talk about nearly enough. After all, people who afford their homes earn more over their lifetimes, are healthier and even live longer.

Jonathan Reckford is the CEO for Habitat for Humanity International. That's a global housing organization working in 70 countries. It's also one of the largest private homebuilders in the United States. He talked to me about what's needed to bridge the affordability gap. He also talked a little bit about their advocacy work and how that shows what we need to do, some of the practical strategies that are needed to drive progress.

He also shared some lessons from his wide-ranging background, including his stint coaching the South Korean Olympic rowing team. He'll talk about what has shaped him as a leader and the one value that can help leaders truly drive change.

He'll get into all of that. But first, he'll talk more about the state of global housing affordability.

Jonathan Reckford, Habitat for Humanity International The state of affordable housing in the US and globally is tragically bad. If you take the U.S. example, the data is cleaner. Globally, we're short over a billion units of housing and there's both a qualitative and quantitative deficit in the United States, depending on who's. Matthews We are short between 3 and 6 million units of housing. And the implications of that is we've seen housing costs rise far faster than incomes, particularly in the last five years. So it's been a long building crisis. But we're seeing, the gap between what a family can afford and what it costs to create a unit of housing is the widest it's been in modern history. And that has all kinds of negative implications.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Of course, it's different based on locality, but what are some of the drivers of this gap in affordability for housing?

Jonathan Reckford, Habitat for Humanity International You could take this to Western Europe, you could take it to and the sort of global North and global South, but what happened in the U.S., for example, is that after the '08 housing crisis, a lot of the small builders who represented about 50% of the house building went out of business and then banks did not recapitalize them. So the big builders came back, but as a result, we underbuilt for probably 12 years by several hundred thousand units a year. And so, over time, if we're not creating supply of housing, that puts pressure on affordability.

Then the pandemic created a perfect storm all over the world. So suddenly the demand for housing went up. Everyone wanted more space, wanted additional housing, and the supply chains were interrupted and the supply of housing got constrained even further for a couple of years.

And then third, people started thinking of housing as more of a financial asset and less as a place to live. So you had a lot of distortions to the market on top of that. You put all that together. And what happened, as we saw, housing prices in historically affordable markets double over the last five years, going up far faster than incomes. And it's actually become a financial challenge for cities and states and countries because ultimately, if people are spending half of their income on their housing, (mortgage or rent) that creates shortages for all the other things families need.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader And what are some of the barriers that are sort of slowing the fix for this?

Jonathan Reckford, Habitat for Humanity International So in some ways, if you look at the whole housing supply chain, we're challenged on every front. Land has shot way up. Skilled labor is actually in short supply. We actually need lots more skilled construction labor. And the labor force is aging and we actually need to create more skilled construction workers, and particularly as construction is getting more complex.

Then on top of that, what we're seeing are building materials had high inflation. Now that's actually slowing down, but not going back to where it was before. And then, of course, interest rates went up. So it's really every piece of the value chain has actually driven housing costs higher.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader And what are some of the knock-on effects of all of these problems with housing and, you know, cities? What happens when people can't get affordable places to live?

Jonathan Reckford, Habitat for Humanity International You know, if you think about attainable housing, we all want housing that we can afford, regardless of our income level. But in many ways, we certainly wouldn't say housing is the only need. We need health. We need public safety. We need education. We need jobs. But in many ways, housing is a prerequisite to those other things working.

So we see if a child grows up and in safety and in affordable housing, she actually stays healthier, does better in school, then has the opportunity to move forward. We see communities that have mixed income, mixed use housing actually performed the best. Yet we have increasingly economically segregated our communities. So, when we don't have enough housing, we actually see the inverse: health outcomes get worse, educational outcomes get worse. It actually has become a bigger issue that employers can't hire because the workforce can't afford housing. So we're actually breaking down the fabric in many of our cities.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader In your experience, how has the conversation on affordable housing, how has it changed or maybe even evolved in the past years?

Jonathan Reckford, Habitat for Humanity International You know, I would say if we can bring good out of bad, there is a growing recognition that we have to tackle this. For a long time it was frustrating as a houser, how little we would hear about housing in major gatherings. And I think what has changed and sometimes I think -- one could be a little jaded about this -- now that middle class families and even upper middle class families' children cannot afford housing. They have discovered we have a housing crisis. We already had a housing crisis. It was just relatively invisible for a lot of folks. And so now that I think it's becoming both an economic imperative and people are hearing about it - it's becoming an election issue --I think we're seeing more seriousness about trying to address it.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader There's only a handful of mechanisms to sort of tackle this housing gap. You know, what are some of those, you know, supply and things like that?

Jonathan Reckford, Habitat for Humanity International I think fundamentally it starts with supply. How do we create more housing? Because if you've got much more demand than you have supply, by definition, you're going to still see housing grow faster than inflation, which is what we've been having.

And then if you think about how do you gain supply, it really has to be multi-sector approach. So the public sector can't solve it by themselves. The private sector can't solve it by themselves. And I would argue particularly that you also need civil society, which amplifies the voices of the community and makes sure that you're actually creating sustainable communities for everyone. So it's going to be a mix.

I've always talked about carrots and sticks. How do you actually make some math work? I mean, funnily it's a math problem. If you're a good hearted developer -- and we are the warmest hearted developer you can find -- we can't build something that the families we're trying to serve at 80% of a median income can afford. And even at the workforce level, 80 to 120% of median income, a developer cannot build that without subsidy and land or financing. So you're going to have to find ways to bring together the sectors.

And I've always talked about carrots and sticks because you can't just beat up developers or they won't build. And and we've seen that in the undersupply. A friend of mine said it's actually a two-by-four and cake. They won't naturally build a mixed income but if you kind of bring a two by four but then there has to be enough cake so that the math works for them.

And what we've seen are a lot of creativity happening in projects where cities can do several things that are really positive. I've seen mayors -- Atlanta is a good example, and there are other cities that have done this, which is, Hey, if you're creating a mixed income project with affordable housing integrated into it, we'll put you at the front of the line and we'll fast track your permits and entitlements. That's worth real money.

If you're adding affordable housing into your project, we'll give you density bonuses. That's worth money. So there are levers you can pull that don't actually cost the city very much that are meaningful to a developer.

The other side of it is cities own a lot of land. One of the fastest ways and sort of simplest ways to get going is to actually for cities to build on land they already own and create affordable housing.

And we need the whole mix. You know, one thing I think people often don't think about is there's a lot of data now around social mobility. And when we study the social mobility, I think in the US context, Raj Chetty has the huge dataset that low income children growing up in mixed income communities actually still have high social mobility. Low income children growing up in areas of concentrated poverty have virtually no social mobility, and we've increasingly become an asset rich and asset poor, segregated society.

Habitat for Humanity's particular niche is affordable homeownership, and we don't think everyone should own a home. But when you look at the wealth gap in the US, and this is true in many other countries, the biggest delta until you get to very wealthy people is whether people have the chance to build an intergenerational asset over time through the ability long-term savings of owning a home. And so now we increasingly have a significant amount of our population who both can't afford to rent but can't possibly save the down payment to actually purchase. So they get further and further divided economically.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader You mentioned a couple of ways that government leaders are creating incentives or creating mechanisms to tackle this. Are there other either mindsets or mechanisms that can be useful for leaders to consider or sort of keep that top of mind?

Jonathan Reckford, Habitat for Humanity International The headline to me is, can we make it faster and easier to build? So we're here in California. I love California, but they made it incredibly slow and hard to build. And as a result, California has the worst housing deficit in the United States because it's so slow, so difficult and so expensive to build anything here. And there's some good intent behind that. But it's got enormous adverse consequences that come with that. So our view would be what are the mechanisms that would speed up and make it easier to build? And then how do we have breaks and compromises?

A great example. We're part of a fabulous project we're doing in St Paul, Minnesota, and we kicked off the first 30 homes honoring our most famous volunteer, Jimmy Carter, just a few weeks ago. And there we built the first 30 of what will be 150 Habitat homes, but it's 150 habitat homes in a 1,200-home mixed income neighborhood that it was historically disinvested in. And the local utility is moving into the community. So there'll be a thousand new jobs that come with that. So it'll be both mixed use and mixed income. It's going to be an all-electric community. And then we were able to bring in some state subsidies and federal subsidies that were going to lower the cost. So the families will get the energy savings, which means affordability for them also addresses sustainability, which we care deeply about. And one of our goals is how do we break through so that our sustainability goals don't conflict with affordability. Because if we're not careful, there's a tension that we drive up the cost of housing in a way that further exacerbates the affordability challenge.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Habitat just completed a five-year advocacy campaign, The Cost of Home. Can you tell me a little bit about it and how it sort of drives the advocacy work that you guys do?

Jonathan Reckford, Habitat for Humanity International Well, this was our first-ever US advocacy campaign. We started, if I could take one step back, what we realized many years ago was Habitat for Humanity could never build our way out of the housing crisis. So the question is, could we use our building to be a demonstration of what's possible and then essentially amplify that by changing the conditions, the enabling environment. So our big strategic view is we engage about a million volunteers a year, and that's not really a construction strategy. That's really a social change strategy. So if we can engage those volunteers, give them this incredible experience of community, but then educate them so that they become voices for more housing and more affordable housing. So they become, "yes, in my backyard," people. And then hopefully we can actually change the market so that it becomes easier for everyone to build. Then Habitat and all the other houser can build more housing. So Cost of Home was all about affordability.

Our global campaign was about property rights, particularly for women and marginalized groups. Because if you don't have the right to own your home, it doesn't make sense to invest in upgrading or improving it. And we've had some great successes around the world.

In the US, the focus was heavily in affordability and we've had some wins. Some examples. Our affiliates in the Twin Cities helped in both St Paul and Minneapolis changed zoning rules where most of the land was zoned only for single family. And now anyone can build up to three units on any one of those lots. So we call that soft density, but that's a way to create more housing in communities of opportunity.

In a similar way, in Portland, they helped lead a campaign to get accessory dwelling units approved so anyone could put an accessory dwelling unit behind their house. And that creates, again, soft density that speeds up getting more supply into the market.

Austin, Texas, quite similarly -- this is sort of the good news -- bad news after a huge effort, all of our California affiliates, along with a coalition, got a major bonding bill done in California, $3.8 billion for housing that included some for affordable homeownership. That's the great news last year that happened. This year, they're leaving it out of the budget. So you're never done on advocacy. But we're pushing both for more financing, more funding and and preserving federal funding for affordable housing. And that's at the local level it's very heavily around land use and zoning.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader If you were going to maybe boil down the enabling environment for affordable housing into a few characteristics or traits, what would need to be in place in your mind?

Jonathan Reckford, Habitat for Humanity International So I think creating the right incentives and the expectation that we're going to create mixed income, mixed-use housing. So if you think about the ideal of both our sustainability goals and housing goals, you want people to be able to live near their where they work. One of the reasons traffic is so bad in cities is that huge swaths of the workforce cannot afford to live close to where they work.

The other side, as I already talked about social mobility, is trying to integrate and have mixed income. It doesn't have to be every block in every neighborhood. I give my hometown as an example all the time. I grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, idyllic college town. When I grew up, it was a middle class town, and you only had two middle schools and one high school. So everyone went to school together. You had blue collar, white collar, academics, business people all mixed. If you were a person of faith, you went to church or synagogue with people across all income bands. And there were service organizations and those were mixed by income as well. Now you fast forward 50 years later and now it's an upper middle class town. So it's diverse racially, it's diverse ethnically, it's diverse in terms of faith. It's not diverse economically anymore. So now you work, you go to school, you worship, you serve with primarily people in your own socioeconomic class. And that's in some ways the the great long-term negative impact.

And I think increasingly, along with a moral imperative, it's becoming an economic imperative. Again, Georgia example -- our quite conservative governor of Georgia is trying to weaken statewide zoning rules because they've been so successful recruiting new clean energy companies to Georgia. Now, these manufacturers opening these big plants are screaming because they can't hire workers because there's no housing. And some of those communities are resisting building more housing. So how do we kind of create both the social will and the economic story to be able to create more housing.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader In your life I read that you took a lot of inspiration from your grandmother, Millicent Fenwick. Do you want to tell us a little bit about her?

Jonathan Reckford, Habitat for Humanity International You know, she was a bigger than life character for in my life, had in some ways a sad but remarkable life story. And I won't go through all of it. But her parents were on the Lusitania when it was torpedoed by the Germans. She lost her mom when she was young, went through some very hard times and, you know, couldn't get a job because though very well-educated, she not finished high school because their family moved to Europe. And then she started copywriting with Conde Nast and becoming the war editor of Vogue magazine and wrote the Vogue Book of Etiquette, which sold a million copies in 1947.

So I found her fascinating and terrifying. If you went to her house, you had to be able to sit up straight and hold your fork properly and discuss food problems in sub-Saharan Africa. And so I think she didn't always really believe in children, just small grown ups. But I found her fascinating.

And whenever I was with her, she would almost always quote her favorite verse from the Bible, Micah 6:8: "He has showed you a man what is good and what does the Lord require of you, but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?" And then she would ask me what we were going to do to be useful. And she co-chaired the Civil Rights campaign for the state of New Jersey for 14 years, and then at the age of 64, ran for Congress and was a ferocious fighter for civil and human rights. And I found her incredibly inspirational from a career perspective. And she was a big figure in my life.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader You mentioned that she was an inspiration to you. How so? What was something that changed you that had you not have these experiences with her that you might have been different?

Jonathan Reckford, Habitat for Humanity International You know, I think and not just her. I had an amazing mentor in my godmother who was another pioneering woman leader and the first woman president of Smith College and a corporate board titan over time. And I think for both of them in different ways, I learned some really important lessons. From my grandmother. I think it was that real deep passion for justice. And I remember I wrote in my book that my wife, one of the only debates I ever saw her, her lose was we were talking about is, is love more important or is justice more important? And my wife was arguing for love. And I think ultimately my grandmother said, yes, but we need justice because love isn't always sufficient. And there's a sadness to that, but of reality to that, too. So I think that deep passion for creating justice -- she fought for migrant farm workers. She fought for civil and human rights. And I think that was embedded in me.

And I think for my godmother, it was the sort of remarkable leadership level and wisdom around leadership combined with an extraordinary ability to be totally present. And I've always wanted to emulate that while fighting hard living in the present and deeply engaging with the people in front of you as you're trying to to get bigger things done.

And one thing she told me that was very meaningful, though it took a while to really understand. When I was in college, I ran for student body president and I lost and probably should have lost. And it was only way later that I look back and realize I was really probably I would have tried to do good things, but I was running because it was something to achieve rather than because I had some mission I was really committed to. And one of her lessons to me was, you know, if you seek power for its own sake, it's inherently corrupting. But if you have a mission that's worth pursuing, you'll accrue the power you need to achieve your mission. And that has stuck with me.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader I read that you've had a variety of different roles in your background. You worked at Goldman Sachs, and I read that you talked your way into a financial analyst job. How does that work exactly?

Jonathan Reckford, Habitat for Humanity International I was so naive. I laugh now. I was going to go to law school to go into politics like my grandmother and suddenly realized I had no interest being a lawyer. I just thought that's what you did to go to politics. So I had to come up with Plan B and I was an English / Poli sci major. I had no knowledge of business whatsoever and out of the blue was invited because of a scholarship I was on and a leadership program as part of, offered an interview with not Goldman Sachs, a different investment bank. And I showed up and they asked me why I want to do this. And I can't believe they even continue the conversation because I said, I don't know. You invited me. But I started learning and I actually thought it would actually be very valuable to learn about business. And ultimately they offered me a job. And but then I had interviewed with other firms. I was learning more. And I had I had heard Goldman was a really good place and short version: They basically said, no, we're done with our recruiting, you're too late. And I was up in New York, had gotten an offer from a competing firm that morning. I had this was the pre-digital age. I had about six hours before I had to go to the airport to fly back. So I just went over to Goldman and asked if someone would meet with me and they said no. And I just said, Well, can I wait? And I waited in the lobby for about 3.5 hours just doing my homework. And eventually this partner came out and said, okay, I'll give you five minutes. And we talked. And to my amazement, someone from Harvard Business School had just turned him down, who had been on the same scholarship I was on at UNC. And he's like, What is the deal with these North Carolina people? And and he said, and I explained, he said, Well, you're in the wrong place. I'm actually I lead the research department. You should be talking to -- the financial analysts. He sent me upstairs.

And this is one of those interesting life lessons because the person leading the program said, you know, you're too late, Why should I bother you? And then he said, What are you going to do if I don't let you interview? And I said, Well, I'll probably take an offer at Morgan Stanley or Solomon Brothers. And it was 180 degree turn because it wasn't necessarily about me, but it was about competing. And so suddenly, 20 interviews later, I ended up with an offer. And I would not recommend that as a job searching strategy. But even though I probably wasn't cut out to be an investment banker, it was incredibly valuable to get grounded in finance, to understand corporate finance. And so I worked unreasonably hard. But it was a great grounding as a first job.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader And you also you you coached the Korean Olympic rowing team.

Jonathan Reckford, Habitat for Humanity International And I said, that does not seem it seems a little surreal now. And so I was working in New York. I was not really living the life I had imagined. I was working all the time and not really living to, you know, to my grandmother's standard, in my view. And so I thought, I really need to gain perspective. I got interested in business school at this point, but I said I want to go and kind of explore the world.

And I applied for a bunch of things and I was incredibly lucky to get a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. And Luce had been the founder of Time magazine. His parents were missionaries in China, and for the last 50 years, they have sent 15 young Americans from all different fields under the age of 30 to work in Asia for a year, with the idea that being exposed to Asia -- and of course, the world has shrunk so much, Asia was so much more foreign back in the 1980s -- and so having won the grant, Korea was going to host the Olympics. I had been an athlete and I thought that I want to do that. And I was lucky enough to go over with Goldman on one of the first international equity offerings for a Korean company. They didn't know I was a glorified slave, and I was able to set up a job doing marketing work for the Seoul Olympic Organizing Committee. And I was so excited. And then to my great surprise, they said, Hey, we see all this rowing on your background. We've just fired our coach. We only qualify because we're the host country. When you come help, help with the rowing program. And I said, No, no, you need to go hire a professional coach. I am not qualified. And to my amazement, they persisted. And so I left Goldman early and went to the US rowing coaching college and one of my former coaches. They were very generous. They were not terrified of the South Koreans and so loaded me up with training plans and I ended up living in the training camp with the Korean coaches and athletes. And it was just a life changing experience. And we did not win in the Olympics, but we improved. We beat the Japanese. And so that was big and it was an incredibly powerful experience for me and really I think gave me the perspective immersed in a completely different culture, to have the time to really examine what I wanted to do next. And so it was a great anchoring time. That really was an inflection point for me.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader And how does it also sort of shape you as a leader? Rowing is sort of deceptively simple. How does that experience help you as you are sort of galvanizing people and sort of making sure people are all going in the same direction?

Jonathan Reckford, Habitat for Humanity International Well, I think that last part is exactly the right part. I think rowing did have some real life lessons for me. First, it takes an incredible discipline. So the sort of delayed gratification to train for, you know, hundreds and hundreds of hours for these very short races is important. And I always love the larger boats that we you know, all the boats are important because that sense of, you know, if you've got eight people rowing together and a coxswain, it takes real unison and your boat is only as good as the weakest link in the boat. And so you could be a great individual contributor, but unless you're actually perfectly aligned with the rest of your team, you're not going to swing and have the results you're looking for. And so I learned a lot about teamwork and discipline.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader You mentioned your book earlier, Our Better Angels. One of the things you do is you. You mentioned that there's these seven simple virtues. Can you take us through those? Because I think that they can be so shaping, especially for leaders as they are going across their own day to day.

Jonathan Reckford, Habitat for Humanity International Yeah. Thank you. You know, I wasn't looking to write a book. And we actually had had done an op-ed with President Carter, our kind of patron saint of Habitat. And he wrote about after Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, if you remember, with 5 trillion gallons of water. And his comment was, you know, when you're in a crisis after a big disaster, you don't care if the person coming to rescue us from a different race, a different faith, a different income level. You're so glad they're there. And he said, when the waters rise, so do our better angels. And then the question was, why can't we live that way when it's not a crisis? You know, why does it take that? And a publisher came in and asked if we would turn that into a book.

And I wanted to focus on virtues because I think that the headline to me and I won't pick all of them, but it is you know, if you think about community and kindness, which were two of the ones that we focused on, along with joy, along with generosity, which is so tied to gratitude.

But my thesis in many ways is if you stay at home and sit on screens, you tend to focus on how others are different. And the algorithms then reinforce that. When you're out in the community serving other people. You're actually focused on what you have in common. And so in many ways, I think the most healing thing in our cultures around the world is for people to go out and do something for someone else. You know, my hope is when people read the book, the reaction will be, I need to go do something. It's really a storybook, not a strategy book, because it's stories of people doing extraordinary things and individuals in communities transforming their communities by acts of of love and service.

And so it's an optimistic book. And I think my hope is, you know, our public discourse has gotten so coarse and dark, and we know that politically you get rewarded from an engagement. The advertisers sell more ads by scaring people and getting them upset. And I think the antidote in many ways to that is when people serve, they build community build connection. And so even though it's not our primary mission, over and over again, I get volunteers thanking me when they come out volunteer with Habitat because when they're out on the build site, working together with other people, you experience community the way it is supposed to feel, but too rarely does. And I think we actually have an epidemic of loneliness and separation. And I think part of the answer to that is for people to find ways to reconnect and go out and serve others.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Are there 1 or 2 virtues where you like, gosh, you know, this is really especially at this moment, really important for people to dig in on?

Jonathan Reckford, Habitat for Humanity International Well, it seems so basic, like kindness, you know, just respect.

A friend of mine wrote a book which I respect thinking about that in the US context, but many countries we're seeing a similar thing. People are very quick to claim rights and slower to claim their obligations or responsibilities. And the two come together and I think as we think about that, it's actually more joyful. You know, we actually have a mental health crisis. We have so many people unhappy. And part of when you go out and, you know, do for others, it's actually, in a way, a selfish act. We feel better about the world. We see the world differently. It creates a little bit of hope.

And so if I had to start, I'd probably start with gratitude and kindness, because my experience is when you're feeling grateful and you're treating people kindly, it's very hard to then go do bad things. It tends to positively infect the way we do the other parts of our lives.

And I think the other one is community. And you don't think of that as a virtue, but you don't get a positive community without intention and without working at it. And I think all of us want it. And I'm shocked in some ways how many people are missing a sense of community.

I love the work that we do around the world to break down barriers and build bridges across difference and Habitat -- a lot of people don't know this -- we built the first mixed race community in South Africa after apartheid. I was in Ireland, in Northern Ireland last year for our 40th anniversary there and in Belfast it coincided with the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Accords. And the day before they signed the accords, Tony Blair and his team and Gerry Adams and the Sinn Fein team spent a day building a Habitat home together. And all of the homes in Belfast were built by Protestants and Catholics building together.

And there's something about serving together that can lower those differences. And whether that's Christians and Muslims in Egypt or Hindus and Muslims in India or as as I joke, but it's not really funny, Democrats and Republicans in the United States. There is something about focusing on our shared values that has a way of diminishing some of the the other-ing that can otherwise be so prevalent in our societies.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader So something that you wish that leaders would prioritize in 2025 that needs to move forward that year. Otherwise we will be even further off track for things that need to be done in five, ten, 20 years down the line. What needs to happen in 2025?

Jonathan Reckford, Habitat for Humanity International So you'll be shocked that I would say we've got to make housing a high priority and housing is expensive and complex, but if we don't solve it, we won't solve all the other challenges we've got.

So if we want a cohesive community, we need mixed income, mixed use housing. If we want better health outcomes. We know housing is a gigantic social determinant of health. We will keep treating the symptoms but not the underlying cause. If we want kids to do well in school, they need stable housing. And ultimately, if we want to attract a workforce, they have to have a place to live.

So by no means is housing the only answer, But we've got to get serious about increasing the supply of housing. If we want to create both healthy and prosperous societies we all want to be a part of.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader That was Jonathan Reckford. Thanks so much to him and thanks so much to you for listening.

Find a transcript of this episode as well as transcripts from my colleague's episodes of Radio Davos at wef.ch/podcasts.

This episode of Meet the Leader was produced and presented by me with Jere Johannsen and Taz Kelleher as editor, Edward Bally as studio engineer in San Francisco, and Gareth Nolan driving studio production.

That's it for now. I'm Linda Lacina with the World Economic Forum. Have a great day.