Building housing affordably; drag through the ages

·30 min·2 clips

Why does architect Angela Brooks say zoning is the real problem behind LA's unaffordable housing?

Eighteen bills come first. Frances Anderton opens with Governor Gavin Newsom's housing package: ADUs, limits on downzoning, and new restrictions on how cities can block construction. The question is blunt. Does giving people more room to build help solve a housing crisis still shaped by local control and architectural ambition? Angela Brooks and Larry Scarpa give the policy talk a working example. Their firm comes in through housing designed across income levels, with architectural flair and a show at 18th Street Art Center's Santa Monica Airport Gallery. The segment stays practical. Housing is treated as a design problem with pressure on both sides: production on one, city resistance on the other. Then the episode changes clothes. Anderton turns from California housing to Simon Doonan's Drag, The Complete Story, with RuPaul's mainstream success as the opening hook. Doonan looks back through mythology, ancient Rome, the Baroque period, and a crowded backstage of names: Caligula, Nero, the Duke d'Orléans, panto, Stanley Baxter, Dick Emery, Danny LaRue, and post-war England. The book has a personal thread as well. Doonan remembers dressing up in his mother's clothes as a child, then finding Hollywood drag at 25. The tone is curious, not gushing. Drag comes through as entertainment, provocation, self-fashioning, and a way to offend the establishment. The ending gets physical. A performer talks about the layers, moisture, and work hidden under a polished look, which lands neatly beside the housing half of the hour. Even the book's benefit has weight: proceeds go to the Ali Forney Center in Harlem to help LGBTQ kids at risk. Housing and drag are not the same subject, but this episode puts them in the same room: public forms, built and lived in.

As heard by us

California housing policy and drag history share a sharp, grounded episode that still makes room for a rough transition.

DNA opens on California's 18-bill housing push and treats it as a live test, not a victory lap. Frances Anderton lays out the measures, then brings in Angela Brooks and Larry Scarpa, whose long housing experience gives the segment some bite: they back the legislation, but still…

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Want California housing bills and drag history in one measured commute-length listen?

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