Advertise on podcast: Who Killed the Starter Home?

Do you feel like something in our country is seriously broken right now? Like we’re losing a piece of what once made America optimistic and upwardly mobile — the belief that our future could be better than our past? Yoni Appelbaum has done the research, and the story he tells is unsettling but also hopeful. For most of American history, uniquely in the world, America’s secret sauce was the freedom to move toward opportunity. That mobility gave people the agency to shape their future and even their identity. But over the past 50 years, we’ve become stuck. Stuck in part because of the purposeful and openly discriminatory use of land. Some of the earliest zoning rules, beginning in 1885 in Modesto, California, were designed to push out Chinese laundry owners by banning the very businesses they operated to serve their customers. Over time, we became very good at building these legal walls. They came to seem normal, appropriate, even “scientific.” The result has been growing separation, rising resentment among those left out, and real strain on the foundations of our democracy. But here’s the hopeful part: these land-use walls are words on paper, written by people. That means they can be rewritten. We can choose to get unstuck.

In this episode, I talk with Gregg Colburn about why homelessness is not just a personal tragedy, but a policy failure. Professor Colburn has done the research. If we want fewer people on the street, we must create more homes. It’s not rocket science. We’ve tried it, and it works.

In this episode, I talk with Andrew Mikula, who is leading an effort to bring a ballot measure to voters in Massachusetts that would make it possible to create starter homes. Their proposal doesn’t seem too radical: if you have a plot of land the size of an NBA basketball court, or can create a lot of that size in an area with existing infrastructure, you should be allowed to build a home on it. Andrew walks through how his team is approaching this process and what it says about the state of our government that it may be easier to win majority support from voters than to pass state legislation to do the same.

In this episode, I speak with Luca Gattoni-Celli about why we can’t subsidize our way out of the housing crisis and how vacancy chains really work. We also unpack two issues that feel permanent but are actually new: today’s homelessness crisis and the growing immobility of people who are being pushed away from opportunity because they can’t afford to live anywhere near it.

In this episode I spoke with Casey Anderson who for 8 years chaired the Montgomery County Maryland Planning Board. I came across his recent article "What are planning hearings for?" where he talks about problems he saw that make our public engagement process so dysfunctional. Casey offers suggestions, but we by no means came up with complete solutions. We hope that this is a start of the conversation. 

In this episode, I spoke with Taizo Yamamoto, principal of Yamamoto Architects. They creating beautiful, sustainable housing in Vancouver. He shares how the flexibility of Vancouver’s zoning allows for innovative and green projects. I loved learning about mass timber structures and other ideas that could help create more sustainable buildings and vibrant neighborhoods.  

In this episode, I spoke with Alain Bertaud, urban economist and author of Order Without Design, whose career spans more than half a century planning cities across the globe, from communist systems to market economies. The incredible stories he shares illustrate why we are forced to consume more land and space, where the real hidden costs lie, and why common sense so often disappears in housing policy. Note: About 20 minutes into the recording, we experienced a technical issue that caused some audio inconsistencies. Our apologies, and thank you for sticking with us.

In this episode, I speak with Mike Hathorne, author of the new book The Great Housing Reversal and the New American Dream. We talk about how market signals are clear about the kinds of homes people actually want to live in, yet outdated zoning and rigid development models continue to deliver the opposite. If we want affordable, walkable, human-scale neighborhoods again, we have to start listening to the market instead of silencing it.

This episode is a special one — our first recorded in front of a live audience on November 12th at the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority conference in Madison. I sat down with Elmer Moore, WHEDA’s executive director, to talk about re-imagining starter homes, the power of combining audacity with innovation, and how WHEDA is putting those words into action to make housing happen.    

In this episode, I talk with journalist Benjamin Schneider, author of The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City-Building Revolution. We explore why cities need room to evolve and innovate, and how that mindset can help bring back starter homes and neighborhood-level creativity. We even dig into the question of where and why one would build an entirely new city and what is an "eco-district."

Every week, 75 to 100 churches close their doors. Some dilapidated buildings will slowly decay; others will become luxury condos with stained-glass windows. Our guest, pastor and property developer Mark Elsdon, isn’t waiting around. He’s building tools to help communities start early and grow something truly unique in God’s backyard — with patience, trust, and purpose.

I had so much fun speaking with Anthony Mattacchione and Raphael Kay.   They apply what they learned from slime mold to architecture and planning. This fascinating single-cell organism sends pulses through its body and can build efficient networks that resemble cities and transportation systems, only more resilient!   I learned that we need a bit of “individual stupidity” for bottom-up community design to work. And that digital twin-making for cities already exists! What are we going to learn from it?

This episode is a little different. I switch roles and speak with Alex Margulis, a Princeton student and inspiring thinker who is researching and writing about climate, housing, and the power of agency. We talk about why sustainability shouldn’t be driven by fear, how housing can be one of the most impactful climate solutions, and explore practical ways students can turn their advocacy into real impact.

In this episode, I talk with Ned Resnikoff, former policy director at California YIMBY (a pro-housing nonprofit that stands for Yes in My Backyard). My favorite part of our conversation is Ned’s story of how a casual happy hour grew into a statewide movement that rewrote the rules on housing, zoning, and grassroots organizing. Ned is now a housing policy fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and a fiscal resilience fellow at California Forward, while also working on a new book with Island Press.

When architect and entrepreneur Carrie Shores Diller heard her clients tell their aging parents, “Oh, we’ll just put these temporary things up, and when you’re gone, we’ll take them back down,” she knew something had to change... That’s no way to face one’s mortality! In this episode, Carrie shares how her company, Inspired ADUs, has brought hundreds of new homes to life, and how California’s bold housing laws made it possible for these small, beautifully designed Accessory Dwelling Units to deliver flexibility, affordability, and connection.