Advertise on podcast: Who Killed the Starter Home?

On this show, we usually bring in experts. They share what is broken in housing and what solutions are being tried around the world. Today is different. I recorded this one on my phone at the Princeton Farmers Market on October 15th. So please forgive the sound and video quality.   Meet Bob and his neighbor. They are 95 and 98. And they love living in the heart of town. We hope their stories ease fears about living closer together and be more open to a variety of homes in our communities.

Charlotte Hayden grew up in Princeton and recently came back as an adult. She found her apartment through a series of lucky coincidences and loves living in a walkable neighborhood without a car. Charlotte says that’s how it works for almost everyone she knows: all housing searches are workarounds. Someone heard of a friend with a spare room. Someone’s parents bought a house and needed to rent it out. Someone got referred by sheer coincidence. People of her generation are tired of relying on luck as a housing policy. And buying a first home feels out of reach. We also talk about what it’s like to live without a car. Interestingly, it’s not grocery shopping that is the worst part. It’s the stigma, and how surprised people are when she shows up on a bike. We also talk about what young people want from a town, such as safe bike lanes and places to sit that don’t require a purchase.

In this episode, Pete Harrison joins us from Connecticut, where he is the director of the Connecticut programs at the Regional Plan Association. RPA's report shows that ninety-one percent of land in Connecticut only allows single-family homes. Pete walks us through why housing, climate, and transit aren't three separate crises. They're the same crisis. Build homes near trains and buses, and you cut emissions, cut car costs, and finally make room for more people to live there. We talk about a new state law called "Work, Live, Ride," built to do exactly that. My 14-year-old son, Ethan Spitkovsky, put it best: the "last mile" problem people blame on transit isn't really a transit problem. It's a housing problem.

In this episode, Professor Richard Green joins us. He's the Director and Chair of the University of Southern California Lusk Center for Real Estate, and he's been obsessed with data and cities since he was about nine years old. He's here with a counterintuitive finding. If you bought a house in the Detroit metropolitan area back in 1987, you did better financially than if you'd bought one in San Francisco and even beat the stock market. Not because Detroit went up more in value. It didn't. But because the rent you don't have to pay is income, and that income is worth more in a stable market than a speculative one. Richard also walks us through the "buy, borrow, die" strategy of the wealthy: borrow cheaply against an asset instead of selling it, invest that money elsewhere, with no need to pay taxes on a sale. Turns out an ordinary homeowner can do a version of that too, just by refinancing smartly when mortgage rates drop. And a fun fact from a hundred and fifteen years ago: a Pasadena newspaper ran complaints about ugly new houses ruining the neighborhood. Those houses were craftsman bungalows that are highly valued landmarks today.

In this episode, Steve Goldin joins us with a rare perspective of the housing system from all angles. He's been a developer, a municipal planning director, a real estate head at a public university, and even started a proptech company, so he's sat at every side of the table. His take is that our fear of change drove the death of the starter home, but from there, we get into some genuinely creative ideas most developers or towns have never tried. For example, to get approvals it may not be enough for a developer to bring data that new residents of a building won't overcrowd the school district, but could it be possible to buy insurance to offer the town a sense of security? If there is a fear of data centers, could there be a market system to pay towns to host them?

In this episode, Dominic Behrens joins us from Sydney, Australia where he is a senior economist with The Centre for International Economics. He is also the co-founder of Sydney YIMBY. Dominic walks us through a real-world experiment most places never get to see. In 2013, a suburban municipality in Australia allowed property owners to subdivide lots down to just 150 square meters, about 1,600 square feet, small enough for townhouses. Construction went up by two-thirds right away. Then in 2019, the required lost size was increased to 250 square meters, about 2,700 square feet, and construction went back down.  Dominic and his co-authors got access to incredibly detailed data and were able to analyze who built these homes (mostly small local builders) who moved in, (young families looking to upgrade), and what happened to the homes they left behind. That last part is fascinating. Research traced the ripple effect of these new townhomes across the much wider market. As young families moved to these high-end small homes, their old apartments became available to people of somewhat lower income and so on creating better the housing options further and further down the income ladder. We also discussed into why these reforms got reversed, even though less than one percent of residents objected, and why Dominic believes townhouses, unlike big apartment towers, could and should be allowed everywhere. Read article here: https://e61.in/what-local-land-use-reform-does-and-doesnt-do/

In this episode, Raisa Rubin-Stankiewicz joins us. She is the policy director of the New Jersey Coalition to End Homelessness. And she's here with some hard numbers. Unsheltered homelessness in New Jersey is up 61 percent from last year. For every one person who gets housed, almost three people become homeless. Yet Raisa has good news: in under two years, New Jersey got veterans' homelessness to what's called "functional zero." More veterans are getting housed than are becoming homeless. It took real money and real coordination, but it proves that this crisis isn't inevitable. We talk about what's broken, what's working, and what coalitions we can build and actions we can take to solve this staggering crisis.

In this episode, Tara Paxton joins us at the start of what she calls her "Act Two." She spent nearly thirty years on the municipal side of planning, most recently as planning director in Brick Township here in New Jersey where this past June, she finished working on Brick’s state's fourth round of affordable housing compliance.  Now Tara is stepping away from municipal government to create something new: an educational and private practice (https://paxtonplanninggroup.com/) built around the gaps she saw up close for three decades. Tara has a term for the real obstacle she kept running into. It’s not “Not in My Back Yard” movement, but something she calls FOOMI, fear of others moving in and changing the familiar quality of life.  Her solutions are not more regulation. It's education. She walks us through her plan to launch a new organization, modeled on Philadelphia's Citizen Planner Institute. The goal: teach residents the actual civics of planning. What a board can and can't legally do. Why "no" isn't always on the table. How to move residents from reflexively objecting to a project, toward contributing to shaping their town's future, one that meets the needs we all have at different stages of life.

In this episode, David Kinsey joins us — the planner who, more than almost anyone else in New Jersey, has shaped the math behind the Mount Laurel doctrine and helped determine the numbers of deed-restricted residential units each town is required to build. It was not housing policy, not economics, but a language assignment that set David on his career path when during a study abroad in college he wrote a paper in French about a new town. Decades later, he was the expert witness in court, spending days on the stand defending the housing formula built from census projections, household formation rates, and land-use factors. David calls the five-decade-old Mount Laurel doctrine, especially after the latest amendments, a smashing success, and multifamily construction with an inclusionary deed-restricted component is visible across the state. But David also acknowledges that New Jersey remains one of the most segregated states in the country, a pattern he traces directly to housing itself. In this episode struggle to share his optimism about the rules for realistic opportunity when in some cases, it takes thirty years to deliver homes near a train station. In other cases, monumental efforts of assembling a multi-layered funding scheme and donated municipal land still fail to create homes.

In this episode, Justin Hollander, professor of urban & environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, joins us — and yes, he's also planned a new town on Mars, underground bike tunnels included. Back on Earth, He shares that planners are usually taught to contain and densify existing places and by any means block expansion. The reality is that economic forces make development ooze out anyway, and it ends up as a sprawling suburbs that delivers somewhat affordable homes while making no real livable places. Justin makes the case that if we acknowledge this reality, we can actually plan new towns that are walkable, transit-friendly, and have community structure that defines a real place people would enjoy and still have starter homes. Maybe we don't need to move to Mars to bike to school after all.

In this episode, research attorney with YIMBY Law Jack Farrell came back to the podcast to walk us through the newly passed Road to Housing Act. This sprawling, three hundred eighty-one-page bill is made up of small technical fixes. For Jack, that's a good sign: the sheer number of granular changes suggests that the authors understand how housing programs work on the ground. We cover the highlights: grant programs that now prioritize ADUs, missing middle housing, and single-stair reform; a fix that makes manufactured homes cheaper to build; the unlocking of Community Development Block Grant funds for affordable housing; and a change that cuts duplicate inspections for properties using multiple federal funding sources. We also dig into the bill's attempt to cap how many single-family homes big institutional investors can own — and why the data suggests Wall Street landlords aren't the main cause of high home prices. And, for a complete fun fact — there is a provision inside a housing bill that has nothing to do with housing: a ban on the U.S. ever creating its own central bank digital currency.

For decades, local zoning rules kept towns like Santa Barbara completely stuck, resulting in virtually zero new housing production. Then, the state of California stepped in. In this episode, architect and housing advocate Ellen Bildsten joins us to share firsthand insights from the frontlines of California's housing revolution. We walk through how a massive wave of statewide legislation bypassed restrictive local zoning to unlock unprecedented housing opportunities—from the initial accessory dwelling unit (ADU) breakthrough to radical new laws allowing single-family lots to be subdivided into multiple ownership opportunities. We discuss the critical "push-pull" of designing for density in highly traditional communities, the financial realities of infill vs. large-scale multifamily projects, and Ellen's dream of transforming a tourist-centered downtown into a walkable, vibrant, and authentic transit-oriented neighborhood.

It is a common story of high-demand towns using zoning to keep housing supply from meeting demand with low- and moderate-income families being pushed out. In this episode, New Jersey's preeminent housing planner Creigh Rahenkamp does a deep dive on our state's half-century attempt to overcome exclusionary zoning. After hearing my recent conversation with Jason Sorens, whose research found no measurable increase in overall housing production, Creigh was furious at what he saw as a mischaracterization of the Mount Laurel doctrine. As we dig in, however, something interesting emerges: the two of them agree on far more than it first appears. Both agree that Mount Laurel has increased the number of deed-restricted affordable units, but that New Jersey is nowhere near building enough homes compared to real demand. And both point to the same culprit for why: local rules continue to exclude, and complex requirements and approvals run up against economic constraints, making projects impossible. Where they split is on what the Mount Laurel doctrine is. Sorens evaluates it as a housing production program. Rahenkamp insists it was never that — it's a rezoning doctrine, with deed-restricted units as the mechanism to capture some of the value that zoning had trapped, for the benefit of low- and moderate-income residents.

You have probably heard of the "Yes In My Back Yard" movement, but you may be less familiar with YIMBY Law — a nonprofit organization that helps research policy solutions, offer legal support, and streamline the arbitrary and delaying tactics stalling new home construction. In this episode, research attorney with YIMBY law, Jack Farrell joins us to describe the housing doctrines in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York. He discusses why simply making "local housing plans" is great in theory, but often fails in practice without clear, enforceable rules. From California's Permit Streamlining Act to battles over home rule in Colorado, Jack walks us through how enforcing clear standards and timelines along with smart incentives can bring predictability back to the housing approval process. Finally, Jack shares a sobering perspective from his early days as a public interest attorney: the direct, devastating link between housing scarcity and domestic violence.   Here is the link to our YIMBY Law project support form: https://www.yimbylaw.org/submit-a-project  Information for anyone interested in YIMBY Action chapters: https://yimbyaction.org/get-involved/what-is-a-chapter/

"Design is the easy part. I get to sit in my secret magic studio, come up with a great design, and draw it up. I can do that all day long. But getting that design to work with the budget, the zoning, the neighbors, and the construction—that’s the hard part." According to Christopher Calott, Chair and Program Founder of the Master of Real Estate Development + Design Program at UC Berkeley. In this episode, we discuss how designers can stop complaining from the sidelines and actually regain control of their vision by claiming their seat at the developer's table. When value engineering ruins a project, it’s because we aren't the ones making the final decisions. Chris breaks down the myth of the "greedy developer," the reality of managing financial risk, and how "building a return on design" can physically and socially elevate an entire neighborhood. We also tackle the harsh reality of the modern housing market: the burdensome "Drive to Value" that forces entry-level homebuyers to make a bargain with the devil just to secure a starter home.