Who Killed the Starter Home?

Have you ever lived with a stranger, shared a kitchen, and ended up marrying someone down the hall? Sam Hooper did. Sam is a legislative attorney who has worked on housing and property rights at the Texas legislature and at a legal nonprofit. He wrote the model bill, the Co-Living Buildings Act.

In this episode, Sam walks us through why single-room occupancy and shared housing, once common across America, was regulated out of existence. He explains what happened when the bottom rung of the housing ladder disappeared, and how occupancy limits, zoning definitions and building codes stand in the way recreating it today.

We talk about what Washington State got right, and what a modern version of co-living might look like. It wouldn't be the Soviet communal apartment I grew up in. As Sam puts it: no one should be forced to live on the streets to spare them the indignity of sharing a kitchen.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.