36. Nurses, Teachers & Firefighters Can't Afford to Live Where They Work. Here's a Model That Helps. | Chris Moeller

What happens when the people who serve your community can't afford to live in it? Chris Moeller, CEO of Orion Growth and creator of the Pathway Communities model, joins Matt Pouliot on Housing Matters to lay out a different way of thinking about housing entirely. Not as an asset class. Not as a rent-versus-own binary. But as an operating system built around stable living. Chris has spent over two decades at the intersection of real estate, energy, and technology. After surviving Hurricane Helene, his work took on a new urgency. The question stopped being how to improve housing and became how to design communities that can withstand disruption and actually support the people inside them. In this conversation, Matt and Chris get into the Pathway Communities model from the ground up: who it is built for, how the capital stack works differently, and why the traditional developer approach keeps pricing out the very people communities depend on most. They talk pocket neighborhoods, adaptive reuse, net zero energy design, food systems, digital equity, financial literacy, and a deed restriction structure borrowed in part from the Habitat for Humanity playbook. They also get honest about what is broken. Wages have been trailing median home prices for years. The missing middle housing product barely exists. Teachers, nurses, firefighters, and police officers are choosing not to work in communities where they cannot afford to live. And most developers are still building to minimum code, optimizing for their exit, and walking away before the roof leaks. Chris is not doing that. Hudson Commons in Hudson, North Carolina is his first learning living lab, and it is already in motion. If you work in housing, local government, community development, or you are just trying to make sense of why the system feels so broken, this episode is worth your full attention. Find Chris Moeller on LinkedIn, on Substack at Chasing Arrows, and at pathwaycommunities.org. His podcast, The Edge Report from Brix, is available on Spotify and YouTube. Housing Matters is hosted by Matt Pouliot, CEO and Broker at Pouliot Real Estate in Maine. New episodes drop bi-weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen.