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Who Killed the Starter Home?: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Marina Rubina
Have you seen any starter homes for sale lately? Neither have we. In this podcast, we speak with experts and try to figure out why this humble first home is going extinct. We’ll be exploring if it is the politicians, wielding zoning laws like a murder weapon who killed the starter home? Or maybe the scaredy-cat planners and designers? Or the developers, armed with cookie-cutter plans and corporate indifference? Is it our convoluted tax policy that subsidies homeownership, but puts every tax penalty in the way of creation of the starter homes. Spoiler alert: it’s probably a little of everything. We’ll be peeling back the layers of bureaucracy, bad faith, and bad planning, with stops along the way for affordable housing scandals, ADU success stories, and a passionate plea for building code updates. Join us for a conversation that’s part policy deep-dive, part therapy session for frustrated builders, and entirely a love letter to cities that deserve better.
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- 6 days ago1h 2m
Data Centers, Affordability and the Race to Regulate and Innovate. Conversation with Abraham Silverman
In this episode, I spoke with Abe Silverman, an energy researcher at Johns Hopkins and a former federal and state regulator. We dig into why data centers matter to anyone who pays an electric bill. Even though data centers have been around for a long time, a new wave of AI data centers is here. Each year they add electricity demand equal to a city the size of Philadelphia, and the grid is running closer to the red line than ever. Abe explains how this affects grid infrastructure, who ends up paying for the build-out, and why it's so frustrating that there's no federal plan, which leaves states to navigate it on their own. There's also reason for optimism. Data centers can be required to be flexible, to pay taxes that benefit communities, and to help fund upgrades to our aging electric grid. With innovation, they could become better neighbors, and we could end up with updated infrastructure paid for by the companies driving the demand.
- 1 weeks ago55 min
Should We Bring Co-Living Back? Conversation with Samuel Hooper
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.
- 2 weeks ago7 min
A Phenomenal Place to Live. No Car Needed. Conversation with Robert Ciatto
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.
- 3 weeks ago40 min
Luck Is Not a Housing Policy. Conversation with Charlotte Hayden.
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.
- Oct 9, 202643 min
It's All the Same Crisis: Housing, Climate, Transit. Conversation with Peter Harrison
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.
- Oct 2, 202651 min
The Income of Homeowners: The Rent You Don't Pay. Conversation with Richard Green
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.
- Sep 25, 202659 min
The Toolbox We Haven't Used Yet. Conversation with Steven Goldin
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?
- Sep 18, 202653 min
Small Lots, Big Difference. Townhomes Work Everywhere. Conversation with Dominic Behrens
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/
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About Who Killed the Starter Home?
Have you seen any starter homes for sale lately? Neither have we. In this podcast, we speak with experts and try to figure out why this humble first home is going extinct. We’ll be exploring if it is the politicians, wielding zoning laws like a murder weapon who killed the starter home? Or maybe the scaredy-cat planners and designers? Or the developers, armed with cookie-cutter plans and corporate indifference? Is it our convoluted tax policy that subsidies homeownership, but puts every tax penalty in the way of creation of the starter homes. Spoiler alert: it’s probably a little of everything. We’ll be peeling back the layers of bureaucracy, bad faith, and bad planning, with stops along the way for affordable housing scandals, ADU success stories, and a passionate plea for building code updates. Join us for a conversation that’s part policy deep-dive, part therapy session for frustrated builders, and entirely a love letter to cities that deserve better.
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