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.