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.

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.