Who Killed the Starter Home?

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.

In this episode, Justin Hollander, professor of urban & environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, joins us — and yes, he's also planned a new town on Mars, underground bike tunnels included.

Back on Earth, He shares that planners are usually taught to contain and densify existing places and by any means block expansion. The reality is that economic forces make development ooze out anyway, and it ends up as a sprawling suburbs that delivers somewhat affordable homes while making no real livable places. Justin makes the case that if we acknowledge this reality, we can actually plan new towns that are walkable, transit-friendly, and have community structure that defines a real place people would enjoy and still have starter homes. Maybe we don't need to move to Mars to bike to school after all.

In this episode, research attorney with YIMBY Law Jack Farrell came back to the podcast to walk us through the newly passed Road to Housing Act.

This sprawling, three hundred eighty-one-page bill is made up of small technical fixes. For Jack, that's a good sign: the sheer number of granular changes suggests that the authors understand how housing programs work on the ground.

We cover the highlights: grant programs that now prioritize ADUs, missing middle housing, and single-stair reform; a fix that makes manufactured homes cheaper to build; the unlocking of Community Development Block Grant funds for affordable housing; and a change that cuts duplicate inspections for properties using multiple federal funding sources. We also dig into the bill's attempt to cap how many single-family homes big institutional investors can own — and why the data suggests Wall Street landlords aren't the main cause of high home prices. And, for a complete fun fact — there is a provision inside a housing bill that has nothing to do with housing: a ban on the U.S. ever creating its own central bank digital currency.

For decades, local zoning rules kept towns like Santa Barbara completely stuck, resulting in virtually zero new housing production. Then, the state of California stepped in.

In this episode, architect and housing advocate Ellen Bildsten joins us to share firsthand insights from the frontlines of California's housing revolution. We walk through how a massive wave of statewide legislation bypassed restrictive local zoning to unlock unprecedented housing opportunities—from the initial accessory dwelling unit (ADU) breakthrough to radical new laws allowing single-family lots to be subdivided into multiple ownership opportunities.

We discuss the critical "push-pull" of designing for density in highly traditional communities, the financial realities of infill vs. large-scale multifamily projects, and Ellen's dream of transforming a tourist-centered downtown into a walkable, vibrant, and authentic transit-oriented neighborhood.

It is a common story of high-demand towns using zoning to keep housing supply from meeting demand with low- and moderate-income families being pushed out.

In this episode, New Jersey's preeminent housing planner Creigh Rahenkamp does a deep dive on our state's half-century attempt to overcome exclusionary zoning. After hearing my recent conversation with Jason Sorens, whose research found no measurable increase in overall housing production, Creigh was furious at what he saw as a mischaracterization of the Mount Laurel doctrine.

As we dig in, however, something interesting emerges: the two of them agree on far more than it first appears. Both agree that Mount Laurel has increased the number of deed-restricted affordable units, but that New Jersey is nowhere near building enough homes compared to real demand. And both point to the same culprit for why: local rules continue to exclude, and complex requirements and approvals run up against economic constraints, making projects impossible.

Where they split is on what the Mount Laurel doctrine is. Sorens evaluates it as a housing production program. Rahenkamp insists it was never that — it's a rezoning doctrine, with deed-restricted units as the mechanism to capture some of the value that zoning had trapped, for the benefit of low- and moderate-income residents.