Who Killed the Starter Home?

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.

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?

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/

In this episode, Raisa Rubin-Stankiewicz joins us. She is the policy director of the New Jersey Coalition to End Homelessness. And she's here with some hard numbers. Unsheltered homelessness in New Jersey is up 61 percent from last year. For every one person who gets housed, almost three people become homeless. Yet Raisa has good news: in under two years, New Jersey got veterans' homelessness to what's called "functional zero." More veterans are getting housed than are becoming homeless. It took real money and real coordination, but it proves that this crisis isn't inevitable. We talk about what's broken, what's working, and what coalitions we can build and actions we can take to solve this staggering crisis.

In this episode, Tara Paxton joins us at the start of what she calls her "Act Two." She spent nearly thirty years on the municipal side of planning, most recently as planning director in Brick Township here in New Jersey where this past June, she finished working on Brick’s state's fourth round of affordable housing compliance. 

Now Tara is stepping away from municipal government to create something new: an educational and private practice (https://paxtonplanninggroup.com/) built around the gaps she saw up close for three decades. Tara has a term for the real obstacle she kept running into. It’s not “Not in My Back Yard” movement, but something she calls FOOMI, fear of others moving in and changing the familiar quality of life. 

Her solutions are not more regulation. It's education. She walks us through her plan to launch a new organization, modeled on Philadelphia's Citizen Planner Institute. The goal: teach residents the actual civics of planning. What a board can and can't legally do. Why "no" isn't always on the table. How to move residents from reflexively objecting to a project, toward contributing to shaping their town's future, one that meets the needs we all have at different stages of life.