Who Killed the Starter Home?

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.

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.