Who Killed the Starter Home?

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. 

In this episode, I spoke with Taizo Yamamoto, principal of Yamamoto Architects. They creating beautiful, sustainable housing in Vancouver. He shares how the flexibility of Vancouver’s zoning allows for innovative and green projects. I loved learning about mass timber structures and other ideas that could help create more sustainable buildings and vibrant neighborhoods.  

In this episode, I spoke with Alain Bertaud, urban economist and author of Order Without Design, whose career spans more than half a century planning cities across the globe, from communist systems to market economies. The incredible stories he shares illustrate why we are forced to consume more land and space, where the real hidden costs lie, and why common sense so often disappears in housing policy. Note: About 20 minutes into the recording, we experienced a technical issue that caused some audio inconsistencies. Our apologies, and thank you for sticking with us.

In this episode, I speak with Mike Hathorne, author of the new book The Great Housing Reversal and the New American Dream. We talk about how market signals are clear about the kinds of homes people actually want to live in, yet outdated zoning and rigid development models continue to deliver the opposite. If we want affordable, walkable, human-scale neighborhoods again, we have to start listening to the market instead of silencing it.