Summer Listening
Two recent podcast appearances
This summer I’ve taken a break from work (for the first time since high school!), and have really been enjoying the chance to spend more time with my family, and to do some personal projects just for fun. As part of that, I’ve been writing less1, but I’ve been able to record a few podcasts recently, and I’m happy to share those with y’all today:
Upzoned — The Housing Crisis isn’t moving one direction
On this podcast I joined Charles Marohn and Jeff Fong to talk about a new study out of Australia called “The role of price spillovers in the Australian housing crisis: A two-market analysis.”
To simplify a bit, the study claims that there is not a single housing market, but rather there are two distinct markets: single family homes, and everything else. The study looks at house price movements in Australia and concludes that the single family house market “sets the price,” and everything else follows, therefore construction of other kinds of housing (ie. apartments) won’t improve affordability. The study also highlights the impact of spillover from more expensive cities to less expensive, claiming that price increases (particularly in Sydney) directly led to price increases elsewhere.
It’s an interesting claim, and I think we had a great discussion about it. As a preview, I’ll say I’m very sympathetic to the idea that housing is not a commodity and not all homes are fungible. I tend to focus on geography — most people have to live where they work, therefore the price of housing in Georgetown, Texas and Georgetown, Colorado should not really affect each other. But, I’ve seen and lived the spillover experience, watching friends and neighbors take their life savings out of San Francisco and use it to move elsewhere, which can and does affect prices in the places people move.
Where Chuck, Jeff, and I all strongly agree is that the financial system is the glue that binds all of this together, and that we have to understand both the supply and demand for shelter and how we finance housing to make sense of the world today.
Who Killed the Starter Home? — Calibrating Caution and Unlocking Housing Choices
This podcast was my first time meeting Marina Rubina, an architect and developer based in Princeton, New Jersey. As a side note, Marina’s podcast is the sort of humble, low-key awesome podcast I love discovering. She’s interviewed a great list of people, and her format is mostly to ask a few interesting questions and give them space to think. If, like me, you enjoy that kind of podcast, this one might be worth subscribing.
Marina and I talked about whether developers are evil (no!) and why it’s so hard to build anything other than McMansions and “Five over ones.” We discussed Denver’s upcoming Unlocking Housing Choices program, and how that aims to increase housing supply in Denver while stabilizing prices. We talked about Strong Towns and “Abundance,” the nuance between these philosophies, and the ideas of proportionality and state capacity. We closed Marina’s idea for a game to help communities understand tradeoffs and make better informed decisions.
A nerdy aside for other housing advocates: Most Americans are terrified of the word “density,” and we managed to have a pretty long discussion about what urban planners would call “density” in Denver without actually saying the “d-word.”2 In my experience, Americans are not actually afraid of density, they quite like it!3 But they have a set of ideas about the word “density” that are deeply engrained, so deep that I don’t think we should expect to ever root them out. So if we talk about something like “little cottages” or “a duplex” or a “Main Street shop with an apartment upstairs” people react very differently than if you say something planner-ish like “we need to allow higher density.” After re-listening to the podcast, I was pleasantly surprised at the level of conversation we were able to have without using planner-ish vocabulary.
Well, writing less on Substack.
If I recall correctly, Marina might have said it once, and I don’t think I did.
See also: every American Main Street.