Technology, Connected - The Housing Market Was Built for a World That’s Gone

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

Median US income: $68,000.Median home price: $440,000.The math doesn't work.Only 13% of Americans earn a salary. Everyone else gets paid hourly or hustles in the gig economy. Yet housing policy assumes stable W-2 income, 20% down payments, and 30-year mortgages.The system is built to extract value, not create stability.Chris Moeller joins Mark and Jeremy to talk about an alternative: stable living.Here's what's broken:"Affordable housing" sounds nice. But it runs on outdated subsidies, wage assumptions from the 1970s, and ownership models designed to extract profit. Developers flip. Investors extract. Renters get priced out. First-time buyers can't enter.Nobody wins except capital.Stable living flips the model:- Separate land from structures (land trusts own the land, residents own the building)- Long-term security instead of short-term yield (no flipping, no speculation)- Impact capital instead of extractive finance (returns that don't require displacement)- Industrialized construction (modular, faster, cheaper)- Better coordination technology (reduce waste, speed up builds)The goal isn't homeownership. It's housing security.Right now, housing is treated as an investment vehicle. Your home appreciates, you build wealth. Great—if you already own. Catastrophic if you're trying to enter the market.We talk about:- Why "affordable housing" programs fail (wage assumptions, subsidy gaps, developer incentives)- How land trusts work (Vienna's model, community ownership)- What impact capital means (patient investors, social returns)- Why modular construction isn't "cheap"—it's efficient- Whether stable living can scale (or if it's just theory)Chris's point: Housing became financialized. We turned shelter—a basic human need—into an asset class. Private equity owns 800,000 single-family homes. Airbnb removed 300,000 units from rental markets. Zoning prevents new supply.The result: You can't afford to live where you work.Stable living isn't utopian. It's pragmatic. Separate speculation from shelter. Build for people who live there, not investors who don't.If you're priced out, paying half your income in rent, or wondering why starter homes disappeared, this episode explains the system—and the alternative.---Guest: Chris MoellerTopics: Housing crisis, affordable housing, stable living, land trusts, impact capital, modular construction, real estate, financializationModels discussed: Vienna housing, community land trusts, resident ownershipStats: Median income $68K, median home price $440K, 13% salary workersPlease enjoy the show.And remember: Stay curious. Be disruptive. Keep Thinking on Paper.Cheers, Mark & JeremyPS: Please subscribe. It’s the best way you can help other curious minds find our channel.--Other ways to connect with us:⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: [e-mail]--Timestamps(00:00) Trailer(03:19) Challenges of Homeownership(05:46) The Housing Market Dynamics(08:29) Technology's Role in Housing Solutions(10:41) Innovations in Construction(12:29) Financing Housing for All(15:06) Reimagining Ownership Models(16:30) Technology's Role in Food Access and Coordination(18:43) Adaptive Reuse in Real Estate and Community Development(19:58) Commercial Real Estate Challenges Post-COVID(23:15) Infrastructure Needs for Sustainable Living(25:31) Global Community and Local Solutions(26:45) Stable Living for Civil Servants and Community Heroes(28:20) Creating Stability and Long-Term Impact

Our housing systems are not really actually circular or regenerative. Our food systems are industrialized. They're really focusing more on GDP and export. Our clothing is synthetic, and it's kind of becoming a sustainability issues. If there's a dependency on certificates and a massive government subsidy to keep you there, and it's a rental model, there's no opportunity for what I like to think of as stability or even upward mobility because the ownership model is completely missing. And it's getting harder.

And it's actually getting, in my opinion, irresponsible. It's harder and harder to have 20% to put down on a 30-year fixed-term mortgage to be well-qualified. We can build a better home in a factory. And we're proving that with our first project in Hudson, North Carolina. And that's where I've chosen to focus at least the next decade of my career is really talking about, like, the purity and the natural regenerative process of physiological needs. And what I realized was that none of that messaging was landing.

It was just wasn't resonating. It was an echo chamber of conversation. So I started kind of coming back down to like what are the basic things we need to get by, right? And what's interesting is that housing, you know, food, shelter, clothing, these things in a lot of developing countries

are actually starting to work against us in a lot of ways. Our housing systems are not really actually circular or regenerative. Our food systems are industrialized. They're really focusing more on GDP and export. Our clothing is synthetic and it's kind of becoming a sustainability issue. So we don't really need to go very far outside of those physiological needs that Maslow talked about to start solving for stability. And that's where I've chosen to focus at least the next decade of my career is really talking about like the pure.

and the natural regenerative process of physiological needs. What do you mean by the hashtag stable living? In our first pathway communities model right now, we're just trying to tackle a couple of things. One, obviously, people talk about affordable housing, which is only as good as its occupants and only as good as the ownership model that's created. There's a dependency on certificates and a massive government subsidies. to keep you there, and it's a rental model, there's no opportunity for what I like to think of as stability or even upward mobility because the ownership model is completely missing.

We always use the example of renting a car, not treating it maybe as well on a boy's trip or, you know, go into a hotel and turn the air conditioning in real low and living the lights on when you leave. You know, that relationship with that asset or that opportunity to engage in that is just sort of contractual and it's short term. But when we have an ownership perspective on something, we take care of something a little bit more. So stable living to me is starting to bring that ownership model into all the things, all housing, food, water, shelter, clothing,

and really kind of proliferate this concept of ownership. Homeownership is a key piece to that, is it not? Yeah, and it's getting harder. And it's actually getting, in my opinion, opinion irresponsible. You know, it's harder and harder to have 20% to put down on a 30-year fixed-term mortgage to be well-qualified. That's one part. The other part is that wage right now, in America anyways, trailing 60%. So there's a lot of numbers out there right now. The average salary right now in America is $68,000. I'm sorry, the median income. The median home price is about

$440,000. So, you know, just to get to that opportunity to buy that first home, you are going to be strapping into a long-term commitment for sure. And it doesn't pay respect to things like insurance that go up and taxes that go up, plus the average home in America is 41 years old. So you already have maintenance costs associated with that ownership model. So just getting to that ownership perspective now, especially if you're saddled with debt from school, you haven't even thought about having kids yet. You have probably don't, you probably got an old car. If you're anything like me getting out of college, you started kind of with nothing.

You know, getting to the point where we have security or safety nets just seems like such a far leap off of that bottom plateau. Do you have any data on how many people, what percentage of the American population are homeowners versus renters? I don't, but I do know this. Only 13% of the United States population has a salary, which is crazy. 13. 13, 1, 3%. So, you know, most of the folks that work in the United States now are either gig or contract or... Wow, that's a staggering number, man. 13%.

Crazy facts, 13%. The other crazy fact is that our home inventory is so old. We're going to have this great resurgence real soon because the baby boomers are going to age out of their homes. But you know what that means. We're going to have an inventory of product that's on the market that goes back to as is buyer beware. There's a tidal wave coming in a lot of ways in America because we had that population boom in the 40s postwar. And that population boom is aging, which is starting to impact a lot of things, right? A lot of our systems.

I never really thought about to you. Just mentioned it, Chris, is the. The boomer generation homes largely are massive and just way bigger than people. It's like when your parents start getting rid of their old giant clunky furniture. And they're like, hey, do you want this? I'm like, no, it weighs 40,000 pounds. And, you know, it's dark wood and maybe a little depressing. but these homes are like probably 3,000, 4,000, 5, 6,000 square foot homes where like it's an inventory mismatch, right?

For what people? The price tag is corresponds to that size. So who buys up all of these homes when they become available? It's the investment companies, the VCs, and then they're rented out on booking.com and Airbnb. And the problem is exacerbated more. We're back to extraction. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. There are micro economies, right? So short term, long term, private equity, venture capital, you know, these are all different micro economies that are happening inside of the housing market. Affordable housing is its own microeconomy. And it works off of a very different model, area median income and needs as defined by affordability, as defined by the federal government. But the reality is those numbers are so archaic and those models are so archaic that quite frankly, everybody right now qualifies for a

affordability because life isn't really affordable. So, you know, what's happening is everything is becoming your immediate income and everything is becoming a requirement for, you know, a qualification anyway for aid. And that's not good, right? We're not going to be able to spend our way out of this. We're going to have to repurpose or rethink another microeconomy inside of housing. first, again, food, shelter, air, water, that physiological need level, that can get to stable living. Once we have stable living, we can start to think about security. We can start to think about stability and finances and safety and then move our way up to love and belonging and esteem. But like, we're not at sustainable. So that word was buried along with affordable at our board retreat a few months ago.

I buried two words, literally at our farm, took the words, dug a hole, buried. And the first word was sustainability because we're not, this isn't a place that we want to sustain currently unless we're at the top of the triangle. If we're at self-actualization, yes, we want to sustain. But most aren't. There's 8 billion people on the planet. The second one is affordability because I think it's too subjective. Can technology be used to point to this housing problem and solve it? And if so, how?

So another hashtag you see me use a lot as total tendency. I'm a recovering office developer, and we used to talk about tenants and tenancy all the time. And what was working with those micro economies was that an office term would be five to seven years. After five to seven years, we would completely gut the environment and come back and build it again, right? So it was this amazing volatility machine inside of the building that just created this economic engine, so to speak. And, you know, really, we don't do that with our homes at all. We buy a house. We have a 30 year fixed. We might do an addition. We might put some cosmetic upgrades to something, a new roof maintenance. But then 30 years later, by and large, it looks exactly the same. So a long way of getting to the technology part. Total tenancy is about technology. It's about how can we move more towards, if we're going to try to get to stable living, can we use better money? You know, we hear the word stable coin, right? So we know that a lot of the technology. that's persistent and interoperable in decentralized finance is just better because it's disintermediated.

So there's efficiencies associated with it. But then also in the U.S. now we've got the Genius Act and the Clarity Act that are starting to define beyond commodities into real world assets. So I think there's a huge future in blockchain technology, decentralized finance, even stable coins and cryptocurrency to help push. along some of these efficiencies, as long as we don't extract that value and profit, and we return that efficiency back to a long-term stable model. So I don't know if you saw it was a few last week that China had 36 or something, thousand drones all working together in a swarm to create a big screen over it. And they were talking about they could use this robotic drone technology to build infrastructure,

to build houses. Do you see any proof of these cutting-edge robotic technologies being used to bring down the cost of housing to speed up the production of the house? Not to that level, not to the abstraction of, like, to the example that you just gave, but industrialized construction is something that we are absolutely using. We can build a better home in a factory. And we're proving that with our first project in Hudson, North Carolina, which hopefully we'll be announcing very, very soon.

You know, the rest of the world really does develop and build mostly homes and factories. The United States really still cobbles a lot of things together in terms of material sticks delivered out to the woods. And then the crews come out and then they assemble. And over a year and a half time or more, it turns into a home. The reality is we can do a lot of that with better quality control, with better materials management, with better project management inside of a controlled environment. So there's a huge difference between building with 40,000 drones into some, you know, amazing object that's a real world asset versus bringing a bunch of guys into an interior of a factory

and building the same way, you know, under one roof. And I think the middle of that is really where the most important innovation is happening right now and a lot of the roboticized processes because once we figure out that repetitive motion and action and we can train ML to know that everything is precisely done, we're moving into a world where Henry Ford did in the early teens, right? We're going to start to be able to build quality housing across an assembly line process. The drone thing that you referenced, Mark,

I think about it solving the coordination problem, right? I think the bigger challenge, Chris, to me, is how do we unlock access to that for people that don't have tradition? I almost think about the coordination problem applied to how people get financing for projects like that and how those modes kind of collapse into smaller amounts instead of being these large unattainable $400,000 loans for people. Like, what could that look like? So responsible finance is a big part of this.

In impact, it's going to take some impact investing to create a healthier financial model around housing. So let me start by telling you some of our secret sauce. Community land grants and deed restrictions are huge. that's a page from the playbook of private equity that we're seeing a lot. Can you explain those two? Yeah, sure. Separating the land and having a land owner or a land grant from the structure itself.

So when you rent an apartment or buy a condominium, you are in the structure and you are, you know, either renting or owning that structure, but you're not renting or you don't own the land below it. So you can, you can on a community deed or on a community. land trust, you can find impact investors that are foundations that have or family office that have long-term thinking in mind that are saying, I have this money, I have this resource. How can I do good with it? How can I do good to, you know, how can I do well to do good? And one of the responses that I have for that is impact investment into community land grants. You can go in and buy a ton of land, sink your money in for a hundred year lease and let

me build on top of it. And then create an ownership model for those assets, for those tenants, for those community members to own just the structure. And decoupling the land from the structure gives back all that value, right? So now they're not burdened with the cost of the land and the cost of the structure a la single family home. So that's one way. The deed restriction is another one.

And the reason that we're going down that path is habitat for human. did this so well. When those habitat owners want to sell and move, they're obligated to sell back to habitat. If they put that house on the open market, it would be subject to traditional market dynamics. So it restricts the actual value of the home in perpetuity. So it's counterintuitive, but it maintains that affordability over a longer period of time. What's the disadvantage of that? Is there a disadvantage to that? Capitalism. Yeah, capitalism.

And, you know, why would you want to do that? And, you know, your home is how you get, you know, wealthy. And that's where, you know, your equity is locked into that. So what we have to do is also introduce new vehicles of investment and new opportunities to make money in other ways. You know, the financial planners in my life that have been consulting into our stable living model, you know, we shouldn't be spending more than 25% of our gross income on our housing. And we are. At some age in place, so the boomers are spending 50, 60, 70% right now.

You know, as their income continues to go down over time because they're simply receiving benefits in their retirement, their retirement starts to run out. You know, all of a sudden, they're spending more and more trying to maintain their stability. So that's the obvious. I think that if we can start to reimame, imagine a stable living model that's less extractive as it relates to housing, I think that

would be a good start. What can tech do to coordinate better? It's a coordination problem. So how do we coordinate better to make sure there's, you know, I know people are doing it, but not at scale. I'll speak to it again with our project of Hudson Commons. We have a community kitchen as part of our amenity space. So there's an old, you know, grandma's 2,600 square foot single-story, Burke Ranch

house on the property. and we were getting ready to imagine this project, everybody scrapped it off the plans. And I was like, we're not scrapping that house. They said, what do you mean? I said, we're going to reimagine Grandma's house as the future. And they said, what do you mean? I said, we're going to take that brick ranch

and we're going to turn it into different use cases inside of that house. We're not going to use it as a single family home. We're going to turn the kitchen into a community kitchen. We're going to do industrialized stainless steel so that we can do prep work in there. We can bring in folks to talk about food. We can bring in a chef. if we can bring in a local producer, whatever it might be. We're going to take the living room, which is the heart of the home with the hearth,

and we're going to turn that into a co-working space. Everybody can get out of their apartment or their unit, and they can come meet somewhere to do some heads-down work. And we're going to take the three bedrooms, and we're going to use the short-term rental model so that when Jeremy comes to visit, because he's got a project in Charlotte, he can crash in one of those places because I have access to it on the app. Right.

So that home is being reimagined. The technology that it takes to coordinate, that is the answer to your question, right? I think. And we get into the better food systems by creating a CSA for an entire community. We have 56 units in that, in that our property on three acres. We estimate that we'll probably have anywhere between 80 and 100 residents on that three acres. So now all of a sudden I can produce protein and and veg from two, or, and dairy from three of our small local producers. They can produce, they can provide us. food at one centralized location, and they don't have to worry about going to seven farmers markets

during the week to try to make 300 bucks at each one. So that disintermediation through technology and the coordination piece is super important to getting to better shelter, better food, better water, better air. And just making that our baseline is our goal. Do you see that model working in high density, inner city housing complexes? Not as well. And mostly because that missing middle product. So a lot of times when we're talking about the missing middle, there's two different perspectives. One is missing middle class, like the middle class is shrinking. That's happening too. But they share that terminology in real estate. The missing middle is actually a product type. So 500 square foot efficiency studio apartment doesn't, our studio doesn't really

exist in rural America. It does exist in the city in many forms from impoverished. all the way up to like super fancy building. So that missing middle product is upward mobility, 500 square feet, 750 square feet, two bedroom townhouse walkout, three bedroom walkout family home. All of that isn't going to be incorporated into our community so that we can provide the opportunity to sort of quote, quote,

move up as life gets more complex. So you mentioned being a recovering office developer. How would you apply your model? that you're testing here to like 10 floors of an office building? Or could you? Yeah, it doesn't work for us. It doesn't work for a lot of people. It works for luxury.

It works for experience. If you've got a $3 million start and a $15 million penhouse, those buildings were not built that way. We like air. We like walkout areas. We like window lines in our homes. Those buildings are big glass boxes that are sealed. So kind of very tough to take a high rise, central business district high rise and turn it into housing.

Definitely not affordable housing without massive subsidies because it's a very expensive lift. Those buildings were built for different functions. Where there is big opportunity, Jeremy, is in the outskirts, 25 miles, 35 miles outside of town where there's a three-story, four-building office park that is, kind of run down. It's got the basic infrastructure for plumbing. It's got, or for water, for utilities. And it's steel and concrete, three-story mid-rise. There's opportunity there because the cost basis is lower. Those small businesses are not renting small offices to five, seven thousand square foot spaces as much because they're working this way. So there's a huge opportunity for adaptive reuse. But the central business district, as I mentioned already, has,

a missing middle product. They have options for people to live in a 500 square foot studio or a three-bedroom walkout. So for our model, we see a bigger opportunity at the fringe of the city, really almost more so even out into the rural towns that have a main street, the hallmark movie towns of America. Are lease rates down far enough to make any kind of economic viability for a move for an owner of that building to do something different or no? It's a mess. Capital markets are a mess. And there's a future, you know, if people are looking at the horizon, they're looking at the supply

demand curve and realizing we have a ton of supply and the demand is going to wane over time because people are going to figure out remote distributed hybrid work models. So what's happening really right now is that distressed debt is going out to capital markets and it's going to auction off. So there'll be a huge opportunity, I think, for opportunistic infills.

to read adaptive reuse, to rethink and reimagine a lot of these assets in the future. But to do it with the affordability lens, a la Maslow's, you know, physiological needs, they just, those two forces don't usually get along very well because capitalism tends to be, how do we maximize profit and IRR for the GPLP? And affordability tends to be a little bit too far on the how do we give it away, how do we give a roof over someone's head and let them stay here without an opportunity for ownership? So the middle is the hard part. That's, to me, that's stability.

Okay. So you move it out, you know, to the outskirts, 20, 30, 40 miles from the city. Certain people live in the city because of proximity to work. So now you have a transportation issue. I'm not saying it's all great stuff, but I'm just thinking, okay, that's awesome. But how do we solve this next piece of the puzzle? It's a great question. And, you know, infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure.

So if you look at the biggest reits, if you look at the wealthiest people, the people who are making the biggest plays right now, they're all investing in infrastructure. So I like to think that our pathway community's model takes process and turns it into product and then turns that product into technology so that we can drive the cost down over time. What I'm aiming for is that stable living becomes infrastructure and it's investable as infrastructure. That takes a lot to get there. You have to have, for example, a microgrid, right, without the capacity and distribution issues associated with our utilities. I'm going to put 56 dwelling units now where there were two. Our infrastructure and the utility is freaking out saying, man, we're going to have to, like, put up a substation. We're going to put in a microgrid.

So that's infrastructure investment. Rural Broadbred. Space-based solar power, microgrid? Yeah, suffering. He's based. Sovereign power. Maybe. You know, five years, maybe. Sure.

So we're going to start with zero to one, figure it out. It'll probably be wrong or obsolete. That's okay. The infrastructure will be in place. Process the product, product to technology drive costs down. Rural broadband's huge. You know, that infrastructure in the stability of an internet for us right now. Again, privileged.

We're still online. We're streaming probably. We're at high def. I can hear you and see you well. It's because I have a stable internet connection, drive fiber to the premise. Everybody in this world should have fiber to the premise, in my opinion. Access to information can help us get past so many hurdles. You can be underprivileged and have a curiosity and have access to information and do fine.

But if you're underprivileged and you don't have access to information, then you're going to find something else to occupy your time. It's probably not going to be productive. I love this ground-up grassroots community-driven solution. Are you alone? Who else is doing what you're doing? Is this happening in every American city? Is this happening across Europe? Is this something that can work in the Sudan as well as it can in Pittsburgh?

You know, it reminds me those old shirts, right? Think globally, drink locally. So right now we're definitely drinking locally. But so is everybody else. So the network note effect is starting to take place where we have a community of people around our process of pathway communities and Hudson Commons and stable living. And all of a sudden, we're hearing from another community that's in Gratz. And they've been thinking this through because their process and their affordable housing models are totally different than ours. And they can relate to they have stable shelter, but they might have inefficiencies or instability with their food system.

So they're all of a sudden tied to interesting conversations. By taking that concept of affordable housing and turning it into stable living, we're now having great conversations with a lot of different network node effect people. And it's growing sort of exponentially, which is exactly what we wanted to do. Like, we're not going to nail all of it, but we're going to focus on stable living instead of just affordable housing. Paint me a character. Who is this going to serve? what do they do for work?

How much do they make? Talk me through. Give me a little character rep of this. I'm glad you asked that. So I always say that COVID cracked the windshield, but Hurricane Helene smashed the glass. You know, I was very heavily involved in the office product before COVID. I realized pretty quickly with the way that those buildings were built and the way that we shared indoor air quality, they were going to be short-lived. So I started sort of exploring other opportunities.

the quick answer to your question, Jeremy, is civil servants. So our model is going to be built specifically around those who have chosen to serve their communities first. So we're qualifying that currently loosely as teachers, nurses, police fire, medic first responders. But at the end of the day, it's folks who have chosen to give to their communities or serve their communities more so than participate in traditional economic, and follow, you know, corporate structure and leadership growth and that kind of thing. So that's what we're doing. And that's why we're teaming up with different towns around the country because they love that story of how can we create workforce development to attract and retain the right talent.

And the right talent being, we can't get people to drive our ambulances. We can't get people to stay in schools long enough to teach. And we can't get nurses to stay here to take care of our elderly because they can't afford to be here. So workforce development through civil service for us. upward mobility is absolutely our ICP. Chris, thank you. As with all, I guess, the closer from Kevin Kelly, what do we want humans to be?

And how does technology help us get there? Yeah, I want stability more than anything else. I just want to create that physiological level. You know, I was privileged enough to be brought into this world with love and belonging already on the third run. And I think that there's a way for us to sort of discover. and revisit those physiological needs and get that stabilized. That's what I'm working on.

That's my, I won't use the L word, because legacy's not what I'm doing. What we're doing is really trying to build the lawn now. I love it. Thank you. Thank you, guys. I enjoyed this. Be destructive.

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