Tuesday, March 24, 2026
I’ve been thinking about the conversation I recently had with Ed Pinto, Co-Director of the Housing Center at the American Enterprise Institute.
It stayed with me longer than most; because it challenged something I think many of us have started to accept as a given. That the housing supply problem is so complicated, so layered, so multi-faceted that meaningful progress and repair is going to take decades, if it happens at all. We hear versions of that everywhere. And over time, it starts to sound true.
But as you can hear in our Keys to Real Estate episodes, by the time Ed and I neared the end of our conversation, I found myself wondering if we are all overcomplicating something that might be much more straightforward than we realize.
One of the things Pinto makes crystal clear is that we keep focusing on the wrong side of the equation. We promote ways to help more people buy homes: lower rates, more flexible underwriting, subsidies, credits. Those ideas can help someone at the margin, but they don’t add even one single house to the market supply. And when supply doesn’t change, the macro-outcomes don’t change either. That’s not a political observation, it’s just math.
Ed talked in practical, on-the-ground terms. And what struck me is that the ideas weren’t sweeping or abstract. In some cases, they felt almost obvious once you heard them.
He kept coming back to one concept in particular: small lot, small lot, small lot. Which sounds overly simple at first, but the more you sit with it, the more it reframes things. If land is one of the biggest drivers of cost (and it is) then everything that requires larger lots pushes prices higher. And everything that allows smaller lots opens the door to more attainable housing. Not tiny homes or experimental concepts, but smaller, functional, family-sized homes that are simply legal to build.
If smaller lots are allowed, what else becomes possible? What happens if a single lot can hold more than one home? What if existing lots can be subdivided in ways that are currently restricted? What if townhomes aren’t treated as an exception in so many markets? None of that requires new land. It requires different decisions about land we already have, and a willingness to allow incremental change instead of preserving everything exactly as it is.
That same line of thinking shows up in how we treat other types of land as well. In many places, it’s still difficult to build housing in areas that are already for development and allow for almost everything except housing: commercial corridors, light industrial zones, areas with infrastructure and proximity to jobs. Over time, we’ve separated uses so completely that we’ve made it harder to solve the very problem we’re trying to address.
A few more of Ed’s ideas stood out because they had nothing to do with building at all. They were about using what already exists more effectively. The way tax policy can discourage movement, even when someone’s housing needs have changed. The amount of unused space sitting in homes across the country. None of these ideas, on their own, change the entire picture. But they point to something important: there is more flexibility in the system than we tend to recognize.
And then there’s the piece that tends to draw the strongest initial reaction, federal land. Not national parks or protected areas, but a very small portion of land already managed by the federal government, in places where development is already occurring. When Ed described it, it sounded less like a dramatic, radical, fringe proposal and more like a continuation of something familiar; a modern version of expansion, approached thoughtfully and in targeted ways.
What could we do with land, given as a grant, and treated as starting capital for a whole new group of buyers? We’ve done this before; we know it works.
What ties all of this together is that none of it depends on a single, sweeping solution. It’s a set of levers that, taken individually, don’t feel especially earth-shattering. But taken together, they begin to form real solutions. Smaller lots. More flexibility within existing lots. Allowing housing where it already makes sense. Using land and space, more efficiently. Remembering that land is capital and treating it as such.
I won’t try to walk through all three podcast episodes here. They’re better heard in full, especially if you’re trying to sort through what’s real, what’s noise, and what might actually move things forward. But I will say this, if you’ve been feeling like this problem is stuck, it may be worth revisiting the assumptions underneath that feeling. Because once you start to question those, a different set of possibilities comes into view. And that has a way of changing how you engage in the conversations that are starting to crop up all around us. And that will be with us at least through the next couple of election cycles.
We’re consolidating coverage for you in our new Housing Inventory & Affordability Watch Library here.
You can catch up on Ed’s episodes of Keys to Real Estate starting here.
Until Next Time,
Mary Schuster
Chief Knowledge Officer
October Research, LLC