How do we solve the problems that really matter?
Join host and founder of Economic Architecture, Dr. Stuart Yasgur, in conversation with pioneers at the leading edge of innovation to understand the concrete actions we can take to address the daunting challenges that are shaping our lives.
Through in-depth conversations with innovators, community leaders, experts, and others most proximate to the issues, the Economic Architecture podcast brings us closer to understanding how we can redesign the market and our collective capacity to solve the important problems we face.
In this week’s episode, host Stuart Yasgur sits down with the CEO of Homium, Marcus Martin.
Martin leads an organization working to make homeownership more accessible and provides the opportunity to build wealth through property ownership. Learn more about Homium: https://www.homium.io/ How do we solve problems that really matter?
In this week’s conversation, host Stuart Yasgur sits down with the AVP for Economics and Policy at the Environmental Defense Fund, Carolyn Kousky, to discuss how the increased risk to our homes in the face of extreme weather events is increasing the cost of our insurance, and potentially limiting our ability to be insured altogether.
As conversations around insurance reach the dinner table in homes across the U.S., people are not only worried about making insurance payments by the end of each month, but also about their ability to remain insured as price and risk go up year after year. By facing risks to our homes head on, we can begin to think through ways to keep insurance costs manageable and accessible for those of us who need it most.
Our fire risk in our own homes and communities is not always a discussion of if, but a matter of when.
When it comes to wildfire mitigation, there are many ways we’ve collectively increased our risk profile by failing to understand which variables are most likely to increase our risk of fire. How do we rethink our approach to analyzing risk, and how can we better understand fire risk variables, like the building materials of our homes, to improve the fire safety of our homes and neighborhoods?
After fires struck the Altadena community in January 2025, a group of architects and designers put their heads together to help their neighborhood act towards reclaiming what they lost—their homes.
As the fire spread across 10,000 acres of land with thousands of residential structures destroyed and 19 individuals killed, the trauma of the Altadena and neighboring Los Angeles fires persists over nine months later. In this week’s episode of the Economic Architecture podcast, host Stuart Yasgur sits down with Tim Vordtriede, co-founder of the Altadena Collective, to talk about the process of making a home rebuild more accessible through economies of scale and how an unexpected structural innovation emerged amidst unfathomable loss.
While Baltimore faces a lack of affordable housing, a number of its neighborhoods are experiencing hyper vacancies.
Where many see these as compounding insurmountable problems, Bree Jones sees an opportunity to rebuild. In this week’s episode of Economic Architecture, host Stuart Yasgur sat down with Bree Jones to talk about the opportunities to invest in cold markets with high rates of vacancy, the structural potential to improve housing accessibility from individual investors, and what forging a scalable pathway to home ownership looks like.
When it comes to preventing wildfires, we must understand both the challenges of existing systems and where the real opportunities for action are.
Dave Winnacker, co-founder of XyloPlan, helps us understand more about the current conversation around wildfire mitigation by sharing his work on analyzing and articulating the risk of wildfires at a large scale. As Dave points out, we’re not creating beautiful plans to sit on the shelf.
If enough homeowners implement Zone Zero – a combustible-free zone around their homes – communities will be more resilient to wildfires.
The question is, how do we get enough homeowners to implement Zone Zero quickly enough to make a difference? In this week’s episode of the Economic Architecture Podcast, host Stuart Yasgur sits down with Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority lead Mark Brown to discuss an innovative new approach they are developing that goes to the heart of the problem by enabling homeowners and communities to quickly and effectively implement Zone Zero.
When the barriers to affordable housing feel insurmountable, one way to drive change is to advance a structural innovation that creates permanent affordability.
In this week’s episode of Economic Architecture, host Stuart Yasgur sits down with Ashon Nesbitt, the CEO of Florida Housing Coalition, to discuss Community Land Trusts (CLTs), an approach to homeownership that changes the structure of homeownership itself. Their CLT Certification program has the potential to help CLTs access large pools of capital and begin to go mainstream.
In this week’s episode, Manann Donoghoe, a climate resilience researcher at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. originally from Australia, explores how researchers are thinking through the real, local impacts of climate.
He’s focused on using policy to make large-scale change and finding ways for communities to adapt better—researching methods for risk reduction before and after climate events. Stuart and Manann sit down to discuss where we can bridge the gap between the climate policy and the devastating local impacts of climate disasters; and how individuals without policy expertise can begin to tangibly contribute to the challenges of extreme weather-related events.
When it comes to green building, too often it is assumed that the changes needed for healthier living environments are a luxury for the wealthy. But there shouldn’t be a trade-off between safe housing and affordable housing.
As Krista Egger says, “Climate resilient housing shouldn’t just be best practice, it should be standard practice… The health of the land directly impacts the health of a family.” In the inaugural episode of the Economic Architecture podcast, host Stuart Yasgur sits down with climate resilience expert Krista Egger from Enterprise Community Partners to talk about the intersection of the housing and climate crisis. From the threat-multiplying effects of weather-related incidents to the financial barriers to making properties green, Stuart and Krista explore which structural changes are necessary to create homes resilient enough to give people peace of mind in the face of increased weather-related events and economic insecurity.
Stuart Yasgur brings 15 years of experience in advancing innovations that use market forces to address social challenges at large scale. As the founder and principal of Economic Architecture, Stuart leads a team of researchers and storytellers to foster, design, and build a wider public understanding of structural innovations.