The Podcast

In this episode, co-founders Jodi Anderson Jr. and Ryan Brennan share their story of creating Rézme—an app designed to help companies adopt more equitable hiring processes by using smarter technology and data.

In this week’s episode, Nancy Watkins, a principal at Milliman Inc., talks through the modern landscape of wildfire mitigation and how data can help us better understand the complexities of the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) so we can better understand risk and fortify communities against wildfires. Host Stuart Yasgur and Nancy Watkins explore how wildfire prevention may create new problems and how the insurance industry doesn’t always recognize homeowners who are hardening their homes to keep their individual homes and community safe.

The criminal legal system creates records of prior interaction that impact the lives of more than 70 million people in the US, and a series of mythologies make it harder for them to access stable employment and housing. In this inaugural podcast episode focused on Fair Chance Hiring, Professor Shawn Bushway shares a powerful aspect of human nature that we’re often inclined to overlook: people change.

In this week’s episode, we dive into the potential for innovating the insurance market with Charlie Sidoti, Executive Director of InnSure. Charlie talks through some of the basic factors that the insurance industry needs to contend with today, from how risks should be financed, to why insurance is top of mind for more people than ever before.

In this week’s conversation on home fortification, host Stuart Yasgur talks to Commissioner Mark Fowler and Dr. Lars Powell to explore an inspiring case study from Alabama.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.