Automatic captions, reformatted for reading: sentence case, paragraph breaks, and
timestamps at their original cue positions. Word order is unchanged. Caption
mishearings are left as recorded.
[00:00:00]
I'm Jim Frank. I'm the founder of greenstone corporation. We've been in the home building business in Spokane for more than 40 years. We're on the south hill of Spokane. This is a community called the garden district. There's a regulatory perception that builders just want to build big houses on big lots. But the reality is the regulations require us to build big houses on big lots. There still remain many, many barriers to building small houses on small lots. You end up with 30 homes for high-income families because they're large instead of having 60 smaller houses that are more affordable. The advantage of small houses is that they can be they have smaller footprints, so they can be built on smaller lots. So you just get more density, you get more homes. That helps reduce the land cost in a home.
[00:00:54]
And then of course the homes are smaller, and so that reduces the construction cost. If you're going to break the chain of poverty for a lot of people, if you're going to provide a high quality of life for middle-income families, then you need to allow them to live in neighborhoods. An apartment would take a few months to get a building permit. In order to do these small lots, you have to go through a process that's a year or two long before you can even apply for a building permit. We have a housing crisis. A lot of families cannot afford to buy a home. A lot of families are renting and don't have the opportunity for home ownership. The answer to our housing crisis is opening the door to build small houses on small lots. We need to make that easy. There are a lot of regulatory requirements around the size and dimension and location of lots. Those all need to be eliminated. People are looking for the opportunity for home ownership.
[00:01:50]
Ownership. If we don't provide that in Spokane, they just go elsewhere. This isn't complicated. This crisis that we have is a result of a regulatory environment that suppressed housing construction. The City of Spokane has no mixed-use zone. We're not allowing retail services and other services that family need to be within walking distance of where they live. So you can save 30% of the vehicle trips by just putting services within walking distance of where people live. That's an answer to a lot of our traffic problems. It's an answer to a lot of the environmental problems. And we're putting people in closer proximity to where they work. The solutions are not that complicated. If you want to solve the housing crisis, you need to change the housing regulations. We need more housing now in Spokane. Spokane. [music]
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRW3vxXDFEw
Automatic captions, reformatted for reading: sentence case, paragraph breaks, and
timestamps at their original cue positions. Word order is unchanged. Caption
mishearings are left as recorded.
[00:00:00]
I'm Jim Frank. I'm the founder of greenstone corporation. We've been in the home building business in Spokane for more than 40 years. We're on the south hill of Spokane. This is a community called the garden district. There's a regulatory perception that builders just want to build big houses on big lots. But the reality is the regulations require us to build big houses on big lots. There still remain many, many barriers to building small houses on small lots. You end up with 30 homes for high-income families because they're large instead of having 60 smaller houses that are more affordable. The advantage of small houses is that they can be they have smaller footprints, so they can be built on smaller lots. So you just get more density, you get more homes. That helps reduce the land cost in a home.
[00:00:54]
And then of course the homes are smaller, and so that reduces the construction cost. If you're going to break the chain of poverty for a lot of people, if you're going to provide a high quality of life for middle-income families, then you need to allow them to live in neighborhoods. An apartment would take a few months to get a building permit. In order to do these small lots, you have to go through a process that's a year or two long before you can even apply for a building permit. We have a housing crisis. A lot of families cannot afford to buy a home. A lot of families are renting and don't have the opportunity for home ownership. The answer to our housing crisis is opening the door to build small houses on small lots. We need to make that easy. There are a lot of regulatory requirements around the size and dimension and location of lots. Those all need to be eliminated. People are looking for the opportunity for home ownership.
[00:01:50]
Ownership. If we don't provide that in Spokane, they just go elsewhere. This isn't complicated. This crisis that we have is a result of a regulatory environment that suppressed housing construction. The City of Spokane has no mixed-use zone. We're not allowing retail services and other services that family need to be within walking distance of where they live. So you can save 30% of the vehicle trips by just putting services within walking distance of where people live. That's an answer to a lot of our traffic problems. It's an answer to a lot of the environmental problems. And we're putting people in closer proximity to where they work. The solutions are not that complicated. If you want to solve the housing crisis, you need to change the housing regulations. We need more housing now in Spokane. Spokane. [music]