The Building Culture Podcast

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#50: Alexandra Vondeling: The Neighborhood IS the amenity

July 23, 2026

Alex Vondeling has spent her career digging into the part of the problem most people skip past. Not whether we need more housing, we clearly do, but what kind, at what scale, and arranged in what way. She is a principal at Opticos Design, the Berkeley firm that coined the term missing middle housing more than a decade ago, and she has become one of the clearest voices in the country on how to actually build it.What I appreciate about Alex, and about Opticos, is that they are not content to on...

#49 Alicia Pederson: How We Designed Families Out of the City

May 26, 2026

Alicia Pederson spent her twenties living in a 16th-century palazzo in Florence, and it changed everything about how she sees cities, density, and what American urbanism has quietly abandoned. She's the founder of Courtyard Urbanist and holds a PhD in English from Northwestern with a specialty in Renaissance pastoral literature, which turns out to be less of a detour and more of a throughline to everything she now advocates for.In this conversation we cover the history of the courtyard bl...

#48 Mike Hathorne: The Great Housing Reversal - It's not a housing shortage, but a mismatch.

May 05, 2026

Mike Hathorne spent 30 years in real estate and development trying to understand why the industry keeps building the wrong thing. His answer is in his book, The Great Housing Reversal.It's not a housing shortage. It's a housing mismatch. 64% of American households are one or two people. Over half the housing stock has three or more bedrooms. Mike walks through the three simultaneous trends reshaping who needs a home in America, why the development industry hasn't caught up, and wh...