Small multifamily housing is illegal and too expensive to build. Architect Sam Naylor breaks down the building code reforms that could unlock the "missing middle."

We know zoning blocks housing. The quieter, equally powerful force is the building code. the invisible rulebook on stairs, sprinklers, and elevators that almost nobody outside the trade ever reads. When a project crosses from two units to three, it leaves the residential code and enters the "commercial" code, where a triple decker answers to nearly the same rules as a skyscraper.

Sam Naylor, co-founder of the design firm Nominal, practicing architect, and adjunct faculty at the University of Minnesota, returns to walk through his new report with Boston Indicators (with support from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies). It's a working map of why three-to-twenty-four-unit buildings stopped getting built, and a menu of fixes.

What you'll get:

Who this is for: architects, planners, housing advocates, and small developers who keep running into the same invisible wall and want to know where to push.

Chapters:
00:00 - Meet Sam Naylor and His Code Report
00:59 - What "Small Multifamily" Really Means
03:14 - Building Code vs. Zoning Code
06:00 - The Sprinkler Requirement Problem
08:12 - How America Ended Up With Two Codes
13:01 - Missing Middle: Everyone's Missing
16:05 - Why We Only Build Five-Over-Ones
18:08 - The One-Third Cost Jump
21:32 - Code Hacking Around the Rules
24:17 - Syncing Zoning and Building Code
29:12 - Digging Out: Sprinklers and Elevators
39:51 - A Vision for Shorter, Denser Cities

Resources:

Los Angeles urban development faces severe housing scarcity and bureaucratic strain while pioneering polycentric node architecture across 88 cities.Los Angeles attracts creative talent with its promise of personal reinvention, yet physical boundaries and rigid municipal codes hold its built environment static. Developers face multi-year entitlement delays and fractured county leadership while trying to expand housing and fortify against rising wildfire risks. Resolving this urban dilemma requires moving past single-family sprawl toward large-scale destination planning.Architect Alex Yuen and co-host Libo Li examine the physical and administrative friction blocking Los Angeles urban development with guest Sam Pepper, principal at Padaro Development Group and host of the Building LA podcast. Designed for practicing architects and architecture students, this episode evaluates how LA can transition from car-centric sprawl into a network of high-density destination nodes.### Key Takeaways* Spanish-style courtyard apartments and bungalow courts offer manageable middle-scale density without destroying single-family neighborhood character.* Administrative fragmentation across 88 distinct cities in LA County creates conflicting zoning interpretations that stall entitlement processes for years.* Los Angeles operates as a coarse-grained polycentric matrix where real estate value concentrates in destination nodes rather than continuous walkable streets.* Cohesive commercial nodes require single-developer anchors or unified property ownership, whereas fragmented parcel ownership leads to retail corridor decay.* Building along urban-wildland interfaces requires structural fortification against inevitable wildfire threats rather than attempting complete hazard elimination.### Who This Is ForArchitects, urban planners, real estate developers, and architecture students analyzing municipal housing policy, polycentric master planning, and climate-resilient design.### Episode Chapters00:00 - Why Los Angeles Resists Transformation01:03 - From London Architecture to LA Development04:53 - Hollywood Cachet and South Bay Aerospace07:43 - Physical Constraints and Byzantine Bureaucracy12:38 - County Governance and 88 Competing Cities18:11 - Managing Encampments and Wildfire Threats19:55 - Courtyard Apartments and Manageable Density22:38 - Polycentric Nodes Versus Jane Jacobs Walks27:27 - Single-Developer Anchors and Asian Urbanism33:21 - Personal Expression and High-Wire Nature40:41 - Padaro Group's Destination Development Model44:47 - Optimism for Los Angeles's Urban Future

### Resources Mentioned

* [Sam Pepper](https://www.linkedin.com/in/samhpepper/)

* [Building LA Podcast](https://www.buildinglapodcast.com/)

* [Padaro Development Group](https://www.padarodevelopment.com/)

* [Norman Foster's Gherkin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gherkin)

* [Lincoln Property Company](https://lpc.com/)

* [The Grove](https://thegrovela.com/)

* [The Row DTLA](https://www.rowdtla.com/)

* [Larchmont Boulevard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larchmont,_Los_Angeles)

* [Third Street Promenade](Third Street Promenade)

* [Hudson Yards](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_Yards,_Manhattan)

### Subscribe & Connect

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/3zYvX2lRZOpHcZW41WGVrp

Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/most-podern-podcast/id1725756164

Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@MostPodern

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/most.podern

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/most-podern

#LAArchitecture #UrbanDevelopment #MostPodern #UrbanPlanning #HousingDensity

Zoning codes run to 3,000 pages, contradict themselves, and change without warning — and right now, they're the single biggest reason most housing projects never leave a napkin.

Recorded live at World of Modular 2026, this episode brings in Avi Kaufman, co-founder and Chief Real Estate Officer of FutureLot, to unpack what it actually takes to answer "what can I build here?" across 30,000 US jurisdictions. Avi started with a light-bulb moment during refugee resettlement — a carriage house behind a main house, housing a family no one knew could be housed there — and built a platform to make that question answerable at scale.

**What we get into:**

- The pre-feasibility gap: more housing projects die from discouragement than from bad economics — nobody's counting the permits never filed

- Massachusetts alone has 200+ definitions of "gross floor area." Multiply that across 30,000 jurisdictions and you understand why builders stall - FutureLot's traffic-light system (green/yellow) tells builders whether a project clears each zoning criterion before a dollar goes to plans - Why the homeowner-builder conversation is broken — and how a shared interface changes "let me drive by" into a real-time answer at any US address

- The tension between local zoning control and the tyranny of whoever has time to show up to meetings

- What a customer who lives in the tool 4–5 hours a day looks like — and why that feedback loop is the product

**Chapters:**

- 00:00 — Intro: What FutureLot does

- 00:50 — Origin story: Afghanistan, carriage houses, and untapped housing potential

- 02:01 — Why zoning data, not building?

- 03:35 — What real estate taught Avi: visuals and ease of use aren't nice-to-haves

- 04:30 — Product walkthrough: the builder experience

- 07:14 — The homeowner interface and what 8 minutes of dwell time means

- 09:10 — Connector, not replacement: the role of FutureLot in the stack - 10:38 — 30,000 jurisdictions and the data complexity behind one screen

- 12:11 — Two years in: the regulatory maze is worse than you think

- 14:00 — Should we standardize zoning? The tension between local control and paralysis

- 15:19 — AI + human review: how the sauce gets made

- 16:28 — Trust mechanisms: overrides, alarms, source citations

- 18:42 — The customer as collaborator: ground truth flows both ways

- 20:30 — Roadmap: 50-state coverage, multifamily, lot splits - 21:07 — The inflection point: why now feels different

- 22:18 — Find FutureLot

**Find FutureLot:**

- [futurelot.com](https://futurelot.com) — free account, 3 property searches

- [avi@futurelot.com](mailto:avi@futurelot.com)

- [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@FutureLot)

- [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/tryfuturelot)

- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/futurelot)

- [X / Twitter](https://x.com/futurelot) - [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/futurelot/)

**Most Podern:**

- [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/3zYvX2lRZOpHcZW41WGVrp)

- [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/most-podern-podcast/id1725756164)

- [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/most.podern)

- [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@MostPodern)