In this episode, David Kinsey joins us — the planner who, more than almost anyone else in New Jersey, has shaped the math behind the Mount Laurel doctrine and helped determine the numbers of deed-restricted residential units each town is required to build. It was not housing policy, not economics, but a language assignment that set David on his career path when during a study abroad in college he wrote a paper in French about a new town.

Decades later, he was the expert witness in court, spending days on the stand defending the housing formula built from census projections, household formation rates, and land-use factors. David calls the five-decade-old Mount Laurel doctrine, especially after the latest amendments, a smashing success, and multifamily construction with an inclusionary deed-restricted component is visible across the state. But David also acknowledges that New Jersey remains one of the most segregated states in the country, a pattern he traces directly to housing itself.

In this episode struggle to share his optimism about the rules for realistic opportunity when in some cases, it takes thirty years to deliver homes near a train station. In other cases, monumental efforts of assembling a multi-layered funding scheme and donated municipal land still fail to create homes.