For a long time, it worked well enough to feel unquestionable. Not so much anymore.

More people are renting longer. The age of first-time homebuyers keeps creeping up. Even people who do buy often don’t stay that long; five to seven years, on average. At the same time, everything that’s supposed to happen alongside that life stage keeps getting pushed out. Starting a family. Putting down roots. Feeling settled.

It’s easy to blame interest rates or housing supply or zoning. Those things matter. But they don’t fully explain the feeling a lot of people carry right now: you’re supposed to be moving forward, but the path feels narrower than it used to.

Here’s what I think is actually going on.

We talk about housing like it’s a financial product: buy vs. rent, appreciation, monthly payments. But that’s not how most people experience it. What people actually want is much simpler. They want to stay. They want to find a neighborhood they like, a street they recognize, a coffee shop they can return to and not have to leave it a year later because the lease is up and the rent jumped. They want continuity. The ability to build a life without constantly recalibrating where they’re going to sleep next year.

Homeownership has been the most common way we’ve delivered that. But it’s not the only way, and we’ve spent almost no energy building alternatives.

Most rental housing isn’t built for staying. It’s built for movement. Twelve-month leases. Regular rent increases. A business model that quietly assumes people will turn over every year or two. That works fine if housing is a temporary stop. It works less well if you’re trying to build anything resembling a life. We’ve essentially designed a system where stability is something you graduate into once you can afford to buy. Everyone else gets flexibility whether they want it or not.

What if time was part of the housing product? Three, four, five-year leases with clearly defined rent increases. Not rent control, not frozen pricing, just time certainty. The ability to stay, on purpose, and plan your life around it. This works best in places that already have some gravity; neighborhoods you can walk around in, a mix of uses, somewhere to go without a specific purpose. And it works best for a specific group: people in the middle of building their lives. Young couples, early families, people who are starting to care more about roots than mobility but aren’t ready or able to buy. Right now those people face a strange choice. Keep renting in a system designed for churn, or stretch into ownership earlier than they want to. There’s room for something in between.

Stability tends to get treated as a concession, something you give tenants at the expense of returns. But lower turnover is real money. Fewer vacancies, fewer concessions, lower make-ready costs, more predictable operations. In the right places, with the right residents, stability can make the math better, not worse.

The harder question is wealth. For many people, buying a home is how they build it. You pay down principal, you benefit from appreciation, you end up with an asset. That’s real. But most of that wealth-building comes from leverage, forced savings, and simply staying in one place long enough for it to work. Homeownership bundles two things together: stability and wealth-building. And for a long time, that bundle made sense. But it also means we’ve forced people into a single decision. If you want stability, you have to buy.

That assumption is starting to crack. Not just as a philosophical argument, but as a practical one. A growing number of developers and investors are testing what it looks like to give renters a stake in the buildings they live in. In Colorado, a state-backed program offers residents cash back on rent and a share of appreciation at sale or refinance.

Enterprise Community Partners has structured a fund where, once investors clear a preferred return, the majority of additional profits flow to residents. Projecting up to $45,000 for long-term tenants. The amounts are modest for now. But the direction is clear, and so is the operating logic underneath it: residents with a stake stay longer, take better care of the place, and improve occupancy. That’s not a charitable framing. It’s a business case.

Most of these models depend on impact capital or policy infrastructure that doesn’t exist everywhere. The wealth being generated is supplemental, not transformational. Developer adoption requires giving up some upside and introducing complexity most operators aren’t built for. These are real constraints. They don’t change the underlying logic.

We don’t have a perfect investment vehicle for renters yet. But pretending that a 30-year mortgage is the only way for a human being to store value is a failure of collective imagination. Security and growth don’t have to be the same thing. Someone shouldn’t have to tie up their life savings in a down payment just to feel settled. They should be able to stay in a neighborhood for five or ten years, build financial security in parallel, and have the place they live in work for them, not just against them.

What we’re really talking about isn’t a housing problem, exactly. It’s that the paths that used to help people build stable, grounded lives are getting harder to access. Harder to stay in the same neighborhood. Harder to plan more than a year ahead. Harder to feel settled without making a massive financial leap. And when people can’t stay, communities don’t really form. They cycle.

The answer isn’t to force the old system to work the way it used to. It’s to build new paths alongside it and to scale the ones already working. Long-term leasing is one. Better, more connected places are part of it. Models that let renters participate in the value they help create will have to sit alongside both.

None of this replaces homeownership. It doesn’t need to. It just expands what’s possible. Because stability shouldn’t only be reserved for the people who can afford to buy.

Now I’m looking at it from a slightly different seat. Still as an entrepreneur working on a startup. But this time in real estate development.

To be frank, the headwinds feel more daunting. Interest rates. Shifting trade policies. A political environment that at times feels like it’s coming apart at the seams. The math of building has become a moving target.

While the lens has changed. The principles haven’t.

In real estate, uncertainty feels more permanent. The capital is bigger. The timelines are longer. A building we break ground on today will outlive whatever strange market cycle we’re currently stuck in.

We’ve re-run the same model three times this year with three different rate assumptions. We stress-test rents. We ask whether construction pricing will level off or whether the next policy shift will spike costs again. You can’t ignore those variables and hope it works out.

But underneath all of that, the fundamentals haven’t really moved.

People still need a place to sleep. They still want to feel like they belong to the neighborhood they live in. They’re still looking for stability and a real shot at ownership.

Housing isn’t discretionary. It doesn’t disappear because the cost of capital rises. Connection doesn’t stop mattering because AI is reshaping how we work. If anything, volatility forces you to get clearer about what you’re building for.

For me, and it directly shapes the work we’re doing at AstraCommons; it keeps coming back to shelter, belonging, upward mobility. Those needs were predictive a generation ago. They’re still predictive now.

If those needs are constant, then the work continues.

What we’re building matters. Housing. Places of commerce. Places for gathering and recreation.

What I am certain of is that good projects, anchored in core human needs and executed well, will attract capital. It may just require more patience, more discipline and a little more humility.

The world is changing at a pace we’ve rarely experienced before.

Fundamental human needs don’t.

Ray Oldenburg coined the term decades ago to describe the spots that aren’t home and aren’t work. The places you just go. It isn’t an academic concept once you’ve felt it. It’s that specific sense of belonging to a neighborhood without having to try particularly hard. It’s the “weak ties” that planners talk about: the casual nods and three-minute conversations that turn a map of houses into an actual community.

You see it in the local coffee shop that basically functions as a neighborhood living room, or the dive bar where you always run into someone you know. Even the public library, which is essentially a free coworking space for freelancers and retirees, does this heavy lifting. In Iowa City, the farmers market serves as an anchor for the community and serendipitous encounters.

These aren’t “amenities” or “experiential retail”. They’re just familiar, accessible spaces and rituals that hold a neighborhood together.

But here is the problem I keep running into.

When you start developing buildings, your perspective shifts. You start seeing things differently. You start looking at floor plans and seeing net rentable square footage, debt coverage ratios, and yield targets. And the tension is immediate: most of these vital “third spaces” operate on razor-thin margins.

A local independent café usually can’t pay the same rent as a national bank or a corporate pharmacy. If we price every square foot of ground-floor retail for “maximum rent,” we effectively banish the very operators who make the neighborhood worth living in.

This is where the capital stack becomes a moral decision.

At AstraCommons, our thesis is that real estate either isolates people or connects them. Mixed-use buildings are one of the clearest tools we have to choose connection. But for a building to actually participate in street life rather than just turning its back on the sidewalk, we have to stop treating the ground floor as a standalone rent check.

It’s all one system.

Sometimes that means the residential income from the units upstairs acts as a stabilizer, giving a small, local operator downstairs the breathing room they need to survive. Other times, it’s about accepting a slightly lower rent today because you know a vibrant anchor tenant will lead to faster lease-ups and better tenant retention five years from now. It might even mean rethinking our partnership structures so the operator isn’t the only one carrying the risk.

This isn’t charity. It’s a deliberate financial design.

I’ve come to realize that these community hubs don’t just happen by accident, and they aren’t just a result of “good design.” They are a result of how deals are structured. If we want neighborhoods that feel like communities, we have to build the financial stacks that can actually support them.

Community doesn’t solely live in a 3D rendering. It lives in the math.

If this resonates or is the kind of work that you’re engaged in, let’s connect: stalley@astracommons.com

In the last few years, we as a family have tried to be a lot more intentional in finding time visiting our friends and relatives in various parts of the country. This has included a lot of driving through various cities and the countryside across the coasts and the Midwest. A drive likely familiar to most of you reading this. On any of these drives, when you pay attention, you realize that even in an unfamiliar town, there is a familiar pattern. The pattern buried in the landscape of American life that we’ve learned not to see. Drive through any metro area and you’ll pass the same repeating sequence: subdivisions separated from strip malls, office parks miles from residential areas, and the mandatory car trip connecting it all. We’ve built this pattern so consistently across the country that it’s become invisible - the water we swim in, the only way we know how to organize space.

But what if this pattern isn’t neutral? What if the physical design of our communities is systematically generating the crises we’re now scrambling to solve? Crises of climate change, economic inequality, and loneliness epidemic.

The Hidden Costs of Sprawl

Suburban development accounts for approximately 50 percent of all household greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, despite housing less than half the population. The average carbon footprint of households in distant suburbs reaches up to twice the national average, while dense urban cores sit at about 50 percent below average. UC Berkeley researchers describe metropolitan areas as resembling “carbon footprint hurricanes, with dark green, low-carbon urban cores surrounded by red, high-carbon suburbs.”¹

In metropolitan regions, suburbs can emit up to four times the household emissions of their urban cores. In the New York metro area, Manhattan households average less than 38 tons of emissions annually, while exurban counties like Sussex County, New Jersey exceed 66 tons per household. It makes you wonder if it is a question of individual choices or if it is baked into the design regardless of individual preferences.²

The Geography of Inequality

The same spatial pattern that drives climate impacts also amplifies economic segregation. Since 1970, residential segregation by income has steadily increased, with the share of families living in either affluent or poor neighborhoods doubling from 15 percent to over 30 percent by 2007.

Suburban sprawl has grown so rapidly that it came at the expense of central cities and older suburbs, with virtually all metropolitan areas seeing suburban rings grow much faster than needed to accommodate population growth. The result? Poor neighborhoods were stripped of basic economic and social assets, while inequality reinforced socio-economic and racial segregation.³

During the heyday of suburbanization, the benefits of suburban life were largely reserved for white Americans, with Black residents systematically excluded through individual and institutional discrimination in real estate and banking, along with racially biased federal policies. While patterns have evolved, research shows that in metropolitan areas that are more compact, children born into the lowest fifth of the income distribution are significantly more likely to reach the top fifth as adults.⁴

The Loneliness Built Into Our Streets

Perhaps most striking is the connection between how we build and how we feel. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term “third places” in 1989 to describe the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work - the cafes, libraries, parks, and corner bars where community naturally forms.

These spaces are vanishing. In a 2024 survey, an astonishing 17% of Americans said they have zero friends, up from just 1% in 1990. The U.S. Surgeon General has declared loneliness an epidemic⁵, with Generation Z (ages 18-22) identified as the loneliest generation, with 79 percent reporting feelings of loneliness.⁶

The suburbs are a capitalist brainchild pushing competition and individualism, locking modern Americans in a labyrinth of McMansions and minivans. It matters how we build cities, neighborhoods and places. As effects of these decades-long trends become more clear, discourse on third spaces has recently entered social media. Ironically, as we lose them in reality and replacing it with a fourth space - the digital world.

The Common Thread

Climate crisis. Economic segregation. Epidemic loneliness. These seem like separate problems requiring separate solutions. But they share a common cause: the post-World War II decision to organize American life around car-dependent, low-density, segregated land use patterns.

The United States is the leading emitter of greenhouse gases among developed countries, in part because it is the only developed country with more of its population in suburbs than in cities. The sprawling, automobile-oriented business-as-usual suburb is not sustainable in the era of climate change and fraying social fabric.

To be sure, I am not arguing that suburbs are inherently bad - plenty of suburban residents report similar rates of friendship and connection as urban dwellers. The question is whether the form of suburban development we’ve defaulted to is serving us well. Oldenburg was primarily concerned by the disappearance of third places as suburbanization continues, noting that modern suburbs only offer first and second places with a mandatory car-centric commute between them.

What’s Next: Building COMMONS

If we are to solve challenges described above through an urban development lens, we have to start by identifying and publicly discussing what is working and what isn’t. Ideally, at the grassroots level, and as a discussion recognizing that the way we’ve been building - isolated residential pods connected by highways to segregated commercial zones - has measurable consequences for our planet, our equity, and our well-being. There have been many meaningful attempts - from New Urbanism to pocket neighborhoods - with varying rates of success to change course over the last few decades.

Starting this week, Simeon Talley, Derick Schroeder and I will be publishing a weekly series exploring what community-centered real estate development actually looks like in practice. We will share case-studies of success and failures, conversations with leading changemakers, and most importantly uncover mechanics to solve seemingly intractable problems in urban development.

What to expect:

Expect many threads and many conversations but one shared conviction: real estate development can be, and must be, a vehicle for building stronger, more connected, more equitable communities. We’ll be digging into the practical realities of development that puts community first. Deep dives on specific challenges - how do you actually finance mixed-use development in secondary markets? What does inclusive zoning look like when you’re working with real budgets and real neighbors? How do you create third places that are economically sustainable?

Some weeks we’ll zoom in on tactical questions - the nitty-gritty of capital stacks, zoning variances, and community engagement processes. Other weeks we’ll zoom out to examine broader patterns in how American cities are evolving and what it means for the future of community.

The Good News

This automobile centric urban development pattern is relatively recent. But across the country, developers, planners, community organizers, and residents are testing new approaches. They’re retrofitting dead malls into mixed-use neighborhoods. They’re fighting for zoning changes that allow corner stores and backyard cottages. They’re proving that you can make the numbers work while building community.

We are excited to get started on this series exploring innovative approaches on building better cities and share what we find. Join us.

And if you’re working on a development project that puts community first — or want to explore what that could look like — we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us at astracommons.com/contact to start a conversation.

Mobin Khan is Founder and CEO of Astra Commons LLC, a community-centered real estate development company. He’s developing projects across midwestern US that put community connection at the center of the built environment.

Simeon Talley is a Midwest-based real estate developer and community builder working at the intersection of arts, culture, and commerce. His work centers on helping emerging projects gain early traction and supporting communities that are frequently overlooked or undervalued.

Derick Schroeder is a licensed Realtor in Iowa focusing on residential real estate and investment properties. When he is not immersed in the world of Real Estate, he enjoys golfing, staying active through exercise, coaching, and cheering for his favorite teams, especially the Hawkeyes..

Together, we’re exploring what it takes to build places worth belonging to.

What patterns do you see in your own community? Where are the third places that bring people together - or where have they disappeared? Let us know in the comments.

References:

1. Spatial Distribution of U.S. Household Carbon Footprints Reveals Suburbanization Undermines Greenhouse Gas Benefits of Urban Population Density, Christopher Jones and Daniel M. Kammen, Environmental Science & Technology 2014 48 (2), 895-902

2. It’s not just cities—suburbs and exurbs need to adopt and implement climate plans too, Megumi Tamura and Joseph W. Kane, April 26, 2023, Brookings Institute

3. The Continuing Increase in Income Segregation, 2007-2012, Reardon, S.F., & Bischoff K. (2016).

4. “Does urban sprawl hold down upward mobility?” Landscape and Urban Planning, 148, 80-88. Ewing, R., Hamidi, S., Grace, J.B., & Wei, Y.D. (2016).

5. Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation - The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community, 2023

6. https://news.gallup.com/poll/690788/younger-men-among-loneliest-west.aspx

Leave a comment