37. The Coliving Solution: How PadSplit Is Turning Empty Bedrooms Into Affordable Housing and Investor Returns

37. The Coliving Solution: How PadSplit Is Turning Empty Bedrooms Into Affordable Housing and Investor Returns

What if the affordable housing crisis isn't really a supply problem? What if the answer is already built, sitting in empty bedrooms across America, and we just haven't figured out how to use it? That's the argument Atticus LeBlanc has been making for years, and he built a company around proving it. Atticus is the founder of PadSplit, the largest coliving marketplace in the United States, with over 33,000 units across 40 states. He structured it as a public benefit corporation with a clear mission: help solve the affordable housing crisis for the 50% of American renters who can't afford their rent, without a single dollar of government subsidy. The platform has generated more than $150 million in savings for renters and over $5 billion in taxpayer savings. Before PadSplit, Atticus spent more than a decade as an affordable housing developer and contractor, starting with $10,000 in savings and building to over $100 million in real estate assets. He's presented at MIT, Yale, UC Berkeley, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, and has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, and Inc. Magazine. He graduated from Yale with a degree in architecture and lives in Decatur, Georgia, with his wife, four boys, two dogs, and a lot of chickens. In this conversation, we get into the real mechanics of how PadSplit works for both investors and residents, and why the coliving model might be one of the most underused tools available right now for people trying to build wealth through real estate in a high interest rate environment. We talk through how hosts on the platform are earning roughly twice what they'd earn from a traditional lease on the same property. We walk through a real investor case study where a guy earning less than $60,000 a year used a VA loan, house-hacked his way into his first PadSplit property, generated $15,000 a year in free cash flow, and used that income to qualify for his next mortgage. We get into the math on how a buyer who can only qualify for a $200,000 home might be able to qualify for a $400,000 four-unit building by presenting rental income to the lender. Atticus also makes a case I hadn't heard put quite this way before: that America doesn't actually have a housing supply problem. It has a housing allocation problem. He walks through the per capita square footage numbers from 1950 to today and makes the argument that you could solve the entire estimated housing shortage, all 7.3 million units, using less than 1% of the existing square footage of housing in the United States. The rooms are there. The regulatory and cultural frameworks around how we use them are the barrier. We also dig into zoning, specifically how local definitions of "family" are one of the most overlooked obstacles to affordable housing in America, how PadSplit navigates those regulations, and what Atticus is currently working on at the federal level to get room rental income recognized by FHA, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac in mortgage underwriting. This one covers a lot of ground. Whether you're a real estate investor looking for a way to make deals work in the current market, a first-time buyer trying to figure out a creative path to ownership, or someone who just wants to understand what's actually driving the affordability crisis and what's being done about it, there's something in here for you. Topics covered in this episode: * What PadSplit is and how the coliving model works for both hosts and residents * How investors are earning approximately 2x rental income compared to traditional leasing * Real investor case study: VA loan, house hacking, and $15,000 per year in free cash flow * Using room rental income to qualify for a larger mortgage * Why the housing crisis is an allocation problem, not a supply problem * The per capita square footage argument that reframes the entire affordability debate * How zoning's definition of "family" blocks affordable housing solutions * How PadSplit handles placement, payments, conflict resolution, and legal exposure for hosts * What needs to change at FHA, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac to recognize room rental income * The history of boarding income in America and why it's making a comeback Connect with Atticus LeBlanc: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/atticusleblanc [https://www.linkedin.com/in/atticusleblanc] PadSplit: https://www.padsplit.com [https://www.padsplit.com/]   Subscribe to Housing Matters on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@housingmatterspod [https://www.youtube.com/@housingmatterspod] Learn more about Pouliot Real Estate: https://www.pouliotrealestate.com [https://www.pouliotrealestate.com/]     Housing Matters is hosted by Matt Pouliot, CEO and Broker at Pouliot Real Estate in Maine. New episodes drop regularly covering everything from first-time homebuyer strategy to real estate investment, housing policy, and economic development across Maine and beyond.

36. Nurses, Teachers & Firefighters Can't Afford to Live Where They Work. Here's a Model That Helps. | Chris Moeller

What happens when the people who serve your community can't afford to live in it? Chris Moeller, CEO of Orion Growth [https://oriongrowth.com/] and creator of the Pathway Communities model, joins Matt Pouliot on Housing Matters to lay out a different way of thinking about housing entirely. Not as an asset class. Not as a rent-versus-own binary. But as an operating system built around stable living. Chris has spent over two decades at the intersection of real estate, energy, and technology. After surviving Hurricane Helene, his work took on a new urgency. The question stopped being how to improve housing and became how to design communities that can withstand disruption and actually support the people inside them. In this conversation, Matt and Chris get into the Pathway Communities model from the ground up: who it is built for, how the capital stack works differently, and why the traditional developer approach keeps pricing out the very people communities depend on most. They talk pocket neighborhoods, adaptive reuse, net zero energy design, food systems, digital equity, financial literacy, and a deed restriction structure borrowed in part from the Habitat for Humanity playbook. They also get honest about what is broken. Wages have been trailing median home prices for years. The missing middle housing product barely exists. Teachers, nurses, firefighters, and police officers are choosing not to work in communities where they cannot afford to live. And most developers are still building to minimum code, optimizing for their exit, and walking away before the roof leaks. Chris is not doing that. Hudson Commons in Hudson, North Carolina is his first learning living lab, and it is already in motion. If you work in housing, local government, community development, or you are just trying to make sense of why the system feels so broken, this episode is worth your full attention. Find Chris Moeller on LinkedIn, on Substack at Chasing Arrows, and at pathwaycommunities.org. His podcast, The Edge Report from Brix, is available on Spotify and YouTube. Housing Matters is hosted by Matt Pouliot, CEO and Broker at Pouliot Real Estate in Maine. New episodes drop bi-weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen.

35. Why Maine's Old Mills, Tanneries, and Closed Schools Stay Vacant (And the Organization Working to Change That) | Gabe Gauvin, Maine Redevelopment

You've driven past it. An old mill building sitting right on the river, windows gone, roof caving in, weeds taking over. And you've thought the same thing everyone thinks: why hasn't anyone done something with that? The answer is complicated. And in this episode, I'm talking with someone who is working every single day to change it. Gabe Gauvin is the Programs Manager at Maine Redevelopment, a quasi-governmental organization created by the Maine Legislature to unlock the state's most stuck properties and get them back into productive use. Gabe brings a background in place-based economic development, rural planning, and environmental remediation, and he has lived and worked in nearly every corner of Maine. He knows this state and he knows these projects. We cover a lot of ground in this one. We start with Gabe's path from the Kennebec Valley Council of Governments to the Central Maine Growth Council and now to Maine Redevelopment, and how working across so many different parts of the state has shaped the way he thinks about community investment and revitalization. Then we get into what Maine Redevelopment actually is and how it works. They are one of only four or five statewide land bank authorities in the entire country. Their scope covers properties that are vacant, abandoned, functionally obsolete, contaminated, or stuck for legal reasons. And their structure as a quasi-governmental organization gives them something most public agencies do not have: the ability to move fast, take on risk, and operate with an entrepreneurial mindset. From there we dig into the Hartland Tannery, the first property Maine Redevelopment has acquired into its land bank. It is a roughly 30-acre brownfield site along the Sebasticook River in Hartland that has had some kind of industrial operation on it for about 200 years. There is an estimated four to five million dollars worth of contaminated material that needs to be abated and demolished before any real redevelopment can begin. Maine Redevelopment acquired the property in January 2025 and submitted an application to the EPA Brownfields Program two weeks later. They find out this June whether that federal funding came through. We also get into the school reuse crisis that is playing out right now across Maine, the toolkit Maine Redevelopment is building to help communities navigate it, and a piece of legislation that had broad bipartisan support, passed the House and Senate, and then did not make it through Appropriations. That one stung a little to talk about, but it is important context for where things stand. And we talk about the economics. Because great ideas and community support are wonderful, but at the end of the day the numbers have to work. Gabe walks through exactly how Maine Redevelopment approaches making projects pencil out, including in some cases giving the land away for free to a developer whose project aligns with what the community actually needs. If you have ever wondered why these properties sit for decades, or if you are a developer, investor, or community leader trying to figure out whether there is a path forward for a site in your town, this episode is for you. Connect with Maine Redevelopment at maineredevelopment.org. Their full team contact info is on the website and they are active on LinkedIn. Housing Matters is hosted by Matt Pouliot, CEO and Broker at Pouliot Real Estate in Maine. New episodes drop regularly covering Maine real estate, housing affordability, economic development, and the people doing the work to move things forward. Subscribe wherever you listen and find us on YouTube at youtube.com/@housingmatterspod.

34. Bath Iron Works Hired 690 People From Out of State. Almost None of Them Could Find Housing

In 2021, Bath Iron Works hired nearly 2,000 employees. 690 of them came from out of state. And almost every single one of them left. Not because they did not want the job. Not because BIW was not a great place to work. They left because they could not find anywhere to live. That story is where this conversation starts, and it is one I have been wanting to have for a while. I sat down with Julie Rabinowitz, Director of Communications at Bath Iron Works, and Dave Hench, BIW's communications and media relations veteran and former Portland Press Herald reporter of 25 years, to talk honestly about what Maine's housing crisis looks like from inside one of the state's most important employers. Bath Iron Works is the largest manufacturer in Maine. They build Arleigh Burke class destroyers, among the most complex machines made anywhere in America. They have been on the Kennebec River since 1884. They employ people from all 16 counties in Maine. More than half of their workforce commutes at least 35 miles each way to get to the shipyard. And since COVID, the housing crisis has made all of that dramatically harder. Wages in Maine have gone up about 38% since 2019. Home prices have gone up 79%. That gap is not just a statistic. For BIW, it showed up as tents. It showed up as employees living out of their cars. It showed up as a young woman in new hire orientation who had a job offer in hand and still could not pass a credit check to get an apartment because she had never had one before. So BIW decided to do something about it. They are now investing in an 84-unit attainable housing complex in downtown Bath, a 20-minute walk from the shipyard. The $22 million project is a partnership between General Dynamics, the Navy, Bath Housing, and Developers Collaborative. It will include studios, one-bedrooms, and a handful of two-bedrooms, prioritized for BIW employees and Navy personnel, with occupancy expected in summer 2027. There are already 87 people on the interest list. We get into all of it in this episode. Why BIW uses the term "attainable housing" instead of "affordable housing" and what that distinction really means. How the Rumford mill town model from the 1800s still holds lessons for what employers can do today. What L.L. Bean is doing in Freeport with a similar workforce housing model. What other employers, developers, and housing authorities anywhere in the country can take away from what is happening in Bath right now. And why, if we want to talk seriously about reindustrializing America, we have to talk about where the workers are going to live first. Dave also brings a perspective you do not hear often. He spent 25 years covering public safety and planning boards at the Press Herald, and he watched the conversation around housing development shift from something that was almost politically toxic to something communities are now desperate for. That context matters. This episode is for employers who are wondering whether workforce housing is their problem to solve. It is for developers who have not thought about knocking on the door of a large local employer. It is for anyone trying to understand why Maine's housing market is the way it is and what it is actually going to take to change it. BIW has been building ships for the United States Navy for over 140 years. Now they are helping build something just as critical: a real path forward for the workers who make it all possible. Learn more about Bath Iron Works at gd-bw.com. Subscribe, leave a review, and share this one with someone in your community who needs to hear it.

33. The $70,000 Mistake: Manufactured Housing, Mobile Home Park Investing, and the Stigma Costing Americans Real Wealth | Andrew Cramer

The average person hears "manufactured home" and thinks trailer park. That reaction is costing them somewhere between $50,000 and $70,000 over five years. Today I'm sitting down with someone who has spent the last 14 years proving why that stigma is not just wrong, it is financially damaging to the people who can least afford it. Andrew Cramer is a partner at Bridge View Asset Management in the Pacific Northwest, where he has led the acquisition, stabilization, and management of more than 3,000 mobile home units totaling over $300 million in market value. His path to manufactured housing ran through biochemistry at Cornell and UC Berkeley, a stint as a financial analyst at Redwood Trust, a co-founded urgent care center in Pennsylvania, and a clean technology division at Alexandria Real Estate Equities. He is one of the most clear-eyed, data-driven voices in this space, and this conversation is long overdue. We get into all of it. The history of the HUD code and what actually changed in 1976. Why the modular versus manufactured debate is largely a stigma problem wearing a regulatory costume. The real math on renting an apartment versus buying a manufactured home in a park over five years. What Title One FHA financing could unlock for millions of residents who currently have no path to building equity. And why the missing middle housing problem in America keeps manufactured communities stuck in a kind of policy no-man's land where they are too affordable to attract private capital at scale and too complex to benefit cleanly from subsidy programs. On the investment side, Andrew walks through what Bridge View actually looks for in an acquisition, how they get distressed parks to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac standards, what an infill strategy looks like when you can recover old spaces without a full land use approval package, and why the operator requirements in manufactured housing are significantly higher than anything you will find in traditional multifamily. We also dig into rent control, tenant ownership models, the real costs buried inside homeownership that most people never account for, and a phase two initiative Andrew is building toward 2028 that he could not fully disclose yet. You are going to want to follow along for that one. If you are serious about housing affordability, real estate investing, or understanding one of the most underestimated asset classes in the country, this episode is essential listening. Connect with Andrew: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-cramer-43b5b513a/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-cramer-43b5b513a/] Bridge View Asset Management: https://www.bridgeviewassetmanagement.com [https://www.bridgeviewassetmanagement.com] Housing Matters is hosted by Matt Pouliot, CEO and Broker at Pouliot Real Estate in Maine. Learn more at https://pouliotrealestate.com [https://pouliotrealestate.com]