Seth Zeren Builds the Next Right Thing

27 Şub · The Messy City Podcast

Of all the parts of this enjoyable conversation with Seth Zeren, now of Providence, RI, the part I liked the most was this quote:

The worst fight is with your allies that betray you.

The quote, which is mostly about perception, says a lot about people who are frequently in heated agreement with each other, but find themselves disagreeing on something that’s very minor in the big picture. We discuss this as we discuss his post called, “When New Urbanists and YIMBYs fight.”

Seth has a great Substack, talking about all the overlap in his interests from city planning to development and more. His path and his passion are impressive. From his early days working in local government, to now the cold, hard reality of making development projects work. And what’s next? Perhaps some place management, perhaps some housing policy advocacy, perhaps just more really interesting redevelopment projects.

Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.

Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.

Intro: “Why Be Friends”

Outro: “Fairweather Friend”

Transcript:

Kevin (00:01.269)

Welcome back to the Messy City podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. I'm excited today to have Seth Zarin here with me on the podcast. Seth and I have met in the past and corresponded a little bit. Seth has a sub stack that I definitely recommend called Build the Next Right Thing. And he's in Providence, Rhode Island, which is actually, I think, one of the sort of most underrated

smaller cities in the country. I've always really liked Providence, enjoyed it. So Seth, welcome to the podcast. I know we're going to have a lot of good things to talk about. We're going talk some housing and some other stuff, but glad to have you on so we can do this.

Seth Zeren (00:43.574)

Thanks Kevin, it's nice to be here.

Kevin (00:46.261)

I think, you know, Seth, I want to kind of start by talking about you're another guy who has a really interesting path and background into becoming into the development world, which is what you're doing now, but certainly not at all where you started. And I wonder if you could kind of walk people through your professional background and then even like why you wanted to do a sub stack.

in the first place, as some of us silly people do to put thoughts out in the world.

Seth Zeren (01:19.862)

Yeah, absolutely. I usually introduce myself when I meet people by saying that I'm a former climate scientist, recovering city planner, turned real estate developer. I usually get a laugh on recovering. Much like people who have all sorts of addiction issues, city planning is something that you always kind of in the back of your head, always kind of want to work on, but can be really challenging.

Kevin (01:35.381)

Ha ha ha.

Seth Zeren (01:48.918)

I'm actually from California. I grew up in the San Francisco suburbs, south of the city in Silicon Valley, basically. And by the time I graduated high school, it was quite clear that I would never be able to afford to live there. At that point, houses were selling for about a million dollars for a little ranch. Now it's about $3 million. And so by the time I left for college, I sort of knew that the housing situation there had been a little bit of a mess.

broken so much that it was really unlikely that I would be able to find a good quality of life there for myself at that time. In college, I ended up studying geology and climate science. So I was a geology major, geosciences major, and I narrowly averted the PhD. I dodged it, fortunately, and I found myself really becoming interested after college. I went and lived in South Korea for a year and I taught English there. And

It was such a different experience than growing up in an American suburb or in a small town where I went to college. And it really got me thinking a lot. And when I came back to the U S and I went and worked at a boarding school while I was figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. And I started to read about cities and urbanism and architecture. And I realized that, Oh, actually at the time I thought I wanted to go to school and do architecture, but I was really intimidated by portfolio and drawing. And I had, I was a scientist. I mean, I could do data.

I understood geology, but, um, so I was really intimidated by that. I ended up going to an environmental management program at Yale where I could kind of moonlight in law and architecture and business. And so that was kind of my entree. And I discovered I really liked zoning at the time. Uh, and I like to say like, I like board games and zoning is basically just the biggest board game imaginable. It's a huge map, bunch of colored spaces and a really long rule book, which was totally my jam. And.

Kevin (03:38.485)

Yeah. Yeah.

Seth Zeren (03:46.038)

So I was a zoning, big zoning nerd. I interned with the planning department, but you know, in between the two years of graduate school and then got a job as a zoning official after graduate school for Newton, Massachusetts, which is kind of that wealthy first ring suburb outside of Boston where the doctors and professors go to have children. And, uh, I was there for about three years before I kind of realized this was not the place for me. I wanted to do stuff. I wanted to shake things up and.

One of the dynamics you'll encounter when you find a sort of a wealthy sort of trophy suburb, right, is that people buy there because they like what it is. Right. So the political dynamic in a place like Newton, like many wealthy suburbs around many cities in America is people are buying a particular place and they want it to stay that way. That's what they bought. And so there's a real change aversion there, which was just a bad fit for someone in their twenties, whose master's degree and wants to get stuff done. And.

I had also at the time had the opportunity to work with a bunch of developers. And this was coming out of the financial crisis. So there wasn't a lot happening right away, but slowly, slowly things started to get back in gear. And after about three or four years there, I decided I was going to jump ship from the, from the planning side and eventually found myself working at a development shop as a development manager, kind of coming in to do the permitting work. Right. So I just basically switched sides. I was going to go do permitting for the developer.

moving complex projects through design review and master plan approval and stuff like that. And I did that for my sort of early apprenticeship for about three or four years. And got to the point where, you know, I got married, we thought about buying a house and realized Boston was also too expensive. So we started considering other places and Providence was nearby. We'd visited, we had friends here. And at the time, certainly it was massively more affordable than the Boston Cambridge area.

So we moved down here about eight, maybe nine years ago, about. And so I was working as a development manager, you know, for a larger firm. And then when I came down here, I was still working remotely, but I connected with some local developers and eventually joined a local firm, Armory Management Company, which is a 35 year old, almost 40 year old partnership now that has done historic rehab.

Seth Zeren (06:09.782)

Main Street revitalization ground up in field development and came on board here, you know, also as a development manager and kind of worked my way up. Now I'm a partner and working on kind of the future of the firm and future of development in the Providence area. So that's kind of my, my origin story. It's one path. I haven't met a lot of other people who've come through the planner path into development. I would say that I was one of those people that you probably remember this, Kevin, you know, whatever eight, nine, 10 years ago at CNU.

There was this whole conversation about why are you working for shitty developers? You know, to architects, planners, engineers, go be your own. And I took that very much to heart and was trying to find a way to do it. And I've kind of managed to find a way to do it, come through that.

Kevin (06:54.709)

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have met a few other folks who kind of started in the planning route and then ended up in development. But yeah, you're right. There's not too many. I mean, one thing I'm curious about, Seth, so like I'm a Midwestern or so. I don't have that experience of growing up someplace and then realizing like I'm never going to be able to come back. I mean, so a lot of Midwesterners like myself leave at some point.

And then often we find our way back home, but it's like, and there may, there's lots of reasons why people do the things, but there's never seems to be this like logistical issue that says, well, I'm just not going to be able to afford to come back where I grew up. What, what's that? And what's that like to at some point have this realization in the place you grew up in, which you probably have some really fond feelings and memories for that you just, you weren't going to be able to make it back or you weren't going to be able to afford to.

make it back. That must be a strange feeling.

Seth Zeren (07:55.414)

It is, and I will say it becomes a lot stranger when you have your own kids, which I have now. I have two young children and we go back to California, you know, once maybe twice a year visit my parents who are still in the house I grew up in. And you know that neighborhood that I grew up in, you know, hasn't built. More than a couple net new homes in the last 50 years, right? Homes get torn down and they get replaced by bigger homes, but.

Kevin (08:00.501)

Yeah, sure.

Seth Zeren (08:24.246)

There's no net additional homes. But my parents raised three kids in that house who all have their own households. My parents are still in that house. So sort of mechanically, if you have a neighborhood that doesn't add any homes, you're essentially, but you have, but you have children, those children have to leave, right? Mechanically, right? And if you then multiply that across an entire region, well, then they have to leave the whole region, which is like why people have to leave California. And I, so I have a very,

like complicated relationship with it. It's like, obviously, it's my home, it has like a smell and weather and just like the culture that is what I grew up with. It's it's I have nostalgia for that. But I also go whenever I go back there, I'm like, this place makes me crazy. Because it's not like you couldn't build more buildings, you know, you couldn't, it's not like the soil can't support more buildings, right? There's no physical limitation, really. It's the self imposed limitation. And then when you go back, especially,

after the last 20 years or so, and you look, you know, here's a region in the world that is the current sort of nexus of tremendous wealth accumulation, right, the Bay Area. And what did we get for it? Right, we got kind of mediocre drive it strip malls, and the, you know, single family houses that go for three and a half million dollars to $5 million. You know, it's similar times in the world, we got, you know,

London, Paris, New York, Chicago, Shanghai, Tokyo, like these metropolitan areas were built and there's this tremendous physical capital that's created by economic growth. But in the Bay Area, it's, it's, it's, it's, so it's kind of depressing for me. I feel like it's helpful to go back as a, as like a cautionary tale, you know, it's, it's a, it's a practice, you know, you have to go to the meditation retreat and struggle. And that's a little bit like what it is for me. Um,

So you would ask why I write and so I'm a full -time developer. I run, you know, commercial development, residential development, run commercial leasing, a lot of architecture design permitting, you know, I would say, you know, there's a lot of different backgrounds. One can bring into the development world and all of them come with different strengths. Uh, being the planner background gives me a lot of facility with permitting. And so zoning is an area where we're really effective zoning historic.

Seth Zeren (10:50.74)

neighborhood relationships, all that kind of stuff. And then finding value in buildings that other people don't see because we look around at what other people are doing in other parts of the country and we're able to import those ideas and try things out. Other people have different advantages that they bring. The reason I write is probably like you, I've got like some thoughts in my head that I have to get out. And, you know, development is a great practical.

you know, craft practice, you know, and it's, I mentioned, I think earlier apprenticeship, like there are a few schools that teach development, real estate development, kinda, but mostly they teach what we think of institutional development. So if you want to go build a skyscraper, go to MIT or Columbia. Fine.

Kevin (11:37.333)

Yeah, MIT's got those great courses and everything else that, yeah.

Seth Zeren (11:39.51)

Yeah, and like, totally fair. Like, that's a reason that's a thing that makes sense in the world, but it's not going to help you, you know, renovate a triple decker or, you know, put up an ad or or renovate a Main Street building. It's just not the skill set. They're not teaching that. So it's an apprenticeship. I mean, it's still really an apprenticeship job. You have to go and you have to go through a lot of stuff and struggle and you see all the pain and suffering and you go through the stress and

Kevin (11:53.877)

Yeah. Yeah.

Seth Zeren (12:08.726)

You start to learn stuff and it's one of those jobs. There's so much to learn that you, you know, here I am 40 a partner doing a bunch of development work and I'm learning stuff every day, right? And we're all learning stuff every day. So it's it's really satisfying in that way, but. It's not necessarily intellectual job, right? I mean, thinking about stuff is important. Math is important. Those are all relevant things, but it's not the only thing that matters. And so I write because trying to figure out some stuff, right? Trying to figure out.

for myself, but then also how to explain things to other people. Um, cause one of things I say to people is that, and I learned this when I became a developer is that like as a developer, I had more in common with the blue collar tradespeople without a college degree in terms of my understanding of the built environment than I did with someone who had my equivalent class background, education, income level, like an attorney or something, right?

They live in a house that they bought from someone else, right? They are a consumer of the built environment, but they know very little about how it gets built. They don't get under the hood. But conversely, like I, you know, the plumber and I under, you know, we're in it together. Now we have very different jobs. We might, you know, we're having a different experience of it, but we both are seeing this world. We're both participating in the making of stuff. And so we end up with this very different environment. And then.

because of the way we've regulated the built environment, now there's this huge chasm between the people who build the cities and the people who consume the cities that are built for them. Because people don't build much for themselves or for their cousin or for their neighbor.

Kevin (13:44.533)

Yeah, yeah, that's a, I mean, that's a really interesting point. I like that Seth. And it sort of resonates with me too. And, you know, in my experiences in design and development and you get some of that in architecture too. If you're the kind of an architect who you spend a lot of time doing construction administration or on job sites, you really, I think get a very different feel for that than if you're just kind of working in schematic design all the time. But yeah, that art of.

creating things. And this is what I kind of often tell people about development. One of the things that just completely, like routinely frustrates me is this sort of parody of developers that's put out in the world. It's like, you know, as the black hat evil people trying to, you know, ruin cities and, and not this understanding that actually, and not that there aren't those people, there are some, you know, there are crappy people in every field. But most developers are just simply in the act of creating things that other people are going to use.

Seth Zeren (14:36.278)

Yeah.

Seth Zeren (14:44.022)

That's true. And I say that all the time as well. And I would add to that, that one of things that's interesting about development, right, coming from planning. So like real estate or city planning, right? Graduate degrees, conferences, magazines, there's even a licensure, right? You get your AICP, go to the conference, get the magazine. It's a profession. Real estate development isn't really a profession.

Kevin (14:44.181)

Like that's the whole point.

Seth Zeren (15:11.254)

You get $2 million and buy a CVS, you're a real estate developer. There you go. You put it on your business card, it's your real estate developer. So there's no professional boundaries for good and for ill. I mean, sometimes I think the boundaries around some of these professions are actually really harmful, but you kind of know what you're going to get. You know what the professional culture is and you kind of know how it changes and you know the institutions. Development really doesn't have any of that. Even the Urban Land Institute, ULI, which is a major player still like,

compared to like the APA and planning is minuscule. And so like part of the challenges is that, so that's one piece of it. It's not really a profession. The other piece of it is that one of the things that's happened in the 20th century is we blew up our development culture, right? We had an ecosystem of building places, you know, that was the design, the construction, the operations, the leasing, the materials.

the trades, there was a sort of ecosystem of it, and we kind of blew it up. We radically transformed it over a short period of decades. And so there's no continuity. So when people do development, there's not a sense of there's any kind of private constraint or private rules. So it feels even less like there's a profession. There's not like a coherent culture, we're going to build more of that, or we're going to evolve incrementally from a coherent culture of building.

We're just going to build whatever you end up. That's where you end up with the like two story building with a mansard. That's like with the weird landscaping. It's just this weird Chimera because the developer and to a large extent, the architects have no grounded. There's, there's no like lineage they're working from. There's no continuity. They're just throwing stuff at the wall, you know,

Kevin (17:00.341)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think one of the other aspects is that in development, so many of the players in the non -institutional world are entrepreneurs. At their heart of hearts, they're entrepreneurs. And it's hard to gather together a whole group of entrepreneurs who are, in some sense, in competition with each other all the time, to feel like a common sense of purpose.

Seth Zeren (17:25.174)

Yeah, and they're often grinding for their own private gain, which in many parts of the United States is sort of seen as not good, right? Profit is bad to a lot of people. And I think that's unfortunate because while certainly people can do bad things and that's not good, making a profit from doing good things is good. It's a good sign. It means you get to do more of it, right? We say we have to make a profit because that's what we, that's the...

Kevin (17:30.101)

Yeah.

Seth Zeren (17:53.062)

seed corn for the next project, right? If we ate all of our seed corn, we would have no next project, right? And if we run out of seed corn, we all starve, right? So you don't get to lose money very many times in real estate before you're out of the game. So it's...

Kevin (18:05.685)

Yeah, well, and nobody bemoans the local cafe or the barbershop or whomever from making a profit. We all want them to make a profit and succeed, but for some reason, the local developer in a business that's far riskier and more expensive, it's like we completely beat them up about the idea that they actually need to make money to keep going.

Seth Zeren (18:22.326)

Yeah.

Seth Zeren (18:27.606)

Yeah. And I think part of it is that there is part of this change in building culture, right? Is that there is where there is more of, or a greater percentage of the built of the new development is sort of seen as done by outsiders for short -term gain. And then they're gone. You know, you'll you've talked to other folks in the incremental development world between the farmer and the hunter, right? And it's we're, we're 90%, 95 % hunters now, you know, instead of 25 % hunters. And that just really changes.

Kevin (18:41.397)

Yeah. Right.

Kevin (18:48.661)

Yeah, sure.

Seth Zeren (18:56.918)

the relationship. So we're a local firm. I work in the neighborhoods in which we live. We work down the block from our projects. If we do a bad job, I have to look at it every day. People know who I am. They're going to yell at me. Like there's a level of responsibility. The profits are most, many of the profits are being reinvested again locally into the next project or into donations to local organizations. So it gets it, you know, not, it's not just as a matter of credibility, but as a matter of like the actual development culture and ecosystem, it's just a better way of life. Um,

I think one of the things that's key though about the developer image, right? Is that there was this real period and formative period for, for you and for me, like in the 60s, 70s, 80s of the real estate developer is always the villain, right? And every hallmark movie and every, you know, real estate developers are always the bad guys. And it's a really easy trope, right? It's, it's, it's change for, you know, we're going to change something that's here now that's good for profit, you know, and then they're going to be gone. Um, we don't have any valorous.

Kevin (19:37.811)

Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Sure.

Seth Zeren (19:56.442)

examples of the real estate developer in popular culture. And I think if I had a magic wand, I would like I would have some great popular sitcom about, you know, a real estate developer, young Latino builder in LA doing interesting stuff and growing over the course of seasons and be hilarious because there's so much tragic comedy and development. So if anyone out there wants to pitch a show to Hollywood, that's that's what I would pitch. Oh, my God, no, that's not me.

Kevin (20:19.893)

Well, I think you've got your next screenwriting gig. So, give us an example of a project that you're involved with now, something you're working on to get people sent to what you're doing.

Seth Zeren (20:31.798)

Yeah, so yeah, I'll give two quick examples. So we just finished a rehabilitation of an historic structure, four story masonry building that was converted back to residential, right? It had been turned into actually a nursing home. It was first as a hospital than a nursing home in the 20th century. It was originally built as four brick row houses. And so we brought that back to residential. That just finished last summer, 12 units. And that project was really great. It's really beautiful building.

We are a little bit counter -cultural in some times what we do. So we built, in part following the logic of the building, because we were doing a federal historic tax credit project, we didn't want to torture the building. So the units are large. We have, you know, 1500 square foot, two bedroom, two bath apartments, which is on current construction, like weird. It's just, they're really big and they're expensive as a consequence of being big. But what we're finding is there are people who will like nice stuff, and they're willing to pay.

more for an apartment. And it's still cheap compared to New York or Boston. It's expensive in Providence, but there are people who will pay that. And right now we're working on the second phase of that project. So that's probably 26 unit building. We're going to try to get some three bedroom apartments in that, which is again, sort of philosophically, we think it's important that there are places where families could live in multifamily housing. It's on a park. It's a beautiful location. And then the project we just started,

As we acquired a 50 ,000 square foot mill building in a kind of old industrial area of the city that has, it's one of those things where the previous owner kind of ran out of money and attention. So some things got done, but not other things. So we're finishing that up and that project, we are actually going to complete sort of the previous owner's plan, which was to create modestly priced commercial spaces. So we, in our portfolio, about 50, 50 residential and commercial, which isn't.

necessarily by strategy. It's just sort of where we've ended up. Uh, but I think on the margin, we're a little bit more comfortable with commercials than the typical developer or landlord in our area. So because we run so much of it and it's full, I mean, we're 95, 97 % full and commercial across 300 and something thousand square feet. Um, and that's because we price to rent it, you know, and we take a good job caring for it. Uh, we follow the advice of making things smaller if they don't rent.

Seth Zeren (22:57.878)

Right? So if you make them smaller, then you make the rent smaller, which means more people can rent it. Um, and there's turnover, but you have a reusable unit, just like an apartment, people move right into it, uh, run their business out of that. So it's been good. I mean, you know, who knows things could always change, but we see a lot of value in, you know, one of the things that happened in American cities is disinvestment and white flight took place was not only did the people leave, but I'll sort of all the businesses.

So it's like, what is your dentist? Where's your doctor's office? Where's your accountant? Where's your graphic designer? Or, you know, where's your retail shops, you know, your salons, your banks, your restaurants, your bars and restaurants and bars usually come first, but that's only a piece of the ecosystem. You know, it's a whole, you know, you need gyms and retail stores and yoga studios. And I know that sounds kind of trite, but it's sort of a, a, a curating kind of orientation. So this building, part of the strategy is to create a building that is safe.

and modestly priced and not pristine so that it's a building in which people can do work. So it's artists, fabricators who have real businesses but need a space to operate their real business. It's not just a crazy building, spray painting the walls, but a reasonable building, not too expensive, not too fancy, but safe. Sprinklers and a roof that doesn't leak. So that's kind of our current project.

Kevin (24:16.149)

Yeah. Yeah. That's a great model. It reminds me a little bit of one of Monty Anderson's projects in South Dallas, sort of a similar deal, large former industrial building and essentially a minimal, very minimal tenant finish, but incredibly flexible. And if it's priced right, it, you know, in his case, at least up, you know, very quickly. That's a cool model. So I didn't really have any, a whole lot of personal experience with

Providence probably until the CNU was hosted there in what was that? Mid 2000s or so. Which was the best Congress up to that point and the best one until we hosted one in Savannah, of course. And anyway, I was really impressed by Providence. I thought it was...

just an incredibly interesting city, very walkable, really cool architecture everywhere, nice downtown. Just seemed like it had a ton of assets, especially in that region. And like you said, priced very differently than Boston or New York. And so I'm curious about the last decade or so, what's going on in Providence. How's the market there? How are things changing? And as a...

more of like a third tier city, what do you see that's different compared to some of the larger markets?

Seth Zeren (25:47.094)

Well, I think that the big story of the last 10 years is that we're no longer kind of isolated on our own. And I don't know if that's mostly a combination of remote work or if it also has something to do with just how expensive Boston and New York have become and other cities. And Providence has seen some of the highest year over year property appreciation in the country. So you're right. It's a nice place to live, you know, and then if you're paying, you know,

$3 ,500 a month for, you know, kind of crappy two bedroom apartment in Somerville, you move to Providence and you can get a really nice apartment for $3 ,500 or you can save a bunch of money. And so that it's not so similar for me, right? We moved down here because it was cheaper. And so that adds demand. It adds demand in the upper end of the market. So a big part of what's happening in Providence, Rhode Island is, is that there's a relatively small number.

but of people with a fair amount of resources, income and capital moving here. And the state chronically, because it's sort of been tucked away for a long time, it has very little home construction, right? We are the last, second to last, third to last in per capita home construction every year for the last few decades. And so the intersection of those two things is causing a really crazy housing spike and a lot of angst.

And for myself, this is one of the places where like my own experience growing up in the Bay Area and then having my own kids has really hit home because, you know, I know in 20 years, I'm still going to need a house to live in. And my two kids are probably each going to want their own house to live in or apartment. Right. So I either got to build them one. They're going to buy yours or they got to leave. It's math. Right. And so it's put the question of housing shortage kind of on the sharp end of the stick for me personally.

Right? Is, you know, am I going to be able to see my grandchildren more than once or twice a year kind of thing? You know, and that's a big deal. Right. And I know people don't quite appreciate it yet. I feel a little bit like a harbinger of doom sometimes because in Rhode Island, the feeling is like this could never happen here. Right. Because we're kind of this backwater sort of economically hasn't done well since deindustrialization. You know, there's some bright spots, but it's a little tough and nice quality of life, but not too expensive. And that whole script.

Seth Zeren (28:13.142)

of worked for a generation or two, but it's not relevant anymore unfortunately. And then that psychic cultural transformation is going to be really hard.

Kevin (28:23.541)

So coming from the background that you came from, how do you compare the development or the regulatory apparatus in Rhode Island and in Providence compared to places you've worked or pros and cons and what's going on there?

Seth Zeren (28:36.086)

Oh boy.

Seth Zeren (28:41.494)

Yeah, when I go to CNU and I'd say I'm from New England, they're like, how do you work there? Because it's hard. Yeah, we're more heavily regulated region. I think that in some ways that's beneficial to someone like me, right? If you're good at navigating the rules, then it's actually to your advantage to work in a regulated market because there's, you I'm not competing on how cheaply I can put up drywall. I'm competing on who can come up with the most creative use of land and get through the regs.

Kevin (28:45.685)

Ha ha ha ha.

Seth Zeren (29:13.686)

It's, you know, Providence itself has a mod, what I would call like a modern zoning ordinance. It's got a lot of, you know, there's things I would quibble with, there's things I would change, but it's basically a functioning ordinance that like does the right things more or less, right? And which is great. We mostly work in Providence. I'd say the rest of the state, like most of the rest of New England, it's still like 1955 and there's no...

resources, no political impetus to like really fix that yet. I've, I've helped one of my responses is I helped found last year a group called Neighbors Welcome Rhode Island, which is a sort of strong towns meets UMB type or organization that we're still kind of launching a website now. We're working on legislation, state level legislation, and also trying to support local organizing in these towns.

Seth Zeren (30:14.998)

So it's a, it's, it's, you know, very similar to the markets I'm used to. It's a new England place. Everyone's in everyone else's business. The place has been inhabited buildings on it for, for, you know, hundreds of years. I think one thing that's always interesting about, about new England though, you know, compared to the national conversation is the missing middle is not missing here. Like our cities are made out of triple deckers, twos, threes, fours, sixes all over the place.

Kevin (30:37.653)

Mm -hmm.

Seth Zeren (30:43.062)

Our problem is we don't know what comes next. So a city like Providence right now, the only plan is, and this is true, Boston and these places, you can, sure, you can build on the vacant lots and there's a bunch of vacant lots and you can build those for a while. There's gonna be some bad commercial buildings. You can build on those for a while. There's some old industrial land. You're gonna build on that for a while. But in a different way, but similar to the regions where everything's zoned single family and it's built out single family, you can't add anything.

to the bulk of the neighborhoods, which are zoned for two and three family homes, because there's already two and three family homes there. And what we don't have, and I don't think anyone has an answer to this, is how do you create a building typology and a business model and a regulatory framework, building code, zoning code, et cetera, to add density to those neighborhoods, to take a three -family neighborhood and bring it to the next increment.

whatever that is, because I don't, I don't think we have a model for that other than to go to a full like five over one big apartment building, but the land assemblage there is really prohibitive. So what's the next thing that's denser than three families on 5 ,000 square foot lots, but isn't a big commercial building. And I don't think we have an answer for that yet. I mean, as a urbanist architecture development community, and we certainly don't have a regulatory framework that will allow us to build it either. So that's like an R and D project. That's sort of a back burner curiosity of mine.

Kevin (32:08.981)

Does the regulatory framework allow you to build the triple -deckers in place?

Seth Zeren (32:14.198)

Uh, under zoning. Yeah, kind of under building code. No, right. Cause triple deckers are commercial code. So you need sprinklers. So you can't build them. The cost difference. You'd just build a big two family instead of building a three family. It's a much better strategy. So one of the things that neighbors welcome is proposing this legislative cycle to follow on North Carolina's example and Memphis's examples to move three, four, five, six family dwellings into the residential code. And, you know, with no sprinklers, a single stair. Um,

And, you know, we'll keep the two hour rating, just add more drywall. Okay, fine. But, you know, that's one of the things we're proposing along with a single stair reform for the small apartment buildings. But yeah, I mean, it's a chicken and the egg, right? There's no point coming up with the prototype and you can't build it. But then no one wants to reform the building code because there's no prototype that makes sense that people are excited about. So it's really kind of trapped. And so, you know, that's an interesting challenge that we struggle with.

Kevin (33:14.069)

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting thing to think about what that next increment to would be beyond the freestanding, you know, triple deckers and stuff like that. Because, you know, I guess the first thing that comes to mind as you start to think about neighborhoods more like you would see in New York or Boston, certain parts of those cities that went to like five and six story walk up buildings that, yeah, yeah. And they're not.

Seth Zeren (33:39.476)

Buildings that touch. That's the big thing.

Kevin (33:43.931)

really townhouses wouldn't call them townhouses, but they might be like a five story walk up. Like you'd see, you know, on the upper East or upper East side or upper West side or something like that.

Seth Zeren (33:49.598)

Yeah.

Seth Zeren (33:52.982)

Yeah, there's two tiers, I think. There is a version that's more about lot subdivision, right? So we have decently sized lots and three families are big, but you might be able to get some more houses on them or bigger versions. And then I certainly moving to the part where you have party wall construction and the buildings that touch, you recover a bunch of lost area to thin side yards that no one can use. That tier is really interesting because you could probably keep them as owner occupant.

Right? They'd be small, you know, two, three, four families, but on smaller piece of land, you know, buildings that touch whatever the next year above that, you know, which is like a single stair elevator, five, six stories, you know, 20 apartments. That's a commercial loan. It's a commercial operator. And, you one of the virtues of the triple decker, right, is that you have a distributed ownership, right? So that it's not just.

You know, we have tons of landlords in the state, you know, because everyone I own, the triple decker I live in, right? Everybody owns, you know, a two family, a three family mom, grandma's two family, right? It's just it, there's so many opportunities for people to be small landlords for good and for ill, mostly I think for good, but there are, there are some limitations to it. Um, you know, so when I look around at international examples, right. You know, so for example, I teach real estate development on the side, cause I really care about bringing more people into this profession and not profession trade.

craft, whatever. And I had some European students last fall, and I brought them to Providence on a field trip, took them around my neighborhood, which is, you know, to native Rhode Islanders like the hood. It's like the inner city. Ooh, scary. And they're like, this is a very nice suburb, right? Because to them, a bunch of detached two and three family dwellings with a few vacant lots in between them or parking lots, this is suburban density. And they're wrong. And they're not wrong. They're right.

Kevin (35:19.893)

Yeah.

Seth Zeren (35:47.786)

you know, historically like that, that was a transition. You'd go from town, right? Which is mostly detached, small multifamily buildings to herb to the city. The building starts to touch because the frontage is really valuable and you wouldn't just leave it for like, you know, five foot grass strips and whatever. Um, and so, you know, it still ends up being quite car focused because, you know, everything is sort of far apart and you know, you got to fill in the empty gaps.

Kevin (36:13.781)

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of that reminds me a little bit of what Jane Jacobs used to talk about in Death and Life of Great American Cities as sort of like the gray zones. Yeah, the in -between density.

Seth Zeren (36:23.094)

Yeah, the gray density. Yeah. And what I would say is what happened to my neighborhood to a certain extent, and I think this is true of a lot of American, you know, urban neighborhoods, you know, sort of pre -auto suburbanization is that what happened, there was so much, there was a lot of removal, even where there wasn't wholesale urban renewal, you know, mercantile buildings were taken down and replaced with a gas station, right, or a parking lot. And the church is, you know, brought down, you know, there's little holes in the fabric.

And when I look at the neighborhood as like someone who thinks about cities and can see, can, you know, learns to look in that way, it's kind of looks like someone who's slightly sick, right? Their skin's a little pale, a little drawn, you know, there's a little yellow in their eyes. That's what it kind of feels like. And so it's about kind of filling it back up again. I think we've kind of, in a lot of cases, we kind of dipped down into the gray zone and we're trying to get back into it because once we get kind of out of that gray zone, adding density is good.

Right, it brings more services, more people, which can support more businesses. And there's this positive feedback that strengthens the neighborhood and makes it better. But in the gray zone, it's like, well, is more people gonna make it worse? Like, what are we? It's a nice callback, because most people don't make it past parks in death and life. It's just too bad. I tell them all the good bits are at the end.

Kevin (37:37.781)

There's many good bits. But yeah, I think there's an interesting aspect of American cities in particular there where you have, and I think about this a lot, we wrestle with this so much in my part of town in Kansas City where there is a sort of urban density that actually works pretty well where everybody pretty much drives still, right? If you know what I mean, like it.

Seth Zeren (38:05.526)

Yep. Yep. Bye, Norris.

Kevin (38:06.869)

The parking is easy and it's just not that, it's not really urban, but it's not really suburban. And I think there was a generation of people who re -occupied a lot of urban places like that in the 70s and 80s in particular, who love it for that. They love the fact that they're like in the city, but it's like parking was easy. Now the problem is, yeah.

Seth Zeren (38:17.91)

Yeah.

Seth Zeren (38:32.182)

Yep, we have that here too, absolutely.

Kevin (38:34.997)

The problem is like historically that was a complete non -starter. Those neighborhoods had far more people, were far more urban. And by today's standards, it would have been incredibly difficult to have a car and drive it around everywhere and park it.

Seth Zeren (38:49.258)

Well, people forget that like you could have the same number of housing units and have fewer people because house hold size is so much smaller today. So the street is relatively empty, right? Compared to when grandma was living here, you know, 80 years ago, um, as far fewer people around.

Kevin (38:53.365)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin (39:03.381)

Yeah. And now with the prevalence of like one car per adult everywhere, the challenge of trying to upgrade those neighborhoods to become more like their historical predecessors, it does create a lot of conflict because then all of a sudden we are wrestling with the, it's really the car issue in many respects. Yeah.

Seth Zeren (39:15.798)

Yeah.

Seth Zeren (39:22.774)

Yeah, you're moving from one equilibrium to another equilibrium. And that's always really painful because it's going to reduce quality along the trip, even if you end up in a better place on the other side. You know, one of the things I find really helpful or really valuable, and I admired your work about this, is the business improvement district. And I don't know, whatever we call that microform of government. And we're involved in helping create one on a main street near us that has suffered from a tremendous amount of urban renewal and...

Kevin (39:32.501)

Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin (39:46.003)

Mm -hmm.

Seth Zeren (39:53.3)

institutional concentration and we're trying to figure out how to improve that. And one of things that I've learned from doing that is that the city, even with a pretty strong planning department, Providence has a good planning department, lots of good people, plenty of staff. It's not low capacity, but they got a big city to run, right? And they can't know it super deeply everywhere all the time, right? And here, and I'm involved because we own a bunch of property nearby and I've been working in the area for years. And so I get to know all the other owners and I get to know the

the nonprofits and the businesses and residents and you know, but I'm working on like eight square blocks, if that right. And I know that really well. I can talk about this block versus this block and this crosswalk and that curb and this parking lot and that, that tenant and you know, at that micro level. And it just seems to me that that's gotta be the future of a lot of this governance stuff. Cause to get out of that bad equilibrium is going to require a bunch of really careful.

tactical hands -on changes to infrastructure, to private development, public, you know, all those pieces. And when I look at the whole city, I'm like, there's not enough coordination, right? There's not enough attention. There's too many things going on, too many fires to fight. It's at that micro level that I could kind of organize enough people, run the small planning exercise, coordinate the private development, coordinate the public investment and keep on top of everybody. But it's only, you know, eight square blocks, right? In a big city.

So how does that work?

Kevin (41:21.525)

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's something we've wrestled with a lot and we obviously do a bunch of it here, but I'm a big believer in, you know, place management at that scale. And I think one of the issues that we've seen over and over again is, you know, my city is even much bigger. It's like 320 square miles geographically. It's insanely large. Half a million people in the city limits. So like relatively low density for that large of a city, but...

the ability of staff to actually manage all that and know what's going on. It's impossible. It's literally impossible. Yeah.

Seth Zeren (41:57.142)

Well, I've been city staff and I remember how insane it was. I mean, you don't get out of the building because you're too busy answering emails. You know, this is like you fight with the engineers or whoever about an intersection is like, have you ever stood in the intersection for an hour? Because I have, right? Because I'm there all the time. But you can't run the city, you know, not getting out into the field and seeing the mucky bits, right? And that's like.

Kevin (42:17.045)

Yeah, there's just a there's a huge mismatch in how we manage cities and their ability to change and solve just solve problems, solve basic problems.

Seth Zeren (42:25.43)

Well, so one of my questions is, is that in part because like the way we teach kind of all the pieces of city building and management is kind of like, and it feels like they're individually busted and then the system is busted. So like public administration, civil engineering, architecture, planning, you know, development, all, you know, whatever that there's a whole package of different professional schools that you could go to that would teach you these different skills, but none of them talk to each other.

And so when they're graduates, I remember being a planner and then talking to the civil engineer Newton being like, we're from different planets, man. Like the words I'm saying, you don't understand the words you're saying, I don't understand, like, and no one's in charge. So we're just kind of like, because every department, one of the things that happens in cities, right, is every department is co equal under the under a mayor or city manager or something. So like planning department can't tell DPW what to do. They're the same level, you know, and so we're just kind of butt heads.

Kevin (43:01.493)

Hehehehehe

Seth Zeren (43:23.67)

But planning is in a particularly bad situation because they don't have any shovels or trucks or much free cash or anything else. They don't get to do much. Their only power is persuasion.

Kevin (43:33.525)

And it's the first jobs that are cut whenever there's a recession too. But yeah, I mean, the whole industry is very siloed. And this has kind of been the classic battle of the new urbanism from the beginning was really the push from our side was to create generalists, that people who could pull everything together. And our charrette process was designed to bring all those people together and problem solve at the same time.

Seth Zeren (43:36.83)

Yeah.

Kevin (44:03.317)

And that actually worked really well, and it does work really well when you're able to facilitate that. The challenge you have in a lot of city governments that I've seen is that they're just like you said, they're all vertically, you know, all differentiated vertically and it's all siloed. And there's not a ton of incentive for the different departments to understand each other and work together unless you have a particularly strong executive who forces that to happen.

Seth Zeren (44:28.662)

Yeah, that's really the game. It's like, does your executive get it and care and willing to spend the time on it? You've said something really interesting in the past on other versions of this podcast, which is that, I don't know if I'll get it exactly right, but we spend like 50 % of the time on design, 40 % on policy and 10 % on implementation. And we should be like a third, a third, a third. Here's the thing. I feel like the charrette process is really great, but then the charrette leaves. New urbanists don't have, as far as I can tell, much of an answer of how you actually run the city.

There's no proposal on how to reorganize the departments of the city government. There's no proposal on charter reform for cities or, you know, there's a whole universe of, you what should the education for a city manager be? Right. We have, we have an idea about what planning should do differently, you know, and so there's bits and pieces, strong towns, urban three, talk a little bit about the finance side. We're just starting to think about it. When you open that door, you realize, oh my gosh, where are the new urbanist police chiefs? Where are the new urbanist fire chiefs? Right.

the controllers, the tax assessors, there's this huge apparatus of public entities that are out there. And I guess part of the reason why the place management is so cool is that you get to actually just be a little micro government. And instead of having to silo off every little bit of things, you're a taxing entity, you can also go hire people to put out flowers, you can also write regulations, you're a whole thing. And so likewise, I feel like the CNU universe has not yet...

Kevin (45:47.541)

Yeah. Yeah.

Seth Zeren (45:55.19)

really contended with like the mucky bits of administering, managing the city.

Kevin (46:00.245)

Yeah, I think that's totally, I think it's totally fair. And, you know, I got a lot of that thinking from Liz Plater -Zyberg who, and so the way she broke it down was design, policy and management. That's the three legs of the stool. Most of the people who came to the new urbanism originally and were most passionate were designers. So they had a very heavy emphasis on design. There were also a lot of policy wonks. So you got that policy piece, but yeah, very few people from.

the world of understanding how to actually manage cities. And we've had a lot of interaction and bring people to the table and conferences and all, but I still think very little understanding in that world of how things work.

Seth Zeren (46:42.166)

Well, and you go, I think, to the International Downtown Association, right? The IDA. How is it that the IDA and CNU are still, like, not connected at all? As far as I could tell, right? From the outside, it just, like, the stuff we're doing is so, so connected, right? And so this, I guess, is a plea to the CNU folks and a plea to the IDA folks, like, let's get together, guys. Because, like, CNU can bring a whole bunch of the design and policy ideas. But you're right, we need managers. And manager, Strong Town sometimes talks about how

Kevin (46:45.173)

Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Kevin (46:55.925)

This is a good question.

Seth Zeren (47:11.132)

maintenance is not sexy, right? It's easier to get people to design a new road than just fix the damn road you got. But that's the problem, right? If nobody's interested and we have no way of making management or administration better, like you'll just keep doing new projects and then as soon as you leave, they'll just fall apart, right? Because no one's going to run them when you go.

Kevin (47:32.981)

Yeah, no doubt. And so hopefully we can make that happen. I would have talked with a few people about this that we need to find a way to link up. I mean, there's always been a linkage there, but it's just not nearly as tight and as strong as I think it could be. I'm amazed when I go to the IDA conference just how few new urbanist consultants even bother to attend, which is shocking to me. It's enormous. But yes, I think there's an in...

Seth Zeren (47:53.558)

Yeah, it seems like a huge missed opportunity on both sides.

Kevin (48:02.965)

One of the, I think, ill effects of the last 30 or 40 years of there's been a lot of education that's pushed really smart, ambitious young people into the policy world instead of emphasizing that how important really good management is. First of all, I would say design also. I mean, and problem solving with projects generally is incredibly important.

My bias is doing projects is more important than policy, but I know there's a role for both. But management, God, if you don't have good ongoing management of a place, just like any business, if a business doesn't have good ongoing management, forget it, you're toast. And a city, if it doesn't have it, is gonna suffer tremendously. So, you one, go ahead, go ahead.

Seth Zeren (48:54.038)

Well, I was gonna say, I feel like in my head, I've been thinking about this for a long time. And when I went to school, I went into an environmental management program, quote unquote management, right? It was supposed to train professional people to manage environmental organizations, work in government, work at the forest service, work for nonprofits, working for profits, doing environmental stuff. Were there any classes on management stuff, right? Managing people, managing budgets.

Communications, no, it was all science, which is great, fine, like I need to know some stuff about ecology or water management or whatever, but like, how are we a professional school? You know, we have to go out in the world and run organizations which have budgets and staff and HR and communications and negotiation. You know, you can go to the business school and learn some of that and a lot of people did, but you gotta ask yourself like, well, what are we doing here?

Kevin (49:44.405)

Yeah. Well, man, I had six years of architecture school and there wasn't one business course that was required the whole time.

Seth Zeren (49:49.718)

Yeah, I mean, I see that. And the planning people, you know, maybe it's gotten better. But when I was going through it, I took a negotiations class at the business school, which was the most useful class for being a planner. It was negotiations. Most planners, we don't need people with physical planning backgrounds. I mean, you need someone who can do some physical planning. Mostly you need some social workers because local government is like a family therapy. They have fights going back 20 years with their neighbor about whatever and who's yelling at who. And it's like, we need just some people to get people to talk to each other.

It's not about technical analysis. No one ever voted for my zoning amendment because I had a great analysis. No, it's relationships. So, you know, I look at this as like, and I know there's been efforts around this at CNU, but I think we need to really get serious about building new educational institutions. I don't know that we can do it inside. I mean, we've tried it, you know, at Miami, we've tried it at Notre Dame, and there's been some successes, but it's just not enough, right? 30 years later, you know, there's just...

it hasn't really changed anything in terms of what we're training. So we have another whole generation raised up in the old way of doing business and we're surprised when we get the same results.

Kevin (50:55.829)

Well, one of the things that even mystifies me, somebody who's gone to a lot of architecture schools to do student crits and everything else is like there's this, there's a whole group that have come through in the last, I would say 15 years that don't even know anything now about the early new urbanism because that was like so long ago and it's just not taught. So it's wild to me. It's like that has gone down the memory hole.

Seth Zeren (51:14.038)

Yeah.

Seth Zeren (51:19.35)

Yeah.

Kevin (51:21.077)

So I talk about that a lot with people that I know just to try to keep some of those things going and make sure people have a memory of what actually happened in a lot of those years.

Seth Zeren (51:29.91)

What I think is so striking is I don't think it's actually that much money that would be needed to build some of these institutions. So if anyone out there is listening and wants to write checks, fantastic. But you could get a lot done for not a lot of money building these new institutions. I really do think that. And the scale of impact on society could be really huge. Yeah.

Kevin (51:51.893)

Yeah. Seth, I want to switch gears and do one more topic before we run out of time. I want to hit on this piece that you wrote about Yenbys and New Urbanists in Strong Towns and sort of the differences or perceived differences, you know, amongst the groups. I wonder if you could sort of set the table and talk a little bit about what, where you were going with that one. It's a long piece for anybody who wants to read it, but it's, it's really good.

Seth Zeren (51:55.862)

Oh, sure.

Seth Zeren (52:02.538)

Yeah.

Seth Zeren (52:14.326)

Yeah, it's on my my sub stack build the next right thing which is I have small children So we watch a lot of Disney movies. That's do the next right thing, which is a song from frozen 2 But related to incrementalism, right? You don't have to know the final answer You just when you and you're confused you just do the next right thing, you know, you're gonna work your way through it solve the problem incrementally Pragmatically, it's very American way to work. It's good. That's build the next right thing and

Kevin (52:27.533)

Know it well.

Seth Zeren (52:45.27)

It's a part because like getting to utopia is not like you're not going to take one jump to utopia. We got to like work in the world we're in. So this piece came out actually, ironically, I started writing this in the emergency room with my child in the middle of the night. Because when you have little children, sometimes they eat like stuff and you end up in the emergency room in the middle of the night. So I'm like, I'm like starting to jot down some notes and the notes were really stimulated by another guy, Steve Mouzon, who's been on your show, I think, who, you know, is active on Twitter and occasionally.

regularly gets in fights with sort of the very online Yimby crowd. And then there was an exchange, you know, about a piece that Steve wrote and some other people responded. And, you know, a lot of people that I'm considered I like or I appreciate their work. I mean, I appreciate Steve's work. I assign his book on on on the original green. I appreciate Nolan Gray's work. I assign his his stuff. So but I was really struck by this continuing like fight.

In this case, between the CNU and the Yenbis. And in my analysis, I mean, you can go read the piece, but I'll give you the really short version. It's basically that, and since I'm from California, I'm very sympathetic to the Yenbi argument, right? I feel it in my bones, right? I can never return to the soil I was raised on because of the failure that has gone before us. So in the Yenbi world, it's all about supply. We got to build a bunch of homes, right? And that's the overriding value and virtue and goal.

right? You see it celebrate. We're going to build so many more homes. And the new urbanist orientation, which is really importantly different for a few reasons. First of all, it was started in the eighties and nineties when there wasn't a housing crisis. So the DNA is not built around a housing crisis was built around building crappy places, right? Go read, you know, uh, suburban nation, right? It's about building bad stuff. Read consular, you know, that's, that's the DNA. It's also mostly working in the South, you know, in the Midwest to a certain extent where

There hasn't been a supply crunch, you know, because they're building stuff, right? It's building sprawl. We can build better sprawl, worse sprawl, but it's still just getting built. And so, you know, a lot of that is about quality. How do we build good places? And so what's so frustrating about, I think, to both sides about the EMBC and U debate is that often we agree. Often building density and building quality are the same. So we're on the same team, but sometimes they're not. And the worst...

Seth Zeren (55:12.502)

fight is with your ally who betrays you, right? Your enemies, yeah, f**k that guy, he's terrible, right? You know, that's easy, but my friend, I thought you were with me, but now we're not, ah. And so that's what keeps happening, right? The CNU folks are like, you know, that might be a little bit too much density, aren't you worried about the blank walls? Aren't you worried about X, Y, and Z? And then, and the, and the, the Yenbis are like, are you kidding, man? Like we're all homeless, like, unless we build this building, we don't have time for your cute little nonsense. You know, your ADU is just too slow, whatever.

Kevin (55:15.477)

You

Seth Zeren (55:41.878)

And so that's, that's on sort of goals and the people are different, right? The CNU architects first developers planners, the Yimby movement really comes out of activists, uh, political advocates, regular people, software engineers who are not professional built environment people, uh, lawyers, right? It's a policy oriented movement, economists, right? That's the core. That's their intellectual DNA is.

know, economists at George Mason, whereas the CNU, it's, it's an, a few architects at Miami. That's really different DNA, right? And I think the CNU has, for whatever reason, not really, it's done some behind the scenes politics, you know, policy change, right? There's been really important behind the scenes policy change, very not visible to normal people. It's never been interested in mass mobilization, you know, votes.

persuading elected officials, it's not their jam. The Yenby movement is a political advocacy movement, right? So they're trying to like win votes and get lost. So the Yenby folks have gotten more bills passed that does a bunch of CNU ideas, right? The missing middle, ADUs, all the stuff that CNU came up with like 20, 30 years ago is being mandated by bills passed by Yenby. So they're like, CNU guys, we're doing the thing. Why are you yelling at us? Right? But the Yenbys don't always appreciate that the CNU has,

rebuilt so much of the DNA of 20th century planning. So like, complete streets was like a CNU invention. People don't realize that anymore because it's now so mainstream. And so there's this sort of tension where people don't see the benefits the others have provided because they're kind of operating in different styles. So that's, I think, the sort of core tension. And then I added the strong towns because strong towns sometimes finds itself fighting with both of them.

And often aligned, right? Often we're all the same team, right? I consider myself a Yimby. I run a Yimby organization. I also am a Strong Towns founding member and I've been at CNU a lot. But they're subtly different, right? The Strong Towns thing that puts them at odds with some of these groups is that Strong Towns core idea is that we need to reengage bottom -up feedback, right? That the system is too top -down, too...

Seth Zeren (58:06.454)

tightly wound, too fixed, too set. So we build these places that are built to a finished state. We can't ever change them. We have tables that are not responsive to content. So we're just locked up. We can't get anything done. And the Strong Town's idea is, well, we need the systems to be responsive, right? If housing prices go up, we should build. If they don't go up, we shouldn't build. We need to make the streets context sensitive. And so on the one hand, we're all for getting rid of parking requirements and upzoning stuff. So the inbys are like, great.

But then sometimes we're like, well, that might be too much of zoning. Here's some reasons why. And the Yenbis are like, wait, I thought you were pro density. I thought you were pro development. We're like, yes, but right. Uh, the strong towns, people would worry that the Yenbis in 1950 would have been the suburban sprawl advocates, right? They would have said, we need the houses now. Damn the consequences. We're not going to worry about fiscal insolvency in 50 years. We're just going to build the houses now. You know, that's, so that's the strong towns. Sort tension with the Yenby movement is the top down, the sort of.

And this is a result of your movement being led by political advocates and attorneys and economists, right? There's the concern about that kind of top -down policy orientation, these sort of single metrics, let's get it done. And then I think sometimes there's also debate with the CNU around things trying to be too precious. There is a tension within the CNU movement between sort of the messy side and the sort of all buttoned up side. And...

So I think there's just interesting tension there. I mean, what do you make of the debate between the UMBs and the CNU?

Kevin (59:38.037)

Well, I think when the Yenbis first came on the scene 10 or 15 years ago, I remember kind of urging some of our colleagues to engage and say, it's like we need to bring these people into the fold. These are our allies. And also, there's a, I think one of the other differences that is hard to overlook is that there's a generational difference. Seeing you people are probably like my age and older.

Seth Zeren (01:00:06.816)

Mm -hmm.

Kevin (01:00:07.635)

Primarily, CNU is trying to change that. They want to change that. They really want to appeal to younger generations. But the dominant voices are definitely Gen Xers and Boomers for the most part. And the Yimby movement is a millennial -led movement for the most part. And I think there's a difference there that also we have to unpack. So I felt like CNU should have been

a little more proactive to really bring the YIMBY folks into the fold and help them understand everything that we've been trying to do for 30 years or more, and then build an Alliance. But that has not really happened. And now there is kind of a tension there. And yeah, exactly. Yeah. Were you at the session I did in Charlotte with the sort of YIMBY debate or whatever we called it?

Seth Zeren (01:00:52.246)

I mean they have their own conference, right? It's happening next week or something, right?

Seth Zeren (01:01:04.31)

I don't think I made that one. Sorry, you'll have to...

Kevin (01:01:05.909)

It was actually, well, yeah, it was part of the CNU session, not Strong Towns. And I got thrown into it at the last second because they couldn't find somebody to debate the Laura, who's the Yenby action head from San Francisco. And I was like, sure, I'll debate her, whatever. I don't know what we have to agree or disagree about, but throw me in the room and we'll do it. And it did tease out to me some differences. And...

Seth Zeren (01:01:09.878)

Yeah.

Seth Zeren (01:01:22.134)

Oh, nice.

Kevin (01:01:33.973)

Uh, and, and I think you have, you fairly characterized a lot of it. I think from, if I were to, if I were to steel man the C and U position, um, it would be that, um, there's no point in just building lots of stuff if it's garbage. We've been down that road before. And if we're just building stuff to build stuff, a generation or two from now, we're going to find we regret all of it.

and it's not going to have a future. Because we did that, especially in the post -war era. We built an awful lot of, you know, we had an incredible housing demand in the post -war era that we needed to deal with. We did have a much more flexible regulatory structure at that time, but we built lots of suburban sprawl that has not aged well. And we built a lot of urban renewal, a lot of which has been torn down in the year since, because it was so awful.

and it was terrible for human beings. And so I under, you know, my own inclination is to frankly be much more laissez faire and that we should be able to just, by and large, people should be able to build what they want to build. And I don't get as caught up in probably some of those specifics as others in this union world do, but I do have a lot of empathy for the fact that.

we actually should all care about building really quality places that we're going to want to keep around for 100 years.

Seth Zeren (01:03:06.774)

And I think part of the distinction too that I think I have to explain to people is like, if you got rid of the zoning tomorrow, you wouldn't start building what we built in the 19 teens and twenties. Cause we don't have that building culture. That's why I come back to the building culture. It's the whole ecosystem of attitudes, assumptions, and practices doesn't exist today. So I tend to look at it as sort of, it's like a, it's like there's scar tissue, right? And you need physical therapy, right? It's hurt, it's kind of healed, but it's healed wonky. Now we need to go through a process of kind of,

Kevin (01:03:14.837)

No, no, we. Right. Yep.

Kevin (01:03:22.997)

Yeah. Yep.

Seth Zeren (01:03:36.316)

exercises and stretching and strengthening and repairing that's going to take a while, but eventually will restore function. And it won't be quite the same, but it'll be better. And that's like at a cultural level, what we kind of need to do to restore the.

Kevin (01:03:48.597)

or the cynical way, it's methadone. So, you know, we're...

Seth Zeren (01:03:53.334)

I'd like to do better than methadone. I mean, that methadone is design regulations. The form -based codes are methadone, right? They're like, they don't, I mean, but at the same time, to the extent that they actually could teach architects and developers how to build not shitty buildings, okay, that could make sense. It's that education program, if it works.

Kevin (01:03:57.717)

Yes. Yes. Yeah.

Kevin (01:04:10.293)

Yeah. And it's funny because I always find it funny when the form -based codes come under attack. And I've got my own issues. I've talked about it before. But certainly when I was doing a lot of form -based codes back in the day, we basically pitched them as we're doing these as a method of deregulation, that we're creating a type of ordinance that is going to allow for a whole lot more development than your current ordinance does. And.

which is true. And that's how most of them work out. Now they've also got their own problems and they've had a lot of issues with being able to scale. But, you know, I think that's one of the routes, that's kind of one of the flashpoints. So anyway, I just, I think the whole thing is interesting. I like the way you handled it and talked about it. And I look forward to more, hopefully some coming together. One of the challenges is that the Yimby movement has ascended.

The CNU is aging out and a lot of questions about what future it has. So I hope the CNU folks who care will kind of wake up to that and try to engage more and help shape the changes that are coming.

Seth Zeren (01:05:20.214)

Yeah, I share that fear and one of things that I noticed though, and one of reasons why I really hope CNU finds a way to kind of pass the torch is it's the only conference where everybody comes together across the built environment, right? The architects come, engineers, planners, developers, public administrators, transportation folks, like they all can come to this conference that actually touches all of their things. If a CNU conference and community goes away,

Kevin (01:05:33.813)

Yep.

Seth Zeren (01:05:48.694)

We're all going back to our silos and there's going to be no cross fertilization. I think we'll all be much poorer as a society for it.

Kevin (01:05:53.973)

No doubt, no Seth, that actually seems like a great place to wrap it. I appreciate it. This has been really great. Remind people where they can find you.

Seth Zeren (01:05:58.454)

Yeah, thanks, Kevin.

Seth Zeren (01:06:03.638)

Oh, uh, uh, build the next right thing. You'll find it on sub stack with Google or whatever.

Kevin (01:06:09.749)

and then you're on Twitter as well.

Seth Zeren (01:06:11.51)

Oh, I'm on Twitter, yes. It's Seth .Zarin. It's very easy to find.

Kevin (01:06:17.075)

All right, good, good. Well, hey, good luck with everything in Providence and hopefully we'll see each other some point in person. So.

Seth Zeren (01:06:21.206)

Thank you.

Seth Zeren (01:06:25.654)

Yeah, well, I hope to see you at CNU this year. All right. Take care, Kevin. Have a good day. Bye.

Kevin (01:06:27.989)

Yeah, I plan to be there. All right. You too, CSF. Bye.

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How Does a Small Developer Actually Make Money?
3 Eyl· The Messy City Podcast
Monte Anderson of Neighborhood Evolution and Options Real Estate in Duncanville, Texas joins me to talk about extremely practical matters: making money in real estate. That is, as a small developer, how is it actually done? What are the pros and cons of different approaches, such as buying and holding vs selling?
We start this by discussing a YouTube video from The Real Estate God. Yes, that’s the real channel. Titled, “The best way to 3x your money in 2024,” the video is a good jumping off point for how to structure deals in an ideal world. And, it goes over the differences between general partners and limited partners.
Monte talks about why nothing ever works as quick as he thinks it should, and the realities of development fees. We discuss the challenges, but also the joys, of working in development.
Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.
Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.
Intro: “Why Be Friends”
Outro: “Fairweather Friend”
Episode Transcript:
Kevin K (00:01.733)
Welcome back to the Messy City podcast. I'm Kevin Klinkenberg. Got our returning champion, Monte Anderson in the house here today. Monte, it's always great to see you and talk to you. Where are you in Dallas? Are you roaming around the country somewhere?
Monte Anderson (00:16.022)
Yeah, I am in Dallas today. Glad to be here with you, but I am in Dallas. I'll be in Lafayette, Louisiana tomorrow morning and Elkhart, Indiana next week. So lot of traveling coming up, but I'm home for this afternoon. It is. It is. We've been going down there for, this is our second year. And so yeah, there's a lot of good food down there. Yeah.
Kevin K (00:26.257)
Cool, Lafayette's a really cool town.
Kevin K (00:39.449)
Yeah, was going to say amazing food, fun people, it be a great time.
Monte Anderson (00:43.647)
Yeah, they are fun people. lot of entrepreneurial spirit down there, know, they've had to do a lot with a lot of things against them, know, hurricanes and, you all the things that you've got in that part of the country.
Kevin K (00:53.627)
Yeah. Yeah.
That's right. That's right. Well, guess depending on where you are, you've got something. like we don't have hurricanes, but we've got tornadoes and floods.
Monte Anderson (01:06.668)
Yeah, yep, that's right. There's something always out there, the unknowns.
Kevin K (01:10.245)
Yeah, I know. I think I texted you a couple of weeks ago, we were up in Dubuque, Iowa, where I know you're also doing some work and they were dealing with the Mississippi is flooding this year. It's been very, very high. And so they've had some flooding in different portions. So in fact, we were going to take like one of their riverboat cruises and we couldn't do it because the river is too high.
Monte Anderson (01:28.705)
my.
Yeah. my, that's because that town is right in between the river and the bluffs. The downtown is right there in the valley, if you will, between the two hills. Yeah.
Kevin K (01:37.67)
Yeah.
Kevin K (01:42.063)
Yeah. It's really cool. had not spent a lot of, I've driven through, I'd driven through before, but I hadn't really spent any time there. And it's really a neat, neat little town with like incredible bones and, just a really pretty setting there on the river.
Monte Anderson (01:52.802)
Yeah.
Yeah, the great thing is it doesn't have any major interstates that go through it.
Kevin K (01:59.569)
But they had a lot of urban renewal. I'll say that. For a small town, boy, did they have a lot of urban renewal that was done to them. anyway, Monty, I wanted to talk to you today. We were exchanging some emails. I sometimes subscribe to these just kind of random YouTube channels or blogs or whatever that touch on real estate or design or planning or whatever.
Monte Anderson (02:03.544)
Yes.
Monte Anderson (02:07.554)
Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin K (02:27.953)
this is one, that I shared with you that is a YouTube channel, from somebody who calls themselves the real estate God, which, of course kind of made us laugh, but it was a really interesting short video. has some pretty interesting content, especially for, newbies, in this video that, I wanted to talk about today, the email, called it the best way to three X your money in 2024.
but really it was like a seven minute video that was about a basic investment strategy for real estate that I think is real, that is similar to what you teach. And I wanted to kind of walk through this and talk about it because I think it is, it's interesting. we've talked about financing before we've talked about different aspects of development. It's interesting to take it kind of step by step.
and help people understand how, you know, where you put money in, how you get money out, how you make money doing some of these smaller projects.
Monte Anderson (03:30.506)
Yeah, that's a really big deal for people getting started, you know, in this business. I mean, how do you get money out? Right? You put it in, but where does it go? And how does it come out fast? And it doesn't come out fast unless you buy and sell. That's basically the bottom line. If you don't buy and sell, it doesn't come out fast. You know, because if you buy a, you know, if you buy a property and you get a loan and you restore that property,
Kevin K (03:37.969)
Yeah.
Monte Anderson (03:59.286)
and you run it and you get it leased up over time. It's not going to cashflow really great in the beginning. It's going to take, it's going to take a while where I find myself these days and making money as far as making, pulling money out is, and this is what the big, developers do, buying something, fixing it up, getting it all rented up or, or, or buying something and getting it ready to sell, you know, and then selling it. And that's where.
A small developers have to do more like buying and selling. And in my case, you know, I charged myself, you know, brokerage fees and management fees and things like that. So my operating company, you know, gets commissions and gets development fees. And that's how we live. And big, big companies do the same thing. You know, the big developer will buy, you know, build a 200 unit apartment complex, lease it up and sell it to the Ohio state teacher pension fund.
You know, and that's where the money's made. That's where the big quicker money is made. But it's, it is really difficult as a small scale developer to buy a property, fix it up, build it and get, and I mean, you're building wealth. Okay. Because usually the property is going up in value, but you don't get a lot of cash flow out of it really quick. It's just, that's just, I think in my opinion, and you know, of course, I don't know everything. It's kind of unrealistic thinking. It looks good on paper.
but it's unrealistic thinking.
Kevin K (05:29.967)
Yeah, it seems like so generally when we talk about making any money in real estate is either you're making money off of the cash flow of the project itself, whether it's a residential project or a commercial project, you know, it's producing more income than your expenses. So you're making a little money year after year on that, or you make money when you sell it to somebody else, assuming you've added value along the way and you're selling it for substantially more than what.
you put into it.
Monte Anderson (06:01.614)
That's correct. And then depending on how much equity you put in in the front and how much leverage or how much debt, how much loan you put on the property, you know, will depend on what your cashflow is going to be. So if you've like in the, I've always been one for putting as, you know, having as little debt as possible because you can go through the times like we just went through in the last year or two when interest rate, like on one of my properties went from four and a half to seven and a half percent.
like it renewed and just went up. mean, they could have went up to 8 .5%, but my bank lacked me, so they did 7 .5%. But if you have much debt, if you have a lot of debt, first of all, you're not going to probably cashflow for a while. And then secondly, when the markets change, when the markets change or when interest rates go up or when vacancy goes up, then you're going to be in trouble.
And that's when you see foreclosures and that's when you see, like right now we're seeing a lot of properties on the market right now, either not so much in foreclosures, but people just needing cash. So they're selling their properties. So.
Kevin K (07:13.233)
Yeah. So like, you know, let's just say if you, random project that you're a small developer and you scrape together $50 ,000 and you, you put that into a deal and then you have debt on the back of it for the balance of the project. You're, you're either getting that 50 ,000 back to you when you sell it. Hopefully plus a profit or you're getting it like drip, drip, drip over time, over a number of years.
Monte Anderson (07:43.211)
Exactly.
Kevin K (07:43.429)
which like you said, at that small of a scale, that might be maybe make a few thousand bucks a year, but you can't make a living off that.
Monte Anderson (07:52.47)
Right. Well, you can't make a living off the drip, drip, drip part. You can't really make a living off that, but you can if you have a hundred units then. Okay. Then you have it. And you can, if you're in the real, if you have a real estate operating company, like I do, where we do our own leasing and management and development and construction. So we pay ourselves to do those, do those things. If, if the money is available, you know, if there is enough, you know, to do that, but
And many times these days, I put myself in better positions. You know, I should have learned after 30, you know, 35 years, I should learn, but I put myself in better positions where I can get those fees mostly. So even if the property is dripping, I'm still getting the fees for operating the property. Now I've got a big one that I'm sitting in right now in Duncanville, Texas. It's called Wheatland Plaza, which is an old strip center, know, with some townhomes I'm going to put on the parking lot.
And right now I've got all my fees into it. got, you know, I've got, I sold another property to, you know, make the cash calls to keep this thing going because I didn't want to get more debt right now while interest was high. So I made a conscious decision not to add more debt on. In fact, I may not have even been able to get more debt on because I'm in a leasing upstage and I bought a
Kevin K (09:06.673)
Mm
Monte Anderson (09:17.87)
strip center that was 60 % least and it went down to 28%. Now I'm back up to 80, but I'm still not up to really breaking even, know, nearly up to breaking even. And when I put the 20, the 19 townhomes on the parking lot, you know, I'm to have a mixed use building. And then now I've got something that's operating, but it takes, it takes time. So that'll probably take me, what I just described is probably take me four or five years to get that done. So you got to last that four or five years.
Kevin K (09:47.589)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Monte Anderson (09:47.736)
you know, negative cashflow and you've got a cash negative cashflow has got to come from from somewhere. So it's, it's funny to hear like in the, the podcast or the, the YouTube we were talking about, it's funny to hear some of the people talking about this stuff because they, this would be the way I would put it on paper to show you a deal. I would show you that in reality, it's just not that easy. And you're constantly having to,
You're constantly having to look for new ways of financing or finding another property to buy and sell to make cash flow or buy and sell something you've already got or raising capital from what we call community impact investors who don't expect huge high returns but are also, they expect a little return but they're as interested in the community impact as they are the return. They're interested in both.
Kevin K (10:45.541)
Yeah. Well, so let's look at a couple of the basics that he talked about just to clarify. He described the way he looks at it as like being a real estate private equity company. I think, I mean, that's clever, but I think it's just basically kind of the way a lot of real estate deals happen. And that is you have general partners and you have limited partners. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about like in your experience, how those, what's the difference between the two?
What roles do they play?
Monte Anderson (11:16.29)
Yeah, like I'm the general partner or the managing partner in, in, you know, nearly all the deals I do. And I have partners, limited partners or, or members. These days we call them members of the LLC. Same thing, same, but they're passive, passive investors. And so in any real estate deal, you really need two things. And this is what I talk about in all small scale developers need two things. Really. We need really a good, decent loan from a bank.
And I always say a bank, bank servers are still our best partners. They're going to be the probably lowest interest rate. They're also be the toughest to underwrite you, know, looking at your paperwork and, you know, looking at you closely and asking you questions. And then you need, you need affordable equity. You're either providing that equity or the down payment or your investor partners are providing that down payment.
Kevin K (12:09.617)
Right. Just like if you're buying a house and you have to put 5 % down, 10 % down, 20 % down, whatever it is. For a real estate deal, it's the same way. And a bank is probably going to require 25 % down pretty typically or more. Yeah. Yeah.
Monte Anderson (12:14.079)
same thing.
Monte Anderson (12:23.726)
or 35 % today, or you may want to put 35 or 40 % today at seven and a half or eight, eight and a half percent interest. I can remember years ago that used to be not be that bad of a rate, but we got used to this low rates. we kind of, you know, below 5%, I kind of call that free money. It's kind of free, you know, really. So it really makes deals easier to do. when they go up, but
Kevin K (12:45.265)
You
Monte Anderson (12:51.822)
Yeah, it's the same thing. You you buy a piece of property, you need a loan, you need equity, whether it's 5 % on an FHA loan to buy a house or whether you got a commercial loan at a bank and you need 25, 35%. We used to say 20 % down on commercial loans, but now these days I would say it's minimum 25 to 35 % down that banks are requiring. Not such a bad thing either, to tell you the truth, but it's kind of going back like a hundred years ago when we didn't have financing.
Kevin K (13:21.211)
Mm
Monte Anderson (13:21.678)
Cause if you think about most of you're in my friends, not wealthy, you know, we didn't grow up with extreme amounts of wealth. 35 % might as well be, you know, might as well be a hundred percent, know, we got nothing, you know, you got nothing, you know, it's still a, still a lot of money. But once you get your, your, your investors, your limited partners, your, your members of your LLC, your passive investors, the passive investors don't, don't operate.
Kevin K (13:33.859)
Yeah.
Monte Anderson (13:49.806)
on a day -to -day basis. They're just like they have stock in your deal. And they need to be accredited investors, which means they have to have a certain amount of knowledge or net worth or wealth. They have to make a certain amount of income. They have to be sophisticated and accredited investors of sophisticated investors. In fact, it's a business person that it's not like a little old lady with their last $50 ,000 in the bank.
That's a non -accredited investor or somebody that makes less than a hundred thousand a year. That would be non -accredited investors. So you want accredited investors and these accredited investors, that means they're sophisticated and if they lose their money, they're big boys and big girls. they, buyer beware kind of beware. So they're going to be passive partners. The general partner or the managing partner operates the real estate venture.
hires the contractors, hires the leasing agents, hires the property managers, hires the architects, negotiates with the bank. Quite often in my case, the general partner would personally guarantee the real estate notes, which I do just about on everything I do. I hear people talk about not personally guaranteeing these commercial real estate deals. It's not in my world, really. That's just not realistic. I have to personally...
Kevin K (15:14.949)
Yeah, how does that even exist? Who gets away with not guaranteeing a deal?
Monte Anderson (15:21.514)
I hear people talk about it on YouTube and things like that. But it's just not realistic. there are different kinds of loans where a lender looks at a bigger real estate deal, big, where the asset is so strictly regulated by the bank or by the lender that you may get.
Kevin K (15:25.125)
Hahaha.
Monte Anderson (15:48.098)
you know, a situation that we, know, that you don't have to personally guarantee. So the asset is lots of equity. You know, it's the lender is really looking at everything you do, commissions paid, finish out, you know, construction, you know, things like that. They're approving everything, approved leases. They might as well be the owner. That's the only time I see that where you don't personally guarantee, you know, your real estate in that case. But.
Generally speaking, is general partners got to guarantee the loan, got to run the operation. Also it's got to get, can get paid for running the operation. We get paid a leasing fee, a property management fee. We get paid a development fee. We get paid all these fees if there's enough cashflow. And since I'm the one putting the deals together, I always feel responsible when there's not enough cashflow and end up leaving my fees in.
because I feel responsible if I didn't make the projection quick enough. it seems we just never make the, nothing ever works as quick as I think it should. It never works as quick. It's the nature of the beast. There's so many different things that can happen, whether it be.
building permits or zoning or platting you know, a supplier, subcontractors, or didn't get a tenant, you know, early enough. mean, these days in most cities have hard trouble, have a hard time with building inspectors. So you may not get, you know, inspections as quick. We used to get building permits in two weeks and, you know, we could build a building in six months. That's just no longer the way it is. You know, it just takes a lot longer than that.
You know, it just, and I used to go to California and they'd say, well, it only took me two years to get a permit. And I said, well, we're from Texas. We got a permit in like two weeks. You know, well, we're like California now. It takes us forever. It takes us forever to get things. So all of those things compile up and can cause you delays and stuff like that. And delays are going to cost you money, you know, and, and
Kevin K (17:51.985)
Yeah.
Monte Anderson (18:07.692)
You know, I'm always changing things too. My projects are done incrementally. So we might start in one end and by the time we get through, it's different than what we originally conceptualized. And that's, it's got, it's good and bad. mean, bad is that it's changed and it's different and likely costs more. Good is it might be a better project because we're more curating the type of businesses or people that are there than we are just filling spaces.
Kevin K (18:33.615)
Yeah. I mean, just like on a personal note, the town, like as an example, the townhouse project that I'm working on with my partners, you know, we, as we have progressed through construction, we have found a lot of things that we decided we wanted to change. And a lot of that was really based on, we know like the price we're going to end up selling these at.
And so it kind of changed our minds about who we think like the buyers are. It's a, it's a more expensive, home now than, it was originally. so, you know, we, for example, during the course of construction, we're like, well, you know, maybe we should change that kitchen. maybe that pantry should be different. Maybe we should have a different kind of countertop or finish. And, you would think that all that would be figured out ahead of time. But like you said, during the course of the project,
Monte Anderson (19:04.589)
Yeah.
Monte Anderson (19:14.98)
Yeah.
Kevin K (19:28.355)
you know, especially something I'm at take two or three years, things change.
Monte Anderson (19:32.908)
Yeah, they do. know, time, time happens so fast these days and with AI and other things, mean, the, the speed of, of everything that's happening is, you know, if you're copying something somebody did yesterday, you're already behind. I mean, you've got to be figuring out, you've got to understand this business and know where it's going rather than copying where somebody's been. can, you can learn from someone, but you really can't copy from place to place. know, you principles are the same, but
Kevin K (19:48.027)
Hehehe.
Monte Anderson (20:02.318)
Yeah, like in the center I'm working in now, it's a 90 ,000 square foot shopping center built in the 60s. And we, you know, it was, we're converting it to mix of uses from retail and restaurants to coworking, you know, school and, you know, state of Texas lease and things like that. And we start off thinking we're going to get, you know, $16 a square foot or $18 a square foot. And we'll put a little lipstick on it here and a little, you know, fix some roofs here and stuff. What we find is if we
If we cut the spaces up smaller and we really gut them out and really make them nice inside, we can get $24 a foot. So $24 a square foot versus 16's a lot of money, you know, to the bottom line, which makes the property a lot more expensive. It's just what you just described with the townhome. You got a better kitchen in, you know, we're going to, we can get more money. In fact, if we keep the cheap kitchen in, we may not sell it.
because we found out that the market was a little bit different. And by being an incremental or a nimble type developer, you can make those decisions on the fly and adjust and hopefully profit, you know, hopefully profit from that. In the meantime, you got to get more money somehow. So where do you get it? You either get it from your equity partners or you get it from your, from your bank. And this is a good reason to have community at your partners you want to have. You don't want to have poor partners.
Kevin K (21:17.521)
Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin K (21:30.907)
Yeah.
Monte Anderson (21:30.958)
You want to have rich partners because poor partners can't help you if you get in a situation.
Kevin K (21:34.362)
Yeah.
Kevin K (21:41.297)
Well, and I like your point about the fees part of it, because I think that was something I didn't really know anything about related to development 15 years ago, was that, if I'm the managing partner or the developer of this project, then I essentially pay a percentage fee to myself, and that's part of the construction loan and everything. And I remember in the first workshops that John Anderson did that I
paid attention to, he was like, you know, it's kind of 5 % of hard construction costs in the ballpark. And so I was like, that sounds good. You start to bookmark that. then, you just like you said, that can evaporate during, you know, if things go a little bit sideways. And like on our project, we had budgeted a development fee for all, for the three of us who are managing partners and the construction costs changes and the inflation that's happened over the last few years have really caught up with us.
And we basically having to contribute those fees back to the project to cover other things that we would like to do to it. So we hope to get paid out at a later date, but the reality is we're not going to make that fee during the course of the project.
Monte Anderson (22:53.218)
Yeah. And that's, I would say that's more normal than not. I would just say that's more normal than not. Cause I don't know something about in the idealistic stage, you remember when you were getting ready. I remember when you were getting ready for the townhomes and stuff. And it's the idealistic stage. It's fun during that stage, you know, it's like, it's like new love, right? It's like falling in love and you're in love, you know, all of sudden and everything is, you know, right. Unicorns and rainbows, you know, and then, and then all of sudden, you know, the reality.
Kevin K (23:07.483)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Monte Anderson (23:22.414)
the reality kicks in. But I think that's more normal than not. In fact, I'm embarrassed to say this, but in my one, I had a hotel project in Dallas up here and the, was paid my development fee. I did the project in 2004 and 2005 and I sold it in 2015. And that's when I got my development fee in 2015. And it was my own fault.
Kevin K (23:46.233)
Yeah.
Monte Anderson (23:52.586)
In fact, my own arrogance, my own thinking I knew everything when I started that project that caused that to happen to me. And I wanted to do the project no matter what. I was just going to do it no matter what. I just wanted to do it. And that, and I was like kicking the can down the road, but that own arrogance.
I tell Bernice and I talk about this all the time, Bernice Riedel and I, don't fall in love. She says fall in love with these projects. I say, don't fall in love with them until you own them. Don't fall, because it excuse your, and I fell in love with this project before I did it. And so I just had to do it anyway. Sometimes you just, you and I were talking earlier, sometimes you just, and if you're going to do that, that's fine. Just know that the pain is coming. Just know the pain is coming with it.
Kevin K (24:32.145)
Mm
Monte Anderson (24:51.178)
I understand it. I understand loving a project more than anything and you want to do it. I understand it. Just be prepared, you know, for the stress and the high level of anxiety that will come with that.
Kevin K (25:02.481)
So, Monty, that begs the question then. If you didn't get paid your development fee for 10 years, if that's more common than we'd like to admit, how do you live? How do you make a living during the course of doing these projects? Because you have to have some cash flow to pay the bills on.
Monte Anderson (25:21.774)
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I started off as a real estate agent leasing and selling space, you know, and buildings in my commercial real estate agent. And so all in the beginning days back in the early years, 100 % of my business was third party broker. I was doing this for somebody else, you know, and that was easy. You know, I had an easy life back then. And then I decided to be a developer.
Kevin K (25:48.667)
Yeah.
Monte Anderson (25:51.406)
So, but what happened now today, I have about 80 % is my own stuff and 20 % is other people's about 80 % today. And so you still need to be working. We call it working in the flywheel or working in the area. You're still working to crank that flywheel to move your company along, to move your own personal life along. You still got to make income. So I always kept brokering space for others.
people. And if you're an architect, so you would still keep doing architectural work for other people or doing your podcasting or doing your, you know, if you're an IT guy, you still, you know, you're working on your IT in these buildings, you're doing, you're doing work in other buildings, you know, but you're doing in hopefully in your farm or in your community, or anywhere you're where you're, you know, you're committed to where you're committed. That's a really key to this is, is working in an area that you, you know, that you commit to as a small scale developer, you need to
You need to stay close to home and not try to be working in, you know, Kansas city and St. Louis and Oklahoma city and, you know, Dubuque, you know, you'll be, you'll, that's a good way to go broke. You know, it's being too scattered out, you know, like that. You, and some people may can do it, you know, I'm just not capable of doing that. You know, you have to stay close and that's how I make a living. And I keep my, another thing is, you know, you want to keep.
I mean, it's just silly stuff to say this, you know, live on half of what you make, try to get used to that, you know. That's a really hard thing to tell people and that's, you know, try to live on half, you know, try to really live, you know. I've had to sell my houses before. I've had to sell my cars. I mean, I've had to, you know, when the going gets tough, you know, sometimes you got to do what you got to do. Now, on wood and thankfully.
And by the grace of God, I've been able to build my net worth continually. But when you sell a property and you make a lot of money on it or you make a profit, you've got capital gains, you know, then. And so the only way not to pay those capital gains is to do, you know, to trade that property or do a 1031 tax deferred exchange and put the money into another property. So I sell a property and I get some money and I either pay a bunch of taxes on it or I have to re -spend it.
Monte Anderson (28:17.826)
But if I respend it, hopefully I can get a brokerage fee, an architectural fee, construction fee. And so I end up living on these fees. You know, I'll end up in these fees I pay myself. I'm able to pay myself. they're not, you know, they're market fees. They're fair to my partners, fair. You you always want to put these fees and stuff in your partnership agreements.
You want to put what you're going to get paid. You always want to put that in your partnership agreement. So your partners know what you're getting paid. You want to have that upfront. You don't want that to be a surprise. You know, as you're putting, I've got partners for like over 20 years, financial partners, and they just, trust me. It's whatever you want to do, do it. You know, and because they're used to me, you know, taking care of them. And that's really important as you take care of, you know, your
your people that invest with you like that. gotta take, I would, if I had to, would sell everything I had to make sure my people are whole and my banks are paid if I had to. And I'd just start over again. I haven't had to, but thankfully, but I've sold things along the way when I really didn't want to sell them, you know, to be able to keep on going.
Kevin K (29:31.323)
So, I mean, I think it sounds like then, if this is a fair way to say it, that if you're doing this sort of thing, first of all, it's probably, especially for a lot of people, it's better to think of it as like a side hustle, at least initially. But more importantly, it's it's great to be able to have one of those people in the flywheel that you would normally pay a fee to.
it would be great to be able to replace yourself with at least one of those. So whether that's brokerage, property management, design, engineering, anybody that you might normally be cutting a check to, if you have an expertise in one of those areas and you can claim that fee, then that is a way to keep getting yourself paid.
Monte Anderson (30:13.302)
Yes.
Monte Anderson (30:18.538)
Yeah, yeah, think about this. Think about this in your farm up there and your Kansas City farm up there. You're working on this project right now. You're having to put your fees back in, but you're also working on a project for another guy, John Doe and Jane Doe down the street. You're doing the same things. You're still improving the neighborhood. So it's really, I don't look at it as a side hustle. You're doing architecture for yourself and you're doing it for Jane and John and these other people.
Kevin K (30:39.91)
Okay.
Monte Anderson (30:45.42)
And then every third or fourth or fifth deal is your deal. And every third or fourth or fifth deal, it's your deal. And then the more you get going over time, every other deal is your deal. And then every two deals is yours and one is somebody else's. And every three deals is yours and then one is somebody else's. So over time, it becomes, but I think it's good as a small scale developer to have.
the term used, side hustle, is true to be able to start right now. Because right now you can adopt a place, start doing your architecture in that place, stop building, know, start working on hospitals all over the country, just work in your own farm, and do small jobs, do storefronts, come and help people do their lettering on their windows if you're an architect. You know, help them just fix things up.
You you make enough money to make a living and at the same time, now you're working on your townhomes. You know, you're working on your townhomes and now you find another project and I'm always looking for an opportunity. Because if I can find an and what is an opportunity? An opportunity is where something is below the market. Like the shopping center I bought, 90 ,000 square feet, 60 % occupied, the rates were like six or $7 a foot per year. You know.
When I get through, it's 90 ,000 square feet. The rates are 22, $24 a square foot. So I bought it. It was way below the market, but the market site is a $6 building. The market didn't see it as a $24 building because it had the cheap kitchens. Like you say, in the townhouse, had, so we put good kitchen, you know, we did better and we had to do, we had to spend more, but it was, we were able to make a lot more money.
And in the long run, it will be. I can tell you this on all of my projects, all of them, just a hundred percent. If I keep it long enough, I will get all my fees and a really good return because what I'm doing is improving a farm. I'm improving a community together. And as they say, it's the tide rises, so to all chefs. So every time I'm improving something in that farm, the one I've got is going up in value.
Monte Anderson (33:10.412)
And over time that'll go up. If we look at it at three or four years, that's where the problem is on the YouTube video that we talked about is looking at stuff that could get rich quick scheme is, don't know. There's guys who flip houses and do things. Gals that flip houses and do things that probably they get rich. They get somewhat rich, you know, I guess. And some of them get rich, I guess. And you know, you can do that.
Kevin K (33:22.523)
Yeah.
Monte Anderson (33:38.552)
That's just never been my goal in doing real estate. My goal has been one of a townmaker, you know, of making our lives better. And I know you have the same goal in mind. So do most of our friends have that goal. We want to make the built environment better. Money's important, but it's not always the only important thing.
Kevin K (34:02.363)
Yeah, I think it's, kind of took the words right out of my mouth. That's like, you're not, you're not describing a, get rich quick scheme at all. But you're describing something that has a different kind of reward that somebody had. Obviously your, your goal is still to make money and make good money if you, know, if you're smart about it, but you're not going to be rolling up in a brand new Maserati in two years or something like that. It's because your goal is really to improve.
Monte Anderson (34:08.93)
Yeah.
Monte Anderson (34:28.098)
Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin K (34:31.525)
your place and lift your own community up and do really good stuff along the way.
Monte Anderson (34:39.084)
Yeah. And, and like you said, make making money. always tell people wherever I go these days, making money is the most important thing. Doing good is equal, but I didn't say doing good is the most important thing first. And then make it my, you know, I said, making money, said most of them, because without making money, you can't continue. You're going to be stuck. You know, if you build those townhomes.
all your money's gone and all your credit's tied up and you weren't able to sell them or you weren't able to get the rents, then everything you got's tied up. And I can't tell you how many friends I've got all over the country right now that are one time, developer and out. They're one deal and out, you know? And so when I get stuck on a project and I do, I'm on one of those right now, it's just big and it's bulky, you know, and it's hard.
So I've got to continue to do these littler projects around that keep me. That's what keeps me making, know, my own salary, you know, making, you know, got to, we, had a meeting with my staff this morning and said, okay, what are we going to sell right now? What's, what's on the board that we can sell? You know, what can we do? That's when we make our fees, you know, brokerage fees and development fees when we sell these properties. And then we can do another one. We'll fix them up. And hopefully we get to.
sell them to somebody good, you know, that hadn't been the case always with me. I sold some stuff to some people I didn't, I wished I wouldn't have, but sometimes I have no choice. You know, sometimes I have no choice. have to do, but the difference too, in what you and I are talking about today, you're in the middle of it yourself right now. And I am in it all the time constantly is that we're in the middle of this, you know, of
very difficult, you know, complex, you know, maybe more complex than somebody doing a big, you know, $100 million building over here. Because a $100 million building, you've got lawyers and lobbyists and architects and planners and engineers and contractors, and you've probably got a big bid and you're going to build it all at once and it's going to be over and it's financed by the Ohio State Teacher Pension Fund.
Monte Anderson (36:57.602)
know, has financed it and it's probably easier because the developer didn't have to be the developers more of a financial architect, more of a financial wizard, you know, if you will, whereas a small scale developer like us, you know, we're the, you know, we're everything. Yeah, we're quite often we're the contractor, you know, handling leases, we're going to raise the money, we went to the bank to sign the note, you know, if the plumbing's broke, you know,
Quite often I might be the one that's called depending on when it is, if it's in the middle of the night or something like that. We're very close and these are personal. We know the names of our tenants or our buyers. kind of, know our people. That's the big difference. And so you gotta be, you gotta really be, I think more knowledgeable sometimes about building, about developing and building. And I would think that this is the way people were a hundred years ago. I would think.
100 years ago when there was no financing, or maybe a little longer, but 100 years ago when there was no financing and you're building these projects in towns with all cash or borrowed money from the attorney in town who had a little money, or that's quite often who's building those things back in those days. Quite often it was bankers and attorneys back then, bankers built.
We're developers. can't do that these days because of the laws, but quite often bankers and things were developers. And you were raising all cash and you're doing it. That's why all of the buildings are small, a lot smaller back in C. And they were built incrementally. When we talked about incremental development, we didn't invent incremental development. That's the way the beginning of time. Yes.
Kevin K (38:48.143)
Yeah. Yeah. That's the way all development was until really fairly recently. I'm curious about if you could talk about some of the ways things go wrong. So you mentioned you have some friends who are like one project and out. What's going on? How does something like this really go wrong for somebody where, or are there a couple of key mistakes to just really watch out for?
Monte Anderson (38:55.5)
Yeah, it was.
Monte Anderson (39:16.748)
Yeah, the biggest mistake is humility, not enough humility. I mean, really to have that open mind to really look at the reality and the facts, know, really have your ego checked and the reality of facts. You really need to look at those facts. Do not try to, you know, cherry coat it. not try to do that.
What happens in these cases is be a guy like you or me was starting out, you you put together a deal and you put all your money in, you put all your money in just to get the plans done and, you know, know, down payment on the property and engineering and, you know, bank fees and attorney's fees. And you put all your money up, you got your money. And then now you got a couple of partners and you've promised these partners. You've promised them certain things, you know, that are probably too good to be true.
Kind of like the guy on YouTube. Probably too good to be true. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And we've promised those. And we've promised those things and now it's not the right, we said it was. Or we want to upgrade the kitchens. Or I want to change the spaces. In fact, I have a meeting this afternoon at four o 'clock after this to talk to one of my partners about this exact.
Kevin K (40:21.903)
Yeah, if it sounds super easy, watch out.
Monte Anderson (40:44.318)
banking today and saying we need more, we need more money. And then you, then you, can't get much more money. You, you, you spend two or three years getting their project together. You used all your money, you used all your in -laws money to part of your investors. You got your credit tied up. You finally did get, say that in the best cases or in some of the best cases, you got it all built. It's built and you're not, you're for one thing, you're brain dead.
your brain dead, you're just deal dead. And secondly, you've got no more money. You got no more credit. You've got to go back to work wherever you are, doing whatever you can to make money. Because you still had your house and your wife and your kids. You still had to, and so that's actually best case in some scenarios, you didn't go broke. But in many cases where the deal maker, the promoter, the developer promises things.
They might even lose their interest because they can't, especially if it depends on how they promise the payback to the investors. You could actually lose your interest. call that, you there's a preferred return. A preferred return is when you would maybe guarantee an investor return. You would guarantee them maybe a 6 % preferred return, which means you're going to get 6 % from day one in the deal. And if you can't pay me back, that's 6 % plus a percentage of the profit.
then I take your interest. And that happens, that happens a lot. And that's not as bad as a bankruptcy or a foreclosure, but you ended up doing all this work and you end up with nothing. And so I never do preferred returns with anybody. I never do those, just don't do them. There's too many unknown things. There's just too many things that can happen. Preferred returns sometimes it's like having a bad credit card. You can't get the interest, you know, paid.
And it just keeps going every day while you're having delays or not getting the project done quick enough.
Kevin K (42:51.697)
So then for your, do you have a recommendation then for dealing with investors so that you don't have to do the preferred return? How would you structure, recommend structuring?
Monte Anderson (42:59.246)
Yeah, I do. I do. have a, what I call the whole pie. I'd say it's the promoter. And this is, I'm going to oversimplify this, promoter, the developer, you put up the money to pursue all the money to do the deal, the architecture, the due diligence, the earnest money, the legal money, and you sign the note. And then the investors, which you may be an investor in your own deal. If you put cash in your own deal, your investors get 50 % of the deal.
And they put up 100 % of the cash needed, the equity needed. And as the cashflow is there, they get their equity, they get their equity back first. No percentage return. They get their equity back first. And once their equity is all paid back, then you split 50 -50. So you're 50 % going in, you're 50%. But they get all their money back. And here's the thing about investors. Most of time, once they get their money back, they're very...
They're very flexible then once they get their principal back. And then in the meantime, you say, well, I got no fees. How am I going to make a living? Well, you make your living off the development fee, the leasing fees, the management fees. So you're making those fees back. then, then if you get the building leased up and this is what I'm doing here at where we speak right now, is I'll get this thing leased up and stabilized with no more construction going on. Then I can go out on the market and get a better loan.
So I can get a better loan. know, lenders during construction, you know, you've probably experienced this. You lenders are very nervous during construction.
Kevin K (44:35.218)
yeah, that's the riskiest time period.
Monte Anderson (44:38.252)
Yeah. And so they're in, this way, this way people get back, they get back to their percentage when they get it here, when it comes back, you're going to get it when it comes back. Now I got to treat them right. And I got to do my best to get their money back. And that taking me time to build relationships where I can, where I can get this done. And these are also community investors. And I would say, what is a community investor? It's a person that's, it's typically a baby boomer, generally speaking between.
It's worth between three million and $20 million net worth. That's gotta have 100, 200, 300 ,000, 1 ,000 they can put in one of your projects. Maybe there's three or four of them if you need a bigger amount. they're gonna be like around, it's somebody you can have coffee with and talk to. No, they're gonna be...
more empathetic with you, you know, if you're honest with them, you know, always be honest with them. Always telling the bad news and the truth. Always. Don't hold, don't hold back and surely don't hide it. Don't hide. Don't, don't do that. Don't do that. People are, people are, people are forgiving and better when, the truth, when you're, when you have a true, you know,
You have a true relationship that's not full of hidden things and it's just a, it's better. And it always comes out in the end. It always comes out better for you. And they know you're committed.
Kevin K (46:21.263)
Yeah, was gonna say eventually you might be able to hide something for a little bit, but it's gonna come out.
Monte Anderson (46:26.604)
Yeah. Yeah. You're not going to be able to be careful with your numbers. And I've done this. mean, I've, you know, I've been too optimistic on my numbers, you know, I mean, cause I wanted to do the project, you know, and, I have people around me that keep me balanced in that place. said my long time CFO here, he's an old banker back when he he's been with me forever, I always give him proformas and stuff. do. said, look,
Kevin K (46:46.16)
Ha
Monte Anderson (46:56.27)
shoot holes in this, really, just really take my stuff apart. Really look at it, critique it, challenge it. Tell me I can't lease that space for this much, or I can't resell it, or I can't know why I can build a restaurant for $100 a square foot. It's gotta be 150, no matter how you look. Tell me those things. Tell me I can't manage this thing for $5 a square foot. It's gotta be, critique me.
Yeah. Keep me balanced.
Kevin K (47:27.867)
So yeah, I think that's great advice. Always have somebody that you have a relationship enough with that you can ask them to poke holes in what you're doing. So I mean, we've talked about some of the downside, there's also, mean, the reality is we're interested in this and a lot of people are interested in this because there's a ton of enjoyment that comes out of it as well. Some financial, but a lot of it non -financial. I think one of the things just
Monte Anderson (47:37.88)
Yeah.
Kevin K (47:57.243)
For me personally, I'll never be able to shake loose the architect inside me and I just love seeing buildings going up. the incredible reward you have to know that you worked on something and you can see it manifested physically is pretty awesome. So there's all those things and it kind of like we were talking a little bit about earlier, I think one of the things that I remind myself of.
Monte Anderson (48:16.92)
Yeah.
Kevin K (48:26.845)
frequently is that sometimes you just have to make a decision to just go and to just do it. And you can definitely get paralysis analysis here in this always hoping for the perfect timing and the perfect deal. But there's never really any such thing. at some point, you want to do your homework and everything. there comes a point where you just got to pull the trigger and try it and do something, right?
Monte Anderson (48:33.186)
Yeah.
Monte Anderson (48:54.402)
Yeah, yeah, I'm very instinct guided by instinct. I mean, I'm very guided by instinct. Now, mean, you've seen me before work on numbers and stuff, you know, I'm constantly running numbers. When I see projects, I can see it with numbers. I see the numbers and the spaces and the sizes and what the rents should be and.
operations that cost and stuff like that. yeah, at some point, there's no way you're going to be able to prove it and you just got to go for it. You just got to. And to your right to see a project go from like you've seen, you know, go out of the ground to see it come up. mean, to watch the framing and, know, from the plumbing, watching the plumbing stick up and the framing. mean, there's, there's something so great about that, especially when you're doing a project that's worthy, you know, worthy project. It's something.
I mean, we were meant to be builders, think, as humans, especially. I mean, we were meant to build and to do good things upon the earth. Hopefully we could do better things than we've done upon the earth, than some of the things we've done, but we were meant to be builders. And there's nothing like it to see.
project. have photos all around my office of projects and things that and it's just so good to see all of that and to also have made a decent living and built some wealth you know and today I have my daughter and my granddaughter both work with me and to have that that legacy or that start of something is
It's like there's no way any amount of money could make me feel as good as looking at some of these projects and just seeing businesses thrive and people have decent places to live. There's something so special about that. Otherwise, I'd just be a broker today, just brokering deals and wouldn't care. I think there's something in us that wants us to be townmakers.
Kevin K (51:00.581)
Mm
Monte Anderson (51:00.704)
It wants us to make our towns better. And maybe it's you're not the developer. Maybe you're just one of the champions, the community champions, or you're just an activist in the community that supports this. It's nice to have people like that. Those are very important people to me. People that cheer me on and don't just criticize me. They're very important, you know, to me. They're just as important as anybody, you know, but that, but there's something so good about that. And then, then you will, if you can, if you can.
If you can commit, here's why committing to your neighborhood or your farm or your place for the rest of your life is so important. Because once you commit to that place like that, you commit. The universe changes around you. It makes things easier. Well, I don't know about easier. It makes things doable. It gives you resources. It gives you things that you wouldn't have had when you make that.
when you don't have that commitment. gives people come to you and they want to sell you a property cheaper or they want to, you know, people will invest with you. People will do things with you when they know that you're a true, you're champion like that. And then you will make money. And I think people and my partners and stuff, they want me to make money. They allow me to make money on these projects. They want me to make money. You know, I have to make them money too, but, and to...
see all the small businesses that I deal with and the people that I've seen in housing that may not have had housing and subcontractors and welders and carpenters and know painters and people that around me help them build their businesses and stuff I'm involved in all of that there's I mean I can't imagine doing anything better I don't know what it would be maybe I could be a missionary or something do better work or something but I don't know this is good stuff well this is just good
Kevin K (52:49.563)
Yeah. Well, you're a missionary of sorts. You're a certain.
Monte Anderson (52:57.312)
It's good stuff, it's good, you and it helps you help people. You help build a better, you hope you do. Not everything I've done is always the best for sure, because I've made a lot of mistakes, but that would be the hope that you are able to leave something decent. By the way, my other granddaughter just graduated from Stephen F. Austin in Texas to be an architect.
Kevin K (53:24.729)
wow. All right.
Monte Anderson (53:25.644)
So that was really cool. she's, you know, I got kids, so there's family trees, you know, starting to be architects and developers and stuff. it's a good.
Kevin K (53:36.625)
I feel like we're starting to brainwash our kids in that regard too. We've got them, you know, all those like HGTV type shows. We got them watching those and they're really enjoying them. And it's fun to watch with them. The latest one that we found, which I guess is not a new show, I guess it's like seven years old, but there was a show called You Can't Turn That Into a House. And it was actually three guys from Kansas City who
Monte Anderson (53:40.994)
Alright.
Monte Anderson (53:46.396)
yeah.
Monte Anderson (54:01.6)
Yes.
Kevin K (54:05.821)
made the show and they take these things like, you know, they'll take a couple of school buses or a grain silo or a horse trailer or whatever, and turn it into like a little house. and it's just like the coolest thing. And they do it on these ridiculous schedules and ridiculous budgets, but that act of creativity is so just, you know, incredible. And I remember actually, I think the first one we saw that it was like this, this stuff kind of reminds me of Monty because.
Monte Anderson (54:20.78)
Yeah.
Kevin K (54:34.489)
you have done some really cool, creative, unique stuff with your projects that are way outside the box on what people would normally look at, especially for your retail stuff.
Monte Anderson (54:44.15)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We use a lot of trailers and stuff like that. love buses and trailers and things. Yeah. Kind of cool. Yeah.
Kevin K (54:49.435)
Yeah.
Kevin K (54:52.977)
So it's fun work and I agree it's fun to share it with others and everything else.
Monte Anderson (55:00.111)
Yeah. We do need to make more money as small middle class developers and stuff. We do need to make more money. So we need to continue to teach each other and help each other. That's another thing about the friends that you and I have. I think we all pay it forward. We're all always trying to help each other, I think. And that's a good thing.
Kevin K (55:21.477)
Yeah. Well, Monty, where can people find you next? Or you mentioned earlier some places you're going to be roaming around to. Where else are you working these days?
Monte Anderson (55:34.934)
Let's see, South Bend, Indiana, Elkhart, Indiana, Denton, Texas, Regina, Canada, Dubuque, let's see, Lafayette, Louisiana, getting ready to start in Orlando, Florida. Of course, Bernice Riedel is working in Buffalo and Jim Cooman in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And then we've done a little bit of work or still doing work in Kansas City or in Grandview.
Missouri with an abandoned golf course down there that you remember. We're still working on that. They got their financing and bought that, the people that were helping. And then you can always reach us at neighborhoodevolution .com and optionsre .com. And we're always here. We do, we only do development, you know, in my farm, in my local area of Southern Dallas County. Southern Dallas County is where I work. And then we...
Kevin K (56:11.867)
Good. Good.
Monte Anderson (56:32.022)
Then we coach and teach and train, help cities create ecosystems all over the country through neighborhood evolution.
Kevin K (56:44.571)
Well, we just ran into Bernice recently. was here in Kansas City giving a keynote speech for a Missouri Main Streets Conference. So that was kind of cool to see. terrific. All right. We'll say hello.
Monte Anderson (56:51.916)
Yeah, and she's right outside my door right now here in Texas. She's riding with me to Lafayette tomorrow. yeah, we're meeting Marcus. Marcus King in Detroit will meet us in Lafayette. So Marcus is coming.
Kevin K (56:59.451)
Good, good. All right, Monty.
cool, good, good. All right, well I'm jealous. Sounds like a fun crew. So. All right, Monty, thanks so much. This was great, very informative and I'm sure we will do it again.
Monte Anderson (57:09.218)
Yeah.
Monte Anderson (57:17.762)
Yeah, thank you, Kevin. See you soon. Bye.
Kevin K (57:19.205)
All right, take care.

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Cities and Parents: Let's Get Real About What Matters
27 Ağu· The Messy City Podcast
Truth is, I wish we talked a lot more about making cities as kid-friendly as possible. The topic is often overlooked. That’s why it was fascinating to see Derek Thompson’s article, “The Urban Family Exodus Is a Warning For Progressives” get so much traction. He clearly touched a nerve.
Today, I give my take in this solo podcast. As a father, as someone that loves cities, and someone that is in fact deeply concerned about the trendlines, I share my observations. This one gets a little personal. Ground I cover includes:
1. How parents really feel about their kids
2. What life in American cities is really like
3. How things are different now from the historic norm in the US
4. What parents really prioritize, not what we wish them to prioritize
5. What cities can do
6. How cities *could* be amazing
Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.
Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.
Intro: “Why Be Friends”
Outro: “Fairweather Friend”
Episode Transcript:
Kevin K (00:01.824)
Welcome back to the Messy City podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg flying solo today, doing an episode in a way that I've done occasionally in the past, but I haven't done a little while. I've had some amazing guests. I've got some more coming up and I love talking to people other than myself primarily in this gig, but it is fun once in a while to just riff on something that's in the news or on my mind.
And that's what I'm going to do today. I do want to take a second and say thank you to all of you who are listening and following. The podcast has really grown a lot in audience the last six months. And I really appreciate everybody tuning in. And if you get a chance, please hit that like or follow button. Leave me a review on your podcast platform, especially if you're on Apple. Apple is the biggest podcast platform by far.
So if you're listening through Apple podcasts, I'd really appreciate it if you gave the show a rating. All of that stuff helps get attraction and grow the audience. And the bigger the audience, the better I will be able to be at providing you all with really good programming and interesting guests and the ability to try to help us all out as we navigate how to improve our cities, how to improve our own situation.
if you're a, a small developer or an aspiring small developer, try to become one. if you are someone who's just interested in cities and planning to do whatever you can do to make your community a better place to live and, and, help us, help us all out in our own little world. So that's the point. That's what I'm trying to do here. And, I hope you enjoy it judging by the numbers. A lot of you are enjoying it. So that's really cool. And, it's,
It's definitely a lot of fun for me. So with that, I want to talk about an article that's made the rounds a lot lately and a topic that I've seen discussed in social media and elsewhere. And it really has to do with the subject of families and big cities. And a lot of this most, the most recent flurry of discussion happened at
Kevin K (02:25.002)
as the result of an article in the Atlantic by Derek Thompson titled, The Urban Family Exodus is a Warning for Progressives. And I'm going to commit a cardinal sin here today where I'm going to talk about this topic without having read the actual article. So forgive me for that, but I will say I have read many, many articles on this topic.
And what I really want to talk about today is just kind of my own experience as a father, as a parent, and my own interaction and evolution on this issue. Because I think there's an awful lot in the context of this subject that we just don't talk very much about. Especially those of us who are in this tiny, tiny niche of
people who call themselves urbanists, who care about cities, who care about development in cities. There's an awful lot tied into this issue that overlaps with others that we've talked about here before, but I think there's some that's really specific about having kids that I'd just like to dive into. So the context really in Derek's article, I did see some of the numbers. I don't have them in front of me. You can find them.
out there, it's not hard to find. But the context was that people with children are continuing to move out of big cities. That this trend really started in the early COVID years, 2020, 2021, and has not really abated. so the article really was kind of a warning, especially to people in some of the larger
cities in the country, the places like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, et cetera, that people who have a choice, who have kids have continued to leave. And so that is why he says it's a warning. I guess I would say right off, right up front, I think this should be a concern for everybody. I don't think it should be a concern just for somebody who calls themselves a progressive. I've always had the opinion that
Kevin K (04:42.818)
Communities and cities are for everybody in every age group, every kind of background, every interest. The best kind of communities really embrace everybody. And it's a little strange to me when we say that, when we just kind of dial it down to like a political impulse. I understand why he's doing that. the reality is that most big cities are run by progressives.
And so I think he's talking to progressive policymakers. But I think this issue really should concern everybody because honestly, when you don't have children living in your city, you have to ask yourself, like, what future does your city have? This is often talked about in relation to like places that are like retirement communities. And a lot of retirement communities also go through phases and fads.
And if they don't evolve, since they're not replacing people themselves, there are no children in retirement communities. And so people aren't growing up there. What happens as people die off and those populations change? Well, the same is true of cities. If children are not growing up in cities and having, or if they're not growing up in your community and having a good feeling about it, it lowers the likelihood that they will want to be there as an adult.
And if you're not going to be there as an adult, it's going to hurt your future population as well. everything in cities is a function of time. And there is that fourth dimension that we often neglect, that things change a lot over time. And we don't think about what might happen 10, 20, 30 years down the road. But if your community doesn't have children in it, that's a big red flashing warning sign.
for what happens in the next generation. So I think this is an issue that should concern everybody. And again, I'd say right up front, I am terribly, terribly biased on this because I do have children. I have two young children, two daughters that are six and eight years old. And so I want to share, I think what might be useful for me, first of all, is to share a little bit of a personal perspective on having kids.
Kevin K (07:09.09)
And then I have some thoughts related to what's going on in terms of evaluating and understanding cities and the landscape of cities in the United States. And then also what we might do, what cities might be able to do to course correct. What can they do to turn this around so that cities can be attractive to people who do have kids and reverse that population loss. So let's just start off with the personal.
not a young person anymore. I certainly don't feel old, but I can't deny the math, but I'm not somebody who's in my 20s or 30s. And I have kids, but I came to having kids pretty late in life compared to most people. So my oldest was born when I was 45 and then my youngest when I was 47. So I'm not in...
What is it? Al Pacino world here? Is it Al Pacino that like that recently had a kid or something and he's about eight years old? I'm not in that world, but I am definitely in the category of people who had kids late in their adult life. And so I lived a long period of time without children in cities and now I'm living with children in a city environment.
and I think the thing, you know, the thing, the way I would like to talk about this first and foremost, there's so much about this that changes. You know, there's a lot of cliches about the things that change. And when you have kids and I knew all those cliches, I heard them a million times. It's really hard to fully understand that until you go through it. And, having children completely rewires your brain.
and your priorities in a lot of ways that have really surprised me as a person. And I have often found myself just like shocked at things that are different about me now that I am caring for and responsible for these two young people. Just, you know, one silly thing is just like...
Kevin K (09:29.184)
you know, my wife and I have talked about this, like anytime there is like a movie or a show on TV and there are children that are like at risk, they're abducted, they're being hurt or harmed in some way. It's like, you know, I just lose it now. And it, the emotion that that creates in me and us is, it's hard to describe. It really,
It affects me in ways that are, they seem kind of silly, but I understand and I empathize much more with the families and people in those situations than I ever would have otherwise. And so it's really kind of bizarre, but it's like an incredible way to just like make me all of a sudden choke up, you know, watching a movie, having some harm come to a small child. But I mean, the reality is,
I will tell you from my experience, you do become much more emotional when you have kids. At least in my experience, I have found a protective impulse, the desire to protect them from harm and from the world that I just wasn't sure that I had that. When I was younger, I didn't know about that, but when once you have those children in your care,
It's incredible how protective you are of just every aspect of their life. so I get why we don't want to become helicopter parents. We are not like that. But I get why people have that reaction. I get the instinct that a lot of parents have to really deeply care for every aspect of what happens in their child's life. And I would say,
If you don't have that kind of reaction, if having kids doesn't change you in some meaningful way, then you should probably take a long look in the mirror. I mean, you might be a sociopath, I'm just saying. And it should change you. because it's an incredible thing to have to care for another human being. It's an incredible joy. And there's definitely the part of me that says, God, I wish
Kevin K (11:54.036)
I had done this when I was younger and even had more kids than just the two of them because they really bring you incredible joy into your life. I would say that probably the highest highs and lowest lows come from being a parent. The moments you have them with them that are really great or fun or memorable from a good standpoint, stand out above and beyond anything else that
you I did for myself in the years before I have kids. So it really is very different and it does tend to make you think that the life you led before kids was very like self -centered and maybe selfish. And I'm not saying that as like an accusation to anybody because, I lived it. I lived it myself for a very long period of time, but it is just really different. So
having kids that you care for really does change your priorities in ways that you probably can't communicate perfectly in an article, especially if you're like a childless person and you're just trying to describe like statistics that are happening and analyze what's going on. If you can't understand the emotion of it, then you're really missing something really important. So one aspect of that
is that with small children especially, you spend an awful lot of your time and mental energy trying to come up with activities for them and trying to entertain them, trying to do these things in ways that you're not worried about their safety. mean, you're literally worried about them surviving every moment.
And so we spend a lot of time like trying to chase down those different activities. And for a lot of small kids in particular, in American cities, a lot of those places are in the suburbs. And I'll talk more about that in a little bit and the evolution of all that. But that is part of the day to day that most parents deal with is, you know, maybe you're going to a kid's play area or a play date.
Kevin K (14:21.192)
or a daycare or a swimming pool or aquatic center or whatever it is. And in American cities, most of those are in suburban locations because that's where most of the kids are. so there is this kind of challenge that you have as somebody who lives in an urban area that there isn't as much just kid -focused amenities as you would have in a lot of suburban areas.
So it's true that if you live in the suburbs, you're still driving a lot to all these places, but it is closer and there's just a lot more of it. And so, you know, as a parent, we do find ourselves getting in the car a lot and driving out to suburban locations for any number of activities. And frankly, the family oriented events and activities, there's just so much more of them that are in businesses and other things in the suburbs.
And it's just, one of the things that I think you can't really describe very well is going to, when you have small children, going to a place where you can kind of just let the kids free and roam around and play with other kids and not worry that they're going to be harmed. there's a, there is like a stress reduction on your own life that happens there. And so you're kind of always looking for those opportunities and there's just not much of that in a lot of urban areas or.
urban locations. Now I think cities have gotten better for families in my lifetime. And there are more things. So like in my city, there's something we call Science City, which is basically just like a kids play area that is in the Union Station in Kansas City, Missouri, that's in the city. It's a really cool place. The kids love going there. That's an example of like a very family and kid focused activity.
And there are some people working on creating more activities nearby and adjacent to it that I think will be really cool. We obviously have parks, we have playgrounds, we have a fantastic park that is a block away from our house that the kids walk down to and it's got a playground and everything. So we've used that a lot. We've got some of those types of things. And we have a neighborhood main street that is just up the block from our house.
Kevin K (16:45.054)
And if we walk a few blocks in one direction, you know, we can hit the ice cream place and there's a taco place and there's, there's, there's some places that are, that are fun to hang out. Now, I will say in our area, most of there are some, most of those businesses are not what we would call like kid friendly places. and maybe that's a, that might be an especially American way of looking at businesses. but they aren't.
And they're generally focused on the demographic of people who live in the cities, which tends to be younger and just certain crowds of people that are not dragging their kids around. we have some of those things. It is better. But we also lack a lot. We don't have a swimming pool, for example, in our neighborhood or anywhere near us.
By contrast, both of my sisters live in suburban subdivisions in our metro that both have neighborhood pools. And they can just walk over any time when they visit their aunts and uncles and they can just go swimming all day. Granted, they pay for that. It's part of your HOA dues if you live in one of those subdivisions. But we don't even have that option in our area at all.
in our part of the city. Now, some cities are better than others. Our city is not particularly good at having those kinds of amenities. And that's really something that is very lacking, not to mention some of those kid play areas. And there's just also very little programming of events that are specifically for kids and families in the city.
Parks department is doing a little bit more of that than they used to, but, it's great. We love, we do as much of that as we can. But when you compare it to the sort of routine events that happen in a lot of our suburban jurisdictions, it just doesn't compare. and, and it's frustrating. It's frustrating for us because we wish we had a lot more of that. Cause we don't want to get in the car and drive for 20 or 30 minutes to another location. But we often find that.
Kevin K (19:07.116)
that's just kind of what we have to do. So that, I mean, that's one aspect of all this is, you know, when you are in middle -class family and you are trying to balance, you know, a lot of these needs and really care for your kids and provide them with fun things to do and go to places where you can kind of relax too, it's really important to have those things nearby. So, you know, another aspect of this
I think if you're to step back a little bit, and that's all kind of like personal experience. If I were to look at like, are the things that most normal families really care about when it comes to choosing a place to live? And I've mentioned this before, but one thing that I think almost anybody listening to this podcast would have to understand is that like,
Those of us who are in our little world here are not normal. If you are a quote unquote urbanist, you are probably not normal. You probably do not have like the same value system as the vast majority of people in your city or in our country. I'm not saying that's a good thing or a bad thing. It's just, it just is. It's just different. A lot of us put a high priority in our own life.
in living somewhere where you can walk around to some things or ride a bike to some things. And I love all that. I put a high priority in that. I wish more people did. I wish that was normative in our culture that like the idea of using your body to get around to most things in your daily life was like normal. It used to be normal in our cities. And if I were to say a little sidebar here,
one of the things that's really kind of unique about American cities and culture is that we conflate urban with big city. and by urban, mean like places where you might like walk around to things. so this is, this is different than most countries in the world where, where people small town, whether you're in a small town or a big city, most people walk around, to get around.
Kevin K (21:36.69)
And it's different from our historical legacy as well in the United States, because prior to the 1920s and the beginning of the suburban experiment or the revolution in city planning that happened at that time period, every community in our country was a walkable place. Everything that a lot of quote unquote urbanists would love was normative.
And if you don't believe me, just look at pictures and postcards from literally any community in America prior to the 1930s. And you see that they are all what we would call urban today in terms of how people actually lived. So that was our legacy and that was how our country developed for a couple of hundred years.
until we embarked on this experiment to basically destroy it all and destroy it all kind of on purpose with big money and big policy and for many decades of intentional destruction. And so we're left with this situation now where people tend to conflate like, if you mean walkable and urban, well, that's only in like the big city. And that's just not true.
that's never really been true historically. But on the ground today, that is how a lot of it feels, that you have big cities that are kind of walkable and maybe people take public transit, maybe people ride bikes. And then you have suburbs where people drive cars. And very simplistically, that's how a lot of people look at the world. And I've always been frustrated by that.
And it certainly doesn't have to be that way. But that is how a lot of people look at it. one substacker who I've talked about before here, Addison Delmastro, he does a really good job of writing about this. He kind of talks about this topic frequently on his substack, which I think is called the deleted scenes. Just the notion that small towns, as we think of them today, really are just big cities that haven't matured or
Kevin K (24:03.778)
didn't mature or grow into being bigger places, but they all have the same DNA. The little town where I went to high school, Marshall, Missouri, has this lovely courthouse square and beautiful older neighborhoods from before the 1930s. And it has the exact same DNA as like the neighborhood that I live in now. It's just that Kansas City, Missouri grew to become a big city.
Marshall, Missouri did not grow to become a big city. It kind of stagnated at a certain population and it's been more or less the same population for about a hundred years. So big cities grew and changed and a of small towns did not. And then we also had the growth of suburbia, which was a completely new way of living that was in many ways organized around needing a car to get to places. So.
So anyway, I guess that's a bit of a sidebar. It's kind of thinking about how cities are in America today. But historically, they weren't that way. So anyway, setting that aside, for most normal people in our country today, they look at the landscape and don't really think about these issues. It's just like, it is what it is. You live in America, you have a house, you have a car, you drive to places. And that is baked in to the cake.
that like that's part of the lifestyle. And so as a result, a lot of people, especially families with kids, they're not really like thinking about like urbanism or walkability as a thing necessarily for their children or for their family location. Some people do. I think there's more people that think about it now than used to. There's probably more people who think about it from the standpoint of like, it'd be cool to have like bike trails nearby.
because a lot of suburbs have done a great job of building like bike trail networks. But not many people are thinking about, you know, I want to live in a place where they have like a neighborhood main street that we can walk to with the kids. Again, I wish they would, but it's just not in the minds of most people. What is in the minds of most people, especially people who have a choice in where they want to live, not everybody has a choice, not everybody can afford to move. But for people...
Kevin K (26:29.996)
For middle class people especially who have a choice, and if you have kids, this is the reality. You're thinking about crime and safety first and foremost because you're trying to protect your children from harm. That is first and foremost in the minds of nearly every parent that I know. How do I protect them from harm? And yes, that can include, you know, there are,
can include walking and biking as a part of that, but what most people are thinking about is, I want to live somewhere where our house isn't likely to get broken into, where our car isn't likely to get stolen or carjacked, where it's less likely to run into violent crime, especially in public. Because violent crime is a reality in our society. We have a lot of it. My city is a particularly violent city.
unfortunately, and we can't ignore how prominent that is in the minds of most people who have a choice. So I always put that up there, like that's number one. If people aren't thinking about that or factoring that into, you know, why people might be leaving cities, then they're completely missing the boat. The second thing that people think about really are the quality of the schools when you're thinking about your kids. And
sure that's a loaded topic. We all know the history of public schools is fraught with a lot of different issues. But there's just simply no question that every parent is trying to get their kids into the best possible school that they can, the best one that they can afford. And by afford meaning whether it's a private school that they want to pay for or it's a public school in the place with the house that they can most afford with the best public school.
so that is a major consideration and, you know, frankly, most big cities fail in this area. Most of our big cities in the country, including my own have public school districts that are often at the bottom of the list in terms of rankings for schools in their Metro areas. you can argue with me whether you want, if you want to, about whether that's fair or not fair. It doesn't matter. All people know is.
Kevin K (28:56.65)
school, those schools bad, other schools better. And people are going to act on whatever they think is best for their kids. Because you're a really weird person, I think, if you want to experiment with your children by sending them to a school that is potentially subpar. So again, there are a lot of factors involved with why schools are better or not.
You know, in our city, we happen to have a unique network of charter schools that was started 20, 25 years ago. And so charter schools are public schools, but they each operate as their own independent school district, essentially. And our kids go to a charter school in the city that is an excellent school with some of the best academic ratings in the state of Missouri.
really great school. a foreign, it's a unique foreign language immersion school and we really like it. We're very, happy with it and we have many friends who have had their kids there and have their kids there and so it's kind of a unique situation. That was an incredible enticement. I will tell you before we had charter schools in the city as a choice, people as soon as they had it, as soon as their kids hit like elementary school age, they were out of here.
they were moving to the suburbs. And now that we have a whole selection of charter schools as an option where people don't have to pay, we have many, many more families that are choosing to stay in the city and keeping their kids in those schools. So that's an encouraging thing. That's generally been a good thing. But a lot of cities don't have that choice. A lot of parents don't have that choice.
When we lived in Savannah, Georgia, we didn't really have that choice. think there were two charter schools in the city of Savannah and they were both just unbelievably oversubscribed and very, very difficult to get into. And again, you have to ask yourself as a parent, you know, are you going to just like play a lottery game with your kid's future? And most parents are not. They're not going to if they have a choice. Again, many parents don't have a choice, but if you do have a choice,
Kevin K (31:20.694)
you're just not gonna play that game. And you'll make whatever sacrifice you need to for your kids, if it means moving, if it means moving to somewhere that's more expensive, whatever you have to do for your kids' future. So that's a big deal. The other aspect of schools, things we can't, the discussion we can't avoid, although I think a lot of people would love to avoid it, is that there is still a tremendous hangover from the COVID policies. And the schools that were closed,
the longest during COVID were almost all schools in major cities and especially schools in large school districts in inner cities. And there are many, many parents who have just not forgotten that and have not let go of it and will not let go of it. I think obviously there was plenty of evidence that
people left, a lot of people left those districts during the COVID era so they could be somewhere where their kids could be in school. And I would suspect that there is a hangover from that for a lot of people still looking to get out who are still very angry about what happened during that era, kept keeping their kids out of school for a year, some places, two years. And they want to be somewhere where they know that's not going to happen.
again or where they suspect that won't happen again. that's another aspect of the school situation that in the current era is a big deal. So again, top of the list when you have kids, crime and safety, and schools. I think the third thing after that is cost of living. And this is where the affordability discussion comes in.
You know, this has everything to do with housing affordability primarily, but it also has a little bit to do with taxes and overall cost of living. You know, I live in a city where our city has an income tax, a 1 % income tax. It's the only city in our metro area that has that. And so I get it when people don't want to be part of that.
Kevin K (33:41.068)
when they say to themselves, well, I can live somewhere else in this Metro and not pay an income tax. I can be in a better rated school district and I'm going to have lower crime. I mean, honestly, that's the logical choice. Who wouldn't? You really have to be a weirdo or like me to say we want to like live in the city when those are your basic choices. And it's funny that any of these things get framed otherwise.
Like that is the normal rational choice to make is to live somewhere that's less expensive where you get more for your money that is safer for you and your kids. So that's just the hard truth for how all these things work out that a lot of American big cities fail in those key areas compared to their suburbs. And then unfortunately what's happened over the years
is that the primary political constituencies have adjusted to all this to kind of reflect their populations. big cities tend to focus on policies that are the people who are left in those cities who like them, wealthy people, childless people, and oftentimes people who don't have a choice to move somewhere else. And then suburban cities tend to keep reinforcing and focusing on
like families and kids, oftentimes to the exclusion of attracting younger people and single people and childless people too. So they have that blind spot in a lot of suburban areas. And so there's that issue as well. I think in the minds of a lot of city and urban policymakers, what's really great for kids is just not top of mind. And so it kind of becomes like a self -licking ice cream cone.
in the policy world. And it's just an unfortunate side effect of where we are. So what can cities do? What can urban areas or major cities do about all this? Honestly, that's always a question. I've just never been the kind of person that I am satisfied with stating a problem and not trying to give.
Kevin K (36:03.458)
some concrete ideas on like what to do, what else could be done. And so I'll take a shot at a few things here. I mean, I think a lot of this is kind of going to logically follow from the other part of the conversation. But first and foremost, cities need to be serious, and I mean really, really serious about public safety and crime. And too many cities just are not. My city is not.
just flat out not serious about it right now. We have one of the worst murder rates and crime rates in the country. There is no sense of urgency on this issue from our leadership at all. There are people who care. There are people who are trying to do things. But there's no sense of urgency related to
How do we deal with this immediately and today? It's mostly like about like longer term solutions. And I'm, you know, long, I'm all for the longer term solutions. Those are great. But if you don't deal with things immediately, then you lose people. People just leave and they get fed up and they're going to move on. So if your city is in that category that it's not really serious about crime and safety, you're going to lose people and you're especially lose middle -class families with kids. That's just part of the reality.
Another thing that cities can do is try to find ways to support innovation in education. I'm going to write about this more at a future date here, but I've had long had some thoughts about ways that public school districts, especially really large ones, could be reformed. And I think there's a lot of reform needed in public school administration and education.
And if you are a logical person, you would start with the ones that are the most underperforming. And we are fortunate here in Kansas City, Missouri, that we have more choices than most with charter schools, with private schools, and a public school district. But our public school district needs to be better. There's just no other way to say it. It's got to be better. And we've got to find ways to just innovate much more quickly.
Kevin K (38:28.41)
and in more thoughtful ways than what we're doing right now in education. Or again, people will leave. It's just that simple. If the schools suck, people are going to move somewhere else. So the third area, not really all that surprising, but when we talk about cost of living is cities need to get really serious about trying to be affordable with, and to try to make their housing as affordable as possible.
I've stated this here before in this podcast, but as a refresher, I don't think that means like we need to build capital A affordable housing. That is just generally not as, that's not what I'm talking about. We're talking about housing for middle -class people generally that have kids. The path to affordability there is to do what a lot of cities have started to do, which is really reform their codes and processes.
to actually make it easier to produce new housing and produce it at scale. So whether you're talking about single family houses, townhouses, duplexes, missing middle housing, whatever it is, most cities have become really, really difficult to work in to produce new housing. And their suburban counterparts are quite easy to work in.
For somebody like me, I don't like the housing that is being produced in most of our suburbs. The standard suburban format, industrially spit out house in community. That doesn't appeal to me. But it sure would be nice if our city, if we could produce housing at the pace and ease at which it happens in a lot of suburban places. So that is something that we're seeing progress in.
We're starting to see reform in a lot of cities, but we've got a long, long ways to go to get that better. And obviously the last thing, I think this is a little more challenging, it's probably more from an entrepreneurial standpoint, but we really need more amenities for kids and families in urban places. Like if you really care about having and retaining kids and families in urban places, they've got to have those.
Kevin K (40:52.546)
amenities that families come to expect nowadays. You know, this isn't this isn't 1950 anymore where a lot of places just didn't have amenities. Now there's an expectation and if people don't have it, they're going to go where where those expectations are being met. So, you know, neighborhoods should have pools. They should have swimming pools. They should have play areas and playgrounds and park spaces.
It would be nice if there were more businesses that were more welcoming to families and kids and more like family focused businesses. So those can't be mandated. I'm not saying like those can be mandated from the top down, but it would be smart for people who care about those things to encourage them, try to create them. So I'll just like sum up here by saying that
I think the frustrating part here, and I think probably a lot of you may feel this way as well, is that a lot of our cities could be absolutely amazing for families and for kids. And they can be amazing in ways that our suburban communities cannot be and may never be able to be. By having the freedom of movement
on foot or bicycle and the free, ability to explore and be independent in a really well functioning place that was historically available for kids to be able to like actually walk to a neighborhood school or a neighborhood park or a pool. And there's just an awful lot of suburban communities that will never ever have that.
because of the built pattern that exists, which makes it virtually impossible without like radical change. The built, the physical DNA of a lot of cities is ideal for incorporating all that. But we have an awful lot of policy problems, administrative problems, and just intransigent thinking that is holding
Kevin K (43:19.57)
us back and holding our cities back. time marches on. If you are a parent and you live in a city and you haven't thought about like going somewhere else where a lot of that could be easier, then you're probably unique in that regard. I've thought about it. My wife and I have thought about it. We have had discussions about, know, we are city people. There's a lot we love about the city.
But might it just make more sense for us to live in one of the suburbs in the area? And there's a list of things we just really wouldn't have to think about or worry about very much. And we have never pulled the trigger on that. I don't know if we ever will. We really love our neighbors and our community. And we love the school that our kids are in, which really helps. That's a major.
major factor that would keep us in the city. But the other things are a real source of frustration. We absolutely worry about the crime and safety issues. They are real and extremely concerning for us. We do get frustrated with the cost of living. That is just, it's just more expensive to live in the city and we have fewer amenities.
I mean, that's just the reality. you know, is that the end of the world? No, it's not the end of the world. And we're in a pretty fortunate position compared to a lot of people. But my point is that I think that many, families, the majority of families think about things this way. They're not thinking about, boy, it would be cool if our kids could walk somewhere, you walk down the street to the neighborhood ice cream shop.
and live in sort of an urbanist paradise. You're not thinking about that. You're thinking about very basic things like the safety of your children, the education they're going to get, and how much things are costing you. And that's the part of the discussion that if we want to be honest and if we really want to make things better and fix things, we have to be aware of these and have real frank discussions about.
Kevin K (45:48.332)
That's what I have for you today. This is Kevin. Thanks again for listening to the Messy City Podcast. And please hit that like or follow button and leave me a review if you can. Send me a note. Let me know what you think. Leave a message on the Substack page. Thanks everybody. Talk to you later. Bye.

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Exploring the Mechanics of an Architect’s First Small Development
20 Ağu· The Messy City Podcast
We travel to the beautiful Pacific Northwest this week to talk with architect Cary Westerbeck. Cary lives and works in Bothell, Washington, a northern suburb of Seattle. He traces his path from being a bicycle mechanic to architect, developer and even Planning Commission member.
One of the really cool things about this episode is hearing Cary take me step by step through his process to build the Fir Street Lofts. This size of project, 3 apartments and one retail space, is the kind of project that should be within reach of many aspiring developers. Cary talks about how he conceived it, designed it, financed it, and general contracted it as well. If I could construct a curriculum for architects, I’d have them all listen to this episode to learn how much more is possible than just being a hired gun for others.
Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.
Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.
Intro: “Why Be Friends”
Outro: “Fairweather Friend”
Transcript:
Kevin K (00:01.132)
Welcome back to the Messy City Podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. This week we're off to the Pacific Northwest to talk with another small scale developer and urbanist kind of guy who's done some really cool work and who I haven't really had a chance to talk to a lot in person, but our paths cross all the time, including when this one drops, my most recent guest will have been Jim Hyde from the Small Scale Developer Forums and
And my guest today, Kerry Westerbeck, has been very involved in the Small Scale Developer Forum. there's kind of a fun alignment there that I'm looking forward to talking about. But anyway, Kerry, welcome to the podcast. It's great to see you.
Cary (00:43.968)
Thank you, Kevin. Nice to be invited. Great to be here.
Kevin K (00:46.786)
Well, again, it's a situation where we just know so many overlapping people. It makes it feel like the world is really small.
Cary (00:53.226)
Indeed.
It really does. There's so many connections, whether it's social media or blogs or podcasts. Like, hey, I know that person and they know that person and all these points begin to overlap. It's fun.
Kevin K (01:08.952)
Yeah, and I know there's more than like 20 people doing small scale development in the whole country, but for whatever reason that like circle we travel, and it of feels like there's like 20. So I don't know.
Cary (01:17.162)
Yeah.
Cary (01:20.884)
No, it's true. It's the same bunch of us kind of keep getting hit up. Maybe we're the ones who'll enjoy talking about it. Others are just doing it and being quiet. I don't know.
Kevin K (01:29.816)
Could be, could be. There's a whole lot of people who just, you know, proceed on in the background and do really cool stuff. So anyway, Carrie is in the Seattle Metro area and is doing some really neat stuff up there and has for a long time. And I wanted to talk obviously about some of the projects you've been doing, but you also have a really interesting background getting into this.
Cary (01:36.212)
That's right.
Kevin K (01:56.236)
that our mutual friend, John Anderson, kind of clued us into. And I wonder if you want to start by talking a little bit about like your own journey to being where you are now. I think we're probably around the same age, ballpark. so, yeah. And so, you know, by the time you hit our age, you've probably had two or three different lives, it feels like, or certainly professional lives. And there's lot of different paths that people take. So let's talk a bit about where you started out.
Cary (02:03.541)
Yeah.
Cary (02:09.865)
early 50s.
Cary (02:17.214)
Yes. Yes.
Cary (02:25.974)
Sure, no, I think that's a really good way putting it. I have a lot of friends who are five to 10 years older and some of them didn't know me when I was younger. I do joke, I've had many lives, I've lived many lives because I was a bicycle mechanic for much of the 90s before I finished my undergrad degree and then went later and got a master's in architecture and became an architect 20 years ago. So I...
30 something years ago, I spent six months in the Virgin Islands working as a cook when I was just casting about traveling. So these newer friends, yeah, was great. Yeah, on St. John, US Virgin Islands at Eco Resort. And so yeah, I've had these interesting paths and I worked for Seattle Public Utilities after my undergrad degree before I got my architecture degree. This is in the late 90s and decided
Kevin K (03:01.964)
That's cool. That must have been a... I think we could do a whole podcast probably just on that experience.
Cary (03:23.828)
At the time, my policy wasn't too thrilling to me, but I did some policy work for a while around Seattle Public Utilities work. I was a project manager for a watershed action plan. anyway, my route to where I'm at today, yeah, I was doing that. I've been actively involved in the outdoors here in the Northwest, biking and hiking and backpacking and stuff. But I've always been intrigued with architecture.
Even when I was younger, I thought I'd go be an architect when I was in high school. And then I kind of got into a little more carefree lifestyle in my late teens, early twenties, and really didn't apply myself very well when I was in community college and when my friends were off at the universities and stuff. So I had kind of a more circuitous route to getting married in my mid twenties and then deciding to finish my undergrad degree, doing that policy work, Seattle Public Utilities in the late nineties, and then deciding.
hey, I've got kind of got my life together more. I'm better at studying and applying myself. I'm going to go pursue that architecture degree. So I did do that at the University of Washington from 2001 to 2004. And that's how I got my start as an architect in 2004. I've always been in the Seattle area. I was born in Tacoma, just south of Seattle. And I grew up actually one town over from where I am today in Bothell, Washington. I grew up in Woodinville, Washington next door.
So I've stayed local, love the Northwest. So I became an architect and like many of us, became an intern at a good local firm in 2004. And we were just working as fast as we could as architects with that firm, which is still around today until many of us got, most of us got laid off one by one in 2008, 2009. And as we all who live through that, know that story, I think something like 40,
Kevin K (05:19.468)
Well, nope. Still have the scars.
Cary (05:21.782)
Yeah, you know, yeah, exactly. 40, 50 % of the architects, I think, in the country got laid off within a few months, something like something crazy like that. Yeah. So I'd only had five years experience at that point, but had done all kinds of work and been working a lot. So I had enough to then quickly get licensed within a year or so. And I was in the process of beginning my own firm because my wife's a librarian and a teacher. so
Kevin K (05:29.154)
Yeah, it was brutal.
Cary (05:51.03)
firms didn't have work in 2009 or so, but these teachers are still employed. And so a couple of them, we want to do an addition, we want to do a deck, whatever. I started a small firm kind of out of necessity to make a living. And that actually worked pretty well. So I was actually doing okay during the recession, starting a small firm and learning how to do contracts and all kinds of things.
But all along, we started owning houses. My wife and I bought our first house in 1997 prior to my becoming an architect. And my dad had always been kind of a frustrated engineer architect. we actually lived in a couple of architecturally significant houses growing up. So I was sort of steeped in design. so along with that, he was always remodeling our houses. So I kind of had this DIY spirit. And my brother was, at that time, a
professional contractor and general contractor. He's now a professional architectural photographer. Interestingly enough, he shoots my work. So immediately we would remodel each house we own. We had a few houses through the year before the projects we have now that we own now. And so I wasn't afraid to put on the tool belt and learn how to do things. So I say that because we were starting to look at getting into design build when I was at the firm I worked at, Johnston Architects.
And I actually built out the offices when we moved offices in 2007 or so. I was the lead on that and literally cutting the wood and building the desks and all kinds of things like that. Cause I had experienced doing that and brought remodeling houses. And about that time I learned about Jonathan Siegel down in San Diego. Most people know who he is these days and this line of work. And one of the guys in the office had gone to one of his in -person.
seminars where we taught people how to be architect as developer. I thought, hey, I've always been interested in design build and building my own projects, self -initiated work, but I didn't really understand. You could just decide you're going to be your own client. This is an electrifying idea.
Cary (07:58.932)
So it was planted. didn't do anything about it for a while, but I thought, okay, well, I'll keep remodeling my houses and doing work for clients. And got a lot of on the ground construction administration, construction observation work, doing projects, not only when I was working at Johnston for that five years, but then later on my own being very hands -on, both designing the projects and walking clients through those projects. So that gave me a pretty good feel for working side -by -side with general contractors. And I could be comfortable with that.
So I started getting this bug that I wanted to self -initiate projects and become the architect as developer, you know, idea person like Jonathan Siegel. And I was finding out about others at that time in New York and other places. And so I took the online course by, what was it, 2014 or so that Jonathan Siegel offered online. He decided it was too much work to do tours and keep speaking. So that...
Kevin K (08:55.17)
He was probably having too much fun in San Diego too.
Cary (08:58.3)
Exactly. know, by then he'd already had a lot of good projects under his belt. I think a lot of us saw his stuff winning awards and everything. So he would become pretty high profile. So that course was extremely empowering and convinced me that, I've got the skill set and he, you know, is very empowering in that way. You can go do this and you've got the skills and you've got the, you know, the intelligence and everything. And he was right. So that led to us.
Buying an existing triplex in the downtown core. I'm actually in that triplex right now. And with some extra land on it. And that was 2014. So we learned how to be, had tenants already, so we remodeled some of the units over time. learned how to be landlords.
We even sold our house nearby and moved into one of the units of our family of four, my wife, myself, our two daughters who were younger at the time. And we lived in the upper floor of that existing triplex that we bought in 2014 while I designed and planned a new building for the front yard.
Kevin K (10:06.776)
So how big, just describe the units in that triplex. How big a space were you looking at?
Cary (10:12.95)
Yeah. So the triplex was actually, its origin is, it was a barn built in 1913 by one of the early families, that kind of a founding family, the Erickson family of the city of Bothell. And it was a barn where they raised rabbits, a rabbit hutch. And it's 30 feet by 40 feet, two stories, with the gabled roof. Like literally just like the diagram of a gabled house, basically that children draw.
And it had two units, has two units in the downstairs and one unit upstairs. And then I've carved out a little office out of a shared foyer on the upstairs that I remodeled into my office where I'm sitting now. And we will replace this eventually with a building I'm working on what it will be replaced with.
Kevin K (11:02.552)
So you were in basically 1 ,200 square feet with the four of you then. A couple of little kids.
Cary (11:05.386)
Yep, correct, actually. Including my office. what I'd carved out from my conference room, so just a separate door and a deadlock, deadbolt stuff that I use now. We didn't use it at the time when the family was living in the hall upstairs. My wife's in my bedroom was the small conference room, which I've never really used in conference room, but it worked out great.
Kevin K (11:28.856)
So did that, at the time, that feel like a bit of a sacrifice, kind of moving into that space? Yeah.
Cary (11:33.29)
Yes. Yeah. was, so we've remodeled it. was kind of nice and shiny and new and, know, certainly an old building, but we made it look pretty nice and permitted all the work. I moved a bunch of walls around and built new bathrooms and all kinds of stuff. And we were over here with, with friends kind of looking at it one day after we got the final sign off. And I thought we should move in here and save money so we can build the new building soon. And I thought my wife's, my wife's a gamer. She's pretty flexible.
And I thought, well, I'll wait day or two and see what she thinks. So I proposed the idea a couple of days later, and we'd been living in a nearby town next door, Kenmore, for 11 years, had a quarter acre lot, and a mid -century house. I'd remodeled every square foot. It had pretty good equity in it, and it could help us with the future project. And so I proposed the idea, let's move in, let's save money. We will travel little more for a few years, and she loved it. So that's what we did six months later.
And so yeah, we kind of made a sacrifice about three and a half years we lived in that little 1200 square feet. But the cool thing, you know, cause I'm an urbanist too, this is a small little downtown. We're right in the middle of downtown. City Hall is a block away. They're building multifamily all around us. Most of it's built now. There was more going up, but at the time there was only one out of about 10 buildings that had been built in that last 10 years. So,
Kevin K (12:31.596)
Fantastic.
Cary (12:55.39)
We really wanted to, I wanted to walk my talk and the family was into it too and be in a walkable place where we could drive less and we were in my transit and bicycling and stuff. So we've really been doing that. And we had that, you know, immediately overnight. So it was a, it was an adjustment, but it was really been fun.
Kevin K (13:13.176)
So by way of context, what was the local real estate market like when you bought this place in 2014?
Cary (13:18.966)
So at the time, know, it always seems expensive at the time, right? Never, it's so much worse than it used to be. Well, it seems downright quaint and affordable now looking back on 2014. It was a very hot market. We got a great price when we sold our house and we had a really good price on the Triplex because the family owned this old building kind of, it was one of many and it was very run down and they just wanted to get rid of it. So we got a great deal. It's more than double what we paid for it. So yay for us, right?
but it all felt like a stretch at the time. I honestly don't know that we could get it today. not because of competition, but because of the cost of land and, and, properties down here now. a key factor there was, because of being an architect and into local planning issues. And, and, we lived in the town next door, Kenmore, which does some overlapping planning, at the county level and so forth with, with the city of Bothell where I'm at now.
Bothell had a master plan and a new downtown code and zoning code and things like that. There was sort of a hybrid for the downtown, sort of a hybrid form based code that I was well aware of had been written and put in place. It was kind of a sleepy place. A lot of people didn't know. So I was well aware that this town was going to rapidly change and grow because they had set the table for it. So for once I got in at kind of at the right time, but it was a stretch.
Kevin K (14:47.606)
Yeah, right. So at some point you decided to take a closer look at that vacant lot next to you. And was that the next project you undertook or was there anything else after that?
Cary (15:00.938)
Yeah. So we actually, I guess we would call this the covered land play because with the triplex, the triplex lot here, the city had actually bought about four feet because right after we moved in, they rebuilt streets and sidewalks fringes and really made these beautiful deluxe streets, replaced all the infrastructure, daily at a creek across the street. did millions and millions of tens of millions of dollars worth of downtown improvements as part of this plan.
But otherwise, the triplex came on a lot that was 6 ,750 square feet. And so we already had the land as part of the triplex property. So when I eventually designed and built the building that I'd become known for, I built it in the front yard. already had the land. I short -platted it as part of the building permit. And I short -platted.
because otherwise the old building rides with the new building on the financing. And that would sort of drag it down. So I realized I needed to split the lot and create a brand new fresh lot that would give me some equity because there would be value given to that lot. And at the same time, have the finances completely separate from the old triplex that we owned on the lot. So I turned it from one lot into two. And I would do that over and over if I could.
Kevin K (16:22.336)
Interesting. Yeah, and I
Yeah, so why do you say that? was the advantage of that from your perspective?
Cary (16:32.054)
You basically, give yourself a free lot and in small development, as you and probably many know, the land basis or the cost of land or getting a chunk of land to build on is one of the most difficult hurdles for small operators. Bigger developers can often do a purchase and sale and wait until they entitle a project to pay their five or 10 or 15 million for their property. That's how all the bigger projects are done around here.
But small mom and pop sellers for the size of lots, I'm usually looking at five, six, seven thousand feet, whatever. They just want cash upfront. so you kind of have to commit. So to get a property that already has a building that can sort of help offset the costs, in our case, the mortgage with renters, while you split the lot, you're effectively giving yourself a new tax lot.
at very little cost. Just really the cost of splitting that lot is the cause of any taxes you eventually start paying on the property tax.
Kevin K (17:39.669)
So, what would a like that cost in Bothell by way of comparison, just if you found a vacant lot in a neighborhood?
Cary (17:45.59)
Yeah. So at the time, that lot, is only the building I built is on a lot that's just about 2 ,600 square feet, 2 ,625, very small. There's no minimum lot size in our downtown, fortunately, like there is other places. The valuation five years ago was 400 ,000. It's probably a little bit more than that now. So it's not inexpensive land down here. We're doing a project now that broke ground for a four unit just a few blocks away from here. So it's a good comparison.
Kevin K (18:08.141)
Yeah.
Cary (18:14.358)
I'm working on it with two other partners. doing four townhouses. We wanted it to be more, but that's another story I can talk about later. And that lot is 5 ,400 square feet, I believe it is. And it was $640 ,000. And lots have sold in the two years since become even more expensive per square foot. So, yeah.
Kevin K (18:42.872)
That's That's amazing. My Midwestern brain has a hard time getting around those numbers.
Cary (18:47.772)
yeah. When I look on the social media groups I'm part of, the Neighborhood Development Group that John Anderson started, and Income Mill Development Alliance and others, Kansas, where you are, and of course, Grand Ure in the city, where property probably costs a little bit more. And then in the South and the Midwest, my jaw drops when I see what you guys can get land for and lots for.
Kevin K (19:13.196)
Yeah, yeah. Well, it's a different market in lot of ways. So let's talk about the project you built there, which I've seen pictures of. I haven't seen it in person, but it's a really cool project. It's kind of in many ways like the classic example of a small mixed use project that we talk about in a hundred different seminars that you were actually able to execute. So I'm curious about like why you chose that particular kind of project and some of the pros and cons of doing that.
Cary (19:15.583)
It is. It is.
Cary (19:42.26)
Yeah, no, I love to talk about that. learned so many lessons, but really fundamental to this was meeting John Anderson after I did the Jonathan Siegel course. I really had a lot more I needed to learn about sort of scrappy on the ground, get things done, part of the small development. And John Anderson, I met just at the perfect time.
and incremental development alliance was young then. I actually went down to Texas and took one of their boot camps in 2016. But he taught me about the, for a first project, don't get too crazy. Do three stories you can do with like a single stair. I already knew about that. Single stair is hot now, but at the time it was okay. We'll keep it three stories or less, single stair. International building code allows that. And design it around what can be allowed with an FHA 203B loan.
B or C, can't remember. The ones that are renovation loan. But this is the vanilla FHA home loan that millions of Americans have gotten to buy anything one to four units. So if you're going to buy your first house, this is that loan. The unique thing is, unlike most mortgages, you can do one to four units. So that's not unusual. But they allow up to 49 % commercial. There's no other.
vanilla mortgage that allows that. And I was really interested in doing mixed use because I had a corner lot in downtown. And I just felt as an urbanist who wanted to place make and create places for people that this should be a corner shop, commercial shop. So I had my sort of template then. All right, I'm gonna do four units. Originally I was gonna redevelop the entire lot all at once. And I realized that was.
biting off more than I wanted to chew and I didn't really want to get rid of a cash flowing triplex because this is my first project. So I thought, well, this is perfect. I'll split the lot. I'll do a single stair FHA compliant building that's not going to get me out of my ski tips. This won't be built much differently than a single family home, which I had a lot of experience with, like commercial. And I'll general contract it myself.
Cary (22:05.242)
And I don't get too fancy, it's a simple shape. And that was kind of the premise. And what I call it is a well -detailed simple box. But that was the groundwork for the project. To do that, and I was allowed to work on it for a few years, kind of refining and working on it. But during my spare time.
Kevin K (22:28.504)
Let's talk about a couple aspects of it, the FHA 203B thing, know, not everybody knows about all that. Did you have a hard time like finding a banker or bankers who understood, you know, financing it this way?
Cary (22:33.833)
Mm
Cary (22:41.686)
Yes and no. So most mortgage folks I talked to knew about it. Many of them were unwilling to originate them. I don't know if there just wasn't as much fat in it for them or what. The original, when I was finishing the project in late 2019, just prior to the pandemic, the mortgage broker I was working with at the time had done a great job for me doing a refi and a home equity loan or a
sorry, HELOC on the Triplex so I could use the Triplex as a sort of cash machine, which is another small developer ploy. He'd been really spectacular for me, really experienced. But he was very reluctant and quite frankly unwilling to originate an FHA loan because I suspect he wasn't going to get paid as well. So he brought me a commercial loan just as the pandemic was beginning and it was really
awful terms and we had to bring a lot of money to the table. And so I quickly had to go find another experienced mortgage person. a lot of them will say they're interested and then you get into it and they try and deter you from doing one, the FHA. So that's information that I should share.
Kevin K (23:56.418)
So you really have to kind of push through. I think John has talked about this before. It's almost like you have to know more about some of these programs, or know as much as your banker does, or your lender.
Cary (23:58.571)
Yes.
Cary (24:04.032)
Yes.
Yeah, John makes that point. I completely agree. I downloaded the 600 page, whatever it was, manual on HUD lending that he recommended. Granted, just not to scare everyone, you're not going to read the whole thing. You're going to skim it for certain sections. so, yeah, I would quite literally call these mortgage brokers up, or lenders, and have to tell them they were allowed to make this loan. And this is why. And here's the terms. And so it's so true.
I got a little disgusted at certain points that I was extricating with people on their own business. Yeah, but I did find this guy who was incredible. He was basically ready to retire, but he was just having fun, still doing things. And he found the pandemic loaning to be really tough, but also a challenge. So lucky for me. And I paid a lot of extra interest. That was the only thing in my project that went.
Rye as it were the the designing the permitting the construction. I want really smoothly it was throughout 2019 Getting the final loan mortgage that FHA mortgage to take out the construction loan Which was high interest because I was a new developer was the only really challenging and expensive part of the whole project
Kevin K (25:21.194)
Interesting. what would that product, I guess talk us through if you did the construction loan, like what sort of percentage equity did you have to have to do that? Or how did you finance it? then when you do the permanent financing, how did that convert?
Cary (25:29.813)
Yeah.
Cary (25:37.206)
Yeah, so I was a little unusual in that I did talk to multiple banks. I'll cut to the chase. I got a hard money loan from a small two -person LLC that I was put in touch with from my mortgage guy at the time. And they loved me, these lenders. It was 12%. Doesn't sound quite as bad today, but at the time it was twice what banks were lending for construction loans, so it was expensive. But it was easy and it was fast and draws were
were painless and they trusted me. They visited the site once and completely believed in me and the money was, you know, we did all the paperwork. They had a first position and all the normal stuff a mortgage company would do paperwork wise. was just not fly by night. But because it took extra five or so months at the end to get the takeout mortgage, the final mortgage, that FHA mortgage, I paid something like $125 ,000 in extra interest. So that was painful.
I did that but I had talked to two different kinds of banks and this is the kind of information I love to share with people. I did have banks that were interested in loaning on the building. One type of bank was the one type of loan I should say is banks who are wanted to loan to myself and my wife as a husband and wife entity building basically a house. One to four units they just kind of saw it as a home loan basically. They don't care if you do four units.
And though they were wary of the commercial part, for fair warning, they were like, we don't really loan on commercial. So we hadn't really sort of do that because we weren't offered the loan in the end. so they actually they did offer us a loan. was much it was several hundred thousand less than we needed. Ironically, it was because I had spent a fair amount of time of my own office time working on my project. I didn't make as much money for the prior tax year. So I kind of
was stung by the fact that I was putting my energies into my own building, doing the construction drawings and managing the design. I looked much better on paper for the prior tax year and they were like, well, what happened here? You you you dropped like, well, I was, you know, giving myself as sweat equity as it were, as an architect. And there's value in those drawings, but they don't care about that. They want your tax return. we couldn't borrow enough money.
Cary (28:01.742)
to with a bank that wanted to loan us the money as a private home project. So they're out of the picture. We would have had to bring too much money to the table ourselves. I also talked to a commercial lender. They liked it. They wanted to loan the full amount, but they wanted a guarantor. Not unusual. I did not have a guarantor. So we probably could have used a family member, but we didn't want them to have
power or decision -making power on the project. Because they're the person I'm thinking of, they're in real estate as well. And we thought, well, we want to do our own thing. So we eschewed that and went hard money. So I didn't go a traditional route there. But I also learned that it's not unusual for those of us doing it for the first time to seek out private money or hard money like this. Yeah.
Kevin K (28:55.638)
Interesting. What was the total size of the project? What cost?
Cary (29:01.11)
Yeah, like the stats. Okay, yeah, the the total cost we borrowed 1 .3 million. It cost about 1 .5 in hard cost construction costs total 1 .5 million with with soft costs. No, excuse me. I apologize.
trying to recall here, hard cost for closer to, I think it was closer to the original 1 .3 million. And with soft costs, we were at about 1 .5 million. And the total value of the project in the end at the lower end was about 1 .8 million, putting a lower kind of lower end price on the value of the land. So yeah, was a, you know, so all in, you know, if you're around about a $1 .5 million project.
Kevin K (29:52.672)
Interesting. And then were you as the architect able to pay yourself a fee for that and for the construction management?
Cary (29:59.99)
Yes, I love to talk about that. So I didn't pay myself for construction management per se, but what I did was this project took a lot of planning. And this is the kind of thing I love to share with other architects doing this. I had learned from Jared Devalle back in 2011. He was one of the other people I learned about the architect as developer model when I went to an architecture conference in 2011. And I was intrigued with his
I think his company was called Alloy working in like Dumbo and New York City. And he had expressed how you have these different companies, you own them all, but they're arms length transactions. So you have your development. And in my case, the development, the building is called Fur Street Flats, because the 183rd street out in front of my building was originally called Fur Street, like the tree, Douglas Fur. So it's called Fur Street Flats. And that was one LLC.
And then I had my established architecture firm, Westerberg Architecture. And then I also became a licensed general contractor. And that was my firm for that, Shelter Lab. And so they had arms length transactions with each other. So First Street Flats had a written agreement to provide architectural services. Westerberg Architecture would provide architectural services to First Street Flats.
Now granted, that money is just being shuffled between my different business accounts. And I had to have business accounts and you go to the bank and you get a business account and you have to show them your LLC agreement and your state certificate and all that. But yes, so that's a long -winded way of saying, Westerbrook Architecture got paid by First Street Flats a fee to design the project. What happened then was I made sure that I continued to give myself a paycheck as I acted as the journal contractor for a year building the building.
My architecture firm was giving me a regular salary, even though I was not doing architecture work. This was so that I paycheck consistency that the mortgagers want to see when you're done with the project. So you don't have a, they want two years. So I just had continuity there. So I used that fee. Once I got my loan, First Street Flats paid Westerbrack architecture for the design. And I used that money to live on just basically as my paycheck that I would have been earning as an architect. I just.
Cary (32:22.358)
prepaid it and drew on it as I built the project. So that essentially covered me to work as a general contractor and I did not pay myself a general contractor fee or a developer fee. I considered it all basically I get to keep the building because I'm not selling the building. I get to keep the building and that's my that's my equity stake and my payment. So it's a little unusual but I learned all that from these various people I studied.
Kevin K (32:45.496)
Interesting. Yeah.
Kevin K (32:52.536)
Well, I mean, it's interesting because obviously for any architects in the audience to think about getting into development, that's just an aspect of it, which is paying yourself, covering your overhead during that process, the design process and construction process. I mean, it's pretty cool that you also did the construction management. There's probably a lot of architects who wouldn't do that.
Cary (33:02.838)
key.
Cary (33:14.474)
Yeah. Yeah, that's really a critical thing to understand going in. Are you comfortable being your own general contractor or not? And then if you're not, and you're going to have someone do it, which is not uncommon, you're going to pay a little more. It's smart for lot of people though, because there's so many pitfalls in construction if you're not skilled at it. I had my snafus here and there, but I handled them.
they're going to happen whether you're building it or not yourself or not.
Kevin K (33:48.024)
So when you get this project complete from the construction standpoint, how did it go from a leasing standpoint?
Cary (33:54.55)
so I'll add one more thing that I hadn't shared is, my family designed the entire third floor, top floor for our family to live in. we designed it custom for ourselves. It's not like super fancy, but it's each floor has 10 foot ceilings. There's a lot of glazing. there's a couple of exposed steel beams. It's got the top floor has three bedrooms, two baths, a nice kind of big great room.
People really like the space. It's nicely proportioned. So we were building a home for ourselves as well. So we are living. And that's another thing FHA loan requires. It requires the owner, owner occupancy for the FHA 203B. And that was one of the things I hadn't mentioned. And that's very different from my commercial investment property, where you were actually not allowed to live in the building. It's completely different. They literally disallow it. So that's another reason that FHA loan is unique. But anyway, lease up was
Kevin K (34:31.063)
Interesting.
Cary (34:49.078)
almost effortless. That's not the right word, but we really only had a couple units. So my mom lives in the one bedroom. We have a one bedroom, a two bedroom, and we live in a three bedroom. And then we have the commercial space on the ground floor. October, two months before we got our certificate of occupancy, October of 2019, I started to kind of just.
getting word of mouth out that I had this small commercial space about 650 square feet on the corner available. People saw it too, and it's a very visible corner. So there was already a lot of buzz. And I had a ton of interest. So right away, a broker actually, a very busy broker in town brought me a barbershop. And I actually had gotten my haircut from one of the two owners that wanted to start this barbershop. And I thought, well, they're a good tenant. It's idea was better than the other offers that I'd had.
And so we quickly worked out a you know, broker -ridden lease a couple months prior. I helped them do their, few drawings they needed to submit to the city for a small TI build out. And so that went very quickly. And I always say this, and I say this to my friends in city council, and I'm on planning commission as well. This is really important to know. There aren't enough small spaces in my town and around here, especially these newer...
These younger West Coast cities, they don't have the plethora of old buildings with small affordable spaces. People are always looking for small spaces. I could have leased that 650 square feet out a dozen times over. Whereas when they're building these bigger buildings, these five over ones in town, which we have a lot of, they're sort of a lost leader where they've got the retail that's hard to fill. It gets filled here because we're a busy place on the edge of Seattle, but they're 3 ,000, 4 ,000, 5 ,000 square feet. They take a big...
you know, national or at least a very successful local business to fill those. So there aren't nearly enough of these small ones. So leasing that commercial space was really easy. It went very quickly. And I had mom for the apartment. And then we were advertising on Craigslist at apartments .com, maybe one of the two other places for the two bedroom, which again was filled within a week or two, probably a couple of weeks. I showed it three or four times and it was snapped up. And then we were done.
Kevin K (37:04.728)
Yeah, that's great.
Cary (37:08.406)
And we had to fill our unit because we were moving out of the old triplex, but it also found a newly married couple who started a family right away and they were there for the first few years throughout the pandemic. So we had everything filled in no time.
Kevin K (37:09.218)
Yeah.
Kevin K (37:26.488)
That's ideal in many respects.
Cary (37:30.452)
It is, I mean, I really feel like I should knock on wood or something that went so well. And we've stayed full ever since. I've had a lot of people who've asked me, because the building is popular, the new building's popular, people, get compliments on it still all the time. And people are always asking if there are units available. So I'm flattered, but I, there's been no turnover.
Kevin K (37:50.104)
Well, it's also nice from a small scale standpoint that you just have a handful you have to deal with. That's kind of a real advantage.
Cary (37:57.778)
It is. It's plenty. I've said, so we've got seven units, including the commercial unit and our own personal unit between the two buildings, the old building and the new building. It's about as much as I want to manage because I've got a full, very full life in other ways and volunteer things and run my business and some development. So it's about as much as I want to deal with. If it gets much, if I get more units that I get to, you know, that we get to keep, I will have to go, I will decide to hire a management company.
One of my clients actually runs a good firm doing that, I'll hire her.
Kevin K (38:32.396)
Well, there you go. So what happens after that, after first street's up and leased and then kind of where do you go from there?
Cary (38:41.194)
Yeah. Well, interestingly, so I had been reading about this pattern from John and others who successfully have done this in the past, John Anderson and many other small developers. You get your building stabilized and then you borrow against it to build the next project. And I was all prepared to do that, but the pandemic hit. So I was just happy to get the thing mortgaged and keep it. Because there was a couple of months when we couldn't get the mortgage in line.
very quickly that we were worried we were gonna have to sell the building because the plan was always to hold it. So I was gonna go do another project. So it's been years until I've got a couple years ago another property that I partnered with two other people because I couldn't easily borrow against my building. So it's taken me more years than I planned to try and get to the next project.
So that was kind of what was next as far as the last five years. And it continues to be challenging to really try and find land and investors. And then right now, even if you could find that to make projects pencil out is tough because of interest rates and the cost of land in our area and the cost of construction.
Kevin K (40:00.46)
Yeah, yeah. Have you thought about, I'm sure you've thought about it, but like what types of projects, if you imagine that you would want to do next, if you could find the right site and everything else, what are you looking to do?
Cary (40:02.08)
So it's been hard that way.
Cary (40:10.09)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.
I'm still really intrigued with infill and small scale, urban or close in suburban work. I've looked at and I was pretty serious about a cottage project because I'm on planning commission and we just passed middle housing, missing middle housing code for our city that I helped write.
I was actually the nerd six, seven years ago who would bring articles about middle housing, missing middle, the Opticos had written to council meetings and planning commission meetings to hand them out. So it's really exciting to be that annoying guy and finally get our way. I wasn't on planning commission then. so I've, really been interested in bungalow courts and cottages and stuff. And I say that because it's not necessarily my, to me, that's not like the pinnacle of what I want to do, but I like that it's sort of the,
Kevin K (40:53.944)
Yeah.
Hahaha.
Cary (41:09.867)
the gateway drug for some people who are used to single house on single lot. They seem more open -minded to, we'll put four small homes that are more affordable. They're still expensive, but they're more affordable for our area. And they're gonna be a little closer to schools and shops and services. So it's sort of this entry. And so we're starting to see some proposals in the city that. So I'm interested in that and have had a...
of stops and starts on a couple of those. Doing some townhouses right now with the two partners that I mentioned earlier. We actually wanted that to be about a 10 unit, because of parking, which we're working on eliminating those parking mandates, but because of parking requirements and then interest rates, we couldn't do the build and hold model that we had hoped. we're doing four townhouses, but I remain interested in, you know, if I could have my way, I'd still keep doing mixed use. Very similar to my first First Street Flats project.
but probably more units. I'd love to do 10, 20, 30, ideally over. I'd love to create some sort of a community space that I program, that I could hold and keep. Even if I had to sell condos or something like that and only keep like condo -wise commercial space at the bottom, I'd love to have sort of like a community space I could rent out for events and artists and things like that. It'd be great sort of as my equity piece.
So and I may be to do that in my replacement for this triplex so what I've designed for this this lot to replace the triplex right now that I'm excited about is We had local state legislation here in Washington State legalized co -housing which is also essentially micro units and Because we're right near transit frequent transit in downtown here There is no parking required and we're also about a mile
Kevin K (42:55.234)
Mm
Cary (43:05.078)
from University of Washington Bothell campus. It's a satellite campus. It's about a half an hour to the main campus, but it's a very busy branch of the University of Washington. And they're really close. There's students all around. They don't necessarily have cars. So that need for parking space is not strong. There's a co -located community college there on the same campus. So they're growing all the time.
And there's a lot of people in tech here who ride e -bikes around and walk. And so a lot of people don't necessarily put high priority on car ownership. So suddenly, the project I've been trying to figure out how to make work on this around 4 ,000 square foot site, which is the old Triplex I've been talking about that we own here that I'm sitting in. Suddenly, it works. 20 to 22 units, 350, 400 square feet each, the kitchenette, the bathroom.
The key is you have to have a community space with a shared kitchen and so forth, which is fine. It's fun idea anyway. And a bunch of them have been successfully built in Seattle. So I'm not really excited about that right now because I'm trying to make that happen.
Kevin K (44:09.386)
Interesting. So are there like code, zoning code challenges or anything associated with that building type?
Cary (44:15.538)
Fortunately, nothing special. We have to codify it because there's now a ticking clock. All these cities in Washington have to allow them. So we will be, enough, tackling that in planning commission, I'm sure, in the next year because we'll have to. the similar buildings have already been built, like I mentioned, in Seattle and elsewhere. So it's really going to be a standard, like in my case, five -story, IBC compliant.
building that we've got to put an elevator in, a couple of stairs and so forth. So that would be tight, but it works. But otherwise the zoning here is pretty generous. I'm in the second most dense zoning for the city of Bothell. And so we can go five stories, 65 feet taller bottom story, zero lot line except the back, there's a five foot setback. And then like I said, I get out of those parking requirements, which allows me to really use maximum
Maximum use out of the site.
Kevin K (45:14.826)
That's really cool. And it seems like the student angle really makes a lot of sense for that type.
Cary (45:20.468)
Yeah, yeah, because the students rent apartments around here all the time. And so probably a great option because most of the apartments around here are a little more expensive and a more nicer. Not nice finishes, but I mean, they're larger or more expensive than maybe a freshman or sophomore would want to pay for.
Kevin K (45:41.964)
Yeah, for sure, for sure. Well, and it's nice, you know, as a student to be able to get your own place, you know, even if it's really small, it doesn't matter. Like when you're that age, it's just cool to have your own space.
Cary (45:46.816)
Yes.
Cary (45:50.57)
Yeah. Yeah, I make that point like in planning commission meetings and elsewhere, people say, because there are certain folks who think it's really inhumane to live in a micro unit. And I do not. I don't think they should be making decisions about how other people want to live, make choices about they want to live. But I lived on Capitol Hill in Seattle, a very dense, walkable, urban neighborhood, very popular neighborhood in Seattle when I was younger.
I had a space that was actually the first year about 120 square feet. was like 10 by 12. Bathroom is down the hall, so it's more like a boarding house. I absolutely loved it because it was super cheap and I was just gone a lot anyway. So it was great. And then I had, I felt like I really arrived because the next year I had one that was about 300 square feet. That seemed huge. So it's all relative.
Kevin K (46:27.746)
Mm
Kevin K (46:38.04)
Well, and it's, you know, it's sort of that like what's old is new again. Because that type, you know, back 100 years ago, there were all manner of types like this, not just boarding houses, but there was the classic building called the apartment hotel, which was really this type. And people rented a room in the apartment hotel and it had some shared amenities. And we had dozens of them. Most older cities had them.
Cary (46:44.074)
Yes.
Cary (47:04.476)
yeah. Yeah, Seattle had a ton, like you said, we were all tracking this these days, but most cities had a lot of them. They outlawed them the seventies, eighties, nineties. The building I was in that I mentioned that I lived in with the bathroom down the hall with both units, bathrooms down the hall. It was a similar building. It was like a single room occupancy type, but they were all different unit sizes. There were some full size apartments, small, medium, large. It's still there. In fact, it just sold a couple of years ago.
Kevin K (47:31.872)
Interesting. Yeah. So one thing, you know, obviously in the Pacific Northwest, Seattle, that area has been one of the leaders for quite a few years in the whole single stair building type deal. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your experience with that and understanding of like how important of a change was that to allow that to happen in Seattle?
Cary (47:44.544)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Cary (47:57.078)
Yeah, Seattle's had it for 50, 60 years, something like that. So we've had it for a long time. And there are lot of sort of sleeper buildings that have utilized that single stair for my entire life. And they make a small site work. In fact, I'm friends with Mike Eliason, an architect who helped put the single stair idea on the map and gets a lot of deserved notoriety for it. And Mike spent many years in Germany.
working and so he was really familiar with that type of building, which so common around the world. Yeah, it's for folks who don't know, and I know Kevin probably knows a lot of this, but it makes a small site much more viable because you can create a lot less hallway and circulation space by doing a single stair. Usually the building will be sprinklered so it's safer than you would think. And it allows each unit, usually you can...
total is usually only four per floor. So you usually have at least a corner and two aspects for light and air and cross ventilation. Sometimes like our building, we've got three. So it makes it much more humane to live in. And most people really respond to a building that it's not, for example, folks listening, we've all been in hotels with a single hallway and then that's a double loaded corridor and they've got apartments or rooms off of each side.
Most apartments in the United States built today are that double loaded. So you might have a long deep unit if it's two or three bedrooms. It's uncommon, but let's say two bedrooms or even one bedroom. And there aren't a lot of windows. So all the windows are on the outside edge and you can't get cross ventilation and you don't have light from more than one side. So a single stair makes a much more livable, desirable unit. Most people, again, walk in one and they respond differently.
than they might to one of these double loaded corridor units. what you see in a lot of countries say they want to do a really big building. They build multiple side by side. every, you you might have one every 50 feet or something like that. each stairway serves a slice. So you might end up with five of them in a row and they each have their own stairway, but then they have like a firewall between
Cary (50:19.272)
each of these individual buildings might look like one big building. So there are different ways to put them together. And they actually have, as Mike Eliason and others have been riding on for some time now, very good safety ratings. In fact, fewer fire incidents that we do in the United States with our two -stair buildings. So there's a lot to recommend them and there's momentum behind making them more legal. Washington State, in fact,
passed a law this last year, one my friends, a representative here at Bothell helped push the legislation that the city, excuse me, the state of Washington has to have a up to six story single stair building code amendment essentially or ordinance that any city can adopt. They're not forced to, but they can adopt it and ready to go in about a year. I think it was a year, year and a half.
I think other states are starting to do it too. California might have it on theirs. But the key thing is that it allows buildings like my three story, but you could do four, five, six, and it makes a small lot instantly more developable. The reason we see a lot of these big block size, half block size buildings, we call them podium buildings, five over ones, whatever, with 100, 200, 300 units is because they have to aggregate land into these huge.
plots so they could do a big enough project to merit two stairs, multiple elevators, and make them viable. Whereas once you can just do a single stair, maybe a single elevator if it's needed for accessibility, you can make almost any little slice of a lot work. So it opens up enormous amounts of our building, our zoning, the fabric, the land in America that we maybe have looked at and not been able to utilize.
Kevin K (52:13.645)
with them.
Kevin K (52:17.976)
Yeah, I kind of think of it myself if I were to go back to thinking about how I lived like when I was in college and the standard college dormitory that I lived in, and I think a lot of people lived in, was a double -loaded corridor, little shoebox rooms that two people stayed in together with one window. And they weren't particularly pleasant. You're 18 or 19 years old, that's not a big priority, but it's not like,
Cary (52:46.025)
Okay.
Kevin K (52:47.244)
They weren't like the most pleasant places to live. And then when I remember, you know, especially at a college and I started having some friends that rented some of these more historic, like four and sixplex apartments that had exactly what you described. So they had a single entry and a stair in the middle of the building. And then they were flanked by usually one bedroom apartments, sometimes two bedrooms, going up two or three stories. And what was so cool was you would walk in, you walk in those places.
and it's windows on three sides. And it just immediately felt, even for like some of these places that at the time were like really old and hadn't been renovated and God knows how long, they just felt so much better because of the presence of the windows and the light and the cross ventilation. And that's a huge benefit of this approach.
Cary (53:33.173)
So true.
Cary (53:39.798)
It's true. I don't even know if I felt completely as strongly about it as I do when I was working on my building and taking advantage of this aspect. I mean, I knew as an architect, because I'm always trying to get bedrooms with two sources of natural light. are pattern language kind of things we reflect on as architects, right? But until you, I think, like you said, walk into one and experience it and kind of know you're comparing it to something with that single window.
aspect type of apartment, it really kind of smacks you up in the head. Like you said, it doesn't matter how old it is, whatever. It's just, it's so much more humane. with us as a culture, as a society, as a country, waking up to how, we could have that and it would be good for us. And a lot of people would enjoy it. And we just kind of have to legalize it as a, it's a pretty powerful thought that, we could have, we could have nice things as the meme guy.
Kevin K (54:33.846)
Right, and it's not like we're giving something up in order to get it. It's really just kind of a silly adaptation of how the building codes have grown and changed over the years.
Cary (54:36.672)
No.
Cary (54:43.702)
Precisely. Yeah, we could just decide to do things differently and have these nice things and hey, we might even be safer for it.
Kevin K (54:51.384)
Yeah, yeah, no doubt. So, you know, one of the things, Kerry, is like we joke about here in the middle of the country is that like all the trends, of course, start on the coasts and then eventually, you know, like 10 or 20 years later, they find themselves here in the Midwest. what other obviously you all, especially a lot of West Coast states have really been leading the charge because of your your housing crisis is much more intense than
Cary (55:02.238)
Hahaha
Kevin K (55:20.118)
what we are having, so there's a lot more reform happening. What else is going on that you're seeing that we might be hearing more about as time goes on?
Cary (55:26.794)
Mm
Cary (55:31.286)
One of the hot ones right now that I think is going to happen and this is gonna fit right into the whole Midwest and Heartland because you guys have to tell me the corner store idea We're starting to warm up in the state here and various cities and and the people like just your average citizen Really responds well to this like why don't we have corner stores anymore? Well, let's set aside the fact that they're hard to necessarily operate and run and make work. Let's you know, that's maybe
going to have to be tackled, but it doesn't have to be a store per se. It could be a wine bar. could be a cafe, whatever. So we're starting to see a trickle of bills and ideas and cities experimenting with the idea of re -legalizing corner stores. Granted that West Coast is covered with these dendritic cul -de -sac laid out neighborhoods that are not grids.
And they do not lend themselves well necessarily like a grid does to having corner stores and walkability and everything. So we're going to have, we have some challenges, but that's one of the things we're seeing people really wake up to is how do we allow low impact mix use in our residential neighborhoods again? And Spokane has a program that goes back, I think to 2017, because Spokane is an older city in Washington.
It's not old compared to Midwest and back East, but for us, it's, you know, they were going gangbusters in late 19th century. They had a lot more corner stores that were turned residential, kind of turned into homes because they outwalled them. Well, they had sort of an amnesty program beginning, I think it was 2017, with some success where you could take anything that was clearly on record as being a commercial store or commercial use.
could be turned back into a commercial use. They have a whole program for it. And Volkan's really been on the forefront of programs like that, Missing Middle and other things as well. So that's one I see coming that gets talked about a lot.
Kevin K (57:36.768)
Interesting.
Kevin K (57:41.248)
Mm -hmm, interesting. Well, if I could marry two things that I just personally really love. One, as an architect, I love small buildings and small spaces. And the second is I love the, especially what you see in Japan, the Japanese approach to really, really small businesses that are run by one person, but are fanatic and excellent at what they do. And to have more of that in our communities would be.
Cary (57:50.656)
Yeah.
Cary (57:56.842)
Yes.
Kevin K (58:10.319)
would be pretty cool.
Cary (58:12.18)
You and me both, I'm fanatic about having those. really, yeah, I'm so envious when I see those cute little, beautiful little Japanese stores serving just specialty teas or donuts or whatever. Yeah, it's amazing.
Kevin K (58:25.25)
Yeah. Yeah. Or like, it's a, it's like the best restaurant you've ever eaten at in a head and it seats like six people, you know, so yeah.
Cary (58:31.958)
Yeah, exactly. back in 10 minutes. Yeah, it's gorgeous. Yeah, exactly. We've got to open the doors just to have people be able to sit on the stools, right? Yeah, it's great. Yeah. And so we're seeing people get more comfortable with that. And like I said, it's actually a popular idea with lot of people who aren't necessarily into policy and planning and design, the people who live in neighborhoods frequently.
Kevin K (58:41.036)
Yeah, no doubt. No doubt.
Kevin K (58:56.13)
So one last thing I wanted to ask you about, Kerry, was obviously you've been on the planning commission for some time and wanted if you could talk a little bit about why you got involved in that way. And maybe as somebody who's not just a designer, but a developer, and you have a foot in all these different worlds, what were some of the advantages for you to get involved in that response?
Cary (59:11.115)
and
Cary (59:15.254)
Yeah. And a little bit of background on that. know we don't have much time. Something I didn't talk about here, but I've been a member of Strong Towns for, gosh, probably 10 years now, of earlier days, not super early. And so I've been on their podcast a couple of times and I've been a fan and been part of some of their classroom, know, their classes and things like that. Anyway, so I've got a
Program background and then I had a very successful now kind of quieter group called Bopop Botha lights for people oriented places Our town is Bothal, which is one of the early local conversations That strong towns now fosters really strongly anyway that led me to going to lots of planning commission and and built a city council meetings and then as friends and I were doing that We've
ended up taking over many of us who were in BoPOP or were peripherally related to BoPOP. City Council, five people now, and most of Planning Commission, and some have cycled from Planning Commission. So anyway, my pitch to getting on Planning Commission was at the time, four years ago, I'll be up for another four years this next winter, there were no people on Planning Commission who were...
architects, developers, builders, engineers, anything like that. And I feel like they usually, she should have at least one or two who actually work in the codes and build and develop or plan or whatever. So that was actually my pitch. And some of my detractors since then have said, he's this, you know, developer, shell, architect, blah, blah. And I very, very, you know, I'm very out.
Kevin K (01:00:55.44)
Ha ha ha.
Cary (01:01:01.086)
out about that. Like, yeah, that was literally my pitch is we should have people who are doing this work who were reading and using the code who are the ones helping to modify it and build it and change it. I'm very unabashed about that. So that is why I wanted to be in there. And that's what we've been doing. And sometimes it's a bit boring and tedious to put it mildly. But
It's important work and I encourage people to seek that out if you have any interest in it. Most people are still somewhat lay people, but we have a couple of people who are civil engineers, planners, lawyers. So there are people who do work related to making code and law who are fit right in. But we like to have people who are not necessarily related to, because we like diverse perspectives on planning commission. As long as they're willing to bone up and learn about how to.
Kevin K (01:01:51.212)
Yeah.
Cary (01:01:53.972)
how to operate and read the code and ordinances and things.
Kevin K (01:01:59.798)
Yeah, it just seems, you know, honestly, logical to me that if you have a commission or anything that is heavily involved in regulating one industry that there ought to be some people from there who interact with those regulations every day and who are involved. Just like, like if you had a commission to regulate barber shops, you would expect like there'd be a few barbers, you know, on the commission.
Cary (01:02:18.72)
Yeah. Yeah. That's why I kind of chuckle when people think there's this conflict of interest. And I say, no, I was, that was literally my pitch was you need people who do this work, who are helping to shape these, these policies. And, it's been, it's been good for me. And then I think, I've helped, helped get a lot done. I believe that it's useful for pushing us forward and streamlining and, and, know, helping to housing is just a major, major issue.
How can we sort of stay safe and compliant, but grease the skids for more housing? It's been a big, focus.
Kevin K (01:02:57.014)
No doubt. Well, Kerry, it's been a real pleasure. It's been a lot of fun. feel like we could easily go on for another hour or two, but I think we'll call it right there. And I really value having your experience and sharing that with everybody. And hopefully we get a chance to talk about this again at a future date.
Cary (01:03:04.874)
down.
Cary (01:03:16.446)
Agreed, my pleasure. Like I said, I can keep, keep put a quarter in me and I keep going, I hope, hopefully some of this is useful.
Kevin K (01:03:23.2)
and how if somebody wants to try to find you either, you know, internet or social media or whatever, what's the best way.
Cary (01:03:30.068)
Yeah, I can be found. Well, my website is westerbeckarchitecture .com. And you can always drop me a note there. But the easiest way, I'm still on Twitter under my own name. We'll see how long that lasts. I've jumped onto Threads social media, which I've been spending more time. And I can be found under my name there. So those are both good ways to find me. And then I have a business page on Facebook.
I don't go on there very often, but if anybody tries to message me there or finds me there, I will see that. So I can be found pretty easily on those platforms or my website certainly. And there's a number for my firm on the website, so people could feel free to call or text me if they want to. And many people have. I've been contacted dozens and dozens and dozens of times since finishing my building five years ago. And I'm always happy to help.
Kevin K (01:04:26.459)
that's fantastic. All right, Kerry, well, really appreciate the time and look forward to talking again. All right, take care.
Cary (01:04:32.736)
Thank you, Kevin.

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Jim Heid and the Small-Scale Developer Forum
13 Ağu· The Messy City Podcast
Abby Newsham and I have some fun with a joint podcast this week, as we host Jim Heid. Jim runs the Small Scale Developer Forum, and has a new book called “Building Small: A Toolkit for Real Estate Entrepreneurs, Civic Leaders, and Great Communities.” He spent some time in Kansas City while preparing to host his next forum here in October. Registration is open now!
Jim is a wealth of great information for emerging developers. A landscape architect by trade, he came to development mid-career. He shares his story about why and how he did this, working as a small developer in the California context, and why he thinks real estate should be the noble profession to solve a lot of our ills of today.
Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.
Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.
Intro: “Why Be Friends”
Outro: “Fairweather Friend”

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Missouri's Favorite Topic: KC vs St Louis
6 Ağu· The Messy City Podcast
This week, we take a little different tack and explore a time-worn Missouri rivalry: Kansas City vs St Louis. I invite two born-and-raised St Louisans, Abby Newsham and Jason Carter-Solomon to explore what is working and what is not with these two cities and metros.
These two regions dominate this part of the Midwest, but have entirely different cultures and growth trajectories. If you go back far enough to Joel Garreau’s “Nine Nations of North America” you may remember that he labeled Kansas City as the capital of the “Breadbasket” region, and had St Louis as a border city between the Breadbasket and “Dixie.”
Today, Kansas City is growing with sizeable numbers for a Midwestern city, and St Louis is fairly stagnant. What gives? Why is this so, since St Louis has such obvious assets? We explore this, as well as the horror that is St Louis-style pizza.
Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.
Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.
Intro: “Why Be Friends”
Outro: “Fairweather Friend”

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Code Reform is not just about Zoning
30 Tem· The Messy City Podcast
There’s so many acronyms in this episode, it might make your head spin. We talk about IRC, IBC, IEBC, ADA, FHA and more. John Anderson and I don’t do this to punish you, or make you feel confused. But, it’s critical to understanding the world of how buildings actually get built.
John is usually good for at least a couple of one-liners, and this one is my favorite in this episode:
Real estate development is a black box full of money and villains.
You’ll learn in this episode why requiring sprinklers in small and middle-scale building isn’t necessary, and how it makes housing less affordable. We talk about single-stair reform, and understanding how the Fair Housing Act is a very different animal than the Americans with Disabilities Act.
For more from John, check out his blog.
Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.
Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.
Intro: “Why Be Friends”
Outro: “Fairweather Friend”
Transcript of Episode:
Kevin K (00:01.81)
Welcome back to the Messy City podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. You know, we spent a lot of time in the world of whatever you want to call it, urbanism, planning, design, urban design, talking about zoning reform, especially for what we kind of call missing middle housing and the need to reform zoning codes to enable the production of sort of smaller scale.
housing. And so I've had a number of episodes on that. We've talked about it. We'll continue to talk about it. But one thing we really haven't talked much about at all, and that's often overlooked, is the need for reform to building codes and building code and development approval processes generally with local governments. So my friend John Anderson started an email thread the other day.
that, kind of dug into this issue and like a lot of John's emails, it was long and thorough and a little bit grumpy. and so I thought John and I should just, talk about it, because there's a lot of really great stuff here that I'm not sure that people think about, terribly much, especially if you're one of those people who wants to do small scale, development.
whether new construction or rehab, especially for new construction, there's just a lot of other things to think about that you're going to have to consider and other things potentially to work on with your local government to try to reform. So that's a very long introduction to say, welcome John, how you doing?
R. John Anderson (01:44.944)
Good, I'm good. I'm glad that emails are really thin medium, so it's hard to get grumpiness to come across at the right amplitude.
Kevin K (01:55.902)
always comes across, you know, it's okay. But I've known you long enough to be able to even decipher it when it's kind of a little more subtle.
R. John Anderson (02:06.724)
Well, I'll tell you one thing that's.
Kevin K (02:08.766)
And then there are times that you and Gary Brewer go at it and it's not subtle at all.
R. John Anderson (02:13.468)
hi. I, it feels like, having a conversation with someone in Quebec where I just don't, our experience is so different. The world's way operator so far apart. It's it. I feel like we're too, you know, Neanderthal tribes meeting in the dark searching for a common word for fire without success. You know, so.
Kevin K (02:37.63)
Yeah.
No doubt. No doubt.
R. John Anderson (02:41.904)
No, Fog thinks small house 500 square feet. No, Og thinks small house 3000 square feet.
Kevin K (02:47.646)
Exactly. $2 million is a reasonable budget for any new house, Yeah.
R. John Anderson (02:52.046)
Right. And you ought to have it specially designed by an architect because that's the world that he's operating in.
Kevin K (02:58.812)
That's okay. We love, we love Gary too. He's a brilliant designer. but, he long operated in a different stratosphere in terms of architecture. So John, let's, let's get into this a little bit. I think there's, do you want to kind of lead off a little bit, just talking about building code reform generally before we get into some of the
R. John Anderson (03:01.818)
Yeah.
R. John Anderson (03:17.71)
Well, yeah, let's talk about why you'd want to reform the building code. We've seen a fair amount of uptake in zoning code reform where folks are, think, under the banner of making middle scale, missing middle housing legal again.
you see that find its way into comprehensive plans and then policy documents. And then from there, it goes through the gruesome process of actually changing the zoning. Often it takes two mentions in the comprehensive plan or three to get that to happen. It's in the implementation paragraph in the back. We should change the zoning to make this legal. And the, and you
To the credit of people that are trying to move a comprehensive plan forward, they really are trying to engage the big ideas and get enough consensus and buy -in to be able to pursue them. And then that can be a couple hundred thousand dollars down the road and you've exhausted all your staff and you have no budget left to actually change the zoning. So which is why it takes two or three cycles of the comp plan.
But when it finally comes around to it, then you get zoning that allows a duplex, an ADU, a fourplex. And then the fourplexes don't get built. And that's because when you move, in most places, when you move past two units, a duplex, into three units in a building, you move from the International Residential Code to the International Building Code or the Commercial Code. So.
And when that happens, you have fire sprinklers. And in order to have fire sprinklers, you need to make a connection at the water main. You have to protect the water main from stale water in your sprinkler system from washing back, backflow preventer. You need a sprinkler riser and a pressure reducing valve and a flow alarm. And like this red trombone that lives in a little closet that gets inspected by the building is the fire inspector before.
R. John Anderson (05:29.36)
you run horizontally your pipes. And because you're tapping the water menu, that's a serious piece of plumbing work, but it also typically requires a tap fee. in Seattle, that was $16 ,000. And in Chattanooga, it was $18 ,000 if you wanted to build a fourplex.
Kevin K (05:54.204)
That's just the fee. That's just to check you right to the municipality. Right.
R. John Anderson (05:56.664)
Yeah, there's no tap. There's no water coming your way. There's just the promise of water now that you've paid the fee for the privilege. And it's at the discretion, typically, the fire official for an entirely residential building. If you're going to build a residential sprinkler system, the geek term for that is NFPA 13R, National Fire Protection Association, 13R. That means you can use PECs or PVC plastic pipe once
once you're inside the building and you've got it all set up. But for a 13 -hour system, for a residential system, it's the fire official has some discretion about whether or not they want a separate dedicated service, or you should be able to use the domestic service with a backflow preventer or check valve to keep the stagnant water and the fire sprinklers from contaminating your domestic water. But typically fire officials are
are creatures of habit and that habit is usually enforcing the strictest standard possible and not, they're not given to, making concessions. would make a builder's life easier. So it's good. It's got, you're deviating from the system, you
Kevin K (07:08.68)
Plus you're, yeah, and you are practicing the dark arts of real estate development, so you probably are serving to endanger the lives of whoever you're building for,
R. John Anderson (07:21.434)
Well, that's actually how we make our money. It's by endangering other people. The more of our customers we can put at risk, the better for us. And I think, know, in their defense, our culture says that real estate development and construction is a black box full of money and villains, and it's unknowable how much money is going to be made. So why would you complain about saving children from a fire?
Kevin K (07:30.558)
It's
R. John Anderson (07:49.552)
because there's just a huge amount of money you're going to make. it's a technical problem wrapped in myth and caricature.
Kevin K (07:59.518)
So if I just take a step back and think big picture again here, so especially maybe for a lay person, you know, a lot of people, I remember this, a lot of people refer to these codes as like fire codes. That's kind of like the vernacular for people who are not architects or in the professions, but they're actually technically called building codes. When I was a young architect, there were multiple different building codes. There was a uniform building code and there was a Southern building code.
BOKA code, and then they eventually all coalesced into what we call the International Building Code. And that is the standard now that most cities, local governments, and states adopt. There are different cycles and years at which you might adopt a But as you mentioned, there's also this companion piece called the International Residential Code, which for the most part governs just one family and two family
buildings.
R. John Anderson (09:00.428)
or attached one family, like a townhouse with a fire separation wall between them, no common hallways or anything. The entity that issues those codes is called the International Codes Council, it's a private nonprofit. And if you're a fire official or a local building official, this is probably your trade group. Also, if you manufacture
Kevin K (09:07.474)
Right.
R. John Anderson (09:29.872)
fire sprinklers, you're probably pretty active there. Because what happens is there's a code cycle where, okay, we have a new edition of the International Residential Code coming out for 2028 or 24 or whatever. so in between the last time the model, what they call model codes were issued and now folks have made proposals. This last round for the 2024
contains a lot of really good improvements on the codes for building decks, which were kind of a neglected area and there were a lot of deck failures and some smart folks got together and came up with some common sense solutions. So, and if you use those solutions, you don't actually have to have an engineer verify your deck construction. So the issue of the model code and then state by state, state legislatures
they'll review it in committee. It'll come to a vote. They'll adopt the such and such year, the 2024 international residential code, international existing building code, international FAR code, international, you know, all of those codes, kind of all at once. And then depending on your state, you can, when the state adopts it, then it goes over to a codes commission
does rulemaking where they might make some adjustments that are appropriate to that state, local climate and economics. And then it becomes law. And then the process for it to happen at the local level, your county, municipality, town, some places it immediately becomes the one you're supposed to work with. Others you have a window to
adopted in and if you don't do anything to amend it, it's the one you're going to work with. And other places, the only way you, so you could adopt it and make it less stringent in places like California or New York, and I believe Illinois, but in states that are what are called Dillon's rule state versus home rule states, Dillon's rule state, you can only adopt it to make it more
R. John Anderson (11:55.726)
So in Tennessee, recently basically legalized fourplexes without fire sprinklers. And they did that at the state level after attempting to do it just for Shelby County and Memphis. They had to go back and try again. most of the code reform issues that are going on in most states have to be engaged at the state legislature.
level. And a lot of states will eliminate the requirement for fire sprinklers in all new residential units.
Kevin K (12:36.178)
And so we should probably talk about like what's the whole big deal? Why wouldn't you want to have sprinklers required in buildings? And I want to give you a little background from my standpoint, but you go ahead and answer that first. What's the problem here?
R. John Anderson (12:55.662)
Well, I think the problem is one, first of cost, and then second of benefit. A two -story fourplex is actually safer than a single -family house of the same size because there are rated assemblies separating one unit from the rest. You have exiting that meets the requirements.
all those places that are sleeping rooms have to have an egress window. So in addition to going out through the hallway, you could go out through the window or a firefighter could come in from the window and they're sized. So firefighter with a Scott pack can go through the window. the, and there isn't much in the way of actual evidence that fire sprinklers save lives or save structures. They're mostly there even in commercial buildings to increase the amount of exiting
people have to get out of the building. They don't put out fires. They control smoke to a point. So, and it, you know, it makes sense if you're in a big quarter building or a hotel or, you know, a high rise, that getting out of the building in the case of a fire is a big serious issue. There's a big difference in scale between a high rise and a fourplex. So, and also the cost of, again, getting the system just to the building is significant.
actually costs more than running the pipe inside the building. So that additional cost, say you're trying to build market rate apartments adjacent to a daycare and a place for food and drink. And you get actually a little bit higher rents because you have those community amenities. But if the rents are not high enough to support a more expensive kind of construction, then
you probably build townhouses or something else. So the notion of the missing middle, there is a whole strata of easily built wood frame buildings that could be built, but for this fire sprinkler requirement that makes the cost too high to be able to recover either with a sales price or with rent. So basically, you can't get the rent, you probably shouldn't build the building. And it's
R. John Anderson (15:19.536)
I mean $18 ,000 before you install the system. you're going to, that's the same system you would use for 16 units. Just 16 units would have more pipe. But the core system being kind of, that cost being spread over just three or four units, it kills it off. And it's typically six units or more become kind of the threshold.
Kevin K (15:44.958)
Well, and there's also an ongoing maintenance cost. mean, you can't just like put in a backflow preventer in a fire sprinkler system and just like let it sit for 50 years and never touch it.
R. John Anderson (15:53.284)
Yep. Yep. Well, and also the, you'll often hear fire officials talk about, you're going to, you know, okay, so it costs a little bit more on the front end, but people are going to save money on their homeowner's insurance, you know, or, or the building owner will save money on their insurance. And that's just not true because there's more property damage from leaking fire sprinklers than there are from fires. And the folks that issue insurance are smart enough to, you know, look at the actuarial tables and say, Nope, no break for fire sprinklers. So.
Kevin K (16:22.59)
And I think you can – even if you don't know a of this stuff, you might intuitively kind of know it because if you look around and see what is actually built in terms of new construction and that's why I think one reason when you look around you see an awful lot of – not just single family. I mean there's obviously a big single family market but when you go to duplexes or a townhouse rows where you might have four, six townhouses in a row or something like
You're doing all of that with the international residential code and you're avoiding all of the complexities of the international building code or the requirements that come with having multiple units.
R. John Anderson (17:04.996)
Yeah. Also, if you were to do, there's a, there's a paragraph in the international residential code that says, okay, so you could have a duplex and up and down duplex, no fire sprinklers attached to that. know, so you had a ground floor, you know, one bedroom and upstairs, had a two or three bedroom, you know, three story building like you'd see in Savannah. you can't do that without fire sprinklers. Now, once you put two units in a, in a building and attach
with the firewall and everything, now you gotta do fire sprinklers. So, and that's a really, really practical, flexible building type that we can't do because every one of those individual buildings now needs a fire sprinkler system. And there's just, now you're looking at spreading the cost of that red trombone over two units, so.
Kevin K (17:56.882)
Yeah, it's interesting to me because I think about before the codes unified, there were very different philosophies between like the UBC and the BOCA code. broadly speaking, like one of them was, have very, it was more about building materials and assemblies. And then
what became the international code was really just basically about sprinklers. They say we're gonna be a lot more lenient on exiting and materials and other stuff as long as you put in sprinklers. And that's the one that won
R. John Anderson (18:35.93)
Yeah, there are other ways to build without sprinklers, but typically the amount of brain damage required is tough. And a lot of times when you take those alternative routes, the building official or file official will say, no, no, why don't you just sprinkle it? And the evolution of codes over time, it wasn't until the, I think the mid sixties.
It's been a long time since I had to take my journeyman's test as an electrician, but I think it was the mid 1960s. Before that time, you weren't required to ground outlets. So an old house with no ground, your answering machine, computer, television, anything is kind of at risk because there's no ground. So now grounding outlets became the thing. In about 1975, hardwired smoke detectors became required.
And that actually saved a lot of lives. So that was a really effective change in the building code. And when it all got consolidated, the kind of code caulking that was used to bring it all together was, well, yeah, we have all these differences, but I think we can agree that if you sprinkle it, it's no problem. We got it covered. So the end over time.
you see that's also the place where you would go to argue about whether how wide a street needs to be because that's incorporated into the fire code. And in recent additions, it went from being 20 foot clear to 26 foot clear, depending on which appendix you adopt. And this is the kind of thing where if some restrictions are a good idea in the name of safety, then more might be better. And I think that a lot of this comes
We have really specialized rules that are not integrated into making places worth caring about. They are specialized and the builder, the developer, the architect, or the people that are responsible to combine these ingredients in a capable way. And then we have them reviewed by a bunch of specialists who each have their own particular set of goals when they do the review.
R. John Anderson (20:57.956)
And if you've ever worked on a big serious building that had elevators and you had a local electrical inspector and a state elevator inspector, both operating under perfectly good codes, you could be hung up for six months while they fight. And you've built it the way you thought was, the way the architect got it signed off. But in the final turf competition, you could
really jammed up because now you have specialists that are in conflict. And both of them feel like they have the authority to win.
Kevin K (21:36.926)
But of course, one of the great ironies of all this is the sort of buildings that we're often trying to reproduce or emulate or do new again have been around for 100, 100 plus years. The truth is most of those were built with a very similar construction method as how we build today. A lot of them were like balloon framed with like a, maybe they have a brick veneer or something like that. But a lot of them aren't like Clay Chapman's structural masonry buildings. They're actually
wood -framed. have no, right, I mean they have no fire rated assemblies at all between the units or between the hallways. Single stair often in many cases, no sprinklers, none of those features at all. And I'm not to say there haven't been fires and tragedies in any of those buildings, but by and large, if you look around, there's enormous wealth of them that have existed for over a
R. John Anderson (22:09.124)
with really, really thick brick paint that goes on
R. John Anderson (22:36.922)
Yeah, and I think that the.
If the decision about how much risk are we willing to take on, say as a community, that decision is delegated to elected officials and elected officials have staff and they adopt these model codes and enforce them. And the, isn't a lot of defensible territory in the, wait a minute. The rules that you are playing by and you want me to play by are,
What's the technical term? Kind of b******t. And I would like to make a case for that. And people get very defensive because I think also people have a really good internal gyroscope for the slippery slope of having to rethink all their assumptions. And they'll put their heels in the ground and it doesn't take much to say no.
as opposed to, you you make some interesting points. I would really like to dig into the research on this. I appreciate you brought it to our attention. know, that more commonly is like, look, you make a pretty good case, but if we let you do it, we'd have to let everyone do it. And I know you're a very careful builder, but there are some schlocky guys out there that are gonna make terrible things happen. And we have to protect the public from them. So we're gonna throw you under the same bus we throw them under.
So, you know, so a lot of this comes down to how do people perceive and measure risk? How do they communicate about it? And are there benefits out the other side of it that are worth taking that effort? So right now, they're, last count, there are like nine different states that are, that have legislation pending about going to single stair for six stories in a sprinkled building.
R. John Anderson (24:36.56)
And what that does, if you Google single stair buildings in Seattle, you'll see that the ability to do just one stair allows you to work on a smaller footprint. So it creates a lot of really good infill on 50 by 100 lots or 100 by 100 lots instead of a full half block podium building. The requirement for two stairs and
a third of the diagonal distance of that rectangle separating the two stairs. So you got your room to make a choice which stair you're going to. That requirement creates a lot of, and then two rated stair stair assemblies. That creates a lot of corridor buildings to amortize all that common area and all those additional stairs. So they've been building single -story single stair buildings with sprinklers in Europe for a very long time. And it's kind of
it's the established standard for, you know, that portion of the Western world. And so about 12 years ago, there was an amendment made to the local building code in Seattle to allow for single stair buildings. And a lot of them have been built with good success and are perfectly safe. And now the legislature has, I believe, passed it and it's on to the codes commission for rulemaking.
The fourplexes don't need fire sprinklers rule didn't make it out of committee. But the but you can see, you know, looking around the country, there's at least nine states that are looking for single stair. And I think that we'll see a similar Montana, you can build a fourplex with no sprinklers in Vermont. You can build a fourplex with no sprinklers. But the.
These things end up often sponsored by the local home builders association. In North Carolina, home builders came in with that. It passed in the legislature. It also involves some reduction in the requirements for the energy code. So Republican supermajority got it passed. Democratic governor vetoed it. Supermajority overruled them. Now those are
R. John Anderson (26:59.482)
Those are supposed to be the rules except that it still has to go to the codes commission and the codes commission doesn't have enough members and members are appointed by the democratic governor. So it became a turf issue about if those guys are for it, I'm against it. Plus, you know, energy codes are for important purposes like climate change. So we can't give ground on that ideologically. So that's kind of the process. And I think that the kind of bottom
support for these things at a state legislature, you know, one at a time. I think that probably has a better chance than a top -down approach where you make code proposals to the ICC and need to survive the committee review process to be able to have those proposals incorporated in the next round of the
I've, I've resisted, I've resisted joining, but I figured out that membership costs this, you know, the same as buying all the hard copy code books, as the non -member. So.
Kevin K (27:55.038)
Have you
Kevin K (28:06.398)
There you go. Have you seen any discussion at all from the ICC about changing the one and two family to go up to three and four family?
R. John Anderson (28:17.808)
Not at the ICC in general. There's no proposals currently in the mix. But I think that
It's a, you know, I only have so much room for research and development and missionary work in my life. the, and my batting average on that is pretty dismal.
thought about trying to rally the troops and get multiple proposals in from all over the country. So absent a grant from Melinda and Bill Gates, I don't think I'm going to storm the battlements of a top -down solution.
Kevin K (29:09.886)
So it wasn't there, was it Memphis that did up to six units without sprinklers?
R. John Anderson (29:15.118)
Yeah. Yeah. And then it was killed off by the state fire marshal. And so the so the legislative fix to that was to say that the state fire marshal does not have jurisdiction in Shelby County or kind of was like in there, tagged on to some other bill. So the so now you can do six units, no forest reclures, but with
typically two hour separations between units, which is not a heavy cost because by the building code, the sound transmission requirements you have, if you just pick the right wall sandwich, you will exceed the two hour fire rating by the time you get to the sound transmission coefficient number of 59, which is
the minimum between units and multifamily.
Kevin K (30:14.43)
Isn't it mostly just like a double layer of Type X drywall on both sides?
R. John Anderson (30:18.352)
Yeah, typically double layer on resilient channel or double layer on double studs with air gap. So, you know, and it's 5 -8, two layers of 5 -8.
Kevin K (30:27.912)
Yeah, okay.
Kevin K (30:33.65)
Yeah, and the whole scheme of things that's cheaper than the sprinkler deal.
R. John Anderson (30:38.5)
Yeah, it's also the, just makes for a much quieter unit, you know, which is a benefit that your residents would see as a good thing.
Kevin K (30:46.034)
Yeah, no doubt.
Kevin K (30:53.586)
Right. Right. So we've talked a little bit about, you know, the sprinkler issues that relates to three, four, five, six plexes, that sort of thing. We've talked about the single stair exiting possibility. What else are you seeing that like small developers should be really aware of when it comes to, or like red flags when it comes to other code issues besides what you might see in the zoning
R. John Anderson (31:18.698)
the, one of the things that you'll, it's a confusing problem. all, facial tissues are not manufactured by Kimberly Clark called Kleenex, right? But if you said pass me a Kleenex, people know exactly what you're talking about. The brand name has become kind of the generic name. The same thing happens with accessibility requirements.
the Americans with Disabilities Act governs basically places of public accommodation, commercial offices, retail, movie theaters, universities, hospitals, state capitals. And the Fair Housing Act governs the accessibility requirements for residential.
and you need to have four units or more to have that building be covered by that set of standards. So if you were going to have four units in a fourplex, two up, two down, all of the ground floor units would be required to be accessible, adaptable. That doesn't mean they have to be accessible when you build them, but they have to be adapted to be accessible in a reasonable period of time if someone with a disability wants to rent
So what that turns into is doors with enough clearance, lever hardware, enough backing in the bathrooms to put in grab bars, enough space between appliances and counters, and be able to get into the building with a zero -slip entry. So we typically build porches, you know, two and a half feet over the surrounding grade. And the way that we handle
that adaptability issue is in a fourplex with a raised floor. The ramp you put in goes down the side of a narrow deep building and brings you up to the front porch elevation. So, and you don't have to do that until someone shows up and wants to rent that, you know, is in a wheelchair or whatever. So, but the people can, a lot of people conflate accessibility for residential with ADA.
R. John Anderson (33:44.634)
people talk about ADA requirements as if that's all of the accessibility requirements. So for small developers, it's important to understand if you did a mixed use building, the commercial on the ground floor is governed by the ADA, although there's some square footage exceptions for certain things. And then the units upstairs, if you decided to put all four units on top of the commercial space on the ground floor, as far as the Fair Housing Act is concerned,
the second floor is now the ground floor, because that's the first place that housing occurs. So now you either need a really big difference in grade or an elevator, which you're not going to amortize over four units. So the better play is to put one unit, however small or modest on the ground floor, because in a non -elevator building, all ground floor units need to be accessible, adaptable, all one of them in this case.
Kevin K (34:41.534)
John, what might an elevator cost in round numbers, just to by way of thinking about
R. John Anderson (34:47.504)
Well, there's like the base, the cab and the equipment round numbers, that's going to be 50 to 75 ,000. And then you're going to see typically about 25 ,000 a stop in the additional shaft way. And that's for hydraulic. Once you've ever stayed on the fifth floor of a Hampton Inn, that's a hydraulic elevator and you're able to
some maybe some bad life choices by the time you get to the fifth floor because they're very slow at that point. So four stories is kind of the effective maximum for a hydraulic and at which point now you go to a traction elevator which is significant but another 50 to 60 percent more expensive per floor. So again if you are in a situation where you're going to have to have an elevator for market reasons or
for accessibility reasons, you need a lot of units to be able to spread that cost. Because it's not only a first cost, there's the ongoing maintenance and your insurance is gonna go up. But also your construction cost is gonna go up because as soon as you introduce an elevator into the building, kind of all the trades sort of start to move their numbers up or drop out because, yeah.
Elevator inspector as an HVAC guy used to doing two story buildings. I don't think I need that guy in my life, you know, because I'm supposed to provide exhaust for the shaft and they're really picky about how you do that. And I just don't do enough elevator buildings to, and I'm busy anyway, you know, so there there's a point where, it's like there, there are buildings that are scaled right for a small developer. And then there's the next
Kevin K (36:22.034)
Yeah.
R. John Anderson (36:45.104)
which is a significant bump in the number of units, the cost, the overall scale and complexity of the project. there's, and the folks have a, often have a mistaken notion about that being same as, you know, that's the same as, as the four townhouses I built, just 40 units with an elevator and corridors and fire sprinklers. What's the worry? You know, you know, if I'm going to do four units in this town with all the brain damage I got to go through, I may as well do
You know, so now I get to raise more money. It costs more to build on a per square foot basis. My rents have to be higher. Everything sort of starts to snowball in complexity and scale. And what you should have done as a small developer is instead of, you know, swinging for the fences with that home run, that great project that now you don't have to work anymore. You should do a series of small projects and have a portfolio that is made up of things that.
You weren't just doubling down until you lost everything. And you see conventional developers doing the same thing. it's like, you know, if I'm going to, you know, in California, it's probably the best example. If I'm going to do 400 units, may as well do 4 ,000 because the environmental litigation will cost about the same. You know, and also if I can get the stuff approved now, because the barriers to entry are so high, I can definitely make money on 4 ,000 units.
400 is kind of sketchy, I don't know, it's a small deal.
Kevin K (38:17.534)
Yeah, I was just having this conversation with a couple of developers, friends the other day here and like in our city. Like there's just, there's no, there's a lot of great discussion and talk about reform to enable small scale stuff. But when you actually put pencil to paper and start to do a project, like the, the review machine has no mechanism to handle.
smaller scale stuff or at all. And so everything pushes for bigness. And it's frustrating because there are a lot of us who I think would like to do some smaller scale stuff. But know, John, this is one reason like you developed, you created the 4F building prototype was to really kind of help smaller developers understand like a hack around some of these different codes.
R. John Anderson (39:12.622)
Yeah, and that's around the same time that, at that time you could in Texas, Idaho, Nevada, and a few other places, you could build a fourplex without, fire sprinklers. and those were some of the very few places during the great recession that you could build anything. So, it seemed to make sense. What's happened since then is that the fire sprinklers will, you know, the form follows finance fourplex really at this point should be two duplexes on the same lot or.
a four unit cottage court or something. David Kim was really instrumental in hacking the code to come up with the three story single stair walk up. And that could be a mixed use building with one unit on the ground floor and then no more than four units on each of the second and third floor and had a maximum exiting number. So we kind
It's kind of like working an investment strategy around the tax code. You know, it's like that's that we're going to have to fit this box. And what we found was that you do wood frame construction. You could do a tall ground floor if you needed retail. And you could do either nine units, four on each of the second and third floor and one unit on the ground floor, the rest commercial, or you could do 12 units all the way down to the bottom, or you can add additional units on the ground floor as long as they
direct access for exiting on the outside wings or something on the back. So that type is getting a lot of traction. The same time Eric Brown and Union Studio had developed similar buildings using the same analysis of the code. So there's a number of those that have been built.
That one of the benefits when you're doing a small multi -family building with fire sprinklers and the like is that you, if you're only doing four units on a floor, the common area is basically the stairway at a very large landing. So you end up with maybe four, about six to 8 % of the building area is common area compared to the 15 to 18 % you see in corridor buildings.
R. John Anderson (41:36.752)
So got to pay to build it, you got to pay to clean it, maintain it, insure it, et cetera. And so being able to reduce the common area, being able to reduce the number of stairs, together buildings that would fit on a 50 or 100 foot lot opens up a lot of opportunities for three story buildings and for mixed use. But again, ADA for the commercial and Fair Housing Act for the rest.
Kevin K (42:04.712)
Right. So it's really kind of funny because I think I don't think I ever really learned about the Fair Housing Act until you and I started working together, which was, you know, easily almost a decade into my career as an architect. And then we started like looking at the Fair Housing Act. There actually are some interesting workarounds besides like the ground floor thing in the Fair Housing Act. So one or two that I want you to talk about the townhouse rules for fair housing.
But one I remember is I think it was adopted in what 1983 and it exempts all buildings built before that year if I remember right. 91, okay.
R. John Anderson (42:45.127)
1991, May, March of 1991, March 30th, 1991. So if you have an older built.
Kevin K (42:48.902)
Okay. It's almost like you'd memorize that or like tattooed it somewhere.
R. John Anderson (42:53.712)
You remember back in the early days of computers when offices didn't have IT people and whoever had figured out how to stay on hold for three hours with Dell computers to get a technical support answer?
Kevin K (43:13.534)
or was like me, was like the 18 or 19 year old who just grew up with computers, that was the IT person.
R. John Anderson (43:16.644)
Yep. Yep. And the fact that you could figure out how to download a print driver, you were now the go -to guy. And the more people came to you and asked for help with their print driver, the more problems you solve. the, you know, the fact that you never got a raise because you were the de facto IT guy. So these days for our own purposes, we have dug into this stuff. And then you start to look around and say, wait a minute, not everybody has done this homework. No, no, it's like
Kevin K (43:23.228)
Yeah. yeah.
R. John Anderson (43:46.126)
No, we're really busy and it's really hard and really complicated already. You know, we already have the building code and the fire code and everything else. Fair Housing Act. Jesus. So the, so I really, I have a hard time passing up on a chance to reduce my sense of imposter syndrome. It's like, I really am a legitimate guy, you know? No, no, I've read this. Let me send it to you, you
Did you read it? No, I didn't. just took a word for it. So no, you got to read it and tell other people about it. You know, it's like, so you, you, ended up coming across as some sort of, you know, uh, crazy person, you know, the kind of people who nailed their 19 thesis to the door of the church and Wittenberg kind of guy, you know, like, uh, that was not my intent, but it's sort of evolved that
Kevin K (44:40.072)
So anyway, one thing I remember, so a great workaround in the Fair Housing Act, I've had a lot of people over the years talk to me about, have like a old historic mixed use building and they don't want to, they're scared to renovate the upstairs for residential because of what they say ADA, just like to your point, it's not ADA, it's actually fair housing. And my point was no, you're exempt.
R. John Anderson (45:06.212)
You're exempt. One of the problems, those buildings are covered by the international existing building code, which gives fire officials and building officials a lot of latitude about how you get to the intent of the code, how much effort is going to be required given the level of renovation you're doing. And that same sort of metric is applied
accessibility upgrades for places covered with the ADA, know, more than 20, you know, can you devote 25 % of your budget to accessibility? Well, $25 ,000 in bathroom upgrades doesn't go very far. It's pretty easy to do. But when it comes time, when, when, uh, the current building code says, if you have residential occupancy over mercantile or business or, know, anything else, that's a big.
hazard and now you need to have fire sprinklers because it's under the international building code. International residential existing building code says look if you can put another layer of drywall on the ceiling and create a two -hour rating around the stairway you're good you know. Also you need to use a firecock anytime conduits go through a through a rated floor or
A lot of building officials are not ready to, you know, to learn about how much discretion they have or why they should use it in order to be able to get those second story apartments back online on Main Street. So the so even though it's in the code that they have adopted that this could happen, they're not trained at it. They don't get any practice at it. It basically, you know, goes through kind of the code egg sorter. Let's you know, you're spending this much money. You're now you need to bring it all up to code.
So in those settings,
R. John Anderson (47:06.434)
Eric Cromberg is probably the best person to talk to about what the international existing code will allow you to do if you can explain it to the people enforcing it. And I think it's important to do that before you submit your plans with your code analysis and your stamp and wet signature next to the code analysis that says, I really do know what I'm talking about. Please look up these sections.
You need to, you you need to talk with your building officials about the intent of the code and the like. And have you seen this section of the, know, you have to cultivate those relationships so that people trust you rather than they feel like they have to defend their turf. So, but the, the, the townhouse exemption and fair housing act is two story units are exempt from being covered by fair housing act, which.
accounts for some of the enthusiasm for building rental townhouses.
Kevin K (48:07.868)
Yeah, yeah. And can you stack them then?
R. John Anderson (48:12.75)
No. No, if you stack a townhouse now, that's two units between, even though they have a firewall, once you put two units into a townhouse, now you're into fire sprinklers.
Kevin K (48:24.86)
Okay, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. All right, so yeah, so just again to clarify a little bit in case we're making people's heads spin a little bit. I think it might be, but like when you talked about the international existing building codes is yet another code that's part of the model code family and it has to be adopted. I don't think like my city has adopted it. I think there are a lot of local governments
R. John Anderson (48:36.624)
I think the odds in that are pretty high.
R. John Anderson (48:53.392)
I would, if you look, it's in there in the alphabet soup of adopted codes. Most, most folks.
Kevin K (48:56.188)
Yeah. Okay. But it was, it was created, okay. It was created for the express purpose of making renovation of more historic buildings easier.
R. John Anderson (49:07.588)
Yeah. And the, all of the, the, the best parts of the international existing building code are all the paragraphs about intent, you know, and if you're sitting down with a code official about that, said, okay, so this says the intent is this, can we agree that that's, you know, that's a good intent? And if we can get, if we can satisfy that, you know, this project, can we get to yes, you know, the,
But folks in those kind of positions don't want to be called out for being wrong or dogmatic or they wouldn't want to be characterized as Pharisees, which is usually the word that's like, I'm thinking that really loud and I'm in those meetings. The blind guides. So I think that it's about building relationships with the staff that are dealing with that.
And I think in order to get to that point, small developers probably need to international residential code compliant buildings and establish trust with their neighbors so that you've built that foundation of support and you're blunting some of the opposition that might come if you're looking for some kind of entitlement later. But if you're just asking for building permits,
build your track record and build your trust, be the person who does what they say they're going to do. Hire local folks, train local folks, create enough daylight in between you and the big production builder from out of town or the developer from the other side of town where you are, if this is going to happen, we would rather our person do it. Janine is the person who's built all those great carriage houses in our neighborhood.
And we would like to see her be able to continue to do that. So we think that, you know, it's reasonable that we should, you when she renovates the old trolley stop, mixed use buildings, she shouldn't have to put in fire sprinklers, you
Kevin K (51:19.954)
Yeah. Yeah. And to kind of put a last piece on it that is ever much so fun is there's the human element to all of this. And I was, I actually saw a tweet this morning from our friend Aaron Lubeck about, I think a builder friend in where he is in Durham had a project submitted and one staff reviewer for some, I can't remember the exact story, but there were like two different staff reviewers or code reviewers on it. And one of them came back with like
No,
R. John Anderson (51:53.264)
Hard to get good help.
Kevin K (51:54.686)
That's OK.
R. John Anderson (51:57.216)
I'm being protected from marauding squirrels on the telephone wires.
Kevin K (52:01.022)
I fully understand. But basically, one staff person had no comments, and another one came back with 25 comments. And so there's a human element to this that the people who review your application and are looking to apply the building code may end up with very different interpretations of what is required and what is not required. So John, advice on how to navigate
R. John Anderson (52:27.182)
Well, the plan checkers and the building inspectors report to the chief building official. And that's a position that you have to identify when you adopt the building code. You know, you're, you're, you know, that's a job description that, that has to get filled. And sometimes that person has many other responsibilities, but there's somebody identified as the last word as the chief building official. Appointments with that person.
and conversations about intent and, you know, demonstrating that you're trying to build something that will be safe and reasonable. And that you're trying to get to the intent of the code. If you can build that relationship,
if you're sideways with a plan checker, it's like, well, we have, we have two very different opinions about this. Can we bring in the chief building official to, you know, break the tie or maybe advise a different approach? You know, are you okay with that? It's like, it's, it's, you know, it's not personal, you know, I definitely think this is working and my, my architect who's responsible for the safety of this building until the end of their natural life,
that person, you know, has signed off on it. The city's got no liability here, even though you believe it does. So we think we've got you covered for liability. We think we've been responsible as professionals. How about it? I mean, come on, you know, but you need to build that relationship demonstrating that you are not not someone who's, you know, given to tantrums
or calling city council members, city manager, you're not gonna go over their head. You wanna work it out within that smaller circle. The day you go overhead, you go up the food chain, you can mark that day because now from now on, all your plan checks are gonna be given extra scrutiny and given to the most senior person and the most careful person in the group.
R. John Anderson (54:41.014)
More difficult is the situation where somebody will pick up a set of plans that are pretty much done by a junior person and then redline it and say, no, no, it has to be like this. And your conversation likely when you get your plans back is going to be with the junior person who can't actually articulate what the senior person did. And it's quite possible that they were wrong.
but now you got that extra layer to go through. So to be able to get to the person who can say grace on the whole arrangement and build that relationship and demonstrate that while you have that relationship, you're not always going to pull that card. You're not going to do it for every little thing. And it's like the...
There's kind of a quick sorting system that plan check and building inspectors have. If this person is basically doing a good job, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt because they're consistently doing a good job. If this person is a jerk, I think it's my duty to protect my fellow building inspectors from this monster.
You know, and I need to actually maybe cross the line a little bit in order to be able to put this guy in his place because he never read the code. You know, so the, there's a whole lot of high school hallway one -upsmanship that goes on usually between males. I think that female building officials and female contractors and developers typically are more rigorous in
study and their presentation and their communication skills. and I think recovering elementary school teachers who've become small developers, their communication skills are awesome because their expectation for human behavior is fairly modest.
Kevin K (56:41.662)
No doubt, no doubt. All right, John, before we wrap, any final words or thoughts for people to think about as they look at codes?
R. John Anderson (56:53.602)
Well, I think that particularly for small developers, it's really important because of the level of complexity and kind of the possibility that code issue will just stop your project altogether. It's important to become, don't leave it to your architect to be the last word on the code. It's OK to have spirited discussions about it. But
Get Francis Ching's books about, you know, the building codes illustrated or the international residential code illustrated, which when you read the code, there are a lot of things that you end up making a sketch or a diagram. So you see if you've got it figured out because it makes references from one section to another. You can't just hold it all in your head. The great thing about the Frank Ching books is that he's made those drawings much better than you
and they communicate really effectively and you can bring that into the meeting. don't subcontract code compliance to somebody else because just like you wouldn't subcontract your personal guarantee on the construction loan to someone else, it's that serious. And start with small projects. Make small code problems and solve
Kevin K (58:10.386)
Yeah, no
Kevin K (58:16.638)
Yes, some of us may. We may learn to take that advice one day or maybe not, who knows.
R. John Anderson (58:24.448)
Well, I have a steady stream of I told you so's on any day of the week. So I'm happy to help people out with that.
Kevin K (58:33.054)
Yeah. All right, John, thanks so much. this. All right. See you later.
R. John Anderson (58:35.994)
Sure, take care.
Thank you.

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A Conversation with Joe Minicozzi
23 Tem· The Messy City Podcast
There’s a lot of takeaways from any conversation with Joe Minicozzi, or one of his many public presentations. Here’s mine today: omnipotent forces didn’t create our current systems, whether we are talking about zoning, traffic engineering or tax assessment. Or, in fact, just about anything in life.
These were all created by fallible humans. We can, and should, change them. It’s our duty, our responsibility. Your local tax system, and your local zoning code were not handed down to you by Moses from the mountain.
Joe Minicozzi of Urban 3 is one of those rare people that just has a knack for communicating complex ideas. If you haven’t seen one of his presentations, run out and do so. Here’s a sample from Not Just Bikes, and one from Strong Towns. Today, we talk in audio form instead of video, but I suspect you’ll enjoy it just the same. Since this is a blog, too, here’s a few visual references for fun:
Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.
Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.
Intro: “Why Be Friends”
Outro: “Fairweather Friend”
Text Transcript:
Kevin K (00:01.231)Welcome back to the Messy City podcast. You know, one of the joys that I've had in being involved with the New Urbanism Movement and the Congress for New Urbanism for many, many years is you get to meet and know people who take a lot of issues that we talk about and care about and completely reframe them and make them much more interesting and accessible and understandable, I think, to a larger audience. And there's been a number of people whowho've done that or I've seen that happen in the course of my career. And one of those is joining me here today, live from Asheville, North Carolina, Joe Minicozzi. Joe, how's it going,Joe Minicozzi (00:42.018)Great, thanks for havingKevin K (00:43.771)Well, it's fun. I've been wanting to do this one for a little while and it's you're a busy guy and I'm really glad you made some time. Joe, you may know he's often had his work featured in Strong Towns. He's a regular on the speaking circuit with his firm, Urban 3, and he's really developed a unique approach to kind of explaining our built environment in graphic and financial termsI think has changed a lot of people's thinking about things. And we're going to get to some of that. Joe has, one of the cool things, Joe, is you're working all over the country. So there's always something new to talk about. But before we get there, I do think it's interesting for people to understand your background because like somebody coming upon you today and one of your presentations, they might think, he's like this kind of urban guru guy. What does that mean? Or he's like a financial guru guy, but you're actually, you're an architect.Correct? Not licensed, but educated. Yes. Where did... I don't think... One thing I never knew, Joe, like, where did you growJoe Minicozzi (01:44.476)Well, not licensed. Can say that. Educated, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so... GoJoe Minicozzi (01:56.116)upstate New York, Rust Belt, little town called Rome, New York.Kevin K (01:57.445)Ruffio.cool, that's a cool town.Joe Minicozzi (02:05.282)Why do you say that? That it's not cool. When I wasKevin K (02:07.983)Well, I mean, there's some cool built fabric there. No?Joe Minicozzi (02:11.256)No. When I was a kid, they tore down most of downtown. It was literally one of the largest urban renewal projects per capita in the entire United States. And they blew up, I don't know, like eight to 10 blocks of downtown and built a wooden fort. There's a revolutionary wooden fort in what used to be our downtown. Google Rome, New York and go into the downtown, you'll see it.Kevin K (02:39.715)OK, I must be thinking of pictures I've seen of a different upstate New York downtown then or something.Joe Minicozzi (02:43.288)Oh no, no, it's, didn't, but I didn't realize that was abnormal because you you grew up in a town of 30 ,000 people, this is it, right? That's all you know. You just, so when you go to college, you're just like, yeah, surely like you've got a fort in your downtown, right? You know, everybody's got one. Actually Savannah has one. So, but it's not in the downtown. They didn't eliminate Savannah to rebuild a wooden fort. Yeah, but this is a magnet that I have that I in my bookcase over here. This is my grandfather.Kevin K (03:03.193)Right. That would have been rather odd.Joe Minicozzi (03:13.34)used to tie a rope to this thing. And he's an Italian carpenter, first generation American. And he's tied a rope to this and that rope was tied to my waist. And I used to just walk around job sites all day with him as a kid. I was like, you know, six years old walking around a job site with this huge magnet tied to my waist. And I was picking up nails and I would just sit there with this little anvil, like making the nails go straight so he could reuse them because you know, he's depression era.And I thought I was building buildings since I'd go home and talk to my dad and I was like, I'm building buildings with Papa. And he goes, sounds like you want to be an architect. And I was like, Bing, I want to be an architect. so that's, I wanted to be an architect since I was nine years old and I went to architecture school.Kevin K (03:53.903)You know, that's funny. That's like a weird thing we share in common. It's like, I don't know how that happened with me, because I actually didn't know anybody, you know, in architecture. And I knew a few people who built things, but for whatever reason, I just like always knew I wanted to go into architecture and city planning. it's it's just where I was. So, but anyway, so go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. I had no idea. Like why showed up to like freshman year?Joe Minicozzi (04:12.386)Yeah, like, they really cool pencils, right? I mean, it's like little clicker pencils, awesome, great tools.Kevin K (04:22.199)And here's the list of all the s**t you have to buy. And I was like, what is, what does even all this stuff do?Joe Minicozzi (04:25.162)Yeah, here's, out and buy a thousand dollars worth of stuff. Yeah, little, remember that, God, I hate saying this, it sounds old. I was explaining to somebody on staff, remember those little letter writing tools, that little plastic thing that you'd have to put on your parallel bar to make those three lines to do your lettering properly? That was insane. Anyway, sorry, sorry kids. That doesn't exist anymore because we actually type in computers now.Kevin K (04:39.745)my god, yeah.Kevin K (04:44.805)Totally, Yeah.Kevin K (04:53.349)Yeah, I know. Everyone wants to share. mean, actually learning how to do architectural lettering was a pretty cool thing. I mean, I always liked the benefit ofJoe Minicozzi (04:59.628)Well, the frustrating thing for me is you go all the way through architecture school and the University of Miami is a five -year program and you never built a building. So how can you be a designer of a building and not understand how it's constructed? So in my fifth year, we petitioned the school to build a homeless shelter and we just went ahead and built it, designed it, built it, worked with homeless folks to figure out what are their needs? How do we help solve the problem architecturally?And think that's one of the beauties of Miami is that, you know, the whole time I was, know, Miami is known for its new urbanism, but I was always talking with Liz Plater -Zyberg about what was going on in my hometown, because here you have a town that was designed for walkability, designed for the things that new urbanists would proclaim, yet it was dead as a doornail and we were eliminating our downtown. And Liz would always say to me, she's like, well, that's economics. That's something different.and we're trying to deal with this flood of what's happening in South Florida. That's a different reality. So this whole being seen as an economist is mostly about chasing a question of what are the policies that shape our environment and how do I visualize those for folks, which is very in line with new urbanism. We just look at the moneyKevin K (06:15.397)So talk a little bit about how you got to this point then professionally of working on your own and doing a lot of the economic analysis work that you doJoe Minicozzi (06:24.984)Well, mean, if first is working in architecture, and I think this is probably true for most people that are urban designers, is that you want to look at the context of things that's more exciting for you, or why would somebody say, I'm hiring you, the architect, to do an office building here? If you have an urban design mind, you're like, an office building? Why not a mixed use building or why not a residential building? Why is that developer choosing? That's really the designis when the developer makes a choice, right? And so why is the developer choosing office over residential or over retail? In having an urban design mindset, you're going to be more empowered to be looking for those things, those other forces. What are the financial streams? So after architecture, I went to grad school and then started doing like internships in real estate development, real estate finance. I worked at John Hancock Real Estate Investment Group in Boston.kind top of the food chain, where they had $4 billion worth of real estate across the country. And you're seeing how they're making decisions financially about what's going on in your town, right? Because they're going to be doing an asset in your town, a strip mall or a mall or whatever, right? Totally different design series. It was fascinating to watch, but it felt, if you saw the movie, The Big Short, it felt a lot like that. It was like, wow, these people are like on a different way of thinking.Like there's questions they're just not even asking. We were spending $100 million a year fixing the buildings that we owned. Now when you're making 15 bucks an hour, like that's a lot of money, right? And so you'd sit there, trained as an architect, you'd sit there with these asset managers and I would literally show them pictures of buildings that we owned, a building that we owned in Topeka and a building that we owned in Tacoma. And there are two office buildings that we owned.And I would ask the finance officers, I'm like, what's the difference between these two buildings? And they would start going through all of this gibberish of numbers and cash flows, cap rates, NOI, all of that stuff. And I'm like, no, no, no, look at the pictures. And like, what are you talking about? I'm like, it's the same damn building. We own the same building, the same office park building in Topeka and Tacoma. And you know, they fall apart differently based on the ecosystem. And this was like mind blowing toJoe Minicozzi (08:43.104)And it's just like, wow, they don't even understand what this... It's just a cashflow model for them. It's not a building, right? As an architect, you're going to... Like the windows fall apart differently. It's going to be based on the heat load of the air conditioner, all that stuff. But it's kind of mind blowing that this is the cashflow, the invisible sine curve that's moving by low cell high, that's moving through the system. And we're not even talking about it. So it's always... Yeah, go ahead. Well, it's always made me curious and got into real estate development.And then during the recession is when I started Urban 3, trying to help cities understand that they're prey to these sign curves.Kevin K (09:20.539)Yeah. I remember you used to tell a story about working at John Hancock and I think this is just instructive for people to understand the world of like big development, big finance was I think you had a story about we had they had X million dollars that they had to place within like 48 hours or something like that. What wasJoe Minicozzi (09:37.56)Yeah. It was called a capital call where the CEO of the real estate arm came in and said, need to get, I think it was like $120 million into the ground in the next quarter. So that was an issuance that he was given from Topress. think of anybody that's on this podcast, if you have a 401k plan, if you're like CalPERS is the biggest one, the California teachers.pension. They have to make money on their money, right? So they take your retirement investment and they go out and make money so that you can have growth in your dollars as an investor. So if you want to see your 401k plan grow, well, somebody's got to make that money grow. So they're going around, in case of John Hancock, that's an insurance company. So somebody buys John Hancock life insurance. They want to return when they die on their money. what they do at the top level of John Hancock, they're putting some money intobonds, money into stocks, some money into real estate. So ours was the real estate arm. And whatever decision was made at the top, money came into the real estate world and was like, okay, that needs to get into the ground as fast as possible. So they were issued this $120 million in the next quarter. So the people that are finance managers call up all of their developer friends and were like, can I buy a building somewhere? That was basically how it happened.And the more expensive the building, the better because the more we can get that $120 million down to zero, the faster with less transactions. So imagine if you were the guy on the office that found a hundred million dollar building, like that's actually good, right? Now in architecture world, when we go to school, we're learning the direct opposite, like smaller, like little investments. We're not thinking about the big fish that are out there. anyway.Kevin K (11:25.583)Yeah. Sometimes it feels like you're like a language translator, Joe. It's like you have these two different worlds that you have grown to understand really well. One is like architecture and development, and the other is finance. And do you feel like you're kind of like straddling those worlds and trying to explain one to theJoe Minicozzi (11:44.652)Yeah, it's a simple sense, the tagline of our company is a data -driven storytelling, you know, that we have to communicate this stuff. And so lot of what we do is just unnerve things. I just came back from a meeting with our county assessor and their consultant, and, you know, he's going through this report that's got how many pages? I don't know, but it's all this. And it's like, how can you show me all of this text?and start talking to me about it. And I'm just like, I'm like, dude, you got to show me a picture somewhere. It's like, this is crazy. And so what we do is if you watch any of our work, we spent a ton of time breaking a city down to reveal its essence. So I don't need to get into like whether or not your spark plugs are firing at 20 beats per second or whatever. I need to just show you your car works, right? What does the audience want? They don't need to know the details. And far too many of us technically,trained folks, even architects, get down into the details and the audience doesn't necessarily understand does the car work, yes or no. So that's basically the method of our work is try to make it simple for folks. I use lot of analogies when I talk to people because that's how we relate. that's kind of, think of it having a curious mind, you want to go in and break something down, but to be able to speak it to a regular audience.It's not that the audience is stupid, it's just people just don't care about those kinds of details, they just want to know the bigger picture.Kevin K (13:19.545)Yeah, yeah. And so before we get into a couple of those stories, I am also curious, when you started your business in the recession, how did you, like who were your first clients and how did you get going in that world? Because it's definitely a different thing for an architect or urban designer to get into.Joe Minicozzi (13:39.448)You know, the funny thing was, I remember in the recession, I think I did a local lecture here in Asheville to the AIA, to the Architects Association. You know, it's a recession. Yeah, you're not building buildings. So as an architect, you're out of work, you know? But what's crazy about the architectural education, it's really an amazing education in creative thinking, but also critical thinking, right?So we're all given, you remember studio, there's like 15 of us in a studio, we're all given one problem to solve, but you're get 15 different answers, right? So that's the creative side. But the analytic side happens in all of that, that we're trying to break it down and figure it out before we can get to a design process. So that's the critical thinking side. Those skills can be applied anywhere. And then also in architecture, what do you do at the end of the semester? You have to pin up your work and you have to defendbut it has to communicate to an audience visually, right? They need to understand what's going on in the design intent by what they see on the wall and how you present it. If you just look at that as a basic educational format, that can be applied anywhere. So we just applied architectural thinking to quantitative economic data for cities, right? So we get all of your data. We figure out what's its floor plan. Like why is this road here?Why is your city grown a certain way? That's all a floor plan, right? But there are decisions that are made along the way that fuel that growth. So if I add three bedrooms to my house, was it because I had four kids? know, it's like, that's the decision point for growing the house. Well, the same is true for cities. So we see when you get white flight, you're going to see that like in Kansas City. We saw that in Kansas City, Missouri, like this massive growth, southward, northward and westward or eastward,That's the whole, and that all happened really fast from 1950 forward. I think you, it's something like you doubled your population from 250 to 500, but you've 10 times your land area, which is crazy.Kevin K (15:52.475)Yeah, yeah, it's somewhere. We had a massive geographic expansion from the like 1947 city until today. I think the original 1947 city or so was probably in the ballpark of about 40 square miles. And now it's like 315 or so.Joe Minicozzi (16:15.242)I'm just drawing off the top of my head. There's an actual presentation out there somewhere, but I think it was like three times the road per person growth. So you're taking down three times the cost. So yeah, during the recession, was basically, I was showing up at conferences trying to help folks that were trying to have conversations about walkability, urban design, equity, and tryingKevin K (16:19.865)Yeah. yeah, absolutely.Joe Minicozzi (16:44.472)trying to share that the things that actually are all things that we advocate for also produce more wealth for communities. Does that make sense? So it was just like, look, we should just talk about that. Rather than say that it's good to have walkability, that can seem like a threat to an individual that you're trying to get me out of my car. That's very judgy. So rather than get involved in that emotionally, let's just talk about the fact that a Walmart actually destroys your wealth.Don't hate the player, hate the game, but you better understand the game. So when we did the models early on, it was just comparing Walmarts to Main Street, and Main Street was winning every single time. But why don't we build more Main Streets? Because the reverse is true, that we make it easier to do the Walmart, we tax it less, we charge it less, so that of course, Walmart's going to... You're going to see more Walmart -type buildings. I don't mean to be picking on Walmart so much. It'sThat's like a prototype, like the boxes. Those are throwaway architecture. So if you have property tax system that's based on your value of property, then there's an incentive for me to build junk in your community, right? The crappier the building I build, the lower the taxes I pay. Has nothing to do with the costs of the property. So the typical Walmart consumes two police officers per Walmart. So it actually costs you more in police services than a Walmart pays in property taxes.So if you were the owner of a Walmart, that's a good deal for you, right? So don't hate them. I hate us for not doing the math on that. It's that's shame on us. It's not hard. You just go call the police chief and say how many police officers are at Walmart every day and they'll tell you. That's data,Kevin K (18:28.015)Yeah. So let's talk about some of the recent data then. Not far from Walmart country, you've been working in Springfield, Missouri, which obviously is southwest Missouri, not far from Bentonville, Arkansas, which is the home base for Walmart. So we were talking, yeah, and Bentonville's actually an amazing, really cool town. And so you've been down in Springfield doing a bunch of work, and we were chatting about it.Joe Minicozzi (18:44.69)We've done Bentonville too, yeah.Kevin K (18:57.6)So this kind of took you in a little different direction. You started looking at trees and stormwater and everything else. I wonder if you could kind of talk through that scenario.Joe Minicozzi (19:05.888)Yeah. Springfield is really cool. it's one, it's nice about it. It's just straight smack dab in the middle of the country. It's Midwestern. There's not a lot of dynamic change to it because you don't have the coastal pressures of being next to an ocean or something like that. You don't have the rapid change of Silicon Valley where there's crazy changes in employment. It's very stable thatAnd so in that stability, it's sort of a nice control subject of what's going on here. It's also not, it's not at the edge of some blast zone of some other city, you know? So think of like Rancho Cucamonga, California, which is outside the blast zone of Los Angeles. So whatever happens on Los Angeles is going to spread into the suburbs, suburb cities that are around it. So anyway, putting that aside.There's also this business person there, his name is Jack Stack, who wrote this game called The Great Game of Business, awesome book about business transparency. So the quote that I like of his is, I'm reading it right here, it says, a business should be run like an aquarium where everybody can see what's going on, what's going in, what's moving around, and what's coming out. So his theory of business is that everybody inside the company should know the balance sheet, they should know the P &L.that it's not him as the business owner, that he has a gold mine of money in the basement. You know, that everybody on staff should understand they've got to pay rent, they've got to pay insurance, all this stuff has costs. Well, our attitude is the same with cities. We should make the city economics so transparent that everybody understands the land use, the economic consequences of land use decisions. Don't tell me that people just want to live out in suburbia. Of course, if you're subsidizing them, why wouldn't you want to live in suburbia?So they hired us to do that modeling. Their city has run mostly off sales tax. think it's 86 % of their revenue comes from sales tax, 14 % comes from property tax, as far as geospatial, things we can put on a map. So that's kind of like the majority of their cashflow. When I did the presentation there,Joe Minicozzi (21:27.2)One of the things that we're doing the first side, showing the revenue and we're getting feedback from the staff and you're an urban designer, I'm an urban designer. One of the things that we tend to pay attention to how a city is shaped and what it looks like when we drive around. There weren't a lot of street trees in the city. And Graham Smith from Multi Studio based in Kansas City. He's the urban designer on the project. Graham said to me, goes,Kevin K (21:49.935)Yep.Joe Minicozzi (21:54.988)Do notice there's not a lot of street trees? And I was like, yeah, that's kind of crazy. It's like, it's like somehow like trees don't happen in the city. So I made a comment about it during the staff meeting and somebody in the engineering department said to me, well, I said, why don't you have trees? And he just said to me, goes, well, it's because trees attack the streets and sidewalks and use that word attack. I like my, my designer kicked in and I immediately responded. Do you not know how to design a tree pit?And then I stopped and I was like, well, that's not fair because I'm going to put them in the defensive. so, you know, this is somebody that's coming in with a mindset of maybe he came from, life safety or something, or the risk department inside city government. So he's only looking at it as a balance sheet item of one line item. Yes. A tree could screw up a sidewalk if you don't plant the proper tree species and don't build a tree pit. I got it. But it doesn't mean you should just lay waste to all trees. So just for fun.I came back to the office, I talked with Lea Hanringer, who was on the project. was like, and Lea's interested in understanding climate effects. So let's just look at the trees and what they could do financially for the city. So the whole stormwater system is, well, currently they're at a $9 million a year deficit in their stormwater system. They should be spending 15 million a year. They're only spending 6 million a year. So let that wash over you. They're not investing enough in their system that they've built.So that's only going to cause an economic collapse at some point in the future. If I don't brush my teeth every day, that's going to be a problem. One of them is going to fall out, right? So brushing my teeth every day is a maintenance issue. Same is true with any kind of infrastructure system. But to just go out and just totally replace the whole infrastructure system, if we just went out and built their stormwater system today, it'd be $600 million, $661 million worth of investment. So we considered the tree as a pipe and just said, what do trees do?And we actually made a cartoon of two sponges on a stick because there's a sponge in the air called leaves that suck water when the water hits it, keeps it from hitting the ground. And there's a root system that absorbs water from the ground. All of that keeps it out of the stormwater system. So a tree is essentially a pipe replacement, just to be crude about it, right? The average tree in Springfield, Missouri. And again, you don't have to be exact.Joe Minicozzi (24:23.192)Let's just get in the ballpark. It's like 770 gallons of water per tree gets sucked out of the air and 1500 gallons a year gets sucked out of the ground by the root system. So we can do the math on that and we kind of did an estimate based on the trees that they currently have in their city. Scaling that up, you're talking $600 ,000 of savings in the air and $1 .6 million savings in the ground. So that's $2 .2 million a year that you're not paying.in your stormwater system because of these trees. Here's an idea. Buy more trees. That sounds like a real rocket science idea. But I know, hey Joe, trees cost money, then we're gonna have to maintain them, we're have to make sure that we've got to get out and fix a sidewalk every once in while because we did something wrong. Okay, well we can do numbers on that. So we ran the math on it. The average benefit from the tree is a pipe, if you will.is about $115 a tree. The cost is 75 bucks. 'all take out your calculators at home, subtract $75 from 115. That means it's net positive 40 bucks a tree. we just, you know, just as a rough estimate, if you just go out and plant 10 ,000 trees, you're going to be net positive $400 ,000 a year. You can essentially use the tree to manufacture money to buy for police officers.That's cool. So don't just take it and look at that one side and just like, yeah, it's complicated to fix a sidewalk. What are the downstream effects of this? Now to kind of scale this up, remember I said $600 million system. Eugene, Oregon, we just happen to have the data. So Springfield's 170 ,000 people, Eugene, Oregon's 175, so it's got 5 ,000 more people in it. The stormwater system in Eugene, which actually has more rain in Eugene than in Missouri.Their stormwater system cost 400 million dollars versus Springfield is six hundred and and and 20 million dollars so so basically another way putting this Eugene, Oregon saved a hundred and eighty million dollars in their stormwater system and It comes down to the fact that they're a lot smaller. They the city shape is more compact So by doing compact design, you can actually save a hundred and eighty millionJoe Minicozzi (26:46.903)Does that make sense? It's 35 square miles for Eugene. It's 83 square miles for Springfield.Kevin K (26:52.327)And to put it in context, I would imagine Eugene is still largely a city of like single -family homes. It's just maybe exactly, it's just a different layout for the city itself and how everything is configured on the ground.Joe Minicozzi (26:59.862)Yeah, yeah, it's not European.Joe Minicozzi (27:09.592)Well, our attitude is like, look, these are your choices. I live here in Asheville. So if you want to stretch out, fine. If you're a Midwestern city and you're like, hey Joe, this is the Midwest, you don't understand, we got lots of land here, we're gonna stretch out. It's like, oh cool, yeah, do it. But just make sure that you understand the cost of that stretching out and make sure that you let your decision makers know that people want to have a one acre yard, awesome, but it's gonna cost us $180 million more in a stormwaterIs that the best choice for that public investment, that $180 million? Or could you have, I don't know, sent every child on a walkabout sabbatical around the world with that investment? There's lots of choices you could do with $180 million. Let's just be honest aboutKevin K (27:58.117)Yeah, no doubt. Not to mention like one of the least of which could just be like lower taxes if that's your thing, you know.Joe Minicozzi (28:06.232)Well, or you could have invested that $180 million in more trees and you would have had $50 million of new revenue in your system on an annual basis, which is more than the ARPA funding that you got. ARPA was just a one year deal. Like you could actually manufacture more money than the federal government gave you. I mean, come on now, let's just talk aboutKevin K (28:18.307)Right.Kevin K (28:24.123)Yeah. And I think the interesting thing is you're not even really getting into what some people might think of as like the frou frou design benefits of trees versus not trees in this. And so makes it a more pleasant place to walk orJoe Minicozzi (28:37.174)yeah. Aesthetic quality that reduces the heat island effect, reduces your air conditioning bills because you're not dealing with the outward effect of radiation. mean, there's lots of things. CO2, I mean, we didn't get an A that. We're just like a tree as a pipe replacement. Just start there. But yeah, if you did do those numbers, if you read, I don't know if you see on the bookcase up here, Happy City.and they get in the quantitative sociological effects that are actually financial as well because Canadians measure that stuff. We don't in America because we don't pay for health systems at the government level. So when the government actually does pay for the health system, they kind of want to know what the costs are. know, Charles Montgomery used all of that math in there to explain the financial consequences. I think the book is sort of a mislabeled. I think it's more of an economicthan with the name Canotes.Kevin K (29:35.739)So at the stage you are now with Springfield, have you presented all this information to them and had that out in the world?Joe Minicozzi (29:45.356)Yeah. Well, one of the biases was that they wanted to continue to annex more land. And the first question I asked, which was why? And they said, well, people live out there and there's some higher wealth houses that are out there. Therefore, we're going to get higher taxes. And the reality of it is, and this is back to the original analysis that we did, which is the value per acre analysis.One of the biases people have with math is when they see like the Walmart's worth $20 million, they get really excited about it, especially compared to a building that we rehabbed on Main Street here in Asheville that's $11 million. So Walmart's twice the value, right? But that Walmart took 34 acres of our city versus our building on 0 .5 acres. And it's just a habit that humans have where they just immediately go to the big number without understanding the efficiency.Well, the same is true with suburbia. It's like, okay, yeah, they're experiencing wealth flight out of Springfield where people are just outside the city limits out in the county in their high -end neighborhoods. But when we do our tax model, you can see that they're actually not that productive. That's the first thing. Back to how I said, Springfield gets its money. They get their money off sales taxes. So why would you want to chase residential?Makes no sense. So we're gonna go and bring them into the city limits and then we're have to provide more services for them and not get any taxes out of them because we get all of our taxes out of sales. I actually told the audience when that question came up, I said, look, right now they're living outside, driving into your city and shopping, you're collecting their sales tax dollars and they're going home. You don't have to pay for their schools, you don't have to police them, you don't have to put the fire services for them, that's their problem. Why would you wanna take them in?and have more costs in your community when you're already getting the money that you need, which is the sales taxes. And as a planner, I hate saying that because it's like, everybody should be part of the community if you're involved at an economic level, but from a brass tax of how their financial system operates, there's no incentive for them to annex that land. But again, when you have the politics of everybody just there, and this is something just true to the new, as long as you've been in new urbanism and I've been involved, it's like this kind of habit.Joe Minicozzi (32:10.06)that we are America, so we must suburbanize. It's just this, it's ingrained in us. And it's really, it's a myth more than anything else.Kevin K (32:17.014)Right. So it also kind of strikes me, one of the interesting things about your work or that you get to see is the very different ways that local governments are funded all over the country. So you've talked about this example in Missouri, and it's probably really similar to how my city is. If I broke down our property tax bill, I think about 70 % of it goes to the school district. And then it's kind of apportioned up between the county and the city and some other, like the library board and a mental health.Board etc, but the lion's share is a school district and most of our city revenue is sales tax and then income tax because we Yeah, which is rare, but we have an income tax But I'm curious like what you've seen like around the country. Are there approaches that seem better worse more sustainable less sustainable or they just like they'reJoe Minicozzi (32:54.4)Yeah, which is very rare. Yeah, that'sJoe Minicozzi (33:08.916)They're all different. One of the jokes that I used to make is when we did this, I want to reference my former boss, Pat Whalen, in public interest projects. Pat's amazing. He's a genius. Pat had this incredible PowerPoint called the Economic and Environmental Case for Urbanism.And so he's the director of a real estate company trying to explain the value of downtown revitalization to people. That's where the value per acre analysis comes from. It was part of his show. what was interesting is it made sense in Asheville, and I just started poking around other cities in North Carolina because I was on the Downtown Association Board, and we're trying to figure out the value of our downtown versus other downtowns.you have a day job working for a district, the real Kevin Klinkenberg, you have this day job for this boundary. Well, don't you want to know how you operate versus the downtown improvement district or the Westport improvement district? Yeah, of course you do. So I was doing that for 10 cities bigger than Asheville and 10 cities smaller than Asheville. What's our taxable, non -taxable ratio? Who's got too much non -taxable? I don't know. Like until you get the data. So I made this shared website that's a Google document.And I shared it with the downtown directors for all the 10 cities and we populated it so we could all get metrics to understand how we stack up.What was your original question?Kevin K (34:43.963)It's just about the different mechanisms for a big localJoe Minicozzi (34:46.75)yeah. So, in that, we started to see that the downtowns were crushing it versus every other part of the city. Right? So, as an urban designer, we advocate for walkability, downtowns, everybody likes them, why don't we do more? And we start to find all the zoning rules that don't allow it, all the policies that don't allow it, and all the biases. And a whole Congress for urbanism is essentially discussing these things, going, who the hell put these things in place? You know, it's just, that's what we do. And we try to undo.these kind of rules that kind of get in the way. So I was doing, I think I was talking to Peter Katz and he's like, does it work this way in Florida? And I was like, I don't know. And so he hired us to do the analysis in Sarasota and sure enough, it was the same damn thing. So here's the way I see it. Florida has totally different rules than North Carolina. North Carolina has different policies than South Carolina, which is way different from Missouri.Everybody's got different state tax policy rules. But you know, and I know, when you drive around suburban Phoenix or suburban Los Angeles or suburban Boston, you see the same crap. To the radio audience, that's an architectural terminology, but it's like you see the same junk everywhere, right? And I told Peter, said, you know, it's hilarious to me. We all have different math, but it yields the same results. So in North Carolina, it's two plus two equalsIn South Carolina, it's three plus one equals four. In Florida, it's one plus three equals four. In California, it's 22 times 16 divided by the square root of 47 equals four. You know, it's like, we can make it complex, but at end of the day, that's all we have to do is use our eyes and go around suburbia and say, why is this happening? And you're going to see the same exact economic results in the landscape that's baked into the policy to reward it happening. So sort of shame on us for, you know, I don't have a math degree.I'm trained as an artist like you. I draw pictures, but I'm gonna go look at those policies and read them. Sometimes it gives you an aneurysm when you read some of these policies. But I think that's the beauty of the world that you and I operate in, is we're not afraid of that stuff. We'll get involved in transportation policies. Let's go read the ITE manual. It's like, of nerd does that, but we do it.Kevin K (37:07.611)I mean, if you talk to me when I was 19 years old in architecture school and said, well, hey, you're going to learn all about the intricacies of zoning codes and traffic engineering and also like, what? What are you talking about? But if you really want to understand your world and make a difference in it, you've got to dive into those things. So yeah, exactly. And actually, it is kind of fun and interesting to learn that it was fascinating to me when I first learned.Joe Minicozzi (37:25.826)and not fearKevin K (37:35.003)much more about traffic engineering, like how engineers actually thought and what they were looking at and how they were evaluating streets and intersections and everything else to come up with their solutions.Joe Minicozzi (37:47.544)Well, you can be a better practicing professional too if you're respecting their profession and saying, I want to learn how you operate. Now I'm going to call BS on things when I see it, but at the same time, I'm going to respect that you have knowledge that I don't and I want to learn. But the thing that makes, I think that makes you and I different is that we also know that Moses didn't deliver their rules. That these are not infallible people that have designed this stuff.Kevin K (38:12.184)Right.Joe Minicozzi (38:16.056)that these are humans that are operating with their best intention, but often they make mistakes.Kevin K (38:22.331)No doubt, no doubt. I think we don't emphasize that enough that really so much of what we struggle against is just people trying to create systems and rules and then working with it and all of that can be changed.Joe Minicozzi (38:37.112)Yeah. Well, I just, this morning I sat with my county assessor and this is trouble that we started back in 2021. And here we are three years later and we're going through a reassessment in January of this year. And he's telling me that like a lot of the things that we recommended back in 2022, they're going to do, but they're not going to do it until 2029. I just about lost my mind.I was like, you know how many human beings my wife and I could produce in four years and you can't change policy? Come on now. That's bias in the system where it's like, there's nothing to stop them. It's just they've never done things this fast before. it was kind of frustrating and I told them, said, look, you just need to see me as a taxpayer now and not a consultant. I live here. My staff suffers.Kevin K (39:12.377)Yeah.Joe Minicozzi (39:32.438)with housing, everybody I know suffers with housing in this community because we're a hot market right now. And it's not fair that because you're going to be uncomfortable changing the way that you behave, there's no law that says you can't do this. This is just about your practice. And we see this, you've seen this with your career with city planners. It's like, well, we just haven't done it that way before. It's like, well, change.Kevin K (39:55.749)Yeah, yeah, it's not hard. It's not the end of the world, you know.Joe Minicozzi (39:57.622)The world's not going to stop. And guess what? Guess what? You're going to make a mistake again. Yeah, it's going to happen. It's like we're humans.Kevin K (40:05.423)I know. There's a real struggle a lot of times to just get people to take a risk to try something and try and fail and if you fail, it's not the end of the world. So what hasJoe Minicozzi (40:16.376)They won't assess Airbnb's as commercial product. I'm like, dude, we've got 4 ,000 of them in my city. I've got people from Florida, cash flowing houses up here, and they're paying them off in four years. And my staff can't do that. I can't do that. Like, what the hell? And so why are you choosing to value them as houses and not commercial product? And the state, the state charges an occupancy tax on top of them, right? So the state knows that they're hotel rooms.Kevin K (40:19.532)yeah.Joe Minicozzi (40:45.368)because they're paying an occupancy tax, much like a hotel room would. So why are you choosing to value it differently and not value it on its cap rate? And I'm serious. Like I know that I'm kind of like beating this drum about here in Asheville. Nationwide, this is a problem. And the assessors are like, well, you know, it takes a while to kind of work this out. I'm like, no, Airbnb has been around since 2015. For f**k's sake. Sorry. It's like, this is, it shouldn't take 10 years.Kevin K (40:59.547)Yeah, noJoe Minicozzi (41:14.626)to realize how it affected the marketplace. You just sound stupid at that point. we don't understand.Kevin K (41:19.289)Yeah, it was crazy. It was such a big issue, as you might imagine, in Savannah, which I think for a time, Savannah was like the number one city in the world for Airbnb.Joe Minicozzi (41:29.516)Well, at least in Georgia, you have a separation between an occupant and a non -occupant. We don't have that in North Carolina. We're all treated the same, which is insane. So in Georgia, if you own a house in Savannah, but you live in Kansas City, you're taxed at a higher rate than somebody that lives in a Savannah house. Owner -occupied is totally different than non -owner -occupied. In North Carolina, we don't even have that protection.So it's even worse for us. So it's maddening. So anyway, anybody that's on this podcast that lives in a tourist town, like this is one of the things that should be the top of your agenda to talk about. It's like, I'm not saying don't do it. You we're a tourist town. Our baseball team is called the Asheville Tourists. Got it. Been the Asheville Tourists since the 1920s. This is our economy. But don't tax them less. That's crazy. Yeah.Kevin K (42:00.068)Interesting.Kevin K (42:24.443)Understand what they are, tax them, or have some policy that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, no doubt. So one of the other things that you've been able to do with your work then is kind of related to all this. You get the chance to like dive deep into the history of especially like property taxation and other things. And I know you've read a lot of stuff in this world. How hasJoe Minicozzi (42:28.746)It's a commodity, right? What does that do to housing prices?Kevin K (42:51.269)kind of impacted the work that you're doing or you're thinking, or what are some notable things that you've seen and just looking back a long time ago when a lot of these rules were being formulated.Joe Minicozzi (43:01.75)Yeah, there's some.One of the things about new urbanists, it's kind of weird. I hate that term because we're sort of just urban thinkers. We're complex thinkers.Joe Minicozzi (43:19.68)It's not new. This is just, we're operating in an urban environment, we're going to be interrogating things, but we tend to lean toward, if it's broke, fix it. That's our attitude. And it shouldn't take forever. But we also swim upstream to try to figure out who put this fence in. So who put the fence out in that field? And why is that fence there? And if the fence serves a purpose, keep the fence.If the fence was there for just because some random situation, get rid of it. It's like unnecessary policy. So you'll hear within our cluster of crazy friends, a lot of us are just like, rid of parking standards. Why do you need them? Why do we have trip counts for highways? Because when you look at the base data of trip counts, it doesn't make sense. Plus, since pandemic, we've changed the way that our commute patterns operate. So we should be changing our math.And like we operate faster with a level of, with trying to stop the bleeding, if you will. We're triage people, you know, we're like the emergency room medics. But we're also going to go upstream to figure out how did this start? So just for, you know, I started to see a lot of patterns in the assessment maps of how neighborhoods were construed or different market areas that lined up with redlining.And so redlining started in 1934 and went to 1968 and was deemed unconstitutional. But if you go to Mapping Inequality website, you actually find that there's maps that predate redlining that the bankers were using that was essentially racist. That if you were an immigrant or in a black neighborhood, they deemed you high risk and they changed your ability to get cashflow. Redlining was adopted at a federal level.So it's federal policy that said this is the rule of the land now, which makes it pernicious. It was already pernicious before, but for the federal government to come in and say, we're going to be unconstitutional here is pretty bad. But to everybody's credit, everybody's hands got slapped in 1968, that changed. Well, here we are today and we're still seeing the same effects in the valuation that models very similarly to redlining. So I was just like, well, maybe there's got to be a book somewhere that this is all talked about in theJoe Minicozzi (45:41.816)I found this book from 1922. It's the ninth edition. So was actually the first edition was 1895. So think about this, a book was reprinted nine times because it was so popular. It's called The Essays and Taxation by Edwin Seligman. And I love this quote. So just for the radio audience, just turn on your mind to 1895. This is what he wrote. Practically, the general property tax is actually administered as beyond all doubt, one of the worst tax systems known to the civilized world.Because of its attempt to tax intangible as well as tangible things, it sins against the cardinal rules of uniformity, of equality, and of universality and taxation. It puts a premium on dishonesty and debauches the public's conscience. It reduces deception to a system and makes a science of navery. It presses hardest on those least able to pay and imposes double taxation on one man and grants entire immunity on the next.In short, the general property tax system is so flagrantly inequitable that its retention can only be explained through ignorance and inertia. It is the cause of such crying injustice that its alteration or its abolishment must become the battle cry of every statesman and reformer." So this is somebody who works in taxation and goes, this is a crock of junk. Let's get rid of this. And that was over a hundred years ago, right? And so now I sat in a two hour meeting.with my assessors and their consultant going through is excruciating detail, all of this crazy mathematics. I'm like, why are we doing it this way? I understand what you're doing, but let's take a big step up. Why do we finance cities this way? Why is it based on value? know, Kevin, you and I are trained as architects, right? We want to do beautiful buildings. We want to do, if I could afford it, I would build a stone house, you know, because I like stone and it lasts forever.So I create an asset that will be in the community for hundreds and hundreds of years paying taxes. Why would you penalize me for that? You should be charging me on how often I drive on that road and how many times I use a fire call. Charge me for the services you provide rather than some arbitrary, hey, you built a stone house, therefore you pay more taxes. You could be right next door to me in a tin shack and have actually more income than me.Joe Minicozzi (48:09.944)and be taxed less because you have a tin shack and I've got a stone house. I could be making $50 ,000 a year and you're making $200 How is that fair? This is where I said that the income tax is a little bit more fair, but the thing is if you're really rich, you're not making income. You've got assets, right? Those are all hidden somewhere, not being taxed. So there's no perfect systems. That's why we advocate, and you see in our models, those red -black models where you haveBlack is producing wealth, net positive, red is net subsidy. And we did that for Springfield. 80 % of the city is subsidized. So just show that to the citizens and just be like, this is how we're subsidizing it. Is this the best choice? But you should charge me for it. If there's, yeah, go ahead. No,Kevin K (48:52.091)So when you do this, go ahead. I was going say when you do that kind of historic research, it, I mean have to ask the Georgist question, does that, how do you think about that relative to the Henry George critique, the land value tax approach versus the standard property tax that we do in most places?Joe Minicozzi (49:11.16)I mean, I think that aligns with Henry George, the statement. It aligns with how I feel as a taxpayer and also as somebody that practices in this world. The more we get into this with the Cessars, I have all the respect in the world for what they do because we do all of our work on their data. So I'm very thankful for them as a profession. But I also see that they're trapped.in a construction of their own making, the same way that traffic engineers are. And for anybody that's on this podcast that's read Confessions of a Recovering Engineer by Chuck Marrone, I mean, he nails it. That same ethos in that book is the same ethos I see with the zoning people that are all just about zoning. This is the way the zoning is, as if some omnipotent force gave them the zoning, you know? And then there's the same as I see this with the assessors, where I always ask them, I'm like, why is that the standard? Where did this comeLike today when this one assessor was telling me that legally they can't assess Airbnbs as commercial. So I immediately asked her, I'm like, can you show me the law that says that? And she just went blank. And I was like, you just told me that there was a law that this, so tell me the law. And they don't, this is their bias. This is their practice. This is their fear. They're afraid to stir up the people that are out there with Airbnbs. I'm like, that's not what the law says. So you're making a choice not to do that. There's so much...Joe Minicozzi (50:43.129)discretion that people don't talk about. You see this when you talk to old school planners that are just like, the trip counts and the parking requirement, their bias kind of comes in. They won't call it a bias.Kevin K (50:56.197)Yeah, yeah. And I think we've often talked about that. And I think Jeff Speck famously wrote about that. You can manipulate a traffic study to say whatever you want it to say. And it's really just about the choices that you're making of what you want to do or what you want the outcome to be.Joe Minicozzi (51:14.12)We did a land analysis. Back to Henry George, we did a land value analysis where we just turn off all the buildings and just look at the land value per acre. This was in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The larger parcels in the commercial strip area were half the value of the out parcels across the street. I asked, I'm like, does land magically lose half its value when you cross the street? Same zoning category.And the tax assessor told me with all confidence, she goes, well, the cheaper one is bigger. The more land you have, the lower the value. And it's like, what economic rule is that true? And she goes, there's less people that can afford large tracts of land. So therefore we have to give a discount because there's less people in the marketplace. And I was like, well, that's kind of true. But does that work this way with other limited commodities like diamonds? If I get a bigger diamond, is it cheaper? Surely there's less people that can afford a biggerAnd everybody in the room was laughing, but she was just totally confused by that. And the weird thing is that I don't have an economics degree. I've actually never taken an economics course. So I just asked a question because I'm curious about this stuff.Kevin K (52:23.323)Yeah. So Joe, you've also been working a little bit in Annapolis, Maryland, which is obviously a really, really different context than Springfield, Missouri, one of the oldest cities in the country. wonder if you want to talk a little bit about what you've been doing there and what you're seeing.Joe Minicozzi (52:40.376)Yeah, Annapolis is cool. We did one of those red -black models for them. And one of the things that we noticed was their annexation pattern was an interesting tell. It's kind of funny. like, I've got a picture for that, but it's kind of hard to talk about a picture in this space. I'llKevin K (53:03.387)Well, eventually, eventually this will be a YouTube thing too at some point. So we could doJoe Minicozzi (53:08.696)Yeah. from one of the things you could see in the, again, we talked about at the start of this about Kansas City, there's tells in the annexation pattern that tell you the problems that you're having today. So it's kind of like, you and I are the same age. I'm 56. There's things that I'm dealing with today in my body that didn't happen because of what I did last week.It happened because of stuff I did when I was in high school, right? The older you get, like all of a sudden it's like, my ACL gave out. Why is that? It was because I played football in high school. So it's like, just took a while for that ligament to just finally give. I can remember the concussion that I had when that happened. You know, it's like things like that. So we look at cities the same way as what did you do in your past that you're now seeing the problems today? So.One of the rules that we all know is roads only last about 50 years. so every 50 years is when you have your heart attack based on what you did when you first built those roads. Annapolis did 71 % of its land acquisition. So if you look at it today and just say, if we make a pie chart of this, when did these areas break down? Their first hundred years is 4 % of their land.for their first 100 years. From 1920 to 1800, that's 80 years, they did 5 % growth, okay? So that was 120 years. In just the year of 1951, they annexed 71 % of their land. So let that wash over you. Just imagine the pie in your mind of 4%, 5%, and then 71 % in one year. Sothose developments didn't all happen in 1971. would take a while from the late 50s, early 60s when you start to fill in all of those subdivisions, you're filling in a lot of lane miles in 71 % of your city. So those roads are now being replaced now in the 2020s, 2030s. And they're looking at, let's see, kind of try to do the quick math here. They're lookingJoe Minicozzi (55:34.264)close to.two thirds of their roads are coming due because of that original sin of that annexation. But the habit in the 1950s, I think about that. People come back from the war, we're like, we're going to be modern. There's all these policies in place to reward this, the federal highway system, the FHA loans. And it's not that people had ill intent, they just were naive. They're just like, well, let's try something different. Let's kind of remake cities. And this is what we're dealing with. It's like we have to kind of think back to when that happened. So we show them theAnd you can see their jaws drop when I was showing this to them. And it's kind of like walking in and I'm the doctor, we just got a bunch of CAT scans and I show you your broken shoulder. I'm like, is the reason why you can't pick things up. You've got your shoulders broken. And everybody can see it because you can see it on the map. 71 % is a lot of area in one year.Kevin K (56:27.023)Yeah. What is some of the examples of how some of your clients have reacted to information when you're finally at the end? I would imagine it runs the gamut from complete denial to people excited to make some change. mean, what do you see on the back end of doing these analysis?Joe Minicozzi (56:49.196)You know, the mayor actually called me yesterday. I was bicycling into work and I get this telephone call from Annapolis and it's him and he's so excited. And he goes, it's it's hard. It's indescribable. We're all singing from the same sheet of music now. And so, you know, in respect for politicians, and I don't, I don't mean this in a, in a, as, negative as this is going to sound, but think about, let's, let's just kind of make it blunt.You win a popularity contest and you become mayor. That's it. That's the American system of government right there. They don't have the master's degree in urban design. They don't have the research of 30 years of public policy analysis and parking requirements. They don't have that junk shoved in their heads the way that you and I do. So they just win this popularity contest and they're trying to figure things out.their commerce is what they hear from people, the emotions, the conversations, how people react to their day -to -day living. It's sort of on us as professionals to help demystify that. So that's basically, that's the MO of our company is we're going to try to find a way to give you a lot of quantitative data, but we're going to do it in a way that's easy to understand and give you a pie chart. You know, it's like, we're not going to make that hard. You know, it's just, it is. This is what's going on. Here's that pie chart showing you 71%.is in that one year, they've had that data since 1951. It's like, it shouldn't be magic to pull this stuff out. So it really is on the professional to do that. So usually what we get is we see a game. He's right. We do see a game change from people because we've created a graphic that people can see and they can see what's going on. You can't argue against the pie chart. There it is. 71%. It's like there's data.There's a pie chart so everybody can see how big that is. Just make it simple. We don't hand you an 85 page document explaining it all in text. Why? 65 % of the audience are visual learners. Show them a picture. So once we did that and kind of walk them through and help them understand, they could see their city with new eyes. That's actually another quote that a mayor gave me in Davis, California. He goes, it's as if I've never been to this city called Davis and I could see it with new eyesJoe Minicozzi (59:16.886)So it's respecting them and honoring that their life is hard. Their role is near impossible. They've got to learn how a multi -billion dollar corporation operates the night after the election. And there's all of these habits baked into it. how do we short circuit that and make it easy for people to move? So we've seen changes. We've seen Rancho Cucamonga, California.They adopted a one to six rule for their downtown as an area to value ratio. So now they have like a two drink minimum, if you will. And there was a steel manufacturing company that came in for a tax break. And the assistant city manager told me, goes, you know, it's fun is after we did this math with you all, he goes, they came in and asked for a tax break and they're a big employer.But then I compared them on a per acre basis to other manufacturing plants in our city, these smaller ones, and they were actually way more beneficial than this big one. So I told the big one to take a hike. And it was like, that made my month. It's like, I couldn't believe he did that. But it was like, we gave them a new language to understand themselves. And as a consultant, it's like, yeah, I wasn't there for the win, but I feel proud of that. It's not sexy to talk about, but it's like, that's cool.So there's not as much satisfaction as being an architect when somebody lives in a house that you produce, but it's a different kind of satisfaction.Kevin K (01:00:52.003)Yeah, I really like the analogy of, it's almost like you're providing an MRI or a CAT scan. You're the doctor giving them critical information about the health of their community. And then really it's up to them to decide, do they want to correct that health or not?Joe Minicozzi (01:01:11.606)Well, it's value statement of our company too, that the doctor doesn't blame the patient. And so if you're going in and you're a smoker, chronic smoker your entire life, the doctor knows you're an addict. But what can the doctor provide you to help you get past your addiction? So the doctor is going to show you an MRI of your lungs and you're going to see the black spots all over the lungs. The doctor is going to be like, guess where that's coming from?Kevin K (01:01:14.083)Okay.Joe Minicozzi (01:01:40.128)and you'll say, it's my smoking. It'll be like, yeah, you want to keep doing it? It's up on you. I'm not going to be able to pull a cigarette out of your hand, but I have to do what I can to give you information to be an educated consumer. So that's kind of our MO.Kevin K (01:01:54.821)Joe, I think that's a great place to wrap. And if people are looking to find you and your company, what's the best place to go?Joe Minicozzi (01:02:06.552)Urban3 .com, three is all spelled out. You can also, there's plenty of videos online that you can Google through YouTube. My favorite one is the one that Not Just Bikes did on our work. Not Just Bikes is just a great resource for lots of information on city planning. And also Strong Towns covers a lot of our work. And also the Congress for New Urbanism.If anybody wants to come to a conference, the Congress for New Urbanism or the Strong Towns Gatherings are great. Or if you want to go deep nerd, we're like at the Government Finance Officers Association conferences every year. That's a whole lot of fun. So yeah, we'll see you around in public and thank you for doing all ofKevin K (01:02:54.405)Yeah, so really appreciate it, Joe. I'm sure we'll do some more in the future, but this is a great introduction for anybody who doesn't know your work. And also for those who do, I really appreciate the deeper dive. So hang in there. Keep doing what you're doing. And we'll talk again. All right.Joe Minicozzi (01:03:13.25)Thanks.

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Planning Takes Center Stage in Kalamazoo
9 Tem· The Messy City Podcast
I’m not often left speechless when I’m interviewing guests, but for a few moments here I struggled to digest what Rebekah Kik was telling me about Kalamazoo. If you’re a planner, you must listen to this episode. This is a truly inspirational effort in a city that doesn’t get the limelight. For a city of about 75,000 people in a quiet corner of Michigan, the staff and community have done amazing work.
The story is mostly about a planning effort called Imagine Kalamazoo, which sounds like every garden-variety planning effort everywhere. But, the way it came together and what it produced in short order is truly unique. Learn how a plan executed at a high level helped attract corporate funding on the back side that will help the day-to-day livability of the city.
Along the way, we trace Rebekah’s career from a small college in Michigan, Andrews University, to working as an architect and planner. She talks about how her drawing skills helped her survive the Great Recession, and how her tenacity is helping her home town get better.
I’ve said before, and I’ll stand by it, that the most innovative work in local governments happens in smaller cities and towns. Kalamazoo definitely rings the bell for that theory - accomplishing the kinds of successful efforts that we so rarely see in large cities. More to come on that at a future date.
Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.
Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.
Intro: “Why Be Friends”
Outro: “Fairweather Friend”
Episode Transcript:
Kevin K (00:00.802)Welcome back to the Messy City Podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg.Sometimes you, over the course of your career, you get to know people and see them and see, watch their careers evolve along with yours. And if you're fortunate, you can see people, meet people when they're young and see them grow into all sorts of new positions and do interesting work. And today I'm fortunate to have a guest that's a little bit like that. We have...The assistant city manager for Kalamazoo, Michigan, Rebecca Kick here. Rebecca, how you doing?Rebekah Kik (00:39.082)I'm really well Kevin, thank you.Kevin K (00:41.666)I was just thinking earlier, I think I met you originally when you were a student at Andrews, is that right?Rebekah Kik (00:47.594)That's correct. We got to intersect our paths when I was on charrette with Professor Philip Bess.Kevin K (00:58.594)Yeah, yeah. So, and Phil, we've had Phil here on the show before. He'll probably do so again, I'm sure, especially now that he's in retirement and his schedule is going to open up a little bit more. But yeah, those were some fun days that seemed like about a million years ago.Rebekah Kik (01:17.194)It really was. Mostly because I used to just chase Philip at his heels. I knew he was doing cool things. I did. I just knew he was doing cool things and I wanted to know desperately what he was doing and I begged him to take me.where he was going. I told him I would do anything. I would fetch coffee. I would make copies. You know, get lunches. I would do whatever he needed me to do. I would be that gopher, that little sponge, because I knew he was hanging around with cool people and I wanted to learn and know and do. And I believe that charretteKevin K (01:48.61)YouRebekah Kik (02:14.633)was in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And it was in the Hartside neighborhood. And that was the first time I had ever heard, I believe at that time, we were calling them traditional neighborhood codes or they weren't called form -based codes yet. They were regulating plans or something like that. They were much more technical still at that point. But they were...Kevin K (02:16.609)Yep.Yeah, that was all like early days stuff for new urbanism and coding and all that. So let's just go back to that a little bit, Rebecca. I just, I think it's interesting. So you went to a really small college in Michigan, Andrews University. Did you, did you like grow up in Michigan or how did you find Andrews?Rebekah Kik (02:45.834)Yes.Rebekah Kik (02:56.394)Mm -hmm.Rebekah Kik (03:02.058)Yes, I did. So I grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan and I didn't know I wanted to be an architect. My mother was an administrative assistant in an architecture firm and I had my own desk at the firm. She would pick me up from school and I would sit at my desk and I was givendifferent kinds of plans all the time that I would be finishing with different templates that I would draw and I would be picking out finishes and finish drawing, finish the plans. They would teach me how to add walls, tell me about wall thicknesses, things like that. They were building foam core models that, you know, maybe that model didn't meet the...client specs or whatever. So I would take the model home and I would finish it myself. I was doing architecture all the time and the architects at the time would just laugh at me because I'd be like, I can't be an architect. That's not a real job. And the whole time just loving everything that they were doing. And so finally, of course, here was graduating from high school and I told my mom's boss.Kevin K (04:13.826)HeheheheRebekah Kik (04:26.378)I was looking for an architecture school and that's when he said, where are you visiting? Where are you going? And I said, well, I just visited University of Michigan. Went to Lawrence Institute of Technology and he said, have you gone to Andrews University yet? And I said, no, you know, where's that at? And he goes, well, please do. You know, it's down in Bering Springs. And I...have to say I walked through the door I saw this nearly four foot talland it was built completely out of wood and it was this craftsman, this quarter scale craftsman home. And the details were so beautiful and hanging behind it was this analytics.Rebekah Kik (05:29.418)It was hand drawn. It was ink rendered, you know, like the Chinese style ink, you know, Richard Akonomakis from the University of Notre Dame came and taught this third year course, this analytic course. And then in your fourth year, you built this model. I was captivated. That was it. It was this.moment and then I met with Lou Seibold and I walked around that it's a pole barn. Let's be honest, if you have not visited Andrews University, you look at the work on the walls and you can't peel your eyes away. But if you zoom out for a second, you will lose it because it is a pole barn and a series of trailers. But the workKevin K (06:19.17)HeheheRebekah Kik (06:25.738)and the students and the heart and the community that is built at Andrews will suck you in and you will know.Kevin K (06:36.962)Yeah. Yeah. I had the pleasure to come speak at Andrew's one time and then do some critiques. And it's a really unique, it's a very small college. And it's a religious college or it's affiliated with the Seventh -day Adventist. And it's one of the few colleges in the country that for lots and lots of years has actually taught a more sort of traditional pre -war.Rebekah Kik (06:46.378)Mm -hmm.Kevin K (07:04.738)approach to architectural design and urban design. So, I mean, that all, when you're 18 years old, you don't really know or understand any of that stuff. But I mean, how do you think that shaped your educational experience?Rebekah Kik (07:18.922)my goodness. The first book that I was handed in my first year, first class, Timeless Way of Building. And that was it. It shaped everything. When you're handed a treatise like that, your whole life is set on this path. And you realizeKevin K (07:30.242)Hmm. Yeah.Rebekah Kik (07:48.33)that there's.There's a healing you can do in the work.that.Rebekah Kik (08:05.482)Yeah, there's a healing that you can do in your work and there's a harm that you can do in your work. And I chose the path of healing. And you realize that when you graduate, let me be clear, once you get out into that world and you, especially in your fifth year at Andrews, by your fifth year, you're doing sort of these professional practice classes.you are seeing, and finally with these eyes, you're at the, you know, the scales fall off and you're like, my God, you know, suburban sprawl. And you understand like what the built environment is. And you, you understand like what your responsibility to, you know, how you place your buildings and, that you have this moral responsibility, for what you're doing in.in the space and you now want to repair and you want to show others that you can repair. And I remember entering professional practice and driving every architecture firm that I then proceeded to work for insane.Kevin K (09:33.666)YouRebekah Kik (09:34.377)Because I catch, they'd be like, okay, in turn, you know, read the zoning rules, tell us where we can put the building. And I'd say, but these are wrong. We shouldn't put our building like this. And they go, Rebecca, come on, like, really, just tell us where does the building go? Like, tell us the building envelope, like, just do the sketch. And I'm like, but we can't do it like this.it shouldn't be this way. Like, look at the, look at across the street. Like, this isn't responsible. You have to go somewhere else.Kevin K (10:10.178)Yeah. Yeah, it does kind of ruin you for working in like a lot of typical architecture firms, especially like big shops.Rebekah Kik (10:21.386)It does. It does. And so you have to be, and this is what I tell architects who are graduating, like you, I'm so sorry, like you're ruined now. Like you have to be really, really careful about who you're going to work with and for, and where you're going to go because you are going to be frustrated and you're going to frustrate others.Kevin K (10:37.762)Yeah.Kevin K (10:44.098)Yeah. Well, I will tell you one thing I do remember from my visits to Andrew's is I was so jealous of the drawing ability of what I saw the students creating. And long after I had gone off and graduated from college and I would see the work that you all were producing and the work that students at Notre Dame was producing, I would just think, my God, these students are all going to get great jobs because look at thisThey can all draw and it's beautifully done. And it really, you know, it left me feeling like, okay, I better go find something else to do.Rebekah Kik (11:21.578)You know, I do say that kept me employed during the downturn. And it kept me flexibly employed. So I got laid off three times. And that was hard. And it allowed me to seriously surf those crazy waves.because I could draw. So I got employed by, this is how I learned planning by experience. Because I was never interested in planning school. I could never have just planned school. I just, I don't have the patience for it. But I was able to walk alongside of planners.Kevin K (12:07.778)Mm -hmm.Rebekah Kik (12:18.858)and transportation planners especially, and engineers. And I could help them express their vision. So when they were doing road diets, you know, I worked for Gladding Jackson in Orlando. And that was so much fun. My time with them, I spent six years with them after UDA.Because, and that's what I did. I was there, one of their lead illustrators on their transportation planning team. And that's how I got hired was because I could draw. And I did everything vertical because they could, they had great planners and they could do everything flat. And they needed someone to vision everything vertical and do all the infill when they were doing the sprawl repair, when they were doing highway teardowns.then I could come in, do the SketchUp model, and then vision everything vertical for them. Yeah.Kevin K (13:23.234)Interesting. So one thing I will say real quick is, I think I may have pushed you to move the mic a little too close. I'm getting a touch of static off of it. So there you go. That's fine. Test that there. Okay. Let's try that. don't worry, I can edit and cut things. That's not a big deal. So, well, I think about that and I think it's a great testimony to having an actual skill.Rebekah Kik (13:36.906)Okay.Rebekah Kik (13:43.274)Okay.Kevin K (13:53.058)You know, and you, you know, you and some of the others that came out of those schools had to have a real marketable skill, which was really learning how to draw beautifully by hand, which, you know, I think a lot of people think that that's just something you can either do or you can't do, but it actually is teachable. And, and so I've always been jealous of that. And I've observed something similar to what you talked about that the folks that I knew in the profession who had that ability to draw by hand.Rebekah Kik (13:53.738)Yes.Rebekah Kik (14:09.994)Yes.Kevin K (14:22.626)They have never lacked for work. They have always had people wanting to hire them. And of course, the better you are at it, the more work that you get. So it's even in our high tech age, that ability to just be able to sit down and draw beautifully by hand is incredibly valuable.Rebekah Kik (14:41.226)Yeah, it is. And I feel like even in my job now as city, when I, when I got hired by the city of Kalamazoo, even as city planner, just being able to sit down with whoever I'm talking to, when I can pull out a piece of paper and draw, it's like a universal communication.It just feels really good. I love it.Kevin K (15:12.546)Well, it's like a superpower. I mean, I've seen that, you know, so many, so many times even, you know, with fellow architects in other firms, like when I was a young person and I, there was a project manager I worked with when we did a lot of schools and he had a great ability to just like, we would meet with a client and all of a sudden he could just whip out a sheet of paper really quickly, three -dimensionally diagram what we were talking about and everybody got it. And it was just like, bam.Rebekah Kik (15:19.946)Yeah.Kevin K (15:41.538)I never really had that ability very well. So I probably appreciate that in other people. And then I've often like overpaid for it just because like, you know, I know how important those drawings are. So I always like to hire good, good renders and people who can really, really draw. So you talked about, you bounced around a little bit. You survived the meltdown, the economic meltdown in 2008, 2010.Rebekah Kik (16:04.298)Yeah.Kevin K (16:10.69)How did you end up back in Kalamazoo? Which I didn't know you grew up there. That's really cool. So you're working for a city government and a place you grew up.Rebekah Kik (16:16.618)Yeah.Yeah, so that's a little bit about how I ended up back here. So the last layoff in 2010, Gladding Jackson merged with AECOM.Kevin K (16:33.89)huh.Rebekah Kik (16:36.138)I was a tough one. I was a little too much for a lot of me and my Gliding Jackson colleagues kind of scattered after that one. And I ended up with a really great freelance contract after that one. I was doing a lot of fun on -call planning, transportation planning work in Southern Colorado.And lots of good things came out of that. But one good relationship that came out of it was a transportation planning relationship with Brad Strader out of LSL planning who was in Detroit at the time. And so I was coming back to Michigan. I hadgrandparent who passed away who was in Richland, Michigan, which is just outside of Kalamazoo and Me and my brother had actually inherited her home and My brother was gonna remain in Kentucky. He didn't want to move back home and I said well I had just had my son and just got married and we had our first child and I was like Those are the things that bring you homeKevin K (18:04.418)Sounds familiar.Rebekah Kik (18:05.61)Yep. So Xander was 10 months old and we moved back to Michigan and I started contracting with LSL planning and I started doing some charrette work with them in Kalamazoo and Lansing. And I was doing some traveling to Toledo and Detroit and doing some charrette work and things like that with them. It was fun.And so one of those projects was on Portage Street here in Kalamazoo. And we were doing some work and the city of Kalamazoo was like, what is this team? Like, what is this process that they're doing? We did all kinds of really cool exercises on this road diet that we were going to do on this four lane road. And they were like, whoa, this.She's a planner and architect and she talks like an engineer and we need a city planner. Let's take her out to lunch. She says she's from Kalamazoo. Does she know we need a city planner? So they did. They took me out to lunch and I told them, you know, gosh, I really love my work with LSL right now.you know, I kind of have a really cake job. They pay me really well and working on all these really fun projects. That's when the Q line was about to go into Detroit. I had already done some light rail in Vancouver and Minneapolis, and I really loved doing light rail projects. And...they started to tell me, we're about to start this new master plan for the city of Kalamazoo. Gosh, we haven't had a city planner in like a year. We really need somebody like you here. We really, you know, don't have a vision for transportation for the city. And I just thought, gosh, I was like, I'm not a planner, though, you guys. Like, I don't really, I don't really know if you wouldRebekah Kik (20:30.346)like somebody like me here, they said, well, why don't you just interview? Would you just interview, just meet us? And so I said, OK, well, maybe I'll just interview. So I went back home and I talked to my husband about it. And I said, you know, maybe I'll just interview. Maybe.You know, I wouldn't be traveling so much and things like that. And Zana is still little, so maybe that's better, you know, that I'm just home more. So, you know, I interviewed, and then they asked me for a second interview. And they said, would you prepare a PowerPoint about how you would run a master plan process for us?Kevin K (21:24.898)You're like, well, yeah, I can do that.Rebekah Kik (21:26.73)And I thought, okay, sure, why not? I'll show you how I'd run your master plan process. So I put this Imagine Kalamazoo process together and I thought, okay, now we'll see if they really want to hire me. I'll blow them away, right? Like I'm just gonna do the kitchen sink it down. Let's see if they're up for this. And I did, I threw the kitchen sink at them. I was like, who is it?Kevin K (21:42.914)He he.Rebekah Kik (21:54.762)here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna have 70 person work group. You're gonna engage 5 ,000 people in your city and you are gonna, you're gonna go to where they are. You're not having these town hall meetings. You're gonna have youth development. You are going to, you know, because I did all this stuff in Colorado. I did these 26 like county meetings and I had them all build off of each other.I did like these really crazy engagement kind of things. And they lapped it up. Like they loved it so much. And they were like, yes, you know, you're hired. And that's like, my gosh, now I have to deliver.Kevin K (22:37.858)HahahaRebekah Kik (22:41.354)and I did, I delivered it. I became city planner. I ran the largest community engagement, the city has ever done. I engaged nearly 5 ,000 people through 75 ,000.Kevin K (23:01.086)my God. And how big is Kalamazoo? Jeez. So like, boy, about 15 % or so of the population. That's incredible.Rebekah Kik (23:08.554)Yes, and this is where the surreal meter just goes off the chart. It resulted in...several billionaires in our city creating a permanent $500 million endowment called the Foundation for Excellence for the City of Kalamazoo to permanently implement Imagine Kalamazoo forever.Kevin K (23:52.546)So, I mean, my jaw is dropping here. I'm sitting here trying to absorb this. So, all right. So first of all, I have to, so how does a town of 75 ,000 people have billionaires at all?Rebekah Kik (24:05.93)Striker, Pfizer, Zollettis. What else do we have? The Upjohn Pharmaceutical Company started here. Yeah, we have several medical manufacturing and pharmaceutical, like the...COVID vaccine ground zero is here. Yeah. So.That's how we have like the billionaires are here, but they saw that we were doing something drastically different with our community outreach. They saw that.Kevin K (25:03.042)So when, I mean, that's an enormous amount of money in any community to contribute to some sort of, what sorts of things did they think they wanted to immediately fund?Rebekah Kik (25:15.818)So they, the first thing they did was they made us economically competitive with all of the other municipalities around us and they lowered our tax villages to be even with everyone else around us. So that's one thing that they did was they stabilized all of our property taxes. So they actuallyYes.Rebekah Kik (25:44.906)give the city seven million dollars a year so we had a level playing field for all of our.Secondly, the priorities within Imagine Kalamazoo are things like making sure that we have all of our sidewalk connections. We have all of our potholes filled. We have all of our core services are taken care of. All of our trees are trimmed. All of our lights are lit. All of our streets are swept.Like we have solid core services. Then all of our parks are moat. All of our football fields look amazing. All of our youth programs are taken care of. We have things like summer camps. It's called Super Rec. Recreation programs, our pools are open always. You know, those are like what?call like our community promise that all of those things are tip top shape, always quality and level of service are met. And then we have what are called like our aspirational things. So maybe we want to make sure thatEvery neighborhood that has a major park also has a splash pad. That would be aspirational. So we've been working on making sure that those parks have great splash pads. And we've installed about four of those now. The next aspirational thing that we have is making sure thatRebekah Kik (27:43.658)All of our bike lanes are connected throughout the city so that you can ride from your, you know, just about every school is connected or elementary school is connected within a quarter mile distance, you know, reasonably. So we're kind of mapping that out and making sure that we have like that good safe routes to school plan. So that's another aspiration that we have.Kevin K (28:09.186)Mm -hmm.Rebekah Kik (28:13.738)So things like that.Kevin K (28:13.986)So then like how much of those things that you described are like under the banner of like the city government, it's what it does year after year and how much of it is like through this additional corporate support.Rebekah Kik (28:26.666)Yeah, we would never be able to do this under what the city government has. We just don't have enough tax base and enough of our own funding to do that. And so we use this additional five to $8 million per year that we get from that $500 million endowment. That's what we get about like the interest.Kevin K (28:37.058)Mm -hmm.Kevin K (28:49.026)Okay.Rebekah Kik (28:53.034)from that $500 million is about $5 to $8 million additional aspirational funding is what we get to go with.Kevin K (29:02.082)So their idea is to try to keep that $500 million as capital long term. And then they're spending the interest or giving it back to the city. Just by comparison, what's your city budget overall? The total city budget. Do you have an idea?Rebekah Kik (29:06.026)Mm -hmm. Yep.Rebekah Kik (29:10.922)Yep. Yes.Rebekah Kik (29:17.61)Yeah, it's about 182 million. Yeah. We're like 25 square miles, just to give you an idea. We're pretty compact city. We're very, I mean, we've got some big streets. We're pretty walkable. Pretty compact.Kevin K (29:23.746)Okay.So cute.Kevin K (29:31.266)Okay, 180, yeah. Yeah.Kevin K (29:40.77)Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's an older city that was probably largely built out pre -World War II. Yeah. So, so that's interesting. So then maybe in any given year, it could be five to 10 % of the city budget more or less, depending on how it works out that that's getting kicked in extra. That's pretty cool.Rebekah Kik (29:44.554)Yes. Mm -hmm. Yes. Mm -hmm.Rebekah Kik (29:56.97)Yes.Yeah, and we do, we also have like a incremental development loan program for housing. We've got pre -permitted housing plans. We do small business development out of those funds. Yeah, we've got a lot of buckets.Kevin K (30:20.898)Well, so let's talk about some of those buckets. What do you mean by your incremental development fund? What's that all about?Rebekah Kik (30:24.842)Yeah.Rebekah Kik (30:29.258)Yeah, so back in that day also when I was the Young City Planner in 2015,Kevin K (30:39.266)And how many planners are on staff?Rebekah Kik (30:42.762)So at that time, there were five of us. Okay? And everybody had their own job. So, you know, I had a historic preservation coordinator. I had a zoning administrator. I had a site plan coordinator. I had no general planners. That was me. I was the generalist on staff as the quote unquote city planner.Kevin K (31:08.482)Mm -hmm.Rebekah Kik (31:14.026)And so I.I knew the zoning code was completely broken. And before I was going to start the master plan, I read all the past master plans back to 1977. So there were four master plans. And the 1998 plan was the most curious.And it had said, it's in this little sidebar, which send it to you. It says, you have a problem to solve. You have a contradiction to solve. You're a city that relies on a tax base. However, you want to reduce that by expanding your lot sizes.because it was saying, you know, you wanted to go to the suburban model. They wanted to create 60 foot wide lots and really suburbanize, creating this R1 district. However, you're a city that relies on taxes. And their standard lot size at that time was 32 feet. And so they're like, basically, you're crushing your tax base.Kevin K (32:43.618)Yeah, so kind of a classic Strong Town's math problem here with the development pattern.Rebekah Kik (32:45.418)And so.Yes.And so here it is in that 1998 sidebar, like some consultant just like shoved it in there and said like, warning, warning, Will Robinson, it's over here. And so I had read that and at that time, Jim Cooman was the executive director there and he was in town doing this.Kevin K (32:58.786)HahahaRebekah Kik (33:20.554)developer boot camp with us and I handed the zoning code to Jim and John Anderson and I said hey you guys I think I'm reading our master plan and what I would really love is if you guys just maybe just flip through this with your small developer brains and maybe mark it up a little bit andTell me what I need to do through like maybe a first blush. Like what if I could do anything right now, change anything, what would I do? And I still have John Anderson's red lines of my zoning code. I refuse to get rid of that. I swear, I'm gonna give it to the museum. Yes, and.Kevin K (34:08.514)HeheheYeah, you should frame it and, you know, hang it up.Rebekah Kik (34:17.994)Because it is the first text amendment and this is when we decided we would not do a full overhaul of the zoning ordinance and we would do an incremental Zoning Changes because that's what we would do. We would just say okay. Well, we can just do this. We will just do these text amendmentsKevin K (34:44.642)because you didn't want to hire a consultant for a million dollars and take five years to overhaul the zoning code and then have it fail.Rebekah Kik (34:48.778)No, because that's right. And that's not what we needed to do. Because we just needed to do some tweaks. Because it was just the setbacks. The setbacks were the issue. And unlocking those stupid square footage requirements. And we had this really, really great, we had like this.tea room requirement. Like you could do this tea room as long as your house. I still wish we could find like who the hell was this for? It was like a tea room and the house had to be like 50 years old and it could be open from like 9 a to 7 p I mean it was so utterly specific. Like it had to be for somebody but...I mean, I wish we could figure out whose address that was for.Kevin K (35:47.554)youRebekah Kik (35:50.09)It was unreal. But so, yeah, so that incremental development fund was again born out of this two and a half day session. We knew the Foundation for Excellence was kind of rolling in. And so I posed to the room. I said, OK, you guys, if I had a million dollars, what would you do with it? And they're like, what? What are you talking about? I said, no, seriously, a million dollars cash.I got a million dollars cash, what do I do with it? And they said, well, okay, Rebecca, if somebody graduated from this class, it's an equity fund. And you put those dollars aside and if you have it as a gap loan and it's 1 .5 % interest and it's for four units.And it's, you know, 80 to 120 percent AMI. And it's, you know, 30 year amortized, you know, here's the performance, here's how it fits in. And I was like, great, that's what it is. Okay.Kevin K (37:02.273)Hmm. So basically a way for like a small developer who's getting started to be able to work through basically to get bank financing because there's this other gap financing that can help out along the way.Rebekah Kik (37:17.93)Yes, and we also, so we do that loan program and we do it for four units. We do it at one and a half percent. We'll do it out for as long as we need to. We can be as patient with the capital as necessary. And we also can push it out further.Kevin K (37:46.818)Mm -hmm.Rebekah Kik (37:47.914)So we can make it do, we can be two years out. We can do it after two years or five years if that helps so that you can get some rental income in for a couple years. For five years if that helps your bank as well.Kevin K (38:05.89)Interesting.Kevin K (38:10.946)So have you had some takers on this program?Rebekah Kik (38:13.674)Yeah, we've done, I think we've done at least four of those loans already. So, and we started that, unfortunately, so it started in 2019. We got that loan program and the policies up and going in 2019. So obviously COVID affected that.Kevin K (38:31.074)Mm -hmm.Kevin K (38:41.442)Mm -hmm.Rebekah Kik (38:42.602)quite a bit, so we really hope that we can get some more of that out starting soon.Kevin K (38:48.45)Yeah.That's cool. That's a really interesting idea. So along with that, then you said you mentioned you've got a pre -permitted plan program. And I've talked with some of the folks in that world, the Jennifers and the Mats who do this kind of work. What all have you adopted or what have you done in Kalamazoo?Rebekah Kik (38:53.93)Mm -hmm.Rebekah Kik (38:58.794)Yes.Rebekah Kik (39:10.25)Yeah, so we have duplexes. We have up and down duplexes and an ADU unit that we built. So it took us four years to get this launched as well. But that's because we started building with a nonprofit builder first. We built three duplexes and ADUs. and a cottage, a 900 square foot cottage as well.And we wanted to be sure that we had the Performa like as tuned as possible and that we got all of the kinks out in the plan also. And we have comps now because we built them. And we knew we needed that for the duplexes, not so much the cottage. I mean, we do have some smaller homes in the city.We also have some ADUs in the city. But we now have at least our pre -permitted ADU in the city. But the up and down duplex, we need banks. We're probably going to stop at that a little bit. We now have three of those built.Kevin K (40:23.81)That's cool. And do you think you'll expand that to other plans, other building types?Rebekah Kik (40:30.218)Absolutely, we have four plex, six plex, and 12 plexes coming. And we also have lined up our nonprofit builder to also be, and we're also funding our nonprofit builder with those Foundation for Excellence funds. Again, for us to take the risk in building those, putting the comps on the market.making sure we're getting the performer right. And it gives the developer a model, you know, to really see and touch and feel the quality of it, take a little bit of that risk out for them to see us build it and understand it as well.Kevin K (41:18.562)So along the way, you became the assistant city manager as well, moved up from planner to that. How and when did that happen?Rebekah Kik (41:31.498)So that happened in 2022. Yeah, and how that happened was a couple of things. So one was I had been in my direct, I moved from city planner to the director of community planning and economic development.in 2017. And so I was director for the longest time at the city. And as I was director, I absorbed economic developments. And I did that between 2018 and 2019. Our economic development director at the city retired. And he only had a staff of three. And I had been shadowing and working withKevin K (42:02.466)Mm -hmm.Kevin K (42:15.65)Mm -hmm.Rebekah Kik (42:29.066)the Brownfield authority the full time. And I finally said to him, I was like, you just, you retire, let me take on your department, you know, planning and economic development just need to be won. He knew like the whole time I was just like, come on, you know, like development is just becoming my thing.Kevin K (42:42.434)Mm -hmm.Rebekah Kik (42:58.602)I never knew I was like this budding developer inside the whole time. I had no idea. They don't tell you that in architecture school that you are like the secret developer. Because they never teach you the finance side in architecture, which they should.Kevin K (43:17.154)Yeah.Rebekah Kik (43:27.05)They should definitely teach you that. So I had gotten my economic development, finance professional certification and I took my test and I did that all during COVID. And at the same time, or just as I was coming out of COVID, I also had been working with the IA Women'smunicipal leadership program through the state of Michigan, slowly thinking about city management and leadership. And so I had been thinking about it. I had been talking to my city manager and to my boss, William, about that and about whatcareer path looked like for me, what roles they were looking for in city management. At that time, there was a city manager who was about to retire and what they were looking for in their team member. And so then that city manager had retired and they hadn't hired anyone.And then there was a person who joined the city manager's team and they called her like, she was like a project manager and they called her like, like the strategic innovation coordinator or something like that. It was kind of a weird goal.Kevin K (45:14.178)Hehehe. Hehehe.Rebekah Kik (45:14.538)like, that is so my role. I was like, wait a minute, but she's not a city manager. And then she got some opportunity and she left. And you may or may not know this about me, but I'm sometimes I can be a little bold. So I went to my boss. I said,Kevin K (45:21.442)Mm -hmm.Kevin K (45:26.594)HeheheKevin K (45:34.242)Yeah.Rebekah Kik (45:42.474)So you may or may not be hiring for that role, but I think that that's my job. I'm going to put a job description in front of you. And I think this is my job description. And I kind of went like that.Kevin K (45:57.89)I love it. That's great.Kevin K (46:08.354)I love it. So obviously he was like, well, clearly you're right.Rebekah Kik (46:11.946)Clearly you're right. Yes. Exactly. And so I said, look, the strategic vision, Magic Helmets, 2035 is coming up. 2025 is due. And by the way, at Magic Helmets, 2025 every year,Kevin K (46:14.85)There's no other conclusion I can draw at that point.Rebekah Kik (46:36.617)I give the City Commission an update. I call it the Imagine Kalamazoo Birthday Celebration. They're all online. And I show the Commission how Imagine Kalamazoo gets implemented every single year. And I tell them that, you know, by the way, in Kalamazoo, we implement our master plans. And here's how we do that. And here's how I've shown you how we implement our 138 goals.how we're on track, how much money we've spent, how we take our community's vision and how we've implemented it. And so now this year, I've been showing them how we are going to create the strategic vision for Imagine Calendly 2035. And as city manager, I'm showing them how their strategic vision for the entire organization. I have been...My role now is as an organization leader. I have.been engaging the organization because that's, I didn't do that last time. I only engaged the community. So since October of last year, I've done six internal staff retreats. I've done an entire organizational survey. I've just started doing my second round of small group meetings where I've been engaging in what's called a group governance.meetings and I'm responding to all of my internal staff their needs in terms of tools, resources, staff capacity, funding, technology, policies, leadership, support, everything they need in order to support the community's vision.Rebekah Kik (48:37.386)So that when I go out to the community to find out what the community wants us to do, my staff is prepared to do that work.Kevin K (48:48.258)I mean, I'm really just, I'm a little blown away by all this. I'm kind of having a hard time digesting and coming up with questions because it's so, I mean, obviously this is the work of an architect. I mean, right. I mean, clearly this is what you went to architecture school for, to help, you know, reorganize and prioritize city management and get everybody, you know, working together as a team. Why don't you tease out what may be, without naming names, like a couple of the challenges.Rebekah Kik (48:59.626)Right.Kevin K (49:16.322)along the way or maybe something you see as an opportunity by going through that kind of internal reassessment.Rebekah Kik (49:24.298)Yeah, I mean, number one, this group has no clue what I'm doing. Like, teamwork to a government, they're utterly confused. They do their work on their team, absolutely. Like, their work in their department intheir division on their team. Completely on board with that. But understanding that they're part of a larger organization that may have to talk to each other.or know what someone else does at somebody else's job.It's been a real hurdle to get them to realize that it's not someone else's fault that they don't know what the reason someone else is doing something else. It's been tough.Survey after survey after survey or conversation after conversation people will constantly tell me What's the problem communication the problems communication? And then I will say well, how would you like to communicate it? Well And it's the same in the community as it is with my staff Well, I don't read email. Well, if you send me something more, I'm not gonna look at it. Okay. Well thenRebekah Kik (51:15.05)So tattoos, like what do you want me to do? I can't literally come and talk to you every single day. Carrier Vigin, like I can't help you not help yourself. So it's, I can only do what I can do. I think they've appreciated at least that I'm trying.Rebekah Kik (51:41.322)I have tried to create relationships with supervisors as far down into the organization as I possibly can. And I've tried to let them know that they must talk to their staff because I know they won't read the email and I know they won't read the posting that I put on the board. So I just really, really tried to compel them that they must talk to their staff.because that is really the only way that I know that they can get information that I really want them to have about something. And that's probably the best I can do. And I have worked really, really hard to help people in these cross -departmental teams. That's so far been my best.possible angle at getting people to understand each other as best I can. The first meetings are absolutely the best because when people look at each other across the table and they're like, why are we here together? This feels so weird. The first couple times and then they get it. And they're like, okay, okay, we're good now.But the first couple times, it's really awkward. Now we're okay.Kevin K (53:11.298)Yeah. I mean, it seems to be like a lot of what you describe is kind of the siloed nature of a lot of city government, which I've certainly experienced and continue to experience. And there's something interesting here though, that I think that may help you, you, you think about this differently than others. And I want to have you comment on this. And that is, you know, all those years that you spent doing design charrettes.you know, you and I both did a ton of those, we learned from all the other masters of the new urbanism. and they really, one of the things that that group did that people don't talk about as much that I think is incredible was this invention of the interdisciplinary design charrette. And, the whole notion being that we would get, everybody who needed to work together on a project in a room, for, you know, a week.and we'd spend a week together solving a problem together. And so you, we'd have, certainly we'd have architects and planners, but we also had engineers. you know, we had people who knew codes. we, we had everybody who might, we had developers and builders, anybody who might impact the built environment. And I think one of the things that I learned through that process, I'm curious if you did as well was just how, that inner, how well that interdisciplinary.process worked to solve problems and it was so much faster than a typical planning process.Rebekah Kik (54:48.298)Yeah, no question. The interdisciplinary process with all those perspectives is...probably the biggest lesson learned and probably the way that I think about things almost subconsciously. It's probably just built in to my thought process and I'm not even thinking about it, but yes, it's just there now. You're absolutely right, Kevin. It's probably just there now. Yeah, of course that's the way I'm.Kevin K (55:26.85)Yeah, it's like in the background, you think, obviously this is the way to do things. Yeah. Yeah. So you also mentioned that in your email to me that you've also had some success recently with some big grants to help with big projects. What are those all?Rebekah Kik (55:31.114)I'm going about things. Yeah.Rebekah Kik (55:44.938)Yes. So I was just reflecting on this because it has been such a labor ofof love for a long time. And now I'm, it's one of those things where you just keep watering it and watering it and watering it. And now I am like seeing all of it come to fruition in such incredible ways. And the public works director and I were just like high -fiving like crazy yesterday. So 10 years ago when I started,Director Baker and I, when we started on Imagine Kalamazoo, we started writing our connected city chapter. We got bold and we decided we were gonna write a land use and transportation master plan. And because that's what I was writing when I was a consultant, right? And I said, look, this is the right thing to do.because I want to change the land use, you want to change the streets as well. And I said, we have to do this together. I can't change this built environment without you. And you don't want these streets to stay the same either. You know they're not safe. So we have to write this land use transportation plan together. We can't do that without two way traffic in our downtown. We can't do that without a network. And we got to reallyput pressure on Michigan Department of Transportation. So the first thing that we had to have happen was we had to put a lot of pressure on Michigan Department of Transportation. They, for lack of a better way to say it, they owned all of our trunk lines, which were our main streets, our main one -way pair, which kind of circled our downtown and our main east.Rebekah Kik (57:50.57)East West and our main North Souths. And we finally got, we had a couple of friendly people, one which was our region planner for MDOT in our area and the governor's liaison was a friend, Andrew Hahn and Jason Latham. And at that time, again, it's just city planner, but I knew the language.So we sat down with MDOT at that time. This was the first domino to fall. And I, again, city, sometimes I wonder, like the city was like, gosh, this girl's mouth. I just got in every meeting and I said, Kim, we studied the network. And they said, those aren't, those are your streets.These are our streets. And I said, yes, but can we study the network? No, we're going to study .streets and you're going to study your streets. And I said, but we're going to fail at your two -way network because we don't have the same values. Can we study the network? And then they said, well, maybe we should just give you the streets back. I said, OK, that sounds good. So we finally got them to give us the streets back.Kevin K (59:04.642)HeheheheHahaha.Rebekah Kik (59:16.298)And we got to study the network and we got to show everyone that the two way, the reversal, it works. We can restore two way traffic. And that's how we got the first raise planning grant. Thanks to Pete Buttigieg being, you know, in his seat as secretary of transportation. And because all of thethe TIDER grants, the BUILD grants, everything before was never a planning grant. So a city the size of Kalamazoo, you don't have $6 million put up for engineering and planning of these streets, right? So we, this was monumental for a city of our size to get a planning grant. And that was it. That was the first.time we and with the MDOT transfer we got nearly 12 million dollars with that because it was like well MDOT said well we were going to spend 12 million dollars just milling and filling those roads so we'll give you the 12 million we got to put that money up with our act 51 dollars got the match we got the six million dollars to do the planning then we got the planning done now we could show we'll shovel readyAnd then Monday we just found out we got $25 million raised grant to do the construction for Kalamazoo Avenue or for Michigan Avenue because we already got $12 million reconnecting America grant for Kalamazoo Avenue. And yeah, by the way, we got $38 million protect grant because that's for theflooding that happens on Stadium Drive. So here we are, a hundred million dollars in little old Kalamazoo, Michigan, all because it's in, it's in Imagine Kalamazoo, it's in our master plan, it's in land use transportation, it's there, it says it, it transforms our community.Kevin K (01:01:39.714)That's really, that's an incredible story. That's really amazing. So clearly you have a staff of like about 200 people working with you, right?Rebekah Kik (01:01:47.242)You know, all five of us, we are like paralyzed. We're having a happy hour tomorrow. You're invited.Kevin K (01:01:55.138)Well, I, you know, I have, have long had this, suspicion that, or this belief that the most interesting work happening in our field is cities that were under like 50 ,000 people. And I see now, I think I just need to raise that threshold to like 75 ,000 to loop Kalamazoo in, but it is, it's amazing how often this happens that it's the smaller cities that are doing the most groundbreaking work and doing it.Rebekah Kik (01:02:14.797)Just a couple more.Kevin K (01:02:24.738)really well. That's pretty incredible. So now, you know, obviously Michigan is not exactly a booming state in terms of population. Have you seen an impact on the city's like economic fortunes with some of the planning work? Is the city growing at all or how's that work?Rebekah Kik (01:02:41.994)You know, we are and we aren't. I don't think at this point we're losing anyone, but we're certainly not booming in any capacity necessarily. No, we're not growing in any industry per se.pretty quiet there. I think we're just doing good, steady work and we're just trying to be great and steady and consistent and keep who we've got, you know?Kevin K (01:03:24.162)Well, it seems like in certainly in the Rust Belt, being able to keep who you've got, have happy citizens and have a high quality of life, you're like way ahead of the game.Rebekah Kik (01:03:35.85)Yeah, no question. No question.Kevin K (01:03:40.481)Yeah. Rebecca, this has been an incredible story. I'm sure there's a lot more to it. If people want to look up more about what you've done and what you're doing in Kalamazoo, what's the best way to do that?Rebekah Kik (01:03:55.978)Imagine Kalamazoo .com. It's, yeah, yeah, it's got the whole story. It's got a page with all our plans, our process, our public participation plan. We tried to codify it. It's got a toolkit. It's, you know, go to where people are and have fun. Yeah.Kevin K (01:03:58.242)Okay, that's straightforward.Rebekah Kik (01:04:24.202)It also if you go to Kalamazoo city org You can at the bottom of the page you can see the foundation for excellence story You can see our investments you can see the 50 million dollars that we've invested in our city in our neighborhoods you can Could check out that whole story. It's Really incredible and just know we're incredibly grateful for it. We understand what it means for us andYeah, we don't take it for granted. Yeah, thanks, Kevin.Kevin K (01:04:58.666)that's fantastic. Rebecca, it's been great catching up. I really appreciate your time doing this and look forward to following more of what's going on in Kalamazoo.Rebekah Kik (01:05:08.874)Hey, I'm just grateful for that opportunity. Thanks for allowing me to catch up and share our unique story.Kevin K (01:05:15.618)my pleasure. Take care.Rebekah Kik (01:05:17.578)Yeah, take care, Kevin.

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Parking Parking Parking!
2 Tem· The Messy City Podcast
We must talk about your parking regulations. In fact, we must mock them.
In no other area of life do head spins quicker, and people’s opinions take on truly bizarre forms, than we we talk about parking. I get it, we are a culture obsessed with driving and parking. It’s part of nearly adult’s daily routine. In this episode, Tony Jordan of the Parking Reform Network and I have some fun with it, while also diving into the nitty-gritty of how to make change in your community.
As a bonus, Tony describes some of the most bizarre, and most hilarious parking requirements he’s run across.
Here’s a link to Donald Shoup’s article, “Roughly Right or Precisely Wrong.”
Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.
Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.
Intro: “Why Be Friends”
Outro: “Fairweather Friend”
Transcript:
Kevin K (00:00.92)Welcome back to the Missy City podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. Today we're going to talk about everybody's favorite topic, parking. The bane of my existence for most of my professional career, but we've got Tony Jordan here with us today from the Parking Reform Network. And I'm really looking forward to this conversation so we can get into the weeds a little bit on what's actually an incredibly important topic. So Tony, welcome.Tony Jordan (00:28.617)Thanks so much. Happy to be here.Kevin K (00:31.064)Well, it's a pleasure to have you. I ran into you in Cincinnati at the Strong Towns National Gathering and seeing you and we were chatting over a couple of beers and it just seemed like, you know, as soon as we start talking, it feels like, well, this probably should be a podcast. You know, we should spend more time getting into things. So I'm grateful you were able to make some time to be able to join. Tony, before we go too far, why don't we tell me what is the Parking Reform Network and how...How long has it been around?Tony Jordan (01:03.081)the parking reform network is a, 501 C three organization that was founded, founded in the spring of 2019 and we launched in March of 2020. and it, yeah, it was actually okay for organizing a national organization because everything moved online. Like we, we, people were much more amenable to slacking and, using zoom calls, but we, the idea behind.Kevin K (01:16.92)Good timing.Tony Jordan (01:33.641)The need I saw, I had been doing parking reform locally in Portland, Oregon, where I'm from, or where I live, for years, helping to get rid of parking mandates that had been added back in and removing them entirely from the city and worked on upzoning projects too. And the whole while I really felt like one of the things that was missing in advancing parking reform was,having an advocacy organization and a community that really was helping to educate the public and advance these policies. The practitioners and the city council even often knew that these policies were bad, the existing ones, but the public support wasn't there. So founding the Parking Inform Network, it's a community of practitioners, academics, activists, policymakers who...We exist to kind of build a community and a movement around educating the public about parking policy and accelerating reforms. And we do that through a number of research and outreach and advocacy avenues.Kevin K (02:47.352)That's cool. So how did you, what was your background then getting into this? Were you in planning or transportation or talk a little bit about like how you came to this, to this spot.Tony Jordan (02:57.641)Yeah, I mean, I grew up in Los Angeles in San Pedro, the port of LA, and went to school at Santa Cruz and got a politics degree. And then I moved up to Portland and I mostly worked in tech for most of my career, web design, backend, server services programming. And I also, but I also did a couple, I worked at a couple of jobs as a labor organizer. So my background was not at all in planning. I got rid of my car.We got rid of our household's car in 2008. I had a two year old. We had another child in 2010. And I feel like that kind of primed the pump. I started looking around transportation a little differently. And then in 2010, I read a blog post very randomly on a website called Metafilter that was about the high cost of reparking, about Professor Shoup's book that had come out years before. And I am the kind of person, if I hear something interesting, I'll go look up the Wikipedia or I'll look into it.And so I got the book on inner library loan and started reading it. And I was just like, my mind was blown. Shoop has asked me, you know, one time, what did you think when you read the book? And I was like, man, I felt like I was eating a hamburger and reading the jungle. Like it was really like, what is going on? You look once you your eyes are open to this, you look around. I live across the street from a parking lot. I worked overlooking a parking lot and I just like your.to understand why, how much these things cost and then why they're there was just like, why doesn't everyone know this? I looked at my own zoning code in Portland and actually at the time Portland was a pretty, was pretty Vanguard city. We had no parking mandates on our corridors, on our bus, our frequent service corridors that had passed in 2002 kind of to little fanfare. And, but then a couple of years later,In 2012, all of a sudden, they started building apartments on a couple of these corridors. Division Street was one, North Williams. And they were building like 30, 40, 50 apartments in a building with no parking. And they were leasing up. And then someone proposed someone got permitted at 81 unit building on the street with no parking and the neighborhood just went nuts. And they started petitioning the city council to add parking mandates back.Tony Jordan (05:18.633)And so there was a pro they started considering this and I said, Hey, I just read this book a couple of years ago and I started going to city council and I met people who were interested, but they weren't really very organized. And so I started just like creating a mailing list and, and, you know, we lost, they actually added parking mandates back in, but that kind of got me totally started. That was when I first reached out to professor Shoop. He wrote an op ed. And I started just that, that really kicked off.the fuel of like, okay, we need to be better organized on this and next time we're not gonna lose.Kevin K (05:52.152)Interesting. So if I could go back like you said in 2008, you got rid of your car. What prompted you all to, and you had a two -year -old. So what, do you like hate America so much you decided to get rid of your cars? What was that all about?Tony Jordan (06:06.665)You know, the check engine light went on and I took it into, I just afford focus 2004 focus second car ever owned. I took it to the dealer and I mean not to the dealer to the repair shop and they thought, this is the transmission. I thought, man, that transmission on that car has always been weird. Sure. And they, it was going to be $2 ,000. And, and I said, okay. And then they called me back and said, you know, it's not the transmission. We looked at it. Like we haven't charged you anything, but we think it's the computer maybe. So here.Kevin K (06:10.104)Ha ha ha.Tony Jordan (06:36.233)put this little dongle on and drive around for a week. And I said, how much does the computer cost? And they said, $2 ,000. And I was like, okay. And then I drove around and they came back and they said, nah, it's not the computer. We think it's this. How much is that? And I was like, they said engine or something, engine rebuild. And I was like, $2 ,000. And I was just like, man, if I pay for this to get fixed, I obviously expect that either the computer or the transmission will break next. And that will, so I just thought like, this is going to be a never ending money pit. So I told my wife and I discussed it and we had.We lived in Portland, we lived near Transit, I had a bike, we lived near Zipcar, right? Zipcar, it was kind of in the center of Zipcar. And so we said, let's put the car in the garage and just try six months without driving it. And we did. And then at the end of six months, I sold it to the dealer for $2 ,000. And so I was up $4 ,000. And then I never really looked back at buying a...Kevin K (07:22.52)What a cool idea.Kevin K (07:34.936)And that's just, hey, I really like, I mean, that's a great way to just like, let's test it out. Let's see if we can handle it for a while. And so then in terms of like having small children, I know myself having small children, it's not the easiest thing in the world because it's just, you know, there are so many things that you might want to take your kids to that you just need a car to get around. How did you manage that?Tony Jordan (07:55.945)I mean, some of it, we just didn't do as many things. My son took offense to this when I told him when he was older, but I said, one of the nice things was it does kind of make some decisions for you. It simplifies your life. So you're probably only gonna go to one birthday party in a weekend unless they're very close to one another, right? Like, or in a day, right? So some of it, initially we used Zipcar quite a bit and...Kevin K (08:15.608)God, that sounds magical.Tony Jordan (08:24.489)you know, tapered that off over time. And obviously with small, small kids, it's a little bit harder, but we know we carried the kids on our carriers. We never did, you know, when they got a little older, I had a bike trailer I would take to preschool. But it does, you know, you kind of adjust your life over time. It's not, it's not easy. I feel like we are a bit of like, you know, first adopters, still people who are voluntarily living in solidarity with people who can't drive.or can't own vehicles, right? Those people exist in our communities. And so, you know, I experience a lot of the same frustrations voluntarily, but I also have the capacity to try and, you know, argue for it. So, I mean, I think that, you know, my kids do sports or my daughter dances, my son does ultimate frisbee and other things, and he rides his bike to work now at Trader Joe's, and they take the bus, and they're just very independent. And I'm sure there are, you know, opportunities that...we can't do, but I mean, that's kind of life. You make decisions and in exchange, they really are, you know, they know how to get around. And I think they're gonna, I think it's gonna really give them a good leg up when they get to, you know, college or, you know, as the world has to adapt and reduce car dependency, you know, it's not gonna be as painful for them, I think, as you make these changes.Kevin K (09:51.224)How do you know, do you notice much of a difference then between like them and their friends and just other families that they, that you might run around with and like just their own habits and behaviors in that regard?Tony Jordan (10:01.769)Yeah, I mean, a lot of even though we live in a place that's pretty walkable, like obviously a lot of the other parents do drive frequently. I don't begrudge them that. My children get rides with other parents sometimes, too. I mean, we're you know, I don't think we'll offer to pay sometimes. Or, you know, like it's it's not like we're trying to be complete moochers or freeloaders on this. But, you know, like I think it on one hand, like my daughter,When she started middle school, other parents were often driving and we said, hey, we're not going to drive, so let's get our kids riding the bikes. And so our kids had their own mini bike group. And then as she didn't want to ride as much anymore, she would take the bus and other kids would learn to take the bus with her. So there is, I think, by just living a lifestyle that is less car dependent, sometimes I think people find it grating, like, these holier than thou.anti -car people, but at the same time, like it is an example. Like you can see it being done and other kids do it. My son now is 17. So he, you know, some of his friends are getting driver's licenses, but a lot of them aren't. One of the bigger conflicts is he's in film class and a lot of film is done. Well, not only logging, lugging gear around, but obviously, but it's a very common set piece, right? Is to be in a car or driving a car from point A to point B andKevin K (11:28.248)Hmm.Tony Jordan (11:30.313)So one of his frustrations is he doesn't have a card to do these film transitions, you know, but it's, you know, I think it's worked out mostly okay.Kevin K (11:39.512)Have you ever tried to like quantify, you know, like how much money this has saved you over the years?Tony Jordan (11:47.337)I mean, I have not, other than the initial calculus I did where it was like, I'm up $4 ,000 on, and I can use that for zip car or whatever. I mean, I know it does. It definitely, I don't, I'm not the best budgeter, honestly. So I don't keep a spreadsheet, but I mean, the fact that we haven't owned a car for these years has definitely, you know, we take cheaper modes. And to some degree you do less, you do just do less stuff and that.Kevin K (12:04.26)Yeah.Tony Jordan (12:16.873)you know, simplifies your life and makes it a little bit cheaper.Kevin K (12:21.912)Yeah, I mean, I promise I'll get off on other topics, but I just find it's interesting when people are able to live in a way that we're told you can't live. So have you found that not having the car has opened up ways for you to spend money on other things in your life that maybe you wouldn't have been able to do otherwise?Tony Jordan (12:25.705)No problem.Tony Jordan (12:45.289)once again, I don't sure specifically like how much it impacts that. I mean, obviously the cost of buying some nice bikes is, you know, still much cheaper than, than spending on a car or the gas. I still have to pay for insurance. I mean, I still voluntarily pay for insurance. I don't have to, but I have a non -name donor policy, which is kind of expensive. you know, I think more, it just, it just, I find it is a much.more, it's a much more peaceful and relaxing way to live in most times. Like driving is so stressful, especially if you live in a larger city. Like it's, at least to me, it's scary. You, you, if you think about it, it's not like you're kind of making life difficult for everyone else who's not in your car at the expense of your convenience for the most part. And so I just find the ability to not have to like one of the best dividend is I never have to worry about like, you know,like that responsibility or that pressure or that inconvenience. If I'm on the bus, even if it's in traffic, I can be on my phone or be talking to who I'm with and not be worrying about piloting.Kevin K (14:00.408)Yeah, and you don't have to sweat finding a place to park wherever you're going. So that's kind of a nice thing. So then were you working in tech pretty much all the way up through the beginning of forming the Parking Reform Network?Tony Jordan (14:03.209)Exactly, yeah.Tony Jordan (14:14.025)Yeah, I mean, mostly, even when I worked for, so I worked two times for unions. I worked for the University of California, professional technical employees before I moved up to Portland. And then I worked for AFT organizing nurses. In both those jobs, I still often did the backend database or the website. And then I spent the 13 years before that working at a company that did online admissions applications. So yeah, I was mostly in.Kevin K (14:19.256)Okay.Kevin K (14:38.52)Okay, that's really cool. So then when you formed this nonprofit, who else kind of formed it with you or was this pretty much like you're taking this initiative on or were there others that really said they wanted to jump on board with you?Tony Jordan (14:51.561)I had been in discussions. So Portland has a great advocacy scene. So I had initially formed or after where I left off the story about the losing and parking mandates coming back. A couple of years after that, I started an organization called well, initially it was called Portland Shoopistas and then at Shoop's suggestion, we changed it to Portlanders for Parking Reform. And that was kind of just a low, I had a blog, a website, a newsletter, you know, an advocacy org that worked in partnership.Kevin K (15:02.488)Yeah, yeah.Tony Jordan (15:19.657)with other coalitions to just kind of like keep an eye on what was happening with various, you know, on street and off street parking policies in Portland and in the region and, you know, organize testimony and events and just kind of build awareness. So in that process, I worked with many. Portland has just, you know, freeway fighter this year. We have, you know, housing activists. It's a great scene. Michael Anderson from Sightline Institute and I had been talking about theconcept of he proposed we should have a green lane project, which was a project of people for bikes to propose protected bike lanes. He said, you know, we should have, there should be some sort of project for parking similar. Like the idea was like, maybe get a cohort of cities together and take them on a discovery trip. And then they pledged to go review their parking code. And so we had pitched, he helped pitch that around to a couple of places and no one was really interested in hosting a similar project.that kind of consensus was it's hard to fundraise for parking reform, which is true. And so a couple of years later, I was in Chicago speaking at the Parking Industry Expo with these two women, Jane Wilberding and Lindsay Bailey. And...we kind of started hatching a concept around like, you know, like what, how do we, like, what would be a larger organization or, you know, a movement around this. And then I went to APA in San Francisco in 2019, Shoop was talking and there was, you know, a bunch of parking people there. And we met another student, we met a recent grad, Mike Kwan, who had graduated from Santa Cruz and now lives in DC. And so I said, you know, I asked, basically we were out at, at,at dinner with Patrick Sigmund, who is the original Chupista. And kind of we're just talking about like, you know, I think there just should need there needs to be something there needs to be an organization that is focused holistically on parking reform, not just the mandates of the on street management. And and really, I wanted to bring this organizing capacity. So we agreed you need three, you need four people to start a nonprofit organization. And so Mike and Jane and Lindsay were the.Tony Jordan (17:44.073)three original board members and it took a couple months to get the certifications and then set up a website. And then, you know, we went public with it in March and started bringing more people on March, 2020. I mean, yeah.Kevin K (17:57.08)That's terrific. That's terrific. So obviously, one of the big pushes has been in the parking reform world has been to remove or reduce minimum parking mandates. As you've talked about these things, what are the arguments that you are using or you see other people using that are most successful in sort of moving the needle related to that issue?Tony Jordan (18:23.305)I think the problem we've had is largely just lack of information, low information about what these mandates are, what we're talking about. So what are we talking about? We're talking about rules from the seventies, sixties, fifties that are anachronistic and completely based on nothing that are these like,Sorry, hold on.Just one second.Kevin K (18:57.048)No problem.Tony Jordan (19:12.297)I might need to take a redo on that section in one second.Kevin K (19:14.552)No, it's fine. Go ahead.Kevin K (19:24.504)All right, so talk about the most effective arguments.Tony Jordan (19:25.481)Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what we're talking about are these anachronistic rules that are based on nonsense from the 70s. But, yes, and we're talking about just getting rid of these mandates and not eliminating existing parking, you know, generally not severely restricting the ability of people to build parking in their new developments or with their businesses. But I think the other key is really showing people like,how much parking costs, how much space it takes up, what are the other impacts on things they care about, fiscal viability of their cities, the tax -based stuff, water runoff management or urban flooding and pollution, urban heat effects, just walkability, all these things come back to these rules. And what I found really effective lately is to just, you present that information, but in the context of, you know,I'll go look at, for example, bowling alleys. I'll draw a circle of a hundred miles around a city and find examples of bowling alley parking requirements, which are hilarious in themselves because it kind of shows you when they were written. And you'll find one per lane, two per lane, three per lane, four per lane, five per lane, six per lane, seven per lane, right? In just like an area around. And so it's like, what could be the difference between a bowler in this city?where they require two per lane and this one was seven or funeral homes. Like you'll, I, it's not uncommon to see one city require one parking space for 50 square feet, which is a pretty high requirement. You're talking the parking lot is going to need to be six to eight times bigger than the funeral home. And then another place will, will require only one per 500. So that's like a, you know, or, you know, like that's a pretty large difference. You know, 10, we'll find 10 to 12 times difference in.a city that's just 50 miles from another city. And I think that when people see that, that contrast, it really undermines the faith in like, why do these numbers exist? And their first reaction is, well, maybe we can just fix them. And you're like, no, like you can't, like just X them out and get working on the real work that it takes to repair your city, right? The parking mandates is just like...Tony Jordan (21:48.713)That's just clearing a hurdle. It doesn't actually change anything. That requires a developer -friendly zoning code, or it requires transportation management on the ground. But you're never going to get anywhere if these rules exist.Kevin K (22:06.072)Yeah, I was thinking about, and I think we may have talked briefly about this, but obviously, you know, Shoop's book, The High Cost of Free Parking is kind of like the gold standard for the field. It's a really, it's an incredible book. But I remember years before that, he wrote this little magazine article called Roughly Right or Precisely Wrong, which was maybe like three or four pages. But just that alone was such adevastating takedown of the stupidity of most minimum parking requirements and where they come from. And it's always wild to me that people think that those requirements are actually based in something real.Tony Jordan (22:48.169)Yeah, I mean, I have a slide that's called roughly right, precisely wrong based on that same concept. And it highlights this poor little town in Georgia, Woodbury, Georgia, that is really very small. And they have so many land uses with parking requirements and they have like, they're specific to two significant figures for things like, you know, hospital employees, like 1 .26 or 1 .72 for students. And then this place has two requirements.Like they have a separate land use requirement for parking for a hella port and a hella stop. Two, like it's different. Hell if I know what the difference is, right? And it's like, I like you point these out or North Carolina, when we went to CNU last year, we were looking at North Carolina cities because it was in, you know, it was in Charlotte. And there's all these parking requirements in cities in North Carolina for drive -in movie theaters. Like, and they literally are like,Kevin K (23:23.992)What is that? What the hell is that?Tony Jordan (23:46.569)one per speaker box. So it's like you're like telling a drive -in movie theater, which once again, no one's building them, that they have to have a parking space for every park. Like what is going on? One of my favorites is in Dallas, there is a parking requirement for sewage treatment plants. And it's one parking space per million gallons of capacity at the sewage treatment facility, which, and if you look at,Kevin K (24:12.264)my god.Tony Jordan (24:14.409)There's a sewage treatment facility. If you look at it on Google, it has this gigantic parking lot and there's like 20 cars in it because it's like it has like 300 million gallon capacity. So the parking lot is and this is the city telling it's who builds a sewage treatment plant, right? Like the city. But a water treatment plant in Dallas, like for drinking water, only requires two parking spaces. And you look at the you look at a satellite picture of the parking of the water treatment plant and there's like 20 spaces they didn't just build two. They built what they needed. Right. And so like this is really it's like.Kevin K (24:27.032)Yeah, no kidding.Tony Jordan (24:44.009)why are cities even saddling themselves with these requirements? It's insanity, right? Like something really went wrong in, you know, what in the urban planning profession and it just is kind of, we're trying to stop the bleeding and, you know, yeah.Kevin K (25:02.616)Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just hilarious, some of this stuff. When you detach yourself from it and you're just like, it's so, some of it's just so utterly ridiculous. But I think there's something you said that was really important there, which is like, you know, you're really, you're trying to just go about the business of like clearing a hurdle. So like you're not trying to say this is going to solve every problem. But what this is doing, you're trying to remove an impediment to.especially to more like walkable urban style development that really prevents a lot of good things from happening in cities all over the country.Tony Jordan (25:40.649)Right. I mean, it's it. I use an analogy sometimes like if you want to grow a garden, the garden in this case being like a walkable community, you can't go throw, you know, vegetable seeds in your lawn and expect it to work. You've got to remove the rocks and the weeds in the grass first. That's getting that's your parking mandate removal is just prepping the zone. You still have to do all the other stuff. You have to, you know, create the zoning code and you have to.manage on street parking so that it doesn't create spillover or whatever. So it's really a first step. The other great thing is that it's not just housing, right? Like this is a policy, one of the reasons I work on it. I can hardly find a better way to spend my time than one policy area that works on housing, transportation and climate, right? Like it's a piece of, if you have a climate action plan, it's not gonna work.with parking mandates. If you have a transportation plan to build more transit or get people to use other modes, it's not going to work if you have parking mandates. If you have a housing plan, it's not going to work if you have parking mandates. So this one thing, it doesn't fix everything, but it unlocks and makes your other plans actually gives them a fighting chance at success.Kevin K (26:58.2)So then how do you respond to, I mean, I can probably, I'm probably going to test like some of the arguments that people, that I hear all the time and I'm sure you hear them all the time too. but I'm just curious and it's good for the audience to kind of hear how you think about these things. But you know, one thing that I certainly hear a lot is, well, you can eliminate that, but people, people are still going to drive. So what's the point? You know, we live in a big city in a big region that's spread out and people, people drive. That's what they do. So, you know, that, and that seems to me like that's a common.objection that people have to removing some of those standards.Tony Jordan (27:31.561)Right, well, I mean, it's kind of ironic because your arguments are either it's not going to have an impact or it's going to be a disaster and it can't be both at the same time, right? So I think that's true. And to that I say, yes, the world is currently, most of our country is built for people who want to drive. And so on one hand, that should be comforting to the person who's worried about.I've got kids and I don't want to take them on the bus or, you know, my grandma likes to shop at this Walmart. Like the Walmart's still going to be there unless they just close it and build a bigger Walmart farther away, right? Like, I mean, they're still going to, these places still exist that people will drive to. Your house still has a parking space. So no one's asking you to change. We know that there's intense demand for a different way to live. That's why walkable communities are very expensive because...people want, there's not enough of them and people want to live in them. So I think like this just, it makes it possible to build these places. And then we'll see whether it's just consumer preference shows that, you know, people see these places and they want to move into them and we can build more of them or retrofit more of our communities to be like this way. Or frankly, there's a distinct possibility that we will be forced to make some decisions about not driving as much, you know, based on, you know,climate or just geometry issues of traffic. So like one way or the other, I think we have to come up with a solution. And this is, you know, it's just stop digging. First, the first thing is stop digging. And these parking mandates are just requiring everyone to dig the hole a little bit deeper every time they start a business or build a building. And, you know, so that's, I think that's one argument is, you know, well, if the demand is not there, then what do we have to lose by trying, you know, like these.the rules are just in the way of even trying to provide that thing that people seem to want.Kevin K (29:32.696)So another thing that I hear a lot, especially this is much more so like in urban communities, this is where these issues really come up more often anyway. You don't really find a ton of this discussion in a lot of our suburban communities. But I mean, there's some of that, but not a lot. But like in the parts of town where I live in the more urban part of Kansas City, one of the really common objections, let's say there's a large new apartment proposal or there's a commercial.There's a business that wants to go in and if they want to have no parking or very little parking, one of the objections as well, people are still going to drive and all they're going to do is they're just going to park up all the streets in front of my house in the neighborhood nearby. And they're just going to spill over into that. So you're really just making my life more miserable by taking parking away from our streets.Tony Jordan (30:25.449)Mm hmm. Yes. This is the spillover issue can be real, right? I mean, obviously, if you have successful businesses that have parking and they attract more people, since we know these numbers are incorrect, right? There's nothing that says a restaurant, the minimum ratio is actually providing enough parking for the customers or not. Right. I mean, so there's spillover anyway. But, you know, so there's one I would say. The.The solution to that is cities need to mind their own business when it comes to parking. They own the curb. The community owns the curb. It's a public asset or liability, depending on how you look at it. And, and, you know, if sure, if it's free or underpriced, then people will take advantage of that. So manager, you know, the city also knows when permits are coming in for new businesses or for new buildings and should be able to pretty readily anticipate that demand might increase in an area.and create a permit district or a meter district or some other management, which are great because they actually can return revenue to the community to help, you know, make things more walkable with more lighting or crosswalks and help people actually get to these places in other ways. I think that it's also what this gets to me really interesting is just like, I'm often asked like who opposes these reforms and why, and, and it's incumbents, right? Like incumbents, people who,already are using the business that doesn't have enough parking supposedly, right? Like if, hey, you want these ratios because supposedly they provide enough parking. So if you support them, provide the ratio for your own business, and then you don't have a problem. But no, you're using the on -street parking. You're using the asset, and you're worried that another business is going to come in and attract more customers than you do. That's a business issue. Or you know, you...want to park on the street, you know, or you're develop, you know, you're using the asset already that exists, you're using this thing. And so you want to moat. I think one of the things people think developers fund this work. and I wish they did, but the fact is, I don't think current, the developers that are making a lot of money or building a lot of projects, they usually are, they've evolved to exist in the ecosystem that includes parking.Tony Jordan (32:44.265)Do they really necessarily want someone else coming in that's got a more nimble business model that's going to compete with their buildings? I don't know. I think that's one of the reasons why some of this has taken longer is like, you know, you're competing with a status quo and everyone who exists, they've evolved to operate in status quo. And this is a disruptive change potentially. This could change, you know, how your main street works. And so I think there's a natural pushback there, but the...You know, the solutions are easy. We know how to manage parking. So like, if that's really your concern is just that there might be congestion on the curb. Well, we've got a solution for that, right? It's, yeah.Kevin K (33:27.96)Yeah, it's funny because I think about like my own neighborhood, which was largely built in the first two decades of the 20th century. And so it has that sort of a neighborhood main street and that there's a portion of the main street that is built with sort of classic American early 20th century buildings, you know, right up to the sidewalk, very popular.numbers of restaurants and everything else. And it's a really popular little area. And it's been popular for years and years. But on that same exact street, like if you wanted to build a new restaurant, the zoning would require a minimum of 10 spaces per thousand square feet, which would make it completely impossible to actually build what's there today. And there's this really funny disconnect that.we've talked about forever, which is we have these places that people obviously really love for very human reasons. It's great to be in a place where you can just like walk around and see other people and you can sit at a table and just enjoy the street life and activity. And so these places are extremely popular in most places where they exist, yet our rules and regulations don't allow you to build it again.Tony Jordan (34:52.137)Right. Yeah, I think, yeah, it's true. I show a picture of, you know, like of Main Street. I have a slide where I show a picture of Main Street and then just a shopping center. And like you can't this isn't I am not the first person to do this, but you count up the number of businesses in there and they're roughly the same number of businesses in a big shopping center as opposed to like one block of a Main Street. Of course, the bigger businesses are bigger, but partly that's because they have to they have to support because we don't allow.We don't allow localized commerce either. I mean, that's a whole big part is there's a lot of the talk is around residential parking requirements and allowing more infill housing, but we need a lot more infill commercial too, right? I mean, my friend Neil Heller, you know, with his accessory commercial units, like, why don't we allow these, like, if you think about trip reduction, cities will spend so much money to try and get someone to take the bus to go get their hair done, where if you allow someone to open a hair, you know, just.Kevin K (35:35.64)Yeah, yeah.Tony Jordan (35:50.857)do hair in their basement or in their garage, you know, legally or open a little storefront, the person might just walk or ride a bike to that. You're reducing the trip for free.Kevin K (36:01.528)it out. So what is what's going on then? One of the things that you all do is you track what's happening nationally in terms of parking reform state by state. What are some of the most encouraging things that are happening across the country that you're seeing?Tony Jordan (36:16.041)Well, for one, I think we're just seeing more and more cities get rid of their parking mandates entirely or do large scale reforms. This is obviously, you know, just a drop in the bucket. Municipal, you know, we've got I think I was just looking at it yesterday and we're right around. There's like 70 or 71 cities that we know of in the United States that have gotten rid of their parking mandates citywide for all uses. Most recently, Tualatin, Oregon, I think was the most recent.when we've added to the list. So that's great because it shows other places that they can do it. It shows that the sky's not falling, there's momentum behind this, these cities are, you know, someone will say, well, we have, I was in La Crosse, I was talking to people in La Crosse, they said, well, we have snow. I said, well, you can talk to the people in Duluth or the people in Anchorage. They also have snow. You know, so there's, we're getting more and more comps. We finally just got a city in the center of the country in Colorado, like, you know, Longmont, Colorado just did it, so it's.Kevin K (37:13.08)Okay, good.Tony Jordan (37:13.705)It's great to see that momentum, because I think it emboldens people. And then that starts to trickle up into the statewide and regional planning areas where we're seeing the conversation start in, you know, Minnesota. They had people over parking act, which proposed to eliminate mandates statewide. Oregon has pretty strong reforms that are requiring. That's why we have so many cities with no parking mandates, because the state's kind of making requiring cities to make a choice between getting rid of their mandates or managing their off street parking.So I think that the encouraging thing is that the conversation is moving forward. The solutions are much less incremental at this point. There's a recognition that like we don't have time to mess around, you know, checking every couple of years. It takes so long to build things is one thing. It's like, you know, I tell people, it's like, you know, you're not going to see the impact of this for years. We don't have time to wait. So that's, I think that just the general awareness, all of these reforms then.create buzz or opportunity for buzz. And so just, you know, every time someone hears about this, there's an opportunity for another Tony Jordan to get hooked on the topic and get active in their local community. So like, you know, you hear about the city next door and maybe you're going to go down to planning commission next and start banging the drum around parking reform.Kevin K (38:35.672)What are some of the larger cities that have done dramatic reform?Tony Jordan (38:40.201)The largest in the US is Austin, which did it last year. In North America, Mexico City has no mandates. Toronto, Edmonton, Montreal is about to do so. San Francisco, in the United States, you got San Francisco. I'm trying to think of who's on the, St. Paul in Minneapolis.San Jose was, is a, is a large city that's done it. Portland has no parking mandates and Portland, because of our statewide rules, many of our suburbs are also starting to have no mandates. So we're starting to build a metro area that we'll have, which I think will be very useful to see how that interplays. Cause that's one thing, you know, Dallas could get rid of the parking mandates tomorrow, but you know, the Dallas Fort Worth metro area is such, or Los Angeles, you know, there's so many other cities that are requiring it and cars don't.car demand doesn't stop at the city border, right? So there's a bit of where everyone kind of needs to make a commitment together, you know, to not like, you can get rid of parking mandates in your downtown, but if all of your surrounding community is car dependent, it's going to be very hard to redevelop parking lots in your downtown because the demand is just going to be there. So I think like, you know, we're starting to, these larger areas will, will, will be helpful, but I, but it's also great to have smaller cities get rid of mandates too, because.That's the majority of cities in the United States are smaller places that aren't megopolises.Kevin K (40:13.56)Are you able to track like winds that come from the policy change at all, like in terms of maybe development activity, other stuff that would have happened, would not have happened without the reform?Tony Jordan (40:26.161)Starting to, so some of our partners like Sightline, Katie Gould at Sightline who covers parking the best. She covers this in the Northwest and in some other places. We just actually are, we have a blog post that's about to come out tomorrow based on a Twitter thread where someone was highlighting changes in Anchorage. One of the issue here is, you know, many of these, I mean, when we talk about 70 cities,There were about 15 cities at the end of 2020 in the United States, maybe 13, maybe it's 13, somewhere, you know, not many more than 10 that had gotten rid of their mandates citywide. So we've, you know, had about 55 cities do this reform just in the last four years. Seeing what happens, I mean, there are, Katie Gould has shown some great examples of, you know, projects that, you know, immediately when the reform has gone in.will go in and submit a redesign that doesn't punch a hole through the middle of the building to access the parking lot or adds a certain number of apartments or homes. There was great examples out of Fayetteville, right? When Fayetteville was an early adopter of no commercial mandates, they need to catch up on the residential side. But, you know, where buildings were getting reused all of a sudden that had been vacant for many years. So that's going to be, we're trying to track that. We're a small and growing organization and so capacity to do that. But,Those stories are the critical ones, I think, to show people the benefit of doing this.Kevin K (42:02.584)What about anecdotally from Portland, which you're most familiar with, where you didn't have mandates and you did have mandates and then you went back to not having mandates? Have you seen some good wins there?Tony Jordan (42:13.897)Well, I mean, in a way, the best example from Portland is in the opposite direction, right? We had, as I mentioned, buildings going up on this division street that had 30, 40, 50 apartments. They were very numbers, right? You look at the permits, the number of apartments being built, and they were all over the place between 30 and 80, right? What we did in Portland was we instituted aWhen they took a step back, they said, okay, you can build up to 30 units with no parking. But if you build 31, you have to have a 0 .2 parking ratio, one for every five apartments, which is relatively low, but it was retroactive to the whole building. So you had no parking to 30 units. And then the 31st apartment, you had to have six parking spaces on site. And what did we see? No one's gonna study on this, but I looked back, you know, you saw a haircut. All of a sudden, a bunch of apartments had exactly.30 units. I think this marginal impact, it's harder to quantify, but I think honestly, the biggest thing is if you think of every apartment that's been built in the United States over the last 70 years, and you know, they might still, even if you say they built the exact same amount of parking that exists right now, if developers were allowed to just max out what was practical apartment -wise on that site with that same amount of parking, we'd have 10, 20, you know, five to 20 new apartments.in every apartment building in the United States. We would have no housing crisis if we had just let that happen, even with parking being built. So I think those marginal increases where you're just adding five or 10 apartments in a building that would have had a lower number because they couldn't meet the parking requirement, that's kind of the invisible benefit, I think, that is harder to quantify but is already, I'm sure, taking place, right? Cities with no mandates.They still build with parking, but they build a bit more housing. And that's, you know, that's important, you know, is to build. And then over time, maybe they start building a lot more housing and a lot less parking. But initially right away, you know, you might just add two or three more units because you can, or you might add bedrooms on the units because a lot of times the parking requirements are based on bedrooms. So you're going to build studios because they have a lower parking requirement. You know, I mean, I know there's many factors to layouts, but that's one of them sometimes.Kevin K (44:41.752)Yeah, it seems like it's probably a classic like hockey stick, you know, adjustment curve where it'd be really slow and minimal for a number of years potentially, or just kind of modest. But then there comes a point where there's an inflection and other things, other things that don't really work well right now, you know, like better public transit, better bike, but just better alternative transportation all of a sudden starts to work more. And, and you probably get more things that are within a walking distance that you didn't have before.What do you say to people who say, well, you know, the parking requirements really don't matter because the investors, the lenders are going to require a certain amount anyway. And that's really where the stumbling block is. What do you, what do you say to that argument?Tony Jordan (45:28.585)I mean, I think if we're talking about apartments with zero parking, sure. I mean, I think that's, you know, it took, it took 10 years for Portland to find a developer who was willing to build a large, a mid -size apartment building with no parking. Once they did and it rented, then the investors were very happy to do it. So some of it is just the market's not proven. This is what I mentioned before, the inertia of, of just these people have business models.They have relationships with bankers, they have funding streams, people understand the product and so they know what to invest in. You're trying to change that. To build an apartment building with much less parking requires not just the developer but brokers. There's a lot of players that have to align. So in a way, yes. Now the fact is that we can't even start working on fixing those other problems that the parking mandate still exists.So like, if you know, like it's absolutely worth it. They're just overhead on your city too. I mean, like they just cause city staff spend time on this that they could be spending approving other permits. So like get rid of them and you know, if nothing changes, then nothing changed. But if we are actually then can, can be successful in, you know, I think a lot of the work like incremental development Alliance or other people who are, you know, trying to, you know,there's a whole set of education and building capacity for building these kinds, remembering how to build these kinds of communities. And so that's going to take a little while to build that capacity. But if we haven't prepped the garden, once again, that can't take root. That can't happen.Kevin K (47:12.792)You know, it's always so funny also when I think about like the politics of some of these things and the politics of this issue. I mean, you're talking about something which is essentially removing a requirement from your local government, which is typically thought of as like a conservative political approach. And yet almost all the reform happening is in blue states and blue cities, which is just kind of bizarre.I always think about it, it shows how upside down a lot of people's thinking is in regards to these issues. So, I mean, that being said, obviously, you know, a lot of the places you've mentioned, you know, are pretty dyed in the wool blue places politically. What are you seeing as any kind of positive trend in more like conservative or red states as well?Tony Jordan (48:08.553)It surely is confusing, right? Why some people would support these regulations. I think there's a bit of just team opposition that goes into this. Whoever proposes the policy first might receive opposition. Yeah, I think some of the reason why these reforms took root first in...Kevin K (48:23.832)Yeah, sure.Kevin K (48:28.216)I've got to be against it. They're my enemy. I've got to be against it no matter what.Tony Jordan (48:38.761)in liberal, more liberal or blue places was, well, that happens to be where the housing crisis hit first. There also are, there are very good reasons for every one of every political stripe to support parking mandates, but there may be more reasons if you are politically, if you're, you know, liberally aligned, you might believe, you know, you might be more concerned about climate change, right? And you might be more concerned about transit access. So those issues tack on to the, you know, you know, general market problem.and they give you a little more reason. There's more coalition members. I think, you know, now that said, Anchorage is an example where, you know, it was a mixed city council that had broad political support from both conservatives and liberals. You know, there are a lot of Midwest cities that are doing this that are not necessarily very liberal. I think it's just the messaging is taking a little...it's a little harder, you know, because of just coding to break through, but this should definitely be an issue that we can win on across the political spectrum. I think it's just, it has to be intentional and continue that education around what we're actually talking about here. And to some degree it finds out if people are really for real about what they say about, you know, markets or business, you know, activity. I...Kevin K (50:01.4)Yeah.Tony Jordan (50:06.121)If you're in chamber of commerce or something, I had a woman complained to me. She came up to me in Chuck Morrone in Minneapolis and St. Paul and said, you know, I'm from the such and such Avenue business association. I said, and she was opposing the bill in, in, in Minnesota. And I said, do you, does your association just, it only supports existing businesses, right? Like you don't care about entrepreneurship. Do you? And, and, you know, she was like, well, of course, but I was like, no, of course you wouldn't. I will say one group that is on the.like kind of more conservative side of the spectrum. You know, some like I went to a conference in Arizona, a one day symposium that was about like doing business in America. And it was from like kind of like a, you know, economic, you know, libertarian side. And some of those folks really understand the parking mandates. Like they get that this and, and the like Institute for Justice is like they work not only on parking mandates, but just other barriers to people beingeconomically free, like, you know, licensure requirements for hair braiding and things. It's one of those things that kind of fits into this, you know, once you see what this is being used for, which is often manipulation, right? Cities want to keep the parking mandates in place so they can sometimes just have more control over what businesses get to open or where they get to open. So. Yeah, exactly. And no one wants to give up their power, right? Like, that's one of the reasons it exists is because.Kevin K (51:26.04)Yeah, or leverage for negotiations.Tony Jordan (51:34.377)Yeah, people use them to decide where a restaurant can go as opposed to, it's not really about parking, right? Because they'll grant the variance somewhere else. They just don't want to have the bar next to where they like to hang out.Kevin K (51:50.072)Well, I mean, I do notice that on your map, Missouri and Kansas are not represented. So I hope that at some point we are within the next couple of years, we're working on some stuff to try to get us there locally. But yeah, it's a big hole. You're right. That's right. Branson eliminated theirs. Branson, interestingly enough, also has no building code. Or they were like, Missouri was one of the few states.Tony Jordan (51:59.817)What?Branson, Branson's got no mandates, right?Kevin K (52:18.712)God, my memory is going to fail me now because this has been a few years since I've thought about this issue. But for a long time, they were one of a handful of states that had no statewide building code adopted. And so cities and counties had to actually opt in to adopt one. And Branson did not have one for forever for a long time. So it's pretty interesting.Tony Jordan (52:28.329)huh.Tony Jordan (52:40.297)I think we're going to see a lot more activity. There's a lot of cities too. I know this isn't, you know, there's cities that have like Norman, Oklahoma is not on the map as a red dot because they maintain parking mandates for frat houses and some other housing alignments. So we're, we're pretty strict about who gets to be on the, on the dot. And, but there are a lot of places that are, that have done significant reforms. Hopefully we can tell more of those stories and highlight that. We just hired a policy director, Dan O 'Hara guess from, from strong towns.Kevin K (52:56.888)Okay. All right.Kevin K (53:08.312)Yeah, yeah.Tony Jordan (53:10.345)And we have an intern working this summer on kind of helping us to get more of an idea of where we can have a bigger impact in providing education and resources to the people on the ground. So I'm very excited about the potential for, you know, to see these. Right now reforms happen. Sometimes we know, like we knew Birmingham was going to, was working on getting rid of their mandates, but then other cities pop up where we haven't even had any contact. They might use our product, our maps or our resources, but.I wanna know, I wanna really, like I wanna know where the heat is coming from next so we can really, you know, hype it up and celebrate it.Kevin K (53:47.224)Yeah, I know. It's going to create like an impossible test for you since there's so many municipalities around the country. But there are those like, you know, the one I'm in, in Kansas City, Missouri, we have actually had some pretty good, I would say incremental reform at the city government level. And especially in Oregon, so it was passed last year that really is very helpful for infill residential development, sort of missing middle scale that basically just waived all parking requirements for that, which was nice.But we still have pretty onerous stuff in other parts of the city or other parts of the code. So it's very much piecemeal.Tony Jordan (54:27.561)Yeah, I think, I mean, obviously there's statewide reform progress and I know people are mixed, you know, that's tough because the cities want their local control. I think like, obviously if we're going to really deal with this problem, you know, that's probably necessary in a lot of places. It helps certainly to have a number of cities though, get rid of your mandates initially so they can be examples. And even I think anything that requires cities, I like it like if you can just get a city to open up and.and actually examine what these are and reckon with it. Shoop says one of the best pieces of advice he has to like someone who wants to get their city to get rid of mandates is take that paper, the pseudoscience of parking reform and, or pseudoscience of parking mandates, sorry, whoops. And, and give it to, you know, have a, have a planning commissioner, a city council person direct the staff to read this paper and prepare a memo as to why it's correct or wrong, right? Like,Kevin K (55:19.896)Hmm.Tony Jordan (55:20.393)I like it until like you go in your garage and you open up an old cooler and sometimes there's something really bad that you forgot in there. These mandates are like a fish that someone left in a cooler for 60 years, right? Like it's bad. You open it up and if you can force people to actually defend it, like I think that's what we need to do is say, okay, you don't want to get rid of these mandates, then it's on you to tell me why that they are correct. And so if we can shine some light on it, I think we'll start to see, you know, cities.in other communities get rid of them more readily because, you know, no one's going to want to step up and defend them anymore.Kevin K (55:59.928)It's pretty hard to defend. So when I think about Shoup and the work that he's done, especially if I go back to Pasadena, which is one of his favorite examples he loves to use in downtown Pasadena, I think about as much about parking management as anything and sort of balancing the on -street and off -street needs and figuring out the economics of it so it actually makes sense.How much of the parking management side do you all get into or track as part of your work?Tony Jordan (56:35.241)Well, one of our first things we ever put together was a or one of the first products we released that we actually are very proud of is a guidebook on parking benefit districts. It's a handbook for activists, right? And so this was written by one of our first interns, Evan Kimler. And it's like, I felt there was a need to. You have parking in the city, you have high cost free parking, you have, you know, various papers, but they're not.Kevin K (56:45.432)Okay.Tony Jordan (57:03.113)necessarily accessible or activism oriented. So we do promote parking. Parking benefit districts are a great idea. It's there's not it's such a synergistic thing. You know, you charge for parking, which would which helps to manage the demand and then you reinvest, which helps drive the demand lower. And then ideally, some point in the future, you don't have much more revenue because no one's parking, but you don't need it because you spent the money on making it more walkable. Great.We promote that. I talk about parking management every time I give a lecture. It's harder to track. We're starting to do this. We were just talking with some folks at IPMI, like, where are the data sets for this? How do we know? And so trying to figure out where there's good examples of data -driven parking management and good examples of permits. It's also a problem, potentially a problem. A lot of states have rules that prohibit cities fromyou know, actively manage their curb, maybe in a best practice. Like they don't allow them to, you know, charge parking for people with disability placards, which is leads to a lot of placard abuse and makes streets unavailable for people. Or they limit them from using demand -based pricing for permits. The permits can only be cost recovery, or they limit what they can spend money on, you know, from parking. Like you maybe you can only spend it on.parking garages, or maybe you can only spend it on, I mean, transit's not a bad thing, but San Francisco, I think, spends a lot of its net revenue from SF Park on transit. That's great, but there's also other things that maybe could be more impactful at a local level. So I think that's one case where I think we need to find out what the lay of the land is and then really start to highlight these examples. It's a harder political press because...Charging for things is not popular. But I think the other thing is that I think cities a lot of times don't go far enough. So they charge you, but you're not getting a value, right? If you paid a park and you still can't find a place to park, you're not happy. If you paid a park and you had a good experience, you know, that you're not, of course, I don't want to pay for anything in my life. I don't want to pay for a cup of coffee, but if I pay for one and it's bad, I'm upset. If I didn't pay for one and it's bad, you know.Tony Jordan (59:27.305)I'm not as much. So I think like once you're charging, go all the way and charge enough that there's an open space on every block, right? Like Shoop says, you know, maybe 85 % or whatever it is so that someone driving down the street can find a space, even if they have to pay for it. Like we're willing to pay for things as American consumers. We do it all the time.Kevin K (59:46.168)Yeah. So it does seem to me like this kind of work is the sort of work that developers and investors and lenders would want to support. But you say you're not really seeing much of that at this stage?Tony Jordan (59:59.945)Yeah, I think that, I mean, the funding in general for this is tough because we're a national organization. A lot of people are locally focused, a lot of developers, right? They're locally focused. So they want to see, like they're more concerned about what's going on in their community. And if they either, you know, if they have parking mandates, you know, like we can't promise we're not an organization that comes in and drops people out of a helicopter to like, you know, to work on something.We're helping to build just a national environment and movement to make these policies happen better. So, and I think once again, the developers that make a lot of money right now make it in the current regulatory environment, right? Like that's the end the ones. So we need the small scale developers as they start to, or the incremental or the ones that get it, as they start to maybe prove this point, maybe we'll see some people paying it forward.Kevin K (01:00:45.848)Do you know?Tony Jordan (01:00:58.377)you know, on what it is. But I recognize like, you know, yeah, the people who get it, they're just trying to get their, they can't build the projects that will make them the money because they're, you know, they're not legal yet.Kevin K (01:00:59.256)Yeah. Yeah.Kevin K (01:01:12.216)Yeah, that is an interesting twist. It probably is more of like the smaller and mid -sized developers who stand to benefit the most from parking reform. The large ones are going to negotiate their projects no matter what anyway. It's a different animal. But the smaller and mid -sized ones are less likely to have the kind of extra cash sitting around to support these efforts.Tony Jordan (01:01:23.881)Right.Tony Jordan (01:01:33.769)Right. I mean, and I'm not saying that the bigger developers, they don't fight the reforms at least generally. They're just not, they're not at contrary. I think this is, we find this across the whole housing zoning reform spectrum. You know, everyone thinks that it's developer, you know, developers financing this and it's, it's not, it's, I mean, mostly it's not even finance. Most of this work is done by people who care passionately about the place where they live or the, there's the, the future of, you know, for their children.And they're driven by that passion. And we're just all trying, you know, the more we can fund these endeavors, they have a ability to have a larger capacity because not everyone can, you know, can spend their time on these things without being paid. So I think, you know, I think the awareness is getting there, you know, and eventually, you know, I think we'll start to see more resources.put towards this, you know, some of it is just similar to when it took a lot of people. People wanted to see a building work in Portland before they would build more without parking. People want to see this as a viable organizing area. They want to see the successes coming and then, you know, then the, then they'll invest in it. Right. You kind of kind of prove, prove the point first on it when you're doing something a different way.Kevin K (01:02:58.2)Yeah. Well, Tony, this has been great. I really appreciate the conversation. Before we wrap up, I have to know, so how many Don Schupe posters or bobbleheads do you have?Tony Jordan (01:03:10.825)Those things don't really exist, unfortunately. I don't have nearly the collection of parking paraphernalia as I'd like. I've got an Andy Singer cartoon, you know, No Exit, that's about parking that I got. I have a weird poster on my wall here that's of a mural someone did on a garage door in Seattle. It's Jesus.Kevin K (01:03:14.264)I'm out.Tony Jordan (01:03:36.521)trying to find a parking space because there's a church across the street from this person's house and the people would park in their driveway. So they made this mural. It's by this guy named Two Things. I'm starting to build it up, but no, I mean, I have a couple of autographed books and some photos, but it's one of those things. It's hard to find paraphernalia. Mostly it's books that I've got, you know.Kevin K (01:03:43.064)Ha ha ha.Kevin K (01:03:54.712)Yeah, yeah, that's great. Tony, thanks so much. I appreciate the work and the time. What's the best way for people to find you?Tony Jordan (01:04:03.689)You can go to our website, parkingreform .org. You can, I encourage people to become a member. It's a sliding scale membership. Support the work we're doing with a contribution and you can get in our Slack and get invited to our events. And that's where all our resources are. So yeah, parkingreform .org and we're on social media. You can find us by typing in parking reform, our parking reform network.Kevin K (01:04:30.264)Very good, very good. Well, it's incredibly important work and I'm thankful there are people out there like you, you know, looking at this holistically and nationally and it's crazy how the situation we're in and hopefully we can continue to find our way out of this mess into something a little more rational.Tony Jordan (01:04:48.809)Yeah, thanks for helping me spread the word.Kevin K (01:04:50.744)You bet. All right. Thanks, Tony. Take care.

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Talking Streetcars and Transit with Mr. KC Streetcar
25 Haz· The Messy City Podcast
It’s no secret in the world of transit and streetcars that Kansas City has had one of the most successful new streetcar lines in the country. For a two-mile “starter line,” it’s had an outsized impact on our city’s reputation and civic image. Today, I talk with the man behind RideKC Streetcar, Tom Gerend.
Tom is a planner by education, but work took him eventually into the world of transportation planning and now, operations. We talk about how a planner ends up in this kind of role, and how he’s managed the start up and operations of a new Authority and transit line. Along the way, we talk about RideKC Streetcar’s unique funding stream, and what is next for the future.
Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.
Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.
Intro: “Why Be Friends”
Outro: “Fairweather Friend”

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"Coach" Carson connects Financial Independence to Strong Towns
18 Haz· The Messy City Podcast
As I said right off the beginning of this interview, I really love it when worlds collide in my own life. It’s one of the more joyful aspects of doing a podcast, and talking with people in real life.
Chad “Coach” Carson is someone in the Financial Independence world that I’ve listened to and followed for some time. He’s a very genuine guy, and his particular niche focuses on using small-scale real estate investment to build financial freedom for yourself and your family. Check out his website, YouTube channel and podcast.
We ran into each other at the Strong Towns National Gathering in May, and I knew immediately we’d have a lot to discuss. This episode is the result. Among other things, we talk about his non-profit in Clemson, SC to build a trail network, his family’s 17 month stay in Ecuador, and how we all can talk about small / incremental development. There’s just so much good content in this episode, I don’t want to give away any more.
That said, here are a few more links worth sharing:
For a taste of his content, check out Chad’s recent episode with Paula Pant on “7 Powerful Principles for Financial Freedom.”
ChooseFI House Hacking page
Incremental Development Alliance
Bigger Pockets
Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.
Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.
Intro: “Why Be Friends”
Outro: “Fairweather Friend”
Episode Transcript:
Kevin K (00:00.89)
Welcome back to the Messy City Podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. One of the things that I really enjoy is when worlds collide in my life. Things that I have interest in that are in very different worlds find themselves aligned with each other. And I'm really fortunate to have a guest today that's a classic example of that. My wife and I have had a kind of a long interest in what's called the financial independence movement. And, and,
You know, a lot of that we can talk about what all that means for people. I hope we do, but, a lot of it is really just kind of creating resilience in your own life. and, one of the people in that world that I have, noticed for quite a long time and followed and with, with some interest is a guy named, Chad, Carson, otherwise known as coach Carson. And, he's, agreed to join me today. So I'm delighted to have you here, Chad. Thanks for coming.
Chad Carson (00:56.397)
Yeah, thanks for having me, Kevin. It is fun to see different interests collide on the internet. That's always a good time.
Kevin K (01:03.034)
Yeah, yeah. So we actually ran into each other at the Strong Towns National Gathering in Cincinnati. And it was just kind of funny. I had seen enough of Chad's videos to kind of have an idea what he looked like. I'm looking around the room and I see this guy in the back and I'm like, that looks a little bit like Coach Carson, you know? Is that really him? And so, and lo and behold, it was, so we had a chance to just chat briefly on site. But...
For those chat for those who don't know you and I would imagine probably most of my audience doesn't know who you are And the work that you do. Why don't you talk a little bit about what you spend most of your time dealing with?
Chad Carson (01:40.013)
Yeah, I also have a lot of intersections of worlds, but for the last 21 years, my professional career has been an entrepreneur and I've been entrepreneur in the real estate investing space. So I graduated from Clemson University and I was a football player there. So that was like how I paid for school. And I was, I thought I was going to go like the route of being a medical in the medical field and applied to medical schools, but I was just so tired from playing football that I said, I'm just going to take a year or two off and just like take a break before I go into that. And then.
that gave me space to kind of explore an itch I had for being an entrepreneur. And I was lucky enough to have family members. My dad was in the rental, had rental properties growing up and I never really liked them. Actually, when I was a middle schooler, he used to take me over to a property he just bought. There was a fixer upper and he's like, hey, clean up this pile of trash, Chad, and paint this wall. And I was like, this is horrible. Like, who ever want to fix up a property or turn this nasty place around? And sure enough, when I got out of college, I was like,
That's actually pretty interesting. Let me, let me see how that goes. And so I got into that business of really the finding fixer upper properties. initially just finding them for other people. I was what's in the net world. I was called a bird dog where I would just go in. I didn't have any money. I didn't like a bird dog. I wasn't the one actually hunting the birds, but I would just point to them and people who had resources and money would buy them and I would make a little finders fee every time that happened. And, but that taught me the business. It made me a little bit of money.
I was living at home at that time and it just got me, I decided, you know what? I don't ever want to do a real job. I'm just going to keep doing this. And it grew into a business where I found the funding for those deals. I got a business partner. The two of us found other partners to put up the money or private financing. We started flipping houses, fixing them up, reselling them just to make some money. And then we got into the rental property business from there. And that's really what I, kind of the end story of my rental, my real estate business was,
planting these little seeds of buy and hold properties. I started off house hacking. I did, you know, I lived in one unit, rented the other units out. And so that's, that's been my core kind of financial career, how I made money. And, but then that has evolved into other things, which is why I met you at Strong Towns as well. So once I started, you know, got past like the business side of real estate, of, of making money and the finances, which is all interesting, also just started thinking about
Chad Carson (04:01.133)
the community and like, why is this neighborhood the way it is? Why is this neighborhood a fixer upper and this was not? And started volunteering in my community at local advocacy meetings and just doing that. And so that led to a couple of things. One is I started just being frustrated with connectivity in my town. And so in 2014, I and some other people in our town started a nonprofit trying to connect the parks and the downtowns and with a trail system.
Little did I know that most towns that did that had like a rail railway that they was abandoned and they could like take over. And so I had to like crash course over five to six years just learning about, you know, easements and right aways and the DOT and how difficult it is to work with the DOT. But we've, yeah, we could talk more about that one, but that's, that's been a passion project of mine, which is why I got interested in strong towns and local advocacy. And along the way, separate from that, I also started teaching other people.
how to do the thing that I love doing with real estate investing. And so I started a blog and a podcast and a YouTube channel and what started off as a hobby became a real thing. And people started reading it to my surprise and people started watching my YouTube videos. So I have like a little media business with that. And I have a nonprofit that I'm a board member of and a founding member of that I'm super passionate about in my local community. And then the real estate investing actually takes a lot less of my time these days, but it's still kind of the main thing.
Kevin K (05:04.442)
Mm -hmm.
Kevin K (05:27.098)
Yeah, and so you've got a super active YouTube channel with a good following and you're putting up a video, what about once a week or so?
Chad Carson (05:36.109)
Yeah, the what's I have a coach Carson YouTube channel. It's also the podcast. So my podcast has evolved into the YouTube podcast as well. So that's that's my main thing there.
Kevin K (05:45.53)
Okay. And this may be a funny thing for you. So I think probably the first time I heard you was on the choose FI podcast a long time ago. and so, I actually moderate the choose FI house hacking, Facebook page. Yeah. I've bugged those guys into creating it and I I'm a terrible moderator. I mean, I don't do anything. I don't do anything I should do with it to try to, you know, encourage more conversation, but.
Chad Carson (05:55.533)
Mm -hmm.
Chad Carson (06:03.597)
nice.
Chad Carson (06:09.305)
Yeah.
Kevin K (06:15.418)
It's incredible how quickly that started and zoomed over 5 ,000 members and everything else.
Chad Carson (06:21.005)
Yeah. Yeah. I became friends with Brad Barrett, who was one of the founders of choose FI and stills their hosts of their podcasts. He's become a good friend. And yeah, that was, it's kind of like strong towns for me. It was like, I was doing these things. I'm trying to save money and try to improve my financial life and really just get more autonomy. Like you, I think you were talking about some version of that earlier. I just, I just didn't want to go work for the man. That was always my motivation. I wanted to have space to read, to think, to have interesting stuff. And I just didn't want to go.
and be in somebody else's treadmill. And that's pretty much what the, to me, what the financial independence movement is about is it kind of got hung up in the retire retirement idea that you're going to retire early at 35 years old and sit on a beach with a pina colada. The opposite seems to be the truth. The truth, like a lot of my friends like Brad Barrett, Mr. Money Mustache is a big famous blog that who is in the financial independence movement. Paula Pant is another blogging podcasting friend of mine. All these people.
they, you build these resources of financial independence early, you save money, you're frugal, but you do it so that you have this abundance of time and flexibility and you can then cash that option, those options in however you want. And for me and my family, my wife is a Spanish teacher. And so foreign languages have always been sort of our, our mutual passion and living particularly Latin America and Spain. And so we took our kids to live in Ecuador for 17 months in 2017.
And our, they were three and five years old. We wanted them to become fluent early in their life. And that financial independence, having rental properties back at home, we could kind of put that on pause for a little bit and still have some income coming in that allowed us to do that personal passion project. And, and, and do it. So that, that is to me, that's, that's financial independence, advocacy and local communities is financial independence, being able to do something. This for me has been like almost like a full -time job being the
working on, on trail transportation, advocacy, and, but I don't, I don't want to get paid. I don't care if I get paid. I, in fact, I'm spending a lot of money, you know, donating a lot of money on it. And that's great. I love that because there's some entrepreneurial ventures that aren't, I don't think always best suited for, for profit. You know, there's, you make your profit over here and then you free up this time and this energy to solve problems in your community that they're honestly, there's just not many people who have the capacity to do that. So that's been a lot of fun.
Kevin K (08:42.234)
Yeah, I think we, I'm not sure how much people talk about that enough in the financial independence world that one of the great luxuries it gives you is it gives you that ability to devote time and potentially money in a philanthropic way in your own community and make a difference there. I think that's really cool. I remember reading about how you took the family abroad for over a year and that was kind of a source of inspiration for us as well. We've...
Chad Carson (08:57.005)
Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin K (09:06.97)
We've, you know, my wife and I have had this idea for, for quite some time that we would do something like that. Of course we haven't done it yet, but we've done, you know, we did, and there's still time. The kids are still young enough. They're six and eight. but, we, we did take them, in 2018, I guess it was, we took them to Europe for a month. and, we, you know, I approached it from the standpoint that I was, I was a big proponent of house hacking, but I didn't really know what anybody called it.
Chad Carson (09:13.805)
Still time.
Kevin K (09:36.09)
and so actually done it three different times in three different ways in my life, just different life stages. And, like to your point, I think one of the things that we really loved is, when we were living in Savannah, and we had, we owned a townhouse that had a carriage house in the back. and the carriage house produced a lot of rental income for us. So then when we had started having kids, my wife kind of, she wanted to quit her job.
and stay home for a while. But obviously that's a financial hit to do it for people, you know, with two of us were working professional jobs while having that income from the house hack just completely made it work. And it just enabled a lifestyle for us that we really wanted to live. And so we always felt like that was kind of a great luxury effect of that.
Chad Carson (10:27.085)
I think it's undersold. House hacking is something, if you look at the average budget, last time I looked at it in the United States, I think 30 to 40 % of most people's budget is with housing. And if you, so you can, the hack is the literal word. Like if you could figure out how to do what you did, what I've done, and either cut your housing expense in half, or maybe like in my case, I really did well and eliminated my housing expense altogether by living in a fourplex and living in unit number two and renting the other three out.
I mean, I was living positive, $100 per month as a young entrepreneur. And, you know, so my wife was able to do the same thing. She was a Spanish teacher. She wanted to stay home a little bit and I wanted to take a break too. And so it's, it's amazing when you cut those like core expenses of housing and then you add the car. And for us, it was just, you know, just being smart with the car, not doing something that's crazy, but also this is where transportation infrastructure comes in. If you can have one car instead of having two cars, I mean, what, what is that seven to 10 ,000 bucks per year or whatever the latest number is.
I mean, so you started adding up like a thousand a month for housing and five to 600 bucks for a car. I mean, you're talking a couple thousand bucks a month for an average family. That's huge. Like after tax, you know, if you're talking about before tax, that'd be 3000, maybe 4 ,000 a month. So it's a really powerful tool for a lot of people and it gives you flexibility, it gives you freedom. And so that's what's interesting to me about housing, not because...
Everybody needs to be a real estate developer investor, although they could, but just doing a little bit like that, like that can give you leverage. It can give you options. You can tell, tell people, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do this because you have your housing expense taken care of.
Kevin K (12:07.354)
Yeah, I think that for me that's where the alignment was always interesting in my own kind of long and winding career in working in the design and planning of walkable places. And there were always a lot of spin -off interests in that, different things that I thought were great for it, I think is better for you from a health standpoint. The more that you can just move your body as part of your daily routine, it's better for you. But the economic benefits.
You know, we often don't talk enough about that. I always used to tell people if you can, you don't have to get rid of your cars, but like if you can just live car light, you know, and, and so if you're a family of four, instead of having three cars, if you can have two or one and live off of that, the amount of money that you free up to do other things, it's, especially when you, when that starts to accumulate over time, it's incredible. It's, it's, it's absolutely life -changing.
Chad Carson (13:02.189)
Yeah, that's one of the basic principles of the financial independence movement is just understanding basic compounding math. The $1 ,000 a month is not $1 ,000 per month. It's that number compounded. If you could, if you can invest that money, for example, and it grows at 7%, I'm putting myself on the spot here because I don't know the exact amount that compounds, but you know, that, that number turns into 20 ,000 or a hundred thousand bucks over a 10, 20 year period. And if you start like stacking those up, that's, that's really the difference between.
having some, even if it's not financial independence, it's like some level of like autonomy where you have options with your job, where you're not living paycheck to paycheck and housing and transportation are always, from a personal finance standpoint, are always at the crux of that. And that's what I think the financial independence movement focuses on is I love also focusing on it from the advocacy standpoint and the local community standpoint. But if you just take the perspective of the individual, this is one of those things, just your housing choice, your car choice, if possible.
you can really change the trajectory of your own career, your own family's ability to have some options.
Kevin K (14:07.162)
Yeah, I think I remember one time, it might have been just like a joke or something on Twitter, but it was somebody who said something the effect of, if it weren't for all the money we spend on cars, we'd be a nation of millionaires. Anyway, so you start having this interest in bike trails. So what was kind of the genesis of that? Was it more just trying to figure out other ways to get around, sort of a healthy living thing, or how did you become interested?
Chad Carson (14:20.045)
Yeah, there we go.
Chad Carson (14:36.909)
I've always been into fitness and exercise and athletics. So I think part of that was just, I walk around a lot. I just do that and to think, but I was also, I had young kids, two or three year old, and I was pushing her in a stroller. And that really gave me that sort of visceral understanding of the community's infrastructure. And in a negative way, I would try to, I live in a neighborhood that has a small neighborhood of single family houses, and I have to cross a state.
Kevin K (14:54.906)
Mm -hmm.
Chad Carson (15:03.085)
what I didn't know is a state road, but it's a state road. Almost every road in South Carolina is a state road, by the way. That's another story. But they, you cross this road and it's people, it's 35 miles per hour, but people go really fast. There's some blind spots. There's no sidewalks. And it's just, it's not, it's very unfriendly to pedestrians. And I felt that in a visceral way as a dad who's protective of his little girl. And I'm trying to play Frogger to go across the street to get to the park that's a quarter mile away.
And I was just thinking to myself, this is ridiculous. Like this is, this is insane that a neighborhood like this is in this, a beautiful park down there with this, you know, walking along a Creek and a playground that we can't get there safely on foot. How hostile is this? And so that, that spurred me to then go to the local meetings and say, all right, I'm going to volunteer. There's a local 10 year comprehensive plan. And I sat in all of these, I, you know, contributed as I could as a real estate entrepreneur, but the, this connectivity idea.
kept coming up over and over again, like Clemson University, Clemson where I live is a small college town. We have 25 ,000 college students now. We have a lot of faculty members, but it's a really tiny town. I mean, 17 ,000 was one of the last census numbers. I think it's 20 ,000 or so now. It's on a lake, it's beautiful. We have 15 ,000 acres of forest land around the community. So like you're five minutes from biking trails, walking trails, waterfalls. And it's just like this little.
nature, natural paradise with the lake as well. But it's horrible connectivity from, it's just like, it's a little, I grew up in Atlanta. It's like a microcosm of Atlanta because everything's built for getting around in a car. And so I realized that I started listening to planners talking about that. And my question as an entrepreneur was like, okay, well, who's working on this? What department's working on this? Or is anybody taking any action on this? And they were like, no.
No, it's we're going to put it in the comprehensive plan. I was like, is it? Okay. That's great. Was it in the last comprehensive plan? Yeah, it was in the last comprehensive plan too. And so I got, I got this kind of what many entrepreneurs do is when you see a problem, you start just figuring it like, how are we going to solve this? Let's go solve it. And it's sort of in a naive way. I said, I'm going to just ask them questions. And there was one professor at Clemson university who is an architectural professor actually, and his students had a kind of cross curriculum class where they had put together this idea.
Chad Carson (17:23.021)
something called the Green Crescent Trail. And the Crescent is the Crescent train line that goes between New York City and New Orleans, so the Crescent City. And so they kind of been inspired by that idea of connectivity of the railroad and that history in our town of students who went to Clipsy University used to get off the train and walk off the train down into Clipsy University. They get their barber haircut and it was a military school at that point and they'd walk on the campus. And so that kind of historical connection with the Crescent line and then green.
and the spaces around us and the connection to the land was the inspiration. And they had this story, this whole idea, they had maps and it was amazing. And I saw the little video and I got so motivated by that, that I said, like, this has to happen. Like, this is really cool. And I talked to the professor, I talked to some of the students, students rotate in and out of class a lot. So they move on to their jobs and their careers in another city. But I started meeting with people and say, we gotta do this. And some other entrepreneurs, that professor.
and we formed a nonprofit and one thing led to another, but we started getting some money for a master plan study. We started talking to landowners and I can go into all the details and all the mistakes and frustrations that we had, but we started making progress and that was 2014. So that was 10 years ago, whenever we started it.
Kevin K (18:38.874)
So I mean, yeah, I do have some questions just getting into the weeds a little bit, especially for people who have an interest in doing something similar. I guess the first question is like, you start identifying this problem. Like, who do you know how to call the very first time? Just try to get a hold of somebody at the city planning department? I mean, Clemson's a small town, so people are more accessible there. But who did you figure out who to call?
Chad Carson (19:02.029)
are the city planner was very friendly. And she she has moved on to another town, but I still kind of have connections with her on Facebook. And she she was the one who said, Yeah, this professor is working on it. And yes, connectivity is really important. Let's try she was one of those young, just optimistic planners and just had had a good head is very friendly. So she her name is Jennifer and she was she was great. She gave me some good feedback. I wish I'd heard your podcast. I wish I'd had strong towns. I wish I'd had like, when I read the walkable city by Jeff speck, I was just like,
Kevin K (19:16.922)
huh. Yeah.
Kevin K (19:25.57)
I'm going to go ahead and close the video.
Chad Carson (19:30.977)
my God, there's a world of people out here trying to do this thing too. Like this is, this is great. so I, I didn't have all those resources right away, but I just sort of fumbled around, ask questions, talk to professors being in a university is kind of nice. Cause there's others professors who are urban planners. There's professors who are architecture students or architecture focuses on the community. So I just started asking questions and talking to people, but really approaching it. I think the entrepreneurial approach is you stumble along, you set a short -term goal.
You run into a wall that didn't work, turned around and go another direction. And I did a whole lot of like bumping into walls. And, and, but I think the thing we did well was like having a vision, like just having, so we, as soon as we could, we started getting a name and a pictures and maps and talking to the community. And we didn't know exactly what we were doing, but we sure were dreaming big and had a vision. And we were trying to, I think the thing I, I, and some of our other early members tapped into was just.
this emotion that community members have of wanting to make their place better. And we made that our mission. We said, our mission is to connect the places we love in our community with a safe alternative transportation network. We want to make it safe for me to push my kid in a stroller to the park. I've told that story hundreds of times. And then other people started saying, yeah, I wish I could walk to the local downtown and that's a quarter of a mile away. Or we have a lot of international students in town who live in these apartments.
and they're walking in the gutter, the ditch on the side of the road to try to get to the bus or to try to go to the grocery store because it's just not doable. And so I think there's been a variety of different people from the practical transportation side of things, from students, but then really the people we had to get on board were the local community members who actually don't really care anything about, many of them don't really care anything about practical, you know, commuting anywhere, going to the grocery store. They wanted to do it for recreation. And so we've sort of had to tap into like the recreational trail movement plus,
the actual practical use of transportation, which I was interested in, and try to connect those two and figure out how to get funding and to put all that together.
Kevin K (21:31.993)
Yeah. Yeah, there's actually, so there's a guy in Dallas named Jason Roberts who created the Better Block, which is a pretty cool deal. And he has a great TED talk that's out there all the time where he talks a lot about, especially early on, just naming, naming something, whatever it is, even if it's like you and one other person, just give it a name, create a logo, create a website. It's super easy. And then all of a sudden people think it's a real thing. Now there's a lot to that. So, so.
Chad Carson (21:57.069)
Yeah, exactly.
Kevin K (22:01.53)
Then how did you go about, you said at some point you started finding some funding. What was the nature of that funding and how did you figure out how to make that happen?
Chad Carson (22:11.277)
Yeah, we had a local county council person who saw the vision, I guess, and it was inspired by it. And he had some recreational funds from the county that year that he could allocate. And I think it was $25 ,000. He allocated that 25 to our idea to do a feasibility study. And then the city of Clemson put in 5 ,000, the town of Central put in 1 ,000. We got Southern Wesleyan University, which is, there's a university in this little town of Central next to Clemson.
They were on board and then the city, I think the Clemson University also chimed in a little bit, although we had a hard time getting Clemson University on board at first, ironically. But it's basically four entities, four local entities plus the county, all chipped in money, but mainly the county. And then we went through a process of hiring a local landscape architecture firm, I think Alta Planning ended up doing that. I guess not local, but.
Kevin K (23:01.466)
Mmm, yeah.
Chad Carson (23:04.205)
So they, they came in, that was a lot of fun just to see how their process worked. And to this day, I still look at some of their maps and some of their estimates. If they put, they put cost estimates together, they put their maps. It was a great plan, but the problem I learned was, and they told us this at the time was like, I think all the city council members and other people we were trying to pitch for this idea, they saw the numbers on that plan, which were, you know, $30 million, $40 million. And it's just, just ridiculously big number for a small town.
And understandably, they're like, yeah, this is not, we can't do this. And so we had a hard time figuring out the first little thing to do. And, you know, the Strongtown style, like what's the first little $500 thing or a hundred dollar thing we could do. And I knew that concept and we knew that concept, but it really had a hard time getting traction on that, but particularly because a lot of the segments we were trying to build on were in DOT right aways where we had to get a couple of private easements.
I'll also say that even the well -meaning people inside the city government, there's always a propensity to do bigger and more formal stuff to build something really, we don't build things like dirt trails in our town. We build nice stuff in our town. That was like the attitude I got a lot. And I said that was a really difficult thing to bump up against because they would, with good intentions say, well, let's go get this grant. Let's go do this thing. And the grant would take six months to apply for. We wouldn't get it. And then we'd miss a bunch of momentum. And then.
They were kind of used to this though. They're like, yeah, we'll just wait until the next cycle. And three years go by and nothing's happening. And that was really, really frustrating.
Kevin K (24:39.034)
Yeah, yeah. Once you get, learn a little bit about the government funding cycle, especially for transportation, it's very eye opening. So at what point did you come across the Strong Towns conversation then?
Chad Carson (24:52.429)
Yeah, I think I started listening to the podcast and I was interested in the financial angle as an investor. I just, I found it fascinating that towns were not really budgeting for their liabilities. And I compared it as a real estate investor. This is something we actually deal with all the time because we have a house that you buy from 1950. It's a single family house and you have these things called capital expenses that we all, if you're an experienced investor, you know, those are the thing that come up and bite you.
that most rookie investors underestimate the amount of repairs and maintenance they're going to have to do. But as I learned kind of the school hard knocks, these $8 ,000 heating and air bills or $10 ,000 roof or a sewer line that has to be replaced from the house to the road, those will eat up your cashflow for the next two years. And so you have to start creating sinking funds or having reserve funds to pay for those things if you ever want to have a real business, a real rental property business.
And it was fascinating to hear that cities aren't doing that. Like, wow, okay, so we have these 70 year capexes that are, you know, they're not even budgeting for it. And that the, you're building these new construction properties. And so I was just fascinated by that math and by the lack of conversation about that and lack of awareness of that in many places. And so that was interesting, but also just, I was just energized by the advocacy, the local, there's other people doing this. There's other people working on it.
The fact that you can use social media to try to garner support in your community. So for all those reasons, I was, I was on board and I think I read, happy city and walkable cities, but it was other things first. And they kind of brought me into the strong towns world as well.
Kevin K (26:32.09)
And then, have you been able to use that with any of your friends or neighbors or anything as a way to help broaden the conversation?
Chad Carson (26:41.229)
Yeah, I think I bought all the city council members, walkable city at one point. And, you know, probably, I'm probably that annoying local person who brings up, sends, I send city council members regularly, strong towns, articles and different things. And, so yeah, I'm, I'm using that resource a bunch and particularly YouTube videos I find in podcasts, I think are helpful books are great too, but I think having little snippets of content, something somebody can watch in 10 minutes can really change their perspective and a video.
As a YouTuber, I've really become a believer that YouTube videos, they use all the senses to try to influence somebody, right? You're seeing something, you can use visuals, you can show maps, you can show music if you want to. So I've really enjoyed using that as well. And I have ambitions myself to create more content. Like I create a lot of real estate oriented content, but I have a long list of ideas I would love to create videos on and shorts on. And I've...
10 different intersections that I want to go out and show how awful they are in town. And I think social media and video and what Strong Towns has done really well is just using media to leverage their voice and be able to make a change. I think that's one of the best things about the media revolution we have now. Small people with not many resources can make good enough content to do, it goes viral and makes a big difference.
Kevin K (28:02.49)
Yeah, I'm always amazed that I'll stumble on some sort of YouTube channel that I didn't even know existed that was related to like urban planning or whatever. And I'll check it out and they have like 600 ,000 subscribers or something. It's just like, wow, where's that? Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, some of the folks out there, like not just bikes and others who have like literally millions of subscribers and produce really beautiful, incredible content on a regular basis. So yeah, you're right. It's, it's cool. I think I'm.
Chad Carson (28:14.093)
Exactly. There's a big audience. Big audience. Isn't that amazing? Yeah.
Chad Carson (28:28.621)
Exactly.
Kevin K (28:31.514)
find myself increasingly behind the times on some of that stuff. Yeah.
Chad Carson (28:33.997)
You got a podcast that this is great. This is the medium people are listening to.
Kevin K (28:40.218)
I actually, the funny thing is I actually created a couple of videos probably almost 20 years ago at this point that related more specifically to like street design. And it was really fun to do, but it was so early on and I, you know, I, the technology wasn't quite as good or as inexpensive yet. So I actually hired like a marketing firm to create them for me. And it was, it was really fun. And, and I actually got, they got a ton of views and I was excited for that, but it was just having a hard time justifying.
you know, paying that amount of money to keep doing those sorts of things.
Chad Carson (29:09.933)
Yeah. Well, if you want to experiment and do a couple of pilot projects, I've got my editors on the call and ready. I've got a graphic designer. So let's collab and we'll make a couple of cool videos and test them out on Coach Carson.
Kevin K (29:20.858)
I would love to do that. Yeah, I'd love to do that. Like you, I have a longer list than I'll ever be able to get to of things like that. So one thing I'm curious about, so it was, you said it was Ecuador where you and your family went for 17 months. Is that right? So how did that experience of living in a foreign country, how did that kind of shape your idea about how to get around a place? I would imagine, I mean, I'm going to make an assumption. It could be totally wrong here, but the assumption you're probably living in an older,
Chad Carson (29:35.213)
Correct, yes it was.
Kevin K (29:50.17)
city where you were walking around most of the time.
Chad Carson (29:53.069)
Yes, we lived in Cuenca, Ecuador. So Cuenca is a third biggest city in Ecuador. And Ecuador, by the way, is just an amazing country. To me, it's a lot like Costa Rica was probably 30 years ago, 40 years ago, in that it has, from an ecological standpoint, it's just amazing. It's got rainforest in the, it's got the Amazon basin rainforest on one side of the country. It's got highland mountains. So we lived in, Cuenca is in the highlands, it's 8 ,000 feet up.
8200 feet or so is the kind of the base of this place and you have mountains around that. And then you have the coast and of course the Galapagos Islands, which have a lot of history with biology. I was a biology major, so I just loved going to the Galapagos and getting to study that. So it's just amazing place. People are really amazing. I love the food there and a lot of, you know, so many fruits and local foods, but from a walkability standpoint, we, we chose, I kind of learned how important walkability was to me when we started choosing where we wanted to live.
And we, we look for parks, we look for the downtown and then we found residential areas near those places. It's the top of the list. Like there's a lot of other criteria. Of course we wanted to be safe. We wanted to have other things, but walkability has been and still is like the top of my list. And the cool thing about going to another country is you can see there's different approaches to, how they built their cities. This was a colonial city. So we had like the kind of the Spanish square in the middle and it's a public, it's amazing.
Spanish squares are amazing public spaces because people use them. There's benches around, there's trees, there's the church on one side, there's the civics building on the other side. They're playing, you know, in the 1700s or 1500s, it depends when. So that was kind of the center of town. We were kind of off that kind of old colonial town, but relatively close. And the whole town was built around parks, was built around that center, but it was also...
you know, I think resources are an issue. It's not like they had more resources than an American city. But most people, the thing that struck me was a lot of the people like my Spanish teacher who I met with every week, he rode a bus from the suburbs into town every single day. He walked around a lot. And people didn't do this because it was just something they wanted to do. let me let me be a walk in a walkable town. This is the entire system of transportation was built around people who couldn't afford a car.
Chad Carson (32:16.493)
And so it was out of reach for most people, even like he was a teacher, he taught me on the side and he taught English at an elementary school. So he was like lower middle class, but for him to get a loan to get a car or to have enough money was just completely out of reach. So there's this whole system of both public transportation officially from the city buses. There's also just people walking and on paths that are kind of necessary to get around, but there's also an informal.
transportation system that if anybody's traveled in Latin America, you'll see how this works. It's like people standing on the side of the road and when they go by, you just kind of raise your finger up and somebody eventually might pick you up. And so we did that several times where we missed the bus and this like delivery truck came by and said, you need a ride in? And we talked to him in Spanish and we'd sit in the back of the delivery truck and offer them some money and go to town. So like, there's just this enormous kind of organic system of.
of transportation that was fascinating to see, but walkability was just kind of implied. Like everybody knew you, all right, yeah, you have to make it walkable because it's just for survival and people have to be able to do this.
Kevin K (33:24.346)
How did your kids react to being in that environment?
Chad Carson (33:29.165)
they were three and five at the time. So I think they were a little too young to like be fully aware of what they were getting into, but it was beautiful to see them sort of integrate themselves. And they had about seven or eight words of Spanish when we started. And as a three -year -old, you don't have that many, that many words anyway. So it was okay. But then by about seven, eight months in, I had a head start. I had learned Spanish. I wasn't great at it. My wife was very fluent, but I was way ahead of them. But by seven, eight months in,
We were sitting around the dinner table talking Spanish and they were correcting me saying, Papa, no se dice eso. And they would kind of wag their finger at me, Spanish Ecuadorian style and, and correct my Spanish, which was amazing. So the language they just really took to, they made friends locally. but then also, you know, they just kind of get used to, to being there that we, at first, we first started walking around the complaint and why not? I don't want to walk around. But by the end it was just, just what we did. You just, you walk everywhere. And I think that's sort of stuck with them a little bit.
Kevin K (34:28.89)
Yeah, I've often talked in presentations that, especially people my age and sort of our general generation, that it really was a formative thing for when a lot of us like traveled overseas. And if you got to spend any length of time living in a foreign country and just kind of experiencing what it's like, because most of the world, frankly, you are living in a place where...
still the backbone of getting around is walking. We're a little unique in that regard in the United States. And I always tell people American cities used to all be that way too. We used to all be walking cities until about the 1920s or so. But it's definitely like it really gets, it really affects your thinking and your perspective on a lot of things, especially like a unique chance like you had to live somewhere for a really extended period of time.
What was the adjustment like coming home?
Chad Carson (35:28.045)
depression. And I'm literally mean that literally it's it was my wife and I both had a really hard time. I think the kids did okay. Our older daughter had a hard time in school, just which of things natural, you know, when you go through a big 17 months living somewhere else. Our younger daughter was in kindergarten. So everybody was new to kindergarten. She did okay. But, you know, my wife and I had transportation and walk lack of walkability was really the big deal because there was a lot of great things coming back. I was also
believe it or not, I had a lot of Ecuadorian friends who said, are you sure you want to go back to the United States? Because it seemed like every month there was another school shooting. And that's a political topic. I'm not going to get into the details of it. But it's a reality that a lot of other countries don't have. And they were worried for us going back to the United States, which I find very humorous given that we had the same thing for people in the United States. Are you sure you want to go to Ecuador? Are you sure you want to go there? And that was the same question they were asking as we came back. So that was an adjustment. But really the...
The fact that we had to drive so much was again, was just a shocker to your kind of system. And we, but we, I was determined and my wife was determined to only have, we sold one of our cars when we left and our other car we put in storage with family. And we kept this one car for about two years after we got back and I bought an e -bike. And so we, my wife and I, we sort of kind of an adjustable side, it was in between my size and my wife's size. So neither one of us like was perfect for us, but we.
I use the heck out of that e -bike. And if somebody wanted to have a meeting with me, I was like, well, here's the two places I can meet in town where I knew I had a fairly safe route to get to. And I would meet them at those places. So it really like being in another environment where I walked all the time, inspired me to try to do that when I got back. And I had to use biking because walking was not possible to get all over town just from a distance standpoint. And so having a bike and having an e -bike in particular.
It would make it in the hot summer, you know, South Carolina summer when it's 90 degrees and humid, I could still go, you know, two miles away and be there, not really sweat. And that was great. Like it was so inspiring. So going back to like the green Crescent trail movement, it sort of took a pause. I was still involved with it, but when I got back, I was really gung ho about that and excited about it again. And so that just experience of going somewhere else and seeing that it's possible to do this and seeing what it feels like and knowing that people will really.
Chad Carson (37:49.165)
get a lot out of this and are gonna, it's gonna be awesome when we can get it. Sort of motivated me to get back into that. And we, we've since made, I didn't finish that story, but we've since made a lot of progress. We have this, just this year in this past year, 2023 opened up about a mile and a half of multi -use path and the city of Clemson and then another mile or mile and a half inside Clemson University. So there's a trail that connects two city parks, Clemson Elementary School to the university.
Kevin K (38:12.378)
Great.
Chad Carson (38:18.829)
And then the university has a botanical gardens, which is one of the key kind of park locations in town. So it's connected to that. So we've connected like three or four of our strategic locations and people being able to see that it's on the ground and it's possible and asking questions like, Hey, can we get more of this? And so it's been really nice to have some validation after so many years. And then we have a lot of momentum now, all the city council members that I've talked to are.
very much on board. The city of Clemson now has dedicated funding every year, $250 ,000 for the Green Crescent Trail. They have raised, they did, we should talk about from a strong town standpoint, they actually bonded some money to build another trail as well, another portion of the trail, along with a couple of the park infrastructure. So it's, I mean, they're spending money and they're investing in it, which is awesome. And we're also working with a couple of the local smaller towns, which is a different dynamic.
Kevin K (39:03.642)
interesting.
Chad Carson (39:15.053)
They're 5 ,000 person towns with lower budgets, but we've got another half a mile on the ground in one of those towns. And we're working with the third town to do just a natural surface trail to start. We're starting to learn our lesson. We're working, as we speak, we're working on, one of the city council members is working on getting easements from a couple of property owners. One's a church, one's a historic foundation. And so we're kind of, we're getting our order of operations where we get the land secured and then we.
I think we're just going to try to see what's the lowest cost trail we get on the ground and build a trailhead and just get people using this and connect, you know, smaller locations we can, a quarter mile, half a mile, and just get it on the ground and then let people experience it. And they're going to say, well, we want more of this. And so then we can say, yeah, yeah, we do want more of this. What's, what's the next step? And that's the, luckily we've learned a little bit, but I'm really excited about how it's coming together. And we have a, we have a 30 plus mile kind of map.
that we've kept updated. We're showing what the towns will look like when they're connected, what all the routes we're trying to connect are. And then we have like an implementation plan of here are the two or three locations in town that we really think are the low -hanging fruit where we can make progress and get easements and raise money. And so that's all that all was spurred personally for me along by living in places that were walkable that I could see the potential for it.
Kevin K (40:38.202)
That's amazing. And I mean, I think you're totally right that I have the same experience from a professional standpoint, but I've seen it time and time again when you have trail networks, when you have even like we have the streetcar system we have here in Kansas City. Oftentimes the most challenging thing is just getting a little bit of it going. And then once people can see it and feel it, touch it, ride it, whatever, then they tend to want more. So I think...
that's definitely the right path. And so you found then that just even in those cases, just getting sort of like a gravel trail down is a better place to start than than waiting for the paved surface.
Chad Carson (41:19.021)
I think so. If I had to do ever again, I'm not sure we had had that surface, but if we could have had anybody give us a quarter mile, even within a park, I would have just said, let's do that. Or let's do the, let's just do a crosswalk. Let's just, let's do a tactical urbanism. And we talked about that. I just, I don't think we pressed it enough. I think we got talked out of that kind of stuff by well -meaning people, often planners or people who are like, Hey, we're supportive of this. Let's do this, but let's do it bigger. Let's not do a little.
crosswalk and I think that's a mistake. I think it's the you lose momentum you you get you know that that person changes jobs somebody city council people rotate off and if you don't get some tangible quick process progress on the ground through either temporary or otherwise you're you're gonna lose momentum and it's just it's kind of amazing we didn't lose the whole get off track because we went five or six years without anything.
on the ground and we had a lot of supporters and we had a lot of maps and we had a lot of meetings, but it got really frustrating not having the actual stuff on the ground. So that was something I would, if we did it over again, it would have found a way to do that.
Kevin K (42:23.354)
Yeah. So has this been then like a gateway drug for you to the broader strong towns movement or are you gearing up to start thinking about zoning and all that sort of stuff yet?
Chad Carson (42:30.453)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I actually went on the planning commission. I didn't mention that I was on my local planning commission after during that same time. So yeah, I got involved and I've always been involved in housing. And so I think housing is affordable housing is something that I find even I find it some ways more approachable because I understand housing so well and the finance financial world. So I've been more interested in transportation, but seeing how that connects to housing and how important they are.
Kevin K (42:37.43)
cool.
Chad Carson (42:59.085)
I'm really geared up as well to try to help shape opinion on that, talk to people about it, preach about it, whatever we have to do. Yeah. But, and also maybe I was really inspired at this latest Strong Towns gathering by some of the alternative ways to build affordable housing. For me, the ADUs and cottages, that's always been vernacular for me in the real estate investing world. And that's from a purely kind of...
you know, just financial independence movement. That's it makes a ton of sense. But to see that that's maybe a potential solution on a larger scale, I think is really exciting. And then I'm excited also, it's not something I've kind of written plans for it. And I think I could get into some of the small scale development. I never called it that I didn't think about what we're doing as development, fixing up a property that needed $50 ,000 in work and turning it around or.
turning, you know, subplating a lot and building an extra unit on there. It was just something we did, but it's been kind of cool to see it a whole other world of people seeing it from a little bit different perspective of this is adding housing supply to the market and seeing that real estate investors, as I call them, is like, there's a role for us, a really important role for affordable housing, for providing rentals, for building more rentals. And so yeah, I'm excited about that. And I think I'm...
I'm more in, I think, the finance, financing role these days. Like I have done on the ground, I've managed all my properties myself. I've managed remodeled projects. I'm a little less interested in that at this point because I've done all that. But I like partnering with people who do that. And so we've, my business partner and I have financed some deals with other people, kind of been the mentor on the ground. Here's how, all right, we need to do this. Let's get this done. And I think some of the planning, the properties and acquiring the properties and then.
working with people on the ground who we can partner to kind of execute them. That's something that I'm interested in doing more of.
Kevin K (44:53.146)
That's terrific. Yeah, I think one of the things that we've really tried hard to broaden is the understanding of what a developer actually is. And unfortunately, there's this idea that a developer, somebody is a guy who has a fancy suit that drives a $100 ,000 car and builds six story buildings and everything else or $50 million projects. But the reality is, just like you said, if you build a house,
If you renovate a house, you're a developer. You may not think of it that way, but if you are doing anything that really contributes to the built environment, no matter at what scale you're a developer, and that's, I mean, historically, that is much more aligned with how our cities were built than the way we think about it today.
Chad Carson (45:39.885)
I got a question for you. This has been on my mind. What is what is the worst connotation being a real estate investor or being a real estate developer when you when you walk into when you walk into a room of local citizens? Because I don't know for me developer is like not a positive word. Like I gotta get I gotta get my head around this. I like developers. I'm fine with developers. But man, like in my town right now, developers are like the evil empire like you might as well be might as well be Darth Vader walking into a room because they've just there's been a lot of
building pressure for the big buildings for the, you know, 700 unit apartment buildings for students. And so we small developers, I call it my, I wrote a book called the small and mighty investor. My heart, my heart is with the investor who has two properties, five properties, 10 properties. We might as well not even be, you know, in the room. So I feel like we have a marketing problem, an imaging problem that maybe there's a new name. Maybe it's not, I don't know, but like, I just, I'm curious what your take is on that.
Kevin K (46:29.305)
Yes.
Kevin K (46:36.698)
Well, I mean, you're totally right. And some of the black hat stuff has been well -earned. My good friend John Anderson, who is one of the founders of the Incremental Development Alliance, he used to always talk about how he was teaching people the dark arts of development. And we always made, we had a lot of fun with all that. But there's definitely been a lot of work to try to rebrand what development is and what a developer is and to try to.
Chad Carson (46:52.557)
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Kevin K (47:06.458)
you know, almost think about it more. There is a field called community development. I, I hesitate to call people community developers because there actually is like, there's, there's like whole federal programs that are tied to that term and everything else. And their community development block grants and stuff like that. But, but in a sense, that's kind of what it is. my, my friend, Monty Anderson, who was also very big in the incremental development world. he, he likes to talk about.
people as farmers. And he really likes to encourage that language, you know, that if for people who want to do small scale development and really work in a community in your place, the idea is thinking about it like a farm and, you know, first of all, to find your farm, whatever that is, that location that you care about, that you want to live in and invest in, you know, literally for like the rest of your life, because you want to have a positive transformative effect on it. And then,
The analogy, like a farmer, a farmer knows every blade of grass on their farm. They know where all the really productive areas are and the not productive areas are. They know what's going to work in different sections of their fields. And ultimately, that type of developer where you're just working in a community at a smaller scale, that's kind of the analogy.
Chad Carson (48:23.725)
Yeah, I like that. Yeah, I think the word small is important. Keeping small versus big. And then I think one of the problems a lot of people have is that the bigger developers don't have skin in the game. They don't have skin in the game in the local community. Even a big developer, if they live there and they had to bump into people in the grocery store and have to see and talk to those people, that's a natural human pressure that we've always had when you live in a tribe or live in a community.
Kevin K (48:36.666)
Mm -hmm.
Chad Carson (48:53.197)
where you couldn't just make an action or make a decision without thinking about how that affects your neighbor and your community. And you might make a decision that makes less profit so that you're not ashamed of being there. And that's something when you're sitting at a desk in New York City, you don't have to make that decision. It's just a number on a piece of paper. And I find that annoying, I find it lame. And it's always bothered me like in the real estate investing sphere too, that the big hedge funds, the big...
go big 10X. That's kind of been like the aspiration for a lot of people in the financial world. It's like, once you grow up out of the single family houses and the duplexes, then you'll move up to like the real investing. And one of my mentors was a guy named John Schaub and he's in Sarasota, Florida and he's owned single family houses for 50 years. Like that's what he thinks is the best from a selfish standpoint. And it's also from the community standpoint, his tenants benefit. He's had tenants who stay for 10, 20 years. They get to live in a nice community.
So I don't know, I think I resonate a lot with that idea. But yeah, imaging and how do we frame that and how do we tell those stories is such an important part of the process.
Kevin K (50:02.17)
Yeah, I mean, I think we put a, we definitely put a big emphasis on the term small developer or incremental developer. And there's probably better ways to talk about that. we have a, we have a local sort of meetup group that my friend, Abby Newsham, who also has a great podcast on the strong towns network that she organizes. That's just, small developers of Kansas city. and, we have, I don't know, 20, 30, 40 people that come every week to a meeting where we kind of, it's almost like a, like a support group.
in a lot of ways. But you know, as you know, as you allude to, there's such a vast gulf, like two different worlds in real estate development. There's the people who work at the hedge fund level, and they literally are doing projects anywhere in the world. And they're working with hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars at a time to build projects everywhere. And then there's the people who work in communities, and they're probably getting their loans from a community bank.
Chad Carson (50:31.853)
Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin K (50:59.002)
you know, a locally owned or a regionally owned community bank. And they are your neighbors and they are people you're going to run into. So you're right, it's a huge difference.
Chad Carson (51:10.669)
Night and day. My only banker has been a guy who lives locally, goes to church locally. He runs on our trail now. He's like, I love this green crescent trail and he's running on it. So it's a, that's the one of my favorite parts about the real estate investing business, but also how it spurs off into the trails and the housing advocacy and working on your local planning commission, all the relationships you build and how organic that is and how mixed up that is. Like it's a really fun part of it.
Kevin K (51:34.906)
Yeah. Well, it's an interesting drug that once you catch on to all this stuff, you find yourself going in a lot of different rabbit holes.
Chad Carson (51:40.717)
Yeah, yeah, I'm all in. Yeah, I'm in the rabbit hole for it, there's no doubt.
Kevin K (51:46.266)
So how else can people in my world, how can we help you or what questions do you have that I can answer or others can answer in our world? What sort of things are you would like to know about the world of city building and design?
Chad Carson (52:04.845)
That's a great question. I never thought about that. I think design, I'm really interested in maps and just like design is an amateur and I find it really, I've been fascinated with just studying how cities are built. So I don't know if it's like, I'll just tell you what I'm learning, what I'm studying. Like all the Strongtown books have been great, but I think the thing that is,
good about all that is like taking the design world, the development world, and translating it into a language that's understandable for laymen, for people who are just a layperson who's on the ground. I think that's been the brilliant part about a lot of your work, about what I've seen Jeff Speck do and other people is, yes, I know planners and city council, but a lot of city council members are the lay people. They're not professionals. So that's kind of what I've been trying to do in my own world of real estate investing as well. I feel if I have any kind of signature,
Kevin K (52:53.946)
Sure.
Chad Carson (53:01.357)
is taking this complicated idea of math and finance and negotiation and evaluating neighborhoods and trying to simplify it and translate it into a common vernacular, something that's easy to understand, telling stories. And I think that's the trick with all of this as well, is like translating it, because ultimately, getting a lot of people on board doing this and maybe the mixing of these two worlds we're talking about today. I mean, I think, I...
publisher of my books, bigger pockets, for example, they're the big real estate investing website. There's 2 million members of bigger pockets. They have the, you know, top five investing podcasts in the in the country world, whatever, I don't know, and they have another two or three podcasts, like there's a lot of people who are interested in it from that angle. And I found just because I've been talking about it on my own, that there's a lot of those people who are interested in architecture design, but they just don't see themselves in that yet.
And I would love to help bridge those worlds in whatever way we can. That's part of my interest in coming on this podcast too. It's just, I think, I think there's a lot of one of the beautiful parts about this kind of local small developer movement is that it is not only like there's a selfish motivation behind it, which is fine. Like I'm good with that. That's capitalism, right? That's that's people, people have to have a engine, a personal motivation to do this. They can make money. They can turn this into a business. but then there's also, this is a really,
Kevin K (54:19.034)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.
Chad Carson (54:28.653)
people have an interest in their own communities and designing them. And they're curious about why it is that you can't cross this street the same way I was. And so I think like, go back to your question, I think just continuing to open up the hood to show like, here's how cities are built. Here's why this intersection is the way it is. I found that to be fascinating because it's something I took for granted before. It was just an assumption I made. And a lot of these things happen in like a back room somewhere.
And so like bringing that to light and showing like, no, here's why over the last 60 years cities are built this way and here's how we can do it differently. I find that enormously interesting and optimistic and fun to be able to learn that.
Kevin K (55:10.618)
Yeah, and my experience has certainly been that the people who are the most persistent, and often it takes way longer than you think anything should take to get done, but those people who are persistent and really have a passion for whatever it is in their community, that they're ultimately the ones who get things done. And it frustrates all of us how long things can take, but it all starts by somebody giving a damn to begin with. It's funny.
We talk about other people in our world, but like Pete from Mr. Money Mustache, he's moving to cul -de -sac, which is a pedestrian -only community in Tempe, Arizona, which was designed by my friend Dan Parolick's firm Opticoast Design out of Berkeley, California. It's a total small world.
Chad Carson (55:52.525)
Yeah. Okay. Small world. Yeah. I went out, I went out and visited them. Yeah. He lived there for the winter and I went and visited him in February. So we all, we all hung out and cul -de -sac and rode e -bikes and I think he missed, I think he missed his Colorado mountains a little bit too. So I think he's going to be back and forth between, you know, visiting both, but yeah, yeah, exactly. There's a, there's a ton of crossover between all these worlds.
Kevin K (56:03.77)
Nice.
Kevin K (56:14.906)
There is. Yeah, it's a funny thing. And the e -bike thing is a whole other topic we could get on some other time. I've also become an enormous fan. I think for, especially for American cities, they're an incredible, they're just a game changer for getting around. One last thing I'll just leave you with, since I know you're interested in maps and design, but if you really want to go down a rabbit hole, especially with your experience in Ecuador, you should look up the laws of the Indies, which was basically the...
Chad Carson (56:22.605)
Yes.
Kevin K (56:44.122)
the Spanish laws for how they built cities and towns all over South Central and part of North America when they settled the area. And it's fascinating as hell. But those places, like you stated, were specifically laid out and documented in this sort of group of essentially like design laws. It's really interesting. Chad, last question for you.
I can't remember this, were you on any of the great national championship teams at Clemson?
Chad Carson (57:18.669)
No, I tell people I set the stage for all of that, but I was not that good. So I went there in 98 through 2002. We played in a couple bowl games. We were in the top 10, top 20, something like that. But yeah, I had fun playing football, but I was not a national champion. And I got out of there without having any serious injuries. You can judge whether I had any head injuries. Perhaps there were a few screws loose after that. But yeah, overall, it paid for my school, and I'm very grateful for it.
Kevin K (57:39.81)
Okay.
Kevin K (57:48.57)
That's really cool. All right, well, I want to thank you so much for doing this. This has been a lot of fun. And it was really great to run into you. And hope we can find a way to continue the conversation.
Chad Carson (57:58.285)
Yeah, I look forward to staying in touch and I have my reading to do now. So thank you for the, thank you for the recommendations. And this has been a lot of fun. Thanks. Thanks Kevin.
Kevin K (58:02.714)
No problem. All right. Thanks, Chad. Take care.

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Frank Starkey: Architect as New Urbanist Developer
11 Haz· The Messy City Podcast
Frank Starkey and his family are one of those rare breeds of Floridians that actually have deep roots in the Sunshine State. We talk about how they sought to owner their grand-dad’s wishes as they ultimately developed the family cattle ranch in New Port Richey. A big part of their work was the Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND) called Longleaf. And later, the Starkey Ranch project.
Here’s a funny real estate video about Longleaf: (funny to me, anyway)
If you listen to Frank, you’ll learn how an architect has a whole different perspective on the present and the future, and why he thinks he has a luxurious lifestyle now in downtown New Port Richey. You can see some of his current efforts at this link to his website.
This is episode number 50 of The Messy City podcast - thanks so much for listening. If you’re new to this, welcome! I look forward to the next 50, as we explore the issues and people who love traditional human settlements, and are trying to create them. I love talking to the do-ers, to the creators, and everyone who has skin in the game that’s trying to build a more humane world.
Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.
Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.
Intro: “Why Be Friends”
Outro: “Fairweather Friend”
Transcript:Kevin K (00:01.18)Welcome back to the Messy City podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. I'm happy today to be joined by my friend and fellow new urbanist, long time participant, Frank Starkey, joining us from Florida. Frank, how you doing today?Frank Starkey (00:20.337)Howdy, Kevin. Doing great. Happy to be with you. I've been...Kevin K (00:22.908)I didn't even check. I assume you're in Florida at home, but you could really be anywhere. Okay.Frank Starkey (00:25.617)Yeah, I am. Yeah. Yep, I'm in our we recently moved into a townhouse that Andy McCloskey, who used to work for me, built in town here and we just bought one and we're very happy here. It's really nice.Kevin K (00:40.348)Cool, cool. And you're in New Port Richey?Frank Starkey (00:45.169)Yes, Newport Richey is on the northwest side of the Tampa Bay region. It's part of the region. We're in that suburban sprawl miasma that characterizes all Florida cities. And we're about 25 miles as the crow flies from Tampa, basically from downtown Tampa, and probably 15 to 20 miles from Clearwater and 30 miles from St. Pete. So we'reAnd we're right on the Gulf. We have a river that runs right through town that river miles from where we are out to the Gulf is maybe five river miles. So you could easily kayak and paddle board right out there or upstream pretty quickly you're into the Cypress freshwater wetlands. So we've got a lot of good nature around.Kevin K (01:39.516)Do you ever do that? Do you ever get out on a kayak or whatever and get out there on the river?Frank Starkey (01:43.089)Yeah, it's been a while. But if you go up to there's a preserve that the city owns that's up in the freshwater area. And if you're in there, you think you're in the Tarzan. A lot of the Tarzan movies and shows were filmed in Florida swamps and you feel like you're in a Tarzan movie. You can't see that you're in the middle of town. And if you go out to the coast, the barrier island and right where we are.They really start and go south from here. So from here on up through the big bend of the Panhandle in Florida, the coastline is all marshes and salt flats and grass wetlands. It's a much prettier coastline in my opinion than the more built -up barrier islands. But you can go out and kayak for days and days out in the coastal areas and see all kinds of wildlife and water life. So it's pretty cool.Kevin K (02:40.124)That's cool. That's really cool. Well, Frank and I have been talking about trying to do this for a while. We'd hoped to hook up in Cincinnati, but schedules just got in the way, as is typical for that event. But I really wanted to talk with you today, Frank, because you hit on a couple of my hot points, which is that you're an architect and a developer.Frank Starkey (02:51.313)youKevin K (03:06.332)And I know as a designer that you also care a lot about the kind of issues that we talk about routinely within the world of new urbanism and urban design, which is, you know, creating beautiful walkable places. So I just think it'd be interesting. You know, I talked to a lot of people who come into the world of trying to be developers. You and I probably both talked to a lot of fellow architects who we try to encourage to be developers.Frank Starkey (03:06.481)Mm -hmm.Kevin K (03:33.948)And so it's fascinating to me how people come to that. So I wonder if we could start just a little bit by talking about like your path and where, you know, how you got to this point. You, did you grow up in Florida or were you in Texas? Is that right?Frank Starkey (03:51.761)Now I grew up in Florida. I went to college in Texas, but I grew up on a cattle ranch just east of here, in an area that's now called Odessa. It was a 16 ,000 acre, beef cattle ranch that our grandfather had bought in the 1930s. And we were about 20, 20 miles from downtown Tampa and Newport, Richie was our hometown because of the county we're in Pasco County. And so we came to, you know, church school.shopping was in Newport, Ritchie. But I also kind of had an orientation towards Tampa because we were sort of closer that direction. And then my extended family all lived in St. Petersburg. My parents had grown up there and then my dad grew up in Largo on a branch down there that his dad had before the one in Odessa. I...Kevin K (04:41.564)So it's like the rare species of old Florida people, right? So.Frank Starkey (04:45.361)Yeah. Yeah, but man, I have a weird, I've always come from a very mixed, I mean, just a very much kind of background, culturally, geographically, economically. My great grandparents were from, mostly from the upper Midwest. And so we kind of, and my great grandfather on my dad's side.was William Straub, who was the publisher of the St. Petersburg Times. But I later found out that he was instrumental in getting the city to hire John Nolan to do a plan for the remainder of St. Petersburg. He was instrumental in getting the city to buy up a mile of its waterfront to create a continuous waterfront park along the bay in downtown St. Petersburg, which is the crown jewel of the city in terms of civic space.So I kind of grew up and then that that kind of orientation towards parks. He also helped the County, Pinellas County establish a park system, which was one of the earliest ones in the country. And so I kind of this park orientation and public space and civic life and civic engagement was a strain through my whole childhood. You know, my whole is kind of a generational thing in our family. And so that's one thread and.Living in the country, we didn't have much in the way of neighbors. The area of Odessa in those days was pretty poor. So I rode the school bus with kids that had virtually nothing and went to school in the suburbs of Western Pasco, which was where the kids were mostly from the Midwest. Their grandparents had worked for Ford or GM or Chrysler and then they...moved to Florida and the grandkids, you know, the kids moved with them. And so those were the kids I grew up with. And so I, you know, I didn't feel like I grew up in the deep south. People, but I, but I was close enough to it that I understand it, but I don't consider myself a, you know, capital S southerner, my accent notwithstanding to the degree that a good friend of mine,Frank Starkey (07:07.793)I grew up in Plant City on the east side of Tampa, which is much more in the farming world part of Hillsborough County. And he was much more deep south than I was, even though we grew up, you know, 40 miles apart. So it's just a very different cultural setting. So I grew up with, you know, upper Midwest heritage who had been in St. Petersburg since 1899. And then, you know,poor kids, middle -class kids, and then eventually wealthier folks. So I just kind of had this really all over the place cultural background that's not nearly as simple as, I mean, all of Florida has a tapestry of, a patchwork of different kinds of cultural influences. South of I -10, north of I -10, you're in South Georgia or Alabama, but.the peninsula of Florida is very culturally mixed up.Kevin K (08:11.228)So the old canard, I guess, was that the west coast of Florida was populated by people who came from the Midwest and the east coast was from the Northeast. Does that hold true in your experience?Frank Starkey (08:22.129)Yeah, that does hold true, although there were a lot of New Yorkers in Boston, not so much New England, but still a lot of New Yorkers found their way across. So I grew up around a lot of New York Italian descent folks, as well as Midwesterners. So I, you know, it's a wonder I don't have a New York accent or a Michigan accent or a Southern accent, because those were the kind of the three, more about more, you know, Northern accents than.than Southern accents from immediately where I grew up.But yeah, I -75 goes to Detroit and that I -95 on the East Coast goes to New York. And so that means that has an impact.Kevin K (09:06.844)Did you ever know about the Kansas City connection to St. Pete then with J .C. Nichols down there in downtown St. Pete?Frank Starkey (09:17.329)And tell me about it. I mean, I, because Bruce Stevenson's book, I think touched on that because they, they had an APA convention down here back in the 1920s.Kevin K (09:20.54)Well, that's it.Kevin K (09:28.54)Yeah, J .C. Nichols who developed the Country Club Plaza here, starting really in the 19 -teens, later in his life, he was asked to, or he bought property in St. Petersburg, in or near the downtown area. And the whole concept was they were going to essentially build like another version of Country Club Plaza there in downtown St. Pete. Yeah. And so I think like a small portion of it got built down there.Frank Starkey (09:32.785)All right.Frank Starkey (09:51.665)Really?Kevin K (09:57.564)And then maybe the real estate deal fell apart or something like that. But there was, yeah, that was a big push at some point. Yeah. Yeah.Frank Starkey (10:03.633)or the Depression hit. Interesting. Now, I wasn't aware of that. I didn't know that he had bought and had plans to develop here. That's interesting. The other, St. Petersburg's, well, the Florida Land Bus was in 1926. So Florida real estate speculation really ended then, and then it didn't pick up again until after World War II. So that might have been the death of it.Kevin K (10:13.084)Yeah. Yeah.Kevin K (10:27.164)Yeah. Yeah.So you find yourself growing up on a ranch then, pretty much in Florida. What takes you to architecture? What takes you to architecture and then to Texas to go to architecture school?Frank Starkey (10:35.505)I'd have been becoming an architect.Frank Starkey (10:42.289)For whatever combination of reasons, one evening when I was in about fourth grade, I, dad recollected this years later. I asked dad at the dinner table, what do you call a person, what do you call a person who designs buildings? Not as a riddle, just, and he said, it's called an architect. And I said, well, that's what I want to be when I grow up. And I never had the sense to question that decision again. So.Kevin K (11:00.54)Yeah.Kevin K (11:09.276)That's how it sounds vaguely familiar.Frank Starkey (11:11.853)youSo, you know, whether it was Legos and Lincoln Logs and the Brady Bunch. And when I was a kid, we had a cabin in North Carolina that dad had the shell built by this guy who had a lumber mill up there and he would build a shell for you for $5 ,000 or something. He built that out of green poplar wood. The whole thing was immediately warped and racked and sagged and did everything that.green wood will do, and we immediately put it in a building. But dad spent all of our vacation times up there finishing out the interior of that. So I was just around that construction. And dad was also being a counter rancher, and he knew welding. And he was always tinkering. And in addition to fixing things, he was also inventing implements to use on the ranch and things like that. So he just had a hand building.ethic that, you know, he just kind of had. So whatever made me decide I wanted to design buildings, as I grew up from that point on, I just was all about it. And so by the time I got to high school, I couldn't wait to get into working for an architect. And I was an intern for an architect in Newport, Ritchie, when I was in high school. And then I went to Rice University in Houston to go to architecture school. So after I, and I did my internship here,which is part of the program at Rice for the professional degree. I did that in New York City for Pay Cop, Read and Partners. And another ironic thing was I learned, I had a really great classical architecture history professor in college at Rice who in his summers led, he and his partner who was a art history professor also, a fine arts.Frank Starkey (13:10.289)They led an archaeological excavation outside Rome of a villa from the dated that basically dated a time period of about 600 years straddling the time of Christ. And I've spent the summer after my freshman year on that dig. So I had a had a really strong exposure to classical architecture and urbanism throughout my school. And when I worked for PAY, I worked on James Freed's projects.At that time, we were working on what became the Ronald Reagan building in Washington, D .C. It's the last big building in the federal triangle. And so it's a neoclassical exterior with a very modern interior. It's kind of like a spaceship wrapped inside a federal building. And the other project I worked on a little bit that year was the San Francisco Main Library, which is in the Civic Center right down in the Civic Center ofFrancisco with the City Hall and the old library. The new library is a mirror of it that's a neoclassical facade on, well, two wings of a neoclassical facade that face the Civic Center side. And then on the backside, which faces Market Street, there's a much more modern interpretation of that commercial core district facing along Market Street.So I worked on these buildings with Sirius that took, you know, this was at the end of the Pomo era of the 80s when everybody was making fun of classical architecture in, the architects were having fun with it or making fun of it, however you look at it. And Fried was taking it more seriously. It was still a updated take on neoclassical architecture.in some of the details, but it was really a fascinating exposure to the actual practice of designing classical buildings, working for one of the most famously modernist firms in the world. So.Kevin K (15:21.628)Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. Yeah. That's pretty wild. Was rice, I mean, we're about the same age, was rice kind of like most architecture schools, generally speaking, in their emphasis on looking at modernist design as the holy grail that you must pursue?Frank Starkey (15:28.433)Mm -hmm.Frank Starkey (15:38.769)Yeah, interestingly, like my childhood and the cultural mix that I described earlier, Rice was sort of in this period at that time where it was between deans. There was a series of, it's too long a story to explain here, but the previous dean who had been there for 15 years or something, O. Jack Mitchell, announced his retirement the day I started classes. And...So he was a lame duck. And then it was, you know, we basically went through a series of searches, deans, dean passed away, interim dean search, a new dean, and then he resigned. So the whole time I was in college, we really didn't have a dean. And the faculty that Mitchell had built was very, I'd say ecumenical. They kind of, we had some diehard theoretical postmodernists and we had.At the other end of the spectrum, we had a guy who did a lot of real estate development who was super practical and we always made fun of him for caring about mundane things like budgets. And I know he was, I made him a laughing stock, which I wish I'd taken more of his classes. But anyway, and then a really good core faculty who had a real sense of, and real care about urban design and.Kevin K (16:46.428)Well, yeah, exactly.Frank Starkey (17:04.401)My sophomore class field trip was to Paris and we did studies of, you know, in groups, each of us studied at Urban Plus. So I really had a strong urban design and contextual sensibility through my architecture class, all my architecture classes. In the background, there was this whole drum beat of postmodernist, post structuralism and deconstructivism.that was going on. I never caught into that. It always just seemed like anything that requires that much intellectual gymnastics is probably just kind of b******t. And it also, I was involved with campus ministries and fellowship of Christian athletes and church. And so I had a sense of mission and doing good in the world. And it also just,it just didn't work with that either. So I didn't really go in for that stuff, but the urban design stuff really did stick with me. And then the classical architecture and Vignoli, which I mentioned to you the other day, that really did kind of stick to me as a methodology.Kevin K (18:29.436)Man, I went for it hook line and sinker, man. It was, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I thought deconstructivism was like the coolest thing at that time period. And I bought the whole program for some period of time. And frankly, until I ran across some of Andreas's writings and then started learning about seaside. And that's really what kind of broke it open for me that I started to.Frank Starkey (18:32.433)Really?Frank Starkey (18:40.465)-huh.Frank Starkey (18:52.273)Mm -hmm.Kevin K (18:58.556)see things a little bit differently and all, but I, yeah, I was, I was in deconstructivism was funny because you could just kind of do anything and you know, you could call anything a building basically. Yeah.Frank Starkey (19:07.537)Yeah.Yeah, yeah, the author is dead long live the text was the, and so you could just, yeah. And to me, it was just pulling, it was just pulling stuff out of your butt and I just.Kevin K (19:22.636)totally. Yeah. Yeah. It was all b******t, but it was, I guess, fun for a 19 or 20 year old for a little while. So, all right. So fast forward then, did you come back to Florida then pretty much right after school or? Yeah.Frank Starkey (19:25.809)Yeah. Yeah.Yeah.Frank Starkey (19:38.929)Yeah, I did a gap year after college and then ended up in Austin for another year and then came back to work with my brother. So by that time, we had seen, because of where the ranch is situated, it's sort of in the crosshairs of growth patterns coming from Tampa to the south and Clearwater to the southwest.and Newport -Ritchie from the west. So it was, the growth was coming from, at us from two directions. Granddad and you know, this 16 ,000 acres that's 20 miles from downtown Tampa, as you can imagine in the 20th century is going up in value pretty dramatically from 1937 to 19, you know, to the late century. And in the early seventies, he started selling and donating land to the state for preservation.Kevin K (20:24.22)Mm -hmm.Frank Starkey (20:36.177)and so we had, you know, again, that whole park ethic, and the, so we were selling, kind of selling the Northern parts that were away from the development pattern, off. And it was partly for the state tax planning purposes and also just, but primarily to put the land into conservation. So there would be something left of native Florida for people to see in future generations. That was his.His goal. My brother had my brother six years older than me and had gone to University of Florida and gotten a finance degree. And he came back after college, which was when I was like my senior year in high school and started working for the granddad was still alive and he was working for the estate, helping with that planning. And granddad passed away while I was in college and we had the estate tax to deal with. And we ended up selling some more land to the state for conservation. And he also started learning the development.process. We knew that as much land as we could sell to the state as possible, we were not going to be able to sell at all and we were going to have to develop. Somebody was going to develop land on the ranch. And our family wanted to see that it was done in a way that was, you know, that we would be proud of that, that put together our, you know, our family goals for civic engagement, environmental preservation, and, you know, and also.It was the whole family's sole asset. So it's everybody's retirement fund and principally our parents and our cousins. So we have cousins who are half generation older than us. So we were accepting that development was inevitable and wanted to be more in control of it. So Trae had been talking to me for a while about coming back and working with him on the development stuff in the ranch. So that's what I decided to do in 1995. And the decision point for me,Kevin K (22:09.468)Yeah.Frank Starkey (22:34.449)was, you know, I had set up my career trajectory to become a consulting architect and design buildings for other people. And I realized that I had this opportunity to, you know, have a bigger imprint on developing a neighborhood that could perhaps set a pattern. By that time, I had become knowledgeable about new urbanism and what was going on at Seaside. AndAnd at that point, I think some of the other projects were starting to come out of the ground. So this was 1995. So I was like, well, I, you know, I've got too much opportunity here. And, and with what, what I know and what I have to bring to the table, it just seems like the thing I'd need to do. So I came back and we started working on development on the southwestern corner of the ranch, which was sort of the direction that was the frontline for development.So in 1997, we held our charrette for what became Longleaf, which is a 568 acre traditional neighborhood development that we broke ground on in 1999. Our first residents moved in in 2000. And that was the first TND in Pasco County. And in my opinion, it was the last TND in Pasco County. Because the county loved it so much that they...Kevin K (24:00.38)YouFrank Starkey (24:04.721)passed the TND standards ordinance, which it would never comply with and that no other developers ever wanted to do. And so nobody really has. They've kind of just, it's been compromised with, right? That's a whole other story.Kevin K (24:20.14)Yeah. Well, that sounds, I mean, we may need to get into that at some point, but, so you started this in 2000 and really in earnest 2001 or so. And obviously there was a little, little bump in the economy right then, but I guess kind of more of a bump compared to what came later. So talk about like those first, maybe that first decade then, like what all did you build and how much of this were you actively involved in the design of?Frank Starkey (24:24.529)Okay.Frank Starkey (24:39.377)Yeah.Frank Starkey (24:49.425)It's fascinating looking back on it how compressed that time frame was because we sold we we developed the first of four neighborhoods In the first neighborhood we did in As I said 99 2000 and then we built the second neighborhood in 2002 2003 we sold the third and fourth neighborhoods in 2004 whichYou know, six years later, we look like geniuses. If we would have been, if we'd been real geniuses, we would have waited until 2006 to sell them. But we got out before the crash, obviously. So we did well there. We were, I was, you know, Trey and I, because we had a view of building a career in real estate development, we thought we should do everything.We should touch every aspect of the process ourselves at least once. So we knew how everything worked. But then we never scaled up our operation big enough to hire people to fill in those specialties for us. So we really both kind of ended up doing a whole lot of the work ourselves. So our master, our designer was Jeffrey Farrell, who did thethe overall plan for Longleaf. And he wrote the design code, but we collaborated on all that very closely, because I knew enough about what urbanism was and architecture. And so I administered that design code with our builders. He detailed out the first neighborhood. He and I detailed out the second neighborhood.collaboratively or sort of a 50 -50. And you know what I mean by detailed out, just, you know, you take a schematic plan and then you have to put it into CAD and get it, get to real dimensions and deal with wetland lines and drainage and all that stuff. You get, s**t gets real about, you know, curbs and things like that. So that kind of, those details. And the third neighborhood I detailed out, but we sold it, but the developer who bought it built it out according to what I had done. So I was...Frank Starkey (27:15.281)very involved with the planning side of it. And of course I had been involved with the entitlements and then I administered the design code with all of our builders. So I was dealing with there and we had, we didn't have sophisticated builders. We didn't have custom, we weren't a custom home builder project. We were small local production builders. So these were builders who built 300 houses a year. We weren't dealing with.David weekly, you know, a national home builder who was doing nice stuff. Nor were we dealing with the 12, you know, you know, a year custom builders. So we didn't have much sophistication on the design side coming from our builders. So I did a lot of hand holding on the design of that. I always tell if you're a architect who's going to be your.Kevin K (27:46.716)Mm -hmm.Frank Starkey (28:13.169)is going to develop a T and D. I will tell you under no circumstances do what I did. Always hire somebody else to be the bad guy because as the developer you just can't look the home builder in the eye and say let this customer go. And so even though they're asking you to do something you shouldn't. So you need somebody who can be your heavy for that and it's not going to be you as the developer. But anyway, so I did that andAnd then I designed some of the common buildings and then had them. I wasn't licensed yet. And so I had those CDs done by somebody with a stamp. So I always said that I, you know, between the larger planning of the ranch and the strategy there, and I also got involved in community, you know, regional and county wide planning efforts and committees and things like that and planning council.So I kind of worked at the scale from the region to the doorknob. Which, you know, is fabulous as an architect because I've found all of those levels, I still do, I find all of those levels of design and planning fascinating.Kevin K (29:17.084)heheKevin K (29:30.78)So let's talk about the mechanics of being a land developer for a minute and how you did it. So you obviously own the land, and then you came up with the master plan. So then how many steps did you take? You took on the burden of entitling probably the whole project in phase by phase. And then were you also financing and building infrastructure as well, and then basically selling off finished land?Frank Starkey (29:36.433)Mm -hmm.Kevin K (29:59.26)finished parcels or finished lots to other developers or builders.Frank Starkey (30:04.177)Yeah, what we, so dad on the land free and clear, he contracted the land to us under a purchase and sale agreement whereby we would pay a release price when we sold a lot. So, you know, it's favorable inside family deal. We paid him a fair price, but it was a very favorable structure that allowed it, and he subordinated it to.to lending for, we had to borrow, we don't have cash as a family, we didn't, none of us have cashflow from, you know, we don't have some other operating company that spits off cashflow. So we had asset value, but no cashflow. So we had to borrow money to pay for infrastructure, I mean, for planning and entitlement costs and engineering. And so that was our first loan. And then we had,We set up a community development district, which is a special purpose taxing district that a lot of states have different versions of them in Florida. It's called a CDD. It's basically like a quasi -municipality that a developer can establish with permission from the county and state government to establish a district, which is then able to sell tax -free government -style bonds to finance infrastructure.So it's an expensive entity to create and then to maintain. But if you're financing a big enough chunk, which in those days was like $10 million, it became efficient to have the care and feeding of the district in order to get the cheaper money. So you could get cheaper bond money for financing infrastructure. You could not finance marketing or...specific lot specific things you could for example, you could finance drainage, but you couldn't finance still so some of the Terminology was a little bit You kind of had to do some creative workarounds, but basically our so but we it also meant you had to still have a source of capital for those things that the district would not finance so we had an outsideFrank Starkey (32:28.497)Loan structure in addition to the CDD financing and that was how we financed the construction of the development and then sold the lots to individual home builders We had three builders under contract in our first phase and each of them was committed to a certain number of lots and they had enough capital access on their own to finance their the construction of their houses a lot of themwould use their buyers financing and use do construction permanent loans to finance the vertical construction of the houses. But the builders had the ability to take down the lots. So that was the deal. I don't know if that structure is still done very much or if there were many builders in that scale that still do that in Florida or in this area. It seems like most of those builders got just crushed.in a great recession and never came back. I'm not really aware of any builders that are in that scale, in that size range anymore. I mean, if there are, there's maybe a dozen where there used to be 100.Kevin K (33:40.86)Yeah, so they either got smaller or a lot bigger basically.Frank Starkey (33:45.681)No, they mostly just flat got killed and just went out of business. And they may have resurrected themselves. Yeah, they may have resurrected a smaller or gone to work for somebody else or retired because a lot of them were older. Of the builders that we had, yeah, I think they probably did get smaller in fairness, but they were gone. And we were out of, as I said earlier, we were long out of long leaps. And the...Kevin K (33:47.836)Yeah.Frank Starkey (34:13.969)Crosland was the developer that bought the third and fourth neighborhoods and they didn't they brought in all new builders. So they brought in David weekly and inland, which was a larger regional builder. And then Morrison, I think one of the other large, larger builders who did rear loaded T and D project product.Kevin K (34:38.108)So how much heartburn was that for you and your family to go from this position where you're like asset rich but cash poor to and then all of a sudden you're taking on pretty large debt to do this development piece? I mean, what was that like?Frank Starkey (34:54.801)Well, you know, you just you don't know what you don't know when you're young and ambitious. So it was it was there. I did. There were some real Rolade's cheering moments. I think, as I recall, the most stressful times for us were before we started construction. And it was it was frankly, it was harder on Trey because he was he was starting a family at that time. So he had.He had literally more mouths to feed than I did. I was still single and so, and I didn't have the stresses on me that he did. And once we got under development, we weren't so much, you know, the stress level shifted to different, you know, kind of a different complexion. And, you know, fortunately when the recession hit,We were done with long, we didn't have, you know, we weren't sitting with longleaf hanging on us. So that was good. but we were in the midst of entitlements for the Starkey Ranch project, which was the remainder of the land that the family still had that had not been sold to the state. And we were taking that, there was about 2 ,500 acres. We were taking that through entitlements starting in 90, in 2005. And I would say that we got our, our entitlements.not our zoning, but we got our entitlements package approved, in essence, the day before the recession hit. So, so we had borrowed again, borrowed a lot of money to relatively a lot more money to pay for that. And that also involved the whole family, because that was the rest of the ranch that that the part that long leaf is on dad had owned individually, free and clear. The remainder of it.had been in granddad's estate and that went down to children and grandchildren. And so there were seven different owners of that. And we had spent some time in the early 2000s putting that together into a partnership, into one joint venture where everybody owned a pro rata share of the whole, but we had other shareholders to answer to. And so that was a whole other level of stress.Frank Starkey (37:16.913)due to the recession because our bank went, you know, did what all banks do and they called the loan even though we hadn't gone, we hadn't defaulted. We would have defaulted if they'd waited six months, but they blanked first and they sued us and we spanked them in essence, but we, at the end of the day, but it was two years of grinding through a lawsuit that was hideous and that was really the most unpleasant.Kevin K (37:29.82)Hahaha!Frank Starkey (37:46.257)level of stress, not because we were going to lose our houses, but because we were, it was just was acrimonious and not what we wanted to be doing. Plus you had the background of the whole world having ground to a halt. So fighting that out through the dark days of the recession was, that was pretty lousy way to spend a couple of years.Kevin K (38:12.284)Yeah, so then how did you all come out of that situation then?Frank Starkey (38:17.009)We ended in a settlement. The settlement, the worst part of the settlement to me was that we had to, long story, but some of the, we had retained ownership of downtown Longleaf with the commercial core, mixed use core of Longleaf. And that wasn't completed development yet. And because we had that collateralized on another loan with the same bank, we ended up having to cut that off as part of the settlement. So.we, you know, we had to, we amputated a finger, not a hand, but still it was, it was, you know, it was our pointer finger. So that was, that was hard, but, but we lived to fight another day, which again, you know, fortunately it's better to be lucky than good, right? We were, that makes us look like, you know, we did pretty well coming out of the recession. So after the recession and after getting that settled out, and there was a couple of other small pieces of land that we had,Kevin K (38:52.124)heheFrank Starkey (39:15.121)collateralized to the bank that we handed over, but basically got them to walk away from pursuing us further. We got that worked out and then we had to then figure out how to sell the land. Our joint venture partner, which was to have been Crosland on developing the ranch, they had gone to pieces during the recession, so they weren't there anymore.And the only buyers at those coming out of that were big hedge funds and equity funds. And they were only, their only buyers were national home builders and the national home builders, even the ones like Pulte who had tiptoed into traditional neighborhood development product before the recession. They were like, nope, nope, nope, backing up, never doing that again. They're.Kevin K (40:10.46)Yeah. Yeah.Frank Starkey (40:12.593)So everything that we had about TND and our entitlements, they're like, get that s**t out of there. TND is a four letter word. We will not do that. So we kind of de -entitled a lot of our entitlements and cut it back to just a rudimentary neighborhood structure and interconnected streets and some mix of uses and negotiated to sell it to one of these hedge funds or investment funds.who developed it with a merchant developer and sold it to national home builders. And they pretty quickly undid what was left of our neighborhood structure and developed it in a pretty conventional fashion. They did a really nice job on it and it soldered a premium to everything around it. They did a really great job with their common area landscaping, but they gutted the town center.They didn't even do a good strip center in lieu of it. They just did a freestanding public and a bunch of out parcel pieces. They squandered any opportunity to create a real there out of the commercial areas. They did beautiful parks and trails and amenities centers, but they just didn't get doing a commercial town center.Kevin K (41:36.444)What years was that when they developed that piece?Frank Starkey (41:40.337)We sold it to them in 2012 and I guess they started construction in 13 or so and it was really selling out through 2020. They still got some commercial that they're building on. I don't know if they've got any residential that they're still, I mean, it's kind of, its peak was in the 17, 18, 19 range and it was one of the top projects in the country and certainly in the Bay Area.and got a lot of awards. And yeah, so I don't, I can't complain too much about it because it sounds like sour grapes, but basically they didn't, I always just tell people I'll take neither blame nor credit for what they did because it's just not at all what we, there's very little of it that is what we laid out. So because that, so we, having sold that in 2012, that left me and Trey to go do what we wanted to do. All of the, you know, the rest of the family for that matter. And,Trey was ready to hang it up on development for a while. So he kept a piece out of the blue out of the ranch and settlements and started the blueberry farm. And I went and decided to do in town, small scale development. Ultimately ended up in Newport, Ritchie back in my own hometown. And then and that's that's what I've been doing since basically since 2015.Kevin K (43:06.844)Yeah. So I'm curious about a couple of things. So with the completion of the sale of all that and the development of both Longleaf and Starkey Ranch, I guess I'm curious how your family felt about the results of all those. Were people happy, not happy with the results? Was there... I'm just kind of curious about that dynamic because it's an interesting thing with a family property. And then...I guess secondly, with you being somebody who carried more a certain set of ideals for development, what did you take away from that whole process, especially with Starkey Ranch and anything, any useful lessons for the future for others relative to an experience like that?Frank Starkey (43:38.321)Mm -hmm.Frank Starkey (43:56.209)Couple of thoughts. As far as the whole family goes, we were, well, our cousins don't live here and they were less engaged in it intellectually and just personally. The four of us kids had grown up here and this was our backyard. They had grown up in St. Pete and one of them lived in North Georgia. And so it was, they just weren't as...emotionally invested in it. Not to say they didn't care, but it just didn't, it wasn't their backyard that had been developed. And you know, and we all are proud that three quarters of the ranch of the 16 ,000 acres, over 13, almost 13 ,000 of it is in conservation land that will always be the way it was when we were kids. Except there are no fences, which is very disorienting, but anyway.It's still, you know, that's the way granddad saw it when he was young and it will always be that way. So that's, we're all excited about that. And we pay attention to that more than we do to what happened on development. I think even long leave the, what, you know, the, the people in the surrounding area think we're sellouts and, people who have lived here.for five years or 10 years or 15 years are still just shocked and dismayed by the rapid pace of development. Well, it was a rapid pace of development, but we've been seeing it coming for 130 years now as a family. And I mean, it's why we put land into conservation going back to the early 70s when granddad started selling that. What people can see is the part along State Road 54, which is the visible stuff.which 10 years ago was a lot of pastors with long views and pleasant looking cattle who were money losing proposition as a agricultural business. But people don't see that. They just thought, it's a pretty pasture land. And how can you turn that into houses? It's so, you greedy b******s. So yeah, we get a lot of flak still to this day. I mean, and I've got a.Kevin K (46:12.092)Yeah.Frank Starkey (46:17.425)Trey's wife is a county commissioner and she gets all kinds of grief for being corrupt because people see our names on everything and they're like, well, they must be corrupt. No, you've never met any less corrupt people. And so there's kind of public blowback to it. I've said what I've said, what I just told you about how the development of the ranch did not comport with what we envisioned for it.And I don't, I don't shy away from saying that. I don't go around banging a drum about it. cause what's, what's the point of that? And a lot of people might think I just sound like sour grapes, but it, you know, it's, we, I think we all had our ugly cry about the ranch at some point. I mean, I remember when we were, we, the first closings of the ranch were in 2012 and it was a phased state down, but you know, they, they take a chunk at a time.So we stayed in our office, which was the house that we had grown up in at the ranch headquarters, right where the cattle pens and the horse barn, the truck barn and the shop and all of the ranch operations were. And the day that, eventually we had to move everything out and all that, almost all of that got torn, all of it got torn down. I remember having, I went out and stood by a tree and cried my face off for a while.Kevin K (47:46.044)Yeah.Frank Starkey (47:46.673)You know, it still chokes me up to think about it. And we all did that. I mean, but it wasn't an overnight thing to us. Whereas if you lived in a subdivision in the area that, by the way, had been a cattle ranch 20 years ago, you didn't, you know, you're not building, you're not living in a land that was settled by the other colonists. It seemed shockingly fast, just like overnight. my God, all of a sudden they're, they're.They're scraping the dirt the grass off of that and you know three weeks later. There's houses going up It's just shocking and and really disorienting we'd said we had seen it coming literally our whole lives We always knew that was going to be the case. So it was there was going to be something there our Feelings about the what what what it was compared to what we would like it to have been or another You know, that's what we have to wrestle with but the fact that it's developedWe always saw that coming and people don't really understand that until because you just, you know, because it just it's perceived so differently. If you just drive by and see it developed one day when it wasn't, then if you grow up with an aerial photograph on the wall of dad's office and you know, we just know that that's not always going to be that way.Kevin K (49:05.82)Yeah. Yeah.Well, let's talk for a minute about what you're doing now then with the stuff in Newport Ritchie and the smaller scale infill stuff. What was like the first one, after shifting gears and doing that, what was like the first project you took on on your own?Frank Starkey (49:25.561)Much more much more fun topic. Thank you for shifting gears. I should have let you do that soonerKevin K (49:30.204)Yeah.Frank Starkey (49:33.617)The, so Newport Richey is a pre -war town that was laid out in 1911 by Wayne Stiles, who I'm starting to learn more about was a pretty cool town, kind of B -list town planner who worked with people like John Nolan and the Olmsted brothers and was contemporary to them. Got a very competent little city plan for a small town and it has building stock in the downtown.the main street and Grand Boulevard downtown that dates to the 1920s and to the 1950s and 60s, kind of about half and half. And so it always had these good urban bones, some decent building stock, nothing great. It was never a wealthy town, so it doesn't have big grand Victorian houses down at Boulevard or anything, but it's got some good characteristics. But it had economically just cratered, just for years and really decades of disinvestment.moving out to the suburbs. It wasn't white flight in the traditional sense, but it was economically, it was the same just reallocation of wealth from the historic city into the suburbs and leaving the city behind. So in 2015, there was a, so downtown Newport, which he has a little lake, a about a five acre really lovely little.city park, a riverfront, and the central business district is right next to it. And then there's a pink Mediterranean revival hotel building from 1926 in that park. It kind of ties it all together. It's all the same ingredients that downtown St. Petersburg has, just in miniature and in bad shape. And St. Petersburg, believe it or not, which is now the best city in Florida,was really down in heels for most of my childhood. The Vanoi Hotel, which is their big pink hotel, was a hulking, you know, it looked like something out of Detroit when I was a kid, broken out windows and chain link fence around it and weeds and looked like a haunted hotel. So the Hacienda was kind of in that shape almost. And Downtown was doing, was, you know, just kind of sitting there with some honky tonk bars and a lot of, you know, just kind of moribund.Frank Starkey (51:54.705)commercial space. The city had bought out the First Baptist Church, which overlooked that lake right downtown when the church decamped out to the suburbs like all the other capitals in town. Even God's capital moved out to the suburbs. And the city bought it and tore down the church buildings and put a for sale sign on it, put it out for RFP a couple times, got crickets in response. Because no self -respecting developer would look at downtown New Port Richey as a place to develop.And I looked at it and as Robert Davis and Andres 20 will point out, we developers and architects and urbanists, we live in the future. You know, our brains are in what can be, not what is here now. And you've heard Andres say that the present is a distortion field. So I wasn't bothered by the fact that the neighborhoods around it weren't the greatest neighborhoods. They weren't terrible.Kevin K (52:39.8)Yeah. Yeah.Frank Starkey (52:48.177)And I looked at it and said, well, this is a pretty good gas piece of property. You got through overlooking this nice lake. There's a park. There's a downtown right there. We can work with this. So I asked the city to put it out for an RFQ, which they did. And Eric Brown, your buddy and mine, and one of your former guests on the podcast recently, was the architect for the buildings. And Mike Watkins, whom you also know, was the planner. I had them come in and do aCharette to develop a design for an apartment project on that former church property. And we negotiated a deal with the city to buy that property and we were off and running. So that was the first project. Just announcing that and showing, you know, as people were, some people were rightly skeptical that it would just end up being another low income housing thing because.This is Newport Richey. It's an economic shithole. Why would anybody put anything nice here? And surely, surely, even if you think it's going to be luxury, or if you're just saying it, it's obviously just going to, there's no way it can end up being anything but low income housing. And, but a lot of other people were excited to see that somebody was putting some investment in town. And it just kind of started to change people's thinking.Then we took on a commercial building downtown that when I was a kid had been a, IGA grocery store where we did our grocery shopping and it had, fallen into, you know, another moribund state as an antique mall that just needed to be fixed up and, and refreshing them live and up or something new. So we bought that and, did a severe gut job on it.divided it up into five tenant spaces, brought in a natural grocery store that was in town, but in a much terrible location. And a new microbrewery, the first microbrewery in town, and a taco place, and a kayak paddleboard outfitter, and a CrossFit gym. Kind of a dream lineup of revitalizing. Yeah. The kayak place didn't last very long.Kevin K (55:04.636)It's like the perfect mix.Frank Starkey (55:11.665)They were pretty much pretty ahead of the market and also just work. It wasn't their core business. They just didn't really know how to do it right. And then the taco place ended up getting replaced. The CrossFit gym outgrew the box and went to a much bigger location. And then we replaced them with an axe throwing business, which is killing it. So no joke, no pun intended. And then the microbrewery is still there.natural food store is still there. And then in the paddle boarding space, we now have a makers, a craft market that is multiple vendors that are, you know, like cottage industry makers selling under one roof. And we have a new bar and hamburger place and the former chocolate place. And they're also doing really well. And so between those two projects, it really, and then, you know, it's other,businesses started opening, new businesses opened downtown that just kind of had a new approach. They weren't honky tonks, they weren't just kind of appealing to a kind of a has -been demographic. And I just started changing the attitude. And the most remarkable occurrence was at one point, and this was around 2018,I just noticed that the online chatter in the general discussion among locals about Newport Richey kind of flipped from overwhelmingly negative people just running down the town, just saying this place is terrible. You know, get out while you can. There's nothing but crack heads and, and prostitutes and you know, it's just terrible. And to, Hey, this place is pretty cool. It's getting better. There's, it's got a lot of potential.And the naysayers started getting shattered down by the people who were more optimistic and positive about the town. And it just kind of hit that Malcolm Gladwell tipping point pretty quickly. And the attitude of the town and the self -image of people in town just has been significantly different ever since then. And then that's, of course, paid dividends and more investment coming to downtown. Now you can't find a place to rent for retail downtown.Frank Starkey (57:38.641)We actually have the problem now that there's too much food and beverage and the market isn't growing enough because we've got to bring in customers from outside of the immediate area because it's just not densely populated enough town yet. But that's so that's kind of where things started in New Port Richey.Kevin K (57:56.604)That's really, that's a great story. It's kind of, it's so indicative of also like what Marty Anderson has talked about. Let's sort of like finding your farm and a place that you care about and working there and making it better. And that's really cool. When it came to all this, were you self -financing? Were you working with investors? How was that process?Frank Starkey (58:13.169)Yeah.Frank Starkey (58:22.321)On the central, which is our apartment and on the 5800 main, which is the project that had been the IGA store, I have a financial partner on that. Who's another local who had made done well for himself in banking and lived away and moved back and was wanting to invest, but also to do some invest locally in a way that helps, you know, give something back to his own town. And that was my attitude as well. So our, our.Capital has been him and me on those two projects. And then I've got two other buildings that, one other building that I have a co -owner on and then another building I own solely by myself. So I've got a total of four projects. And all of the projects that I have are within one, two, three blocks, four blocks of each other.I was, you know, you mentioned the farm. I was very intentional about farm. I said, okay, my farm is New Port Richey. My farm yard is downtown and my barn is our office, which was right in the middle of all that. And the so that's, you know, and then now Mike and I live three blocks from all of that stuff. So we have we our new townhouse is three blocks east of downtown.Since 2018, we lived in a house that was four blocks south of downtown. So all of it was walkable. And even when downtown had just a couple of restaurants that were mostly just diners, one place that was pretty decent for lunch and salads and things, and a couple of pretty mediocre to crappy bars. I have a lot of friends here now and my office is here.And I immediately realized this is the most luxurious lifestyle I have had since college because the ability to walk everywhere and just live your life on foot is luxurious. It's just delightful. And my best friend now lives well in our old house, lives a block away. And we got to be friends living in town here and living a block from each other. And we would just ride bikes. And there was a whole other crew ofKevin K (01:00:24.284)YouFrank Starkey (01:00:49.041)the people we'd ride bikes up the river in the evenings and maybe stop for a beer or maybe not and just enjoy the town. He really showed me just kind of, I smacked myself in the forehead one day when he talked about how nice it is to ride up the river during the sunset. I was like, wow, you mean you can just enjoy living in these walkable places? Because I'd always spent so much time trying to build them that I didn't spend much time just...f*****g enjoyment.Kevin K (01:01:19.676)I know, I know. It's a crazy thing. It's like it shouldn't be like a rarity or anything like that. We wish it was available to everybody, but it's wild. That was the thing about living in Savannah and that was like the hard part about leaving Savannah was, I think for a lot of us who have our ideals about walkability and everything, you kind of go back and forth about, do I want to spend my time?Frank Starkey (01:01:30.257)Yeah.Frank Starkey (01:01:37.489)Yeah, I bet.Kevin K (01:01:48.38)you know, working real hard and trying to create this as much as, as I can and, and live in a certain place where I, I guess have the economic opportunity to do that. Or do you also maybe just say, yeah, at a certain point, screw it. I just want to live somewhere where I can be, you know, do the things that I talk about all the time. So.Frank Starkey (01:02:06.513)Yeah, exactly. And it is hard to live in a place that's already kicking butt and do the things to make a place kick butt. So.Kevin K (01:02:20.124)Yeah, and in so many of these places, the places that we admire, and if you didn't get in early, you can't afford it at a certain point anymore anyway. So it's kind of a crazy deal. So as an architect, then would the infill projects, I mean, I know you worked with Eric and Mike and some others, but do you do any sketching or work on any of these sort of, is it a collaborative deal or do you at this point just be like, well,Frank Starkey (01:02:28.369)Right.Kevin K (01:02:46.268)I'm going to be a good client and be kind of hands off and just help direct my architects.Frank Starkey (01:02:50.865)I try to, I'm trying very hard to just be a good client and direct my architects. I'll let you ask Eric on whether I'm a good client or not, but that's probably been the project where I have been the most, I've left the most to the architects to on the design side. On the, the one of the commercial building that I owned by myself was a,building that didn't have any windows, two stories right on one of our main streets on a corner. So two full facades with essentially no windows. And it needed new windows storefront and upstairs. So it basically just needed a whole facade because there was just a big windowless bunker. But it had existing structural columns or structural considerations for where I could put windows.And it ended up being a interesting, challenging facade composition project. Anyway, I designed that building. And also it was a double high space where the second floor was just a mezzanine. And we closed in the second floor to make it into a mixed use building. So that because it had always been a nightclub or restaurant and it was too big as being a story and a half to for that, for this market to support because the upstairs are just kind of.You know, just sucked. So I was like, this needs to just be a regular size restaurant on the ground floor and then offices above. So I did the architecture on that, including the build out for the restaurant. I had some help on that on the layout, but I did the design, interior design stuff on that. I wish I had, I love the facade design process.And that was a really fun project. And the result was, you know, it's, it's unusual because of the constraints that it had. So, but it's, I think it's a fun, it's a good result. but if I were doing more projects, I mean, I really feel like I don't do architecture every day. So I'm not, yeah, certainly I'm not going to do construction drawings because I don't have that, capability just cause I don't, I mean, I have the technical ability to do it.Frank Starkey (01:05:15.249)and I am now licensed, I could sign and seal it, but I don't want to. And I haven't signed and sealed anything yet. So my goal is to be more of a client than I am an architect.Kevin K (01:05:27.868)So in all this stuff and going back to even your initial work with Longleaf and others, you've obviously tried to create well -designed places and beautiful places. I know you said you had some thoughts kind of based on one of the other podcasts I had where we were going back and forth and talking about beauty in buildings and the value of that versus sort of utilitarian values as well. How have you tried to balance all that and really create?beauty and do you find it at conflict with also making real estate work?Frank Starkey (01:06:04.753)I don't find beauty in conflict with making real estate work at all. I think it's critical. I don't think that things have to be built expensively in order to be beautiful. And my comment to you in my email was about y 'all had had a discussion on this, your podcast before last.about and you had said you can't legislate beauty no code in the no amount of code in the world is going to result in beauty and I've always thought about that because I agree with you that codes by their nature don't result in beauty that that human love results in beauty I mean that's you know because that's a it's a it's a spiritual outcome not aI mean, it's an outcome of the spirit. I don't mean that metaphysical terms, just, but it's something that comes from a level of care that's not, that doesn't happen from just conformance.Kevin K (01:07:10.94)Yeah, it's a value you bring to a project basically. It's something you really care to do. Yeah.Frank Starkey (01:07:16.529)Yes, that said, the American Vignoli and other handbooks that were used by builders, not by architects, but by people who were just building buildings and designing them, designing and building buildings by hand in the 1800s and early 1900s.resulted in scads of what we consider beautiful buildings with a capital B because it codified, maybe not in a sense of regulation, but in a sense of aspiration and guidance. It codified a way to arrive at competence with beautiful principles underlying it. And I wonder, it's...It's a hypothesis. I've not proved it or even set out to prove it. But if you could require that people follow the American Vignole as an example, or something else like that, where the principles of proportion are codified and they're followable, then I think you probably would still have to have some coaching.But I think you would get a whole lot closer than you can in the, because it's more like a playbook than it is a rule book for producing a competent design. Competent in the classical sense.Kevin K (01:08:54.556)Yeah. Yeah.Kevin K (01:09:02.236)Yeah, I think that's fair. It's more like coaching people about people who care. If you want to do good things, here are simple rules and patterns to follow that are not going to get you the Parthenon necessarily, but they're going to get you certainly at a minimum like a B building, like a B or a B minus building if you follow these rules.And if you do them really well and execute the details well, you could end up with an A plus building. Yeah.Frank Starkey (01:09:34.641)Yeah. Yeah, and it's something that McKim, Mead, and White can follow that and come up with something spectacular. But the same underlying principles are in every garden variety inline building on a street. Because individual urban buildings and places that we love are individually not spectacular. It's the accumulation ofbe buildings that are singing in the same key that makes a good chorus. Not everything can be a soloist anyway.Kevin K (01:10:11.996)And certainly, a lot of the people who produced the buildings in that era that you described, late 19th, early 20th century, I mean, there were a whole lot of just illiterate immigrants to the United States, ones who were building all that. And they didn't need 200 pages of construction drawings to follow it, but they did have patterns and illustrations and guides that they could follow.Frank Starkey (01:10:25.041)Yeah.Kevin K (01:10:42.46)and just some kind of basic standards. Yeah.Frank Starkey (01:10:43.217)And also a general cultural agreement on what looks good and what doesn't. And that's what I think you can't recreate from start, I mean, from scratch, because it's got to, that culture builds up and accumulates over decades and generations of practice.Kevin K (01:11:09.148)No doubt. Have you seen with the buildings that you have done in Newport, Richey, has there been other people who've looked at what you've done and tried to essentially say, kind of continue to raise the bar with good looking buildings?Frank Starkey (01:11:24.209)Unfortunately, I can't say that has happened yet. There hasn't been that much new construction in New Port Richey. And I don't, I can't think of any off the top of my head that have been done since we built the central, for example, which is really the only new ground up build. There's another apartment project and apartments and mixed use downtown, but it was designed in 2006 and then it was stalled and it finished about the same time we did, but it has nothing.you know, didn't follow others at all. We did have a lot of people. And this is something I would recommend, which I did accidentally. I didn't put really good drawings of the buildings into the public before they were built. I made a real now here's a blunder. There's a my blunder was I allowed the elevations of the buildings.to be the first thing that got into the public view because they were required as part of the permitting process. And an elevation drawing of a building is the architectural equivalent of a mugshot. It's representative and it's accurate, but it's accurate, but it's not representative. So it doesn't show you what a person looks like. It shows you just facts about their face. And so it shows you facts about a building, but not what it's gonna look like. So people saw the elevations.of what Eric could design, which were intentionally very simple rectangular boxes with regular, very competent, beautiful classical facades, but they looked really flat, they looked really boxy, and they looked terrible. They couldn't be at elevation, there's no depth on it. So people were like, holy s**t, of course he's building, I mean, they look like barracks. And so people lost their minds. I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So we quickly put together some 3D renderings.based on a quick sketchup model, we illustrated the hell out of them with landscaping and showed what a view down the street would look like. And it was a much better view. And that's really how you perceive the buildings. And so people were like, OK, well, if it looks like that, I guess I won't oppose it so much. But they were still rightfully skeptical. And so I shouldn't, yes, do not let the first thing that people see of your buildings be an elevation drawing. But the.Frank Starkey (01:13:50.769)renderings that we put together were not very detailed and they didn't show how refined the buildings are and how much architectural detail and character they have to them. And I just didn't, because I just didn't have time to model it, I was like, get something out there that's just kind of, you know, the building's really, you know, this is about the space of the street and the landscaping and the view to the lake and all that. Once the buildings were built, we had people say, stop us in the street and say, man, I was opposed to this at the beginning, but this is so beautiful.Kevin K (01:14:19.404)YouFrank Starkey (01:14:19.505)Thank you for building this. I really love it. It's great. And that was the goal. And we really were intending to not make them spectacular buildings, but really nice buildings that really brought out a nice moment in the urban design. So they wrap around the lake. And then Central Avenue is a street that takes off from the lake or terminates in the lake.And so we have towers on the two corners that kind of mark that entry to Central Avenue and then buildings that mirror each other across Central. It's very formal and competent, but it's not overbearing. And the buildings are up to the street, the parking's in the back. So urbanistically, they're doing what they need to do. And which also, you know, that people, that's one of those things that if you describe to people, they don't really get it. But if you...show it to them and they see, you know, and you say, you know, this could have been parking here instead of a building. Then they understand, yeah, that's really nice.Kevin K (01:15:26.364)Yeah, no doubt. So after all of this, do you recommend the path of architect as developer to other people, especially young people?Frank Starkey (01:15:37.937)Yeah, if you've got an architecture degree, you've got a great basis for development. A funny story, when I was in college, I had a friend who was in one of the student ministries that I was very involved with who wanted to become a, she was studying linguistics and she wanted to go work for Wycliffe Bible translators and go work with some obscure people group and.discover the lexicon and translate the Bible. That's what Wycliffe Bible translators do. And there were some folks who lived in the area who did exactly that. And they had been architecture students at Rice. And so we went to their house for dinner and they told us about their path of how they got into translating the Bible. They worked with some little people group in Papua New Guinea that had like200 people who were all the only people on the planet who spoke this dialect of this language and their task was to Learn their language not get killed learn their language Develop a lexicon of their language and then translate Use that to translate the Bible into their language. So it's and they described that as a multi -level problem -solving task for which their architecture degrees had perfectlyprepared them. And so they described architecture as a multi -level problem solving task, right? You have to, everything from beauty to plumbing, structure, construction, durability, all of those things that Vitruvius told us about, you're solving for all of those things with one solution. So the ability to think and...Kevin K (01:17:00.476)Huh. Huh.Frank Starkey (01:17:28.273)and solve a problem on multiple dimensions at the same time is a great skill for life, whatever you're going to do. And I tell people who want to go into architecture, do it because even if you don't end up as an architect, it's still a great preparation for a lot of different things you could do from translating the Bible to, you know, technology things and real estate development. So real estate development is definitely a generalist pursuit. You know, I know a lot about.a lot of things from I'm not a, you know, I'm more than just a jack of all trades, but I'm certainly not a master of many, but it's helpful to, you know, I know a lot about drainage. I know a lot about regional planning. I know a lot about how codes work and how planning works and, and, and politics and things like that. There are a lot of things that architecture school doesn't do a good job of teaching in terms of teamwork and people.management both of working with other people and managing teams. That's something that most people will have to pick up as a skill from architecture school. But if you're an architect and you want to become a developer, I say go do it.Kevin K (01:18:45.788)Yeah, that's great. I love that, I love that. That's a great explanation. So, all right, Frank, we should probably wrap it here. This has been really cool. And for me especially, I love these chances to get to know people better that I've known for a little while anyway. So, that's...Frank Starkey (01:18:53.777)All right.Frank Starkey (01:19:03.441)Yeah, Kevin, I feel like we've always known each other and we've had a lot of mutual friends, but we've never just sat down and talked at this kind of length. So I've enjoyed it too. Sometimes I'd like to interview you the other way around, although I'm picking up a lot by listening to your podcast, which I really do enjoy it. So I'll put a shout out to that as well. Okay.Kevin K (01:19:10.332)I know.Yeah.Kevin K (01:19:17.244)Ha ha.Kevin K (01:19:20.923)Yeah, well, that'd be fun. We could turn the table anytime we want, that'd be fine. So, all right, thanks. I appreciate it, Frank.Frank Starkey (01:19:30.065)And one of these days I'd like to come see you in Kansas City and see what you're doing out there.Kevin K (01:19:33.788)Yeah, please do. I would love your feedback on some of the things that I'm doing and others that I'd like to do. And, you know, we all have kind of a different path of what we're doing, but we have a lot of similar goals and ideals. So it's always interesting to see how different people are working in whatever they're doing.Frank Starkey (01:19:47.505)Yeah, good.Frank Starkey (01:19:52.241)Yeah, absolutely. You've got a fun job doing a podcast, so good for you. And you're doing a good job getting a lot of voices out here in addition to your own.Kevin K (01:19:56.092)Now let's...Kevin K (01:20:01.148)Yeah, I enjoy it. It's been, I think this one might be number 50 with you that I'll release. And so that feels like, I'm hitting a milestone where it feels like it's a real thing now. So that's kind of cool.Frank Starkey (01:20:08.913)Wow.Frank Starkey (01:20:14.673)Yeah, very good.Kevin K (01:20:17.692)All right, Frank, I appreciate the time. All right, you too, take care.Frank Starkey (01:20:20.433)Thanks, Kevin. Have a great week. Bye -bye.

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On Housing with Aaron Lubeck
4 Haz· The Messy City Podcast
Aaron Lubeck and I sat down in Cincinnati, during CNU 32, to talk a lot about housing, policy, and how to actually make change. Aaron writes a Substack called On Housing, where he frequently explores these issues. And, he’s one of the founders of Southern Urbanism, which has a terrific array of writers and feature pieces.
Some of the posts we discuss:
I am Going to Gring Back the Sears Home
What’s Next for Jane Jacobs’ Sidewalk Ballet?
A Brief Detour to Honor My Old Lady
How North Carolina became a leader in building code reform to enable affordability.
From my archives:
Let Urban be Urban, Let Suburban be Suburban
The video of my presentation on Suburban vs Urban
Mom
Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.
Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.
Intro: “Why Be Friends”
Outro: “Fairweather Friend”

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Gen X - Step Up or Opt Out?
29 May· The Messy City Podcast
I join my favorite Akron-ite, Jason Segedy, in Akron, to talk about northeast Ohio, Strong Towns, and generational roles. We do this while sitting outside a former major tire factory, in the tire capital of the world. What a cool scene it was. It makes me think I need video for these discussions.
Jason and I seem to have a lot in common, and he’s the kind of person I can chat with for hours. As I told him toward the end, I also just really love and admire people who love their town. It’s become such a rare quality these days, so perhaps I just notice it more. But it’s energizing and endearing to find people who have a deep love affair with place.
We spend a fair amount of time talking generational issues, and no small amount critiquing our own cohort - Generation X. What’s next for us? Will our age group step up to be the adults in the room, or will we lean into our well-earned cynicism and be lifelong critics?
Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.
Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.
Intro: “Why Be Friends”
Outro: “Fairweather Friend”

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KC Crew, May 2024 - Real Talk
21 May· The Messy City Podcast
Two of last year’s most popular guests return to talk all things KC real estate, and especially urban core development. It’s a challenge right now, and we talk about why, and when things might change.
We also hit on some topics that people like to avoid, such as this piece on surging exurban development in our region. Do urbanists understand how little we produce, compared to what’s happening in the burbs?
Finally, we discuss the tangled web of drug stores closing in the urban core, and the importance of beauty in the urban environment. In fact, last week, I wrote about this topic here. And, for more, see this great video by former Charleston Mayor Joe Riley:
For Midwesterners, we need to do better.
Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.
Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.
Intro: “Why Be Friends”
Outro: “Fairweather Friend”

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What do ferris wheels and Bono have in common?
9 May· The Messy City Podcast
Every so often, I get into the personal advice game. Perhaps it’s a side effect of being a father, as well as hitting a point in life where you’ve seen and done a lot. I like to share whatever wisdom I’ve learned, in the vain hopes that someone else can benefit from my experience. That’s especially true for younger people who have a passion for cities, for development, and for making beautiful places.
Along those lines, in this episode, I discuss my pet peeve with the word “they,” how to think about issues in your community, and what I’ve learned about external locus of control vs internal locus of control.
Get building, get positive and work towards a better future.
Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.
Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.
Intro: “Why Be Friends”
Outro: “Fairweather Friend”
Transcript:
Kevin K (00:01.26)
Welcome back to the Messy City podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. Thanks for joining me. It's been a while since I've had the opportunity to do a solo podcast and just talk about a few things that are going on and some thoughts in my mind. And today seemed to work out really well for that in this week. So I'm going to share a few things that are going on and hopefully give you a little bit of inspiration in your day.
If it doesn't inspire you, you can send me a note as well and say, hey, you were completely off base there or lost and that's fine too. Of course, I can't help but record these now and think about my friend Chuck Morrone's comments about my own voice and how things sound. I think if you do anything like this, you're the kind of person you probably never liked the sound of your own voice, but it's good to know that others respond to it and like it.
And I'm happy to keep doing these. There's a lot going on right now. There is coming up here in May is the Strong Towns National Gathering followed by the Congress for the New Urbanism. It's a big deal in the urbanism world. Those annual confabs, which I have gone to for a number of years. Don't know that I'll keep going to those indefinitely, but I still think there's value in that or similar groups like them.
depending on what your own interest is. I'm also keenly aware that the National Town Builders Association does a couple great get togethers every year. Those are, that tend to be people more on the development side, as well as the Urban Guild, which is a group that I'm a little bit affiliated with as well, which is mostly designers and architects, but it's a lot of people doing really, really cool stuff to try to make the world a more beautiful and better place.
They have a get -together coming up this later later this year in November, which will be in Huntsville, Alabama And I'm gonna try to make it to that as well. Don't know if I can do all these things. It's a challenge when you've got a family and work and everything else, but I do always enjoy getting together with colleagues and learning about what other people are doing Figuring out what I can take back to my own community and just getting inspired from other people. So
Kevin K (02:28.844)
I have always enjoyed that. I suppose it appeals to the extroverted nature that I have. But I certainly enjoy getting that inspiration from others. So I want to talk a little bit today on a different tack. This is not necessarily a new subject locally, but it's something that's been on my mind. And bear with me as I go through this, but there's a new...
There's a new attraction in Kansas City that opened late last year. We are among many cities now in that we have a Ferris wheel near the downtown area because you know how these things are, all the trends come and go and activities come and go. And right now it seems like every city has to have a Ferris wheel, a big Ferris wheel for people to get up and view the whole city and everything else. And, and, uh,
I've been on it, it's kind of fun. I understand why people like them and they're visually very distinct and interesting. The first notable one I can remember that was new, I guess, was in London, which was pretty striking. I remember at the time thinking, well, that was kind of strange, but now it's gone into the realm of common and you see these attractions popping up just about everywhere.
But what really interested me was the response to the Ferris wheel in the local community and the discussion boards and everything else. Actually, when I say discussion boards, it almost sounds like an old man's term at this point, but probably more, I guess I would say on social media, which is where a lot of conversation happens. And it's fascinating just how negative.
the reaction was to me. And I think one of the things that I most commonly heard, where there were two things really, which is why did they put that there? And why did the city fund that instead of fixing the streets? So all interesting for me because it's all very telling about how people react to projects, building structures that are built.
Kevin K (04:52.044)
in a community. And I want to talk about that for a minute and what it means for each of us and what I think we, what mindset I think we need to have that is more productive if we want to really improve our own communities. So, you know, I don't, I'm not one to ever really assail people or blame people for the thoughts that come out of their mouths because, or because this is,
the world we live in, the world we live in is driven by the experience that people have had over many years. Development, in the development world, we've gone to from a place where development was almost entirely private sector 100 years ago to now where there's an enormous amount of public sector development or public -private partnerships that happen. There's an awful lot of things that happen now.
through government and from the top down that never would have happened 100 years ago. And I say all that because it really came to mind when hearing people talk about the Ferris wheel project. The first one being, why do we have that Ferris wheel when we could have been fixing the potholes? Well, the Ferris wheel in this case, in our city, was a private development. This was an enterprise that a local developer
bought the land for, came up with the plan, financed it and built it. This is not a city project. So it's kind of easy for us to, who know that sort of thing, to then just mock people for being stupid, right? You're stupid. How do you not know that that's like a private project? But I get it because we do have so many things nowadays that are in fact either driven directly,
by city government, have a partnership with city government, or require city government approval to happen. And it's very easy, I think, for a lay person who is not in the design, development, construction world to not understand that and to think everything is a city project. But in this case, and probably like many others around the country, this was just a local entrepreneur.
Kevin K (07:18.764)
doing a project with land he owned that that he expects to make a profit on with this attraction and a whole series of attractions next to it that actually seemed kind of cool and I'm excited to see how this all builds out over the next year or so as he continues to build it and and that really kind of tied into the to the other comment which is you know, why did they build it there? and I admit
I want to admit right up front, I have a real pet peeve. And that pet peeve is the word they. And this is something I've had for a long time. And I wrestle with this because I hear it all the time. And it's just this notion that there is some group of people out there that just make all these decisions for what happens in your community.
whether that's city council people or people in private rooms or whatever. But we have arrived at this place where we just all tend to think that there is a they that can be either blamed or praised for whatever goes on. And I find that really troubling because it's not a they. This was a person. This was a person and his development team.
That made the decisions and and built this thing and that's very common In our city there. I hear this so often, you know, why did why did they build that apartment complex? and You know our city does this and this why do they do that? And I think there's this this thing there's this thing this phrase that my wife has taught me from psychology which is called external locus of control and
The notion being that if you kind of give up control of a lot of things in your own life and decisions, you have essentially given that control over to others. That's an external locus of control as to an internal locus of control, which is saying I am responsible for my actions and what happens and what I see and do in my life. An external locus of control means like, eh, you know,
Kevin K (09:41.996)
I'm just gonna let whatever happens happens. And I think we all balance this in our own lives or we can't possibly control everything. But I also think it's kind of led to this symptom where we see where we often think there is a they out there that is imposing their will on me or on us. And that's just not.
Even in our very complicated world, that's not how it works. But again, I don't necessarily blame people for thinking that because we have gotten to this place where there is so much often confusion about who is doing what and who is responsible for what. There are politicians who even if they didn't do something, they try to take credit for it. That's long been a standard in politics is to deflect the blame and accept.
you know, accept the compliments for whatever happens. You know, if something is good, name it and claim it, whether you had anything to do with it or not. And I think that gives the impressions that the impression that politicians and public sector people often have way more control over what happens in a community than they really do. And so I really wish we could get away from that thinking and that use of the word they.
And to really just talk more specifically about who exactly has done something. Why, you know, who is that individual that took it upon themselves to create that project and why. And it's funny because in this case, the Ferris wheel in Kansas city is in a bit of an odd location. If you, if you go there, it's right next to a freeway. It does provide a great view of downtown when you're up on the Ferris wheel. And it's neat before this in front of the skyline, but it's right next to a freeway, which is a little odd.
And I can imagine a series of other locations in the city where the same thing would have been really cool and better. And in fact, there is a major park nearby that is up on a hill would have been an incredible site for it. But the parks department didn't pursue that route. They didn't try to do a project or this project. And instead you have a developer who did and who took it upon themselves to do it.
Kevin K (12:08.076)
And that was the place where he had the opportunity to make it work. And I hope, I really hope it works. I think it will work. I think it's going to be a cool attraction and sort of entertainment area for the city, but that's how those things go. And I want to, I just want to encourage all of us to kind of get beyond this notion that there is a they out there. And, and one thing that I, I would just add to this is that, um,
You know, it kind of feeds into a mindset. I think when you approach something like, they are doing something to me, or they are doing this, they are doing that, it can kind of feed into a real negative feedback loop that can be a real trap for people in a community. Because there's always something going on. There are things to not like and things to like.
And I think that every community, every society has problems and we want to try to solve problems. And we're a time and a place where I think a lot of our cities do have problems. And I would never be the first to say otherwise. We have a lot of issues and things to resolve. I mean, in my opinion, the worst of our problems tend to come from kind of a utopian thinking.
coupled with the desire to force utopian ideas from the top down on people who maybe aren't ready for it and are often very bad ideas. But that said, I really hope that we can kind of find a way to avoid the forces and the voices of negativity. And I think that use of the word they,
almost always leads to like a negative mindset and a negative commentary. And again, as the idea that your locus of control is outside you for your community and for your neighborhood, as opposed to thinking about ways that you and others can take control yourselves and just do things and do positive things for your place. So one of the things that I would just say is, you know,
Kevin K (14:33.516)
try not to give in to the voices of negativity, doom and gloom, and grievance. Sometimes it seems to me as if we have a grievance industrial complex in our country that there are people who have so many grievances about life or society, but they move from issue to issue and they carry with them the same anger, the same...
sort of negative vibes, no matter what the concern or topic is. And that's problematic. It's problematic for the person, I would say. I once heard a quote, I can't remember who said it, but it's something to the effect of, bitterness is a poison that you think you can use it against your enemies, but ultimately it ends up destroying you.
And I think there's a lot of truth to that. There have been things in my life that I have been bitter about and I have wrestled with internally. And I have had to learn that that bitterness that I might've been holding onto was actually causing me physical harm. And that physical harm might've been something minor like just like loss of sleep and loss of sleep turning into...
negative moods or whatever, but it also might be something more that you get so consumed by negative thoughts that it's very hard for you to do anything constructive in your life or to be somebody that others want to be around and to do good things with. And so I would just humbly suggest that as much as you could, especially if you're a younger person,
embrace a positive vision for the future. And there's a very popular sort of meme going around lately that's just about we need to be building things. We need to build more things. And I think that's true. I think we're in, I think we're kind of coming, I hope we're coming out of an era where there's a lot of vitriol and negativity.
Kevin K (16:58.156)
which presents an incredible opportunity for people who have a positive vision of what the future could be and what to do about it. And to actually build yourself up, to build others up around you, to build things physically. So obviously, a lot of what I talk about on this podcast is about designing, building, developing things. And I think there's unbelievable opportunity.
for anybody in any walk of life to get into a place where you're actually participating in building something physical, which is an, there are just immense emotional rewards for seeing that happen. So as somebody who was trained as an architect, I obviously love that very much. But I think for anybody that I see, whatever it is, the more you can create things and build things physically,
is incredibly just valuable to yourself as well as people beyond you. Right now, or even I would say the last decade, there have been so many very, very loud voices that seem to push the other way and think we shouldn't be building things in that. I would just say specific to the world that I know the best.
that developers are evil and they're awful and they're money grabbing people and we need to take our pound of flesh as much as we can and punish them. And there's just an awful lot of vitriol and hatred of developers and of development that is, in the end, it kind of reflects that problem with bitterness because...
People are going to build things. And if you and your community embrace an attitude that developers and development is bad, you are creating a recipe for your own decline, ultimately. Just in the same way that carrying bitterness from something that happened years ago can really lead to just personal harm, carrying bitterness towards change for the future is only going to make your place.
Kevin K (19:17.516)
less and less relevant and less attractive to others who want to have a positive future. So that doesn't mean of course, and I feel like I always have to qualify this and say it that like, that doesn't mean all development is great and all, you know, and I love all of it. There's a lot of terrible development. There's a lot of, there's a lot of bad architects. There's a lot of bad developers. There's bad buildings that are built. We should always try to and strive.
to do as good a job as we possibly can to try to build beauty in our world. I'm a firm believer in that building beauty is so deeply important. It's for the human spirit and for life in communities. And we don't talk nearly enough about building beautiful things, building beautiful places. Even if you're not in the building world, something as simple as planting a flower garden that adds beauty to the world.
is incredible. It's so important. And I wish we all could do a little bit more of that. So of course do good things, but you have to have this attitude of improvement and positivity and that activity in the world is a good thing. And that a utopian aim, while maybe it comes from a good place, is something to be deeply concerned about, especially when somebody is pushing their utopian aim.
on somebody else. So build yourself up, build others up around you, challenge yourself to get better all the time. This is kind of a funny sidebar, but I've definitely read my share probably of self -help stuff in my life, because I think I'm probably the kind of person that's always looking for ways to just improve what I'm...
whatever I'm doing, maybe optimize a little bit. But I do, I have at different points in my life challenged myself to do things that were uncomfortable, that I was not good at, that I didn't really have in my background. And often did that just as a way to force myself to do something that maybe was uncomfortable. I am by no means, you know, like,
Kevin K (21:43.244)
some of the more intense really optimizers and everything else in the world. But, you know, for example, when I was a kid, I was a very unhealthy, a very sickly kid. I had asthma that was really, it was actually life -threatening for me as a child. And I eventually with time, with some medication and with growth,
basically outgrew it. But I didn't really start to fully outgrow it until I was like almost out of like high school, I would say. And so there was a lot of like athletic stuff that I just wasn't really able to fully participate in when I was a young person, because I just didn't have the stamina, the long stamina to get through things. So when I got older, when I turned 40,
I resolved that I wanted to, I had started to do a little bit of long distance running and resolved that I wanted to run a half marathon, which of course I had never run any distance anywhere close to it before. And I actually completed my first half marathon when I was 41 and I did it three years in a row. And actually each year improved my time from the year before.
And all of that was a tremendous physical challenge for me to do because I had never been a long distance runner. Um, but I will tell you the feeling that I got from that when I would complete those races and the memory that was still with me about, uh, how challenging it was just for me to breathe. When I was a kid, the fact that I could overcome and do those things, it meant a lot to me. And it gave me.
a lot of confidence and the feeling that if I could do that, I could do other things as well. Lately, I've been doing something similar and I don't like to talk too much here about just personal things that are going on. But now that I'm into my fifties, I have been trying some things that have also been challenging for me. And so I've been doing some martial arts stuff the last couple of years. And this year I've actually started.
Kevin K (24:07.5)
doing jujitsu classes in earnest for the first time. And that has not been my world at all. I mean, when I go to these classes and I take a beating and it's hard and you know, you learn all the things that are going on. You know, this is not the world that I came from where of, you know, wrestling and combatives and that sort of thing.
but I have really learned to enjoy it. And especially with the jujitsu training, the more I go, the more I just really get into it and enjoy what I'm learning. And the feeling that I get of it making me stronger and more capable, and the fact that, you know, that it's hard, and it is really hard, that it's hard, but I can...
get through a class and even if it's a rough day or whatever, afterwards I have this feeling that I really did something. And so I share that again just to say that it's important to challenge ourselves to do better, to try to, sometimes maybe to push on things in your own personality and your own world that you know that you struggle with or that are not your thing.
And I'm a firm believer in trying to push through some of your weaknesses whenever you can and challenge yourselves and have that vision that, yes, I can overcome things. I can do things. And embrace a vision that you are capable of doing a lot of things. So, you know, being, I understand why a lot of people are very risk averse and you kind of get in a lane and you just stay in that lane.
in your life. But being too risk averse can really prevent incredible self -improvement. And you can miss out on a lot of successes in life that you probably never knew that you were even capable of. That's not to say like be reckless and just take any risk you want. Of course not. But don't be fearful either. And really lean towards
Kevin K (26:31.372)
this notion of building yourself up and then building others up along the way. Because the more you build yourself up, you will find that people are drawn to that. People want positive things to cling onto and to take themselves along for a ride for something that's good and interesting and positive. People like to build things. And I...
And I often think that we don't talk enough about how people like to overcome difficulty. And so difficulty in and of itself is not a bad thing. I think it can often be a really good thing. And so push through that difficulty as Bono might say, don't let the b******s grind you down. Right? So.
That's were a few thoughts for today. I think one last thing. I have no idea where this is going to go, but in the spirit of, again, pushing through and trying to do things, I had a personal interest in real estate development since I was a college kid, and maybe even younger. I don't know. It's hard to remember at this point. But.
But there were so many steps along the way where I could have taken a risk to do something. And I took a few, but I just never really fully dived into that to see what I was capable of. And I think what for me is that that lesson is you tend to regret the things you didn't do more than the things that you did do. And I certainly regret that when I was younger, I didn't take more risks and more proactive steps to push through.
my lack of knowledge, my own questions about risk when it came to maybe developing some of my own building projects. So this week I actually put in an offer on a commercial property for the first time that I have ever done. I've never done this before. Sent a letter of intent over to purchase something. I don't know if anything will come of it. I hope something will come of it. I have a great idea for a project.
Kevin K (28:52.62)
on the site. It's not a terribly large project. I think it's kind of in a wheelhouse that I can execute really well, a fairly small project. But I'm challenging myself to push through my own aversion to just taking that next step. And we'll see what happens. So hopefully something comes of it, and I'll be able to share some details as it goes.
And if not, there will probably be another opportunity right around the corner. And that's the message that I would hope to share is there's always opportunity around the corner. Don't think so much about who they are and what they are doing and think so much about you and what you are doing, what you can do, what you and your friends or others or your family can do. And have that internal locus of control and...
Don't imagine that the world does everything to you. Create your own world in the process. Thanks so much for listening. If you wouldn't mind sharing the podcast, hitting the like or follow button on your favorite app and encouraging others to do the same, I'd really appreciate it. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. This is the Messy City Podcast. Be talking to you soon. Bye.

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A Conversation with Charles Marohn
30 Nis· The Messy City Podcast
Chuck Marohn, the President and Founder of Strong Towns, joins me to talk about his newest book, “Escaping The Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis.” Along the way, we also discuss the upcoming Strong Towns National Gathering in Cincinnati, a different way cities can think about building and financing new sports facilities, and our different takes on the place-making of Disney World.
If you have an interest in attending the National Gathering in May, I highly recommend it. Register at this link, and use this code for Discounts: KEVINK2024
For some background on Walt Disney’s history in Kansas City, check out Thank You Walt Disney.
Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.
Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.
Intro: “Why Be Friends”
Outro: “Fairweather Friend”
Episode Transcript:
Kevin K (00:00.964)
Welcome back to the Messy City podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. I'm delighted today to have my friend Chuck Morrone on the show. Mr. Strong Towns, Chuck, it is so good to see you and I'm really excited to talk with you today.
Charles Marohn (00:16.848)
Hey, I'm really happy to be here. And here's the amazing thing. I listen to your podcast. You have a great voice for this. I mean, I have this horrible voice that people have grown used to. But when you turn on, you're like, hey, this is the messy city podcast. I'm like, yeah, man, you should be doing way more of this.
Kevin K (00:37.38)
Well, at least you didn't say that I have a great face for radio. So.
Charles Marohn (00:40.72)
Well, you and I both.
Kevin K (00:44.484)
Oh man, well, it's fun. You know, I'm still very much an amateur at the podcasting gig. And it's been fun to learn and experiment with it. You've been doing it for quite a while. And so I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you on this show. And we've got a couple of, a couple of fun topics, but in a couple of things that I think will get more serious and interesting as we go. And we'll just get through whatever we can get through. But.
Charles Marohn (01:11.568)
That sounds great. Well, you've been having all my friends on, you know, so like, yeah, here's Howard. I'm like, wait a sec. That was a blast. And then you had, you had Seth Zeran on recently. I'm like, that's really cool. So yeah, it's been fun. You know, I, I know you and I know, uh, you know, some, some of the ways that you think about things. And I really am. I love chatting with you, um, hearing you have these.
Kevin K (01:15.172)
I try to do that.
Kevin K (01:19.076)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Charles Marohn (01:38.704)
fun conversations that we sometimes get to have in person. Hearing you have them with other people is just, it's a delight for me. So yeah.
Kevin K (01:46.02)
Well, that's very great, very flattering to hear. You know, it's one of the fun things you've probably experienced this too. One of the fun things about having a podcast is you get to choose who you want to talk to. And there's a lot of people that we know and we've all known for a long time that I get to learn so much more about. And for me, that's been one of the most enjoyable aspects of this is just getting to really know people's backstories a lot more. And so that's been a great pleasure.
Charles Marohn (02:04.496)
Sure.
Kevin K (02:16.036)
So.
Charles Marohn (02:16.4)
Yeah, yeah. Well, you you know everything about me, so we don't need to talk about.
Kevin K (02:20.1)
We know a lot about we know a lot about Chuck. Chuck, fortunately, shares his backstory a lot, although I'm sure there's tons we could get into. I'd rather save the time for some other topics, but you. You do have an awful lot going on right now in this moment, and I want to talk about a couple of those things. One is you have a book, a new book, the strong escaping the housing trap, the strong towns response. This is your.
Charles Marohn (02:32.24)
Yeah, it's the least interesting part.
Kevin K (02:49.636)
third book, right? Yeah, okay. Tell me a little bit about why an engineer wanted to write a book about housing.
Charles Marohn (02:51.12)
Yeah, yeah. Number three. Yep.
Charles Marohn (03:01.52)
Well, the reality of the story is that I, in the early days of writing the Strong Town's blog, was thinking about a book the entire time. I mean, I started writing this three days a week blog back in 2008, and to me, it was building up to a book. I had a couple publishing companies and agents contact me.
And when I gave them my book proposal, it was just blah, blah, blah. It was, it was like 2000 word book. Like it didn't make sense. It was only when I got hooked up with Wiley publishing where we stepped back and we said, okay, this is actually multiple books, put this together in like the compilation of what you think it should be. And I said, well, I, I think I should write the book on finance first. I think I should write the book on transportation. Second, third would be housing. And then there's a couple others that are coming.
And so we kind of agreed to a five book series that would kind of encapsulate the strong towns conversation. Housing happened to be the third. And the crazy thing about it is I didn't plan to release it in the middle of a housing crisis where everybody's talking about housing and housing's like on the lips of, you know, every political debate and every public policy conversation. It just so fortuitously happened that we're dropping our ideas in the middle of this kind of housing.
you know, policy feeding frenzy right now. But.
Kevin K (04:27.556)
Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting aspect of that. I know obviously there's a long timeline to write a book anyway, to write it, get it published, edited, and all that sort of stuff. So I'm curious, like, what has changed in your mind from the point when you first started thinking about writing this book to actually getting it out today?
Charles Marohn (04:48.624)
It's, so Daniel Hergis and I co -wrote this, and I know you had him on a couple weeks ago. It was a really good conversation. The two of us, I think, encapsulate in our thinking the trap that we were trying to illuminate. Because I, we both went through the same graduate school program, and we both maybe took different things away from it. He was really focused on housing and kind of the,
the mechanics of zoning and how the government has intervened in the housing market and all the kind of things that I would just put under an urbanist label. And for me, I was really fascinated with the financial side of the whole thing. That was the thing to me that when I was in grad school, I didn't think the housing people made any sense, quite frankly. You have to take some of that. And I was like, this is really dumb. I don't get it. And
I think I didn't get it because as an engineer, I was more plugged into the finance side. I spent a number of years just reading every book on finance that I could. I actually watched for like two years straight, I had CNBC on in my office. Not because I think CNBC is like a good channel or like has revealing things, but because the lingo that they use, the finance lingo that they use, I didn't understand.
So when they said like MBS, like what is an MBS? It's a mortgage backed security. When they were talking about interest rate spreads and swaps, like I'm like, what the heck is that? Once I learned that language, to me the fascinating thing about housing was how it really is at its core downstream of the financial conversation that's going on in this country. So Daniel and I really tried to merge those two together, first in a set of insights that the two of us could agree on.
and then in a narrative of the book that we could publish and share with the world.
Kevin K (06:45.348)
So, without giving away too much of the book, obviously we want people to go buy the book. And I think you can pre -order it right now, is that right?
Charles Marohn (06:48.656)
Yeah, yeah.
Charles Marohn (06:55.248)
Well, it's not like it's a murder mystery, you know, like I'll tell people the core insights, but you know, there's a lot of depth there beyond that. So.
Kevin K (06:57.892)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. But maybe how about just tease out a couple of the key insights that you think are critical to share related to what the housing trap actually is.
Charles Marohn (07:12.912)
Well, the housing trap is the situation we've gotten ourselves in where housing as a financial product needs to go up in value. So the price of your house needs to go up for the economy to churn. But housing as shelter, when the price goes up, everything falls apart. Lots of people can't get into a house. If they get into a house, they're very financially strained. Once they're in a house, it's tough to move, take another job.
So these two things compete against each other and they're both necessities. I mean, shelter is in Maslow's hierarchy of needs and we've literally structured our entire economy to where mortgage -backed securities, your house bundled with a bunch of other houses, sit as the bank reserves for every bank in the country. Housing prices can't go down. They have to go up financially. Housing prices can't go up. They must actually come down.
for us to be able to function as a society. And that is the trap because both of those things are true at the same time.
Kevin K (08:17.412)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think probably the word of the decade has been financialized. And it seems like we've used that to discuss a lot of the foundation of the economic system we have today. And it certainly affects housing in all forms of real estate.
Charles Marohn (08:23.76)
Mm -hmm.
Charles Marohn (08:35.184)
Well, Daniel and I reached this understanding quite a while ago, I mean, way before we started working on the book, that if you if you look at the market for housing today, it represents the market of financial products. So when you see developers out building single family homes on the edge of Kansas City, what you're seeing is the manifestation of a financial instrument. The mortgage bundled with other mortgages.
securitized, sold off as a mortgage -backed security. There's a lot of liquidity. There's a lot of money and capital put into that product because it's a really good financial product. When you see the five over ones being built, the one story of concrete with five stories of wood construction, whether it is an apartment building or a condo, whether it's a high -end condo or a mid -level condo, whatever it is, those also are financial products.
Those are really easy to bundle with other similar structures from all over the country. Again, securitized, sold off, bought up by pension funds, put on the books of banks, all this stuff. What you don't see is you don't see the single family home converted to duplex. You don't see the single family home where we take the fourth bedroom that nobody's using and put it, make it an accessory apartment. You don't see the backyard cottage. You don't see the small 400, 600 square foot starter home.
because there's no financial product for those things. But those are the products that if they were available in the local market would actually anchor the market at a lower price point and keep the rest of it from going crazy. And so the conclusion that we've come to is that we just need a policy to build not more single family homes and not more five over ones and more apartment buildings. We really need policies to build lots of this starter stuff.
And the cool thing about it is that cities can do that on their own. They don't need federal grants and approvals. They don't need state support and funding. They actually have the capacity to really shift their local housing market, make it more locally responsive, and they can do it all on their own. They just have to do it with intention.
Kevin K (10:50.436)
Yeah, I think one of the things that you've talked about and written a lot about too is the notion of how after the financial crisis, 2008, 2010 or so, that the housing recovery in many ways has been kind of re -inflating a bubble. And I'm fascinated by this because obviously I'm not an economist, although I play one on TV. And it certainly seems like...
Charles Marohn (11:07.248)
Hahaha.
Kevin K (11:17.604)
the signs of stress that we've seen in the banking system even the last, let's say, year, year and a half, is putting a ton of pressure on the local community banks and continuing to centralize the banking system into larger and larger banks, including the four banks that are essentially protected by the federal government. So in essence, it kind of seems like we haven't really...
At a federal level, we're almost doubling down on this approach that has given us these large products that we don't really like.
Charles Marohn (11:53.84)
There's no doubt that our strategy when housing starts to level off or go down, as in like 2007, 2008, when housing went down in price, our strategy is to pump more money into the top of the financial funnel in order to keep housing going in the other direction, in order to keep housing from falling. And so, yeah, you have this weird thing where every economist looks back at 2001 to 2008,
And when you say housing, what they'll fill in the blank with bubble. They'll say, yes, it was a housing bubble. And you say, OK, well, in 2008, it started to go down a little bit. And then 2010, it hits bottom and it starts to go back up. And it's way, way higher than it is today than it was in 2008. That was a bubble. What is this? And they say, well, that's a housing recovery. Right. Like we recovered to a bubble and then beyond. This is.
You know, I think we don't know all of the things that we will know after the next reset. Warren Buffett has the same. You don't know who's swimming naked till the tide goes out and the financial tide has not gone out yet. So we really don't know where the bodies are buried. But if you listen to financial news, you'll hear a lot of fretting over regional banks, commercial real estate.
A lot of people when they hear commercial real estate think Walmart or strip mall or franchise restaurant or what have you. Those are certainly part of commercial real estate, but also part of commercial real estate is apartment buildings. You know, multifamily, multifamily buildings is a big part of commercial real estate. And those are financed with at least partially with short term financial products at local banks that have to be rolled over. And there is a huge incentive to extend and pretend.
to pretend that they'll someday be rented out at high margins, at high prices. And that works when interest rates are low or very stable. But when interest rates rise, those financial products actually decrease in value, those bonds do. And so banks are less willing to, or less able to really pretend that...
Charles Marohn (14:10.544)
You know, the in the hundred unit apartment, the 50 units or 40 units that aren't rented will someday be rented at this really high rate. The bank can only pretend so much until, you know, the grim reaper of finance comes for them. And it kind of feels like for regional commercial banks, like that's going to be the shakeout that will make a lot of cascading things in the apartment market. Be very, very different six months, 12 months from now.
Kevin K (14:39.684)
Yeah, if I were to maybe tie together a couple of different things, one, you had a recent, one of your recent podcasts where you talked about, uh, this is an election year and you kind of went through, uh, this, which was great. I really enjoyed it. Uh, and, uh, I have long enjoyed the way that you have talk about politics and the sort of reframing of the top down versus bottom up, you know, instead of like left, right all the time. I think that's incredibly helpful to think about.
Charles Marohn (14:49.808)
Haha.
Kevin K (15:09.764)
But you mentioned, you kind of talked a little bit about the old Tip O 'Neill phrase and the all politics is local, you know, and how that shifted to all politics is national today. And I can't help but think about that in relation to like this real estate discussion and financing where real estate used to be hyper local and it feels more and more like all real estate is national in that respect in terms of how we plan, design and finance whatever is being built.
Charles Marohn (15:40.4)
I think that's a brilliant insight. To me, the question is, what is the price of the house sensitive to? And a lot of us think that it should be sensitive to the buyer's ability to pay, right? You have a product in the marketplace, there's someone coming to buy it. If that person can't afford it, the market will have to adjust and figure out, is it smaller units, is it smaller rooms, is it less appointment? What is it that will make that
unit affordable to the person buying it. But our market is completely insensitive to the ability of people to pay. What it is more sensitive to is the macroeconomic funding stream. If we can lower interest rates, if we can print money at the Fed and buy mortgage -backed securities, if we can create massive amounts of liquidity, if we can funnel this liquidity to hedge funds and others that will invest in single -family homes as rental products or in a commercial -backed
real estate, what we can do is we can really drive up the price. And so I think from a consumer standpoint, you have to ask, like, what is the product here? We think that the product is us buying a house where the consumer, the house is the product. But the reality is, is that that transaction is incidental to creating what the real product is, which is a mortgage or a commercial real estate certificate, something that can be bundled, can be securitized and sold off.
That is what the market is sensitive to, not to your inability to pay. We are, in all sense, not the consumer, we are the product.
Kevin K (17:18.436)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's right. And well, I suppose this topic, since the book is fresh or will be freshly out, will be a big center of discussion at the Strong Town's national gathering coming up in a couple of weeks.
Charles Marohn (17:34.736)
Yeah, no doubt. I mean, I know that I'm scheduled to do a little bit of housing discussion there. You know, the National Gathering is really we don't call it a conference. We don't call it we call it a gathering because it really is Strongtown's advocates from all over. I would say all over the country, but it's all over North America. And we've got people coming from around the world for this thing. It really is a chance for people to see and learn.
what other people are doing bottom up to build strong towns. And housing is certainly part of that and will be part of the discussion. But a big, big emphasis of the gathering is just to, there's a phrase that I used last year that I'll probably talk about this year again, is just like, you're not alone. Being an advocate in a city can feel, you can feel very alone. Like you're the man or the woman against the machine. And the reality is, is that when people join together in a neighborhood,
when they start to gather more people together with them, there's so much that can be done from the bottom up. It's really empowering to get these local heroes in a room, let them see each other, let them talk to each other, let them hear each other's stories. I feel like that's the most powerful part of the gathering, really.
Kevin K (18:50.371)
Yeah, yeah. Well, I certainly enjoyed it last year and then the first one you had a few years ago in Tulsa. And this one's coming up in Cincinnati, May 14th and 15th. It precedes the Congress for the New Urbanism and both are well, well worth attending. So I hope folks who are listening can get out. And if you get a chance to attend, that's great. If you can't look at it for next year, it's really a cool way to meet.
Charles Marohn (19:03.055)
Yep.
Kevin K (19:19.556)
people who are interested in the same things. I was really fascinated, Chuck, last year in Charlotte at the, I talked about this with a number of our CNU friends, the difference in the dynamic between the Strong Towns crowd and the CNU crowd. Seeing that like back to back was really fascinating. And it's completely and utterly anecdotal and just judging by what I saw. But I felt like there was a lot.
Charles Marohn (19:30.64)
Yeah.
Kevin K (19:47.268)
of energy in the Strong Towns room and Strong Town side of things. And generally speaking, a younger crowd and less, you know, like the senior crowd long has been focused on the design and building professions, architecture, engineering, planning, and the Strong Town, which is great. You know, it's fine. We need, we have to do that, but the Strong Towns crowd was really different. It was much more diverse in terms of the backgrounds of the people that were there.
Charles Marohn (20:16.24)
So you and I are, I'm gonna say I'm a little older than you, right? I'm 50 this year.
Kevin K (20:20.836)
No, I'm 54, my friend.
Charles Marohn (20:24.112)
Okay, okay, well, all right. I assumed I was a little older than you. You just look younger, that's what it is. You and I have been hanging out together at the CNU for many years. And I remember when I first started going, this was the place of super high energy, right? Like I would go, I would meet all these thinkers and all these people doing stuff. And we would like,
Kevin K (20:30.436)
It's just, I just kept my hair color longer, that's all.
Charles Marohn (20:50.48)
debate things in the hallway. And there was all these like side things going on. Remember in Salt Lake City, when we did the first debates, it was just this like crazy wild party of, and I say party, I don't drink. There was no like, this was a party of like intellect. Like it was just like electric in the air. I have, I have, I have been searching for that the last few years. I've been like, where's that? Like I want, I want to be in the room with that energy. And I showed up at,
are gathering last year with high expectations, but really, you know, knowing, having been on the road and met with people, knowing that our movement had a lot of this bottom up energy, a lot of, you know, just very different people from people who are doing retail and like, I sell flowers and I, you know, have a bakery to people who are, I'm out building homes, I'm doing this stuff, I'm on a planning commission, I'm a mayor of a city.
There really is a, when you say diverse, it's a crazy group of bottom up people all who self identify as like, I love my place. I want it to be better. I walked into that room at the opening last year and I'm like, this energy is out of this world. It's amazing. I'll give you a little like under the hood. I'm
I wanted last year, like, let's get some music. There should be a party. Like we're having a party here. Like everyone's coming together. Let's get some music. And when I got there and like I had a thing where my daughter was graduating, like that was the week of her graduation from high school. And I could, I flew in at the last minute and I had to fly out right away. So it was just like the timing didn't work well for me, but I got there and like, we didn't have the music because like logistically it wasn't going to work and the sound system wasn't going to work and all that.
And I kind of was like a little disappointed. I'm like, Oh, I don't, I don't, I kind of want the vibe to be up here. I walked in the room and the vibe was up here. And I'm like, if we would add music, like they would have blown the roof off this place. It would have been a little too crazy because people were amped. They were excited. Um, I have been re I've been assured that this year there will be music. So we'll see what, we'll see what happens in Cincinnati. If we can, uh, yeah, get, uh, get things even more, uh, more excitement, let's say.
Kevin K (22:53.284)
Yeah.
Kevin K (23:02.564)
Oh good.
Kevin K (23:11.364)
Yeah, well, I look forward to that. I mean, I think like you, I have, you know, it used to be like the CNU, we would come back from a CNU and the adrenaline rush was so crazy that for like a month afterwards, all you could do was think about the stuff that you heard and talked about and you're like, we've got to do X, Y, and Z now. And, you know, I honestly haven't felt that rush in quite a while with CNU. Part of that might just be that I'm getting older and...
It's harder for me to feel that and things change. But there's definitely, I love the excitement of the debate and the discussions and seeing a lot of younger people there I think is really cool. So kudos to you guys and hope it continues.
Charles Marohn (23:57.488)
Thank you. Thank you. It definitely will. We're committed to it. And, you know, I mean, this thing is going off here in a couple of weeks and we're almost full. So, I mean, we've sold hundreds of tickets, people flying in from all over. It will be, it will be, it will be really cool.
Kevin K (24:08.164)
Yeah, good.
Kevin K (24:17.092)
All right, well, let's shift and talk about something a little more lighthearted, perhaps. But I want to talk, first, let's talk about baseball, something that both of us share an interest in, both American League Central Division fans of different teams. And obviously, there's a rivalry. But honestly, there isn't really much of a rivalry because both teams are never good at the same time.
Charles Marohn (24:24.464)
All right.
Charles Marohn (24:43.152)
Who do you like legitimately consider your top rival?
Kevin K (24:47.076)
Well, I think for years, the weird thing is it was like the Cardinals, right? But they're not even, but they're National League. Right, so when interleague play started, I think that became a really, really big deal and those games were enormous in both cities. It's tapered off a lot and it's probably, you know, the Cardinals have been such a great organization for so long, they probably kind of laugh about it amongst themselves.
Charles Marohn (24:51.312)
Okay, right, they're not even in your division, right?
Charles Marohn (25:03.248)
Yeah, yeah.
Charles Marohn (25:12.976)
Sure.
Kevin K (25:14.468)
Uh, so, uh, any more, I don't know, you know, when I was growing up, um, it was the Yankees, it was the Royals and the Yankees. Um, because in the seventies, the Royals had those great teams that won the division every year, 76, 77, 78, and then went to the playoffs and just like lost to the Yankees every year. And, uh, finally turned around in 1980 and won it and world went to the world series. But.
Charles Marohn (25:21.104)
Okay. Yep.
Kevin K (25:41.732)
So for years there actually was a pretty fierce rivalry between the Royals and the Yankees, but that was again not in the same division. So it was a little odd.
Charles Marohn (25:50.8)
We share this in common because the twins, I think we, I mean, we did have the record of all sports for most consecutive playoff losses. And losing consecutively in baseball games is hard to do because you, even, you know, even coming in with mismatched teams, you've got a like 40 % chance of winning statistically any game. So the idea, I think we lost 17 or 18 in a row post -season and almost all of those were to the Yankees. And so we had a deep,
Kevin K (26:04.228)
Yeah.
Charles Marohn (26:20.912)
I mean, I told my daughter growing up, you know, she's two years old. And I said, in this family, we don't hate anybody, but we do hate the Yankees. So that's, that's an acceptable, but for me in the division, it's the white Sox. Like I, I'm not a fan of Cleveland. I, I don't really care about Detroit all that much. I gotta say Kansas city does not, like I don't get, you know, foaming at the mouth when we're playing Kansas city, but.
Kevin K (26:29.38)
Ah yes.
Charles Marohn (26:49.712)
When we play Chicago, the White Sox, I like go ahead and hit every ever the batter like I don't care. Like I'm I don't like those guys.
Kevin K (26:56.868)
Yeah. Yeah. And the White Sox, they just have every misfortune. I mean, come on. I think ever since they tore down Old Kamisky, it's been like a curse on that team. So speaking of, go ahead.
Charles Marohn (27:06.192)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I took, let me, let me tell this story real quick. Cause this will solidify Chicago for me. I took Chloe, my oldest, she came, I was speaking in Chicago once and she, she's probably like five or six young kid. We rode the train, the Amtrak to Chicago and we were just there for a couple of days. I spoke at this conference. The White Sox were playing a game.
And so we went to the game because she likes baseball, you know, dad and daughter go in the game. We showed up. She wanted to wear her twins jersey because, you know, the twins weren't playing. It was the White Sox versus some other team. I don't even remember. We walked in to sit down. Little girl with a cute little pink twins jersey on. People started booing her and yelling at her like literally like she started crying. She felt bad. I'm like, these people don't deserve this kid. This is the White Sox. I hate you guys.
Kevin K (27:52.164)
Oh my god.
Charles Marohn (28:01.296)
I'm sorry I came to your dumb stadium with my beautiful daughter. Get lost. So.
Kevin K (28:06.02)
Well, it is their punishment for tearing down a nice stadium, building a horrific one, having a lousy owner. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was probably the worst new baseball stadium built in that entire era. So speaking of new stadiums, one of the things I just want to chat with you about and get your perspective on is we are having a big debate here locally regarding baseball stadiums because the Royals ownership.
Charles Marohn (28:11.984)
Yeah, it was a bad stadium. Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin K (28:34.884)
which is a new ownership group. They bought the team, I guess, three years ago, local people led by John Sherman. They want to build a new park. They want to leave Kauffman Stadium and build a new park in the downtown area. And which in theory, you know, I'm, I and many other people are like, great, let's do it. Sounds awesome. But, you know, obviously we're having this kind of age old debate about,
how to finance and build a stadium. And in a smaller market like Kansas City, that comes with fairly large public subsidy one way or another. And the projects themselves just balloon in size incredibly. So we're talking instead of a baseball stadium that might be, I don't know, let's say $600 million, now it's a stadium in a district that's two billion.
And the public is expected to underwrite a significant share of that. So there's, you know, we have this, we, there's been this knowledge within our world for years that a lot of us, the economics of this are just kind of silly, but how the, how the hell do cities escape this discussion and this trap? Because I'm completely mystified as how we ever get out of the situation where we are subsidizing major league franchises.
Charles Marohn (30:04.784)
I have some weird thoughts on this. And yeah, I don't think that, I think that people who are gonna hear this and I'm probably just gonna make like everybody angry. Because I do have like very strange thoughts on this. So let's go out to the edge of Kansas City where the DOT and the city are actively building interchanges because they wanna get more development.
Kevin K (30:06.692)
please share.
Charles Marohn (30:32.816)
What I find frustrating about that, when you go build an interchange and you've got on ramps and off ramps on the highway, you're in a sense robbing the highway capacity, right? Because an interchange creates friction and slows down traffic and all that. In order to get the development on the side of the highway, the frontage roads, the interchange, all the big box stores and all the stuff that will go there, and then the housing subdivision that will go adjacent to that.
The act of building that interchange makes multimillionaires out of a bunch of randos out in the middle of nowhere. It might be the guy who like inherited it from someone who inherited it or someone from inherited it like. And that's probably the most palatable. What generally happens is someone by bought it from him a decade ago and like a land speculator just sat on it and then worked with the D .O .T. to get it developed. But either way, it's a massive cash transfer from the public.
to private property owners. And I have always said, if we're gonna do that, we should do one of two things as a public. We should go out and buy up all that land around where the interchange is gonna be. I'm thinking like a mile in each direction. You know, we should buy that ahead of time at pre -interchange rates. We should build the interchange and then the interchange makes the land more valuable.
We should then sell the land back to the market at that higher rate and use that amount to pay for the interchange. That or a more conventional way to do it would be to do a special assessment, which cities do all the time when they're out building sewer and water, they special assess the whole thing.
I'm cognizant of the fact that like the Colosseum in ancient Rome was not built in order to get ancient Rome. Like ancient Rome was what it was. And then wealthy patrons came in and said, I want everybody to think I'm awesome. So I'm going to build this Colosseum and, you know, deck it all out and do all that. I feel like our stadiums are, in a sense, the same thing. And if I were a city.
Charles Marohn (32:41.36)
working with some very rich people to try to build what is in a sense a monument to them and their play thing, this major league baseball team. I would want to use the tools of either imminent domain and development, or I would want to use the tools of special assessment to recoup my part of the investment. Because if I'm gonna build a baseball stadium,
I want it to be Wrigley field in terms of the intensity of the development around it and what that actually means to the land values in its vicinity. If I'm going to build, I can't remember what the Atlanta one is called. I hate that state, the new Cobb field or something like that. It's a junk park. Like it might be a nice place, but I like, don't like anything about its development. Even, um, you know,
Kevin K (33:21.028)
the new one.
It's truest. Is it truest park? Yeah.
Charles Marohn (33:36.112)
Target Field, which is like one of my, I think Target Field is my favorite park and I'm biased obviously, Minnesota Target Field. But I think it's a great park. I think the way they financed it is really backward. And the development around it has trailed the park by 10 to 15 years because we didn't have the right kind of financial.
I'm going to use the word incentives, but I don't mean giveaways. I mean, incentives by like now you've got a $10 million special assessment in this land. You better build something that's a hundred million dollars on it or, you know, you're going to pay a high tax rate year after year after year. You got to make use of this property. We didn't have everybody's incentives aligned when we made the big public investment. And so we didn't get the private investment out of it that we should have got. That's.
I could buy into stadiums if we actually had that mindset because then the public is not only going to recoup their investment ultimately, but you're going to get a really nice product at the end.
Kevin K (34:44.804)
Yeah, I think that's a really interesting way to think about it. And unfortunately, I don't think we don't really have public officials who think about it that way. Yeah. Well, yeah, we don't have the stomach for it. And it's a good point.
Charles Marohn (34:53.36)
the stomach for it? I mean, Chuck says, imminent domain, everything within a mile. I mean, that's crazy. But if you were responsible with your finances, you would do a special assessment.
Kevin K (35:08.932)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot of logic to that. And maybe you don't even recover all of the public investment, but you could recover a substantial portion of it. Who knows?
Charles Marohn (35:20.72)
What I think you can, I think you recover some of it upfront, right? Like you can, you can have your upfront and then you'll have the after effect of basically having the incentives aligned where people will then develop and then you will collect the rest of it in terms of long -term taxes. I mean, I, I've watched Kansas city Joe, our friend, Joe Mancosi did some, some analysis of tax increment financing deals that Kansas city's done that would make your stomach churn. I mean, just giving away.
tens of millions of dollars to the most ludicrous kind of things that will never cashflow. I've watched Kansas City build monstrosity things out on the edge of town and call it growth and call it public investment when the city's guaranteed to lose money on every single one of these things. You don't even need more than a napkin analysis to figure that out. It makes me sad. I would, if, if Kansas City were to become more sophisticated about the public purse, I think they could build a stadium.
responsibly, but they can't do it without, you know, in a sense, demanding that everyone who's going to get rich on it contributes proportionately to what is being built.
Kevin K (36:28.74)
Yeah, yeah, I like that. I mean, it seems to me almost like it's sort of a third way thought, you know, thought pattern about it because as I tried to talk to people locally about it here, unfortunately with the reality of sports and sports economics today, like a city the size of Kansas City, you're just not going to build a new facility without public investment in it. It's just not going to happen or you're going to lose the teams. And that sucks, but that's where we are.
Charles Marohn (36:55.408)
Did New York, didn't New York have public subsidy on their ZO2? I mean, I'm.
Kevin K (37:00.612)
I think they might have. I know in San Francisco when the Giants built their new stadium, they built it all themselves. And I can't remember some of the new football stadiums they have. Yeah. Yeah.
Charles Marohn (37:10.704)
I know the 49ers, the 49ers got a huge subsidy on theirs. So, I mean, you're like, I'm with you because you and I are both told that we're mid -market teams, you know, and you've suffered the trauma. No, I was going to say you've suffered the trauma of having a football team lead, but that was St. Louis that had the football team lead. That wasn't Kansas City. You guys have the glorious football team.
Kevin K (37:30.308)
That was St. Louis, yeah. Uh -huh. Nope.
We do. We had a baseball team leave, but that was before I was born. So the Kansas City A's. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we lost an NBA team and an NHL team in my life.
Charles Marohn (37:40.048)
Okay, so that that trauma is is gone.
Charles Marohn (37:47.984)
Really? What was your NBA team? I don't remember that.
Kevin K (37:50.276)
It was the Kansas City Kings. They went to Sacramento. Yeah, in the 80s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, at one point we were the smallest city in the country that had all four major sports leagues.
Charles Marohn (37:53.104)
Sacramento, no kidding. I did not know that. Huh. Huh. Um.
Charles Marohn (38:05.52)
We've been told that that Minnesota can't support four because we're too small for that. And there's always the, you know, I feel like it's one of those things where each team can kind of threaten to leave because they're the we're the fourth one that can't be supported without a public stadium. Yeah, it here's here's so you have a you have a background in architecture. Here's what I struggle with with stadiums. I feel like.
And I'll say this even about my beloved target field. We don't build stadiums that will be around to be excavated in the future. Like the Roman Coliseum, we can look at and we can see this grandeur and like it's been there thousands of years. We don't build anything that isn't in a sense, it might have a nice fancy facade and it might be nice. And we've used some decorative brick to make it look good.
But the reality is, is like, like we just built a plastic band box with some good veneer on it that looks cool. And I like the dimensions, but these aren't like massive public investments meant to endure beyond really a generation. Right? I mean, am I, am I misunderstanding something about how we build these things?
Kevin K (39:25.38)
Well, I think there was an era where they were built differently. I think that's probably more commonly the case now. I mean, even Kauffman Stadium is a pretty incredible structure in and of itself. There were a lot of impressive structures, though, built in that era in the 60s now that basically are all gone. They're all torn down and replaced. It seems more like they're thought of more like a consumer product.
Charles Marohn (39:48.4)
Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin K (39:55.076)
now that is like you build these stadiums and they're wildly expensive and they're huge, but essentially they're built to last maybe two generations. And then we're looking to either completely overhaul it or replace them.
Charles Marohn (39:55.888)
Yeah!
Charles Marohn (40:11.952)
Well, I realized that the Metro Dome, which the Metro Dome was a special case product where we built the dumbest stadium at the end of the dumb stadium era. And like, I think the year after we built the Metro Dome or two years later, Camden Yards was built and everyone had buyer's remorse right away. But, you know, you're talking about a stadium that at the 18 year mark.
They said needs to come down and we're going to contract this team and actually have fewer baseball teams because of this bad stadium. We got target field in 08 or 09 somewhere in there. I think somewhere in that range. So, you know, the the the Metrodome era lasted 24, 25 years. And I remember that like the roof caved in on it and like you blew it like no one was sad really to see it go because it was really like a plastic box.
It seemed to me like it's a consumer good, like it's just designed. And I wonder if, because Wrigley Field, you know, say you could tear that down and rebuild it in place, right? I don't know what it would take to do that. I mean, people would flip out if you did that. They're going to maintain it till it can't be maintained anymore. But.
there's really no question of where the Chicago Cubs will play. And I don't think that's because it's iconic as much as it is embedded in this ecosystem around it. You know, so to I'm sorry, Kevin, to me, the key to having a good public stadium investment would be that you have to actually grow the ecosystem around it. So there's some codependency. So that thing actually like could never leave again.
Kevin K (41:45.7)
Yeah, yeah.
Kevin K (42:03.428)
Yeah, as our as our friend, Philip Bess would say, he wrote a great, great little book called City Baseball Magic, which actually was a study of what the White Sox should have done when they replaced Comiskey Park. But he talked about it's just the best ballparks are neighborhood ballparks. It would then emphasis on the neighborhood park. So check out one fun little bit of baseball park trivia for you.
Charles Marohn (42:24.784)
Yeah.
Kevin K (42:30.436)
One of the very first projects I worked on as a young architect right out of college was at the Metrodome. You remember at one point they put in these big vertical screens to block off parts of the seats. Yeah, to block off part of the seats to make it look more full for different events. I did that. It was a ridiculous project.
Charles Marohn (42:30.8)
Uh oh.
Charles Marohn (42:44.336)
The baggy? Yeah, the baggy.
Uh huh. Uh huh.
man, I hated you then. Because it was so weird because what it was, the Metrodome was built like a football stadium and then they overlaid this baseball stadium within it. And I had season tickets for a while. My brother and I, when I was in grad school, I got them. We went up, the twins had been historically bad for many years and they were selling season tickets at an event. And my brother and I said, well, let's...
Let's go look at them. If we can get front row seats, we'll do it. Well, we got front row seats down by the tunnel where they come out for the football game. So it was like by the bullpen. It wasn't it wasn't by the dugout or anything. It was like maybe like what would be in the corner today. But front row is front row. I mean, they were really cool. Like we were right there. You could yell at the right fielder and talk to the guys in the bullpen. It was it was awesome. The problem was you were facing the 50 yard line.
which was like center field. So if you wanted to watch the game, you had to like crane your head over the left to actually see the game going on. Those when those banners went up, I think the what you tell me, I feel like the thing was to try to make it feel less empty because you took out like 20 ,000 seats by by putting up this big curtain to say, hey, it's not as empty and it's a little more intimate. Yeah, it didn't work.
Kevin K (44:12.164)
Yep. Mm -hmm.
Kevin K (44:22.148)
It was a funny deal. Just the sort of project you give a young architect to work on.
Charles Marohn (44:22.288)
Hahaha!
Charles Marohn (44:28.88)
So did you, you came up to the metronome and like, you know, what was your level of involvement with?
Kevin K (44:33.988)
The funny thing on that, I was just the kid in the office doing the drawing work, so I didn't actually go get to do a site visit for any part of it. But when I was a little kid growing up in Albert Lee, I mean, we went to the Metrodome a lot. I have a lot of great memories of going to games at the Metrodome.
Charles Marohn (44:38.352)
Sure, sure.
Charles Marohn (44:49.648)
Now hang on a sec, you're not Minnesotan, are you?
Kevin K (44:52.836)
No, not really. We lived in Albert Lee.
Charles Marohn (44:55.536)
Okay.
I mean, I like you, I like you, and you have some positive characteristics about you. I didn't want to automatically attribute them to being Minnesotan, but now things are falling into place.
Kevin K (45:05.54)
No, we lived in Albert Lee for eight years. And yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. And it was when I was a, you know, elementary school kid and junior high. So, you know, those are great years and great, great memories. My parents, I think my parents really were happy to get out. They thought it was way too cold and, you know, they weren't, they weren't too fond of that. But well, I was a kid. I was a kid. I didn't, you know,
Charles Marohn (45:09.68)
OK, OK, so you got a little of the vibe.
Charles Marohn (45:21.456)
Yeah, yeah.
Charles Marohn (45:31.376)
You didn't think it was too cold though, did you? Cause you're, yeah, bring it on.
Kevin K (45:36.548)
So, last thing I just wanna kind of touch on a little bit, cause it's a fun topic is you've been, you've shared a lot in many podcasts about your love for Disney World and your enjoyment of Disney World. And I just wanna touch on this a little bit. And I've probably like, you know, thinking way too deeply about all this stuff, but we took our kids there, I guess it was about a year and a half ago. I have actually no experience with Disneyland in California, just Disney World in Florida.
Charles Marohn (45:47.824)
Yeah.
Charles Marohn (46:04.752)
Mmm.
Kevin K (46:05.7)
And of course we had a fantastic time. It was absolutely magical for the kids for the age they were. And everything about it was really, really nice. And I just want to talk a little bit about it because it's fascinating to think about because if you could think about like the un -strong towns, it would be like Walt Disney World. It's...
you know, if you think about the most incredible, or at least this was the thought I had at the time. If you thought about something that was like the most top -down, large enterprise you could conceive of, it's Disney World. And yet we both really, really enjoy it and find a lot to admire. And I wonder if you could maybe expand on that a little bit or talk about it.
Charles Marohn (46:40.912)
Absolutely.
Charles Marohn (46:51.984)
Well, let's start with this. I think the thing that I have always loved from the time that I was, I think 13 was the first time that my family went up until today, is that it is some of the best designed urban spaces in America. If you want to experience, you know, you and I hang out with a crowd.
where there's actually a debate over, do you like your urbanism gritty or do you like it fake? And there's a whole strain of people who like, if I can't smell urine in the street, it's not a real city. And I'm from a small town. I actually like things nice. So the idea of going to Disney World and riding transit and having it be beautiful and comfortable and fun, the idea of not having a car and going to places and walking around and...
Yeah, there's a lot of other people there, but it's so well designed and proportioned. And the hyper attention on the human experience, not just standing, how you stand in line and wait, but how you actually get the transition from one place to another, to another. You know, like the sight lines that you have and the smells, like all of this, the music, as someone who is an auditory person,
The idea that you would walk between different places and the music would not clash with each other as you would go from one place to another, but actually blend. I try to explain this to my wife decades ago and I didn't do a very good job. I said, it's comforting to me because it's so well designed. I used to take my, when I ran my own planning and engineering firm, I used to take my team down to just show them.
Here's what good urban design looks like. And like, let me look at the way these buildings are proportioned and laid out. Look at where they've done with the lighting. Look at this. It wasn't like we were going to come back to Brainerd, Minnesota and build Disney World. But my gosh, you look at the lights we put in the park, they're just like ugly street lights because, oh, we need light here. The attention to detail is so deep and thorough. And the stories are just legend of like, you know.
Charles Marohn (49:10.416)
They would they would put a tree in a spot and what would come and he'd look at him and be like, oh, geez, I should be three feet over this way. And be like, why should it be three feet? Well, look at like here's where it blocks this view and that like this and that. And then he'd walk away and they go, we had to move the tree three feet because now I'll never be able to walk by this and see it that way again. Our cities. Could spend way less money and be vastly more beautiful if we had just.
a tiny bit of the understanding of urban design that like the base Imagineer has. And I think that is the thing that, you know, it is Disney World is not meant to endure. It is. I mean, they call it a stage. You're on stage when you're there at the park. It is, you know, like a stage in a theatrical production. It's false fronts. It's like not.
Not like super high quality construction. It's meant to be ripped down and rebuilt after a certain amount of time. But your city is made to endure. I mean, you want your city to be around 100 years from now, 200 years from now. None of us build thinking that, well, this neighborhood is going to be disposable. If if we grasped 10 percent of what the Disney Corporation grasp about building great places, it would be a revolution in this country of.
of urban design.
Kevin K (50:38.66)
Yeah, I think one of the things that struck me or maybe it just occurred to me differently this time as well is since I'm in professionally now, I'm running this place management organization here in Kansas City. And so I have gotten a whole lot more exposure in day -to -day work with just management of public space and how difficult that is and just the challenges.
Charles Marohn (50:51.888)
Yeah.
Kevin K (51:07.652)
I started to look at it a little bit through that lens. And I think when I started to do that, I'm just completely and utterly impressed with the management of everything that Disney does from beginning to end, from the entire experience, from when you arrive through the process of going through security. Oh my God. The thousands and thousands of people that go through security per hour. And it's just this utterly seamless experience that you're just like, why can't the airport be like this? You know?
Charles Marohn (51:37.072)
Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin K (51:37.092)
And, you know, all the aspects of it really makes you say, this is what I think a lot of us are really hoping. This is how we wish our places were managed on a daily basis, including the cleanliness of it. And I know it's a fake world. It's a theme park. But I think that's part of it seems to me like that's part of the attraction.
Charles Marohn (52:00.464)
Yeah, and I actually think we can discount it and say it's a fake world, like I totally get it. But I also feel like what they've recognized that we all could easily recognize is that a huge part of creating value is the experience. We were having a chat here internally today about an article that one of our writers is working on about transit.
and just how a lot of the wayfaring is being taken out in New York and in other places because it was old and it just didn't get replaced. And you can go to a place like Vancouver where they've got new parts of the system and those parts have great wayfaring and great signage. The reason is because the way we finance transit focuses on massive one -time investments.
but it doesn't really look at long term the user experience and how do we improve that? How do we put money towards that? And how do we make that fun? We would rather have double the size of the transit system and have it be really crappy for everybody than to have half the transit system and have it be marvelous for everyone who uses it. And that is really a byproduct of like our macro economy, right? Grow, grow, grow, build, build, build more, more, more. Disney builds a lot, but
They never build anything without having a strategy for how it will be exquisitely maintained, for how it will really be conformed and contorted to match the experience. They're always willing to check their assumptions, check their understandings based on how people use stuff. And I think that we could learn a lot from that.
The four step process that we use at Strong Towns, the idea that you humbly observe where people struggle and you ask yourself what's the next smallest investment and then you do that and you repeat the process. Part of that comes from really Walt Disney himself. This may be a apocryphal insight, but there's a story about Walt that feels like it's genuine.
Charles Marohn (54:21.232)
He had an apartment at Disneyland and he would go down in the morning and walk around in his bathrobe watching people get the park ready. And one day he's out walking around and they're putting up a fence. And he's like, why are you why are you putting up a fence there? And he's well, people keep cutting across the grass. We want them to stay on the sidewalk. And his answer was, well, you've got it wrong. Rip out the sidewalk and put it here where people are walking. They're showing you where to go.
anyone who's been at one big box store and trying to drive to the next big box store and recognizes that they have to drive half a mile up the highway and then do a weird U -turn and come back and use a right in right out and do all this. Anybody who's tried to cross a street and recognize that they have to walk half a mile to a street light to cross and then come back appreciates the idea that Walt has, which is observe where people are struggling, observe where this is hard and just make it easier for them.
To me, this is a genius insight, but it shouldn't be a hard one for us to do.
Kevin K (55:27.46)
Yeah. Yeah. And I think the other thing is the other observation that I think ties into all that is what you see with Disney World, or at least what I saw with it, is we're in this weird time and place in our culture where there's just not a lot of feeling that we're doing a lot of things really well. And even at the big corporate level,
very large corporations, it seems like there's more bad news than good when it comes to all that. And here you have this massive corporation. The Disney Corporation is absolutely massive and owns so many things. And they own this enormous complex of Walt Disney World. And I think when you go there, it's like it kind of, I can understand how my parents would have thought about that era, that America.
does big things really well because Disney World epitomizes somebody, an organization doing big things really, really well down to the smallest detail like you describe.
Charles Marohn (56:38.096)
Well, Walt Disney embodies, for better and for worse, I mean, I think there's obviously two sides to this, the immediate post -war mentality. I mean, Disneyland itself is a hubristic undertaking to transform an orange grove out in the middle of nowhere into this dreamland where you can take your kids, you can take your grandparents, everybody can go and have this wonderful time.
His vision came about because he was sitting at like an old carnival, watching his kids go on rides that were dirty and not well taken care of and grounds that weren't very fun. And he's like, as an adult, you're kind of ostracized from participating. Let's build this dream world. I think it is in many ways the best of that era because he did have a
a dream and a vision that was very, I'm not gonna use, I want to use the word inclusive, but I think that is probably wrong in our current context. But he would have said, a place for everybody to come. He was also criticized for it being too expensive like it is today. So there's limits to what is very expensive. But I think it's also the worst.
Kevin K (57:55.3)
It is expensive. Yeah.
Charles Marohn (58:00.912)
of what we did, because it is this idea that you can create perfection. All like it is possible to build to a finished state and have it be done right. And when it comes to magical make believe places, I think that that's probably right, because they don't have a mindset that it will always be there. They are always redoing and refixing things and all that. But we when we take that mentality and we bring it into our neighborhoods and our cities and we're like, well, we can build this.
with a Disney mentality where we go out and build it perfect the first time and then walk away. Sure, we'll get 20 years where it's the nice neighborhood and the good place, and then it will become a downward spiral like every place else. And I do think we have not, it's almost become a place that allows us to believe in the wrong things. Like we, to me, I feel like if my mayor went to Disney World, he would come back,
not with the mentality of we need obsessive maintenance and to humbly observe where people are struggling and to respond to the human condition and have great urban design. He would come back and say, wow, we can build big stuff really quickly and have it be awesome. And I'm like, that's the wrong takeaway, buddy.
Kevin K (59:16.196)
Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I think it does espouse a lot of those contradictions. So that feels like probably a good place to leave it. I should also mention in case you didn't know that Walt Disney is from small town Missouri. And Marceline. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, everything in Missouri is pronounced strange. That's just the way it is. It's also Missouri. So I should say that. You know.
Charles Marohn (59:22.032)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Hey, thanks, man.
Charles Marohn (59:31.696)
He is, no, I definitely knew that. I've been wanting, it's Marceline, is that the name of the place? Marceline, okay, I'm saying it like I'm Minnesotan.
Hahaha
Do people actually say that? Missouri?
Kevin K (59:47.619)
If you're if you are not in Kansas City or St. Louis, it's pronounced Missouri. Oh, yeah.
Charles Marohn (59:52.336)
Seriously, I did not know that. You know, I spent a summer at Fort Leonard Wood, which was one of the most miserable summers of my life. So I had clay, you know, Minnesota, we have this beautiful glacial outwash. Doesn't mean like the engineering geek, but we have this nice glacial outwash. So when it rains, the water drains into the ground and I'm in Kansas City or I'm sorry, I'm in Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri and I have a tent that I'm sleeping in because I'm a soldier.
Kevin K (59:57.316)
Oh, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, that's it.
Charles Marohn (01:00:21.392)
And it rains and guess what happens to the water in Missouri? It just runs into the lowest area and floods it, which happened to be my tent. Oh my gosh, it's horrible. Just wretched.
Kevin K (01:00:24.548)
Yeah.
Kevin K (01:00:29.124)
Yeah, yeah, and you just get mud everywhere. It's wonderful. Yeah, but yeah, but yet continuing the story just briefly, Walt Disney then as a young man went to Kansas City and got his start in journalism and his professional career in Kansas City. And he worked at a place called the Laffagram Studios, which a friend of mine here, a developer is trying to restore and they're trying to make it into an attraction. But yeah, it should be a cool thing when it gets done. So.
Charles Marohn (01:00:41.328)
Yeah.
Charles Marohn (01:00:54.128)
Oh nice.
Is that where he did the first, because there was a first iteration before Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse was the second prototype after he had a falling out with his business partner. Yeah.
Kevin K (01:01:01.348)
Yes.
Kevin K (01:01:06.628)
Yes. Yeah. There, there is some, you know, urban legend that the first one was here at the Laffagram studios. But I think, I think that's, uh, I mean, we'll claim it, but it's hotly debated. Uh, well Chuck, thanks so much for doing this. Uh, for again, um, the book, uh, coming out is Escaping the Housing Trap, the Strong Towns Response. And then the Strong Towns National Gathering is coming up May 14th and 15th in Cincinnati.
Charles Marohn (01:01:13.392)
Sure. Let's go with that. Yeah, yeah, let's go with that.
Kevin K (01:01:35.844)
So I can't wait to see you there and see our other good friends and look forward to a great week in a city that I've been looking forward to spending more time.
Charles Marohn (01:01:48.624)
Thank you, my friend. And I'm, I'm happy, uh, to introduce a whole bunch more people to your podcast. Um, if you're not listening, if this is your first time listening and you're listening, cause of me, put this on your rotation. Cause this is a very good podcast and Kevin, uh, has a lot of my friends and our mutual friends and a lot of other interesting people. Um, we talk about more than just Disney and, uh, Kansas city and baseball. So yeah, thanks friend. Absolutely.
Kevin K (01:02:10.052)
Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, thanks, Chuck. I appreciate that. All right. Take care.

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Is the proposed Royals' stadium a good idea?
26 Mar· The Messy City Podcast
Butch Rigby is a long-time Kansas City developer, small business promoter, and city booster. We decided to sit down and talk about the looming ballot initiative on April 2, and the pros and cons of the current proposal for moving the Royals to the Crossroads neighborhood.
You can listen to more of Butch’s story in this podcast.
Another podcast of interest is this discussion with Philip Bess, and our work together to save Fenway Park.
Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.
Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.
Intro: “Why Be Friends”
Outro: “Fairweather Friend”
Episode Transcript:
Kevin (00:00.644)
Welcome back to the messy city podcast. I've got a returning guest, butch Rigby here, otherwise known as Kansas city's George Bailey, as I've described my, uh, my longtime friend and, uh, and partner in crime on, uh, Kansas city issues, downtown development issues, et cetera. And, uh, Bush, it's great to see you. Oh, Kevin. It's always great to be here. Matter of fact, it.
feeling like Savannah, Georgia. It is. I mean, it's already in the 70s and it was the 70s in February or something. That was crazy. So I know everything's blooming. All the stuff I planted last fall is looking good. So I'm happy. I was worried that everything bloomed too early and it was going to get frozen out. But I don't think so. I know. I think we're like straight into lake season pretty soon. So that's all right. Well, butch, I wanted to have you in today to talk about.
the baseball stadium issue in particular, because it's a hot topic here locally. There is a proposal on the ballot coming up in April here in Kansas City and Jackson County to extend a sales tax, an existing sales tax that will expire in a few years.
to help fund a new baseball stadium for the Royals in a downtown location in the Crossroads area. And then also provide funding for the Chiefs for a series of improvements to Arrowhead. And Butch and I go way back on this issue. We had a lot of fun years ago talking about the potential for downtown baseball when we were both volunteering with the Urban Society of Kansas City.
That's correct. That's right. Shout out to all of our urban society buddies. Oh yeah. They knew who they are. And I think it's interesting, maybe where we could start Butch is to kind of put things in context for what we talked about. That was probably now 20 years ago when we were getting involved in that. Just about. Yeah. And so that was when the Glass family owned the Royals. And...
Kevin (02:16.186)
Downtown was coming along, but it was still a little bit more in its infancy of redeveloping. And there was a push on the part of a lot of people to try to get the Royals to consider coming downtown. And we took on this crazy volunteer task of looking at all the different sites that there were downtown and trying to get people to analyze them and...
put their thoughts together. That was, in retrospect, that was kind of a wild thing. And we had a couple hundred people who volunteered with it, as far as I remember, right? We did. And, you know, of course you have to remember 30 years ago when I bought my first building down in what was then Film Row, 19th and Wyandotte, you know, before the days of Crossroads, it was a ghost town. And I'm not kidding. I mean, it was literally...
On a Friday night, we would hold these Christmas and July parties to celebrate the history of Film Row. And we were the only thing going on down there. Now, you know, we were begging for tenants. I had a few buildings that I bought and I was having a challenge keeping a coffee shop tenant open. Certainly wasn't, you know, having any luck with restaurants or anything like that. That's just natural when you've had, you know, a big daytime population in office towers in the, inside the loop.
Uh, but you really have, uh, I think we had 2 ,500 residences downtown, which isn't enough to support really anything. Yeah. And, uh, you know, at that time, uh, you know, kind of spin forward a dozen years or so, and, uh, things are happening. You know, they're announcing, uh, you know, the, the big push for the, not only the power and light, but to get H &R blocked downtown to do, uh, get the Sprint Center downtown. And, uh, we held the halfway.
mark of the development at Screenland at my theater for a while. And, you know, that was a time when we were all thinking, hey, there are several good options for baseball because it meant more and more people making downtown what it used to be. 30 years before I was there, everything was downtown. Shopping was downtown. Movies were downtown. If you wanted to see a first run picture, it was downtown. It was a destination for a reason.
Kevin (04:38.482)
And that was gone. And so we saw that opportunity. And of course, back then, like you say, there were probably eight good sites because, you know, they were going to be kind of on their own and developed around them as opposed to the new, the new situation. Now, when we have a, an owner who really wants to be downtown and reflects that same passion for a good, strong downtown, um, you know, they're limited to a couple of sites and they have to take into consideration.
all of the other ancillary effects of the Royals being down there. And of course the ancillary effects of the reason that I support a downtown stadium. So I think you're one of the people that I really would enjoy talking to about this because you have your interests across many areas. And so obviously you care about the city and about the downtown and the urban core.
but you also have an almost unimpeachable track record of caring about everything local, Kansas City, small businesses. And as we look at the proposal that's on the table today, and that's really been, I think, about the primary source of controversy has been that the Royals have chosen a site in the Crossroads area. It's funny, they keep calling, you know, in the paper keeps calling it like the East Crossroads. I think of it.
personally like North Crossroads, if you want to call it that. It's literally the edge of downtown, edge of the loop. The loop hopefully will be erased. But no, I mean, look, I'm in business to make money. I always have been. But I don't believe real estate is a commodity. I don't believe you just develop strip centers. I mean, there's a business doing that, but it's not what excites me. What excites me is the challenge of empty buildings becoming full.
I mean, when I was down in the crossroads back in 94, my friends just couldn't understand it. They go, it's dead down there. And I thought, well, you know, they got to do something with Union Station. They've got to do something with that big piece of land, maybe a hotel at 17th and Central, you know, and why not? And of course, things got better. We get the Performing Arts Center, world -class, and the Union Station was completely renovated.
Kevin (06:59.762)
And a lot of things happened that in unison, but we were always able to maintain old buildings, small tenancies. To this day, I have, you know, 14 buildings. I have 200 tenants. They're all small businesses. And those tenants range from single office tenants to small restaurants, to law firms, to salons. I mean, you know, 63rd street, for example, between Oak and Rock Hill.
was 70 % vacant as a corridor in 2014. And now we're 100 % occupied and it's all small business. And small business got us through COVID. Small business stayed. They're resilient. You know, they're not making corporate decisions from afar. So, you know, being downtown, a lot of people say, well, how could you possibly want the baseball stadium in the crossroads? And, you know, I was initially,
like everybody else, assuming the East Village was the spot. It made all the sense. You could do $2 billion worth of development. And I slowly came around to understand why the location they picked was the one they picked, and this is before they announced it. But I started thinking about the fact that the city of Kansas City is responsible for tax shortfalls, sales tax shortfalls at the Power and Light District and all that development. And, you know,
That's just part of the deal. I mean, if you really look at all the ancillary revenues they get because of the effects of the Paranlight district, it's probably still a positive for the city. However, why would you try to be far enough away that people get there, park, go to a few bars around there and leave and create competition for yourself? Where the location they picked is for the most part, the Kansas city star building.
a newer church building that already they've outgrown, a lot of vacant ground, and then a block of buildings that of course, most people would like to see them not tear those buildings down, but in any development, you will lose some buildings. And they do have to have some ancillary space for parking, for season ticket parking, for offices, a little revenue from a hotel, things to offset the cost.
Kevin (09:24.914)
And so I started looking at it and I said, it's also two blocks from the streetcar as opposed to eight blocks. And if we are going to grow our habit and try to get a, you know, what we call an intermodal transportation option, that is non -car options downtown, whether it be Uber or the streetcar or other forms of transportation, you know, we've got to encourage people to use the streetcar. We've got to encourage people to use Uber. So.
It became apparent to me that the Kansas City Star Building was going to do nothing. And, you know, so I did come to support it. Now, do I support it unconditionally? No, I think there are some challenges that they must deal with and get out in front of. Parking is the number one. Security is a close second. Respect for the people who are being displaced is probably up there at a tie for number one. And,
You know, I've had some talks, I've had some opportunities to talk to the Royals and to talk to the architects. And I do genuinely believe that John Sherman wants to do the right thing. I do believe John Sherman does not want chain restaurants. He's a Kansas City guy. People treat him like he's some hedge fund billion around New York who just landed in our town. No, he's, he lives in Jackson County. He's very charitable. He and his wife are very involved in the community.
and always have been, and I think it's really almost unfair to characterize him just because you're mad about a baseball stadium. And so I have felt that the location is good. And I think it makes a lot more sense, especially if the funding can be extended to cover the freeway another three blocks, or two blocks, whatever the extension of the freeway cover is, because then you genuinely...
have a walkable community. Yeah. I mean, I think if we just talk about the location, just for a second, just that aspect, I feel like I was one of the few people that never liked the East Village site. Yeah. And I always felt like that site was too far from the streetcar. Kansas City is not New York. We're not used to.
Kevin (11:42.418)
We don't have a population used to taking public transportation and walking long distances. And so if we ever, my feeling was if you really wanted people to use the streetcar as an amenity to get back and forth to games, which would be a good thing for the city. Oh, absolutely. Because then people could populate the entire urban core. They could park it at the plaza. They could park at the riverfront, you know, any number of places and then hop on the streetcar and get there. And I think that would be a good thing for our city.
But I've always felt like it needed to be much closer than the East Village site was. Not to mention, the East Village site is surrounded by a bunch of government buildings, which basically close at four or five o 'clock. It's kind of a dead zone downtown. And then east of there, you've got a lot of just really social service issues that are really problematic for thinking about the kind of atmosphere.
that you have in a ball game. And so I think from that standpoint, I was never in love with the East Philly site. And so when they announced the Crossroads site, I think if I were looking at it like if it was a blank slate, if all of that was empty today, it makes a lot of sense. And because it's proximity to so many other things, proximity to Power and Light District.
the ability for all those things to build off of each other, which is something we talked about years ago, like the virtues of an urban ballpark is it becomes like a one plus one equals three situation for entertainment and other uses. And so it seemed to me like the major issues from the site standpoint were the existing businesses that are being displaced. I didn't care about the Casey Star Building at all. I think it's hideous. I'd be happy to see it gone, but.
I know not everybody agrees with me on that, but I think it's hideous. But there are all those, you know, a number of really cool businesses that you and I have probably both been to and really enjoy in that area. And so it's kind of a question of like what happens, what happens to them? Well, and I couldn't. Oh, that's okay. I'll edit that out. Nice ringtone. Yeah, I thought I turned it off. Sorry about that. I forgot to turn it off. Anyway.
Kevin (14:03.058)
I couldn't agree more. You you have the displacement of those businesses is a big deal. Yeah. Um, and you know, the Royals will have to step up and I believe they will. And I believe they've made this indication. They will step up and not only make those businesses whole, but make sure they can relocate close. If not better, uh, they can, uh, you know, whether it be rent deficiencies or anything else they have to do to make sure those businesses can thrive.
Um, you know, in a perfect world, yeah, you'd like to leave Oak street and leave those businesses and actually encapsulate them as part of the stadium. But it's my understanding that, you know, the new green dirt farm might be in right field. And, uh, and that's probably one of the tougher ones. Sure. Um, the green dirt farm, they've invested incredible amount of money and a lot of time and a lot of effort and they're getting ready to open after, you know, it's not easy to set up a cheese making. Oh, and there's such a phenomenon.
They are such a phenomenal business. But the Royals are very well aware of that. And they do have, I think they do have time under the construction schedules to relocate them and pay for all of the things they will need to do to get them back up and running again and hopefully even better. But it, you know, it's important to note that, you know, while if you skip that block, you know,
does the stadium become as self -sufficient as it should be? And remember, there's a billion dollars in private money going into this project. To me, I do listen to some of the bar owners and people who have been very vocal about how opposed they are to it.
And I get it. I empathize. I, I, I, you know, I will tell you, I own a building at 1701 McGee down the crossroads. It faces what will be the new baseball stadium. And we are going to be in the direct impact zone of construction. I mean, all my tenants are going to have to be facing all the perils of a, you know, a billion dollar project going up directly across the street. Um, I think that the, uh, you know, Royals have already announced they have.
Kevin (16:15.474)
construction management plans, they intend on busing workers in from remote lots. I mean, all of these things will go a long way to help. Some people will say, oh, well, you'll make so much money because you own the building. No, the building is rented. It's always been rented. I'm not changing tenants. I just signed a seven -year lease extension knowing the ballpark was slated for that spot with a small office tenant who's, they're part of the church next door and I give them a discounted rent and always have.
You know, I've locked myself into a long -term deal and I won't ever walk away from any of my tenants. I mean, you know, you spoke earlier, I genuinely do believe in small business and I genuinely, you know, I know that I would never rent one of my buildings, you know, to a national credit tenant to, you know, to get double the rent and kick out a local business. I just, just, I'm not in the business, you know.
purely for the money. I make money. I will be the first to say I've been very fortunate with my business success, but really that's due to all my small tenants. I don't remember that those are the ones that brought me here, you know. And so when I do support the baseball stadium where it is, I do that with an absolute solid belief that it will benefit the Crossroads. I think that we do have to, you know, maybe,
create a permit street parking for businesses only, or maybe you hand out scan cards for the day so it can't be baseball parking, but at the same time, identify parking structures. Don't just announce to the public, oh, we've got enough parking, we've done a study. I mean, I'm here from the government, I'm here to help you. I mean, we probably do need to get some very,
clear messaging out there that there are a lot of people in the crossroads who do support the Royals. But we've got to back it up with understanding the real issues people fear. There's a lot of work there to do on a lot of those logistics. And I would say for anybody also curious about Butch's background on the previous podcast that I had him on, we kind of walked through his whole story starting from the very beginning. And I think it's really interesting. I actually think it's
Kevin (18:36.882)
for especially a lot of young people to think about a career path. So I think one of the other aspects of all this, I guess I want to come back a little bit to the small business side of things and putting your real estate hat on. And if you were advising the Royals on like how to handle the real estate side of helping those small businesses, because,
I would imagine most of them are most, if not all, are probably tenants. They probably don't own their buildings. So they're on a lease of some kind. So like if the Royals buy the property, the building owner gets paid. And then the business, you know, they're like, okay, you got to move somewhere. What are the sorts of things that the Royals could do or that, you know, you might think about from a real estate standpoint for a tenant in that situation? Well, of course, you know,
The tenant has rights under a lease, you know, just because the Royals buy the building. If they are forcing or condemning the tenant out of the space, then they have a financial obligation. This is just, you know, pure legal talk. They, you know, they have a financial obligation to make the tenant whole again. And that goes without saying. And, you know, condemnation is not like the old days. It's not a popular thing. They do have the rights of condemnation and you need them. But,
You know, they're very, very much skewed toward the person being purchased or bought out or put out of business. Now, with that said, if I were advising the Royals and I think they listen to this, I think they feel similarly, if you're going to look at the budget and you're going to look at the overall scheme of how much things are going to cost, you know, you might be able to get carpeting at a little lower cost with a lot of work and competitive bid. You might be able to get a lot of different things and, you know, save money.
This is on a place to start trying to cut costs. This is a place that you get a little more than generous for a lot of reasons. The number one, because it's the right thing to do. A small bar owner's bar is as important to her as the Kansas City Royals baseball team are to the ownership group. It's like I say about small office tenants. I pay just as much attention to a single tenant user because from the perspective of both small businesses,
Kevin (21:01.17)
This is their life and they probably work just as hard as the Royals do, you know, and, and, and the chiefs and everybody else. And so treat them with not only fairness, but with a generous nature. Now, if any, you know, they've got to have, you know, it's gotta be reasonable. They've got to have some, um, you know, financials to back up, you know, their business and they've got to be paid. But, you know, I, I'd say to the Royals, you know, let's get out in front of this right now.
And I also think the general public needs to see who the Royals are. I mean, right now they're, you know, they're, they're working hard. I've, I've had some interactions with them and I have found it to be positive. I was at the Crossroads Community Association meeting and while it was a rather, you know, lively meeting for the most part, we put together a community benefits agreement. You know, some of the things we thought were important that the Royals needed to hear about.
public safety, architectural integrity within the neighborhood. And I think there's gonna be a pretty good community benefits agreement announced pretty soon. There is the Community Improvement District, which is a, if you get 51 % of the owners of the property around there to agree to it, you combine a small sales tax and a property tax.
and you start employing security guards and trash pickup and cleanup. Well, the Royals could be a big part of that. And I would advise the Royals give back more than you get. In other words, you know what, you're going to participate in security on game night. Why don't you participate in a security patrol seven nights a week? All of a sudden the crossroads is that much better off because the Royals were there. If you're going to participate in, you know, parking and, and, you know, some of the, uh, you know, you're going to,
park cars there, why don't you help participate in identifying or maybe even building a little bit of parking. You know, some of it for the neighborhood. There's a, I believe the ballpark site also includes, you know, a rather decent sized lot on Locust and during construction, make that open to all, you know, of the neighbors to park in during construction. There's a lot of things they could do that would be a very small percentage of the budget.
Kevin (23:24.178)
that would be very helpful to the neighborhood in the long run and alleviate some of the concerns. Yeah. How do you, how do you think about the parking question? Let's say when the stadium is done. And I know you and I probably think similarly about parking, but we're, we think differently than most people think. And I think your, your average Kansas city is obviously very used to the situation today.
at sports complex and it's easy, it's not cheap anymore, but it's easy and you can see the stadium and everything else. Parking in a downtown situation is really different and there is a lot of parking downtown. There's actually a whole lot of existing parking in garages and on streets, but there's also more and more competition for that use, especially depending on, you know,
the time of day that a game might, that people might actually start coming to a game. So how do you, how would you think about that? How do you talk about that issue with other people? Well, when I am talking about the issue, of course, the number one fear that comes up is, Hey, on game night, I might as well shut down the record bar. I might as well shut down the brick or I might as well shut down my business. It isn't particularly catering to baseball crowds, you know? Um, and, and, uh, because.
No one's going to come down to the ballpark or down to the, to the crossroads if they feel that, well, it's a ball game, there'll be no parking and I'm not going to go pay $20 to park to go get a beer or listen to music. So, you know, my first thought is we must have a restrictive street parking, you know, program in place. And, you know, if, if, if we need to be, we'll be a little progressive about it at the same time, let's identify clearly identify on an app.
that you can look at on your phone, that any website you can look at that says, here are your parking garages, touch the parking garage. It'll tell you how many spaces are available. We're reserve a space right now. Once people feel comfortable where they like to park and where they want to be downtown and they know where they're going, they're going to have a whole lot more, you know, ease in, in, in going to the game. I remember when I was a kid, I went to the, I'm
Kevin (25:45.778)
This will tell you how old I am. I went to the Kansas City A's game at municipal and my dad knew just the right guy to park in his lawn for 25 cents. And we did it every game. But I mean, you know, that, that idea that, that, uh, you familiarize the general public. Um, there's going to be a lot of our population that just is really going to be resistive to going down, down to a ball game. But then there's a whole new generation. They're just used to it. They go down there. And I think the, the job will be.
clearly identify that available parking to clearly put it on a map, let people see it. You know, we're from Missouri, show me. Yeah. Also worth noting that when we built the Sprint Center, we didn't build any new dedicated parking for that. Correct. And by all accounts, that hasn't hurt the Sprint Center at all. No. And I think that, you know, for the Royals, it's looking at the perspective of the businesses around it. I mean, the
When you're inside the loop, you know, you've probably had your business there and always park, parking's always been a concern. You know, we developed the crossroads, you know, we as a city and all of us developers and have lived off a rule that allowed for no street, I mean, no off street parking. If you had 3 ,500 square feet or less, if you have historic buildings, there's no requirement for street parking and allow those buildings are historic. So, you know, that was done with the idea of more and more public transit, which you and I both.
support, but it also did lead to a pretty reasonable dependence upon street parking. So let's save that street parking. Let's say that in front of every building that is a non -office or maybe all the buildings, you have to get a little, if you want to park there, it's for a business. It's sort of like during COVID, they gave part of the parking to restaurants and they let them utilize it. Well,
We do that and you get a little ticket and you scan it and put it in your, you don't have to scan it. You just put it in your, you know, dashboard. And if an officer comes by and they check the scan and it's valid, good. You know, maybe the, you know, brick Riverside or company gives you the ticket or maybe the hair salon, you know, or maybe who's ever opened the brick, you know, or maybe the music, you know, venue does that. So, you know, again, and a lot of those buildings will have their own parking that, that, uh,
Kevin (28:08.306)
that they rely on, but a lot of them, a lot of them don't. I have a parking lot at 17th and Oak and I will only utilize that for my tenants. And I've had a couple of small businesses request, well, would I rent them some nighttime parking? The answer is yes, I would. Before I need baseball parking revenues, I'd rather have, you know, a small restaurant that knows they'll stay in business because that parking lot will be off limits for baseball.
And I think there are other landlords that will make those designations and then we can really call out how many available baseball spots we have. And it's, it is a lot. Yeah. And another aspect of this, which, you why to me, the location as close to the street car as you could get a stadium was important was it, it completely extends the range and location at which somebody might park if they're driving in, say from.
Johnson County, or if you're driving in from north of the river or whatever, by the time a new stadium would open downtown, you would have a, the streetcar would be open from the river to UMKC. And so you could effectively come anywhere into that part of the city. And I know some people may hate hearing this too, because they don't like that idea, but you could drive into let's say the Westport area and you could get a drink before the game at Westport and then hop on the streetcar and take it to the game.
Oh, yeah, and you could do that. You could go to the plaza. You could go to anywhere up and down Main Street or in that corridor in Midtown. And so the the idea that all of the parking has to be like right near the stadium, even for commuters, is it's a different in this situation. And it is. And, you know, maybe there's a deal made with UMKC to utilize that large garage on game nights. Maybe there's a and I think it's a great example. You know, people talk about, well,
Is it really going to pay? Should we be supporting the Royals? You know, well, you know, there's 81 games a year. And you're talking about now, instead of going to the ballpark, pulling in the lot, seeing the game and leaving, you may well be getting off work and getting some dinner. You will have the easy ability in our town to go to Regaza or go to Hill Central or go to one of the restaurants up and down the streetcar line.
Kevin (30:31.89)
have an early dinner, have a couple of drinks, get on the street car, go to the game, come out of the game. And again, getting back on the street car, especially if you're walkable from the street car, which is a small percentage, but a nice percentage, you don't have to worry about the car. And so we'll learn that. I mean, I've often said, don't force people on the street car, encourage them, excite them about it. And quite frankly, our street car has been phenomenally successful in making it free.
I think was the key to success. So yeah, I mean, we do need to, you know, we do need to understand in the big picture, you know, if nothing else, the crossroads wasn't truly successful for coffee shops and restaurants and things like that until we had enough people living downtown who were there all the time and who were there at night and who were not just driving in.
And that happened because of the power and light and because of sprint and because of all the energy that was created and the baseball stadium will do more of the same. More people will live downtown. I believe we have 32 ,000 people living downtown right now. And I wouldn't be surprised to see 42 ,000 people downtown in five years, six years, especially with the baseball stadium there. And then if you really think about, you know, how many cars do you need? Does anybody know? Well,
9 ,000 for a 34 ,000 seat stadium, 1 ,500 will already be included in the ballpark project. So you've got 7 ,500 spaces that you're really looking at, and about 3 ,500 of those will be in the crossroads. I mean, you start dividing these up, and then you look at the intermodal transportations again. You look at the street car, you look at Uber, you look at those things, and you gotta only believe that number will grow.
Right. So, you know. Yeah, we talked about this or joked about it with my wife, who you know. And it's funny how basically everybody our age and younger when they are going out these days for entertainment, they're taking Uber. Absolutely. There are very few people that are driving around. The people my age and older tend to still be driving. No matter what they're doing, they're going to hit a couple of bars, they're going to party hop or whatever it is, they're probably still driving.
Kevin (32:54.45)
the younger crowd is much more used to just using Uber instead. You know, it's interesting, you know, I've probably like you, I mean, I've got a million really fond memories of Kauffman Stadium. And I started going there in the 70s when I was like a little kid. And when the great run that we had at the teams in the late 70s. And the stadium is...
it's a better stadium now than it was then with the improvements they made 20 years ago. So I've always, I mean, I have tons of great memories, but I've, you know, I've traveled enough to know and been around to enough cities to know that it's a terrible location for a baseball stadium where it is now. And we can all argue and debate about maybe what the best or ideal location is, but there's just no question that baseball exists.
so much better when it's part of a neighborhood and it can feed off of other activities and be mutually supportive. I think you just said the magic word neighborhood because I have heard John Sherman quoted as saying, I want to build America's next neighborhood ballpark. I mean, I remember going to Boston because I wanted to see the Red Sox play at Fenway and I got off the subway and I, whatever transportation we were on.
the ballpark and I keep looking around, then I looked up and I go, oh, this is the ballpark. It blended right in and you see these, you know, like Wrigley Field, you see the excitement of people all around you walking into the ballpark and you can see the buildings across the way and you can see, you know, the noise of a city and you know, it's a neighborhood attraction and it's a large one, but it looks a whole lot better than an empty glass building and a big flat parking lot. Let's face it. Yeah.
Yeah, no doubt. Yeah. And there's just something a little bit more, almost just magical about the experience of being in a city, coming up to a game and the excitement that happens with that. I'm not saying that there wasn't any of that at Coffin Stadium. There was two. Oh yeah. But it's just, it's a completely different feeling to it. And I don't remember going to municipal stadium back in the day. I probably did when I was like a little, little kid.
Kevin (35:18.486)
Yeah. The huddle club for the chiefs, you know, for a dollar you sit on the grassy hill at the ballpark. Those days are probably over the one dollar ticket. But yeah, you know, and, and, and probably the single most important reason to have the ballpark downtown and where it is, is because instead of all of the money being captured by Jackson County in the Island known as the sports complex, it is now being spread out amongst small businesses. And instead of a game time, you know,
being limited to the time it takes to park and the time it takes to get out. Game time can be right after work and you don't have to go anywhere if you're downtown or whatever restaurant you'd like to eat at along the way. And, you know, the truth is as long as we can preserve the integrity of the Crossroads neighborhood, it can only be a win for the, you know, for the neighborhood. And there are a lot, I've spoken to a lot of people in the Crossroads.
who believe the same way, but all of us believe that there are good things that can come out of this as long as the Royals will be, as they would say, team players, which I believe they are. Well, and I totally get and empathize with all of the people in the crossroads who care so deeply about that neighborhood. I mean, what you and others, many, many others have done over the last three decades or so is fantastic. And taking something,
an area that was very, very quiet, to say the least. And it's really our best neighborhood in a lot of ways in the urban core now. It's so lively and interesting and fun, and there's a great diversity of things going on all the time. And it's continuing to grow and change and expand, which is fantastic to see. So I totally get the...
the feeling that people have of being protective of that. And there are a lot of unique, creative businesses in the area. So I really hope the Royals, if they're successful with the ballot initiative, can find the right balance to keep people happy and enhance the neighborhood and really do something for the businesses that are there and make them feel valued.
Kevin (37:44.886)
because it is a special thing that we've done in Kansas City and I love to see it. Yep, me too. I think it would be, it can be a win -win. And I would hope that, you know, again, I come here as a 30 -year resident, so to speak, or business resident of the Crossroads and care deeply about it and very much, and you know, I think it's only a positive as long as it's done correctly. Yeah.
But I don't care about that Casey star printing press building. No, no. I heard somebody at the Jackson County meeting the other day go, can you imagine you walking in this big, beautiful neighborhood and there's this giant big box, you know, big stadium there. And of course I didn't say it, but I was thinking, are you color buying the color green? That monolith is, I mean, I always thought it was kind of cool, but it's, it's the, I don't know what the use could be.
possibly be. I've heard museum, but boy, that would be, uh, that would be a big museum. We have a lot of museums in this town. No doubt. And oh, by the way, the star got tax abatement for that building. Yes. And the church doesn't pay. Yeah. They got it twice. The church doesn't pay tax. So, you know, and another thing is we have all that ground in the East village that could A, be used for additional parking. And, and I think they could come up with the clever tram system to get people right over to the park if they didn't want to walk.
And B, the church could be moved over there, I would hope. You know, there are strong presence down there. You know, I've heard all the arguments, oh, you know, it's going to, there's $31 million worth of real estate not being taxed. I go, well, it wasn't really being taxed too much anyway. Yeah. And, you know, if you go back to the, I remember the original vision for why we call it East Village anyway, which was, you know, the idea was the property owners and others were going to come together there and build a really cool neighborhood.
and build an urban neighborhood. And that opportunity is still there. And that actually would still be, that would be an ideal solution for moving ahead with that part of downtown. And we can use the people, we can use the development, be a great place for just another wonderful urban neighborhood. Oh, absolutely. And more and more people living downtown and it'll be convenient to services and things like this. Absolutely.
Kevin (40:07.316)
All right, Butch, as we wrap it up here, do you have any other final thoughts or comments? Is there anything we didn't cover? Something I didn't ask? No, I mean, I think my final thought is, you know, for those people out in the audience today who are still very skeptical or very concerned, you know, with good reason, I'd say really, you know, look at some of the solutions and look at some of the other downtown baseball stadiums and how they have.
been very successful with the area around it and reach out, talk, ask the Royals, make those questions public. Not, why are you doing it, but how can we make this work for all of us? And I believe if you really take the time to look at it, there are good solutions and then only better prospects for small businesses in the neighborhood.
Butch, one of the things I've always loved about you, you're such a positive guy and you've always got like a positive outlook on whatever's going on. And I really appreciate that. I think that's great. I think that's well said. Thanks. All right. Well, thank you for joining me. Again, this is the Messy City podcast. If you're new to the podcast, we talk a lot about city planning, design, development issues, not just in Kansas City, but all over the country. And I hope you will.
hit that like or follow button and stay tuned and drop me a line as well. Thanks very much for listening. Take care.

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Seth Zeren Builds the Next Right Thing
27 Şub· The Messy City Podcast
Of all the parts of this enjoyable conversation with Seth Zeren, now of Providence, RI, the part I liked the most was this quote:
The worst fight is with your allies that betray you.
The quote, which is mostly about perception, says a lot about people who are frequently in heated agreement with each other, but find themselves disagreeing on something that’s very minor in the big picture. We discuss this as we discuss his post called, “When New Urbanists and YIMBYs fight.”
Seth has a great Substack, talking about all the overlap in his interests from city planning to development and more. His path and his passion are impressive. From his early days working in local government, to now the cold, hard reality of making development projects work. And what’s next? Perhaps some place management, perhaps some housing policy advocacy, perhaps just more really interesting redevelopment projects.
Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.
Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.
Intro: “Why Be Friends”
Outro: “Fairweather Friend”
Transcript:
Kevin (00:01.269)
Welcome back to the Messy City podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. I'm excited today to have Seth Zarin here with me on the podcast. Seth and I have met in the past and corresponded a little bit. Seth has a sub stack that I definitely recommend called Build the Next Right Thing. And he's in Providence, Rhode Island, which is actually, I think, one of the sort of most underrated
smaller cities in the country. I've always really liked Providence, enjoyed it. So Seth, welcome to the podcast. I know we're going to have a lot of good things to talk about. We're going talk some housing and some other stuff, but glad to have you on so we can do this.
Seth Zeren (00:43.574)
Thanks Kevin, it's nice to be here.
Kevin (00:46.261)
I think, you know, Seth, I want to kind of start by talking about you're another guy who has a really interesting path and background into becoming into the development world, which is what you're doing now, but certainly not at all where you started. And I wonder if you could kind of walk people through your professional background and then even like why you wanted to do a sub stack.
in the first place, as some of us silly people do to put thoughts out in the world.
Seth Zeren (01:19.862)
Yeah, absolutely. I usually introduce myself when I meet people by saying that I'm a former climate scientist, recovering city planner, turned real estate developer. I usually get a laugh on recovering. Much like people who have all sorts of addiction issues, city planning is something that you always kind of in the back of your head, always kind of want to work on, but can be really challenging.
Kevin (01:35.381)
Ha ha ha.
Seth Zeren (01:48.918)
I'm actually from California. I grew up in the San Francisco suburbs, south of the city in Silicon Valley, basically. And by the time I graduated high school, it was quite clear that I would never be able to afford to live there. At that point, houses were selling for about a million dollars for a little ranch. Now it's about $3 million. And so by the time I left for college, I sort of knew that the housing situation there had been a little bit of a mess.
broken so much that it was really unlikely that I would be able to find a good quality of life there for myself at that time. In college, I ended up studying geology and climate science. So I was a geology major, geosciences major, and I narrowly averted the PhD. I dodged it, fortunately, and I found myself really becoming interested after college. I went and lived in South Korea for a year and I taught English there. And
It was such a different experience than growing up in an American suburb or in a small town where I went to college. And it really got me thinking a lot. And when I came back to the U S and I went and worked at a boarding school while I was figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. And I started to read about cities and urbanism and architecture. And I realized that, Oh, actually at the time I thought I wanted to go to school and do architecture, but I was really intimidated by portfolio and drawing. And I had, I was a scientist. I mean, I could do data.
I understood geology, but, um, so I was really intimidated by that. I ended up going to an environmental management program at Yale where I could kind of moonlight in law and architecture and business. And so that was kind of my entree. And I discovered I really liked zoning at the time. Uh, and I like to say like, I like board games and zoning is basically just the biggest board game imaginable. It's a huge map, bunch of colored spaces and a really long rule book, which was totally my jam. And.
Kevin (03:38.485)
Yeah. Yeah.
Seth Zeren (03:46.038)
So I was a zoning, big zoning nerd. I interned with the planning department, but you know, in between the two years of graduate school and then got a job as a zoning official after graduate school for Newton, Massachusetts, which is kind of that wealthy first ring suburb outside of Boston where the doctors and professors go to have children. And, uh, I was there for about three years before I kind of realized this was not the place for me. I wanted to do stuff. I wanted to shake things up and.
One of the dynamics you'll encounter when you find a sort of a wealthy sort of trophy suburb, right, is that people buy there because they like what it is. Right. So the political dynamic in a place like Newton, like many wealthy suburbs around many cities in America is people are buying a particular place and they want it to stay that way. That's what they bought. And so there's a real change aversion there, which was just a bad fit for someone in their twenties, whose master's degree and wants to get stuff done. And.
I had also at the time had the opportunity to work with a bunch of developers. And this was coming out of the financial crisis. So there wasn't a lot happening right away, but slowly, slowly things started to get back in gear. And after about three or four years there, I decided I was going to jump ship from the, from the planning side and eventually found myself working at a development shop as a development manager, kind of coming in to do the permitting work. Right. So I just basically switched sides. I was going to go do permitting for the developer.
moving complex projects through design review and master plan approval and stuff like that. And I did that for my sort of early apprenticeship for about three or four years. And got to the point where, you know, I got married, we thought about buying a house and realized Boston was also too expensive. So we started considering other places and Providence was nearby. We'd visited, we had friends here. And at the time, certainly it was massively more affordable than the Boston Cambridge area.
So we moved down here about eight, maybe nine years ago, about. And so I was working as a development manager, you know, for a larger firm. And then when I came down here, I was still working remotely, but I connected with some local developers and eventually joined a local firm, Armory Management Company, which is a 35 year old, almost 40 year old partnership now that has done historic rehab.
Seth Zeren (06:09.782)
Main Street revitalization ground up in field development and came on board here, you know, also as a development manager and kind of worked my way up. Now I'm a partner and working on kind of the future of the firm and future of development in the Providence area. So that's kind of my, my origin story. It's one path. I haven't met a lot of other people who've come through the planner path into development. I would say that I was one of those people that you probably remember this, Kevin, you know, whatever eight, nine, 10 years ago at CNU.
There was this whole conversation about why are you working for shitty developers? You know, to architects, planners, engineers, go be your own. And I took that very much to heart and was trying to find a way to do it. And I've kind of managed to find a way to do it, come through that.
Kevin (06:54.709)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have met a few other folks who kind of started in the planning route and then ended up in development. But yeah, you're right. There's not too many. I mean, one thing I'm curious about, Seth, so like I'm a Midwestern or so. I don't have that experience of growing up someplace and then realizing like I'm never going to be able to come back. I mean, so a lot of Midwesterners like myself leave at some point.
And then often we find our way back home, but it's like, and there may, there's lots of reasons why people do the things, but there's never seems to be this like logistical issue that says, well, I'm just not going to be able to afford to come back where I grew up. What, what's that? And what's that like to at some point have this realization in the place you grew up in, which you probably have some really fond feelings and memories for that you just, you weren't going to be able to make it back or you weren't going to be able to afford to.
make it back. That must be a strange feeling.
Seth Zeren (07:55.414)
It is, and I will say it becomes a lot stranger when you have your own kids, which I have now. I have two young children and we go back to California, you know, once maybe twice a year visit my parents who are still in the house I grew up in. And you know that neighborhood that I grew up in, you know, hasn't built. More than a couple net new homes in the last 50 years, right? Homes get torn down and they get replaced by bigger homes, but.
Kevin (08:00.501)
Yeah, sure.
Seth Zeren (08:24.246)
There's no net additional homes. But my parents raised three kids in that house who all have their own households. My parents are still in that house. So sort of mechanically, if you have a neighborhood that doesn't add any homes, you're essentially, but you have, but you have children, those children have to leave, right? Mechanically, right? And if you then multiply that across an entire region, well, then they have to leave the whole region, which is like why people have to leave California. And I, so I have a very,
like complicated relationship with it. It's like, obviously, it's my home, it has like a smell and weather and just like the culture that is what I grew up with. It's it's I have nostalgia for that. But I also go whenever I go back there, I'm like, this place makes me crazy. Because it's not like you couldn't build more buildings, you know, you couldn't, it's not like the soil can't support more buildings, right? There's no physical limitation, really. It's the self imposed limitation. And then when you go back, especially,
after the last 20 years or so, and you look, you know, here's a region in the world that is the current sort of nexus of tremendous wealth accumulation, right, the Bay Area. And what did we get for it? Right, we got kind of mediocre drive it strip malls, and the, you know, single family houses that go for three and a half million dollars to $5 million. You know, it's similar times in the world, we got, you know,
London, Paris, New York, Chicago, Shanghai, Tokyo, like these metropolitan areas were built and there's this tremendous physical capital that's created by economic growth. But in the Bay Area, it's, it's, it's, it's, so it's kind of depressing for me. I feel like it's helpful to go back as a, as like a cautionary tale, you know, it's, it's a, it's a practice, you know, you have to go to the meditation retreat and struggle. And that's a little bit like what it is for me. Um,
So you would ask why I write and so I'm a full -time developer. I run, you know, commercial development, residential development, run commercial leasing, a lot of architecture design permitting, you know, I would say, you know, there's a lot of different backgrounds. One can bring into the development world and all of them come with different strengths. Uh, being the planner background gives me a lot of facility with permitting. And so zoning is an area where we're really effective zoning historic.
Seth Zeren (10:50.74)
neighborhood relationships, all that kind of stuff. And then finding value in buildings that other people don't see because we look around at what other people are doing in other parts of the country and we're able to import those ideas and try things out. Other people have different advantages that they bring. The reason I write is probably like you, I've got like some thoughts in my head that I have to get out. And, you know, development is a great practical.
you know, craft practice, you know, and it's, I mentioned, I think earlier apprenticeship, like there are a few schools that teach development, real estate development, kinda, but mostly they teach what we think of institutional development. So if you want to go build a skyscraper, go to MIT or Columbia. Fine.
Kevin (11:37.333)
Yeah, MIT's got those great courses and everything else that, yeah.
Seth Zeren (11:39.51)
Yeah, and like, totally fair. Like, that's a reason that's a thing that makes sense in the world, but it's not going to help you, you know, renovate a triple decker or, you know, put up an ad or or renovate a Main Street building. It's just not the skill set. They're not teaching that. So it's an apprenticeship. I mean, it's still really an apprenticeship job. You have to go and you have to go through a lot of stuff and struggle and you see all the pain and suffering and you go through the stress and
Kevin (11:53.877)
Yeah. Yeah.
Seth Zeren (12:08.726)
You start to learn stuff and it's one of those jobs. There's so much to learn that you, you know, here I am 40 a partner doing a bunch of development work and I'm learning stuff every day, right? And we're all learning stuff every day. So it's it's really satisfying in that way, but. It's not necessarily intellectual job, right? I mean, thinking about stuff is important. Math is important. Those are all relevant things, but it's not the only thing that matters. And so I write because trying to figure out some stuff, right? Trying to figure out.
for myself, but then also how to explain things to other people. Um, cause one of things I say to people is that, and I learned this when I became a developer is that like as a developer, I had more in common with the blue collar tradespeople without a college degree in terms of my understanding of the built environment than I did with someone who had my equivalent class background, education, income level, like an attorney or something, right?
They live in a house that they bought from someone else, right? They are a consumer of the built environment, but they know very little about how it gets built. They don't get under the hood. But conversely, like I, you know, the plumber and I under, you know, we're in it together. Now we have very different jobs. We might, you know, we're having a different experience of it, but we both are seeing this world. We're both participating in the making of stuff. And so we end up with this very different environment. And then.
because of the way we've regulated the built environment, now there's this huge chasm between the people who build the cities and the people who consume the cities that are built for them. Because people don't build much for themselves or for their cousin or for their neighbor.
Kevin (13:44.533)
Yeah, yeah, that's a, I mean, that's a really interesting point. I like that Seth. And it sort of resonates with me too. And, you know, in my experiences in design and development and you get some of that in architecture too. If you're the kind of an architect who you spend a lot of time doing construction administration or on job sites, you really, I think get a very different feel for that than if you're just kind of working in schematic design all the time. But yeah, that art of.
creating things. And this is what I kind of often tell people about development. One of the things that just completely, like routinely frustrates me is this sort of parody of developers that's put out in the world. It's like, you know, as the black hat evil people trying to, you know, ruin cities and, and not this understanding that actually, and not that there aren't those people, there are some, you know, there are crappy people in every field. But most developers are just simply in the act of creating things that other people are going to use.
Seth Zeren (14:36.278)
Yeah.
Seth Zeren (14:44.022)
That's true. And I say that all the time as well. And I would add to that, that one of things that's interesting about development, right, coming from planning. So like real estate or city planning, right? Graduate degrees, conferences, magazines, there's even a licensure, right? You get your AICP, go to the conference, get the magazine. It's a profession. Real estate development isn't really a profession.
Kevin (14:44.181)
Like that's the whole point.
Seth Zeren (15:11.254)
You get $2 million and buy a CVS, you're a real estate developer. There you go. You put it on your business card, it's your real estate developer. So there's no professional boundaries for good and for ill. I mean, sometimes I think the boundaries around some of these professions are actually really harmful, but you kind of know what you're going to get. You know what the professional culture is and you kind of know how it changes and you know the institutions. Development really doesn't have any of that. Even the Urban Land Institute, ULI, which is a major player still like,
compared to like the APA and planning is minuscule. And so like part of the challenges is that, so that's one piece of it. It's not really a profession. The other piece of it is that one of the things that's happened in the 20th century is we blew up our development culture, right? We had an ecosystem of building places, you know, that was the design, the construction, the operations, the leasing, the materials.
the trades, there was a sort of ecosystem of it, and we kind of blew it up. We radically transformed it over a short period of decades. And so there's no continuity. So when people do development, there's not a sense of there's any kind of private constraint or private rules. So it feels even less like there's a profession. There's not like a coherent culture, we're going to build more of that, or we're going to evolve incrementally from a coherent culture of building.
We're just going to build whatever you end up. That's where you end up with the like two story building with a mansard. That's like with the weird landscaping. It's just this weird Chimera because the developer and to a large extent, the architects have no grounded. There's, there's no like lineage they're working from. There's no continuity. They're just throwing stuff at the wall, you know,
Kevin (17:00.341)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think one of the other aspects is that in development, so many of the players in the non -institutional world are entrepreneurs. At their heart of hearts, they're entrepreneurs. And it's hard to gather together a whole group of entrepreneurs who are, in some sense, in competition with each other all the time, to feel like a common sense of purpose.
Seth Zeren (17:25.174)
Yeah, and they're often grinding for their own private gain, which in many parts of the United States is sort of seen as not good, right? Profit is bad to a lot of people. And I think that's unfortunate because while certainly people can do bad things and that's not good, making a profit from doing good things is good. It's a good sign. It means you get to do more of it, right? We say we have to make a profit because that's what we, that's the...
Kevin (17:30.101)
Yeah.
Seth Zeren (17:53.062)
seed corn for the next project, right? If we ate all of our seed corn, we would have no next project, right? And if we run out of seed corn, we all starve, right? So you don't get to lose money very many times in real estate before you're out of the game. So it's...
Kevin (18:05.685)
Yeah, well, and nobody bemoans the local cafe or the barbershop or whomever from making a profit. We all want them to make a profit and succeed, but for some reason, the local developer in a business that's far riskier and more expensive, it's like we completely beat them up about the idea that they actually need to make money to keep going.
Seth Zeren (18:22.326)
Yeah.
Seth Zeren (18:27.606)
Yeah. And I think part of it is that there is part of this change in building culture, right? Is that there is where there is more of, or a greater percentage of the built of the new development is sort of seen as done by outsiders for short -term gain. And then they're gone. You know, you'll you've talked to other folks in the incremental development world between the farmer and the hunter, right? And it's we're, we're 90%, 95 % hunters now, you know, instead of 25 % hunters. And that just really changes.
Kevin (18:41.397)
Yeah. Right.
Kevin (18:48.661)
Yeah, sure.
Seth Zeren (18:56.918)
the relationship. So we're a local firm. I work in the neighborhoods in which we live. We work down the block from our projects. If we do a bad job, I have to look at it every day. People know who I am. They're going to yell at me. Like there's a level of responsibility. The profits are most, many of the profits are being reinvested again locally into the next project or into donations to local organizations. So it gets it, you know, not, it's not just as a matter of credibility, but as a matter of like the actual development culture and ecosystem, it's just a better way of life. Um,
I think one of the things that's key though about the developer image, right? Is that there was this real period and formative period for, for you and for me, like in the 60s, 70s, 80s of the real estate developer is always the villain, right? And every hallmark movie and every, you know, real estate developers are always the bad guys. And it's a really easy trope, right? It's, it's, it's change for, you know, we're going to change something that's here now that's good for profit, you know, and then they're going to be gone. Um, we don't have any valorous.
Kevin (19:37.811)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Sure.
Seth Zeren (19:56.442)
examples of the real estate developer in popular culture. And I think if I had a magic wand, I would like I would have some great popular sitcom about, you know, a real estate developer, young Latino builder in LA doing interesting stuff and growing over the course of seasons and be hilarious because there's so much tragic comedy and development. So if anyone out there wants to pitch a show to Hollywood, that's that's what I would pitch. Oh, my God, no, that's not me.
Kevin (20:19.893)
Well, I think you've got your next screenwriting gig. So, give us an example of a project that you're involved with now, something you're working on to get people sent to what you're doing.
Seth Zeren (20:31.798)
Yeah, so yeah, I'll give two quick examples. So we just finished a rehabilitation of an historic structure, four story masonry building that was converted back to residential, right? It had been turned into actually a nursing home. It was first as a hospital than a nursing home in the 20th century. It was originally built as four brick row houses. And so we brought that back to residential. That just finished last summer, 12 units. And that project was really great. It's really beautiful building.
We are a little bit counter -cultural in some times what we do. So we built, in part following the logic of the building, because we were doing a federal historic tax credit project, we didn't want to torture the building. So the units are large. We have, you know, 1500 square foot, two bedroom, two bath apartments, which is on current construction, like weird. It's just, they're really big and they're expensive as a consequence of being big. But what we're finding is there are people who will like nice stuff, and they're willing to pay.
more for an apartment. And it's still cheap compared to New York or Boston. It's expensive in Providence, but there are people who will pay that. And right now we're working on the second phase of that project. So that's probably 26 unit building. We're going to try to get some three bedroom apartments in that, which is again, sort of philosophically, we think it's important that there are places where families could live in multifamily housing. It's on a park. It's a beautiful location. And then the project we just started,
As we acquired a 50 ,000 square foot mill building in a kind of old industrial area of the city that has, it's one of those things where the previous owner kind of ran out of money and attention. So some things got done, but not other things. So we're finishing that up and that project, we are actually going to complete sort of the previous owner's plan, which was to create modestly priced commercial spaces. So we, in our portfolio, about 50, 50 residential and commercial, which isn't.
necessarily by strategy. It's just sort of where we've ended up. Uh, but I think on the margin, we're a little bit more comfortable with commercials than the typical developer or landlord in our area. So because we run so much of it and it's full, I mean, we're 95, 97 % full and commercial across 300 and something thousand square feet. Um, and that's because we price to rent it, you know, and we take a good job caring for it. Uh, we follow the advice of making things smaller if they don't rent.
Seth Zeren (22:57.878)
Right? So if you make them smaller, then you make the rent smaller, which means more people can rent it. Um, and there's turnover, but you have a reusable unit, just like an apartment, people move right into it, uh, run their business out of that. So it's been good. I mean, you know, who knows things could always change, but we see a lot of value in, you know, one of the things that happened in American cities is disinvestment and white flight took place was not only did the people leave, but I'll sort of all the businesses.
So it's like, what is your dentist? Where's your doctor's office? Where's your accountant? Where's your graphic designer? Or, you know, where's your retail shops, you know, your salons, your banks, your restaurants, your bars and restaurants and bars usually come first, but that's only a piece of the ecosystem. You know, it's a whole, you know, you need gyms and retail stores and yoga studios. And I know that sounds kind of trite, but it's sort of a, a, a curating kind of orientation. So this building, part of the strategy is to create a building that is safe.
and modestly priced and not pristine so that it's a building in which people can do work. So it's artists, fabricators who have real businesses but need a space to operate their real business. It's not just a crazy building, spray painting the walls, but a reasonable building, not too expensive, not too fancy, but safe. Sprinklers and a roof that doesn't leak. So that's kind of our current project.
Kevin (24:16.149)
Yeah. Yeah. That's a great model. It reminds me a little bit of one of Monty Anderson's projects in South Dallas, sort of a similar deal, large former industrial building and essentially a minimal, very minimal tenant finish, but incredibly flexible. And if it's priced right, it, you know, in his case, at least up, you know, very quickly. That's a cool model. So I didn't really have any, a whole lot of personal experience with
Providence probably until the CNU was hosted there in what was that? Mid 2000s or so. Which was the best Congress up to that point and the best one until we hosted one in Savannah, of course. And anyway, I was really impressed by Providence. I thought it was...
just an incredibly interesting city, very walkable, really cool architecture everywhere, nice downtown. Just seemed like it had a ton of assets, especially in that region. And like you said, priced very differently than Boston or New York. And so I'm curious about the last decade or so, what's going on in Providence. How's the market there? How are things changing? And as a...
more of like a third tier city, what do you see that's different compared to some of the larger markets?
Seth Zeren (25:47.094)
Well, I think that the big story of the last 10 years is that we're no longer kind of isolated on our own. And I don't know if that's mostly a combination of remote work or if it also has something to do with just how expensive Boston and New York have become and other cities. And Providence has seen some of the highest year over year property appreciation in the country. So you're right. It's a nice place to live, you know, and then if you're paying, you know,
$3 ,500 a month for, you know, kind of crappy two bedroom apartment in Somerville, you move to Providence and you can get a really nice apartment for $3 ,500 or you can save a bunch of money. And so that it's not so similar for me, right? We moved down here because it was cheaper. And so that adds demand. It adds demand in the upper end of the market. So a big part of what's happening in Providence, Rhode Island is, is that there's a relatively small number.
but of people with a fair amount of resources, income and capital moving here. And the state chronically, because it's sort of been tucked away for a long time, it has very little home construction, right? We are the last, second to last, third to last in per capita home construction every year for the last few decades. And so the intersection of those two things is causing a really crazy housing spike and a lot of angst.
And for myself, this is one of the places where like my own experience growing up in the Bay Area and then having my own kids has really hit home because, you know, I know in 20 years, I'm still going to need a house to live in. And my two kids are probably each going to want their own house to live in or apartment. Right. So I either got to build them one. They're going to buy yours or they got to leave. It's math. Right. And so it's put the question of housing shortage kind of on the sharp end of the stick for me personally.
Right? Is, you know, am I going to be able to see my grandchildren more than once or twice a year kind of thing? You know, and that's a big deal. Right. And I know people don't quite appreciate it yet. I feel a little bit like a harbinger of doom sometimes because in Rhode Island, the feeling is like this could never happen here. Right. Because we're kind of this backwater sort of economically hasn't done well since deindustrialization. You know, there's some bright spots, but it's a little tough and nice quality of life, but not too expensive. And that whole script.
Seth Zeren (28:13.142)
of worked for a generation or two, but it's not relevant anymore unfortunately. And then that psychic cultural transformation is going to be really hard.
Kevin (28:23.541)
So coming from the background that you came from, how do you compare the development or the regulatory apparatus in Rhode Island and in Providence compared to places you've worked or pros and cons and what's going on there?
Seth Zeren (28:36.086)
Oh boy.
Seth Zeren (28:41.494)
Yeah, when I go to CNU and I'd say I'm from New England, they're like, how do you work there? Because it's hard. Yeah, we're more heavily regulated region. I think that in some ways that's beneficial to someone like me, right? If you're good at navigating the rules, then it's actually to your advantage to work in a regulated market because there's, you I'm not competing on how cheaply I can put up drywall. I'm competing on who can come up with the most creative use of land and get through the regs.
Kevin (28:45.685)
Ha ha ha ha.
Seth Zeren (29:13.686)
It's, you know, Providence itself has a mod, what I would call like a modern zoning ordinance. It's got a lot of, you know, there's things I would quibble with, there's things I would change, but it's basically a functioning ordinance that like does the right things more or less, right? And which is great. We mostly work in Providence. I'd say the rest of the state, like most of the rest of New England, it's still like 1955 and there's no...
resources, no political impetus to like really fix that yet. I've, I've helped one of my responses is I helped found last year a group called Neighbors Welcome Rhode Island, which is a sort of strong towns meets UMB type or organization that we're still kind of launching a website now. We're working on legislation, state level legislation, and also trying to support local organizing in these towns.
Seth Zeren (30:14.998)
So it's a, it's, it's, you know, very similar to the markets I'm used to. It's a new England place. Everyone's in everyone else's business. The place has been inhabited buildings on it for, for, you know, hundreds of years. I think one thing that's always interesting about, about new England though, you know, compared to the national conversation is the missing middle is not missing here. Like our cities are made out of triple deckers, twos, threes, fours, sixes all over the place.
Kevin (30:37.653)
Mm -hmm.
Seth Zeren (30:43.062)
Our problem is we don't know what comes next. So a city like Providence right now, the only plan is, and this is true, Boston and these places, you can, sure, you can build on the vacant lots and there's a bunch of vacant lots and you can build those for a while. There's gonna be some bad commercial buildings. You can build on those for a while. There's some old industrial land. You're gonna build on that for a while. But in a different way, but similar to the regions where everything's zoned single family and it's built out single family, you can't add anything.
to the bulk of the neighborhoods, which are zoned for two and three family homes, because there's already two and three family homes there. And what we don't have, and I don't think anyone has an answer to this, is how do you create a building typology and a business model and a regulatory framework, building code, zoning code, et cetera, to add density to those neighborhoods, to take a three -family neighborhood and bring it to the next increment.
whatever that is, because I don't, I don't think we have a model for that other than to go to a full like five over one big apartment building, but the land assemblage there is really prohibitive. So what's the next thing that's denser than three families on 5 ,000 square foot lots, but isn't a big commercial building. And I don't think we have an answer for that yet. I mean, as a urbanist architecture development community, and we certainly don't have a regulatory framework that will allow us to build it either. So that's like an R and D project. That's sort of a back burner curiosity of mine.
Kevin (32:08.981)
Does the regulatory framework allow you to build the triple -deckers in place?
Seth Zeren (32:14.198)
Uh, under zoning. Yeah, kind of under building code. No, right. Cause triple deckers are commercial code. So you need sprinklers. So you can't build them. The cost difference. You'd just build a big two family instead of building a three family. It's a much better strategy. So one of the things that neighbors welcome is proposing this legislative cycle to follow on North Carolina's example and Memphis's examples to move three, four, five, six family dwellings into the residential code. And, you know, with no sprinklers, a single stair. Um,
And, you know, we'll keep the two hour rating, just add more drywall. Okay, fine. But, you know, that's one of the things we're proposing along with a single stair reform for the small apartment buildings. But yeah, I mean, it's a chicken and the egg, right? There's no point coming up with the prototype and you can't build it. But then no one wants to reform the building code because there's no prototype that makes sense that people are excited about. So it's really kind of trapped. And so, you know, that's an interesting challenge that we struggle with.
Kevin (33:14.069)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting thing to think about what that next increment to would be beyond the freestanding, you know, triple deckers and stuff like that. Because, you know, I guess the first thing that comes to mind as you start to think about neighborhoods more like you would see in New York or Boston, certain parts of those cities that went to like five and six story walk up buildings that, yeah, yeah. And they're not.
Seth Zeren (33:39.476)
Buildings that touch. That's the big thing.
Kevin (33:43.931)
really townhouses wouldn't call them townhouses, but they might be like a five story walk up. Like you'd see, you know, on the upper East or upper East side or upper West side or something like that.
Seth Zeren (33:49.598)
Yeah.
Seth Zeren (33:52.982)
Yeah, there's two tiers, I think. There is a version that's more about lot subdivision, right? So we have decently sized lots and three families are big, but you might be able to get some more houses on them or bigger versions. And then I certainly moving to the part where you have party wall construction and the buildings that touch, you recover a bunch of lost area to thin side yards that no one can use. That tier is really interesting because you could probably keep them as owner occupant.
Right? They'd be small, you know, two, three, four families, but on smaller piece of land, you know, buildings that touch whatever the next year above that, you know, which is like a single stair elevator, five, six stories, you know, 20 apartments. That's a commercial loan. It's a commercial operator. And, you one of the virtues of the triple decker, right, is that you have a distributed ownership, right? So that it's not just.
You know, we have tons of landlords in the state, you know, because everyone I own, the triple decker I live in, right? Everybody owns, you know, a two family, a three family mom, grandma's two family, right? It's just it, there's so many opportunities for people to be small landlords for good and for ill, mostly I think for good, but there are, there are some limitations to it. Um, you know, so when I look around at international examples, right. You know, so for example, I teach real estate development on the side, cause I really care about bringing more people into this profession and not profession trade.
craft, whatever. And I had some European students last fall, and I brought them to Providence on a field trip, took them around my neighborhood, which is, you know, to native Rhode Islanders like the hood. It's like the inner city. Ooh, scary. And they're like, this is a very nice suburb, right? Because to them, a bunch of detached two and three family dwellings with a few vacant lots in between them or parking lots, this is suburban density. And they're wrong. And they're not wrong. They're right.
Kevin (35:19.893)
Yeah.
Seth Zeren (35:47.786)
you know, historically like that, that was a transition. You'd go from town, right? Which is mostly detached, small multifamily buildings to herb to the city. The building starts to touch because the frontage is really valuable and you wouldn't just leave it for like, you know, five foot grass strips and whatever. Um, and so, you know, it still ends up being quite car focused because, you know, everything is sort of far apart and you know, you got to fill in the empty gaps.
Kevin (36:13.781)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of that reminds me a little bit of what Jane Jacobs used to talk about in Death and Life of Great American Cities as sort of like the gray zones. Yeah, the in -between density.
Seth Zeren (36:23.094)
Yeah, the gray density. Yeah. And what I would say is what happened to my neighborhood to a certain extent, and I think this is true of a lot of American, you know, urban neighborhoods, you know, sort of pre -auto suburbanization is that what happened, there was so much, there was a lot of removal, even where there wasn't wholesale urban renewal, you know, mercantile buildings were taken down and replaced with a gas station, right, or a parking lot. And the church is, you know, brought down, you know, there's little holes in the fabric.
And when I look at the neighborhood as like someone who thinks about cities and can see, can, you know, learns to look in that way, it's kind of looks like someone who's slightly sick, right? Their skin's a little pale, a little drawn, you know, there's a little yellow in their eyes. That's what it kind of feels like. And so it's about kind of filling it back up again. I think we've kind of, in a lot of cases, we kind of dipped down into the gray zone and we're trying to get back into it because once we get kind of out of that gray zone, adding density is good.
Right, it brings more services, more people, which can support more businesses. And there's this positive feedback that strengthens the neighborhood and makes it better. But in the gray zone, it's like, well, is more people gonna make it worse? Like, what are we? It's a nice callback, because most people don't make it past parks in death and life. It's just too bad. I tell them all the good bits are at the end.
Kevin (37:37.781)
There's many good bits. But yeah, I think there's an interesting aspect of American cities in particular there where you have, and I think about this a lot, we wrestle with this so much in my part of town in Kansas City where there is a sort of urban density that actually works pretty well where everybody pretty much drives still, right? If you know what I mean, like it.
Seth Zeren (38:05.526)
Yep. Yep. Bye, Norris.
Kevin (38:06.869)
The parking is easy and it's just not that, it's not really urban, but it's not really suburban. And I think there was a generation of people who re -occupied a lot of urban places like that in the 70s and 80s in particular, who love it for that. They love the fact that they're like in the city, but it's like parking was easy. Now the problem is, yeah.
Seth Zeren (38:17.91)
Yeah.
Seth Zeren (38:32.182)
Yep, we have that here too, absolutely.
Kevin (38:34.997)
The problem is like historically that was a complete non -starter. Those neighborhoods had far more people, were far more urban. And by today's standards, it would have been incredibly difficult to have a car and drive it around everywhere and park it.
Seth Zeren (38:49.258)
Well, people forget that like you could have the same number of housing units and have fewer people because house hold size is so much smaller today. So the street is relatively empty, right? Compared to when grandma was living here, you know, 80 years ago, um, as far fewer people around.
Kevin (38:53.365)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin (39:03.381)
Yeah. And now with the prevalence of like one car per adult everywhere, the challenge of trying to upgrade those neighborhoods to become more like their historical predecessors, it does create a lot of conflict because then all of a sudden we are wrestling with the, it's really the car issue in many respects. Yeah.
Seth Zeren (39:15.798)
Yeah.
Seth Zeren (39:22.774)
Yeah, you're moving from one equilibrium to another equilibrium. And that's always really painful because it's going to reduce quality along the trip, even if you end up in a better place on the other side. You know, one of the things I find really helpful or really valuable, and I admired your work about this, is the business improvement district. And I don't know, whatever we call that microform of government. And we're involved in helping create one on a main street near us that has suffered from a tremendous amount of urban renewal and...
Kevin (39:32.501)
Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin (39:46.003)
Mm -hmm.
Seth Zeren (39:53.3)
institutional concentration and we're trying to figure out how to improve that. And one of things that I've learned from doing that is that the city, even with a pretty strong planning department, Providence has a good planning department, lots of good people, plenty of staff. It's not low capacity, but they got a big city to run, right? And they can't know it super deeply everywhere all the time, right? And here, and I'm involved because we own a bunch of property nearby and I've been working in the area for years. And so I get to know all the other owners and I get to know the
the nonprofits and the businesses and residents and you know, but I'm working on like eight square blocks, if that right. And I know that really well. I can talk about this block versus this block and this crosswalk and that curb and this parking lot and that, that tenant and you know, at that micro level. And it just seems to me that that's gotta be the future of a lot of this governance stuff. Cause to get out of that bad equilibrium is going to require a bunch of really careful.
tactical hands -on changes to infrastructure, to private development, public, you know, all those pieces. And when I look at the whole city, I'm like, there's not enough coordination, right? There's not enough attention. There's too many things going on, too many fires to fight. It's at that micro level that I could kind of organize enough people, run the small planning exercise, coordinate the private development, coordinate the public investment and keep on top of everybody. But it's only, you know, eight square blocks, right? In a big city.
So how does that work?
Kevin (41:21.525)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's something we've wrestled with a lot and we obviously do a bunch of it here, but I'm a big believer in, you know, place management at that scale. And I think one of the issues that we've seen over and over again is, you know, my city is even much bigger. It's like 320 square miles geographically. It's insanely large. Half a million people in the city limits. So like relatively low density for that large of a city, but...
the ability of staff to actually manage all that and know what's going on. It's impossible. It's literally impossible. Yeah.
Seth Zeren (41:57.142)
Well, I've been city staff and I remember how insane it was. I mean, you don't get out of the building because you're too busy answering emails. You know, this is like you fight with the engineers or whoever about an intersection is like, have you ever stood in the intersection for an hour? Because I have, right? Because I'm there all the time. But you can't run the city, you know, not getting out into the field and seeing the mucky bits, right? And that's like.
Kevin (42:17.045)
Yeah, there's just a there's a huge mismatch in how we manage cities and their ability to change and solve just solve problems, solve basic problems.
Seth Zeren (42:25.43)
Well, so one of my questions is, is that in part because like the way we teach kind of all the pieces of city building and management is kind of like, and it feels like they're individually busted and then the system is busted. So like public administration, civil engineering, architecture, planning, you know, development, all, you know, whatever that there's a whole package of different professional schools that you could go to that would teach you these different skills, but none of them talk to each other.
And so when they're graduates, I remember being a planner and then talking to the civil engineer Newton being like, we're from different planets, man. Like the words I'm saying, you don't understand the words you're saying, I don't understand, like, and no one's in charge. So we're just kind of like, because every department, one of the things that happens in cities, right, is every department is co equal under the under a mayor or city manager or something. So like planning department can't tell DPW what to do. They're the same level, you know, and so we're just kind of butt heads.
Kevin (43:01.493)
Hehehehehe
Seth Zeren (43:23.67)
But planning is in a particularly bad situation because they don't have any shovels or trucks or much free cash or anything else. They don't get to do much. Their only power is persuasion.
Kevin (43:33.525)
And it's the first jobs that are cut whenever there's a recession too. But yeah, I mean, the whole industry is very siloed. And this has kind of been the classic battle of the new urbanism from the beginning was really the push from our side was to create generalists, that people who could pull everything together. And our charrette process was designed to bring all those people together and problem solve at the same time.
Seth Zeren (43:36.83)
Yeah.
Kevin (44:03.317)
And that actually worked really well, and it does work really well when you're able to facilitate that. The challenge you have in a lot of city governments that I've seen is that they're just like you said, they're all vertically, you know, all differentiated vertically and it's all siloed. And there's not a ton of incentive for the different departments to understand each other and work together unless you have a particularly strong executive who forces that to happen.
Seth Zeren (44:28.662)
Yeah, that's really the game. It's like, does your executive get it and care and willing to spend the time on it? You've said something really interesting in the past on other versions of this podcast, which is that, I don't know if I'll get it exactly right, but we spend like 50 % of the time on design, 40 % on policy and 10 % on implementation. And we should be like a third, a third, a third. Here's the thing. I feel like the charrette process is really great, but then the charrette leaves. New urbanists don't have, as far as I can tell, much of an answer of how you actually run the city.
There's no proposal on how to reorganize the departments of the city government. There's no proposal on charter reform for cities or, you know, there's a whole universe of, you what should the education for a city manager be? Right. We have, we have an idea about what planning should do differently, you know, and so there's bits and pieces, strong towns, urban three, talk a little bit about the finance side. We're just starting to think about it. When you open that door, you realize, oh my gosh, where are the new urbanist police chiefs? Where are the new urbanist fire chiefs? Right.
the controllers, the tax assessors, there's this huge apparatus of public entities that are out there. And I guess part of the reason why the place management is so cool is that you get to actually just be a little micro government. And instead of having to silo off every little bit of things, you're a taxing entity, you can also go hire people to put out flowers, you can also write regulations, you're a whole thing. And so likewise, I feel like the CNU universe has not yet...
Kevin (45:47.541)
Yeah. Yeah.
Seth Zeren (45:55.19)
really contended with like the mucky bits of administering, managing the city.
Kevin (46:00.245)
Yeah, I think that's totally, I think it's totally fair. And, you know, I got a lot of that thinking from Liz Plater -Zyberg who, and so the way she broke it down was design, policy and management. That's the three legs of the stool. Most of the people who came to the new urbanism originally and were most passionate were designers. So they had a very heavy emphasis on design. There were also a lot of policy wonks. So you got that policy piece, but yeah, very few people from.
the world of understanding how to actually manage cities. And we've had a lot of interaction and bring people to the table and conferences and all, but I still think very little understanding in that world of how things work.
Seth Zeren (46:42.166)
Well, and you go, I think, to the International Downtown Association, right? The IDA. How is it that the IDA and CNU are still, like, not connected at all? As far as I could tell, right? From the outside, it just, like, the stuff we're doing is so, so connected, right? And so this, I guess, is a plea to the CNU folks and a plea to the IDA folks, like, let's get together, guys. Because, like, CNU can bring a whole bunch of the design and policy ideas. But you're right, we need managers. And manager, Strong Town sometimes talks about how
Kevin (46:45.173)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.
Kevin (46:55.925)
This is a good question.
Seth Zeren (47:11.132)
maintenance is not sexy, right? It's easier to get people to design a new road than just fix the damn road you got. But that's the problem, right? If nobody's interested and we have no way of making management or administration better, like you'll just keep doing new projects and then as soon as you leave, they'll just fall apart, right? Because no one's going to run them when you go.
Kevin (47:32.981)
Yeah, no doubt. And so hopefully we can make that happen. I would have talked with a few people about this that we need to find a way to link up. I mean, there's always been a linkage there, but it's just not nearly as tight and as strong as I think it could be. I'm amazed when I go to the IDA conference just how few new urbanist consultants even bother to attend, which is shocking to me. It's enormous. But yes, I think there's an in...
Seth Zeren (47:53.558)
Yeah, it seems like a huge missed opportunity on both sides.
Kevin (48:02.965)
One of the, I think, ill effects of the last 30 or 40 years of there's been a lot of education that's pushed really smart, ambitious young people into the policy world instead of emphasizing that how important really good management is. First of all, I would say design also. I mean, and problem solving with projects generally is incredibly important.
My bias is doing projects is more important than policy, but I know there's a role for both. But management, God, if you don't have good ongoing management of a place, just like any business, if a business doesn't have good ongoing management, forget it, you're toast. And a city, if it doesn't have it, is gonna suffer tremendously. So, you one, go ahead, go ahead.
Seth Zeren (48:54.038)
Well, I was gonna say, I feel like in my head, I've been thinking about this for a long time. And when I went to school, I went into an environmental management program, quote unquote management, right? It was supposed to train professional people to manage environmental organizations, work in government, work at the forest service, work for nonprofits, working for profits, doing environmental stuff. Were there any classes on management stuff, right? Managing people, managing budgets.
Communications, no, it was all science, which is great, fine, like I need to know some stuff about ecology or water management or whatever, but like, how are we a professional school? You know, we have to go out in the world and run organizations which have budgets and staff and HR and communications and negotiation. You know, you can go to the business school and learn some of that and a lot of people did, but you gotta ask yourself like, well, what are we doing here?
Kevin (49:44.405)
Yeah. Well, man, I had six years of architecture school and there wasn't one business course that was required the whole time.
Seth Zeren (49:49.718)
Yeah, I mean, I see that. And the planning people, you know, maybe it's gotten better. But when I was going through it, I took a negotiations class at the business school, which was the most useful class for being a planner. It was negotiations. Most planners, we don't need people with physical planning backgrounds. I mean, you need someone who can do some physical planning. Mostly you need some social workers because local government is like a family therapy. They have fights going back 20 years with their neighbor about whatever and who's yelling at who. And it's like, we need just some people to get people to talk to each other.
It's not about technical analysis. No one ever voted for my zoning amendment because I had a great analysis. No, it's relationships. So, you know, I look at this as like, and I know there's been efforts around this at CNU, but I think we need to really get serious about building new educational institutions. I don't know that we can do it inside. I mean, we've tried it, you know, at Miami, we've tried it at Notre Dame, and there's been some successes, but it's just not enough, right? 30 years later, you know, there's just...
it hasn't really changed anything in terms of what we're training. So we have another whole generation raised up in the old way of doing business and we're surprised when we get the same results.
Kevin (50:55.829)
Well, one of the things that even mystifies me, somebody who's gone to a lot of architecture schools to do student crits and everything else is like there's this, there's a whole group that have come through in the last, I would say 15 years that don't even know anything now about the early new urbanism because that was like so long ago and it's just not taught. So it's wild to me. It's like that has gone down the memory hole.
Seth Zeren (51:14.038)
Yeah.
Seth Zeren (51:19.35)
Yeah.
Kevin (51:21.077)
So I talk about that a lot with people that I know just to try to keep some of those things going and make sure people have a memory of what actually happened in a lot of those years.
Seth Zeren (51:29.91)
What I think is so striking is I don't think it's actually that much money that would be needed to build some of these institutions. So if anyone out there is listening and wants to write checks, fantastic. But you could get a lot done for not a lot of money building these new institutions. I really do think that. And the scale of impact on society could be really huge. Yeah.
Kevin (51:51.893)
Yeah. Seth, I want to switch gears and do one more topic before we run out of time. I want to hit on this piece that you wrote about Yenbys and New Urbanists in Strong Towns and sort of the differences or perceived differences, you know, amongst the groups. I wonder if you could sort of set the table and talk a little bit about what, where you were going with that one. It's a long piece for anybody who wants to read it, but it's, it's really good.
Seth Zeren (51:55.862)
Oh, sure.
Seth Zeren (52:02.538)
Yeah.
Seth Zeren (52:14.326)
Yeah, it's on my my sub stack build the next right thing which is I have small children So we watch a lot of Disney movies. That's do the next right thing, which is a song from frozen 2 But related to incrementalism, right? You don't have to know the final answer You just when you and you're confused you just do the next right thing, you know, you're gonna work your way through it solve the problem incrementally Pragmatically, it's very American way to work. It's good. That's build the next right thing and
Kevin (52:27.533)
Know it well.
Seth Zeren (52:45.27)
It's a part because like getting to utopia is not like you're not going to take one jump to utopia. We got to like work in the world we're in. So this piece came out actually, ironically, I started writing this in the emergency room with my child in the middle of the night. Because when you have little children, sometimes they eat like stuff and you end up in the emergency room in the middle of the night. So I'm like, I'm like starting to jot down some notes and the notes were really stimulated by another guy, Steve Mouzon, who's been on your show, I think, who, you know, is active on Twitter and occasionally.
regularly gets in fights with sort of the very online Yimby crowd. And then there was an exchange, you know, about a piece that Steve wrote and some other people responded. And, you know, a lot of people that I'm considered I like or I appreciate their work. I mean, I appreciate Steve's work. I assign his book on on on the original green. I appreciate Nolan Gray's work. I assign his his stuff. So but I was really struck by this continuing like fight.
In this case, between the CNU and the Yenbis. And in my analysis, I mean, you can go read the piece, but I'll give you the really short version. It's basically that, and since I'm from California, I'm very sympathetic to the Yenbi argument, right? I feel it in my bones, right? I can never return to the soil I was raised on because of the failure that has gone before us. So in the Yenbi world, it's all about supply. We got to build a bunch of homes, right? And that's the overriding value and virtue and goal.
right? You see it celebrate. We're going to build so many more homes. And the new urbanist orientation, which is really importantly different for a few reasons. First of all, it was started in the eighties and nineties when there wasn't a housing crisis. So the DNA is not built around a housing crisis was built around building crappy places, right? Go read, you know, uh, suburban nation, right? It's about building bad stuff. Read consular, you know, that's, that's the DNA. It's also mostly working in the South, you know, in the Midwest to a certain extent where
There hasn't been a supply crunch, you know, because they're building stuff, right? It's building sprawl. We can build better sprawl, worse sprawl, but it's still just getting built. And so, you know, a lot of that is about quality. How do we build good places? And so what's so frustrating about, I think, to both sides about the EMBC and U debate is that often we agree. Often building density and building quality are the same. So we're on the same team, but sometimes they're not. And the worst...
Seth Zeren (55:12.502)
fight is with your ally who betrays you, right? Your enemies, yeah, f**k that guy, he's terrible, right? You know, that's easy, but my friend, I thought you were with me, but now we're not, ah. And so that's what keeps happening, right? The CNU folks are like, you know, that might be a little bit too much density, aren't you worried about the blank walls? Aren't you worried about X, Y, and Z? And then, and the, and the, the Yenbis are like, are you kidding, man? Like we're all homeless, like, unless we build this building, we don't have time for your cute little nonsense. You know, your ADU is just too slow, whatever.
Kevin (55:15.477)
You
Seth Zeren (55:41.878)
And so that's, that's on sort of goals and the people are different, right? The CNU architects first developers planners, the Yimby movement really comes out of activists, uh, political advocates, regular people, software engineers who are not professional built environment people, uh, lawyers, right? It's a policy oriented movement, economists, right? That's the core. That's their intellectual DNA is.
know, economists at George Mason, whereas the CNU, it's, it's an, a few architects at Miami. That's really different DNA, right? And I think the CNU has, for whatever reason, not really, it's done some behind the scenes politics, you know, policy change, right? There's been really important behind the scenes policy change, very not visible to normal people. It's never been interested in mass mobilization, you know, votes.
persuading elected officials, it's not their jam. The Yenby movement is a political advocacy movement, right? So they're trying to like win votes and get lost. So the Yenby folks have gotten more bills passed that does a bunch of CNU ideas, right? The missing middle, ADUs, all the stuff that CNU came up with like 20, 30 years ago is being mandated by bills passed by Yenby. So they're like, CNU guys, we're doing the thing. Why are you yelling at us? Right? But the Yenbys don't always appreciate that the CNU has,
rebuilt so much of the DNA of 20th century planning. So like, complete streets was like a CNU invention. People don't realize that anymore because it's now so mainstream. And so there's this sort of tension where people don't see the benefits the others have provided because they're kind of operating in different styles. So that's, I think, the sort of core tension. And then I added the strong towns because strong towns sometimes finds itself fighting with both of them.
And often aligned, right? Often we're all the same team, right? I consider myself a Yimby. I run a Yimby organization. I also am a Strong Towns founding member and I've been at CNU a lot. But they're subtly different, right? The Strong Towns thing that puts them at odds with some of these groups is that Strong Towns core idea is that we need to reengage bottom -up feedback, right? That the system is too top -down, too...
Seth Zeren (58:06.454)
tightly wound, too fixed, too set. So we build these places that are built to a finished state. We can't ever change them. We have tables that are not responsive to content. So we're just locked up. We can't get anything done. And the Strong Town's idea is, well, we need the systems to be responsive, right? If housing prices go up, we should build. If they don't go up, we shouldn't build. We need to make the streets context sensitive. And so on the one hand, we're all for getting rid of parking requirements and upzoning stuff. So the inbys are like, great.
But then sometimes we're like, well, that might be too much of zoning. Here's some reasons why. And the Yenbis are like, wait, I thought you were pro density. I thought you were pro development. We're like, yes, but right. Uh, the strong towns, people would worry that the Yenbis in 1950 would have been the suburban sprawl advocates, right? They would have said, we need the houses now. Damn the consequences. We're not going to worry about fiscal insolvency in 50 years. We're just going to build the houses now. You know, that's, so that's the strong towns. Sort tension with the Yenby movement is the top down, the sort of.
And this is a result of your movement being led by political advocates and attorneys and economists, right? There's the concern about that kind of top -down policy orientation, these sort of single metrics, let's get it done. And then I think sometimes there's also debate with the CNU around things trying to be too precious. There is a tension within the CNU movement between sort of the messy side and the sort of all buttoned up side. And...
So I think there's just interesting tension there. I mean, what do you make of the debate between the UMBs and the CNU?
Kevin (59:38.037)
Well, I think when the Yenbis first came on the scene 10 or 15 years ago, I remember kind of urging some of our colleagues to engage and say, it's like we need to bring these people into the fold. These are our allies. And also, there's a, I think one of the other differences that is hard to overlook is that there's a generational difference. Seeing you people are probably like my age and older.
Seth Zeren (01:00:06.816)
Mm -hmm.
Kevin (01:00:07.635)
Primarily, CNU is trying to change that. They want to change that. They really want to appeal to younger generations. But the dominant voices are definitely Gen Xers and Boomers for the most part. And the Yimby movement is a millennial -led movement for the most part. And I think there's a difference there that also we have to unpack. So I felt like CNU should have been
a little more proactive to really bring the YIMBY folks into the fold and help them understand everything that we've been trying to do for 30 years or more, and then build an Alliance. But that has not really happened. And now there is kind of a tension there. And yeah, exactly. Yeah. Were you at the session I did in Charlotte with the sort of YIMBY debate or whatever we called it?
Seth Zeren (01:00:52.246)
I mean they have their own conference, right? It's happening next week or something, right?
Seth Zeren (01:01:04.31)
I don't think I made that one. Sorry, you'll have to...
Kevin (01:01:05.909)
It was actually, well, yeah, it was part of the CNU session, not Strong Towns. And I got thrown into it at the last second because they couldn't find somebody to debate the Laura, who's the Yenby action head from San Francisco. And I was like, sure, I'll debate her, whatever. I don't know what we have to agree or disagree about, but throw me in the room and we'll do it. And it did tease out to me some differences. And...
Seth Zeren (01:01:09.878)
Yeah.
Seth Zeren (01:01:22.134)
Oh, nice.
Kevin (01:01:33.973)
Uh, and, and I think you have, you fairly characterized a lot of it. I think from, if I were to, if I were to steel man the C and U position, um, it would be that, um, there's no point in just building lots of stuff if it's garbage. We've been down that road before. And if we're just building stuff to build stuff, a generation or two from now, we're going to find we regret all of it.
and it's not going to have a future. Because we did that, especially in the post -war era. We built an awful lot of, you know, we had an incredible housing demand in the post -war era that we needed to deal with. We did have a much more flexible regulatory structure at that time, but we built lots of suburban sprawl that has not aged well. And we built a lot of urban renewal, a lot of which has been torn down in the year since, because it was so awful.
and it was terrible for human beings. And so I under, you know, my own inclination is to frankly be much more laissez faire and that we should be able to just, by and large, people should be able to build what they want to build. And I don't get as caught up in probably some of those specifics as others in this union world do, but I do have a lot of empathy for the fact that.
we actually should all care about building really quality places that we're going to want to keep around for 100 years.
Seth Zeren (01:03:06.774)
And I think part of the distinction too that I think I have to explain to people is like, if you got rid of the zoning tomorrow, you wouldn't start building what we built in the 19 teens and twenties. Cause we don't have that building culture. That's why I come back to the building culture. It's the whole ecosystem of attitudes, assumptions, and practices doesn't exist today. So I tend to look at it as sort of, it's like a, it's like there's scar tissue, right? And you need physical therapy, right? It's hurt, it's kind of healed, but it's healed wonky. Now we need to go through a process of kind of,
Kevin (01:03:14.837)
No, no, we. Right. Yep.
Kevin (01:03:22.997)
Yeah. Yep.
Seth Zeren (01:03:36.316)
exercises and stretching and strengthening and repairing that's going to take a while, but eventually will restore function. And it won't be quite the same, but it'll be better. And that's like at a cultural level, what we kind of need to do to restore the.
Kevin (01:03:48.597)
or the cynical way, it's methadone. So, you know, we're...
Seth Zeren (01:03:53.334)
I'd like to do better than methadone. I mean, that methadone is design regulations. The form -based codes are methadone, right? They're like, they don't, I mean, but at the same time, to the extent that they actually could teach architects and developers how to build not shitty buildings, okay, that could make sense. It's that education program, if it works.
Kevin (01:03:57.717)
Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Kevin (01:04:10.293)
Yeah. And it's funny because I always find it funny when the form -based codes come under attack. And I've got my own issues. I've talked about it before. But certainly when I was doing a lot of form -based codes back in the day, we basically pitched them as we're doing these as a method of deregulation, that we're creating a type of ordinance that is going to allow for a whole lot more development than your current ordinance does. And.
which is true. And that's how most of them work out. Now they've also got their own problems and they've had a lot of issues with being able to scale. But, you know, I think that's one of the routes, that's kind of one of the flashpoints. So anyway, I just, I think the whole thing is interesting. I like the way you handled it and talked about it. And I look forward to more, hopefully some coming together. One of the challenges is that the Yimby movement has ascended.
The CNU is aging out and a lot of questions about what future it has. So I hope the CNU folks who care will kind of wake up to that and try to engage more and help shape the changes that are coming.
Seth Zeren (01:05:20.214)
Yeah, I share that fear and one of things that I noticed though, and one of reasons why I really hope CNU finds a way to kind of pass the torch is it's the only conference where everybody comes together across the built environment, right? The architects come, engineers, planners, developers, public administrators, transportation folks, like they all can come to this conference that actually touches all of their things. If a CNU conference and community goes away,
Kevin (01:05:33.813)
Yep.
Seth Zeren (01:05:48.694)
We're all going back to our silos and there's going to be no cross fertilization. I think we'll all be much poorer as a society for it.
Kevin (01:05:53.973)
No doubt, no Seth, that actually seems like a great place to wrap it. I appreciate it. This has been really great. Remind people where they can find you.
Seth Zeren (01:05:58.454)
Yeah, thanks, Kevin.
Seth Zeren (01:06:03.638)
Oh, uh, uh, build the next right thing. You'll find it on sub stack with Google or whatever.
Kevin (01:06:09.749)
and then you're on Twitter as well.
Seth Zeren (01:06:11.51)
Oh, I'm on Twitter, yes. It's Seth .Zarin. It's very easy to find.
Kevin (01:06:17.075)
All right, good, good. Well, hey, good luck with everything in Providence and hopefully we'll see each other some point in person. So.
Seth Zeren (01:06:21.206)
Thank you.
Seth Zeren (01:06:25.654)
Yeah, well, I hope to see you at CNU this year. All right. Take care, Kevin. Have a good day. Bye.
Kevin (01:06:27.989)
Yeah, I plan to be there. All right. You too, CSF. Bye.

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Two Urbanists Walk Into a Bar
6 Şub· The Messy City Podcast
Eric Brown spends most of his time designing beautiful buildings and doing urban plans for his firm, Brown Design Studio. But, when you get him away from the desk, you find someone with a good sense of history, and an understanding of how to get things done. We partnered up together in Savannah to help create the Savannah Urbanism Series (a guest lecture series), host CNU 26, and create the Savannah 2033 Plan for greater downtown.
With all of Eric’s many accomplishments, he’s a good person to talk with when we try to understand the bigger landscape of change and cities. So, we cover a lot of ground including the role of the business community in planning historically, what all is going on in Savnanah, and what he’s seeing with new, greenfield development. He talks a bit about his project Selah, in Norman OK, as one example.
Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.
Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.
Intro: “Why Be Friends”
Outro: “Fairweather Friend”
Transcript:
Kevin K (00:01.346)
Welcome back to the messy city podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg Got my good buddy Eric Brown with me today. Eric is architect urban designer man about town Savanian What what else should I have on your resume here?
Eric (00:22.818)
Probably my best accomplishment, which is being a father.
Kevin K (00:25.718)
There you go, there you go. All right, well, I'm in that with you now as well, although I was a little later at the party than you, but it's a pretty awesome responsibility and I know Nick's a great kid, so congratulations on that.
Eric (00:41.494)
You haven't seen him in a while. He's six foot one now.
Kevin K (00:45.142)
Jesus, it's taller than me? That's not possible.
Eric (00:47.982)
He's a, he's still grown too. He's a big boy. He's going to be a big boy. And, uh, you also haven't seen ace the wonder dog.
Kevin K (00:57.418)
Yeah, yeah, I know. It's been a couple of years since I've been back. Although watch out rumor is we're gonna make a trip back this year, so I'll let you know. So I wanted to, there's a lot of things Eric and I talk about and there's any number of directions we can go with this hour today, but I do wanna hit a couple of things specific to like what stuff that you work on and some things that we did years ago.
Um, Eric and I were kind of partners in crime in Savannah, um, really trying to, um, bring more discussion about new urbanism and, and better long-term planning, uh, to the city. And that may seem like a strange thing because Savannah is famous for its planning, uh, and its built environment. But like a lot of cities in the last several decades, um, it's really just been kind of the default.
same stuff that you see everywhere, other than the historic district. So one of the things that Eric and I kind of put our heads together on was to get a group together and do an updated master plan of sorts for the greater downtown area of Savannah. We did this in 2018. We called it the Savannah 2033 plan. And...
We called it 2033 because not just because it was like 15 years was a nice round number away, but really because 2033 is the 300th anniversary of the founding of Savannah. Savannah is actually older than the United States as a country. So it felt like a great benchmark for us to give. And I flew the coupe a few years ago, so I haven't been in touch in Savannah with every...
as much of what's going on, but I wondered, Eric, if you could talk a little bit about that plan and effort and any legacies from that and what might be going on today, sort of good, bad, or indifferent, regards to thinking about planning in downtown Savannah.
Eric (03:11.402)
Um...
That's a good question. And you know...
I'm gonna kind of circle back to that answer in a second. But, you know, we also, you know, you and I also kind of had our little CNU group here, brought the Congress here in whatever year that was. But, you know, as part of that CNU group, we did a series of...
Urban Speaker Series. You know, we had Mayor Riley, we had Deiru Tadani, we had Rick Hall. Um, we had, yeah, we had a, um, you know, the top talent and, you know, I'm sure I'm forgetting a few on there. And.
Kevin K (04:01.738)
Chuck Morrone, yeah, Joe Menard goes there, yeah.
Eric (04:14.634)
you know, when I'm really kind of proud of our efforts, you know, even after all these years.
Eric (04:23.242)
because people still talk about that. You know, they still talk about those. And, you know, if you were listening to you and I back in 2018 or 17 or whenever that was, we were doing those, 19. You know, our mission, what we told everybody our mission was is to raise the bar of discourse and education here on urban planning matters and.
You know, I got to say buddy, congratulations, because it took a while to sink in, but we did it. You know.
Kevin K (04:56.175)
Well, things move a little more slowly in Savannah, right?
Eric (04:58.938)
Absolutely they move slow.
Kevin K (05:01.586)
Although, honestly, they move slowly everywhere. So, what are you gonna do?
Eric (05:07.531)
But I've seen the effects of some of those. And I think.
You know, we've given people the vocabulary and in some cases, passion to go deal with some of these issues. Some of our elected officials, some of our staff members. And so I just wanted to kind of tell you that, you know, all those efforts that were pretty much thankless at the time are still somewhat thankless. But, you know, we did do it. We had an effect on that. So.
I'm real proud of you and our efforts on there. So I wanted to throw that out there. There's some significant changes coming that I really can't mention. I don't think it's appropriate to mention right now. But when they do occur, you'll be shocked and you'll know exactly how much of an effect we had.
Kevin K (05:54.046)
That's great to hear.
Eric (06:17.038)
exciting to see if that does come to fruition. And everyone out there in podcast land, cause I've talked to other senior groups about doing this or those grassroots education efforts, they are thankless, just they're important though. It's really the most important thing I think you can do as a local group. So hammer away at that stuff, cause it does bear fruit.
But back to your planning question, you know that master plan...
Eric (06:57.246)
was really good work. That our team.
you know, just did some really amazing work in a very short time for what we were doing.
Kevin K (07:08.89)
on a shoestring too. I mean, we did that on a ridiculous budget.
Eric (07:10.51)
Oof.
Yeah, yeah, we did. Um, but.
Kevin K (07:17.078)
I mean you and almost – you and basically everybody else donated huge amounts of time or else it never would have gotten done.
Eric (07:24.47)
Well, you know, again, I think it's kind of the same thing. You know, we did get, you know, city council to adopt that guide.
You know, I don't know that they have ever gone back and looked at it since then. Um, but it has. Spurned off and affected a lot of things. You know, the tide to town has been a success here, which is, you know, kind of linking up, um, some bike trails with some of our canals Savannah's got a lot of canals, um, and waterways.
and kind of tying all those together so that you can really get somewhere substantial on a bike that's in a nice interesting setting, you're not sharing the road with automobiles. So that's just, they just got more funding for their next phase. It's very, it's a huge success story and that's probably the biggest one that came out of that effort. You know, there's
There's continuing work with the Civic Center, which is one of the focal points of that plan. And the work we put in there is a good kind of milestone, I think, to judge the future work by.
Eric (09:00.246)
And the Waters corridor has finished up and it looks really nice. I just went, I was over there the other day. And so, you know, those efforts kind of helped that area a little bit, which was part of the East side charrette as well from the Congress.
Kevin K (09:21.13)
Yeah. You know, one of the things we used to talk about, Eric, it kind of may help people to have some context to know that this was basically a planning effort that we put together that was outside City Hall. We worked kind of through the remnants of Savannah Development and Renewal Authority, but we also went out and raised money privately and
and pieced it together. And that was something like, you and I used to talk about that all the time, how, I wonder if you could just expand on this, you know, that one of the frustrations we have is that in so many cities, the business community and people who ought to know better about development and, you know, things that would work well, at least financially in a city.
the business community largely has kind of stepped away from being involved in planning and we used to just, that's something we kind of wrung our hands about all the time. Even in a great historic city like Savannah that was often the case, but clearly cities all over the country, you know, it's just been a sea change in how people think about that. And I wonder if you could kind of share some of your thoughts on that.
Eric (10:43.033)
Yeah, so...
You know, I'm a big history buff, history fan, as it relates to planning, but just in general. And, you know, when you look at some of the great plans that have been done.
Eric (11:05.366)
plan for San Francisco, the plan for Chicago, heck, even the 1815 plan for Manhattan. You know, it wasn't the city of Chicago didn't do that plan. It was the business community that wrote Dan Burnham and Unlimited Check to go get it done, make us a world-class city.
And San Francisco did the same thing.
It's because the business community needed a competitive city to be competitive in an emerging national market, you know, and never in our history until probably, I would guess, posted.
post-war or maybe probably during the depression that started where you had you started to rely on government agencies to do that.
you know, because there was no planning profession prior to 19 something, 1912, maybe. Um, and so that's interesting. Um, again, how we used to do it. And, you know, not, I sound like an old man, get off my lawn kind of thing, but, um, you know, it worked and it, those were beautiful plans and they've stood the test of time. They've built magnificent world-class cities.
Eric (12:31.282)
Chicago is a top three, top five US city, however you want to rank it. San Francisco same. So, you know, you know, so where's our business community? What's the question you and I kind of asked ourselves over some beverages, I think one or two nights and you know, it's.
It's different. It's different now. And I don't think we realized this at the time, but you know, let's say in 1893, you know, the business community in Chicago and you had some national, you know, obviously Sears was based, I think Sears was based out there at the time. And you know, you had some national companies, but you know, businesses were for the most part locally owned.
Eric (13:30.042)
So you had the department store that was locally owned. It wasn't a Macy's yet. It wasn't a Woolworths yet. There were locally owned businesses that did things, steel mills, building cars or mufflers or whatever it was. And all that's gone. Literally that whole class of independent businessmen.
that are locally based and care about where they actually are and where they live and how their kids are going to view all this. Those guys are gone and they're replaced with global.
corporate MBA dipshits that just care about stock price. And so they're running a global company out of somewhere. And it's real hard to get them to do anything other than for the PR work. And raising funds for CNU, I think we've got a taste of that. But what was interesting is Delta's based out of
Atlanta Chick-fil-A is based out of Atlanta. And so they were willing to fund some efforts in their home market they perceived it as. So we got lucky with a few of those. But Gulfstream here is one of our few major businesses in Savannah. And they do a ton in the community. They do. But they don't give
s**t's about the planning work here. It's just not on their radar.
Eric (15:18.166)
You know, so I think that.
that whole shift is something to be cognizant of. And you have to find kind of that civic leadership somewhere else. And by all means, if you have a local-based business, then lean on them. They're just not that prevalent like they used to be. Before we relied on the city.
You know, here we have obviously tourism groups that are interested in the planning. So, you know, they provide some of that leadership, right or wrong. And...
Eric (16:07.678)
I think you have to, you know, as a...
You know, as like what we were doing is basically, you know, guerrilla warfare, you know, I always viewed it as, you know, working outside the system as the system isn't getting it done. You know, we were trying to model our efforts on, you know, what some of the great planners before us, Daniel Burnham, and them were doing and engage that business community. And, you know, we found some success here.
And so for people that might be trying that same thing, I would do some research into where some of the capital or trusts are in your city. Those are usually good sources for funding efforts to do stuff like this.
Kevin K (17:04.594)
Yeah, I was thinking about like, even here in Kansas City, we had a great City Beautiful Plan like a lot of American cities did, starting sort of 1880s and all the way through the 1910s. It's interesting that there's a couple of great books that talk about how the creation of the Parks and Boulevards plan here. There was a core group of local business people, including the newspaper publisher that basically
town and lobbied for that thing to happen. They hired a famous landscape architect at the time, George Kessler, who was an Olmsted disciple. And they basically went around and lobbied to make sure it would happen. And over 100 years later, that's as big a part of what the city is known for as anything for people who come here and see it. And you can see the Parks and Boulevard
Kevin K (18:02.814)
I mean, that's pretty common all over the place. I think you make a great point too about just like the local civic leadership in like, do you ever think about that like in your, compared to your native Ohio? So Eric grew up in Ohio and you know, Ohio is interesting because let's say, you know, 70, 80 years ago, there was unbelievable wealth and industry and local leadership and great cities that were built.
As a result, great architecture, but it's probably suffered as much as any place with a lot of those companies becoming part of what you describe. They all eventually got absorbed and combined and merged or dissolved. And there's not as much of that local civic leadership as there probably was.
Eric (18:56.934)
No, it's not. You know, all those rust belt cities. Pittsburgh's actually probably the best example of a city that was able to pivot quickly, in part because they have a variety of higher learning institutions there that really help them become a research center in many ways and survive the shift away from making steel.
Eric (19:25.955)
and you know.
Cleveland in 1920 was a top five city. It was number four or five city in America in terms of population. And it fell off a cliff there. I mean, it's still a big city, but it's a skeleton of itself. Everybody lives in the burbs, mostly.
You know, they don't make, Cleveland never made cars or they made some steel, but they made a lot of the stuff that went into cars, mufflers, transmissions, engines, um, all sorts of that stuff and some steel. But I'll, you know, a lot of that's gone. Not all of it, but most of it.
Eric (20:14.026)
But you know, I think.
Eric (20:18.334)
I think those grassroot efforts to find better planning and better design work and expecting better.
I think it needs to start with somebody in the community. If that business community is not there, then maybe it's a neighborhood association or downtown association or somebody needs to start it. And I think just follow that path of educating and doing some demonstrative projects, which I know you've done both in Kansas City and-
time here in Savannah, you know, just showing how you can, nobody knew what a parklet was. You know, after that, I did one and, um, you know, COVID kind of opened that box and in many places.
Kevin K (21:06.385)
So we just went out and did one.
Eric (21:17.778)
I think it's just, but you're fighting uphill guerrilla warfare, but it's actually easier that way because you don't have to answer anybody. You just kind of do what you do. And so I really enjoyed that time we were doing that stuff here.
And you know, we just met, a couple of us met again here in the fall. You know, we're going to pick up on some of that again, which is somewhat falling off the radar here. I just haven't had the same time that I had when you and I were doing it.
Kevin K (21:54.73)
Yeah. And Savannah also is, I guess it's kind of unique when you think about it because it's got, they're probably more like multi-generation families and people who are really invested in the place than there are in other cities in the country. We had a lot of luck with like realtors and other people who also cared about real estate value. But there definitely were, there are.
some of those still legacy families that give a damn about the place and what it's changing into for better or worse. I think probably a lot of cities have that, but it felt like maybe some of those older southern cities, Savannah, Charleston, Beaufort, where it used to be, might have a little more of that than other places.
Eric (22:46.226)
Yeah. Yeah, no, I agree. You know, this, this whole topic is really almost worth.
Eric (22:55.147)
a CNU sub-chapter or, you know, boot camp for guerrilla warfare or something.
Kevin K (23:01.508)
Ha ha
Eric (23:03.574)
You know, how, how to affect change in your local city. That would be actually an interesting session to do. Cause I get asked a lot on stuff.
Kevin K (23:16.914)
Yeah. Well, and you've also done it not just in Savannah but in Beaufort. You were there with like what, 14 years? Yeah. Something like that. All right.
Eric (23:24.082)
I don't remember yet, a long time. No, more than that actually, but because I'm getting old now. But yeah, and you know.
Kevin K (23:31.736)
Hehehe
Eric (23:36.866)
There's, you know, once you start waving the flag, people come out of the woodwork and say, yeah, you know, that's a good point, or I agree with that, or, but, you know, you got to, somebody's got to light the fire.
Kevin K (23:51.651)
Yeah.
So what else is happening in Savannah these days? What are you seeing from a development or a design standpoint? I know when I left town and since then, there's been a lot more, I guess what we call, large-scale development east of downtown and a little bit on the west of downtown. And then we had a lot of discussions about, how do you make incremental?
change and make some of that missing middle stuff easier in the older neighborhoods? What are you seeing these days? Is it kind of gradual change? Does it feel like things are moving faster or what?
Eric (24:35.596)
Um...
Eric (24:39.702)
No, it's there's, you know, if you drive over the bridge into Savannah from South Carolina, you know, I did it the other day and I don't know, there were 13 cranes, you know, the amount of cranes in the air is always a good judge of what's going on. And, you know, we are in that stage where.
We kind of are coming out of a stage where we couldn't build hotels fast enough anywhere.
And they've kind of run out of downtown space, although not entirely.
actually they two of the biggest buildings you know
just sold to hotel companies that are going to convert them back. The one building used to be a hotel that sits on Johnson Square. That's going to be converted back to a hotel, so we're losing all that office space. And the one East Bryant building, which is the tallest building in Savannah, was just bought. It's going to be at Ritz Carlton.
Kevin K (25:42.58)
Okay.
Kevin K (25:54.63)
Oh wow, that's quite an upgrade. It was a great building.
Eric (25:57.59)
Well, yeah, it's a great building. It's just, you know, it's displacing. We're losing two of the major office buildings downtown. Um, and you know, there's a ton of hotel buildings still going on. Um, there's a couple on their construction. I can see out my window here. Um,
And the other thing is the large apartment building that takes up as much, you know, it's as much of a Texas donut as you can fit on whatever site you're on. So there's probably.
Eric (26:37.558)
six, seven of those going on in various parts of town right now. And some just finished, some just finished up. There are several kind of over by the bridge. There's a lot on upper Montgomery Street that are either built or coming online. That whole area is kind of marching southward. There's a couple of infill ones over by where I live. There's two right, right by my.
Eric (27:09.858)
And you know they're just they're huge big buildings and the ones inside the historic district you know have enough of a review process. I was walking by the one the other day and you know it's got a really nice brick to it. It's got nice windows you know but the all the you know all the details are kind of crappy. You know the
They made them put brick lintel up there, but it's fake. You know, it doesn't overhang the masonry at all. So, you know, all that little stuff that we kind of gripe about, you know, that stuff's not a hundred percent, but you know, the building forms okay and the materials are okay. But then you look at the ones that are outside that district and holy s**t, it looks just like the fourth war in Atlanta or, you know.
any big city is that nameless, shitty architecture.
the crazy colors and the rain screen b******t and the ins and outs and the balconies and all sorts of just, you can just see that those fall apart within 10 years. So we're getting some of that, you know, wherever they can do it, they try that. Thankfully, historic district kind of protects us from that to some degree. These are the same issues, you know, Charleston faced as well.
We're usually about seven years behind whatever Charleston's going through.
Eric (28:50.647)
And but you know, it's especially during COVID.
You know, all the downtown real estate in a span of 18 months doubled in value, doubled and had already, you know, I'll be here 10 years.
Eric (29:10.527)
in October.
Eric (29:15.514)
And you know everything's over four times of what it cost when I first moved here. Coming up on five times. So, you know, there's...
Kevin K (29:27.182)
It was already kind of at a high basis by then, at that point, honestly.
Eric (29:34.376)
It's, you know, coming up on, you know, residential stuff in my neighborhoods.
Eric (29:46.622)
eight, nine hundred bucks a foot. Something like that, you know?
which is pretty expensive.
Kevin K (29:56.786)
Yeah, that's the understatement.
Eric (30:00.987)
You know and so that's kind of what's going on here. You know it's really filling in and you know the
Midtown District, which is south of the Historic District, south of Forsyth Park, that continues to thrive.
Eric (30:26.07)
you know, some businesses, mostly food and beverage stuff opening up. And, you know, that neighborhoods, which is your old neighborhood, that's, that's also seen a similar, you know, bump in value, you know, which was a lot more affordable back in the day. It's even be hard pressed to find something, you know, under a million bucks up there now or something close to that.
$800, $900, $800, $900. And tons of people, especially during COVID, they flocked here, man. There's so many people that cashed out of, my old neighbors were from Brooklyn. Sold whatever they had in Brooklyn, paid cash for whatever and put money in their pocket. So it's so cheap compared to those kinds of places.
Still, still is.
But yeah, it's a big jump in population here. And it's been interesting, because it's a big jump in.
Eric (31:39.586)
people living, so that's good. And then, we're still overrun with our, and most people I'm sure won't know that, but Savannah's got a hellacious take rate for Airbnbs, short term rentals. I've never come across anywhere that has any sort of ordinance like the one we have. It's 25% non-owner occupied.
Kevin K (32:00.33)
Hehehe
Eric (32:09.226)
by ward, which is our neighborhood system, if you will. So that doesn't include the owner-occupied ones or the illegal ones. So just the economics on that math drives a lot of... A lot of the Victorians were picked up as Airbnb investments by holding companies. I mean, they would sell without even looking at them just because they can do the math, right?
Kevin K (32:39.286)
I keep wondering when that bubble's gonna burst. Feels like it's bursting nationwide in different places, the Airbnb bubble, but Savannah, Charleston, those cities are so popular. I don't know.
Eric (32:52.49)
Yeah, the tourism numbers here are ridiculous for a city of this size, honestly. And with the last round of hotels online now and more coming, it's really overrun with tourists. It just wasn't designed to have as many people as we have here. So it's like, you need reservations now to go get dinner. It's like Manhattan.
It's hard to roll in unless you find a neighborhood joint. There's a few left. You can just roll in and you happen to know somebody and you get dinner. Otherwise, there's her standing in line for some of these dumb restaurants. It's like.
Kevin K (33:35.498)
Hmm. Yeah, that's a new thing.
Eric (33:37.975)
this.
Kevin K (33:38.998)
So I also want to talk a little bit about how your practice has changed over the years and like what all you're doing today. Eric's firm is Brown Design Studio. He's an architect. He's done architecture and urban design and urban planning but probably heavier on architecture. And I'm curious like – so you've been doing this a couple of years now? And –
You know, obviously a lot has changed from when you initially started doing like new working in new urbanist communities and doing the architecture you're doing. What do you see in today that what if anything is kind of different about your approach and what you're working on, who your clients are, that sort of thing?
Eric (34:30.783)
Um, that's like, you know, that's a good question.
I think, and this is our 26th year in business. So we've survived a couple minor meltdowns and one major one, but our whole focus, we don't do anything that's not, that wouldn't be classified as new urbanism, whether it's infill work or.
Greenfield work or something in between. So, you know, we're not like local architects doing whatever comes in the door locally. You know, we work solely in New Urbanist projects, you know, across North America and a few other spots. But that's what we continue to do. And so, you know, not much has changed.
In that regard, that's always what our mission was. And we're still on our, it's like the Starship Enterprise, we're on our 26th year mission to help build healthy, walkable places. And it's worth it. It's been a fun challenge. So we continue to do that. We have long-term relations with a lot of, most of our clients are developers. And we have...
You know, we have some long-term relationships that, you know, we're here when they need us. They know what we do and, you know, what we're good at, what we're not good at. Um, so that's, that's our, that's our core. That's our core right there.
Kevin K (36:19.658)
Do you find yourself doing more infill these days as opposed to greenfield stuff or is that not the case?
Eric (36:31.054)
Um, no, it's, you know, we always, we've always done, you know, because something that plugs in a new urbanist community also plugs in an older urbanist community. You know? Um, and so those always went hand in hand for us, but you know, to, to the heart of your point, yeah, after, you know, definitely after, you know, when the market came back in 2012, 13, whatever 14, you know, um,
Definitely we're doing a lot of smaller infill projects. Some of them are pretty random. We'll get a call from a guy in Michigan somewhere that wants to do six townhouses on an urban property his parents owned or something. All sorts of stuff like that all over the place. And some bigger projects, there's still some bigger projects kind of plodding along.
we were able to do.
Eric (37:34.562)
project in Oklahoma, outside Norman, in between Norman and Oklahoma City. That's pretty interesting, a greenfield project. It's big, 720 acres. We did that planning work about three years ago and last year we just got some finished vertical architecture done. So we're continuing to work on that project that we're real proud of.
which is called Salem. And it's been fun, you know, doing the land plan, you know, internally. A lot of times we work with some other land planners. So this one we did in-house and then you know with some other team members, but it's been real fun, real rewarding and then you know delivering the architecture to build it out. That's keeping us busy as well, you know that project.
But yeah, we've always somehow been known for our missing middle work. We were doing that before anybody knew what to call it, before Dan had invented that term. And so that's still one of our bread and butters. We're still known for that somehow.
Eric (38:55.714)
done a lot of multi-family projects, continue to do those a lot, a lot of townhouses. And what's interesting is I finally got...
Eric (39:08.054)
You know, over the years, and I'm sure you've done this as well, you know, where you, you want to take a garden apartment guy and get him to do what we want him to do, right? And I've failed. I failed probably. I'm probably, I'm now like one in 17. So I've got one that I got to actually do it. Um, that's not totally true, but, um, this was a big, you know, 350 unit.
project and we got him to build it out of, you know, four, six, eight and 12 pack units. And it's under construction right now. So that was interesting. I think that's going to be a good case study going forward because his rent, you know, I'm anxious to see how his rents compete. It's in a, it's in a, you know, a decent walkable community.
So I'm interested to see how the financial case study works out.
Kevin K (40:13.557)
Where's that one?
Eric (40:14.942)
That one's in Bluffton, actually, which is across the river in South Carolina. Near for people who don't know it's near Hilton.
Kevin K (40:16.842)
Okay, cool.
Eric (40:25.425)
Um.
Kevin K (40:27.476)
How have the conversations changed with builders and developers since the early days of doing this stuff? Did you have to do a lot more arm-twisting early on with some of your early clients? Is it an easier sell now to do the kind of work that you want to do?
Eric (40:50.27)
Well, no, it's not. It's the same cell. However, you know, I'm not the smartest guy, but I eventually learned to stop chasing those clients. So, you know, I don't waste my time with them. If you want to do something else, you know, have fun. Here, I'll give you some names of people to call. You know, we can't help you. Um, because I don't give a s**t. You know, if you want to go do some five-car garage, houses somewhere, go have fun.
Um, but, you know, so we only take on projects that, you know, are in line with our vision, our mission. And, you know, that that's just what I learned to do, you know, be selective about, you know, who we're going to work for, because we don't want to do everything. We only want to do, you know, something that helps our, our mission, which is, you know, building great communities. And, um, if we're, you know, in alignment,
When people do call us, we're gonna run through a wall for them. And we believe in what we do every day. And so I guess I got smarter is what happened.
Kevin K (42:02.292)
I remember a lot of those conversations too. I got, my God, we went through trying to convince so many crappy builders and developers to do something better.
Eric (42:12.31)
And what was your, you know, and I did the same thing, man. Um, we were both young, you know, I have similar backgrounds and, you know, had young companies and were young men. Dumb young ideals that you probably put, you know, what was your, what was success rate on?
Kevin K (42:14.378)
there.
Kevin K (42:24.259)
Yeah.
Oh, almost zero. Yeah.
Eric (42:28.726)
Yeah, it's like me with these apartment guys. I finally got one, a big one to do it. You know, we've done lots of little ones, but to get a 350 unit thing, that was a big win, but it took me 20 some years to do it. So that's not a good use of my time. But I think what's interesting.
Kevin K (42:45.311)
Yeah.
Eric (42:56.014)
is in my, you know, my, my victory that I'm kind of patting myself on the back about there with the apartment, they wouldn't have come to me.
if they didn't get rejected prior, because it was, they had to conform with a form, form-based code that we have in the right. And so that's how, you know, otherwise they would have just happily built their normal shitty garden apartment. You know, so that code reform is still critically important.
you know, part of our world. Cause you really, you know, convincing someone, you know, to do what we would term the right thing versus, you know, what they're planning on doing. It's a low percentage win rate for anybody. I don't care how good you are, you know, as a closer or whatever, but, and it's just, you know, it's a waste of all of our time and efforts cause it burns you out cause you lose so much.
Kevin K (44:00.979)
Yeah.
Eric (44:01.954)
And, you know, I think our efforts would be better spent into, you know, guerrilla warfare to get the codes changed so that these developers now have to start doing the right thing. And then.
Kevin K (44:12.698)
Yeah, and nurturing like other younger developers who want to do something different, helping bring them along.
Eric (44:23.254)
Yeah, for sure. Um, you know, but a lot of these projects, you know, are still the big boy, you need $40 million in capital to tackle and you know, those, those guys, you know, I love the small income stuff. We do a lot of that. Um, but you know, it's like, you're talking about the market share of like a Bugatti versus, you know, Volkswagen or something.
Kevin K (44:30.098)
Yeah. Yep.
Kevin K (44:51.902)
Yeah.
Eric (44:52.374)
You know, you got to change Volkswagen. You got to change the mass market.
And so I think that guerrilla warfare into code reform at a local level is something that we don't advocate enough for, which goes way back to our start of our conversation. So I think that's, if I could do something besides outlawing traffic engineers.
Kevin K (45:07.358)
Yeah.
Eric (45:22.814)
That would be one of the things is push us on this code reform where everybody's working off some type of form-based code.
Kevin K (45:32.166)
Yeah. Well, it's interesting because even after working in that world for almost 30 years or whatever, we've seen some good efforts with code reform and some good efforts with regulatory reform but there are a lot of days where it feels like we've made zero progress depending on where you're working.
Eric (45:56.)
It is, you know, it's and I've.
You know.
Eric (46:03.734)
Like the analogy is...
Eric (46:08.27)
You're.
You know, somebody's spending all sorts of time and effort to build stuff downtown here. Great. And we're trying to, you know, expand downtown even, which is a, which is an awesome thing that we're able to do here a little bit, you know, expand your urban core. Meanwhile, you know, out in our suburbs are happily building, you know, Costco's and targets and all sorts of b******t subdivisions. And it's like.
Eric (46:40.502)
You know, we don't learn. And we don't learn. And some of the strong town stuff makes so much sense when you look at how the life cycle of those suburbs. And it's funny because poolers now, after spending all sorts of money on all sorts of great police stations and city halls and all this stuff, now all of a sudden, they've got funding that's different.
Eric (47:10.847)
It's just so funny because you know they're hitting that seven year curve on a lot of stuff.
Eric (47:18.358)
But, you know, I guess that's just, you know, it's just frustrating that the, the conventional model is still building, you know, what, 90% of our built environment here easily. And, um, you know, I guess
Kevin K (47:31.986)
Yeah. Easily. Yeah.
Eric (47:40.526)
You know, I've just kind of almost accepted it. It's like almost you have to let that happen before you can come back and fix it in maybe 30 years or urbanize it in 30 years. It's almost like, you know, the old patterns of.
development where you would build, you know, one story buildings down on Main Street. And then all of a sudden it made sense to somebody build a two story building and made more money than everybody tore down the one story buildings. And you just have to maybe go through that process, I guess. I don't know.
Kevin K (48:14.198)
Yeah, I mean, it's such a machine. All that stuff is such a – I mean, so you have to envy it. It's an incredible machine. The efficiency of it is amazing. It makes a ton of money for people if you get your timing right in the market. Of course, you could lose a ton of money if you get your timing wrong. But yeah, I like –
I always think about like, I make the military analogy. So if you're somebody who cares about traditional urban planning, it's like we fight hand to hand combat in our older neighborhoods and we're really excited when we're in a battle or two. In the meantime, it's like the enemy is carpet bombing, you know, everything outside the older neighborhoods just at will and we kind of willfully ignore it. But yeah.
It will continue on I think as long as it can continue on, it seems to.
Eric (49:16.246)
Well, you know, we're...
were how many, you know, it's the expected lifestyle. You know, there's no more generations. There's very, you know, very few percentage of people that have not been raised in the suburbs. Yeah, so it's the normal and, you know, driving, you know, 25 minutes to.
Kevin K (49:34.43)
Yeah, exactly. It's been like four generations now, yeah.
Eric (49:44.75)
go to your super Kroger or whatever, or a grocery store, is normal for us.
Kevin K (49:51.706)
Yeah. That's like, so like the last thing I wanted to ask you is, I mean, so you just mentioned you've, you're working on this Greenfield project in Oklahoma. And I know, I know you well enough to know that you've worked, you still work on some other Greenfield projects here and there. But, but by and large, it seems like I might have the wrong impression about this. I fully admit that I could be wrong about it. You're more plugged into the, this world than I am, but it seems like there's a whole lot less.
of those Greenfield New Urbanist projects going on than there were say 20 years ago across the country. I don't know. I guess I wonder, do you think that's wrong or right? If that's the case, what's going on? I think we all thought that once Seaside and all those projects and then Kentlands and once they were all 10, 15 years old.
and people saw how cool they were that we would see like an explosion of these around the country and that clearly hasn't happened.
Eric (50:55.65)
Not exactly. And I think you're, you know, I think you're right. Our, I think our expectations 20 years ago that we were going to change the machine or if not the machine, at least the, my thought was always you would show the market there alternatives.
Kevin K (51:18.678)
Admittedly, we were like naive and idealistic. I mean that was also part of it.
Eric (51:23.67)
Well, you know, I'm still kind of that same naive, idealistic person in many ways, which is both pro and cons. But, you know, I think...
Eric (51:40.466)
I think these projects.
Eric (51:46.102)
have shown people.
that there are alternatives to living in the cul-de-sac, conventional neighborhood world.
Eric (52:00.358)
And I think that if you look at the market research, it shows you the prices in Ketlin's, the prices in ION, the prices in Norton Commons is significantly higher than its competitor that's a conventional thing right next door or right down the road.
Eric (52:30.076)
But it also takes 10, 15 years to do something like that. And meanwhile,
You know, most of the development work is.
Eric (52:45.398)
you know, it's easier to go to a D.R. Horton and be done in three, four years, five years. You're done. Right. And the landowner got their money in the first year.
They didn't get as much money as they could have, but they got it the first year and they're out. They're on to the next thing.
You know, and I think there's just a perfect storm of all these variables there. Those are some of them, you know, the time investment that it takes. I think, you know, we've all, UI has stolen most of the good ideas of the new urbanism that they can make sense of on a spreadsheet, right? And they've thrown all the other stuff away. So they, you know, they have,
co-opted some things from us, but you know, UIs, those folks are developing most of the stuff here, you know, not the Urban New Urbanist group, NTBA is a fantastic group that I really enjoy spending time with.
Eric (53:56.066)
You know, those are developers that are in one, two, three, four places, you know, for 10 years, 15 years, or, you know, you can only do so much. Even the bigger, more sophisticated ones. You know, meanwhile, these other guys are just, you know, knocking down 10,000 houses a year.
Kevin K (54:22.686)
Yeah, and while I think we kind of recognized how hard it was to do those first TNDs 30 years ago, and I think it's gotten a little easier, it's still incredibly hard. Everything about it is incredibly hard, and you really have, it's kind of a unique personality of a developer who wants to take that on and push for it, because you're gonna be fighting, even today, you're still gonna be fighting so many battles.
to just execute even a mediocre T&D.
Eric (54:56.626)
And, you know, I think there's, you know, there's still a lot of Greenfield work. I think you're seeing a little bit of, you know, obviously no one, not many projects survived 2008. And so, you know, you didn't see many come back on.
It took a long time for them to come back online. And in some places, our sailor project, which has virtually very little regulatory oversight, it took three years to get vertical, which is unheard of anywhere else. Most places are still in their entitlements in year three. It takes you five years to come out of the ground. Most places.
Eric (55:45.89)
You know, it's just a long investment. And, you know, again, the ULI guys are typically...
A lot of those guys have to answer to the capital.
And the capital is not that patient generally. You know what I mean? They gotta have a plan to move so much dirt or lots or whatever it is. And they just can't wait into something for 10, 15 years, it's hard. I think for that group to understand that. And I guess, you know, that's.
Kevin K (56:04.233)
Mm-hmm.
Eric (56:25.858)
you know, maybe something that we have never solved is how do you engage that industry in a different way. And, you know, you remember back to the New Urban Fund that was supposed to show them how to do it. Um, that didn't quite work.
So I don't know, you know, it's that.
Eric (56:47.362)
I, you know, I'm a market guy. So the market guys believe the market's going to kind of tell you what to do. And, you know, they're going to go the easy route, but they're going to put in the big pool and all the stuff that helps them increase their sales rate and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, it is what it is.
But the people who do, you know, trail with outside Atlanta, they're doing great. They're killing it. You know, so whenever we do these, you know, Norton Commons continues to kill it.
They just dominate the market. Once, once you do it, you can do it right. We haven't been able to set up the machine in most cases, you know, the industry to, to continue that it's always been kind of a family or one-off or. You know, very few of these have been done by corporate folks, I guess, just like watercolor that there's been a few, but, you know, they quickly went back to selling pine forest or whatever they were doing before that.
Kevin K (57:54.102)
Yeah, exactly. Like St. Joe Company did watercolor and water sound and stuff and they own so much land and I think they – it seems like they've kind of gone away from that back to a hybridized version of what they were doing before.
Eric (58:08.574)
Yeah, and it's, so I don't know, man. I, you know, I do think, you know, if you, if you look around, there's also a lot of smaller projects that we don't really hear about. You know, if you call up Mike Watkins or somebody like that, Mike, Mike's extremely busy and that's what he's working on. You know, he's working on these a hundred acre little projects that he's, you know, nailing and, you know, we do a lot of work with Mike and
Tom Lowe and those guys. There's a lot of smaller projects that just you aren't gonna hear about. And they're never gonna be, you know, we've done some DPZ. We've got a DPZ project that's stuck entitlement in the entitlement process that we're set up to do some of the architecture on. But you know, it's year four.
Kevin K (58:42.536)
Interesting.
Eric (59:00.394)
So they'll call us when they need us, but there's not as many getting the limelight that we used to get. And I, you know, I just had this conversation with Rob Studeville, who used to do one of my favorite things, which was write the New Urban News. I love getting that magazine every month. Remember? Um, so it was good to catch up with him about that, but he, you know, he had those same thoughts and, um, you know, I just don't think maybe as a movement, we're communicating what we're doing very well with.
Kevin K (59:15.936)
Mm-hmm.
Kevin K (59:29.534)
Yeah.
Eric (59:30.13)
other. You know, nobody knows about my Salem project. It's probably one of the bigger ones. You know, Mike doesn't, you know, Michael shares stuff, you know, when he needs one of us to come in and help him on stuff. I don't know what they're doing.
I don't know what DPZ or Dover Cole is doing, unless we're working on a specific project with them. So we really don't share as much as we used to.
Kevin K (59:57.67)
Yeah, I think that's a great point. You know, it's like another, we could do a whole other hour sometime on how CNU itself has changed and gotten away from a lot of the practical side of just building great communities. And I think a big part of that is we've lost, we're not talking to each other about who's doing what. And we used to actually have a running list of all these places all over the country. I don't think that even exists anymore.
Eric (01:00:25.798)
I don't think that's a priority anymore.
Kevin K (01:00:27.558)
No, it doesn't seem to be.
Eric (01:00:30.434)
But you know, I think.
Eric (01:00:34.282)
you know, that, that CNU group.
has gotten away from communicating and with each other our successes. Cause that's a large, cause it kept you going. You know, we'd all go back to our little hometowns after seeing you and you feel, I would feel renewed and re-energized. And, um, you know, I would, I would love getting New Urban News in the mail. And I would, whatever I was doing, I would stop and sit down and read the thing. Cause it was great to hear about, you know, some new exciting stuff or some new projects.
And ironically, in an age where it's very easy to communicate these days, you know, we don't. We don't pat ourselves on the back. We don't share our success stories.
Kevin K (01:01:21.242)
It's kind of like seeing you never evolve and communication wise we never evolved past the email to serve.
Eric (01:01:28.53)
No, you're right. You're exactly, you're 100% about that. The most painful way to communicate that's ever been invented, I think.
Kevin K (01:01:29.618)
Kind of hilarious. Yeah.
Kevin K (01:01:36.864)
No doubt.
Eric (01:01:38.114)
except maybe the group text, I don't know.
Kevin K (01:01:42.697)
Yeah. Eric, I think we'll wrap it there. It's been about an hour. What are your, what's your favorite spots in Savannah? Your favorite hangout spots these days.
Eric (01:01:53.902)
Hmm, that's a good question. Depends what my mood is. But, you know, I've got a...
I've got a couple of establishments, you know, two blocks from my house that you're most likely to find me in one of those three places. You got, you know, the most famous dive bar in the world, Pinky's.
Kevin K (01:02:16.159)
Mm-hmm.
Kevin K (01:02:19.914)
Mm-hmm.
Eric (01:02:23.642)
There's a place called Savoy, which is run by the people who own Pinkies. And I think that wasn't there when you were here, was it? So that while you were here, it was this kind of shitty wine bar that nobody ever wants. So it's in that space in the Drake Tower. And it's, you know, you go in there and it's 95% locals, 90% something like that. So, you know, I hang out there and then, you know, over by the...
Kevin K (01:02:32.05)
I don't think I don't remember it now.
Kevin K (01:02:37.57)
Oh, yeah, yeah. OK.
Eric (01:02:53.198)
Perry Lane Hotel. There's some stuff there. Those are my hangouts these days.
Kevin K (01:02:59.454)
All right, so anybody listening, if you're in Savannah, you know where to find Eric, buy him a drink and talk about all this stuff and much more and find out what he's up to. So it's been great to catch up with you. I'll get my butt down there to Savannah one of these days soon so we can dive a little deeper and do the off-color stuff.
Eric (01:03:25.17)
Okay, good. I don't think you have to censor anything. So I was on my best behavior. But, you know, I, again, just want to reiterate, I think it's great that you're doing this. This is a great way to communicate with folks. Again, we need to do kind of more of this stuff. And, you know, I think just to reiterate earlier, you know, we accomplished a lot here, man. So I'm proud to.
Kevin K (01:03:30.11)
Not this time, yeah.
Eric (01:03:54.606)
have had you here as a Superman to my Batman or whatever, whatever you want to term it. So I miss you.
Kevin K (01:04:00.29)
Thank you.
As long as it's not Batman or Robin.
Eric (01:04:07.158)
I don't want to see you in tights. That would not be a pretty sight, but miss you here, buddy. I appreciate you.
Kevin K (01:04:10.305)
Nobody.
Thanks very much. I definitely miss you, Miss Savannah. I need to find myself there more often. So good to talk to you. See you.
Eric (01:04:22.466)
All right, buddy.

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