In 2015, Mott Smith pivoted his development focus towards commercial food prep and co-founded Amped Kitchens. At the time, Los Angeles’ food industry was expanding rapidly and he saw an opportunity to provide turnkey food production space to both new startups and existing food companies. It took two years, working with the L.A. County, the Department of Public Health, food business accelerator Food Centricity, and even Southern California Gas Co for Amped Kitchens to complete their first building, a 56,000 sf facility in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood of LA. With 54 pre-licensed wholesale kitchens for lease the building opened 50% pre-leased, and they quickly had a waiting list. Clients included brand name companies like Beyond Meat, Soylent, Blue Bottle Coffee and Applebee’s as well as startup companies who had outgrown their hourly, incubator and home kitchens.
Of note, this $18 million project was complex, involving seven financial partners, tax credits, loans and equity investments. They’ve opened a second building in Chicago since and have plans for more.
Mott founded his development company, Civic Enterprise (CE), with Brian Albert in 2003. CE’s goal was to specialize in projects that added value to emerging neighborhoods while leveraging innovative regulatory tools. Before embracing the role of developer, Mott served as acting director of planning at Los Angeles Unified School District, and was director of special projects there for four years. This followed his role as founding executive director of New Schools‐Better Neighborhoods. Mott also has taught ‘urban infill’ at USC, is a founding board member of the California Infill Builders Federation, and served on the boards of affordable housing developer Restore Neighborhoods L.A. and L.A. Más. He is also, wait for it, the former bassist of L.A. area rock band, All Day Sucker.
Read the podcast transcript here
Eve Picker: [00:00:13] Hi there. Thanks for joining me on Rethink Real Estate. For Good. I’m Eve Picker and I’m on a mission to make real estate work for everyone. I love real estate. Real estate makes places good or bad. Rich or poor. Beautiful or not. In this show, I’m interviewing the disruptors, those creative thinkers and doers that are shrugging off the status quo in order to build better for everyone. If you haven’t already, check out all of my podcasts at our website Rethinkrealestateforgood.co. Or you can find them at your favorite podcast station. You’ll find lots worth listening to, I’m sure.
Eve: [00:01:10] Mott Smith is not a big box developer, at least not the big box that might spring to mind. His company, Amped Kitchens, rebuilds vacant warehouses into turnkey food production spaces. Think of it as an apartment building for commercial food producers, says Mott. This might sound straightforward to you, but it took two years working with the L.A. County, the Department of Public Health, Food Business Accelerator, Food Centricity and even Southern California Gas Company to get the first Amped Kitchen building off the ground. It opened 50 percent leased and quickly had a waiting list. Clients included brand name companies like Beyond Meat, Soylent, Blue Bottle Coffee and Applebee’s, as well as startup companies who have outgrown their hourly incubator and home kitchens. And this first facility was quickly followed by a second in Chicago. Mott’s plans are big despite the complexity of these projects. I’m fascinated by his approach and I’m sure you will be too. If you’d like to join me in my quest to rethink real estate, there are two simple things you can do. Share this podcast and go to Rethinkrealestateforgood.co, where you can subscribe to be the first to hear about my podcasts, blog posts and other goodies.
Eve: [00:02:44] Hello, Mott! I’m so happy to have you on the show. You sound like a developer after my own heart, and you’ve landed in such an interesting place.
Mott Smith: [00:02:54] Yeah, thank you for having me, Eve. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Eve: [00:02:58] So I’m most interested in your career pivots, which sound interesting and pretty nimble from planner to founder to teach to developer. What’s the common thread there?
Mott: [00:03:12] Well first of all, I mean, we can call them pivots, but the truth is I’m doing all of them simultaneously, even now. I think like you, I have always loved cities. There’s that, that magic of generativity that you get when you put a bunch of people together and you let them create stuff organically. And there’s this emergent quality that was just, it’s like the best, it’s the best thing. My wife is an ocean person in a nature person. And she describes the feeling she gets by looking at the ocean and this feeling of possibility and endlessness. And that’s exactly the feeling that I get when I’m looking at or better in a city, you know? And I knew from the earliest times that I can remember that I wanted to somehow be involved in bringing that life force to more places. I grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC in the 80s, and at that time D.C. was not so lively a place. And I remember going with my family to visit places like New York and thinking, oh boy, like this is where it’s at. Like, we need this, we need to recreate that type of environment. And I just kind of became an informal like fanboy student of urbanism and, you know, took it from there. That was that’s how I got my start.
Eve: [00:04:43] That’s a lovely story. So, what’s risen to the top in 2020 / 2021?
Mott: [00:04:51] As well, so, you know, I guess now I still describe myself primarily as a real estate developer, I’m very fortunate that I get to teach in the Master Real Estate Development Program at USC, which I’ve been doing for, I think, the past 10 years or more. I also graduated from that program and that keeps me sharper. It introduces me to students who always have such great ideas and gives me an excuse to talk about things and reflect on things. But I’m also involved civically. You know, I’m on the Small Business Commission here in Los Angeles. I was a founding board member of a group in California called the Council of Infill Builders, which advocates for better and more sustainable infill policies. And so, all those things take up a lot of time. But my day job is I’m Co-Founder and CEO of a company called Amped Kitchens. And you know, we are much more than a real estate development company, but we are real estate development company. We buy properties and we build multi-tenant commercial kitchen complexes and we run them. And so, I feel a little bit more like a kind of, a regular business person than, I think, I did when I was doing primarily development or things that were more recognizable as development. But I’m still a developer.
Eve: [00:06:22] So Amped Kitchen sounds like a really interesting idea. I want to know, I suppose, first and foremost, why you started doing that.
Mott: [00:06:33] Sure. So, you’re going back to the, you know, to that big idea that the thing that gets me going is this, you know, the life force of cities and the creative force of cities. And when I moved to Los Angeles, which I did with my family in 1987, when I was a teenager, I had this really palpable sense of all of this potential here. So much creativity under the surface. So, you know, this huge immigrant population. People were flocking here in droves. And it, you know, there were parts of the city that really felt like a creative, generative city. But a lot of it felt like it was just kind of sputtering. And I was fascinated with why that was. Like what was it that allowed that fire to kind of catch in a place like New York, but not really go anywhere in a place like L.A.? And I, you know, I started diving deep into the city’s planning policies and redevelopment agency practices and the politics and all that stuff. And you know, if you ask the typical person that you’d meet, why is it that New York is great and L.A. doesn’t have that vibe and the typical person, their response to that question or really any question about the city as well? The planning in L.A. sucks. There’s just not enough planning. And what I slowly came to the conclusion of was that there was actually the opposite problem that there is way too much planning and that if if something tried to happen here, like somebody wanted to open a restaurant or somebody who wanted to convert a building from commercial use to residential use, they would get 25 percent of the way there and then something in the bureaucracy of the city would stop them. And I saw this happening again and again and again, where people had these just fantastic ideas and wonderful projects, and they would just continue to hit like a regulatory brick wall because the way we regulate development in L.A. and I think in a whole lot of the English-speaking world, to be honest. If what you’re doing doesn’t match what was, you know, what was written down in some plan, it doesn’t count and should probably be stopped. And unfortunately, you know, if people’s creativity, you know, kind of natural creativity doesn’t line up with what people wrote down on a plan 20 years ago, then it generally doesn’t happen or doesn’t happen without great difficulty. And so that was kind of the diagnosis that I came to. So, my business, which I co-founded with my business partner Brian Albert back in 2003, actually under the name Civic Enterprise, Civic Enterprise Development, which still exists. Our thing has always been doing projects that create the opportunity for that kind of creative generative flow to happen better. And that’s meant is doing new product types, generally innovative product types that increase the opportunities for people, particularly at the entry level of the economy, to kind of express themselves either commercially or residentially or whatever it might be. So we were the first development firm to bring a tracked, map to market under what was called the City of L.A.’s Small Lot Subdivision Ordinance. The Small Lot Ordinance.
Eve: [00:10:30] Oh yes, I know it. Yes.
Mott: [00:10:32] We got town homes and we had a great time with that. And we at the time, in 2007, we brought the most affordable, unsubsidized, single family turnkey homes to market in the Silver Lake neighborhood out here. And so, that was really fun. We’ve done a lot of work with parking policy, actually, helping the city of West Hollywood, for instance, rewrite its parking code to turn what was your previously, you know, a 12-to-18-month process for new restaurants and bars to go through a zoning process that did little more than costs, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars…
Eve: [00:11:14] Yes.
Mott: [00:11:15] Offer sacrifices to the zoning gods. It turned that into an over-the-counter process, which helps enliven countless storefronts that had been vacant on Santa Monica Boulevard and Melrose Avenue and Sunset Boulevard, et cetera. We got into the food business because when the last recession hit, we were very lucky that we’d gotten out of our last deal with our, you know, with our shirts. And so, we had a little bit of cash and were excited at all the opportunities to buy up urban properties at bargain prices. And then after about two years of trying to do that, we realized that even in the depths of recession, there were, really, no great urban properties that we could find at bargain prices. The recession seemed to have the effect of causing the kind of the bad stuff to lose all its value, but a lot of the good stuff was still highly sought over and, in some cases, even more so. We were fighting with companies like Lennar and KB Home and DR Horton over these tiny little properties like 12- and 14-unit properties. It was very, very strange time. And so, Brian and I were having one, we’d go out to dinner and, you know, brainstorm about what was next. And we were at a friend’s restaurant in Hollywood. He came over and sat with us and started complaining about how he knows all these great bakers. But he couldn’t for the life of him, get bread for his restaurant because none of them could get their wholesale permits. None of them could deal with what was at the time, like a one to two year and two to $30,0000 process to go from being a just a regular commercial baker who sells at farmer’s markets to one who can legally sell to restaurants. And the light bulb went off and we said, All right, well, if there are people out there trying to do that business and they’re hitting a one to two year, two to $30,0000 regulatory wall, that’s something that we would like to address through development. And that’s where Amped Kitchens was born.
Eve: [00:13:18] Interesting. You work on projects that is just absolute brain damage for other people.
Mott: [00:13:25] That’s our value proposition is we’ll take the brain damage, so you don’t have to.
Eve: [00:13:28] Yes, I like that. It’s it sounds like a lot of fun to me, too. So, how does Amped Kitchens work? What does Amped Kitchen look like?
Mott: [00:13:40] Yeah, yeah. Ok. So, we’ve got three locations now. Two in Los Angeles and one that we recently opened in Chicago. We’re actually having our grand opening celebration on October 14th, which we’re very excited about. So, there are 50 to 60 plus kitchens in a building.
Eve: [00:13:59] Wow.
Mott: [00:13:59] That we’ve engineered. We have finished up to the point of having utilities, connections for equipment. They’ve been pre inspected by the local health department and we’ve got an operating team on site that makes sure the facility stays clean and sanitary to the highest industry standards and that we’ve got logistics support. You know, our team drives forklifts and things like that. And when you sign a lease with us and we operate very much like an apartment building does for residential uses. You sign a one-year lease, you bring your equipment in, your sign goes on your door. And instead of spending one to two years in many hundreds of thousands of dollars getting ready to get your permits, you can start selling five-dollar loaves of bread. Generally speaking, within a matter of weeks, you have your permits and you’re in a very supportive, very communal, vibrant environment where you can run your food business and get lots of support. So, when you get a life changing order from Whole Foods for 10,000 units next month, you can say yes to that without having to worry that there’s going to be a problem.
Eve: [00:15:17] So it’s a little bit of an incubator as well.
Mott: [00:15:20] You know, it’s funny. We bristle at the idea of calling it an incubator. And that’s for, it’s for three reasons primarily. One is it doesn’t accurately describe our tenant base. Because we’ve got everything from local mom and pops to very well established corporations who are just looking for innovation space, or, you know, for instance, the Beyond Burger was piloted out of one of our facilities for about a year, and it was sold at every Whole Foods in the nation. And Beyond Meat was a public company at the time with its own major manufacturing resources. But they, when you’re launching a new product like that going from the so-called benchtop in the test kitchen or the lab to the scale of a factory, that journey is a very fraught one, and nothing ever comes off the production line at a factory tasting or looking or feeling like it did in the test kitchen.
Eve: [00:16:20] Yeah.
Mott: [00:16:21] And so if you’re going to be spending millions of dollars to outfit a production line, you want to have an excellent idea that you’ve nailed your formula and process.
Eve: [00:16:28] Interesting.
Mott: [00:16:28] And so companies like Beyond Meat come to us so they can nail the formula and process in an environment where the cost of iteration is very, very low by comparison. So again, I wouldn’t call this an incubator, one because of that, and two, because it’s just been our experience that a lot of incubators have a kind of event evangelism about them.
Eve: [00:16:50] Yes, I know what you mean. Incubation seems to be a rapidly growing industry, doesn’t it?
Mott: [00:16:56] Yeah. And there’s a remedial quality to it, also. Like, you know, you come learn from us, you can one day be like the big boys or big girls. And I’ve gotten, I don’t think I have any of the answers. I just want to provide an environment that’s really supportive. And if you’ve got the answers or if you can find the answers, it’s not going to be, you’re not going to hit a brick wall of regulation, you’re not going to hit a brick wall of facilities capitalization. You’re going to have lots of opportunity in front of you and lots of support. But informal support.
Eve: [00:17:31] So maybe let’s call it a community rather than an incubator.
Mott: [00:17:34] Yeah. Sure.
Eve: [00:17:34] So do you do things that sort of encourage community or does it happen naturally?
Mott: [00:17:40] Yeah, it’s a great question. We do. I mean, we’ve, you know, there’s an online platform kind of like a Slack. It’s not quite a Slack, but people use it to ask questions of each other, and it’s really practical stuff. It’s exactly the sort of stuff that you need to develop a networked business community. Like, for instance, when we started out, our first tenant wanted their organic certification. And most of the agencies out there that do certification for organic prefer to work with, you know, big multibillion dollar companies. And so, they couldn’t find somebody who was willing to work with little old them. They put up a post on our online platform and somebody said, oh yeah, I’ve got a friend who does this and they love working with small companies.
Eve: [00:18:23] Oh, that’s great. That’s perfect.
Mott: [00:18:25] And now they’re doing everybody in the building. Same thing with kosher and halal, you know, having the people who come by and certify them. People start to know the buildings. They know how we operate, and it just creates that. There’s that goodwill that comes from that community that you’re describing, Eve.
Eve: [00:18:40] Yeah, that’s really great. So, these projects you’ve got like 50 or 60 kitchens in three locations now, that’s a ton of tenants.
Mott: [00:18:49] Yep.
Eve: [00:18:50] These projects can’t be inexpensive to build. Are they ground up? Or are they renovations?
Mott: [00:18:57] So the three that we’ve done and, right now I think we’ve got 180 kitchens total, the three of them have been renovations. They’ve been adaptive reuses of existing warehouse structures.
Eve: [00:19:10] So yet more impact.
Mott: [00:19:13] Yeah, yeah. And we love the adaptive reuse because we love reusing the old buildings. There’s generally a zoning advantage to that because if we were to build ground up, we could never comply with any city’s parking requirements. It’s just, you know, which are totally absurd and frankly anti-business. But in an ideal world, we would build ground up for our next project in a city that doesn’t have strict parking requirements.
Eve: [00:19:40] Really?
Mott: [00:19:40] Just lay all the lessons learned. Well, because it’s such a building systems intensive development…
Eve: [00:19:48] Yes.
Mott: [00:19:48] That kind of weaving your air conditioning system and your plumbing, and all that, onto an existing platform could be very challenging.
Eve: [00:20:00] Interesting, and do you have the next city planned? It’s going to be a big metropolis?
Mott: [00:20:06] You know, we used to think that we had to be in really foodie places. What we’ve discovered is that a lot of our tenants are really just, you know, workaday food companies that are feeding people in their communities. And I think any metropolis of sufficient size needs at least one or two or three of these.
Eve: [00:20:28] Interesting.
Mott: [00:20:28] So yeah, the slate is pretty open.
Eve: [00:20:33] Ok, so I mean, how much does it cost to build compared to a residential building or commercial building? And how do you finance that? Because, as you said, this is an innovative project. Banks won’t have seen these before.
Mott: [00:20:48] Yeah.
Eve: [00:20:48] How do you tackle all of that? You know?
Mott: [00:20:51] Yeah, it’s funny. When we had our first anniversary celebration at our first location in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood of L.A., one of our financing sources, a company called Genesis LA, it’s great, my favorite bank.
Eve: [00:21:04] That’s right. They work with RNLA as well, don’t they?
Mott: [00:21:08] They sure do.
Eve: [00:21:09] I think, yeah, you know, we I did a crowdfunding project with them on Small Change.
Mott: [00:21:15] Oh nice.
Eve: [00:21:16] Oh yes.
Mott: [00:21:16] We’ll have to talk more about that.
Eve: [00:21:18] Yeah, yeah.
Mott: [00:21:19] Yeah, right. I mean, I am on the board of RNLA and Genesis LA has done a lot of great work. And really, they are my favorite non-profit bank. And I say that with great love for many non-profit banks. But when we were looking for financing for our very first deal, they were the first ones to say yes to us. They gave us a very small, relative to our need approval. But they did it strategically, saying that when they said yes to us, that would be the signal for other banks that they can say yes as well, and it completely worked out that way. But the joke that we had in our first anniversary celebration was that we were, you know, our pitch to Genesis was that we were two developers without deep balance sheets, building a project, without comps for tenants, without credit. And they said, yes.
Eve: [00:22:11] Isn’t that amazing?
Mott: [00:22:12] Yeah. Yeah.
Eve: [00:22:13] I think I’m in love with Genesis LA.
Mott: [00:22:18] Well deserved.
Eve: [00:22:18] Because, you know, think about all the rest of the money floating around this country that really doesn’t think that way. You know.
Mott: [00:22:25] Well yeah, and you know, when we used funds, is what we use new markets, tax credits for all of our deals so far.
Eve: [00:22:30] Mm hmm.
Mott: [00:22:31] And one of the funds that we pulled from was one of these funds established to address food deserts. And we feel that our project is legitimately addressing food deserts through a variety of means. But it’s funny that a lot of, you know, the funds like this are often established with relatively lofty goals. And then you look at what they’re actually putting their money into and quite often it’s, you know, paying for a corporate supermarket that was going to locate in the neighborhood anyway and just giving a more favorable financing. And again, one of the things I absolutely love about Genesis is that, is not how they do business, they really look to make an impact and change. Move the Overton window, I guess, of what’s acceptable in a way that really sticks.
Eve: [00:23:21] Yeah, that’s really fabulous. So back to the cost per square foot. What does that look like in a building with, you know, 60 kitchens? It’s a lot of plumbing runs, right?
Mott: [00:23:32] Yeah, you know. So compared to what residential is costing these days, I don’t know that it’s terribly different. I mean, I would say that to take an existing structure and convert it to our use is going to be somewhere in the 250 to 275 dollars a square foot range.
Eve: [00:23:49] Okay, so that’s pretty similar.
Mott: [00:23:51] Yeah.
Eve: [00:23:53] The kitchens. How big of the kitchens generally? Or are they different sizes?
Mott: [00:23:56] Yeah, they range from as small as 150 feet, all the way up to 4,000 feet.
Eve: [00:24:02] Okay. Interesting. So, I have to ask this question. How has the pandemic affected Amped Kitchens? What does the new kitchen economy look like?
Mott: [00:24:17] Well. Yeah, so okay, so there is an explosion now of what are known as ghost kitchens or dark kitchens some people call them.
Eve: [00:24:27] Um hmm.
Mott: [00:24:28] This is this idea of a building full of virtual restaurants, where the delivery apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash and others can come and grab multiple orders from multiple brands and ship them off. And in fact, some of your listeners will probably know that Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber, left Uber and started a company called Cloud Kitchens, which is specifically geared towards making these complexes. And he based his first building on, actually, our first building. Sort of a scaled down version of it. So, the pandemic has accelerated what was already a boom in that, and that idea of ghost kitchens. And I’ll be honest with you, Eve, that I’m not very long on the idea of ghost kitchens. You know, our complexes are really production oriented. They’re not delivery oriented. Although we do have some tenants, who do that. Most of our tenants are doing, you know, they’re selling to customers all over the country, all over the world, as opposed to people within a 10-minute drive. And the theory behind cloud kitchens was that, you know, one day everybody is going to be ordering food from their homes and, you know, it’s good to kind of aggregate these resources. And again, during the pandemic, that actually really started to happen. And I think it created a bit of a bubble in the cloud kitchen, in the cloud kitchen where there’s so much product coming online.
Eve: [00:25:59] Uh hmm.
Mott: [00:25:59] But what people are starting to discover is that cloud kitchens or ghost kitchens are really just retail locations, and there’s nothing magic about them. The fact that they don’t have seats or a front end for customers doesn’t make them, it doesn’t make them not retail. They still have to be close to the consumers geographically. And the truth is, if you’re going to be that close to consumers geographically, you probably should have a place for the customers to come, sit down and enjoy themselves and get an experience also.
Eve: [00:26:30] Yeah.
Mott: [00:26:30] So I think we’re going to see a bit of a shakeout in the industry where you know, the Domino’s pizzas of 2021, as it were, will survive and a lot of others will probably move into more traditional brick and mortar that might have certain optimizations for delivery, but it won’t be exclusive delivery.
Eve: [00:26:49] I certainly hope so.
Mott: [00:26:51] So that was a very long way to say that. There’s, yeah, so there’s been a boom. I think it’s going to contract a little bit. That was a very long answer.
Eve: [00:26:58] So it doesn’t sound like it’s really impacted your Amped Kitchens either way.
Mott: [00:27:07] Yeah, I mean, it has, I guess, a little bit. Probably positively from, you know, as a property owner perspective. About a year ago was the peak of uncertainty, I would say, and we did lose some occupancy. A lot of our tenants were struggling just because of the uncertainty about where we were going to end up.
Eve: [00:27:31] Um hmm.
Mott: [00:27:31] A certain portion of our tenants are commissaries that service retail restaurant locations. Like, you know, maybe you’ve got 10 locations in L.A. and you want one place where you cook your potatoes, you know, and ship them out every morning. So, we’ve got. We have a portion of tenants who do that. And while the restaurants were shut down, those tenants were struggling, but they’ve all bounced back. We’ve had a huge boom of meal delivery companies, people that’ll give you a subscription or you’ll buy a subscription for weekly delivery of chef driven meals. Huge boom in that. And so, given the fact that food has remained an affordable luxury that people, I think, need in terms of being able to kind of treat themselves more than ever, and the fact that meal delivery is really booming, those two things have been great for our tenants.
Eve: [00:28:27] So are most of your efforts focused on this or do you have any other projects in the works that you can talk about?
Mott: [00:28:33] My business world is exclusively focused on this, but I have very active civic life as well and have been active in the movement to end parking requirements universally in California and some efforts to make housing development more affordable and more, you know, increase the supply of housing in places like Los Angeles. I’m very active in the civic world with respect to those two issues.
Eve: [00:29:06] So, and are there current trends in real estate development that you’re following that you think, sort of, give hope in other ways?
Mott: [00:29:14] Yeah, for sure. I think that new product types and new regulatory opportunities, I mean, this is what we based our business on was what you might call regulatory innovation, where you get something legalized that hasn’t been allowed recently and go build it and be the first one to do it. That’s been our business model for since we started in 2003. And I would say that strategy still is a very rich field to mine. And there, you know, I think people who’ve got somewhat contrarian insights into various kind of micro markets in big cities are doing great and will continue to do great. You know, people who want to build, say, parking free or parking light projects in San Diego, let’s say, where they’ve for the past two years have been legal near transit. That’s starting to happen with great success, you know, for people who want to live car light or car free lifestyles. There are, you know, with the shakeout in retail, I think there is going to be a lot of interesting stuff to happen in Los Angeles, for example, the, for the next one to two years, all of the rules that constrain converting retail space to restaurant space are, or many of the rules are, being suspended. And so again, what would have been a one to two year, very expensive process to turn a shuttered retail store into a neighborhood cafe is right now basically an over-the-counter process. And so, I think they’re going to be lots of opportunities here for people to help neighborhoods rapidly respond and kind of reposition their resources in a way that’s good urbanistically and good business wise.
Eve: [00:31:16] So my last and favorite question is what’s your big, hairy, audacious goal?
Mott: [00:31:23] I think I’ve already hinted or more than hinted at them…
Eve: [00:31:27] But like a hundred kitchens all over the country, you’re going to take over the world like…
Mott: [00:31:35] Yeah, I mean, ah, I’ll give you two goals. My big, hairy, audacious Amped Kitchen’s goal is, within the next five years we’d love to have one to two facilities in the top 15 metros in the U.S. and have a, you know, a robust network of management resources that make them by far the best places to launch a new product or grow a brand. That’s my big, hairy, audacious business goal. And then my big, hairy, audacious social civic goal is the one that I’ve already mentioned, which is, I’d like to see parking requirements eliminated everywhere. It’s happening city by city. Recently in Minneapolis and, also, St. Paul. I’d like to see it happening everywhere to, kind of, unleash some of the potential that is sitting there waiting to happen in cities across the country.
Eve: [00:32:36] I’m with you on that. Well, I can’t wait to see what you accomplish. I have a feeling you’ll get pretty far.
Mott: [00:32:43] From your mouth to God’s ears, as my grandmother would have said.
Eve: [00:32:47] Thank you very much. I enjoyed the conversation.
Mott: [00:32:50] Me too, Eve. Thanks for having me and keep doing what you’re doing. I really appreciate it.
Eve: [00:33:12] You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at our website, Rethinkrealestateforgood.co. There’s lots to listen to there. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music. And thanks to you for spending your time with me today. We’ll talk again soon, but for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.
Image courtesy of Mott Smith, Amped Kitchens