Dorchester rocks.

Eve Picker: [00:00:11] 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 Re-Think Real Estate for Good, Darko, or you can find them at your favorite podcast station. You’ll find lots worth listening to, I’m sure.

Eve: [00:01:05] Travis Lee is the developer who believes in the local economy. After launching a career building big, Travis came home to Dorchester in 2014 to found TLDevelopment. Dorchester is a vibrant and diverse community in Boston. Since then, his work has not strayed beyond the boundaries of the Dorchester community, and that’s the way he likes it. Travis takes his role in the community very seriously. He works closely with community groups and civic associations to conceive, plan, permit and construct his various properties. To date, he has built, or is planning, 80 residential units and 50,000 square feet of neighborhood commercial space. One hundred per cent of his residential units are affordable to families making between 60 to 90 percent of the area median income. And his projects are designed and built to meet Passive House standards as well. He’s also co-founded a unique brewery and a co-working space, all in Dorchester. You’ll want to hear more.

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Eve: [00:02:46] Hi, Travis, thanks so much for joining me today.

Travis Lee: [00:02:49] My pleasure, Eve. Thanks for inviting me

Eve: [00:02:52] So, you’re a real estate developer with a mission grounded in community, and I wanted to understand why that’s important to you.

Travis: [00:03:00] Well, it’s a great question. I graduated college and moved up to Boston from South Carolina to work at a homeless shelter in downtown Boston. And my first year of living in Boston was sharing a bunk with a man recovering from substance abuse. Along with thirty-one other men in recovery at a homeless shelter, and my job was to be an informal in-house caseworker who helped folks find jobs and go to court and help them with their court cases and just be a friend, so to speak. And that was probably the most influential year of my life in terms of getting a up-close view of community development and/or broken communities and hearing all of my new friends tell me about their stories and the communities they came from. And it gave me quite the passion to be deeply involved, deeply engaged in a community as I grew older, and to play a small role in facilitating a healthy community for folks.

Eve: [00:04:22] So how did you wind your way to developer in Dorchester today?

Travis: [00:04:27] Well, after that year of living and working at the Boston Rescue Mission, I took on a role via AmeriCorps at a micro-lending organization called Accione USA, where I spent a year making five-thousand-loans to Spanish speaking entrepreneurs.

Eve: [00:04:48] Oh, that’s interesting.

Travis: [00:04:49] In the city of Boston. And I think I had more fun that year than I have in many, many years. And after that year, I got an internship at the Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Corporation, a community development group in Boston. And I had the great privilege of working on a redevelopment of a 1880’s brewery, the Haffenreffer Brewery.

Eve: [00:05:16] Oh, that’s fun.

Travis: [00:05:17] And we converted one hundred thousand square foot abandoned brewery into 32 small business spaces. And to be involved with the financing and the construction and the tenant fit-out of that project got all of my blood flowing for community development. From there, I got married and moved to New York City and got a job working at a public private bank called the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, where I was charged with making loans and equity investments into small businesses and real estate projects that otherwise would not occur in Harlem or Upper Manhattan, and got a chance to be on the lending side for small businesses and fell in love with small business, and helping those small businesses grow and start up shops when they were having a hard time finding the capital. So, we got to play that gap financing role. And a couple of years later, moved back to Boston and moved into a neighborhood called Dorchester, where my kids would go to school and my wife would teach and I looked for a job in the community development world.

Travis: [00:06:38] This time, I wanted to be on the development side, and I found an old friend who was running a real estate department at a community development group called Madison Park CDC in Roxbury and took a job as a project manager and spent the next seven years developing two hundred or so apartments and/or homeownership opportunities in the Roxbury neighborhood called Nubian Square. And those seven years were extremely influential, mostly because for seven years I worked in the same location with the same people, the same community groups getting to know the heart and the soul of a neighborhood and getting to understand the vision that a community had for itself and thereby getting to play a role in executing their vision. And that’s when I said, I want to spend the rest of my life working in a single community, helping to advance the vision that that community has for itself. And that means getting to know a place, getting to know the people there, getting to know what they care about and putting the skills and the experience and the resources that I, as a developer, have at my disposal. Putting those to work for the sake of moving forward a community’s vision for itself and finding the balance where I can both make money and accomplish a vision that a community has, and that’s a very tight rope to walk.

Eve: [00:08:20] Yes, it is.

Travis: [00:08:21] It’s been extraordinarily enjoyable, and the relationships have been very sweet over the years.

Eve: [00:08:29] That’s wonderful. That’s a very powerful vision and a pretty unusual goal. Not many people think that smaller can be bigger, I suppose. Right? You’re just focused on one community.

Travis: [00:08:42] Yeah, it’s tough to limit the opportunism. For a long time, I got phone calls from friends or colleagues in other neighborhoods or other cities saying, hey, I’ve got a great opportunity, let’s, can you come and participate here or there? And for several years, it was really, really hard to say no. And after a few years of committing to a place and committing to a people and building those relationships with people, where they started to trust that what I said, I hear you and we can’t do exactly what you’re asking for, but we can do this and that, and moving forward and working alongside the community. After experiencing some of that, it became much easier to say, You know what, we’re going to turn down some, what might look like great opportunities way over there, to focus right here. And to be honest with you, the neighborhood that we work in, Dorchester, is the neighborhood where I live. And the neighborhood where I’ve lived for 15 years, and my five children go to school and my whole family lives and operates. And so, it all feels very close to home, and there is much satisfaction getting to see my own neighborhood grow up in a more equitable, inclusive manner and being a small, small part of practicing equity and practicing work that builds wealth in communities that have had wealth extracted from them over the years. And so, it’s…

Eve: [00:10:16] So, you know, what is Dorchester like? I mean, that brings me to think about what is that demographic like in your neighborhood?

Travis: [00:10:24] Well, Dorchester is a large neighborhood. I think there’s close to a hundred-thousand people altogether. And it is a very diverse neighborhood. Some people liken it to Queens in some ways, Queens New York. There are African American people, there are Africans, there are a strong Latino population, a white population, a strong Cape Verdean population, which of course is West African and a strong Vietnamese.

Eve: [00:10:53] I have to say Yum.

Travis: [00:10:54] It is a very diverse group of people that live here. And my humble opinion is that most of us live in our own silos. The cross-cultural gathering and community building is fairly weak, and we have mostly white people doing life with white people, and we have Vietnamese people doing life with Vietnamese people. And I think there’s a younger generation that is really working hard to bridge some of the cultural barriers there. And that’s one thing that our organization is trying to do, is trying to facilitate community building across cultures where language barriers are real, cultural differences are real, and finding commonalities. Finding things that will bring people to the same table, often over food. And that’s why most of our projects have a retail component, a small business component on the ground floor where we can help work with a local entrepreneur to open. We’ve opened four restaurants at this time.

[00:12:08] Oh, that’s great.

[00:12:08] That is the owner and that is the operator, but as the developer/landlord who wants to facilitate a community gathering space for people in the neighborhood to come and eat and be together and that’s something we believe in.

Eve: [00:12:21] So a very diverse neighborhood. And what does your team look like?

Travis: [00:12:25] Well, at the moment, we have three people on the team. Myself, I’m a white man of Western European descent. We have a woman named Dariella, who is a woman whose family comes from the Dominican Republic. She identifies as a person of color. She often identifies herself as being black. And Milton, our third teammate, is a black male who grew up in the neighborhood, although both Dariella and Milton both grew up within five to seven minutes of all of the work that we do. I am the newest comer to the neighborhood, having been here for just 15 years or so.

Eve: [00:13:11] Okay, so okay, let’s talk about the project. So you’ve done quite a lot of work. What are the projects like that you focus on in Dorchester?

Travis: [00:13:19] Well, about four years ago, we actually, our work started seven or eight years ago in buying one of the largest office buildings in Dorchester. It was sixty-five percent vacant, and it was a struggle to buy it. The financing of it was quite difficult, but we managed to purchase this mostly vacant building and over the next six to nine months, fitted out with a non-profit tenant. And then we started a shared workspace on the fourth floor because we were unable to find another tenant. So, we started a business to be our own tenant, and we call that space the Field’s Corner Business Lab. We have 120 or so members that all share the space as members of the Field’s Corner Business Lab. We, from that building, once it was occupied, we built a six-family, and our first new construction residential building in Dorchester. It was aimed at households earning 70 percent of the area median income. At that time, it was like fifty-five thousand to seventy thousand dollars a year in annual income as what we were honing in on. The vision for an income target came from some of the experience I got as a non-profit developer working for CDCs, whereby we built affordable housing strictly for households making at or below 60 percent of Boston’s area of median income. And what I started to read about, and think about, was the hollowing out of the working class. Those folks that made too much money to qualify for the quote low-income-housing and yet could not afford the market-rate housing. And so, we started with a focus on what some call middle income, others call workforce housing, and that trend has stuck.

Travis: [00:15:21] So our first six-family building was quickly occupied entirely by neighborhood residents who were working and making around 60 to 70 percent of the area median income. We then went on to build a 14-unit workforce housing project with rents between 70 and 90 percent of the area’s median income. And in that project, we had some ground floor retail space that was occupied shortly after construction by a local catering company and restaurant called Fresh New Generation, which we are extremely excited about. Not too long ago, in December of 2020, we purchased a thirty-one-unit existing building. It’s about 60 years old and was failing in many regards. The physical condition was failing, the tenants were not well cared for, and we have spent the last year systematically re-renovating the building, both physically and reaching out to each tenant, trying to figure out how we can provide folks with the resources they need to thrive. And that has been a challenging project, one that helps you realize that you don’t change the culture of a building overnight, especially one that’s been operating in a particular way for many, many years. So as a team, we have been investing in the building, both with people and investing dollar resources to help slowly turn the nature of that ship into a place that people are happy to call home. And just a month ago, we began construction on a twenty-nine-unit five-storey building in a neighborhood of Dorchester called Fields Corner. This project is the first of our projects to include a community investment offering.

Eve: [00:17:22] Yeah, on Small Change.

Travis: [00:17:24] We worked with Small Change for many numbers of months to just recently launch an offering for members of the community to invest in this building. It will have studio and one-bedroom units available to folks making between 70 and 90 percent of the area’s median income and will also have a ground floor retail component. We are currently talking with two different restaurants, restaurant owners, to possibly move into that space. So, we have a few other things in the pipeline that we’re working on in the future. But those are the things that are currently either complete or in construction.

Eve: [00:18:03] Are underway. So, let’s talk a little bit more about 1463 Dot Avenue, the crowdfunding project, which, you know, I have to say you’re the first developer who came along who really had a really serious community engagement plan in place. Often crowdfunding is more casual, a little more organic than that, you know, but I’d love to hear about that strategy.

Travis: [00:18:28] Well, I think the first part is that we weren’t primarily trying to raise money. And it all starts with what the objective is, and our objective of this community investment initiative was to do development different. And we have recognized that many of us, including our own team and our own operations, we’ve done development the same way for so long and we step back, and we wonder why we’re not creating a more equitable environment, why we’re not making a bigger change, a bigger impact. Why we’re not creating better access for people who have been historically marginalized. And so, we said to ourselves, we’ve got to do something different. We’ve got to push the envelope a little bit. We’ve got to move the needle a little bit and test the waters. And so, while we weren’t looking primarily to raise money, we were looking primarily to engage residents of Dorchester in a process. And I think we were quick to say, this is also not primarily a wealth building exercise, right? When you invest two thousand dollars into something, and you make 10 percent on that money every year. Two hundred bucks isn’t going to change your life.

Eve: [00:19:49] Oh yeah, but compare it to a bank account, which makes you -0.5 Percent a year. It might change your life a little bit, you know.

Travis: [00:19:59] But in terms of what the primary objective was, it wasn’t even wealth building. It was place-making and community building. It was this this hope for a psychological change in, say, two or three hundred people who live in the community who might otherwise have walked by this new building and said, look what somebody is doing in my neighborhood. Maybe they walk by and say, Look what I’m a part of. Look what we are doing in my neighborhood. So that was the biggest objective or that is the biggest objective. Can we steer the narrative a little bit to be one of greater inclusion and one of less look what he or she is doing but look what we are doing? And so that’s our hope, and that’s what we’re off to do. And so, you ask, why did you engage in such a robust community engagement process? It’s because of that reason. This is not about raising money. This is about raising community participation, raising engagement, connecting people to their place, to their home and to each other. And we hope that that is accomplished.

Eve: [00:21:07] So Travis, I’ll tell you, I mean, that’s why I built Small Change. I mean, it really was for that very reason because I feel that people love the cities they live in, and they really want and need a palpable connection to them. And so, I think what you’re doing is exactly right, but it’s extremely difficult. I’d love to know your playbook for community engagement because not everyone really understands that. It’s very, very difficult. But it’s working. It looks like it’s working, right? People are starting to invest. So that must feel pretty gratifying to you.

Travis: [00:21:46] Yeah. You know, we’re a week or two into this.

Eve: [00:21:49] Yes.

Travis: [00:21:50] And the investments are certainly gratifying. I am going to be more satisfied when we have a group of investors that feel more connected to their community and to their neighbors because of this, right? The ultimate achievement here won’t be that we raise fifty, one-hundred or two-hundred-thousand dollars. It will be that people care more about the place they live in, and they feel more part of its growth than they would have otherwise, and that’s going to be hard to measure. I will say, you know, as you mentioned, this is a really hard thing to pull off, technically, legally, you know, jumping through all the hoops to pull off this community investment. It was really hard and without the help of our teammates, CoEverything, Miriam and Declan, we certainly would not have been able to do this. But we won’t know that we are successful until after the fact, and we talk to people who are invested in this and get a sense of how their psychology has changed because of this project.

Eve: [00:23:01] You know, I think you’re going to find that they will come to you. One of our developers in Washington worked on a project in a food desert, and he told me that the highlight for him was every now and then he’d be walking down the street, and someone stops him and said, I invested in that building with you. And you know, it was probably 500 dollars, but it’s extremely meaningful to both of them. And I have a feeling that if you, you know, this is a marketing exercise as well, right? So, wouldn’t it be great if those people come back to you with more project ideas? Because it’s now, you know, community that they feel more connected to and they have a stake in it, that would be really wonderful.

Travis: [00:23:43] You know, having done real estate development work exclusively in this particular neighborhood for the last eight years, we’re not calling on strangers to come and participate in this investment opportunity, right? But that’s the benefit of forgoing some of the opportunism that might be out there in other cities or other parts of our state. But we get a benefit from focusing on a group of people in a certain place. We get to know them, and they get to know us. And as you said, we now call on these relationships and say, look at this opportunity, can you share it with your friends? And we have ambassadors. We have people that want to be a part of what we’re doing and that bring opportunities to us and say, Listen, our neighbor is going to sell some real estate soon. Would you all come take a look at it?

Eve: [00:24:36] Yeah, it’s pretty great.

Travis: [00:24:38] It’s super. It’s a super wonderful place for us to be. And it reminds us that if we can do what we say we’re going to do and be honest and transparent and put others before ourselves, people will start to believe that this is real and that we’re trying to be, trying to move the needle a little bit and they’ll get on board. And that’s…

Eve: [00:25:03] Yeah. So, beyond all that brain damage, you do a lot of other things Passive House standards, transit-oriented development, something called the city of Boston’s Compact Living Pilot requirements and really complicated financing from what I’ve seen. Do you want to talk about the challenges of making a project like this really, sort of, fit that affordable worker housing model?

Travis: [00:25:34] Yes, I think the financing of these projects is the most difficult part, and it’s not because money is not available. It’s because our objective to offer housing that is affordable to the median income household in a neighborhood, or in this neighborhood, I should say, that is getting harder and harder to do. And we traditionally have not sat in line for big state subsidies. We traditionally have worked with creative private lenders who are mission-aligned and have more patience and often lower returns requirements, but they still need their money back. And so we borrow real money that has to be repaid, and the costs of these projects is increasing big time each year, and material pricing. You know Covid has had a large part of this. And so it’s getting more and more difficult. Part of this Compact Living Program that the city has opened up allows developers to build much smaller apartments than otherwise, or historically, we could. And as you know, Eve, there’s not a lot of ways to reduce the price of something, right? You either get government subsidy, you build a piece of junk, or you build something smaller and more dense. You build smaller units in a more dense building and you get more in the bag. And part of our thesis here has been in order for us to be competitively affordable, and if we’re not going to rely on big government grants, which so far, we have not really done, then we’ve got to build smarter and we’ve got to get more in the bag. So, that’s been what we’ve been trying to do. We’ve built smaller unit sizes than most. Our studios are often in the three-hundred-fifty square foot range and our one bedrooms are as low as four-hundred or four-hundred-and-fifty square feet, five-hundred square feet. And on one hand, this isn’t a home run, right, because people want and need space to live in. On the other hand, if we want to bring the price down, we’ve got to take advantage of all the opportunities we’ve got.

Eve: [00:27:53] Yeah, I mean, I think those sizes are OK. I actually have a little cottage that’s a two bedroom that’s 600 square feet and it’s extremely comfortable. And I think that really comes down to the architecture and how you lay it out. Are you going to lose spaces and common areas or you’re going have some sensible layout that really efficiently captures every square foot? You know, there’s a big difference, right?

Travis: [00:28:18] Yeah. The layout’s super important, as you say, and we’ve gotten, I think, better and better at this over time. The other really important thing to ask yourself is who’s going to live here, right? Are we trying to attract the young professional who is working downtown and making a single salary, but a pretty good salary? Or are we trying to, and maybe that person lives in a more expensive part of Boston who wants a cheaper rent. Or are we trying to create opportunities for people that already live in Dorchester, have a decent job, but might have, might be a part of a household, might have a child or two? And I think knowing your audience is really important and the audience that, you know, that we are really trying to target are people that currently live here. And not just trying to attract people from outside of Dorchester but trying to create a space that people that live here and are getting priced out of here can stay. We have constraints that we’re trying to live within, and hopefully this next project with twenty-nine apartments, hopefully with our marketing efforts, we will be able to fill it with Dorchester residents. That’s the goal.

Eve: [00:29:33] That would be fabulous. So when will that be? When are they going to live there?

Travis: [00:29:39] Well, we started construction in December, so we expect to complete in about March of 2023 and we will begin our marketing efforts in the late fall or winter of 2022.

Eve: [00:29:53] I bet you must already be keeping a waiting list, right?

Travis: [00:29:56] We’re currently working on our branding and our various web pages and marketing materials, so we haven’t specifically launched a campaign for applicants yet, so we’ll start that in a couple of months.

Eve: [00:30:13] It sounds like it will go really well, but I wanted to also talk about the other stuff you do because it sounds like you haven’t stopped at buildings. You mentioned the Fields Corner Business Lab, and I also read about the Dorchester Brewing Company, which you co-founded. What about those?

Travis: [00:30:30] Yeah, I think those have largely been attempts to bring people together. Fields Corner, one of the neighborhoods of Dorchester, won an award, a handful of years ago, for being, I shouldn’t say an award. It was ranked like number eight in the country for its true diversity. And there wasn’t, you know, a few years ago, me and a friend were lamenting that while it is so diverse on paper, there was so little interaction in general, from culture to culture or community to community. And so, part of the objective was could we create a shared workspace where Vietnamese entrepreneurs and Cape Verdean entrepreneurs and Latino entrepreneurs and white entrepreneurs could come together and work not just side-by-side but get to know each other and do their work better because of relationships they’re building with other like-minded folks, maybe with different perspectives. And that was the objective there. And to date, it is an extraordinarily diverse work environment. Of the hundred and twenty members, it’s very well representing the community at large. The Dorchester Brewing Company was an idea envisioned after the Field’s Corner Business Lab took effect where we double-booked and sometimes triple-booked the number of seats in the shared workspace so that we could reduce the price of one seat by renting it to say three people, hoping that they’re not all there at the same time, right? This is sort of the airline effect.

Eve: [00:32:07] The hoteling thing, right?

Travis: [00:32:09] Yes. And so, we did something similar with this beer industry. We figured out that in Massachusetts, some 20 or 30 percent of beer companies did not have their own brick and mortar but were borrowing someone else’s brick and mortar to brew their beer. And that’s called the contract brewing industry. And we realized that there wasn’t a specific manufacturing center for beer that focused on making beer for others, as opposed to one big beer company making beer for themselves in their own building, and then pawning off a little bit of excess space to other people and often treating them like stepchildren. And so, we envisioned this concept where we would be the first state-of-the-art beer manufacturing center that existed for other beer companies. And in 2016, we finally launched in a 24,000 square foot building with the full array of packaging options and a very flexible beer production system. And we had 15 or 20 different customers that we brewed beer for all under the same roof. And they would come pick up their beer. And the beauty of the beer industry is that ninety-five percent of beers are made in a super similar manner, with mostly the same ingredients. And so, we could order ingredients in very large quantities and instead of paying 89 cents a pound for some material, we could pay 22 cents a pound.

Eve: [00:33:45] Wow.

Travis: [00:33:45] And we pass that savings on to these small brewers that are otherwise paying 89 cents a pound for that product. And it’s been a real win-win and the funnest part of the whole project has been taking a piece of all the product we’re making for these 15 or 20 different beer companies and selling them in a single tap room on premise, where the general public, the Boston population, can come and sit and drink any one of these beers.

Eve: [00:34:16] That’s fabulous.

[00:34:17] That are all on premise, but they were all authored by different companies, but made by us on premise. So, it’s fun thing.

Eve: [00:34:24] That’s really fun. So, you’re a pretty busy, guy. What’s your big, hairy, audacious goal? This is my final question, I promise.

Travis: [00:34:37] What is my big, hairy, audacious goal? You know, when I die, I would love to look back on years and say that I stewarded my opportunities as well, and that I stewarded my resources well, and when I think about what that means, I think about, was my time and energy and resource put to use in a manner. that created a more just and equitable community? And instead of thinking a mile wide and an inch deep, by focusing on literally a quarter-mile radius, could the efforts that our team, the efforts that we’re putting towards our development and towards our community, could we go a mile deep in an inch wide and create lasting impact that might build generational wealth in families who have been pushed to the side for many, many years? Could we actually bring opportunities within arm’s reach of families that haven’t been able to grab a hold of them? That’s our hope, and that would be an extraordinarily satisfying life if I could have a very small role in accomplishing that.

Eve: [00:35:55] Well, it’s been a complete pleasure talking to you, and I hope the crowdfunding raise is wildly successful. I hope you do more, too. It’s been a great pleasure. Thank you, Travis.

Travis: [00:36:06] Eve, thanks for your time. Have a lovely day.

Eve: [00:36:25] That was Travis Lee. As an entrepreneur and small business owner in Dorchester, Travis commitment to economic development in his neighborhood is personal. He works hard at fostering collaboration amongst entrepreneurs, small businesses and community development organizations to advance one of Dorchester’s most promising business districts and to improve the place that he calls home.

Eve: [00:37:04] 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.