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Project Destined.

Cedric Bobo is the CEO and Co-founder of Project Destined, a social impact vehicle that trains urban youth and military veterans to be owners and stakeholders in the communities in which they live, work and play. Prior to founding Project Destined, Cedric spent over 20 years as an investor and investment banker including over 10 years at The Carlyle Group where he committed over $2 Billion of equity capital.

In 2015, Cedric was named to the “10 Top Powerful Black People on Wall Street You Should Know.”

The name Project Destined was inspired by the 2016 film Destined. It tells the story of a young boy who in one reality is a drug dealer and in the other is a successful architect. The outcome of a single event determines the path the boy pursues. Cedric plans to change the life outcome to a good one for many teenagers without opportunity.

Prior to Carlyle, Cedric worked at D.L.J. Merchant Banking (London) and McCown De Leeuw. He is the co-founder of Charter Board Partners, a non-profit focused on governance in the charter school sector. He also serves on the District of Columbia’s Office of Public Charter School Financing and Support Credit Committee and Beauvoir, The National Cathedral Elementary School.

Cedric received his MBA from Harvard Business School and a BSME, summa cum laude from the University of Tennessee.

Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:04] 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. And speaking of building better, I’m very excited to share that my company, Small Change, is now raising capital through a community round that is open to the public. Small Change is a leading equity crowdfunding platform for impact investment in real estate. For as little as $250, anyone 18 and over can invest in Small Change, helping to fuel our growth as we disrupt the old boys club of capital that routinely ignores so many qualified people and projects. Please visit wefunder.com/smallchange to review the full details of our raise and to make an investment if you can. And remember, investing is risky. Don’t invest more than you can afford to lose.

Eve: [00:01:35] Today, I’m talking with Cedric Bobo, the co-founder of Project Destined, a non-profit that teaches minority teenagers the ins and outs of real estate investment. The name Project Destined was inspired by the 2016 film Destined. It tells the story of a young boy that in one reality is a drug dealer and in the other, a successful architect. The outcome of a single event determines the path the man pursues. Cedric, who has roughly two decades of investor and investment banking experience, plans to change the outcome to a successful one for many minority teenagers. In 2015, Cedric was named to the ten top powerful Black people on Wall Street you should know, so he has a lot to share. Listen in to hear the inspiring story that took Cedric from Mississippi to Wall Street and the incredible rise of Project Destined. 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 or head over to rethinkrealestateforgood.co and subscribe. You’ll be the first to hear about my podcasts, blog posts and other goodies.

Eve: [00:03:08] Hello, Cedric. It’s really nice to finally meet you.

Cedric Bobo: [00:03:10] It’s great to meet you Eve and thank you for taking time to hear from me and hear our stories. It’ll be fun.

Eve: [00:03:15] Oh, no, It’s a pleasure. I can’t wait. So, you’ve been named one of the ten top powerful Black people on Wall Street you should know. And I’d like to hear a little bit about your background on what took you from Harvard, I suppose all of this started, to Wall Street and then to Project Destined.

Cedric Bobo: [00:03:34] Yeah. I mean, look, I’m a from northern Mississippi and I start every story with that’s where I’m really from. And that’s frankly what frames my story. You know, my great grandfather, you know, bought a hundred-acre farm in the 1890s. I was born there. My mom was born there, and most of my history starts there. And so, I grew up, I wanted to just build something, and I wanted to have a path to a great life. And I didn’t know how to do it. So, I studied engineering in school because I thought it would give me a job. And then I did a summer program at Harvard Business School where you go there for a weekend. That was the beginning of change in my life. I just didn’t know there were all these things you could do with your time, right?

Eve: [00:04:21] And how old were you then?

Cedric: [00:04:23] Yeah, I was 20 years old when I first got there. So, I had been in school for a couple of years studying engineering, loved engineering, but I knew I wanted to be a businessperson. So, I got to Harvard Business School and there were people going to work at McKinsey and Company and all kinds of things I’d never heard about. And I was fortunate enough that after that summer I was going to spend a year at Oxford where I was going to study politics and economics for a year just to do all my electives, frankly. And when I was there, I played rugby with folks that were doing investment banking. It was now the second time I’d ever heard that term before, after Harvard. And I was like, they’re doing some of the same math that I do, but their earning potential seems demonstrably higher. And I was like, well, at least I should go and try that. And I have an indulgent mom who was willing and I’m an only child and my mom is willing to support me to try anything except go to New York. So, after some after some convincing, she supported me to go to New York and I went to Solomon Brothers for the summer. And I’ve told people this many times. They put me in the private equity group and it was the first time I had heard that there were people who used other folks money to buy stuff and get a piece of the profit. I think my mom still thinks that that’s a scam because when I told her that she was in shock, I still think it’s an amazing job.

Cedric: [00:05:58] And so, I thought it was just pretty incredible. I loved investment banking, wanted to go into private equity, got a chance to do that. Not in New York, but in San Francisco. So, I followed the job to San Francisco. And that was really a transformational period for me because in New York it’s somewhat like London, where people just pride themselves on all the success they’d had. They never talk about the failures in New York because there’s like a penalty for a setback. But I got to San Francisco, and I was like, people fail forward here. People are always talking about some startups that they started and then it fails, and they learn these lessons and now they’re going to go and start something new. And for me, it tapped into my early desire to build something and be an entrepreneur because I was like, wow, these people are incredibly bright. They try stuff, it doesn’t always work out, and then they go and try it again. And there are these venture capitalists that will support them if everything lines up. And that really kind of blew my mind in terms of financial engineering in a different way, starting businesses. And so, I then went to Harvard Business School, and I was determined to come back to private equity, but I happened to do my summer between business school years in London at a firm dealer to merchant banking. So, I was in their London group.

Eve: [00:07:20] One of the most entrepreneurial places in the world, right? London.

Cedric: [00:07:24] Yeah. London is super entrepreneurial. And I was an American in London, which just gives you, I think, great license to try different things. I think that you start with some credit because they see everyone is like as American, as slightly aggressive. So, they kind of give you a little bit of, I think, special street credit when you have this accent, which I think is nice. And so, I spent a couple of years there and I had a father-in-law who was a surgeon who bought real estate on the side. And I would look at like his capital structure for his deals. And I was like, you buy real estate the way I buy companies. I was like, I didn’t know you could do that. And I was just completely blown away that, like, there were people who were buying buildings using private equity principles. And that was my initial hook into real estate. I was like, wow, like I could be using some of these same skills but be involved in creating places. That was transformational for me.

Eve: [00:08:23] So then what led you to launch Project Destined after that career?

Cedric: [00:08:28] Yeah. So, I left London and spent ten years at Carlyle, still buying companies for a living. But from day I found out that my father-in-law was buying buildings in this way, I started buying apartments and apartment buildings on the side. And I really like, I loved it. I could go all the time. That when you buy a widget manufacturer in South Korea, like, I think I know what happens in that factory, but like, I’m really taking their word for it. But these revenues come from producing these widgets. When you’re in apartment building and people pay you rent every month, it is just very clear the value you add and the contract that you’re entering into with your tenants. And so, for me, real estate just felt incredibly transparent. I felt like I knew how I was adding value every single day and I wanted to find my way back into real estate as a profession. So, I loved Carlyle. Carlyle went public and my wife and I were fortunate enough to where financially we were at a place where I could try something entrepreneurially and it wasn’t going to detract from my family’s quality of living. And I’ve seen this movie about Detroit called Destin, about how much investing was happening in Detroit, and the participation among diverse people wasn’t as broad as certainly any of us would like or probably anyone in politics in Detroit would like.

Cedric: [00:09:48] And so, I flew to Detroit, and I was just blown away what was happening there in terms of investing downtown. And I told my wife, like, I think I could do something and contribute here with my sort of financial engineering background, but also entrepreneurially. And so, that was the beginning of Project Destined. I had this idea that, why couldn’t I create an apprenticeship program starting with high school students, then that train students how to look at real estate. But I was actually going to buy the real estate and teach them while doing that was the beginning of Project Destined. It was 15 students, high school students, in Detroit, and from the first class I was like, this is going to be a large platform. I didn’t know how I was going to get there, but I think most entrepreneurs probably have this experience. Like, I just saw the future in those 15 students, and I knew we were going to train thousands of students one day.

Eve: [00:10:38] But what’s the problem you’re trying to solve with those students? Let’s talk about that. And who are they? You know, why them? You know, that’s really the question, right?

Cedric: [00:10:48] Yeah. Well, I think it always starts with who you are, right? I mean, so like, this is I tell people that, like, starting Project Destined is a completely selfish act for me. I’m solving my problem is that, like I was a small-town kid in Mississippi, I had incredibly big aspirations. I didn’t know how to get there. There was no path. No one could say to me, first to the engineering, then go to Wall Street, then go to Harvard. I didn’t have that. So, my access problem started with a visibility problem. Like, what if I wanted to play pro football? It was completely clear what you do, do good in high school, go to SEC school, get drafted, but wanted to do business. In my small town there was no transparency. And so, the problem I’m trying to solve is an access problem, but really, it’s a visibility and pathway problem. I think the access can be created if you have the vision for yourself and you have someone who will help you create the network. So, the problem solving is really an access problem that I had as the kid in Mississippi. And now the people that I have a chance to impact, it started with these 15 kids in Detroit, primarily African American. Right? But today it’s young women in London, right? It’s, you know, young women and men in India. Right. We all have these access problems when it comes to being an owner and business leader. So, for me, like, our market is pretty large, but it started with me and then it transfered to, transitioned to 15 kids in Detroit, who I viewed as seeing their city change and they felt more victim than participants. I wanted to teach them how to become a participant. And in doing it with those 15 students, I was like, There’s so many people that face the same roadblock, whether they’re rural, Caucasian kids in West Virginia or they’re black kids like me in Mississippi, like I saw an access problem. That to me is a huge opportunity for the real estate sector. That’s the problem I’m trying to solve.

Eve: [00:12:45] Yes. So, the other day I read this really alarming statistic, which I’ve known, but it just, sort of, reinforced what I think is going on in real estate, and that is that last year, venture capitalists invested 2% of all the funds they invested in women and 1.4% in minorities. And every time I see that number, I think, what makes people think real estate is any different? You know, as a female real estate developer, I can’t say for sure how I’ve been hampered, but I certainly feel my trajectory would have been different if I’d been a white male. So, how do you, like I think you have a very unusual story. Probably a somewhat rare one. How do you tell these kids really what they’re up against?

Cedric: [00:13:35] My story is rare in terms of some of the places I’ve had a chance to work and learn from. Right. But my story is quite common when it comes from, I thought I was smart enough but didn’t know what the hell to do with it. I think all of us suffer from some degree of imposter syndrome. And so, what I tell students from day one is the first part of being successful is knowing you deserve to be successful. Once you know that, then what you need is clarity of path and a network. And I tell every kid, I’m going to give you both of those. All you got to do is stick with me for nine weeks. So, we have a nine-week program where today, the thing that we’ll do for today. We’ll train, from those 15 students of Detroit. We’ll train close to 2500 students this year.

Eve: [00:14:24] Wow.

Cedric: [00:14:25] We’ll turn 1000 this semester alone. But we had 3000 applications from 290 students for our program this semester. And our program is every semester fall, spring, summer. Right. And so, we’ll have a thousand students who will join our community. We kick off on September 26, and on the first day of class, I tell them the same thing, which is that you’re already going to be successful. I get a chance to be a part of it but let me describe to you how it’s going to work.

Cedric: [00:14:52] First, I’m going to teach you a ton of stuff about real estate, but then I’m going to mobilize the real estate community to be a part of your journey. So, you’re going to learn in multiple ways. First, you’re going to learn from me lecturing you. I’ve got to give you some language. I’ve got to help you build confidence and using that language, that’s sort of step one. The second thing is that I’m going to put you on a corporate backed team, right, where it’s going to be ten of you all on a team. You’re going to be backed by some fancy company like Brookfield or JLL or Goldman Sachs, and you’re going to have mentors from those companies that are going to be part of your journey. And every three weeks you’re going to meet with them to prepare for a competition. Here’s what’s going to happen, in the beginning, they’re going to be kind of passive and like, it’s nice to meet you, you’re a nice person, and then you’re going to go and compete and represent their brand. And if you don’t finish first, they’re going to be pissed off. And the next time they get together, they’re going to say, I know Cedric cheated you. I know the judges didn’t get it right. Now, how do we make sure team Goldman-Sachs wins next time? And now what we have built is a bond to where they’re not feeling sorry for you.

Cedric: [00:15:59] They’re saying, you’re team Goldman Sachs, and we didn’t finish first. So, how are we now going to work together, so you finish first. And what’s happening there is we’re transitioning from them feeling sorry for you to feel like they get a chance to enhance your life’s journey. And what I feel all the time is that I don’t know how to scale pity, but I know how to scale self-interest. And if I can get Goldman Sachs people to care about you winning at life, not why you’re losing, then now you have a friend for life, right. Now, all you got to do is really focus on two things. Curiosity, when you have those Goldman Sachs people in the room, ask them tons of questions, and then after they answer them, send them a thank you note. Curiosity and gratitude will win you friends for life. I’m going to put you in the room, but then you take it from there. Like that’s sort of our philosophy. And we’ve gone from 15 students to 1000 this semester. And it’s really those principles, I’m going to teach you. You’ve got to be confident and then you’ve got to be able to connect with people, so they’re part of your journey. That’s what we do.

Eve: [00:17:05] So, tell me about the kids, the students you’ve trained. Where do they come from? How are they finding you?

Cedric: [00:17:11] If I get a chance to do life over again, I’m going to be like a sports agent because, like, I love like, I love that idea that there’s some small-town kid in Arkansas who looks like me, who’s smart as a whip, but doesn’t know how to get to work on Wall Street. Like, I want to go and find those kids and help train them, train them up. So, I find them however, we have to, right. So, we do everything from, we register at 300 plus universities that our program is available to every single semester for nine weeks. Every kid earns at least a $500 scholarship stipend for doing this. They get paid to learn. Then secondly, we’re on LinkedIn all the time. We’re always posting about students winning and we get to be a part of it. So, I’m not telling Cedric stories. I’m telling a thousand different student’s story who’ve come into our program and hopefully had a better life. So, I’m celebrating talent and other people watching say, oh, I could be like that. That kid is me.

Cedric: [00:18:11] And then the other thing is that we must be in like a thousand different Facebook groups. I’m confident the CIA must track us for like, why the hell are we in so many different student real estate groups? And the reason why we do that is because I need kids to know that I don’t feel sorry for them, but that I need their talent. And every call I tell every kid, you got to be self-interested. If I don’t do something that adds value to your life, do not waste your time with me. And I think by saying that by being transparent, kids like, well, maybe there’s something there for me. So, we’re on social media, we’re at college universities we’re wherever it takes. But I think the composition of the learning plus the scholarship plus the mentoring gives them three things that they can sort of bank on as being maybe helpful in their lives.

Eve: [00:18:56] So, I’m guessing that the criteria for being accepted into the program is curiosity and desire, right?

Cedric: [00:19:04] Yes, all of that. We have an application. It takes less than 10 minutes to complete it. And the most difficult question is how can our program improve your life? Because if you can answer that, I can improve it. But if you don’t have any visibility on how I improve your life, you’re just taking it for like whatever reason. So, it’s not about your GPA, it’s not about what year you are in school. We have first semester freshmen all the way through graduating seniors. It’s about, do some research on our program and tell us how we can help you. If you can answer that, then we will probably 90% of the time be able to improve it.

Eve: [00:19:43] So, I’m also gathering that the program is virtual. Is there any in-person program these days?

Cedric: [00:19:49] We launched it in virtual in 2019, not because of COVID, obviously, but because of transportation in New York. Amazing public transportation. Kids can get anywhere. Go to Atlanta. It’s much more challenging. And so, we just saw we were losing students because they couldn’t get to a class on Saturday. So, we started doing virtual in a partnership with Brookfield and Westfield and Los Angeles Lakers and Walker Dunlap in 2019, where we did 90% of the course virtual on Zoom. So kids could do all the training. And then we would have these in-person experiences, tours, meeting with mentors, competitions, and we saw that students could always get to a tour, they could always get to a competition. But they found it more challenging to get to weekly training. And so, that was the beginning of us doing it virtual. And so today, when students do the program, all of my training is virtual. Their mentor office hours is virtual because when mentors travel, it allows them to still be able to fulfill their responsibilities. But every kid is invited to a site visit an office visit in person on their team so they can get the magic of kind of being together. And you meet with mentors every three weeks, and you are fully welcome for those to be in-person or virtual. So, many of our mentors do virtual because they travel, but like Goldman Sachs in New York, they did every meeting in person at Goldman Sachs headquarters. And so, we try and have that blend because that flexibility means that people can consistently meet their responsibilities.

Eve: [00:21:25] So how many mentors do you have right now?

Cedric: [00:21:27] So, we’ve probably had over a thousand mentors since we started. We’ve had a ton. And so, every sponsor provides somewhere between three and five mentors. So, this semester we’ll have over 250 mentors that are with us. But we’ve had years where we had like 4 to 500. It varies every semester in terms of the number of mentors and sponsors that we have.

Eve: [00:21:56] So, then I have to ask, what does your team look like? It’s a lot to manage.

Cedric: [00:22:02] Yeah, well it’s fun. I mean, part of the benefit for me, this is where I think Carlyle comes from my experience, it that for the first three years, I didn’t have a single corporate sponsor. My wife and I funded everything personally. And it makes you really learn how to operate in a lean fashion when you write a check. And even today, I don’t tend to invoice my sponsors until after the program is over, because I do believe in like operating really, really lean. And I think sometimes surplus can lead to you not being as efficient. So, our team today is about 160 folks, U.S., Canada, Europe, because we’re now, so now we’re U.S., Canada, Europe, and we’re going to launch Asia in the spring. But all of my staff as requirement, are all alumni of Project Destined. I only hire my alums. If I don’t hire them, why the hell should anybody else? And so, our team is truly built out of diverse perspective. And I think part of the reason why we can be extraordinarily innovative is that I have all of these students who’ve taken our program and now work on our staff. And if there is something they want, they’re very clear on it.

Cedric: [00:23:15] So for example, where we’re launching a new affordable housing bridge program this fall, that came because lots of my students said, Cedric, why aren’t you teaching me how to explore affordable housing? And I was like, well, we should do that. And so, we had an event with Standard Communities, and 200 kids showed up. So, I was like, you know what? We should probably launch an affordable housing course. So now we’re launching an affordable housing program. So, our staff is the true source of our innovation because every day they are telling me what they want. Today, we’re going to announce a new program with Greystar, where we’re teaching students investment management and real estate development. That came because our students were like, Cedric, we want to go and get these jobs. If you give us more exposure, we got a better shot. We launched a financial modeling course with NYU and Columbia’s graduate schools over the summer. It’s because more of my students were like, Cedric, we have to pay $500 for these modeling courses. We can’t afford that, and it keeps us from getting jobs. So, we built the course. And so, by having staff who are the beneficiaries of this work, they drive our innovation.

Eve: [00:24:22] So, when they start asking you how to do a community capital raise, you’re going to come and talk to me?

Cedric: [00:24:28] Exactly. We’ll have a new course.

Eve: [00:24:31] Because that’ll be the next thing you know, how can I spread the wealth to my community? Right?

Cedric: [00:24:35] I think lots of students want to understand it. They’re still building the language, right? Because right now they’re still in school and they’re thinking about all these things that they want to do. And these things require capital. First, they want to get a job right because they want to get some reps. But ultimately, all of our students, I think, fall in love with real estate because of the chance to both shape a skyline but also influence their community and participate in it.

Eve: [00:25:01] Yeah, absolutely.

Cedric: [00:25:02] They’re going to start learning to raise capital. They’re going to be like, you know what? How do I raise capital to actually do what we have been professing?

Eve: [00:25:09] Yes, well, that’s what I do.

Cedric: [00:25:11] Yeah.

Eve: [00:25:12] Yeah. And I love it because, you know, one of the things I love about the SEC regulation we use is that we’re required to explain everything in plain English to investors. So, you can’t use words like capital stack unless you bring in your glossary, like really plain English for people who have never done it before. So, I think that is an important feature. Anyway. So, I’d like to really hear about some of your favorite success stories. Can you give me a few, buildings built?

Cedric: [00:25:44] Yeah. So, I’ll give you a few of them. The first is after we did Detroit, I went to my hometown, Memphis, and we launched a program there and there was a tall, lanky kid that reminded me of myself who was just finishing high school, who joined our program. He was just turning 18 years old. He was a star in our program. It turns out he’s going to school at GW in D.C. and I have a presentation at Freddie Mac in a few weeks, and I’ve never built the presentation. We didn’t have any successes. So, I was like, Myles, they don’t give a crap about me. They want to hear from students. And so, I said, Myles, why don’t you come present? And so, his parents drove him up a day early to start school so he could present at Freddie Mac at a town hall. And he was so incredible that David Brickman, who was then CEO, said, you know what? We don’t have a summer internship program for freshmen, but I think you’d be great. So, Freddie Mac hires him for the summer, he crushes it. He then goes to Cortland, the large owner operator, and is a sophomore intern there, their top sophomore, and their top intern overall.

Cedric: [00:26:52] And then he’s like, I really wanna work at Brookfield. So next summer, he interns at Brookfield. Then he’s like, Cedric, well I want to go and do something with Hinds. Then he interns at Hinds. So, this is the kid I met when he was 18 from my hometown, Memphis, and he’s worked at Freddie Mac, Cortland, Brookfield, Hinds, and now he’s working full time at Cortland. And that’s that sort really taught me something. Going back to why I created it is that I don’t know what his life’s journey would be without tragic death, and I think he’d still be very successful. But even for a rich white male, that’s an incredible set of college experience.

Eve: [00:27:26] It’s just incredible.

Cedric: [00:27:28] That we’re creative because not me. Because his vision for himself changed once he got in the game. And the whole point is that lots of kids have big dreams. They just don’t know how to ask those questions and ask the world for that. And so, that’s one of my favorite stories. The second one is, we have a program in New York with the Real Estate Board of New York, where we’ve trained now 500 students for them. They’re our largest partner in the world. And all we do is train CUNY students for them. And CUNY is an incredible place because there’s a young woman who joined us, Christina Ceccarelli, as a freshman after her freshman year at Baruch.

Cedric: [00:28:07] I don’t think she cared much about real estate, she wanted to be entrepreneur and thought real estate could be interesting. Did our program for the summer. She crushed it. She joined our staff. She then spent the summer at Greystar doing property management this past summer, and then next summer she’ll be at Blackstone. So, to go from like your first stint at Baruch and you don’t know what you want to do and really think it’d be interesting to then you’ve been at Greystar and then soon at Blackstone, like, that’s just a surreal experience and it highlights our program is going 60% women since the beginning and we only had our first women’s program this summer with the WNBA and US Bank. So, her story just highlights that there’s so many young women who want to explore real estate, but they don’t see an opening for them. But when you bring in the idea of community and ownership that speaks to things that are important to them, then they realize the world of opportunity. So, those are two that really stand out as powerful in my mind.

Eve: [00:29:05] That’s pretty, pretty fabulous. So, clearly, it’s more about the people than the real estate for you because you haven’t talked about real estate success stories. But like, is there someone who’s built a portfolio that they would never have dreamed of because of your program? Or is it just too early days?

Cedric: [00:29:21] Well, look, we start very young. When we started in 2016, we started with 15-year-olds. We only started doing college in 2018. You know, we start with freshman. So, our first college graduate group is just coming out. But one of our students, Ishmael Almanzar, who was in our first college class that was backed by Judy and Jamie Diamond and John Gray from Blackstone, he started, he was a freshman at Bronx Community College as a freshman. Did our program for eight different semesters, interned Tishman Speyer, JLL, then went full time of JLL and bought his first investment property this year. And the kid is 22.

Eve: [00:30:03] Oh, wow.

Cedric: [00:30:03] And we have a lot more students like that are coming because once you realize the process of becoming an owner and the fact that there is nonrecourse debt and everything is tied to your name, it’s like the world really opens up to you. So, I think we’ll have lots of additional or new entrepreneurs, but they’re still early in the game. And Eve, what I preach to all of them is that, look, I didn’t start out buying companies. I went to work for Carlyle to learn how to buy companies, so I could learn from them and then build scale. So, I tell all of my students, I support entrepreneurship, but go and get some reps at the best firms in the world and learn how they do it so you can scale your efforts once you build expertise. I think many of our students will practice entrepreneurship, but they’ll also work at Greystar and Brookfield and Blackstone and others because that’s how they build the network and the kind of confidence to do it on their own at scale.

Eve: [00:31:07] So, I hesitate to ask this question because I’m not sure you’ve had any, but what are some of the challenges that you’ve had building Project Destined.

Cedric: [00:31:16] Yeah. I think the biggest one is that. I think there is this view that sometimes if you are training young women and young brown men, that it’s a charitable act. It’s about pity, not about talent. And so, that’s been the biggest sort of early challenge. I think people just thought, well, let me go in and do the right thing. It’ll be nice and I can put it in my report. But now that’s completely transitioned to where you’ve got 4000 alumni. I’m trying to hire summer interns or full-time people. All of your kids are doing 50 hours of real estate training on top of school. That’s an amazing talent pool. So, I had to shift the mindset from pity to opportunity. And that’s been the biggest challenge, is just that mindset of like the talent is already there. Now we can be your scale partner and you can see 290 universities through us, through your own efforts, just by limitations on human capital, you probably recruit from ten schools. That shift was really challenging, and we still fight every single day.

Eve: [00:32:30] You know, I think you’ve just described what the whole country is like in every industry. Like, you know, we’re still in the pity stage, right? We really need to see an opportunity. So, final question for you. What does success look like for you and Project Destined?

Cedric: [00:32:50] Look, I mean, I want global domination. I want to have a globally dominant talent platform. Even if a recession hits, whether you like it or not, you know, we’re going to double and triple in size every year. I don’t care what happens in the economy, because I know that there is a need for a vehicle that provides scaled access to diverse talent. So, I won’t be satisfied until we’re training tens of thousands of students every year across the globe US, Canada, Europe, Asia, Africa. So, we’ve done all of those markets before, but we haven’t scaled it in Asia, we haven’t scaled it in Europe, we haven’t skilled it in Africa. So, we’ve got to have a scale platform. So if you’re JLL and you need someone in New York, in London, in Munich, in Dakar, in Hong Kong, you should be able to come to us and know that those folks have all received best of class training. That’s what success is for me.

Eve: [00:33:50] Maybe you can help shift that horrible 2%, 1.4% number.

Cedric: [00:33:56] Well, one thing I’ve learned about capital, I learned about capital, is that capital certainly has a bias.

Eve: [00:34:04] Very big bias.

Cedric: [00:34:06] But it is driven by a certain level of greed. And just like in football or basketball, if you see a bunch of players come out of Africa and Poland, you know what happens? You start going to Africa and Poland to get talent. So, what I’ve got to do is make sure we produce the wins, and we tell the story so that capital feels like it’s missing out if it doesn’t include scale. And that’s the shift we have to make, is that capital has to be competitive for our talent and our time, and they don’t feel like they have to compete for it. And we’ve got to transition that mindset. So, the storytelling, what you do today through this podcast is vital. The quality of the storytelling has to match the actions and the outcomes.

Eve: [00:34:51] Well, I can’t wait to see the outcomes. I’ll be watching your progress, and I really appreciate what you’re doing. Thank you very much for joining me.

Cedric: [00:35:00] Eve, my pleasure. Great to see you. And it’s always good to spend time with you.

Eve: [00:35:20] I hope you enjoyed today’s guest and our deep dive. You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at RethinkRealEstateforGood.co. There’s lots to listen to there. You can support this podcast by sharing it with others, posting about it on social media or leaving a rating and review. To catch all the latest from me you can follow me on LinkedIn. Even better, if you’re ready to dabble in some impact investing yourself head on over to wefunder.com/smallchange, where you can invest directly in Small Change and our mission to democratize capital formation to create impact in commercial real estate development. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music, and a big 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 Cedric Bobo

Creative Homies.

Adewale Agboola (pronounced “WAH-Lay”) and his partner, Cyrus Coleman have purchased the historic Enterprise Building in downtown Portland originally constructed in 1905. The 20,000 square foot building is located at 433 NW 4th Avenue, Portland, Oregon. They plan to repurpose the 20,000 square foot building located at 433 NW 4th Avenue, into a creative hub dedicated to the BIPOC (Black and Indigenous People Of Color) community in Portland and are calling it the Creative Homies Enterprise Building (the “Building”).

Adewale believes there is a critical need for such a gathering/work space in the market for the growing BIPOC community in Portland. A series of curated spaces are being designed, ranging from a subterranean music bar and lounge, to a museum-style gallery, cafe/wine bar and boutique store, a full production studio space, with equipment rental and creative space available for use by the Portland creative community along with rental lodging for studio guests.

Adewale Agboola is a photographic artist by trade. His work is emotionally driven, capturing the mood and demeanor of his subjects in powerful photographic images. He is well-versed in understanding human emotion, art + storytelling and not afraid to express his strong emotions through his work.

He attended Mankato state university for Aviation and studio art. After being recruited to travel to China one summer to photograph lifestyle, Adewale became fascinated with the art of photography and creative directing. Now, after a 15- year career in the creative industry, he has worked with clients such as Nike, Target, Adidas, Wolf and Shepherd, redwing, RedBull, General Mills, Invisalign, Lil Nas X, Gronk, Bon Iver, The national, Chastity brown, Indigo girls, Ani Difranco and the list goes on.

Adewale is fascinated by people and has a genuine love for everyone he meets. His superpower is bringing like-minded people together. His ability to communicate and encapsulate moments from extreme to intimate is born of a deep and natural understanding of emotion. His photographs speak for themselves because of the beauty and truth they lay bare.

Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:07] 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. And speaking of building better, I’m very excited to share that my company, Small Change, is now raising capital through a community round that is open to the public. Small Change is a leading equity crowdfunding platform for impact investment in real estate. For as little as $250, anyone 18 and over can invest in Small Change, helping to fuel our growth as we disrupt the old boys club of capital that routinely ignores so many qualified people and projects. Please visit wefunder.com/smallchange to review the full details of our raise and to make an investment if you can. And remember, investing is risky. Don’t invest more than you can afford to lose.

Eve: [00:01:38] Today I’m talking with Adewale Agboola. Adewale is an astounding photographer with many Fortune 500 clients. As a Black man, he is in a minority in that profession. Only about 5% of professional photographers are Black. He’s also a minority in his hometown, Portland, Oregon. Only about 13% of the population in Portland is Black. But he and his partner, Cyrus Coleman, another successful artist who also lives in Portland, started hatching a plan to create a small art gallery and meeting space aimed at people just like them. Last year, they closed on a 20,000 square foot building in downtown Portland. Not so small at all. And have some very big plans to turn it into a creative hub catering to BIPOC creatives. They call themselves the Creative Homies. You’ll want to hear more.

Eve: [00:02:41] 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 or head over to rethinkrealestateforgood.co and subscribe. You’ll be the first to hear about my podcasts, blog posts and other goodies.

Eve: [00:03:07] Hello, Adewale. Thank you so much for joining me.

Adewale Agboola: [00:03:10] Hey Eve, how are you doing?

Eve: [00:03:12] Your career path has fired both sides of your brain, first in aviation and then in your amazing work as a photographer. Truly amazing, beautiful work. How did photography take this lead in your life?

Adewale: [00:03:26] Photography, I think it became a place where I could express my emotions and express who I am as an artist. Earlier on in my uni days, I was really fascinated by the art of photography and just in general, the art of art. I mean, coming from a very technical engineering and like aviation background, I was kind of just blindsided by the art of art. So, I started shooting for my school newspaper and that kind of led into more involvement in creativity and more involvement in art. By the time I was junior year, during my uni years, I was recruited by Nat Geo to go to China for three months and travel with them and just photograph lifestyle. And this was like almost like an internship kind of things, but it was almost like the first time I’ve ever faced a world bigger than mine and so completely different and so beautiful. And I was just enamored by the culture that everything in China was like, almost like a sensory overload. Like, it just woke me up to this thing. And by the time that I came back home to school, I was gone. I just went through school, finished my degree and finished my pre-flight and professional flight certification. And I basically told my parents the last day I graduated, I’m going to move to Chicago and be a photo editor. And it goes.

Eve: [00:05:02] And like all parents, they were probably horrified.

Adewale: [00:05:06] Very, very, very horrified. It was pretty hard for them to kind of take that in because I’ve just spent like almost six years of my life flying.

Eve: [00:05:14] Yeah.

Adewale: [00:05:14] Spent a great load of money to do something so minute, but also something that I love, you know?

Eve: [00:05:23] So, they must be pretty proud now because your photographs are gorgeous. They’re just amazing.

Adewale: [00:05:28] They’re very happy now. Now it’s like, oh well, you’re not asking us for money, like how you can do everything on your own. I think they’re very happy now. They’re very, they’re very like, oh great, you can make money. That’s good.

Eve: [00:05:43] Well, that’s what every parent worries about, that their child isn’t going to starve on the streets, I suppose so. So, then I have to ask, what are the challenges you’ve being confronted with as a Black photographer in a majority white profession? I’ve read that there’s a very small percentage of Black photographers, something like 5%.

Adewale: [00:06:01] Yeah, I mean. When I started out, I didn’t have anyone to really walk me through how this is going to pan out, right? I had this ambition that I wanted to make it and work as a photographer, but something I never realized is you have to play the game, right? Like, you have to take all the clients. You have to go through all the seminars. You have to go through all the networking events and all of that. But also, I never had an agent. Now I have an agent to represent me. So, I never really knew how to really market myself except like on Facebook and Instagram. Well, Instagram was not even around during that time, It just was Facebook. So, it was really, really, really hard for me to really, like, make strides in any way until basically I just started randomly going to different agencies, I would look up ad agencies, and I would talk to a creative director like, hey, do you mind if I show you my work? And I started doing that. I think I kind of told myself I need to do three a week, to talk to three different creative directors or someone on an agency a week. And I would do that constantly until I got my first, like, my first big break. And once that happened, I think my first big break was a five different campaign with 3M, which is a massive company. And for the first time in my life, I saw like this big check. I was like, oh, my God, I couldn’t believe like a photographer could make this. And then as that kind of went through, I started showing those work and that landed me my second work and that landed me my second work until I got to like, photographing for Target and now Nike and Adi. So, it’s been really, really great. But also, being Black in a field that is really slim. For example, during the uprising, the George Floyd era of what happened, it was really important that Black Voices gets to narrate those events. It was really hard for me to see that go through, having the white photographers photograph, almost like Black grief, which is really hard. So, for me, I took it upon myself. I mean. I think one of the biggest quotes as a photograph was, I forgot who said this, pick up a camera, photograph the things that are going on in your community. That’s how you get noticed by anything. Once you’re out there shooting the interesting thing going on in your community and you’re giving it, you’re doing it with gratitude and you’re doing it with empathy, you’re doing it with grace. I mean, everything will come to you by nature. Everything will come to you easily. And I think that’s what I did during that time. I photographed what was going on in my community. And I told the story through images. You know, people always ask me, what do you do for a living? I simply just say, I see for a living. My job is to capture a moment to eternity. My job is to take moments and just put it in history as what they simply are. In my life, make tangible. Really, so…

Eve: [00:09:20] So then, I’m going to ask a leading question. So, you live in Portland. What’s it like to be a creative in Portland? A Black creative in Portland today?

Adewale: [00:09:30] It’s quite tough, actually. It’s I think for me, I would think artists should be more, given more opportunities here in Portland that are of color. But, generally speaking, Portland is a very, very white city. And people will give work to who they know and what they know.

Eve: [00:09:54] And what they’re comfortable with, right.

Adewale: [00:09:56] What they’re comfortable with, and people don’t really go out of their comfort zone to really search for great artists or great black artists. It’s usually, oh, we’ve used that person, let’s use that person again. Where you could actually challenge yourself and look at who is around and who lives in Portland, Oregon. It’s a really hard town, which is like one of the reasons why we wanted to do what we’re doing.

Eve: [00:10:21] Well, let’s talk about that, because we haven’t talked about that yet. So, you got together with your partner, Cyrus Coleman, who’s also a very talented artist, recently and purchased a commercial building in downtown Portland. So, I want to hear about how that came about. But tell us about what you plan to do with the building.

Adewale: [00:10:41] Yeah. I mean, Cyrus and I started this idea, like, we were looking at a 400, 500 square foot studio to just have a space where we can create our work, where he could paint, and I could just turn it a photo studio. But also, we wanted a place where our friends can come to and just hang out and also just like, kick it with us while we do our work or they’re doing their work. And this idea kind of just started snowballing into multiple facets of things. You know, Cyrus’s family, are a music legacy family, and they’ve got this crazy tie to music legends. And I think that was like, really amazing. It’s like, oh my God, we could have a block party in the summer in this 400, 500 square foot building.

Eve: [00:11:29] As long as I’m invited.

Adewale: [00:11:32] Well, we kept coming up with this idea and something really hit me. I realized that there isn’t a lot of Black creatives in town, at least not enough that are showing theirselves or showing their work or being advertised. I started realizing that even looking at my work. So, we got together with Jessie Burke, who her and her husband, runs the Society Hotel here in Portland. And after we talked about our pitch deck and everything and kind of presented her this idea of what we wanted to really bring to Portland and how we want to unify creative people in town together and make something better for our community. And she basically asked the question, would you like to rent, or would you like to create generational wealth? And we know it’s to do with generational wealth. Of course, we definitely don’t want to rent because we’ve just gone through this two-months long campaign of trying to find a place and everything is just a bit too much. So, Jessie was like, well, I’ve got some units I can show you and I’ve got a building that you can buy. So, they started showing us these rental places that we can, which were all wonderful. But Cyrus and I had this inkling in the back of our head, we wanted to see this building. And the minute we walked into this building, we realized, it’s like, we can’t go back.

Eve: [00:13:02] And it was 20,000 square feet instead of 500 hundred.

Adewale: [00:13:07] Yeah. We couldn’t go back. We’re now stuck in this thing. And we’ve got to figure out how to acquire this building before anything happens. So, all of the inspiration comes from just my background of being a photographer, his background of being an illustrator and a designer. And also, we love wine, we love bringing people together, we love bringing Black people together, but we also love bringing all the Black people together, of creative, in a place where we can all talk and all laugh comfortably. Where no one is looking over our shoulder or no one is telling us what we can do or what we can’t do. And the idea is also to foster creative mind and to foster people’s outlet. You know, I would just be open minded in a place that could be of shelter, a place that could be like an oasis for people. So, we ended up acquiring the building in December 2021, and we started this conversation in June 2021. So…

Eve: [00:14:13] That was pretty quick, that was pretty quick.

Adewale: [00:14:15] Talk about reality kind of coming to fruition. We were very, very happy and very honored that Jessie and Jonathan saw something in us and they, kind of, went on this trip with us and it’s been an amazing ride and it’s still an amazing ride. There’s still, there’s bumpy days, there’s great days, there’s bad days, there’s good days. And you take it as it is and you go and you wake up the next morning and you go again and do it.

Eve: [00:14:39] So, just for our listeners. So, Jesse and Jonathan are a couple in in Portland who’ve been very successful with two hotels that they own and other real estate developments. And during the pandemic they decided that I suppose they needed to give back and they have developed this non-profit where they’re working with, I think the way Jonathan said it was to help shift real estate assets into the hands of the BIPOC community. And they do this with a limited number of clients, right? And you guys were, I think, some of the earliest. So, it’s a great story.

Adewale: [00:15:20] We’re also the one with the biggest undertaking, I think. I think our building is very ambitious and it’s also very well needed and it’s something that, you know, you can really talk to people and people just connect with it because it’s been something that has been wanted. We’re so surprised that Nike and Adidas and all the other companies that are around Portland hasn’t really thought about something like this for all the creatives that they bring into the city. Because one of the biggest issues Portland is having is losing great talent. They’re not able to keep them here because it’s not New York or it’s not L.A. Or it’s not London or any big metropolis. So, the idea is if we can foster a building where all of these people that are coming in could actually build family, build friendship, build all those things, It’s.

Eve: [00:16:14] Maybe even professional networks, right?

Adewale: [00:16:16] Yeah. The possibilities are infinite on what could happen then. So, yeah.

Eve: [00:16:21] So, what’s your big audacious goal for the building? You’ve got 20,000 square feet. What are you going to do with it?

Adewale: [00:16:28] I’m hoping it’s forever everlasting, really. It just grows. But, at the moment, the basement is going to be a jazz club, which is something that is very well needed in Portland as the couple that we had here has shut down. So, a lovely jazz club. And then we’re going to have a private speakeasy room in the basement too, and a beautiful kitchen. And then, that’s the basement of the building, which is also another 5000 square feet, which is, oh, insane. The first floor is going to be a big gallery room and a wine bar, a coffee shop and a point-of-sale place for every artist, but also for merchandise from whatever show is there or whatever we want to sell that it’s going to be that spot there. And then the second floor is going to be a full makerspace. This is a dream artists space. You can come in, you can paint, you can sew. There’s going to be a podcast room, there’s going to be a printing center, there’s going to be a screen-printing center too. So, it houses everything, any creative needs. And also, when you’re done with everything from the maker floor and you want to do a production and photograph your product and photograph everything, there’s a full production studio that is going to cater on the same level as Nuke Studio, Acme Studio. All of those places in LA, so people like Nike and Adidas and King and on running can find a place to actually shoot product and be present in Portland, Oregon. So, we don’t have to always keep flying everyone out to New York, flying everyone out to L.A. There’s a premiere studio in town and you can get that done here.

Eve: [00:18:13] So, what’s like the best outcome that you can imagine with this building?

Adewale: [00:18:18] Oh, man, the best.

Eve: [00:18:21] Am I asking too hard questions.

Adewale: [00:18:23] No, the best outcome for this building would be for it not to be used to the full potential of what it could be. I want people to see what it could be, and I want people to forever keep coming in to just work and produce work that are unparalleled, that are great, that are just revered by other artists. So, one of the best outcomes I really want for this building is I really want it to be a great oasis for artists. I want kids from high school to come in once a month to learn what it feels like to be an artist, to learn what you can become as an artist, because I wasn’t given that as my younger self. But also, it’s elevated and it’s Black excellent. It’s going to be something different from what people are used to in Portland. It’s going to have some African flair, some European flair. It’s going to have things from the world in it that I think everyone would be really stunned. But one thing I do also really want is I wanted to always, forever evolve. I don’t want it to stay stagnant. I don’t want it to stay still. I wanted to keep evolving and keep moving as we all grow.

Eve: [00:19:39] So, how far along are you in the process? You have the building. You need to renovate it, right?

Adewale: [00:19:45] Yeah. So, we’ve just won the occupancy review so we can have more people in the building. With the city, we are submitting our permits. We’re submitting the permits on Monday, this upcoming Monday to the city, we are now represented by an advertising firm who is going to do all the branding and all the the brand book and the design and the signs. We have a PR team that is behind us now to start going to different magazine and publishing. We have a world renowned, a world-renowned hardware store that is giving us a good amount of credit to come by and see things we can put into the building. We have friends going around talking about the building to friends. The building is in one of the most impeccable shape I’ve ever seen. It’s really got these lovely bones that is undefined. But also, we’re in the middle of talking to multiple different contractors. We’re now getting, we’re supposed to be getting the bids in actually today of what the build out is going to be. So, we hope to start demolition hopefully at the end of November or at the beginning of January so.

Eve: [00:21:04] And open the doors?

Adewale: [00:21:05] Open the doors hopefully as early as June.

Eve: [00:21:09] So, I do know that that you had, you know, financing was a challenge. So, tell me how you financed all of this and how are you going to finance the renovation?

Adewale: [00:21:21] So, even starting, we basically spoke to the lenders, and we presented to them what we really wanted to do with the building.

Eve: [00:21:32] What was their reaction?

Adewale: [00:21:34] They were like, this has never been done in town. This is great. Like, this sounds amazing. And we went ahead and put down the earnest money and then we also went ahead and put down the deposit on the building. We’re so lucky, we had really, really great sellers when they financed it for us. So, we didn’t have to go straight to a bank real quick. They trusted us and they believed in the idea of what we had. And now we’re at this point and we’re going through a local bank for construction and construction and finalizing things. They’re called Prosper Bank. They basically oversee all the BIPOC community. They oversee all those built out for BIPOC. They’re supposed to be an opportunity zone like bank, where, you know, if you’re a BIPOC community, like someplace like Chinatown and all that, they would finance all of those.

Eve: [00:22:37] So I have to say, you know, Jonathan told me that you went to maybe a dozen banks.

Adewale: [00:22:42] Yeah.

Eve: [00:22:43] And you, and I saw your business plan. It was very professionally laid out. And he said, only when you removed your images from those packets did the bank start talking to you. And honestly, that is, that just made me gasp. That was really pretty shocking for me.

Adewale: [00:23:01] It’s. It’s a hard thing to eat up sometimes. And trust me, I’m so sorry if I get a bit emotional.

Eve: [00:23:11] No, I’m emotional.

Adewale: [00:23:13] It was. You know, we’ve heard about things like that before, but it being done to you, it’s a whole completely different thing. You know, I like to want to say like there isn’t you know, what they call it like, there isn’t. The word is getting away from me. Well, it happens. It happened to us. And one of the biggest things was like Jonathan, Jessie, you know, started also their business. They had to go get a loan from a bank and they were right where we were. They didn’t really have much, and they were approved because basically they look like.

Eve: [00:24:07] They’re white.

Adewale: [00:24:08] Yeah. And for us it was very different. We had this amazing idea, and we have this great execution and we were just shunned off by everyone. And it’s very apparent because we’ve sat down for hours and hours and days to work on this business plannings and everything and to make sure it is so perfectly driven and perfectly written. I’m pretty sure the banks are going to be the one who even wins no matter what. But they declined us, multiple people. And it’s been really sad to kind of really see. But at the same time, Cyrus and I have such really crazy drive and really big heart, because we don’t let things like that phase us, we kind of rise to the occasion and we rise to do more, better and be better. That’s the way we’ve kind of looked at this process.

Eve: [00:25:01] Yeah.

Adewale: [00:25:02] We don’t let it knock us down. I think we just get up and we keep moving and hopefully something happens. And throughout the entire process we’ve always rised up and something has always come true for us.

Eve: [00:25:15] So, there’s a lot of discussion about, you know, wealth generation for minorities, communities, for the BIPOC community. And, and the thing that is tracked, I think, is redlining. You know, people have tracked what happens with redlining. But they’re really not tracking what’s happening to people like you going to a bank and the process of getting a commercial loan and how different it is for minorities and women, and they do track venture capital funding. And we know that the amount of money that is invested in minority businesses is minuscule. So, I really, like 1.2% of all funds this year. So, I’m sure it’s not very different for real estate. And it’s really, we’ve got a long way to go, so. I’m sorry you went through that. I’m very glad you got the building.

Adewale: [00:26:12] Yeah, it’s the lay of the beast. You know, it’s life. It’s not fair, but we understand it. You know, I think Cyrus and I, we’ve been really in tune and intertwined. Like we understand the world and the world of injustice and the world of what it is. But we don’t want to ever let that get us down. There’s so much more to be done, but we’re very optimistic and we’re very driven. So, nothing is going to break us down anytime soon.

Eve: [00:26:47] So, full disclosure, you have also listed a crowdfunding offering on Small Change. And you know, who do you hope will invest and be partners with you in this building?

Adewale: [00:27:00] We hope to see the leaders of tomorrow, people who believe in ideas. People who want to see things evolve. People who are dreamers. People who are artists. People who supports the hearts. People who know exactly what it feels like to be an immigrant, who also knows what it feels like to be Black in America to start anything. But also, people understand business and know this is good business and also understand, like the dark history of sometimes of what Portland is and what this is going to do for that community and how it’s going to celebrate this community. We’re hoping big investors come in and look at it like, okay, I support this. I love jazz club. I can go there and just sit down and listen to good music.

Adewale: [00:27:48] I feel free drinks coming on.

Adewale: [00:27:51] Yeah. Hey, it’s a perk. But also, if you’re a fan of, like, good art. Cyrus and I have promised ourself, we will always find people that would believe in quality to present their work, that wants to present their work. And something that is being really, really hit at the moment is a wine bar. We love good natural wine. That’s how we bring people down to the table. I mean, if you love wine and you want to see Black kids bring good wine from the Canary Islands, from London, from Spain, come to this place, it’s going to be great. Invest in it. And if you’re an artist that you always need a studio and you can’t work from your home and you need something to sew, like you need a machine to sew, you end up price machine. It’s also for you to come. Invest. That’s what it is. It’s for the like-minded, the artist in us, and also the business savvy people who just love to sit on the computer and do their meetings.

Eve: [00:28:54] You know I, first of all, I hope America is listening and I hope everyone goes and checks out your offering. And I really hope you are wildly successful, and I get to come see it next year.

Adewale: [00:29:06] Well, you’re going to be there on the opening day.

Eve: [00:29:09] I am. I’ve been told I have to do what dance is that I have to do? The mashed potato.

Adewale: [00:29:15] The mashed potato dance. No, you have to be that because you’re part of the reason why we’re really doing all of this. You’re helping us and a great deal. So, you and your team have to be there. That’s definitely going to be an invitation sent to you guys.

Eve: [00:29:31] It’s a deal. Okay onwards, right.

Adewale: [00:29:34] Yeah.

Eve: [00:29:35] Thank you.

Adewale: [00:29:36] Thank you so much.

Eve: [00:29:54] I hope you enjoyed today’s guest and our deep dive. You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at RethinkRealEstateforGood.co. There’s lots to listen to there. You can support this podcast by sharing it with others, posting about it on social media or leaving a rating and review. To catch all the latest from me you can follow me on LinkedIn. Even better, if you’re ready to dabble in some impact investing yourself head on over to wefunder.com/smallchange, where you can invest directly in Small Change and our mission to democratize capital formation to create impact in commercial real estate development. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music, and a big 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 Creative Homies

Counting on Crowdfunding.

Jamison Manwaring is the co-founder and CEO of Neighborhood Ventures, a remarkable Arizona-based real estate crowdfunding company, focused on value-add multi-family properties.

It’s a real estate company, for sure – they buy, hold and sell property. But the capital plan is innovative, with a growing pool of state residents who are permitted to invest through Arizona intrastate securities law. Nine successful projects later, Jamison is now taking his plan to the national stage with their latest project, a short-stay hotel he wants to repurpose into affordable housing. And he’s raising funds on SmallChange.co, not just once, but a second time now.

Jamison attended business school at the University of Utah where he graduated with a BS in Finance. He was always interested in finance. He loved it enough to become president of the finance club. Even at a young age Jamison’s determination shone through. He wanted to work in New York, at a top finance firm. But those companies have their pick of Ivy league school graduates, which he was not. So, every Thursday night he flew the red eye to New York to network.

You’ll have to listen in to hear the rest of the story.

Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:06] Eve Picker: 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. And speaking of building better, I’m very excited to share that my company, Small Change, is now raising capital through a community round that is open to the public. Small Change is a leading equity crowdfunding platform for impact investment in real estate. For as little as $250, anyone 18 and over can invest in Small Change, helping to fuel our growth as we disrupt the old boys club of capital that routinely ignores so many qualified people and projects. Please visit wefunder.com/smallchange to review the full details of our raise and to make an investment if you can. And remember, investing is risky. Don’t invest more than you can afford to lose.

Eve: [00:01:39] Today I’m talking with Jamison Manwaring, for a second time. Jamison is enjoying success as the co-founder and CEO of Neighborhood Ventures, an Arizona based real estate crowdfunding company focused on value-add multifamily properties. Always interested in finance, Jamison went to business school and studied finance. He loved it enough to become president of the finance club. Even at a young age, Jamison’s determination shone through. He wanted to work in New York at a top finance firm, but those companies have their pick of Ivy League school graduates, which he was not. So, every Thursday night he flew the redeye to New York to network. But wait, if I tell you what happened next, I’d be a spoiler. So, listen in to hear the rest of the story.

Eve: [00:02:39] 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 or head over to rethinkrealestateforgood.co and subscribe. You’ll be the first to hear about my podcasts, blog posts and other goodies.

Eve: [00:03:02] Hi, Jamison. It’s great to have you back on my show.

Jamison Manwaring: [00:03:05] Hey, Eve. Good to be back. As I was mentioning in the intro, I’d much rather be in Pittsburgh right now. You’re 80 degrees. We’re supposed to get 99 degrees and it’s still mid-September. So, we’re ready for the cooler weather here in Phoenix. But real estate is hot as well.

Eve: [00:03:23] As hot as the weather. That’s right. So, I want to go back to your background, which is solidly in finance, all the way back to college when you majored in finance. And I’m wondering what led you to launch Neighborhood Ventures and focus on real estate?

Jamison: [00:03:39] I didn’t know what I was going to study when I got to college, not unlike many people. And started in accounting, did some accounting classes, ended up landing with finance because what I knew I wanted to learn was how to analyze a business. And I kind of look at finance as the language of business. You know, if you are a good entrepreneur and you can start a business at some point, you’re going to need to understand what’s happening in the business. And I had actually started a small business right out of high school that was like a for sale by owner service. At one point we had a couple hundred listings and we charged people a flat fee, like $1,000 fee to list their home and would market it for them. And the business was great at times and then at times it wasn’t great, and I really didn’t understand why, what was driving that, what was beneath the results.

Jamison: [00:04:40] So, I ended up knowing that I wanted to go to college to be able to learn how to analyze a business and ended up in finance, which is where trying to understand a business for either investment purposes, if you’re from the, looking at the company kind of outside in or if you’re inside the company learning how to manage the business properly, where to spend money, where to pull back capital, where to reinvest more capital. And so, that was a very useful skill that I’m really happy I ended up sticking with that major.

Eve: [00:05:14] That’s where you started with finance. So, take me on the journey from there to Neighborhood Ventures.

Jamison: [00:05:20] Out of college, well, my junior year of college, I decided I wanted to go to Wall Street and I don’t know if I had seen a movie. I’m trying to think back at the time it was after the great financial crisis. So, some of those movies were out, the Big Short was out. And I was definitely intrigued by everything that was done by the investment banks, the importance of that in our economy and the importance of the work they do. And so, I determined that I wanted to go get to Wall Street. And I was from University of Utah, which is not a school that the investment banks recruit at. They don’t really consider.

Eve: [00:06:02] Not Ivy League, right?

Jamison: [00:06:04] Yeah, they really focus on those Ivy League schools. So, I had to go in what I call the side door and I started flying out on a Thursday night redeye after class, I didn’t have class on Friday. I’d fly out to New York Thursday night, redeye. I would arrive at about 6:30 a.m. in JFK, JetBlue flight. And I would start reaching out to folks. I would try to have a few meetings, set up an advance, just an info session. So, I would ask, I would tell folks, hey, if I can have 15 minutes of your time, I’m just trying to, I’m a college student. Which kind of opens people, opens doors. And these were alumni from either University of Utah or BYU, which there’s a lot of close ties there. And I’m here in New York for the day, I would love to be able to come by and meet. What I also found is Friday afternoons, a lot of people on Wall Street, it’s a little bit of downtime. They kind of have to be in the office, but they don’t mind having, spending some time with somebody to get off of their desk. And so, I did that for a couple of months. I probably did a half a dozen trips.

Eve: [00:07:19] That’s exhausting!

Jamison: [00:07:19] It was, and I spent the night at the beginning in a hostel with eight other people. And that was a new experience for me. I was like, I got to get out of here.

Eve: [00:07:32] At least it wasn’t a park bench, right?

Jamison: [00:07:34] Yeah, it was close. It was about, I think it was 25 bucks a night. And then even the cheapest hotel was like 125, which I couldn’t afford. So, I ended up meeting a lot of great people who even to this day are I’m connected with and view them as mentors through that process. So, it was kind of one of my experiences that was really hard. But you look back and you’re like, I’m very glad I did that, and I don’t know if I could do it again.

Eve: [00:08:05] It’s pretty gutsy. I don’t know how many people would take that on. You know, that’s.

Jamison: [00:08:10] Well, and being from Utah, the people who know say you have to do it that way if you want to get there.

Eve: [00:08:16] Interesting.

Jamison: [00:08:18] You got to go hustle. I ended up meeting an alumni who, I didn’t ask him for an internship, but we connected a few times and he said, Hey, would you be interested in doing an internship with us? He was at Barclays Capital, which had bought Lehman Brothers. He was a senior person there. And I said, Yeah, I’d love an internship. And now that you ask, I would love one. And he got me an interview, phone interview. And then when I passed that, they flew me out and did a super day. I didn’t know what would happen. I didn’t have any other options for that, that internship. But they ended up giving me an offer. And I think they paid pretty decent, enough that I could move to there for the summer, live in New York.

Eve: [00:09:08] Not have to stay in the hostel, right?

Jamison: [00:09:10] Not have to stay in a hostel, which was very exciting. And I worked on a sales and trading floor there. Selling equities and talking about equities that. Basically, what we did was we would promote the research of the firm. Hey, this is a stock that we like. This is stock we don’t like. Talk to clients about their thoughts on it. And it was a great experience. I ended up moving from the sales floor to the actual research floor, which I’m very happy I did. That’s where you can really do deep dive financial analysis on companies. And I worked on a few IPOs and ended up moving to Goldman Sachs in their technology team and working with software stocks.

Eve: [00:09:53] That’s pretty impressive from Utah.

Jamison: [00:09:56] Yeah, and it’s, kind of, back to your question. One of the things that I learned through this time was I loved investing, but I didn’t like equities in particular, tech equities. They’re very volatile. They have big swings, daily swings, sometimes especially software stocks up 15, 20% after earnings down 15 to 20% after earnings if they miss. And it did not suit me when it came to my kind of temperament.

Eve: [00:10:33] Yeah, I get that. It doesn’t suit me either. Maybe it’s a control thing. You kind of got to understand what’s making those swings happen, right? And it’s pretty hard to get that.

Jamison: [00:10:46] And there’s a lot of factors in public equities that are outside of our knowledge and our control. There’s a lot of quant funds that are just trading on the algorithm, and they don’t make sense, but they move the market. I was certainly turned off by any impact I could have. Right. You’re just one person in such a large pool of people. So, I learned a lot there, but I began looking for my next option and knew that I wouldn’t be there forever. One of the companies I worked on their IPO was LifeLock. They’re based in Tempe, Arizona, and had grown a business to several million subscribers around identity protection. I worked on their IPO, and I got to know the CEO and the CFO, and through that process I kind of let them know, Hey, if anything comes up, I would be interested in getting out of New York and getting back west and ended up moving out here in 2015. When I joined the company, our stock was $8 a share. And I knew it had a long way to go, and that’s why I wanted to join. I saw it as a real opportunity. We ended up selling to another company 18 months later for $24 a share, 3x.

Eve: [00:12:02] That’s pretty good. Yeah.

Jamison: [00:12:04] So, that was great. At that point, I didn’t have a job because we got acquired by a bigger company, but I had bought a property when I was in New York, a ten-unit building, in my home, near my hometown of Idaho. And just kind of going back to what we were talking about before, Eve, how much I didn’t like software stocks and equities, public equities. I really liked, for about a year and a half, that I had had this little ten unit building on the side. I don’t know, there was just something about that it was physical that I could see it, that we could improve the operations, we could enhance what the property looked like from the street, all those little things. And then we would see big improvements in our revenue. And I really love that experience. And I was kind of just doing it for investment. I didn’t expect that I would go into that now, looking back. But I could clearly see that I like that a lot better. And I think you have to enjoy what you do. And so, that was one thing that, it was pretty clear to me. I wanted to do more of that and less of public equities.

Eve: [00:13:16] So then, tell us about Neighborhood Ventures, because that’s what grew out of that love, right?

Jamison: [00:13:22] Yeah. So, I had actually followed you and some other folks in the industry in the mid 2000, 2014, 2015, 2016. My company got, Lifelock got bought out in 2017, and a lot was happening in the crowdfunding space. And I wanted to figure out how could I raise more capital to do more projects. I had done this one project of my own on the side, and I really saw crowdfunding as a unique way to do that. I didn’t want to do the old-fashioned country club route where you go out and get a few wealthy people to raise, to write checks. That didn’t seem very interesting to me. And I wanted to do something new and different and creative and kind of a new challenge. And I was looking at a building to potentially buy and try to crowdfund. And my broker, I told him what I was looking to do, and my broker said, well, you know, my boss talks about real estate crowdfunding all the time. And I said, well, what’s his name? He said, John Kobierowski.

Jamison: [00:14:27] And I ended up emailing him and he had been an apartment veteran for 30 years in Phoenix and was very interested in launching a real estate crowdfunding company as well. And he brought a lot of industry knowledge and over 30 years in the Phoenix market. It was kind of an instant match where I said, well, let me focus on the capital raising, the crowdfunding, the technology side, and you could really focus on the real estate side. So, we realized that we had a good match. We’re very different in the skills that we bring and what we like to do, but that’s when we launched the company. And the name Neighborhood Ventures, he had already bought and already had the domain name. And so, we, I love the name and we launched in, basically 2018 was our first offering.

Eve: [00:15:22] So, let’s talk about that a little bit. Like, what are you trying to accomplish with Neighborhood Ventures? What is it? What does it look like? What’s the business?

Jamison: [00:15:30] I was talking about this yesterday in a team meeting with our team at work, at Neighborhood Ventures. And I think it’s important to go to your why. Why you do what you do? Your motivation. I think that’s very, it’s important to me to understand why am I doing what I’m doing? And I also look at that in other people. If somebody is being very friendly to me because they’re trying to sell me a pair of shoes at the mall, I kind of question that. I’m like, well, they’re just being, you know, they’re just buttering me up so they can sell me something. So, I think motivation matters a lot. And I don’t like it when, in that situation I can see real quick, okay, they’re just trying, they have an angle here, right? So what Neighborhood Ventures are, it’s very simple.

Jamison: [00:16:22] With John and I, we want to get more people involved in the opportunity to invest in commercial real estate. That is, has been our mission from day one. It’s always been a really good asset to own. That’s what drew me to it. It’s very stable relative to other assets. It goes up in value, it produces cash flow. There’s all these things about it that are really appealing, but it’s only been available to a small group of people. So, what our mission is and our reason why we started this is we want to get a lot more people involved. And we have big ambitions, we think we can grow that to a lot of folks nationally, there’s a big pool, about 40 million people nationally who have funds they want to invest, but they don’t reach that accredited status, which most people have to reach to invest in most projects on on crowdfunding platforms.

Eve: [00:17:20] So that’s 97% of the population, right? Approximately, yeah.

Jamison: [00:17:24] Yeah, yeah. And young folks right now who want to start putting money away. I think commercial real estate is very appealing, if they can invest in smaller increments. For us, it’s $1,000 minimum, and then they can start putting even $100 increments after that or whatever it might be. But you can start with small amounts and start to build that nest egg. And then we do have larger investors who like to do more than that, too. But our goal is to broaden that group, to allow a lot of people to own this asset. And I think we’re in the second inning so far and we think the next few years are going to be really interesting for us.

Eve: [00:18:08] So the buildings you focus on, what are they like?

Jamison: [00:18:13] John’s an expert in multifamily, so we’ve largely focused on multifamily projects in the Arizona market, both in Phoenix and then Flagstaff, which if you’re not from Arizona, Flagstaff is about 2 hours north of Phoenix. And when it’s 110 in Phoenix, it’s 90 or 85 in Flagstaff.

Eve: [00:18:36] Balmy.

Jamison: [00:18:38] And it’s 2 hours away. So, it’s pretty amazing. The elevation is pretty, is a big factor in that. But if you’re in Phoenix and you can get up to Flagstaff, it’s an amazing place. It’s kind of almost like a a Jackson Hole or an Aspen or a Park City. One of these cities, it’s mountain town, but it’s great for Phoenix. So, we have two projects in Flagstaff. It’s an area that’s landlocked. So, there’s not much development going to happen there, and if you can get a piece of property, it’s a good property to hold on to. And so, we largely focus on finding properties that are in these core areas that have good trends happening there, but they need to be repositioned. The assets are underperforming for some reason. A lot of times it’s because the amenities aren’t up to date. There’s been deferred maintenance, there’s poor property management, and we can look at the other properties in the neighborhood and see that the rents are much higher in those properties than in this property. And that’s when we act. We say, look, we know we can go purchase that property.

Eve: [00:19:46] So really, value add.

Jamison: [00:19:48] Yeah.

Eve: [00:19:49] And that’s smart because you can probably offer a return much earlier because the building continues to cash flow or starts to cash flow pretty quickly, right?

Jamison: [00:20:00] That’s right, yeah. We typically don’t pay distributions for the first year, but it cash flows earlier. Sometimes it’s been four or five months. We’re paying distributions to investors.

Eve: [00:20:12] That’s pretty amazing. So, you know, you actually did an offering, it was a three-way offering, and one part of it was on my funding portal Small Change. And that was a pretty big repositioning of a rather worn-out looking hotel. Do you want to talk about how that went?

Jamison: [00:20:34] Yeah, we still, we own the asset. It’s performing well. This was a, as I think the way you put it, worn out hotel in a neighborhood in Mesa, which is a bedroom community to Phoenix. Originally a very good property, well built, beautiful pool courtyard all of the units were suite, so they all had kitchens. But the manager who had owned it for ten years really ran it into the ground and there was illegal activity going on at the property. The Mesa police were, and the fire department were locked out of the property. The owner was very antagonistic to them for a lot of interesting reasons. And it was the blight of the neighborhood.

Eve: [00:21:21] How many units was it? It was pretty big.

Jamison: [00:21:23] 120.

Eve: [00:21:24] Right right. It’s a big blight.

Jamison: [00:21:27] And here it sits in a really, an up-and-coming neighborhood. But it was pulling the neighborhood back. There had been a Starbucks that popped up 100 yards from the property. There’s a Costco a quarter of a mile away. It was on the up and coming, but this place just continued to drag it down. And it was the place that bad people came to do bad things, frankly. And I’m sure there was other people there that were just looking for a cheap place and that’s where they stayed. So, when we saw it, we saw the potential. And ultimately, we are planning to get it rezoned to multifamily. We’ve been working with the city of Mesa on that, and that does take some time. But until then we operate it as a vacation rental and it’s doing very well. And ultimately.

Eve: [00:22:20] I gather you made improvements to it, right?

Jamison: [00:22:23] Yeah, that’s right. So, we went in and new carpet, new flooring, new fixtures, new cabinetry, new paint. And you know what? This didn’t take a lot. It wasn’t a gut. It was kind of a they call it lipstick and eyeshadow. You know, the bones were good, right? So, we just went in and made it look good, made it look like it’s a place that you’d want to stay, freshen it up, make it contemporary. And people love staying there. And we do want to add it as a multifamily, as an apartment building, because there’s a shortage of affordable housing across the board and definitely in Phoenix. And these units, I think the city will be able to get this rezoning and folks will, for example, a normal two-bedroom, one bath in Phoenix is about 1800. And I think ours is going to be more like 1500. So, to be able to add 120 units onto that will help.

Eve: [00:23:23] How many buildings have you raised funds for now through Neighborhood Ventures?

Jamison: [00:23:27] We’ve done 13 projects so far. 12 of them have been multifamily, and then we did do one retail project. We brought on a retail expert. And that’s a project in Tempe that’s three buildings. One’s a fast-food restaurant, one’s a Dunkin Donuts, which we’re in the process of building right now. And then we have a third vacant that we’re going to start leasing up soon, once the Dunkin Donuts comes in and their sign goes up, then we’re going to lease that out. So, that’s been a really fun reposition, very similar idea. This was before a cannabis shop, kind of a rundown mattress shop. And, you know, not a place that, not well maintained. There hadn’t been a capital investment. The parking was weird. The dumpster was right in the middle of the property, that kind of thing.

Eve: [00:24:19] Now you have your retail legs, right?

Jamison: [00:24:22] Yeah, yeah. And the city was very excited. We were going to come in and help revamp that part of town. But we believe you need to have deep expertise in whatever you’re doing. So, we took that on once we brought out a retail expert. Chris My mind is blanking his last name, but.

Eve: [00:24:47] He’ll forgive you.

Jamison: [00:24:48] Yeah, maybe we’ll see. He’s a retail expert, so he’s led that for us. And it’s been a great project.

Eve: [00:24:57] Great. So, your current project, full disclosure, is also raising funds on Small Change, which we’re delighted about. And you want to tell us about that? Where is it? What is it?

Jamison: [00:25:08] Yeah. So, this is in again one of these up-and-coming areas. This one is in central Phoenix. It’s near my home where I live in central Phoenix. I live right off the light rail and love this area. But this area has seen a lot of revitalization in the last decade. Downtown kind of used to be a place in Phoenix where you didn’t want to go. And this is uptown, which means it’s about two, two and a half miles north of downtown. It’s a highly desirable area because you’re in the middle of everything. You don’t have to commute to work if you’re working downtown. We’ve seen more of the young folks who are moving to the area want to live in these areas that have a bit more culture, they have more activities they don’t want, they’re not going out to the suburbs. And so that’s really exciting. And so, this area, this project fits right into that. It’s 30 units and as we went and did the tour, it was very clear that they haven’t done anything on this property for probably 25 years, except the minimum amount. But it’s sitting right here around all of these new build projects that are six, seven stories, and they’re great, two-bedroom, one bath townhouses and stacked apartments. And so, we saw the opportunity immediately to go in and bring this up to the standard of today’s renter, and we’ll see a really good return on that.

Eve: [00:26:39] What are your plans for the project? I think it’s actually six little buildings, right?

Jamison: [00:26:43] It’s six separate buildings. But one of the things that you don’t know when you do value add, sometimes you dig in there and you open a wall, so to speak, and you realize you’re going to have to do more plumbing, you’re going to have to do some electrical work. The part of the flooring needs to be repaired, you know, those are the sorts of things you don’t know going in. So, we always build a contingency around that. But the plan here is, the units were laid out really nicely, so we don’t have, we don’t have to get permits to build anything different or to move walls. We avoid moving walls, but we’re going to go in and update it. New flooring, new paint, new fixtures, new cabinetry. We’re going to rethink the outside area. The outside area is kind of weird, kind of felt like a prison yard for whatever reason. It’s all blocked off and the pool has a really weird, big fence around it that you can’t see. So, that’s actually going to be one of the big value-adds is kind of rethinking how the outside space is used, which is really important in Arizona, especially in the winter when people just want to spend time outside. So, rethinking the outside, updating the inside and then the location, because of where it’s at, people will be really excited to live in that area in a brand new newly renovated unit.

Eve: [00:28:05] So, then what’s the total development cost, including the building? And tell us about how you’re financing it.

Jamison: [00:28:13] Yeah, so it’s 30 units. The purchase price is 222 per unit. And so, I like to look at it on a per unit basis, but 222 per units what we’re buying it at and then we’re going to end up spending about 35,000 to renovate it. So, our cost basis is 260, 265,000 and some of that includes contingencies. So, if we can shave some of that off, might be closer to 260 on the high side 265, that’s our cost basis. And then when we look at what the value of that building is going to be, it will depend on what the rents are going to be. And we’re expecting the rents will be around the average of that neighborhood, which is about 1800 for two bed, one bath. And that would put the value of that unit around three 325 to 340.

Eve: [00:29:11] What are the rents now for that unit?

Jamison: [00:29:16] They’re in rough shape so they’re renting for under 1000.

Eve: [00:29:19] So, it’s a pretty big shift.

Jamison: [00:29:21] It’s a big jump. They’re all over the place. There’s one that’s 100 and there’s one that’s 800, which is kind of strange that, and they’re the exact same unit. But the neighborhood comps are real right now, are 18 to 1900.

Eve: [00:29:40] That sounds like a great project. So, just generally, what are some of the challenges that you’ve been confronted with this business? Because it’s different. I mean, the product is pretty normal, but the way you’re tackling it is different.

Jamison: [00:29:53] Yeah. I think one of the, our goals is to make it a frictionless experience for our investors. But we know how difficult this is to get from purchasing a property, getting, securing debt and capital to buy it, do the renovations. All of those steps perform the renovations, which we have a crew in house that does all our renovations, which helps us a lot. Then leasing up the property to qualified tenants who are going to pay the rent. That’s a big process in and of itself and then continue to collect the rent and manage that. And for our investors, we want it to feel like they’re involved, that they get to see what’s happening, but they don’t have to worry about all of that stress. For them, it’s easy. It’s almost like when you’re on Amazon and you just three clicks, you get some you order something, and it shows up at your doorstep a few hours later. That type of experience is what we really aim for our investors, even though there’s a lot of complications to get there. So, I think the biggest thing that is a challenge is ensuring that you don’t go over budget in the renovation. It’s really easy to do.

Eve: [00:31:05] That’s for sure.

Jamison: [00:31:06] When you get into one, a project, you say, oh, let’s do that, let’s do that, let’s do that. And then you kind of realize, look, you have to have an ROI at the end of this, so you can’t do everything you want to do. You have to be strategic about that and you have to hit deadlines. If one thing gets pushed back, then it pushes everything back. So, that’s the biggest challenge.

Eve: [00:31:30] And that must have been super big the last couple of years because the construction industry got really weird there.

Jamison: [00:31:38] Yeah, yeah, prices went up. It was harder to get materials. So, we were, we tried to be ahead of that. We tried to order stuff well in advance, so that helped us. Still, there were some things that we just couldn’t get for a long time, right? But we think about that. We try to get ahead of the game. You know, and then the other big challenge is finding good deals. And we are very picky about the deals that we do because we don’t have to do deals, meaning we’re going to only do deals that we really believe we can achieve, and we have a high level of confidence. Some of the ones on the fence we’ll look at and we’ll pass on. Other people might move on it because they need to deploy capital, or they need to keep their investors happy or whatever. For us, we’re not going to do deal unless we really have a high level of confidence. We believe in it, and that means we pass on a lot of deals, we see a lot of them, and we just say, look, we’ll let somebody else take that. We’re going to go after something that we think has a better opportunity. Which, we want to keep the risk as low as we can.

Jamison: [00:32:48] So, finding deals is hard in this market. And my co-founder, John, he runs day to day. He’s the CEO of ABI Multifamily, they’re the largest broker in Arizona that sells apartments. They sold 125 apartments so far this year. And that’s where we get our deal flow. A lot of times old clients call him and say, hey, look at this. Here’s a project that I’m looking at selling, and we buy it off market. So, figuring out where those deals are going to come from, especially in a market where it’s tight, has been really important for us and we have a big advantage there. But it can be really challenging to find those deals and, that really have a good amount of juice left in them.

Eve: [00:33:36] So, are you thinking about expanding operations beyond Flagstaff and Phoenix and maybe even beyond Arizona?

Jamison: [00:33:45] Yeah, yeah. So, working with Small Change is kind of our first step into that, where we can now raise capital from investors nationally. Prior to that, we’ve only raised capital from Arizona investors through the Arizona crowdfunding laws. So, we’re excited to begin to raise capital and to begin building in our investor base nationally and over the next 18 months, I think they’ll be, actually sooner than that, probably six months, I think we’ll have some exciting announcements, more things we’re doing nationally to meet our mission. We want to, we have about 5000 investors in Arizona so far, and we’re just in Arizona. So, we want to go nationally and offer what we are doing to the whole country. And we’re really excited about that. And so, I think it’s going to be an exciting time for us. We’ve been building towards this. Our momentum just kind of keeps carrying us through to this next step.

Eve: [00:34:41] Well, thank you very much for joining me. I’m really looking forward to seeing the next exciting announcements.

Jamison: [00:34:47] Yes.

Eve: [00:34:48] Thanks, Jamison.

Jamison: [00:34:49] We’re excited, thanks again for having us. We love everything Small Change is doing and love to partner with you guys and you guys are great to work with. So, thanks for having us on.

Eve: [00:35:00] Appreciate that. I appreciate that.

Eve: [00:35:10] That was Jamison Manwaring, CEO of Neighborhood Ventures. Jamison is putting his determination to work building his innovative company in Arizona. It’s a real estate company for sure. They buy, hold and sell property, but the capital plan is innovative, with the growing pool of Arizona residents permitted to invest through Arizona intrastate securities law. He’s seen early success, and he’s taken his plan to the national stage, raising funds, for a second time now, on my crowdfunding platform, SmallChange.co. We can’t wait to see how it turns out.

Eve: [00:36:00] I hope you enjoyed today’s guest and our deep dive. You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at RethinkRealEstateforGood.co. There’s lots to listen to there. You can support this podcast by sharing it with others, posting about it on social media or leaving a rating and review. To catch all the latest from me you can follow me on LinkedIn. Even better, if you’re ready to dabble in some impact investing yourself head on over to wefunder.com/smallchange, where you can invest directly in Small Change and our mission to democratize capital formation to create impact in commercial real estate development. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music, and a big 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 Jamison Manwaring

Transforming neighborhoods through crowdfunding.

“The idea of harnessing small-scale investors for real estate development is gaining momentum nationally, boosted by digital platforms and federal rule changes” writes Carey L. Biron, for Thomson Reuters Foundation. “Backers say the approach opens up real estate investing to a broader pool of buyers and gives locals a say in neighborhood investments – and a stake in any profits, too.”

Since 2016 crowdfunding laws have been driving investment and the US market is estimated to reach USD250.62 billion by 2030. “Real estate has traditionally been left to those who already have money to make more money. And crowdfunding gives you a platform to democratize that,” says Molly McCabe, chief executive of investment advisory firm HaydenTanner. “This is one way to really ensure the community gets to participate and benefit from what’s being created, and to have a sense of ownership.”

Crowdfunding not only makes real estate investing available to a broader pool of buyers, but it provides previously unobtainable finance for unusual projects and marginalized minority and women developers.

Lyneir Richardson, chief executive of social enterprise Chicago TREND, is one of those developers. He crowdfunded a partial purchase of Walbrook Junction, a shopping center in a Black neighborhood of Baltimore which has seen major decline in its 40 years. Richardson held more than 60 meetings with local groups and 90 percent of his 130 investors, who invested between $1,000 and $50,000, care about or have some connection to the neighborhood. He now intends to revitalize Walbrook Junction to bring life and wealth back into the neighborhood.

Another developer, Joanna Bartholomew, used crowdfunding to raise capital for Aruka Midway. The project aims to restore 23 Baltimore row houses which have been vacant for decades. “We did it with the purpose of showing people you can have a stake in the neighborhoods you’re from, or neighborhoods that remind you of where you grew up,” said Bartholomew, chief executive of O’Hara Developments.“That you’re able to invest in your own backyard.” This was Bartholomew’s first try at crowdfunding and although it took more work than she expected, it brought her almost 80 new investors.

Both developers raised capital through Small Change, an online platform launched in 2016 by Eve Picker. Small Change has helped raise almost $11 million to build housing for the homeless, transform empty buildings into corner shops, put retail in food deserts “and everything in between” said Picker. More than half of those developments are women- or minority-owned, and most would not have succeeded in seeking traditional financing. “Projects like these require patient money and a long-term hold,” she said. “You have to wait while the neighborhood catches up.”

Read the original article here. Or listen to podcast interviews with Lyneir Richardson and Joanna Batholomew.

Image courtesy of Joanna Bartholomew

Dump it Right There.

In 1992 Julie Bargmann founded D.I.R.T (Dump It Right There) studio, a landscape architecture firm in Charlottesville, VA. She set out to focus on regenerating contaminated and forgotten urban and post industrial sites. Early on, one of the studio’s first major projects catapulted her work into the spotlight and became the early poster child for D.I.R.T.

The Vintondale Reclamation Park, a 25 acre park on a former coal mine near Pittsburgh, was designed in collaboration with an artist, an historian and a hydrogeologist. An acid-polluted stream was diverted into a series of six pools, where limestone, engineered soil, and plants leeched toxins out of the water. Vintondale became a model for bioremediation and was featured in the Cooper Hewitt National Design Triennial.

Many other projects have followed, like Urban Outfitters Headquarters at the abandoned Navy Yard in Philadelphia, transformed with pathways, lawns, and dog parks. Julie won a 2014 Honor Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects for this project. Or Core City Park in Detroit, a collaboration with Philip Kafka of Prince Concepts, converting an abandoned parking lot into a public park. Completed in April 2019 this project was featured in Landscape Architecture magazine.

While studying at Harvard, Julie came under the wing and influence of Michael Van Valkenburgh. “Her energy and enthusiasm made her stand out”, he recalled, and she later worked in his firm. She was also influenced by Frederick Law Olmsted, the 19th century architect of Central Park, and Robert Smithson, the artist-designer known for “Spiral Jetty,” a large-scale earthwork sculpture in Utah.

Julie is a professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia, and was named Professor Emerita this past summer (2022) after teaching there since the 1990s. In 2021 she was named Innovator of the Year by Architectural Record and that same year was awarded the inaugural Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize (described as the landscape architecture equivalent of a Pritzker Prize). In 2001 she won a National Design Award for Environmental Design, and in 2007 was awarded the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Urban Edge Award. She was a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome for Landscape Architecture in 1990, and a United States Artists Fellow in 2008. She was named as one of the most influential people of the 21st century by CNN and Time Magazine.

Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:07] 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.

Eve: [00:00:42] Meet Julie Bargmann, the inaugural recipient of the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize. This prize has been described as the landscape architecture equivalent of a Pritzker Prize, so it’s a really big deal. What makes this most exciting is the work that is being honored. In 1992, Julie founded Dirt Studio, which stands for Dump It Right There. She was intent on regenerating contaminated and forgotten urban and post-industrial sites. And it all began near Pittsburgh at the Vintondale Reclamation Park, a 25-acre park on a former coal mine. The end result became the early poster child of her business, a model for bioremediation that was featured in the Cooper Hewitt National Design Triennial. Today, she is often referred to as the fairy godmother of industrial wastelands, as she crafts amazing new landscapes out of the contaminated and toxic sites she works on. You’ll want to hear more.

Eve: [00:01:59] 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: [00:02:20] Julie, it’s really an incredible honor to have you on my show today. Thank you for joining me.

Julie Bargmann: [00:02:25] Yes, I am honored. I love that you chose a landscape architect to enter into this realm of speaking about real estate. I’m actually quite passionate about it in terms of what landscape architecture’s role is within it.

Eve: [00:02:41] So, you know, I agree with you. And too often I think architects think about landscape as an afterthought, but it should really be an integral part of building and design. Absolutely, absolutely. So, I’m going to start by saying you studied to be an artist. So, where did your fascination with degraded and toxic landscapes begin?

Julie: [00:03:05] Well, I often tell the story of driving with my, riding in a station wagon down the New Jersey Turnpike and being completely fascinated by the refineries. I don’t know what it was. It was just kind of this perverse attraction, wondering, like, what is going on there and who’s working in there and what’s it like in there? So, I think that was a little kernel of it. And then I just kept finding myself attracted to working landscapes and working cities. So, off I went to Pittsburgh to study sculpture at Carnegie Mellon, and I love that city. I just, when I was there, the steel mills were still along the rivers. They were still belching smoke. It still smelled, which I thought was great, was all part of it. As an artist, I actually went into the steel mills because I wanted to see how they worked and who was working there, and I think that really did it. I still had no idea what I was going to do with my life. When later I discovered what landscape architecture was and that I could be kind of venturing into all these different types of landscapes, that was it. And not that landscape architecture at the point was kind of working in working landscapes, but I was kind of determined to do that.

Eve: [00:04:39] Yeah, but there’s a lot of very precious landscape architecture out there and what you’ve. And I think you really work in some of the worst and most toxic landscapes to be found. What about that is really interesting to you?

Julie: [00:04:56] Well, I think, first of all, I think the range that I like to be clear about with my work is that it does go to the biggest and the baddest, to the toxic, but also to the degraded. That is part of the kind of repertoire of industry. Right. It can be wicked and sometimes it can be kind of, quote unquote, inert but still impactful, you know. And the toxic ones, for a long time, I did projects with the EPA, and I was working on Superfund sites, which are the sites that are designated as kind of the biggest and the baddest. I think what I brought to that, which was completely unknown right then by the EPA for years and maybe to date, is the kind of cultural and social aspect of these landscapes. You know, they were totally focused on the remediation, right? The quote unquote, cleaning up of these landscapes. But I was like, well, come on, there’s kind of more to it than that. There are generations that still live around these sites whose grandfather probably died, black lung. And so, there are connections there. And I actually stopped working with the EPA because I just felt like I was being in my head against a wall where it was difficult to integrate that kind of factor. They always felt an enormous amount of urgency in kind of doing the fix and getting out of there versus actually engaging the community in what might be an incremental regeneration of that site. So, they’re quite myopic.

Eve: [00:06:45] Yeah, it sounds like they’re focused on fixing a problem, whereas what you saw was a future asset, really, for the community.

Julie: [00:06:54] Correct? Yeah. I don’t know if you remember way back to spell check.

Eve: [00:06:58] Oh, yes.

Julie: [00:06:59] Yeah. When I used to type in remediation, it would say correcting a fault. And then if you type in regeneration, it says creating a new. And I was like, Boom, that’s it. I’m never going to use the word remediation anymore because that’s not what this work should necessarily be about.

Eve: [00:07:20] So, I read somewhere that the Vintondale Reclamation Park, which is actually it’s a 35-acre site near Pittsburgh, was pivotal. But I’d love to know why.

Julie: [00:07:31] Well, you know, at the time I was really, really interested in this work. I did, as part of my academic research, because that’s around the time I started teaching. I did a tour around the United States just to kind of get a sense of what was going on. And I got this call, kind of out of the blue to join this team to work on Eve: Vintondale and. Well, actually to work on acid mine drainage, right. Which is the by-product of coal mining. And we were looking for to actually look at prototypes and models for, you can imagine, there are so many towns, post mining towns, former mining towns, that are plagued by acid mine drainage. So, to be on this team was my dream come true. There’s multidisciplinary. There was an artist, hydrogeologist, historian, who I, historians I love, you know, scientists, too. I love them too. And the community involved and AmeriCorps volunteers. It was just this collective effort to look at basically making the transformation of acid mine drainage visible, not behind a fence. You know, let the community know. One of the by-products, too, is yellow boy. Yellow boy is yellow boy. This is what it is. And this is you being a part of the next evolution of that landscape.

Julie: [00:09:14] Much like I was saying with the EPA in terms of trying to advocate for the community to be involved and not even maybe intensely involved, but at least a participant or a witness to what was going on in terms of the transformation here of acid mine drainage. That was, to me, a breakthrough in projects. And for me, it was a breakthrough in landscape architecture. This coincided, by the way, with a lot of the great projects that are in the Ruhr Valley of Germany. So, what we did was, in essence, make that science visible so that they could say, oh, I get it. You know, the acid, mine drainage is coming from mine number one, and it’s going through this system, and it’s coming out as biologically rich and being drained back into the streams. So, I basically, I call it an ecological washing machine. And that’s what was right near a bike trail. So, lots of folks are able to see it and nicely enough, it remains a model for the region.

Eve: [00:10:29] Interesting. So, when you work on a project like this, how does your work begin? Where does the inspiration come from?

Julie: [00:10:36] Oh, the history. Absolutely. Every time. Every time it’s the history of the site, which means the history of the people there. I just can never think about starting a project without really knowing what happened there before, because I feel that you cannot really propose anything about the future of the site unless you know it’s past, because it is all part of an evolution. It makes the process inclusive. It’s what I was thinking about in terms of private development, infusing the public in it for the public good. It’s the history. It’s the history. The history levels the playing field in terms of everyone who’s working on a project, because there’s a bigger story and a bigger picture. I feel that we want to be responsible to.

Eve: [00:11:35] So, is there an example of a project where the history took you in an unexpected direction or.

Julie: [00:11:43] Well, oh man. I guess I flash right to Detroit and I’m working with a wonderful, wonderful young developer there. And he is doing amazing things of investing in the public realm in the neighborhood, along with his private developments. And it was our like our I call it our first date. We just, I just came out and I was like, okay, you know, let’s look at the site. And we’re standing in front of like a blank, seemingly blank, parking lot covered with concrete. And he said, what would you do? And I knew that there was a historic engine house that was there. And I was like, Hmm. And it was raised in the seventies. And I was like, Hmm. I think that’s when they pushed, you know, the buildings into their basements. And I turned to him, and I said, dig. And he went. Okay. And he had a front-end loader there the next day. And I just was crossing my fingers about what would come up because I wanted to, I thought about integrating it into this public park, this community park we are making. And sure enough, beautiful redstone came up to make these, kind of, scattered little terraces. And then one day up came a giant piece of sandstone that said 1893 on it.

Eve: [00:13:22] Oh, wow.

Julie: [00:13:23] I was like, Oh. I was both very happy and very relieved. I was like, That’s it, that’s it. We found it. We found the material evidence of that history, and the park suddenly became actually quite old. I can’t tell you. I just got goose bumps again. I do every time when I think about it. The developer, he tells the story to everyone and the story kind of spreads. And everyone is knowing an essential part of history of their neighborhood, of Core city. That was unexpected and wonderful.

Eve: [00:13:58] That does sound wonderful. Is this the developer who’s working on the Caterpillar housing?

Julie: [00:14:03] Yes.

Eve: [00:14:04] Very unusual architecture as well. Quonset huts, right?

Julie: [00:14:09] Yes. He is having some architects do a little twist on Quonset huts because he wants to take something that’s very affordable and make beautiful spaces that are not terribly expensive so that they’re accessible for more folks. So, he’s quite adventurous that way and he, I just feel like, you know, his name is Philip Kafka, has his heart so much in the right place. I mean his, the proportion of like, I can’t remember, he loves trees, and I can’t remember what number he’s up to. But he’s very proud of the number of trees that he’s planted in Core City. For instance, the caterpillar. I think we planted 200, maybe 300. I can’t remember. He goes 200 trees and eight units. That’s how he thinks of it.

Eve: [00:15:04] Do you find that you need to educate people on this? Because this makes me think immediately of the people around where I live who are who are mowing down enormous old historic trees.

Julie: [00:15:17] Yeah.

Eve: [00:15:18] Because they want a flat piece of land to build their house on. But the tree seems to be the most valuable asset they have. I don’t understand it.

Julie: [00:15:27] Absolutely. I mean, everyone is quite used to a tabula rasa. You know, it’s the kind of easiest way to go. And that’s why, you know, again, I want to emphasize history of the site. Right? The trees are very much that history of the site. And you can’t replace that history, you know? Right. You just can’t. I mean, some history is buried underground like that park in Cork City, and some is just looming large, you know. And so, this is where I constantly go back to history, and I constantly go back to telling stories. Because most people like stories. And most people like to be part of a story. And that’s basically the form of education. Like I’m flashing to working with Ford Motor Company on the River Rouge plant and it took telling the story about the Coke ovens, which they wanted to wipe out. One, say we did our homework and said, you know, that part of it is toxic, that part is not, you know.

Julie: [00:16:41] So we did that homework, the environmental homework. And then when we did the history, we were reminding them that they were looking at a piece of incredible history of this Rouge River plant being the first manufacturing plant in the world. In the world. You know, so it occurred to us and they kind of came to that that was too important a story. You know, it was just too rich and too significant to so many people, so many generations that worked at Fords, they called it Fords, to obliterate. And they didn’t have to. They didn’t really have to. And that was the education part, too. You know, I called it homework and I found that, you know, especially as a woman, I needed to kill them with knowledge and just say, hey.

Eve: [00:17:48] Was it easy?

Julie: [00:17:50] Sometimes more than other. I have to say, I even changed my tone. You know, I think early on I was pretty insistent. And then, I think I was more empathetic, you know, to the folks who were really dealing with the EPA, and.

Eve: [00:18:05] Yes.

Julie: [00:18:06] And a lot of pressure to remediate. And I encourage them, I’m like, come on, let’s talk about this. Let’s show them a careful mapping. Because they didn’t know how to map. You know, they showed the flow diagram of the coke ovens, and we did another map of it and said, look, you know, this is the part that’s harmful. So, we need to deal with it in another way and this other stuff we can deal in another way. So, you don’t need a tabula rasa. You can have your cake, your coke ovens and you’re, there We put remediation fields and remediation gardens, which they just loved, you know, they just whew. You know, they put it on their website in all caps, you know?

Eve: [00:18:49] Yeah. Well, it tells an amazing story. When you work on a very large project, what does your team look like?

Julie: [00:18:58] Oh, wow. Well, sometimes I work with another landscape architect. A DIRT studio is modeled after an artist’s studio. So, the most folks I’ve had been working with me is maybe five. So, if it’s a really large project, I need, I look for a bit more firepower and so, that’s really fun working with another landscape architect. Always engineers are on there, and I think more unusually, is getting scientists on the team. I always insist about that. Like when we’re starting and the client, I’m like, no, we need this scientist. Which they, you know, they didn’t know would be at all necessary. And like I said earlier, I, which is really unusual for a client to hear, is to have a historian on the project. And then when I’m talking about like scientists, too, it’s just not even kind of like one type of scientist, soil scientist, wildlife biologist, you know, that when I had a phytoremediation scientist. And it’s, I have to tell you, it is so wonderful. I mean, my learning curve is always like vertical, you know, on these projects by bringing in. Yeah.

Eve: [00:20:22] Fabulous. So, you know, you’ve done a really broad range of projects. Like there’s some for retail clients and…

Julie: [00:20:31] Yes.

Eve: [00:20:31] …some remediation. What are some examples of the project you’ve taken on, what they were and what they became?

Julie: [00:20:40] The most kind of in a way obvious, because they’re out there, retail client was Urban Outfitters. And, with Urban Outfitters it was really interesting. They were moving from Rittenhouse Square into tight little quarters out to what was really at the time the hinterlands of the Philadelphia Navy Yard. And, you know, I worked very, very closely with the founder, Dick Kayne, which was a blessing and a curse. He’s quite something, but we got along famously. And for a project that was coming from some folks that are so aesthetically based to be kind of more, more like historically based and environmentally based was, you know, that was a challenge. I, quite frankly, learned at some point not to even talk about what I was doing, what I was proposing in terms of history and the environment. It just wasn’t of enormous interest to them. You know, as I say, I snuck sustainability out in the back door and.

Eve: [00:21:59] I hope he’s not listening.

Julie: [00:22:01] Oh, that’s OK. Dick is so cool, you know, he won’t mind. He knows I love him. We used to speak our secret language of Latin, of plants because he loved plants. So, we just got along great. And he was cool, he just was like, Yeah, bring it on. And he never really asked that many questions. There was an amazing amount of trust between us, and that’s something that I can’t speak enough about is, as you probably know from projects, that trust is enormous. And so, with the Urban Project, there wasn’t an enormous amount of remediation that needed to be done. Some lead soils had to be dealt with. And, you know, lead is tricky, man. So, they didn’t want to go through the process of other types of remediation. So, one okay way of dealing with it is actually to encapsulate it. So, it was encapsulated.

Julie: [00:23:04] But the big thing with Urban Outfitters that was tricky was when it was going into like phase four and being built around the historic dry dock that was right in the center of this gorgeous, you know, water body from way back when for the huge ships. I found myself in that precarious place of kind of, I say, I always kind of say, defending the public realm within a private enterprise. That’s when I have to say, I think design gets really tricky, you know, because there was really kind of like a teetering point where literally something that we would do, we were forming, would feel too private, you know. And how is it that we could make this campus that was private, but parts of it could be shared? So that’s, I have to say, a big deal.

Eve: [00:24:04] It’s like pushing against a gated community, right?

Julie: [00:24:07] Yeah. So, I mean, I have to say, that’s what I feel like in landscape architecture, because we’re dealing with ground, and I know this is the case in most development and I’ve had projects where, I’m just realizing I’m picturing a good old fax I sent sometime where it said I quit. Because, you know, the commitment to the public realm wasn’t there, you know, which I’m learning from working with Kafka in, you know, in Detroit is so essential. Maybe I knew it intuitively. So essential in terms of building that quality of common ground that then makes sense for the individual happily living in their private abode. So, yeah.

Eve: [00:25:00] That probably touches on my next question. You’ve written about the overlap between poor and minority communities and contaminated soils, and I certainly know of that. I mean, I have to ask, how and why did that happen and how do we fix it? Why is it that poor and minority communities have had the brunt of this mess, basically?

Julie: [00:25:23] You think about industries and how they would kind of most conveniently cite themselves, you know, and when industries were getting up and running before all the environmental legislation starting in 1973, when you think about it, my God, that’s not that long ago. You know, most of the industries started up then, you know, they were looking for floodplains to discharge all of their nasty stuff and they were looking at a lot of land that did not have a lot of value to have people be downwind and downstream from nasty stuff. So, poor soils, poor people, they go together. I mean, it’s just a thing to be conscious of now, which I think a lot of folks are.

Julie: [00:26:14] I mean, there is the kind of whole movement of environmental justice. Industries are being held accountable. I like to think that, you know, the ground that we live on is, and work on, is becoming more just. And I think it is, I think I like to think it is. I should say it should be because I think folks are much more aware. If you asked somebody what a Superfund site was, you know, what, ten years ago, 15 years ago, they wouldn’t know what you’re talking about. The level of environmental awareness has just gone up so high. But the next thing is the action to enforce it and act upon it. And I don’t think that most folks, in what the things that they’re proposing, you know, you look at developers working in Richmond, or any working city and their projects are going to be scrutinized. Yeah.

Eve: [00:27:18] Yeah, I think that’s true. So, there’s been a definite shift, but I always wonder whether it’s still too easy to forget about the poor communities. And you know, and if sufficient funds are being deployed to make those contaminated lands into assets there. Someone has to start a project, right. They have to have the funds to start it and I don’t think that’s equitable yet.

Julie: [00:27:48] Right. So, for instance, you know, I’m flashing back to Detroit where I’ve done these projects and I’m thinking about how, you know, and you probably know about some of these Eve, these deals are being struck with developers where it’s like, okay, we’ll sell you this land, you know, but you’re also going to be responsible for this land, which will be, you have to make something there to benefit the existing, often poor, community. I’m optimistic about initiatives like that. It’s kind of, or it is, forcing developers who I think could very well be just carpetbaggers, you know, in a disinvested, deep populated city like Detroit to make them more civic minded.

Julie: [00:28:49] I was running around Detroit with the former Planning Director Morris Cox. And there’s one man there who’s planting a bunch of tree farms. And I was kind of disgusted, as much as I love trees. And Maurice asked me, he goes, What’s the problem? And I said, I know it maybe improves the quality, the value of the land here, but who is it doing that for and what at all about tt is civic? You know, I’m like, where are the trees along the street where are the. And I just, I kind of went on my rant to just dissect it for what public good a private enterprise was doing, you know? And he was like, oh, and I said, you should insist. You should insist that, yeah, the city will sell you this land, but you need to do this and this for the public realm.

Eve: [00:30:00] I always thought there was just a little bit of a problem with our political structure because someone who has some power to make these decisions may have been an insurance agent in a past life. They don’t necessarily have any training on landscape or architecture or urban design or how to make better civic places. And they’re really given enormous power to control what happens in those places.

Julie: [00:30:28] Yeah.

Eve: [00:30:29] That’s a shame.

Julie: [00:30:31] I’m sorry, did you say planning folks?

Eve: [00:30:35] Well, planning folks are a little bit better because to be a planning person, you’ve got to have some background in planning. No, I’m thinking like a mayor or someone on city council who has.

Julie: [00:30:45] Oh, my God,

Eve: [00:30:46] The power to make a vote and doesn’t really have any of the necessary education or understanding, right?

Julie: [00:30:53] Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I have to jump in here to, I mean, I’m so excited to say this because I always say, like, I have a huge crush on mayors, you know, and that happened from being part of the Mayor’s Institute on City Design.

Eve: [00:31:08] Oh, yes.

Julie: [00:31:10] And I was on many sessions and blah, blah, blah, but regional and national and I just think they’re brilliant. I just really think, you know, having been in there and, you know, just one on one or just the mayors, you know, talking about a specific project, but some more in general. Just everyone I know, I saw that light bulb go up above their head and they were like, we are the architect of this city. You know, if we can’t make an informed decision, we better surround ourselves themselves with somebody who could help them. Yeah.

Eve: [00:31:52] That’s a great outcome.

Julie: [00:31:54] Yeah.

Eve: [00:31:54] So, I want to ask you about this incredible honor that’s been bestowed on you. You’re the first inaugural laureate for the Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize. It’s not just National, it’s international.

Julie: [00:32:10] Yeah.

Eve: [00:32:11] What does that mean to you?

Julie: [00:32:13] Well, it means a lot to me, obviously, but I can’t not be. But for me, it’s what it means to the discipline, my discipline. And that has to do with, I think, what I might represent. And that is, much like Cornelia Oberlander, who it’s named for, I decided I could take risks and I wanted to take risks. I had the advantage of teaching, so I always say I was kept by the university. But what I found is that there was something that the jury was saying in terms of the value of having a critical practice, not a commercial one, having one that was going to get out there. And the other thing was to influence a good many students after 27 years of teaching. So, that was heartening to me about receiving the prize. I’m just enormously proud, and I’m enormously proud of my discipline. You know, I’m hoping that what my getting the prize communicates is for people to go ahead, you know, be fearless, kick some ass, you know, just do it. Don’t be afraid. Yeah.

Eve: [00:33:31] So, I have to ask you, is there anyone following in your footsteps? Anyone who’s coming up young in the ranks, who’s fearless, doing really interesting things?

Julie: [00:33:42] Yeah, there are former students who are doing it. I even swell up with pride right now. My former associate, David Hill, of Hill Works is just doing some amazing projects. He’s based in Auburn, Alabama. And another former student, and also a dear friend of an architect, I’ve known her since she was nine years old, Maura Rockcastle and Ross Altheimer with TEN x TEN architects, Chloe Hawkins. Nicely enough, I think I can list a good number of folks. And also I think that I have kind of a solidarity, a group that is kind of a support group, I think of Kate Orff. Kate is absolutely fantastic and she’s doing unbelievable work and I can’t think of names right now. They’re out there, and I just know that, you know, there are a lot of emails that just say, you go girl, you know?

Eve: [00:34:46] And so, you got a little bit of prize money. What do you plan to do with that?

Julie: [00:34:50] Oh, okay. Well, I’m looking outside at my Bambi. My Airstream, Bambi. She’s named Cornelia. And she and I are going to take that cross-country trip that I took, it will be what’s 1993? What is the arithmetic? But it’s a lot of time. That mining tour that I told you about. So, I want to do that again. I want to stop at DIRT projects along the way, see how they’re doing, you know, visit with the old pals that I built it with. Hit some more Rust Belt cities. I have a project in Pittsburgh to stop at. And, you know, I think I’m just going to keep going west and look at some big holes in the ground again. I liked them.

Eve: [00:35:45] So, I’ll be really interested to see what comes out of them.

Julie: [00:35:50] Yeah, I hope so. The Cultural Landscape Foundation who has bestowed the prize, I’m hoping they will put together some sort of blog or some sort of something, you know, of my time on the road. That’d be fun.

Eve: [00:36:07] Well, I really, thoroughly enjoyed talking with you. Your work is fabulous, and I can’t thank you enough. And I can’t wait to see what’s next.

Julie: [00:36:18] Thanks. Great. Thank you.

Eve: [00:36:21] Okay.

Julie: [00:36:22] It’s been a privilege.

Eve: [00:36:30] I hope you enjoyed today’s guest and our deep dive together. You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at RethinkRealEstateforGood.co. There’s lots to listen to there. If you like what you heard, you can support this podcast by sharing it with others, posting about it on social media, or leaving a rating and review. To catch all the latest from me, you can follow me on LinkedIn. Even better, if you’re ready to dabble in some impact investing, head on over to smallchange.co, where I spend most of my time. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music. And a big 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 Julie Bargmann