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It’s a Buckminster Fuller thing.

Judi Lynn Brown, co-founder and Chief Impact office of CivicMakers, is a creative systems and design practitioner. She is a member of a new generation of progressive and inclusive change-makers who embrace civic technology along with “radically inclusive, participatory governance structures.”

CivicMakers, which is based in the Bay Area, was created to make gathering spaces for those interested in public impact projects and civic innovation. It has since evolved into an innovation and engagement firm that provides “service design, community engagement and digital strategy to government agencies, nonprofits and civic technology companies.”

Born in southern California and raised in Nevada, Judi comes from a working class family where neither parent attended college. She was raised as a Catholic, came out in her mid-20’s and feels “queer activism is absolutely a model for sustainability.” Judi’s early life experiences suggested the “world-saver” path she would later take and her first professional experiences in nonprofit management and corporate philanthropy led her to look for more “creative ways to change parts of systems that currently don’t work for 100% of humanity.”

Prior to CivicMakers, Judi worked as a design strategist with Collective Invention, a social innovation firm working in education and community development. And she also did survey development and evaluation work for Zawadisha, a micro-lending fund for female entrepreneurs in Kenya. Judi she worked on a project involving the first-ever impact-rated municipal bonds, and on homeless issues (as a nonprofit board member).

Insights and Inspirations

  • Human-centred design (HCD) is an approach to problem-solving that puts the people at the heart of the design process. It’s all about designing for public impact.
  • Civicmakers applies human centered design to disciplines like strategic planning and community engagement. They also use systems thinking because being in the public sector means there’s no designing in a vacuum.
  • Judi hates scale. Her ambition is to remain hyper local, digging into the minutia of each community she works with.
Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:07] Hi there. Thanks for joining me on Rethink Real Estate. 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. When I’m not hosting the show, I’m running my real estate crowdfunding platform, SmallChange.co, where you’ll find impact real estate investment opportunities open to everyone. Or you can learn more about me and catch up on some podcasts at my Web site EvePicker.com.

Eve: [00:00:59] Today, I’m talking with Judi Lynn Brown, a self-confessed world saver. She’s one of a new set of progressive change makers in support of radical inclusion. Her early career involved some professional stints that disheartened her, and she decided that non-profits and corporate philanthropy were not for her. Instead, she decided to figure out a creative way to change a system that currently doesn’t work for 100 percent of humanity. And so she co-founded CivicMakers, an innovation and engagement firm that provides design and digital strategy services to support excellent community engagement. Hyper local is big in Judi’s mind.

Eve: [00:01:47] 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 go to Patreon.com/rethinkrealestate to support this podcast for the price of a cup of coffee.

Eve: [00:02:08] Hi Judi. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Judi Lynn Brown: [00:02:10] Hi Eve. Thanks for having me.

Eve: [00:02:12] Yeah, so I was really fascinated by the company you launched called CivicMakers, which is a great name, by the way.

Judi: [00:02:19] Thank you.

Eve: [00:02:20] I was wondering how long ago you launched it and why.

Judi: [00:02:25] Yeah, thanks for that question. CivicMakers, we’re kind of a unique firm in that we actually started as a meetup.

Eve: [00:02:34] Oh.

Judi: [00:02:35] Right around mid 2014, my co-founder, who I actually met while I was in grad school at Presidio Graduate School in San Francisco. He was working for change.org at the time. So he’s kind of in this emerging civic technology space. Prior to that, he had spent seven years in local government, and I was in school studying public administration and really just became fascinated with the concept of reimagining the design and delivery of public services by involving the people who are served in that process.

Eve: [00:03:13] What a unique thought.

Judi: [00:03:15] Imagine that, right?

Eve: [00:03:18] Yes.

Judi: [00:03:18] Revolutionary. So CivicMakers, like I said, started as a meet up, CivicMakers.meetup.com. My co-founder started hosting these events around the Bay Area that were a mix of salons, panel discussions, unconferences with a wide array of topic areas from public broadband to democracy in the workplace. And at that time, after I graduated, I was doing some work with a small social innovation firm that was run by some really incredible women. And I started getting involved, helping Lawrence, who’s my co-founder, with events for CivicMakers in about April, I think, of 2015. By August, we kind of started accidentally getting hired to do services. So, we’re like, OK, I guess we’re a services firm now. Prior to that, we were actually pursuing our work as a civic technology firm. So CivicMakers was going to be a platform that would connect consultants, practitioners, and developers in this emerging civic innovation space. So we pitched to Y Combinator. We went through that whole experience of putting the pitch deck together, trying to find a chief technology officer. And then it just kind of turned out that we were the platform, in fact, because what we love to do is bring people together and provide space for them to imagine their big creative ideas and bring them to life. So fast forward, you know, several years and we’re a seven-person civic design firm. We work primarily with municipalities throughout Northern California. We have some clients in California as well. And it’s all in applying human centered design to disciplines like strategic planning, community engagement. And I get to lead up a lot of our immersive learning experiences, which is really fun for me. So, it’s facilitation and coaching and… Yeah, so that’s the origin.

Eve: [00:05:29] So your business really grew out of a real need because people started hiring you?

Judi: [00:05:35] Yeah, it continues to evolve in that way, right. I think that having that as a foundation, you know, we never put together a business plan in the beginning for our services. The challenge is that we’re very responsive and adaptive. So that means that we are somewhat obsessively going back and examining the services, how we talk about them, who the clients are. You know, we’re also beholden to the public procurement process, you know, so there aren’t always RFPs issued that ask for the type of services that we do, but that’s grown over the years.

Eve: [00:06:17] Just for the sake of our audience. What exactly is human centered design?

Judi: [00:06:22] Excellent question, Eve. Thank you for that. So human centered design is a design process that incorporates human input throughout. This was highly popularized about 30 years ago with firms like IDO, the Stanford d.school, and traditionally has been applied to, you know, technology products. For example, like all the apps that we use, go through a process of empathizing with users, defining what exactly the market is, what exactly the problem is they’re trying to solve, ideating around how to solve that problem in a unique way, prototyping. So, of course, we’re not building it before. We are testing small increments of what a product or service could look like. And then we continue to test that with users. So that’s how that plays out in that technology space or private industry. We take that process, and we apply it to things like programs, policies, procedures within the public sector. So the idea that we’re not just creating programs that exist within the minds of our so-called experts, people who have some letters after their name or have been working in a particular field for a long time, they’re an integral part of that process, but they’re not the only part of the process. So we bring in the end users.

Eve: [00:07:50] So and I also read on your site about something called public impact design. Is that different than human centered design?

Judi: [00:07:59] That’s a great question. Early on, human centered design and design thinking in the public sector is kind of a bright, shiny object right now. It’s gaining momentum. It’s gaining traction. We can’t just take this particular methodology that has worked really well in the private sector, plop it into the public sector and assume it’s going to work well. So, we were playing around with this idea of how CivicMakers uniquely apply as human centered design. And it came up with this. It’s about public impact and it’s about designing for impact. And it’s not just that we use human centered design and the five phases of empathize to find IDA, prototype and test, but that we’re also bringing in systems thinking because we definitely in the public sector, there is no designing in a vacuum. Everything has some kind of reverberation or constraint, right, within a system. And then the other sort of methodology that’s part of that is reflective practice, which is something that a lot of professional fields, such as medical doctors do this where they have to constantly be learning and relearning about their practice, going through certifications, et cetera. So if we are to do that at a public administration level, pause and reflect on what we’re learning as individuals and how we’re applying that in our work, the idea here is that we create change by engaging individuals. That’s reflective practice, helping them collaborate and problem solve creatively with teams. That’s human centered design. And then this third layer is that this is all within, you know, arguably very broken systems. So…

Eve: [00:09:55] Yeah, no, it’s not easy to pause and reflect. I can’t remember when I did that. We are all moving very fast. And it’s that’s got to be pretty purposeful, I imagine.

Judi: [00:10:10] Yeah, definitely. And all of these, sort of, the idea that we’re pausing and reflecting on how we as individuals show up in the work, what are our unique superpowers. Right? How do those map to those of our teams? And then what are we really trying to achieve, those, sort of, systems level view. Even we as a small firm have a hard time living those values, right?

Eve: [00:10:37] Yeah, yeah. You talk about impact. How do you describe impact? What do you see as impact?

Judi: [00:10:45] Yeah, I don’t know that I have a good answer for that, Eve. When we started this firm and in grad school, I actually focused primarily on the concept of impact evaluation. And I did that through the lens of microfinance. And I found that impact can really only truly be defined from the perspective of those who are impacted. Right?

Eve: [00:11:13] Yes.

Judi: [00:11:14] So if we have the World Bank and the IMF and, you know, professors, folks who are, you know, doing extensive literature review and trying to create some sort of standardized framework by which we can measure something like, for example, a quality of life indicators over the life of the loan. We can’t do that in a meaningful way without also being able to source those indicators from people who are served. So, we have a really amazing intern from UC Berkeley right now who’s helping us to develop our theory of change.

Eve: [00:11:54] Mm hmm. I would love to see it. We developed our own little change index, which is our impactful tool and probably out of the same frustration or comments that you just made. I mean, in the physical world, you know, the impact tools we had when we developed this were leads ratings and oh, God, I don’t even know what else. But those those types of ratings for everyday people just make no sense at all.

Judi: [00:12:22] Yep.

Eve: [00:12:22] I mean, they had enough for me, a professional, to understand.

Judi: [00:12:26] Yep.

Eve: [00:12:27] I dug into my urban design background and my understanding of spaces and where people like to be and like to exist in affordable housing and job creation to kind of create a much simpler, more flexible view of what impact might be.

Judi: [00:12:43] Yep.

Eve: [00:12:43] And some of the indices out there were just downright scary.

Judi: [00:12:48] Yeah, and inaccessible, right?

Eve: [00:12:50] Very, very inaccessible. Well, you know, we work with regulation crowdfunding, which demands accessibility. The rule actually says that we need to write everything in plain English.

Judi: [00:13:01] Yep.

Eve: [00:13:02] And so that was kind of the driving force behind our stupid simple index.

Judi: [00:13:08] Yeah.

Eve: [00:13:09] Which actually took an awful long time to develop and figure out how it might work, applied to real estate. Not easy. Yeah. Yeah. I can imagine what you’re doing is even harder.

Judi: [00:13:21] Well I had a feeling, Eve, that this was definitely a topic that we could explore together because…

Eve: [00:13:30] Yes.

Judi: [00:13:30] Right, you accidentally start a civic design firm and accidentally become a human centered designer, and then you have to come up with something to call yourself so that the world knows how to position you within these structures that tell us where people are. Right?

Eve: [00:13:50] Yes.

Judi: [00:13:50] And so I took on this title of Chief Impact Officer, you know, a good six years ago. And I’ve realized that I don’t like any of those words.

Eve: [00:14:03] Yes.

Judi: [00:14:04] I don’t like chief. I am leery of the term impact because…

Eve: [00:14:09] I don’t like titles like Period.

Judi: [00:14:14] And I certainly don’t want to be known as an officer because, you know, I think that word from a public administration perspective, Eve, stay with me here, the idea that, you know, in the public sector, so many of our institutions are designed according to arbitrary hierarchies. Right. A lot of that comes from the sort of command and control this kind of like militaristic aspect of governance. So a lot of the language was

Eve: [00:14:49] Very, very male, you know.

Judi: [00:14:51] Oh. Yes, definitely extractive. Yes. Like, what is it? Divide and conquer. I’m constantly trying to sort of like de-violence or de-militarize my own language because even saying something like front line employees, you know, gives us a mental image of war, right?

Eve: [00:15:15] Yeah, it does. What are frontline employees? That is actually a first for me. I’ve never heard that.

Judi: [00:15:21] Oh, I’m so glad you asked that.

Eve: [00:15:24] I understand it, but it’s…

Judi: [00:15:26] Yeah, these are public facing employees.

Eve: [00:15:30] Oh.

Judi: [00:15:31] These are like the public servants at the DMV that no one is very excited to see, but play a very important role in shaping our cities, right.

Eve: [00:15:41] And so they’re at war with their customers.

Judi: [00:15:44] Exactly. And that’s the image that we’re painting in our heads of public service.

Eve: [00:15:49] Yeah, I worked in a public service job for a couple of years at the planning department.

Judi: [00:15:55] Um hmm.

Eve: [00:15:56] Actually, my boss was the past head of planning for San Francisco, and this was a few years ago and it was the best job I ever had. It was fantastic. It goes both ways. So the public didn’t always treat us very well.

Judi [00:16:11] Right, right. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I love hearing that, Eve. I think that there are many, many, many unsung heroes every day making our cities better. And, you know, I’ll give you an example. We’ve been fortunate enough to be doing this work with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. And essentially, it’s a training program for public facing employees. So those are the bus drivers, the ticket agents, the parking control officers. You know, the ones who drive those little they’re called gopher vehicles around. Everyone hates them, Eve. Even if you’re not getting a ticket, people see those gophers and they turn red. These people have arguably some of the most dangerous jobs because at least law enforcement, you know, they can defend themselves. Our parking control officers, they have stuff thrown at them. They’re yelled at. And so, part of these trainings are around how they can de-escalate potentially violent situations with the public.

Eve: [00:17:23] Wow. So what is impact then?

Judi: [00:17:27] Oh, right, yes, back to that, what is impact? Some of the metrics that I use are things like hugs and high fives. So, stay with me here, back when we used to be able to do workshops in person. I’ve done workshops with state employees for the California Department of Technology. So I’m a human centered design facilitator for their open enrolment trainings that are open to any state employee across the state. And then sometimes I’ll work within their leadership academy. So it’ll be like cybersecurity professionals or IT professionals. And, you know, we think about state government as being kind of, you know, not very human. So if I walk into a room of people who did not know each other, you know, four, five, six, seven hours prior to that, depending on how long the workshop is and we leave the room and people are giving each other hugs and high fives, that’s an indicator of impact to me.

Eve: [00:18:36] Mm hmm.

Judi: [00:18:37] I know it may sound just like you were saying, surprisingly simple, but the theory is that if we create internal bureaucracies that really respect the creative potential of everyone within that bureaucracy, regardless of where they sit, if people within a municipality, I get emails all the time from some of this really amazing work that I’m so humbled to be able to do, which will be like, I was about to leave the city until I was part of this learning experience.

Eve: [00:19:12] Oh, wow.

Judi: [00:19:13] Because…

Eve: [00:19:14] That’s a great result.

Judi: [00:19:16] Yeah. And those are the things, Eve, that I can’t really quantify. Like, I cannot demonstrate the ROI on the culture change work. That essentially is happening when we’re able to do this.

Eve: [00:19:32] I agree. I agree.

Judi: [00:19:34] And I’m sure you struggle with that, too.

Eve: [00:19:36] Well, we have some clearer indicators, but there were always challenges. Things don’t always work perfectly. But there are other returns on investment that are not, you know, indicator list that I certainly am aware of. Like, you know, the return on the pandemic and Black Lives Matters is filtering through. To my life in an unexpected way, as I’m sure many other people are feeling. So, you know, with, what a horrible year, with some really amazing outcomes.

Judi: [00:20:14] Absolutely.

Eve: [00:20:14] So, was that the way to get there? Probably not. But apparently it needed, there needed to be some sort of seismic event to make people sit up and think, right?

Judi: [00:20:27] Yeah, absolutely. That’s an excellent example. You know, there’s offices of racial equity popping up all over the country.

Eve: [00:20:37] Oh, yeah.

Judi: [00:20:37] So now we have equity officers. A few years ago, it was all about the chief innovation officers and the chief digital services officers. I don’t know if creating separate offices is really the way to do this, right?

Eve: [00:20:55] I’ve always felt like when I’m invited to be on an all-women’s panel at a conference, I just feel like it’s being invited to sit at the kid’s table.

Judi: [00:21:04] Yeah.

Eve: [00:21:04] So, you know, treating everyone equally is really the key. Separate office seems, you know, I don’t really fully understand it. But the way I’m feeling it in real estate is that more and more minority real estate developers are coming to us. It’s a pretty significant shift. And I’m loving that. It’s really pretty fabulous, and I’m convinced that’s a direct result of the last 18 months.

Judi: [00:21:34] Yeah. In theory, everyone treated equally. Love that. And, you know, there is a certain amount of reckoning that people who have historically had access, right. There’s a certain kind of empathy and humility that we as people of privilege have to be aware of every day and think about, what are we willing to give up to make up for some of the, you know, inequities that have existed? I started in sustainability, right. So, 10 years ago when I was in grad school to do a sustainable master’s in public administration, it was like chief sustainability offices and chief sustainability officer. Right. But like sustainability should be part of all of the work. Innovation should be part of all of the work. Equity should be part of all of the work. And I wonder if, you know, as part of this work that these offices are doing, if we can find ways to not be, you know, exclusive, like, here’s the all-women’s conference kind of thing, but really strategize how we might elevate and remove barriers, you know, and I think maybe what you are experiencing in real estate is a by-product of that. We do have to be intentional about barrier remover because it turns out we all succeed when we provide others with the same opportunities.

Eve: [00:23:11] So how does your work then translate to the physical environment? I have to ask that because, you know, real estate is what I think about.

Judi: [00:23:19] Yeah.

Eve: [00:23:19] But I mean, I’ve been to plenty of community meetings in my past, first as a planner in a planning department and also as a real estate developer. And they were always very difficult.

Judi: [00:23:32] Yeah.

Eve: [00:23:34] Meetings with very little meeting of the mind, really. You know, they and us, really, that’s what these meetings are typically. So how does this change that?

Judi: [00:23:46] Yeah, I was thinking about this in terms of some of the projects that. So I don’t need the community engagement efforts for our business. My business partner, Cristel, does. She has a background in planning and community development. She actually started her career at Google and then decided she wanted to do more meaningful work. You know, there are constraints, right, because if a planning department or a housing authority hires us to do community engagement. In some cases, they’re hiring us to do the sort of check the box, have a community meeting at 2pm on a Tuesday. That means the usual suspects show up. Like how many working mothers can show up to a public meeting at two p.m. on a Tuesday, right?

Eve: [00:24:34] Well, especially in underserved neighborhoods where often single mothers who are holding down several jobs.

Judi: [00:24:40] So, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And so the pandemic actually going back to what we were talking about a little bit earlier, has made these engagements slightly more accessible. I mean, of course, we still have the digital divide to maneuver, but we were doing a project with the housing authority in Silicon Valley and we were going to have a community meeting the following week before we got the shelter in place mandate, right. And the client would have been happy with twenty-five people showing up to that meeting. We move that online. We used various channels to market it, we made it accessible, we included subtitles, we did some in language facilitation, and we got three times the amount of participation than we had assumed we might get doing it in person. So that’s an example.

Eve: [00:25:45] That’s a great outcome. Yeah.

Judi: [00:25:48] And so how that translates to your point to the physical environment, of course, is that we have more voices saying, OK, if we want this percentage of this development to be affordable, what does that mean? And, you know, because there are some people, there’s like the YIMBYs and the NIMBYs, but like sometimes the YIMBYs are only YIMBYs if it’s like 20 percent affordable housing, but if it’s 40 percent, then they become NIMBY’s, right. So those are the kinds of you know, and then there’s there’s some pretty egregious and painful limitations around the Brown Act and and just some of the constraints that we have with true, meaningful community engagement. But if our clients also get it and they should, because when they engage community authentically into your point, Eve, you know in the planning process, it’s like, OK, we make a decision, we make a decision, we make a decision. And then it’s like, oh, let’s engage community and then community’s pissed off because they’re like, actually, why didn’t you engage us at the beginning, right?

Eve: [00:27:06] Yes. Yes.

Judi: [00:27:07] So our sort of human centered community engagement, like applying that human centered design lens to how we engage community offers to start that engagement much earlier. And it doesn’t have to be with a whole public meeting. Right. We’ve really been experimenting with this concept of civic councils so that there is there is like a learning opportunity. There’s like a co-ownership opportunity. And it’s not just this two-way us against them communication stream, but that we’re actually having deliberative dialogue around what’s going to change in our cities.

Eve: [00:27:48] Because change is scary, right?

Judi: [00:27:51] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s another thing that the pandemic has shown as though too, right. It is possible for our permitting processes to be online. It is possible for our engagement processes to be online. What would be really nice is if we were able to respond to crises which will just keep on coming, instead of react. So, so much of what we saw was reactive. But we’re also seeing those who are resistant to change. It’s the only thing that is constant, right?

Eve: [00:28:32] I think most people are scared of change. I have to keep reminding myself of that because I love change. I thrive on change. It just drives me. I’m married to someone who has trouble with change. He likes things the same. And I think most people do. And because they can’t visualize what is coming, it makes it really scary. And that’s hard to wrap your head around, I think.

Judi: [00:28:57] Yeah. So the way that shows up in our work, um, well, there’s definitely the built environment, but we do a lot of work around sort of digital infrastructure, digital services. We don’t build those things, but we do some of the engagement around them, right. So whether it is convening community to co-create, lots of alliteration there, digital privacy principles, or helping a municipality internally engage their employees, some of whom have been doing the same paper based process for 30 years, and have that fear they’re going to become irrelevant when their process is digitized. Right. That’s a real scary fear. And if we can get leaders to ask those people, these are not necessarily the quote unquote front line or public facing in some cases, but, you know, like payroll clerks, for example, like that’s still a job in a lot of municipal government. If we can bring them along and ask them, where are you seeing some of the greatest needs or gaps in services? How might we engage your human ingenuity to meet those while we can understand that a lot of your time that you would spend matching up paper-based time cards and doing data entry in a system from 1991 will be freed up. It’s not that they’re going to go away. Right, because…

Eve: [00:30:45] They’re going to do something different.

Judi: [00:30:46] Exactly. And if we ask them, what would you like to do, what are you seeing? As opposed to telling them we’re doing this whole project and it means that you know, 80 percent of your workday is going to change, then I think that we can minimize some of those shocks and some of the fear.

Eve: [00:31:08] So you said that you’ve been very responsive, little company. And I’m just wondering if you thought about how you’re going to scale or if you have a big, hairy, audacious goal.

Judi: [00:31:19] Yeah, I hate the concept of scale, Eve. I mean, maybe hate is a strong word. I am highly critical of the concept of scale because I think some of the magic that we get to co-create with our partner clients where we do that work is due to the sort of hyper localization, is due to the fact that, you know, like I live in San Francisco, I ride those buses with those operators that I’m training. Right. I visit the small businesses that the Office of Economic and Workforce Development is supporting. I think at some point, because we are also just like overachievers, we have a very rigorous internal strategic planning process. And at one point in time, I would say maybe around 2017, when we went from a two-person company to a three person company, we were like, oh, in 10 years we’re going to have 50 employees and we’re going to have offices here and offices here and. I just don’t know that that’s part of what we want to do, because when you reach a certain size, you just don’t have that level of intimacy and relationships. And those are the projects that I feel are most impactful, even if you ask me what I mean by that, and I’ll stumble through not having, you know, the exact metrics in mind.

Eve: [00:32:59] It sounds to me like it’s a little like cloning. Cloning these little offices is, you know, probably the way it might work because you you have an impact in one particular part of the world, but maybe you could do it somewhere else.

Judi: [00:33:12] Yeah, I appreciate that. Some of the scale of the work. Right. In realizing that my superpower is facilitation and co-creating immersive learning experiences. Right. It’s not, like I taught a couple graduate level classes, but I really try to create a space that allows for folks to share their innate knowledge and what they’ve learned about their work. It’s very much about eliminating the power differential between professor and student. And so I had the opportunity to go and test this out in late 2019 because of work that we had done with California Health and Human Services. So they had an Office of Innovation, right, here it is. The Office of Innovation would take people from different departments, train them up an innovation methodology, and then they would work for a year in doing these sort of design sprints with different departments and then they’d go back to their home departments. That model has shifted quite a bit. The Office of Innovation has now morphed into something else because, again, maybe that wasn’t the best approach. But I had the opportunity in working with the Deputy Director of that office to go to Montenegro, which is her home country. And we did a five-day training, immersive training in this concept of digital transformation, which has nothing to do with digital and everything to do with humans, right? So we had teams from Albania, North Macedonia, Bosnia Herzegovina, where else, Serbia and Montenegro. So I had five teams of people from the Western Balkans, of which I know sadly very little about. Right. In terms of their context. And it was sort of scary because, again, the work is very context specific. But, Eve, we had an amazing time and now I have lifelong friends who are ministers of, you know, digital transformation in Serbia. Like I can hit them up on Slack right now. So I do appreciate that. I don’t know that some of the longer term, deeply embedded project work that we do would work elsewhere, but we’re open to it.

Eve: [00:35:42] Well, this has been a delightful conversation. I appreciate that you’re a local girl.

Judi: [00:35:49] Thank you.

Eve: [00:35:50] Local is where your heart is. And it’s pretty fantastic that San Francisco has you.

Judi: [00:35:55] Oh, thank you. We have a multitude of challenges. That’s such a nice reflection. And as part of my project for grad school, I went to Kenya and I interviewed women business owners. This is for another conversation, maybe over cocktails sometime, Eve.

Eve: [00:36:12] Yes, in real life.

Judi: [00:36:16] And I realize that…

Eve: [00:36:17] When the pandemic has been crushed.

Judi: [00:36:19] Exactly. Exactly. And I realized that I don’t need to do that work in Kenya or in, you know, anywhere else that isn’t my beautiful, vibrant and challenging adopted city of San Francisco. So, you know..

Eve: [00:36:39] It’s been delightful. Thank you so much for joining me.

Judi: [00:36:41] Yes, thank you, Eve.

Eve: [00:36:45] That was Judi Lynn Brown. Judi hates scale. Her ambition is to remain hyper local, digging into the minutia of each community she works with. She doesn’t see any other way to continue building on the work she’s doing, human centered community engagement.

Eve: [00:37:08] You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at EvePicker.com, or you can support us at Patreon.com/rethinkrealestate for the price of a cup of coffee. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music. And thanks to you for spending your time with me today. We’ll talk again soon. But for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

Image courtesy of Judi Lynn Brown, CivicMakers

She’s breaking barriers.

Joanna Bartholomew, owner of O’Hara Developments, is a woman who’s breaking all barriers. 

While Joanna’s background is in social work, community health and financial education, real estate is in her blood. Her father was a developer, and as a young girl she spent time with him, both in the office and on job sites. So it’s no surprise that she launched her own real estate company.

But being a Black woman in the real estate industry is not quite enough of a challenge. On one hand, Joanna is focusing on broad community development by tackling decaying properties in East Baltimore (one block at a time) and breathing new life into them. But on the other, she is committed to providing outreach to the people who will occupy them. To make sure that what she is building will serve the community effectively, Joanna’s organization offers up financial literacy courses and down payment programs, to both educate and support new potential home-owners. All of it to make sure everyone can have a chance at home ownership.

Insights and Inspirations

  • Joanna is one of a few. A black woman with her own real estate company.
  • She’s focussing on community development one block at a time, tackling decaying properties and breathing new life into them.
  • Her past career in social work creeps into her real estate work. She offers up financial literacy and down payment  programs so that everyone can have a chance at home ownership.
Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:17] Hi there, thanks for joining me on Rethink Real Estate. 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. When I’m not hosting the show, I’m running my real estate crowdfunding platform, SmallChange.co, where you’ll find impact real estate investment opportunities open to everyone, or you can learn more about me and catch up on some podcasts at my website EvePicker.com.

Eve: [00:01:14] Today, I’m talking with Joanna Bartholomew, owner of O’Hara Developments and a woman who’s breaking all barriers. While Joanna’s background is in social work, community health and financial education, real estate is in her blood. Her father had a real estate company. And as a young girl, she spent time with him in the office and on job sites. So it’s no surprise that she launched her own real estate company. But being a black woman in the real estate industry is not quite enough of a challenge for Joanna. She’s focusing on community development one block at a time, tackling decaying properties and breathing new life into them. You’ll want to hear more.

Eve: [00:02:04] 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 go to Patreon.com/rethinkrealestate to support this podcast for the price of a cup of coffee.

Eve: [00:02:25] Good morning, Joanna. Thanks so much for joining me.

Joanna Bartholomew: [00:02:28] Hi, Eve. Good morning. Thanks for having me. Yeah.

Eve: [00:02:32] So you’re a pretty rare breed, a black woman developer. And I was wondering how you got there from your initial career choice of social work. That’s quite a journey.

Joanna: [00:02:46] It quite is. So I actually was raised in real estate. My father was a developer. So, growing up, I knew him to just be the person that always would have me in these rooms of either going to a settlement or going to the old Hechinger, which was the former Home Depot, picking up the lumber and looking at like design sketches and things like that. I still remember having to take a construction class in an elementary school. And I have to be honest, I probably picked the classes I knew I could pass. My house, that I had to build it looked better than all the other kids in the class because of my dad. But fast forward, you know, being in the field of social work for some years and working with families that were facing various challenges, one of the most common things that we saw was their access to equity, their access to wealth. And in the population that I worked with were people that looked like me and other brown families that had limited access. And it wasn’t because of anything other than the knowledge and knowing where to get information. So what I wanted to do, expanding on, I said, you know, it’s time for me to fire my boss, get into the roots of what I know, and bring both worlds together so we could be able to provide access to equity. And one of the first places you could do that with is in real estate.

Eve: [00:04:11] So isn’t that interesting? Because my parents sort of grew up always investing that I grew up with my parents, always investing in real estate. They actually were refugees, so they had very little, but that’s when they had money and that’s what they invested in. So I was also very comfortable with real estate. And it really is about a comfort level, isn’t it, with something you don’t understand.

Joanna: [00:04:33] Right. Right.

Eve: [00:04:35] It’s really interesting.

Joanna: [00:04:37] And it does take a level of comfort to know what you know in your brain and have to manifest that into reality. And it requires some guts. And if you have the privilege of seeing that in your younger years, when you get older, it does feel a little bit more comfortable vs. a family that doesn’t know anything about these type of financial terms and systems. And now you’re adding on a big house responsibility onto it. So we want to be able to be that line of support.

Eve: [00:05:06] So what sort of projects do you focus on?

Joanna: [00:05:10] So our projects primarily are residential. The majority of them are three level homes, three story homes where they’re row homes there in the urban community. And we are either transitioning them into single family homes where they can use the whole space for their family or we are actually converting them into duplexes, most of them being bi level units, two bedrooms, two baths, where people can also be able to rent from them for a period of time. Now, with our renters, we do something a little different because, again, we’re encouraging homeownership. We take a portion of their rent and we put it into escrow. So when they’re ready to be able to transition to being a homeowner, they could actually use those funds, especially if they’re purchasing one of our properties towards either down-payment or any moving costs.

Eve: [00:06:02] Oh, wow. So how long does it take for someone to save enough that way to purchase a house?

Joanna: [00:06:11] Well, it really just depends. I mean, everybody’s situation is different. How much they need for down payment, is different and they may not even use it. They may use it towards their moving costs. They can use it however they choose. But I would say if I had to put a number on it, most people could be able to use those funds at least in about a year and a half. Right. So.

Eve: [00:06:35] Right. So this is the social worker in you emerging in real estate.

Joanna: [00:06:42] Yes. Most developers could care less about where you’re moving to next.

Eve: [00:06:46] This is really, this is really cool. So you’re really working on the whole thing. The real estate project and the people who live in the projects.

Joanna: [00:06:57] Yes.

Eve: [00:06:59] So where do you focus on your projects?

Joanna: [00:07:02] So as of right now, we have I would consider it to be our staple development site, which is in Baltimore City. We’re actually restoring a nice portion of the neighborhood. Some people say that we bought the neighborhood, but I don’t feel that way. It’s about two continuous blocks, I would say, in that area that we’re focusing on. And majority of them are actually not all of them are three story buildings. And we’re planning for about 15 single family homes and eight buildings that will actually be duplexes.

Eve: [00:07:35] So I’ve seen the blocks and the architecture is really stunning. And these buildings have been vacant for a while, haven’t they?

Joanna: [00:07:45] Yes, they have, unfortunately in a lot of urban neighborhoods, what we hear and what we see is the aftermath and some of it we’re still fighting that’s affiliated to redlining. And redlining is something that has caused a lot of funds to not be placed in certain neighborhoods over the years, which would have allowed people to become homeowners, which then also brings in other things as far as, you know, very poor behaviors in terms of drugs and things of those nature. So these are neighborhoods that have that are being revamped. But we have to be intentional in how we do it in these spaces, because these are people that have lived here in some shape or form for a long time. But in this particular area of Baltimore, Baltimore had a great flight at one point where a lot of these homes became became vacant. So we’re working with various city programs and some individuals in terms of the acquisition of the properties. And we also make sure that we work with some of the neighborhood associations as well, making sure that they are aware of some of the programs that we have. One of the beauties about adding in the social work piece is that because of our program and through our non-profit, we’re also able to provide up to 43,000 dollars in down-payment assistance as well.

Eve: [00:09:00] Wow. So you have to tell me more about the non-profit. You’re throwing things at me really fast. So what condition are the buildings in?

Joanna: [00:09:11] It varies. Some of them. I mean, you have to, I tell people all the time what we see in like the Home Depot and Lowe’s now as lumber is nothing in comparison to some of the true lumber that was there way, way back in the day. So these houses have stood the test of times. I mean, they have great solid bones. Some of them are still pretty intact and maybe they just need heavy cosmetic work. But there’s also some of them where the roof has already caved in and now we’re doing a lot more extensive work. There’s a good portion of them that are also considered to be historic. So when we restore those, we have to follow certain architectural guidelines. So we have to put back like wood windows. If the staircase was still intact, we have to restore the staircase to its original state as much as possible. We have to take certain pictures, submit it to the historic alliance there to be able to make sure that we’re following things to code. So it’s a little bit a mixture of both that we experience.

Eve: [00:10:18] Cool. So when it’s done, how many units will there be? What will this project look like?

Joanna: [00:10:24] So in this phase of the project, which I consider to be Phase A, there will be a total of 31 units. Between the single families, the units from the duplexes and one of the duplexes has a commercial space at the bottom. So it’ll be 31 units and the the duplexes will bi-level two bedroom, two bath, kind of give you that New York feel a little bit. So it will have that, that feel of a home because you can be able to go upstairs and downstairs. One of the things that we did during the time of when the pandemic first hit and really, really heavy, we readjusted the layout for the single-family homes because we know some people are not going back into the office for work for some time and some children are still going to do hybrid learning or they’ll be learning 100 percent from home. So those homes have a loft area that could be converted back to a bedroom later on, if they chose to. And it also has a private office for whomever wants to use that as well. So we wanted to meet the families where they are in the times that we’re living in because we don’t know how long we’re going to be living this way. So it’s a very convertible house. I would say that can truly grow with you.

Eve: [00:11:40] And what is Phase Two?

Joanna: [00:11:43] Well, Eve, maybe I could say a little bit about that. So,t Phase Two is at very, very early stages. We have some land there that we are considering to do some development on. We can’t talk too much about it, but it could be some brand new construction with some condos. So we’ll see.

Eve: [00:12:04] Ok, and I know you’ve talked to me in the past about open space as well and how that knits into your overall strategy. And can you talk about that?

Joanna: [00:12:15] Yes. So through our non-profit, we manage about 27, 25 lots, give or take, in the East Baltimore section of the city. Our biggest thing is, is reducing vacant lots. So right now, a lot of the lots, we’re just keeping them clean as much as possible. Some of them are side lots next to homes. Some of them are just completely wide open spaces where they used to be homes, but they had to be demolished for whatever reason, more than likely because it was a safety hazard to the neighborhood and they’re just completely open. So what we’ve been doing with one of the particular areas, which is about a little over a quarter acre of land, that space, we’re actually transitioning that to a community park. So on our in our neighborhood, right behind some of the houses that we’re planning to build to restore there, you would now have a community park right in your backyard where you could really be in your kitchen and look out and see your kids playing or any of those things there. It’s going to be really nice. We’re using a concept that we like to call It Takes a Village. So we are blurring the lines of Baltimore City and really allowing people from different cities and states to donate and be a part of reducing vacant lots in urban neighborhoods, period. And that has been going pretty well. So we’re excited to see what it looks like when it comes together.

Eve: [00:13:39] So I want to come back to the non-profit. You said you have a non-profit as well, which is kind of unusual for a developer. Why? And what do you accomplish with that?

Joanna: [00:13:48] So through our non-profit, we only manage space, the green spaces, because they are not providing us any rent. So through our reinvestment model, we donate a portion of our profit from our developments into our non-profit. That helps us to be able to provide financial wellness workshops for the neighborhood. We’ve recently partnered with JPMorgan Chase Bank, which we’re really, really excited about, to be able to offer workshops to the neighborhood. We also have a summer financial literacy program that we’re actually in our fifth year. I couldn’t believe it, the other day when I saw the number. We’re in our fifth summer providing financial literacy specifically for young women. And then we also have our housing and financial counseling program. So for us with a non-profit, it’s not necessarily totally focused on real estate, but it does manage the last that we adopt and or that we own under that umbrella.

Eve: [00:14:46] It’s a really interesting strategy because often in neighborhoods like the one you’re working in you would only be able to have a non-profit developer to accomplish all of this. This is not yet. I’m sure it’s still a soft market. Is that what you’re experiencing? I mean, the market values are going to be different in a in a more established neighborhood in Baltimore, certainly. Right.

Joanna: [00:15:12] Right. So I would say that right now we are still in the early transition part of this neighborhood. We do have some brand new development that has already happened. They they did modular homes right in our backyard where we are. And those were eight. Yeah, I think we’re eight of modular homes and they look beautiful. And we have some other homes that have already been restored and they vary. In terms of price point, you do have some non-profits that have actually built those homes and they were able to take advantage of different funding and they were able to offer them under three 300,000. And then you have some of your traditional developers who have come in and done restoration projects and they’re selling for over 300,000. So we’re still very much in the early phase in this particular area. And it just it does vary.

Eve: [00:16:03] Right. So not absolutely ground zero.

Joanna: [00:16:05] Right.

Eve: [00:16:06] So tell me about some of the challenges you’re being confronted with, both as a developer and with this project.

Joanna: [00:16:15] Right, so as a female developer, one of the challenges is that I’m often taken as the secretary when I walk into most places then the owner. And it’s nothing wrong with being a secretary or an administrative assistant. But it’s the assumption of the fact that she could actually be the owner, that sometimes can be a bit frustrating. And so that can kind of get underneath my skin a little bit. I try my best for it not to get to me, but it can be a bit uncomfortable. I feel like when I get into spaces and I get in and I get a chance to connect with other female developers, I almost feel like it’s a sorority. Like you haven’t seen your sorority sister since college. You’re like, oh my God, just another person like me. And we’re able to connect. Thank God. I had somebody call me yesterday and they were all the way in Boston and they said, Joanna, do you have like two minutes just to say hi to someone? They saw you online. She also female developer. Can you just say hi? And we were like, oh, my gosh, this is great. We have to connect. And, you know, I say that to say Eve, we need more females in this space. We need to have more women investing for sure. But we need to also have more women in the real estate industry. And this has been a very much a male dominated space for a very long time. I still come across in business meetings, in business meetings where men will say, sweetie, honey and I have to correct them.

Eve: [00:17:41] Yeah, oh yeah.

Joanna: [00:17:43] I’m not sweetie, would you say this if I was a man and we were talking about the deal? No, let’s you know, so I have to, often, correct that as well. So that’s some of the challenges that I face on the female side of being a developer. But building in Covid-19, I mean, who would have thought that this would be the time that we would really be doing this would be right in the middle of Covid-19. And it’s like, oh, my goodness. I think the beauty for me, though, because I’m often the person that’s thinking outside of the box, Covid has made every industry have to think outside of the box. So now when I’m going into spaces and I’m talking about for profit and non-profit and down payment assistance and thinking about the actual individual and how it affects their family, people are actually more open-minded now than they were three years ago when we first started.

Eve: [00:18:39] I think that’s very true. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So so what about financing? I mean, you know, most of the honeys I’ve received have been at banks. I sometimes want to come back with sugar, but that won’t work.

Joanna: [00:18:58] Well, in regards to financing, we’ve been able to be in a good position. I mean, Baltimore’s is one of the places that we that we have our our staple project. We’re also doing some work in the Philadelphia area. And this is this is not the beginning. This is not a very this is the beginning of this level of how we’re going about things. But I’ve been able to do some projects in the past where I was strategic with those funds and really allowed that to be the spark of what we’re working on now. We’ve also done…

Eve: [00:19:28] I think I think it was asking more like how did banks treat you when you walk in the door? You know…

Joanna: [00:19:35] Banks are a little bit a little bit different. I think I’ve come across more of the honeys and the sweeties in the private the private conversations. That could be a little frustrating, but I think the bank so far has been pretty good. And we haven’t had to really work with too many of them. Most of our financing when we’ve done construction and things of that nature has been more of your alternative options. Some people call them hard money and things like that. But I haven’t had a bad experience at the bank, knock on wood that they won’t.

Eve: [00:20:10] Well, that’s an improvement. OK, so no other serious challenges. It looks like you’re roaring along. What about perception, like in the neighborhood?

Joanna: [00:20:23] Well, I would tie that in. And that’s part of where I was going with that. Perception in the neighborhood especially, and I’ll focus on Baltimore because Philadelphia is home for me. When you’re going into a city where you’re not from there, it does require another layer of work. You have to understand how their systems work. But right down to how can you get your utilities turned on is a whole new system, even with some of the things that we’re coming from a different city. Not necessarily using Philadelphia systems and trying to put them into Baltimore, but you’re looking at different systems from various cities. In addition to things that you have learned from a different industry and you’re bringing them into a city that you’re now in a room with other creatives, but now you’re bringing a different process to them because they may have only understood how things go in Baltimore, but now you’re bringing in new information and you want to do this in a strategic way where you’re not trying to flex a muscle and so to speak to them. But you want them to start thinking outside of the box of how they can be able to address some of the challenges. So I would say in a nutshell, it’s been positive overall, but at the same time, we’ve had situations where you do have people wondering, well, who is this woman? Where does she come from? How does she know this and how does….but now I could say that we’ve gotten past that part. And I want to say 95 percent is very much welcome in opening. We can pick up the phone, ask questions, get the support that we need with no problem. And Baltimore has become almost like a second home for me.

Eve: [00:22:08] That’s nice. But what about the neighborhood itself, the people who live there?

Joanna: [00:22:12] Right. So the people that live there? One of the things that I did from the very beginning, and this is before we did any construction on any property, I went I knocked on the door of the local church and I sat with one of the associate pastors asking them questions about what, how the neighborhood operates, what’s the vibe in the neighborhood, and I did not I did that not only with the church but even when we were out, some of my meetings are not just your formal neighborhood association meetings or your land use committee meetings. Some of these meetings, Eve, is right on a stoop. Sitting with someone that lives in the neighborhood. Asking questions and engaging with them before your you know, they just see you doing demo. And that has been very helpful. So, I mean, I think I might have one of the best security systems in the area, and that’s called neighbors now because of the fact that we have this relationship. So we will welcomed very early on with positivity. I didn’t have any issues with neighbors because I went to them. I didn’t wait for them to come to me.

Eve: [00:23:16] That’s great. So they trust you and they’re looking forward to what you’re building, right?

Joanna: [00:23:20] Oh, yes, absolutely.

Eve: [00:23:22] That’s wonderful. So you just made it a little harder for yourself. You added crowd funding to the mix. Your project of Aruka Midway in Baltimore is listed on my platform, Small Change. And that’s just another layer of complexity. Why did you do that? What do you hope to, what do you hope the outcome is?

Joanna: [00:23:50] What I hope for the outcome to be is for in urban neighborhoods, for wealth to be more normalized by the people that live there. And this is what I mean by this. Growing up I grew up in North Philly. That’s considered, quote unquote, the hood for some people. And when we will see development happening, even if you went off to college or came back, you’re like, oh, my goodness, what happened here? Ms. so-and-so used to live here. This school building used to be here. One of the common threads in the neighborhood and not just in North Philadelphia is, well, I didn’t even know what happened. Nobody ever talked to us about it. And we often feel boxed out, left out. And then definitely there was no one saying to us, well, how we could be able to at least reap some part of the return for things that are happening right in our neighborhood, that they also want us to patronize it. You want us to come shop at these retail places and things of that nature. So while we’re doing the crowdfunding raise, is to now provide an opportunity for people that live in the neighborhood, people that can relate in urban neighborhoods or those that want to support this type of development structure for them to also have a piece of what we’re also going to be reaping as well. That’s why we’re really creating it. We’re already doing the education in the community. We’re already providing the housing counseling through partnerships. We’re providing down payment assistance. So now the thing is, where can we do this in a way that, yes, we are able to raise the funds to do the development, but we also strategically do it in a way where those that can connect with this area in some shape or form can also be able to see what it looks like when you get that dividend check every year or see what it looks like when you can say, I own a piece of that restaurant that I go to every Sunday for family, a family breakfast. Those things start to matter. So that’s why I decided to create Aruka Midway. It’s a part of restoration for the neighborhood. And Aruka actually means restore in Hebrew.

Eve: [00:25:55] Oh, I didn’t know that. Thank you.

Joanna: [00:25:57] Yeah.

Eve: [00:26:00] Yeah. So, yeah, there’s something very palpable about people wanting to be involved in and engaged. And crowdfunding seems to just go that extra step. They can actually say I own a piece of that. I made it happen. Right?

Joanna: [00:26:13] Yes, absolutely. It’s the story that’s able to be told.

Eve: [00:26:17] Right. So what’s next for you? What’s ultimately your big, hairy, audacious goal, Joanna?

Joanna: [00:26:26] Believe it or not, and some people are often like, what, you don’t want to do this in 20 other cities? I absolutely do not. I want to live. I want to be able to enjoy the fruits of my labor and be able to enjoy time with my family. So doing this in more than three cities is not the goal. Three cities will be our max. We’re still identifying what that third will be. And ultimately, what we want to be able to do is for companies that see this to be a structure of purpose in their real estate development, is to be able to sow a seed and be their partner in helping them get started. Be a part of that funding for them where they could be able to come to O’Hara Developments and say, hey, I found a block, I found a neighborhood, or maybe it’s just one house. I know it fits into your model. Is there a way that you could support me? So if we could do that in a way of being some form of an equity partner in the beginning, giving them the consultation that they need, the support that they need. As long as they are looking to mirror a socially conscious and impactful model, the way that we have it, we want to be able to be that source for other developers in urban development.

Eve: [00:27:41] That’s a great goal. So thank you. Thank you very much for talking with me today. I hope that listeners will go check out your offering on SmallChange.co. We can’t talk too much about it here, but there’s lots about it there. So here’s to your success, Joanna.

Joanna: [00:28:00] Thank you, Eve. Thank you and thank you for having me today.

Eve: [00:28:09] That was Joanna Bartholomew. Joanna Bartholomew changed her career path from social work to real estate, and yet she didn’t. It’s not just about the vacant and decrepit row houses that she’s rehabbing one block at a time. For Joanna, it’s also about the people who will occupy them. She immerses herself in the community to make sure that what she is building will serve it well. And she offers up financial literacy and down-payment programs so that everyone can have a chance at home ownership.

Eve: [00:28:51] You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at EvePicker.com, or you can support us at Patreon.com/rethink real estate for the price of a cup of coffee. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music. And thanks to you for spending your time with me today. We’ll talk again soon. But for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

Image courtesy of Joanna Bartholomew, O’Hara Developments

One year. 41 more conversations.

41 amazing people. 41 inspiring conversations.

Cynthia Muller. Richard Rothstein. Andre Perry. Charmaine Curtis. Lyneir Richardson. Darryl Scipio. Libby Seifel. Beth Silverman. Patrick Quinton. Daniel Parolek. Charles Durrett. Heather Hood. Diana Lind. Scott Flynn. Atticus LeBlanc. Sam Ruben. Andrew Luong. Stephanie Gripne. Shannon Mudd. Ken Weinstein. Garry Gilliam. Andy Williams. Daniel Dus. Patrice Frey. Bruce Katz. Christopher Leinberger. David Peter Alan. Annie Donovan. Michael Shuman. Dan Miller. Scott Ehlert. Katie Faulkner. A-P Hurd. Max Levine. Brian Dally. Jonny Price. Michael Lee. Kevin Cavenaugh.

These are the rockstars of my show.

Season Three starts soon …

Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:14] Hi there. Thanks so much for joining me today for the final episode of Rethink Real Estate. For Good, season 2.

My name is Eve Picker and I’m on a mission to make real estate work for everyone. Real estate can help to solve climate change, can house people affordably, can create beautiful streetscapes, unify neighborhoods and enliven cities. 

You can learn more about me at my website, rethinkrealestateforgood.co, or visit my real estate crowdfunding platform, SmallChange.co. Our projects offer impact, solve housing problems, invest in neighborhoods and give everyone the opportunity to invest and build wealth for as little as $500.

[00:01:12] Today marks the second anniversary of this podcast. Two years ago, I didn’t know that our audience would grow as it has. In fact, two years ago I wasn’t sure we would have an audience at all. Now 10,000 people download episodes every month. That’s 10,000 people who care about thoughtful and impactful real estate solutions.  Wow!  I am humbled that all of you want to listen in.

This second year has been an opportunity to learn from yet another class of extraordinary leaders and innovators in real estate. My guests are working on housing solutions, policy issues, manufacturing, in fintech, on preservation, on developing new technologies and on providing real estate metrics, on mobility issues, as architects, on sustainable development, on community capital, on equity for women and equity for minorities and in many other niches, pushing the boundaries of the built environment to be better for everyone. 

The range of work that is being accomplished is quite awe-inspiring.

[00:02:25] Perhaps the most important theme this year was equity.

Cynthia Muller, director of Mission Driven Investments at the Kellogg Foundation. has been described as a “thought leader of the impact investing ecosystem and a trailblazer in the field.” In No guilt. Just Action. she reminds us that every time there has been an opportunity for black and brown people to build an asset, to build wealth, it’s been taken away from them. Let’s change that. 

Richard Rothstein and Andre Perry have written about these inequities.In The Color of Law Richard argues for a national civil rights movement to ensure that we all get to reap the economic benefits of living in this rich and diverse country. And In Know your price, Andre share findings that homes are underpriced by 23 percent, or $48,000 per home, in majority black neighborhoods. That’s $156 billion in lost equity.

[00:03:31] Charmain Curtis, Lyneir Richardson and Darryl Scipio are a new breed of black developers. Charmain has built a successful career as a developer despite being a black woman. She didn’t realize what she was up against until she was in her 30s. In Spread the Wealth she ponders how wealth could be distributed equitably to everyone.

In Building Generational Wealth, Lyneir describes his plan to buy 100 community shopping centers with 100 community members, all focused in majority black neighborhoods. He provided the first opportunity to 140 investors on Small Change early this year.

[00:04:17] Justice runs deep with Darryl.  In Turning renters into homeowners he describes his latest passion project, Savers Village.  He aims to help every tenant save enough for a down payment on a home.

And Libby Seifel is focused on women.  In Women building collective muscle, she describes the network of women leaders in real estate she has built. After more than 30 years in the industry, she is no longer the only woman in the room, and that some of the biggest new projects in the Bay Area are being driven by women.

[00:04:56] Housing solutions are importantly getting a lot of attention.

Perhaps the boldest of these is Beth Silverman’s Lotus Project. In Radical in its Simplicity she tells us how ,for just $800, her organization can successfully house a homeless family and change the trajectory of their lives forever.

We learn about accessory dwelling units as an affordable housing solution in Yes! In My Backyard! Patrick Quinton has developed a manufactured solution that drops a 32×14 foot ADU into a typical 50-by-100-foot lot in Portland, Oregon without hitting the setbacks and without requiring city design review. And he’s raising money for this project on Smallchange.co

[00:05:48] On the west coast, Daniel Parolek, architect, coined the phrase, The Missing Middle just as the critical absence of affordable housing was becoming a major planning issue for cities nationwide. He explains what the missing middle is, why it is important and how we can build more of it. 

Charles Durrett brought co-housing from Copenhagen to the US many years ago and wrote a book about it. He explains why he’s spent a career in co-housing and how it can make people’s lives better in It takes a Village.

[00:06:27] In Northern California, Heather Hood oversees efforts for the Enterprise Community Partners that ensure low- and moderate-income residents have access to affordable, quality housing. We talk about the enormous size of this problem in The elephant in the region.

And Diana Lind wraps it up for us in Lets be Brave. She’s written a book called Brave New Home in which she argues that the single-family home is at least partly to blame for our current housing woes.

[00:07:01] Technology is rapidly transforming the real estate industry in many different ways as well.

Some of my guests, like Patrick Quinton and Scott Flynn in Manufacturing change, are focused on manufacturing affordable homes in factories. Scott’s company, IndieDwell, manufactures smaller, sustainable and affordable homes at the pace of 10 homes per week and growing.

But others are pursuing new ideas.  Atticus LeBlanc tells us about PadSplit in One Room at a time.. He wants to dramatically change how we address affordable housing by using space that is now under-used in everyday homes.

[00:07:46] Or Sam Ruben in 3D-printing, robotics and automation, oh my! His company is printing buildings and hopes to create affordable and sustainable homes with their new technology.

And finally, Andrew Luoung who has deconstructed the often lengthy and confusing process of small scale real estate investment, making it accessible to everyone.  In Andrew loves real estate he describes the online turnkey service that he has developed into Doorvest.

[00:08:20] Some guests are focused on fertilizing tranches of future impact investors and leaders.

None is more passionate than Dr. Stephanie Gripne. In The impact accelerator, she tells us about founding the Impact Finance Center with a mission to identify, train and activate philanthropists and investors to become impact investors. Her big, hairy audacious goal is to move a trillion dollars into impact investing.

Dr. Shannon Mudd is right behind her, teaching students how to invest $50,000 of real money for maximum social impact. His Young Angels are carrying this knowledge into their professional careers.

[00:09:09] Others want to pay it forward.

Like Ken Weinstein, a highly successful Philly developer whose career was inspired by his landlady in Germantown. He’s created a boot-camp for aspiring developers called Jumpstart Germantown and describes the program in Jumpstarting a community.

[00:09:32] Garry Gilliam may be best known for playing in the NFL. Today he has a second career as an impact real estate developer. He tells about his first project in The Bridge. It came about as a joint effort with Garry’s friends from the Hershey School, a philanthropic school for low-income children. That school gave them all a leg up and now they want to give back to their community. 

Or Andy Williams, a former Marine who was determined to secure his future through real estate. He’s built a substantial portfolio of homes, a real estate development business focused on larger projects, and now, a program that seeks to turn veterans into entrepreneurs just like himself.  

[00:10:23] Some guests, like Daniel Dus and Patrice Frey, are focused on building on what’s already there. Learn how Daniel is planning to redevelop the dramatically underutilized historic luxury estates of the Berkshires for the shared economy in Everything old is new again.  And in Saving Places, Patrice explains the role of the National Main Street Center in servicing the revitalization of commercial main streets in big cities and small towns alike.

Bruce Katz moves the focus back to metro areas in Cities are networks. As a foremost policy expert, Bruce argues that cities must knit together solutions. It’s an imperative. And he calls this the new localism.

Christopher Leinberger is thinking along the same lines in Back to the Future. As a renowned urban strategist, teacher, developer, researcher and author Chris thinks “Back to the Future” got it right.

[00:11:30] While David Peter Alan enchanted me in I’ve been working on the railroad with his singular passion for the country’s railway system. He has ridden the entire Amtrak system and about 300 transit providers in the U.S. and in Canada.

Annie Donovan and Michael Shuman are focused on alternative finance. Michael thinks we have it Totally backwards. Local owned businesses make up 60 to 80 percent of the private marketplace in the average U.S. community. But economic developers and subsidies almost always overlook them. And Annie believes that disruptive capital is critical for solving thorny problems. She describes her pursuit of fairness in economics and finance in The world beyond banks.

[00:12:27] A handful of guests are diversely focussed on sustainability in the built environment.  Perhaps the most interesting is Dan Miller, who has launched a platform that connects everyday investors with farmers who need loans. He’s Stewarding the Future of Farming with investments as low as $100.

Scott Ehlert and Katie Faulkner are mass timber experts.  Katie as an architect with an eye on sustainability in From here to there.  In Mass timber for the masses, Scott tells us about the installation and cost benefits of a proprietary hollow core mass timber system he is designing that uses 50% less wood fiber. And, as if that is not enough, Scott is also designing a robotic fabrication facility to anchor a new wood product innovation campus, in California.

While A-P Hurd remains focused on building Livable and delightful communities.

[00:13:28] This class of guests would not be complete without my colleagues in the crowdfunding industry.

Some like Max Levine and Brian Dally are focused on real estate.

In Hello, Neighbor we learn about Max’s Neighborhood Investment Company, which has a mission “to localize wealth creation and broaden access to neighborhood equity.”  While in Get in on the ground floor,  Brian describes the platform that he has built into the go-to funding platform if you want to fix’n flip property.

Jonny Price, previously with Kiva and now with Wefunder, is focused on Filling the “crazy” gap. There’s a common theme for Johnny – financially excluded and socially impactful businesses.And Michael Lee is Building Virtual Communities using blockchain. Instead of using blockchain for crypto, he’s using it as an organizing tool to democratize the power of data.

[00:14:31] Finally, what better way to end than with Kevin Cavenaugh a developer in a class of his own. In I do a bunch of weird stuff, you can tap into this unique developer. Left brain, right brain, head and heart all come to bear on his wildly creative buildings. “I’m tired of mocha-colored, vinyl-windowed boring. I can’t change the fact that the streets are gray, and the sky is gray. But the buildings?” says Kevin.

Phew. That’s a lot of podcasts.  I’ve enjoyed every interview with every person.  I’m in awe of them all.   But it’s time to take some time off to recharge and get ready for Season Three. We’ll be back refreshed in September with many more amazing people for you to listen to and for me to learn from.

Thank you so much for joining me.  Now go forth, invest a little in your community and make some change!

Investing locally.

Vibrant, thriving communities need locally owned businesses. Local businesses can create a vigorous local economy, provide more jobs and reduce poverty. In the US private sector, small businesses produce two out of three jobs and generate approximately fifty percent of the GDP. And locally owned businesses also give rise to more civic engagement, higher voter participation and more volunteerism.

Everybody wants to live in a lively, prosperous neighborhood, but that’s not where most investments are going. The majority of Americans still invest in stocks and bonds, benefitting large corporations outside their communities. Banks typically only approve twenty percent of small business loans and venture capital funding only goes to a lucky one percent.

Small business needs those investment dollars.

Michael Schuman, economist, attorney, author and entrepreneur, is an avid advocate for local investing. He believes that start-ups and small main street businesses make a robust economy. In his book, Put Your Money Where Your Life Is, Michael outlines strategies for investing locally.

  • Invest in you. There’s nothing more local than owning your own home. Once you pay off your mortgage you can invest in energy efficient improvements to reduce your household bills. You can pay off credit cards and student loans or lend money to family or friends at a lower-than-market interest rate.
  • Invest in other people. There are many ways to invest in local small business and real estate. There might be a larger local project raising funds from individual investors to improve existing businesses or develop new ones. It’s also possible to invest in local government projects through a municipal bond offering.
  • Save locally. Open an account and deposit your money in a locally controlled and operated financial institution. These community focused financial institutions have local decision-makers and serve the local community well.
  • More options.  Join a local investment club or start one. Slow Money, which catalyzes local food investing, has local chapters or investment clubs too. Or invest through community development corporations or a micro-credit fund.

The more you engage with your community, the more you will learn about local investment opportunities.

Listen in to my conversation with Michael to learn more.

Image by John D. Norton

How to be an Impact Investor.

Impact investing is rapidly increasing in popularity and there’s a growing interest from first time investors. Education is the key to feeling comfortable for those sticking their toe in the water.

In 2012 Dr. Stephanie Gripne recognized a need for trustworthy, un-conflicted investor education.  Back then she was the director of the Initiative for Sustainable Real Estate Development at the University of Colorado’s Lead School of Business. Money just wasn’t flowing into projects which were trying to make a difference and most investment advisors were trying to gain business or build a fund. Her hypothesis was that a non-profit could offer such education and might activate or accelerate investment where it matters.

If you’ve never heard of an accelerator, it’s like a boot camp for start-ups and small business. Their role is generally to identify, educate and invest in entrepreneurs. Stephanie thought that an accelerator might just be the way to educate impact investors, so in 2012 she founded The Impact Finance Center (IFC). It is essentially an accelerator. Founded as a non-profit academic center, its mission is to identify, train and activate philanthropists and investors to become impact investors. Those investors might include private foundations, community foundations, high net worth individuals, companies, family offices and a growing number of new investors.

The IFC offers one-on-one training as well as small and large group training. And for those who want to train themselves there are two hundred online classes and forty-seven recorded webinars. The Center also offer simulation activities where would-be investors can either pretend to invest or practice investing small amounts. Or they might learn how to invest as a group by pooling a little money. And for those who are already investors, the IFC can evaluate portfolios and investment advisors for governance and fees, evidence-based decision evaluation and impact.

The IFC’s education institute is only a part of their community infrastructure which they are building to be replicated, scaled and customized. Also in their arsenal are investor clubs, a marketplace for impact investing, a Who’s Who of impact investing, and partnerships with civil society organizations like community foundations and Community Financial Development Institutions.

Listen in to my podcast interview with Stephanie to find out more about the in-roads she is making.

Image courtesy of Impact Finance Center