Rethink Real Estate. For Good.

Design

Great streets.

I live on a not so great street. It’s a shame because it could be really great!

My side of the street is filled with small storefronts, bars and restaurants. There is lots to see from the sidewalk and there are lots of places to stop along the way. The other side of the street is filled with a monolithic building that has no retail (or other) activity at all. And the next block down is no better since it’s filled with a parking garage.  

No amount of street furniture, trees or landscaping will solve this fundamental problem. No-one wants to walk on the other side because it is boring and painfully empty. You’d be a solo pedestrian and no-one wants to be that. Even worse, the street is wide and inhospitable. There is no canopied median strip and there are no bike lanes. Crossing is not a leisurely stroll. It’s a hurried dash from one side to the other.

Really great streets are hard to find. Both sides must entice you to zig zag from one end to the other, making sure you haven’t missed any delectable place to stop along the way. Some of my favorites include Campbell’s Parade in Sydney, Australia with Bondi Beach and it’s bronzed surfers on one side and endless places to eat on the other; Istiklal Avenue in Istanbul, jammed with pedestrians, lined with stunning architecture and full of things to do day and night; and Flinders Lane in Melbourne. It’s just a tiny alley, but stuffed full of exciting shops and restaurants. I can never get enough of it.

What’s your favorite street?

Democratizing green roofs.

Molly Meyer is democratizing the green roof. 

80% of the buildings that will exist in a few decades from now are already built. And since buildings are one of the biggest contributors to climate change, figuring out how to retrofit them economically and easily is a must do. Green roofs are a big part of that. Molly wants to put a green roof within the reach of anyone who owns a building.

She’s tackling this through engineering incredibly lightweight soil and systematically training contractors in how to use it. Her company, Omni Ecosystems, in Chicago, is growing, evidence of the demand.

Molly’s interest in green roofs developed in Germany, where she spent two years working in the green roof industry on a Robert Bosch Fellowship after completing her degree in Earth Systems at Stanford. She founded Omni Ecosystems in 2009 where she works to advance technology associated with working landscapes in order to create rooftop gardens (and other types of working landscapes) that are functional, biodiverse, environmentally friendly, and fiscally beneficial. The company is multidisciplinary and comprised of five branches: OmniInnovation (research and development), OmniProducts (product development), OmniWorkshop (design studio), OmniConstruction (installs living infrastructure systems), and OmniStewardship (provides care for long term landscape management). They don’t just build green roofs – they invent, design, supply, construct, and maintain working landscapes.

In 2019 Omni Ecosystems headquarters relocated to the Bowman Dairy Company’s State Street facility in Chicago, rehabilitating the neglected into a design studio with a 30 ft palm tree, construction yard and manufacturing warehouse, and a rooftop showcase with a 15,000 sq ft green roof including 32 trees. Omni Ecosystems has patented a number of innovative solutions to improve their products including the Omni Tapestry and the Omni Green Roof and have received numerous awards for their visionary products and Molly has received more for her visionary leadership.

Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:11] I thought I’d kick off the New Year with an inspirational conversation I had with Molly Meyer last year. Molly is the founder of Omni Systems. She’s developed a brand-new approach to greening roofs.  She’s engineered an incredibly light-weight soil that weighs just 12.5% of your average garden soil, making it possible to easily grow trees on rooftops. Why is this so important? 80% of the buildings that will exist in a few decades from now are already built. And since buildings are one of the biggest contributors to climate change, figuring out how to retrofit them economically and easily is a must do. Green roofs are a big part of that. Molly wants to put a green roof within the reach of anyone who owns a building. I was blown away. 

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Eve: [00:01:38] Molly Meyer is democratizing the green roof. Why, you ask? 80% of the buildings that will exist in a few decades from now are already built. And since buildings are one of the biggest contributors to climate change, figuring out how to retrofit them economically and easily is a must do. Green roofs are a really big part of that. Molly wants to put a green roof within the reach of anyone who owns a building. She’s tackling this through engineering incredibly lightweight soil and systematically training contractors in how to use it. Her company, Omni Systems in Chicago, is growing, evidence of the demand. I was fascinated and hope you will be to listen in. If you’d like to join me in my quest to rethink real estate, please share this podcast. Or go to RethinkRealEstate.Co and describe to be the first to hear what we’re cooking up next. Hi, Molly. It’s really nice to have you on my show today.

Molly Meyer: [00:01:41] It’s so nice to be here. Thank you, Eve.

Eve: [00:01:44] You’ve built an amazing company I heard about called Omni Ecosystems with a vision to democratize the Green Roof. So tell me about that. What’s the problem that you’re trying to solve?

Molly: [00:01:57] Yeah, so, well, green roofs are one aspect of it, but when we’re thinking about putting landscapes on structure, weight is a serious concern. So making sure that green roofs, or that the ecosystems that we put on structure aren’t too heavy. And so we’ve invented a new type of growing media or engineered green media, which colloquially we call soil, but it’s very, very lightweight. And so typical soil, like in someone’s front yard, would weigh under a lawn. To grow that lawn would be about 120 pounds per square foot. And typical green roof systems will grow along in about 80 pounds a square foot. We’ve grown lawns in 15.

Molly: [00:02:48] Oh Wow.

Molly: [00:02:50] Orders of magnitude lighter weight.

Eve: [00:02:52] Wow. Wow, wow.

Molly: [00:02:54] And so why is this important? You know, this is one aspect of what we do, which is broadly, broadly what we do is how do we integrate nature into the built environment. But why is this aspect of it important is because when we look at the building stock that’s going to exist in 2040, I might have this stat wrong, but I believe it’s almost 80% of the building stock is already built. Right. And that’s huge. So, and when we know that the built environment contributes at least 40% to greenhouse gas emissions, then that makes it very clear that there’s a huge imperative to retrofit and to adapt our existing structures to be more, to be able to mitigate and adapt to climate change. So when we think of overhauling the auto industry or transportation, if the administration were to put forth a new sort of emissions standards for auto manufacturers, that would turn over about 10 to 15 years. So, we’d know, okay, in 2037, by 2037, here in 2022, those new standards will be in effect. And we know we’ll see the benefits of these better emission standards. But that’s still only, what, a quarter or a third of emissions. There’s still almost half comes from buildings. So, we really do need to be thinking now about what retrofits look like. And while there’s a lot that contributes towards how a building can be greener, I think one really important part is integrating nature into it. So, creating greenery in, on and around buildings.

Eve: [00:04:49] Interesting. Just as an example, I don’t know, maybe about five years ago, I live in a little downtown building which has a flat roof with a stair to it. And I wanted to put a, I wanted to put a green roof on it. And everyone said, no, no, no, no, you won’t have the structure. You’ll have to get a structural engineer, etc., etc. But, you know, I was thinking some lovely little perennial. It’s a tiny little area. It’s maybe 20 by 20. But I thought, you know, something that would be low maintenance in the sun, up there, would give us a little less cooling needs inside since we’re on the top floor. So, when you go to retrofit a building, did you look at existing structure to understand what sort of weight it could carry? Like if joists carry a roof, what extra can they carry?

Molly: [00:05:37] Sure. Yeah. So, we don’t have structural engineers on staff. We, you know, a developer or a building owner would hire them as another consultant within the team. And it’s really important to have a structural engineer to evaluate the building so that we can ensure that it can hold even a lighter load to put the system on. But when our soil scientist invented this new type of growing media, the very first projects they looked at were incredibly limited loads. There used to be in Chicago, a small grocer called True Nature Foods, and True Nature wanted to grow food on their own rooftop and their joists, the structural engineers said their joist would only support an additional 12 pounds per square foot. So, insanely light, and no one had ever grown food in this capacity. But the soil scientists that that we work with, Michael Rabkin, he invented our soils. This was back in 2004, 2005 time period when he was faced with this question. He said that was the first project that they were trying to tackle, and he really developed a process to do this. And it’s all based on the concepts of terraforming. Terraforming is how do you grow soil? So, soil grows in nature, right? Rocks break down biological materials like microbes and earthworms and whatnot, grow in on and around them and organic matter builds up over time. So, you have a profile of biogeochemical processes happening. It’s where geology and biology meet, is what soils really are. And so, to grow soils is really to ask how do we introduce biological organisms to the geosphere in a way that we can make sure plants can thrive?

Molly: [00:07:44] And so, Michael, his work prior to omni ecosystems was with the U.S. Military asking how would we grow food on Mars? How would we grow food? Yeah, in otherwise unable to be grown upon areas. And so, if you were to watch the movie The Martian with Mike, it’s painful because he just goes, “That’s not how it works. That’s not how it works.” Apologies to Matt Damon, but the genesis of the soils at Omni Ecosystem differ significantly from how other providers within this industry ask: How do you grow on structure? How do you grow in lightweight? Because their approach is very much from an engineering or mechanical mindset. Let’s look at the geology and the chemistry of it. So, making sure that there’s certain rock substrate and then there’s a certain amount of NPK, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and other micronutrients. Whereas our approach is we can grow on any geologic substrate because we can add the appropriate biology in order to turn that rock into soil. And so, what we’ve done is we’ve just used a very, very lightweight rock and we grow within it, we turn it into soil on a rooftop. And so, our processes really mimic the ideas of ecological succession. So, when a forest fire goes through an area and decimates a forest, over the course of the next five decades, you will see a forest regrow there. And there’s these ecological steps that occur in growing back a forest. We take those biological processes, and we accelerate them. We put all the ingredients together so that nature can do what happens in after forest fire in five decades. We do it in 12 weeks on a rooftop.

Eve: [00:09:53] Wow. So, it’s actually on the roof. These were not the questions I was going to ask you. I’m fascinated. I know I like it. So, it’s actually a process that you implement on the rooftop.

Molly: [00:10:08] It is, yes. You know, we grow soil from bare rocks. So, on day one, the rooftop looks the worst that it will. And over time, it grows. And so, the most cost effective version of this is actually one of the most cost effective versions of greening rooftops anywhere on a market. It’s less expensive than other sort of monoculture systems. We’ve created a native wildflower meadow that can work anywhere in the Midwest and East up and down the Eastern Seaboard to really mimic nature, to create native habitats.

Eve: [00:10:27] Fascinating, how fascinating, and do different weights of soil give you the ability to grow different things?

Molly: [00:10:51] Weight, not so much depth. Yes. So, the deeper we would go with a soil profile, different plants can survive. So, there are a few misconceptions, however. Many plants don’t actually have tap roots or roots that need to go straight down. Most plants can adapt, and their roots can go sideways. So, lawns, native wildflower meadows, those can all exist in the shallowest three inches. When we try to create forests or tree canopy on roofs, then we do go to a deeper profile because typically our clients want to have mature trees on the roof. And so, we have to cover fully their root balls or their rooting mass with soil. And so, we might have to go up to a two foot depth, but it’s still very lightweight. For example, on our own headquarters, the building where I’m speaking to you today. We created a rooftop with a very structured Bosque, so a series of 15 maple trees in one area. There’s over 30 trees on the roof, but 15 maple trees in one area that, through the use of this lightweight soil, through the use of just optimizing just the right depths that need to be there. And, through the use of air spading, which is a process by which you remove excess soil from the root of a tree. Those things, we’ve allowed us to put this forest on the roof in 60 pounds per square foot. To do this with any other technology, or approach, would weigh 240.

Eve: [00:12:31] Wow.

Molly: [00:12:32] Yeah.

Eve: [00:12:33] When can I come and visit?

Molly: [00:12:34] Any time. Eve, come any time.

Eve: [00:12:36] It sounds really amazing. You’re sort of in the process of making your vision to democratize green roofs into reality. And just tell me a little bit about your company and when it launched and what products and services you offer.

Molly: [00:12:53] Yeah, absolutely. So, we started the company about 13 and a half years ago, in January of 2009. Great time to start a company in the real estate industry. If you remember, I’m being sarcastic. It was.

Eve: [00:13:08] Did she get a loan for a building then?

Molly: [00:13:11] Not so much. But we started the company then here in Chicago because there was quite a robust green roof industry here in Chicago. Thanks to Mayor Daley, his administration put forth a sustainable development policy that was the core of which was around green roofs. So, there was a great market here and we brought our products and services, which at first were really just green roofs. And so, we started with this lightweight soil, bringing it to market. And over time, we found that clients were asking us for more and more services in addition to the products, because it’s a unique approach. It’s not what most landscapers would do and how they would approach creating green space. And so over time, we added a construction arm and a maintenance arm and a design studio. Today, the core of our business is really around supplying our, the soils that we’ve invented and designing landscapes that do more than just look pretty but actively work to adapt and mitigate the climate change. We do still offer some of those construction maintenance services, but it’s less of the focus of the firm. And really what we’re trying to do is get these soils out to other contractors so that they can implement them because we realize there’s too much work to be done for us to try to become a big behemoth contractor. We really want to educate other contractors because our skill set is in inventing and understanding soils. And then our other core is designing with this advanced technology in mind.

Molly: [00:14:59] So through our design studio, we’ve really been able to push the industry forward in thinking about what can be done on structure and within landscape. So the rooftop that I mentioned before in the building I’m in where we have a quarter of the weight of a typical approach, that’s the first time that’s ever been done, and it’s in the staid and risk averse real estate architecture and construction industries. It’s unique to push forward that much through a client. So, our own design practice can push those boundaries and then lead the way for other designers to implement or to apply those to other projects. But another example of sort of work that we do now is not just on structure but on grade. So, one of the soils that we’ve created actually has an enormous amount of pore space. So typical soils have about 25% pore space, which means like air space or where air or water could be held within the geologic substrate. And our stormwater soil has 78 to 91% pore space.

Eve: [00:16:09] Interesting.

Molly: [00:16:10] Over three times the amount of space for water to be held. And this is really important because this becomes then a stormwater management tool using innovative soils. Projects where we are applying this are particularly in urban infill sites where there’s environmental contamination. So, when you have environmental contamination and you’re doing new construction, you often need to dig out that contaminated soil, haul it off somewhere, make it somebody else’s problem to dispose of. But hauling that off in order to create space for cisterns or underground vaults to manage your stormwater.

Molly: [00:16:49] So what we’ve been able to do is say we can cap the existing site, which is a typical approach to environmental remediation, to put a engineered barrier on a site and leave the contamination in situ. And then on top of that, we’re able to put this super spongy soil and it basically behaves like a green roof on ground. But in doing this, the soil, the contamination remains in place to minimize the amount of negative impact that might occur due to that contamination moving. We’re able to bring in this clean soil that manages the stormwater without digging down, and we’re able to often exceed the stormwater requirements of a site. So doing all of this in a couple of sites that we’ve studied and are implementing this on, we have found up to a 35% cost savings when you compare the grey infrastructure approach to the green infrastructure, meaning if you were to look at the environmental, civil and the landscape budgets together of the typical grey infrastructure solution, meaning with cisterns and hauling off contaminated soil, it would be 35% more expensive than just capping the site and putting a super spongy soil on. And the other benefit is that for that less money, we’re getting a more robust landscape.

Eve: [00:18:20] Yeah, and that sounds amazing.

Molly: [00:18:22] So bigger trees. Yeah. Yeah.

Eve: [00:18:25] So do you find that it’s useful where you have really poor soil, like solid clay or it’s really. I suppose you could treat that as contamination too, right?

Molly: [00:18:34] Yes, you could. Absolutely.

Eve: [00:19:37] Because there’s no water runoff. It’s just like a brick wall.

Molly: [00:18:40] Right.

Speaker1: [00:18:41] Just thinking here.

Molly: [00:18:43] Yeah.

Eve: [00:18:44] We’ve lost a lot of retail and there’s lots of strip malls with tons of parking that are standing empty. And I wonder all the time what they’re going to become. Can you just cover over asphalt or concrete?

Molly: [00:19:57] We can, yeah.

Eve: [00:19:59] Have you done that yet?

Molly: [00:19:00] We have actually, a version of that.

Eve: [00:19:04] Turn the mall, the local mall into a park with tiny little retail outlets around the hitch. I think I might go buy one.

Molly: [00:19:13] We absolutely can.

Eve: [00:19:14] That’s really interesting.

Molly: [00:19:19] Yeah. And we have yeah, we’ve put the soil on just straight on asphalt and concrete caps and very shallow, and we can grow plants out of it.

Eve: [00:19:26] Because, you know, that does a couple of things that first of all, it changes the nature of the space. And secondly, the demolition costs and hauling that material and putting it in landfill is just an awful thing to do, you know? So really, really interesting.

Molly: [00:19:42] Yeah. The carbon footprint, I think can particularly as developers start to consider and quantify better the carbon expenditure that they have with each of the decisions they make, it may become very cost effective because of the ability to offset all those hauling the carbon of all that hauling. Yeah.

Eve: [00:20:05] So where are you offering your products and services now? Just Chicago or have you gone national.

Molly: [00:20:11] We’re national. We do this work coast to coast. We have projects now in Phoenix and California, Minneapolis, Atlanta, DC, New York, Connecticut.

Eve: [00:20:26] Not outside the country?

Molly: [00:20:27] Well, we do have a very first couple of projects in the Grand Cayman this year. Everyone on our team is saying, I have to go to that project for site visit. And so, it’s very competitive to us and staff members there for a site visit. But right now, really solidly work within the continental United States. And we’re excited that we have a couple of opportunities to expand beyond that right now.

Eve: [00:20:51] Well, I have a project I’m working on and trying to get built in Australia and we could use that technology there. And the architect I’m working with would be fascinated by this. I mean, they have lighter soils there, but really nothing, nothing like this.

Molly: [00:21:06] Yeah.

Eve: [00:21:07] Are you getting towards your vision to democratize the green roof? How far do you have to go?

Molly: [00:21:12] Oh, we have a long way to go. Well, I think we are making headway, but this is a big endeavor. And it’s not just about us. It’s about everybody contributing to it. We definitely have a couple of decades more of work to do.

Eve: [00:21:26] Who are your customers?

Molly: [00:21:27] Yeah, good question. So, our customers are, for our landscape architecture studio, we are often either directly contracted by architects or ownership, depending on how a certain contract might be structured. For our products, we sell those to other contractors. So, roofers, landscapers and periodically general contractors who do work.

Eve: [00:21:55] So if I wanted to find someone in southwestern Pennsylvania, could I go to your site and see who you sold to?

Molly: [00:22:02] Oh, yeah. You know what? I don’t know if we have a list on the site for Southwest Pennsylvania, but, yeah, we have folks I can connect you with.

Eve: [00:22:11] Okay. Do you touch on who’s on your team? You’ve got a research division. Like what does your team look like to start a company and grow a company like this?

Molly: [00:22:21] Yeah, we have a very diverse team with quite a broad set of skill sets. So, we do have a soil scientist and, as well as a team of, I think about ten landscape architects and a couple of architects. We also have construction project managers. Obviously, HR and accounting and then we have horticulturalists.

Eve: [00:22:50] So your typical stuff.

Molly: [00:22:51] I started the company where I was wearing all the hats, you know somebody had to drive a forklift. It was me, right? If somebody had to pull weeds, it was me. Over time, we’ve grown, and we’ve really gone from a group of generalists who are willing to do anything to now, over the last few years, really having a group of specialists who bring expertise from their prior work. So, we have a director of operations now who comes to us after a career as an owner’s rep. So, she really understands the breadth of the industry and how to interact with our typical clients and how our team should be operating. Yeah, so a really, quite a diverse group of people. But what’s peculiar about our group and what we do is that we need this breadth, to enable to go deep in what we do, right? Because what we do is so unique, but it has to slot in across the industry from design and construction, also through stewardship, through the whole timeline, and be able to speak to each of the stakeholders which are obviously very diverse within the AC industry.

Eve: [00:24:04] And what’s the range and scale of projects?

Molly: [00:24:07] Oh yeah, we have very large projects which can be acres in size, like the Morton Salt Project where we’re applying our soils on grade to manage contamination and stormwater on that site. It’s a four-acre site and other projects are even larger. And then we have a contest among our sales team for the smallest project. And I think right now it’s about 26 square feet. But if you have anything smaller than that, they will be fighting tooth and nail to sell it to you.

Eve: [00:24:43] 26 square feet, that’s a little room.

Molly: [00:24:44] Yeah, exactly.

Eve: [00:24:25] No. So a little tiny little courtyard. Like a little urban courtyard somewhere. Tiny, weenie, little one.

Molly: [00:24:49] Yeah. That might have even been a set of planters, but yeah. But, more or less, our average project tends to be, I don’t know, between a half-acre and an acre of size.

Eve: [00:25:02] Residential, residential, commercial. Do you have residential customers who come to you?

Molly: [00:25:12] We do have residential customers that come to us. Our typical clients, however, are commercial and institutional. So, over the past ten years, much of our work has been commercial developers who are looking to green amenity deck space for their tenants. And we’re finding quite an increase in that after the pandemic, as people are thinking about how do we lure our folks back to the office? And green space is really critical, and adapting existing structures is very critical. And that’s obviously a sweet spot for us. Through the pandemic, many of our projects continued that were commercial, but we have seen quite an uptick in institutional work, health care and higher ed. Those portfolios for us are really increasing significantly. And then we do residential. Yeah, we do it and we enjoy it. But really, I think we’re a commercial outfit, so we kind of work with commercial clients.

Eve: [00:26:06] Interesting. Just to wrap this part of the conversation up, just tell me about one of your favorite projects that you worked on that was really very impactful.

Molly: [00:26:14] Sure. Well, we were lucky to build and supply and continue to maintain the green roof on Studio Gang Architects headquarters here in Chicago. And that was a really fun project for many reasons. Obviously, to get to work with Studio Gang is an honor, but also because of what we actually did on that project. So, they were looking at an existing building. I’m not remembering the vintage, but that was probably before the 1930s. And so, there was a limitation on the structural load. I want to say it was around 22 pounds a square foot that we were limited to. You know, Studio Gang wanted to put a wildflower meadow on the roof, a native meadow, as well as some trees. So, we worked with the structural engineer to identify the columns over which we could place trees, and then the remaining area, we sort of sloped the topography of the soil to manage the weight, keep it low, and then seeded the roof with a native wildflower meadow. And this was really, really fun to do and to think about the species that were up there. But one of the challenges that came up was that the project was delayed and what should have been seeded in the spring was seeded in the fall and late enough in the year that we weren’t sure if the plants could establish and protect the soil from wind scour through the winter. So, we spoke with the Studio Gang and said, hey, look, we can seed with the meadow, with the native species, and they can cold stratify help establish in the spring. But through the winter we’re not entirely sure. So, what we’d like to suggest is seeding the roof with a cold hardy annual so it could establish in the fall, cover the roof through the winter, and then we can mow it back in the spring. Or it could die back because it’s an annual and then the perennial plants could establish.

Eve: [00:28:20] Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. It’s like a blanket.

Molly: [00:28:23] Right. A cozy blanket. So, we ended up seeding with winter wheat. And winter wheat, we thought, I think at the time this was the first time we did this. We were like, let’s just throw a lot of wheat on this roof because we’ve got to make sure it stays in place. So, when we came back in the spring, it was a wheat field across this rooftop. It was so dense. And so, we asked, can we leave it up here rather than mow it? What do you think about just seeing what happens? And they were game. And so, we let it mature and in July we took some samples, sent them to a lab, and they were cleared for, basically there are certain type of fungus that can attack wheat and then it can be dangerous to humans if you were to consume it, but it came back clear on all this. So, we got a group of students together from a non-profit called After School Matters here in Chicago and One Summer Chicago, two different groups. But we worked with them to train them up. The students came to the rooftop with us. We harvested all the wheat. Well, actually, we harvested about 3000 square feet because it was a lot of work. So, we just did about 3000 square feet of this roof because Studio Gang wanted us to harvest with scissors so that we wouldn’t damage the underlying perennials that were coming up.

Eve: [00:29:51] That’s a lot of work.

Molly: [00:29:51] It was so much work. So, the students and we, like everybody, like our staff was out there or the students and we all were out there with a pair of scissors doing this. We brought the harvest back to our headquarters at the time. Another group of students helped us winnow, separating the chaff from the grain, and they came up with all different ways to do this. They took boards and beat the boards together to break up the seed heads. They took a bucket and filled it up and put a chain in there on a drill and beat apart the wheat. And then they took fans and blew the chaff away from the grain. So, like all this stuff, and over the course of three weeks they processed all of this wheat and we had 66 pounds of grain and a local artisanal miller milled it into a high grade pastry flour. And we had over 60 pounds of flour, which then a local baker worked with the students to bake it into cookies that they sold to raise money for After School Matters and One Summer Chicago.

Eve: [00:30:59] That’s really a lovely story. That’s a lot work.

Molly: [00:31:02] It was so much work, so much work. But it did really pay off because a few things came of that. One is the students were hilarious and incredible and so much fun to work with. And one of the students was like an aspiring stand-up comedian, and he put a whole bit together about like how insane it is where cookies and bread come from, which was awesome. And then at the time, the mayor of Chicago was Rahm Emanuel, and he came to our headquarters to celebrate their graduation from this non-profit, this student summer program that they were in. And there were 30,000 kids across Chicago that were in this program, and about 30 of them were here, were with us. And he came to their graduation, and he was supposed to be at our office for like 30 minutes. He spent almost 2 hours just hanging out with the kids. It was so cool. They gave him a pound of flour. And then, you know, Studio Gang’s rooftop ended up winning an award for this project. And today it’s a native wildflower meadow. So, after that first season, the story.

Eve: [00:32:18] They didn’t keep the wheat? Because wheat is beautiful.

Molly: [00:32:20] It is. It really is. But they wanted the native wildflower meadow and so they let it go back to that. And every year now they do a BioBlitz where they bring out a group of biologists and study like what are the species they’re seeing and what’s happening on the roof. So, it’s interesting to see that this is a space, a very urban space. It’s right at the intersections of Ashland in Milwaukee, in Chicago. It’s a very dense intersection, but three floors up, all this ecology has happened in the past five or six years. You know, it’s pretty impactful.

Eve: [00:32:57] It’s pretty fabulous.

Molly: [00:33:18] And then we also learned something very cool, which I love the data behind what we find out on each project. So, here’s a project where it’s about 5000 square feet. We harvested 3000 square feet of wheat and we got 66 pounds of flour. So, what we know now is that for every 50 square feet of a green roof, you could have 1 pound of flour grown. And this is important when we think about how do we scale this up, right? So across the city of Chicago, we worked with Perkins and Will to actually study how many square feet of green roof could ever be built and learned that from each of these data points of all of our projects, that little bits like how much, how much stormwater on this project, how much we do on this project and whatnot. We learned that, you know, if every year you harvested wheat on all the, all the eligible rooftops in Chicago for green roofs you could get, what’s the number of pounds? It’s almost 10 million pounds of flour and that of grain. And that grain could turn into nearly 50 million bottles of beer a year. That is pretty dang cool.

Eve: [00:35:38] Well, so I have two more questions for you. Clearly, you’re really passionate about this. How did you come to it? What’s your background?

Molly: [00:35:09] Oh, yeah, I know enough to get myself really in trouble. So, I studied Earth Systems for my undergraduate degree and my graduate degree. So, I got an undergrad and a master’s from Stanford in Earth Systems. And my focus there was within geology and narrowly within geology, I took a lot of soils and biogeochemistry classes, but I really just knew enough to get myself in trouble. I didn’t. I’m not a soil scientist. After my master’s degree, I ended up going to work for a general contractor as a carpenter for a couple of years just to do something different and be, I wanted to be up in Seattle where I could ski and climb every weekend, and after a few years of that, kind of wanted to go back into working in the environment but thought about, I was so interested in construction and how the built environment was, operates, but I really love soils and a couple of conversations some friends said, what about green roofs? So, I got a fellowship to work in Germany and learned how they build green roofs over there.

Eve: [00:36:23] It’s the country of green,

Molly: [00:36:25] Right, yeah.

Eve: [00:36:26] I mean, they separate out all their recycling. You can’t put glass bottles in except for certain hours because it might disturb the neighbors. I mean, they are so organized.

Molly: [00:36:37] Yeah, yeah, they are.

Eve: [00:36:40] Very precise. Yeah.

Molly: [00:36:41] Yeah. And so, I went over there, and I was there for about a year and a half learning, learning about the German green roof industry, which at the time really was far ahead of the United States. And so, I learned a lot there about green roofs, best practices, came back to the United States and just very fortuitously met Michael Repkin within that first few months of coming back, or being in Chicago. And it’s, his soil science background and me to know enough that he was speaking the truth, but not enough to be able to do it myself. We teamed up and really created Omni Ecosystems from that.

Eve: [00:37:20] How fabulous.

Molly: [00:37:21] Yeah. And over the past 13 years, in some ways we’ve leapfrogged what Germany did. You know, German green roofs remain very much about seeding, which is a monoculture and non-native to most of Europe and North America. In our work is, how can we go lightweight, how can we manage more stormwater, how can we become more biodiverse? But none of that would be possible without understanding what they developed in Germany and building upon it.

Eve: [00:37:48] Absolutely fascinating. So, what’s next for you? What’s next? There’s got to be something next brewing.

Molly: [00:37:55] Oh, boy. We always have little things brewing, but, you know, what we’re really excited about right now is scaling up the solutions we’ve created so that others can implement this. We recognize that we are on a very short timeline to mitigate and adapt to climate change. And the soils that we’ve invented and the design approach that we have has really kind of shown people, hey, there’s a path, it’s proven, this isn’t a pilot study anymore. We have this done and figured out. And so, what we’re working actively on right now is scaling and empowering others to use this technology. And that’s why I said earlier, our construction and maintenance teams are small and mighty, but really what they’re about is learning how these, our systems are best implemented and managed so that we can train others to do it. So, we’ve now built training programs. We have more than 50 contractors around the United States, either fully trained and implementing our systems or in the process of getting trained up. And that to us is really exciting because our hands can only do so much. But getting this technology to others.

Eve: [00:39:16] Now is exciting because I would want to know who they are. I mean, I hope you have a database.

Molly: [00:39:21] We do. And to your point earlier, it’s not on our website yet. But that’s part of the, part of our plan over the course of the next year is to build that up. And we want to make sure it’s just easy, easy for people to deploy this technology and use it.

Eve: [00:39:39] Well, this has been absolutely delightful. I’m in awe. How interesting.

Molly: [00:39:43] Thank you, Eve. It’s a treat to speak with you. And I do hope you’ll come visit sometime.

Eve: [00:39:47] I’m definitely going to. When this latest COVID wave settles down again, I’ll try and come to Chicago. I’d really love to see what you’re doing. Thank you so much.

Molly: [00:39:17] Thank you, Eve.

Eve: [00:39:24] That was Molly Meyer, founder of Omni Systems. She’s developed a brand new approach to greening roofs, an engineered soil that weighs just 15 pounds per square foot. That’s just 12.5% of your garden soil, which averages 120 pounds per square foot. And it’s not only meadows that she’s growing, but trees in her lightweight soil. I’m blown away.

Eve: [00:40:40] 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 Molly Meyer

Flat is the new normal.

“Mass-market production and the commodification of housing has led to a ‘flattening’ of design into a limited set of bland, homogeneous options” writes Diana Ionescu for Planetizen.

Once upon a time, houses used to have unique features. Today, if you drive around any American city, you’ll see neighborhoods full of cookie cutter homes and rows of surprisingly similar, cheaply constructed apartment blocks. Architecture critic Mark Lamster, from Dallas Morning News, writes: “To call this ‘architecture’ is an insult to the art. Rather, think of these buildings as spreadsheets bumped up to three dimensions.” He calls this “The Flattening, a gradual draining of character from just about every corner of our lives.”

How did this happen? Cookie cutter suburbs are not new, but the trend seems to have accelerated. The status of houses has changed from family home to commodity. This has led to their design being driven purely by economics. Builders who want to appeal to a wide range of buyers, to embrace the demand for greater efficiency and to use the cheapest materials available, now favour quantity over quality and character.  

Will this shift be kind to us in the long run?  We think not.

For economic and sustainable reasons, we need to shift our focus to long-term growth of cities. This means designing and building a variety of housing types for the ever-increasing variety of family types.  And it also means designing and building to improve our cities, making them delightful places to live, not flattening them.

Read the Planetizen article here or the original Dallas Morning News article here.

Image by BrianScantlebury licensed by Canva

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

Cultural Commentary.

Although her focus at school was art history, Allison Arieff initially landed squarely in the publishing world. After an editorial stint at Chronicle Books, she began her well-known tenure at Dwell magazine, in 2000, she was a founding Senior Editor, but she soon took over the reins as Editor-in-Chief, from 2002 to 2006. During her tenure, the design and architecture magazine won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence (2005), and by that point it had already become a ubiquitous read for an emergent design aficionado community, rekindling a design lifestyle boom for the 21st century, lightly centered around a contemporary California-style modernism.

Following this, Allison was an opinion writer for The New York Times for almost a decade and a half, where she dealt with issues such the lack of female representation in architecture, the rapid rate at which home square footage is increasing, and the need for more inclusive cities. She also wrote about design, architecture and cities for CityLab (at Bloomberg). During this period Allison also worked for nine years  as Editorial Director for the urban planning and policy think tank, SPUR (San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association). Originally born out of the 1910 SF earthquake as the San Francisco Housing Association (SFHA) it eventually grew to incorporate urban planning, land management, transportation, along with the appropriate name change. Using research, education and advocacy, they focus on issues such as housing, transportation, sustainability, food access and more.

In 2018, Allison was awarded the Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary. She has lectured at Stanford University, The New School, Pratt, and the University of California, Berkeley, and has published three books: Prefab (2002), Trailer Travel: A Visual History of Mobile America (2002), Spa (2004). Prefab, her first and next known book, explores the history and innovative potential of prefabricated housing – a side gig Dwell actually explored long after her departure.

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: [00:00:41] Allison Arieff was lucky enough to help launch Dwell magazine, first as founding senior editor and then editor in chief. During her tenure, the Design and Architecture magazine won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, and by that point, it had already become a ubiquitous read for an emergent design community, rekindling a design lifestyle boom for the 21st century. Since then, Allison has continued to build a storied and prominent career as a writer, author and thought leader. Prefab, her first book, explores the history and innovative potential of prefabricated housing well before prefab became a thing. Today, Allison is back where she started as the editorial director of another print magazine, MIT Technology Review. You’ll want to hear more.

Eve: [00:01:45] 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: [00:02:13] Hello, Allison. Thank you so much for joining me today. I’m really pretty honored to have you here.

Allison Arieff: [00:02:18] It’s my pleasure.

Eve: [00:02:19] Probably the most exciting thing for me is that during your tenure at Dwell, one of my little urban real estate projects graced the pages of Dwell, which was a very exciting moment for me because Dwell was, of course, a very big thing at the time. And so, like talking about Dwell, which you helped launch early in your career, what was the purpose of Dwell? How did it come about.

Allison: [00:02:41] So long ago now, Dwell started in 1999 and the founder, Laura Beam, had been designing or looking for an architect to design a home for her and was having a really hard time, kind of communicating with her architect about what she wanted and also felt that there weren’t any publications that really reflected what she was looking for. I also just want to remind your listeners that in 1999, the Internet was kind of at a different place. Right now, of course, there are a billion and one places to find pictures of architecture and houses and all that stuff. But it was so different when Dwell started that for a while we even debated whether or not we needed a website. So think about that for a minute.

Eve: [00:03:34] Yeah, I used to have stacks of architectural magazines that I’d leaf through, and those stacks are long gone, so, yeah.

Allison: [00:03:41] So, Laura really decided she wanted to launch a magazine to kind of speak to what she thought was missing in the market, and specifically with an eye towards kind of modern design. If you think about most shelter magazines that were around back then, kind of like Architectural Digest, it’s more sort of palatial, aspirational, celebrity driven stuff.

Eve: [00:04:08] Not for everyday people, right.

Allison: [00:04:09] Not for everybody. Though, interestingly, the readership of Architectural Digest is much more aspirational. The people who read it tend not to be the people who own those houses, but people who aspire to them. So, I think that the idea of Dwell was to be really about the idea of good design for everybody, that everybody deserves it, that it should be much more a part of the conversation. There was really an emphasis on architecture. Even though only 5% of homes are designed by architects in the United States, I think we would really argue that it’d probably be better if that percentage was a little bit higher.

Eve: [00:04:52] Much, much better.

Allison: [00:04:53] But really, I think the magazine was really trying to demystify design and architecture at a time when they felt much more mystical than they are now. And it was really just a tremendous opportunity to be brought in to build something. Literally there was no magazine, at al, and we had nine months to put the first issue together. We launched in 2000, and then after that we had five weeks to do every other issue. So, we had kind of the luxury of time to think about what this might be at the outset. I think we really benefited, especially from two things. One, we were based in San Francisco rather than in the New York publishing world. So, we actually had to get up off of our desks and we had to reach out to different people than maybe we would have had we been in New York where the publishing world sort of is and was. And also, many of us on staff had never worked for a magazine before, so we were not really burdened with the whole like, oh, well, we always do it this way. So, on the one hand that’s amazing, on the other hand, it’s like we were just blissfully naive about a lot, but I think that enabled us to do a lot of really interesting stuff.

Eve: [00:06:11] And it was an amazing magazine. I remember I just thoroughly enjoyed it. So, it’s really about democratizing design, which hasn’t really quite happened yet. Maybe it’s a little better than it used to be because of the Internet. So, how did you come to be the first editor, which I think you were, right?

Allison: [00:06:32] So I was the first senior editor. And when I started, I was hired by Karrie Jacobs, who was the first editor in chief, and Karrie had been involved in Colors magazine, which was, again, another major design milestone. Tibor Kalman did Colors with Benetton. She was also at Metropolis Magazine. I was hired by Karrie. I had been at Chronicle Books prior to that. Publisher here in San Francisco. We just put together this really amazing team of people. Karrie left after about a year and a half, and I became editor in chief after that. But one thing about that team, and I think it’s really reflected in the pages, is we just really, really liked each other and had such fun putting that magazine together. And I think that energy and enthusiasm, like we really were just a bunch of kids, like let’s put on a show. We really spent a ridiculous amount of time together and just had a lot of fun putting it together. So, I’m stunned and amazed that I am here now at my new job, which I’m sure we’ll talk about later. And I get to do print magazine again because that’s my favorite thing to do.

Eve: [00:07:46] Oh, that’s really interesting. Why is architecture and design so important to you?

Allison: [00:07:54] I think about, and I read about this quite a lot when I had my column for The New York Times. When something is working, you don’t really think about. Like I’m sitting in a chair at my desk and a chair is comfortable enough so I’m not really spending a lot of time thinking about my chair. If my shoes are comfortable, I’m not spending a lot of time thinking about my shoes. But if you’re sitting in an awful chair or if you’re wearing really uncomfortable shoes, that’s all you’re thinking about. So, I think that we underestimate how much that sort of thing affects our quality of life and kind of how you go about your day. And so, on the one hand it seems quite obvious, we should be surrounded by things that were thoughtfully considered and well designed, but for the bulk of people and things, I just think that’s not true.

Allison: [00:08:43] We’re living in generally inefficient homes. I mean, with the heat wave now, I think it shows that we’re not really building things in a way that maximizes energy efficiency. We’re spending our time in cars that are getting bigger and bigger and more dangerous and wasting more fossil fuels. There’s so many aspects of life that, it’s not that we don’t have the ability to do better, we’re just either not paying attention or sort of wilfully ignoring that things could be better, or we’re not willing to invest in them being better. But I think that the things that we use and the environment that we are in, whether the ones we work in or live in or go to school in, are so important to myriad aspects of our life and we sort of ignore them at our peril. And I think that we’ve as a society done exactly that. We’re not investing in infrastructure. We’re not designing schools that are great learning environments for kids. There’s all these things that were neglected. And I think that, again, it’s not that we don’t have the ability to do better. Sort of lacking the will to do so. And a lot of respect.

Eve: [00:09:57] You know, I often wonder whether it’s just the supreme comfort of things being the same and that, you know, making change or changing something is uncomfortable, difficult, difficult to imagine, difficult to envision. You know, it just.

Allison: [00:10:14] It’s easier to not do that. I mean, you were an architect. You’ve developed projects. I mean, I remember speaking to developers, whether of office space or of housing, who were like, well, this model works. We get our ROI and why change it.

Eve: [00:10:32] And then we have the world littered with that model, right.

Allison: [00:10:36] Right, right. It’s like, oh, we’re going to build this on top of a parking structure and have this and that. And it’s like, well, this doesn’t really make a lot of sense. Yeah, but it works, it’s fine. And so, I think that you just see that writ large everywhere, and that’s kind of why you get on a plane and go somewhere now and you’re like, where am I exactly? Because…

Eve: [00:10:54] So, I mean, it’s really a shame to think that the world is shaped only 5% by thoughtful design, maybe, you know, and a lot of the rest of it is cookie cutter just because that’s the way we always do it. Do you think technology has changed changes? I mean, for one, people can see more design and they’re just subjected to more on the Internet. Right? So, they can surely see there are more possibilities. But, has that really changed things?

Allison: [00:11:27] I don’t think so. I feel like technology has enabled more consumerism, maybe. So maybe there’s a greater variety of products available. But I have not seen the advancements that I might have hoped for. More sustainable architecture, say, or cost savings through technology than enabled more attention to the design of buildings. It’s pretty disheartening, to be honest, to see how little that has changed. I have an image kind of in my archive of stuff of the first house with solar panels, which was in the thirties. And we’ve known how to do this for a really long time. And the fact that solar panels are still this really massive cost. They’re not part of anybody’s normal construction process or water collection, like all these things that are actually really, really easy to do at this point. You have to go through some hurdles.

Allison: [00:12:36] I mean, grey water, for example, was like illegal to have in San Francisco, where I live, until recently. Like, all these things that should just be par for the course. We’re trying to put solar on our 100-year-old house, and the cheapest it’s going to be is like $15,000. Ultimately that will be fine. But that’s the cheapest, right? And it should not be. When we got a new roof, whenever we got a new roof, like it should have been at this point, like you get a new roof and that’s part of it.

Eve: [00:13:05] You just get the solar panel with it. Yeah, yeah.

Allison: [00:13:08] I think the government could do better. I think industry could do better. The incentives are still pretty small for these things. They’re just there’s not enough collective work, but there’s not enough will from the top. I mean, you see how places can be transformed with visionary leadership, right? We can take the example of Paris and Mayor Anne Hidalgo who’s like, cars are a blight, these things should happen in this city. We’re going to have bike lanes. We’re going to have greater pedestrian access to things. We’re really going to prioritize the experience of a person in the city as opposed to a car living in the city. That wouldn’t happen just without someone really taking the risk to make it happen. And I’m just not seeing that happen anywhere in the States.

Eve: [00:13:50] It’s also, I think, culturally different here because I have an architectural friend in Italy and I was always astonished at how much sort of design for the good was accepted there versus here, where personal property is really first and foremost. If that tree is dropping leaves on my property, I want you to get rid of it. It’s not that the tree can cool down everyone’s houses, it’s just making dirt on my car. It’s a very different way to think about the world and.

Allison: [00:14:20] Agreed.

Eve: [00:14:21] Yeah, it’s interesting. So since Dwell, how has your focus shifted? What are you working on these days?

Allison: [00:14:29] Sure, let’s see. So, I was at Dwell for about seven years, I would say. And where at Dwell we were very focused on this idea of, that good design is for everybody. But in the end at Dwell, it was like, good design is very good for the person fortunate enough to live in a house that’s in Dwell.

Eve: [00:14:52] That’s right. They were absolutely spectacular places.

Allison: [00:14:55] Like yeah, things are great. I’m in this house. So, not long after I left Dwell, I started writing a column for the New York Times, interestingly, for the opinion section, but that’s who asked, so it was great. And so, I really started focusing on kind of beyond the house, right, to the street and the neighborhood and all kinds of various aspects of design and was really kind of expanding my ideas around how design could have more impact on more people for the better.

Allison: [00:15:30] I joined an urban planning and policy think tank in, let’s say, 2012 called SPUR, the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research, and then really expanded my focus from the house to the city to the region. Like how can we think about things from a much broader perspective, transportation networks, housing policy that ensures a certain level of a certain standard of ideally design, but let’s just say at least density, for regions and really focused on all aspects of urban policy. For nearly a decade at SPUR and worked on their, I was editorial director there. So, I did a magazine there, oversaw the website, oversaw public programming, all those kinds of things. And learned more than anyone would ever want to know about how.

Eve: [00:16:24] Probably had a lot of fun.

Allison: [00:16:27] Cities and regions work, which can be a little demoralizing. You talked about different places, having different attitudes. I mean, San Francisco fights for 20 years about a bike lane. The bike lane ends up being like a quarter of a mile and you celebrate for a week. And then someone introduces a ballot proposition to get rid of the bike lane. So, it’s just like this constant specific task around here, which is a little bit exhausting, but you’ve got to keep fighting the good fight. Earlier this year, I joined MIT Technology Review as editorial director of their print magazine, and I’m delighted to be working for print magazine again. I never thought it would happen. And while the bulk of technology reviews focuses on digital, every single person who ever went to MIT gets the print magazine, and we also have subscribers.

Allison: [00:17:23] So, it’s a lot of people who are looking at it. And so, I get to fill 88 pages every two months, and it’s technology writ large. I mean, as far as I’m concerned right now, anything can be a technology story. We’re doing a gender issue right now. We just did a cities issue. You can, of course, find all of these at TechnologyReview.com. We are doing one on mortality because really technology touches everything in our lives at this point. So, it’s a pretty broad definition. So, for me it’s fantastic because the different people that I can talk to during the course of a week, it’s just, I can talk to people about any subject that they want really, and we can turn it into a technology story. So, that’s great.

Eve: [00:18:09] That’s really great. So, you know, the one thing I wanted to touch on also was zoning because, you know, I’m in a place right now which still utilizes the 1950 zoning code, which is really bizarre, you know. It’s an overlay district of 3500 square foot lots that require enormous setbacks and, you know, a nice front lawn, none of which is energy efficient, especially in the current weather. I mean, I know, you know, have you written about zoning and its impact on place and, how do we tackle that behemoth? Because that’s really influencing everything, I think.

Allison: [00:18:48] It really is. I will say, a number of cities over the past few years eliminated single family zoning, which was great. But this goes back to the leadership thing that if there’s not leadership in place to kind of push for the policies that allow things to change within those zoning changes, then you don’t really get very far. But just to give another very contemporary example, during COVID tons of businesses had to shut down temporarily or permanently. And now, so many cities have massive amounts of vacancies, and maybe those spaces are zoned for something quite specific. I’m kind of all in favor of, this will never happen, but I’m in favor of it, of just like there should be no zoning, this should be just like a five-year zoning free time. Like, if you can find something to fill a space. Fill a space.

Eve: [00:19:41] It’s really interesting, yeah.

Allison: [00:19:44] Because I go, we have a little office space in downtown San Francisco, and I go downtown once or twice a week and it is a ghost town. There is nobody down there. Because of supply chain issues, there’s like, a shortage of everything. So, you see plywood over all kinds of businesses. And first I thought, oh my God, this many businesses closed. But in fact, people can’t get glass to to replace doors. So, it just adds to this feeling of just being in utter desolation and barring any pretty genius plan for bringing all these businesses back, I honestly think we just have to think so creatively about how to use these spaces. There’s lots of talk of converting office to housing, for example, which is not easy but not impossible. And I think that, and I’ve talked to people too, I’m like, oh, we have all these vacant storefronts. We can think about housing. And people will say things like, oh well, people don’t want to live on the ground level. And I’m just like, you know, I think people would be okay.

Eve: [00:20:44] Yes they do!

Allison: [00:20:44] It’s pretty easy to, there’s an empty Walgreens that you could like.

Eve: [00:20:51] You could do amazing like artist live/work spaces and taller storefronts and there’s all sorts of reasons to want to live there. You know, I agree with you. And Pittsburgh’s actually getting a lot of new housing in vacated buildings. But I think Pittsburgh’s fortunate in that it’s a little cultural hub in the downtown. So, I am interested to see how that shifts over time. You know, another thing I’ve noticed, which I don’t drive that often, but recently I drove through, past a strip mall which was completely deserted. And I noticed that, you know, first of all, there’s acres of empty parking, acres and acres of it. Surely, we can convert that into parks and usable spaces. Like I could see that being really interesting housing or office space with sort of an amenity out the front. But instead, what I saw was that all the storefronts systematically were being changed into storage, storage pods, which is, I’m not sure that’s the right direction either.

Allison: [00:22:01] Yeah, I’m amazed to see some of the prime real estate that some storage units have.

Eve: [00:22:09] How much stuff can people store, you know, it’s.

Allison: [00:22:12] SPUR did a study of empty parking lots in downtown Oakland actually a few years ago. And I won’t get the number right. But it was something on the order of, let’s call it 45 surface parking lots in downtown Oakland, the amount of housing that you could build on that. And to be fair, some of it has actually been developed into housing. But people will fight to preserve anything right now.

Eve: [00:22:36] Or if you took two lanes off one of those like eight or ten lane freeways in L.A., you could build an awful lot of housing. Anyway, it’s really interesting stuff. What do you hope to illuminate with your work these days? A little bit different than Dwell, I think.

Allison: [00:22:54] Hmm.

Eve: [00:22:56] Because you’ve written about women in architecture, streets, sustainability, access, inclusivity, much, much more, cars as death mobiles. I mean, there’s just tons of stuff out there, right?

Allison: [00:23:11] I feel like culturally we went through this period of embracing every notion of technology and really believing that it was going to solve every problem that we had. Anyone who’s read my work could see that I do not share that belief. I am not anti-technology, but I think for a really long time I’ve been really kind of urging a more critical look at anything that promises that it’s going to be the savior of anything that might be autonomous vehicles or Hyperloop, which, by the way, has still not been built anywhere, or how Lyft and Uber were going to solve transportation problems within cities. And now it costs like double the price of a taxi to take an Uber in the city. And the transportation systems are haemorrhaging riders.

Eve: [00:24:05] Exactly.

Allison: [00:24:06] And don’t have enough money to sustain basic service.

Eve: [00:24:09] And the streets are clogged, right.

Allison: [00:24:11] So we’re seeing a bit of a reckoning. Where people are hopefully being a little bit more thoughtful about empty promises. I think we’re also seeing a racial reckoning, gender reckoning. I mean, all these things that we might not have been thoughtful enough about around technology. Who’s making the decisions about a new product, who is that product serving? What would a diverse team look like to build these products? All these things I’m interested in highlighting. We have a story coming out in the next issue of Tech Review called “Why Tech Can’t Solve Its Gender Problem,” which just kind of looks at the trajectory of women in technology, careers and technology over the last, let’s call it 80 years. And most of technology was kind of dominated by women for a while. Coders were women. It was almost like being in a typing pool and the story just outlines how that culture became so incredibly male and then who is actually working now to change that? So, I’m very interested in telling stories around technology that have not really been told enough.

Eve: [00:25:22] A lot of that has to do with capital too, you know, who’s driving capital to what. Which is also a very elite class of.

Allison: [00:25:29] Absolutely.

Eve: [00:25:30] White males, because really, they dominate the VC world. So, you know, you have some ridiculously low percentage of women owned businesses and minority businesses, like 2 or 3% being funded.

Allison: [00:25:46] Well, I think what’s really interesting about this story in particular is, how it shows how intertwined all these people have been. Like, this guy takes this guy under his wing and then that guy takes this other guy under his wing and there’s just like a continuous thread of sort of insider relationship. So, that’s one thing that we’re exploring. In the cities issue that we did, talked a lot about everything from how surveillance is becoming such a big feature of our cities and how we might think thoughtfully about how that might be helpful in some regards and how that might be terrible in other regards. We had another piece on, I called it because I can’t help myself from my early magazine days of provocative cover lines, but like, sexy retrofits, how really the most sustainable architecture that you can do is just making sure that you’ve made the existing buildings more sustainable than they were before. There was an example of the New York Housing Authority, if they replaced all the refrigerators and all their units with energy efficient refrigerators, it’s like a million refrigerators, right? It has an impact that far outweighs any like, tech gadget or any other thing that you might think of. So really kind of digging into.

Eve: [00:27:00] Sensible solutions.

Allison: [00:27:02] Again, the broader swath of what technology can and can’t do.

Eve: [00:27:07] Interesting. So, I love it. So, what are some of your favorite amazing projects in the built environment today?

Allison: [00:27:17] Oh, this is a tough one. I will say I don’t follow kind of like new developments in architecture as closely as I once did. I’m also going to admit to something. Increasingly, I realize that sometimes a project can be successful in spite of the architecture or design of it, and I’ll give you two examples. So, every Saturday I go to the farmer’s market. It’s just a couple blocks from my house. It’s called Alemany Farmer’s Market, and it’s in a giant parking lot and with some stalls and no one ever parks in this parking lot. It’s just like, it’s there for the farmer’s market and there’s a flea market. And then it was a big COVID testing site at the height of the pandemic. There’s nothing attractive about this. The traffic flow is terrible, but it is the one place that I can think of in San Francisco that is the most diverse place that you could go. People from all walks of life show up there, every income level, every race, gender, kids, everything. People coming from all over the region to sell their produce.

Allison: [00:28:29] It was not designed well but doesn’t matter. Something allows it to succeed. And I’m kind of fascinated by this. For all my time spent arguing about the importance of good design, the fact is that sometimes it’s irrelevant in a way, like whatever it is about this market, it’s drawing everyone to it, in spite of the fact that it is just a parking lot. And so, I think that sometimes I’m in love with a building. It’s gorgeous for a million reasons, but then also I’m in love with something that’s just like a messy, random spot that ends up becoming really popular. And so, you can’t program, it’s programmed, it’s a farmer’s market, but still, I’m kind of fascinated.

Eve: [00:29:14] You can’t program those accidents. No, I think that’s right. And then you just have to hope that no one will mess it up.

Allison: [00:29:21] Yes. Yes. I mean, another example here is the Japan time in San Francisco, which is a neighborhood where lots of people were displaced at one point. It’s right across the street from the Fillmore neighborhood, which is one of the worst cases of urban renewal nationally. Just really, a very complicated history. But what emerged is this weirdly like Japanese shopping mall that has like ramen shops and bubble tea and an amazing bookstore which is packed night and day. And the building is like 1970s. There’s like bronze stair banisters and there’s one, there’s like two bathrooms for this entire huge complex. Like, there’s so much that’s wrong with it, but people cannot stay away from it. And so, again, it’s just whatever is there is just like hit on the zeitgeist of what people want. And if you tore it down and built some Herzog and de Meuron building, it wouldn’t. I’m just kind of fascinated in these spaces that function in spite of architecture.

Eve: [00:30:25] I completely agree. You know, When I visited in Beijing, which I have never been able to get out of my mind, was like, the Chinese like to build these sort of mega malls. And this was this, it was right behind Tiananmen Square. And it was this really long boulevard, very, very wide, with brand new shops on each side. You know, it was wide and difficult to cross. I mean, it was used, brand new, right? And then right behind it was this little alley which ran the length of it, packed like ten feet wide packed with people you couldn’t move. And I would much rather be there than the brand-new boulevard, you know, it was way more interesting. So yeah, I don’t know how you design that.

Allison: [00:31:18] I think this is the challenge of so many suburbs, right? And I’ve written about this quite a lot. It’s like cities are interesting because they have a patina and they’ve evolved over time and things kind of ebb and flow. When you put down like a new suburban development, it’s just this thing plonked down and it’s very hard to give any kind of context or texture to those kind of moments. We see so many of them and I don’t know that anyone is really, can crack the code on making them feel a little bit less like they were just plopped down.

Eve: [00:31:50] Right, right. When I was a young architect, my favorite book of all time was a book called Great Streets. Do you remember that? It had visual sections through streets that worked really well. And you could kind of really dissect what, at least spatially what drew people. You know, if a street’s too wide, it’s scary to cross. If there’s nothing on the other side, there’s no reason to go there. If you have to walk past blank parking garage walls, you’re not going to walk down the street. So, like some… I thought it was a fascinating book, anyway. We’re diverging now. So, what are some of your favorite cities?

Allison: [00:32:31] Favorite cities? Oh, I have a lot of them. Actually, just planning a trip to Dublin, a place I haven’t been, so I’m excited to go see Ireland. I lived in London for a bit. I absolutely love London. A less obvious one. I went on a press trip several years ago to Turin, which doesn’t seem like a city that tons of people visit, but it was kind of the most amazing surprise turn. There was so much there that was absolutely incredible. I stayed in a hotel where the Fiat factory was. There’s a track on the roof, which I think they made into a park. There’s an amazing contemporary art museum in a castle. Like a half hour ahead of town. There was just I mean, I had, it was one of those funny things where someone called me at Dwell, we would like to bring you to Turin. I was like, sounds great. And it was just, I had no expectations. So, it was such a surprise. I do really like visiting. I mean, one of the best parts of my experience at Dwell is that we did this issue every year called Modern Across America, where we tried to find examples, I mean, I’m sure you remember this, of architecture not in the major cities where you would expected and admittedly we were a little condescending when we would talk about fly over zones and all that kind of stuff. But on the positive side, I took trips to all these places that you might not ever normally plan a trip to.

Eve: [00:34:11] Maybe like Pittsburgh.

Eve: [00:34:14] Fayetteville, Arkansas, Gary, Indiana. Once a year I would, we would send people out and we would, this is back in the day when magazines had money and you could like, people have to do stuff. And I loved Milwaukee. I loved going to all these places because you will always find some little pocket of a creative community. And obviously I’d be going in to visit an architect and an architect would be happy to show me everything in their city or town. But also, the architects would universally say, like, if I was living in New York, I wouldn’t be able to build anything. And here I can pretty much build anything. So, there was something always really great.

Eve: [00:34:55] So it seems like you’re describing authenticity and grit a little bit, right? Places that have.

Allison: [00:35:02] Yeah, I mean that, But I think that obviously you go to Paris. Paris is amazing. You’re still going to find like a million surprises in Paris or Rome or any of those places which I love, as everyone does. But I also think it’s interesting to kind of visit places that you’re not expecting to have anything to be good, quite so interesting and discover it there. So, I like a mix of those things for sure.

Eve: [00:35:31] So, you also wrote a book on prefab housing before, probably before it was a thing, right? And what drew you to the subject and how do you think that’s played out?

Allison: [00:35:43] Sure. Well, I have to tell you a funny story, because I just heard the story about. So, before I did the Prefab book, my husband and I did a book on Airstream trailers.

Eve: [00:35:54] Oh, my favorite thing in the world.

Allison: [00:35:56] And weirdly, because they go through cycles of like extreme popularity. But at the time when we started that book, they were not going through extreme popularity. We definitely foresaw a trend. And my sister just told me the other day, my mom passed away some time ago, but somehow my sister and I were talking about camping. When I did that book and went on a few camping trips with my husband during the course of having that trailer, my mother had said to my sister, she’s not turning into a camper, which I just learned and I thought was hilarious. So, God forbid she’s camping. But so, the Airstream, the Airstream trailer, my mom really liked to make hotel reservations. She’s not a camper.

Eve: [00:36:43] I’m not either. I can glamp, but not camp.

Allison: [00:36:48] Which is all to say, the thing about the Airstream trailer that’s fascinating, it’s fascinating as a design object. It’s also fascinating as an example of something that’s built on an assembly line. Like you can live in it. There’s a form that’s repeated, right? And so, ultimately prefab, it’s the same idea, right? Is that you have a form, and you repeat it and that’s how you build housing and it’s more efficient and all those things. Both prefab and trailers obviously are attached with like tremendous stigmas, right? Of like, oh, you live in a trailer park. And I can’t count the number of movies that I’ve seen where, especially after doing an Airstream trailer movie, the bad character invariably lives in an Airstream trailer just outside of town. It’s just like such a funny trope because one the Airstream trailer is probably like $50,000 now because they’ve become like this collectible item, but it’s this funny trailer trope.

Allison: [00:37:41] So one of the first issues we did at Dwell certainly informed by the Airstream trailer stuff was on prefab houses, which was kind of a risqué thing for a shelter magazine to do because again, prefab houses are associated with trailers and cookie cutter crappy construction. In all fairness, the majority of prefab houses are exactly that, and you see them dotted across the United States. They’re just not necessarily advertising that they’re prefab, but in its perfect form prefab could be a very efficient way to deliver well-designed houses to a lot of people, and certainly I went all in on that at Dwell. We had an international design competition to actually build a house for our client, something I would not recommend doing for a variety of reasons. But it really elevated the perception and awareness of prefab to a point we could not have anticipated. There were so many articles about the prefab book and about the prefab competition that even Cooking Light did an article about prefab housing. It was it was in the New York Times Magazine gift guide, like a little prefab house. It just became this weird cultural thing, which, believe me, when we signed that book up with the publisher and told people what we were writing a book about, people were like, oh… interesting. Could not have anticipated that.

Allison: [00:39:11] I will say that it is very, very difficult to put a well-designed prefab house into production and much harder than anyone would have thought in the early 2000, lots of fantastic architects really invested their heart and soul and all their money into prefab factories to kind of do modern prefab. And it didn’t really pan out, especially as the housing recession hit in 2009 and kind of ended a lot of that. If I had a dime for every VC or various entrepreneur who has come to me to say that they have cracked the code on prefab and they know how to make it work, I would be very wealthy. It’s still very problematic. In a way it kind of goes back to what I was talking about a visionary leadership. If you build one prefab house like a one off, it’s going to be really expensive. In order to have any success, you need to do it at scale. Has there been an entity, and I’m talking specifically about the United States because it was very different elsewhere, has there been an entity willing to invest enough money to build, say, 1000 well-designed prefab homes? No. So the businesses end up producing extremely high-end one-off prefabs, which to my mind is like the antithesis of why you would use prefab in the first.

Eve: [00:40:34] That’s what we’re seeing with 3D printing as well, right?

Allison: [00:40:36] Oh, completely. When people say of 3D houses, it’s like, oh.

Eve: [00:40:40] They’re so expensive.

Allison: [00:40:41] It’s not. The energy use of 3D printing is off the charts. Absolutely off the charts. However, in Japan and Scandinavia, there’s tons of amazing prefab houses being built. The stigma is not attached. There aren’t the same kind of union battles that there are with prefabricated construction. I won’t go on and on because I could go too deep on this. But it remains, I say this in my book, it’s like this perpetual promise that we never quite get to.

Eve: [00:41:12] So, if all the myriad of things you’ve done, is it something you’re proudest of or enjoyed doing the most? Well, maybe the print magazine, because you really had.

Allison: [00:41:22] You know, it’s interesting. I’ve been so fortunate. I got to, I really had so many amazing experiences and I’ve got to do so much writing and editing. I’m back to doing mostly editing. And I do have to say it’s really nice to be editing again after a lot of writing, New York Times is a very high-profile place to be putting something out in the world all the time, and it causes a lot of anxiety. It’s kind of nice to just be a little bit more in the background, so I’m quite proud of the work that I’ve done, kind of pushing for more walkable, liveable cities, though I do feel like I could continue to write the same article every year till the end of time. I feel like I’ve turned what began as like a design publication and maybe a career in design journalism, to something definitely more advocacy oriented, which I’m proud of.

Allison: [00:42:24] I promise I didn’t force her into it, but my daughter is actually taking an urban planning college program at UC Berkeley this summer, so I’m raising a generation of, she wants to go into urban planning, I swear we didn’t push her. So, I’m proud of that, that she’s absorbed those lessons. She’s a city kid. She walks around, takes public transit everywhere and understands why those things are important. So, yeah. Thrilled to be back in publication that still values print. And obviously it’s through MIT. So, I’m just working with a very intelligent group of colleagues, which is the most that anybody could hope for really.

Eve: [00:43:07] Well, thank you very much for joining me today. And I can’t wait to read what’s next because I’m sure it will evolve. You’ve had this incredible array of things that you’ve written about. It’s a long way from Dwell, I think, which was a little entitled, maybe.

Allison: [00:43:30] Yes.

Eve: [00:43:32] But lovely. A lovely magazine. I’m still proud that we were in it. So…

Allison: [00:43:36] Yeah.

Eve: [00:43:37] Thank you so much for joining me. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Allison: [00:43:40] Oh, me too. Thank you.

Eve: [00:43:51] 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 Allison Arieff