Rethink Real Estate. For Good.

Development

Transforming neighborhoods through crowdfunding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image courtesy of Joanna Bartholomew

Dump it Right There.

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

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

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

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

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

Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:07] Hi there. Thanks for joining me on Rethink Real Estate. For Good. I’m Eve Picker and I’m on a mission to make real estate work for everyone. I love real estate. Real estate makes places good or bad, rich or poor, beautiful or not. In this show, I’m interviewing the disruptors, those creative thinkers and doers that are shrugging off the status quo, in order to build better for everyone.

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

Eve: [00:01:59] If you’d like to join me in my quest to rethink real estate, there are two simple things you can do. Share this podcast and go to rethinkrealestateforgood.co, where you can subscribe to be the first to hear about my podcasts, blog posts and other goodies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julie: [00:14:03] Yes.

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

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

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

Julie: [00:15:17] Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

Eve: [00:18:05] Yes.

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

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

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

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

Julie: [00:20:31] Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julie: [00:30:28] Yeah.

Eve: [00:30:29] That’s a shame.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julie: [00:31:54] Yeah.

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

Julie: [00:32:10] Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eve: [00:36:21] Okay.

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

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

Image courtesy of Julie Bargmann

Eve Picker wins national Real Estate Award.

Connect CRE has named Small Change founder and CEO Eve Picker as one of their National 2022 Women in Real Estate Award winners. 

Central to Connect CRE’s selection of Eve was her establishment of the Small Change Index to evaluate the impact of real estate projects according to ESG-related factors. All projects listed on Small Change must score at least 60% on the Small Change Index in order to prove that they offer an opportunity for real impact within their community.

Connect CRE noted that Eve is on a personal mission to democratize real estate and highlighted Small Change’s performance as strong evidence of Eve’s success: over half of the projects have either a minority and/or female sponsor, 65% have included affordable housing and 78% have been located in underserved communities.

Connect CRE also reported that the US News & World Report has ranked Small Change as one of the top seven real estate crowdfunding platforms.

To read more visit https://www.connectcre.com/awards/2022-women-in-real-estate-awards/national/eve-picker/

Image courtesy of Eve Picker

Not a Snowflake.

Elizabeth Timme is one of four co-founders of a brand spanking new design and planning office based in Los Angeles: Office of: Office. Elizabeth, a third generation architect, born in Texas and raised in LA, is best known for her work as founding co-director of LA-Más, a small but notable non-profit, “designing and building initiatives that promote neighborhood resilience and elevate the agency of working class communities of color.”

In its early days, LA-Más worked with the Northeast LA Community Plan Riverfront Collaborative. Their work ranged from affordable housing to storefronts for small business owners, shining a much needed spotlight on homelessness, housing shortages, and how to stabilize communities ahead of gentrification. Projects included ADUs (Backyard Homes Project), the Watts Community Studio project, the Reseda Boulevard Great Streets Initiative, and Backyard Basics, a proposal for affordable housing in Elysian Valley.

Elizabeth loves the field of architecture, but she is cognizant of the industry’s warts, including lack of diversity and accessibility in both the industry and its clients. She has said “I fundamentally challenge the layers of bureaucracy that strangle our ability to service environments that don’t have the resources to challenge, or to lobby, or to invest in something better than the status quo.” At Office of: Office the mantra is always community first.

LA-Más was named as an 2018 Emerging Voice by the Architecture League, and Elizabeth has been on the Women of the Year list by Los Angeles Magazine, a Curbed’s Young Gun of the Year, and recipient of the Vanguard Big Idea Challenge in 2019. She has written for Manifest Journal, Log 48, and Tablula Plena. Before LA-Más she served as project manager and development officer at MASS Design.

Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:05] 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: [00:00:40] Elizabeth Timme is no snowflake. Strong and outspoken with degrees in architecture under her belt, she’s building an alternative career on the strong beliefs she holds. That great design should be a right, not a privilege. A third generation architect born in Texas with childhood years spent in Italy and West Indies, Elizabeth has made roots in L.A.. First, she co-founded La Mas in northeast L.A. and now Office of Office, a nonprofit focused on designing joyful and careful places in collaboration with communities. You’ll want to hear more.

Eve: [00:01:23] 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: [00:01:48] Hello, Elizabeth. It’s really nice to have you here today.

Elizabeth Timme: [00:01:51] It’s wonderful to be here.

Eve: [00:01:53] So, you’re an architect by training, but you launched LA-Más now office of: Office, which are really not typical architecture firms. And you’ve been heard to say great design should be a right, not a privilege. So, how does that all come together?

Elizabeth: [00:02:11] Well, I think it really starts from having the perspective of being a third generation architect. And also, my father really came from a blue collar family, household, and so did my mother. In Texas doing industry trades, working for Howard Hughes oil and, on both sides of the family. And for me, I saw how far and how hard my father worked to be able to kind of become middle class. And so, it’s always really been important to me that architecture was broadened and widened to include individuals perspective and voice who didn’t have the privilege that I had to come into an upper middle class family where a college education was assumed. And I think there’s so much really profound substance to the dialogue of architecture in city making and place keeping that is not a part of the table when people who have challenges, who don’t have safety nets and have a lot of pain associated with living in modern cities or anywhere, their perspective isn’t represented and their perspective doesn’t fundamentally shape how we go about building cities and keeping cities. Right. So, I think that my perspective around these two different practices and even going back from the naissance of my professional career, is that architecture should and can be of service and really wanting for there to be more diversity in the field and the conversation.

Eve: [00:04:05] So then you launched LA Más and now Office of: Office. And how, how do they, take me on that journey.

Elizabeth: [00:04:12] Well, I think it really began in 2008 when I went into my graduate career and, as a graduate student. And that was the beginning of the Great Recession. And that was very different than my undergraduate education, where in 2005 I was being offered 401Ks and really cushy things and architecture seemed.

Eve: [00:04:43] Yeah, ofcourse.

Elizabeth: [00:04:44] And my friends were negotiating for that. They were like, Where are you picking? Like, Who has the best 401K and what is your health insurance? And it was so wild and so different and architecture seemed like a very stable place to have a professional, lifelong career. And then when I went back into graduate school, it was because I was really frustrated with the lack of innovation and curiosity that was present in the architecture firms that I was working in. And I graduated in 2010, and there was no career opportunities. The architecture profession and, neck and neck with law, was the most unemployed professional discipline in the United States.

Eve: [00:05:32] But it makes sense, right? Like all of those developers went out of business and boom, everyone else attached to them went out of business.

Elizabeth: [00:05:41] Absolutely. And I think that also the schools, and I’ve been witness to this, they churn out tons of kids who really have a lot of strong ideals about shaping the world and supporting a better future. And there’s not a real clear professional conduit for getting a job.

Eve: [00:06:02] I think that’s right. Yeah. I think architecture has been treated as a really precious career. And yet architects are so well trained to do so many things, right?

Elizabeth: [00:06:14] Absolutely. And also the numbers and the NCARB AIA and the licensing process has gotten better. But if you look at how many architects graduate school every year versus how many, and we’re I’m a little off topic, but how many licensed architects are active in our profession? I want to say it’s in the thousands of licensed architects, whereas it’s like hundreds of thousands of architects graduate.

Eve: [00:06:43] Interesting.

Elizabeth: [00:06:43] And so, we have a really impoverished process that supports really curious young perspectives, being able to call themselves architects. And so, I graduated in 2010, and the career that I knew and the career that I had watched my father had, for instance, was not an option for me. And it wasn’t just not an option for me. It wasn’t an option for any of my peers. It wasn’t an option for people who I had gone to undergrad with and they had lost their jobs. And so, it was really a. Paul Nakazawa, who was one of my mentors in grad school. He was a business, he got his major in business and architecture. He always said the recession was the most valuable time for him to retool and recalibrate about why he was doing anything.

Elizabeth: [00:07:39] And so, to graduate in that climate, it made me really question what the value of the architectural practice was and why I would be a part of it. And so, this was radical for me, where the values in which I grew up in, in the household I grew up in, instead of going to playgrounds, I was going to Roman ruins, right? So, it was very hard to unlink that from some core identity that I had. And so, there, you know, I worked at another kind of nonprofit architecture firm, really saw the kind of inner workings of that. And I founded LA Más, three months pregnant with kind of coming back from grad school in 2012 and seeing a conversation happening with urban planners and landscape architects around the future of the city, and about the kind of early underpinnings of gentrification and displacement and really, really being curious about what that meant, but also wanting to add value and support that conversation and not see it being had in the discipline of development and architecture.

Eve: [00:08:52] So what sort of projects did you work on in LA Más when you launched?

Elizabeth: [00:08:55] So when I launched, we started working on the Northeast L.A. Community Plan River Riverfront Collaborative, and this was kind of early. So the CRA also, the Community Redevelopment Agency, had been dissolved by Jerry Brown to balance the budget in maybe 2010, or between 2010 and 2012. And there were the early seedlings of all of that lack of investment in the state of California and in specifically Los Angeles. So what that meant is new library sites were not being identified and developed, storefronts and small businesses weren’t being supported. The public realm and the public right of way didn’t have a clear conduit for investment. There were all of these ways in which there wasn’t an agency that was proactively developing and supporting existing communities and neighborhoods. And so, we were starting parallel with the mayor at the time, Eric Garcetti, who was doing a lot of urban planning initiatives like Great Streets and Parklet work.We were starting a critical conversation in parallel to that about how are we going to be stabilizing communities ahead of gentrification.

Elizabeth: [00:10:13] And so, the neighborhood plan for northeast L.A. was about identifying sites where there was community power and community stakeholders and the built environment didn’t match the kind of thriving residents and thriving cultural activity that was happening there. And so, from there, we went into doing some of the great streets work where there were 15 boulevards identified by 15 councilmen in the 15 council districts that were kind of these quasi vanity projects around, let’s do something cool to really make L.A. Streets great. And we started off by saying, listen, the the metrics that you all have for success don’t match the ways in which you should make it accessible to invest in communities. Why are you talking about $100,000 of steel furniture when we could do something out of marine grade plywood with a certain type of finish and it would cost us 10,000. Why aren’t you doing it in coalition with community members and non-profits? Why are you doing it in a silo and a political process? Why are you not considering the small business adjacent to the public realm and their right to expand their operating and stabilize their income through being able to access the sidewalk?

Elizabeth: [00:11:37] And so, we did a lot of work that was design plus in that period where we were doing community engagement, but we were really partnering with the small business owners to redefine what it meant to invest in the public right of way. That the storefront and the small business owners right didn’t end at the store, at the beginning of the sidewalk, that it extended to the middle of the street. And that the pedestrian needed to really have a visible imprint in the city and that a pedestrian oriented public space was more important than a car oriented one. And so, it’s all these “duh” things that were very easy for us to establish in those first half of our existence, to be able to have a conversation in parallel with the political one where we’re actually implementing projects with very different short term time frames, in partnership with community members and with drastically more accessible budgets.

Eve: [00:12:39] Sounds like really hard work.

Elizabeth: [00:12:41] It was. Yes, it was. And in tandem with that, I was building my family. I have three kids and I was pregnant every two years, and in not a strategic way at all, while we were doing the majority of that.

Eve: [00:12:58] Just makes you work harder. Being a mother makes you very focused, doesn’t it?

Elizabeth: [00:13:03] Yeah. And for me, it was a huge amount of creative energy that came from that process, kind of birthing some very early seedlings of ideas as well as birthing children. It was pretty powerful and I don’t hear women talking about that very much. And I’m guessing it’s probably because there’s not clear avenues by women led conversations, but it felt very organic to be creative personally and professionally at the same time.

Eve: [00:13:35] You know, for me as a mother, I think what fell away was everything else I was wasting my time on. I had to be ultra focused on the family and the work, and the rest of it was like, poof, you know, no time for that, you know?

Elizabeth: [00:13:49] And it is interesting because I have had periods where I’m not the best mentor because I’m at home doing that work.

Eve: [00:14:00] Yes.

Elizabeth: [00:14:00] And I think that there’s a real backlash professionally if women aren’t willing to do the work of mentorship.

Eve: [00:14:07] Oh, really?

Elizabeth: [00:14:08] Yeah. I think that, you know, and I kind of battled that in my office. And I think I’ve been able to walk a middle line. But the idea that you wouldn’t come to the table to nurture other people in a in a professional environment, I think in some ways you don’t realize it’s expected of you until you graduate into a profession that is so reliant on mentorship. And yet you see people who are excelling, not giving any of it, not offering any of it. And that was one of the biggest challenges with me having working in a traditional, quote unquote architecture practice is there was no conduit for me to be mentored by anyone in a position of power. I had to find it myself.

Eve: [00:14:50] Yeah, I think that’s true, yes.

Elizabeth: [00:14:53] Across the board, you know. I think the kind of boomer mentality is that everyone’s a special snowflake. And I don’t think that that really extends to, how do we mentor a younger group in some of these kind of hard skills.

Eve: [00:15:07] Right.

Elizabeth: [00:15:08] So anyhow, I think the expectation was that you have to do that, offer that mentorship in a kind of nurturing environment. And I think that that was a real limitation that I had early in this career that I’m talking about, because I didn’t have that creative ability.

Elizabeth: [00:15:28] Interesting. So let me ask you about the very playful and bold architectural language you use and how you arrived at that. How does that fit into the story?

Elizabeth: [00:15:39] Well, it really did begin, I lost both of my parents when I was 23, the year that I was graduating from college, four months apart from completely preventable. And my my father had lung cancer that could have been prevented if caught earlier and my mom had a stroke that could have been treated if it hadn’t been misdiagnosed. And so, I’m an only child and my parents were very work focused, so I didn’t have a strong relationship at the time with our extended family, and I felt very alone. And very placeless. And I really immersed myself in the different communities of Los Angeles. In Little Tokyo, and my favorite restaurant or in Little Ethiopia. Having a conversation with some store owners about how they kind of weathered the civil unrest or the earthquake and the kind of network of community members that they relied on over coffee. Ethiopian coffee we were having together, or even going up to Northridge and working in a clothing store. And so for me, through small business owners, mainly, I developed this kind of extended network of understanding and being connected to people’s oral history. And every instance everyone was a person of color or a black individual, right? Kind of bringing me into something that felt larger.

Elizabeth: [00:17:20] And I went from feeling so alone and empty to so full and full of joy. And I think I got to move through that grieving process because I was able to connect and share a kind of much richer collective community experience that doesn’t exist within the white framework. And I felt so much, and I continue to feel so much gratitude and joy about what it means to live in Los Angeles, and joy when I connect to others and I am kind of brought into community that I want to celebrate that and I want to kind of have the world reflect all of that incredible exuberance that exists. And it makes me upset when people move from New York and they come to Los Angeles and they talk so much shit about the city. And it makes me really mad because I know moving from Houston when I was 13 and then losing my parents ten years later how much play, how much fun, how much vibrancy exists in this city. And it’s because of a bunch of dead male planners that existed nearly 100 years ago that the city looks the way it does. It has nothing to do with the people who live here.

Eve: [00:18:45] Yeah, it’s going to take a lot to change it.

Elizabeth: [00:18:48] If we could all remember that it was made by a handful of people, if not less, over a very short period of time. And we’re just kind of playing that out rather than challenging it.

Eve: [00:19:00] So then it was really top down, and what you’re doing is this bubbling bottom up stuff that we hope is going to seep through to everything.

Elizabeth: [00:19:09] I think that if you present a parallel world that is the one that people could choose and you show them how, then you build in where they have the agency to choose it and the ability for their identity and their lived experience to shape it. I think that that’s far more sustainable and powerful than whatever these kind of starchitect solutions are that are pretty boring and age terribly and look dated so quickly. I mean, you know, our culture moves so rapidly now and thanks to the Internet and technology that people finish construction on these projects and they’re already getting made fun of, and it’s because they’re just not very resilient systems in which we could put forward civic investment and institutional investment in the city.

Eve: [00:20:03] So tell me, like Office of: Office, how is that different as a practice and is it for profit or nonprofit? was LA Más non-profit?

Elizabeth: [00:20:13] Yeah, we were a non-profit. And so, what happened is during the beginnings of the pandemic, we were already looking at restructuring so that we could be place based. And this is a strange bucket to think about, because outside of Los Angeles, we are place based in Los Angeles. Inside Los Angeles, you understand the city to be a region. The county of Los Angeles includes 88 cities. And the city of Los Angeles is a kind of gerrymandered, strange object that touches all of these different 15 council districts that in and of themselves are different cities. And we really wanted to look at what it meant to be doing community led community development. And so we began that process. And when you say that what we’re doing is grassroots, I wouldn’t say, or bottom up. I would say that the process of making LA Más something that was truly bottom up was a really deep education in what that line is between where you are from outside a community, regardless of your identity, and what your place should be in supporting community members in their agency to shape the world they live in. And so, we switched to mutual aid efforts. We switch, we paused, all of our storefront work, all of our small business support, our public realm work, our Section eight ADUs, all of that thinking, to have and support community members leading the thinking. And after two years, it became clear that that was just going to be the best place for LA Más to be. And it also became clear that those of us who had been leading the programs around small business and public realm and affordable housing alternatives wanted to continue to do that work at a larger scale and really understand that mechanism between supporting and being in partnership and coalition with community based organizations, right? So it was going through that process of becoming a community based organization that really got us a very deep amount of insight into what that sweet spot is for a group of policy weirdos and architecture dorks and graphic design geeks to really be able to stand in our power and be of greatest assistance, right?

Eve: [00:22:59] One of my questions was going to be, what does meaningful community engagement look like? And I think you’ve answered it. That’s a really big struggle, right?

Elizabeth: [00:23:07] I think that the thing is, is if you are doing it, you are of it, right? You don’t, it’s not a pop in, pop out, check off the box thing. It’s something where, you are a community based organization, you were led, and you are a community member and it’s not the community, it’s your community. And so, the best possible situation would be, you know, you’re from a different community in L.A. or you’re from a different city or you’re a city agency or a council office and you want to support that community based organization, those community members, and you let them continue to do that work and you further that work, and you let them lead that conversation, right? And you’re all in the same space together. There’s no bullshit table where there’s flawed negotiations. And so, the community engagement process is kind of a fiction because it’s an organic, living, ongoing, continuous thing that others can be invited into or not. And we shouldn’t pretend certain projects are for communities when they’re really not. And I think being able to be transparent about those distinctions is half of it, because so many communities have been told something is for them when it’s clearly not. And so, it’s kind of a little bit of a complicated thing to answer, but I hope I’ve.

Eve: [00:24:34] It is. What is it the new practice focuses on then?

Elizabeth: [00:24:37] So the new practice is really, although we’re based in LA, it’s really centering the kind of community knowledge and leadership in being foundational to the built environment and that we are and we have always been great collaborators and we have all of these tools that we are very clear about being tools that we are using to be at the service of a community conversation. Right. And that we’re really not centering those tools in the conversation, but using them to be in service of the conversation. And so, I think that’s an important distinction. And we’re a nonprofit and we have these programs that we had at LA Más. But I think the big difference is the way that we are talking with and in coalition with community based organizations. From the outset, all of that is something that we are in deep partnership with our community based partners rather than in a perfunctory or kind of transactional one.

Eve: [00:25:43] So, can you tell us about a project you’re working on and how it works?

Elizabeth: [00:25:48] We are working with the city of Southgate and we are helping to inform how they roll out all of their ADU policy and programming, but also how they are building affordable housing units and meeting their housing goals. So, that is an example where we are very purposefully reflecting back to the city of Southgate, what it looks like to have a contextual ADU approach that really matches a lot of the unpermitted and informally created affordable housing and thinking about a network strategy so that as we upgrade that housing, we’re not displacing any existing residents that are benefiting. And we’re not putting any residents in a precarious economic situation by getting into the big unknown of permitting something that’s unpermitted. So, that’s one example. I think there’s some others, kind of continuing this affordable ADU work as a program. And a lot of that is kind of really understanding the expanded voucher system that exists now and didn’t exist when we started the program. And being able to understand the nuances between these different housing providers and where they link up and match with the residents. And I think we’re now in a place where at this current phase of our work, we’re expanding the tent and partnering with groups like the Casino Coalition so that we’re capacity building these different nonprofits, rather than just ourselves, to have an affordable housing program. So for us, that kind of 2.0 is expanding the tent and bringing in others to do this work and having a kind of nurturing network where everyone’s benefiting from each other’s kind of hard knocks rather than everyone doing it in silo and us kind of supporting that conversation based on our ten years of experience.

Eve: [00:27:54] So going back to architects, should architects be trained differently? What’s missing?

Elizabeth: [00:28:00] I think that the training of architecture. How do you think about prioritizing and organizing discretely different buckets of technical information and having those result in something ephemeral and perceptual like rooms or space? It was one of the most impactful experiences I’ve had as a human, is to be a part of that educational process. It was also one of the most traumatizing. And the room for me as an individual didn’t exist. The way in which I came into that program with some cognitive differences, there wasn’t room for that, and there wasn’t room for the people that I felt had the ability to shape the profession the most, which is my friends who were black and my friends who were Latino or Pacific Islander, you know, kind of backgrounds, Filipina. Like that wasn’t really on the table. And so, I think also watching my friends and with those different identities and backgrounds, struggle was really traumatizing and scary. And it sent a clear message to me that as a woman, I didn’t have a place. And my place was best guaranteed in the profession if I could support men or if I could be masculine myself. And so, I think that the education of architecture has a lot of really powerful things and a lot of potential, but the culture of architecture is profoundly toxic.

Eve: [00:29:46] Well, that would be true of the whole real estate industry, I think, on the whole. So, that’s definitely where the power is held. And I think it’s shifting, but maybe not fast enough, right?

Elizabeth: [00:29:58] Absolutely. However, it was very clearly told to me when I entered school as a young architect that it was going to be as hard as becoming a doctor. And if I wanted to opt out of that, I should as soon as possible so I didn’t waste anyone else’s time. And being in that process, you get really brainwashed over those five years or let’s say four, and then you go on to do a three year post professional degree. I don’t know, I think that the challenge is, is that you kind of get enculturated and you get, and if you don’t fit into that model, you’re not even in the peripheral edges of the conversation around what things like beauty and identity and context or culture and community, you don’t even get to bring that to the table. And so, you see all these terrible white projects, these terrible quasi pseudo organic things, because there is no reference point anymore to the conversation. It is an art without subject.

Eve: [00:31:13] Yes. I mean, I love architecture. It’s pretty hard to damn it all. But, you know, I hear what you’re saying that certainly, you know, I go back a few years earlier than you do. And certainly women had a very precarious place in architecture then. And it’s just profoundly depressing that it hasn’t changed a lot. I suppose that’s my takeaway. I can only imagine what it’s like for someone who’s of a different culture. It’s just got to be much worse. But that’s true of real estate, like across the board construction, real estate development. It is just heavily dominated by white men. It’s going to change. It has to change, right?

Elizabeth: [00:31:59] Yeah. It’s very hard without banks lending in different ways, without lenders kind of. And I think it will change because there is more diversity inside banks. But the kind of racist underpinnings of the redlining and the kind of, then that period of time still exist.

Eve: [00:32:22] Yes.

Elizabeth: [00:32:24] There’s all these other things that exist that are barriers to people being able to get into the profession or become developers because they’re able to seem like a sure bet when in reality, 90% of Angelinos are living $400 away from being completely bankrupt? Yeah, homeless. And so, how do you have there be development models that reflect the kind of incredible resilience and vibrancy to which people are surviving in that context in a way that’s far more sustainable than these Rick Caruso terrible, displacing, unsustainable foam and marshmallow projects that are.

Eve: [00:33:14] Foam and marshmallow. I’m writing that down.

Elizabeth: [00:33:17] They’re just like terror, like Italianate, Mediterranean esque, you know, terrible things that are going to be so impossible to make work in 10 to 15 years when we have a different climate and a different kind of world, they’re going to become wastelands. And I think the idea that we’re not lending and we’re not allowing, there’s not more room for communities of color to be developers or to have resident led development is just such an oversight. The banks took huge risks in building suburbs and malls, and they can take those same risks in allowing for resident led development in communities of color.

Eve: [00:34:05] Do you think they can or they won’t?

Elizabeth: [00:34:07] Well, they won’t.

Eve: [00:34:08] Well, they should.

Elizabeth: [00:34:10] They should. They can. They’re not.

Eve: [00:34:13] Yes. Yeah.

Elizabeth: [00:34:15] And so, I can say anecdotally, we were talking about architecture and diversity and women. And I think the hardest conversation to have is that white women do not structurally change the profession of architecture. And if they did, we would be seeing a different kind of context and climate and conversation.

Eve: [00:34:35] What do you mean by that?

Elizabeth: [00:34:36] I think that our proximity to power makes it really hard for us to challenge it. I think that you know what I have seen.

Eve: [00:34:46] But then there’s you and there’s me. So some of us challenge it.

Elizabeth: [00:34:51] I’m challenging. I’m not changing. And I.

Eve: [00:34:54] That’s true.

Elizabeth: [00:34:55] I can speak to the ways that these constructs are racist, but I can’t talk to the lived experience of someone who’s black and terrorized. And so, if we’re not having black women, if we’re not having people of color being able to inform that conversation and also be at the helm of structurally changing it, you know, as a white woman, I’m not capable of structurally changing something that’s racist without perpetuating it. And so, all I can do is just kind of unveil and expose, but I don’t have the ability to offer sustainable models for the future. And so, I think that that is the kind of crux of it, is for there to be a return to white women being in that supportive environment so that we’re really clear that we’re accomplices, but we’re not foundational underpinnings of diversity and change.

Eve: [00:35:50] I’m feeling really depressed now.

Elizabeth: [00:35:53] I know it’s rough, but then it’s like you sit on that for a while and then you realize how powerful it is to support there being radical change and that you know, that we don’t have a legacy of talking about white women and how they’re doing that rather than co-opting that work. You know, and they exist, I know so many white women that are great accomplices. And so, it’s just being really clear about what our role is. And so, I felt like it was a misstep to not kind of say that because I don’t want it to be confused that somehow I’m structurally changing anything. I think that it’s more so just trying to offer a kind of parallel conversation so that there’s more room for there to be a bit more depth in how we do development and architecture.

Eve: [00:36:41] What I like is that you’ve taken this really extraordinary education in architecture, which is, you know, a problem solving education that makes you really think about how to take nothing and turn it into something. And you’ve shifted away from, you know, those glamour buildings into an area where you can really use exactly the same skills to make something out of nothing. Right. And I really think that architecture is a very unique education in that way. It’s pretty powerful. It’s pretty rare to find someone who has those creative problem solving skills from any other profession. I think so. I think it behooves the architecture. It’s just not my, I shouldn’t be saying this, it’s not my interview. But I think it behooves the architecture profession and architecture schools to think really hard about what else those students can do with these skills because they could really change the world. Right.

Elizabeth: [00:37:43] Absolutely. And I think it does really begin with your education and those who are leading that process, but also the ways in which people have access to it and their exclusive, notoriously known expensive schools like USC, University of Southern California in Los Angeles. They do a really good job of offering scholarships and being diverse and inclusive. But the, and the planning school and there are other schools that do a really great job of including the identity and the kind of pathway for there to be a USC alumni network at the disposal of these young graduates. And it does not exist in the school of architecture. And I think that’s not happenstance. I think that there’s no economic or professional, how do you call that limitation or what is it when you do something bad.

Elizabeth: [00:38:39] Consequence.

Elizabeth: [00:38:40] Consequence, thank you! There’s no consequence at this point for the architectural education to not structurally be rethought because it is a machine, an economic machine.

Eve: [00:38:53] Well, that’s true of universities and schools across the board, right?

Elizabeth: [00:38:57] Well, potentially. But I think that with planners, planners that don’t represent the communities they’re in, it’s very hard to get those projects done. Architects that are doing projects for developers, you know, we have, I think, the consequences the architects and the architectural profession is getting smaller and smaller. And the amount of things that architects do is getting kind of whittled down into something quite impoverished.

Eve: [00:39:22] Yes. So the planners also don’t think about the built environment. Right. So, I mean, have a masters in urban design because because at the time I really wanted to think bigger than buildings, how the buildings shape cities. But, surely there’s got to be something that’s, you know, a masters in something else that thinks about the physicality of architecture and how it can improve places. A master of community design, community place building. I don’t know, maybe urban design just has to change.

Elizabeth: [00:39:57] Yeah, it is. The other thing about it is that the amount of things you have to be an expert in is so wide. When you touch architecture, it’s green building design, environment, anthropology, context, politics, permitting, building construction, space, aesthetics, color that is very hard to pretend that you’re going to be good at all of it.

Elizabeth: [00:40:25] No, I think that’s true. That’s really true. I’m working on a project in Australia and actually this is really interesting because I’ve been wondering about the way architects perform there and they use a lot more consultants than I’ve ever seen in the States. They have consultants for every corner of accessibility and sustainability. Exactly, I think because I think they’re remaining focused on design and place. Maybe it’s harder there. I don’t know. But I was sort of, I’ve been fascinated by that. Very different.

Elizabeth: [00:40:57] It is very different. I mean, I think that that’s a far more collaborative model than the one that tends to happen here in the US, where all of that stuff can get done in a very half assed way, if not completely ignored around the kind of, just supporting the aims of a developer and being able to check off the boxes of the things that the city requires you to do.

Eve: [00:41:24] Yeah.

Elizabeth: [00:41:24] And also just regurgitating the plans that you did before because it’s a terrible business model to be an architect because you have to do too much stuff. Right.

Eve: [00:41:33] Right, right.

Elizabeth: [00:41:34] Is a really hard business model. And so, I think we would be in a better place if we had power over capital and or we were comfortable being intermediaries and negotiators and facilitators instead of centering our really cute, the really precious creative idea. Which is a kind of absurd pretext right now when we have such a diverse, kind of multifaceted conversation that’s happening across so many different technology and communication platforms. So, I think architects would do better to de-center themselves from the conversation. But I think that’s very hard with the kind of Frank Lloyd Wright, Rem Koolhaas precedent for what it should look like to be an architect.

Eve: [00:42:24] A starchitect, right.

Elizabeth: [00:42:26] Yeah a jerk.

Eve: [00:42:29] So, what excites you most about the work you’re doing and what potential do you think Office of: Office has? Where do you want to be in five years? Horrible question, but I’m going to ask it. What’s your hope?

Elizabeth: [00:42:42] Someone asked me that. What was it? It was like, I don’t know. I’ve never been able to plan, and this isn’t a good thing, beyond a day. I do get a little depressed, and I guess we all do, if I don’t have anything I’m looking forward to. But, it’s never been work for me that I look forward to. It’s always been spending time with my friends or we have a trip planned for me and a couple friends to go to Guadalajara and some other places. I’m looking forward to that. I am looking forward to being surprised by the growth of the people I work with and I’m partnering with for Office of: Office. I’m looking forward to, when you have children, I don’t know what they’re going to be like. It’s so wild. And the same thing with LA Más, when I created LA Más, or now that I’m a part of creating Office of: Office with my partners. I think I just love that potential of, you don’t know what’s going to happen and you don’t, you’re kind of surprised by that. And so, every day it’s better than what you could imagine. I love, what I love is working with our partners like Tom DeSimone, who you had on. They’re just so cool. Like, they’re just so, I’m not proud of the projects I’m proud of the people that are crazy enough to want to work with us and that are okay with this level of transparency in our conversation. Because the conversation you and I are having is the conversation we have with our partners.

Eve: [00:44:22] I love it. So this is almost like a child that’s going to grow up and you’re going to be surprised along the way, right?

Elizabeth: [00:44:30] Yeah. Like if I had an idea, like, oh, I’m going to have three kids, I’m going to get married, I’m going to, you know, I, ugh. I don’t know. I was probably voted least likely to get married or least likely to have kids in high school. I don’t have any landmarks really.

Eve: [00:44:48] Well, I have one more question. You probably are not going to have an answer for this, but what keeps you up at night, if anything?

Elizabeth: [00:44:56] Oh my God. So many things.

Eve: [00:44:57] Oh, really? I’m surprised.

Elizabeth: [00:44:58] Like Anne wakes me up in the middle. So many things. Like I think about this crazy. I’m going to think about this conversation and all the stupid shit I said and all that. I’m absolutely going to think, oh, I should have said that.

Eve: [00:45:14] And I’ll probably get a ton of emails from people saying, I love that conversation you had with Elizabeth.

Elizabeth: [00:45:19] Well, I’m going to think about little things. I’m going to think about like I canceled a dentist appointment. I’m going to think about like the people that were inconvenienced by that. I obsess about the ways in which I was not thoughtful enough when I spoke or interacted with people usually. I also think about the commitments I make professionally that I can’t follow through on because I overcommit myself, because I’m excited about everything.

Eve: [00:45:47] That’s scary. I do that a lot.

Elizabeth: [00:45:49] So much. I don’t think as much about not doing the things that I should, or not being the person that I thought I would be. And that used to happen more. I would say, at the beginning of my career. I used to stay up at night thinking, how am I going to become, how am I going to be in a position where I can become the person I’d like to grow into?

Eve: [00:46:16] That’s interesting. Well, as you get older, you just tend to not care anymore.

Elizabeth: [00:46:20] Yeah. And just like, okay, well, if I can’t go, you know, I don’t know. Like, if I can’t go do that, then I’m going to go do something else.

Eve: [00:46:31] Well, Elizabeth, on that note, I’m going to end this. I’m going to be really interested to see who you become, because I’m sure it’s going to be someone you’re already someone pretty fabulous. But I’m building on that. So, can’t wait to see what else you do. Thank you very much for joining me.

Elizabeth: [00:46:47] Thank you so much. I’m so honored to be a part of your prestigious list of interviewees.

Eve: [00:46:51] Oh, for heaven’s sake, not prestigious, but thank you.

Elizabeth: [00:46:55] Very much so. I was very proud to have you extend the invitation. Thank you so much.

Eve: [00:47:00] Okay. Well, thank you.

Eve: [00:47:12] 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. 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 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 Elizabeth Timme

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