• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • About Us
  • Say hello
Rethink Real Estate. For Good.

Rethink Real Estate. For Good.

  • Podcast
  • Articles
  • In the news
  • Speaking and media
    • About Eve
    • Speaking requests
    • Speaking engagements
    • Press kit
  • Investment opportunities

Gentrification

Not a Snowflake.

October 12, 2022

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

Slaying Gentrification.

June 29, 2022

David Kemper wanted to find a way to safeguard established renters against gentrification. His goal was to build a real-estate investment model that both stabilized existing rents and gave a voice to that community. Too many have suffered from racism and disinvestment in their neighborhoods. Across the country, communities are being torn apart because residents are being priced out of the neighborhoods they have called home for decades. Just as resources and new opportunities come to a community, its longtime inhabitants often get pushed out.

So David and his team are working towards an alternative: cities with inclusive, mixed-income neighborhoods. These diverse and dynamic neighborhoods will deliver better economic, social, and health outcomes, especially for lower-income residents. The model they have developed, MINT (or Mixed-Income Neighborhood Trust), is a sophisticated and replicable ownership model. Each MINT develops, owns, and operates a rental housing and retail portfolio. MINTs harness the money coming into communities to keep rent affordable for existing residents. Trust Neighborhoods, David’s non-profit, works with neighborhood-focused organizations to facilitate the formation of each MINT with the goal of a self-sustaining organization, run by the neighborhoods themselves. This gives neighborhoods equal footing with developers contributing to the gentrification taking place.

David and his co-founders started Trust Neighborhoods in 2019 and have since launched three MINT pilots in Kansas City, Missouri and in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Fresno, California. They have already shown to be beneficial. But they are just getting started. Neighborhood Trust is growing, and they hope to work with neighborhoods across the country, forming MINTs in each city and protecting community members who have too often been overlooked. 

Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:08] Hi there. Thanks for joining me on Rethink Real Estate. For Good. I’m Eve Picker and I’m on a mission to make real estate work for everyone. I love real estate. Real estate makes places good or bad, rich or poor, beautiful or not. In this show, I’m interviewing the disruptors, those creative thinkers and doers that are shrugging off the status quo, in order to build better for everyone. If you haven’t already, check out all of my podcasts at our website RethinkRealEstateForGood.co, or you can find them at your favorite podcast station. You’ll find lots worth listening to, I’m sure.

Eve: [00:01:00] David Kemper wanted to find a way to safeguard established renters against gentrification. His goal was to build a real estate investment model that both stabilized existing rents and gave a voice to that community. The model he landed on, MINT, or mixed income Neighborhood Trust, is a sophisticated and replicable ownership model. Each MINT develops, owns and operates a rental housing and retail portfolio. Trust Neighborhoods, David’s non-profit, works with neighborhood focused organizations to facilitate the formation of each MINT, with the goal of creating a self-sustaining organization run by the neighborhoods themselves. Trust Neighborhoods is still new, but David has said that they hope to expand their reach and work with neighborhoods around the country. Listen in to learn more.

Eve: [00:02:01] 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 torethinkrealestateforgood.co, where you can subscribe to be the first to hear about my podcasts, blog posts and other goodies.

Eve: [00:02:30] Hello, David. Thanks very much for joining me today.

David Kemper: [00:02:33] Thanks very much for having me on.

Eve: [00:02:35] You launched something called Trust Neighborhoods in 2019. And I wanted to ask you first, what problem are you trying to solve?

David: [00:02:45] Yeah. I’m one part of the three of us who are leadership at Trust Neighborhoods is Kavya Shankar and Jason Dehaemers, and the problem we’re trying to solve is that you have neighborhoods which have experienced disinvestment over decades, often from racist reasons, that now are finally having investment come into them and becoming a higher opportunity, both by public efforts, by private efforts and a lot of efforts on the part of current residents. But just as those neighborhoods are becoming higher opportunity, the very residents which are most deserving of participating in that and have often contributed so much to creating that experience a second injustice of being displaced from that neighborhood, not only denying them that experience of living in a higher opportunity neighborhood, but often even creating harm beyond that prevention of opportunity and around that problem is why we started working with neighborhoods through our nonprofit Trust Neighborhoods to help set up these mixed income neighborhood trusts.

Eve: [00:03:41] When did this need become clear to you? What’s the journey you took?

David: [00:03:46] We followed different paths in the leadership team. My particular path was through working at New York City government in affordable housing, and that was first in a department there called Housing Preservation Development, where I got to do a lot of refinancing of LI-tech which low-income housing tax credit deals and HUD multifamily deals, which is really the current meat and potatoes of American affordable housing finance. And you both saw how those worked at volume and the non-profits and neighborhood-based organizations that use them and also where it wasn’t working, which is especially around what real pinpoint anti-displacement looked like.

David: [00:04:22] The city of New York at the time was then interested with the arrival of de Blasio and really pinpointing neighborhoods where likely gentrification would create displacement. And a lot of the effort was around creating inclusionary zoning to prevent that displacement. And I had the good fortune to be part of the team who was working on that, and then a new team that was set up in capital planning in the city planning department and trying to work with neighborhoods facing that pressure to proactively prevent displacement. But there’s kind of this rhetoric in New York, which is wonderful, but, you know, New York is everywhere. And there’s this idea that they would build a model and it would work for the whole country. And I grew up in Kansas City and have stayed deeply appreciative and tuned into a lot of cities like it. And you see this phenomenon playing out across the country, including Pittsburgh, certainly very familiar with it.

Eve: [00:05:12] Oh, yeah.

David: [00:05:13] And the mechanism is not going to be that you’re going to prevent displacement by incentivizing what’s going to happen when a five-story building is torn down for a ten-story building. A lot of the displacement and change in ownership and lack of control is happening long before that. So, the same principles are playing out, but you really need to focus on building a different kind of set of tools. And fortunately, both found others who cared about, and we had the time to work on this, but most of all spent time with a lot of neighborhood based organizations in neighborhoods that had either undergone gentrification or facing it. And really sat down with them and said, what are your pain points? How are you spending your days? What are you looking at for tools? And almost consistently you had this need identified of saying, if we could just have our own ownership group, that could really do cross-subsidy in our neighborhood in a way that we could raise outside capital akin to the developers we’re competing against that can move at the speed of the market. It’s not applying for a grant for a house that gets receipt that that grant was received months after the house was sold and really do it at the scale at which we were experiencing displacement. And bit by bit, we worked with some neighborhood partners on honing that model, launching pilots, and now we’re working to get out across the country.

Eve: [00:06:31] And that model, you call it MINT, right?

David: [00:06:35] We call it MINT, a mixed income neighborhood trust.

Eve: [00:06:38] So tell me precisely how it works.

David: [00:06:40] In some ways, it’s very simple. Some ways a little more complex. We help the neighborhood set up this mixed income neighborhood trust. It is an LLC which has all of its voting shares controlled by something called a perpetual purpose trust that is somewhat distinctive from some uses of trust models where there’s not national trust, there’s a legal trust which is assigned to a purpose agreement which controls all the votes of this new entity. That trust then has a trustee group which has the existing neighbor based organization on there and resident representation and adheres to a purpose agreement which we work with residents, the neighborhood based organization, on writing when we’re setting this up, which really identifies what anti displacement means, what protect me belonging means what long term financial sustainability for this new institution looks like and then really build in also details and nuances, that are particular for each neighborhood. That serves as a long term constitution that then this operating company of the Mixed Income Neighborhood Trust has to adhere to as it buys, develops, and then long term owns a mixed income portfolio, which today we’re entirely focused on housing in a way that prevents the displacement of residents in that neighborhood.

Eve: [00:07:57] So the trust is actually a developer.

David: [00:08:00] In some ways. It’s a vehicle to allow a neighborhood to serve in a developer function for its neighborhood. And the way we’ve set up is that each mixed income neighborhood trust will have a general management function, which is essentially a budget line that goes back to the neighborhood-based organization. So you aren’t building duplicative new institutions. You’re really building the capacity of groups that have been on the ground, have legitimacy, have been doing the hard work, and too often are then excluded from actually having that level of control and autonomy within their neighborhood as it experiences this kind of pressure. So really important for us is not just hitting numbers on preservation of affordable units, but really also changing power structures in these neighborhoods where especially women and people of color have been precluded for so long.

Eve: [00:08:50] I’m trying to wrap my head around this. It sounds pretty powerful. So if a new developer comes to the neighborhood and purchases a property outright, what control does this Trust or MINT have?

David: [00:09:04] It is just in parallel with that. There’s no outright authority it has. It’s more putting the neighborhood on more equal footing with a lot of more conventional developers that may be participating in a neighborhood that is facing gentrification.

Eve: [00:09:17] I see, okay. And so, how is a MINT portfolio designed?

David: [00:09:23] So one of the one of the key things we begin with is really doing an analysis with the neighborhood-based organization of what does protecting displacement need, what is the real need in the neighborhood. An example of this is one of the first neighborhoods we worked with was in Kansas City, Missouri, in the northeast section of neighborhoods there, and the neighborhoods called Lykins. And from a parcel view of housing in that neighborhood, they have 1700 units of housing and 900 of those are rental housing with basically zero regulated within that. They are next to a neighborhood that has had some of the fastest rising rents in the city. They’re beginning to experience that same pressure coming on the side of them. So, the beginning was talking with residents saying, look, you have 900 households that are renting in this neighborhood at this average rate. What does it look like to make sure that those households, some of those will move into homeownership? Some of those will not be necessarily having their income rise as fast as the market is rising. What does it mean to protect them from displacement and then working with them to identify how can we maximize the preservation of those units? What does cross-subsidy look like from likely rising rents and unrestricted units we put under that same ownership group? So it self-finances affordability, which works for a subset of neighborhoods and then saying also what is feasible?

David: [00:10:40] In terms of what are rehab partners or construction partners you can work with and what kind of volume can they work with? What is the churn happening in a market? Is this a neighborhood where you’re seeing hundreds of units bought and sold every month or is this something where you’re seeing a dozen bought and sold every month and then putting together a capital stack that makes that feasible. We really do that whole hands-on diligence process with them and service a lot of the short term capacity which a lot of neighborhood based organizations just don’t have to set up that kind of vehicle. But then once it’s set up with that governance, with those partnerships in place for renovation, for property management, and that scope of of what they want to be building in as their own ownership, as much as possible we then build their own autonomy to be running that and attuned at the neighborhood level as they build that ownership and manage it in an accountable way long term.

Eve: [00:11:27] So tell me, how long does it take to go through this process, from thinking about it to actually forming a group that’s governing itself?

David: [00:11:36] Yeah, I mean, we’re kind of figuring it out. We did the two pilots. We are in the midst of a third one right now. We’re in the midst of a fourth one right now. So, we’re learning exactly what the long term process looks like. It’s probably about nine months to a year in terms of our experience, but it may be that right now, I think one of the bigger bottlenecks has been capital appetite, especially for more philanthropic sources. And we’re building it so that long term can take in non-philanthropic sources that are okay with low returns, which certainly can move faster. We don’t know what looks like if that bottleneck is not there for how fast it happens.

Eve: [00:12:12] Interesting. So, the pilots, where are your pilots and where’s the third one? Kansas City and.

David: [00:12:17] Our pilots are in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Certainly, a really meaningful place to get to work, especially in 2021 with the memorial of the race massacre there. And then in Kansas City, which is also where we’re based and very meaningful to work with a neighborhood in our own home in a way that is disciplining and really holds us to doing quality work. The third, which is currently in formation, is in Fresno, in central Fresno with some really great neighborhoods there as the downtown is experiencing growth and preserving a lot of housing stock as well as hopefully providing alternative to owners that have been in the neighborhood they would like to have purchased out.

Eve: [00:12:58] So how far are these experiments in? Like the the MINTs are formed? Have they purchased properties? What are they doing?

David: [00:13:08] Yeah. As noted, Trust Neighborhoods came together in 2019. We really worked with the neighborhoods and the pilots and on the whole scoping and 2020 and both those pilots launched in early 2021. So, they’re just over a year old right now. But both have really seen promising signs so far. They both control well over a dozen units of housing. I think the one can see is almost up to two dozen now.

Eve: [00:13:30] Wow.

David: [00:13:30] And out of that is some real glimmers of hope, both in terms of just operational efficacy, seeing the governance really have resonance in that governance. But most importantly, some of those of early glimmers of impact, like the Mixed Income Neighborhood Trust in Tulsa, which was set up with Growing Together, which is focused in the Kendall-Whittier neighborhood, is the Kendall-Whittier Neighborhood Trust and I was actually just out there last week as they did a celebratory open house for another one of the renovated units that’s open, and had both residents and contractors and funders and everyone all together having paletas really feeling the promise of the work. But alongside things like that were it’s a deep renovation project, they’ve had ones where they’ve just bought housing that was for sale in the neighborhood and been an alternative to a lot of what are kind of unsavory buyers and sellers in that neighborhood, and there was one that was selling and a they bought it and the seller told them, you know, every other buyer told us they were going to clear out the residents in these units in order to renovate them and re rent them at a higher rate.

David: [00:14:37] And instead the Kendall-Whittier Neighborhood Trust was able to own them and have all the residents stay in place along with the budget, to actually improve the quality of those units of housing discovered families that are in the school, which is a place based school that would have told you’re not able to come back to your school with your kids on a couple of months’ notice of a new school year. So, it was a real change to instead get a knock on the door from the Kendall-Whittier Neighborhood Trust saying, hey, look, you’re not only in a safe place versus this threat which is facing you, but we’re also here to make sure that you’re not displaced as this neighborhood continues to become a better place.

Eve: [00:15:17] That’s very powerful. So how do you plan to scale? I mean, how many neighborhoods will be successful?

David: [00:15:24] Yeah, that’s a lot of a lot of our focus is yeah. From the beginning which which may be distinctive in some ways is that we really have had an eye toward saying we are not content if this happens for a dozen units in one neighborhood, the scale of the need in just one neighbor is larger, that the scale of need across the country is hundreds of neighborhoods which are very rapidly changing. And we at this point get a lot of cold outreach from neighborhoods across the country that say, we’re interested using this model, we’ve heard about you, can we work together? Our biggest limit on that side is our own capacity of a team as we grow that team and grow our own operational ability.

David: [00:15:59] But we’re really focused on building our own team to be this short-term service, which is a big piece, is really being able to step in and work with neighborhoods across the country on setting it up. A big part is building long term capital supplies. We’ve had a generous supporter who has come in for funding the design of a fund that will be the national with ready capital, which we hope will solve that bottleneck issue and help build that overall market, which can bring in a lot of capital which is not usually participated in both community governance models and models focused on anti-displacement and changing power structures in this way. And then a big piece is just learning from each neighborhood trust and really powerfully having them start to build their own peer group in a way that is self-reinforcing, builds us as a better support partner, but also can build on their own experiences, lessons learned interpretations from those governance bodies of what anti displacement really looks like and very hard decision making moments. And then also step in as they discover things which are even more valuable to each neighborhood trust. And already the two pilots have met and compared notes. And we think it will only get stronger as you have more and more mixed income neighborhood trusts in the country working these neighborhoods for the residents.

Eve: [00:17:14] So that was one of the questions I have. Like, community engagement is really hard. Do you experience friction when you set up one of these? Like what does it take to get everyone on board?

David: [00:17:29] Community engagement is hard, but what we’ve been doing with the Mixed Income Neighborhood Trust is so different from a lot of what more conventional community engagement is. I think the place to pinpoint there is, we are helping the neighborhood-based organization set up these entities that have residents in long term governance. And that is very different from a typical project where there is a community engagement period, which then ends and residents never have another maybe not even another voice, much less any actual real power in that institution or project. And residents are smart, and they get it. And if they think they have a six-month engagement process to try to convey all the complexity of experience in a neighborhood and any possible thing in this, that will be a very hard process. And instead, with this both, I think we’ve worked with really great partners on designing community engagement, which both make for very productive sessions, where people come into it already with a sense of having had time to do one on ones with everyone and talk through their experience and have that as a, as a jumping off point. But then the most important thing is they then step into the actual governance long term. So, there’s a real ability to keep on iterating and having a voice in the model and in this new institution in their neighborhood. That’s actually something I think we thought was going to be a lot harder and has been really energizing to spend time with residents who just get this and are excited to have this kind of institution as a vehicle for creating this kind of change in their neighborhood.

Eve: [00:18:56] So how big is your team and what sort of skills are represented at the moment?

David: [00:19:01] Not very big. Five of us full time right now. We’re doing some hires right now.

Eve: [00:19:05] Small but mighty, right?

David: [00:19:07] Yeah. Part of the building up the capacity to actually take on the scale of problem and our skill set is mixed. Kavya had been out in the White House and had done organizing work as well as some amount of investment side work. And then Jason is utterly brilliant all things finance, governance and had really worked more in the investment banking, private equity world and then some corporate governance and just delights in building out an actual new financial structure which is solving for things that are more complex than just making money. And then my background was more in the affordable housing finance community development side. We’ve got two wonderful more junior members of the team, Natalie and Ben, who have both actually come through Venture for America, which has been a great source of team members and a delight to work with.

Eve: [00:19:55] So you’ve been working on this a little while. I’m sure you’re thinking about improvements. How could it be improved and why? It can’t be perfect, right?

David: [00:20:04] A big thing is the pilots in place as they grow. And I think then building out their own governance and being improved in that way.

Eve: [00:20:13] This is a pretty entrepreneurial idea. So, entrepreneurs never sit still for very long.

David: [00:20:18] Yeah, I think a big part of the improvement also is building that peer group in terms of having the neighborhood trusts speak to each other more. Building out just a lot of the capital familiarity. Right. There’s a risky moment at the beginning of saying, can you put money into a new vehicle that is creating this kind of impact, and will that really work? And as we start to see them work, that makes it so it’s a lot easier for the next one to say, yes, I want to see that happen too. I think as each neighborhood-based organization kind of learns what what means to be taking this on and building into their existing institution. And as you varied organizations right now, they’re, one is a neighbor association, one is one of the purpose-built communities, one is a CDC. So, as you start to have a peer group of different kinds of neighborhood focused organizations that are using this, that will make it even better.

Eve: [00:21:06] And do you think this is really unique? Is there anyone else doing similar work?

David: [00:21:11] There are aspects that are unique in their aspects that are very familiar. A lot of the land trust community and world, I think, is using community land trust towards similar spirit and functions. But I think unique here is the ability to use the outside capital, the outright control of the land versus separation, the focus on, there’s a lot of renters being displaced, There’s a big focus of this, versus a lot of CLTs tend to have more home ownership focus. We early on have met with a lot of peers across the country that we sort of think are doing relevant, familiar work. And a big part of ours is not having too much pride of authorship of really learning for others. A part of that early on is we were calling this a mixed income land trust and we spent time with the Kensington Corridor Trusts out in Philadelphia. And they said, hey, look, you know, we’re really trying to establish more the terminology of a neighborhood trust here. And we said, sure, great, we don’t we don’t have any pride of term here.

David: [00:22:04] We have a really great to actually be part of helping build on what you’re doing. So, we decided to call it a mixed income neighborhood trust. And so a noted MINT kind of sounded nice too. So, that was part of it. We’ve also liked a lot of the shared equity worlds and built out. The Kresge Foundation include us in the community of practice of several groups working on shared equity models, which certainly plays into a lot of what you in Small Change have also been building into and that’s been really great to be part of. And Elwood Hopkins, who’s led that has just been a great champion and convener. And then I think also on, if you see models and neighborhoods facing gentrification that have relatively succeeded in doing cross-subsidy to the benefit of their neighborhoods. Some of those have come out of almost less conventional models than necessarily a community developing corporation. Where if you look at what the Hasadim community has done in South Williamsburg, in New York, it’s experienced massive gentrification pressure, which, because of ownership and cross-subsidy, has in many ways actually made it more affordable for that community through their cross-subsidy and ownership of land. Likewise, you see some of that with some of the Chinatown family societies in New York, and you see a couple of clusters of that in different places in the world. And there are some community development corporations, I think, use their assets. We right now are working with the East Boston Development Corporation in Boston, which has been both an amazing partner to work with and also the way in which they’ve built out the organization ownership and building their own self-financing mechanisms is really in line with what we’d like to see this model enable for more neighborhoods. So, it’s been amazing to get to work with them as a partner in that.

Eve: [00:23:39] So, how many more neighborhoods do you think will have mint in one year or three years from now?

David: [00:23:46] One year. A few, but three years. We’d like to see actually getting up to really doing this at scale.

Eve: [00:23:55] And what does success look like to you?

David: [00:23:57] Success looks like living in a country where we have cities that have mixed income neighborhoods led by especially residents that had been excluded and discriminated against, especially black and brown leadership of institutions that are creating high opportunity neighborhoods that work for everyone. And not only does it hopefully make it so that those neighborhoods become very high opportunity neighborhoods in a way that works for a mix of incomes and identities there, particularly each neighborhood, but also it stops this phenomenon in America where we’ll see investment go into one geography. And there’s almost this assumption that you’ll end up not serving a large chunk of residents who will get displaced somewhere else. And then almost, then you’ll continue to see a cycle where you’re chasing poverty to different geographies, just as all these efforts to try to improve a place come to fruition. Instead, we stop that. I think with half a dozen MINTs in each American city, you could actually create a thing where at the core of each American city are these mixed income neighborhoods which are robust, wonderful, I think could be some of the best neighborhoods in the country. And you also have this window of opportunity, the United States, where we buy deep tragedy of racism and suburban investment. We’ve ended up with the cores of our cities being massively underinvested and undervalued. But, we in many ways are the anomaly in the world on that. And we’re seeing our appetite shift where the cores of our cities are becoming the most valuable places, which is much more akin to everywhere else in the world. It would be a tragedy, I think, to then see us also just have it where if you don’t have the money, you can’t afford to live anywhere near the middle of the city.

Eve: [00:25:39] I think that shift is already happening.

David: [00:25:40] Yeah, we have we have a window of opportunity, I think, for a crucial subset of neighborhoods to at least secure some place near the center of the city that especially carries such deep meaning and current social capital institutions in a way that could create a very different kind of city.

Eve: [00:25:58] I’ve been living in a downtown myself for quite a few years now and have gone from being one of the first residents to one of many who look very affluent to me now. And it’s disturbing. I really feel like the vitality of mixed people using a place is really being wiped out. So, I agree with your argument here. So, I have one more question for you, and that is what keeps you up at night?

David: [00:26:29] Oh, lots of things. At the very beginning, I really did not sleep that well. There’s a lot more stress and things, I think. As we built out a really quality team that’s helped with the sleep. Journaling helps the sleep. You know, you write down your worries.

Eve: [00:26:46] I’m so glad it’s not me alone.

David: [00:26:48] Then you don’t have them bouncing around your head in the middle of the night. I mean, you always you always kind of swing back and forth too, you have this thing where you go, there are moments where you go, oh yeah, this is doing great and we’re going to run with it. There are moments that you go, oh, is something going to hit us that we aren’t expecting and everything’s going to fall apart? And I feel fortunate that more and more of the days are the former.

Eve: [00:27:09] Yes, yeah. Or there are moments where it’s like, why am I doing this? It’s a very hard road.

David: [00:27:16] We’re up against a daunting scale of historical injustice, of momentums, of other forces in the world. So it’s understandable. It’s hard, but there’s also hope.

Eve: [00:27:27] I think you’re also up against greed, unfortunately. So, the gentrification of neighborhoods is going to continue. The question is, is how many can you catch and save? Right.

David: [00:27:39] Yeah. I think the hardest thing for us right now has been when we have neighborhoods that say we really want to work with you, now is the moment. And we’ve just had to say we just don’t have the capacity to work with you right now. And that’s been really hard.

Eve: [00:27:54] That’s heartbreaking.

David: [00:27:55] I remember one very early on going, well, you know, whether or not you work with us, we’re going to be here fighting displacement, our neighborhood. So, it’s not so much are we going to work together and find displacement more? They’re going to be there doing it regardless. It’s just really hard to not have the ability at this point to say yes to everyone and get these in place with the speed which with these words are changing.

Eve: [00:28:20] Is there any like white label option that you can create for do-it-yourselfers?

David: [00:28:26] We’ve occasionally sent along pieces. Unfortunately, it’s just, I think a big reason why we built the team is that a lot of people know all the principles, it’s just, don’t have the capacity in a team that actually will step in and run with it. So, that was, we have no pride of that. We’re happy if someone else wants to do it. Just a big part is building the team to be able to actually say yes to more places and run with it.

Eve: [00:28:52] Well, you’ve chewed off a huge problem, and I really hope you’re super successful and I can’t wait to see where you are in three years. Maybe we’ll have one in Pittsburgh or 2 MINTs.

David: [00:29:05] Yeah, we’d love that.

Eve: [00:29:07] That would be fantastic. Yes. Let me know if you need any introductions.

David: [00:29:12] Yeah, well, if they’re are neighborhood based organizations, this resonates with their priorities and what the neighborhoods are, then. .

Eve: [00:29:18] There’s tons. I feel like someone once told me that community development work started in Pittsburgh. It’s got an enormous number of neighborhood-based organizations. I helped found one myself, a CDC. So, every neighborhood has one. It’s a pretty active place that way.

David: [00:29:37] Well, we’ll follow up. Definitely.

Eve: [00:29:38] Yes, definitely. But thank you very much and congratulations and good luck.

David: [00:29:44] Eve thank you.

Eve: [00:30:01] You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at our website RethinkRealEstateForGood.co. There’s lots to listen to there. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music, and thanks to you for spending your time with me today. We’ll talk again soon, but for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

Image courtesy of David Kemper

Design justice.

May 25, 2022

Bryan Lee, Jr. may have studied architecture, but he is by no means just an architect. Bryan’s philosophy and ideas are big, challenging and adamant. To address these ideas, in 2017, Bryan created Colloqate Design in New Orleans, a firm that uses design thinking to create a conversation or dialogue (thus, the  name of their firm) within the community to speak both to “collective values and ideals or reveal persisting inequity and injustice.” Everything is on the table. Sustainability, community history, immigration, transportation, food security, housing values. Bryan says, “Design justice is a foundational principle; it is not a design process, yet. It is an underlying framework for how to think about getting to the architecture.”

Interested in architecture at a very young age of ten or eleven, Bryan recalls, as a child, noticing the dramatic difference between the spaces and places of Sicily (he was an Air Force brat) and the streets of Trenton, NJ. Out of school he did a stint in an architecture firm, as well as two years as Place and Civic Design Director for the New Orleans Arts Council. But with Colloqate established, alongside the last few years of intensely heightened awareness of issues of racism and climate change in the U.S., his firm’s impact is growing.

Bryan is a founding organizer of the Design Justice Platform, and he co-organized the Design As Protest National Day of Action (hosting more than 30 workshops). Most notably, he was named 2021 National Design Award winner in the emerging designer category by the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. He was also a 2018 Fast Company Most Creative People in Business and a 2019 Architectural League Emerging Voice.

Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:06] Hi there. Thanks for joining me on Rethink Real Estate. For Good. I’m Eve Picker and I’m on a mission to make real estate work for everyone. I love real estate. Real estate makes places good or bad, rich or poor, beautiful or not. In this show, I’m interviewing the disruptors, those creative thinkers and doers that are shrugging off the status quo, in order to build better for everyone. If you haven’t already, check out all of my podcasts at our website RethinkRealEstateForGood.co, or you can find them at your favorite podcast station. You’ll find lots worth listening to, I’m sure.

Eve: [00:01:01] Bryan Lee may have studied architecture, but he’s more than an architect. He launched Colloqate Design in New Orleans to explore big, challenging and adamant ideas about equity in the built environment. At Colloqate Design, a community conversation puts everything on the table. Sustainability, community history, immigration, transportation, food security and housing values. The end goal is an equitable, physical landscape. It’s a fascinating conversation. Listen in to learn more. 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: [00:02:06] Hi, Bryan. I’m just delighted to have this opportunity to talk to you today.

Bryan Lee: [00:02:10] Yeah, wonderful. Thank you for inviting me.

Eve: [00:02:13] You have a really big, bold idea to design spaces of racial, social and cultural justice. What does this statement mean to you and why is it so important?

Bryan: [00:02:26] Yeah. I mean, the way that I kind of define culture is that it is the consequence of persistent circumstance and immediate condition, meaning there’s a long history that drives how culture is formed and it is directly impacted by how we’re currently living, which means that every space that has a connection to our racial, social, cultural worlds is significant in the shaping of our lives. And so, for me, when we think about justice in any of those spaces, it requires us to have a cultural framing. It requires us to understand a history of racial violence, racial oppression and racialized joys. There are there are joys that come as a by-product of the communities that are formed through moments of oppression. And so, I think recognizing those, not ignoring them and elevating them to a valuable asset within a design process, within an architecture, within an urban plan or urban design, allows us to have more just spaces that serve more people.

Eve: [00:03:45] I love that you talk about joy in there as well.

Bryan: [00:03:48] Yeah, it’s necessary.

Eve: [00:03:50] My parents were actually refugees and what always surprised me about them was they went through six really long, hard years in labor camps, but they always spoke about these joyful moments that, you know, were part of that community. Exactly. Exactly what you said.

Bryan: [00:04:06] Yeah. Even to that, I grew up and my father used to tell me he didn’t know he was poor until he went to college and people told him he was poor. And part of that is that, like, community is so necessary and specifically for marginalized or disinherited communities. We often form social capital and cultural capital together that allows us the currency to move through the world, and that is usually shaped by the moments that are created through joy, through those experiences that build connection with one another. And so, I find it utterly necessary for us to conceive of an architecture that responds to those joys or responds to those disparities, and acknowledges the fact that people who have had to create cultures out of violence or oppression or harm or trauma have spatial solutions to a world that is actively seeking to harm them oftentimes. So anyway, yeah.

Eve: [00:05:07] Yeah, my parents actually met in those labor camps. So that was a very, you know, and they were a long love story. So, it was it was a strange mix, as you said. So, your platform is called Colloqate. What exactly is Colloqate?

Bryan: [00:05:26] Yeah, thanks for asking. Most people don’t, so it’s nice. So Colloqate is a combination of two words and one formal word. So, if we think about kind of colloquial, the kind of informal or sophisticatedly informal use of formal language, whether that be written language, whether that be cultural language or spatial language is a necessary understanding. So, understanding that informality and how people use that informality to shape their space is significant. And then location. So, what is the informal language of a place? Right. And so Colloqate is really trying to understand those relationships. And then the term I found, the word collocate with a C, to be even more enlightening when it comes to the type of work we’re looking to do, because it talks about the sequence of words and phrases habitually juxtaposed at a greater frequency than chance. And for us, that is exactly what we’re looking at. We’re looking at the sequence of people in place habitually juxtaposed at a greater frequency than chance, where there are people and places and spaces. How often are those people there? Why are they there? What are the relationships that people have between those spaces? Acknowledging that they are unique to particular cultural, racial, social communities means that we can understand that frequency as an affirmation of the type of space that might want to be built in the future. So that’s what Colloqate means.

Eve: [00:07:08] That is what Colloqate. So, what services do you provide and why do you think they’re important?

Bryan: [00:07:15] We are a non-profit design justice practice, so our focus is a, it is a social mission to deal with projects that are around advocacy, around organizing and around design. And so, we provide services that fit within those three brackets. From an advocacy standpoint, we do trainings on all of our projects as well as we do trainings on a project-by-project basis or just for the general public. So, the intention then is to kind of create a wealth of knowledge for folks to move and move their practice in the direction of design justice. And so that’s part of the advocacy. We also advocate for housing rights, tenant rights. We advocate for community voice in projects. We are a firm that does research and works on projects that are focused on anti-Carceral spaces. So how do we kind of think about the abolition of space, not just as a way to eliminate a certain type of space, but as an opportunity to create new types of spaces that hold people with care and value. And so those are the types of things we do. And again, practically, we still kind of hold the standard scope of services. We do planning work. We do engagement work pretty heavily and a lot of organizing work.

Eve: [00:08:54] But I mean, it’s an unusual practice. First of all, the fact that you’re a non-profit is pretty unusual in the architecture world and the range of services is pretty unusual as well. What led you to use your training in this way?

Bryan: [00:09:08] I worked in the field in the kind of, quote unquote, traditional architectural practice for, I don’t know, 14, 15 years before leaving, going and working for the city and then expanding and starting my own practice. I think the thing that led me here, well, there’s obviously multiple moments along the timeline that shape and shift how you get to at any given point. But I think leave grad school, I graduated in 2000, end of 2008 right before the market crashed. So maybe a month or two before the market crashed. Yeah, there were no jobs for a significant amount of time. And so, I had to re-evaluate how I wanted to exist within the profession, whether or not I was even going to be in the profession. I didn’t know that there was going to be a profession for me to go back to. And so, or at least in the way that I wanted to. And so, part of it was taking a moment during that recession and reflecting on how I wanted to exist if I were going to exist in the architectural world, how might I do that? And so, I wrote down the things that that were important to me and thinking about some of the other organizing work that I had done in the past, whether that was kind of community organizing or kind of in the political space, I found that to be extremely vital to who I was as a human. And I found the architecture world to be very kind of necessary for me to kind of grow as well.

Bryan: [00:10:45] And so, I couldn’t, but I couldn’t figure out how to connect those two things. And so, what really led me to this is that I started a program or expanded a program called Project Pipeline here in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 2012 with a bunch of people, all of the names which I can’t name immediately, just because it’s a lot of people. But we started this program, expanded it to this idea around social justice, through design education. And so, we taught students across the city for six years, and the program still goes, I turned it over. But we taught them, thousands and thousands of students to think about their spaces through that lens. And the more and more we did that, the more and more kind of connected we felt in our communities through that work.

Bryan: [00:11:39] It made me realize that a) it was possible that it was easier to understand than most architects are kind of adults may lead you to believe. And then I had the opportunity to leave the kind of traditional practice and go work for the Arts Council of New Orleans to essentially work on place and civic design work. So, ground level work that was still architectural in nature or sculptural in nature. It was public art and community design. And from there I really found that to be hyper intriguing, in large part because the people who are engaging in those art pieces and those spaces were wildly different than the folks that you often see engaging in the architectures that I was building and that felt wrong. It felt wrong that that the communities I serve, the communities that I’m a part of were not, did not have access to the type of space that we wanted to create in other realms. So that was the driver. And once I left the Arts Council, I said, I can go back and work for another firm or I can give this a shot. And so that’s what we did. We started a practice and really wanted to kind of lean into that as a tool, lean into design justice as the tool to drive how we conceive of the architecture we’re putting into the world.

Eve: [00:13:10] You know, I find this especially interesting because I don’t know if you realize this, I’m an architect by training. And I’ve always thought that architecture training is perhaps the best training that anyone could get. We were trained to be makers. We make something out of absolutely nothing. Right. So, there’s this really incredible problem-solving path that you take from nothing to, you know, sometimes enormous projects. And it’s always been bewildering to me that more architects don’t take a different path because architecture, dare I say it, is a little precious.

Bryan: [00:13:45] It is.

Eve: [00:13:47] And it’s just such a wonderful tool. So, yeah, I totally get, I totally get why you went in this direction. So, when you do this work, how do you bring stakeholders on board to see the issues that you know to be true.

Bryan: [00:14:03] The way that we engage is first with the acknowledgement that there are three different types of outreach that happen. One is just a general outreach, which is, which is a communication tool that is often from a developer or an architect or a client to a community, oftentimes doesn’t have a lot of feedback, but it is an acknowledgement that something is happening. We try to avoid that pretty much at all costs. Moving into engagement, you often have some sort of dialogue, right? So, it is, there’s a feedback loop that happens with engagement. But if you’ve worked in a design firm, you often, you’ll recognize that it is often extractive because we don’t stay in those communities. We’re often in grab it, form relationships, and then we’re gone, right? And so that is also harmful. If you also on the other end of that, if you’ve ever talk to your community members after that process, you’ll hear from them that they feel jilted and don’t like that process over and over and over again. And so we tend to move ourselves more towards the organizing space, which is a means and opportunity for us to build power in communities through a design process. And we really bring this to a head when we kind of bring to bear that there is no better way to build community than through organizing one’s community around building a space. It takes an awful lot of time. There’s an awful lot of money, there’s an awful lot of money involved and there’s a ton of decisions. And so all of those things communities want some self-determination around. And if we create a process within the design of a building that or space that reflects the voice of those people, then not only will there be more investment into those spaces, but the spaces will reflect and be more present for the communities we serve.

Bryan: [00:16:06] And so the way that we do that just in general is a couple of ways we hire what we call community design advocates as a part of the team, so they become a part of the design team. They are they are not a focus group. They can serve in a focus manner, but their primary obligation to the project is to continue doing the organizing work that they were previously doing. So, if they were talking about tenant rights or if they were talking about cultural spaces throughout a particular neighborhood, their job is to, kind of, continue engaging with their community members around those things that they care deeply about. And so, in doing so, they have pre-existing relationships, they have pre-existing knowledge that we will never get, right. We can’t have it through unless we have those previous relationships as well. We just can’t. And so, can we relinquish some of our ego and need to hold power along every single step of the way and allow for community members to thoroughly describe how they experience space, how they think about space, and how they want to see space articulated, and then try to translate that. And our job then becomes translator rather than to present a series of drawings or renderings that may completely miss a mark. So that’s one way.

Eve: [00:17:39] I like the notion of relinquishing ego, which is probably very hard for many architects to do.

Bryan: [00:17:46] Yeah. Yeah, it is. It’s difficult and understandably so. Like, people don’t really fully understand how hard it is to be an architect.

Eve: [00:17:55] Yes. No, I think that’s true. I think that’s true.

Bryan: [00:17:58] So very difficult and the stakes are high. But anyway, the other two things is we create. So along with the CDOs, we create what we call a spatial implications document. And so, every conversation that’s had throughout the course of a project is tracked, and that might mean 30 to 40000 comments. And we tag and theme those comments. Those comments are then broken down into process implications, program implications and spatial implications. And then we talk with the client about process implications, meaning we can make the spatial suggestion, but if you don’t change a process, then the outcome is going to be the exact same. So that’s one thing. Programmatic Solutions. What activities are people kind of reflecting throughout the sets of conversations? So, we talk with community members again to kind of compare and reflect on the activities that people want to have. And then the spatial documentation is really just about the design team and how we reflect some of those other process and programmatic implications into an architecture, into the spaces we’re designing. And then lastly, we infuse what we call a design justice set into our standard architectural set, which just means that for everything that’s produced, whether it’s on safety, whether it’s on recreational space or restrooms, we create the themes, and it will reflect itself into the architectural drawings. And so, we tag and annotate every design decision that was critical through the engagement process and through the project management team’s process. And we tag those on the drawing, so we talk about the things and hold ourselves accountable to the things that the community said. And we attempt to say, these things are happening, these things are not happening, and here’s why they’re not happening. Right? So, it’s a level of accountability that will live on past the submission of the architectural documents.

Eve: [00:20:12] That’s pretty fascinating. So, I have to ask, how different do these spaces end up because of that process? If you sort of reflect and say, okay, if I were to go in and design this without this process, you know, how different would it look?

Bryan: [00:20:28] I don’t think it’s major. What I think is that there are I mean, I think it’s like a tone and intonation in someone’s dictation or speech to someone like you can tell when someone means something sarcastically or when they mean something genuinely. I think it’s that, I think the community voice is very much a tone and inflection in the architecture rather than large gestural moves most of the time. It doesn’t mean that it’s not those. Yeah, but, but so for instance, whether that’s finding the moments across an architecture that are, across a building that allow for participatory designs that might mean facade design, that might mean kind of internal artwork in a building, that might mean the community spaces are culturally reverent versus architecturally simple to create, structurally simple to create. So, it might mean that we have this, and I say we, can you create a space that thinks about prayer circles or freedom circles or kind of native. So, like, again, the types of spaces that are created may shape and reflect the cultural resonance. So that’s another thing. And then I would say the other things are really about marginalized communities that often pops up. So, when we talk about non gendered restrooms, right? So that is a touchy subject in every project that we do. But having those conversations brings to bear a lot of conversations. And so, while a client may want to approach it in that particular way, and we might as a design team, when we hear some of the religious entities who are a part of these spaces say, Well, while we want to make sure that other folks feel comfortable, we also know that our kind of religious background doesn’t allow us to operate in this particular way. And so can you also accommodate us as well? And so, it means that you shape the restrooms a little differently. You don’t have all kind of non-gendered restrooms, but you have spaces that other people can use based on their own principles and values.

Eve: [00:22:51] So there are other stakeholders like the city and funders and. What do they have to say about this process?

Bryan: [00:23:00] The city loves it because the city is, oftentimes is directly accountable to the to those stakeholders, to the neighborhoods. Right. Those are the people who are going to show up at the doorstep if they don’t if they don’t listen to them. So, the city views it as a tool to accommodate the conversations that they would otherwise not be able to have. I don’t often care about what funders have to say about anything. You know, I think mostly those conversations are wrapped around a, it’s choosing the appropriate clients. So, I would say I don’t care what funders say that are in opposition to to considering the voice of community. So, we wouldn’t work for them in the first place. But the developers that we often work with or the clients that we often work with are usually institutions or other non-profits who actively want to understand the impact of their work on a larger community. And so, they are they are pre invested in this type of work in the first place.

Eve: [00:24:10] So what kind of architecture would actively dismantle barriers and make buildings more equitable?

Bryan: [00:24:17] Yeah. So, part of the kind of continuum that we think about in architecture or at least in design justice reflects on what liberation looks like in this work. And so, what that really means for us is that we have to reflect and dismantle past structural systems that have implications on the current policies, procedures and practices within our own, within our own realm. So, we have to kind of think about those structural systems before an architecture can even come to be, because systems are created for a reason. They’re created so that the outputs of those systems are consistent, that they don’t have to worry about the outputs diverging too much from the standard. So, first things first is acknowledging and understanding those systems. The second thing is to make things fair or accountable in the present. So that really just means that we want to make sure that whatever architecture we produce has a mutual, a mutual aid about it. Right. Meaning that there are no private properties, even if there are, everything’s private, even if it’s privately owned, whatever property exists for a developer or a client or institution, it abuts or is adjacent to a partner, to someone else, to a community. And so, we thusly have a responsibility to those partners. The third thing is, can we create spaces that are fundamentally about future setting? And so, when I say future setting, that might mean that we have to rethink or recalibrate the typologies of space that are better informed by cultural, social, racial communities. So, meaning we acknowledge that redlining has had a tremendous effect on black and brown communities across the entire country, and it drives even current gentrification processes.

Bryan: [00:26:19] We also acknowledge that policies that exist in a lot of cities restrict the square footage of housing that can go on any given site, restrict the density within places. All of those things are often and were often developed as a means to negate or to push out black, brown, BIPOC communities more generally. And so, it really is both challenging those policies and procedures, but then taking that as an opportunity with community to redevelop or to develop new ideas about how we can exist in space. What new spaces should exist on the other side of abolition of prisons? Because it’s not as though we’re not still going to have issues and communities. And I don’t think anyone’s ever said that even in the defund world, it is always to say, can we create new spaces that serve our community a little bit better? When we talk about housing and affordable housing and we drive so much of our housing propositions on area median income, that negates the fact that wealth was stripped from so many communities for the last 100 years, 150, 250 years. Right. So depending on what timeline you want to use. And so, it means changing a policy around income so that we can actually develop a housing stock or a housing typology that recognizes that wealth discrepancy.

Eve: [00:27:57] And I mean, you know what the architecture profession is like. It has a very small minority population. Right. So, you know, given that, how do you see the role of racism and race as influencing contemporary architecture?

Bryan: [00:28:18] Yeah. I mean, I think it’s substantial because we are often conduits of power. We are reflecting the will and the needs of our clients and the will and the needs of those clients who have the money that’s available to build architecture at that scale is often conservative, is often coming from a different specific perspective. When I say conservative, not from the political lens, but.

Eve: [00:28:50] No, I, the industry is very monoculture and.

Bryan: [00:28:54] Yeah, precisely.

Eve: [00:28:55] And, in many ways beyond architecture.

Bryan: [00:28:57] Yeah. And so, I think that those, the values there are then reflected. We often say in our work that our values are validated through the spaces and places we design. And so, if a history of racialized spatial violence as it still exists, who’s to say that those principles of practice don’t still permeate through the architecture that we design? Because those are the rules. That’s the system that we’ve created. Even thinking about the kind of growth of modernist design in a way that and even super modernist design that that starts to think and postmodernism starting to think about an architecture that disassociates itself from its cultural implications means that you’re valuing an architecture that does not reflect other types of cultures. Right. Because it’s ornamental or it’s extra. And therein lies so much of what other communities who haven’t had the opportunity to shape their environments find valuable. I mean, we talk often about the reason that so many black and brown communities have a lot of murals and visuals in that particular nature. But we don’t have a significant home ownership ratio. We don’t have, we haven’t been able to control the wider or broader landscape of neighborhoods in order to shape and self-determine those outcomes, which means that we use visuals, we use art, we use muralism we use a lot of those other expressions to put a fingerprint on the spaces we live in. And so, when the architecture doesn’t allow for that, when the architecture doesn’t allow for a cultural resonance to be prominent, then those values are validating one set of groups over the other.

Eve: [00:31:01] So is there a little bit, a little tiny glimmer of hope for you? You see any glimmers of hope, like anything changing over the last few years that have led you to sit up and say, oh, that’s interesting. That’s a shift going on.

Bryan: [00:31:15] Yeah. I mean, first of all, you know, a lot of this work came to be through another program or work that we did called design as protests. And one of the core definitions that we use during those workshops is to say that to protest is to have an unyielding faith in the power and potential of a just society. It is fundamentally about our collective hope, and if design at its best serves that same purpose, we have no choice but to be hopeful in a future that connects and serves the communities we serve. So yes, I am always hopeful. I don’t think we have a choice. But I’d also say that the things that give me hope, the least of which is our organization still being around. I mean, I think we knew that this was going to be a very difficult pitch but turns out it really isn’t. A lot of people have been clamoring for this type of work for a long time, but the architectural world has ignored it. And to that note, you see more and more RFPs that are popping up that call for critical race theory or design justice as a part of their core evaluation metrics. And I think going from three years ago, one project in the northwest that was maybe $32 million, something of that sort. There’s probably $2.8 million or $2.8 billion worth of work over the last four years in the northwest. That is leaning more towards this direction, that is looking at critical race theory and that is looking at design justice as a core component of their work. Interesting. And it’s huge. So, I am hopeful in the sense that I see clients and institutions shifting and demanding more of us. And the more that that happens, the more that we will hopefully do the work to meet them where they need to be or where they are.

Eve: [00:33:27] So I have one more question for you. Actually, a couple, but this one is what do you like best about the work you do?

Bryan: [00:33:37] Yeah, I love that question. I love people. I love the fact that we get to connect and work with communities over and over and over again. It’s the best part of our job is working with, let’s say, people say stakeholders or end users. But what I love about it is that I get to be in community daily and get to grow with people. That is not from a extractive perspective, not from a position of transaction. Right. And to build those relationships is amazing.

Eve: [00:34:12] Yes, I can see that. So, one final question and that is, what is your big, hairy audacious goal?

Bryan: [00:34:20] My audacious goal is to fundamentally shift the way that practice standardizes engagement and organizing into the work. And by that, I mean, can we stratify the profession. A) bringing in new community members who historically would not have an opportunity to be a part of the design profession. So, creating a community design advocate as a general role on all projects across the board, it would be to create and, continue to create and build out the processes for engagement that make it, not just the processes but the tools for engagement that make it infinitely easier for all firms to do it.

Eve: [00:35:13] Because it is hard.

Bryan: [00:35:15] It’s very, very, very hard work.

Eve: [00:35:17] Very hard. Yeah. Maybe harder than designing a building, right?

Bryan: [00:35:22] It’s very, very difficult work. I mean, a lot of it is just so much research, it’s qualitative. And to be able to summarize and think about those spatial implications is a design process unto itself. And so, if we can find and build out the Autodesk architectural suite, that is something comparable to that, that allows us to create the tools for people then generally, will make it more tempting for clients to demand that work in their process. And if we can do that, you entirely shift the field. So that’s the idea. That’s where we’re going. And it’s happening slowly.

Eve: [00:35:59] Well, thank you very much. I can’t wait to see the end result.

Bryan: [00:36:03] Yeah, no problem. Thank you for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Eve: [00:36:20] That was Bryan Lee, founder of Colloqate, and an architect pushing the traditional boundaries that the architect’s role into something far more significant.

Eve: [00:36:41] You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at our website RethinkRealEstateForGood.co. There’s lots to listen to there. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music, and thanks to you for spending your time with me today. We’ll talk again soon, but for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change

Image courtesy of Bryan Lee, Jr.

Reclaiming your Community.

April 6, 2022

Majora Carter’s career as urban revitalization strategist has spanned environment, economy, social mobility, and real estate development. Her work has won major awards in each sector, including a MacArthur ‘genius’ Grant and Peabody Award winning broadcaster.

Majora’s words — “Nobody should have to move out of their neighborhood to live in a better one” — are inscribed on the walls of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture. And her new book, called “Reclaiming Your Neighborhood”, the subject of our podcast, takes a next step in her thesis – build where you live,  talent will stay and your neighborhood will prosper.

Born and raised in the South Bronx, Majora has long-focused much of her work there, looking always to make positive change for her community, and in doing so, gained both national and international attention. She believes that talent retention may be the key to turning around low-status neighborhoods. And she’s backed that up with her Boogie Down Ground Hip-Hop coffee spot which she owns and operates with her husband in Hunts Point, around the corner from where she grew up.

Majora is also a lecturer at Princeton University’s Keller Center, serves as editor and senior producer at GROUNDTRUTH, a platform for telling stories of people building community power, and she previously served as associate director of The POINT Community Development Corporation. She founded and ran Sustainable South Bronx and co-founded Green for All.

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. If you haven’t already, check out all of my podcasts at our website RethinkRealEstateForGood.co, or you can find them at your favorite podcast station. You’ll find lots worth listening to, I’m sure.

Eve: [00:01:01] My guest today is Majora Carter, my second interview with this powerhouse. Her career as urban revitalization strategist has spanned environment, economy, social mobility and real estate development, and her work has won major awards in each sector, including a MacArthur Genius grant. Majora’s words are inscribed on the walls of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture: “Nobody should have to move out of their neighborhood to live in a better one.” Her new book called “Reclaiming Your Neighborhood”, the subject of our podcast, takes a next step in her thesis. Build where you live, talent will stay, and your neighborhood will prosper. Look for the book on Amazon, in bookstores or on Majora’s website. There is no way around it. If you are really interested in impact investing, this podcast is a must listen.

Eve: [00:02:19] Hello, Majora. I’m so delighted to have you back on this show.

Majora Carter: [00:02:23] Thanks for having me.

Eve: [00:02:25] It’s been a while, but you’ve just written a book called “Reclaiming Your Community,” and in it you ask how we can address the problem of persistent poverty in low status communities differently. So, I wanted to start by asking you what is a low status community and what does it mean to you?

Majora: [00:02:46] A low status community to me – the way that our company defines it is a place where inequality is assumed by both the people that are in that community and those outside looking in. And so, what that what it looks like and I think that’s easier to describe that way; It’s the kind of places where there are more environmental burdens, where there’s higher rates of poverty, lower educational attainment, the kind of places where you won’t find diverse options for food. Not many great places to invest your money or you’re charged for it, like through check cashing stores or places like that. And it’s just literally the places where inequality is just understood. And so and they look different. They can be inner cities, they could be Native American reservations, they could be the kind of former booming Rust Belt towns that only white people lived in. But the jobs are long gone.

Eve: [00:03:44] This is a really big and hard question. So why is it difficult to improve the status of a low status neighborhood?

Majora: [00:03:52] Well, like a lot of things, it comes down to who benefits from it. And because if you look at those communities, literally billions of dollars are pumped into them through the philanthropic industrial sector and as well as our government. And it looks different, but it comes in the form of whether there are subsidies to build very low-income housing and homeless shelters, whether it’s the multibillion dollar economic engine that’s our pharmaceutical industry that absolutely does profit off of lifestyle related health conditions from diabetes and obesity and heart conditions. And it’s the, you know, the fact that there’s such low educational attainment but really, we’re not investing in public education within those areas either. And so, again, so it’s always like a problem to be solved. Again, folks, there are definitely industries set up to perpetuate that and actually benefit from them, but the people in those communities are not getting any better.

Eve: [00:04:53] So how does the redevelopment industry impact this cycle?

Majora: [00:04:58] Yeah, so like I think there’s an old saying, “all relationships are about real estate” and I believe it’s true in this regard because real estate development can be used as a transformational tool if we use it that way. I mean, think about it. What we’re doing is literally redefining what constitutes what is happening in those areas. So, when you do it by creating really interesting commercial, industrial, residential development. And so, you can tweak the formula and create benefits for the people that are there or not. Right?

Eve: [00:05:32] Right.

Majora: [00:05:32] And so if we’re thinking about development as a transformational tool and if we know that sort of status quo development, which either content to concentrate poverty and everything and all the ills associated with it from low health outcomes, low educational attainment, you know, higher rates of people being incarcerated. If we know that, then what if we designed those places and developed them in ways that actually promoted the opposite?

Eve: [00:06:01] Right.

Majora: [00:06:01] And that’s when we decided to look at a tool. We literally borrowed a page from the business community that looks at if you are an employer, if you own a business and you train, you hire your staff, that’s your talent and you pour resources into them, whether it’s training or benefits or reasons for them to want to stay. You know, you’re not doing it so that your competitor will hire them away. You’re doing it so that your talent sees you as the place to be. But we don’t do that in American low status communities. We don’t treat our communities that way. And so, what we’re trying to do is apply a talent retention approach to real estate development. Like what do folks that are born and raised in those communities, the talented ones, the ones that are either academically or artistically or any kind of talent, the ones that are literally taught to measure success by how far they get away from those communities, what can we do to keep them there? And so, we ask, what are you looking for in the community that you desire? We ask community members in my hometown in the South Bronx, what’s that? In that classic kind of low status community and people of all income levels, they were looking for kind of things that made them feel good about being in their own community, whether it was good places like cafes, restaurants, great parks, places to play and work. Those are the kind of things that they wanted. And so why aren’t we building those things here in our own community? And that is when we realize that that’s the kind of real estate development we wanted to do. And we labeled it a talent retention, real estate development strategy.

Eve: [00:07:47] You talk about real estate development impacting low status neighborhoods in one of two ways, and the first is displacement gentrification, which we touched on, and the second is poverty maintenance. So, tell me about poverty maintenance.

Majora: [00:08:03] Yeah. So, poverty level economic maintenance as we’ve called it, or PLM, which really sounds gross, but because it kind of is, where again, billions pumped into these communities from government and philanthropic sources, but the economic level of the people in that community does not change. So, subsidies that go to low income, quote unquote, affordable housing developers, which is only for very low income housing and even homeless shelters, lots of money in terms of the health clinics and the multinational pharmaceutical industry that are government subsidized and actually do support lifestyle illnesses according to, whether they are diabetes, obesity. But things related to the quality of life that that happen in communities, low status communities and seeing those type of things, even community centers that are that I think are often just there’s like resources that are poured in specifically to support the bright ones in the community. And so those are the ones that measure success by how far they get away. And those type of things literally pull people outside of our own community to seek greener pastures. But again, the people that remain are usually the ones that remain in poverty. And that is the way that those communities are treated.

Eve: [00:09:31] Right.

Majora: [00:09:32] Whether it’s by the philanthropic and our government interest, it’s like we play to that in terms of like creating more low-income housing, more health clinics and opportunities to support people that are chronically suffering from lifestyle health conditions. And through that, we are not seeing the kind of transition from people who are actually creating more healthy opportunities for them, for themselves in those communities. And we’re seeing more and more money pumped into those things. And thus, we’re seeing the concentration of more and more poverty and all the things associated with it, whether it’s low educational attainment, higher rates of folks involved in the justice system, poor health outcomes, and more reasons for more people to want to leave those communities. So again, poverty level, economic maintenance, somebody is doing well, but not the people that are in those communities.

Eve: [00:10:27] So, you know, I think actually in the built environment, what you’re talking about is perpetuated by the affordable building types that we see, because you can really drive through a neighborhood and you can see you can point out affordable housing very clearly. And that, I think, is a very visible manifestation of that Poverty Maintenance or PLM, as you called it.

Majora: [00:10:49] Yeah. The architecture of poverty is, you know, you know it when you see it.

Eve: [00:10:55] Yes.

Majora: [00:10:55] It’s kind of like pornography. It’s like you know it when you see it.

Eve: [00:10:59] Yes, it’s true.

Majora: [00:11:01] Yeah, it may look different in a rural or urban or a suburban context, but everybody knows.

Eve: [00:11:07] That’s right. So, you know, you’ve already touched on this, but you write about how third spaces are key to talent retention in low status community economics. And so what is a third space?

Majora: [00:11:21] So, third spaces are these urban planning parlance for places that are neither work nor home. Right? And it’s just this third space where community can happen. And to us, community is not just a place, it’s an activity. Right? It is literally an action verb, but you do need places to do it. And so, if you don’t and so if you’re in general, if you’re in a low status community, the kind of places, the kind of third spaces that are in those communities are generally not the kind of places where people feel like they’re vibrant and they’re working to support the kind of goals and aspirations for their lives. It’s like, I think about some of the places in my neighborhood in the South Bronx where the largest places were communal real estate was either the waiting rooms at health clinics or pharmacies and also community centers where most people do not go and hang out or don’t want to be seen in. Right. Or for long anyway. And it’s just like, you know, in terms of cafes or cool places to hang out, very few. And so that’s when we realize we’re creating this this architecture or the architecture that’s here is literally creating this sort of like talent repulsion experience for people who are feeling like, I know I’ve got something good to offer because I don’t – Low status communities have never had a shortage of amazing people coming from them. Right. But I do have a problem with them staying. I mean, even America loves the Cinderella story of like somebody being born into some kind of hardscrabble community and they have to pull themselves up and then they go out and make something great of themselves. They’re coming from these communities. Why can’t we make something of ourselves here?

Eve: [00:13:13] Yeah.

Majora: [00:13:14] And that’s both the challenge, but also the joy of realizing that it’s not just this thing that this this miracle that needs to happen, it’s something that we can do because we already have the tools and the keys to our own recovery within our own communities.

Eve: [00:13:33] So, you know, I visited you in the Bronx and there’s not a lot of third places there. But you created a coffee shop, and didn’t you tell me that it was voted, what was it voted, number one?

Majora: [00:13:44] We were voted the best cafe in New York in 2021.

Eve: [00:13:49] Can you believe that? That’s awesome.

Majora: [00:13:51] Yes, I can. Yes, I absolutely can. And it’s because we but it was by time out in New York and it was because we were, and yes, we do have great specialty coffee. I’m sorry. Do you hear that.

Eve: [00:14:09] The dog? Yes.

Majora: [00:14:09] Yes, I’m sorry.

Eve: [00:14:10] Everyone will have to deal with the dog on this podcast.

Majora: [00:14:13] I know.

Eve: [00:14:14] Is my life, right?

Majora: [00:14:15] He’s like really upset because my husband just walked out and he’s like, “don’t go” anyway. I’ll Start over. But yes, we were voted best cafe in New York City in 2021 by “Time Out New York magazine.” And I like to think it wasn’t just because we’ve got great coffee and tea and an awesome local craft beer and wine and sangria, but and really awesome community vibes. But it really was the vibes part because what we did was really instil within our community that our cafe was simply a vessel in which to hold all the great hopes and dreams and aspirations of our community and then gave it a platform to show it. We absolutely took advantage of having to do much of our work outdoors because of COVID, and suddenly we became this, this wasn’t just encased within the four walls of our cafe, but we took it outside and people were doing things like open mics and even credit repair workshops and art exhibits, and basically it was just such a liberating way for people to see how beautiful their community was. And because it was literally like spilling out onto the sidewalk for everybody to see. And I feel like that is the reason why we won that award. You know, not, you know, again, we do have really good stuff there, but it was mostly that we created this this environment that allowed people to see how beautiful their community was and participate in it.

Eve: [00:15:54] So you tested this thesis out. Do you know of any people who stayed in the community because of this third place? So, what’s next? How do you – that’s a big block you’re on, by the way. And yes, that’s going to take quite a lot of work to transform into a community asset, shall we say.

Majora: [00:16:12] Yes. Well, you know, you’ve got to start somewhere. I mean, some environmentalists would say, what’s the best time to plant a tree? You know, 20 years ago. What’s the next best time? Today. And so that’s where you start. And you have to start somewhere. And by creating examples and showing them what it does do is give people that are open to it an opportunity to say, well, if they could do something, why can’t I?

Eve: [00:16:37] Yes.

Majora: [00:16:37] And that is exactly what we’ve seen, like our little cafe has, actually, because it’s just allows people to connect together. We’ve seen everything from people being able to buy homes from one another. We’ve seen people start new businesses and locate them within the community. We’ve seen people develop their own capacity to see themselves as a different person, but the same one, but being able to do it within their own community. I’ve been incredibly excited by seeing folks realize that looking around and going, Wait, there’s people like me here. Why do I feel like I need to to escape when I could build something right here? So, yes. And what’s also super exciting is that I’ve also seen folks from around the country intuitively do this. And writing this book was simply a way to help other folks see that this may be mostly my story and how I got to the point where it’s like reclaiming my community was something that I want to see everybody to do because I feel like we have to do something to sort of repair the social fabric of our country. And we should start in the places that are most impacted by some of the specious problems that whether it’s systemic racism and classism have actually created in this country, but really created low status communities that are not helping us as a as a country evolve into the greatness that it could be.

Eve: [00:18:11] So I know you’re also working on a second third space, which I’ve had the good fortune to visit.

Majora: [00:18:16] Yes.

Eve: [00:18:17] A beautiful old railway building. Tell us about that. What’s going on there? It’s not far away. It’s like less than half a block away from your coffee shop, right?

Majora: [00:18:28] My world is really small at this point. I mean, the coffee shop is literally a three-minute walk away. The other project that you’re referring to is even a minute walk away from where I live.

Eve: [00:18:41] Yes, yeah, yeah.

Majora: [00:18:43] It’s a historic rail station designed by Cass Gilbert, America’s first starchitect, as they call them, Cass Gilbert, who designed also the Woolworth Building and the US Supreme Court building. It was quite the dandy in his day in the early part of the 20th century, and so we had this beautiful aesthetic. And so, this old rail station is about 4000 square feet, and so we’re transforming it into an event hall. So, my husband James and I actually literally did the initial demolition ourselves. Fortunately, we got other people to help us to finish it up, and it’s super exciting because the idea that we can take a space and by its nature as an event hall, it’s literally being filled by other people to do all sorts of things. And so we’re hoping to see it used as an amazing music venue, which actually sort of hearkens back to literally right across the street from where the rail station is, used to be a place where vaudeville excuse me, vaudeville, you know, Latin music as well is like it was like a musical and theater place where people would come right across the we want to bring some of that back as well. You know, and it’s also really interesting for me because that rail station is the reason why my family decided to settle there. My father was from down south, a big old black man who was a Pullman porter, and he bought our house for cash because back in the 1940s, there weren’t a whole lot of banks giving money to black men for mortgages. So, he actually won 15,000 in a horse race in California, put it in a satchel, literally cash, put it in a satchel, brought it back to New York. You found an Italian family that would sell to him, and he bought it.

Eve: [00:20:38] Which, in itself, was unusual, right?

Majora: [00:20:41] Literally, yeah. And he didn’t feel comfortable staying in the house for a couple of years, so he just rented it to them because it was the neighborhood was all white, but he bought that house because there was talk that they were going to reactivate that particular rail station and that was actually his line. So he was just like, Oh. Two blocks from my house. That’s what I want!

Eve: [00:21:01] He understood the power of transit, right?

Majora: [00:21:04] Exactly. Unfortunately, they never reopened it for transit, but he did have the conductor to slow down the train so he could hop off and climb out to his house.

Eve: [00:21:12] Oh, that’s great.

Majora: [00:21:13] Yeah, so that was pretty funny.

Eve: [00:21:16] Right? So, you know, I have to go back to the words that you’re quote that’s on the walls of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture. And you said, “Nobody should have to move out of the neighborhood to live in a better one.” And it really sounds like you just got tired of waiting around for someone to fix yours.

Majora: [00:21:34] Yes. In a nutshell, it was just like, you know, I mean, it was a little deeper than that, actually, because it really did come from this place where, you know, because I was one of those kids who measured success by how far she got away. I was told from very early on that I was a smart kid and that I was going to grow up and be somebody. And of course, I believed that I was just like I was really smart. I was reading when I was three. I was like, I’m getting out of here, especially when my brother was killed. And, you know, and I did watch, you know, because of financial disinvestment. All, so many of the buildings in my neighborhood were burned down. And I watched a lot of it. And there was a there was some trauma associated, I think, with like seeing and feeling these things, experiencing these things. So, yeah, I was like, education’s going to be my ticket out. And it was until I ended up back here only because I was broke and I needed a cheap place to stay when I went to graduate school. And that’s the only reason why I came back. And it did. It felt like such a horrifying defeat to be this kid with like I had a bunch of letters behind my name. I went to good schools, and then all of a sudden, I’m like back home and mommy and daddy’s house in the South Bronx. Hard and, but what was amazing was discovering that that education and distance actually was a blessing because like that’s when I saw when the city and state were building this huge waste facility on our waterfront, and we already handled an enormous amount of it. I was like, Oh my gosh. Like, it’s because we just this is history repeating itself. We are a poor community of color, politically vulnerable, and this is what happens. And all I could think was I mean, first was shame when I understood it and I was like, oh, like I just wanted to run away. And I did. And you know what? No one blamed me. But now I see it like, literally, with like eyes completely wide open, and I wanted to do something about it. And yeah, like, I wanted nice things in my own doggone community. Absolutely. For me and for everybody else.

Eve: [00:23:51] Yes. Yeah. I don’t know what to say next because I know how hard it’s been for you. It’s an amazing it’s an amazing journey that you’ve taken. I just want to say that. So, you also talked to me about the Jumpstart program in Philly, which I actually I interviewed Ken Weinstein, who launched the program in our second podcast season. If anyone wants to listen, it’s an amazing program. Tell me about it and why you why you love it so much.

Majora: [00:24:23] Wow. Yes. So, I was actually getting an award in Philadelphia, and it was the Edward Bacon Award who was actually it is Kevin Bacon’s father. And but he was like this amazing urban planner in Philly, and everybody loved him. Yeah.

Eve: [00:24:42] Yeah, yeah.

Majora: [00:24:43] And so I was getting this award and like part of it, and it’s like a really big thing over there. And so, part of it was that I got to hang out with some, some notable people in Philly, and I was like, okay, cool. And I sat in on this roundtable with graduates from this program called Jumpstart Germantown. And they were all, almost all black folks younger than me. And they were all talking about, like, the deals that they were doing. And I was just like. What? This many in a major American city talking about real estate deals and what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. And I was amazed. And so, but Jumpstart Germantown literally was a way to get folks from communities just like mine to be more involved in residential real estate development in Philadelphia, in Germantown. And so, the way that it was done, Ken Weinstein was literally, was getting inundated with, because he’s really a nice affable guy, and folks were just like, how do you do this? And he’s just like, oh, I can tell you. And he’d give them that information, and then he realized this is too much. And then he got his friends like help, created a training that gave people just enough information so that they could actually get out on their own. And then the best thing that he did was create a fund. So, where he gave the first couple of loans to those folks to do their first few deals.

Eve: [00:26:13] I remember him saying he realized that no matter what he taught them, if they couldn’t get the financing, it was useless.

Majora: [00:26:18] Exactly.

Eve: [00:26:19] And they couldn’t get the financing.

Majora: [00:26:20] No, no, no.

Eve: [00:26:22] What a guy. Yeah.

Majora: [00:26:24] So I was just like. Wait. What? And I totally flipped out and actually decided, I mean, I literally went to Philly for the next four weeks to just to take that class. And I’d love at some point to be able to start a project like that here in New York. And I actually encourage everybody to consider it in other places, too. But again, what we saw there was an incredible example. It wasn’t like a non-profit kind of like, “Oh, we’re here to help the poor people.” It was more like, “Nah, we’re going to help you compete” in this capitalist system that we’re in so that you can actually reclaim your own doggone community. And I was blown away.

Eve: [00:27:05] Pretty fabulous. And he’s franchised it, right? So, there have been a number of different neighborhoods and cities that are now have jumpstart programs.

Majora: [00:27:13] Yes, quite a few at this point.

Eve: [00:27:15] If I weren’t so busy, I would start one.

Majora: [00:27:17] I know.

Eve: [00:27:18] Pretty it’s pretty fabulous. But requires a little bit of resources. I want to ask one other big question and that is what does meaningful community engagement look like, especially when it comes to redevelopment of an area? What should it look like?

Majora: [00:27:37] Yeah. For us, meaningful community engagement means that it’s actually driven, at least in part, by listening to what the community’s hopes and dreams and aspirations actually are. And by no means assuming that you know what they are before you start. Because if you do, basically what we’ll do is what we see the non-profit industrial complex and even our government telling us what needs to happen in those communities. And that’s the same kind of status quo development that actually concentrates poverty. And what we did, we literally created surveys and did focus groups, and we even had an advisory board built from very informal leaders within our community that allow folks to give them reasons to think about. Yeah, what does it look like? What does a great community look like for me? And they were really specific about what those things were, and we knew it because they would talk about the things that they would leave the community to experience. And when we realized like honestly, where somebody’s hardest is, where they spend their money, and if you weren’t spending it in your community, what were you spending it on? And could we actually create the same kind of experience in our community that make people that just to give people a second look. And it has been hard because there’s such low expectations applied to low status communities and after a while people even internalize them. And that’s why it’s difficult to do that, which is why I’m so glad that I’ve actually gotten there’s company now. I mean, being the first one in to do something as crazy as like a really high-end specialty coffee shop in a place that hasn’t had anything like that in decades. It was exhausting. But at the same time.

Eve: [00:29:35] You got a lot of pushback early on from the neighbors, right?

Majora: [00:29:38] I got some pushback. I didn’t get a lot. What I got was they were very loud, but I think it was basically rooted in fear.

Eve: [00:29:46] I agree. I was going to say the same thing. I think change is very difficult for most people. And.

Majora: [00:29:52] Yeah.

Eve: [00:29:53] And they’re worried about being left out, you know, and, and they usually are left out, let’s be honest about it. So, you know, that was really why I asked that question. Like, how do we make people feel like part of something?

Majora: [00:30:08] Right, and their people are left out because the folks that are doing most of the development never had any intention of letting them in in the first place. I mean, if you think about the kind of development that happens in poverty level economic maintenance, I mean, there isn’t a place for most of the people in our community to even participate at all. I mean, there’s this thing, like, oh, we do community engagement and outreach, which means you get people together for some kind of little visioning thing and some ridiculous highly paid consultant gets like post-its up on a wall. And then you say, you did it. What did you do? I mean, it’s just like this is ridiculous. The kind of development that happens in low status communities was never intended to include people from those communities, except as recipients of like whatever they’re putting out, which we know concentrates poverty, and everything associated with it.

Eve: [00:31:04] Or gentrified it. Right. But either way, they’re left out. Yeah.

Majora: [00:31:09] Yeah, totally. And so, they know that. And that’s why I’ve been advocating as much as I can and also literally putting myself in that role of developer because I’m like, I’m already trying to create more opportunities for folks like we’ve done revenue shares for the cafe. We, we set it up so that people from our community can actively use it in a way that meets their goals and dreams and aspirations. I do that and I’m not a non-profit of not like I do that on my own. We’re absolutely looking to develop more opportunities for crowdfunding investment projects, for people within our community, for the other projects that we’re doing, because we want them to feel like they actually have an investment in their own community. And the only way to do that –

Eve: [00:32:01] I’ll help you bring them to Small Change. That’d be so cool, I’ll be waiting.

Majora: [00:32:02] I’m pretty, I would love that. I would love that. So, it is different when people do the development from our own communities because we are sensitive to what we haven’t had and what we do need and what our dreams are, because we bothered to ask and I’ve also experienced it, you know, I was that little girl who was just like, there’s nothing in this neighborhood. And it makes me feel like I’ve got a stain attached to me because of the way people think about my community. And, and I don’t want that on anybody. Like, I also don’t want them to feel like they’ve got to leave in order to believe that that they’re of any value.

Eve: [00:32:48] Awesome. So final question. If you were to change one thing about real estate development in the US to make better cities for everyone, what would that be? Maybe that’s unfair, you can say two or three.

Majora: [00:33:04] Yes, I’m going to say a few things. I’m sure. So, oh, gosh. If I could change the way real estate development happens in order to support more people doing it. I mean, I’m not exactly sure how to do this, but I know that the cost of doing it just literally is physically doing it is just so high. And I just wish that the cost of construction could go down. Don’t ask me how to do that.

Eve: [00:33:30] Oh God, yeah, everyone I think wishes that.

Majora: [00:33:33] But it’s just insane. And then sort of like the barriers to entry I wish would be a lot more equitable. I mean, I remember my very first deal where and it was just to do a small rehab know our mortgage broker literally made me write a letter because she looked at me, looked at my community and literally said, you know, I have a story in the book. She was like. Why did you want another house? Or another property? You already have one. And I was like, do?

Eve: [00:34:09] Because this is called wealth creation. This is called Building My Future, right?

Majora: [00:34:14] Yes. And but she, to her, it was just like, why would a black woman want to do that? Especially from a neighborhood like that. And so, she made me write a letter to the underwriters explaining to them that I was a fine, upstanding individual. That does nice things for her community. And I was like, I know she doesn’t ask any white men about this, but you know what? I wrote the letter. So, this was me. And I had great credit, property in mind, a willing seller, a free development loan, already pre-approved. I mean, it was just like and that’s a small example. You know, I hear about them all the time, you know, access to capital, how hard it can be.

Eve: [00:34:58] Yeah. So do I, I think the access to capital is completely inequitable.

Majora: [00:35:02] Yeah, exactly. And those are the main two things. But also, I think the other one is making sure that people in low status communities see themselves as rightful developers of their own community. Because that is one of the hardest things where I think even some of the challengers that I get is more like, who do you think you are? And these are people from communities like mine within the social justice industrial complex who are just like, “You shouldn’t do that.” And it’s just like, why should that? It does like because again, such low expectations of folks in our communities like here, I’m being challenged because I’m actually saying, no, I can do better than what’s actually happening here. Yeah. And I get it coming and going sometimes. But there are more people who see the value of it and who are actually thinking about how they can do it themselves.

Eve: [00:35:59] Well, thank you, Marjora. I love you to death. And I think this is fantastic. And I can’t wait to visit again.

Majora: [00:36:08] I know.

Eve: [00:36:09] Hang out in that coffee shop.

Majora: [00:36:11] Yes. Yes. Oh, my gosh. It’s so super exciting. And wait till you see the rail station within the next few weeks. We’re getting it ready for a pretty big event. Ted X the Bronx is

Eve: [00:36:25] Fabulous!

Majora: [00:36:26] Doing their event there. Yeah,

Eve: [00:36:27] That’s really fabulous.

Majora: [00:36:29] You know, we’re phasing it in.

Eve: [00:36:31] I have to come back again soon.

Majora: [00:36:33] You’re going to love it.

Eve: [00:36:34] Cool. Okay. Bye.

Majora: [00:36:35] Thank you. All right. Take care. Bye bye.

Eve: [00:36:44] That was Majora Carter. I’m repeating myself, but I’m still in awe. Majora is uncompromising about her mission. She lives and works in Hunts Point in the South Bronx, one of America’s lowest status communities, just two blocks from the house she grew up in. When it became clear that no coffee shop operator wanted to operate out of her space in the neighborhood. She created her own business to achieve a goal. Now that is putting your money where your mouth is.

Eve: [00:37:27] You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at our website RethinkRealEstateForGood.co. There’s lots to listen to there. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music, and thanks to you for spending your time with me today. We’ll talk again soon, but for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

Image courtesy of Majora Carter

The Housing Lab.

October 27, 2021

Michelle Boyd runs the Housing Lab at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation.

The Terner Center itself was created in 2015, with a mission “to formulate bold strategies to house families from all walks of life in vibrant, sustainable, and affordable homes and communities.” The Housing Lab program was developed in response to the void of knowledge accessible to entrepreneurs who were trying to solve core problems in the housing market, primarily policy and funding. The hope was that investigating (read: accelerating) new housing ideas could help to advance innovative practices.

Today, the Housing Lab is an independent nonprofit organization, a sister organization of the Terner Center, that identifies and accelerates early-stage ventures which might help to make housing more affordable and fair. The lab has a team of experienced ‘coaches’ that work with entrepreneurs such as Dweller and PadSplit. They also work with Graduate Student Fellows from across UC Berkeley, including students from the Masters of Business Administration, Masters of City and Regional Planning, Masters of Real Estate Development + Design, and Masters of Public Policy (MPP) programs.

Michelle brings nearly a decade of experience in community and startup finance, organizational design, and urban policy research to the Housing Lab. Previously, she worked as a strategy consultant for the Bridgespan Group on issues of community development, housing, and education. Michelle has also worked at a Chicago-based CDFI, as a Kivi Fellow in India and even, back in the day, as a Senate page in Washington, D.C. She also serves as a Chamberlin Fellow with the Urban Land Institute.

Insights and Inspirations

  • The Housing Lab at the Terner Center is a startup accelerator with a heart. Cohort businesses are chosen because they are developing a solution that will hopefully help the housing crisis.
  • The Lab’s startups are diverse and tackling how to build, how to appraise, and how to engage community in their businesses.
  • The Lab is funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative amongst others.
  • Michelle thinks of the Lab as a startup too, in growth mode.
Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:10] Hi there. Thanks for joining me on Re-Think Real Estate. For Good. I’m Eve Picker and I’m on a mission to make real estate work for everyone. I love real estate. Real estate makes places good or bad, rich or poor, beautiful or not. In this show, I’m interviewing the disruptors, those creative thinkers and doers that are shrugging off the status quo, in order to build better for everyone. If you haven’t already, check out all of my podcasts at our website RethinkRealEstateForGood.co or you can find them at your favorite podcast station. You’ll find lot’s worth listening to, I’m sure.

Eve: [00:00:56] Today, I’m talking to Michelle Boyd, who runs the Housing Lab at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation. The Terner Center’s mission is to formulate bold strategies to house families from all walks of life in vibrant, sustainable and affordable homes and communities. And in turn, the Housing Lab program was developed to support entrepreneurs trying to solve core problems in the housing market. The result is a business accelerator which hosts a widely varied group of developing businesses. These are early stage ventures with a powerful mission to help solve some segment of the housing crisis. Michelle’s background brought her full circle back to housing after a decade in community and start up finance, organizational design and urban policy research, I’m going to learn a lot from Michelle and so will you. So listen in. If you’d like to join me in my quest to rethink real estate, there are two simple things you can do. Share this podcast or go to patron.com/rethinkrealrstate to learn about special opportunities for my friends and followers and subscribe if you can.

Eve: [00:02:31] Hi, Michelle, I’m really delighted to have this opportunity to talk to you.

Michelle Boyd: [00:02:36] Thank you, Eve. I’m really excited to be here. I’ve enjoyed listening to your podcast and I’m honored to be able to participate.

Eve: [00:02:43] So you’ve been working on perhaps one of the most difficult challenges of our time, affordable and accessible housing for everyone. I wanted to start by just talking about how our real estate industry has failed everyday people. Why is there such a huge gap between housing availability and the need?

Michelle: [00:03:06] Yeah. I mean, it’s a big question, we talk about it in our work at the Terner Center as a myriad of factors that’s contributing to it. There’s no single bullet there. I’d say if we think about the real estate industry as the mortgage industry that is financing home ownership and financing the construction of housing, the construction industry that is building housing and the broader investment markets that influence warehousing is built, as well as the policy elements at the local, state and federal level that regulate real estate. Each of those sectors has contributed to the great inequality that we see in our housing market.

Eve: [00:03:53] Yeah, and zoning is a big part of that. And then

Michelle: [00:03:57] Absolutely,

Eve: [00:03:58] Along with that is NIMBYism, right? Once people get used to having a half acre lot, they don’t want to give up on it. So.

Michelle: [00:04:07] And we have this fundamental assumption in the United States, particularly in California, where we do a large share of our work, that someone has the right to dictate what gets built a few houses a few blocks down from them or even across the city for them. And I think the way that power is allocated in the U.S. really favors homeowners.

Eve: [00:04:31] And I that’s right.

Michelle: [00:04:33] Yeah, and takes, doesn’t allow for power for decisions really to be made at a regional level, for example, as we think about how housing markets are regional because our job markets are regional. There are very few, if any, ways for policy leaders, government leaders to make regionally minded housing decisions. And so instead, they’re left up to small municipalities and neighbor by neighbor. Just saying that we don’t want the housing here. We want it elsewhere.

Eve: [00:05:02] That’s right? That’s probably the most insidious part of this. So, you know, that really struck me. As you can hear, I’m not an American, I’m Australian. Well, I’m a U.S. citizen now, but this is my accent. And that was one of, probably the only culture shock I really had. In Australia, local municipalities really do have much more control. So if you know, if there’s a beautiful tree in your yard, you, you need to get permission to hack a branch off it. Or, you know, if you’re going to build an addition to your house, you have to show some diagrams to make sure that you’re not casting a shadow on your neighbor’s house. I mean, there’s things in place there that just would never fly here.

Michelle: [00:05:50] Yeah, I think we have both a norm that you, as someone who lives in a certain neighborhood, has the right to dictate how and where housing gets built. But however, that power is inequitably distributed.

Eve: [00:06:12] Yes.

Michelle: [00:06:12] It’s most likely, it’s most often allocated to the people who have the time to show up to planning meetings.

Eve: [00:06:19] Yes.

Michelle: [00:06:19] Who have trust in the political system to think that they will be listened to. And that means it to predominantly older white homeowners who really want to keep things the status quo. I mean, I spent, there is this misconception that we can continue to have…

Eve: [00:06:41] Keep things the same.

Michelle: [00:06:41] Yeah, keep things the same and have cities that aren’t dense and still address our housing equity and environmental goals. Like those things are intention to each other and we and requires a compromise.

Eve: [00:06:53] Yes. Someone else I interviewed said that the most difficult thing for people is understanding and envisioning change. And, even if keeping things the same may not be better for them, you know, changing things may actually work out very well for them. But it’s very hard for people to visualize that, I think.

Michelle: [00:07:14] Right. There was a study I saw recently about how that upzoning in the city of Los Angeles, so allowing for more density, more dense housing, actually raise the property values of the single-family home parcels that didn’t were upzoned because they were seen as more valuable now that they were proximate to higher density housing. That runs in contrast to how people perceive the influence of apartments in the neighborhood. They think that they’ll destroy their home value or destroy their quote unquote.

Eve: [00:07:43] Yeah, interesting. So how do we begin? I mean, how do you think we begin to tackle these issues as so many of them?

Michelle: [00:07:51] Yeah, yeah. Well, I think it you know, it’s in part disentangling where the zoning decisions should lie and where the incentive structure should lie. Like, are there certain types of programs and agencies that can be put in place at a regional level in order to make more regionally focused housing decisions? And then also, I think there are creative solutions about how we can. Right now, it’s really, really difficult to add in what is often called the missing middle housing. So, this is housing, that’s three stories or four stories that can accommodate between two and 20 families. It’s really, it’s economically infeasible to build that type of housing in many areas, and that type of housing would be more amenable to some of the people who don’t want to see their neighborhoods change so fast. And so then we kind of get into this other complex problem, which is the extremely quickly escalate, extreme escalation of housing construction costs and everything that’s contributing to that. And it starts to kind of, you know, you continue to peel layers of the onion to understand where that’s the status quo. I think some of the things that we see as opportunity are both thinking about policy change and then also thinking about how to support more creative proposals and creative thinkers within the housing industry. And this is a large part of my work. There, as we think about the housing industry as a whole, it’s been one of the slowest to innovate in the United States. It’s one of the most inefficient industries compared to other industries and its ability to reduce the cost over time or increase the efficiency of labor, for example. And so I think there and that has to do with a lot of reasons, but one of them is the way the real estate industry is financed and the way it is regulated that make it really hard to support more creative approaches to doing things differently.

Eve: [00:10:05] Absolutely. I think you and I see eye on that. So, you run a non-profit called the Housing Lab, which is a closely affiliated with the Terner Housing Lab, right? And I want to know what is the Housing Lab’s role in changing the game?

Michelle: [00:10:22] Yeah, so just to take a step back and contextualize the Housing Lab that, so we have a close affiliation with the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, where our sister organization, we were incubated by the Terner Center and we now live in a sister non-profit that’s called Terner Labs, which is a we’re using as a platform to grow the Housing Lab, the program I run, and then other creative initiatives that use technology and business innovation to address housing inequity and housing affordability. And so the Housing Lab specifically is a program that supports entrepreneurs with creative approaches to reducing housing costs and increasing housing equity in the United States. And so, the way we see it is that entrepreneurs that are trying to, as you mentioned, have creative ideas and housing or face a number of barriers specific to innovating in the real estate environment. So, one of them is the complex regulatory environment that is regulated at the local, at the state, at the federal level. And it’s regulated for really strictly, for good reason. Once you build a house, it’s always there. It’s important that the house is safe. It’s important that house is built to a certain standard. We have, after the global financial crisis, we saw a great need to more highly regulate our mortgage market. So, there’s a reason these regulations exist, but they also stymie innovation. So we support entrepreneurs and figuring out how to best develop their company strategy and their relationships with government in order to effectively navigate that environment. The second main area is thinking about capital. Raising capital and structuring their company. There is not a lot of money to invest in innovative and risky projects in real estate.

Eve: [00:12:07] That’s for sure.

Michelle: [00:12:08] Yeah, that’s right. And for a number of reasons.

Eve: [00:12:12] Yeah, because banks are really made to keep, you know, they want to invest in the same.

Michelle: [00:12:18] They want to invest in the same. The way that real estate is underwritten is evaluated is by looking at a financial model of a prior investment. And if you don’t have a prior investment, an example of what you’ve done, it’s almost impossible to get money from a bank.

Eve: [00:12:31] Yes.

Michelle: [00:12:32] And in order to do real estate innovation, it’s not like you can take $20,000 and code something in your basement and come up with the next great solution to real estate. You often need to buy an asset or buy land or buy a home and use that as a testing ground for your product, and that costs a lot of money. And it’s really hard to raise that capital. And so, when you work with entrepreneurs about both connecting them to creative and innovative capital providers and helping them think through how they can structure their companies to attract certain types of investors who will help them accomplish both their impact goals and understand the level of risk that they’re taking. And so, and that’s, I think, something that it’s not completely unique to housing, but the environment of innovating in housing requires a different approach. The third, the third main area that we support them with is thinking about all the entrepreneurs we work with have a strong social mission to increase racial equity and or housing affordability and thinking about that intention and how they actually design their business to follow through on that intention in the long term. There is a real risk, particularly with technology and the financial services environment, for example, to unintentionally cause more harm than good. Like placing an innovation that, on top of a really inequitable and messed up system, can sometimes not accomplish those impact goals that the individual entrepreneurs are seeking. And so, we help them think about how to build their business model for long term accountability to keep them towards the impact goals that they have set out.

Eve: [00:14:17] So you host a cohort, you have a program every year, I don’t know how many years have you been doing this?

Michelle: [00:14:24] Yeah, so we’re in our second cohort now. We launched our first cohort in. So we run a cohort program, it’s a six months of intensive advising for a small group of entrepreneurs. We work with four to six organizations each year. We’re in our second cohort now. Our first one was, ran from 2019 to 2020. We graduated our first entrepreneurs on April 7, 2020, which is not the environment we were anticipating graduating to.

Eve: [00:14:52] Yeah, it sounds like you took a break pretty purposefully.

Michelle: [00:14:56] Well, we took a break purposefully to redirect our program. I also had a baby, and it took a bit of time off in between the two cohorts. So we’re now deep into our second cohort.

Eve: [00:15:06] Congratulations! Yes. And how does it work? You know, you select four to six entrepreneurs in one cohort and what is the selection process look like? How many people apply? What do they have to go through?

Michelle: [00:15:21] Yes, we look at about 150 applications each year. We have close to 160 this year and it’s a four-month application and diligence process. So how that works is we have a pretty what we intend to be an accessible application for the entrepreneurs. It’s ten short, intermediate or medium answer questions. And if we’re interested, we do an internal review, a little bit of looking around the website, looking at materials that sent us. And then if we’re interested, we invite them to a second application, or they provide more information on their financials and under upcoming plans for growth. At that point, if we choose to advance them, then we go through multiple rounds of interviews. So, we have we work with a team of graduate students from across the graduate programs at UC Berkeley who help interview the entrepreneurs. We also have an external selection committee that has a range of investors from impact investors, philanthropy, venture capital investors, traditional real estate investors who and experts in construction innovation. And so we work our selection committee to work with the entrepreneurs do these series of interviews. Once we get down to maybe our final 10 to 15, we start working with the companies to look at what type of work we may do together, since our program is, involves a significant investment of one on one advising, and we want to make sure there’s a good match between the needs of the organization and the advising we can provide.

Eve: [00:16:58] Um hmm.

Michelle: [00:16:58] So we spend the last month of our diligence process working with the companies on this. Throughout the whole process we are using a specific set of selection criteria that we’re evaluating the organizations against, that primarily looks at the quality of the idea they’re working on. Like, how creative is it and how likely is it to accomplish the equity and affordability goals that the organization has? We look at the strength of their business model as a product market fit and are they well suited to the capital environment that they’ve targeted themselves towards? Because we look at non-profits for profits, we don’t care we’re agnostic as to what type of company structure it is that we just care that it’s well suited to the capital environment, that it’s in the business structure, that it’s chosen. We can also just kind of look at the standard stuff at any early stage investor would look at around the team skills that they have in the leadership as well. And then the last part is really, well, how they fit with our program.

Eve: [00:18:02] So pretty rigorous. You must also be thinking about the cohort blend, or aren’t you? I mean,

Michelle: [00:18:09] Yeah, absolutely. I’d say we’re looking for entrepreneurs that will be one, like good participants in our program. Like active members of our cohort that will strengthen the community of entrepreneurs, and then we are looking for a certain amount of diversity of the types of problems that they’re working on. So, our 2021 cohort that we’re working with now, each of them is trying to address a pretty different gnarly challenge within the housing market. We think there’s some overlap and we’ve already seen this as opportunities the entrepreneurs need to work with each other. But we are intentionally selecting to pursue types of solutions that are different than one another and can build off one another.

Eve: [00:18:59] Tell me about the 2021 cohort. Actually, I know a couple of have interviewed a couple of the earlier cohort, but I’d love to hear about the new cohort and who they are and what they’re trying to accomplish.

Michelle: [00:19:13] Yeah, I am thrilled to talk about what they are doing and I’m excited. They’re really cool. So, we have two that are in the homeownership space. And so the first one is an organization called Black Star Stability. What they’re doing is to help restructure homes, restructure the financing on homes that right now are encumbered by predatory financing. And so they have built a business structure where they purchase homes that currently have land contracts on them or predatory lease to own agreements. So these are agreements where a family is paying a certain payment each month like a mortgage, but they don’t actually own title to the house, as you would on a traditional mortgage. And they’re often have been paying for 20 years, but have barely paid down any of their ownership stake. There’s really predatory fees and other things that hold them back. And so Black Star purchases these homes, usually in pools of these homes and then restructures them into traditional 30, 10, 15 or 30-year mortgages that end up saving the families. Both give title of the house to the families and save them hundreds, if not more than a thousand dollars a month. And so, the other home finance company that we’re working with is a group called True Footage. They have a new strategy for how to manage the home appraisal process that involves technology and addressing the labor structure of the home appraisal industry.

Eve: [00:20:49] That’s interesting.

Michelle: [00:20:50] Their primary goal is to increase the speed of appraisals and to reduce racial bias.

Eve: [00:20:55] That’s really interesting. We’ll see if it works.

Michelle: [00:21:01] Yeah, we’ll see if it works, I mean, we there’s a lot of things that are contributing to the racial bias we’re currently seeing in the home appraisal industry and a lot of that is baked into the history of racial segregation and ongoing racial bias. But we do see an opportunity for technology to support at least reducing the bias on the margin that is caused by the current appraisal industry, which is incredibly subjective. And I’m going to get these numbers wrong. But I think the current appraisal industry is over 85 percent white men right now…

Eve: [00:21:38] I would say that’s exactly what I imagined. It’s crazy.

Michelle: [00:21:42] And they are over 65 and no shade to throw to the white sixty-five-year-old men, including my father and my father in law, but that is not representative of the sample of the people who are currently seeking home appraisals.

Eve: [00:21:57] Right? Interesting. And then you have a couple more.

Michelle: [00:22:02] Yeah, we’ve got two models that are working with creative like shared housing type solutions. And so, one of those is called the Homecoming Project. It’s a project of an organization called Impact Justice in Oakland, California, and they are placing people coming out of long prison sentences. So, 10 plus years into homes, into renting rooms of homes in the communities that they would like to come back to after they’re released from prison. And it’s a, they’ve worked with 50 individuals so far and have incredible outcomes in helping the people through their program, secure long term housing and get a good start on the ground. So, we’re helping them think through their scaling strategy and seeing if they can access some federal resources into the program. And then the second organization in that category is a group called L.A. Room and Board, and they are using underutilized housing that’s adjacent to college campuses to house community college students that are struggling with homelessness and housing insecurity. And both those models combine the provision of stable housing with also a provision of services and wraparound services to support the individuals while they’re there.

Eve: [00:23:24] So these are these five companies, entrepreneurs, some of them, you know, there’s really only one really high tech one, right? True Footage.

Michelle: [00:23:33] Yeah, True Footage is the only high tech one. And also, there’s one more that I haven’t mentioned, which is a group called Trust Me that is building a new AI financial product and governance structure for community-based organizations to purchase and manage mixed income neighborhood trusts. And so these are trusts of rental property in neighborhoods, and they particularly are trying to serve community based organizations in neighborhoods at risk of gentrification to really purchase a large share of rental property in their neighborhood and maintain stabilized rental prices in that neighborhood. While that neighborhood may see increased rates of rental, increased rents and gentrification. But to your other question about technology? Yeah, True Footage is the only organization working with us this year that is pure tech model that’s seeking traditional venture capital. That’s flexibility has a technology angle to what they’re doing as well around how to communicate to the homeowners that they’re working with and streamline communications and streamline their mortgage processes. And there is everyone in the organizations working with some portion of technology in what they’re doing.

Eve: [00:24:56] That’s a requirement these days, right? It’s not the core of what they’re doing, which is really interesting because I think most people think of entrepreneurs and incubators as places that are all about high tech solutions. So that’s not what you’re doing here.

Michelle: [00:25:16] I will say it’s something that we we knew that going into this, we wouldn’t work exclusively with technology entrepreneurs. Because, as we often say, on our team, you don’t live in a virtual house. Like there’s a real physical nature to housing and to this year’s cohort, in particular, has less of a technology bent. But that really came from our focus this year on trying to find entrepreneurs who are solving racial equity concerns coming out of COVID 19. Like the areas of inequity that were exacerbated by the COVID 19 pandemic. And just the organizations we’ve ultimately chosen are working on really gnarly problems. We think the innovation that they’re working on is scalable despite not having a pure software platform, and it has a significant opportunity to impact individuals on a deep level. I think as we’ve seen, a lot of the technology and innovations tend to be more on the surface and the impacts that they’re able to have.

Eve: [00:26:22] It’s really interesting. So, tell me about like some success stories from the first cohort.

Michelle: [00:26:30] Yeah, happily. So, a couple of the organizations we’ve worked with, so and one of them that had a more pure technology angle and where I think technology is really suited to the problem they were trying to solve as an organization called Esusu. And so, they provide data and analytics to tenants and property owners that improve tenant credit and financial well-being. And their hallmark platform product is a rent reporting platform that has overall allows tenants to record past and current rental payments to the credit bureaus, in order to positively influence their credit scores. And overall, across all of the individuals on their platform they have increased credit scores on an average of 50 points over the past year, with many of the individuals on their platform having credit score increases that far exceed that. And they have grown exceptionally over the past couple of years, and they now have at least 30 percent of the largest landlords that are on the National Multifamily Housing Council list. 30 percent of those landlords are now using Esusu’s rent reporting platform. And so, they’ve been able to scale pretty quickly and actually just raised a large round of financing that’s going to help them grow to the next phase.

Eve: [00:27:54] Wow.

Michelle: [00:27:56] So we’re, yeah, they’ve been really successful and we think it’s an all star team that’s working on that. And we looked at a lot of rent reporting platforms and when we were doing diligence for our last cohort and found that Esusu had, for us, the perfect combination of scalability and strong impact focus in what they were trying to do. And strong racial equity angle to the work.

Eve: [00:28:18] So who’s who’s on your team and how do they help move these ideas? Or, you know, early start ups to a functional business model like this that might scale?

Michelle: [00:28:31] Yeah. So we, I, we do work with organizations that already have a core business model in place because the advising that we help them with is really an accelerant. Like we’ll help them with their business model around the edges. And then with their policy strategy, their capital fundraising, what supports it and that and their long-term accountability, and then also open up our network to them. And so in order to really open up our network to them, they have to be at a stage where they’re ready for those conversations and partnerships. And so, our internal program team is small. It’s really me and Carol Galante, the faculty advisor at the Terner Center and the founder of the Turner Center. And then we have a wide network of coaches who some of them we pay, some of them have donated their time pro-bono, who are leaders in the real estate innovation industry, and they spend time with their companies as much as two hours a week, helping them identify and sort through their priorities during the program and really help them get in front of key people in government that can help them secure certain partnerships. Get them in front of industry experts that other industry experts that can just take them to the next stage in their organizations analysis about how they fit into the regulatory environment. For example, how to structure a partnership with a large bank. So, it’s really through this kind of intensive work where we sit down with the entrepreneur and get a full list of all their biggest challenges and what they want to do. We pick out like three or four of them and really help them with and we get on the phone weekly and talk through them with that mix of like advising, structure that helps with their decision making if they want that and really, really network connections. And so, an example of a couple of our coaches. One of them is, they kind of range in experience. So, we have a woman named Molly Turner, who helps start the policy team at Airbnb and now works on faculty at the Haas School of Business and advises start-ups, both on scale strategy and how to work with city governments. We also have a coach, Brad Blackwell, who used to run homeownership growth and policy at Wells Fargo and is now retired, and he supports our companies that are working in the mortgage environment. And so that’s just two examples of some of our other coaches work professionally as real estate investors and for a mix of non-profit, affordable housing and traditional real estate and are helping organizations on that type of work. And then we have in addition to those coaches that get on the phone for a couple of hours a week. We also have a wide network of other advisors that we can connect our companies to for specific projects or goals. And those often have a strong real estate expertise, but not always. Some of them bring their expertise and non-profit scaling strategies specifically, which is important to some of the organizations, and they just know how to apply that to specific companies.

Eve: [00:31:57] Ok, so, you know, it’s not always smooth going when you build something like this, you must have also had some failures. What have you learned that you might do better?

Michelle: [00:32:08] Oh so much, Eve. We’re constantly innovating ourselves. I mean, we’re you know, well, we’re a program that was established at an established university. We tend to view ourselves as a little start-up ourselves in constantly getting information and feedback from our companies and from our advisors and innovating as we go. I think some of the biggest changes we’ve had over the past were just in our first two years. Our first year, we had a heavy in-person component. And before COVID hit, we had already realized that we needed to reduce the in-person requirements and in-person time for our companies. Our founders are all over the country. They are already working.

Eve: [00:32:54] Yeah, that’s really hard.

Michelle: [00:32:54] Some of them are parents. And so, we were already transitioning our model to be more virtual, especially for the advising and kind of like monthly cadence check ins and then just kind of more targeted in-person community building. More retreat type space for our founders when that was needed. So that’s one big thing that we learned over the past year. Another was that we switched that part that I mentioned that the last month of our diligence process is about figuring out how we work together. That’s in addition to our diligence processes this year. We found that allows both to make sure that our partnership with the company, that we’re coming in with really clear expectations on how we’re going to work with each other. And it also lends itself to our intensive one on one advising model. We’ve invested more resources in that one on one advising this year. So, it’s just really important to us that the coaches we’re working with are getting to know the companies and really feel like there’s a mutual match there. And so, as we’ve transitioned from these kind of bigger in-person events to more of this kind of an intensive one, that’s the biggest change. We also have revised our selection process and criteria as we continue to learn about the information that we need. I think we’ve, we’re really happy with the selection process this year and imagine keeping that mostly intact in the next couple of years.

Eve: [00:34:25] And then, I have to ask this question. You’re a non-profit, someone has to pay for this. So who funds you and why?

Michelle: [00:34:35] Yeah, so our largest funders to date are foundation funded. So, our major founding partner was the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. And we’ve also brought in money from the we also partner with the James Irvine Foundation here in California and a couple other West Coast foundations that we have a tech angle to their work or come from families like family offices that have that do real estate work. And the main reason that most of our funders have at some point worked or received pitches from some of these start-up innovative housing ideas, and they see the same need we see to one, provide specific type of coaching to these entities to navigate the regulatory and finance environment. They see the same challenges we see that these companies face, and so they see the need for advising and two is they honestly want help and understanding which organizations they should support and work with. They see value in the diligence process that we do in order to select the companies that we work with.

Eve: [00:35:47] Interesting. Yes.

Michelle: [00:35:47] The kind of the housing expertise that we bring to that diligence process is of value to them.

Eve: [00:35:54] It sounds like you have good partners.

Michelle: [00:35:57] We do have good partners and they’ve also been great partners in helping us improve both our program and our selection process as we’ve grown.

Eve: [00:36:05] And then I just want to switch to you. How did you find your way to this role? What’s your background and how did you land here?

Michelle: [00:36:14] Well, I’ll say it. It’ll maybe sound like it makes sense perfectly, but you think everybody knows it? That’s not always, always how it feels. So I’m originally from the Detroit region, I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, and both sides of my family have been from Detroit for almost a hundred years. And I really, I grew up, my father worked in real estate, and I grew up understanding the physical nature of the divide in Detroit, primarily racial divide. My suburb was overwhelmingly white upper middle class. And you would drive six miles down and cross that Detroit line. And the change in the quality of housing stock was incredible across that boundary, from a well strewn sidewalk to one that was completely broken. And so I started my career educational path studying urban policy to try and understand the forces that shaped the inequity that I saw that was so clear to me when I was growing up. And my first few jobs were in economic development. So I worked in the non-profit sector for Workforce Development Organization for an organization that invested in small businesses that were operating in low income communities. I then had the opportunity to spend several years with the Bridgespan Group, which is a non-profit philanthropy advisory firm. And while I was there, I really got to take a step back and think about the myriad of factors affecting urban development in the U.S. and somehow just kept finding my way back to housing. I had the opportunity to work with a couple of housing focused clients and just kept finding that housing was this nexus of social equity around issues of race and financial markets and in place that just became more and more interesting to me. And I frankly became frustrated at the limited tools available to philanthropy and even non-profits that wanted to make a real change in housing. I was working in San Francisco, and at that point it was almost already about half a million dollars to build one new apartment subsidized apartment in San Francisco, and that number is continuing to rise. And I had a full philanthropic client who are trying to advise to work in housing and say that they felt like investing in housing was a big black hole that was going to suck up all of their money. And part of them wasn’t wrong.

Eve: [00:38:47] Yeah.

Michelle: [00:38:47] And so I took that point and I went back and got an MBA at UC Berkeley and really wanted to understand the real estate financial markets. Like what was governing the investment markets within housing and what were some creative solutions that could help push us forward in this egregious policy. And I was at UC Berkeley while the Terner Center was thinking about expanding. I had just had this initial partnership with Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and thinking about expanding its innovation work. And so I got to help build out the housing program and then step in to lead it when I graduated. So, at this point, I feel like I get to draw on both my experience and philanthropy investing in non-profit advising, but also draw on my strong interest in working on solutions that are interacting with the traditional capital markets in ways that can influence at a more significant scale.

Eve: [00:39:44] It sounds like a perfect landing place for you. So tell me one more question, and that is how do you plan to grow the Housing Lab? You have small cohorts. This is the second one. What do you think it’s going to look like in five or 10 years?

Michelle: [00:40:00] Yeah, well, we’ve clearly seen through our application process the past few years that there are way more highly qualified companies that want the services that we offer, then we have the capacity to serve. And so we are thinking over the next few years about both how we can grow our program to serve a larger cohort and then also how we can think about serving the broader ecosystem of innovators out there. Like, what type of network can we build light or touch advising to serve a broader group? So, I can imagine us growing to have kind of a second tier to the work that we do that can serve a broader number of innovators. And I, we also are in conversations with several partner organizations to explore establishing more financial vehicles that can fund innovation. Specifically, there is a gap for many of the organizations that we see, and I’m sure you’ve seen this too. Through the innovative financing that you do is that sometimes companies can find that money for that first pilot, but then they may need five or 10 million dollars for the next version of their pilot. They can’t get that from the traditional bank.

Eve: [00:41:20] Yeah, yeah.

Michelle: [00:41:21] But then they can’t go back to their philanthropic investors because that’s too much money concentrated in one project. And so, yeah, we’re working with several of our partners to explore what our different creative ways we can have to fund some of these more innovative models. And so, whether that’s something that we build into our Housing Lab growth or something we do in partnership that’s housed at one of our partner organizations, but I definitely see that something that we want to make progress on in the next couple years.

Eve: [00:41:47] Well, I can’t wait to see where this takes you. I think the ten companies so far are pretty fabulous. So, I’m really excited to see what happens the year after and the year after and count me in if you build something bigger. I think that networks around creativity in the housing market don’t seem to exist and they’re critical.

Michelle: [00:42:13] Yeah, I mean, you’re coming back to one of the main reasons we started this program is we were just hearing from entrepreneurs that they didn’t feel like they had peers. And so, building a peer support network where people can bounce ideas off each other and get feedback and input and share each other’s networks are really important.

Eve: [00:42:32] Yes, it’s pretty fabulous. Thanks so much. Thanks so much, Michelle. I really enjoyed talking to you. Can’t wait to see what happens next.

Michelle: [00:42:40] Thank you, Eve. Thank you for your time.

Eve: [00:42:47] That was Michelle Boyd, who runs the Housing Lab at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation. Just like the businesses she serves, Michelle is growing a business too. The Housing Lab is a mere start-up, having hosted two cohorts, a total of 11 companies to date. To make a significant difference, Michelle knows that she must expand the Lab’s offerings. I can’t wait to see where that takes her. You can find out more about this episode, or others you might have missed, on the show notes page at our website RethinkRealEstateForGood.co. There’s lots to listen to there. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music. And thanks to you for spending your time with me today. We’ll talk again soon, but for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

Image courtesy of Michelle Boyd and the Housing Lab

Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Small Change is raising capital. You can help us grow!

Invest here

NSSC Holdings, LLC is conducting a capital raise through a Regulation Crowdfunding offering listed on Wefunder Portal, LLC, an SEC/FINRA reporting Funding Portal. See the listing page for more information.

sign up here

APPLY TO BE A PODCAST GUEST

More to See

$3.22 Trillion.

September 26, 2022

Agri-Crowdfunding.

August 22, 2022

Hedge funds and the Housing Crisis.

August 8, 2022

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Tag Cloud

Affordable housing Climate Community Creative economy Crowdfunding Design Development Environment Equity Finance FinTech Gentrification Impact Investing Mobility Offering Opportunity zones PropTech Technology Visionary Zoning

Footer

©rethinkrealestateforgood.co. The information contained on this website is for general information purposes only. Nothing on this website is intended as investment, legal, tax or accounting strategy or advice, or constitutes an offer to sell, solicit or buy securities.
 
Any projections discussed or made may not be accurate and do not guarantee a specific outcome. All projections or investments are subject to risk due to uncertainty and change, including the risk of loss, and past performance is not indicative of future results. You should make independent decisions and seek independent advice regarding investments or strategies mentioned on this website.

Recent

  • Ready. Set. Homes.
  • Disability Forward Housing.
  • We Own This.
  • Caterpillars.
  • Cut My Timber.

Search

Categories

Climate Community Crowdfunding Development Equity Fintech Investing Mobility Proptech Visionary

 

Copyright © 2023 · Magazine Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in