Impact

Toronto

May 30, 2023

Canada has opened its arms to immigrants. We tried to build a wall. This is how that decision plays out.

Drive just 5 hours directly north from Pittsburgh, and weave around the Great Lakes a little, and you’ll be in Toronto, perhaps the most multicultural and multi-racial city in the world.

With the foreign-born population in Toronto now over 50%, New York City is in the rear view mirror. Pittsburgh is not even a speck on the horizon, with only 4% foreign-born residents. This multi-cultural population gap plays out in so many visible and important ways that it’s impossible to even begin to list them here. But what’s most visible when you visit Toronto is that minorities are fully-integrated into every walk of life. They are economists, real estate developers, taxi cab drivers and business owners. They have turned Toronto into a very colorful mosaic indeed. Every corner of Toronto is a thriving, vital metropolis.

And then there is the construction. There is not a block that has escaped. The foreign-born population is expected to rise by another 500,000 immigrants over the next year. As Ontario works to add 1.5 million new homes by 2031, construction in Toronto is unrivaled by any other North American city. According to the RLB Crane Index for North America, Toronto, at a count of 238, has more cranes in use than all U.S. cities combined. And while Seattle (in second place) has a commendable 51 cranes, Pittsburgh is not on the list at all.

This dynamic metropolis with a core of soaring skyscrapers is not shying away from immigration. In India, Canada is hailed as pretty much the holy land. Adverts abound in Punjab urging one to “Study English, move to Canada.” Along the way, someone (collectively) decided that an immigrant is an economic driver and will bring prosperity. And that decision defined the remarkable course of Toronto and Ontario.

They decided to encourage immigrants. We decided to build a wall.

Waste to Energy.

May 24, 2023

Samuel Alemayehu is an experienced global serial entrepreneur and active angel investor. His work in the
past two decades has been guided with an obsession to empower the individual and sustain the village.
His current focus is running Frontier Resilient Capital (FRC) to incubate or invest in companies who are
developing or commercializing breakthrough technologies that empower the individual (personalized
web) and sustain the village (biomanufacturing, renewable energy, carbon capture and circular
economy).

Sam started his career in Silicon Valley as a serial entrepreneur launching two companies from his college dorm room. He first got introduced to venture capital at Venrock Associates, where he focused on consumer media investments. He then moved to Africa, founding and investing in numerous companies across the continent and in a range of industries through Cambridge Investment Group and most recently FRC. Sam incubated 4AFRI at Venrock before growing the platform in 12 African countries with over 25m customers. He then built a mobile gaming platform, LotoPhone, in 18 countries with millions of customers before exiting the startup in 2013. He also created Sen Sante in partnership with leading investment banks to help develop large health infrastructures in Africa with a mobile based universal health insurance. Sam created mobile solutions aimed at empowering the individual.

Over the next decade Sam incubated Cambridge Industries Ltd, East Africa Electric Ltd, and Contingent Technologies Inc. to accelerate the implementation of pioneering infrastructure projects in emerging cities. He set up the first locally manufactured wind study program in over two dozen sites throughout East Africa. He oversaw the planning, design and construction of the first municipal waste-to-energy facility in Africa, located in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as part of a pan-African sustainability city park project to industrialize the circular economy with the initial facility built at a cost of USD120m. The full project has created over 20,000 jobs and aims to employ over 250,000 before the end of 2030 in ten cities. Each facility is designed as a multi-purpose plant with numerous functions, including metal recycling, brick production, industrial steam, producing biodegradable plastic, and modern insect farming. Sam has recently invested in commercializing breakthrough technologies through projects in Uganda, Kenya, Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, DRC, Somaliland, Djibouti, Botswana, Angola, Namibia, and South Africa.

Sam is an active angel investor globally and sits on the board of numerous companies as an investor. He also sits on three non-profit boards: the Ron Brown Scholars Program, KID Museum, and VC Include. Sam is a founding partner at Pitch and Flow, an innovative storytelling platform that uses the global appeal and power of hip-hop to showcase and celebrate the next generation of entrepreneurs. He is a graduate of Stanford University School of Engineering and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader.

Read the podcast transcript here

Eve: [00:00:14] 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: [00:00:54] Today I’m talking with Samuel Alemayehu, born in Ethiopia and educated in the US, Samuel is a serial entrepreneur and investor focused on deploying technology as an equalizing force. “Let’s change the world to technology and products that empower the individual and sustain the village” says Samuel. Through his work with Cambridge Industries, Samuel is revolutionizing the way we think about sustainable energy and infrastructure. He built the first waste to energy plant customized for sub-Saharan Africa in Ethiopia, the Reppie Waste to Energy project. The project takes 80% of the city’s garbage and turns it into 25% of its electricity. Samuel has boundless energy and a lot to tell. So, listen in.

Eve: [00:01:53] 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: [00:02:24] Hello, Samuel. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Samuel Alemayehu: [00:02:28] Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

Eve: [00:02:30] Very excited. So, you have said “let’s change the world through technology and products that empower the individual and sustain the village”. And I’m just wondering how you’re tackling that?

Sam: [00:02:44] Exactly. So that has been our mantra as long as I remember. And whenever you’re building any kind of product and services, it has to focus on the individual, kind of be usable. Does it improve our life? And most importantly, does it improve the community that we live in sustaining our village? And at the end of the day, this is a global village and we’re doing it one waste trash at a time and starting in emerging markets. And we have evolved to do many things right now. Um, but our focus has been how can we take something that has been a headache, a nuisance and convert it into a treasure, convert it into something of value and do it in a way that really addresses water treatment, sanitation, and most importantly, a vibrant circular economy in every city.

Eve: [00:03:42] So this you’re referring to the Reppie waste to energy plant, I think first and foremost, right?

Sam: [00:03:48] That’s the first facility we’ve done.

Eve: [00:03:50] And that was, where is that located?

Sam: [00:03:53] That is located in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Eve: [00:03:56] And that’s where you were born, right?

Sam: [00:03:59] I was born and raised there, and I left when I was 14.

Eve: [00:04:02] So what goes around comes around, I think. So, tell me tell me why. Why did you start this waste to energy plant?

Sam: [00:04:12] So, a lot of people start projects or entrepreneurial endeavors for something they love. A labor of love. For me, it was a labor of hate. Hated the garbage in Addis Ababa. I, it’s just, it’s everywhere. Um, you know, you would think if you live in a wealthy neighborhood, it’s collected and taken out, out of sight, out of mind. But no, not for me. Not where I grew up. Like I remembered the garbage was everywhere. We picked around, it really annoyed you. And even in the area where it’s being dumped, it used to be the outskirts, but it’s smack in the center. It is not a modern, even, you know, landfill site, but it is something where we’re digging the ground and throwing this garbage. And it’s in a country that imports metal, that imports plastic, and we’re not recycling it, we’re not reusing it. And we’re not trying to come up with a way, want to address the health impact, the direct sanitation impact of the garbage, but also when this could be an opportunity to create something of value. And I, you know, I left Ethiopia when I was 14, did my high school in the D.C. area and then went to Stanford and then was a software engineer, did a bunch of different companies around software. So, when I came back to Ethiopia, I was like, okay, we need to do something about this and it needs to happen, and started working with those that have addressed it in Europe. But we wanted to create something unique for Africa because the waste was unique, the challenge was unique, the community was unique.

Eve: [00:05:54] So how does the plant work?

Sam: [00:05:58] So the first facility, because the overall concept is how do you build a facility that takes in garbage and creates value? That’s a purpose. And have minimal garbage out of it as possible? The very first facility that we built in Ethiopia, does combustion, but with a flue gas treatment, the same flue gas treatment that allows you to capture the nasty gases that would come out from burning it, because that allows you to reduce the significant amount of the waste and capture those gas through flue gas treatment as per the EU standard that allows you to be located within 100-meter radius of residential areas all over the EU. So that’s the standard that we followed. Then over time, when we’ve been implementing other projects, we started to add, hold on, for the food waste, how can we separate the food waste and what is the optimum value we could get out of food waste? And that was doing insect farming and that is taking the food waste, separating it and feeding it to black soldier flies that grow 230 times their weight within ten days.

Eve: [00:07:06] Whoa.

Sam: [00:07:07] And making that into chicken feed and fish feed and organic fertilizers.

Eve: [00:07:12] Whoa.

Sam: [00:07:13] So it becomes really, really incredible value-add. And then for the waste and then we say, ooh, what about the plastic waste? How can we separate plastic waste and recycle it in the most exciting way possible? So, we started working with scientists around the world that have been using new type of enzymes that break down the plastic, and that allows you to filter it and separate them. And then you say, what about once it has gone through the system? And if you are to use combustion and you’ve burned it, the ash that comes out, we could turn the ash into bricks. What about the metal that is in there? We use super magnets to separate out the metal. This facility in Addis right now alone is separating 3.8 million kilograms of metal every single year.

Eve: [00:08:02] Wow! So, this plant does a lot more than one thing.

Sam: [00:08:08] It does a lot of things within one facility. It is how do you take garbage, but how do you turn it into value? And one of those values is electricity. So, it is able to generate 185,000,000 kilowatt hours of electricity, which is the equivalent of about 20% of the household energy generated in a city of 5 million people.

Eve: [00:08:31] Wow.

Sam: [00:08:33] And then you have other byproducts, be it making interlocking bricks, recycling plastic, being able to create food waste and converting that into chicken feed, fish feed and other. So, currently, we’re in the process of building a new facility in Kinshasa, which is a city of 18 million people. It’s actually the largest French-speaking city in the world, double the size of Paris.

Eve: [00:09:01] Wow. All these things I didn’t know.

Sam: [00:09:05] You never know. And Kinshasa is this vibrant place. But we’re not using incineration and with the flue gas treatment, but instead, it’s fully entirely set up with what’s called anaerobic digesters. And we’re able to capture the gas and use the gas for energy generation as well as to replace household charcoal usage.

Eve: [00:09:26] So what’s the… It’s a lot. So, what’s the long-term plan? I mean, how many plants, how much garbage are you tackling? I mean, how much more is there to tackle in Ethiopia? Are you seeing cleaner streets? I have lots of questions.

Sam: [00:09:42] We are. We have seen cleaner streets, one, in the program that we implemented in order to collect garbage better. But most importantly, the challenge has always been disposal. So, our core goal is to continuously evolve and change with advances in technology so that, how can we create the maximum value from the resource? To us, the waste is not garbage or a waste. We like to call it feedstock. So, to us it’s a raw material that comes in and we say, how can we maximize the highest amount of value from this garbage and, or from this waste, from this feedstock? And the goal is to be left with almost no waste whatsoever. Right now, we still send about 2% of the garbage back into landfills, but everything else gets to be used to different values, but within one central facility. So, in Addis, it’s a city of 5 million people, it’s processes 500,000,000kg of garbage a year. And that’s the only facility we want to add other additional facilities next to it.

Sam: [00:10:52] We partner with others as well. And it is a facility that we’ve built in partnership with the Ethiopian government. In Kinshasa, we’re fully owning the facility and we will be processing 3,000,000,000kg of garbage a year and really creating over 35,000 jobs in collection as well as disposal and, and other projects. But there are other cities, so we have feasibility studies in Gabon. We’re also working in places like Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua are the three places that we’re exploring in Latin America. We have a partner we’re working with in Bangladesh. We think the technology that we’ve put together, the system and it’s allowing even other innovators and entrepreneurs to plug in, into our existing infrastructure because we have the waste, if they come up with a better way to deal with, let’s say, battery waste or another type of waste, they could easily plug into our platform and be able to service and provide a circular economy solution.

Eve: [00:11:57] So any plan for the US?

Sam: [00:12:01] Uh, Eve, that is a good and interesting question. We do think we have come up with even better solution that could work for the US. But the US is tough. The US, because it really is bureaucratic. You have two companies that totally dominate anything that has to do, to be done with waste. That is Waste Management and Republica. If they want it done, it will be done. If they want to block it, they will block.

Eve: [00:12:28] And if they want to hike up prices, they hike up prices. I bet they do that. Yeah.

Sam: [00:12:32] Look at their stock! Their stock, for the past 20 years, they’ve performed better than many companies.

Eve: [00:12:38] Oh, yes.

Sam: [00:12:40] It’s a multi-billion-dollar enterprise.

Eve: [00:12:40] I fired them on my little buildings because it was so expensive. It was outrageous. And…

Sam: [00:12:47] I mean, one of the challenges there is the US is on track to have landfill that is the size of the state of Rhode Island. Throughout the US. And this is land we’re never going to get back. This is land where, you know, it’s just continuing. And they talk about, oh, we have landed the right way or the different… But this is a permanently wasted land. If you want to re-mine it, it is really challenging. But instead of coming up with newer solutions, they’re continuously rebuilding more landfill. But all is not lost. There are some companies that are doing some exciting projects, specifically around anaerobic digesters and the recycling of plastic waste.

Eve: [00:13:32] I’m actually, I’m a little shocked to hear that, you know, that the management of waste is actually controlled by two companies in the US.

Sam: [00:13:42] A supermajority of it. That’s correct.

Eve: [00:13:45] That’s kind of crazy.

Sam: [00:13:47] Well, a lot of things in the US are either a monopoly or a quadropoly. I mean, be it…

Eve: [00:13:53] That’s a monopoly, isn’t it? That’s…

Sam: [00:13:56] Yeah, that’s a duopoly. You know, and you look at grain supply. You have four companies, the ABCDs, you know, Archer Daniels, Cargill, and a few others that dominate, like there’s various sectors.

Eve: [00:14:14] But if you were to go to a particular region or a city and say, we want to try this in your city, could those monopolies stop you?

Sam: [00:14:28] If, because it’s long-term contracts. So, when it comes to the waste collection, they have a long-term contract.

Eve: [00:14:36] I know, I fought with them about that. That’s actually why I fired them because I refused to sign long term contracts. Interesting.

Sam: [00:14:44] There are places where the cities, because it’s regional, you don’t need something that needs to be done fully. Vermont, New Hampshire. California has put in requirements. So, EU does a lot of innovative work because regions make a requirement saying you cannot throw to a landfill, or the amount of money we give you is not going to be as much. Like if you pay less, it will actually will lead to more innovation. Because if they pay them enough, they can just throw it in there and they don’t have to worry about monetizing it in order to be competitive. In Ethiopia, we have to come up with all these monetization schemes because we are not making that much money. Like they would make about $100 per ton of waste, on average, it really does vary in different places. So, they don’t have to worry about it, but we do because we make less than $2 per ton of waste. So, we have to come up with as many ways as possible to generate revenue from the waste, and that is recycling it, that is putting it through a circular system.

Eve: [00:15:44] That’s innovation, right? You get complacent when you make too much money.

Sam: [00:15:49] Necessity is the mother of innovation.

Eve: [00:15:51] Yes, I know. That’s exactly right. The city that, what city is this first plant in?

Sam: [00:16:00] The one that we’ve done is in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Okay.

Eve: [00:16:03] So what do the people who live there think?

Sam: [00:16:07] That’s a good question. So, as the main facility, we do have great support because one of the things, Eve, is building the very first facility of its kind in Africa. I have as much challenges, I don’t think we have enough time on the podcast of the challenges that we have faced as implementing projects.

Eve: [00:16:26] I’d love to hear about them.

Sam: [00:16:28] But a lot of it is artificial challenges, as bureaucracies and when governments change, you know, they make it very, very, very tough. But what it has done is it has been able to remove garbage from just piling up in landfills. Landfills take a large amount of land, usually for a city of this size, it would be around 200 hectares every 20 years, every 25 years that you have to dedicate for that. And it needs to be within close proximity of the city or it’s going to cost you quite a lot to transport that garbage. So, with the city, we have gotten incredible support, but when bureaucratic changes happen, we have to continuously provide support and program for the community. So, those are some of the challenges that we’ve faced, is bureaucracy and government changing rules on you. But right now, it is going in the right direction. We’ve gotten a whole lot of support because at the end of the day it is providing much needed electricity, significant amount of job creation, but also turning something that was, you know, a problem into a significant amount of a solution and a treasure.

Eve: [00:17:47] How many jobs have you created?

Sam: [00:17:50] So when it comes to waste collection, in a distributed way, it’s 11,000 jobs have been created in Addis Ababa. 11,000. And then with the waste disposal system and the ancillary works, it’s about 850 jobs.

Eve: [00:18:05] That’s quite a lot. So how quickly do you think, you know, the others that are in planning will emerge?

Sam: [00:18:13] We do see half of those facilities up and running.

Eve: [00:18:17] Okay. This is amazing. I’m sort of stumped for asking questions. So, what were some of the most unusual challenges that you’ve had? So, we all know about bureaucracy and you know that rules changing.

Sam: [00:18:31] Let me give you a couple. One was initially. So, when we started operating the facility, a lot of the waste collection that was done, we implemented a per kilogram. That’s the international standard for waste collectors. And what we realized was as soon as we implemented that system, initially it was used to be just a monthly fee. A lot of the waste collectors would fill up the weight, so the weight all of a sudden increased. Oh, and it was a bit suspicious. And within a week we had to shut down the facility because half of the waste that we’re collecting was rock and dirt that have been dug up on the ground.

Eve: [00:19:11] So those are all the entrepreneurs out there being entrepreneurial.

Sam: [00:19:15] You do the incentive this way. So, we had to bring them back in and create a different set of incentives that really aligned with all of us and that had a trust-based system and a support system. So that was one of them that happened with waste collection. And another one that you face is there’s a lot of misconception around waste to energy. So, the typical incinerator of the past is not good for the environment at all because anybody could start a fire. Burning waste by itself is the worst thing you could do to the waste. But a modern flue gas treatment, the flue gas treatment alone costs us about $40 million of capex. And you see them all over Europe. There are over 400 of these facilities in Europe. In Denmark, over 95% of all the waste is processed through these facilities. But what they do with the flue gas treatment is a modern facility that is able to capture what would have been emitted and convert it. And so, educating that part was quite important. But the more work that we continue to do, we even found more innovative solutions that were way more superior, both financially and environmentally, to even the combustion process that even Europe uses right now. Which is being able to separate the waste as much as possible, using enzymes to break down those wastes to their individual values, to include projects like insect farming. That allowed us to really maximize the value of every single bit of that waste. And so those were some of the innovative projects that came out from the challenge of this legacy brand that incineration had addressing that, but also really growing away from it because of a lot of the innovations that are out there.

Eve: [00:21:18] So when you separate out the trash, how do you do that? And I’m asking because I interviewed someone in Norway who had created these robot waste pickers that were just fascinating for large objects and small ones.

Sam: [00:21:35] So, we use humans and kind of separation systems because we need to employ. You could use robots, we have systems, we can employ robots as well. But in Africa we need as much of the jobs as we could get. We provide safe environments and usually we do it three ways. One is to separate them at source as much as possible. Two, once they have arrived on site conveyor belts and to be able to separate them. The first facility that we did is bulk, so we didn’t need to do the separation and the separation is done using super magnets or other parts at the end, but earlier is using as much of human power as possible. But when it comes to, for example, metal, we use super magnets. For non-ferrous metals we use eddy current technologies. With plastic, once we have plastic waste, we actually have, you’ll like this. So global plastic recycling in the world is abysmal. It’s 8/10% maximum. A lot of the waste makes it to landfills and waste disposal sites. The reason that Europe and US have a higher calorific value, meaning its ability to generate energy is higher, is mainly because of the amount of plastic and paper that makes it to those waste to energy facilities as well as disposal facilities. A huge number. Because it doesn’t get recycled and it’s a shame that it doesn’t get recycled. It makes it to waterways as well. It’s a detriment for different things. So, what we have done is we take out plastic waste separately together and then all of the plastic, we don’t separate the plastics. We introduce an enzyme. This is a technology that was developed in University of Texas Austin and a team out of University of Nottingham. And this enzyme that they have breaks down the plastics to its individual components and then we’re able to use a specialized membranes that allow us to filter the different chemical compounds of the plastic individually, separately. And you can maximize the recycling process to up to 80/85%.

Eve: [00:23:49] Wow.That’s a big difference.

Sam: [00:23:51] And something, once it’s scaled, could be a game-changer.

Eve: [00:23:54] Yes. So you must have a lot of scientists and software engineers and other people involved in this project.

Sam: [00:24:03] We do. We work with scientists both as subject matter experts that advise us, but also in our team. We’ve also been early adopters for a lot of scientists that are working in the waste sector, because one of the advantages of emerging markets compared to Europe or US, usually is, when you want something to be adopted in the US, you go head-on into legacy companies that are usually well capitalized and very powerful. So very hard to change it. Or as a legacy infrastructure that is already a sunken cost that somebody will lose money to adopt a new technology. So there quite a lot of hesitation. But for us in an emerging market, that infrastructure hasn’t been built yet. So, when somebody comes up and say, I have the solution, it’s new. It’s like, we raise our hands quickly and say we will adopt. Can we work? So, we have been early adopters to a lot of this technologies that allows us to start working with them to even invest in them. So, when they come back into Europe, US, we’ve had an opportunity to really have a seat and be a player in a lot of these emerging technologies.

Eve: [00:25:17] It’s really fascinating. It makes me want to go to Africa.

Sam: [00:25:21] You’re welcome. We would love to host you.

Eve: [00:25:25] So, yeah, it’s very difficult when you’re up against a system, right? And you’ve probably seen that in your other work as a VC because, you know, I’m the 1.9% that you would invest in, a female, right? And then if I were black, I’d be the 1%, right? And that’s just, you know, that’s a system that’s very difficult to break through to. There’s so many of them.

Sam: [00:25:52] Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Eve: [00:25:54] And zoning, like in my world, in real estate, you know, zoning has really shaped the physical landscape in the US and not always, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a very bad way. Right now, it’s a detriment to really building new affordable housing quickly. But breaking through it, there’s so many layers, there’s so much to go up against so I totally get it. But you’ve also been, you’re also part of something called the Power Africa Initiative, which was set forth by the Obama administration to work on large-scale wind farms in Africa. Can you tell us about that?

Sam: [00:26:30] Yeah, so the Power Africa Initiative was something, as you said, that the Obama administration spearheaded, and it’s to support and assist renewable energy adoption throughout the continent of Africa. So, our collaboration with them is in the support of wind farms in a place called Aysha, and different parts of Ethiopia. But we’ve also worked with them in putting up wind mass to select and identify the best wind locations. So wind is one of those renewable energy technologies where location matters, just like real estate, location, location, location. And if you have the right type of location, the investment return on it, as well as its impact, its ability to generate electricity, you can go to a site where it’s generating maybe 15% of the time effectively, or you could have some of the sites that we’ve worked with in Aysha and another site called Lake Turkana in Kenya, on the border of Kenya and Ethiopia, they have plant factors as much as 65 to 70%.

Eve: [00:27:38] Interesting.

Sam: [00:27:38] That means for the same one wind farm that you have in there, it is operating and generating electricity at full capacity for 65% of the time.

Eve: [00:27:48] That’s amazing.

Sam: [00:27:50] That’s a significant amount of return. So, it’s identifying those sites where what we’ve worked on and what we have realized is, you know, especially with climate change and climate adaption, it has to be incorporated with where humans are located. Where are the load zones, how can we get them, how can we help them with energy transition? How can we use waste problem as a means of addressing the environment problem? Because one of the things is, you know, the same way you could emit a significant amount of carbon dioxide through gas fired power plants or, you know, diesel fired power plants, you also generate a significant amount of greenhouse gases in a landfill. Landfills around the world are responsible for that. So, the way we looked at it was energy transition, circular economy, they’re all very similar in addressing climate change. And if you are to do it where the development is happening, so that when energy, when new housing is built, you plug in. Hey, it needs to have a waste solution. If you have a good waste solution, if you have a reliable energy source, then the quality of living in those new housing projects becomes very attractive. So, we work with developers very closely to make sure that we are their partners, both for recycling and circular economy waste management as well as renewable energy supply.

Eve: [00:29:17] I was going to ask you how could your model be improved? But it sounds to me like you’re thinking about that every moment.

Sam: [00:29:24] No, because you can always improve. You know, Eve, the one thing that just heartens me right now, given all of the challenges that are out there, is advances in science and technology. Everybody’s talking about AI, ChatGPT, but what AI has done to plastic recycling, to the way we’ve been able to create a lot of these enzymes is because of AI. The ability to simulate the right type of wind locations, steady multiple sites at the same time. So, a lot of technological advances have made it very, very attractive to start addressing things. So, what we do is, we always have our ears, so as you alluded, my day job now, I’m still on the board and a majority owner of Cambridge, is in a new VC fund called C1 Ventures. Our work is, how do you continuously find, identify and collaborate with entrepreneurs and scientists that come from different environments? Because a lot of solutions, as you said, women get less than 2% of the global VC funding, minorities because… But at the end of the day, female entrepreneurs have performed better than any other entrepreneur out there. But if we want to find a solution, so how do we use the technologies? How do we bring individuals from different fields and put them in the right location, connect them with implementation projects, connect them with the right services? And if you could do that, innovative solutions are going to come up. Some of them, they use technology, some of them they’re going to innovate socially, business model innovation. But you need the diversity of thoughts. You need the diversity of experience.

Eve: [00:31:14] Yeah, I agree. So, tell me what’s going on with real estate in Africa?

Sam: [00:31:20] I am glad you asked that. Let me give you two stats to just show how real estate is extremely important in Africa and very dynamic. One is, for the next 15 years, the top ten fastest growing cities in the world are all in Africa.

Eve: [00:31:37] Oh, interesting.

Sam: [00:31:39] We have…

Eve: [00:31:40] Except for Melbourne, Australia.

Sam: [00:31:43] Well, no, as a city it doesn’t even come close.

Eve: [00:31:46] Oh, I think it ranks, it’s really. No, I read somewhere it was the second fastest growing city in the world, so I’m not sure…

Sam: [00:31:52] For the next 15 years – I’ll share with you the UN study.

Eve: [00:31:55] Okay.

Sam: [00:31:56] Exactly. And I want everybody to take a look at that. But it is, it’s incredible.

Eve: [00:32:02] It’s exploding.

Sam: [00:32:04] It’s a young population, but a lot of the cities have the infrastructure and the housing. So, for example, take Addis Ababa. It is, it has the infrastructure and the housing made for 500,000 people. But it’s a city of 5 million. It is growing at a much faster pace than the city was ever designed for because we’re talking about Ethiopia as a country in 1990 had a population of 42 million. Right now, we’re a population of 120 million.

Eve: [00:32:33] Wow.

Sam: [00:32:34] So, a much, much faster growth where infrastructure hasn’t kept up. So, there’s a huge demand for housing. And the more housing you just patch in, that is a strain on the infrastructure because the infrastructure needs to also be designed for that. So, you have an opportunity to build smart cities, to build self-sufficient communities. You’re starting to see innovative solutions that are trying to adapt local building materials instead of importing building materials or using traditionally Western building materials and steel or cement. There are modern mud houses that are incredibly beautiful and well designed for insulation, in country. You will see adoption for modular construction. You’re starting to see, and we have supported and funded a project, for example, in Nigeria, a project called Butterfly Island.

Eve: [00:33:33] I’ve talked to him, yeah.

Sam: [00:33:35] Yeah, a small city where they’re building really exciting communities of, a community of 100,000, a community of 50,000. But anybody that is working on modern building technologies, brand new way of building, building materials, they need to go to Africa. We have more cement factories, more building material factories being built every day. You have companies like, Brimstone Energy that have reinvented the way we make cement. So, Brimstone is, has designed, and this is a couple of scientists from Caltech, that have taken instead of having limestone, because when you want to make Portland cement, limestone is your raw material. Limestone, you heat it up, it automatically generates calcium oxide, which is what you need for, Portland cement, but also carbon dioxide. But they replaced it with calcium silicate, which is black rocks. And they’re are 200 times more abundant than limestone. But when you process calcium silicate, you’re able to produce Portland cement and silica, but in a carbon negative process.

Eve: [00:34:46] Interesting.

Sam: [00:34:46] We’re starting to see more of those type of cement facilities that are entirely reimagining, again, the same identical Portland cement, but reimagining the way it’s made. They will get adoption in Africa. The housing demand in Africa is high. Every government, every government that is going through an election, the one thing that they’re asked, the one thing that they keep on promising, is affordable housing, affordable housing, affordable housing. Jobs and affordable housing are the bottlenecks but they could also be an innovative linchpin for some of the most exciting business models, some of the most exciting building materials companies to come up and build housing the right way.

Eve: [00:35:29] So, for a real estate entrepreneur like myself, I love seeing new things. I’ve never been to Africa. I’ve traveled all over the world, but not Africa. What would be the first place you’d suggest I go? I love cities.

Sam: [00:35:41] I’m biased, of course I’d like you to go to Ethiopia first. Ethiopia, Addis Ababa and explore what Addis Ababa has done. I mean, this is an open invitation. We would love for you to also go to Kigali. They’ve done a really good job of being a welcoming environment, specifically for housing entrepreneurs. You get tax benefit, tax holidays like ten, 15 years, tax holidays. Gabon is another really exciting place, Senegal. And we could share information around, kind of, the governments that are being quite open to attract investment, to attract entrepreneurs to come and build their creative solutions. I’ll be remiss not to mention, for example, what Habitat for Humanity is doing, Jonathan’s leadership there with innovative platforms to attract and bring in building technology innovators together and accelerate them, but also collaborate with them to build. So, it’s an incredible place. Africa is very, very beautiful and welcoming, and we would love for you to come there.

Eve: [00:36:52] Well, it’s risen to the top of my list after this conversation.

Sam: [00:36:56] We need, yeah, we need to get you out there quickly.

Eve: [00:37:00] So I’m going to go back to your background. You were born in Ethiopia and you emigrated to the US. I watched the little video clip when you were accepted to, I don’t know how many universities just four years after you arrived. That was pretty amazing. So, what took you from that early beginning to where you are today and the path you’ve chosen in your life?

Sam: [00:37:24] Oh, that’s a really good question. You know, one thing I would say is, for me personally I have been the beneficiary of the generosity of strangers. I have asked for help. It’s just all of us need luck. My story would not have been possible if I had stayed just in Ethiopia. The American opportunity was incredible. But even my opportunity in the US would not have been possible if it wasn’t for individuals that are just asked and that have transformed my life. So let me give you just a couple of examples. One was, so when we came to the US, my dad used to be minister, uh, head of transportation in Ethiopia, and he was a prisoner there as well, a political prisoner and came here and was driving a taxi in DC.

Eve: [00:38:17] Oh.

Sam: [00:38:18] And he was also a Parliament member. From being a Parliament member and as minister to being a taxi driver. But but one thing he wanted for us is to get a good education. He was like, I’ll do my work and my mom as well. When my mom was a teacher in Ethiopia, became a parking attendant. But when he was driving his taxis one day and this was like six months after we have arrived, this was in 2000, I was 13 turning 14 in 2000. And a passenger in his taxi, a random white guy, was having a conversation with him. And and my dad was like, I want my kids to go to the best schools. He didn’t even know which one was the best schools. And this guy said oh, that’s wonderful, like, does he like engineering? And he was like, yes, yes, yes, he does. And he was like, oh, I read in my alma mater at MIT, there’s this Ethiopian kid that did his undergrad at MIT. Now he’s about to do his PhD. His name is Solomon Assefa. You should reach out to him. And my Dad writes the name, comes home to me. He’s like, you need to call this guy. So, I went to the MIT database, found his name, send him a random email saying, oh, you don’t know me, just arrived in the US but would love to go to this place called MIT.

Sam: [00:39:31] I wasn’t even sure. And guess what? 24 hours later I get this two-page, like detailed, what became my blueprint of like, good thing. If you’re very serious, this is what you need to do. Take the most challenging classes. These are the various things that you need to do – da, da, da, da, da. Boom, printed it, put it on my wall, and that was my blueprint. And the fast forward, four years later or three and a half years later, I was fortunate enough, and there are so many others, my teachers at my high school and others I said, I want to do this, can you help me? Boom, they were there. After school. Then, became valedictorian of my school and got accepted to all of the top schools and then I reached out to him saying, you don’t remember me, but three and a half years ago, you really changed my life. You told me it was possible and that I could do it. I followed that blueprint. It worked, and I’m about to come for an admit weekend at MIT, would love to meet you. Then the guy goes oh, my God, [inaudible] I’m so glad. So, we met and we’ve been kind of really good friends ever since. And he’s…

Eve: [00:40:40] That’s wonderful.

Sam: [00:40:41] Yeah. My partner in our venture fund now, again, the generosity. Going out there and asking. He had, for the projects that I did when I was at Stanford. Nobel Prize winner Dagga Shroff, who won the Nobel Prize in 1992 for Superfluidity of Helium, became my partner in a project that we did where we helped kids. In East Palo Alto, learn science and technology by transforming golf carts.

Eve: [00:41:08] Right.

Sam [00:41:09] And so a lot of time the key thing is going out there and asking has been has been the thing for me and giving back.

Eve: [00:41:16] Do you think that generosity is unique to America.

Sam: [00:41:21] From strangers? No, it’s not. But America, the opportunity merged with the generosity to help. Unlocks incredible opportunities.

Eve: [00:41:31] But speaking to you, Samuel, I’m sure they got a lot out of it, too. It wasn’t just generosity. So, but…

Sam: [00:41:39] But for most of them, it came out with no currying favor, or looking ahead. Yes, they really wanted to help. And yes, like, we became great friends and we’ve invested together and we’ve done stuff. And, you know, a good mentorship is rewarding for the mentor as well as the mentee, the sponsor. And we all need to do that out there. But in the US, the opportunity, taking advantage of those really generous connections and supports have been very, very helpful for me.

Eve: [00:42:14] A couple more questions. What’s the entrepreneurial space like in Africa?

Sam [00:42:18] Again, another really good question and want to be careful in how I answer it because everybody, like a majority of Africans, are entrepreneurs by necessity. Every subsistence farmer is an entrepreneur, that owns his own little land. You go to the city, be it the shoeshine boy or others, they’re all entrepreneurs. There’s a difference between entrepreneurial by necessity, because there are a lot of them that will tell you, I won’t trade that for a steady job and for a predictable way that could support my family. But it’s built that entrepreneurial spirit. It’s about survival. Life is challenging in many parts, but there is ingenuity.

Sam: [00:43:02] Incredible ingenuity, sadly, is not met with resources. So they are not able to scale up what they could do. But recently you’ve also seen entrepreneurial spirits flourishing in the tech sector, in the mobile sector. Where, you know, the best mobile money project came out of Africa with M-Pesa out of Kenya. You have a lot of innovative solutions from farm tech, agritech and insurance tech that are just flourishing all over the continent. And it makes the continent have a very dynamic path, and it’s entrepreneurship that will take it to the next level. But what it lacks is the resources, funding, mentorship from other businesses. There’s angel investment and risk capital from those that have done it. It’s not there as much. It’s still family and friends, and it’s very, very challenging expecting somebody to be able to do that.

Eve: [00:44:03] Yes, it is.

Sam: [00:44:03] Structures need to be in place, but that, it’s there. It’s the entrepreneurial and it’s a young, young continent. More than 50% of Ethiopians are under the age of 15.

Eve: [00:44:16] That’s really interesting because, you know, necessity is the mother of invention. I grew up in Australia when it was, I think, much more entrepreneurial, now Australia has become very wealthy. It’s an amazing place, absolutely gorgeous. But I think with wealth comes complacency and less entrepreneurship. And that’s, there’s this is wonderful sort of balance, right, you’ve got to get to to keep new things happening, I think.

Sam: [00:44:45] No, you’re absolutely right because I mean, take the US, you have places like Silicon Valley and Austin and parts of pockets of the US that have been quite entrepreneurial in the tech sector. But we need entrepreneurship everywhere. We need, and you’re right, like, it does breed complacency and we’re starting to see climate change is really putting a bit of a fire on many people. You know, scientists that would have been comfortable working in a big company are very much demanding to go out there, and they’re quitting to start their own companies.

Sam: [00:45:29] So I think we want innovation to happen in every sector. You know, sadly a lot of Internet based or software-based innovation limits itself in a few sectors, but we want to transform the way cement is made. We want to transform the way steel is made. Agriculture has been stuck. It’s a 10,000-year-old technology. If Jesus is to come back, we still make things exactly the same way, our protein and carbohydrates. But there are better ways and we’re starting to see them and we’re starting to see this extremely unprecedented excitement to reinvent the way we do things.

Eve: [00:46:04] So one more question for you, and I’ll leave you alone. What keeps you enjoying it? What keeps you up at night?

Sam: [00:46:12] So, well, the main one is am I being a good dad? So, I’ve got three kids. Dad, that has been the biggest job, the biggest project I’ve ever undertaken.

Eve: [00:46:23] It’s A very big job, yeah.

Sam: [00:46:24] That keeps me up at night. The other one is, you know, I kind of, I’ve been extremely fortunate in my life to have traveled a lot to really call the US and Africa and even parts of Europe, my home and at the end of the day, we are a global citizen. But at the end of the day, a lot of innovations and advances, there’s a lot of waste in certain places, but shortage in many other places and there’s this disconnect and you feel hopeless. It’s like, how do we connect it? Because it’s just even food production there’s excess here in the US and Europe and there’s shortage in many parts of the world, but there’s enough that is already being made.

Sam: [00:47:11] How do we create that equality and equitable sharing and innovation and growing together, but connecting and shrinking our village to this global village of the human tribe. It’s something that we all, you know, aspire to see. Sometimes you get, you’re very proud that things are going in the right direction, and at times you’re really depressed because we’re really separating even further.

Eve: [00:47:39] Yeah, it’s not really a global economy yet, is it? No. Well, this has been absolutely delightful. Thank you very much for joining me. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Sam: [00:47:48] Thanks for having me.

Eve: [00:47:50] I can’t wait to hear more.

Sam: [00:47:52] Absolutely. We’ll be looking forward. Thank you so much.

Eve: [00:48:06] I hope you enjoyed today’s guest and our deep dive. You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at RethinkRealEstateforGood.co. There’s lots to listen to there. Please support this podcast and all the great work my guests do by sharing it with others, posting about it on social media, or leaving a rating and a review. To catch all the latest from me, you can follow me on LinkedIn. Even better, if you’re ready to dabble in some impact investing, head on over to smallchange.co where I spend most of my time. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music. And a big thanks to you for spending your time with me today. We’ll talk again soon. But for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

Image courtesy of Samuel Alemayehu

Fix Development.

April 5, 2023

Juli Kaufmann believes in a quadruple bottom line return. Her company, Fix Development, applies this philosophy to each and every real estate project in their portfolio, prioritizing economic stability, environmental stewardship, social equity, and cultural continuity.

Juli founded Fix Development in 2009, and has since developed more than $25 million in real estate projects in Milwaukee. While Fix Development operates as a “for-benefit” company, Juli’s focus is on businesses that generate earned income but give top priority to social mission. The Aux Evanston, a project to be owned 100% by the community, is a great example of this.

Juli is also the managing member of Riverbee Collective, a collective of over 40 investors who all own a piece of a Milwaukee building formerly known as the Cream City Hostel. This building was redeveloped by Fix Development, and the Riverbee Collective is currently transitioning the building into a housing cooperative meant to support people dealing with losses and uncertainty such as jobs, instability and landlord challenges. She is also a founding member of Fund Milwaukee, an investment group that seeks to match unaccredited local investors with opportunities to support local entrepreneurs, all while focusing on impact. The effort has raised over $1 million in local capital to date. Juli is also a founding member of Bublr Bikes, Milwaukee’s bike sharing system. She also consults on impact-based commercial real estate development projects, providing guidance on real estate and financing development strategies.

Awards include the 2020 Milwaukee Magazine Betty Award, which honors remarkable women in the community: 2018 Woman Executive & Executive of the Year by BizTimes Milwaukee; 2017 Biggest Neighborhood Impact Award by the Milwaukee Business Journal: and a 2013 AIA Top Ten Green Projects in the Nation, for The Clock Shadow Building, in Milwaukee.

Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:19] Hi there. Thanks for joining me on Rethink Real Estate for Good. I’m Eve Picker and I’m on a mission to make real estate work for everyone. I love real estate. Real estate makes places good or bad, rich or poor, beautiful or not. In this show, I’m interviewing the disruptors, those creative thinkers and doers that are shrugging off the status quo in order to build better for everyone. And speaking of building better, I’m very excited to share that my company, Small Change, is now raising capital through a community round that is open to the public. Small Change is a leading equity crowdfunding platform for impact investment in real estate. For as little as $250, anyone 18 and over can invest in Small Change, helping to fuel our growth as we disrupt the old boys club of capital that routinely ignores so many qualified people and projects. Please visit wefunder.com/smallchange to review the full details of our raise and to make an investment if you can. And remember, investing is risky. Don’t invest more than you can afford to lose.

Eve: [00:01:59] People, planet, profit and place. This is the return that Julie Kaufmann believes all real estate should achieve. Less than that is simply not good enough. Julie founded her company, Fix Development, with this explicit goal. She applies the philosophy to each and every project in her portfolio, prioritizing economic stability, environmental stewardship, social equity and cultural continuity. One recent example is The Aux in Evanston, Illinois, a vacant warehouse destined to be converted to a black owned business wellness hub. The goal is for the community to own and manage the building, with investors contributing through a crowdfunded capital raise, and Julie has orchestrated this in the background.

Eve: [00:02:58] Hi Julie, it’s really great to have you on my show.

Juli Kaufmann: [00:03:01] Hi Eve. Good to see you.

Eve: [00:03:04] So, you’ve said that the driving force behind the fixed development business model is your quadruple bottom line philosophy, and I wanted to learn about that. What is that?

Juli: [00:03:16] The quadruple bottom line is sort of a morphing of what’s more commonly referred to as a triple bottom line for people, planet and profit. I think that’s language that got some traction in recent years. I in my work really just, personally in my life really, just care you know a lot about people, a lot about planet and I understand we live in a world where profit or money drives basically everything. So, for me, it was always just more about finding pathways that had to do, had impact beyond just my pocketbook. But the fourth element really is about place or culture. So, people, planet, profit and place, recognizing that, you can’t just drop in something that’s beautiful for the environment and good for a few people. It really has to be of the fabric of place to be meaningful in a way that I think transcends time. And I try to integrate that fourth bottom line in the work I do as well.

Eve: [00:04:17] So, how did you build your development company around that idea? That’s a lot.

Juli: [00:04:24] Yeah, I mean, it’s a lot. It just I think it makes sense in hindsight when people are like, what do you do? Try and creating a framework to make sense. But what I really like to say is I built my company and I called it Fix Development because I was just an individual who was an activist and wanted to fix shit. If I can say that in your podcast.

Eve: [00:04:41] Of course you can.

Juli: [00:04:42] So, I was like, I shortened it to Fix Development to be a little more appropriate. But I think that I’ve evolved as a human, as an activist, it’s my nature. And that started back in college, you know, protesting and being activist around a number of topics, including climate change. We didn’t even call it climate change back in those days. But nonetheless, thinking about, how do I be the change I want to see in the world? And eventually I found my way to entrepreneurship only because I was living in neighborhoods all the time and concerned about what I saw in my own neighborhoods. Why were there toxic brownfields? Why was there disinvestment? Why were there lack of things that I wanted to go to like ice cream shops in my neighborhood? And what can I do as an individual to make that look differently? And so, it really is just around that activism background and a do-it-yourself mentality that the world is not going to change for us and the systems are increasingly morphing against us, if you will, us being the euphemism for the individual and our own self-determination. And so, through that lens, I started to think about what I wanted my little corner of the world to look like, and development became the vehicle I used.

Eve: [00:05:55] So, you know, then Fix Development, what needs to be fixed in development? I sprung that one on you, right?

Juli: [00:06:04] What doesn’t need to be fixed? Yeah. I mean, I think what you focus on in your podcast, are these themes are very common for us change agents in this work and it’s really the financial systems and real estate systems themselves. They’ve been, the architecture of those systems, are built around white male dominance and that’s not always bad but it’s exclusionary and we’re a diverse, multicultural world. And in my community, that’s certainly applies. And in my neighborhood that applies. And when you don’t have all those voices and perspectives and ideas at the table, it changes what the world looks like. And it’s not always for the better. And when you’re increasingly driven by solely economic profit of singular profit, financial profit as a bottom line, it’s no surprise that there’s toxic waste dumps all around us and that people are marginalized in decision making because they’re not valued. And so, I even forget the question, but I think all of that needs to be fixed.

Eve: [00:07:05] All of that needs to be fixed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it goes really deep, doesn’t it? Because that filters into zoning and all sorts of things that impact the physical world around us. But what led you to launch Fix Development? What were you doing before?

Juli: [00:07:21] You know, my background is, I started in corporate America. I worked for Procter and Gamble, and I sold like Downy fabric softener. You know, gross right? Sort of sucked the soul right out of me. But it’s useful, I have a business degree background and I think it’s useful as a training to understand the mindset of a lot of smart people in the world and how they apply their intellect. And I didn’t view it as meaningful. And I eventually worked my way through some nonprofits thinking mission driven work would be a solution. But you find very quickly that all sectors of the world have systems that are oppressive and dominant paradigms that are part of the problem and not the solution. And so, you know, I found my way, like many entrepreneurs, to entrepreneurship. And I think the reason real estate was my calling had more to do with just neighborhood activism. Like I could see places and wanted to see places look differently. I don’t have formal training in real estate development.

Eve: [00:08:19] Oh, who does?

Juli: [00:08:20] Yeah, right. I mean.

Eve: [00:08:21] That’s why so much of it is bad.

Juli: [00:08:24] Amen, sister. I think that partly that I recognize that, like, there were a lot of bros in my community who were like, doing some stuff. They just had access to money. And I was like, oh, what are you doing that for? You know, because they can, I guess. And so, what’s beautiful about it is, the flip of it is because, quote unquote, anyone can do it, but can do it badly. Anybody can also do it and do it well, was my belief and I did put that to the test. And so, I do use this DIY strategy in all of my work now, do it yourself. I learned it myself. And then I said, you know, I’m nothing special. Why can’t I collaborate with other neighbors in other parts of my city and teach them alongside me as I’m learning, and we learn together and do it ourselves?

Juli: [00:09:11] So, a big part of the Fix Development model is this co-development model, bringing together spheres of expertise that aren’t necessarily developers but that know communities are, you know, community leaders who are opinion leaders, who can rally neighbors around an idea, bringing together folks who just have lived there forever, who know the real estate and are like, oh, that building is such an important asset in our community. Here’s why. Those kinds of values are critical to successful development. And so, it’s been a mechanism I continue to use now, is just working with quote unquote average neighbors to raise up real estate.

Eve: [00:09:49] Interesting. So, it must be really difficult to balance each project’s financial return on investment to reach that quadruple bottom line goal. What does that look like for you?

Juli: [00:10:03] Every project is different because every project is such, you know, that cultural resonance that being embedded in of the community is so critical that each community defines the project for us and therefore they’re never the same. So, I have projects where, you know, Black leadership, Black equity, Black ownership is a critical social impact of the project, and other projects I have a real driving force around climate change and minimizing environmental impact and celebrating resilience. And those aren’t mutually exclusive. But, you know, in each project, a different set of values emerges as kind of the leading set. And that’s fun. It keeps it interesting. And, you know, in an ideal world, all of the bottom lines are represented, and they are to some degree, just some have different priorities, I guess I would say.

Juli: [00:10:52] And it’s just being true to that and bringing that as a through line, through everything, weaving together those priorities in each decision. So, for example, a project I have in Illinois right now, African American equity is the critical driving factor. And so, they are making decisions at every step. And for example, we’re hiring a Black architect, we’re hiring a Black general contractor, we’re hiring a Black graphic designer. So, it’s not just, you know, who the tenants are, who the leaders are, what the project looks like, who owns it at the end. It’s every step in between where that priority is paramount. But at the end of the day, we’re making strong environmental decisions. It’s going to be a cultural icon and there will be a positive bottom line financially. So, each project is a different tapestry. And so, therefore they’re all extremely hard and take a lot of work. And it’s not easy to cookie cutter these.

Eve: [00:11:41] Well, I’m going to dig into one aspect of it. You mentioned this project that is really all about building an asset for Black people, for African Americans. So, you know, you seen the statistics on investments in Blacks and in women, and they’re like shockingly low. 1% of all venture capital invested goes to Black-owned companies. So, in real estate, that must be really hard. If you’re putting together a project where Blacks have ownership and are the driving force, what does that look like when you go to a financial institution or try to raise money for that project?

Juli: [00:12:17] Yeah, you don’t go to financial institutions because you get what, you know you get, which is no. Or patronizing maybe that’s eventually a no. Or you’re doing it wrong, here’s the way to do it. And I think that for me, in my work, I’m white, but I’m a woman. And when I started, I happened to be a bit younger, too. So, those were a couple strikes against me anyways. You know, people just pat you on the head and say, oh, isn’t that cute? It’ll never work. And I think now I’ve done my work for over ten years, you know, I still get no, but I’m less patronized because I have examples I can show. And in this case, we don’t bother to just waste time on it anymore. We go to a contingency of the willing. And increasingly there are more of us. There are platforms like Small Change that you’ve helped lead that bring together like-minded compatriots. I’m often asked the question, who else out there is doing the work you do? And for the longest time I said, I have no idea. I’m sure there are brilliant people.

Eve: [00:13:13] Yeah.

Juli: [00:13:14] I’m no different in some ways, and there are probably people just like me so frustrated everywhere in this country and beyond. But I’m too busy trying to get this job done to know. But I knew of you a little bit. So, now I think there are mechanisms through the World Wide Web where we’re finding each other, and that means investors too. So, I don’t generally use banks. I can’t. They don’t want to party with me, so I don’t party with them. But we have to find more angels. It’s still the case that a lot of projects that I work on and folks like me and entrepreneurs like me, we’re not just trying to build in suburbs, in affluent neighborhoods and then layer on it something we’re trying to solve way more than that. And we recognize, we want to be in the urban community because density is important to climate change. We want to be in the urban community because equity is important to human existence and there are lack of projects in certain communities. So, we’re already layering on to our developments, so many barriers that most of our traditional colleagues don’t have. So, we still need subsidy if you will. We need angels and impact investors.

Eve: [00:14:14] You know, you need subsidy basically, because the world thinks that Blacks and women are not investment worthy.

Juli: [00:14:21] Right. And that has built up a system of, that the real estate won’t get appraised, even if I can show you that I have a business model that will work, you’re not going to value my piece of real estate in a certain neighborhood because of all the other systemic racism and oppression and all those things. I mean, of course, all real estate development projects have subsidy. They just call them different. They call them tax incremental financing, or they call them, you know, the government will give $1 million handout to our very successful corporation in our town because they asked for it. When we ask for it, we have to do a song and dance all day to the end of the moon. But I think it’s worth it when you see the impact of these projects once they’re built. They are transformative in people’s lives, truly. And now we have ten years of experience in my company where you see the impact of the jobs that have been created, the companies that have been formed, the commercial corridors that have been catalyzed to greater impact, neighborhoods that have become more stable. I mean, it’s very real and very tangible.

Eve: [00:15:19] Can you tell me about 1 or 2 of your very favorites?

Juli: [00:15:23] They’re all my Children and none are my favorites, Eve.

Eve: [00:15:25] Okay, well, 1 or 2 of your children then. You know, I suppose a couple of projects that best exemplify this quadruple bottom line and what you can get out of it.

Juli: [00:15:38] Yes. I have a wonderful project in a neighborhood called Walker’s Point. It’s a historic neighborhood in Milwaukee, one of the three founding neighborhoods of the city. And it was my first project. So, that’s probably why I love it. It’s a very hard-core example of my philosophy in action. I lived kitty corner from a toxic waste dump in my neighborhood, and that just infuriated me. And on that site, I ultimately built my first huge project. It’s an $8 million building called the Clock Shadow Building, and it has a urban creamery on its first floor, and then it has health related businesses on the top three floors. It’s a smaller set of investors. It was my first project before crowdfunding was really even going. It’s over, it’s now 12 years old this year and it had had incredible impact. And now that neighborhood is actually quite transformed. And what I’m proud of is we set the standard and I think we helped catalyze change in that neighborhood. And now it’s actually outpacing, it’s one of the few neighborhoods where change is outpacing the rest of the community.

Juli: [00:16:35] And so, we set rents back in the day that are now renewable in long term leases that are affordable. So as the tides raise all ships, our ship is staying anchored. And those tenants remain viable and have a growing base of customers because the neighborhood has grown up around it and it has won international awards for its climate impact, we use rainwater to flush the toilets, we have a farm on the rooftop. So, it’s demonstrated a lot in terms of environmental impact, it’s generated returns for its investors every year, and it has thriving nonprofit and for-profit tenants. So, I’m really proud of that project. And it’s one of my first.

Eve: [00:17:10] Let me ask you about that. You have this anti-gentrification strategy. How does that work?

Juli: [00:17:14] It’s, first of all, it’s community owned, right? So, our neighbors, our owners aren’t looking to flip and get out and make a big profit. They would like a return on their investment, but by definition, they are neighbors who own our real estate and therefore their vested interest is in their neighborhood staying great for them. And they don’t want Applebee’s, you know, they want a local coffee shop. They don’t want all these mega chains come and taking the soul out of their neighborhood. They want our local neighbor who opened a ice cream shop to continue to thrive with that ice cream shop. That’s a literal example. It’s called Purple Door Ice Cream that we got into one of our projects in this neighborhood. So, I forgot the question.

Eve: [00:17:50] No, that’s good. That’s a great answer. Because it’s community owned, it’s community controlled, and decisions are made that keep the project full of the sorts of businesses the community wants. Right?

Juli: [00:18:02] And it comes, those owners have a philosophical alignment with the quadruple bottom line. So, they’re getting a financial return. They’re not looking to increase those rents every year just because they can. They’re looking to ensure those tenants stay. They keep getting return, but they get those cultural, social and environmental impacts as part of their valued return. And if we were to forgo those returns, sure, we could recruit different tenants at this point. But that’s really critical. And I think without owners like this working in combination with tenants, you don’t have that kind of outcome.

Eve: [00:18:34] Right. So, how do you find the projects or how do they come to you?

Juli: [00:18:39] Yeah, there’s an overabundance of brilliance and opportunity and properties in all of our communities that could be developed. So, there’s sort of some special magic and sauce. I started by working my own neighborhood and picking off projects that were meaningful to me. As the model grew and more neighborhoods were attracted to it working in their neighborhoods, I’ve partnered with Co-developers. And so, I usually look to find somebody who’s extremely motivated, who has time and capacity to give to the project that is a recognized leader, and they may not have the business model fleshed out, but they know a lot and they will come as a co-equal to the table minimally. And then we build the project together. And at this point, I’m not taking on any more because I have way too much on my plate.

Juli: [00:19:25] But most of my projects have been in different neighborhoods throughout the greater Milwaukee area, and I now have a, I was recruited to a project in Illinois which I resisted for quite some time because, I mean, it’s so hyperlocal, the work we do. You know, it’s knowing your community that really matters. But in that particular case, there are five other co-developers. So, it’s a really strong local team and I’m able to just bring the real estate experience that that team did not have and add it to their expertise. So, the common threads are that there’s passionate co-developers, that there’s a really cogent idea. In the case of the Illinois project, it’s a coalition of tenants focused around wellness and racial equity. So, they have a common theme they want to get after and that’s it. Then we just build it from the ground up. We do it ourselves. Each one’s different.

Eve: [00:20:10] Have any disappointed you, any of these co-ownership models?

Juli: [00:20:15] Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say the one thing that’s been beautiful and not disappointing me, but it’s restored my hope is that there have been so resilient through pandemic that because of that local ownership, there is such a strong base of community support that buys into these tenants that goes and shops there even during the hardest times or where experts from the ownership community come in and help them pivot from a brick and mortar model to a virtual model so that most of our tenants not only survived but thrived during pandemic. That was an upside. A downside, a hard thing I learned, I guess, one project I’ve had was a hostel project. It’s the first hostel in Milwaukee and we partnered on that project, we had about 80 community owners. We still do. But it was a single tenant project.

Eve: [00:21:01] 80.

Juli: [00:21:01] Yeah. I mean, I think that was that’s one of my larger ownership groups, 80 owners. All in the neighborhood, really excited about the hostel concept. And then it opened right before pandemic.

Eve: [00:21:10] Oh.

Juli: [00:21:12] Hostel is like the worst possible business to have.

Eve: [00:21:15] Oh yeah, that’s pretty bad. How do you pivot from that?

Juli: [00:21:16] So, it died. It died, and then it was our only tenant, so then we had a real tough challenge. We were able to pivot. But the learning there is diversify your revenue streams.

Eve: [00:21:28] Yes. Yes, So.

Juli: [00:21:31] But not too many. Not too many.

Eve: [00:21:32] What are some other influences on your work? Maybe that’s enough. You sound to me, I’m an introvert, you sound incredibly brave for taking on this sort of vast array of new people and always sort of putting them together in this big jigsaw puzzle of development projects. 80 investors in a little project is significant.

Juli: [00:21:56] It’s such an astute insight, Eve. I’m also an introvert, and when people who meet me learn that they’re stunned because you have to cultivate your extroverted and I think I’m shocked by you telling me that as well. I’d say who inspires me are ironically, people. It’s such a hard thing to explain to people who aren’t like us in terms of introversion, but I really don’t want to spend a ton of time with people, yet awe inspired by all of them. And they are the reason the work happens. But I just would like to go away from all of them. And it’s not because hate people so much as it sucks the soul out of me sometimes.

Eve: [00:22:26] It really does. Yeah, I taught for a while and it was just exhausting, and it took me a few years to figure out why because, you know, I gave it my all, but I was so exhausted afterwards, it would take me the whole next day to recover.

Juli: [00:22:40] Yeah, exactly.

Eve: [00:22:41] And other people get energy from that. And we were sucked dry, right. So…

Juli: [00:22:48] Yes, but I think it’s an important point to say that these projects, this work that we do, it requires people with incredible passion and energy and commitment and perseverance to lift such hard things and believe in them for so long. And part of the reason I stand in my two feet and come and be present all the time is because I do see how many people are moved by it. And one by one we turn minds and hearts and I just keep telling others, you can do it too. Please do it.

Eve: [00:23:17] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Juli: [00:23:18] So I can take a nap.

Eve: [00:23:19] Yeah. No, I feel exactly the same way. So, the big question is, and we know the answer, is this kind of real estate development harder than developing a market rate building?

Juli: [00:23:32] Isn’t that hysterical? It’s a hysterical question.

Eve: [00:23:35] But it’s an important one because, you know, sometimes it’s actually really hard to get to that magical 21% internal rate of return that, you know, deep pocketed investors are looking for. That’s hard.

Juli: [00:23:45] Never get to that. Never get to that. But I guess I will say in fairness, I don’t think I’ve ever done a traditional real estate development. So, what do I know how hard they are? What came to mind to me right now is like what people say to you when they haven’t had children, and then once they have children, they’re like, I had no idea.

Eve: [00:24:02] It’s true.

Juli: [00:24:02] Traditional development is really hard. I get it. I’m sure that it is. Now layer on all these other things and try and do it. You’re really just trying to change systems in this kind of work, and I think people can all understand how hard that is. And what for me at this point in midlife is difficult, is looking backwards and thinking, wow, so many of these things have been amazing. And then while I’ve been doing them, I’ve felt so proud, and I’ve seen the impact. And yet at the same time, it’s crushing to see how little the world has changed.

Eve: [00:24:34] Completely crushing.

Juli: [00:24:36] That’s where I have to look to the next generation for hope and inspiration, because I’m short of it. I feel like I do feel proud of what I’ve accomplished. Yet, I’m just so dismayed at how little progress as a society we’ve made and.

Eve: [00:24:49] We actually seem to have stood still. I think we’re working in this little corner of it, and it feels like progress. But then when I look outside this little corner, I realize there really isn’t any progress at all and that is, it is crushing.

Juli: [00:25:01] Yes, the end. Thank you for coming to our depressing podcast.

Eve: [00:25:06] Well, if you’re going to listen to two women developers, this is what you get.

Juli: [00:25:11] Reality sucks. We’re in it.

Eve: [00:25:14] Yes. My first really significant project downtown. When I went to the first banker, I approached, I got, oh, honey, no one’s going to live downtown. And that was, that just motivated me to go to the next one.

Juli: [00:25:28] Right. I mean, I do think, like, there’s a point at which it motivates you, right Because we’re so wired to not take no for an answer because we can see the vision. And I think that’s the power of continuing to do the work, is helping others continue to see that there is an alternative. It’s like when we had the first Black president in the United States. I know how meaningful that is. One of my other favorite projects we didn’t talk about is called the Sherman Phoenix. What happened in Milwaukee was police shot a Black man, there was an uprising. A ton of buildings got burnt down. One was a bank, and me, together with co developers, redeveloped that into a hub for 30 black owned businesses. All to say, I now get to lead tours where all kinds of folks, not just Black people, come and walk and say, and you can literally see the tears in their eyes saying, I’ve never seen a place like this in my world. And these are Milwaukeeans who live in predominantly Black neighborhoods, who have never seen a marketplace where the business owners and the building owners look like them. And it is literally transformative.

Eve: [00:26:30] That’s really fabulous.

Juli: [00:26:31] Yeah,

Eve: [00:26:32] Will you conduct an Eve Picker podcast tour?

Juli: [00:26:36] Yes.

Eve: [00:26:37] For all our listeners, that’s really fabulous.

Juli: [00:26:39] Of course.

Eve: [00:26:39] So, then how do people perceive you and how do they respond to the work that you do?

Juli: [00:26:44] I think you have to ask them, right? My sense of it is people like you and I have fans and haters, I’m sure. I don’t know. I mean, you don’t get to this point in Systems Change work without ruffling a few traditional feathers. I speak truth to power all the time. It’s increasingly easier for me to do that in rooms where I look different than the audience I’m talking to because I have the power to do that. I try in every speech I now give to talk about my white privilege. I talk about white men, and it’s not an attack. It’s just a statement of reality that we need to keep saying out loud. I date a white man and sometimes I can see how uncomfortable he gets with that conversation. It’s not personal, it’s reality. And until you. When you’re the dominant paradigm, you don’t see it. You don’t see how it affects those of us who aren’t in it. So, I think that that makes people less comfortable with me sometimes. But certainly, I know that there’s plenty of people who view this work as inspirational and I hope that they’ll replicate it in their little corners of the world.

Eve: [00:27:52] Yes. So, I’ve heard you say that much of your work has less to do with construction and more to do with advancing social entrepreneurship and developing new models for social investing. What does that mean and how has that played out in your life?

Juli: [00:28:09] Yeah, I think really real estate is just the vehicle. You know, it’s a tool, but what’s really important is how we change. I don’t even like to say change the narrative, but actual change the reality of the corner of the world. It happens to be through brick and mortar, but the real power of the model starts with co-development. Teaching neighbors that this is a skill set and a power they have that they can access and that they can take control of in their own little corner of the world. That’s number one. Number two is that then you can imagine not only leading a project, but populating a project with your friends and neighbors who have brilliant ideas, who never had access.

Juli: [00:28:48] That guy down the street who makes this new thing he calls a spring roll, but that he bakes, not fries. And it has sweet potato and black beans in it because that culturally feels more acceptable, that idea is brilliant. And it doesn’t have to be that you go to a big bank and get a big loan, your neighbors can pull together and help you start that little business in this little building that’s on your main street. That’s all possible. And guess what? Those banks won’t finance it. Well, that’s great. You know why? Because we don’t want that kind of system oppressing us any further. Look what they’ve done to put us in this position. Let’s do it ourselves together and own this building. So, when I started, there weren’t mechanisms to self-fund and do it ourselves. I mean, learning how to do real estate was somewhat possible because I did it in places where nobody gave a crap, to be honest. And so, there were so many opportunities that we could just take.

Eve: [00:29:33] That’s exactly what I did. Yeah.

Juli: [00:29:35] Get buildings for free here, please take this building for free. And then, oh, no, only a crazy person would do that. And then, right. You know.

Eve: [00:29:43] Oh I know exactly.

Juli: [00:29:44] And then you do it. But then you feel so proud because you did it together and you have this amazing thing that exists in it and it’s a powerful beacon. When we started, there wasn’t sort of a mechanism, there wasn’t crowdfunding, there weren’t crowdfunding laws, believe it or not. I mean, the Internet did exist, but not much more. So, we formed a group called Fund Milwaukee, which in many ways is a precursor to what you have as Small Change or many other platforms that aren’t real estate focused now. But we just looked to a lot of local living economies across the state and country and said, how are you pulling your assets and resources as neighbors to get things to happen? And we built off of that. So, we built our own little micro funding mechanism in Milwaukee. It’s now been supplanted mostly by some of these platforms, but it still works because we’re all volunteers, so we don’t layer on any fees which any platform needs to survive.

Eve: [00:30:37] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Juli: [00:30:39] You can’t do this for free forever, even though we do a lot of it for free. And then it’s because people give to people, right? And so, people like us, who don’t look like the power structure, who don’t have the right language, come to a safe environment and say, I have this idea. I don’t even know how to put it into a business plan. It’s a group that wraps around and helps and says, here’s why this might work or here’s why it wouldn’t. We’re not going to reject you because you didn’t have a good business plan. We’re going to help you. It’s a supportive environment. So, all of that is meaningful and has impact. And at the end of the day, yes, there’s a building, but what we’re left with is people whose lives have been changed and whose skill set has been expanded. And that can be adapted and replicated and expanded in their families and in their neighborhoods and in wherever they go next. And that’s intrinsic wealth.

Eve: [00:31:25] And that’s an amazing legacy to leave behind, which is only, because you’re pretty young, it’s only going to get better. It’s pretty fabulous.

Juli: [00:31:34] I’m pretty young. I’m trying to retire soon.

Eve: [00:31:38] That’s young. It’s just a state of mind.

Juli: [00:31:40] Fair enough, right. I need another lifetime to hike for a while away from everybody.

Eve: [00:31:46] Yes. So, I have one last question. And that’s what keeps you up at night?

Juli: [00:31:51] You know, it’s what we touched on earlier. It’s not anything specific to my projects. It’s specific to the world. And, you know, will we survive climate change? Will my kids survive climate change and wealth inequality? Those are the two main disparities that I see just getting worse. And I am very scared that we’re not substantively making progress in the right direction. I see, there’s very few women world leaders, and I think it matters when we have them and they’re stepping aside because they’re exhausted from the work. And I think we need more people with bold and just profoundly transformative disruptions at this point.

Eve: [00:32:31] Yes, the New Zealand prime minister stepped aside, which was really sad for exactly that reason. Yeah.

Juli: [00:32:37] So, I hope, I want to stay hopeful, but I have to say it’s hard to see how we get to the other side of wealth inequality and climate change. And those are the two things that I think really are spiraling us out of control these days.

Eve: [00:32:51] Yeah, well, I want to believe that there’s a lot of people like us out there squirreling away in their little corner, making things happen because, you know, there’s got to be, right. I wish I lived in your little corner of Milwaukee. It sounds fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me today. It’s a great conversation and I want to come visit.

Juli: [00:33:13] Well, thank you and thank you for Small Change. We are raising for my projects on your platform, and it’s been an incredible vehicle to do that and it’s transformative in the work that I do to have platforms that advocate the same values. So, thank you.

Eve: [00:33:46] I hope you enjoyed today’s guest and our deep dive. You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at RethinkRealEstateforGood.co. There’s lots to listen to there. You can support this podcast by sharing it with others, posting about it on social media or leaving a rating and review. To catch all the latest from me you can follow me on LinkedIn. Even better, if you’re ready to dabble in some impact investing yourself head on over to wefunder.com/smallchange where you can invest directly in Small Change and our mission to democratize capital formation to create impact in commercial real estate development. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music, and a big thanks to you for spending your time with me today. We’ll talk again soon. But for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

Image courtesy of Juli Kaufmann

Ready. Set. Homes.

March 22, 2023

Necessity is the mother of invention.

In 2019, Dafna Kaplan embarked upon an investigative journey to uncover the obstacles preventing true construction innovation from widespread adoption. Extensive research and development led to the launch of Cassette, an integrated product and service model with an innovative delivery approach.

In 2022, Cassette introduced a beautifully designed one-bedroom apartment pod that can stack up to six stories high into a multifamily development. And their first order for 200 pods came in.

The company’s commitment is simple and straightforward: Deliver one manufactured product exceptionally well, improve that product’s performance and features over time, and with that discipline and repetition – reverse the cost escalation in housing construction.

Dafna is a recognized futurist and design influencer, with a vast and varied career spanning two industries: consumer product tech and construction. Her past roles have included VP Marketing at MATT Construction where her leadership helped the company achieve over 300% revenue growth and senior roles in several rapid-growth organizations, from Inc. 500 startups to mid-size ($500M) companies. In 2017, she co-founded a live entertainment company, HATCH Escapes, before exiting the role with 30% return on investment in 12 months. Between 2009-11, she launched successful products for high-net-worth clients and influencers, including Marley Coffee and the Johnny Carson Digital Archives. And there is more!

Dafna has been a board member and advisor to several organizations, including American Institute of Architects Los Angeles, Western Museums Association, HATCH Escapes, Consumer Electronics Association, Urban Land Institute Los Angeles, the Consumer Electronics Association accessories division, and A+D Museum, among others. She completed an MBA at UCLA Anderson School, where she graduated top of the class with honors, and completed her BA at the University of Oregon.

In 2020, Dafna received the Presidential Award from the Los Angeles Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) for her work at Cassette, addressing the housing crisis.

Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:09] Hi there. Thanks for joining me on Rethink Real Estate for Good. I’m Eve Picker and I’m on a mission to make real estate work for everyone. I love real estate. Real estate makes places good or bad, rich or poor, beautiful or not. In this show, I’m interviewing the disruptors, those creative thinkers and doers that are shrugging off the status quo in order to build better for everyone. And speaking of building better, I’m very excited to share that my company, Small Change, is now raising capital through a community round that is open to the public. Small Change is a leading equity crowdfunding platform for impact investment in real estate. For as little as $250, anyone 18 and over can invest in Small Change, helping to fuel our growth as we disrupt the old boys club of capital that routinely ignores so many qualified people and projects. Please visit wefunder.com/smallchange to review the full details of our raise and to make an investment if you can. And remember, investing is risky. Don’t invest more than you can afford to lose.

Eve: [00:01:43] Necessity is the mother of invention. In 2019, Dafna Kaplan embarked upon a journey to uncover the obstacles preventing true construction innovation from widespread adoption. Extensive research and development led her to launch Cassette. In 2022, Cassette introduced a beautifully designed one-bedroom apartment pod that can stack up to six stories high into a multifamily development. Dafna’s commitment is simple and straightforward. Deliver one manufactured product exceptionally well, improve that product’s performance and features over time, and with that discipline and repetition, reverse the cost escalation in housing construction. In 2020, Dafna received the Presidential award from the Los Angeles chapter of the American Institute of Architects for her work at Cassette, addressing the housing crisis. Listen in to be inspired. 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: [00:03:12] Hi, Dafna. I’m really excited to talk with you today. Thanks so much for joining me.

Dafna Kaplan: [00:03:17] Thank you. I’m excited to be here, Eve.

Eve: [00:03:20] The tagline on your website says, Accelerating construction, 1000 homes at a time. Tell me about that.

Dafna: [00:03:30] Sure. Actually, I appreciate you reminding me what it says. It’s been a long time since I’ve been on my own website.

Eve: [00:03:37] That’s a great tagline.

Dafna: [00:03:39] It’s really connected to, in some ways, how we started the business which was this observation that there was a lot of interest in construction, especially in housing, toward utilizing what we know works in manufacturing. So, there’s a lot of adoption of prefabrication and manufacturing construction in the form of things like what we do, modular. But there’s also this, what seemed to be a lack of understanding in the real estate and construction world, that part of what really makes manufacturing efficient is this ability to run at scale. And so, while your project might be 15 units of housing or even 100 units of housing, when you’re thinking about efficiencies that come from manufacturing, it’s really in the thousands or it needs to be thought about in the thousands to really capture the efficiency and more important, the process improvement that you get from doing the same thing over and over and over again.

Eve: [00:04:42] That makes sense. Although, you know, it’s the same problem with the missing middle housing, right? That’s almost too small to build efficiently, which is why there’s so little of it. You know, tell me about the company. When did you found it? How young is it?

Dafna: [00:04:58] Yeah, sure. And as long as you get back to that missing middle, because that’s a big part of, I think, why we’re doing that.

Eve: [00:05:03] Oh, we can get back to it right now. Go ahead.

Dafna: [00:05:06] Okay. Yes, I agree. Most of those projects are too small to gain any kind of efficiency. But that is part of the purpose of how we’re looking at the business of creating the housing as a product and at least a componentized part of that project that we could repeat over, say, 100 different projects, so that your project of maybe ten units, at least half of the cost of your project might be able to be encapsulated in this manufactured item that is getting cheaper over time, like your television set, as opposed to getting more expensive every year. And so, if we can capture a big chunk of your project and then aggregate that savings for a bunch of developers like you, then we have the potential at scale to really reduce the cost of housing.

Eve: [00:05:55] That makes a lot of sense. So, how long have you been in business?

Dafna: [00:06:01] So, in business, we actually formed and raised a little bit of friend and family capital to launch in early 2020, concurrent with the pandemic launching.

Eve: [00:06:10] Perfect timing.

Dafna: [00:06:13] And that set in motion a beautiful series of pivots that that I’d say every founder launches at the wrong time for some reason or another and at the right time for some reason or another. So, we formed the business. And as soon as the pandemic hit, we saw it as an opportunity to do two things. One, to start just consulting and taking everything, we had learned and understood about modular housing and modular construction and start doing feasibility studies for developers. While we were doubling down on our actual product design and engineering. So, we spent the last couple of years really focused on designing a best-in-class structural system that could go together very quickly on site and could be very easy to understand for the trades that have to interface with that object when it comes to the site to get the design finished. So, we launched that product, which is not only a structural system, it’s an entire finished one-bedroom apartment. This one designed by Hodgetts and Fung, an incredible design duo in California, and we launched that in late October last year.

Eve: [00:07:22] So, it took a while. Yeah, I saw the first Cassette Home you rolled out, the pod, and it’s absolutely gorgeous. I want to move right in.

Dafna: [00:07:32] Thank you. Same here.

Eve: [00:07:33] I’m wondering where you’re shipping it to at this point. Let’s start with how big it is and what it looks like finishes and windows and.

Dafna: [00:07:41] Yeah. So, as I mentioned, it was designed by a duo in California named Hodgetts and Fung, Craig Hodgetts and Ming Fung. They’re pretty well-known architects, but they have a lesser known history in industrial design. They actually had two modular patents, so unbeknownst to us before we met up and started chatting with them about a year ago, they’d been passionate about this idea of industrializing great design and we sort of landed on this idea and an alignment that just like, Target in the nineties, hired Michael Graves, a famous architect, to design your teapot for 20 bucks. Right? If you can really leverage manufacturing to do this at scale, there’s no reason you can’t have great design. And so, they took this roughly 600 square foot structure that we had, and they really made it sing from a livability standpoint. If you had 600 feet, that was about fourteen and a half feet wide and 43 feet long to live in, what would be the best version of that to live in?

Eve: [00:08:48] And so, what is the best version of that? Just how would you describe it?

Dafna: [00:08:52] Well, because of the structure, one of the real benefits of this unit is that we have a wall-to-wall window system on the front of the unit. So, about a 14 foot wide floor to ceiling window system. And on most applications that will be a window system with a couple of operable windows. A developer does have the option to get a sliding door system and to hang a balcony off of that unit.

Eve: [00:09:16] Right.

Dafna: [00:09:16] That’s sort of the… you see it the moment you walk in the door, you see that the end of the unit is just this giant, beautiful opening.

Eve: [00:09:24] It always makes space feel so much bigger when there’s light.

Dafna: [00:09:28] Yeah, and then a gorgeous sort of compact but luxurious cooking kitchen because both Ming and I love to cook, and I think a kitchen makes a great home. And then between the bathroom, which is immediately off the door and the living room is a bedroom that completely opens up with a three panel Hafele slider door. And the thinking behind that was that 80% of renters are one and two person households. We imagine that most of the time that bedroom would be open. And so, why make it a small door? Why not just open that entire wall so that your hallway doesn’t feel like a hallway?

Eve: [00:10:08] Nice. And again, anyone who’s listening, you should go check it out because it really is gorgeous. So, it’s a pod and how can it be used? You talked about, you know, someone who might use ten of them. I mean, how can it be put together?

Dafna: [00:10:24] Yeah, the design of the unit was really made for the business-to-business market. It was made for a real estate developer of any size who wants to deliver housing really quickly, to be able to stack it up to six stories high in multiple kinds of configurations. The constraints are really how it connects, which is at the corners. So, it is a bit rigorous in terms of a grid, but you could do a building with a single loaded corridor on the outside or you could do, if you have enough space, they’re long units, you could do a double loaded. And the unit comes with the structural support brackets to hold up that corridor or to hold up a balcony on the other side.

Eve: [00:11:06] So if someone purchases like ten of these units and they’re going to make a five-story building with two units on each floor, do they build the common areas and then these pods slot in? Or do you provide, or are you hoping to provide staircase pods as well?

Dafna: [00:11:27] Someday we would provide the staircase pods. At this point, I think what our interest is, how can you make a product that is the same every time so that as we discussed, what is the minimum chunk of a building you could replicate and not have it changed between buildings. And so, often the common areas and the stairs and the, say the amenity spaces, are the things you really want to customize. But there’s only so many ways to design a 600 square foot apartment. And most architects will accept that because we hired a great architect to design the inside of that, they don’t need to revisit that. And so, we are only going to prescribe the apartment part and then give you multiple options for how you can configure that as an architect on the site.

Eve: [00:12:15] That makes a lot more sense.

Dafna: [00:12:17] Yes, you will have to add the corridors. Yes, you’ll have to add a staircase. There are many miscellaneous metals companies that will prefab a stair pod. That’s not something that you need a special thing to do.

Eve: [00:12:28] Right, fascinating.

Dafna: [00:12:31] To help visualize the way they connect together. They don’t slide in; they actually stack like Lego bricks. So, the beauty of our particular system and the way we designed it and the benefit of those two years in a pandemic, is that we got ourselves to a system where you don’t even need to weld it or bolt it together. It literally just stacks on top of each other until you’re at the top of the building. And then we tension a cable down the columns. It’s a vertically post tension connection.

Eve: [00:13:00] I’m going to ask questions I hadn’t planned now because I’m wondering what that’s like to get through building, permitting, and if that’s going to vary from state to state. Where are you targeting as your, for your rollout?

Dafna: [00:13:13] Yeah, we are based in California, and while it may have been easier to design a system for Texas or for any other place in the country, housing is not only deeply needed in California, it’s the entire West Coast. And what makes the West Coast difficult for modular structurally is the seismic, just the seismicity of the West Coast. And so, we felt like the greatest need was here and steel construction and specifically post tension construction, the way we’ve done it, it’s beneficial in a seismic zone if you can get it right. It’s tricky. But we have designed this particular product to be able to stack up to six stories with no external bracing, which is very unusual, especially for a modular project and one of that height. And so, it can go together very rapidly in a seismic zone. You could use the same product in a different state. We likely just wouldn’t need all of the columns, if that makes sense.

Eve: [00:14:16] Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dafna: [00:14:17] Right now there’s eight columns per unit. You probably will only need to connect the corner columns in a state that doesn’t have the same seismicity.

Eve: [00:14:26] That makes a lot of sense. But are you focused on California is your market for now.

Dafna: [00:14:32] It’s our launch market. We’re focused anywhere on the West Coast. And you are right in that modular is permitted differently in every state, but most states permit modular at the state level rather than for a small municipality. And so, the benefit is the same product we’re using in Los Angeles we can use anywhere in California. And it’s permitted through private agencies in our case, which is also the case, and I think more than 40 states, where the state farms it out to private agencies to really specialize in this manufactured housing division.

Eve: [00:15:09] Interesting. I have to ask, why 600 square feet?

Dafna: [00:15:14] Oh, it’s a great question. It’s really driven by the dimensions that would make the cost and constructability and shipping logistics most efficient in our minds. That is something that changes from state to state and from highway to highway because different roads have different regulations, even within the same state. Different highways allow different widths on the trailer for different costs. So, ours was driven around this, for us, it’s like, how do we get the 80% or 90%? And what we decided was to keep it under 15 feet wide, even with all of the wrapping and the tarp on a truck, and to keep it at a length that was kind of just in that sweet spot where there’s the greatest number of trucks available. They certainly can drive a 75-foot module on a truck. And there are a lot of wood modular companies that are doing 75 feet long so that they can get two apartments in one with the corridor. That restricts the type of building you can design, but it also does make the logistics quite challenging.

Eve: [00:16:25] Oh yeah, I imagine, yeah. 75 is long.

Dafna: [00:16:27] And while there are trucks that can do that, there’s only so many and you run out of them. And so, you don’t want your project being a slave to what the shipping industry has available. We wanted it to be something that could ship on the most widely available fleets. And so, that’s how we landed. And we wanted a livable space. We didn’t want an eight-foot-wide container home. In our minds, that’s not a livable space for most people.

Eve: [00:16:54] Right. So, you just launched. Do you have customers yet?

Dafna: [00:16:59] We do. We’re very fortunate. So, we launched the product, but we had already been working with a few developers and we’ve, both Nick and I, have been in the industry quite a while, so we’re fortunate to have a lot of goodwill. We have a signed letter of intent from a woman owned developer.

Eve: [00:17:18] Yay!

Dafna: [00:17:18] To do 200 plus units of workforce housing in the, not north of Los Angeles, but in LA County, in a city called Lancaster. And so, we’re just in the early stages of conceptualizing. It’s a ten-acre site, so we’re in the early stages of conceptualizing how that lays out.

Eve: [00:17:38] It’s a great first LOI to have. Congratulations.

Dafna: [00:17:42] Thank you.

Eve: [00:17:43] So, what’s your goal for 2023 and two years from now and five years from now? How do you get to the 1000 homes at a time? I suppose with five of those projects, right, and you’re done.

Dafna: [00:17:55] I would love to be serving projects of all size. I would love for more infill developers with ten units to understand that they can get the benefit of this, whereas they may not be able to get the benefit of most modular because you need a bigger scale or a bigger order. But by ordering a product that a company like Cassette has already prototyped has already put the R&D into, you don’t need to add that to your pro forma. And so, maybe now it pencils for you and maybe now we can scale that and make an impact across the industry with that as a product, as opposed to being a custom fab shop that kind of starts from zero every time.

Eve: [00:18:36] Interesting. So, I did talk to you once before and I was sort of really interested by the statement that you made that your hope is that eventually they will, costs will go down for each Cassette, not up.

Dafna: [00:18:50] Absolutely.

Eve: [00:18:50] So, let’s talk a little bit about that.

Dafna: [00:18:52] Yeah, I mean, why else would we do this, right?

Eve: [00:18:56] To make a lot of money. Not to bring costs down.

Dafna: [00:19:01] Yeah. I mean, making money is important, but there’s certainly easier ways to make money than starting a really complicated business. So, I could have stayed in an executive job. I could have done that. You know, life is precious. And I think a lot of us get to a certain point in life where we try to align the things that we know how to do and make money with the things that really matter. And that moment sort of came from me and my ability to think through that sort of came a few years ago, and that’s how that came about. All of a sudden, I forgot your question.

Eve: [00:19:34] You know, I suppose it’s how do you differentiate yourself in the marketplace? But also, I remember you saying that your ultimate goal was to drive the cost of each pod down.

Dafna: [00:19:44] Yeah.

Eve: [00:19:45] Purely because you’re not offering customized options.

Dafna: [00:19:49] Yeah, it gets down to a few years ago when I was leaning into industrialized construction. It wasn’t just because it was the hot new thing. It was because I had spent ten years in the manufacturing sector before I was in architecture and construction. And what I saw happening in prefab was not really manufacturing. And now there’s such an interest both from cities and the investment community in what prefabrication can do, because there’s this thought that, wow, manufacturing gets cheaper every year, right? We get better and better. We are so far advanced in manufacturing in terms of productivity improvement, that it is basically at the top of all other industries when it comes to productivity gains per year. And construction is pretty much dead last on that list. And in fact, we’ve probably lost productivity in the last 20 years for a lot of reasons, some of them good reasons for safety reasons, but some of them not so good reasons.

Dafna: [00:20:53] So, there’s this sort of understanding that there’s an inevitability around industrializing this construction industry yet, I think. You know, manufacturing is a really complex business, especially complex manufacturing, which would be more like automotive or aerospace. It’s not like manufacturing, say, a widget that has one plastic tooling form and then you amortize that form like we’re making plastic cups. It’s like, you have 50 different subassemblies inside of this product that are sub assembled by different. Call it mechanical, electrical, plumbing, subassemblies, etc…

Dafna: [00:21:33] So, it’s complex manufacturing. Yet if you look since the thirties, complex manufacturing, it’s been measured that for every time you double the number of units you make, there is a constant savings and there is a curve of efficiency and savings associated. But that is when you’re doubling the same unit over and over. That is something that the way that most developers are buying modular construction, it’s still not happening. Even if you have 100 units in your building, that’s barely enough for a factory to start understanding how to build that product. And those savings, don’t, they do come a little bit from material aggregate, but Katara proved that just having big volume doesn’t get the cost down the way that process improvement actually gets the cost down. Which is the primary driver of cost savings, and manufacturing is this process improvement. So, we thought, okay, how do we create a process that really could be the same every time, all the way through installing the product? And so, that’s sort of the target. And the answer to your goal is I want to get this one product to 1000 and start to measure that curve. And what is that constant savings for every doubling? Because then we have a way of predicting how the cost will come down and then we have a reason to launch a second product and a third product.

Eve: [00:22:57] So, you also will have to probably, I’m assuming, scale your manufacturing operations. I don’t know where you’re manufacturing right now, but how do you expect that to change over the next few years as these numbers go up?

Dafna: [00:23:10] That’s exactly true. And so, the business was designed around scaling manufacturing from the start. And so, we actually have two agreements right now. We have two manufacturing hubs, and we’re bringing a third one online. And they’re in all in different places to have some diversification, to have scalability, but also have geographic diversification. Sort of, what’s best for this project? Where should these come from? And then building the back end, one of our goals in 2023 is starting to build what they call an ERP system in product where you start to really have control and data on every single material that goes into that product. And to be able to move that material and supply database across your different hubs of where you’re manufacturing it.

Eve: [00:24:03] Interesting. So where did the inspiration for this come from?

Dafna: [00:24:08] Oh, boy, I don’t think it was sort of a sudden inspiration. It was really more of a leaning in. It started with the hypothesis that manufacturing should work in construction, specifically around multifamily, because you have the ability to do the same thing over and over. It’s a lot harder in this country to do that with single family. That’s a whole other conversation, but I thought it should work. I’m going to lean into this, and for about a year I traveled around the world. I talked to different manufacturers, and not just of modular, but different forms of prefabrication, from CLT to panelized housing to volumetric. And in Asia, there’s a lot of volumetric that’s been going on for decades, actually. And I asked a lot of people in the US who’ve been doing these projects. And so, it was really a leaning in that led to just a lot of observations and questions. And one day I wrote a business plan. I thought, there’s something I see that I don’t think other people see. And as I started speaking about it, there were large companies and partners that were very interested right away in working with me.

Eve: [00:25:24] Another question I have is we know that buildings are responsible for probably about 40% of tainting our environment, our world. How does this process help, or does it help?

Dafna: [00:25:36] Yeah. I mean, that’s one of the most exciting parts about this, is that construction is also one of the most wasteful industries.

Eve: [00:25:44] Very wasteful.

Dafna: [00:25:45] When you think about things that are thrown in a landfill and a dumpster.

Eve: [00:25:48] That’s beyond the 40% emission number, right?

Dafna: [00:25:51] Yeah. No, no, absolutely. So, from a sustainability perspective, there’s been some measurement. Obviously, I’m not big enough and don’t have the track record yet to start measuring our specific business around it. But the early studies, at least in the UK and I think now in Canada have shown something like 70% less carbon emissions just from less trucks to the site.

Eve: [00:26:15] That’s what I was going to say. You’ve got one truck run instead of like probably hundreds, right?

Dafna: [00:26:20] I believe you have to be really honest and say, okay, well then you also have to measure trucks to your manufacturing hub. And so, people get very concerned about having a manufacturing site maybe where they think it should be. But what I would say from a sustainability perspective is the biggest thing you want to make sure is that all the suppliers are in close proximity to that manufacturing hub. So, and we have a manufacturing hub in Korea. We have a partner in Singapore. We’re working on a couple in North America right now. But the bigger important piece of that is designing the product and supply chain that goes into that manufacturing and making sure that that doesn’t have a big distance to travel and that that’s a sustainable material. If you’re doing it to really be sustainable rather than to just get points on a board, it makes you think about a lot of different things. And it’s one of the things I think we’re most excited to start measuring from day one is, how do we benchmark our carbon emissions and then over time, how do we improve that?

Eve: [00:27:24] Yes, fascinating. So, what’s standing in the way of producing housing like this? What’s making it harder for you? Or harder than it should be?

Dafna: [00:27:36] Yeah, harder for us versus harder for the industry may be two different things. I mean, we are, like a lot of women owned businesses.

Eve: [00:27:44] Oh, well, that’s hard right there.

Dafna: [00:27:46] Yeah. That started in a pandemic. I’m not complaining, but we’ve bootstrapped and that’s just a slow process. You know, maybe it’s my optimism. I don’t think things are standing in our way. I think there’s a lot of capital markets that don’t understand how to calculate a risk of something that’s very new. And so that’s not just me, that’s the modular industry facing industries like banking and insurance that are not incentivized to take risks, right. So, changing things in that industry usually takes a crazy amount of capital to be able to guarantee loans and those things. So, that’s one of the obstacles to the industry. But it’s softening. And then what I would say is the bigger obstacle, and this is the less talked about obstacle, is this culture of custom start from scratch. And even a lot of architects are looking at prefabrication and saying, Oh, I want mass customization. And what I would say is, well, you haven’t even figured out how to make the industrialization work. Great, let’s get to mass customization. I love that.

Dafna: [00:28:49] I was, the contractor I worked for, built the Broad Museum and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and every kind of iconic, like one off unique thing and using 3D technology, and it’s all great. But that’s not where construction started and that’s not where prefab or modular needs to start. We need to start by understanding that when I build a project as a developer and a general contractor, my typical process involves 80 different stakeholders down the chain, from the lender to the plumber on site to the neighborhood to the permitting agency. There’s a lot of people involved in this process. And the crazy part about what we do, is that every time you develop a new project, you change all 80 of those entities, or maybe like 75 of them are different every time. And so, if you’re going to say like I do, that cost savings over time comes from process improvement, how in the heck is that going to happen when you have a different 80 companies doing that process every time?

Eve: [00:29:54] Right.

Dafna: [00:29:55] And so, I’m trying to sort of cordon off this 50 to 70% of what you’re doing to make sure we can have a repeatable process for you. But what that means for everybody else is that I need to make sure that my product is actually created in a way that’s simple enough that I can teach it to a very fragmented industry, and they can quickly get it every time. So, I think one of the obstacles is this sort of desire to customize everything and not really respect and understand the investment that goes into creating a product in a manufacturing environment. But I do believe that just by showing the industry that a beautiful product can be created and it has a fixed price, and you could actually know exactly what you’re getting for the price you’re getting it, which is unheard of in construction, that developers will buy that. If you build it, they will come. And that’s what we’re starting to experience and it’s, hopefully that will be transformative in the industry when that starts to happen.

Eve: [00:31:00] Well, I feel like I’ve missed some question somewhere. Is there anything else you want to tell us? It’s a fascinating business.

Dafna: [00:31:07] I feel like I’ve been talking too much, and I’d like to know more about you, actually.

Eve: [00:31:12] Well, that’s not what this is about, but we can talk about that later. It’s really fascinating. What’s next for you? I mean, what do you have to do over the next three months to keep this going and keep building it?

Dafna: [00:31:25] Yeah, well, we’re set on executing perfectly, right? I mean, there’s a lot of people that want to get a lot of projects. I want to get our first project in the ground and have the project work the way we’ve promised and to keep our word and to measure it. And we’re fortunate enough to have at least one customer that wants to move forward and work with this system. And I think our job is to just execute well. So, that’s my goal. I believe everything else falls into place from that.

Eve: [00:31:54] Well, I can’t wait to see it. Thank you very much for joining me. It sounds fantastic.

Dafna: [00:31:59] Thank you, Eve.

Eve: [00:32:18] I hope you enjoyed today’s guest and our deep dive. You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at RethinkRealEstateforGood.co. There’s lots to listen to there. You can support this podcast by sharing it with others, posting about it on social media or leaving a rating and review. To catch all the latest from me you can follow me on LinkedIn. Even better, if you’re ready to dabble in some impact investing yourself head on over to wefunder.com/smallchange where you can invest directly in Small Change and our mission to democratize capital formation to create impact in commercial real estate development. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music, and a big thanks to you for spending your time with me today. We’ll talk again soon. But for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

Image courtesy of Dafna Kaplan

Disability Forward Housing.

March 8, 2023

Micaela Connery is co-founder and CEO of The Kelsey, a San Francisco–based nonprofit that co-develops accessible, affordable, inclusive multifamily housing, advocates for policy changes that promote inclusive practices, and provides tools and templates for others who want to build housing based on its model.

Since founding The Kelsey in 2017, Connery has secured more than $120 million in funding to pilot programming in existing units in Oakland and to finance new buildings in two of the nation’s most challenging housing markets—San Jose and San Francisco. She also oversees strategic planning across program areas, including housing development, field building, and community and political advocacy.

Connery’s lifelong advocacy for people with disabilities stems from her relationship with her late cousin and close friend, Kelsey Flynn O’Connor. The Kelsey co-founder and chief inspiration for the organization, O’Connor lived with multiple disabilities. As the two grew up together, Connery saw firsthand the obstacles many disabled people face in accessing the same resources as their nondisabled peers. Determined to work on solutions, Connery realized there was no cohesive model for housing that would allow people like her cousin to live independently in a mixed community, so she set out to build one.

The Kelsey’s model for accessible, affordable, inclusive communities allows disabled and nondisabled people with a wide range of incomes, needs, and life experiences to live side by side in equally high-quality homes. Locations are chosen for their proximity to jobs, community, culture, services, and transit, while architecture and engineering go beyond building code requirements to implement universal design. In addition, thoughtful but optional community outreach programs foster interaction, understanding, and connectedness, leading to mutual support and a sense of belonging.

Connery is proudest of the role The Kelsey plays in shifting the narrative of what disability-forward housing looks like. The Kelsey is spearheading a movement for equity co-led by people with disabilities—voices that should have been at the forefront a long time ago. Connery envisions a world where inclusive housing is the norm and people with disabilities have true options for community-based living. She believes The Kelsey’s work will show that everyone is better served by design choices that include disabled people. Prior to founding The Kelsey, Connery published leading research as a fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. Her findings identified what became the core elements of The Kelsey’s design and programming principles. Before that, she served for 12 years as CEO of United Theater, a nonprofit organization she founded at age 15 to foster inclusion and leadership among disabled and nondisabled students through the arts.

Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:10] Hi there. Thanks for joining me on Rethink Real Estate for Good. I’m Eve Picker and I’m on a mission to make real estate work for everyone. I love real estate. Real estate makes places good or bad, rich or poor, beautiful or not. In this show, I’m interviewing the disruptors, those creative thinkers and doers that are shrugging off the status quo in order to build better for everyone. And speaking of building better, I’m very excited to share that my company, Small Change, is now raising capital through a community round that is open to the public. Small Change is a leading equity crowdfunding platform for impact investment in real estate. For as little as $250, anyone 18 and over can invest in Small Change, helping to fuel our growth as we disrupt the old boys club of capital that routinely ignores so many qualified people and projects. Please visit Wefunder.com/smallchange to review the full details of our raise and to make an investment if you can. And remember, investing is risky. Don’t invest more than you can afford to lose.

Eve: [00:01:51] Michaela Connery is co-founder and CEO of the Kelsey, a non-profit focused on inclusive housing for people with disabilities. Michaela’s lifelong advocacy grew out of her relationship with a late cousin and close friend, Kelsey Flynn O’Connor, who lived with multiple disabilities. As the two grew up together, Connery saw firsthand the obstacles many disabled people face in accessing the same resources as their non-disabled peers. Determined to work on solutions, Connery realized that there was no cohesive model for housing that would allow people like her cousin to live independently in a mixed community. So, she set out to build one. Since founding the Kelsey in 2017, Connery has secured more than 120 million in funding to pilot programming in existing units and to finance new buildings in two of the nation’s most challenging housing markets, San Jose and San Francisco. You’ll want to hear more.

Eve: [00:03:08] 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: [00:03:32] Hello Michaela. I’m really excited to talk with you today.

Micaela Connery: [00:03:35] Thanks for having me. Excited to chat with you too and share more.

Eve: [00:03:40] So, let’s start with this. What is The Kelsey?

Micaela: [00:03:44] Yeah. So, The Kelsey is an organization that both advocates for and develops disability forward housing that’s affordable, accessible and inclusive. We are a not-for-profit based in San Francisco, working both in the Bay Area but also nationally. Our work began with Kelsey, our co-founder, who was a disabled advocate and my cousin, and can share more on that. And yeah, our mission is really to address what we see as both a really critical but too often overlooked housing need of people with disabilities. 1 in 4 Americans who live with a disability, addressing their housing need, and also recognizing that building housing that meets that need, that’s affordable, accessible and inclusive actually just makes better housing and communities for all people.

Eve: [00:04:35] It does. So, let’s go back and tell me why you started it. Like, take me on the journey.

Micaela: [00:04:40] Yeah. So, as I mentioned, my co-founder and my cousin and dear friend Kelsey, she and I really grew up together and, you know, went through every life milestone together and through all of those, you know, experienced, you know, access and inclusion or in some cases, lack of access and inclusion through really all life stages. And, you know, whether that was at our schools or in summer camps or church or recreational stuff or travel. And so, that was just a part of our lives and how we saw the world. And when we were both in our 20s, similarly, life milestones going through at the same time. We were both, you know, in that phase of life where we were looking to move out of our parents’ home, and Kelsey didn’t use verbal language to communicate, she used modified signs. But she made it very clear that she was ready to move out on her own. And the options were just incredibly lacking and limited for her and particularly lacking the option for integrated, community based, inclusive housing where she could live not only with other people with disabilities, but in real community, with people of all backgrounds and disability.

Micaela: [00:05:52] And, you know, recognized really quickly that what I thought might have been a unique issue to Kelsey based on her level of support need and where she lived was not unique to her at all. And in fact, Kelsey was an example of a much larger systemic issue of a lack of housing for people with disabilities. We had affirmed in this country through a lot of policies and rights-based work, the right of people with disabilities to live in the community of their choice and can talk more about what those policies are. But that that right was 100% not made a reality and that it was particularly acute for people in lower income communities and communities of color. And so, that led me to go on this journey to first understand like, what was this problem, who was solving it, what was the system around it that I could plug into and be a part of solutions and ultimately realize that solution didn’t exist and created that within the Kelsey.

Eve: [00:06:49] Wow. So, can you talk about some of the biggest issues you saw her struggle with? I mean, what were the reasons why it was so difficult to find housing?

Micaela: [00:06:58] Yeah, this is something that I really looked to investigate right off the bat, both as it related to Kelsey, but also as it related to like disability housing more broadly. Because one of the things that was really clear once I started to both, you know, with Kelsey and her family, but also talking to other people with disabilities, is that nobody kind of disagreed that there is a need for housing for people with disabilities. But, you know, it was hard to create some clear language around what that actually means. What is housing mean for people with disabilities? And that gets to your question around like what were the barriers and what I categorize and saw as the barriers, and this still informs our lens of our work today. I said earlier, affordable, accessible and inclusive. Those are our focus areas at the KELSEY, because those are the three barriers that we’re actually seeking to overcome in our model of both housing development and housing advocacy. And so, really what gets in the way of people with disabilities ability to live in community of their choice is one, a lack of affordability where folks with disabilities are disproportionately likely to be low and extremely low income. Our SSI system forces people to live in extreme poverty. So, those individuals, 4 million plus Americans who rely on SSI are at the lowest of incomes in our country. And other disabled people, you know, have other affordability considerations, not to mention just broadly in this country, we have an affordable housing need. So, the first barrier is really people couldn’t afford to live where they wanted to live. The second barrier then came that even in some cases if you solve for affordability, which was not being solved for, that then there was the gap in accessibility.

Micaela: [00:08:37] And accessibility we really define as anything to do with the built environment, so that even once people found housing, it wasn’t located in an accessible space, their unit wasn’t accessible to them, the amenities weren’t accessible, it didn’t meet their specific access needs and wasn’t designed for them. And then really the third barrier that came in had to do with inclusivity, which was really about the operations and the services that, you know, if you solve for one and two, that then still, and this was particularly true for Kelsey. Kelsey was somebody who used 24-hour support and care and that communities, you know, weren’t designed to be connected to the kind of services that, you know, Kelsey needed in her home, in the community. And that still, and we can have a long conversation about this, that still there’s a really, what I would say, unfortunate, if not dangerous sort of, you know, divide in saying, oh, people with disabilities use supportive services, those ones go to facilities and group homes. Like if you have less needs, then you can live in community-based housing. And we reject that concept. And really then it’s about how do you design communities where people with disabilities, regardless of the level of their support need, have access to integrated, diverse community with diverse neighbors and diverse experiences and within that community have access to the services they need to not just survive, but thrive there.

Eve: [00:10:03] Yeah, because disabilities come in all shapes and sizes, don’t they? Which makes it. And yeah, we have, I mean it’s already very difficult to build affordable housing, but to then be able to address all of the issues that need to be overcome, that must be an enormous project.

Micaela: [00:10:19] Yeah, well, you know, I think I would say yes to people with disabilities, you know, have diverse access needs and are a heterogeneous population. One size does not fit all. I would challenge a little bit that building disability forward housing has, you know, additional complexities by nature of the fact that disabled people have different needs because, you know, what we found is that actually if you just anchor on these access needs from the start, they’re just better design choices that for, you know, in 90% of times don’t actually bring additional costs to a project or make it any more difficult. It’s just shifting to have that consciousness, that access and disability is a natural part of the human experience, and we should be designing spaces that reflect that, you know, just like we would, you know, now it’s, you know, there are so many things that are standard around how we think about and develop housing and include within that, you know, access can be one of those things. It’s it’s a choice not to include that. And we would say it’s an opportunity to include that to create better spaces.

Eve: [00:11:23] Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. I think at least where I live, the zoning codes have required inclusion of accessible units in all sorts of projects and sometimes it doesn’t make sense. They can be really high-end projects and you’re required to set aside a certain number of accessible units which, you know, they might be available, they might not be available, they may not be affordable. It makes a lot more sense to address the entire building in some way.

Micaela: [00:11:53] Yeah. And we think that that’s the interesting thing about disability too, is that like, while I mentioned the affordability consideration, like and it is the case that, you know, many people with disabilities live on low and extremely low income. There are people with disabilities at all levels of income, including high income, workforce housing, you know, teachers, you know, direct service workers. There are disabled people at all levels. And so, we should be really thinking about how do we define and design housing of all types to include accessibility. The design principle that we’ve used at the Kelsey Air Station, which is our first community that’s under construction right now, is that 100% of our units are visitable and adaptable, meaning that if you are a person with disabilities, you can one visit any unit. So, because we would see communities where, you know, you couldn’t have a friend over if they used a wheelchair because they couldn’t get into your apartment. That’s a terrible way to build community.

Micaela: [00:12:48] So, that 100% of our units are visitable and adaptable, meaning a guest with disabilities could come in, enjoy dinner, use the restroom, you know, be in the unit, and then 100% of units are adaptable without, you know, skills or training that somebody could come in and adapt their unit to make it fully accessible for their needs. And then 25% of the units are specifically already adapted and designed with, you know, enhanced accessibility features. But like, all countertops are the same height. And I’m a very tall person, and I would tell you that that works. All the countertops are the same. All the widths and spaces and additional design features for access are included everywhere. Backing for grab bars are included everywhere. And that’s just.

Eve: [00:13:33] That’s basic, yeah.

Micaela: [00:13:34] It’s smart to do also from an efficiency and a turnover because you’re not saying, oh, like you have to go into that one unit or what if you have less or more or whatever it is. It’s just a, it’s a better, it’s better for disabled people, it’s better for owners and operators, and it’s better for future residents who could become disabled or have a disabled child or have a disabled guest. It’s just all across the board better.

Eve: [00:13:55] I’m sure you’ve made comparisons between these buildings that you’ve built following these procedures versus a regular building and what is the cost increase when you provide 100% adaptable units?

Micaela: [00:14:08] Yeah, so our community, I mean, we’re in the Bay Area, so cost is expensive to start with. But we have found if you compare our buildings to comparable projects, it is not like significantly more expensive. I don’t have a specific dollar amount to give you and that’s something that we once we’re finished with construction, we can probably give those numbers more directly. But that from our initial budgeting and estimating that we’ve done with all of our contractors and partners, it is not measurably more expensive to do these accessible projects than it would to do other kinds of projects. The cost comes in on accessibility when most people grumble about accessibility being more expensive, it’s because they didn’t do it from the beginning, and it’s incredibly expensive to retrofit.

Eve: [00:14:52] To retrofit yeah. Because you’ve got to have wide enough doors and you’ve got to have, you know, think about your hallways and everything from the beginning, right?

Micaela: [00:15:00] Yeah. But if you build that in, then it’s just in your cost. And our units are tighter. Our studios are at 490 our twos are around 700ft², about. So, there are like also people are like, Oh, that’s going to be this huge building. It’s going to have a massive footprint. We’re doing like dense infill development with these kinds of accessibility. So, it’s really feasible to do it. But again, it’s the intentionality of doing it from the start.

Eve: [00:15:26] I can see a primer in the works here.

Micaela: [00:15:29] Yeah, yeah.

Eve: [00:15:30] For contractors.

Micaela: [00:15:32] Yeah, we do actually have something called our Housing Design Standards for Accessibility and Inclusion. Those are at thekelsey.org/design and these are a set of design guidelines and design strategies for people doing cross disability accessibility and not just around some of the stuff that we’ve talked about, but it starts with community engagement and outreach from the project conception, obviously through all the units and the built environments, but up into resident services and operations. And it’s, you know, 300 elements that people can use in their own projects or, you know, as a funder or as a developer to define what accessibility looks like. And we’ve got folks using them all across the country and they’re just a really, we like went from our first community to our second and we felt like we had to retrain our whole design and development team on all of our accessibility goals and what it meant and what cross disability accessibility meant and all of that. We were like, why isn’t there a standard that we can just share with our team? And there wasn’t. So, we created one and it’s up for folks to use exactly in that way as a primer.

Eve: [00:16:34] That’s great. So, when did you launch the organization?

Micaela: [00:16:37] So, we are just coming up on five years. Our first round of funding came in March of 2018 and that launched us into a community organizing work we did across the Bay Area called, Together We Can Do More, as well as securing our first two sites in that time. So, we’ve been around for just about five years.

Eve: [00:16:57] And how many projects have you built? They’re all in the Bay Area so far.

Micaela: [00:17:00] Yeah. So, we have a project under construction in San Jose of 115 mixed income homes for people with or without disabilities. We’ll be breaking ground soon on a similar 112 home community in San Francisco right across from City Hall. We also have a small pilot that we operate providing residents services within an existing project in Oakland, so all in the Bay Area. But then we also do technical assistance where we might not be the developer, but we help support other people working on housing projects or housing adjacent projects where they’re working on being disability forward and needing capacity building or project scoping or feasibility studies or community engagement support. And so, we’ve done technical assistance both across the Bay, across California and nationally, too.

Eve: [00:17:51] So, it sounds like you’re not always the developer. How do these projects get developed?

Micaela: [00:17:56] Yeah. So, we are not always the developer in these examples of the projects that are under construction or about to be, we are the co developers, so we work in partnership with local, you know, both for profit and not for profit housing developers, building, you know, these communities and they come on and we share development responsibilities. Us obviously really leaning into the disability forward elements of the project and our development partners, you know, sharing their, you know, track record with just developing standard affordable or mixed income housing and our technical assistance work that really ranges from, you know, as we talked about at the beginning, disability. You know, disabled people are, you know, parts of communities everywhere. And so, our technical assistance clients range from affordable housing organizations who, you know, know that they are serving or desire to serve disabled people, but it’s not explicitly their mission and want to do that better and understand, you know, community engagement or dealing with regulation around disability services and compliance there or involving more disabled people in their design and development process. And so, we do that.

Micaela: [00:19:03] We’ve also worked with disability service organizations who deliver services, and as part of those services, aim to provide housing or support somebody in the provision of housing for the people that they serve but aren’t a housing developer or housing expert. And so, we’ll lend development capacity to them. And then we’ve also worked with some finance organizations who are thinking about how to think about accessibility or disability inclusion within the projects that they fund. And so, helping them think about, you know, design and development guidelines like our design standards as it relates to ecosystems of multiple projects, not just a single one. And so, you know, it really ranges in terms of all the different players, and we do a lot of stakeholder mapping of, there’s a lot of players who impact how housing gets built and who housing gets built for. And so, we really are open to lending capacity for any of the people who are moving the needle on getting housing out there to make sure that needle is moving towards more disability forward models.

Eve: [00:20:04] So, how is leasing managed and how long is the waiting list?

Micaela: [00:20:09] The community that’s under construction in San Jose will open in the first part of 2024. And so, we’ve actually just hired our resident services director who’s just starting that leasing, the marketing and leasing process and partnership with our property management and other compliance partners. Um, we don’t know how long the ultimate wait list will be, but I can tell you that even just on having like a, we have like a general form that people without any active outreach just sort of having it up there, we’ve got several hundred people who have like put their names to be notified when the lottery comes on. We imagine when we actually market it, that number will grow just from based on what we’ve seen both in affordable housing generally and particularly for people with disabilities. Our process works in that 25% of our homes are explicitly reserved for people with disabilities who utilize supportive services. And we have tenant referral organizations and partners who help us verify, you know, residents, you know, having eligibility under that criteria of being disabled and using services. And then within that, people qualify. And based on that criteria and income and there’s a lottery, then out of the qualification. And then the other 75% of the homes are available and marketed based on income, whether or not you have a disability. And it may also be the case that there are people, it will likely be the case, that there are people in those 75% of homes who might not qualify as a person with disabilities who use supportive services, but they’re a teacher who uses a wheelchair in San Jose, who likes the middle-income home, who still is disabled and comes through those 75%.

Micaela: [00:21:47] So, you know, people with disabilities will exist in both categories. And I’ll just note that we do specifically do a lottery. I saw a lot of communities that operate, especially in disability founded models or disability focused models that do waitlists. But we feel really strongly that, you know, we shouldn’t preference people who had involvement in the process or who are in the know and able to get in line first that we, you know, have a very specific affirmative marketing goal to make sure this community is known and particularly underserved and underrepresented, low and extremely low income communities, as well as communities of color in the cities we build and making sure that all people have an equal chance of getting a home in the building so people will qualify, get in and then be ultimately selected through a lottery, to try to give the most open process.

Eve: [00:22:43] I do want to get back to some of the policy questions you alluded to. And I’m just wondering what the biggest hurdles have been for you and what challenges you still have.

Micaela: [00:22:52] Yeah, I think we look at our policy focus as not far off from the framing of affordable, accessible and inclusive either. The biggest hurdles around building disability forward housing as we created at the Kelsey as one like, you know first of all, full stop, we don’t have a universal right to housing in this country and we are under subsidizing a system that needs more subsidy overall. And so, we exist within that as a housing development organization, regardless of whether we’re focused on disability. But I will say that the existing financing sources for affordable housing, very few target disabled people as they’re kind of, you know, when you apply for funding, there’s different sort of target populations and disability is not included typically in like preferences or scoring for programs. And often if it is included, it only applies if you are a disabled person experiencing homelessness. And we 100% believe that disabled people experiencing homelessness should be provided housing. But we also believe that you shouldn’t have to become homeless.

Eve: [00:23:59] In order to get it, yeah.

Micaela: [00:24:01] In order to get it. And so, it’s a both, and situation there that we need to have subsidy that provides housing for disabled people who are living in a household with parents or guardians who are aging. We need to provide funding to disabled people who are in an institution or a hospital and are ready to move out but have nowhere to move into the community. And so, just one like increasing public subsidy into, you know, housing and particularly making sure that that subsidy includes, you know, either incentives or requirements to include homes for disabled people. The main federal program that exists around that is the HUD 811 program. And we do a lot of advocacy to increase that. But that can’t be the only, and I’d also say that like we’ve also seen that a lot of our funding sources, even including like, you know, recent Nofas put out by the city of San Francisco, while well intended, a lot of these funding sources actually like don’t adhere to some of the goals of community integration and building mixed communities of people with and without disabilities of all incomes. You know it’s this sort of like let’s solve all together and concentrate extremely low-income housing. And I understand the need because we need to build more of that housing. But we also do need to think about Olmstead, which is the the Supreme Court ruling that mandates, you know, the right to community living for people with disabilities as well as, you know, the integration mandate of the Americans with Disabilities Act, that we need to make sure our housing policies live up to that integrated community model and that our funding sources not only incentivize it, but don’t actually disincentivize it, which sometimes they do.

Eve: [00:25:42] Right, right.

Micaela: [00:25:43] And then I’d say the two other policy focuses are around that accessibility. As you pointed out, there’s a lot of confusing and sometimes compliance heavy accessibility focuses where, when people think about accessibility of the built environment, it’s like one just like, oh, endless regulations, you know, opaque guidance. You know, I never know what I’m going to get. This funding source requires this, and this funding source requires that. And so, doing some work to streamline and clarify baseline accessibility so that all communities meet increased baseline accessibility, which they should, as well as that would be considered a stick. That’s a requirement and we think that’s important. But also layering that with incentives, carrots of how do you, in addition to just requiring a baseline accessibility, how do you provide incentives or systems that support enhanced accessibility or provide technical assistance or capacity building for people to do really robust accessibility? And so, we’re working on some federal legislation that’s going to be introduced in the Senate soon, specifically around that.

Micaela: [00:26:49] And then the third area is really about housing related services and that, you know, we have underfunded Medicaid in this country significantly. And California, where we’re based, relatively speaking, has robust supportive services. But that’s even that relatively is still not enough. We don’t pay direct care workers enough. We don’t, some states haven’t opted into waitlists or into waiver programs and still run waitlists where people can’t have access to services and are waiting to receive the services that they need. And so, even though we are not a service provider at the Kelsey, we recognize that people’s access to Medicaid and other supportive service programs directly impacts their ability to live in the community of their choice. And so, we we don’t necessarily lead advocacy in the service funding area, but we definitely participate in support and lift that up as that. Those two things have to go hand in hand. And perhaps there’s also opportunities which we do work on, is how to better coordinate between housing systems and service delivery systems to serve people better. When we de-institutionalized in this country, we sort of said, okay, here all you disabled people, you can take your money for services and go live wherever you want, and quote unquote, and we never actually built the live wherever you want things. And therefore, our housing system sometimes don’t even think about disabled people who use supportive service as like their responsibility or on their docket. They think, oh, those people are like served in group homes or some other things. They’re not like who the state of California is developing affordable housing for or who the city is responsible for. That’s like another system, and that’s absolutely wrong. The housing infrastructure has a responsibility to serve these people but has an opportunity to leverage service dollars coming out of the service systems once that housing is built. And so, how do we get those systems in our post institution world, getting those systems to work better to to meet the true goal of community living?

Eve: [00:28:47] How many people with disabilities are there in the US?

Micaela: [00:28:52] 61 million, I believe, is the most recent number. That’s 1 in 4 people.

Eve: [00:28:58] 1 in 4 people. And if you add into that, seniors who are having trouble getting around and could probably benefit from housing that thinks about that, you know that’s a lot of people yeah.

Micaela: [00:29:10] Think the 1 in 4 does include older adults with disabilities but yes. You’re exactly right.

Eve: [00:29:15] I mean, it’s not even necessarily a disability. You know, your knees are creaky. You don’t want to take steps anymore like, you know, sort of basically, you know, lifestyle hurdles that you start having.

Micaela: [00:29:26] Yeah, it’s a huge population. It’s also a diverse population, as we talked about before. We spend a lot of time too, like, I think it can be a both, and of thinking about the big tent disability of we are a stronger political movement when disabled people and allies like think about and advocate for disability holistically and don’t separate based on you know, do you have this type of disability or that type of disability or are you this age or that age or, you know. Just really take a big tent approach. And then you can within that big tent also be very intentional around specific interventions of supporting specific access needs or specific service needs. I feel like, you know, sometimes we’ve diluted our power as a disability rights movement of, you know, I go to conferences where it’s like, well, this is for high support need people not low support. And it’s like, okay, let’s just like talk about that all people need support and let’s like build for that.

Eve: [00:30:21] I love that approach, yeah. It makes a lot of sense. Who else is working in this space? Should there be more of you?

Micaela: [00:30:27] Yeah. Fortunately, I think there have been more and more developments coming up focused on disability access and inclusion. We actually, with that in mind, you know, part of the Kelsey’s mission has from day one always been like, we seek not to be the only. We seek to be a part of a robust field of a lot of people doing these kinds of developments. Like it would be crazy if there was one senior housing developer in the country. There’s not. There’s, you know, thousands of developers who do that. And there should be, you know, all developers should be doing disability forward development as part of what they do. We convene a group called the Inclusive Houser Network that includes housing developers that have, you know, individual projects. You know, one in Maryland, another one that’s getting developed in Maine, some work out of Chicago, something happening in Denver, in the DMV, Washington, DC area, to name a, Pacific Northwest.

Micaela: [00:31:24] So, there are some, you know, single projects. And one of the things that we do at the Kelsey is really try to bring those disparate organizations together to share best practices, start to build like an industry group, and then also have that group be working on shared policy priorities. Again, building power for this issue together. And we also hope again with things like the design standards and our technical assistance, like one of our goals is also like, hey, you developer, take what we have, run with it, it’s free, it’s Available. We want to make it so that every developer can say that they are a disability forward housing developer and sharing the tools and strategies that make that possible.

Eve: [00:32:04] So, I have to ask, what’s your background? You’ve got a lot of knowledge wrapped up in this.

Micaela: [00:32:09] Yeah. So, you know, I often say as it relates to this work, my initial background is as Kelsey’s cousin and just really from a young age, and I think about this a lot as a currently non-disabled person leading a disability organization, but that my whole life has been really wrapped up in, you know, disabled allyship and what that means in a, you know, a powerful way to share power and build opportunities in that way. And Kelsey really taught that to me. And that, you know, was from a very, whether when we were like 13 years old and our mothers had the brilliant idea that like we would be each other’s support staff at a summer camp, just the two of us or many other things that throughout our lives. I think I actually was younger than 13. But anyway, so my background really started with Kelsey. I also, prior to this, because of Kelsey, I had started a school-based inclusion program. I was a theater kid growing up and was perturbed by the lack of disabled representation in our arts programming in our school, and so redeveloped arts programming for people with and without disabilities that was student led and led by students with and without disabilities to do theater. And, you know, just as it leads to this, that was like this aha moment as Kelsey was going through her own housing challenges. And I was seeing this on a family level. I was running this education program and seeing our young people who were graduating our school programs was in middle and high schools. And we had talked in the education programs, all our entire kind of theory of change was like, inclusive education and recreational programs like prepare students for more meaningful inclusive adulthoods.

Micaela: [00:33:47] And it was like those inclusive adulthoods did not exist. And that was really a part of the inclusive concept of the Kelsey really building integrated communities was to realize that promise of inclusion that our education system is making to students with and without disabilities. But our housing and community development infrastructure is not meeting. And so, that was that. And then I kind of did, more formally before launching the Kelsey in 2018, was a graduate student at the Harvard Kennedy School and eventually as a Mitchell Scholar at the University College Dublin too. But at Harvard I was a Research Fellow on housing and disability publishing my initial research on this that really formed the Kelsey and did the Social Innovation Fellowship there also to initially design the Kelsey’s business model so that that helped launch into this work.

Eve: [00:34:40] So, one final question I have for you, and that is what keeps you up at night?

Micaela: [00:34:46] You know, I think what keeps me up at night is, it depends on the day is either out of concern or out of hope of just, how do we as a society create and in some cases return to true community and like, true like interdependence and recognizing that an interdependence is a principle of disability justice, that, you know, I’ve really been moved by and that really try to both internalize in my personal but also in obviously the work we do at the Kelsey and like their interdependence exists, we can point to really great communities. And I think we even saw it in many of our communities in this country during COVID, that we really recognize that like we are only as strong as our neighbors biggest trouble. And so, we really have to look out for one another and care for one another and that, you know, we need to create communities where that’s not just possible, but it’s encouraged and supported. You know, some of the systems we build go right in the face of that. And so how do we both, on an individual level, lean into that, you know, and I feel when I see moments of interdependence and moments of true community, I feel so inspired and like, oh, we can do this, it is possible. And then I feel worried when I see, you know, how isolated people are and how much our sort of capitalist systems, you know, create this false narrative that we are only, you know, little cog machines that are going to get forward by ourselves and nothing else. We just need to go, go, go. And so, yeah, that keeps me up at night, of just thinking about what it really means to have community, what it means to have communities that take care of one another. And with inclusion of diversity and both seeing when people do that really well and seeing where we have a lot of work ahead to make that happen in a real way for everyone.

Eve: [00:36:46] Well, it sounds like you’ve only just started, and I can’t imagine you’re not going to be wildly successful. So, I’ll be really interested to see where this goes, and I’ll be looking for that download too. I’m really interested in what you’re saying. It’s fascinating.

Micaela: [00:36:59] Awesome.

Eve: [00:36:59] Very sensible.

Speaker3: [00:37:01] Thank you so much, Eve. Well, it was great to chat with you on this and appreciate you lifting up, you know, disability forward housing in your storytelling.

Eve: [00:37:10] Okay. Thank you.

Micaela: [00:37:11] Thanks, take care.

Eve: [00:37:21] I hope you enjoyed today’s guest and our deep dive. You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at RethinkRealEstateforGood.co. There’s lots to listen to there. You can support this podcast by sharing it with others, posting about it on social media or leaving a rating and review. To catch all the latest from me you can follow me on LinkedIn. Even better, if you’re ready to dabble in some impact investing yourself head on over to wefunder.com/smallchange where you can invest directly in Small Change and our mission to democratize capital formation to create impact in commercial real estate development. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music, and a big thanks to you for spending your time with me today. We’ll talk again soon. But for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

Image courtesy of Micaela Connery

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