Rethink Real Estate. For Good.

Impact

Adaptive re-use.

To adaptively re-use a building is to re-imagine and re-purpose it. Often old, historic buildings have outlived their original purpose. They can be demolished or brought back to life and adapted to contemporary life. And there are compelling reasons to re-use historic buildings.

Sustainable

The adaptive re-use of buildings is inherently green. It’s a form of recycling which uses less energy than new construction and generates less waste than demolition or ground up new construction. The bulk of materials that give the building shape don’t need to be manufactured, procured or transported – they’re already on site and in place. Typically they are higher quality materials which would be prohibitively expensive to purchase today or, in the case of old growth forest, no longer even available. A hundred years ago building standards were also higher. A century-old building might outlast a brand new one.

Less urban sprawl

Urban sprawl can be contained by the re-use of existing old or abandoned buildings. Many older buildings are located in dense, walkable neighborhoods with good access to transit. Warehouses and factories in cities around the world have been converted to a myriad of uses, including co-working offices and some of the coolest homes. Industrial waterfronts in many cities have transformed struggling and forgotten areas into vibrant neighborhoods. And even unused railway trestles have been converted into linear parks providing much-needed outdoor space as well as pedestrian links between neighborhoods.

Lots of character

Historic buildings are a tangible part of the past, providing cultural enrichment to communities and allowing residents to take pride in the history of their place. The revival of urban downtown areas and historic buildings has often resulted in higher property values. People seem drawn to local history, to the warmth of old materials or maybe to older buildings just because they are more interesting.

As long ago as 1961, Jane Jacobs asserted that small businesses, like stores, restaurants, neighborhood pubs and small start-ups thrive in old buildings. Maybe she was right. A newer study from the Preservation Green Lab shows that cities with older, smaller buildings have higher density, a greater number of small businesses, more entrepreneurial activity, more diversity and more affordable housing.

Affordable

Avra Jain, who co-founded the Vagabond Group, is a wildly creative Miami developer, passionate about adaptive re-use projects. She has earned a reputation for identifying the next IT neighborhood. Her remake of the abandoned 195O’s Vagabond Hotel on Biscayne Boulevard in Miami changed the course of that neighborhood forever. The historic MiMo District was born. But Avra wants to push adaptive reuse even further. Her personal passion is to convert these abandoned and historic motels into reimagined, affordable housing communities. She’s tackling both the restoration of significant architecture and the making of affordable housing in a very unique way.

Listen to my interview with Avra to learn more about the importance of saving buildings.

Image by Eve Picker

From here to there.

Katie Faulkner has been working for twenty-five years on spaces and buildings for education, working, living and healthcare. Design is in her blood.

In 2017, she received the Boston Society of Architect’s Women in Design Award, the criteria of which describe her life, her sentiments and her goals to a ‘T.’ She is a person who exemplifies the highest level of excellence in their contributions to the design community and the built environment, and she has taken the “long and winding road” of an evolving career, develping a collaborative, compassionate, and participatory approach to working with others.

That road includes co-founding a design firm, NADAAA, that has been recognized with many notable awards including the 2014 Holcim Award, an AIA COTE Award, and numerous other accolades. She has also pushed herself to learn new skills outside the confines of the architectural world, including receiving an MBA from Boston University and becoming expert at new building technologies, in particular, mass timber construction.

This year, Katie launched WestFaulkner, motivated by her interest in both mass timber and modular construction, recognizing the potential for each to reduce risk and improve cost control in construction. Underpinning all of her projects is the sentiment that design architecture should be accessible to everyone, regardless of budget. All of her endeavors seek to reconcile the ecological and social impacts of planning and construction work, with a net positive outcome.

Before WestFaulkner, Katie was a Vice President of Design for Katerra, focusing on a mid-rise mass timber housing prototype, and an Associate Principal at Shepley Bulfinch. She received her Master of Architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a Master in Building Administration from Boston University.

In 2020 she was named to the American Institute of Architects College of Fellows.

Insights and Inspirations

  • Katie believes design will be disrupted forever by the pandemic.
  • Mass timber is widely used in Europe. In the U.S. it is expensive and not yet widely cost competitive.
  • The use of mass timber is hindered greatly in the U.S. by building codes.
  • Flexibility is an added bonus with mass timber. It’s much easier to reconfigure spaces to shrink and grow with their inhabitants with timber than with concrete or brick, for example.

Information and Links

  • The cross-disciplinary commitment of the Carbon Leadership Forum is of particular interest to Katie. It is a network of architects, engineers, contractors, material suppliers, building owners, and policymakers who are taking bold steps to decarbonize the built environment. Their goal is to accelerate the transformation of the building sector to radically reduce the embodied carbon in building materials and construction through collective action. They do this through research, creating resources, fostering cross-collaboration, and incubating member-led initiatives to bring embodied carbon emissions of buildings down to zero.
  • Katie appreciates the curation of Architecture News Now, which is rich with important industry news, takes a global perspective and brings attention to important news and environmental issues within architecture and design.
  • Outside of architecture Katie is a fabric artist and has particular admiration for women like Anni Albers, Eileen Gray, and Charlotte Perriand. She can lose herself in a gallery of quilts or the stories/work of the quilts from Gees’s Bend. 
Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:13] Hi there, thanks so much for joining me today for the latest episode of Impact Real Estate Investing.

Eve: [00:00:20] My guest today is Katie Faulkner, an architect with a 25-year career. She has traveled a long and winding road to find answers to the design issues she cares about – that design and architecture should be accessible to everyone, regardless of budget, and that all projects should have a net positive outcome. Starting with a master’s in architecture degree from Harvard, she added in an MBA and a stint with Kattera diving into the technological aspects of mass timber construction. Her work has earned her many awards. You will want to listen in.

Eve: [00:00:20] Be sure to go to rethinkrealestateforgood.co to find out more about Katie on the show notes page for this episode and be sure to sign up for my newsletter so you can access information about impact real estate investing and get the latest news about the exciting projects on my crowdfunding platform, Small change.

Eve: [00:01:29] Good morning, Katie, I’m really excited to talk to you today.

Katie Faulkner: [00:01:32] Good morning, Eve. Thanks so much for having me.

Eve: [00:01:34] Yeah. So last week I was absolutely spellbound by the fabulous presentation you gave to our lovely Women’s Design Collaborative on the four ways in which COVID will forever affect design. And that presentation, for our listeners, is posted on the Small Change blog roll if they want to take a look. But I wanted to ask you, what inspired you to research and prepare that presentation?

Katie: [00:02:00] Sure. So, Rebecca Martinez and I did this together. Rebecca is located in L.A. and I’m in Boston. And both of us have lost our jobs during this COVID pandemic so we’ve had some time to really focus in on member advancement for the Women’s Development Collaborative. And that’s been great for me because it has opened up a world of development that I’ve long wanted to participate in, but actually as a designer and architect, haven’t done a lot of directly. So, Rebecca and I were brainstorming with Libby, who, you know, is our leader for WDC. And we had been talking about an open letter and a video that Sheryl Durst, who’s the CEO of IIDA, had put out there on the future of design. And she made some pretty bold predictions and so Rebecca and I started debating some of them, and that was really fun.

Katie: [00:02:50] We noticed that designers have been prognosticating since March. Some of the prophecies have seemed kind of silly. Some have been extremely elegant. All have called into question the way we go about our lives, how we interact with our fellow human beings, what we consider to be dangerous, what we consider to be fair, how we support one another. And we found that a lot of the changes that we were seeing had been things that had already been in motion before the pandemic. And what we were witnessing was some kind of acceleration. So, I think you’ve had some of the guests on your show in the past. Even before this you’ve had MASS Design on. They came out early with some restaurant guidelines and some health care standards. Other firms have done the same. The magazine Architizer, the online magazine, had all these articles of sort of X ways that COVID will change Y, you know, how housing will change, how office will change. And then, of course, I always like to give the last word to The New Yorker, which had this article on how the coronavirus will reshape architecture. So, Rebecca and I kind of sat down and we thought about it from our perspective on the West Coast and the East Coast, what were we seeing?

Eve: [00:03:55] And so, what did you find? Maybe the question should be: what are like the most ground-breaking things that you found, the most interesting things you found?

Katie: [00:04:03] We were all over the map because we felt, like, that we could base our one-hour presentation on so many topics that we found interesting, even if we just looked at how she saw L.A. and how I saw Boston. But given where we were in our careers, given that we were really trying to work with women and women in development, we decided to divide the presentation into four areas. Into work, into home, into the ground floor of what I’ll call mixed use development and then in terms of how we were seeing changes on the street. And so that’s how we started, and we began to pull together some studies that maybe had already been underway pre-pandemic but were now really being looked at. People like Heinz Development and CBRE were making some predictions about office. And we were seeing other architects kind of talk about the home. One of the things I think we zeroed in on immediately were how changes of work, our preferences in work. We did a poll of our own group, of our WDC membership, and I think you were there. Not one person in that group felt, like, that they would be going back to the office full-time even after a vaccine. I think that was the most startling discovery we made as we were pulling the presentation together.

Eve: [00:05:23] Interesting. Moving forward in your work, how are you going to act on what you found?

Katie: [00:05:30] Well, interesting. I mean, personally, as I’m launching a firm myself, it’s really given me pause to think about what to invest in. In a normal situation, I would have run right out and subleased some office space as I have a number of friends and colleagues who have small offices who have been great about offering me desk space and resources. But I haven’t needed it because so many of my colleagues and the people I’m collaborating with are not going back to the office. They have families, they’ve got reasons to stay home. So, I don’t think I’ll do that immediately. I’ve spent more time investing in my home office. I’ve spent more time investing in my technology platforms and learning new tools so that I can produce work by myself or produce work with a series of collaborators. So, it’s a little bit of a different model. Again, the technology platforms, I think, were things that we were already all using, but we’ve really accelerated our investment in ways that we might not have seen before.

Eve: [00:06:33] Yeah, and I think in the same way we’ve seen acceleration of businesses that were maybe dying. It’s almost like a compacted 10 years, isn’t it, during this pandemic of things that have changed?

Katie: [00:06:46] Yeah, another thing that surprised us quite a bit was retail. I don’t think anybody is surprised that retail is being challenged during this time, because I think we’ve been watching, over the last decade, retail try to adjust to online competition. But I do think that what we found in a McKinsey report was that, it’s thought that we’re pushing 10 years early in the acceleration of consumer penetration on digital platforms. And by that, I think they mean that there has been this gradual movement to people doing a lot of business online, even things like their health care, more than just ordering groceries or products, actual real penetration to digital platforms. So suddenly, in three months, we’ve moved 10 years forward.

Katie: [00:07:36] So what does that mean for our own mixed-use development? I mean, you and I have talked about this before, that in housing developments, there’s going to be this assumption that there’s an activated street, right? That there’s a ground floor that’s dynamic. Well, if that’s not going to be retail, if that’s not necessarily going to be small business, what’s it going to be? So that, I think, caused Rebecca and I to really take a deeper dive into things like omnichannel retail and what does that look like? Who’s likely to take ground floor? Or maybe things like ground floor housing, maybe? What does that look like? So, that’s interesting. And of course, not everybody is in a highly populated urban area, but I think that still does cause to call into question kind of ground floor housing models. So that was a bit of a discovery for us.

Eve: [00:08:23] And what do you think is going to happen with offices on the whole? I mean, we hear people want to go back to office. They want to go back to work. They don’t like working in isolation, but also isolation might be a little bit safer and cheaper and all of those things.

Katie: [00:08:40] Yeah, that was confusing. I think for me, I’m still on the fence on how that’s going to go. If you look at CBRE or a recent article that I read about Heinz, people in commercial are predicting a decrease in overall office demand for sure. But it seems like they’re predicting, kind of, a small decrease that I’ve read as low as two percent. And the reason they say that is because they think that there’ll be an overall demand for more space in your office. Maybe offices aren’t going to bring the whole group downtown, but when they do, people will want 15 percent more space than they had. I don’t know about that. I mean, it isn’t that I don’t believe people want more space, but the open office was already kind of well underway. That kind of studio model that architects and designers have been used to was really taking over all kinds of office sectors. But that being said, I don’t know that everybody, I’m going to go back to that informal poll that we took just with our own group, I think most of my colleagues don’t think that they’ll go back every day. That maybe they’ll check into their office hub once a week, but they won’t be showing up every day. Now, that begins to call into question things like the nine to five schedule, right? So many of us work in different time zones and we have colleagues that work maybe overseas. Why limit our work to nine to five? If I’ve got parents or children or other pressures, I can get just as much done, but maybe I’m restricted by school hours, et cetera. So now we’re thinking like, whoa, what about the weekend?

Katie: [00:10:20] It’s a really interesting question to begin to think about how we structure our workday. If we don’t have to be in that physical office space, that the Headquarters becomes more of a network and less of a physical space to be, I’m not so sure. I mean, we’ve listened to other people talk about this kind of glut of office space going into the housing market. So maybe two problems get solved at once. I mean, it’s all very fascinating. I don’t know that the data is there yet, but it certainly gives one pause in terms of how we think about how we’re going to structure our work life balance.

Eve: [00:10:54] You know, I couldn’t really answer that poll because the question for me would have been, were you going to the office 9 to 5? I mean, I lived two floors above my office, and so my schedule was already sometimes at home, sometimes at the office. And that’s going to continue. And I’ve been using Zoom for years. So, for me, it’s really not much of a shift.

Katie: [00:11:17] I have the same issue. I had been practicing with a firm that I co-founded for almost 11 years, and then I’d taken a job with a West Coast construction company with the understanding that I’d move out there when my youngest son graduated from high school. So, from the time I started that job, I was completely remote. I’d go to Seattle a week a month, but otherwise completely Zoom-focused. Because of their West Coast time zone, I’d also adjusted my schedule to match theirs. So, I was already quite comfortable with that as a way of working and it really gave me a sense that people could work almost anywhere as long as they could find the time to come together. So, I think what you’re pointing out is something that was already happening. I mean, the real reasons why we’re not going to the physical office anymore, but I’m not so sure that we actually have to go back, at least in the way that we did. I think people will feel safe eventually when there’s a vaccine, but there’ll be other reasons why we’ll call into question, I mean, why would I battle traffic? Why would I kind of expend that carbon footprint to drive in if I live out of the city? It begins to not make a whole lot of sense.

Eve: [00:12:24] Yeah, yeah. You’re an architect and you obviously care about design very much. And I just wanted to understand why it’s important to you and why you think, I believe you think, it should be important to everyone?

Katie: [00:12:36] Oh, that’s, yeah, so I have been practicing since the late 90s and almost since the beginning have had a real fascination with prefabrication in construction and the ability for construction to be much more efficient in a way that had a much lower carbon footprint. This was, I think, back before, I think even then we all knew that we had a real responsibility to the climate but maybe the climate as a crisis wasn’t screaming at the top of our agenda the way it is now. I think we’ve always, as architects, had a Hippocratic Oath to do no harm. And as time has gone on, it’s been clear that we, as an industry and construction, actually contribute to a good deal of the carbon emissions globally. So even though we, I think, have always been trained to make the world a better place, and I really do fundamentally believe in the power of design to do so, as we’ve matured as designers, as I think data has been made more available to us, we realize that we’ve been as much of the problem as any other industry, if not more so.

Katie: [00:13:48] And I think that we cannot alone, as designers, make a change. But if we begin to look at the way we deliver projects, if we begin to look at the materials that we use and the way that we work as industry, developers, manufacturers, we could do a great deal better in in reducing carbon footprints to the point where our buildings would have not only a zero carbon footprint, but actually would have the ability to be productive. And we’ve seen people do that. What’s been the challenge is that it’s expensive. It’s not for everybody. I think as I’ve gotten to what I think is probably the sort of, you know, final yards of my career, the sort of next 20 years, it’s so important to me that the work that I do be moving us all in a positive direction. And I know that most of my colleagues feel the same way. We’re all looking at issues of storm surge. We’re all looking at issues of climate. We’re all looking at the responsibility of making the world a more sustainable, a more fair and inclusive place. And I’m definitely not alone in that. I think designers kind of bring that passion. I hope so anyway.

Eve: [00:15:00] But I think you’ve gone a little bit further because you worked with, for Katerra, right?

Katie: [00:15:05] I did.

Eve: [00:15:05] On timber housing solutions.

Katie: [00:15:09] That’s right.

Eve: [00:15:10] What is mass timber construction?

Katie: [00:15:13] Oh, well, I’m happy to talk about that. So, in 2011, I launched a firm with a couple of partners called NAADAA. One of them is the designer, who’s fairly well known, Nader Tehrani. And that practice was really focused on design excellence, but design excellence with a really profound engagement with the materials of construction and how construction, kind of the means and methods of construction. So, we were very interested in mass timber when people started talking about that. And it has been a common material in Europe for decades. There are housing, there are examples of schools. Europeans, Austrians, Germany in particular, have done a magnificent job in turning that into an affordable and sustainable way to do all kinds of construction. The US has been behind that, meaning lagging, in that our zoning codes, our building codes did not necessarily make it easy for us to use the material. It’s also not been cost effective. What it is, is mass timber incorporates everything from cross-laminated timber, which is a series of what we’ll call lam stock, general old two by four construction, glued up into layers and then layered upon layers so that it becomes a pretty robust material that can compete with concrete.

Katie: [00:16:31] It’s also glulam which is very typical. Lots of people have been using glulam for years, which is again another glued-up means of using just regular timber stock into something that has a lot more resilience, both structurally and with fire protection. If done well, mass timber can be very sustainable and work very well with forestry management and actually help bring industry to parts of the country that have not necessarily had productive forest for a long time but have a lot of timber. There’s a whole wealth of research that’s being done by the Carbon Leadership Institute or the Carbon Leadership Forum. There are companies like Katerra that have been founded on bringing cross-laminated timber into the mainstream of construction.

[00:17:20] It can be done as a hybrid. It can be done with steel, it can be done with concrete, and even then, still very much lowers the carbon footprint. It isn’t just the material itself, but it’s the ability to do a lot of the fabrication offsite. So, when it comes on site it can get erected relatively quickly. We at NADAAA put together and successfully delivered the first mass timber student residence for Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. That is a hybrid. It’s not completely mass timber and by that, I mean the structure itself is steel, meaning the columns are steel, but the slabs are cross laminated timber. So, you can leave those exposed with certain construction types so you get beautiful ceilings and you can really appreciate the natural wood. Goes up very fast, has much less dust and waste than concrete. It’s a wonderful material and we could do a very deep dive on that in this podcast. I know we’ve talked about the WDC doing something on it. There’s no shortage of information on it. It’s a really fascinating material and I think the challenge now is to find ways to bring it into the market so that everybody can access it, so that it really can be cost effective for housing, for schools, for all kinds of typologies that really need not only carbon with a low footprint, but with a cost price point that that makes it accessible to everybody.

Eve: [00:18:44] You know, I was interviewing an architect in Amsterdam, Superlofts.

Katie: [00:18:49] Oh, yes.

Eve: [00:18:50] In my podcast. And he also brought up another aspect of mass timber that I thought was really fascinating from a design point of view. He was designing communities where he expected people to want to change their spaces, you know, add maybe another unit or subtract a room over time. And mass timber gives you the ability to break through and change the space that someone occupies much more easily than other materials, which I thought was really interesting.

Katie: [00:19:21] You know, we talked a little, we’ve talked a little bit about this, that, again, just getting back to this discussion of acceleration, pre-COVID if we were talking about housing, I would have said the biggest challenges to housing in the next decades are social justice, the delivery method, and then, of course, climate. I mean, those three things could be put to just about any construction type. But that social justice component it’s exactly that. That way that we could deliver housing to people that would give them the flexibility to grow so that maybe when you’re just starting out, it’s just a small household. Maybe it grows to have a family or have a multigenerational component where parents move in or people stay.

Katie Faulkner: [00:20:05] And you’re completely right, mass timber allows for that because it’s this, kind of, terrific almost plug and play kind of construction that you can have the slabs put in place would have structural integrity themselves and have a pretty decent span. And you can kind of leave it as a shell and then outfit it as time goes on with either a timber construction or a hybrid construction of something that’s more of a lighter frame. And it is exactly that. It’s extremely flexible. So, you can build this kind of grid system that’s quite elegant, that allows itself to be a studio, a one bedroom, a two bedroom, a three bedroom. It can be townhouses. So, we’re not yet doing a lot of that here and again, I think that the barrier is market driven. It’s that it’s not yet cost competitive with other construction types. But I think that that’s coming. I think you’re going to see that in housing, this ability for people to get a housing unit, a housing type, and then grow into it. So, your Amsterdam architect is spot on and I think the U.S. will catch up.

Eve: [00:21:10] Yeah, cool. Shifting gears, do you think architecture offers the same opportunities for women as men?

Katie: [00:21:19] I do. I’m very optimistic about architecture, where I’m less optimistic is architecture within the integrated delivery process. So, I really, as an architect coming up, feel that I had a lot of opportunity to grow. I had a lot of support, even though I would often find myself the only woman at the table. When we would get on the job site, as soon as the project would leave the office and expand into the what really is, I guess if I could back up, what really is a project has a great deal more than architecture. Architecture has the ability to bring some vision and really help clients see the potential of their project. But you can never do that without engineers, without the funds, whether that be developer funds or client funds, and certainly without contractors. The world of construction is not necessarily as supportive of women as architecture has been. Architecture is by no means without problem. But I think that if you look at where we are, there are a lot of women in leadership positions and more all the time. I have a lot of role models in architecture who have been women who I’ve looked up to, both well-known and not. But as soon as we leave the office and we go into that world of project delivery, whether it be development or construction, it’s discouraging.

Katie: [00:22:54] I think that I’ve wanted, my leaving NADAAA was difficult to do because I loved it. I love architecture but I really wanted to make an impact and I thought the best way, I think the best way to do that, is to somehow move a little bit more directly into construction and development. That has been extraordinarily difficult as a middle-aged woman or frankly, as a woman at all. That is challenging. And I’m frustrated. I think that women in development, there aren’t very many, you and I have talked about this before. If we really want to look at women run projects, there are great examples where a lot of the leaders are women. But if you dig deep, they’re often backed by firms that are led by men. I’m not saying that that’s a bad thing. There are plenty of very enlightened men. But for women to have these opportunities, I just think that the barriers are huge. We often don’t even really know about development. And when we get there, I don’t know. there’s just, this topic is so rich, but the short answer is, is it’s a challenge for sure.

Eve: [00:24:03] You know, for quite a long period of time I think that was the only female developer in Pittsburgh, which was a little startling to me.

Katie: [00:24:11] That doesn’t surprise me at all. I mean, that’s frankly, before I even knew about WDC, I had researched you and had seen a project on Small Change and gotten really excited about you as a woman developer. I mean, I’ve contacted women developers all over the country just to meet them, just to kind of find out more, to see how I can get started. Fortunately, I mean, what I will say is that when you do meet people in development who are women or who want to see women succeed, there are a lot of tremendous resources for us. Finding those, though, is difficult. And kind of finding the capital and the wherewithal to start a project, as you know, is challenging.

Eve: [00:24:54] Yes, but don’t give up because it’s a lot of fun.

Katie: [00:24:57] Well, I’m trying, I do, I’m very optimistic and I’m extremely grateful for WDC and for our members because there’s a lot of support there.

Eve: [00:25:05] Yeah, it’s great. Well, I’m going to shift gears again and ask you, I think I know the answer, do you think socially responsible real estate is necessary in today’s development landscape? Essential, not necessary?

Katie: [00:25:19] Oh, I think it’s essential. It really is. I mean, I don’t think that where we are today with our issues of equity and diversity and inclusiveness, I don’t think that’s any accident. I think that the tragedies that brought it to the forefront, that brought people out to the street, that was just something that was waiting to happen. There have been so many challenges to housing, to work, to various industries. I just cannot see that the social challenges and the environmental challenges that we have are not inextricably linked, that when we build anything, we have to look at the neighborhood that it goes in, the group that it is meant to serve. You cannot come into an area as a developer or an architect or a constructor without having the very people that the project is meant to serve at the table. And you cannot but think about the impact of the building on the neighborhood and the neighborhoods of the neighborhood, it’s just not a question anymore.

Katie: [00:26:26] You know, you put something up and the hope is that you make the place better than it was, that you’re giving people opportunities that they didn’t have. We talk about kind of a scorecard, right.? And sort of, how do we look at a project? There’s the environmental component, there’s a jobs component, there’s an inclusiveness component. There’s just such a complex, three-dimensional web. We cannot not do that, no matter what it is that we’re building – a factory, a distribution center – it’s long past time. And I think that as developers, as architects, as builders, we can only do so much. We’re going to have to take a really good look at our land-use restrictions, at our zoning requirements, at the building codes. There’s going to be a lot of work. But I think that the louder the conversation is, the more people that are standing up and saying, hey, wait a minute, I think this is an extraordinary time. I think in many ways we will look back at 2020 as being a year of sea change, a real pivotal year.

Eve: [00:27:29] No, I agree with that. But I think probably my biggest frustration is still finance and…

Katie: [00:27:35] So true.

Eve: [00:27:35] You know, what’s happened in the last month, it’s a very odd phenomenon. Over a period of four months, things were pretty quiet as people grappled with their own situations around the pandemic and whether or not to move forward with their projects. But now, all of a sudden, everyone’s gotten very busy. And I had a conversation with a developer yesterday who is doing a really interesting, worthwhile little project, not so little, actually, and wants to raise money for it. And the proportion of money he wants to raise is actually pretty high. So, my first question is always, can you get a bank loan? Because bank financing is the cheapest money you’re going to get. You should always look for a bank loan before you look for equity. And he said no. The banks here have stopped lending, there’s nowhere for me to go. So, we’re in this time of change, right? And we need to be thinking about the new next things and the way we’re going to live. And our financial institutions seem to be shutting down. That’s big.

Katie: [00:28:47] That is big.

Eve: [00:28:48] They were already not amenable to new ideas because money is lent based on performance of projects just like it before. So, if you’re doing something new, it becomes very difficult to finance something. And we need new now, right?

Katie: [00:29:04] Yeah, I second that. I find that the most frustrating part, well, one of the most frustrating parts about trying to launch new businesses, there is a lot of lip service to supporting new businesses, small businesses, women-run businesses. There aren’t a lot of financial resources there. And you’re right, the first place I would go would be a bank. But if you haven’t done a project before, if you don’t have a track record as a developer, even pre-COVID, you’re just not going to get that loan. So, I don’t know how to solve that problem. I mean, I think that, again, there’s all kinds of places that I can go to offer me training, to offer me, kind of, coaching but where to get the money? Difficult. Very difficult.

Eve: [00:29:54] Very difficult. So, at Small  Change we try to do a little bit of that, but it’s a really big problem to solve. As big as zoning and everything else. Now, I feel really depressed.

Katie: [00:30:05] But you shouldn’t because I actually think that you have stood as an example of what’s possible. I mean, you know, all of these things that crowdfunding brings opportunity to people who a) might not have had access, even just to the equity, but b) wouldn’t have the wherewithal to know how to do it. So even though I think it’s challenging and we’re looking at, we have ambitions maybe to do bigger projects, the fact that you have allowed a group of people who might not have even had access to it, the notion to better understand how to get a project developed, that’s huge. And if those rules change, I mean, that’s really something.

Eve: [00:30:44] Yeah. Yeah. Well, final question. What’s next for you? Well, you’re in the next, right?

Katie: [00:30:51] I think so. I mean, I’m really trying to make lemonade. I, again, I was, it was a little bit of a, well is very much an unplanned shift. I had joined Katerra, which was a big change. I mean, I’ve been an architect in conventional practice for, I like to say over twenty-five years, because as we get to 30 years, that’s starting to sound kind of ridiculously old, but it’s been a long time. So, the notion of moving to a construction company was a really big change and for a number of reasons that didn’t work out. So, I’m trying to go back to kind of what my ambitions always were, were to do an impactful, sustainable, socially responsible architecture and development. I think that architecture as an art can only go so far. And to really be impactful, I’m going to have to enter the world of development and that’s new to me. So, I’ve spent most of the last four months trying to learn more about development, trying to partner with others who are small enough to want to kind of take on a collaboration. It’s very, very challenging in Boston. But to begin to maybe look outside the well-developed metropolitan areas to some other Opportunity Zones that are well served by public transit. It’s been a learning curve for sure, but I’m optimistic. It’s also an incredibly exciting time. I think people are motivated. As you said, we need a new new. That being said, it’s a bit of a, it’s a bit of a cliff that I’m trying to scale. So, let’s check back in a few months. But I’m hopeful that we’ll see some progress.

Eve: [00:32:27] We should try and do a project together. And if there are any, anyone else out there that wants to join us, that would be amazing.

Katie: [00:32:33] It would.

Eve: [00:32:34] My big dream is, sorry gentlemen, but an all-woman-run development project would be just amazing.

Katie: [00:32:45] It would, it would. I think we have a shared ambition there and I believe, I believe we’re going to see it. I’m going say in 2021. So, let’s cross our fingers.

Eve: [00:32:53] I hope so. Well, thank you very much for joining me. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Katie: [00:32:58] Oh, thanks for your interest. It was a pleasure.

Eve: [00:33:07] That was Katie Faulkner. Many architects stay within the confines of prescribed architectural roles. Katie has really stretched herself and now she wants to stretch herself more. She sees real estate development as the ultimate way to take control of the physical landscape. And I’m right there with her. Let’s hope she succeeds and brings her wealth of knowledge and compassion to the real estate development world.

Eve: [00:33:42] You can find out more about impact real estate investing and access the show notes for today’s episode at my website, rethinkrealestateforgood.co. While you’re there, sign up for my newsletter to find out more about how to make money in real estate while building better cities.

Eve: [00:33:59] Thank you so much for spending your time with me today and thank you Katie for sharing your thoughts. We’ll talk again soon but for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

Image courtesy of Katie Faulkner

Reimagining the role of real estate development.

The affordable housing crisis in the United States is affecting more people than you might think.

For many Americans, across many income spectrums, a modest apartment is a cost burden and out of reach. There are multiple factors that have contributed to this affordability crisis. Wages have not kept up with rents, fiscal policy has favored homeowners, cars and transport are expensive and take up valuable real estate space and then there’s the rising cost of building affordable housing.

Experiments are being conducted to grapple with this problem in cities around the globe. Berlin is freezing rents, Minneapolis is working towards more affordable housing through updated zoning regulations, New York wants to produce quality affordable housing through careful design, California has passed a law permitting the construction of ADUs (Accessory Dwelling Units ) and many cities, including San Francisco, Boston and Milwaukee, are recapturing highways to provide more land for housing close in. All of this is leading to affordable housing innovation.

Entrepreneurs are working hard to make a difference too. Thibault Manekin founded Seawall Development, a real estate development company, focused on a particular housing niche – affordable housing for teachers. Seawall’s first project, the $20 million Center for Educational Excellence, is an adaptive reuse of a 100,000 square foot vacant factory building. In its reimagined form, the building houses 40 apartments for teachers along with 30,000 square feet of collaborative office space for a variety of non-profits that underpin the success of the school system. Seawall approached the development process collaboratively. They saw this as an opportunity to listen to educators and provide them with affordable, well located housing, shared with like-minded people. And bringing them together with education focused non-profits allowed for further collaboration and sharing of resources. The teachers provided design input for their apartments, chose the amenities for the shared resource center and even chose their own rents based on salaries.

“Everything that we’ve ever done has been built inside out” says Thibault “And what we mean by that is that we start with the end users, the people that are going to be living and working in our buildings. It’s important for us that they have a sense of pride, of authorship and ownership in what’s being created.”

Listen to my interview with Thibault to hear more about Seawall Development’s unusual and wholistic approach to real estate development.

Union Craft Brewing, Baltimore, courtesy of Seawall Development.

Saving places.

Patrice Frey is President and CEO of the National Main Street Center, where she oversees the Center’s work. Patrice and her team offer programs and guidance on placemaking, local entrepreneurship, facade improvements, crowdfunding and green rehabs to their network of approximately 1,800 members, all in service of revitalizing commercial main streets in both big cities and small towns alike.

Based in Chicago, Illinois, the National Main Street Center is a subsidiary of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and has participated in the renewal of more than 2,000 older commercial districts during its 30-year history. Before joining the National Main Street Center in May 2013, Patrice served as the Director of Sustainability at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, where she oversaw the National Trust’s efforts to promote the reuse and greening of older and historic buildings, including research and policy development work through the Seattle-based Preservation Green Lab.

Patrice worked for several years in the field of community development and urban research before joining the National Trust. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s program in historic preservation, where she received a master’s degree in preservation planning and a certificate in real estate design and development through the Penn School of Design and Wharton Business School. Patrice completed her master’s thesis on the application of the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards to historic buildings. Patrice also worked for the City of Goleta, California, where she coordinated the acquisition and preservation of coastal open space, as well as a number of community development related programs. Prior to her time in Goleta, Patrice worked for the Brookings Institution’s Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy in Washington, D.C., where she served as the executive assistant to the center director. She received her bachelor’s degree in politics and international relations from Scripps College in Claremont, California.

Insights and Inspirations

  • Main streets are the heart of their community.
  • They are often the single biggest asset that a neighborhood or small town has.
  • And Patrice sees them as entrepreneurial eco-systems.
  • Two main streets that Patrice loves are in Edenton, North Carolina and Emporia, Kansas.

Information and Links

  • Patrice finds this Roadmap to Recovery a great source of inspiration. She especially loves the community response map at the bottom of the page.
  • The National Trust for Historic preservation wants your help finding 1,000 places where women have made their mark. Submit your entry!
  • Follow this reddit thread for serious lego and creativity talent. Patrice has been collecting since she was eight and her favorite sets date back to the 1980’s.
Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:10] Hi there. Thanks, so much for joining me today for the latest episode of Impact Real Estate Investing.

Eve: [00:00:18] My guest today is Patrice Frey, the president and CEO of the National Main Street Center. Through the Center, Patrice and her team offer programs and guidance on placemaking, local entrepreneurship, facade improvements, crowdfunding and green habs, all in service of revitalizing commercial main streets in both big cities and small towns alike. Their network is very big with eighteen hundred members. If you want to hear why main streets matter, listen into our conversation.

Eve: [00:01:04] Be sure to go to rethinkrealestateforgood.co to find out more about Patrice on the show notes page for this episode. And be sure to sign up for my newsletter so you can access information about impact real estate investing and get the latest news about the exciting projects on my crowdfunding platform, Small change.

Eve: [00:01:35] Good morning, Patrice. I’m really looking forward to our conversation today.

Patrice Frey: [00:01:39] Hi, Eve. Thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to it.

Eve: [00:01:42] Good. You have a pretty big job. The National Main Street Center now has eighteen hundred members. Is that right?

Patrice: [00:01:50] It is, yeah. Eighteen hundred members all across the country. Every state in the union, I think, except maybe saving Hawaii.

Eve: [00:01:59] Ok. That’s pretty big. How has it grown under your watch? You’ve been there since 2013, is that right?

Patrice: [00:02:09] Yeah, I have. We launched as a subsidiary of the National Trust in 2013. Before then, we had been a program embedded at the National Trust for Historic Preservation and we have been very fortunate to see a strong membership growth in the last, in the last seven years or so. You know, those 18 hundred members are located all across the country. It’s a really good mix of rural programs and more mid-sized and then quite a bit of representation in some larger cities as well. When we took over in 2013, the team had a real focus on reaching out to folks that had been members in the past and maybe they had lapsed. And we’ve also just put a tremendous focus on developing new content and new resources that have helped to, I think, attract people, attract people to the organization. Yeah. So, it’s been really gratifying. We’re so proud to have such a large and strong membership.

Eve: [00:03:10] So I have to ask, I suppose the main question is why Main Streets?

Patrice: [00:03:16] Well, great question. You know, Main Street is important, I think, in at least two ways. The first is they truly are in the heart of a community and people tend to feel about their town, the way they feel about their downtown, which is to say you’ve got a healthy, vibrant, thriving downtown. I think that’s a real sense of pride, provides a real sense of pride and helps shape the identity, a positive identity for a community. And the reverse is true as well, where if you look at downtown and there’s nothing happening, I think that can help sort of create a sense of distress and incredibly challenged. So, psychologically, we know main streets are extraordinarily important. They’re really important for the quality of life factor, you know, providing restaurants, dynamic shopping experiences, all of that good stuff. But we also know that they’re key to economic competitiveness, right? Because as the economy, we’ve seen these seismic changes in the economy in the last 10, 20 years, we know that people are more mobile and they’re often picking where they live and then choosing a job. And that means for those employers, for local leaders, it’s extraordinarily important that there are high quality places in those communities and downtowns have those qualities in abundance.

Eve: [00:04:40] So that’s what’s going to be my next question. Why is it important to save them? So, one reason is that it offers an option for people. But what if they didn’t have that option? Why is it really important to save main streets?

Patrice: [00:04:54] A couple of reasons come to mind. The first is that often if you’re looking in some of our more stressed areas, cross country, whether that’s in rural or urban areas, other than the people, that commercial quarter is often the single greatest asset that that community has, right? It tends to be affordable, stay flexible, it’s adaptable, it’s walkable and we know more and more people are really appreciating the benefits of walkability. So, it really is an approach to asset based economic development that leverages what you already have. The other thing is main streets, particularly those, you know, those truly that were built like before the 1950s, you have just such a beautiful sense of character. They really reflect the local culture. They were built in a human scale. They’re super, and I’ve already talked about adaptability, but that is extremely important, 5the fact that you can adapt these places, you know, you can do like light manufacturing, you can do a restaurant, you can do standard office. You can, you know, turn upstairs into apartments or condos. So, it’s important and for many communities, this is the single biggest asset they’ve got.

Eve: [00:06:13] Yeah, I always find when I go to a small town or borough with a charming main street, I feel very comfortable with the scale. It’s kind of very easy to relate to, which is a bit of a relief sometimes, I think.

Patrice: [00:06:28] It is, it is. And it’s so funny because, you know, with Covid I’ve been spending a lot of time at home and I have a four-year-old son and we had checked out a book from the library on Roman design, Roman construction. And it’s just, you know, looking at the sketches was just reminded that, you know, this is an urban form that has existed for millennia. And I think it’s existed for a reason. It’s certainly existed for purposes of transacting commerce, but it’s also been a place that people go to connect with each other. And I think Covid is making us realize how much we appreciate having places to go.

Eve: [00:07:09] Yeah, and how much we miss it, right?

Patrice: [00:07:11] Yeah.

Eve: [00:07:12] So a hard question. How do we bring equity to small towns? This is the other pandemic, right?

Patrice: [00:07:21] Yeah, no, no, no. And yes, equally as concerning, if not more so. I think the first thing is acknowledging the problem for what it is and speaking openly about it. You know, in many communities, there is a legacy of African Americans being excluded that dates back to Jim Crow where African Americans were really only allowed downtown on certain days, during certain times to complete their shopping. So, I think some of it is really just acknowledging that in many ways main streets were, just have extraordinary histories of exclusion. And my own thinking is you only fix that by a truly intensive community engagement process where you are committed to reaching audiences and meeting members that you haven’t had traditionally part of downtown and then programming in a way in which those communities, particularly African-American community, feels supported. We, at the Center, do a lot of work on entrepreneurial ecosystems, and we’re taking a fresh look at that in terms of really understanding and helping communities embed within their work practices that really create for more diverse representation downtown.

Eve: [00:08:53] Yeah, I think exciting time about this moment is everyone I am talking to is really thinking about this issue very constructively. And I’m not sure that’s ever happened before. It’s going to be really wonderful to see, you know, what a year of thinking brings, right?

Patrice: [00:09:11] Yeah, it will. And I think now we’ve got to do the work, right? It’s getting past the talking and acknowledging that, yeah, that we have a problem. And, you know, we’re certainly, I personally am really committed to it, and then the organization, Main Street America, are very committed to it as well. You know, I think we’re going to have more tools and resources, support our communities in this conversation in the coming months and I would also say, you know, we’re eager to intensively engage in places where they’re ready to have this conversation and, you know, they want to make some changes.

Eve: [00:09:50] Yeah. Yeah. What are the primary activities of the Main Street Center? How do you help communities?

Patrice: [00:09:57] So, we’re the leading national revitalization organization nationally. So that means we can provide training, technical assistance, grants, networking opportunities. All of that good stuff. But we’re probably best known for something called the Main Street approach, or the four point approach, which is a revitalization strategy that’s been used now by about 2000 communities to help them really identify their values, identify their vision for downtown, and then program in a way to really make that happen. It’s a very comprehensive approach. A lot of times what we see in economic development is, you know, kind of the  one-shot wonder where you build the stadium, or you build the museum or a baseball park, and expect that that will automatically transform an area. That is very rarely the case. Instead, what we know makes a big change, big differences, is small steps, incremental change over time in a way that really takes into consideration the design of the place, economic vitality, the strategies, how you’re, what kind of place you’re actually trying to create and how you are attractor helping those businesses. And of course, promoting it, marketing, marketing it, all that good stuff.

Eve: [00:11:19] Right now, what communities have you been working on?

Patrice: [00:11:24] Well, we do a lot of work in communities. Up until Covid, right?

Eve: [00:11:28] Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Patrice: [00:11:29] We have our field services team that I think was in 200 communities…

Eve: [00:11:35] You know, Covid19, I’m just astonished at the trickle-down effect. Every time I talk to someone there’s another impact I haven’t thought about.

Patrice: [00:11:45] Yeah, yeah. So, our field services typically visits, will visit at least 200 communities a year. And we have transitioned a lot of those services online. But particularly when you’re talking about place, it’s really tough work to do. Place and relationship building. It’s really tough to do.

Eve: [00:12:11] Impossible remotely, right?

Patrice: [00:12:13] I won’t say it’s all impossible. I will say a lot of it is extremely difficult. Yeah.

Eve: [00:12:19] Yeah. I mean, you can only go so far.

Patrice: [00:12:22] Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, it’s hard for me to pick a place where we’re doing work, but, we’re in so many places, but Ohio, we’re doing some really exciting work there in a few of the heavily coal-impacted areas in terms of supporting the development of entrepreneurial ecosystems in that place. And I would say that work is almost certainly shifting off, because of Covid, to be focused on recovery as well.

Eve: [00:12:54] I suppose the question is, you know, how are you shifting your thinking because of this pandemic?

Patrice: [00:13:01] Well, yeah. So, I actually have great hope for main streets on the other side of all of this. I think the reason I’m so hopeful is because I think they, you know, like we talked about, they’re so adaptable. And even though I think we’re going to see the marketplace change a little bit, I think the space to sort of inherently, you know, we can do it, right Eve?

Eve: [00:13:33] Well, you know, I think main streets have a future because I think there are going to be a lot of people who want the calm, peace and space in places that have small main streets. Unfortunately, I think we’re going to go through a period of time where downtowns in larger cities might be scary for some people. And that could be to the advantage of smaller communities.

Patrice: [00:13:59] Well, I think that’s right. And I think we are also seeing where so many of our big cities were reaching peak unaffordability.

Eve: [00:14:07] Oh, yeah, there that too.

Patrice: [00:14:09] Yeah, that combined with the dynamic of, you know, people wanting a little bit more space and realizing that they can work from anywhere. I do think that bodes well for rural towns. I just feel like Americans have reconnected with the value of walkability in recent years. And, you know, I think that persists on the other side of this as well. Even though the economic impacts are going to be severe, we’re going to have vacancies, storefront vacancies that we’re, you know, going to be challenged by, overall, I think, we come out for the better.

Eve: [00:14:44] Yeah. So, storefront vacancies were happening before the pandemic, right? Because retail was really shifting dramatically.

Patrice: [00:14:52] Yeah. Because we’re so massively overbuilt in terms of commercial space especially.

Eve: [00:14:57] And I think because retail activities have changed so much in the last few years.

Patrice: [00:15:02] Absolutely.

Eve: [00:15:02] So, what does that mean for main streets? I mean, hasn’t it changed so much in small places? I mean, I like having my groceries delivered from Whole Foods or Costco or somewhere, but I don’t know if that’s possible in a small town, so…

Patrice: [00:15:17] Yeah, yeah. From what I’ve seen, probably not. I guess maybe there have been some changes. Maybe there will be some changes. We are seeing where, particularly larger retailer vacancies, were really starting to be a problem. My impression is that those tended to be in places, maybe central business district downtown, the malls, the lifestyle centers, et cetera. But I don’t tend to see those national retailers concentrated quite so heavily on our main streets, at least in the type of communities that we’re working with. So, I’m a little bit, you know, less concerned about that dynamic there, because we were seeing, people were really being extraordinarily creative in creating an experience at customers. And whether that was a restaurant or retail. Yeah. And so, again, I think, you know, none of the fundamentals have changed. And so, I see that continuing on the other side.

Eve: [00:16:18] Yeah. So, it’s maybe a shift towards slightly different retail types. Which is kind of exciting to think about.

Patrice: [00:16:26] Yes, it is, it is. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I, I am sick of like trying to online shop for clothes.

Eve: [00:16:34] Oh, I hate it.

Patrice: [00:16:36] I want somewhere I can look at them, you know, like touch them, feel them, like, you know that sort of human want, you know. I think that it’s real and doesn’t go away.

Eve: [00:16:48] So, I’d love to hear about, like, an accomplishment you’re really proud of or a project that you thought sort of exemplified what you do at the Main Street Center, something that’s, that you love.

Patrice: [00:17:01] Yeah. Well, I love that you ask that question, thank you. We are working on an advocacy campaign right now to ask for congressional support for, I mean through organizations, and so, I have been so heartened and just thrilled to see the way that our network has really rallied behind this cause. Unfortunately, state and local Main Street Programs are in peril. We know fiscal budgets, which are a big source of funding for these programs, are badly endangered. And so, we have been rallying and approaching Congress about what sounds like a large number to me, but I’m told is actually a small number. We’ve been rallying around a 100 million dollar ask to ensure that we can sustain these main street programs when small businesses need them most. You know, these Main Street Programs, the leaders of these programs are the folks on the ground who are helping the small businesses with their PPP application or they’re directing them to local community foundations for grants or making sure they understand what might be available through the state. They’re also sometimes in the room negotiating with landlords for rent forgiveness or forbearance. In this moment, what I’m most excited about, most proud of, is the way that folks have rallied to Main Street’s defence. And I’m pleased that Congress seems to be listening. We have a long way to go yet, but I’m feeling good about it.

Eve: [00:18:44] Awesome, that sounds fantastic. So, I’m just shifting a little bit to you. What’s your background and how did you, what led you to this role?

Patrice: [00:18:54] Well, it was a meandering path. So

Eve: [00:18:57] They’re always the good ones.

Patrice: [00:19:00] Well, you know, some people, some people know. Like my husband, you know, knew in third grade what he wanted to do and he’s doing it today. So, I, to make a long story short, I ended up at Brookings Institution. That was the Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy at that point. And right after, soon after college, because I just love cities and, you know, I was sort of leaning towards the idea of a planning degree. And then I ended up on a tour in downtown Tacoma, Washington, with my dad. And, you know, we had this tour guide. Michael Sullivan, very well known locally, who captured my ardent attention. He just took us down, through downtown, telling the stories of the buildings. And I thought, OK, well, this is what I want to do. So, from there I, because I had really been interested in policy and really interested in architecture, and so I figured, OK, this is preservation is really a melding of those two things. So, from there, I took my time, but I ended up in grad school at Penn for preservation in the Design School. And I did my thesis actually on the greening of older historic buildings and ended up at the National Trust working as their research director. And then it’s it was a lot, I had so much fun in that job working on sustainability and older buildings. And then Main Street came along and I thought, well, you know, there are a lot of parallels between, a lot of threads, between sustainability and main streets. And so, I threw my name in the hat and here I am.

Eve: [00:20:50] That’s fabulous. So, you get to run this really pretty unique organization.

Patrice: [00:20:56] I love it.

Eve: [00:20:57] And spend time on main streets.

Patrice: [00:20:59] When times are normal, I get to see some of the most beautiful, most special places that I think people often never see. So, I am really grateful for that.

Eve: [00:21:11] So what’s one of the most beautiful, most special places you’ve seen?

Patrice: [00:21:17] So, a couple come to mind immediately. One is Emporia, Kansas. And I wouldn’t say it’s like beautiful in the way that, you know, you might think about a landscape or something. But it’s a city of, I think it’s twenty-five thousand, it’s near nothing, right, which is to say, I think Kansas City is a good two and a half, three hours away. And they have done such an extraordinary job of nurturing entrepreneurship there and have had just like success story after success story. I want to say that the Main Street Program has helped to support something like 70 or 80 new business starts there. They will allow good stuff with housing downtown. Just extraordinarily dynamic leadership. Great community. Yeah, just, just…

Eve: [00:22:11] In an unexpected place, right?

Patrice: [00:22:13] Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, the other thing that I realize is, well the other, to one of the other key lessons I’ve learned, it’s from place called Edenton, North Carolina, and it’s an absolutely charming downtown. But sometimes with the preservation lens you can look at a place and say like, “oh, that facade isn’t”, you know, “that facade isn’t quite right”, “those windows…”, etc., etc.. And there’s a lot of what I would describe as imperfect preservation there, but I say that with no judgment. The thing I realized is, you know, it’s really not about the way it looks, it’s about what’s happening at 2:00 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon, which is: Is this vibrant? Are people using this space? Are they getting what they need? And, you know, Edenton is absolutely just incredible.

Eve: [00:23:06] Oh, I’m going to have to put them on my bucket list.

Patrice: [00:23:08] Yeah, it is right on the water. It’s a beautiful, beautiful place. I’m probably getting my history wrong, but I think it was very briefly the capital of North Carolina.

Eve: [00:23:18] Fabulous. So, do you think socially responsible real estate is necessary in today’s development landscape?

Patrice: [00:23:26] I think it’s absolutely essential. I’m pleased to see that, you know, there is a bit more attention on it than perhaps in the past. My two big concerns when it comes to real estate are, well really three, building in a way that truly supports the community, is in line with the community’s vision. The second is building with time in mind. Meaning, I think so much of what gets constructed today is just utter crap.

Eve: [00:23:57] Oh, yeah, I agree.

Patrice: [00:23:58] And it will, it will not stand the stand the test of time either design wise or, you know, the fundamentals, the physical structures are so poorly constructed. And then the third thing that is, again, just kind of how I look at the world, is the reuse factor. You know, I tend to really gravitate to projects, you know appreciate projects, that are making use of an old building in some form or some fashion because they, the research I did early on in my career regarding the carbon impacts associated with new construction, was kind of formative in my thinking about this. I mean, there are just massive, massive impacts associated with constructing new buildings and tearing down old ones. And it’s just critically important that we’re giving that our full attention as we’re designing these places.

Eve: [00:24:52] Yeah, and, you know, I’ve done a lot of reuse projects and I find people really love the idea that they’re living in or occupying something that has a history. So, it’s a shame to eradicate it. It’s useful today.

Patrice: [00:25:09] Yeah. And Eve, you are a hero, a true champion among the development community for the work you’ve done on.

Eve: [00:25:19] Oh, thank you.

Patrice: [00:25:19] Yeah, and reuse. I think you’re right. I mean, I do think there’s an element of the human psyche that finds it very important to connect to elements of the past. And that’s what building reuse allows us to do. I mean, unfortunately, so much of what is being constructed today, you know, has so little value that, yeah, it’s hard to imagine 50 years from now that people are going to be fighting to save those places.

Eve: [00:25:46] Yes. Yep. Shifting gears again, what community engagement tools have you seen that have worked best? I know you talked about going further with them in the future, but I’m just wondering what works?

Patrice: [00:26:02] Yeah. So, I mean, there’s certainly the you hold a meeting and you see who shows up and you create the space for them to, for everyone to have a voice and to talk. And that’s very important. But there are two engagement tools in particular that we’ve had some success within recent years. One are surveys. I mean, obviously, that’s a little bit different and limited because you’re not having a dynamic conversation with someone. But that can be extraordinarily helpful in reaching a larger community group about and engaging them in terms of how they want to see their downtown evolve. And the second, and this is really important, is going to where they are, right? So, which is to say, if you have groups that just tend to not engage downtown and yet, you know, there’s a festival happening or there’s some sort of gathering, churches, what have you. That can be a great place to go and engage directly, you know, hand somebody a survey and talk to them at the same time. That’s been extraordinarily valuable.

Eve: [00:27:04] Oh, interesting. And then I have to ask this question. Do you think equity crowdfunding can play a role in building main streets? I’m hoping the answer is yes.

Patrice: [00:27:15] Money? Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that crowdfunding, is probably the most exciting thing I’ve seen come along and real estate, I’d say full stop. Precisely because I think it creates a foundation for better community engagement, literally community buy-in.

Eve: [00:27:35] Yes. Yeah, that’s the important bit. Yeah.

Patrice: [00:27:37] Yeah. And that is, you know, that’s what it’s all about.

Eve: [00:27:42] Yeah, so they get to vote with their dollars. I mean, they also get to see the upside.

Patrice: [00:27:49] They do. They do. Yeah.

Eve: [00:27:51] Yeah. That’s what I love about it. So final question, what’s next for the Center and what’s next for you if you’re looking five years ahead, like what are the big goals?

Patrice: [00:28:03] Oh boy, I can answer the one for the Center pretty easily.

Eve: [00:28:07] Well, the 100 million for sure, right. That’s a really big goal.

Patrice: [00:28:10] After we get our 100 million and I go on vacation…I will not go on vacation. In terms of what’s next for the Center it is a renewed focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. You know, we’ve recently been doing some strategic planning that we’ve completely, I think, rethought our strategic plan to be aligned with goals of enhancing equity on main streets. I don’t want to be Pollyanna-ish about this and say, you know, we’re going to be able to snap our fingers and massive changes overnight but I do think we’re going to focus on creating tools and partnerships that will really support communities who want to have this conversation, are committed to creating a more diverse representation downtown. So, you’re going to see more resources come from the Center focused on the diversity issue. You know, the five-year question, Eve, is a really hard one because I’m spending all the time with Main Street. So, every year sort of presents a new challenge and you never know what’s coming down the road for you. I hope that, you know, five years from now, we’ve got double the membership and that we honestly have really engaged on the diversity issue in a really meaningful way.

Eve: [00:29:38] Yeah, I think that’s a good goal. And I hope there’s quite a few more main streets with less vacant storefronts.

Patrice: [00:29:45] That’s a good hope as well.

Eve: [00:29:48] Well, thank you very much for talking to me today. And I’m really looking forward to seeing what else, what else happens.

Patrice: [00:29:54] Thanks Eve, great to talk to you as well.

Eve: [00:30:08] That was Patrice Frey, the president and CEO of The National Main Street Center. Patrice impressed on me the importance of main streets. These commercial corridors are often the single biggest asset that a neighborhood or small town has. They are the center of commercial activity, often full of well-built, historic buildings, and they are the heart of their community. It’s important that they thrive. It’s important that they are saved and reused in ways that befit the way we live today.

Eve: [00:30:47] You can find out more about impact real estate investing and access the show notes for today’s episode at my website, rethinkrealestateforgood.co. While you’re there, sign up for my newsletter to find out more about how to make money in real estate while building better cities.

Eve: [00:31:04] Thank you so much for spending your time with me today. And thank you, Patrice, for sharing your thoughts with me. We’ll talk again soon but for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

Image courtesy of Patrice Frey

Equity and parking requirements.

Zoning, which dictates minimum off-street parking requirements for new and old buildings alike, has led to over 30% of our cities being given over to parking lots. While these parking requirements make for better parking, they make everything else worse.

There is no science to parking requirements. Every city adopts its own zoning rules and parking requirements. If you ask a planner how a parking requirement was set in any particular city, they would have no idea where the number came from.

What we do know is that parking requirements do a lot of damage. By favouring the car, cities have sprawled out of shape to make room for cars. And that spread has discriminated against those with lower incomes as housing close in becomes more and more expensive because of the lack of land. It’s made it harder and harder for those who really need to live close to where they work, to be able to afford to live close. If someone needs to buy a car to get to work because they can’t afford the housing that is close to their job, they also have to be able to afford all the associated costs of owning a car. It’s a vicious circle.

A 2016 study found that the median net wealth of Black families hovered at around $17,000, or 10 percent of the net worth of a typical white family. But some cities require two parking spaces per residence for apartments for low income families, and these are often Black families. How can they afford two cars? Since each space could easily cost more than $17,000 to build, wouldn’t it make more sense to put that cost towards higher-quality housing closer to their work? 

Dr Donald Shoup, a research professor at the Department of Urban Planning at UCLA, has spent his career deeply immersed in parking and land economics. His book, Parking in the City, shows that parking reforms can improve urban metro areas both economically and environmentally. It’s difficult to reform zoning for parking piecemeal says Donald.

“I recommend that cities should just remove off-street parking requirements.”

Many cities are following his recommendations and looking closely at parking requirement reforms and how this will make that valuable land available for much-development housing development instead. Houston recently increased its no parking requirements to cover a larger portion of the city and San Francisco, Buffalo, Hartford, London and Mexico City have already removed their off-street parking requirements completely. Expect to see more cities follow suit very soon.

Donald and I talk parking in this podcast. Listen in.

Image from pxhere