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Technology

It’s a Buckminster Fuller thing.

September 8, 2021

Judi Lynn Brown, co-founder and Chief Impact office of CivicMakers, is a creative systems and design practitioner. She is a member of a new generation of progressive and inclusive change-makers who embrace civic technology along with “radically inclusive, participatory governance structures.”

CivicMakers, which is based in the Bay Area, was created to make gathering spaces for those interested in public impact projects and civic innovation. It has since evolved into an innovation and engagement firm that provides “service design, community engagement and digital strategy to government agencies, nonprofits and civic technology companies.”

Born in southern California and raised in Nevada, Judi comes from a working class family where neither parent attended college. She was raised as a Catholic, came out in her mid-20’s and feels “queer activism is absolutely a model for sustainability.” Judi’s early life experiences suggested the “world-saver” path she would later take and her first professional experiences in nonprofit management and corporate philanthropy led her to look for more “creative ways to change parts of systems that currently don’t work for 100% of humanity.”

Prior to CivicMakers, Judi worked as a design strategist with Collective Invention, a social innovation firm working in education and community development. And she also did survey development and evaluation work for Zawadisha, a micro-lending fund for female entrepreneurs in Kenya. Judi she worked on a project involving the first-ever impact-rated municipal bonds, and on homeless issues (as a nonprofit board member).

Insights and Inspirations

  • Human-centred design (HCD) is an approach to problem-solving that puts the people at the heart of the design process. It’s all about designing for public impact.
  • Civicmakers applies human centered design to disciplines like strategic planning and community engagement. They also use systems thinking because being in the public sector means there’s no designing in a vacuum.
  • Judi hates scale. Her ambition is to remain hyper local, digging into the minutia of each community she works with.
Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:07] Hi there. Thanks for joining me on Rethink Real Estate. 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. When I’m not hosting the show, I’m running my real estate crowdfunding platform, SmallChange.co, where you’ll find impact real estate investment opportunities open to everyone. Or you can learn more about me and catch up on some podcasts at my Web site EvePicker.com.

Eve: [00:00:59] Today, I’m talking with Judi Lynn Brown, a self-confessed world saver. She’s one of a new set of progressive change makers in support of radical inclusion. Her early career involved some professional stints that disheartened her, and she decided that non-profits and corporate philanthropy were not for her. Instead, she decided to figure out a creative way to change a system that currently doesn’t work for 100 percent of humanity. And so she co-founded CivicMakers, an innovation and engagement firm that provides design and digital strategy services to support excellent community engagement. Hyper local is big in Judi’s mind.

Eve: [00:01:47] If you’d like to join me in my quest to rethink real estate, there are two simple things you can do. Share this podcast or go to Patreon.com/rethinkrealestate to support this podcast for the price of a cup of coffee.

Eve: [00:02:08] Hi Judi. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Judi Lynn Brown: [00:02:10] Hi Eve. Thanks for having me.

Eve: [00:02:12] Yeah, so I was really fascinated by the company you launched called CivicMakers, which is a great name, by the way.

Judi: [00:02:19] Thank you.

Eve: [00:02:20] I was wondering how long ago you launched it and why.

Judi: [00:02:25] Yeah, thanks for that question. CivicMakers, we’re kind of a unique firm in that we actually started as a meetup.

Eve: [00:02:34] Oh.

Judi: [00:02:35] Right around mid 2014, my co-founder, who I actually met while I was in grad school at Presidio Graduate School in San Francisco. He was working for change.org at the time. So he’s kind of in this emerging civic technology space. Prior to that, he had spent seven years in local government, and I was in school studying public administration and really just became fascinated with the concept of reimagining the design and delivery of public services by involving the people who are served in that process.

Eve: [00:03:13] What a unique thought.

Judi: [00:03:15] Imagine that, right?

Eve: [00:03:18] Yes.

Judi: [00:03:18] Revolutionary. So CivicMakers, like I said, started as a meet up, CivicMakers.meetup.com. My co-founder started hosting these events around the Bay Area that were a mix of salons, panel discussions, unconferences with a wide array of topic areas from public broadband to democracy in the workplace. And at that time, after I graduated, I was doing some work with a small social innovation firm that was run by some really incredible women. And I started getting involved, helping Lawrence, who’s my co-founder, with events for CivicMakers in about April, I think, of 2015. By August, we kind of started accidentally getting hired to do services. So, we’re like, OK, I guess we’re a services firm now. Prior to that, we were actually pursuing our work as a civic technology firm. So CivicMakers was going to be a platform that would connect consultants, practitioners, and developers in this emerging civic innovation space. So we pitched to Y Combinator. We went through that whole experience of putting the pitch deck together, trying to find a chief technology officer. And then it just kind of turned out that we were the platform, in fact, because what we love to do is bring people together and provide space for them to imagine their big creative ideas and bring them to life. So fast forward, you know, several years and we’re a seven-person civic design firm. We work primarily with municipalities throughout Northern California. We have some clients in California as well. And it’s all in applying human centered design to disciplines like strategic planning, community engagement. And I get to lead up a lot of our immersive learning experiences, which is really fun for me. So, it’s facilitation and coaching and… Yeah, so that’s the origin.

Eve: [00:05:29] So your business really grew out of a real need because people started hiring you?

Judi: [00:05:35] Yeah, it continues to evolve in that way, right. I think that having that as a foundation, you know, we never put together a business plan in the beginning for our services. The challenge is that we’re very responsive and adaptive. So that means that we are somewhat obsessively going back and examining the services, how we talk about them, who the clients are. You know, we’re also beholden to the public procurement process, you know, so there aren’t always RFPs issued that ask for the type of services that we do, but that’s grown over the years.

Eve: [00:06:17] Just for the sake of our audience. What exactly is human centered design?

Judi: [00:06:22] Excellent question, Eve. Thank you for that. So human centered design is a design process that incorporates human input throughout. This was highly popularized about 30 years ago with firms like IDO, the Stanford d.school, and traditionally has been applied to, you know, technology products. For example, like all the apps that we use, go through a process of empathizing with users, defining what exactly the market is, what exactly the problem is they’re trying to solve, ideating around how to solve that problem in a unique way, prototyping. So, of course, we’re not building it before. We are testing small increments of what a product or service could look like. And then we continue to test that with users. So that’s how that plays out in that technology space or private industry. We take that process, and we apply it to things like programs, policies, procedures within the public sector. So the idea that we’re not just creating programs that exist within the minds of our so-called experts, people who have some letters after their name or have been working in a particular field for a long time, they’re an integral part of that process, but they’re not the only part of the process. So we bring in the end users.

Eve: [00:07:50] So and I also read on your site about something called public impact design. Is that different than human centered design?

Judi: [00:07:59] That’s a great question. Early on, human centered design and design thinking in the public sector is kind of a bright, shiny object right now. It’s gaining momentum. It’s gaining traction. We can’t just take this particular methodology that has worked really well in the private sector, plop it into the public sector and assume it’s going to work well. So, we were playing around with this idea of how CivicMakers uniquely apply as human centered design. And it came up with this. It’s about public impact and it’s about designing for impact. And it’s not just that we use human centered design and the five phases of empathize to find IDA, prototype and test, but that we’re also bringing in systems thinking because we definitely in the public sector, there is no designing in a vacuum. Everything has some kind of reverberation or constraint, right, within a system. And then the other sort of methodology that’s part of that is reflective practice, which is something that a lot of professional fields, such as medical doctors do this where they have to constantly be learning and relearning about their practice, going through certifications, et cetera. So if we are to do that at a public administration level, pause and reflect on what we’re learning as individuals and how we’re applying that in our work, the idea here is that we create change by engaging individuals. That’s reflective practice, helping them collaborate and problem solve creatively with teams. That’s human centered design. And then this third layer is that this is all within, you know, arguably very broken systems. So…

Eve: [00:09:55] Yeah, no, it’s not easy to pause and reflect. I can’t remember when I did that. We are all moving very fast. And it’s that’s got to be pretty purposeful, I imagine.

Judi: [00:10:10] Yeah, definitely. And all of these, sort of, the idea that we’re pausing and reflecting on how we as individuals show up in the work, what are our unique superpowers. Right? How do those map to those of our teams? And then what are we really trying to achieve, those, sort of, systems level view. Even we as a small firm have a hard time living those values, right?

Eve: [00:10:37] Yeah, yeah. You talk about impact. How do you describe impact? What do you see as impact?

Judi: [00:10:45] Yeah, I don’t know that I have a good answer for that, Eve. When we started this firm and in grad school, I actually focused primarily on the concept of impact evaluation. And I did that through the lens of microfinance. And I found that impact can really only truly be defined from the perspective of those who are impacted. Right?

Eve: [00:11:13] Yes.

Judi: [00:11:14] So if we have the World Bank and the IMF and, you know, professors, folks who are, you know, doing extensive literature review and trying to create some sort of standardized framework by which we can measure something like, for example, a quality of life indicators over the life of the loan. We can’t do that in a meaningful way without also being able to source those indicators from people who are served. So, we have a really amazing intern from UC Berkeley right now who’s helping us to develop our theory of change.

Eve: [00:11:54] Mm hmm. I would love to see it. We developed our own little change index, which is our impactful tool and probably out of the same frustration or comments that you just made. I mean, in the physical world, you know, the impact tools we had when we developed this were leads ratings and oh, God, I don’t even know what else. But those those types of ratings for everyday people just make no sense at all.

Judi: [00:12:22] Yep.

Eve: [00:12:22] I mean, they had enough for me, a professional, to understand.

Judi: [00:12:26] Yep.

Eve: [00:12:27] I dug into my urban design background and my understanding of spaces and where people like to be and like to exist in affordable housing and job creation to kind of create a much simpler, more flexible view of what impact might be.

Judi: [00:12:43] Yep.

Eve: [00:12:43] And some of the indices out there were just downright scary.

Judi: [00:12:48] Yeah, and inaccessible, right?

Eve: [00:12:50] Very, very inaccessible. Well, you know, we work with regulation crowdfunding, which demands accessibility. The rule actually says that we need to write everything in plain English.

Judi: [00:13:01] Yep.

Eve: [00:13:02] And so that was kind of the driving force behind our stupid simple index.

Judi: [00:13:08] Yeah.

Eve: [00:13:09] Which actually took an awful long time to develop and figure out how it might work, applied to real estate. Not easy. Yeah. Yeah. I can imagine what you’re doing is even harder.

Judi: [00:13:21] Well I had a feeling, Eve, that this was definitely a topic that we could explore together because…

Eve: [00:13:30] Yes.

Judi: [00:13:30] Right, you accidentally start a civic design firm and accidentally become a human centered designer, and then you have to come up with something to call yourself so that the world knows how to position you within these structures that tell us where people are. Right?

Eve: [00:13:50] Yes.

Judi: [00:13:50] And so I took on this title of Chief Impact Officer, you know, a good six years ago. And I’ve realized that I don’t like any of those words.

Eve: [00:14:03] Yes.

Judi: [00:14:04] I don’t like chief. I am leery of the term impact because…

Eve: [00:14:09] I don’t like titles like Period.

Judi: [00:14:14] And I certainly don’t want to be known as an officer because, you know, I think that word from a public administration perspective, Eve, stay with me here, the idea that, you know, in the public sector, so many of our institutions are designed according to arbitrary hierarchies. Right. A lot of that comes from the sort of command and control this kind of like militaristic aspect of governance. So a lot of the language was

Eve: [00:14:49] Very, very male, you know.

Judi: [00:14:51] Oh. Yes, definitely extractive. Yes. Like, what is it? Divide and conquer. I’m constantly trying to sort of like de-violence or de-militarize my own language because even saying something like front line employees, you know, gives us a mental image of war, right?

Eve: [00:15:15] Yeah, it does. What are frontline employees? That is actually a first for me. I’ve never heard that.

Judi: [00:15:21] Oh, I’m so glad you asked that.

Eve: [00:15:24] I understand it, but it’s…

Judi: [00:15:26] Yeah, these are public facing employees.

Eve: [00:15:30] Oh.

Judi: [00:15:31] These are like the public servants at the DMV that no one is very excited to see, but play a very important role in shaping our cities, right.

Eve: [00:15:41] And so they’re at war with their customers.

Judi: [00:15:44] Exactly. And that’s the image that we’re painting in our heads of public service.

Eve: [00:15:49] Yeah, I worked in a public service job for a couple of years at the planning department.

Judi: [00:15:55] Um hmm.

Eve: [00:15:56] Actually, my boss was the past head of planning for San Francisco, and this was a few years ago and it was the best job I ever had. It was fantastic. It goes both ways. So the public didn’t always treat us very well.

Judi [00:16:11] Right, right. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I love hearing that, Eve. I think that there are many, many, many unsung heroes every day making our cities better. And, you know, I’ll give you an example. We’ve been fortunate enough to be doing this work with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. And essentially, it’s a training program for public facing employees. So those are the bus drivers, the ticket agents, the parking control officers. You know, the ones who drive those little they’re called gopher vehicles around. Everyone hates them, Eve. Even if you’re not getting a ticket, people see those gophers and they turn red. These people have arguably some of the most dangerous jobs because at least law enforcement, you know, they can defend themselves. Our parking control officers, they have stuff thrown at them. They’re yelled at. And so, part of these trainings are around how they can de-escalate potentially violent situations with the public.

Eve: [00:17:23] Wow. So what is impact then?

Judi: [00:17:27] Oh, right, yes, back to that, what is impact? Some of the metrics that I use are things like hugs and high fives. So, stay with me here, back when we used to be able to do workshops in person. I’ve done workshops with state employees for the California Department of Technology. So I’m a human centered design facilitator for their open enrolment trainings that are open to any state employee across the state. And then sometimes I’ll work within their leadership academy. So it’ll be like cybersecurity professionals or IT professionals. And, you know, we think about state government as being kind of, you know, not very human. So if I walk into a room of people who did not know each other, you know, four, five, six, seven hours prior to that, depending on how long the workshop is and we leave the room and people are giving each other hugs and high fives, that’s an indicator of impact to me.

Eve: [00:18:36] Mm hmm.

Judi: [00:18:37] I know it may sound just like you were saying, surprisingly simple, but the theory is that if we create internal bureaucracies that really respect the creative potential of everyone within that bureaucracy, regardless of where they sit, if people within a municipality, I get emails all the time from some of this really amazing work that I’m so humbled to be able to do, which will be like, I was about to leave the city until I was part of this learning experience.

Eve: [00:19:12] Oh, wow.

Judi: [00:19:13] Because…

Eve: [00:19:14] That’s a great result.

Judi: [00:19:16] Yeah. And those are the things, Eve, that I can’t really quantify. Like, I cannot demonstrate the ROI on the culture change work. That essentially is happening when we’re able to do this.

Eve: [00:19:32] I agree. I agree.

Judi: [00:19:34] And I’m sure you struggle with that, too.

Eve: [00:19:36] Well, we have some clearer indicators, but there were always challenges. Things don’t always work perfectly. But there are other returns on investment that are not, you know, indicator list that I certainly am aware of. Like, you know, the return on the pandemic and Black Lives Matters is filtering through. To my life in an unexpected way, as I’m sure many other people are feeling. So, you know, with, what a horrible year, with some really amazing outcomes.

Judi: [00:20:14] Absolutely.

Eve: [00:20:14] So, was that the way to get there? Probably not. But apparently it needed, there needed to be some sort of seismic event to make people sit up and think, right?

Judi: [00:20:27] Yeah, absolutely. That’s an excellent example. You know, there’s offices of racial equity popping up all over the country.

Eve: [00:20:37] Oh, yeah.

Judi: [00:20:37] So now we have equity officers. A few years ago, it was all about the chief innovation officers and the chief digital services officers. I don’t know if creating separate offices is really the way to do this, right?

Eve: [00:20:55] I’ve always felt like when I’m invited to be on an all-women’s panel at a conference, I just feel like it’s being invited to sit at the kid’s table.

Judi: [00:21:04] Yeah.

Eve: [00:21:04] So, you know, treating everyone equally is really the key. Separate office seems, you know, I don’t really fully understand it. But the way I’m feeling it in real estate is that more and more minority real estate developers are coming to us. It’s a pretty significant shift. And I’m loving that. It’s really pretty fabulous, and I’m convinced that’s a direct result of the last 18 months.

Judi: [00:21:34] Yeah. In theory, everyone treated equally. Love that. And, you know, there is a certain amount of reckoning that people who have historically had access, right. There’s a certain kind of empathy and humility that we as people of privilege have to be aware of every day and think about, what are we willing to give up to make up for some of the, you know, inequities that have existed? I started in sustainability, right. So, 10 years ago when I was in grad school to do a sustainable master’s in public administration, it was like chief sustainability offices and chief sustainability officer. Right. But like sustainability should be part of all of the work. Innovation should be part of all of the work. Equity should be part of all of the work. And I wonder if, you know, as part of this work that these offices are doing, if we can find ways to not be, you know, exclusive, like, here’s the all-women’s conference kind of thing, but really strategize how we might elevate and remove barriers, you know, and I think maybe what you are experiencing in real estate is a by-product of that. We do have to be intentional about barrier remover because it turns out we all succeed when we provide others with the same opportunities.

Eve: [00:23:11] So how does your work then translate to the physical environment? I have to ask that because, you know, real estate is what I think about.

Judi: [00:23:19] Yeah.

Eve: [00:23:19] But I mean, I’ve been to plenty of community meetings in my past, first as a planner in a planning department and also as a real estate developer. And they were always very difficult.

Judi: [00:23:32] Yeah.

Eve: [00:23:34] Meetings with very little meeting of the mind, really. You know, they and us, really, that’s what these meetings are typically. So how does this change that?

Judi: [00:23:46] Yeah, I was thinking about this in terms of some of the projects that. So I don’t need the community engagement efforts for our business. My business partner, Cristel, does. She has a background in planning and community development. She actually started her career at Google and then decided she wanted to do more meaningful work. You know, there are constraints, right, because if a planning department or a housing authority hires us to do community engagement. In some cases, they’re hiring us to do the sort of check the box, have a community meeting at 2pm on a Tuesday. That means the usual suspects show up. Like how many working mothers can show up to a public meeting at two p.m. on a Tuesday, right?

Eve: [00:24:34] Well, especially in underserved neighborhoods where often single mothers who are holding down several jobs.

Judi: [00:24:40] So, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And so the pandemic actually going back to what we were talking about a little bit earlier, has made these engagements slightly more accessible. I mean, of course, we still have the digital divide to maneuver, but we were doing a project with the housing authority in Silicon Valley and we were going to have a community meeting the following week before we got the shelter in place mandate, right. And the client would have been happy with twenty-five people showing up to that meeting. We move that online. We used various channels to market it, we made it accessible, we included subtitles, we did some in language facilitation, and we got three times the amount of participation than we had assumed we might get doing it in person. So that’s an example.

Eve: [00:25:45] That’s a great outcome. Yeah.

Judi: [00:25:48] And so how that translates to your point to the physical environment, of course, is that we have more voices saying, OK, if we want this percentage of this development to be affordable, what does that mean? And, you know, because there are some people, there’s like the YIMBYs and the NIMBYs, but like sometimes the YIMBYs are only YIMBYs if it’s like 20 percent affordable housing, but if it’s 40 percent, then they become NIMBY’s, right. So those are the kinds of you know, and then there’s there’s some pretty egregious and painful limitations around the Brown Act and and just some of the constraints that we have with true, meaningful community engagement. But if our clients also get it and they should, because when they engage community authentically into your point, Eve, you know in the planning process, it’s like, OK, we make a decision, we make a decision, we make a decision. And then it’s like, oh, let’s engage community and then community’s pissed off because they’re like, actually, why didn’t you engage us at the beginning, right?

Eve: [00:27:06] Yes. Yes.

Judi: [00:27:07] So our sort of human centered community engagement, like applying that human centered design lens to how we engage community offers to start that engagement much earlier. And it doesn’t have to be with a whole public meeting. Right. We’ve really been experimenting with this concept of civic councils so that there is there is like a learning opportunity. There’s like a co-ownership opportunity. And it’s not just this two-way us against them communication stream, but that we’re actually having deliberative dialogue around what’s going to change in our cities.

Eve: [00:27:48] Because change is scary, right?

Judi: [00:27:51] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s another thing that the pandemic has shown as though too, right. It is possible for our permitting processes to be online. It is possible for our engagement processes to be online. What would be really nice is if we were able to respond to crises which will just keep on coming, instead of react. So, so much of what we saw was reactive. But we’re also seeing those who are resistant to change. It’s the only thing that is constant, right?

Eve: [00:28:32] I think most people are scared of change. I have to keep reminding myself of that because I love change. I thrive on change. It just drives me. I’m married to someone who has trouble with change. He likes things the same. And I think most people do. And because they can’t visualize what is coming, it makes it really scary. And that’s hard to wrap your head around, I think.

Judi: [00:28:57] Yeah. So the way that shows up in our work, um, well, there’s definitely the built environment, but we do a lot of work around sort of digital infrastructure, digital services. We don’t build those things, but we do some of the engagement around them, right. So whether it is convening community to co-create, lots of alliteration there, digital privacy principles, or helping a municipality internally engage their employees, some of whom have been doing the same paper based process for 30 years, and have that fear they’re going to become irrelevant when their process is digitized. Right. That’s a real scary fear. And if we can get leaders to ask those people, these are not necessarily the quote unquote front line or public facing in some cases, but, you know, like payroll clerks, for example, like that’s still a job in a lot of municipal government. If we can bring them along and ask them, where are you seeing some of the greatest needs or gaps in services? How might we engage your human ingenuity to meet those while we can understand that a lot of your time that you would spend matching up paper-based time cards and doing data entry in a system from 1991 will be freed up. It’s not that they’re going to go away. Right, because…

Eve: [00:30:45] They’re going to do something different.

Judi: [00:30:46] Exactly. And if we ask them, what would you like to do, what are you seeing? As opposed to telling them we’re doing this whole project and it means that you know, 80 percent of your workday is going to change, then I think that we can minimize some of those shocks and some of the fear.

Eve: [00:31:08] So you said that you’ve been very responsive, little company. And I’m just wondering if you thought about how you’re going to scale or if you have a big, hairy, audacious goal.

Judi: [00:31:19] Yeah, I hate the concept of scale, Eve. I mean, maybe hate is a strong word. I am highly critical of the concept of scale because I think some of the magic that we get to co-create with our partner clients where we do that work is due to the sort of hyper localization, is due to the fact that, you know, like I live in San Francisco, I ride those buses with those operators that I’m training. Right. I visit the small businesses that the Office of Economic and Workforce Development is supporting. I think at some point, because we are also just like overachievers, we have a very rigorous internal strategic planning process. And at one point in time, I would say maybe around 2017, when we went from a two-person company to a three person company, we were like, oh, in 10 years we’re going to have 50 employees and we’re going to have offices here and offices here and. I just don’t know that that’s part of what we want to do, because when you reach a certain size, you just don’t have that level of intimacy and relationships. And those are the projects that I feel are most impactful, even if you ask me what I mean by that, and I’ll stumble through not having, you know, the exact metrics in mind.

Eve: [00:32:59] It sounds to me like it’s a little like cloning. Cloning these little offices is, you know, probably the way it might work because you you have an impact in one particular part of the world, but maybe you could do it somewhere else.

Judi: [00:33:12] Yeah, I appreciate that. Some of the scale of the work. Right. In realizing that my superpower is facilitation and co-creating immersive learning experiences. Right. It’s not, like I taught a couple graduate level classes, but I really try to create a space that allows for folks to share their innate knowledge and what they’ve learned about their work. It’s very much about eliminating the power differential between professor and student. And so I had the opportunity to go and test this out in late 2019 because of work that we had done with California Health and Human Services. So they had an Office of Innovation, right, here it is. The Office of Innovation would take people from different departments, train them up an innovation methodology, and then they would work for a year in doing these sort of design sprints with different departments and then they’d go back to their home departments. That model has shifted quite a bit. The Office of Innovation has now morphed into something else because, again, maybe that wasn’t the best approach. But I had the opportunity in working with the Deputy Director of that office to go to Montenegro, which is her home country. And we did a five-day training, immersive training in this concept of digital transformation, which has nothing to do with digital and everything to do with humans, right? So we had teams from Albania, North Macedonia, Bosnia Herzegovina, where else, Serbia and Montenegro. So I had five teams of people from the Western Balkans, of which I know sadly very little about. Right. In terms of their context. And it was sort of scary because, again, the work is very context specific. But, Eve, we had an amazing time and now I have lifelong friends who are ministers of, you know, digital transformation in Serbia. Like I can hit them up on Slack right now. So I do appreciate that. I don’t know that some of the longer term, deeply embedded project work that we do would work elsewhere, but we’re open to it.

Eve: [00:35:42] Well, this has been a delightful conversation. I appreciate that you’re a local girl.

Judi: [00:35:49] Thank you.

Eve: [00:35:50] Local is where your heart is. And it’s pretty fantastic that San Francisco has you.

Judi: [00:35:55] Oh, thank you. We have a multitude of challenges. That’s such a nice reflection. And as part of my project for grad school, I went to Kenya and I interviewed women business owners. This is for another conversation, maybe over cocktails sometime, Eve.

Eve: [00:36:12] Yes, in real life.

Judi: [00:36:16] And I realize that…

Eve: [00:36:17] When the pandemic has been crushed.

Judi: [00:36:19] Exactly. Exactly. And I realized that I don’t need to do that work in Kenya or in, you know, anywhere else that isn’t my beautiful, vibrant and challenging adopted city of San Francisco. So, you know..

Eve: [00:36:39] It’s been delightful. Thank you so much for joining me.

Judi: [00:36:41] Yes, thank you, Eve.

Eve: [00:36:45] That was Judi Lynn Brown. Judi hates scale. Her ambition is to remain hyper local, digging into the minutia of each community she works with. She doesn’t see any other way to continue building on the work she’s doing, human centered community engagement.

Eve: [00:37:08] You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at EvePicker.com, or you can support us at Patreon.com/rethinkrealestate for the price of a cup of coffee. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music. And thanks to you for spending your time with me today. We’ll talk again soon. But for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

Image courtesy of Judi Lynn Brown, CivicMakers

One year. 41 more conversations.

July 28, 2021

41 amazing people. 41 inspiring conversations.

Cynthia Muller. Richard Rothstein. Andre Perry. Charmaine Curtis. Lyneir Richardson. Darryl Scipio. Libby Seifel. Beth Silverman. Patrick Quinton. Daniel Parolek. Charles Durrett. Heather Hood. Diana Lind. Scott Flynn. Atticus LeBlanc. Sam Ruben. Andrew Luong. Stephanie Gripne. Shannon Mudd. Ken Weinstein. Garry Gilliam. Andy Williams. Daniel Dus. Patrice Frey. Bruce Katz. Christopher Leinberger. David Peter Alan. Annie Donovan. Michael Shuman. Dan Miller. Scott Ehlert. Katie Faulkner. A-P Hurd. Max Levine. Brian Dally. Jonny Price. Michael Lee. Kevin Cavenaugh.

These are the rockstars of my show.

Season Three starts soon …

Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:14] Hi there. Thanks so much for joining me today for the final episode of Rethink Real Estate. For Good, season 2.

My name is Eve Picker and I’m on a mission to make real estate work for everyone. Real estate can help to solve climate change, can house people affordably, can create beautiful streetscapes, unify neighborhoods and enliven cities. 

You can learn more about me at my website, rethinkrealestateforgood.co, or visit my real estate crowdfunding platform, SmallChange.co. Our projects offer impact, solve housing problems, invest in neighborhoods and give everyone the opportunity to invest and build wealth for as little as $500.

[00:01:12] Today marks the second anniversary of this podcast. Two years ago, I didn’t know that our audience would grow as it has. In fact, two years ago I wasn’t sure we would have an audience at all. Now 10,000 people download episodes every month. That’s 10,000 people who care about thoughtful and impactful real estate solutions.  Wow!  I am humbled that all of you want to listen in.

This second year has been an opportunity to learn from yet another class of extraordinary leaders and innovators in real estate. My guests are working on housing solutions, policy issues, manufacturing, in fintech, on preservation, on developing new technologies and on providing real estate metrics, on mobility issues, as architects, on sustainable development, on community capital, on equity for women and equity for minorities and in many other niches, pushing the boundaries of the built environment to be better for everyone. 

The range of work that is being accomplished is quite awe-inspiring.

[00:02:25] Perhaps the most important theme this year was equity.

Cynthia Muller, director of Mission Driven Investments at the Kellogg Foundation. has been described as a “thought leader of the impact investing ecosystem and a trailblazer in the field.” In No guilt. Just Action. she reminds us that every time there has been an opportunity for black and brown people to build an asset, to build wealth, it’s been taken away from them. Let’s change that. 

Richard Rothstein and Andre Perry have written about these inequities.In The Color of Law Richard argues for a national civil rights movement to ensure that we all get to reap the economic benefits of living in this rich and diverse country. And In Know your price, Andre share findings that homes are underpriced by 23 percent, or $48,000 per home, in majority black neighborhoods. That’s $156 billion in lost equity.

[00:03:31] Charmain Curtis, Lyneir Richardson and Darryl Scipio are a new breed of black developers. Charmain has built a successful career as a developer despite being a black woman. She didn’t realize what she was up against until she was in her 30s. In Spread the Wealth she ponders how wealth could be distributed equitably to everyone.

In Building Generational Wealth, Lyneir describes his plan to buy 100 community shopping centers with 100 community members, all focused in majority black neighborhoods. He provided the first opportunity to 140 investors on Small Change early this year.

[00:04:17] Justice runs deep with Darryl.  In Turning renters into homeowners he describes his latest passion project, Savers Village.  He aims to help every tenant save enough for a down payment on a home.

And Libby Seifel is focused on women.  In Women building collective muscle, she describes the network of women leaders in real estate she has built. After more than 30 years in the industry, she is no longer the only woman in the room, and that some of the biggest new projects in the Bay Area are being driven by women.

[00:04:56] Housing solutions are importantly getting a lot of attention.

Perhaps the boldest of these is Beth Silverman’s Lotus Project. In Radical in its Simplicity she tells us how ,for just $800, her organization can successfully house a homeless family and change the trajectory of their lives forever.

We learn about accessory dwelling units as an affordable housing solution in Yes! In My Backyard! Patrick Quinton has developed a manufactured solution that drops a 32×14 foot ADU into a typical 50-by-100-foot lot in Portland, Oregon without hitting the setbacks and without requiring city design review. And he’s raising money for this project on Smallchange.co

[00:05:48] On the west coast, Daniel Parolek, architect, coined the phrase, The Missing Middle just as the critical absence of affordable housing was becoming a major planning issue for cities nationwide. He explains what the missing middle is, why it is important and how we can build more of it. 

Charles Durrett brought co-housing from Copenhagen to the US many years ago and wrote a book about it. He explains why he’s spent a career in co-housing and how it can make people’s lives better in It takes a Village.

[00:06:27] In Northern California, Heather Hood oversees efforts for the Enterprise Community Partners that ensure low- and moderate-income residents have access to affordable, quality housing. We talk about the enormous size of this problem in The elephant in the region.

And Diana Lind wraps it up for us in Lets be Brave. She’s written a book called Brave New Home in which she argues that the single-family home is at least partly to blame for our current housing woes.

[00:07:01] Technology is rapidly transforming the real estate industry in many different ways as well.

Some of my guests, like Patrick Quinton and Scott Flynn in Manufacturing change, are focused on manufacturing affordable homes in factories. Scott’s company, IndieDwell, manufactures smaller, sustainable and affordable homes at the pace of 10 homes per week and growing.

But others are pursuing new ideas.  Atticus LeBlanc tells us about PadSplit in One Room at a time.. He wants to dramatically change how we address affordable housing by using space that is now under-used in everyday homes.

[00:07:46] Or Sam Ruben in 3D-printing, robotics and automation, oh my! His company is printing buildings and hopes to create affordable and sustainable homes with their new technology.

And finally, Andrew Luoung who has deconstructed the often lengthy and confusing process of small scale real estate investment, making it accessible to everyone.  In Andrew loves real estate he describes the online turnkey service that he has developed into Doorvest.

[00:08:20] Some guests are focused on fertilizing tranches of future impact investors and leaders.

None is more passionate than Dr. Stephanie Gripne. In The impact accelerator, she tells us about founding the Impact Finance Center with a mission to identify, train and activate philanthropists and investors to become impact investors. Her big, hairy audacious goal is to move a trillion dollars into impact investing.

Dr. Shannon Mudd is right behind her, teaching students how to invest $50,000 of real money for maximum social impact. His Young Angels are carrying this knowledge into their professional careers.

[00:09:09] Others want to pay it forward.

Like Ken Weinstein, a highly successful Philly developer whose career was inspired by his landlady in Germantown. He’s created a boot-camp for aspiring developers called Jumpstart Germantown and describes the program in Jumpstarting a community.

[00:09:32] Garry Gilliam may be best known for playing in the NFL. Today he has a second career as an impact real estate developer. He tells about his first project in The Bridge. It came about as a joint effort with Garry’s friends from the Hershey School, a philanthropic school for low-income children. That school gave them all a leg up and now they want to give back to their community. 

Or Andy Williams, a former Marine who was determined to secure his future through real estate. He’s built a substantial portfolio of homes, a real estate development business focused on larger projects, and now, a program that seeks to turn veterans into entrepreneurs just like himself.  

[00:10:23] Some guests, like Daniel Dus and Patrice Frey, are focused on building on what’s already there. Learn how Daniel is planning to redevelop the dramatically underutilized historic luxury estates of the Berkshires for the shared economy in Everything old is new again.  And in Saving Places, Patrice explains the role of the National Main Street Center in servicing the revitalization of commercial main streets in big cities and small towns alike.

Bruce Katz moves the focus back to metro areas in Cities are networks. As a foremost policy expert, Bruce argues that cities must knit together solutions. It’s an imperative. And he calls this the new localism.

Christopher Leinberger is thinking along the same lines in Back to the Future. As a renowned urban strategist, teacher, developer, researcher and author Chris thinks “Back to the Future” got it right.

[00:11:30] While David Peter Alan enchanted me in I’ve been working on the railroad with his singular passion for the country’s railway system. He has ridden the entire Amtrak system and about 300 transit providers in the U.S. and in Canada.

Annie Donovan and Michael Shuman are focused on alternative finance. Michael thinks we have it Totally backwards. Local owned businesses make up 60 to 80 percent of the private marketplace in the average U.S. community. But economic developers and subsidies almost always overlook them. And Annie believes that disruptive capital is critical for solving thorny problems. She describes her pursuit of fairness in economics and finance in The world beyond banks.

[00:12:27] A handful of guests are diversely focussed on sustainability in the built environment.  Perhaps the most interesting is Dan Miller, who has launched a platform that connects everyday investors with farmers who need loans. He’s Stewarding the Future of Farming with investments as low as $100.

Scott Ehlert and Katie Faulkner are mass timber experts.  Katie as an architect with an eye on sustainability in From here to there.  In Mass timber for the masses, Scott tells us about the installation and cost benefits of a proprietary hollow core mass timber system he is designing that uses 50% less wood fiber. And, as if that is not enough, Scott is also designing a robotic fabrication facility to anchor a new wood product innovation campus, in California.

While A-P Hurd remains focused on building Livable and delightful communities.

[00:13:28] This class of guests would not be complete without my colleagues in the crowdfunding industry.

Some like Max Levine and Brian Dally are focused on real estate.

In Hello, Neighbor we learn about Max’s Neighborhood Investment Company, which has a mission “to localize wealth creation and broaden access to neighborhood equity.”  While in Get in on the ground floor,  Brian describes the platform that he has built into the go-to funding platform if you want to fix’n flip property.

Jonny Price, previously with Kiva and now with Wefunder, is focused on Filling the “crazy” gap. There’s a common theme for Johnny – financially excluded and socially impactful businesses.And Michael Lee is Building Virtual Communities using blockchain. Instead of using blockchain for crypto, he’s using it as an organizing tool to democratize the power of data.

[00:14:31] Finally, what better way to end than with Kevin Cavenaugh a developer in a class of his own. In I do a bunch of weird stuff, you can tap into this unique developer. Left brain, right brain, head and heart all come to bear on his wildly creative buildings. “I’m tired of mocha-colored, vinyl-windowed boring. I can’t change the fact that the streets are gray, and the sky is gray. But the buildings?” says Kevin.

Phew. That’s a lot of podcasts.  I’ve enjoyed every interview with every person.  I’m in awe of them all.   But it’s time to take some time off to recharge and get ready for Season Three. We’ll be back refreshed in September with many more amazing people for you to listen to and for me to learn from.

Thank you so much for joining me.  Now go forth, invest a little in your community and make some change!

The potential of unused space.

March 8, 2021

The US may be facing the most severe housing crisis in its history. Restrictive building regulations and zoning have pushed real estate prices out of reach for more and more Americans. The problem, which has been growing for the last fifty years, has been sharply accelerated by the pandemic.  

While some progress is being made, the rate of homelessness is outstripping policymaking to squash it. This problem requires more creative responses, both long-term and temporary, that recognize the unique characteristics of cities and their populations.

Vacant land 

Many cities have vacant and underutilized land. There’s a growing awareness that cities are the most sustainable places to live and this makes vacant lots in cities quite attractive. Often small in size, they can be well-suited for the building of small, affordable homes. Developers and architects are turning their attention to these lots in an effort to make an impact on housing affordability. Architects like Brian Gaudio, turned housing manufacturer, who launched his company Module to build efficient infill homes. Or Jonathan Tate, a New Orleans- based architect who focused on designing and building affordable housing on odd-shaped and forgotten lots. One of his projects, Starter Home Two, was built using crowdfunded equity raised through Small Change.

Adaptive reuse

Underutilized government offices, hotels and shuttered public schools might also help to solve the housing shortage. The pandemic has increased the inventory of buildings that now stand vacant. And some developers and investors are creatively acting upon the opportunity.

Repvblik, an LA development company, has built its practice around adaptive reuse since 2015. In Branson, Missouri, they have converted a Days Inn Hotel into affordable housing, turning 423 hotel rooms into 341 affordable multifamily units. Plato’s Cave now includes coworking spaces, meeting rooms, a gym, a communal kitchen and dining room for functions, a beach volleyball court, and free-to-use bicycles. The cost of conversion for this project was less than half of the cost of building a new property. Starcity, a San Francisco-based company, is also converting defunct and underused commercial and hospitality spaces. And ASK Studio, an architectural firm, has converted an 1888 local high school, in Clinton, Iowa, into 16 affordable multifamily units.

Empty rooms

But what about homeowners who are feeling the squeeze and have a spare room or two in their home? Or real estate owners who are just not realizing the appropriate rent for their property? Atticus LeBlanc, an affordable housing advocate for over a decade now, founded Padsplit to address affordable housing a little differently. Instead of building new, he advocates for using every empty space in every home for an abundance of affordable living options. On Padsplit, a technology platform, homeowners can list a room, or find a local contractor to reconfigure their home so that they can share it with multiple tenants. On the outside, a PadSplit looks like any other traditional home. But on the inside each house typically has five to eight furnished bedrooms, with shared bathrooms, kitchen, dining, and laundry rooms (no living rooms). Utilities, internet service and cleaning is included in weekly rent, making these “pads” extremely flexible housing options. Padsplit homes are designed to allow single person households, or individual workers in our communities, to be able to rent individual rooms rather than entire homes.

Want to learn more? Listen in to my podcast conversation with Atticus.

Image by Htm CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia

One room at a time.

December 9, 2020

Atticus LeBlanc is the founder of Padsplit, a technology platform dedicated to affordable housing, with no barriers of entry. Atticus, who studied architecture and urban studies at Yale, has been an affordable housing advocate and real estate investor for over a decade, with a company that owns and manages over 550 affordable residential units. But he founded Padsplit with a much bigger goal in mind. He wants to dramatically change how we address affordable housing by using space that is now under-used – whether in our own house or a rental property. He wants to make every available room a safe, clean home for someone who really needs it, all while providing a fair return to homeowners.

PadSplit’s platform allows homeowners to list a room, or to work with local contractors to reconfigure a house to optimize the space for multiple tenants. PadSplit houses typically offer five to eight furnished bedrooms, with shared bathrooms, kitchen, dining, and laundry rooms (no living rooms), with all utilities, internet and a cleaning service included, for a weekly rent. To rapidly provide new affordable housing in our changing economy, Atticus wants PadSplit to take hold in a really big way. So, he’s planning to grow the 1,100 rooms that are on PadSplit today, to many hundreds of thousands of rooms. PadSplit is his moonshot. 

Atticus has written in-depth Op-Ed pieces for the Forbes Real Estate Council blog, is the co-chair of ULI’s UrbanPlan Education Initiative, and he co-chaired the Design For Affordability Task Force in 2018.

Insights and Inspirations

  • Atticus wonders how we’ll ever catch up on the affordable housing we need to build if we don’t think differently.
  • Every spare, unused room can be a fresh start, and safe home, for someone who needs it.
  • PadSplit is a private market solution to a problem that is generally managed inefficiently with subsidies.
  • PadSplits are generally located near public transit.
  • No traditional corporate leases. No deposits. Month to month. Fully furnished. Stay a month or stay a year. People can live in PadSplits to live close to their job (where they otherwise may not be able to afford a unit), or simply to get back on their feet.

Other Information

  • Atticus has three rituals that keep him grounded: Journaling, exercise and nightly dinners around the table with his family. He also loves fishing and backpacking whenever he can escape from his work routine.
Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:09] Hi there. Thanks so much for joining me today for the latest episode of Impact Real Estate Investing. My guest today is Atticus LeBlanc, founder of PadSplit, a technology platform dedicated to affordable housing. Atticus has been an affordable housing advocate and real estate investor for over a decade now, his company owning and managing over 550 affordable residential units. But he founded PadSplit with a much bigger goal in mind. He wants to dramatically change how we address affordable housing by using every space that is underused, in our own house or in a shared home. He doesn’t care how. Every room is a safe, clean home for someone who really needs it. You’ll want to hear more. Be sure to go to EvePicker.com to find out more about Atticus 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: [00:01:26] Hello, Atticus. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Atticus LeBlanc: [00:01:30] Absolutely. Pleasure to be here, Eve. Thank you for the opportunity.

Eve: [00:01:33] Yeah, I’m really looking forward to that conversation. Because you’re doing something pretty unusual. You started a company called PadSplit, and I’m wondering why you started it.

Atticus: [00:01:45] Sure. Yeah. So I think ever since I was a kid, I enjoyed solving problems. And maybe charging at windmills bigger than, bigger than where appropriate at any given time. And this has just been a really big windmill. I’ve been in in real estate my entire career here in the Atlanta area, going on 18 years now. And have been an entrepreneur for the last 15. And then in housing, specifically, for the last 12. As an entrepreneur in the housing space, I came to see a lot of what I felt was wrong with the industry, and the growing, let’s just say, affordable housing crisis for lack of a better word, and lack of supply, and lack of customer discovery for people who were the front line workers within our communities. And folks who ultimately had to commute hours or several hours a day to be able to afford a place to live and get to their place of work. And so, when I got to a point in my career where I felt like I was comfortable financially and had built up enough of the real estate portfolio that could support my own family, this was kind of a moonshot endeavor to look at ways to really solve the underlying fundamental issues of housing, on affordability, not just in the Atlanta market, but trying to do so around the country, and potentially around the world.

Eve: [00:03:10] So, PadSplit splits pads, it’s a great name. What does a PadSplit house look like, typically, after you’ve finished renovating it?

Atticus: [00:03:21] If we’ve done our jobs well or if our owners and real estate investors have done their jobs well, it looks from the outside like any other traditional housing unit, whether that’s a single family home or apartment. On the interior, it’s a little bit different. But essentially it’s just geared to allow single person households or individual workers in our communities to be able to rent individual rooms rather than entire homes. So, because we, we’re a marketplace and we align incentives with real estate investors who are generally looking for higher returns, one thing that may be different is you’re typically going to see more bedrooms in a PadSplit home than you would in a typical home. And the reason for that is in a traditional rental home environment, or any home environment, you have a lot of inefficient, underutilized and unmonetized space. So, if you’re going to rent a property, there’s almost no cost included in the rent for the formal dining room, for instance …

Eve: [00:04:28] Right.

Atticus: [00:04:28] … or the home office. And there’s no reason why, given the fact that we have a lack of housing supply, that these spaces shouldn’t be utilized to actually house people. And so, what PadSplit does as a marketplace, it allows those spaces to be utilized on an individual contract basis with each one of those people who needs a place to live. And in doing so, also makes the home more profitable for those real estate investors. And so, the difference is you would see, instead of a formal dining room, you’d see that room converted into a convertible living area where you actually have a bed instead of a dining room table. And that owner is getting paid for it rather than not.

Eve: [00:05:11] So, by doing this, you can include traditional investors who get a return and you don’t need subsidies, you’re not relying on the government to produce affordable housing. Is that right?

Atticus: [00:05:24] Exactly. Exactly right. Yeah, and throughout my career I’ve worked with a number of more traditional affordable housing programs and have consistently been frustrated by …

Eve: [00:05:35] Oh, they are so complicated.

Atticus: [00:05:37] Yeah, it, well, not just the complication, but the time. The time and energy and effort that goes into creating those units, and meanwhile, we have an abundance of outside opportunity. Right? There is …

Eve: [00:05:52] I think also not just the time and energy. I’ve done some work like that, too, but it’s an industry that kind of hasn’t caught up to what people want today. So, it can be pretty inflexible.

Atticus: [00:06:03] Absolutely.

Eve: [00:06:04] About, you know, what an affordable housing unit should look like.

Atticus: [00:06:08] Yeah, I’d say there are two major issues with the affordable housing industry, let’s call it. And one is the fact that virtually every program is designed to limit profit. And where profit is created or treated as an enemy. And instead they will pay as a percentage of cost. It’s OK to get paid as a percentage of cost, but not as profit. And what you do is you misalign incentives there. Where an affordable housing developer who’s maybe redeveloping a property, they have a home with perfectly good kitchen cabinets, but if they’re getting paid on a percentage of cost, they are now motivated to spend those public dollars to replace those perfectly good kitchen cabinets with brand new ones, because they only get paid if they actually spend that additional subsidy. And I’d say, overall, in most of the programs I’ve worked with, they generally have that same ideology. That they need to pay a fee rather than thinking about what is the most efficient solution possible.

Eve: [00:07:15] Right.

Atticus: [00:07:16] The second issue is just customer discovery, in that if you look at the Low-Income Housing Program, for instance, which has been probably the most successful affordable housing creation program in American history, three million units over about 30 years, there’s still no customer discovery there, where they’re evaluating the needs of the individual residents. The rules that are governing what types of units are created are ultimately from a consortium of government officials with some private advice from developers, but almost never based around purely, OK, you are a person who is in need of housing – What exactly do you need and what is the most efficient way to create that?

Eve: [00:08:02] Right. Right.

Atticus: [00:08:03] And so as a result, you spend a lot of money creating something that isn’t necessarily geared towards the end customer.

Eve: [00:08:09] What do you include in a PadSplit room, and how did you discover what your customers want?

[00:08:15] Yeah. So, what’s included in a room, and really this goes hand-in-hand with what the customers want. Rooms are fully furnished. They include all utilities, Wi-Fi, laundry, telemedicine and credit reporting into one single bill. And that bill is charged on a weekly basis, or on individual pay periods when people get paid. And this came out of the customer discovery process when I was managing properties that I owned, and particularly in lower income apartments, I ran into situations where I saw people that would end up late on their rent and under eviction because ultimately they decided to pay a utility bill, a cable television bill, for instance, in the middle of the month, and didn’t have enough money left over by the time the first of the month rolled around to be able to make that payment. And it was mind boggling to me, initially, that why would anyone ever choose to do that? And as I dove a little deeper, it occurred to me, well, wait a second, you know, we’re obviously, we’re almost at the end of the month now, but if I asked you or anyone else, what day of the week does November first fall on? No one, almost no one would know off the top of their head.

Eve: [00:09:40] Right.

Atticus: [00:09:40] But we all know that today is Wednesday. And if I get paid on Friday, it’s very easy for me to budget around that.

Eve: [00:09:47] Right, right, right.

Atticus: [00:09:48] And at the same time, if I’m living paycheck to paycheck, then it’s very difficult for me, and me personally, I mean, I’ve long put a lot of my stuff on autopay just because I know I won’t remember. But if you don’t have the financial capacity to do that and you have to really be careful about your budgeting, it’s not easy when you have a cable bill that’s due on the 12th and a water bill that’s due on the 23rd and so forth and so on. And you start to compile all these bills. And people are just not spending their money as wisely as they should be because it’s not top of mind.

Eve: [00:10:26] Right, right.

Atticus: [00:10:27] And the prioritization of those expenses is not anything that’s easy to do. And then on top of that, as I looked at the traditional housing industry, and in a rental property where people would have to pay large upfront deposits, we all know that there’s a huge portion of the population that doesn’t have the money, doesn’t have any savings …

Eve: [00:10:48] Yes.

Atticus: [00:10:48] … to be able to do that. And so you really want to just wait around for them to build the savings so they can get the deposit? Or do you want to figure out a way to create easier access? And so, that’s really what we’ve done, is created lower barriers to entry for individuals who are in need of housing, but also kept the billings on a regular schedule that’s easy to remember so that they can afford them.

Eve: [00:11:11] Right, right, right.

Atticus: [00:11:11] And they don’t have to come up with those upfront costs to outfit their bedroom or apartment or house on the front end, that just further exacerbates their affordability issues.

Eve: [00:11:22] So, where you start your operations?

Atticus: [00:11:25] So, started here in Atlanta. I really kicked off my housing career, I’ve been in Atlanta now for 20 years, almost. I kicked off my housing career in late 2007, early 2008. Really a touch before that, but really just got into the swing of things before the crash had really been public, but it was clear that something was going on, and that home values were much lower than they should have been, although at the time I had no idea why, and no one could really tell me why. But it’s been a long time coming. And we’ve been working on this problem for a long time.

Eve: [00:11:58] You started in Atlanta. How many units you have now and where they located?

Atticus: [00:12:03] So, we have about 1100 units today.

Eve: [00:12:06] Oh, wow.

Atticus: [00:12:07] And they are still mostly in Georgia, although we have a handful of units in the Texas market. And we’ve got some in Alabama, we’ve got some in Virginia. And we’ll be making a larger push into, into the Houston metropolitan area, as well as a couple other markets here over the next several months.

Eve: [00:12:28] And what are your tenants look like? Who are they?

Atticus: [00:12:31] Here in Atlanta, our members, as we refer to them, average income is around 25,000 dollars a year. It’s the cashier at your grocery store, the barista at your at your coffee shop, the security guard at any local retail establishment or hospital, Uber drivers, Lyft drivers, administrators in various government offices.

Eve: [00:12:54] That is shocking. Administrators and government offices.

Atticus: [00:12:57] Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, we’ve we’ve had police officers. We still have some teachers. Average age is, is just under 40, about 39 years old.

Eve: [00:13:04] Oh.

Atticus: [00:13:04] About 60 percent single women. And here in Atlanta, we’re 97 and a half percent African-American. But yeah, I mean, I refer to this group of people really as the invisible population. But I challenge any of your listeners to just ask next time you’re in some sort of retail environment, or heck, your Amazon delivery driver. But the folks who work in your community, whether that’s a hairstylist or the, anyone at the grocery store, where do they live, ask them where they live. And I think you’ll be intrigued to find the answer. But it wasn’t until maybe five years ago or so, I really started to understand that you could be working full-time in this country and very easily be homeless.

Eve: [00:13:48] Yeh.

Atticus: [00:13:48] And just that there are almost no housing options available for people that earn less than around 35,000 dollars a year that are the traditional options without any subsidy.

Eve: [00:13:57] I always make a habit of asking Uber drivers,= if that’s the full time job. And I’m, I’ve been stunned hear who has to moonlight, Uber driving …

Atticus: [00:14:09] Yeh.

Eve: [00:14:09] … over the years to make ends meet or to pay for groceries or to make the rent payment. It’s pretty shocking …

Atticus: [00:14:17] Yeh.

Eve: [00:14:17] Especially on the West Coast.

Atticus: [00:14:20] Yeah, definitely. I mean, even here in Atlanta, which is a relatively affordable city, we have a young woman who’s now been with us for almost three years, who works as a pastry chef in Midtown. But before PadSplit, she was commuting an hour and a half each direction …

Eve: [00:14:35] Oh, wow.

Atticus: [00:14:35] … to get to her place of work. And then I remember the last time I was in San Francisco asking my Uber driver where he lived. And he lived with his family in Fresno, three hours away. But then four days a week, he shared a studio apartment in Daly City near the airport. And that was how he made it work. So that he could spend some time with his family in Fresno. It’s incredible when you see the lengths that people have to go to just to find reasonable housing. And these really are people that our economy relies on on a regular basis, but really just go unnoticed.

Eve: [00:15:08] That’s pretty heartbreaking. So, I have to ask one question as an urban designer and architect, what do the neighbors think …

Atticus: [00:15:17] Yeh.

Eve: [00:15:17] … when you renovate the house?

Atticus: [00:15:19] Depends very much on the neighbors, right?

Eve: [00:15:21] Right.

Atticus: [00:15:21] It would be no surprise to anyone that we have NIMBY opposition, you know, folks who say not in my backyard.

Eve: [00:15:28] Well, I’ve heard, Atticus, that quite a few people say, on my podcast the last month that NIMBYism is probably the biggest reason why we’re in this predicament.

Atticus: [00:15:39] Oh, unquestionably. Yeah, I don’t deny that at all, and it’s frustrating. I mean, with with a lot of those those conversations where people say, OK, well, yeah, I think the person who works in my grocery store should be able to live here. And my question is always, do the people who serve your community deserve an opportunity to live there? And almost no one ever says ‘no’ to that question. Right? But they will say, well, yeah, but the government is going to fix that.

Eve: [00:16:11] Right.

Atticus: [00:16:12] And, or the cities are working on that problem. And I don’t think anyone really has an idea of just the scope and the depth of the issue and how bad things really are. And the fact that if we as a society are not working to change these issues on our own, nobody’s going to get anything done. And so, yeah, I mean, absolutely, there are lots of neighbors who, under the guise of, quote unquote, protecting the integrity of single family neighborhoods, which they conveniently forget, like all of those zoning codes were based in systemic racism going back a hundred years, that it’s OK for all of this space to go to waste while you have people who are working full-time, that are living on the street or commuting three hours.

Eve: [00:16:58] Right.

Atticus: [00:16:58] And I mean, that’s a real difficulty and something that I think we as the community or as a nation of communities and neighborhoods ultimately have to decide where the line in the sand really is. And at what point do you say, OK, in our country, everyone should have equal access to opportunity and housing opportunity almost goes without saying, but what are we willing to do to live out those ideals?

Eve: [00:17:27] So, you’ve thought a lot about affordable housing solutions. Why this one?

Atticus: [00:17:32] Well, for me, I was intrigued by private market solutions that didn’t require subsidy programs. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked with a lot of subsidy programs and particularly housing choices and still am an owner of a number of properties that work with housing choice participants. But just the time, right? It was, how quickly could I do something today that could create a groundswell of support and address the problem as expeditiously as I felt like it needed to be addressed. And so that’s really the reason why I looked at private market solutions, was because I knew that if you could align those incentives to just create more efficient market opportunities, then I had already seen over the course of my career how strong some of those forces could be. Where here in Atlanta, I watched entire neighborhoods change over the course of just two or three years because of the actions and investments of not one large company, but tens or hundreds of independent individual real estate investors and entrepreneurs. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

Eve: [00:18:43] Yeh.

Atticus: [00:18:43] And so, the idea was, OK, well, right now we are decrying the gentrification and displacement in a lot of these communities. And I agree, that I think in a lot of ways, the displacement especially, is heart wrenching and contributes to the same problems that we’re seeing with people having to move further and further away from their places of work. But what if we could take the same group of individuals who really are just pursuing their own best interests, which we can’t expect them not to. And you said, OK, well, instead of contributing to gentrification and displacement in these areas, what if I gave you another option for investing that allowed you to create more affordable housing? And if you could make affordable housing more profitable than the other alternatives that people had so that the best option available was also one that was a societally good thing and created positive social change for these largely marginalized groups, then those investors would absolutely pursue those. And that was really the thesis that led me to create that split in the way that we’ve done.

Eve: [00:19:44] How much do your tenants, or your members pay per month compared to a unit like what, that they would have to go out and get in the marketplace?

Atticus: [00:19:53] Yeah. And it’s not apples to apples, because our units are all-inclusive.

Eve: [00:19:58] No, of course not. There’re furnished, and electric and utilities and everything, right?

Atticus: [00:20:02] Exactly. Yeah. But it’s about 600 dollars on average, across our portfolio, that people pay on a monthly basis.

Eve: [00:20:10] How much vacancy do you have, because that’s always a good indicator.

Atticus: [00:20:13] Yeah. So, right now we have about 45 rooms or so that are available, so we stay pretty well full. Of course, back to the customer discovery and user question. What we found too is if you’re new to town, if you come here and you’ve got a job, you don’t really want to sign a 12-month lease, you’re trying to figure out what part of town you want to live in.

Eve: [00:20:37] Yes.

Atticus: [00:20:38] And so …

Eve: [00:20:39] It’s like co-work, for housing.

Atticus: [00:20:41] Yeah, similar. Similar. Yeah. I mean, it’s but so our terms are certainly shorter. On average, we still see nine months as an average term …

Eve: [00:20:50] Yeh.

Atticus: [00:20:50] But we absolutely have folks who come to town and are trying to get their bearings or get their feet under them, or maybe they’ve just been through some sort of traumatic situation like a divorce or the death of a loved one. And they don’t need something long-term. They need an affordable place to stay for three months.

Eve: [00:21:08] Right.

Atticus: [00:21:08] And so we see those as well. And that certainly contributes to the amount of vacancy as well. But, yeah, we stay pretty well full.

Eve: [00:21:16] And I have a feeling that you chose this path, as well, because it’s a way to scale what you’re doing. I’d love to hear your hopes on scale.

Atticus: [00:21:25] Yeah, I certainly had no business starting a technology company.

Eve: [00:21:30] Kind of like me.

Atticus: [00:21:31] I am a real estate Neanderthal. But I was intrigued by what I had seen AirBnB do over the preceding 10 years, in terms of, just how individual hosts around the world were able to take this model and run with it. And I wanted to do the same thing with much more positive social impact for affordable housing. And I wanted any real estate investor, or homeowner, candidly, or housing provider of any kind, anywhere, to be able to pick up these sets of tools and provide affordable housing in their communities, regardless of what their thesis may be. If they wanted to create housing for farmers or teachers or employees at a certain facility, that they would be able to use these same sets of tools to be able to do that. And that was really, the major reason why I started PadSplit as a technology marketplace as opposed to a real estate company, was because I certainly didn’t fancy creating this mega-corporation that owned thousands and thousands of homes. And, oh, by the way, even if we did, that still wouldn’t be near the impact that I was trying to create in the world.

Eve: [00:22:49] Do you own any of the buildings yourself at all or are they really …

Atticus: [00:22:53] Personally, I have two. The first prototype and then I have one other one. But other than that, no. We have maybe 65 or 70 different owners of all the properties.

Eve: [00:23:05] Oh.

Atticus: [00:23:05] Anyone from an individual homeowner, all the way to institutional or sub-institutional investors. I do have one room in my personal home that I rent through the platform. We don’t really count that one.

Eve: [00:23:17] So, how do you manage those building owners? Because I can imagine some bad ones might creep in.

Atticus: [00:23:24] Well, a lot of that is baked into the model. Right? Where we don’t do traditional corporate leases the way that other similar companies have done, where we’re the ones making the improvements. The owners are ultimately sharing in the profitability. So, they see a direct correlation between the quality of the unit and their bottom line. And that’s really, I think, important about aligning those incentives. And they are the ones that are purchasing, maintaining and renovating those properties. And then also to maintain accountability, a big part of the platform, and this was absolutely from AirBnB, giving the residents in those homes or the members in our platform the ability to rate and review both maintenance and quality of those homes.

Eve: [00:24:05] Um Hmm.

Atticus: [00:24:06] So, kind of creating …

Eve: [00:24:09] That’s encouragements.

Atticus: [00:24:10] … creating 360 degree accountability where not only are those posts motivated by the bottom line, but they’re also accountable to the members inside those homes as well.

Eve: [00:24:22] You touched on systemic racism and I know you’ve written about this and thought about this. And I’d like to know what you think of some of the key examples of racism in housing policy that exist today and that have made this problem worse.

Atticus: [00:24:40] It’s not really a question of what I think. It’s just a question of a history lesson. And there are a couple of points there. One, if you look at any historic neighborhood today compared to what the population makeup was 100 years ago, or call it turn of the, turn of the 20th century, what you’ll find is that there was a much wider distribution of family makeup in those neighborhoods then, and housing choices there, than than there are today in those same neighborhoods. Because since the 1960s, we’ve as as a nation really forced this idea of single family home. And that’s been repeated over and over and over, where one family, one home, in spite of the fact that you look at 35 percent of the population as single person households. Today. And meanwhile, our home sizes have just continued to increase, even though family size continues to decrease. So, you had this this extreme mismatch. How that relates to systemic racism is this, in that, whether you’re looking at as as Richard Rothstein analyzed in Color of Law and has been written about by a number of other publications, the foundation of these zoning codes, when things started to change in really, whether it’s L.A. 1908 or Buchanan in 1917, they stemmed from trying to segregate neighborhoods based on race. Like, that was the foundation of zoning. And if you acknowledge that at any point in our history, regardless of if you believe that it’s happening today, but at any point in our history, if our culture has contributed to wealth inequality on the basis of race, at any point, if that has contributed to our current inequality of income based on race, then you also have to acknowledge that because these housing policies are based around income, they’re also based around race. And so if I say in a particular neighborhood, you who may be lower income and maybe a single person are not allowed to live here by virtue of the fact that the average home is going to rent for 3,000 dollars, I’m discriminating based on race, in that situation. And so, by limiting the diversity of housing stock and housing choices, we are absolutely discriminating based on race while we are discriminating based on income. And the great irony is, across racial groups, there are very few communities who have any concern about discriminating based on income. But very rarely do the same folks ever acknowledge that because you’re discriminating on income, it also means that you’re discriminating based on race, but it’s just, it’s just a fact.

Eve: [00:27:29] Yes. Yup. OK, so then what’s what’s the biggest challenge you’ve had?

Atticus: [00:27:37] Oh, let’s say, the only, only one, huh? Yeh.

Eve: [00:27:41] One of them.

Atticus: [00:27:43] Listen, I mean … It’s a massive problem. And I’d say, the single biggest thing is, is anticipating and managing human behavior at any level of scale. Right? Whether that is relationships with members inside the homes, whether that is relationships between the members, or just the home and people in the neighborhood. And the sheer amount of effort necessary to maintaining all those relationships. Or the foresight to build in structures and processes that align behaviours appropriately. And we’ve done a lot of work on this and certainly put a lot of thought into it. I mean, listen, we sit at this intersection where we are involved in people’s lives 24 hours a day, seven days a week, at the very base of Maslov’s hierarchy of needs, in terms of just the need for safety and shelter.

Eve: [00:28:49] Yeh.

Atticus: [00:28:49] And so, it is about as big a problem as I think I could have ever tried to tackle.

Eve: [00:28:55] Yes, I’d agree with that.

Atticus: [00:28:56] And just the sheer complexity of those different interactions is the single hardest thing in my mind.

Eve: [00:29:02] So, what’s your big, hairy, audacious goal with this, with PadSplit?

Atticus: [00:29:08] For me, it’s always been that you can solve at least a significant portion of the housing crisis on a national and global scale. The big, hairy, audacious goal is that it becomes a household name that just becomes commonly accepted. That if you are in an apartment or if you are in a home and you have extra space, why on earth wouldn’t you trust another individual to lease that space from you? In the same way that I think ride sharing to hitchhiking. Where 20 years ago you would never imagine getting the back of a stranger’s car, whereas today we do it all the time. And those activities are not fundamentally any different. What’s different is the fact that you, as a customer of that service, trust that stranger that you’re getting into the back of a car with. And so, the big, hairy, audacious goal is that same paradigm exists for housing. Where you trust that you can use this platform and and allow someone else into your home without really missing a beat. And that’s just obviously a wholesale change to the way that we think today about, quote unquote, strangers. And if we can empower access to those opportunities, both as a user of housing or as a provider of housing, and to empower those users to become providers eventually and build their own income and wealth, that’s really what we’re setting up for. And we want to make sure that those opportunities exist everywhere.

Eve: [00:30:38] Final question, but I think I read that you were looking for funding and you did receive a chunk of it, is that correct?

Atticus: [00:30:45] We did, yeah. So we closed …

Eve: [00:30:48] Congratulations.

Atticus: [00:30:48] Thank you. Yeah. We closed on on our Series A round of financing a couple of weeks ago. So, we will be around for much longer.

Eve: [00:30:56] You’ll be bigger and doing more of this.

Atticus: [00:30:57] Hopefully. Yeah. We just keep putting one foot in front of the other and are anxious to expand to new markets that are interested in solutions.

Eve: [00:31:05] Well, it’s really been delightful talking to you and thank you very much, and thank you for tackling this very big problem.

Atticus: [00:31:12] Well, we’re trying. But thank you for having me, Eve. I really appreciate it.

Eve: [00:31:31] That was Atticus LeBlanc. He wants PadSplit to take hold in a really big way. He can’t see how we will ever be able to catch up and provide enough affordable housing quickly if we don’t think differently. That empty spare room or that basement den can offer a comfy bed and a safe home to someone who really needs it. So, he’s planning to grow the 1100 rooms on PadSplit today to many hundreds of thousands of rooms. PadSplit is his moonshot.

Eve: [00:32:15] You can find out more about impact real estate investing and access the show notes for today’s episode at my website, EvePicker.com. 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. Thank you so much for spending your time with me today, Atticus. And thanks 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 Atticus LeBlanc, PadSplit

Empowered through the Blockchain.

October 26, 2020

The blockchain is not as complicated as you might think. “Blocks” are just digital pieces of information and the “chain” is the public database where the blocks are stored.

The block

Each block (or digital piece of information) might include transactions, participants, dates, times or identifying information. This doesn’t necessarily reveal your name as the blocks use digital signatures much like usernames. Each block has a unique cryptographic code called a “hash”, created by a special algorithm, so that no two blocks can be the same. And a single block can store approximately 1MB of information.

The chain

The chain is then a number of blocks strung together. As a block of data is added, it not only becomes part of the chain, but it becomes publicly available. Information about the block such as when, where and by whom the block was added is available for anyone to see.

Distributed ledger

Each blockchain user can opt to connect through their computer to a node, often called a “distributed ledger”. This means the blockchain is “distributed” to their computer, not only providing a live feed of what is happening in that particular blockchain, but more importantly, distributing the information across a network of computers that might connect to it. Because blockchain is distributed in this way, there is no single, definitive account for a hacker to manipulate.

Security and trust

Each block is added chronologically to the end of a blockchain and contains its own hash as well as the hash of the block before it, making it extremely difficult to alter the contents of a block once it has been added to the blockchain. When a hash is created it is transformed into digital information. If this digital information is edited in any way, a new hash is created. Other security measures implemented in blockchain include tests for computers that want to join and add blocks to the chain.

Applications

The advantages of utilizing the blockchain include accuracy, cost reduction, decentralization, privacy, efficiency and transparency. Bitcoin, which we’re sure you’ve all heard about, is only one such application. Others being explored today include banking, healthcare, property records, supply chains, voting and smart contracts.

Michael Lee, a cultural planner and designer with an architectural background, has found a new use for the blockchain. He’s developed a web application called BLDGBLOX. The Bldg app is an online bulletin board which helps to turn community ideas into public action. The user-friendly interface of BLDGBLOX tracks information dynamically in projects created by anyone who wants to start one, as people use it and add to it. The information gathered in the blockchain created can be a useful way to track the impact of a particular project, thereby encouraging people to invest in projects that are impactful for their community. Michael hopes that the data gathered through BLDGBLOX projects will empower people to make more informed decisions. It’s an amazing example of blockchain being used as an organizing tool.

Listen in to my interview with Michael to learn more about how he wants to democratize the power of data.

Image by TheDigitalArtist from Pixabay

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