This is Abby and you are listening to Upsound. Hey everyone, thanks for listening to another episode of Upsound show where we take a big story from the news each week that touches the Strong Town's conversation and we upsone it. We talk about it in depth. I'm Abby Nuschum. I'm a planner in Kansas City and today I have a surprise, very special guest that I've been meaning to have on the show for actually a really long time now. Mike Keen, who is a retired professor and incremental developer in South Bend, Indiana. Hello Mike, thank you for joining.

Hey Abby, thank you so much for asking me to join your show.

You've been on my list for a really long time and I've just been waiting for the opportunity to get you on and we had a little bit of a break towards the end of last year and yeah, this was an opportunity to actually have you on Upsound. You've been featured in a couple of Strong Town's articles in the past. You're kind of coined as the accidental developer. Could you maybe kind of introduce your story for any of the listeners who are not aware of it or not aware of who you are?

Well, as you said, I was a college professor, graduated from Notre Dame and stuck around the community, taught sociology for a long time, urban studies and then the last 10 years between 2008 and 2018, I helped create the sustainability studies program at I use South Bend, sort of the triple bottom line. How do we bring economy, ecology and society together? And in 2017, I thought it was time to see if to stop teaching about it and see if I could put it into practice and I was going to help build in my neighborhood about a block and a half from where I live, a house that can produce as much energy as it uses that a partner of mine that I had met along the way had developed a different way of doing things. The problem was when we got over there, there was an appraisal gap and there was a bunch of other buildings and small businesses that were abandoned. And so it turned out that I started out thinking we were going to build one house, but then I ended up renovating an old flower shop and then the electric shop next door that was abandoned need to be done. And then we had a fire at a house, a half a block away. Plus, we had all these vacant lots that were overgrown. And so, and you could buy them for $25 and $500 or the legal fees. So, I picked seven or eight of those up, you know, all this from two blocks from where I live. But the interesting thing was, you know, by the time I had been out of the university for less than a year, I had a house I needed to build, a building that I was renovating, seven or eight vacant lots. And I didn't know how to do a pro forma, never heard of one. And so, that's when some folks introduced me to Monty Anderson and I started following around and began to learn the whole idea of incremental development. And for the last seven years, basically, I've been going to school and learning not through books, but by getting in there and getting my hands dirty. And that's why I call myself the accidental developers. Not anything I planned to do after I left university. It just kind of happened.