Frank Starkey and his family are one of those rare breeds of Floridians that actually have deep roots in the Sunshine State. We talk about how they sought to owner their grand-dad’s wishes as they ultimately developed the family cattle ranch in New Port Richey. A big part of their work was the Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND) called Longleaf. And later, the Starkey Ranch project.Here’s a funny real estate video about Longleaf: (funny to me, anyway)If you listen to Frank, you’ll learn how an architect has a whole different perspective on the present and the future, and why he thinks he has a luxurious lifestyle now in downtown New Port Richey. You can see some of his current efforts at this link to his website.This is episode number 50 of The Messy City podcast - thanks so much for listening. If you’re new to this, welcome! I look forward to the next 50, as we explore the issues and people who love traditional human settlements, and are trying to create them. I love talking to the do-ers, to the creators, and everyone who has skin in the game that’s trying to build a more humane world.Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.Intro: “Why Be Friends”Outro: “Fairweather Friend”Transcript: Kevin K (00:01.18) Welcome back to the Messy City podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. I'm happy today to be joined by my friend and fellow new urbanist, long time participant, Frank Starkey, joining us from Florida. Frank, how you doing today? Frank Starkey (00:20.337) Howdy, Kevin. Doing great. Happy to be with you. I've been... Kevin K (00:22.908) I didn't even check. I assume you're in Florida at home, but you could really be anywhere. Okay. Frank Starkey (00:25.617) Yeah, I am. Yeah. Yep, I'm in our we recently moved into a townhouse that Andy McCloskey, who used to work for me, built in town here and we just bought one and we're very happy here. It's really nice. Kevin K (00:40.348) Cool, cool. And you're in New Port Richey? Frank Starkey (00:45.169) Yes, Newport Richey is on the northwest side of the Tampa Bay region. It's part of the region. We're in that suburban sprawl miasma that characterizes all Florida cities. And we're about 25 miles as the crow flies from Tampa, basically from downtown Tampa, and probably 15 to 20 miles from Clearwater and 30 miles from St. Pete. So we're And we're right on the Gulf. We have a river that runs right through town that river miles from where we are out to the Gulf is maybe five river miles. So you could easily kayak and paddle board right out there or upstream pretty quickly you're into the Cypress freshwater wetlands. So we've got a lot of good nature around. Kevin K (01:39.516) Do you ever do that? Do you ever get out on a kayak or whatever and get out there on the river? Frank Starkey (01:43.089) Yeah, it's been a while. But if you go up to there's a preserve that the city owns that's up in the freshwater area. And if you're in there, you think you're in the Tarzan. A lot of the Tarzan movies and shows were filmed in Florida swamps and you feel like you're in a Tarzan movie. You can't see that you're in the middle of town. And if you go out to the coast, the barrier island and right where we are. They really start and go south from here. So from here on up through the big bend of the Panhandle in Florida, the coastline is all marshes and salt flats and grass wetlands. It's a much prettier coastline in my opinion than the more built -up barrier islands. But you can go out and kayak for days and days out in the coastal areas and see all kinds of wildlife and water life. So it's pretty cool. Kevin K (02:40.124) That's cool. That's really cool. Well, Frank and I have been talking about trying to do this for a while. We'd hoped to hook up in Cincinnati, but schedules just got in the way, as is typical for that event. But I really wanted to talk with you today, Frank, because you hit on a couple of my hot points, which is that you're an architect and a developer. Frank Starkey (02:51.313) you Kevin K (03:06.332) And I know as a designer that you also care a lot about the kind of issues that we talk about routinely within the world of new urbanism and urban design, which is, you know, creating beautiful walkable places. So I just think it'd be interesting. You know, I talked to a lot of people who come into the world of trying to be developers. You and I probably both talked to a lot of fellow architects who we try to encourage to be developers. Frank Starkey (03:06.481) Mm -hmm. Kevin K (03:33.948) And so it's fascinating to me how people come to that. So I wonder if we could start just a little bit by talking about like your path and where, you know, how you got to this point. You, did you grow up in Florida or were you in Texas? Is that right? Frank Starkey (03:51.761) Now I grew up in Florida. I went to college in Texas, but I grew up on a cattle ranch just east of here, in an area that's now called Odessa. It was a 16 ,000 acre, beef cattle ranch that our grandfather had bought in the 1930s. And we were about 20, 20 miles from downtown Tampa and Newport, Richie was our hometown because of the county we're in Pasco County. And so we came to, you know, church school. shopping was in Newport, Ritchie. But I also kind of had an orientation towards Tampa because we were sort of closer that direction. And then my extended family all lived in St. Petersburg. My parents had grown up there and then my dad grew up in Largo on a branch down there that his dad had before the one in Odessa. I... Kevin K (04:41.564) So it's like the rare species of old Florida people, right? So. Frank Starkey (04:45.361) Yeah. Yeah, but man, I have a weird, I've always come from a very mixed, I mean, just a very much kind of background, culturally, geographically, economically. My great grandparents were from, mostly from the upper Midwest. And so we kind of, and my great grandfather on my dad's side. was William Straub, who was the publisher of the St. Petersburg Times. But I later found out that he was instrumental in getting the city to hire John Nolan to do a plan for the remainder of St. Petersburg. He was instrumental in getting the city to buy up a mile of its waterfront to create a continuous waterfront park along the bay in downtown St. Petersburg, which is the crown jewel of the city in terms of civic space. So I kind of grew up and then that that kind of orientation towards parks. He also helped the County, Pinellas County establish a park system, which was one of the earliest ones in the country. And so I kind of this park orientation and public space and civic life and civic engagement was a strain through my whole childhood. You know, my whole is kind of a generational thing in our family. And so that's one thread and. Living in the country, we didn't have much in the way of neighbors. The area of Odessa in those days was pretty poor. So I rode the school bus with kids that had virtually nothing and went to school in the suburbs of Western Pasco, which was where the kids were mostly from the Midwest. Their grandparents had worked for Ford or GM or Chrysler and then they... moved to Florida and the grandkids, you know, the kids moved with them. And so those were the kids I grew up with. And so I, you know, I didn't feel like I grew up in the deep south. People, but I, but I was close enough to it that I understand it, but I don't consider myself a, you know, capital S southerner, my accent notwithstanding to the degree that a good friend of mine, Frank Starkey (07:07.793) I grew up in Plant City on the east side of Tampa, which is much more in the farming world part of Hillsborough County. And he was much more deep south than I was, even though we grew up, you know, 40 miles apart. So it's just a very different cultural setting. So I grew up with, you know, upper Midwest heritage who had been in St. Petersburg since 1899. And then, you know, poor kids, middle -class kids, and then eventually wealthier folks. So I just kind of had this really all over the place cultural background that's not nearly as simple as, I mean, all of Florida has a tapestry of, a patchwork of different kinds of cultural influences. South of I -10, north of I -10, you're in South Georgia or Alabama, but. the peninsula of Florida is very culturally mixed up. Kevin K (08:11.228) So the old canard, I guess, was that the west coast of Florida was populated by people who came from the Midwest and the east coast was from the Northeast. Does that hold true in your experience? Frank Starkey (08:22.129) Yeah, that does hold true, although there were a lot of New Yorkers in Boston, not so much New England, but still a lot of New Yorkers found their way across. So I grew up around a lot of New York Italian descent folks, as well as Midwesterners. So I, you know, it's a wonder I don't have a New York accent or a Michigan accent or a Southern accent, because those were the kind of the three, more about more, you know, Northern accents than. than Southern accents from immediately where I grew up. But yeah, I -75 goes to Detroit and that I -95 on the East Coast goes to New York. And so that means that has an impact. Kevin K (09:06.844) Did you ever know about the Kansas City connection to St. Pete then with J .C. Nichols down there in downtown St. Pete? Frank Starkey (09:17.329) And tell me about it. I mean, I, because Bruce Stevenson's book, I think touched on that because they, they had an APA convention down here back in the 1920s. Kevin K (09:20.54) Well, that's it. Kevin K (09:28.54) Yeah, J .C. Nichols who developed the Country Club Plaza here, starting really in the 19 -teens, later in his life, he was asked to, or he bought property in St. Petersburg, in or near the downtown area. And the whole concept was they were going to essentially build like another version of Country Club Plaza there in downtown St. Pete. Yeah. And so I think like a small portion of it got built down there. Frank Starkey (09:32.785) All right. Frank Starkey (09:51.665) Really? Kevin K (09:57.564) And then maybe the real estate deal fell apart or something like that. But there was, yeah, that was a big push at some point. Yeah. Yeah. Frank Starkey (10:03.633) or the Depression hit. Interesting. Now, I wasn't aware of that. I didn't know that he had bought and had plans to develop here. That's interesting. The other, St. Petersburg's, well, the Florida Land Bus was in 1926. So Florida real estate speculation really ended then, and then it didn't pick up again until after World War II. So that might have been the death of it. Kevin K (10:13.084) Yeah. Yeah. Kevin K (10:27.164) Yeah. Yeah. So you find yourself growing up on a ranch then, pretty much in Florida. What takes you to architecture? What takes you to architecture and then to Texas to go to architecture school? Frank Starkey (10:35.505) I'd have been becoming an architect. Frank Starkey (10:42.289) For whatever combination of reasons, one evening when I was in about fourth grade, I, dad recollected this years later. I asked dad at the dinner table, what do you call a person, what do you call a person who designs buildings? Not as a riddle, just, and he said, it's called an architect. And I said, well, that's what I want to be when I grow up. And I never had the sense to question that decision again. So. Kevin K (11:00.54) Yeah. Kevin K (11:09.276) That's how it sounds vaguely familiar. Frank Starkey (11:11.853) you So, you know, whether it was Legos and Lincoln Logs and the Brady Bunch. And when I was a kid, we had a cabin in North Carolina that dad had the shell built by this guy who had a lumber mill up there and he would build a shell for you for $5 ,000 or something. He built that out of green poplar wood. The whole thing was immediately warped and racked and sagged and did everything that. green wood will do, and we immediately put it in a building. But dad spent all of our vacation times up there finishing out the interior of that. So I was just around that construction. And dad was also being a counter rancher, and he knew welding. And he was always tinkering. And in addition to fixing things, he was also inventing implements to use on the ranch and things like that. So he just had a hand building. ethic that, you know, he just kind of had. So whatever made me decide I wanted to design buildings, as I grew up from that point on, I just was all about it. And so by the time I got to high school, I couldn't wait to get into working for an architect. And I was an intern for an architect in Newport, Ritchie, when I was in high school. And then I went to Rice University in Houston to go to architecture school. So after I, and I did my internship here, which is part of the program at Rice for the professional degree. I did that in New York City for Pay Cop, Read and Partners. And another ironic thing was I learned, I had a really great classical architecture history professor in college at Rice who in his summers led, he and his partner who was a art history professor also, a fine arts. Frank Starkey (13:10.289) They led an archaeological excavation outside Rome of a villa from the dated that basically dated a time period of about 600 years straddling the time of Christ. And I've spent the summer after my freshman year on that dig. So I had a had a really strong exposure to classical architecture and urbanism throughout my school. And when I worked for PAY, I worked on James Freed's projects. At that time, we were working on what became the Ronald Reagan building in Washington, D .C. It's the last big building in the federal triangle. And so it's a neoclassical exterior with a very modern interior. It's kind of like a spaceship wrapped inside a federal building. And the other project I worked on a little bit that year was the San Francisco Main Library, which is in the Civic Center right down in the Civic Center of Francisco with the City Hall and the old library. The new library is a mirror of it that's a neoclassical facade on, well, two wings of a neoclassical facade that face the Civic Center side. And then on the backside, which faces Market Street, there's a much more modern interpretation of that commercial core district facing along Market Street. So I worked on these buildings with Sirius that took, you know, this was at the end of the Pomo era of the 80s when everybody was making fun of classical architecture in, the architects were having fun with it or making fun of it, however you look at it. And Fried was taking it more seriously. It was still a updated take on neoclassical architecture. in some of the details, but it was really a fascinating exposure to the actual practice of designing classical buildings, working for one of the most famously modernist firms in the world. So. Kevin K (15:21.628) Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. Yeah. That's pretty wild. Was rice, I mean, we're about the same age, was rice kind of like most architecture schools, generally speaking, in their emphasis on looking at modernist design as the holy grail that you must pursue? Frank Starkey (15:28.433) Mm -hmm. Frank Starkey (15:38.769) Yeah, interestingly, like my childhood and the cultural mix that I described earlier, Rice was sort of in this period at that time where it was between deans. There was a series of, it's too long a story to explain here, but the previous dean who had been there for 15 years or something, O. Jack Mitchell, announced his retirement the day I started classes. And... So he was a lame duck. And then it was, you know, we basically went through a series of searches, deans, dean passed away, interim dean search, a new dean, and then he resigned. So the whole time I was in college, we really didn't have a dean. And the faculty that Mitchell had built was very, I'd say ecumenical. They kind of, we had some diehard theoretical postmodernists and we had. At the other end of the spectrum, we had a guy who did a lot of real estate development who was super practical and we always made fun of him for caring about mundane things like budgets. And I know he was, I made him a laughing stock, which I wish I'd taken more of his classes. But anyway, and then a really good core faculty who had a real sense of, and real care about urban design and. Kevin K (16:46.428) Well, yeah, exactly. Frank Starkey (17:04.401) My sophomore class field trip was to Paris and we did studies of, you know, in groups, each of us studied at Urban Plus. So I really had a strong urban design and contextual sensibility through my architecture class, all my architecture classes. In the background, there was this whole drum beat of postmodernist, post structuralism and deconstructivism. that was going on. I never caught into that. It always just seemed like anything that requires that much intellectual gymnastics is probably just kind of b******t. And it also, I was involved with campus ministries and fellowship of Christian athletes and church. And so I had a sense of mission and doing good in the world. And it also just, it just didn't work with that either. So I didn't really go in for that stuff, but the urban design stuff really did stick with me. And then the classical architecture and Vignoli, which I mentioned to you the other day, that really did kind of stick to me as a methodology. Kevin K (18:29.436) Man, I went for it hook line and sinker, man. It was, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I thought deconstructivism was like the coolest thing at that time period. And I bought the whole program for some period of time. And frankly, until I ran across some of Andreas's writings and then started learning about seaside. And that's really what kind of broke it open for me that I started to. Frank Starkey (18:32.433) Really? Frank Starkey (18:40.465) -huh. Frank Starkey (18:52.273) Mm -hmm. Kevin K (18:58.556) see things a little bit differently and all, but I, yeah, I was, I was in deconstructivism was funny because you could just kind of do anything and you know, you could call anything a building basically. Yeah. Frank Starkey (19:07.537) Yeah. Yeah, yeah, the author is dead long live the text was the, and so you could just, yeah. And to me, it was just pulling, it was just pulling stuff out of your butt and I just. Kevin K (19:22.636) totally. Yeah. Yeah. It was all b******t, but it was, I guess, fun for a 19 or 20 year old for a little while. So, all right. So fast forward then, did you come back to Florida then pretty much right after school or? Yeah. Frank Starkey (19:25.809) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Frank Starkey (19:38.929) Yeah, I did a gap year after college and then ended up in Austin for another year and then came back to work with my brother. So by that time, we had seen, because of where the ranch is situated, it's sort of in the crosshairs of growth patterns coming from Tampa to the south and Clearwater to the southwest. and Newport -Ritchie from the west. So it was, the growth was coming from, at us from two directions. Granddad and you know, this 16 ,000 acres that's 20 miles from downtown Tampa, as you can imagine in the 20th century is going up in value pretty dramatically from 1937 to 19, you know, to the late century. And in the early seventies, he started selling and donating land to the state for preservation. Kevin K (20:24.22) Mm -hmm. Frank Starkey (20:36.177) and so we had, you know, again, that whole park ethic, and the, so we were selling, kind of selling the Northern parts that were away from the development pattern, off. And it was partly for the state tax planning purposes and also just, but primarily to put the land into conservation. So there would be something left of native Florida for people to see in future generations. That was his. His goal. My brother had my brother six years older than me and had gone to University of Florida and gotten a finance degree. And he came back after college, which was when I was like my senior year in high school and started working for the granddad was still alive and he was working for the estate, helping with that planning. And granddad passed away while I was in college and we had the estate tax to deal with. And we ended up selling some more land to the state for conservation. And he also started learning the development. process. We knew that as much land as we could sell to the state as possible, we were not going to be able to sell at all and we were going to have to develop. Somebody was going to develop land on the ranch. And our family wanted to see that it was done in a way that was, you know, that we would be proud of that, that put together our, you know, our family goals for civic engagement, environmental preservation, and, you know, and also. It was the whole family's sole asset. So it's everybody's retirement fund and principally our parents and our cousins. So we have cousins who are half generation older than us. So we were accepting that development was inevitable and wanted to be more in control of it. So Trae had been talking to me for a while about coming back and working with him on the development stuff in the ranch. So that's what I decided to do in 1995. And the decision point for me, Kevin K (22:09.468) Yeah. Frank Starkey (22:34.449) was, you know, I had set up my career trajectory to become a consulting architect and design buildings for other people. And I realized that I had this opportunity to, you know, have a bigger imprint on developing a neighborhood that could perhaps set a pattern. By that time, I had become knowledgeable about new urbanism and what was going on at Seaside. And And at that point, I think some of the other projects were starting to come out of the ground. So this was 1995. So I was like, well, I, you know, I've got too much opportunity here. And, and with what, what I know and what I have to bring to the table, it just seems like the thing I'd need to do. So I came back and we started working on development on the southwestern corner of the ranch, which was sort of the direction that was the frontline for development. So in 1997, we held our charrette for what became Longleaf, which is a 568 acre traditional neighborhood development that we broke ground on in 1999. Our first residents moved in in 2000. And that was the first TND in Pasco County. And in my opinion, it was the last TND in Pasco County. Because the county loved it so much that they... Kevin K (24:00.38) You Frank Starkey (24:04.721) passed the TND standards ordinance, which it would never comply with and that no other developers ever wanted to do. And so nobody really has. They've kind of just, it's been compromised with, right? That's a whole other story. Kevin K (24:20.14) Yeah. Well, that sounds, I mean, we may need to get into that at some point, but, so you started this in 2000 and really in earnest 2001 or so. And obviously there was a little, little bump in the economy right then, but I guess kind of more of a bump compared to what came later. So talk about like those first, maybe that first decade then, like what all did you build and how much of this were you actively involved in the design of? Frank Starkey (24:24.529) Okay. Frank Starkey (24:39.377) Yeah. Frank Starkey (24:49.425) It's fascinating looking back on it how compressed that time frame was because we sold we we developed the first of four neighborhoods In the first neighborhood we did in As I said 99 2000 and then we built the second neighborhood in 2002 2003 we sold the third and fourth neighborhoods in 2004 which You know, six years later, we look like geniuses. If we would have been, if we'd been real geniuses, we would have waited until 2006 to sell them. But we got out before the crash, obviously. So we did well there. We were, I was, you know, Trey and I, because we had a view of building a career in real estate development, we thought we should do everything. We should touch every aspect of the process ourselves at least once. So we knew how everything worked. But then we never scaled up our operation big enough to hire people to fill in those specialties for us. So we really both kind of ended up doing a whole lot of the work ourselves. So our master, our designer was Jeffrey Farrell, who did the the overall plan for Longleaf. And he wrote the design code, but we collaborated on all that very closely, because I knew enough about what urbanism was and architecture. And so I administered that design code with our builders. He detailed out the first neighborhood. He and I detailed out the second neighborhood. collaboratively or sort of a 50 -50. And you know what I mean by detailed out, just, you know, you take a schematic plan and then you have to put it into CAD and get it, get to real dimensions and deal with wetland lines and drainage and all that stuff. You get, s**t gets real about, you know, curbs and things like that. So that kind of, those details. And the third neighborhood I detailed out, but we sold it, but the developer who bought it built it out according to what I had done. So I was... Frank Starkey (27:15.281) very involved with the planning side of it. And of course I had been involved with the entitlements and then I administered the design code with all of our builders. So I was dealing with there and we had, we didn't have sophisticated builders. We didn't have custom, we weren't a custom home builder project. We were small local production builders. So these were builders who built 300 houses a year. We weren't dealing with. David weekly, you know, a national home builder who was doing nice stuff. Nor were we dealing with the 12, you know, you know, a year custom builders. So we didn't have much sophistication on the design side coming from our builders. So I did a lot of hand holding on the design of that. I always tell if you're a architect who's going to be your. Kevin K (27:46.716) Mm -hmm. Frank Starkey (28:13.169) is going to develop a T and D. I will tell you under no circumstances do what I did. Always hire somebody else to be the bad guy because as the developer you just can't look the home builder in the eye and say let this customer go. And so even though they're asking you to do something you shouldn't. So you need somebody who can be your heavy for that and it's not going to be you as the developer. But anyway, so I did that and And then I designed some of the common buildings and then had them. I wasn't licensed yet. And so I had those CDs done by somebody with a stamp. So I always said that I, you know, between the larger planning of the ranch and the strategy there, and I also got involved in community, you know, regional and county wide planning efforts and committees and things like that and planning council. So I kind of worked at the scale from the region to the doorknob. Which, you know, is fabulous as an architect because I've found all of those levels, I still do, I find all of those levels of design and planning fascinating. Kevin K (29:17.084) hehe Kevin K (29:30.78) So let's talk about the mechanics of being a land developer for a minute and how you did it. So you obviously own the land, and then you came up with the master plan. So then how many steps did you take? You took on the burden of entitling probably the whole project in phase by phase. And then were you also financing and building infrastructure as well, and then basically selling off finished land? Frank Starkey (29:36.433) Mm -hmm. Kevin K (29:59.26) finished parcels or finished lots to other developers or builders. Frank Starkey (30:04.177) Yeah, what we, so dad on the land free and clear, he contracted the land to us under a purchase and sale agreement whereby we would pay a release price when we sold a lot. So, you know, it's favorable inside family deal. We paid him a fair price, but it was a very favorable structure that allowed it, and he subordinated it to. to lending for, we had to borrow, we don't have cash as a family, we didn't, none of us have cashflow from, you know, we don't have some other operating company that spits off cashflow. So we had asset value, but no cashflow. So we had to borrow money to pay for infrastructure, I mean, for planning and entitlement costs and engineering. And so that was our first loan. And then we had, We set up a community development district, which is a special purpose taxing district that a lot of states have different versions of them in Florida. It's called a CDD. It's basically like a quasi -municipality that a developer can establish with permission from the county and state government to establish a district, which is then able to sell tax -free government -style bonds to finance infrastructure. So it's an expensive entity to create and then to maintain. But if you're financing a big enough chunk, which in those days was like $10 million, it became efficient to have the care and feeding of the district in order to get the cheaper money. So you could get cheaper bond money for financing infrastructure. You could not finance marketing or... specific lot specific things you could for example, you could finance drainage, but you couldn't finance still so some of the Terminology was a little bit You kind of had to do some creative workarounds, but basically our so but we it also meant you had to still have a source of capital for those things that the district would not finance so we had an outside Frank Starkey (32:28.497) Loan structure in addition to the CDD financing and that was how we financed the construction of the development and then sold the lots to individual home builders We had three builders under contract in our first phase and each of them was committed to a certain number of lots and they had enough capital access on their own to finance their the construction of their houses a lot of them would use their buyers financing and use do construction permanent loans to finance the vertical construction of the houses. But the builders had the ability to take down the lots. So that was the deal. I don't know if that structure is still done very much or if there were many builders in that scale that still do that in Florida or in this area. It seems like most of those builders got just crushed. in a great recession and never came back. I'm not really aware of any builders that are in that scale, in that size range anymore. I mean, if there are, there's maybe a dozen where there used to be 100. Kevin K (33:40.86) Yeah, so they either got smaller or a lot bigger basically. Frank Starkey (33:45.681) No, they mostly just flat got killed and just went out of business. And they may have resurrected themselves. Yeah, they may have resurrected a smaller or gone to work for somebody else or retired because a lot of them were older. Of the builders that we had, yeah, I think they probably did get smaller in fairness, but they were gone. And we were out of, as I said earlier, we were long out of long leaps. And the... Kevin K (33:47.836) Yeah. Frank Starkey (34:13.969) Crosland was the developer that bought the third and fourth neighborhoods and they didn't they brought in all new builders. So they brought in David weekly and inland, which was a larger regional builder. And then Morrison, I think one of the other large, larger builders who did rear loaded T and D project product. Kevin K (34:38.108) So how much heartburn was that for you and your family to go from this position where you're like asset rich but cash poor to and then all of a sudden you're taking on pretty large debt to do this development piece? I mean, what was that like? Frank Starkey (34:54.801) Well, you know, you just you don't know what you don't know when you're young and ambitious. So it was it was there. I did. There were some real Rolade's cheering moments. I think, as I recall, the most stressful times for us were before we started construction. And it was it was frankly, it was harder on Trey because he was he was starting a family at that time. So he had. He had literally more mouths to feed than I did. I was still single and so, and I didn't have the stresses on me that he did. And once we got under development, we weren't so much, you know, the stress level shifted to different, you know, kind of a different complexion. And, you know, fortunately when the recession hit, We were done with long, we didn't have, you know, we weren't sitting with longleaf hanging on us. So that was good. but we were in the midst of entitlements for the Starkey Ranch project, which was the remainder of the land that the family still had that had not been sold to the state. And we were taking that, there was about 2 ,500 acres. We were taking that through entitlements starting in 90, in 2005. And I would say that we got our, our entitlements. not our zoning, but we got our entitlements package approved, in essence, the day before the recession hit. So, so we had borrowed again, borrowed a lot of money to relatively a lot more money to pay for that. And that also involved the whole family, because that was the rest of the ranch that that the part that long leaf is on dad had owned individually, free and clear. The remainder of it. had been in granddad's estate and that went down to children and grandchildren. And so there were seven different owners of that. And we had spent some time in the early 2000s putting that together into a partnership, into one joint venture where everybody owned a pro rata share of the whole, but we had other shareholders to answer to. And so that was a whole other level of stress. Frank Starkey (37:16.913) due to the recession because our bank went, you know, did what all banks do and they called the loan even though we hadn't gone, we hadn't defaulted. We would have defaulted if they'd waited six months, but they blanked first and they sued us and we spanked them in essence, but we, at the end of the day, but it was two years of grinding through a lawsuit that was hideous and that was really the most unpleasant. Kevin K (37:29.82) Hahaha! Frank Starkey (37:46.257) level of stress, not because we were going to lose our houses, but because we were, it was just was acrimonious and not what we wanted to be doing. Plus you had the background of the whole world having ground to a halt. So fighting that out through the dark days of the recession was, that was pretty lousy way to spend a couple of years. Kevin K (38:12.284) Yeah, so then how did you all come out of that situation then? Frank Starkey (38:17.009) We ended in a settlement. The settlement, the worst part of the settlement to me was that we had to, long story, but some of the, we had retained ownership of downtown Longleaf with the commercial core, mixed use core of Longleaf. And that wasn't completed development yet. And because we had that collateralized on another loan with the same bank, we ended up having to cut that off as part of the settlement. So. we, you know, we had to, we amputated a finger, not a hand, but still it was, it was, you know, it was our pointer finger. So that was, that was hard, but, but we lived to fight another day, which again, you know, fortunately it's better to be lucky than good, right? We were, that makes us look like, you know, we did pretty well coming out of the recession. So after the recession and after getting that settled out, and there was a couple of other small pieces of land that we had, Kevin K (38:52.124) hehe Frank Starkey (39:15.121) collateralized to the bank that we handed over, but basically got them to walk away from pursuing us further. We got that worked out and then we had to then figure out how to sell the land. Our joint venture partner, which was to have been Crosland on developing the ranch, they had gone to pieces during the recession, so they weren't there anymore. And the only buyers at those coming out of that were big hedge funds and equity funds. And they were only, their only buyers were national home builders and the national home builders, even the ones like Pulte who had tiptoed into traditional neighborhood development product before the recession. They were like, nope, nope, nope, backing up, never doing that again. They're. Kevin K (40:10.46) Yeah. Yeah. Frank Starkey (40:12.593) So everything that we had about TND and our entitlements, they're like, get that s**t out of there. TND is a four letter word. We will not do that. So we kind of de -entitled a lot of our entitlements and cut it back to just a rudimentary neighborhood structure and interconnected streets and some mix of uses and negotiated to sell it to one of these hedge funds or investment funds. who developed it with a merchant developer and sold it to national home builders. And they pretty quickly undid what was left of our neighborhood structure and developed it in a pretty conventional fashion. They did a really nice job on it and it soldered a premium to everything around it. They did a really great job with their common area landscaping, but they gutted the town center. They didn't even do a good strip center in lieu of it. They just did a freestanding public and a bunch of out parcel pieces. They squandered any opportunity to create a real there out of the commercial areas. They did beautiful parks and trails and amenities centers, but they just didn't get doing a commercial town center. Kevin K (41:36.444) What years was that when they developed that piece? Frank Starkey (41:40.337) We sold it to them in 2012 and I guess they started construction in 13 or so and it was really selling out through 2020. They still got some commercial that they're building on. I don't know if they've got any residential that they're still, I mean, it's kind of, its peak was in the 17, 18, 19 range and it was one of the top projects in the country and certainly in the Bay Area. and got a lot of awards. And yeah, so I don't, I can't complain too much about it because it sounds like sour grapes, but basically they didn't, I always just tell people I'll take neither blame nor credit for what they did because it's just not at all what we, there's very little of it that is what we laid out. So because that, so we, having sold that in 2012, that left me and Trey to go do what we wanted to do. All of the, you know, the rest of the family for that matter. And, Trey was ready to hang it up on development for a while. So he kept a piece out of the blue out of the ranch and settlements and started the blueberry farm. And I went and decided to do in town, small scale development. Ultimately ended up in Newport, Ritchie back in my own hometown. And then and that's that's what I've been doing since basically since 2015. Kevin K (43:06.844) Yeah. So I'm curious about a couple of things. So with the completion of the sale of all that and the development of both Longleaf and Starkey Ranch, I guess I'm curious how your family felt about the results of all those. Were people happy, not happy with the results? Was there... I'm just kind of curious about that dynamic because it's an interesting thing with a family property. And then... I guess secondly, with you being somebody who carried more a certain set of ideals for development, what did you take away from that whole process, especially with Starkey Ranch and anything, any useful lessons for the future for others relative to an experience like that? Frank Starkey (43:38.321) Mm -hmm. Frank Starkey (43:56.209) Couple of thoughts. As far as the whole family goes, we were, well, our cousins don't live here and they were less engaged in it intellectually and just personally. The four of us kids had grown up here and this was our backyard. They had grown up in St. Pete and one of them lived in North Georgia. And so it was, they just weren't as... emotionally invested in it. Not to say they didn't care, but it just didn't, it wasn't their backyard that had been developed. And you know, and we all are proud that three quarters of the ranch of the 16 ,000 acres, over 13, almost 13 ,000 of it is in conservation land that will always be the way it was when we were kids. Except there are no fences, which is very disorienting, but anyway. It's still, you know, that's the way granddad saw it when he was young and it will always be that way. So that's, we're all excited about that. And we pay attention to that more than we do to what happened on development. I think even long leave the, what, you know, the, the people in the surrounding area think we're sellouts and, people who have lived here. for five years or 10 years or 15 years are still just shocked and dismayed by the rapid pace of development. Well, it was a rapid pace of development, but we've been seeing it coming for 130 years now as a family. And I mean, it's why we put land into conservation going back to the early 70s when granddad started selling that. What people can see is the part along State Road 54, which is the visible stuff. which 10 years ago was a lot of pastors with long views and pleasant looking cattle who were money losing proposition as a agricultural business. But people don't see that. They just thought, it's a pretty pasture land. And how can you turn that into houses? It's so, you greedy b******s. So yeah, we get a lot of flak still to this day. I mean, and I've got a. Kevin K (46:12.092) Yeah. Frank Starkey (46:17.425) Trey's wife is a county commissioner and she gets all kinds of grief for being corrupt because people see our names on everything and they're like, well, they must be corrupt. No, you've never met any less corrupt people. And so there's kind of public blowback to it. I've said what I've said, what I just told you about how the development of the ranch did not comport with what we envisioned for it. And I don't, I don't shy away from saying that. I don't go around banging a drum about it. cause what's, what's the point of that? And a lot of people might think I just sound like sour grapes, but it, you know, it's, we, I think we all had our ugly cry about the ranch at some point. I mean, I remember when we were, we, the first closings of the ranch were in 2012 and it was a phased state down, but you know, they, they take a chunk at a time. So we stayed in our office, which was the house that we had grown up in at the ranch headquarters, right where the cattle pens and the horse barn, the truck barn and the shop and all of the ranch operations were. And the day that, eventually we had to move everything out and all that, almost all of that got torn, all of it got torn down. I remember having, I went out and stood by a tree and cried my face off for a while. Kevin K (47:46.044) Yeah. Frank Starkey (47:46.673) You know, it still chokes me up to think about it. And we all did that. I mean, but it wasn't an overnight thing to us. Whereas if you lived in a subdivision in the area that, by the way, had been a cattle ranch 20 years ago, you didn't, you know, you're not building, you're not living in a land that was settled by the other colonists. It seemed shockingly fast, just like overnight. my God, all of a sudden they're, they're. They're scraping the dirt the grass off of that and you know three weeks later. There's houses going up It's just shocking and and really disorienting we'd said we had seen it coming literally our whole lives We always knew that was going to be the case. So it was there was going to be something there our Feelings about the what what what it was compared to what we would like it to have been or another You know, that's what we have to wrestle with but the fact that it's developed We always saw that coming and people don't really understand that until because you just, you know, because it just it's perceived so differently. If you just drive by and see it developed one day when it wasn't, then if you grow up with an aerial photograph on the wall of dad's office and you know, we just know that that's not always going to be that way. Kevin K (49:05.82) Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's talk for a minute about what you're doing now then with the stuff in Newport Ritchie and the smaller scale infill stuff. What was like the first one, after shifting gears and doing that, what was like the first project you took on on your own? Frank Starkey (49:25.561) Much more much more fun topic. Thank you for shifting gears. I should have let you do that sooner Kevin K (49:30.204) Yeah. Frank Starkey (49:33.617) The, so Newport Richey is a pre -war town that was laid out in 1911 by Wayne Stiles, who I'm starting to learn more about was a pretty cool town, kind of B -list town planner who worked with people like John Nolan and the Olmsted brothers and was contemporary to them. Got a very competent little city plan for a small town and it has building stock in the downtown. the main street and Grand Boulevard downtown that dates to the 1920s and to the 1950s and 60s, kind of about half and half. And so it always had these good urban bones, some decent building stock, nothing great. It was never a wealthy town, so it doesn't have big grand Victorian houses down at Boulevard or anything, but it's got some good characteristics. But it had economically just cratered, just for years and really decades of disinvestment. moving out to the suburbs. It wasn't white flight in the traditional sense, but it was economically, it was the same just reallocation of wealth from the historic city into the suburbs and leaving the city behind. So in 2015, there was a, so downtown Newport, which he has a little lake, a about a five acre really lovely little. city park, a riverfront, and the central business district is right next to it. And then there's a pink Mediterranean revival hotel building from 1926 in that park. It kind of ties it all together. It's all the same ingredients that downtown St. Petersburg has, just in miniature and in bad shape. And St. Petersburg, believe it or not, which is now the best city in Florida, was really down in heels for most of my childhood. The Vanoi Hotel, which is their big pink hotel, was a hulking, you know, it looked like something out of Detroit when I was a kid, broken out windows and chain link fence around it and weeds and looked like a haunted hotel. So the Hacienda was kind of in that shape almost. And Downtown was doing, was, you know, just kind of sitting there with some honky tonk bars and a lot of, you know, just kind of moribund. Frank Starkey (51:54.705) commercial space. The city had bought out the First Baptist Church, which overlooked that lake right downtown when the church decamped out to the suburbs like all the other capitals in town. Even God's capital moved out to the suburbs. And the city bought it and tore down the church buildings and put a for sale sign on it, put it out for RFP a couple times, got crickets in response. Because no self -respecting developer would look at downtown New Port Richey as a place to develop. And I looked at it and as Robert Davis and Andres 20 will point out, we developers and architects and urbanists, we live in the future. You know, our brains are in what can be, not what is here now. And you've heard Andres say that the present is a distortion field. So I wasn't bothered by the fact that the neighborhoods around it weren't the greatest neighborhoods. They weren't terrible. Kevin K (52:39.8) Yeah. Yeah. Frank Starkey (52:48.177) And I looked at it and said, well, this is a pretty good gas piece of property. You got through overlooking this nice lake. There's a park. There's a downtown right there. We can work with this. So I asked the city to put it out for an RFQ, which they did. And Eric Brown, your buddy and mine, and one of your former guests on the podcast recently, was the architect for the buildings. And Mike Watkins, whom you also know, was the planner. I had them come in and do a Charette to develop a design for an apartment project on that former church property. And we negotiated a deal with the city to buy that property and we were off and running. So that was the first project. Just announcing that and showing, you know, as people were, some people were rightly skeptical that it would just end up being another low income housing thing because. This is Newport Richey. It's an economic shithole. Why would anybody put anything nice here? And surely, surely, even if you think it's going to be luxury, or if you're just saying it, it's obviously just going to, there's no way it can end up being anything but low income housing. And, but a lot of other people were excited to see that somebody was putting some investment in town. And it just kind of started to change people's thinking. Then we took on a commercial building downtown that when I was a kid had been a, IGA grocery store where we did our grocery shopping and it had, fallen into, you know, another moribund state as an antique mall that just needed to be fixed up and, and refreshing them live and up or something new. So we bought that and, did a severe gut job on it. divided it up into five tenant spaces, brought in a natural grocery store that was in town, but in a much terrible location. And a new microbrewery, the first microbrewery in town, and a taco place, and a kayak paddleboard outfitter, and a CrossFit gym. Kind of a dream lineup of revitalizing. Yeah. The kayak place didn't last very long. Kevin K (55:04.636) It's like the perfect mix. Frank Starkey (55:11.665) They were pretty much pretty ahead of the market and also just work. It wasn't their core business. They just didn't really know how to do it right. And then the taco place ended up getting replaced. The CrossFit gym outgrew the box and went to a much bigger location. And then we replaced them with an axe throwing business, which is killing it. So no joke, no pun intended. And then the microbrewery is still there. natural food store is still there. And then in the paddle boarding space, we now have a makers, a craft market that is multiple vendors that are, you know, like cottage industry makers selling under one roof. And we have a new bar and hamburger place and the former chocolate place. And they're also doing really well. And so between those two projects, it really, and then, you know, it's other, businesses started opening, new businesses opened downtown that just kind of had a new approach. They weren't honky tonks, they weren't just kind of appealing to a kind of a has -been demographic. And I just started changing the attitude. And the most remarkable occurrence was at one point, and this was around 2018, I just noticed that the online chatter in the general discussion among locals about Newport Richey kind of flipped from overwhelmingly negative people just running down the town, just saying this place is terrible. You know, get out while you can. There's nothing but crack heads and, and prostitutes and you know, it's just terrible. And to, Hey, this place is pretty cool. It's getting better. There's, it's got a lot of potential. And the naysayers started getting shattered down by the people who were more optimistic and positive about the town. And it just kind of hit that Malcolm Gladwell tipping point pretty quickly. And the attitude of the town and the self -image of people in town just has been significantly different ever since then. And then that's, of course, paid dividends and more investment coming to downtown. Now you can't find a place to rent for retail downtown. Frank Starkey (57:38.641) We actually have the problem now that there's too much food and beverage and the market isn't growing enough because we've got to bring in customers from outside of the immediate area because it's just not densely populated enough town yet. But that's so that's kind of where things started in New Port Richey. Kevin K (57:56.604) That's really, that's a great story. It's kind of, it's so indicative of also like what Marty Anderson has talked about. Let's sort of like finding your farm and a place that you care about and working there and making it better. And that's really cool. When it came to all this, were you self -financing? Were you working with investors? How was that process? Frank Starkey (58:13.169) Yeah. Frank Starkey (58:22.321) On the central, which is our apartment and on the 5800 main, which is the project that had been the IGA store, I have a financial partner on that. Who's another local who had made done well for himself in banking and lived away and moved back and was wanting to invest, but also to do some invest locally in a way that helps, you know, give something back to his own town. And that was my attitude as well. So our, our. Capital has been him and me on those two projects. And then I've got two other buildings that, one other building that I have a co -owner on and then another building I own solely by myself. So I've got a total of four projects. And all of the projects that I have are within one, two, three blocks, four blocks of each other. I was, you know, you mentioned the farm. I was very intentional about farm. I said, okay, my farm is New Port Richey. My farm yard is downtown and my barn is our office, which was right in the middle of all that. And the so that's, you know, and then now Mike and I live three blocks from all of that stuff. So we have we our new townhouse is three blocks east of downtown. Since 2018, we lived in a house that was four blocks south of downtown. So all of it was walkable. And even when downtown had just a couple of restaurants that were mostly just diners, one place that was pretty decent for lunch and salads and things, and a couple of pretty mediocre to crappy bars. I have a lot of friends here now and my office is here. And I immediately realized this is the most luxurious lifestyle I have had since college because the ability to walk everywhere and just live your life on foot is luxurious. It's just delightful. And my best friend now lives well in our old house, lives a block away. And we got to be friends living in town here and living a block from each other. And we would just ride bikes. And there was a whole other crew of Kevin K (01:00:24.284) You Frank Starkey (01:00:49.041) the people we'd ride bikes up the river in the evenings and maybe stop for a beer or maybe not and just enjoy the town. He really showed me just kind of, I smacked myself in the forehead one day when he talked about how nice it is to ride up the river during the sunset. I was like, wow, you mean you can just enjoy living in these walkable places? Because I'd always spent so much time trying to build them that I didn't spend much time just... f*****g enjoyment. Kevin K (01:01:19.676) I know, I know. It's a crazy thing. It's like it shouldn't be like a rarity or anything like that. We wish it was available to everybody, but it's wild. That was the thing about living in Savannah and that was like the hard part about leaving Savannah was, I think for a lot of us who have our ideals about walkability and everything, you kind of go back and forth about, do I want to spend my time? Frank Starkey (01:01:30.257) Yeah. Frank Starkey (01:01:37.489) Yeah, I bet. Kevin K (01:01:48.38) you know, working real hard and trying to create this as much as, as I can and, and live in a certain place where I, I guess have the economic opportunity to do that. Or do you also maybe just say, yeah, at a certain point, screw it. I just want to live somewhere where I can be, you know, do the things that I talk about all the time. So. Frank Starkey (01:02:06.513) Yeah, exactly. And it is hard to live in a place that's already kicking butt and do the things to make a place kick butt. So. Kevin K (01:02:20.124) Yeah, and in so many of these places, the places that we admire, and if you didn't get in early, you can't afford it at a certain point anymore anyway. So it's kind of a crazy deal. So as an architect, then would the infill projects, I mean, I know you worked with Eric and Mike and some others, but do you do any sketching or work on any of these sort of, is it a collaborative deal or do you at this point just be like, well, Frank Starkey (01:02:28.369) Right. Kevin K (01:02:46.268) I'm going to be a good client and be kind of hands off and just help direct my architects. Frank Starkey (01:02:50.865) I try to, I'm trying very hard to just be a good client and direct my architects. I'll let you ask Eric on whether I'm a good client or not, but that's probably been the project where I have been the most, I've left the most to the architects to on the design side. On the, the one of the commercial building that I owned by myself was a, building that didn't have any windows, two stories right on one of our main streets on a corner. So two full facades with essentially no windows. And it needed new windows storefront and upstairs. So it basically just needed a whole facade because there was just a big windowless bunker. But it had existing structural columns or structural considerations for where I could put windows. And it ended up being a interesting, challenging facade composition project. Anyway, I designed that building. And also it was a double high space where the second floor was just a mezzanine. And we closed in the second floor to make it into a mixed use building. So that because it had always been a nightclub or restaurant and it was too big as being a story and a half to for that, for this market to support because the upstairs are just kind of. You know, just sucked. So I was like, this needs to just be a regular size restaurant on the ground floor and then offices above. So I did the architecture on that, including the build out for the restaurant. I had some help on that on the layout, but I did the design, interior design stuff on that. I wish I had, I love the facade design process. And that was a really fun project. And the result was, you know, it's, it's unusual because of the constraints that it had. So, but it's, I think it's a fun, it's a good result. but if I were doing more projects, I mean, I really feel like I don't do architecture every day. So I'm not, yeah, certainly I'm not going to do construction drawings because I don't have that, capability just cause I don't, I mean, I have the technical ability to do it. Frank Starkey (01:05:15.249) and I am now licensed, I could sign and seal it, but I don't want to. And I haven't signed and sealed anything yet. So my goal is to be more of a client than I am an architect. Kevin K (01:05:27.868) So in all this stuff and going back to even your initial work with Longleaf and others, you've obviously tried to create well -designed places and beautiful places. I know you said you had some thoughts kind of based on one of the other podcasts I had where we were going back and forth and talking about beauty in buildings and the value of that versus sort of utilitarian values as well. How have you tried to balance all that and really create? beauty and do you find it at conflict with also making real estate work? Frank Starkey (01:06:04.753) I don't find beauty in conflict with making real estate work at all. I think it's critical. I don't think that things have to be built expensively in order to be beautiful. And my comment to you in my email was about y 'all had had a discussion on this, your podcast before last. about and you had said you can't legislate beauty no code in the no amount of code in the world is going to result in beauty and I've always thought about that because I agree with you that codes by their nature don't result in beauty that that human love results in beauty I mean that's you know because that's a it's a it's a spiritual outcome not a I mean, it's an outcome of the spirit. I don't mean that metaphysical terms, just, but it's something that comes from a level of care that's not, that doesn't happen from just conformance. Kevin K (01:07:10.94) Yeah, it's a value you bring to a project basically. It's something you really care to do. Yeah. Frank Starkey (01:07:16.529) Yes, that said, the American Vignoli and other handbooks that were used by builders, not by architects, but by people who were just building buildings and designing them, designing and building buildings by hand in the 1800s and early 1900s. resulted in scads of what we consider beautiful buildings with a capital B because it codified, maybe not in a sense of regulation, but in a sense of aspiration and guidance. It codified a way to arrive at competence with beautiful principles underlying it. And I wonder, it's... It's a hypothesis. I've not proved it or even set out to prove it. But if you could require that people follow the American Vignole as an example, or something else like that, where the principles of proportion are codified and they're followable, then I think you probably would still have to have some coaching. But I think you would get a whole lot closer than you can in the, because it's more like a playbook than it is a rule book for producing a competent design. Competent in the classical sense. Kevin K (01:08:54.556) Yeah. Yeah. Kevin K (01:09:02.236) Yeah, I think that's fair. It's more like coaching people about people who care. If you want to do good things, here are simple rules and patterns to follow that are not going to get you the Parthenon necessarily, but they're going to get you certainly at a minimum like a B building, like a B or a B minus building if you follow these rules. And if you do them really well and execute the details well, you could end up with an A plus building. Yeah. Frank Starkey (01:09:34.641) Yeah. Yeah, and it's something that McKim, Mead, and White can follow that and come up with something spectacular. But the same underlying principles are in every garden variety inline building on a street. Because individual urban buildings and places that we love are individually not spectacular. It's the accumulation of be buildings that are singing in the same key that makes a good chorus. Not everything can be a soloist anyway. Kevin K (01:10:11.996) And certainly, a lot of the people who produced the buildings in that era that you described, late 19th, early 20th century, I mean, there were a whole lot of just illiterate immigrants to the United States, ones who were building all that. And they didn't need 200 pages of construction drawings to follow it, but they did have patterns and illustrations and guides that they could follow. Frank Starkey (01:10:25.041) Yeah. Kevin K (01:10:42.46) and just some kind of basic standards. Yeah. Frank Starkey (01:10:43.217) And also a general cultural agreement on what looks good and what doesn't. And that's what I think you can't recreate from start, I mean, from scratch, because it's got to, that culture builds up and accumulates over decades and generations of practice. Kevin K (01:11:09.148) No doubt. Have you seen with the buildings that you have done in Newport, Richey, has there been other people who've looked at what you've done and tried to essentially say, kind of continue to raise the bar with good looking buildings? Frank Starkey (01:11:24.209) Unfortunately, I can't say that has happened yet. There hasn't been that much new construction in New Port Richey. And I don't, I can't think of any off the top of my head that have been done since we built the central, for example, which is really the only new ground up build. There's another apartment project and apartments and mixed use downtown, but it was designed in 2006 and then it was stalled and it finished about the same time we did, but it has nothing. you know, didn't follow others at all. We did have a lot of people. And this is something I would recommend, which I did accidentally. I didn't put really good drawings of the buildings into the public before they were built. I made a real now here's a blunder. There's a my blunder was I allowed the elevations of the buildings. to be the first thing that got into the public view because they were required as part of the permitting process. And an elevation drawing of a building is the architectural equivalent of a mugshot. It's representative and it's accurate, but it's accurate, but it's not representative. So it doesn't show you what a person looks like. It shows you just facts about their face. And so it shows you facts about a building, but not what it's gonna look like. So people saw the elevations. of what Eric could design, which were intentionally very simple rectangular boxes with regular, very competent, beautiful classical facades, but they looked really flat, they looked really boxy, and they looked terrible. They couldn't be at elevation, there's no depth on it. So people were like, holy s**t, of course he's building, I mean, they look like barracks. And so people lost their minds. I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So we quickly put together some 3D renderings. based on a quick sketchup model, we illustrated the hell out of them with landscaping and showed what a view down the street would look like. And it was a much better view. And that's really how you perceive the buildings. And so people were like, OK, well, if it looks like that, I guess I won't oppose it so much. But they were still rightfully skeptical. And so I shouldn't, yes, do not let the first thing that people see of your buildings be an elevation drawing. But the. Frank Starkey (01:13:50.769) renderings that we put together were not very detailed and they didn't show how refined the buildings are and how much architectural detail and character they have to them. And I just didn't, because I just didn't have time to model it, I was like, get something out there that's just kind of, you know, the building's really, you know, this is about the space of the street and the landscaping and the view to the lake and all that. Once the buildings were built, we had people say, stop us in the street and say, man, I was opposed to this at the beginning, but this is so beautiful. Kevin K (01:14:19.404) You Frank Starkey (01:14:19.505) Thank you for building this. I really love it. It's great. And that was the goal. And we really were intending to not make them spectacular buildings, but really nice buildings that really brought out a nice moment in the urban design. So they wrap around the lake. And then Central Avenue is a street that takes off from the lake or terminates in the lake. And so we have towers on the two corners that kind of mark that entry to Central Avenue and then buildings that mirror each other across Central. It's very formal and competent, but it's not overbearing. And the buildings are up to the street, the parking's in the back. So urbanistically, they're doing what they need to do. And which also, you know, that people, that's one of those things that if you describe to people, they don't really get it. But if you... show it to them and they see, you know, and you say, you know, this could have been parking here instead of a building. Then they understand, yeah, that's really nice. Kevin K (01:15:26.364) Yeah, no doubt. So after all of this, do you recommend the path of architect as developer to other people, especially young people? Frank Starkey (01:15:37.937) Yeah, if you've got an architecture degree, you've got a great basis for development. A funny story, when I was in college, I had a friend who was in one of the student ministries that I was very involved with who wanted to become a, she was studying linguistics and she wanted to go work for Wycliffe Bible translators and go work with some obscure people group and. discover the lexicon and translate the Bible. That's what Wycliffe Bible translators do. And there were some folks who lived in the area who did exactly that. And they had been architecture students at Rice. And so we went to their house for dinner and they told us about their path of how they got into translating the Bible. They worked with some little people group in Papua New Guinea that had like 200 people who were all the only people on the planet who spoke this dialect of this language and their task was to Learn their language not get killed learn their language Develop a lexicon of their language and then translate Use that to translate the Bible into their language. So it's and they described that as a multi -level problem -solving task for which their architecture degrees had perfectly prepared them. And so they described architecture as a multi -level problem solving task, right? You have to, everything from beauty to plumbing, structure, construction, durability, all of those things that Vitruvius told us about, you're solving for all of those things with one solution. So the ability to think and... Kevin K (01:17:00.476) Huh. Huh. Frank Starkey (01:17:28.273) and solve a problem on multiple dimensions at the same time is a great skill for life, whatever you're going to do. And I tell people who want to go into architecture, do it because even if you don't end up as an architect, it's still a great preparation for a lot of different things you could do from translating the Bible to, you know, technology things and real estate development. So real estate development is definitely a generalist pursuit. You know, I know a lot about. a lot of things from I'm not a, you know, I'm more than just a jack of all trades, but I'm certainly not a master of many, but it's helpful to, you know, I know a lot about drainage. I know a lot about regional planning. I know a lot about how codes work and how planning works and, and, and politics and things like that. There are a lot of things that architecture school doesn't do a good job of teaching in terms of teamwork and people. management both of working with other people and managing teams. That's something that most people will have to pick up as a skill from architecture school. But if you're an architect and you want to become a developer, I say go do it. Kevin K (01:18:45.788) Yeah, that's great. I love that, I love that. That's a great explanation. So, all right, Frank, we should probably wrap it here. This has been really cool. And for me especially, I love these chances to get to know people better that I've known for a little while anyway. So, that's... Frank Starkey (01:18:53.777) All right. Frank Starkey (01:19:03.441) Yeah, Kevin, I feel like we've always known each other and we've had a lot of mutual friends, but we've never just sat down and talked at this kind of length. So I've enjoyed it too. Sometimes I'd like to interview you the other way around, although I'm picking up a lot by listening to your podcast, which I really do enjoy it. So I'll put a shout out to that as well. Okay. Kevin K (01:19:10.332) I know. Yeah. Kevin K (01:19:17.244) Ha ha. Kevin K (01:19:20.923) Yeah, well, that'd be fun. We could turn the table anytime we want, that'd be fine. So, all right, thanks. I appreciate it, Frank. Frank Starkey (01:19:30.065) And one of these days I'd like to come see you in Kansas City and see what you're doing out there. Kevin K (01:19:33.788) Yeah, please do. I would love your feedback on some of the things that I'm doing and others that I'd like to do. And, you know, we all have kind of a different path of what we're doing, but we have a lot of similar goals and ideals. So it's always interesting to see how different people are working in whatever they're doing. Frank Starkey (01:19:47.505) Yeah, good. Frank Starkey (01:19:52.241) Yeah, absolutely. You've got a fun job doing a podcast, so good for you. And you're doing a good job getting a lot of voices out here in addition to your own. Kevin K (01:19:56.092) Now let's... Kevin K (01:20:01.148) Yeah, I enjoy it. It's been, I think this one might be number 50 with you that I'll release. And so that feels like, I'm hitting a milestone where it feels like it's a real thing now. So that's kind of cool. Frank Starkey (01:20:08.913) Wow. Frank Starkey (01:20:14.673) Yeah, very good. Kevin K (01:20:17.692) All right, Frank, I appreciate the time. All right, you too, take care. Frank Starkey (01:20:20.433) Thanks, Kevin. Have a great week. Bye -bye. Get full access to The Messy City at kevinklinkenberg.substack.com/subscribe

Aaron Lubeck, housing writer, and urbanism co-founder, discusses housing policy, North Carolina's building code reform, and suburban vs. urban development. Conversations also touch on Jane Jacobs, YIMBY movement, container housing, urban planning challenges, and simplifying housing regulations for equity and fairness.

I join my favorite Akron-ite, Jason Segedy, in Akron, to talk about northeast Ohio, Strong Towns, and generational roles. We do this while sitting outside a former major tire factory, in the tire capital of the world. What a cool scene it was. It makes me think I need video for these discussions.Jason and I seem to have a lot in common, and he’s the kind of person I can chat with for hours. As I told him toward the end, I also just really love and admire people who love their town. It’s become such a rare quality these days, so perhaps I just notice it more. But it’s energizing and endearing to find people who have a deep love affair with place.We spend a fair amount of time talking generational issues, and no small amount critiquing our own cohort - Generation X. What’s next for us? Will our age group step up to be the adults in the room, or will we lean into our well-earned cynicism and be lifelong critics?Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.Intro: “Why Be Friends”Outro: “Fairweather Friend” Get full access to The Messy City at kevinklinkenberg.substack.com/subscribe

Returning guests from last year discuss KC real estate challenges, exurban development, drug store closures, and urban beauty. They emphasize the need for better urban development, beauty in architecture, and inclusivity in the industry.

Every so often, I get into the personal advice game. Perhaps it’s a side effect of being a father, as well as hitting a point in life where you’ve seen and done a lot. I like to share whatever wisdom I’ve learned, in the vain hopes that someone else can benefit from my experience. That’s especially true for younger people who have a passion for cities, for development, and for making beautiful places. Along those lines, in this episode, I discuss my pet peeve with the word “they,” how to think about issues in your community, and what I’ve learned about external locus of control vs internal locus of control. Get building, get positive and work towards a better future.Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.Intro: “Why Be Friends”Outro: “Fairweather Friend”Transcript:Kevin K (00:01.26)Welcome back to the Messy City podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. Thanks for joining me. It's been a while since I've had the opportunity to do a solo podcast and just talk about a few things that are going on and some thoughts in my mind. And today seemed to work out really well for that in this week. So I'm going to share a few things that are going on and hopefully give you a little bit of inspiration in your day.If it doesn't inspire you, you can send me a note as well and say, hey, you were completely off base there or lost and that's fine too. Of course, I can't help but record these now and think about my friend Chuck Morrone's comments about my own voice and how things sound. I think if you do anything like this, you're the kind of person you probably never liked the sound of your own voice, but it's good to know that others respond to it and like it.And I'm happy to keep doing these. There's a lot going on right now. There is coming up here in May is the Strong Towns National Gathering followed by the Congress for the New Urbanism. It's a big deal in the urbanism world. Those annual confabs, which I have gone to for a number of years. Don't know that I'll keep going to those indefinitely, but I still think there's value in that or similar groups like them.depending on what your own interest is. I'm also keenly aware that the National Town Builders Association does a couple great get togethers every year. Those are, that tend to be people more on the development side, as well as the Urban Guild, which is a group that I'm a little bit affiliated with as well, which is mostly designers and architects, but it's a lot of people doing really, really cool stuff to try to make the world a more beautiful and better place.They have a get -together coming up this later later this year in November, which will be in Huntsville, Alabama And I'm gonna try to make it to that as well. Don't know if I can do all these things. It's a challenge when you've got a family and work and everything else, but I do always enjoy getting together with colleagues and learning about what other people are doing Figuring out what I can take back to my own community and just getting inspired from other people. SoKevin K (02:28.844)I have always enjoyed that. I suppose it appeals to the extroverted nature that I have. But I certainly enjoy getting that inspiration from others. So I want to talk a little bit today on a different tack. This is not necessarily a new subject locally, but it's something that's been on my mind. And bear with me as I go through this, but there's a new...There's a new attraction in Kansas City that opened late last year. We are among many cities now in that we have a Ferris wheel near the downtown area because you know how these things are, all the trends come and go and activities come and go. And right now it seems like every city has to have a Ferris wheel, a big Ferris wheel for people to get up and view the whole city and everything else. And, and, uh,I've been on it, it's kind of fun. I understand why people like them and they're visually very distinct and interesting. The first notable one I can remember that was new, I guess, was in London, which was pretty striking. I remember at the time thinking, well, that was kind of strange, but now it's gone into the realm of common and you see these attractions popping up just about everywhere.But what really interested me was the response to the Ferris wheel in the local community and the discussion boards and everything else. Actually, when I say discussion boards, it almost sounds like an old man's term at this point, but probably more, I guess I would say on social media, which is where a lot of conversation happens. And it's fascinating just how negative.the reaction was to me. And I think one of the things that I most commonly heard, where there were two things really, which is why did they put that there? And why did the city fund that instead of fixing the streets? So all interesting for me because it's all very telling about how people react to projects, building structures that are built.Kevin K (04:52.044)in a community. And I want to talk about that for a minute and what it means for each of us and what I think we, what mindset I think we need to have that is more productive if we want to really improve our own communities. So, you know, I don't, I'm not one to ever really assail people or blame people for the thoughts that come out of their mouths because, or because this is,the world we live in, the world we live in is driven by the experience that people have had over many years. Development, in the development world, we've gone to from a place where development was almost entirely private sector 100 years ago to now where there's an enormous amount of public sector development or public -private partnerships that happen. There's an awful lot of things that happen now.through government and from the top down that never would have happened 100 years ago. And I say all that because it really came to mind when hearing people talk about the Ferris wheel project. The first one being, why do we have that Ferris wheel when we could have been fixing the potholes? Well, the Ferris wheel in this case, in our city, was a private development. This was an enterprise that a local developerbought the land for, came up with the plan, financed it and built it. This is not a city project. So it's kind of easy for us to, who know that sort of thing, to then just mock people for being stupid, right? You're stupid. How do you not know that that's like a private project? But I get it because we do have so many things nowadays that are in fact either driven directly,by city government, have a partnership with city government, or require city government approval to happen. And it's very easy, I think, for a lay person who is not in the design, development, construction world to not understand that and to think everything is a city project. But in this case, and probably like many others around the country, this was just a local entrepreneur.Kevin K (07:18.764)doing a project with land he owned that that he expects to make a profit on with this attraction and a whole series of attractions next to it that actually seemed kind of cool and I'm excited to see how this all builds out over the next year or so as he continues to build it and and that really kind of tied into the to the other comment which is you know, why did they build it there? and I admitI want to admit right up front, I have a real pet peeve. And that pet peeve is the word they. And this is something I've had for a long time. And I wrestle with this because I hear it all the time. And it's just this notion that there is some group of people out there that just make all these decisions for what happens in your community.whether that's city council people or people in private rooms or whatever. But we have arrived at this place where we just all tend to think that there is a they that can be either blamed or praised for whatever goes on. And I find that really troubling because it's not a they. This was a person. This was a person and his development team.That made the decisions and and built this thing and that's very common In our city there. I hear this so often, you know, why did why did they build that apartment complex? and You know our city does this and this why do they do that? And I think there's this this thing there's this thing this phrase that my wife has taught me from psychology which is called external locus of control andThe notion being that if you kind of give up control of a lot of things in your own life and decisions, you have essentially given that control over to others. That's an external locus of control as to an internal locus of control, which is saying I am responsible for my actions and what happens and what I see and do in my life. An external locus of control means like, eh, you know,Kevin K (09:41.996)I'm just gonna let whatever happens happens. And I think we all balance this in our own lives or we can't possibly control everything. But I also think it's kind of led to this symptom where we see where we often think there is a they out there that is imposing their will on me or on us. And that's just not.Even in our very complicated world, that's not how it works. But again, I don't necessarily blame people for thinking that because we have gotten to this place where there is so much often confusion about who is doing what and who is responsible for what. There are politicians who even if they didn't do something, they try to take credit for it. That's long been a standard in politics is to deflect the blame and accept.you know, accept the compliments for whatever happens. You know, if something is good, name it and claim it, whether you had anything to do with it or not. And I think that gives the impressions that the impression that politicians and public sector people often have way more control over what happens in a community than they really do. And so I really wish we could get away from that thinking and that use of the word they.And to really just talk more specifically about who exactly has done something. Why, you know, who is that individual that took it upon themselves to create that project and why. And it's funny because in this case, the Ferris wheel in Kansas city is in a bit of an odd location. If you, if you go there, it's right next to a freeway. It does provide a great view of downtown when you're up on the Ferris wheel. And it's neat before this in front of the skyline, but it's right next to a freeway, which is a little odd.And I can imagine a series of other locations in the city where the same thing would have been really cool and better. And in fact, there is a major park nearby that is up on a hill would have been an incredible site for it. But the parks department didn't pursue that route. They didn't try to do a project or this project. And instead you have a developer who did and who took it upon themselves to do it.Kevin K (12:08.076)And that was the place where he had the opportunity to make it work. And I hope, I really hope it works. I think it will work. I think it's going to be a cool attraction and sort of entertainment area for the city, but that's how those things go. And I want to, I just want to encourage all of us to kind of get beyond this notion that there is a they out there. And, and one thing that I, I would just add to this is that, um,You know, it kind of feeds into a mindset. I think when you approach something like, they are doing something to me, or they are doing this, they are doing that, it can kind of feed into a real negative feedback loop that can be a real trap for people in a community. Because there's always something going on. There are things to not like and things to like.And I think that every community, every society has problems and we want to try to solve problems. And we're a time and a place where I think a lot of our cities do have problems. And I would never be the first to say otherwise. We have a lot of issues and things to resolve. I mean, in my opinion, the worst of our problems tend to come from kind of a utopian thinking.coupled with the desire to force utopian ideas from the top down on people who maybe aren't ready for it and are often very bad ideas. But that said, I really hope that we can kind of find a way to avoid the forces and the voices of negativity. And I think that use of the word they,almost always leads to like a negative mindset and a negative commentary. And again, as the idea that your locus of control is outside you for your community and for your neighborhood, as opposed to thinking about ways that you and others can take control yourselves and just do things and do positive things for your place. So one of the things that I would just say is, you know,Kevin K (14:33.516)try not to give in to the voices of negativity, doom and gloom, and grievance. Sometimes it seems to me as if we have a grievance industrial complex in our country that there are people who have so many grievances about life or society, but they move from issue to issue and they carry with them the same anger, the same...sort of negative vibes, no matter what the concern or topic is. And that's problematic. It's problematic for the person, I would say. I once heard a quote, I can't remember who said it, but it's something to the effect of, bitterness is a poison that you think you can use it against your enemies, but ultimately it ends up destroying you.And I think there's a lot of truth to that. There have been things in my life that I have been bitter about and I have wrestled with internally. And I have had to learn that that bitterness that I might've been holding onto was actually causing me physical harm. And that physical harm might've been something minor like just like loss of sleep and loss of sleep turning into...negative moods or whatever, but it also might be something more that you get so consumed by negative thoughts that it's very hard for you to do anything constructive in your life or to be somebody that others want to be around and to do good things with. And so I would just humbly suggest that as much as you could, especially if you're a younger person,embrace a positive vision for the future. And there's a very popular sort of meme going around lately that's just about we need to be building things. We need to build more things. And I think that's true. I think we're in, I think we're kind of coming, I hope we're coming out of an era where there's a lot of vitriol and negativity.Kevin K (16:58.156)which presents an incredible opportunity for people who have a positive vision of what the future could be and what to do about it. And to actually build yourself up, to build others up around you, to build things physically. So obviously, a lot of what I talk about on this podcast is about designing, building, developing things. And I think there's unbelievable opportunity.for anybody in any walk of life to get into a place where you're actually participating in building something physical, which is an, there are just immense emotional rewards for seeing that happen. So as somebody who was trained as an architect, I obviously love that very much. But I think for anybody that I see, whatever it is, the more you can create things and build things physically,is incredibly just valuable to yourself as well as people beyond you. Right now, or even I would say the last decade, there have been so many very, very loud voices that seem to push the other way and think we shouldn't be building things in that. I would just say specific to the world that I know the best.that developers are evil and they're awful and they're money grabbing people and we need to take our pound of flesh as much as we can and punish them. And there's just an awful lot of vitriol and hatred of developers and of development that is, in the end, it kind of reflects that problem with bitterness because...People are going to build things. And if you and your community embrace an attitude that developers and development is bad, you are creating a recipe for your own decline, ultimately. Just in the same way that carrying bitterness from something that happened years ago can really lead to just personal harm, carrying bitterness towards change for the future is only going to make your place.Kevin K (19:17.516)less and less relevant and less attractive to others who want to have a positive future. So that doesn't mean of course, and I feel like I always have to qualify this and say it that like, that doesn't mean all development is great and all, you know, and I love all of it. There's a lot of terrible development. There's a lot of, there's a lot of bad architects. There's a lot of bad developers. There's bad buildings that are built. We should always try to and strive.to do as good a job as we possibly can to try to build beauty in our world. I'm a firm believer in that building beauty is so deeply important. It's for the human spirit and for life in communities. And we don't talk nearly enough about building beautiful things, building beautiful places. Even if you're not in the building world, something as simple as planting a flower garden that adds beauty to the world.is incredible. It's so important. And I wish we all could do a little bit more of that. So of course do good things, but you have to have this attitude of improvement and positivity and that activity in the world is a good thing. And that a utopian aim, while maybe it comes from a good place, is something to be deeply concerned about, especially when somebody is pushing their utopian aim.on somebody else. So build yourself up, build others up around you, challenge yourself to get better all the time. This is kind of a funny sidebar, but I've definitely read my share probably of self -help stuff in my life, because I think I'm probably the kind of person that's always looking for ways to just improve what I'm...whatever I'm doing, maybe optimize a little bit. But I do, I have at different points in my life challenged myself to do things that were uncomfortable, that I was not good at, that I didn't really have in my background. And often did that just as a way to force myself to do something that maybe was uncomfortable. I am by no means, you know, like,Kevin K (21:43.244)some of the more intense really optimizers and everything else in the world. But, you know, for example, when I was a kid, I was a very unhealthy, a very sickly kid. I had asthma that was really, it was actually life -threatening for me as a child. And I eventually with time, with some medication and with growth,basically outgrew it. But I didn't really start to fully outgrow it until I was like almost out of like high school, I would say. And so there was a lot of like athletic stuff that I just wasn't really able to fully participate in when I was a young person, because I just didn't have the stamina, the long stamina to get through things. So when I got older, when I turned 40,I resolved that I wanted to, I had started to do a little bit of long distance running and resolved that I wanted to run a half marathon, which of course I had never run any distance anywhere close to it before. And I actually completed my first half marathon when I was 41 and I did it three years in a row. And actually each year improved my time from the year before.And all of that was a tremendous physical challenge for me to do because I had never been a long distance runner. Um, but I will tell you the feeling that I got from that when I would complete those races and the memory that was still with me about, uh, how challenging it was just for me to breathe. When I was a kid, the fact that I could overcome and do those things, it meant a lot to me. And it gave me.a lot of confidence and the feeling that if I could do that, I could do other things as well. Lately, I've been doing something similar and I don't like to talk too much here about just personal things that are going on. But now that I'm into my fifties, I have been trying some things that have also been challenging for me. And so I've been doing some martial arts stuff the last couple of years. And this year I've actually started.Kevin K (24:07.5)doing jujitsu classes in earnest for the first time. And that has not been my world at all. I mean, when I go to these classes and I take a beating and it's hard and you know, you learn all the things that are going on. You know, this is not the world that I came from where of, you know, wrestling and combatives and that sort of thing.but I have really learned to enjoy it. And especially with the jujitsu training, the more I go, the more I just really get into it and enjoy what I'm learning. And the feeling that I get of it making me stronger and more capable, and the fact that, you know, that it's hard, and it is really hard, that it's hard, but I can...get through a class and even if it's a rough day or whatever, afterwards I have this feeling that I really did something. And so I share that again just to say that it's important to challenge ourselves to do better, to try to, sometimes maybe to push on things in your own personality and your own world that you know that you struggle with or that are not your thing.And I'm a firm believer in trying to push through some of your weaknesses whenever you can and challenge yourselves and have that vision that, yes, I can overcome things. I can do things. And embrace a vision that you are capable of doing a lot of things. So, you know, being, I understand why a lot of people are very risk averse and you kind of get in a lane and you just stay in that lane.in your life. But being too risk averse can really prevent incredible self -improvement. And you can miss out on a lot of successes in life that you probably never knew that you were even capable of. That's not to say like be reckless and just take any risk you want. Of course not. But don't be fearful either. And really lean towardsKevin K (26:31.372)this notion of building yourself up and then building others up along the way. Because the more you build yourself up, you will find that people are drawn to that. People want positive things to cling onto and to take themselves along for a ride for something that's good and interesting and positive. People like to build things. And I...And I often think that we don't talk enough about how people like to overcome difficulty. And so difficulty in and of itself is not a bad thing. I think it can often be a really good thing. And so push through that difficulty as Bono might say, don't let the b******s grind you down. Right? So.That's were a few thoughts for today. I think one last thing. I have no idea where this is going to go, but in the spirit of, again, pushing through and trying to do things, I had a personal interest in real estate development since I was a college kid, and maybe even younger. I don't know. It's hard to remember at this point. But.But there were so many steps along the way where I could have taken a risk to do something. And I took a few, but I just never really fully dived into that to see what I was capable of. And I think what for me is that that lesson is you tend to regret the things you didn't do more than the things that you did do. And I certainly regret that when I was younger, I didn't take more risks and more proactive steps to push through.my lack of knowledge, my own questions about risk when it came to maybe developing some of my own building projects. So this week I actually put in an offer on a commercial property for the first time that I have ever done. I've never done this before. Sent a letter of intent over to purchase something. I don't know if anything will come of it. I hope something will come of it. I have a great idea for a project.Kevin K (28:52.62)on the site. It's not a terribly large project. I think it's kind of in a wheelhouse that I can execute really well, a fairly small project. But I'm challenging myself to push through my own aversion to just taking that next step. And we'll see what happens. So hopefully something comes of it, and I'll be able to share some details as it goes.And if not, there will probably be another opportunity right around the corner. And that's the message that I would hope to share is there's always opportunity around the corner. Don't think so much about who they are and what they are doing and think so much about you and what you are doing, what you can do, what you and your friends or others or your family can do. And have that internal locus of control and...Don't imagine that the world does everything to you. Create your own world in the process. Thanks so much for listening. If you wouldn't mind sharing the podcast, hitting the like or follow button on your favorite app and encouraging others to do the same, I'd really appreciate it. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. This is the Messy City Podcast. Be talking to you soon. Bye. Get full access to The Messy City at kevinklinkenberg.substack.com/subscribe

Charles Marohn, President and Founder of Strong Towns, discusses his newest book 'Escaping The Housing Trap' and the Strong Towns National Gathering. Topics include rethinking city building and financing sports facilities, urban design reflections on Disney World, and origins of Walt Disney in Missouri. The conversation also touches on the need for affordable housing policies and strategic public investments in stadium construction.

Butch Rigby is a long-time Kansas City developer, small business promoter, and city booster. We decided to sit down and talk about the looming ballot initiative on April 2, and the pros and cons of the current proposal for moving the Royals to the Crossroads neighborhood. You can listen to more of Butch’s story in this podcast.Another podcast of interest is this discussion with Philip Bess, and our work together to save Fenway Park.Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.Intro: “Why Be Friends”Outro: “Fairweather Friend”Episode Transcript:Kevin (00:00.644)Welcome back to the messy city podcast. I've got a returning guest, butch Rigby here, otherwise known as Kansas city's George Bailey, as I've described my, uh, my longtime friend and, uh, and partner in crime on, uh, Kansas city issues, downtown development issues, et cetera. And, uh, Bush, it's great to see you. Oh, Kevin. It's always great to be here. Matter of fact, it.feeling like Savannah, Georgia. It is. I mean, it's already in the 70s and it was the 70s in February or something. That was crazy. So I know everything's blooming. All the stuff I planted last fall is looking good. So I'm happy. I was worried that everything bloomed too early and it was going to get frozen out. But I don't think so. I know. I think we're like straight into lake season pretty soon. So that's all right. Well, butch, I wanted to have you in today to talk about.the baseball stadium issue in particular, because it's a hot topic here locally. There is a proposal on the ballot coming up in April here in Kansas City and Jackson County to extend a sales tax, an existing sales tax that will expire in a few years.to help fund a new baseball stadium for the Royals in a downtown location in the Crossroads area. And then also provide funding for the Chiefs for a series of improvements to Arrowhead. And Butch and I go way back on this issue. We had a lot of fun years ago talking about the potential for downtown baseball when we were both volunteering with the Urban Society of Kansas City.That's correct. That's right. Shout out to all of our urban society buddies. Oh yeah. They knew who they are. And I think it's interesting, maybe where we could start Butch is to kind of put things in context for what we talked about. That was probably now 20 years ago when we were getting involved in that. Just about. Yeah. And so that was when the Glass family owned the Royals. And...Kevin (02:16.186)Downtown was coming along, but it was still a little bit more in its infancy of redeveloping. And there was a push on the part of a lot of people to try to get the Royals to consider coming downtown. And we took on this crazy volunteer task of looking at all the different sites that there were downtown and trying to get people to analyze them and...put their thoughts together. That was, in retrospect, that was kind of a wild thing. And we had a couple hundred people who volunteered with it, as far as I remember, right? We did. And, you know, of course you have to remember 30 years ago when I bought my first building down in what was then Film Row, 19th and Wyandotte, you know, before the days of Crossroads, it was a ghost town. And I'm not kidding. I mean, it was literally...On a Friday night, we would hold these Christmas and July parties to celebrate the history of Film Row. And we were the only thing going on down there. Now, you know, we were begging for tenants. I had a few buildings that I bought and I was having a challenge keeping a coffee shop tenant open. Certainly wasn't, you know, having any luck with restaurants or anything like that. That's just natural when you've had, you know, a big daytime population in office towers in the, inside the loop.Uh, but you really have, uh, I think we had 2 ,500 residences downtown, which isn't enough to support really anything. Yeah. And, uh, you know, at that time, uh, you know, kind of spin forward a dozen years or so, and, uh, things are happening. You know, they're announcing, uh, you know, the, the big push for the, not only the power and light, but to get H &R blocked downtown to do, uh, get the Sprint Center downtown. And, uh, we held the halfway.mark of the development at Screenland at my theater for a while. And, you know, that was a time when we were all thinking, hey, there are several good options for baseball because it meant more and more people making downtown what it used to be. 30 years before I was there, everything was downtown. Shopping was downtown. Movies were downtown. If you wanted to see a first run picture, it was downtown. It was a destination for a reason.Kevin (04:38.482)And that was gone. And so we saw that opportunity. And of course, back then, like you say, there were probably eight good sites because, you know, they were going to be kind of on their own and developed around them as opposed to the new, the new situation. Now, when we have a, an owner who really wants to be downtown and reflects that same passion for a good, strong downtown, um, you know, they're limited to a couple of sites and they have to take into consideration.all of the other ancillary effects of the Royals being down there. And of course the ancillary effects of the reason that I support a downtown stadium. So I think you're one of the people that I really would enjoy talking to about this because you have your interests across many areas. And so obviously you care about the city and about the downtown and the urban core.but you also have an almost unimpeachable track record of caring about everything local, Kansas City, small businesses. And as we look at the proposal that's on the table today, and that's really been, I think, about the primary source of controversy has been that the Royals have chosen a site in the Crossroads area. It's funny, they keep calling, you know, in the paper keeps calling it like the East Crossroads. I think of it.personally like North Crossroads, if you want to call it that. It's literally the edge of downtown, edge of the loop. The loop hopefully will be erased. But no, I mean, look, I'm in business to make money. I always have been. But I don't believe real estate is a commodity. I don't believe you just develop strip centers. I mean, there's a business doing that, but it's not what excites me. What excites me is the challenge of empty buildings becoming full.I mean, when I was down in the crossroads back in 94, my friends just couldn't understand it. They go, it's dead down there. And I thought, well, you know, they got to do something with Union Station. They've got to do something with that big piece of land, maybe a hotel at 17th and Central, you know, and why not? And of course, things got better. We get the Performing Arts Center, world -class, and the Union Station was completely renovated.Kevin (06:59.762)And a lot of things happened that in unison, but we were always able to maintain old buildings, small tenancies. To this day, I have, you know, 14 buildings. I have 200 tenants. They're all small businesses. And those tenants range from single office tenants to small restaurants, to law firms, to salons. I mean, you know, 63rd street, for example, between Oak and Rock Hill.was 70 % vacant as a corridor in 2014. And now we're 100 % occupied and it's all small business. And small business got us through COVID. Small business stayed. They're resilient. You know, they're not making corporate decisions from afar. So, you know, being downtown, a lot of people say, well, how could you possibly want the baseball stadium in the crossroads? And, you know, I was initially,like everybody else, assuming the East Village was the spot. It made all the sense. You could do $2 billion worth of development. And I slowly came around to understand why the location they picked was the one they picked, and this is before they announced it. But I started thinking about the fact that the city of Kansas City is responsible for tax shortfalls, sales tax shortfalls at the Power and Light District and all that development. And, you know,That's just part of the deal. I mean, if you really look at all the ancillary revenues they get because of the effects of the Paranlight district, it's probably still a positive for the city. However, why would you try to be far enough away that people get there, park, go to a few bars around there and leave and create competition for yourself? Where the location they picked is for the most part, the Kansas city star building.a newer church building that already they've outgrown, a lot of vacant ground, and then a block of buildings that of course, most people would like to see them not tear those buildings down, but in any development, you will lose some buildings. And they do have to have some ancillary space for parking, for season ticket parking, for offices, a little revenue from a hotel, things to offset the cost.Kevin (09:24.914)And so I started looking at it and I said, it's also two blocks from the streetcar as opposed to eight blocks. And if we are going to grow our habit and try to get a, you know, what we call an intermodal transportation option, that is non -car options downtown, whether it be Uber or the streetcar or other forms of transportation, you know, we've got to encourage people to use the streetcar. We've got to encourage people to use Uber. So.It became apparent to me that the Kansas City Star Building was going to do nothing. And, you know, so I did come to support it. Now, do I support it unconditionally? No, I think there are some challenges that they must deal with and get out in front of. Parking is the number one. Security is a close second. Respect for the people who are being displaced is probably up there at a tie for number one. And,You know, I've had some talks, I've had some opportunities to talk to the Royals and to talk to the architects. And I do genuinely believe that John Sherman wants to do the right thing. I do believe John Sherman does not want chain restaurants. He's a Kansas City guy. People treat him like he's some hedge fund billion around New York who just landed in our town. No, he's, he lives in Jackson County. He's very charitable. He and his wife are very involved in the community.and always have been, and I think it's really almost unfair to characterize him just because you're mad about a baseball stadium. And so I have felt that the location is good. And I think it makes a lot more sense, especially if the funding can be extended to cover the freeway another three blocks, or two blocks, whatever the extension of the freeway cover is, because then you genuinely...have a walkable community. Yeah. I mean, I think if we just talk about the location, just for a second, just that aspect, I feel like I was one of the few people that never liked the East Village site. Yeah. And I always felt like that site was too far from the streetcar. Kansas City is not New York. We're not used to.Kevin (11:42.418)We don't have a population used to taking public transportation and walking long distances. And so if we ever, my feeling was if you really wanted people to use the streetcar as an amenity to get back and forth to games, which would be a good thing for the city. Oh, absolutely. Because then people could populate the entire urban core. They could park it at the plaza. They could park at the riverfront, you know, any number of places and then hop on the streetcar and get there. And I think that would be a good thing for our city.But I've always felt like it needed to be much closer than the East Village site was. Not to mention, the East Village site is surrounded by a bunch of government buildings, which basically close at four or five o 'clock. It's kind of a dead zone downtown. And then east of there, you've got a lot of just really social service issues that are really problematic for thinking about the kind of atmosphere.that you have in a ball game. And so I think from that standpoint, I was never in love with the East Philly site. And so when they announced the Crossroads site, I think if I were looking at it like if it was a blank slate, if all of that was empty today, it makes a lot of sense. And because it's proximity to so many other things, proximity to Power and Light District.the ability for all those things to build off of each other, which is something we talked about years ago, like the virtues of an urban ballpark is it becomes like a one plus one equals three situation for entertainment and other uses. And so it seemed to me like the major issues from the site standpoint were the existing businesses that are being displaced. I didn't care about the Casey Star Building at all. I think it's hideous. I'd be happy to see it gone, but.I know not everybody agrees with me on that, but I think it's hideous. But there are all those, you know, a number of really cool businesses that you and I have probably both been to and really enjoy in that area. And so it's kind of a question of like what happens, what happens to them? Well, and I couldn't. Oh, that's okay. I'll edit that out. Nice ringtone. Yeah, I thought I turned it off. Sorry about that. I forgot to turn it off. Anyway.Kevin (14:03.058)I couldn't agree more. You you have the displacement of those businesses is a big deal. Yeah. Um, and you know, the Royals will have to step up and I believe they will. And I believe they've made this indication. They will step up and not only make those businesses whole, but make sure they can relocate close. If not better, uh, they can, uh, you know, whether it be rent deficiencies or anything else they have to do to make sure those businesses can thrive.Um, you know, in a perfect world, yeah, you'd like to leave Oak street and leave those businesses and actually encapsulate them as part of the stadium. But it's my understanding that, you know, the new green dirt farm might be in right field. And, uh, and that's probably one of the tougher ones. Sure. Um, the green dirt farm, they've invested incredible amount of money and a lot of time and a lot of effort and they're getting ready to open after, you know, it's not easy to set up a cheese making. Oh, and there's such a phenomenon.They are such a phenomenal business. But the Royals are very well aware of that. And they do have, I think they do have time under the construction schedules to relocate them and pay for all of the things they will need to do to get them back up and running again and hopefully even better. But it, you know, it's important to note that, you know, while if you skip that block, you know,does the stadium become as self -sufficient as it should be? And remember, there's a billion dollars in private money going into this project. To me, I do listen to some of the bar owners and people who have been very vocal about how opposed they are to it.And I get it. I empathize. I, I, I, you know, I will tell you, I own a building at 1701 McGee down the crossroads. It faces what will be the new baseball stadium. And we are going to be in the direct impact zone of construction. I mean, all my tenants are going to have to be facing all the perils of a, you know, a billion dollar project going up directly across the street. Um, I think that the, uh, you know, Royals have already announced they have.Kevin (16:15.474)construction management plans, they intend on busing workers in from remote lots. I mean, all of these things will go a long way to help. Some people will say, oh, well, you'll make so much money because you own the building. No, the building is rented. It's always been rented. I'm not changing tenants. I just signed a seven -year lease extension knowing the ballpark was slated for that spot with a small office tenant who's, they're part of the church next door and I give them a discounted rent and always have.You know, I've locked myself into a long -term deal and I won't ever walk away from any of my tenants. I mean, you know, you spoke earlier, I genuinely do believe in small business and I genuinely, you know, I know that I would never rent one of my buildings, you know, to a national credit tenant to, you know, to get double the rent and kick out a local business. I just, just, I'm not in the business, you know.purely for the money. I make money. I will be the first to say I've been very fortunate with my business success, but really that's due to all my small tenants. I don't remember that those are the ones that brought me here, you know. And so when I do support the baseball stadium where it is, I do that with an absolute solid belief that it will benefit the Crossroads. I think that we do have to, you know, maybe,create a permit street parking for businesses only, or maybe you hand out scan cards for the day so it can't be baseball parking, but at the same time, identify parking structures. Don't just announce to the public, oh, we've got enough parking, we've done a study. I mean, I'm here from the government, I'm here to help you. I mean, we probably do need to get some very,clear messaging out there that there are a lot of people in the crossroads who do support the Royals. But we've got to back it up with understanding the real issues people fear. There's a lot of work there to do on a lot of those logistics. And I would say for anybody also curious about Butch's background on the previous podcast that I had him on, we kind of walked through his whole story starting from the very beginning. And I think it's really interesting. I actually think it'sKevin (18:36.882)for especially a lot of young people to think about a career path. So I think one of the other aspects of all this, I guess I want to come back a little bit to the small business side of things and putting your real estate hat on. And if you were advising the Royals on like how to handle the real estate side of helping those small businesses, because,I would imagine most of them are most, if not all, are probably tenants. They probably don't own their buildings. So they're on a lease of some kind. So like if the Royals buy the property, the building owner gets paid. And then the business, you know, they're like, okay, you got to move somewhere. What are the sorts of things that the Royals could do or that, you know, you might think about from a real estate standpoint for a tenant in that situation? Well, of course, you know,The tenant has rights under a lease, you know, just because the Royals buy the building. If they are forcing or condemning the tenant out of the space, then they have a financial obligation. This is just, you know, pure legal talk. They, you know, they have a financial obligation to make the tenant whole again. And that goes without saying. And, you know, condemnation is not like the old days. It's not a popular thing. They do have the rights of condemnation and you need them. But,You know, they're very, very much skewed toward the person being purchased or bought out or put out of business. Now, with that said, if I were advising the Royals and I think they listen to this, I think they feel similarly, if you're going to look at the budget and you're going to look at the overall scheme of how much things are going to cost, you know, you might be able to get carpeting at a little lower cost with a lot of work and competitive bid. You might be able to get a lot of different things and, you know, save money.This is on a place to start trying to cut costs. This is a place that you get a little more than generous for a lot of reasons. The number one, because it's the right thing to do. A small bar owner's bar is as important to her as the Kansas City Royals baseball team are to the ownership group. It's like I say about small office tenants. I pay just as much attention to a single tenant user because from the perspective of both small businesses,Kevin (21:01.17)This is their life and they probably work just as hard as the Royals do, you know, and, and, and the chiefs and everybody else. And so treat them with not only fairness, but with a generous nature. Now, if any, you know, they've got to have, you know, it's gotta be reasonable. They've got to have some, um, you know, financials to back up, you know, their business and they've got to be paid. But, you know, I, I'd say to the Royals, you know, let's get out in front of this right now.And I also think the general public needs to see who the Royals are. I mean, right now they're, you know, they're, they're working hard. I've, I've had some interactions with them and I have found it to be positive. I was at the Crossroads Community Association meeting and while it was a rather, you know, lively meeting for the most part, we put together a community benefits agreement. You know, some of the things we thought were important that the Royals needed to hear about.public safety, architectural integrity within the neighborhood. And I think there's gonna be a pretty good community benefits agreement announced pretty soon. There is the Community Improvement District, which is a, if you get 51 % of the owners of the property around there to agree to it, you combine a small sales tax and a property tax.and you start employing security guards and trash pickup and cleanup. Well, the Royals could be a big part of that. And I would advise the Royals give back more than you get. In other words, you know what, you're going to participate in security on game night. Why don't you participate in a security patrol seven nights a week? All of a sudden the crossroads is that much better off because the Royals were there. If you're going to participate in, you know, parking and, and, you know, some of the, uh, you know, you're going to,park cars there, why don't you help participate in identifying or maybe even building a little bit of parking. You know, some of it for the neighborhood. There's a, I believe the ballpark site also includes, you know, a rather decent sized lot on Locust and during construction, make that open to all, you know, of the neighbors to park in during construction. There's a lot of things they could do that would be a very small percentage of the budget.Kevin (23:24.178)that would be very helpful to the neighborhood in the long run and alleviate some of the concerns. Yeah. How do you, how do you think about the parking question? Let's say when the stadium is done. And I know you and I probably think similarly about parking, but we're, we think differently than most people think. And I think your, your average Kansas city is obviously very used to the situation today.at sports complex and it's easy, it's not cheap anymore, but it's easy and you can see the stadium and everything else. Parking in a downtown situation is really different and there is a lot of parking downtown. There's actually a whole lot of existing parking in garages and on streets, but there's also more and more competition for that use, especially depending on, you know,the time of day that a game might, that people might actually start coming to a game. So how do you, how would you think about that? How do you talk about that issue with other people? Well, when I am talking about the issue, of course, the number one fear that comes up is, Hey, on game night, I might as well shut down the record bar. I might as well shut down the brick or I might as well shut down my business. It isn't particularly catering to baseball crowds, you know? Um, and, and, uh, because.No one's going to come down to the ballpark or down to the, to the crossroads if they feel that, well, it's a ball game, there'll be no parking and I'm not going to go pay $20 to park to go get a beer or listen to music. So, you know, my first thought is we must have a restrictive street parking, you know, program in place. And, you know, if, if, if we need to be, we'll be a little progressive about it at the same time, let's identify clearly identify on an app.that you can look at on your phone, that any website you can look at that says, here are your parking garages, touch the parking garage. It'll tell you how many spaces are available. We're reserve a space right now. Once people feel comfortable where they like to park and where they want to be downtown and they know where they're going, they're going to have a whole lot more, you know, ease in, in, in going to the game. I remember when I was a kid, I went to the, I'mKevin (25:45.778)This will tell you how old I am. I went to the Kansas City A's game at municipal and my dad knew just the right guy to park in his lawn for 25 cents. And we did it every game. But I mean, you know, that, that idea that, that, uh, you familiarize the general public. Um, there's going to be a lot of our population that just is really going to be resistive to going down, down to a ball game. But then there's a whole new generation. They're just used to it. They go down there. And I think the, the job will be.clearly identify that available parking to clearly put it on a map, let people see it. You know, we're from Missouri, show me. Yeah. Also worth noting that when we built the Sprint Center, we didn't build any new dedicated parking for that. Correct. And by all accounts, that hasn't hurt the Sprint Center at all. No. And I think that, you know, for the Royals, it's looking at the perspective of the businesses around it. I mean, theWhen you're inside the loop, you know, you've probably had your business there and always park, parking's always been a concern. You know, we developed the crossroads, you know, we as a city and all of us developers and have lived off a rule that allowed for no street, I mean, no off street parking. If you had 3 ,500 square feet or less, if you have historic buildings, there's no requirement for street parking and allow those buildings are historic. So, you know, that was done with the idea of more and more public transit, which you and I both.support, but it also did lead to a pretty reasonable dependence upon street parking. So let's save that street parking. Let's say that in front of every building that is a non -office or maybe all the buildings, you have to get a little, if you want to park there, it's for a business. It's sort of like during COVID, they gave part of the parking to restaurants and they let them utilize it. Well,We do that and you get a little ticket and you scan it and put it in your, you don't have to scan it. You just put it in your, you know, dashboard. And if an officer comes by and they check the scan and it's valid, good. You know, maybe the, you know, brick Riverside or company gives you the ticket or maybe the hair salon, you know, or maybe who's ever opened the brick, you know, or maybe the music, you know, venue does that. So, you know, again, and a lot of those buildings will have their own parking that, that, uh,Kevin (28:08.306)that they rely on, but a lot of them, a lot of them don't. I have a parking lot at 17th and Oak and I will only utilize that for my tenants. And I've had a couple of small businesses request, well, would I rent them some nighttime parking? The answer is yes, I would. Before I need baseball parking revenues, I'd rather have, you know, a small restaurant that knows they'll stay in business because that parking lot will be off limits for baseball.And I think there are other landlords that will make those designations and then we can really call out how many available baseball spots we have. And it's, it is a lot. Yeah. And another aspect of this, which, you why to me, the location as close to the street car as you could get a stadium was important was it, it completely extends the range and location at which somebody might park if they're driving in, say from.Johnson County, or if you're driving in from north of the river or whatever, by the time a new stadium would open downtown, you would have a, the streetcar would be open from the river to UMKC. And so you could effectively come anywhere into that part of the city. And I know some people may hate hearing this too, because they don't like that idea, but you could drive into let's say the Westport area and you could get a drink before the game at Westport and then hop on the streetcar and take it to the game.Oh, yeah, and you could do that. You could go to the plaza. You could go to anywhere up and down Main Street or in that corridor in Midtown. And so the the idea that all of the parking has to be like right near the stadium, even for commuters, is it's a different in this situation. And it is. And, you know, maybe there's a deal made with UMKC to utilize that large garage on game nights. Maybe there's a and I think it's a great example. You know, people talk about, well,Is it really going to pay? Should we be supporting the Royals? You know, well, you know, there's 81 games a year. And you're talking about now, instead of going to the ballpark, pulling in the lot, seeing the game and leaving, you may well be getting off work and getting some dinner. You will have the easy ability in our town to go to Regaza or go to Hill Central or go to one of the restaurants up and down the streetcar line.Kevin (30:31.89)have an early dinner, have a couple of drinks, get on the street car, go to the game, come out of the game. And again, getting back on the street car, especially if you're walkable from the street car, which is a small percentage, but a nice percentage, you don't have to worry about the car. And so we'll learn that. I mean, I've often said, don't force people on the street car, encourage them, excite them about it. And quite frankly, our street car has been phenomenally successful in making it free.I think was the key to success. So yeah, I mean, we do need to, you know, we do need to understand in the big picture, you know, if nothing else, the crossroads wasn't truly successful for coffee shops and restaurants and things like that until we had enough people living downtown who were there all the time and who were there at night and who were not just driving in.And that happened because of the power and light and because of sprint and because of all the energy that was created and the baseball stadium will do more of the same. More people will live downtown. I believe we have 32 ,000 people living downtown right now. And I wouldn't be surprised to see 42 ,000 people downtown in five years, six years, especially with the baseball stadium there. And then if you really think about, you know, how many cars do you need? Does anybody know? Well,9 ,000 for a 34 ,000 seat stadium, 1 ,500 will already be included in the ballpark project. So you've got 7 ,500 spaces that you're really looking at, and about 3 ,500 of those will be in the crossroads. I mean, you start dividing these up, and then you look at the intermodal transportations again. You look at the street car, you look at Uber, you look at those things, and you gotta only believe that number will grow.Right. So, you know. Yeah, we talked about this or joked about it with my wife, who you know. And it's funny how basically everybody our age and younger when they are going out these days for entertainment, they're taking Uber. Absolutely. There are very few people that are driving around. The people my age and older tend to still be driving. No matter what they're doing, they're going to hit a couple of bars, they're going to party hop or whatever it is, they're probably still driving.Kevin (32:54.45)the younger crowd is much more used to just using Uber instead. You know, it's interesting, you know, I've probably like you, I mean, I've got a million really fond memories of Kauffman Stadium. And I started going there in the 70s when I was like a little kid. And when the great run that we had at the teams in the late 70s. And the stadium is...it's a better stadium now than it was then with the improvements they made 20 years ago. So I've always, I mean, I have tons of great memories, but I've, you know, I've traveled enough to know and been around to enough cities to know that it's a terrible location for a baseball stadium where it is now. And we can all argue and debate about maybe what the best or ideal location is, but there's just no question that baseball exists.so much better when it's part of a neighborhood and it can feed off of other activities and be mutually supportive. I think you just said the magic word neighborhood because I have heard John Sherman quoted as saying, I want to build America's next neighborhood ballpark. I mean, I remember going to Boston because I wanted to see the Red Sox play at Fenway and I got off the subway and I, whatever transportation we were on.the ballpark and I keep looking around, then I looked up and I go, oh, this is the ballpark. It blended right in and you see these, you know, like Wrigley Field, you see the excitement of people all around you walking into the ballpark and you can see the buildings across the way and you can see, you know, the noise of a city and you know, it's a neighborhood attraction and it's a large one, but it looks a whole lot better than an empty glass building and a big flat parking lot. Let's face it. Yeah.Yeah, no doubt. Yeah. And there's just something a little bit more, almost just magical about the experience of being in a city, coming up to a game and the excitement that happens with that. I'm not saying that there wasn't any of that at Coffin Stadium. There was two. Oh yeah. But it's just, it's a completely different feeling to it. And I don't remember going to municipal stadium back in the day. I probably did when I was like a little, little kid.Kevin (35:18.486)Yeah. The huddle club for the chiefs, you know, for a dollar you sit on the grassy hill at the ballpark. Those days are probably over the one dollar ticket. But yeah, you know, and, and, and probably the single most important reason to have the ballpark downtown and where it is, is because instead of all of the money being captured by Jackson County in the Island known as the sports complex, it is now being spread out amongst small businesses. And instead of a game time, you know,being limited to the time it takes to park and the time it takes to get out. Game time can be right after work and you don't have to go anywhere if you're downtown or whatever restaurant you'd like to eat at along the way. And, you know, the truth is as long as we can preserve the integrity of the Crossroads neighborhood, it can only be a win for the, you know, for the neighborhood. And there are a lot, I've spoken to a lot of people in the Crossroads.who believe the same way, but all of us believe that there are good things that can come out of this as long as the Royals will be, as they would say, team players, which I believe they are. Well, and I totally get and empathize with all of the people in the crossroads who care so deeply about that neighborhood. I mean, what you and others, many, many others have done over the last three decades or so is fantastic. And taking something,an area that was very, very quiet, to say the least. And it's really our best neighborhood in a lot of ways in the urban core now. It's so lively and interesting and fun, and there's a great diversity of things going on all the time. And it's continuing to grow and change and expand, which is fantastic to see. So I totally get the...the feeling that people have of being protective of that. And there are a lot of unique, creative businesses in the area. So I really hope the Royals, if they're successful with the ballot initiative, can find the right balance to keep people happy and enhance the neighborhood and really do something for the businesses that are there and make them feel valued.Kevin (37:44.886)because it is a special thing that we've done in Kansas City and I love to see it. Yep, me too. I think it would be, it can be a win -win. And I would hope that, you know, again, I come here as a 30 -year resident, so to speak, or business resident of the Crossroads and care deeply about it and very much, and you know, I think it's only a positive as long as it's done correctly. Yeah.But I don't care about that Casey star printing press building. No, no. I heard somebody at the Jackson County meeting the other day go, can you imagine you walking in this big, beautiful neighborhood and there's this giant big box, you know, big stadium there. And of course I didn't say it, but I was thinking, are you color buying the color green? That monolith is, I mean, I always thought it was kind of cool, but it's, it's the, I don't know what the use could be.possibly be. I've heard museum, but boy, that would be, uh, that would be a big museum. We have a lot of museums in this town. No doubt. And oh, by the way, the star got tax abatement for that building. Yes. And the church doesn't pay. Yeah. They got it twice. The church doesn't pay tax. So, you know, and another thing is we have all that ground in the East village that could A, be used for additional parking. And, and I think they could come up with the clever tram system to get people right over to the park if they didn't want to walk.And B, the church could be moved over there, I would hope. You know, there are strong presence down there. You know, I've heard all the arguments, oh, you know, it's going to, there's $31 million worth of real estate not being taxed. I go, well, it wasn't really being taxed too much anyway. Yeah. And, you know, if you go back to the, I remember the original vision for why we call it East Village anyway, which was, you know, the idea was the property owners and others were going to come together there and build a really cool neighborhood.and build an urban neighborhood. And that opportunity is still there. And that actually would still be, that would be an ideal solution for moving ahead with that part of downtown. And we can use the people, we can use the development, be a great place for just another wonderful urban neighborhood. Oh, absolutely. And more and more people living downtown and it'll be convenient to services and things like this. Absolutely.Kevin (40:07.316)All right, Butch, as we wrap it up here, do you have any other final thoughts or comments? Is there anything we didn't cover? Something I didn't ask? No, I mean, I think my final thought is, you know, for those people out in the audience today who are still very skeptical or very concerned, you know, with good reason, I'd say really, you know, look at some of the solutions and look at some of the other downtown baseball stadiums and how they have.been very successful with the area around it and reach out, talk, ask the Royals, make those questions public. Not, why are you doing it, but how can we make this work for all of us? And I believe if you really take the time to look at it, there are good solutions and then only better prospects for small businesses in the neighborhood.Butch, one of the things I've always loved about you, you're such a positive guy and you've always got like a positive outlook on whatever's going on. And I really appreciate that. I think that's great. I think that's well said. Thanks. All right. Well, thank you for joining me. Again, this is the Messy City podcast. If you're new to the podcast, we talk a lot about city planning, design, development issues, not just in Kansas City, but all over the country. And I hope you will.hit that like or follow button and stay tuned and drop me a line as well. Thanks very much for listening. Take care. Get full access to The Messy City at kevinklinkenberg.substack.com/subscribe

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