The Messy City Podcast

Rebekah Kik, an architect and planner who has navigated the complexities of urban design, shares her inspiring journey and insights from Kalamazoo. She discusses the transformative 'Imagine Kalamazoo' initiative, which uniquely attracted corporate funding to enhance city livability. The conversation also delves into the rise of local billionaires, the integrated approach to planning, and the evolving housing landscape. Rebekah emphasizes the power of community collaboration and innovative strategies in small cities to create significant change.

Tony Jordan from the Parking Reform Network joins the podcast to discuss the absurdity of parking regulations. They explore living car-free, challenges in parking reform advocacy, and US cities making changes. Dive into the importance of parking management and the passion behind reform initiatives.

It’s no secret in the world of transit and streetcars that Kansas City has had one of the most successful new streetcar lines in the country. For a two-mile “starter line,” it’s had an outsized impact on our city’s reputation and civic image. Today, I talk with the man behind RideKC Streetcar, Tom Gerend.Tom is a planner by education, but work took him eventually into the world of transportation planning and now, operations. We talk about how a planner ends up in this kind of role, and how he’s managed the start up and operations of a new Authority and transit line. Along the way, we talk about RideKC Streetcar’s unique funding stream, and what is next for the 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” Get full access to The Messy City at kevinklinkenberg.substack.com/subscribe

As I said right off the beginning of this interview, I really love it when worlds collide in my own life. It’s one of the more joyful aspects of doing a podcast, and talking with people in real life.Chad “Coach” Carson is someone in the Financial Independence world that I’ve listened to and followed for some time. He’s a very genuine guy, and his particular niche focuses on using small-scale real estate investment to build financial freedom for yourself and your family. Check out his website, YouTube channel and podcast.We ran into each other at the Strong Towns National Gathering in May, and I knew immediately we’d have a lot to discuss. This episode is the result. Among other things, we talk about his non-profit in Clemson, SC to build a trail network, his family’s 17 month stay in Ecuador, and how we all can talk about small / incremental development. There’s just so much good content in this episode, I don’t want to give away any more.That said, here are a few more links worth sharing:For a taste of his content, check out Chad’s recent episode with Paula Pant on “7 Powerful Principles for Financial Freedom.”ChooseFI House Hacking pageIncremental Development AllianceBigger PocketsFind 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 K (00:00.89)Welcome back to the Messy City Podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. One of the things that I really enjoy is when worlds collide in my life. Things that I have interest in that are in very different worlds find themselves aligned with each other. And I'm really fortunate to have a guest today that's a classic example of that. My wife and I have had a kind of a long interest in what's called the financial independence movement. And, and,You know, a lot of that we can talk about what all that means for people. I hope we do, but, a lot of it is really just kind of creating resilience in your own life. and, one of the people in that world that I have, noticed for quite a long time and followed and with, with some interest is a guy named, Chad, Carson, otherwise known as coach Carson. And, he's, agreed to join me today. So I'm delighted to have you here, Chad. Thanks for coming.Chad Carson (00:56.397)Yeah, thanks for having me, Kevin. It is fun to see different interests collide on the internet. That's always a good time.Kevin K (01:03.034)Yeah, yeah. So we actually ran into each other at the Strong Towns National Gathering in Cincinnati. And it was just kind of funny. I had seen enough of Chad's videos to kind of have an idea what he looked like. I'm looking around the room and I see this guy in the back and I'm like, that looks a little bit like Coach Carson, you know? Is that really him? And so, and lo and behold, it was, so we had a chance to just chat briefly on site. But...For those chat for those who don't know you and I would imagine probably most of my audience doesn't know who you are And the work that you do. Why don't you talk a little bit about what you spend most of your time dealing with?Chad Carson (01:40.013)Yeah, I also have a lot of intersections of worlds, but for the last 21 years, my professional career has been an entrepreneur and I've been entrepreneur in the real estate investing space. So I graduated from Clemson University and I was a football player there. So that was like how I paid for school. And I was, I thought I was going to go like the route of being a medical in the medical field and applied to medical schools, but I was just so tired from playing football that I said, I'm just going to take a year or two off and just like take a break before I go into that. And then.that gave me space to kind of explore an itch I had for being an entrepreneur. And I was lucky enough to have family members. My dad was in the rental, had rental properties growing up and I never really liked them. Actually, when I was a middle schooler, he used to take me over to a property he just bought. There was a fixer upper and he's like, hey, clean up this pile of trash, Chad, and paint this wall. And I was like, this is horrible. Like, who ever want to fix up a property or turn this nasty place around? And sure enough, when I got out of college, I was like,That's actually pretty interesting. Let me, let me see how that goes. And so I got into that business of really the finding fixer upper properties. initially just finding them for other people. I was what's in the net world. I was called a bird dog where I would just go in. I didn't have any money. I didn't like a bird dog. I wasn't the one actually hunting the birds, but I would just point to them and people who had resources and money would buy them and I would make a little finders fee every time that happened. And, but that taught me the business. It made me a little bit of money.I was living at home at that time and it just got me, I decided, you know what? I don't ever want to do a real job. I'm just going to keep doing this. And it grew into a business where I found the funding for those deals. I got a business partner. The two of us found other partners to put up the money or private financing. We started flipping houses, fixing them up, reselling them just to make some money. And then we got into the rental property business from there. And that's really what I, kind of the end story of my rental, my real estate business was,planting these little seeds of buy and hold properties. I started off house hacking. I did, you know, I lived in one unit, rented the other units out. And so that's, that's been my core kind of financial career, how I made money. And, but then that has evolved into other things, which is why I met you at Strong Towns as well. So once I started, you know, got past like the business side of real estate, of, of making money and the finances, which is all interesting, also just started thinking aboutChad Carson (04:01.133)the community and like, why is this neighborhood the way it is? Why is this neighborhood a fixer upper and this was not? And started volunteering in my community at local advocacy meetings and just doing that. And so that led to a couple of things. One is I started just being frustrated with connectivity in my town. And so in 2014, I and some other people in our town started a nonprofit trying to connect the parks and the downtowns and with a trail system.Little did I know that most towns that did that had like a rail railway that they was abandoned and they could like take over. And so I had to like crash course over five to six years just learning about, you know, easements and right aways and the DOT and how difficult it is to work with the DOT. But we've, yeah, we could talk more about that one, but that's, that's been a passion project of mine, which is why I got interested in strong towns and local advocacy. And along the way, separate from that, I also started teaching other people.how to do the thing that I love doing with real estate investing. And so I started a blog and a podcast and a YouTube channel and what started off as a hobby became a real thing. And people started reading it to my surprise and people started watching my YouTube videos. So I have like a little media business with that. And I have a nonprofit that I'm a board member of and a founding member of that I'm super passionate about in my local community. And then the real estate investing actually takes a lot less of my time these days, but it's still kind of the main thing.Kevin K (05:04.442)Mm -hmm.Kevin K (05:27.098)Yeah, and so you've got a super active YouTube channel with a good following and you're putting up a video, what about once a week or so?Chad Carson (05:36.109)Yeah, the what's I have a coach Carson YouTube channel. It's also the podcast. So my podcast has evolved into the YouTube podcast as well. So that's that's my main thing there.Kevin K (05:45.53)Okay. And this may be a funny thing for you. So I think probably the first time I heard you was on the choose FI podcast a long time ago. and so, I actually moderate the choose FI house hacking, Facebook page. Yeah. I've bugged those guys into creating it and I I'm a terrible moderator. I mean, I don't do anything. I don't do anything I should do with it to try to, you know, encourage more conversation, but.Chad Carson (05:55.533)Mm -hmm.Chad Carson (06:03.597)nice.Chad Carson (06:09.305)Yeah.Kevin K (06:15.418)It's incredible how quickly that started and zoomed over 5 ,000 members and everything else.Chad Carson (06:21.005)Yeah. Yeah. I became friends with Brad Barrett, who was one of the founders of choose FI and stills their hosts of their podcasts. He's become a good friend. And yeah, that was, it's kind of like strong towns for me. It was like, I was doing these things. I'm trying to save money and try to improve my financial life and really just get more autonomy. Like you, I think you were talking about some version of that earlier. I just, I just didn't want to go work for the man. That was always my motivation. I wanted to have space to read, to think, to have interesting stuff. And I just didn't want to go.and be in somebody else's treadmill. And that's pretty much what the, to me, what the financial independence movement is about is it kind of got hung up in the retire retirement idea that you're going to retire early at 35 years old and sit on a beach with a pina colada. The opposite seems to be the truth. The truth, like a lot of my friends like Brad Barrett, Mr. Money Mustache is a big famous blog that who is in the financial independence movement. Paula Pant is another blogging podcasting friend of mine. All these people.they, you build these resources of financial independence early, you save money, you're frugal, but you do it so that you have this abundance of time and flexibility and you can then cash that option, those options in however you want. And for me and my family, my wife is a Spanish teacher. And so foreign languages have always been sort of our, our mutual passion and living particularly Latin America and Spain. And so we took our kids to live in Ecuador for 17 months in 2017.And our, they were three and five years old. We wanted them to become fluent early in their life. And that financial independence, having rental properties back at home, we could kind of put that on pause for a little bit and still have some income coming in that allowed us to do that personal passion project. And, and, and do it. So that, that is to me, that's, that's financial independence, advocacy and local communities is financial independence, being able to do something. This for me has been like almost like a full -time job being theworking on, on trail transportation, advocacy, and, but I don't, I don't want to get paid. I don't care if I get paid. I, in fact, I'm spending a lot of money, you know, donating a lot of money on it. And that's great. I love that because there's some entrepreneurial ventures that aren't, I don't think always best suited for, for profit. You know, there's, you make your profit over here and then you free up this time and this energy to solve problems in your community that they're honestly, there's just not many people who have the capacity to do that. So that's been a lot of fun.Kevin K (08:42.234)Yeah, I think we, I'm not sure how much people talk about that enough in the financial independence world that one of the great luxuries it gives you is it gives you that ability to devote time and potentially money in a philanthropic way in your own community and make a difference there. I think that's really cool. I remember reading about how you took the family abroad for over a year and that was kind of a source of inspiration for us as well. We've...Chad Carson (08:57.005)Yeah. Yeah.Kevin K (09:06.97)We've, you know, my wife and I have had this idea for, for quite some time that we would do something like that. Of course we haven't done it yet, but we've done, you know, we did, and there's still time. The kids are still young enough. They're six and eight. but, we, we did take them, in 2018, I guess it was, we took them to Europe for a month. and, we, you know, I approached it from the standpoint that I was, I was a big proponent of house hacking, but I didn't really know what anybody called it.Chad Carson (09:13.805)Still time.Kevin K (09:36.09)and so actually done it three different times in three different ways in my life, just different life stages. And, like to your point, I think one of the things that we really loved is, when we were living in Savannah, and we had, we owned a townhouse that had a carriage house in the back. and the carriage house produced a lot of rental income for us. So then when we had started having kids, my wife kind of, she wanted to quit her job.and stay home for a while. But obviously that's a financial hit to do it for people, you know, with two of us were working professional jobs while having that income from the house hack just completely made it work. And it just enabled a lifestyle for us that we really wanted to live. And so we always felt like that was kind of a great luxury effect of that.Chad Carson (10:27.085)I think it's undersold. House hacking is something, if you look at the average budget, last time I looked at it in the United States, I think 30 to 40 % of most people's budget is with housing. And if you, so you can, the hack is the literal word. Like if you could figure out how to do what you did, what I've done, and either cut your housing expense in half, or maybe like in my case, I really did well and eliminated my housing expense altogether by living in a fourplex and living in unit number two and renting the other three out.I mean, I was living positive, $100 per month as a young entrepreneur. And, you know, so my wife was able to do the same thing. She was a Spanish teacher. She wanted to stay home a little bit and I wanted to take a break too. And so it's, it's amazing when you cut those like core expenses of housing and then you add the car. And for us, it was just, you know, just being smart with the car, not doing something that's crazy, but also this is where transportation infrastructure comes in. If you can have one car instead of having two cars, I mean, what, what is that seven to 10 ,000 bucks per year or whatever the latest number is.I mean, so you started adding up like a thousand a month for housing and five to 600 bucks for a car. I mean, you're talking a couple thousand bucks a month for an average family. That's huge. Like after tax, you know, if you're talking about before tax, that'd be 3000, maybe 4 ,000 a month. So it's a really powerful tool for a lot of people and it gives you flexibility, it gives you freedom. And so that's what's interesting to me about housing, not because...Everybody needs to be a real estate developer investor, although they could, but just doing a little bit like that, like that can give you leverage. It can give you options. You can tell, tell people, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do this because you have your housing expense taken care of.Kevin K (12:07.354)Yeah, I think that for me that's where the alignment was always interesting in my own kind of long and winding career in working in the design and planning of walkable places. And there were always a lot of spin -off interests in that, different things that I thought were great for it, I think is better for you from a health standpoint. The more that you can just move your body as part of your daily routine, it's better for you. But the economic benefits.You know, we often don't talk enough about that. I always used to tell people if you can, you don't have to get rid of your cars, but like if you can just live car light, you know, and, and so if you're a family of four, instead of having three cars, if you can have two or one and live off of that, the amount of money that you free up to do other things, it's, especially when you, when that starts to accumulate over time, it's incredible. It's, it's, it's absolutely life -changing.Chad Carson (13:02.189)Yeah, that's one of the basic principles of the financial independence movement is just understanding basic compounding math. The $1 ,000 a month is not $1 ,000 per month. It's that number compounded. If you could, if you can invest that money, for example, and it grows at 7%, I'm putting myself on the spot here because I don't know the exact amount that compounds, but you know, that, that number turns into 20 ,000 or a hundred thousand bucks over a 10, 20 year period. And if you start like stacking those up, that's, that's really the difference between.having some, even if it's not financial independence, it's like some level of like autonomy where you have options with your job, where you're not living paycheck to paycheck and housing and transportation are always, from a personal finance standpoint, are always at the crux of that. And that's what I think the financial independence movement focuses on is I love also focusing on it from the advocacy standpoint and the local community standpoint. But if you just take the perspective of the individual, this is one of those things, just your housing choice, your car choice, if possible.you can really change the trajectory of your own career, your own family's ability to have some options.Kevin K (14:07.162)Yeah, I think I remember one time, it might have been just like a joke or something on Twitter, but it was somebody who said something the effect of, if it weren't for all the money we spend on cars, we'd be a nation of millionaires. Anyway, so you start having this interest in bike trails. So what was kind of the genesis of that? Was it more just trying to figure out other ways to get around, sort of a healthy living thing, or how did you become interested?Chad Carson (14:20.045)Yeah, there we go.Chad Carson (14:36.909)I've always been into fitness and exercise and athletics. So I think part of that was just, I walk around a lot. I just do that and to think, but I was also, I had young kids, two or three year old, and I was pushing her in a stroller. And that really gave me that sort of visceral understanding of the community's infrastructure. And in a negative way, I would try to, I live in a neighborhood that has a small neighborhood of single family houses, and I have to cross a state.Kevin K (14:54.906)Mm -hmm.Chad Carson (15:03.085)what I didn't know is a state road, but it's a state road. Almost every road in South Carolina is a state road, by the way. That's another story. But they, you cross this road and it's people, it's 35 miles per hour, but people go really fast. There's some blind spots. There's no sidewalks. And it's just, it's not, it's very unfriendly to pedestrians. And I felt that in a visceral way as a dad who's protective of his little girl. And I'm trying to play Frogger to go across the street to get to the park that's a quarter mile away.And I was just thinking to myself, this is ridiculous. Like this is, this is insane that a neighborhood like this is in this, a beautiful park down there with this, you know, walking along a Creek and a playground that we can't get there safely on foot. How hostile is this? And so that, that spurred me to then go to the local meetings and say, all right, I'm going to volunteer. There's a local 10 year comprehensive plan. And I sat in all of these, I, you know, contributed as I could as a real estate entrepreneur, but the, this connectivity idea.kept coming up over and over again, like Clemson University, Clemson where I live is a small college town. We have 25 ,000 college students now. We have a lot of faculty members, but it's a really tiny town. I mean, 17 ,000 was one of the last census numbers. I think it's 20 ,000 or so now. It's on a lake, it's beautiful. We have 15 ,000 acres of forest land around the community. So like you're five minutes from biking trails, walking trails, waterfalls. And it's just like this little.nature, natural paradise with the lake as well. But it's horrible connectivity from, it's just like, it's a little, I grew up in Atlanta. It's like a microcosm of Atlanta because everything's built for getting around in a car. And so I realized that I started listening to planners talking about that. And my question as an entrepreneur was like, okay, well, who's working on this? What department's working on this? Or is anybody taking any action on this? And they were like, no.No, it's we're going to put it in the comprehensive plan. I was like, is it? Okay. That's great. Was it in the last comprehensive plan? Yeah, it was in the last comprehensive plan too. And so I got, I got this kind of what many entrepreneurs do is when you see a problem, you start just figuring it like, how are we going to solve this? Let's go solve it. And it's sort of in a naive way. I said, I'm going to just ask them questions. And there was one professor at Clemson university who is an architectural professor actually, and his students had a kind of cross curriculum class where they had put together this idea.Chad Carson (17:23.021)something called the Green Crescent Trail. And the Crescent is the Crescent train line that goes between New York City and New Orleans, so the Crescent City. And so they kind of been inspired by that idea of connectivity of the railroad and that history in our town of students who went to Clipsy University used to get off the train and walk off the train down into Clipsy University. They get their barber haircut and it was a military school at that point and they'd walk on the campus. And so that kind of historical connection with the Crescent line and then green.and the spaces around us and the connection to the land was the inspiration. And they had this story, this whole idea, they had maps and it was amazing. And I saw the little video and I got so motivated by that, that I said, like, this has to happen. Like, this is really cool. And I talked to the professor, I talked to some of the students, students rotate in and out of class a lot. So they move on to their jobs and their careers in another city. But I started meeting with people and say, we gotta do this. And some other entrepreneurs, that professor.and we formed a nonprofit and one thing led to another, but we started getting some money for a master plan study. We started talking to landowners and I can go into all the details and all the mistakes and frustrations that we had, but we started making progress and that was 2014. So that was 10 years ago, whenever we started it.Kevin K (18:38.874)So I mean, yeah, I do have some questions just getting into the weeds a little bit, especially for people who have an interest in doing something similar. I guess the first question is like, you start identifying this problem. Like, who do you know how to call the very first time? Just try to get a hold of somebody at the city planning department? I mean, Clemson's a small town, so people are more accessible there. But who did you figure out who to call?Chad Carson (19:02.029)are the city planner was very friendly. And she she has moved on to another town, but I still kind of have connections with her on Facebook. And she she was the one who said, Yeah, this professor is working on it. And yes, connectivity is really important. Let's try she was one of those young, just optimistic planners and just had had a good head is very friendly. So she her name is Jennifer and she was she was great. She gave me some good feedback. I wish I'd heard your podcast. I wish I'd had strong towns. I wish I'd had like, when I read the walkable city by Jeff speck, I was just like,Kevin K (19:16.922)huh. Yeah.Kevin K (19:25.57)I'm going to go ahead and close the video.Chad Carson (19:30.977)my God, there's a world of people out here trying to do this thing too. Like this is, this is great. so I, I didn't have all those resources right away, but I just sort of fumbled around, ask questions, talk to professors being in a university is kind of nice. Cause there's others professors who are urban planners. There's professors who are architecture students or architecture focuses on the community. So I just started asking questions and talking to people, but really approaching it. I think the entrepreneurial approach is you stumble along, you set a short -term goal.You run into a wall that didn't work, turned around and go another direction. And I did a whole lot of like bumping into walls. And, and, but I think the thing we did well was like having a vision, like just having, so we, as soon as we could, we started getting a name and a pictures and maps and talking to the community. And we didn't know exactly what we were doing, but we sure were dreaming big and had a vision. And we were trying to, I think the thing I, I, and some of our other early members tapped into was just.this emotion that community members have of wanting to make their place better. And we made that our mission. We said, our mission is to connect the places we love in our community with a safe alternative transportation network. We want to make it safe for me to push my kid in a stroller to the park. I've told that story hundreds of times. And then other people started saying, yeah, I wish I could walk to the local downtown and that's a quarter of a mile away. Or we have a lot of international students in town who live in these apartments.and they're walking in the gutter, the ditch on the side of the road to try to get to the bus or to try to go to the grocery store because it's just not doable. And so I think there's been a variety of different people from the practical transportation side of things, from students, but then really the people we had to get on board were the local community members who actually don't really care anything about, many of them don't really care anything about practical, you know, commuting anywhere, going to the grocery store. They wanted to do it for recreation. And so we've sort of had to tap into like the recreational trail movement plus,the actual practical use of transportation, which I was interested in, and try to connect those two and figure out how to get funding and to put all that together.Kevin K (21:31.993)Yeah. Yeah, there's actually, so there's a guy in Dallas named Jason Roberts who created the Better Block, which is a pretty cool deal. And he has a great TED talk that's out there all the time where he talks a lot about, especially early on, just naming, naming something, whatever it is, even if it's like you and one other person, just give it a name, create a logo, create a website. It's super easy. And then all of a sudden people think it's a real thing. Now there's a lot to that. So, so.Chad Carson (21:57.069)Yeah, exactly.Kevin K (22:01.53)Then how did you go about, you said at some point you started finding some funding. What was the nature of that funding and how did you figure out how to make that happen?Chad Carson (22:11.277)Yeah, we had a local county council person who saw the vision, I guess, and it was inspired by it. And he had some recreational funds from the county that year that he could allocate. And I think it was $25 ,000. He allocated that 25 to our idea to do a feasibility study. And then the city of Clemson put in 5 ,000, the town of Central put in 1 ,000. We got Southern Wesleyan University, which is, there's a university in this little town of Central next to Clemson.They were on board and then the city, I think the Clemson University also chimed in a little bit, although we had a hard time getting Clemson University on board at first, ironically. But it's basically four entities, four local entities plus the county, all chipped in money, but mainly the county. And then we went through a process of hiring a local landscape architecture firm, I think Alta Planning ended up doing that. I guess not local, but.Kevin K (23:01.466)Mmm, yeah.Chad Carson (23:04.205)So they, they came in, that was a lot of fun just to see how their process worked. And to this day, I still look at some of their maps and some of their estimates. If they put, they put cost estimates together, they put their maps. It was a great plan, but the problem I learned was, and they told us this at the time was like, I think all the city council members and other people we were trying to pitch for this idea, they saw the numbers on that plan, which were, you know, $30 million, $40 million. And it's just, just ridiculously big number for a small town.And understandably, they're like, yeah, this is not, we can't do this. And so we had a hard time figuring out the first little thing to do. And, you know, the Strongtown style, like what's the first little $500 thing or a hundred dollar thing we could do. And I knew that concept and we knew that concept, but it really had a hard time getting traction on that, but particularly because a lot of the segments we were trying to build on were in DOT right aways where we had to get a couple of private easements.I'll also say that even the well -meaning people inside the city government, there's always a propensity to do bigger and more formal stuff to build something really, we don't build things like dirt trails in our town. We build nice stuff in our town. That was like the attitude I got a lot. And I said that was a really difficult thing to bump up against because they would, with good intentions say, well, let's go get this grant. Let's go do this thing. And the grant would take six months to apply for. We wouldn't get it. And then we'd miss a bunch of momentum. And then.They were kind of used to this though. They're like, yeah, we'll just wait until the next cycle. And three years go by and nothing's happening. And that was really, really frustrating.Kevin K (24:39.034)Yeah, yeah. Once you get, learn a little bit about the government funding cycle, especially for transportation, it's very eye opening. So at what point did you come across the Strong Towns conversation then?Chad Carson (24:52.429)Yeah, I think I started listening to the podcast and I was interested in the financial angle as an investor. I just, I found it fascinating that towns were not really budgeting for their liabilities. And I compared it as a real estate investor. This is something we actually deal with all the time because we have a house that you buy from 1950. It's a single family house and you have these things called capital expenses that we all, if you're an experienced investor, you know, those are the thing that come up and bite you.that most rookie investors underestimate the amount of repairs and maintenance they're going to have to do. But as I learned kind of the school hard knocks, these $8 ,000 heating and air bills or $10 ,000 roof or a sewer line that has to be replaced from the house to the road, those will eat up your cashflow for the next two years. And so you have to start creating sinking funds or having reserve funds to pay for those things if you ever want to have a real business, a real rental property business.And it was fascinating to hear that cities aren't doing that. Like, wow, okay, so we have these 70 year capexes that are, you know, they're not even budgeting for it. And that the, you're building these new construction properties. And so I was just fascinated by that math and by the lack of conversation about that and lack of awareness of that in many places. And so that was interesting, but also just, I was just energized by the advocacy, the local, there's other people doing this. There's other people working on it.The fact that you can use social media to try to garner support in your community. So for all those reasons, I was, I was on board and I think I read, happy city and walkable cities, but it was other things first. And they kind of brought me into the strong towns world as well.Kevin K (26:32.09)And then, have you been able to use that with any of your friends or neighbors or anything as a way to help broaden the conversation?Chad Carson (26:41.229)Yeah, I think I bought all the city council members, walkable city at one point. And, you know, probably, I'm probably that annoying local person who brings up, sends, I send city council members regularly, strong towns, articles and different things. And, so yeah, I'm, I'm using that resource a bunch and particularly YouTube videos I find in podcasts, I think are helpful books are great too, but I think having little snippets of content, something somebody can watch in 10 minutes can really change their perspective and a video.As a YouTuber, I've really become a believer that YouTube videos, they use all the senses to try to influence somebody, right? You're seeing something, you can use visuals, you can show maps, you can show music if you want to. So I've really enjoyed using that as well. And I have ambitions myself to create more content. Like I create a lot of real estate oriented content, but I have a long list of ideas I would love to create videos on and shorts on. And I've...10 different intersections that I want to go out and show how awful they are in town. And I think social media and video and what Strong Towns has done really well is just using media to leverage their voice and be able to make a change. I think that's one of the best things about the media revolution we have now. Small people with not many resources can make good enough content to do, it goes viral and makes a big difference.Kevin K (28:02.49)Yeah, I'm always amazed that I'll stumble on some sort of YouTube channel that I didn't even know existed that was related to like urban planning or whatever. And I'll check it out and they have like 600 ,000 subscribers or something. It's just like, wow, where's that? Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, some of the folks out there, like not just bikes and others who have like literally millions of subscribers and produce really beautiful, incredible content on a regular basis. So yeah, you're right. It's, it's cool. I think I'm.Chad Carson (28:14.093)Exactly. There's a big audience. Big audience. Isn't that amazing? Yeah.Chad Carson (28:28.621)Exactly.Kevin K (28:31.514)find myself increasingly behind the times on some of that stuff. Yeah.Chad Carson (28:33.997)You got a podcast that this is great. This is the medium people are listening to.Kevin K (28:40.218)I actually, the funny thing is I actually created a couple of videos probably almost 20 years ago at this point that related more specifically to like street design. And it was really fun to do, but it was so early on and I, you know, I, the technology wasn't quite as good or as inexpensive yet. So I actually hired like a marketing firm to create them for me. And it was, it was really fun. And, and I actually got, they got a ton of views and I was excited for that, but it was just having a hard time justifying.you know, paying that amount of money to keep doing those sorts of things.Chad Carson (29:09.933)Yeah. Well, if you want to experiment and do a couple of pilot projects, I've got my editors on the call and ready. I've got a graphic designer. So let's collab and we'll make a couple of cool videos and test them out on Coach Carson.Kevin K (29:20.858)I would love to do that. Yeah, I'd love to do that. Like you, I have a longer list than I'll ever be able to get to of things like that. So one thing I'm curious about, so it was, you said it was Ecuador where you and your family went for 17 months. Is that right? So how did that experience of living in a foreign country, how did that kind of shape your idea about how to get around a place? I would imagine, I mean, I'm going to make an assumption. It could be totally wrong here, but the assumption you're probably living in an older,Chad Carson (29:35.213)Correct, yes it was.Kevin K (29:50.17)city where you were walking around most of the time.Chad Carson (29:53.069)Yes, we lived in Cuenca, Ecuador. So Cuenca is a third biggest city in Ecuador. And Ecuador, by the way, is just an amazing country. To me, it's a lot like Costa Rica was probably 30 years ago, 40 years ago, in that it has, from an ecological standpoint, it's just amazing. It's got rainforest in the, it's got the Amazon basin rainforest on one side of the country. It's got highland mountains. So we lived in, Cuenca is in the highlands, it's 8 ,000 feet up.8200 feet or so is the kind of the base of this place and you have mountains around that. And then you have the coast and of course the Galapagos Islands, which have a lot of history with biology. I was a biology major, so I just loved going to the Galapagos and getting to study that. So it's just amazing place. People are really amazing. I love the food there and a lot of, you know, so many fruits and local foods, but from a walkability standpoint, we, we chose, I kind of learned how important walkability was to me when we started choosing where we wanted to live.And we, we look for parks, we look for the downtown and then we found residential areas near those places. It's the top of the list. Like there's a lot of other criteria. Of course we wanted to be safe. We wanted to have other things, but walkability has been and still is like the top of my list. And the cool thing about going to another country is you can see there's different approaches to, how they built their cities. This was a colonial city. So we had like the kind of the Spanish square in the middle and it's a public, it's amazing.Spanish squares are amazing public spaces because people use them. There's benches around, there's trees, there's the church on one side, there's the civics building on the other side. They're playing, you know, in the 1700s or 1500s, it depends when. So that was kind of the center of town. We were kind of off that kind of old colonial town, but relatively close. And the whole town was built around parks, was built around that center, but it was also...you know, I think resources are an issue. It's not like they had more resources than an American city. But most people, the thing that struck me was a lot of the people like my Spanish teacher who I met with every week, he rode a bus from the suburbs into town every single day. He walked around a lot. And people didn't do this because it was just something they wanted to do. let me let me be a walk in a walkable town. This is the entire system of transportation was built around people who couldn't afford a car.Chad Carson (32:16.493)And so it was out of reach for most people, even like he was a teacher, he taught me on the side and he taught English at an elementary school. So he was like lower middle class, but for him to get a loan to get a car or to have enough money was just completely out of reach. So there's this whole system of both public transportation officially from the city buses. There's also just people walking and on paths that are kind of necessary to get around, but there's also an informal.transportation system that if anybody's traveled in Latin America, you'll see how this works. It's like people standing on the side of the road and when they go by, you just kind of raise your finger up and somebody eventually might pick you up. And so we did that several times where we missed the bus and this like delivery truck came by and said, you need a ride in? And we talked to him in Spanish and we'd sit in the back of the delivery truck and offer them some money and go to town. So like, there's just this enormous kind of organic system of.of transportation that was fascinating to see, but walkability was just kind of implied. Like everybody knew you, all right, yeah, you have to make it walkable because it's just for survival and people have to be able to do this.Kevin K (33:24.346)How did your kids react to being in that environment?Chad Carson (33:29.165)they were three and five at the time. So I think they were a little too young to like be fully aware of what they were getting into, but it was beautiful to see them sort of integrate themselves. And they had about seven or eight words of Spanish when we started. And as a three -year -old, you don't have that many, that many words anyway. So it was okay. But then by about seven, eight months in, I had a head start. I had learned Spanish. I wasn't great at it. My wife was very fluent, but I was way ahead of them. But by seven, eight months in,We were sitting around the dinner table talking Spanish and they were correcting me saying, Papa, no se dice eso. And they would kind of wag their finger at me, Spanish Ecuadorian style and, and correct my Spanish, which was amazing. So the language they just really took to, they made friends locally. but then also, you know, they just kind of get used to, to being there that we, at first, we first started walking around the complaint and why not? I don't want to walk around. But by the end it was just, just what we did. You just, you walk everywhere. And I think that's sort of stuck with them a little bit.Kevin K (34:28.89)Yeah, I've often talked in presentations that, especially people my age and sort of our general generation, that it really was a formative thing for when a lot of us like traveled overseas. And if you got to spend any length of time living in a foreign country and just kind of experiencing what it's like, because most of the world, frankly, you are living in a place where...still the backbone of getting around is walking. We're a little unique in that regard in the United States. And I always tell people American cities used to all be that way too. We used to all be walking cities until about the 1920s or so. But it's definitely like it really gets, it really affects your thinking and your perspective on a lot of things, especially like a unique chance like you had to live somewhere for a really extended period of time.What was the adjustment like coming home?Chad Carson (35:28.045)depression. And I'm literally mean that literally it's it was my wife and I both had a really hard time. I think the kids did okay. Our older daughter had a hard time in school, just which of things natural, you know, when you go through a big 17 months living somewhere else. Our younger daughter was in kindergarten. So everybody was new to kindergarten. She did okay. But, you know, my wife and I had transportation and walk lack of walkability was really the big deal because there was a lot of great things coming back. I was alsobelieve it or not, I had a lot of Ecuadorian friends who said, are you sure you want to go back to the United States? Because it seemed like every month there was another school shooting. And that's a political topic. I'm not going to get into the details of it. But it's a reality that a lot of other countries don't have. And they were worried for us going back to the United States, which I find very humorous given that we had the same thing for people in the United States. Are you sure you want to go to Ecuador? Are you sure you want to go there? And that was the same question they were asking as we came back. So that was an adjustment. But really the...The fact that we had to drive so much was again, was just a shocker to your kind of system. And we, but we, I was determined and my wife was determined to only have, we sold one of our cars when we left and our other car we put in storage with family. And we kept this one car for about two years after we got back and I bought an e -bike. And so we, my wife and I, we sort of kind of an adjustable side, it was in between my size and my wife's size. So neither one of us like was perfect for us, but we.I use the heck out of that e -bike. And if somebody wanted to have a meeting with me, I was like, well, here's the two places I can meet in town where I knew I had a fairly safe route to get to. And I would meet them at those places. So it really like being in another environment where I walked all the time, inspired me to try to do that when I got back. And I had to use biking because walking was not possible to get all over town just from a distance standpoint. And so having a bike and having an e -bike in particular.It would make it in the hot summer, you know, South Carolina summer when it's 90 degrees and humid, I could still go, you know, two miles away and be there, not really sweat. And that was great. Like it was so inspiring. So going back to like the green Crescent trail movement, it sort of took a pause. I was still involved with it, but when I got back, I was really gung ho about that and excited about it again. And so that just experience of going somewhere else and seeing that it's possible to do this and seeing what it feels like and knowing that people will really.Chad Carson (37:49.165)get a lot out of this and are gonna, it's gonna be awesome when we can get it. Sort of motivated me to get back into that. And we, we've since made, I didn't finish that story, but we've since made a lot of progress. We have this, just this year in this past year, 2023 opened up about a mile and a half of multi -use path and the city of Clemson and then another mile or mile and a half inside Clemson University. So there's a trail that connects two city parks, Clemson Elementary School to the university.Kevin K (38:12.378)Great.Chad Carson (38:18.829)And then the university has a botanical gardens, which is one of the key kind of park locations in town. So it's connected to that. So we've connected like three or four of our strategic locations and people being able to see that it's on the ground and it's possible and asking questions like, Hey, can we get more of this? And so it's been really nice to have some validation after so many years. And then we have a lot of momentum now, all the city council members that I've talked to are.very much on board. The city of Clemson now has dedicated funding every year, $250 ,000 for the Green Crescent Trail. They have raised, they did, we should talk about from a strong town standpoint, they actually bonded some money to build another trail as well, another portion of the trail, along with a couple of the park infrastructure. So it's, I mean, they're spending money and they're investing in it, which is awesome. And we're also working with a couple of the local smaller towns, which is a different dynamic.Kevin K (39:03.642)interesting.Chad Carson (39:15.053)They're 5 ,000 person towns with lower budgets, but we've got another half a mile on the ground in one of those towns. And we're working with the third town to do just a natural surface trail to start. We're starting to learn our lesson. We're working, as we speak, we're working on, one of the city council members is working on getting easements from a couple of property owners. One's a church, one's a historic foundation. And so we're kind of, we're getting our order of operations where we get the land secured and then we.I think we're just going to try to see what's the lowest cost trail we get on the ground and build a trailhead and just get people using this and connect, you know, smaller locations we can, a quarter mile, half a mile, and just get it on the ground and then let people experience it. And they're going to say, well, we want more of this. And so then we can say, yeah, yeah, we do want more of this. What's, what's the next step? And that's the, luckily we've learned a little bit, but I'm really excited about how it's coming together. And we have a, we have a 30 plus mile kind of map.that we've kept updated. We're showing what the towns will look like when they're connected, what all the routes we're trying to connect are. And then we have like an implementation plan of here are the two or three locations in town that we really think are the low -hanging fruit where we can make progress and get easements and raise money. And so that's all that all was spurred personally for me along by living in places that were walkable that I could see the potential for it.Kevin K (40:38.202)That's amazing. And I mean, I think you're totally right that I have the same experience from a professional standpoint, but I've seen it time and time again when you have trail networks, when you have even like we have the streetcar system we have here in Kansas City. Oftentimes the most challenging thing is just getting a little bit of it going. And then once people can see it and feel it, touch it, ride it, whatever, then they tend to want more. So I think...that's definitely the right path. And so you found then that just even in those cases, just getting sort of like a gravel trail down is a better place to start than than waiting for the paved surface.Chad Carson (41:19.021)I think so. If I had to do ever again, I'm not sure we had had that surface, but if we could have had anybody give us a quarter mile, even within a park, I would have just said, let's do that. Or let's do the, let's just do a crosswalk. Let's just, let's do a tactical urbanism. And we talked about that. I just, I don't think we pressed it enough. I think we got talked out of that kind of stuff by well -meaning people, often planners or people who are like, Hey, we're supportive of this. Let's do this, but let's do it bigger. Let's not do a little.crosswalk and I think that's a mistake. I think it's the you lose momentum you you get you know that that person changes jobs somebody city council people rotate off and if you don't get some tangible quick process progress on the ground through either temporary or otherwise you're you're gonna lose momentum and it's just it's kind of amazing we didn't lose the whole get off track because we went five or six years without anything.on the ground and we had a lot of supporters and we had a lot of maps and we had a lot of meetings, but it got really frustrating not having the actual stuff on the ground. So that was something I would, if we did it over again, it would have found a way to do that.Kevin K (42:23.354)Yeah. So has this been then like a gateway drug for you to the broader strong towns movement or are you gearing up to start thinking about zoning and all that sort of stuff yet?Chad Carson (42:30.453)Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I actually went on the planning commission. I didn't mention that I was on my local planning commission after during that same time. So yeah, I got involved and I've always been involved in housing. And so I think housing is affordable housing is something that I find even I find it some ways more approachable because I understand housing so well and the finance financial world. So I've been more interested in transportation, but seeing how that connects to housing and how important they are.Kevin K (42:37.43)cool.Chad Carson (42:59.085)I'm really geared up as well to try to help shape opinion on that, talk to people about it, preach about it, whatever we have to do. Yeah. But, and also maybe I was really inspired at this latest Strong Towns gathering by some of the alternative ways to build affordable housing. For me, the ADUs and cottages, that's always been vernacular for me in the real estate investing world. And that's from a purely kind of...you know, just financial independence movement. That's it makes a ton of sense. But to see that that's maybe a potential solution on a larger scale, I think is really exciting. And then I'm excited also, it's not something I've kind of written plans for it. And I think I could get into some of the small scale development. I never called it that I didn't think about what we're doing as development, fixing up a property that needed $50 ,000 in work and turning it around or.turning, you know, subplating a lot and building an extra unit on there. It was just something we did, but it's been kind of cool to see it a whole other world of people seeing it from a little bit different perspective of this is adding housing supply to the market and seeing that real estate investors, as I call them, is like, there's a role for us, a really important role for affordable housing, for providing rentals, for building more rentals. And so yeah, I'm excited about that. And I think I'm...I'm more in, I think, the finance, financing role these days. Like I have done on the ground, I've managed all my properties myself. I've managed remodeled projects. I'm a little less interested in that at this point because I've done all that. But I like partnering with people who do that. And so we've, my business partner and I have financed some deals with other people, kind of been the mentor on the ground. Here's how, all right, we need to do this. Let's get this done. And I think some of the planning, the properties and acquiring the properties and then.working with people on the ground who we can partner to kind of execute them. That's something that I'm interested in doing more of.Kevin K (44:53.146)That's terrific. Yeah, I think one of the things that we've really tried hard to broaden is the understanding of what a developer actually is. And unfortunately, there's this idea that a developer, somebody is a guy who has a fancy suit that drives a $100 ,000 car and builds six story buildings and everything else or $50 million projects. But the reality is, just like you said, if you build a house,If you renovate a house, you're a developer. You may not think of it that way, but if you are doing anything that really contributes to the built environment, no matter at what scale you're a developer, and that's, I mean, historically, that is much more aligned with how our cities were built than the way we think about it today.Chad Carson (45:39.885)I got a question for you. This has been on my mind. What is what is the worst connotation being a real estate investor or being a real estate developer when you when you walk into when you walk into a room of local citizens? Because I don't know for me developer is like not a positive word. Like I gotta get I gotta get my head around this. I like developers. I'm fine with developers. But man, like in my town right now, developers are like the evil empire like you might as well be might as well be Darth Vader walking into a room because they've just there's been a lot ofbuilding pressure for the big buildings for the, you know, 700 unit apartment buildings for students. And so we small developers, I call it my, I wrote a book called the small and mighty investor. My heart, my heart is with the investor who has two properties, five properties, 10 properties. We might as well not even be, you know, in the room. So I feel like we have a marketing problem, an imaging problem that maybe there's a new name. Maybe it's not, I don't know, but like, I just, I'm curious what your take is on that.Kevin K (46:29.305)Yes.Kevin K (46:36.698)Well, I mean, you're totally right. And some of the black hat stuff has been well -earned. My good friend John Anderson, who is one of the founders of the Incremental Development Alliance, he used to always talk about how he was teaching people the dark arts of development. And we always made, we had a lot of fun with all that. But there's definitely been a lot of work to try to rebrand what development is and what a developer is and to try to.Chad Carson (46:52.557)Yeah, yeah, exactly.Kevin K (47:06.458)you know, almost think about it more. There is a field called community development. I, I hesitate to call people community developers because there actually is like, there's, there's like whole federal programs that are tied to that term and everything else. And their community development block grants and stuff like that. But, but in a sense, that's kind of what it is. my, my friend, Monty Anderson, who was also very big in the incremental development world. he, he likes to talk about.people as farmers. And he really likes to encourage that language, you know, that if for people who want to do small scale development and really work in a community in your place, the idea is thinking about it like a farm and, you know, first of all, to find your farm, whatever that is, that location that you care about, that you want to live in and invest in, you know, literally for like the rest of your life, because you want to have a positive transformative effect on it. And then,The analogy, like a farmer, a farmer knows every blade of grass on their farm. They know where all the really productive areas are and the not productive areas are. They know what's going to work in different sections of their fields. And ultimately, that type of developer where you're just working in a community at a smaller scale, that's kind of the analogy.Chad Carson (48:23.725)Yeah, I like that. Yeah, I think the word small is important. Keeping small versus big. And then I think one of the problems a lot of people have is that the bigger developers don't have skin in the game. They don't have skin in the game in the local community. Even a big developer, if they live there and they had to bump into people in the grocery store and have to see and talk to those people, that's a natural human pressure that we've always had when you live in a tribe or live in a community.Kevin K (48:36.666)Mm -hmm.Chad Carson (48:53.197)where you couldn't just make an action or make a decision without thinking about how that affects your neighbor and your community. And you might make a decision that makes less profit so that you're not ashamed of being there. And that's something when you're sitting at a desk in New York City, you don't have to make that decision. It's just a number on a piece of paper. And I find that annoying, I find it lame. And it's always bothered me like in the real estate investing sphere too, that the big hedge funds, the big...go big 10X. That's kind of been like the aspiration for a lot of people in the financial world. It's like, once you grow up out of the single family houses and the duplexes, then you'll move up to like the real investing. And one of my mentors was a guy named John Schaub and he's in Sarasota, Florida and he's owned single family houses for 50 years. Like that's what he thinks is the best from a selfish standpoint. And it's also from the community standpoint, his tenants benefit. He's had tenants who stay for 10, 20 years. They get to live in a nice community.So I don't know, I think I resonate a lot with that idea. But yeah, imaging and how do we frame that and how do we tell those stories is such an important part of the process.Kevin K (50:02.17)Yeah, I mean, I think we put a, we definitely put a big emphasis on the term small developer or incremental developer. And there's probably better ways to talk about that. we have a, we have a local sort of meetup group that my friend, Abby Newsham, who also has a great podcast on the strong towns network that she organizes. That's just, small developers of Kansas city. and, we have, I don't know, 20, 30, 40 people that come every week to a meeting where we kind of, it's almost like a, like a support group.in a lot of ways. But you know, as you know, as you allude to, there's such a vast gulf, like two different worlds in real estate development. There's the people who work at the hedge fund level, and they literally are doing projects anywhere in the world. And they're working with hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars at a time to build projects everywhere. And then there's the people who work in communities, and they're probably getting their loans from a community bank.Chad Carson (50:31.853)Yeah. Yeah.Kevin K (50:59.002)you know, a locally owned or a regionally owned community bank. And they are your neighbors and they are people you're going to run into. So you're right, it's a huge difference.Chad Carson (51:10.669)Night and day. My only banker has been a guy who lives locally, goes to church locally. He runs on our trail now. He's like, I love this green crescent trail and he's running on it. So it's a, that's the one of my favorite parts about the real estate investing business, but also how it spurs off into the trails and the housing advocacy and working on your local planning commission, all the relationships you build and how organic that is and how mixed up that is. Like it's a really fun part of it.Kevin K (51:34.906)Yeah. Well, it's an interesting drug that once you catch on to all this stuff, you find yourself going in a lot of different rabbit holes.Chad Carson (51:40.717)Yeah, yeah, I'm all in. Yeah, I'm in the rabbit hole for it, there's no doubt.Kevin K (51:46.266)So how else can people in my world, how can we help you or what questions do you have that I can answer or others can answer in our world? What sort of things are you would like to know about the world of city building and design?Chad Carson (52:04.845)That's a great question. I never thought about that. I think design, I'm really interested in maps and just like design is an amateur and I find it really, I've been fascinated with just studying how cities are built. So I don't know if it's like, I'll just tell you what I'm learning, what I'm studying. Like all the Strongtown books have been great, but I think the thing that is,good about all that is like taking the design world, the development world, and translating it into a language that's understandable for laymen, for people who are just a layperson who's on the ground. I think that's been the brilliant part about a lot of your work, about what I've seen Jeff Speck do and other people is, yes, I know planners and city council, but a lot of city council members are the lay people. They're not professionals. So that's kind of what I've been trying to do in my own world of real estate investing as well. I feel if I have any kind of signature,Kevin K (52:53.946)Sure.Chad Carson (53:01.357)is taking this complicated idea of math and finance and negotiation and evaluating neighborhoods and trying to simplify it and translate it into a common vernacular, something that's easy to understand, telling stories. And I think that's the trick with all of this as well, is like translating it, because ultimately, getting a lot of people on board doing this and maybe the mixing of these two worlds we're talking about today. I mean, I think, I...publisher of my books, bigger pockets, for example, they're the big real estate investing website. There's 2 million members of bigger pockets. They have the, you know, top five investing podcasts in the in the country world, whatever, I don't know, and they have another two or three podcasts, like there's a lot of people who are interested in it from that angle. And I found just because I've been talking about it on my own, that there's a lot of those people who are interested in architecture design, but they just don't see themselves in that yet.And I would love to help bridge those worlds in whatever way we can. That's part of my interest in coming on this podcast too. It's just, I think, I think there's a lot of one of the beautiful parts about this kind of local small developer movement is that it is not only like there's a selfish motivation behind it, which is fine. Like I'm good with that. That's capitalism, right? That's that's people, people have to have a engine, a personal motivation to do this. They can make money. They can turn this into a business. but then there's also, this is a really,Kevin K (54:19.034)Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.Chad Carson (54:28.653)people have an interest in their own communities and designing them. And they're curious about why it is that you can't cross this street the same way I was. And so I think like, go back to your question, I think just continuing to open up the hood to show like, here's how cities are built. Here's why this intersection is the way it is. I found that to be fascinating because it's something I took for granted before. It was just an assumption I made. And a lot of these things happen in like a back room somewhere.And so like bringing that to light and showing like, no, here's why over the last 60 years cities are built this way and here's how we can do it differently. I find that enormously interesting and optimistic and fun to be able to learn that.Kevin K (55:10.618)Yeah, and my experience has certainly been that the people who are the most persistent, and often it takes way longer than you think anything should take to get done, but those people who are persistent and really have a passion for whatever it is in their community, that they're ultimately the ones who get things done. And it frustrates all of us how long things can take, but it all starts by somebody giving a damn to begin with. It's funny.We talk about other people in our world, but like Pete from Mr. Money Mustache, he's moving to cul -de -sac, which is a pedestrian -only community in Tempe, Arizona, which was designed by my friend Dan Parolick's firm Opticoast Design out of Berkeley, California. It's a total small world.Chad Carson (55:52.525)Yeah. Okay. Small world. Yeah. I went out, I went out and visited them. Yeah. He lived there for the winter and I went and visited him in February. So we all, we all hung out and cul -de -sac and rode e -bikes and I think he missed, I think he missed his Colorado mountains a little bit too. So I think he's going to be back and forth between, you know, visiting both, but yeah, yeah, exactly. There's a, there's a ton of crossover between all these worlds.Kevin K (56:03.77)Nice.Kevin K (56:14.906)There is. Yeah, it's a funny thing. And the e -bike thing is a whole other topic we could get on some other time. I've also become an enormous fan. I think for, especially for American cities, they're an incredible, they're just a game changer for getting around. One last thing I'll just leave you with, since I know you're interested in maps and design, but if you really want to go down a rabbit hole, especially with your experience in Ecuador, you should look up the laws of the Indies, which was basically the...Chad Carson (56:22.605)Yes.Kevin K (56:44.122)the Spanish laws for how they built cities and towns all over South Central and part of North America when they settled the area. And it's fascinating as hell. But those places, like you stated, were specifically laid out and documented in this sort of group of essentially like design laws. It's really interesting. Chad, last question for you.I can't remember this, were you on any of the great national championship teams at Clemson?Chad Carson (57:18.669)No, I tell people I set the stage for all of that, but I was not that good. So I went there in 98 through 2002. We played in a couple bowl games. We were in the top 10, top 20, something like that. But yeah, I had fun playing football, but I was not a national champion. And I got out of there without having any serious injuries. You can judge whether I had any head injuries. Perhaps there were a few screws loose after that. But yeah, overall, it paid for my school, and I'm very grateful for it.Kevin K (57:39.81)Okay.Kevin K (57:48.57)That's really cool. All right, well, I want to thank you so much for doing this. This has been a lot of fun. And it was really great to run into you. And hope we can find a way to continue the conversation.Chad Carson (57:58.285)Yeah, I look forward to staying in touch and I have my reading to do now. So thank you for the, thank you for the recommendations. And this has been a lot of fun. Thanks. Thanks Kevin.Kevin K (58:02.714)No problem. All right. Thanks, Chad. Take care. Get full access to The Messy City at kevinklinkenberg.substack.com/subscribe

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

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