Alan Pullman: Creating Meaningful, Mixed-Use Infill Projects that Make Our Cities Better.

Austin Tunnell

Well, Alan, it's great to have you on the podcast today.

Alan Pullman

Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be talking to you.

Austin Tunnell

Yeah, I think this is going to be a fun conversation. You know, we got to touch base a few weeks ago and just within a 15 or 30 minute conversation, it was like, wow, we've got a lot to talk about. but because my audience does not know who you are yet. you know, could you just start by actually talking about studio one 11 a little bit and what you guys do in Long beach and, you know, what you really specialize in.

Alan Pullman

Sure. City of Moilemon is an architecture, urban design, and landscape architecture practice. So it's an integrated practice. And we specialize in, I think the way we describe it is making cities better. And that can be defined in a lot of ways. But our focus is on cities and neighborhoods and empowering communities. And our work is mostly in Southern California, but we're branching out into other areas as well. And I think cities are just fascinating places. They're so complicated. They're complex and complicated. I think if you go on our website, you'll see our tagline is, we love messy cities. And that really represents for us not that we want it to be messy in a literal sense, but that working on cities is messy work if you really want to get your hands dirty. There's no easy solutions. But it really requires just getting involved and understanding the different stakeholders, involving the community, which sometimes could get messy. And also we like cities that are unexpected and different, authentic, unique, and that could be messy too. So really defines, I guess, maybe more of our approach to city making.

Austin Tunnell

Yeah, I like that definition of the complicated versus complex. I first heard Chuck Marone talk about that in his Strong Towns book and he talks about, you know, a watch is complicated, but ultimately you can understand a watch. You can break it down and see how every piece affects the other versus cities are complex, you know, where you give it, because you have humans involved in human decision -making and there's no, you know, deterministic way to fully grasp and understand the city. And that's part of, you know, What he points out is what's kind of gone wrong in some ways with city planning and things is that we think we can completely control the city. So I kind of love that idea of recognizing, hey, there is this kind of inherent messiness to cities, but embracing that. And that's also part of the beauty, I think.

Alan Pullman

I think it's what makes it fascinating. One thing that drives me crazy is when I talk to people, like, if we just did this, our cities would get fixed. If we just got rid of zoning or if we just allowed people to build or if we stop people from building. I mean, there's a lot of thinking that way. And I'm always like, well, maybe. My answer to everything is it depends because there are so many complicated inputs and reactions and interests. So when you do one thing, which sounds like this is perfect, this is gonna really fix everything. It has unintended consequences that we have to figure out. So it's like a garden, really. You're never done gardening. You plan things and you think, okay, I'm done, but it's the opposite. It's just beginning. You need to tend to it and take plants out and put plants in, change the rules of how you water. So there's a lot of cities that are fascinating. And I find it really interesting. I was trained as an architect and really didn't think about cities until I got deeper into my career and had an awakening of what I wanted to do. And the path I was on wasn't the path that I really thought was going to ultimately be fulfilling for me.

Austin Tunnell

Can you actually talk about that? I want to hear like, you know, a little bit of the evolution of your career, but particularly because you're clearly extremely like passionate about what you do now and like clearly love what you do that just comes out and how you talk and what you say and frankly your website, which is awesome. so can you talk about, and then you've even pointed out, I remember we had a brief discussion that some of the things kind of going, I guess, wrong in your early career of like not liking this or, you know, things like that. Can you talk about like how that has actually led you to the things that you do love and really solidifying your own vision.

Alan Pullman

yeah, I mean I went to architecture school in Syracuse, which is a great university. I'm from New York. I grew up on the suburbs of Long Island outside of New York City. I went to school in Syracuse and I became an architect because a lot of people say, how did you become an architect? And it's a very similar story architects have. Like I liked playing with Legos as a kid and I liked drawing as a kid. So that's sort of the entry pathway to becoming an architect in certain ways. I wanted a career where I could be creative, but also I wanted a career where you'd have to get a license and be a professional. I think that's something my parents kind of drummed into me. So architecture seemed like a pathway to that. And I went to school and I was, for a lot of reasons, not a good student. And I barely graduated. It took me six years to graduate. It was a five year program, so that's not terribly hard. But it was not easy for me to be a student. I was just not, I didn't really wasn't well. situated for college at that time. But I did graduate with a degree in architecture, and I got the first job I could get where some friends were working. They invited me in. And I was working in New York for a while and just thought, I lived in New York, I grew up in New York, I went to college there, I wanted something different. I moved in a whim to Southern California because it was just so different than what I had been used to. And it seemed like an exciting place, a place of great growth, and a lot was going on. So when I moved to California, I got the first job I could get here, too. And it was working my way into kind of a career that ended up, without really thinking about it too much, doing retail projects, large regional malls, which were in favor at the time, and lifestyle centers, which is like a mall, but maybe more outdoors with a theater and a bookstore, and working for clients that were national corporations and working all over the country. on those kind of projects and actually becoming pretty successful at it because I learned I think working through that that that there's a formula for this kind of work and if you can understand the formula you can maybe 99 % of it is is fixed and you have 1 % to kind of play around with the style or the space or the materiality and that's where you have to play and and I was very successful doing it but it dawned on me as I was working that my clients were developers

Alan Pullman

We really didn't talk about the tenants much except to think, you know, we just have to create the criteria that the tenants want. And we never talked about the people that we're going to use. It was almost like an afterthought that people actually were going to come here and what they would like to see. And we never, ever talked about the towns where we were working. I was working all over the country and I had no connection to the places I was working. I didn't know what the people really wanted. I didn't know if the shopping center we were proposing. was gonna be a benefit to the community or potentially drive away business from their main street, which was actually where people had invested in businesses and in the local economy. So something was not feeling right for me in that regard. And then what happened, and I think I was lucky, randomly, I was living in Long Beach, California at the time, randomly, and not working in Long Beach at all, but randomly I had a chance to do a project in my... in my neighborhood and it was through the city of Long Beach and economic development to work on restoring some facades along a little main street and it was all independent businesses. And that's really when the light bulb went off because I worked in my community. I kind of understood the community's ethos and what the community wanted. I worked individually with multiple independent businesses. They didn't have a lot of money but they were entrepreneurs and they were invested in the community. And It's when I realized this is what I want to do. This is the kind of work that I really feel passionate about. I think I had to find that by doing something I wasn't passionate about. I was good at, but not passionate about. So I kind of came up with a plan to leave my job, because I didn't think I could change things at my job enough and start a business. But by this time, I was married. I had a rent to pay. So I needed a job. a little bit too nervous to just start on my own. So I went to a large firm that was in my neighborhood that was doing the kind of work I used to do. And I was boldly said, I want to join your firm. And also, but I don't want to do what you're doing. Like I want to do something very different. Here's my vision that we need to reinvest in our cities, not build new shopping centers. We invest in our main streets. There's going to be a return to urban living and we should be placing ourselves in position to chase after that.

Alan Pullman

And they were like, OK. And that's how, yeah.

Austin Tunnell

So you pitched a bigger firm that you're going to like an idea. It wasn't like I need the job to do it. It's like you're pitching them to get a job and also like a position almost. How did they respond?

Alan Pullman

Yeah, exactly.

Alan Pullman

I pitched exactly that. And because I really believed in it, Austin, I really believed that this was right. And I believe that this firm, which was very traditional and was doing suburban shopping centers, which was like a Walmart with a grocery store and maybe a supermarket, that's their bread and butter. But I realized that that may not be, that was working for them. And they were good at doing that. They were very good at that. But they also, I think, could have to realize that something different was coming down the pike, that things wouldn't be let that way forever, that we wouldn't sprawl out forever and just be building and building, building into the hinterlands. And so they agreed to bring me on. But what I found is that they were so good at what they did, their reputation was set in that kind of work. So I had to invent Studio 111 as a vehicle, a company within the company with a different branding, a different website, a different ethos, a different space. I even said we have to take different office space for this group and to build our work and to differentiate ourselves and to build some brand recognition for this new idea. So that's really how it came about. And once I started with C111, and the name is just, our address was 111 Ocean Boulevard here in Long Beach. Once I did that, we started getting facade improvement work and we got a lot of it. And soon we became really experts in that kind of work, working with the communities, building those relationships. We also started doing streetscape improvements and building the landscape practice a little bit, and then planning different districts. And so that's really how it all became about. And that was the evolution of C111.

Austin Tunnell

That's pretty amazing, you know, because I talked to quite a few architects, you know, a lot, a lot of times in their twenties or something like that, you know, they're in the industry and they're kind of going, this is not what I expected it to be. Like I thought I was going to be working on like architecture and like building this, you know, building the world and in a lot of sense, building our cities. And then they're stuck doing retail or bathrooms or something like that. what kind of fascinates me is. Your approach is both like this very like confident thing to do, like you said, because you believed it, but also I have to imagine you also took a very humble approach to it. Cause if you just went and started shaking your finger at a firm saying like, what you're doing is dumb. I want to do this. They'd be like, no way. So the fact that you integrated yourself into a company and then were able to create this other thing, like, do you have any thoughts about like how you did that or how you would talk to other architects that they were saying like, how would I go about doing this? and not like it's, Hey, follow your exact path. But at the same time, like you had vision, but also kind of like humility and we're able to work through that.

Alan Pullman

I think one of the things that helped me is in without writing it down, although I did eventually write down, I think I had a business plan because one of the things I want to do when starting this is not make it a pipe dream or a pet project. I wanted it to be a business that would actually make money. There was a thinking at the firm I joined decades ago that good design just is nice, but it doesn't pay and doing the generic rollout work. listening to developer clients and just being a good servant there was the way you could make money. And I thought there's probably a way that you could make money doing really meaningful work that's impactful to communities and is good design at the same time. And I worked at figuring out how to do that. My first step was I had done, as I mentioned, that facade improvement project. And I knew there was a lot of money floating around with economic development agencies using community development block grants to help communities, the retail in communities, what they call commercial storefront facade enhancement programs, helping communities and their businesses do better and compete with the shopping centers that I had previously been doing. So I knew there was a lot of money there and I knew if we developed a team that could be very, very efficient, very focused and systematic about it, that we could actually make money doing that. So for the first, probably three or four years, that might be all we did, but I was correct. There was a lot of interest in this. There were a lot of RFPs that we submitted and got, and we were just really very, worked really hard. I won't say it was easy, but worked really hard to build the practice, to build the business model of working in communities and building relationships. So that's how it started. I think I just knew that there would be that kind of work and our passion for it. And our ability and our skills and the people I recruited who were equally passionate could make something out of this. So that's really my, I've always said you have to have a business plan as well as a passion for something.

Austin Tunnell

Yeah, it sounds like if I'm hearing you right, you really kind of like niched down, like you started like very specifically and did that for a time. And then that lets you, I'm kind of just guessing here, but like that started attracting kind of the right tribe of people interested in you guys. Like, you know, you're talking about developers that didn't really care about the communities they were working, not saying they're bad people or anything like that, but just different kind of business model. So was that kind of like, you started with these facades and storefronts and all that, and then

Alan Pullman

Thank you.

Austin Tunnell

And then from there, it kind of like evolves and grows, you know, and I hear that in business a lot, you know, Amazon started with books, you know, you always hear that like niche down first, start very, very, very specific and be really good in that space. where people just like go to you, is that, is that kind of what you guys did? Okay.

Alan Pullman

That's exactly, exactly what we want. And it was the, you talked about being humble. Like I was thinking this might be all we do and that might be okay. And I really wanted to get good at what we did to, and I think we ended up being one of the best firms in the area doing that kind of work. But I also believe that from small things, larger things would evolve. I didn't know. where, but one of my philosophies was action will create opportunity and those opportunities will come. And we did develop a great core team of people that are really passionate about working in cities and working with existing businesses and understanding how main streets and small independent businesses really can support the local economy and be partners with a community that chains and larger shopping centers aren't quite. able to do. So it was intentional and it was humble. There was times when I felt like, okay, we need to do more than just facade improvements. I mean, it's great to do that work, but when you're painting a laundromat and putting up a new sign and taking away security grills and doing new windows, it's fantastic work. But we also felt, okay, what's next? What do we need to be doing next? And that's when we thought we've been helping cities with restoring main streets. But what's really happening in cities that we should be paying attention to? And what we realized is, is it was going to be housing. That housing was becoming, returning to city centers, to corridors and to districts and cities, and that we needed to build our repertoire on that. And we made an intentional attempt to, to, you know, get housing developers who may have been doing retail and mixed use interested in hiring us. So we found somebody that was able to take the leap of faith with us. And we did several projects that were successful mixed use projects. And that really was kind of an explosion in the scale and the capacity of our studio.

Austin Tunnell

Fascinating. Can you actually talk a little bit more about that? Like how you found that developer, how you pitched that developer and also what did you actually kind of build? What was the product?

Alan Pullman

Yeah. Well, one of the things that we used to have in California, redevelopment agencies and redevelopment agencies were tasked with removing blight. You know, looking back, they were really problematic and we don't have them anymore. And I think it's not a bad thing. But a lot of the facade work we did and a lot of the planning work we did and the neighborhood improvement work we did, what some of that money was funneled through redevelopment agencies. So we had developed I think a really good relationship with cities and redevelopment agencies over the years doing the facade work and developed a reputation for being kind of community architects that cared about the community and were local to communities. And there was a developer who knew us through some of the more retail work that the firm had done, but also knew that we had brought on people that had expertise in housing. Some of my staff had done housing previously. And we were able to pitch him on being the architect for two projects, fairly large projects in redevelopment zones. One in the city of Burbank, which is kind of an entertainment city and had a small downtown. And we designed a 155 unit project above about 70 ,000 square feet of retail on a little main street across from a movie theater. It was really supposed to be the core of their downtown. And another smaller one. that was in Pasadena near a rail station. So those were the two projects we did. They were very difficult to do. We learned a lot. We made mistakes along the way. But it was trial by fire. But ultimately, they came out really well. And I still drive by them, and I'm very proud of the work we did there. But they really taught us a lot about that scale of architecture and that scale of building and working. with cities on larger scale projects. And since that, we've been doing a lot of other things, including retail projects, and I could talk about those. But we've been doing housing, although right now our real focus on housing is more incremental, incremental infill projects, not large, massive, new developments. And there's reasons for that. But that's really sort of the evolution of that work.

Austin Tunnell

Alan, can you hear me? it just broke off for a second, but it'll be fine because it records locally. So we'll be good. It just kind of froze there for a second.

Alan Pullman

Yeah, did I? Did I? Yeah, did you? you know.

Alan Pullman

Let me just make sure that I'm on the right internet.

Alan Pullman

For some reason, I think I had this problem before, Austin, the internet. OK, it should be OK now. My internet is back. It's kind of going up and down a little bit. Yeah. OK.

Austin Tunnell

Okay, great.

Austin Tunnell

I just made a little note of the time, so I'll, I'll let the guy know too. you know, you, you said, well, there's a couple of things I want to go in this direction. Now you said you learned a lot on those big projects. and not necessarily have to get into all the mistakes you made or something, but for example, when you took on the next project after that, like, how did you approach it differently? Were there some key things that you were like, we're really approaching this differently than we did that project.

Alan Pullman

Well, part of it was a learning curve of just learning the kind of buildings we were doing were that typology that is ubiquitous in this country, which is a stick frame, you know, four or five story building over a concrete podium. We had never done a project like that before. So we learned just how those buildings go together. There was just a lot of lessons learned in building that kind of building. But what we also started to think about is these were nice projects, very expensive, and there was nothing wrong with that. And they were for sale projects, which I think built a connection to the community and ownership and into the community, which I think was great. But we also felt like the biggest need in our cities was going to be affordable housing. So the next series of projects we did was in affordable housing and learning how building a repertoire of affordable housing projects. And when I say affordable, I don't mean naturally occurring affordable. I mean subsidized affordable projects, which is something that we continue to do and try to innovate in as much as possible because it's such a big need in our cities right now.

Austin Tunnell

And is that something you do pursue through public private partnerships of some kind? When you say subsidy, is it, you know, with the state, with the city, with the federal government?

Alan Pullman

Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, all of the above. They are funded in different ways. So to build subsidized housing is very challenging. There's different vehicles for the different funding sources. There's vouchers. There's innovation funds, which we used on one project recently to build a modular affordable housing project. And there are more traditional like what we'll call light tech, which is, you know, it's a wonky term, right? Low income housing tax credit, which come states give out and they are able to pay up to 70 % of the cost of building a dedicated affordable housing project that meets certain affordability criteria based on average median income.

Austin Tunnell

And is that California only or is that kind of like all states have a program like that?

Alan Pullman

All states have a program like that. Yeah, that's a national program. And it's weird because it's not a state or HUD program. It's an IRS program as a way of selling tax credits to corporations and investors and then taking those proceeds and funneling them through affordable to nonprofit housing developers. So even though

Austin Tunnell

Okay, what?

Austin Tunnell

Hmm.

Austin Tunnell

Interesting. I mean, there's a lot of interest around this kind of stuff right now. So I'd be curious, are there any like, not that we wanted to do a deep dive on this, but like from a high level and not necessarily specific to California, but you know, programs that, you know, besides this one or like, how would you even approach this? Are there like key things that you could go over quickly of like, if someone was looking to do an affordable housing projects, like here's the top five things I would look into. And if not, that's okay.

Alan Pullman

Well, most of it. Yeah, I mean, most of it. I can speak. It happens in all states, but in California, there's a certain amount of funds. There's a much bigger need. So the funds are allocated based on a competitive process that happens several times a year. And really, it's one of those things like development where it's now you have to specialize in this kind of housing project. And so it's not something that anyone can do. You have to become a nonprofit. You have to have a track record of going after these funds. You have to build relationships. It's become very specialized. And that's a little unfortunate. I think there are other ways to build affordability without that. But just like most of our infill development has become, you have to be a specialized, big institutional developer to build. typically in cities because land prices are so expensive and there's so much complexity in a building in the city right now that you have to really be an institutional scale developer to do it. The same thing with housing, low income housing. So I guess my only one thing is hire a good lawyer because it's so complicated. It's probably a lawyer sort of. a jobs program and as much as a housing program. Because there's so much complication in how you bundle all your funds together and how you get a competitive proposal together that gets the kind of credits and wins the allotment from the state at any given time.

Austin Tunnell

Interesting. Yeah, that is unfortunate how difficult it is that requires that level of specialization and sophistication in the sense, you know, that doesn't help the affordable housing. And, you know, you mentioned infill development too, where, you know, it's just so expensive and there's so much regulation to get through. A lot of times that, you know, and it can take five years for something to get out of the ground that, you know, small scale developers have a really hard time, you know,

Alan Pullman

Yeah.

Austin Tunnell

waiting that long to get paid. You have to have a lot of money to be able to kind of wait that out to see if a project goes forward. You know, you mentioned, go ahead.

Alan Pullman

So, you know, I mean, that's why I was excited to talk to you because you've talked to a lot of people and you yourself are trying to break the model to a certain extent and do it differently. And that's really where after working and feeling good about the work we did, but also trying to find developers that were trying to break the model of business as usual. Because as you know, development really follows a lot of formulas and most development is formulaic. easy to repeat, easy to finance, but the outcomes aren't really there for the communities that we're serving. And I just say really what long -term we want our cities to be. So we've been lucky that we have been working with some more community -minded developers that really want to break the paradigm and want to do things differently. And during the downturn, our firm, Sierra 11, itself became a small community developer and we bought a piece of property here near your office, it was a totally run down, two, three run down buildings and an empty parking lot. And we got into the development game a little bit. And I learned a lot from that too. And I did learn that even at a small scale of development, you write a lot more checks before you get a check.

Austin Tunnell

Yeah, that is absolutely true.

Alan Pullman

But it was still fundamental to actually try it out.

Austin Tunnell

Have you done any more of that or is that kind of like a one time and then you've got great partnerships with other people?

Alan Pullman

We did it once. It was challenging. It took a long time for us to get our return. But I'm very happy with the way the project turned out. It won several awards. And it was a great example of both adaptive reuse, new construction, commercial, office, and residential. So we were able to do all the things that we really believe strongly. And we saved some buildings that I think the city would have been happy if we tore them down. And we said, no, there's value in these buildings. And they've become great little community institutions like a great cafe, a record store, a salon, and then some really creative office space that you can't find. You couldn't build it new. And now we also have added a housing component to it. So it combined the mixed use, the adaptive reuse, the scale. and the maintaining of existing buildings, things that really are core to how we think we should be redeveloping cities. And I think the city took notice. They're like, wow, these guys really pulled it off. It might have taken a while. But it's turned a dilapidated and somewhat rundown corner into a really nice section of downtown. So I'm really thrilled that we did that. And we used that model multiple times with other developers to do similar things.

Austin Tunnell

That's, that's awesome. And I think there's so much interest moving into this kind of like infill development. Like you said, you were, you know, started off doing some of these bigger projects and then now you guys have really focused on smaller scale infill projects. and you said for good reasons. So I, I, one, I'd like to hear kind of like what your thinking is on what are those good reasons of why you're focusing on infill. And then two, I think an interesting question is, cause I think there's a lot of developers out there interested in doing this, but it is kind of like, how do I do this? And I'm curious from like a, an architecture like, and I think it's just so critical. If you're a developer, like you have to have the right architects and urban designers. Like you cannot just go hire an architect or a civil engineer and think you're going to get a product because you said, Hey, I want small businesses or whatever. Like you really need someone that specializes in this. And I'm just wondering, so one, sorry to go back to the questions. Why are you focusing on this? And then two, how do you collaborate with the developers? Like, what does that relationship look like? as you're collaborating and working on these projects, cause I find there is a lot more like back and forth. I think when you're working on these infill highly creative projects.

Alan Pullman

Well, I think in our DNA, when we talked about the work we did, like these facade improvements, it's totally collaborative. Like you can't go in and say, I have a great idea. I'm going to force it on a business. You have to work with the bones of the building. I mean, you have to just adapt to what you have. And you have to work with the business and understand their goals. So it's a co -creation kind of process. And I think agility is something that a lot of architects struggle with, like being mentally agile to understand, let's go in this direction. Well, maybe that's not working back out. Let's try this direction. I just believe that we tried to foster a sense of agility here and thinking flexibly about what is the outcome we're trying to achieve. How can we get there? Maybe actually not building is even a better solution than building. So it's more of a mindset than anything concrete that you have to bring to these kind of projects. I always say that when developers change their minds, sometimes architects, sometimes even my staff will be like, this is so frustrating. How could they change their mind? I'm like, because the process is a learning process, and you go down the process. And sometimes you've learned enough to realize, this isn't the right way. We have to back out and try something different. And I'm always excited about that. It's not really always easy on the budget, but it's really important to stay flexible and agile. how we approach projects. I love the creative partnership with our clients. I think it's maybe my favorite part of the job, working with clients and really digging into what they're trying to achieve and ways that we could try to do it. I think with the adaptive reuse project that we did here, what was also great is that we didn't have, our business plan actually was fundamentally challenging. I'll just tell you about our business plan. We didn't have a lot of money and it was us. me and my partner Michael and some other community investors. And our job, our goal was, one of them was a contractor, that we would build a little piece of the project. We had enough to build a little piece of it. And then we would sell it with an SBA grant, a loan to a business, take those funds, build another piece and go down the road. The problem is we did this in 2008 and there was no way that anyone could get an SBA loan. So we had to figure out how to just...

Alan Pullman

lay low, do as much as we could, and just let it evolve over time. And it was a little challenging in that regard. But ultimately, it worked out in the end. It just took a lot longer than I anticipated. But once we did that and we did some other projects that were really about taking assets and working in a scale that worked in the community, I think that we were able to show with some of our clients. And there's some really creative people out there. Like you said, that want to do interesting things for the community, it's just finding them and helping support them. Sometimes it's about deferring our fee because it's really hard to fund projects early on or finance them. We try to be as creative as possible, find ways to move forward on the project. We've even talked about taking a percentage of ownership in the project if that's one way that we can help move the project along and make it successful. We haven't done it yet, but we've talked about it.

Austin Tunnell

really interesting. You know, when you're doing these projects, it seems like you're really focused once again on the community, on local identity, on local businesses. Is there ways from, you know, kind of an architecture and urban design and your collaboration with the developer that you are, how are you kind of catering to these more local businesses rather than the chain restaurant, the national chain? I'm not saying there's none of that, right? There's totally a place for those at times. I mean, the way I think about it is do everything you can with local businesses and that's after that fill in with regional and national businesses, you know. But how do you kind of cater to that and protect that?

Alan Pullman

Yeah.

Alan Pullman

Well, I mean, you asked me why in -field development was important to us. And I think, again, it comes from our experience and seeing what cities were doing, where they were taking, they were buying up older businesses and older buildings with the idea that they could demo it, demo the buildings, get rid of the, buy out the businesses, and then get it RFP for a big institutional developer that would come in and build something much bigger, much more expensive that would require national chain retail to pay the rent and finance it. And seeing that occur and the loss of independent businesses, the loss of a sense of place because what replaced some of the older buildings, and they needed work, no doubt, but what replaced them was never the kind of quality or originality of the existing buildings. And we thought there's a much better way to do this. Now, it wasn't anything that we invented, right? My partner, Michael Bond, who's been instrumental really for me in developing our firm, came from, worked for an architect named Stephanos Palozoides, who was one of the founders of the Congress for New Urbanism. So Michael has this new urbanist sort of creed in terms of scale and human scale development he brought to it. And I've always been very interested in smart growth and have really thought there are smarter ways to develop rather than the way the business had evolved. So that's really why we thought incremental development really is the way for cities to go. And it also allows cities to try things and build things and then change tech and change direction as they go. So absolutely critical. But I think it's also we really try to vet our clients a lot. We ask a lot of questions. If somebody comes to us and says, We have this very complicated go -no -go process that we talk about the client. What is their goal stated? And what's their real goal? What have they done before? Why do we think that this is the right thing for the community? And we always try to make sure there's alignment between the client, the community, and ourselves. And that's really a big part of the process, working with the right people. I think sometimes we've taken the client and been able to influence them, although our agency is somewhat limited because we're drawing the project, which is pretty powerful, but we're not financing it.

Alan Pullman

And that's sometimes where all the power comes from.

Austin Tunnell

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We, the financial financialization of, architecture and our cities is you can see the imprint of that on our cities pretty, pretty strongly. yeah. The D do you work kind of handy? I mean, cause you've talked about, you know, serving the local community and stuff like that. Do you guys work with local businesses?

Alan Pullman

Absolutely.

Austin Tunnell

Like as you're developing the spaces to be like, what do you need? What kind of space do you need? Or are you kind of just taking what you've got and then, and then the developers finding those, or are you involved with the tenant improvement or, you know, once again, kind of curating those businesses that do go in there.

Alan Pullman

So a good example of how we do this is our own office, which you can see on our website. So we were in a traditional, when I started with the firm, we were in a traditional office tower with a beautiful view of the ocean. And everyone thought, this is great. What could be better than this office? And I said, this is a terrible office for us because we're all about community. And here we are in our ivory tower with all these views not connected to the community. So for many years, I advocated. that we have to move our offices also into a more creative space because a traditional class A office building, as your listeners know, is a kind of limited space. It's great maybe for lawyers. Even then, I actually don't think anyone wants to be in those kind of spaces anymore given the world that we live in. But at the time, I was like, we have to move out. And we started looking for like a warehouse or some cool space. You know how creatives like to be in those cool warehouse spaces. And the city had torn them all down. All the old buildings were gone. But there was this shopping center in downtown and had a notion rack and it was vacant for like a couple of years. And I walked through it and I thought this actually could be an amazing space for architect. I mean, I had a T bar ceiling at 11 feet, but I was like, there's gotta be something incredible above that. So we ended up going to the owner of this property. I wish we could have bought it, but we rented it. We went to the owner and we said, we have an idea. What if we took your space of consumption, buying, which is going to be hard to fill, and turn it into a place of production where people were working. And our team did that. And he softened because he thought he was going to always have a retail center. But he liked the idea it could be an office in what was a retail space. So we rented the building. And we started to say we have to totally transform it. And we did that. And it's a big box. But the corners, we made sure were available for retail tenants because we're not there on the weekends and we're not there late at night all the time. We wanted to have activity on the street because it's right in downtown. So we left those to be tenants. And we actually, because of our network, because we're so ingrained in the community, this facade improvement I did 20 years ago, I still go there and talk to the tenants and the businesses I work with.

Alan Pullman

kind of garden this community. And we had so many connections that we were able to bring in somebody that wanted to bring in a restaurateur that wanted to bring in a distillery. So we have the first distillery on one of the corners of our property. And then another one of my partners knew somebody that wanted to open a Mediterranean restaurant. So another incredibly successful Mediterranean restaurant is on the other side of the property. So you have our office and those two tenants in there. We really kind of knew what kind of tents we should be looking for and designed to that even if we didn't know who they were. And it ended up being a totally transformative project where the part of the street we're in, which was very sad and a bit forlorn, has now become a really dynamic little food scene, little creative scene because our office was designed also because we wanted to be connected to the community in Austin. So we actually created our conference rooms to be joint use that the community could use them. So there's board meetings and there's workshops and there are political people come and give debates and we have speaker series and we have an artist in residence there. So we've turned our office into a lab of sorts that really helps create that energy that we're all looking for in a post -COVID kind of world and it's really been successful. So yeah, we really get involved in thinking about what should go there and I mean, our clients know this. Our good clients know it really well, but we want to be co -creating it with

Austin Tunnell

That's amazing. I didn't that's about your office. I mean, that's, that's really, really cool. I find that very inspiring. One, just that idea of, really being connected to the community because I think it is very easy, like even while intention, you know, just to, to not be that, you know, it's really easy to kind of get stuck in the own little world and actually being so intentional. But the actual sharing of the office and creating this kind of like vibrancy and connection, I hadn't heard that before. How did you, how did you, present that to people where you're like, hey, in our conference rooms open for booking. Like how did you actually practically go about kind of implementing that, opening it up?

Alan Pullman

Well, it was like an evolution, but we knew we wanted to have... We knew that if we created a nice conference room, and it's pretty big, it could hold 80 people. It's like this big, raw space. And it's only one of our conferences. But we knew that if we created it and opened it up, people would want to use it. We found out that we were oversubscribed. People really want to use it. You know, I'm on several downtown boards, like the Business Improvement District and... Michael is on several boards, so we offered it to the boards we're on saying, if you want to have a board meeting, we can have it here. And it's been super successful and continues to be. But as it evolved, I realized we could do more. And then when COVID happened, we were like, we need to really reestablish community connections and go deeper into it. So I had this idea that we should have somebody really focused on this. So we hired what we call our Community Experience Coordinator. And he's this amazing guy. He comes from a hospitality background. He does a lot. He does marketing for us and he does so much in terms of the office. But he's the point person in organizing. People call him and say, can I use the room? He keeps the calendar and he's really out there. He's so connected himself in building those relationships with the community. So it's become a real thing that we see as capital for us, social capital that we're building. Then we also decided that we wanted to build even more connections with the community. So we started this Artist in Residence program. We have an artist who uses one of our conference rooms as his studio. But he's really connected to the community as well. So he brings in all sorts of interesting, creative people into the space. And so we have that kind of energy going. And he does workshops with us as well. And then our Community Experience Coordinator brought in somebody who he said, you know, she has an apothecary and she does fragrances and let her do like a little event for us. And it turned out so interesting and well that we ended up taking a little corner of our space and having her do a pop -up shop. So we have an apothecary in our architecture studio, which is kind of amazing. So all these things, we call it the lab. It's like a lab.

Alan Pullman

Everything's an experiment. You don't know if it's going to work or not, but we're really trying out different ideas. We do something called a rumble where we bring in speakers that come in and then do lunch. And it's always a local business. Again, our community experience coordinator is so connected. He'll bring in a local brewer or local restaurant to come in with food. So we're really building that connectivity to the community in any way we can. And I think it really pays off.

Austin Tunnell

I find that so inspiring. I mean, I mean, genuinely, I haven't heard anyone that's done to the level of what you're doing. And I love how you kind of make it all about an experiment. Like that's how I've learned to think about business. Well, frankly, life, like you just don't know what's going to happen. But what did you say earlier? Action? What was your kind of saying? I have a different saying. Action produces opportunity. What did you? Action creates opportunity. Like you don't know until you try and then things can evolve from there. And that's kind of what's like.

Alan Pullman

Yeah.

Alan Pullman

Action creates opportunity.

Austin Tunnell

Yeah, that's really cool. And I love, Really integrating the software part of, you know, architecture is kind of the hardware. It's the canvas. And that's incredibly important to get right. And it shapes how we live and it shapes the type of software that can be run. But at the same time, hardware in isolation is meaningless. You know, your iPhone without the software on it is just a heavy paperweight. It doesn't actually do anything. And remembering that the architecture, the point of it is to be in service for people, to people.

Alan Pullman

is there?

Austin Tunnell

And I really think that's just really beautiful. I just haven't, that's really cool. So I would love to, you're making me really want to.

Alan Pullman

Well, you'll have to come out here and check it out because, you know, you know, the other thing we did is we saw this street right next to us. It was a narrow little street. We said it needs to be shut down. And during COVID it was. And then we said, OK, let's make this permanent. So we did. We painted a big mural on the street and it now hosts a farmers market and it hosts a Thursday market. And sometimes there's skateboarding demonstrations. So we are about extending out. And my marketing director, who's also our special projects director, is really involved in another initiative we have, which is helping activate. Because it's, you're right, it shouldn't just be, for us it's not just about the space. It's like, how are people using it? So sometimes programming spaces, we did a poster exhibit recently on a big blank construction wall down the street. We found an artist that was doing posters and we were able to put up like 200 posters and activate the space become an outdoor gallery and we're doing more and more events We've been programming in a and architects don't typically do this, but we've actually been programming in a public park we've been doing yoga and story time and pet hour and puppet shows for kids Organizing we don't do all that ourselves. So so except we did have one employee who was a Bollywood dancer. So she gave a Bollywood dancing class, which was very successful. So we've been actually trying to break down the walls of the hardware and software and realize it's all one thing. And if you do it all, you really can help a community thrive and build connections. So that's another thing that we're doing from a business standpoint that I think is also kind of different for an architect. But the people here are just really passionate about those kind of things.

Austin Tunnell

awesome.

Austin Tunnell

No, it's extremely different. I mean, there's a lot of it's kind of not well known, what we said, just kind of like not uncommon for architects to never even visit a project that has been completed after it's completed. I mean, that's pretty typical in the industry from what I understand. No, I actually wrote down community experience coordinator because I'm like so inspired by that concept because it's something we already think about. We're not really to the scale where we can do all that though we're starting to invest more in our communities and getting on boards and going to things. What you're describing is very much like what our dream at building culture is and part of the inspiration for our name, you know, it's the building culture, you know, the construction culture, but it's also building culture and, and, and, really wanting to engage at the cultural level. Cause right. It is the same, you know, and, and once again, I think when we were talking on the phone, you know, a few weeks ago,

Alan Pullman

Mm -hmm.

Austin Tunnell

You mentioned the profession of architecture and I would really kind of throw everything in architecture, building developer, all that. And you said, you know, really think of yourselves as public servants, you know, and I really think that is a great way to think about it. and, and something that I want to build in culture to really be the, you know, the heart of building cultures to think of ourselves as public servants. Yes, we're in business. Yes, we have to make money. Yes, we have to all that, but like ultimately we're. we are creating like the world for people to live in, you know, and that's a profound responsibility as well as opportunity.

Alan Pullman

Yeah, it is. It is. I mean, we think we have to serve our clients, but we have to serve the community beyond our clients. And that's why I like what you're doing, because you are trying to build culture. And it's not just a culture that stops at architecture. I mean, let's face it, architects are trained to think about the building as an object and stop there. If you look at traditional architectural photography, this is something I struggle with so much. There's never any people in it. They might not even be furniture in it. They'll take a picture of a house and no one looks like they could live in it because there's nothing human in it. And that's how architects have been trained. I think it's wrong. I think we have to put people at the center of it. And so when we started our practice, we said there's really no difference between urban design and architecture and landscape. Like, how could they not be all connected? And then when we start building places, we realized building places... You said it yourself, maybe an architect builds it, never sees it again. But once you build it, you have to manage it. So place management becomes so critical because it needs to be tended to. It needs to be activated. People need to have reasons to go there beyond just consuming things. And it's part of what builds community. So I feel like what you're doing is very inspirational to me. I love seeing that. And I'm learning a lot from you. your podcast and I'm happy to share with your listeners, you know, the things that we're trying to do as well.

Austin Tunnell

Thank you. No, I really am inspired, but I can't wait to talk to the team about it and be like, we've got, you know, and then come out there at some point to see, to see what you guys are doing.

Alan Pullman

Now, not all of my partners were like, got it at first. It took a while. I mean, we're just lucky because the people are just so phenomenal. The team that we have built is just so incredibly good at what they do and make it fun. But I think people do see this as, this is actually fun. This is meaningful. This is beyond just the nuts and bolts of being an architect. We're actually contributing to the community in ways that we didn't ever think about we could do before. And so I think it just pays dividends in the joy factor of working here. And you don't have to always participate in it all, but for some people, it just really makes it unique and different. And I believe that you need to stand out a little bit. You have to differentiate somehow.

Austin Tunnell

Right. It's not always at fun, joyful, probably kind of a self selecting in terms of attracting the right people to your company, both in terms of staff and employees and clients, frankly, when they see that. I'm not, not all the time, but it also makes business sense, I would think, you know, like it's all these things, even though that might not be the, you know, the motivation, but all these things kind of reinforce each other. It's not like a win and lose situation. There's just a lot of ways to build off of that.

Alan Pullman

Well, again, it goes back to what I started with when I was working either I feeling isolated because I was working communities I was isolated from or working in a building. I felt isolated from the community. I always felt like, okay, there's another way to do this. Let's figure out, let's try some things to figure out another way to work with communities and to work in a community. And so it really kind of started with all of those thinking that happened based on the things that were working in my, in my career, in my life at the time.

Austin Tunnell

Well, to shift gears just a little bit, wanted to ask, you had mentioned before the idea of trying to find places, you know, municipalities, cities that are willing to break the rules a little bit. And that is one of the things that just gets into all the stuff you're talking about in these adaptive reuse and these mixed use projects and human scale is generally in conflict with the current rules and regulations, whether it's zoning, whether it's parking minimums, whether it's utility. easements, whether it's fire trucks, garbage, all that, you know, have, what do you look for? Like, are there, are there things that you do look for or do you just kind of like work through them when you have, you know, when you have a project?

Alan Pullman

Well, I mean, it's a great question. There's so many different factors, right? like a lot of cities that are in high demand. First of all, we have nationally like house prices are going up. And so there's obviously a need to provide more housing in many, many cities. And so cities have, I've seen a lot of cities and I've actually been complicit in some of this saying, well, let's increase the zoning. Let's increase the density you could build here because you need to be able to build more. And the unintended consequence of that is that when you, increase the zoning, you've made the land very expensive. And when it's very expensive, it now becomes the purview of well -funded, well -financed developers to play in that place. And they have their own formulas. They want to build at least 300 units, which means they'll gobble up big lots and build very large buildings that change the scale of the neighborhood. And again, I have to be honest. We've done that. I realized maybe this isn't the way we should be building because they're building for the profit motive. And I'm quite okay with people making money because I think it's absolutely critical if we're going to have investment in our environment. But that's all they're building for. And a lot of these projects that I've seen are kind of building a monoculture. I think Strong Towns talks about this really well where I see a lot of urban five over two with studios and one bedrooms and it's a formula and this great amenity. So people living there will never have to venture out of their building to even experience the city. They're in a city, but they're not living a collective life. And because they're rental, they'll only live there for a few years until they move out to find a family, start a family or have a larger place. So I feel like cities have to really, I look for cities that are looking to maybe break

Alan Pullman

that mold that aren't so willing to just up zone and hope that the development won't gentrify and change the neighborhood. And there are places that are doing that. I'm currently working with a group that's looking at incremental growth through ADUs, lot splits, and adding second floors in a working class neighborhood to build affordable housing. And I feel like In a city like Los Angeles that's like 80 % low suburban single family, the ability to slowly infill those neighborhoods is what's really interesting because it does not mean that we have to have a big out of town developer come in and maximize his return on capital to his investors and have that money kind of swish out of the community. It means that local property owners can actually do some of their own development or local nonprofits can build affordably and actually provide some real affordability, not the capital A subsidized affordability, but real affordable kind of units. So that's something that we're really pivoting to as much as we can. I mean, people call it missing middle. I think that's a term that's used a lot. But it's a really important discussion to have because I've seen massive building growth that does not necessarily create the right outcomes that the community really wants to see.

Austin Tunnell

Absolutely. And just with so many cities, whether it's California, rhyme, Oklahoma, Texas, like so much of it is already taken up by suburban sprawl. And the idea of trying to like wipe that out or something and build from scratch dense urban, like it's just not going to happen, you know? but that doesn't mean we have to find a way forward. We do have to find a way forward. and, and those limitations also lead to more creativity, you know? and and probably more decentralized development, as you're saying, rather than one big developer, which could make for some really interesting stuff.

Alan Pullman

Yeah, I mean, the evolution of the suburbs. I mean, it's different if you're working in Manhattan, right? You're not going to have small incremental development. You might have some, but it's a little bit of a different situation. But in places like LA, which was sort of the father of suburban kind of cities, but I think there has been a lot of innovation around that. I see ADUs going up in so many neighborhoods, and I see how It's kind of that gentle density that people talk about, but it really can, it returns some of that development capacity to the community in ways that just outsourcing to large developers can't do. But saying that, we do, I did, there are some areas, certain things can't be incrementalized, like infrastructure, like putting in a rail line or a major road.

Austin Tunnell

No.

Alan Pullman

That's something that has to be thoughtful in advance. But there are other opportunities, Austin, whether it's a regional mall that's dying or an industrial site that has the industry has moved away or it's better located someplace else. There are large scale opportunities. I don't want to make everything about like an ADU because I think there are opportunities to do it thoughtfully at a larger scale. It's just then again, you want to take the lessons of small incremental development and apply to a larger canvas.

Austin Tunnell

Absolutely. I think that makes a lot of sense and, it was a very kind of, once again, dynamic way to be thinking about it. There's not one silver bullet. There's not one solution and you know, jobs as architects and in this industry is to adapt to the, to the situation. You know, you've been, you've been in the industry while, and I think you've, you know, founded studio one 11, what 20, 24 years ago or something. what are some of the things that you've seen?

Alan Pullman

Absolutely.

Alan Pullman

Exactly.

Austin Tunnell

over your career that have gotten worse, that frustrate you, but then also some of the things that have gotten like better. And I just, and I mean that kind of in a very broad way, whether that's in the architecture industry in general, or I, or even kind of at the, the city level. Alan Pullman (01:00:13.687) I mean, some of the frustrations we have, I'm sure many of your listeners have the same frustrations. I don't know why it's so complicated. I mean, I am most familiar with the California context, but getting a project approved is just so cumbersome. Even reading a code is just, we need land use attorneys to help us interpret the code and the overlays and all the things that are layered on. As you layer on things that are supposed to make things easier, that layering makes it more complicated. I get frustrated at cities when you'll have different departments. It's the siloed city, right? And the larger the city, the more bureaucratic it becomes. But public works not working in conjunction with community development, not working in conjunction with the utilities. And we see that a lot, a lot of times. So there's just those kind of frustrations. I don't have any solutions to them, unfortunately. But I do feel like those things are getting worse. There's also certain things in the code that, well, life safety. I take it very, very seriously. But sometimes it feels like it's hard to justify the constraints that we have put on by the fire department, which sometimes are very whimsical. They don't come out of the code. They're just an opinion by the fire department. It's very hard to build human scale cities when you have requirements for a 30 foot road for fire truck access, for instance. A 30 feet and the road is like 80 feet because of that access. So I think that... going to the positive, I do feel that there's, there could be dialogue. There could be dialogue about these things in certain cities and people are willing, you know, crisis creates opportunity. People are willing to say, you know, what we're doing, if they're smart, what we're doing isn't working. The outcomes aren't what we want. Maybe the intentions are absolutely great. Can we change the process so that we get the outcomes that we'd like to see? And I'm having those conversations with cities all the time. Alan Pullman (01:02:28.727) Change is hard. Again, cities are complicated and complex, so they take a lot of time to work through and change comes slowly when you're talking about the built environment. But I am hopeful that there'll be a new generation of planners and city officials that are thinking about things differently. And as an example, I'm doing a large planning effort in a city and I met with Public Works and we had ideas that these roads need to totally be reconfigured for people. They were developed in the 60s and they're all about moving cars. And even though we still have cars and we have to move them, there needs to be a better balance. In fact, it needs to bounce towards people rather than the automobile. And I met with Public Works and I was thinking, they're going to hate this conversation that I'm going to have. And absolutely, they were absolutely no. They were like, you're right. This is not the way we have to develop the city of a future. And so I was really quite relieved and hopeful that there are people coming up that are thinking about a city for people rather than a city as a machine that's moving cars or making money and trying to find a better balance between all those elements. Austin Tunnell (01:03:45.446) That's really encouraging. Yeah, I share similar frustrations, absolutely. And especially the siloed thing and just utility departments and things that have no concept of what the actual goal is or actually serving people. It's just that very myopic kind of view. But I've also been encouraged, we were presenting a master plan recently to kind of a smaller town, so not Oklahoma City, but in Oklahoma. And presenting, you know, I started kind of with the, I didn't say, here's the plan. I started with kind of the why, you know, and why are we even talking about, what, what is architecture and like how it shapes how we live and all that kind of stuff. And then, and then the how and the what. And man, I was kind of blown away. I mean, these are like older people, right? So they're not even young people or something. And they were, and one of the really focuses was of creating a place for people and also like multi -generational living and also being able to do more within this. Alan Pullman (01:04:40.983) Mmm. Austin Tunnell (01:04:43.59) 80 acre neighborhood than just like sleep. And no, you're still going to have cars. You're still going to have to drive out. You're still going to go to work. and man, they were all excited about it. They were just like, this is a great idea. I was actually very blown away. Like I was expecting everyone to have a major pushback and I thought that was pretty exciting. Now, now comes the hard work of actually once again, working through the utility departments and all that. And when you actually do run into the rules, you know, that don't fit, you know, I just can't believe how much our rules dictate what gets built. Other than what we want, you know, I mean, I just love Steve Jobs. He started with that, you know, with computers revolutionized the computer industry in the eighties saying you can't build, you know, engineers, computers by engineers for engineers. You've got to start with the human experience, the user, and then back into the hardware to make sure your hardware is actually serving what you want. And like our codes and all of that are completely the opposite. It's just like, here's the codes and all of the hardware is shaped to fit the codes. Alan Pullman (01:05:38.679) Yeah. Alan Pullman (01:05:42.903) Absolutely. It's very frustrating. Yeah. But I mean, I, another thing that I'm encouraged about is, you know, looking around the country and I've looked into since our conversation in Oklahoma city. I mean, there's really interesting things happening all over the country. And some of the most interesting things aren't happening in the coastal cities. They're happening in, in midsize cities and smaller towns. Really interesting developments are happening in Detroit. And there's a really interesting developer there, Prince Concepts. Austin Tunnell (01:05:43.878) Yeah. Alan Pullman (01:06:11.991) I see really cool projects happening in Oklahoma City. So I'm inspired by the things I see all over the country and people trying out new things. And it's great to hear when you meet with a group that they're thinking, well, we don't have to do it this way. Let's focus on the outcomes. And those are outcomes that everyone can kind of share. Austin Tunnell (01:06:31.366) Yeah, absolutely. And you're right. There are a lot of amazing projects from Oklahoma City and Edmond are just, I mean, I'm amazed at the concentration of these, I mean, really cool developments. I mean, some of them are in the works, but haven't even come out the ground yet, but in five years, there's going to be a very high concentration of very like well done new urbanist projects at various scales from a one acre scale to, you know, Carlton Landing and Wheeler, which are, you know, hundreds of acres, thousand acres kind of thing. Alan Pullman (01:06:59.415) Mm -hmm. Austin Tunnell (01:07:00.486) it's, it's pretty exciting. Alan Pullman (01:07:02.551) Yeah, and those are great. They're going to be great to visit and great case studies to look at. Austin Tunnell (01:07:07.846) Yeah, yeah, they will. And that's what gets me excited is there's still so much to do. Like, you know, all the, if all the problems were solved, we wouldn't be in this industry, probably you, because like we'd be bored. But, that's what is kind of fun is like tackling the problems that actually are meaningful and people need to tackle, you know, they're not going to solve these problems, aren't going to solve themselves, but it also kind of lends in my opinion, you know, meaning to the work that we, we do. Alan Pullman (01:07:34.903) Absolutely. I mean, I've been doing this a while, as you said, but I do remain really hopeful and optimistic. Sometimes that optimism may not be based in all the realities of the world, but I do look to the future and I have to be. As an architect, you must be optimistic, right? Because you're planning the future and you don't want to be pessimistic about the future. So I do see opportunities to improve things and make progress and rectify. past mistakes and we'll make some future mistakes and then hopefully we'll be agile enough to rectify those. Austin Tunnell (01:08:09.606) and I think that's a yeah, optimistic and we're optimistic too. I think that's a great place to end. This has been a really fun conversation, inspired by some of these ideas. And I very much want to get out to you guys at some point. I didn't tell you this, but I was actually in Long Beach. gosh, in college, I spent a couple of months there working on the beach and I stay, I cannot remember the movie. I should have looked it up before. There is this hotel on the beach, like very near downtown that this kind of depressing movie Johnny Depp stayed in. like in the movie, I don't know if you know what I'm talking about, if it's still there, but anyway, huh. Okay. Anyway, we, Alan Pullman (01:08:42.135) I do. No, it's not there. In fact, we tore it down. We're designing a project on that site. Yeah. Austin Tunnell (01:08:50.246) did you really? Okay. I stayed in that hotel. I stayed in the hotel for a couple of months and Long Beach was really a special, really special place. I really loved it. Alan Pullman (01:08:58.775) Yeah, it's unique. It's unique. Austin Tunnell (01:09:01.734) Well, Alan, how can people kind of follow you? I know you're on LinkedIn, your website. Where can people follow what you guys are doing? Alan Pullman (01:09:10.327) Yeah, I mean, you know, our website is www .studio -111 .com and you could just look me up on LinkedIn and we also have an Instagram page and a LinkedIn page. So all of our contact information is there on the website. So if somebody's interested, feel free to drop us a line. We'd love to talk. Austin Tunnell (01:09:34.086) Great. Well, that's awesome. I'll put that in the show notes as well. Alan, thanks so much for coming on. I look forward to following along. Alan Pullman (01:09:40.951) All right, you too, Austin. It was great to talk to you. I really appreciate it. Bye -bye. Austin Tunnell (01:09:44.55) You too. Bye.