Coby Lefkowitz: Building Optimism - Rethinking Cities, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Design

Austin Tunnell

You can go to the Netherlands, to Amsterdam or Utrecht and see these exquisite and enchanting places. Could we possibly have that here? The answer is yes. It's possible to have an excellent city if you're focusing on traditional architecture, but it's far more important to get the streets and the orientation of the buildings from one another and the fabric of the city right.

Austin Tunnell

Welcome to the Building Culture podcast, where we explore holistic solutions to crafting a more beautiful, resilient, and thriving world through the built environment. I'm your host, Austin Tennell. If you are in the market for high quality windows or doors, whether residential or commercial, new construction or remodels, I highly recommend you check out Sierra Pacific Windows, who we use at Building Culture on a lot of our projects, as well as if you are in the state of Oklahoma, check out One Source. windows and doors and want to thank them for sponsoring this podcast. Koby, it's great to have you back on the podcast. think we talked last in February earlier this year, were episode 10 for anyone wanting to go back and listen to that. We dove into your story a little bit, but good to have you on here again. Awesome. Thanks so much for having me back on. And it's always such a pleasure to talk to you, whether on the podcast or without. you know, we'll give a sign of maybe some things to come that we've been discussing at the end of the episode. Yeah, that, that. Sounds fun. been having it has been fun to talk more throughout the year off off not offline, I guess but off the podcast but just for anyone that is not familiar with you before we kind of jump into the book and your project and some of this other cool stuff. Can you just give a little bit of background about who you are, what you do? Yeah, so I am a developer by by trade. I'm an urban planner by training. So in a lot of my work, I to marry those two worlds together to build a better built environment at the intersection of city building and planning and development. So those two fields are often not in dialogue with one another and they have to be. And it's my belief and I know it's one that you share that when we bring these disparate disciplines of city design together in the service of effectuating real estate development, leads to better communities.

Austin Tunnell

That's what I do daily. I'm a writer as well. I just published a book, Building Optimism, which I'm really excited to get to talk with you today about and do a couple of articles here and there for some journals and trade publications and then on my sub stack as well. developer, writer, and whatever else we want to throw on Philosopher, yeah. And that's what I kind of like. I think that's why we get along so well is really marrying. I'm kind of obsessed with Apple and Steve Jobs, at least certain aspects of it, not necessarily the Apple of today, but its foundational ideas of taking technology and blending it with the arts, mixing the liberal arts with arts, with technology. And I think we really come from that perspective on real estate, where it's part art, it's part science, it's part business, and you can't overly focus on any one of those. You really need to bring all this together, along with psychology and sociology, because you're you're really building the human habitat. so, I don't think I meet many other like philosopher builder, finance writer guys. So, yeah, it's fun. but on that note, let's talk about your books. so yeah, yeah. So talk about your book, building optimism. came out what a couple weeks ago, I believe. Yeah. you did the self publishing route, right? That's right. Okay. So, so start, start with Why did you write the book? So there's a real answer and then there's an after the fact sort of contrived answer. And I think both work well. The real answer is that I've been writing articles for Substack for Medium for some time and I just accumulated some couple hundred thousand words of disparate thoughts. And I'd been thinking through how I could tie those together in service of a broader philosophy on how we do the built environment. And I was talking with some friends about this a couple of years ago and they said, are you writing a book? I no, I'm just writing articles right now. That seems a pretty ambitious thing to go from some thoughts that you're putting on a blog post part time writing at nights and weekends to publishing a book. And they asked, well, why don't you? It seems like you've done most of the work already. That's a good idea. Maybe I'll do it.

Austin Tunnell

And as those talks progressed, I went from maybe to, yes, I'm definitely going to write this book. And then I had a debt to those friends to finish it and to make, to make good on my promise. So it sounds maybe like a bad reason to write the book, but I just promised people I would do it. And then once I told them that I couldn't break that promise. Cause every time you talk to them, go, Hey, how's the book going? yeah, it's coming along. And so, I wouldn't have been in the position to do that unless I had made myself accountable to friends and to colleagues in the field. And so that's where it started. And now after the fact, that's not a wholly satisfying answer to people. And even though it is the right answer, there's often something else. Well, no, really, why'd you write it? Did you write it to make money, to build a brand, to... promote your views on the world, so on and so on. And the truth is you don't write a book to make money, especially not with the royalty fees that Amazon gives on the self-publishing route. So that was never top of mind. Brand promotion is something I'd never really thought about. I've sort of been busy building buildings and writing to think much of that. And now it's become something as you have a product out in the world that you have to be more mindful of. But that wasn't a driving force. And so when you knock off some of these reasons, the last one is I wanted to distill a worldview and be able to set that out to the world in something very easy to remember to me, which was optimism. You can dive into a little bit more what exactly an optimistic city or an optimistic developer, architect, planner, et cetera, looks like. But I... I hope in some way it becomes a catchall. I don't anticipate nor hope for this to be something as large as a broad city building movement like you would think in postmodernism or modernism. Those are quite ambitious targets. But when one says postmodernism or modernism or international stop building, you immediately know.

Austin Tunnell

when one mentions that what they're talking about. And I think the real hope for this book is if someone mentions an optimistic city, then it's one that immediately conjures up a certain set of visuals and beliefs on what that place is. That's really cool. I really like the name building optimism and actually pretty close to building culture. I think we got a similar thing going on. I like building optimism. And one of the reasons I like it is particularly today and I, you know, maybe the past decade or something, there's been a lot of negativity about the world. And by the way, we could spend 10 hours talking about all that's wrong with the world. Like, I don't mean there aren't things wrong with the world, but at the same time, it's not like that the world is going inherently to hell in a handbag. Like there's a lot of people out there doing amazing work. And I think what... one of things you're really good at is shining a light on that. So you don't shy away from critiques or criticisms or what is bad, but you also have a pretty generous worldview where it's not like everything needs to be traditional architecture in the traditional sense, you know, and you have a broader perspective of what we mean by traditional architecture, which, you know, I don't want to put a definition in your mouth, but we're like, it's more like human architecture. Is it beautiful? And there's all kinds of different kinds of beauty. And I think that kind of optimistic take in the age of climate, apocalyptic climate change and all the apocalyptic narratives out there is really important. So I actually really, I kind of love the building optimism itself as a brand and a meaning. I think you're really good at projecting that as well. Thank you. And it wasn't intentional. It was sort of a inorganic evolution of this project that I think we talked about earlier in the year. on Twitter that year of building optimism to instill in people that hope that we can still create good things in North America because it's for too long been, our development patterns rather, for too long have not been good. And it has led to no small amount of pessimism about the world around us. And as you so well say, that is not necessarily based in reality.

Austin Tunnell

There are so many great things going on, but there's not a spotlight cast onto them. So this book, part of the book was an effort to show people that there is really great work going on and they are not. It is not a fantasy to hope to build another world, a better world because people are already doing that today. One of the core messages of the book is that people can only reasonably be expected to do something that has already happened. It's one thing to say that you're going to sail across the seven seas if no one's done it before. You think you're going to end up in the subcontinent like Columbus and you end up in the Caribbean. Right. That's a certain sort of venture. There's another, if you sail a hundred years later and say, well, someone has already sailed to the West Indies a century before me. Now I have a map for how to do that. And so I want people to believe that this project to better city building is not only possible, but that it's already happening and that it is very fertile ground for them to come in and add to that like where we, I'm actually curious to ask you this, like where do you think we are in time? And I don't know, like Simon Sinek has his little bell curve of, I don't know if you know what I'm talking about, where it's like you got the innovators and I think it's like the first two and a half percent and then it's like the early adopters and then the early majority, late majority, blah, blah, and the people you're never gonna get. And this whole kind of like urbanism movement of, and what I would really, I mean, you can call it new urbanism or TNDs and I just call it like human centered urbanism.

Austin Tunnell

whatever you want to call it, you know, started really resurfacing back in the late eighties, you know, starting with Seaside. And a lot of work has been done over the past 40 and 50 years. At the same time, we're still at the very early stages. Where would you say we, where do you think we are kind of in that curve? Like I would, I'll kind of give you my answer first. I'm curious to hear what you say. Like I think we've got a lot of the innovators that have happened that have kind of come before us a little bit that have been like, Here's how you build great neighborhoods. Here's some of the ingredients. But it certainly has not made it to early majority, in my opinion. We're still almost in the revolution stage, where there needs to be a revolution. Because it is like so many old institutions need to be not just fine-tuned or adjusted, almost basically overthrown, rebuilt, rethought from the ground up. I'm curious where you stand on that. In terms of innings in a baseball game are usually the best barometer for this where someone says, we're in the bottom of third inning. We're pretty early to this. I don't know if I could handicap it quite so easily there because I actually think an exponential curve is the more approximate way to analyze this. So for an exponential curve, you start with this very low to almost no growth. And there's a little bit of uptick, a little bit. And then it hockey sticks where ideas that have been percolating for some time are taken up and they become broadly disseminated across society. That might be an overly optimistic view, but it's one that I earnestly believe where we have had this sort of skating along the bottom of the X axis for a couple of decades. And we've seen more interest in building human friendly, human scaled optimistic neighborhoods and cities. And I think we are at the inflection point where that curve is going to go exponential. And there's a couple of reasons for that. One, there is sort of a contagion effect to land use regulations. We saw this in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, a little bit less so in the 1920s, where single family Euclidean zoning took the country by storm after it was

Austin Tunnell

upheld by the Supreme Court, I believe in 1925 or 1926 in the Ambler Realty. And then we saw after the Great Depression and World War II, these codes get adopted one after the other. And that's what cemented our development patterns in North America for much of the next century. I think that we are in a very similar position today where there is a set of outdated... regulations that govern the built environment. And cities have been questioning this for the better part of a decade, thanks to the work of the new urbanists and other pioneers with this innovator class in the 80s and 90s. And it's my belief that... As more cities adopt this, those who get left out will very quickly see that if they don't change their land use environment, they are going to fall very, very far behind. So this could be everything from repealing exclusionary zoning, allowing ADUs in a backyard or a duplex in a neighborhood that might not historically have it, or repealing parking minimums. allowing for parking spaces if one wants to build them, but not mandating them. There's lot size coverage ratios. There's any number of regulations that we can look through. And the reason why I think they're going to have this contagion effect across the country is that we're seeing the fruits of this work in places like Austin, has made permitting perform a point of emphasis and has legalized... triplex across the city. And we've seen a lot of permits now passed, homes built, and rental prices shockingly have dropped. We've seen this in Houston as well, where a number of land use reforms have led to the city being, I believe, the most affordable major city in the United States. Now, we can quibble with the way those development patterns have come about, but in core neighborhoods where townhomes may be built on

Austin Tunnell

no more than four or 500 square foot lots. That is a level of density that was, you you can speak to this obviously a lot better being from you than I can, unthinkable 20 years ago. Right? So these, there are sort of the decades that pioneers do their work. And once they broadly have some level of understandable or graspable benefit, other cities will very quickly take that up. We can go into why that is. There are conferences that city managers and public officials attend and they share best practices. There are people moving with their feet to places that have made quality of life and cost of living principle aims to achieve. Texas and Arizona and Tennessee, it's no secret, have gained large swaths of population, mainly in my opinion, because it's It's so much cheaper to live there. And when you're living there, you enjoy a better quality of life than if you're in Massachusetts or Northern California or New York. And so if these places don't want to be left behind, they're going to have to get up with the times. And that is not something that takes a century. It can happen in a couple of years. Yeah, that's a really good point. It's kind of like the, gosh, what is it? Gradually then suddenly that. Exactly. it's gradually, gradually, gradually, and then suddenly, and I find that's the case for a lot of things. Getting back to the book a little bit, like what are some of the other tenets in the book or something that you'd like to share on here? So what you touched on before of building in traditional ways, but not traditionally, stylistically. So there are There's this divergence, I would say, between traditional urbanism and traditional architecture. I am a staunch defender of traditional urbanism, and I am an admirer of traditional architecture. Some of our projects will be traditional in spirit, but I wouldn't say that in order to have a good city, you have to have traditional architecture. I think it's possible to have an excellent city if you're focusing on traditional architecture, but it's far more important to get.

Austin Tunnell

the streets and the orientation of the buildings to one another and the fabric of the city, right? And then good buildings make that that much better. One of the examples I draw on the book is if you have the most beautiful buildings in the world, but they're set across nine lanes of traffic from one another, and then they're set back another 20 feet from the road, their impact is greatly diluted to potentially being neglected entirely. If instead of a nine lane highway splitting those buildings, you had a 50 foot wide road, a Boulevard perhaps with a row of trees in the middle, that becomes a much more pleasant place to be. And that's an urban design in a traditional urbanism categorization as opposed to the architecture. that might not make me friends in certain circles. And of course, I'm saying that as an urban planner. Naturally, I think that the plan and urban design matters more. The reason why I feel comfortable in stating this so forcefully in the chapter, I think the heart of the book is this chapter on building good foundations, is that you can go to cities as different looking on the surface as Rome or Kyoto or San Miguel de Allende or any other that you want to throw in this calculus. But if you take away the veneer of a certain style that's been applied to it, They're all compositionally very, very similar. They have housing that's mixed in with retail and commercial and institutional space. They have rather narrow streets. They are built at more or less of a human scale, except for certain monuments that Leon Crer talks about this, this residence of its house, where you don't want a city entirely built of monuments because then each loses its meaning, but you can have a city of entirely small. I think exactly a punctuation. And so if you, if you have small buildings across the way, you get a homogenous suburb that people might not really care for. if you punctuate with some monuments here and there, that can lead to a much better city. but it doesn't matter what those monuments are. It can be a, a, a Buddhist temple in one case, or it can be a church in the other. They look very differently, but on the foundational level, they perform the same role. They are.

Austin Tunnell

places of spirituality, of worship, and of community. And they're lovely in whatever forms that they manifest. So that's why I think we can say with confidence that the foundations matter so much. And that's not to say architecture doesn't matter. It absolutely does. I just don't want to proclaim a single style better than all others. Because even I live in Brooklyn and even on one single block, there might be seven different styles of buildings that to an untrained eye looks functionally the same rather. You might have Neo-Grech, Italian at revival, federal style, and a couple of more to throw in there. But the fabric comes together to create a wonderful place. that is something that is perhaps not as satisfying to... somebody who wants to very easily apply lessons from this book. But I think it's empowering because it allows each community to have some level of self-determination to decide what makes sense for them. How do they want their identity to be imbued in bricks and mortar and to move on from there. If you want to show your support for this podcast and also have the chance to win a really cool hat like what I'm wearing, if you're watching on Spotify or YouTube, you can leave a five-star review, screenshot it and send it to playbook at buildingculture.com. When we hit 100 reviews on Spotify and Apple respectively, I'll do a raffle, select 10 people and send out hats. You've got a 10 % chance of winning. It's pretty good. Leave a five star review, take a screenshot and send to playbook at buildingculture.com would really appreciate it. Thanks so much. I'm actually like in, I think total agreement with you, which I think I'm with you that there's people that would definitely, that we very much like and agree on a lot of things that would probably disagree with us here. And starting, there's a couple of things, but you know, know, Thomas dowry, he's been on the podcast a couple of times, you're working with him. obviously we work with Tom a lot. and, and we were talking once about like, what is urbanism? Cause I don't actually think it's a great word because it, at least it conjures the wrong thing in people's mind. People think big five story buildings or bigger. And, and he's like, urbanism is spatial.

Austin Tunnell

That's what it means. It's spatial and you can create space with all sorts of different things. You can do it with a brick wall, a garden hitch. You can do it with buildings. You can do it with landscaping. You can do it with trees. So you can have suburbs that are sub urban that are spatial while still being very like low density. And he shows lots of nice examples in the Netherlands and stuff. And so I think like understanding urbanism in that sense, it's not that we think that everything should be urban in the sense that people think of that today, I think. But so there's that. And then the second thing is I don't like I also don't love the term traditional architecture. I don't know what else there is because it gets it's not really a style. Like there's so many styles that fall in traditional architecture. Like what does that mean traditional versus modern? And like the way I define traditional architecture is more like a set of almost like values and principles that can be expressed in infinitely. creative ways, but there's also parameters. It's like a game, you know, there's still, there's still parameters around it, but it's not like we've to do traditional architecture means you have to repeat what has been done in the past. You're doing period architecture that you're doing Georgian architecture. That is a type of traditional architecture. But like for me at building culture, like I don't have classical training. I didn't go to architecture school and learn how to draw the five orders, you know, of columns. And I think that's really cool. And I would have loved to, to learn that, but the way I think about, people often ask, what style is it that you guys are doing? And I'm like, I don't know. I don't have a style to call it besides, would almost say it's a continuation of the traditional architecture language. It's living language. And so it doesn't necessarily fit, it's just trying to, and there is evolution. All traditional architecture in the past was new. I remember Italians like, hate gothic architecture and flying buttresses about their churches were ridiculous looking, you know, and I'm sure who knows how many times traditional architecture has been scorned that particular style. And so I'm very much in agreement that I do think there is good architecture and there's bad architecture. And then I do think there's places for people to disagree within that too. You know, just kind of like beauty is both objective and subjective, or at least that's what I would say. But I'm really with you that getting the spatial

Austin Tunnell

aspects right of urbanism or suburbanism getting those because we are literally meant to function in space. They just put us in a wide open field. There's a reason our houses have rooms to them, you know, and getting that right is more important because by the way, you can always rebuild the buildings later. You can reskin a building in 50 years, 100 years. Once you get the urbanism right, imprinted wrong, it is very, very, very, very, very difficult to change unless you're going to bulldoze a bunch of stuff. And that can take centuries. I absolutely agree that, and this is a point that I make in the book, there is, I think, a survivorship bias around older buildings being innately more robustly constructed. It certainly is the case that there are many buildings that have survived to today that were excellently constructed, but we're only seeing the ones that have survived. So if you're not seeing the wooden shacks that preceded the small homes, and there were many more wooden shacks and there are stone built homes or brick, know, masonry built homes today. And so there is this, I think, unfortunate association with, and then this is not perhaps the, this was not the intention of the preservation movement, but this has been the upshot of it. that there needs to be this sacred preservation and protection of certain structures because we can't build anything like it again. And if we lose that, we lose our opportunity to make our cities wonderful places. And I think that's really because we've lost this optimistic and this hopeful spirit and certainly of certain virtues of how we design places. talked about this, I forget if it was on the podcast, but certainly offline, that if you go and crack open any architectural treatise, pretty much before the 20th century, one of the first things you'll read is that they build with beauty as a virtue. They hold beauty to be a virtue. Now, what does that mean specifically? It's tough to say, because if you're reading Palladio in the Italian pre-Renaissance context,

Austin Tunnell

That's very different than if you're reading, let's say Christopher Alexander, who's a 20th century theorist, but nonetheless, these rules still apply. We lost that ethos underpinning how we build. And so we hold on with a great deal of suspicion, I think, to any level of change. But historically, that's not how cities evolve. are the result of many places that have been torn down or rebuilt and torn down and rebuilt in some cases, dozens of times, depending on the age of a place. And I would love for us to get back to that spirit where we're not cherishing the merely good for fear of what might come after it. But we're using that almost as a postmark to say, here's our best effort today. Chuck Barone talks a lot about this. We're going to start with this wood framed or wood side of building and then In the future, when we can marshal a certain amount of funds, we're going to tear that down and we're going to build a brick building. We're going that down and we're going to build a marble gulf. We're going to add pieces of ornamentation that have no coherent relevance to the structure of this place. We really only need, if we're building a bank, you only need a small box, but let's have some vaulted ceilings. Let's guild some of the entrance ways, let's say, to inspire greater level of human experience. And I do think we need to get back to that. It's really what's missing. And when you take that virtue away from the built environment, you get to this position where we're at today, or where we're trying to move away from that, where you feel so dispirited in a soulless environment and as though it's not built for you. It's a very transactional experience. People can feel that and sense it. And that goes back to why I believe we're going to be, we might be rounding that corner to exponential growth because you can only be beaten down for so long before you demand something better. I like how you said that people experience it as if it's not built for them as a transactional experience. mean, that's a really good way to describe modern building. I don't mean modern stylistically. Yeah. It's funny as you were talking, I was literally thinking like Chuck Marrone and Daniel Herrigus, because they're

Austin Tunnell

I mean, he's talked about a lot, but even in his most latest book, the latest book, the escaping the housing trap, he really gets into that, that idea in modern America, especially that the idea that we can build things to completion out of nothing. So there's nothing and then let's build it once forever. And you would think that a lot of people would assume like us building culture, we're all talking about durability that we're like, no, no, you should build it forever. And it's actually like, no, I think places need to evolve and grow organically and there is an excellent place for cheap and fast architecture. Like you need that as part of every city as it evolves and changes and eventually as it matures and places do mature. Like if you look at a Paris, it doesn't mean it never changes ever again, but it does eventually kind of get locked in place. But I that took hundreds of years to get there. And then it's like, okay, we're going to rebuild out of masonry and kind of more permanent. And then it makes sense at that point. But I think we really need to that mindset would be very helpful of letting places evolve. And of course, that also is helpful to take a longer term mindset on city building. always say like anyone involved in the built environment, anyone involved at all, but particularly in government or regulation of any kind really should be thinking about this on like a hundred year plus timelines because so much seems very, very, very, very, very short-sighted. it's like cities are built over hundreds and you could argue thousands of years. Yeah. know, and they're living organisms and there is a little bit of messy. You don't want everything messy all the time. No, but like you need to allow for that mess and trying to control it all so much. We, I think we really shoot ourselves in the foot, cap the ceiling of everything that we could be like you're saying. Yeah, I'm kind of curious to hear your take just a little bit more on preservation, like historic preservation particularly and how it functions in the US and granted it functions differently everywhere, but But that's become a big thing and I hear more more young people. We're young, I know, we're 30, you know, I'm 36 now, so I'm like, anyway, young people, know, in their college, whatever, and more people going into preservation, there's more academic programs focused on preservation. And it's not that, what's weird is like, it's not that I think those things shouldn't exist because I think that stuff's really important for people to learn how to preserve great things. But there's almost this,

Austin Tunnell

It's almost like not an optimistic take about everything. It's like we have these few jewels left and everything else is so terrible that we need to put all of our resources in just to prefer what we have. And don't get wrong, I want to preserve those things too. And I also want to build a whole better world. And I think we can. And so it kind of drives me crazy. And some of the decision making around it drives me crazy. Just because it's old doesn't make it good. You know, just because this didn't exist before on that neighborhood doesn't mean it shouldn't exist. You know, like there's so many frustrating things I find about it, even though I'm like kind of grateful sometimes because you could tear down this wonderful house and build a monstrosity because of the current building culture we have, which is, you know, not excellent architecture, I would say generally speaking. But that, mean, I kind of sharing my take, but I want to hear, want to hear your take. I share it. share it. And I also think that we should be able to have conversations in you know, freely sharing thoughts that might offend others because we won't progress the discipline forward if we don't. If we're always agreeing with one another, that lack of tension I think leads to a stasis and can get enshrined. And that really is what most of our belt environment looks like today. So it's good to have this push back. I would say, I think it's an entirely rational position for young people, but more often the case, if you go to preservation, committee meetings or, or, you know, in New York, we have the LPC. So commission hearings, a lot of older folks are there because they, they want to preserve beauty and culture and character in their neighborhoods. And they do not have a much of

Austin Tunnell

Well, I don't want to be pessimistic here, but I'll say they don't really have much reference to what might be better. So it's totally rational to preserve the few good buildings that we have if you do believe that what's coming in the future won't be better. so it gets back to the core thesis of this book that instead of motivating people out of fear to preserve what they have, let's change that mechanism a little bit to motivate them into doing something positive so that someone in the future may preserve their efforts. There's a book, a chapter in the book called On Stewardship. And the idea that it gets at is if we want to cities that last for centuries and buildings that last for centuries, yes, we can construct out of masonry. can eschew that the cheap two by fours and we can build and should build in accordance with local climates. So it makes more sense to build, let's say with CMU brick in the Southeast where it's much more humid than two by fours that can warp, for example. But no matter what structure you build, it's never going to last for posterity. There will always need to be some level of maintenance to it. And that's a different sort of preservation. It's more of a living tradition. as opposed to a historic structure being maintained as a palace museum for some. minor general in the Revolutionary War, that's a very different thing than someone living above a coffee shop in a structure that was built in 1635. And I think we feel that difference as well. any building that wants to have a hope of lasting for several hundred years has to be capable of inspiring love and affection and kinship for it.

Austin Tunnell

The buildings that are being preserved today have done that because they have broad bases of support. Parks have that as well, friends of the Highlander, Central Park Conservancy, and so on and so on. I would like to see the preservation movement keep its roots in protecting the most cherished cultural assets that a given city has. And you can see the fruits of this in a place like Charleston that is as wonderful as it is because it is retain that historic heritage, but not forget that there's two sides to that coin. We have to push forward or else we will exist in that stasis. And in order to do that, the stewardship has to be, we're going to build a wonderful structure, something that's beautiful, maybe objectively, maybe subjectively, but that over time it will be capable of attracting the affections of future generations to uphold that and really instill this better culture of development. So I would agree with you that preservation in many cases is not working as intended today. And it's been weaponized by no small degree of bad faith actors. So there is much that needs to be reformed there. But I would push forward and say, let's create places in the future that are not only capable of, or that are not only worthy of preservation, but that we take those skill sets that preservationists currently have and apply them more broadly beyond the small set of structures that they currently shepherd. Yeah, no, I like that. Something you said, and I want to pivot to your project here in a second, but something you said, have you ever read a Samuel Hughes article, Making Architecture Easy? It's terrific. It's one of my favorite articles, probably about architectural style that I've read, because he really... And just for those listening, one I would highly recommend it, Samuel Hughes, Making Architecture Easy. I think it's part of the Work in Progress platform. the very, very, very short synopsis is if you were to blast music throughout an entire city where everyone could hear that same music all the time, because architecture is actually very public, like other people interact with your house or architecture far more than you as an individual do.

Austin Tunnell

you know, because people are passing all time on that. a public thing. It's like if a city was blasting music, well, I blasting, I don't mean like so loud, but like you'd want it to be easy. You'd want it to be easy to like and generally likable and, and easy to understand. And yes, you can have the, you know, really insane music too. That's technically difficult. And a few people can really appreciate it as pieces of art. And that is you need that. You want people innovating and pioneering and artists and all of that. There's a place for that. But at the same time, the fabric of our cities or, you know, kind of that music playing and over the whole city, you want that to be accessible. And I'm like, I really like that as a way of thinking about it. There's a reason why pop music is called pop music. It's pop. It's popular. And so maybe we need a pop architecture that is not kitsch. That's not kitsch. That is not overly complex for the purpose of being complex such that It's only reachable or understandable by some esoteric few and there is I can fall prey to that as well. I mean, I You probably get asked this question a lot. I I certainly for my part do people ask me what what the most beautiful city in the world is and I can hem and haw and try to sound really smart and give you some small city of 36,000 people in Southeast Asia and say you know what I've discovered some hidden source of meaning in this place that no one else does. And to prove to you how much I know about beautiful cities, I'm going to name somewhere that you've never heard of. But the answer is probably Paris. Paris is just probably the most beautiful city in the world. Maybe Rome, right? And so there's a reason why those are the most highly trafficked tourist destinations in Western Europe. There are other destinations in Asia. I think Bangkok might have the most people. that travel there in the world. It's a great city. It's also a lot closer to China, which has the largest tourist market in the world. broadly, let's say Paris, Rome, and there are elements of cities in Southeast Asia that are widely attractive. There's a reason why people are going to these places. They're popular. So, we should try to build in a way that Samuel espouses.

Austin Tunnell

Also, I read that article in his voice and for anyone who knows Samuel, he's got just a brilliant way of speaking, very sonorous and he's, yes. I need to get him on the podcast. I've never heard him talk actually. Oh, he, yeah, he, well, there's much that can be said there. All that I'll say is that he is one of the most articulate and eloquent speakers on the built environment that we possess today. So it's well worth having him on. What he says rings out so true to me. And I think we can sometimes get lost in this project for building more beautiful cities and trying to shoot for the moon. And oftentimes what really makes a city great is the underlying fabric. It's just the foundations, like I advocate for in the book, that are sufficiently high enough. And then you have the projections beyond there. But if your foundations aren't good, it doesn't matter if you have the most beautiful structures in the world that punctuate it. No one's going to really want to spend much time in that city. Completely agree. I can keep going down this for a while, but I want to pivot to your project that we recently discussed in Kingston. I'm kind of in love with it. I think it's super cool. And it's actually really similar scale to what we're working on in Oklahoma City, Edmond, our Townsend project. Yeah. Talk about your project and how it started. what it is, where it's at. So something that you and I share and why we spend so much time talking about this and have gotten so close is because we don't just want to broadcast our message of what a better world looks like out to the world. We want to take action on that. And so this project was something that's been on my mind for a lot of time or a long time, wanting to implement the principles that I have for the world. in the world, not just to write about them. the Genesis was long story short, found some land a couple of hours away from where I grew up in a very charming 17th century Dutch city called Kingston. was originally settled by the Dutch in the 17th century, groups of people have taken it over, the English and then the Americans. And so it has this wonderful tapestry or mosaic rather,

Austin Tunnell

of buildings for more than three centuries that are peppered throughout it. And it maintains this terrific foundation that we've talked about, narrow streets, street trees, old historic buildings, a dynamism that doesn't really exist in most other cities. blown away by the existing fabric of it. By the way, it's in New York for everyone that doesn't know what is. Upstate New York, two hours north of New York City, about an hour south of Albany in the Hudson Valley. So it has so many elements that cities of any size would be envious of, much less a city of 25,000 people. And that level of, I would say... understandability where you can, it's not some sprawling and vast metropolis. There's a concentrated amount of good work in a couple of neighborhoods is something that I, I wanted to add to. Yeah. I didn't want to add a new neighborhood to the side of it. I wanted to do what we call infill housing. If anyone hears infill and doesn't know, we just want to add to the existing fabric instead of going out and doing greenfield development. And incrementally sort of broaden that base of the historic uptown neighborhood known as the stockade. So the city recently updated its zoning code with the help of our friends at Dover Cole, a planning firm based in Florida. And I was talking with Victor Dover about some of his recent work and what he was up to, mentioned that he had just updated the zoning code for Kingston. In my opinion, think it's one of the most permissive building environments anywhere in America, which is saying something because it's a blue state. It's in the heart of a blue state. Most permissive building environments are in the sunbelt in the South. And it's a lot easier to build in Oklahoma than it is in New York City, right? Or just outside of it. So that was really exciting where I didn't have to uproot my life to go somewhere that would make it easier to build.

Austin Tunnell

The basic idea from the project is, can we leverage the principles of good urbanism, good architecture, and a socially desirable outcome, in this case, affordable housing, to create a fundamentally lovely place? And that's the hope of what we'll do here. So we're building 36 or 37 units of housing in the heart of this historic city that will be walkable to a grocery store, a gym. There's a number of restaurants, bars, offices in as much as someone wants to live car free. They can absolutely do that here. Residents in this neighborhood often don't have cars. They can bike around pretty easily. There's very wide, widely available bus access. And like I it's quarters of an acre. It's on three quarters of an acre. So there's, it's not a huge site, but there's enough scale that even by building this project, you are broadening the base of walkability in the city. It becomes another block that you can walk down and explore. so the long story short, we want to build one of the best new projects in America and we want it to be as affordable as it can be based off of the construction costs, based off of relative incomes in the region. And so we're shooting for around 80 % of the units to be at 80 % of the area median income or lower. And we may well be able to do better than that, but that's currently what we're targeting. I'm going to share a little trick we use at building culture. So if you're designing a house, you have to have egress windows or egress in any bedroom, for example. And the problem with that is egress. windows are very large, especially if it's a double hung window or something like that. And because of design constraints, sometimes we want a smaller window if it's in a dormer or just for the hierarchy of the elevations. Well, a really cool trick that we use with our Sierra Pacific windows is we'll take something from their urban casement line and we'll put what's called a piano hinge on it. And so rather than kind of a normal casement that kind of slides open where only part of the window is open,

Austin Tunnell

This is almost like a door hinge. so the entire window opens and you can meet egress with a two foot by four foot window, a two four window. It's the smallest possible egress window anyone makes. And that's a nice little design trick. If you're as nerdy as I am, you will actually think that's really cool. So check out Sierra Pacific windows and if you are in the state of Oklahoma, check out one source windows and doors. We at building culture use both of them regularly. What I love about it, you when you showed me the plans is for people hearing like 36 units, three quarters of an acre, you're probably imagining an apartment building. It's not an apartment building. It's 36 kind of discrete. Like it's two story, right? Everything's two story. Yeah, so it's two story like house, almost like attached housing looking things surrounding. It's very like Hoffia houses or Dutch houses almost feeling where and they kind of surround the perimeter and then create all these inner blocks. Courtyards and it's stunning. It's amazing what you can do on three quarters of an acre people are like three quarters of an acre That's nothing you can do so much on three quarters of an acre and thankfully because I do I'm doing it more now and I've learned a lot from Tom You know, I'm getting used to looking at plans and like immediately having a rat usually like if I look at a 2d sight plan I'm kind like I don't know what I'm looking at or like don't have a reaction I'm getting the point where I actually have like immediate kind of gut reactions and emotional reactions Just like if I look at a building. I looked at this and show me I was like Like you could just immediately sense it, feel it, imagine myself there, imagine myself walking through all the little courtyards. And to be able to do this, not just in some big giant apartment building or multifamily building, like there's other ways to do infill, there's other ways to add density. I mean, you're talking about 36 units on three quarters of an acre. I mean, that's amazing. And so like what I love about it is it really is offering an alternative. Once again, I'm not against multifamily apartment buildings. I think we need those. We also need this more fine grained human scaled urbanism and urban design that you're doing. And by the way, obviously I've built it yet, but my guess is it will be very compelling. You know, like as in, as in people will, if you're comparing like, do I want to live in a big apartment building or do I want to live here? Uh, and it's a similar price there. Most people are going to choose there. And that's great if not everyone does, but I mean, So your plan is to hold it, build it, hold it, lease it up, stabilize it, cash out.

Austin Tunnell

That's right. So we're going to build this to hold it for the long term. I'm a younger guy. I want to do many projects in this region. And I want this to sort of be a template that we can show smaller cities. If you leverage a certain regulatory environment with some local grants for the production of affordable housing, here's what you can realize. We can create places that we would have thought impossible to build in the United States. You can go to the Netherlands. to Amsterdam or Utrecht or Harlem and see these exquisite and enchanting places, could we possibly have that here? The answer is yes, if we allow for a certain course of decisions to be played out. Similar to what we talked about earlier, this is sort of urban design first and architecture second. These buildings will be, I think, and thanks to Thomas's work and another architect that we're working with, Alessandro. Réun Fini at Demo Architects, fabulously beautiful. But what makes the plan compelling is the fact that there are all these intimate courtyards, these haffiats, this Dutch form of housing, so that when you're there, you feel like you're being gently being hugged. You're not in some dark courtyard that you might find in New York City where there's seven story, 10 story buildings around you and light doesn't fight its way to the ground floor. Not at all. These are one, and then we'll have a few three story buildings. That was something the city wanted a little more focus on because we'll be building on what will become a more prominent street. And so I wanted a little bit more height there. So we'll have this gradient of one to three story buildings that will feel very intimate because of the scaling of the courtyards without being overwhelming based off of the contours of some of these courtyards. where the units are being positioned, where we're putting the doors, where we're putting the windows. So at every point we are considering how can we maximize the experience of people who are living here. And then also this may be, it could be intention. I don't think it will be. We're being very considerate with how we play this out. One of the four courtyards is going to be a commercial courtyard. So we want to have a portion that attracts and invites people in off of the street.

Austin Tunnell

where you walk underneath the covered arch passageway. So very evocative, what you might find in Italy or England. And once you pass through this archway, another court slowly unveils itself to you, where there is a coffee shop, maybe a Pilates studio, maybe a wine shop. Small retail uses in three or 400 square feet of space with chairs that'll be out into this courtyard so that it becomes almost a quasi public, but it's sort of mysterious park where when you walk by, you won't really know what's going on, but it's sufficiently intriguing to pull you in. And then once you go in, we think there's going to be this real wow effect of spending time in sort of this sheltered hidden garden. So there's a lot of elements that we're playing around with here. And I think it's shaping up to be something pretty exciting. Man, it's cool. You talk about it makes me realize once again, the parallels to Townsend are even though they're very actually different projects and different feeling projects. I'm just so excited to see them both. But our project is technically a little bit over an acre, but because of the way the lot set up, it's split by an alley. So part of the lot that's across the alley is it's obviously part of the neighborhood, but it's kind of different. could say it's really just townhouses off the street. So like our main kind of like area is about three quarters of an acre. I think it might be like 36,000 square feet. And we've got on that, we've got 12 townhomes. Now these are larger, well, I say larger, I mean, they're 1200 square feet to 1600 square feet or most of them. And then we actually got a couple 2100 square feet and even like a 3000 square foot one, all in these 12. And then we've got a couple, and then we've got this kind of more commercial area where, you you've got all these beautiful courtyards and gardens there. And then you walk through to kind of a more commercial courtyard that is made up of three buildings framing this courtyard that they're all commercial and we're doing some, a little bit of boutique retail on the bottom and then kind of like a, a coworking-esque on the top. And when I say coworking, it's, it's more like private offices, but like all the heart of it is that courtyard we're gonna, we're moving our office into there, building, we're gonna move our office into there and we're gonna be able to do programming and like have just the musician coming on Friday night in that courtyard. We've got this little hundred square foot cafe. just, anyway, so excited to have like, cause it's nearby, nothing's going to be open like.

Austin Tunnell

to 11 p.m. or something like it's gonna be like really mild stuff, a real asset. But just hearing you talk about it, I'm like, wow, there's a lot of parallels, but they also look and feel so different. That's what's so cool. And different price points. Ours is pretty high end, just to be completely honest. Ours is pretty high end. And that is just is what it is. We wanna do some other stuff too, but. Absolutely, and I talk to people about this often. There can be some. level of self-censoring in, certainly in the Yimby movement, you don't want to talk too freely and openly about the prices of housing, but also I think there's a great deal of merit to building a product for a certain clientele that can vote with their dollars. And instead of living on a three acre lot, a couple miles out of town in a $5 square foot house, for them to downsize. 3,100 or 3,000 square feet may not be downsizing to a lot of people, but relatively, let's say it is. In Oklahoma, can be. In Oklahoma, it can be, right? maybe they to go in 1,200 square feet, right? And I think there's an extraordinary amount of value to having people choose this form of housing over the alternative. And that means you do have to build it out to a certain quality, but we should be building cities for everyone. They should not just be for people who are making 50 % of the median income or 100 % of the median income or 150. We don't want to segregate by class. We want these to be places that can be more widely shared. And I think with a project such as yours, if other people copy you, that's one of the chapters of my book is good artists copy, great artists steal. I hope they contract you out and you can go and build the structures. But if there's another developer down the street who goes, huh, I really like what Austin's doing there. Maybe I'll just take it. Seems to be working pretty well. And, you know, I think there's a lot to be said there for that. And maybe he's able to, or she's able to offer these homes at a lower price point and yours becomes the more exclusive variety. You see this in cities around the country.

Austin Tunnell

especially in row house or townhouse cities like Baltimore, St. Louis. I draw these distinctions in the book that the basic form of a Baltimore townhouse, there are some that are lower rise, but there are some exquisite neighborhoods that are higher rise, is not that all different from a Boston townhouse, for example. But the price variance between those two can be five times as much. What's going on there? It has to do with land values. doesn't have anything to do with the underlying architecture. You know, you could have a 2000 square foot home in St. Louis that costs $200,000 and you could have one in New York that costs 2 million or 3 million or something more than that. So it's important to keep in mind that we need to build for people across the spectrum. And the most important thing is to push this more optimistic vision of what a better city can look like so that then That is the default way of building as opposed to, you know what, if you don't, if you're making a middle-class income, you're just going to have to make do with driving an hour each way every day, as opposed to the, is becoming more unattainable lifestyle of living in a walkable community. Man, I've got such a good anecdote from this morning directly on this topic. And I will say like, it is something I'm pretty passionate about because I 100 % agree with you. We need all spectrums of housing and price points. Because when you start getting concentrated, that's when the problems can start happening. And I feel like today it's a little bit controversial to build nice housing. It's much more like cool. And I don't mean that, it's just like we want to build affordable housing, but I mean, because it's kind of got that social aspect, and if you're building nice housing, people will pretty easily crap on it. But like, so here's an example, including politicians, you know, we're putting stuff in, you know, I've got, and I'm not talking about this project particularly, but just in general, you've got city councilors or things like that. And we just need more affordable housing. And how dare you build, you know, expensive housing. like, well, what's expensive? That's relative. And it's very difficult to build affordable housing. And what's driving these costs? Of course, no one asks questions. They just, you know, want to dictate. But here's my anecdote. This morning, and I'm not going to say which city, but a city near Oklahoma City, we were presenting a Austin Tunnell (01:00:37.902) 200 acre greenfield master plan. a developer hired us to do a 200 acre master plan. We've gone through the phase one, we were kind of getting with the city very early on in the process to show the concept of it. And it's all the, it's the T and D stuff. There are some quarter acre lots actually, but then there's 800 square foot houses and 1200 square foot house and 1500 square foot house and 2000 square feet and four plexes and live work units and kind of a little village center, what we would call it with a coffee shop. all the ingredients of a T and D. And we actually, because I, I do try to speak to the audience, but it's also 100 % authentic. I'm talking about there's a wide range of housing for people from rentals and blah, blah. And yes, there's even spaces for 4,000 square of houses and the economic, not the city manager, but the, whatever you call it. was like the head of economic development for that city. He said, I really liked the concept. I get what you're talking about. However, we really need nicer housing. We've got a lot of kind of like that entry level housing you're talking about. And the problem is as a city, all the people that start making more money, they leave. And so we'll actually have people come and work out of our city. You know, they come to their jobs, whatever, and maybe they'll eat lunch there, but then there's no one there to eat dinner because all the people that have made money leave to go live in a nicer house somewhere else. And so from an economic development perspective from the city, not only for local businesses, for property taxes to keep literally the city thriving and for opportunities to come. He's like, no, desperately don't get rid of nice housing. We really need some nice housing to attract like middle income and people that are rising up the income ladder. And I just thought it was so cool. Cause he wasn't saying don't build affordable housing. He was just like, please build nice housing too. And not because he doesn't like affordable housing. It's just that he makes a very real point. We don't want to concentrate. poverty, and said, actually want people with resources staying there and building things and contributing their resources. And it reminds me of another project near downtown Oklahoma City in this historic black area of town. And one of the guys that I've been working with on it, he grew up in the community, black guy, and he talks about like one of the most important things is we need great housing. We also need Austin Tunnell (01:02:50.314) the lowest level, like entry level housing, and we need great housing because what's happened to this black community is the moment people started doing well, what did they do? They left. They moved across town. They took up all their resources, their example, their network, and they moved across town because there's no that they want to live there. And so he really talks about, which is pretty controversial in some ways, but like we actually really want great houses. And then we also want the entry level house. like, that is so important. I wish more people talked about that. It's really important. There's been A lot of, there's some research that I include in the book to this point, but you don't want neighbors that are concentrated privilege or concentrated impoverishment. it's unfortunately become this fiber end issue and it really shouldn't be. The message is we want strong communities where everybody can feel a part of them. And unfortunately, the national consciousness has sort of selectively decided who we should build for. Now, there's very, you won't find many people struggling to build for the highest classes, right? There will always be builders there in some communities, but where are you building that really matters? Do you want those people to be in the heart of town or do want them to be segregated away, taking the resources, shopping in their exclusive shopping malls or strip malls or whatever it might be? Of course not. people who are making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year to be rubbing shoulders with people making 10, 20, $30,000 a year. There is a... extraordinary amount of research showing that the way to mobilize the most impoverished and marginalized members of society is to move them into mixed income neighborhoods so that they have a better station of role model. That's not to say that people who are in their neighborhoods are not worthy of being role models, but if you're in a neighborhood that has 40 or 50 % rates of poverty and increasingly there is a higher share of Austin Tunnell (01:04:58.19) highly impoverished or highly prosperous neighborhoods, chances are you're not going to meet someone who is a professor or a doctor or an accountant or a lawyer or any of these trades that could help somebody mobilize themselves up from impoverishment. And that's really important. It's not to say that the only way to find meaning and value in life is to be an accountant. Far be it for me to say that as you well know. But I think there is... It is important to say that this pathway needs to be shown to people so that there are more career opportunities than just working in retail or working in, let's say, heavy manufacturing. It's great that those pathways exist. There are people for whom that makes sense and they want to orient their lives in that way, but we need to have that optionality of choice. And you can't reasonably say that one has any level of optionality if they aren't aware of these different paths. that's sort of, it's a human development argument. It is an economic development argument and it's a city development argument. If you only had homogenous trapped homes in one community, how could you reasonably say that you want to live in a townhouse or an apartment? You don't know what it would look like in that community, but if you did see a couple of them, maybe that option presents itself and opens itself up to you. It's the same exact way in cities. So I would like to see it. Maybe this conversation is a very small part of that. People pushing back on the segregationists, whether it's class or racial or any way to say, you know what, it's okay to build for certain sets of the market. It's okay to focus on middle, upper middle, lower, what have you. But there has to be a place for all these people in the same community. get really disproportionately poor outcomes. We only focus on one or two groups. the story that is often told is, you know, we're only building for rich people here. But the other side of that coin, which is not what you're saying here, directly, it is indirectly what you're saying, is if the wealth moves out of a neighborhood, you're only going to be building for the most marginalized. And while they do need homes, we know empirically that those neighborhoods struggle. And the people who are not able to mobilize themselves out of that, Austin Tunnell (01:07:25.901) can become trapped in place. There's this terrific book from Professor Patrick Sharkey called Trapped in Place of the same title. Raj Chetty has formed excellent research on this as well. And some of that is featured in the book that there are few things that could be more important than creating truly pluralistic, integrated, along class and race lines, neighborhoods. And there has been an unfortunate cultural and societal pushback over the last few years. I think it's incumbent upon people in a position to do something about or say something about it that we want that pluralistic and integrated society and that it's okay to fight for that. I really think so. And I like it because you're bringing it back to the human element of just the built world is the human habitat. I was just in this conversation yesterday with a guy, a friend who was kind of thinking about kind of changing jobs. He's like, it's pretty depressing just looking on indeed.com and you know, whatever zip recruiter.com looking for jobs. Cause it's kind of like, you know, it's really hard to find anything. Like you don't even know what it is and all that. And so he's like, I just wanted to meet up. starting to talk to people just to basically network and see there's any ideas and get ideas. And I was like, that's a hundred percent the way to do it because relationships. is where most opportunities come from. That does not mean things are not a meritocracy in America or that I'm against a meritocracy. I'm just telling you from personal experience in my life, most of my opportunities have come from meeting someone, almost all of them. And those could have been random. One of them is because I moved into a rental house when I was dirt poor. And the guy that owned the main house was quite wealthy. And guess what? He ended up investing in building culture. That's lucky. You know what I mean? don't... you need the opportunities to run into those relationships of people that can help you where you say, Hey, I'm looking for something and they can go, Hey, I've got an opportunity over here. I know something. Cause that's where, you know, people that move up the income ladder, they tend to have relationships to other people that have opportunities and present those opportunities. And if you don't have access to those relationships, well, you don't have access to economic climbing the economic ladder. And it's not because it's a, I'm not saying there's not racism left in the country and places, but that's not like in Austin Tunnell (01:09:44.503) that's really not a racial thing. think it's more of like a class thing and then a segregation thing based on how we're building and then exacerbates these issues. And I get why people are upset, in many ways, I think the wrong thing is being focused on in those areas. One thing I will say here though is because sometimes I'll say stuff like this on occasional on social media, you know, about urban and people come back to like, yes, but it has to be safe, you know, and I actually completely agree like, Everyone wants to be safe. Every neighborhood should be safe. Mixing incomes does not mean it's not safe. At the same time, there's so many examples of not well-to-do neighborhoods at the lowest kind of margins, and then they are not safe. But that doesn't mean it's because, you know, there's many reasons for that. But that is one thing I think is really important with all this kind of like urbanism talk and people living together and all that. And there is a sense of like actual community to that. and safety and things like that is actually like very, very important to build societal trust. Yeah. So I completely agree. I'll say two quick things there. To your former point, you need to cultivate the conditions where serendipity can manifest. we often will say, I bumped into Joanne on the street and she gave me a job. Why did you bump into Joanne? It's because you were both going to the grocery store and you had a meeting at three o'clock, but you had 10 minutes to spare. And instead of driving or getting in your car and driving 20 minutes away, you only live to walk away so you can go there. So you need to, you have that fabric that is felicitous and well suited towards those moments of serendipity. It's very difficult to have that happen in a homogenous Euclidean zoned and sprawling neighborhood. So that's the first point. The second is a controversial point that shouldn't be controversial at all. You didn't say it in these words, but it's the basic sentiment. People will rail against any level of improvement in a less well-off neighborhood as gentrification. And I understand the fears that change will bring into a neighborhood. And displacement is a very real fear that we should protect against. But improving a neighborhood Austin Tunnell (01:12:12.373) in the abstract and then with specific interventions is not anything that should be feared. It should be welcomed with open arms. If you live in a food desert and a grocery store opens up, that's a good thing. That's not gentrification. If you live in a neighborhood that's unsafe and the city installs street lamps so that crime is deterred by more light being brought to the street and people can't hide in dark corners, that's a good thing. It protects the people in that neighborhood more than anybody else. It's not about making this a more pleasant place for someone wealthy to come stroll at night. It's fundamentally about improving the conditions of life for all. these can be pretty thorny subjects, but I think when people express concern, let's say your notion of concern about safety, what do they really mean? There are people who may in bad faith are using safety as some thin veil for some other concern. And that's unacceptable, of course. It's not worth having a conversation if that becomes a guise for race or class or religion or someone who doesn't look like you and you don't want them in your community. But they could also mean that they just want to be able to walk home without being at risk of having their backpack stolen from them or feeling any level of anxiety. And let's take those concerns honestly and sincerely. And similarly to the gentrification point, people are concerned about gentrification, what do they mean? They likely mean they're concerned about being forced out of their neighborhood. They're concerned that the culture and identity that has been cultivated will be lost. Okay, that's a very different story than opposing any level of change on its surface. So how do we protect against these things in the abstract? Well, let's figure out how we can get housing vouchers to people who need them, right? Instead of effectuating rent control, which has been proven, you know, this is something that economists nearly unilaterally agree on, which is a very difficult thing to get economists on both sides of the political spectrum to agree on, is that rent control is not a good idea. It disincentivizes development. It leads to landlords not improving their structures. And these impacts disproportionately negatively impact or affect the most marginalized. That's not a good policy as far as I'm concerned. I want to make sure that whether you're making $20,000 a year or $2 million a year, Austin Tunnell (01:14:37.411) You have safe and stable housing. So how do we most effectively deal with the concerns that people are facing? Let's dive into a little bit. Let's talk to them. Let's not presume that we know the best. This is something that we've done for quite some time in city building. And it's led to all manner of poor outcomes because it suddenly becomes the fancies and whims of one person applying them on thousands of others. We need to have a city that's shaped as Daniel Harrages mentions in a lot of his writing, shaped by many hands so that it becomes reflective of those people, but without descending into a level of stasis that privileges the few. So, of that. I think that's really well said. I think there real issues that we do have to kind of engage with and address. And like you said, you do risk offending people on these things, but like some of this stuff really needs to be. talked about in more circles. You know what's more offensive than hurting someone's feelings? Not having fresh vegetables. I mean, that's bad. know a food desert, there's a food desert in Oklahoma City, a grocery store opened up there and everyone was so excited. Is this one closing down? It's doing so poorly that it might close down because of kind of things we just talked about, both safety and crime and theft, and then there are not, there's not enough diversity of income to support. the actual grocery store and guess what, it's gonna go back to food desert, which is really sad. Boy, we could talk for a long time. Because I could go, we could pull Joe Rogan and go for three hours easily. Let's end with a little bit of just what we've kind of been talking about lately together off the podcast. You want to kind of give that teaser you're better at it than I am. Yeah, I hope I can express it in the way that I talked about earlier today. So There is a group of kidded spirits in the built environment and for developers, but you we certainly have aligned values with architects and planners and public officials who want to create the better, the sort of world that we've described on the podcast here that you've spoken about, that I've written about. and I think there's an opportunity for us to join forces in some respects. Austin Tunnell (01:16:58.787) to broaden the impact and create a larger surface area for where that impact can be directed. What I mean by that is it's very difficult for small developers on their own to be able to attract capital, attract resources, and political will to be able to create the sorts of communities that we all want more of. If we want to see that beautiful new duplex rise in a neighborhood, a lender would much rather land on a 200 unit building than that small duplex, right? In the current setup, there are not very many places that that small developer can go. I've been beating this drum for the better part of a year now that we need to broaden up financing channels for small developers to create more idiosyncratic and intriguing neighborhoods. The answer that I previously had, which I still think is a good one, is let's see if we can get dedicated financing from a series of like-minded sponsors or lenders and direct those funds where they should ultimately go. But it's still very difficult. If someone only needs a $500,000 loan or a $2 million loan, they're just not going to compete well against someone who needs a $200 million loan. But if you can link together some of those smaller developers under a shared banner of building a better built environment or creating a better built environment, now suddenly it's not one $500,000 loan, it's several, or it's a couple $2 million loans or $3 million loan. And you can walk underneath that banner with people who have that shared mission and bring more attention to the work that you're doing that you might not be able to receive on your own and form this coalition of practitioners who want to take action upon all the things that we've discussed here. And historically that's been very difficult to do. So I think, you know, going at it alone. So I think the solution could perhaps be doing it together. Yeah. Well said. Austin Tunnell (01:19:24.851) I'll just say one thing on this. I really think there's an opportunity here too. And this is just kind of layering onto what you said is a lot of these projects, these more difficult projects have what you call idiosyncratic neighborhoods and stuff like that, just more human-scale neighborhoods. They're very difficult to pull off for many reasons because of all the rules and all the obstacles in the way. then financing is the ultimate barrier. And it's very, very, very difficult to raise the money and then also to get the debt financing to do it, as you said. And what's unfortunate, and I've experienced this myself, like personal experience, and I've observed this everywhere else too, is these types of neighborhoods and developments, whether it's a three quarter acre or a thousand acres, know, T &D or something, those places tend to create the most value over time. But day one, they're not the most valuable. It takes time to grow into like how valuable it is. And if you're like on this timeline of I need a five to seven year exit and a 20 % IRR and I've got an 8 % preff clock or something in front of me, it could be very difficult to pull off some of these projects. I'm even talking about infill and stuff too in particular. And you know, something, one of the things we've talked about is Moses Kagan and his idea of, and he applies this to multifamily value and multifamily, this idea of the indefinite hold. And he's like, I can't remember exactly what it says on his Twitter profile, but it's like, we, we do what families have been doing throughout history. We buy quality assets and supply-constrained markets. We leverage them conservatively, steward them well, and we hold them definitely. And he literally won't tell his investors in IRR. He's like, nope, not gonna tell you that, because that's based on guessing what a cap rate and an interest rate is gonna be in seven years. No way I'm doing that. I'm telling you, here's the project, here's why I think it's good, and here's why I think it's gonna grow in value. And I got excited by that perspective, because I'm like, I think this could be a perspective we can bring to these more like, these TND developments because if you actually are finding investors that take a longer term perspective, a 10, 15, 20, or even longer perspective, like especially family offices, I think there's also opportunity there for building these legacy assets and then holding them indefinitely where you can take tax-free distributions. Because one of his points is, it's great if you're exiting in five to seven years and you've got a 25 % pre-tax IRR if you are a pension fund or Austin Tunnell (01:21:46.187) You are an endowment that doesn't pay taxes, but if you're an individual that gets passed through to you and you're going to pay taxes on that based on your income bracket. And so like your post-tax IRR is going to be way less. So if you actually hold indefinitely and you're getting the cash flow, you're getting the depreciation as it appreciates, maybe cap rates compress one year after 10 years and you refinance, you can cash out some, get some of your cash out, return that to investors. completely tax free and then keep holding the asset and keep cash flowing the asset. And once again, I love his, and it aligns incentives too, because you're also, I love that he says, stewarding it well. Because it's not just like, let me extract as much of my cane and get out of this in seven years. We're holding this for the long term. And so he actually thinks about it differently. His remodels are better and better quality because he's going to hold it long term. And that was kind of long, but I kind of get excited about layering on that aspect to what we're talking about. And I've got Moses coming on the podcast in January, so I'm excited about that. I'm going to kind of... try to talk about some of this stuff about applying this to ground up and what he thinks and all that. So it's, it's so well synthesized by Moses. And I think there is an opportunity for us to what I call pull the capital stack towards where we want it to go. I think for a lot of development there is, I've been guilty of this in the past. There's been an assumption that this is what investors want to see. So I'm going to give it to them. If I want to go raise money, I have to do a five year hold. I have to try to deliver 20 % IRR. I have to give an eight to a 12 % pref. But if you phrase it a little differently, it's say, we want to build some of the best new housing in America. We're going to do it in disparate markets. So you have a diversified hedge to one individual market. We're going to hold this for the long term because of the quality of the housing or the community, whatever it ends up being. We believe we're going to get above market returns or we'll be able to increase the value of the land, either on our property, surrounding it, perhaps there's options, there's different things to talk through there. And you can put your name behind that and say, we ex-partner support the best new housing in America, look at our projects, that's going to want to make other sponsors work for you. Because ultimately, if you're a capital allocator, your job is putting money in the right places. And if you want to make your job easier, support people who are going to return you more funds, but also Austin Tunnell (01:24:09.709) that you don't have to turn that money around every three years, every five years, every seven years. If you allocate once for 10, 15, 20 years, you can collect your dividends four times a year, twice a year, once a year, whatever the distribution schedule is, and take pride knowing that you're doing well by whoever your beneficiaries are, and you're doing well by the communities. the, obviously a lot more that can be said there. I've written about this in the book. I wrote about this on Noah Smith's, you platform a couple of months ago, if we want to see a better built environment, it starts by attracting the right capital. And I think that capital just hasn't been told the right story. And if we provide them that better story of how they can more effectively be stewards of a built environment, we will see extraordinary change. And this unfortunately is the last bit of conversation that urbanists or advocates miss. we can pass the best zoning code reform, building code reform, land use regulation reform that we can imagine. If we don't have the right financing, nothing of the caliber that we want to get built is going to get built. So it's incumbent on us to create the conditions for Cabo, but feel more comfortable with that and understand the games that they need to be playing and make them work for us. Well said. Well, stay tuned guys, because we will, I don't know, make announcements whenever we make announcements. I don't know when. or keep you updated. Koby, so you're on X, you're on Substack, your book, building optimism. Anywhere else people can find you or follow you. That's what it looks like. There we go. No, that's great. X is great. My email is kobylefko at gmail.com. It's open to the public. wants to email me, please do. know. I put it out. mean, look. If someone wants to find it, it's out there anyway. So I might as well broadcast it for those people who have some degree of good faith and want to continue these conversations. So yeah, please, if you are interested in whether you're a small developer in a small town who wants to figure out how to get started, or you're someone who wants to help support a better built environment, reach out to me. I won't. Austin Tunnell (01:26:30.243) Solicit, know or give Austin's email maybe on the side you can reach out to him You can reach out the playbook at building culture.com I do actually check that it's just I can't my I get 50 to 100 emails a day that I already have to navigate. Yeah Oh, yeah. Yeah, totally And yeah, you know get the book it would mean the world to me I think a lot of that what we discussed today if if that resonated with you You'll see more of it in the book and there's a lot of pretty pictures that show people Christmas present you it's a great Christmas present, know Or you get receipts from Amazon, let's say Santa left them in your stocking and you didn't love one of the books that you got, this is a good replacement. Well, Koby, it's been great having you on. Love catching up and talking to you again. And we'll talk to you, have you on here again, but we're about to have another call together. So which we're late for, by the way. Thanks so much, All right. Awesome. Thank you, man. If you've been enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe and share with your friends. And if you're listening on Apple or Spotify, please leave us a five star review and take a screenshot, send it to playbook at building culture.com. And when we reach a hundred reviews, I'm going to send out a 10 building culture hats, like up there behind my head. If you're watching video and I'll send it to your house. Thanks so much for listening and catch you on the next episode.