â đď¸ Local Real Estate Developers
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- [00:00]
A
This is the Local Real Estate Developer Podcast where we share the stories of locals across the country who took that empty lot or that old building and turned it into something awesome that their community needs. I'm Christy Candle and I've been a real estate developer my entire career. My co host Rafael is a commercial broker and together we're sharing the stories of locals making a huge impact on their communities. And what we've learned is you don't need millions in the bank or decades of experience to get started. You just need the confidence, tools and the right people around you. This podcast podcast is your chance to gain the confidence to get in the game. Because real estate development isn't just for the insiders anymore. It's for people like you too.
- [00:42]
B
Welcome to the Local Real Estate Developer Podcast. I'm your co host, Rafaquezo and I'm a developer located here in Louisville, Kentucky. It's always great to be here with my co host, Christy Candle. How's it been?
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A
Hey, it's been great and I'm very excited to come visit you soon in Louisville when it's not just a few weeks zero degrees outside. Yeah, yeah, we are. We're in the final phases of planning for the first local real estate developer meetup which is happening August 27th through the 29th. It's going to be amazing. We're going to have in all sorts of developers across the country. We've got other speaking and on developer panels, we've got local city panelists. It's going to be awesome. The more we put this together, I just get so fired up. So very excited about that. And yep. So for our audience, I'm a developer, I'm in southwest Florida and I not only have done real estate development for 20 years, but I also teach locals how to do it. And I'm working on creating Elevate Southwest Florida, which is a 20 acre sports and wellness destination which is creating one of those missing third places in our community. So lots of, lots of fun stuff going on. So always, always great to see you, Rafael. I can't wait to see you in
- [01:51]
B
person and yeah, yeah, no, we're really excited. So it'll be a great event for sure.
- [01:57]
A
Yeah. So today's guest I actually found while again stalking the social media, this time on LinkedIn and I'm always looking for people who put some thought provoking, forward thinking things out there and he, he definitely did that and he's got quite the, the background and, and interesting story to tell. So Rick, welcome to the show.
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C
Wonderful. Thank you so much. And, and thanks for having me. And as a matter of fact, I. I'll have to tell you, because I started my business Ash and Lime in Louisville.
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B
Oh, nice. That's great.
- [02:28]
C
At a spe. At a special event. So, yeah, so basically my firm is called Ash and Lime. People who sometimes hear that go, are you a. Are the ingredients of Roman concrete? Basically. So if you look at that, those are ingredients that have stood the test of time over centuries in creating enduring places. So this was kind of a wisdom that we had that have created places that. That we know work that. That we know that these techniques are timeless. And similarly, my firm is a planning firm that was started in. In Louisville, as I'll tell you, back in 2003. And it's really about the idea of what are the principles of whether it's planning, whether it's development, whether it's business development, that have really stood the test of time that we can go back either in this country or in other countries and see that they work. So I can tell you a little bit more about that, but that's kind of what I do. And the firm that I've been doing for the last 13 years.
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A
Well, can you also maybe give a little bit of background before that and kind of on yourself and how you even got interested into real estate and development in the first place?
- [03:39]
C
Sure. So I've been interested in how cities work my entire life. I have. I happen to have been someone who had a very unusual background, especially for an American, Having lived in the Hyde Park Square neighborhood of Cincinnati as a little kid and been used to the idea of, you know, in the early 80s, going off and walking off on your own and getting ice cream and going to the store and having relationships with all of the store owners and the neighbors and things like that. Ended up living in Chicago. And even as a young child living in the high rises, I lived in Presidential Towers, which was then the tallest high rise in the world, residential high rise in the world, and then essentially ended up living in a bunch of different places that were very walkable. And always throughout my entire life, most of my life, I've lived in sort of the most, what we might call walkable urban place that I could find. And I've been very attracted to third places my entire life. I also, from even my teenage years and my young adult years, you know, if I looked at a warehouse that was not being used, I would say, hey, wouldn't it be interesting if you had artists coming in here? Wouldn't it be interesting if this were some sort of shared office space. This is always the way that I thought. And sort of these types of places were very much natural for me. They were very native for me. So when I. When I went to University of Cincinnati, I graduated with a sociology degree and very little sense of where my life was going or what I was going to be doing. I ended up doing a few other businesses. My ex wife had a title search company. I ended up doing title searches and selling our services. I started a newspaper, did some sales jobs and things like that without having a lot of a sense of direction. At one point I was sitting in a car with my mother, my stepfather and my wife at the time, and we were talking about, you know, what maybe could I do that I'd be feeling a little bit better for? And Doug said, you know, have you thought of being an urban planner? And the car went dead silent. It was like all four of the people in the car knew what he was saying was right. And the funny thing is he said this 20 years ago. And I've never, having spent my whole kind of younger life than that, very directionless about careers. I've never looked back since then. I've never had a doubt of it since then. It was very clearly I felt what I was supposed to do. And it's very much what I've lived in my entire life. So I just have so much of a database of experience, so to speak, from this that it's very natural for me to be in this profession, if that makes sense. And as I've spent 20 years in this profession studying it, practicing, and then having my own practice, you know, it's. It's just been something that I've immersed myself in and that as I've gone forward, it's. I've seen how it ties to all of these different disciplines tied together, that the planning stuff that I was doing is not separate from real estate, it's not separate from economic development, it's not separate from community outreach, that these things all tie together and that they work because all of these things are working in conjunction with each other. So the way that I think doesn't necessarily separate these into different disciplines because they're all kind of part of the same thing to me. So I kind of learned think of like, what do we actually need to do practically to make things work? And once you start asking that question, all of these fields come together, if that makes sense.
- [07:15]
B
Absolutely. And you know, going back to that day, 20 years, 20 years ago, what was the progression from that day to Actually getting into what you're doing today, was there a period of time where you had to go back to school? And also, you know, once you. If you did have to go, like, at that point, was it getting a job in a setting that. That kind of where you could hone that craft, or did you just from day one, jump out and do your own thing? I'd be kind of curious to hear that. Evolution.
- [07:46]
C
Yeah. So I went to grad school at University of Illinois, Chicago. And by the way, I'd add this one thing. When going through my background. For people who are 50 years old, this is kind of maybe the cutoff point where this is almost not unheard of. From first grade through finishing grad school, walking or taking transit was my primary mode to school the entire time. Now it does include three years of military boarding school. But still, you know, that. That was my entire experience. So. But I decided to go to grad school. And when I went to grad school, I had wonderful consulting opportunities, wonderful internships. I had. I did an internship at the American Planning Association Planning Advisory Service I ended up working with, which was headquartered in Chicago at the time the Congress for the New Urbanism was headquartered in Chicago. I did some work for them. I worked for this group, you know, center for Neighborhood Technology, which is best known for the Housing and Transportation Affordability Index. And. But I graduated in 2009. So that took me to Fort Worth, which was where I could find a job. And the job and kind of the. The whole thing was outside of my comfort zone. Probably if the economy had been really strong, I would have stayed in Chicago, and I would be far, far worse of a planner if I had stayed in Chicago and kept working for think tanks and not thrown into a place that was outside of what I had understood to be my natural habitat at the time. So I ended up working in the city of Fort Worth. I actually ended up doing kind of a specialized role with the police department, largely around crime prevention through environmental design, as well as pedestrian and bicycle safety. So that was a very interesting experience. But when I went to Fort Worth, I was spending a lot of time in Dallas and all over the region. And I met people who had very radically different ways of looking at how to plan and how to make places better. You know, I started meeting these people who had these ideas about incrementalism and about focusing on what you actually have and tactical urbanism and, you know, like, what. You know, meeting the better block people. Like, what are the next things that you can do with what you actually have what's actually there, and how do you make a move right now? I was in Fort Worth. There was this place, Ray street, which was way under the radar than in Fort Worth. You had to be a specialist and kind of squint your eyes to see the level of opportunity that there was in Ray street at the time for it to be something that had more local businesses and was more vibrant and so forth. So we did. If any of you are familiar with this group, the better block. This is an organization that started about a mile from where I am right now. They did what you might call demonstration project, where if you have a street, you know, you. You're literally filling in storefronts. You're borrowing trees to be street trees. You're painting bike lanes. It looks like both of you are familiar with that. And so we did one of those in Fort Worth, in the Riverside neighborhood, while I was working for the city. And the first thing that we did was a neighborhood cleanup. And if you looked at the neighborhood after the cleanup, it was like, this looks completely different. And I'm sitting here, I'm realizing I've read all these books. I have this master's degree. I've met all these really smart people. Never once in anything I've read did anybody say, hey, maybe the first thing you should do is, if there's trash on the sidewalk, clean it up. And it was completely transformative. And so I started not only locally, but nationally, thinking very, very different about my profession and thinking very much like, my job isn't to make something in theory, my job is to actually make something happen. Like, if something doesn't happen, then why did you hire me? Right. I started for. I've gone to. I think I figured out 10 or 11 Congress for the new urbanisms. I started going in 2011, and I started meeting some younger people, generally within the CNU then, who had very similar ideas. And then I also went to cnu. There was this guy who was kind of unknown at the time, named Chuck Marone, who had these ideas about this Strong Towns thing, which turned out to be the same principles that we're talking about, right? And these were very embryonic at the time. But I saw him develop from kind of going from asking some engineering and fiscal questions to developing this very comprehensive philosophy that was on the same lines. I started working, working with this, you know, gentleman, Monty Anderson, who I met actually, in Florida at one of the cnus. But he was here in our area and saw him. I was at this first thing back in 2015 that was called the Incremental Development Alliance. That was the first one in Duncanville, Texas. And this became a national thing. So I ended up connecting. Yeah.
- [12:47]
A
Just to pause real quick and double click on that. You just mentioned at least three groups here that are trying to do similar things across the country that we've talked with. We've. We've had better block on the pod. We've. We've talked with incremental development and strong towns. They haven't been on the pod yet. And then, you know. So as part of these groups, what is a. Like, if you had to summarize what they're trying to do and the impact they're trying to make, how would you. Because they're all doing really great things in the industry.
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C
If I had to summarize it in one word or one sentence, I should say it's do what you can with the resources you have.
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A
Yep.
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C
And start with what you have. Figure out what's there, take the next step. And that. That's. We had. I came up with several principles when we started this firm 13 years ago, but the first one was that. And I, you know, I find that the principles are still the same. And what's happened is we've become what I might call too clever by half. We've, you know, we have all of these very complicated ways of looking at places that even in places where you wouldn't expect it, you would think that if you were in a town of 3,000 people in rural Texas, that it wouldn't work that way. The system is set up to work that way. No matter what scale of place you're in. It's set up so that the person who owns a store that's been in town for 60 years is less important than the massive company that comes in from out of town and wants to build something on the fringes. Right. Like your chances of getting a subsidy if you're a local coffeehouse downtown versus if you're a Starbucks out by the highway. The local company is ignored, whatever it might be doing. For the most part, our systems are not scaled to that. Similarly, our systems are scaled to what we might call silver bullet projects. That's everything that's incentivized and that goes on all scales. So what's very hard is to do the work of saying what's actually there. What can we do that doesn't necessarily cost a million dollars or 10 million or 100 million, depending on the scale of your town, but what can we do actually right now with the resources that we really Have. And that's a very radical idea. And, you know, I think that, honestly, if I'd been Spain the last 13 years trying to tell cities, here's a great way that you can spend $10 million or $50 million, rather than, here's a great way that we can leverage $300,000, I'd probably be a much wealthier person. It'd probably be easier for me to get business because it would be taken more seriously than to say, you actually have great people here. You have great businesses, you have great spaces. You have a place that's worth fighting for already. The stuff at the edge of town, you know, maybe take its tax base, but that's not worth fighting for. What you have as a community here, no matter what your town is, is worth fighting for, and it's worth being proud of. That's a very radical message. Yeah, unfortunately.
- [15:50]
B
Well, I appreciate the context there, because I think there's a lot of people that. That have this grandiose idea of things they want to see in a. In a community as an example, and that's good to have. But I also think it's important to start incrementally and say, okay, well, yes, that's the big, hairy, audacious goal, but how do we get to point A, and then we can get to point B, and eventually things start. Begin to compound and momentum builds, because otherwise there's a lot of people that would essentially look at the problem, see this large gap between where they want to get to, and they say, you know, maybe it's just not feasible for what we want, what we need to accomplish. And so I think it's important that you're sharing what you are because you realize that it doesn't. It takes community effort, but it doesn't necessarily. You don't necessarily need an unlimited amount of resources to just get your foot into the door of making progress.
- [16:46]
C
I like that. Here's maybe how I would even add to that. The ends that we have in mind are way too small. The goals that we have generally are too small, and the means are too big. Right. So, for example, it's like I should. I probably. People are probably bored of hearing about the convention center in Dallas, but I have to talk about it because I office so close to there for so many years, and it's such a source of frustration. So if you've listened to a few of my interviews and you've heard me talk about the convention center too many times, apologies, but I can't help but think about it, because I would Think about it. Every day, you know, we have a more than billion dollar convention cent, we're going to make it into a multi billion dollar convention center in Dallas, right? And if you look at, and what people say in defense of it is if you look at the way the policies are set in the state, it encourages this type of behavior, right? Just if you look at the way that we have hotel occupancy taxes, what it doesn't encourage is local development. What it encourages is let's blow a huge amount of money on a stadium or convention center, right? So these are, these are systems that are meant to make us act in a way that may not be in our best interest and unintentionally, but we're taking this massive convention center and it's like we're going to spend these many billions of dollars. So our ends, our means are grandiose. But what you don't hear from the leadership is we are going to make a downtown that's so special that when people visit it, they will have experiences that they'll tell their grandchildren about. They're not saying we are going to create something that someone will come, will walk through downtown Dallas, a young person, and will say, I have to live in Dallas. This place is wonderful. We're setting our ambitions extremely low and we've confused this silver bullet nonsense with actually setting something. And it's like, you know what if you, you know, I've been in a small town where I was part of a pop up, right? Like a one day pop up, you take some vacant storefronts, underutilized storefronts, and you put some businesses in them temporarily. And people are like, this doesn't feel like an event. This feels like the way this city felt 40 years ago. You've brought back my childhood when this place was meaningful, when this place was special. So the means to this was just a pop up, right? Just filling in empty storefronts. But the end was, oh my gosh, this isn't an event. This is what our downtown should be. This is the experience that it should provide for people. So I think that, and it's taken me a long time to articulate that because I think that when I first started talking about incrementalism, what people, the way that people sometimes felt, even people who were not necessarily profoundly misguided, right, who kind of got it, it was even like, you're focusing on the cute little things and we're going to focus on the big things. So they might even kind of get it. But it's like oh, yeah, they do the cute stuff and that's nice, but the big, important stuff will leave up to the adults. And it's like, no, you're not being the adults. You're not actually setting a goal to create something that. That people are going to want to invest in, that people are going to want to visit, that people are going to love, that people are going to care about, and that maybe even your town of 5,000 people is going to be somewhere where people say, yeah, I'm going to graduate college, but after it, I'm coming back here because this is a place I'm proud of, I love, and that is worth fighting for. So that's kind of the distinction I would make, is that we're trying, we're working on. You set your ends to be spectacular, but the means to that ends might be. Let's make this a place where every Saturday night we have something good enough going on in this lawn that we have over here. It's not even a park yet, it's a lawn, but we have something good enough going on that the locals are going to want to hang out here at night and see a movie and see a concert. And when people come visit, they'll be like, oh, gosh, this is like a real small town. Like, everybody seems to know each other. The locals are hanging out here.
- [21:00]
A
That's distinct and they're accepting. Hey, can we chat for a second? Since you're listening to this podcast, you're already thinking like a developer. You see the potential in your community and you're ready to do more than just watch from the sidelines. That's exactly why we created the Local Developer Vault. It's a free resource full of tools, templates, and trainings to help you take action. And here's the best part. When you sign up, you'll also get access to our local real estate developer community. It's full of people just like you who are making real things happen in their neighborhoods. So don't just listen to the stories. Become the next one that we. We spotlight on our show. The link in the show notes to unlock the vault and join our movement of us to come in too. Because they're happy, they're whole. Because a lot of times tourists get the, I guess, the love and the extra attention and it's like, but if your locals are happy and healthy, they're going to be warm and welcoming and want to share their community and share their culture and what's there with them.
- [21:55]
C
There's. There's a guy named Jeff Siegler who. I'm sure the two of you are at least somewhat familiar with who, but if not, you should be. He's. He's been a huge influence on me. But he has a book called you'd city is sick. And one of the chapters is your city has a side piece. It's like you're not focused on who you should actually be loving. You're focused on the tourists, and you don't actually care about the locals who are whom you're supposed to be loyal to. So my father and stepmother had a place in a town called Petersburg, Illinois. And Petersburg was. It's about a half hour or so from Springfield. I mean, it's a few miles away from where Abraham Lincoln had. You know, he had like. They had like, this old village of where Abraham Lincoln had, like, a log cabin that he used to live in. So it attracts people from all over the state. And some people were wondering, could Petersburg get some of these visitors? And Petersburg, you know, they would keep basically saying, we don't want the visitors. We don't want to be Galena. Right? And so kind of superficially, people would say, well, you don't have that. You know, you don't have the bones that Galena has. You're not. And, you know, you. You kind of got this response which I figured out was very insulting, which was kind of like, well, you should wish you were Galena. Right? Because they weren't listening to. They weren't. What was underneath that wasn't. We don't want to be this. This, you know, place that has world class. You know, Galena used to be larger than Chicago, Right? Like, you can feel that as you're walking through. It was the first place they had a train to. But it was like, no. What they're articulating is if revitalization of this place means that we're going to be a place that sells dresses and fudge to tourists. We'd rather have half of Main street be empty, right? Like, we'd rather have half of Main street be empty. And so if you're catering to the locals first, that's actually going to be the soul of the place. It's not going to be enough to fill up three blocks of storefronts that. That were, you know, that had more of an economic purpose 130 years ago, right? You need the tourists to come in, but you serve the locals first. You have a place that the locals love, and the locals will be proud of, and then the tourists will largely come because of that. There's a reason why you have the Hallmark movies that talk about these, you know, that these small towns that they really have, they depict a relationship not only between people, physically between people in physical space, between people on a main street that's essentially no longer exists the way that it did many decades ago. Right. It's like, bring that back. Everybody wants to go to a place where they see that the locals care, the locals love it. And if you're, you know, in a place where it's like there's a lot of places where if you show movies at night or if you have a band come at night, people are going to show up, the locals are going to show up and you haven't done anything that's super expensive and it'll help to support the businesses, but it'll bring authenticity and life to the place. You can have an economic, a very economically successful place if you bring in the tourists, but it's going to feel soulless, it's going to feel sterile. The locals are going to make sure that it actually is a real place that has a soul.
- [25:14]
B
Yeah, yeah. The qualitative versus quantitative analysis, which I feel like a lot of times people don't really consider. I think we've gotten to a point in a lot of cases where we just look at, hey, you know, how much revenue are we going to generate from this particular opportunity? Which is important piece of the puzzle when it comes to any type of project. But that shouldn't be the sole focus. It should also be something where you. It's a tapestry. Right. You have to factor in all types of things into any of the analysis. And frankly, the most important piece, especially for these types of projects is how is it going to serve the residents of the community that we're in? Because, you know, to your point about the Dallas, you know, Convention center, I mean, granted, I'm sure that those investments will maybe deliver a couple hundred thousand more square feet and maybe you can now extrapolate that out and say, well, how many different conventions can we actually get to come here and everything? Which is fine. But you know, if that is, if that's, if that funds could have been used to your point, make the downtown more approachable and more attractive to people who are actively living there. Maybe there's a brand new wave of different types of tourists that come there that could maybe make. Fill the gap between what they were planning to accomplish with expansion of the convention center through just people that actively want to come to Dallas. And maybe you get people, residents moving into it, which again, I'M sure Dallas doesn't have a issue attracting young people to it, but maybe they are able to do at a higher rate than they are today. And that's one of the things that I wish we were a little bit more proactive about here in Louisville. I know we're very tourist centric. It would be really nice to see more awful approach when it comes to incentivizing more activity, especially downtown, from residents. And I'm sure it's not unique to our community, but.
- [27:01]
C
No, I mean, it's, you know, if. If anything, Louisville has more of kind of a. What we might, you know, Louisville had. How would I word this? Dallas's growth came after the automobile. Right. So its whole infrastructure and the way that it relates to everything reflects that. Which is not to say that Louisville hasn't been largely retrofitted for the automobile. It has, but you have a very different base there. So it's much harder in a lot of ways to really have organic downtown development in a place like Dallas and to bring people in. And we have, you know, it's very easy for people to live 20 years of their lives without ever setting foot on either of our primary downtowns in a way that it probably wouldn't be in Louisville.
- [27:58]
B
I feel like Cincinnati's done a pretty good job of, especially closer to their downtown, activating the waterfront. You know, there's a lot of art around the city. We went up for one of the light shows that they had where they were shooting all these different images on the buildings. And it was just walking around and engaging with it. It was great. It was a really cool experience.
- [28:18]
C
Cincinnati has done a lot for its downtown. Cincinnati does not know what it has on the neighborhood scale, which may be an advantage because they. They haven't messed with too much yet. They have a lot of kind of, you know, what we might call streetcar suburbs throughout their region, whether it's within city limits or outside, that are really delightful. You know, I also would add that the transformation of the over the Rhine neighborhood in Cincinnati has been. Has been truly extraordinary. And, you know, I remember because I lived in the Clifton neighborhood, you know, that's adjacent to over the Rhine without a car. And I was there during the rebellion that happened in 2001, which was basically the worst urban disorder since Los Angeles. Right. So this was a neighborhood that was. That had profound disinvestment and a lot of problems, but had very, very good architecture. You know, I visit there for. My mother and stepfather still live there. So I visit there from time to time. I Don't. I'm sure that there's a nuance to displacement that I don't. That I haven't followed closely, that I'm sure is there. I don't follow closely enough. But in terms of just sheer revitalization of an area that was, you know, very disinvested, very dangerous in some pockets that had very high crime and so forth. And to see that revitalized is certainly an extraordinary story. I used to go to a club on Vine Street, 1313 vine, which called the Warehouse, which is now in a very nice neighborhood in Cincinnati. And I would lie to my mother and tell her that I always took a cab there so that she didn't know that I actually would take a bus downtown or go to a friend's house in the neighborhood and walk to the Warehouse, which may not have been a recommended practice necessarily.
- [30:09]
B
No, I mean, you know, I appreciate your sharing that. I mean, again, one of the things that I saw just through my experience, having gone up to Cincinnati quite a few times at this point, is that, you know, the architecture obviously is great. You know, you've got a lot of great building stock in Cincinnati. And then really, I mean, the art was really cool to see. I mean, a lot of the buildings have some form of, you know, painting that had been. Has been put up there. And it makes for a nice experience. As you're walking around town, you can kind of point out different things and, you know, referencing the light show. I had a. A while back we had another podcast. We had a lady that I had interviewed about. I think she's in New York City. But they do these types of pop up type of art events throughout the world and it creates these exhibits that they plop into a place for a certain period of time and it helps to activate or engage a space. Right. There's parts of the city, maybe there hasn't been a lot of foot traffic to. So they would engage her and her team and they would come in and create these art shows that are, you know, removable in some cases. Sometimes they would have something that would be more permanent. But again, it was kind of the same concept where you, you have people come to an area that are interested in just seeing the art exhibit or whatever else. And then it just so happens that as they're engaging with the art and walking around now, they can kind of see what it can be. So great, great ideas. I love the, I love the thought behind nice.
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C
Oh, and I. You, you. You've reminded me, I put a PID on telling you about how our business was founded in Louisville.
- [31:47]
B
Yeah, absolutely.
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C
So as I mentioned, I was involved with a group called, that was then called CNU Next Gen. Fortunately, CNU has a. The Congress of the New Urbanism, just in case some listeners aren't familiar with it. So, you know, the Congress for the New Urbanism is an organization that was started really in response a few decades ago to the sort of fact that we were no longer building in a wave of traditional towns and cities, you know, that we were building in this very car oriented suburban fashion. You had a group of mostly architects at the time who decided that they wanted to, well, let's say, bring back the technology of how we were building places, figure out why the. How the great places that we had worked and created an organization for it. So, and again, I've been to the last 10 or 11 of these. What happened within this is that there was a group of younger people who I would say realized that the CNU had become. Had been too much about only physical places, which maybe made sense in the 90s as they were figuring stuff out or the early zeros, but hadn't really figured out enough about how the human experience itself about people and hadn't really figured out how to work as much from the ground up. So they were really sort of a reform organization within the CNU and would have meetings every few years to kind of get, you know, kind of invite only, you know, about 25, 30 people. And everyone gives a presentation about some topic that they think is important to them. To give you an idea of how these things work. The one before I went to in Louisville was in New Orleans about three or four years before something like that. And these young guys named Mike Leiden and Tony Garcia as well as some others came up with this idea called tactical Urbanism, which of course ended up being a globally influential idea. There ended up being books about it, and it's now probably one of the most influential ideas of urbanism. So this is the group of people that I was with, and I think there were 27 people total. They had everybody present for a couple of days and then they asked people, they said, bring in three people from your city who should be part of this conversation. Apparently I'm the only person who took that seriously because I was like, I have to bring in three people from my city. It's. I didn't see it as optional. So I'm the only person who I think brought in more than one person from my city. But I did manage to bring in three. All of us did A presentation on one theme. What is the future of American urbanism? Some people came in with these very intense theoretical constructs. Even though you only had six minutes to present, people managed to get it out. Other people, it was much simpler. What I actually talked about was an idea that the downtown Dallas would have been in very, very, very different shape if they had done it, which is very simple. So you have these two main parks in downtown Dallas that are, you know, maybe separated from three quarters of a mile or something like that. And then you have these three main streets that are parallel to each other. Main Commerce and Elk. So what this basically said is, okay, between these two parks and between, if we go one block past these streets, so we go five streets thick, we have 100,000 square feet of vacant storefronts. So what we're going to do, what this plan is, is we are going to white box all these storefronts so that they can be used. And we're, you know, I think was a low interest loan or something like that. But like, we're going to make it work. We're going to white box these. If you have a business that goes into these spaces, then just fill it up. We're good. If you do not have a business to go into the space, as a condition of taking this money, we're doing a pop up retail program and you have to do pop up retail within these spaces. And the cost of this was going to be 8.8 million. I don't. There is no part of me that thinks if we hadn't done that and we hadn't done like five or six other things in downtown Dallas, I don't believe we'd be having the struggles that we're having at all. I believe we'd have a far more thriving downtown and I believe even the office market would be. I don't believe, for example, that we would have lost all of our law firms to go to uptown, which is adjacent to downtown, which is like its own business district. So anyway, I diverge a little bit, but I give a presentation on that. But then I saw of all these presentations, almost all of them were saying the same thing. It was like. And these were. This was a room I was honored to even be invited into. Right. These were the smartest, some of the smartest planners who I knew. And it was this theme of, like I said, do what you can with the resources you have. Focus on outcomes, get a high return on investment, like Pareto principle, like 80, 20, right? Find the 20% of things that get 80% of the results, help empower people. You know, work from the ground up, Try something, and if it works, keep going, fill in gaps, all of these things. So I'm hearing this for two days, and then we get to bring in the people from our community. So I bring in three other people from my community. This guy, Scott Polakoff, was a very prominent planner, especially in Dallas at the time. Looks at myself and a couple other people. He said, you should start a business based on these ideas. And I was either wise or foolish enough to agree to it. So I ended up starting Ash and lime with three, with two other partners. We actually started with a different name, but someone with a similar name threatened to sue us. So we're a dba, but we decided on ashen Line. And so I've been doing this for 13 years, and frankly, when I started it, none of us had the portfolio to have any business doing this. My stepfather wrote a book on risk called the risk paradox. And what he always tells me, and I have, you know, regular conversations with him about the business, and what he always tells me is that it's like anything else. If I'd understood what I was getting into, I wouldn't have done it like it would. And people told me how hard it would be, and I was arrogant enough not to believe that. But, you know, now, 13 years later, I'm fortunate enough that I do have the portfolio to back up what I did at the time, because people were willing to. You know, people were willing to take chances on me and see what I could do, and I was able to build relationships based on that. So I've been able to make a living doing this stuff for 13 years, really integrating small development planning, local economic development, and kind of a bunch of other things that add up to. If you're in a place, if you're in a neighborhood, if you're in a district, if you're in a corridor, what are the next steps that you need to take to bring life to the place?
- [38:41]
A
So one of the things, just kind of a general question that we ask everyone is about partnerships. And clearly you have a company, but then there's also partnering with different jurisdictions or consultants or different things. And partnering can be scary because you're. You're entering into a relationship for a decent amount of time where money's on the line. So how do you vet your partners? And maybe a lesson learned from you?
- [39:02]
C
You know, I think the partners have been fairly easy to vet because it comes from relationships, you know, and. And it's. So I have Partners, maybe in multiple senses in that sometimes we need a bigger firm to team with, or sometimes we need firms with specific experience. In some cases, we have smaller, more nimble people who we work with. But also, you know, in a sense, when we get hired by a city we partner with and everything like that, I'll give you. I'll give you a quote by Warren Buffett that says you can't make a good deal with a bad person. So I've worked in places under 1500 people. I've worked in some of the biggest cities in Texas. I've worked in suburban places. I've worked in very thriving places. I've worked, you know, and sometimes you have to deal with bad people. But if. If your primary contact is a bad person, if you're getting red flags, the opportunity is not as good as it seems. And one thing that I vet for, because I found this hard out, the hard way, is to make sure that whoever my primary contact is has the same value system that I do. Because if we get into an argument that I say, you know, not necessarily an argument, but if we have. If I have a different opinion, right, If I have a different opinion about the way to go forward, ultimately, within most spectrum, you know, the. The client is right outside of some, you know, ethical or whatever situations. But I want us to have a discussion based on a common base understanding of what the right thing is. And if you don't have that, then you're going to end up in a very frustrating situation. And, you know, I have to remind myself, like, if I wanted to. If I wanted to seriously compromise my ethics, I could have picked a much easier route for myself than this. So at this point, you know, I understand that a lot of people have to do that. I'm fortunate enough that I don't. I think the other thing is that these. When you have partnerships, you're going to like the person. You're going to have mutual respect for the person. Many times, you'll have admiration for the person. Many times you'll have trust, get everything in writing even, no matter how much you like or trust the person, and set expectations. Not only there can be disputes about money sometimes, but disputes about fairness. One of the biggest disputes that I ever got into that got kind of nasty, unfortunately, that I don't know that any of the parties handled it well. Wasn't about money, but it was about credit and respect, right? The money had already been settled, but it was like, well, wait a minute, I did all of this and I have to be treated with Respect. I've learned a little bit about this. I think earlier, Christy, I think you were. I think you were talking. One of the two of you was talking about how maybe this was actually before we started recording, you were talking about how your work can get tied into your identity. Right. So one thing that my stepfather points out to me a lot is that I had a tendency, especially early and probably still do, to over personalize my business, to over personalize the relationships, to make it. To make business relationships more tied to things like loyalty than they probably should be. Right. Like, a business relationship is ultimately a transaction. When you're immersed in something and when something is a true vocation and when you have a high degree of respect for someone, you may see this as like, you know, if they don't give you the credit you think you deserve, or if they don't, if you get into a money dispute, it becomes something more than like, okay, this is a business issue. Right. And maybe even if you don't get the credit or even if something happens, it's like, but you know what? Like, we made a deal. I got paid. I'm going to be able to put it in my portfolio. So we don't need to make this more personal than it is. If that. If that makes sense.
- [43:12]
B
Yep.
- [43:12]
C
By the way, I've never articulated it that. That well, so I'm glad that you asked me the question.
- [43:17]
B
Yeah.
- [43:17]
C
Because I think that's. That summarizes a lot of things I've been thinking about for a long time.
- [43:22]
B
Yeah, I mean, I agree. And I think that kind of goes back to the whole idea of your going back to the values piece, which is. I feel like one of the most important pieces of partnership is communication, because, you know, sometimes you can head off resentment from building, which is ultimately what kills a lot of partnerships by just having a conversation about what you're feeling or what's frustrating you about a situation. Because there's been times in my past where I've had. I've still had partners and there could be something that I'm doing that is inadvertently. I'm doing it inadvertently, but maybe it's rubbing someone the wrong way. And unless you kind of have a conversation about it, then there's no way to really address it or correct it. Because I feel like, you know, for the most part, if you. If you do business with people who are ethical and have similar values to you, that type of conversation shouldn't put them off, per se. So, yeah, I mean, I think it
- [44:24]
A
might be a difficult conversation. You might have to push your egos aside and be willing to maybe hear some not so good feedback and just to not take it personally, but go, hey, we're going to get stronger. We're going to grow from this.
- [44:35]
B
Yeah, well. And understanding it's a team, right? Because I think that's another thing too, is that there are going to be seasons of the team effort that maybe the other partner is doing, pulling more weight, quote, unquote. And there's going to be series periods of time where maybe that's inverted, but as long as the team is winning, like, that's what matters, in my opinion. But again, not everyone's going to feel that way. There's people out there that are like, I want to have credit for every single thing that I do. And whether if you're in business with someone who's willing to allow that to happen, great. But otherwise it could create friction. So it's one of those things where you just gotta read the other person, which can't always. Which can be difficult, especially if it's early on in your relationship with someone.
- [45:20]
C
And sometimes even credit isn't about credit, but it's about respect. I'll add one more thing that may be helpful to some listeners. So I think that one of the things I think sometimes, you know, like, I think about how hard it was for me as someone who is very into music, when I realized that some people who I idolized musically to the extent that I saw something coming from a higher place in their music, right? That they were bad people, right? So that you can say, how. How could John Lennon have done what he did? And then this is an extreme case, but there are more and less extreme cases. And then a woman beater, right? Like, it's like, so this person had these extraordinary gifts, but you can also say, but he was also a bad person, right? So someone can have extraordinary gifts within a profession. And someone can have. They can be such extraordinary gifts that you may say, like, this has to be like a great person, like a great human being, because how could they do such great work if they're not right? And especially when you're in a field. So someone can share your values in terms of planning or development or something like that, but that doesn't necessarily make them a good person. It's like the saying of, don't meet your heroes. And I've seen that multiple times because I've had the privilege of coming into contact with most of the people who I admire in the field. And I've seen multiple times that, well, Maybe they're not always like, maybe they've done great work, but that doesn't necessarily make them, you know, a great person. So I would say that's one thing to watch out for in any partnership is it's like separate maybe what gifts they may have. They may have gifts and they may have the same values for you in planning, but they may not have the same values for you that you do otherwise. And you can get blinded to that. Does that, does that make sense? I don't know if either of you have experienced that.
- [47:36]
B
Yeah, no. I mean, luckily. And again, I've had partners for different projects and Christie's talked about this too. Like having partnership in a single project versus a enterprise that you're building over a period of time. Because in, let's say a commercial real estate project, I mean that the whole period of that, that investment may be a few years. So if for whatever reason things aren't working out in that partnership, it's a temporary situation versus, you know, building a business, that's going to be something that you carry on for decades. Selecting someone in that environment is going to be. Need to be very much more carefully. You need to be very much more selective about that process because you're, you're taught you're hitching yourself to someone else for a long time.
- [48:22]
C
But it's interesting and I would say, and this is also slightly different than the way I've looked at it. So this is interesting, I would say, you know, based on the sequence that I've described to you, right. What this has been about in my experience is not so much building a business, but being part of an ecosystem that's building a movement. So in that sense you can have enormous respect for people. Because I've seen again, it's like whether it's like the, you know, the experiences with like Inc. Dev or Strong Towns or, you know, others that, that I mentioned, it's like seeing them see a new Nexon, right? Like, being with that early on, it's like you have the sense that everybody's building a movement together. So in my personal experience, may have been different than some other people, but like I. It's like you have an implicit trust in everybody that's around you. But it's like, but you still have to like, have clear expectations for all parties, right? It's like have clear expectations, have clear scopes, have clear agreements and still make things about business. And you may feel a lot the same way because I know that the work that you're, you know, that you're all doing is very cutting edge as well. So. But it's like you're creating something bigger than yourself, but you don't want to make it. You don't want to personalize it too much, if that makes sense. Like you still one of the, I mentioned Monty Anderson. One of the things that he always says is making money is the most important thing and doing good is equally important. Right. But you have to make, if you don't make money, you, if you, if you don't run it as a business, then you got to find something else to do with yourself.
- [50:03]
B
Yeah. Money allows you to make impact. So if you have the ability to spread the message to a broader audience, that's, you know, you got to be able to sustain yourself as a business because otherwise you're not really going to impact that many people. You may impact one on one with people, which is great. There's nothing wrong with that. But if you really want to achieve scale, you've got to be able to have a viable business that can, can spread what you're trying to accomplish.
- [50:28]
C
Exactly.
- [50:29]
B
Yeah. Well, Rick, really appreciate your time. I found this discussion extremely insightful and I'm really looking forward to following you and some of the things that you're doing. First off, kind of share a little bit about what your next five years looks like, what is your vision for the future and then we can kind of wrap up and you can share some information about your social links and everything.
- [50:52]
C
I see my primary role going forward as focused around two areas. One of is storefront revitalization. I co founded this group a while ago called the Storefront Renaissance League. And I'm doing a project in Seeley, Texas that I'm really happy about and we have several others that are going to be coming up. And the idea of that is bringing in people who have a variety of skills in terms of helping to bring new life to storefronts, whether it's pop up retail, whether it's filling it in with small businesses or whatever that may mean. And the, this was actually my, my co founder in this, Jaime Isaretta, who's another person worth talking to if you haven't yet. He, he had the idea of a superhero league and at first I was like, but I don't like the idea of us coming in, being the superheroes and swiping in. When he made me like it, he said, no, no, we're inviting them to the league. We're going to teach them how to be the superheroes in their own towns. I'm like, okay, I love that. That's cool. Because you have to have the humility in this business. It'll teach you that a lot. The other thing that I'm focused very heavily on is the idea of third places, which for members of the audience who might not know that you have this idea that there's your home, which is your first place, your work, your second place, and then your third place, where everybody knows your name, you know, where you go, you see and be seen, you converse with people, you make new friends and conn with old ones. And one of the things that I've really figured out is that those places have been dying gradually for decades, essentially. So I'm helping to come up with strategies, getting an understanding of third places, you know, exploring them as much as possible within my region and state and coming up with strategies to make them work. So I think that while I'll still be doing downtown planning and neighborhood planning and, you know, supporting incremental development, all of those things that tie together, those are two subspecialties that I see myself focusing mostly on over the next five years.
- [52:52]
B
That's great. No, I'm looking forward to continuing to follow along with that progress. And if people wanted to learn more about what you're doing and follow along with your journey, I know you've been posting different content pertaining to what you've been doing. What's the best way for them to be able to reach you?
- [53:07]
C
Well, you know, LinkedIn is a good way. I'm very active on LinkedIn. The funny thing is I'm actually more active, much more active on my personal LinkedIn than on my business at the time being, which I'm going to kind of expand more on that. But if you look me up. R I K. It's actually spelled without a C. R I K Adamski. A D A M S K I on LinkedIn, you can follow out the ideas you have and you can reach out to me on there. That's. That's where I'm. I'm actually most active. Right.
- [53:33]
B
That's great. Well, we'll make sure to include that in the show notes. If you guys are watching this on YouTube or podcast format. Format, go ahead and access that and you'll be able to reach out to Rick.
- [53:41]
C
Nice. Well, thank you so much for having me. You've asked great questions, apparently, because I feel like as I was talking, I realized and was able to articulate some things myself that I've never quite said the same way. So I give you credit as interviewers for managing to pull that out of me. Yes.
- [53:59]
B
Yeah. No, no. And we appreciate the insights you shared and sometimes getting in a room with people who are doing not necessarily the same thing, but we're kind of in a similar industry, but we have different ways of viewing the world. Sometimes it just activates those thoughts. And obviously you have a wealth of knowledge that you've been able to share a little bit today. But like I said, I'm really looking forward to following along and who knows what leads from this because again, a lot of the reason, part of why we do this is to engage with people who are doing awesome things around the country and create a community of people that we can, you know, they can learn from each other and hopefully, you know, leverage each other to be able to make this world a better place, you know.
- [54:41]
C
So awesome. Well, thanks so much for both of you for taking out of your time to talk with me then.
- [54:47]
B
Absolutely. Thank you, Rick, for your time. We really appreciate it. For those of you guys are watching this on YouTube, please like and subscribe. It makes a huge impact on our ability to reach a broader audience and we obviously greatly appreciate the support along with that. If you guys are watching this in a podcast format, whether that's Apple podcasts or Spotify, please leave a five star review. The more people that leave five star review, the broader the reach we achieve and ultimately more and more people will get inspired on their first real estate development project. So thanks again so much for tuning in and we'll see you next time.
- [55:17]
C
Thank you.