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The Great Real Estate Reset.

 
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A tartalmat a Rethink Real Estate. For Good. biztosítja. Az összes podcast-tartalmat, beleértve az epizódokat, grafikákat és podcast-leírásokat, közvetlenül a Rethink Real Estate. For Good. vagy a podcast platform partnere tölti fel és biztosítja. Ha úgy gondolja, hogy valaki az Ön engedélye nélkül használja fel a szerzői joggal védett művét, kövesse az itt leírt folyamatot https://hu.player.fm/legal.

Dr. Tracy Hadden Loh is a Fellow with the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking at Brookings Metro. Her research focuses on commercial real estate and how place-level assets interact and affect the prospects and resilience of the people and enterprises that call a place home in urban, suburban, and rural settings.

Tracy has recently written about the need for reform of the real estate sector, including who benefits from new development, and the governance challenges that exacerbate the extreme and growing spatialization of inequality in U.S. metropolitan regions.

Prior to joining Brookings, Tracy was senior data scientist at the Center for Real Estate & Urban Analysis at the George Washington University School of Business where she was the lead author of “Foot Traffic Ahead 2019.” This study ranked the 30 largest US metros based on percentage of office, retail, and rental multi-family space each area had in their walkable urban space. She also worked on the creation of a strategic plan to bring inclusive and equitable economic development to the area around the former Charity Hospital in New Orleans. In 2022, Tulane University announced plans to redevelop the building into a mixed use complex including research and educational facilities. Prior to her role at GWU, Tracy was the director of research at the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy.

Tracy is a graduate of DC public schools and holds a Ph.D. in city and regional planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition to her research interest in placemaking, Dr. Loh served two years representing Ward 1 on the Mount Rainier City Council in Prince George’s County, Md. She is currently a member of the board of directors of Greater Greater Washington.

Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:03] Hi there. Thanks for joining me on Rethink Real Estate. For Good. I’m Eve Picker and I’m on a mission to make real estate work for everyone. I love real estate. Real estate makes places good or bad, rich, or poor, beautiful, or not. In this show, I’m interviewing the disruptors, those creative thinkers and doers that are shrugging off the status quo in order to build better for everyone.

Eve: [00:00:38] As we embark on a new year, we’re all thinking about fixing things. I bumped this podcast up on my list, because Tracy Hadden Loh has a much bigger and more inspiring fix list than most of us do. Tracy is bi-racial and has experienced inequity first hand. Even as a young child she knew something was wrong. Her career has been a purposeful exploration of how to fix things. As a Fellow with the Center for Transformative Placemaking at Brookings Metro, a branch within the Brookings institution, Tracy focuses on cities, downtown metropolitan areas, placemaking, diversity in cities and reinventing cities post-pandemic. And of course, fixing things. You’ll want to listen in to learn more!

Eve: [00:01:39] Hello Tracy, it’s really great to have you on my show.

Tracy Hadden Loh: [00:01:42] Hi Eve. Thank you so much. I’m thrilled to be here.

Eve: [00:01:45] So you’ve researched and written on so much that interests me. Like what’s next for downtowns? The devaluation of assets in black neighborhoods, diverse neighborhoods, the office re-imagined lots of stuff around cities that I think is really important. But can you tell me a little bit about your background and how you came to be researching these issues at the Brookings Institute?

Tracy: [00:02:08] Sure. Well, I was born and raised in Washington, D.C. I grew up in the city in the eighties, which was a time when the city’s population was still declining, and it was very segregated. I am biracial myself and I was raised by two working parents and my mom is an immigrant to the United States. So, when I was growing up in the eighties, I felt, even just as a child, I could sense how segregated everything was and that it wasn’t right. But I didn’t know why or what to do about it. And now, DC’s population is growing again, and the trajectory of the city is really different. But that raises a different set of questions about who is winning and losing when there’s change. So, that is that kind of big question about who’s winning and losing and who decides the rules by which that happens. That’s really sort of the motivating question of my life. And I went from being a D.C. public school student and living it as a child to wanting to work on it and help solve it as an adult.

Eve: [00:03:37] That’s a great goal. I love what you said, winning and losing. Who’s winning and losing? Because I think that’s a really big question. So, I’m really interested. You’ve done a lot of different things, but I’m really interested in your work around what you call the great real estate reset initiative. Can you tell me what that is, what that means?

Tracy: [00:03:59] Sure. So, during 2020, after COVID had arrived in the United States and then that summer, after George Floyd was murdered, I was really kind of feeling the moment and feeling like it was a good time to try to say something big and systemic about the way things work. And I was talking to a friend, his name’s Christopher Coes, and at that time, he ran an organization called Locus that is a group of smart growth real estate developers. He was like full time staff on that at Smart Growth America. And so Christopher and I were just kind of talking about the big picture and how to frame what’s going on and who’s needed to be part of the solution. And we really wanted to explain to a broad audience why government alone is not going to be able to address the way things work in the United States and the big trends that are shaping our society. It’s going to take every sector. But we wanted to write a piece that really kind of specifically highlighted the role of the private sector in driving how things work through the lens of real estate. So that’s what motivated us, this project was really a collaboration between myself and Christopher Coes and my colleague at Brookings, Jennifer Vey.

Eve: [00:05:49] So, but why is real estate so important?

Tracy: [00:05:52] Well, you know, the built environment determines so much of our lives. I think we hear people say all the time this phrase: place matters. So, digging in, what does that kind of little shortcut mean exactly? The physical condition and location of our neighborhoods is something that determines a lot of a child’s access to health, opportunity, their odds of being incarcerated, their earning potential. You know, the conditions of your neighborhood determine a lot about your life. It’s not just the conditions of your family and you as an individual. And so, we have to ask these questions about real estate and then just kind of looking at real estate as a sector. It’s a huge piece of the American economy. If we understand real estate as an asset class, these are not small potatoes. It’s not as big as the stock market. But it is, this is a huge asset class and it’s the second most common asset class that touches people’s lives. And, you know, the only thing more common than real estate is cash.

Eve: [00:07:09] How big is it?

Tracy: [00:07:25] Let’s see. I have an exact estimate for you. So, if you combine commercial and residential real estate, you’re going to be looking at about 45% of assets in the United States. And that makes it the single biggest asset class. If you separate commercial and residential, then of course it’s smaller, but on its own real estate is the single biggest investment asset class in the United States by far.

Eve: [00:07:40] I think I read in another article, and this is how I found you, that no one will be surprised by this, but a very small percentage of minorities actually own the commercial assets in this larger group of real estate assets, right?

Tracy: [00:07:57] Yeah, that’s right. With my collaborator Jonathan Rothwell and my colleague Andre Perry, we did an analysis of consumer finances and what the most recent version of that survey found is that only 3% of black households own any commercial real estate, and that’s compared to over 8% of white households. So, these are small percentages. Most people don’t own commercial real estate, but we can see that even within this sector, there’s tremendous inequity.

Eve: [00:08:27] A very big difference. Yeah. So, what else did you notice in your research?

Tracy: [00:08:32] With my most recent research project, what I was digging into is what’s going on with retail real estate right now, because I spent the first couple of years of the pandemic seeing these huge impacts to the leisure and hospitality sector and a really rapid evolution of retail business models and kind of the scale of the crisis and then the speed of adaptation. It’s been fascinating to watch, but the built environment itself doesn’t change like that. So, these are new retail business models that are still trying to locate themselves in the same old retail landscape. And I wanted to just kind of take a look at how that was playing out in terms of operating income and tax assessments for different jurisdictions. Because I know from my own service and local government in the past that commercial real estate is such an important part of a jurisdiction’s tax base. And so, the health of commercial real estate is something that we all have to be very concerned about.

Eve: [00:09:39] I’m fascinated by how it’s playing out physically, because recently I was somewhere in the suburbs, which is unusual for me, but still. I landed in this little medium sized strip mall, and I noticed there were many, many storefronts vacant. And at one end of it, I noticed that a storage facility was starting to occupy the storefronts. I mean, I’ve really never seen a storage facility like that. They had pods in the parking area and one storefront after the other was being converted into storage, which is at least a use, but it’s kind of a sad use.

Tracy: [00:10:16] It’s extremely marginal.

Eve: [00:10:34] Yes.

Tracy: [00:10:21] So, what I found in my most recent research project is that what’s happening with commercial real estate in the retail subsector of it is that even after controlling for every single variable that we could think of that is related to real estate valuation, we found that commercial real estate in zip codes that are majority black in terms of their residential population, we found that race explains an across the board 7% devaluation of that property. And so, and previous research found extensive, much bigger, like three times as big levels of devaluation of residential real estate in black neighborhoods. So, we had reason to suspect that we would find this on the commercial side, too, but I wanted to just estimate a parameter around it, try to get a sense of what the size of the devaluation effect was so that I could start exploring the implications to tax basis to neighborhoods and think through the dynamics of what devaluation on the commercial side means and what it does.

Eve: [00:11:33] Okay so, I’m going to go back to something that you said which caught my attention and that the American real estate industry can create communities of opportunity or face a future, both figuratively and literally underwater. What do you mean by that?

Tracy: [00:11:49] So, climate change is another one of these really big generational trends that is going to totally reshape real estate in the United States. But we are really only just at the beginning of the days of seeing how and where that’s going to be priced in and how we’re going to respond. And so, for an industry that is hyper interested in trends, I think that real estate as a sector has been very, very slow to understand the implications of climate change and to figure out how to approach it. There should literally be a fire under the entire sectors butt about it. And so, I wanted to sound the alarm on the fact that right now the bulk of the real estate industry is still very busily building the wrong stuff in the wrong places.

Eve: [00:12:51] Yeah, I think you’re right. The world is moving very fast and real estate doesn’t. And much of the real estate that we have now will be 80% of the real estate that we have in 2040. So.

Tracy: [00:13:04] That’s right.

Eve: [00:13:04] It’s also about reconfiguring it, right?

Tracy: [00:12:54] Yeah.

Eve: [00:13:09] In that great real estate reset initiative, you focused on five key trends, which I found really interesting. The first was separate and unequal. The second was modernizing family. The third was risky housing business. The fourth was the office reimagined. And the fifth, as you’ve mentioned, the retail revolution. I’d really like to talk about each of them. Like, I suppose we’ve talked about the persistent segregation in the country. What about modernizing family? What does that mean?

Tracy: [00:13:41] So, this is another one of these big macro trends that’s going to change everything about real estate that it seems like we haven’t woken up to yet, which is that the types of households that young people in the US are forming today are radically different than what they were one generation ago. So, in that piece I present just a very simple analysis of the census. And what we found is that if you look at young adults, so Americans age 23 to 38. Right now, we would call those people millennials. But if we look at that same age bracket, but back in 1968, so this is my parents, at that time, almost 70% of young adults in that age bracket were married with at least one child. So, that’s pretty much just the vast bulk of people. We’re forming one type of household and there’s one type of housing that is highly desirable to accommodate that type of household. So, as far as housing goes, real estate was pretty simple back then in terms of what the demand was. But today, less than 30% of young adults are married with at least one child.

Eve: [00:15:03] That would be two of my children.

Tracy: [00:15:05] There we go.

Eve: [00:15:06] They fit right into that group.

Tracy: [00:15:08] And so, it’s less than 30%. And every other kind of household has increased in terms of how common it is. So that’s living alone, living with roommates, being a single parent. So having a child but no spouse or having a spouse but no child or still living with your parents. Right. Like all these things are more common now. And so, the issue is that we’ve gone from one kind of household that needs one kind of housing to many kinds of households that need many kinds of housing. And we don’t have that kind of flexibility in our housing inventory. If we look at housing inventory change since 1980, the only type of inventory that has grown in terms of its share of US housing inventory is houses with four or more bedrooms.

Eve: [00:16:00] Oh.

Tracy: [00:16:03] Which is literally the opposite of what’s happening demographically.

Eve: [00:16:09] So the rise of the ADU hasn’t been fast enough.

Tracy: [00:16:14] Not nearly fast enough.

Eve: [00:16:16] And that is because probably if zoning laws and…

Tracy: [00:16:19] That’s right.

Eve: [00:16:19] …financial restrictions, banks don’t really want to lend, all of those.

Tracy: [00:16:23] And builders don’t know how to build them and ADUs require subordinate electricity from a main house. Pretty much like most American houses would need a heavy up to support an ADU. There’s a billion barriers to ADU production.

Eve: [00:16:38] You know, we talked about retail and there’s also the office.

Tracy: [00:16:43] Yeah.

Eve: [00:16:44] The nature of office work is really shifting.

Tracy: [00:16:47] Yeah, that’s right.

Eve: [00:16:48] And I don’t know where the percentages lie right now, but I love the freedom of remote working. I mean, I’ve always worked that way, but the pandemic I think normalized.

Tracy: [00:16:58] Yeah. So, the big picture is that a majority of Americans don’t work in offices. So just slightly more than half of the United States is, they’re working in schools or hospitals or on the road or in a kitchen. They’re working somewhere that’s not an office. But in cities, in metro areas, it’s a majority of the workforce that does work in offices. And where we are right now is that at the beginning of the pandemic, the vast majority of office workers immediately pivoted to full time remote work. That has gradually decreased. And so, at this point, it’s only 25% of the office workforce that is fully remote. But that means that a lot of people are back, but back less than they were before. So, hybrid work is becoming the new normal for office workers. So, this has a bigger impact in cities because it’s in cities where a majority of the workforce is in office using occupations and it’s also in cities where you find central business districts that are heavily dominated by office real estate. And so, those labor markets and then these particular neighborhoods within those labor markets feel very different now than they did prior to the pandemic, because they’ve experienced a massive structural shift that’s now looking pretty sticky.

Eve: [00:18:34] Right. Yes, I live in downtown. It feels very different. It’s very emptied out. And there’s lots of adaptive reuse going on in office buildings.

Tracy: [00:18:46] Yeah, I think the right thing is for the owners of office real estate to conclude that this shift is permanent and to stop waiting for a time machine to take them back to February of 2019 and to instead adopt forward looking strategies that will lead to productive adaptation.

Eve: [00:19:11] I’m going to go back to something you said about the real estate industry moving very, very slowly, which is true. Part of that is because when you want to build a building, you have to design it and you have to get entitlements and permitting and a budget and build it. And by the time you’re done, if you’re in a market that’s shifting, if it’s a larger building, it’s three years later and it may no longer be completely relevant. How do we tackle all of this? How do we incentivize the right sort of practices?

Tracy: [00:19:40] The problem that real estate has right now is that, given how huge the sector is and how it touches all of us and is so important to everyone’s life and entire communities, there’s just a really astounding lack of dynamism in the sector. There’s a lack of innovation. There’s a lack of growth and productivity, a lack of change. And that is, I think, because of a complicated and toxic set of factors, but that we have the ability to do something about. So, first is that the sector is overregulated. And a really complex regulatory environment makes it higher, it slows things down and makes it more complex so, that favors established and big firms. This sort of classic like giant evil developer that seems to live rent free in a lot of people’s heads. So, I think there’s a lot that communities can do with the way that they regulate both zoning and building codes in order to streamline the kinds of development that they want to see. So, you mentioned ADUs earlier. There are multiple communities in the United States that have made it incredibly easy to build an ADU. Pre-approved floor plans and permits.

Eve: [00:21:09] Yeah, I know. Portland, Oregon.

Tracy: [00:21:11] Apply one day, have permission to build an ADU the next day. So, streamline and make super easy the kinds of buildings that you want to see. Which requires that first initial consensus building about what we want and what we need. But do that work, and then enact the necessary reforms. This is something that communities have been very slow to do. It is incredibly stimulating to the economy and to communities to promote the right kinds of dynamism in real estate, and ADUs is an example of that on the residential side. But the same thing applies on the commercial side, that we know that retail business models are rapidly evolving. And yet, we are expecting this retail vibrancy to figure out how to locate itself in yesterday’s retail building stock. So, I think it’s even more complicated on the commercial side than just the regulatory environment. I think what’s going on the commercial side is also that it’s very difficult to obtain financing and access capital to do commercial real estate projects. And banks want projects that feel familiar, that they understand. And the problem is that what’s familiar is obsolete.

Eve: [00:22:38] I’m so with you on that.

Tracy: [00:22:41] So, there is a huge opportunity to make a ton of money in commercial real estate by leaning in even just a little bit more to innovation and inclusion, because it’s a sector that’s desperately in need of new ideas. And so, that means that we need to see new faces.

Eve: [00:23:01] If you were a developer, what would you focus on first?

Tracy: [00:23:04] To be honest with you, I think that the lowest hanging fruit is still housing, just because there is so much pent up demand, we have under built for so long. It’s just not rocket science to make money building housing if you can find your submarket niche and if you have access to capital. So, I think that the low hanging fruit is in ADU and missing middle housing production in US cities of all sizes at this point.

Eve: [00:23:34] But that goes back to something you said before about the racial divide. So, who has access to capital, and will that capital be deployed in disinvested neighborhoods that need the housing the most? I mean, you know, we’re back into this whole cycle of what sort of housing gets built and who does it serve and who does it make money for.

Tracy: [00:23:55] Yeah, and the money to build real estate largely comes from banks. People typically don’t have huge amounts of personal wealth. The people who do have that kind of money aren’t doing neighborhood real estate. So, I think that there is a systematic problem with the kinds of projects that it’s easy to get a loan for and with who can get them. And, I wrote the great real estate reset, wanting to connect with lenders and with lending institutions. It’s been a tough row to hoe. It’s an insular world, and I am not an economist. And so, I think that there’s a need right now for thought leaders with a lot of credibility in the sector to start talking about these ideas. I earlier this year did a fireside chat with the folks at Capital One. It was so wonderful to be invited to do that and to be able to share these ideas in that kind of space. And I think that I plan to just keep knocking on every door and window and trying to have these conversations, because I think it’s clear that capital flows, that’s something that has to change. If we want to start responding in a way that’s smarter, that’s more dynamic to things like these demographic trends, to climate change, to the persistence of white supremacy in the United States.

Eve: [00:25:27] You could also talk about incentivizing innovative projects through city government. I mean, if, as you said, if you take the pain out of building ADUS or you take the pain out of taking an empty strip mall and converting it to housing, that’s a way to provide a very powerful incentive to make things happen.

Tracy: [00:25:49] Yes, I definitely think that there’s a huge role for government in streamlining, making the right thing easy, legal and easy. And then there’s also a role for philanthropy, right? Philanthropy is a huge sector in the United States that in addition to the dollars that they’re legally obligated to spend, there is a huge opportunity for impact investing with their seed corn. Philanthropy has been very hesitant to embrace the opportunity that American real estate presents for impact investing. I don’t know why. This is another one of these conversations I want to have, like, why not? And what would it take to make it happen?

Eve: [00:26:35] Oh, can I join you on that one? So, do you have any examples of people doing some things that you think are great and moving in the right direction?

Tracy: [00:26:45] Oh, sure there are. So first off, Eve, you are an incredibly inspirational innovator in real estate, and you embody the exact opposite of the problems that I’m talking about. You are real. And I just want to validate the incredible work that you do. And Small Change as a platform also is lifting up so many other innovators in real estate. I mean, if someone wants to just like browse, what are the fresh ideas in real estate right now? They can just go to your website and look at so many projects that have been made possible through your platform. So, I think that you are a repository for those examples. But yes, there’s also I think that.

Eve: [00:27:32] But let me tell you where the problem lies for me. Okay. We’ll go back to the systemic problem. So, VCs have on average invested 2 to 3% of their funds in women. So, I am a woman founder of a company, which makes it incredibly difficult for me to raise money and grow. And as well as that, those holders of money are looking for rapid growth and an exit. And when you build something that’s really going to build change over a long time, you have to expect it to take a long time. So, now we’re talking about a whole system of making money on companies that expects immediate gratification. And I know as a developer working in disinvested neighborhoods, that’s not how it works. It’s not Sesame Street. It’s a long hold. You’ve got to be patient and building towards something. We don’t seem to have enough people that understand that.

Tracy: [00:28:38] Yeah. And I think that you will not find that from institutional capital and that we should save our breath from trying to find it. I think that the most innovative projects that I’ve seen that that have been able to do big things, they have a source of patient capital, whether that is like a single extraordinary high net worth individual or whether it’s a foundation or whether it’s a public institution. So, you start with a source of patient capital like that, and then you build a capital stack on top of that. That does include, frankly, it could be majority conventional debt. But you need that patient, you need that big fat patient slice at the bottom to be the foundation of your stack. So, you’re right that the types of projects that we’re talking about, especially at scale, they’re not going to happen without this patient capital piece. And so, that is the piece that I am most focused on motivating, educating, finding and turning out.

Eve: [00:29:49] Sorry I stopped your other train of thought. What were the other great things you’ve seen happen? You said you had other.

Tracy: [00:29:57] Yeah. So, I did a set of six case studies a couple of years ago. This is right before the pandemic on what myself and my collaborator Chris Leinberger call catalytic development projects.

Eve: [00:30:10] Chris, well, he’s the patient capital man.

Tracy: [00:30:13] A lot of what I know about real estate, I learned from that guy.

Eve: [00:30:17] I’ve watched him for years, yes.

Tracy: [00:30:19] I read “The Option of Urbanism” years ago. It’s a life changing kind of book. And then I was incredibly lucky and privileged to have the opportunity to work for Chris for a few years. And we did a paper together where we looked at six case studies from across the US, each with a different source of patient capital and a different source of fairly large parcel assemblies, something between 20 and 100 acres. And in all six of these case studies, we found that they were able to build really enormous at scale transformative neighborhoods that were also, by the way, like extremely financially successful. Very, very financial, very lucrative for their investors. The keys were not just access to patient capital, but that employers were a part, were either the source of the patient capital or part of it from the get-go. These are actually residentially driven projects, although they include a lot of residential. It has to start with something that’s tenant driven in terms of commercial real estate.

Tracy: [00:31:32] And then the final key being that all of these places, the impetus to assemble the capital, to assemble the parcels, it all comes from some kind of crisis. This kind of innovation and real estate doesn’t happen when things feel okay and and things are going well. And that sense of crisis has to be felt outside of the disinvested neighborhoods that are held in an artificial state of crisis all the time. It has to become something that’s felt more citywide, and then these kinds of transformations start to be possible.

Eve: [00:32:07] So, like Pittsburgh losing more than half of its population, that was a crisis.

Tracy: [00:32:11] Yes.

Eve: [00:32:26] And I think the Urban Redevelopment Authority in Pittsburgh really kind of found a whole, I mean, I really admire what they did. They found a whole range of tools to deal with it, as did Mayor Tom Murphy. He really kind of stepped up to fill that patient money gap, right?

Tracy: [00:32:29] Yes. So, I think Pittsburgh is the OG like citywide case study of this. And then Steve Leeper left Pittsburgh and went to Cincinnati and did it again. And that, it’s another incredible story, but this is the model.

Eve: [00:32:48] Yes.

Tracy: [00:32:51] That’s 3CDC in Cincinnati. And I think that the crisis in Cincinnati was multiple days of riots that happened in 2001 after a black teenager was shot and killed by Cincinnati police. And people understood that things needed to change after that tragedy. And, you know, from that moment of crisis, 3CDC was born. And that’s what motivated the private sector in Cincinnati to capitalize 3CDC to the tune of $50 million.

Eve: [00:33:28] Okay. So, I’m sort of speechless. It’s a really big hairy problem, isn’t it?

Tracy: [00:33:39] It’s a big, hairy problem, but it is solvable. To me, the biggest challenge is getting all of the sectoral players to agree that there is a problem and to agree and co-invest in a solution. In places where whatever crisis has provided the extra motivation for that to happen, I have seen extraordinary transformations. The question is just, how can we learn how to do this without the crisis? Because climate change is more like the frog in a bucket of water that’s gradually getting warmer and warmer. It doesn’t create that day-to-day sense of crisis in the same way.

Eve: [00:34:33] No. Yeah. But the pandemic did.

Tracy: [00:34:39] Yeah.

Eve: [00:34:40] The Black Lives Matter.

Tracy: [00:34:42] That’s right. And so, I hope that we can learn the lesson of the pandemic. And it is hard after a time of isolation and great division to emerge and come together, around solutions, but that’s what we need to do right now.

Eve: [00:35:04] So, what excites you most about the work you’re doing?

Tracy: [00:35:10] You know, real estate is fascinating because it affects all our lives. And what excites me most about it is the transformative potential for the fruits of growth to benefit everybody. I envision a world where there are just more great places that work for more people, and I’ve seen it happen many times, so I know that it’s possible and I just wish it at scale for everyone.

Eve: [00:35:42] Yes. And what keeps you up at night?

Tracy: [00:35:48] Segregation. Right. The same thing, and I don’t just mean racial segregation. I mean that kind of these same, like silos between sectors, between jurisdictions. We are right now in our country at every spatial scale, like nationally and in each of our neighborhoods, we are more divided than ever. But we have to build unity in order to confront these big problems like demographic change, climate change, the structural changes that are happening to our economy. It can’t just be everyone for themselves. You know, I am a fundamentally prosocial person that wants to get all hands on deck. I’m not in a particularly extraordinary position of power, but I hope that if I speak this truth that some powerful people might hear.

Eve: [00:36:47] Well, I’ve really enjoyed talking to you, and I would love to stay in touch and learn more about what you’re researching, because it’s fascinating and incredibly important, I think. I’ve learned a lot. So, thank you very much.

Tracy: [00:37:00] Eve I’d love to stay in touch. You’re a personal hero. And you’ve had so many people on your podcast that have, like, greatly shaped my thinking around these things.

Eve: [00:37:10] Well, that’s great. That’s really great to hear. We really, I try to pull together people who I consider, I suppose, instigators. People are thinking a little bit out of the box and pushing the edges of that very traditional.

Eve: [00:37:23] That’s exactly what you do.

Eve: [00:37:25] Yeah. Thank you very much.

Tracy: [00:37:29] Let’s stay in touch.

Eve: [00:37:36] I hope you enjoyed today’s guest and our deep dive. You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at RethinkRealEstateforGood.co. There’s lots to listen to there. Please support this podcast and all the great work my guests do by sharing it with others, posting about it on social media, or leaving a rating and a review. To catch all the latest from me, you can follow me on LinkedIn. Even better, if you’re ready to dabble in some impact investing, head on over to smallchange.co where I spend most of my time. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music. And a big thanks to you for spending your time with me today. We’ll talk again soon. But for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

Image courtesy of Tracy Hadden Loh

The post The Great Real Estate Reset. first appeared on Rethink Real Estate. For Good..

The post The Great Real Estate Reset. appeared first on Rethink Real Estate. For Good..

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A tartalmat a Rethink Real Estate. For Good. biztosítja. Az összes podcast-tartalmat, beleértve az epizódokat, grafikákat és podcast-leírásokat, közvetlenül a Rethink Real Estate. For Good. vagy a podcast platform partnere tölti fel és biztosítja. Ha úgy gondolja, hogy valaki az Ön engedélye nélkül használja fel a szerzői joggal védett művét, kövesse az itt leírt folyamatot https://hu.player.fm/legal.

Dr. Tracy Hadden Loh is a Fellow with the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking at Brookings Metro. Her research focuses on commercial real estate and how place-level assets interact and affect the prospects and resilience of the people and enterprises that call a place home in urban, suburban, and rural settings.

Tracy has recently written about the need for reform of the real estate sector, including who benefits from new development, and the governance challenges that exacerbate the extreme and growing spatialization of inequality in U.S. metropolitan regions.

Prior to joining Brookings, Tracy was senior data scientist at the Center for Real Estate & Urban Analysis at the George Washington University School of Business where she was the lead author of “Foot Traffic Ahead 2019.” This study ranked the 30 largest US metros based on percentage of office, retail, and rental multi-family space each area had in their walkable urban space. She also worked on the creation of a strategic plan to bring inclusive and equitable economic development to the area around the former Charity Hospital in New Orleans. In 2022, Tulane University announced plans to redevelop the building into a mixed use complex including research and educational facilities. Prior to her role at GWU, Tracy was the director of research at the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy.

Tracy is a graduate of DC public schools and holds a Ph.D. in city and regional planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition to her research interest in placemaking, Dr. Loh served two years representing Ward 1 on the Mount Rainier City Council in Prince George’s County, Md. She is currently a member of the board of directors of Greater Greater Washington.

Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:03] Hi there. Thanks for joining me on Rethink Real Estate. For Good. I’m Eve Picker and I’m on a mission to make real estate work for everyone. I love real estate. Real estate makes places good or bad, rich, or poor, beautiful, or not. In this show, I’m interviewing the disruptors, those creative thinkers and doers that are shrugging off the status quo in order to build better for everyone.

Eve: [00:00:38] As we embark on a new year, we’re all thinking about fixing things. I bumped this podcast up on my list, because Tracy Hadden Loh has a much bigger and more inspiring fix list than most of us do. Tracy is bi-racial and has experienced inequity first hand. Even as a young child she knew something was wrong. Her career has been a purposeful exploration of how to fix things. As a Fellow with the Center for Transformative Placemaking at Brookings Metro, a branch within the Brookings institution, Tracy focuses on cities, downtown metropolitan areas, placemaking, diversity in cities and reinventing cities post-pandemic. And of course, fixing things. You’ll want to listen in to learn more!

Eve: [00:01:39] Hello Tracy, it’s really great to have you on my show.

Tracy Hadden Loh: [00:01:42] Hi Eve. Thank you so much. I’m thrilled to be here.

Eve: [00:01:45] So you’ve researched and written on so much that interests me. Like what’s next for downtowns? The devaluation of assets in black neighborhoods, diverse neighborhoods, the office re-imagined lots of stuff around cities that I think is really important. But can you tell me a little bit about your background and how you came to be researching these issues at the Brookings Institute?

Tracy: [00:02:08] Sure. Well, I was born and raised in Washington, D.C. I grew up in the city in the eighties, which was a time when the city’s population was still declining, and it was very segregated. I am biracial myself and I was raised by two working parents and my mom is an immigrant to the United States. So, when I was growing up in the eighties, I felt, even just as a child, I could sense how segregated everything was and that it wasn’t right. But I didn’t know why or what to do about it. And now, DC’s population is growing again, and the trajectory of the city is really different. But that raises a different set of questions about who is winning and losing when there’s change. So, that is that kind of big question about who’s winning and losing and who decides the rules by which that happens. That’s really sort of the motivating question of my life. And I went from being a D.C. public school student and living it as a child to wanting to work on it and help solve it as an adult.

Eve: [00:03:37] That’s a great goal. I love what you said, winning and losing. Who’s winning and losing? Because I think that’s a really big question. So, I’m really interested. You’ve done a lot of different things, but I’m really interested in your work around what you call the great real estate reset initiative. Can you tell me what that is, what that means?

Tracy: [00:03:59] Sure. So, during 2020, after COVID had arrived in the United States and then that summer, after George Floyd was murdered, I was really kind of feeling the moment and feeling like it was a good time to try to say something big and systemic about the way things work. And I was talking to a friend, his name’s Christopher Coes, and at that time, he ran an organization called Locus that is a group of smart growth real estate developers. He was like full time staff on that at Smart Growth America. And so Christopher and I were just kind of talking about the big picture and how to frame what’s going on and who’s needed to be part of the solution. And we really wanted to explain to a broad audience why government alone is not going to be able to address the way things work in the United States and the big trends that are shaping our society. It’s going to take every sector. But we wanted to write a piece that really kind of specifically highlighted the role of the private sector in driving how things work through the lens of real estate. So that’s what motivated us, this project was really a collaboration between myself and Christopher Coes and my colleague at Brookings, Jennifer Vey.

Eve: [00:05:49] So, but why is real estate so important?

Tracy: [00:05:52] Well, you know, the built environment determines so much of our lives. I think we hear people say all the time this phrase: place matters. So, digging in, what does that kind of little shortcut mean exactly? The physical condition and location of our neighborhoods is something that determines a lot of a child’s access to health, opportunity, their odds of being incarcerated, their earning potential. You know, the conditions of your neighborhood determine a lot about your life. It’s not just the conditions of your family and you as an individual. And so, we have to ask these questions about real estate and then just kind of looking at real estate as a sector. It’s a huge piece of the American economy. If we understand real estate as an asset class, these are not small potatoes. It’s not as big as the stock market. But it is, this is a huge asset class and it’s the second most common asset class that touches people’s lives. And, you know, the only thing more common than real estate is cash.

Eve: [00:07:09] How big is it?

Tracy: [00:07:25] Let’s see. I have an exact estimate for you. So, if you combine commercial and residential real estate, you’re going to be looking at about 45% of assets in the United States. And that makes it the single biggest asset class. If you separate commercial and residential, then of course it’s smaller, but on its own real estate is the single biggest investment asset class in the United States by far.

Eve: [00:07:40] I think I read in another article, and this is how I found you, that no one will be surprised by this, but a very small percentage of minorities actually own the commercial assets in this larger group of real estate assets, right?

Tracy: [00:07:57] Yeah, that’s right. With my collaborator Jonathan Rothwell and my colleague Andre Perry, we did an analysis of consumer finances and what the most recent version of that survey found is that only 3% of black households own any commercial real estate, and that’s compared to over 8% of white households. So, these are small percentages. Most people don’t own commercial real estate, but we can see that even within this sector, there’s tremendous inequity.

Eve: [00:08:27] A very big difference. Yeah. So, what else did you notice in your research?

Tracy: [00:08:32] With my most recent research project, what I was digging into is what’s going on with retail real estate right now, because I spent the first couple of years of the pandemic seeing these huge impacts to the leisure and hospitality sector and a really rapid evolution of retail business models and kind of the scale of the crisis and then the speed of adaptation. It’s been fascinating to watch, but the built environment itself doesn’t change like that. So, these are new retail business models that are still trying to locate themselves in the same old retail landscape. And I wanted to just kind of take a look at how that was playing out in terms of operating income and tax assessments for different jurisdictions. Because I know from my own service and local government in the past that commercial real estate is such an important part of a jurisdiction’s tax base. And so, the health of commercial real estate is something that we all have to be very concerned about.

Eve: [00:09:39] I’m fascinated by how it’s playing out physically, because recently I was somewhere in the suburbs, which is unusual for me, but still. I landed in this little medium sized strip mall, and I noticed there were many, many storefronts vacant. And at one end of it, I noticed that a storage facility was starting to occupy the storefronts. I mean, I’ve really never seen a storage facility like that. They had pods in the parking area and one storefront after the other was being converted into storage, which is at least a use, but it’s kind of a sad use.

Tracy: [00:10:16] It’s extremely marginal.

Eve: [00:10:34] Yes.

Tracy: [00:10:21] So, what I found in my most recent research project is that what’s happening with commercial real estate in the retail subsector of it is that even after controlling for every single variable that we could think of that is related to real estate valuation, we found that commercial real estate in zip codes that are majority black in terms of their residential population, we found that race explains an across the board 7% devaluation of that property. And so, and previous research found extensive, much bigger, like three times as big levels of devaluation of residential real estate in black neighborhoods. So, we had reason to suspect that we would find this on the commercial side, too, but I wanted to just estimate a parameter around it, try to get a sense of what the size of the devaluation effect was so that I could start exploring the implications to tax basis to neighborhoods and think through the dynamics of what devaluation on the commercial side means and what it does.

Eve: [00:11:33] Okay so, I’m going to go back to something that you said which caught my attention and that the American real estate industry can create communities of opportunity or face a future, both figuratively and literally underwater. What do you mean by that?

Tracy: [00:11:49] So, climate change is another one of these really big generational trends that is going to totally reshape real estate in the United States. But we are really only just at the beginning of the days of seeing how and where that’s going to be priced in and how we’re going to respond. And so, for an industry that is hyper interested in trends, I think that real estate as a sector has been very, very slow to understand the implications of climate change and to figure out how to approach it. There should literally be a fire under the entire sectors butt about it. And so, I wanted to sound the alarm on the fact that right now the bulk of the real estate industry is still very busily building the wrong stuff in the wrong places.

Eve: [00:12:51] Yeah, I think you’re right. The world is moving very fast and real estate doesn’t. And much of the real estate that we have now will be 80% of the real estate that we have in 2040. So.

Tracy: [00:13:04] That’s right.

Eve: [00:13:04] It’s also about reconfiguring it, right?

Tracy: [00:12:54] Yeah.

Eve: [00:13:09] In that great real estate reset initiative, you focused on five key trends, which I found really interesting. The first was separate and unequal. The second was modernizing family. The third was risky housing business. The fourth was the office reimagined. And the fifth, as you’ve mentioned, the retail revolution. I’d really like to talk about each of them. Like, I suppose we’ve talked about the persistent segregation in the country. What about modernizing family? What does that mean?

Tracy: [00:13:41] So, this is another one of these big macro trends that’s going to change everything about real estate that it seems like we haven’t woken up to yet, which is that the types of households that young people in the US are forming today are radically different than what they were one generation ago. So, in that piece I present just a very simple analysis of the census. And what we found is that if you look at young adults, so Americans age 23 to 38. Right now, we would call those people millennials. But if we look at that same age bracket, but back in 1968, so this is my parents, at that time, almost 70% of young adults in that age bracket were married with at least one child. So, that’s pretty much just the vast bulk of people. We’re forming one type of household and there’s one type of housing that is highly desirable to accommodate that type of household. So, as far as housing goes, real estate was pretty simple back then in terms of what the demand was. But today, less than 30% of young adults are married with at least one child.

Eve: [00:15:03] That would be two of my children.

Tracy: [00:15:05] There we go.

Eve: [00:15:06] They fit right into that group.

Tracy: [00:15:08] And so, it’s less than 30%. And every other kind of household has increased in terms of how common it is. So that’s living alone, living with roommates, being a single parent. So having a child but no spouse or having a spouse but no child or still living with your parents. Right. Like all these things are more common now. And so, the issue is that we’ve gone from one kind of household that needs one kind of housing to many kinds of households that need many kinds of housing. And we don’t have that kind of flexibility in our housing inventory. If we look at housing inventory change since 1980, the only type of inventory that has grown in terms of its share of US housing inventory is houses with four or more bedrooms.

Eve: [00:16:00] Oh.

Tracy: [00:16:03] Which is literally the opposite of what’s happening demographically.

Eve: [00:16:09] So the rise of the ADU hasn’t been fast enough.

Tracy: [00:16:14] Not nearly fast enough.

Eve: [00:16:16] And that is because probably if zoning laws and…

Tracy: [00:16:19] That’s right.

Eve: [00:16:19] …financial restrictions, banks don’t really want to lend, all of those.

Tracy: [00:16:23] And builders don’t know how to build them and ADUs require subordinate electricity from a main house. Pretty much like most American houses would need a heavy up to support an ADU. There’s a billion barriers to ADU production.

Eve: [00:16:38] You know, we talked about retail and there’s also the office.

Tracy: [00:16:43] Yeah.

Eve: [00:16:44] The nature of office work is really shifting.

Tracy: [00:16:47] Yeah, that’s right.

Eve: [00:16:48] And I don’t know where the percentages lie right now, but I love the freedom of remote working. I mean, I’ve always worked that way, but the pandemic I think normalized.

Tracy: [00:16:58] Yeah. So, the big picture is that a majority of Americans don’t work in offices. So just slightly more than half of the United States is, they’re working in schools or hospitals or on the road or in a kitchen. They’re working somewhere that’s not an office. But in cities, in metro areas, it’s a majority of the workforce that does work in offices. And where we are right now is that at the beginning of the pandemic, the vast majority of office workers immediately pivoted to full time remote work. That has gradually decreased. And so, at this point, it’s only 25% of the office workforce that is fully remote. But that means that a lot of people are back, but back less than they were before. So, hybrid work is becoming the new normal for office workers. So, this has a bigger impact in cities because it’s in cities where a majority of the workforce is in office using occupations and it’s also in cities where you find central business districts that are heavily dominated by office real estate. And so, those labor markets and then these particular neighborhoods within those labor markets feel very different now than they did prior to the pandemic, because they’ve experienced a massive structural shift that’s now looking pretty sticky.

Eve: [00:18:34] Right. Yes, I live in downtown. It feels very different. It’s very emptied out. And there’s lots of adaptive reuse going on in office buildings.

Tracy: [00:18:46] Yeah, I think the right thing is for the owners of office real estate to conclude that this shift is permanent and to stop waiting for a time machine to take them back to February of 2019 and to instead adopt forward looking strategies that will lead to productive adaptation.

Eve: [00:19:11] I’m going to go back to something you said about the real estate industry moving very, very slowly, which is true. Part of that is because when you want to build a building, you have to design it and you have to get entitlements and permitting and a budget and build it. And by the time you’re done, if you’re in a market that’s shifting, if it’s a larger building, it’s three years later and it may no longer be completely relevant. How do we tackle all of this? How do we incentivize the right sort of practices?

Tracy: [00:19:40] The problem that real estate has right now is that, given how huge the sector is and how it touches all of us and is so important to everyone’s life and entire communities, there’s just a really astounding lack of dynamism in the sector. There’s a lack of innovation. There’s a lack of growth and productivity, a lack of change. And that is, I think, because of a complicated and toxic set of factors, but that we have the ability to do something about. So, first is that the sector is overregulated. And a really complex regulatory environment makes it higher, it slows things down and makes it more complex so, that favors established and big firms. This sort of classic like giant evil developer that seems to live rent free in a lot of people’s heads. So, I think there’s a lot that communities can do with the way that they regulate both zoning and building codes in order to streamline the kinds of development that they want to see. So, you mentioned ADUs earlier. There are multiple communities in the United States that have made it incredibly easy to build an ADU. Pre-approved floor plans and permits.

Eve: [00:21:09] Yeah, I know. Portland, Oregon.

Tracy: [00:21:11] Apply one day, have permission to build an ADU the next day. So, streamline and make super easy the kinds of buildings that you want to see. Which requires that first initial consensus building about what we want and what we need. But do that work, and then enact the necessary reforms. This is something that communities have been very slow to do. It is incredibly stimulating to the economy and to communities to promote the right kinds of dynamism in real estate, and ADUs is an example of that on the residential side. But the same thing applies on the commercial side, that we know that retail business models are rapidly evolving. And yet, we are expecting this retail vibrancy to figure out how to locate itself in yesterday’s retail building stock. So, I think it’s even more complicated on the commercial side than just the regulatory environment. I think what’s going on the commercial side is also that it’s very difficult to obtain financing and access capital to do commercial real estate projects. And banks want projects that feel familiar, that they understand. And the problem is that what’s familiar is obsolete.

Eve: [00:22:38] I’m so with you on that.

Tracy: [00:22:41] So, there is a huge opportunity to make a ton of money in commercial real estate by leaning in even just a little bit more to innovation and inclusion, because it’s a sector that’s desperately in need of new ideas. And so, that means that we need to see new faces.

Eve: [00:23:01] If you were a developer, what would you focus on first?

Tracy: [00:23:04] To be honest with you, I think that the lowest hanging fruit is still housing, just because there is so much pent up demand, we have under built for so long. It’s just not rocket science to make money building housing if you can find your submarket niche and if you have access to capital. So, I think that the low hanging fruit is in ADU and missing middle housing production in US cities of all sizes at this point.

Eve: [00:23:34] But that goes back to something you said before about the racial divide. So, who has access to capital, and will that capital be deployed in disinvested neighborhoods that need the housing the most? I mean, you know, we’re back into this whole cycle of what sort of housing gets built and who does it serve and who does it make money for.

Tracy: [00:23:55] Yeah, and the money to build real estate largely comes from banks. People typically don’t have huge amounts of personal wealth. The people who do have that kind of money aren’t doing neighborhood real estate. So, I think that there is a systematic problem with the kinds of projects that it’s easy to get a loan for and with who can get them. And, I wrote the great real estate reset, wanting to connect with lenders and with lending institutions. It’s been a tough row to hoe. It’s an insular world, and I am not an economist. And so, I think that there’s a need right now for thought leaders with a lot of credibility in the sector to start talking about these ideas. I earlier this year did a fireside chat with the folks at Capital One. It was so wonderful to be invited to do that and to be able to share these ideas in that kind of space. And I think that I plan to just keep knocking on every door and window and trying to have these conversations, because I think it’s clear that capital flows, that’s something that has to change. If we want to start responding in a way that’s smarter, that’s more dynamic to things like these demographic trends, to climate change, to the persistence of white supremacy in the United States.

Eve: [00:25:27] You could also talk about incentivizing innovative projects through city government. I mean, if, as you said, if you take the pain out of building ADUS or you take the pain out of taking an empty strip mall and converting it to housing, that’s a way to provide a very powerful incentive to make things happen.

Tracy: [00:25:49] Yes, I definitely think that there’s a huge role for government in streamlining, making the right thing easy, legal and easy. And then there’s also a role for philanthropy, right? Philanthropy is a huge sector in the United States that in addition to the dollars that they’re legally obligated to spend, there is a huge opportunity for impact investing with their seed corn. Philanthropy has been very hesitant to embrace the opportunity that American real estate presents for impact investing. I don’t know why. This is another one of these conversations I want to have, like, why not? And what would it take to make it happen?

Eve: [00:26:35] Oh, can I join you on that one? So, do you have any examples of people doing some things that you think are great and moving in the right direction?

Tracy: [00:26:45] Oh, sure there are. So first off, Eve, you are an incredibly inspirational innovator in real estate, and you embody the exact opposite of the problems that I’m talking about. You are real. And I just want to validate the incredible work that you do. And Small Change as a platform also is lifting up so many other innovators in real estate. I mean, if someone wants to just like browse, what are the fresh ideas in real estate right now? They can just go to your website and look at so many projects that have been made possible through your platform. So, I think that you are a repository for those examples. But yes, there’s also I think that.

Eve: [00:27:32] But let me tell you where the problem lies for me. Okay. We’ll go back to the systemic problem. So, VCs have on average invested 2 to 3% of their funds in women. So, I am a woman founder of a company, which makes it incredibly difficult for me to raise money and grow. And as well as that, those holders of money are looking for rapid growth and an exit. And when you build something that’s really going to build change over a long time, you have to expect it to take a long time. So, now we’re talking about a whole system of making money on companies that expects immediate gratification. And I know as a developer working in disinvested neighborhoods, that’s not how it works. It’s not Sesame Street. It’s a long hold. You’ve got to be patient and building towards something. We don’t seem to have enough people that understand that.

Tracy: [00:28:38] Yeah. And I think that you will not find that from institutional capital and that we should save our breath from trying to find it. I think that the most innovative projects that I’ve seen that that have been able to do big things, they have a source of patient capital, whether that is like a single extraordinary high net worth individual or whether it’s a foundation or whether it’s a public institution. So, you start with a source of patient capital like that, and then you build a capital stack on top of that. That does include, frankly, it could be majority conventional debt. But you need that patient, you need that big fat patient slice at the bottom to be the foundation of your stack. So, you’re right that the types of projects that we’re talking about, especially at scale, they’re not going to happen without this patient capital piece. And so, that is the piece that I am most focused on motivating, educating, finding and turning out.

Eve: [00:29:49] Sorry I stopped your other train of thought. What were the other great things you’ve seen happen? You said you had other.

Tracy: [00:29:57] Yeah. So, I did a set of six case studies a couple of years ago. This is right before the pandemic on what myself and my collaborator Chris Leinberger call catalytic development projects.

Eve: [00:30:10] Chris, well, he’s the patient capital man.

Tracy: [00:30:13] A lot of what I know about real estate, I learned from that guy.

Eve: [00:30:17] I’ve watched him for years, yes.

Tracy: [00:30:19] I read “The Option of Urbanism” years ago. It’s a life changing kind of book. And then I was incredibly lucky and privileged to have the opportunity to work for Chris for a few years. And we did a paper together where we looked at six case studies from across the US, each with a different source of patient capital and a different source of fairly large parcel assemblies, something between 20 and 100 acres. And in all six of these case studies, we found that they were able to build really enormous at scale transformative neighborhoods that were also, by the way, like extremely financially successful. Very, very financial, very lucrative for their investors. The keys were not just access to patient capital, but that employers were a part, were either the source of the patient capital or part of it from the get-go. These are actually residentially driven projects, although they include a lot of residential. It has to start with something that’s tenant driven in terms of commercial real estate.

Tracy: [00:31:32] And then the final key being that all of these places, the impetus to assemble the capital, to assemble the parcels, it all comes from some kind of crisis. This kind of innovation and real estate doesn’t happen when things feel okay and and things are going well. And that sense of crisis has to be felt outside of the disinvested neighborhoods that are held in an artificial state of crisis all the time. It has to become something that’s felt more citywide, and then these kinds of transformations start to be possible.

Eve: [00:32:07] So, like Pittsburgh losing more than half of its population, that was a crisis.

Tracy: [00:32:11] Yes.

Eve: [00:32:26] And I think the Urban Redevelopment Authority in Pittsburgh really kind of found a whole, I mean, I really admire what they did. They found a whole range of tools to deal with it, as did Mayor Tom Murphy. He really kind of stepped up to fill that patient money gap, right?

Tracy: [00:32:29] Yes. So, I think Pittsburgh is the OG like citywide case study of this. And then Steve Leeper left Pittsburgh and went to Cincinnati and did it again. And that, it’s another incredible story, but this is the model.

Eve: [00:32:48] Yes.

Tracy: [00:32:51] That’s 3CDC in Cincinnati. And I think that the crisis in Cincinnati was multiple days of riots that happened in 2001 after a black teenager was shot and killed by Cincinnati police. And people understood that things needed to change after that tragedy. And, you know, from that moment of crisis, 3CDC was born. And that’s what motivated the private sector in Cincinnati to capitalize 3CDC to the tune of $50 million.

Eve: [00:33:28] Okay. So, I’m sort of speechless. It’s a really big hairy problem, isn’t it?

Tracy: [00:33:39] It’s a big, hairy problem, but it is solvable. To me, the biggest challenge is getting all of the sectoral players to agree that there is a problem and to agree and co-invest in a solution. In places where whatever crisis has provided the extra motivation for that to happen, I have seen extraordinary transformations. The question is just, how can we learn how to do this without the crisis? Because climate change is more like the frog in a bucket of water that’s gradually getting warmer and warmer. It doesn’t create that day-to-day sense of crisis in the same way.

Eve: [00:34:33] No. Yeah. But the pandemic did.

Tracy: [00:34:39] Yeah.

Eve: [00:34:40] The Black Lives Matter.

Tracy: [00:34:42] That’s right. And so, I hope that we can learn the lesson of the pandemic. And it is hard after a time of isolation and great division to emerge and come together, around solutions, but that’s what we need to do right now.

Eve: [00:35:04] So, what excites you most about the work you’re doing?

Tracy: [00:35:10] You know, real estate is fascinating because it affects all our lives. And what excites me most about it is the transformative potential for the fruits of growth to benefit everybody. I envision a world where there are just more great places that work for more people, and I’ve seen it happen many times, so I know that it’s possible and I just wish it at scale for everyone.

Eve: [00:35:42] Yes. And what keeps you up at night?

Tracy: [00:35:48] Segregation. Right. The same thing, and I don’t just mean racial segregation. I mean that kind of these same, like silos between sectors, between jurisdictions. We are right now in our country at every spatial scale, like nationally and in each of our neighborhoods, we are more divided than ever. But we have to build unity in order to confront these big problems like demographic change, climate change, the structural changes that are happening to our economy. It can’t just be everyone for themselves. You know, I am a fundamentally prosocial person that wants to get all hands on deck. I’m not in a particularly extraordinary position of power, but I hope that if I speak this truth that some powerful people might hear.

Eve: [00:36:47] Well, I’ve really enjoyed talking to you, and I would love to stay in touch and learn more about what you’re researching, because it’s fascinating and incredibly important, I think. I’ve learned a lot. So, thank you very much.

Tracy: [00:37:00] Eve I’d love to stay in touch. You’re a personal hero. And you’ve had so many people on your podcast that have, like, greatly shaped my thinking around these things.

Eve: [00:37:10] Well, that’s great. That’s really great to hear. We really, I try to pull together people who I consider, I suppose, instigators. People are thinking a little bit out of the box and pushing the edges of that very traditional.

Eve: [00:37:23] That’s exactly what you do.

Eve: [00:37:25] Yeah. Thank you very much.

Tracy: [00:37:29] Let’s stay in touch.

Eve: [00:37:36] I hope you enjoyed today’s guest and our deep dive. You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at RethinkRealEstateforGood.co. There’s lots to listen to there. Please support this podcast and all the great work my guests do by sharing it with others, posting about it on social media, or leaving a rating and a review. To catch all the latest from me, you can follow me on LinkedIn. Even better, if you’re ready to dabble in some impact investing, head on over to smallchange.co where I spend most of my time. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music. And a big thanks to you for spending your time with me today. We’ll talk again soon. But for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

Image courtesy of Tracy Hadden Loh

The post The Great Real Estate Reset. first appeared on Rethink Real Estate. For Good..

The post The Great Real Estate Reset. appeared first on Rethink Real Estate. For Good..

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