Why?
We all deserve better than a world filled with generic, soulless and unsustainable places.
There is an epidemic of uninspired development projects lacking cohesive visions and actionable plans.
There’s yawning mistrust between communities and the real estate industry that has metastasized over time. Communities have become so calcified by bad planning, bad design and bad development that they reflexively reject any and all change. Governments have reacted in kind with a cornucopia of byzantine regulations that add cost, time and uncertainty - all of which negatively influences investor sentiment - essentially making the most pressing urban challenges next to impossible to solve.
Developers are relegated to building the easiest, cheapest and fastest possible solution that doesn’t require any community input rather than being incentivized to take on the complex challenges communities face.
This pattern has forced the real estate industry and its design and construction counterparts down a rabbit hole of broken processes and banal solutions just to get projects no one wants built.
There is a failure of imagination to build new kinds of confidence-inspiring arguments in favor of transformative development.
The famously traditional and risk-averse commercial real estate industry fashions projects as commodity-like investments to raise the vast amount of money required to do ground-up development. To do this, developers have to build up investor confidence that they can deliver certainty. They start building an investment argument with an uncreative de-risking mindset, looking only at what's been done in the past versus what is needed in the future. The result? “Developer” buildings that don’t consider influences beyond the building’s walls.
Naturally it is easiest to build confidence by proposing to build what everyone else is building in places where buildings are already getting built, or relying on the experts who’ve been doing it the same old way for decades. It is easiest to define the project based on what has been done five times before compared to something never done before even when it is desperately needed.
All of this leads to the never-ending boom-bust cycles of real estate and projects that don’t meet the needs of the communities in which they are built.
There is a vacuum of trusted voices that cut across silos and deliver full-throated arguments to do things differently and reimagine our built environment.
A de-risking mindset stemming from investor pressure leaves developers with bad choices when hiring experts to help give credibility to their investment arguments – There are established consultant roles that by default can’t work in ways that add up to more than the sum of their respective siloes. No one is connecting the dots or is capable of making a defensible argument to do something differentiated and visionary. Instead, they are stuck with:
Owner reps tasked with hammering down project costs and consultant fees rather than coaching teams up to focus on value creation, leading to inevitable scope gaps, schedule delays and endless change orders down the line.
Competent but milquetoast architecture and engineering firms who use processes based on projects no longer fit for the future (e.g. traditional core and shell offices!), compounding the lack of creativity that plagues the industry.
Starchitects who infuse developments with wild ideas not grounded in reality.
Urban planners tasked with tiptoeing around the community so no stakeholder gets upset. They dispense generic and useless feel-good-isms rather than shape the project–leading the community to feel unheard.
Landscape architects tasked with picking plants and benches instead of making strong connections between development and its context. Urban designers who are never engaged because no one knows what they do.
CMs and GCs who stamp out good ideas before they’ve had the chance to be properly understood because they are concerned about ever-slipping margins while assuming more risk by having to deliver something new.
The status quo unintentionally yields a fundamental misalignment between what actually pencils, makes the community happy, and adds energy to a project.
All these inputs create a fundamental misalignment of what actually pencils, makes the community happy, and adds energy to a project. Too often development visions turn into a hot mess as project teams try to satisfy a wide group of stakeholders, diluting value-creating ideas. As the plan gets weighed down by too many competing interests, fatigue and complacency set in. Project timelines drag toward their uninspired conclusion–if the ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’ factor doesn’t make them infeasible first.