LOVETT


WHY ?


Our world is filled with generic, soulless and unsustainable places.  There’s yawning mistrust between communities and the real estate industry that has metastasized over time. Communities have become so hardened 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 - essentially making the most pressing urban challenges next to impossible to solve. Risk-averse developers then are relegated to building the easiest, cheapest and fastest possible solution that doesn’t require any community input rather than being rewarded for tackling 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 an epidemic of uninspired development projects lacking cohesive visions and actionable plans. There is a vacuum of expert voices that cut across silos and deliver full-throated arguments to do things differently and reimagine our built environment.

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. 
  • relying on the experts who’ve been doing it the same old way for decades. 
  • basing what the project should be 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 failure of imagination to build new kinds of confidence-inspiring arguments that are forward-looking yet simple enough to be well understood, priced and properly risk-adjusted.



←previous