Podcast Episodes

Housing as Economic Development

“The solution to the housing problem is more housing. Getting there is the hard part.” So says my friend Dennis Strait, now retired Principal of multistudio in Kansas City. Dennis is a planner, archi…

Published on 6 months ago

Will Your Town Revitalize or Will it Die?

Not long ago, I started noticing these long and interesting regular Facebook posts coming through my feed by an account named “Revitalize or Die.” Often compelling rants on towns, economic developmen…

Published on 6 months, 1 week ago

Why You Should Make Friends with a Banker

Many of us don’t like to think too much about banking and money until we REALLY need to. As an architect, I’m as guilty as anyone as not taking the time to think through the financial side, and to al…

Published on 6 months, 2 weeks ago

When Principles Meet the Real World

Patrick Tuohey is the Policy Director and co-founder of a think tank called the Better Cities Project. While his own views are politically right of center, the organization is non partisan and aims t…

Published on 6 months, 3 weeks ago

Are properties ever really obsolete?

Rodney Dangerfield once famously said, “golf courses and cemeteries are the biggest wastes of prime real estate.” We won’t touch cemeteries in this episode, but we do talk about golf courses. Monte A…

Published on 7 months ago

It Is What It Is - Or Not

We often don’t realize that the “way things are” is just a reflection of some radical change that happened in a previous era. While I’m a firm believer that aspects of human nature haven’t really cha…

Published on 7 months, 1 week ago

Be Great with your Pawns

Rik Adamski is a man of many hats. But first and foremost, he’s someone that cares deeply about the people side of urban planning. So often, planners, architects and developers get mired in the techn…

Published on 7 months, 2 weeks ago

Do You Live in a Fragile Neighborhood?

From the earliest days of my interest in urban planning, I became very interested in the overlap between design and culture. By that I mean, how cities shape human interaction, and how human interact…

Published on 7 months, 3 weeks ago

Creating a (mostly) car-free new town in Costa Rica

I had the pleasure of meeting Charles Brewer right when he was starting to get interested in becoming a real estate developer. This was after a very successful short career in the dot-com world, as …

Published on 8 months ago

A Conversation with Dhiru Thadani

It’s truly a rare thing in life to run across people that are uber-talented, thoughtful, and just fantastic human beings. Dhiru Thadani is one of those rare people.

An architect, urban designer, auth…

Published on 8 months, 1 week ago