The Mindful Marketplace with Joel Skene

Neighborhood Economics: Asheville's Journey to Economic Vibrancy

• Joel Skene / Joe Minicozzi

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Explore the magnetic allure of Asheville, North Carolina with Joe Minicozzi, our esteemed guest who walks us through the city's phoenix-like rise from Depression-era economic despair to a beacon of urban innovation. Our engaging discussion not only celebrates the pioneering spirits like Julian Price and Pat Whalen, who bet on Asheville when traditional financial avenues retreated, but also serves as a blueprint for cities yearning to reignite their economic engines. Prepare to be inspired by tales of local investment and entrepreneurship that have painted Asheville as a vibrant tapestry of culture and community.

As we navigate the transformation of Asheville's downtown, you'll discover how the city's careful cultivation of local businesses and mixed-use development has created an economic ripple effect, enriching the entire county. Uncover the surprising history of Asheville's liquor laws and how these regulations have shaped the local brewery scene, serving as a testament to the power of adaptive policy in fostering prosperity. Our conversation prompts a deeper reflection on the intricate dance between urban planning, transportation choices, and their societal impacts, offering a thought-provoking look at how our built environments influence the fabric of our communities.

In our final musings, we confront the necessity of challenging established beliefs and embracing new paradigms in urban development and personal growth. Through our dialogue on mindfulness, meditation, and the pursuit of a more encompassing education, we underscore the importance of critical thinking and interconnectedness in our collective quest for a sustainable future. Join us for a compelling episode that promises not only to enlighten but also to galvanize action toward positive change in our cities and within ourselves.

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Joel :

What if investing in each other could change the world? I'm Joel Skeen with bizradious, and this is the Mindful Marketplace. Welcome, joe. Joe Manacosi, really happy to have you here with us today as part of this special series that we're doing for Neighborhood Economics. I'm especially looking forward to talking to you because we're both here in the Asheville, north Carolina area.

Joel :

I have a personal story about the origins of Urban 3. In a totally unrelated way. I moved down here from Detroit area in 2014. One of the first events I went to to try to get out and meet other people and meet other professionals was I went to a young professionals event at the Chamber of Commerce. The speaker that day happened to be Pat Whalen.

Joel :

Pat Whalen was one of the founders of public interest projects. He spoke about the radical transformation that our town had gone through from the 1990s and over about the 15-20 years since public interest projects started investing in our local community. It had such a big impact on me that I went up to Pat afterwards and asked to have a one-on-one talk with him. I was interested in things like local investing and I was just starting my career in financial services. I don't want to keep talking here, because I want to have people hear from you. Joe. Could you give people a little background on yourself? And then I'd love to start by digging in on the history of what public interest projects does and then how that's evolved into Urban 3 and the new urbanists here.

Joe:

Sure sure, pat's amazing. I probably had a very similar reaction to Pat, but I was coming from city design and land planning, a lot of government work and actually real estate finance before I came to Asheville. I met Pat before I fully moved here. It was kind of interesting. I was looking for a good real estate developer that's doing the right thing and public interest projects was checking all of those boxes.

Joe:

As a company, it was created by Julian Price who put $15 million of his wealth into a philanthropically-minded for-profit real estate development company. So it had to act like a real developer and think of it as a revolving fund. The money just couldn't disappear. It had to revolve back into new things. Dan Gilbert is doing this stuff up in Detroit right now at a much larger scale. But Pat was investing in businesses and getting things started up and doing all the things the financial industry wouldn't do, wouldn't touch Back then. When Pat was getting started in the 90s, banks wouldn't invest in downtown because no one was there. So you get this self-reinforcing. If they don't put any money in, of course you're not going to get any investment and no one's going to want to be there. That's what was going on here.

Joel :

My understanding is it was pretty bombed out, almost it was pretty burned up, which is where I was experiencing when I had left Detroit. There was this renaissance and revival, but most of the place was still pretty rough. When I moved to Asheville I was like man, this place is popping tons of local stuff, tons of culture and cool things happening. And then when I got there to learn, it was not like this even just 10, 15, 20 years ago.

Joe:

Yeah, asheville fell flat on its face. In the early 20s. Asheville grew I think was like 20% in population every single year of the decade, which is insane growth, and it had been experiencing that growth since the early 1900s. And it was just phenomenal what was happening here before the Depression. When the Depression hit and the city's books were audited, we thought we had I think they thought they had $17 million in the bank as a reserve account. It turned out we had $18,000 in the bank. The entire city council was indicted and the mayor committed suicide. That's how Asheville entered the Depression and it took until 1976. Sorry, we thought we had $5 million in the bank, not 17.

Joe:

It took until 1976 for Asheville to pay off its bonds. Asheville is one of the few cities in the entire country that said you know, we took this money out, we're going to pay it off. Most cities renegotiated their debt and you know, I don't know if it's just local politics, I don't know if it was the bondholders, I don't know if it's just stubborn Appalachian pride, who knows but that was a choice we made. So Asheville couldn't do the things that a lot of other cities did. We couldn't do a lot of the highways, a lot of the I-240 is a very recent addition to Asheville within the span of my lifetime. So it's most cities were doing the stuff in the 50s and 60s. Asheville was 20 or 30 years behind but we also couldn't do things because it had poor bond rating. So in 1976, when they paid off their last bond payment was when there was actually a plan to tear down most of downtown and build a downtown mall called the Wadley Donovan Plan, and that was probably the tipping point where people are just like no, we're not going to do that. And it was this interesting mix of recent transplants that had come here. You know, a lot of the new age, kind of back to the land, hippie movement and stubborn Appalachian we don't like debt pride kind of got together in this confluence to vote down those, the bonds for that mall, and they did a different strategy. So the city and the county got together and did a downtown revitalization plan and everybody basically cooperated and move forward.

Joe:

And on the private sector side you get Roger McGuire, julian Price, the testies. There's a, there's a handful of folks actually probably more than a handful, is probably about 20 people that were mixing it up and it wasn't just the investors and the real estate people. It was also the entrepreneurs, people like Hector Diaz starting Salsas, you know, just bringing something different to Asheville, and that, john Cram with the Fine Arts Theater and the Blue Spiral Gallery, and there's lots of people that were doing interesting things and making this work and it takes a lot of people to do it. So it's not just public interest projects. But Pat tells shows that story of all the people that had to come together to do this. In Detroit's contrast. Have you ever read Charlie Ladoff's book Detroit?

Joel :

No, I need to write it down. Charlie Ladoff, write that one down.

Joe:

Yeah, charlie Ladoff, he's, he's a, he's a bit obnoxious, but in the book he says go ahead and laugh at Detroit, make fun of Detroit, but realize we're in American city, we're the quintessential American city and we just got there first. And he's right, like the, the, the suicidal moves that Detroit did to itself. And also was it Oakland County, the next county over Yep.

Joe:

Just went. Went to yeah, went to war with Detroit, basically drained all of Detroit's population northward and the county manager there just had this attitude that, like, detroit should die and it's just like, why would you do that when you're in this kind of cooperative economic system? But that's the attitude that you get where people that live outside the city don't see the value of the city. You know, it's a, I think in. I think was 20, 2009, or state legislature called one of our legislators called the city of Asheville a cesspool of sin. Do you remember those t-shirts?

Joel :

I, I've seen them, yeah, something along those lines where, hey, why not embrace it if?

Joe:

Well, but it's like, why would you do that? Like we're all in this together. Can you imagine calling your cousin the cesspool? It's like you're not going to really win some friends there. But the thing is, the city is this dynamic economic engine now that's floating the whole damn county. So that's the reality of the situation. So, rather than hate on us, how about sending us a thank you card for all the money that we're sending out to the county? The downtown has grown by a factor of four in the last 10 years. County hasn't the county's worth $32 billion? This downtown's worth $2 billion and it's only 100 acres. Show me another 100-acre parcel that's worth $2 billion.

Joel :

Yeah, I know that's a good point. I definitely saw the revitalization parallels when I did move here from Detroit because I was a social worker and ran a food bank and was working in nonprofits up there. But what I remember and I had always had this wall separating these two worlds or the two-pocket thinking, where it was the idea that it's like obviously we had seen all the auto industry and the other businesses sort of bail on the city and bail on the workers in that area, and also I was on the nonprofit side. So I saw us trying to do a lot of repairing of the damages that had been done and the poverty that was just rampant throughout the county that I was in, which is right next to Wayne County, washtenaw County, and the city I was in was like a little mini Detroit. It was like a smaller version with all the same problems.

Joel :

But then on the other side what I saw happening in Detroit was one of the most rundown neighborhoods, was one of the oldest neighborhoods, corktown, and Corktown is where the big old train station that used to run from the trains that had headed out of Detroit to Chicago and it's this big, beautiful building built by the guy who built Grand Central Station in New York so beautiful architecture but it was empty. It was boarded up. It was people would go in there and take photos and do graffiti, but there was nothing happening there. But then this one business moved into downtown Corktown and in the midst of the blight they opened up a barbecue place. And it was a hit and people started coming to Corktown all of a sudden and everyone wanted to come to Slowes Barbecue.

Joel :

And then next door a coffee shop opened up and then a little cocktail bar and then a real estate office. And now, 10 years later, 15 years later, that area you can't find a place to rent in that neighborhood because it's so saturated with the market and it's one of the most popular and the most revitalized places in the city. And I saw something sort of similar with when I came here to Asheville in what Pat and what Julian had done with public interest projects. But it seemed like from their perspective it wasn't even so much just natural development. It seemed almost more of an intentional, focused effort to actually not only to develop the real estate but then to actually empower the businesses and the business owners who were their tenants and who were occupying the spaces there. Could you speak a little bit to their unique approach.

Joe:

Sure, yeah, and you nailed it. It's basically you take that wealth and invest it the buildings, you've got to get them going so that people can be in them. A lot of this is putting housing downtown, activating apartments, the ability to rent downtown, and again, the banks weren't doing it. Because the banks looked at the data and no one was living downtown unless they were on public assistance, and so their attitude was like, well, no one's there, so no one's gonna be there. Their market says that they just know that they haven't made that choice. It's like, well, if you've got no place to choose, you're not gonna make that choice, right? So it's just getting upstream a little bit.

Joe:

And to realize a lot of this is we've always had downtowns. There's always been some segment of the population that's been in downtowns. Just allow that to happen. And there were people living downtown, but it was all very ad hoc, sometimes illegal, but there were people that wanted it. There were art studios and people just making the spaces happen. Roger was the first one that made condos downtown for sale. It's a product to improve that market.

Joe:

Roger McGuire, julian and Pat came in after that. Now Julian and Pat were actually thinking about starting a foundation or something like that, and they just realized Julian didn't have that wealth to really make a difference. So rather than do a foundation that was gonna be doing revenue investments all around the county, let's bring it down to a point and let's have a really directed impact in downtown. But it was also doing it through catalytic projects. You don't do just one thing in one little area, you kind of like spread it around downtown and then people will fill in the gaps and that's probably what happened.

Joe:

It's sort of a natural flow of economic capital when economic results when you're looking at downtown revitalization. Actually this goes back to Jane Jacobs Death and the Life of the American City in 1963, where she was writing about it. I don't know if you ever read Jane Jacobs books, but she talks about putting people downtown and things will change and getting out of the way so people can do things To the credit of the city and the county. They were doing some of the bigger moves. I don't know if you know this, but you couldn't get liquor by the drink in downtown Asheville until the 90s.

Joel :

Which is crazy that now we're such a brewery town. We're city, usa, and just a little while ago you had to go to a store outside of the city and take it home. You couldn't even get a drink with your dinner.

Joe:

Yeah, and this is also. I mean, let's come on, let's face it, this is also moonshine world up here and it's just like, yeah, it's illegal to drink in a restaurant. But that changed. I think that was in the 90s. That happened. Roger was active in the late 80s, early 90s.

Joe:

The city did the downtown mass, one of the I think they called it the city center plan. After the mall proposal died, they did some streetscape projects, downtown parking, wall Street, wall Street was an alley. So improving that physical public realm is also because, as an entrepreneur, why would you go invest in a building if it's going to be just an alley? Right, I mean you might do it if it's cheap, but you know you're just. You want the city putting their investment in also clears the decks a little bit. Changing the zoning. They removed parking requirements for businesses downtown. I think about how silly that is that if you buy a building and start it up as a business, you have to buy the building next door and tear it down to make your parking work Like that was stupid. So the city, to their credit, was like let's just not do that and get rid of the parking requirements and we'll build parking structures so that we can have it centralized to handle many different buildings. So the Wall Street parking garage, the Rankin parking deck, you know there's a lot that was going on.

Joe:

But public interest projects 75% of the money. What Pat was doing with his Julian's trustee is putting 75% of the money into the sticks and bricks, into the buildings and 25% into the entrepreneurs. But what I think is magic about public interest projects is, you know, if we could scan around the room, one side of the room are all the creative types and the other side of the room are all the organized people accountants, cpas and it's this duality of you need to have both to do a successful business. And a lot of businesses can't afford a CPA. So what Pat was doing was, if we invested in you to start a business for whatever, making coffee downtown, we would say you know, joel, you don't need to hire a bookkeeper, we'll take care of that and we'll meet with you and share the numbers on a quarterly basis so you don't have to deal with that. So it's like having a they call it a fractional CFO, having somebody that minds your financial system and then meeting with you and helping you stay in business.

Joe:

Pat has a saying that he's going to walk through a wall and beat his head through it before letting the business fail. You know, it's just you have to do a lot of work. So the time was the direct opposite. We'd spent 75% of our time with the businesses and 25% with the buildings. But you know, I tell people it's the BASF of downtown Asheville. Nobody knows who Public Interest Projects is, but they know the businesses. They know Malaprops, laughing Seed, orange Peel, salsa, zombros, but a lot of the apartments downtown too. So that's kind of the key thing. But this is for anybody that's ever read Jane Jacobs. She's been talking about it since the 60s.

Joel :

Well, and even some of the newer businesses. I was very fortunate. A friend of mine was starting up his own new barbershop and he wanted to open up downtown and I had done a brief amount of time in commercial real estate so he asked me to come help him look at the space and kind of ask the landlord certain questions. And when we got there it was a public interest projects building and as soon as I found that out I said man, you need to do this. So now he's had the local barber in tap, has been open down across from Zombros there on Walnut Street for a good eight years now. And what I thought was really enlightening in this whole process is because I think ultimately, what it always is going to come back to is property and ownership.

Joel :

When I was doing commercial real estate I was working in the Ann Arbor Michigan Market, which is where University of Michigan is.

Joel :

It's a very bustling, busy downtown and when I was in high school that downtown was filled with things like record stores and local used bookstores and local coffee shops and everything was very local. Everything was very independently owned. But as I was there once I got into commercial real estate I could actually see what was happening was the rent prices for downtown were just going up and up and up and starting to skyrocket, and, one after one, you would have the local places closing down and a chain would move in. So downtown became a place where all the new businesses down there were either a five guys or a Walgreens, or you could go down the list. But it was no longer this bastion of local, creative businesses and it was instead becoming looking like just like every other place that had just the exact same businesses as across the way. And so I'm curious how that ownership, or the ownership and property piece, why does that play such a big role in keeping Asheville local?

Joe:

Well, we have Ben and Jerry's. We used to have where it's now urban outfitters. Used to be a CVS there is, there's I don't know Lexington. There's that, I forget the name of it Anthropology, anthropology. Yeah, let's see Independent businesses. That dollar, I think it's.

Joe:

I used to know this off the top of my head, but I think it's like 80% of the dollar that you spend in an independent, local business, 80% of that will stay in your economy If it goes. If you shop at a chain or a national establishment, it's the opposite. Now there's a reason why they're big businesses and they do well. And I tell people I'm like, don't hate the player, hate the game, but you better understand the game and what they're good at is being efficient with their money and extracting that capital to their shareholders. Okay, that's their game. What can you learn from that? What can we learn from wandering into anthropology and seeing how they do retail sales and how they do display and merchandise? That's what a business owner can learn and this is one of the things that with Malaprops. I mean Malaprops was a tiny bookstore. The entrepreneur was already there, Emiko was already in downtown and Pat worked with her to move her a couple doors down into the spot that they're currently in and in. That was trying to get that business to realize you can learn from Barnaz and Noble and just get stronger before they show up. So it's not.

Joe:

I don't think the attitude isn't to be as draconian of black and white, good and bad. You can learn from both. Having a mix is good. You know, in downtown Asheville are people coming here for anthropology Probably. I haven't gotten there. I haven't set foot in that building since it became what it was, but I also didn't set foot in that building before it was anthropology, it was just a dead building. So you know, I don't know it's the wealth can be created and can be captured more with small, independent businesses, the national chains, but I also think downtowns can benefit from having both.

Joe:

Here's the thing, though we have a large downtown, our downtown's 120 acres. So as long as we have that product and here's what I would ask you as a resident of Asheville, like we know that it works in downtown, we know that it works in West Asheville why the hell don't we do more of it in North Asheville, in East Asheville, in South Asheville? Why the hell doesn't Enka Candler have a downtown out there? I mean we all go to Black Mountain and walk its four blocks of downtown and it's cute as hell, like, why is there not a Black Mountain to the west of Asheville? You have to go all the way out to Canton for that.

Joe:

So this is the thing is, we can learn what for tens of thousands of years works for humans and the urban product and build more of it. But if you don't and this is what happened in college towns is that all of a sudden the financial industry has realized oh there's a bunch of students with money in their pockets, we can take it from them, and five guys shows up. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. So again, don't hate the player, hate the game. It's. The question is why don't you have another Ann Arbor downtown in Ann Arbor or another place for those industries to go and cultivate both? It's hard to just pass a law and say you can't be a national chain in our town Cities. Try it. It doesn't work. Also, it's not constitutional. It usually doesn't last long. Does that make sense?

Joel :

Oh yeah, and it also I like what you're saying too, because it sounds like it's. You know, ultimately it's more about laying the groundwork, and what type of soil are you cultivating for what's going to grow there? You know like I feel the same way. I'm almost. I love the countryside out here in Lester, but when you drive through downtown Lester there's maybe one little strip mall, right. There's not really a walkable space for people to get out and be around each other and there's not really.

Joel :

You know what I like about the downtowns that I've been in are there seems to be a shared spaces, whether it's parks, it's river walks, it's commerce streets, and when the more we get spread out and the more we kind of have to isolate ourselves in our little, whether it's kind of suburban homes or kind of in these things. It's almost like the less shared resources we have, the more you kind of have to buy. And so it almost makes sense from a perspective of large institutional businesses and large institutional lenders and financial institutions that they would actually prefer us to be more isolated, that they would prefer us to be more spread out and have to. You know, like there's a tool library in Kenilworth, right, but if that doesn't exist. Everyone would have to buy their own tools.

Joel :

They couldn't share them, and so yeah, I'm not sure if I have a question in there, but I'm curious if that's given you any kind of thoughts that are coming up as I'm talking about that.

Joe:

Yeah, and I don't know if you're picking up Pat in the background. He just showed up.

Joel :

That's okay, yeah.

Joe:

I mean one of the this book right here. Let's see boom Strong Towns. Do you know that book?

Joel :

I don't know You're giving me a lot.

Joe:

So, yeah, chuck is going to be a speaker at the conference this year and I'd recommend his book I'm Building a Strong Town. You know, I don't think. I don't think there's a want to it. I think we fall prey to marketing. You know, it's like just watch a sports game and like a basketball game or a football game, you're going to see a truck commercial every single commercial break. You know how many people I mean maybe out in Leicester, people are taking those trucks on dirt roads, but most of these trucks don't go there.

Joe:

The same is true of a lifestyle. We've been marketed a certain lifestyle separation and it's nice to not have a neighbor to not have dogs barking. You know, I live on a it's less than a tenth of an acre. My neighbor's got this ridiculously large dog that's dumb as a box of rocks and likes to bark a lot, you know, and they feel bad. They just don't know how to train a dog and so I'll go over and try to help them. But how many people want to do that? You know, it's much nicer to have seven acres around you and you don't hear that dog, or you might hear it howl or something like that, but it's not going to interfere with your day. So the promise of suburbia is an incredible promise. You know I could criticize you and say like you know, what are you doing? Living way the hell out there. All of your goods and services are right here.

Joel :

And I've got one of those trucks that doesn't go on dirt roads very often to be honest, so I'm not above that.

Joe:

Yeah. So I mean, I go mountain biking. So people tell me, like you know, I've got friends that live out in the forest and like we go mountain biking and I'm like, well, I'll go out and visit the mountains, I don't want to destroy the mountains, and so the more of us that make those choices, the more of us will invade the landscape. But hang on, let me show you something. This is a book from 1973 that the Nixon administration put out.

Joel :

Costs of sprawl.

Joe:

So the Nixon administration in 1970, like I mean, I don't know how old you are I'm 54. But I remember the gas crisis of the early 70s, where you used to have to queue up in line to get gas and only certain license plate numbers were allowed per day to go through. And so the federal government stepped in and goes this is not sustainable. This pattern is not sustainable. There were people in the 50s that knew that it wasn't sustainable, yet we built it. So did you grow up in a single family, detached house?

Joel :

Yeah. Old farmhouse in Western New York outside of Buffalo, yeah.

Joe:

Okay, I grew up in Rome.

Joel :

New York up near Utica.

Joe:

So those patterns are not sustainable. Yet we were induced into them by highway building and all sorts of other things, redlining the HOLC maps from 1934. The federal government shifted mortgages from seven-year mortgages to 30-year mortgages. When I talked to people I'm like you realize there was a day that we didn't have 30-year mortgages and everybody's like what are you crazy? Like no, moses didn't hand us 30-year mortgages, like these weren't, didn't just come with us from the great ooze. These are things that are policies. So all those policies induced a certain pattern of development. And then you've funded with highway conduits of billions and billions of dollars.

Joe:

Just I-26 that's coming through Asheville is going to completely destroy Mills River the way that we know it, because it's going to open up and induce more people to move out there, because we're facilitating that traffic flow. That's a cost put into the ground for somebody to have a cheaper house out in Mills River. Here's the question Did we ever decide to spend a billion dollars on affordable housing in Asheville? What would Asheville look like if we could change Patton Avenue and not have the K-Mart and have some a village there? You know these are choices that we're not getting allowed to make because the system the financial industries have set up a certain capital flow and the thing is just, let's just be conscious of it and realize this is how these patterns happen. But Chuck, chuck will get into that at the conference with it with the cost of streets. Lester Highway, they just widened that thing, in the high heaven, yeah they did put in a sidewalk along it, which is nice.

Joel :

I mean, I actually there's a guy who I've stopped twice to pick him up and give him a ride, because he'll be carrying either cans or a giant metal barrel that he picked up somewhere and he's walking along this crazy dangerous road and it's just so unsafe there. But I also wanted to ask you.

Joe:

But they just built a sidewalk. I mean, let that wash out, you said it right. So we have a Department of Transportation. Is that not a transportation corridor? Why is a sidewalk not transportation? So that modality that we're all born with isn't invested in right? Well, we all, most of us, 99.9% of us could walk or bicycle or wheelchair down a sidewalk. Why does all the money go to the one modality of cars with the Department of Transportation? That's our public dollars they're using to do that. So they're making choices to facilitate and grease the skids for a certain type of development pattern. So that could all be different.

Joe:

You know, and when I moved here in 2003, the folks in Lester didn't even want to have zoning, so they didn't want any land use controls and their whole attitude was like property rights. It's like, okay, that's great, you know, it's like, but if you don't plan or put any rules in place, you're gonna end up with the garbage that's delivered to you. And because it's impossible to build housing in Asheville, because everybody here fights everything that gets proposed, it's not like you can shut the door and people won't move here. So they're going to places that are the path of least resistance. So it turns in a drive until you qualify, the people that are low wealth move further out, which is actually more expensive for them when you add in the cost of transportation. So it's just simple economics that we just we let our emotions get in the way.

Joel :

What? Because I know that with the Urban 3, you guys have kind of this is a newer development that's come out of public interest projects, where you've taken some of those lessons that you've learned and then help other cities develop and kind of create more equitable. You know, I know you guys focus on things like visualizing revenue, cost of service, redlining, you know kind of fair taxation. I guess give us a little overview on what you guys, how you guys have taken those lessons and implemented them in other places.

Joe:

Yeah, well, it goes back to Pat. One of the things that was learning from Pat. I mean, you saw his presentation and when I used to sit there and listen to his presentation like dude, that's way too much information. But he's going to make the argument His. The PowerPoint that he had was called the economic and environmental case for urbanism.

Joe:

So you live here. You actually live where it's a little bit more mixed than Asheville. Asheville has become this monolithically liberal cabal. I mean, it's just I don't recognize Asheville from when I moved here. The strain was here, but it wasn't. It wasn't just so intense, but when public interest projects had to make its case, here you have a downtown real estate developer.

Joe:

I remember being at parties with friends and they were, you know, making some comments about the orange peel and I'm like do you understand how much the insurance costs just to run that orange peel per year? And and they're like, no, and it's like it's it's six figures, and they're just like what. I'm like, yeah, it's called business, you know, it's just these you have to. You can't just open the doors and let people just freely walk in and just drink and not have consequences. So you have to have insurance. And just explaining that to people. So on the left, all developers are evil and on the right, if you're doing stuff downtown, you're somehow subsidized and you're taking the public's wealth and the free market is suburbia and boxes and strip malls, and the reality is this direct opposite. So Pat was just basically trying to explain that in the PowerPoint shows that you don't build wealth with a Walmart, you know. You don't build wealth with boxes. You build it with the fine grain, small businesses, and it's also better for you if you start stacking people. If you don't sorry, if you don't have a yard, it's actually better for the planet and that's the we just have been brainwashed into.

Joe:

Trees are awesome, so get. Trees are awesome if you stay out of them, you know. Stay out of their ecosystem, don't damage their water flow, don't just stay out. If you want to keep farmland, don't build anything on it, because that soil content and the richness of that soil once you put asphalt on it, it's gone and it's just getting people to understand that and so I don't know.

Joe:

I consider myself more of an idiot. I just I have to see pictures because I'm trained as an architect, I'm a visual guy, and so I started taking some of the Pat shows and reworking them and just condensing them down. And the thing that really kind of drove the point home to me was the value per acre analysis. And when you do that, male props the building that, not the building. The building that Mobilia is in, right across the street from Ella, props that buildings a 100 times more tax potent than a Walmart. The problem is, whenever we talk about a Walmart, we always talk about it in total productivity. So it's like, okay, so this Walmart, that's 34 acres, is producing X million dollars of taxes. It's like, well, that's true, but it took 34 acres of farm called Asheville.

Joel :

Yeah, I remember when I first I was able to do a Peace Corps over in Eastern Europe and just the, just the how much more things were condensed. I remember being one of the biggest culture shocks I faced when I came back to the States. I remember walking into it. It was a, it was a. It was a big box store like a Walmart or a Target and I remember looking around and being like holy cow. The whole the village I was living in could fit in this store.

Joe:

Yeah.

Joel :

And just, or the size of a parking lot. When you, when you're used to it, it doesn't, you don't think twice about it, but the moment that you move away and then you come back, it's. It was, it was, it was a little, it was shocking, honestly.

Joe:

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, he exposed all of that to me and I was doing the same. I was, I would take his show, and one of the things is awesome about public interest projects is we were all engaged in community activity as well. We're in different nonprofits, and so I was doing the show as well, but just my version of it and I went and did a presentation at Smart Growth America in 2009. And the it was on.

Joe:

It was on taxation, and I had a quote from Mark Twain that said a person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read, right? So I have a bunch of books behind me. If I choose to not read them, I'm still illiterate. You know, it's like I don't. I don't know what's in those books, but if I read them, I might get some stuff shoved in my brain. And so I had my hand in the air and these are all like people that want to do smart growth and community economic development, affordable housing, and I said so you know who's read your local tax policy?

Joe:

I was expecting a couple nerds to raise their hand, but not a single person raised their hand and I was like what the hell Like? Do you even understand. If you don't understand, that's how we pay for government, right? You don't even in. You work in government and you don't even. You're not even curious. So I was blown away and some people asked me like, Could you do this for us? And that's how urban three got started. So I was just doing it on the side until about 2012 and that's when we started Urban 3 Full Time as a consulting company. But that's all public interest projects, ethos, down to one little silo, basically of it. Let's just show the financial models and what we do is what you'll see in our work is it's very visual. We're doing a three dimensional model of the city.

Joel :

Yeah, I noticed that. I was impressed with those 3D models. They were really cool. What do cities use that for? How are they taking that information and what are they doing with it?

Joe:

Well, the first part of it is a bit of a wake up. So if I can show you your brain, with your creative thought process and green and your brainstem activity in blue, right here, I can show you what's going on in your brain why not show you what's going on in a place, right? So this is Bunkin County. You live here, I live here. Gray is non-taxable, so here's Mount Mitchell and here's Pisca.

Joel :

The National Forest.

Joe:

Yeah, they're non-taxable. So, just to be crude about it, they don't pay me taxes. I don't care, right? Okay, fine, green is low value. So here's a big IV up here, and then here's the Biltmore State, which is Biltmore State. What the house is on, the one that parceled the house is on, is worth $100 million. So it's very valuable, right, but how many 180,000 square foot houses are there in the county One?

Joel :

Or in the country, yeah. In the country, yeah.

Joe:

Yeah, so it's on 8,000 acres of land. So this is like saying miles per tank. But this is how people talk about economics and it's like this is stupid. This isn't like we don't say miles per tank when we talk about cars. So rather than total value, this is value per acre.

Joe:

The model just shifted and you know this is where a lot of people stop and I'm like no, communicate it. So this is what it looks like in 3D. So if I just kept it here, you know a lot of people are just like there's some nerds that'll know like, oh, 20 million is way more than 6 million, right, if you look at the histogram. But this shows you the scale difference and you can see West Asheville right here. You can see downtown, you can also see downtown Black Mountain, you know. And then you can see the sprawl on the south side. You can see what goes out to Lester, which is here's Lester Highway, right there.

Joe:

It doesn't look all that great, you know it's a bunch of garbage, but the thing is like, why not have a Black Mountain on the west side, over here in Enka Candler? Like why didn't that happen? Why didn't it have? You get something good with Biltmore Park, but not a whole lot compared to all of the trash around it. The other thing is you can see the scale of wealth. Look at over here by Chuns Cove on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Notice how that is less productive. Also, biltmore Forest right here is less productive than West Asheville. Did you have known that Biltmore Forest or Chuns Cove is less productive than West Asheville?

Joel :

No, so show it to people.

Joe:

So this is our thesis Just show you the information and not just talk about it. Yeah, how.

Joel :

I'm curious what your take on. Obviously you're going to be at the conference, coming up here at Neighborhood Economics. From your background in developing communities, developing downtowns, urban planning, I know you went to Harvard to learn about this stuff. What is it about Neighborhood Economics that you feel like is either unique or that is exciting to you?

Joe:

Well, it's kind of funny you mentioned those things. Let me give you another story. I grew up in the Rust Belt One family, a town that's called Rome, new York. Lots of Italians there. My uncle, frank, had an Italian restaurant.

Joel :

Get a good carbonara downtown, hopefully.

Joe:

No, you get it at home. You don't go to restaurants for Italian food. You know, and it's like, my uncle Louis had a Sicilian bakery. Uncle Joe had an Italian pastry shop. He paid my mom $300 to name me Joe.

Joel :

Yeah, louis, joey, yeah, yeah, this is.

Joe:

I grew up in small businesses, in family businesses. In that economic system. My uncle Joe's pastry shop was taken in imminent domain and he lost a ton of money in his building, his investment. This is an Italian immigrant son who creates a business, buys a building. He had renters upstairs and the building was taken. I didn't realize, like you know, I was my uncle Joe. He's kind of he's an interesting dude, but we'd hear these stories of what he went through. Fast forward.

Joe:

I go to planning school and we talk about all of this stuff in books back here of oh, this happened, caldera and Renoir. It's like, well, it happened to my family and knowing that they knew it was the wrong thing to do. When you read documents of what was going on, there were business owners that were like this doesn't seem right, you know, but they didn't have the political clout. Now, on the flip side, you have politicians and I'm not going to debase them by saying this, but the truth is they went a popularity contest and the next thing, you know they have to manage really sophisticated decisions. They're not. They don't go to grad school to learn this stuff, so it's not fair to them to put them as position.

Joe:

So what I find, is that oftentimes the people that are in the middle, the bureaucrats, all speak their own language and they're only trained in their own little silos. They don't see how it's connected, because that's not their job. So there's this tragedy of decision making, because no one's on the same page. So the whole thing that we try to do is just give you a visual so everybody can see what's going on, and then just be curious, you know, just start asking questions.

Joe:

Let's get past like these are the way things have always been done. That's not going to solve things. And what I enjoy about this conference is that it's all the folks that know that things need to change in the system and it's becoming aware of it and facile with how to navigate through that system and how to tell their own stories and build their local wealth. These are folks that are trying, from the grassroots level, to grow their economic system of the whole community, and that takes leadership. It takes a certain amount of person that's going to run through that wall. You know, and that's what I enjoy about that conference is it's a whole conference full of folks like that.

Joel :

Yeah, yeah, I find it to be a really unique and really inspiring collaboration, too, at the same time, of people that, where you know, kevin has really hit home to me that there's no litmus test here. We're all just about improving our communities, improving the lives of the communities, especially that have been divested from, let alone not invested in, and then, you know, getting out of this two pocket thinking where we feel like business is only to maximize and extract profit, and that you know, churches and nonprofits are the only thing that can do good and that there's no partnerships to be had there. And so, yeah, I'm really excited for it. I'm excited to get to spend some time with you down there in San Antonio. I'm excited for just a lot of things that are going to be coming out of there that I think are really exciting. Based on what I've heard about what happened with Jackson Mississippi last year, what's happening in San Antonio this year, what I love about the work that you're doing is about kind of.

Joel :

You know, in my own personal growth journey, one of the values that I've come across is trying to, like, let go of illusions, you know, through things like meditation and things like mindfulness in my own life and get past the conditioned thinking that we all have, because every single one of us was conditioned to think a certain way and to actually see reality as it actually is.

Joel :

And that's something that I'm just like really really picking up on. What you're doing is it's like okay, let's drop the assumptions, let's question the assumptions at least and see if they hold up to that questioning, because I think a lot of times we get taught, as you said, we either get taught about our silo or we get taught about our certain particular skillset or a certain thing that we need to do, but a lot of times we aren't taught to actually think for ourselves. And what I say on our show is one of the things that we do is we bring on the people who are questioning the assumptions. That there's just one bottom line and yeah, joe, I'm really glad that we got to have you on here, today.

Joel :

Thank you all for listening here and until next time. Remember we are each other.