How a Popular Development Practice Backfires on Homeowners

Residents of a neighborhood in Colorado are confronting a $434 million debt incurred by their community’s special taxing district, which was set up by developers to finance the neighborhood’s infrastructure. A group of neighbors are now organizing to take control of the district’s board and try to bring transparency to the financial situation.

In today’s episode of Upzoned, Abby is joined by Edward Erfurt, Strong Towns’ chief technical advisor. They discuss how using special taxing districts to fund developments is a common practice, how it leads to snowballing debt, and how difficult it is for residents to manage this kind of situation.

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  Abby Newsham 0:04

  This is Abby, and you are listening to up zoned.

  Abby Newsham 0:18

  Hey, everyone, thanks for listening to another episode of up zoned, a show where we take a big story from the news each week that touches the strong towns conversation and we up zone it. We talk about it in depth. I'm Abby Newsham, a planner in Kansas City, and today I am joined by Edward Erfurt, who's the Director of Community Action for strong towns. Edward, thank you very much for joining me today. This is not it's not every day that you get to be on up zoned and we get to connect with each other. So I'm excited to talk with you today before we jump into the article, I am kind of wondering if you could just kind of introduce yourself to the audience for those who maybe haven't heard of you or about you and would like to learn a little bit more about what you do for strong towns, yeah,

  Edward Erfurt 1:08

  well, thanks for having me on Abby, and we always get a catch up on all different types of odd things the national gathering. But I always enjoy being on up zone. So my background, I went to architecture school, and a few weeks into it, I got introduced to urban design. My parents really don't understand what I do. When I talk to my mom, she doesn't understand why I'm not doing buildings and additions to houses, and I just took a different life path. I found that working in cities was a passion of mine, I've worked in the private sector, doing big Master Plan communities, much like what we're going to talk about today. I also worked in the public sector, working in City Hall and county government, working on development projects and making these things work again, working with some of the financial tools we're going to talk about today for those types of projects. So that led me on a path to do lots of things. After a while, Chuck and I have known each other for a long, long time, and we always said we need to find an opportunity for us to work together. And gosh, just about three years ago, I had the opportunity. There's some openings of strong towns. We start as strong towns. Chuck started to expand into what the organization was doing, and it became the right fit for me, and I have the real honor and privilege to work with local leaders, super citizens and elected officials around North America to help them go that next step. They read about strong towns, they hear one of these incredible podcasts, and they say, Okay, that sounds so much like my community, but I've got all these barriers. What do I do next? What is that first step? So using all the powers of strong towns, I get the opportunity to work with folks, not as a consultant, but really as a coach, to help figure out and untangle those struggles. So it's always fun to write. It's always fun to get on the podcast and share some of these real time. So yeah, I get to do a little bit of everything at strong towns and really, really enjoy it.

  Abby Newsham 3:20

  Thanks for breaking that down. I mean, the more I hear about your role at strong towns, the more fascinating I think it is. You really get to understand the nuance of what people are working on and dealing with in places all around the country, so that that information is really invaluable. So yeah, that is such a privilege, and it's hard,

  Edward Erfurt 3:45

  everything people are doing. If it was easy, we would all be in a much different place. But but as I talk and I get to introduce folks, I get to introduce different members from around the country to each other and show them that all of the cities are in the same situation. It's just a matter of where you are on the spectrum and how much work you want to put in. It is, yes, I'm not designing houses, but I am working on the communities that many of us all call home, and helping people just get to that next smallest step to make their communities stronger and safer. That for me, that's really rewarding, and it's fun to be kind of in the back seat as a guide to that process with those communities.

  Abby Newsham 4:31

  Yeah, that's definitely something that I think anybody who works in the city planning, urban design world, it's always kind of hard to explain to friends and family what you do. It's not. I feel like everybody does something a little bit different, and it's kind of meta, like it's not, it's not like you're you can't point to a house and say, I designed that. Um. That you'll do

  Edward Erfurt 5:01

  20 plans, and then maybe five or six years from now, it gets built exactly

  Abby Newsham 5:06

  or or it'll be like, you know, a set of policies that happen or actions that are taken by other people after a plan is adopted that aren't necessarily physical. So, yeah, it's, it's an interesting job, for sure. Sometimes people will just point to bike lane and say, that's what you do, right? I'm like, kind of, not really.

  Edward Erfurt 5:28

  If it makes you feel better, I'll take credit for it, right?

  Abby Newsham 5:33

  Exactly like, No, not really, but, yeah, but it's, uh, that's the name of the game, but it's cool. It's cool what you're able to do across the country with different people. So also, I didn't realize that you have done master plans for neighborhoods like the ones we're going to talk about today. So very interested in what you have to say about it. This is an article that was written by Olivia young and published by CBS News. Kind of a long title here. It says the largest neighborhood of this Colorado city is $434 million in debt. Neighbors are now seeking board control. So residents of a neighborhood and Castle Rock Colorado are called the meadows are con confronting a four, $434 million debt incurred by their communities special taxing district, which was set up by developers to finance the capital expenses of building the roads, The water lines, the parks when the neighborhood was established. While this might sound like a reasonable way to fund new growth, many residents were not aware of the financial commitment they were signing up for when they bought their home. So the debt was incurred through something called a metro District, which is a really common financing tool used in Colorado, these districts allow developers to essentially issue bonds or loans to pay for infrastructure with the expectations that homeowners that that buy the houses will gradually pay off those loans through an increase of their property taxes, so an additional assessment on their property. However, these districts are initially controlled by the developers, not necessarily the residents. And homeowners don't always have a lot of say in how the money is being managed or spent. And it seems that my understanding is that, in this case, the revenue that was generated through the district was not able to cover the payments of the debt, so the unpaid interest has accrued into more interest, to the point where $70 million of principal has snowballed into $434 million and some residents are saying that this has been structured so that residents will never pay off the bill, making the debt ever lasting. Now, as more people realize that this is a really serious long term tax burden, a group of neighbors are organizing to take control of their districts board and try to get to the bottom of this and really bring transparency to the financial situation. So Edward, what are your initial thoughts on this? This seems like a real problem. I know that Colorado has these Metro districts. I'm not really an expert on them, but it seems like it's a really common tool that may be impacting more than one neighborhood throughout the Front Range. Yeah.

  Edward Erfurt 8:49

  So this is something really common that developers do, and some cities and metropolis is direct developers to this. When you start a development project, and you master plan it all out with all the things that city hall wants. They want to make sure every house has access to parks. They want to be sure you have not just regular storm water, but enhanced storm water, the better roads, maybe a school, all those things, all those costs money, one of the ways a developer can pay for that is to float a bond, and they can repay that bond by working with a municipality through a special taxing district. So there's lots of communities I'm familiar with them for maybe like the new urbanist communities and or master plan communities on your tax bill will be a special taxing district that will be added to it. You're paying an extra couple $100 a year on your taxes. So if you pull up your tax bill, it's going to say, typically, like your city property tax underneath that, and maybe for the school board, you may have four. Fire District, and then you have a special enhancement district or taxing district that is to repay back these types of expenses. So this is a mechanism to go and get lots of amenities in a community. So when we look at a lot of the big Master Plan communities, this is a way that you can do all the development up front at some times. We would describe this as built to finish state. You get you get all your cake before you eat. Your dinner gets built all at once. Cities feel good about it because now they're not nagging a developer to build the pool or to pave the roads. It's all done at once. It's funded the developer, right? Gets the bond. The money actually doesn't go to the Developer. It goes to pay down the bond to the bonding agency. And as a special taxing district, you get a better interest rate because it is a repayable bond. So you're at those municipal bond rates, you know, the one the 2% rates that are coming in. So this, it's not uncommon that big Master Plan developments would have this. And I think I looked a little deeper on some of the articles, and it looked like Hessel rock as a city. They're overlaid with almost a billion dollars worth of these, this particular meadows, is only half of that. So this is something that all these communities are burdened with.

  Abby Newsham 11:31

  So one thing that I'm curious, if you know the answer to that, I immediately thought about, was what happens when they need to repair infrastructure. So I don't know how old this community is. In particular, it's old enough to the point that it has, you know, quadrupled plus their initial principle, even in situations where communities are able to pay down a portion of of those bonds over maybe 1015, 20 years. What happens when they need to repair that infrastructure? Are they taking out an additional line of debt on top of the debt they already have? I mean, it seems that this is essentially the same model that cities have been facing when needing to repair their legacy infrastructure, and they're unable to So cities are taking out bonds. This just seems like another jurisdiction, if you will, or another group of people to get it out of the cities, but into a different entity. Is that? Does that feel right to you? Yeah,

  Edward Erfurt 12:51

  so there's a couple of ways that these are set up. The neighborhood itself, probably it sounds like it has a homeowners association. There's usually some governing document over each of the phases, and there is responsibility assigned early in the development as to who is responsible for the upkeep of maintenance of various aspects of the project. The three big pools of funding that's out there that there's maintenance on the first are all the public parks and community buildings. So part of that may be part of this district or part of another Homeowners Association, or maybe those were handed off to the city to maintain. So mowing, keeping those buildings up, kept all of that is one pot. The next is going to be your roads. So all of the roads in a lot of cities, the last city I worked in, somewhere along the line, they required all of the road maintenance to be handed over to the city once complete, well intentioned, but it puts all the responsibility on the city to now maintain the asphalt, plow the streets, sweep them, all the things that we have to do. And then the last out of the funding is your underground utilities. So this could be storm water, water and sewer. Those may be handed off to utility companies, and they're adding additional maintenance onto it. This, this particular development. They pulled the bonds in 1989 so I'm assuming that time they were building. So yeah, 36 years ago, they pulled the money. And it doesn't take much math to figure out that there are maintenance costs that start to occur at like year 25 so by year 36 there's probably some road maintenance. There's probably some storm water ponds that need to be repaired. There may have been pipes that broke in that time frame. So. Uh, in that realm. Now, what's interesting about this particular neighborhood, in these districts, is that at some point the a new developer came on board, and they refinanced the debt, and they did something that was, well, it was creative, believe it or not, I think creative for the residents. They locked in the maximum millage that they would have on that so they throttled down how much would be collected on each house to pay the debt. Now, the reason you would do that is that these developments are fighting for the same home buyers as the adjacent development next door. So if I'm buying a house, it is disclosed at my closing that all sudden this neighborhood, I have to pay an extra 1000 or a couple $100 a year compared to the neighborhood that backs up to the house I'm looking at. They may look like the same house, but I have a different tax structure. What does that money go to? Well, I get the same things whether I'm in this neighborhood or the neighborhood next door, and that may be something that prevents folks from purchasing a house or restricts them on their mortgage availability, because when they plug that in, the underwriters may say, Well, wait a minute, you you could afford this house, but the amount you have to pay per year and your additional escrow and taxes puts it out of your ability to pay,

  Abby Newsham 16:38

  Right? So it's basically a race to the bottom. And what I think is problematic about this system being managed in this way, where, essentially the developers are the ones, I guess, on the board and running the financial decisions here is that they don't necessarily have an incentive or an ethical obligation to be transparent about what the outcome of not paying more into this would be in this case, to the point that you know they've they've remained competitive, but now the residents actually owe a lot more money than they originally would have. And of course, cities get into these kinds of issues all the time with with debt and this kind of growth Ponzi scheme model. But I just would think from a public sector perspective, there's more of an ethical obligation to to to be transparent about finances and communicate to taxpayers what is needed to pay for the services they want, and this is kind of creating that disincentive to share that information to the point that they now have a lot more debt responsibility than the otherwise would have.

  Edward Erfurt 18:02

  Yeah, this information, it's probably available when you buy a house in one of these communities, it's in your closing documents. If anybody's ever gone and purchased a house, especially in some place that has a bunch of code covenants, you get like, four or five inches of paper, and like 1000 pages that you have to sign. I doubt that you're reading every one of those pages, because if you be there all day, you just know that you are paying into a system to achieve what you want, like you want to have a nice neighborhood. You expect the developer to do this, but how the neighborhood was structured, how it was financed, is really the last thing in your mind. It's it's even below what zoning category Am I like? These are things that everyday people don't ask. They just know it's at cost. The sad thing is that although this is way on the far end of the spectrum, and we can say this is part of a development or developer scheme to it, this is also what a lot of cities do. If we just continually pay the servicing of the debt, what does it matter if we ever pay it off, we just continue to kick that can down the road. I think in this, some of the literature I read on this is at some point, I think in another five or six years, the debt has gone so long that it then goes to zero interest, like they've milked out as much interest as they could ever get out of it, and that goes to zero interest. So now, over the next like I calculated it out, if they're collecting $14 million a year in property tax on their current millage, just for this, they have 430, 4 million in debt. If there was no more expansion of that. Debt. It's another 30 years before they pay it off. It's

  Abby Newsham 20:04

  incredible. And they've been around since the 70s, you said, or the 80s. So we're

  Edward Erfurt 20:09

  gonna be, we're gonna be almost 6670 years, if we just stopped today, on the accrual of interest on this debt, I

  Abby Newsham 20:19

  just want to mention, and that's the principle so that that is paying off the debt from the 80s or the 70s, when this was all originally built, and this is not accounting for maintenance that is going to need to be done repairs. There's a lot of other expenses that will be required to upkeep a community like this, and I don't know the details about who's responsible for that, if it's the Metro district or the or the city, and how, if it is the Metro district, are they needing to then take out more debt on top of The debt they already have in order to maintain what they have, and if they have $434 million in debt, are they able to get an another bond to pay for maintenance that that's not all completely clear to me how that's operated. I

  Edward Erfurt 21:17

  don't think they'll get another bond. I think they just won't pay on what they currently are,

  Abby Newsham 21:21

  so they'll take out of what they have, yeah,

  Edward Erfurt 21:25

  out of the 14 million, they just won't pay as pay down on the loan. So right now, the 14 million isn't even covering the principal. It's not covering the interest, yeah, falling behind.

  Abby Newsham 21:38

  So just to throw additional math on that, let's just say that you said it takes 30 years to pay this off. If they use all of the revenue and they're not accruing any more interest, presumably they need to use a portion of that money every year to pay for maintenance and repairs, so that could bring that long term payoff to well over 30 years, maybe 40, 5060, years, depending on how much needs to be set aside for other needs. It's

  Edward Erfurt 22:11

  highly risky. And the other thing that happens is that all of our states, and I know this is in Colorado, they set caps on how much tax you can put against the property, right? Like, like, if we could just solve the world, if we knew it costs, if it really costs so much per year, we're just going to tax our residents that amount. It's such an astronomical amount that there's protections on it when they do the millage rates in Colorado, this special taxing district, this Metro district tax is in the formula, and it restricts how much Castle Rock could increase their millage every year. So the ripple effects, the long term ripple effects of this for the next let, let's just say, on a on a good year, they can't get any more out of the taxes from the residents in the neighborhood that millage has been set they for the next 30 years. Castle Rock is handicapped. They're handcuffed on how much more they can increase taxes for other parts of the city. So if they needed to go again, the fragility of our local economics. This is something that is unique here, but it is something that impacts the revenue generation for the city if they really needed funding to do the things that citizens might want them to do. That's so

  Abby Newsham 23:41

  one thing I wanted to ask about as well is this dynamic where the developers, you think about development, and a lot of cases where you know developers going to take some land, plot it, subdivide it, build houses, sell the houses, and eventually they're no longer involved. It From my understanding of these Metro districts, it sounds like the developers sometimes are staying on these boards for a long amount of time, and the residents are not always being represented. Is that? Is that your understanding of Metro districts are they? Is does it depend on the metro district that that you're in about how well the residents are being represented? Because they're, they're essentially, kind of, I don't want to say privately run, but maybe that's the right word. But they're like, privately run cities. It's like we've outsourced the job of of what cities are supposed to do to these smaller districts that are set up. And sounds like managed potentially long term by the developers of these cities.

  Edward Erfurt 24:58

  Yeah. I. I don't know exactly how it's structured. Every community, every state, structures something like this differently. I can speak from experience of my developer friends, when they build a development, the first decisions there's one owner to the property, right? Because it's like, let's say, 100 acres, and that one person or development team gets to make all the decisions of the roads. They write the HOA documents. Usually there is a process. As they sell lots, they are then working. They have the head seat after so many years or so many lots, they can then step off of that, and homeowners start to fill that role. Over time, they eventually walk away, like they work their way out of it. Some developers want to stay on board, so they hold out like I think somewhere in the story, it talked about the only person that could be on one of the metro boards was the owner of one vacant lot in the development. That's probably because that is the last hold out lot that the developer had, and there's no one person. It's not like the guy from monopoly. These are usually tied up with other financial products. So by the time you see a development or community already built out any of the debt, any of the pieces to it have been bundled up or leveraged for the next project. So the first person that came and laid this out and just ceremonial did the first shovel they have. They've recouped their money in their their project, they have started a new company, or they've retired and gone to Florida. They're not the people that are back in this particular piece. The other thing is, when you think about citizens, these sorts of structures are usually set up, kind of like an LLC or corporation. When you have a corporation, you have to do reporting, and you have to upload it to different sites in the state, and you have to pay your couple dollars a year to keep that up. When you have an HOA, you it, it's really one of the last jobs. Managing an HOA is a really tough job, because you now have 1000s of residents that all have an opinion, and you are trying to balance all of those without having the resources to do it like City Hall has a police department and a code enforcement division, and HOA can pay an attorney to write a nasty letter. So when you have citizen boards, they and you have tight on funds, things slip through the cracks of some of that recording of how these things are going on. They may just be in the motion of doing it. So it may it may not be as the various as somebody, a developer, trying to hide it, just maybe the fact that there is some somebody in an office in a major corporation that doesn't that's not fully aware of the stake they have here, or the responsibility to do this stuff, and it takes A lot of time to go through all the records to find out who the person is. And there's never a phone number, there's always a PO Box and an LLC. I can speak from code enforcement working in the cities, it just it's a lot of persistence to actually find the person that has the legal authority to be able to take action. So I admire the residents that have been tenacious on this and have gotten one of the different Metro boards, and they need to do that so they can go and really bring to light what is happening. And the best way to communicate what is happening is probably from the neighbors, because they can. They can explain this to their friends and their neighbors in a dialect about what's happening. They can talk about it almost as a third party, so that it's not the big, bad developer talking to them or some bank out of New York this. This is what's there. These are all the receipts of how we got to here. Now we need to figure out how we can pay this down and close this out. And it may require the city to step in and help them do things so they can get this it's in everybody's best interest to get this debt

  Abby Newsham 29:41

  paid off. Yeah, and I, yeah. I certainly think it's great that the residents are trying to take control of the situation. I also think that this is not a this is not appropriate as a long term volunteer effort, if that's what it is right now. Now, because in in a city, you would pay somebody to be managing your books, to be running these financial I mean, this is very important, and so if these boards are run kind of voluntarily, and the stakes are this high, that's just something that gives me a little bit of heartache.

  Edward Erfurt 30:21

  Yeah, managing $430 million worth of debt, yeah, and, and with a revenue stream, or, or a different way, I'm managing a limited liability corporation that is generating $14 million a year in revenue. That's an onerous task for anybody, and there's lots of legal stuff. There's lots of oversight that's supposed to happen with that, and well into attention legislation. That's why they're usually there are management companies that deal just with homeowners associations. It's an expensive service, but when you see all the things they have to do, like, for example, when I was in Florida, one of the things the planning firm I worked for did that was really lucrative, was to map out all of the mowing contracts for all the big Master Plan communities. So when you think about Central Florida, if you've been to Disney World, and you look at any of the neighborhoods you go through, Every neighborhood has lots of grass and the big medians and parks, there's 1000s of acres of this when homeowners associations and maintenance groups and special taxing districts go out and sign the contracts. What we've we're finding is that many of these contracts, there are portions of property that we're getting mowed by two or three different groups. We're doubling and tripling because again, that nobody had linked it to a map or looking at some of the contracting, they were overpaying or it was, I'm just throughout numbers, but like $100 an acre for Sammy to mow, but lonz R Us was $25 an acre. But we didn't know, because none of this stuff lined up. One of the lucrative things we had was just to go and map it based off of the description of the contracts and meeting with folks that that is a management thing that city manager or county administrator would hire staff to do, but for homeowners association emerging out of residents, we don't think about that, and it is a full time job, and if you make a mistake, we could say, maybe this is a mistake, that you just went from $70 million in principle that I would expect had been slowly getting paid off, maybe not because there weren't enough houses to pay it all off, to four 30 million today. That's

  Abby Newsham 33:03

  I mean, that that's an incredible oversight, right? And with that amount of money that's being managed, these are essentially like little cities that really need to have the the attention and care of a city manager, people who who can step in and focus on this full time. And maybe that's what they have. Maybe they have somebody who does handle all the management. But yeah, this just seems like, this seems like a situation where they they really need to be managing it like a city, and it's unfortunate that we have this, these situations where we're kind of duplicating cities. We have lots of we're not just running things under one city. We have these, these districts that have, I guess, little oversight over the financial outcomes I read

  Edward Erfurt 34:03

  in one of the articles, like one of the advocates, one of their citizens in the neighborhood, they're very upset about this, and they describe this, these districts, as a poster child of abuse. That's one way to phrase it. It's not the way I would phrase it. I actually would actually say that this is a demonstration of our suburban development model, and that this community, when we look at this, these numbers are big, but this is the way that 1000s of acres of development is being funded in our cities all across North America, that if you live in a community that was planned all at once, if you live in a community that looks like this, there is probably a document that has a structure similar to this taxing district, and if you aren't paying that type of taxes, then as a special district, it's possible that all of that. Liability got put over to your city, and $70 million worth of infrastructure for this community couldn't be funded with the hundreds or 1000s of homes in this neighborhood. Take that to scale and in in Castle Rock, they've got a bunch of these districts that's over a billion dollars in debt, believe it or not, there are cities that people love and cherish in that are much smaller than this, that are holding that much debt today because they wanted nice things all at once, and they opted for that. So this is really there may be something nefarious there, but what I would really put some grace into and step back and look at, is that this is just the pattern of development that I'm seeing all across North America. It's a way we fund it at strong times. We call this the growth Ponzi scheme, because at some point these roads are going to need to be repaired, the pipes are going to break, and the revenue being generated off of this community is still repaying the debt for the initial construction, and that's going to be a really tough thing to find money for if there's a problem. Yeah,

  Abby Newsham 36:17

  absolutely. Well, I think we'll leave it there. Thank you very much for sharing your insight and knowledge on this topic. I'm not an expert on Metro districts, but it's definitely concerning and fascinating as a model for development in that part of the country. Before we wrap today, I want to do the down zone, which is the part of the show where we share anything that we have been reading, watching, listening to or otherwise doing in our spare time these days. So Edward, I'm going to put you on the spot. What is your down zone?

  Edward Erfurt 36:55

  Well, I have been reading or listening to the words of Bill O'Reilly has these incredible book series that I just been introduced to, and I just finished up his book on killing Patton. And I'm like, a big like, World War Two military buff, and I found it just fascinating, because he goes through the history of Patton being this great, incredible general. And then there's a lot of mystery as to how Patton came to his demise at the end of the war. And I found just found it like a little bit of suspense, a little bit of getting me to think about history and how there are so many coincidences that just all lined up to this great general getting into a car wreck and then ultimately succumbing to those injuries, I just found just amazing story of how that got laid out. So, yeah, that's I've been I've been going through a lot of those books now because I just I love history and I love the movie Patton, so that's all the sound back in my head. And just knowing that you've got this rough and burl Take, take all, don't give up an inch of ground, type general, and learning, learning about that and what happens at the end of a war when your great general no longer has a military to move forwards, yeah,

  Abby Newsham 38:27

  let me ask you, Chuck is a world war one buff and you are a world war two buff? Do you guys get into conversations about this, or debates?

  Edward Erfurt 38:39

  Not debates. It's just, you know, when you start talking about history, it doesn't matter what war that you talk about, there's so much commonality in it, really quite sad. So each of these great wars that we've had, even our modern wars, the only thing really is changing is some of the mechanization, maybe some of the movements on the field, but it's all very much the same. The World War Two is a little bit easier for me to comprehend, because there are places that are still on the map that we can still identify those countries, when you talk about the first great war, you have empires of the time and different boundaries that and different things that upset folks that resulted in that which we might seem silly or trivial today, but were were quite important at that time. So yeah, for me, I can visualize the World War Two stuff. And my dad and I always like Saturdays were the day to watch all the Yellow Ribbon collection and Blue Ribbon collection videos of all those old war movies. That was the one thing in school I knew all. Those generals names and who was on which battleship from those old war movies. So as an adult, I actually have the time now to sit and read through it and dive more in the history. And frankly, I find it be way more dramatic going through the true history of it compared to what some of these movie directors have done. Hmm,

  Abby Newsham 40:21

  wow, that's really fascinating. Well, I don't think I was aware of that book series, and now I'm very interested in looking into it. So I think I'll do that after we're done here. So I will share that I'm actually participating in the boot camp that Incremental Development Alliance puts on. They're actually doing a virtual version of this boot camp. Typically, it's like a two day, I think, kind of Charette style in person workshop. And they're offering this this, this, I think it's five sessions, three hours each session, virtual boot camp. And me and a group of people in Kansas City are all participating in it. And I am actually going to be exploring the idea of finding a building where I can put my painting studio and seeing if it's viable to create space where other artists could also sublease from me small spaces and kind of create like a, I guess, a co working space, in a sense, for for people who are doing art or or maybe other things too. But, yeah, that's that's something that I'm going to be exploring in the next month or so. That's

  Edward Erfurt 41:48

  great. I love ink Dev. I love the mission that they have and that they're inspiring folks like you to invest in your town. I i am nervous as all get up to get out of my comfort zone, I can, you know, I can draw it up, I can promote it, but for you to take that step, it's really important. It's as you've described. It's a way, not only do something you're passionate about, but a way to give back to your community, because that type of investment you make is going to provide an opportunity for others to come together and be entrepreneurials and and reinvest and give back to their community. So I, I always, I aspire to that, and I will cheer you on. But man, it that development

  Abby Newsham 42:39

  very scary. Well, I haven't done it yet, so I appreciate the support in the course. I'm gonna make sure I'm taking the course. Yeah, I'm going through the process of more seriously exploring this idea, the fact that all of my painting supplies are I put it in the basement, and then it finds its way outside of the basement, and then it goes back in, and then it goes back out and takes over my house very quickly. And so I I live in a neighborhood, an urban neighborhood, in Kansas City, where I own my house. I am adjacent to a commercial corridor with a lot of vacant, small buildings. And every day I am just looking at these buildings. There's one so close, like I could throw a rock at it to my house, where I'm like, I mean, it would be really cool to have a space that is close to my home that I can go to, I wouldn't want something where I need to, like, hop in my car and drive 10 minutes, because I just don't think I'll, I'll do that. It needs to be in very close proximity to my house. But there's just so many little buildings that are not being used. And so if I can figure out a model that is financeable, and maybe some ways to to fund it. And and somebody who wants to sell me a building i i would love to implement something like this. So stay tuned. We shall see.

  Edward Erfurt 44:14

  I'm excited. I'm gonna follow up and make sure that,

  Abby Newsham 44:17

  yeah, keep me accountable. Just keep pestering, because

  Edward Erfurt 44:22

  even if you don't, at least you know why it's not. And that starts another incredible conversation your community. We should all be asking why there's a vacant building in our town. And I, I truly believe, with the work that we've been doing through the housing toolkit and housing rated communities, that when you start asking those questions, we all have the local power to make those buildings occupied and helpful. It's like you build. So I'm excited. I'm excited to hear what you learned. Yeah,

  Abby Newsham 44:55

  thank you. I'll I'll be sure to share back on the on the show when I'm done. With it so well. Thank you, Edward. I appreciate you coming on today, and I hope you will join me sometime in the future. Great thanks, Abby. Have a great one. You too. Talk to you soon, and thanks everyone for listening to another episode of up zoned.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• “The largest neighborhood of this Colorado city is $434M in debt. Neighbors are now seeking board control.” by Olivia Young, CBS News (February 2025).

• This Thursday, February 27, Strong Towns will release a toolkit to help city officials welcome incremental housing development. Learn more here. Become a member to join the launch livestream with experts Alli Thurmond Quinlan and Eric Kronberg.

• Abby Newsham (X/Twitter).

• Theme Music by Kemet the Phantom.

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