For the past few months I've been working on a new project called GPLetters. We've traveled around the country meeting and photographing the people behind America's next great real estate companies. Zach Molzer in KC. Bobby Fijan in ATX. Austin Tunnell in OKC. Dave Gordon in MT. Val Katayev in NYC. Many more, published weekly. We're writing deep-dive, long-form, no-AI Letters on how these folks are building at an incredible scale. My goal with GPLetters is to tell the stories of the people (re)building our country, and show behind the scenes of their projects, cities, and companies in a beautiful way. Grateful if you check it out and let me know what you think at GPLetters dot com.

Making hundreds of millions or billions of dollars is more about the game you’re playing than about how good you are at the game This is why you see some VCs get VERY wealthy even when they aren’t S tier capital allocator’s Take a step back and ask yourself “Is the world I’m playing in, one which I can make $5M even if I’m mediocre?” For most people the answer is no But if you want the answer to be yes, you should play in a world where $5M is nothing but a blip in the scheme of things

Laws change, housing gets built. SHRA (SB 684-1123) could kick off an ADU-scale starter home boom in coming years, and it'll get stronger with SB 1116. California YIMBY has been proud to work with @CASenCaballero and allies! We benefited from feedback/examples from BuildCasa.

Best thing that can happen to you early in life is losing money on a stupid venture, realizing “quick money” is a total scam and understanding that the only way to real wealth is putting your head down for 5-10 years & building an actual business Earlier it happens, the better

BuildCasa is on track to deliver California’s first completed SB 684 project. In the past, a project like this would almost certainly be a rental. We’re using the latest tools to create four new fee-simple townhomes plus a renovated existing unit, each sold separately to homeowners at ~30% below average. SB 684 is opening the door to a new generation of small-scale infill housing, and we’re proud to be proving what’s possible. Congratulations to everyone on the team who helped permit, design, and build this project.

What every voter and apparently, the NY Times Editorial Board, should know about housing policy: 1. Rents reflect the balance of supply of apartments and demand for those apartments in a given area. That’s it; there’s no magic. If you want lower rents, you can hope for a recession that destroys jobs and, therefore, demand. Or you can add supply. 2. There is no amount of money that any big city government could feasibly spend that would add materially to supply. This is because, depending on the location, new apartments cost $250,000-1,000,000 to develop… building even a few hundred of those starts to stress any city budget, and many big cities need tens or hundreds of thousands. 3. On the other hand, investors (including pension funds and endowments, insurance companies, rich families, etc.) can collectively **easily** provide enough capital to build as much housing as we need **so long as they are confident they can get a reasonable return**. To get those investors to fund the creation of the housing our society needs, we must do two things: 1. Dramatically reduce the time & complexity associated with securing governmental permission to develop housing. This means reviewing and simplifying the overlapping regulations that constrain housing production: zoning codes, building codes, parking, ADA, etc. But it also means changing the cultures within the relevant governmental agencies from “default no” to “how can we help you?”. 2. Provide certainty around on-going regulation of apartment operations. The way investors get a return from building rentals is as follows: They hire managers to lease the apartments, collect the rents, pay operating expenses and any mortgage payments, and then send the investors the cashflow that remains. But governments all over the country have been restricting the manner in which apartment buildings can be operated in all kinds of ways. For example: Cities have been making it harder to screen tenants, while also making it much harder to evict tenants who don’t pay. You can see why both of those measures are politically popular. After all, who doesn’t want people to get second chances? And who wants anyone to get evicted? But, as a manager, the combination of those two regulations makes it much harder to predict, with any certainty, that the rent will get paid… and that makes it very difficult to get investors to provide capital to create more housing. Another example: Rent control. Again, I understand why renters love rent control and why politicians want to give it to them. But, if, as has been the case in NY, LA and San Francisco, city governments hold annual rent increases below the rate of growth in the operating expenses of the buildings, the cashflow payable to the investors shrinks… making them much less likely to invest capital in building more apartments. In conclusion: For ~every other good or service in the economy, we allow the market to function, and the result is that we have a surplus of choice at all price points (think of food or clothes or cars), which is spectacular for the consumer. If we want a surplus of choice at all price points in housing, we need to get comfortable with the idea of allowing the market to provide it. And that means allowing investors to build rental apartments *and* allowing them to operate those apartments in a manner consistent with making a reasonable profit. Remember: Every developer of rentals is either a landlord-in-waiting or hoping to sell to one.

I'm the architect on this project. As a ministerial project we're not required to meet non-objective HPOZ standards but we're excited to introduce new units that are inspired by the surrounding neighborhood. Here's what it looks like from the street.

With the Autodesk Fusion connector, designers and engineers can create and modify 3D models through conversation.

Developer @DonovanBuilds ! and "I can tell you what every retailer on 5th avenue is paying" retail broker @CoryZelnik