Using Radical Common Sense To Build Great Places, With Steve Nygren

Serenbe is a unique community just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. It’s based on the development pattern of traditional English villages, with walkable, mixed-use “hamlets” surrounded by nature. In today’s episode, Chuck sits down with Serenbe founder Steve Nygren to discuss the process of developing this kind of community, as well as Steve’s development philosophy of “radical common sense.”

• Click here for a computer-generated transcript.

  Chuck Marohn 0:00

  Hey everybody. This is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the strong towns podcast. I can't remember how many years ago it was a while now, I was invited to go visit the development outside of Atlanta called Serenbe. It's rather famous for a bunch of reasons that we will discuss. The invitation was extended by a very kind guy named Steve Nygren. Steve actually has a new book out, or coming out now, called "Start in Your Own Backyard: Transforming Where We Live With Radical Common Sense," and I invited him to come on the podcast and chat about his book and Serenbe and all kinds of other stuff. So Steve, welcome to the strong towns podcast.

  Steve Nygren 0:51

  Thanks Chuck for the invitation.

  Chuck Marohn 0:53

  It's nice to chat with you. I feel like a good place to start would be, in a sense, your story of being a restaurateur and then ending up doing this development, it's an odd story arc, but it's one that, you know, I think would give people a little bit of confidence, regardless of where they are, that maybe they could do a version of this. So can you, can you maybe start there?

  Steve Nygren 1:23

  Sure. You know, Chuck, through my life, I found that the richness is many times the 90 degree turns, well, we're headed one way, and we just know where we're headed, and all of a sudden, something takes us in another direction, and and there are no expectations. And also, you enter with a naive world. Maybe I went to school to become an architect, and got seduced into the hospitality industry. Opened my first restaurant in Midtown Atlanta when it was in an area that was run down and, you know, been built in 1900 it was the only place I could afford the rent at the time. But we became successful and and and continued to go into locations that were not obvious to most people. You look back now, we were at the beginning of uptick, and that was throughout Atlanta, Washington, DC, various places. And so through a hospitality, I was transforming real estate. So I was on the edge of it, not a developer as such, but working with developers in transforming areas. I was very successful. And then in 1994 I had an opportunity to sell the company. We had 36 restaurants in eight states, and we retired to our weekend farm, and I thought, you know, I was just a lucky guy. Kids were young, and I was able to have all this time to travel and go to Europe for a month. You know, life was great, and our farm is, is, is that area of Atlanta that just had missed development? There was, there was no transportation services. It was unthought of in the southwest quadrant of Metro Atlanta, but we loved it because it was so convenient to Atlanta, to the airport, what have you. And so in my seventh year of retirement, there were several threats to the area that development had found this and was finding the area because it was the last affordable land. I started buying more land, and at 900 acres, I realized I couldn't keep doing that. And as we looked at models, we thought, Oh, well, we'll create a model that's going to transform and give a different idea. But as we talked with George and Vicki Rainey outside Chicago, Seaside, these various places that were great models actually ended up accelerating a destruction of the area in more traditional areas. And so I stepped back and said, Hey, we've got to think bigger if we really want to transform the area. And so we spent the next two years bringing 500 landowners together to talk about this. Now, what happens throughout the country is people don't think development is going to affect them. Then a developer borrows money, buys land, starts planning, and starts to the zoning process, and the community decides that's not what I want happening. And so this is where the battles start, whenever, when everybody is already entrenched. And so we started this early thinking about this with with people who were land speculators, who were pro development, and those people who had been here for generations, and they were divided. Part one to you know, bring on the bulldozer. This is payday we've been waiting for, and the other half Don't you touch this land. So we had a diverse group of people that's no different than most areas that are on the edge of development as we brought them together. It was one of the largest land use zoning changes in metro Atlanta, 60 square miles. I. Yeah. And so then all of a sudden, you know, you're down this path of passion. And all of a sudden, you know, I've got this land, I have got to show what we're talking about. So we use the countryside of England as our model, because a dear friend had already been there, really became familiar with how you could cluster development and stave the majority of it for agriculture, because after World War Two, England couldn't afford that sprawl. The island was only so big, and so this was the model we were we were holding up, and several things were happening that helped us support that. This could happen in the United States, in the southwest, on the edge of Atlanta, but then it I felt the responsibility to actually take our land and demonstrate what we were talking about. And that's how I found myself in the path of a developer. And this is what my book's about. Hey, don't worry about what you do not have control of. Look at your own backyard, your own area of influence, wherever that is, and focus there. And if we all did that, it could be a changed world. I'm

  Chuck Marohn 6:09

  interested in the subtitle, the idea of radical common sense, because I think everyone has their own version of common sense. I mean, clearly we all you know, what's obvious to one person might not be obvious to the next, and that, what do you want people to take away as common sense? Going through this book,

  Steve Nygren 6:32

  while I had been on the edge of development, I was a naive developer, and so I came in with all the things I thought we should do. Is I was coming down this and environmentally a dear friend of mine was Ray Anderson. And your environmentalists will recognize that name. He had inter interfaced carpet, and he was one of the first US industrialists to put his company in a carbon neutral footprint in the 90s, Ray had been a friend of mine for years. In fact, his stepsons godfathers are 37 year old, and so we watched him in that transformation. So at dinner one night, I said, Hey Ray, you know all the smart people, could you help find somebody that could help me figure out how to save this area? And so in September of 2000 ray and the Rocky Mountain Institute assembled 23 thought leaders for a two day session. Georgia Tech documented this, and so this was at the forefront of a lot of the environmental issues and how we should address those from a community scale. And so, you know, I'm just excited that we can do these different things. And as we start planning and permitting, I discovered that over 50% of them were not allowed for one or another. And so here's where common sense. This is like. This is all pretty simple. I'm not I'm not discovering something new. In fact, the best place to look is, how did we live and develop 100 years ago? But through these decades, we have so many unintended consequences to the rules and regulations and systems we've set up that we've really changed how we develop where people live. And so it's just kind of clear all that most of our people coming out of planning, architecture, they have that naive mind, and gradually they're beaten down by rules, regulations and and so that's hey, let's look at this common sense thing. And so that's from land use. It doesn't make sense to tear down all of our trees, grade everything flat and then start over, but that's what we have been doing. And so I go back and talk about President Eisenhower set up the interstate highway system to move troops and equipment from coast to coast. It was it's never been used our interstate highways for military actions, but that really set in motion, a lot of our urban sprawl, and if you start looking at item after item, we no longer have communities to where we can walk to the services, the restaurants, the schools, and it's all been out of a focus on efficiency, and we have really, I think, Our regulations that we've put in place over the decades. They've really sanitized where we live out of all kinds of safety or all kinds of of reactions, but we've really taken the vitality out of where we live. We have so sanitized them. We have one intersection at ceramie that I think remains illegal in in most communities and zoning today we have, you know, you have single family houses, which are very normal, and across the street you have townhouses, and then on another quadrant of that intersection you have live works. Now that disappeared for. Zoning so many times where you had the shop on the street and residents above, and then we have a commercial the restaurant. So even if you have two of those or three of those three, you hardly ever have commercial a restaurant serving liquor across from our residents. But yet, if you look at most of our communities 1930 or before all those conditions existed. And so that's a good example how it's kind of common sense we want to walk, especially in this day and age, to all these things. And yet, most of our a lot of our zoning regulations actually decentralize if they don't actually make it not possible.

  Chuck Marohn 10:41

  I first became aware of cerebe in the early 2000s so you're, you're 30 years into this project now.

  Steve Nygren 10:48

  No, no, we, we started looking at this 25 years ago. Okay, zoning in 2002 state law we needed in 2003 and I broke ground on cerebe in 2004 and the first people moved in into in 2005 so we're 20 years into people living here. I

  Chuck Marohn 11:08

  had a good friend of mine, Jeff hegard, who went and visited you, and I swore it was a little earlier than that, but maybe it was like 2006 seven. I feel like the environmental movement in general has changed over the course of your involvement here, and I wonder if you feel like you get different pushback today than you did maybe 20 years ago, or if the sensitivities are different than they were 20 years ago, because I, I do feel like a lot of what you have done as part of a conversation that has kind of shaped and changed how we think about cities paid that timeline for us. What were the what were the concerns that you dealt with in the early 2000s and are those different than the ones that people would come to you to today.

  Steve Nygren 12:03

  Oh, you are so right. The environmental movement, there were some real folks talking about it. It's amazing when you look back at Atlanta. So you did have Ray Anderson in the 90s. You had Ted Turner in the 90s. Dennis Creek started south face, and south face had some of the early, early conferences on on environment and all these things. So this was actually right here. And so we were around it before I was really thinking about we were going to apply some of these things to Sarah mu so when we started, this was the beginning of LEED certification. Our our blue eyed Daisy is one of the first 100 buildings certified, and is, I think, remains, the smallest silver to this day. So we were at the forefront of a lot of a lot of things that people didn't understand. Now, my friends, you know, I'd retired and and then I decided I'm going to be a developer and I'm going to put a restaurant in the middle of a fourth they really thought that I had lost my mind, or where the marijuana patch was, because they knew I was growing something in my woods, out here that I was on. I was not I was not making logical sense to anyone. So you're absolutely right. This was something that you had to search for the people. And it's amazing we all know each other, because there were so few of us at the time. And so I've described it that it felt like, as we were in this movement, we were carrying lanterns in the darkness, looking for one another. The pandemic, you know? So things were gradually changing, you know, whether certification, awareness, rules, regulations, what have you. And then the pandemic came, and we all just went in, went into our own worlds. Now we kept happening here. In fact, is amazing people caravandy, and they thought they were staying for a couple months, and they're still here. They put their kids in the school, you know? They realized this just wasn't this, what some called it the granola community. They were coming in from the west and east coast. Oh, my God, this is a real play, you know. And so they were here coming out of the pandemic. It feels like we walked into lighted rooms. The global wellness Summit is doing their wellness real estate. They invited me to speak at a conference 11 years ago in Marrakesh, and I was the only developer among 38 countries that were in attendance. Wow, today, there are so many that there's a separate conference in time. In fact, I headed there next week, but, but, but last year, this was held in JP Morgan Chase's headquarters on Madison Avenue with like, 400 people from those you know, from around the world, and you have JP, Morgan Chase and Heinz talking about all these issues that we've been and so, man, it's a lighted room now this is a lot of folks talking about it and and they've understand the mark. Is changing your 20 and 30 year olds who are coming into decision in the buying market, they have lived with a fragile world, and they're concerned about all these things we've been talking about my generation, the baby boomers. We've grown up thinking everything's going to always work out. And so we have a whole different approach to seeing the same information.

  Chuck Marohn 15:25

  One of the more stunning things about CRM B is I say this, and I feel like this is even cutting it short. This is, in a sense, like an environmental preserve, but it's also some of the most beautiful architecture and intense urban development that you're going to find. How do you how do you mix those two? And I feel like there's an Atlanta context here too, because Atlanta is, you know, known for its auto oriented, decentralized, spread out development. You're fitting more units per acre than most developments around you, yet you've preserved and made good use of the ecology the natural systems. What is the approach that gets us to that? Where do you start? In a sense, your your ethics around this that gets you to an outcome like that, you're

  Steve Nygren 16:28

  absolutely right. If we can do it in Atlanta, Georgia, we should be able to do it anywhere. Right, Chuck?

  Chuck Marohn 16:33

  Yeah, that's what you'd think, yeah.

  Steve Nygren 16:35

  Using the countryside of England as our model, we move forward. And we brought in Phil tab, who did his doctorate on the English village system. And so we started looking at cluster development. We found a balance. As we brought our through these meetings that we brought in pro development, pro preservationist, we were able to look at various models that could do this. Randall, Aaron's books were a great a great help in giving visual ideas as to what could happen. The studies around 2001 that the Urban Land Institute did on golf courses really helped, because we have so many golf courses, because the bankers saw the high premium that lots in golf course communities brought right the word got out, hey, developers, you go to the bank, you tell them you're going to put a golf course in, chances are they're going to give you your loan. And so everybody was trying to design golf courses. And then the Urban Land study Institute, as you know, did the study showing the majority of people that bought those played golf twice for the lessee

  Chuck Marohn 17:43

  didn't even golf, right? Yeah. So what does that

  Steve Nygren 17:47

  tell you? And so I went to our community and said, hey, what if we could get golf course values without the expense of installing or maintaining it? Right now, what I call common sense, when you really unravel and look at the, you know, the bare facts of it, that's one of the common sense issues. Okay, so then, if you're going to save the land, you know, what's your ratio? You know, we started out saying, hey, developers, if you could get these values, you know, would you preserve a park? Yes. And so, hey, you know we were looking that, you know we preserved somewhere 30 to 50 we started, went to the community, the preservation crew, the people that wanted no development, and we said, hey, you're not, you're not a best safe 10, 15% because anyone interested in conservation easements, organ, they're all in front of the bulldozers up north, where the developments already happening with. You know, this is all comes in later. If we could change, if we could save 30 or 40% would you support development in the area? Absolutely, common sense. We as a community came through, and we're going to save 70% of the land. We're saving it not going to and we're developing the 30% but we're moving all the development to that 30% and so that that's that forces the developer to maximize the number of units into density, which, you know, we haven't been doing. We have shown that, that we can save 70% and we're actually going to put 20% more housing per square mile than Metro Atlanta has done per square mile and a 17 county area over the last three decades. Because this urban sprawl eats up our land, and it's not very efficient. Doesn't have the common space. Certainly doesn't have places for forests or farms and what have you. So here's another it's common sense now. Now, here's the big thing. Infrastructure costs are 40% both to install and maintain. So whether you're the developer. Birth, the local government. This is, this is of interest. Well, common sense. If you're not disturbing the land and running roads all over the entire area, and you're clustering it in 30% of it, it's not going to cost you as much so. So all of a sudden, this is why I talked about common sense. We're, we're so in a pattern, and when I call it a broad thinking, we just keep doing the same thing, and we know that, that we're sicker, we're more depressed, we're using our resources, but somehow we keep doing the same thing and and because we have the regulations, we don't change the regulations. We're not educating our financial institutions that there's a different way, a better way and a more profitable way. And so 2025, years ago, when I talked about doing an environmental community, I quickly stopped talking about an environmental community, because everybody thought I was a, you know, they already thought I was some sort of hippie. And so they imagined, 25 years ago that I was talking about, you know, mud, straw bale houses, right?

  Chuck Marohn 21:07

  The Eco village, compost toilets, yeah,

  Steve Nygren 21:09

  all those things ecovillage and in Ithaca, the biggest thing we can do is change the financial and government's attitude about the need for Big Lots, or, you know, small lots. And so I said, when I really started to understand I was going to be developer to save the backyard, but if we were going to do it, we needed to change attitudes about environmental communities, because we were at the forefront of that. And so it's like, okay, how can I sell the most expensive piece of property, that's the smallest lot that faces a farm or a forest. And if I can do that, I'm going to get the attention of the financial community, because we're going to change that trend of what you think of small lots and saving the forest or the farm, plus we were in an area these 60 square miles. This was farmland our neighboring towns four miles. It really hasn't changed. In the 50s and 100% of the kids in that public school are in some sort of public assistance, in free lunch programs, or whatever it is. So this area could not support their own services. If your house caught fire, chances are it's going to burn down. If you had a medical emergency, you better get in a car because the ambulance wasn't coming. So we also had to balance the tax base. And this is another thing that local governments aren't always looking about. You know, we see the headlines when when workforce housing is displaced. We don't see enough headlines about when executive housing disappears, and this is part of the anger in rural America. For the last several decades, we have been stripping their livelihood through this goal of everyone getting a college education if you're going to succeed, we've stripped their count, and all of a sudden, these many of these communities can't afford their own services because we aren't focusing on the executive housing. So when we talk to local governments now, we really ask that question, do you know what it costs to provide services as an average and do you have as many houses above that line as you do below that line. I

  Chuck Marohn 23:23

  want to talk about the density, but what's the local government's answer to that? I feel like you've educated them by asking a more sophisticated set of questions, a set of questions that I'll use your words are rather common sense. You know, if you're the local government and you're going to take over maintaining this road or take over maintaining this pipe? Do you actually have enough tax base to support that? How has that conversation evolved over the years for you? As you've had this over and over again with people

  Steve Nygren 23:55

  number one? So unpacking this and everyone you're talking about density, you know, if you look at our first community, it was not nearly it's dense by normal standards. You look in our community now we have 1718, units, these simple units per acre. Yep, that's dance in our motto. We have that going up a hillside at 110 feet that our civil engineer said, Oh, my God, you know, you number one, you can't develop so, you know, that's a good excuse to go to Italy and study the hill towns of Italy. You know, they're very dense, very walkable

  Chuck Marohn 24:30

  and charming as heck, and lots of elevation

  Steve Nygren 24:33

  change. Yeah, that area is really studying the Italian Hill towns. Our base theme there is, is Scandinavian architecture, because it's on health and wellness in many of our program. So we have this form and massing from Italy, but with Scandinavian architecture on it, and it's this unique area. So we have a we have a staircase, this great staircase. It goes up 110 feet, 220 steps, and there are 30. Front doors onto a walkable staircase. We don't see that in America. We see all over Europe, and we come back with pictures of it and say how charming it is, and we save our money to go back to these places. Why can't we do it here? And we are doing it here, and we're showing there's a market for it. Now, maybe it isn't everybody, but we have a huge market, because nobody else is really doing this in America to this degree, into this established. A lot of people are starting now. We're going to see some exciting things coming out in the next 20 years.

  Chuck Marohn 25:34

  You know, people need to go look at this themselves. Really, if you're in the Atlanta area, you should go check it out. I feel like when we're saying the word density, there's a lot of people who are taking as as happens. When a lot of planners talk about density, they're taking the standard American subdivision and just cramming it all together. So instead of 20 houses with a garage in front and deck in the back, you get one big apartment building with a big garage. You have immense density, but you also have this exquisitely beautiful place. You talked a lot about needing to reach a certain amount of tax base in order to afford this stuff. You have certain price points within the development, why is the architecture side of this? To me, it's like the key. Why is it so important? How do you thread that needle? If I'm if I'm your standard developer, and I hear you say density, it feels like I should hear something else, besides just more units per acre. I should also hear something about, I should ingest in my brain, something about the beauty of what I'm building is that a fair assessment,

  Steve Nygren 26:47

  there are a lot of threads to make the fabric work. Okay, that's, you know that that's certainly two of them. The density creates walkability. We reality, we haven't been focusing on that. In fact, we sort of, this is the unintentional consequences. I don't think we just, we made a conscious decision to create places that were auto dependent. But this whole idea of, you know, over the last several decades, it's an idea that luxury, a place of success, was a bigger piece of land. And then we start putting in all of our own toys, the pool, the tennis court, if you can, your your movie theater, your cappuccino machine, you know. And then all of a sudden we don't need sidewalks, because nobody's walking, and everybody has that, you know, and and we put fences around them to protect our toys, and all of a sudden we look and we are. We're isolated and depressed and lonely, and we've created places that that that do that unintentionally. But that is where we are in America today. We find number one if you have a walkable community. If you have restaurants and coffee shops and schools and medical services within walking distance, people are not attached to their cars, so you don't have to have the car parked in the garage in the front yard, taking up the streetscape, and we have very cleverly hidden, or just they park on the street. In some places, it's back alleys. In some of the dense areas, your parking is not even near your front door. We're more concerned about having a natural nature within 400 feet of your back door than we are having your car within 100 feet of your back your back door. Now that's not for everybody, but there is a huge market. Our real estate prices have gone up because of demand and and the tight places. And you realize, if you have if you have this density, you also don't have these big yards that you have to spend your time on the weekend maintaining or spending the money to do. The other thing we found is all the big lawns everyone has basically are chemicalized, and I think they're making us sick. We have 240 kids living here full time, and there's not one reported sign of asthma. That's statistically impossible in the United States. Yeah, yeah. We really, you really, don't see obesity. One lady said, you know, I've been on diets for 20 years, and about 10 years ago, I gave them up because none of them were working. I decided they were ruling my life. And she said, we moved here about 10 months ago, and my clothes were loose. I borrowed a scale because I'd given a mine away, and I had lost about 16 pounds without thinking. And she said, I realized I'm walking to places rather than going to get in the. Car to go to places. I walked past fresh food rather

  Chuck Marohn 30:04

  than fast food. I buy McDonald's, right? Yeah. And so she said,

  Steve Nygren 30:08

  just the lifestyle alone, I started losing weight without thinking about it, and it didn't, you know, it absolutely didn't. So the kind of places we build can also lead to that health a piece of that is beauty. Studies are coming out now. How? Especially pandemic. It's so many studies are coming about. Why, you know? Why did people go into such holes? But beauty is an important thing. If you look at how we built American towns, 100 years ago, we had a lot of attention to architecture. You know, it was that European you look at places, anywhere that have survived through centuries. There was an art patron. There was an importance on beauty. It just is what we did in the last five, six decades in America, especially, efficiency has taken over beauty, and we totally changed what we have thought was important, and I think today we're experiencing the consequences of that and the importance of art and beauty in our everyday lives.

  Chuck Marohn 31:17

  The thing that I remember most, I mean, there's a lot of things I remember from our time together, but the one thing that I have told the story over and over and over again to people, because it was so stunning to me. We were going along at one point, and we stopped, and you said, come here. I want you to look at this. And I don't know if you remember this, but you said, I want you to look at this. And you showed me a sight line through the woods. There was like a little, and I'm going to call it like a contemplative garden kind of area. This is all like thick forest, and there was a little, almost like a Japanese garden kind of area, like a just a place of solitude and a trail that ran through, and you had a it was like a post that was up. But then beyond that, it was like ended symmetrically on the next neighborhood over. And I'm someone who I realized that I have a certain odd in my brain, and the symmetry of things and the nature of things really hit me. But I remember looking at that and being astounded by your vision to say, I've got what God gave me, this natural landscape. I'm not really touching it at all. I'm I'm working within it. But within this natural landscape, I have this man made area and this man made area, and they're connected not by a road, not by a street, but by a sight line, and that sight line is actually important to the people on both ends of this connection. If I can make that real by putting this, this thing in the middle that will allow them to connect, I can build something subtly beautiful. Am I? Am I dreaming this, or was this real? Did we actually have this

  Steve Nygren 33:08

  is real and there's, there's any number of places that that could have been that we stopped. So we have paths and view sheds that are constantly running through are developed and our preservation area. So everything is laid out with sacred geometry. As I said, Rocky Mountain Institute helped us find Phil tab, who did his doctorate on the English village system while he was in England. He also studied sacred geometry. So that's the absolute balance of our natural resources. And so this is one reason you feel this. The visual areas that you're talking about help you actually your your mind, understand it, but you're feeling this, this, this balance. And it's not only the beauty of the architecture. So every architect has to defend the style of their architecture. So we have a mix of architecture, as you saw, but we do not allow a mix on one house, and so that really kind of has pure good architecture per each building. We really focus on where each of those houses sit from the curb and the height the rich cat. And so you're feeling the flow of these masses along the street as they help also emotionally move you into these same kind of experiences that you are feeling as we look down these view sheds into nature and out of nature. So that's true all over, and we curved the streets. And no matter where you turn, there is a view shed that whether you're into nature or a building that's centered on a street, we spend a lot of time really looking at that. And it's sort of a natural thing. It's, you know, this is, this is how this should feel. It. You step back and you start analyzing. It's Hey, this is common sense. This, this feels good. This makes sense, this, this functionally works. All those kinds of things.

  Chuck Marohn 35:11

  There was a a peacefulness to the fact that somebody cared enough to do that. And I think that's the to me, that was the, the most jarring thing about it. And I say jarring in a positive way. You go through most subdivisions, and I mean, I've been part of this process. The land surveyor comes in, lays down the lots, the engineer draws up what the road section will be. Here's how much Earth you're going to have to move to make these lots lay out like this. And then the builder is challenged with making each lot work. And, oh, this might be a walkout. And this one might need some fill. And, you know, this might need a retaining wall. How many retaining walls you have? My guess is zero, or pretty close to it, maybe. But,

  Steve Nygren 35:52

  you know, we have them. But the thing is, it's we have them only because we're not disturbing the Earth.

  Chuck Marohn 35:58

  Sure, sure, sure, right, to make up for the topography change, right? That's right. Yeah, I've written three books. I know this is a big undertaking. Why write a book? What prompted you to do this? And I feel like every time I write a book, I learn a lot. The act of writing teaches you something. What prompted you to do this, and what do you think differently now? Or what did you learn? Maybe that you didn't know going in.

  Steve Nygren 36:26

  The real reason was the steady additional interest, as I mentioned, when we started talking about this, everyone thought I was crazy and friendly. I stopped going to meetings or even talking about it. We just pulled in and started doing it, and I thought, well, we'll, you know, we'll build our house, we'll build this restaurant in the woods, and people will start to get the idea, you know, Ray Anderson had, over that course of those those years, had somehow pushed me through that threshold of passion to where you stop looking at logical reasons. You just all of a sudden get that glimpse that this, this isn't that hard. Why isn't anybody doing it? And so, okay, I've just, I've got to do it. I have the skill set. All these years have given me the skill set from hospitality to to working with developers. And so suddenly, that realization I had the skill set. I had the success clout that I could I could call people in important places when rules needed to be changed, and pull them into that conversation. So suddenly it was just like, oh, I never thought I had these skill sets, but now that I see what has to happen, oh, I do have all these skill sets. So it was our responsibility to move forward. And in those first years, literally everybody thought I was crazy. I thought we had all we changed all these zoning there was a lot of press about it. I just knew that I was going to have investors that wanted to come in and help me put the model in. And they all laughed at me. I found out later that they were all laughing as I was trying to raise money to do this. And luckily, I believed in Midtown Atlanta, and I had the real estate that I could leverage and actually do this myself. I couldn't have done it otherwise. So this is why, I know a lot of people, how difficult I was uniquely able to do that. You know, all of a sudden I found, gosh, well, the the analysts, the governments, the real estate community thought I was nuts. There was a buying market that was hungry for this. I was selling my lots as fast as I could put them in. And so that happened until 2008 when I really borrowed a lot of money because I thought this was so easy, I needed to really get a lot of lots on the ground. I brought 120 lots to mark at the end of 2007 and the four builders that had reserved and did contracts on all two went bankrupt and two went out of business. That was a very sobering period of time. But what happened is, is around 2010 the analysts were understanding that environmental and walkable communities were the first to start stepping out of the recession. So the first time people were starting to come and ask what we were doing and have interest in it. And so that was the beginning of sort of, you know, coming out from, from under our blanket, of doing this thing. And that's when a lot of people were identifying us as new urbanists because of our density. Well, we are new urbanists, but new urbanists don't preserve land, or aren't necessarily environmental. Yeah, we're in the published top 10 environmental communities that urban land published back back then. We're the only one with density. You know, it's Braves Island, all these great environmental places. I grew up on a farm. If we're going to build a community, had to have farm. Well, everybody thought I was nuts, because who would want to live next to a stinky farm? Well, industrial farms are but environmental are, and so the press started looking at New York Times reporter did a story on. Us having a farm right next to the house, and called it a neighborhood. That's a kind of a movement. So people are arriving expecting one of those three focuses. And while it was there, there was it was so different than what they were expecting. So that's what we look who are we? And this is when we started looking at biophilic design. And so what we really talk about is this is applying biophilic principles on the community scale. And E O Wilson, many people have talked about that. And you know, 20 years ago, people couldn't spell out, they didn't know what it does, and suddenly you're seeing biophilic design show up in a lot of articles, a lot of places, becoming a lot more so we're at the forefront of really talking about that from a community scale. This is how we've kind of led into all these things. So as we did this, so many people said, Well, you've got to share it, you know? So we started a consulting team. We set up a biophilic room so people can come. But we have discovered these things, and so how can we share them? This really applies to any scale. And what I realized, if I was going to write a book, it really is much more than about developing places to live. It's really about taking responsibility for where we live. And no matter what the issue is, what I really have done is I, you know, how do we get here? And that's what, in writing the book, I really started digging into, how did we get to these places? And this is what I've come to. Hey, nobody intended us to have dysfunctional places, but it would be hard for anyone not to agree that we have dysfunction in the kind of places we're building. You know, you just look at the statistics, we're constantly, you know, sicker and more depressed. And that comes back to our built environment. We're spending so much money on trying to understand how to cure diseases. We're not spending enough. Coming back to the core reason for it, even though we understand that 80% of our deaths are due to lifestyle. So this is where I'm having trouble. You know is I start, started doing the book, you start looking at the research. You find out who has done the research. The studies are all out there, but, but somehow it's not been put together, and then with a focus back on the places we're building. Too many times we come in to address the problem up up here, to fix it once it's there. How to fix it before it happens?

  Chuck Marohn 42:34

  Let me ask you this thing, because I feel like the biggest critique that I've heard of cerebe over the years is that this is a, this is a crazy outlier, like Steve is, uh, you know, a renaissance man, and he's really great. But, like, you can't repeat this. You can't replicate this. What would need to change for this set of ideas to scale? Because I don't see the Toll Brothers doing this. I mean, I don't see DR Horton becoming, you know, mass producing Sarah and B type developments around the country. What would need to happen? We start seeing these all over the place.

  Steve Nygren 43:12

  It's happening. Chuck,

  Chuck Marohn 43:13

  yeah, I know that is to a degree.

  Steve Nygren 43:16

  It is happening. They Yeah, and I know this because the people were helping, sure, and now it's increasing. I getting calls, hey, I mean, last night, a major development that we helped Master Plan five years ago, they didn't think they could get it through the strict zoning. We were able to help them get that. You know, people see places that make sense. And so you come into these rift zone, and people just automatically believe they're not going to go along with it. And so you have to start there. And so it's fine. We get these people, you know, they call last night, hey, now, how did you price your lots? How do you do with your builders? They're excited. They have actually, five years later, they're actually going to market to their builders. We are seeing, may Astor developers coming in here that you would never thought would do this, or helping someone on on affordable housing and printing to workforce housing, we are touching people in every segment of the building market. And it is going to change. If you look at this, what's happening possibly with 3d printed houses for workforce housing, and if they can bring them to the market, especially in places where labor and materials are high, this is all going to change. Now, a lot of our rules and regulations have trouble with it. So we really have to educate both the regulatory community and the financial community that the poo poo and think it's, Hey, this is migrant on his crazy idea. We have moved past that, and the market's showing it, and we're showing how this can happen. And. We have expensive houses here because we're in an area that needed that today. I don't know how your math is here in the inner head, but we have a 40,000 acre city basically all rule the kind of workforce housing that was headed this way and trying to do it, they didn't understand what I was talking about. So they all went to our edges. And so you see those developments on our edges all around it, and we are the only people that have really developed in the 20 years. Now that's changing. A lot of people are coming in from literally all over the world and starting to plan their developments here. But we, to this date, have disturbed about 300 acres

  Chuck Marohn 45:46

  of the 40,000

  Steve Nygren 45:48

  at the 40,000 of my 2000 Yeah, about 70% of it was taxable in the last tax year. Yeah, today we are 65% of the tax base for a functioning city with a full time police, a full time fire, a full time Public Works and People working on education and art, we have brought vitality to a community that did not have a taxpayers for basic services. And so this is what we have to look at, is, how do we how do we bring this kind of vitality, no matter where you are or where it is, when you have to have that balance for it to work? And so why we get criticism for, yes, expensive houses, and that's solving one thing to show there is a market. People will pay dearly to live in a house that has a 10 foot yard on each side of it, but looks out on the farmer nature and they don't have to take care of it. We're proving that there is a market for that, and more people can do that, and it changes the tax base for where it is. But these principles that we're doing here, whether it's density, it actually would work better in many ways, in in the workforce housing now, right, right. You wouldn't have granite curbs. You wouldn't have custom made street lights. It'd be different. But you look at our old mill villages that today, we're saving them. They're charming, and the values have gone up. That's,

  Chuck Marohn 47:23

  that was where the poor people live. Yeah,

  Steve Nygren 47:27

  we need to bring that. You know, in an America, we're trying to build the same house cheaper, and then the Bob comes off, and it doesn't work. You build a different product, right? But it should be the same sense of pride that the doorknob feels good when you hold it now, it might not have the same square footage or be the same, okay, it's very different. And so we're anxious to actually dig into this and produce some of the this other additional housing. What

  Chuck Marohn 47:59

  do you hope people take away from your book, what do you want someone who reads it to be like? All right, I'm ready to go to I'm ready to go to work. Let's go to not

  Steve Nygren 48:09

  spend their energy worrying about what everybody else is doing or that they feel that there is a major problem. And I hope that they step back and say, Where could I affect change? Maybe it's to put it in a garden for your own family. Maybe, you know, to clean up the trash on the road that was driving you crazy as you drove in. Maybe it's to run for the school board. Maybe it's to run for city council. We're just not stepping forward. We're in a period, and you know, it's all the media. We think, you know it just because all of the media and we see the problems around the world, and it feels like they're on our own back door. And if we just step back and say, what is really going on in my own backyard. What is it that doesn't work? And where could I really make a difference? And if everyone will step forward, whether you're doing a podcast, whether you're dealing in your school board, where is it and and you know, so many people have said, Hey, we need more women in decisional places. I mean, there's caring. They come at a situation in a different and they look at view it differently. I pulled in some of the research. And if you look at every position where it's an elected official, and you look at the number of people who put their name forward, not who was elected, but who's put it was only like 23% of them are women. So what could we do to encourage women to step to step into this and to be empowered to do some of these things they are in those communities that is their backyard. There are just many things like this that we hope people just step back and say, hey.

  Chuck Marohn 49:59

  Like I could make a difference. Steve, thank you for taking the time. Thanks for your generosity. You know you've always been very kind to me, and I appreciate I mean, you gave me a whole day of your time too to go around. And you're a busy guy. I really love what you've done, and I hope people do get your book. It's called, "Start in Your Backyard: Transforming Where We Live With Radical Common Sense." It's very strong towns. Steve Nygren, thanks for being on the podcast.

  Steve Nygren 50:30

  Well Chuck, thank you. And you know however much time you need, because you do have a voice and you do have an audience, and you can make a difference. So one question for you: When are you coming?

  Chuck Marohn 50:41

  I hope soon. I did a stop in Atlanta a couple months ago to go to a exhibit in the downtown. I was flying somewhere, and I flew through Atlanta, but I was on the ground, like six hours. It was really crazy. I need to come back and spend more time, not just with you. There's a lot of good things going on in Atlanta that we need to talk about.

  Steve Nygren 51:00

  So, yeah, yeah, we have a lot happening here, so come back.

  Chuck Marohn 51:04

  Let's make it happen. Thanks Steve and thanks everybody for listening. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town. Take care.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• “Start in Your Own Backyard: Transforming Where We Live With Radical Common Sense” by Steve Nygren

• Learn more about Serenbe.

• Chuck Marohn (Substack)

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