The Bottom-Up Revolution
In an era of quick, generic construction, Austin Tunnell makes the case for caring about beauty and craft. He shares lessons from masonry, small‑scale development, and his own projects on creating places people actually enjoy using every day.
Austin Tunnell is the Founder, CEO, and Head of Product at Building Culture, a holistic real estate development company dedicated to creating beautiful, resilient, and thriving places. With a hands-on approach, Austin oversees all aspects of design and craftsmanship, ensuring every detail aligns with the company’s vision for timeless and human-centered spaces.
He also hosts The Building Culture Podcast, where he engages with industry leaders and change-makers to explore holistic solutions for the built environment.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Bottom Up Revolution Podcast. My name is Tiffany Owens Reed. I am your host. I'm really excited about today's conversation.
On this show, as you know, we like to talk to ordinary people who are doing what they can to improve their community in a bottom-up, organic way. We bring on a pretty wide variety of guests. Some people are focused on changing laws and zoning and regulations. Some people really love doing incremental, tactical projects. People are interested in all kinds of things, from housing to transit to walkability to better support for small businesses.
But I always think it's a fun treat when I get to talk to someone who's actually building something — building a new style of apartment building, or building a new kind of neighborhood. That's the nature of today's guest. It's always fun to talk to individuals who are actually creating a tangible way of rethinking our approach to the American city, doing that in the actual world with real built materials. It's always a privilege to talk to them.
Today, I'm joined by Austin Tunnell. He's the founder, CEO, and head of product at Building Culture, a holistic real estate development company dedicated to creating beautiful, resilient, and thriving places with a hands-on approach. Austin oversees all aspects of design and craftsmanship, ensuring every detail aligns with the company's vision for timeless and human-centered spaces. He also hosts the Building Culture Podcast, where he engages with industry leaders and change-makers to explore holistic solutions for the built environment.
Quick note: I mentioned this a couple of episodes ago, but you might hear a small lisp on my end. I had to get braces about two months ago. So if you're wondering if I'm okay — I'm okay. It's just a fun little perk of getting my teeth adjusted. Without further ado, Austin, welcome to the Bottom Up Revolution Podcast. I'm excited to have you here.
Thanks, Tiffany. Looking forward to talking with you.
Tell us your backstory a bit, Austin. I know from speaking with you that you grew up in Houston, traveled around Europe, and professionally you started off as a CPA but then pivoted to architecture. Can you unpack that journey a bit? Tell us some good stories along the way.
Yeah, I have a bit of a checkered past. My first job out of college was as an accountant. That's what my dad did, so I just went into it — super practical. Realized a few months in, oh my gosh, I hate this so much. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, Googling cool jobs and things like that, and ended up coming across the Peace Corps. It took a long — about a year-long — process to get in. So I ended up quitting after getting my CPA. I made a whole 15 months, and I moved down to Panama.
The short story is that was 2013, and that was the first step down this path in traditional urbanism and building. One, because I was introduced to new urbanism down there and read the book Suburban Nation. Two, I was introduced to Clay Chapman, who later took me on as an apprentice. He's really a master mason and builder.
When I got back to the US, he took me on as an apprentice. But I went from Panama to the Peace Corps for a couple years in Uganda. The second cool story is the first person I met off the plane was my now wife, Sarah. She was another volunteer, and we ended up being placed near each other. During those two years in Uganda — obviously not really related to urban design or urbanism — I was reading about it and becoming really convicted by it.
As I mentioned, I had traveled Europe for a few months right before that accounting job. Having grown up in the suburbs of Houston, I was going, oh my gosh, this is incredible, what they built. It's lasted for centuries, it's so beautiful. The lifestyle — grandparents out till late, you have all-night festivals with family-friendly things where kids and grandparents are up and the whole city's up. Just a really incredible experience. It started making me question why the world looks the way it does. Why does Houston look the way it does?
That led me down this long path, including Strong Towns, and really deciding I want to be part of the solution. How do I do that? Do I go back and become an architect, a GC, a developer? I decided I kind of wanted to do all three.
That's kind of the short intro to it.
When you're looking back on your upbringing in Houston, are there any particular memories where — now that you know what you know — you can look back and understand better what was frustrating you, or what felt off, or what was just a thorn in your side a little bit?
Absolutely. When I was growing up there — I graduated high school in 2007, so early 2000s and late 90s — I ended up moving to a neighborhood where my best friend lived. If it had not been for that, I would have been miserable for years and years, because who would I have hung out with?
We would just get on our bikes and ride ten miles down the bayou trails, find forests, whatever. What's interesting is I actually kind of enjoyed my upbringing because I had this free-range kid element to it. It was still at that time the ideal of the suburbs — we were in a neighborhood, but there was tons of land around us.
By the time I came back from college and visited home, there was literally no land left. I remember this starting in high school. We'd be out all night playing paintball in the woods by my house, but towards the end of my high school years those woods turned into another development. When I came back during or after college, it was just suburban sprawl and stroads everywhere. I thought, this would have been a completely different upbringing than what I personally experienced. If you took away my best friend who lived in my neighborhood, I don't know what I would have ever done.
It would have been pretty miserable and lonely, I think. That's really interesting that you got to see the trajectory of suburbia, because there's always that one point in time where it seems kind of nice, but it can't stay that way for the model to work. You have to keep eating up more land — that's actually the trajectory of that pattern of growth.
Whereas when you look at the trajectory of what you're doing at Building Culture, or what you saw in Europe, you see a very different trajectory. Things get richer and more complex, and it gets better for everybody, rather than what you saw: now the kids living there don't have those woods to play in anymore.
I mean, the suburbs — the saying is the more people that come, the worse it gets. People start complaining about traffic: "Well, I moved to the suburbs, I didn't have to deal with this stuff." Versus good urbanism, where the more people that come, in some ways the better it gets. Obviously that has its limits — I don't personally want to live in Manhattan. I like human scale, sub-four-stories stuff like that. But yeah.
Okay, so I want to unpack a little bit more. As you're reflecting on everything you've read, what you've experienced, the cities you've seen — how do you articulate the relationship between the built environment around us and how we experience the world?
I can give a recent example. I'm in Oklahoma City, and most cities in the Midwest tend to have these little urban cores where the historic homes are before white flight moved out to the suburbs. A lot of these cities have revitalizing downtowns and historic areas. My wife and I lived in a historic area for the first five years in Oklahoma City, from 2020, and we had one child who was born there — up to where she was about four years old. Really nice neighborhood, 7,000 square foot lot. This is how the suburbs really should be: beautiful neighborhood, nice houses, big old trees.
But I only knew the neighbor directly across from us and the neighbor directly next to us. We lived there for five years and really never developed relationships, because it would take so much intentional effort. I'm not against being intentional — I like being intentional. But in my mind, one of the outcomes of good urban design is that you remove barriers to relationships. When you throw up a bunch of barriers, that effort to build relationships runs up against reality: what are you going to do, just go to a random neighbor walking by and say, "Hey, you want to come over for dinner tonight?" Some people are super extroverted and will do that, but you can only do so much. You've got kids, you've got a life. You really don't have the opportunity for those small interactions, which means you never actually feel a sense of belonging or feel part of a community. Your kids don't feel part of the community either.
I'll contrast this with where I am now. I lived in another traditional neighborhood development when it was just me and my wife for a few years, then we went to that neighborhood, and I've grown up in the suburbs. But now I live in a TND in a new urbanist community in the Wheeler District, right by downtown Oklahoma City. We moved here last summer — two kids now. In about eight months, I know more people than I did in five years at our other neighborhood, which was still a pretty cool close-to-urban-center neighborhood. There are so many opportunities for casual relationships.
Yes, there are planned events and HOA things, and those are great. We go to some of those. But for me, the magic happens in everyday life. Literally coming on this podcast — I was just at the coffee shop I walked to, five minutes away, for a business meeting. I was meeting one guy, and on the way there I saw two guys I know really well standing outside. We chatted for five minutes and went in.
Those moments — it's so hard to overestimate how important they are and how much they enrich my life. I feel like a part of the community. I walk in and chat up the barista, who I know by name. Those little things are really incredible, and I think we don't really realize how important they are to our everyday experience.
Good urbanism really is about the everyday moments — making every day a little bit more connected, a little bit more beautiful, a little more sunshine.
Versus the suburbs, where in some ways it's all about the big thing. It's about the weekend when you go somewhere, the vacation, whatever it is. All those things are great, but they can't overcome a stale everyday life. That's kind of how I think about it.
I've never heard anybody explain it that way, but you're so right. The little thing versus the big thing — that is just... I think that's the banger. I'm so bad at slang, but oh my gosh. Everyone listening to this: you're listening to a real live Tiffany Epiphany. This is serious, because you're right.
Life in the suburbs really is organized around the peaks, whereas when you're living in a village model, or a town, or an urban fabric — oh my gosh, I'm going to think about this for a really long time now. I remember living in Brooklyn and telling people, you don't need to do extraordinary things to enjoy New York City. You just need to do a lot of really basic things — in a fabulous outfit. You can have a great time doing extremely basic things in New York City because you're doing them in an urban context, which just adds a layer of magic you can barely put into words. You can't manufacture it, you can't produce it — it's simply a factor of there being the right amount of people and a variety of uses. That's what Jane Jacobs always says.
This is great. I think that phrase is the first time I've
heard anything that kind of cracks this nut I've been thinking about — the magic of the urban environment. That comparison between life organized around privacy, and then those peaks: the new car, the remodel, the summer, the events in life — the graduation, the vacation. So you have flat line, flat line, peak, flat line, flat line, peak. Urban life is just these little bumps, constantly. It just feels more vibrant.
"Tiffany Epiphany" works very well.
Wow, that was great. Thank you for sharing that. As you were speaking, though, I was thinking about when you were talking about growing up in suburbia — you said, "If I had not had that one friend, what would I have done?" Baked into that statement is a weird subconscious agreement we all have to not bother each other in the suburbs. Part of me is like, well, you could have just met another friend. But could you, though, in the suburbs?
It's a fair question, because the suburbs have this weird culture of together-but-apart. Like, privacy: "Hi, hope you're enjoying your privacy. I'm enjoying mine. Just don't hit my suburban SUV while you back out." There really is that sort of unspoken expectation for privacy within suburban culture. So I think it's totally fair that if you hadn't had that friend, there was very, very low possibility you would have made another one.
Absolutely. In the neighborhood we live in now, just last weekend — it's wintertime, it wasn't terribly cold, but on a Sunday there were 20 kids playing in the park. I never had a park like that around my house in the suburbs where you could just go over and pick up a game of flag football.
Jane Jacobs writes a lot about — let me make sure I get this right — she's basically saying that when you take third spaces out of a neighborhood, you turn casual friendship into a burden. Because now the only way to get to know people is to bring strangers into your most private space. Most people don't want to do that. They don't want to mix "stranger" and "private home." So you need those buffer zones. First, you need proximity — people need to live near each other. Then you need lots of different things they can be doing. You need buffer spaces where people can meet, socialize, and manage their privacy the way they'd like to. They can choose who gets closer and who doesn't.
When you get rid of those buffer spaces, it's all or nothing — complete retreat, or "okay, we're going to do the dinner party and bring all the neighbors to our house," which a lot of people are not comfortable with. I think you're hitting on that when you talk about the walkable neighborhood, the park, that density — the coffee shop, the ability to walk five minutes there and five minutes back and run into people. The reason it works in a way that the other example doesn't is that we need those buffer spaces. They're so, so important.
Let's talk about the decision you made. You outlined these incredible experiences for us in that first question. Can you slow down a little and really walk us through how you were thinking about embracing architecture and real estate development? You didn't grow up in that world — your dad was an accountant. Can you flesh out that process, what it felt like, what resonated, and what really clicked where you thought, "Yes, this is the direction I want to
go." Yeah. I hope some people listening might be able to relate in terms of knowing they want to be involved but not really knowing how. It's been about ten years on this path since I laid my first brick. I had a career before that, but I laid my first brick a little over ten years ago. I had no design background, no real estate development background, and no construction background — I was really starting from zero.
When I was thinking about it, I asked myself: I know I want to do this, and real estate developer makes sense to me because I'm financially minded. Do I go back to school and get an MBA, or go work for a developer? Do I go join a framing crew? Do I go back to school and become an architect? Those were kind of my three paths.
I met this guy, Clay Chapman, who was building these old-world masonry buildings. That turned me on to the idea of quality of building too — not just the urbanism. I call urbanism the recipe and buildings the ingredients. To have a great meal, you need a great recipe and great ingredients — and we should maybe talk about this later — but I'd say a really great recipe is the most important thing. Get the urbanism right, and you can always upgrade the ingredients later. Anyway, I recognized this difference of quality in the built environment, not just the recipe, and realized I wanted to be part of that solution too.
So I called Clay up, and he offered me an apprenticeship. I was in my late twenties, just got married — we had a five-week engagement after getting back from Uganda. We moved to the middle of nowhere, Oklahoma, because my wife is a total badass and an adventurer. Obviously, she was game from day one.
We moved out to Carlton Landing, Oklahoma. I was making twelve bucks an hour, and she started cleaning houses so we could afford to live while I was apprenticing. At that point, I still had no idea I could design. I didn't think I had an artistic bone in my body and didn't know how to draw. But while doing this for two years, I taught myself how to draw — at least in SketchUp — and taught myself how to design.
People often ask, "Well, how did you teach yourself how to design?" I say, I looked at beautiful buildings and had a lot of Pinterest boards and Instagram folders of things I thought were beautiful. I had the constraints of limited knowledge of construction and architecture, and was working with traditional materials of masonry and timber — I wasn't into steel. So I was limited by proportions and how much you can span with the natural inherent qualities of these materials. Also, I just didn't know that much, so I started designing in rectangles. My first homes were literally just a simple four-walled rectangle.
What I discovered is that if you just get the right proportions and use the right materials, anyone can create something beautiful. There's a difference between good architecture and great architecture. Perhaps only a few people can do really sophisticated, great stuff. But most of the stuff we walk around and find beautiful is really, really simple. For a walkable neighborhood, you need ninety-eight percent good prose and two percent punctuation — the two percent being the really special standout work.
So I kind of learned that I could design, and I think anyone could design. After apprenticing for a couple of years, I launched Building Culture in 2017 as a design-and-build company focused on structural masonry. It's evolved a lot over the last eight years — we started with custom homes and spec homes, learning how to run a business and getting punched in the face every other day, because running a business is really hard. Construction is hard. Architecture is hard. All of that.
We did a small pocket neighborhood first. Then over these last five years, we've been growing a team, brought on a licensed architect, so we're a licensed
architecture company. Over the past few years, we've stepped into full-on development — entitling land, raising money. We just broke ground in December on our first big flagship project, and are already working on two more.
To wrap it up: over the past eight years of running Building Culture, there's always been this vision, but that vision is really blurry. It's not like I knew where I was going and went straight to it. It's the act of exploring, the act of taking the next step day after day. The star that's guiding us is really a value, and that value gets refined over time. The best way we know how to say it now is
"Building a thriving human habitat." That's our mission and goal. Through architecture, construction, and development, we serve that goal and take it wherever it leads. It's been a really exciting adventure — class five rapids and all the stories that go along with running a small business and trying to do something different.
Can you talk about your newest project a little bit more?
Yeah. Townsend is our new project. It's on basically just over an acre. We've got eighteen townhomes, two live-work units, and 13,000 square feet of mixed-use commercial — all on one acre. You can go to TownsendNeighborhood.com and look at the site plan.
What we're doing is what I would call inner-block development, which a friend,
Thomas Doherty — we work with him — turned us on to. In most cities across the US, unless you're in Brooklyn or something,
even in an urban environment, you can't control what's on the other side of the
street from you. If you just line up townhomes on a street, townhomes are great if all the streets are townhomes — it's a wonderful built environment. But when an area is turning over, how do you actually put something that's new and more expensive because it's new, and still create a real sense of place?
Inner-block development is what we call it. If you look at our site plan, it's not just townhomes along the street. We're creating inner courtyards and patterns where, when you come inside the courtyards, there's this flow of spaces where you can wander through and almost get a little bit lost. We control the environment once you're inside the block. It's still beautiful from the street — there are still homes along the street — but then there's this inner world we get to create. That way it functions now and later. It's like a pocket neighborhood within a larger neighborhood, with a sense of identity within a larger identity of a walkable district.
We're really focused on walkable districts and what we see becoming more walkable over time. This was a challenging project because it's an expensive project, so we had to go raise money. I syndicated it — we've got thirty investors involved, contributing anywhere from $50,000 to a few hundred thousand dollars each.
That's been a challenge: how do you do the legal structuring for thirty investors? How do you manage them? How do you handle the taxes, get the K-1s out, meet all the SEC guidelines? How do you get bank financing? These are all things we've had to work through. I've thankfully had experience with bank loans and things like this in the past.
But what I'm also excited about — and I think it's worth touching on — are the tools available now in 2026.
These are very different from the tools available in, say, 2018 or 2020. A small company like ours —
ten years ago, how would I have managed thirty investors and handled distributions and K-1s? It's a lot. But between SEC regulation changes — where I can now publicly announce we're raising, I can go on LinkedIn and Twitter as long as I've filled out the right form with the SEC, which is really simple, anyone can do it — I can say, "Hey, here's what we're doing, we're raising money." People don't know this, but that used to be illegal. It was all about your Rolodex. For people like me who don't come from money — and I'm sure a lot of people listening can relate — I'm not friends with a bunch of millionaires. So I had to effectively crowdfund this, not at $300 at a time, but still in larger checks from accredited investors.
You've got social media as a microphone to get your voice out there, and then you also have software that lets you manage, say, thirty investors on a single project. We're already working on more projects where we'll have a hundred investors. I'm not saying it's easy, but it's also not hard. They all have their investor portal. I drag and drop their K-1s and the AI reads which belongs to which account and routes it automatically. That might sound like too much detail, but the reason it matters is these things become massive logistical
problems if you're a small developer trying to do this. So I'm really excited about the combination of zoning changes we're starting to see — because of the work of people like Strong Towns and new urbanism — plus technology and even some of the regulations around financing. It's unlocking small developers.
Historically, new urbanists and Strong Towns and IncreDev and similar groups — and this isn't a critique, just an observation — have often said to small developers, "Go build a fourplex, go build a duplex." That's great, and I'm all for anyone doing that. But projects in the ten to thirty million dollar range, what you'd call more official development projects — those have historically been incredibly difficult to finance and to bank. The big guys don't want them. The fourplex builders find them too large. But this is a real opening, something new in the past five years, where people actually can go do these neighborhood-scale projects. I'm really excited about the timing of all this and what the next few decades could look like.
How do you pitch this to investors? What are you seeing and hearing back in terms of appetite for these kinds of projects? If you had to synthesize everything you've been seeing and hearing, what's the story you would tell about what people want, or the appetite for a new way of envisioning neighborhoods?
There's this opportunity now to go directly to people. In the past there was usually a middleman. If you were someone with money, you'd invest in a REIT through the stock market, or give it to some big company that would place it for you. And then developers like me — where do you actually go get the money? The big guys aren't going to give it to you because they're managing hundreds of millions of dollars. But now there's an opportunity to go directly to an investor and say, "Tiffany, I've got this project. It's really cool. Look at what we're doing." You explain the economics, and they say, "Cool, I want to invest," and they put their money in directly.
What I've learned is that sharing the values behind what we're doing and why is just as important as the economics. When people invest with us, investing in Townsend or our other projects, it's absolutely an investment. But the moment there's a personal connection — where they're saying, "I like this project, I want to be a part of this" — that is completely different from just handing your money manager a couple hundred thousand dollars and having them do whatever, maybe presenting a list of projects and you pick the one with the highest IRR. When you have a direct connection, suddenly another factor comes into play: what do I value? What do I want to invest in? What do I want to see happen?
A lot of the people who invested with us are local — about half — and they're thinking, I would love to see this in my own neighborhood. The other half are from various states, and they've probably followed Building Culture for some time. There's trust built at scale just from seeing over time that we've been building and are who we say we are.
They're saying, "I'd love to be involved with a project like this. I wish it was in my neighborhood, but I still want to help you do this." And yeah, the returns are great. So I actually tell people: if your number one goal is to make the most money the fastest, this is not the project for you. The right people are okay with that. As I've gotten better at this, I've gotten better at putting the values and what we're doing front and center, which weeds people out quickly. The people it's meant for are really into it. I've literally had thirty-minute conversations with someone who reached out on X, who had not been following me for years, and they ended up investing. It's insane that you can actually do that today and find those people through social media — even though it does have its downsides too.
So part of what you do — something you've mentioned before — is really embracing this craftsman approach to your buildings and your work. For people who may not be familiar — and I was only really introduced to the craft side of building last summer, so it's still kind of new to me — for
people who may not be familiar, do you have a way of explaining what craft architecture, craft building, is compared to what we might normally see going up in our cities? How do you articulate what's unique about this craftsman approach versus, say, mass production, mass architecture? How would you describe the difference?
Yeah, I think it starts with design being really important. We're design-oriented developers, and usually those are three different things. You've got a developer who probably has a business or finance background, a GC, and an architect, and no one really knows what the other person does. The developer hires the architect and GC. There is some secret sauce in being vertically integrated, though I don't think you have to be. You can be a developer and find great architects to work with.
So step one is literally caring about design and human scale. Then it's helpful to have some precedent — to have seen things, whether internationally or close to home, that give you a vision for what's possible and what's going to feel really good. Beauty is a big part of it too, from what I've come to understand.
Beauty is incredibly important. One of our favorite lines is from Winston Churchill: "First we shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us." While he's not talking directly about beauty there,
beauty is just core to building and the built environment. People think of "the built environment" as a terrible phrase — I haven't come up with a better one — but it just sounds so clinical. The built environment is the human habitat. We know that with animals, the habitat really matters. If you put a polar bear in a habitat it's not meant for, it's not going to thrive — it'll get sick, it won't reproduce, it will die. But when it comes to the built environment, we don't really think of people that way.
I think it comes down to beauty and a people-first approach focused on the end-user experience. I love Steve Jobs for this. He really integrated hardware and software and said: you can't just have engineers build something. You have to start with the user experience and then back into the hardware. That's how we think at Building Culture — as developers, architects, and builders. What do we want the human experience to be for the people actually living here, walking in here every day? Then we back into the construction and all the rest.
There's also the question of scale. If you're building a 300-unit apartment complex, it's just harder to achieve craft and make it look great. When you bring that scale down to two or three stories, townhomes, live-work units, small commercial — that scale just lends itself more to attention, beauty, and creating something truly unique and special.
Do you have a theory about why we stopped building beautiful things? I know this is a Tiffany special question coming out of left field. Why did we stop? Is it that we stopped respecting ourselves? Is that too harsh? Why did we stop caring? What happened to beauty? You look at cities like Charleston, Savannah, even Chicago and New York to some degree — there are certain patterns of building. But when it comes to beauty, I sometimes just wonder what happened. How did we look at that and think, "Something's wrong with this, we can do better" — and by "better" we meant worse?
My company is called Building Culture for a reason — it's a double meaning. There's the building culture, the construction culture, and then there's building culture: actually helping culture thrive.
That has become something I think about a lot. When I first started, I put more stock in the "building culture" side — the construction culture: we need to fix how we build, and that's probably 80% of the problem. I've completely flipped that around. I now believe it really starts with culture, with values and beliefs, with who we think we are and what we're willing to value and pay for.
One thing that drives me a little crazy is when people blame capitalism for the ugliness of the world today. You can critique capitalism in all kinds of ways, and that's fine, but this isn't a good one. Florence in the 15th and 16th century was essentially the dawn of capitalism — their banking industry was taking off, their trades were flourishing. It's not exactly like today, but it's often seen as the early emergence of it, and it was one of the most beautiful places on earth. Capitalists and bankers were investing in incredible civic institutions, supporting artists, acting as patrons. So you can't just blame the system. Why aren't we funding the — why does everyone make a bunch of money and then give everything away to 501(c)(3)s and philanthropy? I'm not saying that's inherently bad, but why isn't there something in between?
It also comes down to the consumer side. I think it gets too easy to blame investors. I do think there's real responsibility there, and I wish more investors took to heart the fact that when we're building the built environment, we're literally creating the habitat everyone else has to live in. But on the consumer side: I have nearly gone bankrupt trying to build quality things. People love it — "Oh, it's beautiful!" — but it's $50 more a foot than the house over there, and then you don't get the appraisal. Maybe people just don't want to pay for it. People value bigger over quality. You say you value this, but do you really?
And philosophically, a lot of people don't even believe in beauty, or think it's important, or believe it's completely subjective — that there's no such thing as beauty. A lot of architects themselves are taught in architecture school that beauty is not something they should be pursuing. I think there are all kinds of things we have to work on as a culture and as a society if we want to start seeing beautiful places again.
That's so well put. You've kind of touched on this already a little bit, Austin, but you're in this unique space of preserving tradition while also finding ways to innovate — like the software that's coming out, or new regulations making things easier. Can you speak to any other
innovations that have made these projects more feasible? And maybe any other opportunities you see for future innovation to make it possible for us to build more beautiful places?
I like calling it blending the best of old and new. We're not trying to be Luddites or be nostalgic and say we should build like the Romans, or just copy Barcelona and put it somewhere else. It's about: what are these guiding principles, and how do we reinterpret them in our communities in our own unique way — and then also incorporate new technologies? We do live differently than we did 500 years ago. We need to make room for cars, even if we don't want to design our cities around them. We want to design around people, but cars are very useful when you need them.
In terms of enabling this with technology: I'm excited about AI. There's a lot of possibility for people to do things they couldn't do before — it can be a really helpful assistant. It hasn't really disrupted structural engineering, MEP, or even architecture yet, but I think that's coming. I don't mean mass job loss — I just mean it gives people more tools. People who are already good at things are going to be even better. I'm also really excited about robotic stone carving — a combination of robotics and AI. Monumental Labs and Micah Springett, based in New York, have started with doing statues and stone work with robot stone carving. But they're actually bringing stone workers into the trade, because there aren't really stone workers to speak of anymore. The robot can only get so far, and then the people come in and finish up — but you're doing it at a tenth of the cost. He's starting with art, but the goal is to actually do massive quarried stone blocks delivered to a site where you can put them in place like Legos and have these structurally sound stone buildings at a fraction of the cost. Those things are super exciting.
In terms of business operations, being able to run leaner with some of the tech coming out is really exciting. I just spent the past few weeks building some of our own internal apps. I'm not a coder at all — code looks like gibberish to me — and I'm coding in Claude Code, literally building applications where I can log in on a website and my team can log in. One is a task tracking app, one is an operations app that has our LLCs, entities, bank accounts, and all these custom building systems — rather than using some off-the-shelf thing where ninety percent of it isn't really relevant to you. All of these things increase efficiency, which then lets you do more.
Just keeping an eye on all of that is quite exciting. And then the growing body of knowledge around what good building is, how to work through codes and regulations — because of the work of Strong Towns, IncreDev, and new urbanism, people just have more tools at their disposal than ever before.
What you're saying about robotic stone carving is so fascinating to me, and I think it's
almost like a full-circle observation to what you've been talking about — building culture. Because you have this technology, you have these things you can build. But what really drives how we apply that technology depends on what we believe is important. I hope that if AI and robotics are going to be part of our future, we can see this as an opportunity to really take seriously the need for beauty in the human habitat and for connection. Like what you were talking about at the beginning — the need to live in a human ecosystem where you're able to build those loose ties with the people around you.
I hope we can leverage technology to bring that back to our communities. If it means using AI and robotics to build better buildings and better neighborhoods — do you feel like we're at a crossroads in terms of how we're going to apply these tools as they pertain to the way we think about neighborhoods, cities, and cars? It's such an interesting space. It is a little ironic, though, because you have people who care deeply about old-school craft, and then it's like... but robots. I bet there's some tension there for you and others in the craft space. I kind of put a lot on the table. Do you have any thoughts on any of that?
Yeah, a couple of things. On the question of being a purist — I've become less of one over time. But it's not because I've watered down our mission. It's because I'm actually pursuing our mission above the specifics. What I mean is: I used to be more purist about things like "everything we build should be structural masonry, because structural masonry is better." I still believe structural masonry is a better way to build in most places. But can you afford to do it? So I say: don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Always go forward with what is good and what's the best you can do. But you've got to stay in business, which means you've got to be profitable. You don't have to extract, but you do have to make money. So you have to work within the current confines — regulatory, cultural — and you're always pushing the edge a little. That's what I view my role as: always pushing that edge, taking a little step over, because then you expand the circle.
We do get critiqued sometimes by, I would say, more purist voices: "Well, you don't use the mortar that the Romans used," and so on. I agree — it would be much better to use that. But you figure out how to do it and bring it into one of our projects at a workable price point. There are just so many things you can't do.
Another example: people tend to romanticize the past. The Monumental Labs guy, Micah Springett — of course, people came out of the woodwork saying robotic stone carving is meaningless, it has to be done by a human to be meaningful, you're taking the craft away from the craftsman. I think you can take technology too far, and that does happen. But here's an example: all the great sculptors from the Renaissance didn't start with a block of stone and personally chisel it down to David themselves. They would create a small mold of what they were going to do, and then have a whole team of apprentices rough out the big stuff. The master would come in at the end and refine everything. How is that different from a robot getting you ninety percent there and the craftsman finishing the rest?
If you're doing the same corbel over and over for years on end — are people really dying to do that? Maybe there are a few. But the idea that mass production is a new thing is wrong. Some of the most beautiful buildings in the world, particularly during the Renaissance, featured mass-produced pieces — whether it was cast stone or tile or things like that being repurposed. The question I ask is: are we using technology in service of humanity? That's the goal — not technology for technology's sake, not technology that runs counter to the human experience, but technology that enriches us.
The problem with technology is it almost always has two sides. Social media: I just told you, you can raise lots of money, make amazing connections, make friends above and beyond what was once possible. But the average teen spends nearly five hours a day on social media, and that's catastrophic. That's just unfortunately the way it is. When I see new technologies, I'm not going to say "I won't use that." I'm going to use them in service of doing the best thing we can d to build a better world.
I think that's why the way you've named your company is so interesting, because we do need to build better culture. In a sense, we need to build better places. What you're literally doing is building better places. I feel like the work you're doing is hopefully an invitation for people to really think seriously about what we value as a culture. If we can evaluate what we value, then that will inform how we use the technology. It all goes together.
I really do hope that the work Strong Towns and IncreDev and parking reform advocates are doing leads people to see that it's possible to rethink how we've been building our neighborhoods and our cities. Now we've got these new tools. Let's combine the new knowledge we have with these new tools to build better places — which, ironically, might end up looking more similar to what we had in the past.
It's a really fascinating thing to think about, and it is a lot of responsibility, like you mentioned earlier. We have a responsibility to take seriously the opportunity to leverage these tools as we apply them to how we're building our communities. The choices we make will have really serious consequences. I mean, it's the difference between a young person in a neighborhood having a best friend or not, at the end of the day.
Yeah, absolutely.
This was a really great conversation. Thank you so much for taking time on a Tuesday to speak with me. I learned a lot and really appreciate it. We'll be putting links in the show notes where people can learn more about your work, your podcast, and the projects you're working on.
In closing, can you share a little bit about your neighborhood? Where are you based? And maybe you can share a couple of places you recommend people check out when they come to visit?
Absolutely. I love talking about Wheeler District, which is where I live. You can look it up at WheelerDistrict.com.
You can rent Airbnbs here. If you're in Oklahoma City, I would totally recommend staying in an Airbnb here. There are amazing restaurants, a great brewery, a taco shop, a great coffee shop, and even an award-winning sushi restaurant, all here. Right in the middle of it all is a playground.
I like to say that because when you talk about a village,
a complete neighborhood needs a kind of little center, and it doesn't take much. My joke is: if you've got tacos, coffee, beer, and a playground, you've got it. Because once you make it comfortable for kids and families, it's comfortable for everyone. Our kids are running around out there. But it's not just for families in a Chuck E. Cheese kind of way — you've got high schoolers on dates coming out there because it's still cool. Once you make it cool for families, you make it cool for everyone. Wheeler District in general, particularly from spring through fall when the weather is nice — come get coffee, get a beer, hang out. Bring your family.
Do you have a go-to coffee shop, or any one particular place you like?
Clarity Coffee here is great. Big Friendly Brewery is an award-winning brewery with only one location — this is the only taproom. The owner is not trying to be a national distributor; he's got that small-business-minded owner ethos. Taco Nation is great. Akai Sushi — they're all just killer.
Awesome. Thanks again, Austin. This was such a great conversation, really thought-provoking. I really appreciate the chance to speak with you for the Bottom Up Revolution. Well, thanks Tiffany, thanks for having me. I'm a big fan of all the work that Strong Towns and therefore you have been doing. I've got Strong Towns books on my shelf that I've read over the years.
Thank you so much for joining us for another conversation. If there's someone in your community who you think I should bring on the show, please let us know using the suggested guest form in the show notes. That's how we learn about a lot of great people doing really meaningful work, so I'm always appreciative when you take the time to fill that out.
I'll be back soon with another conversation. In the meantime, keep on working to build a strong town. This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.
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