I’m really looking forward to taking a break from the machine this weekend. Labor Day is usually marked by cooler nights and the early smell of autumn at the farm. I don’t think it’ll feel that way this year. We’re having record high temps this week, and the forecast is showing more of the same for next week. That’ll mean more tomato production and I’m sure the dahlias and zinnias will be stretching toward the sun at a record pace. For me, more firewood splitting in prep for the start of the El Nino cycle of unusually cold winters with heavier precipitation. There’s never enough firewood.

I found a new bike trail called the Grayson Gravel Traverse which looks promising. Some of it is still closed from the impact of Hurricane Helene, but there are plenty of sections to check out - so I’ll probably hop on my bike and ride the section from the farm down to the New River. My friend Charlotte’s farm is down that way so I may pop in and see what they’re up to. That’s how it works up there - people still stop by and check in.

Anyway.

Whatever you’re up to this weekend….remember it’s Labor Day and remind yourself of how hard you’ve been working. That could mean just about anything - not just going to the office. Occupation is translated as how one spends their time. I’m going to decouple my relationship with occupation and time this weekend and just do things I want to…and probably some of the things I don’t want to.

Explorers use compasses, not maps.

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I had an interesting week with energy. Some of it literal. Some of it probably imagined. And some of it powerful enough to fry my router.

It started around my birthday when I mentioned to a friend that I was having a weird day. Nothing particularly wrong, just one of those days where the frequency seemed a little different. She informed me that it was a Sturgeon Moon and proceeded to explain the symbolism around endurance, inner power, transformation and gratitude. I found the whole thing appropriately hippy dippy, but I liked it anyway. So I decided to pay attention.

And when you make the conscious decision to pay attention, something interesting happens. You start noticing things that were probably there all along.

There have been a lot of those things lately. Conversations connecting to other conversations. People showing up at interesting times. Ideas I’ve been carrying around for years beginning to converge. Projects that have lived mostly on paper starting to become real. I don’t know that I believe the moon had anything to do with it, but I do believe there are seasons in life and work. There are seasons when you plant, seasons when you wait, and eventually, if you’ve done the work, seasons when you harvest.

It feels like harvest season is getting close.

Energy has also been occupying a much more practical part of my brain lately. We’re deep into the basis of design for Hudson Commons, our first Pathway Community, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the systems that sit underneath the lives we’re trying to create there. Not just what the houses look like or what they cost to build, but what they cost to live in and what has to be true for the people who own them to actually become more stable over time.

That’s an important distinction.

We have spent decades talking about housing as though the house itself is the economic unit. We measure price per square foot, mortgage payments, interest rates, rents, construction costs and property values. Those things matter, obviously, but they are only part of the equation. A family doesn’t experience housing as a spreadsheet line called “shelter.” They experience a collection of interconnected costs and systems that determine how much money, time and optionality they have left at the end of the month.

Energy is one of those systems.

So is internet connectivity. Food. Transportation. Healthcare. Insurance. Access to financial tools. Increasingly, technology itself. Pull on almost any one of those threads and eventually you find it connected to the others.

That is the thinking behind StableLiving™ and the reason I keep resisting the idea that what we’re building is simply a housing model. Housing is the physical platform, but stability is the product.

That distinction changes how you design.

If you believe your job ends when someone can afford to buy the house, then your design problem is largely solved at closing. If you believe your job is to help that person remain economically stable and build wealth over time, you start asking very different questions. What will their energy bill look like ten years from now? What happens when the grid goes down? What happens when the internet goes down and they work from home? What systems can be shared across a community instead of purchased individually? What can we design once that reduces recurring costs for decades?

Those questions aren’t amenities. They’re economics.

That’s why we’ve been thinking about energy generation, storage and connectivity at Hudson Commons before we’ve moved the first shovel of dirt. I don’t want to bolt resilience onto the houses later because somebody found room in the budget. I want to understand whether resilience itself can be part of the economic model.

There is a tendency to hear words like microgrid, battery storage, distributed energy and redundancy and assume we’re talking about expensive technology or some futuristic version of housing. I think the opposite may eventually prove true. Here’s an interesting COGNITION Energy Survey 2026 that’s worth your email address.

The strange thing would be continuing to build houses exactly as we have for the last fifty years while the systems around them are changing this quickly. I’m certainly not doing that at Hudson Commons - or any Pathway Community for that matter.

A house today is plugged into an extraordinary number of external dependencies. Electricity comes from somewhere else. Internet comes from somewhere else. Food comes from somewhere else. Water often comes from somewhere else. Increasingly, the intelligence operating the house comes from somewhere else. We’ve created enormous efficiency through those networks, but we’ve also created dependency.

Efficiency and resilience are not the same thing.

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I was thinking about all of this when a summer storm rolled through this week. I did what I normally do when a good storm arrives and headed for the front porch with a drink. Within a couple of minutes, it became obvious that this one deserved to be watched from inside.

Then lightning hit somewhere between my neighbor’s backyard and our house.

I’ve never been that close to a lightning strike. There wasn’t really a flash followed by thunder. It felt more like the entire event happened at once. I could feel the energy. The hair on my arms stood up. The dog went nuts. And somewhere inside the house, all that energy found my router and killed it.

There was something wonderfully ironic about spending weeks thinking about energy resilience and digital readiness only to have Mother Nature demonstrate the relationship between the two in about half a second.

No power, no connectivity. No connectivity, and an increasingly large portion of modern life simply stops.

The lesson isn’t that every house needs to become an island. I actually think that misses the point. Independence doesn’t have to mean isolation. The better question is how much dependency is appropriate, where redundancy creates value, and whether some of the infrastructure we have historically centralized might work better when distributed closer to the people who actually use it.

That is becoming one of the more interesting ideas inside Pathway Communities for me. Maybe the community itself can become a platform for resilience. Maybe energy can be generated and stored closer to where it is consumed. Maybe connectivity can have redundancy. Maybe food can be produced closer to the kitchen. Maybe technology can help residents understand and manage these systems instead of simply receiving a collection of monthly bills from them.

And maybe all of this can lower the total cost of living rather than increase the cost of housing.

That’s the experiment.

I don’t know exactly where it leads yet, and I’m becoming increasingly comfortable saying that. Some of the most interesting work I’m doing right now isn’t about pretending we already know the answer. It’s about building enough of the system to start asking better questions.

Which, strangely enough, brings me back to the moon.

I don’t know whether there was anything cosmically significant happening around my birthday. I remain appropriately skeptical. But I liked the advice I was given: pay attention to subtle signs of transformation and lead with gratitude.

There is something useful in that regardless of where you think the energy comes from.

We’ve spent a lot of time planting. A lot of time questioning assumptions. A lot of time trying to understand why systems that appear efficient on paper don’t always produce stability for the people living inside them. Now some of those ideas are beginning to connect.

I’m paying attention.

Harvest season is near.

This weeks song pairing is obvious - Neil Young, Harvest Moon

The less obvious pairing is Goose, Dripfield Red Rocks 8/28/2026 - a missed birthday opportunity for sure.

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PS - thanks to AT&T for getting me a new gateway so quickly….remember, lead with gratitude. 🤣

The language of money is changing.

So is the language of development.

Because development is changing…..well, at least in housing it is.

We’re becoming more socially conscious. The days when a traditional development simply required Debt/Equity via GL/LP and IRR are behind us. We still measure yield, NOI, DSCR, IRR and equity multiple… but there’s also a seismic shift in creating community and lowering the cost of housing. The smart money is now focusing on creating domestic supply chain around industrialized offsite construction, grid independence, and the value of the data layer in housing.

Join me as I dive into new funding models that support patient capital, and share the four requirements for at Pathway Community project as it relates to energy, technology, typology, and adaptive reuse. Hopefully we’ll discover some cool things along the way.

Onward and Upward, but always Forward.

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I’ll start with a relevant article from Green Builder magazine. The Pitchbook 2026 Report illustrates that Q2 deals poured $14.9B into climate tech companies. Meanwhile the news was reporting that green investments are dead in the US. This is simply not true. Q2 brought first-half 2026 funding to $29.2B - putting the sector on pace for $58.4B by year’s end. This is the strongest showing in the sector since 2022. Yeah, it’s not dead.

Investments in battery storage, geothermal wells, and AI as infrastructure are all cited as opportunities for homebuilders. While we haven’t explored geothermal for our project in Hudson, we’re absolutely limiting our future owner’s dependency on central grid and using AI at basically every turn to deliver the project. I love services like Base and products like Anker Solix.

But this is tech investment, not developer investment. And this where I think things will get interesting.

There is enormous capital chasing the technologies that could fundamentally change housing, while the capital stack used to actually build housing remains remarkably conventional. We finance the battery company differently than the development generating the data. We finance the factory building the wall panel differently than the community being assembled from those panels.

Why?

A traditional real estate development is relatively easy to understand. There is debt. There is equity. There are General Partners and Limited Partners. Everybody understands their position in the capital stack and the return expected for taking that position. We measure yield, NOI, DSCR, IRR and equity multiple. Eventually, somebody sells or refinances the asset and everyone goes home.

Except what happens when the objective isn’t simply maximizing financial returns?

What if the project provides stable housing for a transient workforce?

What if the project provides an attainable solution at 80% AMI that doesn’t require more than 25% of the occupant’s gross income?

What if the project lowers household energy costs?

What if the project connected small, local food producers with a community seeking nutritionally dense, responsibly grown/raised products?

What if it creates a solid, domestic supply chain?

What if it demonstrates a better way to manufacture housing?

What if it improves public health outcomes?

What if it allows teachers, nurses, and first responders to live in the community they serve?

What if infrastructure embedded in the community produces valuable operating data for decades?

Those things all create value.

We simply haven’t been good at deciding who receives that value, who should pay for it, and therefore who belongs in the capital stack. (another term that will get buried in the field at the farm at this year’s retreat)

And THAT is the rabbit hole I disappeared down last week. 👆

Without boring all fun readers - and over-exciting all the financiers….here’s a quick glossary of terms I just had Chat build for me so we have all the alphabet soup in one stock pot:

• CDFI — Community Development Financial Institution. Think mission-driven lender. CDFIs exist specifically to move capital into communities and borrowers conventional finance may underserve. Importantly, this isn’t necessarily “cheap money.” But CDFIs can access different sources of capital, take different views of community-development outcomes, provide technical assistance, and sometimes participate in structures traditional banks won’t. Treasury’s CDFI programs can provide long-duration capital that ultimately supports housing and community development.

• SPV — Special Purpose Vehicle. Not a source of money at all. It’s a bucket we create to put particular money into. Usually an LLC or LP, an SPV can isolate one project, asset, investor group or risk from everything else. Investors can therefore say, “I want exposure to this project,” rather than investing in the developer or a blind pool. This one is especially interesting for my thesis because I could theoretically have different vehicles participating in different pieces of the ecosystem.

• DAF — Donor-Advised Fund. Here’s where money gets weird and interesting. Someone contributes assets to a charitable account, receives the applicable charitable tax treatment, and recommends how those charitable assets are subsequently deployed. The money is irrevocably charitable. DAFs are generally associated with grants, but some sponsors also facilitate impact-investment structures. So the important question becomes: can charitable capital help absorb the parts of a project that generate enormous community value but little conventional real-estate return? See DAF Commons if interested….Claire Raffel and Lily Starling Louis are doing some cool work in the space.

• PRI — Program-Related Investment. A private foundation can make a loan, equity investment, guarantee or other investment primarily to accomplish its charitable purpose rather than maximize financial return. The CDFI Fund’s PRI primer specifically identifies affordable housing, community development, property acquisition and economic development as uses, including bridge loans and long-duration patient capital. The IRS also makes clear that PRIs can include loans or equity investments into for-profit organizations when structured to advance the exempt purpose.

• MRI — Mission-Related Investment. Different from a PRI. This comes from a foundation’s investment/endowment side and seeks both mission alignment and investment return. That’s potentially a very interesting home for “patient but not philanthropic” capital.

• Recoverable grant. Somewhere between a grant and investment economically. Capital goes toward the mission, but if defined outcomes or financial conditions occur, some or all can be returned and recycled. That could be useful for predevelopment or demonstration work where conventional development capital is brutally expensive.

• Guarantee / credit enhancement. Possibly the sleeper of the whole article. An institution doesn’t necessarily need to give the project $5 million. It might guarantee $5 million of somebody else’s capital, fund a loan-loss reserve, subordinate its position, or otherwise reduce risk. PRIs can expressly take the form of loan guarantees and other credit enhancements.

There are also Green Banks, CRA-motivated bank capital (Community Reinvestment Act) tax-credit structures, municipal tools, bonds (hello hospitals and universities that want us to help you attract and retain talent and have AAA credit rating) family office impact capital, and more every day.

But you get the point.

There isn’t one alternative capital market. There’s an entire ecosystem of money looking for different combinations of return, impact, duration, and risk. This doesn’t have to be a game of Jenga - and we certainly don’t need to ‘stack’ these things on top of each other.

They can exist like nodes in a network.

Different money, doing different jobs, seeking different returns from different kinds of value.

So maybe rather than asking “How can we fund the project?’ we start asking: “What value does the project create, for whom, and how should that value be reflected in the capital ecosystem?”

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Our projects have 4 jobs for money:

Build. Own. Stabilize. Strengthen.

That’s it.

Build. This is the money most of us understand. It buys land, pours foundations, pays trades, buys materials, and ultimately delivers the house. Banks, construction lenders, CDFIs, and private credit understand this job pretty well. The project gets built. The money gets paid back. Boring is good here.

Own. This is the equity side. It takes more risk, stays longer, and participates in the upside. Traditionally, that means GP/LP equity and a pretty clear expectation around IRR and exit. But family offices, impact investors, MRIs, and project-specific SPVs can bring different expectations around time and return. Patient doesn't mean charitable. It means the money may be willing to wait for a different kind of outcome.

Stabilize. This one gets interesting. What if a hospital, university, foundation, or municipality doesn't need to invest in the real estate, but benefits enormously from its success? A guarantee, PRI, subordinated loan, recoverable grant, or other credit enhancement can reduce risk for everybody else. Sometimes the highest-leverage dollar isn't the one funding the project. It's the one making the other dollars more comfortable.

Strengthen. Some of the most important things we're trying to accomplish simply don't show up in NOI. Financial capability. Digital readiness. Food access. Public health. Community infrastructure. Energy resilience. These create very real value, just not necessarily traditional real estate returns. That's where philanthropy, DAFs, foundations, grants, and other mission-driven capital can participate without pretending every dollar needs to behave like private equity.

So what does all this have to do with housing?

Every Pathway Community starts with four requirements that are quickly becoming non-negotiable: energy, technology, typology, and an element of adaptive reuse.

I want our homeowners as independent from the grid as we can reasonably make them. That means dramatically reducing the energy required to operate the house first, then looking at generation and storage. The goal isn’t a cool solar array. It’s lowering and stabilizing the cost of living.

A house shouldn’t become dumb the day we hand over the keys. We’re building a data layer that can help owners understand energy, maintenance, performance, costs and eventually the health of the community itself. AI is helping us design and deliver the project today. I think it will help us operate and learn from it tomorrow.

We have to rethink what we build and how we build it. Smaller footprints. Better land utilization. Industrialized offsite construction. Different housing types for different stages of life. The objective isn’t to make a cheaper version of the same house. It’s to fundamentally rethink the product.

But before we build something new, we have to ask what we already have. Existing buildings contain embodied energy, materials, infrastructure, history, and often a connection to place that can’t be recreated. Sometimes the most regenerative building is the one that’s already standing. Reuse what we can. Build what we need.

So I guess here’s where my week-long trip through acronym hell finally landed me.

Maybe the project doesn’t pencil because you’re using the wrong pencil.

We’re trying to fund a new kind of housing with an old model for understanding value.

If housing can reduce energy costs, strengthen household finances, improve health, support employers, create domestic manufacturing, generate useful data, preserve existing resources, and STILL produce a financial return, then perhaps all that value shouldn’t be forced through the same Debt + Equity funnel.

Different value. Different capital. Different jobs.

Remember, explorers use compasses, not maps.

Music pairing: Alice in Chains, No Excuses

Three major fires burned roughly 10,000 acres, forced 60,000+ people to evacuate, and destroyed nearly 1,000 homes.

This week, I wanted to touch on something I’ve been working on for several years now: We cannot keep building yesterday’s housing for tomorrows conditions.

I hope you’ll join me as I attempt to define ‘building different’ as something beyond fire-resistant siding and metal roofing.

Onward and Upward… but always Forward.

#StableLiving #TheyIsUs #TinyGiants

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Defining the System

Housing is a system. A vast, entangled network of land, capital, policy, infrastructure, energy, materials, labor, insurance, transportation, public health, and people.

And every home is an output of that system.

We have to make that distinction evident, because when a house becomes unattainable, uninsurable, unhealthy, energy-intensive or vulnerable to fire, flood, heat, and storm, we tend to treat the house as the problem. But the house just where the failures of the system become visible.

We cannot create resilient housing without creating a resilient housing system first.

I’m gonna break the system (the way I see it for Pathway Communities) into 6 parts:

1. The Building

2. The Site

3. Energy

4. Water

5. Community

6. Insurance + Finance

Because a beautifully hardened house sitting inside a poorly planned subdivision, dependent on one road, one electrical feeder, one water system and combustible neighboring structures is only partially resilient. Wildfire is particularly good at exposing that flaw because wind-driven embers can turn the built environment itself into the fuel source. But it’s not the only cause. We saw it with intense rain here in Western North Carolina during Helene.

The Building 🏡

Shout out Phius and Theresa Passive House - Austin, TX

The cheapest house to build isn’t necessarily the cheapest house to live in

Resilience begins by changing what we mean by a ‘good’ building, moving from code compliance and first cost toward survivability, operability, durability, and lifecycle cost.

For most of the last century, we’ve optimized housing around a pretty narrow set of variables: how much does it cost to build, how quickly can we build it, does it meet code, and what will someone pay for it? Those questions still matter, but they’re incomplete. A house can check every one of those boxes and still be poorly prepared for the conditions it will face over the next 50 or 100 years. Extreme heat and cold, severe storms, flooding, drought, wildfire, poor air quality, and prolonged power outages aren’t exceptions anymore. They’re part of the operating environment.

Building differently doesn’t mean adding a few upgraded materials to a conventional house. It means designing the building as a system around durability, efficiency, adaptability, and occupant health. This is where Passive Building principles become particularly important. Better insulation, tighter envelopes, high-performance windows, ventilation, filtration, moisture management, and smaller mechanical systems don’t just reduce energy consumption. They allow a building to maintain safe temperatures longer during an outage, protect indoor air quality, require less from the electrical grid, and ultimately remain habitable when the systems around it are under stress.

And this changes how we should think about cost. The cheapest building on the day it opens may be far from the cheapest building over its useful life. Energy, maintenance, insurance, repairs, equipment replacement, health, and disaster exposure are all part of the actual cost of housing. Yet we mostly measure what it costs to build because that’s the easiest number to see. The costs we avoid are harder to measure. The insurance claim that never happens. The emergency shelter that isn’t needed. The equipment that lasts another decade. The family that can stay safely in its home during an outage. Those costs don’t disappear. They simply migrate somewhere else in the system.

We need a way to see those costs so we can monitor, record, and validate them….and ultimately improve or eliminate them altogether.

The Site 🗺

Shout out Landscope

The cheapest piece of land isn’t necessarily the cheapest place to live. Where we build matters every bit as much as what we build.

The second essential element for the system is the site. For decades, our primary question about land has been: can we build on it? Is it zoned correctly, can we get utilities to it, can we engineer the site, and can we make the numbers work? But where we build has an enormous influence on how people live. Can someone walk to food, work, school, healthcare, parks, or their neighbors? Is the community connected to the places around it or isolated from them? How much time and money will a household spend simply getting from one part of their life to another? A resilient community shouldn’t require a car for every basic need.

Building differently means designing with the site instead of simply engineering our way around it. Work with the topography. Preserve natural drainage and mature trees where possible. Create shade, sidewalks, trails, gathering spaces, and connections to the surrounding community. Think about how buildings relate to one another and how people move between them. Manage water, vegetation, access, and extreme weather risks intentionally. Some of the most valuable infrastructure may not look like infrastructure at all. It may be a sidewalk, tree canopy, trail, garden, commons, or simply land we decided not to disturb.

And once again, the economics are bigger than the development budget. Cheap land on the edge of town may produce lower acquisition costs while transferring thousands of dollars a year in transportation costs to every household that lives there. Poor site planning can create decades of additional infrastructure, maintenance, stormwater, transportation, and public-service costs. Those costs don’t disappear, either. They simply move somewhere else in the system - just like they do in the building.

Energy ⚡

Shout out Anker Solix

The cheapest unit of energy isn’t the one we generate. It’s the one we never needed in the first place.

We have a crazy dependency on energy - and yet we don’t build with redundancy or independence from centralized grid….at all. For most of us, energy is something we don’t think much about until the bill comes or the power goes out. We build a house, connect it to the grid, and accept whatever energy costs come with it for the next 50 years. But energy is part of the cost of housing. A $1,500 mortgage with a $400 utility bill doesn’t create the same household stability as a $1,500 mortgage with a $75 utility bill. If we’re serious about attainable housing, we have to stop separating the cost of the house from the cost of operating it.

Building differently starts by reducing demand. A high-performance building needs less energy in the first place. From there, distributed generation, solar, batteries, microgrids, smart controls, and increasingly efficient appliances give communities more control over where their energy comes from and what it costs. Instead of every home operating as an isolated consumer at the end of a massive centralized system, homes can become participants in a smaller, smarter energy network that can generate, store, share, and manage energy locally.

And once again, this is bigger than the electric bill. Lower demand means smaller mechanical systems, less strain on the grid, lower peak loads, and potentially less infrastructure required to serve growing communities. Local generation and storage can also keep critical systems operating when the larger grid doesn’t. Build the demand out of the housing first, then design a smarter system to provide what’s left.

The Water 💦

Shout out Aco Stormbrixx

The goal isn’t simply to use less water. It’s to get more value from every gallon that passes through the system.

Water is another system we’ve largely made invisible. Turn on the faucet and clean water appears. Flush the toilet and it disappears. Rain hits the roof, driveway, and parking lot and we work as quickly as possible to pipe it somewhere else. We treat drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater as separate infrastructure problems, even though they’re all part of the same cycle. And just like energy, the household ultimately pays for a system it has very little ability to influence.

Building differently means thinking about water before it enters the pipe. Use less of it. Capture it. Slow it down. Let it infiltrate where appropriate. Design landscapes that don’t require enormous amounts of irrigation. Use rainwater where regulations allow. Reduce impervious surfaces and incorporate bioswales, gardens, trees, and other natural systems that can manage water while making the community a better place to live. At the building level, efficient fixtures, leak detection, smart metering, and thoughtful plumbing design can reduce both consumption and the damage caused when something goes wrong.

The opportunity gets much bigger when we stop thinking one house at a time. Shared water strategies can reduce demand on municipal systems, manage stormwater closer to where it falls, reduce flooding, lower infrastructure costs, and create redundancy when centralized systems are disrupted. Instead of treating water as something we buy, use once, and send away, we can begin treating it as an asset moving through the community.

For our Pathway Communities model, #StableLiving™, housing shouldn’t consume infrastructure. That’s why we properly design our communities to help infrastructure perform better.

The Community 👨‍👨‍👧‍👦

The most important infrastructure in a community may ultimately be the relationships between the people who live there.

Somewhere along the way, we got really good at building houses and not necessarily communities. We can engineer streets, install utilities, build homes, landscape the entrances, and call the project complete. But people don’t experience housing as a collection of buildings. They experience neighbors, sidewalks, parks, schools, food, gathering places, services, and the thousands of small interactions that determine whether a place actually feels like home. Social infrastructure is every bit as real as physical infrastructure, even if it doesn’t appear on the engineering drawings.

Building differently means creating places where connection doesn’t have to be scheduled. Front porches instead of garage doors dominating the street. Sidewalks and trails that cross paths. Commons, gardens, kitchens, coworking spaces, playgrounds, and places to sit. Housing designed around people rather than automobiles. It also means connecting residents to resources beyond the physical neighborhood: food, healthcare, digital access, financial education, transportation, education, and employment. The goal isn’t to manufacture community. It’s to create the conditions where community has a much better chance of forming.

And those connections have real value. A neighbor who checks on someone during an outage, shares a tool, watches a child for an hour, offers a ride, recommends a job, or simply notices when something isn’t right is part of the resilience of a place. We spend enormous amounts of money trying to solve problems downstream that stronger communities can sometimes prevent upstream.

Insurance + Finance 💸

Shout out to the IBHS - Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety

If we want different outcomes from housing, eventually the capital & insurance behind it has to reward the outcomes we actually want.

Insurance and finance may seem like the least physical parts of housing, but they influence nearly every decision we make. Lenders determine what can be financed. Insurers determine what risks can be covered. Investors determine what returns are required. Developers respond by trying to deliver a product that fits within those constraints. The problem is that the system still tends to reward the lowest cost today more clearly than the lower risk tomorrow. We can spend more to create a building that uses less energy, lasts longer, requires less maintenance, and is better prepared for disruption, yet struggle to capture that value in the financing.

Building differently means financing differently too. If better buildings reduce energy consumption, maintenance, insurance losses, infrastructure demand, and long-term risk, those benefits should have economic value. The conversation should move beyond construction cost and toward total lifecycle performance. A dollar spent today that prevents five dollars of expense tomorrow isn’t necessarily an additional cost. It’s an investment in cost avoidance. And if someone else in the system benefits from that avoided cost, whether it’s an insurer, lender, utility, municipality, employer, healthcare system, or homeowner, we should be asking how that value gets recognized.

Ultimately, insurance and finance are supposed to help us manage risk and allocate capital. That gives them enormous power to change what gets built. Imagine a housing market where the safest, healthiest, most efficient, most durable homes were also the easiest and least expensive to finance and insure. Suddenly resilience wouldn’t be an upgrade reserved for people who can afford it. It would simply be good economics.

Parting Thoughts

Housing is a system. A vast, entangled network of buildings, land, energy, water, infrastructure, capital, insurance, policy, technology, and institutions. Change one part and you inevitably affect another. Optimize one piece without understanding the others and you can simply move the cost, risk, or problem somewhere else. That’s why building differently can’t just mean a better wall assembly, a solar panel, a bigger stormwater pipe, or a new financing program. We have to start thinking about how the whole system works together.

But systems aren’t the reason we build housing. People are the lifeblood running through all of it. The buildings, sidewalks, energy systems, water systems, financial structures, technology, and infrastructure only matter because of what they allow people to do. Raise a family. Walk to work. Know their neighbors. Stay healthy. Weather a setback. Build some wealth. Age in place. Find opportunity. Help someone else. Live with a little less uncertainty about what tomorrow might bring.

Maybe that’s the biggest shift in what it means to build differently. Instead of optimizing housing around the production of real estate, we optimize the system around the people who live there. We measure success not simply by units delivered, construction cost, or return on investment, but by whether the place we’ve created makes life more stable for the people who call it home. We aren’t building a collection of better houses. We’re building a better system for living.

#StableLiving™ #TheyIsUs #TinyGiants

Song Pairing: Once in a Lifetime - Talking Heads

In other news, a few weeks back I attended the unveiling of America’s fastest solar-powered racecar, Autumn, up at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. The kids were all charged up and the energy in the Convocation Center was amazing. How do I know it’s the fastest solar-powered racecar in America?

Because they took 1st place in the American Solar Challenge - a 1,500 mile endurance open-road competition across public highways where college and university teams race custom solar-powered electric vehicles. The route took them across historic Route 66 and the Great River Road over to Amarillo, Texas where AppState took the checkered flag.

I couldn’t stop asking myself why I was so jazzed for these kids. I mean, my son isn’t part of the team…I’m not really into racing…and I don’t have a vested interest beyond general well-wishing.

Then it hit me.

They’re building a platform, not a product.

It’s a lab. Continuous improvement. Recursive learning. Multidisciplinary approach. These kids are learning by building - whereby every race becomes another data point, and every car becomes another iteration.

This team is optimizing systems, not components. I can’t imagine the car won because it had the best battery…or the best motor….or the lightest body. I imagine the win came because every subsystem worked together efficiently over the duration of the whole race. That’s durability AND efficiency.

They’re measuring what matters.

A traditional race rewards horsepower. A solar race rewards efficiency, reliability, endurance, and intelligent energy management. That sounds a lot like the intellectual leap we’re making from traditional housing/development metrics toward #StableLiving™. We can’t stop at first costs, we have to understand total costs against quality of life.

I guess if I had to sum it up, there’s one more thing I haven’t explicitly said before. Team Sunergy represents something we’ve been circling for quite a while around here:

They don’t stop at research.

Because of the support of the university and their sponsors, this team builds, races, measures, partners, improves and lets students own the meaningful work. It may look like a singular car to someone, but what they’ve created is a multidisciplinary innovation platform that keeps producing better people, better ideas, and better communities.

I’m here for that. All of it.

Congrats, Team Sunergy. Keep punching above your weight class.

Onward and Upward, but always Forward,

#StableLiving™ #TinyGiants #TheyIsUs

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Working Together

It’s widely accepted that partnership with a university research team helps to validate emerging systems and novel products & services. This applies to just about every industry, but lately, America has been noodling on a W.I.C.K.E.D. problem, housing.

Traditional housing innovation followed a pretty standard path: government funds research, universities study problems, and years later developers apply those findings in the field. Currently, we’re flipping the script on that model by making the community itself the research platform, where students, faculty, residents, and industry partners generate real-time evidence while building better outcomes. Instead of research informing projects, the project continuously creates research, accelerating innovation and giving policymakers, investors, and practitioners evidence they can act on immediately.

The approach is the operating model. The data is simply one output of the model.

Traditional housing research produces data. Emerging models produce a continuous learning system. Data is one byproduct, but the real innovation is a model that brings all the stakeholders into the same feedback loop, allowing every project to improve the next. The data tells us what happened. The approach determines what we’ll learn next.

The Great College Collab

#BetterTogether was a LinkedIn hashtag for me a few years ago. It reflected a simple idea: groups are often more resilient, creative, and capable than individuals working alone.

We’re beginning to see that same shift in higher education. The siloed approach to majors and specialization is giving way to more interdisciplinary thinking and the rise of the generalist. AI now knows much of what we know, and often more. As a result, the value of the expert is changing. I’ve heard it described as a shift from knowledge workers to wisdom workers.

You can already see the signs. UNC Asheville announced its Bulldog Promise transfer partnership with Piedmont Community College. The Carolina Collaborative joined forces with the Housing Innovation Challenge to tackle one of America’s most complex challenges. Virginia Tech continues expanding its Innovation Campus through deep public-private partnerships, while Catawba College has spent decades demonstrating what a sustainability-focused institution can become. And lets not forget the tremendous multidisciplinary accomplishment of Team Sunergy from the intro.

These aren’t isolated announcements. They’re signals.

The role of the university is evolving from being a place that primarily creates knowledge to becoming a platform that convenes students, researchers, industry, government, investors, and communities around real-world problems. Education is becoming less about mastering a single discipline and more about learning how to connect disciplines in ways that create measurable outcomes.

Housing is just one example of a much broader shift. When communities become living research platforms, the project is no longer the end result of research. It becomes part of a continuous learning system where every success, failure, and lesson informs the next community. That changes the role of everyone involved. Students become researchers, practitioners become educators, communities become living classrooms, and every completed project leaves behind knowledge that strengthens the next one.

To me, that’s the real opportunity. The next generation of universities won’t simply graduate students. They’ll graduate solutions….because they have to.

America's biggest challenges, whether housing, energy, workforce development, public health, or resilience, aren't discipline problems. They're coordination problems. No single major, department, company, or agency can solve them alone. But universities are uniquely positioned to convene people who otherwise wouldn't be working together. If they become places where those systems are designed, tested, and continuously improved alongside the communities they serve, they won't just educate the next generation. They'll help build it.

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Music Pairing this week: Peter Gabriel Solsbury Hill

More broadly, the 21st Century ROAD to housing bill passed into law, Boxabl went public which set the SPAC market on fire, and the NAR reported yet another all-time high for the median home price in America which now stands at whopping $440,660. That number is up for 36 straight months.

So - numbers.

That’s what this week’s entry is about. Math vs calculus, our inability to see beyond the myopic nature of the balance sheet, and why Indy Johar rightfully called us out as ‘shitty capitalists’ during his talk Civilizational Optioneering at The Long-Now Foundation earlier this year.

One more thing.

I’m thrilled to point out that the dahlias, zinnias, and sunflowers are showing early signs of budding up at the farm. While the garlic took an epic fail this year, the flowers will be along soon to brighten our days.

Onward and Upward, but always Forward.

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For years, I’ve worked in an industry that prides itself on precision. We can estimate construction costs down to the square foot. We can model debt service, forecast lease-up, analyze absorption rates, and debate cap rates for hours. We have become extraordinarily sophisticated at understanding the movement of money and it’s dependency on time.

And yet, somewhere along the way, I began to wonder if we had confused precision with understanding.

Every project I’ve ever worked on has created value that never appeared in the financial model. Some of that value was obvious (alt specs). Some of it was subtle (cost avoidance). But all of it was real.

When a young teacher can afford to live in the community where she teaches, that creates value. When a nurse spends less time commuting and more time with family, that creates value. When an older resident can age in place instead of being displaced from the neighborhood they’ve called home for decades, that creates value. We instinctively understand these things because we experience them in our own lives. The problem isn’t that the value doesn’t exist. The problem is that we rarely measure it.

I’ve been fortunate to spend time with people who challenge the assumptions I carry into these conversations. One of them is Indy Johar, whose work has consistently pushed me to think beyond the boundaries of traditional development. He has a way of asking questions that seem almost uncomfortable in their simplicity. Why, he asks, have we become so effective at measuring financial capital while paying so little attention to every other form of value our projects create?

That question stays with me. In fact, it keeps me up at night.

Not because I disagree with it, but because I realize how often I’ve participated in the same pattern. I would sit in meetings discussing millions of dollars in financing while the conversation drifted past the very outcomes that had motivated the project in the first place. We were optimizing the model for what we could measure instead of asking whether we were measuring what actually mattered.

There is, of course, a reason for this. Money is wonderfully cooperative. It fits neatly into a spreadsheet. It can be counted, discounted, compared, and reported with remarkable consistency. Value is far more complicated. It shows up in healthier families, stronger neighborhoods, better educational outcomes, improved resilience, and opportunities that may not become visible for years. Those things resist simple accounting, so we often treat them as anecdotes instead of assets.

The consequence is subtle but profound.

If financial return becomes the only language our institutions recognize, then financial return inevitably becomes the only outcome our institutions optimize. It isn’t because anyone set out with bad intentions. It’s because every system eventually becomes a reflection of the things it is designed to observe.

That realization has been reshaping my own work.

For the past several years, I’ve been developing the StableLiving Index™, or SLIx™, as a way of thinking about community through a broader lens. Housing is certainly part of the equation, but so are food access, public health, digital connectivity, and financial education. None of these exist independently. Each influences the others in ways that are often difficult to isolate but impossible to ignore. A family struggling in one of those areas is rarely struggling in only one.

The more I worked on SLIx, the more I found myself asking a different question.

What if our challenge isn’t that we lack solutions? What if we’ve simply been organizing the problem incorrectly?

That question eventually led to Hudson Commons, the first-of-its-kind living-learning lab that illustrates the Pathway Communities “upward mobility model” for the essential workforce. Nurses, Police, Fire, Medic, Teachers and more. It also led, somewhat unexpectedly, to spending two days building what would become the Hudson Commons Agent.

People have asked whether HCa is an AI project.

The answer is both yes and no.

It uses artificial intelligence, but that isn’t what makes it interesting to me. If a better technology comes along in five years, I’ll gladly use that instead. The software is temporary. The reasoning is the product.

Over those two days, I wasn’t teaching a machine facts about housing. I was documenting relationships that had accumulated over decades of experience. Why ownership matters. Why resilience matters. Why community design cannot be separated from public health. Why digital access is becoming as foundational as roads and water infrastructure. Why financial education belongs in the conversation long before someone signs a mortgage.

None of those ideas are particularly novel on their own. What is unusual is treating them as part of the same system instead of separate disciplines.

Somewhere during that process, it struck me that we weren’t building a database.

We were preserving judgment, and that distinction feels increasingly important.

Facts change. Technologies evolve. Construction methods improve. Financing mechanisms come and go. But the ability to reason across disciplines, to recognize patterns, and to understand how one decision ripples through an entire community is something else entirely. That is the kind of knowledge that traditionally lives inside experienced practitioners and is often lost when they retire or move on.

Perhaps that is what excites me most about this moment.

Not that artificial intelligence can answer questions faster than I can.

But that, for the first time, we have tools capable of preserving the reasoning behind those answers. They allow us to document not simply what we believe, but how we arrived there.

And once you begin thinking that way, another possibility emerges.

If we can preserve better judgment, perhaps we can also build better measures of value.

Perhaps a project that doesn’t pencil under yesterday’s assumptions begins to look very different when we recognize the value created beyond the balance sheet. Perhaps hospitals, school systems, employers, municipalities, utilities, and insurers all have a stake in outcomes that traditional development finance has treated as externalities. Perhaps what we’ve been calling a capital stack has always been something much closer to a capital ecosystem. To us, that unit of measurement is #StableLiving™.

It’s not an argument against financial discipline.

Quite the opposite.

It is an argument for becoming more disciplined about recognizing value wherever it is created.

Because if we only measure the movement of money, we shouldn’t be surprised when money becomes the only thing our systems are capable of optimizing.

The communities we hope to build deserve a richer accounting than that.

And perhaps so do we.

It’s time for new pencils.

That’s why I keep 5 different types on my desk as a reminder: The golf pencil. The mechanical pencil. The carpenter pencil. The standard #2 pencil, and the colored pencil - of course all of that is next to my compass.

….and remember: explorers use compasses, not maps.

#StableLiving™ #TinyGiants #TheyIsUs

Music pairing - Genesis - Land of Confusion. #relevant

This marks my first entry in July, and the past three weeks have been full of change and rife with emotion. I tried to escape to the beach for a few days, then made my way up to the mountains before spending time on the lake with our baseball family of friends. If I had to summarize my recent earthly experience in a single word, it would probably be restless.

Sometimes restlessness comes from uncertainty. Sometimes it comes from anticipation. And sometimes it comes from the feeling that the world is changing faster than we can process it.

Today’s article explores three things that have been weighing heavily on my mind: the earthquake in Venezuela, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, and Executive Order 14414, Advancing Regenerative Agriculture and Strengthening American Farm Resilience.

I’ve linked both the legislation and the Executive Order because they’re complex documents. They deserve more than headlines or hot takes. They require the kind of concentration and commitment that allows us to understand not only what they say, but what they may signal.

So, with that, let’s jump in on this 13th day of July, 2026.

Hope you make it a great day, and see you in the future.

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Venezuela

Some of you may know that my first major in college was Geology/Earth Science. I loved studying tectonics and became fascinated by the enormous amounts of energy, both kinetic and potential, that the science revealed.

The event in Venezuela was a rare “doublet,” meaning two major earthquakes struck essentially the same area in immediate succession. The first was a magnitude 7.2 foreshock, followed just 39 seconds later by a magnitude 7.5 mainshock. The primary energy release peaked between roughly 20 and 80 seconds after the initial rupture began, meaning the region experienced between 90 and 120 seconds of continuous, violent shaking.

The first earthquake originated approximately 22 kilometers below the surface, while the second occurred at a much shallower depth of about 10 kilometers. That difference matters. As compressional (P) waves and shear (S) waves approach the Earth’s surface, a portion of their energy is converted into surface waves. These waves typically have much larger amplitudes and produce the rolling, ocean-like motion that causes some of the most destructive ground movement during an earthquake. Local geology can either amplify or dampen those effects, but in this case the region experienced a devastating one-two punch, with immense shearing forces generated by two powerful events at relatively shallow depths.

As of this writing, confirmed fatalities have reached 4,490 people, while United Nations estimates suggest that nearly 50,000 people remain unaccounted for. Nearly 17,000 people have been injured, and more than 18,000 have been displaced from their homes, forcing many families into emergency shelters and temporary camps.

Heartbreaking loss of life. Decades-long setbacks for a country already in massive turmoil.

Just as any natural disaster does, the earthquake has a way of revealing the capacity of a society. Not just the strength of its buildings, but the strength of the systems that support everyday life. How much housing can be replaced? How quickly can food move? How resilient is the energy grid? How prepared are local institutions to respond?

Those questions have bugged me for years.

Housing

Because of my work with Pathway Communities, I spend a great deal of time paying attention to housing and public policy. I read legislation, agency reports, executive orders, and research papers because I’m always looking for signals. Sometimes they’re obvious. More often, they’re subtle. They reveal how our priorities are changing and where we may be headed as a country.

That’s what led me to the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act.

One of the things that first caught my attention wasn’t the the substance of the legislation, but the way it became law. Rather than being signed by the President, it became law under one of the Constitution’s lesser-known provisions after the President neither signed nor vetoed the bill while Congress remained in session. Regardless of where you stand politically, that struck me as another signal that housing has become important enough to continue moving forward, even through an unconventional legislative process.

At first glance, there isn’t an obvious connection between an earthquake in Venezuela and a housing bill moving through Congress. One is a natural disaster. The other is public policy. Yet the more I thought about both, the more I realized they were asking the same question from two different directions.

The earthquake exposed what happens when housing inventory is suddenly lost. The ROAD to Housing Act asks how we increase our nation’s capacity to create more housing before the next disruption arrives. One is about recovery. The other is about preparedness. Both are ultimately about capacity.

Capacity, however, isn't simply measured in the number of homes we can build. It's also measured by how well those homes perform over time. Durability. Energy efficiency. Disaster resilience. Long-term operating costs. If we're going to build millions of homes over the coming decades, I think those qualities deserve to be part of the conversation alongside speed, cost, and quantity.

The goal, after all, shouldn’t be about more houses - it should be to build stronger households.

Those aren’t the same thing.

A home that can better withstand a hurricane, requires less energy to operate, costs less to maintain, and leaves a family with more financial capacity at the end of every month contributes something that extends well beyond the structure itself. It increases resilience.

For decades we’ve measured success by units produced, dollars invested, efficiencies gained, and projects completed. Those metrics matter, but they’re outputs. I’m increasingly interested in outcomes. Are households more financially resilient? Are communities better prepared for disruption? Have we simply increased inventory, or have we increased capacity?

Those questions may not all be answered by the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, nor should they be. Legislation has a specific purpose. But I do think they’re worth asking as we consider what kind of housing we want to build over the next fifty years.

The more I sit with it, the more I realize those same questions extend well beyond housing. They're really questions about whether we're creating systems that simply produce more, or systems that become stronger over time.

Agriculture

One of the things I’ve come to appreciate over the past several years is that regenerative agriculture isn’t simply a different way of farming.

It’s a different way of thinking.

Traditional agriculture often asks how to maximize production this season. Regenerative agriculture asks how to increase the productive capacity of the land over decades. It seeks to restore the natural biology of the soil, improve water infiltration and retention, reduce erosion, support biodiversity, reduce unnecessary dependence on synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, and create agricultural systems that become more resilient and more capable over time.

That’s a very different objective.

As I read Executive Order 14414, I found myself agreeing with much of its direction because it reframes agriculture as critical national infrastructure, embraces regenerative agriculture as a systems approach, encourages voluntary adoption and innovation over mandates, acknowledges the importance of reducing cumulative chemical exposure and unnecessary dependence on synthetic inputs, and connects soil health, farm profitability, food security, and human health through the long-term productive capacity of the landscape.

Where I think it falls short is in clearly defining regenerative agriculture, establishing measurable outcomes, taking a more integrated systems view beyond agriculture alone, distinguishing resilience from the underlying capacity that creates it, and addressing the role of regional food systems and food sovereignty in strengthening America’s long-term resilience.

It would be difficult to have an honest conversation about regenerative agriculture without also acknowledging the extraordinary influence of large agribusiness and food companies. Farmers don't operate in isolation. They make decisions within a system of seed suppliers, chemical manufacturers, processors, distributors, retailers, lenders, insurers, and commodity markets. If we're serious about building a more resilient food system, then we have to think beyond the farm and consider the incentives that shape the entire ecosystem. Shout out to groups like Savory, Center for Agricultural Resilience, Kiss the Ground, Rodale & others.

So over the past few weeks, I’ve been drawn to an earthquake, a housing bill, and an E.O. on regenerative agriculture.

On the surface, they have very little in common.

Geology, housing, and farming….

Yet to me, they all seem to be asking the same question:

How do we increase the capacity of the systems upon which society depends - and how do we increase the overall quality of the yield?

Housing

Water

Food

Energy

Technology

Finance

Maybe these were never meant to be separate conversations. They’re all foundational infrastructure. They all influence the stability of a household, the resilience of a community, and ultimately the strength of a nation.

Foundational infrastructure isn’t tested when we build it. It’s tested when we need it.

That feels like a worthwhile thought to carry into the second half of 2026.

Keep exploring, keep tinkering, keep thinking in circles.

See you in the future.

A huge thank you to all the recent subscribers. I can’t do this without you, and I appreciate your interest. Please reach out to me if there’s something you want to explore in depth and I’ll try to cover it or point you somewhere I already have. Genuine thanks and appreciation to you and welcome!

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It’s been a busy week here at Orion Growth - especially in the world of Pathway Communities. We’ve updated the North Carolina model of the StableLiving Index™ to align with the state’s Councils of Government (NCARCOG), continued stress-testing the capital ecosystem behind the Pathway Development Theory, and are closing the bridge round for Hudson Commons, our first brick-and-mortar community in Western North Carolina.

It’s a tough grind to the finish line as we push toward some ambitious ‘mid-year’ goals. The world is moving fast, and the economics that shape housing, development, and community stability are evolving right alongside it. As the tech advances and the economy transitions, one question seems to follow me everywhere I go:

“Why doesn’t my project pencil?”

Developers ask it. Investors ask it. Municipal leaders ask it. The answer is rarely as simple as construction costs, interest rates, or land prices.

In this article, I want to introduce the concept of Value-Created Modeling and the financing structure behind the Pathway Development Theory. This isn’t an academic exercise. It’s the framework we are actively using to bring Post-Hurricane Helene projects in Western North Carolina from concept to reality, and the lens through which we evaluate whether a community can create lasting value for residents, investors, and the places they call home.

Onward and upward, but always forward.

What is value-created modeling?

If a traditional development asks, “How much money can we make from this project?” a value-created model asks “What value is being created, for whom, and how should that value be reflected in the capital ecosystem?”

Let’s start with design - because all awesome things start with design.

Design is not decoration. Design is intention. Before we finance anything, before we build anything, and before we ask a household to call a place home, we have to decide what the project is designed to do. Is it designed to maximize yield, maximize exit value, stabilize household costs, create ownership, or strengthen the community around it? Those are not the same project. They may sit on the same piece of land, use the same contractor, and show up in the same spreadsheet, but they are not designed to create the same value.

In his book, The Creative Act, Rick Rubin suggests that the creator’s role is not to force an outcome but to recognize what is trying to emerge and help bring it into existence. I think development works much the same way. Every project begins with a set of assumptions about what success looks like. Those assumptions shape the design, the financing, the partnerships, and ultimately the outcomes. The homes, roads, sidewalks, and buildings are simply the physical manifestation of an underlying idea.

The pro forma is not the model. The pro forma is just the calculator. Before we start calculating, we have to decide what we are creating and why it matters. Only then can we begin to understand what value is being created, who benefits from it, and how that value should be reflected throughout the capital ecosystem.

Developers think they’re financing buildings. In reality, they’re financing way of life. With the Pathway Communities model, the way of life we’re financing is stability.

That’s the heart of value-created modeling.

Of course, stability is not the only possible outcome. Every development finances a way of life, whether the developer realizes it or not.

A luxury high-rise may be financing convenience and status. A suburban subdivision may be financing privacy and space. A student housing project may be financing proximity and flexibility. A vacation rental community may be financing experiences and recreation.

None of those outcomes are inherently right or wrong. They are simply different expressions of value. The challenge is that most development models never explicitly define the value they are trying to create. Instead, they default to whatever outcome is most easily measured by the spreadsheet.

Value-created modeling begins by asking a different question. Before we ask how much money a project can generate, we ask what type of life the project is designed to support. The answer to that question influences everything that follows, from design and financing to ownership and long-term stewardship.

The Capital Ecosystem

Buckminster Fuller spent much of his life studying how structures behave under load. One of his observations was that strength does not come from making a single component infinitely stronger. Strength comes from distributing load efficiently throughout the system.

I believe development works much the same way.

Traditional real estate finance is often described as a capital stack. Debt sits on top of equity. Additional layers are added until the project is fully funded. As construction costs rise, interest rates increase, and community expectations expand, those layers become heavier. More load is concentrated on fewer participants.

Eventually something gives.

The project no longer pencils.

Not because value isn’t being created, but because the wrong capital is being asked to carry the wrong load.

Margaret Wheatley offers another way to understand this. In A Simpler Way, she reminds us that healthy systems are not built through control alone. They emerge through relationships, shared purpose, and the ability of each participant to contribute to the whole.

That matters because a community is not just a financial structure. It is a living system. If the bank, the developer, the municipality, the resident, the employer, and the foundation are all pursuing different outcomes, the project may be funded, but it is not aligned.

Value-created modeling asks a different question. Instead of asking how much debt and equity are required, we ask what value is being created, who benefits from that value, and how the capital should be aligned to carry the load.

That shift moves us from a capital stack to a capital ecosystem.

If a capital stack is a hierarchy of funding sources, a capital ecosystem is a collection of aligned participants. Each contributes a different form of capital, carries a different form of load, and benefits from a different form of value creation.

The Anatomy

Capital should be organized by function rather than source. The source of capital may change from project to project, but the functions remain consistent: build, own, stabilize, and strengthen.

Together, these four forms of capital create the conditions necessary for long-term stability.

Build Capital

Build capital transforms an idea into a physical asset. It is primarily concerned with execution, risk management, and repayment. Build capital finances the roads, utilities, infrastructure, and homes that bring a vision into the physical world.

Own Capital

Own capital creates stewardship. It aligns long-term interests with long-term outcomes and provides the patience required to weather inevitable cycles. Ownership capital ensures that those creating value have a stake in preserving and growing it over time.

Stabilize Capital

Stabilize capital reduces friction and volatility. It recognizes that certain outcomes create value beyond the boundaries of a project and that beneficiaries should participate accordingly. Stable housing, reliable infrastructure, workforce retention, and economic resilience all create value that extends far beyond a property’s lot lines.

Strengthen Capital

Strengthen capital expands what is possible. It supports outcomes that traditional markets often struggle to measure but communities deeply benefit from. Education, health, resilience, environmental stewardship, digital access, financial literacy, and social cohesion frequently fall into this category.

Viewed individually, each form of capital serves a different purpose. Viewed together, they create a more durable system. When capital is aligned with the value being created, load is distributed more appropriately, participants become better aligned, and projects that once struggled to pencil begin to make sense.

Hudson Commons

Theory is useful. Application is what matters.

Hudson Commons is our first opportunity to put Value-Created Modeling into practice. Located in Hudson, North Carolina, the project is designed around a simple objective: create long-term stability through ownership.

That objective matters because the value being created determines how capital should be organized. If the goal is simply to maximize returns, one capital ecosystem emerges. If the goal is to maximize stability, a different ecosystem emerges.

This is where the four forms of capital become real.

Build capital helps us acquire the land, develop the infrastructure, and construct the homes. Own capital aligns investors, partners, and future residents around long-term stewardship. Stabilize capital recognizes the value created for employers, municipalities, and the broader community. Strengthen capital supports the outcomes that extend beyond housing itself, including digital equity, financial literacy, resilience, and community well-being.

Viewed through a traditional lens, Hudson Commons is a housing development. Viewed through the lens of Value-Created Modeling, it is an attempt to align capital with the value being created and the people who benefit from it.

That distinction may seem subtle, but it changes everything.

It changes how we design. It changes how we finance. It changes who we invite into the conversation. It changes what we measure. It changes what we call success.

Rick Rubin helps me remember that every project begins with an intention. Buckminster Fuller helps me remember that no structure survives when the load is carried in the wrong place. Margaret Wheatley helps me remember that communities are living systems, and living systems depend on relationships. We are literally building structures for humans - we have to place them at the core of our ‘why.’

That is the work in front of us.

Hudson Commons is not the finish line. It is the first proof point. From there, our goal is to bring this model to two more communities in Western North Carolina: one in Watauga or Ashe County, and one in Black Mountain. Three communities. Three applications. One theory tested in the real world. After that, the sky is the limit. We’re grateful for our national partners who are allowing us the margin to think intentionally and locally and solve the challenges in front of us before ‘scaling’ to the rest of the country.

Value-Created Modeling is not about making a spreadsheet prettier. It is about making the value visible. It asks what we are creating, who benefits from it, and how the capital ecosystem should be aligned to carry the load.

That is how projects begin to pencil.

Not because we squeezed one more dollar out of the pro forma, but because we finally aligned the model with the outcome.

Compasses, not maps.

#StableLiving™ #SLIx™ #TinyGiants #TheyIsUs

Also - if you’re not listening to Moonshots podcast, you’re missing out on a free backstage pass into how we’re thinking about what we’re building from the technical perspective. There is a digital trust layer behind this thinking that requires alignment of incentives and chain-of-custody documentation to get us across the finish line. Ask me more.

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This week didn’t disappoint here in North Carolina.

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The University of North Carolina Tarheels baseball team advanced to the Men’s College World Series - and the Carolina Hurricanes won the Stanley Cup.

Winning feels good, and it should.

Success marks the culmination of persistence, teamwork, desire, motivation, dedication, strategy, practice….and maybe even a little luck.

It reminds me of the time my son’s baseball team won the state title and earned their way into the national bracket in Clearwater, Florida.

This was a different level of success. His team had come together in a way most don’t. There was no disputing their commitment to the game - especially in the late July heat across the Southeast. Those kids are friends for life. The memories will never be erased.

I’m going to get to my newsletter in a minute - but I wanted to point something out that has me really bothered.

It sucks to lose. But it sucks even worse to watch someone else win like a loser.

That’s what happened in NY with Knicks fans last week. I grew up with that team - well, not THAT team. Bernard King, Patrick Ewing, Bill Cartwright, Gerald Wilkins, John Starks - Madison Square Garden, St. Johns, Big East Basketball. Even in college - the Knicks did their preseason training in Charleston, a town I loved living in for 10 years.

But I was also taught how to handle our successes and failures. We were taught to win with humility and recognize that when you’re on top, everyone else wants to knock you off the peak.

Coaches know this. Players know this. Owners know this.

You have to learn to win and lose - just like you have to learn to dribble and shoot.

With this Knicks win - some fans exclaimed, “It’s euphoria!”

There was a shooting and four slashings or stabbings amid fights in the city, the police reported. Five school buses were destroyed – including by lighting them on fire. The vehicles were slated to transport fans from the city to MetLife Stadium in New Jersey for World Cup games, a police spokesperson stated. People also badly damaged five police cars, including by smashing them with baseball bats.

Police arrested 63 people connected to the game. Ten police officers suffered injuries, including ones who were punched in the face and struck with a glass bottle.

That’s not celebration, it’s ideocracy.

The euphoria, like the win, is ephemeral.

The ticker-tape celebration is on Thursday this week. Let’s hope it can remain a celebration without it turning into a melee.

Go Canes. It feels good to have Stanley back in NC.

The A-B-C’s of UB’s: Universal Basic Word Salad

Want to go down a rabbit hole? Follow the path to Universal Basic Income and see how many exit ramps you stumble across: UBHealthcare, UBFood, UBEducation, UBCompute, UBEnergy, UBWater, UBMobility, and about a dozen or so more.

Because I’m always trying to frame this around the Pathway Communities model, I’m going to share how I tried to simplify the UB’s into a cleaner framework.

1. Body Basics - Housing, food, water, healthcare, safety.

2. Household Basics - Energy, mobility, child/eldercare, banking, legal access.

3. Modern Life - Connectivity, compute, AI access, digital ID, data rights.

4. Community Basics - Education, civics, social ecosystem, local trust, resilience.

5. Future Needs - Ownership, time, purpose, upward mobility.

For the record, I list #5 not as a FAR future, but very near-term future - as in intended results or the fruit of our labor behind building these communities. I just want to make sure I highlight that here. This is not some far-off future. It is a highly intentional and intended result or yield.

The old social contract was built around income. The new one is being built around access.

The Apple ecosystem is a good example of this. They’re not selling us phones anymore. They’re selling us access to a managed life system - identity, storage, devices, payments, communication…etc. A simpler way to think of it is as a system built around access that gives people the ability to participate without having to own, build, or manage the whole infrastructure themselves. As a builder and tinkerer, this isn’t exactly appealing to me. That’s why my text messages come in a different color. Not sorry, btw.

Other examples include Amazon Prime - another great example. A bundle of delivery, shopping, streaming, reading, and software. Costco - food, fuel, prescriptions, household goods, travel, business supplies - all through a membership model. Coworking - access to workplace infrastructure without owning or leasing long-term liabilities.

Even the local public library system and the community college system fall into this category of access. The pattern is important because the systems all require and provide similar attributes - membership, identity, tools, trust, support, and a way to participate.

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Body Basics

Body Basics are the things a person needs before they can think clearly about much else: housing, food, water, healthcare, and safety. This is the physical foundation of stability. If the home is unstable, the food is unreliable, the water is unsafe, healthcare is reactive, or the environment feels unsafe, then life becomes a constant series of short-term calculations. It is hard to plan for the future when the present is always negotiating with crisis. For Pathway Communities, this is why housing sits at the center, but not by itself. A stable home should reduce exposure to volatility. It should lower the true cost of living. It should protect health, support daily routines, and create enough breathing room for a household to move from survival mode into planning mode.

Household Basics

Household Basics are the systems that make a home actually work over time: energy, mobility, child and eldercare, banking, and legal access. These are the quiet systems that determine whether a household can function without constantly falling behind. Can you afford to heat and cool the home? Can you get to work, school, the grocery store, and the doctor? Can someone care for a child or aging parent without collapsing the household budget? Can you access fair financial tools, understand contracts, build credit, protect yourself legally, and avoid predatory systems? This is where affordability is often misunderstood. The housing payment is only one line item. A home can look attainable on paper and still create instability if the systems around it are too expensive, too fragile, or too difficult to navigate.

Modern Life

Modern Life includes connectivity, compute, AI access, digital identity, and data rights. This category did not exist in the same way a generation ago, but it now determines who can fully participate in school, work, healthcare, banking, government services, and the broader economy. Reliable internet is no longer a luxury. A working device is no longer optional. Digital identity is becoming the front door to essential services. Compute and AI access are quickly becoming the next layer of economic opportunity. This is why I prefer language like Digital Access & Readiness over what I used to call Digital Equity. The goal is not to win a terminology fight. The goal is to make sure residents have access to the tools of modern life, and the knowledge to use them safely and productively.

Community Basics

Community Basics are education, civics, social ecosystem, local trust, and resilience. These are harder to measure than housing costs or utility bills, but they may be just as important. People do not stabilize in isolation. They stabilize inside networks of trust, information, relationships, and shared problem-solving. A community with weak social fabric becomes more fragile during every shock, whether that shock is a storm, a job loss, a health event, or an economic downturn. A community with strong local trust can coordinate, respond, recover, and adapt. This is where Pathway Communities is different from a traditional housing development. The goal is not just to put houses next to each other. The goal is to create a local environment where residents can learn, connect, participate, prepare, and support one another.

Future Needs

Future Needs include ownership, time, purpose, and upward mobility. Again, I do not mean some far-off future. I mean the intended yield of the system. If Body Basics, Household Basics, Modern Life, and Community Basics are working together, then the result should be more ownership, more time, more purpose, and more mobility. This is why ownership matters so much in the Pathway model. Access without ownership can become dependency. Ownership without support can become fragility. The point is to create a system where residents are not just consuming services, but building stability, capability, agency, and wealth over time. The outcome is not simply that someone got a house. The outcome is that they gained a pathway.

Parting Thoughts

The old question was, “How much income does someone need to survive?” That question still matters, but I don’t think it is enough anymore. The better question may be, “What systems does someone need access to in order to live a stable life?” Income helps people buy access, but when the essential systems are broken, expensive, or unavailable, income alone does not solve the problem. It just gives people a slightly better chance of competing inside unstable systems. This is why we built the StableLiving Index™. It’s a starting point. A consensus among the confusion. It’s a score we can all agree on before we get started with the heavy lifting.

To be clear, none of this is a call to socialism. It’s a call to better designed access to better designed systems.

Socialism implies public ownership or centralized control of production. That’s not what I see here at all. I’m talking about access architecture: the way communities, markets, institutions, and households can organize essential systems so people are not forced to rebuild the basics from scratch every time life gets expensive, fragile, or disrupted. It’s a jumping off point - a direction or heading for the compass.

The old social contract was built around income. The new one is being built around access.

That is why the UB conversation is bigger than Universal Basic Income. It is really a conversation about the basic infrastructure of modern life. Housing. Food. Water. Energy. Healthcare. Connectivity. Compute. Learning. Trust. Ownership. Time. Purpose. These are not separate debates. They are connected conditions - and they need to be collected, quantified, qualified, measured, and improved - just like every dollar in a balance sheet.

And that is the real opportunity for us right now. Not to build another housing product. Not to add another acronym to the word salad. But to build a place-based access system around the stable household. A model where the basics are not treated as disconnected services, but as the operating conditions for a better life.

A home. A future. A pathway. #StableLiving™

Despite some much-needed R&R in the woods, Friday couldn’t come fast enough this week. Today’s high temperature is expected to crack 100 degrees- and the hot-tub is being converted into a summer cold plunge to help beat the heat. It doesn’t hurt that my oldest is a lifeguard with guest privileges - so we’ll probably take advantage of that perk at some point over the weekend too.

On record heat days like this, I can’t help but hear my AC condenser unit(s) whirling. With a proposed rate hike of 12% by our local utility, followed by another 8% the following year, our power bill continues to increase as the severity of the temperatures continue. We are currently experiencing a top-ten warmest year on record with our averages sitting 2.2° above the revolving 20-year average.

More specifically, it’s got me thinking about the perilous pursuit of cheap housing in America.

Heat isn’t just weather. It’s energy demand. Energy demand becomes utility bills. Utility bills become household expenses. Household expenses determine whether a family feels financially stable or financially stressed.

Climate volatility doesn’t just show up in temperatures. It shows up in droughts and floods. It shows up in insurance claims, crop losses, infrastructure damage, and increased calls for first responders. No politics here. It’s all connected. We can ignore those connections, or we can start building better systems that acknowledge them.

Which brings me to affordability.

Today, affordability in housing is typically defined by a simple rule of thumb. Financial professionals generally recommend no more than 28% of a household’s income be spent on housing costs. Whether that’s rent or a mortgage payment, the calculation usually focuses on the cost of putting a roof over your head.

But that’s not the same thing as the cost of living under that roof.

And that distinction matters.

Because for decades much of the housing conversation has been driven by a single objective: reduce cost. Cheaper land. Cheaper materials. Cheaper labor. Cheaper construction methods. Cheaper financing. The intention is noble. Housing is expensive and people need relief. The question is whether we've become so focused on lowering upfront costs that we've stopped asking what those decisions cost households over the next thirty years.

What if our pursuit of lower upfront costs has caused us to overlook the long-term costs households inherit after the keys are handed over? What if we’ve value-engineered all the value out the home?

Before we can answer those questions, we need to talk about income, inflation, and exposure.

We have all sorts of national measurements for income and housing, but surprisingly, we don’t have a real-time national tool that tells us what life actually costs in a particular place. That’s part of the reason I built one, but more on that later.

For now, we’ll use the data we have. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, median household income was $83,730 in 2024, statistically unchanged from the 2023 estimate of $82,690. It’s not perfect. We’re in 2026 looking backward through the windshield. But we have to paint with the brushes we have.

The same challenge exists when measuring inflation.

The headline number gets all the attention, but there is no single “actual inflation” rate. A retired homeowner in Maryland with a paid-off house experiences inflation very differently than a first-year teacher renting an apartment in Washington, D.C. Both face the same CPI. Both live in the same region. Yet their lived experience of inflation may differ by three or four times.

That’s because inflation isn’t just about prices.

It’s about exposure.

And before we can define affordable housing, we need to understand what households are actually exposed to.

Let’s jump in.

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Defining Affordability

Ask ten people to define affordable housing and you’ll probably get ten different answers. For some, affordability means lower rent. For others, it means homeownership. For policymakers, lenders, and developers, affordability is often tied to a combination of income and housing costs. The most common rule of thumb suggests that households should spend no more than 28% to 30% of their income on housing. At a larger scale, Area Median Income, or AMI, is used to determine who qualifies for everything from housing assistance programs to attainable housing developments.

There is nothing inherently wrong with these measurements. In fact, they serve an important purpose. They create a common language that allows us to compare communities, allocate resources, and establish guidelines. Without them, it would be difficult to have a national conversation about housing at all.

The challenge is that these measurements primarily focus on the cost of acquiring housing, not the cost of living in it. They tell us whether a household can qualify for a mortgage, afford a rent payment, or meet a particular program threshold. What they don’t tell us is whether that same household can comfortably absorb rising utility bills, increasing insurance premiums, unexpected maintenance costs, transportation expenses, or the countless other financial obligations that come with daily life.

In other words, we have become very good at measuring the cost of the roof over someone’s head. We have been far less successful at measuring the cost of the life lived underneath it.

That distinction may seem subtle, but I believe it sits at the heart of our housing challenges today. Because if our definition of affordability only captures the purchase price while ignoring decades of operating costs, then we may be solving for the wrong variable entirely.

The Cost of Living Under the Roof

Let’s assume, for a moment, that a family finds a home that perfectly meets the affordability guidelines. Their mortgage payment falls below the recommended threshold. Their lender approves the loan. The monthly payment fits neatly within the accepted percentages of household income. By every conventional measurement, the home is affordable.

But then life happens.

The air conditioner runs through a week of triple-digit temperatures. Utility rates increase. Insurance premiums rise after a series of costly weather events. The water heater reaches the end of its useful life. Gas prices fluctuate. A longer commute consumes more time and money than originally anticipated. Property taxes adjust upward. The roof eventually needs replacement.

None of these costs are unusual. In fact, they are entirely predictable. They are part of owning and operating a home. Yet most affordability calculations treat them as secondary considerations rather than central components of the equation.

The result is that two households with identical mortgage payments may experience dramatically different financial realities. One may live in a high-performance home that requires relatively little energy to heat and cool, is constructed with durable materials, and is located close to employment, schools, and daily necessities. The other may occupy a less expensive home that consumes significantly more energy, requires more maintenance, and creates higher transportation costs every month. On paper, both homes may be equally affordable. In practice, they can produce very different outcomes.

This is where I believe we begin to confuse cheap housing with affordable living.

A home that costs less to purchase but more to operate is not necessarily affordable. It is simply inexpensive at the point of sale. The household still bears the burden of every future utility bill, insurance increase, maintenance expense, and transportation cost. Those obligations don’t disappear because the purchase price was lower. They simply arrive later, often spread across decades.

For most families, housing is not a single transaction. It is the largest recurring financial commitment they will make during their lifetime. Measuring affordability without accounting for operating costs is a little like buying a vehicle based solely on the monthly payment while ignoring fuel, maintenance, insurance, and repairs. The purchase price matters, but it is only one part of a much larger equation.

And once we begin looking at housing through the lens of total cost of living rather than upfront cost alone, another factor enters the conversation: exposure.

Not all households experience inflation equally. Not all homes expose their occupants to the same risks. To understand why, we need to talk about the difference between prices and exposure.

Inflation Is Really About Exposure

One of the challenges with any conversation about affordability is that we tend to treat inflation as though it affects everyone equally.

It doesn’t.

The headline CPI number gets most of the attention because it provides a useful national benchmark. It tells us how prices are changing across a broad basket of goods and services. Policymakers watch it. Economists debate it. The media reports on it. Yet for most households, inflation isn’t experienced as a statistic. It’s experienced as a series of bills that arrive in the mailbox every month.

Consider two households living in the same metropolitan area. One is a retired homeowner with a paid-off mortgage living in an energy-efficient home. The other is a first-year teacher renting an apartment and carrying student debt. Both are exposed to the same national inflation rate. Both buy groceries, pay utility bills, and purchase gasoline. Yet their lived experience of inflation is entirely different.

Why?

Because inflation isn’t just about prices.

It’s about exposure.

The retired homeowner has already insulated themselves from some of the largest inflation-sensitive expenses in modern life. Their housing payment may be fixed or eliminated entirely. Their transportation needs may be limited. Their household budget may be less sensitive to fluctuations in energy costs. The teacher, on the other hand, is exposed to rising rents, rising utility costs, transportation expenses, insurance increases, and the countless financial pressures that come with building a life from scratch.

The same principle applies to housing.

Two homes may carry identical purchase prices and identical mortgage payments, yet expose their occupants to vastly different futures. One home may require significantly more energy to operate. Another may be located farther from employment centers, creating higher transportation costs. One may be built with materials that require frequent maintenance. Another may be designed to withstand weather events and reduce future repair costs. The purchase price is the same. The exposure is not.

This is where I believe we begin to see the flaw in our traditional affordability calculations.

Most affordability metrics focus on what a household can afford today. Very few attempt to measure what a household will be exposed to tomorrow.

Yet exposure is often what determines whether a family feels financially secure. A household with lower exposure to utility inflation, transportation costs, insurance increases, and maintenance shocks is inherently more resilient than a household whose budget depends on all of those costs remaining stable.

And if the last several years have taught us anything, it’s that stability should never be taken for granted.

Perhaps the question isn’t whether a home is affordable on the day it is purchased.

Perhaps the better question is whether the home reduces or increases a family’s exposure to the forces that make life more expensive over time.

Because once we start measuring exposure, we begin to uncover one of the most overlooked realities in housing today:

Many of the homes we call affordable are only affordable at the moment of purchase.

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The Hidden Cost of Cheap Housing

This brings us back to the question that has been quietly guiding housing policy, development, and consumer decision-making for decades: How do we make housing cheaper?

On the surface, it seems like a perfectly reasonable goal. Housing costs have risen faster than incomes in many parts of the country. Young families struggle to enter the market. Essential workers are increasingly priced out of the communities they serve. Developers face rising land, labor, material, and financing costs. Everyone is searching for ways to reduce the final price tag.

The problem is that reducing cost and creating value are not always the same thing.

When pressure is applied to lower the cost of housing, something usually has to give. Sometimes it’s square footage. Sometimes it’s location. Sometimes it’s construction quality, durability, insulation levels, window performance, mechanical systems, or long-term resiliency. In many cases, these decisions are made with the best of intentions. The goal is to help a family get into a home they can afford.

Unfortunately, the savings achieved on day one often become costs that compound for years.

A home that consumes more energy every month may be less expensive to purchase but more expensive to operate. A home located farther from employment centers may save money on land acquisition while increasing transportation costs for decades. A home built to minimum standards may satisfy current code requirements while creating larger maintenance obligations in the future. None of these expenses appear on the sales brochure, yet every one of them affects the household budget.

This is particularly important when we consider the power of compounding.

Most conversations about housing focus on the upfront cost because it is visible. It’s easy to compare a $250,000 home to a $275,000 home. It’s much harder to compare thirty years of utility bills, insurance increases, maintenance expenses, fuel costs, and replacement cycles. Yet those recurring expenses often exceed the original savings that justified the lower purchase price in the first place.

Imagine two homes sitting side-by-side on the same street.

The first home costs $250,000. The second costs $275,000 because it incorporates better insulation, higher-performance windows, and a more efficient HVAC system.

At first glance, the cheaper home appears to be the affordable option. After all, it costs $25,000 less.

But let’s assume the higher-performing home reduces utility costs by just $150 per month.

That’s $1,800 per year.

Over thirty years, that’s $54,000 in avoided utility costs before accounting for future utility rate increases.

Now add the reality that utility rates rarely stay flat. Over the last three years alone, cumulative inflation has exceeded 10%, while many utilities have proposed or implemented increases well above general inflation. The savings created by the more efficient home don’t remain static. They compound.

Suddenly the conversation changes.

The question is no longer whether the home costs $25,000 more to purchase.

The question becomes whether spending an additional $25,000 today to avoid $50,000, $75,000, or even $100,000 of future expenses is actually the more affordable decision.

Thirty years later, the answer may look very different.

The higher-performing home may have reduced thousands of dollars in utility costs, avoided major maintenance expenses, increased comfort, improved resilience during extreme weather events, and insulated its occupants from a portion of future inflation. The cheaper home may have required decades of additional spending simply to maintain a similar quality of life.

This is the paradox at the center of modern housing.

By focusing almost exclusively on first cost, we may be unintentionally increasing lifetime cost.

The pursuit of cheap housing can produce homes that are inexpensive to buy but expensive to live in. And when that happens, we haven’t solved the affordability problem. We’ve simply moved it from the closing table to the monthly budget.

The question, then, is not whether we should care about cost. Of course we should.

The question is whether we are measuring the right cost.

Because if housing is truly the foundation upon which families build their lives, then perhaps affordability should be judged not by what a home costs on the day it is purchased, but by what it costs to live there for the next thirty years.

A Different Definition of Affordability

Perhaps this is where we’ve gotten ourselves into trouble.

For decades, we’ve treated housing as a product and affordability as a price point. We have measured the cost of acquiring a home while paying far less attention to the cost of living in one.

The result is a system that often rewards lower upfront costs while overlooking long-term exposure. Exposure to utility inflation. Exposure to transportation costs. Exposure to maintenance. Exposure to insurance increases. Exposure to the growing volatility that seems to touch nearly every aspect of modern life.

None of this suggests that cost doesn’t matter.

It matters enormously.

But if our definition of affordability ends at the closing table, we are measuring only part of the equation.

A home is more than a financial transaction. It is infrastructure for daily living. It shapes a household’s monthly expenses, resilience, health, comfort, and long-term financial stability for decades after the purchase is made.

It begs one simple question:

What if the most affordable home isn’t the one with the lowest purchase price?

What if it’s the one that best protects a family from the rising cost of living?

Because cheap housing and affordable living are not the same thing. And in a world defined by increasing volatility, the difference between the two may matter more than ever.

#StableLiving™ #TinyGiants #TheyisUs #StableLiving Index™

While this is certainly not my first sighting- or even run-in with a bear - this bear was different. It was HUGE. As it turns out - there’s a ton of symbolism in seeing a bear.

Coming off the Energy Summit at Appalachian State University, it’s hard not to recognize the connection between the sighting and the symbol of power and resilience. There are so many forms of energy around us - but we seldom ask ourselves why or how we are impacted by them. In Native American cultures, the bear is revered as a protector and healer. It is thought to guide individuals through periods of introspection and personal growth. It’s as though the bear is reminding me to harness my inner strength and remain grounded, no matter the challenges ahead.

My work in housing is no different. Durability, resilience, and circularity are among the foremost important concepts in Pathway Communities thinking. If we’re going to solve for housing - we have to create stability first. We can’t simply put roofs over people’s heads and forget the needs of the souls that live under those roofs.

I hope you enjoy my thoughts today. More on money - I know, I know…but this is how we finance our next generation of building - so we have to keep talking economics until the new versions make sense and actually feel like they make sense.

Enjoy.

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“Americans have never been richer than they are today. We haven’t had a real recession in 17 years. The stock market seems to hit new all-time highs every other day or so. The homeownership rate is 65%. Two-thirds of American households own stocks. The unemployment rate is 4.3%.

And yet...

We are currently sitting at the lowest level of consumer sentiment in the past 75 years. Lower than the Great Financial Crisis, dot-com crash, Carter-Reagan recession, 1970s inflation, and the start of the COVID pandemic.”

I came across this observation recently and immediately copied it into my notes. It stopped me in my tracks because, on its face, it shouldn’t be possible. If Americans have never been wealthier, why do so many people feel so pessimistic? If the economy is performing as well as the headline indicators suggest, why is consumer sentiment hovering near historic lows? One of these stories seems wrong.

The more I’ve thought about it, however, the more convinced I’ve become that neither story is wrong. They are simply describing two very different realities. (Its also why we’re developing the #StableLiving Index™ but more on that some other time)

The first reality is the one economists tend to measure. It is the world of GDP growth, unemployment rates, stock market returns, household net worth, and productivity. These metrics matter. They help us understand whether the economic engine is functioning. By many of these measures, the United States has been remarkably resilient. We have absorbed a global pandemic, inflationary shocks, geopolitical instability, and rapid technological change while maintaining relatively low unemployment and generating enormous amounts of wealth.

The second reality is the one most people actually inhabit. It is the world of rent payments, mortgage payments, childcare costs, grocery bills, insurance premiums, student loans, and medical expenses. It is the world of household cash flow. Most people do not experience the economy through a quarterly GDP report. They experience it through the accumulation of small financial decisions that arrive every month whether they are ready for them or not.

What if the disconnect we’re seeing isn’t between perception and reality? What if it is between two different definitions of success?

For the better part of a century, we have become exceptionally good at measuring economic output. We can tell you how much was produced, consumed, invested, borrowed, and earned. We can track markets in real time and compare national performance across decades. What we struggle to measure is stability. We have metrics for growth. We have far fewer metrics for resilience.

For years, I’ve worked in housing and community development. I’ve sat with teachers, nurses, first responders, tradespeople, and young families trying to make sense of their futures. What strikes me is that very few of these conversations revolve around GDP, stock market performance, or quarterly earnings reports.

They revolve around questions that feel much more personal.

Can I afford to buy a home?

Can I stay in the community where I work?

Will childcare cost more than my mortgage?

Am I ever going to get ahead?

The people asking these questions are not failing. Many are doing everything society asked them to do. They earned degrees, built careers, worked hard, and played by the rules. Yet many still feel as though stability keeps moving further away.

That observation has increasingly shaped my own thinking. Perhaps the challenge facing America is not simply an economic one. Perhaps it is a design challenge. We have become extraordinarily effective at creating growth, efficiency, and wealth. The harder question is whether we have become equally effective at creating stability.

Can a teacher afford to live in the community she serves? Can a nurse save for a down payment? Can a young family absorb an unexpected $5,000 expense without going into debt? Can a household reasonably expect that hard work will translate into upward mobility? These questions rarely appear in economic reports, yet they may have more influence on daily well-being than the latest jobs number.

Housing illustrates this tension particularly well. A homeowner who purchased a house five or ten years ago has likely benefited from substantial appreciation while securing a historically low mortgage rate. Their balance sheet may be stronger than ever. A first-time homebuyer looking at that same house today encounters a completely different reality. The home is more expensive, financing costs are higher, and the path to ownership feels increasingly distant. Both individuals live in the same economy, yet they experience it very differently.

As I continue my work around housing, infrastructure, and community development, I find myself returning to a simple question: what are we actually trying to optimize for? Economic growth is important. Efficiency is important. Innovation is important. But if the ultimate purpose of those things is to improve human lives, then surely we should care about whether people feel secure, whether they can plan for the future, and whether they believe tomorrow will be better than today.

Perhaps consumer sentiment is not telling us that America is poor. Perhaps it is telling us that many Americans do not feel stable.

Those are not the same thing.

A society can generate extraordinary wealth while simultaneously producing extraordinary anxiety. It can increase asset values while eroding confidence. It can become more productive while leaving people uncertain about their future. If that is true, then the challenge ahead may not simply be growing the economy. It may be creating conditions where more people can actually experience the benefits of that growth.

The data tells us that Americans have never been richer. The sentiment data suggests that many Americans have rarely felt less secure. That feels less like a contradiction and more like an invitation to ask a different question altogether.

Maybe the lesson isn’t that our economic indicators are wrong - maybe they’re just incomplete.

If you’ve been to one of my talks - this is where I point out Indy Johar’s notion that we’re just behaving like shitty capitalists. Why stop at financial gain? Why not go deep into value and benefit and make sure the model not only makes money but also provides a better world or day I say creates a regenerative future?

Too altruistic?

Growth tell us how much wealth a society creates. Stability tells us how much of that wealth people actually experience in their daily lives.

One measures output, the other measures confidence.

If millions of Americans are telling us they feel less secure despite living in one of the wealthiest periods in history, perhaps the most important data point isn’t the one flashing across a stock ticker.

Perhaps it’s the one showing up around the dinner table.

#StableLiving™ #TinyGiants #TheyisUs

At first glance, it feels like an odd read for someone working in housing, infrastructure, and technology. Morris was a designer, writer, and social thinker living during the height of the Industrial Revolution. Steam engines were transforming cities. Factories were changing labor. The modern economy was taking shape.

Yet as I read it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was wrestling with many of the same questions we are today. Not about technology, about purpose. Not about efficiency, about people.

The story follows a man who falls asleep in an industrial London and wakes up in a future society that has reorganized itself around beauty, stewardship, meaningful work, and community. The rivers are clean. Neighborhoods are human-scaled. People take pride in craftsmanship. Work is valued not because it maximizes output, but because it contributes to life.

It is, admittedly, a utopian vision.

But beneath the idealism sits a question that feels surprisingly modern:

What happens when a society optimizes for human flourishing instead of economic efficiency?

For the last 200 years, we’ve become remarkably good at optimization. We optimize supply chains, labor, logistics, square footage, shareholder value, return on investment….The results are undeniable. Humanity has experienced extraordinary gains in productivity and material abundance.

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But there’s always a balance to consider.

The more we optimized transportation, the more disconnected we became from place. The more we optimized housing as a financial asset, the more difficult ownership became for many of the people our communities depend upon. The more we optimized work, the more people began asking whether work itself felt meaningful.

This isn’t an argument against progress. It’s an argument for remembering what progress was supposed to be for.

I’m not certain William Morris would recognize our modern world, and I certainly don’t believe we can return to his. Morris imagined a future with little technology. I spend most of my days building with artificial intelligence, intelligent automation, digital infrastructure, and data systems.

He imagined a future without money. I spend my time trying to create circular capital stacks and financial systems that make ownership more attainable.

He imagined a pastoral society. I’m focused on adaptive reuse, industrialized offsite construction, and revitalizing existing communities.

Yet despite those differences, we seem to be aiming toward a similar destination. A society where housing is a foundation rather than a burden. A society where technology serves people rather than the other way around. A society where communities are designed around belonging, participation, and upward mobility. A society where stability viewed as critical infrastructure.

That last point has become increasingly important to me. For years, I’ve worked in commercial real estate. Buildings, projects, infrastructure. But somewhere along the way I began realizing that housing is not simply a building problem….it’s not even primarily a building problem. It’s a systems problem.

Housing touches education.

Healthcare.

Transportation.

Workforce development.

Financial health.

Social mobility.

In other words, housing isn’t a product. It’s infrastructure. And if it’s infrastructure, then perhaps our goal should not be maximizing housing production alone. Perhaps the goal should be maximizing #StableLiving™.

That idea eventually became the foundation for Pathway Communities and the StableLiving Index™ (SLIx).

It’s not affordable housing. It’s not workforce housing. It’s not luxury housing - it’s stable living.

A condition where people have enough stability in their lives that they can meaningfully participate in their future. When viewed through that lens, William Morris starts feeling less like a utopian dreamer and more like an early systems thinker. He understood something that many of us are rediscovering today:

People don’t want efficiency as an end goal. They want what efficiency is supposed to provide. Security, time, belonging, purpose, beauty, hope.

The challenge before us is not choosing between technology and humanity. It’s choosing whether technology serves humanity. That’s a different question.

What are we really building toward?

135 years ago, William Morris imagined a future that prioritized human flourishing. Today, standing in communities struggling with housing affordability, economic uncertainty, social fragmentation, and natural disasters, I find myself asking the same question. Not how do we build more. Not how do we move faster. Not how do we optimize further.

But simply: How should we live?

#StableLiving™ #TinyGiants #TheyisUs #TotalTenancy™

This article is best paired with a healthy does of Arts and Crafts Style. The movement emerged as a reaction to industrialization. Morris looked around Victorian England and saw factories producing cheap goods at scale, but he believed something important was being lost. One of his most famous ideas:

Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.

Willow Boughs (1887) is one of my favorites because of the simplicity. It’s just flowing willow branches repeated across a surface - creating what he calls a ‘satisfying mystery’ rather than a demanding of your attention.

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But then, well, maybe it does.

GCUC Conference NYC Keynote / Earth Day with Buckminster Fuller Institute / Final submission to Housing Innovation Challenge/ Fundraising Pitch for Hudson Commons / Proforma Creation for #StableLiving / The advent of the #StableLivingIndex™ / CRExCLT keynote with Ram Srinivasan/Vision2Matter 5-1 session/ Welcoming in a new advisor to Pathways / Speaking at NC Leadership Conference in Raleigh, NC / The Housing Innovation Summit in Charlotte, NC / Completing 12-week mentorship program with Avon Old Farms School…. not to mention all the personal stuff - son came home from college, daughter had junior prom, farm house opening weekend, family guests from Seattle, graduation celebration in Connecticut…..woah.

What a whirlwind.

In fact, I think this has been the busiest (and most productive) month of my entire career - and I mean that.

People ask me all the time how I do it all. It’s simple really:

I get to do it.

My mental framing is that I don’t have to do this, I get to do this.

Now, the reality is that most of this work. So yeah, I guess I have to do it.
My point is that I really love what I do…so much so that I’ve turned it into my purpose, not my profession. That gets me out of bed.

What keeps me up at night? A lot.

There is no shortage of things that need fixing. In fact, that’s not even really fair. The things I’m working on are mainly beyond repair and in need of better thinking.

This article is going to focus on POSITIVITY. What we’re DOING not what people are TALKING about doing. How we’re BUILDING not what’s holding us back. How we’re BREAKING DOWN barriers not complaining about the ones that impede our progress. This article is about how we’re constructing our future - each day - and therefore turning us into the architects of the future, not it’s victims. (Thanks Bucky)

I hope you’ll join us.

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The Housing Innovation Challenge (start here, then go here)

The Housing Innovation Challenge has been one of the most meaningful experiences along my journey to #StableLiving because it forced our team to move beyond ideas and into alignment.

The challenge itself is ambitious: bring together universities, industry leaders, municipalities, builders, technologists, and investors to rethink how housing can be designed, delivered, and scaled in a way that actually improves affordability. But what stood out to me immediately was that this wasn’t a theoretical exercise. It was grounded in real constraints, real timelines, real zoning, real budgets, and ultimately real people who will one day live in these homes. That changes the nature of innovation entirely.

From the outset, I approached the Challenge through an Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) lens. Not as a buzzword, but as a working model for how complex housing problems actually get solved. I know, because this is how we’ve always approached complex problems in commercial real estate at Orion Growth. Instead of treating the competition as a single-school design exercise, I believed we had an opportunity to build a broader coalition across the UNC system by connecting different institutional strengths into a unified delivery framework. The lightbulb came from ncIMPACT - Our State, Our Homes, a program I am honored to have been a part of for the last 18 months.

Appalachian State brought deep thinking around sustainability and building performance. NC State contributed technical rigor, systems thinking, and construction expertise. UNC Chapel Hill added strengths in finance, policy, development, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Individually, each school had value. Together, the collaboration became far more powerful than the sum of its parts. This was was about the students - and it will remain that way until the houses we are proposing have new residents and we cut the ribbon.

What I did not fully anticipate was what that alignment would attract.

As the work evolved, the coalition expanded beyond North Carolina and ultimately created new partnerships with Georgia Tech and Harvard. That, to me, became one of the most meaningful outcomes of the entire process. Not because of the names themselves, but because of what the partnerships represented. Different institutions, different disciplines, different perspectives, and different areas of expertise all converging around a shared mission: creating housing solutions that are actually deliverable, scalable, and capable of improving long-term stability for residents and communities.

But it doesn’t stop there.

We were selected to partner with a project called The Harvest Center within Brookhill Village in Charlotte, NC. We haven’t had our initial meeting yet as we just found out about qualifying last Thursday. Check out their Foundation for Lasting Change: 8 Dimensions of Wellness.

This is not about building roofs over heads, this is about supporting the people who live under them.

In many ways, that is the real innovation. Not simply modular construction, advanced manufacturing, or new housing typologies, although all of those matter. The deeper innovation is learning how to integrate people, systems, knowledge, and incentives around shared outcomes. Housing has historically been fragmented across silos that rarely communicate effectively with one another. Designers, builders, policymakers, investors, manufacturers, municipalities, and researchers often operate in parallel rather than in partnership. The IPD mindset challenges that fragmentation directly by creating alignment earlier, reducing friction later, and building shared ownership around both risk and opportunity. To me, this is really about aligning missions and working together to BUILD the new model that makes the old model obsolete.

That’s why advancing to Phase 2 of the Housing Innovation Challenge felt meaningful in a way that extended well beyond the competition itself.

It validated the idea that collaboration, when structured intentionally, can create momentum that no single organization could generate alone. More importantly, it reinforced my belief that the future of housing innovation will not come from isolated breakthroughs. It will come from ecosystems. From networks of people willing to bridge disciplines, institutions, industries, and ideas in pursuit of something larger than themselves. And honestly, being part of building that kind of future is exactly the kind of work I “get to do.”

Stay tuned - this isn’t the end. It’s very much the beginning. Please reach out directly or comment below if you’re interested in becoming a partner….it takes a village.

Here’s the press release.

More on the Orion Growth whitepaper here.

More on the Housing Innovation Alliance here.

More on the Housing Innovation Summit here.

More on the Housing Innovation Challenge here.

Here’s the crew:

#StableLiving #PathwayCommunities #TinyGiants

Across Georgia and the Carolinas, that number spikes to 2.3m acres.

These numbers have been confirmed by all agencies and published in a comprehensive report published by NOAA.

….and now….a drought. In fact, a severe drought.

The storm was 573 days ago. Just long enough to dry out all the underbrush and leave a powderkeg of tinder for the next cycle of destruction: Fire.

Break out the thoughts and prayers.

Here’s the thing that’s got me all sorts of bothered lately.

The storm caused an estimated $87B in damage. The second most costly storm in recorded history. NC comprises about $60B of it. Raleigh submitted a proposal/claim to lawmakers in Washington, DC for just under $30B - taking a nearly 50% hit on the chin, but respecting that full value claims from FEMA during disasters are unheard of. So far, they’ve countered the $30B with just $7B (which is only earmarked).

We’ve only seen $1B.

Read that again. 👆

Our Governor, Josh Stein, has made several phased requests to the General Assembly and Congress:

• $13.5 Billion Federal Request: Submitted to Congress in late 2025 specifically for long-term housing and infrastructure.

• $792 Million State Request: His most recent request (March 2026) for the “Third Phase” of recovery.

Total Allocated So Far: Only about 29% to 30% of the estimated $60 billion need has been funded through combined federal and state appropriations.

Have no fear, data nerds, we’re keeping very close tabs on this down here in our little ‘redneck’ state. Have a look at the handy work by the NC Auditor’s office.

This dashboard is real time, and it’s real telling.

Total Spend By Agency:

Total Spend of Top 10 Projects

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As of April 2026, approximately $1.052 billion (roughly 74%) of North Carolina’s initial federal $1.4 billion Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) allocation has been specifically apportioned to housing.

Detailed Allocation Breakdown

According to the State of North Carolina Action Plan, the housing-specific funds are divided into several key programs:

• Single-Family Housing Program (SFHP): $807 million is earmarked for the reconstruction and rehabilitation of owner-occupied units.

• Multi-Family Housing Program: $191 million is allocated to restore rental units, including small rental rehabilitation and large projects.

• Workforce Housing for Ownership: $53 million specifically targets affordable homeownership for the workforce.

• Temporary Housing Support: Governor Josh Stein’s recent Phase 3 Budget Recommendations (March 2026) requested that $60 million of existing funds be used specifically for Temporary Relocation Assistance (TRA) to house survivors during their homes’ reconstruction.

822,000 acres of timberland wiped out in Western North Carolina. 2.3 million across Georgia and the Carolinas. That is not a statistic, it is a system shock. Then comes the drought. Severe. The storm was 573 days ago, just long enough for the debris to dry, the underbrush to settle, and the region to shift from flood risk to fire risk. One cycle handing off to the next. Nature is not confused about what comes next.

We are.

Hurricane Helene caused an estimated $87 billion in damage, with roughly $60 billion of that in North Carolina alone. The state asked for just under $30 billion in federal support, already conceding that full recovery funding is unrealistic. The response so far is $7 billion, largely earmarked, with only about $1 billion actually deployed. Let that settle. Thirty percent of the need has been allocated on paper. A fraction of that is moving in the real world.

Meanwhile, the tracking is precise. The dashboards are live. The allocations are categorized and distributed across programs. Housing leads the way, as it should. Roughly $807 million toward single family reconstruction, $191 million for multifamily, $53 million for workforce ownership, and additional requests for temporary housing support. These are real dollars doing real work. But they are moving inside a system that is not designed for speed, nor for compounding risk.

Because this is not just a recovery story. It is a sequencing problem. Fire follows flood. Drought follows storm. Displacement follows delay. And every day that funding lags behind reality, the exposure grows.

We tend to talk about disasters as isolated events. A storm. A drought. A fire. But what we are experiencing is a chain reaction across interconnected systems. Land, housing, infrastructure, insurance, and capital all moving at different speeds, often in different directions.

The question is not whether we are spending money. We are. The question is whether we are building toward resilience, or simply funding our way through the next version of the same problem.

Because if the landscape has already moved on to the next cycle, and we are still rebuilding the last one, we are not catching up.

We are falling behind.

#StableLiving

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There were about 145 architects for every million Americans, which puts the total somewhere around 13,000. They were concentrated in cities, working on civic buildings, early commercial structures, and the first generation of skyscrapers. Most Americans would never meet one, let alone hire one.

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The average home was not designed by an architect. It was built from pattern books, local knowledge, and repetition. Architecture, as a profession, operated in a narrower band of the built environment, focused on projects that carried cultural, institutional, or economic weight.

The profession itself was still organizing. The American Institute of Architects was only about fifty years old, and many architects were influenced by the École des Beaux-Arts tradition, which emphasized proportion, composition, and permanence. Everything was drawn by hand. Every line required intention, because every change required time.

At that point, architecture was still relatively close to authorship. The distance between idea and execution had not yet been stretched across layers of process.

As cities grew, that distance began to widen.

In 1916, New York City adopted the 1916 Zoning Resolution, the first comprehensive zoning law in the United States. It introduced the idea that the form of a building could be governed in advance, not just by design, but by regulation. Height limits, setbacks, and requirements for light and air began to shape buildings before an architect ever put pencil to paper.

That logic did not stay in New York. It spread across the country through the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act, giving municipalities a framework to adopt zoning as a standard practice. Around it, a broader system began to take shape. Building codes expanded. Fire safety, structural requirements, accessibility standards, and environmental considerations were layered into the process. Case law followed, clarifying responsibility and increasing liability.

Over time, the act of designing a building became inseparable from the act of proving that it met a growing set of rules.

This is where the role of the architect began to change in a more fundamental way. Not because the profession chose it, but because the environment required it. Drawings were no longer just a way to communicate intent. They became instruments of compliance, coordination, and accountability. The building, in many ways, was permitted into existence as much as it was designed.

It’s also when they started to lose their ‘why.’

By the time we arrive in the present, the numbers have shifted.

The United States now has a population of roughly 335 million people, and there are about 334 architects per million, or just over 110,000 in total. The profession has grown, diversified, and distributed itself across a much larger and more complex built environment.

At the same time, the system surrounding that environment has expanded significantly. Zoning ordinances, building codes, accessibility requirements, environmental regulations, and contractual structures all play a role in shaping what gets built and how it gets built. The modern project is not simply a design exercise. It is a coordinated effort across disciplines, governed by layers of rules that must be interpreted, applied, and documented.

These costs add load to the affordable models….cost being the kryptonite to project metrics.

Technology emerged as a response to that complexity. Tools like AutoCAD and later Revit allowed architects and their collaborators to manage increasing amounts of information. Drawings became digital, then parametric, then embedded with data. Coordination improved, conflicts could be identified earlier, and the process became more efficient, at least in relative terms.

But the center of gravity had shifted. A significant portion of the architect’s time and value became tied to managing this complexity. Producing documentation, coordinating systems, and ensuring compliance became central to the role. As did customer relations, and sales. The profession was becoming a consumption model. Feed the dragon, or the dragon shall perish.

What is beginning to change now is not the existence of that complexity, but how it is handled.

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Many of the tasks associated with code compliance, zoning interpretation, and system coordination are inherently rule-based. They rely on structured inputs, defined constraints, and repeatable logic. As a result, they are increasingly compatible with the tools we are developing today. Building information models already contain much of the data required to evaluate compliance. Artificial intelligence is beginning to assist with parsing codes, checking designs, and identifying conflicts before they become issues in the field.

At the same time, the construction side of the industry is evolving. Production-oriented approaches, including Design for Manufacturing and Assembly, are shifting decision-making earlier in the process. Systems are being designed, tested, and resolved in advance, then deployed repeatedly with a high degree of consistency. In these environments, the emphasis is less on redrawing and more on selecting and adapting from a defined set of solutions.

Taken together, these shifts suggest that some of the responsibilities that expanded the role of the architect over the past century may no longer require the same level of direct involvement. Not because they are unimportant, but because they can be handled differently - and by others.

This does not point to the disappearance of the architect, but to a redefinition of where the profession creates value.

If the routine aspects of documentation and compliance become more automated or embedded within systems, the remaining work begins to look more like what architecture has historically done at its best. It involves judgment, synthesis, and the ability to work across multiple domains that do not fit neatly into a single set of rules.

In that sense, architecture begins to move back toward authorship, but within a much broader context. Not only the design of individual buildings, but the design of how those buildings relate to systems of energy, cost, community, and long-term performance. The questions become less about how to document a solution and more about how to define one in the first place.

The increase from 145 architects per million people to more than double that number tells part of the story. The more important shift, however, is not quantitative. It is structural.

Over the past century, architects absorbed layers of responsibility tied to planning, regulation, and coordination. Those layers were necessary, and they shaped the profession in lasting ways. What we are beginning to see now is the possibility that some of those layers can be redistributed, allowing architects to focus more directly on the aspects of the work that require human judgment and creative synthesis.

If that happens, the role does not diminish. It changes.

And in some ways, it may return closer to its original form, even as the context around it continues to evolve.

Parting thoughts - (and my editorial)

What begins to emerge from this shift is not just a different role for architects, but a different way of thinking about value in the built environment.

For much of the past century, value has been tied to production. More units, more square footage, more output. The systems we built around architecture, planning, and construction were designed to support that kind of growth, even as they became more complex over time.

But if some of that complexity is reduced, or at least managed differently, it opens the door to a different focus.

Not just how much we build, but how well those systems perform once they are in place.

This is where a different set of questions starts to matter.

How does a building reduce the total cost of living for the people inside it?
How does it interact with energy systems in a way that stabilizes long-term costs?
How does it support resilience, not just at the level of the structure, but at the level of the community?

These are not questions that sit neatly within a single discipline. They exist across housing, infrastructure, finance, and operations.

And increasingly, they are being addressed through integrated systems that bring those elements together. In some cases, those systems reduce the need for traditional intermediaries by embedding logic directly into how projects are designed, delivered, and operated. In others, they simply shift where coordination happens and who is responsible for it.

Either way, the outcome is similar.

Value begins to show up not just in what is built, but in what is avoided.

Lower operating costs.
Reduced exposure to volatility.
Fewer dependencies on external systems that may or may not hold.

If the last century expanded the role of the architect through layers of planning, regulation, and coordination, the next phase may be defined by how those layers are integrated into systems that are more stable, more predictable, and more aligned with long-term outcomes.

In that context, architecture is not removed from the equation.

It is repositioned within it.

#StableLiving #PathwayCommunities #TinyGiants #TheyisUs

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Chris Moeller is the Founder & CEO of Orion Growth - pioneer of the OpCo|PropCo model and visionary behind Pathway Communities

No matter what your beliefs, everyone could use a ‘good friday.’

It’s been a heck of a week around here.

We finally delivered our new prototype house to the world (which I’m sure I’ll find time to write more about here in a future newsletter.) That allowed us to do some substantial energy modeling and determine what it’ll take to get to grid-independence. The goal is low-no electricity bill….and while contrary to what one might believe…Duke Energy (and many others) are all about working with us to achieve it.

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#StableLiving is taking on a life its own.

Turns out people are starting to recognize the global connection between energy, fuel, and food. The industrialized food system relies heavily on subsidy, fuel, and fertilizer — that means three inputs we’re kinda light on these days: money, diesel, and potash. I didn’t know until this week that the US is highly vulnerable, importing nearly 90% of it’s supply.

Potash is only a third of the problem though.

Nitrogen is considered the more critical ‘determining factor’ because it can’t be skipped for even one growing season. As of this month, nitrogen prices have surged. Urea (a common source) has jumped 35% in a single month - reaching over $800/ton for the first time since 2022 when all this exploded the first time. (why you’re feeling it at the grocery store still today). This has a profound and direct impact on food costs - which won’t be felt until a year or so from now. Yep, we’re borrowing more from our future.

I could talk fertilizers and regenerative agriculture all day. The bottom line is the American food chain is currently inextricably connected to fuel and energy, and we have to design a new system rather than continuing to treat these symptoms. It can be done - and there are many, many many examples of people doing it.

In other news - we’re going back into space. 🚀👩‍🚀

For the first time in my lifetime, astronauts are bound to fly around the Moon after successfully completing a key burn of Orion’s main engine.

I named my company Orion Growth after the constellation program when I founded it in the mid 2000’s. 2010 marked the year the Orion spacecraft was redesigned to focus on deep-space exploration and I related closely to their purpose as well as the constellation itself.

Funny I chose the ‘growth’ part back then. Our original mission was to help rapidly growing companies create repeatable and highly deployable office packages. That meant turning process into product - an exercise we got pretty good at.

These days, our relationship with growth is very different. What was once measured on an x-y graph from bottom left to top right is now very much circular, and emergent. We have doubled-down on natural systems thinking and circular economics and maintain a laser focus on regenerative outcomes rather than the linear, extractive models of yesterday.

Just yesterday, we were working on our housing model for Pathway Communities, and we discovered an ownership model that would return nearly $100,000 to the occupant after just 8 years of living in one of our communities. Imagine being 29 years old with $100,000 to put down on your first home and also having nearly perfect credit. Not impossible, but currently improbable in today’s economy of rent and extract.

I also teamed up with a dope company to create a new workshop model that follows along with my (still incomplete) book called Re: The first session will be in May and we’ll be engaging with all sorts of civic and social leaders to really expose and work on solution sets to some our biggest problems in the community.

Hopeful.

Very, very hopeful.

Grateful.

Very, very grateful.

I often say I GET to do this work. There was a time (a long time) when I didn’t like what I did at all. In fact, I didn’t like who it was shaping me to be. I had a vulnerable conversation with someone this week that danced along the same theme. As it turns out, there’s not a lot of purpose in the current workforce model, and that needs to change.

My thesis is that if we can create stability for the folks entering the workforce, and those choosing to ease out of it….it’ll go a long way to creating joy and purpose throughout our whole career arc.

Have a great weekend. Hope spring eternal.

~Chris

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Stay with me.

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DfMA - Design For Manufacturing & Assembly. A factory approach to product development used to simplify product structures, reduce costs, and improve assembly efficiency. It was developed by a couple smart dudes named Boothroyd and Dewhurst back in the mid 1970’s.

The benefits are pretty well documented.

Lower production costs.
Improved quality and reliability.
Faster time-to-market.
Less waste, both human and material.

At face value, that all makes sense. But what DfMA is really doing is forcing decisions earlier in the process, where they are easier to make and far less expensive to change. It reduces improvisation in the field and replaces it with intention in the design. Over time, you start to see it less as a tactic and more as a way to remove uncertainty from the system.

Which brings me to the next piece.

IPD - Integrated Project Delivery. Also known as collaborative construction, or Target Value Design, depending on who you’re talking to. The objectives are to increase productivity, reduce waste, avoid time overruns, enhance final product quality, and reduce conflicts between owners, architects, and contractors during construction.

That part is important, but the piece I keep coming back to is how IPD handles coordination. It emphasizes the use of technology and shared systems to facilitate communication between all parties involved in delivering the final product. Instead of fragmented handoffs, you get a more continuous flow of information and decision-making. It aligns people around an outcome instead of isolating them within their scope.

And then there’s Joules.

The international standard unit for measuring energy, work, or heat. Building anything uses a lot of them….and don’t get me started with how farmers have to manage them.

The example that stuck with me is simple. One joule is approximately the energy needed to lift a small apple, about 100 grams, one meter straight up. It gives you something tangible to hold onto.

I tend to look for the most basic unit of measurement my brain can comprehend so I can follow the expense process from there. And once you start thinking in Joules, it applies to just about everything. Calories. Electricity. Equipment usage. Heat. Even human effort.

Fun fact: a typical human at rest produces roughly 5,000,000 joules (5000 kJ) of heat per day.

Which starts to shift how you see things.

Because rework is wasted energy.
Delays are wasted energy.
Poor coordination is wasted energy.

We tend to capture those as cost overruns, but underneath that, they’re just inefficient energy use…and the owner inherits and pays for it.

When I step back and look at these three together, they don’t feel like separate ideas. They feel like parts of the same system.

DfMA shapes how we design.
IPD shapes how we deliver.
Joules give us a way to measure what it actually takes.

Now that I’m building with a purpose (currently attainable ownership models for approachable housing) that 👆 becomes essential ingredients for the recipe.

And when the recipe starts shaping up, something changes.

Construction starts to behave less like a project…

…and more like infrastructure.

When you start designing with intention, delivering with alignment, and measuring in real terms instead of abstractions, the entire equation begins to change. Projects stop being one-off bets and start becoming systems that can be understood, repeated, and improved over time. That shift opens the door to better ways of penciling deals, where efficiency is not just about cutting cost, but about reducing wasted energy across the full lifecycle. For those of us focused on #StableLiving, that means creating buildings that perform predictably, operate efficiently, and leave enough room in the system for people to actually build equity. Not someday, but within reach. Because if we can get the system right, we are not just building structures, we are rebuilding a path to ownership for the next generation.

I’m Chris Moeller and I help build #ResilientCommunities. Ask me how.
#TinyGiants #StableLiving

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I have spent the last few years building housing.

Not units. Not yield. No product.

Systems.

And lately, I can’t shake a question:

“What happens when the system no longer needs the people inside of it?”

There’s a phrase floating around right now called “the intelligence curse.”

The idea is simple. If AI can do all the economically valuable work…then people stop being economically necessary. When that happens, something deeper breaks.

Two Forces

1. The End of the Outlier.

   For most of modern history, the system had an escape hatch.

   The outlier.

   The person who could build something new. See something different. Create leverage where none existed.

   That’s how we got progress. That’s also how we got mobility. It’s also how we generated hope.

So what happens when intelligence is no longer scarce? What happens when it’s abundant, cheap, and clearly better than you?

2. The Lock-In of Capital.

   At the same time, something else is happening. Capital is no longer just an advantage.

   It’s now a recursive engine.

   If capital is what buys intelligence, and intelligence can produce everything….then the people who already have capital don’t just stay ahead, they become unreachable.

The Gut Punch

If we take the end of the outlier and pair it with the lock-in of capital, we get a closed-loop system. Not a deeper moat. Not a higher-walled garden. A closed loop. That means no new entrants. It also means no disruption. That means we have jeopardized upward mobility.

What it creates resembles a permanent class structure based on who had access before the shift.

Woah.

Zooming Out

We’ve seen versions of this through history. Feudal Europe. The caste system. Gilded Age monopolies, even company towns here in the U.S. These are resource-rich economies that stopped investing in people. These are systems that extract instead of develop. They’re places where the economy grows, but the people don’t.

AI has the potential to turn human intelligence into a resource.

If we’re not careful, we could repeat the same mistakes, but this time at a global scale.

No Doom

So the question isn’t whether AI is coming. It’s here.

The question is: how do we keep people in the loop of value creation?

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The first mistake we could make is assuming that value creation begins and ends with employment. That was already becoming untrue before AI. It is even less true now. The question is not simply how humans keep jobs. The question is how humans keep agency, participation, and a stake in what gets built next.

One lane is ownership. If intelligence becomes abundant, then ownership of assets, systems, land, energy, housing, businesses, and communities matters even more. We can’t all own a data center, but we can begin thinking differently about what we control. Our home, our savings, our tools, our network, our local relationships, our skills, our data, even our reputation. The future probably rewards people who move from pure labor dependence toward some mix of labor, ownership, and participation.

Another lane is augmentation. We need to learn how to use AI as a multiplier instead of standing outside of it as a spectator. That does not mean becoming a machine-learning engineer. It means learning how to direct, evaluate, refine, and apply intelligence. The people who stay in the loop will be the ones who know how to work with these tools, not just compete against them. In practical terms, that could mean learning prompting, synthesis, research workflows, automation basics, content creation, analysis, and decision support.

Explore more. Build. Break. Tinker.

A third lane is local, embodied value. There are forms of value that get stronger, not weaker, in a world flooded with synthetic intelligence. Trust is one. Taste is another. So is stewardship. So is physical presence. So is convening. So is relationship capital. So is the ability to make sound judgments in a specific place, with specific people, under real conditions. That is part of why I am working tirelessly in housing, land, and community. It is rooted. It is contextual. It is not infinitely copy-paste. Plus, I get calloused hands and a tired body. Growth requires some pain.

A fourth lane is resilience as value. In a more volatile future, the people and communities that know how to lower their cost of living, reduce fragility, stabilize housing, build energy resilience, grow food, share infrastructure, and keep more value circulating locally are creating enormous value, even if it does not show up first as a salary increase. Cost avoidance is value. Stability is value. Optionality is value. This is where we can unlock agency.

A fifth lane is human coordination. AI may generate answers, but humans still need to decide what matters, what is fair, what gets prioritized, and what kind of world is worth building. Our institutions, policy, governance, and community design are still open terrain. One of the most important ways to stay in the loop of value creation is to help shape the rules of the game. I spent a of ton of time prepping baseball fields back in the day. It was completely necessary and people took notice. Contribution has to happen more intimately than simply stroking a check.

There is also something to be said for building in public again. Not for attention, but for accountability and connection. When people can see what we are working on, contribute to it, challenge it, and improve it, value becomes shared instead of isolated. That matters more in a world where intelligence is no longer scarce.

This is slower work. It is more physical. It is more relational. It is less optimized.

It is also more human.

And maybe that is the point.

If the future is being written right now, then this isn’t a spectator sport.

It’s a design problem.

The good thing is we can fix design problems. Let’s get to work.

#StableLiving

h/t to Luke Drago and Rudolf Laine for the inspiration behind this one.

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Across the Appalachian range, one out of every four trees was a chestnut. You didn’t have to look for it. It was the backdrop. It was the system. They grew fast and straight, resistant to rot and easy to work with. Their wood framed homes, barns, and fences. Their nuts showed up reliably each year, feeding wildlife and families alike. If you lived in these hills, the chestnut wasn’t a feature. It was a foundation. This wasn’t just a tree. It was infrastructure for ecosystems and economies, quietly connecting food, shelter, energy, and livelihood into a single living system that worked without needing to be optimized. It literally built the homes of America.

Until it was gone.

In the early 1900s, a fungus made its way into the United States on imported trees, and what we now call chestnut blight moved quickly through the eastern forests. It entered through small wounds in the bark and spread through the living tissue, cutting off the tree’s ability to move water and nutrients. The tree didn’t fall over right away. It just slowly lost its ability to live. Within a few decades, billions of American chestnuts were gone. The forests didn’t disappear, but they changed in ways that are still hard to fully measure. The canopy shifted, wildlife food sources declined, and rural economies lost a quiet but dependable pillar. What remains today is a kind of unfinished sentence. The root systems are still alive underground, sending up shoots that reach again for the canopy, but before they can mature, the blight finds them. Over and over again.

Not extinct, but no longer functioning.

The old farmhouse at our family land is built from chestnut. So is most of the original furniture that’s still inside. An old cupboard full of dishes - a grand chest built by “Big Pine” (Michael Poindexter) an important community leader from the early antebellum era who once owned the property along with 800 head of cattle.

So I’m trying to bring it back.

I applied for a US Forestry / Virginia Forest Service grant through the American Chestnut Foundation and was approved for 40 trees. I picked them up yesterday in Crimora, VA.

Over the next several days, they’re going in the ground at our family land, The Retreat at Firefly Farm. I’ve been thinking about that more than I expected, because this isn’t nostalgia and it’s not landscaping. It’s an attempt to reintroduce function.

The chestnut didn’t disappear because it was weak. It disappeared because the system around it wasn’t resilient. Too uniform, too exposed, too dependent on a single layer doing too much. That pattern shows up in more places than we’d like to admit. We’ve built a lot of our modern systems this way, housing included. Optimized for speed and yield, but fragile under stress. Efficient, but not always durable. Scalable, but not always supportive of the people inside them. At the farm, I’m trying to move in a different direction. Planting something that won’t fully mature in my lifetime forces a different posture. It slows you down, introduces stewardship, and shifts the question from what can this produce now to what will this support over time.

A quick note on silvopasture:

Part of what this project is rooted in a concept called silvopasture, which is the intentional integration of trees, pasture, and grazing animals into one system. Not separate zones or isolated uses, but a layered approach where each element supports the others. Trees provide shade and shelter, their roots stabilize soil and improve water retention, and their leaves and nuts can become part of the food system. Animals help manage vegetation, cycle nutrients, and improve soil health. It’s slower than industrial agriculture and it’s more complex, but it’s also more resilient. Instead of extracting from the land, you’re building with it, layering functions and creating redundancy so the system can adapt over time. Chestnuts fit naturally into this. They produce food, grow into durable timber, support wildlife, and when placed thoughtfully, become part of a regenerative loop rather than a one-time input. That’s my jam.

Professionally, This is also why the chestnut keeps showing up in my thinking as we evolve the Pathway Communities model and start to fund and build Hudson Commons. Because what the chestnut once was to Appalachia is what housing should be again. Not just shelter, but infrastructure. A system that supports daily life, produces stability, and connects people to opportunity, not just to a mortgage or lease. The goal isn’t to recreate the past because we don’t get to rewind the forest, but we can restore the principles that made it work. Diversity over monoculture, resilience over optimization, long-term stewardship over short-term extraction. That’s what I’ve labeled #StableLiving. Not as a concept, but as a design choice that shows up in how and why we build.

This happens when you start to recognize yourself as a steward of something rather than an owner of it.

There’s something grounding about putting a tree in the soil that you know you may never see at full scale. It recalibrates your timeline and reminds you that not all returns are immediate, not all value is financial, and some of the most important work we do is measured in decades, not quarters. The American chestnut was once invisible because it was so foundational.

Maybe that’s the goal.

To build systems that are so reliable and so integrated into daily life that we stop noticing them altogether. Until they’re gone. I’m planting them again so that doesn’t happen twice.

#StableLiving

Some parts are being pulled.

Some parts are being pushed.

And the whole system holds its shape because those forces stay in balance.

The word, which blends tensional and integrity, was derived by the acclaimed architect, scientist, and thinker R. Buckminster Fuller. (Come visit with me at Fuller Futures on Earth Day in Carbondale)

In architecture, it creates lightweight but stable structures.

In the human body, people use it to describe how muscles, bones, and connective tissue work as a whole system.

In systems thinking, it’s a great metaphor for how resilience comes from balance and interdependence, not from one ridged, overbuilt part (or overused design.) That’s where I want to poke around a bit.

It feels very aligned with the way I think about regenerative systems, housing, and communities. Not a pile of isolated parts, but a living structure held together by balanced forces.

I grew up in a small town in Connecticut. Everyone knew everyone. They knew your name and your order at the deli. There was always a youth sports connection - a coach or someone who volunteered and knew the family. Honks from passer’s by if you were out in the yard. That was just the way it was.

Looking back, that wasn’t nostalgia.

That was tensegrity. Not physical, but social.

A network of small, consistent pulls and pushes. Recognition. Accountability. Belonging. Presence.

There wasn’t a single element that carried that load. But together, it held shape.

Somewhere along the way, we started replacing that with scale.

Times have changed and now I live in a large, urban setting in the American South. Last time I checked, we were receiving something like 150 new people per day.

Naturally, that translates to more units. More efficiency. More optimization. More for the sake of more.

But that means less connection and some big losses along the way.

We lost our corner store. We lost our billiards hall. We lost our chicken joint. Cold beer turned into craft cocktails. Wings turned into charcuterie.

We built for load, and we stopped building for balance.

If we want resilient communities, we don’t need to keep adding weight to the system. We need to rethink how the system holds itself together. My goal isn’t to build something bigger or more complex, it’s to create something more balanced. A place where the load is shared, where no single part is carrying too much, and where relationship between those parts really matter.

That starts at a very human scale. The spaces we design should make it easier for people to know each other, not avoid each other. The built environment has a quiet but powerful influence on behavior, and right now much of it is optimized for separation and efficiency. Look no further than the modern office. If we want something different, we have to design for interaction, for familiarity, for the small moments that build trust over time.

It’s not just about the physical space either. The same idea applies to how we structure finances, energy, and access. When those systems are aligned, they reduce pressure instead of adding to it. They give people room to participate, to stabilize, and eventually to move forward. When they’re misaligned, they isolate and strain, no matter how well the buildings are designed.

That’s the shift I keep coming back to. Moving away from the mindset of pure scale and toward one of balance. From isolated parts to integrated systems. From building for load to building for relationship.

Seems like to me, we need to put some more tension in the system...and take some weight off of it.

#TinyGiants #StableLiving PathwayCommunities

The housing situation in America is no exception. In fact, it’s deeper and wider than I understood it to be….and boy is it noisy.

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I was sitting in a housing conference up at UNC Chapel Hill last week. It’s an amazing initiative called ncIMPACT that is put on by the School of Government. This particular program was called Carolina Across 100 Our State, Our Homes. It was an 18 month journey to help communities develop capacity, analyze challenges, and implement strategies to address affordable housing and related issues across the state.

Think County Commissioners, Town Managers, Planners and staff. It was very helpful for me to understand where North Carolina stands within our national models for upward mobility and age-in-place.

I kept hearing ‘affordable housing’ getting tossed into the mix with ‘workforce’ housing. On top of that, I kept hearing the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) get tossed into the mix with market-rate development. To confuse things even more, people were talking about national builders developing large tracts of rural land to support urban sprawl.

It was a housing salad.

So as I was sitting there listening and taking notes, I typed a simple prompt into one of our housing LLM’s and out came this image:

What struck me most was not just the categories themselves, but the structure. This wasn’t one housing problem. It was three overlapping shortages, each with a different level of visibility, urgency, and consequence. Different problems, different solutions.

The first thing I found interesting is that it was framed as a ‘challenge’ which I like. I like building and solving, so this was perfect to tinker with.

The next thing I appreciated was its shape. A mountain with the peak being illustrated in red and indicating urgency. That top tier is physiological. Like -Maslow’s needs physiological - right there with food, water, and clothing. The image calls this ‘shelter’ and it was aptly labeled ‘Shelter Shortage’ as in, not enough.

Inventory.

We do not have enough basic, physiological shelter in the United States.

I talked with Jeremy and Mark over at Thinking on Paper in the early days about this.

Here’s the statement I’m using that helps keep this (very important) initiative standing on its own.

“We have a critically low inventory of stable shelter in the United States.”

To me, this is where the acronyms of state and federal assistance enter the chat.

AMI, LIHTC, HUD, LMI, PHA, PBV, JTX - even RFP and RFQ.

About $64 billion a year in major HUD housing programs alone, before adding tax credits and some broader community-development programs. In FY2025, HUD’s enacted funding included about $36.0B for Tenant-Based Rental Assistance, $16.9B for Project-Based Rental Assistance, $8.81B for Public Housing, $1.25B for HOME, $931M for Section 202 senior housing, and $257M for Section 811 housing for people with disabilities. (source: HUD.gov)

If you also count the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, which is the biggest federal affordable housing tool, the Fed’s expenditure is is about $15B (source: US Department of Treasury).

So, like, $80B if we don’t get creative an add in CDBG for community development.

This is not my area of expertise. To keep on brand with the housing word salad of acronyms….this is my TAM, but not my SAM or my SOM….and not at all my ICP.

This is important work, but it’s not what we’re trying to do with our Pathway Communities.

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Let’s come down the mountain a little bit. The atmosphere and severity of high-crisis mode has me out of breath.

As we move through the housing challenge image and descend into workforce affordability, we start to pick up a bit more of a mellow vibe. This is where people love to roost. Not quite a crisis and some inherent balance - so nobody is getting hot and bothered.

Be prepared to hear A LOT of noise around workforce housing.

Why?

Economics.

The basic, physiological shelter doesn’t pencil. Yep, you read that right.

$80B of funding and somehow it doesn’t pencil.

👆 A separate article, err, expose so I’ll ✋ and leave you with two words: soft & cost.

Workforce housing is now being washed like so many other important objectives:

Greenwashing, Wokewashing, Healthwashing, Proteins, Regenerative, Wellness…the list goes on.

This is why words matter.

The phrase “housing crisis” is useful, but incomplete. It suggests a singular event. What we actually have is a layered system failure: visible at the top, structural at the bottom, overlapping all the way through. Different problems, different solutions.

We can fix this.

I was watching a segment this weekend on Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, and he said something that stuck with me. His point, in essence, was that too many contractors can stretch process endlessly, modify the contract to death, and still get paid while the public absorbs the cost.

That feels familiar.

Luckey’s model, controversial or not, was to build with conviction first, use his own capital, and create a working product instead of waiting for the perfect process to bless the outcome.

He turned process into product.

That line stayed with me because it points to something much bigger than defense tech.

It points to housing.

In housing, we have become extraordinarily good at managing process. We study it, regulate it, finance it, delay it, subsidize it, commission it, and debate it. But process, by itself, does not create enough durable, attainable places for people to live.

That is where I believe we need a different approach.

We are turning process into product too.

But we won’t stop there.

Once we have the product, we intend to turn it into a technology, something that learns, improves, and drives cost down over time instead of pushing cost up over time.

That is the part that matters most to me.

Because the future of housing cannot just be about delivering one project at a time with more friction, more consultants, and more cost stacked into the system. It has to become more repeatable, more intelligent, and more durable.

That’s right.

A housing model that drives costs down over time.

Not through compromise…not through cheapening the product.

Through better systems, better learning loops, and better alignment between what we build, how we build, and who we build it for.

We privatize the issue. We don’t ask for more money from Washington.

What we are facing is not one housing problem. It is a stack of housing problems. Shelter shortage is one thing. Workforce affordability is another. Ownership, mobility, and long-term stability are another thing entirely. Different layers, different economics, different solutions. If we keep treating them as interchangeable, we will keep applying the wrong tools to the wrong problems.

That is why I am so interested in building a housing model that does more than add units. I want to help build a system that can learn, repeat, improve, and drive cost down over time. Not just because America needs more housing, but because people need more stability.

That is the work in front of us, not simply to build homes, but to build the communities for people to move forward.

Explorers use compasses, not maps.

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