Description
The built environment is optimized to profit from the individual tenant, buyer, or guest who is able to pay the market amount. Through construction efficiencies and financial incentives, and by leveraging new ideas such as the centrality of the nuclear family or the productive value of cubicle office plans, capitalism has been incredibly effective at creating large amounts of usable square feet.
Nevertheless, we face considerable challenges that may not be addressed by these single-bottom-line models. These include a woeful lack of affordable housing, construction techniques with massive environmental externalities, designs that optimize for inward-facing home life but fail to encourage relationships among households and neighborhoods, and urban planning that separates the haves and have-nots.
We’re interested in real estate-driven ventures and projects that bring a redemptive imagination to the use of our physical space, making the most of opportunities to reimagine life together through place-based design, reinvent materials usage for sustainability, and create distinct living environments that bring different demographics together.
In today’s commercially-driven world people are more likely to be seen and referred to as 'consumers' than anything else. Instead of being met with resistance, this shift has often meant that individuals have formed their identity through a composite of brands, and product purchasing can be guided more by the desire to make a statement about one’s identity and values than strict utility. As a result, the lines between social movement, capitalism, and community are increasingly blurry (see: Nike, Whole Foods, and Patagonia).
Given this reality (which is with us for both better and worse), we’d like to support entrepreneurs with a vision for building brands with a counter-culturally virtuous and optimistic view of the world, spreading hope and beauty, eliminating stigma, and most fundamentally, redirecting our identity away from materialistic consumption and toward lasting contentment.
