Start In Your Own Backyard
Start In Your Own Backyard is a mini-series about how the choices we make, both big and small, can transform the world around us. For host Steve Nygren, this is personal. Two decades ago, while running through the woods on his beloved family farm, he spotted bulldozers toppling trees for what he feared was another soulless suburban development. That sobering moment sparked a question that changed the course of his life: Isn’t there a better way to build community? One that works with nature, not against it?
The answer became Serenbe, a community built on biophilic principles, sustainable living, and the idea that well-being starts in the everyday spaces where we live, work, and connect with others.
Through stories, guest experts, and personal reflections, Start In Your Own Backyard invites listeners to find their own sense of agency. Whether it’s rethinking your diet, running for school board, planting edible landscapes, or advocating for change in your city, the podcast explores what it means to take action right where you are.
With a strong belief in the power of optimism, even when things feel tough, this series shows how each of us can create ripples of positive change.
The question is simple: What gifts do you bring? And are you ready to use them?
Want to dive deeper? Steve’s book, Start In Your Own Backyard: Transforming Where You Live with Radical Common Sense, is out now. An instant USA Today Bestseller, this book is part memoir, part guidebook. It offers a blueprint for building sustainable, connected communities, places where wonder exists in the everyday and people of all ages can truly thrive.
Start In Your Own Backyard
Grant McCargo on Responsible Development & Building for the Future
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Grant McCargo, a longtime friend of Serenbe, is an environmentalist and the founder of Urban Villages, a real estate development company creating walkable, culturally rich, nature-connected places designed to stand the test of time.
One of the most striking examples of this work is Populus, a hotel in the heart of downtown Denver inspired by the aspen tree and rooted in biophilic design. It is also the first carbon-positive hotel in the United States, designed to capture more carbon than it emits. But Grant’s approach isn’t always about building something new. In Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square, Urban Villages is breathing new life into existing buildings through adaptive reuse, an approach Grant believes can be one of the most powerful things we can do for the environment.
In this conversation, Steve Nygren and Grant explore what happens when environmentalism becomes part of good business practice, why quality and thoughtful design can create greater value over time, and what we might build differently if we took a long term view instead of focusing on the next quarter or the next sale.
They also talk about why, ultimately, protecting the natural world should be at the heart of how we think about the places we build.
Show Notes
Keywords: Grant McCargo, Urban Villages, Populus Hotel, biophilic design, biophilic cities, sustainable development, sustainable architecture, environmentalism, green building, adaptive reuse, historic preservation, urban revitalization, walkable cities, walkability, nature and cities, nature connected design, long-term thinking, resilient cities, placemaking, mixed-use development, urban planning, Steve Nygren, Serenbe, Start In Your Own Backyard
Are you interested in communities where people, nature, and businesses thrive together? Whether you’re a developer, urban planner, or simply curious about how thoughtful design can create lasting value and resilience, join us in Serenbe – September 28th through 30th – for the annual Nygren Placemaking Conference.
Are You Ready For Radical Common Sense? Visionary placemaker Steve Nygren chronicles the rise of Serenbe, a pioneering model of biophilic living outside Atlanta, and charts a path for others wishing to challenge the status quo, embrace optimism, and reinvent their communities…and themselves.
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Welcome to season two of Start in Your Own Backyard, a series about the power we each have to shape the places where we live and in turn the world around us. I'm Steve Nigren, and this season I'm looking outward, sitting down with people who have shaped the way I think about the built environment, and others who are putting their ideas into action in communities of their own. I believe the built environment as it exists today is at the root of many of our biggest challenges, but I also believe it can be a powerful part of the solution. These are stories about taking agency, using the skills and resources we have, and starting wherever we are. Because meaningful change doesn't always begin with a grand plan. Sometimes it starts in your own backyard. Today I'm talking with Grant McCargo, someone I've known for many years and whose work has shaped the way I think about responsible development. Grant is an environmentalist at heart and the founder of Urban Villages, a real estate development company focused on creating places that are walkable, rich in culture, connected to nature, and built to last. Places where people actually want to live. One of the most striking examples of Urban Villages' work is Populous, a hotel in the heart of downtown Denver, designed to evoke the aspen tree and incorporating biophilic principles throughout. And it is the first carbon-positive hotel in the United States, meaning the building captures more carbon than it emits. We also talk about something I think is especially important: the idea that environmentalism and good business are not opposing forces. Grant shares what he's learned about building high-quality, enduring places that can actually create greater value over time. Grant and I are both very interested in what happens when we stop designing for the quickest return and instead ask what will still be valuable, beautiful, and resilient a hundred years into the future.
SPEAKER_01And I think people are learning in the stock market to stay in, go through the cycles. The built environment, people don't play that game so much. And so if a building's not performing, they're quick to sell it and jump onto the next project versus how do we build things which takes more effort in design, takes more effort in building it. But if you're looking at tenure investments, it is actually the I think a lower risk, higher return model. And we're we're we're proving it.
SPEAKER_00Steve, I just wish we were going for a walk in the woods this morning in Sarinby. Well, let's let's plan to do that too, right? You're overdue for a visit.
SPEAKER_01Well, we're let's just do a one in our heads as we talk today, that we're going for a walk in nature.
SPEAKER_00That's a great idea. Well, for our listeners, just if you'd give them a little bit about uh who you are. Now, you you grew up in Pennsylvania and your family had a farm, as I remember, is that right?
SPEAKER_01Um I did. I did grow up in western Pennsylvania. And my mother was born before the hippie era. But if she'd been born or was a teenager or adult in the late 50s, early 60s, she would have been a hippie. Um so before the word organic farm was in our vocabulary, we had a very small farm, um, just a couple acre garden and some animals. But it was that early childhood of being growing the food, living on the land, and being in nature that definitely influenced my whole life.
SPEAKER_00And that's why it's um so important that children today have that example and experience. Uh, because it informs us. Well, and then when did you get out to my home state of Colorado?
SPEAKER_01Well, I I came out, I I moved to San Francisco right after college, but got exposed to the mountains of Colorado in the 80s, and that's what brought me there. I thought I was just moving for a ski season and I never left the state. Aaron Ross Powell And that was t Telluride, is that right? That was Telluride, exactly. And Telluride wasn't uh what it has become today, which is a very um beautiful, historically restored town that's now become a very affluent ski area. It was at the early days when the streets were still dirt, and when the wind blew, you needed goggles because there was so much uh dirt in the streets from the old mining days. But you know, my yeah, Steve, as you know my story, uh I'm an environmentalist first. And finishing up college, thinking about what I can do to make our planet a better place, I thought of no other place than looking at the built environment. And how do we bring how do we make our cities great so people want to live in the cities, to preserve our rural landscapes for ecosystem services? But then second, how do we build cities to use, to bring nature into them? Because as we started this conversation, we all can't live in the small rural communities. And we have to bring nature into our cities to have that same gift that I had growing up and you had growing up in Colorado on a farm as well.
SPEAKER_00And you are certainly doing that to scale. But is that is was that your first step into urban villages? Or am I getting my head on myself? Now, did you do you you'd had some real estate, you dabbled in real estate while you were in Telly Right, is that right?
SPEAKER_01Yes. I mean, urban real urban villages is an evolution of a series of companies that all had the word urban in it. Uh the first version was called urban real estate partners. But we the reason the name evolved about 20 so years ago was we're really creating villages within the urban context. So, how do we live where you walk, go to school, play, work, live in a neighborhood? And that's what's so neat about Serape is it's all about the walkability. And that changes your relationship to the urban environment if you're on foot or on a bicycle versus in a car. And so we evolve the name to urban villages because our projects grew in size to sort of more district-sized projects, and urban villages seem to capture that story. And that's what but I've been doing the same thing for 40 plus years, as sort of dating myself now. Oh and the longer I do it, the more our mission of how you all think is aligned. It's really about looking at the details, how to activate our urban areas as close to 24-7 as possible, and bringing nature into that. When I say bringing nature in planting trees, it's creating spaces that are calm, like when you walk into the woods, um, looking at materials that have hundreds of years life cycles. And the built environment challenge is 50% of the world's natural resources today go into the built environment. We're building equivalent to Manhattan, the island of Manhattan, globally, every 38 days.
SPEAKER_00That's an amazing comparison when you think about it in that way. And so I realize, you know, people say, oh, you know, is there a chance? Can we change it? Well, well, yes. And it's an incredible high percentage of the buildings we occupy today didn't exist 25 years ago. So the things we do today is going to really change, change the future.
SPEAKER_01I don't question STEM B 100 years from now will look better than it does today. Absolutely. Because it was it was designed to be timeless. And it was designed to continue to grow, but it had the key elements.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And that's on a greenfield site. How do you do that in the urban core is what our challenge is. And what you've done is help preserve land, and that's a precious resource we have. Instead of sprawling, how you look at your county, got transfer development rights, look at open space and conservation easements to preserve that landscape so that it's providing the ecosystem services that support the planet.
SPEAKER_00And those are the two of the great things. I mean, our our our our greenfield and and our urban centers that have been forgotten so much. And and boy, you what what what you have done in Denver, I don't know if I ever shared with you, but the the sugar cube building I I know well. That was that that was the great great Western Sugar Beet Company. And of course, my family grew sugar beets for them. And I would go with my granddad down to that area of town. And in my youth, that was gradually deteriorating, deteriorating until the area around the the old train station uh you wouldn't dare be in. And I remember you telling me a story when you bought, what, six six blocks and and there was not a registered voting in that census district? Is that is that right?
SPEAKER_01Well, it's a life cycle that happens if our urban leaders aren't being conscious. It's no different than your farm if you just let it not think if you don't take care of it, um nature will take it over. If you don't take care of a city, other issues take over that area. And so um Denver went through an urban renewal process in the uh 50s and early 60s and bulldozed huge sections of the urban core to make way for the what they thought the future was, which was elevated freeways, it was going to high rises in parking lots, and that the population in Denver at that point was moving out, like a lot of cities, moving out of the cities after World War II. Everybody wanted a home, they wanted their own backyard, and so they left the cities except for to go to work at their office space. So the urban planning leadership at that time didn't really understand the future, and they basically made downtown a ghost town after five. And so what we did in this neighborhood was bring back that 24-7 activation, where you could walk to school, you could live the shops, and we were able to capture great old buildings like the great Western Sugar Company building to bring back its history and add retail and residential and a solar farm and a rooftop garden to sort of kick off this neighborhood. And I think it was one of the important projects for this neighborhood. I mean, there were several other projects going on at the same time, but it changed it being the least desirable part of town to a very desirable part of town because it had the historical qualities, but it had new life.
SPEAKER_00And as I remember a few years ago, you were sharing this story and uh from this area that that no one lived permanently. I I believe at that period you had the the highest rents, the highest condominium, the highest parking lot, the highest uh everything. And so it's it but but you made it a true village within those blocks of of uh lower downtown. It was just incredible.
SPEAKER_01Yes. And I think we're unfortunately going through a little bit. COVID did a lot of destruction to a lot of our urban cities because the fear of being with people pushed people to the suburbs. And the how we changed our work environment changed. And so we're actually going through a renaissance against now bringing that back. So it's fun to see over the 30 plus years of this neighborhood, we went through a period of it just got better and better and better. And then COVID hit, and you know, people did weren't riding the train, people weren't going out to restaurants, you weren't allowed to gather in public. And it's great to see that bringing back those fundamentals now brings people back again.
SPEAKER_00And now you're stepping into the east side of the downtown district. I mean, the populace hotel, Grant is just fabulous. I've had the opportunity to stay there a few times. And uh, for those who have not seen this hotel, uh, we're gonna put a picture up uh uh on the web when we release this talk. But uh tell us about the populace and then your dreams and plans for that part of downtown Denver.
SPEAKER_01Well, what was neat about Populace, it's the only private property on Civic Center Park, which is Denver's historical core. When Denver became a state, they had to pick where what city would be the state uh capital. And believe it or not, we were competing with the town of Leadville, which is at 10,000 feet, because gold mining and mining industry was where the money was. And uh Denver ended up winning the competition by hiring um some great planners and really designed the Civic Center Park and designed a very stately state capital and the city of Denver's City Hall. And uh there was already a Carnegie Library that was in the park. Um, but at that point, it wasn't a park. The city actually tore down buildings to create this park, but it created a real center of the city. And at other parts of the city grew and boomed, that was a neighborhood that didn't boom because there was so much government offices and uses which are nine to five. It didn't get the residential growth that's necessary. And so when the city decided they wanted to focus on the eastern part of the downtown, or which was really the center of downtown, and it's surrounded by great neighborhoods, uh, they had a competition to find a developer who would do something that would create an iconic landmark for the city and bring some new life back. And since then, the city has invested millions of dollars to redo the park, redo the historic Greek theater that's under construction right now, and repositioning the old library into a community gathering location. And Populous was sort of the first of those three-phase projects that are happening. And so what that's going to do for the neighborhood is now a ton of residential developments happening around it. And it will bring back the original land planners at the pre you know the previous in the 1800s who wanted this to be the center center, it will bring it back and make it the city center again. So we were lucky to do it.
SPEAKER_00That's very exciting. You're going to be doing things all around. That's that uh government city center, is that right, Totten?
SPEAKER_01Yes, we do. We have a couple other big projects we're excited to be talking about uh next year on the other side of the park. But what makes the park so unique was actually having the gift of having a great architect who looks at nature and biophilic design in Jeannie Gang and Studio Gang. And she was the architect of our building that looked at was a walk in the woods she did, thinking about what are what's a store we can bring downtown that's tied to Colorado. And the building was designed around the aspen tree populace. And as an aspen tree grows, it has these scars where the branches break off as it grows, and it's called aspenized. And the windows of the building are unique that basically mimic that uh biomimicry of that story. They really create a very unusual-looking uh design for the building, but also has all kinds of benefits too. It's fun to look through, it makes each room unique and special, it captures the views, it also creates great solar shading and a deep penestration that you don't see in a modern building that gives a richness that's unique.
SPEAKER_00It is just incredible, both to look at from the exterior and to stay in from the interior. And so then when I, you know, learned you were doing the second uh hotel in Seattle, I just thought, oh, you you're going to take that design and r do it again in the center of Seattle. And very different. You've taken a restored uh building. Tell us about what's happening in Seattle.
SPEAKER_01Well, the greenest building we can do is a building we don't build. Um, in Denver, that wasn't an opportunity because the site was didn't have anything on it really. But in Seattle, we had a beautiful 1906 historic building. And so it had original Douglas for Virgin Timbers in it, beautiful timbers. It was built for a plumbing warehouse. Um, then when the ships used to bring all the supplies in in Elliott's Bay there, uh, they would, this was one of the first stops. Um, anyways, we were to had a fun remodel of it, renovation of it. And it's uh the gift of that property was not building something new. And it was a 40% greener building to build from an environmental standpoint, because its structure was there, the brick facade was there. It was just bringing into modern times and a use today that could activate it again. And so we love that story because that's the greenest thing we can do is actually just keep fixing up old buildings and doing that.
SPEAKER_00And now you're doing that with several buildings around there. How many, how many buildings or how many blocks are you restoring?
SPEAKER_01Well, we're we're just focused on one main block right now. We we are interested in doing more in there, but we're in a very lucky to be in a beautiful historical neighborhood called Pioneer Square. And it's the oldest commercial district in the city. And it's the oldest, is because uh how it sits right on the bay. Um and so we're we're not alone in that neighborhood. There's a lot, there's really three other developers doing some really unique projects. So the energy of all three of them going on. And it was historically a um a big commerce, but then it became a very big art district in the 60s and 70s, and then it went through some troubled times. But all the new life is bringing it back, and it once again really is the art districts there. And that's a big part of urban villages story is how do you bring culture, music, art, recreation, great places to eat, places to stroll, community events. Um, and what's really gifted about building in Seattle that you don't have in Colorado is that it rains a lot. And so the vegetation, the amount of vegetation we have in and outside the buildings really gives you that connection to nature. You just feel it at a whole new level, not just in the bricks and mortar, but in the living plants that are on the around the sidewalks, crawling off the side of the building, inside the building, and the rooftops are all have so significant rooftop gardens.
SPEAKER_00It's incredible the way you you have uh brought the historic buildings back to life, brought nature into the city, and integrated art everywhere. I mean, you know, the three of the key things we really believe in. I mean, you've done just an incredible job. And Grant, we first met through your work with uh biological capital. And could could you share with the audience the difference between biological capital and urban villages?
SPEAKER_01Yes. Um they're um born from the same parents. Um I founded both companies. Urban Villages focuses on our urban landscapes and focuses on all the uses that you'd have residential, commercial, um type activations, incorporating solar and rooftop gardens wherever we possibly can, or green roofs. Um and the goal of that is how to make our cities great as possible so that you want to live in the cities and make the cities vibrant. Um biological capital has started to look at our rural landscapes around the same themes, land use. But instead of residential, we looked at agriculture. And instead of office space, we looked at energy. And we looked at habitat more in the natural habitat restoration, um, and we look at water. We need the rural landscapes to provide the ecosystems to support carbon sequestration, to grow our food. And it's unfortunately where we extract a lot of our energy. And so biological was founded, I don't know how long ago now, probably getting close to 20 years ago, really looking at those rural landscapes and how do we do it in a regenerative way versus an extractive way, especially around agriculture and energy. And that's what we've been working on. And it really brought me back to my roots, growing up in a farm. The way we used to farm pre World War II was using animals to provide the organic matter and to maintain, maintain the vegetation management of our agricultural landscapes and then using growing Fruits and vegetables and having that great healthy soil that the animals were were done. After World War II, we got into the factory model. It was the Germans that really built the modern industrial ag model, as they had they had to produce more food with less labor as they were in the constant battle of fighting wars, that they used modern technology to extract more out of the land and use modern-day fertilizers, which are a lot of the same, surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, the same ingredients that they make bombs with. That really set our global footprint back. If anything I could do right now to help the plant the most would be to stop turning over soil, to stop putting nitrogen fertilizers in, um, and just to look at how we grew food a hundred years ago, once again, using the animals to build soils. Our great plains of the United States were built by nature. The bison built our huge soils. They would go in huge herds, a thousand animals a time, across the prairie landscape, and just hit that one spot of grass once a year, and they would be fertilizing it. They would be turning over the soil with their hooves so it's reseeding and moving on and letting it rest. Right now, our feedlots and our commercial cattle operation has totally changed the dynamics of how we raise our animals into a factory mode instead of a natural system mode. Cows are really great at producing proteins out of eating grass. They're incredibly efficient. But in a factory farm, they want to speed things up. So they feed them corn and soybean and other things that make them get fat. If we fed our children high fructose corn syrup, they would get super fat super fat super quickly. And they're able to cut out six to twelve months of the time period from a cow comes off a farm as a young cow and goes into a feedlot, versus we on our farms right now, we don't usually harvest our animals until 26 to 28 months because they're just they're doing the natural way to do it. They're eating grass, they're outdoors, versus in a factory farm, they'll may have harvest an animal 12 to 18 months after it's born. And it's a very different dynamic. When I look at the next generation of what I worry about most and where we get change the quickest is looking at our food systems. And that's why we started biological capital. How do we bring the transect together between the urban world and the rural and that transect? And that's what you do so well at CRMB, it's a hard edge where you let it, you don't just get lower and lower density till you get to the farmland, you just stop it and let those ecosystems happen. We need to do that around our agriculture. If we could stop turning over soil and stop growing corn to feed our animals, the amount of carbon our prairies would grow back is huge. People think about trees as the only way of sequestering carbon on land. Actually, the grasslands are even more productive, but we've destroyed those grasslands by turning over the soil and growing industrial food for our industrial agriculture.
SPEAKER_00Earlier this week, or maybe earlier this week, Laura Turner-Sidell hosted the screening for ground soil, uh, which is really talking about these issues. I don't know if you've had a chance to see uh that. I know it's in early screenings now.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell I've gotten to see little parts of it. I can't wait to see the whole show.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell I mean such an important message that they are are giving. So that it's really exciting. Everyone needs to see that. We can put a link to that in too, because it talks it it talks to exactly, I mean, what you have just described. About to change it. And there's hope now. This is this is kind of the documentary that that is showing some hope.
SPEAKER_01Well, there's there's two things you brought up today. One is how to make our cities be vibrant, attractive, bringing nature into it. And by bringing nature in, we literally have we we found some bunny rabbits on the roof of a parking garage where we put a farm in the middle of the city. We have no idea where the bunnies came from. Um the hummingbirds that are on top of populace on a you know, 14-story building in downtown Denver, because we put all the pollinators up on that roof. There's a place. Um, bringing bees into our rooftop system again. Um and looking at design that we built buildings that will stand for hundreds of years, not 25 to 35 year life cycles, so that we're buildings are going to evolve and grow and designing them so they have adaptive change over time and build on materials that will stand the test of time. And then our rural landscapes, how do we go back and look at nature? Nature's got millions of years ahead of us on RD. You never walk into the woods and say, boy, nature screwed that up. It's only when man touches it that we've messed it up. And how do we look at nature, natural systems, mimic the large mammals of both Africa prair prairies or savannas and the U.S. prairies around bison? How do we change those to our modern-day agriculture that are not creating factories but are using natural systems, letting them be back outdoors in nature? There's both huge ecological benefit for the land, but huge also health benefits for us humans on how we grow our food.
SPEAKER_00Uh, a number of our listeners are in the biophilic community. And we first met, I guess, in the early days of biological capital. And, you know, there there is a gift that you have given me that I don't know that I've ever uh thanked you for because at the time I did not really appreciate it. But you brought Stephen Keller to Cerinbi and introduced him to me and and to Serinby back in those early days. That had to be over like what, 20 years ago. Uh and uh share with us your your your relationship with with Stephen Keller.
SPEAKER_01Um yeah, Steve, uh very early thinker about biophilic design. And he was a professor at Yale, and he was in their environmental studies program. They used to call it the forestry program there. And he he taught me a lot about looking at natural systems. And you were early days of CRM B, and we came down and visit with you, and you were looking at just your early, your first phase was in. You had the farm in and your first little neighborhood in, and you were thinking, how do I continue to go? So it was so fun to see it at that stage. And I love you took us for a picnic on top of your uh a little park that was your natural wastewater treatment facility. I've told that story hundreds of times. And looking at natural wetlands, like I said, there's a great nature story again. Nature has natural systems to deal with pollution and waste. And what a great gift it is that Sarum B has embraced those things and a model for that.
SPEAKER_00Well, one of the things uh, you know, we faced, especially as we were trying to bring financing, is uh everyone has had the attitude that uh doing it environmentally was costly. And of course, we've been able to demonstrate just the opposite. And uh tell us some of your experiences there in balancing uh the environment doing the right thing and the financial model in doing so.
SPEAKER_01Well, I think it's actually a better business model if you take a longer view with your capital. If you build a building, I'm in a building right now that's 20 years old. And we're in a I'm in a space that hasn't been touched for 20 years because we built it right the first time. It's adapted, it's supermodern office space today. But we literally have not remodeled this building for 20 years. And this building is a mixed-use building, so it's apartments and office space. If you don't have to, an apartment's turnover in Colorado, 70% of your units turn over every year. So if you can build a building with real wood floors that are designed to patina and you're not ripping out carpet, um, if you put really high-quality appliances in that are energy efficient, that last longer, um, and you divine spaces that connect you that are beautiful, the actual investment returns greater. The real estate world in America is very different than the than Europe or Asia. It's about building as fast as you can, as cheap as you can, and flipping it. In fact, if you can sell it before you're even done, that's when you're considered a star on a financial return. Um but if you're taking a long view, so if you have institutional capital or insurance company capital or high net worth capital, who are looking at longer-term investment horizons, they're looking for cash flow and growth and an asset that appreciates. If you look at a traditional suburban shopping center, it peaks in value the first three years is open, then it then deteriorates downward because sprawl in a suburban area, what may be a booming area today, may not be booming in 20 years from now. Um, but if you build high-quality assets that look at what's going to be around that over the next 50 to 100 years, even on a 10-year investment cycle, you will outperform, but you require capital that's going to look at a 10-year return. Um and it's a challenge because our investment capital world is they want quick return on capital and the highest yield. And that makes you do short-term thinking. It's like the stock market. You know, if your your company every day is being evaluated by what it is doing today or that quarter or this month's cash flow or the next deal, the stock that has ups and down moves versus take the long view. And I think people are learning in the stock market, stay in, go through the cycles. The built environment, people don't play that game so much. And so if a building is not performing, they're quick to sell it and discount it downward and jump onto the next project versus how do we build things, which takes more effort in design, takes more effort in the planning process, takes more effort in building it. But if you're managing large pools of capital that looking at tenure investments, it is actually the I think a lower risk, higher return model. And we're we're we're proving it.
SPEAKER_00You are proving it, and and we're certainly proving it here on a smaller scale. And curious, I hadn't thought about we're sitting in a 20-year-old building also, that uh no one thinks of being dated, but uh rather than contemporary, we we we uh used architecture from the 1920s to inspire this area. And uh many people think that we possibly restored it. They especially believe that of the Blue Eyed Daisy, our coffee shop, which was one of the first 200 lead-certified buildings. And uh my my favorite story is is is coming out one day, and these eight 80-year-old couple were standing out having a good uh uh vigorous argument. Uh and he was sure it was a restored building, and she said, No, I know they have built it from new. So I think uh that's success. That's a big success. That's right. That's right. I think one of the big things that that Lee did is it taught corporate America about the benefits of certification. It's it's really environmentally, and it was about energy savings. I think the next step, what you're doing, what we're doing, is hopefully uh tying together the health benefits from being in walkable, nature connected, uh and and the savings. And if we could identify those cost savings as the Green Building has done with energy, uh I think that's gonna make a huge difference because I found people like the idea of saving money on their power bills. The corporations are the only ones who have done it. But if we can touch the buying people in in homes and neighborhoods, they'll do amazing things for the health of their children and loved ones. And I think that's that's our next frontier is how we can how we can tie those together. Have you been uh doing anything in that relationship?
SPEAKER_01Well, I think thinking about a lot and talking about a lot. There is a role in government to really provide the incentives to take the long view when it comes to urban planning in the built environment. It's really that's one of their main responsibilities today. And how do the the mayors of cities who may be on a four-year term look at what are the capital improvements that are needed around city infrastructure? And I think energy is one of those areas. Now, there was a period of time where the cities had a steam plant, more historically speaking, where they would the city would share power. And Denver has several of those downtown where they consolidated the generation power in those days with burning coal to make steam. So most buildings didn't have their own little coal plant to do it. They had a a city loop that provided a hot water loop that provided heat and a form of radiators for buildings. I think that cities, in some cities, you're trying this, but they're you're still struggling politically. You know, solar, wind, can the city take a more aggressive action to support that in the rural landscapes around their suburban areas and then work with utilities to pipe that energy in versus trying, you know, you know, population Denver, it's a very small roof. It's hard for us to do enough solar on that roof to make a difference. If you're in the suburban area, it's easy to get enough solar panels to make a difference. Um, but we want to encourage density and going upwards in our city core. And there are opportunities already today to go invest in uh community solar farms that do that. But how does the city infrastructure and our public utility commission make it very difficult to regulate through that process? Um, and I think that's an opportunity. Like in I'll give a water example in Colorado. I can't collect the water off my roof in Colorado. You can do that in Georgia, but in Colorado, if someone else owns those water rights that come off my roof. Now, it would actually be better for our ecosystem for me to have a green roof, collect that water stored that water the plants on my roof. I'm actually filtering that water and then letting it go in the system. Um, how do we look at energy the same way? How are there ways to share those systems? There's a long way to go. I'm not worried about the future of energy, though. It's the public policy around that I'm worried about because the technology is there. I have I have several homes, and I'm very lucky in a couple locations that are totally off the grid. With if you live in the southwestern United States, there's no reason you have to be attached to the grid for electricity. Between um solar and batteries, it's there. What we're missing is the agricultural areas and the nature areas that aren't getting those connections. And how do we put that infrastructure into our cities? If you plant a tree, or if you're in a historical neighborhood of trees, the neighborhood is cooler, it's much nicer to walk around, and the values are up. We should be spending millions every year in planting trees in our cities. The cooling effect would have a huge positive on the energy load of that city and make the cities much more pleasant. So there's many ways for public policy to take a leadership role on doing that. Um, and to be planting trees, looking at future ways to consolidate and deregulate the utilities so that more self-generation can happen and fit in the grid, upgrading our grid. These are some big infrastructure projects only the government can fund. But the payback is huge. It's working around our political system on short-term elections that make it hard to get that done. And that's really the next generation's gift is to get involved in leadership and look at these public policies and take a longer view.
SPEAKER_00Well, I I I'm encouraged. You know, uh 20 years ago, I felt we were all carrying sustainability lanterns trying to find one another, and I find I'm stepping into more lit rooms. Uh that there are there are more of us, not nearly enough, and not enough is happening. But I I think at least we're we're starting to have examples and people are starting to notice. And I find young people who who've been born into this fragile world that they're not going to shrug and wait. They're going to join us, I believe, in changing the future, which is one of the most exciting things.
SPEAKER_01Well, and I think if they got gifted to grow up and see it work. We were gifted to grow up on a rural landscape and appreciate that connection to nature. How is the how's the current generation growing up and getting that connection? I have a granddaughter who's 18 months in San Francisco and she lives downtown. Um in San Francisco, it's easy to go 20 blocks and you're at the ocean, or go across the Golden Gate Bridge and you're in nature. But how does she get exposed to it more every day in the city? Um, those are challenges for our time for them to understand that.
SPEAKER_00That's right. You know, we we we now have over 400 uh kids living full-time at Sarinby. And people who visit actually notice the difference. Uh you know, I uh it's something about our times that people people notice the free-range kids and the uncaged elders that we have wandering around everyone. And and uh you know you know, we when I grew up, that was that that was common, you wouldn't even notice it. Uh, and that was so unusual. People actually call it out and ask about it. So well, Grant, I've enjoyed our our our visual walk uh through the woods together and the conversation. I could go on for hours, but I know uh we we we both have things to do as as we're still pushing this uh ball uphill. Well, thank you, Steve.
SPEAKER_01Always great to connect, and let's go for a real walk of the woods sometime soon.
SPEAKER_00I I would love that. Let me know when. All right, thank you. Thanks, Grant.