SPEAKER_02 0:00

Hey guys, welcome back to the Sun Belt Developers Podcast. Uh my name's Tim Wright. I'm a broker at Cushman Wakefield. Uh we have an awesome guest here with us today, Egbert Perry. Egbert is uh probably has one of the most decorated resumes we've had on the show and um has a lot of really cool layers to to your story. And um I just I know we got lunch a couple years ago, and I just remember getting in the car and I was like, that guy has uh a lot more he he knows way more about the world than I even knew was a thing. So um I just I know from Fannie Mae to affordable housing to just a lot of projects you've been involved with in Atlanta. I appreciate what you've done and I'm really excited about this conversation. I think it's gonna be a lot of fun. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Looking forward to it.

SPEAKER_02 0:43

Yeah. Um do we want to just dive in? I I know you grew up down in An Antigua. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:51

Let me say Antigua. Antigua. Everybody wants to say put the U back in. There is a U in there. So it is you could pronounce it Antigua, but that's wrong. It's Antigua.

SPEAKER_02 1:01

Antigua.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Antigua and Barbuda.

SPEAKER_02 1:04

Barbuda. Right. Okay. That's not Barbados. That's a different thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

Different one. That's Barbuda is the one that got wiped out by the hurricane a few years ago. Got it. And Robert De Niro and a bunch of people are down there trying to build very expensive mansions on the island. Fair enough. But it's Barbuda. So it's a twin island nation.

SPEAKER_02 1:22

And Antigua.

SPEAKER_00 1:23

Yeah. Antigua.

SPEAKER_02 1:24

Okay. Okay. Well, great, man. Yeah. So so you were born and raised on an island. When when did you come up to the States?

SPEAKER_00 1:30

And well, I so I've from a large family, I'm number nine of eleven. Um and all of us, the way the Caribbean works, if it's a small island, uh when you finish high school, you're gonna go overseas to college because it's the the island isn't large enough to support a university system. Yeah. So you end up going abroad. And as is understandable, you go to the places where the colonizing nation's language is spoken. So since it's it was a British colony, you either go to school in the US, the UK, or Canada. So we were a U.S. family. So we went to school in the U.S. So I finished, actually left before finishing school. I finished my last two years of high school in New York on a scholarship that I won.

SPEAKER_02 2:21

Cool. Um I think before the show, you mentioned you have quite a few siblings. You're one of eleven. Yes. Number nine of eleven? Yes. Um did your siblings move up to the States as well? Or is anybody still Antigua?

SPEAKER_00 2:37

All ten of the eleven, one died early. So all ten um got educated. Actually, nine got educated here. Um we're only down to we're down to five now, so they're only five living. Um but so of that five, only one is back home. And ironically, it's the oldest, my oldest brother. Wow.

SPEAKER_02 3:01

So what was it what was it like growing up there?

SPEAKER_00 3:05

Heaven on earth. I wouldn't trade it for all the money in the world, all the tea in China, I wouldn't trade it. I wish I could do one of those um, what do they call it, groundhog days. Yeah. Except it would be a groundhog period. I would just go through that childhood all the way f until I left home. I just just turned 15 when I left home. So everything up to that, I would do that over and over till the end of time. It was wonderful.

SPEAKER_02 3:36

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 3:38

Well like just it was just a slow paced life or um No, it's not the it wasn't the pace. Um was a simpler time, but it also was a I refer to it as the proverbial African village, you know, the st statement it or the saying it takes a village to raise a child. And so the village, we had a village. I mean, everybody was about doing what's right for the young people. So it was a very um communal kind of environment. Um it was safe, it was everybody knew everybody, we didn't have the external influences quite the way they are now, so the sense of materialism and so on wasn't dominant. The values were shaped by who your parents were in terms of how they carried themselves. It had no it wasn't based on how much money you had, finances weren't even in the calculus, it was just a nice people-friendly environment. And, you know, um I have a large family, so I had a an extended network, if you will. So there's nothing I can think of that I would want to replace if I went back in time and did that. In fact, my one of my big regrets is that I it's it's plus and minus, right? On one hand, since you know you have to leave if you're going to college, um, I got a jump on that two years early by this because of the scholarship I won. But if I had to do it over again, I would love to have finished school, stayed home two more years. It was just I left a lot on the table when I did that. So but you can't look a gift horse in the mouth, right?

SPEAKER_02 5:37

So Yeah.

unknown 5:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:39

But that's that's I think it's pretty special. I think a lot of people I mean childhood is it's a special time, but to say there's nothing you change, I think that's absolutely nothing. Yeah. Okay, so you're two years before you're supposed to graduate, you come up to the States and you're what do you study?

SPEAKER_00 5:58

Well, uh it was to finish high school. Yeah. So I graduated. It was a boarding school in New York. So I finished my last I won a scholarship to a boarding school, a very wealthy gentleman who had a second home in Antigua. So he loved Antigua. Um, um it was a they I was the top student in my class and the top athlete in my class, and they had top students in probably the four most prestigious schools on the island. And my name came up at the top of the list. Yeah. And so I won the scholarship. And because it was it was a boarding school, but it was not going to be a boarding school for more than two more years. So they were looking for a student that only had two years of school left. And so among the students that were picked, everybody only had two years left. Um, and so because so I went to the boarding school, and then at the end of that period, it was no longer a boarding school. So that's why he picked someone in two years. And um that was it. Uh somebody up there smiled on me and I won it because the economics, it was very expensive. Yeah. It was $4,300 a year for school in 1970 when the cost I had a brother who was at Stanford in college and Stanford in grad school, and it was $3,700 a year. Wow. So this it was a very elite private school. And this school was more expensive. A year at the school was more expensive than Stanford University. So um I was lucky because the the exchange rate for our dollars, the Eastern Caribbean dollar, was not exactly favorable when compared to the US dollar. So our household income was just a few hundred a few thousand dollars a year. And so the equivalent of about a thousand dollars U.S. was our for the eleven kids and a mother and a father. That's not to say we were poor because I never felt poor, but if we had to pay for education in the States, wouldn't have happened I wouldn't it wouldn't have happened that way. So all my siblings, except one other, finished school, worked at home for a few years, had enough money to come up, be in school for maybe they had their way to pay for about a year, and then they had to figure it out while they were here. I got a a break because I got into the US system earlier before having to navigate college. So in some respects I had the easy path.

SPEAKER_02 8:51

Yeah. But uh that's amazing. So I'm sure it wasn't an easy education. Aaron Powell Yeah. Everything is relative.

SPEAKER_00 8:59

Every immigrant has their story, and every immigrant goes through their own version of trials and tribulations, but um in the scheme of things, I wasn't running from famine, I wasn't escaping war, I didn't cross o shock-filled waters of an ocean to get, you know, I didn't have that wasn't my immigrant story.

SPEAKER_02 9:23

It was just a place that you want to go back to the yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:27

It's uh Yeah. It's it's a different world now. So it's not the same heaven on earth that it was when I was growing up, but it's still it's not bad.

SPEAKER_02 9:39

No, still very different. And I guess what's the population of Antigua?

SPEAKER_00 9:44

Aaron Ross Powell When I left it was sixty thousand people, now it's ninety-three thousand.

SPEAKER_02 9:48

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 9:48

So quite a few years later. Yeah. Yes. Um Well, actually I f went to college at Penn and the Stark the stock thing for me to process was between faculty, staff, and students at Penn, there were as many people at that university as there were in the whole of Antigua. Wow. Yeah. Okay. Or I used to tell people you could take everybody from Antigua, put them in the Georgia Dome when it was the Georgia Dome, and you'd still have 10,000 empty seats.

SPEAKER_02 10:24

That's a good visual. Yeah. For not many people. It's a lot, but it's not. Yes, exactly. Man. Okay. So I d were you looking at any other universities getting out of this um boarding school or um the only one I really wanted to go to was Berkeley.

SPEAKER_00 10:40

Okay. Because by the time I graduated high school, my oldest brother and two other brothers were at Berkeley. So that's where I wanted to go. I didn't I didn't know there was such a thing as a quarter system and a semester system. And you can't. So I messed up on my application. I was waiting to hear from Berkeley and just kept taking a long time. And Penn accepted, and I had the date was coming up where I had to make a decision. And so I decided on Penn because I hadn't heard yet from Berkeley.

SPEAKER_03 11:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:21

And I did that. And later that summer my acceptance from Berkeley came forward in mail back to Antigua. And so I had already committed to Penn. So I think the Lord was looking out for me because my reason for wanting to be at Berkeley had very little to do with academics. Yeah, you are. In those days it was, you know, it was f a free spirit environment. And I was just at that point I finished high school at 16, so I was a 16-year-old wide-eyed kid, and I think the Lord said, Let me save this boy from himself. And so He does that sometimes. So I got saved and I went to pen into a very different kind of environment where I needed to pay attention to my academics and do what I need to do. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 12:11

Were you raised in a Christian household?

SPEAKER_00 12:13

Yeah, I was raised Catholic. So let's see, seven, seven of us went to Catholic school. And um Christ the King High School and then St. Joseph's Academy. Um and that was the that was the journey. I was an acolyte for seven years. I was oh yeah, I or altar boy as they call it. Yeah. So I did the whole Catholic thing. Yeah. Yes. It was a great school. It was as good a school on the island. It was the number one school as far as I was concerned. It's the number one school on the island.

SPEAKER_02 12:48

Yeah. Good values. Okay, so you got a pen. And what were your like what was going through your head? What what did you want to study while you were I I was I was gonna do engineering.

SPEAKER_00 13:00

I knew before I went I was gonna study civil engineering. My oldest brother had sent home some encyclopedias, Britannica Encyclopedias. And on Sunday, our pastime, um my sibling, one above me and the two behind me, all four of us, would spend Sunday afternoons when we were supposed to be reading the Bible, flipping through the Britannica Encyclopedias and so on. And I asked my father what profession built a suspension bridge that I saw in the in the encyclopedia. And he said, Oh, that's a civil engineer. I don't know how he knew because he wasn't really that versed in that. But so I said, Okay, I'll be a civil engineer. That's literally how I made the decision. I had no idea what civil engineering really was, just that suspension bridge. And that was it. So when I went to Penn, that's what I studied. And I did an undergraduate in civil, and then I have a graduate degree, a master's in structural engineering. Okay. But I also went to business school. So I have a degrees in finance and accountant. So I was there for seven years and guarded out my system. Yeah. That's that's what I was doing. I don't need to. Don't need to go back. Didn't even want to drop my kids to school. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 14:21

Yes. Um you go through seven years of education and then did you go straight into working with H.J. Russell and then what was the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 14:30

No, I worked for a year in D.C. Okay with a large national contractor. Okay. And I was recruited to Atlanta by Herman Russell.

SPEAKER_02 14:39

Yeah. Aaron Ross Powell How did that connection come about?

SPEAKER_00 14:42

Aaron Ross Powell A little bit it was a little weird. I was in my last semester of grad school and I got the call, a call from this individual in Atlanta asking if I was interested in being interviewed with his firm in Atlanta. I didn't know this individual. He had mentioned his name, it didn't mean anything to me. It was Herman Russell. And I wasn't interested in coming to the South. So I turned him down. I went to work in DC with this contractor and saw some dynamics I didn't particularly care for. And I thought, I don't need this. So I picked up the phone and called him a year later and asked him if he was still interested in talking. He said yes. Now the way I got to, the way he got to me, I didn't know this until I had been in Atlanta for about a year. But his daughter Donata, her roommate, I think, um, was in one of the calculus sessions. I tutored a lot of students in calculus. And so she told Donada, and I a lot of people on campus knew me as a calculus tutor. So she Donada got my resume from the faculty administrator that ran the tutoring center and sent it to her father and said, You need to try and get this guy. Cool. And so that's how he called me to begin with. As I said, I didn't know this until I had been in Atlanta working at Russell for about a year, and then somebody told me the story. So that was it. Small rock? Never know.

SPEAKER_02 16:25

It's like this guy's pretty smart.

SPEAKER_00 16:26

You should talk to him. Yeah, I I've never used the calculus since. Yeah, yeah. I never wanted to either.

SPEAKER_02 16:33

I I remember those courses. I was like just trying to do whatever I could to get through them. Yeah. Um okay, great. So you come down to Atlanta. Was there any reason you just didn't you didn't want to come down to the South?

SPEAKER_00 16:43

Or like you know, I'm I'm from Little Antigua. I really didn't understand the world. And I thought they were still lynching black people in Atlanta. Wow. That's the my view of the South.

SPEAKER_02 16:55

Yeah. What year was this when you graduated?

SPEAKER_00 16:58

I well, I graduated um high school at seven in 72 and college. I didn't leave college until 79, so seven years. Because I was there for seven years. But still, if you there was no contact with the South. I had no knowledge of the South. And people from the islands were coming to the US through New York, period. Wasn't Miami yet. It was still New York. So you kind of knew the Northeast. You didn't really know the Southeast, or for that matter, the West. And you either landed in New York or Toronto or London. Those were the three places that you left the islands, that's where you went, if you were going to the English-speaking into English-speaking countries. And so there was no reason to know the South or the Southeast or Southwest. It was just you knew New York and Jersey and Philadelphia, that part of the world.

SPEAKER_02 18:01

Hey guys, before we jump back into the episode, I just want to thank one of our main partners, Sanji High Roads. David Sanji was actually a guest in season one and has been a strong supporter of the podcast ever since. Sanji High Roads is a commercial real estate development company responsible for nearly $3 billion in development projects. If you're here in Atlanta, you've probably seen some of their work already, including the high-centric buckhead, that's the hotel right behind Linux, and the new Howell apartments right on Howl Mill. One of their most exciting projects right now is the expansion of the Savannah Convention Center. It's a $400 million development that's been years in the making. If you're interested in development opportunities or want to learn more about their work, visit SanjiHighroads.com. Now back to the conversation. Okay. So you so you came down here, you were you worked with them almost nine years. Russell. Thirteen years. Thirteen years, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:51

Seven days short of 13 years.

SPEAKER_02 18:53

Wow. And um what what were you doing with them, Isla?

SPEAKER_00 18:58

Um actually uh uh HJ, call him H.J. Herman Russell, um hired me as assistant to the president. So I was his assistant. And I once I got to know him later, I understood why I had that title, because anything he gave me to do, since I was assistant to president, already fit my job description. He didn't have to increase my pay. It was just everything fit, right? Yeah, yeah. No, but seriously, um it was a chance to whatever the company was involved in, whatever he was involved in, I had a chance to be exposed to it. So I got a pretty broad exposure in a very short period of time. And when I went there, I was 24.

SPEAKER_02 19:45

Yeah. So where what was their firm like at that point? I I know they've small.

SPEAKER_00 19:51

It was uh $10 to $12 million a year revenues. Okay. Um but the company doesn't tell the story. HJ was bigger than the company. So HJ was a um he was a giant, he was uh story onto his own. He had, you know, his he had a pretty good legacy, um well regarded businessman and so on. So the company was one piece of who he was. He also had interests in a lot of other things, and um so I got some of that spillover effect on me. Um and so it was uh it was a very, very good opportunity. Sure. Twenty-four. Didn't know what I didn't know, thought I knew more than I did, but um you know I got in within a year, literally 11 months, um he turned over all of the construction operations to me. I was 25. Um I had he asked me to do a business plan for the company in April. And uh six months later I gave him the plan. The company was going to be a billion-dollar company in by 1995, which is 15 years. Um and we had the strategy laid out and so on, and I made the presentation or gave it to him, and my birthday's July, so I had turned 25. Um in October I gave him the plan. And sometime in November, one Saturday, he asked me to come into the office and we spent three, three and a half hours together, and then going through discussing the plan, and then he said, Okay, first the next month you're running the construction operations, which was the heart of the company. No way. And so I woke up and I was heading H of us a construction company. And um I would never have gotten that opportunity anywhere else. And um I, in fact, my first day on the job, uh, I was, in addition to being assistant to the president, I was the project manager for what you may know as the Robert Woodruff Library at Atlanta University Center. It was the a joint venture between Beers and Russell. I was the project manager. And I went over to Beers to meet uh Lawrence, who is running, who is HJ's peer. And um, while we were there in the lobby waiting, I remember H.J. saying, Oh, let me introduce you to Lil Larry, which was Larry Galliston. Little Larry. Lil Larry. He was walking down in the hall. And so I met Larry. He was the first person I met outside of Russell on my first date. It was around nine o'clock on April on January 7th, 1980.

unknown 23:08

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 23:08

I met Larry. And so we're how old was he at that time? He was the same age. He was we're about nine months apart. I'm older by about nine months.

SPEAKER_02 23:17

So he's yeah, he's early in his career, too. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:19

Oh yeah. We were both young bucks. We neither one of us knew what the hell we were doing. But it, you know, made for we didn't know that we didn't know anything. No. We both thought we knew more than we did. And we had a lot of fun. So we did a lot of projects together. We built the Carter Presidential Library, 191 Peachtree, the Georgia Dome, um Woodruff Library, uh a lot of pretty significant projects. Sure. And so we remain fri got to be friends and remain friends.

SPEAKER_02 23:54

I gotta ask you. I mean, that first year like what were you maybe need to brag on yourself here, but like to make that sort of impression uh to be able to run construction at at 24 or 25, or like what I mean, what what was it about maybe your work ethic or it wasn't calculus. I wasn't I mean, I got I got you the job, but you know, like what was um Maybe I calculated. No, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:21

Um, you know, I I I actually can't take credit for it because I wouldn't have done with me what HJ did with me. So that was HJ saying, okay, this guy because I I did work. I mean, I got into I showed up at Beers' office at about 6.30, quarter to seven every morning. I was there until about five, between five and five fifteen. I drove over to Russell's office, and I worked from then until about 10 o'clock at night. I did that for about 10, 10 and a half months. That was my life. And I worked, I went in the office on Saturdays, and that's when I didn't have any phone phones or whatever, and so on. And there were a few times a week where I may interrupt my time in working out of Bears office at Russell. So I was really doing two jobs for the better part of ten months. And so I may have already put in two years by the time I stepped into that role. But I think to his credit, HJ said, okay, this guy maybe has enough sense, but he definitely, if he doesn't, he works hard enough to compensate for it. And um let me give him that shot. And it didn't exactly go over well because I was a little young boy, I didn't know anything, and a lot of people had their issues with who the hell is he? But it didn't that didn't last long. And I had a good time, the company did well, everybody, you know, the history was great, and so I owe tremendous amount to to H.J. Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 26:15

Yeah, for him to entrust you with that kind of responsibility. Absolutely. How long were you in that role as at a construction?

SPEAKER_00 26:20

Aaron Powell I actually kept the construction operation until 1990. So even after I had taken over running the entire company, um I was doing double duty, running the construction operation as the president, but also president of H.J. Rustling Company, which had real estate, property management, program management, and construction. So I there were four presidents of the operating companies that reported to me. I was one of them. I was reporting to myself as president of the overall company, but I hired somebody in '89 on a one-year trial before turning over the presidency to him. And when he took over in 90, I relinquished that. And so I was only then the rest of the time president of H.J. Rustling Company.

SPEAKER_02 27:12

Aaron Ross Powell And did y'all hit the billion dollar mark?

SPEAKER_00 27:17

Aaron Ross Powell No. Um The strategy really was that we would the first 150 to 200 million would be organic growth because we would put in place the systems, infrastructure, and so on, and the human resource infrastructure as a foundation, and then we would combine, move forward with some level of acquisitions in addition to continuing the organic growth. And so we hit the 200 million when I left, we were about $200 million in revenues, and we were the third largest black-owned business in the country. We were the third that we were the largest construction. Business, period. We were the largest construction company in the country. Black-owned construction company in the country. So when I left, that's when we should have been doing a lot more. We would still have missed the billion dollar mark, we but we could have been a little further along. There's stories behind that, but the long and short of it all is um when I left it was time for me to leave. Fair enough.

SPEAKER_02 28:38

And you went straight into development?

SPEAKER_00 28:41

I started integral. So Russell was construction and real estate. So the emphasis was shifted. Because part of why I left was to focus on transforming communities and redevelopment and revitalization and so on, in addition to just pure real estate. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:20

I yeah, I've got a lot of questions about it. Like where'd you come up with the name and what were some of y'all's first projects?

SPEAKER_00 29:26

And well, you figure it out now. I did calculus, right? What's the name of the company?

SPEAKER_03 29:31

Integral.

SPEAKER_00 29:32

Integral Calculus. Remember calculus derivatives and integration. So the integral sign. So if you look at the sign of the tension. I've always wondered.

SPEAKER_02 29:44

I'm like, this looks like some 90s math book or stuff. That's exactly right.

SPEAKER_00 29:48

And it really was not it really was intentional. It was um there's a story. You the integral sign is going through a globe, right? And it's integrating people. The integral sign is green. So it's integrating people along economic lines, but it's integrating people around the world along economic lines. So that was the vision. It was literally me sitting down there, idle one night, not knowing what the hell to do, and couldn't sleep. Took out a pen and we were scratching. And my good friend, my closest friend, who started the company with me, we were 50-50 partners. Um he was throwing out names, I was throwing out names, and then he said, How about integralis? I said, What the hell is integralis? And I said, But you know what? It could be integral. How about the integral group? That's how it came about, purely by accident.

SPEAKER_03 30:44

Got it, got it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:45

And then I said, and I like that because it wasn't some granola.

SPEAKER_00 30:52

And we didn't pay a hundred thousand or a half a million dollars for it.

SPEAKER_02 30:56

There's a math symbol, and this is what it's it. Okay. All right. So you come up with the name, you're hanging your own shingle now. You've you've gone out on your own. Yeah, back back to like, I mean, what were some of y'all's early projects?

SPEAKER_00 31:10

And uh the very, very first project um we got was a an assignment in Birmingham because I had taken the Russell Company to Birmingham in like 84. Okay. So I had a long tenure in Birmingham. We had um built the SEC headquarters, the civil rights design and built the Civil Rights Institute there. Um a lot of work, airport infrastructure, and so on. And um when I told the mayor I was leaving, he said, Well, tell me something that you would like to try your hand on in Birmingham, and let's see if it's something that makes sense for the city. And I did. And I got an appointment to do an economic development study in the city of Birmingham. So that paid the bills for from June of '93 till early '94. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Okay. Like a consulting sort of Yeah, it was yeah, it was a fee-based um assignment.

SPEAKER_02 32:16

Did you all raise money at all to get going? Or just bootstrapped it.

SPEAKER_00 32:20

No, just bootstrapped it. The first year we made $23,000.

SPEAKER_02 32:23

Nice.

SPEAKER_00 32:24

And then each of us split it, so we had eleven thousand something each. That was it. And then we started over again in January. And we paid ourselves when there was money left at the end of the day. But um but in late 94 we responded to an RFP from the Housing Authority, and that that's what led to Centennial Place. In between those two assignments, we between those two opportunities, our real first development project was in West End. We did a 144-unit multifamily deal. Okay. Um that we just sold two years ago or three years ago.

SPEAKER_02 33:07

Yeah. Thirty-something years.

SPEAKER_00 33:12

And that kind of horizon that's oh yeah. And um we added a third partner very early on, a guy named Dennis Pellerin. Okay. And really great guy. And so it was really three of us for a while. Um the first, let's say, couple years.

SPEAKER_02 33:29

Okay. Centennial Place, uh just from research, was a pretty groundbreaking kind of approach to to housing. Yeah. Love to hear kind of how that evolved.

SPEAKER_00 33:40

And um really sh you know when we when I left Russell to start Integral, it was a result of my friend, my close friend, Clyde Gums, that was his name, encouraging me to do what I seemed to be passionate about. And so he challenged me to do that. And I said, okay, I'll leave Russell and do that. If you leave Bank of New York, because he was a lawyer and in the credit department of Bank of New York, said, you leave that, I leave Russell and we'll start a company. And literally that's how it came to be. And it was to create communities that looked like the community I grew up in in Antigua. So we were where economics or income didn't determine whether you had a shot at a great education or whatever. So that was the vision. Um and it was not targeted towards public housing sites at all. It was neighborhoods. We were going to transform neighborhoods. And as it turns out, the Atlanta Housing Authority put out this RFP for a developer to partner with them to help them redevelop the site of the country's first public housing project, which was Techwood Homes, in an Atlanta that had the highest crime rate in the entire country. Atlanta was number one most violent city. Um Techwood Homes was the most violent address in this most violent city. The household income for the 1,100 public housing units on Techwood and a contiguous public housing project named Clark Howell Homes was $4,300 a year. And um it was brutal. Anyway, so Clyde and I looked at each other and said, Nobody could be thinking about this as strategically as we have been. We should respond. And the vision was school, early childhood education, health, wellness, and recreation, housing, mixed income. So you had people with means and people without, because the Antigua I grew up in, we didn't have any money, people next door, pharmacists on one side, and the other side, they ran a rum shop, but nobody ever talked about or thought about incomes. It was just, you know, everything else. And so the idea was we're going to create communities that whether you have means or you don't, you could get the right early start in life. And so that's what we responded with. And I didn't know about the Hope Six Program, which provides some funding from the federal government. Um I found out about that through another firm, McCormick Barron and Associates, the principal there, Richard Barron, was somebody I met. I had met him a few years earlier, and when I decided I was leaving Russell to start this, I went to St. Louis, where their firm was to look at some of their work that they did in mixed income housing. It was a different kind of mixed income, but mixed income housing nonetheless. And after I left and went back to Atlanta, um that Tuesday, I went there Friday. The Tuesday, he called me, he said, you know, you're talking about that stuff. Have you ever heard of the Hope Six program? I said, no. Um He said, Well, some of the issues that you cited as challenges, money to demolish and do different things. Um Hope 6 dollars would allow you to use the money to do those things. So I said, okay, well, that's interesting. So we ran different financial models and so on. And then Atlanta came out with, oh, and he said, and by the way, Atlanta has a Hope Six Award for a site in Atlanta named Tequid Homes. So Renee Glover went into the housing authority months after that. And when she went in, she decided she wanted to change the model, break down the concentrations of poverty, and so on and so forth. So she put that site out for an RFP. So Clyde and I looked at each other and said, nobody can beat us. We've been thinking about this and we'll just apply it to that site. It was 60 acres. And so we responded. Um and I called Richard because we were two or three-person for firm, let's say. So we needed to be able to show up right in a national competition. So we and McCormick Barron partnered, and then we presented our vision, got selected, um, implemented what we talked about. So we did a school, we did a YMCA, we did a shelter in arms early childhood development center, we did a bunch of multifamily housing in a mixed income struct model, um, homeownership, mixed income, and then some other parcels we kept for student housing and other things, and woke up and we were national experts. And from there we we've probably developed 10,000 units over the years. But you never know how the journey's gonna flow. You just make decisions and you look back, and some people lie and say, Well, when I was a kid I envisioned such and such, and here's what I did. No, I'm not doing revision, it's history. We went along making decisions along the way, and in reflection, that's what we did.

SPEAKER_02 39:48

How was it as far as the timeline from when you responded to the RFP to when it delivered, and how was the acceptance of it?

SPEAKER_00 39:57

It wasn't very well accepted initially because we had to demolish the projects. So here you are tearing down eleven hundred public housing units. And we got um first of all, it had never been done anywhere. So it was a new concept. And, you know, the advocates came out en masse. How could these two black people, Renee and Egbert, Renee Glover, who was the CEO of the Housing Authority, put all these people out on the street, poor black people out on the street, and so they picketed us, they picketed the Housing Authority and so on. About two years later it was like, when are you gonna do it in our community? Okay, but in the beginning it was it met a lot of resistance until people saw the delivery of the vision and the product. Um but the first units came online. We got selected in September of 94, signed a contract in October of 94, um, and there were only five competitors, five national competitors, but five firms. So um we closed on the first phase of construction in March of '96. And then we raced to deliver the first building just in time for the 1996 Olympics, July of 96. Not that anybody was going to be living there, but we just wanted to sound it was done. We created our own artificial deadline. And so we delivered the first building in July of 96. Okay. Just just on the doorstep of the Olympics.

SPEAKER_02 41:48

Yeah. Yeah. That was an electric time from that year. Yes. I was born in February of this. You didn't know. It was a very electric time. I'm sorry. Yeah. I just I barely was around.

SPEAKER_00 42:05

Um I imagine you have no memories of that.

SPEAKER_02 42:09

I don't know. No, but um it was a special year in a lot of ways. I imagine so. Hey guys, before we get back to the episode, I want to thank one of our partners, the Beck Group. Beck is a collaborative team of designers, builders, and technology experts that cover a multitude of disciplines all under one roof. Typically in a project, you have a designer and a GC, but Beck is different. Both of these disciplines are combined under one roof, so nothing falls through the cracks. This approach helps organizations rethink the way they plan, design, and build their spaces. To learn more about their work and services, visit Beckgroup.com. Now back to the show. So all right. So y'all deliver this project, you become national experts, and what every city across the country is calling you to get your opinion.

SPEAKER_00 42:54

Yeah. So for a while it was Integral and McCormick-Mahon were the names, the sorted uh household names in this space. For a little while, you know, you have first mover advantage for a second. Yeah. And then that uh that disappears. But um, but everybody wanted a centennial place. And so we spent a lot of years saying, no, no, no, not interested, until one day one of my partners, not any of those two, but some new partners, one of them said, you know, I know this is a hobby to you, but maybe we need to start relating to it more like a business.

SPEAKER_02 43:37

Yeah, doing doing a little bit more.

SPEAKER_00 43:39

Yes, exactly. And so we started saying yes.

SPEAKER_02 43:42

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 43:43

And we started diversifying our geography. And over time went into probably twenty different cities we've done projects.

SPEAKER_02 43:54

What about the model after doing so many of these, would you say Led to the early success? Like, were there other iterations of it that um I don't know, maybe maybe didn't work out, or when you look at hindsight, like you just struck a lot of things right, that's why it succeeded? Or it's not a foolproof model, or maybe it is not foolproof.

SPEAKER_00 44:16

Not at all. Centennial is sort of a one of a kind, right? Because it was the first. So any version of that is a copy of that. The idea that you're going to you know when you when you do um development in suburbia, the idea that you're you get the school system doing a school and you're doing housing and so on and some retail that's not novel. That's that happens quite often, right? But the idea that you're doing it with a significant part of the population being poor people, and that you actually care about poor people having a shot at life, and that you're trying to create a great school as a part of the division, because we basically carved out eight acres to put a new school. We went to Georgia Tech to talk about a partnership with Georgia Tech, so it became a STEAM school or STEM, and then you add the AFA Arts, so it became a STEAM school. It was the first one in the state. Um we went to the Y and talked to them about re-engineering their operating models so that they can serve not just people with money that could pay, but maybe a scholarship program to make it accessible to lower-income households so they had a slide in scale. We went to Shelter in Arms, um, gave them a footprint on our site so that they could put their early childhood development center there, and negotiated for some of the spaces or slots to be available to families that were where the ho head of household was moving off of assistance and into the workforce so that those kids would have a preference in the in some percentage of the slots available in the in in the early childhood development center. And then the housing, which was a mix of incomes across the spectrum, some percentage for public housing, eligible households, some other affordable units, and some market units, rental and ownership. And when you do that, that doesn't get done because nobody really does anything for poor people except concentrate them in poverty. And so this was an attempt to do something very different. And I think that's what made it different, unique, special, and every city across the country has that problem. So Centennial was special because I was literally a project manager. It wasn't just here's a business deal, let's do this deal. Yeah. I was day-to-day project manager. I went to f before the school board probably two dozen times making the pitch for them to uh fund the school inside of there. We would raise some money, they would put in some, we'd get to Georgia Tech, we'll go, you know, just I went to the housing finance agency to try and get them to embrace the idea of mixed income housing because there was no such thing. Um so Centennial brought in mixed income housing into Atlanta. There's so everybody talks about it now, but it didn't exist until that project. Um so there were a lot of things that were special that we take for granted now. But if you go to another city, if you don't have the right school leadership, the school the right mayoral leadership, the right um housing finance agency leadership, and so on, you get a watered-down version of that very holistic uh solution. And so we were lucky to have Renee Glover as the CEO of the Housing Authority because she bought into the vision and helped to expand it. Um and she withstood the political blows to try and deliver on that vision. You go into a lot of other cities, the first time they get a negative phone call, they go running for cover and you end up with a suboptimal solution. Trevor Burrus, Jr. And try to pivot and pretty soon you end up with a different version of what you really wanted to do. So they may sign off and select you for the grand vision, but don't have the political courage or political will to stay the course, and you end up with something less than what the ideal was. So that's the that's the negative. Um and if you think about it, these things have a long incubation and launch period, right? So you're gonna go through multiple administrations and so on. Trying to keep that vision alive through all those changes in office, extremely difficult. And that to me is the limiting factor. So you have to kind of lift it out of the political realm and let it stand, have a governance that is you need a sponsoring organization that can stay the course throughout all those changes. That's how I looked at how integral was on that project. We were like a sponsor organization. It's up to us to keep new school board members or new leadership at City Hall or new governmental, um, governor leadership or whatever, get keeping them in the conversation about what it is we're trying to do. And if you don't have that, but it's just another project, there's no way you're gonna be successful. We didn't anticipate, we underestimated what it would take to do that. And so every city doesn't have every city that we worked in doesn't have a centennial place, there are very few. Yeah. Okay, but that's the idea. And a lot of people have since copied it and put their spin on it and called it something else and so on. But for the most part, every time you see that, it's the model that we call the Atlanta model that is being tweaked and replicated and so on, but that's what it was.

SPEAKER_02 51:04

Yeah. We're like I it's it's a big topic of conversation, affordable housing right now, especially Andre's goal for what is it, 30,000? Twenty thousand. Yeah. Um curious, uh not just specifically him, but just the the overall conversation about affordable housing. Like where where do you feel like we are? I it does sound a lot more concentrated specifically on affordable units. Like this kind of mixed community you're talking about isn't as prevalent.

SPEAKER_00 51:32

Aaron Powell Yeah, correct. But I would say I say a couple of things. First of all, we don't consider ourselves as developing affordable housing. We develop housing, but in our housing solution, we try to seamlessly integrate a certain percentage of affordability or affordable units inside of it. So we try to make sure that it is affordable to people across a broad range of incomes. Is that affordable housing? I think not. It's housing, but just like if you buy a ticket on if you go take a flight on a plane and you ask everybody in the plane on that flight what they paid for their ticket, they're probably paid different amounts, right? You bought your ticket two months before the flight and you only paid $300 for it. I was trifling and lazy and I didn't buy it till the day before the flight and I paid $500. Right. But the fact that we have different economic circumstances around getting our ticket, we both get the same lousy bag of peanuts and so on. So you don't get the service is not supposed to be dictated by your economic circumstances, right? So that's the vision. And I think that that's the that to me is the critical thing. So when the mayor talks about 20,000 units of housing, I tend to think of it, and I think he believes this, but it's easier to say 20,000 units of housing. I think he knows, because he says it in a lot of other ways, it's not the housing that's the problem or the availability of affordable housing. It's housing that's affordable in communities where people with choice would choose to be. So just having the housing doesn't fix the problem. It's a community development problem. It needs to be where you can get access to a decent school, decent recreational amenities, uh neighborhood goods and services, et cetera, et cetera. If those things aren't there, and you've just put poor people in a place where none of that's there, you haven't changed their trajectory. So it has a lot to do with, I say it's about housing affordability in communities where people with choice would want to live. And until we solve that, we don't address the upward mobility problems that we have in this city. And I'm sure you know that if you're born poor in Atlanta, you have a 3-4% chance of escaping poverty in your lifetime. So what does that tell you? That tells you that that tells you that our communities are not nurturing, they don't develop. If if you come from outside, you can do well. But if you're here in entrenched poverty, the infrastructure, the system, the policies, the processes do not change that outcome for you. And you don't change that unless you change the communities where people are. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 54:43

Hey guys, before we continue, I just want to thank one of our partners, Corporate Environments. They're Georgia's leading full-service commercial furniture and workplace solutions providers. Whether you're building out a new office, redesigning, co-working, or managing large-scale tenor improvement projects, their team brings expertise in a full service way workplace strategy, interior design, project management, delivery, and installation. They've got locations in Atlanta, Birmingham, and Savannah, and they're helping businesses across Georgia create spaces that leave a lasting impression. You can learn more at corporateenvironments.com. And back to the show. Not much 20 years ago, or was it whether it went from two to four or two to three?

SPEAKER_00 55:32

You know, the if the answer to concentrated poverty is let it get so bad that people with means can come in and buy up the neighborhood and kick out the poor people. Those poor people are going somewhere else that's just as bad or worse. So you just keep shifting the problem. Yeah, I always liken it. I wrote an article for the ULI years ago, and I noted that many years ago, some very liberal, thoughtful, progressive individuals decided that bussing was a good idea. So they bust some kids that lived in um less attractive, demographically less attractive neighborhoods, high crime, concentrated poverty, et cetera, into other schools in more affluent communities, and two or three percent of the population was able to get access to a decent education, uh, which is dictated in this country based on your economics, right? And so they got a chance to do that. But there are 97 or 98 percent that are still back in the old neighborhood. So if you don't fix the old neighborhood, you're not solving the problem. And that's what we do in this country. So when I say the proverbial African village or heaven on earth, it's because um poverty in Antigua where I grew up wasn't a crime. But it is a crime here. If you're poor, you're gonna the sentence for the crime is you're gonna go to the worst school, you're gonna live in the worst um community environments, etc., etc., and you're gonna come into the world with your trajectory set down, and to get that trajectory up level or higher requires huge intervention, a lot of luck, et cetera, et cetera. And that's the sad part of what how poverty gets um dealt with in these quote unquote more developed parts of the world.

SPEAKER_04 57:42

And if you overlay race with that class, then it just is even more extreme.

SPEAKER_00 57:53

So that's social work, and you can only do but so much of that and say you're running a business. So that's why we are both community development and commercial real estate, because you can expend all your brain cells doing that work and never make any money to stay in business. So that's the right okay.

SPEAKER_02 58:13

But it's it's very intentional projects that help communities and stuff. It's um that'll add great impact. Man. Um I don't know what to ask. It's that's I mean, it's just a lot of I've heard these stats before, but I mean you've been around it and you've seen the impact of how projects help and how people make decisions and um it's just it's a heavy reality.

SPEAKER_00 58:40

It is there's not the I don't sense there's really the political will, because if your decision making is stuck in four-year windows, right? How do you reconcile that with projects that have a 20-year timeline, right? To incubate and launch. And so we are constantly making short-term decisions on issues that require long-term strategic approaches. And so this is not supposed to be depression central, right?

SPEAKER_02 59:19

No, no, no, no. I mean you're you're making strides to to help in communities, but they're just the realities that that take solutions, yeah. Yeah. Um I wanted to ask you about your involvement with Fannie Mae. Uh-huh. Curious how that all came about. And um You were on the board? You're the chair of the board for the yeah.

SPEAKER_00 59:40

Yeah, I was on the board. I went onto the board in December of 08, three months after the government put Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into conservatorship. And um I was there for ten years. The last five of the ten, I was the bo the chair of the board. Okay. Um and they basically got rid of the previous board when it was a fully publicly traded company um outside of conservatorship. And when it got put into conservatorship, the um Treasury Secretary recruited, on to George Bush, recruited a board chair, and then that board chair picked nine other um directors, and I was one of those nine, and ten of us were charged with trying to reform Fannie. The same thing was happening over at Freddie. And FANI at the time, Fannie's a $3.2 trillion financial it's the largest financial institution in the country by assets. And then Freddie Mac is $2.3 trillion. So between the two is $5.5 trillion, and it's really um a third of the GDP in those days came from uh real estate. So let's say housing, but real estate.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:15

And um, this is the the tale of the GFC.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:19

The GSEs? And it's Yeah. I mean the truth is the 54 million more 54 million mortgages and 18 million of them are backed by Fannie Mae. Fanny. So the GSEs uh drive the industry. Yeah. And so the global financial system was really at risk. And a lot of people, I don't think the people who worked at Fannie and Freddie ever got the credit they deserve for saving the global financial system. A lot of people went to work every day, vilified in the press about how they crashed the system when they didn't. I mean, the subprime mortgage market was not a Fannie and Freddie domain that largely existed outside of Fannie and Freddie because those mortgages didn't meet the qualified mortgage standards that could be processed by Fannie and Freddie. But Fannie and Freddie did enter the game by buying some of that junk and then putting their John Henry behind it. But the banks and in commercial banks and investment banks are the ones that blew that up.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:38

And the people who made money on the front end also made money on the back end when the system was being fixed. But Fanny and Freddie were the driving forces to um reforming housing finance. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:53

What were some of the initiatives? Like how how to how did you fix it?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:58

Well, yeah, it's a great point. Um, the truth is a lot of um let's say mortgage insurance companies, commercial banks, and so could have been taken under if Fannie and Freddie didn't have the staying power to gradually absorb the shocks in the system. And where did they get that staying power? Really from the federal government. Each enterprise had a $200 billion line of credit from Treasury. And that was used to slowly reform the system. Um a lot of stuff was on the written on the we had what's called a rep and warrant model. You're representing to Fanny that you're giving them mortgages that meet their criteria. And if you don't, then you're gonna have to buy them back from Fannie and Freddie. So if it proves out that you gave them bad mortgages, but we didn't own the right mortgages. Fanny and Freddie didn't on the right mortgages in the first instance because we're secondary market players. So and we didn't have a screen for evaluating all those mortgages coming into into the house because we had the rep and warrant model. So if you lied to me, Tim, here, take back these 10,000 mortgages and give me a check for such and such. Well, if you had if you did that for too many mortgages and you had to write a check, you don't have the money to buy back those mortgages. So if I insisted you do, I could sink you. And so if I allowed it to be a gradual process by which you would absorb the losses you should have had, then you had an ability over time to stay the course and survive, right? And so Fanny and Freddie ended up being um big players in managing digestion of the pay. Exactly, exactly. And you know, the the Fed bought Fannie and Freddie mortgages, which injected liquidity into the system, so that helps. So there are a lot of players that had a hand in saving the global financial, global economy. Yeah. Um It was a thankless job. I mean I can imagine.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:36

All people think about is the crash that happened.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:39

That's right. I was told consider it public service for eighteen months while I was on the board for ten years. Yeah, decades of the yeah. And by the way, they're still in conservatorship. Wow. Oh yeah. Even though the enterprises have long since been reformed. Yeah. Enterprises uh have been reformed since But the get in the I say twenty twelve, maybe twenty thirteen, fourteen, but still tenure. You needed liquidity to build up liquidity.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:12

And so um anyway, it was an experience that was really Yeah, I'm sure you get a quite a perspective on how the world works and how global economies and I had spent seven years before that on the Fed board here.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:27

So I was on the board of the Atlanta Fed. So I w had a 17-year window that demystified how the financial infrastructure works. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:42

I'm curious if if you had a couple of bullet points to change. Obviously, you can't crawl into people's minds, but for the general public, like what you understand about how the world works, like maybe maybe in your own kind of reflection, like what what were some of the big lessons you learned?

SPEAKER_00 1:06:56

Aaron Powell Honestly, it's common sense. Um you can't spend more than you make before you have to pay the piper. So however you manage your checkbook at home, it's the same thing with the governments. If you start getting creative and taking on undue risks when the day comes that you have to pay the piper, if you don't have that money, you're out of business.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:22

So I can't we can't avoid what do we do about $38 trillion? Yeah. Exactly. What's your take on that?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:31

I will just stop it right here because you're trying to get me too political, but let's just say we've been living beyond our means for a long, long time. Yeah. And as long as you but as long as you are the global reserve currency, you think you can print your way out of it. The minute you stop being the global reserve currency, and there are others that take a chunk out of that. All of a sudden you have to face the prospect that you may really have to come clean and come good on your obligations. That picture isn't pretty. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:21

Hey guys, before we get back to the episode, I just want to thank one of our partners, USA Cabling Technologies and Solutions. Alex Morris and his team have been incredible partners for us and actually helped us bring our studio setup to life here. And also got to give a shout-out to Danny Pratt. If you're building out an office, upgrading your audiovisual systems, or need any low voltage solutions, these are the people to call. Their team is professional, reliable, and truly top-tier at what they do. To learn more, visit USACablingTech.com. Now back to the show. Like how would that play out? If I somebody called our note today, like for 30 years, like do we just I don't know, US government goes bankrupt?

SPEAKER_00 1:08:59

Is it China or somebody that comes in and says that for people that are a lot smarter than I am, but let's just say that in much the same way we advise people through the um World Bank about or the IMF, let's say, on their need to practice austerity to save their currency and the economy. Nobody's coaching and counseling us, but we could use that coaching and counseling. I just don't know if we have the appetite or mindset as a society to have to hear that hard truth and act on it.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:46

Right. Right. Well, we have election cycles and nobody cares what happens after they're out of office. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:53

Absolutely. That's that four-year window I'm talking about. Right. And I think countries like China think about a hundred years and we think about the next quarter. Yeah. Right. So we'll make decisions that are good for the stock market, but they may be horrible for Main Street. Right. And you know, that's that's how we operate. So I try to stay out of that. Sure, yeah. I am not built to be a politician. No. Trent Clint Eastwood said a man should know his limitations. I know my that's that's wisdom. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:28

I hear that. Well, um yeah, I just I thought I'd at least try. I mean, you guess you've you've been in some rooms and had some conversations and heard some stuff. Um All right. So we talked about Atlanta model, Hope Six, I've got Centennial Place. Um a couple I'd I'd love to hit on um in no particular order. We got two peach tree, I'd love to talk about assembly, and then um Atlanta Medical Center. And whichever one you want to go out.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:55

I'd I'd love to get kind of the update and yeah, the the emotional projects get a lot of the attention, like the Centennial Places of the World. But the commercial real estate projects have a different kind of brain damage. You know, a lot of our projects uh we we find for some reason or another, I think it's you know how some people say, How do I always attract the wrong kind of man or the wrong kind of woman or the whatever? I always seem to end up in these relationships. Or sometimes I say, what is it that we always attract uh these projects that are brain damage, right? Yeah, yeah. Um and so, but I think part of it is we tend as a company to look to solve problems. And that's not the best way to run a business. So our challenge is managing the sort of easy in the box projects, the mix of that with the projects that are gonna be a couple years of really scratching the brain to see if there's really a project there that can be solved or solution there. And um so assembly's version of that was six years, seven years, vacant site, 4.4 million square feet of building sitting fallow. GM had shuttered the plant, 165 acres, 90 acres um on concrete, um, no infrastructure because it was a plant. So you don't have to be 98 acres of concrete. Yeah. Jeez. Um and so then the question is, what the hell do you do with that? Yeah. Right? And GM had had a couple of unpleasant experiences, so they were not looking to entertain any more developers. But we came in with our own pitch. A number of people helped us because we spent some time trying to analyze the salvage for the 4.4 million square feet of buildings. And some of the proceeds of that would go towards purchasing the pri the site. Okay. So it was a purely per um private transaction, right? You're debt and equity, you're buying the bell the property from GM. And so the salvage value helped to soften that blow. Um, but you had environmental concerns, you had neighborhood issues and so on. Anyway, and how were you going to fund the infrastructure to take that 165 acres and make it developable? The roads, the sewer, the general public infrastructure. So we we figured out how to solve those things. We bought the bill bought the property, we recycled 106,000 tons of material and another 110,000 tons of concrete. Um we uh funded the first fifty-five million dollars of public infrastructure to get enough going and came up with a pretty creative structure to do that. Um built the fur the st a studio, Third Rail Studios, and we did that really as owners. Didn't know anything about um the business. Yeah. But we built Third Rail and owned it for about five or so years. Uh but we really did it just to activate the site while we were trying to solve the public infrastructure problem. Yeah. And we put it on the edge so we could leverage the fact that there's already a road there, so we didn't need the infrastructure. And a lot of things got filmed there. Um Rampage. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We did Rampage, we did um I say we did, we owned it and they leased it to film it. Rampage, Mile 22 at Mark Wahlberg, Ballad of Richard Jewell that Clint Eastwood did, um Good Girls. Is it good girls?

SPEAKER_03 1:15:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:25

Um, did you ever meet any of the stars I came to? No, and Ozark, three three seasons of Ozark. No, we didn't none of those. In fact, um people in the office would say, Oh, can I meet Wayne Johnson? I said, Hell, I can't meet Wayne Johnson. Yeah, I just don't have to. I'm just leasing the space. Anyway. Um, but long and short of it all is we did that um with holder properties, did uh the corporate headquarters for um Soda Simmons bedding. We sold off a 20-acre parcel. We did a studio uh while you're talking. I'm gonna I'm just gonna bring it up. Um It's it's all the way. It's door city of Doorville.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:07

Yeah, we've got we started doing this on on Google Earth Pro. They've got like a timeline. Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:13

Let's see um, Georgia. Let's go here.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:22

And you can flip back and kind of see how things have come along.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:25

And once we got it, once we solved those fundamental problems, a whole lot of people had great ideas about what was possible. Yeah. And so what I the way I think about it is we enabled other people to have a vision that they didn't have before we did that work. Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:43

This is 2007. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:45

So this is we bought it in 2014.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:49

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:50

Let me flip ahead. And it still looked like this. This was still Yes. How many square feet you say?

SPEAKER_00 1:16:57

4.4 million square feet of buildings was on the site. So yeah, so then after we did about a hundred and well, about thirty-eight acres. Uh thirty-eight, somewhere thereabouts, we were approached about selling a hundred and twenty or so acres. And we did to Gray Media.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:25

Okay. I I was always curious how that came about.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:27

And so they're So and then six months later, um five or six months later, we sold third third rail studios to them. Got it. So they were two different transactions. Okay. So talk talk to me about the site here. So it's it's all of what you outlined. Exactly. Stop right there. Yes, exactly. No, that's it. It doesn't include this little Um No, that's it comes down. You can just come down that road. Yeah. Okay. You can come down that whole road right there. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:56

Okay. So 2014 and then I mean a couple years of cleaning it up. I'm just going to pan through. That's wow. Okay. So 2014 to 2015, you'll have to.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:06

Took it all down. Jeez. In one year. What a big project. Yeah. And that's when we recycled all that stuff.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:13

We had Mason Zimmerman in here, Pope and Land a couple weeks ago. Sure. They talked about um this like stadium that they took down and they had a huge paintball war like the the night before they blew it up or something. I'm curious. Did y'all ever play like some hide and seek something? I mean, 4.4 million, you wouldn't find anybody. Like, no, not just too many.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:31

And there were 300 bicycles in there because it was like a little city. Oh, so if you need to get across. And it had baskets on the bikes, so you could put throw your backpack. Yeah, exactly. You put tools and so on in the ride. Yeah, it was really cool, actually. Wow. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:52

So y'all took it. Oh, that's so crazy.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:56

And then okay, the rest of it, this is we sold that out parcel that you see up there.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:00

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:01

And that became that's where you have, I think it's Avanta or whatever you call it. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:06

That's the dealership.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:07

The dealership. So we sold that 20 acres.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:09

Okay. So that's May of 2016. Okay. And then okay, it looks like they've built that.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:14

So they built that. That's right. And uh This is actually pretty cool. Yeah, man.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:18

You can kind of see it how it how it all evolved. Um Dude, what is that? You have like a pond here? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:24

It's uh just a retention pond. Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:26

All right, so November 2016, March 2017. So yeah, you really just sold off a terrific little corner here.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:34

Yes. And it was contiguous to stuff that helped us pay down the debt that we have.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:40

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:41

All right. Uh March 2018. I keep thinking about it. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:45

We're starting to you can see we're destroying some concrete, grinding up some material, but go ahead. Okay. Uh that's and by the way, we put in a park right along the rail. We call it rail park. Oh, cool. Um so we started to create some infrastructure.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:04

Here's 2019.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:05

Okay, you can see some of the infrastructure of the park being put in. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:10

Uh that's 2020.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:12

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:14

2021. Um wait there.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:20

Third Wheel Studios. Sorry, where is it?

SPEAKER_02 1:20:22

Oh, great. Is this kind of like the first whole thing? No, no, down here. No, down there.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:26

Is this a good one? Yes. Third Rail Studios. Got it. So what we what we actually did was it was an existing building. We cut it in half. The second half we put in a forty-foot ceiling height. That sounds good. Right. And the front part was where the milling and other equipment stuff. So that's where the work was done. And that parking lot next to it was how we kept that correct.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:57

All right. This is 2022, 20 Wow. Yeah, 2023. This is the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:03

Okay, so now we sold in 21, late 21. Okay, so they had about two years. Um Third Rail Studios in September of 21. Okay. And then Gray Media put in all of those studios studios.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:21

These office buildings are beautiful.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:24

Yeah, they are. Um And and by the way, this building down here is Sarda Simmons bedding. That's right. Right there.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:33

And so was it this road and north that you all sold?

SPEAKER_00 1:21:37

Or do you sell the entire We sold that what you just outlined. Um right up in the very top left, right there. Yeah. That's a senior housing site that we took out for ourselves. Okay. And that's now Yes. And that's now a senior housing development.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:58

So if you went to Yeah, let's go forward a little bit. Uh there you go.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:05

So you see it L-shaped right there. Yes, coming along. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:10

And then 24 So end of 24, they've they had it pretty cleaned up.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:16

Yes. So they they have this section down here, the bottom, that they hadn't done anything with but their studios and office space and so on on the other side of the tracks. What that means by the Um I haven't been up there in a minute.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:31

This is still what it looks like today. They've got probably I mean, movie industry is what it is now. Probably not calling for another set of stages, but there's still a lot of So that's the story on assembly.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:45

So you know you create the opportunity for the site to be back in play. You do whatever you want to do. You can sell Remaining Land or you can just keep developing.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:56

We opted to do a sale. It helped it work for the investor for us to do the sale. And so we did.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:04

Yeah. And there's a lot of value to having a clean site. Yeah. Yeah. Um okay. What's the latest on um AMC, Atlanta Medical over here?

SPEAKER_00 1:23:15

Um it's demolished. The site is now well it's not fully demolished, there's a little bit left, but um the one the principals in the firm, Eric Pinckney, has been front and center on that. Okay. Um I think you know Eric. But that those buildings are down. Um there's one building yet to be done, and then there's some leveling and cleaning of the site. We have to go through activation as we work through the plan for what the what's coming on the other side of the demolition.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:46

Okay. So the like the end goal still is to be figured out.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:50

Like you all have an idea, but we have an idea, but it's not, you know, it's not the best time in the market. Uh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:55

So it's kind of expensive and banks. Yeah. Um that I mean, it's still an exciting project for a great neighborhood.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:04

It's uh and it's a wonderful piece of real estate.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:07

Yeah. Yeah, it is. Like right next to Freedom Parkway and all the highway. Yes. Um can you comment on Two Peachtree where where that project is sitting at?

SPEAKER_00 1:24:17

I lost a lot more brain cells there. I was brought into that project really by I've toured it a couple times.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:23

Oh, you have? I know I know what you're dealing with. Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:26

Um Mac Reese, great partner. Yeah. T. Dallas Smith, Dallas Smith, and Dexter Warrior, and then um Shania Lalani. Yeah. Yeah. For On the Ground. So those are the four partners Atlantic Companies, Integral, Dallas's Company, and Lalani Ventures. And let's say Atlantic and Integral are equal large partners, and then T. D. Allah Smith and Company and um Lalani Ventures are smaller partners in it.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:01

Like you all have skin in the game, or are you just Oh, a lot of skin in the game.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:03

Okay. More skin than makes sense. And a lot of um my partners internally, we have way too much skin in the game because you're putting money after an idea the marketplace has already told you what downtown is worth. And they say it's not worth a lot, right? And so you're spending a lot of money to try and change the opportunity and trajectory for downtown. So without any real clear path to what the subsidy is gonna be to make it happen. Because really, when you get right down to it, it's an economic development project. Right. Office, nobody's building, there's a reason you don't see a lot of office buildings being built downtown and a lot of residential being built. You see nothing. Correct. And so if it hasn't happened in Midtown, you know it's even further away from happening in downtown. Yeah. Um so it's a heavy lift, and we are trying to be very creative. Um so we, and uh the we is the royal, we the four partners, partner firms, um, to try and make that happen. And we we think we have a good vision for what it could be, but I'm not really ready to to talk about it, even though it's long overdue for us to have a clarity of vision around it, but it's it's not the best time in the real estate market, so you're dealing with a challenging issue in a challenging environment. But it's a 41-story, one million square foot building.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:41

What are you gonna do with that boiler at the top? I've been up there. That's that thing is yeah. I don't know how they got that up there.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:49

Um it was a different time, right? Yeah. Um But no, it's uh that's part of the issue, of course. Your whole MEP infrastructure has to be needs some work. Yeah. So it's not uh let's just say I hope I'm in this position, having a conversation um nine months from now or ten months from now, and I'm saying, oh yeah, we closed last month and we're on the way and everything is fine. So if this was a a year later, hopefully that's what we're gonna do.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:24

We'll have to have you back here. You don't have to, but that's good. Okay. Um okay, so that's that's coming along and um you know, a stacked team that y'all are working with a lot of.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:35

Yeah, and Investor Land has been a great partner. The city's a great partner. I mean, they're probably frustrated because it's been a while. Um, but they can be more frustrated than we are because we're actually doing the work on it. So but it's uh it's a project worth doing because if you can bring five points back, you're saving downtown.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:00

And there's no fully saving downtown without doing that. And I don't think people um unless you're really looking closely, I don't think people understand that that reality.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:14

The main and main of of Marta, of transportation, of course. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:19

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:20

Wow. All right. Well, looking forward to the next next time we talk about it. What else can I ask you about? I we've had a lot. You've had really an incredible career. I know you'll have a lot of projects going on. You're in I think before we were talking about you're in a couple other states. You have some other stuff going on.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:36

Yeah, we are in we have offices in Miami. Yeah. And Carolina's really out of Durham, but out of Durham, we do North and South Carolina. We have major TOD project in Texas, just outside of Dallas. And then we have projects projects that have been developed that we continue to own in a lot of other cities. We've developed in about 20 cities, and we have active projects in a half a dozen cities.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:10

Yeah. Quite a quite a footprint. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:14

All right, I gotta ask this.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:24

You know, the good news if there is good news, the good news is that uh most municipalities understand that um cities, public-private partnerships um is definitely the way to go. The use of public-private partnerships because cities have to be more intentional in causing development to happen in a period or in an environment where labor costs are too high, material costs are too high, cost of money is too high. So deals don't really pencil without some level of s subsidy or support in one way, shape, or form. So the cities that are progressive, strategic, intellectually strong in terms of what kind of tools can be put to use to help stimulate development, those cities will do well. I think Atlanta's always been sort of a leader, front and center. And so I think Atlanta will come out well. There's good mayoral leadership, there's a the mayor's very hard working God knows he's out there. Absolutely, I don't have that kind of energy. Um But I think what's on the horizon is I infrastructure is in the city. So I think if you're in the urban development space, things may be slow, but they'll come back and they'll be some of the first to come back because the demand and population and so on is here. We have some headwinds with our public education infrastructure and some of our physical infrastructure, water and sewer and so on, but those are being dealt with. I think the the opportunity, I like the fact that we're in urban development. Even though urban is changing in definition, some of the suburbs are also now. Yeah, urban.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:34

We were talking earlier. Yeah, they're you got Roswell, you got Woodstock, they're all cool now. They all have these cool little downtowns. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:41

Um can you brag on yourself a little bit? You got this four-pillar award from Council of Quality Growth, I feel like what is that award? Uh there was this I think it came out what, like last week or two weeks ago. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:52

Yes. I mean it's it's flattering. Um I think of it as the the Oscars for business and civic leadership, just in terms of recognition. So I'm I'm thrilled, I'm pleased, and you know, um I appreciate the fact that other people, totally unrelated, have a view of the body of work that we do at the company and that I've done over the years. And you know, I I thank them for that recognition. But I'm very clear that whatever I have done, there are three hundred employees at Integral and a lot of partners and so on that are really part of that same award. Yeah. And so, you know, it's uh easy to pound your chest and and overstate what it is that you've done and not give appropriate credit or attribution to the other people that help to do what we do.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:03

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:04

Well, uh you've had a great impact on the city, so it uh definitely speaks for itself. But um I I can ask you about all sorts of things. I we have a lot of students that listen to this podcast. So I'm curious if you have any advice for them as they're kind of getting out of school and trying to find their way. I've still come back to this fact you got put in charge of all construction at HJR at 2425.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:29

Like, I wouldn't think that people should look at that as their bar. That's like that was the rare exception. I think I got a rare, rare, rare, rare, rare exception. That's uh absolutely um No, I mean, you know, from my perspective, you the best thing you can do is figure out who you are and what I mean by who you are is what it is that what is it that makes you tick. Yeah. Because if you're doing work that makes you tick, you'll be excellent at it because you'll give to it what you need to give to it. Yeah. Um if you're just chasing a buck, that's not a high bar and it's not very fulfilling. But you'll take a lot of time before you realize that it wasn't gonna be very fulfilling. And you may think, okay, I have some money, but you'll still be trying to figure out what you want to be when you grow up. So the sooner you can the more you can invest in figuring that out early, the better your chances of being successful in life. And I use success in quotes because only a person can determine whether they're successful. Nobody else can tell you that you're successful. If I wanted to be um uh the best surgeon in the world and I end up being a trillionaire selling computers, am I successful? I don't know. It depends on if you abandoned your value system. Maybe you can call yourself successful, but you're not the best surgeon in the world. So if that's what was your if that was your ambition and you didn't do it, somebody else may tell you you're successful, but you know to yourself that's not what you wanted. Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:18

Didn't did you ever hear the story of um as Dave Mustaine the uh this is uh you don't seem to be the type to listen to Metallica or Metallica? I don't maybe you are so like there's uh there was a guitarist for Metallica. You've you've heard of that. So um he got kicked out really early on. Um Dave Mustaine, and he was just furious and felt all betrayed and whatnot, and he went and made this band called Megadeth, which I mean this is like 80s death metal music, but like um none of which I I got in Metallica for a little bit, but I couldn't really get into Megadeth. Both of them super successful. Dave Mustaine, like 30 years later, after this whole debacle happened, got interviewed. I think it was like a guitar center interview, or maybe it was some some Rolling Stones article, but um, they asked him about this thing that happened between him and Metallica. And I mean he's sort of like tearing up out of like after multi-platinum. Multi-platinum records, like he was still successful. He still saw this bar of like he was supposed to be a part of this other band. And um there's this book that talks about a very similar story. So the Beatles had a a drummer early on. It wasn't Ringo Switch. Wasn't Ringo, okay. And they they kicked him out. He was this other good-looking little British kid. They didn't like him, so they they kicked him out. And obviously the Beatles go on to become the most successful band probably ever. And they a very similar interview happened. They found this guy that got booted, interviewed him, and he was like, I've had the best life ever. My I've I've got three kids, I've got family, and like, you know, there's a twinkle in his eye, and he's like, if I were to gone, you you know, you see, they've had insane success, but all the drama that's happened with Angular Beatles. So it was just like a very like a calibrating moment. It is it's the bar that you define. Like what is your success?

SPEAKER_00 1:37:13

It's only a it's a personal metric, right? Yeah. And don't let anybody else tell you when you start believing the hype, that's when you get in trouble. Yeah. Yeah. Striving all that. Buy a couple mirrors and look in the mirror.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:28

There you go. A couple. Yeah. Put them all over. Yeah. Um Edgar, this has been awesome. I I really appreciate your time. Thanks for coming down to the studio and um for all that you do for the city and really excited to see what's ahead for the firm and and projects. So Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:42

It's my pleasure. Yeah, man.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:44

Okay. Y'all, thanks for tuning in to Sunbelt Developers. We've got more coming. We're right at the halfway point in season two. Um, and in a couple weeks we're gonna go tour Centennial Yards and have a a construction update before World Cup. But um, got a lot more to come and appreciate you tuning in.