How Do You Make a Place?

Lessons in Placemaking from Three Very Different Projects

Oct 03, 2024
∙ Paid
9
  • Share this post with a friend

    Since you liked this post, why not share it to help spread the word?

Three distinct projects; three rather different developers.

L to R: Camp North End (Hemmerdinger), Burj Khalifa (Rodriguez), Seabrook (Roloff)

The first, Damon Hemmerdinger, Co-President of ATCO, could have come, to borrow a phrase from one of our current presidential candidates, from central casting. Wonkish and cerebral in both appearance and affect, it wasn’t at all surprising to learn that he was a New York developer who had made his way out of the city, first to Austin, and more recently to Charlotte, where he undertook a massive redevelopment project to create a contemporary live, work, play environment.

The second, Rich Rodriguez, COO of Construction and Development at Amherst, was a former Navy SEAL. Where Hemmerdinger was a bit reserved, Rodriguez had a gregarious and commanding demeanor that was perfect for either leading soldiers in a war or overseeing a construction crew in a seemingly quixotic endeavor in the Middle East to create the world’s tallest building.

The third, Casey Roloff, CEO of Seabrook, had the laid back persona of a surfer, but the imagination of an artist; the kind of developer that wasn’t satisfied with creating just a project or even placemaking, but wanted to build an entire town along a deserted piece of Washington coastline from scratch.

For all their contrasts, these three developers, who each gave a presentation as part of the Vision Stage curated by Thesis Driven at this year’s Blueprint Conference in Las Vegas, shared something: the ability to see how an entire place could be fashioned from something inchoate. And they each offered insights that those who hope to follow in their footsteps could benefit from, including:

  • The tools that can create a distinctive community

  • How innovation is relative and based on context

  • The draw of creating something unique

  • The importance of possessing a clarion vision that you’re working towards

Today’s letter will dive into each of their projects through the stories and lessons they shared at Blueprint.

Damon Hemmerdinger and Brad Hargreaves on stage at Blueprint. Image via Blueprint.

Camp North End, Charlotte

It’s a testament to how much placemaking has evolved in the past two decades that a project like ATCO’s Camp North End — which involves the redevelopment of a 76-acre former Ford factory turned US military production facility into a mixed-use live, work, play environment — could almost feel conventional at this point.

Camp North End. Photo from LandDesign.

Like so many of its brethren across the country, Camp North End features a familiar mix of residential, office, and retail spaces. Again, like many other projects, residential is the prime mover here; at least 1,800 units are planned, with the first 300 to debut this fall. There are already 25 food and beverage operators on site as well as 20 office tenants.

At the end of his presentation, Hemmerdinger revealed what he referred to as "Five Secrets of Placemaking." To wit:

  1. Events

  2. Local retailers

  3. Art

  4. Green space

  5. String lights (seriously)

None of these "secrets" are exactly revolutionary, but they bear repeating and some examination all the same, particularly given the somewhat unique, or at least particularly thoughtful, way that ATCO and Hemmerdinger approached them.

Events are a well-known way to activate a development and bring people into it even during its earliest stages. While Hemmerdinger highlighted some things that developers need to be aware of about events — for instance, property owners who want to play music must obtain a special public performance license — the benefits of using an event to foster goodwill and engagement with the community are undeniable.

Moreover, as Hemmerdinger pointed out, events are effectively free advertising, music licensing fees notwithstanding. "[We’re] using other peoples’ marketing budget and other peoples’ content to bring people to our site and make it into a place where retailers could do business."

As for those local retailers, Hemmerdinger emphasized the importance of making sure the retail mix is "curated very carefully." He further advocated for leasing to retailers that "are all startups in one way or another" and, by dint of their unique nature, "possess the [ability] to bring people to a place that they've never been before."

Art is also key to creating a sense of identity in a place, but Hemmerdinger clarified that it’s not just about hiring a trendy street artist to create murals, though that certainly helps. But what’s really critical is finding the aspects of a place that you can unearth — in ATCO’s case, literally — that are unique to a development.

"We've used features that we've excavated on the site like big tanks and concrete slabs to create new interesting objects and interesting things to interact with in the space," Hemmerdinger said.

Regarding greenery, Hemmerdinger’s advice was not to skimp on it. "We've planted a formerly very asphalted, bleak industrial landscape with thousands and thousands of native plants and let them start taking back over the campus," he said.

As for those string lights, Hemmerdinger explained they were a "shorthand for lots of other placemaking tools," but there’s no denying the warmth and hygge they foster, though developers may want to be wary of leaning too heavily into design trends that could soon be viewed as oversaturated.

Outside of these recommendations, one of Hemmerdinger’s most interesting insights came during the Q&A with Thesis Driven Editor-in-Chief, Brad Hargreaves, that followed the presentation. When Hargreaves inquired as to why Hemmerdinger chose to build in the northern part of Charlotte when the city’s growth has largely headed south, the developer’s response was matter of fact.

"This is where the site was," he said. "We couldn't pick it up and move it somewhere else … and it’s a big, meaty site that would really allow us to create something special."

That observation, while seemingly obvious, is something developers of large-scale projects shouldn’t take for granted. In a country where, at least in urban areas, there’s so little raw land available, it’s best not to look a 76-acre site in the mouth. If you build it, and you build it in the right way — with art, hip local retailers, greenery, and those all-important string lights — the residents will probably come.

Burj Khalifa, Dubai

From a former Ford factory in Charlotte, we traversed nearly 8,000 miles for the next presentation, which was centered around the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

Burj Khalifa. Image from AllPlan.

Rodriguez, the former US Navy SEAL, became involved in the project after his team with Emaar Dubai was seconded to become part of the Burj Khalifa project. Rodriguez was appointed to oversee the construction of the world’s tallest building — a project that, at the time he inherited it, was over budget, behind schedule, and had workforce issues.

Like his predecessor on the Vision Stage, Rodriguez narrowed his insights down to five key lessons:

  1. You are who you hang out with

  2. Operationalize your innovation

  3. Innovate to a vision

  4. Innovation is relative

  5. Protect your mavericks

The first of these insights, as Rodriguez acknowledged, is the kind of wisdom that parents have been passing down for generations, but that doesn’t make it any less true. It was also a sentiment that was echoed by Hemmerdinger, who commented that "I have to know a lot about or a little bit about a lot of things, but I've got a group of real experts."

For Rodriguez, this meant surrounding himself with people who "make you very uncomfortable at the table because they're smarter than you are" and are "thinking of things you haven't thought of yet." This is the kind of advice that seems a bit vague in theory but is essential in practice.

For his second piece of advice, Rodriguez offered an example that was far removed from his time in Dubai — at least temporally, if not geographically — when he participated in what became Operation Desert Storm during the Iraq War.

According to Rodriguez, the precursor operation to Desert Storm, known as Desert Shield, represented the first time the Global Positioning System (GPS) was ever utilized on a battlefield. This enabled Rodriguez and his team to map out targets with incredible accuracy, so that by the time Desert Storm kicked off, "It was essentially over in 24 hours," Rodriguez said. "Because for six months, we'd done nothing but mark targets with a 10-digit grid, which gets you down to one square meter of accuracy."

How does this connect to development? As Rodriguez explained, it wasn’t the technology that was new, but how it was used. "That piece of technology existed. It existed for navy ships, it existed for aircraft, but it had never been thought of to get put down to the individual soldier in the field," he said. From a developer’s perspective, this means ensuring that innovations reach the part of the organization that can utilize them most effectively to impact P&L.

Rodriguez’s third lesson, innovate to a vision, could also seem a bit amorphous. He contextualized it by using Dubai’s growth as an example. "In one generation, [Dubai] transformed themselves from a pearl diving, small, oil resource constrained [country] into one of the world’s great financial centers," he said. This was possible because they had a long-term vision they were working towards, and Rodriguez advocated that all developers, but particularly those of large-scale projects, would benefit from emulating that approach.

And that sentiment was echoed by both the developer who preceded him on stage, as well as the gentleman who followed him. If you don’t know where you’re going, if you don’t have a vision, you’re not going to end up anywhere.

To illustrate his fourth edict, "innovation is relative," Rodriguez described how when he initially arrived in Dubai, schedules were provided to him after the fact. If he wanted to see the schedule for the upcoming month’s work, he had to wait until the month was over. This seemed to be a significant factor in why the project was behind schedule.

One of Rodriguez’s mentors told him the solution to the problem was obvious: they shouldn’t be working with monthly, or even weekly, schedules — they needed a daily schedule.

That kind of approach is commonplace on smaller development projects, but virtually unheard of in a large-scale project akin to Burj Khalifa. At first, Rodriguez’s team balked, but eventually he wore them down. And that minor change, an innovation that wasn’t really innovative at all, made all the difference.

"Innovation doesn't have to be created from nothing," Rodriguez remarked. "It just has to be new to your problem set."

Rodriguez’s final piece of advice, to "protect your mavericks," centered around Michael Scott, who Rodriguez recruited to run all the landscaping and hardscaping elements on the project. Scott "had some sharp elbows; he pissed a lot of people off." But he was effective. He successfully resuscitated a fountain project, which was inspired by and ultimately dwarfed the famed example from Las Vegas’ Bellagio Hotel, that was of particular import to one of the project’s main stakeholders — the designer, Giorgio Armani, who was opening his first-ever hotel on the site.

In a sense, that final piece of advice from Rodriguez was really another facet of his first stipulation; not only do you have to surround yourself with people smarter than you, but you must enable them to work effectively too.

Seabrook, Washington

Perhaps the most inspiring presentation of the day came from someone that approached development — and town building, in particular — as an almost artistic endeavor.

Seabrook, Washington. Image courtesy Seabrook.

Roloff, the CEO of Seabrook, began his presentation not with a tidy list of lessons he had to impart, but with a lamentation for what the automobile hath wrought in America.

"It turned our built environment upside down," he said. "They eliminated sidewalks, eliminated alleys, and then we started separating people based on their demographic, their income."

Home construction became centered around the garage, instead of the hearth; commute times escalated; people saw their neighbors less and became more sedentary.

"Suburban sprawl was supposed to be something really great to improve our lives, [but it] ended up being something that really made our lives worse," Roloff said.

But there were alternatives from before the advent of the car. "Places like Carmel, Santa Barbara, Nantucket, Telluride; all these places have a magical quality because we were using urban planning principles and we put the pedestrian first over the automobile because it didn't exist," he said. Before adding, "there was an artistic approach in the way we designed our towns."

It was that spirit of creativity and community that Roloff wanted to bring back to the American town. By his own admission, he was perhaps an unlikely agent for such change. He "barely graduated high school" before enrolling in a community college where he met his wife. That relationship inspired him to want to improve himself, but attending a four-year college was too expensive, so he started a home painting business, and then he started building homes himself, and eventually he built an entire neighborhood.

But he didn’t want to stop there. Inspired by the community of Seaside, Florida, which he viewed as the first "real town" built in America since the introduction of the automobile, he took his profits from that first neighborhood, $2.5 million, and plowed it into the purchase of 250 acres along a "forgotten coastline" two hours from Seattle.

It was there that he created the community of Seabrook: 600 homes and counting, 40,000 square feet of retail, (an additional 20,000 square feet of retail is planned), "amazing public spaces," and abundant sidewalks and bike lanes.

"When people come to Seabrook, they usually don't get back in their car until they have to leave," Roloff said.

At the end of his presentation, Roloff extracted a few nuggets of wisdom from his experience. His first piece of advice: ignore everyone else’s advice.

"One of the first pieces of advice I was given as a developer was, ‘whatever you do, Casey, don't live in your community,’" he said. "I did the exact opposite. Living in our community is part of what's made our town so successful; it's the place that my kids love, our family loves."

In terms of design principles, he recommended "timeless, over trendy. I can pretty much go through any subdivision and tell you what decade it was built in, and that is not timeless."

Casey Roloff at Blueprint. Image via Blueprint.

Finally, he was an advocate for a slow and steady approach that eschewed debt and quick profits in favor of long-term value. He and his wife have maintained 75% equity in the project since its inception, and their initial $2.5 million investment is now valued at $150 million, while Seabrook generates $100 million in top-line revenue every year.

And he’s not done yet.

"Now we want to take our playbook and our prototype and actually scale this and build more towns across the country," Roloff said.

Common Themes

On the surface, these three developers and their projects may not seem to have a lot in common. What does the world’s tallest tower have in common with a coastal American town? And what traits do either of those projects share with the redevelopment of a former US army facility into a live, work, play environment?

And, yet, there are strands of insight and learning that overlap. Consider Rodriguez’s notion that "innovation is relative." In a sense, it’s quite aligned with Roloff’s approach to resurrecting a pre-automobile version of what an American town should look like. In both cases, they took something familiar and applied it in a new context. What’s innovative isn’t the process or even the project itself, but how and where it’s implemented.

Similarly, most of Hemmerdinger’s advice — whether it was about string lights, hosting events, or art installations — centered around the notion of creating a community. And that sense of community was also at the heart of what Roloff achieved. It’s not about the sidewalks or the walkability; those are just tools to foster community.

The imperative to create something truly unique was also central to all three projects. For Hemmerdinger it manifested in the slate of retailers and restaurants his team brought to the project; for Roloff it was about creating a town that embodied the cliche that "they don’t make them like they used to;" and for Rodriguez it was too many elements to count, from the first-ever Armani hotel to a singular fountain display.

And then there’s that somewhat nebulous notion of "vision." Of the three developers, only Rodriguez spoke to it directly, instructing the audience to "innovate to a vision," but it was at the heart of both Hemmerdinger and Roloff’s presentations as well.

There’s no better word for the ability to look at a 76-acre abandoned military facility and see a place where the denizens of Charlotte could live, work, and play. Or the clairvoyance to glimpse an untouched coastline and see an entire town where generations of families could experience a novel way of life that isn’t actually new at all.

Ultimately, that’s the most profound trait these three developers shared, and the most important thing anyone who wants to emulate them needs to remember: it all starts with a vision, a dream you're working towards. It’s something that, at first, you can only see in your mind, but that, through perseverance, can be transformed from an idea into a place.

—Daniel P. Schmergel

Recommend Thesis Driven to your readers

Exploring the trends driving the future of the real estate industry
9
  • Share this post with a friend

    Since you liked this post, why not share it to help spread the word?
A guest post by
Daniel Schmergel has worked in the real estate industry for 20 years, most recently as the Managing Editor of LoopNet. He is an independent investor and has previously been a college professor, music critic, and editor-in-chief of an online magazine.