 Well, good evening. My name is Dale McKeel. I'm a bicycle and pedestrian coordinator with the City of Durham. I want to welcome you to this event tonight, and thank you for coming out on a somewhat cold and dreary evening. For many years, the Durham community has had a dream of developing a trail along the Beltline Corridor, which is a 2.2 mile unused rail corridor that's on the west and north sides of downtown. We received a tiger grant to prepare a master plan for a trail linear park along that corridor. And as part of that master plan, we were looking at ways to ensure that the trail would benefit all of Durham. And that included economic analysis as part of the master plan process. And tonight's presentation will focus on that work. To introduce our speaker, we have Nicole Thompson, who is the president and CEO of Downtown Durham, Inc. Thank you. Good evening. Thanks so much for coming out today. I think you're in for a great treat, Joe Minnicozzi. I've heard speak in previous jobs I've had. He's a principal with Urban Three. I do have a bio, but we agreed early on that I wouldn't read that. You can go online and check him out. But he does work for Urban Three, principal at Urban Three, which is in Asheville, North Carolina. And they do very interesting information with tax data. They take the tax data and they kind of make you understand it and see it and graphically display it. And it's quite interesting what they do to give you an idea of tax policy and how we can drive and dictate and help with development. But I know, Joe, from earlier meetings, I came from Colorado. I've been here nine months, but I was in Colorado for four years. And I heard him give a speech with a group out in Colorado and Pueblo. I mean, I also heard the Durango. I had forgotten about Durango. I heard both in Durango and Pueblo. And very interesting similarities to Durham, in some regards, very different in other regards. But again, quite a different way of looking at tax data, information, and presenting that in a way that is very easily understandable. And he just has a great way of presenting it. So he gets you involved. Many times when you say tax, you want to fall asleep. You want to get up, you want to walk away. But he'll keep you engaged throughout the entire presentation. So I look forward to what he has to share with you. I hope you enjoy it. And again, thank you for your time. Thanks for coming out on a dreary, cold afternoon, evening, and spending some time with us and learning a little bit more. Thank you, Nicole. And thanks for having us here. It's hard to put the context of a greenway into the scale of a city. And really what we tend to focus on at our firm is a much broader picture, is how does this all fit in? I'm trained as an architect, so I liken it to talking about the doorknob without talking about the house. You really want to talk about the house first and come into the doorknob to understand how it all fits in. That the details of a city are important, but you need to see the context of how it's all working out at a macro scale. There's a lot of different ways to talk about cities. I tend to look for analogies or references to understand how cities are in context as well. And the easiest thing that I've come to understand is that cities are a lot like people. They actually are places of people. And they have a trajectory of how they start and where they go. So if you want to see my DNA, this is how I started my life when I was three months old and I had hair. And this is my trajectory, right? So I'm gonna be Papa, whether I like it or not. You can see from my name and how much I wave my hands around that I'm Italian, an Italian descent. So I have those genetic markers. We also have a genetic predisposition to heart disease in my family. And more importantly, I look at this guy, again, when I had hair, but that's my dad. Every Minnicozie man in my family has pretty much had a heart attack. My dad had a seven bypass heart surgery. I don't know what you call that, like a septuple. But for those of you folks in the audience that have genetic issues inside your family, you're aware of this, right? So I can't eat lasagna every night, even though it's food of my people. I can't eat pizza every night, even though I love it, cheeseburgers. There are things that I do, and I will eat pizza and lasagna, but I have to keep it in context and in check. I can't do it every night. I have to have a salad every once in a while or exercise more often, right? That's a really simple way of looking at my body, but that's another way of looking at your city as well. What are the issues that your city's having and what is your genetic markers of what other cities have had? Who's your role model? In Asheville, we have conversations about Atlanta, Charlotte, cities that have gotten further into problems and had issues that we wanna try to avoid, even though we're smaller and still growing, right? These are lessons that we could have learned as kids when we become adults and talk with our grandparents now, right? When I was 18 years old, I didn't care. But now I have to worry about that stuff. So I'm gonna give you a lot of random information, a lot of specific data, but I want you to keep that in mind. This is my lesson. Who are you gonna be when you grow up? What city does Durham look at as its role model? Who are you learning from positive aspects as well as negative aspects? You should be looking at both of those. Who's heart attack you're trying to avoid? Who's healthy tissue do you wanna grow into? And these are all transferable. And I'm gonna do a quick little test for some folks. I did this yesterday, so I see some people that showed up yesterday. Don't shout out the answers. I'm gonna give you a five-second test. This is a kids' book, or sorry, kids' puzzle. I want you to tell me how many shapes you see in this kids' puzzle. It's real simple. I'm gonna give you five seconds to see the image. Ready, go. Okay, how many shapes did you all say? You can shout it out. You're not gonna fail. Eight, seven, 23. This is the overachieving side of the audience here. Okay, how many kids did you see on the bus? What time was it on the clock? Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist who gets into the way that our brains work. And one of the things that I just did to you, he calls it thinking fast and slow. There's a book written about that. I just put you in a fast mode. I gave you a question, right? You went in search of shapes. You didn't see the five kids on the bus. You didn't see that it was 10 after 10 on the clock. You didn't see that and you didn't ask you that question. Our brains are really good at filtering out information. The problem is that sometimes that information can be really critical stuff. So when we talk about a greenway, it's like, I'm like, great, let's talk about a greenway. But I wanna know the other stuff of what's going on. What are the other factors that are happening inside your community before we get to that question? And let's not pre-design your city based on that one question. Do y'all get that? The thing about our work is that we just try to ask different questions about your community and we try to provoke you all into doing the same thing. Don't take your city for face value. Don't take what you see as a reality without knowing what's going on behind it. So that's it. Those are all of our lessons up front. Now let's kind of nerd out on some information. So I'm from Asheville. We have Josh McCarty and Will Crecie here from Asheville. They both worked on your model. Although Josh lives here in Durham. He's a resident, a rabble rouser in the community. But we're based in Asheville, western part of the state, beautiful scenery. Most of y'all, I'm sure everybody's been there. Bluegrass music. We're 90,000 people. We have 40 breweries, which is kind of obscene at this point. We have 100 restaurants downtown. And like any quirky little mountain town, we have men dressed as nuns on tall bikes that eat fire. It's your typical little place, right? Well, it didn't start that way. This is a shot of Asheville from not too long ago. This is a 1990, early 1990s Chevy celebrity. Our downtown was essentially flat on space broke for decades. Any time somebody tried to work in downtown or fix downtown, it was met by this Greek choir of citizens that were like, we're rural mountain people. We're not urban. That's not who we are. They just left these buildings fallow. The thing that's different between us and you all is that we didn't take part of urban renewal. We didn't have the money or credit rating, basically, to do part of the destruction that you all did to parts of your community. But generally, we were basically broke. Julian Price was from Greensboro in the upper left here. He started a for-profit real estate development company that is the company that is our parent company called Public Interest Projects. The interesting thing about Julian is he was philanthropically minded. He was, could we do the right thing in our community and treat it like a revolving fund that will fix a building, but will also invest in an entrepreneur at the ground floor and get somebody up into business in the community to start things like the first vegetarian restaurant, laughing seed. Can we solve a community need at the ground floor and create business folks? Our business was created out of that. So simple things like rehab. This is one of our buildings before and after. It's just basically peeling the aluminum off. But it's allowing an opportunity for somebody to live downtown if they wanted that choice. These are affordable units or below market, really. But it's that opportunity. The other thing that we were constantly doing was having a conversation with our community. How do you get them to have some sense of pride in their place? This is what the Grove Arcade looked like back in 1993. And Julian had his own magazine that he would publish. And he would say things like this. He was just talking about trying to get us to not put billboards up all over the place. But I love this quote that he uses from Arthur Fromer. Among cities with no particular recreation appeal, those that have preserved their past continue to enjoy tourism. Those that haven't receive almost no tourism at all. Tourism simply doesn't go to a city that's lost its soul. Could you please just care about your place, basically? 15 years after he published that, Arthur Fromer's magazine would list us as the number five place in the country to visit. Two years ago, we got listed number one. We get 10 million tourists a year that come through Asheville, which is crazy. But it brings a change to our economy. This is how we can afford 40 breweries and 100 restaurants. That's cool. That's a great story. What we found ourselves doing at Public Interest Projects was telling the story about the data. If that's one economic picture, what's going on and what does it mean to us in the community to have this revitalization? So this is the value of downtown. In 1990, it was worth $100 million. So we're a $15 million real estate developer who owns buildings in a downtown. The downtown's worth $100 million. There's all these other buildings there, too. But just by fixing those buildings that were empty, this is what happened to the taxable value of our downtown. It shot up to $500 million. So all that value was sitting there, just waiting to be used. Those upper stories, when they're not used, they're of a low value. When you start to use them, they gain value. To show you that it's not all love and roses in Asheville, this is Chris Peterson who ran for office. These are some of his campaign ads. The city started investing in downtown. They started fixing sidewalks, doing parking garages so that people could come visit Asheville and stuff like, or work downtown. And this is what Chris thought about downtown investment. He thought is wasteful spending into certain people's real estate. So $26 million invested in streetscape projects. I mean, look at this poor guy, he's like crying. He's so upset with downtown development for bureaucrats, instead of water or sewer streets for our citizens. A downtown parking fiasco, millions of dollars wasted on unused decks. Y'all been to Asheville? Our parking garage is not used? And it's like, well, yeah, when the buildings are empty, of course they're not used. Give it some time. So what happened with the real estate, so let's think about this, $26 million. $26 million is a great deal of money. I don't have $26 million in my pocket. But let me ask you all an investment question. If you invest $26 million on a $100 million asset, and it grows to $550 million, is investing $26 million in yielding $430 million, is that a good return on investment? Why do we listen to Chris? And it's all right, Chris is thinking this way, I get it. He's entitled to that opinion, but he's not entitled to the facts of that return on investment. So let's have an honest conversation about whether or not that's good for our community. We think it's good. So it doesn't stop Chris, however. I mean, he has his own website now with a fire and brimstone coming out of the mayor's head. He misspells charlatans. I asked the mayor, I was like, is that a liquor drink? And she goes, yeah, it should be. But you know, it's just people will say what they want. You know, it's the public realm, that's cool. You need that discourse. But what we've kind of lost in this process of talking about cities is we've lost the civic understanding. This is a kid's book that I found in a garage sale. And it's the city, the town and the country. It's the teacher's guide. So this is how we got the city, the town and the country, right? 1959, this is a 1959 kid's book, third grade. So in kindergarten, you learn about your house. First grade, the school. Second grade, the neighborhood. Third grade, you learn about regional planning, right? The city, town and country. Third grade, folks. In the guide, it says things like this. While patterns vary from state to state, counties are usually responsible for education, library, health, welfare, et cetera. In studying the functions performed by your county, you will no doubt find there's a duplication of services and overlapping of jurisdictions and a lack of coordination between your county and local communities within it. Do y'all have that problem here? Every community that I go to, there's a disconnect between the city and the county. It's like, well, they're one and the same. The city is just a smaller piece of that county, right? So if y'all are Durham city taxpayers, you're also Durham county taxpayers. It's a cooperative investment. So here's the inside of the book. It's the 50s, it's painfully white. It's also misogynistic. The girls are shoved out in the hallway because apparently girls don't need an education back then. But you see what's going on. There's a factory that gets built. There's even more kids that go to school. So in blue right here, you ask your third graders this question. Give four good reasons for building a new school. So your third graders talk about community infrastructure, equity, everybody should have a desk. Maybe we should think about having less students per teacher, right? These are needs within the community. Your third graders are having that conversation. Now you read on about Mr. Canfield over here on the next page. He lived next door to the Allens. He didn't want a new school. He said that once our taxes are too high now, if we build a new school, we'll need more teachers and everything else will have to pay still higher taxes. So you ask your third graders, these are really complex questions, right? Why would some people have to pay higher taxes if a new school were built? Why are some people against paying higher taxes? And your third graders have a conversation about community infrastructure and community need. This is civics, folks. Do we teach this in third grade anymore? I know adults that can't have this conversation. It's all about what I want, right? In the teacher's guide, it says, this is what I find is critically important. Remember, too, that many children, rather urban and rural and regardless of region, are tragically limited in their knowledge of their world, and it's largely the space in which they live and operate. Our challenge as citizens is to illuminate and get past this tragic limitation, share our experiences with each other, get people to understand the dynamics of the city and what it all means to all of us, and also get people past their trap of how they see the world. I know where I live, where I go to the grocery store, where I drop my kids off at school, and then how I get home. If there's a disturbance, all of a sudden, it's the mayor's fault, and I want a new parking space or something, right? This is what happens in the city without ever seeing how it all adds up. So why does it matter? Well, the city is a finite boundary of land. In Asheville's case, our state legislature made it illegal for our city to annex. So the land that we have is the land that we have. That's it. It's just a really big real estate development corporation that we're all shareholders in, in Asheville. To look at it at a bigger level, just look at the word incorporate. This is out of Oxford Dictionary to constitute a company, a city, or other organization as a legal corporation. That's straight from a dictionary. Our cities are corporations. They're incorporated. This is the board of directors for this corporation called Durham, right? Y'all just voted in several new members of your board. But this is a corporation that has to operate. There are costs in the community. There are services that need to be provided. And there's a cash flow in it. And Asheville, or sorry, it's not just the city. It's the county. It's also the country. I was watching the Stephen Colbert show and Joe Biden said this. The United States is the largest corporation in the world. I'm such a nerd. I went and looked it up. This is actually any legal nerds in the audience. That's the US code right there that says it. It's a federal corporation. And this isn't to say that it's gotta be some sort of capitalist corporation. And we do operate on capitalism, but it's a social corporation. We all have to work together in this environment. So my city is worth, Asheville's worth $13 billion in taxable value. So that's six times the value of Ted Turner. Does you think my mayor thinks that she's six times the value of Ted Turner? You know, does Ted Turner wake up every day and just look at Facebook and see what's trending and make his decisions on that? Of course not. Ted Turner's looking at the data of who's watching the shows. How does it work in the marketplace? Yeah, we've allowed our political realm to be steered by just public comment without any data-driven discussion. So let's take a step back into that corporation for a second. And again, look at the land that's within that. So this is one of our buildings that we rehabbed, round story retails, second floor office, upper stories residential. This is a streetscape project that the city did that Chris was upset about. So thank you city for the garbage can, the bike rack, two benches and the street tree. Thank you city. That's awesome. We didn't pay for it. It's a subsidy at our front door, right? It's true. But we fixed this building and took the taxable value from $300,000 to 11 million. So the taxes paid on that property shot up 3,500%. That's taxes y'all get, right? That's the tax base. Go out and buy 3,500% more garbage cans, pay for affordable housing, do whatever, make a park. Does anybody have a 401k plan that grows by 3,500% or a Christmas savings fund? That's good return, right? And people are like, well, Joe, come on, man, that's not fair. We've got this Walmart over here at $200,000 of value. Fair enough that Walmart pays $200,000 in property taxes. This is my old house. We paid $2,000 in taxes to live in that house, but it was on a 10th of an acre. So if a one acre cookie cutter fell from space and hit my neighborhood, it's gonna grab 10 houses paying $2,000 or about $20,000 in acre in taxes. Y'all follow me on that? That's the productivity of my neighborhood. You take that one acre cookie cutter, fly it in space, drop it on the Walmart. This is what it pays per acre in taxes. If you had an acre of our building, this is what you get in taxes. So I was presenting this in, I was in Oregon last week and I asked them, I'm like, y'all are in Oregon. If you had an acre of land to grow something in Oregon, what are you gonna grow? Cash crops, right? Wheat soybeans or marijuana, what do you wanna do? They get it. So you're probably thinking, well, Joe, this is great. We take the losses in property taxes to take the gains in retail taxes on a Walmart. So let's get rid of my house and let's run the number in retail taxes. So this is the retail sales of a Walmart, but the city gets a portion of a portion of those taxes out of that $77 million worth of transaction or about $47,500 in retail taxes, which is significant. You add that to the property taxes. The total gain out of that Walmart is $51,000 an acre. This is just our property taxes per acre. Now remember, I told you we're selling stuff on the ground floor, right? So let's add that. Now you're cooking with gas. Is this all too nerdy for this time of night? Are you guys all right with this? Got a thumbs up, all right, thanks. Jobs. You know, when you stack the numbers up and you stack it up side by side and just let the numbers tell you what's going on and try to be agnostic about this, what's going on with the community, this is a 90-unit nacre building up there for residential, but it's also producing so much more wealth. As an architect, as somebody who looks at the city in a different way, I'm just like, well, there's a reason why we built cities like this for tens of thousands of years. It goes back to Damascus or Ur is that this is very efficient. This is what we've been doing as civilizations. In any country you go back to, we've built in compact forms because it makes economic sense. It's just this American paradigm of stretching ourselves out. We've actually liquidated our value. Some people misconstrue this and they're like, dude, what's your problem? Why do you hate Walmart? What's your deal with that? And just to show you what a nerd I am, I presented at the International Association of Assessing Officers Conference. Is a tax assessor in this room? Does anybody know a tax assessor? It wasn't exactly the most dynamic conference on the planet. Cool people, but definitely like a planning conference seemed like a massive party by comparison. But this guy, Charles Terrell, presented the value of a Walmart. Eight o'clock in the morning, 3,000 assessors in the room, and he's presenting the spreadsheets on how cheap Walmart's are. He's like, our buildings are so cheap. We build buildings that fall apart. They're bad buildings. The assessors don't care. If they're throwaway buildings, they're throwaway buildings. They can't make new value. They're just like, all right, it's cheap. I'm in the back of the room thinking, this is awesome. This guy's getting all of his property tax bills lowered in one meeting. That's efficient, right? Now, none of us have this ability to go lobby for our houses or our buildings that way. It's like, they did it, that's smart. Now, as a citizen, my heart's breaking because I'm like, how is this guy getting away with this? He's basically walking to the room and saying, I'm paying the lowest taxes possible and everybody's cool about it. So I went up to the microphone and I said, Mr. Terrell, what's the useful life of one of your buildings? And he said, 15 years. We designed that building on a depreciable basis to depreciate it as quick as possible, build another one, depreciate it again because we want to maximize that depreciation as a tax write-off and we throw away the buildings away. We're more about the distribution system of the buildings, we don't care about the buildings. So that's it, folks. 15 to 20 years is a useful life of a Walmart. That's their commitment into your corporation. So their investment lifespan is about the lifespan of a cat. That's their commitment to you. But we at least mourn the passing of the cat, right? It's all right to laugh at this stuff, guys. Junk at that. This is the cash flow that's going on in our communities. This is how we lose our wealth that people come in and exploit our policies but these are your policies. Just be aware of what you're giving away. Make sure you're accounting for that. So that's the city side. We don't have a great relationship with our county taxpayers in Asheville. I've got two voters out in the county for every one voter in the city. They got our state legislator to call us a cesspool of sin, which is super awesome. But we like to show our county residents, this is what we average Asheville residents pay in county taxes per acre versus somebody out in the county. So go ahead and hate on us, that's cool. But just send us a thank you card for all the money we're sending your way, right? That's to the county. When I pick up the phone and call the police, the sheriff doesn't show up, right? I got to pay an additional burden called city taxes on top of that. So here's commercial, this is the mall and what the mall pays in taxes versus residential. Let's not stop there, here's downtown. This is our building downtown and what it pays in county taxes per acre versus the mall and versus downtown. I've just breezed through a lot of information because I'm trying to set up a frame of how to look at land differently and then look at it as a productivity method. Don't construe this as being really complicated math, please. This is unbelievably simple. We look at things like cars a certain way, right? When we talk about cars, we don't talk about this in the miles per tank basis, do we? We'd all be driving Ford F-150s. You all tell me, Joe, come on, now that's stupid. It's got a big tank. Of course it gets the most miles. Instead you say we judge cars on productivity by the gallon, not the tank. Miles per gallon, the numbers change and we should all be driving BMWs set as 70 miles per gallon. Joe, get that? Land is your least common denominator. I've yet to find a community where an acre of land costs less than a gallon of gas. If we can judge a vehicle by a $3 commodity on a per gallon basis, we certainly should be doing it for $30,000. This is your corporation. So we've done this all across the country. We've just taken all the doubt and just piling it together. It's real simple. For every dollar of county taxes, somebody pays to the county in taxes. Their brother and sister in the city's paying about five bucks to that same county. Here's the Walmart, here's the mall. This is a two-story building on any main street. This could be in Driggs, Idaho, Durham, Dallas. It doesn't matter. As soon as you start stacking those stories, you're stacking your tax dollars. And then what's crazy is this is from a two-story building to a three-story building. So we're not talking skyscrapers. You see this exponential jump in taxes and then a six-story building. That's the cash flow that comes off those properties. We tend to look at the world and like your doctor looks at your body, right? Your city, and then there's all these layers that are in there. There's different CAT scans that you have when you go to the doctor. There might be a circulatory system problem. There might be a muscle tissue problem. So let's start with the muscle tissue, your property taxes. This is what you can control the most in your community. This is my county. This is Buncombe County. This is Mt. Pisgah Park here. This is, sorry, Mt. Mitchell. This is Mt. Pisgah down here. This big gray blob. So it's non-taxable. Parks don't pay taxes. And just to be crude about it, I don't care about it, it doesn't pay taxes, right? So no value. Green is low value. Purple is high value, right? So green is low value up here. Purple, this is the Biltmore estate, this big purple splotch. You know, it's America's largest house. When Bill Cecil shows up at one of the council meetings, we all genuflect, you know, thank him for his time. He's got a $100 million house. That's cool. But it's 150,000 square feet. He's sitting on 2,000 acres. He's got the biggest gas tank. What does that relate to my little house on a 10th of an acre? So rather to make it apples to apples, rather than saying total value, let's change the map to value per acre. And all of a sudden we get a different image of what's going on economically. Let me show it to you in 3D. Anybody wanna take a guess where downtown Asheville is? Boom. All right, peeks out up here. This is Black Mountain, which is nine miles away. That's its little main street right there. You can see it popping up like a little baby bear compared to mama bear over here. Same form, different scale, right? Which is a scale of urbanism. We used to build towns this way. Now for my brothers and sisters out here in Fairview who think they pay a lot of taxes compared to their cousins out here in Sandy Mosh, right? That's cool. You do our paying more relative to them, but they have no clue because of their tragic limitation of understanding our county. They don't understand what we pay in downtown. So rather than hate on us, then it's the thank you card, right? This is how our tax flow works in our county. Now we're all paying the same county millage rate, right? In our county it's six mills. I think yours is what, five and a half or something like that. So it's the same thickness across the model. So speaking of UL, Durham, here's your county at a total value. So bigger parcels down by the highway on the south side, you see these big values down here. Now again, that's total value. Let's go value per acre. Here's the map, changes. Now you start to see a hotspot in the center right here. Here's Duke University right there. And so here's your model in 3D. Any guesses on downtown Duke or downtown Durham where it is? You can also see the title push on the side of Duke in the value that's being captured along the stuff on the outside of it, which are those higher density buildings, multifamily mixed use, sometimes even single story buildings that are producing wealth. Looking at the city now, city total value, value per acre, city 3D. And we'll leave a copy of all of this stuff to you all as a PDF so you can look at it and have fun with it. Downtown total value, value per acre, downtown 3D. There's stuff you need to be aware of, taxable, non-taxable stuff. This building doesn't pay any taxes. So it becomes a cost for you all, which is fine. Everybody needs a city hall. But you've got wetlands, parks, Duke University. There's trade-offs to all this stuff. This actually isn't so bad. 30% non-taxable is pretty typical for a university town. Y'all are doing better than Chapel Hill. Chapel Hill, what was it like? 50% or 60% non-taxable, it was pretty crazy. Your city limits are 28% non-taxable. And then you get into the downtown, it's about 55 to 45 non-taxable. This is where you wanna pay attention because this is your most fertile soil. This is where you're getting your purple stuff. So you wanna be cautious of how much you take off the tax rolls. A publicly-owned surface parking lot is a huge mistake, basically. Either do a building like this or a multi-leveled parking deck, but certainly not a flat piece of land. But your city is a taxpayer, so for all the city residents in the room, you're about 15% of the footprint of your county, but the property taxes you pay is about 17% of the county's property taxes, which is pretty good. It's like a one to two ratio of what you're paying versus everybody else in the county, in county taxes. Your downtown is a piece of your city. So for the downtown property owners in this room, you all take up 4% of the city's property area where you're producing 28% of the city's tax base. That's a one to 12 ratio of productivity. So to think about that, it's like six times the potency of what you all are to the county. That's really good. But let's not forget what the downtown means to the county too, because what's good for the city is great for the county. So it barely shows up as a footprint for the county. It's just this tiny little dot in the middle of the county, but it's producing 3% of the county's property taxes. Those may not look like huge pie charts, but at a productivity ratio, that's a one to 28 ratio of productivity. That's significant in a very effective return on the community. So I'm just gonna breeze through some examples of properties. This is the New Hope Commons. Its value per acre is $1.5 million. I don't know if y'all can see that in the bottom of the slide. $1.5 million of value per acre. So a Walmart's pulling about 1.4 million per acre. We'll use a Walmart as like a control subject. Everybody knows what the box is and it is what it is. Costco's actually produced less taxes in your community at $700,000 of value per acre. This dead HH Greg is actually not that bad. It's actually more productive than the Costco. Again, don't let your eyes tell you what's going on. Let the numbers show you the data first. Your dying mall, excuse me, your Northgate mall is $1 million of value per acre, which is a little bit less than a Walmart. The mall that's cannibalizing the dying mall is 1.7 million of value per acre, so that's better. When you get into the 15501 cluster, you've got your Sam's Club, your Target. Here's some dead retail over here. The targets are pulling about $900,000 of value per acre. Your dead retail is 300,000. So again, let's remember back to that Walmart comment. When these properties die, that sucks down your tax base. It's producing very low tax base. Y'all are still on the hook for that road and that pipe that goes out there. That's in your cash flow. Sam's Club, about 800,000. This is fun. This is University Tower. Pretty handsome, at about $5 million of value per acre. Now here's what's cool. Check out this McDonald's over here. That McDonald's is a quarter the value of the skyscraper. Isn't that crazy? So either that McDonald's is super, super awesome or that tower is unbelievably bad. I don't know, it's just, you get into the downtown, these mixed use buildings that you all have, your building, these are pulling $2 million, $7 million of value per acre. So this Lakeview multifamily right here is actually almost double the potency of that high rise. So high rise doesn't necessarily be get potency, right? It all has to do with the community design, how it fits into the community, how it uses land, it's potency. So now we're, this is North street community infill up here, these duplexes, $2.5 million of value per acre. This is an assisted project and it's half the potency of that high rise. This is good, do more of that. Create and reinvest in your community's wealth, right? These townhouses, Trinity loft townhouses, $5 million of value per acre. These little guys down here are more potent than that high rise. I think they're like what, two story buildings. So again, go around and look at these things, look in your community with new eyes and see how you can create more wealth. Lakeview mixed use is at $6 million, Liberty warehouses is at $12 million of value per acre. Yeah, they're big buildings, I get it. There's a changes to your community. That's cool. If it's a design question, start bringing design into the question, but don't miss this opportunity to harvest your wealth. West Village Multifamily, which is on the belt line is almost 20 million, let's call it 19 million, of value per acre. That's incredibly potent. When you get into the other downtown buildings that starts to get crazy, this is the Diamond View buildings, they're 28 million, the aloft, which is part of that project area is about 30 million. And then you get into this infill building, which is just a couple blocks away from here, it's at $50 million of value per acre. That's potent. So let's also learn from history. We were kind of a little bit blown away by this. You knocked this down. So Josh ran an estimate of this building. This was what used to be what two blocks from here. And now it's just a public space. $71 million of value per acre is essentially gone. That's wealth that your community could have had today in tax base. Buildings like this, this Lakewood building used to be about $1.7 million of value per acre. Now it's about 3.3. It's double the density of a Walmart. Or essentially by fixing that building, you added a Walmart's worth of value in your community just by fixing what was already there. $3 million. This is both about $3 million of value per acre. This is interesting. Ninth Street is historic. These are just one-story buildings calling about $4.6 million of value per acre about the value of that high rise out of one-story buildings. Dane's place at $5.8 million. This is interesting. The Mateo at $9.5 million of value per acre out of two stories. Mill buildings are pretty productive. Anything from $2.8 million in the upper left to $7 million per acre to $8 million per acre. The Tobacco Campus is pulling about $9 million of value per acre or double the potency of that high rise, the University Tower. And then the Chesterfield's killing it at $28 million. And the Chesterfield's asshole in transition, so eventually it's gonna be fully renovated. And when that happens, you're gonna see that value bump up again. These buildings, the First National Bank, the self-help building, $26 million of value per acre, the Baldwin Lofts at $32 million of value per acre, and the Crest Building at $37 million. Now the thing to bear in mind about these buildings, let's go take a step back for a second. Remember that Walmart conversation. These buildings have been in your portfolio for 100 years, producing that wealth for your community for generations. These are investments that can be recycled. The Crest Building wasn't always awesome. It started good, fell down a little bit in probably the 70s and 80s, but came back as something nice. Think about these investments and demanding investments that reward your wealth into the future. The Durham is at $44 million of value per acre. And then things like this, this is a lesson to learn from. Your downtown Marriott is about $6 million of value per acre. Here's what you tore down. Those buildings are gone, but if we just use the atomic fern as an indicator, that's a two-story building. These are two-story buildings. This is pulling about $8 million of value per acre. The atomic fern, this is pulling 5.7. So even though it's taller, it actually produces less wealth. And it produces less wealth because the majority of that site is one story or less. You've diluted your value. And then this is your big breadwinner. This is the highest purple spike in the model at $92 million of value per acre. So to show you, I'm gonna skip over this chart. This is hard to read on these monitors. This is essentially a bar chart showing a sampling of those buildings I just went through and sticking them side by side. Some people can read charts better than they can read images. So this is county single family down here. This is city single family. This is city multifamily. And then as you get up to you, like let's call it the townhouses are over here. So you to understand the townhouses is a single family attached product versus multifamily versus single family is a good way to kind of look at this stuff. But again, we'll give you this as a print out. So 10 acres of those townhouses would equal the 40 acre Walmart. 16 acres of the Lakewood would equal the 40 acre Walmart. Six acres of the Mateo would equal the 40 acre Walmart. If you had 12 acres of this Beltline project, it would equal the 150 acre Hope Commons. If you had five acres of this building, it would equal the 133 acre South Point Mall. Now again, we understand there's downtown development. I just want you to pay attention to the edges too. Because if I can come out there and build a low density development, I'm squandering your wealth. So if you shave 25 feet off this building, it would equal this tower that's on six acres. This building sitting on 0.3 acres. Some of you all might have yards bigger than that building site. And this is crazy. You don't have to be a tall building. This is the temple building. One and a half acres of this would equal this tower. So for the Beltline project, we're not gonna go into the details of this. We are mostly looking at the context of how this all fits in. And it's basically on the north side of the city. We'll just zoom in for that for a second. But there's a, and it's awesome that you guys are doing this. This is a model that Will made. The blue line is essentially the Beltline. But you can see the potency of buildings in and around the downtown. And as it comes out, you do actually have some potency around there. So you'll see that this is what the city's talking about. The conversation that came out last night was you should get ahead of the game and try to learn from Atlanta and what happened with property speculation and property valuation that the community essentially got priced out of their own neighborhoods because people weren't paying attention to what's happening with the market forces. So be aware of that and get ahead of that. And that conversation came out last night. There's so much that you can do as a government, but as a community, you have to be aware that that costs money to do that. To go out and buy land or utilize your land that you already have inside your portfolio, use that as leverage for community land trust or some other level of affordability. But basically, that's kind of what we're looking at is that project. Economically, we want to see what's going on in the area. Sorry, this is just transitioning. So the red and the dark parcels, the dark green parcels are the stuff that are either eluped, underutilized or vacant. And those are opportunities for you all to use, again, harvest wealth. So there's about 148 acres inside that area. And I know that this is a big building and it makes people somewhat uncomfortable. But what if those 148 acres were of that? That's $19 million an acre times 148. That's a lot of value you can create in your community. You can put other strings attached on that as well to maintain your affordability if you wanted to. Speaking of affordability, excuse me. Retail sales, just a little, so you know as North Carolina residents, it's kind of illegal for us to actually look at retail data, which is mind-blowing for us because we go to other states and get it. So this is Colorado. Here's the downtown property tax. This is the property tax for Durango. And you can see where downtown is. South Durango is the retail strip. This is the retail production. So the retail strip, which is monolithically retail, the mall, the Home Depot, the Best Buy, all of that, we can see that downtown is still outperforming that area in retail taxes. If we had this ability to do this in North Carolina, we would do it. But I'm just gonna be honest with you, we're kind of upset with our state legislature for making that invisible for us. So as taxpayers, you should talk about that with your elected officials. Total productivity, jobs, you can measure this stuff. Take a look at it and see what it does for your community. While we were in Durango, a couple of businesses opened their books to us. So we wanted to compare local businesses versus chains. So here's a couple of one-story retailers. This is Tim Callahan in Peter Shirt's bookstore and coffee shop. This is the footprint difference between the two. This is the county taxes paid per acre out of both of those different establishments. This is what these small businesses pay to the county in taxes per acre. And this is what Walmart pays in taxes per acre, right? Apples to apples. This is the retail tax production of those little businesses versus Walmart. And then this is the jobs. So let me ask you the next question. Which side of this ledger is hiring the local accountant, the local attorney, the local advertising agency? Is it the blue side or the gray side? Which side of that ledger is volunteering to be on the council, on the planning board, sponsoring a little league team? Is it the blue side of the ledger or the gray side of the ledger? You know, so it's not about hating Walmart. I don't want you to take it that way. I want you to understand not to hate the player, but understand the game. You need to hate the game and understand the game and it's your game. Understand the rules of that. So this is an animated model of your development patterns over time. In the chart on the lower right is your population growth. You can see as you're building your community, you're actually building a tremendous amount of wealth in the center and that's how you settled your community in the early 1900s. Let's stop this for a second right about here. So here we are coming out of World War II. You see a fairly compact city, right? You see a clear downtown that your grandparents built for you. And it's pretty compact. Notice what happens after World War II as we start building highways like any American city you start stretching yourself out. So let's do that. Now you start stretching the suburbs, but look at how low the value is in that proposition. Let's stop it in the 80s. You're still pretty disconnected from Raleigh at that point. You're still pretty isolated from the triangle development pattern of what Wake County and Orange County are going through. You still have a pretty compact Durham. Low value in the suburbs. Now let's see what happens between 1980 and today. So you have a massive change in your community. Look at how much more of South Durham County you grew into. But look at the low level of wealth that you've harvested in that transaction. That's the trade-off with the suburban environment. You get a very low return on stretching that infrastructure out. Back to infrastructure. It's all too crazy this part of the night. All right, we're about 45 minutes in, so you're doing good. Sorry, infrastructure. We did a project in Peoria, Illinois. They told us that a parking problem. So we measured their downtown. Here's their water x-ray. Here's their green space x-ray. Here's their roads and sidewalks. And we just went ahead and measured their surface parking lots. And we measured their buildings. We're like, all right, let's take a look at your buildings and your surface parking lots. And let's talk about them for a second. First of all, that big box right there, this thing, that's one huge parking structure. This is a parking structure. This is a parking structure. I'm like, I don't think y'all have a parking problem. I think you got a perception problem. You got plenty of parking. And let's be aware of this stuff, because it affects your cash flow. Now, in Peoria, they make caterpillar bulldozers there, so we had to make it relevant for them to understand pat parking. We're like, when the assessor goes out there, the assessor's got a pricing gun and putting value on things, right? So there's value on the building by about 35 bucks a square foot in parking, about a buck 50, right? The street doesn't care. The street costs $9 a square foot. So let me ask you a finance question. Who's picking up the cost of that $9? Is it 35 bucks or is it the buck 50? It's the $35, right? In other words, we give a subsidy when I waste your real estate and use it for surface parking. You have buried a subsidy into the parking policy, into the tax policies to give me a tax break. That's cool. I don't have to pay for that road, right? So when you drive by these two surface parking lots, I want you all to realize that when you ask for more parking, you're essentially giving away your wealth. Just be clear on that. Understand that and do the accounting. Is that the best use of your money? So when you look at the model of Peoria, the reason why the spikes drop off around downtown is because there's a choker of parking all around it. When you look out into the suburbs, the reason why all of the models in any city that we do are so flat out in the suburbs is because they're mostly parking. We've given them a subsidy. So we did the whole county and this is the whole county is a big area. If you shove all the buildings together as a square, this is how much land area you need to make all the buildings in Peoria County. That's how much land area you needed to consume. So if you want to reduce your environmental footprint, just put the buildings together, right? But oh no, we have to stretch ourselves out. So we do parking. Notice that the parking is more than the building footprint. And then you have your liability. You all get to pay for those roads, right? So when you look at the numbers, there's eight and a half square miles of buildings. There's nine square miles of parking. There's 12 square miles of roads. That's your liability. And then this is everything else, berms, buffers, backyards, parks, farms, whatever. When you look at the values, let's break it down to a per square mile basis. It's easier to see it this way. So your roads cost you $250 million a square mile. This stuff doesn't pick it up at four million bucks. Your parking doesn't pick it up at 40 million. So your buildings have to carry that burden. Oops. So your buildings have to carry that burden. Now as a community, let's take a step back for a second. You want to have an art teacher, a greenway, better education, better parks. Are you having that trade-off discussion or are you showing up here at council and they're just telling you you're broke? They're telling you you're broke because you've got all of these roads, right? The roads that Peoria have will stretch from Peoria to Vancouver is a two-lane road. Do you know how many roads you guys have? Ever done that math? When I, as a developer, build in your community, I give you those roads. That's your liability. I walk out after that, right? So if you're not measuring this stuff, you can't manage it. As you go to the community and have a discussion about it, make sure that you're talking about measurables first before we get into the emotive stuff that's really difficult to measure. When you go to your doctor, there's always taking data, right? She's gonna do your blood pressure, check your hemoglobin count, stuff like that. Start there. Finally, let's get into ROI. So you've got your tax dollars. You've got public investment. What do I do to pay back into the system from a tax level? We're doing Lafayette, Louisiana and they're broken Lafayette. So what's funny is this is the cover of their budget document from 1994. Do you think the finance officer was sending a message about the state of affairs of the government? This is the government in a onesie about to get hit by a tsunami and by a shark, right? So what do you think the elected officials did when faced with this grave of information? They kicked the can down the road. The next year, the finance director to her credit was like, hey, did I mention how screwed we are? The third year, they did a joint city county government to bail themselves out. So the counties going broke, they call them parishes down there. And they just basically did a joint city county government and just took what was left of the city and made it bankrupt too. So we looked at their model. Here's their downtown, this big spike. This is some new urbanism stuff. And they generally spread out into the swamps, right? Pavement, back to pavement for a second. If you take all their roads and shove them together, it's a six and a half square mile parking lot that's 12 times the size of the French Quarter. That's what they own. That has to be rebuilt every 40 years in Louisiana. So this is a cash flow diagram of their roads. And so this is 1960 at this part of the chart. 2009, they stopped taking on roads. So if, excuse me, if I have an air conditioner on my building, that air conditioner has a useful life, right? I know that it's gonna last 12 to 15 years. 15 years from now I have to re-put in a new air conditioner. That's gonna cost us $10,000 on a building that's the size of something downtown here. That's expensive. So what I have to do to get that money is I have to build the savings through my rent so that in the future I'll have that money in a savings account to pay $10,000, right? So you all get the roads. A community comes into your system. That's what you should have set aside that first year right there, that little red brick. The problem is you started taking on more roads and you should have set aside even more money as you took on more roads. So by the time you stopped, you were already starting to rehab that first road that you took on in 1960. But you didn't save any money. Blue is the money that you actually have, red is the savings you should have had, right? Do you see enough blue to pay for the red? If you're already feeling some pain, this is how it's gonna look like in the future. Let me make it easier. Do you have enough blue to pay for the red? You have a billion dollar liability and you have about $55 million of revenue. Now that's about 18 times the difference. Now because you're broke, you went to the bond companies and you start taking out loans. The bonding companies don't care. They come in and skim off the top of your money. Oh, thank you, thanks. And take half that. It's really kind of crazy how some people respond to this, particularly how crazy they responded to it. One of their city councilors said to us, it's not where you live, it's what you believe. Like, all right, I look like Brad Pitt. It's like, I believe I do. Sooner or later I have data, right? I can see myself in a mirror. The Public Works director responded to this statement by saying this, there's no such thing as an infrastructure fairy. He's like, look, I have to pay for stuff. And so we photoshopped Kevin in on that one. But Kevin's like, just let's show it to him physically. So this is the model of the whole city floating in space. What's below the water line is the cost of all the infrastructure. So you live out here, this is what you cost. And this is the revenue that you pay in, right? So in my business, I have revenues and I have expenses. My revenues have to exceed my business expenses, right? What's net positive is in the black and what's net negative is in the red. So you net one against the other and here's what you get. Here's the whole county in 3D. So we can see where the costs are. If we take this thing and slap it on the floor so everything pops up vertically, this is what it looks like. So now we can see how expensive it is for people to live out here. And they told us, so like Joe, people really wanna live out there. That's what the market wants. I'm like, yeah, that's what you're paying them. That stuff in the red, that's what you're paying people to move into those areas. That's called a subsidy, right? I don't care that it happens. I just think you should account for it. Secondly, you should look into your neighborhood. This is one of the poorest neighborhoods in the entire city right here. And that's pretty much net neutral. So wealth or lack of wealth doesn't necessarily be get subsidy either. So just be aware of that. Just to close on this statement. In 1950, they had 34,000 people, five feet a pipe per person, 2.4 fire hydrants. They grew their population to 121,000. Their feet of pipe per person is this. Their fire hydrants per 1,000 is this. They grew their population 350%. They've grown their liability 1,000 and 2,000%. The whole time they told us they got rich. They got oil money out of the Gulf. We measured that too. Here, your wealth actually grew adjusted for today's dollars from 27,000 to 45,000. You grew your wealth, but only 160%. You've grown your liability 1,000 and 2,000%. This is like me getting a $1,000 a year raise and then going home and building a 55,000 square foot addition on my house. It just doesn't make any economic sense. Do you know how many pipes you have? That should be on a map somewhere. So let me kind of just jump ahead. You know, there are economics at play and policies at play that mess things up. How many miles do you have of this stuff in your county where you're paying for all of the infrastructure and you're getting very little return out of those buildings? When you drive by this stuff, a little ticker should be going off about how much you're paying for that to sit there. And we're talking with folks in Charleston and they're like, would you be in favor of an impact fee on developers so that we can help our affordable housing? I said, yeah, but why isn't this stuff being penalized? Why are you letting this stuff sacrifice your land and squandering the real estate in a property speculation and you all have to pay the tab or exact it out of a new developer? Just be aware of that. Other weird things that we see? West Palm Beach, Florida, we just have to put this out there. This little building right here, three stories tall, two blocks away from this tower is actually more potent at $10 and a half million versus nine million, right? Don't let tall buildings be the thing that's tie you up. Understand you can build wealth with little buildings, but more importantly, we take a little risk here, but all of Donald Trump's property, we went ahead and grabbed that. This is before he was president, but the Donald's pulling about $400,000 of value per acre, right? There's Mar-a-Lago, that's the Southern White House now or whatever, but check this out. This is one of the poorest neighborhoods in West Palm Beach. So those are shotgun shacks, three of which are boarded up and condemned. These are actually more tax potent than the Donald. How is that? Again, understand the game of the taxes here. Get yourself beyond the usual conversations of what you're having in your community and understand the policies and their effect. Moses didn't deliver our tax code folks. This is all stuff that we have to control. So just to recap, understand these aren't invisible market forces that are happening, that we in the development community are following those lines. You actually have some great developers in your community that are willing to talk about this stuff. So talk with them, don't villainize them. I was in a meeting two nights ago when some really good developers were being villainized by a neighborhood. Move past that play of how people operate. We saw that in Chapel Hill. That's how they treat their developers there. So your public policies can hurt you, put the gun down, and let's just jump ahead here. And we call this stuff geo-accounting, putting this stuff on your map and just understanding this stuff. And remember, when you talk to your accountant, your accountant doesn't care if you buy a boat, right? Your accountant cares if you can afford a boat. Read the urban crisis from Richard, Florida. This is happening not just here in Durham. If you think you're having problems, we're having the same problems in Asheville, Charleston. Any place that's desirable is going through this gut-wrenching economic fight. It's worse than Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland. Learn from those places and move past it. And you have to, again, as a social corporation, you have to care about everybody in the community. They should all be cared for in your economic policies. And I'm just gonna use this one quote from Jim Collins. If you don't confront these brutal facts, they're gonna confront you. The facts matter. Stick with the facts and keep that argument going forward. George Bush, it's kind of weird that I kind of miss him at this point, but he said America was addicted to oil and he kind of was only partially right. We're addicted to a pattern of living. The suburban pattern is awesome. I can have a big yard. I don't have anybody walking over my head in an apartment up there. That's a cool thing, right? But there's a trade-off. There's massive amounts of infrastructure that our generation is now paying for that has been left for us from a 40-year accumulation of this pattern. It doesn't pay for itself. And I'm not the first person to say that either. You go back to the Nixon administration. Did y'all know the Nixon administration published The Cost of Sprawl in 1973? They told us like, hey, you can't afford this. This is the first gas crisis. And they were telling us our pattern at your local level needs to be fixed. So your downtown is your golden goose. You do have to feed it, put some money back into it and it will reward you. So do your math. Thanks. Sorry. We do have time for some questions and answers. This is being recorded. So I'll ask you to use the mic and I'll bring it to you. Now we have to kind of get it on mic. I'll either repeat you or just say it on the mic. It's gotta go into the TV room. Now I'm an economist and I love data. I think there's some things you really should look at, especially in Durham. We have long had a gross under assessment of vacant property. There is a piece of property right across from Patterson Place that I looked at recently that's worth many millions of dollars. They pay less property taxes on that than I do on my house on a 0.17 acre lot in the city. And the way they do it is the misuse of the forestry incentive. But even if you look at that, I've looked at double lots and vacant lots in the city. I had a student who identified 600 vacant lots in six neighborhoods in the city that were quite buildable. These things are assessed at $30, $40,000 for a lot that's worth a couple of hundred thousand. I think that's one thing they really should look at. I wonder if you included in your analysis of the taxation, the rebates that are given in order to encourage some of this downtown development. Is this gross or net? And if I, uh-huh? We didn't get into that depth of an analysis. Oh yeah, I think you might find that some of these big projects really aren't paying that much tax. And the last thing is we have an awful lot of tax exempt property, much of which is owned by Duke University, but not all of it. And I really think you should look into what happens when Duke builds a building and owns it versus when they rent the same building from a private owner. Just some things I'd really like to see added to this side of what is really good analysis. Yeah, I put this image up for you just for a second just to kind of want us to mess with you a little bit because you are an economist, you're rational. One of the books- I'm not rational anymore, that's been shown. Yeah, one of the books, have you read Misbehaving from Richard Thayer? Richard Thayer is a Nobel, he just won the Nobel Prize in economics last year, or this year. And he's an economist that doesn't believe in economic theory, basically. Because he's like, look, we're all crazy humanoids that make crazy decisions. And he's right. But there are economic policies at play that will mess up your analysis. This is what's up here on the chart, on the wall. This is Cheyenne, Wyoming. And this is just the dirt value for the lot. There's no buildings in this image. And you see up here in the upper left, this is a residential neighborhood, everybody's blue, right? On the right here is $15,000. So when I was presenting this in Cheyenne, Wyoming, I was like, hey, what's going on in this parcel where it's blue, it's $15,000? And when you cross the street over here, it doubles in value for the dirt. Same zoning category, same street, same everything. The tax assessor was sitting in the front row and she raised her hand. And she said, wait a minute, you don't understand. And I said, try me. She goes, well, this is a bigger parcel. And if you have a bigger parcel of land, it's worthless. The mayor just about spat coffee out of his nose. He was laughing so hard. I was like, wait a minute. I get more of your land, you charge me less for it. She goes, yeah, that's our standard. And I said, OK, I've got three miles of frontage around the property. And this fellow's got 200 feet. She goes, yeah, we don't count frontage as part of the assessment. So if you go into any kind of property valuation understanding of your community, the first thing you're going to find is this wormhole of policies that don't make sense. Just don't believe that there's a truth to them. That's the reason why I was at the assessor's conference was to ask them about this standard that they have. And their magazine is called Fair and Equitable. And I asked them, how is it fair and how is it equitable? And they're like, it's not. I'm like, where did you get this standard from? They're like, we don't know. Maybe something in the 1700s could have had something to do with agricultural policy. But now that you pointed out, we need to change it. And I was blown away. I was like, wait a minute. Cities all across the country are operating with this faulty math. Let's take a step back. When Apple put this iPhone out there, aren't we all cool with paying for this glass that's in here and the aluminum that's on the backside of this? Yeah. At the root level, we don't operate our cities that way. No one's paying attention to our costs put into the ground versus the revenues that come out of it. We operate with this buggy 17th century system evaluation. That needs to change. Because you will find all of this speculation, these really weird anomalies, if you have forestation policies in the middle of your city, you might want to get rid of those. Is it a tax break? Know that you're going to let somebody what, sell lumber in the middle of your downtown and give them a tax break to waste that real estate? Yeah, so let's, again, put that out to the community so they can understand it. But they have to see it visually to understand where the gaps are. A lot of people aren't good at math to just retain it in their head as we talk about it. You have to see it and what its effects are. So that's why we'd like to do the pictures to show you how bad you're bleeding. Anybody else? Sir, do you look at tax base per capita when you look at comparing different municipalities? Because what blew me away a little bit in the last revaluation here in the triangle is that Cary, a city with about half a Durham's population, actually has the same tax base in the $25 billion range. Do you look at it as a per capita measure of community wealth or do you only look at it on a per acre basis? Because it always seemed to me that Cary was suburban sprawl on steroids, but they seem to have managed to accumulate a ton of tax base even with that development philosophy. Well, Asheville's, so you guys, yeah, you're right. And thank you for being the first person, I should give you a cookie or something, or I got a sticker here for you afterward, the first person that knew the value of your community. I mean, how many people before you said this knew that you were worth $25 billion? Josh and Will, you did, you knew? Okay, cool. Your county's 29 billion. Your downtown's about 800 million. Asheville is 12 or 13 billion. So you guys are almost double, Ashe, what's that? Oh, Gwinnett County? Yeah, okay. Do y'all know Gwinnett County? Gwinnett County's in Georgia. When we did the project, I was under explicit orders. When I went there, I wasn't allowed to say four words. I couldn't say the word urban, city, town, or municipal in the presentation, which is kind of hard when your company's called Urban Three. But I was like, all right, whatever you want. They said, we're rural people, honey. You know, we're not city people. We're outside the Beltway of Atlanta. We're out here. Lawrenceville's the county seat. I'd never heard of Lawrenceville, but there they are. And when we pulled their numbers, they're 800,000 people in Gwinnett County, which is massive. And I called up my client. I was like, Kelly, you're all 800,000 people. She said, yeah, I know, honey, but we're 460 square miles. We're huge. We're a big, rural place. All right, so 800,000 people into 460 square miles is a density of 1,900 people per square mile, right? You follow me? Which is less dense than Decab, which has Decatur and a piece of Atlanta in it. That's 200 people less dense than Decab. But we had all this other data, so we put it out there for them. They're 200 people denser than Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. Now, as we all know, what's in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina? Charlotte. Now, I'm like, well, how did you do this? How did you get denser and didn't produce a Charlotte? This is Nashville over here. We all heard Nashville, right? 600 people denser than Nashville. They didn't produce Nashville. Both of these places have a professional football team. There's no such thing as the Gwinnett County Cowboys, is there? Like, what did you create here? This is Austin, you double the density of Austin. This is Raleigh. This is Asheville. This is Chapel Hill, North Carolina. That's what rural towns look like in a rural environment. What the heck did you guys do? So when Josh was doing the model, I was talking to Josh and I was like, what the heck is that? Could you turn it on its side? So he rotated it on its side. It looks like a 1970 Shag carpet, doesn't it? It's just like the same thing. All the way across the model. It's dense, right? This is Orange County, North Carolina. There's Chapel Hill, Carboro and Hillsboro. We can see Main Street, Main Street, Main Street in the model and this is what you guys did. Their highest potency is $8 million of value, right? What Kerry did is the exact same thing. So let's put it side by side. This is the most potent building in all of Gwinnett County. Kerry doesn't even have that. This is an economic heart monitor we made of the three counties of Nashville, Austin and Lawrenceville, Gwinnett County, Travis County and Davidson and we pulsed them out. So we got a peak value of 192 million in Davidson, 476 million in Austin and y'all are flat lining to 8 million. So they have wealth, they have value, edge to edge value. Their total value of Gwinnett County is awesome but they've got no dense value. They've got all the horizontal infrastructure of Austin but none of the vertical stuff to pay for it. So I asked them, I'm like, y'all going broke yet? And they're like, oh yeah, yeah, we're broke. Like, what's that? Yet, yet. If they have, they can have a fund balance. Do they have a reserve account placed into the structure to pay for all that infrastructure that they've got? Now it depends, if they're all homeowner association rows that are detached, then maybe they'll make it. But it's that density that produces the wealth. It's the architectural quality that produces the wealth. Josh did a building analysis of Cary and a lot of the building typologies. I mean, let me just ask you this. I mean, we know what architecture looks like that was built in the late 70s. Does that have longevity? Or does it have to be torn out and rebuilt? You know, we didn't build buildings that way back 100 years ago or even 50 or 60 years ago. So there's lots of questions about Cary. I mean, I'll be honest with you. I need to see the data at a deeper level first. But oftentimes you can get value and aggregate value by consuming all that real estate. And they have expensive office parks there that are producing wealth. So there's that kind of stuff. But I'd need to see it in a more apples to apples way. But I'd suspect they're a lot like Gwinnett County. And as you do your analysis and looking at this kind of per acre wealth, I mean, there's a correlation if you look at the places like Walmart or Target that kind of building these major acres. I'm an economic developer by creating things of that nature. So usually there's some negotiation that's happening behind the scenes as relates to kind of how much you're gonna tax me and things of that nature. I mean, how do you equate for the fact that, I mean, if I'm a person building a kind of a single building or redeveloping a single building, I'm probably not gonna be able to negotiate with the town to have my tax rate a certain amount. Whereas on Walmart, I'm kind of lobbying and trying to get incentives and things of that nature. I mean, how does that equate in your model? I mean, so it's not really, I guess just to assess the growing outstanding. Well, I'm assessing this different than this. I mean, there's some kind of back room stuff that's going on in the process of deciding to put the Walmart here versus across the county line. Yeah, there's a lot of tax debates that happen. It depends on the community. The first thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna grab your assessed value. And that assessed value should have within it what's going on from evaluation adjustment if it's transparent. We did projects in New York State, which are just ridiculous what they do up there. They'll move all sorts of knobs and dials around, but they have this thing called a pilot, which is what we call tax increment financing in North Carolina. We have to actually get those because those are agreements that I may have a value on the books, but you're really taxing me at this. And when we go and do a full run on a community, a full flush analysis, we're making sure we're getting all of those agreements upfront. North Carolina is a, we don't have TIF at the same level that a lot of places. So it tends to be easier in our state. We also tend to be more transparent than places like New York. I'm trying to think Josh, what are the other weirdo ones? Yeah, Michigan currently is doing, and the assessors are on top of a lot of this stuff. I mean, we see some crazy things. Michigan Lowe's, North Carolina company, is trying to work the state legislature to assess all Lowe's hardware stores as if they were empty. And they're like, that's our comp, an empty store. There it is, it's sitting there empty. And so we were in a meeting somewhere and I just said, can I get the same thing for my house? And I get my house assessed as an empty house. What's good for the goose should be good for the gander, right? You and I don't have that lobbyist. Now in defensive Lowe's and in Walmart, they're playing the game. They know how to play the game. So we try as much as possible, we call this tax literacy. We want you all to understand how the game's being played and to not see it as something that you can't get part of is a community you could have the discussion. Maybe for small incremental developers, people who are trying to do these small projects, could they get the same tax holiday or something? You can make those policies. We want to have an incentive for homegrown and full development of small units to handle some of our housing shortages. That could be a policy. And there's lots of things, there's lots of dials you can do. In Canada, we find that Canadians are unbelievably sophisticated about this stuff. And it's weird the way that they talk about taxation. They're like, oh, it's reasonable. And they just go at it right there. And they just, they have a whole different way of looking at government. It's a very interactive thing for them. For us, it's a very combative thing, developer bad, me good kind of thing. And some developers are, but not all developers are. So I think we tend to look at things a little bit too black and white and not with the grays on the inside. That makes sense. But if we usually find that stuff and we'll adjust the model to show those things that happen within it. So while we're starting to delve into policy, have a couple of questions on policy. So from both the planning and the economic perspective, what are some policies around infill that you've seen work that you might recommend to a place like Durham or the Triangle? One of my favorite policies that I like to talk about is, if you ever heard of Henry George, Henry George was a tax economist in the 1800s. It was funny. Actually, Josh and I were talking about there was a magazine from what was in 1916 where Durham did a joint venture public private city hall. Y'all did this. Where you built an opera house that was private that had cashflow and paid taxes and it covered the cost of the city hall. It was one of your first city halls. In that same document in the early 1900s, they're wrestling with the explosive growth of the American city and how to handle it. And Henry George came out in the late 1800s with this policy of why do you tax based on buildings? Because there's a perverse incentive for me to build junk in your community. And also use the penalty for somebody that builds a nice building that's made out of granite or something. Why should you penalize that? It's just own, right? So he's like, this is unbelievably stupid. On top of that, if you happen to be the Copley family that stepped off the Mayflower in Boston, you could have all of this land and you could just sit on it forever. You know, just bequeath it to your grandkids, right? Meanwhile, the community's got this pressure happening. Land values are going up and there's no supply. So what if we change the tax system so that your locational system was important and precedent and buildings meant nothing? We're gonna tax you based on the infrastructure and what we committed to the property. That seems simple. It started this huge movement in the 1800s called Georgism. Elizabeth Maggie Phillips, who's up here? She was a Georgist. She has spectacular eyebrows, by the way. She invented a board game because she's like adults are too set in their ways. They don't understand this stuff. As soon as you start talking about taxation, it all gets complex for them and it becomes too difficult. I'm gonna invent a board game to teach people land value taxation. Did y'all recognize this game? Monopoly. It was first called the Landlord's Game. This has all of the rules that we understand, right? Land assembly is important, location is critical and when you put buildings on it, that's how you win the game. The same is true of your city. It's those vacant lots, that stuff that's kind of the in-between space that's not giving you anything. That's where you're losing your money all over the place. You gotta pay for that road that goes by that stuff. You gotta pay for that pipe. You gotta pay to drive a garbage truck by it. You gotta pay to have a police officer go by it. Sometimes they're nuisance properties. So they drive even more police services. The attacks are less. So at the very least, let's think about Maggie and Monopoly and start thinking of your city that way. Don't overthink this stuff. She does have awesome eyebrows, by the way, right? Anyone else? All right, well, why don't we give Joe another round of applause? Thank you. Thank you. And this presentation is being recorded and it should be available on the DTV network and we also will have a copy of the presentation available as well. But thank you again for coming out. Thank you.