What Is Worth Building?
A practitioner's introduction to the questions this newsletter will spend the next year working through.
Twenty years ago I left a career in engineering — semiconductor design, then optical networking — and moved into real estate development. The technical instincts didn’t disappear. The problems just changed.
What I found in real estate is that a project’s feasibility tells you what you can build. It doesn’t tell you what’s worth building. The decisions that shape neighborhoods are informed by context, community, and the history of the places in which our buildings are built — not just capital. Getting the numbers right is necessary. It isn’t the whole question.
The question I’ve been asking since — in different forms, across different problems — is: what is actually worth building?
That question is the premise of this newsletter.
I co-founded Urban Development + Partners in 2006. Since then we’ve developed and acquired urban mixed-use projects across Oregon and Northern California — multifamily, office, hospitality, adaptive reuse — and managed investments through the 2008 crisis, the 2020 dislocation, and the post-pandemic office collapse. We’ve made money, lost money once, and written about both with equal specificity in our investor letters.
We’ve also built intentional cohousing communities from the ground up — working with families and baby boomers who want to live differently than conventional housing allows, and with our friend and colleague Katie McCamant, whose work introduced this model to North America.
This year, I built AI agent systems that now run core workflows at our firm — using tools that didn’t exist 18 months prior. I hadn’t written production code in 20 years. That surprised me about as much as it surprised the people I work with.
Worth Building covers the terrain where all of this intersects.
Housing and supply. Why the shortage persists despite broad consensus that it shouldn’t. What development economics look like from the inside. What policies move the needle and which ones just sound good.
Community by design. What communities should we be creating, and how do we build them deliberately? Cohousing for families and for people planning the next chapter. What it takes to develop a neighborhood for people who don’t yet know each other. Why intentional community works, and why most Americans have never heard of it.
Capital and conviction. The investor’s lens on real estate — acquisition strategy, market cycles, fund structure, the hold/sell decision under pressure. The same transparency I use in our investor letters, applied to questions that don’t require a fund subscription to find interesting.
AI and the built environment. Not AI as concept or hype. What we actually built, how it works, what it changed, and what it didn’t. Practical and specific — written by someone still building.
These aren’t unrelated topics. They’re different angles on the same question.
What housing is worth building? What communities should we be helping create? What investments are worth the conviction they require? What tools are worth the time it takes to build them?
Worth Building comes out monthly. Each issue takes one question, one problem, or one idea and develops it fully — no listicles, no predictions, no five tips. A practitioner’s view from the middle of it.
If that’s useful to you, subscribe. If you know someone for whom it would be, forward this to them.