A wrap-up of another year, the last half of which saw me writing a historically limited amount, which is a bit frustrating to me and, I’m sure, to my readers. I had a lot of high hopes in 2024– to try and reinvent the housing market using modular construction, among others.
The year had a lot of ups and down, ranging from my maintaining front-row seats to the spectacular collapse of the Hubbard Farms Neighborhood Association (a postmortem on this experience will eventually be coming) to my (random, relatively unanticipated) start teaching at Michigan State University in the School of Planning, Design, and Construction (scroll way down for more on this!). My policy advocacy and outreach work with Abundant Housing Michigan— of which I am (apparently, theoretically, nominally, for paperwork purposes) now the appointed treasurer (!)- paralleled the Michigan state legislature actually taking up discussion of some frankly stellar policy positions on zoning and land use reform during the lame duck session. Most didn’t pass, thanks to a diversity of folks ranging from a perhaps thoroughly predictable Republican hissyfit to the stonewalling of the Michigan Municipal League. But we have reason to believe that at least some may be taken up this year, and the possibility of this is solidified with every phone call to one’s elected representation. Advocacy, as it turns out, works! Shoutout to Representative Kristian Grant, whose office has been great to work with on this stuff.
We scored some other rare Michigan urbanism wins in 2024 in things like advocacy against the widening of US-23. It’s at least inspiring that we’ve gotten to the point of discussing these things, but we also have examples of reforms happening– as in the case of Grand Rapids, which passed an unprecedented zoning reform bill last spring.
Speaking of last spring? I got the opportunity to do a bunch of scanning work at Michigan Central Not-Station. You can go on a virtual tour here, but you can also go for a tour in person. There is a Yellow Light Donuts— a modern storefront iteration of the eastside modern classic, drive-thru-only donut shop- and a gift shop where you can buy coffee for $36 a pound. You can also sit in the concourse, largely unmolested by Ford Corporate Bros who have been known to roam the building. The building currently seems to have a few dozen employees, a bit shy of the several thousand that were promised. My top secret intelligence also tells me that the company hasn’t actually spent anywhere near the billion dollars they promised in exchange for $300-some million in subsidies.
But hey, who’s counting? Yes, I’m a little bit bitter– because Ford told me they didn’t care to pay to keep hosting the Matterport spaces after stiffing me on a bunch of the video editing work. It’s generally been frustrating to feel like everyone has come back to Detroit to say they loved the city all along, conveniently erasing the decades during which these same people were so excited about having left this city. This is worst at the corporate level, where mid-level managers can spend millions of dollars to import into taxpayer-renovated corporate offices Harvard-educated talent and pay them cushy six-figure salaries to ideate the future of autonomous cars that don’t exist– but they can’t pay pocket change to maintain a digital asset that continues to be one of Handbuilt’s most trafficked links. Ford viewed the whole endeavor not as a way to create and maintain access to a digital twin of a real life space, but as a very short-term marketing tool, I guess. I’m glad someone got paid, though, I guess.
I’m hoping to keep the spaces alive, but it’s going to cost money.
So, some faint musings on the past year and a Q&A with myself:
Hey, what happened to that whole modular housing thing?
As fate would have it, my consulting contract with ADL Ventures turned into the company basically trying to turn me into a corporate fundraiser for them, while just simply declining to actually support the workstream. After working on assembling what we all thought was a pretty great opportunity to redevelop a whole city block in a southeastern city in conjunction with the municipal housing authority, the company apologized, but sorry, we can’t actually afford to pay you that salary we said we’d pay you. We had assembled a multi-tiered development proposal, though, that involved developing three separate sites– new construction modular on one block, another project catty-corner, and another one several blocks away, plus a proposed eventual renovation of a high-rise apartment tower, all affordable housing. All set up via one of my own connections through POCACITO from way back in 2016 (!).
Rather, the company came back to me, proposing an arrangement in which I would get paid a tiny commission of consulting contracts I was tasked with bringing in, and the company would reap most of the benefit while providing me with no support or (contractually defined) salary. It struck me as a half-baked idea that either hadn’t been vetted by Anyone In Charge– or, more likely, just wasn’t serious to begin with. A mentor asked why I wouldn’t just do the work on my own at that point, especially given the fact that the company had fired its only HR person, half of one of our peer teams, and had appointed an emotionless and culturally incompetent West Coast tech bro (who, as far as I’m aware, doesn’t even really live in the country? Question mark?) to whom I essentially had to start reporting.
I later learned that most people on the team didn’t actually work for ADL full-time and instead had their own side hustles or “real” jobs. So, ADL was sort of a virtual office or shadow enterprise whence a lot of this whole branding, dreaming, and scheming originated. I understand the value proposition of this but it’s super weird when you’re trying to talk about how your company has the solution to someone’s problem and here you are collecting a paycheck from, I don’t know, someone else?
Anyway, pretty weird, overall. It’s been my experience that community work, social innovation, and all of these intersecting fields in which this work took place are all fundamentally relationship-based, and this translates to a lot of real estate development and housing, too. Especially that which seeks to move the needle on things like how housing or community development are done.
When Your Whole Team Gets Fired
It’s a little weird when your whole team gets fired. It’s also weird when half of the people you work with are emotionless goons who think they’re Elon Freaking Musk but can’t seem to retain a workforce, whether a product of a toxic work environment, poor pay, an inability to maintain employee engagement in important work, or a combination of the three. Two members of my team resigned during my tenure and at least a dozen people got fired including at least three senior-level staff. Being overworked was a virtue, in the case of my manager, but while he was constantly traveling and working hard, the company still had mysteriously little money to pay me (at least compared to what was spelled out in our contract).
Add to that the weirdness that the company’s managers had contracted with a national firm to conduct a comprehensive employee satisfaction survey and, when the results came back with universally negative feedback from dozens of responses, they didn’t actually take any of the suggestions in it– they blamed the main recruiter for bringing the wrong people on board, and fired her.
But I guess if it’s working for the partners we assembled at RMI and the Department of Energy, who am I to complain?! What do I know, right?
Anyway, complaints aside, I did a lot of good work for this outfit, including doing the bulk of editing and a bunch of content work on a major white paper on the use of industrialized offsite construction. This was meant to be published by RMI in mid-2024, but they sent it over to West Coast Goon, who, himself a less than illustrious writer with echoes of Trumpian commentary (“everything is black and white! we are winners or we are losers!”), did I-don’t-know-what with it.
I learned a lot of stuff, got paid real human dollars to do it, got to travel to some exotic locations (like Austin for YIMBYland!), met some great people, and would love to do more consulting work in the future. But perhaps with an outfit that is less hokey and less flaky. I fortunately didn’t have to squander any political capital associated with the preliminary funding commitments I announced last summer, because I suspect those will translate into future wins (don’t want to say too much more for fear of jinxing it– big things could definitely still materialize in 2025!). I had some great conversations with funders in West Michigan and with a major Detroit area philanthropy who I think may still be interested in figuring out how to make this whole thing happen!
Hold on– isn’t it kinda weird for you to put these people on blast, publicly?
I’m glad for the question. Absolutely not weird at all.
What’s weird is how we as a society have allowed bad employers and abusive managers to exploit people while we as various levels of collectives– teams within a corporation, communities, what have you- idly sit by and wring our hands, airily suggesting that maybe we can just find another job if things get too bad. I believe we have an ethical obligation to challenge bad paradigms and to hold people accountable for creating and perpetuating bad paradigms. I believe that this is true for everything ranging from climate change to badly managed business relationships. A lack of accountability is how we’ve ended up with people like Trump and half-trillionaire oligarchs controlling the American presidency.
If we’re going to continue to inhabit the epoch of what Jason Moore calls the Capitalocene— differentiated from the anthropocene by the unique set of channels and structures through which capital operates unto itself- we’re going to have to square the thoroughly unnatural channels and structures with the natural ones of human relationships and communities. This involves demanding accountability, both as individuals and as groups of individuals working within the structures of larger systems.
We don’t really do accountability in corporate environments because the individual is largely useless to the organism as a whole. Consequently, everyone is more worried about protecting their own job rather than the collective institution, whether of the team or even the company. This is one of those peculiar areas in which cults of ego butt heads with the idea of for-profit motives that are, at least theoretically, meant to govern capitalism in a competitive market economy. In other words, what’s good for the company is often not necessarily good for the individual ego, and here we see teams hiring shitty but compliant workers, executives promoting compliant but incompetent people to positions of higher managerial authority, or what have you.
The chickens do often come home to roost, though, and all good things must come to an end, if “good things” are, tragically for the sake of the perseverance of capitalist organisms, defined as “milking an unaccountable and opaque system for your own executive profit at the expense of treating your employees like crap.” I found this out after I resigned from a hostile work environment at Exelon in 2022, too– that my skip level manager, a.k.a. my boss’s boss, who had created a toxic work environment in my realm- was himself later fired for being a doofus. Feeling vindicated in a situation like this– or, distantly, schadenfreude- is unfortunately cold comfort for the amount of frustration I had to deal with from facing the prospects of relocating my entire life (and marriage) from Detroit to DC and then just kidding, that’s not happening. The old bait-and-switch! We love to see it.
Anyway, so it goes.
But just as I was valuable short-term labor for ADL, I guess I was valuable short-term labor for Exelon for a minute, too, and that, too, is just how it goes. I don’t really resent that except in that I am always wishing for arrangements in which I could do better work over a longer time frame. I don’t crave wealth or power, I crave the ability to do good work. I’d even tolerate working for doofuses if I could keep getting paid for it. Heck, I am probably valuable short-term labor for my current employer! But there is a big difference with the current setup.
Hold up, though. At what point do you ask whether the problem is you, not them?
Great question! I’ve been asking myself this for years.
I graduated college during a hideous recession. There were no jobs. My first post-graduate job was making $8 an hour part-time with no benefits working for a rich guy who lived in DC and wanted some intern to coordinate his team doing real estate and community development work. I took the job because my college degree led me to be turned down for a lot of service sector jobs based on the fact that I was “overqualified.” He had no idea how to manage people. I had an idea of how to communicate with people, but I didn’t have any idea why a bunch of people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s would want to have a point person who was 22 years old with little professional experience. I then worked for a minor egomaniac of a conceptual artist and, later, for a couple of egomaniacal real estate developers.
In many cases, it’s possible to actually live off a service sector wage– so I picked up things like casual labor or food service or what have you. But these jobs don’t translate to meaningful career advancement opportunity, in many cases. So, in other words, I found work where I could get work. During a bad recession– one during which I probably should have just done what the cosmos was suggesting I do and up and move to the West Coast and work for Daddy Bezos- I had to simply take what I could get. This involved developing and cultivating a niche set of skills- and a temperament of being adaptable, eager, and curious– that often lent themselves to the chaotic imagination of entrepreneurs, innovation, visionaries, and douchebags who fell into any combination of those three categories.
This is great at introducing you to wild and foreign things, forcing you to think on your feet, and figuring out how to solve complicated problems under pressure.
It’s not great for demonstrating long-term viability to a prospective employer.
The biggest single chunk of my résumé comes from The Handbuilt City, which was an umbrella under which I consolidated about a dozen separate W-2 and 1099 work projects from 2011 to 2017 or so. It’s much easier to argue that Handbuilt represents the consolidated functionality of me as a human operating as a consulting brand rather than try to explain to a prospective employer that I collected a paycheck from a company called CAULKINS FAMILY PARTNERSHIP II, LLC and seventeen others. Sure– I was doing big ass real estate deals in my early 20s! But a prospective employer sees that your biggest single résumé item is self-employment and they run the other way. They want to see an Ivy League undergraduate degree, an internship with Goldman Sachs or some philanthropy or McKinsey or what have you, and then an entry-level to mid-level job at a company that they’ve heard of. A linear progression.
I’ve left pretty much all of my jobs with good references– ranging from work in the Fortune 100 to working in nonprofitland or utility contracting-land. I feel good about the relationships I built and I feel generally pretty good about my work product with these companies. But in most cases, I haven’t felt like I’ve had much of a chance with these opportunities. With ADL, the company didn’t have money to pay me. With Exelon, I had little work to do for much of the year, and no advancement opportunity (my manager, who hired me, had quit a few weeks after I started, and I had four managers in a year and a half). It’s a lack of stability from the environments I’ve landed myself in as much as anything else.
Of course, I am also somebody who doesn’t particularly shy away from radical candor, and sometimes this pisses people off. I’m sure someone will think this whole post is wildly inappropriate because it names names. Like I said, I don’t believe in maintaining useless pleasantries for the sake of artificially cuddly relations. If we have a problem, we have a problem, and we need accountability to solve that problem. I feel that accountability is important because we as a society have big problems to solve and we’re not going to solve them if the only thing we’re focused on is taking care of ourselves in advance of the next quarterly earnings report.
Ok, so, what’s next in the new year?
Over the summer, I ended up landing a pretty stellar opportunity at Michigan State University— a real professorship of sorts, with a real office, a real salary, and real benefits! I’m working with a great group of instructors, researchers, and students. It is my first time in a university environment, and my first time really spending time in a gigantic state university. The campus stretches from distant horizon to distant horizon. The level of capital planning is awe-inspiring, moving like a city-sized bucket wheel excavator. There is a Meat Lab. I am committed at least through the entirety of 2025, and it’s possible I will be there much longer than that.
I’ve been back and forth between Detroit and Lansing but more in Lansing since September– legally a Lansing resident as of October in order to cop that sweet homestead tax credit and save myself a couple bucks on the insanity that is Detroit income taxes. It’s unclear how exactly this will play out, but it feels more solidified and stable than it did, say, six months ago, bouncing around from consulting opportunity to consulting opportunity.
It was interesting to contrast previous job experiences with my tenure at Michigan State. It’s wild to imagine that I’ll be sitting in my office and colleagues would come by to say hey, not to tell me I was doing something wrong (this was typically the only time I would see a managerial figure while working in Utilityworld). There is a sense of camaraderie but also professionalism. This has been absent from many places I’ve worked in recent memory. My colleagues were patient with my path toward getting organized as I was given all of about two weeks to prepare for the semester for two courses I had never taught before. We seem to be getting along. I have allowed myself to be roped into a few volunteer initiatives, ranging from involvement in my union to working on campus mobility and safety to sustainability.
Sure, there are plenty of issues. There are a number of goofballs in my professional orbit I still have to contend with, like the attendee of the Alternative Transportation committee meeting who said that “the problem with pedestrian and cyclist safety on campus is that we need better data.” But fortunately, I don’t have to contend with these people too much, because most of my job is to contend with students whom I have to teach about green building, building energy systems, construction methods, environmental topics in site construction, real estate development, and more.
During the spring semester, I’ll be teaching Construction Scheduling and Intro to Green Building, both undergraduate courses.
And during the Spring 2025 semester, I will channel the spirit of the majority-positive reviews from my 67 students last fall. I will also endeavor to avoid what one student last fall complained was an “unkempt appearance” (I wore dress shoes and a jacket to class most days, while another student mentioned that “you do got some drip”). I promise to dress much better, and I’m also going to be able to prepare for the semester with more than a week of advance notice (my hiring was extremely last-minute for the fall semester).
I look forward to writing more– about Lansing, about teaching and what I’m learning from it, and about the equitable decarbonization of the built environment, to which I am still, as always, perpetually, forever committed. May the new year bring regulatory reform, better education and training, and better collaboration!
Write to me and tell me about what you’re up to!
