The sons of a big-time developer in Washington DC learned enough about the real estate industry to the point they feel it’s ‘broken’. So, rather than continue the ‘Big Head’ oriented path of the real estate industry, the chose to forge a new one via the ‘Long Tail’. That is, they’re looking to crowdsource what gets built, starting with ground-floor businesses in Washington DC.

From their website: “Today, neighborhood development is dominated by large institutional companies that use Wall

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We’re reaching the tipping point where our investment and tax dollars are going to start benefitting our local economies rather than private investors, with the ‘Long Tail‘ leading the way. Crowdfunding, a natural extension of crowdsourcing, emerges from the Long Tail and is coming to small businesses. It’s about time!

Cities are wising up in prioritize investing in independent businesses districts over chains. According to a BusinessWeek article, subsidies for chains are not effective. Big

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As we’re witnessing in communities from the Middle East to Wall Street, people are taking it upon themselves to organize and effect lasting change on behalf of the triple bottom line (being economically, socially and environmentally beneficial). These groups aren’t advocating having swarms of people as a better structure for governance, they’re just tired of what’s known in business as the ‘Big Head‘ (represented by the red in the graph above) having too much control, such as in

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Demand sparks supply, so let’s get a list of cities that want to see crowdsourced placemaking in their city, town and/or neighborhood. Then we’ll look into how we can secure grants for them, whether it’s through a new national/international nonprofit or through a local nonprofit. See this NY Times story on Bristol, CT,“You ‘Like’ It, They Build It” for an example of results, which should be a compelling story for potential funders for programs initiated by the local community.

What would the

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Trendwatching.com reports that with 180,000 people moving into cities daily, a rising creative urban population they refer to as Citysumers are defining a new generation that’s more demanding, open-minded, connected, spontaneous and more try-out-prone than ever. What that means is if there ever was a time to experiment with forward-thinking placemaking, the time is now.

The current manifestation of that mentality is with ‘pop-up’ placemaking. It allow cities to try out innovative placemaking

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With the Village of Hempstead, Long Island, New York, when a development team implemented crowdsourcing into the development process in 2011, the Village approved it unanimously. Not so when it wasn’t part of the process in 2007, which resulted in rejection.

In 2007, a development company presented the Village of Hempstead residents (pop. 53K), struggling economically at a medium income half of the immediate area, with 5200 construction jobs, 1200 permanent jobs and $35 million a year in new

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Many of us know that the triple bottom line means “people, planet and profit”, being economically, socially and environmentally beneficial. That is, expanding the traditional reporting framework to take into account ecological and social performance in addition to financial performance (Wikipedia).

So what does this mean for real estate development? What would triple bottom line real estate development look like? Keep in mind this is about the real estate development industry, not about the

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There’s a plethora of books on crowdsourcing out there, but only one documents the crowdsourcing of a city’s entire downtown. In other words, it shows you how far crowdsourcing has come along, from T-shirts to now cities.

Below is the full excerpt from the book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Crowdsourcing by Aliza Sherman, published July 2011 (sure, we had something to do with it). Two days after the book was released, the NY Times published an article on the crowdsourced placemaking of the

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This is apparently Seattle’s first transit-oriented development (TOD). If it gets better than this with TODs so come, hold on to your seats, you’re in for a fun ride.

The starting point is a 9-acre parking lot (left of photo), pretty much your standard building block in many U.S. cities, though adjacent to a major bus transfer station with planned light rail access, which means walkable urban village development is a natural next step. However, one half of what makes this a model for the rest

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Most students at university campuses either don’t need to drive, don’t need to own cars. Yet the isolated dormitory, classroom and cafeteria zone form of development, similar to the isolated subdivision, office park and shopping mall model of suburban development, surprisingly hasn’t changed for decades. Until now. Finally.

Thanks to the forward thinkers at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York, they not only invested $54 million into an open-to-the-public mixed-use

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