In 2014, the Philadelphia school district auctioned off a shuttered vocational school in South Philly — 340,000 square feet, built like a bomb shelter. Seven developers looked at it. Some bid a dollar. Lindsey Scannapieco bid $1.75 million. That building is now Bok: home to more than 200 businesses, the majority owned by women and people of color, and one of the most celebrated adaptive reuse projects in the country.

Lindsey Scannapieco is the founder of Scout, an urban design and development practice with a radically different approach to city development — she listens to buildings and lets them tell her what they want to be, treating existing urban infrastructure as an asset rather than a liability.

In this episode, host Kate Gasparro and Lindsey explore the anatomy of an impact development deal versus a traditional one: structuring for public benefit, underwriting community value that takes years to materialize, and why reusing what a city already has is one of the most sustainable, resilient ways to build vibrant neighborhoods. They also talk about the five-day "funeral" Scout held for a beloved arts institution, and the lessons carrying forward into the Village of Industry and Art — born from the closure of the University of the Arts.

This episode is for the real estate developers and investors who suspect impact and returns don't have to be a tradeoff — and want the evidence. It's for city and public-sector leaders wrestling with vacant institutional buildings, shuttered schools, and distressed civic assets. It's for architects, planners, and preservationists drawn to adaptive reuse. And it's for the community-minded builders, small-scale and incremental developers, and mission-driven entrepreneurs who want to create vibrant neighborhoods without pricing out the people already there.

Resources:

Eight Years in the Making:The Bok Building (Scout)

Becoming Bok: From Decommissioned School to South Philly’s Center of Creative Cool (Philly Mag)

Leaving New York to Find the American Dream in Philadelphia (NYTimes)

Scout gives Philadelphia’s historic buildings a creative second life (Knight Foundation)

Bok comes to Broad Street (Philadelphia Citizen)

What does it actually take to invest in a neighborhood — not just a building — and get it right? In this episode, Brian Murray, CEO and co-founder of SHIFT Capital, takes us inside 15 years of community development projects that started with a few neglected industrial buildings in Kensington, Philadelphia and evolved into a national impact investment platform.

Brian shares how SHIFT's "Whole Neighborhood" approach to urban development differs from traditional real estate — pooling investors across asset types so that loss leaders, small storefronts, and anchor projects can work together as a single ecosystem. He walks through the creation of J-Centrel, a 110-unit adaptive reuse project with a built-in civic engagement program, and how its planned exit into the Kensington Corridor Trust — the country's first community-owned perpetual purpose trust — became a national model for equitable city development.

We also get into the harder truths: why SHIFT's first fund wasn't a home run, why capital is difficult to raise even for low-risk affordable housing deals, and why Brian believes the impact real estate field is great at talking to each other but terrible at communicating with the communities they serve.

Whether you're a developer, an urban planner, or someone who cares about sustainable cities and community-driven infrastructure, this conversation lays out what it really looks like to invest in people and place — and what it costs when you get the timing, scale, or density wrong.

Resources:

• Creating high-opportunity neighborhoods: Lessons from HOPE VI (Brookings)
• The New Street Fight: how SHIFT Capital might help make Kensington a model of the right type of private investment (The Philadelphia Citizen)
• This Apartment Building Gives You a Break on the Rent for Volunteering (Philly Mag)
• Eight months after Kensington’s disaster declaration, progress is tempered by the realities of the opioid crisis (Philadelphia Inquirer)
• Affordable Housing and Community Developing in Impact Investing (Columbia Business School)

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The zoning debate is about what we build and for whom. The building code is supposed to be about how we build it. But the "how" has a way of quietly dictating the "what" and "whom" — making the building code just as political and just as consequential to our cities as anything that happens at a planning commission.

In this episode, host Kate Gasparro talks with Eduardo Mendoza, Policy Manager at the Metropolitan Abundance Project and California YIMBY, about the silent rulebook shaping nearly every piece of city infrastructure around you. They cover what building codes actually are and where they come from, why an American elevator costs three times as much as a European one, and how requirements like double staircases and sprinkler thresholds quietly kill the small multifamily buildings that make for more sustainable cities.

The conversation digs into how outdated rules are slowing the shift toward sustainable infrastructure and walkable, mid-rise neighborhoods, and what reforms — from single-stair buildings to performance-based codes — could change about the development landscape. They close on the harder question: who actually has the power to rewrite the code governing building infrastructure across the country, and on what timeline change is realistic.

If you care about housing affordability, sustainable cities, or the future of how we build, this is an episode worth your time.

Resources: 

North America’s Elevator Problem (About Here)

The American Elevator Explains Why Housing Costs Have Skyrocketed (NYTimes)

The hidden double standards driving our housing crisis (Vox)

Decades-Old Zoning and Building Codes are Responsible for Our Housing Choices (Common Edge)

Your city legalized triplexes. The building code said no. (Congress for New Urbanism)

Why single-stair reform leads to more livable, adaptable infill (Congress for New Urbanism)

Thanks for listening to Building Better Cities! If you'd like to stay connected, don't forget to Subscribe and Follow. You can find all our archived newsletters and podcasts right here. Want to get in touch? Just email the team at [email protected].

For generations, cities were built by the people who lived in them. That's why so many of our most beloved neighborhoods feel like quilted fabrics of architectural styles, mixed uses, interwoven public spaces, and human-scale details. These vibrant neighborhoods weren't delivered all at once through a single master plan — they emerged gradually through incremental urban development, one building, one block, one local investment at a time.

But somewhere along the way, building small became harder. Harder for local developers and entrepreneurs to shape the places they live. Harder for neighborhoods to evolve incrementally. And easier for growth to be defined only by scale.

Today, many communities say they want more housing, more walkable neighborhoods, more local character, and more vibrant main streets. But too often, the systems shaping urban development and city projects only make room for the biggest players and the largest deals — leaving small-scale, sustainable development on the sidelines.

So what would it look like to reopen the door to small-scale urban development?

In this episode, host Kate Gasparro sits down with Jim Heid — founder of Building Small, developer, strategist, and author of Building Small. Jim has spent years championing a different approach to growth: human-scale projects, adaptive reuse, local ownership, and the idea that smaller developments can create outsized impact on neighborhoods and local economies.

Together, Kate and Jim explore what "building small" actually means, why today's development system favors scale, the barriers small builders and lenders face, and what developers, planners, urbanists, real estate professionals, and everyday city lovers can do to help create more vibrant, sustainable neighborhoods in their own communities.

Resources: 

Building Small: Tools for Doing Development Different (Jim Heid)

Small Scale Forums (Jim Heid)

Where did all the small developers go? (Strong Towns)

Why small developers are getting squeezewd out of the housing market (Coby Lefkowitz)

The challenges facing small or emeging housing developers and strategies to overcome them (Urban Institute)

The lost art of small-scale development (Jim Kumon, Incremental Development Alliance)

How 'Developer' became such a dirty word (NY Times)

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For generations, California has approached housing growth through a familiar playbook: long planning processes, neighborhood-by-neighborhood debates, and major reforms that often struggle to deliver homes at scale.

But every so often, an incentive structure quietly changes the system.

In this episode of Building Better Cities, we explore one of those policies: California’s Density Bonus Law, and the findings from Circulate Planning and Policy’s new “Win-Win Bonus” report on how this tool has become one of the state’s most effective drivers of housing production and urban development.

Colin Parent, Executive Director of Circulate Planning and Policy and a key architect of California’s expanded Bonus Law joins host Kate Gasparro to discuss Bonus Law's success. Colin previously worked under Governor Jerry Brown at the California Department of Housing and Community Development, where he helped shape statewide housing policy during a period of major change following the dissolution of redevelopment agencies.

Together, Kate and Colin discuss how Bonus Law evolved from a rarely used statute into a central housing production tool, now accounting for a significant share of multifamily housing approvals in California. We also examine how San Diego became an early testing ground for reform, how local innovation scaled into state policy, and why incentive-based approaches can sometimes outperform more traditional regulatory strategies.

Beyond the mechanics, this conversation explores broader questions of housing affordability, urban infrastructure, and coalition-building: what it takes to align public and private interests—and where even successful policies may still leave gaps, particularly for middle-income households.

Whether you work in planning, development, public policy, or simply care about the future of housing affordability, this episode offers a behind-the-scenes look at how a local experiment became statewide policy—and what it signals for the next generation of housing and infrastructure reform.

Resources:

Bonus tracks- your musical experience into understanding bonus law (Circulate Planning and Policy)

California's density bonus is a 'win-win' for developers and affordable housing (Planetizen)

San Diego housing density bonus is spurring affordable units (SmartCitiesDive)

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How do you measure whether a city is actually getting better?

Most people know LEED as the gold standard for green buildings. But cities are more than buildings—they’re systems made up of housing, transportation, public space, infrastructure, resilience, health, and opportunity.

In this episode of Building Better Cities, Kate Gasparro sits down with Dr. Vatsal Bhatt, Vice President at the U.S. Green Building Council and global lead for LEED for Cities and Communities, to explore how one of the world’s most recognized sustainability frameworks has expanded from buildings to the scale of neighborhoods, communities, and entire cities.

They discuss why LEED for Cities and Communities was created, how it differs from traditional building certifications, and why an outcomes-driven, data-centered approach matters when cities are trying to balance growth, equity, climate goals, and quality of life.

The conversation also explores a bigger question: do rating systems simply recognize good projects—or can they actually change how communities are planned, governed, and built?

Whether you’re a developer, planner, policymaker, or someone who simply cares about the future of your community, this episode offers a fresh framework for thinking about what it really means to build better cities.

Resources:

St Paul's The Heights redevelopment hearns LEED Platinum precertification (REJournals)

onMain- Dayton's Innovation District (onMain)

The masterplan of MIND - the Milan Innovation District (Mario Cucinella Architects)

Siemensstadt 2.0: Research and industry closely linked (Brain City Berlin)

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Transit ballot measures are often seen as a long shot — especially when affordability is top of mind and voters are being asked to raise their own taxes. But in November 2024, 66% of Nashville voters said yes to Choose How You Move, a half-penny sales tax funding $3.1 billion in transit expansion, sidewalk construction, and urban infrastructure improvements across Davidson County. So what made it work — and what can other cities learn heading into the 2026 midterm elections?

In November 2024, sixty-six percent of Nashville voters approved Choose How You Move — a half-penny sales tax funding $3.1 billion in transit expansion, sidewalk construction, and urban infrastructure improvements across Davidson County. 

So what changed? In this episode of Building Better Cities, host Kate Gasparro sits down with Amanda Wall Vandergrift, Deputy CEO of WeGo Public Transit, to unpack the specific messaging, coalition-building, and program design strategies that moved two-thirds of voters to raise their own taxes.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How Nashville flipped the narrative from "fix transit" to "give us more of what's already working" — and why that distinction matters
• Why framing the program around sidewalks, signals, service, and safety resonated more than flashy urban development projects
• The one strategic mistake Amanda sees transit agencies repeat when taking infrastructure programs to the ballot box
• What cities pursuing sustainable development, urban regeneration, and voter-approved transportation investment should be doing right now ahead of November 2026

This episode is essential listening for local leaders, city planners, transit advocates, and real estate investors betting on transit-oriented infrastructure.

Resources:

5 strategies to help transit ballot measures succeed (SmartCitiesDive)

Transit Wins Big Again in Local Electrions Across America (StreetsBlog USA)

Nashville among wave of successful 2024 transit votes nationwide (Tenessee Lookout)

80% of Public Transit Measures Passed in 2025 Elections (Planetizen)

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You pay rent or a mortgage every month and you know exactly what that costs. But how much are you spending just to get where you need to go? For a lot of Americans, transportation is the hidden cost of where they live — and it's a cost that's baked into the way we've built our cities.

In part two of this series, Yonah Freemark of the Urban Institute stays with us and we're joined by Sam Sklar — the writer, consultant, and advocate behind Exasperated Infrastructures — to explore the deep connection between public transit investment, urban land use policy, and how cities grow. Sam brings experience across urban planning, sustainable infrastructure consulting, and transit advocacy, and his platform has become a go-to voice on what it actually takes to build more equitable, people-centered transportation systems in American cities.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Why transportation infrastructure is land use — and how the space cities dedicate to roads and highways shapes what's possible for housing density, walkable communities, and sustainable urban development 
• Why transit oriented development alone won't save struggling transit agencies
• Our March Madness bracket of transit investments reshaping American cities 

This is part two of a two-part series on how zoning reform, housing supply, and transportation infrastructure investment are shaping the future of sustainable, equitable American cities. Catch part one to hear Yonah Freemark break down why upzoning alone won't solve the housing crisis.

Resources:

The Bay Area Considers the Unthinkable: Life Without BART (NYTimes)

The Smart Enough City (Ben Green)

Virginia DOT's Smart Scale approch to allocating tax dollars (VA DOT)

Queenslink: Connecting Communities with Rails & Trails (Queenslink)

Western Avenue alders revived Chicago's BRT dream (StreetsBlog Chicago)

After decades of dreaming, delays, LA's Wilshire subway to Beverly Hills to open in May (LA Times)

How the Interborough Express Could Transform New York (NYTimes)

Build the Roosevelt Blvd Subway (Blvd Subway)

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Upzoning is often pitched as the silver bullet for the housing crisis — change the rules, let developers build, and supply will bring prices down. But the reality is a lot more complicated. In this episode, host Kate Gasparro sit down with Yonah Freemark to unpack what the research actually tells us about the relationship between zoning reform and housing production across U.S. cities.

Yonah is a principal research associate at the Urban Institute, where he leads the practice area on Fair Housing, Land Use, and Transportation and directs the Land Use Lab. He holds a PhD in urban studies and master's degrees in city planning and transportation from MIT, and his research on zoning, affordable housing, and urban development has been published in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Housing Policy Debate, and Urban Affairs Review, among others. He's also the founder of The Transport Politic, one of the most widely cited independent platforms tracking transit infrastructure investment in the U.S. and globally. 

In this episode, we discuss:

• Why upzoning doesn't guarantee housing gets built — and the market conditions that actually drive development 
• How land values absorb the gains from rezoning before construction ever happens 
• The role of interest rates, developer equity, and financial feasibility in urban housing production 
• Why no single land use policy will solve the housing crisis, and what a more complete urban planning toolkit looks like

This is part one of a two-part series on how zoning, housing supply, and transportation infrastructure are shaping the future of American cities. In the next episode, we bring in Sam Sklar of Exasperated Infrastructure to explore how transit investment, city building, and mobility policy connect to the land use conversation.

Resources:

Upzoning Chicago: Impacts of a Zoning Reform on Property Values and Housing Construction (Urban Affairs Review)

Downzoning Chicago: How Local Land Use Policy has Reduced Houisng Construction and Reinforced Segregation (Urban Findings)

America Has a Housing Shortage. Zoning Changes Near Transit Could Help. (Urban Institute)

Unifying Upzoning with Affordable Housing Production Strategies (Urban Institute)

Austin's Surge of New Housing Construction Drove Down Rents (Pew)

Dallas in Booming- Except for its downtown (Wall Street Journal)

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Building better cities requires getting the relationship between cities, counties, and the state right. And few people understand that dynamic better than someone who's lived on both sides of it.

In this episode of Building Better Cities, host Kate Gasparro sits down with Michael Tubbs — former Mayor of Stockton, Special Advisor to Governor Newsom, and candidate for Lieutenant Governor — to unpack who's actually responsible for solving California's housing crisis. From leading a city through bankruptcy recovery to launching the nation's first mayor-led guaranteed income pilot, Tubbs brings a rare perspective on what it takes to drive urban development when power is split between city hall and the state capitol. He's also been a vocal advocate for SB 79 and CEQA reform, testifying before the state legislature in support of legislation that would make it easier to build housing near transit and reduce the regulatory delays that drive up costs.

The conversation covers how state legislation is reshaping local land use and zoning to unlock housing supply and how the relationship between cities and the state determines whether sustainable cities get built — or stalled. Tubbs also shares his vision for using university-owned land to produce housing at scale, his proposals for a California public bank and data dividend, and why transit-oriented development is essential to meeting the state's climate and sustainable infrastructure goals.

If you care about housing policy, urban development, sustainable cities, or the future of California, this is essential listening.

Resources:

3 years ago, Stockton, was bankrupt. Now it's trying out a basic income. (Vox)

Michael Tubbs: What does it take to transform a struggling city? (NPR)

Mayors for a Guaranteed Income

Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration Analysis (University of Pennsylvania)

CA program giving $500 no-strings-attached stipends pays off, study finds (NPR)

Hey Alaskans, it's time to file for your Permanent Fund Divident (Alaska Public Media)

CA Governor Gavin Newsom proposes a "data dividend" for state residents (Vox)

CA's push to clear homeless encampments (Governing)

Riverside Council rejects $20M state grant for affordable housing project (The Riverside Record)

Send us Fan Mail

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