In this episode, I’m joined by Mara Mintzer of Growing Up Boulder for a deep dive into youth-led placemaking and what it reveals about how cities can look, feel, and function differently—often at a fraction of the expected cost. From five-minute neighborhoods and safe routes to school to water play, native habitat, and spaces that invite lingering, kids consistently point to choices that make places healthier, more social, and more sustainable for everyone.

Mara shares how small, hands-on experiments sparked a citywide culture shift: children standing on a giant map to show what works and what doesn’t; teen consultants designing engagement for their peers; and preschool “picnics in the park” that use observation—not surveys—to uncover what little ones truly need. We explore the power of loose parts and nature play, including a $14,000 log-and-stone installation that dramatically outperformed a conventional playground costing many times more.

We also get practical for planners, designers, and developers. Mara breaks down tools that build trust and reduce friction—Place It model-building, intergenerational walks, and clear “what we heard / what we did” updates—and explains how these approaches can actually accelerate approvals rather than slow projects down.

At a systems level, we examine how child-friendly planning reduces car dependence, improves air quality, lowers injury risk, and tackles loneliness by making social connection easy and free. We talk about teen-friendly parks that prioritize autonomy over programming, affordable food options that give kids independence, and emerging “naturehoods” that link schools, libraries, and parks with safe, shaded routes and micro-habitats.

If you’ve been told the only answers are ball fields and plastic slides, this conversation will challenge the brief—and expand what you think is possible.

Resources mentioned: UNICEF’s Child Friendly Cities, Safe Routes to School, Green Schoolyards, and Growing Up Boulder’s new course on building a child-friendly city map with your community.

Subscribe, share this episode with a planner or developer who needs fresh tools, and leave a review to help more people find conversations about making better places possible.

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This podcast isn’t just about ideas—it’s about action. From these conversations, two organizations have emerged to bring regenerative real estate to life:

Latitude Regenerative Real Estate is the world’s first regenerative-focused real estate brokerage, dedicated to aligning values-driven buyers and sellers. With a strong presence in the Pacific Northwest and Great Lakes regions, Latitude also supports purpose-driven developments across North America through strategic marketing and branding services. If you're looking to buy, sell, or amplify a regenerative project, Latitude is your trusted partner.

Hamlet Capital is an investment and development firm committed to building resilient communities rooted in working farms. If you’re developing an agrihood or conservation community, we’d love to hear from you. Together, we can turn visionary ideas into thriving, place-based investments.

Modern life offers speed and convenience, but often at the cost of connection to the systems that sustain us. In this episode, regenerative rancher and developer Thomas Patton joins us from just outside Panama City, Panama to explore what happens when land, food, and daily life are brought back into relationship.

Thomas shares the evolution of his family’s 7,000 hectare property from conventional agriculture to the Coquira Soil Project, and how that work expanded into Lega Vera—a farm village designed around soil health, food sovereignty, and community. This conversation explores regeneration as a practical pathway forward and a redefinition of luxury rooted in resilience, stewardship, and belonging.

———————-
This podcast isn’t just about ideas—it’s about action. From these conversations, two organizations have emerged to bring regenerative real estate to life:

Latitude Regenerative Real Estate is the world’s first regenerative-focused real estate brokerage, dedicated to aligning values-driven buyers and sellers. With a strong presence in the Pacific Northwest and Great Lakes regions, Latitude also supports purpose-driven developments across North America through strategic marketing and branding services. If you're looking to buy, sell, or amplify a regenerative project, Latitude is your trusted partner.

Hamlet Capital is an investment and development firm committed to building resilient communities rooted in working farms. If you’re developing an agrihood or conservation community, we’d love to hear from you. Together, we can turn visionary ideas into thriving, place-based investments.

Gardening is often portrayed as a pastime, an optional extra woven around daily life. Yet across history and across cultures, people have shaped land for reasons that reach far beyond necessity.

Jennifer Jewell, host of the acclaimed show Cultivating Place, has spent decades listening closely to gardeners and land tenders. Through those stories, she uncovers a pattern: cultivation is one of the most enduring ways humans connect to place, and its impact reaches well beyond the edge of the garden bed.

On this episode, we explore why people cultivate and how gardening shapes land, community, and our relationship to place. From pandemic-era growing to the role of ecological landscapes in real estate, this conversation reveals how gardeners contribute to the health and resilience of the places they tend.

———————-
This podcast isn’t just about ideas—it’s about action. From these conversations, two organizations have emerged to bring regenerative real estate to life:

Latitude Regenerative Real Estate is the world’s first regenerative-focused real estate brokerage, dedicated to aligning values-driven buyers and sellers. With a strong presence in the Pacific Northwest and Great Lakes regions, Latitude also supports purpose-driven developments across North America through strategic marketing and branding services. If you're looking to buy, sell, or amplify a regenerative project, Latitude is your trusted partner.

Hamlet Capital is an investment and development firm committed to building resilient communities rooted in working farms. If you’re developing an agrihood or conservation community, we’d love to hear from you. Together, we can turn visionary ideas into thriving, place-based investments.

What if we could build with trees without milling them into straight, uniform boards? On this episode, Neal Collins is joined by Amelia Baxter, co-founder and CEO of WholeTrees Structures, a company reimagining timber construction by using unmilled, round timber as structural elements in buildings.

Together, they explore how WholeTrees transforms the often overlooked “cull trees,” trees that would otherwise be removed as excess byproducts, from well-managed forests into beautiful, durable building components. The conversation goes beyond architecture and design to touch on stewardship, entrepreneurship, and how to invest for sector-wide growth of bio-based and natural building materials.

From the fascinating origin story of the company, the technology and systems that they have developed that has allowed them to scale internationally, to the investment and growth path the company is on, this is a great story that invites us to reconsider how and what we build with. 

———————-
This podcast isn’t just about ideas—it’s about action. From these conversations, two organizations have emerged to bring regenerative real estate to life:

Latitude Regenerative Real Estate is the world’s first regenerative-focused real estate brokerage, dedicated to aligning values-driven buyers and sellers. With a strong presence in the Pacific Northwest and Great Lakes regions, Latitude also supports purpose-driven developments across North America through strategic marketing and branding services. If you're looking to buy, sell, or amplify a regenerative project, Latitude is your trusted partner.

Hamlet Capital is an investment and development firm committed to building resilient communities rooted in working farms. If you’re developing an agrihood or conservation community, we’d love to hear from you. Together, we can turn visionary ideas into thriving, place-based investments.

Across every continent, degraded landscapes tell a sobering story: wetlands drained, forests cleared, tidal flats diminished. The tragedy isn’t that humanity lacks the knowledge to restore them—we know how to bring these ecosystems back. The real challenge lies in how to finance restoration at scale.

In this episode we sit down with Adam Davis, co-founder of Ecosystem Investment Partners, a firm that has channeled over a billion of dollars into restoring ecosystems. The discussion dives into the world of mitigation banking, a financial mechanism that has unlocked private capital for large-scale ecological restoration. For many, it’s an unfamiliar concept, but as Adam explains, it has become a powerful tool for revitalizing degraded landscapes.

———————-
This podcast isn’t just about ideas—it’s about action. From these conversations, two organizations have emerged to bring regenerative real estate to life:

Latitude Regenerative Real Estate is the world’s first regenerative-focused real estate brokerage, dedicated to aligning values-driven buyers and sellers. With a strong presence in the Pacific Northwest and Great Lakes regions, Latitude also supports purpose-driven developments across North America through strategic marketing and branding services. If you're looking to buy, sell, or amplify a regenerative project, Latitude is your trusted partner.

Hamlet Capital is an investment and development firm committed to building resilient communities rooted in working farms. If you’re developing an agrihood or conservation community, we’d love to hear from you. Together, we can turn visionary ideas into thriving, place-based investments.

Jasper van Brakel is on a mission to regenerate the world with the power of finance and business

 As CEO of RSF Social Finance, he leads one of the most innovative financial institutions redefining how capital can serve life—not just profit.

In this episode, Jasper shares how his journey through the early days of finance and impact investing led him to the frontlines of the regenerative finance movement. He unpacks RSF’s bold embrace of the term “regenerative,” and the framework they’ve built to evaluate whether a business is truly healing people, planet, and place—by its very existence.

We dive into:

• Why the type of capital matters as much as the investment itself
• How RSF is using fixed income and Donor Advised Funds to unlock high-impact opportunities
• What medium-return, deeply regenerative investing really looks like in action

If you’ve ever asked, “How can my money do more good?”—this conversation is for you.

———————-
This podcast isn’t just about ideas—it’s about action. From these conversations, two organizations have emerged to bring regenerative real estate to life:

Latitude Regenerative Real Estate is the world’s first regenerative-focused real estate brokerage, dedicated to aligning values-driven buyers and sellers. With a strong presence in the Pacific Northwest and Great Lakes regions, Latitude also supports purpose-driven developments across North America through strategic marketing and branding services. If you're looking to buy, sell, or amplify a regenerative project, Latitude is your trusted partner.

Hamlet Capital is an investment and development firm committed to building resilient communities rooted in working farms. If you’re developing an agrihood or conservation community, we’d love to hear from you. Together, we can turn visionary ideas into thriving, place-based investments.

Rob Avis—designer, educator, and founder of 5th World—is using cutting-edge technology to transform how we design resilient and abundant landscapes. In this episode, Rob shares how his journey from petroleum engineer to permaculture leader inspired the creation of 5th World, a company that merges data intelligence with ecological design.

After working with thousands of students and designing hundreds of properties, Rob saw a major challenge: critical site data—such as climate patterns, property timeline scans, ecosystem services, topography, soils, hydrology, solar exposure, and zoning—was expensive and difficult to access. With 5th World, that information, which once cost tens of thousands of dollars, is now available at a fraction of the price.

This conversation explores:

• Why poor site planning can lead to costly mistakes and long-term problems.
• How data-driven insights can unlock better design decisions and regenerative lifestyles.
• The path to creating landscapes that are resilient, abundant, and regenerative.
• Rob’s vision for bringing ecological design into the mainstream.

———————-
This podcast isn’t just about ideas—it’s about action. From these conversations, two organizations have emerged to bring regenerative real estate to life:

Latitude Regenerative Real Estate is the world’s first regenerative-focused real estate brokerage, dedicated to aligning values-driven buyers and sellers. With a strong presence in the Pacific Northwest and Great Lakes regions, Latitude also supports purpose-driven developments across North America through strategic marketing and branding services. If you're looking to buy, sell, or amplify a regenerative project, Latitude is your trusted partner.

Hamlet Capital is an investment and development firm committed to building resilient communities rooted in working farms. If you’re developing an agrihood or conservation community, we’d love to hear from you. Together, we can turn visionary ideas into thriving, place-based investments.

What if the future of real estate was rooted in regeneration, not extraction?

In this episode of The Regenerative Real Estate Podcast, Neal sits down with legendary permaculture designer Penny Livingston, whose work has spanned continents and inspired a generation of land stewards, builders, and community weavers.

Penny shares her journey from conventional landscape design to studying under permaculture co-founder Bill Mollison—and how that shift redefined not just her profession, but her entire worldview.

Together, they explore:

• What it means to design human environments with nature, not against it
• How permaculture principles can inform development at every scale
• The power of whole-systems thinking in real estate, architecture, and community
• A moving story from her work with the Ketchwa people of Peru
• Why regenerative design doesn’t just sustain—it creates overflowing abundance

This is a conversation that goes far beyond gardens and green roofs. It’s a reminder that how we design our places is how we design our future.

———————-
This podcast isn’t just about ideas—it’s about action. From these conversations, two organizations have emerged to bring regenerative real estate to life:

Latitude Regenerative Real Estate is the world’s first regenerative-focused real estate brokerage, dedicated to aligning values-driven buyers and sellers. With a strong presence in the Pacific Northwest and Great Lakes regions, Latitude also supports purpose-driven developments across North America through strategic marketing and branding services. If you're looking to buy, sell, or amplify a regenerative project, Latitude is your trusted partner.

Hamlet Capital is an investment and development firm committed to building resilient communities rooted in working farms. If you’re developing an agrihood or conservation community, we’d love to hear from you. Together, we can turn visionary ideas into thriving, place-based investments.

For years, we’ve seen the rising demand: people looking for more than just a home. They want community. They want connection. They want to live where food, farming, and stewardship are part of daily life.

But while the vision for agrihoods has gained attention, real-world examples that fully integrate regenerative agriculture, diverse housing, and a true sense of place are still few and far between.

In this episode, Neal sits down with Steve Bruere, President of Peoples Company — one of the nation’s leading agricultural brokerages — to explore both the current state of regenerative agriculture and what it actually takes to bring one of these communities to life.

Steve isn't just advising from the sidelines — he’s developing Middlebrook, a 540-acre agrihood outside of Des Moines, Iowa that blends working farmland, residential neighborhoods, and vibrant mixed-use spaces. With a 20-acre organic farm at its core, Middlebrook represents a compelling look at where agriculture and placemaking intersect.

We dive into the shifts happening across the ag industry, the unique opportunities (and challenges) of building agricultural communities, and why projects like Middlebrook may just be the blueprint for a new kind of living.

———————-
This podcast isn’t just about ideas—it’s about action. From these conversations, two organizations have emerged to bring regenerative real estate to life:

Latitude Regenerative Real Estate is the world’s first regenerative-focused real estate brokerage, dedicated to aligning values-driven buyers and sellers. With a strong presence in the Pacific Northwest and Great Lakes regions, Latitude also supports purpose-driven developments across North America through strategic marketing and branding services. If you're looking to buy, sell, or amplify a regenerative project, Latitude is your trusted partner.

Hamlet Capital is an investment and development firm committed to building resilient communities rooted in working farms. If you’re developing an agrihood or conservation community, we’d love to hear from you. Together, we can turn visionary ideas into thriving, place-based investments.

What if the future of housing isn’t high-rises or cul-de-sacs—but homesteads, gardens, and walkable villages where food is grown just steps from your door?

In this episode Neal sits down with Judith Horvath of Fair Hill Farm—a former corporate professional turned agroecologist who’s helping reimagine how we live, grow, and build community.

Judith’s journey began humbly with a few backyard chickens and tomato plants—but after facing resistance from her suburban HOA, she chose to go all in. Trading suburban restrictions for rural freedom, she and her family embarked on a bold journey into homesteading, permaculture, and regenerative land design.

Now, more than a decade later, Judith is not just growing food—she’s part of a modern back-to-the-land movement. From backyard transformations to agri-centered community planning, her work helps people reconnect with the land and each other in deeply nourishing ways.

Tune in to hear her powerful story, lessons learned from the land, and her vision for an agrarian future that brings resilience, health, and connection back into our homes and neighborhoods.

———————-
This podcast isn’t just about ideas—it’s about action. From these conversations, two organizations have emerged to bring regenerative real estate to life:

Latitude Regenerative Real Estate is the world’s first regenerative-focused real estate brokerage, dedicated to aligning values-driven buyers and sellers. With a strong presence in the Pacific Northwest and Great Lakes regions, Latitude also supports purpose-driven developments across North America through strategic marketing and branding services. If you're looking to buy, sell, or amplify a regenerative project, Latitude is your trusted partner.

Hamlet Capital is an investment and development firm committed to building resilient communities rooted in working farms. If you’re developing an agrihood or conservation community, we’d love to hear from you. Together, we can turn visionary ideas into thriving, place-based investments.