2024 Spring Issue of Urban Land - 10

Editor's Desk
Growing the Building Small Movement
Since the publication of Building Small: A
Toolkit for Real Estate Entrepreneurs, Civic Leaders,
and Great Communities in 2021, author and
developer Jim Heid has continued to grow the
building Small movement. Last year, he launched
a free-yet-private online platform that serves as
an interactive network where like minds solve
the big problems of building Small.
Both the book and the platform were
inspired by Heid's Small Scale Developer Forums
(SSDF), which span 12 years and 22 cities.
Nomenclature aside, Small is not about building
tiny houses or even infill development per se. It
is, however, about creating equity and inclusion.
Heid is an active member of ULI and has
participated in or chaired 16 ULI Advisory Service
Panels, most recently for Fort Lauderdale,
Florida; Napa, California; and Toronto, Ontario.
His next two Building Small Forums will be in
Bend, Oregon (May 13-15, 2024) and Kansas
City, Missouri (October 2024)-both in-person
and live online.
As a Small developer, Heid has completed
three infill projects and is now advising on
another three. We recently spoke to him about
the rising trend.
Urban Land: What is the " building Small
movement " about?
Jim Heid: The classic real estate question:
" Well, what do you mean by Small? How big
is it? How many dollars is it? " .... It's a qualitative
discussion, not a quantitative discussion. So,
Small is a way to build more humane places ....
And it's about a more evolutionary approach to
development, a reaction to the bigger institutional
approaches that are fairly formulaic ... they
don't really respond to the soul and fabric and
character of communities.
UL: What was the genesis of the book? How
is it structured and why?
Heid: The book came from SSDF. As I was
curating those [gatherings], we were going to
different cities, and I always saw a common
10
URBAN LAND SPRING 202 4
theme, [an] incredible amount of passion, and
a surprising amount of impact from these Small
projects-and the incredible difficulty that anybody
who was working in this space was having
[with] getting the projects accomplished. The
book is designed so you can pick it up, enter it
anywhere, use it again and again as a resource.
It wasn't [meant to be] just a coffee table book.
It was meant to be very instructive, but really
written for an audience that is much more
entrepreneurial, energetic.
UL: Is Small just an urban phenomenon?
Heid: No. Small works in the rural areas, works
really well in the suburban corridor, and [it]
works in the urban core.
UL: How are Small projects funded?
Heid: What's happening is some really interesting
innovations in finance, the first one being
crowdfunding from Main Street .... These are
vehicles where unaccredited investors can invest
in projects in their community that they believe
in. An interesting innovation recently [involved]
a social entrepreneur [who] has taken that same
strategy and ... been able to apply it to historic
tax credits. There's a lot of money coming out
of [the] Inflation Reduction Act for greenhouse
gas reduction, via adaptive reuse, [from] which
... a large share of Small projects emanate.
[The] other thing that we talk a lot about in
the forums is the role of high-net-worth investors,
impact investors, friends, and family [who]
want to support the startup of an entrepreneur
that is doing good things in their community.
UL UL
SIBLEY FLEMING is editor in chief of Urban Land.
Starland Yard is a
.5-acre Small project
outside of Savannah,
Georgia's historic core.
The project, conceived
as a temporary
use while waiting
for neighborhood
economics to support
a major apartment
redevelopment,
met such success
in terms of creating
the neighborhood's
third place and as an
economic catalyst for
locally owned small
businesses, has led the
development team to
expand the project
beyond its original
platform.
STARLAND YARD & EASTWOOD MEDIA
2024 Spring Issue of Urban Land

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of 2024 Spring Issue of Urban Land
