An Army of Normal Folks - Tim Sittema: Money Isn’t The Only Scorecard (Pt 1)

Episode Date: January 9, 2024

After decades working as a traditional real estate developer, one day Tim Sittema was shocked by a study that ranked his city of Charlotte as dead last in upward mobility out of the top 50 cities and he couldn’t unsee this reality. Tim felt called to dedicate 50% on a type of development that you would never do if your goal was to make money: affordable housing. He’s since built around 500 affordable housing units, with another 500 on the way! Support the show: https://www.normalfolks.us/premiumSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Somebody said I'm going to develop an affordable housing apartment community or I'm going to develop a market rate apartment community. If you stack those two together and you did a financial analysis, you would never build affordable housing because you take three times the risk and you make a fraction of the upside. So that's why there's so many more market rate apartments getting built and not affordable housing. But I like to say God keeps score differently than we do.

He has a different score card and how much money do you really need? Welcome to an Army of Normal Folks, I'm Bill Courtney. I'm a normal guy. I'm a husband, I'm a father, I'm an entrepreneur, and I've been a football coach in inner city Memphis in the last part unintentionally led to an Oscar for the film about our team. It's called undefeated. I believe our country's problems will never be solved by a bunch of fancy people and nice suits talking big words that nobody uses on CNN and Foxx for rather, an army of

normal folks us just you and me deciding hey, I can help. That's what Tim Sittema, the voice we just heard is done. Tim is a real estate developer who decided to live by a different scorecard. After years of doing traditional development work, one day he was woken up by an academic study that absolutely shocked him and changed him. Since then he's built 500 affordable housing units with another 500 on the way. There's folks like Tim who could do this in every community across our country, and even creating just one affordable housing unit or home can change your life. I can't wait for you to meet Tim right after these brief messages from our

generous sponsors. Hi, this is Jacelle Robbins and we're the host of Reasonably Shady on the Black Effect Podcast Network. I absolutely love our podcast. Yes, it has been so much better than I expected. Yes, because we get to share our lives with everyone. They get to learn about us. This is the podcast that you wanna listen to, just to feel like you're in the living room

with your girlfriends, you're driving in the car with your girlfriend, you having that good girlfriend talk. And sometimes we say things that like you wanna say, but you can't say out loud. We're like speaking your mind for you, but you're scared to say it, but we're gonna say it. We do hot topics, we talk about reasonable and shady things, so get into it.

Get into it and join us every Monday for ReasonBullyShady, and be sure to tune into the latest season of the Real Housewives of Potomac. Subscribe to ReasonBullyShady on the I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. The Celebrity Memoir holds up a mirror to society, don't you think? Oh, I couldn't agree more. It's why we started our podcast Celebrity Book Club with Stephen and Lily.

What's the name of the podcast? I want to write it down in my notes app. It's called Celebrity Book Club with Stephen and Lily. It's the podcast where we read celebrity memoirs. Total guilty pleasures. And then synthesize probing cultural and social analyses from the text. From the season on Sorry, to you, Lizzie's us-grand. From Jessica Simpson to historical figures like Helen Keller.

Isn't that just a delicious mix of high-brow and low? But don't take our word for it. A little magazine called The New Yorker. Everhood of it. Call celebrity book club, Gidey or Bane delectable Patter. If the pattern isn't delectable, honey, it isn't pattern. The New York Times.

Excuse me? Says it's like Eve's dropping on two best friends as they share a bottle of wine. Why drink wine when you can listen to it? Listen to celebrity book club with Stephen and Lily on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Are you looking to carve out your own spiritual path

and connect with a higher power? Maybe you're on a quest for meaning purpose or a sense of belonging. Perhaps you grew up in a religion that doesn't quite align with who you are right now or maybe you've lost your connection to God and want to find your way back. Or if you're like a lot of people,

you're simply trying to make sensible world that sometimes seems overwhelming and confusing. Welcome to what God got to do with it, a podcast with a fresh and relatable take on spirituality and faith. I'm your host, Leanne Ellington, and this podcast was designed to be a place where you can meet yourself exactly where you are on your own journey, without judgment or shame, and without

worrying about whether you're doing it air quotes right. It's your spiritual safe space where skepticism and doubt are welcome. It's a place where faith meets science and miracles meet real life, all while inviting you into the conversation that your heart, soul and spirit needs. Listen to what's God got to do with it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So today's an interesting day because of the way it started. I occasionally, you know, we all have our vices. And I occasionally like to load up Lisa, you know, or my sons and my father-in-law and Flatt of Agus and had a corner and get away from people. It's where I forget about all of the problems of my business and everything I've got going on and

pull out a couple hundred bucks and place in Blackjack and maybe drink a beer and hang out and have fun with my wife, my family, and go eat too much and go to show. So there you have it. One of my vices is I like to go to Vegas and hang out. And so I'm doing that not too long ago. And this young kid, I call him a kid. He's a young adult, probably 30, named Peter StippeVicic or something. I can't even pronounce it. Now I know he's just Peter Stippe. I can't even pronounce it. Now I know he's just Peter Stip walks up to me and says, hey, I saw you undefeated that he'd watched recently. We got to the whole, thanks. I'm glad you enjoyed it, humbling comment stuff. And he didn't leave it alone. He kept on with, you know, I'm so, you know, inspired to do more.

And then he started talking about something he was involved in Charlotte and candidly, I'm trying to sneak away from everyday life. So I'm not paying that much attention to him smiling and nodding gratuitously. But then as he kept talking, I started to get more and more interested in what he was talking about. And it led to today's podcast with another name that's hard to say for me, Tim Sittema, who is our guest today and has done something absolutely phenomenal and Charlotte that I think is replicable all over our country. And that's what we're going to talk today. And Tim, thanks for being with us. Thanks coach. It's great to be here. Tell me about Peter a little

bit. The guy who bothered me at the casino. Stiff is a quiet humble guy. Like he says, he's about 30 something. And he's very reserved until he's not. And he's a good co-caller. He co-caller, we're a real estate team. And he co-calls sellers and so on. And he literally can walk through walls. But otherwise, he'll sit in a meeting and won't say anything. And he was so excited about meeting you. He had just told us the week before about this great movie he watched. He said it was fantastic.

You had to see it. It's undefeated. And I did watch it and it was fantastic. But then he ends up running into you in Vegas. And he was all excited when he came back. So I guess his faith that we're together. And maybe take him to Vegas. He clearly comes out of his shell there. That's right. So before we get into the amazing work that you've done that I really wanna dive into and understand more of, tell me about Tim the kid, Tim, where you grew up, your mom, your dad, your siblings, tell me about the foundation where you came from.

Oh, happy to do that. So it's fun for me to talk a little bit about that. So I'm a the youngest son of my mom and dad, there were I have three brothers, an identical twin brother and two older brothers. My folks were normal folks. My dad worked in the steel mills, my mom was a teacher. They were big about hard work and big about education. Do your job and get it done right, do it with excellence. And so three of the four of us went to college and beyond. One of my brothers didn't, and he still lives in what we call the Cali-Met Region.

We grew up in South Chicago. And so what's the, what is that blue collar? What was it like when you grew up there? Yeah, so when I grew up, it was and still is blue collar, predominantly blue collar. We grew up in Roseland, a hundred and eighth in state. And today, there's a lot of crime and a lot of, a lot of the shootings in Chicago happen in Roseland

and near there. It's a pretty dangerous place today. It wasn't when I was growing up. So it's one of those typical Blue collar kind of inner city neighborhoods really all over our country that was Fed with typical blue collar families that really the expansion of Suburbia and a lot of white flight, honestly, left kind of deserted and poverty filled the gap.

That's exactly right. We don't talk about it quite as directly anymore, but we were products of white flight. The whole neighborhood shifted racially in just a five-year period, and our entire church sold to an African-American congregation. We moved to Northwest Indiana and built a new church and most of the families from our church actually migrated there as well. So it was interesting. I had an instance just two weeks ago. I was on a historically back college in Charlotte called Johnson C. Smith University, and I was taking a tour there,

and I was introduced to an African American guy that runs the security detail there, and he's a big, strong guy, and I commented about, he throws a lot of, you know, steel around, he lifts a lot of weights, and he said, oh, back in the day in Chicago, I did that. And I said, oh, you're from Chicago, where are you from?

He said to the south side, I said, oh, me too. He said, no, where? And I said, oh, you're from Chicago, where are you from? He said the south side. I said, uh, hold me too. He said, no, where? And I said, 108th and state. And he told me, he says, you're the whitest black guy I've ever met. He said, he said, there's no white people from that. So suffice it say you grew up, the son of a still mill worker and a teacher. And so you had the organic family we're cared for, but I got to imagine just, you know, a very

normal average blue collar had what you needed, but not a whole lot extra family. That's exactly right. My dad didn't have a new car until he was in his 60s, I think. He was he was buying hand-me-down cars and because he had to. Yeah, I get it. I have four kids too, so they take everything. So yeah. And then you lose your mind. Then you decide that you don't like some things going on

in Charlotte. And by the way, I got to say your timing's pretty good It sounds like you caught Denver on the run up and you caught Charlotte on a pretty good run up too I'm surprised you're not living in Nashville and you didn't catch that thing five years ago Because if you go downtown Nashville all you see is cranes. It's insane Looks like Shanghai did 15 years ago, but anyway, you caught it up and I've read that you know you were doing your world and

then one day you happened to read something out of Harvard or UC Berkeley or something that gave you a stat that absolutely floored you. What was that? That's accurate a stat that absolutely floored you. What was that? That's accurate. There was a professor from Harvard named Raj Chetty who did a study and I can't remember exactly the year that came out. Maybe. But you already live in inshallah. I was in sharrow. We moved there in 2005. This was maybe 10 years later. So 2015 or so. Not too long ago. Yeah. And it's and it's just and you're long enough there now and developing property and making a life there now that Charlottes home And you have a reality about your Charlotte, right and what is your reality of your Charlotte this growing City what is your reality before you read this of your Charlotte? Yeah, I I lived in a bubble I lived in a you know an affluent neighborhood in South Charlotte

and had friends that looked like me and... And worshiped like you. And worshiped like me. And voted like you. And voted like me. And I thought like you. It's exactly right. Right.

Correct on all fronts. And my world got a little rocked. So Professor Chetty wrote a study and he did a lot of research and he basically ranked the top 50 cities in the country, by population. By population and he ranked them on the basis of upward mobility. If you're born in the lowest 20% tile of income in those cities, what are your chances of migrating up to the top 20% town?

Not the top 1%, but the top 20% town. Just lower 20 top 20. You know, going from the bottom fifth to the top fifth and Charlotte. Which would you agree that's from lower class to call it upper middle? Yeah, I would say that. Middle upper. We're not talking about getting rich. Right.

We're talking about just getting out of kind of lower middle to upper middle. Yeah, and he was trying to, I'm sure, I don't know the man, but he was, I'm sure, trying to essentially come up with a methodology to evaluate on a relative basis, one city against another in terms of the opportunities for poor people, basically. And so he came up with this upward mobility metric and Charlotte was listed 50th out of the top 50 cities in the country in terms of his metric of upward mobility going from the bottom fifth to the top fifth.

And now in fairness, I don't remember the numbers because I haven't looked at them now for many years. But, you know, if Charlotte was whatever, 4.21% or something or other, Atlanta was 4.22% and Nashville may have been 4.23%. I mean, there were a bunch of them that were pretty close, but it was a gift to Charlotte that we actually came into last because it started a lot of conversations at every level in our community, every water cooler, every business, the seats of government were saying,

wow, we don't wanna be last, we don't wanna be 50, a thot of 50, and it started conversations between me and some business friends of mine saying, wow, is there something the business community can do about this? As you said on previous podcasts, the public sector has spent literally trillions of dollars on the declared war on poverty

and they've done a bunch of great work, but the needle hasn't really been moved all that much and the nonprofit world has done it and still does a bunch of great work. But there's certainly more to do as we could see in every city in the country. And largely, in my view, the business community has been right and checks, but that's about it. And it just felt to me like there had to be something else that we couldn't should be

doing in some of these intractable social problems. You know, as I listen to you, there's two things that pop in my head. Is one, Charlotte is always ranked as one of the top 10 cities to live. And isn't it interesting that Forbes or US news report or time or whoever does those kind of rankings would say that you're one of the top 10 cities in the country to live in, but the metrics say, maybe so, but it's also the hardest of the top 50 cities in our country to advance in. So who is it the best city to live in for? Yeah, that's a good question. Certainly not the people in the study. Clearly. Yeah. And and the other thing is, as I heard what you just

said, you know, I'm a business guy on, I own the, I own a business. I know, you know, when I started with nothing and 20 something years later, we've got 130 employees in a manufacturing facility and Memphis and ourselves offices here. We got offices in Shanghai and Ho Chi Minh. We actually do business in 42 different countries. We do business in everywhere from England to Albania to the Dominican Republic to Guatemala and all points in between. It's truly, it's an unfortunate reality of my industry

because you have to do business in the world to move your goods. But the point is, I've learned a lot over the last 23 years and I've made any enormous amount of stakes and I've lost a lot of money because of my mistakes. But what that does if it doesn't kill you, it gives you a lot of wisdom. And you don't make those mistakes again and you grow. And the point is that being held accountable to a bottom line and a bank and a lender and leverage and customers and vendors and employees and yourself, the stress of that is a wonderful, it's sent of to learn quickly and wisely and not make the same mistakes twice.

I don't think that same dynamic exists in the public sector. And I'm not beating up public servants. I'm not. I'm just saying business people look at things differently. The public sector people do. And I have been noted as saying, and I do believe it, that I think government has proven over time in adequate and caring for the most disadvantaged among us. And I don't mean that they do that on purpose. I just don't think the realities of the work that the public sector does necessarily serves the least advantaged among us because we constantly introduce program after program

after program and what happens is programs that were invented 50, 60 years ago that I do believe were well- well intentioned. The world evolves and the programs don't. And then they just get kind of band-dated and fixed along the way and up completely inadequate. Whereas in business you can't afford to do that because you'll go broke. And so a business person looks at things differently. And it would be then my assumption that you guys were taking a fresh look at what these data offered you. I couldn't agree more with you coach. And I love what you said early on when you're

starting this podcast, you drive through a poor area, you see the frustration, the despair, and you think somebody ought to do something about that. And I like how you said it, as if the sentiment matters. Sentiment doesn't matter. You should turn the beer down and look at yourself and say, I should do something about that. And I can start hosting now.

I'm gonna step down. You got the whole, you got it down, dude. Well, I, I mean, that was me. That, that was me, you know, because I'm, I'm, I tell people, I couldn't spell affordable housing 10 years ago, seven years ago. And now I spend more than half my time, you know, living and walking that, that talk because it finally hit me that, you know, maybe I need to do something. Maybe I need to try that. And that, and that's kind of what got me.

So these conversations around the water cooler and with friends were saying, and at the same time or about the same time, there was a shooting of a young African American male in Charlotte, and that led to some protests. So the combination of those two events, this Harvard study, and I think it was Keith Lamont Scott shooting had everybody kind of in Charlotte talking about this stuff and so a friend of mine and I convened a group of guys, you know, that looked like us and we're starting to talk about is there something that we could and should be doing here and there was a lot of interest to do something, but no unity in terms of vision. And so we ended up meeting a young white pastor,

Dave Ducason. This is the guy that I thought, I mean, this Ducason. Ducason, yeah. Dave Ducason, everybody was a pastor working a West Charlotte who was pursuing his PhD and the cyclical patterns of generational poverty. I didn't even know you could get a PhD and the cyclical patterns of generational poverty.

And this guy spent his time traveling around the US visiting different community development initiatives to understand what was really happening in generalized poverty. And you guys had the good sense to grab him up and say, you've seen it, tell us what the real world is. That's exactly right. We actually funded his trips to go out there because he was the pastor. Oh, I thought he was doing that as a part of his, you said, well, he was going to do that, but he didn't have the, and you guys had go do it, but bring us back the

data. That's exactly right. And so we, it was a perfect win-win. So we helped send him to these different places. And he brought the research back in a shameless plug. He ended up writing a book that I'd highly recommend called Neighborliness, very good book, and he's still a friend and dear friend, and he's on our board still and a great guy. But he studied, he flew to Chicago in Detroit in DC in Atlanta in Orlando and studied places that they were working to transform kind of impoverished under-advested

areas and brought back kind of those models that worked. And the punchline was a lot of the areas that were more successfully transformed had used a model that was originally developed by the purpose-built communities folks out of Atlanta. Again, a great, great organization. They transformed the East Lake area of Atlanta. And so Dave and several other friends and I went down to Atlanta and spent a day sitting at their feet, listening and learning. And the punch line, if you're going to, according to purpose-built, if you're going to transform an under-invested area like in Memphis or in Nashville or Charlotte or anywhere, you've got to do essentially they would say four things.

You got to focus on education, you got to have quality schools, you got to focus on housing because you've got to have stable affordable housing, you got to focus on jobs and economic opportunity, and you got to focus on jobs and economic opportunity and you got to focus on health and wellness education housing employment health care You got to do all of those you can't just do one and expect things to you know life trajectories to change You've got to invest in all of those things and so it was amazing just you know all a sudden we spent a day and we had kind of a playbook to go adopt a under-advested area. And so now we had no excuses. We kind of sort of knew what we needed to do. And so we went back to Charlotte and said, all right, we're either going to do it or we're not.

And now a few messages from our generous sponsors, but first, I hope you'll subscribe to the podcast so that you get the newest episodes in your library every week. And please consider signing up to join the army at normalfokes.us because together we can change the country. And you'll also receive weekly email updates about the army. We'll be right back. Hi, this is Jisal and Robin and we're the host of reasonably shady on the Black Effect podcast network. I absolutely love our podcast. Yes, it has been so much

better than I expected. Yes, because we get to share our lives with everyone. They get to learn about us. This is the podcast that you want to listen to, just to feel like you're in the living room with your girlfriend, you're driving the car with your girlfriend, you having that good girlfriend talk. And sometimes we say things that like you want to say, but you can't say out loud. We're like speaking your mind for you, but you're scared to say it, but we we're gonna say it. We do hot topics, we talk about reasonable and shady things, so get into it. Get into it and join us every Monday for Reasonably Shady, and be sure to tune into the latest season of the Real Housewives of Potomac. Subscribe to Reasonably Shady on the

I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. on the iHeard Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. The celebrity memoir holds up a mirror to society, don't you think? Oh, I couldn't agree more. It's why we started our podcast, Celebrity Book Club with Stephen and Lily. What's the name of the podcast? I want to write it down my notes up.

It's called Celebrity Book Club with Stephen and Lily. It's the podcast where we read celebrity memoirs. Total guilty pleasures. And then synthesize probing cultural and social analyses from the text. From Azizan Sorry to Yelissi's Us Grand. From Jessica Simpson to historical figures like Helen Keller. Isn't that just a delicious mix of high-brown low?

But don't take our word for it. A little magazine called The New Yorker. Everhood of it. Call celebrity book club, giddy or Bane Delectable Pattern. If the pattern isn't delectable, honey, it isn't pattern. The New York Times. Excuse me? It says it's like Eve's dropping on two best friends

as they share a bottle of wine. Why drink wine when you can listen to it? Listen to Celebrity Book Club with Stephen and Lily on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Are you looking to carve out your own spiritual path and connect with a higher power? Maybe you're on a quest for meaning purpose or a sense of belonging.

Perhaps you grew up in a religion that doesn't quite align with who you are right now or maybe you've lost your connection to God and want to find your way back. Or if you're like a lot of people, you're simply trying to make sensible world that sometimes seems overwhelming and confusing. Welcome to What's God Got To Do With It, a podcast with a fresh and relatable take on spirituality and faith.

I'm your host, Leanne Ellington, and this podcast was designed to be a place where you can meet yourself exactly where you are on your own journey without judgment or shame and without worrying about whether you're doing it air quotes right. It's your spiritual safe space where skepticism and doubt are welcome. It's a place where faith meets science and miracles meet real life all while inviting you into the conversation that your heart, soul and and spirit means. Listen to what God got to do with it on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

It's funny that you say, now we have no excuses. You know, you remove the barriers to entry when you remove the excuse. And the interesting part to me is you talk about the four key ingredients is housing education, employment and health. Not exactly the most lofty expectations. I mean, we're saying, I guess it should be a dumb moment too. Oh, you mean people need to have good schools, have come kind of a job, a decent roof over the head and their health taken care of. Hmm, shocking.

That's not a high bar, is it? It's not a high bar. So I go back to South Chicago when you grew up. You had a dad working in Stoomil. You've never been able to afford a new car. I don't assume the house you lived in was anything other than just probably a normal. I'd, your brother shared rooms. I doubt you had a six bedroom house. No, no, but the tears were in a store worker. Yeah, but what you did have was a house. You had a good education. Your health was taken care of,

and your parents were employed. So even though you were, you know, middle to low, middle-ish income coming up, you had the very things you needed to have to be able to get to the station and life that allowed you to move from Denver to Charlotte. That's exactly right. But if you didn't have those things and you were in the demographic from the Harvard guy of the impossibility of the upper mobility, the impossibility of the upper mobility, you would just still be in South Chicago. You're exactly right. I'll give you an example. One of the early things we did, so now we're armed

with this model. So we had kind of decided West Charlotte was an area that we were going to concentrate on. And so we convened a, we called it an education summit with the principles of area public schools in West Charlotte. And the principles of the schools themselves. The schools themselves. Did the district get up somehow? No, we didn't, we just, it was an informal deal. We invited them. We said we're gonna buy you lunch.

We'd love to. Let's have a chat. Yeah, let's have a chat. And, you know, they showed up. And there was, I don't know, six or eight, maybe 10 educators in the room along with a number of us. And what's interesting, and now I have grandkids that are in my oldest grandchild is in second grade.

And she's doing quite well reading and so on. And what we learned is one of the key metrics in education is third grade reading literacy. Up until third grade, you learn how to read. After third grade, you read to learn. So if you leave third grade, I know that's old to hold it, that's interesting. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but say that again.

Up to third grade, you learn how to read. After third grade, you read to learn. So if you're not up to third grade, literal, literate by third grade, you're falling behind minute by minute because you can't learn, you can't read to learn because you still had learned to read. That's exactly right. There are some people. That's really interesting. There are some people that can can make projections on the prison space they're going to need based on third grade literacy. Are you kidding?

Your chances of incarceration and all kinds of social challenges increase dramatically if you go into fourth grade with the inability to read. And in West Charlotte, the third grade reading literacy was and is about 15 percent, meaning more than four out of five kids leave third grade Not reading at grade level and so that's what prompted us to have this education summit to talk to the the educators to say what the heck I mean, you know because I've got grandkids Nothing short of a hundred percent reading literacy is acceptable I wouldn't want any of my grandkids or my kids or

anybody else's kids to be leaving third grade unable to read. So we sat down with these principals and educators and said why? I mean what do you need? I mean did it ever go through your head? Why aren't your teachers teaching it? Well that's exactly right and I tell a lot of people this, my uninformed ignorant approach when I walked in the room was thinking the schools are terrible, the teachers are terrible, they're not committed, blah, blah, blah. And I could not have been more wrong. And I think when you think about herb, these massive urban districts, like I think Shelby County, our district, Shelby County, in Memphis, I think is one of the largest districts in the, I think our district, Shelby County in Memphis,

I think is one of the largest districts in the country because it's just, it covers such a huge area and it's not broken up. But you think about the districts in New York and Chicago and Detroit and Baltimore and everywhere else. And, you know, you can talk about teachers unions, you can talk about school board elections, you can talk about teacher's unions, you can talk about school board elections, you can talk about

district presidents, you can talk about all that stuff, and you can quickly get balled up in really a political argument, and you can get balled up in a lot of arguments regarding education. And I think there's a whole lot of people even listening to us right now that have some preconceived assumptions about the people working in our public schools, especially in urban areas, and their effort and their dedication to teach children. And I got to be honest with you before I worked at the Masses. I had some of those same inaccurate beliefs. What did you find? The same. I can't speak to Chicago Public Schools or some of the other cities. I can speak more intelligently about what we see and experience in Charlotte. But I walked into that room

and then we actually, my wife and I and some of our team members at our company, volunteered to tutor and so on every week for a for a while in one of the schools. And and I was blown away. The teachers were great. The principals were great. The facilities were fine. The technology was available. That's not the case everywhere. And you certainly have bad actors in teaching just like you do in any other profession. But by and large my experience is that is I mean you're right there's always outliers but by and large teachers are their teacher. They care yeah they really genuinely care and administrators care about their students

and their teachers and they want things to go well and they want their kids to learn but they don't they you just just told me, what do you say 15%? That's right. 15%. So we said what they had. And one of the things they said, which, you know, basically changed, you know, kind of my life trajectory from there was, they said, if we can get a child in in school in August, you know, what school starts. And if that child here, she is still in school in May. You know, when school starts, and if that child here she is still in school in May, they will learn. But the problem is that's the exception, not the rule.

And so we say, okay, to tell us more about that. Well, a lot of times, I would say most of the students come from single parent households, usually mom, and multiple kids. And mom gets sick, misses work, gets fired, misses a rent check, misses a rent check, gets evicted and pulls the kids out of school to go because they gotta go to find some place

you know, rent by the week hotel or something or other in a different school district. And so they start with whatever, 24 kids in first grade in August and by October, you know, there's eight of the kids have left and six more of joined and and it's really more of a revolving door kind of musical chairs kind of set up where people come and go in these in these school districts. And I'm quite sure that repeats itself in every other city, not just in Charlotte. It's almost like transient school kids.

It's exactly right. It's exactly right. And what it told us was the nexus, the connection between stable affordable housing and educational outcomes. You can go spend $50 million investing in public schools and not move the needle all that much. But if you're going to make an investment, you know, education, housing, employment, healthcare, do all of those things and invest in a collective impact model. And so we said, wow,

we've got to do something about the stable affordable housing so these families can stay put, the kids can walk to school, even when mom gets sick or whatever else, and make sure these kids are in class from August to May or whatever the school year is. And then allow the teachers to do the job. And allow the teachers to do the job. Because they've got gray matter, they can do it, the teachers are for the most part good and dedicated and committed. So that was a real eye opener for us to say, okay, housing and educational outcomes are directly linked. So we always talk about what are we going to do to fix the proverbial it and we're on in some city second, even third generations of poverty and poorly educated kids and a lot of it has to do with this very

thing. But my guess is if you were like me and most folks that do have a heart and want to exact some major change by actually looking at the reality of the situation, rather than what you hear on the news or what you read in the newspaper or whatever your particular political party slants the story to you as, you had to have been sitting at home going, wow. Yeah, and I was in this group of folks that we had been meeting and talking about.

I was the only real estate guy. So education, housing, employment, healthcare, housing is kind of real estate. So I said, all right, let me lean into that. How hard can it be? I say that a lot. How hard can it be? Well, it can be pretty darn hard. We'll be right back.

Hi, this is Jacelle Robbins and we're the host of Reasonably Shady on the Black Effect Podcast Network. I absolutely love our podcast. Yes, it has been so much better than I expected. Yes, because we get to share our lives with everyone. They get to learn about us. This is the podcast that you wanna listen to, just to feel like you're in the living room with your girlfriends, you're driving in the car with your girlfriend, you having that good girlfriend talk. And sometimes we say things that like you wanna say,

but you can't say out loud. We're like speaking your mind for you, but you're scared to say it, but we're gonna say it. We do high topics, we talk about reasonable and shady things, so get into it. Get into it and join us every Monday for ReasonBullyShady, and be sure to tune into the latest season of the Real Housewives of Potomac.

Subscribe to ReasonBullyShady on the I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. The celebrity memoir holds up a mirror to society, don't you think? Oh, I couldn't agree more. It's why we started our podcast celebrity book club with Stephen and Lily. What's the name of the podcast? I want to write it down my notes up.

It's called celebrity book club with Stephen and Lily. It's the podcast where we read celebrity memoirs total guilty pleasures. And then synthesize probing cultural and social analyses from the text. From Azizan Sorry to Lissi's Us Grand. From Jessica Simpson to historical figures like Helen Keller. Isn't that just a delicious mix of high-brow and low? But don't take our word for it. A little magazine called The New Yorker.

Everhood of it. Call celebrity book club, giddy or bane, delectable pattern. If the pattern isn't delectable, honey, it isn't Patter. The New York Times. Excuse me? Says it's like Eve's dropping on two best friends as they share a bottle of wine. Why drink wine when you can listen to it?

Listen to celebrity book club with Stephen and Lily on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Are you looking to carve out your own spiritual path and connect with a higher power? Maybe you're on a quest for meaning purpose or a sense of belonging. Perhaps you grew up in a religion that doesn't quite align with who you are right now, or maybe you've lost your connection to God and want to find your way back. Or if you're like a lot of people, you're simply trying to make sensible world

that sometimes seems overwhelming and confusing. Welcome to what's God got to do with it, a podcast with a fresh and relatable take on spirituality and faith. I'm your host, Leanne Ellington, and this podcast was designed to be a place where you can meet yourself exactly where you are on your own journey,

without judgment or shame, and without worrying about whether you're doing it air quotes right. It's your spiritual safe space where skepticism and doubt are welcome. It's a place where faith meets science and miracles meet real life, all while inviting you into the conversation that your heart, soul, and spirit use. Listen to what's God got to do with it on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So we decided to start doing something in the in the housing space and initially again armed with the purpose built model. I give them all the credit.

This is no original thinking on our part. We're taking what they had developed. We came to Charlotte and decided to focus on West Charlotte, Casey Crawford, who owns movement mortgage, he was an X NFL guy and has a real heart for the inner city and he's investing a lot of his personal money, building public charter schools in the inner city. And so he bought a property and started investing, I think, what is a property? What is bought a property? Yeah, so it actually is kind of a cool story.

So our company buys and redevelopes properties could be an old empty came art center, which is exactly what it was in this example. We also buy vacant land and build apartments or mixed use developments. Our company was under contract on an old empty came art in West Charlotte and we were going to try to redevelop it into a shopping center. But Casey had one of his guys called to say, hey, I hear you guys are going to buy that center. What are you going to do with it? And I told him and I said, what are you calling about?

He says, well, Casey wants to buy it and do a charter school. And he's got a real heart for the inner city. And we weren't all that far along with our plans. So I felt led to assign our contract to Casey. He paid us for our expenses to date. And he bought the center and spent, I think, 12 or 14 million of his own money building a charter school, which has now been open for a number of years. And so that was kind of the start. that was the start of the education piece.

Yeah, but now you got to have affordable housing near it. That's right. So there was some extra land that came with the site. So I talked to Casey about, hey, we want to do something maybe some affordable housing there. He said, great. It wasn't big enough. So we had a symbol of peace next next to it.

We didn't develop affordable housing, so we went out and interviewed different nonprofits that developed affordable housing, invited one to come in, and they loved the idea, and it was a great site. So we started working with them, and it was just tough. It was a more difficult process working with them. And I remember sitting out with Casey, who was involved because he owned part of the land. And in one of our meetings, he looked at me and said, I wish you were developing this.

And I said, yeah, I'm kind of getting the sense that maybe, maybe, you know, that's in my future. And I'm kind of getting the sense that maybe. Yeah. Anyway, we finished that deal. This nonprofit developed the housing there. And then we ended up hiring a couple of folks and building a team to go start developing affordable housing.

And we've been doing it now for, I guess, about six, six years or so, six or seven years. All right, so as I hear all that, not many normal folks have 12 million dollars to buy Kmart and make a school, but there are plenty of people with good hearts who are business folks who know how finance and leverage works that can pull things off like that in every city. But at first, took learning what the problems are to even understand what the world you really needed to do rather than just writing checks and throw a money at it,

which I would argue happens a lot. So that points back to what I'm saying. I don't think any public entity could have pulled that off. There's no cities by and came arts and converting them to public schools and then working with a developer to build housing around the school to better the community. It's it that public people, it's just not what they do. That was my point earlier about the difference in a private business approach to this stuff and a public approach. Get the facts, learn the facts, understand the data, find out what the real problems are in a very practical, realistic sense. And then go fix the problems in a very business-like approach. And that sounds exactly to me like what you've done.

Yeah, I totally agree with you. I mean, business people are known for building a vision, casting the vision, selling the vision, coming up with a strategy to execute, that's what we do. And these are tough, tough, tough challenges, but they need people to think clearly have vision, cast the vision, and so on. And so that's what we try to do. And so we started in West Charlotte and what we quickly learned was this group of us, and I'm sitting here, but any of this group could be here telling the same story, couldn't have done it by myself, didn't do it by myself.

But what we learned was we were the limiter because there's so much work to do, and we only had so much time to do it. So we ended up starting a nonprofit, which we called Freedom Communities plural because we thought we could prove the concept and then scale it to other places. So we started this nonprofit and I'm still involved, still board chair and it's so fulfilling for me to still be involved. So tell us about the first Freedom Community,

which was a cameart in some land beside it. Yeah. How many units I guess is the right word? I'm thinking of affordable housing. I'm imagining something that looks something like apartments or condominiums or something like that. So how many units was that first one? Yeah, so I think the first community, which we didn't develop, that's the one next to the public charter school, I think it's probably about 140 units as apartment community.

We have since now, we've completed three full communities from 130 units up to 180 units and we've got two more under construction right now, so call it, and then we got several more in the work. So, you know, five or six different developments in different parts of West Charlotte. We're trying to invest in areas that are gentrifying, meaning there's new investment coming in. But what happens with the new investment is it displaces the people that have been there, you know, as prices rise, as rents rise, and so on. And so we're trying to get ahead of that gentrification,

trying to find sites that we can develop affordable housing in. And this gets technical, but in North Carolina, and in most states, if you're a nonprofit owner of affordable housing, you don't have to pay property tax. Well, not paying property tax is a big deal on a big property like that. And so we tried to set up a nonprofit to build our affordable housing. And the IRS didn't like the idea of bolting a nonprofit onto a for-profit development company.

And so what we ended up doing was we just said, shoot, we're just going to let freedom communities, a nonprofit that we had just started, we'll let them own all these affordable housing developments. And so that wasn't something that we set out to do, but we kind of fell into it. And it turned out to be a, that's one of the coolest parts of our structure. Our company, Cross and Southeast,

is doing all the work, taking all the risk, investing all the capital, and freedom communities owns the affordable housing, and they can then invest in the families within the affordable housing developments. They get the cash flow that comes from those units. They get the future value. Which can be lower because they're not paying property tax. That's exactly right. That's that's so you're able to lower the rent, run it as a nonprofit, keep the property up, but because you're not having because it's a nonprofit, you're not having to pay property tax as you can charge less rent just enough to cover the maintenance and everything of the project. And in doing so,

offer significantly lower rent for really nice places. Yeah, they kind of like that. So if you're doing affordable housing and this gets back to something you said earlier, so our first development deal using real numbers, our first development deal was 180 units and it cost back then $31 million. Okay. The forward was the money come from. Yeah, $31 million we Okay. Forward, where's the money come from? Yeah, $31 million, we had to build those units.

But the government tells you if it's gonna be affordable housing, they tell you what the rent needs to be, to be affordable. And generally speaking, the rent is for somebody to have an affordable home, they can't be spending more than 30% of their income on housing. And so depending on how much you make, you take 30% of whatever you make, and that's what is considered an affordable rent. And so when you're setting those affordable rents, it costs you $31 million to build this

thing, the building upon completion with the rents that it costs you $31 million to build this thing, the building upon completion with the rents that you're charging is only worth about half that, $15 or $16 million. Well, how do you cover it? How do you cover it? Because you get bills for $31 million. And so you can only finance a certain amount of, you know, maybe you get a $10 or $12 million construction loan because they're not gonna loan you 30 million

on an asset that's only worth $15 million. And so the low income housing tax credit program is the, it's a terrible program, but it's the best thing that's out there for a affordable- Speaking of government programs. Yeah, that's exactly right. We couldn't do what we're doing without it.

So, I mean, that's sincerely, but there's all kinds of challenges with it. And so, so we got, call it conventional debt, safe, use around numbers, $15 million. We've got about $10 or $11 million of low-income housing tax credits through the federal government. And then we still had about $5 million left to solve for. And fortunately, the city of Charlotte and many other cities have something we call it, the Housing Trust Fund. The city floats a bond for now. It's 50 million. It used to be 15 million every two years and they use that for affordable housing initiatives. And so you make an application for your development and they review it. And if they deem it worthy, then they'll make this $5 million or $3 million investment. In our case, it was $5 million. And it's a 1% loan that we need to repay. But 1% money is

pretty cheap. And so we built this $30 million project. We borrowed $15 million. We got $10 million of low income housing tax credits, $5 million from the city housing trust fund. And we were off to the races and we build a project. And nobody makes any money. There's no profit. But it doesn't matter. We get a little development fee to cover some overhead and so on. And we also have to sign loan guarantees and tax credit compliance guarantees. And I mean, it gets involved. You've got to step out there and you've got to go to work

and you've got to put your name on it. That's right. But one of the earliest things we did, knowing what we learned from purpose-built education, housing, employment, healthcare, we said, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to, and I had my team plot the 30 best elementary schools in Charlotte. And I said, okay, we're going to do. We're going to, and I had my team plot the 30 best elementary schools

in Charlotte. And I said, okay, we're going to pair housing with education, plot the 30 best elementary schools in Charlotte. And wherever, you know, there's an elementary school, a great elementary school, we're going to try to get as close to that schools who can with housing. Well, then as you start getting smarter about this low income housing tax credits, you realize that one of the programs says, you need as many tax credits as you can get, but there's a program that says, we'll give you 30% more tax credits

if you build in what they call a qualified census tract, QCT areas. And so we said, okay, great, we're gonna plot these 30 elementary schools and we're gonna plot all the qualified census tracks in Charlotte. And wherever there's an intersection, that's where we're gonna look for affordable housing.

And I was eagerly waiting, I'm thinking, oh, we're pretty odd clever, we got it, we got this strategy. And we got this map printed, and I looked at it, my heart sank, there were no intersections. Well, qualified census tracts by definition are areas of concentrated poverty, and that was a definition like from the 1970s, the government, you know, to combat redlining and some

of those awful things that were done. You mean something five decades ago that was well intentioned, but it's outlawed in its usefulness? Like I was describing about 30 minutes ago. Exactly. So I looked at this and said, so you get a, you get 30% more tax credits to build in areas of concentrated poverty. That's for the most part, don't have quality education.

Don't have access to healthcare. don't have jobs and economic opportunity, but you get more tax credits to build there. The program should be the exact inverse of that. You should be getting bonuses to build in predominantly affluent areas with great schools and all the other infrastructure, but were incentivized to actually further concentrate poverty, which is crazy, in my view. Well, and to that point, and the gentrification point is way too much reading, but it's a chicken or the egg thing. way too much reading, but it's a chicken or the egg thing and it is the scourge of what white flight in the 70s that could be argued started with busing by a large busing and then school integration which is another stain on our history in my opinion. I understand it understand why and I live in the city that dealt with it, but the reason I say it's a stain is

One of the greatest accelerators out of poverty is to have lower income people living amongst working with and going to school at least but a lot of people. Mixed income, that's exactly right. And the problem is when you're inserted to invest in poverty and concentrate poverty and poverty, you lose that step up. I mean, that's right. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. That's exactly right.

Studies have shown that. And some of the communities that we're building now, we're trying to mix incomes from as low as, there's a lot of acronyms and abbreviations in this business, but AMI area, meeting income. So every city or every neighborhood has an area, meeting income in Charlotte, if you're a family of four, it's somewhere around $90,000. That's the area meeting income affordable housing generally serves

people that make from 30% of the AMI up to 80% of the AMI. So again, for a family of 30% of the AMI 90 is only 27,000 a year. So family of four. That's how the heck are they going to for rent? Because we set the rent at again 30% of what they make. So use round numbers. If somebody makes $30,000, they're paying $9,000 for, two-bedroom apartment annually. So whatever that is, $80 bucks. $800 a plus and $700 a month for an apartment

that a market rate for that deal might be $2,000 and they're only paying $700. Well, I bet it's more than that. My kid just rented an apartment, Atlanta first job out. And I mean, it's nice, it's safe, but it's nothing overly special. It's a one bedroom apartment,

not even inside the city limits. And he pays $2,250 a month for that thing. And I mean, I could, we, Lisa and I went with them to find an apartment and we spent all weekend and he did a really good job and we had 18 different places to visit and I was shocked that kids when I say kids 25 to 30 old kids that can't afford a house shut that are out there starting their lives are actually dumping 22 23 24 hundred dollars a month on rent for a one

bedroom or a two bedroom apartment. It's insane. It is insane, but given that you talk about gentrification, you build that in an area that is being redeveloped. How is somebody making 27, 30, 35,000 lower income blue collar person trying to make it from that bottom 20% out of the 20% how do they ever live there and so then they got to move down the wrong to be able to forward housing which puts them in worst neighborhoods worst everything and so goes the cycle The... cycle.

We'll be right back. The celebrity memoir holds up a mirror to society, don't you think? Oh, I couldn't agree more. It's why we started our podcast, Celebrity Book Club with Steven and Lily. What's the name of the podcast? I want to write it down in my notes app. It's called Celebrity Book Club with Steven and Lily. It's the podcast where we read celebrity memoirs. Total guilty pleasures. And then synthesize probing cultural and social analyses from the text. From Azizan Sorry to Lissi's Us Grand. From Jessica Simpson to historical figures like Helen Keller. Isn't that just a delicious mix of high-brow and low? But don't take our word for it. A little magazine called The New Yorker.

Everhood of it. Call celebrity book club, giddy or bane, delectable pattern. If the pattern isn't delectable, honey, it isn't pattern. The New York Times. Excuse me? Says it's like Eve's dropping on two best friends as they share a bottle of wine.

Why drink wine when you can listen to it? Listen to celebrity book club with Stephen and Lily on the iHeartRadio app Apple Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Jacelle and Robin and we're the host of reasonably shady on the Black Effect podcast network. I absolutely love our podcast. Yes, it has been so much better than I expected. Yes, because we get to share our lives with everyone. They get to learn about us. This is the podcast that you want to listen to just to feel like you're in the living room with your girlfriend, you're driving the car with your girlfriend, you having that good girlfriend talk. Sometimes we say things that like you want to say, but you can't say out loud.

We're like speaking your mind for you, but you're scared to say it, but we're gonna say it. We do hot topics, we talk about reasonable and shady things. So get into it. Get into it and join us every Monday for Reasonably Shady. And be sure to tune into the latest season of the Real Housewives of Potomac. Subscribe to Reasonably Shady on the I-Hard Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Are you looking to carve out your own spiritual path and connect with a higher power? Maybe you're on a quest for meaning purpose or a sense of belonging. Perhaps you grew up in a religion that doesn't quite align with who you are right now,

or maybe you've lost your connection to God and want to find your way back. Or if you're like a lot of people, you're simply trying to make sensible world that sometimes seems overwhelming and confusing. Welcome to What's God Got To Do With It, a podcast with a fresh and relatable take on spirituality and faith. I'm your host, Leanne Ellington, and this podcast was designed to be a place where you can meet yourself exactly where you are on your own during, without judgment or shame, and without worrying about whether you're doing it air quotes right. It's your spiritual safe space where skepticism and doubt are welcome.

It's a place where faith meets science and miracles meet real life, all while inviting you into the conversation that your heart, soul, and spirit means. Listen to what God got to do with it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. One of the principal programs that Freedom does is we run cohorts. We have a program called Moms moving forward and we get a cohort typically around 15 moms. We do a one year program and we start a new cohort, a new class every three or four months. So we may have three classes going at one time and there are 12 month programs. And we pay these moms to attend our classes. They meet one-on-one every week with a life coach and then they meet a couple of times a month in a group.

And we have curriculum that we go through with parenting and financial literacy and family planning and all these different important skills and these moms build a network of people that are in it with them. You know the average single mom has three kids in our program. So there may be 15 moms and 45 kids. And so we're serving these moms through this curriculum, but we're also trying to build educational programs for each of the kids to make sure these kids

have every chance they can of learning how to read by their grade. They're great. And continuing to advance in school and sticking with the education, because that's one of the big difference makers is if these kids can change their educational outcomes

complete high school and hopefully get inspired to go to college not every kids You know wants to go to college or needs to go to college right schools are coming back. Thank the Lord That's exactly and community colleges are from we've got a great Central Peabindock Community College system is great and Charlotte So any kid that wants the opportunity should you or has the desire should have the opportunity to do it and that's what we're trying to work on so tell me about the ridiculously amazing and shocking and probably gonna surprise everybody listening to the aha moment when you

found out that 80% of a child's brain developed by the age of three, not third grade. 80% of the human beings brain is fully developed by the age three. Yeah, and give credit where credit is due. I didn't discover that. Hannah Peevers, the executive director did, and she read it someplace. Just when you heard it, that's amazing. And there's all kinds of moments that stand out for me.

You know, one moment, one of the early things we did is we learned that a lot of these moms don't have books at home, these kids don't have books at home. Which speaks to the ABCs, the one, two, three, the learning colors, and the earliest childhood development. But your child at three, their 80th-seller brains developed. Right. So you got to start early and you got to, you know, there's, you know, all kinds of terms, word deficit, you know, one of your kids, when they were little, one of my kids, they hear a certain number of

tens of thousands of words, what the stats are in a week or a day or whatever the deal is, but a lot of these intercity kids, because they're home alone or whatever, they have these thousands and thousands of word deficit. They're not hearing the words. And so that's part of the challenge. They've got to overcome a little bit. So one of the things we did is we bought books and sent them home with these kids. So they could have-

Just children, but kids, yeah. That's exactly right, sent them home. And one of our staff members was talking to one of the kids and said, hey, are you enjoying the book that we sent home with you the other day? And they said, I don't know, mom threw it away. And really was there something wrong with the book? No, I don't know, mom threw it away. And so this teacher or this staff member was puzzled,

well, running it ran into the mom a couple of days later and said, hey, your son said that you threw the book way. Yeah, we threw the book way Well, why'd you throw the book away and the mom said, well, we read it Man, and I mean my heart sunk again when I when I hear that story and and you know right away when you hear that that That mom didn't know to read that book a thousand times to her kid because nobody read her book. That's the generational cycle. We've got to break that cycle. And so, um, and it's not, it doesn't mean they're, they're stupid or they don't care.

It's just got to be taught. That's exactly right. That was nurture. It was never modeled to them. And so, um, you know, and so that's the kind of challenges that we've got to overcome. And so it takes a lot of work over a long, prolonged period of time. One of the other things we learned from purpose built, and I'm a person of faith, and faith is certainly in large part why I'm doing this. But we asked the purpose built folks, do you have a lot of, you know,

churches and faith communities involved and the CEO of purpose built made a comment saying, actually, the faith community does more harm than good. And all of a sudden, you know, I said, why would you say that? And what she said was they are well intentioned. There's a champion that says, I want to do something. So they start a committee and they lean in and they make a bunch of promises. And then a year later, they're gone. They're gone. And they got a new champion that's on to something else. And they disappear. And I was kind of like you're one of your, I guess it was in the Tommy Norman episode

where you're talking about Turkey people, something like that. I mean, they show up, they do good, they feel good for a year. You never see them again. And you never see them again. And do you know people in those neighborhoods that you're trying to serve are really, really accustomed to people coming in,

saying a bunch of stuff, who plot and everything else, and then bolting, and then you go in after two generations or three decades of that, and you wonder why when you show up, they look at you with suspicion. It's exactly right. Well, I mean, it's because that's the picture we've painted. It's, yes, We've modeled it.

We have modeled it. Yeah. And so we, culturally, we, and that is not only, that's public, private, that's, and I agree with you. I think by and large, all of that is well-intentioned. But without commitment and staying power, you're just another noise. Yeah, so they told us, if you're gonna do it, do it. But if you're not committed, then don't even start, if you're going to do it, do it.

But if you're not committed, then don't even start. Because you're going to do more harm than good. And so you got the worst than raising hopes and letting down again. That's exactly right. And so there were lots of challenges we faced along the way. But we were, and this is where the power of teamwork comes in.

If I was doing it myself, I had to give it up a long time ago. But my friends and I said, let's keep going. And let's keep going and fighting through it. comes in, if I was doing it myself, I had to give it up a long time ago. But you know, my friends and I said, let's keep going, let's keep going and fighting through it. And now we're starting to roll the rock a little bit down the hill. It's still hard, but we're not pushing it uphill, you know, all the time anymore. And it's changing lives. And we're hoping to. I mean, I know I get the humility, but the, it has to be changing lives.

Yeah, yeah. I have had, this is one of my things I love to talk about. And again, back to I get asked all the time, as if I know the answers, which I don't, I just know what little bit of experience I've had personally and that's what I can speak to. But doing the work that you're doing and the thousands of other people across the country that we're highlighting will continue to highlight on an army of normal folks. especially though when working in the world

that you're working in now, I think it's important for people to think about the social impact. And we talk about the social impact a lot. And it makes us feel good to talk about being able to move the needle on the social impact. And the social impact is housing and education and health and employment and kids not being transient and staying in school and learning to read by grade level in third grade so that

the indicators of their life from that point are positive rather than negative and not building jails based on how many third graders can read and how many three-year-olds who have an 80% brain development have never been read to or saw the lullabah and the showing up to first grade knowing your ABCs, you want to freeze your colors, and if you haven't had that at home, or in a pre-K, an early childhood development, that's going to slow down your ability to read. I love what you said about until third grade, you learn to read, and after third grade,

you read to learn, and the social impact of everything you're doing, all of it, I think is only half of the story, because I think there's a pragmatic side to this. And I do, I'm not saying this takeaway from the social impact because you know me, I'm a touchy-feely guy. I mean, there's a movie about it and books and everything else and everybody listening should know, I'm the touchy-feely social impact guy. I am. I'm also a businessman. us, man. We need to start asking ourselves the vast majority of every municipalities revenue is property tax, the vast majority. There's some

will tax, probably maybe some tag tax sales tax, maybe a little bit of sales tax, but in Tennessee, there's no sales tax. There's no in Texas and the sales tax in North Carolina. I don't know what it is, but it's not all going to the city squint state and the city gets small piece, right? I would say, well, I know that like 90 something percent of the total revenue in the city of Memphis is property taxes and I would assume in most cities that's at least the lion's share of where your revenue comes from. Pragmatically, what happens to our ability to pay for votes?

What happens to our ability to provide clean water? What happens to our ability to provide well-trained police departments and paramedics and and fire brigades. What what happens to our ability to fund schools? What happens to our ability to actually create a clean healthy municipality and all corners of our earth and all these urban areas? If we don't stop the generational poverty. Because eventually you get to where you have so many folks that aren't contributing to the revenue and the tax base of these municipalities

that they're unsustainable. There's a social impact component to all of this, which I would argue is the most important impact. But there's another one. And the pragmatic is we better get busy about doing something about this. Because even if you don't care about the social impact, you should certainly care about the pragmatic impact. And there's only so many more generations we can go before the have-nots far outnumber the halves and your society no longer works from a fiscal perspective. It paid me an hour, paid me later. It is that.

It is. It's very much that. And our moms moving forward program, we like to say it's a two generational program. We're serving the mom and we're trying to help their kids. And sometimes it's difficult, you know, if a mom, and I'll tell you another thing that's a delicate topic, but it's an important one is the whole family planning thing. I don't care what race or nationality you are. If you get pregnant at 15 and pregnant again at 17, your chances of living in poverty the rest of your

life go up astronomically then if you wait until you're married to have children. That's a fact. So if you've got a single mom that's got three kids, We're going to do everything we can to she probably hasn't finished high school or maybe she's got a GED but she doesn't qualify for some high paying jobs so we try to give her the skills to get to a slightly higher paying job. We go through lots of other training for her and we're going to do everything we can for her and we're investing in that next generation to try to break the cycle so that that next generation can learn some of the the potholes to navigate around. Don't get pregnant when you're 15 or 13 or 16. Stay in school, finish your

education, learn how to read, do your homework, and see how reading to kids gets modeled so that you can repeat that the next generation and so on. It's generational work that we're involved with, but if we can break that cycle for the next generation, it's hard to financially evaluate that contribution. It's expensive. It takes a lot of time, but if we can break that cycle for the next generation, I think the return on investment is huge. So, the first project was 180 units opened in 2020.

The second 156 open in 2021. To date, you've built 504 units. You've got another 500 units under construction. By my math, we'll call that a thousand. You've also told us that most mothers have three kids. So if you count an average of four times the thousand units, You're talking about changing lives of 4,000 people, 3,000 of which are children. How does that make you feel? Yeah, I, uh, never really thought about it that way. Sorry, never thought about it that way.

We take it, you know, one project at a time, one family at a time and hopefully, you know, we do our job and the results speak for themselves. Guys, you can hear just how emotional Tim got there. And y'all, it's just the part of the payoff of living a life of service of others. And I've said it a hundred times, the secret payoff pitch to get involved in serving in our communities and living a life's servant leadership as you really do get a thousand times more out of it than you put into it. And the emotion Tim just shared with us

is his realization of not only what his work is done but what it's meant to him. That concludes part one of my conversation with Tim and I hope you'll join us for part two that's now available. But if for some strange reason you don't, make sure to join the Army of Normal Folks at NormalFokes.us and sign up to become a member of the movement. By signing up, you also receive a weekly email and short episode summaries in case you happen to miss an episode or you prefer reading about our incredible guests like Tim.

Together, we can change this country. And guys, it starts with you. I'll see you in part two. The 1881 shootout in Tombstone, Arizona, known as the gunfight at the OK Corral only lasted 30 seconds, but the market left on popular imagination has held on for nearly 150 years. Why? Because Americans have never stopped being fascinated with the Wild West. Grim and Mile Presents will travel into the unknown, the misunderstood, and the forgotten tales of America's Westward expansion. Grim and Mile Presents The Wild West is available now.

Subscribe on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more over at grimandmild.com. Slash Presents Hey, this is Justin Richmond, host of the Broken Record Podcast. Join me along with co-hostly arose as we sit down with the artists you love to get unparalleled creative insight. You'll hear revealing interviews with some of the most legendary figures in music like Paul Simon, Usher, Pete Townsend, Damon Albarn of the Grillis, and Missie Elliott. And you'll hear from up-and-comers, like jazz artist Leveh, who told me about her fast

rise to fame during the pandemic. Listen a broken record on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Prepare to venture to the darkest, most haunted locations once again. About four o'clock in the morning it felt like the hand of God touched the castle. The whole thing just shook. Brace yourself for a supernatural journey unlike any other. It felt like there were other guests go staying with us that we could not see. Listen to Haunted Road, season five on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever

you get your favorite shows. Listen to Haunted Road, Season 5 on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.