There is a critical need for innovative ideas that will help solve problems related to income based housing, generational wealth passing from one generation to another, and never ending pursuit of cutting costs and increasing revenue. In the East MLK Smart Growth Initiative, I sought out to help land owners along the East-West Martin Luther King corridor of Bryan, Texas to maintain some of their generation wealth situated in the land that had been passed down. 

Many times at the offset of investments coming into older neighborhoods, landowners sell too soon, and rob themselves of larger returns they could have realized if they held their land. My idea was to create joint partnerships between builders and land owners where land owners would gain a greater return for their land at reversion instead of at the beginning by simply selling raw land. I pitched my idea to both investors and land owners. Some investors got out ahead of the curve and grabbed land before I could fully establish the program. In the end, I was able to help a handful of families realize greater returns. 

One of the externalities was also Habitat for Humanity became a much larger player in the neighbors I was targeting. This also helped to keep some of the overall integrity of the community in place. In creating the East-West Martin Luther King Smart Growth Initiative, sought to highlight what I believed to be a gap in the supply side of construction during a rapid period of growth in Bryan, Texas. I helped to usher in smart growth to the community by where hundreds of homes have been built since 2017 at a price point suitable for the area median income.