Realtopia - Real Estate for Teens

What makes a neighborhood feel alive — not just busy? Naomi sits down with Simon Sochas, Senior Strategist at Gehl, and Jenais Zarlin, co-founder and Chief Impact Officer of SF New Deal. Together, their organizations created the Vibrancy Index, a tool designed to measure public life, public space, identity, and economic vitality in downtown San Francisco. Simon explains why traditional downtown me...

Can a dead mall, an empty office park, or a sea of parking become a place where people actually belong? Naomi sits down with Ellen Dunham-Jones, architect, urban designer, and co-author with June Williamson of Retrofitting Suburbia. Her database now tracks more than 2,500 suburban retrofits across the country. Ellen explains how postwar suburbs separated people and everyday life through zoning, an...

Can a place actually make strangers talk — or does design only set the stage? Naomi sits down with Kevin Kelley, architect, co-founder of Shook Kelley, and author of Irreplaceable: How to Create Extraordinary Places That Bring People Together. For more than 30 years, Kevin has studied how physical environments influence behavior and how places can convene people around shared experiences. His clie...

Can you actually create a third place — or can you only create the conditions that allow one to emerge? Naomi sits down with Rik Adamski, president of Ash+Lime and co-founder of the Storefront Renaissance League, to talk about the everyday places where people gather — cafés, bookstores, bars, shops, and sometimes places you would never expect. Rik explains why third places have become harder to su...

Can one piece of infrastructure reconnect a city — and what happens when that idea becomes more successful than anyone expected? Naomi sits down with Ryan Gravel, the urban designer whose graduate thesis became the Atlanta BeltLine, a 22-mile loop connecting 45 neighborhoods around Atlanta. Ryan explains how a year in Paris inspired the idea, why he calls the BeltLine “catalyst infrastructure,” an...

Most cities were designed as if everyone were 30 years old, athletic, healthy, and able to drive. What would change if every street, park, library, and neighborhood had to work for an 8-year-old and an 80-year-old? Naomi sits down with Gil Peñalosa, founder of 8 80 Cities and one of the world's leading voices on public space. As Commissioner of Parks in Bogotá, Colombia, Gil built or rebuilt more...

Can something as personal as loving where you live actually be measured? Naomi sits down with Dr. Katherine Loflin, known as The City Doctor and a pioneer of place science. At the Knight Foundation, Katherine led the Soul of the Community study with Gallup — three years of research across 26 communities and more than 40,000 interviews asking two deceptively simple questions: What makes people love...

Can you learn to love where you live — or are some places simply a better fit than others? Naomi sits down with Melody Warnick, journalist and author of This Is Where You Belong and If You Could Live Anywhere. After moving six times by her mid-30s, Melody arrived in Blacksburg, Virginia — and initially wanted to leave. Instead, she began experimenting with what researchers call place attachment: t...

What turns a space into a place — and can belonging actually be designed? Naomi sits down with Ethan Kent, Executive Director and co-founder of PlacemakingX, a global network of more than 1,500 placemakers in over 85 countries. Before that, Ethan spent more than 20 years at Project for Public Spaces and has worked in and studied places across more than 1,000 cities around the world. From the cheap...

Can the places we live actually make us trust each other more? Naomi sits down with Charles Montgomery — journalist, author of Happy City, founder of Happy Cities, and author of the new book The Trust Experiments: Rebuilding Connection in a World Designed to Divide Us. More than a decade after Happy City, Charles explores how cities shape not just our happiness, but our relationships with one anot...

What if the reason your neighborhood looks the way it does — who lives there, what gets built, and how expensive it feels — isn't random? In this episode of Realtopia, Naomi sits down with Nolan Gray — city planner, Research Director at California YIMBY, and author of Arbitrary Lines — to unpack the invisible rules shaping our cities. Together, they explore one of the biggest questions facing this...

Why does one city feel instantly recognizable while another could be almost anywhere? In this episode of Realtopia, Naomi sits down with Professor Greg Clark — advisor to more than 400 cities across six continents, author, and co-host of The DNA of Cities — to explore what gives places their identity and why the most successful cities of the future may not be the ones that grow fastest, but the on...

Why do some spaces instantly feel right — while others never quite do? In this episode of Realtopia, Naomi sits down with Dr. Toby Israel — environmental psychologist, founder of Design Psychology, and author of Some Place Like Home and Designing Women's Lives — to explore how our earliest experiences of place quietly shape the homes we choose, the spaces we create, and even what makes us feel lik...

What if the housing crisis isn’t just about prices — but about a century of rules that quietly erased some of the most affordable ways people used to live? In this episode of Realtopia, Naomi speaks with Professor Marc Norman, Associate Dean of NYU Schack, about what’s broken in the housing system — and what it would take to fix it. Marc explains why affordable housing is often misunderstood, how...

In this episode of Realtopia, Naomi sits down with Dr. Colin Ellard, professor at the University of Waterloo and author of Places of the Heart, to explore how the spaces around us shape our emotions, behavior, and sense of belonging.  From city streets to living rooms, Dr. Ellard explains how our environment directly impacts our brains—sometimes in ways we don’t even notice. The conversation dives...

In this episode of Realtopia, Naomi speaks with Majora Carter about urban revitalization, environmental justice, and what it takes to build communities where residents can stay and thrive. Drawing from her experience in the South Bronx, Majora shares a powerful perspective on rebuilding neighborhoods from within. The conversation explores how perception shapes opportunity, the difference between r...

In this episode of Realtopia, Naomi speaks with Carlos Moreno, creator of the 15-minute city, about how cities can be redesigned around people, proximity, and everyday life. From his early work in technology to his shift toward a more human-centered vision of cities, Carlos explains why the future of urban living depends less on infrastructure and more on accessibility, local services, and quality...

What if you could invest in real estate the same way you buy shares in a company? In this episode, I talk with Jerry Chu, founder of Lofty, about real estate tokenization — a new way of buying and owning property through digital shares. We break down how it works, how it’s different from traditional real estate investing, and why some people believe it could make real estate more accessible to a w...

What if your home could move with you? This week I'm talking to Eli Rouimi, founder of Plad Homes — a company that's completely rethinking how homes are designed, built, and owned. We get into modular and prefab housing, and why it might be one of the most realistic solutions to the affordability crisis that nobody is talking about enough. We dig into what a modular home actually is (and what peop...

What does it take to shape a skyline — and what responsibility comes with it? This week I sat down with Kobi Karp, one of the most recognized architects in the world, whose projects span over $120 billion in iconic buildings across South Florida and beyond. But this conversation goes way deeper than design. We talked about the housing affordability crisis and why it keeps getting worse. We got int...

Realtopia | Season 2 Trailer — "The Blueprint for Tomorrow" Two years ago, I was a 12-year-old with a microphone and way too many questions about how houses got bought and sold. Now I'm in 9th grade — and honestly? The questions got bigger. Housing is unaffordable. Cities are overcrowded. The planet is warming. And everyone keeps talking about these problems like teenagers aren't the ones who are...

In this Episode of Realtopia, we're diving into the exciting world of architecture. Our guest is Ruben Jimenez, architect and owner of R-Method. Ruben has over 25 years of experience in the Design and Architecture field, working in different firms in Los Angeles, California and in South East Florida, before founding his own studio. In this episode, Ruben tells us a lot about what it means to be an...

Hello everyone. In today’s episode of Realtopia, I am interviewing Leon Azicri of Universal Group, a General Contractor, also called “Builder” in Miami. Leon is more than a contractor; he is also an engineer and understands a lot about what it takes to build different kinds of real estate buildings. And the best part: he once built Jennifer Lopez's house! In this episode, Leon tells us all about w...

Welcome back to Realtopia, the podcast for teenagers where we explore the real estate industry. Today, I’m happy to be joined by Michael Young, a real estate investor in Miami Beach, known for his luxury home developments and house renovations. Michael has a lot to teach us about how to buy land, build luxury houses and sell them! A great lesson on how to invest in real estate for all of us.

Welcome, Realtopians! Today, we're diving into the exciting world of real estate agencies with the amazing Jennifer Rosenfeld, a real estate agent with Sheridan Realty in Miami Beach. Jennifer tells us all about being a real estate agent and her experiences. She has a lot of interesting stories to tell and lots of good advice for us teenagers! I am sure you will be inspired!