The Regenerative Real Estate Podcast

Alissa Collins is the co-founder of Latitude Regenerative Real Estate, alongside her husband, show host Neal. On this special episode of the podcast, Neal and Alissa tell their own life story,  which culminates in their development of regenerative real estate: an approach to the built environment that considers health and wellness, sustainability, ecology, community, and spirit. Alissa and Neal di...

Steve Beshara is a developer, entrepreneur, and designer. He is the founder of Vista Growth, which does place-branding, community design, and strategic planning.  Beshara loves to be innovative, on the edge of the frontier, and he believes that community-planning magic can come from charettes, meetings where a diverse group of people come together to brain storm freely. Steve and show host Neal di...

Jim Gale is the founder and chief storyteller of Food Forest Abundance, an organization that aims to provide people with freedom and independence through food forests. After selling his successful real estate company and retiring at 35, Jim thought he would relax for his remaining years. But after he had children, he started thinking obsessively about the future of humanity and came to a revelatio...

Hiroko Yamamoto is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the College of Architecture at the University of Utah and runs the DesignBuildUTAH program. The program allows students from around the world to live in the Navajo Nation in Utah to design and build affordable homes using green build techniques. The homes are designed in accordance with Navajo culture and use local materials in a way that is cos...

Katie McCamant is an author, architect, and the co-creator of the term "cohousing"—a  community of private homes clustered around shared communal spaces. In the 1980s, she and Charles Durrett published the authoritative book on the subject, Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves . McCamant is now focused on promoting cohousing communities across the United States by work...

Daron Joffe, a.k.a. Farmer D, is a farmer, designer, and ambitious field-builder promoting the idea of agrihoods and conservation-focused land development. He is the author of Citizen Farmers: The Biodynamic Way to Grow Healthy Food, Build Thriving Communities, and Give Back to the Earth, and the leader of Farmer D, an organization that creates agrihoods by collaborating with developers, nonprofit...

Julie Brunner is the housing director at OPAL, a community land trust on Orcas Island in Washington state. Julie has worked in the field of affordable housing since the mid-90s and today OPAL is responsible for housing 200 families on an island with a population of just 5,000. Over the years, both through hot and cold real estate markets, they've found innovative ways to finance and offer hou...

Peter Scialla is the Chief Operating Officer and President of Delos, a company that is infusing wellness into real estate. We spend 90% of our time indoors and increasingly scientific research has shown that our indoor environment has a major impact on our health. Delos is working to make buildings healthier by improving the air, light, and drinkable water within them. Peter and show host Neal dis...

Ian McSweeney is the director of Agrarian Trust, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to support land access for the next generation of farmers. He believes that we need to create a new story about how land ownership works in our society, innovating new and more just ways for people of all walks of life to have access to land. Ian and show host Neal discuss their shared background working as...

David Rust is the founder and CEO of Sagra, an agro-tourism company that works with farms across the country. He believes that a trip to a regenerative farm can be a revelation for people, inspiring them to shift the way they shop, eat, and see the environment.  David and show host Neal discuss the path that led to founding Sagra, including David’s time at Lyft during its meteoric rise. They also...

Jesse Savou is the founder of the BlueBarrel Rainwater Catchment System. Her company offers people across the United States the opportunity to restore the natural hydrological  cycle that modern developments and hard pavements have disrupted. They provide a kit with all the parts and instructions that anyone can use to build their own system.  And, most critically, they connect customers with supp...

Izumi Tanaka is a green realtor, podcast host, and change agent with Latitude Regenerative Real Estate.  Izumi moved to the U.S. from Japan when she was 21 years old and for her whole life has used ikigai as a driving force—a Japanese concept that's often associated with the intersection of a four part Venn diagram: what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can b...

John Kamp is an urban and landscape designer with PRAIRIEFORM and the co-author of the book Dream, Play, Build . For the sake of the environment and our own happiness, it is essential that we design urban spaces thoughtfully—and that requires honest input from community members. For this purpose, John and his colleagues have innovated new ways to do community meetings that minimize conflict and st...

Hannah Lewis is a writer interested in conservation and the intersection of sociology and sustainable agriculture. Her most recent book, Mini-Forest Revolution , is about planting dense forests that can sequester carbon, increase biodiversity, address urban heat, and bring communities together. In this episode, Hannah and show host Neal discuss her academic background and the path that led her to...

Dylan Lamar is  an architect, developer, and the founder of the firm Cultivate.  He believes that affordability is an essential part of sustainability and he is on a mission to address America's housing crisis. Dylan's new mantra is "form follows finance" and he is particularly interested in housing cooperatives as a way to de-commodify the housing market and provide sustainabl...

Dani Baker is an author and the owner of Cross Island Farms, an idyllic edible forest in upstate New York that attracts visitors and volunteers from across the country. For most of her adult life, Dani was a clinical psychologist—but ever since she was a kid, farming was in the back of her mind. When she retired, she bought her farm on Wellesley Island, took a community class about permaculture, a...

Sarah Susanka is an architect, prolific author, and visionary thinker credited with starting the tiny house movement. She’s changed the way huge amounts of people see the world, but she insists the way to create change is by thinking small and attending to the everyday challenges you see in front of you.  I talked to Sarah with a co-host, returning podcast guest Ross Chaplin—creator of “pocket nei...

Alison Sant is a designer, artist, activist, and mother who is inspired by community-led initiatives to combat the climate crisis. She is the author of From the Ground Up: Local Efforts to Create Resilient Cities. We talked about Alison's upbringing in Washington D.C., at the heart of the environmental movement's origin, and we dove into several of her favorite examples of bottom-up clim...

Dr. Vincent Walsh is a designer and serial entrepreneur living and working in Manchester, England. He is inspired and fascinated by the biosphere's natural inclination toward circular systems and "upcycling"—taking components and creating from them something of equal or greater value.  In the show, we discuss Vincent's incredible life story: his experience with severe dyslexia...

Aaron Fairchild has leveraged his own background in finance to lead the way in deep green housing development in the Pacific Northwest. He's applied pressure to the whole market, inspiring developers to make more sustainable housing in order to keep up.  This is Aaron's second appearance on the podcast, and we dive deeper into his ideas about leadership, developing company culture, and h...

Ben Falk is one of the most prominent figures in the world of ecological design but he didn't always see that path as his future. At a young age, he was drawn toward acts of dramatic protest, like sleeping in trees. But eventually he had an epiphany: the best way to inspire change is not to yell at or shame people, but to show them a better way to live.  In the show, we discuss how Ben became...

Concrete, which is energy and emissions intensive, took over the world around 200 years ago. Emily Majewski thinks it's time for its reign to end. Experimenting in her backyard in Mexico, she created a new, environmentally-friendly building material made from biochar called Cast Carbon .  In the show, we hear why Emily and her husband moved to a foreign country to raise their child, how she r...

Agriculture is not a typical investment category that one may think about when they think of real estate investing. For Chris Rawley, he became interested in agriculture through his travels as part of his career in the Navy. He came from a real estate family and knew the mechanics of real estate, but didn’t know how to invest in local farms in his area. He decided to create Harvest Returns to help...

There is a utopic vision that farmers will put down their pesticides, herbicides, and other chemical cocktails conceived and peddled to eradicate pests and weeds in order to save the planet. However the challenge is that the land can become so degraded that once you go cold turkey and stop applying chemicals, everything seems to collapse around you. That’s exactly what happened to Jesse and Cally...

Don Hall is a trainer and facilitator with TransitionUS , the US hub with the global Transition Network . He is a permaculturalist and former Executive Director of Transition Sarasota. Don recently joined us on The Regenerative Real Estate Podcast to talk about his life’s work and the Transition Network’s playbook called Five Stages of Transition. If you’re not familiar with Transition or Transiti...