Podcasts about biscayne boulevard

Can you "out-masculine" rain? Well, Tony sure seems to think so. The crew continues weather talk as Biscayne Boulevard looks like it will be back underwater later today. Also, is Dan racist AND sexist? Plus, we have an exclusive with Dan Hurley in his first interview since turning down the Los Angeles Lakers to stay at UCONN. In a surprisingly honest and vulnerable conversation, Hurley shares how he went about making his "gut-wrenching" decision, the embarrassment he felt over being the center of the story, what he heard on TV that didn't actually apply to his conversations, whether or not he learned if LeBron will be a Laker next year, why he calls one of his players Stewgotz, and how his family felt about the decision. Plus, Stugotz tries to guess Hurley's Top 5 Billy Joel Songs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cat Talk! Panthers back in the Win Column following a dominate victory over the Flyers Same Reinhart reaches 50 goals! Will he get the Panthers record? John Tortorella is a grumpy ole thumb-less menace and we absolutely love it 15 minutes of HEAT! - We reflect on the HEAT's victory over the Cavs We find out why Bam Adebayo has recently fallen in love with the 3pt shot Patty Mills blesses our ears following the HEAT's win over the Cavs We get Game Balls & Game Bum's from the week that was Rhino continues his hot streak Marcos is Rats off a Ship on his Rat Removing exterminator

Oneika Raymond heads to Little River, Miami, a creative hub north of downtown and across the bay from Miami Beach. There, she's joined by local entrepreneur Isabella “Izzy” Acker for a driving tour of the area where Isabella launched Tigre Sounds, a global music discovery platform with a focus on Latin artists. Through it, Isabella hosts live Tigre Sessions, or music events in lesser-known neighborhoods and venues across the city.  Oneika meets up with Isabella at Sweat Records, an independent record store in Little Haiti and a go-to location for music lovers. Oneika has recently moved to Miami and made it her home base, so she's excited to hop in the car with Isabella to get a feel for a trio of neighborhoods that are new to her: Little Haiti, Little River, and Miami Modern, or MiMo for short. They're all within a five minute drive of each other, and home to an exciting creative community of artists, musicians, and entrepreneurs. Oneika and Isabella set off on a driving tour up Little Haiti's main corridor, Northeast 2nd Avenue. Along the way, Isabella points out mainstays like the Little Haiti Cultural Center, Chef Creole, and the B&M Market. From there, they venture into Little River, where the buildings begin to look more industrial and Isabella shares tips for different music venues to check out, like Understory and Helmet One. The final neighborhood in the tour is MiMo, an area along Biscayne Boulevard known for its unique style of architecture featuring curved walls, modern angles, and geometric patterns. You'll find all sorts of fusion restaurants on the thoroughfare as well, including Luna Pasta e Dolci, an Argentine-Italian restaurant which boasts some of the tastiest empanadas in the city. Oneika and Isabella grab a bite at Caracas Bakery, a Venezuelan-owned and French-inspired café serving up pastries and coffee with a Venezuelan twist. There, they reflect on the diversity of the neighborhood and the importance of supporting local businesses.They end the day by sitting down to discuss how Isabella is committed to doing her part to build experiences beyond Miami's beaches that both locals and visitors can enjoy – and why live music and supporting Latin artists is such a big part of that commitment. They talk about the present and the future of the Latin music scene in Miami, the live music venues to support across the city, and how Isabella is raising awareness for Latin music in Miami and beyond through Tigre Sounds.Thanks to Tigre Den for providing a Tigre Session recording of Miluhska performing Loba for this episode.To read full episode transcripts from About the Journey and see photos of each featured destination, head to About the Journey on Marriott Bonvoy Traveler. Starting this season, you can also watch videos from select episodes on our Marriott Bonvoy YouTube channel.

Tasheka Ranette Young's family and friends are hoping her death will open up the conversation around domestic violence. They identified the popular local radio personality as the 34-year-old killed Saturday in her home at Mission Pointe Apartments on Biscayne Boulevard. Bursey Jerome Armstrong Jr., who friends say is the father of her two young children, is charged with second-degree murder in her death. The arrest report with the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office redacts most of the details but lists it as domestic violence involving a handgun. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/leah-gordone/support

On this episode of The Squid Hour, we catch up on all the action from week 4 of the NFL. The Friendos also discuss if they would take a lump sum or the annuity payments if they were to hit the lottery. We also find out that a certain guest Friendo has two one-way tickets out of town already purchased for the Miami football teams head coaches. The Friendos discuss the upcoming series, House of Dragon as a certain Friendo reveals, he is not a fan of Game Of Thrones. Finally, the Friendos are excited about the Miami Heat's HUGE win in their first preseason game as they begin planning the championship parade down Biscayne Boulevard. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

The top headline from the Miami Herald for Thursday including the latest on the return of the Mai Kai restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, new retail on the Miami River, a new restaurant on Biscayne Boulevard in Miami, mask mandates at schools.

There's a script circulating in Hollywood about the night of June 12, 1994. It begins in the affluent Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. The narrator, an ex-con from Miami named Charlie, approaches a cottage-style mansion on Rockingham Avenue and sees O.J. Simpson chipping golf balls on the lawn behind the gate.The man calls out "Juice!" and Simpson welcomes him through the gate.Simpson's happy to see his friend, but Charlie's here on business. He says "Joey" sent him to collect cocaine debts, many of them related to the celebrity football player's ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and more so, her best friend, Faye Resnick.Simpson reacts with fury to being squeezed for money, and the target of that anger is Brown. He's scheduled to leave for the airport in less than an hour for a flight to Chicago, but Simpson decides he's going to confront his ex-wife at her home on Bundy Drive.I supportNew Times Broward-Palm BeachNew Times Broward-Palm BeachLocalCommunityJournalismSupport the independent voice of South Florida and help keep the future of New Times free.Support UsWith Charlie in tow, he drives his white Ford Bronco to the alley behind Brown's home, where blood is soon spilled in great quantity.The premise might sound preposterous. The history of that terrible night has long been seared into America's consciousness. There wasn't some Miami mob grunt with O.J. Simpson the night Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were brutally knifed to death. The Los Angeles Police Department and District Attorney's Office couldn't have missed that Simpson had an accomplice, could they?Charlie is based on a real Miamian, Charles "Charlie" Ehrlich, an ex-drug trafficker and longtime manager at Dean's Gold, a glitzy strip club on 163rd Street and Biscayne Boulevard in North Miami Beach. If fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth, then the script, titled Juiced, after Simpson's nickname, may shed new light on the events of that gruesome night. Or it could be an elaborate ploy to profit off one of the most notorious crimes in history.Fact or fiction, it's one of those outlandish tales where the deeper you dig, the less crazy it seems.CharlieDenizens of Dean's Gold might notice a roundish, 67-year-old bald guy walking around the place like he owns it. Charles Ehrlich doesn't own the club, but he's helped run it for years.These days, Ehrlich is head of marketing and promotion, routinely posing for social-media photos. He cozies up to exotic dancers at the bar. He flashes his grin in the parking lot with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Rob Corddry after the pair shot some scenes for an episode of the HBO show Ballerz. He shares a laugh with Dennis Rodman.In older photos that have nothing to do with Dean's, Ehrlich smiles with his longtime friend O.J. Simpson. While his presence on the night of the murders is open for debate, he was definitely with Simpson during the sports-memorabilia robbery in Las Vegas in 2007 that landed the former football star in prison for nine years. Ehrlich was also convicted in the case but did no jail time. He still sounds defensive about it."O.J. did nine years for something he should have done six months for," he says.As for his own involvement, he says he was present during the impromptu hotel-room heist only because Simpson was a friend and asked him to come along."I made a mistake," Ehrlich says. "I never should have been in that room. Hindsight is 20/20. It was dumb. It was stupid. I never should have been there."He told a similar story during interviews with CNN, ABC, and other news outlets when Simpson was up for parole and eventually freed in 2017. "If it's believed" — "it" being the 'Juiced' version of the murder — "it immediately puts [Charlie] in prison. There's no statute of limitations on murder. Hence our dilemma." tweet this But when it comes to the reason for this phone call — the night of June 12, 1994 — Ehrlich clams up tighter than a cherrystone."I don't want to go there, no disrespect," he says. "I don't want to talk about the past. That's the past. I don't want to go there."Yet Juiced, a copy of which New Times obtained from a self-described whistleblower, is filled with information about Ehrlich's past. The script recounts a childhood in Manhattan with a stepfather tied to mobster Meyer Lansky and the underworld. After some trouble with police as a teen, he's exiled to Miami, where he quickly becomes involved in the drug trade, gets the street name "Charlie Tuna" and eventually serves time in prison before going to LA.The script's author is a Los Angeles film producer named Erik Laibe. Reached by phone, Laibe says he optioned the story from Ehrlich about five years ago and owns the story rights for the next five years as well. He says he's still "vetting" Ehrlich's claims. He declined to speak in any detail with New Times, warning of an intellectual-property lawsuit if the paper reported on the script."It's an interesting mental exercise," says Laibe of trying to determine Erhlich's involvement, or lack thereof, in the murders. "What the truth is — who knows?"Laibe points out the obvious: If Ehrlich truly was involved, he could face serious legal exposure."What is Charlie's motivation in all of this? Money," Laibe posits with certainty. "If it's believed" — "it" being the Juiced version of the murder — "it immediately puts [Charlie] in prison. There's no statute of limitations on murder. Hence our dilemma."In Laibe's view, Ehrlich's presence at the murder scene with O.J. "would be the biggest embarrassment to the LAPD and District Attorney's Office in the last 50 years."The whistleblower says it was the public import of the case that helped motivate the release of the script to New Times."You have to look at this story through the eyes of the victims and their families," says the source, who spoke on the condition that their name not be published. "They have a right to know, and a need to know, and there's a public-safety issue."O.J. Simpson (left) and Charles Ehrlich (seated) in court for a preliminary hearing in Las Vegas in 2007 - PHOTO BY STEVE MARCUS/GETTY IMAGESO.J. Simpson (left) and Charles Ehrlich (seated) in court for a preliminary hearing in Las Vegas in 2007Photo by Steve Marcus/Getty ImagesThe story of Ehrlich's life in crime is a slippery one, but parts of it are verifiable. In the script, Charlie is busted for running a cocaine operation in Atlanta. That happened to Ehrlich in 1987. The prosecutor was a young DA named Nancy Grace. The future Court TV star wrote about Ehrlich's case in her 2005 book Objection! describing him as a "major drug distributor in the city.""When the police searched Charlie Tuna's apartment, things got even worse. They discovered that the place was wired, so he'd know if someone got in. Cops found a silencer in the closet," wrote Grace. "...This was a bad guy, and he has to be stopped from poisoning the streets of the city."Grace won a conviction; Charlie was sent to prison. In the script, Charlie says he served seven-and-a-half years of a 27-year sentence. Upon his release in the early '90s, Charlie describes meeting with a mobster pal named Joey Ippolito, who tells him he's expanding his cocaine trafficking operation and needs someone to help him do it. Charlie jumps at the chance, but there's a catch: He'll have to relocate to Los Angeles.The ScriptIn the script, Charlie describes how he helped Ippolito move cocaine from Miami to the West Coast and facilitate sales to wealthy clientele in LA."[D]ealing with the rich and famous moves a lot of product," Charlie narrates.The real-life Joey Ippolito — or Joey Ipp, as he was known — was indeed operating a major cocaine organization in Los Angeles at the time. In 1993 Ippolito was convicted in an FBI investigation called Operation Lasima (short for "Los Angeles Sicilian Mafia") and sentenced to ten years in prison.Yet Joey Ipp wasn't behind bars on the night of June 12, 1994. A month earlier, under mysterious circumstances, he was able to "walk away" from a federal prison camp in Pensacola, according to published reports.It's clear that Ippolito had ties to Simpson. The Boston Herald reported after the murders that the feds were aware of a relationship between Ippolito and Al Cowlings, Simpson's close friend and the driver of the white Bronco in the infamous slow-speed police chase that preceded Simpson's arrest. From the beginning, some suspected the murders may have been cocaine-related. During the trial, lead defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran posited a theory, without mentioning Ippolito by name, that Brown may have been killed by drug dealers in order to frighten her friend Faye Resnick, who was admittedly addicted to cocaine at that time. But the overwhelming DNA evidence of Simpson's own culpability in the murder made such speculation seem immaterial.In the script, Charlie meets Simpson at the Rockingham estate while working for Ippolito and the two become friends. In the narration, Charlie says Ippolito uses O.J. for "contacts" and that while Simpson isn't a drug dealer, Ippolito "takes care of him for let's just say facilitating deals." "I don't want to go there, no disrespect. I don't want to talk about the past. That's the past. I don't want to go there." tweet this The script has Charlie going to Simpson's house on June 12, 1994, to squeeze him for cocaine debts, sending the former NFL great into a rage."If it's about paying, the complication is that bitch Faye [Resnick]," the script has Simpson saying.As his anger builds, O.J. tells Charlie the two of them are going to drive the Bronco to Nicole's condo and "putting this on her." Cut to Nicole's house: two bodies, a "pool of dark liquid," and a bloody O.J. stripping off his clothes and handing them and the knife to a "mystery man."Charlie the narrator says he'll never reveal whether he is the mystery man, saying only, "

There's a script circulating in Hollywood about the night of June 12, 1994. It begins in the affluent Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. The narrator, an ex-con from Miami named Charlie, approaches a cottage-style mansion on Rockingham Avenue and sees O.J. Simpson chipping golf balls on the lawn behind the gate. The man calls out "Juice!" and Simpson welcomes him through the gate. Simpson's happy to see his friend, but Charlie's here on business. He says "Joey" sent him to collect cocaine debts, many of them related to the celebrity football player's ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and more so, her best friend, Faye Resnick. Simpson reacts with fury to being squeezed for money, and the target of that anger is Brown. He's scheduled to leave for the airport in less than an hour for a flight to Chicago, but Simpson decides he's going to confront his ex-wife at her home on Bundy Drive. I support New Times Broward-Palm Beach New Times Broward-Palm Beach Local Community Journalism Support the independent voice of South Florida and help keep the future of New Times free. Support Us With Charlie in tow, he drives his white Ford Bronco to the alley behind Brown's home, where blood is soon spilled in great quantity. The premise might sound preposterous. The history of that terrible night has long been seared into America's consciousness. There wasn't some Miami mob grunt with O.J. Simpson the night Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were brutally knifed to death. The Los Angeles Police Department and District Attorney's Office couldn't have missed that Simpson had an accomplice, could they? Charlie is based on a real Miamian, Charles "Charlie" Ehrlich, an ex-drug trafficker and longtime manager at Dean's Gold, a glitzy strip club on 163rd Street and Biscayne Boulevard in North Miami Beach. If fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth, then the script, titled Juiced, after Simpson's nickname, may shed new light on the events of that gruesome night. Or it could be an elaborate ploy to profit off one of the most notorious crimes in history. Fact or fiction, it's one of those outlandish tales where the deeper you dig, the less crazy it seems. Charlie Denizens of Dean's Gold might notice a roundish, 67-year-old bald guy walking around the place like he owns it. Charles Ehrlich doesn't own the club, but he's helped run it for years. These days, Ehrlich is head of marketing and promotion, routinely posing for social-media photos. He cozies up to exotic dancers at the bar. He flashes his grin in the parking lot with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Rob Corddry after the pair shot some scenes for an episode of the HBO show Ballerz. He shares a laugh with Dennis Rodman. In older photos that have nothing to do with Dean's, Ehrlich smiles with his longtime friend O.J. Simpson. While his presence on the night of the murders is open for debate, he was definitely with Simpson during the sports-memorabilia robbery in Las Vegas in 2007 that landed the former football star in prison for nine years. Ehrlich was also convicted in the case but did no jail time. He still sounds defensive about it. "O.J. did nine years for something he should have done six months for," he says. As for his own involvement, he says he was present during the impromptu hotel-room heist only because Simpson was a friend and asked him to come along. "I made a mistake," Ehrlich says. "I never should have been in that room. Hindsight is 20/20. It was dumb. It was stupid. I never should have been there." He told a similar story during interviews with CNN, ABC, and other news outlets when Simpson was up for parole and eventually freed in 2017. "If it's believed" — "it" being the 'Juiced' version of the murder — "it immediately puts [Charlie] in prison. There's no statute of limitations on murder. Hence our dilemma." tweet this But when it comes to the reason for this phone call — the night of June 12, 1994 — Ehrlich clams up tighter than a cherrystone. "I don't want to go there, no disrespect," he says. "I don't want to talk about the past. That's the past. I don't want to go there." Yet Juiced, a copy of which New Times obtained from a self-described whistleblower, is filled with information about Ehrlich's past. The script recounts a childhood in Manhattan with a stepfather tied to mobster Meyer Lansky and the underworld. After some trouble with police as a teen, he's exiled to Miami, where he quickly becomes involved in the drug trade, gets the street name "Charlie Tuna" and eventually serves time in prison before going to LA. The script's author is a Los Angeles film producer named Erik Laibe. Reached by phone, Laibe says he optioned the story from Ehrlich about five years ago and owns the story rights for the next five years as well. He says he's still "vetting" Ehrlich's claims. He declined to speak in any detail with New Times, warning of an intellectual-property lawsuit if the paper reported on the script. "It's an interesting mental exercise," says Laibe of trying to determine Erhlich's involvement, or lack thereof, in the murders. "What the truth is — who knows?" Laibe points out the obvious: If Ehrlich truly was involved, he could face serious legal exposure. "What is Charlie's motivation in all of this? Money," Laibe posits with certainty. "If it's believed" — "it" being the Juiced version of the murder — "it immediately puts [Charlie] in prison. There's no statute of limitations on murder. Hence our dilemma." In Laibe's view, Ehrlich's presence at the murder scene with O.J. "would be the biggest embarrassment to the LAPD and District Attorney's Office in the last 50 years." The whistleblower says it was the public import of the case that helped motivate the release of the script to New Times. "You have to look at this story through the eyes of the victims and their families," says the source, who spoke on the condition that their name not be published. "They have a right to know, and a need to know, and there's a public-safety issue." O.J. Simpson (left) and Charles Ehrlich (seated) in court for a preliminary hearing in Las Vegas in 2007 - PHOTO BY STEVE MARCUS/GETTY IMAGES O.J. Simpson (left) and Charles Ehrlich (seated) in court for a preliminary hearing in Las Vegas in 2007 Photo by Steve Marcus/Getty Images The story of Ehrlich's life in crime is a slippery one, but parts of it are verifiable. In the script, Charlie is busted for running a cocaine operation in Atlanta. That happened to Ehrlich in 1987. The prosecutor was a young DA named Nancy Grace. The future Court TV star wrote about Ehrlich's case in her 2005 book Objection! describing him as a "major drug distributor in the city." "When the police searched Charlie Tuna's apartment, things got even worse. They discovered that the place was wired, so he'd know if someone got in. Cops found a silencer in the closet," wrote Grace. "...This was a bad guy, and he has to be stopped from poisoning the streets of the city." Grace won a conviction; Charlie was sent to prison. In the script, Charlie says he served seven-and-a-half years of a 27-year sentence. Upon his release in the early '90s, Charlie describes meeting with a mobster pal named Joey Ippolito, who tells him he's expanding his cocaine trafficking operation and needs someone to help him do it. Charlie jumps at the chance, but there's a catch: He'll have to relocate to Los Angeles. The Script In the script, Charlie describes how he helped Ippolito move cocaine from Miami to the West Coast and facilitate sales to wealthy clientele in LA. "[D]ealing with the rich and famous moves a lot of product," Charlie narrates. The real-life Joey Ippolito — or Joey Ipp, as he was known — was indeed operating a major cocaine organization in Los Angeles at the time. In 1993 Ippolito was convicted in an FBI investigation called Operation Lasima (short for "Los Angeles Sicilian Mafia") and sentenced to ten years in prison. Yet Joey Ipp wasn't behind bars on the night of June 12, 1994. A month earlier, under mysterious circumstances, he was able to "walk away" from a federal prison camp in Pensacola, according to published reports. It's clear that Ippolito had ties to Simpson. The Boston Herald reported after the murders that the feds were aware of a relationship between Ippolito and Al Cowlings, Simpson's close friend and the driver of the white Bronco in the infamous slow-speed police chase that preceded Simpson's arrest. From the beginning, some suspected the murders may have been cocaine-related. During the trial, lead defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran posited a theory, without mentioning Ippolito by name, that Brown may have been killed by drug dealers in order to frighten her friend Faye Resnick, who was admittedly addicted to cocaine at that time. But the overwhelming DNA evidence of Simpson's own culpability in the murder made such speculation seem immaterial. In the script, Charlie meets Simpson at the Rockingham estate while working for Ippolito and the two become friends. In the narration, Charlie says Ippolito uses O.J. for "contacts" and that while Simpson isn't a drug dealer, Ippolito "takes care of him for let's just say facilitating deals." "I don't want to go there, no disrespect. I don't want to talk about the past. That's the past. I don't want to go there." tweet this The script has Charlie going to Simpson's house on June 12, 1994, to squeeze him for cocaine debts, sending the former NFL great into a rage. "If it's about paying, the complication is that bitch Faye [Resnick]," the script has Simpson saying. As his anger builds, O.J. tells Charlie the two of them are going to drive the Bronco to Nicole's condo and "putting this on her." Cut to Nicole's house: two bodies, a "pool of dark liquid," and a bloody O.J. stripping off his clothes and handing them and the knife to a "mystery man." Charlie the narrator says he'll never reveal whether he is the mystery man, saying only, "

BE SURE TO SEE THE SHOWNOTES AND LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE HERE. Eve Picker: [00:00:12] Hi there. Thanks so much for joining me today for the latest episode of Impact Real Estate Investing. Today marks the first anniversary of this podcast, something I am immensely proud of.   [00:00:36] A year ago, I didn’t know that our audience would grow as it has. In fact, a year ago I wasn’t sure we would have an audience at all.  And I certainly never imagined that I would have the opportunity to talk with so many extraordinary individuals, leaders and movers in their respective fields, all doing remarkable things.  When we started the podcast, I thought we would focus on real estate and the impact it makes.  But I’ve discovered that “real estate” is a very broad industry. I’ve found a horde of people working in fascinating niches around this one big central theme – the built environment we all occupy. [00:01:26] These people work in city planning, on affordable housing, in impact investing, on mobility issues, in fintech, as architects, on sustainable development, on community capital, on equity in communities and in many other niches, pushing the boundaries of the built environment to be better for everyone.  The range of work that is being accomplished, is quite frankly, astounding. [00:01:59] I learned how big, visionary thinkers make cities better. Like Josh MacManus in How to leave places better than you find them. He’s spent quite a lot of time rebuilding downtown Detroit.  Or Tom Murphy, past mayor of Pittsburgh, who showed incredible fortitude in shepherding Pittsburgh from abandoned to reinvented in How to transform a city. And most recently, Avra Jain, who tells us all to look past the working girl on the corner in Beyond the Vagabond. When she looked she saw the future of Biscayne Boulevard.   [00:02:45] Other guests have reminded me of the power of zoning, architecture and design starting with Liz Faletta in By right, by design. Her in depth research on the impact of zoning on housing in Los Angeles provides unexpected insight.   In Atlanta, Eric Kronberg convinced me yet again of the importance of salvaging architecture in The zoning whisperer.   Christine Mondor reinforces the idea that architects can influence the future of cities in The power of design.   And Lorenzo Perez’s creativity as a real estate developer in Phoenix caught me off guard in Real estate artist. His approach to transforming ugly desert architecture into beautiful community spaces is wildly creative. [00:03:44] Let’s not forget the housing crisis. Lots of my guests are all in looking for big solutions. John Perfitt and Jason Neville are tackling homeless housing in Los Angeles by re-introducing iconic architecture, in Hungry for disruption; Molly McCabe describes the unusual approach of the Lotus Campaign in Capital is just a tool. Jonathan Tate takes an architect’s approach by focusing on the value of odd lots and the houses you can build on them in Lead by example. Scott Choppin is tackling multi-generational workforce housing in The contrarian developer, an important niche that has gone unnoticed by other housing developers. [00:04:31] Matt Hoffman is focusing instead on how technology might solve the crisis in 7.4 million short. Rebecca Foster, in San Francisco, is busy saving existing affordable housing through financial tools on Accelerating affordable housing. Brian Gaudio has a modular housing solution in Scaling up. And Thibault Manekin (T-bo) of Seawall Development is focusing on specific communities, affordability and astounding preservation efforts in Choose your own rent. [00:05:22] Across the Pacific Ocean, Australian architect Jeremy McCleod has figured out how to deliver Sustainable, affordable and beautiful housing in a market that most people can’t afford. Fellow Australian, Kris Daff, is tackling the same problem in a different way. He’s Assembling communities and offering them a path to home ownership.   And across the Atlantic Ocean Marc Koehler is turning the architectural design process upside down by first curating communities and then designing a building around them in his Superlofts project.  It’s super fantastic!  [00:06:08] Community development and social equity have moved into the foreground this year, and I expect will even more so next.   Brian Murray is Embedded in community in Philadelphia, working on projects that provide equitable opportunity for everyone. Josh Lavrinc has spent his career squarely focused on Advancing community development, through capital raising and real estate development Emerick Paul Patterson is busy experimenting with inclusionary community tactics in New York. Listen to his love of diversity in Delicious Urban Soup. [00:06:47] In West Virginia, Brandon Dennison is experimenting as only an entrepreneur can, on how to end generational poverty in A bold experiment in coal country. John Folan, who heads a department of architecture, wants to make sure that the next generation of architects understand the meaning of equity. For John, Equity is the thread. Majora Carter has gone from Revitalization strategist to barista in her efforts to bring equity to the South Bronx, one of the poorest zip codes in the country, and where she lives. “Nobody should have to move out of their neighborhood to live in a better one,” says Majora. Sadie McKeown, in Political will and community, has seen firsthand the influence of good and steady political leadership in building better communities. [00:07:43] Justin Garrett Moore has a day job ensuring the quality of public space in New York City.  But on the weekends, he’s knee-deep in redeveloping the community he grew up in. Hear what he’s up against as a black man in Black, white and red(lining). Adam Sgrenci is showing communities how they can control their own destinies, andn educating developers on how to Co-create. Adrian Washington has been developing in Opportunity Zones before they were a thing. He decided a long time ago that Greenfields are boring. And Katie Swenson is the quintessential community architect. Home is the most important community development concept for her. [00:08:43] For insights into economic development and financial inclusion hear Kimber Lanning who is Striving for justice in Arizona or Brian Beckon explain how to raise community capital in Share the wealth. Jorge Newbery is using Fintech to keep people in their homes. He’s saved 10,000 and counting, while Ommeed Sathe sees Big Change in his role at Prudential, helping them to build a billion-dollar impact fund. Lance Chimka who leads an Economic Development Department believes their role should always be First in. Towards growth. Christina Marsh has given herself over to the remaking of Erie in Of service. In Erie. Melissa Koide is researching and advancing ideas on financial inclusion. With Fintech. And Lyneir Richardson, wants to help 1,000 urban entrepreneurs grow their business.   [00:09:55] I’ve learned about mobility in cities, and how it touches real estate and equity, from Karina Ricks, who heads a newly energized Department of Mobility, and from Gabe Klein, a mobility rock star, who convinced me that the future of mobility will be enhanced by data in Mobility is pretty pedestrian. Harriet Tregoning is taking on a leadership role with NUMO, the New Urban Mobility Alliance, and explains why in The reluctant planner. And let’s not forget Donald Shoup, parking czar, who believes that parking is over-rated and under-compensated in Parking not required.  [00:10:38] Others think about investment in ways I never imagined. Janine Firpo is on a personal journey to ensure that every dollar she invests does good. Listen to her explain why in She’s all in. Laura Callanan is squarely focused on Connecting impact and creativity. And Mark Roderick, a crowdfunding attorney, explains how the Securities and Exchange commissions are opening the doors for Democratizing investment. And why its a huge step forward; [00:11:12] For innovation in the building industry listen to Jennifer Castenson, who surely has her finger on the pulse of new trends, in Living the Jetson life;   Or maybe you want to learn about blockchain? Listen to Sandy Selman explain how it might be applied to real estate in Digital twins; and if you are ready to embrace sustainability and saving our planet in the most wholistic way, Sandy Wiggins may just be the one to listen to in Let’s change our mindset. And if you think we need to get back to a former time, listen to Jim Kumon of the Incremental Development Alliance talk about The lost art of small-scale development.  He’s teaching small-scale developers how to get back there all over the country. [00:12:01] Phew. That’s a lot of podcasts.  I’ve enjoyed every interview with every person.  I’m in awe of them all.   But it’s time to take some time off to rest, enjoy the weather and just step back from the extraordinary last few months that has rearranged all of our lives.   We’ll be back refreshed in September with many more amazing people for you to listen to and me to learn from. Thank you so much for joining me.  Now go forth, invest a little in your community and make some change!

  BE SURE TO SEE THE SHOWNOTES AND LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE HERE.   Eve Picker: [00:00:15] Hi there. Thanks so much for joining me today for the latest episode of Impact Real Estate Investing.   Eve Picker: [00:00:21] My guest today is Avra Jain, co-founder of the Vagabond Group. With a career path that has taken her from bond trading on Wall Street to developing properties along some of Miami's trendiest streets, Avra has earned a reputation for identifying the next IT neighborhood. Her remake of The Vagabond Hotel on Biscayne Boulevard in the historic MiMo District of Miami changed the course of that neighborhood forever.   Eve: [00:00:58] Be sure to go to evepicker.com to find out more about Avra on the show notes page for this episode. And be sure to sign up for my newsletter so you can access information about impact real estate investing and get the latest news about the exciting projects on my crowdfunding platform, Small change.   Eve: [00:01:23] Hi Avra. Thank you so much for being on my show.   Avra Jain: [00:01:27] Thanks so much.   Eve: [00:01:28] Very nice to be here, yeah. I love this quote from your website, which says, "We operate from the perspective as storytellers, allowing history to take center stage and create a genuine sense of place". And I would really love you to tell us a little about what that means.   Avra: [00:01:46] Well, that really has come from the work that we've done. We, kind of, we got there. We, I'd like to think there were people that actually, sort of, do it and then rather than talk about it. So, I can say that that actually, actually came from the work that we're doing. My team is three architects, one of which was, has a master’s in historic preservation. And so, when we start a project, or we do a project, the first thing that we do is that we study the history of the community, of the buildings themselves, architecturally, culturally. And so, we always sort of start from the story. And if there isn't a story, we don't do the project.   Eve: [00:02:36] Oh, interesting.   Avra: [00:02:37] Yeah, so we actually, so that quote really came from how we really operate. So that's a real reflection of the work.   Eve: [00:02:48] So what sort of stories do you look for?   Avra: [00:02:52] You know, it varies. So, in Miami there's a section of, there's a historic strip from the 1950s and 60s called MiMo which stands for Miami mid-century modern. So, there's a boulevard, Biscayne Boulevard, which used to be US1. So, if you were driving down post-World War Two in your 57 Chevy and you were going to Miami, the Magic City, you would have driven on US1 or Biscayne Boulevard. And there is a section that had these old 50s and 60s motels and, you know, with a big neon signs, and so, we came up here, one of the projects, larger projects that we did, that we're known for is the preservation work. When we renovated the Vagabond Motel to Vagabond Boutique Hotel. And that was the tipping point for the historic boulevard. So, we bought about 10. The neighborhood at the time was all drugs and prostitution. And, you know, it had been a neighborhood that you would've just driven right through with, you know, the shades down next to the baby seat, you know, but there were some spectacular, you know, vintage mid-century architecture, which I know you're an architect so you can appreciate.   Eve: [00:04:17] Yeah, I know. I took a look on your website. They are stunning.   Avra: [00:04:21] Yeah. So well, these were buildings that were up for demolition. And they were in disrepair, you know, SWAT teams were coming in once a month to empty them out because of, you know, drugs and things that would go on. And so, we knew that in order to, and this was a neighborhood that used to be Main Street, Biscayne Boulevard used to be Main Street. If you couldn't afford to stay at the Eden Roc or the Fountain Blue, you would've stayed at the Vagabond. Same architect that did the very famous Delanoe Hotel on Miami Beach. So, we knew what it once was. So, it was about, you know, bringing it back. There are other times when we actually, you know, neighborhoods, right, where we go into warehouse districts and create neighborhoods. This was a neighborhood that was so all we do was bring it back. And there was actually some really affluent neighborhoods nearby and surrounding neighborhoods that were also original from the 1930s and 40s. So, it was really a beautiful project to do both architecturally and for what it did for the community. The thesis was, if we bought enough of these motels that were 20 dollars an hour, you know, sixty dollars a night. The hotel that we bought next to Vagabond, in the lobby the sign said: "no refunds after five minutes". And it originally said ten minutes and they whited it out. That was the neighborhood and so we bought six of these old motels. A couple of them were abandoned and the rest of them we shut down. What happened was we thought is, if you shut down where people were actually doing these bad things, could the neighborhood find itself again? And it did.   Eve: [00:06:20] What gave you the courage to do that? And what sort of resistance did you feel for these projects?   Avra: [00:06:28] Oh, no resistance. Oh, my gosh. The city was like, the mayor, you know, we when we opened the Vagabond, we had nine hundred people. Everybody, all the arts, everybody. It was like a really big deal. This was, you know...   Eve: [00:06:40] I suppose I meant from the point of view of, because opening is easy. But what about the financing? I mean, how easy....   Avra: [00:06:47] Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I was going to say, we had no community resistance. In fact, people continually thank us all the time. But the resistance, yeah, sure financing, couldn't get any.   Eve: [00:06:58] Yeah, I'm sure.   Avra: [00:07:00] Yeah, no, I mean you know, you've done this enough times, Eve. So in fact even my traditional real estate investors, I had done a lot of adapted use in New York City and other places and a lot of my investors which go all the way back, you know, twenty five years to New York City, even some of them were like, ah, you've done a lot of crazy things, but they just could not get past the working girl on the corner. They couldn't get past it. They could not see the architecture. They could not see, they couldn't see the history, they just couldn't see it. They couldn't believe that it would come back. And so, a lot of, in this particular case, a lot of the money for that particular project was myself and my partners, you know, my spouse. I mean, we put up, I'd say 40, 50 percent of the money. So, it was really a cash project. But we found some very clever financing opportunities, financial opportunities. So, we did, I did my homework. I always tell people, you know, part of real estate is doing your homework. Understanding zoning, understanding the community and doing the outreach. Understanding building codes, a lot of homework. Well, I'd done my homework and I knew that there had been an ordinance set up in 2010, where you could sell development rights for historic properties. So, you know, in New York City, we knew that we could do this. We call them transferable development rights.   Eve: [00:08:32] Right. I'm very familiar with them. Yeah.   Avra: [00:08:34] So in Miami, for this particular strip, because it was historic, they down zoned it, meaning they limited, they did a height restriction of 35 feet. They took away buildable rights for the property owners. In exchange for doing that, they offered the property owners the ability to sell those development rights. So, floor area ratio, you know how much you could build. And then later they adopted a policy that also allowed you to sell the density. Like how many apartments you could build. The number of doors we call it, right? So, I was able to arbitrage that and the value of the transferable development rights for the Vagabond was three million dollars.   Eve: [00:09:24] Wow.   [00:09:25] And the purpose of those development rights and the ability to sell them is also to incentivize property owners to preserve and invest in the historic preservation of the property. So, you can sell those rights, but you have to reinvest them into the property and meet historic guidelines.   Eve: [00:09:43] Interesting.   [00:09:44] Yeah, it's not a little project. Actually, I think that, you know, in order to get historic preservation to work, you really have to give people incentives because it's very expensive. For those of us who build, doing historic preservation it's more expensive. It would've been cheaper for me to knock the building down and build it again than it was to actually preserve the existing Vagabond. So, they have to give you incentives otherwise... there's a reason why developers let those buildings go into disrepair and   Eve: [00:10:16] because they're expensive, yeah. Historic tax credits help as well. I don't have Florida has a state credit as well, but I've used those in the past and they certainly help to fill the gap, that's for sure.   Avra: [00:10:29] Yes. We qualified. We nationally designated the Vagabond Hotel. We met those standards and got the federal tax credit. So, we got 20 percent of our investment into the property. Yeah, every state's different. Every state's different. Every municipality is different.   Eve: [00:10:47] This really took creative financing and the, since then, you said you bought six of them and how did the financing change one you opened the Vagabond Hotel?   Avra: [00:10:57] Well, once we opened the Vagabond, sold the development rights, we were able to, get banks to give us some financing. But most of the projects we did, we did cash. We did cash and we financed after. It was just still, even now it's easy, you know, but I took rents, rents on the Biscayne Boulevard for twenty, twenty-five dollars. The Starbucks leases from me for 70 dollars, triple net. So, now it's very easy to get financing. And the Boulevard has a lot of cachet, but it   Avra: [00:10:57] It's very difficult, yeah. I mean, this is actually why I started Small Change because, you know, banks almost squash the creativity out of what needs to happen, the creativity and innovation out of what needs to happen in cities, because you can't, they want to only finance what's been done before. So, how do you tackle a place like this if you can't get financing and you don't have the cash?   Avra: [00:12:00] Yes, it's almost, I would say, it's almost impossible. So, you know, you rely on friends and family. A lot of it's your check book. But that's also the opportunity. Those are the properties that are also undervalued, right? The property that trade that are most expensive, are really a function of financing. You know, Multifamily trades at a tight cap rate because that is the darling with the lenders. Banks really, and part of it is the regulations, banks have to fund based on cashflow, income from properties. The regulations almost mandate it.   Eve: [00:12:36] Yes.   [00:12:37] So, lending on land or lending on an abandoned building and for adaptive reuse, which is unfortunate because in a lot of the underserved communities you need.   Eve: [00:12:48] That's exactly what you need, yeah.   Avra: [00:12:49] And what you lose because these are buildings that need a lot of work. Of course, they're not income producing, nobody should be living in them. And some people do live in properties like that and shouldn't be there. So, you know, the banking industry does not set up to be helpful. You know, what has happened, short of being able to fund yourself or have enough track record to to attract funding, is that there's a, sort of a hybrid lending space now. Used to be you could only get bank financing or a bridge loan or, you know, hard money loan you call it, right? 13, 14 percent which makes projects also unfeasible. You just, you give away all your profits in interest costs. But there's hybrid money out there now, that is more flexible, and you can get, you know, between six and nine percent depending on the project and you’re, and the sponsorship. We've been able to get hybrid money for projects like this. And it's really because of our track record. And it's all personal guarantees, right? I have to sign personally on everything.   Eve: [00:13:58] Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I sign my whole life away.   Avra: [00:14:02] Until the projects completed. You know, it's very hard for people to get into this business from the developer's side. You know, I have three architects that work for me and they didn't want to be in a firm, just, as you guys would call being a cad monkey. I think, you know where you're just drawing all day, right? And so, they wanted to be developers. And so, they came and worked with me. And they're learning development really is about money. So, when you think about what does it take to be a developer? We're not licensed. Architects are licensed, builders are licensed, right? Your electrician's licensed. Even the real estate agents are licensed. Developers are not licensed. You can call yourself a developer as long as you have a check book.   Eve: [00:14:52] Yes. So, what would you tell other women who want to be real estate developers?   Avra: [00:14:57] You have to love it. Well, first of all I'd ask, what does developer mean to you? So, if I asked you Eve, define developer, what, how would you define it?   Eve: [00:15:07] Well, for me, it's all about the buildings. I'm very passionate about buildings and places and using architecture to make better places. So being a developer for me is the opportunity to really make some significant change through the money that I invest, or I put together to make buildings better.   Avra: [00:15:34] And then there's a lot of people that would like to do that, right? So how do they do that? Right? And there's, I think there's a lot of people with vision and, so, you need the money, right? And then you have to be able to execute. And so, a lot of what goes right or wrong is in the execution. So, you know, you have the vision, but it's the, now is the execution. You know, how well do you budget, the quality of the work, the team that you can assemble. And you know the surprises, right. You know, we say we're in the problem-solving business, really, especially with more adaptive reuse or historic preservation. You have no idea where you're buying. You know, we've gotten pretty good at it now and I can tell you every time it's different.   Eve: [00:16:24] Oh, yeah, it's a challenge. But that's the fun of it. But listen, why? You know, you're a female developer, I'm a female developer. There are very few of us. Why is that? Because, you know, women are very good at team building.   Avra: [00:16:40] Well, I think a lot of women are doing it. They just don't have the title, right? So, in my particular case, I'm the founder and, you know, I know I run the company, but a lot of women are doing it. They're just not, I think the front person. Interesting. You do your work, you're the front person. You're doing it but the women that work for me, they all work, you know, I give, I empower them, they all have their own projects within, within the Vagabond Group. They all run their own jobs, they do the architecture, they do the expediting, you know, of course, all under. And they've been with me long enough. They know at first, you know, tightly under my watch and now, you know, call me if you need me.   Eve: [00:17:25] But still, that's a little bit different because they don't have access to their own money. And that's, I think, you know, as you said, the deciding factor. So, where I live there's very few women who kind of can plan their own destiny as real estate developers. I actually don't know of anyone else at the moment. So,   Avra: [00:17:45] It's money, so that's it. You've really defined it. But I will say there's a couple of other things. So, you know, because people have asked me Avra, why, you know, why aren't there more? Well, one is money. And a lot of that money comes with track record. You know, I wouldn't give a first-time person, developer money. I mean, you know, you really have to have experience in order to gain that. So, when I first did my first projects, it was mostly my money.   Eve: [00:18:11] Yes.   [00:18:11] You don't want to lose somebody else's money while you're learning, right? So, there's a learning curve here and so, as you learn and you'd have track record, you can get sponsorship, but you really have to have that, you know, especially in what we do, right? So, what you and I do, we find these. It's easy buying a multi-family, lipsticking it up, creating value. OK that's one thing. But to actually go in and create place, that's different. And that requires mostly cash investments. The returns usually reflect the risk, they always do. I mean, I don't, you, know people, you know, people go "I get two times two times my money". And people are happy getting two times their money in four to five years.   [00:18:59] I can tell you that isn't, that would never be a deal on my desk. If I don't think I'm making four to five times equity, in five years, I don't do the deal, which is why I'm able to get sponsorship. So, part of it is discipline. You know, there's a lot of projects I'd like to do, but I look at them and go, you know, I just can't I can't pencil it. And then, those projects that I can't pencil, which is like affordable housing, I just do myself and I'm OK. But those don't make money. I'm OK that they may or may not make money because I'm doing those for different reasons. Those are for social reasons. But when I'm doing deals where I'm taking in investment money, you know, the returns for the type of deals that we do, at least the perceived returns need to be much higher. But I do that for myself. I mean, a lot of this is my own money and I treat everybody's money if it's my own money. I also don't take fees. I'm not a fee developer, so I get paid based on success. So, I don't, I don't take fees.   Eve: [00:20:03] Ok. So, you right alongside equity investors who risk their money, then.   Avra: [00:20:09] Right alongside. So, I don't make a penny until you make money. And I think that's part of what, the other way that I've been able to raise money. Now, not everybody can do that. That's not realistic for a lot of people. But I've been able to do that because I set myself up for that. I saved enough money. I don't want to get paid, which is why I've been able to get, you know, the investment I get. Because people want to know that your interests are aligned and there are a lot of developers out there, they're really in the fee business. They're just, they're in the fee business period. And I don't think that that makes us aligned.   Eve: [00:20:52] So, tell me a little bit more about the 50s motels that you're converting to affordable housing?   Avra: [00:20:58] Yes, we I did one, we did one in Little Haiti, not too far from the Vagabond. So, if you couldn't afford to stay at the Eden or at the Vagabond, if you couldn't afford to stay the at the Vagabond, you would have stayed at Superior, Superior Motel and Apartments, which is west, further west and 1950s. It's a more modest property. You know, in some of the more modest neighborhoods then historic properties are more modest, but it doesn't mean they're less important. And I bought the building to do affordable housing. The person that runs affordable housing for the county, Mr. Lu, he would say, he actually stalked me into doing this. He wanted to put a new face to affordable housing in the projects that were being done. So, I started by giving him suggestions on what I would do and how I would go about it and then he said, then he just asked me to do something and I did. I can tell you that it was a horrible experience. Working under the administrative aspects of affordable housing. You know, they wanted to give me a small sur-tax loan. That was a half a million dollars sur-tax loan. And then by the time they were ready to give me the loan, I said, I don't even want it. It'll be the most expensive money I've ever gotten because I've spent fifty thousand dollars in administrative costs to get a 500,000-dollar loan, right. There was like a 10 percent cost. You know, every draw request was like the size of a Bible. I said, you know...   [00:22:28] No, that's right.   [00:22:29] I said, Mr Lu, I can do the work, but I can't handle the administrative aspect of this. I wouldn't get a draw for, you know, a draw request. I don't know how sophisticated everybody is on the podcast so I'll try to be a little more descriptive, but, every time you build a building and it's time to, and you have a loan, you do the work, you turn in your invoices, so to speak, and you're supposed to get reimbursed. Well,   Eve: [00:22:57] Quickly, right? Quickly is the idea because you'd need the money to keep going.   Avra: [00:23:00] Well, six to 10 weeks.   Eve: [00:23:03] Yes, I've been there.   Avra: [00:23:05] Which means that in you know, that if a guy doesn't get paid for six weeks or would anyway, if you weren't getting paid six weeks after you've done a job, you'd leave the job site.   [00:23:16] Yeah. So, it costs a lot of money in time because you're,   [00:23:19] So I ended up floating the entire job, meaning I paid everybody myself and then getting reimbursed, you know, six, twelve weeks later. And again, that's not feasible for most people. And that's why affordable housing doesn't work. And that's why, when you drive around and you see these, sort of half-completed buildings, is because you have to have the means in order to get through those projects. And I ended up, I probably have a half a million dollars of my own money in the project making zero return. So, because the cost to do it right versus the rents that you should charge. It doesn't mean, I can charge higher rents but truly affordable rents, you cannot build affordable housing in Miami. If you gave me a piece of dirt and said Avra, build affordable housing at 80 percent of the averaged income, I would tell you I couldn't do it.   Eve: [00:24:15] You can't do it anywhere, actually. You can't do it anywhere in the world, I don't think. So, oh, maybe some places, but it's a standard problem, yeah.   Avra: [00:24:22] Right, so it has to be subsidized, so you have to get grants. So, the reason why we were able to do historic preservation was because of the, you know, the entitlement programs to sell entitlements. That allowed us to grant ourselves some moneys to do these, what I called public benefit projects, historic preservation of the benefit. And you're saving time, you're saving moments in time, right. And then, same thing with affordable housing. You cannot do affordable housing without subsidies and grants. It's impossible. So, those are instances. And people think, oh, well you can get financing for it or people will do impact investing on these things.   Eve: [00:25:02] No, you can't.   Avra: [00:25:03] A bank doesn't lend to the same criteria where there's a public benefit or not. It's not to say they don't want to, but they can't.   Eve: [00:25:12] Yeah, so non-profits become very important in this equation. It's very difficult. How successful has that motel been and have you built other ones that are affordable? Do you have a waiting list?   Eve: [00:25:22] Oh yeah. Well that project, it's called, it was a motel and efficiency apartments. So, there's all apartments, most of them efficiency apartments. Very successful, 100 percent occupied. When you can charge a...And we were able to lease to more high risk candidates, you know, maybe people who've a felony in their past, you know, not a violent crime or something, but we're able to lease to people and not take security deposits. And a lot of, you know, our employees, one of the reasons why we started, we did, we started to do some affordable housing. When we opened the motel, or the hotel, Vagabond Hotel, because we realized our staff were taking two or three buses to get to work, and they were single Mums. So, we actually started subsidizing housing for our employees, early on. We bought an apartment building close by and then we realized that obviously this was not just a Vagabond issue. This is a national, well certainly a local and certainly a national issue. So that started our efforts in affordable housing, was sort of subsidizing for existing employees. And then, when we did the other ones, we're very conscious about trying to fill the void. We can do that because it's a personal investment. We're not a large institution doing affordable housing we've seen. This is not a money maker. I think there's a way to do it where you could get, you know, you can you know, people go, well can you do impact investing and get a five or six percent return? We can, because I don't take developer fees.   Eve: [00:27:04] Right.   Avra: [00:27:05] And we self-perform a lot of the work. So, I'm able to do that. So, on the project I did after this, I took in two small investors who wanted to participate in impact investing. So, we did one in Little Haiti and then we did their next projects in Overtown. Forty-four units in Overtown. And we're in the process of renovating that. Also, a 1950s, late 50s, so it's a combination of preservation and affordable housing, which we think is important. You know affordable housing is not bricks and mortar, it's about people and the qualities of their life and how they feel about themselves. We say we're really in the self-esteem business. You know, how does a single mother feel in their house? The stress level, you know, knowing if her kids are in a healthy environment or not in a healthy environment. The projects we're just in the process of doing, we finished two of five buildings so far, we keep everybody on-site and we rotate them. So, nobody leaves the property, they're not relocated. So, people are not, their lives are not disrupted. They stay where the kids go to school, where they went to school. Their friends are still their friends. They go to the same church, you know. So, we think it's important when you do affordable housing to keep communities intact. That's one of our prerequisites. Even when we did the property in Little Haiti, we did two units at a time and rotated people. So, they did not have to move. So, in the building we just finished one of the, in one of the buildings was a single mom and her child was having a lot of health issues and DCF was going to take the child away because they didn't think that the mother was giving the child the asthma medication and everything, because the child was suffering. And the minute we moved her from the apartment that she was in to one of the new apartments, the child was fine.   Eve: [00:28:59] Wow.   Avra: [00:29:00] She almost lost her child because of the housing, the quality of the housing she was living in.   Eve: [00:29:06] That's pretty shocking.   Avra: [00:29:09] It's shocking. It's unacceptable. I mean, so, most of the buildings that we, so all these buildings that we bought in Overtown, I mean, they should be condemned buildings. I mean, I'm surprised people didn't, well apparently, they had. Some people had fallen from the second floor into the first floor. I mean, the people live in those conditions because they can't afford higher rent and they don't want to move. You know, these tend to be closer to core locations, right? They're older buildings, closer to where they work, it's where their communities are and they don't want the landlords to fix up the apartments because if they do, they know they have to raise the rent and then they might get kicked out. So, people choose to live in these really, you know, sub-human conditions because they can't afford the rent if it was renovated. So, in that particular project, we teamed up with the CRH, the Community Redevelopment Agency in the area, and because they had seen our work in Little Haiti, they had asked us to do a similar project in Overtown.   Avra: [00:30:16] And my, my response was, no. I said, it doesn't work. I go, it doesn't work. I can't afford to subsidize all these projects. So, I said, you know, I told them what they needed to do. One, they had to remove all the administrative. No good developer would operate under those administrative restrictions. And two, I said you're going to have to pay for it. And if you want the rents truly affordable, you're going to have to pay for all of it. Because if you want a seven-hundred-dollar rent, I need to be in that unit for seventy thousand dollars. And by the way, it costs eighty-two-thousand dollars to buy the apartment. And it's going to cost you another fifty-thousand-dollars a unit.   Eve: [00:31:03] To renovate it.   Avra: [00:31:05] So if you want me to do it, and I'm not going to wait, I'm not going to take draws, you're going to have to give me five hundred thousand dollars every time I start a building. Because I'm not going to, I'm not going to chase you down. I'll do open book. Open book, come anytime you want, knock yourself out. But I can't do the work and meet all the typical requirements. And so, they, they said Avra, yes. Do it.   Eve: [00:31:35] Wow.   [00:31:36] It went all the way to Commission. Commissioners voted on it and I did the project. So, they basically bought down the rents and people are living in two- and three-bedroom apartments, beautiful two- and three-bedroom apartments. When I say beautiful, you're an architect. You know, I floated the walls. I did resilient channels for the wall boards for sound.  Wool between. Everything's copper piping. We don't, you know, rebuilt from the inside out. If you'd walked in, you would have fallen through to the studs, to the studs on the floor and you would have seen the roof two ceilings up. So totally rebuilt, you know, with all the right quality materials. No, everything mold-resistant, every, you know, impact glass safety, all those things. So, people are living in really beautiful apartments. And, so think about what that's like. For them. For them, they're people, right? The pride, how their kids feel to come home, to work, the family gatherings. Remember it's, we don't build buildings. You build buildings, but it's really the quality of the experience in the building. It's how people feel. Otherwise, buildings can be nice to look at, right? Right? What are they really? I mean, building to me, they're made of organic materials, I mean, buildings live. And as builders and developers, we have to, you know, we feel that, we think about that. You know, so lots of times I get a building and it just doesn't feel right. It doesn't have the life. And our job is, that when we do these projects, these adaptive reuse and historic preservation projects, whether it's for, you know, an adaptive reuse or for affordable housing, you have to think of it as how do people live? How are people going to feel when they're there, when they're inside? And that’s, you know, sort of, that’s sort of how we operate.   Eve: [00:33:48] That's how it drives you. So, these products, I know we've talked about them a lot, and they're clearly your passion projects. You also work on very, very big projects.   Avra: [00:33:58] Yes, so that I can afford to do the passion projects.   Eve: [00:34:02] Yes, that's the bread and butter work, right?   Avra: [00:34:05] So and those, you know, are more traditional, you know, I do. By the way, they're very good local community banks here that I work with in... we're very fortunate during Covid and everything that, you know, my friends that had the large banks, you know, had a lot of trouble getting, having to work with them and work with their tenants. But the community banks in Miami really stepped up and were the first to say, you know, what can we do? How can we help? So, I've good local banking relations, banks that have lent to me for 20, 25 years that support, you know, that support my projects. Even if they're slightly out of the box they, again track record, they support the project. So, I'm able to do, I'm getting ready to do a large adaptive reuse project towards 50,000 square feet of adaptive reuse in a warehouse district. There might have been a day where I wouldn't get financing, but I will get financing for that, 50 percent loan to cost, and then I'll have the capital stack of my own investors. Then, you know, on some bigger projects, I'm getting ready to do a project on the Miami River. That's a big project to earn, it's a new build. Two hundred fifty-nine apartments,200,000 square feet of office and retail. It'll be almost 180-million-dollar project with 120-million-dollar loan. I'M partnering with a very large developer, Property Market Group, PMG, they build really well. I'm really excited to have a chance to work with them, there are developers that you respect and then there's the other developers that you would really like to work with, and this is one of them. And they're both. And so, they build beautifully. So, they, we're teaming up. They're going to do the residential portion and I'm going to keep the office and retail. You know, without them, they're providing that completion guarantee. I mean, I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have the balance sheet. We're talking financing here, right? I wouldn't have the balance sheet to guarantee a 120-million-dollar construction loan. So, you know, so that's very limiting to do big projects. Problem. You know, I don't do, one reason why I don't do a lot of big projects is because of the financing. It's just by the time we bring in the capital stack and everything, you know, and then when you do that, you lose, you give up a lot of control over the integrity of the project. People start value engineering everything out of the project. And so, you know, the vision gets lost and all-of-a-sudden it's work and it's not fun. You know, it's one reason why I don't do a lot of large projects. So, whereas on the smaller projects, we can keep control. So, you know, so, yes, I am doing a large project because it's a spectacular site with a spectacular vision. But I don't do that as often. The risks are high and the loss, I think more than anything, is the loss of, you know, the vision. I mean when you do big, big projects. You know, what I always say you have to have two things when you, when you partner with people. You have to have the same vision, but you also have the same have the same values. Some people can have the same vision but then if they don't the same values, it is not the same. So, lots of times that happens when you do these, sort of, bigger projects.   Eve: [00:37:36] Yeah. You know, I've always stuck with smaller projects for much the same reason. Because I can finish them the way I think they should be finished and no one's egging me on to do something different.   Avra: [00:37:47] Everyone wants you to cut corners. Hey, it's already sold. Hey, it's already leased. You know, then, who cares, you know, it's a, if it's a 10-year paint or a fifteen-year paint? Well I care.   Eve: [00:37:58] Yes, I'm with you.   Avra: [00:37:59] Those decisions that get made, you know, again, the more people that are involved. For developers that have cut those corners, it's short-sighted because then, why do they come and lease my building instead of their building? Because people can feel the difference. They can feel the difference in quality. So, you know, it's interesting right now in this market and during Covid, and people are consolidating and deciding which offices to keep or which ones not to keep or which neighborhoods to be in or not be in. And I can tell you I have two very large tenants that had offices across the city, and they chose to consolidate. And both of them chose to be in my buildings and give up other spaces. And it really is because of the quality of our buildings, the uniqueness of our buildings. It speaks to their brand. And this was a time when spending the money and having your building be special, having there be a story to the building and the neighborhood that is in mattered. Because lots of times you can't spreadsheet this stuff. Anybody in finance and in the financing world wants, you know, a spreadsheet, right? Well, let's do a spreadsheet, right? You can't spreadsheet the quality of a space. You can't spreadsheet cool and placemaking. There's no spreadsheeting that. But when there's stress in the market and you see how people move and what they choose to keep and where they live or work, how, where rents are more stable or whatever, you see the performance. But when I'm doing a spreadsheet and presenting it to a bank, there's no way to quantify that.   Eve: [00:39:45] Yeah. Just shifting gears a little bit, are there any current trends in real estate development, especially around the pandemic, that you think are most important for the future of our cities?   Avra: [00:39:58] Well, we're staying the course. I mean, our mindfulness, our thoughtfulness, it hasn't changed. If it's before the pandemics, during the pandemic, or the after-pandemic. So, we've always practiced sustainability. Even in our new building, everybody's talking about these new air filtration systems and water systems. We had already designed that into our building before Covid. So, you know, it was like we were already there. We already felt like the wellness trend was, we already got on that bus a while ago. Now the tenants are going to be asking about it and insisting on it. We were already on that bandwagon by. My team is architects and so we are always looking at what's new, what's cutting edge and hopefully somewhat cost affordable so we've already, we're adopting a lot of those. So, I think those things will become more mainstream now. Good. And maybe that will even make them more cost effective. So, we haven't changed. Again, our mindset has always been, you know, we need to adapt to reusing. You use existing buildings. I mean that's the ultimate in sustainability, right?   Eve: [00:41:07] Yes, I agree.   Avra: [00:41:09] It's like fruit shopping, right? The most, the best thing, people don't realize how many CO2s go into building a building. And you knock it down, you spend more CO2s and then you rebuild it and spend more CO2s. There is a really great study out there, and I don't know if you've read it, on green building. And it was put out actually by the historic preservation community but if you were to take a building and knock it down, build it back, using green, let's say green technology, all the new Green Technologies, Sustainability, LEED certified, whatever, it would take you 80 years to make up for the damage done. 80 years to make up for the fact that you knocked down a building. So, we think, you know, so we are all about keeping existing building,   Eve: [00:41:56] Keeping, yeah, yeah.   Avra: [00:41:57] Absolutely. And it's interesting. We, and we do it, you know, we don't stop and think, oh, my God, we're saving the environment, right? But we know that it's important to the sustainability story. But we also know that it's important to the cultural story, to the story of community and social resiliency. When people talk about resiliency, but they talk about it like, you know, well, how high is your sea wall, or whatever. Resiliency, by definition, is your ability to bounce back. It does not say how high is your seawall, it's your ability to bounce back. And that is a social, that is a social response, not a building response, not a civilian engineering response. So, we think that focus, that part of social resiliency is part of keeping community. And part of keeping community is to try to save and do adaptive reuse with existing buildings. Again, we're back to why we build our business around this story. We think without the story we, it doesn't, it isn't going to get us where, we won't be interested. And it's got to be a story that, when you do projects that have a story, people want to be a part of it. People want to be a part of it. People want to work on it. People want to help build it. And then people want to live in it and people want to do their business in it. You know, I think builders, developers underestimate the market.   Eve: [00:43:37] Yeah, I think you're right.   Avra: [00:43:38] I think they underestimated them. They know the difference. And they know how it feels. And if they have a choice to spend a dollar here or a dollar there, they're going to spend it where it also feels good.   Eve: [00:43:51] Yeah. So, one last question for you. And that is, what's your big hairy goal?   Avra: [00:43:59] Gosh, you know, I guess just, you know, I'm living it every day. You know,   Eve: [00:44:06] That's a great answer.   Avra: [00:44:07] Yeah, I just, you know, we just keep doing what we're doing, and I think, you know, we talk about, you know, always wanting to learn, right? And knowledge is empowering, but it doesn't give you power unless you use it. So we are, you know, we're always learning, always curious. We're always helpful to other developers. Very transparent. We open source. So, if you go on, I think you've been on, our website. If you go onto VagabondGroupConsulting.com and you hit open source, we open sourced our affordable housing project. You get all the money we spent, all the inspections, all the time, all the materials, everything. The things that went well, the things that didn't go well. I think that one of the goals would be to hopefully encourage more developers and especially people in the public benefits space. Anybody'd be taking public dollars for sure, to open source their projects so more people can learn and so that more, more thoughtful developers can hopefully...   Eve: [00:45:16] That's a great idea. I'm definitely taking a look. And I'm super jealous of all of fabulous 50s motels that you're renovating. It's a fabulous...   Avra: [00:45:26] Here's a question for you. So how, in your platform, can you help developers like me?   Eve: [00:45:33] Well, if you want to start raising money from a broader group of people, from the community, that's really what investment crowdfunding is about. And I see there's a, how can I say this? I landed in Pittsburgh unexpectedly and one of the really big things I learned here is that people really want to be involved with their community and making it better with their city. It doesn't really matter where you go, people are very connected to the place they live in. And I was working with dollars that dried up in the late 2000s and started thinking about crowdfunding to replace them. You know, also working with banks that became more and more skittish and wanted to do less and less innovative project lending. And so, all of that kind of led me to investment crowdfunding, which really lets the crowd decide. So, you could, very soon you'll be able to raise, there's actually upgrades to the rule under way, but very soon an issuer, a developer, would be able to raise up to five million dollars a year from anyone over the age of 18.   Avra: [00:46:47] Wow. No, no subscription agreement.   [00:46:50] No, no, there's subscription agreements, but we handle all of that electronically online. So, if you go to a funding portal like Small Change, we are registered with the SEC and members of FINRA and it's a very heavily regulated rule. We kind of manage all that. And you basically create a disclosure package which we help you create, register it with the SEC and then everything else is handled electronically as people invest. So, I think the most meaningful thing for me is that if you want to bring along people in your community, you normally don't have a chance to invest and create wealth based on what's happening in their own community. This is a way to do that.   Avra: [00:47:38] So, I think it's a great idea. I actually went on your webpage and I thought about it. So, in in the affordable housing project that we did in Overtown, we actually, one of the partners, because we were getting large grants, they asked, they basically assigned us a local CDC, a community.   Eve: [00:48:00] Right, a development corporation, yeah.   Avra: [00:48:02] Yeah, to be part of the ownership. And it was Mount Zion, which was actually the oldest church in Miami, I think. They're a part-owner, you know, less than 10 percent so the lender has no issues. And I was neglecting again, it was more control thing, it wasn't a money thing because we're not making money. Right, so.   Eve: [00:48:24] Right, but they can bring grants to the table that you can't as a for-profit developer, right?   Avra: [00:48:31] But the reason why I don't put myself in a non-for-profit space is because I know, I see a lot of the people, in non-for-profit space and it's not non-for-profit, OK? It's actually, I call it, so, I'm in the no-profit space. So, I'm like, so I won't put on a non-for-profit space because everybody pays themselves salaries and things. We don't pay. We don't pay ourselves.   Eve: [00:48:53] Well, that's right.   Avra: [00:48:54] So the CDC came in and they've been great because they helped, you know, that was the thing. I said, well, as long as everybody understands nobody's getting paid, I'm happy to have a community organization. And I said, so they have ownership, so certainly down the line this, you know, we have a 30-year covenant and down the line there will be some value there. But I thought that it would have been great if, even instead of the CDC or in addition to the CDC, what if everybody in the community, so I get a grant from this CRA. What if every family that lived in that community all got a piece of the project? Instead of this CDC?   Eve: [00:49:37] Yeah, I've thought about this a lot. I've actually thought that, you know, in a poor community, wouldn't it be fantastic if there were even a foundation that matched investments made, or to increase the value to people who invest, you know, maybe even 100 dollars?   Avra: [00:49:54] Yes. So anyway, we got a three-million-dollar grant, just so you know. But I mean the three-million-dollar grant, and you'll see and, you'll like to see the math in our open source, the three-million-dollar grant will save the residents eight million dollars in rental cost over the 30 years. So, that's a huge benefit to the tenants with subsidized rents but if everybody in the community was given, let's say, a thousand-dollar ownership, assigned a thousand-dollar ownership, right? I mean, as long as I don't have to deal with, you know, a thousand investors, you know, I'm happy to have them own a piece of the project. You know, as long as me as a developer I can do what I do, you know? So, any time there's a grant made into a project, why isn't that grant, which is community dollars, community dollars, taxpayer dollars, why not have that grant be a crowdfund investment?   Eve: [00:50:57] Well, it can be. I just think people aren't quite there yet.   Avra: [00:51:00] Well, let's do it.   Eve: [00:51:01] Yeah. I'd love to do it. I've thought about raising a pot of funds for a community, for example, where someone, maybe you partner with a community development financial institution or a community bank, and someone manages the money, but it's programmatically distributed in the community as well. So now you have, maybe not just your project improving the community, but you're benefiting other people directly. Let's just say you're below a certain income and you need your roof replaced, you can get a loan for zero percent.   Avra: [00:51:38] Miami does a lot of that. I have to say, there is a lot of things we do. America Build does that. We have these twenty-thousand-dollar grants. If people know where to look that is made available.   Eve: [00:51:51] I know. But I'm thinking really community specific, you know. You pick a community that you're working and you, kind of, really try to build it up and make sure that people who are not wealthy in that community come along for the ride when developers do make investments and the community is improved. So, I mean, it could happen in any number of ways but, you know, we all think about what happens to people who are left behind, right? So, there's something there. I'm not exactly sure what it looks like precisely, but I have tools in my toolkit, these SEC regulations that I understand very well that could be deployed in that manner. Absolutely.   Avra: [00:52:34] Yeah. I think there's something there and I think, so, you know, we should talk about that Eve because I'd like to explore that. I think that, I think there's the political will to do it in Miami. I think there's enough. Again, you know, the thing is, is if we do one, right, we do one project and it works, it becomes the model.   Eve: [00:52:57] Yes, absolutely.   Avra: [00:52:59] So our study, the one that we did for Vagabond Group Consulting, that open source, has become sort of a case study. You know, I get calls from all over the country. People.   Eve: [00:53:10] Yeah. That's very important.   [00:53:12] You know, and that's what we need to solve some of these problems we need the transparency. We need to have conversations like you and I are having. And we all need to share and figure out best practices. We need to find a solution and it's in the developer's best interest that we find these solutions. I try to challenge some of my big developer friends and say, listen, guys, we need to be part of the solution here. This is really our, becomes our problem. You don't think it becomes your problem, but it does, because if the restaurant in your building, even if you don't want to do it for all the right reasons, you know, you should understand how it affects you, because if the restaurant in your building can't find employees because there's no place for them to live, you know, they're having that problem on Miami Beach and they're having trouble hiring people because nobody can afford to live on Miami Beach. So that affects your ability to rent your space. I mean, you know, so I tried to encourage that, show them even financially why this is in their best interest. That we all, we all don't do well unless we all do well, right? So, how do we incentivize developers to do that? There needs to be policies in place for that as well.   Avra: [00:54:26] In Miami, we have something where we, where developers can write a check. Like you're building a building and you write a check towards public benefits. Well, you know, make the developer build the affordable, do the public benefit. You know, sometimes writing a check is easier than doing the work.   Eve: [00:54:44] Yeah, no, I agree. Well, this has been absolutely fascinating and I'm going to be in touch soon. But we should wrap up and I really enjoyed talking to you, Avra.   Avra: [00:54:56] Yeah, this has been fun. I look forward to seeing your work. So, you have to send me some of your some of your work.   Eve: [00:55:04] I will.   Avra: [00:55:04] Share some stories.   Eve: [00:55:05] Thank you. Absolutely.   Eve: [00:55:13] That was Avra Jain, a wildly creative Miami developer. Avra and the Vagabond Group have built projects that range from converting a 100,000 square foot warehouse, to luxury loft condominiums in New York's Tribeca neighborhood, to the remake of The Vagabond from motel to hotel on Biscayne Boulevard. But Avra's passion lies squarely with the personal project portfolio she's building. The conversion of abandoned and historic motels into reimagined, affordable housing communities. She's leveraging her past success to tackle both the restoration of significant architecture and the making of affordable housing in a very unique way.   Eve: [00:55:59] You can find out more about impact real estate investing and access the show notes for today's episode at my website evepicker.com. While you're there, sign up for my newsletter to find out more about how to make money in real estate while building better cities.   Eve: [00:56:16] Thank you so much for spending your time with me today. And thank you, Avra, for sharing your thoughts. We'll talk again, too but for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.  

Earning Freedom: Conquering a 45-Year Prison Term Chapter Nine, Section Two 1998-2002 Months 127-180                              Gary’s deposit solves my first problem of the day, but within hours, a crisis of a different sort erupts. I’m staring at the ticker, watching the Dow drop more than 500 points, worrying that the sell-off will accelerate as the trading day proceeds. I’m frozen to the TV when Al, another prisoner, delivers a message that snaps me out of my zone. “They’ve been pagin’ you to R&D all mornin’.” At first I think he’s joking, but we’re not close friends so I doubt he’d play a practical joke on me. I don’t understand why the Receive and Discharge department would be paging me. I look at the red arrows on the TV one last time before leaving the television room. Outside, the warm temperature heats my skin as I make the quarter-mile walk across the compound to R&D. Fumes from the adjacent military base pollute the air, and I plug my ears to block the sound of screeching engines as the jets and giant cargo planes repeatedly land and take off.  The market weighs on my mind, but I’m also institutionalized, accustomed to my fixed routine, and wondering why anyone from R&D would want to talk to me. I’m troubled by the unexpected summons. I knock on the steel door, and wait for the guard. “What’s your name and number?” I give the guard my red ID card. “Where’ve you been? I’ve been paging you for two hours.” The guard scowls at me. “I didn’t hear any of the pages. I was watching TV.” “Roll up,” the guard commands, passing me three large duffle bags and then flicking my ID card back at me “Roll up?” I catch the ID card in mid air. “What do you mean, ‘roll up’? Where am I going?” “Can’t tell you that. Get your shit. I’ve got to pack you out now.” “I need to know what’s going on. I’m not supposed to be leaving. There’s a mistake.” I counter, my pulse racing from the adrenaline surging through my body with this news. “No mistake. Either pack your bags and bring ̓em up here, or I’ll have the officer pack you out. I need all your property here before 1:00 this afternoon.  Either way, you’re going.” “I’m leaving today?” “Get your belongings here before 1:00,” he orders, slamming the door in my face without answering. With limited time to gather information, I rush back to my housing unit and hurry from one staff member to another, trying to find out what’s happening. I can’t find anyone who has information or who cares enough to answer my questions. Finally, I locate Mr. Boatwright, a case manager who spoke with me on occasion about the market. I tell him my problem and he invites me back to his office. “Give me your number.” I hear him clicking the information onto his keyboard as he stares at the monitor. My heart races and my legs twitch with anxiety, making it hard to stand still. “You’re on your way to Miami.” “Miami? That doesn’t make sense. The only prison in Miami is a medium. Did someone raise my security level?” “Not the FCI,” Mr. Boatwright answers, still looking at his screen. “You’re going to the detention center.” “What? There’s a mistake. I’ve been in for more than 11 years. Why would I be going to a detention center?” Detention centers hold prisoners who face unresolved criminal charges, but those kinds of problems are behind me. “Let’s see what I can find.” I hear him clicking keys again and see that he’s reading information. He looks up. “You’re going to a state prison. The detention center’s only a stop.” My stomach lurches. “Who can fix this mess? It’s a mistake. I don’t have criminal charges in the state of Florida.” “No one here can fix this. The transfer order came from Washington.” I steady myself with this news. “Okay. Thanks for checking. I’ve got to use the phone.” I walk out to call my sister and explain all that I’ve learned. It’s already noon, and since the R&D guard only gave me an hour to pack all of my belongings, I ask Julie to call everyone in my support network. This inexplicable transfer to state prison threatens to disrupt my life and I want help from anyone who can undo this mess. I’m intimately familiar with the federal prison system, I know it like I know my own face in the mirror. The rules, the people, the absurdity of it don’t faze me at all anymore. But if I transfer to a state prison in Florida, I’ll be starting from scratch, facing ridiculous “tests” and challenges from prisoners I don’t know and who don’t know me. I don’t have any doubt that I can master any prison, but I detest the thought of upsetting my routine at Fort Dix. When I hang up with Julie, I see Gary waiting for me outside the phone room. “They’ve been paging you all morning to R&D. Did you hear?” “I heard. I’ve got bad news. They’re transferring me to a state prison in Florida.” “Florida? Why?” “No one will tell me. My sister’s on the phone now, trying to get in touch with my friends to rally support to fix this mess.”  This unwelcome news feels like I’ve just been diagnosed with a terminal illness. We walk to my room and Gary helps me pack my sweats, sneakers, toiletries and books. “What do you want me to do with the stocks? Should I sell them?” I ask while pulling and tying the draw strings of my three full duffle bags; everything I own fits inside of them. “Why?” “If I’m in Florida I won’t be able to talk with you.” “That doesn’t change anything. Don’t worry about talking with me. When you have a chance, write me, tell me what stocks you bought or sold. By the end of the year I’ll send the rest of the money to your sister. The transfer doesn’t change anything between us.” I’ll miss Gary. As we say goodbye it’s another reminder that I’m a pawn in this game.  I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow because someone else moves the pieces that control the external circumstances of my life.  All I can do is respond. It’s early on Wednesday morning, my last at Fort Dix. I breathe deeply as I lie on my bed, listening to the whir of the generator outside my window, Toro’s light snoring, and the occasional footsteps of other prisoners who walk to the bathroom down the hall. I know that I only have a few more minutes of peace before the guard arrives. I’ll miss my two-man room in Fort Dix. These are the best living conditions I’ve had since I’ve been in prison. I arrived here in April of 1996 and I had to wait 28 months for enough seniority before I could transfer from a 12-man room to “preferred housing.” I’ll miss the standard twin mattress that rests on springs, I’ll miss the two sliding windows that aren’t blocked with bars, and I’ll miss being able to look up at the moon. It shines through now, lighting the white, bare, concrete-block walls of the room. Mostly, I’ll miss the windowless wooden entry door with its yellow doorknob that turns. The door isn’t any different from the type found in a typical home, but it’s fundamentally different from the industrial strength steel doors used in most prisons. Once I leave here, I won’t be able to close the door to separate myself from the chaos of prison and escape into the privacy of my room, or at least the illusion of privacy. I hear keys clinking and heavy boots on the tile floor outside my room and I know it’s time. I’ve been trying to enjoy the solitude of this final night but my heart pounds, as I know that I’ll soon be locked in chains again. “Santos,” the guard barks as he opens the door, oblivious to the disruption this transfer is about to bring to my life. “Report to R&D.” I’m the only prisoner walking on the compound. I see stars in the clear sky and the moon illuminates rustling leaves of maple trees. The cold morning wind chills my face. Shivering, I take one last look at the red brick buildings and knock on the steel door of R&D, bracing myself for the indignities of another BOP transfer. The guard locks me in a holding cell with other prisoners I recognize. I stretch, sit on the concrete floor, and rest my back against the wall. Through the door I can hear chains clanking against the concrete floor, signaling that my unexpected transfer is imminent. Guards are untangling and preparing the requisite heavy metal shackles they’ll secure around my waist, wrists, and ankles. I hate this. We’re processed out and marched onto the bus, bound for Stewart Air Force Base. I look through the bars on the tinted windows at the people driving in their cars only a few yards away–families, businessmen, and couples. I strain my head to watch a woman in the passenger seat of a white sports car. She’s rubbing the back of a man’s neck. He’s about my age, probably her husband, wearing a crisp white shirt, pale blue tie. This glimpse of the outside world leaves me feeling deeply alienated. It’s been so long since I’ve felt the touch of a woman and I miss it. Observing the couple’s simple act of affection causes me to shake my head and withdraw into my seat. I close my eyes but I can’t block out the sight of that woman’s hand. For hours the bus rolls along the interstate before pulling onto the military base. It stops on the tarmac and guards pass us sack lunches while we wait for the marshal’s plane to land. With my wrists cuffed to the chain around my waist, it’s a challenge to free the cheese sandwich from the clear plastic baggie. It’s only white bread and cheese. The bread is moist and spongy in my mouth–bland, but easy to swallow. I bend over to eat the whole sandwich, but since I’m dreading the airsickness that’s sure to come, I leave the crackers and juice in the bag. The unmarked white plane lands and guards carrying assault rifles position themselves around it. Men and women in chains step off and guards order them into columns for searches. I’ve seen this predictable routine time and again, and it never fails to disgust me. I prefer the routines of prison to the dehumanizing rituals of transit. When my turn comes I climb the stairs into the belly of the plane, drop into my seat, buckle my belt, and I close my eyes. I don’t want to talk. When the plane lands in Oklahoma City, we exit directly into the terminal reserved for the FTC, or Federal Transit Center. It’s a new “holdover destination” for prisoners transferring to prisons across state lines. This FTC is a model of efficiency, processing prisoners like FedEx handles packages. After four hours in holding cells crammed with hundreds of prisoners, I reach my housing unit just in time to be ordered into my cell for the evening lockdown. I won’t be able to call my sister to find out whether she’s made any progress in trying to resolve this fiasco, and the disconnect bums me out. My cellmate arrives and I ask his name after the guard locks us in. “I’m Paul.” He says, shaking my hand.  I sense that he’s young and afraid, and the encounter temporarily throws me back to 1987, when my own term began. “I’m Michael. Where’re you headed?” “Yazoo, Mississippi.” He sets his bedroll on the top rack.  “Have you been anywhere else?” I ask, trying to ease his apparent anxiety. “I was in the Houston detention center and I got sentenced two weeks ago.” “How much time did you get?” “Ten years.” “Don’t worry. It’s going to pass easier than you think.” I know what he’s going through. “How long have you been in?” “Eleven years. I was about your age when I started. How old are you?” “Twenty-five.” I tie my sheets around the vinyl mat on the lower rack and describe for Paul what he can expect. Although I’ve never been to Yazoo, I know that it’s a low-security prison and the prisoners will behave similarly to the men I was with at Fort Dix. Paul asks questions for hours. By talking with him about steps he can take to improve his life, I ease my own tensions. The guards unlock the cell doors well before dawn and my heart sinks when they call Paul instead of me. Wanting to get on with the transfer and settle into a routine, I tighten the green wool blanket around my body and pull it over my head as a shield against the forced air shooting through the ceiling vent above my head. I sleep off and on, accepting that this is going to be another miserable day of waiting The sound of wheels from the breakfast cart rolling across the concrete floor signals me that it’s time to get up. Guards traverse the long aisles of cells, thrusting keys into locks that click loudly as the heavy deadbolts are released. Clatter soon fills the unit as prisoners emerge from their cells, looking for familiar faces. Impromptu conversations begin with discussions about where prisoners are going, where they’re coming from, common acquaintances, and what’s going on in prisons across the country. I’m guessing that 200 of us share the two-tiered, triangular shaped pod. As I wait in line for my breakfast tray I scan the room, looking for familiar faces, or anyone I might have known previously. This FTC houses prisoners of every security level. Some serve multiple life sentences for murder convictions, others serve sentences of only a few months for mail fraud convictions. I recognize tattoos from various prison gangs that rival each other. Although most prisoners in transit want to reach their next stop without problems, I’m hyper alert for the tension that can explode into unexpected violence. At the food cart an orderly passes me a green plastic tray with corn flakes and two cartons of milk. I walk to a table with four plastic swivel chairs and sit down. Another prisoner sits across from me. He wears his black hair long and ties it in several places down his back, making a tight ponytail. “Where’re you headed?” I ask, stirring my cereal. “Miami.” “Really? Me too. I’m going to the detention center.”
He looks up and I notice a crooked scar beneath his right eye. “Are you going to a state prison?” he asks. “That’s what I’ve been told. You?” He nods, confirming that he received the same information. “Where’d you come from?” I ask. “Petersburg, Virginia.” “The medium or the low?” I want to know his security level. “I was in the low.” “I was in the low at Fort Dix. My name’s Michael.” “Ty.” We shake hands. “What did you hear about this transfer?” “I didn’t hear anything except that the order for the transfer came from DC. Another guy sitting next to me on the plane said he was going on the same program. His case manager told him the feds were processing some state prisoners into the federal system and exchanging federal prisoners with the Florida state system.” “Where was he coming from?” “Big Springs.” “That’s a low-security prison,” I say. “Are you from Florida?” “Miami,” he nods. “How ’bout you?” “I was living there when I got arrested, but I’m from Seattle.” “You probably got rounded up because the computer thinks you’re from Florida.” “Maybe so. I guess we’ll find out what’s up when we get there.” When the phones become available, I call Julie to update her on where I am and what I’ve learned from Ty. She’s already spoken with Carol Zachary and Bruce McPherson, and they’re all working the phones to get the transfer reversed. Bruce spoke with Sylvia McCollum at BOP headquarters. Through discreet inquiries Sylvia learned that administrators assigned me as part of a prisoner exchange program with the state of Florida because my registration number identified me as being a Florida resident. I’m relieved to learn that my friends and family are using their influence to show that although I was arrested in Florida, I’m not a resident of that state. ******* The plane lands at the marshals’ airstrip adjacent to the Miami International Airport. As I leave the plane with the screeching sound of jet engines in my ears, the Miami humidity blasts me like a furnace. For a moment, I look around to admire the beds of tropical flowers and palm trees that I’ve missed. Two buses, three white vans, and four cars await us. I’m tired of seeing guards carrying assault rifles, but they’re a part of every landscape where prisoner transport takes place. After inspecting my chains, then searching and identifying me, BOP guards direct me to a bus. I notice the familiar street signs of Flagler, Biscayne Boulevard, I-95, and Palmetto Expressway as we drive. The bus approaches a high-rise building in a downtown district that I don’t recognize. We pause in a driveway while a corrugated steel gate rolls open. The bus pushes through, drives down a ramp, and stops inside the dark basement of the Miami Federal Detention Center. After I complete the requisite forms, fingerprints, mug shots, strip searches, interviews, and hours of waiting in holding cages, I carry my bedroll to join nine other men for an elevator ride to the eleventh floor. We exit into a foyer and the guard unlocks a steel door that opens to a brightly lit, two-tiered housing unit. I see Ty waiting by the guard’s station. The deafening noise, steel tubular railings, stationary tables and stools remind me of the first housing unit I was in after my arrest. I see a familiar face in the crowd, though I don’t recall his name or where I saw him last. He recognizes me and walks over. “Yo, wasn’t youse up in Atlanta back in da day?” He’s my height but carries an extra 100 pounds. “That’s right. I was in B-cellblock. Michael Santos,” I extend my hand. “Ace, Homie.” He bumps fists, gives me a hug, even though I don’t remember speaking to him before. “What’cha doin’ up in here dog? Catch a new case?” “I’m in transit, on my way to a state prison.” “State joint? What up wit’ dat?” he looks at me suspiciously. “I don’t know. They packed me out. A few others are transferring with me. None of us know where we’re going or why.” “Ain’t none a youse got no state charges?” I shake my head. “We’ve all been down for awhile. How about you? What’re you doing here?” The detention center holds people facing new criminal charges and prisoners in transit. It’s not a place where prisoners ordinarily serve their sentences. “New case, Dawg,” he shrugs. “I got out in ’93. Been on the streets for fi’ years fo’ I caught dis new joint.” “What’re you looking at now?” “It’s all she wrote, Homie. Life. I’m headin’ back to the A-T-L.  Know what I’m sayin’” “Sorry.” “Ain’t nothin’ Dawg. You know how we do.” I shake my head, not knowing what to say. “Let me get over into this line, see about getting a cell. We’ll talk more once I settle in.” “You got it Dawg. Yo, I got ev’thin’ you need. Dis my house up in here.” He pounds his chest. “Thanks, Ace.” “Ain’t nothing.” He puts his fist out, we bump knuckles again, and I walk away wondering when I will leave this madness behind. At the guard’s station I stand in line behind Ty, hoping the guard will assign us to the same cell. “I don’t have any empty cells,” the guard says. He sends me to the second tier. I give the cell door a courtesy tap before I pull it open. A man wearing an orange jumpsuit identical to mine lies on the lower rack reading an issue of Maxim. “What’s up? You new?” he asks, leaning up on his right elbow. I nod. “I’m Michael Santos,” I set my bedroll on the top rack. “In transit,” I say. “Where to?” I give the man my story. Then I get his.
His name is Rico and he’s deliberating on whether to accept the government’s plea offer of 10 years. As we talk, I advise him to take the offer, not needing to know anything more than he’s charged with a drug crime. “But I’ve got a baby girl. I don’t think I can do 10 years.” “No one does when they start. If you don’t take this deal, chances are you’ll serve a lot longer and you’ll serve it in tougher prisons. With 10 years you’ll only serve about eight, and you might get a year off that if you go through the drug treatment program. “I don’t think I can do it.” *******  

About Avra Jain With a career path that has taken her from bond trading on Wall Street to developing properties along some of Miami's trendiest streets, Avra Jain has earned a reputation for identifying the next it neighborhood. The recipient of three Sundance Film Awards for the documentary Dark Days, this industrial engineering graduate from Purdue University develops projects based around two of her favorite pursuits: art and architecture. Jain suggests “Through art and architecture, life and lifestyle are integrated. Through life and lifestyle, communities and neighborhoods are created.” To date, that vision has resulted in numerous boutique projects that range from converting a 100,000-square foot warehouse to luxury loft condominiums in New York's Tribeca neighborhood to the remake of The Vagabond, from Motel to Hotel on Biscayne Boulevard. When Avra is not re-imagining skylines, she spends time with her 13-year-old daughter Alexandra, whom she affectionately refers to as "my greatest accomplishment". Some of her most recent recognitions include: Urban Environment Leaders “2014 Orchid Award for Historic Revitalization”, Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce R.E.A.L. “2015 Winner of Developer Commercial Category”, the Women’s Chamber of Commerce “15th Thelma Gibson Award of Excellence”, the AIA Miami “Developer of the Year 2016”, and the "2017 Community Catalyst Award", amongst others. Avra serves on the Miami Foundation Board, Dade Heritage Trust, Locust Projects, and University of Miami's Master of Real Estate Development + Urbanism Advisory Boards. Visit Urblandia.com for more updates. A place for impact entrepreneurs and local community builders. Also, check out Night Young Music for the tracks featured in this episode.

Super Bowl LIV will take place at the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami on February 2, 2020, making it the eleventh Super Bowl hosted in the region. Felipe Angulo, Super Bowl Host Committee Director of Business Connect & Community Outreach comes by the podcast to help us understand the economic and environmental impact that this monumental sporting event has on South Florida and its community. We talked about the planning involved in accommodating the massive influx of visitors into the region, and how the Super Bowl Host Committee leverages the big game to support environmental sustainability in South Florida, to raise awareness for humanitarian issues, and to support local business owners long after the game has left town.  In this episode, Felipe also sheds light on some of the various community engagement programing that will take place prior to the game. Among these include “Superbowl LIVE” celebration, which is the Miami Super Bowl Host Committee’s free-to-the-public fan fest that offers a highly interactive experience for fans to thoroughly enjoy. Taking place on Biscayne Boulevard in the heart of Downtown Miami, this week-long event will feature a tailgate town, fan activities, musical acts, culinary demos, sponsor activations, dance performances, water shows and special surprises. Superbowl LIVE will take place from Saturday, January 25 – Tuesday, January 28, and again from Thursday, January 30 – Saturday, February 1, 2020 at Bayfront Park in downtown Miami. About Felipe:  Felipe Angulo is the Director of Business Connect and Community Outreach for the Miami Super Bowl Host Committee. Felipe is responsible for assisting the VP of Business Connect & Community Outreach with management of the Business Connect program and assisting with the planning and execution of community engagement programming for Super Bowl LIV. Following his Virginia Military Institute education, Felipe Angulo pursued his Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration with a double major of Business Management and International Business at Florida International University. Profoundly devoted to public service, Felipe began his promising career at The Office of The Mayor of Miami-Dade County, where he served as an aide to Mayor Gimenez for three years. He has been an integral part of a distinct establishment, where he developed an extensive, influential professional network. He has already had a significant impact on our community as a notably involved young professional, which led his appointment as Chairman of Economic Development Subcommittee of the Miami-Dade County Millennial Board. His substantial experience and public service acumen will be of great benefit to the Miami Super Bowl Host Committee.

3.3 - WellnessOn today’s Terutlia – we started to explore how street art and commercial real estate uniquely come together in South Florida but it became a conversation about wellness, self care, and the important things in life. Our guests are Miami graffiti artist Pucho and Tissi Almeida – Wellness Director for 1000 Museum on Biscayne Boulevard.

3.3 - WellnessOn today’s Terutlia – we started to explore how street art and commercial real estate uniquely come together in South Florida but it became a conversation about wellness, self care, and the important things in life. Our guests are Miami graffiti artist Pucho and Tissi Almeida – Wellness Director for 1000 Museum on Biscayne Boulevard.

Welcome to the Elevator World News Podcast. This week’s news podcast is sponsored by elevatorbooks.com: www.elevatorbooks.com HADID-DESIGNED TOWER WITH KONE VT SYSTEM OPENS IN MIAMI The 62-story One Thousand Museum, the late Zaha Hadid's final residential tower in the U.S. (ELENET 723), is open in downtown Miami, The Architect's Newspaper reports. Zaha Hadid Architects told ELEVATOR WORLD the vertical-transportation (VT) system, which includes elevators and a car lift, was provided by KONE. At 707 ft tall the fourth-tallest structure in Florida, One Thousand Museum is striking, with a white concrete "web of flowing lines" on the façade that have earned it the nickname Scorpion Tower. Located on Biscayne Boulevard overlooking a 30-acre urban greenspace called Museum Park, One Thousand Museum holds 84 almost entirely column-free units and an array of amenities. Image credit: image courtesy of ZHA To read the full transcript of today's podcast, visit: elevatorworld.com/news Subscribe to the Podcast: iTunes│Google Play | SoundCloud│Stitcher │TuneIn

This year, tons of inventive projects unfold during Miami Art Week 2018 outside the established and emerging art fairs. Individuals and collectives passionate about public art and performance, film, video, music and social engagement will animate an upscale development on the beach, a luxury mall in Miami’s business district, the former Gold Dust Motel on Biscayne Boulevard, and an Asian bodega, an abandoned mall and a by-gone department store Downtown. Art Week has come to this city every December since 2002, when the premiere art fair from Basel, Switzerland launched Art Basel Miami Beach. Since then, the year-round art scene has grown tremendously. Creatives from around the world are calling Miami home. When they come together at the intersection of art and life, it gets very exciting! Voices in our conversation: Zoe Lukov/Faena Festival, Isabel Lewis/Classic Occasions, Tschabalala Self/Lee's Oriental Market and Free Range Miami, Tanya Bravo/Juggerknot Theater and Miami Motel Stories, and Octavia Yearwood/Spinello Projects and FREE! Art Fair Related Episodes: Paola Pivi on Art with a View, Miami Art Week 2018 Preview, Report from Miami Art Week 2017, Lynda Benglis on Creating Fountains Related Links: Faena Festival, Isabel Lewis, Fringe Projects Miami, Tschabalala Self, Free Range Miami, RAW Pop Up, Juggerknot Theater's Miami Motel Stories, FREE!, Octavia Yearwood

In 2018, Locust Projects invited the Detroit-based design duo known as root of two to bring three headless chickens to roost in Miami. For six months, Cezanne Charles and John Marshall embellish the Magic City skyline with their public art and digital engagement project. Previously presented in France and the United Kingdom, Whithervanes translate the traditional weathervane into a 21st century radio transmitter. Mounted on rooftops in downtown, the Design District and Biscayne Boulevard, the four-foot tall birds change colors and direction in response to the climate of fear propagated by the media. These are tech-savvy chickens. They scan the Internet for alarmist keywords, collecting information on topics from violence to economic crises to natural disasters. You can follow their “neurotic, early worrying system”, or N.E.W.S. on the Whithervanes Twitter account. Connecting art with streaming social media and news technology, Whithervane designers Cezanne Charles and John Marshall invite us to think about the emotional impact of the digital information that controls our view of the world. Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio | Photographs courtesy root of two and Locust Projects Related episodes: Art of the Everyday, Art and the Rising Sea, Report from Miami Art Week 2017

Luisa Santos is the founder of Lulu's Nitrogen Ice Cream, which she established in Miami, FL in 2015 with a prime storefront location on Biscayne Boulevard. While Lulu’s proudly sources local ingredients and liquid nitrogen to create the freshest ice cream from scratch. At the heart of Luisa’s business is education, community and sustainability. In our eighth episode, Luisa candidly lays out the origins of Lulu's and her fascination with nitrogen ice cream, the value of naivety and "winging it," the nitty-gritty challenges of finances and the red tape of opening a business, building/maintaining company culture, (im)perfectionism and more. 

With the NBA Playoffs right around the corner, Neal is joined by lifelong Miami Heat diehard & miamiheatbeat.com (Heat Beat Radio) contributor Leif (@lefty_leif on Twitter). Listen as they discuss how the Heat have performed this season, their playoff expectations and what the future holds for the team that calls Biscayne Boulevard home. Will LeBron leave Cleveland? Is Kevin Durant planning to call somewhere else home? A fantastic round of Foul or No Foul is played, and the guys ask themselves as fans, are we truly appreciating the moment we are in with Steph Curry and his Warriors? Stop reading this description and hit download to enjoy this episode. This podcast is sponsored by 'No Halftime' the app. Use the promo code "CLOCK" at sign-up and instantly have $10 added to your account!*Intro/Outro music brought to you by Liquid Spiral (liquidspiralmusic.com)