Daniel Herriges wrote:

At the root of any ecosystem you’ll find a food chain. Start with the question of what resources are available (i.e., sunlight, water, nitrogen and other nutrients). Everything else, while not entirely determined by that, ultimately has to follow from it.

For development, finance is fertilizer. Most of the developers I spoke with cited access to capital as a significant barrier to the kinds of small infill projects they would like to do—and even more so, to creating more small developers doing more projects.

This isn’t because the money isn’t there to be had. At any given time there is more money looking for a good project to invest in than vice versa. But development in North America has a “Who” and a “What” problem.

What gets built today? Mostly formulaic buildings adhering to one of several fairly predictable templates: the monoculture crops of the suburban experiment.

Who builds it? Mostly large to very large development firms. Rarely the people with the most skin in the game: those who live in the neighborhoods they will be developing.

Each of these dilemmas has different answers depending on the scale at which you examine it. It’s important to understand the barriers facing, and options available to, an individual developer. But it’s also important to interrogate the systems that constrain those options in the first place, and to look at what role higher levels of government might play in removing some sources of distortion, and thus freeing up opportunities for individuals to generate wealth for their communities.