The Townbuilder's Podcast is Returning
I was the host for 2 seasons; Levi Wintz will reboot the franchise in 2025.
tl/dr
The Townbuider’s Podcast filled a media gap where no podcasts featured urban developers talking openly about building great places.
After two seasons with me as the leader, the series is evolving with a new host, Levi Wintz, a leader within the Emerging New Urbanists.
In advance of the new season, I will be re-releasing some of my favorite conversations and explaining why they mattered to me.
DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA | Four months into the coronavirus pandemic, everyone started a podcast, and I was not able to avoid the bug (oddly, I still have never gotten COVID).
The Townbuilder’s Podcast was a production of the National Townbuilder’s Association (NTBA), a small group of the best new town developers and architects on earth. It was sponsored by James Hardie.
Though the podcast has remained niche, it immediately fostered a dedicated group of followers. I suspect this is because there are so few resources where developers openly discuss the strategies and difficulties of building great places. We started producing The Townbuilder’s Podcast in the summer of 2020, and the first episodes rolled out that August.
Even though it has been out of production for almost three years, I still get people thanking me for it about once per month.
WHY I LOVED PODCASTING
Podcasting was really rewarding for me. In this fast and frantic modern American lifestyle, we are constantly multitasking. Most people I know carry three devices that are beeping and buzzing and custom ringtoning throughout the day. We no longer have opportunities to do anything for an hour and a half—uninterrupted—and I found that this distractibility leads to disconnectedness and imbalance.
That’s why I personally loved the podcast format so much. It’s 60-90 minutes, uninterrupted—period, full-stop.
The fact that I got to curate conversations with amazing people was just gravy. And it didn’t hurt that they just happened to be some of the most talented and successful industry professionals on earth: Andres Duany, one of the founders of the New Urbanism. Grant Humphries, innovative developer of the new town Carlton Landing, Eric Kronberg, architect developer and zoning whisperer of Atlanta, and many more.
My first five guests were responsible for over half a billion dollars of world-class urban development.
For me, podcasting had the same appeal as black-and-white photography. It strips out all the unnecessary variables that clutter the medium. In today’s technology, most “features” just make it harder to produce a quality thing. A good two-way podcast is just two people talking, cross-pollinating their expertise, searching for common ground and tensioned disagreement, and seeking to solve some problem. Everything else is just noise, and podcasts eliminate that noise.
I still engage regularly with most of my podcast guests through the NTBA (13 out of my 21 guests remain active members). Still, if it weren’t for Townbuilders, I would never have gotten that time—alone and uninterrupted—with any of them. I continue to be grateful for the opportunity.
RE-ISSUING THE GREATEST HITS
As I prepare to hand the mic to new host Levi Wintz, I wanted to re-publish some of my favorite conversations.
First up is a conversation with Lou Marquet, a founder of the NTBA organization and developer of at least four new towns, who passed away on March 10th of this year. Lou was among the most giving people I had ever met and radiated with his French Catholic traditions of excellence and charity. He was an invaluable mentor to me and hundreds of others, and it is worthy of his own separate obituary.
When Lou passed, he had just started as the lead developer on Sandy Point in Edenton, NC. Sandy Point is a 30-year project with 1100 homes. Lou was 75 at project commencement.
That tells you all you need to know about Lou's character and his many followers within the NTBA. They build towns not because it’s what they do but because it’s who they are. You never stop being who you are; you do that until the day you die, precisely what Lou did.
In our podcast talk, Lou revealed that during his 50 years of construction experience, he had been through recessions I had never heard of (each fascinating and different in their unique way). He also discussed how you treat your sub-contractors during good times, which can dictate how your company performs when the economy or projects go sideways.
Lou continues to be missed. I hope you enjoy my conversation with him as much as I did.
If you like these conversations and find them valuable, subscribe via your podcast service. That will help Levi continue the brand into 2025 and beyond. SUBSCRIBE HERE.
