In today’s special rewind episode, we feature an episode from our sister show, The Stacking Deeds Show.
Are you a novice investor interested in real estate? Do you want to learn how to navigate the world of real estate investing and make a positive impact in your neighborhood? In this episode of The Stacking Deeds Show, we dive into the importance of neighborhoods and how investing in real estate can help improve and strengthen communities. Join us as we discuss the challenges and opportunities of investing in fragile states, the power of building relationships in neighborhoods, and the importance of taking a horizontal approach to real estate investing. Whether you’re a seasoned investor or just starting out, this episode will provide valuable insights and strategies for making a difference in your community through real estate.
This show originally aired on October 17, 2023, so ignore any mention of current events. To see the original show notes, visit Saving Distressed Neighborhoods Through Responsible Real Estate Investing: with Dr. Seth Kaplan (stackingdeeds.net).
FULL SHOW NOTES: https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/rewind-stacking-deeds-distressed-neighborhoods-1431
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/201
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Episode transcript
266 9989. Root the realtor’s car. It’s the stacking deed show. I’m Ruth’s neighbor and part time mechanic, Neighbor Doug, broadcasting live from an absolutely spacious, luxurious trunk recording studio. When you invest in real estate, not only are you building or rebuilding houses, you’re helping repair neighborhoods.
So what’s wrong with America’s neighborhoods and why do they need your help to fix them? We’ll talk to a man with answers, Dr. Seth Kaplan. Before that, in our headline segment, is a housing crash like 2008 around the corner? One big bank has opinions, and we’ll share them. Of course, we’ll add a few of our own.
Plus, we’ll answer a call from a deeter on Ruth’s rotary phone, and I will pop in with my amazing property pop quiz, you’ll probably ace. And now, two peeps who are the aces driving this podcast, Crystal Hammond and Joe Saul Sehy.
Well, hi there, Joe. Good to see you again. I feel like it’s been forever, Crystal. I know. Hello. Welcome, everybody. Welcome to the show. Thanks for tuning in. Whether you’re driving, walking, running, swimming, all that fun stuff. That’d be impressive. Those are some good headphones. Opportunity. We just started recording, but it’s been stream of consciousness crystal all morning.
Oh yeah, that’s your
caffeine boost. Forget coffee, forget Starbucks.
Chocolate. That’s what you want for breakfast. If you’d like to sponsor the show, it’s just joestackingbenjamins. com, please. Crystal, we got a fantastic show today. We got a great guest, Dr. Seth Kaplan joining us. This might be the best interview we’ve ever done. Yes, I agree. The conversation is so important.
A lot of people really aren’t talking about the importance of our neighborhoods. You know, part of the community, exactly when you’re investing, you’re not investing in a house in four walls, you know, and a roof you’re investing in a community. So you want to come in there with the community in mind, not just your little house.
Cause Hey, I’ve always been a fan of nosy neighbors. I want nosy neighbors. They can tell you what’s going on 10 times faster than you would know again. What’s she talking about? Really? We’re repairing neighborhoods, but then we’re into nosy neighbors and stealing your coffee Yes! They’ll be like, so and so.
No! They’ll be like, so and so dropped off a package, but so and so picked it up. Be like, so and so! What? So yeah, they have the eyes of the neighborhood. There you are, so. That’s a career off of that, that type of neighborhood where people take care of each other is really what Dr. Kaplan’s looking for. And so is Crystal, apparently.
So we got a great show first. We got a big headline though. So let’s get moving.
Our headline today comes to us from Yahoo finance. It’s written by Arrow and Danny Wright bank of America. Analysts sees quote turbulence. Crystal turbulence, but, and here’s the big but, no housing crash like in 2008. So in this case, I like big butts and I cannot lie.
We did this just so you could say that line, didn’t we? That’s the only reason you picked this. I totally do, cause, cause nobody likes that, but the market crumbling, Danny writes, Bank of America economists are nixing concerns about a housing crash like the one experienced in 2008. Instead, they say the market is more reminiscent of four decades ago.
There’s no evidence of overdevelopment from builders or over leveraging by home buyers and owners. The housing market today is largely dealing with a fallout from tight monetary policy, which is similar to, uh, 1980 when the stock market had a big funk and of course the housing market did as well. In that case, Crystal, back in 1980, we had interest rates, you know, 12, 14%.
I remember, you know, this woman going, I don’t think interest rates are ever going to get back to 12. You might as well refinance your house because 12 percent interest rates. You can’t get. Wow. Oh yeah. Well. One of the things as a 70’s baby myself, I wasn’t in the home buying age in the 80’s, but they also talk about, you know, 23 years ago when I was in home buying age, interest rates were 7.
5%, that’s still high, and another difference that I’m noticing, another but, That I saw while not watching a football game, though, normally that’s when you see the butts, but when back then there was, if you’re listening to this and you’re like, what does that mean? We have no idea either, right? However, no idea.
No more, but no more talking about butts or crashes. Cause we’re in real Ruth’s car and we might need to take grandma’s keys. But anyway, I did have a point here. Back then they had when that previous crash happened. It was the Oprah effect. You get a mortgage, you get a mortgage, you get a mortgage. The banks are not having that today.
So if you can’t afford that mortgage, the bank is like, nah, brah, you can’t have this mortgage. You can’t afford it. You know, do something else, do something else with your money, clean up your credit or, you know, clean up XYZ or you need more time. So. The banks are not only protecting you, they’re protecting themselves too, but that’s what’s protecting from a crash.
Absolutely. That piece, the over lending that happened, definitely not the case here. I mean, it’s so much harder to get a loan and at interest rates where they are today, you know, people looking at these houses and they’re not thinking, boy, this is cheap. I don’t think there’s anybody looking at that. You know, there’s no such thing as a national home market, but if there was, I don’t think in your average community in the USA, anybody’s looking at this market going, housing prices are pretty cheap across the board.
I think once you get to the cost of money, it’s an expensive time to buy, buy property. But if you find a deal, there are deals out there. And just like me, imagine if I would have waited and said, Oh man, interest rates, seven and a half percent. I can’t buy a house at that interest rate. But I found a good deal that worked with my numbers that that mortgage on that duplex was cheaper than the rent that I was paying, like even, you know, having a renter there also that helped with, Hey, but this is still cheaper than renting.
So definitely you want to do the numbers. Well, and that’s the thing, Crystal, if you can afford to buy today, because the house is a good deal, you can get the financing that you can get today. And listen, if you can afford that. You can afford them to refinance when terms are better later. I mean, you’ll be able to lock that in.
Deals are out there. And the cool thing to your point completely is that there are fewer people in the market now than there was a couple of years ago. And that is your advantage as well. It’s acting as a filter. Yeah. Is it though? Let me ask you guys, is it though, because I also know inventory is really low, so is it a bit of a seller’s market right now?
Oh, I totally think it is, Doug. And my point definitely wasn’t that there’s going to be deals galore, but when you do find the deal, instead of having 20 people jumping all over it because money’s expensive, you might have 4 or 5 people going after the same property. And I think you said something very quickly, not under your breath, but it was like end of a sentence where it was like, if you can afford it or if it makes sense.
And I think that’s the key here. You talk about it has to, just because you might’ve found a good deal on an individual piece of property, that may be a good deal for that property, but how does it fit in your annual budget or your monthly budget because I hear now about like a lot of empty nesters.
It’s usually time to downside. And I just saw an article recently about what the normal move was to go from your 2, 800 square foot house that you raised your family in and go down to like a 1, 100 square foot house. You can end up spending more money. On the 1100 square foot house because of mortgage rates and where the market is, and it’s a seller’s market.
And so it may not make sense for you and your budget right now, even though it’s time to make that move. I’m an empty nester. You still have to do the math on where it fits with your cash flow and your budget. Yes, always do the math. Like, we preach do the math. We aren’t preachers, but if we were preachers, we would preach do the math.
Not past the collection plate, we would say, you know, do the math. Lord, you got yourself two good hands there and you got to reach out to your friend in need. The hell’s going on? Who needs a mortgage. No idea what’s going on with either one of you guys today. Holy cow. But I think that when we say do the math, we don’t want to be confusing.
The piece of the math that is variable is the interest. The interest rate on the loan. And that doesn’t mean you want an adjustable rate loan. You don’t, you want a fixed rate loan, but if you can afford that piece, that expensive money later on, when money gets cheap, that can turn it from a decent deal today into now I’ve got this great deal on a piece of property that was undervalued and the money’s cheaper.
I can make that money. So that’s the piece of the math that later on, I think can turn from, I don’t know, agnostic to in your favor. Right. And also the interest rates too. Another issue with what was happening back then, like when there was a crash was people were, they’re like, money’s cheap. I got to buy something.
Money’s cheap. I got to buy something. Going back to what neighbor Doug said, and that’s not necessarily true just because they were buying things that were way too big for their britches, you know, just because money was cheap. They’re like, I’m going to get as much house as I can because money’s cheap.
Interest rates are cheap. And then. Okay. That blew up because they couldn’t afford it in the first place. And that’s on them and that’s on the lenders too, because they admitted their mistakes with just, you get a mortgage, you get a mortgage, you get a mortgage instead of you get a budget. That’s should have been the first words you get a budget.
Well, on that note, I was recently scrolling TikTok, I found a podcast that is made for attorneys, for property attorneys. And this is what they said about this current real estate market from a real estate attorney point of view. We’re not going to see this again for a decade. That we agree on. No, we agree on.
This is a blip. It is a triple whammy between rent laws changing. COVID and interest rates doubling. I were trying to build my business as a lawyer. I will be putting on a seminar on how to deal with lenders. If you owe money to a bank or to a lender, the key is not how great you’re going to save them.
But start by telling them what not to do. Teach them about what gets them in trouble long term. And then You gotta give them different routes. It’s not one size fits all. I have been writing, this is gonna happen for the last three years. If you go look at some of my Huffington Post articles, I have been predicting that it, and I was three years too early.
And I’ve been making all my decisions, I got out of retail because it’s, I’m, I don’t own single rental or residence property other than the house I live in and I’m trying to sell that. That’s Leo Jacobs’s squire, by the way, if you want to look up that Tik Tok video, and I know they cut it up a little bit to make it fit, but he’s saying, Crystal, that he got out of the real estate market three years ago because of the fact that with COVID, with some rent laws changing and with interest rates where they are, that this is creating a short term washout.
We’re going to see in the next few months, a bunch of adjustable rate mortgages come due and when those. Adjustable rate mortgages come due. There is a cleansing about to happen. I’m feeling Doug’s preacher voice coming on again when I say that, but there is a cleansing coming. They agree with Bank of America.
It’s going to be a little short wash. A short wash? Well, and then that all depends on how you buy in the first place. The numbers, they speak for themselves. We don’t preach. I’m going to stop saying preach, adjustable rate mortgages in the first place. So fixed rate, no surprises, doing your math that lends also no surprises, COVID.
That was a huge, huge, huge disruption to the housing market, to our lives, to everything. And now that we’re coming out of that, there’s a lot of differences. Like a lot of things will never be the same, even going to work. Going downtown, shopping downtown. None of that’s been the same. So there are adjustments to be made.
Where are people moving to? Where are people moving from? There are opportunities in all of those areas, even the commercial space. They’re looking to convert a lot of commercial spaces into residential. Just because that’s the trend that’s currently happening. So it’s staying immersed in what trend is happening.
Would you buy or, you know, retail and, you know, right downtown? Maybe, maybe not. I think that’s the big takeaway. Look for the long term deal. I think that the trend is always going to change. And because real estate decision is a 30 year decision, not a six month decision. Let this thing go. Realize that if you can write, no, and it’s not permanent, right?
Yeah, but if you a long term mortgage, whatever happens with the bigger market overall, not that important to you. And by the way, my little old property back when I bought, when interest rates were seven and a half percent, I opted for adjustable rate because, you know, that’s what I could get into. Today it’s 10 percent and I haven’t been able to refinance that place because you know, redlining.
But just know that, you know, what adjustments are happening, what you have, what you bought, and you’ll be fine. I’m fine. You know, that interest rate reset over how many years? Almost 20 years, you know, that’s the gradual, so that just goes back to budgeting. Agreed. Well, speaking of redlining and marginalized neighborhoods, Dr.
Seth Kaplan coming up next. He’s a leading expert on fragile states. Normally, he has worked with the state department and others in government and in education, looking at places like Detroit. Well, even before that, uh, international governments, uh, and about the fragile states of governments in the United States.
He’s looking at the fact that our problems may be different, believe it or not, but he believes we have a strong government, contrary to what’s been going on in Washington the last couple of weeks. We have very strong government systems, and we do not have strong neighborhoods. And so, in this case, he’s flipping the switch and is, um.
Looking at neighborhoods. He’s a lecturer at the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. One that I think a few people have heard of. He’s worked with the World Bank, U. S. State Department, U. S. Agency for International Development, and OECD, as well as developing country governments and NGOs.
But today he’s on Stacking Deeds, talking about how you can get more involved with your neighborhood. But to get there, Doug, I think you’ve got some trivia for us.
Hey there, daters. I’m Ruth’s wrench wielding repair guru, neighbor, Doug. You know, all this talk about credit scores reminds me of my longest dry spell. I was using the dating site, credit score, dating. com, and I kept waiting to find someone with a score as good as mine, but came up aces. I mean, look, I realize it’s hard to get a perfect 100 like me, but I thought I’d find someone close.
They kept commenting, that’s the worst FICO I’ve ever seen! I don’t think they had any clue what a good FICO score is. Which leads me to today’s Property Pop Quiz Trivia Question. What the heck does FICO actually stand for? Asking for a friend. I’ll be back right after I sign up for a less restrictive dating site, like maybe, uh, peakedinhighschool.
com
Hey there, daters, I’m high school legend and the Don Juan of the San Juan, neighbor Doug. I can’t believe how difficult it is to find someone to spend my golden years with. I’ve tried farmers only, turns out growing herbs in your basement doesn’t count. clowndating. com, the makeup irritates my skin, and mulletpassions.
com. That is not at all what I thought party in the back meant. So, it’s back to the drawing board for this guy. Before I do that, let’s get you an answer to today’s property pop quiz. The question was, what does FICO actually stand for? Well, the widely used FICO score is based on the work of engineer Bill Fair and mathematician Earl Isaac.
who founded the firm Fair Isaac in 1956. They developed the first credit bureau based scoring system in the mid 1980s. And now, the Fair Isaac Corporation, better known as FICO, Aha! See? See what they did there? That’s how we got to the term FICO. Hey, let’s get you back to this incredibly informative and entertaining discussion.
Crystal, I think this is our guest with his thumb out along the side of the road. Oh, yes. I love hitchhikers. Come on in. Thank you. And I, I hitchhiked not too long ago, not in this country and not in a safe environment. So I think I would take a second look at that before I do it again. Oh, that is funny.
All right. Move over, Joe. Okay. So joining us, move over, Joe. Yes, go ahead. Yes. And that voice is the voice of Dr. Seth Kaplan. I want to start here. But the neighborhood is maybe the most significant unit by which we measure society. That is a big, big claim, my friend. What does that mean? That means that for you, your family, your children.
The single biggest influence on your life day in and day out is your neighborhood, how safe you are, how much access you have to a support system, how much access you have to opportunity, how much access you have to green spaces. I mean, even if you think about it, this is a real estate investing show, probably a lot of your money is invested in that house.
If your neighborhood climbs in importance, or the whole neighborhood climbs in value, your asset will climb in value. But if that neighborhood became insecure, or something about the neighborhood made asset values go down, you yourself would be financially at risk. So your life. And your assets are very much tied to the fortune of your neighborhood.
What I find fascinating, though, is that neighborhoods are not what you study. You study, full time gig, you study fragile states. And you write that people ask you if the U. S. is a fragile state, but it’s completely flipped, you say. that you’ll go into these fragile states, like, what do you talk about in Cairo?
You want to talk about some of the neighborhoods in some of these fragile states where you’ve spent time? I mean, I’ve spent time in some great countries with great people, and I had individuals, families, neighbors, communities do wonderful things for me. The countries didn’t work very well, but people supported each other very closely.
I mean, you mentioned Cairo, Joe. When I was in Cairo, I had this wonderful family. It was the summertime. I walked around too much. I became dehydrated. I was in real trouble. I had no one to turn to. And the family of a friend of mine basically took me in, put me in a bedroom and nursed me back to health in like over three days.
I don’t think I got out of that bed for three days. And so this is the kind of support that people give each other. You didn’t know these people at all. I knew the son vaguely and they actually didn’t want me in their house because they had a daughter. It’s a conservative society. And at the moment I had an emergency.
They just threw everything out the window, brought me in, and so I had some connection, but you know, when it comes to neighborhoods, it’s not about being close friends with your neighbors. It’s about just having enough of a relationship. That they’re there for you, and you’re there for them, and then you meet at some meeting, you meet at the cafe, you meet in the supermarket, you might come together to clean up your street, or do some volunteer work, so you see them on a regular basis.
It doesn’t mean you’re in each other’s lives. But it’s a recognition that your happiness, your fate, and your neighbors, there’s something tied together there. And you’re not just rowing that boat all by yourself in the middle of the ocean. All of you are rowing together, and therefore you’re more likely to get someplace with your neighbors.
That’s sort of the things I write about. Why is the U. S. so bad at neighborhoods? I mean, reading this, I was very disturbed. Obviously, there’s a lot of great things about what’s going on in the U. S. A., but man, just at this fundamental neighborhood level, we’re really not getting this right. I would say in America, we’ve told ourselves that our happiness is tied to getting ahead.
We’ve told ourselves that it’s not about family. It’s not about friends. It’s about me and my career. And therefore we tend to be very transactional with people. I know this is a show about a lot about transactions, but I would say you also talk a lot about relationships in your show. And relationships with partners, relationships with contractors, but it’s about also relationships with people in your lives and who you’re going to do something with.
And I would say we are all going to be happier when we have close relationships, when we’re involved with institutions. For me, neighborhoods are so important because neighborhoods will determine how lonely we are, how happy you are. When I walk down the streets of my neighborhood, I have a feeling of joy simply because I know the neighbors.
I see people. I smile at people. I walk into the cafe two or three blocks from here, and I can’t walk in and not see. I know the owner. I know the people who work there, and I’m likely to know two or three people in a chair. I won’t know them well. I won’t want to walk over and talk to them for any length, but I’ll smile.
I might ask them something about their family, but it’s just this sense of security, the sense of happiness that you’re in a place that you own to some extent. You don’t just own your house. You own part of the neighborhood. You want to contribute and you expect people to contribute to you. And I would say in America in general, we don’t feel that way.
I felt that way much more in the fragile states. The countries don’t work, but the neighborhoods tend to work. It’s the different parts of society don’t cooperate very well, but on a local level, people are very close. And in our country, we’ve tried to define everything around the individual. And we haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about relationships.
And I think it’s really important for happiness to have relationships. And Seth, I love that you say that because that’s what really drew me into your book and to you too, because as investors, you know, protecting the neighborhood is kind of a foundation to your success. That’s why, you know, I’m developing in the neighborhood I grew up in on the south side of Chicago, because growing up, we would see these developers, well, rehabbers come in, they would rehab a unit, just throw any Section 8 person, or just any kind of person in there, then those people would terrorize the neighborhood, and then the cycle completed, because then they would Totally mess up the house, and then it would go abandoned, and then another rehabber would come in, and they really weren’t giving the neighborhood what they wanted.
Yes. And so, that’s good to speak to you, and you can speak to our Deeders about how to avoid becoming that kind of person, that Terrorizes a neighborhood, not welcome in the neighborhood, you know, cause you also went through that too, where the neighborhood you did so much in Detroit and they’re like, this is not what we want.
He’s just going to come in and gentrify the neighborhood. Yeah. Crystal, this is actually, what’s the guy’s name? Chris Lambert, Chris Lambert, Chris Lambert, life remodeled, great vision and great organization. But he was a guy to Crystal’s point, went into this neighborhood like a bull in a china shop, and was going to do some rehab like a lot of, you know, remodeling people do going to maybe quote help out.
And he got a bunch of pushback because he wasn’t part of the neighborhood. I mean, it’s so true. I mean, If you’re going to buy property, I would like to think that you’re creating a relationship with that neighborhood. Your success depends on the neighborhood. Are you building relationships in the neighborhood?
Are you ensuring people trust you? Are you making a commitment to make not just that property better, but that street better? Or that several streets better? And what can you do if the streets are better? Your property is going to be better if you’re not just doing, I mean, you’ve had several people on your shows, they talk about they own one property and if they have a chance, they buy another property up the block and they buy another property around the corner.
And those are people who are strongly invested in the neighborhood. So if you were to join some association in the neighborhood, if you would lobby the government to do better parks, better schools, whatever it might be. I mean, the thing is, you want that neighbor to succeed, and the better the neighborhood does, the better your assets are going to do.
And so I would just urge listeners to think that their interests are so much tied to the streets and neighborhood where they are invested in, and think what could they do I was thinking about that, about how, if you are seen as integral to the success of the neighborhood, imagine when any project comes up, the leaders of the neighborhood are going to fill you in on those.
And if you’re seen as part of the solution, man, it’s good for you, it’s good for the people, the neighborhood, it’s phenomenal, what a cycle this all becomes. Chris, when he first went into this neighborhood, let’s tell Chris’s story a little bit, Seth, because I think this humanizes it so much. So Chris goes into this neighborhood, he wants to help this neighborhood rehab, and immediately this guy who wants to help out gets a bunch of pushback.
Why are these people in Detroit giving Chris a bunch of pushback when he’s there to help? I mean, there’s the racial component. He’s not from the city and he goes into a neighbor that’s black. It’s a neighbor that hasn’t done very well for decades. And he was doing great things. He was helping clean up streets, help people with their houses, doing things.
But he had a very transactional relationship with people. And then he was given the opportunity to take over what was this very beautiful 1920s built, huge, beautiful middle school and turn it into a neighborhood hub and bring in lots of organizations. And it looks like, on the surface, it looks like win win.
He’s gonna do some great stuff and people in the neighborhood are gonna benefit. But everyone’s immediate reaction was, Who are you, this outsider, coming into our neighborhood? Why are they giving you our single biggest asset to you, an outsider, and not to one of us? And why should we trust you? And why is this not the first sign that you’re going to do things in the neighborhood that are going to force us to leave?
Because that’s been the experience of a lot of people in Detroit. And so he had a very honest soul, very much wanted to help people. He had to learn some lessons. And the things he did to turn this around, and he’s a great guy, is he basically started sitting down with people and talking with them. He broke bread with them.
He sought out the most influential people in the neighborhood. He eventually formed an advisory council of influential neighbors. He hired people from the neighborhood such that his organization was not a bunch of outsiders. but came to become about half the staff came to become or probably more from the neighborhood.
He put people in charge in his organization to continue outreach. So they did a lot of things to embed themselves in the neighborhood to make people feel in the neighborhood that they had ownership and they didn’t just. Asked people’s opinion. They listened and gave people real influence on what was going to be in this hub on what the direction of this organization was going to be.
So when people have ownership, when people feel that organization represents them, because people from that area were being hired. And having important roles, immediately the perception begins to change. You’re not an outsider. You’re not coming in here to tell us what to do and taking our best asset, but actually you can become one of the neighborhood and you could be giving the neighborhood a real role, real influence and real ownership over what you’re doing.
And everyone has a very different perception when they feel that they own something. It’s like if you own your neighborhood on some level, you’re going to want to give to it. If you have some ownership in this organization trying to do something in your neighborhood, you’re going to want to contribute to it.
So it’s a completely different perception, but he had to build that. And there was a series of steps he went through to develop that trust, build those relationships. And eventually, I mean, he thrives, but it’s a process. We should never feel if you go in, and even if you have good intentions, that people will perceive you as having good intentions.
You have to earn the trust, and I think the most important thing that he learned is, you earn the trust by showing up, you earn the trust by making yourself vulnerable, and you earn the trust by bringing in people, and eventually by proving that your words are not only words, your actions are delivering the things that you’re promising.
And that’s very important. When your actions deliver results that people can believe in and they see it’s true, they will really trust you and they will feel completely different about you. And then let’s go back to even him getting the big building. One of the things they were upset about was that he got it for so cheap.
It ended up being like a dollar per square foot. A dollar. Yes. Yeah. For a dollar. So I want the listeners to know that when you are in tune with the entities in the city, the neighborhoods, they have programs for people who want to come and help. So. I guess that was the easy part, him getting that building for a dollar.
It was a process. He had worked with the education authorities in Detroit for years, renovating, helping schools. And they basically were desperate. I mean, cities like Detroit, I think Chicago, a lot of these cities, they have property and no one is investing in the property and the wrong people are taking over the property.
It could lead to, I don’t know, drugs and criminals and you want to turn things around and the city can’t do it. So they really want people with the right mindset who are going to build up a neighborhood. They need you. All you need is the right relationships to find the right opportunities. This was not an open policy.
I believe Chicago has an active policy. He had the relationship because he was getting a very unique asset. He’s getting this huge, huge building. I urge you to look up his organization. See how beautiful and huge that building is. It’s a humongous building. What’s the name of the organization again? I mean, that would be called the Durfee Innovation Center.
The organization is Life Remodeled. Life Remodeled. Life Remodeled, chapter four. I lived and breathed this for years. Believe me, I page number, page number, line number. Believe me, I’ve gone through that. So how many versions have I read of this book before I finish? More than you want to know. When my book came out last year, it was the same thing.
I was like, yes, that would be on page 87, paragraph 3. Yes, it’s like a child. If you have children, they’re a total joy. And then every day I’m also crying. So books are a little bit, I think actually worse. I’m pulling my hair out. So if I look a little bald, hopefully no one will see. And I’m not too bad. My wife is gray and she’s younger than me.
So I would just say that books and children are works of joy. But believe me. There are those moments you wish you could skip over those moments, let’s put it that way. I bet if you’re redeveloping a house, you feel the same way sometimes. You’re saying she’s gray so it even rubs off on her, like it’s spilling out to your neighbor
and the saying here is that when you go into a neighborhood, even if you’ve got great intentions, Like, number one, don’t expect to be successful immediately, just because you have a great idea. And certainly Chris’s idea was a great idea. But also to listen. One line, Dr. Kaplan, I like that you write in the book is, you know, somebody told Chris to kind of sit back and just listen.
Because these people have had charlatans around them coming in with these capes on for the last 20, 30, 40 years saying, I’m different, right? Probably longer than that, actually. But I would say that, you know, people in, let’s call them distressed neighborhoods. I mean, some of it is racism going back centuries.
Some of it is a lot of people with good ideas, but not a lot of knowledge. And then of Huxers that come in and try to take advantage of them. And if you’ve experienced that, it’s like what I experienced in fragile states, people are very mistrustful of those they don’t know personally. And you and I, we may live in a high trust.
environment. They live in a low trust environment and especially don’t trust people they don’t know that are not from their neighborhood. So you have to work hard to earn their trust. You have to literally think as part of your strategy, there’s a material, technical part of your strategy. But I would always think for a good property, especially something you’re looking at longer term, you need to have a relationship strategy, relationship to the people, relationships to the place.
Of course, I mean, I think people should be very careful when they choose places, and we could talk a little bit about that if you want, but it’s wherever you go, don’t think of yourself as the Lone Ranger, think of yourself as you’re going to be embedded in relationships with people, places, and institutions, and how will you act towards those?
How will you earn their trust? How will you contribute? Because your contribution could Do many good things for you personally beyond your asset, but also will come back and help your asset over time. Let’s go just big picture here for a second because there’s a framework around neighborhoods. That I think is important for people to understand and then we’ll go really tactical, but you talk about how this type of rehabilitation of our neighborhoods and of this fabric that is so hyperlocal, it’s so important that it doesn’t work from a top down perspective where the government kind of dictates from on high.
It doesn’t work. Organizations working. It’s almost on an iceberg by themselves. They’re frozen out of everything else. That doesn’t work. You say it’s got to be horizontal. Let’s talk about this horizontal framework of patching up our neighborhood. What does that really look like? Thank you. I always think very horizontal.
I find a lot of people are baked into this vertical thinking. Somehow the answer is a politician or a policy. And I think those are important. We surely could use different policies and different politicians in many places and areas, but I think ultimately the success of our country, the success of our society, the success of our neighborhoods very much depends upon our ability to work together.
So horizontal to me means. Relationships across a neighborhood and then ultimately across many neighborhoods, but if you’re in a single neighborhood, the success of that neighborhood, and I could certainly point to academic studies, which you don’t want to hear on this show, talking about the social cohesion or what we call the collective efficacy, the strength of institutions and norms in a neighborhood, the better they are, the better the neighborhood will be day to day, the safer it will be.
Thank you. the better it will respond to crisis. And I’m just going to give you a very practical example. Last week, last week, my daughter was coming back first week of school. She’s in a carpool. We have like a neighborhood school, except it’s not actually in our neighborhood. So she had a lot of the classmates here, but she went back and forth.
She came home, came in the front door and immediately said to my wife, and I was standing there, that six year old on her scooter in front of her house is going to get run over because we happen to be. About a half a block from a, not a major, but a semi major road and cars turn the corner and they’re not going to see that six year old.
So my wife, we have a baby. My wife took the baby, handed it to my daughter, 11 years old. And she really ran out of the house to talk to that, actually to chase that kid back to his house, if I may say so. And we know the neighbor. We don’t know them well. I wouldn’t call him a close friend, but somebody I know I talk to on the street.
I know what he does, something in insurance. and probably house insurance or something like that. And I know their family, and she acted as if she owned the neighborhood, and that child safety was her mission. And when you live in a place with strong horizontal relationships, and strong, what we would call collective capacity, collective efficacy, excuse me for that word here, but when we have that, people take ownership for each other, they knock on doors if they think someone’s alone and maybe older and they need to be checked in on every now and then, they watch for the kids in the streets.
If there’s someone suspicious, they’re going to call the police or call someone local. They’re doing things day in, day out to make your neighborhood better. And that’s what I mean by horizontal. Horizontal is we are in horizontal relationships. We’re like a community. We care enough for each other. And that makes a place thrive.
I have joy in my neighborhood because I have those relationships and I feel the place is mine. And that’s because we are horizontal. We’re not waiting for somebody to come in and help us, save us, or whatever it might be. We’re taking ownership and doing it ourselves. And I think the more everyone feels that way about their neighborhoods, The better each place in our country will be.
Let’s talk about plugging in to these neighborhoods. You know, a mentor of mine said to avoid clusters of misery. And I’ve got to believe, Dr. Kaplan, there are some neighborhoods that are just going to be clusters of misery. And if I get in there, that’s bad. I really, after reading your work, I feel like If I can plug into some of these neighborhoods that are kind of at the infant state, they got the grassroots starting to move.
I could plug into these and be a part of helping that solution and help myself at the same time. How do I identify these neighborhoods? I mean, I would be very strategic. I mean, I, myself, when I look for where to live. My wife and I spent a couple years. We looked at places. I was in New York. We looked in New Jersey.
I looked around Philadelphia. I was doing some things in Washington. My career in Washington took off after we came. I didn’t know what would happen. So I looked at five or six neighborhoods. between Washington and New York, and I was looking for certain things. So I was very systematic about it, but the way I would do it is I would look on a, I don’t know where people are and what they’re looking at, but you want to start with a map.
You want to start with what are thriving neighborhoods? And then I would say a very easy strategy is look for a place, a neighborhood that’s Not far from a thriving neighborhood. Maybe it’s down, it’s not doing very well, but it’s geographically close to places that are doing well, and has some assets.
Assets could be the housing stock, assets could be some cultural center or a university, assets could be just nature, it could be a very nice park. You’re looking for a place that’s geographically well positioned, has some very good assets, And ideally the places that are doing well, they’re doing well enough that they’re going to begin to spread out and if you go to the next neighborhood over and you’re going to get there before other people do, or maybe a few people have probably the best situation is a few people have got there already, but not a lot of people have noticed.
So you can begin to see something stirring. And you can see that it’s well connected. It has the assets. And there’s some people, you know, think about a curve. We’re not visual here, but think about the curve, a learning curve, or think about a product adoption curve. You want to get there when you’re at maybe the 5 to 10 percent adoption.
So you see beginning things happening, and then you want to go in. I mean, there’s no guarantee it’s going to keep going. Not every neighborhood goes that way. Not every product goes that way. But if you can identify the place that’s geographically close to flourishing neighborhoods and has good assets and is starting to make some change, but hasn’t made a lot of change, that’s where I would go.
And then the second part is I would spend time. I would never invest in a neighborhood that I did not spend time in. Walking up and down, learning the streets, finding out who’s on what street, finding out what assets are on what streets. The connections could be bus or public transportation. It could be connection to roads, it could be closeness to schools.
Even if we identify the right neighborhood, there’s gonna be certain streets. They’re going to do far better than other streets, and you want to know what streets those are. So I would have a two step process. First, I would look at the larger map, identify those opportunity neighborhoods, and then I would be looking within those neighborhoods to find those opportunity streets.
And then I would look for the house or the asset that I would go after. It sounds like you’re the doctor getting to know the heartbeat of the patient before you do surgery. Hopefully he’ll do a lot more than know the heartbeat, but anyway, he has. I would say know your neighborhood quite well before you jump in.
Yeah, we also did a show on how trails add value. Remember like the bike paths and things like that. So that’s something cool to look for also. That’s a potential asset. I mean, some assets can be built relatively easily. Like that could be built with some effort as opposed to if there’s a, I don’t know, a company, a university, some parks.
Things like that. They’re not so simple to recreate or build so quickly. So yes, anything that’s an asset Again, good location and you want to have assets. You always want to build on things that have potential for growth. I only have two questions left on my end and one is, it seems to me, and maybe I’m reading this into the book, but really a little bit of a cross cultural nature is better than much more of a monochrome nature when it comes to the cultures of the people that live in that neighborhood, I would guess you would think a cross cultural neighborhood would give it a little bit more vibrancy.
I mean, that could be an asset. Again, places that have, for example, places with immigrant communities, strong immigrant communities are places where usually the immigrants come. They’re very close knit. They have very good relationships. I mean, this is not true of every immigrant group, but many immigrant groups are like that.
They’re cohesive. And they will invest in the places that they live, and so one thing to do is to find those places, but of course, like Queens, parts of, I’m from New York, so forgive the New York bias, but there’s parts of Queens that are as diverse as any place in the world, and the streets are just exciting.
They’re energetic. I mean, they’re a joy to walk around. and see restaurants from six different countries in two blocks. But I also think the fact that it’s full of immigrants that are investing in their places and they’re moving up the income. They’re moving up the income brackets and they’re doing well.
As they do better, the neighborhood will do better. So that’s certainly also a very good place to target. Last question I had for you was about architecture, which I didn’t find in the book, but I think you’d have an opinion on. I feel like as you’re rehabbing these homes, you might be a better part of a neighborhood.
with maybe like an open porch or inviting landscaping. Like this ties the houses that you’re rehabbing more into the neighborhood. Have you thought at all, the architecture on the neighborhood? Oh, I thought a lot. There’s a very small section that we’re, we’re checking how closely you read the book, but it was a very small section.
I think I have a paragraph, I think I have only a paragraph someplace. about how wouldn’t it be great if urban design made neighborhoods great again. If you ever walk around an Italian city or a French city, you know, there’s neighborhoods. There’s usually a park or there’s some city government building and a few schools.
And everything is designed place by place, as neighborhoods, the United States was like that at some point, but everything post World War II has been a completely unique development pattern, which I don’t think is very healthy for the country and many levels. So I would definitely all four. Beautiful municipal buildings, but of course, if you’re only owning a property to the extent that you’re able to not only build a house with a porch and things like that, but I would encourage you to do things in your front yard that invite neighbors over.
There’s people who I don’t know if you have kids, but don’t put your playground. In the backyard, put your playground in the front yard and invite the neighbor’s kids to be on your playground, whatever it is, you know, the things for the kids to do. If you’re going to build swings, put the swings on the front yard, put the basketball court on the front yard.
I mean, you know, it used to be that houses were built open and. Outward, forward, and then we built everything in the backyard as if we didn’t want to talk to anybody. So I would very much encourage that you not only build your property to be open and welcoming, but use your property, your front yard, and your just general community.
manner with people to be inviting and to say, we’re happy for you to come and spend time with us here. And you can literally change the culture of your block. If you take a few steps that are proactive to reach out to other people and you can use your property all for that, or you can use the street. I don’t know if you have to be in a bit of a non busy street, but you could use the street as well.
And if you take the first step, I’m confident others will follow. It’s funny, Crystal, one thing I like about this project is Dr. Kaplan says that, you know, you can take two people with opposing political views and get them in a room to talk it out and nothing will happen. But if you put them on an action oriented project, like restoring the neighborhood, you can have a Republican and Democrat next to each other, shovels out and everybody’s on the same page.
Yeah, we’re partners in making our places better where we don’t talk well with each other when we’re talking about these far away policy disagreements. So honestly, I would even advertise, don’t put political signs. I don’t know if either of you have, don’t put political signs on your front yard. Put a sign saying welcome or I care or we care or say hello or something like that.
And let’s get politics off our front yard. and let’s know each other and let’s find ways to cooperate with each other horizontally. We’ll all be happier if we focus on something we can make better as opposed to something we can much more directly control. Yeah, something we can control. Exactly. We can control the fate of our neighborhood.
We can’t control the fate of
something in Washington. The of today, Dr. Kaplan, it’s available everywhere, I think. Find me on LinkedIn. The best way to find me is on LinkedIn. I’m very active on LinkedIn because you have longer conversations with people there. So look for me and I’m more than happy to talk to anybody. So thank you so much, Crystal and Joe.
Thanks for helping. Yeah. The pleasure is all mine. The pleasure is all mine. Like a lot of things totally would never have thought of. All right. Now get out of our car. Yes. We need some more elbow room. Hitchhiker. This is the best hitchhiker ever. I hope that was exciting enough for you because we did talk about dollars and cents and so much.
I hope that’s okay. That’s the best. That’s the best conversation. Big thanks to Dr. Kaplan. You know, this is the thing that we don’t think about enough, Crystal, about the fact that we’re making money for ourselves, but we’re also helping out the neighborhood. Exactly. I loved this interview. What I loved most about it was you do have to consider the neighborhood.
One of the things that I’d also talk about that was my appeal to my local alderman was that Growing up, so the vacant lots that I bought in Chicago, there used to be houses on there. There used to be multi units and people would come in, outsiders would come in. They would just throw any Section 8 person in there.
Those people would terrorize the neighborhood and then they’d be gone just as fast as they come in. And I was like, I want to change that. You know, it’s up to me to change that. I don’t want some outsider to come in with their own motives, with their own profit. motives to come in and just terrorize another neighborhood.
So it’s up to us. And he did say that he’s like, the city has loans. The city has land. The city has programs. The city has grants to help people who want to do the work. that are in the community, that know what the communities and the neighborhoods want, and they pay them to do the work to develop the neighborhood.
The city can’t do it themselves. It’s the city. It’s the government. They move at the speed of government. They move at the speed, you know what I mean? Like I can do a lot more because I know I lived there. I grew up there. I know what they want. Well, and what I loved about this interview was just the fact that if you do this…
Your profits can easily go up as well because those people in government are going to try to bring you in knowing that you’re a trusted ally and to Dr. Kaplan’s point, they don’t know who to trust, but they know they can trust you because you’ve done good by them in the past. And you know what the neighborhood wants.
You have your pulse on the neighborhood. And even I’m coming from a really awesome conference in Chicago. It was the Chicago Build Expo. We should have had a microphone with you there. I know next year I will have a microphone, but it was really cool because there were people from the city of Chicago, they were there.
And they were like, Hey, you know, you’re a woman, you’re a minority. We need to talk to you. You guys aren’t, aren’t, you know. coming to the city to do stuff. And we see so many other people doing it. And it was cool. Cause she’s like, these are the certifications you need. Here are the, here are the websites.
Here are the workshops. You should take that. The city, so much help free. And then, yeah, totally didn’t know. And then there was a booth, the County Cook County. So the local County, they have programs. So it’s like just going to this expo. I met so many. government officials. And like, you know, I also saw that you’ll see this on my Instagram.
There’s a place that makes cabinets out of recycled water bottles, like not wood cabinets, they’re made out of recycled water bottles. And you would never know the difference. They looked amazing, but it was just cool to get to see what’s happening in the construction world and how the city, and there were also a lot of like different contracting associations.
Cause that’s what people fear too, when they’re trying to do something. The contracting whole business gets a bad rep. You know, they have a reputation. I don’t know what you’re talking about. So there are a lot of, what do you mean? But there were no, yeah, not the, not the construction workers, but there were a lot of cool construction and contractor associations that were there.
And they were like, yeah, we actually train contractors. We actually have a mentoring program. So if you submit. Work for us. We actually have our own internal like estimator and then we train, you know, these new and up and coming contractors how to bid. They’ll be like, oh, you overbid yourself or you underbid you cheated yourself.
So they work with a mentor and they’re bringing up the next generation of great, great contractors because they’re trying to change the narrative of, you know, contractors. they get a bad rap. And, you know, a lot of times that happens. So it was neat to connect on a different level. So I’ll tell you what I liked about that.
Just that whole thing, Crystal, is that the number of programs that were available that you didn’t know about, that now you do know about. And I think it’s a little like at people’s W2 job. I talk to HR people all the time. They’re like, we have All of these cool benefits and nobody knows what they are, but nobody ever comes and asks.
So going to your local municipality and finding out what those programs are could be a boon for you and for them and the neighborhood. Yeah, the city wants great neighborhoods. It helps the city also too. Well, that’s, you know, the politicians want to get reelected, and that helps everybody.
Well wait a minute, is the phone actually ringing this week? It is. It’s . Let’s see who’s on the rotary. Hey Joe and Crystal, and Doug, this is John in Coeur d’Alene. I have a 17 year old and a 16 year old who will be heading off to college in the next few years. Right now, both are considering schools relatively close to each other in the same town.
Think about buying a rental near their schools. The goal would be to charge them some reduced rent and hopefully have them find a few roommates that I could charge market rent. Or maybe even let my kids live for free and subsidize the mortgage completely with their friends. Sort of a room and board hack instead of a house hack.
My question, does having family members as tenants create any weird taxation issues that I need to be aware of? What if I go down for a long weekend to work on a rehab project or just a visit? Can I stay at that house with my kids or does that blur too many lines between personal and business? To further compound things, what if I were to use a 1031 to purchase that rental?
Does that change anything or otherwise make any of those other overlaps worse? John, great question. I want to start with Crystal with just this idea in general because I think he’s got it half right. Yes, definitely. I think number one, buying a house in a college town is you’re always going to pay a lot for a house in a college town because there is, we talked about competition, there’s going to be more competition for those properties.
So it’s going to be harder to find a quote, great deal in a college town, but you’re also going to find more stability in the rent because we know, Crystal, every year there’s a new flock of people looking for, looking for housing. And so we don’t have to worry about. Being in an area like, you know, we talked about Vegas rents, right?
Depending on the economy in Vegas, things are going to go up and down. Well, the economy in a college campus, probably going to be pretty good most of the time. So that’s number one, you’ve got some stability, but number two here is that John, there’s something you should be doing, which is this. You want to make your child your property manager and you want to pay them to be your property manager.
And what happens then is that you look at what it costs your kid to go to school. You figure out how many hours you can legally pay them because you have to have the kid do work. And now you have them stay in the house. And you pay them money and then they pay for their own college. So John’s probably in a decent mid level or, well, it’s John.
He’s a dean, so he’s probably in a way high tax bracket, probably just freaking brilliant because he’s with us. So John probably is making money. hand over fist. So he’s in a high tax bracket, his kids in a very low tax bracket. So instead of directly paying for college, he pays the child, the child pays for their own college, and now he gets a massive tax break on the college bill.
You want to do that too, John. So that’s number one here. Number two, if he has family members that are renting, it doesn’t matter who rents as long as he can prove that the rent was a market rate. So if he’s giving them a great deal, you can do that, but he can’t be charging a ton of money. That’s way over market rate.
And then it’s a family member because then it looks like an IRS tax dodge. So people are going to be wondering if he’s just, you know, what’s going on there, but if he can prove that it’s market rate or better, there’s no problem there. Giving people a discount on rent, it’s worse for you economically to do that.
It helps the family member. The IRS is going to go. Yeah. Okay. All right, it’s the other way that it becomes a problem. If market rent is 1, 000 and you’re charging the family member 3, 000, they’re going to wonder if you’re money laundering, if there’s truly something else that’s going on inside the family.
Is it a meth house? Joe, I’ll, I’ll be right back. I’m sorry. Nothing you just said is causing me alarm. It’s not that at all. I’ve just got to, just got to go make a couple of calls. Just got to go change some rents. Oh, that’s funny. I didn’t get it. I was like, where is he going? Why did he interrupt to say he’s going?
Now, John, you staying in your own property, this is what I would do. I would make sure that you do some work on that house while you’re there. You do some evaluation, you do some landlord looking around, you document what you did while you were there, which certainly you can do. And as a landlord, hey, you need to be there inspecting that property.
And then your stay becomes, and talk to your accountant about this because you want to have good tax people in your corner, but your stay then really can help with In your stay.
can be something that was based on helping your property get better. Yeah, I love this idea. And on the flip side, coming from the student’s perspective, the dorms are awful and they’re overpriced. I know our dorm was pretty awful in college and it was a hundred million percent overpriced. So I would have picked having my parents buy something for me and I stay there.
I would have happily been the landlord or the property manager to stay somewhere that was. Better than those dorms, but it can’t be though, Crystal, a great deal for the kid, right? The kid has to do, if you’re going to make them the property manager, they have to do the property manager job. They have to do it.
Otherwise then this is a tax dodge, right? We don’t want this to be a tax dodge and we want this to be a win for everybody. And it’s definitely a huge long term win because you’ll have the next set and the next set and you’ll have appreciation and usually that’s a pretty good deal. Yeah. So there it is, John.
I hope that helped. The last part of that question is about using a 1031 exchange. People that don’t know what that is. You take money from a previous house. And you reinvest it into this property and that allows you to defer the tax on the gain on the old property and roll it into this new property.
Now there’s some funky full episode later on 1031 exchanges and how that works. But for now, let’s just say, get help from your tax person before you try this. That doesn’t do anything to it, John. The 1031 is the 1031, where that money comes from. If you stay there and you work on the property. Perfectly legal.
If you’re evaluating the property, perfectly legal for you to stay. It’s your rental property. The place this gets hairy, and this is why Crystal and I have said before, don’t buy property inside your IRA, which is something we hear people talk about doing all the time. And it’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculously complicated.
If it’s inside your IRA and you stay there, you now have associated yourself with that property and it no longer is an IRA asset. And so you just Disqualified your entire IRA and now you’re hosed. So when it comes to that issue. And you own it inside your IRA, do not go anywhere near the property. You can’t have anything to do with that property.
Your kid can’t stay in that property because then it gets all weird. So, this ridiculousness that I hear people buying property inside their IRA, it’s such a pain and I don’t get it. Why you want to go through all that is beyond me. But in this case, 1031 exchange is just a way to defer the tax. has no change on you staying in the property or your kids being in the property, but could be a very good thing, Crystal, for him and his family.
Oh, definitely. Like I’m excited about the prospects and in like when you come down for family weekends, that’ll even make it even better. Having a deduction, a text deduction. And if it’s nice enough and there’s a hot tub, you can have your favorite podcasters come visit too. Yes, we can record or do they make electric shock suits?
Why? So you can get one? Is that what you’re saying? For the hot tubs and swimming while listening. Yeah, John, thanks for the call. If you’ve got a call, Crystal, how do people leave their own voicemail for us? Yes, you can head to stackingdeeds. net slash voicemail, and then we can answer your question just like we did John’s.
And then I see we have a couple of questions too, coming up from Stacia. And we have Kelly. So your answers to your questions are coming up too. So thanks you guys for listening and for stepping up and leaving us some voicemails. We got more excitement coming next week, next Tuesday. If you know somebody that needs to hear this episode, it’s amazing interview with Dr.
Seth Kaplan. Make sure and forward it to them, please. Also, if you are not subscribed to our channel, wherever you are, you’re just checking us out, make sure that you subscribe so you get all the latest episodes, the second that they drop. Yes. And the show notes, if you want the show notes. So we have links to all of the articles that we talked about.
We have a recap, a nice little recap of what we talked about, and then a lot of things that we recommend also, and then we’ll have the link to Seth Kaplan’s. book also at stackingdeeds. net slash show notes written by yours truly. That’s going to do for today. I think crystal think we did it. We did it.
Yeah. All right. Let’s have Ruth take us home, Doug. I think you got it from here, man. What should we’ve learned
today?
Well, Joe and crystal. But first, take some advice from Dr. Seth Kaplan. Not only can you help yourself grow your real estate empire, you can also help grow a neighborhood with the right approach. Work with local leaders, and you could find deals galore.
Second, market crash? Well, not likely. There certainly is change a comin Are your reserves solid and are your interest rates locked? If so, you have little to worry about. But the big lesson, the next time you see Ruth about to hit one of those speed bumps, could you maybe give me a little knock on the trunk a second or two ahead of time?
I’m trying to brew herbal tea back here! Let’s just say, it’d be a lot more relaxing without the second degree burns.
Thanks to Dr. Seth Kaplan for joining us today. You can find out more about his book, Fragile Neighborhoods, Repairing America One Zip Code at a Time, wherever books are sold. We’ll also include an affiliate link in our show notes at stackingdeeds. net slash books if you’d like to pick up a copy and help support the show.
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