Devon Zuegel
speaker
216 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Devon Zuegel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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But I also think it's encouraging because once we do have enough examples and we get more and more every few years, there's now a few dozen of these across America. As we have more of these examples, the more conservative capital will be more interested in participating and say, oh, okay, we've seen this work now.
A lot of these small towns have been built throughout the American Southeast, places like Georgia, Florida, South Carolina. And there's now a growing community of practice of developers who build in this way. And there's starting to be understanding in that region. And more and more institutional capital is coming in. Right now in California, there's basically none.
I mean, there's some debatable cases, but there's none that I would really put cleanly in the category. One that we've found really helpful when talking to investors and to our partners is this beautiful little town in Washington state called Seabrook. It's about two and a half hours from San Francisco. And I'm friends with the developer. His name is Casey.
And it's been built over the last 20 years. And it's been a tremendous financial success. It's a place that a lot of people in Seattle go for vacation. And that's been a helpful one to have because Seattle and San Francisco have a lot more similarities than Atlanta or Birmingham, Alabama. And so being able to point to that and saying, hey, look, it worked in Washington.
Maybe it can work in California. It's a slow and steady process. But I think as we develop more comps, more and more people will build in this way.
Probably the number one thing is something that we all learned in elementary school, but I've seen more examples of is the idea of show, don't tell. I have talked off a lot of my friends ears for years now about the benefits of walkability and being able to go and get a coffee in the morning and having your friends within a few minutes of your home.
One of my friends in particular, and she'll know who she is when she's listening to this, I think has not really been sold on that for a very long time. And she says, okay, Devin. Okay, Devin, that's nice. But then when she and her family came and visited Edge Esmeralda last year, the pop-up village, she lived the lifestyle for that week that I had been describing to her for so long.
And a few days in, she was like, oh, I get it. I see why you've been talking about this for so long. This is great. And... On one hand, I kind of laughed because it was quite funny to see that. And I was really happy that it clicked for her at that moment.
But on the other hand, I'm like, man, if I can't even explain this verbally to one of my closest friends, how could I possibly communicate it with other people? And so that's another reason why the pop-up is so useful, because it's been a way to bring people up to the place where we're actually building this community and the town where we're hosting in Healdsburg. It's not the same.
We're going to do things differently from Healdsburg to some degree, but on the spectrum of American cities, it's much closer to what we ultimately want to build than not. And so getting to just show people the lifestyle that we're trying to create and the types of values that we want people to have in this community has been huge.
And I think especially for something like this, we're essentially creating a real life social network. When people move places, they're not just moving for the house and the physical place, but also who do I know who lives there? Who's someone that I would like to know who lives there?
By being able to show them the types of people who come to Edge Esmeralda and are drawn to that, it helps them start to imagine, oh, my 12-year-old kid could be friends with this other 12-year-old kid whose family is also thinking of moving there. And people can start to picture themselves in it. So I think that's the number one takeaway for me is do less talking and do more showing.
It depends on who I'm talking to. But I think the infrastructure costs to build something like this are astronomical. People don't really understand how expensive infrastructure is. Even quote unquote basics like roads and electrical. I'm not even talking about a fancy infrastructure. suspension bridge or something, just a road. It costs a lot of money to build this stuff.
And I think that many people I talk to are just not aware of it because also a lot of the infrastructure costs are not even visible. They're underground. And so I spend most of my day in spreadsheets.
And talking to our general contractor and civil engineer, thinking about how do we make sure that we both design this in a way that's beautiful and supportive of the type of living that we want to have, but also pays for itself and is not crazy expensive. And people almost never ask me about the infrastructure. I think they just assume that it'll be handled.
And I can tell you that it will not just be handled. It's a whole process. I'm not worried about it. We're going to do it. But it's something that you have to think a lot about. And frankly, it's the thing that can make a project sink or swim. If your infrastructure costs end up being 10% more than you expect, that could be the difference between having a successful project versus not.
Yeah, the most successful version of the story. I'll give the big abstract answer and then also the personal answer. At the high level, the most successful version of the story is that we prove out this model and I and my team get to go build many, many more of these in the world. Not just that, but also it then inspires other people to build in this way.
We're not even trying to do particularly crazy things. Some of them, to me, just feel very low-key. But for many developers, they're like, oh, that's so hard to even imagine doing. And so just giving them an existence proof that this is possible, I think, would then inspire people to do more. And I've already seen... this play out in the Southeast. And now I think it could go even farther.
It's not the dominant form of development happening in the Southeast, but it is a growing form. So that's the biggest one is we would have a chain of these villages all across the country Maybe also bigger ones, like I'd love to build something even a larger scale one day. And then also for people to copy.
And then I think at the personal level, I mean, I'm building this because I want to live here. I'm building the place that I would like to raise my future family in and spend my life in. And so success to me is building a place that I like.
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