Land Development Infrastructure, How to Build Capital, and Community W/ Phil Lund – It's Not a Tiny House Podcast

Phil: [00:01:31] Yeah, I do. So housing or a place that you've purchased is an asset and you should be able to leverage your assets and and make that work for you. You know, I'm, zoning, I get it at OK, this is housing. This is manufacturing. I'm not a huge fan of that because I don't like zones, if you will. And I've.

Wyatt: [00:01:53] So you're not big on the Euclidian designations.

Phil: [00:01:55] No, exactly. Yeah. Well, and I've sat on planning commissions and, you know, with humility I have went through I've got a law degree and I took zoning.

Wyatt: [00:02:05] I was going to say, haven't you got some bones? Well, you cut your teeth doing some law stuff.

Phil: [00:02:11] Yeah, exactly. I don't like that stuff. So you want to give people freedom and freedom allows for them to use it. It doesn't mean that they put junk cars in their yard and things like that. There's got to be some of those kind of restrictions that take place. But if somebody wants to put an ADU and leverage their property and it lends itself to it and they want to rent it out, if they want to move their mother in law in or whatever they want to do, to me, that is exactly what should happen. And the government shouldn't be getting in the way. It should allow that to happen. And just the thought about federal government, distant thing, it's hard to get anything to do with having an impact on that on a state government. The same thing is true as far as it's still difficult. You can elect a representative or senator to have an impact on it. But local government absolutely should be serving the people that are in that community and for that community. If there ever was a time for of the people, for the people, by the people, it is local government. And too often and I got some experience with this, working with multiple local governments, too often that just is not the case that people get in there and they become part of the system culturally. And I'm not even pointing arrows at anybody that I know in Canyon, Florence, Fremont County, et cetera. Right. But I am saying that the philosophy needs to be that we are here to help you as opposed to put burdens on you and put restrictions on you. So back to the ADU. Absolutely. It should be something that's allowed and those 13 lots. So when we did the zoning plan, if you will, that we wrote ourselves and got through the planning commission and the city council does allow for the ADUsup front.

Wyatt: [00:03:44] Right. And so what we're seeing there with with that discussion from those inside, if you will, that are for them and those maybe opposed, there are some folks are worried that that that's going to do something to the neighborhood, maybe negatively, or it's going to affect their property value, possibly negatively. And a very simple rebuttal to that generally is when does livable square footage depreciate the value of a property?

Phil: [00:04:13] Yeah, it doesn't. It goes the other way.

Wyatt: [00:04:15] It goes the other way. Right. And people are already living there. Right. So it's not like you said, hey, we're going to and not that this would even be a problem for me because most people I know weld in their garage anyway. But the backyard of my lot is going to become a manufacturing thing. Well, to a certain point, many garages that I've been in kind of are, right. But I'm from a from a where you make stuff mentality and community. Right. Where yeah. Everybody I know back home especially, they weld in their shop. Hell, they grind sausage in their shop like the garage is their place to get stuff done.

Phil: [00:04:47] Yeah. And if you look at it as a pendulum that on one side of the pendulum is you do anything and everything you want to do and there's just no restrictions. Nobody's arguing for that. There's got to be , we're in a community so you got to have some kind of community standard, but don't let the pendulum go so far to the other way, that bureaucratic mindset is controlling all what goes on in people's personal property. And that's too much far on the other side of the pendulum. So there's this balance that's in the middle. And, you know, hopefully the pendulum just swings around very close to the middle as opposed to swing one side or the other.

Wyatt: [00:05:22] And that's kind of the tug of war that we see in our political system now anyway, which is right and left. Right. If we look at those as the two ends of the pendulum swinging like there's a constant tug of war. And I was having a conversation with somebody about, you know, the three arms of government. I'm like the two big ones are constantly fighting over the third. Right. That's really what you're talking. There's a bone in the middle and the two are constantly fighting for power via the third. For lack of a better analogy, I was just a very crude way that I could build it a I'm like, that's what I see constantly bickering over the.

Phil: [00:05:53] Well, we don't need do that locally.

Barna: [00:05:56] It seems to be us against them all the time. But I also think the fault lies just like in politics with both sides. So where you're saying like local government is like they feel like a gatekeeper or they you feel like they're a block or a burden or something like that while the people have to actually go and interact. So if you're a citizen and you're like, well, the government did this or well, the city hall did this, they did it because you weren't there. They did it because you didn't talk to them. That's how it happens. You can walk in to city hall. You can want to walk into a planning commission meeting, a housing meeting, a city council meeting. And the reason they're doing things in a vacuum is because nobody's there. So when you're saying like they did something I didn't want while you didn't show up. And that's been the point of this podcast since day one is show up. If you don't like something, you change it. I mean, I talked to a lobbyist recently because I don't like something that the federal government is doing. And if I have to pay a lobbyist or a lobbyist can educate me on what I need to do to have that bad, what is bad for my business, like to stop that from happening, I'll do that. But you have to get used to having a conversation with other people, your government, whether it's local or federal.

Wyatt: [00:07:19] And people you're going to disagree with, and that's one thing that we don't understand anymore from a political standpoint, is that if you disagree with somebody, they're the enemy and they're bad. Right. But your adversary is so important to your cause, because if you didn't have that adversary, you would not have a cause.

Phil: [00:07:38] Right, and again, on the local level, we should be able to carve out a win win, so we're all going to go to the parade on May, whatever it is. The first, the flower parade.

Barna: [00:07:49] Blossom festival. I'm trying to remember what we're talking about because we also have the car show coming up.

Phil: [00:07:55] That's the one. And the good news is that it's going to come on and have to take place. So it was going to be reversed and now they're going to have it. So whoever was involved with that decision, thank you very much and it was the right thing to do. Yep, absolutely. And that obviously, I saw it on Facebook. There was some lobbying and I think that took place there, as Barna might have been talking about. And so you get the opportunity to serve. Planning commissions always need more people, historical renovation projects for the committees that they're the city council. All those are opportunities on the local level to serve. And if not to to communicate and to try to do is non adversarial as possible and create win wins. And it's got to be working from both sides. Both the governments got to see it that way as well as the the people. What again is the danger, having watched it for a while, is people get elected to offices and then they think that they've got to represent the the government itself as opposed to the people. And somehow you just become into that system. And your mindset changes certainly happens with congressional people go to Congress. And one would hope that it doesn't happen as much on the local level.

Wyatt: [00:09:09] That reminds me of the Stanford prison experiment, right where they took college kids. All were college children. Yeah, children, kids. Some were guards and some were inmates. Right. And what they found, they had to cut the experiment short because the guards had become too authoritarian, I should say, probably.

Barna: [00:09:30] I think the word is abusive, like physically.

Wyatt: [00:09:32] I mean, they were they were there, right. It was it had escalated to the point to where they thought they were prison guards and that their inmates were no longer college students or that they were. And so does this happen in our local government or any government where now you're on that side and it's the same thing where now you have opposition?

Phil: [00:09:50] Right. It does happen and it happens to all of us. So it's it's a human nature thing. Those are probably not the exception. It's all of us. And it's just something you got to be aware of. It's land mined. It's out there. Don't step on the landmine. Pay attention.

Wyatt: [00:10:04] Everybody people will experience, right? You get elected, well, you're now a prison guard, right? So you have to be careful not to actually think that you're a prison guard.

Phil: [00:10:14] Yeah.

Wyatt: [00:10:15] You have to remember that.

Barna: [00:10:16] Power corrupts, right. Absolutely power corrupts absolutely.

Phil: [00:10:20] Yeah. I served as a county commissioner back in Michigan and they, Michigan has townships. And so in our county we had twenty townships. So five people on those township boards, they represent a area of six miles by six miles. And I was appointed as the commissioner that worked with the township officials to be their liaison. The point was that I went to lots of different meetings and what was apparent to me is every time I went into one, they all had their own little micro culture going on. And so there was five people and they'd bring in two new people. And the three people there would basically bring those people on to what their culture was. And I remember Maple Valley Township.

Wyatt: [00:11:04] That's how we do things here.

Phil: [00:11:05] Well, it just it's you know, it's the virus that whether positive or negative, it both happened. Well, Maple Valley Township, every time I went there, I love going there because all five of those people were come on in the doors and they were great and what do you need and those kind of things. And a couple of people went off, but they had enough people that, again, they got inoculated. So we can do that as well. As far as governments that you inoculate towards the good, it just doesn't have to go towards the negative. So the prison guard can be the friendly prison guard, if you will, wants good things to happen. And same with the city council person, the planning commission person. But you got to get that culture there in the first place.

Barna: [00:11:46] But culture, it's not a thing that happens magically. I mean, it's training. And that has to be your desire to have that culture. So in in a lot of government assistance is just lack of training or on a commission or in a committee or city council. And it's like, why am I here. Yeah. All you're here to vote on this thing. What are my rules, what are the guidelines, what am I what I need to know for this job? Like if that training doesn't exist, that's when those things happen. Like I rule the world now because I'm I'm I'm in this position of of some power. Now you have that is there is no, no, no. There are guardrails. There are guidelines that I need to follow. You don't know that. That when you fall in to that.

Phil: [00:12:26] And there is a demarcation between the council and staff. And you've got to make sure that the staff who work for the elected people are in sync with it as well. Because staff over years can serve out or sit out or wait out, city council members, mayors, commissioners, whatever, and so somehow you got to make sure that that positive culture transforms into the staffing as well, which is where everything's executed at.

Wyatt: [00:12:54] And just helping people like like we've talked several times about probably privately, Barna. Like the city's at least these cities here create a master plan. Right. OK, so that is your your brochure, your booklet. This is what you're working for. You're not working for you on this commission. You're working towards the end of what this this plan is. Yeah. It's not what you want. It's what the city said it wanted. And you're here to find a way to facilitate what the city said it wants or needs not what you want or need. And a lot of times people find an opportunity to go, well, I don't want that. Well, again, this isn't you. You are a figurehead inside of the government now. And the government said it wanted this. So find a way to facilitate that. That's your new job.

Barna: [00:13:40] And the reason the government said it wanted that is because they went out talked to the community. And the community is like this is where we should go.

Wyatt: [00:13:46] And this is how we can incentivize creating this end. Right. So people lose themselves inside of that because they and they go rogue. They're like, now you're the abusive prison guard. No, you're supposed to just be the prison guard.

Barna: [00:14:01] To the streets lack of training. I mean, if the prison guards told you, lay a hand on this prisoner, you're out or you're fired, or then you're going to do that or you're the prisoner. Right. So you know what the rules are. If you don't like, hey, guess what? You got to make sure they don't do anything bad. Well, that subjective.

Wyatt: [00:14:21] And now it's any means necessary.

Phil: [00:14:23] And there has been a transformation with, you know, social media where people are just simply aggressive and that carries off into real life as well. So, yeah, somehow, again, I I'm a big fan of local and local with the government planning commissions, and somehow we can do it differently than what we observe in Washington or even at the state government.

Wyatt: [00:14:43] That can't be the example now. I mean. Yeah, well, we've recently seen. Right?

Phil: [00:14:46] Right, exactly. And again, I know many of the council people, at least at Canon City and good people. And so they this is not directed towards them. And again, nobody's that one hundred percent great. So it's what percent are we in? How do we improve where we've got a gap. And they certainly everyone here is above 50 percent as far as the the good part of government making it work.

Wyatt: [00:15:13] Well in changing the vernacular that we constantly use from the lesser of two evils to the greater of two good's.

Phil: [00:15:19] Yeah, that's fantastic.

Wyatt: [00:15:20] Because we need to rephrase that. We need to reapproach like we're thinking about things. And so and with that, I know that we're probably at our bingo point, if you will, for our allotted time. Barna totally your call if you've got more on your list that you want to throw on.

Phil: [00:15:34] Well, I just want to get one last thing. Please do. If if I don't mind, which is your teacher's example. We're at 120 deer in the area.

Wyatt: [00:15:43] Exactly.

Barna: [00:15:45] That was my question earlier. I think we are at a 120 deer and what do we do?

Phil: [00:15:49] So exactly what do we do? Because we don't want everybody to starve. And so that's a challenge that we have is just common citizens. The governments have got, developers have got, builders have got, anybody that's working in this community have got and it's there's there's solutions out there. We're not the first ones to walk this path. But how do we make it work and we can do that.

Barna: [00:16:15] Well, sorry. And I have a question. Now you've done it. So is more money the answer or money from the government, the answer or other money? Because what we're running into I'm sure you are, too. And I just remember one more thing. This is great, but that building is difficult because of infrastructure. So if you've got half a million dollars in the ground before you can even build the first house that you can sell, that's that's a big hurdle for the little guy, I guess,

Wyatt: [00:16:49] Jonny builder.

Barna: [00:16:50] And the big guy's not coming down here. So how do we bridge the gap of, OK, we have land, we have land with close infrastructure. But as soon as we want to build a house, then, OK, it's water taps and sewer lines. It's everything in the ground that is so expensive that I think that's that's a hurdle. And that's one of the reasons we're at 120 deer.

Phil: [00:17:12] Yeah. Money is a capital. Use it that way. Capital is a necessary component. It also can blind you to other solutions for sure. If you've got too much money floating around there

Wyatt: [00:17:23] You lose creativity.

Barna: [00:17:24] We don't have that problem here.

Phil: [00:17:25] You lose creativity and that again, that probably isn't our problem at this point. Yeah, I'm just recently looking at tokenization of property, which is something new that you can do with Crypto and so that tokenization allows for individuals on a very small basis to invest in property and it gets you past the SEC Securities Exchange Commission, it doesn't violate anything dealing with local government ordinances. It's just a new way to do it. And there was a building up in Aspen, Colorado, that was really the first one in the planet that did that tokenization process. And I'm seriously looking at it for even the potential for Scholastica of it can work because it decentralizes in Democratizes the way we do development.

Wyatt: [00:18:15] So you mean to say that we could take Bitcoin as capital investment in a project?

Phil: [00:18:24] You can take it Ethereum. OK, I don't own any Ethereum right at the moment.

Wyatt: [00:18:28] OK. Let me say good currency.

Phil: [00:18:30] You can take Ethereum, Cardano, there's a couple of them that do it. But what you do is you create you've got a property that's 100000 square foot and you give a value to each square foot of that property. Say the property's worth 200 dollars a square foot. That's two million. So we're going to sell off tokens at one hundred dollars a square foot. And you put that on a marketplace where those are liquid because real estate typically is not liquid. It's something, and also it takes high thresholds, Barna was talking about to get involved, you know, a half million to get into the property itself and add it on. You can fractionalized that and make that work so that it's out there. And I just see with what's happening with cryptocurrency and decentralization and tokenization of products that it's something that absolutely could have legs in the future.

Wyatt: [00:19:22] What about the volatility of that from a from let's just say from a your threshold of risk, right. As the one who's essentially taking the crypto and using that. What about the volatility of cryptocurrency? What about the change because that market changes so rapidly,

Phil: [00:19:40] The tokens would be isolated to this particular project. So they have the ability, you lock them. And they're also looking at because this is fairly new, it's twenty eighteen, here we're 2021. But you have a floor so that if the property's worth two million, the it can't go down past a certain value.

Barna: [00:19:58] So you're creating your own market for that property. You are you're not on the broad market. So it's literally a market for to see how marketable that that property is. Through using cryptocurrency,

Phil: [00:20:15] Crypto and tokenization and just fraction analyzing that.

Wyatt: [00:20:19] And this is for way bigger brains me.

Barna: [00:20:21] We shouldn't have started this. All right. I think, this is another hour. Yeah. I have no idea what's going on.

Phil: [00:20:28] We'll we'll stop there. But the point is that the past isn't what needs to happen in the future. And I think this might apply to small area, small town rural areas just as much as applies to any place else. So.

Wyatt: [00:20:40] Right. Because it makes it it makes getting access to capital open.

Phil: [00:20:45] It does. And it also benefits the person who wants to invest that they don't have to throw in 10000 or 100000 or a million dollars. It's something that you can do in fractionalization and makes it liquid, because typically, as you guys know, when you belong to an LLC, it's a closed environment and it's not easy to get yourself out of that or get your currency back or whatever you're trying to do to get an exit strategy. This simply allows it. It's out there and you can sell it.

Wyatt: [00:21:09] It's crowd funding.

Barna: [00:21:11] A and you're avoiding regulation because there is no regulation.

Phil: [00:21:15] No. The people who are putting out these markets have already taken in the Securities Exchange Commission process. So you still have to make sure that it complies with that. It's not getting around. It is just simply in compliance with it.

Barna: [00:21:27] I was looking to you if you're out of it, because it's not like the government. It's not. Yeah, it's not the American currency or it's not a nation's currency. That you're bypassing those rules because it doesn't apply.

Phil: [00:21:42] No, they still are. The government's going to check out cryptocurrency pretty hard, of course, because they view it as competition. But it does apply. That makes sense. Yeah, they do. And they should because.

Wyatt: [00:21:53] Yes, because they are.

Phil: [00:21:55] Yeah. Well, again, they shouldn't have their monopoly, in my opinion either. So it those regulations still apply and it's to protect the investor. You know, Securities and Exchange Commission is to quote unquote protect the non sophisticated investor. If you're sophisticated, meaning that you have a million dollars or you make two hundred thousand a year, I think is the last criteria, then you don't need to worry about the SEC. You can make the investment because you're an exempt investor. So there's a lot of rules applying to that.

Wyatt: [00:22:25] You didn't break my brain, but you bent it really hard if that last thing is now. I just realized that by monopolizing the currency market, you've turned the government into a business.

Phil: [00:22:35] Absolutely.

Wyatt: [00:22:37] Like I and it's a fun that's a flip flop, in the mind.

Phil: [00:22:40] Why we talk about what the Fed policy is and what the government's doing, because they now control so much of what the economy is doing. And when they eat up health care and other things, again, they're they're sucking that in so that central planners in Washington, D.C., become the power brokers for what happens in the United States. And I'm against it so.

Barna: [00:22:59] Well, but I also problem with basically the currency being a market by itself or banks being an entity that is for profit, because now your cash is no longer a tool just for your financial use to buy something now it's a toy for corporations and the government to stack the deck. And they can because they control most of it.

Phil: [00:23:33] Yeah. And now they don't even tax it. They just print it, quote unquote, because it's actually digital. So you just hit a computer button and all of a sudden there's a trillion dollars created. So again, they're flooding the market and it's creating less wealth for the average individual because their dollars are worth less.

Wyatt: [00:23:48] Because it dilutes the cash.

Phil: [00:23:49] Absolutely.

Wyatt: [00:23:50] Yeah, exactly. And I said that to Barna a year some change ago. And like, if they keep printing money, they're going to dilute anybody's cash that's sitting here because it had a perceived value.

Phil: [00:23:59] To so you might be taxed.

Barna: [00:24:00] I fooled them. I have no cash,

Wyatt: [00:24:03] No crypto, no cash, no land. I'm not even here.

Phil: [00:24:07] Is not a bad way to be off the grid.

Wyatt: [00:24:09] Guys, before we chase this rabbit down another hole, because I would love to.

Barna: [00:24:12] Ok, so Phil, you're going to have to come back again. Now we're getting into other things,

Wyatt: [00:24:16] Into the weeds we go.

Barna: [00:24:17] Or just coffee, we'll do this over coffee.

Wyatt: [00:24:19] Thank you again for joining us on the podcast, Phil. Thank you for for being here.

Phil: [00:24:22] It's my pleasure.

Wyatt: [00:24:23] And hopefully we'll see you soon.

Phil: [00:24:24] Ok, thanks.

Barna: [00:24:26] Follow us, like us, share, subscribe. Follow us on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook or wherever you consume your podcasts.

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