On Medium and Freaking Out

One of the historical peculiarities of digital self-publishing is the reduction of time between interior notion and broadcast belief. The majority of self-published content — be it on social media or on platforms like Medium — is stuff that would have stayed anonymous in letters and journals in days of printed matter, which required considerably more effort to distribute widely than clicking a button.

Amidst the din of online voices, there’s presumably a distinction between self-publishers churning out irrelevant ephemera to no one and those producing useful content for engaged readers. For most of my self-publishing journey, I attempted to land in the latter category, being thoughtful about what I published and generally limiting it to my field of expertise, i.e. the intersection of housing, economics, climate, innovation, technology, and policy. But last summer, I lost this erstwhile editorial prudence and demonstrated the potential downsides of self-publishing — downsides that compelled me to disable my Medium channel for much of the past year.

Birth of a Breakdown

COG was made up of some of the real estate world’s top players, including the outbound director of design at WeWork and the former Chief Economist at the Zillow Group.

For most of 2021, I was focused on developing my real estate startup, Change Order Group (COG), which, despite assembling some of the top names in applied real estate innovation and research, never got funding or jobs. I became quite convinced I was being blackballed in the real estate development and VC scenes owing to several (well-deserved) attacks I made against bad operators in my illustrious network.

I got an opportunity to speak with San Jose, California’s housing department’s podcast, Dwellings, on behalf of COG.

I put everything into COG: I spent my days and nights producing compelling decks and blog posts, I did interviews with major cities, I talked to scores of VCs and potential clients. None of it seemed to matter. People didn’t want to work with me. Everyone agreed I was a top notch trend-forecasting consultant, but no one could see me as a founder who could be counted on to pander to capital market concerns. Former Goldman and Blackstone finance functionaries got hundred million dollar-plus climate funds, while my group, the world’s most talented group of real estate startup, AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction), and research professionals idled or, in my case, starved. I was pissed, and the lack of industry recognition and investment gave me nothing to lose. I used my reputation and platforms, including Medium, to drag the bad guys down to the gutter with me.

Some of the people I attacked seemed unlikely candidates, such as NYC affordable housing developer Jonathan Rose, who, despite his cultivated do-gooder branding, is a key player in promoting a corrupt, unsustainable project in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood.

Editorially, my previous terse, dry, data-backed prose was replaced long, aggressive screeds with complex plots involving people I once called friends, peers, and family members. In a world that uses “that’s not normal” as an invective, these screeds were easy to dismiss as the creations of someone who “needed help.”

This text, given to me by former peer Jon Dishotsky about Brad Hargreaves, was one of many bits of private information I shared online. While useful to investors and would-be founders, sharing stuff like this made me unpopular with many founders of absurdly valued startups like Common, which has received over $100M in venture funding, despite questionable business model, market size, and competence.

While I was aware of how odd my stuff looked, I reasoned that I was too suggestive in the past. If readers knew the details like I did, they’d understand why freaking out and naming names was the only appropriate response to what’s happening. Billions, if not trillions, of dollars are being funneled into stillborn, unsustainable, and predatory real estate projects and startups, all in the service of enriching passive 1-percenter investors, all while the health and material security of the average global working citizen grows ever more precarious, all underwritten by the tax-backed Fed and other central banks, all being promoted as rational business and policy in the news. The logical conclusions of continuing these systems is a genocide of the have-nots. The malevolence of this system cannot be understated.

Cause: FED has created new money backed by mortgage backed securities (bonded leases, mortgages, construction loans, etc. of various asset classes). In order for inflation to decrease, those bonds need to pay out, but much of the real estate is developed for the funds made on the development, not ongoing asset or market stability. Without corresponding and durable economic growth, rents, mortgages, and associated derivative markets will collapse due to mass defaults — no income, no rent or mortgage payment.

Cause. Many of those FED stimulus funds went straight into the coffers of the world’s richest people.

Effect: Across the globe, the cost of living is on the rise.

Effect: The Fed added 80% of all US dollars in the last two years, most of which ended up in investor pockets, while driving inflation and CPI (consumer price index) to record highs and increasing strain on the majority of renters and homeowners.

Reset to Medium

I reactivated my Medium page today, and decided to delete and delist some of my more bizarre, aggressive content, which had its time and place, but now seems a bit wackadoodle.

I brought the page back largely to make my older content available. You see, many of my intimations of market collapse have manifested. Housing affordability is worse than ever. The economy is more leveraged with real estate debt than ever (see MBS chart above), and because the stimulus was primarily generated by mortgage backed securities, a real estate debt crisis could likely trigger a global economic crisis. Many of the initial venture and incubator real estate startups I wrote about folded or proved hopelessly inept and/or corrupt, doing so despite receiving gobs of venture funding and media hype. It’s all still happening and no one is reporting about it truthfully. I want to change that.

I’ve kept busy whilst off Medium. I redirected my startup efforts from COG to my running-focused startup, Run Haus. I started a Substack newsletter with pithier, more personal content, though it is liberally doused with housing, climate, and demographic data. I’ve interviewed and published several pieces in external media. And I’ve started consulting again in the housing and AEC worlds. Take a look at a mostly up-to-date collection of links here.

A general business interview I gave with a Denver-based headhunter in May, 2022, of where I’ve been and what I’m up to.

I’m not sure how I’l use Medium going forward, but I want my older content to be visible. I want there to be far less mystery about why housing is so unaffordable and inefficient (it’s designed that way), and why it’ll get worse surprises under status quo leadership. The good news is that housing, health, economics, and everyday life doesn’t need to be so awful for so many. It’s time to stop believing that’s the case and start promoting conversations that say why.

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