Really Shoulda Started This Blog Sooner

by Kelsey Wood

Long story short (and I promise to fill in the gaps at some point), but Jack and I are headed to a conference this weekend for real estate investors. Do we think of ourselves as real estate investors? No! Absolutely not! But the fact is, we purchased 2.25 acres of land in West Asheville with a little nest egg and a big dream to build an Eco-community.

We want to do well by doing good for People and the Planet. So, we’ve assembled a team of design professionals and engineers with experience creating ecologically diverse and community-oriented spaces. We’ve learned so much about the development process—UDO and zoning and codes, oh my! We’ve studied different models of cooperative land access, from co-housing to land trusts to REITs. Still, we didn’t know how little we knew about financing… hence the conference. Our goal: find a way to pay for this dream so we can make Asheville’s first urban agri-hood a reality!

Seriously, this has been a long and winding road, and we’re just getting started. I do intend to document our progress along the way. And, at some point, I will get around to telling the backstory of the many obstacles we’ve hit thus far, because the dead ends have informed the course of our progress. Have we made the best decisions that someone with a crystal ball (or some experience in real estate and land development) would have advised us to make? Maybe not. Have we wasted time and some money? Probably. But, by sharing our process, we hope to inspire others to follow a model of land development that puts People and Planet first.