Change the zoning codes. Open up solutions for everyone.
Remember the “starter home?” It was a bungalow. Or a cottage? No, a rambler! I’m writing wistfully in the past tense because the starter home has largely disappeared.
This at a time when experts widely agree we need at least 6 million new homes to house all Americans? Yep. Because many cities and boroughs have made building small homes all but impossible.
The hardest project of my life was a 235 SQF “tiny home” on a 1500 SQF lot in Pittsburgh’s Garfield neighborhood.
I was attempting to build a single-family, detached home in a neighborhood with existing amenities and infrastructure. But the zoning codes as written originally left me with only 50 SQF to build on. 50!
I had to fight the zoning board and building inspector. I had to crowdfund the project (on www.SmallChange.co of course) because I couldn’t get a bank loan since there were no comps. It was as if the city had intentionally designed the codes to make the unit economics of building a starter completely unaffordable.
Communit...more
Investment Crowdfunding Allows Impact Investing So Easy a Child Can Understand
William McGuire is the founder and CEO of Incolo, a venture accelerator designed to help entrepreneurs find capital right in their backyard, often via investment crowdfunding. He envisions a world where everyone in the community is invested in its businesses, thereby participating in the upside collectively.
So Easy a Child Can Understand
An intriguing part of our conversation revolved around helping ordinary people understand and value the opportunity to invest in local businesses. To prove that even kids can understand the basics of investing via crowdfunding, Incolo hosted some sessions with “little investors,” some not having even celebrated two-digit birthdays.
Will says, “We just want to see how our kids interact.”
After identifying several companies that would naturally appeal to children, including an app, a film and other opportunities, they held the session with a handful of children. This list also included some boring fare, like an assisted living project.
“We asked all the...more
Are Your Investments Working Against Your Philanthropy?
Your investments work for you 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. What are they doing? Does that work align with your mission and values?
Hard Work
Investing is hard. Like, really hard.
It’s easy, of course, to buy a stock. Especially today. It has never been easier. Many online brokerages don’t even charge commissions anymore. It’s so easy.
But really investing to earn a return over time that will help you achieve financial goals, like being able to retire someday. That is seriously hard work.
One way to make it easier is to hire other people to do it. There are easy ways to do this, like buying mutual funds and ETFs. An ETF is an exchange-traded fund that trades like a stock but represents ownership in a portfolio of stocks, similar to a mutual fund.
Choosing funds is almost as tricky as selecting stocks. Broad funds like those that track the S&P 500 index or the Nasdaq 100 invest in many individual stocks. Funds are not required to disclose every stock they own—only the top ten la...more
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