The Ponce City Market Approach to Sustainable Construction
Transcript
Atif Qadir 00:10
Welcome to American Building. I'm your host Atif Qadir. Join me as we explore the skylines and strip malls, the crosswalks and rail crossings, the balconies, the buildings and the boroughs shaping the next generation of real estate. Let's build common ground.
Atif Qadir 00:33
Today, our guest is Carrie Denning Jackson, a Director at Jamestown. Jamestown is the firm behind landmark adaptive reuse projects like Chelsea Market and Ponce City Market, both of which we touch on in our interview with Jim Somoza of Industry City. Since joining Jamestown, she has led innovation and recently started running sustainability, embedding measurable health, environmental and community programs directly into its mixed-use developments. She worked at Sidewalk Labs before working at Jamestown. And as founder of Place as Medicine, Carrie translates Jamestown's ESG ambitions into actionable design and programming frameworks that prioritize occupant well being and environmental sustainability. Her work spans initiatives like urban tree canopy expansion, mineral-based interior finishes for improved air quality, and the creation of healing spaces within campuses and high rise buildings. Today, we'll be talking about the Ponce City Market in Atlanta. The new Ponce City phase two includes three separate buildings: Scout, which is a 405-unit hospitality building, Signal House, which is 162-unit residential building, and 619, which is 115,000 mass timber office building. Thank you so much for being here with us, Carrie.
Carrie Denning Jackson 02:07
Yeah, thank you so much. Such an honor to be on this. You've had some amazing people over time, and it's bizarre and very cool you just interviewed Jim Somoza. This is great.
Atif Qadir 02:16
That's perfect. It's the world's colliding. Speaking of that overlap with Jim, both of you have worked with or on projects at Jamestown, so tell us about how you got to your role at Jamestown. What was your work history and your career before that?
Carrie Denning Jackson 02:31
Yeah, of course. So pretty much since college, I have been obsessed with the idea of technology and cities and how you can use technology to shape and transform cities. So at the time, back when I was in college, how the Internet and virtual technologies were just radically shaping what it meant to be in physical spaces. And many people thought, Oh, you don't need physical spaces. You can work from the mountains, or you can work from wherever. So I just thought that dynamic of what you can do without place and what you can do with place was so fascinating, and so I just dove into that head first, and some of my first work was on innovation and transportation. Then I went to IBM for a while and did their Smarter Cities work. Again, how can you pull in technology to improve cities? One of the first projects I worked on there was using cell phone data to understand anonymously where people were going. And turns out, now, on my team, you know, we have someone who's looking very closely at this information from the data and research side to understand the type of person who's coming to our asset and how we can make it just an amazing place for them.
Carrie Denning Jackson 03:45
Post IBM, I went to business school, and then I started working at Sidewalk Labs. At the time, couldn't imagined a more exciting place to work for someone who's obsessed with technology and obsessed with cities. It was just this really wonderful thing, because when I started in my career so early, you know, we just had iPhones, we kind of had Yelp, we did not have Uber. And then suddenly you see this explosion of place-based technology and ways you can improve your experience in life. And so Sidewalk was just this brain trust of amazing people you know, like Dan Doctoroff, Josh Seiberman, Rit Agarwal, Charlotte Matthews, who ran sustainability at Related, and then so many peers and friends of mine. And we're still all close to this day, and text constantly, and we're all at our different spots. And so while I was at Sidewalk towards the tail end of it, my focus was on the future of ground floor retail, and how can we make the ground floors inclusive of art spaces and community and obviously small business, large business. How can we make that really great and compelling?
Carrie Denning Jackson 04:54
The company we always looked to was Jamestown. We had pictures of Industry City and Chelsea Market and Ponce in our decks, like I copied and pasted a lot of pictures of Jamestown properties, and we always thought they're doing it right. They're finding the right people in the right mix and curating it and being placemakers, which is rare in real estate, to find groups that like really care about how you feel when you're in a place, and just that magic. And so when I was leaving Sidewalk, I was just serendipitously on LinkedIn, as one does when they're looking for a new job. And a close friend of mine was at Jamestown, and so I reached out, and turned out they had a job focused on innovation and bringing innovations to the properties. And it was like, this is perfect. So it was kind of a dream come true job, and how I got to Jamestown.
Atif Qadir 05:44
That's perfect. So the through line in what you've described, what I'm hearing is a real curiosity about how people live in buildings in the cities around them, the ability to collect and use data in order to inform and produce conscious thinking and planning and design, that overall look and feel and experience of a place that for anyone, whether Jamestown or otherwise, that there's something really positive there for the people that are living there. So love that, and for any folks that may not be familiar, just want to briefly mention Sidewalk Labs. So Carrie did mention that that was a subsidiary of Alphabet. It was founded in 2015 and wants to do exactly that, which is marrying the data and experience of living in a city together. And one of their biggest projects was a waterfront redevelopment in Toronto. So currently, I believe there's something called Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners. Is that the version two or the evolution of Sidewalk Labs?
Carrie Denning Jackson 06:41
So that was created concurrently with sidewalk. It was an infrastructure fund around it, so it still exists, and it took outside capital as well.
Atif Qadir 06:50
So you had mentioned having serendipitously been on LinkedIn and then found the next stage in your career. Earlier on, I described you as having started in innovation as the focus. That's the job there, the role that you focused on, and more recently, you have added onto your portfolio sustainability. From Jamestown's perspective, could you describe what falls under innovation, what you're excited about in that arena, and then similarly, for sustainability?
Carrie Denning Jackson 07:16
So innovation and sustainability are kind of joined at the hip in a cool way. So when I joined, you know, I immediately vibed with our head of sustainability, who's since left, but she's fantastic. Her name is Becca Timms, so she was at Jamestown for, I think, over a decade. And we immediately landed on the fact that when I was looking at innovation in real estate, I saw three things. I saw the importance of data. I saw sustainability being, first and foremost, like we have to be good to the planet, but also our investors, a lot of our tenants, lenders want us to want to see sustainability action, and so many carrots and sticks coming from city, state, federal government around that. So sustainability was a big one, and then, obviously, at the time, and still now, return-to-office, and that dynamic. So those were the three things I saw. And so to that end, we created a data team, and we essentially informally merged innovation and sustainability. So we set in Google speak, OKRs, we set joint objectives and key results, okay for our team. So for the past three years, we were by twice a year, doing retreats, aligning on, you know, these are the things we want to work on.
Carrie Denning Jackson 08:30
And so the sustainability team really owned the sustainability pilots, but we could each speak to them. So like the energy management system that we brought in to optimize our HVAC, like so, much of that is technology driven. Yes, there are some things that you could say are manual approaches, but even then, you know, what are the innovations we can bring to the assets that will help them on their carbon, energy, wastewater journey? And so we really combined those together, and that's really the approach we still take of how can we weave in innovation to hit our sustainability goals? And we recently reset our global targets and commitments for ESG, this is something companies, cities, states, everyone resets every few years. What are our 2030 goals, or 2050, goals. And our second wave of goals ended in 2024, so we got a chance to reset them and as a really fun exercise, and we narrowed it down to three measurable targets around carbon, wastewater, and then we lined up six commitments. So we call them commitments, because they're not measured with a baseline, with a number, so we can't, we're not going to call them a target, because we're not going to, we don't know if we hit it.
Carrie Denning Jackson 09:48
But we have six commitments, and well, several of them actually are about health, because it's healthy people, healthy planet. That's kind of the way we think about it. And so we have designing inclusive spaces because loneliness is a big factor in our health. And the former Surgeon General like that was one of his big calls to arms around loneliness. We talk about increasing access to nature, increasing the ability for people to be active and move. Walkability is a big factor of that, and we really pride ourselves on creating walkable spaces. Signal House, which is part of the Ponce phase two development, which we're going to talk about, one of its front doors is on the Atlanta Beltline. And if you've ever been to Atlanta, like the Beltline is magical, like, and you go on it in the afternoon or in the early evening, people are going down it, and they have lights on their skateboards and scooters. And it's just like a really, amazing experience to watch.
Carrie Denning Jackson 10:42
And then another big commitment we have is around healthy materials, which is something I feel really strongly about. And you know, I've always had this love of cities and technology, but when I became a mom in 2020 which feels so long ago, I can't believe he's almost five, but I realized that, yes, I had a deep understanding of the relationship between nature and health, but I wasn't deeply ensconced in the materials that we use, or air quality or water quality, even the lighting that we choose and its impact on our health, or mattresses having flame retardants, things like that. I knew nothing, and so I started to take a look at that and pursue some of this, creating content and sharing some of this knowledge to the world through my passion project outside of work called Place as Medicine. But then I also got to jump in on work we're already doing at Jamestown around healthy materials, and now, with the role of sustainability can really shepherd it even more.
Carrie Denning Jackson 11:43
And so that's where we're doing stuff like healthy paint pilots using mineral paints instead of acrylic-based paint. So we're going to try those out and learn a little bit more. We tested cork flooring at Scout. It doesn't have some of the downsides that vinyl flooring has. You know, vinyl flooring is incredibly toxic to create, so that places where it's created in the US and in Canada, have very high cancer rates. In Canada, they don't have as many boys because of the unfortunately, phthalates, which can often be put into vinyl, are endocrine disruptors. They affect your hormones. So, you know, you want to try to move away from that as much as you can. And so we try cork flooring. We're working through right now an MOU with a group called Habitable, which used to be Healthy Buildings Network. So they're going to help us look at our materials library, give us insight on it, essentially grade it, and then help us move towards, you know, healthier materials across the board, likely kind of hacking off the most challenging ones, like carpet. I have a bazillion carpet samples here, and so we throw out something like three...what is the number? 4 billion tons of carpet every year? 4 billion pounds of carpet? Sorry, tons is high in the United States, and a lot of it's plastic backed. And also you want to avoid that. It's a long way to say, you know, sustainability is a broad topic. We are thinking about healthy planet and healthy people, and it's just been this really nice, complimentary intersection of passion I have outside of work, and then how I can be part of existing work and help push the existing work forward in this role.
Atif Qadir 13:24
I think a lot of the overlaps that you described come really beautifully together in your roles at Jamestown, and you mentioned carbon, waste and water as the three focus areas for the company. And I'm really glad that you mentioned Dr. Vivek Murthy, the former Attorney General, and that focus on loneliness, because it helps to pull back and describe the building. I think similarly, the building process as not something that is just focused on square footage and what is produced in terms of profit or loss, but actually about that experience that place helps to elicit. Speaking of that experience, you mentioned Place as Medicine in your description of areas that you focus in, focusing before Jamestown and then afterwards. So tell us about what were your experiences that helped you to decide that there was a need for something like Place as Medicine and then decide to launch it. And what's your goal overall with that initiative?
Carrie Denning Jackson 14:21
Yeah, it's really when I became a mom, it was just like, so surprising to me, like, just how little I knew about, again, something like flame retardants in mattresses, where a recent study came out University of Toronto, a woman named Miriam Diamond, this was, like a month ago that the amount of flame retardants in the air and phthalates, and I think it was UV filters around children's beds was extremely high, and they realized it's because their body heat was causing those chemicals to emit. And these are extremely toxic. One of the chemicals which is somewhat out of use now poly brominated diphenyl ethers. Another study showed that it is a number one contributor to IQ loss in the, I think, the United States, or maybe globally, even before lead. And so there were just these things I was learning along the way of like, wow, this is nuts. And if I don't know about it, my friends don't know about it, there's a lot of I guess you could call it health washing and things that are sold that might not be the right solution. And so with Place as Medicine, it's really about more getting it out to like consumers, friends, everyday people.
Carrie Denning Jackson 15:32
I feel strongly that just as we think about food as medicine or exercise as medicine, we need to think about the built environment and the live environment around us, whether that's, you know, our water quality, the materials in our homes, the materials behind our walls. So there's healthy insulation, there's unhealthy insulation, and then think about it through to the neighborhood you know, where tree canopy has been shown to be incredibly beneficial for our health. There's this really wonderful study out of University of Louisville's Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute, which is a whole institute set up to understand health and the lived environment. They call it the Envirome, kind of like the human biome. That's like they made up that name and their study they looked over the course of several years, they planted, they took a four square mile area in Louisville that's socioeconomically diverse. They planted trees in one area, about 8000 trees, no trees in the other area. They did it really intentionally, where they actually modeled like the fluid dynamics of wind coming off the highways.
Carrie Denning Jackson 16:36
So they planted trees kind of in the right areas, mostly evergreens they found were the most effective. No surprise, because they're leaves year round, and they were able to show in the first wave of data, so they've they're going to keep getting data over the years, they found that the trees reduced a biomarker, an inflammatory biomarker, by an amount that translates to a roughly 10% reduction in cardiovascular disease over 10 years, which is a remarkable statistic. For me, sharing something like that and putting it in the same breath as, Hey, think about the materials in your home, the water, the tree canopy, if you can think about all that that essentially is, that's medicine. What a way to think about making your spaces really great and contributing to your health, like we need to talk about that. So that's kind of the mission behind it.
Atif Qadir 17:30
Amazing. And then in terms of one additional role, as you create this set of professional and personal endeavors that you have, is you're a board member of the New York State Chapter of the Nature Conservancy. So green infrastructure is a really important aspect of that. One of those is urban tree expansion. Could you talk about some of your hopes and your goals in your work with that organization?
Carrie Denning Jackson 17:54
Yeah, I love the Nature Conservancy. I've been working with them kind of on and off since 2009. I did a couple papers in my masters with them around conservation, and, you know, the growth of conservation, and does that impact housing prices and things like that. So I've loved them for a long time. My areas of interest, no surprise with them, are cities innovation. And then I care a lot about training younger people and getting younger people excited about green careers and upskilling. So those are the three big areas. And yes, absolutely it's in New York State. In New York City, it's about increasing tree canopy. So the city voted, they approved a measure to increase tree canopy to 30% but we need to, like, really get it in the budget, so there's advocacy efforts around that.
Carrie Denning Jackson 18:43
And yeah, as you mentioned, green infrastructure, like you see when there's various storm events, whether Sandy or Hurricane Henri, and all the ones we have, like you see basement flooding in Brooklyn, you see really high flood, and that's all these impervious surfaces. So asphalt in Brooklyn and green infrastructure, so tree wells, parks, any green space absorbs obviously, you know, it becomes a muddy field, it absorbs the water. And so Nature Conservancy does a lot around that. There's a pilot in Greenwood Cemetery in Queens, or in Brooklyn, can't remember, that's bad.
Atif Qadir 18:44
In the city of New York.
Carrie Denning Jackson 19:04
In the city of New York, one of the five boroughs, that acts as kind of a retaining pond for excess rain, and they use a really cool technology to kind of monitor and be the sensor there. So they're just doing so much around green infrastructure, which is something that at least needs to be put in place, side by side with great infrastructure.
Atif Qadir 19:05
This is, I think, a really good segue into talking about the project that we're focusing on in this episode, which is the Ponce City Market phase two, because it incorporates so many of the themes that you described in your work with Jamestown, Place as Medicine and The Nature Conservancy. Level set it. Give us the big picture description of first, what Ponce City Market is, and then about phase two.
Carrie Denning Jackson 19:05
yeah. So Ponce City Market is this incredible project. It was a former Sears distribution center. Jamestown developed it into this amazing mixed use asset. It's in Atlanta, it's in the Old Fourth Ward, and many, many years ago, developed it into, you know, food hall, office space. There's, you know, a little amusement park on the roof. It's right on the Beltline. It's just this really interesting, fun space. It's like, Chelsea Market on steroids.
Atif Qadir 19:05
I didn't know there's an amusement park.
Carrie Denning Jackson 19:19
Yeah, yeah. It's super cool. It's like, got, like, one of those, you know, you you go up in the little tower and it drops. It doesn't go far. But I guess it's like this cool. It's really cool. And recently, you know, as I joined Jamestown, we were working on phase two of that. And phase two was a mass timber building around four stories, and then two other buildings, both 21 stories, one hospitality building called Scout, and then the other one called Signal House, which is residential. And these were big projects, and they really did push the bounds of what we were you know all about in terms of sustainability and technology. The mass timber office building especially is just this delightful building, and the whole story is really, really cool. Jamestown also owns timber as one of our asset classes, and we own some timber in the southeast. And so the timber for the mass timber building came from our own seedlings. And so it was this kind of like, I think our head of timber calls it like tree to table or something like that. I'm gonna mess it up, but it's like a full farm to table building.
Carrie Denning Jackson 21:41
So it's this full continuum, and because it was all in the southeast, the carbon footprint is low because it wasn't being trucked long distances. And people just love that building. It leased up very quickly. There's a Pottery Barn on the first floor. And people go into the Pottery Barn and they're like, Oh, what's that smell? Is that a candle? I want that candle? And turns out it's just the smell of the Southern Yellow Pine. And so it's this, like, wonderful, biophilic building where you're getting all the senses. You're seeing the wood grain, you know, it has lots of balconies. There's plantings on the balconies. So visually, it's beautiful. Smells amazing. So there's just all these wonderful elements that it would be such a great place to work. So it's an incredible building.
Atif Qadir 22:23
It's a reminder that that contrast between earlier you mentioned beds, children's beds, that have fire retardants, and the experience of that of having toxic chemicals in and around you, versus having the very alluring smell of Southern Pine as two very, very different experiences. And there's a level of of consciousness about what should and could the experience of a user be, and then making other conscious decisions to maximize that person's experience there. So I love that focus that you described there. So you described that mass timber isn't just about aesthetics, it's about a investment channel for Jamestown, it's about that experience for the users themselves. For folks that aren't familiar with mass timber and cross laminated timber, could you give a an overview description of what that is and how that's an alternative to things that people might be familiar with?
Carrie Denning Jackson 23:20
Yeah. So it's wood, wooden beams that are essentially like compressed, include down. So you create the superstructure of the building out of really, really strong, structurally sound wood. It's like, really strong Lincoln Logs. And the superstructure of this building was built in a very fast amount of time. I want to say it was 1/3 the time. And we built it with six people and two foremen.
Atif Qadir 23:46
You said six people?
Carrie Denning Jackson 23:48
And obviously, like, you're going back in and you're doing the facade and the MEP and all that stuff, but just the structure itself, because you're just, it's Lincoln Logs. So you're like, boom, boom, boom, boom. And it's a really, really, it's just a different way of building. But, you know, you had asked earlier, what advice we'd give around that. And you know, I wasn't the one responsible on this, you know, I've learned what the teams have done. And at Sidewalk Labs, we were also trying to build, actually, 40 story mass timber buildings.
Atif Qadir 24:15
Including in Toronto?
Carrie Denning Jackson 24:16
In Toronto, we were going full mass timber. And so that was called Keysight, yeah. And I think the current builder on it last time, this was years ago, but it was, I think, believe it's Dream, and they were doing mass timber. You'd have to check that, but I believe they were doing mass timber, and it's becoming a more popular building material, but it's just a different in how you do it, instead of, instead of the current process, you do a lot of integrated upfront planning with all the different parties, because you have to, it has to be all integrated together and how you build it. So the the pre construction, pre development phase, is much longer, and it's much more full team effort. And then the building phase is shorter. What I would recommend would be people understanding that and learning that nuance. I think the sourcing locally was really interesting for us. And, you know, local supply chains for mass timber is an important thing, and then telling the story, telling the story, especially to drive leasing and get it, you know, these buildings tend to lease up faster because they're just like wonderful buildings to be in. All of that kind of ties together to create a compelling investment.
Atif Qadir 25:27
Amazing. So for listeners that want to deep dive into that topic of mass timber, check out the episode with Nate Helbech, who's the CEO of The Neutral Project. And we focus on understanding mass timber as well as how it's being applied in residential projects across the country. So mass timber is just one of the innovative and sustainability focused initiatives that Jamestown has put into place into phase two. So tell us about the other suite of initiatives and directions that the company is taking with the three projects that are part of phase two.
Carrie Denning Jackson 25:58
Yeah. So another big push we had was about air quality and air quality in the interior spaces, because that's a key one for occupant health. And so we did a few things there. We opted for cork flooring, better air quality experience. We put in induction stoves, which is a really important one, as opposed to gas. Another recent study out of Stanford just came out around, you know, the toxicity of gas stoves. And I know it's a political topic, but it is, you know, not healthy to breathe in gas. And then one that seems extremely simple, but operable windows. You don't usually have operable windows on a 21 story building, and obviously they go out a small amount, but that allows exterior air in and out of the building, which, you know, indoor air quality does tend to be worse than outdoor, with the exception of my apartment, because I've tested that, and I live in lower Manhattan, and it's really bad from the windows, but in this situation, it allows for that airflow to come in and out.
Carrie Denning Jackson 26:49
And I think the mineral paint pilot at Scout will also be really interesting. Acrylic paints, even if they're zero VOCs, still have synthetic chemicals in them that aren't good for air quality and mineral paint, similar to a mass timber. It just like by steps the whole process and its whole concern, it's naturally occurring it's, you know, rocks, and it doesn't have the acrylic based paints off gassing. It's antifungal, it's naturally fire resistant, and you avoid the fact that paint makes up 58% of the micro plastics in the ocean, so you're not having that downside effect of paint that is harmful for the planet.
Atif Qadir 27:43
Okay. And then what you're describing is essentially the guidebook for what Jamestown is looking to deploy in its projects all across the country. So a lot of the materials and the different aspects that you talked about are potentially coming from other countries. So out of curiosity, for example, 80% of the soft wood that's used in United States for the building industry comes from Canada. Today, there was the announcement of a trade deal with China to hopefully address some of those issues. Yay, I think the stock market went up as well. But could you talk about any mitigants, or any thoughts that you guys are having internally about being able to deploy such larger initiatives where you're buying a lot of things, and how that can mess up the potential budget when costs spike, perhaps unexpectedly?
Carrie Denning Jackson 28:30
So that I probably can't speak to with the fluency of someone on the development and construction team, but what I can say on the flip side is where our economies of scale can help move pricing down.
Atif Qadir 28:44
That's a really good point.
Carrie Denning Jackson 28:46
So in some cases, like, linoleum is not your grandma's linoleum, but there's cooler linoleum. It's a healthy building product for flooring. It's linseed oil and like wood pulp, essentially. And a lot of the leading producers, is my understanding, we haven't gone deep in this, but it's one we want to look into more are from Europe, and so they are expensive. And you know, the more buyers you have, whether it's us or us plus a consortium of other developers, and we've kind of talked about that with other developers, we can collectively bring those prices down. There are just some products out there where it's not favorable. Like mineral paint is more expensive than you know, a Sherwin Williams. So how can we all work together, drive that demand, and create new markets for some of these healthier products?
Atif Qadir 29:40
Amazing. So as a organization as large and with such a wide footprint as Jamestown, you have the ability to produce projects that serve as pilots or case studies for other developers. For say, mid-sized or smaller developers that are interested in, let's start with mass timber, for mass timber, could you talk about the planning or the strategy that someone should take to want to do their first mass timber project?
Carrie Denning Jackson 30:08
Yeah, I think again, yeah. I'm just going to caveat that this is not, you know, I'm not a on the development and construction team, but my advice, I think, first and foremost, would be to talk to someone who's done it before and really get their learnings. There are enough. There's starting to be more and more groups, and especially, there's a bunch of developers in the Pacific Northwest that have done this and can give you those learnings, especially around the stuff around the pre-development timeframe, working potentially with Department of Buildings to, if you're working in a city where they don't yet have the policies and codes in place for mass timber, you can get those best practices. That's what I would bias towards would be to learn as much as I can. And there's a lot of you know, there was just a mass timber conference at NYU that I was at, and a lot of groups that just want to share this topic, and so there's nothing proprietary necessarily about it. So I would kind of jump into that whole learning environment.
Atif Qadir 31:10
Cool. And then in terms of learning for, say, smaller products, we talked about linoleum, and one of the new names, or the brand names used currently, is Marmoleum, yeah. And I think there's probably could be some branding around that to give it a new name to get away from Grandma's linoleum considering it's like 97% natural materials. Could you talk about how you learn about a lot of these other materials? Are you talking to your architects? Are you pushing them to meet certain goals, like, what's like the flywheel of the stuff that gets put into the building.
Carrie Denning Jackson 31:42
Yeah, there is no shortage of learning opportunities. There are such great groups out there that we really leverage and onto a lot. There's Parson's Healthy Materials Lab. I just, well, I'm not done with the course yet, but I need to finish their course on healthy materials, and it's been super informative on all of this stuff. They also had a Healthy Materials Library at the New School, and so you can go in and see a lot of these really interesting products, you know, seaweed based foams, or hempcrete, you know, big concrete blocks out of hemp. They're such cool products. And so you can learn from them. I mentioned, Habitable is another great one. There's Mindful Materials. ULI has a whole subsector on and product Council and groups working on healthy materials. So there are real leaders in this space. I've gotten to know some folks at Durst in New York City, and they're big leaders in healthy materials and sustainable construction. They've been leaders in this space for a long time. They would be interesting to have on your podcast at some point. So there's a whole community.
Carrie Denning Jackson 32:46
And again, this stuff isn't, it's not like proprietary trade secrets. The more you can make the market and be buyers and share this stuff. We had a webinar or a small group with a few other developers. We hosted it in March, and the CEO of Habitable spoke and spoke about all these considerations. I think teams may not have the bandwidth and the wherewithal at the moment to trial, or not trial, but really have a work stream around healthy materials. It's kind of like, okay, we're trying to build buildings economically and sustainably. And okay, whoa, healthy like I got to take a step back and think about that, but it was a great way to introduce different companies to the work.
Atif Qadir 33:31
Amazing. And the experience of being at Ponce City Market is is amazing. So I was there earlier this year in January, and saw the original building, the adjacent buildings around it, and I definitely vouch for a lot of the benefits that you described for folks that are visiting there. So for you, you travel, you see a lot of Jamestown's projects. You see other projects through your professional endeavors. Where do you feel the most calm amongst all of those projects?
Carrie Denning Jackson 33:58
I know that's such a good question. I mean, outside of really spending time in nature, which is kind of a cop out question for you, there was a building at Stanford, and I'm gonna forget the name. That's where I went undergrad in business school, and it was this beautiful little space in this, like Eucalyptus grove, kind of in one of the main areas, but it felt really secluded and you went inside. It was very meditative. It was almost like a Japanese look and feel. And it had, it has Nathan Oliveras paintings in it. He was a Stanford professor and also a wonderful artist. And it was like, it's an incredibly calming space. Just one of these, like meditative exposed to arts. Art calms your body. So I'd say that to me, you know, epitomizes a space that I find really rejuvenating and healthy from that perspective.
Atif Qadir 34:45
Thank you. That sounds, I feel calmer just hearing the description of that building.
Carrie Denning Jackson 34:57
It's really nice.
Atif Qadir 34:59
So wonderful. I feel like we've had a really informative conversation. I learned a lot about a project that I visited at least twice the Ponce City Market, and I hope our listeners that have known about the project are inspired to go there and see it again. And for anyone that hasn't been there, that gives them the push to go check it out and maybe experience it at nighttime on the Highline, or the Beltway, as Carrie mentioned.
Carrie Denning Jackson 35:24
Yeah, Beltline. Sorry, I'm losing my mind. The Beltway is the one in Toronto. Yeah, underneath the highway.
Atif Qadir 35:32
And the High Line is the one that goes through Chelsea Markets. So there's some connection between all of these. Anyway, thank you so much for your time here, Carrie, I've really enjoyed our conversation so far.
Carrie Denning Jackson 35:43
Yeah, thank you so much. This was fun.
Atif Qadir 35:48
I'm Atif Qadir and thanks for joining me on American Building. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe on your favorite listing app and leave a rating and review. America's housing crisis is one of our greatest challenges. But what are the real solutions? Hear from the developers and other industry experts driving meaningful change. Get our exclusive guide, Housing in America: Eight Ways We Can Solve Our Way Out of a Crisis at americanbuildingpodcast.com.