There's a piece of conventional wisdom in real estate that almost every developer accepts: retail follows rooftops. Build the housing first, then the storefronts will follow. Tesho Akindele and the team behind Camp North End did the opposite—and it’s paying off in a major way.

When's the last time a ping pong game determined whether you could close a $350,000 loan? For Jonathan Dodson, it happened during his first major development project after walking away from a banking career. His moral stand against workplace harassment led him to launch Pivot Project, an Oklahoma City-based development firm specializing in historic preservation and community revitalization. 

When construction costs forced Worrell Yeung to reconsider their ground-up design, they discovered that reimagining a 1980s barn generated a richer project with more character and history than their original approach.