Tesho Akindele of ATCO | Adaptive Reuse and Placemaking at Camp North End
Courtesy of Camp North End
Community-First Development in Charlotte
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 at Camp North End did the opposite—and it’s paying off in a major way.
Camp North End is a 76-acre adaptive reuse project in Charlotte, North Carolina. Formerly a Ford manufacturing plant turned Army facility turned Rite Aid warehouse, ATCO Properties acquired the site in 2017. For decades, the entire campus was disconnected from the eight surrounding residential neighborhoods, completely paved over, and zoned industrial. Today, it's one of the most vibrant developments in the Southeast: 400,000 square feet of office, 75,000 square feet of retail, 300 apartments, and 1.1 million visitors this past year alone.
This conversation unpacks the mechanics behind large-scale adaptive reuse: how to structure opportunity zone financing across multiple phases, ways to optimize brownfield remediation, and strategies for building community buy-in every step of the way. Tesho also walks through the three buckets of development work—project management, financial analysis, and capital raising—and shares how small teams can rise to the challenge of complex projects.
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“To make it the law that single family is the only house type that’s legal is like saying the only car you can drive in the city is a Mercedes Benz. Of course, I’d like to drive a Mercedes Benz, but it shouldn’t be illegal to drive something else.”
About Tesho Akindele
Tesho Akindele recently retired from a 9-year professional soccer career where he represented FC Dallas, Orlando City, and the Canadian national team. Today, Tesho works for ATCO, a real estate development and operating company. His main focus is their Camp North End property, a 76-acre adaptive reuse and development project located in the heart of Charlotte, North Carolina.
Courtesy of Camp North End
Courtesy of Camp North End
Episode Timestamps
(02:06) Tesho’s career as a professional soccer player and the leadership lessons he learned along the way
(08:28) Tesho's transition from soccer to real estate, his passion for housing advocacy, and joining ATCO
(13:05) Walking through Camp North End's site and the long-term vision for the neighborhood
(23:42) Rezoning industrial land and negotiating over rail easements
(31:23) What "legalize housing" means and why single-family-only zoning hurts cities
(36:38) Affordable housing solutions that meet diverse community needs
(39:16) Why opportunity zones encourage long-term thinking and better design choices
(44:05) Building an internal team with community managers, placemakers, and 24/7 security
(49:52) Practical advice for mixed-use developers
Courtesy of Tesho Akindele
Courtesy of Tesho Akindele
About your host:
Atif Qadir is a licensed architect and entrepreneur, interested in solving big problems through innovation and technology. He has founded two proptech companies and a real estate development firm, building products ranging from software to workforce housing.
His work has been covered by Technology Review, The Real Deal, Commercial Observer, and Propmodo. He’s also a frequent speaker on the future of buildings and cities on popular industry podcasts and at conferences, including this past year at the Commercial Observer National DEI Conference, Yale AREA Conference, Columbia Real Estate Symposium, Open Data Week NYC and Austin Design Week.
About Michael Graves
The world-famous design firm Michael Graves is also a founding sponsor of American Building. Its namesake, the iconoclastic designer Michael Graves, FAIA was a fierce advocate for people-centric design. His work defines a generation of American architecture and includes the Portland Building, the Humana Building and the Denver Public Library. The 1st season of American Building was filmed live at The Warehouse, his historic home in Princeton, New Jersey:
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