The construction industry is at a turning point. Pre-manufactured housing seeks to disrupt conventional building methods due to labor shortages, weather delays, and material waste, as a faster, more efficient alternative. But efficiency shouldn’t come at the cost of health or sustainability. In this episode, Neal Collins sits down with Evan Ryan, a founding member of Croft , a company pioneering a new approach to homebuilding. By integrating the speed of manufacturing with the benefits of natura...
Mar 02, 2025•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast This episode is a front-row seat at a masterclass in regenerative development. Mazyar Mortazavi, CEO of TAS Impact , joins us to share how his Toronto-based firm is redefining urban development by weaving community, sustainability, and impact into every project. Mazyar’s journey is deeply personal—the organization’s strategic plan is following his old master's thesis on anti-gentrification strategies. His interest in this was shaped by growing up in an immigrant family and witnessing firsth...
Feb 20, 2025•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Tre' Cates is an entrepreneur and regenerative thought leader with over 25 years of experience. His work focuses on the importance of building healthy, regenerative organizational environments that support long-term goals without compromising the integrity of society or the environment. As the former COO of the Savory Institute, Tre' played a key role in shaping regenerative agriculture around the globe. For the past decade, he has served as director of nRhythm, which strives to bring ...
Sep 19, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast Blake Jones is a founder of several cooperative enterprises, including Namaste Solar and Kachuwa Impact Fund. He’s a pioneer in his marrying of the cooperative model and impact investing. Kachuwa Impact Fund is democratically owned and operated by its members. They invest in companies that have a positive impact on the environment and society, and real estate that does the same—such as organic farms and affordable housing. They invest in Main Street as opposed to Wall Street, and impact is their...
Aug 29, 2024•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kris Maher is an architect and developer. For over 20 years, she’s worked for the Rancho Mission Viejo community in Orange County, California, where she is currently senior vice president of community development. The master planned community lies on a former cattle ranch, and currently they are developing a 23,000 acre entitlement that will have 14,000 homes in six non-contiguous villages. Almost three-quarters of that land will remain open space surrounding the villages. Kris leads urban plann...
Aug 16, 2024•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jenny Andersson is a regenerative strategist and educator, and the founder of the Really Regenerative Centre in the UK. With over 30 years of experience working alongside brands, organizations, and communities to inspire sustainable and regenerative initiatives, Jenny believes in "harnessing the power of the collective intelligence of organizations and communities to create visions for the future they want." She believes the world has undergone profound shifts—more billionaires than ev...
Jul 29, 2024•1 hr 18 min•Transcript available on Metacast Emily Niehaus is a former mayor and a leader in both affordable housing and education. She is the founder of Community Rebuilds, a nonprofit that constructs affordable straw bale homes, and more recently, she’s also the founder of Heron School, a micro-school for gifted neurodiverse students. In between those ventures, she found the time to be the mayor of Moab, Utah, where she was able to advocate for housing policy with a larger platform. Throughout her impressive, varied career, she has been ...
Jul 09, 2024•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast Jacob Deva Racusin is a natural building designer, builder, and educator. He is a longtime leader in the field of sustainable building and the co-founder of New Frameworks, a worker-owned cooperative committed to a “kinder sort of building.” Using natural materials such as native hardwood, clay, and stone, they are developing data-driven and scalable solutions for cost-effective, non-toxic, plant based building that can substantially impact our urgent ecological and health crises. Starting as a ...
Jun 20, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast Paul Rabinovitch is an impact investor, sustainable developer, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Net Positive Capital, a fund that seeks to build a channel for capital to flow into net positive real estate. He has decades of experience investing in healthy vibrant places and his career is built on the principle that social benefit and profit are not mutually exclusive. He’s been on the leading edge of the impact investing movement in the United States and is hopeful that the rest of the inv...
Jun 06, 2024•54 min•Ep 106•Transcript available on Metacast Sean McLean is a visionary in the field of regenerative development. He is a managing partner of MPact Collective, an impact real estate development firm that takes an innovative, long-term approach toward place-based investing. Sean believes that the best way to build a resilient community is to spend months there full-time learning the issues and addressing them in a sustainable way, working on the scale of decades rather than years. He’s creating opportunities to support underserved and under...
May 22, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep 105•Transcript available on Metacast Analise Roland is an impact entrepreneur, neuroscientist, and movement leader in the field of regenerative development. She is the CEO of Anura, a real estate fund that aims to generate financial, social, and environmental returns. She has a deep belief that developments based on regenerative principles can produce substantial returns that benefit the investor, but also the local community and natural environment. With this mindset, we can foster a regenerative economy and a system of regenerati...
May 06, 2024•1 hr•Ep 104•Transcript available on Metacast Neal and Alissa Collins are partners in business and life, and are co-founders of Latitude Regenerative Real Estate. As Neal recently passed the milestone of publishing the 100th episode of the Regenerative Real Estate Podcast, he and Alissa thought now was a great time for some reflection. Four years after starting the podcast and starting to build the field of Regenerative Real Estate, Neal and Alissa have accumulated a wealth of knowledge from guests and have enjoyed building a community of l...
Apr 10, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep 103•Transcript available on Metacast Doug Davis is a conservation-based real estate developer, self-proclaimed adrenaline junky, and co-founder of The Farm at Okefenokee. It is a legacy project that Doug plans to work on for decades to come, one that combines development and conservation. The Farm is on 705 acres near Folkston, Georgia, and will ultimately have 250 sustainably-built cabins among crop fields and farm animals that will produce high-quality food for its residents. The development is based on principles of regenerative...
Mar 27, 2024•1 hr 28 min•Ep 102•Transcript available on Metacast Lindsay Baker is a movement leader, author, and podcast host. Currently, she is the CEO of the International Living Future Institute, and her path there has been surprising and impressive. She started her career working at the US Green Building Council developing early standards for LEED, subsequently she was a researcher at UC Berkley, global head of sustainability at WeWork, member of Google’s Real Estate Sustainability Team, and co-founder of a smart buildings company. Throughout her winding ...
Mar 13, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep 101•Transcript available on Metacast Greg Hale is an expert on high performance and carbon-neutral buildings. He is one of the developers behind the Catskill Project, a 90-acre carbon-neutral community in upstate New York with homes designed to all passive house standards. The community, which is envisioned to eventually have 25 homes, sees itself as exemplifying the “future of living.” Greg has long been a forward thinker in the area of carbon neutral construction, and the Catskills Project is the culmination of a lifetime of envi...
Feb 28, 2024•54 min•Ep 100•Transcript available on Metacast Peter Block is an author, organizational development consultant, and citizen of Cincinnati, Ohio. Among other books, he has written Flawless Consulting , Stewardship , The Answer to How Is Yes , Community , The Abundant Community , and An Other Kingdom . His work has centered around reclaiming our humanity in the relentless modern world. He has a deep belief in the central role that place and our relationship to it plays in our life—our happiness and our health. Peter and show host Neal discuss ...
Feb 11, 2024•57 min•Ep 99•Transcript available on Metacast Nathan Helbach is a sustainable developer and the CEO of The Neutral Project. When he was in school working on a degree in sustainability, he came up with the idea to build carbon-neutral developments. Today, with The Neutral Project, he is working to make that dream a reality. Key to reducing the embodied carbon in these buildings was moving away from steel and concrete to mass timber. Currently, Nathan is behind the construction of what will be the tallest mass timber building in the world. Na...
Jan 24, 2024•59 min•Ep 98•Transcript available on Metacast Brandon Welch is the co-founder and CEO of Mad Capital, an investment fund dedicated to helping farmers transition from conventional to regenerative and organic agriculture. Brandon knew he wanted to do something to make a positive impact on society and the environment, and he found that the world of finance was the most powerful way for him to do so. Conventional practices are so deeply ingrained in the culture of agriculture and business of farms, that it takes a big leap of faith and lots of ...
Jan 09, 2024•42 min•Ep 97•Transcript available on Metacast Mark Lakeman is an architect, placemaker, and urban planner. He is the founder and design director of Communitecture, and the co-founder of both the City Repair Project and Village Building Convergence. He believes that public spaces play a foundational role in human society. However with relatively recent colonial systems they have been subdued and replaced by a grid system that connects cars and commerce but not so much people. Now, he is working to revive them by breaking through the cultural...
Dec 15, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep 96•Transcript available on Metacast David Leon is the Co-Founder & Executive Director at Farmer's Footprint and Drew Dumsch is the President & CEO of The Ecology School. They are both inspiring leaders in the regenerative movement and have taken innovative approaches to funding their projects. Although the topics of profit and capital can make many in the regenerative world queasy, the reality is that funding is a foundational element to most ambitious initiatives. And just like how society's ideas about food pro...
Nov 24, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep 95•Transcript available on Metacast David Todd is a longtime designer, green living innovator, and realtor. Now he is Partner and Co-Head of Community at Latitude Regenerative Real Estate. He began practicing regenerative real estate in Portland many years before that phrase entered anyone's vocabulary and he's passionate about bringing like-minded people together to accomplish big things. Now, he lives in Kingston, New York, where he is continuing his mission to empower agents and real estate professionals to be catalys...
Nov 09, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep 94•Transcript available on Metacast Mel Meagher is the founder of Unfold Development, a values-driven design and development studio specializing in regenerative thinking. After spending a decade working in a more conventional real estate setting, Mel realized just how disconnected humans have become from our environment–in particular, the harmful impact that our built environments, materials and construction practices have on the earth and on our health. Mel and show host Neal discuss how Mel’s career led them to completely rethin...
Oct 25, 2023•50 min•Ep 93•Transcript available on Metacast Jacob Waddell is the president of the Hemp Building Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to researching and promoting healthy and sustainable building practices. The way we construct our built environment has been a major cause of today’s most pressing environmental and health problems. Moving away from conventional construction materials to those that are more natural is a promising solution that’s only now starting to catch on in the U.S. Jacob and show host Neil discuss Jacob’s path ...
Oct 11, 2023•56 min•Ep 92•Transcript available on Metacast Greg Peterson is a green-living innovator, educator, and podcast host. His life vision, which has guided him for more than 30 years, is "I am the person on the planet responsible for transforming our global food system." Greg was introduced to permaculture in the 1990s and was quickly inspired to spread its basic ideals of sustainability and working with nature. In 2001, Greg created the Urban Farm, a real world environmental showcase home in Phoenix, Arizona, where people could learn ...
Sep 20, 2023•1 hr•Ep 91•Transcript available on Metacast Scott Snodgrass is an entrepreneur, farmer, and land developer. He's started a number of businesses, including Edible Earth Resources, a productive landscapes company; Agmenity, a community farm developer; and most recently Meristem Communities, a real estate development firm focusing on "places for people." He and his business partner Clayton Garrett are working on their first big community project near Houston, called Indigo. Scott and show host Neal discuss Scott's path to...
Sep 07, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep 90•Transcript available on Metacast James Ehrlich is a technology and media entrepreneur. He's the founder of ReGen Villages, a tech-driven company that seeks to design regenerative communities focused on food, water, energy, and circular waste management. He's also the director of compassionate sustainability at Stanford University's Center for Compassion and Altruism Research. James uses his lifetime of experience with video games, television story-telling, and tech to create engaging software that can help people...
Aug 15, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep 89•Transcript available on Metacast Matt Morley is a Europe-based biophilic designer, entrepreneur, and podcaster. He is the founder of Biofilico and Biofit Health & Fitness, and the host of the Green Healthy Places podcast. He’s passionate about biophilic, healthy spaces and finding and bringing together other people leading innovative initiatives in the world of sustainability—which he gets to do with his podcast. As this interview is also being published on Matt’s podcast, he and show host Neal interview each other. They bo...
Aug 02, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep 88•Transcript available on Metacast Tres Crow is a writer, artist, and designer. He's the president of Roots Down, an environmental education firm dedicated to helping governments, non-profits, and communities transform their expensive, labor-intensive green areas into productive urban landscapes. Tres and his colleagues at Roots Down argue that, with the right education, landscapers can change their practices, save money and make landscapes more sustainable. Show host Neal and Tres discuss how the landscaping industry has la...
Jul 19, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep 87•Transcript available on Metacast Jay Standish is an entrepreneur and co-founder of OpenDoor Coliving. For nearly ten years with that company, he was a pioneer in the business of professionally-run community housing. OpenDoor started by leasing a single home and eventually came to operate over 400 units in three states. In December of 2022, Jay and his business partner Ben Provan closed the business after a challenging, but successful run. Jay and show host Neal discuss Jay's first major experiences with nature and the outd...
Jul 05, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Ep 86•Transcript available on Metacast Jo Petroni is an architect based in rural France, and she is the founder of Permarchitecture. She believes in "listening to your land," which is a way to observe the land where we live and build with curiosity and humility—and ultimately reconnect with nature. Jo is also an illustrator and climate change communicator. She is a co-creator of and contributor to the Carbon Almanac and she has an "Epistolary" of letters to imaginary friends published on Substack. Jo and show host...
Jun 20, 2023•1 hr•Ep 85•Transcript available on Metacast 
