The Magic Cow

I had the pleasure of attending the tenth annual UNC Real Estate Conference this past week, and by "pleasure" I mean "obligation." An associate principal at my office--a UNC business school alumnus, and thus the dead-center target audience for this conference--had gotten the firm to foot the bill for his attendance, then was dispatched to Baltimore on more pressing business. Rather than let the firm simply eat the conference fee, he thought it would be better to have them eat five hours of my completely unapplied time, too.

I had never been to the Carolina Club; it probably would have been useful to equate "Carolina Club" on "Stadium Drive" in "Chapel Hill" with the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, in the campus of which the Carolina Club occupies the dead center. Because I was unable to assemble these important nuggets of data into a cogent thought, though, I was at the mercy of a printed Google Map to lead me to my destination. It was only when I wound up in a residential neighborhood on the far end of Chapel Hill that I decided to expend some energy on figuring this all out for myself. Go ahead and check for yourself--type "Carolina Club" into Google Maps and see where it takes you. No, really. Go ahead. It must be some lonely suburban dining room with a barbeque club sandwich on the table. Nice neighborhood, though.

Thankfully, I'm always a half hour early for everything, so I was able to reverse course and still make it to the campus when any normal person would have. There's no building at UNC actually called The Carolina Club, though. That particular institution is INSIDE of the alumni hall, which any MBA alumnus would know without even thinking. I was only pretending to be such a person, so finding my destination involved a number of three-point turns in the path of indignant UNC students. My associate principal had given me almost no information about the event to help guide my travels. (Later, viewing the web site for this event, I determined that even pre-meditated research would only have gotten me as far as the campus and would have been no help in directing me to parking, or to the Carolina Club door for that matter.) I was finally able to zero in on the conference by the sweeping tide of navy blue suits that coalesced at the alumni hall. I fell in amongst the suits and was soon at the registration and name tag table.

It was clear that I had shown up for the wrong party. I was wearing my black & white herringbone sport jacket with a sharpie-markered name tag (because I was an unexpected guest) while everyone except the infrequent female attendee was in full Wall Street business attire of either a dark navy, charcoal, or black, with a cleanly laser-printed name tag on his lapel. It was obvious I was not going to run into any familiar faces here (actually not true, but more on that later). I would have done better to print my associate principal's face out on the back of a paper plate and wear it like a mask; if for no other reason, at least people would ask me what the hell I was up to. My normal strategy in such circumstances would be to retreat to the far corner of the room and feign interest in something--the ceiling? The placesettings? But now I THANK GOD for iphones. Nothing has facilitated the enduring of my social failures more than having a little pocket computer that can make me look busy when, in fact, I'm just a scared social misfit. Judging by the prevalence of smart phones throughout the conference audience, I was not alone.

In an act of courage, I gravitated towards the middle of the room to find a seat at one of the standard ten-seat banquet tables (though I had a nagging suspicion that they were actually eight-seat tables that had been pressured into a higher level of service). I wandered around the tables for a while, looking out over the room of networking real estate professionals--an impotent act given that I was assured to know no single person there--then back at my iphone, which was running no applications, and then back at the floor or the ceiling. I did about three laps of the conference hall and adjoining hallway in this fashion before the conference attendees were called to seat themselves... then again two more times when no one in the room took their seat but instead continued to network.

Once the crowd had finally settled after continued encouragement from the conference emcee, it was clear that the other nine gentlemen at my table all knew each other in some way--some from their common past at UNC, some through their business dealings, and even two guys who apparently knew the same person in Orlando but otherwise had no discernible connection. They were all joined, though, through the pursuit of real estate development (and I would later find through the bloodlust for something called "return"). And there I was, puny, inconsequential, well-intentioned architect with no business being at a real estate conference, no business being at UNC, in Chapel Hill, or even outside of the office for an afternoon. But someone was going to have to eat this already-paid-for catered lunch, goddammit, so I had to push through until at least dessert.

Sensing my dread, two of my table neighbors tried to ease my self consciousness by engaging me in conversation. Bless their hearts, they didn't know that the only thing that makes me more self conscious then awkward silence is awkward conversation. I tried to keep up with them and not totally destroy their opinion of my employers while I eagerly awaited the beginning of the keynote address and therefore the necessary conclusion of the conversation. Having an excuse to shut up is a wonderful, wonderful thing.

The string of speakers that followed really proved how useless was my presence at the conference. Having just attended a (mandatory) 401k quarterly review back at the office a few days before, I was able to follow some of the "big picture" economic handwringing, but when it came to... I can't even remember the acronyms and abbreviations that these people tossed around like it was kindergarten level vocabulary. I'm no dummy, but the speakers could just as easily have been giving their presentations in Italian for the amount of information I was able to glean. It was all disturbingly vacillating line graphs, negative numbers, and inconfidently optimistic tones. It was actually hard to NOT pay attention because it was so bewildering... how could a conference about real estate development be so foreign to the sensibilities of an architect, planner, and urban designer? Isn't this a related field? Kinda?

That's when I realized that this conference had very little to do with building buildings or neighborhoods or places, even for profit. Not a single utterance of the conference speakers was about making cities or buildings because someone might, you know... like doing that? It was entirely about real estate as a machine for generating return. Money goes into the machine and five or ten years later, much more money comes out. How much money, when, and why were the topics of discussion. Not how to create responsible, marketable developments. Not how to sustain a neighborhood for more than a decade. Not anything about the role of designers, architects, and builders in adding value to real estate. None of that. If one of the speakers had gotten up and told the crowd that he had a magic cow back on his ranch that when you fed it quarters it pooped $100 bills, and this is the best return for their money in today's market, it would have ceased immediately its existence as a real estate conference and would have turned into an agricultural fair. Those people dressed in their dark suits with cleanly printed name tags were no more real estate developers than they were cattle ranchers, and cared equally about both. If I can feed money into one end and get lots more money on the other, then damn, that's what I'll do! And I'll pay some peon to pull all those benjamins out of the cow flops and wash them up nice.

Despite my complete reluctance to attend the conference and total lack of comfort throughout the afternoon, my experience was revelatory, not because my fears were confirmed but because I saw that there is room for an alliance between architects and real estate developers. Developers. As opposed to investors. Investors are just shrewd people who look for the magic cow to feed; that's what they expend all their energy toward. To them, that's their creative act. And finding the magic cow before everyone else does satisfies them personally and professionally. Real estate developers--I want to believe--are actually interested in this PARTICULAR magic cow and want to husband it and grow with it. They enjoy running the ranch, building new pens and barns, and watching their little barnyard ecosystem grow. They may often have a hard time seeing the value in what architects and designers bring to their ranch, but the goal of creating and cultivating something is shared. Let's have a real estate conference about that! Maybe that's next year's conference...