Insight on Realty Trends in So Cal with Scott Choppin, The Urban Pacific Group and Host Linda Pliagas

Welcome to Realty411’s live podcast, we are excited to have you listen in! In this brand-new and enlightening episode, we discuss real estate trends in Southern California.

What type of housing is being developed, and why? What are the latest trends in lifestyle affecting the way housing is being built in the Los Angeles area, and beyond?

To give us insight into these important property trends, plus share the latest news in urban development, we have on our show today Scott K. Choppin.

Scott Choppin is the CEO and Founder of The Urban Pacific Group of Companies, a Long Beach, CA-based real estate development company.

Founded in 2000, The Urban Pacific Group of companies focuses exclusively on workforce rental housing communities throughout California, and Western US.

Urban Pacific has created a new housing innovation called Urban Town House (UTH), which pairs private capital with middle-income, multi-generational rental housing, while producing market superior yields on invested equity.

Historically, Urban Pacific’s UTH projects have delivered 22.66% programmatic IRR yields on equity. With over 35 years in the development business, Scott is a leader in the field, and is a regular contributor to major media outlets throughout the nation.

Scott has been published in Forbes Magazine, GlobeSt.com, Los Angeles Times, Builder Magazine, Affordable Housing Finance, Affordable Housing News, and most recently, the cover and feature article about the UTHhousing model in Multi-Family Executive magazine.

Scott and his wife Becky have been happily married and together for 27 years, and are raising their three kids in Long Beach, CA – Sean Patrick 19, Dylan 16, and Jenna 13. Scott and Becky’s three kids are the fourth generation of the Choppin family in Long Beach.

For full transcript click here Expand

Linda: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another Realty 411 podcast. We’re really excited to have you listen in today. In this brand new and enlightening episode, we’re going to be discussing real estate trends in Southern California. Now, what are some types of housing that are being developed right now? And why? What are some of the latest trends in lifestyle that’s affecting the way that housing is being built in Southern California and beyond? Now to give us insight into these important property trends, plus share the latest news in Urban Development, we have a very special guest today by the name of Scott K. Choppin. Now, Scott is the CEO and founder of the Urban Pacific Group of Companies based in Long Beach, California. Founded in 2000, the Urban Pacific Group of Companies focuses exclusively on workforce rental housing communities, throughout California and Western United States. Welcome to our show Scott. How are you?

Scott: I’m doing great, Linda. Great to be here. Thank you so much for the invite.

Linda: I’m so glad that you could join us. It’s a pleasure to have you. I’m really looking forward to getting some insight into some trends, some lifestyle trends that are affecting the way that we live, and the way that you construct multi-family properties.

Scott: Great, well, I think we can hit all those very nicely. I would be happy to talk about the economic cycles and trends that we’re seeing there as well. So, I’m looking forward to it.

Linda: Wonderful. Well first off Scott, now your family has been developing properties in Southern California for many decades. Can you share with our listeners, some of the properties that Choppin is known for; your family is known for?

Scott: Sure. Thank you for the question. So, I did grow up in a family environment in the real estate development business. My uncle Mike Choppin, was the founder and CEO of a company called IDM Corporation, which was predominantly known in the commercial office development space, including developing the World Trade Center, Downtown Long Beach, plus several million additional feet of the 70s and 80s era office buildings. His company also did quite a bit of
residential development apartments. In fact, he was really the first person in our family to endeavor into the real estate development space forming his company in 1960. My dad Carrie, his younger brother followed on several years later, and came into the business in the late 60s, early 70s, and was predominantly involved in apartment development in and around Long Beach plus Southern California generally. Michael passed away in 1998 and my dad is now retired. So, I had the great benefit of growing up around real estate development, real estate development projects and it gave me a really great base to start from. For my career which started in 1995 and then forming, as you said in the intro, founding of Urban Pacific Group; my company in 2000. So we’re on our 20th year of operations this March.

Linda: Oh, wow. Congratulations on that. That sounds exciting. I’ve seen some of the photographs of the properties that you build and I’m just so impressed. They look amazing. I love the amenities as well, the first-rate gyms in the properties and the pool and it’s just everything looks top-notch.

Scott: We appreciate that very much.

Linda: Thank you. Now, Scott, I do have to ask you, now with the COVID-19, and this terrible pandemic, how have social distancing mandates changed your business right now since the spring?

Scott: Yeah, that’s a great question. So we’re actually seeing several different changes, some are negative and some are actually positive, surprisingly enough. So, you know, just an observation for our type of projects that we do that you mentioned in the intro, we focus on a workforce housing product called the Urban Townhouse or UTH for short. That predominantly is made up of, right now several active projects in and around the LA and Orange County areas, and particularly sort of infill style, urban rental housing, that caters to middle income working families. A few things we’ve observed there is our product is that townhouse product, meaning it basically has a front door. You walk in, and then there are three levels of housing inside the unit. So it’s a townhouse style rental unit.

In fact, the way we speak it, Linda, it’s designed and built to rent but lives like a house where you have your family when they live with you, or above and below you, versus a stack flat where you have a family that you don’t know above or below. Plus, we have a two-car garage for each unit. So it definitely lives like a house. The interesting thing that comes from that; is it has actually been an advantage in this coronavirus era because basically, we have no shared hallways, or entry foyers or elevators that you would share in a normal urban building, which we didn’t of course, intend to design it that way to meet the changes from COVID-19. But it’s in fact, gave us a great advantage for people and families who now want to social distance that they don’t have to walk in the hallways with others. Like that’s become a factor that people look for.
The other advantage we’ve had is that our units are brand new. We build only new housing, only new units throughout Southern California. We can make the claim that no one’s ever lived in the unit. So of course, there’s no issue with somebody who had lived there previously, who might have been sick. So that’s sort of a unique, accidental benefit but we’re happy to be able to speak that narrative.
But also the third and the final one, the advantage we’re seeing there is that our units are five bedrooms, four bath townhouse units. They’re rentals, they’re meant to serve large families but what’s interesting now is that we have this work from home environment, that some families are saying they’re going to occupy four bedrooms, and then the fifth bedroom, which is always on the ground floor, predominantly meant for in-laws or grandparents who might have mobility issues, a lot of families are saying hey, we’re going to use that fifth bedroom as the work from home space, or the school from home space. Like, we’ve had a family that has college students, and they’ve like dedicated this room. So our units, because they’re so big, five bedrooms, four baths, 1750 square feet, and in an environment in SoCal, where you generally can’t find that kind of rental housing that’s brand new, you know, we’ve really differentiated ourselves in the marketplace.
Then just a couple of general notes, you know, there’s been some disruption in this city processing space. So things like getting building permits, or if you are going through a rezone, or a sort of entitlement options, like staff for most cities are working from home themselves and that is disruptive to the timelines which in city processes are always slow. Now, they’re even more slow. If you can imagine that.
Then, in fact, we haven’t had it, but some cities, you know, California has determined construction to be essential, like legally essential, meaning that it can continue. But if cities are closing down, like not working, then we’ve seen others who have experienced where they can’t get city inspectors to come out to inspect their projects. So, therefore, they can’t continue with their construction. No inspection, no continuance of construction. And we’ve been very fortunate that all the cities that we’re active in right now, have all remained open and continue to do inspections. So that’s been a net positive but of course, something to be vigilant about.
Then the last thing is that in any recession, we would always anticipate two significant things to happen, that could benefit a project like ours that has a stable rental picture in a recessionary environment, is that we could expect land costs to come down, where land sellers in some cases would capitulate either in timing or price. We’ve actually seen that on several projects that we’re active on now, where we’re getting land price reduction between 15 and 40%.
But the other one is that we would anticipate some declining construction costs which Linda, you, and I have talked about it. But you know, increasing construction costs over many years in Southern California, California generally, and almost everywhere for that matter, has been a continual issue in the development space. We would look for that to moderate now. We haven’t seen that yet, moderate meaning decline or flatten. What we have seen though, is a huge increase in labor availability. So those developers that have chosen to discontinue development, or if you’re a developer in a city that’s closed, you can’t continue, so the general contractor and the subs may lay people off. As an example, on our Montebello project, we probably tripled our labor availability at a contract level, which ends up in that we cut about four months off of a twelve-month schedule for our project in Montebello. So I didn’t expect that. Right. I mean, you could say that in a recession, there’d be more labor availability. But the rapidity meaning how quickly that lots of labor became available was highly unusual and now beneficial, right. And of course, I expect that, as the market stabilizes, that those other developers will start up again. And again, we’ll be back to competing for labor. But at least for the next several months, maybe to a couple years that we could expect to see some benefit and more labor availability.
Linda: That’s a wonderful one. I am so happy that your company is able to keep people employed, that’s so important to keep the economy moving.
Scott: It is great, and I appreciate it. I forgot to mention that. But that is exactly right. We rent to families, middle income working families that can benefit-sharing incomes across multi-earners and live in our units because of the number of bedrooms. But it’s great to be able to say, we’re actually growing jobs. We have more jobs than before. So that’s great. I agree.
Linda: Wonderful. Well, I love the layout of your urban townhouse. In our family, we have three generations living under one roof. And I really love the idea of having one of the bedrooms on the main floor precisely. For seniors who may have mobility issues or also for, like you said, an office space. It’s just such a versatile space.
Scott: Yeah agreed. We’re really focused on the multi-generational family group, that’s who we look to have in our units. Now, of course, if we get roommates and it’s an appropriate choice for them to live in our units, we’re open to that, of course. But we really seek out middle income working families, right, that’s who our tenure avatar is, and really looking for family. As I talk to investors a lot, I get the question a lot. Like a lot of times, somebody will ask, how do you put two families together in that unit? Like they don’t know each other, how do you do that? And I’ve always explained to people that these families, like your family, already lived this way. You know you guys, live in three generations in one house but a lot of families may live in one or two units. They’re maybe physically separate, maybe it’s a unit side by side in an apartment building. Maybe it’s a unit here and a unit down the road. But what we do find which is really a key factor, is that these families already are naturally sharing incomes and expenses across the family group. In fact, I call that economic sharing. So in other words, the family group is combining their resources and combining the cost of living and what we’re doing now is giving them the capability to live in that multi-generational family structure but live in one unit. Instead of say, two, two-bedrooms next to each other.
In fact, we’re renting our units up in Fullerton right now and a lot of the families that are moving in with us, we’re pulling out of, two or more units and others. Like one group is a mom and her kids and then a dad and his kids, their parents are getting remarried. They’re like going to exit two homes or two apartment units and come to live in our unit and that’s what I call recombination. The other example would be that a family has adult children that would be returning to live with the family because maybe their employment situation changed and you know, we’re in the recession. So recessionary like actions for these families tend to have them to start to share more housing costs, incomes, maybe even vehicles, that kind of thing. So, one of the things we’ve always anticipated with the UTH model was that these families would recombine leaving other apartment buildings. You know maybe, the 22 year-olds living in a studio in Downtown LA, their job situation changes and they come out of that unit because they’re a single earner household for that unit, at least. They can’t afford that anymore, because their job has changed or shifted or furloughed.
So they’re going to move home and now they’re sharing with the family, like we talked about before and now this family’s going to move into our unit. So we actually are advantaged by people leaving single-earner households and then joining together with their family to live in what we call a multi-earner household. So you might have a family of four to eight, and you’re going to have somewhere between, you know, three and five on average income earners in the household. No income earner, earns a huge amount. I mean, we do have families that do say the father, the mother, you know, earns the most money. But what we find is that if each person is making 30 or $40,000 a year, that’s sort of the average that we see. Now you have four incomers all of the sudden that family is pulling in 120,000 a year, which you think, on the surface of it, you go, that’s a lot, though in context of housing price in California, though it’s not. In fact, those people are squarely in the middle income, maybe 80 to 120 of median income would be the average for these working families, think blue-collar families. Now, again, we’re giving them that unit where they can afford, our rents at 30% or less of their income, which is sort of the standard of what a tenant should pay to have discretionary remaining income to live a good life. Where if you split that family apart, and have them try to afford the unit singularly or doubly, they can’t do it. In fact, statistically, Pew Research said between 2007 and 2009, in the last recession, 49 million households recombined. So that families grew because their multi-generational structures grew bigger, kids moving home, in-laws moving in, maybe grandparents coming to live. That’s a huge number, and that’s 49 million households, Linda. And that’s each [Inaudible 17:40].
Linda: That’s a lot.
Scott: Right. Then the last thing I’ll share is that, you know, generally, amongst these families that live multi-generationally and particularly for low and middle-income families, the poverty rates are much, much lower. And that’s a function of this economic sharing model. If each individual has to afford a housing, you see in the newspaper, they go, oh, you need to make, you know, I can’t remember the stat, $37 an hour, in your job for wages to be able to afford the average size apartment unit in Southern California, whatever the number is. Well yes, individually for that person, that is true. But here’s the secret of our product type amongst other things, that are advantageous to it is that this economic sharing model now produces a better affordability and capability for that family to survive and thrive in a recession through this economic sharing model. It’s totally unique and uncommon in the marketplace. We’re happy to be part of the solution for these middle-income families. But at least from an investor perspective, these are very stable long term families, multiple earners, strong social networks, which makes them a great tenant for the long run.
Linda: Oh, yes, it sounds wonderful and it certainly is a very unique type of property.
You know, in California and Southern California, you certainly don’t see a lot of five bedrooms, four bath rental units anywhere that are available.
Scott: Right, maybe not what we’re doing there. There’s a couple of people that do like smaller projects that may have these sorts of bedroom counts, but we’re certainly the only company that’s doing it at any scale. And in fact, we’re scaling up as we speak to do more projects or already doing more projects and will do so in the future.
Linda: Awesome. May I ask how many current projects you have for the rest of 2020? And what your goal is for 2021?
Scott: Yeah, so we actually have four active projects now and they’re are at various stages of preparation. Well, let me actually back up a little bit. So we have one project in Fullerton, that’s leasing. Our project in Montebello will start leasing in a couple of months. Then we have four new projects in addition to that. Three in Long Beach and one in Hawaiian Gardens. Then we’re pursuing several additional opportunities beyond that. So for 2021, our capital raise will really be to the Fullerton and Montebello projects, will raise equity for long term hold. Then 1491 Atlantic, we’re raising capital right now. That’s a project in Long Beach. Then our 1901 Pacific already had a capital raise that’s closed out, we’ve will raise the capital. Then we’ll have 1115 East Artesia and 12347 Carson, which is in Hawaiian Gardens and those will be future capital raises coming up in the next few months, give or take.
Linda: How exciting. Scott: So we’re actually Linda, busier now than we were in January. The reason for that is because when we got to, sort of the latter half of 2019, and into the beginning of 2020, our pipeline really started to taper off. The reason for that was what I spoke about before, but in the opposite, land prices were high, and going up and construction costs were high and going up. That’s typical peak market conditions, when the economy is good and the real estate market and multi-family development is good, these are the things that become strained. So just like a naturally disciplined, underwriting team and company related to our projects, we just started to not have projects that we’re making it over the underwriting hurdle rates, for IRR, equity multiple depending on how we’re underwriting particular projects. So we just like, there wasn’t anything to get excited about, right, the projects work very well that we’ve been doing. But now that, we’ve had this land price timing and price capitulation, plus the steady-state of the art leasing, meaning we continue to lease well back in Fullerton, we lease somewhere between 100 to $300, above pro forma even now in the middle of this virus era. We have very healthy rates. And so like that, plus this additional labor really has a story for us to be accelerating now. So hence the newer projects. In fact, the description we give for this UTH model in this now, recessionary environment is recession resilient work product that accelerates during a downturn versus, you know, your normal expectation would be distressed assets. Now there will be distress, how much in the multi-family space is unknown. Certainly, as you guys are tracking, we’ll expect to see more of it in the retail, hotel, you know things that are related to the travel industry. You know, commercial offices will be affected. Industrial on multi-family, you know, seem to be the strongest product types in the market right now. Although you know, we always have to be vigilant generally.
Linda: Well, it’s so nice to know that your real estate development company is increasing in volume and actually doing better now than prior to the pandemic. That’s such wonderful news. I’m glad that your real estate company is truly resilient and I commend you for that.
Scott: Well, I appreciate that. We’re glad of it too, by the way. You know, we went through 2008 that was a hard time, you know, [Inaudible 23:40].
Linda: Absolutely. Now, may I ask for your pro forma rent is for your unit, Scott?
Scott: Yeah, so it depends, of course, as you’d expect Linda, you know, in each market, it’s a little bit different. But right now, our five bedroom four bath 1750 square feet rents for about 3500 a month. And I say about because we might have some where they’re 3300 maybe if they’re in one market or one city. You know in Fullerton right now we’re above that. We’re on average between 3600 and 3800 a month in the Fullerton project. Linda: Wow, very nice.
Scott: But really 3500 seems to be a solid number. Again, when you look at the comparable for five bedrooms, four bath apartments, really there are none. Usually, they are called townhouses that have sold and the investors are renting them. But even then, most townhome condos aren’t five bedrooms. Usually, you’d say three bedrooms maybe four at most, but three is pretty average. Then the only other really comparable, would be houses for rent, like single-family homes available for rent. And what we found and typically do is we’ll want to be undercutting or pricing below the lowest comparable in a market. Like in Fullerton is an example where it is 36 to 3800, a single-family house is easily 4000 a month and above up to 8 to 9000 a month. Now those are you know, getting into really nice neighborhoods, big houses.
But as you would expect, or I’ll share with you, although that is a comp, usually there’s not a ton of those houses on the market, right? Like if you go Fullerton at any given time, you have maybe two to six houses for rent at any given time that are in this size range, again five bedrooms, four bathrooms. And in fact, I’ll say a lot of houses don’t even have the four bathrooms. This is one of the interesting things we do with the five bedrooms that catches everybody’s attention, but I say really our secret is the four bathrooms, Linda. If you’re a family of eight and everybody’s getting up to go to school and go to work, well you know, everybody is working from home these days, having four bathrooms is a real key. Now, we have the two-car garage or [Inaudible 26:00], those are also advantages. But you know, from a lifestyle standpoint, age-old story of not enough bathrooms, everybody’s fighting to get in the bath.
Linda: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Like I said, the model is just so unique. It’s just fantastic that you came up with such a wonderful model that is really helping people rent, much nicer properties than they would individually.
Scott: Right, also you bring up a good point. Most often, I would say I haven’t had a single-family that I can think of over the several projects that we’ve built and leased out where that family had the availability of a brand new rental unit in their community. Usually, most often the folks live where we’re leasing. So in other words in Fullerton, we’re generally getting families from Fullerton. I can tell you, Linda, in our neighborhood, and in Fullerton, there’s been no new housing for probably at least 40 years.
Linda: Oh my goodness.
Scott: Nothing to build, you know, our neighborhood, there is a mix of single-family homes and some older apartments. But if you lived in that neighborhood, you didn’t have any choice to live in anything new, there was nothing available. So we’re introducing this interesting opportunity. I mean, we knew it would be different. I mean, we designed it to be that way. But it’s interesting to come into some of these neighborhoods that have been really overlooked. Right, like you got this sexy new downtown apartments, you know, for the 22-year-old, 25-year-old, that’s completely coherent. That’s a great demographic and the millennial is the largest demographic in US demographic cohort in US history, you know, these are kids that are baby boomers predominantly.
But also, those are single-earner households. So when the environment changes for job prospects and employment for that single earner, they’re not going to sustain the rent in that unit. They’ll have to leave and you know, we overlay eviction moratoriums on that, of course. But that makes our families very resilient and they have generally never had the choice of a brand new unit with a two-car garage and an in-unit laundry and air conditioning. I mean, that is pretty standard in new housing. But when you look at it from these families’ standpoint, generally they’re coming from much older apartments that are, you know, older, right, as you would expect, and don’t have the systems as robust as what we would build today. So it’s a very unique experience for the families. We have families that have never lived in a new unit, ever. And it’s like a real treat to be able to go great, here’s the keys, you know, you’re the first ever to live in this and all the newest countertops, quartz countertops, hardwood flooring, new blinds, all the things that are pretty standard in new apartment buildings. But these families have never had the option for it before.
Linda: That’s awesome. It’s so wonderful to be filling that need that is so important. Now, Scott, you mentioned to me that, historically your family and your development company has been capitalized by your sphere of influence and your own family capital. But now moving forward, you’re going to be sharing and opening up opportunities for other investors to also get involved with this unique development opportunity in California. Can you share a little bit of details about that and how investors can get more information?
Scott: Sure. I appreciate that. So as you spoke, in fact, you know, we’ve traditionally raised capital from institutional capital sources and then utilizing our own capital, but UTH really is a social impact story and not that we’re solely focused on that, of course, we’re looking to produce viable, profitable projects. First and foremost, to produce appropriate market competitive yields to investors. But it’s given us, from the size of the project the capability to go out into the marketplace and talk with individual investors, that may not finance $10 million equity piece on their own and really give the capability for a wider audience for investors, as you suggest. So, what I would encourage people to do if this product type, the UTH workforce housing, stable tenant base sounds interesting, I would encourage people to go to our website, that’s www.urbanpacific.com, and do a couple things while you’re there. One is, there’s a red signup button on every page, click that and that will invite you to join our Saturday email, newsletter, e-blast, we call it. That’s going to be a lot of great information just about the market, generally economic trends. We will do some announcements about our available investments. So that’s part of the way that they would hear about them. But people can go to the contact page also, and our entire team’s contact info is on there. But particularly, my cell phone number and email address are there. I would just encourage people to send me an email, and then we can set up a call to discuss and talk about available projects. Then as we move through time over the next few months, we’ll have active projects like we are raising now at 1491 Atlantic, but then, you know, future announcements will be both put on the website. We will actually have a project investment page, which is going to be up and running here soon. Or people can just contact our team, including me and we’d be happy to tell them what’s available and what the investment criteria are.
Linda: Wonderful. Now give us your website one more time Scott.
Scott: Sure. It’s www.urbanpacific.com.
Linda: Fantastic. Now, before I let you go, give us a little bit of insight to the future of real estate development here in Southern California. What are you seeing? What are some of the trends that are affecting your development, and what you think will be important for the future?
Scott: Yeah, it’s a great question. We spend a lot of time thinking about this, as you would expect, I mean, all developers do. My entire career, I came into the business professionally in 1995, we’ve been in a story of undersupply, right. California, politically, has never been able to reach the levels of production that we had back in the 60s and 70s and 80s, particularly in the apartment space, but for sale also. And, you know, our political environment is very constraining on real estate development, right, local politics, regional and state-level politics. Now, there’s a lot of folks talking about the need to produce more housing generally at the state level in the political environment. But the reality that we see, and one of the reasons we’re encouraged to build and invest our own money and investors and hold these projects long term, is that we are very confident that California will continue to be deeply undersupplied at almost every level for housing. Now each level, market-rate versus affordable versus our product, which sits in the middle, will have different levels of, demand and supply characteristics. But the reality is, it took several decades for us to get into the situation we’re in, where we’re so deeply undersupplied, that it will take several decades for us to get out of it. Let me give you some statistics around that. So in the counties that make up Southern California, Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies did reported a study and basically, they came to the conclusion that Southern California by itself and those counties that makeup So Cal is at a million unit shortfall.
Linda: Wow.
Scott: Meaning we are behind in production, a million units. And by the way, it’s worse up here, because every year we’re getting further and further behind. So when I look at, though, that million is made up of different income categories, you know, low, very low, that kind of thing moderate, like what we do, but the reality is we don’t produce even a fraction of that every year and that’s across the entire state, by the way, not just So Cal. And the Bay Area has similar numbers that they’re behind. We’re just not going to catch up anytime soon.
So what that for us presents is an opportunity. It’s a threat politically, it’s a threat to our families, middle-income families that we really need to stay here to have a robust, social fabric and economy, though we need to supply housing for them. So, we look at pretty much from a social mission standpoint. Now, again, we’re focused on producing yield. So you could think of it like a double bottom line, Linda. So we need to produce profit and yield for investors and we need to take care of these families socially. Double bottom line, right, we’re serving, you know, two purposes for benefit for the properties. And so we continue to be in that story of undersupply, coronavirus is just disrupting that, right. So one of the things that came out is all these projects that I talked about that were stopped, either the developer stopped them or the city wasn’t continuing to be able to facilitate them. That adds more to the undersupply story. I shouldn’t laugh, it’s not a funny situation. But it’s just amazing to me that, we continue to be more and more behind. We can’t as a state get out of our own way. Now, I know, there’s a lot of people working politically.
Particularly I see a lot of folks in the millennial generation that are very, very ambitious to change the state regulations to produce more housing. We’ve got a lot of good, young, state-level politicians that are after that, and I’m highly encouraged. In fact, this is the most activity in the legal sense at the state level that I’ve ever seen in my career, right. We’re talking about it more, it’s more mainstream understood. You know, amongst the public in California housing is important. But yet each city has its own philosophy, some cities really want housing, some cities fight against it tooth and nail, as we all have typically seen over the years. And that’s part of the reason why it’s going to take that period of time to recover, because until the state can compel cities to produce housing, if they’re not otherwise mandated with some sort of legal structure that has teeth, then the cities will continue to take care of, their own needs internally to the city, whether that’s helping the community for generating more housing or not.
And, you know, that is what it is, that’s reality. I’m not in a bad mood about it. I’m encouraged that we’re producing new conversations around it and I’m encouraged that our company is able to produce this UTH housing to help these middle-income families. But I also say, Linda, that our offer is one interpretation of supplying housing, the apparent private capital with the workforce housing model is very unique. But I’m in the story that we need, like lots more of that, like, we need a lot of additional innovations and unique offers in the marketplace all over the United States in every major urban metro. This middle income families falling ever behind in that housing affordability story is happening all over the United States. And so we need lots of people like us doing it, we’re going do a lot too. I’m looking forward to the next 20 years of my career, continuing to do this type of housing. And in fact, I’ll just share with you, basically the majority of the projects, we’re going to own long term, like forever, that kind of long term, because we believe in the story so much and the benefit, and also the under [Inaudible 38:39] story. But I’ll share with you that really we are totally focused on this business plan. We’re not going to do any other kind of housing. We believe in it that much.
Linda: That’s wonderful. Why do anything else and this is working out so well. And there’s such a need for it.
Scott: That too. It helps that it’s working, right? That’s got to be priority. It’s got to work correctly, but we’re encouraged that it is and it’s continuing to in this environment.
Linda: Well, Scott, it’s been wonderful to speak with you about the development that’s going on in Southern California and the lack of because we certainly do need more housing just like you mentioned. And I congratulate you for helping fulfill that drastic need that’s out there.
Scott: Well, I appreciate that. We’re very enthusiastic about it for sure and I appreciate those good words.
Linda: Well, that’s going to do it, for now, Scott, I really appreciate your time and I encourage all of our listeners to visit www.urbanpacific.com for more information about the Urban Townhouse. It’s been a pleasure to speak with Scott Choppin today and thank you every one for tuning in. We will see you again really soon. Don’t forget about our Real Estate Expo this weekend October 17th and 18th. You can find all the details at Realty411.com. Thank you again, Scott, thank you everyone, and have a great afternoon.
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