Grace

As the saying goes, if you can’t see the light, be the light. 

Years ago, I had the good fortune of attending an Italian wedding in Tuscany. It was the stuff movies are made of: a magnificent private estate surrounded by rolling vineyards and stately cypress trees, tables overflowing with food, music, laughter, and a kind of joyful chaos that seemed to pull everyone in.

What struck me most wasn’t the setting. It was the participation. Everyone contributed. The nonnas baked seemingly endless loaves of bread and cakes. The zios meticulously crafted meatballs. Even the bambini had jobs, setting tables, arranging flowers, clearing plates. Nobody seemed to distinguish between host and guest. Everyone simply understood that creating something beautiful together required everyone to carry a little of the weight. I never forgot it.

Recently, my husband and I hosted a family gathering at our off-grid sustainability compound in the Colorado mountains. In my mind, I had imagined something similar: a shared celebration in which everyone pitched in and participated.

Many of the guests, apparently, had envisioned more of a vacation. The result was that my husband and I, and a few other (deeply appreciated) family members, spent most of the time cooking, cleaning, organizing, and making sure everyone was taken care of.

At the time, I was disappointed. I felt unsupported and unheard, and if I’m being candid, I wasn’t particularly gracious about it.

A few months later, though, I see the experience differently. Our guests weren’t trying to disappoint me. They simply arrived with a different set of expectations than I had. And with some time and perspective, the person I became most disappointed in was myself, because grace matters most precisely when we feel its absence.

It is easy to be generous when generosity is being returned; it’s straightforward to be patient when everyone is behaving as we hoped; it’s simple to be gracious when the world around us is generous. The harder work is choosing to display those behaviors when they are not being reflected back at us.

However, as I try to remind myself often, when we can’t see the light, we have to be the light.

I’ve been thinking about that concept a great deal lately, and, inevitably, applying it to my work and the housing sector. Our industry has plenty of reasons to feel discouraged. Housing affordability is under enormous pressure. Insurance markets are destabilizing. Construction costs remain stubbornly high. Builders are operating on razor-thin margins. Climate risk is intensifying. Regulations can be cumbersome. Labor is scarce. Consumers are stretched.

It would be easy to look at all of that and conclude that the only logical response is to strip homes down to the lowest possible first cost. But that is exactly why the idea of being the light is so relevant.

When conditions are difficult, true leadership is not simply finding more reasons why we can’t do better, it’s asking what remains within our power to change. If we build exclusively to the lowest upfront cost and cheapest price-per-square-foot calculation, we risk optimizing the wrong thing—we create homes that qualify on closing day but become increasingly unaffordable to live in because of high utility bills, maintenance costs, insurance exposure, poor durability, and unhealthy indoor conditions. That isn’t affordability, it’s just deferred cost.

It’s why the transition to Value Per Square Foot is so essential, a framework that considers not only what a home costs to buy, but what it costs to own, how it performs, and what kind of life it enables.

Housing is not merely an asset class or a collection of building materials. Canadian builder Doug Tarry put it plainly when I interviewed him recently for my podcast, The Valuation Metric. “I believe that housing is a basic human right. High-performance, safe, healthy housing can’t be just for the elite,” he asserts.

Tarry is working with the YWCA on a community of small homes for people who have been “underhoused.” He described the choice bluntly: Isolate people at the margins, or integrate them into a community where they can walk to work, groceries, trails, and the places that make daily life function.

He also speaks about profitability without apology. He runs a business, so profit matters, but his model turns the conventional equation around. “Our profit increases when we offer a better value proposition to our consumer,” he says.

Tarry inherited from his father early in life the philosophy that he should always leave the campsite better than the way he found it. That principle has become the driving force for his company.

Imagine if that philosophy was applied throughout the housing industry. What would happen if the guiding principle for our sector was to intentionally leave homes, land, people, and communities better?

California developer Curt Johansen has manifested that intention in his conservation community, Lagoon Valley. Decades in the making, Johansen embarked on the Lagoon Valley project by identifying the most biologically and culturally sensitive land, and then protecting it. The homes and commercial buildings were then designed around those protected areas—not the other way around.

Conventional development math might interpret that protected land as lost yield.

Johansen sees something else entirely. In a recent interview, also for The Valuation Metric podcast, he told me that the strongest value both builders and homeowners derive from Lagoon Valley comes from its permanently protected open space. “Residents can step outside their homes and immediately enter trails and natural areas, and that connection to nature has become integral to the value proposition of the homes themselves,” he insists.

He is not ignoring risk or economics either: Lagoon Valley incorporates wildfire buffers far beyond typical requirements, an on-site fire station built before the first residents moved in, and major stormwater infrastructure intended to reduce flood risk.

Johansen told me that developing this way requires patience and a willingness to think beyond the single bottom line. But he also describes the reward of returning years later to communities he created and seeing people still thriving there as priceless.

Professionals like Tarry and Johansen give me hope for our industry. They’re not waiting for the housing system or the valuation metric to transform before they act. They are building the alternative in real time, successfully and profitably. They are, in their own ways, being the light.

And that is what our industry needs most right now—individuals who are willing to shoulder a deeper sense of stewardship. Professionals who are willing to ask different questions, turning ‘How cheaply can this be built?’ into ‘What kind of life will this home enable?’; transforming ‘How many units can fit here?’ into ‘What kind of community will exist here 30 years from now?’

We in the building industry have the unique opportunity to manifest physical reality. Drawings become buildings. Specifications transform into walls, roofs, streets, and neighborhoods. Decisions made in conference rooms and spreadsheets eventually become the places where other people spend their lives.

That is an extraordinary privilege, but it is also a profound responsibility.

Dignified living does not require luxury. It does not require enormous homes or expensive finishes. It means giving people a place that protects them, supports their health, respects their financial realities, and provides a foundation from which they can build a good life.

No single person can singlehandedly solve the housing challenge or the affordability crisis, but each of us can decide what, if anything, we will contribute to the solution. We can choose durability over disposability, full cost over first cost, stewardship over extraction, value over price.

And when we look around our industry and don’t see enough examples of the future we believe is possible, perhaps the answer is not to become discouraged. Perhaps it is simply to be the light.