The E39 highway in Norway runs along the west coast of the country and connects Kristiansand in the south to Trondheim in the north. There's also a ferry connection to Denmark that forms part of the route. The entire highway (excluding the ferry south to Denmark) is about 1,100 km. But it takes about 21 hours to drive it because Norway's dramatic fjords (see above photo) mean that there are seven ferry crossings along E39. The Norwegian government wants to transform the route into a ferry-free highway, which would dramatically reduce travel times. But this presents a number of extremely difficult engineering challenges -- some of which haven't been solved yet. You can learn about a number of them in the below video from The B1M. If you can't see it below, click here. It's a fascinating video.

Photo by Christiann Koepke on Unsplash

Many of you are probably aware of the 58-storey Millennium Tower in San Francisco which is estimated to have sunk about 17 inches and to have tilted about 14 inches to the west since it was built.

Well today it was announced that they may have a fix. Here is what is apparently being proposed as a retrofit (image from SFGate):

The tower was originally built on top of a 10 foot thick raft or mat foundation, which was then supported by concrete piles that went down 60-90 feet into soft clay. Notably, the piles didn’t reach bedrock.

The proposed solution involves drilling 275-300 new micropiles into the bedrock below. But here’s where things get really interesting: The plan is to stabilize the west side of the building first and allow the east side of the building to continue sinking. In theory, this will give the building an opportunity to level out before they fully stabilize it. 

According to SFGate, the entire retrofit is expected to take anywhere from 2 to 5 years, and cost somewhere in the range of $200 to $500 million. The original tower cost $350 million to build. (I’m assuming that’s just the hard cost number.)

I met up with a friend yesterday after work and the topic of my blog came up. He said he loved the content, but that he would like to learn more about the inner workings of what it means to be a real estate developer. His belief was that there are lots of city blogs out there, but rarely do you get the candid perspective of a developer.

I immediately thought this was a good idea for one simple reason: When I’m at a party and I tell someone that I’m a real estate developer, oftentimes they have no idea what that means. They usually think I’m a real estate agent. Or they ask me to explain a typical day. Either way, I’ve found it generally smoother (and more impressive) to just lie and say I’m an architect.

So I’m going to do just what my friend suggested. I’m going to make an effort to talk more about what it means to be a real estate developer. And to kick it off, I thought I’d start with some of the basics and then talk about how I got into the business.

Real estate developers are effectively the entrepreneur that make a new building happen. They go out and buy the land, they put a team in place (architect, engineers and so on), they get the necessary approvals to build (with the help of the team of course), they finance the deal, and then they get a builder to actually construct the project.

Developers are like an orchestra conductor. They don’t play any instruments, they just direct the performance.

But at the same time, developers assume 100% of the risk of the project. If the building fails (because you can’t sell the condo units or lease out the space), that all falls on the developer (and his/her investors). All of the other team members are getting paid based on the services they provide. They’re consultants.

This distinction is what (can) make real estate development so lucrative–with risk comes reward. And I’ll be completely candid in saying that this is part of the reason I decided to get into development. I was training to be an architect and I started realizing that I could make more money as a developer.

But I also came to the realization that as a developer I would likely end up having more say over the built environment. That’s the unfortunate reality of my industry. Even though architects spend far more time than your average developer thinking about what makes buildings and cities great, I would argue that they don’t have nearly the same amount of say. Because if they did, we probably wouldn’t have so many crappy buildings in our cities. But it’s this way because architects aren’t assuming the risk.

Part of me used to actually feel bad about switching over to the dark side, which is how some architects refer to the development game. But the best way to summarize how I feel today is through what an architect friend told me a few years ago: “Brandon, cities don’t need more architects that care about design. We have lots of those. Cities need more developers that care about design.”

And so that’s what I became. A developer who loves design and cares deeply about one of our greatest assets–cities.