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Starland Yard is a .5-acre Small project outside of Savannah, Georgia’s historic core. The project, conceived as a temporary use while waiting for neighborhood economics to support a major apartment redevelopment, met such success in terms of creating the neighborhood’s third place and as an economic catalyst for locally owned small businesses, has led the development team to expand the project beyond its original platform.
Starland Yard & Eastwood Media
Since the publication of Building Small: A Toolkit for Real Estate Entrepreneurs, Civic Leaders, and Great Communities in 2021, author and developer Jim Heid has continued to grow the building Small movement. Last year, he launched a free-yet-private online platform that serves as an interactive network where like minds solve the big problems of building Small.
Both the book and the platform were inspired by Heid’s Small Scale Developer Forums (SSDF), which span 12 years and 22 cities. Nomenclature aside, Small is not about building tiny houses or even infill development per se. It is, however, about creating equity and inclusion.
Heid is an active member of ULI and has participated in or chaired 16 ULI Advisory Service Panels, most recently for Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Napa, California; and Toronto, Ontario. His next two Building Small Forums will be in Bend, Oregon (May 13–15, 2024) and Kansas City, Missouri (October 2024)—both in-person and live online.
As a Small developer, Heid has completed three infill projects and is now advising on another three. We recently spoke to him about the rising trend.
Urban Land: What is the “building Small movement” about?
Jim Heid: The classic real estate question: “Well, what do you mean by Small? How big is it? How many dollars is it?” .... It’s a qualitative discussion, not a quantitative discussion. So, Small is a way to build more humane places .... And it’s about a more evolutionary approach to development, a reaction to the bigger institutional approaches that are fairly formulaic ... they don’t really respond to the soul and fabric and character of communities.
UL: What was the genesis of the book? How is it structured and why?
Heid: The book came from SSDF. As I was curating those [gatherings], we were going to different cities, and I always saw a common theme, [an] incredible amount of passion, and a surprising amount of impact from these Small projects—and the incredible difficulty that anybody who was working in this space was having [with] getting the projects accomplished. The book is designed so you can pick it up, enter it anywhere, use it again and again as a resource. It wasn’t [meant to be] just a coffee table book. It was meant to be very instructive, but really written for an audience that is much more entrepreneurial, energetic.
UL: Is Small just an urban phenomenon?
Heid: No. Small works in the rural areas, works really well in the suburban corridor, and [it] works in the urban core.
UL: How are Small projects funded?
Heid: What’s happening is some really interesting innovations in finance, the first one being crowdfunding from Main Street …. These are vehicles where unaccredited investors can invest in projects in their community that they believe in. An interesting innovation recently [involved] a social entrepreneur [who] has taken that same strategy and … been able to apply it to historic tax credits. There’s a lot of money coming out of [the] Inflation Reduction Act for greenhouse gas reduction, via adaptive reuse, [from] which … a large share of Small projects emanate. [The] other thing that we talk a lot about in the forums is the role of high-net-worth investors, impact investors, friends, and family [who] want to support the startup of an entrepreneur that is doing good things in their community.
