I have sent some version of this email to a lot of rookie developers

Here are some links that are worth your time to explore and then to come back to later because there was something that applies to a problem you will be trying to solve in 6 months:

I started a blog because I got frustrated repeating myself on topics I figured any builder or developer already knows. I found that if I just copied the five paragraph explanation I had just written to someone and pasted it into the blog template, all I needed to do was find an appropriate image to go at the top of the post and a catchy headline and it would become a blog post . Something that other people might find useful. Posting the information in a blog would reduce the time I would need to spend repeating myself, since I could just point people to the blog post where they could get all kinds of useful information. I have not been very active on the blog for some time, but there is still a lot of good content there.

Some background; In 2008 I was working on a team developing a wonderful 200 acre master planned regional infill project next to a middle school and an elementary school with a greenway running through it, when the financial crisis hit. We had just completed all of the California Environmental Quality Act requirements and were ready to start engineering the roads and utilities when the real estate crash in Northern California hit.. We had about 30% of the project in local bank debt. The rest was all equity when the bank called our loan. That meant that the loan had to be repaid in 30 days and the only way to do that was to put in more equity, more cash from the partners. Because I could not come up with any additional cash, I lost an my stake in the project when I could not fund my share of the cash call. I was "diluted out".

That experience taught me a brutal lesson about putting all my eggs in one basket. Economies of scale will not save you from a huge disruption of the real estate economy. Big projects require big capital investment and carry big risks. My partner David Kim and I were both laid off from the development company. We hung out a design and development consulting shingle and started looking at what kind of small projects could still find financing through the 1 to 4 unit typical VA, FHA, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac 30 year mortgage if we could find partners to fund the construction with cash. We found that if you could build with cash from your partner or private lender and then pay off the cost of buying the property and building the four-plex with a government insured 30 year residential 1-4 unit mortgage. At the time FHA and VA loans had the strictest limitations on non-residential space in a 1-4 unit qualifying building at 20% of the building SF.

Shifting Scale out of Necessity The result was the Form Follows Finance Four-plex (or 4-F) We designed it to fit with its narrow end to the street on a 50' wide typical lot, or with its wide side to the street on a 100' wide lot with parking behind the building. We sent this prototype design around to everyone in our network urging them to take the open source resource and adapt it to their local market.
The first iteration of the 4F and its accompanying pro forma are shown below.

I spent 2009-20215 trying to teach basic real estate math to my friends and colleagues in the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU). I was trying hard to convince them that as policy wonks, planners, urban designers, architects, developers, and builders dedicated to making places worth caring about attempting, they would be smart to bet on the places where they were working professionally and construct and own some buildings that would provide some passive income. With some passive income they might be better prepared for the next Great Recession. Maybe next time they wouldn't have to lay off their entire crew and watch them struggle and scatter to the four winds.. I can only imagine how annoying I must have been to some of those folks I have known for 20 + years…. https://www.cnu.org/

Here is an early lecture video from 2011 at the University of Miami's Masters of Real Estate Development + Urbanism program: http://www.andersonkim.com/news/lecture-at-the-university-of-miami.html

We had very limited success in our attempts to turn Urbanists into small developers…. Again, I was probably pretty annoying in my approach.

In the summer of 2015 we started a nonprofit with several colleagues called the Incremental Development Alliance (IncDev). For the last 5 years we have been running around the country teaching workshops and bootcamps folks how to develop small projects in their neighborhood. This effort also includes working with local municipalities to help them clear the zoning and procedural underbrush that can have a disproportionate impact upon small operators. I figure the content we delivered through the lectures and hands-on exercises delivered about 60% of the benefit for the local small developers and people looking to get into the business. The other 40% was the opportunity to meet their people and finding support from like-minded folks in their area, and maybe their neighborhood.

IncDev's work during the pandemic has been limited to on-line workshops and bootcamps. https://www.incrementaldevelopment.org/

Lots of IncDev videos here:https://vimeo.com/incdevalliance

There are links in this blog post to Professor Arthur C. Nelson's book Reshaping Metropolitan America. The blog also has a link to his downloadable data set.
Here is a video of his lecture given around the same time as the book was published: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKH_yMfqeo8

Check out the We Do Incremental Development Facebook Group. The group has a good culture, focused upon pragmatic solutions with a tendency for the Architects in the group to drift into thought exercises and theoretical design firm time to time. Lots of helpful people in the group. Worth scrolling back in the timeline there and poking around in the FILES or VIDEOS sections of the group page.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/smalldevelopersandbuilders

An early version of the 4-F

The first built example of the Form Follows Finance Four-plex (the 4-F) in the Hampstead Neighborhood of Montgomery, Alabama.