Madeline (00:00)
So, Seis, what did you think about the episode?

Andy (00:03)
Well, it was a very engaging, intellectually engaging episode. So yeah, let me just give a quick background. Dick Stewart is founder and chairman of 303 Associates in Beaufort, South Carolina, which is a development and real estate company in the area. And also he's retired. So now, but he's also spending time working on these things. Over 26 years leading this company. Before that, he worked at

other ⁓ companies such as Motorola and worked in the cell phone tower industry. He has a degree from Mercer University and as I mentioned he's recently retired. So those are a few things about Dick Stewart. We talked about so many different things. What was it that that you really liked about the show?

Madeline (00:52)
I wrote down a quote on the whiteboard over there. I liked when he said, anniversaries are a big deal. If you stay alive, you can have a birthday, but an anniversary is when two people stay together and are committed to each other. I liked that, and I liked how he talked about, even though he's retired, that he still does all this with the Freedmen's Art District, and he does all this with the housing and all the things he's passionate about. And it went back to the fact that, ⁓

it wouldn't be good for him to be at home with his wife because he has a lot of too much extra time on his hands and that just wouldn't be good for them. I thought that was kind of humorous.

Andy (01:31)
Yeah, but at the same time it seems like they both have a common they have things they spend together like the Port Royal Sound Foundation and how they work towards that which is a It's an educational outreach to the community and how important that is for a number of reasons I mean, it's a beautiful place That that you know of right, but it's also important where the well tell us

Madeline (01:58)
I was like, hold on, what?

Andy (01:59)
So you'll hear about the story of the well-tell in the episode but But yeah, I mean it's an educational location where they you can go there and learn about the environment learn about the marsh and the different Creatures and things birds and animals that live in the low country, right and it's it's beyond just education because Understanding and being educated helps us better

better deal with and live in the environment that we're in, right? So those were just a few things that I learned about and also not to mention the historical context of everything that he brought in with like the free

Madeline (02:43)
Yes,

that was amazing. I loved hearing him go on about the background he has behind all this and all the things that he studied on. It was just amazing to listen to.

Andy (02:51)
Yeah, and I think it was very important that he took some time because he is ⁓ a big player in the community as far as real estate development, etc. And so in our community, he's well known and so he took some time to spend on that because I think it's important that people understand what his goals and visions are for the community and maybe have an opportunity to really learn about the vision behind what they see.

So I thought that was very important and it was a good opportunity for me to learn as well. And also we talked about ⁓ restoration of buildings and what's called adaptive reuse and how that's an important concept. Instead of just tearing down a building, let's reuse the building. So those are some of the things that I found interesting. My name is Andy Richardson. This is my producer, Madeline.

I've got 26 years in the AEC industry as a structural engineer, and I'm still learning so much about the AEC industry. The purpose of this podcast, Enhance Podcast, is to learn the why of professionals in the AEC industry so that you can learn more about your why. Let's jump to the intro.

Madeline (04:06)
you

Welcome to Enhance, an AAC podcast where we show you behind AAC professionals that you can learn your why.

Dick (04:12)
You learn the Y.

Andy (04:18)
Welcome to the Enhance podcast, Great to have you. Yeah, definitely. ⁓ So I've known you for quite a while, but I thought it would be a great opportunity to come in and, you know, learn from you, document some of what you've done over the years. And this is the Enhance AEC podcast. architecture, engineering and construction. So people are interested in what you've been doing over your career. ⁓ So the first thing I wanted to just do is just have an opener for you.

Dick (04:20)
Thank you. Happy to be here.

Andy (04:48)
⁓ Sometimes it's a bit of a curve ball, but you seem like you can handle it pretty well. So you've been successful in your career in real estate, development, et cetera. But if you had to do it all over again, it couldn't do real estate or development, what would you do from a business standpoint?

Dick (05:07)
Well, that's a good question and let me give you a little background. ⁓ During my productive career, I spent 10 years in Motorola as a major wireless corporation. And then I founded a company of my own and brought in venture capital partners like Chase Manhattan and the Carlyle Group. That company was the largest in the Southeast and we sold that to Nextel. That's how they came to be in the Southeast. And when having done that, I founded a tower company of our own in the Atlanta market. And for a while there,

We were completing construction of a communication tower about every 27 hours using subcontractors. And during that period, I was approached in with the same group that had invested in my company. We went out and invested in American Tower Corporation in Texas. Started buying up and consolidating towers and built about 35,000 acquired sites and stuff inside the organizations. sold, we took it public and I stepped off the board at the time it took public in New York Stock Exchange.

And then I sold my towers into that and kept the sites under about 64 sites, primarily in Georgia, but some in Alabama and North Carolina and South Carolina. And retired here in 98. So the limit of my real estate experience before I came back home was in zoning and permitting towers and using land for those kinds of purposes. I got involved with this because a friend of mine, Big Webb, who's recently passed away, is great guy.

Beek was restoring our house on Federal Street at 303 Federal Street. That's how the company came to be named. And he said to me, why don't you buy Old Bay Marketplace downtown? And I said, well, I had been through it and it looks like a disaster. It's leaking in the roof, it's flooding, and the stores are half closed. What's going on there? And he said, well, it's for sale. I said, how do you know that there's no signs? he said, well, everybody knows Which told me something about the real estate marketing at the time.

Madeline (06:48)
he knows it for sale.

Dick (06:53)
And so I went to see the person who had it listed and he said, you know, this is very important building. Everybody comes to Beaufort Park down there by the marina and walks past this building on the way up or back down Bay Street. And if the right person got that building and did the right thing with it, they could turn Beaufort into Gatlinburg South. Well, Gatlinburg has been burned and rebuilt since then, so I'm not sure what it's like now, but at that time it was like...

eight or 10 pizza parlors, eight or 10 rock shops, 10 or 15 t-shirt shops, and then some flip flops and terry cloth sort of shops. It was not what I would describe as the place I had looked to retire to. We did end up buying it. We ended up changing it, opening up the upstairs, putting in some skylights. And so learned a lot there. After that, we began doing some other buildings. We got involved with the Salsas building here on Bay Street. The front of that building is tabby, so it has no supporting structure, no wood.

No steel, just a melted ⁓ oyster shell and cast up in rounds. And it's thin walled tabby. And we were told by the experts that you could not restore that building because the tabby would collapse either inward on the employees or outward on the folks in the street. But the risk of death was significant. As a retired guy who likes being married to the woman that I'm married to, I needed things to do to keep me from being on the foot around the house. So this was a learning opportunity.

And fortunately I had two great people that were working with me, Norma Duncan, who retired about 12 years ago, and Courtney World, who's been with me now for 26 years. She's now the CEO of the company. We got involved and we opened that building up and it had been closed on Bay Street for over 20 years. And when we redid it, ⁓ Salts's restaurant went in the back. It's now the Harth restaurant in front and there's a ⁓ tea and spice place next to it.

It had been a former bulk store. So we had to take a floor out. We had to go underground. There was a lot of stuff we had to do, but that building has been fully occupied and fully leased all but four days in the 20 plus years we've had it open. And those four days is when we were over between tenants. Then we got, we've been involved in a bunch of buildings on Bay Street and a bunch of buildings down the way here. There's a building not too far from here on Bay Street that we bought. We called it the red bug because the realtor that sold it to us.

Madeline (08:59)
turning it up.

Dick (09:15)
said the building is painted red and that red paint is mostly what's holding the building together because the termites are behind it and have pretty much consumed the rest of the building. It's turned out to be true. So we restored it, put an architecture firm in it and then ⁓ that's changed since then and it's now here. We sold the building some time ago. So since I've been back, we have focused on three things. One is restoration and enhancement of historic buildings and buildings that are in disarray.

Two is doing things that might reduce the amount of sprawl that we're inviting here because in my business career I spent most of my time living in Atlanta a couple years in San Francisco and I saw what sprawl can do to a community, things that you really like to do, people you like to see you no longer did it because you weren't sure if you were going to get stuck in traffic and a hour-long drive was going to be a three-hour drive and so forth.

And so we spent a lot of time trying to do infill and redevelopment inside the area. we are currently involved in the Freedmen's Arts District to help revitalize and store some properties in the Northwest Quadrant, the Old Commons in the Freedmen's Arts District, which is online, so that families can own their property and they can earn income from those properties.

Andy (10:32)
Can I apologize for a second on that because I'm not familiar with that actually and also I'm sure a lot of our listeners aren't either. So do you mind just sharing what that is, the Friedman's?

Dick (10:44)
Sure.

The National Park Service is the organization that approves Landmark Historic District. In the original update, it was focused much on the grand houses and gracious spaces that you see on parts of the Old Point along Bay Street. And the one next to you is a classic case. In the 2002 update, they spent more time studying the Northwest Quadrant and the Old Commons.

And I'm paraphrasing here, but the language they used ⁓ said, this is the first area in the United States where formerly enslaved people have the opportunity to own real estate and begin participating in the creation of intergenerational wealth that comes with real estate. And because of that, that is more significant historically than perhaps some of the bigger houses that we're better known for.

And so if you look at that situation and you follow it farther along, we have now the Reconstruction Aero National Park that President Obama created here in Beaufort and it has been expanding. We have Mather School, which is not far from where we're sitting today, which was one of the first schools for the daughters of formerly enslaved people. So we have history there. And what we have now is a situation that I hope we can manage as a nation, as a community. And that situation is that

If parents bring their adolescent children to Beaufort for a summer week and tour some of these sites and see some of these things and hear about some of what's happening, their opinion about the experience of slavery and reconstruction will be ⁓ ingrained in them through those efforts. I worry that an impressionable

Madeline (12:17)
to.

Dick (12:36)
15 or 16 year old might come away with a sensation that they should be bitter and or angry. Our hopes is that by restoring some of these cottages and Freedman's cottages that are owned by families, ⁓ the culture and the people as well as the architecture can be saved so that those same adolescents when they're here.

we'll be able to take a tour and if it's a freedman's cottage, perhaps there'll be an artist in there so they can look at someone who's doing watercolor or painting or sculpture or whatever. They can attend lectures. And they can also see where Robert Smalls is buried and the tribute to Harriet Tubman because this is where she was based when she conducted the first raid that freed slaves that was managed, I'll say managed, commanded by a woman.

And the one that freed the most, little over 750 slaves were freed on a barge from the Cumbinant River. And the majority of those people were brought to Beaufort and were housed at Tabernacle Baptist Church and nearby. Over 100 of those people joined the Union Army while they were here, and other ones may have later. And so I would like for those adolescents to see the tomb of Robert Smalls and understand about his role as a hero in the

Civil War and also as a leader in our ⁓ public education system, education system generally and representative democracy. And Harriet Tubman and her strong and ⁓ indomitable will to make a difference in people's lives that were being enslaved and see them as people that should provide hope. Because rather than becoming bitter or being discouraged from succeeding, want them to understand that their ancestors up there

involved in these properties here. Probably went to fish fries and went to church with Robert Smalls and perhaps Harriet Tubman and some of the other folks here. And they should view that as a challenge to see what they can do as individuals who will follow on the heels of what those people did that came before them. In the midst of that, what we're trying to do with the Freedmen's Arch District is similar to what's been done in other areas like the Penland School that's in

North Carolina and the Aramont School that's in Tennessee. And those schools celebrate local cultural arts and crafts, but they also bring in people that want to study that and come from other places. We're looking to build that kind of school in the district. We have found someone that's going to donate an 8,000 square foot building to us. We're going to be converting that into studio and galleries and classrooms, perhaps a black box theater and a place to provide food. We'll have some logic nearby on some blocks where

our artists and teachers can come and stay. And we think there are a lot of people that want to come here to Beaufort and experience that. ⁓ So we've got a strong history of that, whether it be Jonathan Green, who is widely believed to be the ⁓ most renowned interpreter of the Southern experience through his Gullah art, or some of the other people that have come and grown through this stage through our folk arts in other areas. But that and things like the art of making a

cast net out of cloth, ⁓ as opposed to making it out of plastic in a factory, the art of building a bateau, and the art of a lot of other things, including culinary arts. All the reasons people should come and celebrate what's happened here and view those as things to motivate them in the rest of their lives. As a contributor to the Freedmen's Arts District, I look forward to a time when we'll see.

Andy (16:09)
Yeah.

Dick (16:15)
fourth and fifth grade classes and other age groups walking up and down the street talking to artists asking what they're doing, learning about what they're doing and sharing those experiences so they can see what's happening in that community. What has happened here is that because of procedural and other issues we have put in place to protect the buildings it has become expensive and difficult to do things and as a result we have some buildings that are in a great location that are not habitable.

or being inhabited but really shouldn't be because they're not safe. We need to save both all the buildings, the people and the culture. And it's sort of interesting when you look at it as a business model, it's that we as a community paid for streets, we paid for street lights, we paid for sidewalks, we paid for libraries, we paid for fire stations, we paid for police stations, we paid for schools, we paid for churches, we paid for parks, including waterfront park. We pay for all of those things. And these houses,

are relatively small as they should have been given the status people economic activity at the time. But they are great in that they are within walking distance or bike riding distance of all those things include our cultural amenities whether it be USCB Center for the Fine Arts or our galleries or other places. And in the world that we occupy today if we can find a couple or a family that can work in that area where they can get by car or bicycle.

Madeline (17:19)
Done.

Dick (17:40)
If they can avoid that second car, that's roughly $1,000 a month that they can put into healthcare or entertainment or ⁓ education or some other thing, rather than having to put it into a depreciating device, a car. So, harkening back to my comment about sprawl and what we experienced in Atlanta, we got this great location and we got this great place to be. And we got a situation where we just need to fix up some of those houses. The great news...

is that we think major financial institutions have set aside reserved funds to do this sort of thing. And they will welcome opportunities on how to do that. And so we are actively engaging with the Community Development Department of the City of Beaufort to remove barriers, make it easier so that we can accumulate capital, and help these people fix up their homes and make them useful.

a professional in this field and you encounter a lot of things. I'm sure your experience is not a lot different than mine, but I find that there are large numbers of people who have never worked in construction and certainly have never worked in historic district who are perfectly comfortable telling us what we should be.

Madeline (18:50)
constructions.

doing

and how we should do it.

Dick (18:56)
And while we

appreciate their enthusiasm, we'd like for them to have a little better base of knowledge, challenge. And so this is my opportunity as a retired guy to spend some time working on that through the Freedmen's Arts District. And Sherri McRae Weatherford, who's our director there, is doing a super job. Now, I'm not sure who will be seeing this or when, but on March 29th.

Madeline (19:01)
when they have to do that.

Let's do it.

Dick (19:20)
On March 28th, we're having a reception for 40 plus professional chalk artists at Tabby Place just over here across the street. They'll be doing chalk artwork on the parking lot and some of the spaces outside. The reception inside will have a ⁓ 15 minute introduction by Aunt Pearly Sue on some of the things she's doing about Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy. And that'll be followed by ⁓ a lecture by one of the historians from the University of South Carolina, Beaufort to talk about.

the Northwest Quadrant in 1955 and what they were experiencing there. That's free and open to the public. We will be having some water and iced tea. We will also be serving a small sampling of low country boil. We don't want to feed people dinner for two reasons. One, we can't afford it. The other ones we'd like to go to dinner elsewhere, but we want them to sample the shrimp and the other things that make our place so special. So, love for folks to come see that and get a feel for how that's working. That's an overview of the Friedman's Arst District.

We've currently done six, we've got six buildings either finished or underway plus this arts.

Andy (20:22)
Yeah, okay. You sound very busy for a retired guy.

Dick (20:26)
Well, I have one daughter, I have one child, daughter who is now giving us two wonderful grandchildren who are 13 and 10. We love all of them plus our son-in-law. And Sharon and I, in October, will be celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary. And a friend of mine recently said, you know, anniversaries are a big deal because if you just stay alive, you have a birthday.

Madeline (20:52)
You don't have to do much.

Dick (20:55)
But if you can find a relationship that the two of you are willing to do things that are necessary to compromise and make it work for a long period of time, that's a testament to the people's commitment to each other and what it's worth. So I find that my relationship with my wife and with the rest of my family is enhanced if I have things to keep me busy. I've offered several times to help Sharon do everything she does better by being home and advising her as opposed to leaving. And she's invited me to do that. She's informed me she won't be there.

So I need to stay busy or otherwise I'll get into mischief.

Andy (21:28)
So that's the secret to 50 years of marriage.

Dick (21:31)
Well, I think the secret is marrying the right person, being committed to letting them know that you're aware that they're the right person and trying to be the best person. The way that a guy described it to me recently, and he's a priest, said, the goal is to be forgiving for the other person when they're not perfect and to strive to be perfect yourself. Well, I got room to improve on both of those things. And so I'm fortunate that I got somebody that I'm happy to be. I got my best friend and best advisor as my

Madeline (21:49)
So.

Andy (21:56)
Yeah, sounds like good advice. ⁓ but you have you have retired from 303 associates, but fourth, okay, but it does sound like you're actively involved in some capacity, I guess. How does that work exactly?

Dick (22:03)
It's my fourth retirement. ⁓

I'm a majority owner of 303, so I'm an advisor from a board level seat. a day-to-day basis, Courtney Wurl is doing a great job running that activity. My primary activities serve on the board of the Freedmen's Arts District, on the board of the Beaufort Jasper Housing Trust, affordable and workforce housing. I'd love to tell you a little bit about that if you get to. And I'm involved in a birding center called the Carolina Byte Birding Center that we're going to be putting out across from the Port Royal Sound Maritime Center.

Madeline (22:30)
you

Dick (22:41)
to talk about preserving and expanding the population of birds in the Carolina Bight and in the Atlantic Flyway. And then I'm involved with USCB on their education foundation, which is

Madeline (22:52)
There's a

meeting I just came to a few minutes ago.

Dick (22:55)
Those are the things that are keeping me busy plus my...

Madeline (22:58)
spent a lot of with our grandkids.

Andy (22:59)
Yeah, fair enough. So ⁓ yeah, I if you want to talk about, really, this is for you. okay. Whatever you want to talk about. So I mean, I definitely have things I want to learn from you. But if you want to hit on that, let's go for it.

Dick (23:13)
Okay, ⁓ when I retired the first time in 98 and we bought the house at Federal Street, ⁓ we thought we were going to be living here six months and maybe six months in Paris, six months here, six months in London and sort of do that. But got involved with a number of things here locally and then we had grandkids and so we didn't do that. ⁓ So some of the things I saw, I began looking into and I thought, well, you the military is important.

Tourism economics is important and retirement development seems to be a pretty big deal around here. What's going on with things like medical and other things. Then I began to look under the hood because I got on the board of the United Way and looked at some of the things we were doing as a community. And what we have here, Andy as I'm sure you know, is we have a relatively well-off group of retirees with a pretty good income level. We have an incredibly poor group of folks that have been legacy poverty people here.

And sometimes they're behind the trees, not a sight, and suffering a great deal because of that. And then we've got a relatively small middle class. And we need to ⁓ provide opportunities for folks to come up, and we need to provide opportunities to fill in some of the holes in our economy. And what I mean by that is if you look at the numbers, we don't have any workforce or affordable housing that satisfies anywhere near the requirements. So I began getting involved with that and trying to figure out what was going on.

20 years ago we funded a program called Project Shelter which we partnered with ⁓ United Way, with the City of Buford, the Historic Buford Foundation, and ⁓ our family to restore some buildings. We learned a lot through that and we left the Historic District because of the administration. Then I got on the board of a couple of other things and saw the problems with getting employees here and I'm sure you've had that, you know, people you deal with if not personally.

Madeline (25:00)
I wish.

Dick (25:10)
And so we began studying this stuff. To Buford County's credit in 2021, they passed a resolution to seek to form a housing trust. And that now has been formed and the members are Buford County, Jasper County and five municipalities, the usual suspects. All of them in those two counties except Rizzo.

And we have now hired Claude Hicks who runs that. Claude brings a lot of experience to us in this arena and I've been digging into it. And the way I describe it is that there are large numbers of people in organizations with large amounts of resources and they don't know how to make a difference in the program. They'd like to, but they're not sure where to start. So I brought with me for this today and I'll leave it with you if you'd like. I have three charts here and these charts were prepared by

Laura Ulrich. Laura is the economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and does a great job and she's been coming down here regularly. And so what she does, these are three sides out of about 40 and the heading here says, let's look specifically at affordability in the two fastest growing MSAs in South Carolina and then in the low country. Now she's from upstate so she thinks of the low country as being here whereas the folks in Charleston, you know.

Sometimes they think they're in low-cost. I'll clarify that as we go. But this one shows what's happening in the Myrtle Beach-Conway area. And if you see this line across here, that's the median income. This is the number of houses that fit into that median income. That is the number of houses that a family earning median income could have purchased in Myrtle Beach and Conway between 2000

in 2020. All of these they could not afford.

Andy (27:06)
That looked like very a lot better in the...

Dick (27:10)
And this is one for Charleston. If you see the map on Charleston, that's Charleston, Berkeley, and... ⁓

Madeline (27:18)
you

Andy (27:19)
think that might be one house right here that is under the line.

Dick (27:23)
⁓

Stand by for these. This is the Charleston number and this is what you see there. So fewer, but some. Same problem. This number is higher, but so is the cost. Now this one I'm about to show you, Buford and Jasper County. A lot of people say, I understand about Buford, but this is Buford and Jasper.

Not a single house, could a median income, not a single median priced house, could median income family have bought in Beaufort or Jasper County in the last 24 years. Not one. And what it says right here, the Hilton Head MSA, which includes Jasper and Beaufort County, has not had a single period of affordability in 24 years, and it has become much more severe recently. Now what is it about our procedures?

our policies and our activities that has caused that to happen. We need to answer this question because we know that grocery stores and restaurants in some places have said they're closing because they can't get employees. We know that other people are only operating five days a week instead of six because they can't get employees on additional day. We know some restaurants are closing at 2.30 because they can't stay open at 7 because they can't get people.

We also know that we have several hundred traveling nurses here because they come in and stay and they work for a period of time to get high subsistence and then they move on. They're not healthcare workers, that payroll is not staying in the area and many of those folks are living in RVs. That's what you've got to do to fill out your employee base. We know that the town of Port Royal put a moratorium on building any more apartments and their stated reason is they couldn't find enough employees to work in the first responder business to respond to additional people.

Well, as I said to a lady the other day when she was complaining about potential people moving here, said, let me ask you something.

Madeline (29:20)
She's 60ish. ⁓

Dick (29:22)
Instead

of one of you or your friends is going to an emergency facility somewhere. I'm not saying it's hospital, I'm not saying it's emergency care facilities. It might be Savannah, it might be Hilton Health. And when they get there, there are 40 people in line in front of them because there not enough healthcare workers to take care of them. You're going to feel okay about that because when you deny these people a place to live, that's what you're setting up. And if some of those people die, well, you accept the fact that you're partially responsible because they couldn't get help. And that's not just when they go.

If you have an incident at your house and the first responders that were going to come there have already gone somewhere else and there's not enough depth in those personnel for them to respond to you, are you going to be okay waiting for a while until somebody can get there? Now other people have said other problems that are just as dire, these are not theoretical issues. These are real issues. There are lot of things we can do and the industry can help. I recently was at a meeting.

where a contractor was requesting some changes to some design standards because he wanted to include some affordable housing in a project that would be near a high school, which would have been good for the teachers and the other people that could just walk from their house directly to school and back, which I personally like for the kids too, because then they don't have to deal with a hard time getting home. And they wanted to change some things, and that included exposed rafter tails on the building.

And that included a couple of things, which are very familiar, where you have to build a house 18 or 30 inches off the ground. If you build them 18 to 30 inches off the ground, you're to have steps, which gives you an ADA issue if you've got it. And you're to have a railing around it when you get to a certain level. That's the law. The practical matter is people falling 18 inches can get hurt too. So the builder may feel the need. That adds, excuse me, thousands of dollars to the cost of construction and to the cost of maintenance of that house.

When you add to that, that adds to the cost of the mortgage and the person to do things. So this individual was told by a planning official at that meeting that these standards is what the elected body had voted on. That's what they want. Well, I used to be on that. I can tell you that when those changes came forward, come forward, they're in a package of changes, you vote on because you're trusting the professionals and nobody is screaming.

Madeline (31:29)
Ciao

Got

you.

Dick (31:39)
And the reason nobody is screaming about it is because no builder, no single party engineer otherwise wants to be the complainer because they fear retribution from the regulatory process. And it's reasonable that you would because nobody likes dealing with somebody they perceive to be a problem. But this person said, and we think we can get that. We think we can get these design standards and get the price you want. And I listened for about 20 or 30 minutes and said, OK, that's great. Can you give us an example of where that's actually happening?

Looked at ceiling, stayed around. I think a couple of houses over that so-and-so place did that. They said, no, that's 2,500 square feet. You're talking about 1,500 foot town. I can't think of a place yet. I said, so let me see if I got a strain. Comfortable we can get there, but we have no actual example of actually doing it. And we've got somebody who's a professional that does this for a living telling you they can't. Now all this occurred before any tariffs on 25 % on lumber or any of the rest of the But if we're going to have affordable housing,

Madeline (32:14)
did.

work.

Can't get there.

Dick (32:40)
we've got to reduce the cost of housing. There's other things that come into it too. So what we're doing at the Housing Trust is we have participated in a multi-party funding arrangement to build Carrington Place over here on Boundary Street. That Carrington Place ⁓ is eligible for tax credits, and tax credits are what the federal government and state governments use to subsidize housing. And that's a senior's

Madeline (32:55)
Street.

Dick (33:08)
55 and older development. It will be full before it opens. And what we have learned in the last few years is people that move into senior housing often stay with it for the balance of their lives. And many folks that live there are women who have lost a husband and or a house and they don't want to keep up with all the things house have and if there's a group, it'd be pretty sociable and positive.

Madeline (33:31)
It

Dick (33:34)
Last year, the number one cause of vacancy in senior housing in the United States was death. They lived the rest of their life in their parents. So where do we put folks that need a place to? Homeless problem? Problem. What the Housing Trust has done as well is our staff, Claude and Jennifer, have done a great job getting qualified through the state to bring state housing ⁓ agency repair funds here.

That group has a little over 20 million a year. Last year, I think it was closer to 30. They can be used for home repairs. They've got a program to

It requires you to go through training on lead-based paint if you're going to work on houses that are older than 1978. And a lot of housing stock in Beaufort are older than 1978. Port Royal as well, some in Bluffton. And so those funds can be made available, but it's very bureaucratic, it's very detailed, and it takes a lot of effort to bring it here, but it can be useful, but they have some requirements. One of the requirements is that you've got to bring the building up to code. Well, you know some of these cottages that were built in the 1930s.

Madeline (34:21)
78.

Dick (34:42)
Trusses, hoists, studs, they're on two feet centers. They're not on 18 and bringing that house up to code's gonna be hard. They were thinking about electrical and mechanical perhaps, but struggle is gonna be difficult. Not to mention that the foundation may have been blocks of brick sitting on the ground with or without mortar in them. So there's a lot of work for us to do. So we're doing some of that and we're working with Deepwell and Help of Beaufort and a couple of other organizations who do repairs.

Madeline (34:52)
be very difficult.

some.

Thanks.

Dick (35:12)
The good news is the City of Beaufort on Tuesday night, the day before yesterday, approved a resolution to partner with the Housing Trust to apply $250,000 of City and Housing Trust money to repairs in the city. That's a good start heading in that direction and will be leveraged with the state money. The other thing we're doing in additional Carrington and the repairs is we have worked with Habitat and we have worked with the hospital to provide down payment assistance.

So if you've got a hospital employee that's trying to buy a house and doesn't have enough money, I think we provided $16,500 for a person up to 15 purchases of houses. For the one with Habitat, it was a program with them in the town or city of Hardyville in Jasper County. And I think it was 15 townhouses over there that we helped folks have a position in that.

Madeline (36:05)
by, where they can move in and begin turning.

Dick (36:10)
So there things to be done about it, but this is very distressing. When Laura gave that presentation at a meeting in November at the Culinary Institute on the TCL campus in Bluff, there were several mayors and county council members there for both councils, and there was a collective. They had no idea this was as bad as it is. So we gotta do something about this.

Madeline (36:31)
Sort of. ⁓

Andy (36:37)
Yeah, I mean, I've been here since the same time you have 1998. But but you're saying every this median household line, these are the these are the cost of the houses in that period of time.

Dick (36:42)
You're right out of junior high. ⁓

This is the median income, and this is the ones you couldn't afford below. And you can see here how the work. And Laura's coming back. Laura will be here. I think we're going to do it now in April or May. And we're going to convene contractors, Home Builders Association, some professionals like yourself and other folks in the design and engineering professionals, and some of the regulatory folks and talk about what we've got to do to get these costs down.

Andy (36:57)
These are the amounts.

Madeline (37:00)
day.

Andy (37:01)
All of them are below the line.

Madeline (37:04)
Well.

Andy (37:23)
Well, I think what I'm seeing from this graph too, mean, you could say at least it was...

close to the line.

Dick (37:32)
huh. For a while. ⁓ right there.

Andy (37:34)
Until

right there, we have a real big dip. And this is what I've felt and seen in the past.

Dick (37:42)
Well, one of the reasons for this too is that if you look at some of the communities, and I won't call names because I could be out of date, a fair amount of their inventory of what would regularly be considered workforce housing has become short-term real estate cottages through Airbnb and VRBO and things like that. When you take that house out of the workforce industry and you put it over there, the price often goes up because you're collecting a different set of money, which feels good for the tax.

the tax collection folks, but it is not good for your income level and your employee base. I would guess that number in the county is somewhere between 3 and 9,000 homes.

Andy (38:16)
Yeah, so that's it.

Yeah, so that's definitely a factor.

Dick (38:26)
That includes the municipalities,

not just the incorporated.

Madeline (38:28)
editor.

Andy (38:29)
There's just so many factors involved here. I mean, it's not an easy solution. They're not making any more land either in Beaufort County,

Dick (38:36)
Well, you

covered that and I appreciate you bringing it up because it's something I should have covered and failed to. The cost of land is about 20 % of the problem based on what we're seeing. Impact fees and other things are going up dramatically, as you know, so in some places, about four or five. I'm not saying it's not warranted, but I am saying it makes it difficult to afford to.

Madeline (38:52)
going to factor.

Dick (39:00)
Strange regulations that have been in place for some period of time and keep moving around make it difficult, as an example. These housing incentives that I was talking about, the tax incentives from HUD at federal level and through the state housing agency, are allocated according to something called a QAP, a qualified allocation program, which they changed a little bit. Last year, you could not even qualify for those unless you were within one mile of

Madeline (39:21)
every year.

Dick (39:29)
1,000 jobs, which is great for manufacturing. But as I understand it, unless you were almost at the gates of the air station, there is no place near the Beaufort or Jasper County that qualified. So we were out. Now the people who were setting those rules oftentimes were being influenced by the people from Charleston and Greenville and Columbia that were at the meeting. I'm happy to say that Claude and Jennifer are now at those meetings and we're being heard. And thanks to our legislative delegation for their help and doing.

Madeline (39:56)
that.

Dick (39:58)
CLAWD is also sitting on the board of the Affordable Housing Board for the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta. And they're having a program, they accepted applications in December and the Housing Trust applied for grant funds to deal with heirs' property. Because we have heirs' property situations here where families can't use their property, can't sell it, can't lease it, can't mortgage it, can't do anything because they don't have clear title.

A lot of legacy reasons why that's case. It goes back to Crow and other stuff, but that's sort of irrelevant now. But if these grants come through, that would allow us to hire lawyers, and we've identified one we would work with to clear title for families, provided they agree to put in place an estate planning. So if the family clears the title and somebody passes away, we won't be back into errors probably again. Federal Home Loan Bank has identified that in the southeast, including

Madeline (40:29)
you

Dick (40:53)
excluding a small part of Florida, again, part of Maryland where they don't report. There's $30 billion worth of family-owned real estate that they can't use because it's tangled up in heirs property.

They may decide to sell it, they may decide to keep it, they may decide to just clean the timber on it, they may decide to buy it, we don't know. But it's their property, and if we can remove that barrier so they can use it, it can be useful for a lot of other things. So when you say they're not making any more land in Beaufort County, you're exactly right. But we may find that we have significant opportunities to make better use of the land.

Madeline (41:27)
we have here.

Andy (41:28)
Yeah, okay. Well, it sounds like that's a big passion of yours is just this affordable housing and improving that and I definitely appreciate, you know, what you're doing to to spearhead some of those things. ⁓ So I guess I want to go back a little bit to your your background ⁓ and because you're from Beaufort, I believe.

Dick (41:54)
I grew up in Bluffton and moved here my senior year in high school to get the urban experience.

Andy (41:58)
Okay, the big town of Beaufort.

Dick (42:02)
Bluffton, the school I was at in Bluffton had four fewer students, grade first through 12, than did senior high, senior class at Beaufort High.

Andy (42:10)
Yeah, now it's somewhat.

Dick (42:13)
Well, know, Bluffton is sort of, it's not Bluffton though.

Andy (42:15)
grew up

in. ⁓ but was there a reason you came back to Buford after you retired from the cell phone industry?

Dick (42:23)
Well, Sharon, my wife is from Savannah, and we looked around at various places, and we wanted to be in a place that had walkability, had a college campus, had a pretty good library system, and had a diverse economy. We didn't want to be in a place where everybody looked and acted the same. And Buford satisfied those requirements, and that was one of reasons for being here. ⁓ We wanted to be close enough to her parents that she's the only daughter that she could be with them, and she did a great job taking care of them.

along with her brother during their latter years. They're gone now. And so it fit in with all those characteristics. We did a house at Federal Street, 303 Federal Street, and I thought we'd be there for the rest of our lives. And then as it turned out, Sharon's love for horses exerted itself again. And so we ended up moving to Spring Island where we have had horses at our house. We've outlived or outlasted our horses and we've outlived or outlasted our dog. So we'll probably come back into town at some point fairly soon.

Andy (43:18)
Okay, is Federal Street still something you own?

Dick (43:22)
No, we sold that house, gosh, 15, 20 years ago. It's changed hands a couple of times since then.

Madeline (43:27)
Yeah.

Andy (43:28)
Okay.

So going back to the ⁓ story about the downtown building, the Old Bay Marketplace, ⁓ and just the idea of improving that. ⁓ There's a term now, it's called adaptive reuse. I'm sure you're familiar with the term. I'm a good old boy, so I just call it renovations and rehabilitation. But it's a fancy term for...

for adaptive reuse, which I think is something that you spend a lot of your career at 303 doing. Can you talk a little bit about that? ⁓

Dick (44:07)
Well, I can. I find like you that we live in a time when people like to label things so they can short-circuit that. And I find that understandable. I also find it sort of unpleasant because I get labeled, you get labeled, every belt gets labeled. And I was joking with somebody the other day, I'm really tired of only being considered because I'm so pretty. I'd like to be thought about differently. They assured me I was. So I got past that. ⁓

Andy (44:30)
Yeah.

Madeline (44:31)
⁓

Dick (44:37)
Reuse of a building in the context of a community is a very important area. The building itself is an element of community. When we redid the Salta's building that had been vacant for several, couple decades, maybe three, the back of that building was a warehouse, windows, no back windows, a metal door.

Madeline (44:43)
So,

store.

Dick (45:06)
and then a chain link fence around the back with some abandoned air conditioning equipment. The front of it was this tabby building underneath which they'd put some beams and they'd put a glass front for a belt store that functioned that way until belt moved out to a suburban location. So when we looked at that we said, what are we going to do with this one? Because the 1797 building was built when Napoleon was invading Russia. mean, it's got lot of history.

The building itself was used by Mr. Saltus to build gunboats for Thomas Jefferson's gunboat navy when he was sending around to the Gulf of Mexico to deal with Cuba. And Mr. Saltus himself was widely respected because he went to Texas, became the governor. We later found out that that was mistaken. A Texan who was here said this Saltus was actually one of the original 10 Texas Rangers. And that mattered because being a governor was nothing.

Madeline (45:37)
Thank

Dick (46:04)
They come and go, but 10 Texas range, mean, so anyway, a lot of history in that place. When we were redoing that building, we looked underneath it and dug some holes to see what we would find. And we found a few things. One, we found China and other things that had been literally brought in with ships because ships were leaving here and going to Europe and Asia and other places. So you could book package passage here or out of Port Royal to go to Amsterdam or London if you chose.

And we also found that if you got down about 18 inches, when the tide came up, the water came up too. So that was just detritus that had fallen off of ships and other things down there. was not real soil. So the water came up and down, which creates, as you know, an exciting opportunity for structural planning for what you're going to do with the building.

When we looked at front of that building, the glass windows were boarded up with plywood. The area where there are now brick was full of weeds and cigar butts and cigarette butts and beer cans. And it was just really unseemly. So we cleaned that up. We got it going. Now then my goal when I came here was that to do this was that I have been fortunate in

Being born in this country and living in a time when we were taught after World War II, I was born in 49, a baby boomer, we were led to believe that almost anything was possible if we worked hard, we tried, and that was the American dream. And I've been fortunate to do better than I thought I would and to provide for my family. And I wanted to see other people have that opportunity. It was my impression having bought a lot of small businesses in the wireless business. A lot of the small...

Folks are so busy trying to make payroll and get something done day to day that they don't have a chance to stop and reflect on what they're doing. And I want to spend some time talking with them. And I pretty successful in that. But one of the things we learned is one of the buildings over next to Fordham Market where Lost Local is, that building came on the market and we bought it. And I went over there to see the guy. And one of them was a payday lending guy.

Madeline (48:04)
Mm-hmm.

Dick (48:13)
He said he wasn't crazy about the office because most of his people rode a bicycle in to pay 25 cents to $2 a week.

Madeline (48:21)
on their love.

Dick (48:23)
I'm thinking

this is probably not helping the rest of the merchants on Bay Street. This doesn't sound like the group that's going down here to buy the, you know, Orvis fishing rod. So I suggested we help them find another place we did that. And I went into another place, lady was delightful and very skilled and made beautiful wedding dresses. And she didn't lease tuxes. She didn't sell jewelry. didn't do any of the amenities that would go along with weddings. So I said to her, how much money do you make on a wedding?

She told me the amount she'd it for. So that's great, but how much does it cost you to make it? She told me roughly the cost of the material, because it varied depending on the dress. And I said, how many hours you've been? She told me. Well, looks to me like you're making about $2.47 an hour doing this, because you're spending all this other time. And out of the $2.47, you're paying your rent and your other stuff here. Wouldn't it sort of make sense if somebody's in here doing this stuff, and they want to be buying invitations or jewelry or renting tuxes?

not deny them the opportunity to spend that money with you. I thought I was helping her build a business. That weekend, we got a call. She packed up and left, disappeared. And the call we got was somebody who'd paid for a wedding dress. And they were planning to pick the wedding dress up and go, they want to if must wear that. She went, I have no idea. I learned at that moment, I had to be careful. My conversation with some folks. But that sort of,

Madeline (49:44)
Mm. ⁓

Dick (49:50)
activity at that end of street changed after we did the Salters building and now you see some of the other changes happen down there. The 700 Bay Street building, which I didn't have anything to do with developing or building, would not have occurred if that end of the street had not been cleaned up and made more appealing. When we got involved, if you drove across the bridge from Ladies Island, you could see the back of that building and there were abandoned step ladders and other stuff leaning against the top of the building, you know, where the windows are upstairs and things.

Those have been satisfying in the adaptive reuse. The other piece though, this is well as anybody perhaps better than most, is probably indicated by lady, I don't know her, but over here on Charles Street, she bought a concrete block building that's been used and got designs done to add two floors to it above the concrete block.

Madeline (50:21)
You know.

Dick (50:39)
After going through the analysis of what it was going take to bring that building up to code and get the structural analysis and other things she needed, she deemed it was better to take it down and just start over. Had she talked to you, you would have probably told her that up front. I probably would have said that's what I'd want to do because I don't want to embarrass anybody else by telling them what they should do with their activities.

Madeline (50:54)
have an

Andy (51:00)
As a of fact, we're doing engineering on that job.

Dick (51:03)
Okay. Well, I hope that works out just right and it's going to be good. And I'm assuming those walls were like a lot of things built at that time. They had mortar between the blocks and had nothing inside of this.

Madeline (51:08)
You

Andy (51:14)
That's correct. Yeah, no reinforcement. it ends up being, like you said, much better to, in some cases it is better to start over.

Dick (51:24)
Yeah,

you know, all change is not bad, but we do have a group of folks, and some of them are quite vocal and critical, who live in the world of should, where you should be able to do that to a building, you should be able to do this building, and I live in a world that is, and that is we can do this, and we will do this, this is what is possible. This should be possible, and if somebody's willing to put an unlimited amount of money and time, probably is. But typically the number of people who willing to put up unlimited amount of money and time.

few and far between and their one knee doesn't last very long because they run out of it. We have buildings around here now that are not historic, full of character and stuff, but people who just oppose change want to act like they are because they don't want other people coming here and they don't want to see things. And it gets to be a little out of hand. Having said that, if you're practicing

Madeline (52:02)
They're not.

Dick (52:20)
Community development, where you're trying to do something that's good for the community and that you think the community will support. That often conflicts with what I'll describe as the world of should folks. Case in point.

We had some of the folks who were unhappy about a project we were proposing to screaming and shouting that we should have been required to do a traffic study. To interstate what it's going to do to all the roads around there. Well, we hired a traffic engineering firm, had local expertise and presence based out of Charlotte. Said, okay, that's a retail space now. We're planning to put apartments there in smaller retail. How will that affect the traffic? Traffic engineering folks said there'll be 55 % fewer trips each day from the building you're proposing.

Madeline (52:53)
Thank

Dick (53:06)
then the building is there if you put it back in use as retail. The immediate response was, let's attack the traffic study because it didn't give them the answer they wanted. The traffic study was done by a firm that employs Rob McPhee. Rob's a traffic engineer, worked with Beaufort County for well over 20 or 30 years. He's based here in town and is familiar with this stuff. So it's one of those situations where...

Madeline (53:14)
.

Dick (53:32)
Well-intentioned people thinking about the world as should get a small piece of information and as a result of that take a position that really is not very well informed. And people get tired of it, people leave and I will describe the Saltus building when we were doing that and some of the other buildings in the historic district. The Red Bug was one of these, Old Bay was one of these. The way of

acquaintance of mine from Atlanta, when he was down passing through here, he was a CFO for an industrial conglomerate, looking at where he was going to retire and was coming through Buford. So we had lunch. And he had been walking around and driving around the neighborhoods because he was kind of an in-town sort of guy. And he said, you know, there are a lot of buildings that are really pretty rough shaped and a lot of yards that are kind of messy and, you know, this looks like a problem. As well, know, word change comes in waves and...

people are making changes and a little bit here, a little bit there. I kind of feel like Beaufort is like having a crack in the window of your house. When you come home one day and you get out of your car and you see that crack in the window, say, oh, I need to do something about that. The next day, you're in a hurry, you get home late, you know, know. About two or three weeks go by, you stop noticing that crack, you don't plan to do it. And then one day you get a call from your wife, in this case, your used wife, could have been husband.

She said, my mother's coming next week. said, my gosh, I gotta get busy and do something about that window. I kinda feel like the mother who has arrived, and I see lots of windows need to be replaced in Beaufort, and they need to be. He said, what's keeping that from being done? I've been busy trying to figure that out. And what, over here on Duke Street, we're building two Freedman's cottages with revolving funds that our family provides to the Freedman's Arts District. And I call them Freedman's Cottages, because it's a classic design two-bedroom.

Madeline (55:00)
Thank

Dick (55:24)
freedom of the cottage type design. Forge in front.

Madeline (55:27)
You

Dick (55:30)
well received

and encouraged by the historic Buett Foundation and other preservation agencies and the HRB. Well, we had to take down two houses to do that. And the two houses we took down were in terrible shape. The roofs had collapsed in, the floors had collapsed in, they were having lots of problems attached to it. And our contractor said we can build this new Freedman's Cottage that meets that sort of design criteria at $300 a square foot, which is not cheap either, but that's today's world. Or we can renovate those for $500 a square foot.

Well, those are 1,500 square foot houses. The incremental $200 a square foot times 1,500 square feet, that's $300,000 somebody's got to pay. And my question to the group is, if this is worth $300,000 more for somebody to invest it, who gets the benefit of that investment? Because the property owner doesn't benefit, his value doesn't go up. Does the city benefit?

Madeline (56:02)
The

Dick (56:27)
Do the historical folks benefit? Does the state benefit? Is there somebody else? Let's find out who that is, because that's who should be funding this. We took a lot of criticism saying we shouldn't be talking about numbers. Numbers shouldn't matter in the historic district. You only have to walk around and see. They do matter. So the HRB was cooperative and gave us authority to take those buildings down before we ever submitted the plans to approve the other buildings, because they had control over that.

We've got that situation in place, but people are discouraged. And so to do adaptive reuse, there's a guy that's over in the ⁓ area that I understand is 80, who is a military veteran, who has real health issues. This is his only asset. It's got mold in the place and other things, and neighbors trying to fix them up. He can't afford to fix it up. He can't afford to move. He's just sort of trapped. We need to do a better job than that.

And we also got, last year we had 44 abandoned and vacant buildings in the district. 44 is a pretty sizable number in 200 acre district. Well, we're fixing up four of those. That leaves another 40 and some of those are commercial and some are residential. So we're looking for ways and we're working with the community development department of the city to find ways. Let me give you an example. The Anchorage, which is just up the street from you here.

and the old jail on King Street are both eligible for and have received historic tax credits. Great. The way historic tax credits work is if you get a historic tax credit valued in million dollars, you can go sell that to an insurance company or a bank or someone else that'll buy it. There's a market for these things and they'll pay you 85 to 90 % of that. So you get $850,000 to $900,000 to fix up the building. That's what they do it for. So if these...

Buildings are worth it and they're eligible to be contributing buildings. Shouldn't we take those cottages and maybe do some of those there? And the answer we have been given, not by the city, but by other folks, is that it's too inefficient because the cost of doing it is very high if it's a small transaction. My response is let's put five or 10 of those houses together where the numbers are bigger and the cost of doing a million dollars worth of that transaction is not.

different than doing one on the Anchorage. That's possible. That's something to consider. So we're looking into how you might make that work. South Carolina has an abandoned building tax credit. So if you've got a Dollar General store or a formal big box retailer or something else that's been vacant for five years, you can apply for tax credits because it's an abandoned building. That doesn't have be historic. It's because the adaptive reuse you're talking about requires somebody to invest some money.

And this is an incentive to do that. And you can get credit up to 25 % of your cost to renovate the building based on an approved budget. One of dilemmas is you've got to be able to predict what your costs are going to be. That's not always easy. Why shouldn't we make that same thing available for some of these cottages and some of these areas to do that? And somebody will say, yeah, but if they don't have income, tax credit is not useable to them. Well, they are useful to them if they can sell them for cash that they can use to fix up these houses.

So we're working hard to try to make some of that stuff happen and we're working with some foundations and some other parties to do that. That sort of adaptive reuse is really interesting because if you talk to Jonathan Rimka, who is a historic preservation economist, he was brought here by HBF and Mayor Murray, spoke at USCB about the benefits and what you might do for historic preservation.

Two nice ladies from Dautau who pointed out they had recently moved here from New Jersey, but they didn't know each other there, they met each other here, wondered what we had to do to get these heirs' properties that are over in the Northwest Quadrant and the old commons area fixed up. His response in that public session was, gotta get those properties out of the hands of the people who own them as soon as possible. Well, that's not what some of us would like to see because we think those people are fabric of this community and we need to keep them here. But the next day in smaller meetings, which I had the privilege to attend,

Someone asked him, if you've got five houses and one of them in the middle of them is in terrible shape, where you might have crime or rodents or other problems, and somebody fixes that up, what's the impact on the houses around it? I thought he was going to say something qualitative. He said, it's typically $40,000 to $50,000 in Greece value per house. That was before COVID. Well, that's the equivalent of an additional house in terms of value for the property on the rolls.

But the other thing it does is when you have those eyes on the street and you eliminate that as a place where possible crime, it reduces your crime, it reduces your police presence, does all sorts of things like that. And it allows somebody who's living there to take advantage of the schools, the parks, the other stuff that we've all been paying for. So finding a way to make those properties useful and productive for the families and still keep them in a form that is historic has to accept the fact that in some cases, buildings are so far gone.

that it's not feasible to save them.

That's just the nature of that adaptive reuse challenge. But I don't expect to get a quick fix. I don't expect to get a quick solution or anything, but every one of these buildings has a different story and a different family and the rest of that sort of stuff. this is all part of the fun. I'd be happy for you to come to one of the meetings we're going to have at the 1401 Duke Street office of the Freedmen's Arts District where we talk about these things.

Andy (1:02:11)
Okay, yeah, I'd to learn more about that.

Dick (1:02:13)
We're in fact planning

to do some podcasts and classes of those stuff. So this is a great training and I appreciate the opportunity.

Andy (1:02:18)
Okay.

Definitely. Have you ever been on a podcast? Okay, yeah.

Dick (1:02:22)
No, this is my first one. They told

me that the host is always great, but the producer can be very scary.

Andy (1:02:29)
Yeah, definitely. So we usually do a preview episode or a preview portion beforehand. We talk all about it. So in terms of letting the listener know what to look forward to. No, it's been great so far. I mean, I've learned a lot about what you've really been passionate about it sounds like over the past 25 years, 26 years. And one of the things that we really want to

Dick (1:02:41)
I hope I haven't been too windy here.

Andy (1:02:57)
That's actually what we really want to key in on one aspect because for somebody to continue doing that after you retire, there's got to be a driving force. Like there's a why there somewhere. So what drives you to keep pursuing these things that you're doing?

Dick (1:03:14)
Well, there's three things. One is best illustrated by a dinner I was at recently. Three other couples. One of the other couples had just returned from a fly fishing trip to South America. One had returned from a hunting trip to Africa, and one had returned from a cruise that took them to the Antarctic. And I was sitting at the table looking at the street, at a building across the street while they finally got to me.

Madeline (1:03:21)
with.

Dick (1:03:40)
I told them what I was working on with building things and one of them said, well, that sounds like work. I said, well, you know, I like to be involved in doing things that I think matter. And I realized when I said that, I had not been complimentary to them and the things they were doing. But I do think being motivated by doing something can make a difference is important and that's part of it. The other one I mentioned earlier about my relationship with Sharon is better off if I have things to do than if I'm sitting around the house. The last part of that is this place is going through rapid change.

You talked about adaptive reuse. Let me use an example of the Port Royal Sound Maritime Center. Have you been there?

Andy (1:04:17)
Yeah, in fact, so a lot of these buildings, you don't know, but I've been involved in a lot of these buildings you've been talking about, maybe peripheral, but we have a little joke about the Maritime Center because I did the foundation design for the whale tail. So good. Every time we drive past the Maritime Center.

Dick (1:04:37)
Well, I wanted that to be 18 inches higher.

Andy (1:04:43)
the kids go well-tailed, well-tailed. That's great. So it's a little funny story. yeah, so we've been, I'm familiar with the Maritime Center.

Dick (1:04:50)
grandson is now 10, but when he was seven and eight, when we'd drive around, he says, is that one of your towers, Papa? that one of your towers? Sometimes it was and it wasn't. But that's an adaptive, reused building. The reason I got involved in supporting the Port Royal Sound Foundation and the people who were leading it is that...

Given the economic and educational situation here when I was growing up, we took everything here for granted.

As we have new people moving in in droves that don't know much about this place, there's an opportunity to teach people. The case of the waterways here in the Carolina Bight, which includes the Port Royal Sound, the Seven River, May River, between essentially the Savannah River and St. Helena. And bite means a curve. There's a Georgia Bight, there's a South Atlantic Bight, there's a Carolina Bight. All of those have

Madeline (1:05:28)
in the

⁓ sound.

Dick (1:05:49)
common characteristics, which is a high level of salinity. So you can see large sharks and sea turtles miles in them. High tidal amplitude, eight to 10 feet is fairly common. Relatively clean, so you got salt marsh stuff growing. And salt marsh grass sequesters a ton of carbon each acre each year. So we have 200,000 acres of salt marsh in Beaufort and Jasper County.

Madeline (1:06:15)
more

Dick (1:06:15)
than

any other place in the state of South Carolina. South Carolina has more than any other state in the Union and that's four million pounds of carbon we sequester each year. If we don't teach people about these things they won't know how to take into account what they're doing. So I was asked by Hilton Head Prep to come attend their environmental day a few years ago. I was happy to go and they had these two school teachers there that would you would

Madeline (1:06:37)
Nah.

Dick (1:06:41)
Be delighted to have your child or grandchild in their class. Very articulate, very bright, clear-eyed, spoke to you, knew what they were doing, and lot of energy. I was pleased. And then one of them said, well, you know, everything we put in the water in Columbia and stuff comes right by here on this way to the ocean, which isn't really the case. But I let that go for that one. And then little while later, the other teacher said the same thing. So I raised my hand, and they were nice and polite to the guy with the gray hair.

I said, well, that's not really the case because here we have very little fresh water. It's high salt. So we put some in the water here. It's going to slosh around like sloshing around in a bathtub for a pretty good while. And we're going to have to be careful about what we're doing there. They were nice and stuff and went on with their presentation. One of them called me a couple of weeks later and said, you know, you were right about that, which Sharon said, well, you weren't surprised to learn that, Sharon. In the event, I was delighted she called. The message I took away from this.

If these are our best and brightest teachers and they're teaching some of our best and brightest students and they don't know the facts about this place that we're in, that's not their fault. That's our fault for not having taught them. And so places like the Port Royal Sound Maritime Center, places like USCB, which we've been big supporters and encouragers of for years, is a big piece of that. The bird population here, most people aren't aware of, we're in the Atlantic Flyway.

Madeline (1:07:50)
it in.

you

Dick (1:08:05)
I only recently learned it from birding people.

The Atlantic Flyway during peak season for migration in this location in Beaufort County can have over six million birds come through here in a week. You can sometimes have a million in a day. Maybe landing at night and it's taken off the next day and they're feeding in the salt marsh and they're doing all this. These are bird populations that travel between South America and the Arctic and they stop here.

Madeline (1:08:23)
in there.

and

Dick (1:08:38)
take the beaches and the salt marshes and stuff and do things with them, their populations are continuing to decline. There are now 60 birds in that group that are threatened with extinction. So the goal of the Carolina Bight Burning Center is to increase the amount of the population and the diversity of the population of birds in the Carolina Bight and the Atlantic Flyway. I I view it to be a bellwether species about the health of our environment here.

Madeline (1:08:47)
Mm.

Dick (1:09:05)
know the old story about the canary in the coal mine. This is sort of the shore bird in the marsh grass here, but it's the same thing. they're not thriving, we got a problem. So that's the reason to get involved in that stuff.

Andy (1:09:13)
Yeah.

Madeline (1:09:17)
And

Dick (1:09:20)
The ideal part of that is for like the Port Royal Sound Maritime Center. Sharon's on the board there and I'm off the board there and I'm happy about that. They don't need me. They're doing fine with what they're doing. USCB is growing nicely. We I hope we'll get some approval for some activities there in the next six or eight months and see them take the next level. They're just this year, they're celebrating their 20th year as a four year degree granting institution. You know, we can make the same percentage percentages of leaps over the next 20 years as we have the last 20 years.

Madeline (1:09:36)
⁓

in.

Dick (1:09:50)
That's going to be a great institution for a long time here. And when you have eight or 10 grandchildren, know, maybe some of them can go.

Andy (1:09:56)
Yeah. Well, I may or may not have one on the way. So, ⁓ but it sounds like you have really found your drive and your why. So that's really awesome to hear. ⁓ And, you know, some in the community may think otherwise. This is a good opportunity, if you'd like to maybe, I think you've already done that really, but maybe dispel any myths that maybe people in the community have about, well,

that it's just about money or it's just about this or that.

Dick (1:10:29)
I'm happy to. I have never sought recognition and never sought any acknowledgement of anything we've done, whether it be donations or contributions. But I was told by an attorney who's representing us in a frivolous lawsuit, which we have won in every case every judge has ever ruled and will be dismissed by the South Central Supreme Court if they decide to hear it. We're completely comfortable. We not only have followed the rules, but the courts have confirmed we followed them.

Madeline (1:10:39)
video.

Dick (1:10:58)
and we've done what we were supposed to do. The people that are complaining the loudest, actually their organization voted for these things more than a dozen times, but they got new people. And my experience has been that some people need a villain so they can posture themselves as a hero and use that as way to raise money for whatever cause they believe in. I find that to be intellectually dishonest. I found it to be counterproductive. But what the attorney told me,

Madeline (1:11:01)
In some.

Dick (1:11:25)
was Dick, if most people in the community had known the things that you and Sharon have been doing in the community for these last 20 some odd years, they never would have sued you. So you need to let that out. So we've been doing that and that's why you're seeing more of that sort of thing happening here. And we're grateful for people like the chamber where I got man of the year stuff and things like that. But the...

profile that I received when the venture capitalists were investing in my first wireless company and they sent me to the Mayo Clinic for three days of unpleasant probing and a couple of days of psychological evaluation was that I was a driven entrepreneur who was going to do what I thought was right and not be easily dissuaded from that by other people who had opinions. ⁓

Another person phrased it and said, you just don't care what other people do. Dick, you're going to do what you think is right. That particular situation to give you sense of why I felt fairly confident, the experts in the industry had predicted that there was a market for 5 % home penetration for cell phones in the United States. That one in 20 houses in the United States would have a cell phone. I knew that was crazy. It was going to be a huge multiple bigger than that. But in any event, I don't really care about

Madeline (1:12:20)
And then

Dick (1:12:42)
The approval of that stuff won't really care about the recognition of that sort of stuff. I care about how my family feels about me and how my grandchildren feel about me and I care about the people that I surround myself with because you want to be around people that you respect and that you admire and that you share values with. Having said that,

For the last three to four years, we've been targeted in a smear campaign by a couple of sources, one of which was somebody who wanted to be my partner. And when we had more experience with the individual, I told him we didn't want to be a partner. He told me I didn't have any choice. He was going to be enough stuff in downtown Beaufort, I had to be a partner. And that further confirmed my belief that I did not want to be a partner.

Madeline (1:13:16)
in

Yeah.

And I'm

Dick (1:13:32)
I told him that and he said, you'll be hearing from me and the next day I heard from his attorney. That started that sort of activity. So we have not been responding in the media and we've not been responding in the social.

media or anywhere else like that stuff, it sort of works like this to me. At the end of the day, after all the noise and confusion ends, if we have behaved honorably and legally...

Madeline (1:13:59)
fine.

Dick (1:14:01)
what I care about.

I was told by somebody in the wireless business, one year I bought 57 businesses in 52 weeks and consolidated different billing and all the rest of mean, there was a lot going on. The reason people don't feel good about you, Dick, is you got up and did a lot of stuff that they said never could be done.

Madeline (1:14:23)
Mm. ⁓ Ma? ⁓

Dick (1:14:26)
Scenario was Sharon when I retired from the wireless business. We engaged in a transaction then that gave us the opportunity to take care of our family and our grandchildren in a way that we were comfortable and met and exceeded our objectives. We sat down over a period of time said, we're not folks who want bigger boats. We're not folks who want more planes. We're not folks who have all those sorts of tastes, as you can tell by the way I dress and what I drive. But we like to have an income that we feel comfortable we can live the life we want. What's that number?

When we established that number, that was the number we arranged our life around. And the rest of this stuff is doing things that are interesting and intellectual. The Salters Building, we were told, was going to be a disaster. And they said, you can never make it. The Salters Building is now returning a nice return, but it's 20 years left or we did it, you know, so we had to sort through it. So doing things that matter with people that you admire and people you respect in a place where it can make a difference is important.

Doing things just to make money is necessary until you get to whatever that number is for you or your family. If you don't know what that number is, everybody should try to figure that out at some point. Because if you just watch the advertisements and listen to the salespeople, you never get to that point. And I five houses, and I don't want to take care of five houses. One house and the ability to travel. But doing that sort of life is fulfilling and meaningful.

Andy (1:15:42)
Sure.

Madeline (1:15:44)
⁓

Dick (1:15:55)
And as a friend of mine, Clarice Walker, who ran the United Way here and took the United Way from a small organization to a really great and very impactful organization. had to serve on her board when she was doing that. When she left, founded a, they founded a, funded her name to provide services to people and folks who contributed. And at her dinner, I told Clarice then, and I didn't realize it when I was saying it, later it applies to me, that

what she had done and the way she had done it and the way she had approached solving problems.

had benefited and will benefit hundreds and thousands of people in Beaufort County and Jasper County, most of whom will never know her name or what she did. But those in that room tonight with her knew what she was doing. Whenever I am finished with this and done with this, folks will make their own decisions about whether Beaufort's better or worse for it. And some of those decisions will be made without any thought whatsoever. I personally think everything we've done I'm proud of.

It makes perfect sense to be doing what we're doing.

Madeline (1:17:05)
I

am not

Dick (1:17:09)
afraid

of those folks who have different opinions because they have different agendas. What I don't like is those folks who are unwilling to engage and actually get anything done and just want to stand on the sideline and complain. I recently was in the company of a, what I'll refer to as a trust fund baby, probably 70. Went to private school, taught in a private school, lived on the trust fund all of his life.

Andy (1:17:23)
Right.

Dick (1:17:38)
never really understood what it meant to make payroll or all those things that you wrestle with as a business person and I wrestle with. And he was talking about how wonderful it was back in the 1950s when he was growing up and he could ride his bike everywhere and do anything you wanted to in the southern town he grew up in. I listened for a while and said, let me ask you something. What do you think it was like for the poor people, the people that were suffering with Jim Crow, the other folks that were making your life?

Plus, because we kind of have a moral obligation to help them if we can, since you and I have benefited so much. And I could tell he had never thought about it like that. And I could tell because he acted if I was trying to insult him, so I let him off the hook, but I wasn't. But I think there is a role for us to play in that while we're here.

I'd like to be respected and I'd like to be regarded with affection and it'd be nice if other folks would gather and then support stuff. But if it's not, that doesn't mean that the task is less worth doing. So we're gonna do it.

Andy (1:18:42)
Yeah, fair enough. I appreciate you sharing all of that. I just had a couple more questions for you. So, I mean, you've been very successful with your business and I'm a business owner. I think about people that, you know, all the way back when you got started, what is it that advice you would give to somebody starting out in business or like, how do you get ahead? I guess is the basic question.

Dick (1:19:11)
Now there are a couple of things. One is it's really helpful to be in the United States where the laws allow you to reap some of the benefit for the things that you do and understanding what you do. The other thing is to try to understand what it is you're trying to In case, what I was trying to do was take advantage of two changing trends to satisfy a need. Need was for mobile communications for people. Mobile phones, if you will.

Madeline (1:19:26)
do. ⁓

The ⁓

Dick (1:19:41)
Changing

scenario was that semiconductors came along so things that used to be big and clunky and had tubes now became smaller much less expensive to manufacture or now In the Federal Communications Commission had some regulatory opportunities that created cellular telephones and specialized mobile radio and stuff that I was involved in so I saw that opportunity And a guy who was in his 60s that had an office down the hall. We were in an executive suite. I just leased a space

not as big as your office here. And that's where I was operating. He was down to call and on Thursdays we'd go down and sit with him at five o'clock because he had pretty good scotch.

Madeline (1:20:20)
And ⁓

Dick (1:20:22)
There were four of us that would go in there and we'd talk about what we'd be doing that week. And the fourth and fifth week, he said, the difference between you pointing at me and these guys is he gets up and does stuff and you guys came in and come in every week telling me the same stuff you were going to do last week that you didn't get done.

Madeline (1:20:36)
in

Dick (1:20:38)
He's never come in here and said something that didn't happen. He'd come in here and talk about the next thing he's doing. Because if it didn't happen, it's not going to happen. He'd done dwelling more, moves forward. You need to have that attitude. And then you need to understand what it is you're trying to do. I have been counseling small business people since I came back. And one of them was about to lose her business. She couldn't afford to pay her rent. She couldn't afford to pay her employees. She couldn't afford to pay her utility bills. And I said, where's your money going? Because you've got a nice little business here.

Madeline (1:20:57)
Yeah.

Dick (1:21:08)
She had to lease a new car every other year. Kids had to have the latest cell phones and she did too, because that was the impression she was giving the people in the community. I said, you're have to change that. She I can't do that. I said, OK, when you lose your business, how are you going to do that? Well, I figured that out then. said, yeah, I can't help you. Well, she lost her business. She lost her cell phones. She lost her car. she's back working for something. Understanding what you do and why you're doing it.

Madeline (1:21:30)
Well.

And.

Dick (1:21:35)
matching that up to your financial criteria as an individual is important. I had a guy come to me and asked me recently would I invest in his business and he told me about it. I told him I wouldn't but let me ask you this, how do you scale that business? What do you mean? I said, how do you take the business you're describing here and make it big? And there was no way. He said, well, I don't really need to make it big. I said, well, how much money can you make with the size you're talking about? And the answer was about a third of what it was going to take for him to live on.

Madeline (1:22:03)
Can't do that.

Dick (1:22:05)
We have in this country a pretty straightforward analysis on what you can do. And if you've got an understanding of what you're good at, what you like to do, and how you want to do it, you can pursue that and achieve it in many ways. As a case, young business person that I ran into, a family member asked me if I'd spend an hour with him talking about it, because he was making some decisions. And he had started two or three of these Jiffy Lube places.

and they were working fine and he was now looking to start a fourth one. I said, is your expertise best at running Jiffy Loobs or is best at finding places to put them? He I don't know. So why don't you think about that a little bit? Because I would suggest what you might consider is hire a good manager and sell him the business on a note so he can...

Instead of you paying him, he can work as hard as he wants to or she can do everything I want to do. then ultimately one day they may own that business and you get paid. You don't have to worry about managing him and then go do another one, go do another one. And if you get a hundred of those out there, you'll have a really big business. And if two of them fail, you can have somebody you can send over there to restart it and hire the new guy and go. He did about 10 or 20 of those. And he said, I really liked that stuff, but I'm not going to do a hundred because I don't want to travel that far from home to find places. So.

Madeline (1:23:07)
and go.

Put them.

Dick (1:23:26)
Is your objective as one restaurant, everybody loves my food, I want to be in the restaurant business. Come to your house to eat for free every other couple of, maybe two Sundays a week is not the same thing as coming in here every day and having lunch and making payroll, not to mention the waiters and the waitress and the cook. He lost his family's inheritance doing it. So in my view, it always had to make sense economically that you're to build something that mattered and you need to have something that protected you to some degree of competition. That's my...

Madeline (1:23:31)
I said, come on.

Dick (1:23:55)
criteria for doing things. And in most cases, it was never about the money. It was about the independence. If you want to make money, go to Wall Street, do what's necessary. Huge fortunes be made and a price to be paid making them. I sold the businesses. I sold the wireless business. I sold it when it became Nextel because we had 300 and some odd employees. We were about to have to do a billion aid in finance and to go build out the Southeast.

And I looked at my time and I was spending almost all of my time either talking to people about human resource problems or talking to investment bankers. I never got to talk to customers. I never get to talk to any of the people I like to deal with. So I left because I didn't want to go through that next round of activity. I sold the tower business when I sold it to American Tower. It was going great guns. We were going fine. We could have continued doing that and continue to add stuff to it, but they're willing to pay a lot more for it than I thought it was worth.

Madeline (1:24:30)
and

Dick (1:24:51)
and I could keep the land underneath and get a check on those 60 sites every month. And we negotiated a 25 year lease that has a 3 % increase or CPI, whichever is greater every year. And now we're in our renewal on that in our 28th year on those. I like that sort of process, it's not elephant. Real estate transaction buying and sell houses, that drives me absolutely nuts. As I describe it in Courtney,

Madeline (1:25:10)
That's what I'm hunting. ⁓

Dick (1:25:19)
has described to me recently, we like to people send us a check every month. We like to increase the number of people sending checks and increase the size of those checks. And if you do that, you can make a pretty good business out of that over a period of time. Unless you have eight grandkids, in which case you might have to rip it up a little bit.

Andy (1:25:29)
Yeah, sounds like it.

Finding somebody like Courtney has been a big plus for your business, I'm sure.

Dick (1:25:39)
In every case,

whether it was a wireless business or here or whatever, surrounding myself with people who are smarter than I am, more organized and driven has been absolutely key to my success. I could not have done what I didn't do without her. Courtney and Norma Duncan are the two people that I would contribute for most of our success in here at B4T.

Andy (1:25:59)
Yeah, I can definitely attest to that. At least with Courtney. ⁓ So you work with lot of architects, engineers, and contractors over the past years, and really even in the cell phone industry, I'm sure, as well. For those of us that are architects, engineers, and contractors, what are some advice you have to us as far as working with people like yourself to get ahead and to do a better job?

Dick (1:26:10)
before I went.

⁓ Thanks for the opportunity. need to reflect just a second. ⁓

Madeline (1:26:34)
Bye.

Dick (1:26:38)
My goal in dealing with professionals like yourself in the field in my law is a fire technology engineer who's just come back from Brussels where he's talking to the Belgian, to the EU about electric battery plants and EVIC vehicles. He's become an expert in that arena. I don't know much about that, but that's what he does. So I got a little engineering and that's how the family, my daughter is a doctorate in psychology. So my grandkids have to choose between an engineer's response and a psychologist's response.

Madeline (1:26:42)
son.

a

Dick (1:27:07)
good parents

and they get along together, but I find it an intriguing different mindset.

It's important to understand what your client is trying to do and whether there's a good fit. And the good fit with a client and the professional depends on them to understand each other's motives. And that includes ⁓ educating each other somewhat.

Madeline (1:27:31)
⁓

Dick (1:27:34)
There are architects that are great at designing luxurious houses for expensive, for wealthy people. That's probably not the guy I'm looking to work with. ⁓ There are engineers who are great at taking a formula and applying it to...

Madeline (1:27:52)
some.

Dick (1:27:54)
understand.

The role for those folks is deep and broad and there lots of customers to do that. My standpoint, one of reasons we got into redoing buildings, whether it be Saltus or Old Bay or some of these others, is because I found it intellectually stimulating to try to figure out the problem of how to restore the Saltus building without having it collapse. That was interesting. I find it economically rewarding because it's the biggest site on the waterfront. It protrudes the deepest into the waterfront.

Madeline (1:28:18)
of

Dick (1:28:25)
and it's broad enough so you can really do something with it over time and the building in the front reflects it. So that makes it worth doing economically that you're not going to be, you know, disadvantaging your heirs by creating a...

bad investment. But that means that whoever is doing that work for us needs to be willing to sit down a little bit and help us participate in solving that problem. Our responsibility as a client to them is to listen respectfully to what they've got to tell us and not try to shoehorn their professional ethics and expertise into some view that we think of the world. I hope I'm better at that than I used to be. I hope I'm better at that than somebody who's impatient or in a hurry can be.

Madeline (1:28:51)
No.

Dick (1:29:10)
And I think one of the things that's been critical to us is that we're not a real estate firm that has to pay off a bank next week. We're not somebody that's got a mortgage with a take running and we've got to hit a certain timetable, get a certain lot done, build some other sort of thing to happen. And that allows you to behave in a rational fashion and in a different fashion in ways that perhaps other folks can't do. Things I dislike about professionals in this arena here, as much like it is in accounting and law firms.

Madeline (1:29:31)
⁓

Dick (1:29:38)
I found when you get above about 30 professionals, you end up in what I describe as a bureaucracy. You've got a very nice, well-educated person from a good school who's going to do your work. A more experienced, well-educated person from a good school is going to review their work. And possibly another person from a well-educated and from a good school review their work. It's going to take longer, cost more, and get you what I would describe as little more vanilla and a little less vanilla bean, because it gets hemorrhagic.

Madeline (1:29:42)
You're

little

in

Austin.

Dick (1:30:07)
Accounting

law firms seem to be the worst, but there's some of this particularly in that, that, little less so in the engineering because you got to have the engineer on the job that you're really going to do something with. Yeah.

Andy (1:30:19)
Yeah.

It does. I I can definitely relate to that. As a growing company, we definitely challenge with that as far as do you want the third level echelon that you described, do you want him out there? Because then...

Dick (1:30:36)
It's your reputation and he's out there working.

Andy (1:30:38)
Yeah, so which which layer do you want out there? But as a growing business, you know, it makes sense to have that first layer

Dick (1:30:44)
Yeah,

and the growing business thing is an interesting issue because as you know, it's a small business time. Every time you hire somebody, whatever you do about making profits, that's now gone now and you're going to earn more money to cover the cost of this person and hopefully have more profits at the end of the day when you're doing that. That's a step, step, step process that is predictable as you continue to grow. That also means that you end up being sort of the marketing guy and they get to do the work.

Madeline (1:30:59)
of

and my

Dick (1:31:09)
My guess is

you didn't become an engineer because you want to be out selling projects, you want to be out doing projects, and that means you get a lifestyle choice that you got to make on how you want to do that.

When I was doing the wireless business, was based out of Atlanta, about had operations in San Antonio, Phoenix, Denver, Charlotte, some New Jersey and Florida properties. So I got a million mile or a few times on some airplanes. I did an analysis after a period of time and said, you know, we'll handle a lot less money, but we'll make more money if we do it right here. We're going to do it within four hours of Atlanta. That way our people can get up in the morning. This is tower business. Get up in the morning, go see the

Madeline (1:31:33)
in

Dick (1:31:49)
what they need to do, get back home that night, sleep in their own bed, know their families and have a rest, a reasonable life. We'll make more money than we would otherwise and we will handle a lot less.

Madeline (1:31:55)
like money.

Dick (1:32:02)
That was working fine. Then I got a call from AT &T who was a good client. And I'm saying this because these folks get those calls too. And they wanted us to do Texas and Tennessee for them. And they called us into the office and I asked the guy who was handling our AT &T account, what's this about? Because I didn't usually get called. He said, I don't know and they won't tell me. OK, so we show up.

And the AT &T guy who was from New York came into their Atlanta office where they have a big office and fancy place with 24 people in the room, plus the two of us. They wanted us to do those two states. And I told them we weren't going do it because we're working within four hours. said, I don't think you understand. Think about who's asking you. Okay. And so I agreed. I'd try to find somebody to do that for them, but we were not going to change our plan because this is what we were doing. And that's when we formed American Tower Corp and brought those venture capital folks in and went out and did that.

You have to be careful in your client relationships that they don't push you into things that you don't want to do. Consultative engineering is an important thing and some of that is transitional. I look at some of the building techniques that are going on around here. I look at 3D printers and I look at digital design and computers and I look at the pumping expertise we can get down to blending and process.

We're going to be building differently than we're building now. We're going to be using different techniques and different materials. And the thing that will hold us up will not be the materials. It will not be the expertise. It will be the codes. So we need to figure out how we can do the demonstration aspects of that. As we see insurance things like we saw in California and like we saw when Helene came through here and went to Asheville, there will be some things that will precipitate some stuff. But it is a slow moving crowd to get codes changed. But it's...

Madeline (1:33:49)
gonna come.

Dick (1:33:50)
Just a question in hell I...

Andy (1:33:52)
Yeah, that's a huge topic in itself because the codes are definitely a limiting factor and there's lobbyists and things that affect the code so we got a lot of those same challenges we were discussing earlier. It's not just an easy fix like many things.

Dick (1:34:11)
And you know,

the folks that have never done this stuff have no idea how it goes. A friend of mine who's in her 80s now lived in Beaufort for 65 years. Married a husband and moved to Beaufort when she was just out of college. She wanted to do some modifications in her house in the city, but it stopped work horror on it because she had some people in there do demolition and do stuff in her house. Said, you don't have a permit. So, why don't you have permits? My house. I said, we have to have a permit.

Madeline (1:34:24)
Emma.

Dick (1:34:38)
then she wouldn't apply for the permit. Well, you've got to get engineered drawings, or structural drawings, because you're taking some of it. And she's livid, because she has no idea that these people have any say over that sort of stuff. I'm not saying they should or they shouldn't. What I am saying is that it is limiting what some folks are trying to do. Because if you could do something that was better, cheaper, easier, and could solve some of these housing problems, but the codes won't let you do it, we probably need to look at that.

Andy (1:35:03)
Yeah. And then the other piece is engineers have to be up to speed on these codes. And we have local codes that are impacting those things like seismic wind. And when you're talking about adaptive reuse, you're dealing with each building is unique. And by the way, that Salthus building, I was involved in that on a couple of occasions as well with two different architects. So there's that thing I told you a lot of times. I don't know if you really...

I've been involved in lot of these.

Dick (1:35:35)
⁓

My memory is not what it used to be either, but thank you for your help.

Andy (1:35:38)
Well, over, I guess what I'm saying is it's been because you have a good architect that you didn't have to worry about that. They took care of it. ⁓ But what was interesting about the Salsa was it has antiquated construction materials. You mentioned the Tabby. I'm not sure if our listeners know what Tabby is, but also it has other steel members that are very unique in terms of how they're built and how they're made. And so how do you deal with that? Because that's not in the code.

Dick (1:36:05)
And

it doesn't expand and contract at the same speed as Tabby either, so you've got that gap.

Andy (1:36:09)
Yeah. Which, by the way, what is Tabby for the listeners?

Dick (1:36:13)
Tabby is a masonry material that consists of oyster shells that have been exposed enough so that the salt's been washed out of them. Ideally, some people made it with salt, but sometimes that failed. Then that's mixed often with sand and it's heated, usually over oak charcoal to get hot enough that it melts. So it forms a sort of slurry. And then the building thing is you consist of putting two planks, usually pretty high planks together, and then...

Madeline (1:36:25)
in

Dick (1:36:42)
putting the tabby in it and tamping it down so it becomes solid and then you let that cool. You do another run of that and another run of that and another run of that to build the building. The anchorage over here is tabby and on the ground floor that's a 30 inch tabby wall and on the third floor it's an 8 inch tabby wall. The solstice building is about 8 inches from floor to three floors up. So it's a very different sort of scenario.

Madeline (1:36:46)
and then you

and

Dick (1:37:07)
⁓ Since

there's no wood and there's no steel and there's no support in there, those things, while they were being constructed, lots of them failed and lots of people were injured or killed during that process. There aren't many left.

Andy (1:37:19)
Yeah. ⁓

Dick (1:37:21)
Les Alces building is reported to be the tallest still standing commercial tabby structure on the east coast of the United States.

Andy (1:37:27)
Okay, interesting. it's also one of the only buildings that lasted the fire. I guess it was a fire in like the 1800s or 90s that basically burned most of the Bay Street down, I believe, right?

Dick (1:37:36)
Somewhere in that neighborhood.

Yeah, they had wooden shingles on at that time. And when the sparks started, they started landing on the wooden shingles and doing so, which is intriguing because we have a little building that was the Rhett Law Office that has a metal roof on it now. And we were asked when we had to put a new roof on, would we go back and put wood shingles on it again like it was originally built? know, metal roofs in Beaufort became a status symbol because wooden roofs had been burning down. So we resisted that. OK.

Andy (1:38:06)
Yeah, I didn't realize that was the reasoning for the metal roofs.

Dick (1:38:09)
Well, that's what I was told by

somebody who should know. Yeah. know how historians are. What are you working on that's fun now? You're going to fix this bridge and this waterfront park?

Andy (1:38:17)
What am I working on right now? Well, ⁓ we were working on this Charles Street job that you mentioned. So that's fun. We've got some other jobs around town. ⁓ We've got five medical offices we're doing in John's Island of all places. ⁓ You mentioned the ⁓ hiring. I say that we're a post-COVID remote company. So part of it was

Dick (1:38:25)
You look like a great lady. I hope so.

Yeah, that's convenient.

Andy (1:38:46)
due to COVID and the hiring struggles we've had and just realizing I'm never going to get a team of engineers here. And so yeah, that doesn't help. And so now I know why I never knew why I just knew people I couldn't bring them. ⁓ So we're we've used that to our advantage. On the other hand, matching what we are assets, which, you know, we have a remote company. So now we can work in Buford, we can work in

Madeline (1:38:54)
Just done now.

Andy (1:39:13)
John's Island, can work in Columbia. I have an engineer in Columbia. So we have a Columbia studio. So that's what we're working on right now. And we're developing this, we're doing this podcast as a way of getting to know people like yourself and give you an opportunity to get your thoughts and ideas, but also share our ideas and get our name out there as well. So those are a few things we're working on. Sure.

Dick (1:39:39)
I got something I want you to think about.

We're going to build this Carolina Birding Center to support Jim Clementone and Birding-Buford. We're going to put it on eight acres that's across from the Maritime Center out on the morgue. In that will be an interpretive center, a classroom, and event space. I'd love to see something where the exterior of that could have some of the nature of a nest, but still be economically...

Madeline (1:39:52)
works there.

Dick (1:40:08)
reasonable and

Madeline (1:40:10)
sustainable. I in my own

Dick (1:40:12)
mind

and toying with the idea of ⁓ 3D printed digital silos, if you would, that could be put together to create something that looks like a nest on the outside but has interesting spaces on the inside. So be thinking about how that might fit in as you're driving around and going to sleep at night. It's not a problem that has to be solved, but it's a stimulating problem that's probably a little different than anything you or I have done.

Madeline (1:40:17)
you

Andy (1:40:36)
Yeah, mean definitely the 3D printed concrete is something that I've seen a lot of.

Dick (1:40:40)
Well, it doesn't have to be that material. That's just one that came to my mind. If it's a curved block or if it's something else that creates the same objective, I'm different.

Andy (1:40:50)
Yeah, I like the idea, so it'll give me something to think about.

Dick (1:40:53)
We can put an eagle's nest

on the top or an offspring or something up there. Yeah.

Andy (1:40:58)
Well, Dick, it was great to have you today. I want to give you an opportunity to share anything else that maybe that we haven't already shared that's on your mind or anything else you want to hit today.

Dick (1:41:10)
A couple things, it's a matter of age, and I'm thinking about my 13-year-old granddaughter and my 10-year-old grandson, so you think about things you can say.

Madeline (1:41:19)
⁓

Dick (1:41:21)
If you watch the daily news and you listen to the things that are coming out of Washington and coming out of international things and other stuff, there's a doom and gloom component of this and unknowns and enough to make you want to feel like you have to watch the news because something else is going to change. Those things are all real, but...

In this last election, I was surprised to find that 70 % of the voters had voted a particular way. Whether what they did was the right thing or the wrong thing to achieve this objective. I am confident that the vast majority of people in this country believe in the American dream. They believe that you should be rewarded for your hard and honest work if you make a contribution through that effort.

They believe in the rule of law so that you should have the opportunity to benefit from your efforts and you should have some protection for the property and the assets that you have, as well as other people being protected from something you might do that's inappropriate. And I believe in the fundamental goodness of people because they will get up and do things, particularly if there's enlightened self-interest with things that will improve their life, the life of their family, the life of their children, and the opportunity to feel that way.

take those actions and benefit from those actions is fundamental to improving the human condition. There has never been another experiment in government that has had much independence, much self-reliance, as much opportunity.

combined with the rule of law and the initiative. It's not about patriotism, it's not about where you're from, it's not about your gender, it's certainly not about who you're sleeping with, which seems to be a big topic of conversation with people. But I think people want to strive for those kind of benefits in doing things. And what we need to do as society is understand that

Madeline (1:43:21)
some of us.

Dick (1:43:23)
are fortunate enough that we can go to meetings and we can talk about stuff and we can represent what we think. But if you're out there trying to feed a family and you're working hard and you're trying to get ahead, a to live, you're not going show up to meetings to say something about that because you're busy trying to make ends meet. Those of us who are in a position to advocate for those folks who are like my parents and maybe like yours who

Madeline (1:43:35)
and you can't find them.

Dick (1:43:51)
worked hard, some much of it manual labor and other sorts of things and gave us an opportunity to do stuff in this country. people that need to be thought about, represented and encouraged. Used to be major employers would be worried about workforce housing. We have had a gated community that's purchased a motel to have housing for their work.

Madeline (1:44:11)
now

Dick (1:44:17)
We've had another restaurant group that has purchased an office building and converted it to apartments so they can have a place for their people to live, which is intriguing because if they leave the restaurant company, they have to leave the apartment.

Those sorts of things harken back to the mill towns when we did that. You could work in the mill and have a house and you had to spend your money in the mill store. That was not a good situation. But somebody has been missing at these meetings when we've been designing what housing looks like and how it should work. Somebody has been missing that was supposed to talk about why these people matter and where they're going to live. We need to all as a community to talk about that because it does matter and it does make a difference. And we can talk about saving trees.

We can talk about saving the water. And I can tell you, busing 10,000 people in the Hilton Head from someplace some distance away is not going be good for the trees, it's not going to be good for the water, it's not going good for the highways. We've got to figure out how to balance this community. And as professionals in the... Had a discussion with a guy the other day who was an earnest, well-meaning young fellow. He said, I hate all these apartments.

Madeline (1:45:15)
I

were.

Dick (1:45:25)
He couldn't really answer the question, so I got to him at the end of the day. Maybe it's just because you don't know anybody that's going to be living there yet. I said, maybe it's because you haven't thought about the economic and the benefits, but if somebody is going to come in be a school teacher or a nurse, they're going to probably want rent before they buy. Where are they going to live? He said, well, I just don't like the traffic. I said, oh, so if you've got 200 single family houses or 200 apartments, and they're generating roughly the same amount of traffic, how do you feel about that? Well, I'm not sure as well. OK, what about?

trees, cut down more trees for two hundred and half. So we went through the conversation at the end of it. What it was, he's unhappy because he doesn't feel in control over growth and he can be angry in an apartment building because he doesn't know anybody that lives there yet. Doesn't identify with living there because he owns his home. We got to step up and do something about this. I hope people will. Thanks for the opportunity to be here.

Andy (1:46:15)
Okay, awesome. Good closeout. how do people find you? Any particular place to... I mean, I don't know. You posted on LinkedIn, I'm retired. Should they reach out on LinkedIn?

Dick (1:46:22)
Why would they want to?

I don't respond

to that. I would recommend that if they're interested in Freedmen's Arts District, they should go to the Freedmen's Arts District website and get involved there. If they're interested in the housing trust, should do that. If they're absolutely interested in me and they're not trying to sell me something or, you know, one of those kind of deals, they can call the 303 Associates office and they will put it through my voicemail and I'll an office to...

Andy (1:46:54)
Very good. All right, well thanks, Jake. Thank you. Great to have you.

Dick (1:46:57)
Great to see you.