Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, everybody, welcome back.
Today's guest is someone I am super stoked to have on with that. Pete. Welcome to the show.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: I'm thrilled we finally made this happen. I think this is my seventh attempt and I canceled the previous six, so I apologize for that.
[00:00:18] Speaker A: Okay, man. So for the uninitiated, for those who don't know, who are you and what do you do?
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Pete Kramiak.
How far back are we going with this?
Like where I was born and raised or just professionally?
[00:00:34] Speaker A: Whatever you want, man. Whatever you want.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Okay. Pete Kramiak.
I am currently a energy efficient home builder in Olympia, Washington, and former and still sometimes musician.
[00:00:52] Speaker A: Heck yeah. Okay.
And let's start professionally and then we'll get like, we'll back into the rest. So tell me about like, what you do. Like, what's your job? How'd you get into it?
[00:01:05] Speaker B: Let's see.
Strangely, I blame it on Ian Mackay.
When I went to college in D.C. starting in about 1988, and I would always hang around the Discord House and Joey P. The fugazi sound guy, had started a kind of wild renovation.
And then I think he just didn't want to finish it or something. And I was the next one that knew how to use tools. And Ian was like, hey, how about you just finish up this whole downstairs project? And I, you know, I didn't know much of what I was doing. And I told them that just, I remember like it was yesterday. I just said, ah, you'll figure it out. And so then I spent like the whole summer renovating the downstairs of the Discord House.
And that turned me into the dude in D.C. that had a van with tools.
And then I kind of became like a, you know, fix up stuff around town sort of dude while I was in college. And then when I left, I moved to Olympia, Washington.
I think it was 93 and. Or no, 95, 1995.
And thought I was going to study organic farming, which I did, but quickly learned that I didn't, I wouldn't be good at it.
And you know, within the first two weeks, the, the rest of my classmates would be like, shoveling manure and I would sneak off and fix a shed or something. And within the third week, I knew farming wasn't going to be for me.
Long story short, my professor hired me to build him a little cabin.
So this is 1996, and I did that.
And you know, at the time, like carpenter money was like, I think 20 bucks an hour, which seemed crazy. It just seemed like I was rich from doing Carpentry and just kept with it and then eventually fell under, just got a job with this really great turned into a mentor T bor Brewer. He was kind of like the hippie green builder in town and taught me just about all the important stuff I needed to to learn to build houses from scratch. And he was ahead of the curve with a lot of the energy efficient and green aspects of building at the time.
And then that went on for years and he eventually kind of just basically co signed on this one big project, a medical clinic where he was technically the contractor but he just kind of oversaw me and that was sort of my, you know, put my mittens on and push me out into the snow kind of moment.
And then from then on I've just been a general contractor.
Usually build almost always with the same architecture firm Artisans Group in Olympia.
I think they still to this point have might have built the most passive houses which is.
Do you know, do you know what that is? Passive House?
[00:04:31] Speaker A: Yeah, please love to hear about it.
[00:04:34] Speaker B: So it's, it's from Germany.
Still getting yelled at by Germans.
It's a call back to my music career and they what's the quick version? They basically took all this data from a lot of American 70s solar pioneer hippie dudes and German like German ified it into like a really smart methodology of how to build super energy efficient houses.
And so it's sort of like in America there was LEED or built green.
Now passive house is one of these certifications but it's global. It's very popular in Vancouver and Canada.
And yeah, it was like a 10 day training and that's sort of my main professional group that I hang out with to this day and keep current on what's going on. And it's really fascinating. We're obsessively trying to use the least amount of energy possible to heat and cool houses or commercial structures and it just totally works. This the house I'm sitting in, my house is one with a pretty small solar array, 10 kilowatt solar array. We power this house and my mother in law's house and three cars and still make more electricity than we need throughout a whole year.
It's crazy and it's just, you know, just smart building and lots of extra insulation and good windows. But you can literally eat and cool your house and drive your cars from a really small amount of electricity if you just don't spend all that energy on heating and cooling all the time.
[00:06:39] Speaker A: Question for you if it so the way you've painted it that it actually takes very little energy to be able to do that if you just build right.
Why isn't that the rule then? Why isn't that happening on a, on a larger scale?
[00:06:52] Speaker B: It's starting to be in some of the. More like Massachusetts I think might adopt it into their code if they haven't already.
It's.
For me it's not that hard because I've done a bunch of them, definite learning curve and it'll definitely take some education and scaling to pull off, but it's really not that hard. It's build a normal stick frame house and put more insulation on the outside.
So it requires some finesse and techniques and education. But.
But it's, it is doable with the current American climate.
Feels like might not happen for another four years on a mass scale because you know, you can throw up a typical American framed house a lot quicker and cheaper, but then pay for it in energy, you know, for the rest of its life.
Yeah, so.
So yeah, up front it's more, cost a little more. It's definitely more cost more. Time pays for itself really quickly, probably five years and then it's, you know, just a net financial gain for the rest of your life. Energy prices only go up.
So.
And it's my punk is the thing I can do with my profession because I think oil companies are huge part of this problem.
So it's like the one tangible thing I can do to really help fix the problem in one little way.
[00:08:38] Speaker A: So the company, it's your company, right?
[00:08:41] Speaker B: It was for 20 years and then just this year I took on two partners, which was part of the reason I kept canceling. I was like, ah, let me do this whole partnership thing and then report back once I've done it. But yeah, I have two younger partners now. They're awesome.
And yeah, we're up to the three of us. Office manager and I think as of today, 12 carpenters.
But before two years ago, it was always just me and two to three carpenters.
[00:09:15] Speaker A: So what changed?
[00:09:19] Speaker B: I was building this two houses on a nearby island, commuting by boat.
And I needed just some help with the second one. And I serendipitously I had known about these guys. They were young, young company.
I saw their truck around town. It was like good graphics. And it's sort of like when you saw another skateboarder in the 80s, you could tell like he was like, you know, cool skateboarder, sketchy skateboarder, a drunk punk. But I could tell these guys were on the same, same page.
And I think I gave them a renovation that I, I usually don't do renovations. I usually just build new houses. Yeah. And I had this renovation, but I was like, ah, try these new guys. And anyways, I heard they were light on work and hired him to come build this really sexy, beautiful a frame.
And within a week they were like, oh God, we'd much rather be doing this than, you know, crawling around crawl spaces and fighting possums, you know, with little, you know, renovations.
Tough gig.
And after like two weeks like they were. The carpentry was so damn good that I, it occurred to me like maybe I should think about it because they were pretty quickly like we should join forces. And so we started flirting with that idea and then we gave it like a real, I think it was a year and a half tryout where kind of just adopt. Adopted their company so they didn't have to close their doors and paid all their overhead and paid them well. And, and we took on the, the carrot out. There was this huge job which we wound up taking because we joined forces.
It's, it's like five of my normal houses in one. It's this massive project where we're just wrapping it up now.
It's bonkers.
And we've pretty much killed it. It's just the biggest, coolest, wildest thing any of us have ever built.
And that was really the genesis of building up the company.
My partner Rowan is really, really good just about, just about everything, but really good at kind of all my blind spots, which were a lot of the admin and financial forecasting, all the nerdy stuff. It's not really my thing. I love building and I suffered through my whole career being just good enough at the bookkeeping and all that stuff.
I was also in the olden days, just hell bent on doing everything myself. Typical kind of punk fashion.
And actually I'm going to go back one important step which is before this, before all the, this partnership idea happened, I reached out to a friendly former. Technically he was a competitor. He was the previous owner of the Artisans Group, the architectural architecture firm we worked for.
They used to be a design build and he's just a smart old building veteran, seen it all, done it all, built all those first passive houses with his partner Tessa.
So I saw him do exactly what I did. He, he started a partnership with young, young woman architect. Really cool, total just ass kicker.
And together they, they were building like they're on their eighth passive house before I even built one.
And they designed, built and did this in the early days when it was, you know, there's not much information how to do it in America.
They really pioneered it and beautiful, beautiful stuff. Artisansgroup.com you'll be stoked.
Anyways, I saw this, I saw someone in my life kind of, you know, kind of reach out and ask for help and grow their company. And Randy was starting to retire, and it seemed nuts to me that someone with all those skills would just kind of, I don't know, sit around and be an old fart.
So I just straight up asked him, you know, like, hey, would you consider, you know, being like my smart wizard consultant, help out with, you know, I just listed all my weak spots, which were basically everything besides carpentry.
And he seemed a little flattered and, and totally jumped in. And the, all of a sudden, like the jobs were just like, all the estimating was going much better.
The day to day was going better, was actually making a lot more money somehow. And then when Rowan and Jacob, my current partners, you know, when we were flirting with that idea, you know, he was able to just game out kind of the big job and say like, yeah, you could literally hire them, pay all their overhead for year and a half, try it out if you like it. At that point, you could keep going. You could all make this much money. And, you know, he just kind of able to crystal ball the whole thing into fruition. Like, I, I, I wouldn't have made that jump.
There's just no way I'd be like, yeah, I'll pay all your insurance and overhead and, you know, health insurance and like, I just wouldn't have been able to wrap my head around that.
So I think, I think that was in, in recent times, that was kind of the biggest moment of my career with finally just reached out for help on the aspects that I was weak at. And that led to, yeah, that led to a pretty quick 3 partner with 13 people company.
There's a caveat to that.
I should give you a moment to ask questions if you want.
[00:16:08] Speaker A: Yeah, I want to return to that idea about asking for help and making that shift from just being the like punk. I just do this all myself to asking for help. But, but keep going.
[00:16:17] Speaker B: Before we get to that, the. I just finished Jason Farrell's podcast that you did. I think it came out last week and there was one thing that jumped off the page or is, and I should have gone back and listened to it again, but he was just talking about, you know, going from punk to the normal world and trying to be a business person in it, but still be punk. And I think a lot of us could use some sort of manual just a little bit to be a little bit.
Is this smarter? Because I just. For years, I think I literally built my reputation on pulling off really great houses for really, really cheap just because I have affliction to, you know, charging more than $5 a show, basically. And that was that. That was something that my friend Randy, the consultant wizard was able to help with. Like, just like, hey, kid, the normal world is charging a lot more than you are and you're producing really cool stuff.
So, yeah, there's some, Definitely some punk things to get over. But I'd also argue our punk ethos is kind of what makes us, you know, honorable, trustworthy people in society. So, you know, I'll take them. I'll take them both, I guess.
[00:17:44] Speaker A: Yeah, man, it is about hitting a balance. I want to ask you, because I want to hit on that kind of like the. I guess maybe we could call it like the discording of price structures, like how we charge, which, like, it's the best story. Like, there's so much. And I think we, Jason and I talked about this is like discord, literally discord Set the ground level for how all of us could do business, but also how we all have to kind of figure it out for ourselves and do business and not suck.
But let me kind of zoom out for something here. Sustainable housing. So we live in a time where conversations about sustainability are all over the place. But a lot of it has to do with, oh, recycle and an electric car and do this and that. This might sound like a ridiculous question, but just from the ground level up, why should someone care about sustainable housing? What does it matter?
[00:18:34] Speaker B: Houses that are built without extra thought into the shell leak, condense, create mold, creates health issues, you know, all this stuff.
But I'd say there's. There's health and then there's the, the toxic element of the stuff that goes into it, building, you know, making really smart choices on the.
What products go into your house. There's also a health issue for me, the use of oil and energy issue as an environmental. I mean, to me, I've been kind of on a climate kick since I was a little kid. Even worked at Greenpeace when I lived in D.C. for a while.
I mean, I'm convinced that's. Of all the Earth problems, that's the biggest one that's kind of being ignored again. It's in its cycle of just kind of falling by the wayside. At our conferences, we get all these really smart environmental scientists and get all the. These really fascinating forecasts.
They're all bad. They're all really fucking bad.
And so for me, besides the health component, the environmental component is the big one.
The next chapter of my career.
I hope I'm balancing out building, you know, fancy houses with building more affordable houses.
Olympia, which was absurdly affordable when I moved here, it was like comically affordable. Like, if you have a, you know, normal, decent job and you lose your apartment right now, you're pretty.
Like, it is hard to find a place that's. That a normal person can afford right now. So that's, that's the third component that I'm. I want to figure out and tackle. I want to build little golden girls huts for all my old cat lady and heavy metal bass player friends that won't mold or give them cancer and be affordable and save the planet. When I went to school in dc, I thought I went to George Washington University for three years. Basically, it's pretty conservative. It turns out it's the number one CAA recruiting school in America.
A lot of the professors are pulled right from government or state department. And what I learned at that college was that I wasn't gonna be able to stay in, like, with politics and stay sane. And that I made, I made the kind of decision at that school after this environmental geography class where, you know, I had an Arab Israeli conflict class.
I decided, this is 1988. I was like, oh fuck, no one's gonna fix that in my lifetime.
And kind of went down the list. Like, there was a whole course just on genocide.
And it was like figuring out the formula of, like, when to call something genocide. And I was like, this is crazy.
Anyways, this environmental geography class jumped off the page as kind of the most important thing and something that I could lean into and try to at least fix the most important problem while all the other stuff simmered in the background. I know building one to two houses a year isn't solving that. I'm under no illusion that it is. But the process of doing a very tangible craft that I love doing that goes in that direction, kind of feeds those things, keeps me sane. And I really enjoy doing it. Seem to be kind of good at it. So it's. It's given me just this kind of fulfillment that I know I wouldn't have if I went down the political path.
I knew that would come out somewhere in this podcast, so I just threw it in willy nilly.
[00:22:46] Speaker A: So I just had this guy named Drew Wilkinson on the podcast just this morning we recorded our episode. He's like a guy from the punk scene as well.
And he worked at Microsoft and was just in, like in the legal department at Microsoft.
And he was like, oh, man, there's like five people at Microsoft whose job it is to look at sustainability, like across all of Microsoft.
And him and a bunch of people basically just like harangued management enough to make it a thing. And then it became a bigger thing and a bigger thing and they made this much bigger sustainability commitment. And he ended up leaving Microsoft and now he has his own consulting group and his whole thing is like, yeah, it's great to do individual action. It's like great to be vegetarian or vegan or be conscious of what you eat. It's good to recycle and think about all of that stuff. But his take was due to the issues of climate change and just the environmental threat.
It's super important for workers to leverage their power to create change within big organizations because they're the ones who have the most power in their organization.
And it's a super cool conversation.
Knowing that you and I were going to be talking today. I was already thinking about, like, it really just take a spectrum of action, right? So you've got the people who are going to drive an electric car or are going to be vegan or vegetarian or whatever personal diet, dietary choice they make. They're going to think about where they shop, where they spend money, if they're going to have solar, all of that. So you've kind of got the personal choices, then you got the bigger choices. How are we going to. I'm going to leverage my power as a consumer, as an employee. But this thing about sustainable housing, and I want to hit on two things about it because you'd said, I know it's not going to solve the world's problems. And I'm not like, I'm not going to like, counter that. But there's two things I'd hit on. First, it's giving people options.
Options, like for something that's at least like net. Net neutral or even like healthier for the planet. So that's one thing. But the second thing and something that I, I really like about what you said is you actually like what you do and it makes you feel good and it's an extension of your politics. And if we have more people doing stuff that they like doing, and that thing actually creates healthy opportunities for people, like good choices for people. I don't know. I mean, it's not like solving a problem, but Certainly speaking to it on some level.
[00:25:08] Speaker B: Yeah, it's obviously a step in the right direction and it is all of those steps.
It just kills me every four years that you know, little progress and then, you know, the next guy gets in and just, you know, leaves the climate, climate summit and you know, just the ping pong game of just going back and forth and just, you know, not, not taking such a profound threat seriously is, it's, it's painful and yeah, just so, just accepting that I'm one very small piece of what I would consider progress helps my brain a little bit, but it's, it's going to take so much more. We, we get may not have seen talks, can't remember her name, but one of our Passive House conferences had this really, really obviously smart lady that worked for, I think it was Henry Paulson who's been in like every Democratic cabinet and he has a think tank and believe he was hired by the insurance insurance company or the insurance industry as a whole to interpolate climate data with insurance data, you know, for the, for North America. And this lady was able just to terrifyingly kind of go through the North American map of like, you know, she's like, Florida and you know, the Gulf coast is going to become uninsurable probably within a decade.
And it was right during the BP oil spill, I remember. And then, you know, there's just been like larger hurricane after larger hurricane since. And how, you know, it's. Insurance is becoming like they're starting to just retract insurance there.
So that one came true and she literally went through the whole map. The whole Colorado river basin is going to dry up and that's 80 million people with no water. And she went through the whole map and by the end it was like, you want to be like right around Puget Sound or there was like rural Tennessee, I remember, and like upstate New York, Vermont.
So it's good for you and I, but you know, long term, that's some heavy shit.
And that's. And the, all of, you know, all of corporate America, you know, knows this stuff. Exxon, you know, knew about global warming in the 70s.
All these people know it and they, they just don't fucking care. And they're running everything sucks.
God, a bummer. Sorry to ruin your podcast, but dude.
Yeah.
[00:28:03] Speaker A: This is the best, man. Okay, I want to hit on the affordable housing piece.
Could you just tell me a bit more? So you say passive housing. I imagine there's multiple different ways, different kinds of sustainable housing and passive housing is one. Is that correct?
[00:28:20] Speaker B: Yeah, Passive house. It's badly named because everyone associates it with passive solar, which was a big thing in the 70s. Everyone thinks you just mean like, oh, I get more sun in my house.
It's a very German thing that should have been translated better.
But basically you're creating a house that fulfills most of your needs passively, doesn't need much heat, doesn't need many inputs, will last for a very long time.
So it's a badly. In my opinion, it's a very badly named thing. But I would say it's the most stringent of all the environmental ratings and methodologies and rankings.
Like we have to get several tests for a certified house. If I'm honest, I've only actually built one certified house, which is my own, because it's such a pain in the ass having Germans come and yell at you and suck all the air out of your house three different times to find every leak. And you know, check your water temperatures, how quickly the hot water gets to each sink.
Like, even I have my limits.
But we build all our houses, you know, as passive houses.
And I do want to certify all of them. Katrine, if you're listening, but I'm also fucking American that doesn't need all these people up in my shit.
So yeah, passive house is super stringent. And it's, it's also just this very vibrant community of builders and architects and engineers that are all just.
It's like the nerd Olympics of trying to save BTUs.
It's. It's a really, really sweet community, really happy. And I have a little bit of imposter syndrome because I'm not a building scientist and I, I've kind of been sitting in the back rolling my eyes a lot when, when they're pulling out some really crazy ideas when, you know, 98% of the way would, would get you really, really good, you know, a really great house.
There's a debate within the community that, you know, I personally would rather build thousands of almost passive houses than 10 certified passive houses.
And that, you know, it's. It's what the scale of the problem needs is.
And they're fully wrapping their arms around that and kind of streamlining things and trying to kind of just hyper infuse how to do this quicker and more affordable and more efficiently.
[00:31:04] Speaker A: So it's like, it's a subset of builders. Like I like how you said, it's like a community of thought and practice and they are actively trying to get it so that they're trying to get their Arms around it so you can move like faster and do it at a bigger scale.
[00:31:18] Speaker B: Yeah, the scaling, you know, the first few years, you know there'd be like four projects, 10 projects, 12 projects and.
And then finally some really big ones like 700 unit buildings and.
And now Brooklyn is fucking gone bananas. There's God, I can't remember the builder's name, but he's just like cranking out these really large, beautiful passive house apartment buildings and mixed use buildings. Um, so it's starting to, it's start like you can. I got goosebumps just thinking about it. But like the, it's starting to scale up and it's really exciting.
[00:32:03] Speaker A: And going back to what you said, they, they take. And I, I might be adding this in. They're more expensive to build up front. Do they take longer to build than average a frame?
[00:32:13] Speaker B: Typically they take me a little longer for sure. I think they take most people a little longer. But like the Brooklyn guy, those are coming out quick. The larger, the larger you build.
All the efficiencies seem to come, you know, they just compound and you're getting, getting your square foot pricing down and like lots of bigger buildings with this methodology is, is going to be the ticket to, you know, how it takes off. I believe the houses are awesome, but we could be housing a lot more people quicker and more affordably if they all don't need, you know, four walls and a basement and a roof. You know, if we can share those in larger buildings, that's where it'll make a bigger societal effect.
[00:33:08] Speaker A: Is there like a project you could point to that people could look up to? Check this out.
[00:33:13] Speaker B: Yeah, can I send you a bunch of links maybe?
[00:33:17] Speaker A: Yep. Yeah, we'll put those in the bio so that everybody can take a look at it.
[00:33:20] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah, I'll pick out if there's a lot of them now, but I'll pick out a range of cool projects out there.
[00:33:29] Speaker A: Heck yeah.
So you'd mentioned earlier, like in your kind of next phase of your career you'd love to see how you could do this with like low income housing or low barrier housing. Like how can, how can something like this be translated into that?
[00:33:43] Speaker B: That would, I think that would need really interesting financing or government help. And there is lots of government help available now.
But for the like, for the super low barrier housing it'd be an awesome practical fit. But it might not be the affordable choice.
But for, I mean literally just here we're. I don't know if it's just a regional thing, but we've been calling it just kind of missing middle.
And that's literally like the like middle class that's getting priced out.
It might be a cool way for, you know, how I'm seeing it around town at least is I have a lot of friends that get an older single or a couple, you know, in a whole house and you know, it's getting, it's already getting time that it's getting hard to keep up the house. And a lot of the houses are, you know, kind of on the end of their lifespan in Olympia. One of my wild pitches to my friends might be like, you know, how about if we, you know, combined a couple of you into a new multi unit structure, brand new, low maintenance, you know, almost zero energy costs and you know, maybe march down the line and build one on each of these properties and use their equity as part of the buy in, trying to keep it out of the government.
And this is a fully unformed thought, by the way. So this might all get cut, but I'm starting to see in my little world with my cat ladies and heavy metal bass player friends a way that we could start smartly solving all of their old age problems.
Put them all in warm little boxes, big fancy European windows, they can look out and complain about the world as we do with their cats and heavy metal bases.
[00:35:45] Speaker A: One of the things I'm thinking about because we both live in the Northwest, like housing out here is totally, totally insane. And you know, trying to get, trying to get into the housing market in general is totally crazy.
Let alone the idea of like building a house and then the idea of like putting something that upfront is going to cost more money, even though it has long term actually really quick return based on what you're saying, like five years is super quick return. But it, it's got high cost of higher cost upfront, takes a little bit longer, can take a little bit longer to build.
What's the.
I know there's the idea of like the return after 5ish years, but how do you sell that to like younger people trying to get into the market or people who are considering building a home? Like what's the way that you would, you would talk about that idea?
[00:36:33] Speaker B: I thought of the project that I should have talked about instead of my fantasy of housing my cat ladies and heavy metal bass players together in warm boxes. My good friend Dan Whitmore in Seattle, who's very active in this passive house community.
I, I sort of get credit for turning him on to it because at my previous house I built A before this house. I built another house for my family back in 2001 and did a radiant floor.
And it eventually like year three, I think on New Year's Day, it started springing all kinds of leaks in the pipes. The pipes just failed for the radiant floor eating.
And I celebrated New Year's Eve. And then my wife kind of shook me awake. It was still a little drunk.
And she's like, there's like a bubble in the hallway, but it's like filled with water.
And I was like, what?
She's like, there's a big bubble in the hallway, but it's filled with water. And I was like, okay. And like stumbled over and there's literally like the wall had a boob.
There was like a boob sized bubble and you'd poke it and it was obviously filled with water. And then I put a little hole in it and squirted out. And I was, I was still kind of like just awake, definitely a little, still tipsy. And I was just like watching the water squeeze out of the wall boob. And I was, I was like, how, how is this happening? And. And so tore the house apart, found the, the leaking pipes, anywhere these pipes would bend, started springing little leaks.
And my like almost brand new house had like, I did rip out the whole ceiling and fix all these pipes. And I was furious.
And during that, the first New York Times article about passive house came out. And it was, it was like German houses that are so energy efficient they could be heated with a hair dryer. I feel like that was the title, but I might be imagining that. And it was just all about these first passive houses that needed so little heat.
And you know, the shells were just, you know, just built kind of different, you know, with no thermal bridges and you know, basically put a whole big warm coat around the whole structure. And I was looking at my like torn apart brand new house. I was like.
And I remember just emailing Dan the article and saying like, this is what we should be doing, dude. Because we were, you know, we were in all these other like green building programs or lead programs and they were kind of just like a checkbox, you know, thing. And at the end of it you're like, Great, I got 10 lead points for, you know, picking 10 little things. But it, you know, it was very unfulfilling.
And long story short, Dan is now running the whole passive house builder training and is like doing all these really cool projects. And the project that he just finished, he privately funded, he and two friends, he another builder and I believe his friend Ginger is like a affordable housing advocate and has been for years and knows all the city programs and was able to secure some funding, but not much of it, but they just pulled off a 12 unit house that they think is part of the Seattle funding. Like had to tie like four units to half average Seattle rent and four units to 70% Seattle average rent.
And then the other four units they were just able to rent out at market rate.
Long story short, he pulled it off.
They all pulled it off. And it's a beautiful, really cool project. I'll share that for sure. And whole project was. They believe they built it for about 3 million. So over 12 units over time with Seattle rent is, you know, it's like a really impressive thing. And that's where I was like that, you know, that's what I should be doing in Olympia.
Yeah, it's like literally all solar, like solar powered, you know, constant fresh air. That's a huge part of what we do. Because our, our shells are so airtight, we literally blow our door, test it, squeeze all the air out and find every little leak. Um, but then we have this other cool device called a heat recovery ventilator. Getting into the weeds, but gives you constant fresh air while saving the heat from the exhaust air.
So there's the houses are just like invigoratingly fresh feeling. So that this, to me locally, this is my template of like what I could be pulling off.
You know, in my town, we even as part of this big project, bought this really cool European crane. Basically it's like a rotating telehandler with an 80 foot boom. So I could be building like really probably a four story building.
And that's, that is exactly where the affordability would be, would make all of these steps pay off even quicker.
The cost upgrade for the exterior insulation on that building becomes almost negligible because it's just so it's just one big quick step instead of like a house where there's billions of corners and all this little finesse stuff. So that was the glaring example of, you know, here's a template. Like I might even build the same damn thing with the same plans if I can, just to save more money. But that's where that's where I'm headed of, you know, how to pull this off.
How's all my friends?
[00:42:19] Speaker A: Let's take a step back.
Where'd you grow up?
[00:42:23] Speaker B: Newport, Rhode Island.
If you know about it, it's famous for like the Great Gatsby and where all the, you know, the Vanderbilts you know, and all the crazy rich people and the Gilded Age built their mansions on the, on the coast.
We were not of those people, but I delivered their flowers from my gay owned flower shop and worked on their boats as a little apprentice marine electrician.
Yeah, so my mom was a art teacher and my dad built like sonar for submarines, like an oceanographer dude and I loved sailing. So I grew up just looking at the Newport Bridge, right across from like a little Revolutionary War fort. Battery Park.
Super cool place to grow up.
[00:43:14] Speaker A: So you'd mentioned when you were young, like quite young, you got into environmental action, like having at least some kind of consciousness about that. Where did that come from?
[00:43:22] Speaker B: Yeah, my mom, I think the first earth day was 1972.
And it was like the one sticker we had on. Well, it was like the one sticker that we had on our car for a long time. But my mom, my mom was pretty cool.
We grew up, we had a little VW Bug and my parents moved in right as the Navy was kind of moving out in scale. There was a very large Navy base there and it moved out I think in probably 1969 or 1970.
And then they moved, they moved in and the house, the. Sorry, the town was just pretty trashed from the exit of the thing.
So her and some of her artist friends started this like anti litter campaign and turned our car into this little like with like they turned into this little ladybug looking thing with psychedelic lettering on the side. And it was the anti litter bug.
So I was like a three year old. I got to drive around Newport in the anti litter bug.
And I was like, what's up?
Yeah, like I drive by the other kids, they're like, oh, hey, yeah, I'm in the anti litter bug. But you know, maybe, maybe you could get in here someday. I don't know. But I'm the fucking, you know, it's the cool. It was. I felt like I still feel cool.
I drove around in the anti litter bug.
But she was, you know, she was just like active and you know, cool, cool local campaigns and really cool artists.
And my dad was sort of the Square, you know, 1970s dad that would work all the time and travel a lot. They didn't last. But it was also a cool time because Doris Duke, who you hear after every NPR story, the Doris Duke Trust.
She was like the heiress for I think Duke University and maybe Domino Sugar. She murdered her gigolo, I think in 1968.
She drove him through an iron fence and then very quickly bequeathed Newport, you know, at the time it was probably a million dollars, but at the time it was like billions of dollars to, like, fix up all the historical buildings. So my whole childhood was Newport just turning into this magical kind of Renaissance fair village. And every colonial house, you know, in our neighborhood got restored. And all around town, all these cool old buildings got kind of brought back to life.
All thanks to the squished gigolo.
Crazy tale.
We're so far off the script.
[00:46:04] Speaker A: Oh, dude.
[00:46:05] Speaker B: Sorry.
[00:46:06] Speaker A: Like, you know what?
There's no way I would have guessed that we would talk about that today, but I'm glad we did. It's really set the tone. Okay, so how did you find skateboarding and punk?
[00:46:19] Speaker B: Oh, that was pretty easy.
Newport's a surf town, so there was like, you know, cool old surfer dudes mainly kind of the. The Water Brothers scene, that Sitt Abruzzi. There's actually a really cool movie called. I think it's called the Water Brother or Water Brother. What is it? It's about Sid Bruzzi. He's kind of like the godfather of surfing in Newport and New England.
But he had this cool little surf shop.
And then Serg Pete Serguson, the coolest punk. I believe he moved from California and, like, was already cool and just looked cool and was cool.
He worked at the surf shop. And so by like, seventh grade, we would all just go there and, you know, that's how we heard all the first punk tapes and. And then his band was called Vicious Circle. There's a couple of those, but they were the first one, and they were really good. And they just took us under their wing and, you know, let us play their instruments and, you know, showed us how to play a bar chord and got us going. So the skateboarding thing, it was. It was already happening in. In Newport, you know, before, you know, Pal Peralta and all that.
So there was a history there for sure.
[00:47:41] Speaker A: So when did the. The idea of, like, you know, to do it yourself thing, like, how did that get imprinted on you?
[00:47:48] Speaker B: I mean, if you were a skate punk, that's what you did. It didn't even take much thought, really. It's, you know, if you wanted to have a show, you just badger to every establishment in town until you could find a place to do it.
Newport's, you know, huge tourist town in the summer, so there's all sorts of weird spots.
And eventually this one funky little jazz club, the Blue Pelican, kind of became our home.
[00:48:14] Speaker A: The.
[00:48:14] Speaker B: It was one of those, like, benevolent owners who a. Like to make a few Bucks on Sundays and be like, kind of had a heart for the, you know, excited kids that were stoked on a little. Their own little musical scene. So that. So Newport became this weird little stop for about four or five years on the east coast. And we'd suck in, you know, all the bands we liked, I think. I mean, that's probably how we got close with seven seconds. They played there a couple times, and that's how they noticed us and wound up asking to put out our first record or offering to put out our first record. They didn't really have to ask very hard. So, yeah, and it's only 40 minutes from Providence, an hour and 45 minutes from Boston, and three and a half hours from New York, two hours from the anthrax in Connecticut, so.
So my little crew became just pretty fierce road trip road trippers. You know, starting in, like, 10th grade when I first got my license, just, you know, anything between New York and Boston, we would go to if it was important. And. And then my grandmother lived in D.C. just a couple miles from the Discord House, so I would go down there a really young age. We recorded, learn our first record.
We were still in high school.
Stayed at my grandmother's house and, you know, go record, go record with Ian, who I still to this day wonder if my dad offered him, like, babysitting money.
You know, it's like, pimply. I care if I was 11th or 12th. I must have been in 12th grade. But, like, we were little shrimps, you know.
[00:50:05] Speaker A: So where I wanted to tuck into this is, like, I asked you about how that DIY spirit got imprinted on you, but I want to pull it even further back. And we touched on this a little bit before the beginning of the podcast. It's like punk and hardcore is, like, full of these, like, larger than life characters. Like, absolute, looming larger than life. But in a lot of ways, they're just another kid. You know, like, maybe they're just a little bit older than you, but they've done these things, like, put out these, like, monumental records that people are still talking about, like, 30 years later, and people are still, like, you know, mapping their lives on. And unfortunately, you know, just yesterday we lost out from ssd, but that's. And, I mean, I don't know, I grew up a certain way, so I can't speak for other kids, but it seems like an unusual thing for kids in, like, junior high or high school to be road tripping three or four hours to, like, like, another state or another city and, like, to see bands, you know, and doing all this stuff and then also putting out records and like touring all over the place. But for you and I, that's just like. Yeah, that's just normal. Like, that's, that's what you did.
[00:51:06] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Just, you know, there's that one early 80s, there's that one east coast place that would, you know, manufacture your cassettes and then you, you know, make your own little fill in cover art for the cassette. And it was just, it was just what you did. Didn't very much thought, you know, it was, it was really like basically a large community of crafters.
[00:51:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:51:36] Speaker B: Like just get into like needlepoint now.
Violent, political needlepoint.
[00:51:43] Speaker A: Stay tuned for part two of this interview. Next week on One Step Beyond.
What's that?
[00:51:56] Speaker B: Beyond.
