Why the next economy plays like a jam session.
Remember musical chairs? The music plays, everyone circles, and every round a seat disappears. The last person standing wins a lonely room. It's a children's game, and it's also a pretty honest description of how a lot of real estate gets played.
Fear of losing the deal keeps people circling. Seats are scarce on purpose, and when the music stops somebody is always out. Danny's new piece asks a simple question: what if that's the wrong game? What if the next economy, the one that actually builds housing and keeps corridors alive, plays less like musical chairs and more like a jam session, where every new player adds to the music instead of taking someone's seat?
Below is the short version. The full piece walks through the game theory, the capital stack, and a year of testing the idea on El Cajon Boulevard.
Inside the piece
Cheap money is the music. Everyone hears it stop at once.
In real estate, the music has been cheap capital and rising prices. When it stops, through rate hikes, lenders pulling back, or a buyer walking, whoever doesn't have a seat is out. Development adds a sharper edge: binary risk. A council vote, a coastal permit, a tax credit award either goes through or it doesn't, and the earliest money in the deal is the money that can go to zero.
Extraction pushes the cost out the door. It's coming back in.
The extractive playbook is simple: buy cheap, squeeze the spread, exit. It works on paper because the real costs land on someone else: tenants, neighborhoods, the city. Those costs are now coming home as housing shortages, insurance and climate exposure, and a deep public distrust of anyone who shows up with a rendering. Our read is the same as Danny's: that model is running out of road.
In a jam session, a new player adds to the music.
Nobody in a jam is waiting for someone else to lose their seat. Map that onto development and every party has a part to play. Capital keeps time and should earn a real return for it. The community carries the tune. Government provides the room everyone plays in.
Musical chairs vs. the jam session
| Musical chairs | Jam session | |
|---|---|---|
| Supply | Fewer chairs every round | Pull up another chair |
| The music | Stops on purpose | Keeps going |
| Motive | Fear | Curiosity and craft |
| Time horizon | One round | Repeated play |
| Who wins | One person | The whole room |
| Economy | Extractive | Regenerative |
It's a prisoner's dilemma, and we play it more than once.
Robert Axelrod's work on repeated games, and Keohane and Nye's Power and Interdependence, land in the same place: when the same players meet again and again, cooperation stops being charity and starts being strategy. Developers and communities meet again and again.
cooperates
defects
cooperates
defects
Mutual cooperation is the only square where the repeat game keeps paying.
Four practices we use on every site.
- Tune up with the neighborhood first.Engage before the hearing, not at it. Local alignment is how binary events break toward yes, and it lowers the cost of capital.
- Let every instrument play its part.Blend the stack: tax credits, New Markets credits, CDFI debt, philanthropic and patient capital, and market-rate equity.
- Play before you build.Activate the site early with pop-ups, markets and interim uses. That foot traffic is underwriting data: proof of demand before a shovel goes in.
- Pass the tip jar back around.Keep value local through revolving funds, local ownership stakes and operator equity.
Three service lines. One band.
One Year on El Cajon Boulevard
A year ago Pop-Up Winona opened on El Cajon Boulevard in City Heights as a live test of everything above: play before you build, tune up with the neighborhood, let every instrument play its part. A year in, the room is full.
⤢ Tap to expand
Tap the flyer to see it full size. New mural by @artbypetrikowski: Libertad en vida y muerte. In partnership with Pop-Up Winona and Love City Heights. All are welcome.
Danny turns 47 this week, and Pop-Up Winona logged 47-plus events in its first year. We'll take the rhyme. The anniversary runs straight into Día de los Muertos, the season when the veil is thin and we remember the people who built before us. It's a fitting place to ask the question the whole piece turns on: what do we leave for the people who come after?
The full piece, live
The music is already playing
Whether you're a developer, a capital partner, a city, a neighbor, or an owner sitting on a site that could do more for its block, there's a part for you. Come by Pop-Up Winona tonight, or tell us what you're working on.
Read the full piece Connect with WhollyWholly Creation Inc. | CA DRE Broker License 02117640 | CA License 01404430 | 858.663.4576 | hello@whollycreation.com | www.whollycreation.com