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In the last five years the question I was asked the most was. “How are you doing this?” What they were asking was always about the countless articles and awards that LJ Urban was getting. We used to have a joke, if its been more than a week with no mention in the news of LJ Urban, something is wrong… I have been thinking a lot about that lately and weather or not I should tell about our secret weapon, I debated if I would be giving it all away or… Anyhow, I decided its best to just tell you and get it out there.

Without a doubt one of the biggest reasons that we were able to do what we were able to do was the guys at EMRL Floyd and Stephen are working on another level from the rest of us when it comes to getting a story told, they built this website and helped craft the vision for LJ Urban.  That is not to say that we were not authentic, that is just what is so amazing about them, its like they sat down with us and found the passion that was deep inside and pulled it out and brought it to life.  They should not call themselves an advertising company but rather a Business Consultant / Shrink.  They get to the bottom of who you are and tell the story like no one else can.

I want to thank them from the bottom of my heart for all they did for LJ Urban.  I know that they will play a major role in the next version of what we become…

Go check out their site www.EMRL.com

Levi

I have been putting off writing this post for some time now, I knew it was coming about three months ago but held out hope that there was going to be some way around the way things were going, but now that I sit down to do it I wish that I had a long time ago, I have so much to say about what we did right and wrong but most of all I do not feel regret for trying, yeah there were many things that in hindsight I should have done differently but LJ Urban has been an extraordinary adventure from the start, we set out to change the world and I can only hope that there were others who were changed as much as we were along the way. But now it is over, or at least this version of it. We had a good long run, almost 7 years in total, but things are over now. To put it simply what happened is this, the market value of the property we hold fell too far below the loans we had on the properties, we were able to hang on for the past year after that happened in hopes that things would turn for the better but with no cash flow and no equity with which to borrow against LJ Urban became no more.

The plan was to take the year off so we would not keep spending money on overhead but the values kept plummeting and the banks and lenders became impatient.  Despite sleepless nights, migraines, ulcers and everything else we put into making it work, the end result is a company with no book value and no future as a property development company.

But what LJ Urban really was at the heart of the company was so much more than the property values or the LLC Documents, LJ Urban was a movement, this site has had over 400,000 visitors every years since we put it together, LJ Urban represented for so many of us a new way of thinking. We built a company that set out to do things differently not just as a marketing campaign or motto but because we believed that we were coming into a market that was broken.

We believed that the wasteful tract housing trend is dead wrong and that there is a better way, we believed in cities, we believed in the power of communities made up of millions of people all over the world who wanted to see cities made into better places to live. We fought against long commutes and construction of more and more new roads to more and more identical rows of matching houses, and do you know what? We were right, spending countless hours each week in the car just to have a big yard and 3000 square feet of home to live in is not only wasteful its sick and wrong. More than 50% of the world lives on less than 2 dollars a day and we still continue to build larger houses with more room to park our SUV’s. What’s worse is that before all this happened with the market we as a community of people who cared about the earth and the people who live in it were actually getting somewhere with convincing the Americans that they needed to be more sustainable but as soon as the recession hit it was like everyone felt that they no longer had to do the right thing, the motto became “me first” as everyone tried to grab what the could for themselves. But the truth is if we had been more conscious of the impact of the things we were doing not just on the earth but to the people that live on it on both sides of the globe, if we cared about the other expenses that came along with our lifestyle we might just have avoided this whole thing. You heard me right, we brought this on ourselves by caring more about the flashy image we presented than the foundation on which we were building our lifestyle.

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This is adaptive reuse!

This looks interesting. Wonder how much luck they are having as a collective.