The question of why you do what you do seems to be bouncing around the nether regions of my head lately, I have to be honest that when things get challenging I ask the question more often than when life rolls out the red carpet.   

So I have decided that today, for as much my benefit as yours, I am going to try and put into words why I get up in the morning and do what I do. It’s the list of things that make me want to push harder into life and make a difference in the world.

The center of everything in my life
Is it just me or do we all seem to have this thing about work and our careers that we think it’s the be all end all? I have to say that for me the real meat of who I am and what I do in life is after I get home from work when I walk in the door, kiss my wife and hug my three beautiful children. That is where the real, raw, core of who I am rests.

I like making cities better and dreaming of new ways to build places for people to live but I would give it all up in a second if it came before my family. My wife is awesome and my kids are some very cool little people that I love to be with.

The other thing I have found in life that is worth fighting for is adoption. Ruth, our youngest, is 17 months old and the sweetest little thing I have ever met. We adopted her last year and its one of the more rewarding things we have done in life.

We learned in the process that there are so many kids that need homes and never get adopted. The foster care system is no place for kids to spend their formative years and the shortage of willing families is a tragedy. If any of you ever want to know anything about adoption, call me and I will drop everything to talk with you and help you figure out how to adopt. I can assure you there is nothing better I could be doing with my time.

Eco-Urban community
The mantra at LJ Urban is that we build eco-urban community for real people to live real life. At first, when Jason came up with the term, I thought it was a bit gimmicky or contrived, but the more I learned his vision for what it meant, the more I came to believe that building eco-urban community was a big part of the answer for what is wrong with the way we treat the earth.

To us, eco-urbanists are the people who care about the earth and see productive urban cities as a means for fruitfully housing people and fostering community. Eco-urban communities are places built to endure and contribute instead of take away. Places that are not geared towards consumption of resources, but built to consume less and encourage their inhabitants to live lightly. 

Before Jason passed away, he and I talked often of writing a book together about what eco-urban community is and should become, and although I will never be the writer that Jason was, I am taking up that mission and starting to write the book that never came to be. It’s one of the things that I feel truly strongly about in life. We would all be better off if the core of all cities morphed into thriving low-impact urban communities. 

It’s a fun topic to write about because it’s not like I have to make things up; I can just look all around and see the movement already underway. People are starting to speak out and step up for change. We are a generation who has inherited a broken world, and that brokenness is just the inspiration we needed to wake up and start to work on a better way.

LJ Urban
I am passionate about LJ Urban. It’s kind of weird to say that about the place where you work, but it’s true in this case, and I want my kids to know that I fought for something good when they look back at my life and how I lived it. Not that there aren’t hard days, and that things always go as we plan them. We are real people with real problems just like everyone else, but LJ Urban is a company that stands for something better and that makes it all worth fighting through the hard stuff. Jessie (my super cool wife) and I had a conversation recently about how things don’t have to be perfect to be right. You can have messy emotional days and rough times but still be on the exact right track where you are supposed to be. Even though we are having to fight with everything in us to move ahead, and the housing market may have not been nice to us in the past year, we’re still on the right track heading the right way.  

We set out not only to build houses, but to inspire people to do things to make the world a better place. LJ Urban makes the cut on this list of the few things in my life that are truly rewarding and I know this time will only be remembered as the time when it became perfectly clear that this was a mission worth everything we have got.

Neighbors wanted
My family and I are getting ready to move out of our current house and into the Good project, and we are starting to look for other people to move in with us (not like in our house per say…but you know, next door in one of the other houses we are building). It’s kind of funny; we’re finding out that we are not quite sure how to go about this because it’s the first time we’ve actually had something to sell. For so long we have been all about passion and getting the word out on the street about cities and making them better places.  But now we actually have homes and it’s time to sell them to people. I like the switch because we get to start really getting to know people and find out more about what they think community should look like. I am having a great time and have met some very cool people who think urban community is as cool as I do.

The topic made the list here today because it’s one of the things that I am really excited about that is going on in my life. We get the chance to start building a community and experience first-hand what it takes to get the ball rolling.

It’s almost like we could write a personal ad asking for just the right neighbor to come and build the first LJ Urban community with us…

Wanted
Urban poineer who sees potential in life and wants to join together and make the world a better place. No prior experience needed. Gardening skills a bonus. No car nessecary.

It’s funny looking back at the topics I picked out. I actually sat here and wrote the topics first and then wrote what they meant to me. But all the topics have a common thread: community and people. Wife, kids, neighbors, communities, building communities. Hmmm. Sensing a pattern here.

So that’s it, that is why I get up and get going and push through what at times seems to be the hardest of circumstances; like losing your brother and best friend in the same month, or having to cut down to 3 people from 13 at your company. Those things are hard, but the good far outweighs the bad.

Levi