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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.

I tell you the truth, LJ Urban will rise again, maybe not as the same company or even with the same name but there has to be a movement of people who care and they have to be doing things right to prove to the world that there is a better way, without it who is going to stand up and say with authority that not only are we doing the wrong direction but that there is a better direction to go in and it works? Who is going to be the spokes person for true communities in the heart of our cities? Communities that build instead of tear down, and use less than they can of the worlds finite resources. Who is going to stand against American consumerism and all its negative effects around the globe and say that we as Americans want to export something other than greed and selfishness?  Because we can choose to export more than just capitalism but we can choose to export a better way of life, one that impacts the world for good rather than for bad.

What gets me the most frustrated about all this is that we had a business model that was actually viable, we were not like the RED campaign that Bono put together that relied on donations just to keep all the marketing alive, we could have kept going if the whole world did not melt down a the hands of the Americans greed. Lets face it, this mess was our fault and we should have seen it coming. A country with an average of more than 9,000 dollars of credit card debt per person and loans that grow their balance instead of shrinking it, should not have stood up and tell the world that we had a stable economy in 2003, we should have been trying to fix things back then before we disgraced the world with our disaster.

I wish this post could be one big ‘I told you so’ but it isn’t, I screwed up to, I bought the lies and believed in things that were not real, I told myself that everything was going to be ok and that we could just go on building. I focused to much on the environmental un-sustainability of our economy instead of the financial volatility we were facing as a country.  I should have been more careful and spent more time trying to build a solid foundation for LJ Urban, instead I got caught up in changing the world and did not spend enough time making a strong company to do it with.

But let us not take this time and continue to look backwards on our failures, let us move forward and stand up for what is right, let us take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves in front of us today and most of all let us lead the next revolution. Sustainability is not dead just because its believers are distracted by financial stress, it’s the next few years when our country is going to be put on a new path, everyone agrees that we as a country had it all wrong, so now is the time for us to stand up and proclaim a better way to the world.  Let us lead by example and show that we can do right as well as wrong.

I walk the streets of Ethiopia and rent movies from Obama DVD and buy groceries from Obama Market because the world still looks up to us. So its right now more than ever when we need to be something to look up to.   It’s amazing that our name is not mud, but I tell you the truth if we keep this up it will be.

The last thing I want to say is thank you, thank you to everyone who stood by and supported LJ Urban, who believed in our effort to be more than a company, more than just another developer out to make money, investors who put their money where their heart was and invested in something that was going to make the world a better place, people who spent afternoons rolling out sod for makeshift parks in parking spaces, people who helped tear down chairs after we watched yet another documentary on the right way to build cities, people who got up in the morning, read our blog and commented, helping us decide which kind of countertops and flooring materials to use.   Thank you for believing in community, I only hope that the hundreds of people who emailed me over the years to say that they were inspired are still inspired, I hope that you do not take our end as proof that the movement is dead, because its only just beginning and you are right in the middle of it. Most of all I want to thank Jason Presley who in the last few years of his life put more creativity into LJ Urban and made more brilliance appear out of thin air than anyone could have. It’s his vision and passion that made this whole thing come to life.  Also thank you to the people who worked at LJ Urban and poured their hearts into the details to make it all work, I only wish I could have kept things rolling if not just to keep working with you all.   Jason, Micah, Steve, Vanessa, Mary, Scott, Molly, Brandon, Cindy, Chinua, Ben, Makayla, and Lia. The most creative gang of people in the world.

We are going to leave this website up as a resource to inspire people that there is a better way, and if you want to leave a comment about the ways that LJ Urban impacted or inspired you, we would love to hear it, or if you want something to remember us by, buy a shirt, we still have quite a few left and would love to walk down the street and see people who choose to make a difference in the world wearing one of them.

Be sure to check back from time to time, as we will post here when we come back with a new version of LJ Urban.

There will be more…

Thank you

Levi  Benkert