How to Solve the Big Problems of Modern Democracy #37

How to Solve the Big Problems of Modern Democracy #37

Hi Everyone and Welcome Back!

This week on The Nick Halaris Show we are featuring civic leader, Leonora Camner.  Leonora is the Executive Director of ClimateSafe Villages, an innovative non-profit focused on helping communities build resilience, and the former Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA.  As a civic activist with an impressive track record of success, she’s fast becoming one of the most important voices for those looking to make the world a better place.

Ready to dive in? Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music and Youtube or on your favorite podcast platform.

When I reached out to Leonora to invite her to the show, I thought we’d have an important conversation all about housing but as we got into the episode so many fascinating topics kept coming up we barely covered housing.  Animated by her experiences pushing for much-needed housing policy reforms, Leonora has become a passionate advocate for a whole suite of big ideas including leveraging the power of community to deal with all the potential consequences of climate change and pushing for innovative reforms to democratic processes.  In this fascinating episode, we cover:

  • Why waking up to the true dangers of climate change is something we should be doing right now

  • What resilience looks like in the context of urban living in the age of climate disaster

  • Why politicians are so reluctant to talk to voters about the whole truth

  • Why Leonora came to believe that our big policy failures are a function of broken democratic processes

  • Why citizens’ assemblies might just be the answer to our intractable political problems

  • & Much, much more

Stay tuned to the end to hear how being a mother infused even more meaning into her already purpose-driven existence.  

As always, I hope you all enjoy this episode.  Thanks for tuning in!      

Love this episode? Please rate, subscribe, and review on your favorite podcast platform to help more users find our show. 🙏 Thank you

Nick Halaris

I’ve been fascinated by investing for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I would read the Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Barron’s, pouring over the data tables, stories and interviews with a passion and an insatiable kind of curiosity. As I grew into adulthood, I struggled to find the right outlet and channel for this passion and spent much of my twenties wandering and trying out different things. I had a very brief career as an attorney, spent some time as a strategy and leadership consultant for big multinational companies, failed in an attempt to start a hedge fund, and even ended up helping run a scrap metal recycling operation for a while.

At the age of 30 though, I took my stand. I made up my mind that no matter what I was going to be an entrepreneurial investor. As crazy as it sounds, I owe everything in my life to this one foundational decision—even my amazing wife and my beautiful kids. I don’t think I would ever have met Alicia had I not made this one choice. At that moment in time, the financial world had just been devastated by the crash in the housing market and the near systemic failure of the global banking system that followed. I’ve always had a contrarian bent to my investment thinking; so, to me the carnage in real estate looked like an opportunity.

It all started with one house in Compton California. The business plan was simple: buy a distressed foreclosed home from a bank, bring it back to life with a big renovation and sell it to a first-time homebuyer. Things progressed slowly as they tend to do with real estate. In the first years of this, I think I did 6-7 homes. But then after plugging away day-by-day, suddenly it seemed, things just came together. I found the right investors and the right loans and the right deals and in just a few short years I ended up investing in over 100 such transactions, building a portfolio of almost 2,500 multifamily units and creating a fully vertically integrated real estate company with almost 100 employees.

Fast forward to today and I’m running the second evolution of my entrepreneurial investing career and having so much fun that I have to stop and remind myself that this is all real.

http://www.nickhalaris.com
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Why addressing the housing crisis is so critical to America's future #38

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Why business leaders must embrace the responsibilities of citizenship #36