What Regenerative Communities Can Learn From Commercial Real Estate

I started my real estate program with a fear.

After years working in regenerative community development, discussing governance systems with groups around the world, thinking through bioregional commons management, designing landscape-scale interventions, I worried that I was too deep. That this fundamental real estate knowledge would be useful, sure, but that I'd be speaking a language of ecology and regeneration that would go in one ear and out the other. That there'd be no place for it here.

Halfway through my master's at CU Leeds, I can report: I was both right and wrong. And the ways I was wrong are actually what excite me most.

The Gap I'd Seen Firsthand

Before this program, I'd experienced the disconnect between vision and execution up close. I built my own ecological home in the mountains of Colorado. I worked at ReCommon, speaking with regenerative community projects from around the world. This inquiry took me from projects in the United States to a bioregional initiative with indigenous groups and impact investors in northern Colombia.

What I kept encountering was no shortage of vision and coherence. People understood what needed to happen. They could articulate beautiful, systems-level thinking about how communities could function in right relationship with their landscapes.

What was missing? Executability. Because at the end of the day, these are complex real estate deals.

The movement is full of passionate community organizers, people who care deeply about governance, landscape stewardship, and ecological restoration. The problem is that landscape-scale interventions (watershed-level projects, regional food systems, actual village development) require real estate mechanics that most people in the regenerative world simply don't have.

Think about what a regenerative community project actually involves. This isn't just an industrial building or a multifamily apartment complex. This is everything woven together: energy infrastructure, conservation and carbon credits, housing ranging from affordable to luxury, standalone businesses, farm and ranch operations integrated into the landscape. These are incredibly complex and dynamic projects with long time horizons requiring very particular capital stacks.

The regenerative community space, as rich as it is in ideals, is often missing the profit and business fundamentals that the real estate industry has been perfecting for decades.

The Spectrum

Picture a spectrum. On one end, the vision: a perfectly regenerative, deeply ecological community. Best case scenario. On the other end, a cookie-cutter, soulless subdivision built with cheap materials and without much passion, but it pencils out on paper. It works for the bank. It works for the lenders who need to move money through the system efficiently to get their yield.

Sustainable real estate sits somewhere in the middle, definitely closer to the conventional side, but with meaningful green building features and sustainability considerations. Here's the crucial difference: sustainable real estate projects are actually happening. They're getting financed. They're getting built. All around the country, all around the world.

The regenerative movement? Rich in ideals, but completely lacking in realized projects at scale.

I think most people in the regenerative space would rather see something 60, 70, 80 percent regenerative and actually happening than 100 percent regenerative and not happening at all. If sustainable real estate projects are currently sitting at maybe 20-25 percent on that regenerative spectrum, the opportunity is to keep shifting them forward. To 30, 40, even 50 percent. Because any progress in that direction is meaningful.

And here's the uncomfortable truth: regenerative community development projects that don't happen don't make an impact. No matter what, the real estate industry machine is going to keep going. The lenders and banks have obligations to keep putting capital into projects. The money has to keep flowing. So it's on the people who want to push the boundaries, to tip sustainable over into regenerative, to prove that it makes sense on paper. That it makes sense financially. That it works in the spreadsheet.

Because if it only makes sense ecologically and spiritually and planetarily? Unfortunately, that's not enough.

What I Actually Found

So here's where my fears were wrong.

The deep fringe of ecology and regeneration (bioregional commons management and all that) is still way too advanced for the conventional real estate world. What surprised me was finding something closer than I expected: sustainable masterplanned communities.

I'll be honest, I assumed that anything in commercial real estate, anything in these very large masterplanned communities, would be completely devoid of ecological thinking or sense of place. I was wrong. Some of these developers are actually trying to do the right thing. They're thinking ecologically about how homes are built. They're considering pollinators, green spaces, walkability. They're creating places people actually want to inhabit, with attention to placemaking that I genuinely didn't expect.

Take Baseline, the community built by McWhinney here in Colorado. This is a large, multi-hundred-million-dollar masterplan development that incorporates many of these sustainability aspects. Is it a fully-blown regenerative village? By no means. But it's impressive, no matter how you look at it, to see a project of that scale happen with sustainability in mind.

It's not the full expression of what the regenerative space talks about. But there are real indications of movement in the right direction. It's not widespread yet, but hints of this thinking are becoming more mainstream. The baby steps toward the ultimate realization are very much happening.

The Aha

Here's what I've learned so far: real estate finance, deal structuring, and development operate as a total machine. There are standards. There are ways of doing things. And this machine has been refined over decades, if not centuries, to actually get projects built.

Instead of trying to fight that entire system and build a new one, whether through web3 tokenization or other alternative methodologies, I think the regenerative movement should look at how conventional real estate development actually works and figure out how regenerative projects can operate through that lens.

Because otherwise, they may just not work at all.

There's still room for innovation and pushing boundaries. But it has to happen within the context of how things actually get done. A success first in the spreadsheet and with the lenders before it's a success in real life.

Meeting in the Middle

For a lot of people in the ecological and regenerative world, commercial real estate is the enemy. Masterplan communities are something to fight against, not learn from.

Having jumped into the deep end of the conventional real estate world, seeing how these deals get done, how big they are, how effective some of these large developers really are, I actually think there's so much to learn from this space.

The more that bioregional agents of change, stewards of ecologies, and remediators of landscapes can engage with the commercial real estate world of brokers, lenders, banks, and investors? The better. Cap rates and IRRs aren't the enemy. They're the language of getting things built.

That's the reflection halfway through my program. If you're in the regenerative space and you've been treating real estate as the opposition, I'd encourage you to look closer. And if you're in the world of real estate, maybe look at the regenerative space to bring projects closer into right relationship with nature. The tools for actually building the future we want are already there. We just need to learn how to use them.