Letter of Introduction

I graduated High School in 2006 with a minimum wage job and exactly zero college applications submitted. I watched scrupulously as many of my peers confidently left for colleges around the country and secretly wondered if they knew what they were doing. I had several hotly contested discussions with my parents about what I was going to do with my life if I didn’t make the expected next step toward higher education and higher earning potential. Eventually I would summarize my instinctual adolescent disdain for automatic college attendance this way; I wasn’t passionate about learning anything in particular, and couldn’t justify the expense. I vividly remember my dad’s response, with a knowing look he said, “well, then you’re going to do it the hard way”.

He wasn’t wrong. I’m still glad I didn’t follow my teenage peers.

Like many young people I bounced between various service level jobs after high school. Eventually I stumbled into a role as a project engineer for a small design build firm based in Kirkland Washington called Bromik. At Bromik I fell in love with the construction industry while building luxury single family homes. I often look back on this period of my life as a giant virtual sifter. In a very short amount of time I learned a lot about myself and what I did and didn’t want to do. Now at almost 30 I’m a Junior at the University of Washington, I’m married to a blessing of a woman, I have a mortgage, I’ve carved out a career, and most relevant to this discourse, I know what I want to learn about.

In the summer of 2012 while still working my way up to eventually become the Director of Operations at Bromik, I found myself standing on the roof of a waterfront home ensuring proper fastener spacing in the roof sheathing. With nail gun in one hand, hammer in the other, I worked quickly down a truss line. I held the trigger down on the nail gun, bouncing it every 8 inches to land centered on the chalk line, while my other hand commanded the hammer that sank any nails standing proud of the sheathing due to a drop in pressure from our underpowered and overworked compressor. Suddenly, a thought struck me and I paused, straightened, looked out across the water, and cocked my head. I had recently completed an entry level psychology course at a local community college where I had learned about the three basic needs of each person – food, water, and shelter. The thought that halted my progress was that while I didn’t know how to grow food or collect clean water, I did know how to build shelter. It occurred to me then that the best possible application of my newly acquired skills and rampant passion was to house the vulnerable. It has taken me more than 5 years to flesh out what that would look like but since that afternoon on the roof I’ve been focused on affordable housing.

I want to build quality, attractive, aggressively decent homes that anyone can afford. The entire reason I applied to the University of Washington and the Community Environment and Planning Major was to further this goal. My career aim is to master the niche where private business resources, nonprofit goals, and creative planning wherewithal intersect. I aspire to be a leading Nonprofit Real Estate Developer.

I recognize that this goal is both painfully specific and immensely diffuse. These are relatively uncharted waters. Few choose to develop real estate or build housing for any reason other than maximizing capital gains and this, coupled with meticulous exclusionary planning policy, has irrefutably perpetuated housing inequality. By attending UW and completing my B.A. in Community, Environment, and Planning I endeavor to obtain valuable skills to better provide sustainable alternatives to market based housing that is and has been pricing teachers, police officers, waitresses, maintenance workers, and retail associates out of our cities.