Workforce Housing Is Rewriting Northern Arizona's Growth Story
Across a career that moved from plastics manufacturing in Canada to structured finance on Wall Street, I've watched a lot of industries reach a point where the old assumptions stop working. You can feel it before the data catches up. The signals show up in conversations with business owners, in the way employers talk about hiring, in the gap between what a region promises and what it can actually deliver to the people who keep it running. That's exactly what I'm watching happen right now in Northern Arizona, and it's why I made the decision to put serious time and capital behind a 47-acre workforce housing development near Sedona.
The shift I'm describing isn't subtle. For years, communities like Sedona and the Verde Valley built their economic identity around tourism, hospitality, healthcare, and outdoor lifestyle. That model worked. But somewhere along the way, the housing market stopped keeping pace with the workforce those industries actually need. Teachers, nurses, hotel staff, first responders, and tradespeople are being priced out of the communities they serve. Employers I've spoken with throughout the region aren't struggling to find customers. They're struggling to find employees who can afford to live within a reasonable distance of the job.
I didn't come to this realization from a report. I came to it from direct conversations with local business leaders and community members who kept describing the same problem from different angles. Recruiting is harder. Retention is worse. Commutes are longer. And the longer that gap persists, the more fragile the region's economic foundation becomes. When I saw that pattern clearly enough, I knew it was the kind of problem worth building toward, not just talking about.
What's changed in how I think about this project, compared to how I would have approached an opportunity 20 years ago, is the emphasis on integration. When I scaled my plastics manufacturing company from $500,000 to $25 million over a decade, the work was largely internal: build the right systems, hire the right people, execute with discipline. Real estate development at this scale is different. The community itself is a stakeholder. Location matters in ways that go beyond logistics. Proximity to Interstate 17, access to employment corridors in Sedona and Flagstaff, walkability, and green space aren't amenities layered on top of the project. They are the project. Getting those decisions right requires a different kind of listening than I had to practice earlier in my career.
Here's where I think the broader shift is heading. Workforce housing is moving from the edges of regional planning conversations to the center of them. Public officials, business associations, and community organizations are starting to treat attainable housing as an economic infrastructure issue, not just a social one. That framing matters because it changes who is at the table and what kinds of solutions get considered. I expect that shift to accelerate over the next few years, particularly in high-cost, amenity-rich regions like Northern Arizona where the affordability gap between wages and housing is among the widest in the state.
The structured finance work I did later in my career, building an investment fund around long-term lease assets and bringing credit-enhanced packages to Wall Street, taught me how capital flows toward problems that are clearly defined and responsibly structured. Workforce housing, for a long time, struggled on both counts. That's changing. The problem is now clearly defined at the regional level, and developers willing to approach it with discipline and long-term planning are finding more pathways to viable structures than existed even five years ago.
I bring all of that history with me into this development. The discipline I built in manufacturing, the long-term thinking I applied in structured finance, and the community-first orientation I've developed over years of working across different industries are all shaping how I approach this 47-acre project. And what I know from building businesses over decades is that the most durable ones solve a real problem for real people. Northern Arizona's workforce housing shortage is exactly that kind of problem, and I'm committed to being part of a solution that this region can build on for years to come.