There's a piece of conventional wisdom in real estate that almost every developer accepts: retail follows rooftops. Build the housing first, then the storefronts will follow. Tesho Akindele and the team at Camp North End did the opposite—and it’s paying off in a major way.

Camp North End is a 76-acre adaptive reuse project in Charlotte, North Carolina. Formerly a Ford manufacturing plant turned Army facility turned Rite Aid warehouse, ATCO Properties acquired the site in 2017. For decades, the entire campus was disconnected from the eight surrounding residential neighborhoods, completely paved over, and zoned industrial. Today, it's one of the most vibrant developments in the Southeast: 400,000 square feet of office, 75,000 square feet of retail, 300 apartments, and 1.1 million visitors this past year alone.

This conversation unpacks the mechanics behind large-scale adaptive reuse: how to structure opportunity zone financing across multiple phases, ways to optimize brownfield remediation, and strategies for building community buy-in every step of the way. Tesho also walks through the three buckets of development work—project management, financial analysis, and capital raising—and shares how small teams can rise to the challenge of complex projects.

Episode Outline

(02:06) Tesho’s career as a professional soccer player and the leadership lessons he learned along the way

(08:28) Tesho's transition from soccer to real estate, his passion for housing advocacy, and joining ATCO

(13:05) Walking through Camp North End's site and the long-term vision for the neighborhood

(23:42) Rezoning industrial land and negotiating over rail easements

(31:23) What "legalize housing" means and why single-family-only zoning hurts cities

(36:38) Affordable housing solutions that meet diverse community needs

(39:16) Why opportunity zones encourage long-term thinking and better design choices

(44:05) Building an internal team with community managers, placemakers, and 24/7 security

(49:52) Practical advice for mixed-use developers

Additional Resources

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Access resources from my panel discussion on Opportunity Zones at the Yale AREA Conference

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