PULL QUOTE FROM TODD REIDBORD: You want the whole environment around you to be successful, and that includes the neighborhoods around you.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: This is BUILT, the podcast where you meet creative leaders in the commercial real estate industry and hear how they do what they do.

I’m your host Brian Maughan, Chief Innovation and Marketing Officer with Fidelity National Financial.

In our fourth season of BUILT, we’re taking a closer look at the community impact of real estate revitalization and development. We’re interested in the neighborhoods that surround commercial spaces and the locals who work in them. 

In this episode, we’re talking to Todd Reidbord. He founded Pittsburgh’s Walnut Capital Management over twenty-five years ago with his business partner and childhood friend, Greg Perelmen. Todd and Greg grew up in the area, and have watched the city change over the course of their lives. So for Walnut Capital, Pittsburgh’s development is personal.

TODD REIDBORD: We just started looking around where we had grown up and where we had lived and said, you know, how can we make this better? So we started our company based on catering to the new economy of Pittsburgh.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Walnut Capital’s history is entwined with that of the city itself; Todd and Greg had their start in real estate development following one of Pittsburgh’s major industry shifts.

TODD REIDBORD: When I think about real estate, it's always local, what you know. And we looked around ourselves and we were sitting and living in an area around the great universities of Pittsburgh at the time. Pittsburgh was kind of emerging after the industry kind of fell apart…

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Pittsburgh was once one of the world's leading industrial powerhouses, a hub for steel production during the Industrial Revolution. But after World War II, the demand for steel declined, and the industry collapsed. Pittsburgh went from producing 95 million tons of steel to… 5 million tons in just a few decades.

Many of these industrial buildings—factories, mills, and warehouses—were abandoned across the city. By the ‘80s, the commercial landscape had totally changed.

TODD REIDBORD: What we became was a medical and educational city. We probably have over 50,000 students and faculty here at Pittsburgh today. Uh, so we really think of ourselves as a “meds and Eds” economy, but we saw all these people coming to our great universities and medical centers, looking for places to live in these great city neighborhoods, but nobody was taking advantage of that population and sort of renovating old apartment buildings.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: The economy changed too quickly for the city to support it. So those old apartment buildings became Walnut Capital’s very first deals.

TODD REIDBORD: It seems like so crazy now, like putting air conditioning in, you know, putting new kitchens in, you know, maybe creating a place for people to park where in the past these were old, kind of rundown brick buildings, but they were beautiful and they were five minutes or 10 minutes walk or drive or bus to the universities. 

BRIAN MAUGHAN: From there, Pittsburgh’s economy kept growing, and with it, Todd and Greg’s vision for their home city. They saw potential in its existing structures and the areas that could use a little more love: spaces that had been underutilized and underinvested in.

In 2022, for instance, Walnut Capital worked with the city to plan a mixed-use development spanning 18 acres called Oakland Crossings. It would re-develop a stretch of student housing and an underutilized hotel to offer the South Oakland neighborhood a much-needed grocery store, many more units of affordable housing, and a central green plaza.

As a public-private partnership between Walnut Capital and the city, it prioritizes equitable and inclusive community growth, while being a major deal in commercial real estate.

Pittsburgh’s Mayor Ed Gainey announced the landmark deal in March 2022:

ARCHIVAL: Mayor Gainey: “First I just want to thank Greg and Todd., Your vision is by a transformation here and not just a transaction. And to build a connector like this that is going to help make it more effective and efficient for people to move in, to come in to work, in to play in. And I see Saturday nights down here now. [Laughter] … The level of diversity that's down there… You've created that vibrant thing. You've made it a vibe. And I just want to say thank you.”

BRIAN MAUGHAN: This is Todd’s philosophy with Walnut Capital: If we're not providing access to opportunity for all, nobody wins. When working on a property in one neighborhood, Todd considers the whole city:

TODD REIDBORD: Pittsburgh is a city of neighborhoods and there are many diverse neighborhoods that are, I always say, within a nine iron of each other. And our idea is how can you sort of connect these neighborhoods together? How can this development be a catalyst for the improvement of these neighborhoods? 

If we can have opportunity for people in these neighborhoods to have jobs around the areas and have opportunities, then it makes the neighborhood more sustainable and it makes people wanting to continue to reinvest in those neighborhoods and move to Pittsburgh.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: People respond to opportunity. Pittsburgh saw it happen with this shift to the quote “meds and eds” economy, as Todd says, and before, when industrial careers brought new families to the area. Like the Reidbord [Read-board] family.

TODD REIDBORD: My families, when they came from Europe, came to Pittsburgh, uh, probably three or four generations ago, and most of them settled and stayed in the area… So I think that a lot of the people that came here, established their own, based on where they came from or their religion or their culture, and most of those neighborhoods are still surviving and prospering today. It hasn't been this huge migration to the suburbs, as you've seen in a lot of other cities. We do have suburban communities in Pittsburgh, and I did grow up in a close-in suburb, but a lot of the same groups of folks that in multi-generation have stayed in the same neighborhoods, which I think is a great characteristic about Pittsburgh and one that we think helps us as we move forward. I mean, people like to come to Pittsburgh cuz it's really, there's a sense of place here.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Tell me, do you have an early memory of Pittsburgh, maybe when you went somewhere with a grandfather, a grandmother, a family member? I mean is there anything that you remember in Pittsburgh that was like, “Ah, yeah!”

TODD REIDBORD: I do remember the old, we used to call them the stinky steel mills. So when you would drive from where we lived in the suburbs into the city where my grandmother lived, you had to drive by the old mills along the river and they smelled, and we used to roll up all the windows or, you know, hold our noses and things like that. You didn't really think about how beautiful the rivers were in the valleys and the hills. You thought about how bad it smelled.

The other thing, I remember with my grandfather going to Forbes Field, the old Pirate games, you know, it was, it was one of these old, uh, stadiums right in the center of Oakland, the university district. I remember he had this big white Cadillac and we would drive up and it seemed like we parked in some neighbor's yard or something and just went into the game. And I remember, I don't know, as a kid, I remember that there were, people not speaking English, sitting around us. You know, watching these baseball games and we would sit there and watch. It was a fun memory that I had.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: After a childhood in Pittsburgh, Todd traveled 200 miles east to Philadelphia, for college.

TODD REIDBORD: When I went to college, I went to Penn at Wharton. I was a business major. I studied economics and political science, and I wanted to be a banker. I wanted to get into finance. This was in the, uh, early eighties, interest rates were 20 some percent, and the only place where there was really activity and business happening was in Southern California. It turned out I had an uncle that lived out there, so I went out to Southern California and got a job with a bank there but it was mostly real estate. Um, that's sort of where the industry was going at the time. I did a lot of real estate banking, worked with a lot of real estate developers, went through a training program, and then after a few years, I thought it was time for me to come back, back to Pittsburgh and go to school. So I decided to go to law school and again, became a real estate lawyer, but I would say probably caught that kind of bug when I started working in Southern California.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: So you come back to Pittsburgh, you attend the law school, and how did Walnut Capital come about?

TODD REIDBORD: I was a real estate lawyer for a major firm in Pittsburgh, really focusing on transactional work, working with banks, again in real estate lending. But getting the development bug, trying to meet with clients, and borrowers from the bank and understand what was going on.

So, after about six or seven years at the law firm, decided to make the move in development and through a connection of somebody I knew from the law firm, I got a job with a local Pittsburgh company called 84 Lumber, which is a national chain of lumber yards, and the owner hired me to be kind of in charge of real estate, new store development, things like that.

So it really gave me the opportunity to get my feet wet in the development side of the business, really the nuts and bolts of it, you know, going around to these little towns and finding a place to put a lumber yard and how to build the lumber yard and working through the zoning or planning and all those kind of processes.

So, after I did that for a few years and sort of decided I really wanted to go out on my own, um, coincidentally at the same time an old childhood friend sold his business. He had a pharmaceutical distribution business. And you know, we were both in our late thirties, I guess, and you know, what do you do when you, if you sell your business and you have a pile of money? You get into real estate.

And as it turned out, most of the development activities and what we've done has been in really a small little radius of where, the original family immigrated to and it's kind of fascinating to me when I hear stories from my father talking about his grandfather and the places that they went around the area that we’re developing has been interesting for me.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Such as … one of Walnut Capital’s biggest projects, the open-air shopping and office development, Bakery Square. All together, it’s a little larger than 30 acres in the city’s East End neighborhood of Larimer.

TODD REIDBORD: My father tells the story that his grandfather used to take him where Bakery Square was adjacent to... It was where a train station was. It was along the railroad tracks and they used to bring the trains in from the circus and unload the animals and put the big tops up around the train station.

So where we're sitting today at Bakery Square was a place where my great-grandfather would take my father as a little boy to see the circus. So when you drive by there, you think about that. Like how are we sitting in the same place? That, you know, multiple generations ago were going to the circus there.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: In Todd’s great-grandfather’s days, Bakery Square had been the historic Nabisco Factory. It was a huge warehouse with brick walls and soaring ceilings. But in this particular case, after many decades, the real estate wasn’t conducive to the industry… So in 1998, it closed after 81 years.

TODD REIDBORD: I mean, the reason Nabisco left is because it's inefficient to bake in a seven story old brick building that was built a hundred years ago… Here we are sitting in 2006, 2007, and we were approached by, a local sort of public private agency that owned the factory building.

So there they're sitting with this empty building at a location that really sort of, I would say, off the beaten tracks. It was surrounded by rail yards, um, and truck loading docks. And it was just sort of in a, I use an expression, sort of a “no man's land”. It was in-between neighborhoods. It was adjacent to disinvested communities.

We went over and we looked and we see this great big building with this beautiful first floor space. And we said, well, maybe we can create this retail community over there and have big, bigger medium box stores, the classic urban street retail.

But we didn't have the right location. So we said, let's take a chance and let's buy this property. It wasn't that expensive in terms of the total square footage you're getting, and we really wouldn't know what we would do with the upper floors. It's a seven story building. “Let's activate the retail and we'll figure it out later.”

; a fellow that we grew up with was an investment banker at a firm in New York, and they putting a real estate opportunity fund together and they decided to come in to be our investment partner at the time. All of a sudden the recession hit and our bank was National City Bank, I mean, they basically pulled back, they were acquired by PNC, but they were out of business basically. So here we were sitting with this: we had bought the property and we were sitting ready to commence this development with no financing. And, I mean, we're in a recession. No tenants, you know, nobody really committed to it. To their credit, some of their partners in the fund were real estate developers in New York. They liked the location. They saw what we saw. And they said, you know, basically, let's go for it. You know, we're, we're gonna recapitalize this. We'll put more equity in, we’ll bring a line in from New York, and let's just start going for it.

So we embarked on this renovation project, and we started talking to our friends at the local universities, Carnegie Mellon in particular, and we learned that Google was looking for additional space in Pittsburgh. They had a small office there adjacent to CMU'S campus. And Google made a commitment to come to Bakery Square, really as our first major tenant. So that really sort of changed our whole attitude as to what Bakery Square could be.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: What were some of the challenges that you had in taking a historic old hundred year old building and retrofitting it for today?

TODD REIDBORD: I would call them challenges and opportunities. And I think the challenges were, obviously you have a lot of square footage, that was in an industrial context with thick walls and high ceilings and big columns everywhere. You know, the floor plates were almost 48,000 square feet. So the ability to have office space on one level and not having multiple levels and going up and down was attractive. So what we were able to do was work with our contractors and architects to renovate the building in a sensitive way and using tax credits and other means, to do a really beautiful renovation.

So we really spent a lot of time and a lot of money and a lot of care in completely renovating the exterior of the building. And it's pristine, in its appearance, in a historic context. And we cleaned all the old soot off the terracotta and we brought back all life to the building. When you come in and renovate it and make your office space, you don't try to make it perfect.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Tell me a little bit about how you have, from that early stage, how you made decisions about your developments specifically to enhance kind of this balance between opportunity and history.

TODD REIDBORD: It's a great question and one we get asked a lot, and that's how do you decide what projects you wanna work on? And Pittsburgh is a funny place. We’re a—it depends how you characterize ourself—we think of ourselves as a kind of an eastern type city, but on a, a much smaller scale and a personal scale.

But what we don't have here is a lot of transactions. So we don't have a great database of market studies and what things are worth and how much per dollar per area or land per square foot. It's more of a gut feeling. Because really when we look around for development opportunities, we try to put our minds, and say, would this be something that would be appealing to me or to our team? We bring in our marketing team, we bring in our rental agents, we sit in a room and we say, would you live here? Is this the kind of, uh, something that you would take advantage of?

And I think that it's worked well for us because we've seemed to been able to capture sort of what people were looking for in Pittsburgh. It's not just an analytical data-driven analysis. I mean, of course as time has worn on, we have much more data and much more ability to do market studies and look at rents and compare things. But at least in the early part of our company, it was really more of a gut feeling.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: I love it. So describe for me Bakery Square. What would I expect to see if you gave me kind of an audio tour through or around that property and community?

TODD REIDBORD: The first original Nabisco building was on about six acres. But we were able, through a number of sort of opportunities to acquire additional property around there. So today, we have almost 30 acres of land that we call Bakery Square.

What we were able to do is really create a sense of place. So we have not only have a great office building, but now we have first floor retail, we have restaurants, we have 350 apartment units. We have 50 some townhouse town homes that we sold, um, in almost a million square feet of office space. 

So it's a vibrant community, which we think is where the future of office development is that, you have to have these sort of amenities. So on a Saturday, um, we have an LA Fitness there, so you see people coming to the gym a lot. We have a, um, a number of restaurants there. So you see a lot of people coming there, having a cup of coffee, meeting their friends, playing games, people with Scrabble. On the weekends our marketing team has activities so you can bring your kids there and have Disney characters or it's a bring your dog and we're having a contest for dogs or, you know, we're always thinking of ideas.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: I have to ask, is there a bakery?

TODD REIDBORD: No… [laughter]. We would like to have a bakery. The one thing that you talk about, the old timers and the folks, is they remember driving up and down the road that we're on, Penn Avenue, and smelling the cookies and crackers being baked there.

But, maybe one day we'll be able to get that. We do have a restaurant that features pizza. You can smell the wood fired pizza ovens. You can smell the coffee, you can smell the Panera bread being baked. But we don't have quite the bakery that we always wanted. We’d love to have it one of these days. We’ll get there. We’ll get there!

BRIAN MAUGHAN: No, that’s good. You'll get there. That's great.

So as you've grown Walnut Capital, what have you learned as a leader, especially as you've tried to balance both, you know, this community, this development, let's make a profitable company, let's build the right team. So how do you keep that community of Walnut capital together?

TODD REIDBORD: It's a challenge and I mean, we started as a family business. We're still a family business. We treat our employees like our family. We probably have 150 employees now. But we do try to really take care of our employees. We want everybody that works for us to have obviously, a living wage, have health insurance, have benefits, have opportunity to advance.

I mean, we believe in continuing education. We believe in promoting from within. We believe on taking a chance on people that maybe are changing careers or coming right outta school and not sure what they want to do but we give them an opportunity to learn.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: I like that because you talk about “embracing the architecture,” you’re kind of doing the same thing inside of the company or the organization, right? Everybody's individual, everybody's got their talents, everybody's part of a different community. How do you weave that into the culture of your organization?

TODD REIDBORD: We also believe in being part of the communities that we're in, so we have a very big initiative, we call it Grow With Walnut, where we want to give back to the communities around us. For example, adjacent to Bakery Square is an elementary school in a disinvested neighborhood, Lincoln Elementary. We do a lot of work with them. We have their kids come over and do art projects. We do school supply drives. We really wanna become part of that community so that the kids that go to Lincoln School think of Bakery Square as a place where they can come and enjoy themselves, again we want to give back to the community.

And we, you know, we're not perfect, not everybody buys off on all this, but I think as, as, as a team, our employees seem to want to, want to give back to that. So I think that one of the cultures I think that we have in our organization is a willingness to help the communities around us.

And it's one thing that we think about a lot as we continue to expand at Bakery Square, I mentioned we have some opportunities to expand and make it a more urban context: we worked with one of our local hospital systems. There's a community center now in one of our developments, we had some empty space, one of our tenants went out of business, and we were able to put them in there really at no cost to them, but they invested in the community. So now it's a job training facility. It's a place for people to go to get access to healthcare. Uh, there's a food bank, there's meeting rooms, job training, all these kind of things that, um, we think are important.

So that the success that we can have at Bakery Square can be, uh, transferred to the neighborhoods around us.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Around the Bakery Square development, Walnut Capital focused their efforts on the neighborhood of Larimer as a whole, partnering with the city to offer increased affordable housing so that Larimer residents can not only remain in their community, but build wealth… while also enjoying the benefits of the multi-use development.

TODD REIDBORD: Our challenge is how do we make these communities be more successful? How can we encourage people to come in and buy homes there? People that have left these communities and moved out want to come back now that they're vibrant again or potentially vibrant. And I think that's something that is an initiative going forward. We were lucky enough to have been successful that we can take some of that success and use it to make the neighborhoods around us even better.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: We always like to ask for you to kind of reflect on the career you've had. Obviously you've been very successful. And kind of think back or think forward to, what is some advice that you might give someone who is gonna bring the next wave of Pittsburgh or other city developers that are gonna do something similar to what Walnut Capital has done for the city?

TODD REIDBORD: I mean the opportunities that we've had in Pittsburgh and the real estate community are largely driven by number one, obviously the project we've done, some of the great partners that we've had, some of the great tenants that we've had has given us opportunity beyond our beliefs.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Speaking of opportunity, Bakery Square had a very important visitor in 2014. Here’s a clip from WXPI news…”

NEWS CLIP: “The other big story we’re following today is President Obama's arrival in Pittsburgh. He’ll be visiting east liberty square to talk about new technologies and entrepreneurship in manufacturing...”

My partner Greg and I sat in a room with President Obama and talked about things and, you know, it was a thrill of a lifetime meeting the president of the United States, having him come to your property.

We have a group at Bakery Square that's, uh, does research with people with disabilities. By the Veterans Administration. So we've met senators, generals from the Army, you know, joint chiefs of staff, people like that. Just these opportunities that come about. I always say, take advantage of the opportunities that you see in front of yourself.

Try to be a little bit disruptive. Don't just go with the sort of conventional wisdom. Look for opportunities where you think you have specific knowledge and specific ideas that are different than others have, and follow those ideas. Don't be afraid of quote failure.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: One last question. If you happen to be in the passenger seat of your grandfather's white Cadillac [TODD LAUGHTER] and you were now driving past one of your properties, Bakery Square, any of them, what do you imagine he would say?

TODD REIDBORD: It's funny cuz my father who's 93 says the same things thinking about my grandfather, his father as well, is that: they just basically can't believe that it's sort of happened to these folks that came to Pittsburgh as immigrants, you know, without really even speaking English. And then how, how did all this happen? How did these same properties that they drove by every day on their way to work, you know, become part of our family? I mean, I think they'd say, this is quote the American dream, I think they'd be proud.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: I applaud you and Walnut Capital for the vision that you have in a great city like Pittsburgh, who's been a part of the fabric of the United States, these communities that you're involved in and yet you've been able to kind of mesh a growing, profitable, very well respected business, and that is part of what has built our communities as a whole. So thank you so much for taking the time with us today.

TODD REIDBORD: I enjoyed it. This was great. I appreciate it.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Thanks for tuning into Season Four of Built! We have more great stories coming up…with our next one in two weeks. We’ll be telling you the story of Quick Quack Car Wash, an empire of car washes across the American West.

JASON JOHNSON: Real estate, at the end of the day, is a hand-to-hand combat in relationships and negotiation at the store level, at the dirt level.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: And if you missed the first three seasons, go listen! Our guests have been behind every type of structure from community solar gardens to developments specifically designed for the life sciences.

You can find all Built episodes wherever you get your podcasts. If you like the show, please give us a rating or review on whichever podcast platform you use. It helps new listeners find us.

Built is a co-production of Fidelity National Financial, PRX Productions, and Goat Rodeo. From FNF, our project is run by Annie Bardelas. This episode of Built was produced by Jay Venables. Our Senior Producer is Genevieve Sponsler. Audio mastering by Rebecca Seidel.

The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

The archival clips you heard in this episode were from producer Mike Lee with Walnut Capital. The music was from APM Music.

I’m Brian Maughan.

And remember, every story is unique, every property is individual, but we’re all part of this BUILT world.