Brian Narration: If you stand on the southern bank of the Oklahoma River, looking north, you get to enjoy the peaceful Oklahoma City skyline. It features downtown with its most recognizable building, the glass clad Devon Tower - at 50-stories, it's the tallest skyscraper in the city.

Brian Narration: And since 2016, the city horizon includes a Ferris wheel, which marks the spot for the Wheeler District. An entirely new urban development with a mix of live-work-play spaces that include shops, offices, restaurants, a school, and a variety of housing options.

Devin and Sade Dawson: this neighborhood has that feature that we used to have wind growing up, with children playing outside and you don't necessarily have to worry like. Where they're going because it's in his pocket of community.

Devin and Sade Dawson: Having three parents to ask where your child is, is a good problem, you know? Right.

Regina Story: we know our neighbors, we walk the dog to get the mail, and we're it's very interactive.

Brian Narration: We visited in April 2023, and met people, like Elliot who is 7 and attends the local elementary school.

Elliot Gile: The Wheeler District, is kinda special. I like it cause, um it's like a small city in a big town. And then in the summer it has a pool.

Brian Narration: I’m Brian Maughan, Chief Innovation and Marketing Officer with Fidelity National Financial, and this is Built – The podcast where you’ll meet creative leaders in the commercial real estate industry and hear how they do what they do.

Brian Narration: In this case, how they are turning an old airpark into a new community in Oklahoma City.

Act I: Setting the Stage

Wheeler Visit_BLAIR: developments are so interesting cuz how do you create a place that Yes is a development, but like, why do some places keep feeling like a development and other places feel like a place?

Brian Narration: Blair Humphreys is from Oklahoma. He is CEO of Humphreys Capital, and is the developer and president of the Wheeler District.

Wheeler Visit_BLAIR: Ultimately, The thing that people are really after is the community and the buildings are just kind of the stage, uh, and the scenery for where that thing happens.

Brian Narration: Building that stage for a community takes vision, time, money and the effort of many along the way.

BLAIR: In 2014, I had the opportunity to come lead this project, working on land that had been purchased prior to the recession, had been carried through as this empty site of dreams and we had an opportunity to start to imagine something new.

Brian Narration: And the space for those dreams is a 150-acre site that includes the former Downtown Airpark, built in the 1940s.

BLAIR: it was a small airport, primarily serving local pilots and their small Cessna planes. It had, uh, business jets that were flying in and out for serving downtown corporations.

Brian Narration: Tom Linck is a mechanical engineer that remembers the old airpark.

Tom Linck: single runway, about five hangars out here on the road. A paint hanger back in the back that I did work in. Years ago.

BLAIR: And then it had a great little, the greasiest spoon diner type spot where a bunch of pilots would hang out and eat breakfast and, probably stick around for lunch and talk shop. I mean, I‘ve been in a small plane that landed here before. I've been in the diner and had pancakes there before and I think for most people that lived in Oklahoma City, that would've been their experience if they knew about it at all.

Brian Narration: And the lot remained as an airport all the way until its bankruptcy in 2005.

BLAIR: Prior to that, really, the land we sit on today, was part of the Oklahoma River bed, was called the North Canadian River at the time. It used to be a sinuous curving river that regularly flooded and caused a bunch of issues. The Corp of Engineers came and turned it into this very engineered and channelized band that cuts through the middle of Oklahoma City.

Brian Narration: People from Oklahoma remember going to concerts in the open field but beyond that the area remained underutilized. In 2006, the development group bought the land, but then the market began to shift and in late 2008 the recession hit, so things got delayed a few more years. By 2014 momentum had started to build again, and the developers invited members of the community to participate in a charrette - a meeting to envision the future of this space.

BLAIR: So as far as I'm aware, at least in these parts, we were first project to really invite the community in. And so we hosted. a series of public events over the course of multiple weeks where the community got to come in and share ideas, and share a vision and work with planners and engineers and architects to begin to craft an idea of what this neighborhood could be.

Brian Narration: Blair went to the University of Oklahoma for an undergraduate degree in Entrepreneurship and finance, and then received a graduate degree in City planning and urban design from MIT. So he had some ideas already in mind.

BLAIR: we had our non-negotiables. So based on my background and based on what we thought was the, generally appropriate thesis for development on the site, we just said, look, we're gonna build a place that is pedestrian friendly. Highlights, bikeability and opportunities to get outside is a great place for families. and is urban mixed use providing a place not just for shops, but for residences and not just for residences of a single type, but of a broad spectrum.

BLAIR: If that's the type of place that you would like to help imagine, then come Yeah. and so that's mostly who showed up. we had. What the planners described as one of the youngest, public processes they'd ever seen. So we had tons of 20 somethings, tons of 30 somethings roll out and participate in the process.

BLAIR: We had local proprietors that were excited to begin dreaming about having a future shop there. And we also had people that didn't necessarily fit squarely into that when we said, a place for walkability, one guy was focused on his horse walking and trust me, if you haven't been to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma City is not a place where like horses are walking around. But this particular guy liked to just show up with his horse and walk along the river. And his primary concern about the entire plan was what his horse was going to think of it. You know, you get all types, but at the end of the day, you take all that and it gives you a baseline understanding of what the market's interested in.

Brian Narration: And these conversations help developers hone in on trends and turn them into something more lasting.

BLAIR: We heard a lot of feedback at the time of people who wanted a tiny home on wheels. You might remember all the craze there for a while. And so we're looking through that and we started to do some underwriting and some, some research on it.

BLAIR: And what we found is man, this is not the deal people think it is. Basically, As they sit in a tiny home on wheels that's depreciating each year, their cost in order to lease the land that they're on goes up each year. But we took that concept and transferred it into these tiny homes or cottages, that are permanent structures.

BLAIR: And we were able to build a product that was allowing people to get the home ownership they wanted, moving out of apartments into home ownership while decreasing their monthly payment and really checked that box for them.

Brian Narration: After the charette with the community, the typical steps you have to work through in development began.

BLAIR: from civil engineering to entitlements to, making joint venture and partnership agreements with the city on a variety of different infrastructure pieces. Finally in 2018, we got to break ground on the first house and got to welcome our first residents in the spring of 2019.

BLAIR: So that's pretty cool. Yeah. So we're been a long time coming, but now we're finally to the point where we have a real place. it's a place people call home. It's a place that has shops and residents and energy. and it's fun to see it come to life.

Act II: Site Tour / Transformation

Brian Narration: The Wheeler District is about a mile and a half southwest of Downtown.

BLAIR: Where Oklahoma City was founded, was in what they called the unassigned territories, where people literally ran to stake their claim for land and, uh, and we're developing a parcel that was just such a parcel.

Brian Narration: The site takes advantage of the airpark layout, so if you're looking from the air -or in Google maps- you'll recognize the old runaway almost parallel to South Western Avenue. And the development is expanding to both sides of that arterial road.

BLAIR: Western Avenue is one mile west of where the city was founded. And then we're just on the South bank of the Oklahoma River, which comes through the middle of the city. Wheeler District it's land that at one point was part of the kind of broader Oklahoma River bed, but is now, within an area that's outside of the floodplain.

BLAIR: It has great views of downtown Oklahoma City. and then it has great access, not just to downtown, but also to I 40, which connects all the way through the city, and beyond.

Brian Narration: One of the things that probably stands out the most is the Ferris Wheel right on the river bank.

BLAIR: It's a great landmark. It's a popular attraction here, and it also has some history.

BLAIR: Back when we were doing the early iterations of trying to figure out how to make this project work, my brother just, he just knew or had the insight that like, we just gotta give people a reason to know where we are, to see us off the highway, have a reason to go there.

BLAIR: And he was looking for just something that would be attractive and might be a landmark. And saw that the Santa Monica Ferris Wheel was for sale on eBay. And so he bought it, he bought a ferris wheel on eBay.

Brian: On eBay…

BLAIR: Yeah. It's a hundred feet above the Oklahoma River. In fact, it's the same Ferris wheel that you'd see if you saw the movie Ironman where he is flying through the LA night scene.

Ironman Clip: Sir, there are still terabytes of calculations needed before an actual flight is a driver. Jarvis. Sometimes you gotta run before you can walk ready in 3, 2, 1.

Brian Narration: That's Robert Downey Jr. playing Tony Stark as he takes his Mark 2 suit for its first test flight in the 2008 movie Iron Man, and he visits this very same Ferris Wheel.

BLAIR: So we developed that in 2016. It was the first thing built out here on the Air Park. and it was really, I think, marked the arrival of this vision we had for Wheeler District.

BLAIR: Since then, we've built, just over I think 170 houses. We have office buildings, couple restaurants. It's what I describe as a burgeoning, village center. We've only built out approximately 15, 20% of the overall land area. So we still have a long way to go. but we're on our way.

BRIAN: So there's an interesting concept about grafting, right? And there's a book called A City's Not a Computer, and it's about urban planning. And it talks a little bit about this concept of, in order to graft well, you have to keep some of the root, some of the history of the land and infuse new, if you do too much new, if you cut it too deep or too close to the soil, you might introduce some problems. If you completely destroy the past, you lose all that history, all that heritage. And I think what's interesting about the Wheeler District is you've really taken the Air Park And used it and haven't tried to erase it. You've made it a part of this community and really leveraged it.

BLAIR: Yeah. I think that was especially important given the timeframe we were designing in.

BLAIR: When you looked at what we had in terms of the residual buildings that were on the land, we had this terminal building that was the old diner spot and kind of the gateway into the airport. And then we had one old hangar. and then the runway, and that's what we had to work with. and so each of those items ended up being prominently featured in the plan.

BLAIR: the terminal building is now a restaurant and kind of a central meeting point. It has a playground and a taco shop and a patio where people hang out. The runway was turned into a, an avenue with a bike path down the middle and a tree-lined streetscape where the exact measurement from outside of sidewalk to outside of sidewalk and the alignment and everything. It is the old runway. In fact, it's Runway Boulevard now. and the hangar, continues to be a dream, that it could be something, but truth is. What we eventually discovered the hangar's bones really are not fit for redevelopment at all. and so it'll be something else. It'll be, a development, that will take the place there, that won't fit into this old rusty hangar.

BLAIR: But, we'll, hopefully that old rusty hangar will be something somewhere someday.

BRIAN: That's good.

Brian Narration: Blair took me around the development, and I got to experience some of what has been built here.

Wheeler Visit_BLAIR: Okay, let's start by going this way. As we come around the corner, you'll see the old terminal building.

Brian Narration: We began at Spoke Street, which wraps around the North and West sides of the old terminal.

Wheeler Visit_BLAIR: It's now Taco Nation, which is a great spot if you enjoy Baja style taqueria.

Wheeler Visit_BRIAN: Nice.

Brian Narration: On one side of Spoke Street, the reinvented terminal is a white and silver, one-story construction with an inviting outdoor patio and a playground. On the other side, is a brewery that has an old barn vibe. This is a two-story building with a copper color, wood facade and a steep roof line. And on top: the name The Big Friendly. The brewery and Taco Nation are run by locals.

Wheeler Visit_BLAIR: The big friendly brewery, won best brewery in America within its category at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver. So, excellent beer, highly recommend it.

Wheeler Visit_BRIAN: Nice

Wheeler Visit_BLAIR: uh, that by itself is worth the trip.

Brian Narration: As we walk across the street I noticed the main road is made of concrete but there's a segment made out of cobblestone. Blair says this makes drivers slow down.

Wheeler Visit_BLAIR: And now as we walk up Spoke street um, You are on, one of the smallest right away streets in America. So it's 30 feet of right of way. It's curbless, so it's a place where bikes, cars, and pedestrians are all sharing the right of way and having to navigate each other. In this case, we also have some construction equipment, uh, which you can hear in the background.

Brian Narration: As we pass a crane, we find ourselves among a few two- and three-story structures with retail at street level.

Wheeler Visit_BLAIR: This was our strategy for creating an opportunity for long-term retail, and so these are what we call shop homes. They're a town home product, so we sold all 10. But it provides for either a live-work or a live-rent opportunity.

SAM: Originally those were pegged to be single family homes

Brian Narration: Born and raised in the Oklahoma City Metro area, Sam Day is one of the architects working in the district.

SAM: I think I knew I wanted to be an architect or do something with design, probably from like age seven. I just loved building, loved drawing. It kind of consumed me.

Brian Narration: Sam met Blair when he took his college course on urban design, and then worked as Blair’s graduate assistant. Sam then went on to get a masters in Real Estate Development at UC Berkeley. Sam now has his own firm, Dry Line Architecture. He put a lot of work into this very street.

SAM: As the neighborhood got going, you know, we had made this promise of retail happening and there's this question we keep throwing back, like, how are we gonna get retail to a neighborhood where 80 people live?

Brian Narration: So Sam found inspiration in the place that many Americans have used to start their own businesses.

SAM: Like Apple being started in the garage, HP being started in some garage, like this kind of entrepreneurial spirit that happens in the suburban garage.

Brian Narration: So the team came up with the idea of live-work townhomes. Unlike an apartment building where you may live upstairs from say, a drug store, the residents of these townhomes live above their own businesses.

SAM: In townhome typology, we have this thing on the ground floor. A lot of times, especially if you're doing three stories, that's throw away space.

SAM: I took a lot of work in terms of code research and working with appraisers, working with mortgage underwriters, to make these happen but, you know, there's only so many things you can build out there retail wise.

SAM: It's hard to build mixed use, it's hard to make it work in the building code. It's hard to make it work in financing. It's hard to make it work in all these different things.  

SAM: And then there was this. Thought of, “Hey, we gotta make these small cuz we have to make 'em affordable.” So it was like very intentional from the get-go. This is going to be designed around live-work. This is gonna be designed for a certain demographic that we believe has this entrepreneurial spirit.

SAM: That's what kind of sprung me into the development mode cuz it's like well okay, I can design this stuff, but we gotta figure out how to do the financing. Gotta figure out how to do all these other things besides just the architecture.

Brian Narration: And sometimes you can’t always see what’s coming.

SAM: we launched the product on the day that oil futures went negative,

SAM: which was a really scary time to be real estate in Oklahoma City. But it turned out we also launched it like right as. Covid was taking hold and people were starting to like get it in their mind that I want extra space. I want somewhere I can work at my house, whether it be a home office or starting my own firm or whatever.

Brian Narration: These are individually owned properties that sold out just a few weeks after the launch without having broken ground.

BRIAN: When I stood at Spoke Street and I looked at the different structures on both sides of me, they were small enough, they were workshop-like, and I could pass five, six different retail shops pretty quickly, right? I could browse through street and I felt like that made it quaint. But also convenient, so, did you find a perfect formula?

SAM: No [laughs], the beginning of that conversation dates back to 2012. We were studying Jan Gail, who's an urbanist, and he has this thing of saying, “Hey, you know, you should get a door on the street maybe every 25 feet.” That's kind of a walkable rhythm, that if you exceed that, the street's starting to get pretty boring.

Brian Narration: Today, at Spoke Street, 8 of the 10 live-work townhomes have small shops open. There's a clothing boutique and winery, and other professional services like graphic design, a chiropractor, realty and accounting, and a very cool bike shop called Capital Co-op.

Brian Narration: As we continue our tour of the Wheeler District, I notice the buildings have similar features, but don’t look exactly the same.

Wheeler Visit_BLAIR: if you go outta your way to try to make every building different, there's only so much about a building you can change and it, it starts to get forced pretty quick. And the reality is, is that many of the best places in the world. Are reusing the things that work. That might be the floor plan, it might be the scale. And that's what starts to create the fabric or the grain, uh, of their urbanism. We want to create good vanilla, sometimes you want urbanism where the building is not the most interesting thing happening at every scale.

Wheeler Visit_BLAIR: At the same time, you want people to have pride in their residents, and you want. Uh, for there not to be a monotony.

Brian Narration: There's different shades of brown color in the bricks, different finishes in the facades… Just a few blocks away we find ourselves on Wheeler Street, facing an array of very colorful Terrace homes.

SAM: Those were definitely a team effort on the design side. It's a series of six, what Blair might call detached townhomes and they're three stories tall. I think they're 15 feet wide at the front. So they're really narrow, tall buildings on small lots, and they're painted in a gradient going across left to right. And then each individual house is painted in a gradient from a pastel to a more saturated color. So there's like a dual gradient moving across from terrace home to terrace home, and then up each terrace home.

Brian Narration: Fondly called the rainbow houses, these 6 homes are pushed right up to the street and their outdoor space is actually on the second floor, offering privacy by vertical separation. And the eye-catching element is that each one is a different color: green, blue, purple, pink, peach and yellow, with that gradient shift from ground to rooftop.

SAM: And it's also an expressive thing cuz it's like trying to express the values of the district of diversity.

SAM: And, in some way maybe we have some anxiety about doing a lot of attached or dense housing of people feeling like it's too monotonous. Hey, I want, I've always wanted to own my own home that looked like my own home, and this is maybe a way that we can design attached or semi-attached product in a way that feels distinct.

Brian Narration: From the Terrace homes we continue our visit taking advantage of one of the guiding urbanism principles here: walkability.

Wheeler Visit_BLAIR: We've interrupted our block grid with some paths that have as little as six or 10 feet of right of way. Just allow pedestrians to slide through the development, but without having to put in a full street. as you walk between these houses, you'll see how it provides connections, uh, through the neighborhood, short distances for people that are walking. And it's ultimately kind of a beloved way to get around for kids.

Brian Narration: We get to Runway Boulevard, the road that used to be the old airpark runway!

Wheeler Visit_BLAIR: You can see trees on each side of the outside roads, as well as a double row of trees, uh, down the center line, with a bike and pedestrian path that runs down the central axis of the old runway.

Brian Narration: Rows of beautiful sycamore trees, among other species, are growing at the moment!

Wheeler Visit_BLAIR: You can imagine in 10, 15, 20 years, you'll have those arch cathedrals that might be, an experience you'd have on Commonwealth Avenue or something like that in Boston.

Brian Narration: And trees are a vital part of the team's environmental strategy.

BLAIR: the site had virtually no trees on site. It was an airport. They're not necessarily the most cost-effective thing to do for a developer, cuz you don't really capture the value of the tree you plant. But we believe it's one of the greatest gifts that you can give the future.

Brian Narration: And besides the greenery, they decided to use geothermal systems in their construction; so heating and cooling systems that take advantage of earth as a heat source.

BLAIR: We decided to do geothermal, not just because it made sense from an environmental standpoint specific to energy, but it made sense from an environmental standpoint, related to how you experience the outdoor environment. And so our houses are urban. They're very close together, but many of the houses have a private courtyard. And you can sit in that private courtyard and because there's no condenser there, you hear birds chirping, you hear the breeze blowing.

Brian Narration: I got to experience the quiet as we walked along small streets and alleys.

Wheeler Visit_BLAIR: The alleys here, they carry a lot for us. Underneath our feet, you have the sanitary sewer line, the water line, you have all the communication lines, fiber, internet, et cetera. As well as all the electrical service for these houses that you see on either side of the alley. Um, of course you see the garages that are all facing in here. So whether it's the trash cans, the parking of the cars, or, most of the major utility framework, all that's running through the alley.

Wheeler Visit_BLAIR: When you get it all done, it looks all neat and tidy. Uh, to make it all happen requires a ton of coordination and a lot of work across everything from utility companies to the city, uh, to the engineers.

Brian Narration: The live-work townhomes and the terrace homes, among other home types in the Wheeler district, are intentionally different beyond their design.

Wheeler Visit_BLAIR: One of our commitments from the beginning was we wanted to broaden the typical range of offering even within single family homes so that more people had an opportunity to buy here. So one of the ways we did that is by creating smaller lots with smaller houses. So on the same block, you might have a house, uh, that costs, you know, five, six, 700,000 or more, um, just down the street from someone who bought a house for under $200,000.

Brian Narration: To create a mixed-income neighborhood for everyone, the team’s goal was to deliver 20% of products within affordability ranges of 70 to 120% of the Area Median Income.

Wheeler Visit_BLAIR: And of course, those are Oklahoma City prices and, and with the construction cost increases we've seen over the last couple years, they're always changing. But, things tend to be more affordable here than in most places.

Act III: A Flourishing Community / The Future

Brian Narration: To truly support a growing community, housing, play and retail space are not the only aspects to consider.

BLAIR: When somebody is looking for a house, they don't really just want a house.

BLAIR: They're looking for a solution, and they're looking for a package of what a place can offer them. That's proximity to the places they need to be, that might be work or church or wherever else they need to go. That is, obviously a great space for them to live. But then in most places, What it also means is that's how we package our school with it.

BLAIR: And so when we took on this project, we were aware like, man, we're gonna be adding a bunch of new students into an area that was struggling, to provide enough seats in the classrooms.

BLAIR: And so we started thinking through how could we be, one part of a broader solution to this.

BLAIR: Wheeler is interesting in that it's the meeting point between downtown urban development and what has become a predominantly Hispanic area south of the Oklahoma River.

BLAIR: And somebody, not us, somebody came forth with an idea, they said, what about making it a dual immersion, a bilingual school where seats are protected based on the spoken language at home.

Brian Narration: The Wheeler District has the Oklahoma City Public School District’s first bilingual charter school: Western Gateway Elementary.

Brian Narration: It's in its second year of operations with over 230 students who come not only from Wheeler but from 4 other surrounding neighborhoods.

JULIANA: Hola! Mi nombre es Juliana Gile.

Brian Narration: Jualiana teaches First grade and she's Elliot's mom, the 7-year-old student you heard at the beginning of this story! The mascot here is a bear or “Oso” in Spanish,– so the saying here is ‘we are bears’ – ‘somos osos!’.

BRIAN: If I'm one of your students and you start the class, what should I say back?

JULIANA: Okay, so I would say, Somos Osos, and you'll say, Estamos listos!

BRIAN: Estamos litos?

JULIANA: No. [ES] Estamos listos

BRIAN: Listos, Estamos listos

Brian Narration: That means "we are ready" by the way.

JULIANA: Yep. Are you ready? Somos Osos!

BRIAN: Estamos listos!

JULIANA: There you go. Good job.

BRIAN: I could be a first grader. That's fantastic.

JULIANA: You could, you passed.

JULIANA: Our school is a, two-way dual immersion program, which means that our students learn 50% of the time in English and 50% of the time in Spanish.

Brian Narration: Juliana relates to bilingual education because in her case, Spanish is her native language, so learning English was a big part of her upbringing.

JULIANA: Because I am a first generation Mexican American, we didn't always have the resources and my parents weren't always able to read with me or help me with my homework. And so at a very early age, I took it upon myself to learn as much as I could and to teach my cousins. I have 40 plus cousins.

JULIANA: I think we helped each other learn the language. I remember I actually had to repeat kindergarten because I didn't know enough English.

Brian Narration: Juliana found joy as a natural teacher to her family members and decided to make bilingual education her career. She was the first teacher hired at Western Gateway Elementary in 2021 and she got to visit the school during construction with her two kids.

JULIANA: We had to be very careful because obviously the walls weren't all the way up. It was just a frame essentially. It was really cool to just walk and see what was being built. And now, you know, we're in here and I'm like, wow, to see it come to actual life has been really rewarding.

Brian Narration: Juliana says there's pride in the fact that education here is bilingual.

JULIANA: One time I read to my students the story of Selena, and in the story, she gets frustrated because her father didn't teach her how to speak in Spanish, and she asks him why. And he mentions to her that in school for him it was not okay to speak in Spanish. And so that language was lost. We don't want our language to be lost. We want to continue the tradition of honoring our ancestors. And that's essentially why I chose Western Gateway for my kids. I want to make sure that they can communicate with their abuelito and abuelita, I want them to have a forever relationship with them.

Brian Narration: Now, Juliana doesn't live here in Wheeler, but she has friends and family in the district and says the development has been a great way to foster community not only for the people living here but for other locals as well.

JULIANA: Oftentimes will meet, to have play dates, to eat dinner. Sometimes I'll send my kids walking to do art classes at the coffee shop. It's a very walkable neighborhood.

Brian Narration: But besides being walkable and bikeable people around here tend to use another word to describe it.

John White: Community is the best way to describe it. We're a community.

Devin and Sade Dawson: it does have the word unity in it. Not to be cliched.

Steven and Josie Vekony: People are always out on their front porches and getting to know your neighbors and do life with your neighbors was a really cool thing and probably my favorite part.

Regina Story: Well, we lived in the outskirts of Oklahoma City before, and I could say the 11 years we lived there, we just didn't know our neighbors and we didn't interact with them like we do here.

Steven and Josie Vekony: The community here is one of the reasons we're here. Hi, good. Sup Jordan.

Tom Linck: People living, acting together, making decisions together. [Unknown passing voice] The best neighbor in the whole place right here.

Brian Narration: It wasn’t always like this.

SAM: you go back five, 10 years in Oklahoma City, there's a lot of people who would say, this won't work. People don't wanna live this close to each other. They're not willing to pay the extra 10% for higher quality of buildings.

SAM: There's just so many naysayers. And I think Wheeler District has pretty emphatically proved that to be wrong.

Brian Narration: Almost 17 years into the development, and the work continues. Blair says they expect to have 2,000 households in a blend of single-family homes, town homes, condos and apartments. Plus more civic infrastructure and other commercial opportunities.

BLAIR: It's not going to change the world, at least not for everybody. It's not going to reinvent urbanism. But what I think we can do is take lessons from the last 200 years of city development and apply them in a creative way to recreate what great neighborhoods used to be and create what the 21st century neighborhood could be.

Brian Narration: And if you are young and inspired to start your own journey in real estate, Blair has some advice.

BLAIR: On the one hand it's about investment and it's about return but it's so much more than that cuz it, it really does change the way that we have an opportunity to live. And, decisions that we make based on a five- or 10-year investment horizon, tend to have, impact to generations of how cities live and work. So, pursue passion as long as you can make it work and go full bore on it and see where it leads. Make friends along the way and then ultimately figure out how do you have some co-conspirators that have some overlap in their shared vision and your shared vision so that you can go do it together.

Brian Narration: As we approach the end of our visit, the streets start to get crowded around here, and the reason is exciting!

Wheeler Visit _ ASHLEY: I'm Ashley Terry, and I'm the Vice President of Development for Wheeler District.

Wheeler Visit _BRIAN: And then just tell us a little bit really quick what's going on right now.

Wheeler Visit _ ASHLEY: Yeah, so we're at the Wheeler Criterium races. Uh, they take place on Tuesday nights out here in Wheeler District. So we close down the streets, uh, invite everybody to come out and race their bikes through the streets of the district.

Brian Narration: And tonight, they have the kids’ races, so there's a lot of anticipation in the air.

Wheeler Visit _ ASHLEY: We've got a bunch of kiddos, uh, doing some of their first, uh, bike racing here in Wheeler District.

Brian Narration: And just like that, the racers line up. Parents and residents watch and cheer. People have gathered to create community in this former airpark.

Wheeler Visit_voices: [local ambient]…racers! 3, 2, 1. Goo!. [People cheering]

Brian Narration: To see photos from our visit to the Wheeler District in Oklahoma City, visit builtpodcast.com

Built is a co-production of Fidelity National Financial and PRX Productions. From FNF, our project is run by Annie Bardelas. This episode was produced by Sandra Lopez-Monsalve and edited by Genevieve Sponsler. Production support by Emmanuel Desarme. Audio mastering by Rebecca Seidel. Our location producer is Dan Epstein. The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

Special thanks to our guests, and to Sade and Devin Dawson, Elliot Gile, Tom Linck, John White, Steven and Josie Vekony, Regina Story, and everyone else who spoke to us in Oklahoma City.

And if you’re curious, the book I mentioned in this episode is called A City's Not a Computer by Shannon Mattern.

I’m Brian Maughan.

If you like what you hear, tell a friend in commercial real estate about us! And remember, every story is unique, every property is individual, but we’re all part of this BUILT world.