PULL QUOTE FROM MARIAH DIGRINO: I think people on the surface think of dealing with real estate as dealing with dirt, dealing with surveys, dealing with very two-dimensional, static things. But what I really loved about the land use work was you're dealing with people.

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 Mariah DiGrino. She’s a Chicago-based Real Estate Development Attorney and a Partner at the global law firm, DLA Piper. 

Mariah works in land use entitlement, which is where real estate intersects with government. Meaning, she works to help developers obtain the approvals they need to develop their properties.

Mariah: It's helping companies with site selection process, so, evaluating incentive packages that various municipalities or localities might present to them and helping them decide where to put their manufacturing facility or their offices or headquarters.

Brian: For Mariah, it’s not just about securing sites for her clients to develop new properties in Chicago, but it’s about how.

Mariah: You have to navigate the community that you're coming into and whether it's the community members that live nearby or the decision makers that sit in city council or that sit in the plan commission, you really have to connect with them. And I think particularly you find in the land use arena, a high degree of connectivity to the community just because of the nature of the work that we do.

Brian: In addition to community engagement, DLA Piper has made it a part of its mission to encourage its lawyers to engage in Pro Bono work.

Mariah: It's a value that the firm has. And I think it's connected to real estate because, you know, real estate is – it's places where people are, right? It's places where people live, work, play. So, you know, it is a very dynamic community centric field.

Brian: And Mariah’s pro bono work with the Greater Chicago Food Depository gives her a very local focus beyond her regular work with DLA Piper.

Mariah: The work entails direct, pro bono representation, but also policy study and advocacy. one of our signature projects that the firm promotes is around hunger. That work has now expanded nationally. We represent food banks in any location where we have an office, we will often also represent their local food bank in a pro bono capacity. And then internationally, we were instrumental in getting the Global Food Banking program off the ground, in providing material support for that.

Brian: I want to start with a little bit about your origin story. Tell me a little bit about where you grew up. I mean, I'm not sure that you wanted to be a land use attorney when you were little, maybe you did, but tell us a little bit about your beginnings.

Mariah: I had no idea that this kind of law practice existed until I was in law school.

I've played piano since I was five. And, if anything, when I was growing up, aspired to be, a musician so my undergraduate degree is in music performance on Oboe.

Mariah: I kind of realized, well, I need to find a job and the music industry, which probably surprises nobody to learn, is highly competitive, particularly in the area of classical music.
And there are not a lot of jobs, but a lot of really talented people. And, through my own growth, realized I just need more security than that particular career could provide.

So I grew up in a small town in West central Illinois called Macomb, Illinois. It's pretty rural. One of the Illinois's state universities is located in Macomb and my father worked there. And so that provided kind of a window to the world outside of, rural west central Illinois. My father, who is an accountant and worked at the university in their business office, his background did not allow him the opportunity to pursue secondary education beyond a bachelor's degree. But he always aspired to be a lawyer. As an accountant. He was always adjacent to lawyers. And thought their work was very interesting.

So that was always kind of a kernel for me in the back of my mind.

So I am kind of drawn to rules and rigidity and so that aspect of the law was attractive. But other than that, I had zero understanding of what it was to be a lawyer. My only window into that would be the small town lawyers I saw practicing in Macomb.

And what you see on tv. Which, neither of those are my experience at all right now. (laugh)

Brian: After graduating from law school at the University of Illinois in Champaign, Mariah got her professional start when she became a first year associate. And as luck would have it, her firm needed a land-use associate at that time, a position she was happy to fill. She’d found her niche in land-use entitlement, and so it’s work that she continued on with it as her career progressed to where she is today as a Partner at DLA Piper.

Brian: Tell me a little bit about the greater Chicago food depository and your work as general counsel.

Mariah: It's exciting in the sense that you get to provide that strategic advice and counsel that maybe you don't get to do in your day job as a land use lawyer. So the Greater Chicago Food Depository is the food bank that serves Cook County. They are a member of a network of food banks called Feeding America.

They have 700 member agencies, which are food pantries, soup kitchens. And if you think about the analogy to commerce the greater Chicago Food Depository is like the warehouse supplier. They're supplying the food to then the retail points of sale, or in this instance, the member agencies being soup kitchens, and food pantries.

So the Greater Chicago Food Depository provides support to those member agencies. Through social services, they will do benefits outreach to clients to help them apply for and obtain SNAP benefits, for example. They'll often partner with other agencies to kind of provide a more continuous sort of care around healthcare partnerships, promoting again, food and nutrition and health.

Brian: Those partnerships were vital to communities, especially during a recent example:  the height of the COVID 19 pandemic, when The Greater Chicago Food Depository partnered with local food pantries to ensure people could access fresh food.

ARCHIVAL - ABC 7 - GCFD Clip - Dec 2020:

Xavier Hernandez: Since the pandemic started, it's been really busy for us. What I'll do is start up at 6:00 AM we'll deliver a product before we even start our normal day. Do a regular day, and then sometimes we'll still have, more to do after that.

ABC 7 Reporter: It's a cycle. Truck drivers at the Greater Chicago Food Depository have been in nonstop since March.

Joe Rodriguez: Normally, we distribute anywhere between 150,000 to 250,000 pounds of food. We are now during the pandemic, up to 300 to 400,000 pounds of food going out of our docks, every single day.

Xavier Hernandez: You don't realize it until you see it, firsthand. And, when you live it, coming to work every day, you see really long lines. And I mean, we're in a pandemic and people are lined up to get food.

Larry Jones: As a kid, we struggled. In our household with food insecurity, so I know what it's like not having food in the house. Every situation is different in families, but everybody needs food at the same time.

Joe Rodriguez: They are the people behind the scenes. They're the ones that do the work that, no one gets to see. It's not just a job.

Brian: That was an excerpt from a December 2020 news segment from ABC 7 Eyewitness News in Chicago.

Mariah’s pro-bono work at the Greater Chicago Food Depository lasted over nine years.

Brian: Did you ever have a time when your land use knowledge and expertise coincided or intersected with your role as general counsel?

Mariah: Oh, yeah. I reflect on my tenure as general counsel and the people who held that role before me. The stars align, the universe aligns for the food depository and, you know, the right person is there for the job that needs to be done.
And so for me that meant representing the food depository in connection with a massive facility expansion project that they are currently, under construction. But you know, this has been years in the making. They identified a site next door that they wanted to expand into, so we helped them acquire it.

So there's the real estate transaction. We helped entitle it to develop a meal prep facility. And so, I was able to apply my skills as a land use attorney. But also interact with the client and be embedded with the client in a way that I don't often get to do with my developer clients.

So, for example, I help them select the architect for the project and help them develop the request for proposals, help them kind of figure out like what it is that you wanna build, what are your objectives with this project?

Brian: With the expansion of the Greater Chicago Food Depository, came the capacity to allow for more access to nutritional foods. When their first facility was built in 2004, they didn’t have enough cold-storage space to offer as many fresh foods as they would’ve liked. With the new facility, that all changed. And then they went even further…

Mariah: They over time took on providing meals to schools and to park district programs and libraries in the summer to provide prepared meals for kids who are going to these programs who need breakfast and lunch.

There's also a need in the community for medically tailored meals and meal delivery services, like Meals on Wheels to seniors and other individuals who can't access traditional points of distribution, traditional food pantries. So to fill that gap, the food Depository created a meal prep facility.

The idea being we wanna welcome our clients, we wanna welcome our volunteers, we wanna welcome the community into our facility and make this a place where people come to us. And one of the lessons they learned through Covid was that perhaps those resources might be more, more impactful if directed to meeting people where they are and directing those resources into the community.

Brian: Were there any land use issues that had to be considered and dealt with for the expansion?

Mariah: Yeah. It was an unused surface parking lot in a manufacturing zoned area. We had to rezone the property to allow for this unique use. The food depository kind of doesn't fit into one particular box. So we rezoned the property. We had to vacate a public street that separated the existing facility from this new site.

So that's a city council approval process as well and public hearing. They had to undertake from a broader real estate development standpoint, the site being in a manufacturing district and had previously been used by you know, a rail was owned by a railroad company and had been used for storage of tractor trailer, the boxes you would see.

So they had to undertake environmental remediation. So there were certainly land use entitlement issues with the city of Chicago. Obviously the organization is so important to the city and because of their great work throughout the city, they have just such a high degree of credibility that we had to go through the normal process certainly, but the food depository is so effective that they're already in the community.

Brian: I was gonna ask if some of those same issues that the depository needed to go through for their expansion were a little bit easier or convenient given their relationship with the city, right, than just if you were coming in there trying to expand something that wasn't such a community based business or solution or, service.

Mariah: Yeah, I would say it's, it's easier for a number of reasons. They are a forward thinking organization.

But they also know that this is a beacon for not only the community that they are in, but a beacon for Cook County as a whole. And they have enormous national recognition among other food banks. And so they're really a beacon nationally as well. So I think built into their DNA was the idea that this is gonna, this project is going to, you know, employ high design.

We are going to exceed metrics around sustainability. We are going to exceed metrics around diversity and inclusion. All of those things are already baked into the DNA of this organization in a way that, they're already preempting any issues that might even be points of discussion with the city.

Brian: Mariah’s work with the Food Depository is just one of many projects she’s balancing at a time. So I asked her about another project she’s worked on as the land use attorney with DLA Piper – Pullman Park.

Pullman Park is a 180-acre site next to I-94 and 111th street on the far south side of Chicago. The area was once home to Ryerson Steel, the Pullman Rail car company, and other factories that provided jobs for its community. But as is the story with many industrial towns that experienced a decline post WW2, the site was left vacant after decades of disinvestment.

It was eventually acquired by the nonprofit organization, Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives – a client Mariah has represented since around 2009. That’s when the planning for Pullman Park’s transformation really began to take shape.

Mariah: So Pullman Park today it's been developed with a Walmart anchored shopping center, a retail center along hundred 111th Street with a Culvers.

There is a community health facility located on 111th Street. It's the site of the Veteran Roasters, which is a coffee company that will be relocating there in a new development. It's also home to the Method Factory, Whole Foods distribution center, a Gotham Greens Greenhouse Facility, and an Amazon distribution center.

So that really goes back to 2009, and even in the years leading up to 2009 with heavy community engagement it started with talking to the community about, what do you, the community in Pullman, want to see happen with this land? There were a number of charrettes, a number of technical assistance you know, panels and other activities to collect that community input and marry that with what the market would bear.

Which is always the challenge, right? With real estate development is balancing the expectations of the community with the expectations of commerce and, finding the reality of what can be developed that maximizes the vision and goals of the community, but also, allows it to come into being, it still has to be financially supportable.

And a master plan was created that called for development of a mixed-use community. It's providing essential services, healthcare services, retail shopping opportunities that they no longer have to leave their community to find those opportunities. It has resulted in measurable improvements in quality-of-life metrics, reduction in crime, increased employment opportunities, educational opportunities.

Brian: What are the differences that you've been able to see in helping both a non- profit organization and a for-profit initiative? Is there any differences that you can starkly point out?

Mariah: Well, a big difference is just sort of the profit model, the financial modeling for it. Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives is a nonprofit organization, but their mission is to really bring resources into that community. And so their objective is to leverage their own resources, leverage public assistance like new market tax credits or other sources of financing, leverage those to bring private dollars and private investment into the community.

And so, in the beginning stages of Pullman Park and developing Pullman Park, it required more heavy public assistance in order to, to build the infrastructure. And to attract the private capital to invest. It's now evolved now that there's been proof of concept and there's successful development.

With Pullman Park, we're seeing now, private investments seeking out opportunities to invest in Pullman Park.

Brian: Given Pullman’s rich history, the federal government gave the area an official designation: Pullman National Historical Park. The former railcar manufacturing facility for Pullman Company, built in 1880, houses exhibits and is the Visitor Center. But calling it a Visitor Center doesn’t do it justice – it’s a beautiful red-brick structure over 700 feet long with a famous clock tower.

Mariah: Rehabilitating the Pullman clock tower, developing a recreation center across the street to provide space for sports fields, indoor sports fields for baseball basketball, you know, football for teams to come and, and teams to come from outside the community to come into the Pullman Park neighborhood, to attend a baseball tournament at the community center, for example. Those parents are gonna go, need, need a place to eat. They're gonna go shop, they're gonna go enjoy the National Park. So through that commitment to the community, they've been able to bring the investment back into Pullman Park and create those outcomes.

Brian: I'm very curious about this. In order to continue this trend, what could make it easier to facilitate these community redevelopment projects from your perspective?

Mariah: One of the trends that I've seen that is an impediment to public-private partnerships, and it is a real impediment to promoting development in disinvested neighborhoods is the expectation for a return on profit and in particular, an expectation by the government agency that there be a return on the, the public's investment in the project. And a tendency for the government agency providing that public assistance to view themselves like the private market views itself.

And the problem with that is you often have to take a leap of faith, and understand that the investment being made here is not for the purpose of creating a return, but for the purpose of providing an essential service in the community.

And the reason that I say it's problematic for the government to equate itself with the private market, is that the private market has choices. Private capital can choose to invest in Chicago, or they can choose to invest in, you know, Columbus or Asheville or Nashville or any other market around the country that you could come up with or internationally for that matter too. I'm gonna steal a phrase that one of my colleagues uses. Private capital is not romantic.

Brian: The key difference between public developments and private investments is that the public developments are for the benefit of the community or the public first and foremost. And private investments are focused on generating a return. But sometimes, it’s easy to conflate the two models and that can be problematic.

Mariah: I understand that there's definitely a balance that needs to be struck. You know, you, can't be wasteful with taxpayers resources. You have to be judicious. But, there is just such a fundamental need for these communities that have experienced decades of disinvestment and decades of depopulation, that they need immediate and dramatic assistance and they need help and they need it now.

Brian: I agree. I, I applaud everything that you've been a part of. We've talked about a lot here today, but I know that you've done a lot more and I'm just thankful that the OBOE career did not work out for you.

Mariah: It's the reeds, man. I can't with reeds! (laughter)

Brian: Because it's great, the work you've been doing, and I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us here.

Mariah: My pleasure. Thank you.

Brian: Thanks for tuning into Season Four of Built! We have more great stories coming up…with our next one in two weeks.

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 and PRX Productions. From FNF, our project is run by Annie Bardelas. This episode of Built was produced by Morgan Flannery. Our Senior Producer is Genevieve Sponsler. Audio mastering by Rebecca Seidel.

The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

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.