ASSEMBLAGE defines being a global citizen as somebody that’s globally minded that’s making courageous decisions about things that benefit oneself, one’s neighbor, and one’s planet. So with that, talking to you about your background, how you arrived at this particular moment in your life and how you arrived at the concept for Treehouse.

So I’ll start by saying that I grew up in a multitude of different worlds. I’m half white, half black. On the white side of the family I had the experience of looking at extreme levels of racism, serious levels of wealth, and drug addiction. And on the black side, I had the experience of owning, for instance, my great grandfather’s ‘freed’ papers, watching black entrepreneurship in Los Angeles, the drug trade up close and personal. It’s sort of a story of redemptive healing in a hood that’s marred with gang violence and poverty.

And which area of Los Angeles was this?

So I grew up in Watts, South Central area, but I was born in Beverly Hills. My mother unfortunately became deeply addicted to heroin. Everything just sort of unraveled for her, about the time I was, I’d say five or six. 

What was simultaneously happening is that we were in the throes of early 90s Los Angeles. This is the point at which the crack cocaine epidemic started to unravel at the seams, and it went from a purely sort of entrepreneurial, very controlled economic venture, to one of territory, war, the development of gangs. A wild amount of guns flooded into our communities. My family was close enough that I experienced the ride of what that meant.

There was this sort of cultural zeitgeist thing that was happening in the hood, that was telling me and my friends to get up and get out. That was our goal: to leave the hood. And while in South LA and Watts I couldn’t leave, so I had to lean into my environment. And in that environment my friends and I would build club houses and tree houses; we needed an escape. So this is sort of the evolution of the name Treehouse.

My dad was very crude, sometimes, in his lesson choices. I remember we were driving, I was 10 years old, through South LA and people are fighting in the streets. And we’re what he calls ‘rubbernecking’ and he’s saying “Stop Rubbernecking. Listen. The lesson I want for you is ‘You’d rather hear about it, than be about it’. But we kept looking – my cousin and I we kept looking – we got to the gas stations and he’s like, “ We’re going to go back and I’m gonna show you that you’d rather hear about it than be about it. Keep your eyes straight. Stay focused. Protect your community, don’t worry about tangential stuff.”

So we went back and one of the gentlemen who was fighting had been murdered. Right in the middle of the street. And my dad’s like, “This is life or death, where you’re at. Your goal is to build your community out of it. Not add to the gossip. Not add to the chaos. Stay focused.”

Which is a really powerful thing to see, like in your formative years of life: community, as a noun, but also community, as a verb. And, you’re one of the few people that knows the embodiment of community as a verb, internally. And that’s not a common experience, for everyone.

That’s what I think ultimately gets me to Treehouse, right? It’s these key moments of looking at community as (to your point) a contact sport. Community isn’t always sexy. It isn’t always the next fireside chat. It isn’t always how we’re going to see the next marketing experience at Soho House. It’s just not. It’s much, much deeper than that. 

Then at 16 I get incarcerated. What I thought would be fully a normal day in South LA. You heard what I’m dealing with at 13. Getting in a fight, breaking someone’s CD player? This is par for the course! But today wasn’t that day. I was incarcerated and I learned a lot about our justice system. 

After the fact, I remember writing that during my sentencing in the courtroom felt like my mortuary and the jumpsuit like my casket.

I would learn more in depth about the ridiculousness of our justice system. And the biggest thing that I learned was how effectively creating ‘others’ out of human beings could drive fear. And fear would result in wild, terrible consequences. 

The othering of people like “Oh, you’re not part of this particular thing” or “You can’t be in this community” or whatever…

In the words are the millennial: ‘like mindedness’. It seems innocuous until you start having extreme woke politics and extreme conservative politics, and we don’t see, actually, day to day how that impacts our biases.

Put a pin in that, because it was actually something further down I want to talk to you about that part. But when you talk about coming through that experience and then the campaign that you did. All of these are parts that got you here.

Going through the prison experience, I started one of the largest college programs in America. I wrote Governor Schwarzenegger a letter of how we could restructure prison and suggested that there should be a college dorm inside prison. My first foray in ‘built community’. 

There’s a Nipsey Hussle line that I love, which is, “He grew up knowing that he was a genius / but he’s left with no platforms to explore.” I felt the same way about people there, because they were the ones teaching me. My cellmate taught me English. My next door neighbor was a MIT professor that got in a bar fight. He taught me math. I saw genius in there, but they’re not given the options. 

Prison was exiling people from their communities. Luckily, inside a whole different community, a microcosm, was happening. 

And that’s what I wrote to the governor: that there’s a tremendous amount of energy here, that if harnessed differently, could produce a tremendous amount of success. That program started with 30 people in the dorm. We would debate philosophy. We would talk about going to Mars, teach each other chess. We taught each other how to play instruments. So many beautiful conversations. We were breaking down racial barriers which in prison is Jim Crow South. There are literally water fountains, benches for race, but we’re breaking that down in the dorm. I think there are now 30,000 plus people in that program. You’re able to get a two-year or four-year degree prior to coming home and be a contributing member to society. 

California’s recidivism rate is about 75-80% on its own. If I, anybody, ran a company like that, should close tomorrow. That level of failure. With the college program we started there’s less than half a percent of people that recidivate and go back to prison. 

I came home and went to Loyola Marymount to study engineering, and was wrapped in community there too. I was realizing that we needed community on the outside as well. So we created a nonprofit ARC, which is, I think, the largest one certainly in Los Angeles but –

And ARC stands for

The Anti-Recidivism Coalition. All of your recent laws that you’ve probably seen passed in justice reform, whether it’s prop 57, prop 47 or getting [LA county District Attorney] George Gascon elected, much of what Kim Kardashian is pushing, all of that is ARC.

When it was envisioned ARC was to be wholly run by formerly incarcerated people, making sure that there was a nonprofit that provided people – or an entity that provided people community first; and actual tangible resources to do great. 

So had just had this very successful physical community in prison, the worst of circumstances. Then I came home, and within a month and a half I walked onto Loyola’s campus. And I’m thinking, “Where on earth did they make all these beautiful people? All these beautiful trees? There’s grass!” “What is happening here?” And my desire for design and aesthetic and how that changes your spirit became so palpable. 

And then I stepped into my professional life which was just building construction and utilizing my engineering degree. 

So. Ace Hotel.

So. Ace Hotel is a moment where we’re on a 300-person project that I’m managing on any given day. The mental gymnastics of that is, first of all, one of the greatest addictions I’ve ever had. I could walk on a floor in the morning and there were just studs, and by two o’clock the whole thing is drywalled. Just transforming. 

Ace Hotel was different. In that it was… it was new. It was hip. It was decadent. It was sort of at the cutting edge of culture in downtown LA. The entire street was desolate while we were doing construction and it began to change little by little as we got closer to ending construction. They were having a lot of fun and they were doing so in beautiful design, with nature and trees around in an otherwise barren space.

That was the beginning of me thinking “I want to build one of these one day”.

Meanwhile the local Assemblyman is termed out; all these whoo-ha’s start jumping into the race to represent Watts and Compton and Carson and South LA and Playa Vista. I think, “the interest of Playa Vista is going to be the interest of this politician” and everyone that jumped in didn’t have the backbone for what’s needed for this community. Their hands were tied by whatever resources being given to them because there’s a lack of resources. 

Beverly Hills is going to elect what’s in the best interest for them and for the politician in Watts. The people in Watts cannot fund the campaign. Period. That’s to me the dirty money of politics. It’s not that money is in politics, it’s that money is unequally distributed in politics. Those who cannot raise money, those who do not have support will not be beholden to their community. 

And so I looked at that and I was like, “Nah, I want to rock for my community.” And if I have the audacity to run, being formerly incarcerated, I’m already signaling ‘fuck the establishment, I’m going to do this my way’.

So what year was this again?

This was 2013. I set up this grassroots community campaign, naive as it gets at 25, thinking we’re gonna run the state. [laughs]

But also, that was your training, your community service. What the result was; did you…?

So I won the primary, lost the general, and it was a big thing. It was fascinating actually what happened. Initially I couldn’t raise money for the life of me. 

Then something switched. I started leaning in, more and more of like, “This is who I am, this is what I believe.” I realized that the power of being elected wasn’t just the ability to sign a law but it’s also the power of influence.

There is an incredible amount of plant life here. What role does plant life play in giving people a sense of wholeness as a place, and why was it important to have that here?

Nature is healing, just full stop. Sitting in a barren space in Blythe, California. That’s where I was, for years. Concrete. Sand. Holes.

The consciousness of humans is shifting and starting to see that Earth matters, it really matters. Pulling from the earth, trying to actually recycle it and finding more ways to be regenerative in urban environments is important. And so that’s one part of it. The second part of it is: cooking is a big part of community.

And there’s a rooftop garden.

And there’s a rooftop garden.

And so yeah that’s plants, they’re healing. We need to go back to the dirt. We need to go back to the source of human understanding.

When we talk about the housing crisis in California, it’s the hot-take, hot-button thing for everybody. How much of the Treehouse vision was a reaction to the housing crisis?

Zero.

Zero?

The housing crisis is a philosophical crisis in this country. We have more than enough wealth, more than enough free space, more than enough apartments, more than enough apartment buildings. We do not have enough heart to let people live in them. Treehouse is trying to say, connect back to your community.

So from a philosophical standpoint, Treehouse isn’t necessarily a reaction to it, as much as an example of what can get us out of it.

Yeah.

Which is interesting because that plays into this next question, which talks about equity, and the role that the private sector can play in looking at the opportunities, the barriers to entry to things, at alleviating not just like urban housing challenges but fostering a sense of community in society. Treehouse in the private sector is doing that.

I tend to try and operate in the gray of the world [in order] to really understand things. Both are necessary, public and private. They can’t interact or coexist without one another.

For sure. Hundred percent.

Going to the vision of what the future holds. Not everybody can live at tree house right now (because, size) but what advice would you give to people who want to build more intentional connections with the community around them, no matter where they are? And then we’ll close out by, what do you have next?

There were a few things that started to happen [last March] that were fully reminiscent of prison and South LA to me that the rest of the world thought was wildly novel. One of the most palpable were the folks singing in the apartments in Italy or singing Biggie Smalls in New York. In prison, that happened every single Friday. There were open mics, people were walked to their cells, there were sing alongs, there was poetry, the whole bit. It was the human spirit locked behind bars, locked away from one another, screaming, we want to be together.

Treehouse cannot bound the human spirit, no physical space can bound it. Then COVID hit. And we’re in a world that’s telling us to separate from one another. 

One of my favorite people on this block is Eddie who lives across the street. Eddie is five feet tall and maybe 99 years old. Every single day during construction, he came and ate with the construction workers, and hung out with us. In the evening he played chess with me. Every single day. He brought his Mexican ballads that he used to listen to, brought over his record player once the cafe was built. The first time we ever sat in the cafe, and there were couches in there was with Eddie and he brought over his little record player and we listened to that. A fe days later, we finally had the AV system up and I was able to find his ballads on Apple and played them, and he danced with our team. 

And when quarantine happened, I could not stop thinking about Eddie. Eddie doesn’t have family. Eddie is in an apartment by himself. Neighbors did not talk to Eddie. They didn’t talk to one another. And that’s all I kept thinking about who is looking out for Eddie. Where’s his community? Everyone’s so afraid. And I get it, getting sick and passing away, there’s consequences, they’re real. But today, we have each other, we’re optimizing for tomorrow that may not even come. 

I appreciate and I believe in contextualizing ourselves as global citizens but I go back to that idea of appreciation for life and plants and clay and dirt. We are all from the earth. But we take, in my opinion, too many big swings. And we all want our names in something; we are human, we want appreciation, we want to feel validated. And the entrepreneur and tech culture of successful CEOs and unicorns and blah blah blah, it’s enticing.

Houseless people are still people. Eddie is a human being that’s left alone. Someone whose children may be crying, we don’t know if they’re being beat, we don’t know if they’re mentally challenged. There was a moment that the police were called on the parents [down the street] because they heard that the kid was yelling. Not once did someone go knock on that neighbor’s door. Did they know that person’s name? Did they ask if maybe they’re hungry? 

But we’ll give to Homes for Humanity. We want to structure the biggest Deepak Chopra app to give mental healing. We’ll do all these things, but not once did someone say, “Are you okay?” “Is your kid okay?” These are the things that we take for granted. Just go meet the person next door. Small swings.

There’s one common thread here which is the willingness to participate. Whether that’s participating in creating the system, whether it’s participating in dismantling the system, whether it’s just participating in questioning the system. But it’s really about participating in proximity with people, as opposed to our self imposed isolations or ideations of, “oh you know I’m gonna figure this out on my own”. And you’ve created a wonderful space for people to experiment with what that looks like. So what’s next.

The dream is to have a Treehouse in every single corner of this world. I hope that Treehouse is a part of impacting the overall zeitgeist. The American dream has been centered around the single family home and all it’s accoutrements, which played into the market. If you and 100 million others can buy a vacuum, that is a big market. Versus, having one vacuum for the whole building, or for the whole community. 

I’m not saying single family homes are inherently bad. There’s a lot to learn from a single family home. And that’s the dynamic of the family. Our next big building is three times the size [of the Treehouse Hollywood location]. The first floor is a local market with a multitude of local vendors and then the next two floors are just for families. I lived here with my daughter, there’s serious stuff that a family still needs to accommodate. There are private moments. There are moments of serendipity that have to happen through the family to make sure those bonds are cared for. There are moments of vulnerability that need to be designed for.

As opposed to still designing for just the single person.

Right. And so in that building, you have more two bedrooms and three bedrooms that are more quaint for the family and they open off into a courtyard because, what do we want people to do? We want them to be free. So that courtyard has a playground dedicated to the children. And the adults don’t have to feel afraid for their kid to play outside, in a major city. Above that there are a variation of micro studios, one bedrooms, and two bedrooms, 50% of which is affordable. I’m excited for older generations to move in. 

What would that look like for people who aren’t working, coupled with the full playground and daycare space? I’m done talking to Washington about early childhood education.

You’re just going to show it.

We’re just going to do it. The top floor and the roof is a private club. Why? Because you don’t have to deny human vanity and things that people care about, like good design.

…just include it in the conversation.

…just include it. But with that private club we’re going to make a statement: that it’s for the people who live in this area. Obviously the rest of Los Angeles is invited, but…

It’s local to where it’s local to.

It’s local to the community. In LA alone, we’re trying to get 12 of these in backlog by the end of the year. COVID happened, but I dream of the day that this building is a catalyst for the entire neighborhood. 

Last thought and story, Geoffrey Canada. Harlem Children’s Zone. My biggest hero. [He] had an idea. And he said, on this block in Harlem, on this one block (not the big swing) but on this one block every kid will be able to go to college, if that’s their decision. Every mother will be able to live in the hope and sacrifice that she’s made, every father will be made whole again. It’s ugly down the street, we’re going to plant trees. Ownership matters. We’re eventually going to be able to buy all of this. 97 blocks later and hundreds of millions dollars later, they were purchasing housing projects entirely from the government and upgrading them. 100% high school graduation rate later. 97% college graduation rate. Brilliant.

That’s a North Star if there ever was one. And we want this to be a catalyst for more.

I want it to be more. And I want Treehouse to impact the vision of the American dream as one that values interdependence. Right now, we value independence too much.

I’m stopping that there, for so many reasons.
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This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
To find Prophet and Treehouse:
@prophet_walker
@treehousecolive
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