Now City Labs · Brighton Communities

Brighton Communities

Working material for the board and invited collaborators.

Now City Labs research

How districts create value

Two frameworks Now City brings unchanged, and the site specific arithmetic that has to be built from scratch.

Working document · September 2026
Framework one

Assembly and entitlement

The mechanism applies generally, and every number that goes with it has to be built for the site it is used on.

A buyer of one assembled parcel is not exposed to a holdout refusing to sell, and a buyer of an entitled parcel is not exposed to years of permitting uncertainty. Buyers price both of those risks into what they will pay, which is why an assembled and entitled parcel sells for more than the same land held in pieces.

For this campus the mechanism is visible in one specific place. Two adjoining parcels on Brighton Street would sit inside the campus boundary rather than beside it, which changes the arithmetic of the growth model rather than adding to it. Brighton's own documents name them as two of its most important targets, and one of them appears in the priced list at $675,000.

Framework two

Measuring whether money stays local

Michael Shuman advises Now City on this. His indicators travel from project to project because they are about how a local economy works rather than about any one place.

The question the indicators answer is whether money spent in a neighborhood circulates there or leaves immediately. It matters here because Brighton's own case rests on it: the distributed ownership argument in its documents is that spreading ownership across more entities multiplies the number of organizations that can apply for the same funds, and the local contracting example in its August report is a fire alarm project run with a neighborhood partner.

Brighton's Investor Brief states a local money multiplier. We went looking for the derivation and could not find it, so the figure is not used anywhere on this site. It is a good candidate for the measurement set once the basis is known.
Site arithmetic

What value looks like on this campus

Built from the figure register, so that one number means one thing across every document.

The starting position, from Brighton's own balance sheet. $36.0M of property against $8.2M of debt, leaving $27.8M of net equity at roughly 23% loan to value, with $2.6M of reserves. The four page handout states $8.5M of debt and 24% for the same two figures, which is one of the reconciliation items. The capital goal stated in the August report is $100M, and by our own arithmetic the seven silos described there sum to $120M, which is worth reconciling before the stack is shown to a funder.