Now City Labs · Brighton Communities

Brighton Communities

Working material for the board and invited collaborators.

Brighton Communities and Now City Labs

Team

Who is doing this work.

Working document · September 2026
Now City Labs

Now City Labs

A small real estate development team that built its own tools to underwrite and pressure test its own deals, and now uses them on other people's projects.

On this engagement the work is reading, arithmetic and sequencing. Sixteen documents read and indexed, eighteen places where two Brighton documents state different numbers reconciled, Seattle's adopted plans and funding programs read as they stand in September 2026, and a figure register that holds one meaning per number across every document we produce. Where we estimated a figure instead of reading one, we said so.

Brighton Communities

Brighton Communities

Twenty five years of ownership and operation in this neighborhood.

What we can state from the documents: Brighton owns 149 homes across two buildings, holds 3.94 acres at 6727 Rainier Avenue South, described as a five acre campus in its August report, carries $8.2M of debt against $36.0M of property, and states a capital goal of $100M. The four page handout states total debt as $8.5M, which is one of the reconciliation items.
Advisors

Advisors

Named plainly, with what each one advises on.

Michael Shuman advises Now City on local economy measurement. His published work on how to measure whether money stays in a local economy is one of two frameworks we bring to a project unchanged, and it is cited from the book rather than paraphrased. See the value page.

Nobody on this page has been asked to endorse this project, and no advisory relationship implies one.
The existing team

The firms already holding this work

Named because the study plan asks several of them to reconcile their own work, which only they can do.

  • Fivedot, with allied8: the June 2024 site report. The February 2025 core site growth study sheet carries no firm name, and its companion site plan, created the same minute, carries a different author. Of the two documents, only the June 2024 report names a firm, so we attribute the growth study to neither.
  • Environmental Works, with Swenson Say Faget, Ecotope, Woolsey and Otis: the October 2025 electrification and accessibility study for Brighton Place, including the cost estimate, the structural report and the elevator estimate.
  • Alpha Sharp Development Partners, with allied8: the South Holly townhome program.
All of this work is good work, and each study answered the question it was scoped to answer. The study plan asks them to answer one more question together. None of these firms has been approached about the sessions described on this site.