:: aribra ::

by Yahya E. B. Henry

Welcome to the new Aribra.com

It’s official. The transition is complete and we’re off! Thank you so much for the continued support and encouragement as the project was and continues to be underway.

I founded The Aribra Group, LLC as a think tank and real estate development services organization to promote and demonstrate best practices in the built environment with a primary focus on the smaller city. Aribra provides two distinct but complimentary services: 1) fee development services and 2) Aribra.com.

Aribra.com serves as an online forum and blog to exchange ideas advancing sustainable real estate development within small and medium-sized cities (populations less than 500,000). In our research, we found a plethora of information on efforts to encourage infill development, create pedestrian-friendly streets and develop human scale communities for larger metropolitan regions (New York, San Fransico, Chicago etc). [...]

by Yahya E. B. Henry

Ready

My passion for sustainability has been a gradual expansion of many ideas that I initially accepted then questioned. Albert Einstein said that questions were the beginning of genius. The more I learned about our energy dependence, peak oil, climate change, gentrification, urban development and land use, the more I explored how each were interrelated. My journey lead me to resign from a very promising career in land brokerage and development where aside from making a great living; I begin to notice I was, in fact, a part of a problem. After coming to understand that low-density suburban development was unsustainable, I knew a shift was forthcoming. I was a part of an organization that developed conventional subdivision; yes, those monsters that inevitably aid in sprawl, cause traffic congestion, deforestation and consume massive amounts of land. Evidence suggests that the building sector accounted for nearly 30% of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and I knew there had to be a better model to follow. My attempts to interest my then partners in infill development largely fell on deaf ears. A part of my goal was to hopefully influence a decision that would allow for more infill development – development near existing infrastructure, work centers, services, and public transportation. The entrepreneurial bug bit me and I left. This is where things really got interesting [...]