Could Creativity Be the Missing Ingredient?

I've spent most of my career telling people that 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 you are is not 𝘸𝘩𝘰 you are. I even gave a TEDxTalk on it.

It took me until last month to realize the same thing is true of buildings.

A 125-year-old denim mill in South Carolina, long written off, is now 205 apartments.
A vacant school could be next.
An underused parking lot.

We call it a housing crisis. And it is.
But I've started asking a more audacious question: 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐟 𝐢𝐭'𝐬 𝐚𝐥𝐬𝐨 𝐚 𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐬?

Because I've sat in a lot of rooms where money wasn't the only obstacle.
The problem was imagination and initiative.
The willingness to tackle the giant problem; the audacity to leap.

We get so locked into the way things are that we stop exercising the imagination to see what they could become.

I know what it's like to be looked at and have someone see only your current address.
I also know what it's like when one person refuses to do that.

Turns out buildings need that too.

I dug into what this looks like and what it takes to see possibility where others see a problem in my latest Forbes blog post.

What If We’re Actually Having a Creativity Crisis?

Does a building in your city come to mind that others have stopped seeing?