Hi. This is Paul Zellazer, and welcome to The Wirepreneurs Podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app. It helps more people learn how to have positive impact through a values based business. Thank you so much. Today I'm thrilled to introduce you to Arturo Schneider, and our topic is learning humility from the communities you want to serve. Arturo is the CEO of Prime Store Development, a retail sector leader that oversees a portfolio in excess of 750,000,000. Their mission is to manage and develop properties that empower the communities they serve and promote an ethical and rewarding work environment for their employees. Arturo, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me, Paul. Really a pleasure to be here with you.

As we record this episode, we are now over 300 episodes. We published episode 301 yesterday, and we've never done a topic on humility. So when you proposed this, I was just thrilled. I'm so excited about what you're doing to introduce what you're doing, but also how you're doing it. So thank you for bringing that topic to our community.

Thank you for having me. Thank you for having the interest in what we do.

So what would somebody need to know about Arturo before we get into the topic? Arturo, just like the short version of your backstory, how did you get into doing work around real estate and communities that are oftentimes left out of economic conversations and trying to be of service and positive impact? How did you get into that intersection and what would somebody want to know about who you are before we get into that topic?

Yeah, it was happenstance. I came from Mexico. I was born in Mexico City. I moved to Los Angeles in 1986. My older brother was a minority investor in a Mexican restaurant where I was a cook there at age 17. And the people that I worked with in the kitchen, my colleagues sort of educated me and introduced me to what their life was like in the communities where they immigrated to or were born into. And I became pretty fascinated with that topic. And through some friends and family relationships, I was able to understand the impact that real estate has on community. And with a couple of pennies and no education, I started working in that in the neighborhood on the grassroots level, really as an activist effort to try to change the narrative in our communities of Latino and black neighborhoods.

Yeah, one of the things that we know is that if you look at the research communities that are black communities, Latinx communities, first of all, real estate is oftentimes similar. Real estate that should be valued equally oftentimes isn't right. That's one of the things we know as I was researching this, and also access to just the physical bricks and mortar space that people need to do businesses or people buying homes. There's a lot of inequality in the real estate world. Is that fair to say?

Tremendous. And I think one of the things that really drives the underbelly of that is infrastructure. We don't have in a lot of our communities sufficient infrastructure, whether it is the systems that do transportation or water power storm systems. Many neighborhoods we work in don't have a grocery store, a bank, any kind of a facility, a hospital nearby. And all of that influences where people end up living as a result of where they end up investing. And what we set out to do was try in as little, as small of a company as we are to hopefully begin to influence and get rid of the expression, what's my ticket out? As opposed to what is in my community? How can I be an agent of change to make my community better and stay here?

And this wasn't yesterday. So give our listeners, like when are we talking? When you started thinking this was a few decades ago, right?