Realtopia - Real Estate for Teens
Real estate. Real conversations. Hosted by a teenager trying to understand the world she’s about to inherit. I’m Naomi Cohen, and I created Realtopia — a real estate podcast for teenagers, by a teenager. What began as a podcast about real estate evolved into conversations about something even bigger: how places shape people, and how people shape places. Because real estate was never just about buildings. It’s about the future of places — cities, housing, belonging, design, community, and the people shaping them. Each episode, I ask architects, developers, researchers, founders, and urban thinkers the questions teenagers are not supposed to ask. Welcome to Realtopia.
Episodes
Naomi sits down with Gil Peñalosa, founder of 8 80 Cities and one of the world's leading voices on public space. As Commissioner of Parks in Bogotá, Colombia, Gil built or rebuilt more than 200 parks and helped t...
Naomi sits down with Dr. Katherine Loflin, known as The City Doctor and a pioneer of place science. At the Knight Foundation, Katherine led the Soul of the Community study with Gallup — three years of research across 26 communities and more than 40,000 interviews asking two deceptively simple questions: What makes people love where they live, and ...
Naomi sits down with Melody Warnick, journalist and author of This Is Where You Belong and If You Could Live Anywhere. After moving six times by her mid-30s, Melody arrived in Blacksburg, Virginia — and initially wanted to leave. Instead, she began experimenting with what researchers call place attachment: the feeling of b...
Naomi sits down with Ethan Kent, Executive Director and co-founder of PlacemakingX, a global network of more than 1,500 placemakers in over 85 countries. Before that, Ethan spent more than 20 years at Project for Public Spaces and has worked in and studied places across more than 1,000 cities around the world.
From the cheap beach chairs...
Naomi sits down with Charles Montgomery — journalist, author of Happy City, founder of Happy Cities, and author of the new book The Trust Experiments: Rebuilding Connection in a World Designed to Divide Us.
More than a decade after Happy City, Charles explores how cities shape not just our happiness, but our relationships with one another — and...
In this episode of Realtopia, Naomi sits down with Nolan Gray — city planner, Research Director at California YIMBY, and author of Arbitrary Lines — to unpack the invisible rules shaping our cities.
Together, they explore one of the biggest questions facing...
In this episode of Realtopia, Naomi sits down with Professor Greg Clark — advisor to more than 400 cities across six continents, author, and co-host of The DNA of Cities — to explore what gives places their identity and why the most successful cities of the future may not be the ones that grow fastest, but the ones that become ...
In this episode of Realtopia, Naomi sits down with Dr. Toby Israel — environmental psychologist, founder of Design Psychology, and author of Some Place Like Home and Designing Women's Lives — to explore how our earliest experiences of place quietly shape the homes we choose, the spaces we create, and even what makes us feel like we belo...
In this episode of Realtopia, Naomi speaks with Professor Marc Norman, Associate Dean of NYU Schack, about what’s broken in the housing system — and what it would take to fix it.
Marc explains why affordable housing is often misunderstood,...
From city streets to living rooms, Dr. Ellard explains how our environment directly impacts our brains—sometimes in ways we don’t even notice. The conversation dives into the s...
Drawing from her experience in the South Bronx, Majora shares a powerful perspective on rebuilding neighborhoods from within. The conversation explores how perception shapes opportunity, the difference between regenerative and extractive d...
From his early work in technology to his shift toward a more human-centered vision of cities, Carlos explains why the future of urban living depends less on infrastructure and more on accessibility, local services, and quality of life. The conversation e...
In this episode, I talk with Jerry Chu, founder of Lofty, about real estate tokenization — a new way of buying and owning property through digital shares.
We break down how it works, how it’s different from traditional real estate investing, and why some people believe it could make real estate more accessible to a wider group of...
This week I'm talking to Eli Rouimi, founder of Plad Homes — a company that's completely rethinking how homes are designed, built, and owned.
We get into modular and prefab housing, and why it might be one of the most realistic solutions to the affordability crisis that nobody is talking about enough.
We dig into what a modular home actually is (and what people get w...
This week I sat down with Kobi Karp, one of the most recognized architects in the world, whose projects span over $120 billion in iconic buildings across South Florida and beyond.
But this conversation goes way deeper than design. We talked about the housing affordability crisis and why it keeps getting worse. We got into AI and how it...
Two years ago, I was a 12-year-old with a microphone and way too many questions about how houses got bought and sold. Now I'm in 9th grade — and honestly? The questions got bigger.
Housing is unaffordable. Cities are overcrowded. The planet is warming. And everyone keeps talking about these problems like teenagers aren't the ones who are going to...
And the best part: he once built Jennifer Lopez's house!
In this episode, Leon tells us all about wha...
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