“We get accusations of being shills for the developer. We get all sorts of accusations.”
He watches me as he says it, relaxed, but still choosing his words carefully.
His home is a quaint single story on a good amount of land, the kind of place that suits someone who loves the Earth. His windows are full of colorful recycled glass he’s turned into art pieces. Trash, now reflecting light.
This was our third conversation. The first two were accidents. I stopped him while covering a “No Kings” protest in Montgomery County, Maryland. In the industry we call that a “man on the street,” where you stop people at random and ask how they feel about an event. The region I cover is overrun with people who lean left. But by that point, even the politically neutral were organizing, as the Trump administration indiscriminately slashed their jobs and their neighbors’ jobs.
The third time we met on purpose, to discuss how the organization he leads in Maryland, the Sierra Club, is trying to evolve environmental politics, which at this point is pretty well fused with progressive coalitions.
“It is not uncommon that Sierra Club or other similar groups will talk about how a politician is bought off because they took money from a developer,” he says. “And we’ve had conversations with people saying, developers build housing. Unless you’re building the house yourself, all housing is built by developers. So we cannot discount a person and an entire policy because it’s supported by the industry that builds houses.”
“I’m glad there are pro-clean energy businesses out there figuring out how to make a profit off of something that’s good for the planet,” he continues.
He is not wrong about the bad words of the left.
Covering politics in this region, as progressive groups take the main stage, I hear it constantly. The antagonist is “developers.” Or people just looking for “profit.” I’ve sat with politicians on and off the record trying to understand how they reconcile it. They want jobs, housing, growth. Many court developers to get those things while using rhetoric that casts developers as the villains of their worldview. It’s an interesting dance to watch.
But the larger question he’s asking is about reconciling altruism with business. In capitalist America, can you — or better yet, should you be able to — protect the environment while making money doing it?
It isn’t only the environmental community asking.
In my world, Kara Swisher took heat on the podcast Mixed Signals by Semafor for profiting from journalism. She is transparent about the millions she’s made from podcast deals, live events and the rest of her brand. The critique, roughly: you cannot spend a career holding the tech industry to account while getting rich in its orbit. The money is the compromise. The money is a tell.
And this is not only a tension on the left. On the right, “elite” gets swung by politicians who went to Yale.
Some of it, I imagine, comes from how wealth has stratified in the United States. A K-shaped economy, and the access that money buys inside it, has sharpened what people hear in “profit,” “developer,” “elite.” Some of it is more local than that — communities watching development arrive and understanding, sometimes correctly, that the wealthier residents got a say they didn’t.
Which is the thing I keep coming back to. These words are carrying more than they can hold. “Developer” is doing the work of a much longer sentence about who get to be in the room, who has a seat at the table, who has to live with what happens and the lingering resentment from what is lost.
Maybe that’s the next frontier, watching these coalitions try to parse their own vocabulary and the grievances stacked inside it. I’ll be listening for it.
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To paraphrase this same individual (I think?) from another article of yours, when it comes to developer and profit, the devil is in the details. The same could be said about by right development. Important for increasing housing density (an environmental win!), but has had some deleterious impacts in the irresponsible build out of data centers in our region.