Remember musical chairs? A ring of chairs, one fewer than the number of kids. The music plays, everyone circles, and the moment it stops you lunge for a seat. Whoever is left standing is out. Another chair gets pulled. The music starts again.

Round after round, the circle shrinks. Eventually everyone is on the sidelines except one kid, sitting alone in a single chair in the middle of an empty room.

Here is my question: did you know that was the game you were playing in real estate?

Was it fear that kept you circling? Fear of losing the job, of missing the quarter, of being the one left holding the flip when rates turned? That's the game. It's zero-sum, folks. For me to get a chair, you have to lose yours.

In real estate, the music is cheap money and rising prices. While it plays, everyone circles: buy, flip, refinance, repeat. Then the music stops. Rates jump, a lender pulls back, a buyer walks, and the people without a seat are out.

Development has its own version, which finance people call binary risk. A binary event has only two outcomes: the deal lives or it dies. A city council vote. A coastal permit. A tax credit award where you either make the cutoff or wait another year. The early money exposed to those moments is small, expensive, and prepared to go to zero, because when the music stops on a binary event there is no partial credit.

The extractive economy is musical chairs at scale. Buy cheap, squeeze the spread, exit, and let someone else absorb the cost. For a long time it seemed to work, because the bill went to people who weren't at the closing table: tenants who were priced out, neighborhoods that lost their local owners, cities left with infrastructure nobody paid for.

Now picture a different room. A drummer starts a groove. A bass player sits in and locks onto it. A guitarist joins, then a horn, then a singer. Every new player makes the song bigger. When someone else walks up with an instrument, nobody pulls a chair away. You pull one up.

The music doesn't have to stop for anyone to win. Nobody has to lose for the song to be good. And the better it sounds, the more people come through the door.

That's the regenerative economy, and it maps onto development cleanly. Capital is the rhythm section: steady, essential, and it should get paid. Investors need yield and a real IRR. The community is the melody: the reason anyone came to listen. The city, state, and federal government are the venue: they need the room full, the tax base growing, housing getting built, and jobs on the corridor. None of those needs cancel each other out. They're all part of the same expanding energy, and they get louder when they're in time.

The question isn't whether capital should earn a yield. It's whether that yield is created or captured.

Game theory has a name for the musical chairs trap: the prisoner's dilemma. Two players each choose to cooperate or defect. Defecting looks smart in any single round, so two rational players often land in the worst outcome together. Map it onto a development site:

That bottom-right box is where much of California has lived for a generation. The way out is time. Robert Axelrod's work on the repeated prisoner's dilemma showed that when players expect to meet again, cooperation wins, because the shadow of the future outweighs the temptation of one round. Keohane and Nye made the same point about nations in Power and Interdependence: the more ways actors are bound together over time, the more absolute gains matter over relative ones. Musical chairs is a one-round game. A jam session is a repeated one, and the repeated game rewards trust with cheaper capital, faster approvals, and a better next deal.

Regenerative development isn't a mood. It shows up in how a deal is structured:

A year ago we opened Pop-Up Winona on El Cajon Boulevard to test a simple idea: what if we played the jam session instead of musical chairs? With a coalition of local makers, musicians, nonprofits, and neighbors, Year One produced more than 47 events and drew more than 5,000 people to the corridor. Nobody had to lose a seat for that to happen. Every new partner made the song bigger.

I turn 47 this week, and Winona turns one. I'll take the rhyme. Tonight we celebrate the anniversary and cut the ribbon on a new mural, and for the next week the space carries straight into Día de los Muertos.