Builder
Coby Lefkowitz believes we can still build places worth loving.
Through Backyard, the real estate development firm he co-founded, Coby works on infill housing and walkable communities. He is an urban planner by training, and that background shapes how he approaches development. A building is one piece of a neighborhood. What happens at the street, what people can walk to, how much housing a place can support, and whether someone actually enjoys being there all matter.
Coby has spent years looking for evidence that contemporary development can produce places people care about.
In 2022, he documented a new multi-unit development every day for his “Year of Building Optimism,” collecting hundreds of examples that showed what new housing could look like across the country. That search eventually became Building Optimism, his book about how North America arrived at its current built environment and what it would take to create something better.
His ideas also show up in Backyard’s projects. The firm has focused on smaller infill development, adding housing inside existing neighborhoods at a scale that can support more walkable local life. One early project at 3322 Nile Street in San Diego turned a single property into four homes, part of a broader effort to explore what small-scale housing production can contribute to cities.
Coby also teaches real estate development at NYU’s Schack Institute of Real Estate and writes regularly about housing, development, urban design, beauty, zoning, and the rules that shape what gets built.
Across all of it runs the same conviction.
The places we admire were created by people.
We can create more of them.
Optimism, for Coby, is closely tied to knowing how places actually get built.
He writes about zoning, finance, parking, design, development economics, and the dozens of rules and decisions that eventually become a street or neighborhood. Backyard puts those questions into practice through smaller infill projects, where the ambition for a better place still has to survive land costs, financing, approvals, construction, and the market.
That connection between aspiration and execution is a large part of what makes his work useful.
Better places are possible. Somebody still has to figure out how to build them.
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