Leon Walker, Founder & CEO of DL3 Realty, joins host Joe Smazal to break down 25 years of development work on Chicago’s South Side — and the framework behind it.

Leon went from a junior partnership at LaSalle Partners/JLL, with a Singapore assignment on the table, to coming home after his father’s death to build in the neighborhoods he grew up in. Since then DL3 has created 3,000+ jobs with another 10,000 in the pipeline, delivered the first new family housing Englewood, Woodlawn, and South Shore had seen in 40-50 years, and brought back national retail, banking, and primary care to communities that had gone decades without.

We get into his venture development model and the five factors every deal has to clear: historically successful location, nearby anchor institution investment, readily available land or buildings, early green shoots, and deliberate local leadership. Plus why “cost per unit” is the wrong way to judge affordable housing, how housing functions as an economic development platform, and why a weekly in-person team meeting still beats anything on a screen.

Chapters
00:00 Intro & rapid fire
02:00 Integrity, creativity, professionalism
04:39 AI tools vs. the weekly deal task force
10:25 Growing up on 71st & Stony Island
15:44 Leaving corporate to start DL3
20:03 The first deal: 21% prime and a national bank in Roseland
25:00 Being a Black-owned firm in a 2% industry
26:30 What DL3 actually stands for
28:17 Balancing profit and impact
32:26 The five factors of venture development
38:26 The Thrive brand: Woodlawn, Englewood, South Shore
47:42 The cost-per-unit critique, answered

Part 2 coming soon.