Therapeutic homes, recycled glass sand, and community trusts

Good morning {{name!|reader}},

We’re constantly faced with decisions. There are the little ones everyday like snoozing the alarm versus getting out of bed or watching that extra reel versus going back to the task at hand. There’s also the bigger, albeit less frequent, decisions like whether to quit your job or the decision to move to a new city.

A lot of these decisions, our slightly evolved hunter-gatherer brains want to make quickly (there’s a shadow moving in the bush – is it a lion about to attack). However, we’re also capable of stepping back, weighing our options thoroughly, and making an educated decision. We’re pretty good at choosing between options. We’re less good at questioning whether those are the right options to begin with. Sometimes, changing the question reveals a fuller spectrum of possibilities.

One decision I (Brenner) was recently thinking about was quitting my job to pursue 3GT full-time versus balancing both (maybe some foreshadowing there). In that evaluation process, there’s a lot of trade-offs I have to consider: sacrificing a stable income for the potential growth upside, the consistent workload of a corporate gig versus the major commitment going full throttle in a startup, or the fallback in the event this doesn’t work out. However, all these considerations involve an implicit assumption that these are my only options.

But what if I instead asked: how can I maximize the time I can devote to this while preserving as much career optionality as possible? New choices emerge taking a leave of absence from my current job for few months or finding a new job with a later start date. Changing the question creates new possibilities that weren’t visible before.

On that note, this week we’re bringing you three stories where changing the question gave way to better solutions. Nevada found that better, less disruptive care for kids doesn’t necessarily cost more than sending them to distant institutions. Two Tulane students are showing that environmental restoration doesn’t have to be a money-losing obligation when waste can become useful infrastructure. Fresno is showing that by rethinking ownership structure, housing affordable doesn’t necessarily require endless government subsidies.

With gratitude,

Brenner, Jordan, and Zac

A child in Nevada has a mental-health crisis. If weekly therapy appointments aren’t enough, the only other option is a psychiatric residential treatment facility (“PRTF”). At these locked-down facilities, children follow strict schedules from wakeup to sleep. Personal items are restricted and parental visitation is on a schedule. They cost the state $300,000 annually per kid (nearly the cost of a townhouse in Nevada). Not to mention, the facilities are often in Utah, Colorado, or Arizona – eight-plus hour drives from home. However, according to the state, a middle ground never existed (that’d be like having a thermostat that can only be set to 60 or 95).

That lack of optionality was brought to light by a 2020 DOJ investigation that culminated with a 25-page report on institutionalizations in Nevada. They found average facility stays of 9-12 months with longer durations tied to a host of concerns like elevated risks of physical and sexual abuse and delayed cognitive and language development.

However, Nevada quickly settled with the DOJ in early 2025 and got to work. They developed better intensive services such as designated care coordinators, crisis response teams coming to homes, specialized foster care, and in-home therapists. Beyond the settlement language, Nevada’s biggest addition was therapeutic homes with round-the-clock care, designed to host kids for 1-3 months. Kids would still ride the bus to school with everyone else, see their families regularly, and keep their routine.

What’s changed: nearly two years into their reform implementation and we’re seeing promising results. In January 2025, 35% of tracked youth were in PRTFs. Now: 16%. More specifically, institutionalized children dropped by 22 while the number tracked went up more than twofold. A system with one answer can only help as many children as it has beds. Now, the state has more than one answer and it’s helped to absorb 1,000 new kids by meeting them where they are.

If you paid attention in middle school science class, you might remember that when lightning strikes sand it turns to glass. If not, no worries, here’s a quick lesson: the heat from lightning melts the sand grains and breaks their crystal structure, which cools in under a second, freezing the atoms in place. Meanwhile in Louisiana, the sandy coastline is eroding at the pace of roughly one football field every 100 minutes.

At the same time, glass recycling in America has collapsed (only one third is properly handled) as cities pull back on the more expensive route and opt for landfill dumping. In 2020, a pair of Tulane students who couldn’t figure out what to do with their empty wine bottles came up with an idea. They started Glass Half Full, a business to clean up their campus backyard and recycle glass bottles into sand that goes toward restoring the coastline.

Zooming in: To date, they’ve recycled 14 million pounds of glass (over 30 Statues of Liberty worth). New glass starts on a conveyor, then gets sorted by color and decontaminated. For glass too small to be melted into new bottles, the next step is pulverization into 100% silica sand (fine enough to roll around in without getting cut).

Why it matters: Glass Half Full partnered with ReCoast, a New Orleans-based nonprofit restoration program, which conducted extensive research (led by Tulane professors) to test the efficacy of the silica sand. The studies found the sand had no negative impact on the survival of native species nor stunted the growth of key plants.

After Hurricane Ida in 2021, a breach opened in the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. It let salt water into freshwater marshes, killing vegetation and accelerating sediment losses. Glass Half Full worked with a team of 100 volunteers. Over two days, they stacked coffee sacks with 45 metric tons of recycled glass sand into a berm (wall to manage water flow). A year later, ReCoast found 1.25 inches of sediment growth, an exciting reversal to prior losses.

However, Louisiana has identified $50 billion of unfunded restoration projects. At Glass Half Full, only 3% of capacity is used, so they’re reaching all the way to Florida for collections. In the meantime, two students turned glass’s lack of historic ‘recyclability’ on its head, sending bottles back out as the sand they started from.

Fresno’s historic Tower District, home to the iconic 1939 Tower Theatre and nearly 200 independent businesses, is the kind of place Ashley and Carlos Mireles-Guerrero, dreamed of opening their bookstore. And in July, they proudly opened a storefront in the neighborhood. However, it was a hard-fought battle to get there. When they first looked in 2024, they faced quoted rents too high on buildings too wrecked to fix. So, they opened their first location in Chinatown instead.

The difference: Since the couple last toured, the building was purchased by South Tower Community Land Trust, a neighborhood nonprofit formed in 2022 to buy property and keep the land permanently on its own books. It formed out of a nine-year neighborhood fight after the city demolished a police substation and floated a new apartment complex when locals wanted a park instead (which they eventually got last year). It’s also bought a home and sold it below market (on restricted resale to preserve that deal for future tenants). Funded by donations, grants, and a loan, the trust can afford building rehabs while also setting affordable rent since they’re not trying to turn a profit.

History repeats: this has been playing out on the other side of the country in Burlington, Vermont since 1984. The Champlain Housing Trust owns nearly 700 homes which have seen over 1,300 collective owners who earn on a quarter-share of home appreciation during their stay while the rest stays with the homes to keep them comfortably below market price.

California wrote a $500 million fund and property tax break for exactly this, but South Tower has acquired both of its properties on local donations without touching either. Fresno separately started offering a sales-tax rebate for small, non-chain businesses. The only one to qualify was South Tower. Meanwhile, several Tower District storefronts in this neighborhood have been vacant since the Nixon administration (collecting dust since before both Apple and Microsoft formed). The city also started keeping a list of the neighborhood storefronts empty for more than 30 days that currently runs 50-60 long. The trust model represents an opportunity for first-time homeowners in an era of exuberant housing inflation as well as small-business owners unable to compete with massive franchises.