Team

Built around the work
in front of us.

Founders and senior advisors. We hire carefully and bring partners in for the right moment in the right project.

Founders · Head of legal · Senior advisors
Leadership

The team.

Portrait of Erik Gillberg, co-founder and CEO of Now City Inc.

Erik Gillberg

Co-founder & CEO

Erik has spent 30 years inside the operating reality of property: how buildings live, age, and either serve or fail the people in them. Alongside it he built a 20-year career in technology, business development, and startup leadership, learning to design systems and align teams around outcomes rather than tasks. Now City is the synthesis of the two: districts treated as living systems, where capital, design, and operations are engineered together from the start instead of colliding after the fact.

LinkedIn →

Portrait of Ritchie Ju, co-founder and COO of Now City Inc.

Ritchie Ju

Co-founder & COO

Ritchie leads design, development, and operations. B.Architecture from Carnegie Mellon, MS in Architecture and Urban Design from Columbia, MBA candidate at Johns Hopkins. Previously a mobility planner at Lyft in New York, where he led bike-share expansion, and later supported capital raise and development of a 1,000-unit multifamily mixed-use project in NYC.

LinkedIn →

Advisors

Senior advisors.

We work with senior advisors whose expertise is directly essential to the work, building on the craft of the community builders and industry veterans who came before us.

Portrait of Michael H. Shuman, advisor on local economies.

Michael H. Shuman

Local economies

Michael is an economist, attorney, and one of the architects of the 2012 JOBS Act. Adjunct Professor at Bard Business School. Author of Put Your Money Where Your Life Is, The Local Economy Solution, and others. He advises Now City on community-rooted ownership, local capital formation, and finance models that keep wealth in place.

LinkedIn →

Portrait of Neal Payton, advisor on urban planning and design.

Neal Payton

Urban planning & design

Neal, FAIA, FCNU, directs the western U.S. urban and architectural design practice at Torti Gallas. His work focuses on master plans, form-based codes, and the public realm, especially the revitalization of declining urban centers, brownfields, and aging suburbs. He advises Now City on urbanism, master planning, and entitlement strategy.

LinkedIn →

How we show up

Six values.

Our values drive our design process and our decisions. They help us find the people who want to build this with us.

A sunlit community commons with people gathering, gardens, and shade trees.
A place people can call their own. The commons is where a neighborhood becomes a community. Concept rendering.
Beliefs divide us. Values unite us.
Jeff Rasley

Cultivate Curiosity

We ask big questions. Where are the healthiest, happiest people and places in the world, and what can we learn from them? How do we build and live better, everywhere? How do we move faster on climate, equity, and resilience? We chase the answers.

Catalyze Creativity

Creativity is imagination in action. It is how we learn, grow, and solve problems. We need it running at full strength to design better places and figure out what nobody else has figured out yet.

Be Courageous

Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. Face the hard internal and external challenges. Choose to act for the good of the whole. Build and live in new ways that are better for people and planet.

Develop Diversity

Because it is the right thing, and because it works. Diverse communities of people, species, and ideas are healthier, more resilient, more alive. We design for it, hire for it, build for it.

Build Trust

Trust is how a team, a neighborhood, and a partnership stay coordinated. Transparency builds it, even when transparency feels uncomfortable. We choose it anyway.

Begin Regeneration

Sustainable holds the line. Regenerative makes things better than we found them. We are not interested in defending the status quo. We are interested in repair, renewal, and growth.

Join us

Help us build it.

We are designers, developers, and operators who care deeply about people and ecosystems. We are building toward a future where humanity has figured out how to live well without breaking the home world. We could use your help.

We hire carefully across development, urban design, capital, operations, and engineering. Strong candidates with experience in walkable urbanism, district-scale infrastructure, public-private partnerships, or institutional capital are welcome to introduce themselves. Interns and project-based collaborators are welcome too.

Drop us a line at [email protected] or via the Contact page.

Get in touch

Let's build better
places, together.

If any of this resonates, we would love to hear from you, whether you are an investor, a landowner, a city, a future resident, or simply curious. No commitment, just the start of a conversation.

Investment overview → [email protected]
↑