Ryan Howard

Ryan will explain to you, unprompted, that his neighborhood is pre-IPO. Ryan has a temp’s salary, a failed startup, and a room at his parents’ house. The neighborhood, to be fair, is genuinely correct.

Every friend group has a Ryan, the guy who has reinvented himself six times, calls everything a “space” or an “ecosystem,” and is always one pivot away from making it. Placing Ryan Howard is a comedy in two parts. Part one is figuring out the trendiest, most forward facing, most defensibly cool neighborhood in Atlanta, because that is unquestionably where Ryan wants to plant his personal brand. Part two is remembering that Ryan is broke, lives with his parents, and is going to have to fit that entire persona into a studio. The fun is that both parts point to the exact same place.

Who we’re working with

Ryan’s resume is a cautionary tale told at a party by someone who thinks it’s a success story. He went from temp to corporate VP faster than anyone should, got there partly on charm and partly on fraud, flamed out, and came back to the same office as a temp again, undaunted. He founded WUPHF.com. He has cycled through hipster, tech bro, and startup founder as though they were seasonal collections. He is a genuine narcissist with real ambition and almost no follow through, perpetually convinced the next thing is the thing.

The profile captures him precisely, contradictions and all. He wants an industrial loft, urban, walkable, in a hipster, artistic, tech neighborhood, and he has explicitly ruled out anything suburban or family oriented, because those places are, to Ryan, evidence of giving up. And then the budget, which is the joke that makes the whole thing work: $200,000 to $300,000, noted right there as “lives with parents.” Ryan’s taste is venture funded. Ryan’s bank account is an unpaid internship. He is going to buy the smallest possible piece of the coolest possible neighborhood and describe it like a Series A.

The match: Old Fourth Ward

Ryan lands in Old Fourth Ward, and the irritating thing is he’s right.

This is, legitimately, the neighborhood Ryan’s entire personality is cosplaying. Old Fourth Ward sits on the BeltLine’s Eastside Trail, wrapped around Ponce City Market and a short walk from Krog Street Market, and it is the physical center of Atlanta’s cool, creative, tech adjacent gravity. Converted industrial lofts, startups, the constant low hum of a place that markets itself as the future. If you handed Ryan a map and asked him to point to where the winners live, his finger lands here, and for once the self mythologizing matches the map.

Then the budget does its work. At $200,000 to $300,000, Ryan is not getting the soaring industrial loft from the pitch deck. He’s getting a small studio or a tight one bedroom in an older building, at the very bottom of the O4W market, which does start low enough that he can technically get in. And Ryan will treat those four hundred square feet as a founder’s headquarters. He will host, he will network, he will refer to his apartment as “the space,” and he will tell every single person he meets that they bought in early, that O4W is pre-IPO, that they should have seen it five years ago and it’s still not too late. He is broke and adjacent to his parents’ money and living in a shoebox, and his personal brand has never been stronger. Ryan wins the only way Ryan ever wins, which is on narrative.

The alternatives

Little Five Points. Cool, but the wrong cool for Ryan. L5P is punk, countercultural, tattoo and record store authentic, and it doesn’t care about being the future. Ryan needs a neighborhood with an upward trajectory he can claim to be part of. L5P would find him exhausting, and on some level he’d know it.

East Atlanta Village. Genuinely hip, genuinely creative, and genuinely a great fit for a real version of this guy. The problem is Ryan’s whole thing is being early, and by his logic EAV is already discovered, which in Ryan brain means it’s over. He wants to be ahead of the trend, not in it.

Grant Park. Lovely historic neighborhood, walkable, near the BeltLine, but settled and increasingly family oriented, which trips his stated deal breaker. Ryan cannot be seen living somewhere with a lot of strollers. It would undermine the entire pitch.

The verdict

Ryan buys the smallest loft he can find in Old Fourth Ward, on the BeltLine, and immediately becomes the neighborhood’s most confident unofficial spokesperson.

The beautiful thing about placing Ryan is that the joke and the correct answer are the same answer. He picked O4W to prove he’s ahead of the curve, and the annoying truth is that O4W actually is one of the most dynamic neighborhoods in the city, so his instincts, filtered through all that ego, landed on something real. He’ll never be able to afford more than a corner of it, and he’ll describe that corner as the center of the universe, and the audacity almost works. Ryan gets to live inside his own pitch. For Ryan, that has always been the entire dream.

Stanley Hudson is next, and Stanley wants the exact opposite of everything Ryan just said, delivered with as little effort as possible.