Inland Public Properties Development (IPPD) is a 100 percent owned subsidiary of Inland American Real Estate Trust, a public non-traded REIT. Institutional Investing in Infrastructure senior editor Drew Campbell spoke with IPPD president and CEO, Charles Jones, about the company’s social infrastructure strategy and its recent charter schools transaction with Imagine Schools.

What is your relationship with Inland America?

Inland America views itself, and rightly so, as an incubator of new ideas and positions itself to be on the leading edge of new asset types. Social infrastructure is certainly one of them. Inland is at least two or three years ahead of the wave that we see coming for social infrastructure investment. All of IPPD’s capital comes from Inland America, and investors can buy shares of the Inland REIT and gain indirect exposure to the IPPD business.

What is attractive about the charter school sector?

Five or six years ago