Bisnow's podcast, Make Yourself At Home, hears from members of the commercial real estate industry about how they are managing this new reality and gaining insight into their day-to-day approaches. You can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify and Amazon Music.
On this episode is Rick Gropper, a principal at Camber Property Group. Gropper co-founded the for-profit affordable housing developer with Andrew Moelis back in 2016, after starting his career at L+M Development Partners.
The company now has about 6,500 units, most of which are affordable, and around 3,000 affordable units in the pipeline for New York City through preservation or ground-up development. Gropper speaks on the podcast about the opportunities that may lie ahead in the affordable housing space, and how he has learned to build in communities that have been burned by development in the past.
“For-profit developer has become a negative thing in the current political climate and people hear ‘for-profit developer’ and they think ‘these guys are greedy, they're self-centered, they just want to make X dollars and go on to the next projects,” he said.
"We are a for-profit developer, we do make money on development … But we also care very much about the work we are doing. We are really dependent on our reputation to complete projects and do what we actually say we will do. There’s a balance in the affordable industry between profit and social good.”
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