| Like you—and 1,200 other insiders—on Thursday we gathered at the Westin Waterfront for the 19th annual United Way Real Estate and Building Industry Breakfast to fight homelessness. (Who knew orange juice could be such a huge draw?) | |
| It was the the largest United Way breakfast yet, with attendees adding nearly $3M to the $31M that the breakfast has collected since it was first chaired by Beacon Properties' late Edwin Sidman and Colliers co-chairman Kevin Phelan. The late Hank Spaulding and the late George Slye, co-founders of Spaulding & Slye (now owned by JLL), were honored for their philanthropy and industry leadership. In ‘83, Hank also approached MIT with a unique idea: starting an academic program to cultivate industry leaders. Now, the MIT Center for Real Estate is a premier global training ground for CRE execs. | |
| The keynote, Tufts president emeritus (Harvard and MIT alum)Lawrence Backow greets three generations of Leventhals: Beacon Capital Partners CEO Alan, his son Evan, and patriarch Beacon Properties founder Norman. Lawrence stressed the urgency of preventing changes that would limit the amount of NIH funding to Boston-area researchers—now about $3B/year. Today, he says, the wealth of nations is determined by their intellectual capital, rather than natural resources or access to capital, and metro Boston has the largest concentration of academic researchers in the world. (That stat comes from researchers who did a study about the location demographics of academic researchers.) | |
| The morning’s big award, the Norman B Leventhal/Edwin N Sidman Leadership Award went to Terra Nova Partners partner Polly Bryson (center), whom we snapped with Kevin Phelan and United Way client Deshia Saucer. Polly, one of the first women to be a principal at a major CRE firm (Spaulding & Slye), has long been active in United Way and other non-profits. In the opinion of Doug Gensler, and many others, she gets the job done and is a delight. Polly says the need to end homelessness is greater than ever. Through the United Way, she hopes that every child enters school ready to learn, stays in school, and families are financially stable. | |
| HYM Investment Group managing director Tom O’Brien is working on three big projects, each a game changer in its submarket. In partnership with the Canyon Johnson Urban Fund, he hopes to start construction soon on one rental apartment tower and two BTSs at the $2B, 5M SF North Point mixed-use complex. Downtown, HYM is leasing and managing One Congress St (aka the Government Center garage) and wants to develop the centrally located property into a mixed-use complex with office, residential and retail. HYM will hear in the next few weeks whether it won the bid to redevelop the Thorndike Street courthouse in East Cambridge. | |
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