Keeping with our theme this week, we hear news out of New York that Kushner Real Estate Group purchased three adjacent buildings at Fifth Avenue and 30th Street for a high-end condo building designed by HWKN Architects. This week, we snapped KRE president Jon Kushner at a YM/WREA lunch at the University Club, where he gave the status update on his company's project roster, otherwise made up of rentals in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. Jonathan says the design is 40 stories and 135k SF. KRE owns over 6M SF of commercial and more than 9,000 apartments and has more than 6,000 more in the pipeline.

The projects under construction include 1.1M SF Hudson Lights in Fort Lee, N.J. (Bridgegate central) as well as the 1.6M 18 Park (above) and the 640k SF tower that's Phase 1 of Journal Squared, both in Jersey City. Jon’s family started in NYC real estate, too. His paternal grandparents crossed the Atlantic in 1949 and arrived with just $50. His grandfather worked for four years building apartments in Brooklyn for New York's Muss family, and they saved half of every paycheck. In 1954, he started building houses in Rahway, NJ, with the Wilf family (of Minnesota Vikings fame). Jon came on board for KRE full time in '99 and has been swinging the firm's pendulum to high-rise, urban rentals.