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For Meredith Marshall, the managing partner of BRP Cos., the answer to the housing crisis comes down to three main things: supply, supply and supply.
In the Bronx, his company is co-developing 1,000 workforce units at a project known as La Central. Last year, the firm delivered 500 housing units at the Crossing in Jamaica, and it is already underway with 600 more units in the same part of Queens.
Marshall is also no stranger to the myriad problems that slow housing: He is still working on trying to pull together the second phase of a project that was approved under the Bloomberg administration. He said not nearly enough money is being put toward the solution, and the number of steps developers must take to get a building out of the ground needs to be reduced.
"We need to get people around the table,” Marshall said on this week's episode of Bisnow Reports. “We don’t all have to agree, but we have to agree about common facts. We lost 20% of our Black children in New York between 2010 and 2020 … largely middle-class people moving down South. Neighborhoods they lived in have become more competitive, largely because of supply pressures.”
Marshall discussed some of the changes he thinks need to happen at a policy level to right the housing development ship, he discussed his scrappy early days launching the firm, and he shared advice he gives to young people of color who are also looking to break into the industry.
“Scale up, scale up,” he said. "If you are doing $100M in transactions, try to do $1B, and come up with a plan to scale up."
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