The king of the Gold Coast, Kushner Real Estate Group, has purchased three adjacent buildings at Fifth Avenue and 30th Street and is designing a high-end condo building with HWKN Architects.

Yesterday, 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. His 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 the Muss family, and they saved half of every paycheck. Then, in 1954, he started building houses in Rahway, NJ, with the Wilf family. Jonathan came on board for KRE full time in ’99 (after four years as a frat brother of C&W’s Ron Lo Russo at NYU) and has been swinging the firm's pendulum to high-rise, urban rentals.

KRE owns over 6M SF of commercial and more than 9,000 apartments and has more than 6,000 more in the pipeline. Among the projects under construction are the 1.1M SF Hudson Lights in Fort Lee; the 1.6M 18 Park (rendered above) and the 640k SF tower that's Phase 1 of Journal Squared, both in Jersey City; and the 837-unit Madison Farms with 140k SF of retail in Bethlehem, Pa.