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So we talked about, you know, you being the CEO of Bedrock and you guys have deployed billions of dollars in capital. So how did you land at that position?
Yeah, you know, it's actually interesting. As you pointed out, I'd been in California for a significant part of my professional life as a real estate developer, and I certainly had also been in Cleveland. When I left my position as executive vice president and the chief administrative officer of the Cleveland Browns in two thousand and five, went to San Francisco and was recruited there by a company called Leonage.
It's the largest home builder in the US.
And I ran the San Francisco Bay Area office doing master plank communities.
But I did that for about ten years, and the company was spun off that endeavor, which was called five point and five point essentially focused. It took all the experience and diligence we had in building master planning communities in the urban community setting, and we began to continue develop i should say, properties in San Francisco, Irvine, and in Valencia.
And I did that for five years. We took that company public.
I did that for five years, and then in twenty twenty I actually retired.
I'd been at it for quite a while.
And those of you who are in real estate development may know that it can be fairly taxing, and I can tell you that in California it is doubly taxing. I can tell you in San Francisco is triply taxing. So I felt I had done what I needed to do and retired in twenty twenty. But if you all recall, the beginning part of twenty twenty was also the beginning of the five letter word COVID, and so there we were retired with nowhere to go, nothing to do, nowhere
to go, and everybody sort of hunker down. And it was about that time that I received a call from a headhunter. And I always joked that the only reason that I picked up that call was because I had nowhere to go. Otherwise my wife and I would have
been halfway around the world, maybe even in Ghana. But as it turned out, there I was at home and the headhunter invited us to take a look at Detroit and asked me if I would consider becoming the CEO of Bedrock, and I frankly, initially I had turned it down, but again, after two months of frankly sitting at home, I decided my wife and I decided to check out Detroit.
And as I had just mentioned, I had spent a significan amount of time about almost eight years in Cleveland, so I had a sense of Detroit and frankly the Detroit from ninety eight to two thousand and five.
I was there.
When I was in Cleveland, I'd been through Detroit and Detroit wasn't doing that well.
But my interest was piqued and we flew out to Detroit. And I will tell you that I was very, very.
Pleasantly surprised this city was on the rebound and had a certain energy to it.
But I had yet to meet the chairman, Dan Gilbert.
So when I met with my wife and I met mister Gilbert and his wife, we talked to him about what he was looking for in terms of this company and what his vision was.
And when he explained his vision, it was really bringing these cities of Detroit and Cleveland back to their prominence as twenty first century world class cities, it resonated with me, and that's essentially why I decided that I would, indeed, as I say, get off the couch and take.
The helm of this wonderful company. So that's how I ended up in Detroit.
So we got to say thank you for getting off the couch. That wasn't an easy task. We've been due to Detroit. Shout to everybody in Detroit. We get a lot of support there. We've been there. I wonder when you took on the task. Looking at it, right, there's the downtown area where we know that Ally and Rocket Mortgage, and we could see all the infrastructure being built downtown.
What was the plan?
Looking at it from a five to ten year. Standpoint of how we revitalize this is it we start here and build out, or do we build out?
Like what were you guys.
Looking at before you said all right, I'm going to I'm taking this task one.
Well, candidly, the folks who had been in before me had done a tremendous job, as I say, building up Detroit.
And I think there's no question that the city's developed from the core downtown out, primarily because the downtowns are the biggest revenue generators of any city, and the revenue generated from the downtown is fundamentally what funds a significant amount of the services for the rest of the city. So a downtown that has declining tax revenues is a downtown that frankly can barely sustain the quality of services
required for the rest of the city. And so I think it was very obvious that the downtown areas of Detroit needed resuscitation, and that's the work that had begun before I got here, and being here, I think has been very clear that not only do you have to build the physical elements of the downtown, and certainly, and we take pride in the fact that we're able to take these classic buildings, renovate them, re energize them, and
frankly repopulate them. But it's also just as important for us to think about the spaces in between the buildings, and those spaces belong to the whole city, and those are the spaces that we create activities and energize those spaces to ensure that folks in the broader city will have a reason to come downtown.
And we've been spending quite a bit of time doing that in the.
Public spaces and places between the buildings, to the point.
Where we had a roller rink downtown.
We created a wonderful winter festival area downtown.
We also support major national and international events.
We're coming up soon to the Grand Prix Detroit Grand Prix coming downtown. We followed quickly by Movement, which is electronic music festival, and then soon thereafter we are bringing in the Afro Nation Festival again to really fight the rest of the world to come to Detroit, and in doing so, I think refresh their memories of what a great city this is and perhaps just encourage them to maybe think about a relocation into this city.
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