Away From the Limelight, a Builder Makes His Mark

THE NEW YORK TIMES
December 31, 2006

By ALISON GREGOR

Joshua L. Muss on a roof overlooking the Oceana Condominium and Club, which his firm developed in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

IN the sometimes flamboyant world of property development, Joshua L. Muss has established a reputation as an unobtrusive builder.

"He just quietly goes ahead and figures out how to develop a project," said Steven Spinola, the president of the Real Estate Board of New York, who has known Mr. Muss for about 25 years.

Recently, at a site in Flushing, Queens, where Mr. Muss is planning a 3.3-million-square-foot retail and residential complex, "I was impressed by the fact that he didn't say, 'I've got this site - tell me what I can build on it,' " Mr. Spinola said. "Instead, he was thinking about how he was going to change the neighborhood."

This understated style has also benefited Muss Development, the family-owned company based in Forest Hills, Queens, that Mr. Muss has been running for the past 23 years, after his father and grandfather. The company has been in business for 100 years.

Under his leadership, the company has expanded in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island with several large developments, including the 656-room New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge and the 850-unit Oceana Condominium and Club in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

The evolution from builder to community visionary has been generations in the making. At the start of the 20th century, Mr. Muss's grandfather, Isaac Muss, emigrated from Russia to South Africa, where he built barracks during the second Boer War, and then to Brooklyn, where he immediately began building housing in order to support his family, which grew to 11 children. Six of them were boys, and the five surviving ones became builders, including Mr. Muss's father, Hyman Muss.

The family was one of 123 builders featured in the book "Building Up Greater Brooklyn" (Brooklyn Biographical Society, 1925). Mr. Muss said Muss Development has developed about 18 million square feet of space over its 100-year history, surviving the ups and downs of the economy.

"The Depression virtually wiped my grandfather out, but the family continued in business," said Mr. Muss, who is 65. "To support himself during the Depression, my father, who had graduated law school, became an ordained rabbi. He couldn't make a living as a developer or a lawyer, so he became a pulpit rabbi."

Mr. Muss said he knew from childhood that he, too, was destined to be a builder. After graduating from Yeshiva College and Harvard Law School, he joined the company in 1965 and spent a decade learning the business.

"For five years, I listened to everything my father said and did, and everything he said was right," Mr. Muss said. "The next five years, I figured that everything he said and did was wrong. After that, I came to appreciate what he did right and what he did wrong, and I started to contribute."

When his first development attempt went awry after the financier ran out of money in the mid-1970s, Mr. Muss took on a project from the home builder Kaufman & Broad, which had struggled for more than a decade to get development approvals for a tract of land on the South Shore of Staten Island.

Mr. Muss received the necessary approvals within two years. He said he learned that intestinal fortitude was sometimes necessary to close a deal.

"The final approval was to get a sewer outfall permit, which went over somebody else's property, which was a ship junkyard," he recalled. "I went out with one of my contractors, who knew the landowner, and for the first time ever, started drinking.

"We sat on the porch in the middle of this desolate area, talking to the owner, and I don't know what I was drinking, but it had a kick," he continued. "After about six or eight sessions, we convinced him to give us the approval to go across his land."

Before his father caught on, Mr. Muss went back to being a virtual teetotaler. He then developed a 75-acre patch into Woodbrooke, a large residential community on Staten Island with about 1,200 condominium units.

"To be a developer in the true sense of the word, you have to have anywhere from 10 to 20 years of experience to understand the risks that are inherent, the time frames, the disappointments, the costs, the rewards, the net gross and the income levels," Mr. Muss said. "Honestly, unless you've suffered a little bit, you really don't appreciate what it takes."

Mr. Muss's wisdom has helped to get Muss Development - which still does all its own construction - through the real estate market's leaner times. It took the company 15 years to develop the first phase of the Marriott in Brooklyn, beginning in 1983.

"We started this project in times of greatness; it evolved into an era of hunger," Mr. Muss said.

Downtown Brooklyn at the time was not the competitor it is today to office markets in Lower Manhattan and New Jersey. But Muss Development persisted and, when the hotel succeeded, started an expansion to make it one of the larger hotels in New York City.

Big projects with sweeping timelines are common in the boroughs outside Manhattan, Mr. Muss said. Though the costs of development can be comparable to Manhattan's, he said, the financial rewards can be smaller.

Because those boroughs see the spotlight less often, other Brooklyn developers like the Walentas family consider Mr. Muss not just a notable competitor but also an ally.

"Rising tides certainly lift all boats," said Jed Walentas, whose father, David Walentas, originally envisioned the neighborhood now known as Dumbo. "I think in Brooklyn there's more of a collegial atmosphere than you have in Manhattan," he said. "Josh has been a wonderful partner."

Joseph J. Sitt, the founder of Thor Equities, another large Brooklyn developer, said that family-owned developers have distinct advantages but that Mr. Muss has distinguished himself with the transformation of a faded beach club into Oceana in Brighton Beach. It is one of the largest housing communities to be built in the city outside of Manhattan in more than a half-century.

"His family owned Oceana for years, and it has definitely been a strategic advantage of his, but I think that if he had paid the market price, he'd still be one of the best developers in town," Mr. Sitt said.

The Oceana property had been owned by Alexander Muss, Mr. Muss's uncle, since the early 1950s. Alexander Muss received local government approval to build four towers in the early 1990s after a protracted community battle, but financing had become difficult. Mr. Muss bought the property from his uncle in 1996 and decided instead to build 15 lower-rise buildings that better fit in with the neighborhood. That helped to obtain financing. "We decided that we'll build less units and have less traffic, and they'll give us a ticker-tape parade," Mr. Muss said.

The 15th building is currently under construction. Oceana's units range from two-bedroom homes to penthouses, and have prices from $600,000 to more than $2 million.

Mr. Muss says he will apply lessons learned there to his development in Flushing. The $600 million project will have 1,100 residential units and an 815,000-square-foot retail center.

And what about venturing into Manhattan? That effort is being led by the fourth generation of Muss Development, primarily by his son Jason. Mr. Muss seems to think that it is a good idea, but he would rather that few people know.

"I don't want it known that I'm into Manhattan," he said. "That's one of my strengths. People don't worry about me. They think I'm under the radar."