Edward Broderick (left), Adam R. Jelen (top right), and James Patchett.
Edward Broderick, Adam R. Jelen and James Patchett
CEO; president and CEO; president and CEO at Gilbane Inc.; Gilbane Building Company; Gilbane Development Company
One would have to look high and low on this list to find a name that has a longer history in real estate than Gilbane.
The first Gilbane to tackle real estate did so back in 1870, when William Gilbane founded a carpentry firm and a couple of years later convinced his brother to come aboard. More than a century and a half later, the privately-owned firm has developed some 25,000 residential units, 24,000 units of student housing, and in the last 53 years has done $11.8 billion in total development. That’s a lot of carpentry.
“As a developer, housing is, by far, core to what we do,” said James Patchett, who leads Gilbane’s development arm. Company leadership also includes Adam Jelen, who heads Gilbane Building, and Edward Broderick, a fifth-generation member of the Gilbane family who became CEO of the parent corporation last year.
Housing means a lot of things for Gilbane. In Syracuse, N.Y., the company is building the Laurel, a 499-bed student housing complex (Gilbane is one of the top 10 developers of student housing in the country); in Virginia it’s converting 3601 Wilson Boulevard into apartments (what construction firm worth its salt wouldn’t be active in adaptive reuse); and it’s rehabbing 8,000 affordable or mixed-income housing units worth some $3 billion nationwide.
“Our belief is that in the long term there’s going to be a need for more housing,” Patchett said. “The demographics fundamentally support it. We believe in doing good by doing well — we all need more housing. It’s the right thing for the world, and a good business decision.”
In New York City alone, Gilbane has some 2,000 units of housing under construction, including the 1,272-apartment Manhattanville Houses campus. They’re developing a 100 percent affordable mixed-use development in the South Bronx called the Peninsula. Also under construction is the $254 million, 283-affordable unit Brownsville Arts Center and Apartments in Brooklyn.
And that’s just one region. If we wanted to get into all of it, we could be here awhile. Maybe 155 years?
