Don Peebles

“As a developer, it’s been an exciting year,” Don Peebles said. 

No doubt.

Over the course of the past year, Peebles Corporation not only advanced several developments within its existing pipeline — not just any projects; big, important ones that have grabbed headlines as well as the industry’s interest — but it also added “a couple of billion dollars of new projects” to its pipeline, Peebles said. 

The cumulative result was an impressive year of accomplishments that demonstrate exactly why Peebles is a Power 100 player to be reckoned with. 

First, he got Angels Landing — a $1.6 billion, 2 million-square-foot project in Downtown L.A. — fully entitled after a four-plus-year effort. The high-rise will be the city’s third-tallest building, with hotel, residential, retail and restaurant space. It will also be the tallest project in the country created by Black-owned real estate firms, with Peebles teaming up with Victor MacFarlane of MacFarlane Partners.

Then, Peebles won its bid to build lab space and mixed-income housing on a highly coveted, state-owned piece of land known as Parcel 25 in Boston. Its winning proposal will add 300,000 square feet of lab space, and almost 40 percent of the housing units will be affordable. Peebles will team up with minority construction firms in the site’s development. 

The development was given the green light at a time of peak demand from the research and development community, with lab space a scarcity. 

“In Boston, there’s more than a 4 million-square-foot backlog of unmet demand for life sciences, and we see that continuing to grow,” Peebles said. “It’s the future, life sciences play a huge role in medical advances and also in controlling future pandemics.” 

Then there are his buzzed-about plans for the development site at 418 11th Avenue in Manhattan, where Peebels hopes to build Affirmation Tower, a 2 million-square-foot, mixed-use project across from the Javits Center that also will be the most inclusive skyscraper in U.S. history. 

If state officials greenlight it, Affirmation Tower would be the world’s tallest building owned by majority Black-owned companies, the tallest building ever built by a woman-led contractor, and the world’s tallest skyscraper designed by a Black architect. Affirmation Tower’s renderings show five rectangular boxes ascending in size to the top, and that design is intentional. 

“We’re trying to turn the industry upside down, and the building reflects that,” Peebles said.