Lisa Gomez and David Dishy

Affordable housing may steer the ship at L+M, but it is culture that anchors the projects that Lisa Gomez and David Dishy manage. 

L+M is working on a slew of developments that includes the National Urban League Civil Rights Museum, the National Black Theatre and the People’s Theatre Project, among others. These projects have the potential to become valuable civic and cultural destinations, said LMXD’s Dishy. (The museums are in Harlem and Inwood, respectively.) 

In partnership with other developers, L+M also returned its attention to office at Essex Crossing. Finished in 2023, the development has struggled to attract office tenants, and the development team announced in March 2024 that it would install two floors of prebuilt suites. 

Then, there’s Bronx Point, an affordable mixed-use development and the future home of the Universal Hip Hop Museum. The housing and public space components of Bronx Point officially opened last fall, and L+M is roughly halfway through filling the project. The development contains 542 units and amounts to roughly 530,000 square feet. The total cost was $349 million.

For L+M Development and LMXD, the consistent overlap between cultural institutions and affordable housing happened naturally but intentionally: L+M deliberately builds within and in partnership with communities. Dishy and Gomez therefore work hand in glove, along fluid — but defined — categories. When projects come to their attention, they pursue them.

“At the end of the day, producing housing for people to live in and be affordable is an incredibly important thing,” said Dishy. “We’re spending a lot of energy trying to help see how that can be made to happen.”

This relentlessness characterizes L+M’s business strategy, alongside kindness and stubbornness, including during what’s one of the more difficult eras for project financing. Members of the L+M family of companies are akin to urbanists before they’re real estate developers, said Dishy. He also pinpointed the importance of thoughtfulness in mixed-use projects to assess how multiple uses can succeed together. 

In addition to Bronx Point, L+M is breaking ground on other affordable housing projects. This March, for instance, the developer secured $126 million for Brownsville, Brooklyn’s Marcus Garvey Extension Phase 2. The project is slated to break ground this spring and will have 178 affordable housing units. And, just this April, an affiliate fund of L+M bought the 1,600-unit Knickerbocker Village affordable housing complex in Manhattan for $84.5 million, The Real Deal reported. 

“This is a long game, and it’s not for the faint of heart,” said Gomez. “In good times, it’s easy for anybody to be a developer. When it’s tough and you have to really kind of hunker down, that’s when you see who’s really doing the work.”