by Rachel Z. Azoff

Jonathan Rose leads the development community towards a sustainable future.

SPEND JUST A FEW MINUTES WITH Jonathan Rose and you quickly forget you are talking to a high-powered executive on the 23rd floor of his firm’s swanky Fifth Avenue headquarters in the heart of Manhattan. The city’s frequent police sirens and blaring horns fade into the distance as Rose leads you on a spiritual quest of contemplation and reflection. With kind, brown eyes that sparkle behind large-framed glasses, the gentle, soft-spoken developer transports you to a 1998 visit with the Dalai Lama in the foothills of the Himalayas; a hiking trip six years ago across Switzerland; a horseback ride through the Moroccan mountains in 2006; and finally, a trek this past June to Split, Croatia, to observe its flawless, 1,700-year-old aqueduct system.

As the clicking of designer heels and the muffled sounds of closed-door conversations bring you back to the present, you glance around the New York office abuzz with activity and are immediately struck by the purpose of Rose’s jet-setting trips. These international adventures inspire him to do what he does best: Make the world a better place by zealously infusing the best global practices into the planning and development of affordable, sustainable communities across the United States.

“I have known Jonathan since 2001, and he is truly a visionary,” says Katie Swenson, director of the Columbia, Md.-based Frederick P. Rose Architectural Fellowship, a program named after Rose’s father and endowed by his family. [For more on the program, see “Good Fellows” on opposite page.] “There are few people in your life that you meet who are able to have a large vision and then work so hard to make it happen.”

A third-generation developer, Rose left the comfort of his prestigious family business, New York-based Rose Associates, in 1989. He then launched his own firm, Jonathan Rose Cos., under the mission of “Tikkun Olam,” a Hebrew phrase meaning to repair the world. His firm touts a strictly environmentally and socially conscious mission and is dedicated to repairing the fabric of cities, towns, and villages—while preserving the surrounding land—through the development of sustainable, transit-accessible, mixed-income communities.

And though Rose may be an idealist, he doesn’t just have far-fetched ideas on ways to repair the world. He has the skills and know-how to transform his visions into the development of successful, sustainable communities. “Jonathan is not a dreamer,” says Bill Struever, president and CEO of Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse, a Baltimore-based developer that has partnered with Rose Cos. “He is very much into what can actually be built and what is truly achievable if we put our minds and hearts into it. One of his greatest strengths as a leader is his ebullience and indefatigable championing of what’s right combined with his practical sense.”

Over the past two decades, Rose has grown his company from a two-person team to a firm of 54 staffers with five offices, managing $1.5 billion worth of multifamily and commercial projects in eight markets, spanning from the New York metropolitan area and New England to the Southwest and the Rocky Mountain region. All the while, he has stayed true to his beliefs, incorporating them both in body and business.

A SPIRITUAL CALLING
Rose, 56, doesn’t dress like a typical CEO. Instead of Armani suits and a Rolex, he prefers khaki pants, casual collared shirts, comfortable Merrell walking shoes, and a black sports watch. Take one look at his outfit and listen to him expound on Charles Darwin and the origin of the species, and he could easily be mistaken for a psychology or philosophy professor. Actually, that’s not too far of a stretch. He majored in both of those subjects at Yale University and uses his knowledge to enhance his real estate development with a passion for environmental, social, and economic issues.

The developer says he is not merely following in the professional footsteps of his father Frederick, a respected developer who died in 1999 at age 75. Instead, he is fulfilling a personal calling. “When I was a small child, I used to imagine utopias—the ideal communities I wanted to live in,” he recalls. “Every night when I’d go to sleep, I had this place I’d go to play. I have always been drawn to the idea of building amazing communities and the idea of social equity.”

Rose gained firsthand development experience as a teenager, working at the family business in leasing offices and on construction sites in New York where he learned how to structure complex financing deals and build on time and on budget. After receiving his undergraduate degree from Yale, he earned a master’s in regional planning from the University of Pennsylvania and for 13 years worked at Rose Associates, which develops and manages more than 30 million square feet of major office towers, commercial retail centers, mixed-use complexes, and high-rise residential buildings across the East Coast. In 1989, Rose decided it was time to devote himself entirely to developing green communities with a strong social emphasis and formed Jonathan Rose Cos. (Rose Associates is now run by Jonathan’s brother, Adam Rose.)

“I call Jonathan the Dalai Lama of green,” Struever says. “For him, development is passionate and spiritual.” Indeed, a deep sense of spirituality guides Rose and his firm as they work toward their mission. A self-described “Jew Bu,” Rose practices both the Jewish and Buddhist faiths and considers the Dalai Lama and a number of other spiritual leaders as close friends. He is a firm believer in interdependence, a fundamental Buddhist principle that recognizes the interconnectivity of all elements of life.

“By accepting the natural role of spirituality in human culture as part of how we think and how we are as people, it has allowed me to be a more integrated person in my work,” Rose says. “It also allows those I work with to be more integrated because it gives them space to bring their own deep value systems and raise the question of what is the right thing to do? What are the deepest values that we want to carry out? How can we collectively make the world a better place?”

Rose credits his family for instilling a strong value system at an early age. Rose’s grandfather and great-uncle founded Rose Associates in the early 1930s and built the first state-funded affordable housing project in New York City. His father later joined the firm and built such prestigious Big Apple landmarks as the Bankers Trust Building and Sheffield at 57th Street. The Rose family also ranks among the city’s top philanthropists. Frederick and his wife Sandra, who survives him, have contributed more than $100 million to numerous charities over the years, including a reported $5 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, $15 million to the New York Public Library, and more than 30 million to the Lincoln Center.

Jonathan Rose’s good will and spirituality are key to his success, adds good friend Bart Harvey, a trustee and former chairman and CEO of Columbia, Md.-based Enterprise Community Partners. “If you are really looking at the world from the point of view of how to leave a world that is better than the one you inherited, you think in a wholly different way,” Harvey explains. “It’s in your spiritual consciousness that you are not just on this earth to make money; you have a purpose to be here. Jonathan is willing to really look hard for those answers.”

PROJECTS THAT MATTER
Rose has been pushing his green agenda for roughly 20 years, long before environmental consciousness gained celebrity status and actors such as Brad Pitt started promoting green living. “Jonathan has been championing and developing green and healthy affordable housing for almost two decades, and his depth of experience now is really appreciated,” says Paul Freitag, director of real estate development for Rose Cos.’ New York region. For the firm, going green means more than simply slapping a LEED certification on its properties—Rose Cos. wants to address what the firm views as a dire need to change the country’s development pattern. “America is going to grow by 90 million people over the next 30 years, and in the past, our growth has been primarily through sprawl,” Rose says. “Sprawl is economically and environmentally unsustainable, so we have to come up with a more compact form of development—that means denser cities.”

The firm achieves its green mission through four practice areas: planning, project management, investment, and development. Their planning work spans the gamut in terms of both location and scope of project. Projects include writing green development guidelines for rebuilding southern Louisiana post-Katrina; helping a nonprofit strategize on how to best use a city block; and designing a green master plan for a 900-acre expansion of a Chinese city. “We will go anywhere there is an interesting challenge that we can come up with a solution for,” Rose says.

On the project management side, the firm works with cities and nonprofits to oversee the design and construction of a wide range of sustainable structures, including university buildings, museums, libraries, and performing arts centers. In its investment division, Rose Cos. created the country’s first green smart growth real estate investment fund, which acquires, greens, and improves the cash flow of both commercial and residential assets, along with owning the buildings for the long-term. A recent investment: the purchase of the Joseph Vance and Sterling Buildings, two 20th-century office buildings just blocks away from the historic Pike Place market in downtown Seattle. Greening strategies include using eco-friendly cleaning materials and naturally cooling the buildings without air conditioning.

Development, however, constitutes 70 percent of the firm’s work, with 2,409 residential units currently under development nationally. The firm builds both for its own portfolio and for non-profits. Right now, all eyes are on David & Joyce Dinkins Gardens, Jonathan Rose Rose Cos.’ latest New York project. The 85-unit green apartment community on West 153rd Street in Harlem, co-developed by the Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement, houses low-income families and 18-year-olds aging out of foster care.

The $19.5 million property features community gardens with designated areas for meditation and relaxation—a standard amenity at Rose-developed communities, on-site youth job training, and, of course, an abundance of green features. By committing to sustainable design from the outset, the design team greened the property at just 1 percent to 2 percent of the total development cost. “The hardest part of going green is convincing the different agencies that support affordable housing that green is worth it in the long run,” says Whitney Foutz, a project manager at Rose Cos. who headed up the development of Dinkins Gardens.

The best proof is a leisurely stroll through Dinkins Gardens. The project includes a typical checklist of eco-friendly products: solar shades, high-performance windows, Energy Star-rated appliances and light fixtures, plus more sophisticated features such as a green grid roof and a rainwater harvesting system, both of which were funded by grants. But you’ll also fi nd a few unusual green twists. The gas boiler is on the roof, for example, instead of the typical basement location. That may not sound like a big deal, but the move is much more cost-effective and makes the boiler 3 percent more energy-efficient. How? When a boiler is in the basement, 3 percent of the energy is used to heat the exhaust gases that run through the flue from the basement up to the roof. The rooftop location eliminates the need for a flue on each level of the building, and at a construction cost of $10,000 per floor that adds up to a $90,000 savings for the property. On top of that, a flue occupies the size of a walk-in closet on each floor, so eliminating the pipe leads to a higher ratio of rental space.

Still, Rose’s favorite feature is this: The apartments are individually ventilated to reduce the mixing of air between units for better indoor air quality. Fresh air is drawn in continuously through window trickle vents and expelled horizontally through voids in the concrete plank, as opposed to traditional vertical ducts. Also, as the warm air passes through the concrete plank, the plank absorbs the heat in the air then re-radiates it back into the apartment. In addition to providing better air quality for the residents, the developer doesn’t have to purchase vertical ducts, gains extra space, and achieves higher energy-efficiency.

The firm plans to incorporate these innovative practices into its future developments, which include two high-profile projects in the Big Apple. Next spring, they will break ground on Via Verde, a 221-unit mixed-use, mixed-income development in the South Bronx. The city awarded the 1.5-acre site to Rose Cos. for just $1 after the firm won an international design competition that drew 35 entries from around the world. Designed by New York-based Dattner Architects and Grimshaw Architects, the building is expected to receive, at a minimum, LEED Gold certification and an Enterprise Green Communities designation. The connected green rooftops of low-rise townhomes, a mid-rise duplex building, and a 20-story tower will be used to harvest rainwater, grow fruit and vegetables, and provide recreational space.

Nearby in Brooklyn, Rose is co-developing a 5.8-acre brownfield site awarded to the firm through an RFP issued by the City of New York and the New York City Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Dubbed Gowanus Green for its location along the Gowanus Canal, the community is expected to open in 2014 and will feature a whopping 774 mixed-income residential units and 65,000 square feet of community and retail space. Among its sustainable features, the project will include an advanced stormwater management system with a swale trail to retain 100 percent of the stormwater on site.

While Rose Cos. clearly isn’t afraid to take a leap of faith and push the edge on a project’s green design, the firm is extremely conservative on the actual implementation, Rose says. “Our projects are structured to be very low risk and have lots of layers of debt and equity so that they have a very financially stable balance structure,” he says. What’s more, despite today’s shaky credit environment, the firm’s financing avenues aren’t drying up. “Because our projects include significant amounts of affordable housing, they also have significant amounts of low-income housing tax credit equity and qualify for [various] loans and subsidies so we continue to find financing to close our deals,” Rose adds.

Yet, unlike many developers, Rose isn’t afraid to put the brakes on a project. “Real estate people often fall in love with a particular project, and they end up losing a lot of money because they are oblivious to market conditions,” says Frank Robinson, director of Denver-based law firm Otten Johnson Robinson Neff and Ragonetti, which represents Rose Cos. “With Jonathan, he is not afraid to walk away when the circumstances aren’t right.”

INVESTING IN THE FUTURE
The firm recognizes that its work is just a small step toward changing the nation’s development footprint in the face of global warming and overwhelming population growth. The key is getting other firms to follow in their footsteps. Developers across the country agree that Rose Cos. is setting the stage. “The best way you move the development industry is by creating successful projects,” says John McIlwain, a senior resident fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Land Institute (ULI). “By actually making the numbers work and completing the projects, that is really the great value of what Jonathan has done.”

The government also needs to do its part—and Rose knows that time is running out. Climate experts say that the country has a three-year window to change its infrastructure investments to avoid the warming crisis, according to Rose Cos. Rose is rallying for that change through his work on a wide range of industry committees, including co-chairing ULI’s newly formed Climate and Energy Committee, chairing the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s Blue Ribbon Sustainability Commission, and serving on the boards of the Natural Resources Defense Council and Enterprise Community Partners.

The nation’s top priority needs to be to increase federal funding for infrastructure, including an investment in buses, bridges, roads, and highways, Rose says, the frustration clear as his normally mild voice escalates in volume. “I recognize it’s difficult to add new funds at a time of a coming recession, but as a nation we invest a sixth per population in infrastructure that Russia, China, Brazil, and other countries do,” he says. “We are falling way, way behind.” Rose is hopeful that the next administration will fight for a smart national transportation and energy infrastructure policy. “We have always been a country that has looked to our future, but we haven’t had leadership for some time that has inspired us to invest in our future.”

Investing in the future also means finding ways to house the major population surge that will occur over the next several decades. Though Rose is a huge proponent of urban, transit-oriented living—he walks to work everyday and takes the train on the weekends to his second home in upstate New York—he recognizes that a vast number of Americans will always live in the suburbs. “If we are going to grow by 90 million people in the next 30 years, we’ve got to put the people somewhere, and they are not all going to go to cities and brownfields, as much as I’d like that to happen,” he says. The solution, he explains, is to densify our suburbs by building town centers, extending train lines and bus routes, and adding car share programs. A prime example: Rose Cos. partnered with Stamford, Conn.- based W&M Properties to develop the 50-unit Metro Green Apartments, phase one of a major transit-oriented, mixed-income development located one block from a busy train station in Stamford.

“I have known of Jonathan for many years, and one of my hopes was that a developer of his caliber would come and build housing for Stamford,” says Robin Stein, land use bureau chief for the City of Stamford. “He is committed to sustainability and mixed-income, really going above and beyond city requirements in both areas. For example, we require that 12 percent of the units be affordable, and he is providing roughly 23 percent.” Plus, the entire development is expected to achieve LEED Gold designation under the U.S. Green Building Council’s Neighborhood Development pilot program.

Over the next three to five years, expect Rose Cos. to deliver or break ground on similar projects. The company, which is growing at a rate of about 30 percent a year, plans to expand its footprint to the Pacific Northwest, Atlanta, and Dallas. While the here and now is important to Rose, he never forgets
his long-term vision for the firm. “It’s clear that our mission will not be accomplished in my lifetime, so I am really trying to build a company that will outlast me,” he says. “My goal is to ultimately put myself out of a job.” But given Rose’s passion and commitment, it will be a long time before that happens.

[ the developer ]
Title: Founder, Owner, and CEO
Age: 56
First job: Working for the family business,starting at age 13, on construction sites during the summer
Favorite quote: “You can’t solve a problem with the same mind that created it.” —Albert Einstein
Favorite book: Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
Best advice someone gave you: From my father, Frederick Rose: “Don’t regret the projects that you didn’t do, just make sure that you don’t regret the projects that you do.”
Person you most admire: Jim Rouse, founder of Enterprise:“He is my hero. In my 20s, if he was speaking somewhere, I’d actually travel to hear him speak.”
Recent vacations: London, Jerusalem, Croatia,and Switzerland
Hobbies: Hiking; jazz enthusiast . In 1979, he founded his own record label, Gramavision Records.
Cool fact: Rose and his wife, Diana Calthorpe Rose, co-founded The Garrison Institute, a former monastery they transformed into a meditation and spiritual retreat center in Garrison, N.Y. The institute is backed by such prominent spiritual leaders as Father Thomas Keating and Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. Next spring, the institute plans to host a retreat to help real estate leaders green their companies.

[ the company ]
Jonathan Rose Cos.
■ Founded: 1989
■ Headquarters: New York
■ Employees: 54
■ Scope of Work: Manages $1.5 billion worth of multifamily, commercial, and cultural projects
■ Notable Projects: David & Joyce Dinkins Gardens, an 85-unit affordable property in Harlem; Denver’s Highlands’ Garden Village, the redevelopment of an old amusement park into a mixed-use Mecca featuring both single-family and multifamily homes, office and retail space, as well as the historic Elitch Theater; and a comprehensive plan for the Town of East Hampton, N.Y.
■ On the Boards: Via Verde, a 221-unit mixed-use, mixed income project in the South Bronx; Gowanus Green, the redevelopment of a 5.8-acre brownfield site in Brooklyn; Fortune Society, a 114-unit affordable housing project in West Harlem; the 50-unit Metro Green Apartments, phase one of a major transit-oriented development in Stamford, Conn.; and the East and West Second Street development, a 5-acre housing project in Albuquerque, N.M.’s Alvarado Transit District.

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Related Stories from October 2008

Good Fellows: Rose gives young architects a chance to make a difference at community development firms.

Seal of Approval: Rose Cos. relies on three green certification systems to ensure true sustainability.