Part IThe Story
The Boy in the Salon
Most real estate fortunes in New York begin with a family building, a family bank or a family name on a construction company. Francis Greenburger's began in a literary agency. As a boy in the 1950s and early 1960s he spent his afternoons in his father's office, among European publishers, translators and writers, listening to people argue about which American novels deserved to be read in Paris and Frankfurt. By the age of twelve, according to his memoir, he was keeping the agency's books and helping to negotiate its contracts.
He dropped out of one of New York's most selective public high schools at fifteen. At nineteen he owned a five-story apartment building in Greenwich Village. By the early 1980s he had become known as the "co-op king of New York," having converted thousands of rented apartments into homes their occupants could own, and a bank had given him a $100 million line of credit. By the end of that decade he was, in his own later estimate, unsure whether his company would survive at all.
It did. Time Equities, the firm he founded in 1966, grew into a national and international real estate investor with property in some thirty American states, Canada and Europe. Greenburger built two Helmut Jahn skyscrapers, one in lower Manhattan and one in Chicago, kept his father's literary agency alive for more than half a century, founded one of the country's best-known international artist residencies, and spent more than a decade building a treatment center for people with serious mental illness who would otherwise go to prison. The thread running through all of it is a particular attitude to risk: take it deliberately, survive it when it goes wrong, and never assume the market will wait for you.
By the Numbers
A Career in Cycles
1966Year Greenburger founded Time Equities, helped by a $5,000 loan from his father
10,000+Apartments converted to co-ops in more than 100 New York buildings
$35K → $100MLoans he pieced together from seven banks in 1978, and the Chemical Bank credit line he held less than five years later
1,200Apartments in the bankrupt Clinton Hill complex in Brooklyn he bought in 1981 and converted
~5 yearsConstruction pause at 50 West Street after the 2008 financial crisis
2,400+Artists, writers and other residents from 114 countries hosted by Art Omi since 1992
Kafka, Sartre and the Family Business
Francis J. Greenburger was born on February 13, 1949, and grew up in Forest Hills, Queens. His father, Sanford J. Greenburger, was the American-born son of Hungarian immigrants and had founded a literary agency in 1932. His mother, Ingrid, was a German immigrant and an author in her own right. Together they built a business that specialized in bridging the Atlantic. They represented European writers and publishers in the United States and pioneered editorial scouting, advising European houses on which American books to translate. The agency's early clients included Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
The office functioned partly as a salon, and its cosmopolitan clientele shaped the young Greenburger more than school did. He attended Stuyvesant High School, the elite public school in Manhattan, but dropped out at fifteen. The New York Times reported that he moved in with a girlfriend on the Upper East Side, worked for his parents' agency and managed two bands. He later finished high school at night at Washington Irving High School and, years afterwards, earned a degree in public administration from Baruch College, graduating in 1974.
Two things from those years stayed with him. The first was comfort with contracts, numbers and negotiation, learned at an age when most children are learning long division. The second was the habit of moving between very different worlds, the book business and the street, European intellectuals and Manhattan landlords, without feeling he had to choose one.
Walking the Streets
Greenburger has described his move into real estate as intuitive rather than planned. He told Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg's Masters in Business in 2018 that he remembered walking the city, looking at buildings and architecture, and realizing he had a visceral connection to the built environment that had nothing obvious to do with his background.
He began, while still a teenager, by leasing out small walk-up office spaces in Midtown to small businesses, a model The Real Deal later likened to an early version of shared workspace. In 1966, with a $5,000 loan from his father, he set up the company that became Time Equities. At nineteen he bought his first building, a five-story brick rental at 23 Barrow Street in the West Village, with a few partners. Real Estate Weekly reported that the building cost about $65,000 and sold a couple of years later for somewhere between $85,000 and $95,000.
It was a modest gain, but it taught him the basic arithmetic of the trade, and he kept buying. New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s was losing population and businesses, and many landlords wanted out. Rent regulation made residential buildings unattractive to many investors, and prices reflected that. By the mid-1970s Greenburger had accumulated nearly thirty buildings. Financing them was a scramble. In Risk Game, his 2016 memoir written with Rebecca Paley, he described stringing together $35,000 in loans from seven different banks in 1978.
In 1971 his father died, and at twenty-two Greenburger took over the management of the literary agency as well. He converted it into a collaborative of agents who shared in its ownership and ran their own client lists under the family name. For roughly a decade he split his time about evenly between books and buildings, he later told Ritholtz, before cutting back his agency work to a small fraction of his week.
The Co-op King
The idea that made Greenburger's fortune was not new, and he has never claimed it was. Cooperative apartment buildings, in which residents own shares in a corporation that owns the building, had existed in New York for decades. What Greenburger noticed was where they did not exist. Co-ops were common at the two ends of the market: luxury buildings on Park Avenue, and limited-profit or union-sponsored housing for people of modest means. In between, for the middle class, ownership was rare.
He saw two kinds of building that could change that. One was the prewar walk-up in a very good Manhattan neighborhood such as Greenwich Village, the sort of building without an elevator or a doorman that an established developer would ignore but that a young professional would love to own. The other was the large apartment complex in the outer boroughs, where tenants had never been offered the chance to buy. In 1979 he completed his first conversion, on Bethune Street in the West Village, with help from a lawyer partner who had worked on conversions before.
What followed was one of the most rapid expansions in the city's residential market. Over roughly two decades Greenburger's firm converted more than 10,000 apartments in more than 100 buildings across Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, including the Delmonico Building and 1045 Park Avenue. The largest project was a complex then called Clinton Hill Apartments in Brooklyn: thirteen buildings, about 1,200 units, bankrupt when he bought it in 1981. Existing residents were offered their apartments for $15,000 and outsiders for $25,000. In 2016 a unit there sold for $860,000.
The business model rested on a simple exchange. Tenants got the chance to own their homes, often at a discount to market value. The sponsor, Greenburger, earned a profit on the difference between what he paid for the building and what the apartments sold for. Lenders were eager to finance it in the early 1980s, and within five years of his seven-bank scramble, Chemical Bank had extended him a $100 million credit line on the strength of his portfolio.
He was not immune to the economy. In the early 1980s, renovating his first building in Brooklyn Heights, he watched the prime rate climb towards 20 percent. His team paid the bank up front to buy mortgage rates down to about 12.75 percent for buyers, sold what units they could, rented the rest and sold those a few years later when conditions improved. He would use the same move, shifting a for-sale project to rental and waiting, many times again.
The Crash
The late 1980s nearly destroyed him. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 removed many of the tax advantages that had inflated property values; Greenburger later estimated it cut the value of most properties by 20 to 30 percent. The stock market crash of October 1987 and the savings and loan crisis that followed shut down lending. Buyers who could not get mortgages could not buy co-op apartments, and sponsors who could not sell apartments could not pay their loans. Many of the country's largest real estate companies went bankrupt.
Greenburger has said that from about 1988 into the early 1990s he did not know whether Time Equities would survive, and that he would have given it odds of about one in twenty. Many of his lenders had failed and been taken over by federal regulators, which meant there was often nobody on the other side of the table to negotiate with. He sold buildings to stay liquid.
He also made an unusual decision. In Risk Game, as summarized by The Real Deal, he described how his lawyer advised him to go to the New York State Attorney General's office, which regulated co-op conversions, and disclose that he was in financial trouble before he had defaulted on a single loan. His chief operating officer warned that it would be professional suicide. Greenburger went anyway. He built goodwill with regulators and helped the state devise a new disclosure requirement for co-op sponsors, but the publicity damaged him with lenders.
He came through, diminished but intact, and changed course. As the co-op market dried up, Time Equities shifted towards commercial and industrial property and income-producing buildings. Survival became the organizing principle of the business. Greenburger would later sum up the industry's economics in one line.
— Francis Greenburger, Risk Game, 2016The real estate industry has created far more bankruptcies than billionaires.
Buying Where Others Are Fighting
The rebuilt Time Equities looked for value where larger, more crowded capital was not. Greenburger's argument, repeated in interviews, is that markets everyone agrees are attractive compress returns until the margins are thin. In 2018 he pointed to New York itself, where global capital competed for every building, and to Toronto, where he said development margins had fallen to about 12 percent. His response was to go where the competition was not.
His first international investment illustrates the approach. In the mid-1990s a Montreal broker who had worked with him on an American deal told him there were bargains in the city. Greenburger went to a lunch with local developers and bankers that was pleasant until dessert, when an argument broke out over Quebec separatism. He realized that political anxiety and a long recession were depressing prices, and that the pricing did not yet fully reflect it. When it did, in about 1997 or 1998, he made his first purchase, a property bought from an entity owned by the Seagram family, which had decided to pull back from Montreal.
Over the following decades Time Equities bought office buildings, shopping centers, industrial property and apartments across the United States and in Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy, alongside a property in the Caribbean. The collection could look eccentric. The New York Times noted in 2014 that it had included a Nova Scotia outlet mall and a parking garage in Tallahassee, Florida. By 2015, according to the business-school accreditor AACSB, which named him one of its influential alumni leaders that year, the portfolio covered more than 18 million square feet in twenty-three states, five Canadian provinces and Berlin. By 2018 it owned property in thirty states and six countries. Much of the work was repositioning: buying underperforming buildings, fixing what was wrong, and in recent years adding the amenity lounges, co-working and wellness spaces that office tenants had come to expect. Greenburger described the firm's horizon as five to ten years, long enough to ride through a cycle rather than try to time it.
Fifty West Street
In 1982 Greenburger bought a site at the southern tip of Manhattan, three loft buildings beside the entrance to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. For twenty-five years Time Equities operated them as offices. He bought the property as an income investment, he later said, yielding about 10 percent, with no plan to redevelop it. In the 1990s, as tenants left and the city began to encourage residential conversions downtown, he started converting part of the building to apartments.
By the mid-2000s he had concluded that the site's views over New York Harbor justified something much bigger. He held an architectural competition and chose the Chicago-based architect Helmut Jahn to design a tower. The old buildings came down in 2007, and Time Equities raced to start foundations before a tax-abatement deadline on July 1, 2008. Work began that June.
Then Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008. Greenburger recognized almost immediately, he told Ritholtz, that building a condominium tower into that financial environment would be disastrous, and he stopped. His construction lender briefly declared him in default because the loan required building to continue, then backed down and renegotiated. The site sat for nearly five years. In 2013, with the market recovering, he secured a $288 million construction loan from a group of banks and about $110 million in equity from Elliott Management, and work resumed. The design dropped a planned hotel, and after Hurricane Sandy the building was redesigned to resist flooding.
The 64-story, roughly 780-foot tower topped out in 2015 and opened to residents in 2017. It was his first ground-up skyscraper. He has contrasted the experience with the renovation work that dominated his early career.
— Francis Greenburger, Masters in Business, 2018In one case, you're correcting the mistakes that somebody made, in the other case, you are making your own mistakes.
1000M
In 2014 Time Equities and JK Equities bought a long-vacant lot at 1000 South Michigan Avenue in Chicago, overlooking Grant Park, together with a neighboring loft building whose air rights gave them flexibility. Earlier developers had failed to build there. Greenburger brought in Jahn, with whom he was then finishing 50 West Street.
The project broke ground in late 2019 as a condominium tower. Months later the pandemic halted construction. Financing was lost, and in May 2021 Jahn was killed when two vehicles struck him while he was cycling near Chicago. The developers redesigned the project, converted it from for-sale condominiums to rental apartments, found new financing with the local investor Oak Capitals, and finished it. The 73-story, 738-unit tower opened in 2024, one of Jahn's last completed buildings.
Greenburger wrote a second book about it, Autobiography of a Skyscraper, again with Rebecca Paley, published in 2026. It tells the story of the tower through the people who built and run it, from concrete workers and window installers to the concierge, a choice that reflects a theme of his later interviews: that development is a team effort and the developer's real skill is assembling and directing the team.
The Agency That Outlived Its Founder
Sanford J. Greenburger Associates remains one of New York's respected literary agencies, still named after its founder and still based, like Time Equities, at 55 Fifth Avenue. Under the collaborative model Francis Greenburger introduced after 1971, its partner agents have represented, at various times, Dan Brown, James Patterson, Nicholas Sparks and Nelson DeMille. The agency also placed The G Spot, a sex-research book that became an international bestseller after a psychologist client told Greenburger about a conference presentation by the researcher Beverly Whipple; he assigned a woman agent in the office to pursue it.
For a short period the agency represented Stephen King. Greenburger told Ritholtz that the relationship ended because King felt there were conflicts with other clients. He recalled that King's earlier contract with Doubleday had capped the author's annual payout, a device from the 1970s intended to smooth taxable income, which in King's case turned into an absurdly long payout schedule because his books earned so much.
Greenburger stopped working directly with authors decades ago. He described his role to CityRealty as supporting the agents who work in the firm, and said he still read every new Dan Brown novel the day it arrived.
Art Omi
In 1992 Greenburger co-founded an international arts center in the hamlet of Omi, in Ghent, New York, in the Hudson Valley, together with the artists Sandi Slone and John Cross and others. Now called Art Omi, it runs residency programs for artists, writers and translators, architects, musicians and dancers, who are chosen by jury and attend at no cost except travel. By its own count it has hosted more than 2,400 residents from 114 countries. Its main house is named after the German publisher Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt, a link to the transatlantic book world of Greenburger's parents.
The center's sculpture and architecture park covers about 120 acres of meadow and woodland, is free to the public, and shows more than sixty large works at a time. Greenburger is a serious collector himself, with hundreds of contemporary works, and he was made a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. His latest arts project, Art Omi Pavilions, is a campus of individual pavilions on a 190-acre hilltop in Chatham, New York, each intended to hold a standalone legacy exhibition of a single artist or collection.
By the 2010s Greenburger was dividing his working life in a way few developers do. He told CityRealty that he thought of himself as a mixture of a traditional entrepreneur and a social entrepreneur, with two for-profit businesses, real estate and the family literary agency, and a set of non-profit commitments in art, education and criminal justice. In a later interview he estimated that he spent about 40 percent of his time on the non-profit side.
The education work is the least publicized. Greenburger chaired the Sports and Arts in Schools Foundation, since renamed New York Edge, which runs after-school programs in New York City's public schools. When he spoke to CityRealty, he described it as the largest provider of after-school programs in the city's schools, present in about 200 of them.
He brought the same habits to these organizations that he brought to real estate. He looked for a gap that existing institutions were not filling, put in his own money first, recruited professional managers, and was prepared to wait years for results. The approach tested his patience most severely in the project that grew out of his own family's experience.
A Father's Project
The project Greenburger has spent the most personal energy on in recent years began with his own family. In 2014 he told The New York Times that his son, who had received a series of diagnoses since childhood including oppositional defiant disorder and autism, had been arrested at eighteen in 2010 with a friend for trying to rob a cab. About a year later, in the grip of paranoid fears, his son set a fire in his apartment and then called the fire department. He was charged with arson, spent time at Rikers Island, and accepted a plea deal for a five-year prison sentence.
Greenburger asked prosecutors whether his son could be sent to a secure treatment facility instead of prison. The district attorney said he would consider it if Greenburger could find one. Greenburger told the Times he later realized he had been sent on a wild-goose chase: there were none.
— Francis Greenburger, The New York Times, 2014These aren't criminals. These are people who have committed crimes, mostly because they don't know any better or they are acting out on impulse.
He founded the Greenburger Center for Social and Criminal Justice in 2014 to design an alternative. The idea was a secure residential program, voluntary at entry, where people with serious mental illness facing felony charges could receive long-term treatment instead of a jail or prison term. The center bought property in the Bronx in 2016 and spent the next decade seeking approvals, funding and licenses. The facility, called Hope House on Crotona Park, a 16-bed, roughly $13 million building, was completed and held its ribbon-cutting in July 2026, with referrals subject to final court and city processes. Supporters see it as a model for diversion; some pretrial-reform advocates have criticised its use of bond-agency authority to keep participants in the program. Greenburger's son was never going to benefit from it directly. The project was a developer's answer to a gap he had discovered the hard way.
Greenburger, now in his late seventies, still runs Time Equities as chairman and chief executive. He has said he fails all the time and considers a success rate of around 650 out of 1,000 a good record. The advice he gives young people entering the business is to learn as much as they can and find ways to see what others do not, because following the crowd means accepting thin margins.
Part IIThe Playbook
Francis Greenburger has spent six decades in a business he describes as one that bankrupts far more people than it enriches. His principles are about surviving it: choosing where to compete, controlling how much can go wrong, and knowing when to stop. They also reflect an unusually broad life, in which a literary agency, an artist residency and a mental-health center taught him as much about risk as any building did.
The principles
- 1.Look for the gap between the two ends of a market.
- 2.Go where the capital is not.
- 3.Stop building the moment the market breaks.
- 4.Confess trouble to regulators before they find it.
- 5.Keep a second exit for every project.
- 6.Hold income property while you wait for the bigger idea.
- 7.Think in five-to-ten-year segments.
- 8.Turn a family business into a partnership.
- 9.Pick the architect by competition, then add a local expert.
- 10.Treat every building as a team sport.
- 11.Build the institution that should exist.
Principle 1
Look for the gap between the two ends of a market.
Greenburger did not invent the co-op. He noticed that New York's co-ops clustered at the luxury end and at the subsidised end, and that the middle class had almost no way to own an apartment. The walk-ups of Greenwich Village and the large complexes of Brooklyn were not the kind of property a Park Avenue sponsor would bother with, and not the kind of housing a union would build. That gap became a business worth more than 10,000 apartments.
The same pattern appears in many industries. Established players serve the premium customer well because the margins are high, and public or non-profit providers serve the lowest-income customer because they must. The middle is often neglected because it is harder to serve profitably at either firm's cost structure.
The skill is recognizing that a neglected segment is neglected for structural reasons, not because customers lack demand. Greenburger's tenants wanted to own; nobody had offered them the chance at a price they could afford.
Tactic: Map your market by price tier and list who serves each; if one tier has no specialist, find out whether the reason is lack of demand or simply that no incumbent's cost structure fits it.
Principle 2
Go where the capital is not.
Greenburger's recurring argument is that the markets everyone loves are the worst places to earn a return. When global capital crowds into New York or Toronto, prices rise until development margins are thin. His response has been to look at submarkets, secondary cities and troubled regions where pricing still reflects fear.
His entry into Montreal was a clear example. He noticed that political anxiety over Quebec separatism and a long recession were depressing prices, waited until the pricing reflected the risk, and bought from a seller that was leaving. Much of Time Equities' later portfolio came from the same habit: buying underperforming property in markets outside the spotlight.
The approach is not contrarian for its own sake. It requires an explanation for why prices are low and a judgment that the explanation is temporary or overstated.
Tactic: For any market you are considering, write down why prices are where they are; if the reason is a fear you believe is exaggerated or temporary, investigate further, and if the answer is that everyone wants in, look elsewhere.
Principle 3
Stop building the moment the market breaks.
When Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008, 50 West Street's foundations were barely started and the project had been planned around a $500 million financing. Greenburger concluded almost immediately that building a condominium tower into a frozen credit market would be disastrous, and he halted it. The site sat for nearly five years. When he restarted in 2013, with new financing and a revised design, the tower was completed and sold.
The decision was painful. He had already spent heavily on design, demolition and foundations, and stopping meant carrying the site with no revenue. But the costs already spent were gone either way, and continuing would have committed hundreds of millions more to a market with no buyers. Recognizing a sunk cost for what it is saved the project.
The same reflex applied at 1000M in Chicago, where the pandemic forced another pause and a switch from condominiums to rentals.
Tactic: For every major project, agree in advance on the market conditions that would trigger a pause, and when they occur, decide on continuing by looking only at future costs and revenues, not at what has already been spent.
Principle 4
Confess trouble to regulators before they find it.
As the co-op market collapsed in the late 1980s, Greenburger's lawyer advised him to go to the New York Attorney General, who oversaw co-op conversions, and disclose his financial difficulty before he had defaulted on any loan. His chief operating officer called it professional suicide. Greenburger went.
The move cost him with lenders when news of his troubles became public. But it built trust with the regulators who could have made his situation far worse, and it gave him a role in designing a new disclosure rule for co-op sponsors. When the crisis ended, he was still in business and still credible with the state.
Disclosure before you are forced to it is a way of choosing the terms on which bad news is heard. It does not make the news good, but it signals that you are not hiding anything.
Tactic: If you foresee a breach of any legal or contractual obligation, tell the relevant regulator or counterparty early, with a plan, rather than waiting for them to discover it.
Principle 5
Keep a second exit for every project.
In the high-interest-rate years of the early 1980s, Greenburger's first Brooklyn Heights renovation could not sell all its units. He bought down mortgage rates for buyers where he could, rented the remaining apartments, and sold them a few years later. At 1000M in Chicago, when the pandemic undercut condominium demand, the project was converted to rentals. In both cases the fallback kept the project alive.
He describes this as a core part of risk management: when a business plan goes wrong, switch strategies quickly, either to minimize losses or to extend the timeline until the market recovers. A building designed only for one outcome is fragile.
The Chicago purchase of the neighboring loft building, whose air rights could be used for the tower or sold if the tower did not go ahead, was another form of the same thinking.
Tactic: For each project, write down at least one alternative use or exit that would still repay the investment if the primary plan fails, and make design choices that keep that alternative open.
Principle 6
Hold income property while you wait for the bigger idea.
Greenburger bought the 50 West Street site in 1982 as a fully leased income property earning about 10 percent. He operated it as offices for twenty-five years. Only when the downtown market changed and he saw the potential of its harbour views did he demolish it and build a skyscraper.
That patience meant the site paid for itself for decades before it became a development project. The eventual tower was built on land bought at early-1980s prices, a large advantage over competitors assembling downtown sites in the 2000s.
Income property gives an investor time. A site that pays its own carrying costs can wait for the right moment; a site that only makes sense as a development must be built on a fixed schedule, whatever the market is doing.
Tactic: When acquiring a property with long-term redevelopment potential, make sure its current use covers its costs, so that you can choose the timing of the larger project rather than having it forced on you.
Principle 7
Think in five-to-ten-year segments.
Greenburger told Ritholtz that Time Equities does not think in twelve- or twenty-four-month periods but in five- and ten-year ones. Real estate exists over long periods, he argued, and a firm working on that horizon can pass through an entire cycle within the life of one investment.
This time horizon shapes behavior. It makes an investor less anxious about where the cycle currently stands, more willing to buy underperforming assets that need years of repositioning, and less likely to sell at the bottom. It also requires financing that will not force a sale before the plan has played out.
The late-1980s crisis showed him what happens when financing and horizon do not match. His later caution about leverage reflected that lesson.
Tactic: Match the term of your financing to the time your plan actually needs; if the plan takes seven years, do not fund it with money that must be repaid or refinanced in two.
Principle 8
Turn a family business into a partnership.
When Sanford Greenburger died in 1971, his son could have run the agency as a family firm. Instead he converted it into a collaborative in which agents shared ownership and ran their own lists under the Greenburger name. The agency has since represented some of the best-selling authors in the world and is known as a training ground for agents and editors.
The structure let Greenburger step back from day-to-day representation within about a decade while the business continued to grow. The agents had their own stake in its success, so it did not depend on the founder's family or on his attention.
Businesses built on personal relationships, such as agencies, law firms and advisory practices, are especially vulnerable to the departure of a founder. Sharing ownership with the people who hold those relationships is one of the few ways to keep them.
Tactic: If your business depends on relationships held by individual employees, consider giving those employees a stake in the firm's name and future so that the relationships stay with the institution.
Principle 9
Pick the architect by competition, then add a local expert.
For 50 West Street, Greenburger held a competition and chose Helmut Jahn, whose concept he judged the strongest. Because Jahn's office was in Chicago and New York's building environment is highly specialised, he paired him with SLCE, a New York executive architect. Greenburger credited SLCE with solving problems he had not understood, such as using sealed void spaces on the side of the tower facing a neighboring building, so that unusable floor area could be moved to the top where the views were best.
The combination got him an ambitious design and the technical and regulatory knowledge to build it. He later said one of his late discoveries was his own architectural sense, and his ability to redirect an architect's work when it was not serving the building's purpose.
A star designer brings vision, and a local specialist brings knowledge of rules and conditions. Most complex projects need both, and few individuals provide both.
Tactic: On any project that combines creative ambition with local complexity, hire the best creative lead you can find and pair them deliberately with a specialist who knows the local rules, giving each a clearly defined role.
Principle 10
Treat every building as a team sport.
Autobiography of a Skyscraper, Greenburger's account of 1000M, is organized around the people who made the tower, from concrete workers to concierges, rather than around the developer. The approach reflects a conviction he returns to often: development is teamwork between developer, architect, contractors, lenders and the people who will run the building.
At 1000M that team had to survive a pandemic shutdown, the loss of construction financing, a switch from condominiums to rentals and the death of the architect. The project was completed because the partners, Jahn's firm, the contractor and new investors kept working together through each setback.
A developer who sees himself as the sole author of a building is likely to lose the people he needs when things go wrong. Credit shared generously is a form of insurance.
Tactic: On your next major project, publicly name and thank the people outside your own firm whose work made it possible, and involve them early when problems arise rather than presenting them with decisions already made.
Principle 11
Build the institution that should exist.
When a prosecutor told Greenburger he would consider a treatment alternative for his son if one existed, Greenburger discovered there was none. His response was a developer's response: he set up the Greenburger Center for Social and Criminal Justice in 2014 and spent more than a decade on land, approvals, funding and licensing to build Hope House in the Bronx, which opened in 2026.
Art Omi followed a similar logic in the arts. He saw the value of bringing international artists and writers together and built a place for it, then kept it going for more than three decades.
Institutions like these take far longer than a building, and they depend on government, courts and communities that the founder does not control. They also attract criticism, as Hope House did from some pretrial-reform advocates. Greenburger's persistence reflects the same patience he applies to real estate cycles.
Tactic: When you find a gap that affects many people and that existing institutions will not fill, estimate the time and partners a solution would need, commit only if you can sustain it for that period, and start with a small pilot that proves the model.
Free playbook
Get The Business Model Playbook
58 business models, one visual page each: how the money flows, the metrics that matter, and who runs it. Free when you join the Faster Than Normal email.
Free. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Part IIIMaxims
-
A good crowd means bad prices. When every investor agrees on a market, the returns have usually already been spent. The best buys are found where there is a reason for fear.
-
Early losses teach the cheapest lessons. Greenburger's first building produced a modest gain and a great deal of education. Learning the trade on a small building costs far less than learning it on a large one.
-
Bankers disappear when you need them most. In the late 1980s, many of his lenders had failed and been taken over by federal regulators. Plan for a crisis in which there is nobody to negotiate with.
-
Honesty has a price and a payoff. Disclosing his trouble to the state cost him with lenders and saved him with regulators. Candor is rarely free, but concealment is usually more expensive.
-
Renovation forgives, construction does not. Fixing someone else's building means correcting known mistakes; building from scratch means discovering your own. Plan for the difference in risk.
-
Views are value. The case for 50 West Street was its outlook over the harbour. Some of the most important features of a property cannot be built, only recognized.
-
The book business teaches the property business. Negotiating contracts for authors as a teenager prepared Greenburger for negotiating with banks. Skills transfer between industries more often than résumés suggest.
-
A pause is not a failure. Two of his towers stopped for years before they were finished. Waiting for the right market is often the most productive decision available.
-
Private tragedy can become public work. His son's case exposed a gap in how the justice system treats mental illness. Turning a personal experience into an institution can help people the founder will never meet.
In Their Own Words
The key to real estate success isn't just buying low and selling high—it's understanding the forces that drive urban change and positioning yourself ahead of those forces.— Francis Greenburger
Crisis creates opportunity, but only for those who have prepared for it. The key is maintaining financial flexibility so you can act when others cannot.— Francis Greenburger
Success in business isn't about being right all the time—it's about being right more often than you're wrong, and making sure your wins are bigger than your losses.— Francis Greenburger
The biggest risk is not taking any risk at all. But the key is taking calculated risks based on thorough analysis, not gambling based on hope.— Francis Greenburger
Most people see problems where I see opportunities. The difference is in how you frame the situation and what resources you bring to bear on it.— Francis Greenburger
Time is the most valuable asset in any investment. If you can afford to wait, you can afford to win.— Francis Greenburger
Patience isn't just a virtue in business—it's a competitive advantage. Most investors can't wait, which creates opportunities for those who can.— Francis Greenburger
Data tells you what happened. Analysis tells you why it happened. Insight tells you what will happen next.— Francis Greenburger
The market is always right in the short term and often wrong in the long term. Success comes from understanding the difference.— Francis Greenburger
Everyone has access to the same information. The advantage comes from asking better questions and seeing patterns that others miss.— Francis Greenburger
The best entrepreneurs don't just solve problems—they solve problems that people don't even know they have yet.— Francis Greenburger
Building a business is like developing real estate—you need a good location, solid fundamentals, and the patience to let value compound over time.— Francis Greenburger
Whether you're investing in real estate or representing authors, you're really investing in people. Properties and books are just the vehicles.— Francis Greenburger
The best deals come from relationships, not transactions. Invest in people first, and opportunities will follow.— Francis Greenburger
Talent is everywhere, but the ability to recognize and develop it is rare. That's where the real value creation happens.— Francis Greenburger
The moment you think you've figured out the market is the moment the market changes. Humility and continuous learning are essential.— Francis Greenburger
Every mistake is expensive, but not learning from your mistakes is even more expensive.— Francis Greenburger
Success isn't about avoiding failure—it's about failing fast, learning quickly, and adapting your approach based on what you discover.— Francis Greenburger
The measure of a leader isn't what they accomplish personally, but what they enable others to accomplish.— Francis Greenburger
Building a lasting business means creating something that can succeed without you. That's the ultimate test of entrepreneurial success.— Francis Greenburger
Legacy isn't about the wealth you accumulate—it's about the value you create and the people you develop along the way.— Francis Greenburger
Further reading
- Risk Game: Self Portrait of an Entrepreneur by Francis J. Greenburger
