Square Feet | Interview: Away From The Limelight, A Builder Makes His Mark

IN the sometimes flamboyant world of property development, Joshua L. Muss has established a reputation as an unobtrusive builder.

He just quietly goes ahead and figures out how to develop a project, said Steven Spinola, the president of the Real Estate Board of New York, who has known Mr. Muss for about 25 years.

Recently, at a site in Flushing, Queens, where Mr. Muss is planning a 3.3-million-square-foot retail and residential complex, I was impressed by the fact that he didnt say, Ive got this site — tell me what I can build on it, Mr. Spinola said. Instead, he was thinking about how he was going to change the neighborhood.

This understated style has also benefited Muss Development, the family-owned company based in Forest Hills, Queens, that Mr. Muss has been running for the past 23 years, after his father and grandfather. The company has been in business for 100 years.

Under his leadership, the company has expanded in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island with several large developments, including the 656-room New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge and the 850-unit Oceana Condominium and Club in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

The evolution from builder to community visionary has been generations in the making. At the start of the 20th century, Mr. Musss grandfather, Isaac Muss, emigrated from Russia to South Africa, where he built barracks during the second Boer War, and then to Brooklyn, where he immediately began building housing in order to support his family, which grew to 11 children. Six of them were boys, and the five surviving ones became builders, including Mr. Musss father, Hyman Muss.

The family was one of 123 builders featured in the book Building Up Greater Brooklyn (Brooklyn Biographical Society, 1925). Mr. Muss said Muss Development has developed about 18 million square feet of space over its 100-year history, surviving the ups and downs of the economy.

The Depression virtually wiped my grandfather out, but the family continued in business, said Mr. Muss, who is 65. To support himself during the Depression, my father, who had graduated law school, became an ordained rabbi. He couldnt make a living as a developer or a lawyer, so he became a pulpit rabbi.

Mr. Muss said he knew from childhood that he, too, was destined to be a builder. After graduating from Yeshiva College and Harvard Law School, he joined the company in 1965 and spent a decade learning the business.

For five years, I listened to everything my father said and did, and everything he said was right, Mr. Muss said. The next five years, I figured that everything he said and did was wrong. After that, I came to appreciate what he did right and what he did wrong, and I started to contribute.

When his first development attempt went awry after the financier ran out of money in the mid-1970s, Mr. Muss took on a project from the home builder Kaufman & Broad, which had struggled for more than a decade to get development approvals for a tract of land on the South Shore of Staten Island.

Mr. Muss received the necessary approvals within two years. He said he learned that intestinal fortitude was sometimes necessary to close a deal.

The final approval was to get a sewer outfall permit, which went over somebody elses property, which was a ship junkyard, he recalled. I went out with one of my contractors, who knew the landowner, and for the first time ever, started drinking.

We sat on the porch in the middle of this desolate area, talking to the owner, and I dont know what I was drinking, but it had a kick, he continued. After about six or eight sessions, we convinced him to give us the approval to go across his land.

Before his father caught on, Mr. Muss went back to being a virtual teetotaler. He then developed a 75-acre patch into Woodbrooke, a large residential community on Staten Island with about 1,200 condominium units.

To be a developer in the true sense of the word, you have to have anywhere from 10 to 20 years of experience to understand the risks that are inherent, the time frames, the disappointments, the costs, the rewards, the net gross and the income levels, Mr. Muss said. Honestly, unless youve suffered a little bit, you really dont appreciate what it takes.

Mr. Musss wisdom has helped to get Muss Development — which still does all its own construction — through the real estate markets leaner times. It took the company 15 years to develop the first phase of the Marriott in Brooklyn, beginning in 1983.

We started this project in times of greatness; it evolved into an era of hunger, Mr. Muss said.

Downtown Brooklyn at the time was not the competitor it is today to office markets in Lower Manhattan and New Jersey. But Muss Development persisted and, when the hotel succeeded, started an expansion to make it one of the larger hotels in New York City.

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