The Closing: Meredith Marshall

Meredith Marshall was a fledgling Brooklyn developer, doing a handful of modest multifamily deals, when he came across a hot-sheet hotel in Clinton Hill that would change his life.

Built in 1851 to house the Brooklyn Society for the Relief of Respectable, Aged, Indigent Females, the property at 320 Washington Avenue was by the late 20th century no longer respectable. Indeed, according to a neighborhood newsletter, it was now occupied by “ladies by the hour who brought only scanty-panty testimonials of propriety.”

The building, known colloquially as the Graham Home for Old Ladies, had gorgeous bones and a promising location, but it was in a historic district, requiring preservation of the facade. “It had these big corridors, these big staircases, it didn’t pencil for anything,” Marshall said. “We didn’t know any better, so we had an offer on it and we put down our life savings. And when we brought people through, they said, ‘This cannot work.’”

Marshall and his partner, Geoff Flournoy, were advised by a contact from Guyana to try a radical approach: “Take this building down, but put steel reinforcements in,” Marshall recalled. “Effectively, we demolished the building after we shored it up and created a different core. All these engineering firms were saying you had to demolish it and gut it and then shore it up, which would have put us way over budget. And he came up with that strategy which really got us on the map.”

Had it failed, the $2.3 million acquisition and condominium conversion would have wiped out the partners. Instead, the project’s 25 units sold out when they hit the market in 2002, laying the foundation for one of New York’s most under-the-radar development empires. 

Today, without much fanfare, Marshall and Flournoy’s BRP Companies finds itself among the ranks of New York City’s biggest developers, with 9 million square feet in the pipeline across several projects, including La Central, a nearly 1,000-unit workforce housing project in the Bronx, and the new headquarters of the National Urban League in Harlem. One of its major backers is Goldman Sachs’ Urban Investment Group, which started with a $20 million equity investment in 2007 and has since committed over $500 million to the company’s projects.

“We all were doing this part-time, we all had full-time jobs. I lost sleep over it,” Marshall recalled of the Old Ladies deal. “And my business partner, Geoff, his father said something: ‘I started in my late 40s. If you guys start now, in your late 20s, there’s no turning back — go ahead and do it.’”

Marshall and The Real Deal discussed his family’s roots, his unorthodox career, lessons from titans such as Bruce Wasserstein and Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and his quest to reclaim the development narrative in New York.  

Born: September 17, 1965
Hometown: Brooklyn, New York
Lives in: Upper West Side, Manhattan
Family: Married, three children

You were the first Black family on your block in East Flatbush. What was that like?

The first night, some people ripped off some of the siding from the house. 

There were some other “microaggressions,” as they call it today, but my parents were tough. They had a house — they dealt with it. Someone insulted me when I was young, and my father went at them with a tool. They had to hold him back. 

Before long, more African-American, African-Caribbean families moved in. And it was a very nice mix, we had Italians, Jewish people, Irish. People had pools in the backyard. We had the deli at the corner that had eclairs and all those things. 

When you took your wife to Barbados to meet your extended family, you learned something about your paternal grandfather. 

His 95-year-old cousin, who was still working his own plot of land, told me, “You remind me of your granddad.”

My grandfather wanted to be a world traveler — Barbados was too small for him. He was a master carpenter, and Cuba was building hotels and casinos at the time. He went there and started to organize the workers — he didn’t like the way they were treated. And according to his cousin, he was on a scaffold and someone tripped the scaffolding and he broke his neck and was buried in Havana. 

What lessons did you take from your own father?

He said, if you make a dollar, save 50 cents. He read the full New York Times every Sunday. He drove a bus, and I knew at some point that his intellect and his being was beyond what he was in terms of occupation — nothing wrong with that occupation, but he was the best math student in his primary school. He didn’t have parents, so he could only go so far; his surroundings didn’t let him. He always said he was bigger than a small island, and so he wanted to come to America. He was the first one [in the family]. 

What elements of your Caribbean background have stuck with you? Play any cricket?

I used to go watch cricket, but I made the transition to baseball. My kids are serious baseball players. I’m the smallest guy in the house now; the 14-year-old grew taller than me. 

How does it feel when that happens?

I could still take them. But at some point, that’s going to run out. 

What sort of platform do you want to give your kids?

I think they’re missing the grit we had. When I was 10, my mother would give me the grocery list and $100. I knew how to buy meat and fish, and I knew the tradeoffs. I knew if it was $101, I would run short. Those things, my kids don’t have. They order their shoes with my Apple Pay on Amazon. It’s not their fault. But I think part of the grit, part of the delayed gratification, part of that is that if there are 100 people in the room and there are only five slots, I’m gonna get those five slots. My kids say everybody should get a participation award. I talk to a lot of my peers, and we think the kids are missing that toughness that we had growing up in a working-class neighborhood. 

What was your first job?

I was the guy that organized the kids to clean the car. We would bag groceries. We would go to the store and pick up little things for the elderly in my neighborhood. I wasn’t the best worker. I was the best organizer. We divvied the money up accordingly, and maybe I got a little more. 

We worked for a photography company as messengers. And I remember some guys with big offices said, “Son, you can be here. Work hard in school.” Some of them would make you go through the back, and that stayed with me, because I treat everyone the same. I treat everybody as if they’re front-door people.

What does money mean to you? 

You need to have money to take care of your own personal needs, but also to give you optionality. Family members would borrow from my dad, and he always saved money, but I knew there was another way. I used to watch soap operas with my mom, and I would see “Guiding Light,” and these guys would buy companies and had all those toys. So I always wanted to be that business guy.

You spent quite a bit of time in Africa as an investor in the early ’90s before you started your own development shop.

[Zimbabwe’s then-President] Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF [political party], they were in good standing at the time with the U.S. We met them at one of the fancy hotels here. After my stint at Wasserstein Perella, we formed a private equity emerging market advisory firm called Musa Capital [backed by Prince Alwaleed]. We were in Asia and Europe with joint venture partners, but always inward-looking at African investments. I probably visited 30 countries in Africa at the highest level. We bought fish factories from the government of Uganda, invested in banks in Nigeria. 

Doing business in Africa at the time, I’m sure you learned some hard lessons.

Definitely. And we got burned a few times by partners who had different perspectives. And I can’t blame them. They’re in a very difficult environment, and you’re only as good as the environment you operate in. Sometimes you could have good guys trapped in a bad system. 

You’ve worked for two very different titans: M&A kingpin Bruce Wasserstein and a Saudi royal, investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. What did you absorb from them?

From Bruce, we learned the art of negotiation, how to distill information. The big picture, but also on a micro level, how do you maneuver people? It was a wonderful three years. I worked seven days a week, my roommate was my business partner. But you can do that when you’re 27 years old.

Prince Alwaleed’s thing was always relationships. And promotion. He’s great at promotion. When people know who you are, it helps because you get the telephone call before someone else. 

Do you ever think about your position as one of the few major Black developers, and the responsibility that might bring?

More so now. I was born right after the Civil Rights Act. But [being cut off from] public accommodation, not benefiting from the G.I. Bill, the FHA and redlining, all those things left Black folks trapped. So it’s not like we’re special. It’s that people that came before us didn’t have the opportunity. And so I don’t take that lightly. I’m spending a lot of my time with younger developers, younger people who want to get into the business, partnering with groups that may not have the resources we have. 

How did developers lose control of the housing narrative? How did adding more housing become, in a sense, a four-letter word?

I think for political reasons, if you had to go after one group, you want to go after the group that most people have to pay every month — that guy’s the bad guy. 

But the person building workforce housing is not a bad actor. You’re living in a place that somebody had to build. It’s easy to have politicians come in and cut a ribbon, take a picture, but yet they rail against you. You can’t let that happen. 

So now we’re going to be part of commissions and work with them because we have to change the narrative. We need more housing for everyone. So when they say, “housing for all,” it’s just not putting restrictive measures in place, right? Like rent control or saying, “No, this housing is not 100 percent affordable.” That actually exacerbates the situation and gentrification, quite frankly.

I don’t know why we can’t figure out a way to create more housing without city and state largesse. We need regulatory relief, and we need some catalytic investment. But most of it can come from the private sector. 

What is your moonshot? The project you wish you could replicate?

I want to change the trajectory of neighborhoods. My kids joke, they think I’m an Uber driver. I drive a car [a GMC truck] that Uber drivers drive. I have my Yankee cap and I just go in neighborhoods and drive around. If you look at the investment, it’s all Manhattan, Gold Coast of Queens, Downtown Brooklyn, largely. There’s some buildings [outside of that], but the neighborhoods haven’t changed since I’ve been around. We haven’t really included a large swath of the population. 

What’s your biggest vice?

Ice cream. I worked at Baskin-Robbins. I like 50 flavors. 

What’s your favorite movie?

“Coming to America.” I watched that probably 50 times. When I was younger, I swear, I walked down the street at NYU and people thought I was Eddie Murphy. There’s a part in the subway station, when [Lisa] gives [Prince Akeem] back the $20 million earrings, the station says Sutphin and Archer. And I’m building my development in Jamaica, Queens, right at that train station. 

You get just one line on your tombstone. What is it?

Let the work I’ve done speak for me.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.