COMPANY: WinnDevelopment
TITLE: Chairman
AGE: 68
FAMILY: Wife Marla, four sons, three daughters-in-law, and six grandchildren
FAVORITE QUOTE: “The quality of the opportunity is inversely proportional to the quality of the offering materials.”
FAVORITE BOOK: “Atlas Shrugged”by Ayn Rand
LEADERSHIP PHILOSOPHY: The only way to do it is to do it. You can write it down; you can talk about it; or you can actually do it.
PROUDEST ACCOMPLISHMENT: Building a meaningful and impactful professional life while at the same time creating a happy family where my wife and adult kids actually want to spend time with me.
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As president and managing partner of WinnDevelopment, Larry Curtis helped grow WinnCompanies’ portfolio from 3,000 units in 1987 to 116,000 units today, generating economic impact of more than $1 billion in the past decade.
He says he’s accomplished that largely by being nice.
“When I look back at my career and hopefully look forward on an even greater career, being nice and working with people has a way of doubling and tripling relationships and opportunities,” Curtis says. “In the business of developing real estate, we have what I call the four Cs: conceptualize, capitalize, construct, and cash out. Finding the opportunities, the first C, results from relationship-building.”
Curtis’ great-uncle, who owned a boutique shoe store in Philadelphia, taught him how to win friends and influence people when he was still a boy. “He basically made his living being nice,” Curtis says. Curtis’ father, an attorney in Massapequa, New York, taught him to meet one new person every day—a practice that has also forwarded his career.
Getting to know hotel doormen and people in line at Starbucks helped him see—earlier than most—the need for workforce housing to serve people who were “working hard, doing everything right, and still closed out of the housing market,” he says. With properties like The Watson, an award-winning 140-unit community with 86 workforce units in Quincy, Massachusetts, WinnDevelopment serves that population.
When Curtis walks Winn properties, he often meets residents who thank him for providing a great place to live, which may be the most gratifying iteration of his quest to meet someone new every day—as well as his life’s work, he says. “That doesn’t happen without a great team,” he’s quick to add. “It happened through intensity of effort.”
Residents love Winn properties because the company builds what he calls “undifferentiated housing,” Curtis says. The properties don’t fit stereotypes of affordable housing, he says. “It feels like any other housing—luxury housing and maybe even better.”
Building Relationships and Community
Curtis decided at a young age, after attending a Christmas party at the mansion of his father’s biggest client, that one day he would live in “the house on top of the hill.” He mowed lawns, worked odd jobs, and retrieved shopping carts from parking lots for $1.65 an hour, saved his wages, and bought his first house for $17,000 when he was 18. He fixed it up and flipped it for $34,000. That taught him that “anybody can make money in real estate,” he says, and he set out to be a developer.
After earning an architecture degree at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City, Curtis curated his own graduate school curriculum at Harvard, studying design, accounting, zoning, and planning law and taking some courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
At Winn, he says, he has been less a developer (a word he says didn’t even exist when he got into the business) and more a builder—“surely a builder of affordable housing, but also a builder of a community that came from years of relationship building,” he says.
Curtis saw opportunity in transforming vacant historic structures into housing long before anyone else did. In 2003, Winn bought the oldest surviving cotton textile mill yard in the United States, Boott Mills East in Lowell, Massachusetts, and used historic rehabilitation tax credits to redevelop it into the Apartments and Lofts at Boott Mills. Winn has since transformed 47 historic structures in seven states into more than 5,400 apartments.
“Building new buildings inside old buildings is the greatest anti-NIMBYism around,” Curtis says. While building on vacant land almost inevitably draws resident protests, rehabilitating blighted buildings that have sat empty for 20 years brings “the hug-fest,” he says. “It’s also a great way to revitalize communities.”
Curtis pioneered what he calls the “used housing business” in Massachusetts, rehabilitating unregulated housing in gentrifying communities into long-term affordable housing, and “instant affordable housing,” converting failed condominium projects, says Catherine Racer, undersecretary of housing development for the Massachusetts Office of Housing and Livable Communities. Those approaches, she says, have created “thousands of units of long-term affordable housing in Massachusetts without the delays and cost factors associated with entitlement and new construction.”
Laughter and Larryisms
Just as important, Racer says, Curtis is fun to work with. “We have had hundreds of conversations over the years,” she says. “I think every conversation has included laughter.”
An analog guy, Curtis has been jotting down what he calls “the unintended wisdom of others” in black-and-white school notebooks for 40 years. The practice keeps him “sitting at the edge of my chair waiting for somebody to say something that makes my quote book” at even the dullest meetings, he says. The quotes are also raw material for a book he plans to publish.
He still runs every day off a handwritten to-do list. “If it makes my sheet, it’s going to get done,” he says, because “the only way to do it is to do it.” That’s what Curtis calls a “Larryism,” and he has plenty of them. “The quality of the opportunity is inversely proportional to the quality of the offering documents” is one. “The unfortunate part about this business is somebody actually has to do the work” is another.
As Curtis moves to wind down his career, he’s gratified that he’s built “not just buildings but better lives” over the past 40 years. In January, he became chairman of WinnDevelopment and handed daily management responsibility to his longtime second-in-command, Adam Stein. He’s become a fitness fanatic “so I can spend time with family and friends for decades to come,” and he’s looking forward to spending more time with his six grandchildren. But he’s not ready to leave the industry that he has helped shape—and that has shaped him—quite yet.
“We’ve never had a greater need for affordable housing, and it’s never been more difficult to create,” he says. The skyrocketing costs of building, the economic environment and NIMBYism make it harder than ever to build, he says.
But he hasn’t given up hope. Two years ago, Curtis became a lecturer in the master of real estate program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, the same program he graduated from 40 years ago. The students there fill him with optimism about the industry’s future.
“When I was a student, I cared about getting a career, getting a job, and making money,” he says. “These students truly want to solve problems. Yeah, they want to have a good career, but they also want to have an impact. So, they’re teaching me something I didn’t know at the same age—that you can do both.”