City Vision
“We often send Ronnie materials the night before a meeting; he hates coming into a meeting not having seen the documents beforehand. Sometimes project managers will bristle against that idea, because if you send him papers ahead of time, he will absolutely go through every one of them and change every one of them.” –Daniel Gehman, principal, Thomas P. Cox: Architects
“I’m an organizational nightmare,” Ratner declares, shaking his head as he walks into his office on the 11th floor of the Terminal Tower, part of Forest City’s Tower City Center redevelopment project. Ratner isn’t exaggerating: His desk is piled so high with stacks of papers that the desk’s surface is hidden from view, while floor plans and project submittal binders line the floor and windowsills.
But the strategy works. Ratner, together with a highly skilled executive team of both relatives and non-family members, has grown the company’s residential arm into one of Forest City’s best performing divisions. “Ronnie’s business alone is bigger than the whole company was 10 years ago,” says Chuck Ratner. At the end of fiscal 2005, the residential group’s assets were $2.2 billion, or 27 percent of the total assets of Forest City Enterprises. (The company owns interests in 34,829 apartment units at 123 properties, ranging from senior and assisted living projects to high-end luxury communities.) The division also contributes about one-third of the company’s earnings.
Such numbers are the result of some grand plans by Ratner and his team. Among the company’s mega mixed-use endeavors: Atlantic Yards, a mixed-use development in Brooklyn expected to include a new Frank Gehry-designed arena for the New Jersey Nets basketball team (in which Forest City is an investor); the redevelopment of a 42-acre former military site in Washington, D.C., into the Southeast Federal Center mixed-use community; the 2 million-square-foot Waterfront project in D.C., which involves the redevelopment of the former Waterside Mall; and the newly completed University Park at MIT, a 27-acre project adjacent to MIT’s Cambridge campus. (For more on University Park, look for the November 2006 issue of Multifamily Executive.)
As big and intimidating as these projects may be, they never seem to scare Ratner, says Gross, a long-time colleague. “The size of a project doesn’t seem to faze him,” Gross observes. “He will just go about analyzing a project–whether it’s big or small–in the same way. He’s great at conceptualizing a project, which is the real genius of a work.”
“He has what I consider super intellect and will go ahead with projects where others fear to tread,” says Sam Miller, Forest City Enterprises’ co-chairman of the board and treasurer. “He never takes no for an answer, and at the end of the day I know very few undertakings that Ronnie has done that haven’t been eminently successful.”
Yet while Ratner sees the big picture, he can also focus on the fine points of a project or property. “He cares a great deal about detail,” says Chuck Ratner. “He’s very concerned about what the kitchen countertops look like and what appliances and light fixtures are used.” But the design-minded CEO never forgets the bottom line. When Ratner visited an old office building in L.A. that Forest City was converting into condos, he noticed an unnecessary elevator shaft that could be removed and replaced with a unit on each level. “He added substantial value to the building,” says his brother.
And Ratner, who is nearly 60, does all this work with an enormous amount of verve. “Ron is a ball of energy,” say Judith Rawson, mayor of Shaker Heights, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb where Forest City is working on a major transit-oriented development. “We could use a thousand more just like him.”
