As developers, we go through the long grind to bring homes and commercial buildings into reality. That grind includes finding and negotiating the purchase of a piece of land, creating a vision for the site, creating a legal plan that can be approved, getting financing for the project, surviving the approvals process, market research, hiring consultants, completing detailed design, construction tendering, construction management, sales or leasing and finally post occupancy management. Each step is fraught with a lot of risk and expense. If anything goes wrong at any step, the entire project is in jeopardy along with your assets.
The process is not for the faint of heart – and along the way, having to keep our eyes fixed on the bottom line at each step has a way of pulling one’s gaze away from the horizon and focusing deep in the trench. Interestingly because of this pressure, it is very easy to completely lose track of the larger goals of building great communities and buildings that brought us all to this industry in the first place. Between this process and the dominance of minimum acceptable performance-oriented building standards, we are creating places that function, but have little meaning or culture.
In the context of these grinding forces, developers who manage to create places that have beauty and meaning or any level of emotional connection to their community deserve high praise. Everything in the process is stacked against them achieving these goals and it is only through their internal sense of commitment to ideals, force of will and enormous creativity that they create anything that is special for us all to experience and appreciate.