Scott Stanford:

Hi everybody, and welcome to The Infrastructors, the premier podcast for engaging conversation with influential thought leaders in AI, tech, government policy, and smart city innovation. Today's guest is the president of the Howard Hughes Corporation, Greg Fitchitt.

So Greg, before we get into the crux of this conversation, how did you get into the real estate business -- commercial and residential real estate. Is that something you were interested in as you hit college and after or was it just something that came up on you?

Greg Fitchitt:

It was not. I was a philosophy major in college. I spent a few years in Los Angeles. Spent a few years after that trying to be an actor in Hollywood.

Scott Stanford:

You look like an actor.

Greg Fitchitt:

Thanks. Unfortunately, not enough people in Hollywood felt that way. So, after a few years of that, I decided, "Well, I don't know if I want to keep trying to do this and be struggling to pay the rent when I'm 40 or 50 years old and through a temp job, I ended up working at Guess Jeans.

Scott Stanford:

Okay.

Greg Fitchitt:

If you remember Guess Jeans.

Scott Stanford:

I remember Guess Jeans, yes.

Greg Fitchitt:

And I started like basically building stores in malls.

Scott Stanford:

Who was the big model, the Guess Jeans model?

Greg Fitchitt:

Claudia Schiffer.

Scott Stanford:

Claudia Schiffer.

Greg Fitchitt:

Claudia Schiffer.

Scott Stanford:

Married to David Copperfield.

Greg Fitchitt:

That's right. That's right.

Scott Stanford:

Okay.

Greg Fitchitt:

I just kind of, again, through a temp job, found myself in the real estate business and found out that I really liked it. It was the project sort of nature of things of where you see something go from a deal to designs with an architect and then you hire a contractor and then, in a pretty short space of time, you build a complete store and I just really found that really satisfying. So, that's how I found myself in the real estate business. Went back to school because my philosophy major was maybe helpful but wasn't exactly a business-oriented degree. So, I went back to school at UCLA and then went to work for Westfield. I flipped from the tenant side of the business to the landlord side of the business and was there for 15 years. That's where I got into the world of development.

Scott Stanford:

Right. And Westfield, of course, the big malls-

Greg Fitchitt:

The big shopping center. Yeah.

Scott Stanford:

...all across America.

Greg Fitchitt:

Malls across the country and did a lot of work on the west coast there. My sort of big project there that I finished up with was a redevelopment of a big shopping center in University Town Center in La Jolla. Big mixed-use project. That was the first project where I got into something other than just retail. Had a big residential entitlement there, and then had an opportunity to come and work for Howard Hughes. In retrospect, looks like getting out of the mall business might have been a really good move, but I can't say it was because I foresaw anything. It was just dumb luck.

But yeah. Came to work for Howard Hughes and Howard Hughes really is a city builder. We develop all types of real estate, commercial real estate. We do residential. We do office. We do retail. We do hotels, everything that comes together for a community.

Scott Stanford:

Now, we all know Howard Hughes from history and The Aviator, the Leonardo DiCaprio movie, and he was into making movies and things like that. How did his name become associated with commercial real estate?

Greg Fitchitt:

Yeah, he's a fascinating character, a true innovator, entrepreneur, engineer, amazing businessman. People know about the movies. They know about the aviation, but most of them don't know about the real estate. He also purchased 22,000 acres in the West Valley of Las Vegas with the idea of turning that into a master plan community, a small city, which after his passing, that land was acquired by the Rouse Company, which is also part of the Howard Hughes Corporation.

So that's kind of the genesis of how we acquired the name. The Howard Hughes Corporation came out of the restructuring of General Growth, which was a mall company in the late sort of 2000s, got out over their skis, and went through a restructuring.

Our chairman is Bill Ackman. He had taken a position in the company and said, "General Growth is really focused on the malls. They have this other land, these master plan communities that they're not really focused on. So. let's split the company apart. General Growth focused on the malls, and we'll create a new company, take the name Howard Hughes from Las Vegas. And that will be a master plan, community developer."

We had five big properties around the country that came out of that restructuring in 2010. And we actually just recently acquired our sixth, which is 37,000 acres of land west of Phoenix. That is a, it's a 40 year project. It's a good sort of example of the company and of what we do. We are in it for the long-term. We are really building complete communities, places for people to...The cliche is live, work and play, but that's exactly it. Sort of everything that you would want for great quality of life. We're not just somebody who builds buildings and then sells them. We build them to hold them for the long term and are really about creating, again, great places for people to live their lives.

Scott Stanford:

Now, Columbia, Maryland, which is where we're emanating from and the good folks at Rekor, their headquarters. This is also a regional hub for the Howard Hughes Corporation. What was it about Columbia that made it a perfect spot for one of these master plan communities?

Greg Fitchitt:

It really goes back to, again, Jim Rouse in the mid 60s, created the Rouse Company and created Columbia. The idea of Columbia -- assembled this land between DC and Baltimore, sort of halfway in between, saw that this was naturally going to be an area of growth and assembled the 14,000 acres that would become Columbia. And really that development was largely completed. The 10 villages surrounding downtown Columbia were completed in sort of around 2000. The last piece is really what we are as a successor to the Rouse Company. Our job is to complete that downtown, which is the 400 acres around the mall around Post Pavilion and the Lakefront. We're now 12 years into it and over a billion dollars of investment into it, but we still have a long way to go.

Scott Stanford:

When you develop a new property, a specific property, what's the research and technology that goes into that? Is it community life? The lifestyle, public safety, transportation access? Do all those things go into accounting for when you guys decide this is the perfect spot to put up one of your buildings?

Greg Fitchitt:

Yeah. We are really data driven and we're also very much building for the future. It's really...I'm not involved in the Phoenix project, but that is really a tremendous opportunity where we will be building for, again, for the next 50, hundred years. It'll be technology forward in every sense of that concept, whether it's environmental sustainability, whether it's social responsibility, whether it is technology and connectivity, all of that is going to be taken into account in the design of that future city.

Scott Stanford:

For individual buildings, how do you guys decide how the parking is regulated? Do you know who the tenants are? Do they have to give their license and vehicle make and model and color? And if somebody's found on the property without valid credentials, does that all go into the process of putting a spot together?

Greg Fitchitt:

Yeah. Parking, in some ways, is one of the biggest challenges of what we do. We do it in our town centers, its urban, urban development, urban style development. We don't do a lot of surface parking. It's almost all parking structures. Parking structures are very expensive and you don't want to overbuild them. So one of the things that we spend a lot of time on is collecting data about the usage. And this has just become even much more important recently because in the last two years, no one's been in the office or very few people have been in the office. Even still, we don't really know what the future looks like. Some different companies are taking different approaches. Elon Musk just said, "Everybody's got to be in the office a minimum of 40 hours a week." Other people are like, "Hey, come into the office if you want. We've got it here." It it's just all over the map. And I think it's still going to take another couple years to really figure out what the future is going to look like.

Scott Stanford:

So, you talk about this data. What type of technology are you using to gather all this data right now?

Greg Fitchitt:

So, it's interesting you ask because we are right now in the process of evaluating new systems for that. We have, in downtown Columbia, we have over 7,000 parking spaces. About two thirds of those are in garages. What I think we will do is have a camera system that is able to record license plates. And that way that provides a lot of data about who's coming in and who's going out, when are they coming in? When are they going out? Are they an employee? Are they here to go to a restaurant? Are they here for some other reason? All that information will be very useful to us, again, in projecting when we build our next building and the next parking structure, how big should that parking structure be? How should it be designed? So again, we don't want to overbuild parking.

From 12:00 AM midnight all the way through the next day, the usage of those spaces, it changes a lot. Typically, your office use would be from nine to five, maybe not so much anymore. Restaurants are heavy in the evening and on the weekends. Evaluating when your parking spaces are being used and how much overlap and how much share there can be, is really important. So we don't overbuild parking. We also don't know what the future is going to look like in terms of autonomous vehicles. We've seen big trends with Uber. People don't have as many cars as they used to, especially the younger generation. I remember when I turned 16, the first thing I did on my birthday-

Scott Stanford:

Get the car.

Greg Fitchitt:

...was get my license.

Scott Stanford:

Yeah, your license.

Greg Fitchitt:

It was all about...I lived in suburbia. I grew up in suburbia. It was all about your car. I had never met anyone who didn't get their driver's license at 16 until I went to college and met people from New York.

Scott Stanford:

You're right.

Greg Fitchitt:

But it's just not the same world today. People, even who live in, more sort of suburban area, more auto dependent environments, they Uber and they don't necessarily...Maybe a couple would have one car, but they don't see a need for two. It really is a different mindset. So understanding the need for parking spaces and the usage of the parking spaces we build is very important to our business.

Scott Stanford:

And the traffic as well. How much do traffic patterns in certain areas impact your decisions on whether or not to go in and put up a building?

Greg Fitchitt:

Yeah. Having access to the buildings and easy access, convenient access is so important to our tenants, to the businesses who choose to locate in our environment. So understanding traffic patterns, understanding and projecting how they will change. And again, that's something that is very much dynamic now, as people sort of rediscover what it's going to mean to go back into the workplace as we get through the pandemic, and we sort of learn what life is going to be like post-COVID. Understanding what the real data is, is very important to us.

Scott Stanford:

When you guys go in, how do you work with a city or a municipality around the planning? You guys basically have everything ready to go when you go into these municipalities and just give it all at once? You have all the technology, all the research, it's all ready to roll?

Greg Fitchitt:

It's always a dialogue. We don't want to go in with a half-baked idea. So, we do a lot of work upfront to make sure that we know what we want to build and have the data behind what the traffic demand's going to be, what the parking demand is going to be. But then it's a dialogue. And it's a dialogue with the municipality. It's a dialogue with the community because we want to make sure that what we build is right. And frankly, having other voices have input into that is helpful.

Scott Stanford:

What are some of the biggest issues you foresee in the future when you're planning to go into residential or commercial communities? Are there things that you guys already foresee as potential problems in the near future?

Greg Fitchitt:

I don't know if I would say problems, but I think there are definitely things that we are watching closely to see and thinking about as we, again, we design for the future. So, we are always looking at autonomous vehicles. What do we think that is going to look like? We know they're coming. We don't know when they're coming and we don't know exactly what they're going to look like, but we are confident that is going to be coming. So, we want to plan for that.

We are still thinking about how this is not a transit rich environment, but we think that transit will be an important component in downtown Columbia's future as we move forward in all of our communities. So, we think about what does the future of transit look like? It probably doesn't look like it does today. It's probably, in this area, it's probably not going to be a train. Trains are incredibly expensive to build. It's probably not going to be a traditional bus system with big diesel buses. That's probably-

Scott Stanford:

And gas prices are through the roof.

Greg Fitchitt:

And gas prices.

Scott Stanford:

Electric or flying cars seem to be the way to go.

Greg Fitchitt:

It probably is going to be electric and it's probably going to be autonomous and it's probably going to be smaller vehicles. So, thinking about that and trying to make sure that we are planning for that in the future is very much part of our business.

Scott Stanford:

Greg Fitchitt, Howard Hughes Corporation. Greg, thanks for hanging out with us today.

Greg Fitchitt:

Ah, thank you. It's my pleasure.‍

Scott Stanford:

Well, my friends that's all the time we have today on The Infrastructors. Join us next time for our conversation with the President of the Philadelphia Urban League, Andrea Custis.