In an interview with Jamie Martin, partner at Edgemoor Infrastructure and Real Estate, he talked about what drives his approach to development, why he believes every project deserves more than a competent response to the proposal, and what 30+ years in this business has taught him about the work that matters most.

Q: What part of your work do you enjoy the most?

Jamie: I always joke, never tell my boss, but what I do is just a lot of fun. Every project is unique and different, with its own set of challenges, and getting to help clients who are genuinely wrestling with something they want to achieve, that kind of makes our day. Whether it's master planning a project, finding a new opportunity nobody else saw, or figuring out a financing approach that makes something possible that the client thought was out of reach, we get to roll up our sleeves and help them find the best path forward. There's rarely the same kind of day twice, and having enough background across finance, design, and real estate to be useful in just about any conversation along the way is what makes it fun.

Q: You have a quote that you've used before about never delivering what the client asked for. Can you unpack that?

Jamie: We've never delivered what our client has asked for. Not one single time. We always deliver something different, and it's always better. Whether it's through the financing, the design, the contracting approach, we've never actually just done what they asked. 

A good example is the middle school project we worked on in Falls Church. The city needed a new school and had been asking developers to go find land for it. In a city of two and a half square miles and no spare land, that meant looking outside city limits and bussing kids out of their own community. Everyone had accepted that as the only option. Before we went down that road, we looked at what the city already owned, and found that the high school property had enough room to accommodate a new school if the pieces were rearranged. That insight eliminated millions in land acquisition costs, cut years off the timeline, and kept the school in its own community where it belonged.

Nobody asked us to look at the high school property. But taking the time to question the assumption before moving forward is what completely changed the trajectory of that project, and it's something we try to do on each deal.

Q: Walk us through your approach. When you take on a new project, what does that process look like for you?

Jamie: Every time a new project comes in, the question is always the same: what more can we do? Before responding to any brief, I invest the time to understand the full picture, because the best path forward is rarely the most obvious one. I'll look at a client's capital planning, their five-year projections, things they may not have even thought to connect to this particular project. On a recent project, a county came to us for a government building. When I dug into their broader capital plan, I found they also had a performing arts center in their pipeline that nobody had thought to connect. Bringing those two together on a single site would create something far more valuable than either building on its own.

Beyond that, we're very selective about team composition. Every project gets a team built specifically for it, the right people, the right consultants, the right financing approach matched to the unique needs of that project. And we keep our financing options open as long as possible rather than committing too early, because the right answer depends on the project, not on a predetermined playbook.

And through all of it, I believe the process should be something people actually enjoy being part of. Our job is to do the heavy lifting and raise problems with solutions alongside them, so that all the client has to do is make the decision. The superintendent of the school system in Falls Church said something at the dedication that's stuck with me ever since. She said, I've built a lot of facilities in my career, and I always hated the weekly meeting with the contractor. On this project, I came to look forward to the meetings. The reason wasn't that there weren't any problems. It was that every problem came with a solution, and all she had to do was decide.

Q: Tell us about the Long Beach Civic Center. What made that project special?

Jamie: The city was spending $12.8 million a year to maintain buildings it needed to replace, with no public funding available for new construction. No bonds, no tax measures, no voter approvals. So the puzzle was, can we give this city everything on their wish list, a new City Hall, a Port Administration Building, a public library, a five-acre park, and have their annual payment be no more than what they were already spending? That took a tremendous amount of creative problem solving to figure out, and the answer ended up coming from a lot of different places.

One of the pieces of that puzzle involved selling a piece of city-owned land to help make the financial model work. Should have been straightforward, but it wasn't. There was a seven-foot diameter storm pipe running through the property that belonged to Los Angeles County. The city didn't know it was there, and it didn't have a recorded easement, so it technically didn't have a right to be there either. I went down to city hall and started going through microfiche, old land records, not glamorous work. But in those records, I found that an unrecorded easement for the pipe was attached to a recorded easement on the adjacent property, and that the developer of that adjacent parcel already had a legal obligation to relocate the pipe. Nobody in the city knew any of this. Negotiating that resolution unlocked the full value of the property and brought millions into the project. If nobody had taken the time to dig through those records, the project would have either moved forward with less money and more compromises or not at all.

We also structured it so that the Port Authority, which is a revenue-generating entity with restrictions on where its money can go, paid for its building in a way that contributed equity to the overall project. And we monetized a separate piece of city land to bring in additional funding. All of these pieces working together is what made it possible to deliver a $513 million civic campus within the city's existing annual budget.

Since completion, that part of downtown Long Beach has experienced a wave of new housing, restaurants, and business activity. What started as a civic project became a catalyst for the broader transformation of the entire downtown district, which to me is the most rewarding part.

Q: What makes Edgemoor different from others in this space?

Jamie: I've heard we're too nice, nicer than the average developer, and I take that as a compliment. It puts people at ease, and I think it changes the quality of the work. We have personal commitments to seeing that a project is done well and successfully. The people who start a project are the people who finish it. I started working with a woman on the Long Beach Civic Center back in 2009, and I can still call her any day and chat. That's not unusual for us. We see competitors who have a lot of people that chase jobs, make promises, sign the paper, and disappear to go make promises on the next one. That's just not how we operate.

We have 100% client satisfaction across every project we've ever done. And I think that comes down to those personal relationships, built through communication, through keeping your word, and through being there when things get hard. Not every project goes perfectly. But when you step in and solve a problem thoughtfully, without creating angst for the client, and they see you handle it well, that builds a level of trust that lasts well beyond any single project.

Q: What inspires you outside of the work?

Jamie: Family, friends, and Boy Scouts. I have three Eagle Scout sons, all grown now, and I'm still involved, still helping young people. Probably more than you'd think, Scouting has influenced how I approach my work. If you ask some of the folks that work here, they'll tell you they come and ask me a question, and I never just hand them the answer. That's what Boy Scouts taught me. Let them work through it, and they'll know it better. One of the most rewarding parts of this job is watching someone figure something out on their own and realizing they're more capable than they thought. That mentorship philosophy carries over into everything. It's not about having the answers, it's about helping people build the confidence and the instincts to find them on their own.

Q: What excites you most about your work right now?

Jamie: It's still the discovery. Every project has something in it that nobody has found yet, some opportunity, some connection, some way to make it better than what was asked for. After 30 years, I still get the same feeling when I find it. And I still believe that the best projects are the ones where someone took the time to look a little deeper before locking in a direction. That's never going to change for me, and honestly, I hope it never does.

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Jamie Martin is a partner at Edgemoor Infrastructure & Real Estate, where he has spent over two decades leading complex public and institutional development projects including the Long Beach Civic Center and Fuse at Mason Square, among others.