Not even David Furman has been immune to the downturn

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Charlotte architect David Furman was inside a room of dozens of developers and builders who city officials had asked to get together to discuss the master plan for uptown.

It was the late 1990s, uptown was still growing in starts and fits and 1st Ward, along the eastern quadrant, was a “dangerous ghetto,” Furman said.

But revitalization efforts were under way. Using financing from a U.S. Housing Urban Development Hope VI grant, Bank of America Community Development Corp. and the Charlotte Housing Authority had broken ground in 1998 on First Ward Place, a mixed-income rental community that was replacing dilapidated public housing.

“Somebody asked, ‘What would it take to get you guys to work down here?’” Furman said. “And there was just silence in the room. I said, ‘Hell, I think it could be an awesome neighborhood. I’ll take all you got.’”

And so began Furman’s nearly 20-year run as one of Charlotte’s most prolific, progressive and high-profile developers, a man credited by some with defining the look and feel of uptown.

“Charlotte has just experienced its most defining era of urban development in this last decade, and the captain of the team was David Furman,” said Michael Smith, president and CEO of Charlotte Center City Partners, a taxpayer-funded organization that promotes uptown. “His fingerprints are all over the residential development in Center City.”

Specializing in the multifamily industry, Furman’s company has designed and built more than 50,000 housing units across the eastern U.S.

These days, though, Furman is a lot less busy, thanks to the downturn in the real estate market.

Furman hasn’t built anything new since 2008. The residential development landscape has changed dramatically and the future remains uncertain, he said.

“It’s been real quiet,” he said. “For three years we haven’t done anything new.”

He said he’s gearing up for some new projects, putting more focus on the rental side of his business.

Furman, 63, is a rarity in Charlotte: a native. He grew up off East Boulevard near Freedom Park, just a few miles south of uptown, which was still just a lazy crossroads when he was a young man.

When he was still a kid, Furman decided that he wanted to be an architect. By sixth grade, he was drafting house plans for fun.

After he graduated in 1972 from the North Carolina State University School of Design in Raleigh, he worked for a couple of Charlotte-area architectural firms before starting his own firm, David Furman Architecture, in 1980 in an old house on Park Road.

But in the early 1990s, business had slowed thanks to a recession, and Furman had to look for ways to diversify.

He reached out to Chris Branch, a Charlotte real estate developer who at the time was working for Summit Properties. Together they launched The Boulevard Co. in 1992 to focus on infill housing projects in Charlotte, while Furman still maintained his architectural firm. Over the next seven years they created 16 projects totaling more than 800 units.

But by the late 1990s, Furman sensed a shift in the real estate market. After years of fleeing to the suburbs, Charlotteans, especially young adults, wanted to live closer to uptown.

Furman and Branch parted ways in 1999, and that same year he created Boulevard Centro.

One of his first townhome developments was Skyline Terrace, a 1st Ward revitalization project he completed in 2001. He would go on to design and develop about seven other 1st Ward condo and townhouse projects, including 10th Street Townes, Alexander Court and Cityview Townes. He also designed and developed flashier, midlevel high-rise uptown developments, including the 17-story Courtside, a 107-unit project at Sixth and Caldwell streets, completed in 2006.

Gateway Lofts, a residential development completed in 2002, is among the project’s he is most proud of. The 4th Ward, six-story concrete building has ground-level retail and multilevel loft units ranging in size from 800 to 1,400 square feet apiece. The project also features stained concrete floors, exposed brick walls and steel stairs.

“Charlotte hadn’t seen this kind of thing before,” Furman said. “It was very unique and cool. We sold that project out in two days. People were running to ATM machines and giving us cash.”

Furman said he has also done some “feel-good” projects. He designed the buildings for the Metrolina Food Bank and Crisis Assistance Ministry for free. He also designed McCreesh Place. The development, which is owned and operated by St. Peter’s Homes, a Charlotte nonprofit, is a 63-unit shelter that houses homeless men with disabilities. Furman also designed the $2 million, 9,472-square-foot ongoing McCreesh Place expansion.

“David is a straight-line thinker,” said Charles Woodyard, president and CEO of the Charlotte Housing Authority, which put together a financing plan to pay for the expansion. “He’s not just trying to make a dollar. He’s trying to make a difference from a societal standpoint.”

From 1999 to 2007, Boulevard Centro designed or developed about 22 projects valued at close to $265 million in total, the majority of them uptown.

“It was unbelievable,” Furman said. “We were in the right place at the right time. Money was available, and there was this confidence that no matter what you paid for something, it would be worth more in an hour.”

But it wasn’t all success for Furman. One high-profile hiccup was Concourse, which was proposed as a 25-story, $56 million condo-hotel tower at East Trade and Caldwell streets next to Time Warner Cable Arena.

That deal fell through in 2007 because of site restrictions and construction costs, even though the majority of the project’s 117 units had been reserved, Furman said.

He still keeps a rendering of the project in his office.

“There’s nothing more embarrassing than making big announcements about something and then having it crash and burn,” he said. “But it was just too expensive for what we were trying to accomplish.”

And then there was The Apartments at Quarterside project, completed in 2008, which was intended to be condos.

“It was 90 percent sold,” he said, “but we couldn’t get it done before the world turned to shit, and nobody closed. So we got into the apartment business by default.”

In 2007, Furman finished his crowning glory just before the economy bottomed out: Trademark, a 28-story mixed-use condo tower on West Trade Street.

Furman changed the name of Boulevard Centro to Centro CityWorks in 2008, when he moved the company from its former East Boulevard location to the Trademark building, which is also where he and his wife live.

An uptown resident for about 10 years, Furman doesn’t own a car. Instead, he walks everywhere, including to Charlotte Bobcats games, where he’s a regular fixture.

“I don’t understand why people live in the suburbs,” he said. “It’s just horrible. More people want to live in an urban context, especially with the explosion of the younger demographic.”

Furman is protective about uptown, which has led to some rough exchanges between him and a local businessman.

In November, Furman sent an irate email to marketing company Trafk Media after the company’s owners used chalk to create temporary ads on uptown sidewalks.

Furman, who used the f-word in the email, threatened to never do business with Trafk.

Todd Trimakas, co-owner of Trafk, said the ads were harmless and a common practice in many cities.

Furman said that 2008 was the first year in nearly a quarter of a century when he didn’t have a building under construction.

“It was just this huge void in my life,” he said. “I’m used to dreaming and creating and making stuff happen.”

To fill the free time the real estate downturn has created, Furman last year bought a small warehouse near his office to serve as an art studio, where he makes intricate woodcarvings. But he said he’d much rather be building new projects than working on sculptures.

And he’s positioning his company to hopefully take advantage of the changing dynamics in the housing market.

Furman said that thanks to tougher mortgage-lending policies and concerns about home values falling further, no one is buying. “We’re turning into a rental nation, and no one knows how long it will last.”

This year he hired about six people for The Housing Studio, a division of Centro CityWorks that focuses exclusively on apartments. He said he has some projects in the works, but he’s learned over the years not to talk about plans prematurely.

“I don’t want to make any announcements until there are shovels in the ground.”

Sam Boykin can be reached at [email protected].