Meet real estate developer Andy Garcia

I majored in urban studies along with economics. My family was affected by the Great Recession, so I was deeply interested in learning about the intersection between our financial system and the built environment.

My favorite CED course was Environmental Design 1. I loved reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and working on the semester-long project of carving a city out of a book. It introduced possibility and imagination into the physical world and taught me about different types of architectural drawings — plus it upcycled a used book. City Planning 235: Methods of Project Analysis with Ann Silverberg is a close second.

Observing the creativity and potential of other students, from studio classes to furniture building. I appreciated the many lecture series as well, especially MRED+D’s spring 2019 series, which included a speaker from Sand Hill Property Company who spoke about the Valco Mall redevelopment project in Cupertino.

CED taught me to dream big, past a car-centric, pavement-covered, nuclear family-driven built environment. CED also gave me a practical foundation that has helped me succeed in my current career in real estate development / asset management. The corporate world can lack creativity, history, and perspective, which is why I feel CED’s education has lifelong dividends.

I currently manage a portfolio of apartments, warehouses, and offices at different stages of development for an institutional investor / asset manager. It’s exciting, given all the challenges with leasing office space, with construction costs, and with the movements in debt capital markets. I gravitated towards the real estate field because I can leverage my backgrounds in both economics and urban studies. I am also developing the skill set I need to work in affordable housing, adaptive reuse, and other types of complex building projects.

I follow @yimbygram for its development content. It’s a great way to follow the most high-profile projects around the country, though I wish it had more diverse typologies.