PRINT THIS STORY:

CHANGE TEXT SIZE:

THE LATIN BEAT

Andrés Friedman is Forest City’s guide to the Hispanic community

By Molly Knight

Bringing decent retail to underserved urban areas is not just a job for Andrés Friedman. It’s his passion. Friedman directs the two-year-old Hispanic Retail Group, part of Forest City California Commercial Development, a division of Cleveland-based Forest City Enterprises. He oversees downtown projects in the California cities of Coachella, Fresno, Inglewood and Stockton.

In February Friedman was promoted from project developer to vice president. “Andrés was brought into the company specifically to launch our Hispanic retail initiative,” said Brian M. Jones, CEO of Forest City California. “His roots in the Hispanic community gave him the obvious edge.”

It wasn’t only Friedman’s cultural background that impressed Jones, though. “His past experience in commercial retail development, his architectural credentials and understanding of the technical side of development, as well as his knowledge of the business side made him well qualified,” said Jones. “His recent promotion to vice president is an indicator of our reliance upon his judgment as a senior-level executive.”

Jones cites the growth of the Hispanic Retail Group by means of Friedman’s strategic oversight and negotiation skills. Indeed, there are several projects in the pipeline now, besides the four currently under development.

“Our joint venture partners have great confidence in him,” Jones said. “Andrés is a man of great integrity, a quality that is critical to the Forest City culture and to developers in particular. In our business, nothing and everything happens quickly. … Andrés has the warmth and sense of humor that win over potential clients and endear him to his business associates.”

For Forest City, inner cities offer development opportunities that are increasingly difficult to find in the suburbs. For Friedman, they are a chance to improve the lot of people who have problems enough already without having to pay top dollar for mediocre retail.

“I was raised with community values,” said Friedman. “I grew up in Mexico, so I’m sensitive to what these people are looking for. What Americans must understand is that the people who take the risk to cross that border are hard-working, motivated individuals who are looking to create better lives for themselves and their families. It is imperative that we focus on bringing goods and services back to these communities.”

The Chilean-born, Mexico City-raised Friedman speaks from personal experience. His father died when Friedman was just 5 years old. His mother, now left with the burden of raising two young sons, was an only child, so familial support was limited. “My grandmother took care of us,” said Friedman. “Those were tough days, but it made me into a stronger person.”

When Friedman was 21, he and his brother took over the family business, a wire and cable factory. He put that aside, though, to earn a bachelor’s degree in architecture and a master’s in construction management from Universidad Iberoamericana, in Mexico City. He came to the United States in 1997 and earned a second master’s, in real estate, from Harvard University. Then he went to work at Trammell Crow Co. in Boston and stayed there three years. After this, Friedman moved to Los Angeles and took a job at Infomart, a Dallas-based company that provides office space to companies needing a high-tech environment. In 2003 he joined Forest City.

Friedman has worked hard, and now he is determined to help others, particularly by improving their retail and social environments. He says Hispanic grocery chains do a particularly good job of addressing their shoppers’ needs. The Inglewood project, about four miles from Los Angeles International Airport, will have a grocery anchor, a 47,000-square-foot Gigante supermarket. The 107,000-square-foot Stockton development will be grocery-anchored too.

The 300,000-square-foot Fresno site will contain a mix of Hispanic and non-Hispanic retailers, and the 140,000-square-foot Plaza Oasis, in Coachella, will get a Cardenas supermarket anchor. The Plaza Oasis redevelopment will create about 400 jobs and generate millions of dollars for this predominantly Hispanic city, according to Hispanic Retail Group.

Friedman says Hispanic grocers address their market’s needs in other ways. They create wide aisles so that large families can stroll together, for instance (many Hispanics regard shopping as a leisurely, social activity). The communities in which they live offer cross-generational weekend activities that revolve around food and music. Cities should therefore focus on providing the fabric for such activities by building centers that serve as gathering places.

“To reach this community, you have to first understand its culture,” said Friedman. “You have to understand that you often have two to three generations living under one roof, and that these families like to spend time walking around while they shop.”

For his part, Friedman says he loves to take two-hour lunches to sit with his wife and bask in the laughter of his 6-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter.

Friedman was a real catch, says Tom Niles, who hired Friedman at Trammell Crow. (Today Niles is executive vice president of development at the Providence, R.I.-based Procaccianti Group.) “Having run a large business in Mexico, he was distinguished beyond his years,” said Niles.

Friedman says he was drawn to Forest City because it is a “respectable company involved in quality developments.” Forest City is an $8 billion firm that has made a specialty of building ambitious mixed-use projects. With so many market areas already cornered, Forest City California turned some of its attention to the retail needs of the state’s burgeoning Hispanic population, and the parent company decided to create the specialized retail group.

With purchasing power at an estimated $800 billion and a total U.S. population of 43 million, the Hispanic market is a lucrative demographic that the firm could no longer ignore, says Jones. There are about 11.6 million Hispanics in California, according to the Census Bureau, and a Pepperdine University study sets their collective buying power at about $171 billion. “Retailers and developers who don’t recognize the power of this population are missing a huge opportunity,” Jones said in an e-mail to SCT. “It became obvious to us at Forest City five years ago that we needed to reach out to this population.”

Jones recalls an incident following a meeting with municipal leaders for a Los Angeles project that demonstrated Friedman’s ability to do that. “As Andrés and I were coming out of a presentation to the City Council, we were confronted by [three or four] television cameras eager to hear the meeting’s results,” said Jones. “Each reporter began throwing questions at us, including the reporter from Univision, the Hispanic network.”

Andrés immediately slipped into Spanish, bringing tears to the reporter’s eyes, Jones says. “It underscored the completely bicultural nature of the man and took the interview into a new, and very positive, direction as she [the reporter] began to focus on Andrés himself and his understanding of the market.”