Who's behind the project? Lifelong dreams of building cities coming true for Gateway Jax CEO

Drawings from most 8-year-olds are pretty basic: a flower, a pony, a dinosaur, a stick family in front of a house. When Bryan Moll started drawing cities at 8 years old, he had no idea it would spark his first interest in what would become his career.

“I have had a love for the built environment is the best way I can describe it,” he said. “The first time I ever got into a plane, I was looking down at all the county roads, the mile-by-mile squares, and then I started looking at cities and [their] grids. I thought that was so cool, and I remember my mom gave me a piece of paper, and I started drawing cities.” 

From there, Moll said, his interest transpired into taping dozens of pieces of paper together and drawing big cities with main streets, buildings and fictitious retailers.

“I can trace back my love for, you know, placemaking, city building, whatever you want to call it, from being a little kid,” he said. 

Although his technique needed quite a bit of honing from the time he first sketched the grids of intersecting roads and skylines on scrap paper, Moll’s love for the job has only grown.

Moll, now the CEO of Gateway Jax, is in charge of what could be one of Jacksonville’s largest and most ambitious projects in recent years.

Gateway Jax announced in September a $500 million mixed-use development project in downtown that includes apartments, grocery and retail spaces.

While the execution of this project is “by no means easy,” Moll said he is confident his team will be able to succeed where others may not have had as much luck in Jacksonville.

Snowy mountains to Capitol Hill to sandy beaches

Building things or imaging what could be built came naturally to Moll, whose father was a bricklayer and homebuilder in his hometown of Sterling, Colorado. After figuring out an idea of what he wanted to do for a living, Moll went to the University of Colorado Boulder for real estate and urban planning, 

“That's where I realized that what I really wanted to do was real estate development,” he said. 

After a brief stint working on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., Moll found an opportunity to work for JBG Smith, the largest publicly traded, pure-play real estate company in the D.C. market, as an analyst. Ten years later, he was a part owner and principal at the company.

One of Moll’s favorite projects was his very first — a 475-unit apartment complex that he worked on after he had been an analyst for four years. 

“That was the project where I really had the opportunity to prove myself and my abilities,” he said. 

Other projects he enjoyed working on included a Trader Joe's-anchored project in a food desert in D.C., the Atlantic Plumbing mixed-use building in a warehouse district and, his biggest Florida project to date, Water Street. 

“I spend a lot of time still in Tampa,” he said, “and every time I go there, I just cannot believe those were parking lots in the middle of nowhere in downtown Tampa. It felt like no one thought we could do it, everyone thought we were crazy… To go there today and see what that's turned into is pretty special.”

Moll came to Strategic Property Partners, the company that developed Water Street Tampa, and became the developer for that project in 2016.

“I had no connections to Florida but talked to my fiancé at the time, soon to be my husband, and said, ‘Hey, do you want to move to Tampa? I've got this really, really great opportunity,’” Moll said. “We went down twice … and I just saw the vision and the aspiration, and I thought ‘Wow, this is what I wanted to do my whole life.’”

Signing on for a downtown project

Moll traveled back and forth between Tampa and D.C. while working on various projects for about four years until COVID-19 hit. 

“It was pretty hard on a lot of downtowns, but especially in D.C.,” he said. “D.C. had a lot of challenges — still has a lot of challenges — as a result. And so I just started kind of putting feelers back out into Florida.” 

From there, he met Alex Sifakis, the president of JWB Real Estate Capital, which had been eyeing and buying property in downtown Jacksonville. 

After a few visits to Jacksonville, Moll was sold on the vision of what downtown could be.

Gateway Jax is a commercial real estate company backed by DLP Capital and sponsored by JWB Real Estate Capital.

The first phase of the project, which is expected to total 22 acres and a more than $2 billion investment over the next decade, is underway now. It includes over 1,000 multi-family housing units, at least one grocery store, dining, retail and greenspace between East Church and West Union streets. 

The goal is to eventually expand to cover over 20 city blocks. Plans in the works now also include east of LaVilla School of the Arts, north of the Duval County Courthouse and west of First Baptist Church — an area that is mostly parking lots.

“I don't believe there's ever been the scale of assemblage that we've been able to put together in two years — 25 acres, 20 city blocks — and really to do the things like to bring in a full-service grocery store, to bring in all the really great restaurants and putting all that together,” Moll said. “You can't really do that if you control just one block or two blocks.”

Something that has been encouraging to Moll is the amount of interest from retailers that the project has received already. Despite not being in a stage to start signing businesses for leases at the completed buildings, he said he has seen more interest here than in any other market at this stage of a project.

The draw to Jacksonville

During initial visits to Jacksonville, Moll said he walked a lot of the streets downtown and “couldn't believe that the fabric was so great.” 

“I kind of joke because these all sound like small things, but the block sizes are very walkable,” he said. “A lot of cities have block sizes that really are challenging for pedestrians. Here, it feels so good to walk from one block to another. You can get from one end of downtown to the water in about 10 minutes. That's pretty incredible for a pretty large downtown.”

Moll said part of what attracted him to Jacksonville and this project in particular were the demographics, including Jacksonville’s unemployment rate, which is typically around or under 3%, its net new job growth and its well-educated workforce.

“It's a relatively young place, which is really important when you're thinking about urban, mixed-use apartment-led projects,” he said. “Looking at the macro scale, [Jacksonville] has all the data that would suggest the foundation is there for something unique in downtown.” 

Jacksonville, especially downtown, has had a rocky history with development, though. Many projects and renderings have either failed to get off the ground or turned it pretty different from what was initially promised, leading some to become skeptical of developers with big promises for the future.

Moll said he isn’t too concerned about this skepticism because he’s been able to demonstrate success in this area in the past.

“We’ve done it before,” he said. “I am very focused on Jacksonville and proving that this can work here.”

Moll said Jacksonville “is just as much home” as Tampa now.

“I promise I'm not this sentimental usually,” he joked. “But in my high school yearbook, my parents placed like an ad with a little photo of me with Lincoln Logs and said ‘Yesterday you were building with blocks, tomorrow you'll be building cities.’ And that has always stuck with me.”

Moll said even though he never imagined those play blocks would bring him on this path to Jacksonville, he’s “very happy” with where he ended up and excited for the city’s future.