Breaking Ceilings|Breaking Ground

Molly McCabe & Jill Ferrari
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  • Entrepreneurship

Every skyline has a story. Breaking Ceilings | Breaking Ground brings you the women behind them — developers, entrepreneurs, and innovators transforming commercial real estate across North America and shaping the next generation of great cities. Hosted by CRE veterans Molly McCabe and Jill Ferrari, each episode goes deep with industry trailblazers: the deals they've closed, the companies they've built, and how technology, community, and bold vision are changing what's possible. Whether you're already building or just getting started, this is the conversation you've been waiting for.

  1. 4d ago

    Sara Myerson - MSquared - Capital that Builds Community

    Sara Myerson, Managing Director of Investments at MSquared joins Molly McCabe and Jill Ferrari. With 15+ years across finance, design, development, and public-private partnerships, she has a strog belief: place is important and home should be a safe and comforting. Sara came out of Middlebury not knowing what she wanted to do. Goldman Sachs was a place to start.  As kid with architecture kits, but “probably didn't have quite the design bug” to be an architect — what she saw instead was how private capital shaped the places people live. Then she did a “180” and got a design-oriented master's in urban planning at Harvard: “stuff that I was not comfortable with.”  Instead of returning to finance, she went to Boston City Hall, where she helped build the city's first master plan in 50 years: Imagine Boston 2030 & ran the planning department for four years. “While I never intended to go there, I'm very happy I did. And that's MSquared's secret sauce too — many of us have sat in all of those verticals.” The Blend“When people are 100% affordable housing developers, they sometimes think anyone would just be happy to have a unit or a home. Market-rate developers probably do a little bit of a better job building what people want in those locations. We blend those two.” Investment focus: mixed-income multifamily housing, predominantly new construction, in growing, supply-constrained markets — combining public & private capital to address the housing crisis differently. Her rules: resist the widget - “Instead meet the community where they are;” location is king; & every project needs a public sector partner “to unlock the potential of that site and of that design.” The Foster Youth StorySara described a housing authority running a voucher program for youth transitioning out of foster care. Shared thesis: mixed-income communities in transit-oriented, vibrant locations are where foster youth thrive. “They start to see possibility in how they want to build and shape their life.” Molly heard the parallel: The Lotus Campaign, which she co-founded,  moves people experiencing homelessness into mixed-income communities for the same reason.   The Market“Everything's up — operating costs, development costs, interest rates... creating increasingly large gaps in these projects. But return expectations haven't changed.” Supportable proceeds moved from roughly 70% LTV to around 60%: “That's a big gap emerging in your capital stack. And that's just from interest rate movement.” Bright spots: public partners still prioritizing housing, and rent growth projected across all top-50 markets in 2027. Those who get starts in the ground now are positioned best when the cycle turns. She also sees a reckoning coming with the refinancing wall — hence MSquared's acquisition interest in strong assets whose debt no longer pencils. What Makes a Developer InvestableHer first answer was partnership: “Knowing what you don't know and making sure you bring that into your team — or what you don't have.”  “People are considered emerging developers for a very long time…even when they're really not.”  What she looks for is scrappiness. “Those are the ones that are gonna come through this cycle and be the strongest.” Her differentiation advice: know the micro place. Their recent close in Eugene, OR pairs an emerging developer with one whose whole career is rooted there. Jill's advice to students of: “Do it all. Try it all out. Get as much exposure as you can,”  mirrors MSquared’s practice — newer team members work across both development & investment verticals. Connect with Sara MSquared is deploying Equitable Housing Solutions Fund II in mixed-income multifamily, typically entering as an equity or preferred equity partner; projects range from 50 to 700 units. https://www.linkedin.com/in/sara-myerson-boston/ https://buildmsquared.com/

  2. Oct 26

    Sauda Ahmad-Green- S&S Development: Would I Live Here?

    What does it take to build the neighborhood you grew up in? For Sauda Ahmad-Green, it started with a law school exercise. In this episode of Breaking Ceilings Breaking Ground, Molly McCabe and Jill Ferrari sit down with Sauda Ahmad-Green, Esq. Owner and principal of S&S Development Group in Detroit. Sauda builds mixed-income family housing in Virginia Park, the neighborhood where she grew up, and she's still there: family, friends, and neighbors who knew her as a child wave at her from the street. Like many of the women we've talked with, Sauda became a developer by chance. In her third year of law school, an exercise in Real estate transactions course became real when Sauda asked herself how she'd actually practice title clearing. She took her savings and tried it on a burned-out building in her childhood neighborhood that had sat on the city's demolition list for twenty years, untouched because it was owned by ten different entities. Clearing the title took six months. Suddenly, Sauda owned the building and the letters started arriving from the City: do something with this building it's falling down. Her opportunity came from a woman at a community bank with one Detroit branch. She saw Sauda's savings as equity and proof of intent, pushed a construction loan through. She also named the work Sauda was doing: "Did you know this is the work that our developers do." Sauda's reply: "No, I didn't know that." Sometimes it takes someone else to put out a hand to start. "She took a chance on me." Merrill Place I was completed in 2010. Merrill Place II took a decade (through all sorts of travails, including COVID) because the pre-recession funding sources no longer existed and she had to find another way. It turns out, as a a naturally occurring mixed-income model at 60–120% AMI, Merrell I was the model. Also in this episode: The gap funding crisis: plenty of senior financing exists, but in neighborhood development you almost always hit a gap. "Twenty, thirty percent of my stack: those funding sources no longer exist."Geothermal as a free utility: Merrill Place II doesn't bill heating and cooling to tenants. "For me, sustainability means equitable application of sustainability to all. If it doesn't benefit everyone, then it's not sustainable."The design test: "Would I live here? Would I want my mother to live here? My grandmother?" And why every two-bedroom unit has two full bathrooms.The Kamala Harris tour: Sauda hosted the former Vice President at Merrill Place II. "No, I want to see everything. Show me." Before leaving, Harris acknowledged her impact. "To know that I'm doing good work, and that it is seen, and that it's needed."Her advice, "Don't wait to have it figured out. If it's on your heart, just start. Because the development is in the learning process."Connect with Sauda Ahmad-GreenLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saudaahmadgreen/Website: sdevelopco.comSauda is assembling the capital stack for Merrill Place phases III and IV, roughly 60 more units, bringing the project to about 100 total. Learn more about Breaking Ceilings Breaking Ground: https://breakingceilingsbreakingground.com/ Subscribe, follow, leave a review, and share.

  3. Oct 19

    Dr. Gina Merritt - NREUV - The Safety Net

    What do a recurring childhood dream and a bulldozer have to do with building community wealth? Everything, if you're Dr. Gina Merritt. In this episode of Breaking Ceilings Breaking Ground, Molly McCabe and Jill Ferrari sit down with Dr. Gina Merritt, MBA: Founder and Principal of Northern Real Estate Urban Ventures (NREUV) in Washington, D.C. Gina grew up in affordable housing in the Bronx, lost her mother at thirteen, and helped raise three younger siblings. At sixteen, a conversation with her father set her on the road to independence. On Wall Street she found a pure meritocracy and loved it. But business school changed the question: she no longer wanted to make rich people richer. She sent a résumé to D.C. thinking she was applying to a general contractor. It turned out to be a development opportunity. Asked what would excite her about the job, her answer was immediate: "If I could build neighborhoods like the one I grew up in. I grew up in affordable housing." Then came the bulldozer. From roughly age seven to fifteen, Gina had a recurring dream, two or three times a week, of a bulldozer chasing her. On the first day of her first development job, she pulled up to a twelve-acre site, saw the bulldozer, and started crying in her car, not from fear, but from recognition. "My God, this is what I was supposed to do." She'd never seen one in real life. She grew up among thirty-story buildings. Her central concept, formalized during her doctorate, is social capital, leveraging trusted relationships to connect people to opportunity. And when the job isn't enough, her team becomes the safety net. Sustainability, in her definition, is whether a person's life can hold together long enough to reach the opportunity in front of them. Also in this episode: Mary's House for Older Adults: the nation's first communal affordable housing for LGBTQ+ older adults.The 2020 inflection: after twenty years of hearing no, Goldman Sachs and Capital Impact Partners funded her first ownership projects. "What these investors and lenders were underwriting was not my balance sheet. It was my experience."The $1 billion goal: $1B in assets under management by 2034.Ground Up, launching December 1, a learning community teaching development at minimal cost. "If I could do it, a little girl from the Bronx, anybody could do it."Know your numbers: "I don't think you're a true owner-developer unless you know how to run your own financial model."Connect with Dr. Gina Merritt Website: drginamerritt.netGround Up wait list: community.drginamerritt.netVolunteer with Project Community Capital: projectcommunitycapital.netNREUV: nreuv.comLearn more about Breaking Ceilings Breaking Ground: https://breakingceilingsbreakingground.com/ Subscribe, follow, leave a review, and share this episode with someone who's building a safety net of their own.

  4. Sep 28

    Ashley Terry, Pivot Project - Pieces of a City

    What if the best preparation for a career in development was never having a five-year plan at all? In this episode of Breaking Ceilings Breaking Ground, Molly McCabe and Jill Ferrari sit down with Ashley Terry, President of Development at Pivot Project in Oklahoma City. Ashley's path into real estate was anything but traditional: she started out as a hairdresser before a single book changed the direction of her life. Ashley leads development strategy and execution across Pivot's portfolio, with a focus on urban infill, mixed-use, and adaptive reuse in downtown Oklahoma City. Her work spans hospitality, historic rehabilitation, retail, housing, and public-private infrastructure. But she's less interested in isolated projects than in what she calls "building pieces of a city": the ten interdependent parts that all have to work together to make a place function. It's a generalist's superpower, and Ashley leans all the way into it. In the course of a single day she might move from historic tax credits to re-tenancy to horizontal infrastructure, connecting dots that usually live in separate conversations. Before Pivot, Ashley spent more than a decade at Wheeler District, a 150-acre urban infill project in Oklahoma City. She joined in a flexible "do whatever needed to be done" role and grew into Vice President of Development, with work spanning placemaking, entitlements, infrastructure, vertical development, operations, and strategy. Watching a project evolve from an empty field into a neighborhood where people live, work, and gather gave her a rare feedback loop: and taught her that small decisions have a long tail. She also shares one of the best stories in the episode: a small playground placed between a restaurant and a brewery that turned into a family epicenter, with friends driving 30 minutes from the suburbs just to use the patio. The idea came from a 2017 team trip to Copenhagen, where the team biked the city and observed how families were woven into everyday public life. Ashley defines sustainability in a way that will stick with you: does a project actually work over time? Can a building adapt to a second- or fourth-generation user? Can it remain financially and operationally sound long after the original development team is gone? She also tells the story of Western Gateway Elementary School: handed an idea in 2017 with no education background and told to make it happen. She broke ground in March 2020, navigated charter authorization and curriculum-driven design decisions (restrooms in every classroom, for starters), and calls it her favorite project because she could see children learning in the finished building. Throughout the conversation, Ashley keeps returning to a people-first lens shaped by Jan Gehl's Life Between Buildings and Jane Jacobs. Developers create the framework for community, she says: but they can't manufacture it. The best work leaves room for people to make a place their own. Connect with AshleyEmail: ashley@pivotproject.comWebsite: pivotproject.comLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ashleynterryPivot Project is actively seeking partners: architects, lenders, and investors for its development pipeline. Learn more about Breaking Ceilings Breaking Ground: https://breakingceilingsbreakingground.com/ Subscribe, follow, leave a review, and share this episode with someone who's ready to jump in and figure it out.

  5. Sep 21

    Elam Freeman - Ojas Partners - With Vigor and Vitality

    What does it take to build a retail-first development platform in one of the fastest-growing markets in the country? For Elam Freeman, it starts with knowing who the customer is: because she is one of them. In this episode of Breaking Ceilings Breaking Ground, Molly McCabe and Jill Ferrari speak with Elam Freeman, Nashville native and founder of Ojas Partners, a retail-focused commercial real estate advisory firm serving greater Nashville and surrounding markets. Elam also launched an investment venture in 2025 that sponsors deals in the neighborhoods she knows best. Elam's path into commercial real estate was anything but linear. She studied political science, expected to work in social services, and taught yoga on the side to pay bills during her commission-only early years. When she entered the industry a decade ago, she describes feeling like a fish out of water culturally: but instead of retreating, she ran at the problem. That choice shaped her career philosophy: stand up, buy in, and break ground. At Ojas Partners, Elam and her team of about ten brokers serve as "the advocate for the retail in the room" on mixed-use projects. They come in early to help developers program retail space so it attracts the right tenants, then carry projects through lease-up. The firm has brought brands such as Equinox and Sweetgreen to Nashville while also helping local businesses grow from one location into many. Elam explains why retail strategy is a development function, not just a leasing function: and why securing commercial tenants can help mixed-use projects reach closing with more stable income streams. She also shares her approach to neighborhood merchandising: coordinating retail across a corridor so a district feels cohesive rather than piecemeal, because a rising tide lifts all ships. Now moving from LP investments to GP sponsorship, Elam is candid about her goal of getting more women and more first-time investors into private real estate. She discusses accessibility, walking before you run, and why she operates with an abundance mindset: "When you get the right people in the room, one plus one equals three." She also makes the case for AI as a force multiplier: not a replacement for judgment: and explains her plan to bring in an "AI architect" to connect marketing, accounting, and operations into one cohesive platform. Connect with Elam Freeman LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/elamfreeman : messaging is the best way to reach herElam is actively seeking capital partners for Nashville deals, from institutional groups to friends-and-family opportunities, and welcomes listeners interested in investing alongside a female sponsor. Learn more about Breaking Ceilings Breaking Ground: https://breakingceilingsbreakingground.com/ Subscribe, follow, leave a review, and share this episode with someone ready to run at the problem.

    Elam Freeman - Ojas Partners - With Vigor and Vitality

  6. Sep 15

    Ronita Coleman - LJ Golden Realty - Building for Future Generations

    Ronita Coleman: Persistence in PracticeWhat does it take to bring a nearly century-old building back to life after more than 20 years of vacancy? For Ronita Coleman, the answer is persistence, alignment, and a commitment to building for future generations. In this episode of Breaking Ceilings Breaking Ground, Molly McCabe and Jill Ferrari speak with Ronita Coleman, co-founder of LJ Golden Realty in Metro Detroit. Ronita shares the story behind Casa del Rey, a historic building in Pontiac, Michigan, being transformed into a 54-unit apartment community for middle-income and working-class residents earning approximately 60%–120% of area median income. With the project nearing its ribbon cutting, Ronita reflects on the challenges of restoring a complex, long-vacant property—and why she and her husband believed Casa del Rey needed a solution they could help provide. Ronita’s path to development began alongside a 24-year career at General Motors. She and her husband started by fixing and flipping foreclosed homes, then shifted to buy-and-hold investments after becoming parents. After acquiring approximately eight to ten single-family homes on Detroit’s east side, they recognized that commercial real estate offered the scale needed to multiply their impact. The transition was not easy. A first commercial deal fell apart at the closing table, but Ronita kept the property and treated the experience as an education rather than a defeat. Her philosophy is clear: every challenge teaches you how to handle the next one. Ronita also discusses the lived experiences that shape her approach to development—including her retired parents, her late grandmother who lived independently until age 86 despite being blind, and a cousin who uses a wheelchair. Accessibility, affordability, walkability, “busability,” and dignity are not abstract concepts in her work. They are essential measures of a quality home and community. Connect with Ronita ColemanLinkedIn: Search for Ronita ColemanFacebook: Search for LJ Golden RealtyInstagram: Search for LJ Golden Realty Learn more about Breaking Ceilings Breaking Ground: https://breakingceilingsbreakingground.com/ Subscribe, follow, leave a review, and share this episode with someone who is building with persistence—and with future generations in mind.

  7. Aug 31

    Ellen Buckley - Prospera Real Estate Collective - Sapient Urbanism

    Ellen Buckley believes the next frontier in real estate isn't a building technology. It's understanding people. Ellen is founder and CEO of Prospera Real Estate Collective, where she's led over $6 billion in development across multifamily, workforce housing, mixed-use, hospitality, and master-planned communities in the Midwest, Northeast, Southeast, and Asia. She started in the industry at fourteen, transferring deeds at her grandfather's law firm. By seventeen, she was the only woman on an all-male framing crew. Today, she's applying neuroscience and human behavior research to how communities get built. In this episode, Ellen talks about: Why she moved a workforce homeownership project forward through a partnership with a local churchCommunity immersion: why she spent three days living in a North Miami neighborhood — and did it again in Coconut Grove — before finalizing a projectSapient urbanism, and what changes when developers study neuroscience and human behavior alongside site plansAn independent study Prospera commissioned on workforce turnover costs in Miami-Dade County: $1.3 billion in a single yearWhy she treats sustainability as three things at once — economic, social, and environmental — not just green building standardsHer advice for women moving into development: don't wait until you're not the only one in the roomConnect with Ellen: LinkedIn (Ellen Buckley) or ellen@prosperaco.com If this episode moved you, subscribe to Breaking Ceilings | Breaking Ground, leave a review, and share it with someone building something. Know a woman in real estate development whose story should be told? Reach out through breakingceilingsbreakingground.com.

  8. Aug 24

    Belinda Watts - Row Partners: The Translator

    Belinda Watts: The Third Ascent What happens when an accomplished architecture and design career becomes the foundation for an entirely new chapter? In this episode of Breaking Ceilings Breaking Ground, Molly McCabe and Jill Ferrari speak with Belinda Watts, founding partner of Row Partners LLC, a certified woman-owned owner’s representative and project management firm serving clients across New York City and the tri-state area. Belinda’s career has taken her from a sheep farm in Australia to Pratt Institute, innovative work in tensile and modular structures, and 25 years as a project director at Gensler. At 67, she launched Row Partners and began what she calls a “third ascent”—a new phase of entrepreneurship, development, and purposeful work. Belinda explains how she acts as “the translator” between clients and the specialized language of construction, design, insurance, and real estate. She also shares her perspective on adaptive reuse, small-scale development, interior architecture, retail’s role in activating streets, and why well-cared-for spaces influence how people live and work. Her advice for aspiring developers is refreshingly practical: development does not have to mean a ground-up, 25-unit project. A two-family or four-family property can offer the same essential lessons in acquisition, financing, renovation, property management, and stewardship. Belinda also talks candidly about moving from the efficiency of a corporate structure to the challenges of building her own business—and the value of having big aspirations supported by small, achievable plans. In this episode, we discuss: Belinda’s journey from rural Australia to New York’s design and development communityHer 25-year career at GenslerThe “translator” role of an owner’s representativeAdaptive reuse and flagship retail projectsReclaiming retail frontage on 14th StreetHow retail helps activate streets and strengthen neighborhoodsInterior architecture and the importance of “cared-for design”Small-scale development and renovating two- and four-family propertiesLaunching Row Partners at age 67The “third ascent” and later-career entrepreneurshipBuilding systems after leaving a large corporate firmWhy aspiring big with small plans can create lasting momentum Connect with Belinda Watts: Row Partners LLC: https://rowpartnersllc.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/belinda-watts-220b9090 Learn more about Breaking Ceilings Breaking Ground: https://breakingceilingsbreakingground.com/ Subscribe, follow, and share the episode with someone building a meaningful second—or third—act in commercial real estate. Breaking Ceilings Breaking Ground celebrates the women shaping the future of real estate development across North America.

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Every skyline has a story. Breaking Ceilings | Breaking Ground brings you the women behind them — developers, entrepreneurs, and innovators transforming commercial real estate across North America and shaping the next generation of great cities. Hosted by CRE veterans Molly McCabe and Jill Ferrari, each episode goes deep with industry trailblazers: the deals they've closed, the companies they've built, and how technology, community, and bold vision are changing what's possible. Whether you're already building or just getting started, this is the conversation you've been waiting for.

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