Two Trees Management

Overview

Two Trees Management is a privately held, family-run New York real-estate developer founded in 1968 by David Walentas. It built its reputation on the decades-long transformation of DUMBO, Brooklyn — the waterfront district Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass — from a derelict industrial zone into one of the city’s most expensive mixed-use neighborhoods. The firm is run by Walentas’s son Jed Walentas, who joined in 1997 and is now CEO and principal, and it describes itself as self-financed, using its own capital rather than outside equity partners (The Real Deal; Commercial Observer). Its signature project is the redevelopment of the roughly 11-acre former Domino Sugar Refinery site on the Williamsburg waterfront, acquired in October 2012 for about $185 million and built out as a mixed-use campus — including the public Domino Park and the converted Refinery office tower — in a program valued at roughly $2.5 billion (Forbes; Commercial Property Executive).

Founding and the DUMBO bet

David Walentas grew up poor in Rochester, New York, studied mechanical engineering at the University of Virginia, and entered New York real estate in 1968 with Jeff Byers, a well-connected heir to several fortunes. The pair called their firm Two Trees, after the farm of Byers’s grandmother, and began with rent-controlled buildings and co-op conversions in Manhattan, including Alwyn Court at 58th Street and Seventh Avenue (Forbes; Dan’s Papers). Byers died in the mid-1970s — Forbes reports 1977, Dan’s Papers says December 1975 — and Walentas paid Byers’s family $1.8 million for his stake, leaving him cash-depleted and cut off from the wealthy investors Byers had courted (Forbes).

In 1979 Walentas borrowed $12 million and bought 2 million square feet of old industrial buildings in Fulton Landing from developer Harry Helmsley at about $6 a square foot, after no bank would lend on the deal; the Lauder brothers, Ronald and Leonard, provided the financing. He had stumbled on the area — then a dying industrial district of underused warehouses — and saw the potential to create an entire neighborhood, which he renamed DUMBO. The rezoning battle took decades: the Koch administration refused to rezone the area, a deal brokered through Governor Mario Cuomo’s office brought state Department of Labor offices and their 1,000 jobs to DUMBO, and residential rezoning finally arrived in 1997 under Mayor Rudy Giuliani (Forbes). By 2015 the company owned and managed 12 buildings in DUMBO comprising more than 3 million square feet of commercial and residential space, with total holdings above 4 million square feet (Commercial Observer).

Leadership and the family model

Jed Walentas graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1996, worked briefly elsewhere at his father’s insistence, and joined Two Trees in 1997. He describes the transition as gradual rather than a single moment — “in a lot of ways it’s still [David’s] company” — and runs the firm with his college friend and business partner Amish Patel. The operating philosophy is deliberately old-fashioned: “We don’t have any partners anywhere… We run it like an old-fashioned real estate business here. I’m not saying we don’t have any lenders, but we don’t have any equity partners” (Commercial Observer). That self-financing model, built up over decades of converting buildings one at a time and selling finished projects to fund the next, let the firm pursue the Domino project without outside investors (Forbes).

Beyond DUMBO, the firm’s portfolio has included the $600 million Mercedes House development in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen — 1.2 million square feet of tiered, glassy luxury designed by Enrique Norten, fully leased within a little over a year — the Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg, the 300-apartment BAM South development in Downtown Brooklyn, and the 17-story 60 Water Street at Dock Street in DUMBO (Forbes; Commercial Observer).

The Domino Sugar redevelopment

Two Trees bought the shuttered Domino Sugar refinery and its surrounding 11 acres in October 2012 for about $185 million — $30 million more than its initial bid — after a drawn-out fight between the previous owners. The firm set aside the site’s existing as-of-right approval and went back through the city’s land-use process for a plan it believed in: four taller towers, a public waterfront park and square, and the refinery itself kept intact, including its iconic sign, and converted into office space. The revised plan won final city approval in 2014, with 2,500 apartments including 20 percent low-income housing (Forbes; Dan’s Papers).

The campus was masterplanned by SHoP Architects and built out in phases. The first residential building, the SHoP-designed 325 Kent with 500 apartments, was followed by Domino Park — a six-acre public waterfront park designed by James Corner Field Operations, the firm behind the High Line, which opened in June 2018 with salvaged refinery artifacts, a refinery-shaped children’s playground and flood-resilient landscaping (Architectural Record). The 330-unit One South First residential tower, the fully leased Ten Grand commercial building (opened 2020) and the two-tower One Domino Square followed, alongside the Domino Square public plaza (Commercial Property Executive). The landmarked refinery building itself — its filter, pan and finishing houses designated landmarks in 2007 — was converted by Practice for Architecture and Urbanism into The Refinery at Domino, a 15-story, 460,000-square-foot Class A office tower that places a contemporary glass building inside the historic masonry shell, separated by a 12-foot gap planted as a vertical garden. Bloomberg valued the refinery renovation alone at $150 million (Commercial Property Executive).

Leasing the office tower proved harder than expected. Two Trees initially bet on landing a large anchor tenant but, with only about a quarter of the space leased a year after its 2023 completion, subdivided the big floorplates for smaller tenants. By May 2026 the building had reached 90 percent occupancy across 56 tenants — including event-space operator Skylight, which expanded to 13,600 square feet on the top floors, and job platform Bandana — with the retail portion fully leased (Commercial Observer). As of August 2026, the project’s first 1,240 apartments were fully leased, its 160 condos were 80 percent sold, and another 1,400 units were expected within a few years, in a total program Two Trees has valued at $2.5 billion with completion targeted for 2027 (The Real Deal; Commercial Property Executive).

River Ring

In 2019 Two Trees paid $150 million for the former Con Edison oil-storage lots on River Street, just north of the Domino site, and unveiled River Ring: two twisting towers designed by Bjarke Ingels Group amid a landscape by James Corner Field Operations, with 1,050 apartments, office and retail space, a 3-acre public waterfront park with a cove and public beach, and a 50,000-square-foot YMCA. The project needed a rezoning from manufacturing to residential and drew organized opposition from a group called Sustainable Williamsburg, which argued it would deepen gentrification and strain infrastructure; Two Trees countered that if the rezoning failed it would sell the site, most likely to a last-mile logistics developer (Brownstoner; Architect’s Newspaper).

After a pandemic pause, the project moved through the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure: Community Board 1 voted yes with conditions, Borough President Eric Adams issued a conditional approval, and the City Planning Commission voted unanimously in favor. In December 2021 the full 48-member City Council approved River Ring unanimously, with 263 permanently affordable apartments and a $31 million Two Trees commitment to off-site senior affordable housing within the community district (Brownstoner; Brownstoner). Construction did not start, and Two Trees raised concerns that the project could not move forward under 485-x, the state’s replacement for the 421-a program. In 2026 the project was revived after it was granted a 421-a tax break, resolving the standoff (The Real Deal).

Arts, philanthropy and Jane’s Carousel

The Walentas family’s DUMBO project was intertwined with the arts from the start, and the driver was David’s wife Jane Walentas, an artist. In 1984 the couple bought a 1922 Philadelphia Toboggan Company carousel at auction — bidding on every horse to keep the set together — and Jane spent 27 years restoring it by hand, scraping layers of paint down to the original. It now operates as Jane’s Carousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park, housed in a glass pavilion designed by architect Jean Nouvel (The Brooklyn Rail; Dan’s Papers). The family has provided more than 100,000 square feet of donated and subsidized space to artists and arts organizations — Smack Mellon, the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, St. Ann’s Warehouse and others — a scale of developer arts support that the executive director of Smack Mellon called unmatched in New York City (The Brooklyn Rail). Jane Walentas died in July 2020 (The Brooklyn Rail).

A tax-abatement dispute at 125 Court Street

A ProPublica investigation into New York’s 421-a property-tax abatement program found that Two Trees had registered 256 units at its 125 Court Street building in Brooklyn as exempt from rent stabilization without ever obtaining final certification for the abatement, and that the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) did not challenge the improper exemptions until 2011. Following a 2013 audit, the company refunded $299,148 in overcharges plus $90,805 in interest to 80 tenants. ProPublica reported that Two Trees had received over $10 million in total 421-a tax savings at the building, and calculated the total tenant overcharge at roughly $368,000 — about $80,000 combined across 64 low-income units and about $288,000 combined across 47 market-rate units — more than the amount the company refunded. ProPublica also reported that reimbursement disputes persisted among affected tenants after the refund (ProPublica). In March 2016, City Council member Stephen Levin and Assembly member Jo Anne Simon cited that reporting in asking the state’s Tenant Protection Unit to investigate the building’s full rent history, noting that tenants in rent-stabilized apartments can be entitled to triple damages for overcharges; Two Trees called it “an isolated incident where we identified and corrected mistakes made years ago” (ProPublica). In 2017, a separate class-action lawsuit alleged that Two Trees had committed about $10 million in rent fraud and made false statements to the city to secure roughly $92 million in tax subsidies at the same building. The company publicly called the suit “frivolous” (The Real Deal).

What this profile does not claim

Neither source read for this profile reports how the 2017 class-action lawsuit was ultimately resolved — only the allegations, the dollar figures cited, and the company’s denial. Sources disagree on the year of co-founder Jeff Byers’s death (1977 per Forbes, December 1975 per Dan’s Papers), and this profile does not resolve it. Published figures for the Domino program’s scale vary by source and date and are presented as dated snapshots. No claim is made about the firm’s current portfolio beyond what the cited 2015–2026 sources document, and no claim is made about the exact date of Jane Walentas’s death beyond July 2020.