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Brooklyn's Top 50 Most Influential

Every day this week, we're going to count down Brooklyn's Top 50* most influential people who have shaped Brooklyn neighborhoods by building new structures, preserving older ones, influencing property values and quality of life, speaking for thousands, or changing the course of developments, for example. We did 41-50 yesterday, so today it's 31-40. Instead of listing everyone from Bloomberg to Bernanke, we mostly stuck with locals. Surprisingly still, by broadening our definition of influence beyond quantitative factors like real estate holdings and constituency, the toughest task was keeping the list down to only 50 (*So we cheated, there's actually more like 65 people on the list, and it was still hard). Ranking them in order was also tough. In some cases we considered the type of entity the person represents, the potential impact of the project he or she is working on, and the extent of influence over time, distance and the number of Brooklynites affected. By all means, feel free to give us your two cents in the comments section. By the end of this week, we could have 200 people on the list!

36. Halstead Property director of development marketing Bill Ross has been involved in the Brooklyn real estate for almost three decades, and was instrumental in expanding Halstead's reach into the market by selling them his own Brooklyn Heights-based firm, William S. Ross Real Estate, four years ago, when it employed 25 agents at the time. In his current role, he's helped big-time developers like Walentas and Stahl Real Estate assemble air rights so they can make their buildings taller, and determined the unit make-up and pricing at projects like Toren. Ross also sold the Carlton Mews site in Fort Green, and Toll Brothers' land in Gowanus.

Post Date: 10/21/2008

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