An innovative mixed-use development in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood is being led by a collaboration of “great minds” and a “family that believes in a greater Chicago.” That’s how JC Griffin explains Metropolis Pointe. The family that believes is his family-governed Griffin Venture Group. The great minds include Jim Rylowicz, VP and general manager at CenTrio, a provider of sustainable energy solutions. Host Phil Coover invites them both to discuss the project in this episode. JC describes Metropolis Pointe as a sustainable project that the community, environment, and Earth can be “happy about for generations.” Jim recalls listening to JC’s pitch and realizing that Metropolis Pointe aligns with how CenTrio thinks about energy. “And given that alignment, it was a no-brainer to keep the conversation going.” Tune in to this conversation to hear why Axios selected Metropolis Pointe one of Chicago’s top projects for 2026.

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Real Estate for Breakfast, where McGuireWoods partner Phil Coover brings you essential conversations with leaders in commercial real estate, translating complex industry challenges into actionable insights.

Good morning. This is Real Estate for Breakfast podcast. I'm your host, Phil Coover. I'm a partner in McGuireWoods real estate group here in Chicago.

And today we have a really exciting episode. It's going to be really fun. We're going to learn a lot. And big picture, one of the reasons why I started this podcast in 2016 is because I just wanted to talk to interesting people doing really cool projects, and I wanted to learn from them. And we're going to do both those things today.

So we have JC Griffin, who is the founder, managing principal, and chief executive officer of Griffin Venture Group. JC, thanks for coming on the show.

Phil, I'm so happy to be here with you. Thank you for having me and Jim on today.

Then we also have Jim Rylowicz. He's the VP and general manager of CenTrio Energy in the Chicago market. And we're going to talk about CenTrio and their energy, their thermal energy, district energy, which we're all learning about, Jim's way ahead of us.

And JC invited him on the show. But first, I really want to focus on the Griffin Venture Group, because that's what caught my eye to start this podcast is the Metropolis Pointe Project, which has been in cranes. It looks like something out of the future and maybe it will bring us into the future. I reached out to JC just because I thought this project was so cool. And then I was also noticing you guys have white construction on the job. Mark White's a former, the CEO of White Construction Architecture. He's a former podcast guest. Some of our listeners will remember him.

They have a really cool video on their website of Metropolis Pointe, which is really interesting. But JC, tell us about the project. Tell us about Griffin Venture Group. Start wherever you feel would be good.

Well, Phil, I couldn't agree more with you in the sense of it being somewhat illustrative of the future. We certainly have approached this opportunity with the future in mind, and that's why we've got partners like CenTrio with us and executing what we believe to be one of the most sustainable projects that will be built in our generation. And certainly one of the most transformative development projects, ground up development projects in Chicago's history.

And we ultimately approached this, also thinking that it needs to be a part of a community driven initiative to empower corridors around the city of Chicago that has been disinvested in and neglected for, also for generations. And so who better to lead that type of initiative than someone that has roots in the community and has a family that stems back all the way to the early 20th century in Chicago. And that's what Griffin Venture Group is. And that's what we represent as we carry on this project that we hope to serve as a guide on, if you will, to future development in the city of Chicago.

Now, as far as Griffin Venture Group and our experience in executing future focused development projects like Metropolis Pointe, our rap sheet is pretty shallow. In fact, this is going to be our initial project, ground up development project, but we have engaged and have participated in projects throughout the city, not under the Griffin Venture Group GVG banner, but my family has been invested in the city of Chicago, like I said, for an excess of 50 plus years, certainly dating back to the 1940s where we made the transition to Chicago through the great migration.

So my family comes from Mississippi and Texas and Louisiana, and my great-grandparents participated in a lot of economic development when the city of Chicago was going through its own transition of civil rights and inclusion.

And my family, for that matter, were able to get involved in the petroleum business through the acquisition of gas stations and, on the south side of Chicago and restaurants, and developed a single family house portfolio. Since then, we've diluted, divested from that, but this is our initiative now to really bring that level of investment, some of those gains that we received from earlier generations of my family, and execute what we believe to be something extremely impactful in a positive sense for the future of the city of Chicago.

Now, as far as what Metropolis Pointe represents and what we're looking to execute is extremely complicated. But on the face, it's a mixed use, future focused, future oriented, tech enabled, next generation asset that we ultimately understand where digital infrastructure is going, to the sense of understanding that it's going to be a critical component in our day-to-day lives, all of our lives.

And we also understand that housing will continue to be necessary, right? And so marrying those two assets seems just logical to us. And that's why we are leading something that we believe is going to be extremely transformative, but also set a standard for what future focus development looks like throughout the world.

Thank you for that summary. It's such an interesting project. When I first saw the pictures, I thought, "Oh, it's another apartment building. That's great. We always need more units here in Chicago." But tell our listeners in case it's in the Bronzeville area, but just how great that location is in proximity to The Loop, the lake, tell us about the location. And then, if you could explain in addition to residential units, what else you're looking to include in this project?

Right. So the location is in Bronzeville. It's in the Douglas community. So Bronzeville, for those of your listeners that aren't familiar, is one of the most historic communities in the country. In fact, it was acknowledged in the United States Congress as a historical neighborhood a few years ago.

And what that does is, it really pretty much lines the community up to be prioritized for investments from the federal government and grants, et cetera, so on. But the great migration that happened in the early 20th century really served as a population, or distributed the population of Black and brown Americans, that were enbondaged and enslaved in the United States all the way up into the Emancipation Proclamation. And even during the Jim Crow period, there were populations in the southern portion of the country that were looking for economic inclusion and opportunity.

And so they settled in Bronzeville, they settled in Harlem, they settled in Detroit, settled in Cleveland. But Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood certainly served as the epicenter, and a leading community and neighborhood where we saw a lot of those that made that trip from the southern parts of the country into the Bronzeville neighborhood.

And so, we selected this simply because, one, and first and foremost, my family is extremely familiar with the Bronzeville community, and that's where we held our businesses. And two, there's a great opportunity to help a major mega development project get off the ground called Bronzeville Lakefront, which has been in the news for years as a 3.8 plus billion dollar mega development project, just to the south of our site.

And so, the location specifically being in the Douglas community is on the northern edge of Bronzeville, between 25th and 26th Street and Martin Luther King Drive. And this is also extremely important, because we've seen in Chicago, those of your listeners that pay attention to a lot of the different type of development initiatives that take place throughout the city, we've seen several proposals throughout the years be presented by institutions and developers that are trying to develop on the lakefront, or near the lakefront.

And that's simply because the lakefront is cherished property, right? And the city of Chicago years ago, dare I say, I don't know exactly when the ordinance was passed, but certainly several decades ago, had actually protected the lakefront from being developed. And so, it's made it extremely difficult for developers to be able to capitalize on opportunities.

But because of this location, we don't have that barrier. We can get what I like to call, to be a near lakefront position and be able to demonstrate exactly what you can do with that type of location and topography. So that's the location, that's a little bit of history of Bronzeville.

Oh, I love that. Yeah. And it's right next to the 55th highway as you come in. So it would have a very prominent view as you approach the city, before you drive up to Soldier Field and right around there in the lakefront. So tell us about what you're planning to have on the project in addition to the residential units. And that might be a nice segue to let Jim tell us a little bit about CenTrio.

Absolutely. So, as far as the breakdown of the programming for the site, we approach this really with an open mind about what we really believe Bronzeville, first and foremost, could bear, right? Again, paying homage to the significance of the community. I mean that in a sense of what do we ultimately want to deliver to be additive to that significance, right? What do we want to help the community and this neighborhood of Bronzeville really be able to feel proud about?

And we've seen so many developments around the city, talking about sports and entertainment complexes, casinos, cannabis, dispensaries, et cetera. So these things were thought about, but at the end of the day, it went back to, what do we want Bronzeville to be seen as and the residents be proud of?

And that ultimately led to this mixed use concept that's been proposed to the city, and that you've seen in the newspapers, that includes a distributed energy plant that CenTrio is a partner in delivering a 200,000 square foot data center, that we are looking at partnering with several different operators on a 45-plus story residential tower, and additional ancillary mixed use real estate. And really something extremely unique, which is what we're calling the Artificial Intelligence Preparedness Institute, which is really centered around preparing the next generation of labor and workforce to be able to participate in the economy in a dignified way by having the skills and the tools, the knowledge and the expertise, to not only apply for these particular roles that will be coming online in the near future, but to excel in these roles.

And that's exactly why we've partnered with CenTrio, because individuals like Jim have been ahead, again, of the curve here, right? They are already invested their time, their energy in learning about systems, and mechanical operations that the future will certainly need to incorporate in its operations. Mechanical systems will need to incorporate this level of technology.

And so, Jim and his team have been extremely supportive of our efforts in delivering this unique product to Bronzeville and the city of Chicago, but by no means could we do this independently of them as well. Or they could do it, I'm sorry, independently of us. And Jim will be able to speak to this, but the primary driver is the off takers in these situations, whether that's a data center, a distributed energy plant, thermal energy storage facility or district cooling plant, or a 50-story residential tower. It's all about who is going to occupy these facilities.

And so, regardless of what we talk about, that's front and center, but we really are pushing forward again on what I highlighted at the forefront, which is sustainability, and that's, in my mind, also equals resilience. And so, that's what we're leading with Metropolis Pointe is something, again, the community can be extremely proud of for generations to come, something that the environment and the world and the earth can be happy about for generations to come, and something that we all can ultimately want to see in and around urban metropolis and urban centers around the world, similar projects.

That's so interesting, because most developments, and I represent developers, are focused on what can we do to generate the most revenue from this piece of land. And what's interesting about the additional uses you said is they're all uses that would help the community, and not just generate revenue for the property owners.

And so you're talking about the artificial intelligence prepared community. You're talking about helping the community learn how to prepare for the future of AI. I want to get back to that. So you have the AI Preparedness Center, but then also providing distributed energy to the community. And that's not something I've ever heard a developer talk about, including thinking about how can we raise the level of those around us and get energy and thermal energy in this case out to others, which is a great segue to bring Jim into this conversation and CenTrio.

Jim, thanks for being on the show. Tell us about CenTrio, and what you all plan to do with this development.

Yeah, thanks for having us, Phil. So CenTrio is a district energy company, a nationwide district energy company. We have our largest system right here in Chicago.

And so, we've connected with JC on this project a while back, and realized pretty early on that it's a great fit for what we do and how we think about things. District energy, for those who are unfamiliar, is a way of heating and cooling buildings and other critical facilities.

And so traditionally, these facilities would have their own onsite heating and cooling generating equipment, chillers and boilers and things of that nature, to supply comfort cooling and heating to keep people comfortable within the buildings or to facilitate processes.

With district energy, what that enables is to eliminate the equipment at each individual building, and consolidate into larger distribution plants. And then, that energy is generated at those larger plants and distributed back out to the buildings.

And by doing this, we can aggregate diverse load types, we can utilize technologies or equipment that don't pencil at building scale, but pencil at larger scale. And so we can derive these efficiencies, sustainability benefits, reliability benefits, and really benefit the entire community by doing this.

And so, with the Metropolis Pointe Project, as JC indicated, there's a large component of it is this data center. And we all know that data centers have certain requirements from an energy perspective. And so, we think about this as, okay, a data center has certain requirements. How can we meet those requirements, and then leverage the infrastructure that a data center needs, to benefit the other aspects of the development or the surrounding community? And by doing that, again, we can do things more sustainably, more reliably, and meet the needs of, not only the critical load facility, but residents and neighbors.

So interesting. So theoretically, you'd be able to develop buildings in the area a little bit more cost effectively,, because you wouldn't have to plan on having your own system for chilling water, for one example. So it might facilitate community development because you'd already have this system that you could tap into rather than have to have your own.

That's exactly right.

And then for data centers, so for those that aren't studying data centers, they have two, probably more than two, but two very big needs, which is energy and chilling. These things heat up, you got to keep them cool. So would CenTrio, would you have plants there as part of the development, and then would that help the data center by having chilled water right on site?

That's right. So we would have a plant as part of this development, that would be designed not only to serve the initial data center load, but also be used to serve the other uses in the development as those come online, with the potential possibility of further expansion to serve loads outside of the Metropolis Pointe development, if that made sense.

I got a basic question for you for a data center. Would they, talk about data centers needing to chill the water? What are we talking about? Are you spraying cold water on these things? What is actually happening inside? You're running pipes around it with cold water to keep it cool? How's it work?

There's different ways to cool the actual data center equipment, and it's dependent on what the actual data center use is, but from CenTrio's perspective at the plant, we're producing chilled water. And that chilled water is then brought over to the data center to be used to cool the processing equipment. And again, sometimes that's the equipment's directly cooled by the chilled water, sometimes the chilled water cools the air that then cools the equipment. So there's different ways to do it depending on the end user.

Interesting. So what's the plan for getting the energy to the data center? I know that's always kind of one of the first questions I hear when people are talking about data center development.

JC, you want to talk about the power?

Yeah, sure. I think, Phil, you kind of touched on, when you think about distributed energy, you immediately perhaps may think about electricity. That's what a lot of us do. But power and energy is, by definition, more than just electrical.

And so when you think about what it is that CenTrio is providing us is at this point in time, the primary resource is that cooling component that you highlighted earlier. But the other that we're talking about now, is energy, as it pertains to electricity, but also as it may and what I believe should be a critical part of future conversations, current and future conversations, which is alternative solutions for powering and energizing these types of facilities.

And so, we've looked at and are considering more than just what's considered grid power, which is primarily what we see come from ComEd. But we believe that a mixture of solutions in powering facilities like this and proposals, where we have mixed use, heat export system configurations in place, that we certainly should be entertaining discussion and assessing the use of natural gas and renewable natural gas is to sustain the level of power that it's going to require in order for these types of assets to be able to function optimally.

And so, that's what we're doing at Metropolis Pointe. So not only are we looking at CenTrio to assist us with cooling the system through this heat export configuration that Jim walked you through, which uses cooling methods, which is basically a direct liquid cooling method to cool the chips that rest in servers, but we also need energy in order for the server itself to function, and for all of the chips to be able to accurately conduct their operation, which is computing. All of the different large language models and training models and inference models, workloads that we anticipate will be extremely critical for whatever operator decides to primarily occupy MPDC1, which is the name that we've pointed for Metropolis Point Data Center One.

And so the energy associated to that is extremely complicated. I think it would take way more than 45 minutes to an hour to really walk through all of the different hoops that not only developers, but also distributing companies like ComEd, and also the capital markets community, think of the Blue Owls of the world, that really focus on spending time and their human energy in securing these assets to be able to ultimately energize these types of facilities.

So we believe that Metropolis Pointe can execute what we believe to be a co-location, but also attractive to an edge-oriented workload, that is really speaking data center language by saying that we believe it can be a multi-tenant facility that is extremely close to an urban center.

But at the same time, we're assessing whether or not this can really serve as a node for hyperscale operations to be conducted. There's a lot of focus on data centers using or deploying resources to acquire large swaths of acreage and land in areas where it's cheap to acquire, which is not usually in urban centers. But there's also a very interesting aspect to their operations that requires them to lower their latency performance. And in order to do that, they have to be closer to the consumer.

And so that's where the edge orientation really becomes extremely attractive. And then, you really want to be able to have these facilities clustered together in a way, which is again, why you're seeing some of the hyperscalers focus on these large buildouts is that the more facilities, data centers you're able to have working on managing all of these different workloads, the greater level of performance they're able to execute.

And so with Metropolis Pointe, we see this as, again, a step in the right direction for Chicago in preparing for next generation workloads, focusing on inference, focusing on large language models, but most importantly, lowering the latency between large carrier hotels like 350 ECERMAC, which is just about a half mile up the street from our site, and additional data center throughout the marketplace.

And the energy to close on this particular topic is, again, probably one of the most complex but most important topics as far as it relates to, how do you energize and power these facilities. And so we're looking at a myriad of different ways to do that. Of course, electricity is the primary focus, because it's the most reliable at this point. But because of the strains that are associated to the grid, as these particular assets continue to become prioritized in the capital market space, we've got to be conscious around whether that's sustainable, again, equally resilient, and how can we can better use all of the different methods of energy in order to sustain these workloads.

Thank you. All right, JC, one follow-up question because that was a tough one, but one thought that I had running through my mind is, I'm sure what I've heard in the press that there's a lot of "not in my backyard" for data centers. But I've also hear you're considering bringing a smaller size, but a substantial sized data center to an urban area.

So why do the hyperscalers or why do the users want the data center near the city? Is it that latency factor that you referenced? Yeah, because that's kind of the first time I've heard someone talk in a compelling way about why we should put something in an urban area. And yeah, so tell us more about that latency term that you used, and why you're getting the interest there.

Well, I'll try to be short on this one. And when you talk about latency, and by no means do I put myself out to be an expert in this, right? My background is not in digital infrastructure, but I've had the opportunity to be next to people like Jim who certainly has had more exposure to this space, and certainly have brought on consultants to assist the entire team in educating us all on how we can best configure and position Metropolis Pointe to be successful in its incorporation.

So the basic understanding of what we have, Phil, over the value proposition, for not only Metropolis point, but for digital infrastructure to be closer in these urban corridors, is that we will ultimately need these facilities close to consumer activity and traffic and populations, if we want to stay competitive in building out next generational assets.

So everything that we've been hearing post pandemic has been primarily driven on two things pertaining to commercial real estate development, which is conversions, right? Taking old, dilapidated or obsolete office buildings and converting them into some housing or some other type of asset class.

And then the second has been ground up development of brand new office buildings, which we consider to be class A or AAA assets. And then, what's touched on, dovetailed off of those two, has been the talk of flight of quality and the doom loop, right?

So those are the driving factors that we're considering as developers, as investors, is are we thinking broadly enough over what we can do in urban corridors with underutilized assets or underutilized land? My belief is we need to be doing more than just build office class A or AAA office buildings, and that we also need to do more with older office buildings than convert them into housing. And that's not to say that either one of those initiatives are negative or wrong, but I think it's a little bit restrictive as to how much ingenuity and creativity we can actually exercise.

And so, that's what we're doing with Metropolis Pointe is we understand that we ultimately sit on roughly just under seven acres. And to the immediately south of us, there's a 47 acre development project that has had difficulty getting off the ground.

So how can we think differently about attracting capital in a world-class city like the city of Chicago? And doing so I believe requires ingenuity and creativity and collaboration, like partnering with CenTrio, like including a data center in a multifamily skyscraper development.

And I believe that by doing that, you not only broaden your net of the investors that you can attract into a city, but you can also start, again, going towards sustainability, creating ecosystems that can withstand larger economic challenges in the future.

For those of us that practice in finance and development and real estate and investments, et cetera, we understand it's all cyclical. We can't avoid economic downturns. They're a part of the system. But what we can do is we can learn, and which I believe some of us do a great job at doing, we can learn from the past and then we can build adequately for the future so that the hardships that we face, regardless of your economic level, aren't as hard, right? Aren't as harsh.

And that's what Metropolis Pointe is presenting is we want to create resilient housing for people. The city of Chicago has a very, very rich history over what it has and hadn't done in the past regarding the least fortunate of people. Not everyone is going to get into Harvard. Not everyone is going to become a hotshot attorney like you, Phil. Not everyone is going to be able to live the highest extent of what America has to offer.

So we need to think about providing for those selected few, a lifestyle that is enriching and exciting and comforting. But then, at the same time, we have to think about providing for those that won't necessarily meet those levels of success and their success looks different.

And so Metropolis Pointe is taking all of that into account. We understand that there are people on fixed income. We understand that there are people that are affluent and have unlimited income. We understand that there are middle age or middle class workers that receive promotions annually or little steps up in pay associated with inflation.

And so, how do we meet all of those different required, those tiers, those demographics? And I believe, along with those that I've been able to convince to follow our effort with Metropolis Pointe, believes that by being creative, including distributed energy, district cooling from CenTrio, including a digital infrastructure facility, a data center like MPDC1, and anchoring that with a 50-story skyscraper, we believe that's a very creative way to meet some of those issues.

And then also when you're talking about helping those in the community, your artificial intelligence preparedness center.

Yeah. AIPI, Artificial Intelligence Preparedness Institute.

You know what pops in my head is my mom was a librarian and she was the director of a public library in DeKalb, Illinois where I grew up. And she oversaw the expansion of that library in about 2010 to 2012. And what she would always talk about is that literacy can be in a variety of ways. And we always think of literacy in terms of just reading a book, but when she sought to oversee the development of that library, she wanted computers and she wanted a 3D printer, and she wanted the community to have access to technology that would help them for the future and not just be able to check out a novel. Which, not to diminish checking out a novel, she reads every day.

But she was thinking about that and she would always go preach that the community needs to learn literacy in all different types of ways. And JC, you're a librarian, you're the first person that I've ever heard talk about artificial intelligence preparedness, and trying to provide something. So it's very interesting. Would that be like a nonprofit or a tenant that's doing it? Who would be trying to figure out how that works?

Yeah. So the AIPI is really first, that's a component that really came to mind from my family and my sister is actually who's leading the initiative. Her name's Cassidy, and she's not with us today, of course, but she's an educator by training.

And we were talking about how can we ensure these data centers and skyscrapers and distributed energy plants cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. And when you think about that, you say, "Man, that's a lot of money coming across the table." And historically when that's happened, we see a bull rush from certain special interest groups to try to create CBAs, community benefit agreements, that obligates developers and their partners to perform a certain way in order to ensure that economic prosperity is distributed in a way that is fair.

It's interesting because we don't need a CBA, frankly. We're approaching this with the community in mind. And I think historically that's the unfortunate disposition that the industry has had, is that it's required these special interest groups to have to create a level of advocacy around fairness in order to be prioritized.

But that's again, going towards the sustainability aspect of how we are looking to execute this project. Community benefit is what's ultimately driving this. Of course, we're in it for a profit. We're in America. We need to make sure that our mortgages are paid and insurance is paid and our car notes are paid and our children can go to school and we've got clean clothes to wear to work. I mean, we all have to make money. And that's important, but I don't believe we need to be as bullish around the capitalist perspective than we've kind of allowed our industries to kind of get away with.

And that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be smart around our budgets or be smart around our proforma, or be diligent about how it is we are underwriting projects. But the AIPI is really saying, "Listen, we understand where career, the workforce, is going to the extent of what we know." You don't know what you don't know, but we do know that the workforce is going in a different direction and we don't need any more Wall Street Journal articles or we need to read any more WSJ articles to understand that.

What we need is we need practitioners, developers, investors, partners like CenTrio to step up when there's an opportunity to demonstrate leadership. And by doing that, you don't have to wait for a community special interest group to advocate for a CBA to be put in place. And so the AIPI is doing that. It's saying, "Listen, we understand this. We're going to prioritize this with labor. We're going to prioritize this with artificial intelligence and technology organizations. We're going to prioritize this with higher educational institutions."

And so, this isn't just going to be another think tank, where you bring in highly scholared individuals from around the world and pontificate on tufted leather sofas. This is going to be an opportunity for people to truly get hands-on experience, certifications, badges, credentials, and expertise, and confidence to be able to feed their families, to buy a house, to have children, to take that trip to Italy or Rome, Rome's in Italy, and Greece, et cetera.

So that's what the intention of the AIPI is. And so, there's a huge labor shortage associated to what Jim is doing and his team. There's a huge labor shortage associated to building out data centers. There's a huge labor shortage as to individuals that understand how to manage large language models and how to manage teams and being able to put together inference workloads, for these data centers to ultimately compute.

There's significant labor shortages all throughout this industry of digital infrastructure. And so, how can we lean into being leaders in this space? It's not just by putting up a 50-story tower, it's also by making sure that the community has access to that level of economic prosperity as well.

And so, that's what the AIPI is really anchored in. And Phil, I'm happy to connect you with my sister in the future so that she can give you more details.

Yeah. I'd love to learn more. Amen. That speech. And earlier when you were answering your question, I don't have decades of data center infrastructure expertise. I think that's the thing is no one does. That's why learning about it and the shortages of labor are so important to address is because we're all rushing ahead. I get people ask me all the time, they're like, "What lawyers can we hire that have done a ton of data centers?" And I'm like, "None." You can find lawyers that have done a few, but they're lying to you if they say that they've done 40, because there's just not that many of them around for one set of lawyers who have done.

Jim, I feel like you're an all star receiver and we're just not getting you the ball. We got Jim here on the podcast.

That's good, Phil. That was a good one.

It's like you could sign that all star receiver for tens of millions of bucks, but you got to throw them the ball every now and then. So tell us, I know we're coming short on time, but just tell us how you got to know JC and how CenTrio got to be a part of this project and your view of what the Griffin Venture Group is doing.

Well, Phil, first of all, I'll say if running the ball is working, you don't need to throw it to the receiver. So JC's knocking out of the park here.

We first met JC, actually, JC reached out to us originally, if I'm recalling correctly, JC. Came across us maybe through White and seeing our facilities downtown, we have a number of large scale district plants in downtown Chicago. The one most folks recognize and see is right along the river coming in on the Eisenhower after you cross under the old post office, going east into the city, there's kind of an odd looking building there and that's one of our facilities. And so, that's a large pooling plant with a large ice battery system actually where we make ice at night, and then melt that during the day to provide cooling to the district loop downtown.

So I think that grabbed some folks' attention and JC got to researching and thought, "Hey, this could be a good fit for what he's trying to do at Metropolis Pointe." And we met one day, JC pitched the vision and again, it just seemed to fit really well with what we do, how we think about infrastructure, how we think about energy at sort of a neighborhood scale and a mixed use scale.

And given that alignment, it was a no-brainer to keep the conversation going and see how we could fit into the vision of Metropolis Pointe.

Well, thanks, Jim. Thanks, JC. Appreciate both your time today. Thanks for coming on the show. JC, do you have any closing statements? I feel like you're very inspiring when you talk. So I feel like get us out of here with something about, you can tie us all together, something about the future and what we're doing here.

Well, Phil, that's very kind of you to say. I'm going to let my mother know that you shared that very kind compliment with me. Since I was a child, she's always encouraged me to find my way through the faith. Her dream for me is to be a minister, spreading the good word.

And I've always told her, I said, "Listen, mom, and this is something that's important to me, is we need more believers in the boardroom, and not just behind the pulpit, right? We don't have enough people advocating for believing in something greater in the boardroom." And so, that's what I can leave you with is that this project is being led not only by great professionals with amazing minds like Jim and his team at CenTrio, but it's being led by a family that believes. It believes in a greater Chicago, it believes in a greater Bronzeville, it believes in better for people.

We believe in a better person, right? We believe in that. And it requires a lot out of us, because once again, I think the business community isn't structured in a way to accept these types of these initiatives easily. So we're thankful to have CenTrio on board with us. We're thankful for your time, Phil. Thanks for accommodating and being able to share a little bit about our story.

We were just recently selected by Axios as one of the top projects in Chicago in 2026, which is a big deal. But with all of this notoriety, with all of this recognition, that's a lot of pressure as well. And so, just continue to pray for us and invite us on. We look forward to getting an invitation on the show once the thing's built.

Well, we need more believers out there. JC, Jim, thank you very much for coming on the show.

Thanks, Phil.

Thanks, Phil.

Thank you for joining us on this episode of Real Estate for Breakfast. To learn more about today's discussion, please email host Phil Coover at pcoover@mcguirewoods.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

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