Former Santa Rosa resident John Ryan shepherds Rohnert Park’s University District development

In 1996, Pohlson and Ryan began the Northern California division of Brookfield Residential Properties, a Calgary- based company that operates in nearly a dozen locales in the U.S. and Canada.

Local roots

Ryan grew up in Santa Rosa’s Bennett Valley just over the hill from University District. His father, John Ryan Sr., was in the real estate and mortgage business, which offered the opportunity for his son to work summer construction jobs.

Ryan’s brothers James and Kevin continue to operate the family business, Ryan Mortgage in Santa Rosa.

But after graduating from St. Mary’s College, Ryan went to work specializing in real estate for a large accounting firm. He later spent a decade with Los Angeles-based homebuilder KB Home, including a few years for the company in Paris.

The company he now leads has 83 employees. It builds about 3,000 homes a year and sells another 4,000 residential lots to other home builders.

At University District, while Brookfield has developed the lots and gotten plans approved, it has yet to build homes but may do so in future phases. The first-phase builders are KB Home, Richmond American Homes and Signature Homes.

The prominence of those regional and national builders indicates how home construction changed after the recession. Residential building here for decades was dominated by county-based companies, but many of those businesses didn’t survive the tremendous financial strains of the housing crash, in part because they lacked the deep reserves of the national companies.

“There’s not a lot of local guys left,” Ryan said.

University District

A few years after starting the Brookfield division, Ryan heard about the University District site from his brother, James, who sits on the Exchange Bank’s board of directors. James Ryan had learned of the site from one of the bank’s clients, Clos Du Bois winery co-founder Thomas Reed.

Reed, a former secretary of the Air Force, was a leader in a partnership that had spent nine years assembling eight parcels just north of the university. The negotiations with landowners were arduous, said Reed, but necessary in order to provide the scale needed for a successful project.

“If you do it right,” he said, “you’ve got to have a couple hundred acres.”

When Reed’s Vast Oak Properties partnership began its efforts in 1990, no one knew the land across the street one day would house the Green Music Center. Later, Reed said, the partnership sold at cost to the university the 26-acre parcel on which the center’s Weill Hall now sits.

However, by 1999, the year that Reed’s group entered into a partnership agreement with Brookfield, the university had announced a proposed price tag for the Green Music Center of $47 million and an estimated completion date of 2002.

In reality, the music center cost $145 million and didn’t open until 2012.

Before University District could get a green light from Rohnert Park, the City Council had to write a new general plan, annex the land to the city and approve a specific plan for what would be built there. After the project won council approval in 2006, a Penngrove group filed suit, contending the city failed to adequately study the groundwater impacts of homes from University District and other developments planned under the new general plan.