Guided by the principle that every project is an opportunity to open doors and impact lives in a lasting and transformative way, Type A Projects is a woman-owned developer dedicated to building inspiring, vibrant and affordable places to live, work and learn.
Annie Tirschwell and Jill Crawford established Type A in 2013 after building over 1,000,000 SF of schools and community facilities with the nonprofit developer Civic Builders Inc. Among those developments were many award-winning designs and groundbreaking public/private partnerships with the NYC Department of Education, the NYC School Construction Authority and NYCHA. Civic Builders’ buildings continue to serve more than 10,000 low income children and their families in NYC and beyond.
Annie Tirschwell began her career in real estate as a key member of the Chelsea Market Building development team and manager of a 2.5 million SF adaptive re-use portfolio including the Falchi and Factory Building complex in Long Island City. She went on to develop numerous industrial buildings for the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center (GMDC) and to co-found Civic Builders which remains one of the nation’s most prolific charter school facility developers. At Civic, she led the creation of a portfolio valued at over $500,000,000.
Jill Crawford started her real estate career in historic preservation, managing the Upper Manhattan Historic Preservation Fund, a joint venture of the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone and the NY Landmarks Conservancy. Through the Fund’s twenty-five restoration projects, Jill worked with a range of community institutions including Harlem’s historic Convent Avenue Baptist Church, Abyssinian Baptist Church and the Malcolm Shabazz Mosque. At Civic Builders, she focused on public/private partnerships that leveraged public capital funding with New Market Tax Credits and private philanthropy to create thousands of school seats in underserved neighborhoods.
Annie and Jill formed Type A to continue working on high-impact, creative, multi-use real estate projects that support NYC’s neighborhoods and communities. Type A has worked with a range of organizations including DREAM (formerly Harlem RBI), Harlem Village Academies, Citymeals-on-Wheels, and Industry City among others. Their current work includes Bronx Point, a co-development with L+M Development Partners, that will transform a long vacant parcel along the Harlem River into a vibrant, mixed-use building with more than 500 affordable apartments, the Universal Hip Hop Museum, a host of commercial and community facility uses and a waterfront esplanade.
Pedram Mahdavi (Chief Operating Officer) is a real estate professional with a successful track record operating in both the private and public sectors. In his previous roles at The Hudson Companies and Forsyth Street Advisors, he led financial structuring and development of new construction and rehabilitations projects with nearly 2,000 affordable and market rate apartments and 200,000 SF of commercial space totaling over $500 million in total development costs. He managed all aspects of project delivery including financing, entitlements, design, construction and stabilization. Most recently, he worked in the NYC Mayor’s Office as senior advisor to the deputy mayor for housing and economic development where he oversaw real estate and economic development entities and led the City‘s negotiations to deploy strategic use of City development tools and assets to advance policy priorities.
Type A Projects is a Certified Woman-Owned Business Enterprise (WBE) in the City of New York.