Jay John Hellman, PH.D.
“An applied real estate thinker who lives with the future as his constant companion”
- Alan Feinberg, RA, AICP, President of Central Maryland Development, Inc.
Dr. Jay John Hellman holds five degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:
Ph.D. (Quantitative Policy / Systems Analysis and Planning), M.S. Management (Sloan
School of Management, incorporating research/education at Harvard Business School),
and B.S., M.S. and E.E. degrees.
A real estate developer and trend researcher known for his leadership in
understanding how buildings, towns and cities are being changed by computer
and communication technologies, Dr. Hellman is the inventor of the term
our increasingly Internet-driven world’s changing work patterns, social structures and
living conditions. Telecommunications technology, he predicts, will change our world
physically as well as culturally in the 21st century just as the railroads changed it in
the 19th century and the automobile, air travel, telephones and television changed
it again in the 20th.
Dr Hellman's work has been prominently referenced by media including the WASHINGTON POST,
the prestigious HARVARD INTERNATIONAL REVIEW (which has featured Dr Hellman's ideas in
two leading articles on its worldwide website, The Technologies of Peace and The Future of
Urbanization), URBAN LAND, international magazine of the authoritative Urban Land institute,
which has featured Dr Hellman's work in the major articles Choosing a Skyline, Telecommunities
and Superbuilding, HOMELAND SECURITY TODAY, COMMLAW CONSPECTUS: THE
JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATIONS LAW AND POLICY of the Columbus School of Law at
the Catholic University of America, and National Public Radio. Dr Hellman is also referenced
in two books published by the National Academies Press, joint publishing arm of the National
Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and
National Research Council, all operating under a charter granted by the US Congress. The
two books citing Dr Hellman are THE TELECOMMUNICATIONS CHALLENGE: CHANGING
TECHNOLOGIES AND EVOLVING POLICIES (2006), and ENHANCING PRODUCTIVITY
GROWTH IN THE INFORMATION AGE (2007), both by Dr Charles W. Wessner, Director
of the National Research Council's Program on Technology and Competitiveness.
Dr Wessner lectures frequently on international technology policy and high-technology trade at
Harvard and other universities. Dr Wessner has cited Dr Hellman's focus on the relationship
between transportation and communication; the analogy between office buildings and
computers; the insight that office buildings evolved as a tool for what was then a new kind
of work, namely processing and communicating information, based on the paradigm of paper-
based manual labor; and the recognition that while it has long been a familiar fact that location
is of paramount importance in real estate, it is less widely understood that technology defines
location, and that until the advent of computers and online connectivity the most important
technology in this context has been transportation. Dr Hellman's published statements of his
virtual adjacency concepts include VIRTUAL ADJACENCY AND THE MEANING OF PLACE,
the leading paper in the Spring 2008 edition of COMMLAW CONSPECTUS: THE JOURNAL
OF COMMUNICATIONS LAW AND POLICY, and PRIVACY AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS:
AN ARGUMENT AND AN IMPLEMENTATION (The RAND Corporation). The former is based
on Dr Hellman's opening address to the March 2008 symposium on national telecommunications
policy held by the Institute for Communications Law Studies at Catholic University of America's
Columbus School of Law in association with the Federal Communications Bar Association,
("Physical consolidation is the problem. Virtual consolidation is the solution, the effective
implementation of which requires an astute use of technologically informed local vision planning.
This blend of technological education and systematic local vision planning is essential to guide
environmentally and economically effective land use and wisely managed infrastructure
development in the information age. A failure to combine these requisites condemns local
communities to be governed by outdated assumptions which sooner or later cost them
dearly, in both money and quality of life." -- J.J. Hellman)
BACKGROUND: As a student and a researcher at MIT, Dr. Hellman was inspired by
the ideas of one of America’s pioneering computer scientists, Jay Forrester, who applied
engineering principles to the analysis of social organizations, paving the way for the
discipline now called System Dynamics. Dr. Hellman similarly developed a holistic,
multidisciplinary approach to real estate research and development based on the study
of evolving computer and telecommunications technologies, focusing on how these
changes affect the nature of work, the physical character of buildings and patterns of
land use. He foresaw the personal computer and began researching its effects
on real estate before it was invented. A theme of his work is taking derelict or
unexploited sites, and applying technological research to develop them for high
profit combined with positive environmental impact.
On leaving MIT, Dr. Hellman became Vice President at Boston Financial Technology
Group (Paine Webber’s real estate investment banking arm) providing equity capital
for the development of multi-family housing projects across the US. Two years later
he moved to Washington DC to become Executive Vice President of Swesnik & Blum
Realty Corp., a real estate development and management company, where he was
responsible for developing three major downtown office buildings. Two years later
he left to start The Hellman Company, inc.
His first development milestone was the Lafayette Centre project - a million-square-foot
project comprising five buildings (four of which are now built). The anchor tenant of One
Lafayette Centre was AT&T corporation, the largest telecom company in the world at
that time (1978.) To implement this project, Dr. Hellman successfully changed Washington
DC’s zoning laws, creating the One-Step Planned Unit Development (PUD), a methodology
that more than 30 projects have since used. (It allows greater project flexibility than zoning
laws usually would.) Here Dr. Hellman achieved a significantly better window-to-area ratio
than normal, and dramatically improved view quality from over 50% of the windows.
Dr. Hellman then realized he was going to have to re-think the office building development
business. It was clear to him that the computer was going to transform office work just as
the tractor had transformed agriculture. The first major application of his “office building
of the future” research came when he brought Sears, Roebuck and Co., the largest
retailer in the world at the time, a prestigious national presence at 633 Pennsylvania
Avenue, Washington DC. This project, located on the street whose most famous
address is the White House, helped catalyze the work of the Pennsylvania Avenue
Development Corporation by bringing the city’s east end alive. Here, Dr. Hellman
transformed a building which, in spite of being an historical landmark, was derelict
because others had been unable to see its potential.
The same line of thinking led to one of Dr. Hellman’s most important accomplishments
in 2004 when the National Association of Realtors, the US’s biggest real estate
trade organization, opened its new $45 million flagship Washington DC offices at
500 New Jersey Avenue, a short distance from the grounds of the US Capitol.
For years skeptics had dismissed this site, an exceptionally prominent vacant lot in
the heart of the metropolis, as undevelopable due to its small size and narrow, unusual
shape. Dr. Hellman’s proprietary research convinced him otherwise. He assembled
the site, formed an expert team to prove its viability as the site of a landmark new
tower, won unprecedented zoning variances for it and brought it to the NAR.
Choosing a Skyline - How intelligently are we recognizing urban context as a feature
of environmental responsibility?
Dr. Hellman has also developed three residential communities: Seneca Chase
131 homes) and Nestoria (57 homes) in Loudoun County, Virginia, and Streamview
(198 homes) in Charles County, Maryland. He has transformed a vacant warehouse
just 12 blocks north of the US Capitol into the most elegant nightclub / entertainment
venue in Washington DC (Fur Nightclub at 33 Patterson Street, NE). In a rundown
industrial area, he transformed an old automotive warehouse into a high-tech regional
bakery for Dunkin Donuts. His current projects in Washington DC include helping to
revitalize the Georgia Avenue corridor / Park View / Petworth neighborhood.
A major focus of his work has been reinventing the small town in the age of the computer.
He is currently research advisor and managing partner to a visionary project (500 acres
of land already assembled) to turn the town of La Plata, Maryland, into America’s first urban
telecommunity. In this model urban development of tomorrow, it is envisaged that many
residents will not leave their neighborhood every day to go to work but will remain in La
Plata while working “virtually” in Washington DC or elsewhere, linked 24/7 by fiberoptic
Internet, making desktop video-collaboration a ubiquitous reality.
Telecommunities - La Plata, Maryland, could be transformed into a prototype of America’s
new telecommunity.
APPLICATIONS: While Dr. Hellman’s main “laboratory” has been the Washington DC
metropolitan area and its surrounds, his research is universal in scope and applicability.
His ideas overlap with, and in some cases have anticipated, important new directions in
contemporary management theory, productivity studies, government studies, urban planning,
environmental studies, sociology, design ethics and architecture. He has guest-lectured at
venues including George Mason University Center for Regional Analysis / Institute of
Public Policy, Howard University School of Law, Catholic University School of Law,
the Urban Land Institute, Catholic University School of Architecture, the University of
the District of Columbia, the Delaware Graduate Realtors Institute, the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and telecom industry association conventions OPASTCO and VTIA.
His audiences and users of his ideas have included real estate professionals in Europe whom
he’s lectured for the Belgian Government; one of America’s top research think-tanks (the RAND
Corporation); Fortune 500 companies; foreign governments; and law firms requiring expert
witness testimony to fight important real estate cases.
The present Majority Leader in the United States House of Representatives, Congressman
Steny Hoyer (MD) was so impressed with the excitement generated in Congress about Dr.
Hellman’s ideas on reinventing the city in the age of the computer that he sent a dossier on
Dr. Hellman to the White House to guide the nation’s top leadership in efficiently and effectively
“reinventing government”.
Dr. Hellman now keeps law-makers in both the Republican and Democratic parties abreast of
his research regularly through private briefings.
Dr. Hellman chairs a real estate research and project development firm, The Hellman Company,
inc., which, since 1980, has been a leader in relating the evolution of computer and communication
technology to the real estate development objectives of major organizations. He has helped blue-
chip clients to leverage off his multidisciplinary background and his ability to bring high-tech,
financial, holistic urban planning, architectural, engineering and financial methodologies into
profitable synergy.
AVAILABILITY: Dr. Hellman will consider performing selected research and advisory tasks
for clients engaged in significant real estate development and/or urban planning projects. His
inputs could include speaking engagements in or outside the US; conducting specially-
designed private seminars for senior executives and professionals; reviewing proposed
projects and assessing their technological, environmental and other areas of opportunity and
risk; providing data and/or expert commentary for inclusion in a private project presentation
or motivation; or the creation of private strategic reports for clients on agreed topics.
