Jamie Martin has spent more than two decades at Edgemoor leading complex public and institutional development projects. His approach is built on a simple belief: every project deserves more than a competent response to the brief. By investing the time to understand the full picture, staying flexible on approach, and treating every client relationship as a long-term commitment, he consistently helps institutions and communities arrive at outcomes that exceed what was originally envisioned.

Starting with a Question

The first thing Jamie tends to do on any project is ask what more can be done. Not in a theoretical sense, but in a practical one. He looks at what else a client is planning, and where the project at hand might fit into a bigger picture.

On a recent engagement, a county came to Edgemoor looking for a new government building. The brief was clear and well defined. Before putting a proposal together, Jamie spent time with the county's broader capital plan and noticed something nobody had connected. The county also had a performing arts center in its pipeline. The two projects had been conceived separately. Brought together on a single site, the combined development could be more useful to the community than either building would have been on its own.

That kind of connection tends to surface when there's time to look for it, and Jamie makes the time. He describes his instinct as curiosity rather than cleverness. "There's almost always more to the picture than what's in the brief. Taking the time to understand it is usually worth it."

Thinking Carefully About the Team

Team composition is something Jamie spends real time on. Each engagement gets a team shaped specifically around it — the consultants, the financial partners, and the expertise matched to what the project actually calls for.

He also takes his time before locking in a financing structure. The right approach depends on the project, the client's constraints, and the opportunities that surface as the work unfolds. That patience occasionally means changing course when a different structure fits better, which adds work in the moment but tends to produce a stronger result in the end.

Consultants tend to want to be on Edgemoor's teams. Jamie thinks that has less to do with the projects themselves than with what it feels like to work on them.

Staying Open

Jamie tries not to force a solution onto a project. Every client comes with a different set of goals, constraints, and institutional realities, and the approach is shaped around those specifics rather than around a model that worked somewhere else.

The Long Beach Civic Center is a good illustration. The city needed to replace aging, seismically unsound buildings but had no ability to raise new public funding. The solution that came together, a Design-Build-Finance-Operate-Maintain structure that was the first of its kind for a municipal project in North America, didn't come out of a standard playbook. It was assembled piece by piece, with each element of the financial model shaped around the city's specific constraints. What got delivered was a new City Hall, a Port Administration Building, the Billie Jean King Main Library, and a five-acre park, all within the city's existing annual budget and accompanied by a 40-year maintenance commitment.

The outcome came from staying open to possibilities rather than defaulting to what had been done before.

Making it a Good Process

Jamie believes the development process itself matters as much as what gets built. These projects take years, and the client-side people involved are usually managing them on top of everything else they do. His role, as he sees it, is to carry the weight of the process so the client can focus on the decisions that matter.

In practice, that means trying not to bring a client a problem without a recommended path through it. It means being accessible, responsive, and genuinely invested in their experience. And it means working to make the process something clients can look back on with pride rather than something they're relieved to be done with.

When Edgemoor pursued a major campus project for Texas A&M in Fort Worth, Jamie and the team spent three years working closely with the university's day-to-day team before a change in leadership ended the initiative. The feedback that came afterward stayed with him. The client's team said they were sorry the project ended, but sorrier about not getting to keep working together. "That mattered to them as much as what was being built," Jamie says. "To me, that was the strongest validation that the approach is the right one."

Staying Through the Whole Thing

The people who start a project with Jamie tend to be the people who finish it. The continuity is something he values because the trust that develops over years of working with a client is what allows the hardest conversations to happen productively.

On the Long Beach Civic Center, Jamie's involvement stretched across the full arc of the project, from helping the city position the opportunity during the years Edgemoor was delivering the adjacent courthouse, through the competitive procurement, and into the delivery of the civic campus itself. That sustained presence gave him a depth of understanding of the city's needs, its leadership dynamics, and its community that no amount of proposal preparation could have replicated.

Jamie has described himself, half-jokingly, as nicer than the average developer. He takes it as a compliment. It puts people at ease, it changes the tone of the work, and it reflects how he operates. He keeps his word. He follows through. And he stays long after most developers have moved on.

Developing the People Around Him

For Jamie, the work doesn't stop at project delivery. He sees developing the people around him as one of the more meaningful parts of his role at Edgemoor.

His mentorship instinct comes from a long involvement with Boy Scouts, where he learned that the most useful way to help someone grow is rarely to give them the answer. At Edgemoor, that translates into giving younger team members real responsibility and the space to work through challenges, while being available when they need guidance. "The people around me tend to grow because they're trusted to," he says. "That's all I try to do."

Jamie has three Eagle Scout sons, all grown now, and he remains actively involved in Scouting. The patience and belief in people that define his approach to mentorship are the same ones that shape how he approaches development. Both come down to investing in something today that will keep serving well into the future.

The Long Beach Civic Center

The Long Beach Civic Center is the project that brings Jamie's approach together in one place. A $513 million civic campus that replaced aging, seismically inadequate buildings with a modern City Hall, a Port Administration Building, a public library, and a reimagined five-acre park, all across a six-block stretch of downtown Long Beach.

The project was the first municipal DBFOM in North America and the first to combine public infrastructure and private development within a single project. It came in on time, within the city's existing annual budget, and with a 40-year maintenance commitment that keeps the facilities in peak condition for decades.

Since completion, downtown Long Beach has changed considerably. New housing, restaurants, and businesses have followed, reshaping a neighborhood that had long been in need of reinvestment. The project received more than ten industry awards, including P3 Bulletin's Project Grand Prix and Best Social Infrastructure Project, ENR's Southern California Project of the Year, and DBIA Western Pacific Region's Project of the Year.

What Endures

Jamie has spent more than two decades at Edgemoor with full client satisfaction across the projects he's led. The measure he cares about most, though, is simpler. It's whether the communities on the other side of the work are genuinely better off for what was built, and whether the experience of getting there was something everyone involved can look back on with pride.

Mary Ellen Henderson Middle School is still serving students in Falls Church more than twenty years after it opened, in the neighborhood where Jamie grew up and where his own children attended. The Long Beach Civic Center has become the anchor of a revitalized downtown. And the relationships Jamie built along the way continue to grow long after the last day of construction.

That is what stewarding a project looks like, in his view. Not just delivering it, but caring about what it becomes, and who it continues to serve, long after everyone else has moved on.