The gross effect.

• Author: Speizer, Irwin
• Position: Charlotte real estate developer Jim Gross - Cover Story

He's rash, brash and can be as stubborn as an ass. But Jim Gross has changed the course of residential development in Charlotte.

Charlotte's resident bad-boy developer is on the phone giving his lawyer a leisurely morning chewing out. Dressed in his standard maverick uniform of blue jeans and faded polo shirt, he works behind a big blond-wood desk piled with legal papers and building plans, his rainbow-colored finches contentedly chirping in their glass cage nearby. Forty yellow toy trucks and tractors line the window sills of his 19th-floor downtown office. The walls are bare, the only picture in the room a photo on his desk - a closeup of the builder and his wife, Karen. Gross has his tongue stuck out.

The problem this morning is a letter his attorney has drafted responding to an ongoing dispute. "Not strong enough," Gross says and dictates a new version juiced with moral outrage and accusation. When he's finished, he gives the lawyer a verbal jab for good measure: "So what do I need you for?"

Then he chuckles.

That's Jim Gross - in your face one minute, giggling the next. A cherub-faced 40-year-old in wire-rimmed glasses, he is an irrepressible agitator and innovator of the Charlotte real-estate development scene, a pioneering visionary and royal pain in the basement. "I'm just a small operator," he says, which is true. Over the last six years, he has built only about 250 residential units - not enough to register a blip on the radar of the city's booming housing market.

What sets him apart is his abrasive style and the type of things he builds: condos and lofts in or close to downtown - often rehabs of old, abandoned factories and commercial buildings no one else wanted. "I do projects no one else will touch," he says. "I do them my way. By their very nature, they are bound to raise some eyebrows."

Born in New Jersey and trained as an architect in Charlotte, Gross formed a development company, Metropolitan Group Inc., in his adopted city in 1990 and has shunned convention ever since. "There's no question he is a pioneer," says Charles Hight, dean of UNC Charlotte's College of Architecture, where Gross got his degree. "Part of it is just luck. The much greater thing is that he saw the opportunity when everybody else was heading elsewhere."

With his first project, Dilworth Crescent, Gross almost singlehandedly jump-started the local market for urban housing by building - and selling - 39 upscale townhomes in the midst of a condominium slump. While his subsequent projects have become increasingly controversial and problematic, entangled in contract disputes and marred in one case by the collapse of a wall, they have been trendsetters.

He revived interest in upscale housing in the heart of downtown by buying an abandoned department store surrounded by office high-rises in 1993 and converting it into the 68-unit Ivey's Townhomes. He helped launch the current warehouse-to-loft craze with Factory South, an old Lance factory just south of downtown that he turned into 85 condos, starting in 1995.

Now he is trying to push forward his grandest project yet, a proposed 42-floor condo complex next to Factory South. Tall as a 34-story office building, it would tower over the surrounding South End neighborhood of low-rise shops, restaurants and apartments. He started out talking 24 to 26 floors, then added height and glitz to the design. The units would sell for $200,000 to $1.2 million. "Think about it - a penthouse apartment on the 34th floor? That is so sexy," Gross says. "It will be the tallest residential building in the state of North Carolina. By far."

It is indeed big, bold, risky, even a little nutty, completely out of scale with its surroundings. It's the kind of thing Charlotte has come to expect from Gross.

"He is the Donald Trump of Charlotte. Or maybe the Don King of Charlotte," says Kevin Kelley, a principal in Shook Design Group, which specializes in commercial design and works in many of the same neighborhoods. "He has these big ideas. You love and hate him at the same time."

Gross can be charming, but his arrogant, take-no-prisoners approach to foisting ideas on neighborhood groups and planning agencies often rubs people the wrong way. When invited to discuss his tower project with a South End development association, he opened by informing the assembled members that he didn't need their approval.

"He can be pretty blunt and direct," says John Crotty, a Charlotte lawyer who heads the Dilworth Community Development Association, which represents a gentrified neighborhood just south of downtown. "When someone says they don't like something, he tells them he thinks they are wrong and why he thinks they're wrong. I...