Staying Power
Almost twenty years ago Danny stood on the summit of Mt. Whitney and made a proclamation about who he was going to be in commercial real estate. This Labor Day weekend he was back on Whitney Portal Road, watching the sun come up over the same mountain with a different posture. Not proclaiming. Listening.
That shift, from proclaiming to listening, is the honest description of where this firm is right now. We are in the building phase. Not the announcing phase, not the arriving phase. The part where you put your hands on the ground and keep going, one project, one corridor, one family at a time. Staying Power is Danny's telling of twenty-five years of that work: the escrows he had no business closing, a Global Financial Crisis that knocked mentors clean off their horses, the mentors and clients who bet on him before he'd proven anything, and the decade spent rebuilding trust one decision at a time.
Below is the short version. The full story runs from a $52 million first sale in Little Italy to a statewide land pipeline for workforce and affordable housing, with the projects, the people, and the lessons in between.
Inside the story
The mountain was waiting.
A morning on Whitney Portal Road, a cafe wall, and a line from Dr. Seuss: "Your mountain is waiting, so… get on your way." The path to that mountaintop ran through people who opened doors: Bob Fitzgerald, Casey Brown, John Frager, Jeff Rasak. It ran through a small, locally owned San Diego brokerage where autonomy let an entrepreneurial nature thrive. The first sale, born out of a 2003 to 2004 apprentice program, closed in 2005: a $52 million disposition of Porta D'Italia, a 190-unit condominium conversion in Little Italy, representing Lennar. Nobody around him thought a transaction that size was possible.
Go big or go home. Not bravado. Survival dressed up as ambition.
The 2008 summit statement wasn't rooted in confidence. It was born from fear, from the Global Financial Crisis, from watching clients and mentors with decade-long careers get knocked clean off their horse. Liar loans, collapsed assumptions under residential and condo development, bankruptcies, short sales, a halt on land acquisition, and that turmoil bleeding straight into office, industrial, retail and multifamily. The proclamation was a young broker's way of staying upright.
Smaller, faster, more agile bets. Activation instead of capital stacks.
When the for-sale market cratered, the team moved out of landlord leasing and land advisory and into tenant rep retail, food and beverage, and tactical urbanism. The corner of 8th and G became Neighborhood, the first restaurant that launched Consortium Holdings. Craft & Commerce followed in 2010, then predevelopment for Kettner Exchange from 2012 to 2014. Both in Little Italy. Both catalysts for two decades of investment on the west side of Downtown and the waterfront. Across hundreds of openings over twenty-five years, one pattern held: the individual entrepreneurs and emerging brands who risked it all for their vision are what actually moves economic development.
Learning to build alongside them, not just transact with them.
The Q in Little Italy. The Charmer in South Mission Hills. The Golden Hill Post Office. Land sales with Jonathan Segal AIA and then Matt Segal lit a fire, and the due diligence and design studies that followed opened doors across California. Work with Graham Downes Architecture, Blokhaus, Lloyd Russell AIA, Foundation 4 Form and Butler Malick followed, along with guest lecturing at Woodbury's MRED program, USD's MSRE, and NewSchool of Architecture and Design. Kettner Exchange, an Orchid Award winner and still the city's top destination a decade later, marked the real pivot from brokerage into principal advisory.
Then the breaking point. Between 2011 and 2013 Danny got married, watched his first son Connor come into the world, and lost a dear friend and business partner, architect Graham Downes, to an act of violence that shook the whole San Diego design community. Both things, close together, taught in very different ways what it takes to stay in the eye of the storm while the world moves around you.
A thousand units of land and a billion in development.
As the market found its footing, the work moved from tactical infill into mixed-use: apartment and hotel development, value-add repositioning, adaptive reuse, and New Markets Tax Credit financing: capital stacks and tools that let money flow back into the communities and corridors everyone else had written off. When the brokerage was acquired and the industry consolidated, Danny stepped off the corporate ladder and formed his own firm in 2013. By 2020 he had assembled his first thousand units of land and a billion of development as a principal.
The programs are built for exactly the buildings most people write off.
Three projects tell the story. 37ECB on El Cajon Boulevard: the old O'Connor's Church Goods buildings taken down to concrete and studs and rebuilt as a first-of-its-kind vocational and trade campus led by SDCOE/JCCS. Hotel Monroe in Downtown Phoenix: a 1932 Art Deco landmark on the National Register, brought back with historic and New Markets credits and now a Hilton Garden Inn. The Lafayette Hotel & Swim Club in North Park: financed and recapitalized around 2011 with New Markets and historic credits, with Danny leading the 2018 refinance-versus-disposition analysis on a $16 million loan alongside roughly $15 million in NMTC allocation that ran its full community-benefit course.
Forty years across the full spectrum, not biased by one niche or lens.
Single-family homes and REOs for banks and lenders across California. ADUs, missing-middle and small-scale infill. Two-to-four unit owner-user and investment properties, where understanding zoning and permitting pathways is increasingly what separates a lot from a development site. Regional builders, trades and middle-market multifamily operators. The $2M to $10M segment, where staying non-institutional keeps equity checks at $1 to $5 million and local investors in the game. And billion-dollar programs, sourcing land as developer rep for institutional LIHTC and workforce-housing partners statewide.
Community building beyond development.
The work isn't finished. Workforce and affordable housing, modular off-site construction, mixed-use efficiency, and the conviction that everyone should be able to afford an apartment at every income level, especially the middle incomes and frontline workers. A 2022 land acquisition role, 6171 Mission Gorge Road, is nearing completion at 483 units and has been touted as the largest privately funded modular workforce housing project in California. The Developer's Toolkit, Modules 0 through 5, built with software and AI, lets us assess almost any site or structure fast, in a market where rates are higher for longer and the real work through 2026 is adaptive reuse of structures that already exist.
Same muscle. Different scale.
For the past year we've supported and facilitated Pop-Up Winona on El Cajon Boulevard alongside the ECBBIA and Tootie Thomas, on a site the owner leased at a discount for activation and community benefit. Since October 2025 it has hosted more than fifty public events drawing over five thousand people to a stretch of the Boulevard that has seen decades of disinvestment. Small by dollar volume next to an institutional sale or a billion-dollar program, and exactly the same muscle: showing up, building trust, and doing the work a corridor actually needs.
From the story
Our Roots
Danny's parents came from the South Bay of Los Angeles in 1979, the year he was born, and started in real estate and the building industry in San Diego County. That was the foundation. The last four decades, theirs and now ours, have been spent building on this ground one project at a time.
The family behind the firm: Rich Briant, Nicole Briant, Kathy Fitzgerald and Danny Fitzgerald.
Wholly Creation operates like a family office, one that helps other family offices and institutional partners build legacy rather than just close transactions. The brokerage is the bread and butter; it's what lets consulting, development services and investment come in over time. Kathy holds the Broker of Record seat she earned over four decades. Danny drives listings and acquisitions. Nicole holds the vision, the clarity, and the books. Rich keeps the whole thing standing.
This is the bedrock the Sacred Land arc is built on: what endures beneath everything we build. Not the market cycle, not the capital stack. The ground itself, and the people who keep showing up on it. Looking ahead and back over forty years, this is a legacy move for the family, not just a career. What we build now is what the next generation inherits, works from, and builds on again.
So we listen. To our clients, who tell us what a corridor actually needs long before a study does. To our intuition, which has been right about more sites than any spreadsheet. And to the land, which was here first and will be here after.
The full story, live
We're in the building phase
Wholly Creation is actively sourcing off-market land from San Diego through Orange County and Los Angeles to Sacramento: defunct malls, underutilized commercial parcels, vacant motels and offices, repositioning them toward mixed-use, for-sale housing, and the workforce, affordable, senior and large-family communities our neighbors actually need. If you're a developer, a capital partner, a city, or an owner sitting on the right parcel, let's talk.
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