David Belt

Early life

Belt was born in 1967 in Trenton, New Jersey, and grew up in Yardley, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. He is the oldest of two children. Belt attended grade school in Bucks County, Pennsylvania and later the George School. His younger brother Jonny Belt is an Emmy Award winning show creator for Nickelodeon.

Career

Belt moved to San Francisco in the 1980s while on tour with a punk band. He began his construction career in San Francisco working as a laborer. A major fire in the Berkeley Hills presented an opportunity for him to begin taking on larger project management roles with the UMB Corporation. He later met Lee Saylor who hired him and served as a mentor. Soon Belt began running large projects including the New International Terminal at the San Francisco International Airport. In 1999, Belt returned to the East Coast.

A through line of Belt's career has been attention to projects of particular social relevance. His endeavors tend to include renovations of at-risk properties, repurposing of abandoned spaces, and public art projects that showcase new ways to think about public objects or urban design problems. In conjunction with an entrepreneurial ability to either position his own companies or set up new entities around those projects, Belt is said to have "turned real estate into a creative practice."

Though he has been referred to as an artist, community activist, or architect, Belt stated in a March 14, 2014, lecture at the University of Michigan that he denies these titles for himself and prefers to contextualize his work as being that of a real estate developer. In interviews, when asked about his resistance to adopting a more traditionally creative title, he espouses a more dynamic understanding of the role of a developer as someone "who should care about design."

New Lab

Belt is the co-founder and CEO of New Lab, an interdisciplinary space designed to support entrepreneurs working in emerging technologies, and a resource for tech, hardware, and new manufacturing in New York City. Based in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, New Lab provides the tools and community that unite and support nearly 500 hardware-centric innovators, representing over 70 companies in a variety of fields—including robotics, A.I., urban technology, and energy—and fosters collaboration and advancement across disciplines.

New Lab is housed in Navy Yard Building 128, a century-old former shipbuilding facility which once represented the state-of-the-art in manufacturing. Belt first walked into the building, which had by then been abandoned for decades, in 2011. Belt told the Financial Times that when he saw derelict Building 128 in 2011, he knew that he wanted to turn it into a “hub for state-of-the-art manufacturing and engineering . . . the potential was just incredible”. He, along with his friend Scott Cohen, imagined how the building could become a relevant hub for modern-day manufacturing.

The history of the site, coupled with a present-day need to provide NYC’s design and manufacturing community access tools, resources, and space, formed the impetus for Cohen and Belt to create New Lab. Along with his team at Macro Sea, Belt oversaw the development of New Lab from concept to place. Belt’s other company, DBI Projects, led construction management effort. In September 2016, New Lab, an 84,000 square foot workplace where entrepreneurial inventors share equipment and collaborate on their products, officially opened its doors.

G27 Global Institute

G27 is a "design-centric" residence for study-abroad students in Berlin, Germany. The project is unique in that it is an attempt to change the current design paradigm of student housing as it is, according to Belt, "one of the most overlooked and under-explored design disciplines. At its best, it's institutional and sterile and at its worst is confined to dilapidated couches and condescending amenities."

In line with Belt's tendency to seek out buildings that have a history with which the project he's undertaking will resonate, Macro Sea identified the former Roka manufacturing complex in Berlin for the project. In order to realize their vision, Macro Sea and DBI gutted and renovated the 85,000 sq. ft. complex and courtyard. Roka's facility would be transformed into "a five-story front building located at 27 Gneisenaustrasse, home to future administrative offices and faculty apartments, and a large six-story factory building set back from the street and separated by a magnificent tree-lined interior courtyard." G27 opened for the Fall 2015 semester and has been leased to the Council on International Educational Exchange.

Enterprises

Belt has initiated business entities to develop, oversee and raise money for his projects. Each of his companies perform discrete design, project development, development management, and consultancy functions on projects that vary widely in size, scope, and location.

Macro Sea

In 2009, Belt started Macro Sea out of a need he identified for "execut[ing] forward-thinking projects that were outside the scope of a typical real estate development firm." He says, "Macro Sea's main focus has been on both developing creative interim-use projects that we believe transform and energize our surroundings, and on constructing permanent developments that provoke meaningful conversations and function as community incubators." Macro Sea exists as a series of ongoing collaborations between experts in a wide variety of disciplines including lawyers, artists, architects, designers and others. The company has served as the entrepreneurial framework for most of Belt's development pursuits since 2009.

DBI Projects

In 2002, Belt formed DBI Construction Consultants. DBI Projects was formed as a sister developing company in 2015. Since its inception the firm has provided project management, development management, and real estate advisory services for a number of high-profile projects in New York City, Europe, Latin America, and South America. According to the firm's website, DBI Projects is "a multi-disciplinary construction consulting real estate development and project management firm that provides services to a diverse client base that includes global insurance carriers, real estate owners, institutions, and not-for-profit groups." Since it began in 2002 the firm has developed over $1.8 billion in projects and currently has $948 million under development (1.3 million in square footage).

DBI Projects is acting as construction project manager for the World Trade Center Performing Arts Center, several charter school projects, and recently completed the transformation of St. Ann's Warehouse, an 1860 tobacco warehouse beneath the Brooklyn Bridge in DUMBO, into a non-profit performing arts institution.

Personal life

Belt lives in Brooklyn, New York. He has served on a number of boards and donated pro bono services to a number of charitable, philanthropic and artistic organizations including The Robin Hood Foundation, Bread and Life, Rooftop Films, Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, St. Ann's Warehouse, and Neighborhood Trust Financial Partners.