A shopping center is a strange kind of autobiography. It begins as dirt and argument: a parcel, a traffic count, a zoning meeting, a lender's doubts. Then the concrete arrives. A grocery cart rattles over a threshold. Someone orders lunch, picks up a prescription, takes a child for a haircut. The developer disappears, and daily life takes over. Joshua Simon likes that transfer. He has spent his career turning empty intersections and tired properties into places people use without thinking about who put them there.
Simon entered commercial real estate in 2004, at 18, while he was a freshman at Arizona State University. He worked for Sandor Development, arranging meetings, bidding projects, helping build centers and lease space. A year into the business he attended his first ICSC conference. He later joked that the veterans probably saw how green he was. Green is survivable. Indifference is not, and Simon had already found the machinery fascinating.
He stayed six years. College was folded around work: three full days at the company, two days in class. This is the less cinematic part of the founder story, which makes it the useful part. Before Simon put his name on a company, he learned how land, tenants, permits, lenders and deadlines misbehave together. The apprenticeship gave him a close view of the work's essential paradox. Development is an act of imagination conducted through checklists.
The recession as an opening
In 2010, Simon left to form SimonCRE. He was 25, and the market was still wearing the damage of the financial crisis. Commercial property did not look like an easy place to begin. That was part of the appeal. He had no wife or children then, and he reasoned that if failure was going to require moving back home, youth was the cleanest moment to accept the possibility.
The company began without outside equity. Simon used bank debt and the proceeds of work, a constraint that made each completed deal argue for the next one. His mother, Nikki, joined as office manager and bookkeeper. The arrangement supplied an early company line that sounds like the founder smiling while checking the ledger: if you cannot trust your mother, whom can you trust?
“I like to create, and I like to be much more in charge of my own destiny.”Joshua Simon on starting his own firm
Bootstrapping a real estate developer is an especially physical version of restraint. Software founders can release a rough product and repair it on Tuesday. A developer cannot patch a misplaced entrance overnight. Capital is tied up, approvals arrive on municipal time, and the customer is really several customers at once: tenant, lender, buyer, city and neighbor. Simon's early structure rewarded a practical kind of creativity. A proposal had to be imaginative enough to win and ordinary enough to finance.
The repetition accumulated. By 2015, SimonCRE said it had developed and leased more than two million square feet. In 2020, the count had passed 175 projects. The company's current biography reports more than 308 completed projects in 24 states, together valued above $1.63 billion. The numbers are impressive chiefly because they measure hundreds of separate negotiations with reality.
The unfashionable middle
The strip mall has never enjoyed the cultural protection granted to a handsome train station or a beloved old theater. It is where errands happen, which is precisely why its disappearance was so confidently predicted. E-commerce turned “retail is dead” into a durable headline. Simon heard something narrower: some retail was obsolete, while useful retail was becoming easier to distinguish.
His portfolio followed that distinction. Build-to-suit stores, grocery-anchored centers, restaurants, services and open-air projects do jobs that a delivery box cannot perform alone. Simon has described seeing development's effect on communities from the beginning of his career. In practice, that means listening for what an underserved area lacks before fixing a tenant list. A center works when the parts create frequency together: the anchor makes the weekly trip, lunch makes the spontaneous one, and services give the place a rhythm.
The SimonCRE intersection test
A simplified reading of the operating logic visible across Simon's interviews and projects.
This is where the civic claim enters. Simon does not build city halls. He builds places with leases. Yet in a fast-growing suburb, the first useful retail cluster often becomes a form of social orientation. It tells residents where the practical center of town is becoming. It supplies jobs, taxable activity, a meeting point and a reliable answer to the mundane question, “Where should we go?” Commerce does not automatically make community, but it can give community somewhere to keep bumping into itself.
A very large bet in Surprise
Village at Prasada made Simon's thesis visible at metropolitan scale. Along with Prasada North, the open-air development in Surprise, Arizona totals about 1.3 million square feet. SimonCRE describes it as the largest open-air retail center built on the West Coast in 15 years. The project is less a revival of the enclosed mall than an adaptation to how the West has grown: spread out, car-oriented, hungry for a concentrated mix of stores, restaurants and services.
Large projects can make a founder sound like a collector of square feet. Simon's public comments tend to return to the harder unit: relationships. A tenant must trust the delivery schedule. A city must trust the plan. A lender must trust the economics. Employees must trust that the founder's appetite will not outrun the operating system. The finished property is the visible artifact of all that borrowed confidence.
The tenant mix is a small economy. Every new name changes the value of the names already on the sign.
SimonCRE has extended the approach across metro Phoenix. Medina Station in Mesa is planned around roughly 350,000 square feet of retail. In August 2026, Simon celebrated the opening of its Target, thanking the leasing and internal teams by name and calling the occasion the end of a journey of many years. Roosevelt Commons in Buckeye covers about 100,000 square feet. Asante Trails and Elm Street at Surprise City Center add mixed-use ambitions to the map. Each project sits in a place where rooftops are arriving and the commercial center is still being negotiated.
Ambition learns to share the frame
Simon has never disguised his appetite for work. An early interview recorded 90-hour weeks, a schedule he defended by saying the clients and colleagues had become friends and family. A later profile described a “first in, last out” approach. The trait has made him productive and, by at least one colleague's affectionate account, slightly alarming to anyone pleased with an ordinary ten-hour day.
But his public story also shows the founder learning to distribute ambition. SimonCRE introduced employee profit sharing. Its project announcements foreground teams. Simon's professional service expanded from local boards and conference roles to the ICSC Foundation and the ICSC Board of Trustees. The young operator who once wanted control over his destiny now runs a business in which success depends on giving dozens of people meaningful control over their part.
The same progression appears in his community work. Simon has served organizations connected to Arizona State University and the Phoenix Jewish community, chaired gatherings, mentored business owners and supported charitable fundraising. His most compact explanation is also his best: “Because I can make a difference.” The line is not ornate. Neither is a useful shopping center. Both are judged by what happens after the intention.
He also retains a taste for the personal scoreboard. At 18, Simon began reading The Wall Street Journal and imagined appearing in it one day. Roughly 21 years later, the paper profiled his contrarian push into retail. Simon marked the moment online, delighted that the prediction had arrived and amused that it came without the Journal's famous pointillist portrait. It was a founder's victory lap calibrated to one LinkedIn post: sincere, specific and just self-mocking enough.
What builders can steal
Simon’s career offers no magic cap rate and no shortcut around permitting. Its portable lesson is a way of seeing. First, apprentice close enough to the work that its frictions become obvious. Second, treat a bad market as information rather than a verdict. Third, use constraints to force sharper choices. Finally, remember that scale is not merely more units. It is more promises that must all come true at approximately the same time.
There is also a lesson in choosing an unfashionable arena. Fashion attracts talent, capital and noise. Unfashionable work can leave more room to notice the customer. Simon bet not on “retail” as an abstract category, but on people continuing to live physical lives in growing places. They would still need dinner, shoes, groceries, dentists, gyms and somewhere convenient to meet. The internet could change the trip without erasing the need.
Sixteen years after SimonCRE began, its founder is still making that case one intersection at a time. The buildings will age. Tenants will change. The clean rendering will acquire sun-faded signs and a stubborn shopping cart. That is not the failure of the vision. It is the moment architecture becomes ordinary enough to belong to everyone else.