Tom Fitzsimmons just finished eighteen condos at the former site of St. Nicolas Greek Orthodox Church. A block away, his company, Huron Contracting, is demolishing two rental houses that he’ll replace with four condos overlooking North Main Park. Nearby, they’re hustling to get 121 Kingsley West’s nineteen units closed up before winter. And he’s just won approval for 410 N. First, a twenty-five-condo building that will run through the block to Ashley.

That’s sixty-six new homes within a two-block radius, collectively worth $42 million. Fitzsimmons has built so much housing in and near downtown that Mark Berg and Peter Allen, whose previous attempts to develop the 121 Kingsley site ran aground in the Great Recession, “literally gave him a third of the deal to bring in his expertise,” Allen says.

The Ann Arbor native wasn’t always so sought after. When he started Huron Contracting after graduating from the U-M in 1991, “I was actually up putting roofs on houses for a couple of years myself,” he recalls. “There wasn’t a lot of opportunity in the local area for architects.” So, he says, “I decided, ‘What the hell–I’ll start my own building business.'”

It was easy to become a builder but harder to make money at it. “I struggled quite a bit for several years … If I was lucky I’d get the odd kitchen and bath remodel, but it was a lot of just general maintenance.” He tried hiring more staff but ended up taking unprofitable jobs just to meet his payroll.

“So I retooled,” he says. “I went back to school to get a graduate degree in business.” When he came out, he kept building–but started to do development, too. He’d find a home to remodel or land to build on, figure out a project that might work, hire an architect, arrange the financing, and manage the construction.

In the late 1990s he built Eagle Ridge, forty-three townhouses on N. Maple. But by then bigger, richer developers were snapping up the available land at the edge of town. “How do you compete with Crosswinds?” he asks of the national developer that was (and still is) active here.

Instead, he decided to specialize in smaller projects within walking distance of downtown. That’s where Allen, who’d taught him in his B-school real estate class, rediscovered him a dozen years ago.

“He’d find these single-family homes on duplex-zoned lots,” Allen recalls. “He did the most amazing job of character, [of designing] new construction to match historic buildings. And that’s really hard to do.” Between 2006 and 2011, Fitzsimmons built twenty duplexes in near-downtown neighborhoods, “new homes that most people aren’t aware of,” he says, “because they didn’t go through the site-planning process” that’s required for larger projects.

“It’s what he likes to do and is good at,” says Realtor Stephanie Savarino, who has worked with Fitzsimmons for more than twenty years. “He’s got a good feel for what Ann Arbor should have in what area, especially in Kerrytown, downtown, and Water Hill.”

He’d also caught a national trend. “In December 2013, there was a fantastic Wall Street Journal article about people coming back to their alma maters and wanting to live in close,” says Savarino. The paper’s examples were Ann Arbor, Berkeley, Austin, Boulder, and Madison–all of which are experiencing the same movement back to college towns.

Fitzsimmons still likes duplexes. Because they can be approved and built relatively quickly, they’re less likely to be caught in an economic downturn than a downtown high-rise. “From initial concept through city approval through pre-construction approval to building the thing, those can take three [or] four years,” he says. “And the market can change in that time. I think that’s what doomed a lot of them in the last cycle”–including an eleven-story condo once approved for 414 N. Main.

His smaller project there still needed planning approval, but he’s taking that risk more often as he scales up to build more mid-sized buildings. He’s doing it partly because one- and two-family lots with redevelopment potential are getting scarce and partly because demand is still strong.

The tipping point came a couple of years ago, when Fitzsimmons was building a duplex and a pair of single family homes on either side of Beakes on N. Fifth Ave. “And literally just doing the four homes on Fifth, we must have gotten twenty calls from people wanting to live in that area,” he says. “So we started looking to see if we could scale up, and that led to 414 [N. Main] and [121] Kingsley.”

121 Kingsley West has a similar footprint to Berg and Allen’s project, but the units are bigger and have more parking–both pluses for Fitzsimmons’ core clientele, empty nesters downsizing from single-family homes. He’s got two staffers who do nothing but help buyers customize their units, doing everything from buying fixtures to changing floor plans.

As Fitzsimmons scales up, architect Marc Rueter notes, more people are noticing his niche–these days, “there are a lot people who would like to do” small projects near downtown. Other developers are at work on projects within sight of his on Main and Kingsley, and a megaproject has been proposed for the Beal Construction property on Felch.

But while Fitzsimmons has more competition than he did when he zeroed in on downtown fifteen years ago, he’s also got a running start. Says Rueter, “he’s built up a reputation with a lot of potential buyers that he can deliver a product they really want.”