With property values plummeting, interest rates rising, and daily rumors of yet more Fed bailouts of venerable lending institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the real estate development business is not a very good place to be these days.

Just ask Harry Macklowe, the New York City mogul and former owner of the G.M. building, whose net worth was obliterated earlier this year when he was unable to refinance a $5.8 billion loan.

But there’s at least one man who’s undaunted—Related Companies’ Stephen Ross, who recently raised outside financing of $1.4 billion from investors such as Goldman Sachs and the Abu Dhabi sovereign-wealth fund to finance several huge city developments, including one of the largest projects imaginable—a multibillion dollar transformation of 26 acres in Midtown Manhattan.

“Too many people believe that when things are bad, they don’t know how they can get good and when they’re good, they don’t know how they can get bad,” says the 68-year-old Ross, who founded Related in 1972 with an initial focus on developing affordable housing. “When you’re a real estate developer, you need to have a little more vision, and see where the momentum is going.”  

It’s a bold move that could end up with Ross in Macklowe’s situation, but Ross has a precedent in mind. His uncle, well-known industrialist Max Fisher, cut a deal with Marathon Oil during the Great Depression to guarantee his supply, allowing his gas stations to prosper when supplies ran short and competitors had no gas to sell.

“We’re getting ready to make sure we’re well-positioned for the next growth period,” says Ross. “I’d rather have [the economy] bad today so that when we [finish building], it’s great.” All told, Ross plans to invest $9 billion in the next few years, including a $3 billion mixed-use development designed by Frank Gehry in downtown Los Angeles, a $3 billion ski resort in Snowmass, Colorado, and a 144-acre mixed-use development in Phoenix.

In some ways, the soft-spoken Ross is the anti-Trump. He has no reality shows, doesn’t date supermodels, and has only been married twice. And whereas Trump focuses on luxury housing, Ross tends to look at mixed-use developments that ideally provide shopping and resources that the neighborhoods lack. But Ross’s bets are as huge and as audacious as anything The Donald could conceive.

When Ross paid $348 million to develop the Time Warner Center in 1998, the city was still working its way out of a recession, and his plans for turning the area into a high-end retail space were seen as ludicrous by some (another developer had proposed making Sears the anchor tenant). Today the development is considered a huge success and the average price per square foot in the area has almost doubled from the time construction began in 2000.

Now Ross hopes to do much the same thing with the sprawling, sparsely populated West Side Railyards on the Far West Side of Manhattan, turning it into a mixed-use neighborhood with retail shops, soaring office towers, and a mix of luxury and affordable housing. Originally considered the front-runner to win the development rights from the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which owns the Railyards, Related was forced to withdraw its proposal when News Corp., its anchor tenant, got cold feet the day before final bids were due in March. But when talks between the M.T.A. and Tishman Speyer fell through over a series of payment contingencies the company wanted in place in case the economy didn’t rebound, Ross jumped right back in.