It seemed like a wilderness to me when I was young, but all that changed in the late 1980s when the world’s largest nuclear submarine base—Kings Bay—opened nearby, a six-minute drive away in the town of St. Mary. Businesses and restaurants, from Wal-Mart to McDonald’s, sprang up overnight. My husband, Celso Gonzalez-Falla, and I decided to take a chance with the family’s legacy land.

Houses, rather than paper, seemed to be what the area needed most, and so in 1988 we built four modest homes and four small rental units on one edge of our property. Everyone in the area thought it was folly, but to our surprise they sold and rented immediately. We continued building and have since created a community of about 1,100 houses called The Lakes. It is home to more than 5,000 people in what is now the town of Kingsland.
While this might not be a great accomplishment for someone in the real estate business, I was neither a Trump nor a Levitt. We live in New York, where we devote our time to theater and art. What did we know about building houses? Yet when opportunity knocked, or more to the point pulled up to the front door in a bulldozer, we decided it was time to don our hard hats and set to work.

I suppose it would have been easier to turn everything over to a team of experts and manage it all from afar, but that is not my style, nor is it my husband’s. Instead, from the very beginning, we immersed ourselves in the details. I have a strong background in the arts, and helped to design the simple houses and plan the streets. My husband has an expert sense of financial matters, so he focused on that aspect of the project. The way I describe our partnership is that if there is something you can see, I’ve done it. If it’s something you don’t see, my husband has done it.