Developer Chris Meany is a man of big ideas, and even bigger projects.

From the wildly successful Ferry Building to a 5,500-unit waterfront village planned for Treasure Island to the transformation of Bay Meadows race track into a transit-oriented community with 1,250 homes and a new downtown, Meany is a central figure in some of the Bay Area's most ambitious urban infill projects.

Meany, a principal with Wilson Meany Sullivan, said he sees a common theme in Bay Meadows, Treasure Island and the 240-acre Hollywood Park, another mixed-use development the firm is doing at a Los Angeles race track.

All three projects represent an effort to refocus on denser housing stock in the urban core after decades of over-development on the margins of metropolitan areas. Meany sees a revival in interest of people wanting to live in a walkable neighborhood near public transportation, restaurants, and grocery shopping.

"We're going through a periodic change in taste," said Meany. "Younger people are realizing that to come together and live in villages is a hugely socially positive thing. Take walks, run into your neighbors, share park spaces."

That's a business opportunity, he said, for companies willing to "offer a new way of living we think people are hungry for."

"Even if the economic world is stagnant, to the people who address that change in taste there is potential for financial reward," Meany said.

Change is hard

But while transit-oriented infill housing is trendy public policy, it's not always popular in the inner suburbs like San Mateo, where Meany and his partners face staunch opposition to the Bay Meadows project, which also includes 1.2 million square feet of offices, 15 acres of parkland and 150,000 square feet of stores and restaurants.

In December, opponents of the plan to demolish the historic Bay Meadows racetrack to make way for homes, stores and offices failed to get enough valid signatures to place the issue before voters in the June election. But they are not giving up. Donna Bischoff, of the group Save Bay Meadows, said the developers lack an understanding of San Mateo's culture and history.

"Meany ... is trying to impose his own lifestyle preference on people who moved to the suburbs because they wanted to distance themselves from the urban environment," she said.

Meany, who grew up in the suburban community of Pasadena, said he understands why the rhetoric of so-called new urbanism is threatening to older suburbanites.

"If you raised your family in a suburban world in which everybody had their single-family home and you made those lifestyle choices and suddenly somebody is coming along saying 'there is a better way to live', you could get very defensive about that," he said.

But with housing costs among the most expensive in the country, and traffic choking even far-flung suburbs, many young Bay Area families are longing for a different kind of housing and lifestyle than they grew up with.

"Younger people recognize that their only road to home ownership and security lies in adopting a new development model," Meany said. "Older people, it can seem a challenge to the lifestyle choices they made. It's not intended to be."

Meany said he is not trying to ram anything down the community's throat.

"A long time ago we got over the notion that you just go into a back office and draw a land plan that makes you the most amount of money and go try to sell it to people," said Meany.

A desire to build

After graduating from Georgetown with a degree in economics, Meany, 46, went to work for a medical technology company. The project he was working on was rejected by the Food and Drug Administration, Meany was laid off, and he concluded he didn't have the technical knowledge to make it in medical products. So he started looking for other options.

"I was looking for a product that a simple guy like me can understand," he said. "Well, people have been building buildings for a few thousand years -- I thought, I ought to be able to figure that out."

He landed a summer job overseeing a retail project in Florida with a small British company,

Aston Development, whose owner, Art Kean, was investing Saudi money in historic mansions. Eventually Aston Development sent Meany to San Francisco, where he was put in charge of the redevelopment of 48 Stockton St., the former I. Magnin headquarters where FAO Schwartz eventually moved.

Kean also sent the young Meany to Paris and London to "walk the streets and get ideas" and was a great teacher, said Meany.

"He was fairly rigorous about the need to develop pro formas and to be analytic, on the one hand, and, on the other, encouraged me to understand the more artful side of the business."

In 1989, at 29, Meany struck out on his own and was hired to redevelop the Flood Building at Powell and Market streets, where Jim Flood paid him a developer's fee to carve up and find new tenants for the 100,000-square-foot building. He eventually landed the Gap as an anchor tenant, and the restoration caught the eye of Peninsula real estate tycoon William Wilson, who hired him to redevelop the Pruneyard, a 100,000-square-foot shopping and office complex in Campbell.

In 1996 Meany and Wilson formalized their relationship, forming Wilson Meany to do high-end infill projects in the $20 million to $40 million range. Their company formed a partnership with giant Equity Office Properties in 2000 aimed at constructing office buildings. With that market going into the doldrums, the partnership dissolved within three years. Wilson and Meany went back out on their own, in partnership with Tom Sullivan. Today, the firm employs 35 people.

While many developers test the capital markets each time they have a new project, Wilson Meany Sullivan is lucky to have Terry Fancher's Stockbridge Partners, a private real estate fund, as a consistent financial backer.

"The relationship allows us to be both stronger and more nimble," Meany said.

A fresh eye

Karen Alschuler, a principal with the architecture and urban planning firm SMWM, who worked with Meany on redeveloping the Ferry Building and on the Treasure Island plan, said Meany brought "a fresh eye" to Treasure Island. It was Meany, who only joined the team last October, who insisted on cutting a quay into the West side of the Island across from the Ferry Building, rather than using existing pier on the Oakland side of the island inherited from the U.S. Navy.

While cutting a new pier across from downtown San Francisco will add some $25 million to the cost of the project, it encouraged the development team to double the amount of housing, with most of it a 10-minute walk from the where ferries will be steaming back and forth across the bay.

"Chris is definitely one of a kind," she said. "He just insisted on taking a fresh look at the project."

On the Ferry Building development, Alschuler said it was Meany who pushed to limit the retail portion to regional food producers, even during the poor economic times, when it was difficult to find tenants. Now the building is fully occupied and the food hall alone generated more than $50 million last year.

Meany is just as confident in the Bay Area's appetite for tens of thousands of units of new urban housing, though he's mindful of the need to time the market.

"At any one point in time, the market could be oversupplied. There are only so many housing units that can be absorbed in a two-month window, or a six-month widow," he said. "The question is how long it will take at any one moment to absorb them. ... So I personally wouldn't be rushing in to put up product that would come to market in San Francisco in late 2007."

Michael Cohen, San Francisco's director of base reuse development, said Meany is an unusual combination of "creative and pragmatic."

"Too often the pragmatists give you projects that are boring, and the creative ones give you projects that don't pencil," said Cohen, working closely with Meany on the Treasure Island project. "Chris has the ability to find the place where they overlap."

"These big public private-partnerships are the projects that developers live for," said Cohen. "They cause a lot of brain damage, they are hard, but they are legacy projects."