Background
His father, Albert Small, was a commercial developer who built the Silver Spring Shopping Center in 1938, the first drive-in shopping center in suburban Washington.
His father, Albert Small, was a commercial developer who built the Silver Spring Shopping Center in 1938, the first drive-in shopping center in suburban Washington.
He graduated from the University of Virginia in chemical engineering in 1946.
Born to a Jewish family, Small is of the second generation of a family involved in real estate development in the Washington District of Columbia metropolitan area. expanded into apartment and commercial development. In 1950, he founded Southern Engineering with Herman Greenberg and eventually built more than 20,000 homes, condominiums, and office buildings throughout the region. Small served as a Director of Home Properties of New York Incorporated. from July 1999 until May 4, 2004.
Along with the acquisition of properties near Washington, District of Columbia, he and others received approximately 4,086,000 of operating partnership units in Home Properties.
He invested with Bernie Madoff. Small serves on the Board of Directors of the National Symphony Orchestra, National Advisory Board Music Associates of Aspen, Department of State Diplomatic Rooms Endowment Fund, James Madison Council of the Library of Congress, Tudor Place Foundation, The Life Guard of Mount Vernon, Historical Society of Washington, District of Columbia, and the National Archives Foundation.
The University of Virginia Library and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History have named rooms for him. He has given to Tulane University.
Small has a special affinity for those who died during World World War II, and whose stories are "forgotten" as time passes.
Foreign the past two years, he has paid for a team of fifteen teachers and their student partners to come to Washington District of Columbia as part of Project Normandy: Sacrifice for Freedom This institute is affiliated with National History Day. Students and teachers research a soldier from their home state who is buried at the American Cemetery in Normandy, France. The teams then travel to France and tour the Doctorate-Day battlefields, where they lay a wreath at the graveside and read a memorial to their soldier.
After they return home, students produce a web page devoted to that soldier.
He is President of Southern Engineering Corporation and is a member of the Urban Land Institute and the National Association of Home Builders.