Three generations of one Texas family, in the business of land and the homes built on it. LCJ grew out of a Harris County surveying office founded in 1948, and it is still run by the same family today.
Russell Alva (R.A.) Washburn, "Red" to everyone who knew him, was elected Harris County Land Surveyor in 1948, back when the job was an elected office.
Alongside the office he built Washburn and Company Land Surveying, the firm that started everything that came after. For most of a generation the family business was a simple one: survey the land and file the plats.
R.A. had three sons. Larry and Charlie both took engineering degrees from Texas A&M and left to build careers of their own, Larry as an engineer in California and Charlie in the Air Force. James Malcolm ("Big Jim"), the youngest, skipped college and followed his father into surveying. By the late 1970s all three brothers were back in the family business.
The survey company was doing so well that the family decided to stop just measuring land and start owning it. They found the opening in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's rural development program, building and owning affordable apartments in small Texas towns.
They formed the company in 1981 and named it after themselves. LCJ: Larry, Charlie, and James.
What started as an investment and depreciation strategy became the family's second business, and eventually its largest.
R.A. Washburn died in June 1987, still serving as Harris County Land Surveyor. Continuing his father's legacy, his youngest son, Big Jim, ran for the seat and won it.
Big Jim held the office, and he and his brothers ran the companies together. Years later, after the family moved north, he was elected San Jacinto County Surveyor as well.
By then the apartments built in the early eighties were no longer just an investment. They were real properties in small towns with families living in them, and they needed full time management.
In 2003, Craig Washburn (Charlie's son) and James "Jim" Washburn (Big Jim's son) bought LCJ Management from the brothers.
The same year they formed two more companies under the same ownership, LCJ Development and LCJ Construction, so the family could plan a project, build it, and manage it without ever leaving the group.
The decade that followed took them well outside rural housing: townhome developments, beach house construction on the Gulf, condominium projects in Austin, and multiple developments and construction projects along the East Coast.
Big Jim died in Shepherd, Texas in 2013. That same year the family turned the company back toward the work he and his brothers had started in 1981: rural rental housing and tax credit development in the small Texas towns that need safe and affordable housing.
The first acquisition and redevelopment deal LCJ took on was in Shepherd, the town where he died.
More than a dozen have followed. LCJ has grown to roughly 1,440 units, taking on aging properties and rebuilding them rather than letting them fall out of the affordable housing stock.
In 2026 Devin Baker came on as Chief Operating Officer and Glenn Hanna as Chief Financial Officer, joining Craig Washburn, Chief Executive Officer, and Jim Washburn, Executive Director.
LCJ remains a Washburn family company, now with a leadership team assembled to grow it.
Washburn and Company Land Surveying is still in operation, nearly eighty years after R.A. Washburn first ran for county surveyor. The crews go out, the plats get filed.
LCJ is growing. The company is adding to its own portfolio and now manages properties for outside owners: agency compliance handled right the first time, properties maintained instead of deferred, and reporting an owner can rely on.
Three generations in, it remains a family business, in Texas, working the same ground.
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