New vistas for Henry Cisneros

New Urbanism’s first champion at HUD discusses his philosophy and strategy as a private-sector developer of housing in cities. With the Bush Administration proposing to end new funding of the HOPE VI redevelopment program after the current fiscal year, this seemed a good time to ask former Housing & Urban Development secretary Henry Cisneros what he thinks the program has accomplished in its ten-year run and, more importantly, to find out what he is doing now as a private-sector housing developer. Trained as an urban planner and public administrator, Cisneros was the first Mexican-American to run a major American city when elected mayor of San Antonio in 1981. He served four two-year terms, focusing much of his attention on rebuilding the city’s economic base, recruiting convention and tourist trade, attracting high-tech industries, and expanding housing opportunities. As HUD secretary from 1993 to 1997, he broadened HOPE VI into a major effort not just to knock down the nation’s worst public housing projects, but also to rebuild their sites with mixed-income developments containing homeowners as well as renters. Cisneros, 55, signed the charter of the Congress for New Urbanism in Charleston, SC, in 1996, bringing the CNU convention to its feet with his pledge to apply New Urbanism’s principles to HUD’s housing developments. In August 2000 he teamed up with Kaufman and Broad Home Corporation (now known as KB Home) to form American CityVista, a San Antonio-based company that builds new residential developments in parts of cities where development hadn’t occurred in years. He was interviewed by phone by senior editor Philip Langdon. NUN: What kinds of conditions did you find in public housing when you were at HUD? Cisneros: In Newark, I walked onto a drug deal with a guy stuffing money into his jacket as he came out of a building. My assistant secretaries and I were going into the building on a Sunday afternoon. When I visited Lafayette Courts in Baltimore, the police wouldn’t let Mayor Schmoke and me go in the building. They said, ‘We can’t vouch for your safety. We can’t let you go in.’ I mean, here we are, the secretary of housing and the mayor, allowing women and children, families, to live in the building — but we could not go in because the police feared that we would stumble across a drug deal in a corridor and get shot. NUN: How well do you think the HOPE VI program has dealt with those conditions? Cisneros: The improvements that HOPE VI has created in cities are dramatic. The removal of high-rises that were virtually unlivable, and the construction of smaller-scale townhome complexes — some rental, some homeownership, with an attempt at mixed incomes — have been exactly what some communities needed, very dramatic turnarounds. In Newark, for example, Hovnanian, the big private builder on the East Coast, has been building for-sale homes across the street, down the block from a former public housing site that is now a mixed-income development. Neighborhoods that were once a drain on a city’s energy — no one would come near them, they discouraged development around them — have in many instances been converted into magnets. We reduced the density dramatically. To do that, you have to move some people off the site, so we employed Section 8 certificates to allow some people to live elsewhere, with an option to come back. Many chose to live elsewhere. I just saw a study HUD produced that showed that many people who left are very satisfied with the results. On the whole, they’re satisfied that their children have done better in school, and they’ve been able to be closer to work and such. So the strategy of breaking up the density on the whole was good for those who stayed, as well as for those who chose to use Section 8 vouchers. New urban influence NUN: Have the developments closely adhered to new urbanist ideas? Cisneros: I guess what I’ve got to say is, they may not be classic new urbanist in every case, but they are infinitely better than what was there, and they have a chance. We incorporated new urbanist concepts like private space. Buildings were given private entrances so that people would have “defensible space.” They wouldn’t have to walk through common corridors where the lights were knocked out by the gangs so that the gangs’ deals could occur in the dark. When you’re dealing with huge bureaucracies, when you are the funder but not the designer — that is to say, the design occurs at the local level — I feel like we did a good job. We established a clearinghouse of new urbanist ideas which they could utilize. And I’m pleased that in some cases the result has been new urban in principle if not in detail. NUN: You’re now the chairman, CEO, and co-founder of a firm called American CityVista: How is it organized? Cisneros: It’s a joint venture with KB Home. I own 65 percent, they own 35 percent. I’d long felt that I wanted to end my career doing the things that I most enjoyed when I was mayor and when I was HUD secretary. That was seeing communities come into existence, projects come to fruition on raw ground — conceptualizing and designing and putting a little creativity into them, and watching families move into homes. NUN: To do that, you needed to team up with an existing builder? Cisneros: I‘d had an ongoing conversation with Bruce Karatz, who is the chairman of KB Home. I met him when I was in Los Angeles after the Northridge earthquake. He was one of the people who weighed in to help when 20,000 people were out of their homes. He said, “Look, I’d love to do the same thing, and I’ve debated whether we should do it as a division of our company.” This is a much more time-consuming process than building on suburban land, so we decided that I would be the person to organize American CityVista. The concept is basically to bring the resources of a large production builder — one of the three largest builders in the country — into central city neighborhoods, or into areas where no building has occurred. Their assets, their financial capacity, their design capacity help to carry out, in effect, a redevelopment initiative. NUN: How large are your developments? Cisneros: We’re talking 50, 60, 100 homes, enough to make a stand, to be kind of an identifiable village in the midst of a big city. Our working principle is, we’d like to be in the 100-home range — 80 to 120 homes. It’s generally land that has been passed over for some reason. Often, our sites are not classically central city, because Southwestern cities don’t have the same kind of central city identification, but they tend to be more inner ring. NUN: How do you go about this? Cisneros: My job, the job of our team based in San Antonio, is to work in the markets where KB operates and identify sites in central neighborhoods or near central neighborhoods, bring the land under control, work through the entitlement process, work on the community design, and work on the product selection. You can’t just take a suburban product and plunk it down on a central site, that doesn’t work. It means working with the schools, because in every case schools are an issue. Families can’t go back into central areas if their children are going to go to schools that are unacceptable. NUN: What do you do with the schools? Cisneros: In San Antonio, we’re on the south side, in an area where no homes have been built in 40 years — a place called Lago Vista. When we announced the project, we announced it in the high school, with the school superintendent. And we gave a $10,000 gift to upgrade the school’s computer lab. We have worked closely with the school to align their programs with local businesses, to get them in on breaking developments on the San Antonio education scene. So, we could assert that we were committed to the improvement of the schools as much as we were to building the community. Lago Vista is selling ahead of what the projections were. We have sold about 265 homes now, on a site that could eventually be built out to 600 homes. It has been a great success. The most frequent thing I hear when I’m at Lago Vista is, “Thank God, somebody is building new homes in this neighborhood, because I’ve always wanted to come back here, and there were no choices.” A busy agenda NUN: Where else are you building? Cisneros: We’re building two communities on the south side of Austin, about ten minutes from downtown, in a Latino neighborhood. In Dallas, one of our proudest locations, we built on a public housing site. Not a HOPE VI, but a renovation of one of the most notorious public housing projects in the country. In effect, we became the for-sale builder on a site where Habitat for Humanity is going to build 100 homes at about $65,000 to $75,000. We have sold out the 210 homes we built, at prices ranging from $90,000 to about $130,000. The total community will have 310 homes, ten minutes from downtown. We’re opening our first community in Houston, a place called Victoria Park, in the southeast part of Houston near Hobby Airport, again, in the Latino community. We are building a community in Fort Worth which is going to be our boldest initiative yet. It’s in an African-American neighborhood called Stop Six. Here we persuaded KB to go into the neighborhood and buy some large lots amidst and between existing homes. It’s important that the community see a big builder as part of the solution to local issues and not just continually building out on the fringes. This year we will open two communities in Austin and as many as four or five in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. We have been selected to collaborate on a HOPE VI in Phoenix with McCormack Baron, and we are hopeful about being able to be active in Albuquerque. We have sold out a community in Los Angeles. We have a community we hope breaks ground this year in Pomona. NUN: Are all of American CityVista’s houses single-family? Cisneros: They’re all single-family detached, generally with cement fibrous siding with traditional designs — a good effort at craftsman simulations that utilize porches and modern, open floor plans. We’re putting a lot of thought into landscaping and sidewalks. A new urbanist might look at them and find imperfections, but we never have advertised them as New Urbanism. We’re just doing the best we can and trying to stay within prices that families can afford. NUN: Do you use alleys? Cisneros: These are all front-loaded. But in Lago Vista, we offered optional garages on the back, on the side — separate, detached garages. Other houses have an attached garage on the front, and many families prefer that for security reasons because this is a tough neighborhood, or at least it’s in a tough area. In their minds, they’re not getting a contemporary house unless they have the attached garage. With all due respect to people whom I greatly respect — the new urbanists — this is a compromise, trying to incorporate as many principles as possible and yet trying to accommodate both the pocketbooks and the desires of people in a central city area. NUN: How do the streets in your developments relate to the surrounding streets? Cisneros: They continue on through generally, because the fire departments of the cities require it. Even though the community would like to be sealed off because of crime, because they don’t want people from other neighborhoods coming into the neighborhood, generally the fire codes require continuous and connected streets. NUN: How many houses have you produced? Cisneros: We have collaborated with KB on 1,000 homes in the two years since we’ve been in existence, and our goal for the year ahead would be about 1,400 more. This is exciting work. NUN: Any final thoughts? Cisneros: There’s a bigger story here, and that is that New Urbanism has been so successful that even a large production builder acknowledges the importance of infill and the importance of intact communities, and is striving to produce something that is socially beneficial. I’m saying the New Urbanism can take credit for generating imitators, even if the imitators must make compromises to produce on a large scale, in a central city, and at affordable prices. u