What prompted you to leave the private sector?

First of all, I spent the first 30 years of my career in real estate development of some sort. Real estate is fundamentally a cyclical business, and this is my third downturn in the development business since 1981. I’m not so sure that I’m going to see another upside of the real estate cycle in my career. I’ve always been interested in the progress of the city of Des Moines, particularly its neighborhoods. I’ve always been involved with city and county policies regarding housing. When I got a call from one of the board members of this organization indicating that the previous director resigned and would I be interested in doing this, my response was, absolutely.

Is it as exciting as working on big development deals?

In some ways it is more exciting, because it allows me and this organization to use talents and to use information and knowledge to impact a segment of the community that’s often overlooked. It’s easy for people to get excited about the Brown-Camp Lofts, or the first residential redevelopment projects in downtown Des Moines; it’s not as easy to get people excited when you open 18 units of affordable housing on Forest Avenue. Yeah, everybody smiles and says that’s nice, but you don’t get the same kind of juice from it, and it’s every bit as important. In some ways, it’s more important.

Have you changed the organization’s approach to developing affordable housing?

The organization had an expert come in and and talk to the board and decide what direction the board should go in the future. The clear message was that the organization needed to raise its profile in the community and needed to earn that profile, needed to be the repository for strategic planning on affordable housing in the community. We needed to be the experts, and we needed to engage new constituencies that we really hadn’t done a very good job of engaging in the past, and most particularly the business community.

Why wasn’t the business community involved?

The organization previously had had more of a social service focus as opposed to a business focus, and part of my job was to make the business case to this community for the investment in affordable housing.

Is that a difficult pitch?

Absolutely not. Affordable housing is the foundation for everything this community talks about. Much of what we finance and encourage to be developed is housing for folks who work full time in our service industries for some of our largest employers. I like to talk about the folks who need affordable housing, who might be a single mother with two children who needs a two-bedroom apartment who makes $10, $11, $12 an hour working 40 hours a week in a call center. That mother doesn’t make enough money to meet the average rent on a two-bedroom apartment in the Des Moines area. If we want to be the kind of community that attracts new businesses because of our work force, then we have to have safe, stable, affordable housing for them to live.

Is that message being heard?

The first rollout of this was last January during the the legislative session. It gave us a chance to get our feet wet, because you raise the same sorts of issues to legislators who are determining how much money to put into the housing trust fund. For the current Legislature, issues like economic development, work force and jobs resonate with them, and they started to get it, and we ended up in a tough budget year with 100 percent funding of the state housing trust fund. There aren’t too many other programs that came out of the last Legislature unscathed. You don’t go up to talk to them about the fact that it is good work; you make the business case. So now when we go out and talk to the business community … we’re sitting at the table because the business community realizes that affordable housing is important.

Any recreation interests?

I teach classes at Grand View, which to me is fun and recreational. My artistic side is that I’m a stained-glass artist.