Colorado Real Estate Journal -
Ismael Guerrero heads one of the biggest real estate development organizations in Denver. For almost six years, Guerrero, who just turned 48, has been the executive director of the Denver Housing Authority. The DHA has a staff of about 300, including part-time workers, an annual operating budget of about $100 million and typically a construction budget of another $60 million to $75 million. It is a force in real estate during good times and bad. “We have a budget of $15 million to $20 million in procurements annually, which we spend with small businesses and local companies,” Guerrero said. “During the Great Recession, when all of the private companies were basically shut down, we were still hiring landscapers, concrete guys, people in the construction trades, architects, engineers and others,” Guerrero said. “We were really a lifeline to a lot of companies. We were hiring when a lot of private companies were not.” Developer Bill Mosher was the chairman of the DHA and headed the search committee when Guerrero was hired in 2007. The DHA conducted a national search before hiring Guerrero, after Sal Carpio announced he was going to step down at the helm of DHA after being diagnosed with cancer. Guerrero really shined when the top three candidates were invited to a neighborhood meeting in Westwood, which was attended by more than 50 residents, Mosher recalled. “Ismael has this innate ability to connect to people at a very human level,” in addition to the financial, developmental and entrepreneurial skills the DHA board was seeking, Mosher said. “DHA is the largest landlord in the state of Colorado, but we wanted it not only to be a traditional housing authority that just provides services to low-income renters, but to be very entrepreneurial and developmentally oriented,” Mosher said. “Ismael had the financial background, the development background and the community development background, plus he really listens and respects all people and really cares about their wellbeing,” Mosher said. “Ismael is the whole package. He has far exceeded our greatest expectations. He is a leader.” Guerrero not only brought a broad, diverse set of skills to the job, but knows firsthand what it means to grow up in a poor neighborhood. Guerrero grew up in the Pilsen and Little Village area on the Near West Side of Chicago. His father, a welder by trade who later opened a small auto repair shop, moved to Chicago in the 1960s with his mother, seeking a better life. “It was a typical, very lowincome and immigrant neighborhood, not dissimilar to Westwood or Lincoln Park in Denver,” Guerrero said. With a big caveat, however. The Chicago neighborhood where he grew up was much more dangerous than even the poorest Denver neighborhood, given the gang violence of the Latin Kings and Maniac Latin Disciples in the 1980s. “Denver is not as old of a city as a big industrial city like Chicago or New York,” Guerrero said. “You don’t have the same history of crime and poverty and blight that the bigger and older cities have. Denver still has this small-town feel. And even in Denver’s poorest neighborhoods, there are a lot of people who take pride in where they live. I think in Denver a $20 million HUD grant can have a lot more potential than in a lot of bigger cities.” Guerrero’s parents, who came to the U.S. without speaking English, stressed education to their children. His father barely graduated from grammar school, but taught himself English and went to a trade school to sharpen his welding skills. His parents sent Guerrero to Catholic schools in Chicago. He was the first in his family to go to college, earning an industrial engineering degree from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and an MBA from the University of Chicago. “I was lucky my parents sent me to Catholic schools because the public schools in my neighborhood were terrible – probably the worst in Chicago.” He also was introduced to real estate at an early age. Growing up, his father had purchased a three-plex. “We lived in one and rented out the others,” Guerrero said. “I’d follow my dad around and help him fix things, like stopped-up toilets. So maybe real estate is in my blood.” Despite an engineering degree from one of the topranked engineering programs in the U.S., Guerrero never wanted to be a traditional engineer. “I always like the project management and financial side,” he said. “As an industrial engineer, I would be optimizing operational sides of businesses, looking at the cost-benefits over time for new technology, for example.” Before he entered real estate, he worked for two telecommunications firms in Chicago, AT&T and Ameritech. That corporate background, along with his analytical training as an engineer, has been extremely valuable in his role heading the largest housing authority in Colorado, he said. “A lot of people in affordable housing are very passionate about what they do but they don’t have the corporate background and training as far as running departments and large operations,” Guerrero said. Still, he didn’t find the corporate life fulfilling. “I wanted to return to the neighborhood where I grew up and give back,” Guerrero said. “Especially when I went away to college, I realized it didn’t have to be the way it was and it could be improved.” A friend launched a faithbased organization called the Resurrection Project and asked Guerrero to join him. He jumped at the chance. “It was an ‘ah-ha’ moment for me,” Guerrero said. “I realized this is what I wanted to do.” He worked with the Mayor Richard M. Daley administration and a suburban homebuilder named Jerry Bigelow to build single-family homes on city property in Pilsen and other rundown and long neglected neighborhoods in Chicago. “They’d go into the barrio and build the first new singlefamily homes in the neighborhood in probably three decades,” Guerrero said. “Jerry had made a lot of money building big suburban subdivisions and this was his way of giving back.” After about six years, he and his wife decided they would rather raise their children somewhere other than Chicago. They moved to Denver in 1999. “Like a lot of people, we came to Denver for the quality of life,” Guerrero said. “We love camping, and hiking, biking and skiing. We love the mountains. We love the outdoors.” Also, he had two cousins from Chicago who had already moved to Denver. “Coincidentally, they are both engineers, too,” he said. His first job was working as the chief financial officer for the Rocky Mountain Mutual Housing Association, at the time headed by Bill Sullivan. “It was a great organization, but I really wanted to get back into real estate development.” He joined Denver-based Mercy Housing, one of the nation’s largest owners and developers of affordable housing, as a vice president of housing development. “Mercy Housing’s mission and margins are very good,” he said. “As part of a national organization, I was able to interact with other affordable housing developers in cities like San Francisco and Chicago and Seattle. I was very fortunate. It was a great learning experience.” Eventually, however, he wanted to learn another aspect of the business, so he took a job as the first community development director for U.S. Bank in Denver. “Before then, the equity investments in community development projects U.S. Bank was making in Denver were handled from their Portland office,” he said. “I learned a lot from that job,” Guerrero said. “It was great to learn how deals look to the investor side. Literally, hundreds of transactions over the course of a year would come across my desk.” While he was working at U.S. Bank, he helped finance an affordable housing deal with developer Charlie Woolley, among others. He also did a number of deals with housing authorities across the state, including the Denver Housing Authority. He has incorporated the best practices he learned at his other jobs at DHA. “Probably the most important thing I learned is to surround yourself with really good people who are passionate about what they do and are committed to their jobs and try not to micromanage them,” he said. At the same time, he runs the DHA as if it were a private, for-profit operation. “We have to meet our operational and financial goals,” he said. “First, you have to take care of the basics. Once you have a strong foundation, you can push the envelope on other things.” Mainly, that has meant making affordable housing construction and rehab projects in Denver some of the greenest and most sustainable in the country. “We’ve really been able to push the envelope on green building,” Guerrero said. The green benefits, while adding to the cost upfront, are not only good for the environment, but make sense financially over time, he said. “We know we will have real payoffs, in terms of real monetary savings, in five, seven or 12 years,” he said. “We look at the cost of putting up solar panels or geothermal heating and cooling, which is expensive today, but you have to look ahead to see the benefits are in the future” Future generations are extremely important to him. “Whenever I see kids who live in these low-income projects, yes, I worry about them. I also realize that any one of them has the potential to do great things.” Mosher would say that Guerrero has accomplished great things as he rose from his humble background growing up in Chicago. “Honestly, I’m surprised that Ismael has stayed at the job so long,” Mosher said. “DHA is a good platform for him because it is a large, complex organization. “But I’m sure if he was willing to leave Denver, officials in Washington, D.C., would love to have him in some top-level federal job. We are lucky to have him here in Denver.”