Affordable Housing Institute : US

It’s not every day you get to acknowledge someone whose business career is older than your industry.

 

 

Max Kargman, who died over the weekend, was born in 1908, when Theodore Roosevelt was president and the United States still had troops in Cuba after our victory in Theodore’s Spanish-American War (ten years earlier).

 

 

Times Square, New York City, 1909

 

Modern affordable housing — that is, government involvement — dates from 1937, when President Franklin Roosevelt swept up the Resettlement Administration into his newly formed Farmers’ Home Administration.  Max was 28.

 

 

Ford, 1935

 

In 1968, when Lyndon Johnson elevated housing to cabinet-level by creating HUD, Max was 59.

 

 

Sears catalog, 1968

 

Round about that time, tax shelter equity syndication of affordable housing was being invented, in Boston, largely by Max and various people he recruited at law firms and accounting firms. 

 

 

 

Brandywine Village, 402 apartments in East Boston, built 1968 when Max was 59

 

I met and have worked with most of them, in Chicago, Boston, and elsewhere, and to a man they speak fondly of Max’s infectious rambunctious enterprise, his spirit of demanding curiosity and initiative, and their time working together.

 

 

Huron Towers, 248 apartments in Cambridge, built 1975, when Max was 66

 

I met Max in 1988, when he was 79, when I formed the Assisted Housing Legal Rights Fund to mount a constitutional challenge to the Emergency Low Income Housing Preservation Act (ELIHPA) as a taking without due process or just compensation.  By then Max had already sued the Federal government fifteen years earlier, establishing that Federal supremacy meant Boston rent control could not be applied to HUD-regulated and HUD-assisted properties, like those owned by Max’s company, First Realty Management.  Max had won that lawsuit, and we were going to win this lawsuit, or at least achieve the larger objective.  “You can only win,” I remember Max exclaiming in one of our many conference calls, “by showing that the Federal government did it just to save money!“

 

 

Burbank, 172 apartments in Boston, rehabbed 1970, when Max was 61

 

Max was shrewd, animated, curious, cheerful — and, invaluable from my perspective, a walking storehouse of knowledge about the origins and evolution of the American affordable housing ecosystem.  I felt as a Constitutional scholar might feel if he had James Madison living in Belmont.  Given how scarce is that knowledge, and how valuable to some of us, I mused that Max should be declared a living national treasure, like a Japanese sword maker — except that his calligraphy was written in buildings, programs, and the legacy he has passed on his two sons, Bill and Bob, with whom we work from time to time.

 

 

Battles Farm, 320 apartments in Brockton, built 1970, when Max was 61

 

Max was married for seventy years and worked until he was 91.  And at 91, he was still sharp as a tack.  In those ways he remains my role model. 

 

Max was an original.  Which is why he was always so much fun, and had so much impact, and will be so remembered.

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