John B. Cruz III is president and CEO of Cruz Cos., a leading Boston-based construction, development, and management firm.
One of the country's oldest and largest 100% minority-owned companies, the firm has developed approximately 3,500 affordable homes, starting with Taurus Apartments in the early 1970s.
Cruz reflects on why the development remains important to him and the community.
Name of development:
Taurus Apartments
Location:
Roxbury, Massachusetts
Briefly describe the development:
Taurus Apartments is a 38-unit, four-story affordable apartment complex in the heart of Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. We developed and built this community in 1972 and opened it in 1973 at a time when new, high-quality affordable housing simply was not being created here. Fast-forward 51 years, and Cruz Cos. still owns and manages it today.
The unit mix includes one- and two-bedroom homes, and our intent was to provide comfortable, accessible homes of an exceptionally high quality for the area's working-class, predominantly Black residents.
Your role in the project:
Cruz Cos. was the developer and also the general contractor for Taurus Apartments. Once we completed the project, we continued to manage it as well. In fact, this was our first-ever development project, and it launched us from a successful contracting business started by my father, John “Bertie” Cruz Jr. —John B. Cruz Construction—into an entirely new trajectory as a 100% Black-owned integrated real estate firm, which was almost unheard of at the time.
The backstory here is that in the late 1960s and early 1970s my father and I often worked doing carpentry framing for builders and developers in Boston’s wealthy, almost exclusively white suburbs. It upset me that housing of this quality wasn’t being built in the less privileged, majority minority neighborhoods where we lived and where our family and friends lived—and that we weren’t able to use our skills as builders in our own community.
So, I took some training seminars on real estate development, and, at the same time, the city of Boston opened a bidding process for a piece of land in Roxbury. We submitted and won, then worked closely with the Department of Housing and Urban Development and MassHousing on the financing. It was exciting and rewarding to be the driving force behind a project like this, and to be in charge of so many aspects that had previously been out of our control. We were able to design the building with the amenities that we wanted for our community, and we were able to use a local labor force to build it—over 50% of the subcontractors were minority workers.
Share why this development is meaningful to you:
There are so many reasons why Taurus Apartments is and always will be meaningful to me. Of course, it was my first development, and that alone makes me proud every time I think about the project or visit and talk with residents who love living here 50 years after the building first opened. But even more, developing this project proved to myself and to the world that it was possible and necessary to build apartment communities like this—with features and amenities such as a brick exterior; elevator access to all four stories; balconies in every unit; recreation space; and a meeting room with a kitchen; a laundry room; and a closed-circuit TV security system—in the inner city.
We had a vision, and we stuck to it. Some advisers questioned the costliness of a brick facade or of elevators and suggested that we eliminate amenity space and balconies in favor of more units. But we just really believed that our friends and neighbors deserved housing with these features—which would have been seen as completely standard in other neighborhoods, by the way—and so that’s how we built it. It turns out we were right. Taurus Apartments ended up winning a design award from the local American Institute of Architects chapter, the city’s Boston Ready Development Program promoted it in its marketing, and the building has been a success ever since. In fact, some of the original residents still live there, and we’ve upgraded their apartments over time to become more senior friendly.
Lesson learned from this development:
One of the key lessons from Taurus Apartments is that successfully developing affordable housing success depends on strong partnerships and collaboration. Through this project, we built relationships with key political leaders, state and local agencies, public and private financing entities, and important community groups—and these relationships helped us navigate the complexities and challenges of the affordable housing sector. Many of these relationships have endured for half a century at this point and are a significant factor in our continued growth as an affordable housing leader. Housing agencies know they can rely on us, banks and investment groups see our track record and know that our properties are successful for decades, and community organizations see how these projects strengthen neighborhoods and in fact advocate for many of our developments.
Another crucial lesson was that real estate development is an effective tool for building ecosystems of economic empowerment and growth. Taurus Apartments proved the downstream benefits of a community-focused development model, and this is an approach we’ve prioritized in every subsequent project. Across 50-plus years, we’ve employed an average of 70% MBE contractors and consultants and 70% minority workers on all our construction projects. And because our goal is to always utilize local labor, this means over time millions of dollars have been funneled directly back into the communities where we’re developing housing. These projects demonstrate the holistic value of affordable housing—it’s about much more than providing accessible homes. It’s about opening up a whole world of opportunity and creating the foundation for building wealth and for closing the wealth gap.
How has this development changed your life?
Taurus Apartments gave me both a career and a mission. Before we completed this project, it was hard to even imagine a Black-led real estate firm; today, we’ve developed thousands of affordable homes across the Eastern Seaboard, and our focus remains on creating accessible housing opportunities and stimulating economic development and wealth generation in communities that have been overlooked for too long.
Taking a chance on that first development project has also shown me the value of being bold and trying new things to reach our goals. In part because of Taurus Apartments’ success, in the 1980s we launched a dedicated property management division, which now oversees more than 1,300 apartments. In turn, the experience of operating Cruz Management inspired us to create a 501(c)(3) social responsibility arm, Cruz C.A.R.E.S. (Community, Arts, Recreational and Educational Services), which offers workforce development, recreational opportunities, summer camps for children, scholarships, and more for residents of our communities.
And, of course, Taurus Apartments has inspired us to continue being bold in our development aims. We recently completed the final phase of Residences at Harvard Commons, a 99-home residential community that integrates affordable rental housing with for-sale single-family homes in a master-planned neighborhood within Boston’s historically Black community center. This project has become a model for mixed-income neighborhood planning, and, once again, it proved that long-underserved city districts can thrive with the right investments. Similarly, we’ll soon begin construction on a new 110-unit affordable development in College Park, Maryland, and on 135 Dudley St., a new two-building, mixed-use, mixed-income development that is set to reinvigorate Roxbury’s Nubian Square. With affordable rental apartments, workforce and market-rate condominium units, community space, and retail offerings, this project will be a really transformative undertaking for the minority community—and it wouldn't have been possible without Taurus Apartments.
