COMPANY: Cruz Cos.
TITLE: President and CEO
AGE: 83
FAMILY: Third-generation family business; John has continued the Cruz family’s legacy in construction, development, and property management. Cruz Cos. traces its roots to 1948, when the company was founded by John’s father, John “Bertie” Cruz Jr.
FAVORITE QUOTES: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”—Maya Angelou
“I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.”—Maya Angelou
“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”—Mahatma Gandhi
FAVORITE BOOK: “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration” by Isabel Wilkerson
LEADERSHIP PHILOSOPHY: Work hard, do the right thing, invest in people and the community, and create opportunities that make it possible for the next generation to succeed.
PROUDEST ACCOMPLISHMENT: Building the Michael E. Haynes Arms building right here in the heart of Roxbury. I wanted young people in this community to see someone who looks like them, someone they could relate to, and know if I can do it, they can do it, too. They can also build businesses, create opportunities, and be successful without having to look outside their own community or ethnicity for an example of a role model and what is possible.
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John B. Cruz III’s stated ambition in his high school yearbook was to be rich.
More than 60 years later, at 83, he’s the chairman and CEO of Cruz Cos., which has developed more than 2,000 affordable housing units throughout New England and the Mid-Atlantic and has hundreds more in the works. A leader in developing mixed-income, mixed-use communities, Cruz Cos. is one of the largest minority-owned construction and real estate organizations in the United States with revenue in the tens of millions.
“I’m blessed,” Cruz says. And as he’s piled up those blessings, his ideas about what matters most have evolved as well. Learning to love “is the most important lesson,” he says. Raised a Catholic, he became a Baptist so he could go to church with his wife, and now he’s a Buddhist. “Through Buddhism, I’ve learned to deflect the hate and the jealousies the world has for you,” he says. “I really credit Buddhism for helping me through.”
Born in Wareham, Massachusetts, to second-generation immigrants from the Cape Verde Islands off the northwest coast of Africa, Cruz’s early life was shaped by a close-knit community that he says made him “who I am and what I am today.” His grandfather, who was once a bootlegger and close associate of Joseph Kennedy, owned a grocery store, a package store, and a pool hall, which was the focal point for the Cape Verdean community in Wareham. He was one of the town’s most respected figures, but Cruz’s childhood was far from stable.
His parents divorced when he was 5, and he moved with his mother and sister to Cleveland and then to Buffalo, New York, when his mother remarried. His mother and stepfather were loving and never abusive, but they struggled with alcoholism. He had to hide money to buy himself milk and cereal when they went on binges. In Buffalo, he was bullied for his light skin until his stepfather taught him to fight back.
“I don’t regret any of the time with them,” he says. “Hard times can make you bitter, or they can make you compassionate. For whatever reason, I became more compassionate and more tolerant and maybe more determined.”
Under the Microscope
When he was 12, Cruz’s mother sent him to live in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood with his father, who would be able to provide better education and economic opportunities because he owned a construction company that did remodeling and subcontracting projects, mostly for white builders in the suburbs. “White folks hired him and were happy with his performance, but my father could never, ever make a mistake or, worse, hold the job up,” Cruz says. “He understood that being Black, he was under the microscope.”
Cruz started nailing down wood floors for his father’s business when he was 13. At 16, his father used the wages he’d saved for him to buy him a 1954 Mercury. “I was the only Black kid in high school who had a car,” Cruz says, “and that made me say, work doesn’t suck.”
It bothered him that Roxbury lacked the high-quality housing he helped build in the suburbs, but his first instinct wasn’t to address that. He wanted to be a writer or an actor until his high school guidance counselor showed him how much those jobs paid and suggested he help build his father’s company instead.
After graduating from Boston’s Wentworth School of Technology and completing MIT’s Minority Developers Executive Training Program, Cruz helped transform his father’s carpentry business into the John B. Cruz Construction Co., handling multimillion-dollar projects in the Boston area. But the company kept losing its biggest bids, even as low bidder with bonding in place. “White companies grow every day by doing the larger job,” Cruz says. “But for us, there’s some systemic block.”
His answer was to become the owner. “It was harder for the system to say we couldn’t be the contractor if we were the owner,” he says. “Not accepting no, that’s my superpower.”
His first project, started in 1972 and completed in 1973, took him full circle. Cruz built Taurus Apartments, a 38-unit affordable housing community in Roxbury, on land won in a city of Boston bid and financed with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and MassHousing. At a time when high-quality affordable housing was scarce in inner-city Boston, he insisted on a brick façade, elevators, balconies, laundry facilities, and a security system even after advisers urged him to trade those amenities for more units. More than half of the project’s subcontractors were minority-owned, a particularly significant accomplishment in 1970s Boston.
“I was walking on eggshells, not knowing 100% how I was going to get this thing completed and trusting my instincts that I could do it,” he says. “It was scary. And a lot of people didn’t expect us to finish the job.”
Cruz Cos. still owns and manages Taurus, and many original residents remain. Through the project he built relationships with public agencies, political leaders, and community groups that led to later developments. Sheila Dillon, director of the Boston Mayor’s Office of Housing, says Cruz has been “one of our most trusted development partners” for more than 50 years.
Closing the Wealth Gap
In 2024, Cruz opened the 55-unit Michael E. Haynes Arms in Roxbury, with 36,00 square feet of office space that serves as Cruz Cos.’ headquarters and studios through three-bedrooms at 30%, 50%, 60%, and 80% of the area median income. That costs the company pro forma returns, but Cruz believes mixed-income housing is crucial to revitalizing neighborhoods. Harvard Commons, a 99-unit community in Dorchester, Massachusetts, is a mix of for-sale single-family homes and affordable townhome rentals. The first homes sold for a little over $400,000, while the last four sold for more than $1 million, Cruz says. “It proved it worked.”
Not every bet paid off as well. Dennis Blackett, one of Boston’s first Black developers, advised Cruz to build a track record in Massachusetts, then leave for markets with more Black political power. In Miami, Cruz developed a 463-unit project encompassing a large city block that included a 30-story tower he doubts would have been politically feasible in Boston because of its scale. But the site, a warehouse district next to Overtown, never hit its occupancy and rent targets. After 10 years, the troubled HUD property was sold. “I left a lot of my father’s money in Miami,” Cruz says.
Adamant that rentals alone can’t close the wealth gap, he continues to push the envelope. Cruz Cos. is pursuing a project with 60 affordable units and a nine-story, 110-unit condominium building in Roxbury. The first phase of the $150 million development is slated to start in December.
Cruz also spends where it builds. Across its five most recent developments, 78% of project dollars went to minority businesses. Cruz tries to hire minority-owned subcontractors with a second generation in the business because he says wealth rarely arrives in one generation. This year, the company founded Build Black, a national awareness campaign to encourage investment in Black and Brown neighborhoods. Through CRUZ C.A.R.E.S. (for community, arts, recreational and educational services), the firm provides trips, after-school programs, and paid summer internships for residents. Cruz has endowed scholarships at universities and trade schools, including a minority scholarship named for his father at Bridgewater State University, and often gives nonprofit and advocacy organizations free office space in his developments.
Cruz expects to work at least until he’s 86, like his father, but he’s handing the reins to his son, Justin, who became chief operating officer in 2024. He’s doing his best not to micromanage him. “When I went to work for my father, I made a lot of mistakes because I hadn’t worked for anybody else,” he says. “But I survived. He’ll survive, too.”