Mark Vengroff keeps his father close.
Not as a framed portrait on a desk. Harvey Vengroff is present instead as inspiration: in boxing gloves hanging year-round where you’d see mistletoe during the holidays, in framed letters screwed into drywall and in the steady labor of keeping thousands of people housed in a region that has made it increasingly hard to be poor.
Mark is 61 now, and has spent decades negotiating, persuading and choosing his words carefully. In his world, words move things like permits, parcels and funding—and change lives. He runs One Stop Housing, the affordable-housing company his father founded 20 years ago. It’s the kind of work that never really ends in a town where wealth too often dictates residential development and where thousands don’t live a glossy postcard-picture life.
Mark didn’t grow up dreaming of this work. He grew up inside it…