Breaking into Boston’s general contracting market during tumultuous racial upheaval in the 1970s taught John B. Cruz III to rise above discrimination.

Enduring decades of ups and downs running one of the country’s largest 100% Black-owned construction and real estate organizations has steeled Cruz Cos. for the current Trump era chill on federal affordable housing funding and diversity programs. “Every morning, I feel two things—that I’m either flying a bomber and I have to put on my flak jacket to go out there … or I’m running the gantlet, and if I fall, I’m done,” the firm president and CEO says of the mentality that has helped him win work on notable projects such as the Boston Police Dept. headquarters and Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center.

The son of first-generation Cape Verdean immigrants has met with several U.S. presidents—including Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan—fighting for parity for minority contractors. Also president ex-officio and board member emeritus of the National Association of Minority Contractors, Cruz worked with other Black-owned firms for federal and state legislation ensuring that parity. He helped influence other states to write language allowing bids to be rejected for not meeting diversity goals after Massachusetts became the first state to reject a public bid for not meeting MBE set-asides in the 1970s.

Systemic racism remains in the industry, says Cruz, 81. Even reaching a single-project bonding capacity of $50 million and aggregate bonding of $100 million did not prevent him from being denied contracts based on doubts about his firm’s ability and financial strength, he says.

Cruz still has two minds about MBE programs. While his father and uncle succeeded in the business without such initiatives, he recognizes the need for equity efforts such as ones that allow minority firms to use letters of credit instead of bonding to secure projects—something he himself has benefited from. “The obstacle back then was getting people to open the doors, not to give you something, but to let you bid,” Cruz says of his father’s struggles.

Cruz credits MBE programs for “opening up the government and private industry to at least do a good faith effort soliciting work.”

His own firm has employed an average of 70% MBE contractors and consultants and 70% minority workers on all construction projects since its founding. Cruz has endowed scholarships worth hundreds of thousands of dollars at several universities across Massachusetts, enabling students from economically challenged neighborhoods to attend college and learn advanced building trade skills that enable them to enter the industry. Fernando J. Domenech Jr., president of DHK Architects, has collaborated with Cruz for three decades, noting how his “human touch” shows in “his care and commitment to bettering the life of others, his notion of inclusivity and fairness to all.”

Cruz is developing a 10-story mixed-use development called 135 and 145 Dudley with affordable rental units and market-rate condos, some of which are intended as workforce housing units affordable to Roxbury residents.
Rendering courtesy The Architectural Team (TAT)

Breaking Barriers

A third-generation, family-owned business performing construction, development and management services particularly focused on affordable housing, Cruz Cos. was born from the carpentry and framing subcontracting business that Cruz’s father, Bertie, started in 1948 because he could not find steady work elsewhere. The younger Cruz’s introduction to construction came in working weekends and holidays on his father’s projects in blistering heat and biting cold while teenaged peers watched cartoons. “I felt my life had gone to ruin,” he jokes.

While those grueling early days set up Cruz to expand the family business into a firm comprising Cruz Construction, Cruz Development, Cruz Management and Cruz Relocation, he originally wanted to be an artist before his high school guidance counselor showed him prospective salaries for those in the arts. Cruz enrolled in the Wentworth School of Technology in Boston and followed his counselor’s advice to mold his father’s company in the image of a successful firm he admired.

With “no Black firms to emulate,” Cruz looked to one of the state’s largest construction companies at the time, Perini Building Co., now Tutor Perini. “At that time, they were third generation. I said, ‘Well, we’re second generation now so maybe we can grow.’” Succeeding his father in the 1970s, Cruz steered the company from subcontracting into general contracting and decided to develop his own projects to create opportunities. “If we are the developer,” he says, “it’s much harder for someone to deny you access to your own work.”

In 1973, he completed his first development, a 38-unit affordable housing apartment building in Boston’s Roxbury section. Sheila Dillon, city chief of housing and director of the Mayor’s Office of Housing, says Cruz Cos. has been an “invaluable partner” in creating and preserving affordable housing. “His work has provided critical housing opportunities for families while also strengthening communities by prioritizing economic inclusion, minority workforce participation and long-term neighborhood investment,” she says.

Michael E. Liu, senior partner and design principal at The Architectural Team Inc., recalls creating drawings for one of the firm’s early collaborations to restore and stabilize an apartment building that “included extensive instructions for the patch and repair of bullet holes.”

Cruz also “instituted apprenticeship programs to develop a new generation of construction, development and management professionals from these same disadvantaged neighborhoods,” Liu says

One of Cruz’s most prized projects, Harvard Commons, revitalized a once-struggling section of Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood into a mixed-income community after breaking ground during the Great Recession. Cruz started selling the homes for about $400,000. The development’s last two homes sold for more than $1 million. “It’s proved that in spite of whatever is said about Boston, racially, you can still build a [diverse] community,” Cruz says.

His latest project in Boston’s Nubian Square is a 10-story mixed-use development, including affordable workforce housing units for Roxbury residents. Expected to start construction later this year, the project will help “alleviate, or slow the tide of, gentrification,” Cruz says.

Justin Cruz has followed in his father’s footsteps, also starting as a laborer. Now chief operating officer, he says “persistence” is one of his father’s great qualities. The younger Cruz credits his father’s “smart and strategic decisions” with helping the company survive hardships. “A lot of people would have given up a long time ago, but he keeps showing up,” he says. The elder Cruz is working on a succession plan for his son to take over the business, but retirement is not in his near future. “I’m not ready to retire,” he says, “At least not until I’m 86 like my father.”