Henry Cisneros - After Leaving Public Office

After Leaving Public Office

After leaving HUD in January 1997, Cisneros moved his family to Los Angeles and served from 1997 to 2000 as president and chief operating officer of Univision Communications, the nation’s largest Spanish-language broadcaster that had become the fifth-most-watched television network in the nation. Cisneros currently serves on Univision’s Board of Directors. By 2000, Cisneros and his wife moved back to San Antonio.

Upon returning to San Antonio, Cisneros established a firm to develop affordable housing there, and in other American cities. His commitment was to develop homes affordable to the core of America’s workers such as police, nurses, teachers and city workers. “Home ownership is the way people step into the American dream,” Cisneros told the San Diego Union-Tribune. “It creates access to the levers of wealth.” The company he formed in 2000 as American City Vista to develop residential areas in the central zones of many of the nation's major metropolitan areas, evolved to become CityView.

Headquartered in Los Angeles, California, with an office in San Antonio, Cisneros has built up CityView to be one of the nation’s top institutional investment firms focused on urban real estate, in-city housing, and metropolitan infrastructure, working with both residential housing and commercial real estate developers. Cisneros vast knowledge of cities and their associated infrastructure, governmental experience in working with diverse groups and bureaucracy, in addition to his numerous relationships built over a lengthy career, have been, and continue to be, crucial to CityView’s development and success.

Cisneros’ continued active involvement in the real estate industry has led to him receiving multiple national honors. In 2006, Builder Magazine named Cisneros #18 out of the top 50 most influential people in the real estate industry. In June 2007 Cisneros was inducted into the National Association of Homebuilders (NAHB) “Builders Hall of Fame” and honored by the National Housing Conference as the “Housing Person of the Year.”

As a private citizen, Cisneros remains active in non-profit and civic leadership. He was an advisor for the American Democracy Institute; a trustee for the American Film Institute; and Co-Chair of The National Commission on Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, to name a few. Cisneros is currently a board member for the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, and after-School All-Stars, founded by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, in addition to being a member of the Advisory Boards of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation, among others. He also took a role in corporate leadership and has served as a board member for Live Nation, in addition to the boards of major builder KB Home and the largest mortgage lender in the nation at one time, Countrywide Financial — two companies among many that prospered in the housing boom, drawing criticism along the way for abusive business practices.

Cisneros has also been author, editor or collaborator in several books, including Interwoven Destinies: Cities and the Nation, a project with the late former HUD Secretary Jack Kemp; Opportunity and Progress: A Bipartisan Platform for National Housing Policy was presented the Common Purpose Award for demonstrating the potential of bipartisan cooperation; and Casa y Comunidad: Latino Home and Neighborhood Design, a publication that took the first-ever look at the growing and increasingly prosperous U.S. Latino community and its housing needs, was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Silver Medal in the category of best business book of 2006. His most recent collaboration with the late former HUD Secretary Jack Kemp, Our Communities, Our Homes: Pathways to Housing and Homeownership in America’s Cities and States, is a guide for local leaders in designing comprehensive housing policies.

Cisneros served as a member of the Debt Reduction Task Force at the Bipartisan Policy Center.