Henry Cisneros
Founder & Chairman | CityView
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Henry Cisneros lives in his grandparents’ original house in San Antonio. In fact, he often works in his study, located in his grandfather’s former bedroom. He lives there, not for financial reasons, but because it serves as a reminder of his mentors and more importantly because he cares about the community his family has been a part of for generations.
“My neighborhood is 95 percent Hispanic; I interface daily with recent arrivals,” he says. “I see many of my interactions at the highest levels of American society through the prism of the Latino people with whom I live.”
Cisneros reflects on his mentors when looking at his career. They include his grandfather, who emigrated from Mexico in 1926 to become an integral part of San Antonio’s community; his father, who served in World War II and was involved in early Latino civil rights efforts; and Congressman Henry
B. González. But he was truly inspired to pursue public service in 1968—a watershed moment in US history that saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King
Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, Vietnam War protests, and the civil rights movement.
“It occurred to me that our country needed some serious work, and I made the decision to do my part,” he says. “All of my studies shifted to the area where I thought I could make a difference: cities—the problems of the nation’s urban areas, and the people who live in them.”
Throughout his career, improving cities has been central to his career, from his time as the mayor of San Antonio through his time as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and into his career in the private sector.
Now with CityView, he is continuing his mission to improve urban centers, this time by building new residential projects and raising capital for other projects through Siebert Cisneros Shank.
“The work that I do today is a continuation of what I tried to do as mayor and at HUD in terms of opportunities for people to live better in decent homes and through infrastructure projects that advance the city at large,” he says.
Reading List
In his personal time, Henry Cisneros has a few priorities. He enjoys listening to classical music, he hates missing his grandchildren’s athletic events, and he tries to work out daily.
“It doesn’t come quite to every day, but I usually get in twenty-six days each month,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be a long workout, but some weight lifting or some running or walking every day. That, I find, brings me great peace and relaxation.”
However, outside of the challenge of exercising nearly every day, he has embarked on a new ambitious endeavor: to read all one hundred books on the New York Times list of the best books of the twentieth century.
One of his favorites so far is Wallace Stegner’s novel Crossing to Safety.
“It is a book about normal daily life, but it helped me understand how our society has evolved by understanding how people think and how various times in American history impacted have people and their thoughts.”
His daughter, Teresa, gave him the book for Christmas. She majored in English at Yale University, and Cisneros says he takes his reading cues from her.
