A Sense of Place

His parents once lived and worked in public housing, and he was the first member of his family to own a home.

Those facts might not stand out in the extraordinary family odyssey that Julián Castro, '96, vividly traced as the first Latino to give a Democratic National Convention keynote address in 2012: the "unlikely journey" that began with his orphaned grandmother's desperate crossing from Mexico into Texas at age 7; continued through his hardscrabble upbringing by a Chicano activist and single mother on San Antonio's West Side barrio; then led to Stanford University, Harvard Law School and elected office by age 26.

It was a path shared each step by Castro's identical twin, then a Texas state representative and now congressman Joaquín Castro, '96, who introduced his brother that night at the convention in Charlotte, N.C.

But ever since Julián Castro, 40, joined President Obama's cabinet last July as secretary of Housing and Urban Development, his memories and ideas of home have become not merely plot points of a compelling political biography, but a window on how Castro might lead the federal department most engaged in helping poor and working-class Americans find—and own—homes of their own.

It is a task for which Castro's humble roots and political ambitions seem intriguingly suited. Supporters in Texas have long hoped that at least one of the telegenic and youthful Castro brothers might someday end Republicans' dominance of statewide office in Texas, and in Washington, the power and poignancy of their personal experiences is now reaching a broader audience. In particular, Julián Castro's HUD appointment has vaulted him onto many media short lists of potential running mates for likely 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, especially as the growing Latino vote has encouraged two candidates of Cuban heritage, senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), to enter the Republican presidential field.

Julián Castro, who focused on economic development and education as mayor of San Antonio, has rebranded HUD the "Department of Opportunity" as it marks its 50th anniversary this summer. During a year in which tensions in America's cities have boiled over from Ferguson, Mo., to Baltimore, Castro has quietly linked his family story to the Obama administration's broader efforts to strengthen the economy, and reduce poverty, inequality and racial division.

"We see housing as a platform for opportunity in people's lives. If you don't have a place to call home . . . then you can't build on anything," Castro told a forum hosted by the Texas Tribune in his home state in May. "It's not just about better housing, or better education, better transportation or better jobs. It's about all of those things."

"What I saw told me that people living in public housing have the same dreams and the same potential as everyone else that we were going to school with." 

He says he is committed at HUD to building for others what his brother has called an "infrastructure of opportunity," just as they enjoyed.

"I feel very blessed to have had great opportunities in my life," Castro adds, in an interview from his Washington home, where he was tending his infant son. He explains that he benefited from a national commitment to affirmative action, Pell Grants, student loans and summer jobs programs.

He attended middle school next to one of San Antonio's largest public housing projects. "What I saw told me that people living in public housing have the same dreams and the same potential as everyone else that we were going to school with," Castro says. "And just because somebody is living in public housing or assisted housing does not mean they are not ready to work, or that they do not want to rise in life. I am convinced that our nation is at its greatest when it expects hard work, but it matches that hard work with great opportunity."

Picking up a mantra of his mentor, former San Antonio mayor and HUD secretary Henry G. Cisneros, Castro has revived calls to expand access to credit for middle-income Americans to buy homes—a taboo subject since the 2008 financial crisis and housing bust.

"It's time to remove the stigma associated with promoting home ownership," Castro says. If getting a loan was too easy a few years ago, today it is too hard, he asserts: "The pendulum has swung too far."

For his part, Joaquín Castro recalls how when Annie Leibovitz photographed the Castros in 2013 for Vogue, the family chose as the setting the kitchen table of one of the rental homes they lived in as children. He remembers those first homes as "small, kind of cramped, but [having] a feeling there was nothing to lose, and just a lot of love and a lot of hope."

"We were in our own little world, my brother, me, Mom and our grandmother," Joaquín Castro said from his Capitol Hill office recently. "We were . . . shuttling through the larger world, in our own bubble. That felt pretty comfortable."

There is a fairy-tale quality to how the Castro brothers describe their early life, captured memorably in a lengthy profile this year in Washington's influential National Journal magazine. Their grandmother, Victoria, made the crossing in 1922 from Coahuila, Mexico, to live with relatives in Texas. Despite receiving no formal schooling past the third grade, she taught herself to read and write in two languages and earned $8 a day as a maid, cook and babysitter.

The twins were born on Mexican Independence Day, and after age 8 were raised by their mother, Rosie, after their father, Jesse Guzman, a math teacher and an activist, moved out.

It was a modest upbringing. The family moved often and, at times, had no car.

The twins remember a carefree summer when they were 9, riding a bus by themselves to a theater downtown to see The Karate Kid five times. After school, their grandmother, with whom they often shared a bedroom, would give them a few dollars to buy her a soda and a bag of Fritos.

"I can't say we ate the most healthy growing up, but it sure was fun," Joaquín says, chuckling.

Their mother was a community organizer during the 1960s and '70s and remained active in San Antonio politics with La Raza Unida, a Chicano third party. (Hanging in Julián's D.C. office is a poster from his mother's unsuccessful 1971 city council campaign with the slogan "Government for the People.")

She drove the boys to excel, taking them "forever with me on the campaign trail," she says, sending them to libraries and sports practice, heading the parent-teacher association and pushing them to get the best education wherever they lived.

ON THE JOB: Castro, far right, visited refurbished area in Union Beach, N.J., on the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy, along with New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, ’91, MA ’92, far left. (Photo: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development)

"I think those values, your ability to make an impact on problems, made a big difference in how they see life," says Rosie Castro, 68, who retired recently as an administrator at Palo Alto College, a community college in San Antonio whose student body is predominantly Latino. "I always tried to show them, there's problems, but there's a way to overcome those problems. And they've always been able to do that."

When he was about 11, recalls Joaquín, two neighborhood friends asked how much his mother earned: about $21,000 a year. "The guy said, 'You're rich!' The girl said, 'Why do you live on the West Side?' " says Joaquín. "That was one of the first times it stuck in my mind . . . My mom never let us feel like we were going without things. She never let us feel like we didn't have much."

Admitted into the Class of 1996, the boys flew to Stanford, each carrying Southwest Airlines' three-bag limit. It would be the first time they lived away from their family.

Julián Castro says it was Stanford that opened his eyes to a new world that was more diverse, better educated, more innovative and wealthier. "That's what first interested me in coming back," Castro says. "I wanted to see how I could improve the prospects for San Antonio."

In their junior year, the brothers won election to the ASSU senate. (They each received an identical total of 811 votes to lead the field.) Among their ideas, the Stanford Daily reported, was to set up volunteer SAT preparation workshops in East Palo Alto. Julián took that idea with him years later when, as mayor of San Antonio, he established Café College, a resource center to provide free college test preparation and admission and financial aid advice to the city's high schoolers.

Likewise, Joaquín Castro launched a citywide literacy campaign that became SAReads, and the Trailblazers College Tour, which raises funds to help underprivileged high school students visit leading universities. He serves on the board of the College Advising Corps, a nonprofit organization that places recent graduates as college entrance counselors in at-risk high schools.

After graduation, Julián interned at the White House and earned a law degree from Harvard. Then it was back to San Antonio, where in 2001, at age 26, he became the youngest person ever elected to the city council. He ran for mayor and lost in 2005, but he was elected in 2009.

James Montoya, '75, MA '78, who admitted the Castros in his first class as dean of undergraduate admission, credits the brothers for sharing "a deep understanding of the power of education to change lives and to change the world."

Montoya, who was part of Stanford's second large entering class of Latino freshmen in 1971, is now vice president at The College Board, where the Castros still speak with him about how to help first-generation college students succeed.

"That comes from their own experience of understanding how education—including their Stanford education—has helped to propel them into the national limelight," Montoya says.

Julián Castro took over at HUD from Shaun Donovan, a well-known New York City housing expert who is now Obama's budget director. Castro admits it "took a couple of months" to adjust to the pace and complexity of HUD, which has 8,000 employees and a $46 billion budget, compared with San Antonio, which is largely run by a professional manager and where the mayor has fewer than 10 staffers.

Observers have lowered their expectations, noting the second half of presidents' second terms rarely lead to big new initiatives, especially when an opposing party controls Congress. Moreover, HUD faces an uphill battle against budget cuts. Overall, roughly three-fourths of HUD's money goes to rent subsidies for individuals and projects, and to shoring up the nation's crumbling supply of public housing.

Nevertheless, Castro barnstormed through 25 states and 40 cities in his first nine months, handing out federal dollars, cheering on policy experiments, and meeting mayors, senators and governors.

Two of Castro's major goals are to implement a new National Affordable Housing Trust Fund to pay for rental housing for the very poor, and to finalize the most sweeping changes in decades to the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The latter rule would require for the first time that federal grant recipients not only not discriminate, but also take affirmative, measurable steps to reduce racially and ethnically concentrated pockets of poverty by connecting residents through affordable housing to schools, libraries, parks, transportation, and job and training opportunities.

Castro has championed the idea that housing can help break the cycle of poverty since his time as mayor, when San Antonio became the first of what are now 13 HUD Promise Zones across the country. The city launched an urban revival by building 2,700 downtown housing units using $39 million in tax and fee incentives, and drew in another $55 million in federal funding that included a $30 million HUD Choice Neighborhood Planning grant to, among other things, raze and redevelop a public housing project on the city's impoverished East Side. Graduation rates at the local high school have since climbed by more than 20 percent, and attendance at feeder schools is up, he says, a result of trying "to holistically improve neighborhoods" by coordinating agencies at all levels of government with private and nonprofit groups.

"Those are concrete results, that you know young people here are going to have more hope, they are on a better trajectory for success and they are more likely to be able to achieve the American dream," Castro told the Texas Tribune this spring. "What we saw in Baltimore and in Ferguson is a multilayered challenge that at the heart is about ensuring that people have opportunity to move up in life."

Researchers handed policymakers powerful evidence this May that geography plays a large role in the ability of poor children to escape poverty. A Harvard study found that upward mobility varies between cities and is related to how long children spend time in quality neighborhoods, measured by such factors as schools, access to jobs, amenities, and social and community norms.

One problem, Castro noted, is that there is also a strong correlation between places that have high wages and growth—such as the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, and Austin, Texas—and expensive housing.

"All of that has the implications of making it more difficult for people to rise into the middle class and to stay there," Castro says. Raising the minimum wage is a good starting point, but it will take more ideas to bridge the divide between rich and poor.

HOMAGE: Castro toured the childhood home of Martin Luther King Jr. in January. (Photo: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development)

Castro's rhetoric echoed that of Cisneros, who contends that while bad loans and risky market practices triggered the foreclosure crisis, the answer is not to de-emphasize home ownership as a path to the middle class.

Cisneros has known the Castro family for decades. "They have good values born and bred of experience in poor neighborhoods watching other people struggle to advance," says Cisneros, who attended kindergarten with Rosie Castro, and whose daughter, Mercedes Cisneros Badger, '97, studied Spanish with Julián at Stanford.

"I never fear that they will abandon people who need the most help in our country," Cisneros says.

Julián Castro plays down speculation about 2016, saying he is focused on HUD. He has postponed a planned memoir with publisher Little, Brown, until he leaves office, saying, "I wanted more time to put it in my own voice, craft it my own way."

He has kept his family's house in San Antonio, but home for now is a rental in Washington with his wife, Erica, and their two young children, Carina and Cristian. Joaquín lives across town, renting on Capitol Hill and commuting weekends to his home in San Antonio with his wife, Anna Flores, and their toddler daughter, Andrea Elena.

Asked where home will be in five or 10 years, Julián says, "very likely in San Antonio." He adds, "Anywhere Erica and the children are, I'm sure I'm going to feel very comfortable."

Spencer Hsu is a reporter for the Washington Post.