Peter Monroe
Peter Monroe was born in Detroit in 1943, at the height of World War II. In his lifetime, he has seen the creation of the TV, the computer, cable transmission of information and the emergence of Google, the search engine, which has revolutionized the availability of information in the world.
Peter’s mother, Virginia, was the daughter of Dr. Herbert Hills, owner of the first Buick ever built and the # two executive of Packard Motor Car Company in its heyday. Peter’s dad, born in Calgary Alberta, was a rough hewn man who was recruited by the New York Rangers, worked his way through two degrees at Columbia, was a star J. Walter Thompson executive, who moved to Detroit in 1943 to marry Virginia.
Peter was the #1 student in his high School in Grosse Pointe Michigan, and also the Michigan Junior tennis champion. He graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts in 1965, from Exeter College, Oxford University in 1967 where he received Oxford’s highest academic honor –a first class honors degree—as well as receiving Oxford’s highest athletic award—a tennis “blue” for playing against Cambridge, and from Harvard Law School in 1970.
Recruited by one of the top Wall Street Law firms, Monroe instead chose to join George Romney at HUD in 1970, as he wished to make affordable housing a reality for millions of Americans. After a short stint in the White House, Monroe went to Florida to work for the chairman of U.S. Home Corporation—at that time the nation’s largest homebuilder. Monroe then accompanied the founder of US Home into the development of shopping centers, and successfully pursued that career until 1989, when the real estate market showed signs, after the 1986 Tax Reform Act, of collapsing.
In 1989, Monroe was tapped by Jack Kemp to be the chief operating officer of the FHA, where he contributed to Jack Kemp’s reform program. Gwen Iffel of the Washington Post wrote an article describing Monroe’s successful stand against a Treasury raid by a Texas developer seeking excessive subsidies. He also convinced Jack Kemp , in the face of opposition by the Mortgage Bankers Association to terminate the ill-conceived co-insurance mortgage program, created by the Reagan Administration and which the US Treasury losses in excess of $4 billion on only $14 billion of mortgages created.
After his success at the FHA, the Treasury Secretary recruited Monroe to become the 4th (in a little over one year) president of the RTC Oversight Board, charged with closing 2,000 savings and loans, putting 2,000 corrupt S&L executives in jail, disposing of over $400 billion in assets held by the financial institutions, and repaying millions of depositors who had put their faith in the “Full Faith and Credit” of the United States Government. Monroe would like to be remembered by three achievements: 1) the invention of the securitization of commercial mortgages (which led to the commercial conduit market) and 2) sufficient success of the RTC that it could actually dissolve shortly after Monroe left in 1993; and 3) a sufficiently bipartisan and effective tenure that he was asked by the Clinton administration to see the job through.
Monroe returned to the development and disposition of real estate from 1993 to the present with a brief interlude for two years (2000-2002) as the executive director of the Urban Land Institute Foundation—back in Washington, as well as a 3 month interlude in 2006 to
Currently, Monroe serves as the President and CEO of a venture capital firm whose first mission combines his interest in affordable housing with his business success—as he tackles the exploding problems in the inner cities of vacant REO housing and the prevention of further growth in such problem by restructuring mortgages in foreclosure to keep homeowners in their homes.
Monroe manages to keep writing articles on issues ranging from Federal Casualty Insurance to capital gain tax treatment for “carried interests” in venture and real estate capital firms to the importance of preserving the separation of church and state as a constitutionally-based principle.
Peter lives in Tampa Bay with his high school sweetheart, Renee, (whom he married in 2004!) and his two sons, Pierce and Taylor.