Remembering Bob Santucci
Sad news: We’ve learned that our good friend and colleague, Robert Santucci, has passed away at 73.
Bob Santucci had over 45 years of experience in housing program design and development, sustainable building, value engineering, and renovation. He operated large-scale and innovative affordable housing programs offering new construction, scattered-site rehabilitation, and multifamily rentals. He authored and delivered 28 post-graduate training programs for real estate developers and was widely published in both technical publications and mainstream media sources, such as “Readers Digest” and “Money” magazine. Over the course of his career, he provided more than 500 onsite technical assistance consultations to states, cities, and nonprofit developers, including devising a system to provide work writeups and estimates for 112,000 homeowners post-Hurricane Katrina.
Bob was respected for his guidance in healthy homes techniques, cost-effective mitigation of lead hazards, scattered-site rehabilitation, and business planning.
On a more personal note, as one of its key advisors on enabling lead hazard control methods to conform to construction methods and practices, Bob Santucci was a central figure in the early years of the National Center for Health Housing (then known as the National Center for Lead Safe Housing). He helped some of the first HUD lead hazard control grantees to write specifications that enabled contractors to bid on and successfully complete housing improvements that protected children. He also played significant roles in NCHH’s evaluation of the HUD lead hazard control grant program, which remains the nation’s largest study in this field. Bob also had a wonderful sense of humor, and some of the first videos of how to perform lead dust, paint, and soil sampling were done in his home. Perhaps most important, he showed how complicated jobs and processes could be done in a practical down-to-earth way that made sense and protected the health of children.
Most recently, Bob continued to work with our organization, serving for many years on the board of directors for Healthy Housing Solutions, NCHH’s for-profit subsidiary.
NCHH and Healthy Housing Solutions thank Bob Santucci for his friendship, candor, humor, his service to our organization, and most importantly, his longtime dedication to this important cause. Our thoughts and condolences are with his family during this difficult time.
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