John D. Lusk, Pioneering Developer in Southern California, Dies at 91

Pioneer developer John D. Lusk, who in 1946 left a job at a Los Angeles bank and went on to build a $500-million real estate empire, died Sunday at his home in Laguna Beach. He was 91.

Lusk leaves as a legacy the development of much of post-World War II Southern California. His company, originally John D. Lusk & Son, now Lusk Co., built more than 40,000 homes and scores of shopping centers, office buildings and industrial parks.

He used his vast fortune to support a host of charities and educational programs, including the prestigious Lusk Center for Real Estate Development at USC, which began in 1988 with a $4-million grant from the builder.

“He was a real entrepreneur, and a real gentleman,” said Alfred Gobar, a Placentia real estate consultant who knew and worked with Lusk for more than 20 years. “He was a major influence in the building industry.”

Lusk told contemporaries that his parents--his father was a Methodist minister, his mother a schoolteacher and scriptwriter--imbued in him a sensitivity to the plight of the underprivileged and a desire to promote prosperity in the community.

To that end, he supported as many small, low-key efforts as major charities, giving time and money to local YMCAs as well as the City of Hope.

He was a founder of Nuestros Pequenos Hermanos, an orphanage in Cuernavaca, Mexico; a trustee of Mead Housing Trust, a nonprofit development organization for low-income housing; and a founding trustee of Whittier Presbyterian Community Hospital.

Lusk, who dropped out of USC in 1925 at the end of his freshman year to pursue a banking career, also valued education. In addition to his work with the Lusk Center, he was a life trustee of Claremont College. He also endowed the Lusk Chair in Planning and Development at USC’s school of urban and regional planning.

His 50-plus years in the building industry began after a 21-year career in banking. Lusk parlayed his bookkeeper’s job at then-Security Pacific Bank in Los Angeles into a series of increasingly important assignments that culminated with the vice presidency of the bank’s Beverly Hills office.

There, his principal clients were the builders and developers who were turning the arid Southern California hills into one of the nation’s premier patches of urban real estate.

As Lusk himself told the story, he moved to the other side of the desk in 1946, when his boss--deaf to his arguments that the region’s housing market was about to explode with demand from GIs returning home from battlefields in the Pacific--decided to stop making real estate loans.

He resigned and started a custom home-building company and soon was spearheading a team of craftsmen who were hammering together estates in Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Bel-Air and other tony enclaves in west Los Angeles.

Joined by his son William--now vice chairman of Irvine-based Lusk Co.--Lusk turned his efforts to more affordable tract housing, first in Westchester then moving south with the populace, and sometimes ahead of it, into Whittier, Hacienda Heights and La Habra.

He is survived by his wife, Nancy; sons, William and Robert; daughter, Kristen; and seven grandchildren. Memorial services will take place at 9:30 a.m. Friday in the Church of the Recessional at Forest Lawn in Glendale. The family requests that in lieu of flowers, donations be made in Lusk’s name to Friends of the Orphans, P.O. Box 25507, Tempe, AZ 85285.