Albert Snyder, who died at age 88 on Sunday in Lakewood, built residential buildings throughout Denver, starting with a unit of apartments in Five Points.
The son of Eastern European immigrants, he grew up in Denver. After completing his military service, Snyder and his brother, Bill, bought the Welton Department Store at 2643 Welton St. in 1944.
Snyder’s mostly African- American customers told him that their pleas for affordable, appealing and usable housing fell on deaf ears when they approached the city. Lenders shunned Five Points as a bad investment. So Snyder decided to build a small apartment development there in 1949. White colleagues told him he was crazy, he said in a 1986 Denver Post interview.
“‘Five Points?’ they said. ‘Why do you want to build in Five Points?”‘ he recounted then. “I found that it was a ready market, that you could do well in it.”
He rented each 900-square- foot, one-bedroom unit for just under $68 a month, calling them “modern apartments” that “replaced rats’ nests.” Many of his tenants had private bathrooms and kitchens for the first time in their lives, said his daughter, Marleene Earnest of Lakewood.
With partner McKinley Harris, Snyder founded the Public Realty Co. in 1951. At the time, it was one of Denver’s few racially integrated firms. Snyder handled land acquisition and contracting arrangements, while Harris supervised management.
For the next 37 years, Snyder, Harris and architect Leo Rosenthal put up dozens of small two-story apartment buildings, each distinguished by a brick exterior, an overhanging hipped roof and a steel balcony with its own entrance.
Public Realty Co. built about 80 apartment buildings throughout struggling but promising neighborhoods. Many were near busy Denver intersections and hospitals, including Swedish Medical Center and what was then known as Denver General Hospital.
In 1967, Snyder sold Public Realty Co. to Harris. He established Almar, a real-estate company named for himself and his daughters, Marleene and Margo.
Local brokers and other developers knew Snyder as a builder with an exceptional intuition for ferreting out sites on the brink of profitability, Harris said. Financially strapped tenants knew him as a landlord willing to cut some slack on late rent payments.
With Almar, Snyder focused on commercial real estate. His specialty was triple-net lease- backs – buying a piece of commercial real estate from companies such as Circle K and 7-Eleven and leasing the property back to its former owner, whose money became freed for other investments.
Snyder lived frugally and donated property to charitable causes. Apart from long weekends in Las Vegas, where a Boys and Girls Club facility was named in his honor, he rarely took vacations.
In addition to his daughters, survivors include his sister Cecilia Stogner of Englewood; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. His wife, Aleene Hill Snyder, died in May.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-820-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
