Mark Vengroff keeps his father close.

Not as a framed portrait on a desk. Harvey Vengroff is present instead as inspiration: in boxing gloves hanging year-round where you’d see mistletoe during the holidays, in framed letters screwed into drywall and in the steady labor of keeping thousands of people housed in a region that has made it increasingly hard to be poor.

Mark is 61 now, and has spent decades negotiating, persuading and choosing his words carefully. In his world, words move things like permits, parcels and funding—and change lives. He runs One Stop Housing, the affordable-housing company his father founded 20 years ago. It’s the kind of work that never really ends in a town where wealth too often dictates residential development and where thousands don’t live a glossy postcard-picture life.

Mark didn’t grow up dreaming of this work. He grew up inside it.

Before One Stop Housing existed, before Harvey became known as Sarasota-Manatee’s most stubborn and prolific converter of decaying motels into truly affordable apartments, he was something else: a debt-collection pioneer who founded a global commercial receivables empire largely by refusing to behave like a conventional executive.

Vengroff Williams & Associates, a debt-collection and outsourcing firm, grew into one of the largest of its kind in the world. It managed roughly $23 billion in receivables and had estimated annual revenues of $37.7 million. As of 2013, Harvey held a $75 million property portfolio.

The contradiction never bothered him. “You make money, and you do good,” he liked to say.

Harvey wore shorts to court hearings. He ran meetings from restaurant booths. At his properties, he cut the grass himself to figure out who was dealing drugs in the neighborhood and weeded them out. He showed up to collect rent with two large dogs, Max and Duke, who, Mark says, “looked like lions,” though they were gentle.

He watched his father argue with city officials, storm out of meetings and return months later with a new plan. He also watched Harvey stop a meeting cold when he found out that Mary Jo, a receptionist who worked the front desk of Vengroff Williams & Associates’ Sarasota office, had been let go. She had two kids, and Harvey greeted her every morning. He wanted to know why Mary Jo, one of his roughly 1,100 employees, was fired.

“You don’t get it,” he told his son. The lesson would land later.

Mark talks about his father in a way that resists romanticizing. Harvey could be infuriating. He could be dismissive of systems, processes and other people’s patience.

“He was a fighter,” Mark says. “I’m a lover.”

But they both share a core belief: People deserve a chance to stabilize their lives. Not a rescue fantasy— just a chance. That belief plays out in small moments. Mark recalls a woman who once arrived at one of the properties after fleeing an abusive marriage in Texas. She had been living in her car. Her credit was bad. She had been turned down repeatedly as she sought a place to live. She later told the property manager that if she were denied again, she planned to jump off a bridge.

Instead, she was handed keys. “Welcome to your apartment,” the manager said. The woman collapsed onto the floor, sobbing. Months later, she told him, “You saved my life.”

Another tenant, working at McDonald’s, once paid her rent and broke into what she called her “happy dance” in the leasing office. “I paid my rent,” she said, “and I have money left over to stock my food shelves. I might even treat myself to a nice dinner.”

Those moments stay with Mark.

“The only requirement we really have is that the person has a job,” he says. “If they’re working, we’ll keep the rent where they can afford it.

“That’s what this is supposed to do,” he continues. “Give people a chance to land. The first thing that changes is that people can breathe again. When housing is stable, everything else in life starts to fall in place.”

On average, before the pandemic, tenants stayed roughly 18 months to two years, long enough to settle, save and move on. Today, with housing costs higher across the region, stays are often three to four years. Even so, one to four families each month leave One Stop properties because they've saved enough to buy a home. Former tenants now work for the company. Others send their children to work there, too.

When people ask Mark what he does, he doesn’t say he’s a developer. He describes the job differently. “My job is to inspire and bring the best out of the group of people I get to interact with,” he says. Part of that outlook comes from growing up in the shadow of a larger-than-life founder. “I always felt like I had something to prove,” he says. “People would say, ‘Oh, your father started the business.’ I wanted to show I could build something myself.”

Mark didn’t begin in housing. He spent nearly three decades rising to CEO of Vengroff Williams & Associates on Long Island, later leading WestStar Group, a medical provider and claims financing company, and Walker Advertising in Los Angeles. He relocated to Sarasota in April 2018, but he could have remained in California—or just retired.

“I was having the time of my life,” he says of living in Los Angeles. Instead, he chose to carry forward his father’s housing mission. “I thought I’d do the collections business for the rest of my life,” he says. “Housing wasn’t the plan.”

From One Stop Housing’s headquarters inside its University Row apartments near Sarasota Bradenton International Airport, the company now operates more than 4,000 affordable rental units across multiple states with additional developments in the pipeline. The organization has also expanded to include One Stop Housing Development & Construction (OSHDC), bringing roofing, plumbing, electrical work and general contracting services in-house to control costs in a town where builders routinely charge $350 a square foot.

“We run it like an assembly line,” Mark says. “One crew finishes site work and moves to the next project. Another pours foundations. Another follows behind with framing. It keeps everyone working and keeps costs down.”

Inside the office, reminders of the company’s origins are everywhere. In one frame, there’s an email Harvey sent at 3:24 a.m. on Aug. 3, 2018, defending the finances of another housing project, Robin’s Apartments, to a skeptical investor. He ticks through the group’s credentials: three real estate professionals, three money managers, two attorneys, two accountants, then notes that he personally loaned nearly $3 million to complete the project and guaranteed $8.4 million in debt.

Then he adds a line that reads less like corporate correspondence than something closer to Harvey’s natural register: “The above is not meant to be a ‘F…Y…’, but it’s close.”

Harvey was a sailor who taught himself navigation by pointing a boat toward fear. Mark says his father was afraid of deep water, but Harvey waded in, anyway.

Sailing is what first brought him to Sarasota. In 1990, after vacationing on these waters, Harvey returned to his previous home on Long Island and answered an advertisement placed in a local newspaper by the economic development arm of the Greater Sarasota Chamber of Commerce. Then-mayor Kerry Kirschner even flew north to recruit him. Harvey, already running a rapidly growing commercial collections business, told them they didn’t need to sell him on the city. His boat was already docked on Longboat Key. If they could find him office space near the marina, he would move.

They did.

At first, he used his sailboat as an office for a year. Then Harvey bought the vacant Brenton Reef restaurant on North Tamiami Trail for $1 million, arriving in shorts and boat shoes, and converted the old dining room into a Vengroff Williams office. He kept one of the booths as his desk long after the company expanded to larger quarters on Fruitville Road. From there, over the next two decades, he assembled a real estate portfolio that would grow to tens of millions of dollars in workforce apartments and commercial holdings—much of it along corridors other investors ignored. While he’d been managing properties for decades, he officially formed One Stop Housing in 2007.

Along the way, Harvey became known as a businessman who believed bureaucracy wasn’t merely inefficient but morally suspect when it delayed help to people who needed it. He could be ferociously generous and ferociously difficult in the same afternoon.

Mark is one of five siblings, but he was the one who ultimately stepped into the housing work. Harvey asked him to come to Sarasota for what Mark assumed would be a brief visit. “Just give me two days,” Harvey told him. Mark flew in with his wife, Lisa, climbed into his father’s pickup truck, walked his father’s properties, met the managers and talked with tenants.

“By the end of the two days,” Mark says, “I fell in love with the people here.”

Harvey’s second act in affordable housing, the one that now defines his local legacy, began as a practical response to something he couldn’t ignore. His employees couldn’t afford to live near their jobs. Many couldn’t afford to live decently at all. All the while, Sarasota was booming. Condos were rising. Wealth was arriving in visible, vertical forms. But the people cleaning homes and hotel rooms, staffing restaurants, working retail, driving delivery routes, caring for elders, teaching and protecting the public were being pushed farther and farther out.

Harvey noticed. He began buying old motels. They weren’t pretty. Most people saw them as problems: drug-riddled, half-vacant, stigmatized, often along corridors many avoided. He converted the motels into small studio and one-bedroom apartments with kitchenettes. Nothing fancy. But they were clean, functional and safe. The rents were low by design and the model was unsubsidized. The margins were tight.

One early conversion began almost accidentally. He purchased a struggling hotel, intending to hold it for a school that wanted the land. While waiting, he realized many of the people drifting through were working but homeless.

He asked one dishwasher how much rent he could afford. “Three hundred bucks,” the man said. Harvey handed him keys to a room with a hot plate and a small refrigerator. The building filled up.

This became One Stop Housing.

By the time Harvey died in October 2018, the company had brought roughly 1,800 affordable apartments to the Sarasota- Bradenton region. Today, under Mark’s leadership, that number has more than doubled, with thousands of units in operation or various stages of development.

Mark continued One Stop Housing not because it was easy, but because, in his words, “someone has to.” The need didn’t evaporate after his father’s death. Walking away would have meant abandoning thousands of tenants who already lived in Harvey’s buildings and thousands more who might one day need the next ones.

Mark has described the company’s focus as serving the “missing middle,” households earning roughly 60 percent to 80 percent of the area median income, or AMI. What that means, in practice, is more revealing than it sounds. According to the 2025 Florida Housing Finance Corporation limits for the North Port-Bradenton-Sarasota metropolitan area, 80 percent of the Area Median Income for a single person is $60,300 a year. For a household of four, it’s $86,100. At 60 percent AMI, a single person earns $45,240.

Housing is considered affordable if it costs no more than 30 percent of gross income and often relies on government subsidies. A single person living at 80 percent AMI can afford about $1,508 a month in rent. At 60 percent AMI, it’s about $1,131. A household of four at 80 percent AMI can afford roughly $2,153.

Mark doesn't concern himself with strict definitions of affordable housing. He simply wants to supply housing that working people can afford. “Workforce housing is the hardest space to operate in,” Mark says. “There’s more money in affordable housing and more money in market-rate housing. Workforce [housing] sits in the middle. The margins aren’t great, but the need is enormous.”

Now place those figures next to prevailing rents. Many new apartments in Sarasota and parts of Manatee County lease at well above $2,000 per month, often closer to $2,200 or $2,400 for a two-bedroom unit. Even one-bedroom units routinely exceed $1,700, especially if they’re centrally located. Those rents align more closely with households earning 110 percent or 120 percent of AMI.

A teacher earning $58,000, a sheriff’s deputy earning $62,000, or a nurse’s assistant making $55,000 earns too much to qualify for deeply subsidized housing—but not enough to comfortably absorb market rents.

And that’s where much of the region’s workforce lives: employed, often full time, frequently with benefits and still one medical bill, car repair or insurance spike away from instability. In Sarasota County, more than 47,000 households spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Nearly 25,500 households spend more than half.

United Way’s ALICE framework sharpens the picture. ALICE—which stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed—refers to households earning above the federal poverty level but below what it actually costs to live locally. In its most recent report, the survival budget for a family of four with two young children reached $104,424 in Sarasota County and $95,004 in Manatee County. That budget covers only essentials: housing, child care, food, transportation, health care and basic technology. It doesn’t include things like savings or long-term security.

The median household income is $77,705 in Sarasota County and $79,524 in Manatee County. Both figures fall tens of thousands of dollars below the ALICE survival threshold for a family of four. In fact, 43 percent of Sarasota County households and 42 percent of Manatee County households live below that threshold—either in poverty or working but struggling.

The city has responded with incentives to increase attainable housing, which differs from traditional affordable housing in that it targets moderate-income workers who earn too much to qualify for subsidized units but still struggle to afford market rents. Much of Mark Vengroff’s work operates in this same middle band of the housing market.

The City of Sarasota’s Downtown Attainable Housing Density Bonus Program allows developers four times more density if they include housing priced for moderate-income residents. At least 15 percent of the additional units created through the density bonus must be designated attainable and must remain so for households earning up to 120 percent of the area median income for a minimum of 30 years. Those units must also be split across income tiers: at least one-third must serve households earning 80 percent of AMI or less; no more than one-third may serve households earning between 100 and 120 percent of AMI; and the remainder generally fall between 80 and 100 percent of AMI. When you do the math, it doesn’t amount to many units.

Vengroff's projects are made up of workforce units only, in many cases, indefinitely.

Sarasota County added complementary tools, including surplus land dispositions for affordable housing, impact fee reductions for smaller units and expedited permitting for developments serving households at 100 percent AMI or below. Earlier this year, Sarasota County approved nearly $30 million in federal disaster-recovery funding for several affordable housing projects, including one tied to One Stop Housing, through its Resilient SRQ program.

At the state level, Florida’s Live Local Act allows qualifying attainable housing developments to bypass certain local zoning constraints if they meet steeper affordability requirements.

Harvey’s original model was different. He didn’t wait for allocation cycles. He bought distressed assets, renovated them efficiently and set rents deliberately below market, absorbing any risk directly. The margins were narrow. The game was a long one.

Mark operates in a more complicated environment, and some newer projects incorporate public incentives. But the company’s DNA remains less subsidy-dependent than many of its peers. Without deep tax-credit cushions, projects must survive insurance volatility, labor shortages, interest-rate fluctuations and material cost spikes largely on their own economics.

If Harvey treated bureaucracy as something to bulldoze, Mark treats it as terrain to navigate. Harvey stormed out of meetings. Mark stays in the chair.

Near the end of a hallway hangs a large red poster board covered in handwritten messages to Harvey.

“Paying it forward.”

“We all miss you.”

“People are still depending on you.”

That last sentence could be said of Mark as well.

But Mark’s inheritance isn’t in those framed letters or the boxing gloves. It’s the insistence that housing isn’t abstract policy but lived math, what people can afford after they pay their bills. In a region where wealth often rises faster than wages, someone still has to keep building.