SANTA CRUZ — A noted philanthropist, engineer and affordable-housing developer whose support birthed UC Santa Cruz’s engineering school and uplifted causes in the Monterey Bay region and beyond, Jack Baskin died Sunday in his Carmel home. He was 100.
Throughout his career Baskin built thousands of low-income and senior homes across the wider Bay Area, including San Francisco’s first low-income housing center and the subsidized San Lorenzo Park Apartments in Santa Cruz.
As a philanthropist, Baskin made impactful contributions to higher education and helped found numerous regional nonprofits — among them, Community Foundation Santa Cruz County and the Live Oak Senior Center.
“Both in Jack’s profession and his philanthropy, he’s left an incredible impact and legacy,” said Susan True, CEO of the nonprofit Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County County, which Baskin co-founded. “To say he was a giant would be an understatement.”
The Peggy and Jack Baskin Foundation, founded with wife Peggy Baskin in 2007, continues to support gender equity, feminism and education with a focus on the South Bay and Monterey Peninsula.
Baskin contributed more than $10 million to the Santa Cruz campus over the course of several decades, according to a UCSC release — funding scholarships, endowed chairs, arts programs, the Institute of Marine Science and the Elena Baskin Visual Arts Center, named for his late wife.
When Baskin gave UCSC $5 million in 1997 to found the Jack Baskin School of Engineering, it was reportedly the largest gift the campus had ever received.
“Jack Baskin’s impact at UC Santa Cruz can be seen across the campus, from engineering to the arts and humanities,” said UCSC Chancellor Cynthia Larive in a prepared release. “His philanthropy has been strategic, multifaceted, and transformational to our campus, and his support included extensive contributions of his time and energy.”
His legacy can also be seen across Cabrillo College in Aptos, where Baskin supported engineering and women’s studies programs, a women’s educational success program, a childcare center and scholarships.
Cabrillo College President Matt Wetstein credited Baskin as “the model philanthropist, looking to improve the lives of people who are really going to benefit from it.”
The son of Russian immigrants, Baskin was born in upstate New York in 1919.
His family had modest means. Baskin’s father, Isador, was a watchmaker and his mother, Anna, had worked in factories as young as age 14 as a recent immigrant, according to Baskin’s daughter Marianna Mejia.
“He always had a strong sense of helping people, and he got it from both parents,” Mejia said.
Baskin was the first in his family to attend college, working to support his tuition and earning a degree in aeronautical engineering from New York University in 1940.
According to a family obituary, he worked with military aircraft in World War II before moving to Los Angeles with his first wife, Virginia, in 1945. From the West Coast, he began building houses and saw his career take off during the postwar boom.
Baskin soon found his calling in building homes for low-income and senior residents, and relocated to Santa Cruz in 1970 with his second wife, the late Elena Baran.
“Why did I switch from building for the affluent to the low and moderate income segment of society? Well, I thought there was a greater need for the latter and also it was something I wanted to do,” Baskin told this news organization in an interview in 1978.
In a later interview with this news organization — as the Baskin School of Engineering opened at UC Santa Cruz in 1997 — Baskin said growing up in a low-income immigrant family formed his desire to give back after he found success as a developer.
“What I’m doing in some sense is paying back the community, the university and the country for what they did for me,” Baskin said.
Baskin is survived by an extended family including his wife, Peggy Downes Baskin, and daughters Mejia and Elaine Baskin.
A memorial celebration is scheduled for 3 p.m. Feb. 22 at Cabrillo College’s Samper Recital Hall.
