Maryann Crush

Vocation

Lifestyle

Traits

Family

American real estate developer, buying her first house at age 21 and continuing to buy property all over her neighborhood until, by 2000, she runs the largest real estate firm in South Boston. Crush was 10 when her dad walked out on the family, leaving her mom with three kids and without money or hope. Crush was impacted with the insecurity of a rental apartment and the fear of eviction, so traumatically that her immediate and steady goal was to buy a house. She and her husband, Boston attorney Brian Crush, live in the desirable, tree-lined eastern end of Broadway in South Boston. They have two kids, ages four and seven, whom they adopted from a cousin with severe addiction problems. Financially secure, she wants to give back to the community the stability that she now has. In 1998 Crush agreed to become the unpaid leader of the South Boston Betterment Trust, a group formed by political friends to build affordable housing for residents priced out of South Boston's hot real estate market, one of the highest in the nation. Her philanthropy has instead been greeted with distrust from residents who claim that she is not working on their behalf but profiting from the displacement of longtime residents and the conversion of rentals to high-priced condos. Crush defends her commitment to affordable housing but does not apologize for making money out of sales in an area where the median price of a home has doubled in the last five years. She has quietly been a behind-the-scenes player in local politics for some time as a fundraiser and city planner. A workaholic, she puts everything she has into a single-minded approach to a goal, and she claims that the goal for the past year and a half has been betterment of her community in the area she knows best; real estate. Maryann started work at 11 as a baby-sitter employing a sister and a cousin. She worked her way through college with two jobs, saving enough to buy a run-down Victorian house on K Street. Within a few years, she had begun buying boarded up abandoned tenements which she repaired and rented. She made time to care for her sick grandmother and in 1984, start her business, MCM Properties. As well as her business turn-over, she personally owns 14 condominiums and seven houses. Her interest in not in politics per se, but in issues, causes and she is in this way, very civic minded. Crush has not only strong enemies but devoted friends in high places.