Steve Hanleigh, now in his late seventies, has worked in California real estate for over fifty years. He lives in Monterey, California, home of Cannery Row (which John Steinbeck called “a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream”), the legendary 1967 music festival (where Janis Joplin gave her career-making performance), the historic Pebble Beach golf links, and unrivaled natural beauty.

Everything in Steve’s life—his son and granddaughters, his successful career, his home—came close to never existing. His father’s entire family line was almost wiped from the timeline of human history before Steve was even born, simply because they were Jews living in Austria when the Nazis came to power.

For Steve to exist at all, and to find himself in California, an improbable series of events had to take place—starting with his father meeting his mother in the middle of World War II.

STEVE:

My whole family on my father’s side are 100% Ashkenazi Jew. Our family name was Hahn. My grandfather owned a business in Austria making Belgian lace—a factory for some of the royal families of Europe. It started struggling after the Great Depression.

The family business was seized in 1938, during what was called the Anschluss. It’s when the German Nazi Regime entered Austria. No war was involved. Nothing had been declared or anything. The Nazis took my grandfather’s business over. I don’t know what happened to it.

My father was a salesman for his father in the family company, and one of his brothers was a salesman as well. My father’s territory was Western Europe, and my uncle Leopold was Eastern Europe.

When the Nazis came, the family decided to get out of Austria because they saw the handwriting on the wall. My uncle’s destination was Australia, but to get to Australia, the only way you could go was through China. So he and my grandparents went to Shanghai. My dad went to London because he had contacts there.

The other members of the family got taken care of in other ways by the Nazis.

Before the Nazis came to Austria, there were almost 200,000 Jews in the country. By 1942, only about 7,000 remained.

About a year after Steve’s father arrived in England, Germany invaded Poland. England and France declared war on Germany.

STEVE:

My father spoke four or five languages. So when the war broke out, he enlisted in the British Army, and because of his language abilities, he was assigned to a unit that would do prisoner interrogations.

The Army had Steve’s father—whose name was Walter—change his last name from Hahn to Hanleigh, so that in case he was captured by the enemy, he wouldn’t be so quickly identified as an Austrian Jew.

Paris fell to the Nazis on June 14, 1940. It was, U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson later said, “the most shocking single event” of the war. After the French government signed an armistice with Germany, thousands of men and women across France risked their lives to aid British and American troops.

Including Steve’s mother.

STEVE:

My mom was a peasant woman in northern France living where wars have been fought for centuries, in the flat area between Belgium and France. Great for cavalry and for tanks. She was in a little town called Rincq, in a three-bedroom, one-bath home. She was one of 12 children.

She spent the first three or four years of the war helping to feed downed pilots from the Battle of Britain and other missions. People in the town would hide the pilots and my mom would take food from the family farm, like eggs and potatoes, and give it to them.

I’m so proud of my parents. I wish they were still alive.

On June 6, 1944, Allied forces took the beaches of Normandy, the first step in the liberation of France. 

STEVE:

My dad came into the Normandy area about two weeks after the invasion, after the Allies had territory. He would interview captured Germans for information.

As the Allies pushed north up towards Belgium and Germany—this was late 1944—he meets my mother in this small town in northern France that had maybe 300 people. She’s about 20, probably 21 at the time, and he was about 32 or 33. They met and dated for a while.

But my dad has to keep on going because he’s got this job to do. He finally got to Berlin. He gets shipped back to England and discharged from the army. This is in mid-1945, after the war. So he goes back to France to try and find my mother. And he does.

PLF:

Did he just go back to that small town?

STEVE:

She was still there. He finds her and takes her back to London, and London is just totally ruined.

That’s where Steve was born: in the ruins of London after the war. The couple, with their new baby, made their way to Australia and met up with the other Hahns—who all ended up changing their last names to either Hanleigh or Hanley.

Steve spent his early childhood growing up in Australia. But when he was in elementary school, his father died.

STEVE:

My mom was devastated. But she was real strong country stock, self-willed and accountable. She opened a little store, became very successful, and then met this guy who was a vice president of Sears and Roebuck. They fell in love, got married, and the decision was made to move to United States, to Chicago, Illinois. And that’s how I got to this country. I was an eighth grader.

They were briefly living on an estate in Naperville, a well-heeled Chicago suburb. But Steve’s new stepfather was abusive.

STEVE:

My mother leaves. Packs me up one night, takes my dad’s ten thousand pounds of war separation money, hops in the car, and drives off, not telling her second husband where we were going.

She was an incredible woman.

We lived in a one-bedroom apartment for about three or four months, with sleeping bags and no refrigerator. We had a cooler. She got her license to practice as a beautician in Illinois and supported and mentored me. She was a pretty dynamic lady.

They stayed in Illinois for a couple years. During the summers, Steve started earning money.

STEVE:

We were broke. We had my father’s ten thousand pounds, but that was all we had to live on.

I started picking strawberries in local small farms. They would charge me 15 cents for a box. I had a little red wagon, and I’d fill it with strawberry boxes and knock on doors. I’d sell them for 40 cents a box. They were all sold. Then I’d bring the money home and my mom would let me keep most of it. But if she needed money, we had a little bit extra. That’s when money had value.

Another summer I got a job selling popsicles, peddling around a tricycle with a big box on it that you’d put dry ice in to keep everything frozen. Met all kinds of girls.

After Steve got through his first year of high school, his mother packed up the car again and they drove across the country to San Francisco, where old friends of Steve’s father from Austria were living.

After Steve got through his first year of high school, his mother packed up the car again and they drove across the country to San Francisco, where old friends of Steve’s father from Austria were living.

STEVE:

They put us up for six months while my mom got her California beautician’s license. Then my mom started a business, cutting hair.

Steve earned his degree in economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, married immediately after graduating, and went into real estate on the advice of his now-ex father-in-law. He helped his mom invest her money in real estate and securities.  

His mom had never gone to college. But she was “wily,” Steve says. By the time she died, she was worth around $3 million.

STEVE:

Yeah, my mother, she just had more common sense than anybody I think I’ve ever met. She was also a spectacularly good-looking woman. But she never got married again. She refused to.

When Steve started out as a real estate broker in the early seventies, he worked out of a red Volkswagen camper van and sold small houses in the San Jose area to young families, including veterans returning from the Vietnam War. He also sold to Vietnamese refugees, who created their own banks by pooling money from several families to afford first one downpayment, then another. Steve sold 10-12 houses to a group of Vietnamese families this way. They were hardworking and smart, he says; by working together, they were able to buy property in an area that was rapidly growing.

STEVE:

San Jose was beginning to boom. That’s the birthplace of the electronics business. Hewlett-Packard, Memorex, Intel, IBM—they were all hiring these young guys out of ‘Nam and college graduates.

When young buyers were ready to trade up to a bigger house, Steve would sometimes buy their starter house from them. He built up a franchise operation with 85 agents working for him, selling and buying homes. 

PLF:

Was it the tech industry that made you confident about investing in San Jose real estate?

STEVE:

I don’t think I had a specific reason why I should buy, other than they don’t make dirt anymore.

This country is about the only country on earth where you can buy, sell, lease, rent, build, remodel, do whatever you can with your property within reason and it’s constitutionally guaranteed. There’s no other place on earth where you can do that.

Frankly, part of my dedication to PLF and to the real estate industry is because the government has become so invasive and so intransigent, and very few people are speaking out against it other than PLF, Californians for Homeownership, National Association of Realtors, and advocates for property rights.

That’s why I love you guys. You do what I believe in and successfully. I’m a strong proponent of litigation. If you can’t sell it at a compromise table and it’s not fair, go to court.

Real estate is a different business now than it was in the seventies. For one, today’s brokers are focused on marketing themselves. No one is selling houses over a little folding table in the back of a Volkswagen camper anymore. 

Also, there’s the housing crisis. But Steve has a bold solution for that. 

STEVE:

I think the greatest thing the American government ever did for its citizens was when they created the Homestead Act back in 1880. And the government gave away land and what happened? All these people had dreams of owning something, got their wagons, and they went and staked out 40 acres.

I see no reason why the United States couldn’t do that again. The federal government is the biggest landowner in the country. State governments own tremendous amounts of land. The only way you’re going to get reduced values and affordable housing that’s meaningful, that isn’t an 800-square-foot three bedroom on the 15th floor of a suburb of DC, is to create new cities and new opportunities. That’s the only solution. That’s been the only solution since Adam and Eve. Look at them, they lost their first home, got kicked out of a garden and had to go live who knows where. If you go look back on history, that’s what’s formed wealth. I’m sounding like a philosopher now.

At this point in his life, Steve doesn’t personally represent buyers and sellers anymore. He doesn’t collect commissions.

STEVE:

But I can remember there was no better sense of value, personally anyway, than handing over a set of keys to a young family for their first house. The anticipation and the wonderment and the pride that that young family has is just amazing. Because it’s still the American dream.