Ray Huffman
1934 - 2001

A Brief History of Huffman Apartment Buildings

Ray Huffman was born in Iowa and raised in a middle-class family in Pasadena. Ray went to college at Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist religious college in Greenville, South Carolina. After quitting college for good at the end of his first year, Huffman returned to Pasadena and drifted into the carpentry trade, married his high-school sweetheart, and began raising a family. After working with J.H Hedrick Construction Company for four years, Hedrick sent him to San Diego to open a field office In 1957. For the next five years, Huffman learned the ins and outs of apartment development.

By 1962 he was part-owner of three small lots and, by supplementing $2,000 in savings with a few thousand more borrowed from his brother-in-law, Huffman and his wife started building apartments themselves. Huffman handled the construction itself: his wife Carolyn, who is equally responsible for the successes of their construction business, did the accounting and helped decide when and for how much the buildings were to be sold.

Huffman concentrated almost exclusively on building apartments at a time when most other developers in San Diego, citing low demand and low profitability for apartments, were blanketing San Diego’s canyons and hills with single-family homes. When Ray started building, he claimed that the market for apartments in San Diego wasn’t at all promising. The boom of the late Fifties had faded and apartment vacancy rate at the time was hovering near ten percent. Because of this, other builders at the time were taking things out of their units to try to make the building process cheaper. Ray did the exact opposite. The innovations Huffman put to use in apartments included wall and ceiling insulation (for soundproofing), kitchen windows, heavy-duty front door locks, fold-down bathroom scales, stainless-steel kitchen sinks, microwave ovens, trash compactors, and the like.

There were other reasons Huffman was able to hold his costs down: choosing areas where land costs were moderate and his ability to find subcontractors who were willing to work for a relatively low profit margin. The result was a profusion of similar-looking buildings which were often copied by other buildings Ray had already built, vastly increasing Huffman’s impact on the physical appearance of San Diego’s neighborhoods. This also enabled Ray to get loans and building plans approved quickly because all of the buildings were so similar. The subcontractors also knew the layouts very well. Of the 570 apartments buildings, over 340 of them were 7, 8, and 9-unit properties, all of which almost always had the exact same unit mixes.

The first apartment ever built by Huffman’s construction company still stands: a nine-unit complex at 4525 Texas Street, three blocks north of El Cajon Boulevard in North Park. But like so many of Huffman’s later buildings, it had four parking spaces in front and five more in the back. Following hist first property’s completion, Ray built 2 properties in 1960, 3 properties in 1963, and 14 properties in 1964.

After he got the building process down to a science, Ray was able to construct a property in approximately 110 days. Ray had created a “Ford Assembly Line” for San Diego apartment construction. There was a period where Ray would have as many as 70 apartment buildings under construction at one time, all at different locations spread throughout San Diego County. This feat was accomplished without the office technology we use daily: no cell phones, computers, fax machines, or internet.

Ray Huffman is one of the most prolific apartment builders in San Diego’s history. Over 575 individual apartment buildings were built by Ray Huffman between 1958 and 1991 in communities from North Park to El Cajon, from Pacific Beach to Imperial Beach, and from Escondido to Riverside. Almost all of these properties still stand today, making up over 7,200 rental units in San Diego.

One branding tool Ray Huffman used was the well-known “Built by Ray Huffman Construction” plaque in the front concrete. This branding is what gives apartment owners today the pride of owning a true Huffman Apartment Community. Do you own a Huffman? Click on the link below to see if your property is on the list.

No one knows a Huffman like a Huffman! If you would like any assistance with your Huffman property, contact Austin Huffman directly at (858) 761-2529.