Dell Loy Hansen and the price of an empty space

Dell Loy Hansen began with an album full of holes. Given blue Whitman penny folders for Christmas in second grade, he had perhaps forty coins toward a hundred spaces. The vacancies bothered him. He wanted to complete the pages, then improve the coins already in them. Even a childhood hobby could acquire a development schedule.

That small domestic project offers a useful way into a much larger, less tidy life. Hansen would build houses, buy apartments, own a professional soccer club and pursue an American coin collection measured against Louis Eliasberg’s. Today, his attention reaches from Utah to Ukraine, where the empty spaces are homes that people have lost to war.

The connection is an appetite for taking on another project. Its consequences have varied. Apartment operations made his business; soccer brought a public reckoning; Ukrainian housing has given his construction experience a new purpose. To understand how these chapters fit, it helps to begin before the expensive coins, when a building site still meant work he could do with his hands.

The builder changes buildings

Hansen’s father worked for the Soil Conservation Service. His mother taught school. His family moved to Cache Valley when he was in seventh grade, and he came to regard that part of Utah as his roots. He began building houses while attending college. His eventual degree from Utah State University was in political science, an academic preparation with no obvious requirement to master concrete.

He nevertheless learned the physical business: setting footers, pouring foundations and driveways. During his college years he worked on modular homes with a partner. Later, running a turf farm after his regular workday counted as recreation. Some people unwind by putting their feet up. Hansen had sixty acres on which to keep moving.

The homebuilding business ran into the savings and loan crisis. In his account of 1988, he had worked through the year only to lose $100,000. He closed the operation that October. Within a month, he and longtime friends had bought three apartment buildings in Salt Lake City and formed Wasatch Property Management.

The distinction mattered. Building a house and selling it means finding the next buyer. Owning apartments means paying attention after people arrive. Hansen later described himself as an operator, with the emphasis on improving the operation continuously. By 2016, those first apartment buildings remained in the portfolio. His retreat from one business had become a long residence in another.

The calendar behind the portfolio

Wasatch grew beyond apartments into commercial property, development, investments, technology and consumer products. The range could make its founder sound like a collector of businesses. His habits suggest a more involved arrangement: he wanted the figures, and he wanted them on schedule.

In 2016, his monthly calendar reserved the tenth for commercial real estate, the fifteenth for Real Salt Lake and the days that followed for venture businesses. That is a revealing kind of personal detail. A portfolio may look adventurous from the outside; inside, someone still has to explain the accounts.

His relationship with education also outlasted his student years. The Hansen Scholars Program at Utah State has been funded since 2002. In 2015, the Huntsman School recognized him as its Distinguished Executive Alumnus. He had also served on Utah’s business and economic development board under Governor Mike Leavitt.

A high-school English teacher, Jackie White, had given him Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations at graduation. He kept the book and credited Stoic philosophy with shaping his outlook. The image is rather good: a property developer carrying lessons from a Roman emperor, while trying to keep a modern collection of enterprises on its monthly reporting timetable.

A dollar with a very long past

The pennies never entirely left him. In adulthood, collecting returned, and in 2016 it became a more deliberate pursuit. He set himself the challenge of assembling a collection that could rival Eliasberg’s, extending the scope into later American coinage. John Brush, his partner at David Lawrence Rare Coins, helped with the search.

In June 2018, the firm bought the Mickley-Hawn-Queller 1804 Draped Bust dollar on Hansen’s behalf for $2.64 million. Even the name sounds like a property with several previous owners. Its history was the attraction: the Class I 1804 dollars were actually struck in the 1830s for diplomatic presentation sets. The date on a coin, it turns out, can require an explanation.

The appeal went beyond possessing an expensive object. A collection asks a question that can be answered one acquisition at a time: what belongs in the next empty space? In a 2022 interview, Hansen recalled breaking coins out of their protective plastic holders so they would fit his album, preserving the labels at the back. The folder still outranked the packaging.

As his Ukraine work grew, he began considering what parts of the collection could finance. In 2023, holding a gold coin dated 1901, he explained that its value could pay to feed thousands of people. The collector’s eye for value had found another calculation.

A collector’s calculation · 2023“I can feed 3,000 people for that coin.”Dell Loy Hansen

The chapter that cannot be polished away

Hansen joined Real Salt Lake as a minority owner in 2009 and bought out Dave Checketts in January 2013. Soccer made him visible to people who would never open a property prospectus or a coin auction catalogue. It also made his conduct a matter of public scrutiny.

In August 2020, after he criticized players for declining to play in a protest against racial injustice, reports alleged that he had made racist remarks. Major League Soccer opened an investigation. On August 30, the league announced that he would begin selling Utah Soccer Holdings, which included Real Salt Lake, Utah Royals FC and Real Monarchs.

Hansen later denied the allegations in an interview. The sale process and the final transfer should be kept distinct: MLS approved Real Salt Lake’s sale to David Blitzer and Ryan Smith’s Smith Entertainment Group on January 5, 2022. The transaction included the stadium, training center and academy.

Any account of his philanthropy has to leave this episode in view. Money spent on homes does not settle questions about earlier conduct. A biography can contain useful work, serious allegations and an owner’s denial without forcing them into a convenient moral ending.

Fifteen miles from Kyiv

Hansen first visited Ukraine in May 2022. He worked with To Ukraine With Love and subsequently established Hansen Ukrainian Mission. His experience was in acquiring, building and operating places for people to live. War had created an urgent need for exactly that knowledge, though under circumstances far removed from an American apartment acquisition.

In June 2023, he met President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and presented plans for Hansen Village. The settlement took shape in Tarasivka, roughly fifteen miles southwest of Kyiv. It includes apartments, duplexes and larger accommodation for foster families. The mission describes its housing there as rent-free for internally displaced people.

The details make the place legible as a neighborhood: playgrounds, barbecue gazebos, a clubhouse, football fields, shops and bomb shelters. That final item sits uneasily beside the others, as it must. Ordinary life is being reconstructed in a country still at war.

In 2024, the village began welcoming children with bicycles. An elementary school opened that September. These are practical ways of giving a newly arrived family something beyond an address: somewhere to go, people to meet, a school day to organize. Julie Hansen serves as a foundation director, alongside Ukrainian and American colleagues responsible for the separate projects. The operation extends well beyond one donor’s decisions.

The next empty space

The next stage brings the project back to the business of long-term housing. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has established a loan facility of up to €100 million for housing companies owned by Hansen and supported operationally by his Ukrainian mission. Its Ladder to Prosperity program combines affordable rentals and rent-to-own homes.

The first committed tranche is €7.1 million for 182 homes in two projects in Kyiv region. Later phases aim for approximately 1,800 homes by 2029. The larger number remains a target. The remaining €92.9 million is an uncommitted tranche, an important distinction when large financing announcements can make tomorrow’s buildings sound already occupied.

The program also includes construction and operations apprenticeships intended for at least 300 internally displaced people. Here, housing becomes a place to learn a trade as well as somewhere to return after work. A development succeeds over years, through the people able to maintain it, afford it and build the next one.

In October 2026, Senator John Curtis discussed a recent visit to Hansen Village on the Senate floor. A project begun with private giving had become part of a wider conversation about Ukraine’s future. Hansen’s ambitions now face the ordinary tests of development alongside the extraordinary uncertainty of war: financing, delivery, rents, schedules and continuity.

The practical ambition is replication. His housing platform is intended to demonstrate a model that can be used more widely. That shifts the test from the size of a personal donation to whether the arrangements can survive repetition: another site, another financing decision, another group of tenants with incomes that have to cover the rent.

The childhood album offered the satisfaction of a finite number of holes. Housing offers no such tidy finish. Another family arrives; another building needs work. Hansen has spent decades learning how to acquire and operate property. In Ukraine, the next question is how much of that knowledge can become a durable place for somebody else to live.