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Martin also led NAHB’s effort to successfully increase FHA loan limits and expand homeownership opportunities, and he helped initiate studies at various universities — including Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies — to demonstrate the positive effects of homeownership on the community.
Martin serves on Fannie Mae’s Housing Impact Advisory Council and he is a trustee of the Home Builders Institute and a member of the National Housing Center Board of Governors. He has also actively promoted U.S. home building in international markets and chaired the Department of Commerce’s U.S.-China Residential Building Council in 2000.
 Leonard R. “Lenny” Sendelsky, also a second-generation home builder, was born in Perth Amboy, NJ, and formed the Lenguy Construction Corp. in 1958. During his nearly 50 years in the industry, he has overseen construction of more than 3,000 homes and apartments in addition to many commercial and industrial buildings.
Sendelsky has been a board member of the Central Jersey Builders Association for the last 46 years and was its president in 1964. He was named “Builder of the Year” by that association in 1966 and 1989 and by the New Jersey Builders Association in 1967 and 1989. He became a member of his state association’s Builders Hall of Fame in 1974.
Sendelsky was a founding director and the first president of the Home Owners Warranty Corp. of New Jersey in 1975, and he was re-elected to the presidency of that organization from 1983-85. He also helped found his state association’s Institute of Multifamily Housing, which he served as chairman from 1986-87.
Sendelsky served with high honors on the boards of many New Jersey governmental agencies, including the New Jersey State Uniform Construction Code Advisory Board, the New Jersey Standards Committee for Construction of Sewerage Facilities for Realty Improvements, the New Jersey State Building Authority and the Middlesex County Planning Board.
He has an extensive record of service to his community, including membership on the boards of the Thomas Edison Council, Perth Amboy YMCA, Middlesex County United Way and John F. Kennedy Medical Center Hospital.
“For their steadfast commitment to their industry and their local communities over the years, Don and Lenny have earned the highest respect and admiration of their peers and colleagues,” Rayburn said. “They have truly attained the right to be included among the most distinguished ‘housers’ in the country as part of the National Housing Hall of Fame.”
Photos by Herman Farrer
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Donald D. “Don” Martin is a second-generation home builder who grew up in rural Kansas and flew jets and helicopters for the U.S. Marine Corps before beginning his career in the housing industry in the mid-1960s. During the next 30 years, he built more than 9,000 homes in Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Virginia, Maryland and Arizona. Martin opened his own home building company in Albuquerque in the mid-1980s and built single-family homes and developed lots for other builders there and in Santa Fe.
